Imagine no Religion...
By
Roberto Diego
Chapter 6.
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Table of Contents
Chapter 2. Modern Cultural Paradigms
Chapter 3. The Principle of Progressive Benignity
Chapter 4. Ritual as Allegory
Chapter 6. How Does Altruism Feel?
Chapter 7. The Psychology of Collectivism
Chapter 8. The War against the Ego
Chapter 9. The Psychology of Moral Triangulation
Chapter 10. The Influence of the Enlightenment
Chapter 11. A Culture in Moral Crisis Link coming soon
Chapter 12. The Tyranny of Organized Religion – Cult as Culture Link coming soon
Chapter 13. The Separation of Church and State Link coming soon
Chapter 14. Is Religion the Foundation of Society? Link coming soon
Chapter 15. Rationalism Link coming soon
Chapter 16. Cynicism and Chauvinism Link coming soon
Chapter 17. Definition of Religion Link coming soon
Chapter 18. Curing Man Link coming soon
Chapter 19. Disenfranchising Unreason Link coming soon
The disenfranchisement of religious cultural leaders Link coming soon
The disenfranchisement of the Suffering Savior paradigm Link coming soon
The disenfranchisement of the good/evil paradigm Link coming soon
The disenfranchisement of the chorus (collectivism) Link coming soon
The enfranchisement of the ego Link coming soon
The establishment of reason Link coming soon
Prologue Link coming soon
How can the individual know what is the right thing to do on any issue regarding his life? Is a list of commandments enough? What about pleasure? Where does it fit in? What about self-defense? Is it ever appropriate? How can one negotiate with a world of people all of whom have different ideas of what is right and wrong? How can one decide what is right for oneself? What are the definitions of right and wrong?
The prevailing method of determining what is right is to use faith. It is thought by many that if God rules the universe, then doing what He says must be the right thing. What the individual thinks, if he is allowed to think, is irrelevant. He should do what the representatives of God tell him. If one questions the commandments of God or decides to violate them, one is met with hatred and ostracism. To be a sinner or an infidel is to be the devil and deserve the mask of hatred.
Religious culture has only one answer to the question of what is correct action: do that which helps others. That’s it, nothing more. To approach the issue of morality in this way is to neglect the individual and create instead a soldier in the army of God, one that is always doing what others think is right (sacrifice) and thinking what others think God thinks (obey). There is no security here and no certainty. One can only pray and hope.
Another invalid concept that proceeds from the contemporary culture is called “discipline.” This concept means doing what you don’t want to do because it is right while what you want to do is wrong. Consider the meaning of this. If one wants to do something that is bad for one, that something is considered so compelling that one is willing to sabotage one’s life and values in favor of it. Conversely, in order to do what is right, one has to force oneself to do the opposite of what one wants to do through discipline; presumably one doesn’t really want to do what is right.
Why should a person have a conflict between doing what he wants to do while also forcing himself to do what he doesn’t want to do? I think there are two factors:
The problem for the child at this stage is the adults. Some of them are simply too busy in their own lives to help the child and often they don’t understand what the child is doing, which is learning and growing. A good parent will recognize the child’s need for learning and support during this period and will dedicate himself to helping the child negotiate reality by giving helpful advice, protecting him against anything dangerous that he might do and providing safety warnings. The adult might even know enough about child development to understand the critical issues to which the child should be directed in order to develop more efficiently. (See Montessori)
Psychologists claim that children have a tendency to blame themselves when they see their parents misbehave; the truth is that they blame themselves because parents tell them they are bad. With this ineffable “badness” looming over them at all times, it is no wonder they blame themselves for everything wrong that the parents do. The parents’ exhortations and anger have created the very disintegration that will later cause them psychological problems. And, unfortunately, children influenced in this way will do the same thing to their children when they are adult. To treat a young child as if he is the devil is wrong; to treat him as if he knew he was doing something wrong is unforgivable.
That religion provides the moral and philosophical foundation for this treatment of children is seldom acknowledged. An even worse issue is that religion sees the devil in any act a person performs for himself and builds a whole philosophy of exploitation around the idea. According to this view, we must not give quarter to the “demons” that have inhabited two year old children; they must learn to fear god, must be punished and taught the virtues of giving up their own values, all in the name of teaching them how to be moral. Reason, purpose and self-respect are destroyed through this process.
Some have also thought that religion has provided us with the Golden Rule as a guide to help a person decide right from wrong in various situations. The idea of doing “unto others as you would have them do unto you” is considered a profound philosophical insight that provides a hard and fast rule. It is, in fact, a contradiction of morality:
In fact, most men can’t define the good for themselves because they have only been given these types of contradictions. Since men must accept a “commanded” good, they have no choice but to be obedient slaves doing what they are told, hating whom they are told and dispensing false justice against contrived “evils.” The major issues that need to be addressed in order to develop a rational morality are ignored because religion has disconnected the human mind from its ability to find answers. Faith and commandments are the methods of that disconnection. Wasted, unhappy lives are the result.
Most philosophers, intellectuals and cultural leaders consider the ego to be a negative aspect of man. They even consider that society was created primarily to control and defeat the free exercise, and even the emergence, of the ego. They assert that self-interest is associated with blind emotions, murder, dictatorship, bloody strife, genocide and hatred. They treat the ego as if it were a mean spirit that must be defeated anytime it raises its head. To keep the ego down, they think they must disapprove of any semblance of self-interest; even minor instances of pride in achievement must be met with a volley of ridicule. Indeed, their solution to the emergence of egoism is blind emotions, murder, dictatorship, bloody strife, genocide and hatred against the egoists.
One of the legacies of religion is that most people live their lives afraid of exerting their own ego, their own self-interest, afraid to do what they want to do. From the religious foundation, they believe that God rules the universe and that the individual is a mere slave to God’s commandments. As we’ve discussed, this is rationalism, the belief that ideas come from a mystical realm – which relegates thinking to mere deduction from scripture. Indeed, to the extent that religious men use reason and logic, it is only appropriate after the establishment, through faith, of mystically-derived premises.
The result is that most people learn to fear the ire of others and, as a consequence, they avoid doing what they desire. The entire issue, the fear of having pride and being self-assertive, is denied and forced into the subconscious mind. The result is that the average individual spends his life wondering why he can’t assert his desires while also feeling jealous and angry at others for their freedom and wanton sinfulness. Such individuals live their lives within a struggle to force themselves to do something so they can survive and find a semblance of joy. When they realize that self-assertion cannot be avoided, they seldom recognize that it is the hatred of the ego that is their problem.
Many individuals internalize and deny the hatred of the ego they experience and turn it into self-control. Their mistaken early “value” becomes pleasing others or, more appropriately, making others like them. With this value as core, the message is clear; don’t do what is good for you but what pleases others. This subverts a proper, healthy value structure and destroys the individual’s ability to be free to pursue self-developed values. Not only does it subvert his ability to develop a true value structure appropriate to him as an individual, but it makes him feel anxiety any time he has a personal wish or desire.
This anxiety is the key to the power of religious culture and its ability to destroy the potentiality for happiness. Our cultural leaders, in pursuit of their war against the ego, believe that they must tie anything the individual does to their motives and goals rather than his own. It is a war over what the individual does and thinks. More than this, it is a war of hatred, pure unmitigated hatred, toward the individual and the freedom inherent in his ability to think and judge. The individual is the treasure, the unique focal point that they want to control and manipulate for their own purposes.
Because men are punished by religion for self-interest, each is thrown into inner turmoil that they can barely even describe – because it is so painful and confusing. When reasonable cooperation is coupled with self-sacrifice, men have no way of properly evaluating the true moral worth of any action. They can only identify themselves as proper (self-sacrificing) or improper (seeking self-interest).
Many people come to feel that they have to compromise with altruism by outwardly professing love of all men while secretly pursuing their own values. The result is pretension, stunted self-interest and boredom over having to satisfy such an irrational culture. It is also a waste of precious time in a life limited by time.
During the periods of history when man has been mired in self-sacrifice, the one key element that was ignored and denigrated (then and now) is his ability to think, cooperate and trade. What religion and hatred of the ego mean for man, morally and psychologically, is that no matter what he does, he is made to feel that he has done something wrong. Whatever the motive of a given choice, it can be shown to possess some form of self-interest (and is therefore evil). Only total self-abnegation will work to satisfy the “point makers” of religion; only a complete dedication to others will make one admirable (and a fool). Anything else, by this view, no matter how much production, thought and effort are involved, no matter how many beneficiaries there are, is base and has no moral worth.
As Ayn Rand has pointed out, altruism does not mean merely doing good things for others; rather it means placing others above oneself, it means living a philosophy that hates the individual and his ego. If altruism were merely doing good acts for others when it is rationally called for, it would not be a psychologically harmful concept. As long as man is able to maintain his self-respect and his prerogative to act upon his reasonable choices, there is no threat to him and no fear. On the other hand, when we make altruism our base philosophy, we accept the axiom that living for others is the prime value, the basic choice and the most appropriate moral act in all situations regardless of the harm done to the person that is sacrificed. In my view, and in light of this choice imposed by religion, the refusal to be an altruist is actually the most moral act one can perform.
In reality, merely doing things for others does not make one good. Human value comes from the mind, the esteem in which the individual holds one’s self, the thinking engaged in and the values that the individual selects. A proper morality requires a rigorous attention to the facts of reality, a dedication to truth and a focused effort to gain usable knowledge. More importantly, it requires a rejection of any idea or person that would prohibit and keep a person from achieving the good he has defined. Allowing moral equivalency to an idea like altruism would destroy the possibility of integrity in a man.
Consider the difference between the active mind and the passive mind. Let’s take the passive mind first. To hold that the only thing one need do is “help others” in order to find value is to have a passive view of intellectual (and moral) activity. The answer for every issue of self-value is “I’m good because I help others.” For every moral choice, the issue is “I must help others.” When evaluating others, the question is “What does he/she do for others?” When deciding on a love partner, the question is “Does he/she help others?” When analyzing a political issue, the question is “How does this help others?” For the passive mind, there is only one basic question in life, “Is altruism fostered or is it not?” And if it is, then good, if not, reject that option.
One might think that life is easier for the passive thinker since he is only concerned about altruism and judging all issues by that standard. In fact, there is little that can be accomplished through altruism. When everything is sacrifice, everyone, provider and beneficiary alike, sacrifices his mind first. If the mind is not enough, consider that the act of sacrifice diverts the sacrificial person from keeping the reward of his effort, and it gives that reward, including the time and energy spent in both education and production, to someone who will merely consume, not save, that reward. This is why you see so much poverty in the world: the poor only consume – therefore, the person that sacrifices his own production is doing something very evil – he is sacrificing his own past and future and condemning himself to an endless struggle that will only alleviate the momentary suffering of all except himself.
It may be hard to believe that giving to the poor is actually the worst thing one could do to alleviate poverty, especially when we see television programs appealing to our emotions and exhorting us to give millions of dollars so that orphans in Africa can be “saved.” Let’s compare the investment of one million dollars into a new business and an additional one million dollars into an orphanage. That one million dollars invested in the business purchases a building, equipment, machines and production tools that give jobs to about 20 people. Those people learn how to be productive and they spend their time creating a product that other people need and are willing to purchase. This value created by the business owner and these employees ensures that these people have nice homes, plenty of food, labor saving devices, entertainment devices and overall affluent lives. Without the investment of that one million dollars, these people might not have been able to survive. Without the intellectual excellence of the business owner, the company would not be able to continue improving its products and thriving. That one million dollars made possible the earning of additionally many more millions of dollars that gave these people the affluence that enabled them to purchase additional products that they wanted, live better lives and even create hundreds of other jobs in other industries to provide them and others with additional products. It also kept their children from being orphans. That one million dollar investment was worth untold millions of other dollars, all of which were invested in elevating the living standards of people that might otherwise have starved.
Had that million dollars gone into a charity, the first thing that would have happened is the payment of a large amount of money to the management of the charitable organization. Additional dollars might have gone into administrative and fiscal matters of the organization that collected the donation leaving a small percentage of the money for the orphanage. Additionally, large amounts of money must be spent in marketing the needs of the children. The children might find themselves used in expensive photo shoots and be the subject of television footage created by expensive cameras, the cost of which would have fed a child living in a third world country for the rest of his life. Eventually, the orphanage would have bought food, clothing and ensured a shelter for the orphans, some of whom might even have been mistreated in the orphanage. Perhaps the amount of money given to the orphanage might have helped it pay for operations for a couple of months, possibly even a couple of weeks. In addition, the children might be told that they are victims of society and deserve to have society take care thereby creating a cycle of dependency. They might even be told that they are starving because of the many people that live affluent lives and enjoy television and snacks while they starve. They may be told that the most evil person in society is the selfish person who lives for himself. In effect, that million dollars would have been wasted, would have created few jobs and, because it was not invested in productive activity, would not have produced more jobs and affluence. It would have instead created more poverty because the money was spent in consumption rather than invested in the productive futures of people. Had the money been spent on a factory, it may not have been necessary to build the orphanage.
What the altruists miss is that capitalism and selfishness eliminate poverty while charity creates poverty. Investment, freedom, capital accumulation and human genius are responsible for improving peoples’ lives and it is these very principles that make it possible for average people to earn a living and provide additional value that elevates all of our lives. Altruism never solved a social problem and all the millions of dollars wasted in alleviating poverty only kept the poor from lifting themselves up because it took that money away from productive people and industrial geniuses. The dollars fed into altruism because of the guilt that altruism imposes on productive people did only one thing; it fed unproductive people who would otherwise have been truly saved by a good job. Yet you hear no cries that we should establish capitalism in poor countries by those who say they care for the poor. One can only assume that they don’t care for the poor at all; they care only to make people feel guilty, they care only to stop human progress; they are practicing the ritual of killing the best among us; and as Ayn Rand has said, they are doing nothing but “hating the good for being the good.”
Notice that advocating altruism ignores the basic question of what “good” is actually done by altruism. That the problems of others continue to demand more sacrifice is lost to the evaluation – few conclude that altruism is not working; or that there are charlatans that capitalize on the desire of people to live altruistically; that the people who are helped usually have no desire to be self-sufficient. In fact, altruism solves no problems; if anything, it sometimes delays the inevitable self-destruction of people for a few days, weeks or months while it destroys the time and production (the life) of the person sacrificed. And because altruism never preaches self-sufficiency, indeed considers it a sin, there is no hope that people will be saved by altruism. If someone who has been helped decides to educate himself and work his way out of poverty, that is an act of selfishness, and altruists rush to ensure that this person becomes their guilty slave when he is productive.
The active mind, on the other hand, has to be involved in the issue of gathering facts in order to answer life’s questions. The thinking individual must focus on reality and on the nature of the issue at hand. For the active mind, the choice is not to help others but to focus upon the facts, to create generalizations about the nature of reality and to use those generalizations to advance life. When the individual evaluates himself, the question is not, “do I help others” but “what is the quality of my thinking and of the choices I make?” “Is my thinking correct?” When evaluating others, the question is, “What are this person’s values and how do they reflect on his ability to think and judge and live?” Every moral choice involves the question, “What are the facts that can help me decide?” When analyzing a political issue the question is “What are the facts that can help me decide upon the right position to advocate?”
The active mind is focused on finding solutions by looking at reality. As a result there is no constant repetition of one thought or question. There are a wide range of thoughts and innumerable new abstractions and generalizations that feed directly into the individual’s ability to choose among a range of choices that lead to a fuller, richer life. The passive mind ignores all facts and stays focused only on altruism. For the altruist, there is no need to look at reality. The result for the passive mind is intellectual decline and decay; and for the active mind, the result is ever better solutions to life’s problems; full rich living.
A person acting upon his own rational self-interest, by that very act, is acting against the idea that it is his duty to sacrifice for others and because so, he is able to achieve values and to live. But in a more profound sense, this individual is not consciously acting against anything – he is merely living. It is only those that observe him and evaluate him according to the philosophy of altruism that think about him, that hate him and want him to feel guilt. They want him to feel pain over their disapproval of him and they want him to grant validity to their demands that he give up his very self and his production for their sakes.
When we talk about having an active mind, we are talking about being awake. This means having an ego, looking out and saying “I’m going to learn what is real, express it as truth and make a decision about what I’m going to do about it.” That is awareness. That a modern intellectual would call the act of thinking naďve proves that many of our supposed “best” minds are not intellectuals at all, but sleeping automatons repeating the teachings of Buddha or God or Allah or Marx without thought and without connection to the real world. They are polemicists that disagree among themselves only on non-essentials, while they all accept faith, altruism and collectivism as unquestionable.
The active mind uses questions and knowledge to identify existence and it integrates the product of the inquiry into a coherent, consistent generalization that provides a foundation for problem solving and action in the real world. The active mind comes to see the “real’ world as a sort of edifice, an integrated universe where causality holds and knowledge can provide certainty and peace of mind. He sees his mind as an efficient tool and he learns that pleasure is not a guilty sin but a consequence of his selection of rational values – and he is convinced of their importance for his life; he does not pursue them haltingly but actively and passionately; and most importantly, he does not pursue them by looking at others and wondering if they approve. The real smile he smiles is his smile, his wisdom, his accomplishment, his joy at being alive.
Observe that the issue of having an active mind involves no propaganda that excludes anyone from the process. Everyone has the opportunity to think for himself. Any poor individual can begin the process of learning how to think, of learning how to use his mind in order to solve the problems of his life. This is because reason is a faculty that every individual possesses and any person can have a successful, rich life by using his mind. However, in order to be consistent, in order to fully accomplish the good he defines, he must reject the idea that his mind should be shackled for the sake of others and that his goal in life is to serve others. Altruism destroys the mind and life. It is either altruism or reason.
In the United States of America, we seldom see overt, angry hatred aimed at the individual coming from altruists (except for progressives). This is because of the influence of reason that culminated in the institutional assertion of the right to happiness. After the Enlightenment, in America, altruistic/religious leaders learned that men were free; they realized that they must couch their hatred of man behind smiles and expressions of love for the downtrodden. Today, they dispense guilt through the fallacy of appeal to pity, by showing the suffering of others and asking the question, “who could possibly refuse to help the helpless?” In addition, they also learned centuries ago that hatred and anger expressed toward individuals created so much fear in them that they often became incapacitated and delirious. So they hide that hatred through expressions of love. Yet, you can see the mask fall, the hatred exposed, when an individual refuses to cooperate out of principle, and refuses to accept their feigned ‘authority.’ At that point collective anger and vitriol toward the individual become the argument.
Altruism is the modern equivalent of ritual human sacrifice in prehistory. A product of the principle of progressive benignity, it has come to mean benevolence toward men and helping others. But religious propaganda hides the true intent. Altruism is a method for the expression of hatred of the ego, for the destruction of the freedom and assertiveness inherent in the concept of self-sufficiency. Altruism would kill with anger and hatred any person who chose to do things from a sense of self-interest. Altruism ties all choice and all values to a ritualized love of all men. Expressing “Love for mankind” is a cynical effort to justify altruism’s cruelty and hatred of man; it is the perfect scam.
Altruism distorts motive and right. Altruism says it is right to do things out of charity but wrong to do things out of selfish love. Altruism distorts the meaning of both love and action by assuming cynically that men won’t do right unless they do it because they must. So it exhorts men to sacrifice for others in blind promiscuous pursuit of the well being of all. When they preach the sacrifice of god for the sake of man, they mean the destruction of man and they have the audacity to say it is for the sake of man and life.
Religion, through rationalism, has disconnected emotion from values by insisting, under pain of eternal damnation, that all love and all value resides in God and in others. Altruism criticizes reason, makes it unnecessary and as a result removes from the realm of the good all that the individual can bring into the world through his own thinking and effort. By telling him to love a value called “others,” they ask him to replace his love of personal values with a false, unfocused love. This lack of focus is what destroys the mind (and much more). The individual is left as a slave who must strive with every ounce of his being to value others…there is no room for the individual in religion’s view of morality and there is no room for his mind, his real values and his real emotions.
When is it appropriate to help others in a non-altruistic philosophy? The answer is whenever it is chosen by the helper as an option among several options; after considering all the facts, and after ensuring that the actor is not harmed as a result of the help given, that his life is not made more difficult.
To answer the question of this chapter, how does altruism make one feel? It feels bad. For the altruist, the self is never experienced fully or enjoyed because, within his mind, thinking is comprised of one key thought: what do others think about me? Every encounter with others is therefore a potential source of pain and fear depending on others’ attitudes, body language, verbal and facial expressions and demeanor. Altruism is one thought that destroys all other possibilities of rational thought. And for centuries generations of people have clung to the singular idea of altruism, not because it is logical and produces good results, but because it is an outgrowth of religious rationalism that has been passed down culturally by philosophers, intellectuals, parents, peers and educators, combined with guilt, faith, self-righteous anger, exhortations and ritual masks of hatred.
Guiltless action cannot be accomplished if one fears others and their opinions. Guiltless action can only be accomplished by means of reason and by the expectation of reason from others. Consider that only a person who can’t think for himself will accept uncritically the thinking of others. A person capable of (taught) reason does not need the exhortations of others to fill the gaps in his thinking since reason is always there to help in analyzing reality, drawing conclusions and taking appropriate action. That security found in reason creates the opposite of fear and anxiety because the individual knows that others are capable of reason and that that is the basic capability that characterizes being human, that cynicism and chauvinism are not human but weak and helpless, pitiful and hopeless.
Morality should not be something that you do because you have to; it is something you should want to do with your whole being; something you want to run to, so to speak, because it is good for you, so beneficial and life-serving that it beats all the alternatives.
To the altruist there is no possibility of a guiltless life. In his view, if one is “free” to do as one desires, there is only the possibility of reckless sexual abandon and criminality. Any value that he develops on his own is therefore meaningless and this means he has no way of justifying it to himself, no way of convincing himself that the value should be pursued or fought for. This method sends him on a quest for floating abstractions as values and destroys his connection to the real world and objective value. That is why he must force himself to do what is “good.” That there is an entirely different possibility once men are freed from faith, superstition and restrictive ritual has never occurred to him.
We cannot get morality from the pit of our stomach, especially from the singular emotion of fear. That is an animal’s sense of motivation and is not appropriate for man. Man must select his values and decide, with reason, what is appropriate action that will achieve a specific goal. The individual must reject moral systems that bring man back to the animal level and require that he pretend to be good.
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| Roberto Diego |