CHAPTER 2

The Art of Morality

“You loved me as a loser, but now you’re worried that I just might win. You know the way to stop me, but you don’t have the discipline.”—Leonard Cohen, First We Take Manhattan

“Good is the thing that you favor / evil is your sour flavor. / You cannot sedate / all the things you hate.”—Marilyn Manson, Dogma

There comes a time in every thinking person’s life, usually in their teens, when they are struck—sometimes through a grim epiphany, sometimes through a slowly mounting aura of dread—by the utter meaninglessness of existence. It is never a comfortable moment, and all who experience it will deal with it differently. Often, it is our reaction to this first existential crisis that shapes and defines the rest of our lives.

Some will entrench themselves in religious doctrine, searching for meaning in the bosom of a patriarchal creator figure who has bestowed them with life, and who can also bestow that life with meaning. These people may become men (or women) of the clothe, or theologians, or at the very least develop an encyclopedic knowledge of the scriptures of their faith. Most of these people will walk through life with strong words of condemnation always spilling from their tongues. “This is sinful! This is against God’s will! This is an affront to my faith!” They lob these sentiments as though they were Molotov cocktails of truth, burning down the world of vice and sin.

Others, when faced with the specter of nihilism, will engender themselves with a strong and keen sense of civic pride, and will set to work trying to right the wrongs of the world through political action. These people will become activists, politicians, social workers, teachers, or some manner of public servants. They will devote their lives to making the world a better place, though oftentimes they find themselves completely disenfranchised later in life when the enormity of their task begins to crush their youthful exuberance into the jaded antipathy of the defeated.

Others will make their life’s goal the pursuit of knowledge, be it scientific knowledge, or the musings of philosophers, or the world of literature, or whatever discipline best suits them (the only discipline that ever suited me was a few whips and chains in the bedroom). These people will become the vaunted intellectuals of society, the scientists, the engineers, the mathematicians, the historians, the writers, the philosophers, the architects, and so on.

Most thinking people, when confronted with the unbearable weight of nihilistic reality and the existential crisis it prompts, will somewhere find a path that they hope will lead them away from meaninglessness, and into the warm arms of purpose. Maybe the path is faith, maybe it’s public service, maybe it’s intellectual pursuits, or maybe it’s something else entirely—but whatever the nature of the path may be, the purpose of the path is always the same: an escape route from meaninglessness.

When I was confronted with the meaninglessness of life, I was 14-years-old. I was living in Washington state. My father was in federal prison in Texas for tax evasion and conspiracy to commit mail fraud. My stepfather, whom I consider to be a good man, was addicted to crystal meth, and his already hot-headed personality was exacerbated to the point of complete volatility. I will not relay the extent of his actions during this time, other than to say that they were a great tribulation for his family, myself included. He thankfully prevailed over his addiction after a few years, and returned to his former self.

My standoffish personality alienated me at home and at school. I had only one friend, a fellow fat kid named Jesse, who was a Star Wars geek with a lot of artistic talent. I had a crush on him, but it went unspoken and unexplored. He liked girls only, and I respected that, but it was still frustrating. I had no luck with guys or girls, both of which I was interested in. No one wanted my fat, zit-faced, awkward, stand-offish, dismissive, asshole self to call their own. I can’t imagine why not!

It felt as if the trials of life were weighing heavily upon me, and it was impossible for me not to wonder to myself, “What purpose does any of this serve? Why am I trapped in this state of being? What has brought me and my family to these circumstances?” Father gone, stepfather insane, hormones raging, skepticism checkmating all sentimentality, and a whole host of other problems that seemed huge then, but have faded into obscurity as time has healed their wounds.

There were pragmatic answers to many of my questions, but they were not satisfying. Why was my father in jail? Because he didn’t pay his taxes. Why didn’t he pay his taxes? Because he was greedy, and he deluded himself that he was invincible. Why did he feel that way? His ego was out of control. Why was his ego out of control? Because he had the ability to control and manipulate people, and after years of using it to great effect, he naively began to imagine that his powers were without limit. Why was he so effective at manipulation and control? Because he was smarter than everyone else around him. So he was in jail because he was too smart, and because he was too stupid. Useful realization? Maybe. Satisfying? Hardly.

Why was my stepdad addicted to crystal meth? Because it made him feel good, and it gave him the energy to work the long hours he needed to work to keep the family afloat. Why was all that weight on his shoulders? Because my dad, who used to take care of everyone, was no longer able to do so (and we’ve already explored the reasons why). No satisfaction there. No grand purpose. No divine plan. Just a cocktail of human fallibility. Just a shitty world that was neither fair, nor concerned.

So the practical answers to my questions were crystal clear. But on a broader level, on a meaning of life level, I could find no satisfactory answer. Religion was empty. The thought of a great despot in the sky, to whom I owed my soul, was no solace. And besides, I saw no shred of evidence that God was the truth. Christianity, the trendy religion of the time and place, was just a mythological construct designed to control people, much like every other religion that had existed throughout history. At the age of 14, I had already dismissed the notion of God. His existence was neither practical as a reality, nor desirable as a fantasy. My belief in God had the same shelf life as my belief in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, two entities that, unlike God, at least had something concrete to offer—presents and money. What did God offer? A place in the clouds where you could go and kiss his ass for eternity? No thanks.

A sense of civic duty was foreign to me and remains so to this day. I have occasionally raised money for charities, including The Water Project, a charity that builds wells for people in Africa, and the International Women’s Health Coalition, a feminist group that helps girls in third world shitholes where feminism is actually needed. I have a low opinion of feminism in the west, but in nations where women are still consigned to the role of second class citizens, I consider myself a staunch feminist. Though, I’m still fond of a well-constructed sexist joke. Or even a poorly-constructed one if I’m being drunk or honest.

I must be empathic here, however: although I can occasionally give myself over to a greater cause for a brief window of time, I could never sustain such an effort in the long term. My hatred of the human race will always nag me into seeing the endeavor to change the world as a waste of my time, and I am therefore unable to engage my passions to that end with any degree of sustainability. My misanthropy is too all-encompassing for me to feel inclined to devote myself to a life of service to the greater good. At the age of 33, my misanthropy has only grown more powerful. Often, I find it painful to exist with this seething contempt for my own species broiling and churning within me, but I have found no effective remedy for this condition. I have instead found ample causes to exacerbate it, despite the suffocating grief I incur as a result. Hatred of humanity is rarely a satisfying hatred. It’s a bleak, depressing, disappointed hatred that often is just a stopgap for the tears I want to shed for my fellow man and for myself.

So when I was faced with the inevitable existential dilemma that all thinking people face, my 14-year-old self could not retreat into religion and slap the God band-aid across my psychological wounds, nor could I transform myself into a do-gooding crusader who seeks fulfillment in making the world a better place. I could not find faith in a cosmic despot that defied reason, nor could I see why such a horrible species as humanity deserved a better world in which to live. So, what of science? What of intellectual pursuits?

I knew early on that I could never be a scientist. Although I have tremendous respect for what scientists do, my mind doesn’t work like theirs. A scientist sees things in absolutes, and they’re diligent in their search to uncover new facts about the world. They are meticulous people, patient, and willing to devote mountains of time to exploring every facet of a new problem. In contrast, I see things in shades of grey, I give up easily when something is difficult, and I find the meticulous attention to detail that a good scientist must possess to be a tedious and frustrating burden. I am interested in the results and conclusions of science, but the process of doing science would absolutely bore me. Engineering and mathematics would carry with them the same problems.

I have a great affinity for intellectuals, a small affinity for activists, and almost no affinity for the religious—but ultimately, they all seek the same thing. They seek out the truth, that which Friedrich Nietzsche described thusly:

“What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms -- in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

“We still do not know where the urge for truth comes from; for as yet we have heard only of the obligation imposed by society that it should exist: to be truthful means using the customary metaphors - in moral terms, the obligation to lie according to fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all.”—Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense, The Viking Portable Nietzche, translation by Walter Kauffman.

What Nietzsche is saying there, when boiled down to the simplest terms, is that truth is a social construct; that our conceptions of truth are little more than traditions that have been puffed up with rhetoric and metaphor to give them an artificial weight and gravity. I have more than once bored my YouTube audience to death by reading to them from a poem by Stephen Crane. It goes like so:

“Truth," said a traveler,
“Is a rock, a mighty fortress;
“Often have I been to it,
“Even to its highest tower,
“From whence the world looks black.”

“Truth," said a traveler,
“Is a breath, a wind,
“A shadow, a phantom;
“Long have I pursued it,
“But never have I touched
“The hem of its garment.”

And I believed the second traveler;
For truth was to me
A breath, a wind,
A shadow, a phantom,
And never had I touched
The hem of its garment.
—Stephen Crane, The Black Riders and Other Lines, 1895

We live now in an age of three basic competing truths: the truth of God (religion), the truth of good (morality), and the truth of science. There may be some disagreements as to who God is, what good is, and even some argument over what science is empirically valid—but almost all overarching truths, the “big” truths that people cling to, fall neatly into these three categories. You can even see science and religion fighting about which of them dictates morality, with religion claiming that scientific morality cannot be objective and is therefore useless. While science claims that religious morality is regressive and based on unfounded myths. People, regardless of where they derive their truths from, are determined that the truth is a rock, never merely a breath. A subjective world where there is no mighty fortress of truth to plant your feet is disconcerting.

Well, then allow me the honor of being the decomposer of the disconcerto.

God isn’t the truth, he is a fictional construct of man, as evidenced by the mountains of discarded gods that overflow the garbage bin of history. It is further evidenced by the contradictory nature of an all-powerful and all-knowing and all-wise being who creates faulty humans, and then blames them for their imperfections. It is further evidenced by the fact that much of what was once attributed to God, we now have naturalistic explanations for that are far more satisfactory, and for which there is much greater evidence. I could write a book on all the reasons why I don’t believe in God, but several authors like Richard Dawkins, Victor J. Stenger, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and others have already done so, and their books are more than sufficient reading on the topic.

Science, though it is to be respected, is not the truth. Science creates predictive models of reality that are deemed useful if their predictive powers are demonstrable. Newtonian physics are the truth in that we can use them to understand the properties of reality, but with the discovery of the quantum world, quantum physics began to be developed as a new and more precise predictive model. We still use Newtonian physics in most instances, because it’s precise enough to be useful (and quantum physics still has a way to go—there’s not even a quantum theory of gravity yet). But a model that explains why you like chocolate ice cream is not the same thing as chocolate ice cream or your experience of it. Perhaps science will one day ascend to the level of truth, but for now it is merely a methodology whereby we can have a greater understanding of the world through a system that is minimally dependent on human bias.

But here’s the big one. Here’s the one that religion and science both fight over like two dogs pulling at different ends of the same toy, each hoping to jerk it away from the other. Here’s where things get messy and people get upset.

Good isn’t the truth. Morality isn’t the truth. It is a pliable system of behavioral controls designed to subdue behavioral traits that are, for the moment, considered unfashionable. Morality is every bit as subject to the temperamental whims of humanity as fashion, or diet, or decor, or slang, or any other human frivolity.

Homosexuality, just in my lifetime, went from being perceived largely as an immoral and unnatural act, to being perceived largely as a perfectly moral act that is worthy of respect and is even treated heroically in many circles. Histories and cultures have flipflopped on this issue throughout time. Many native American tribes were totally accepting of homosexuality and even transgenderism. In Ancient Greece, many considered relationships between men and adolescent boys to be a good learning experience for the boys, and a means of population control. Plato, widely considered the pillar of Western philosophy, praised such relationships in his earlier works—though he would later disavow this stance. Today, Plato would be booed off the national stage in utter disgust if he were to utter such a position. Kevin Spacey might have his back, but that’s about it. In Ancient Egypt, even worshipped deities, such as Horus, engaged in homosexual acts. There exist to this day depictions of Horus fucking men in the ass. Imagine walking into a Christian church and seeing Jesus pounding some man butt. It would be a completely surreal experience. But Ancient Egyptians didn’t blink at the equivalent. Of course, Egyptian culture at the time was pretty freaky—they condoned incest, and even considered some prostitutes sacred (they weren’t the only ancient society to embrace that concept either). Today, being gay in Egypt can result in a 3 year prison sentence, and in 2013 95% of Egyptians polled believed homosexuality should not be accepted by society. Usually, I’m not a traditionalist, but I think Egypt needs to get back to it’s freaky roots.

Whether homosexuality is good or bad depends on where you are, when you are, and what sort of homosexuality your practice. In ancient Rome, to penetrate a man was looked at with respect, but to be penetrated by a man was looked at with scorn. In Japan, men of equal social standing hooking up would be viewed negatively, but a powerful man from a higher cast taking on a younger lover from a lower cast was seen as completely normal and a net positive for both men.

Humanity’s ever-changing attitudes towards homosexuality are far from the only example of our wildly-shifting and changing morality. For another example, simply look to the Bible, where a man described as righteous and good offers up his virgin daughters to rape mob, rather than let his house guests, who were complete strangers, be raped by aforesaid mob. The name of this supposed righteous man was Lot, and today few people would describe his actions as moral. But at the time that the Bible was written, he was considered the good guy. He was so good, in fact, that when God chose to smite the city where Lot lived, it was only Lot and his family that God spared. No person of modern moral sensibilities would ever view offering one’s daughters up to be gang raped by an angry mob as morally good. John McCLane never did anything like that, nor did Luke Skywalker or Tony Stark. We tend to like our heroes a little more reluctant to offer up their kids to be raped these days.

But perhaps our friend Sam Harris can help us? He’s a famous atheist and neuroscientist who wrote a book called ‘The Moral Landscape’ which purports right on its dust jacket to tell us “How Science Can Determine Human Values.” Maybe he has the answer to what Lot should have done when an angry mob showed up at his house, demanding to rape his newly arrived house guests?

Well, according to Harris, moral good can be defined as that which increases the well-being of conscious creatures, and he is utilitarian in that he believes that the greatest good is that which increases the well-being of the most conscious creatures. So, then, would Harris simply recommend giving the rape mob what they want? It is the solution that brings about the most happiness, is it not? Lot and his family won’t like seeing their guests raped, and I’m sure the guests won’t enjoy it much, but the vast majority of people (everyone in the town, according to The Bible!) will be most happy if they are simply allowed to rape!

That doesn’t really sound right, does it?

Harris makes some attempt to address these sorts of problems in ‘The Moral Landscape’, but the attempt is rather pitiful. He writes:

We already know that psychopaths have brain damage that prevents them from having certain deeply satisfying experiences (like empathy) that seem good for people both personally and collectively (in that they tend to increase well-being on both counts). Psychopaths, therefore, don’t know what they are missing (but we do). . . . [Psychopaths] are generally ruled by compulsions that they don’t understand and cannot resist. It is absolutely clear that, whatever they might believe about what they are doing, psychopaths are seeking some form of well-being (excitement, ecstasy, feelings of power, etc.), but because of their neurological and social deficits, they are doing a very bad job of it. We can say that a psychopath like Ted Bundy takes satisfaction in the wrong things, because living a life purposed toward raping and killing women does not allow for deeper and more generalizable forms of human flourishing. . . . Is there any doubt that Ted Bundy’s “Yes! I love this!” detectors were poorly coupled to the possibilities of finding deep fulfillment in this life, or that his obsession with raping and killing young women was a poor guide to the proper goals of morality (i.e., living a fulfilling life with others)?

His solution to the problem of sadism is to simply say that, well, bad people are obviously defective, so their sense of their own well-being is warped. Therefore, what? We can just sort of ignore them in moral equation? That’s like saying, “I have discovered an objective measure of what tastes best! Whichever flavor brings the most people the most happiness is the best flavor! And it turns out that Peanut Butter is the flavor that brings people the most happiness, so we must all eat peanut butter! Oh? What’s that you say? Some people are allergic to peanut butter? Well, they’re just defects of nature, so ignore them. Don’t let them ruin the objectively good taste of peanut butter! It’s science!”

Not to mention the fact that under Harris’ view of morality, the strongest condemnation he can muster for a psychopathic serial killer like Ted Bundy is that he’s doing a “bad job” at finding his own well-being. Pretty mild admonition, don’t you think?

However, Harris in the preceding excerpt was only addressing the psychopathy of one man. The story of Lot—the story of Sodom and Gomorrah—concerns an entire city of rape-hungry fiends who are simply starving for some nonconsensual fun. They obvious all feel that it is in their own best interest to rape the weary travelers taking shelter at Lot’s house. So, if we apply the Harris standard here, then I must ask, If every man and most of the women in town are going to be the happiest raping a group of wayward travelers, then who is Sam Harris to deprive them of that sublime act of well-being seeking? The people have spoken! And they want rape!

Now, my objections to Harris’ moral philosophy are withered a bit as you pan back and realize that Harris would simply take an even broader look at the culture of Sodom and Gomorrah, and come to the conclusion, probably rightly, that a society where rape is a tolerated norm is ultimately bound to create more suffering than happiness, or at least more suffering than is necessary. A society where no one rapes or wants to rape is clearly going to cause less suffering than a society where rape is as normal as brushing your teeth. This broader view is the basis through which Harris opposes moral relativism. He’s less focused on individual decisions and situations, and more focused on the collective of humanity. As he makes clear in his 2010 Ted Talk, ‘Can Science Answer Moral Questions.’ Here’s an excerpt of Sam speaking on the subject of Islam and more broadly on the subject of moral relativism:

Now, this brings us to the sorts of moves that people are apt to make in the moral sphere. Consider the great problem of women's bodies: What to do about them? Well this is one thing you can do about them: You can cover them up. Now, it is the position, generally speaking, of our intellectual community that while we may not like this, we might think of this as "wrong" in Boston or Palo Alto, who are we to say that the proud denizens of an ancient culture are wrong to force their wives and daughters to live in cloth bags? And who are we to say, even, that they're wrong to beat them with lengths of steel cable, or throw battery acid in their faces if they decline the privilege of being smothered in this way?

Well, who are we not to say this? Who are we to pretend that we know so little about human well-being that we have to be non-judgmental about a practice like this? I'm not talking about voluntary wearing of a veil -- women should be able to wear whatever they want, as far as I'm concerned. But what does voluntary mean in a community where, when a girl gets raped, her father's first impulse, rather often, is to murder her out of shame?

Just let that fact detonate in your brain for a minute: Your daughter gets raped, and what you want to do is kill her. What are the chances that represents a peak of human flourishing?

This line of reasoning strikes me as a specious appeal to emotion that presupposes the superiority of western moral precepts with no legitimate basis for doing so. The west once believed that slavery was a morally righteous institution, so much so that hundreds of thousands of men died fighting for its preservation when a disagreement erupted over the issue. To simply presuppose our own moral superiority to other cultures is to negate and avoid examination of ourselves.

Just as we in the present look at the barbarity of the past and cringe at the wickedness of our ancestors, so to will future generations look back at us with the same disgust. Perhaps it will be our treatment of animals that they find hideously immoral, or our treatment of the environment, or perhaps it will be something we cannot even imagine. Perhaps in the future it will be considered a great moral evil to sleep on a bed, and us bed-sleeping fools of the past will be looked upon as disgustingly indulgent hedonists obsessed to an unhealthy degree with our own comfort. If you don’t think morality can be so arbitrary, then open your bibles once again and read about Moses condemning a man to death for working on the wrong day, or God telling his people that to mix fabrics is a horrible sin. Or, if you want a more contemporary example of arbitrary morality, then look no further than our society’s condemnation of prostitution. As is often the case, George Carlin said it best: “Selling is legal. Fucking is legal. Why isn’t selling fucking legal?” And to those who point to the dangers of prostitution as evidence for why it should be illegal, I will remind them of the patently obvious fact that it would be a lot less dangerous if it weren’t an unregulated black market.

Hell, only 17 percent of Americans think Polygamy should be legal, but what possible objection could exist to adults making a choice about their own sexuality and with whom the shall cohabitate? Polygamy is a practice that President James Garfield once described as an “offense to moral sense.” And most people still agree, despite that fact that The Bible that James Garfield was sworn in on is riddled with polygamy, and never once is it condemned. King Solomon, considered the wisest ruler of The Bible, had 700 wives and 300 concubines. He doesn’t sound wise to me—that’s a lot of nagging to deal with. See, I told you I could appreciate a good sexist joke.

Opposition to moral relativism seems to me to take only one form, whether it’s being attacked from the left or from the right, and it’s the weakest argument I’ve ever heard. It goes like this: “But if we accept moral relativism, then we can’t pronounce moral judgments on other cultures, and we really like doing that!”

Where’s the logic there? I can’t find it, and I’ve looked. We’re so eager to say, especially of the Muslim world, they keep their women in bags and beat them if they get out of line. That’s clearly wrong! Yet, where is our great outrage at the fact that our stores are filled with chocolate derived from cocoa beans harvested with child labor and even child slavery in Western Africa? We don’t mind supporting their fucked up culture to the point of participating in it monetarily. I’m pretty sure the child slaves who work under terrible, dangerous conditions so that the 60 billion dollar a year chocolate industry can feed your fat ass Milky Ways and M&Ms are suffering just as much as the Muslim women who are forced to wear niqabs—maybe more. When’s the last time you even heard someone talk about our culpability in that? The story is the same for the diamond industry. And much of our cheap clothing and electronics are manufactured in third world sweatshops where people are paid pennies an hour. Hell, in the United States, we’re technically allies of Saudi Arabia, one of the strictest Muslim territories on the face of the earth. We’re happy to condemn their way of life, but we don’t allow our condemnation to hinder our continued monetary support.

Even Western workers often contend with brutal work conditions, as evidenced by the recent exposé of Amazon’s warehouses, where workers are reportedly peeing in bottles because they can’t even find time in their overworked schedule to go to the bathroom. In the UK, 55% of Amazon workers stated that their job has given them depression, and over 80% said they would not apply for a job at Amazon again. Recently, Amazon fired 100 workers in Spain for striking for better working conditions. James Bloodworth, a former Amazon employee from the UK said this of the conditions:

“My first week there [two] [people] collapsed from dehydration. It's so [commonplace] to see someone collapse that nobody is even shocked anymore. You'll just hear a manager complain that he has to do some report now, while a couple of new [people] try to help the guy (veterans won't risk helping [because] it drips rate). No sitting allowed, and there's nowhere to sit anywhere except the break rooms. Before the robots (they call them kivas) pickers would regularly walk 10-15 miles a day, now it's just stand for 10-12 hours a day. [People] complain about the heat all the time but we just get told 80 degrees (Fahrenheit obviously) is a safe working temp. [Sometimes] they will pull out a thermometer, but even when it hits 85 they just say it's fine. There's been deaths, at least one in my building. Amazon likes to keep it all hush hush. Heard about others, you can find the stories if you search for it, but Amazon does a good job burying it.”

The reality is that western civilization is often at the forefront of championing cruelty for profit. This capitalistic brutality manifests itself in a plethora of ways:

• The brutality we allow our corporations to engage in at home and abroad, as described above.
• The horrors of the Private Prison industry in the USA, an institution that gives companies a financial incentive to imprison people—and these same companies then, of course, use some of their money to lobby for stricter sentencing guidelines and more criminalization. We have created a profit motive for putting people in prison. We call ourselves the land of the free, but in reality we in the United States have the highest per capita prison rate of any nation on earth, other than Seychelles.
• The horrors of the military industrial complex, an entire industry built around war, devouring tax dollars and shitting out weapons and other military machinery. We used to look down at people who made money off of war, calling them war profiteers. Now, it’s seen as a legitimate business model. But don’t worry, I’m sure that the multi-billion dollar US arms industry that made 209.7 billion dollars worth of sales in 2015 alone isn’t at all a factor in the United States being perpetually at war (we bombed 7 different countries in 2016 alone).

Now, let me make something clear: I am not an anti-capitalist. I like money. I plan to sell this book for money, and you’ll never see me wearing a Che Guevera shirt or sporting the hammer and sickle of the former Soviet Union as a fashion statement. But, let’s be honest about the downsides of embracing capitalism as completely as America has done. Let’s be honest about the immoral deeds done openly in this country and, to a lesser extent throughout the west, in the name of profit.

My friend and respected YouTube colleague, Kyle Kulinski of the popular YouTube politics show Secular Talk, has put forth similar ideas to Sam Harris concerning morality, condemning the moral relativism of postmodernist thought, and has told me in private conversation that he eagerly awaits the portion of my book where I talk about moral relativism, and at this juncture, we have reached it. So, for Kyle, for Sam Harris, and for everyone else who holds to the notion that moral relativism is a preposterous notion, here’s my thoughts in their very simplest form: you’re wrong.

Now here’s my thoughts in a much less simple form: moral relativism is not only an observable reality from culture to culture, but from subculture to subculture, from time period to time period, and from person to person. Morality is absolutely relative. In fact, the term moral relativism isn’t even all-encompassing enough to describe the nature of my stance on morality. I prefer to think of myself as championing a form moral nihilism, which is defined as the meta-ethical view that nothing is morally right or wrong.

Before you go leaping to the defense of morality or weeping at it’s demise, let’s take our eye off the distracting illusion of what morality purports to be, and instead look into the black and vicious heart of what morality actually is. And for that, let’s revisit my 14-year-old self, who is still in the midst of the first of his many existential crises.

Where did I turn for meaning? When faced with the lack of purpose inherent to human existence, what path of purpose did I try to walk? God was ludicrous, civics was for do-gooders, and science was tedious. So, I found my refuge in art. I could find no truth in art, but I was obsessed with the beauty of its lies. The world was full of shit in all the wrong ways, but in art I could find whatever line of bullshit most satisfied me. And unlike religion, it didn’t require the gullibility to actually fall for it, only the ability to entertain it, and to be entertained by it. For the darkness in me, there was Lovecraft. For the rebel, Marilyn Manson. For the optimist, Star Trek. For the adventurer, Star Wars. For the cynic, Carlin. For the dreamer, Dali. For every facet of my soul, there was some musician, performer, author, director, comedian, or painter who could feed it, who could teach it, who could guide it.

I wanted more than anything to be an artist of one kind or another. I wanted to take what was inside of me and show it to other people in a way that might resonate with them, in a way that might create a beautiful alchemical reaction in their being, changing them in ways both subtle and fundamental. Nothing seemed more important to me than this ambition. I would be a great director of superlative films the likes of which the world had never seen! I would be a musician and singer with lyrics that would change the world! I would be a writer whose words would ring out through history as a beacon of my own importance, signaling my genius to all generations!

The megalomania I possess today is a pale imitation of the unbridled ego of my youth. I was starving to be important, recognized, beloved, and celebrated. And it was this aspiration that imbued me with purpose. There could be no objective meaning to my life, but I could settle for what I imagined was the next best thing: the intersubjective consensus of my peers that I was greater than other men, that I was smarter, deeper, and infinitely more brilliant and wise. Humility was not among my strengths.

I didn’t see myself as I was. I didn’t see a fat, zit-faced, socially awkward, introverted teenager. All I could see was my own grandiose vision of how great I would be someday. I never suspected for even a second that I would one day be 33-years-old, still fat, still socially awkward, still introverted (but at least no-longer zit faced). Instead of directing sweeping epic films watched by millions, I make YouTube videos watched by thousands. Instead of being beloved for my genius, I am often hated for my obnoxious bluntness. Instead of writing world-shattering novels, I write YouTube videos and this meandering screed of a book.

Yet, if I had never aimed for genius director, I might not have even made it to mid-level YouTuber. If I’d been more practical, I might now be a gas station clerk. If I hadn’t aspired to be a great novelist, I might never have mastered writing well enough to convey these thoughts to you now. If I never tried to be the equal of my heroes like George Carlin and Marilyn Manson, I might never have developed enough showmanship to engage with anyone on an interesting level.

And so, art for me was not a grand truth. I never thought it was. But it was a personal truth. And it was a personal truth that shaped my life in ways that I think were ultimately for the better. Art never gave me a rigid series of rules and said, “do these things and you will achieve greatness!” It gave me tools, it gave me guidelines, and most importantly it gave me ambition. I may not be everything I wanted to be, or even close, but the benefit of hindsight shows me that I’m much more than I could have been.

Salvador Dali once said, “At the age of 6, I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.” Dali was an accomplished artist, but he fell well short of his greatest ambitions. But it didn’t ultimately matter, because his ambitions were so great that even in falling short of them, he achieved greatness.

I think that you must treat morality the way that an aspiring young artist treats art. You must conceive of yourself as the ultimate moral being, and strive towards that goal, so that even if you fall terribly short of it, you have still managed to be less rotten than you might have been. But in order to do that, you must realize that morality, at its best, is deeply personal and completely subjective.

When I was young and attending school, I had within me a pathological aversion to authority, and being prone to deconstruction, I was always astutely observing the systems whereby my peers and I were being controlled. I noticed that oftentimes rules were completely arbitrary nonsense with seemingly no good reason for being. For instance, my school had a policy of no hats. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why such a rule existed. What was the dire consequence of allowing students to wear hats? I asked about it and was told that hats would be too great a distraction. I felt perplexed and incensed by that answer. If hats were introduced into the student population, they would become such a distraction that productivity would cease? “I was going to do the assignment, Mr. Jenkins, but the kid in front of me was wearing a hat, and I just couldn’t take my eyes off it! Goddamn, that hat was just mesmerizing!”

Occasionally though, some of the more rebellious kids would sneak in a hat. They would wear it when teachers weren’t watching. Or they’d even wear it brazenly in class and have to be told to remove it. It was after observing this several times that I hypothesized why such a rule existed. Teenagers are prone to acts of rebellion, so it made sense for the adults to give them meaningless and arbitrary rules so that their inevitable transgressions against said rules would result not in any sort of tangible disruption, but instead in prosaic acts of mere pseudo-rebellion. In other words, rules like “no hats” only existed to channel youthful rebellion into a benign defiance, rather than a substantive defiance of the actual system of authoritarian control being implemented. It was the system’s way of giving us a symbolic issue to fight over so that the substance of their dominion was less likely to be jeopardized by kids not going along with the program.

I was distressed when I realized that the adult world functions in much the same way. If the population is dissatisfied with the condition of society, then the leaders will invariably find a symbolic issue to channel the people’s focus away from any action that threatens the powerful. “You’re poor? That’s a real shame. Well, look at that rich NFL player who won’t kneel for the national anthem! Doesn’t that disgust you? Aren’t you pissed off about that? Pay no attention to the system that keeps you in poverty, even though you work 40 hours a week and so does your spouse. Instead, focus on Colin Kaepernick not respecting our national theme song and refusing to grovel before our national rag! Don’t be disobedient in your own interest, instead turn on someone being disobedient in his own interest! That’s the American way!”

Make no mistake, for the people upset at Colin Kaepernick and other NFL players taking a knee during the national anthem, that fight is a moral issue. They’re genuinely incensed that someone doesn’t show proper respect for the very same country that’s fucking them over, especially when it’s someone who has it better than them. “What does he have to complain about? He makes 20 million a year! I’m stuck in a shitty job! Fuck him!” No. Fuck the corporation who doesn’t compensate you fairly for your shitty job. Fuck the country that lets them get away with it. And most of all, fuck you for being so easily distracted by symbols and pageantry that you don’t stop to take a look at who your real enemies are.

So, have you figured out yet what the morality foisted upon you by society actually is? Have you figured out yet that morality is not about good or bad, but is about the controllers and the controlled? If not, let me beat you over the head with yet another example. Who are the most despised people in all of society? Child rapists. Even among murderers and thieves and regular old rapists, a child rapist is the lowest form of human scum.

So let’s think about the Catholic Church for a moment. It is well known by now that for years, the Catholic Church was home to priests who used their positions of power to rape children. When this great, supposedly ultra-moral organization uncovered the activities of these men, the power structure of the Catholic Church did not bring them to justice. It did not even kick them out of the church. It covered up their activities, and if a priest received a bad reputation for raping kids in one diocese, they simply moved them to another so that they could start anew. The great moral entity called church, who had stood in judgment of millions of supposed sinners throughout its storied history, when faced with its own evil, did the worst thing possible: it camouflaged that evil. It protected it. It knowingly and willfully provided shelter and a victim pool to its most sexually predacious priests.

Let’s think about this for a second. In prison, a child rapist is looked at as complete scum, even by murderers. Often, they are beaten and even killed by fellow inmates in their prison. In civil society, they are looked at with the utmost disgust and, if allowed back into the world after serving in prison, they are closely-monitored like no other criminal. Society considers few, if any, actions more reprehensible. So, how can it be that the entire power structure of the Catholic Church, a church with 1.2 billion members, saw this problem of rampant child sexual abuse and said, “The best way to handle this is to cover it up and protect our predators.”? How does that make sense?

In all actuality, it makes perfect sense when you come to the realization that morality, as it exists now, is nothing more than a tool of the powerful to control the powerless. The 1.2 billion members of the church are expected to conduct themselves according to the morals foisted upon them by said church, but those in the church’s power structure do not hold themselves to the same standards. They don’t view themselves as beholden to the same morality as their parishioners, because they know what those parishioners don’t—that the morality they peddle is not about good or bad, it’s about maintaining power and control. So even the clergy that weren’t sexually preying on kids were defending those who did and working hard to see that predator priests were spared from the negative consequences of their insidious transgressions. The mantra of the powerful has always been: “We are the powerful and we can do as we please. You are the subjects and you will do as you’re told.”

Morality has always been about “do as I say, not as I do.” That’s why Sam Harris rails against Islamic evil, but turns a blind eye to the evils of his own society. That’s why the government of the United States can act disgusted when some two-bit dictator murders innocent people, but is totally comfortable with their own complicity in murdering the innocent when it suits our national interests. That’s why the catholic church can make the unconscionable decisions to protect the worst sorts of predators in its midst. That’s why a burglar who steals 200 dollars will see the inside of a prison cell, but a banker who steals 200 million will continue to sip cocktails in a posh spa in Aruba while perfect 10 women pretend to enjoy sucking his underwhelming dick.

Morality is a mechanism of control. Nietzsche recognized this 130 years ago. And I know we’re not as smart as Nietzsche, but I think it’s time we caught up with him on this simple point. It’s not difficult to grasp, and once you see it at all, you’ll easily see it everywhere.

Aside from being a mechanism of control, morality is also a human construct that is completely subjective. And since there are many who believe in some form of objective morality, based either in science or in religion, I will need to defend my statement that morality is subjective. Though, in honesty, I’d just as soon not waste my breath or the energy required to animate my fingers, but because I love you, I’ll slum it by actually entertaining objective morality for a moment.

If we look at humankind from a far enough distance to escape our anthropocentricism, we see that the universe itself cares about nothing. Nature cares about nothing. It is completely cold to us, and to everything else within it. Nature has no special affinity for us, or for any other living thing. The vast majority of species that have ever existed on earth are now extinct. Nature didn’t see fit to save them. Nature saw fit to kill them off. Nature has created a system whereby animals feed on one another to survive. If a gazelle must die for a lion to eat, nature is just fine with that system. Nature has created a system where many birds produce more offspring then they can feed just so they have a “back up” kid—the smaller and weaker baby birds are often pecked to death or kicked out of the nest to starve when they become too burdensome. Think about that: a living thing brought into this world just to die. A living thing that only exists on the off chance that something goes wrong with his or her sibling, and if nothing does go wrong, they die, having never been given a chance to live. Is that the design of a compassionate mother nature who loves us and has some great moral plan in mind for us?

At any moment, a giant asteroid could collide with the earth and wipe out all or most life on the planet. It’s happened before. There’s no magical force preventing it from happening again. Nature shows us no deference, because nature has no awareness and no compassion.

Christians try to give nature compassion by calling it God. Instead of a cold mother, they say we have a warm father who loves us all very much. So why do we suffer? Because he’s testing us. Because we must prove ourselves worthy in this life to attain eternal paradise in an afterlife that begins when we die and shed our mortal bodies. There’s no evidence whatsoever that this idea is true, so it’s little more than pretty wrapping paper around a turd.

A more scientific explanation for how nature has given us morality can be furnished through evolutionary biology. Even Darwin himself believed that morality was a byproduct of evolution. Humans have evolved a capacity for cooperation unprecedented among mammals (I think bacterial colonies that can function as a single organism have us beat though, perhaps). Researcher Michael Tomasello, co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, has observed that, “It is inconceivable that you would ever see two chimpanzees carrying a log together.” There is no mechanism within chimpanzees that allows them to cooperate on that level. For us, cooperation is a natural trait that manifests in early childhood.

The idea behind the evolution of morality is that from evolution we have developed a natural inclination to cooperate, an ability to empathize with one another, a sense of fairness, and an ability to recognize shared intentionality—and from these things spring our concept of morality.

Let’s reiterate those evolved traits scientists have proposed as the building blocks of morality:

1. Cooperation
2. Empathy
3. A concept of Fairness
4. A recognition of shared intentionality.

It makes us sound so noble, doesn’t it?

Let me give you a scenario. Two cavemen are sitting around a fire, and they’re watching their neighbor in the cave nearby, and he has all sorts of shiny rocks and all the best cavewomen. Then one caveman says to the other, “Thag has all the shiny rocks and all the best women. That’s not fair.” (They’re very articular cavemen.) And his friend says, “I empathize with your feelings about Thag. Hey, I have an idea, let’s cooperate, and kill Thag.” And with wonderous shared intentionality they do just that. They bash Thag’s brains in with a big rock and steal his gems and his buxom caveladies.

We’re sounding a little less noble now, yes?

Ultimately, I have no objection to the idea that evolution has played a hand in the development of modern conceptions of morality, as it has had a hand in all human behavior—compassionate or brutal. My only question is, whence cometh the objectivity? Just because morality evolved with man doesn’t mean that morality is objective, and just because some constituent pieces of human nature like fairness and empathy can be building blocks of morality doesn’t mean that can’t also be building blocks of immorality as well.

Let’s boil everything we’ve talked about so far down to three basic premises, shall we? I would hate for you to lose the plot. Here’s what’s going on in this verbose tangent:

1. Morality is primarily used as a mechanism of control by the powerful to keep their subjects in line.
2. Morality is completely subjective.
3. For morality to be useful to us moving forward, we must reject it as a mechanism of control and embrace its subjectivity. We must embrace a more personalized take on morality that enables us to embody our own unique visions of morality, the same way an artist develops their own style of art.

I will speak no further on premises 1 and 2, but premise 3 no doubt has raised questions in your mind. Well, let’s be honest. There’s one question lingering in your mind above all others. If we were to embrace this idea of highly personalized morality, are we not opening the flood gates for some really fucked up notions of moral good? Are we not giving every would-be Hitler the power to label themselves good without us being able to argue against it in any concrete way?

Well, if we treat morality as art, and we treat ourselves as the artists of morality, then we must look to art for the answer to that question. Some people are really bad at art, just as some people are really bad at morality. Usually, the bad art is rejected and never goes anywhere, but occasionally art that is considered bad by many discerning people reaches extraordinary heights. A painter slams their paint covered butt against a canvas, calls it “Untitled” and charges $1,300,000 for it, and some scumfuck businessman who needs to launder his money buys the painting. A hack director like Michael Bay who makes the same overwrought, brainless action film for the 17th time is rewarded by a stampede of fools rushing the cinema, desperate to be parted from their money. Usually, bad art fails, but occasionally it succeeds.

The same would be true of morality in a world where morality is strictly personal. People will share their moral ideas and moral philosophies, and usually the bad ones will die off. But occasionally, because we are a stupid species, bad ideas will take flight and become the latest trend. The Michael Bay’s of morality will convince people that the latest moral trend is shitting on the sidewalk to keep our sewers clean.

This is where law comes in. Law needs to be separate from morality, but we’ll get into law in a later chapter. The main thing that you need to understand upfront is something that Marilyn Manson expressed in his 1999 essay for Rolling Stone, ‘Columbine: Whose Fault Is It?’: “We live in a free country, but with that freedom there is a burden of personal responsibility. Rather than teaching a child what is moral and immoral, right and wrong, we first and foremost can establish what the laws that govern us are. You can always escape hell by not believing in it, but you cannot escape death and you cannot escape prison.”

You actually can escape prison, either by getting away with your crimes, or by actually physically breaking out of the prison, but the point remains: whatever moral notions people develop, that can only be allowed to govern their behavior up to a point. We as a society still need collective order, and for that we need tangible consequences to the actions that we deem not necessarily wrong, but simply and pragmatically not conducive to a functional and prosperous society.

So if some raging psychopath wants to say, “In my moral system, chopping people’s heads off is okay!” Society’s response to that is, “You’re free to think so, but if you act on those values, you’re going in a cage forever and you’re going to be really sad.”

And if, by some miracle of human stupidity, that guys’ morality becomes popular enough that the laws of the land are changed and chopping off people’s heads is now legal, then at that point, don’t we deserve the disastrous results? In the words of the internet’s restless hivemind, “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.”

Here are this chapter’s aphorisms:

1. If a person offers you rules, what they are actually offering is chains. What they call good is that which suits and empowers them, what they call bad is that which offends and challenges them.
2. You must be the artist of your own morality. Morality must evolve with the needs of the age, and it cannot evolve as quickly as it must if good and bad are a matter of deference to tradition.
3. You can escape another’s moral judgments simply by not giving weight to them, but you cannot escape the consequences of the law simply by ignoring it.