Is Religion False But Good Anyway? - Part 1

The Redpill Bluepill Dichotomy Is Dumb and Wrong

This is part one in a four part series:

Part One: The Redpill Bluepill Dichotomy Is Gay - why every modern ideology, left or right, is degenerate trash.

Part Two: Adaptive Lies, Maladaptive Truths - Examining some micro examples of adaptive lies and why rationality so often fails.

Part Three: Bias, Power, and the Ambiguous - why “truth”, bias, and power are inseparable.

Part Four: TBD

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Preface

Notorious shape rotator and gentleman shitposter, Telmudic, asked the following on the birb app the other day.  

I did reply to Tel’s third comment here¹ about why I think comparing the religion question to the race question is comparing apples to oranges (or, more precisely, apples to apple seeds) but his first two I knew would require a whole two thousand word poast if I cared to address them.

Well I do. And it will actually be three, three thousand word poasts. Oops!

I must admit this series may misunderstand or misrepresent Tel’s position (I have no knowledge of his view beyond the above tweets). But what my bias thinks (wants?) him to be asking is a really important question I’ve been meaning to address for a long time. No better time than now!

Tel if you ever read these and it’s not at all the angle you were looking for: Sorry, I have used your question as a springboard toward my own selfish aims. I hope you at least find it interesting. Or at worst, take solace in the fact that others might and I would have procrastinated attempting it for months or years otherwise.

And on the chance it is the right angle, but you think the conclusion is wrong, I hope you will make good on your threats to moonlight as a himbo wordcel and start a substack to show me why :)

Anyway, onto my first case:

Red Pill and Blue Pill as False Dichotomy

First, I must explain my position of the redpill vs bluepill being a false dichotomy. And further, that failure to understand this is actually why the west has made no philosophical progress since the postmodernists over half a century ago. Seems Tel agrees with at least the former—given that neither option he presents involves “seeing how deep the rabbit hole goes”—but I must make the case for the sake of the latter.

Allow me to quote my favorite e-Pajeet and also-shapefag, Dr. Ajay Kumar (he/him), in his introduction of the “green” or “chromo” pill.

Every system that works rests upon a foundation of useful lies.

There are three stages in understanding this:

Blue pill: believes the useful lies.
Red pill: sees why the useful lies are lies.
Green pill: sees why the useful lies are useful.

Step 2 is the worst place to be. This is where the likes of Richard Dawkins and Michael Malice find themselves. It’s where the postmodernists found themselves during the high deconstructive phase.

If you fail to take the green pill then you turn into an anti-theist, a bitwit, a lolbert, or a woketard. And nobody likes those people.

On the other hand, if all you take is the green pill, then you glow in the dark, which increases your risk of being involved in a car accident.

Now I don’t perfectly agree with his assessment—and, as a Darwin Simp, I prefer the term “adaptive” rather than “useful”—but I think the chromo pill framework is highly explanatory.

It correctly identifies that Redpillers (of which I used to be) and postmodernists (of which I am currently sympathetic) have basically the exact same methodology. The only real difference being that the former simply have a right leaning (preferring conservative ie old and tested) bias while the PMs have a left leaning (preferring progressive ie novel and untested) ones. And this ultimately opens the door to explaining both why The Redpillers don’t actually fix anything as well as how the post modernists, despite correctly identifying that almost all things we believed at the time were lies, somehow managed to increase rather than decrease the level of delusion in our society.²

And this failure in both happens because, despite their newfound wisdom that the truths were actually lies, they remain naïve—both still holding the fundamental assumption that if you just dismantle the lies then the truth will automatically shine through.

In the case of the PMs, they believed that if we simply deconstruct the old Lindy lies like Conservatism, patriotism, Christianity, gender binary, the concept of race, etc—lies which worked reasonably well for most people for hundreds and in some cases thousands of years but “oppressed” or otherwise limited various small but not insignificant minority groups—the more nuanced “actual truth” which is “more fair and reasonable” will naturally spawn from their ashes.

When what actually happens is dismantling the old lies creates a vacuum in which even more more deluded, anti-social, parasitic, resentful, and extractive lies come rushing in. Progressivism, identity politics, globalism, white ethnomasochism, consumerism, whiteness studies, feminism, LGBTQIA+ etc. and all the rest are just a few modern examples of this (most if not all of which I can assure you would have the postmodernists rolling in their grave).

“Haha, retards!” says the reactionary redpiller at these new “absurd”, “extractive”, and “dysfunctional” metanarratives. And they aren’t wrong. But ironically, most of them having never read the post modernists, are completely unaware that their own attempts to “fix” these new less-Lindy metanarratives contain the same naïve deconstructionist mindset that caused them in the first place, leading their proposed replacements to be equally as incomplete and thus equally if not more prone to this spiraling off into toxic dysfunction of unintended consequences as the trash they seek to replace.

Whether it be around race or gender or nation or whatever else, all the deconstruction the dissident right does to the progressive left is intellectually accurate (just as all the deconstruction the postmodernists did to the order that preceded them was intellectually accurate). And yet their solution is almost always just “let’s go back to the old solutions that were insufficient” seemingly completely oblivious to the fact that if those solutions were sufficient we wouldn’t have ditched them in the first place.³

The left says “all the old shit is bad lets invert it” The right says “all the new shit is bad, lets invert it” Both sides generally incapable of novel thought, only inversion.

As I go into more in that piece: trying to cause a new pandemic with an old virus that everyone is already inoculated against (ie trying to return formerly dominant ideologies back to dominance) is not only equally as retarded but more retarded than believing that “new and different” is inherently better. This is implicit in the fact that the left always wins and the right always loses.

But the left ultimately always loses too. Because despite that they always end up with the power, their naïve deconstruction, their belief that “different and new” is inherently better, only makes things worse too (because “different and new” is actually almost universally worse). And this is because all “redpillism”—all belief that deconstruction is a solution rather than just entropy—is degenerate by definition.

As far as I can tell, whether it’s the libs, the progs, the cons, the dissident right, and pretty much everything in between, all share these three fundamental axioms, and they are at the root of why we have been in philosophical decline for at least a century (if not four).

1. “truth” is inherently “good” (rather than that “goodness” is itself an adaptive lie invented by conscious beings to increase the survival of their genes)

2. human beings will prioritize “truth” over survival.

3. And thus, that deconstruction and critique—of getting enough people disillusioned with the current system by pulling one loose thread to unravel the whole societal sweater—are the primary means by which “goodness” and “truth” flourish (rather than the primary means by which chaos, entropy, and destruction flourish).

But even this might not be so bad—or at least could ultimately be realized as flawed—if it weren’t for the fact that everyone only strawmans the thing they seek to replace.

An Inability To Steelman

Having spent the last decade surfing the political spectrum—from Occupy Wall Street progressive, to McNuke Anarchocapitalist, to Wignat poasting neofascist, and a dozen more in between⁴—spending 40+ hours a week autistically examining and provisionally believing each for months or years at a time before becoming disillusioned when I inevitably find a thread—usually several—that unravels the whole thing, I can say with absolute confidence that: every last one of these ideologies is not only shallow and incomplete but has totally strawmanned the system they aim to replace.

Not a single proponent of these “improved systems” or any other I’ve ever come across (minus maybe a few NRx-ers) have even asked (let alone answered) questions like “What are all the ways in which the existing system is good and functional, and we must be sure not to break with our replacement?” or “what is it about the existing system that made it outcompete—and thus be by definition better than—everything that preceded it?” or “what are the really good reasons my obviously better system didn’t win out against the system we actually chose and how have those circumstances changed to where mine will now succeed?” or, in the case of reaction, “what are the really good reasons my formerly dominant system I want to reimplement stopped being dominant and what has changed so that it will stay top dog this time?”.

And the reason not a single one of them has ever even asked these obvious and elementary questions which would be taught in the 100 level course of “civilization engineering” at a community college is because their fundamental motivation is rooted not in some kind of benevolent, detached engineering task of Salus populi suprema lex (“the health of the people is the supreme law”)⁵ but rather in a personal, emotional vendetta against a system which they feel has harmed, suppressed, extracted from, or exploited them.

All “alternative” political systems are rooted first and foremost in grievance, of feeling that we are the “oppressed minority” who is being extracted from to benefit those who have not earned it. It is us—the good people who deserve to thrive—vs them—the bad people who prevent us from getting what we deserve.

If you are a white nationalist it is generally the jews; a jew, the antisemites; a socialist, the rich; a libertarian, the socialists; a progressive, the conservatives; a conservative, the progressives; an atheist, the christians; a christian, the atheists, etc. All have some outgroup boogeyman that is the cause of the ingroup’s suffering, and the ingroup will “get what we are owed” once the outgroup are stopped.

For every last one of these, you must first have the experience of feeling harmed, and only after—depending on what group you fall into (racial, gender, personality, preferences, “vibe”, etc) and in what way you perceive the harm was done—do you “discover the truth” of the “obviously correct” political solution to your personal grievances with society. Of course, this axiom of personal harm massively biases your examination of the problem. And it’s why political “solutions” are as varied as soft drinks. Because the “problem” they are designed to fix is not societal, but psychological; to channel your resentment, to give you something to believe in, and to make you feel like the world makes sense. Not to ever actually be implemented.

And thus they all inherently and by design strawman the system they claim to be replacements for. Because they are not seeking to paint an accurate and holistic picture for engineers who wish to build a product, but rather are the product themselves, built to be a believable story to sell to consumers that will make them feel empowered, important, understood, like they matter, etc. And thus, predictably, they end up completely ignoring all the things the existing system gets right, making their claimed “upgrades” catastrophic downgrades if they ever actually end up implemented.

Because when you strawman the existing solution you make it impossible to truly understand why it was selected. And if you do not understand why it was selected there is no way your “upgrade” has accounted for everything it does right. And if your “upgrade” has not accounted for the critical “need to haves” the current regime fulfills, instead focused entirely on some minority’s idealistic “nice to haves” it does not, your replacement is by definition worse. And thus, all attempts to “improve” a system which have not spent most of their time trying to understand why the existing one is the best thing we’ve been able to come up with so far, is guaranteed to produce worse results than the thing it’s trying to replace.⁶

So unless we want to kill three hundred million people this century too, it might be worth reconsidering our strategy.

Are We Even Asking the Right Question?

Let’s circle back to the original question:

If it’s true that religion and most other “pre-scientific” beliefs, are a “lie”, but also that all careless attempts to dismantle them only bring about something far worse (and that repeating this process, such as reactionaries deconstructing progressivism, only creates something even worse than that) what then is our option? Just try to believe the lies? Pretend the lies are true? Which lies? the pretty Lindy ones (conservatism) or the kinda Lindy ones (progressivism)? Why not the really Lindy ones (monarchism, slavery, white nationalism, women as property, etc)?

I think we are still asking the wrong question. There is a third position. We just haven’t found it yet because no one has actually tried. Because, as far as I can tell, everyone smart or transgressive or mutant enough to see that the old lies are lies is too arrogant, emotionally stunted, or willfully ignorant to realize that their inversions of it are too.

The reason we are stuck—deconstructing and transgressing ad infinitum and calling it progress—is because the only people who treat the lies with the appropriate respect are the ones who believe them (“bluepilled”) while everyone who doesn’t believe them (“redpilled”) always throws the baby out with the bathwater. Until the latter begin to treat the lies with respect, until they take the green pill, we will remain in this downward spiral of degenerative retardation.

If you wish to improve society you must treat it the way you treat any other system you actually successfully improve.

Take software for example. If you want to improve some code you must first understand what the existing code is doing, and how it is doing it and why it’s doing it. And to seek first and foremost to not break the old code with your new code. Yes, the old code is shit, and you could write better code in your sleep. Likely you hate not only how it’s written but also much of what it actually even does. But mucking about with code you understand will already have you squashing bugs for longer than it took you to write your whole update. Mucking about with code you don’t understand is how you spend the next few days (or weeks!) in troubleshooting hell. And just deleting random blocks of code you think are “bad” or “useless” on the live production server? Lol! not even libs are that stupid!

And yet this is exactly what we are doing. Society is a live production server, written by millions of contractors over centuries, with a mountain of tech debt large enough to reach mars, and everyone is just out here trying to delete entire libraries like we’re playing fuckin’ mine sweeper. The real miracle of twentieth century modernist arrogance is not our transistors or TVs or moon landing but rather that we only killed three hundred million people and not everyone.

If you wish to actually progress society, rather than send us all to hell again, the first thing you must understand is that the lies—whether they be the more Lindy ones of conservatism, Christianity, gender roles, etc or the less Lindy ones of Progressivism, atheism, feminism, etc—exist for a good reason. They are adaptive. While not perfect, they were the closest thing evolution could come up with thus far to survive in the memetic environments it was subject to (and when a new one becomes dominant it is almost always because the environment changed that cause the old one to stop working).

And given that basic Darwinian selection brought us not only all the complexity of life but even the universe itself, it should be implicitly obvious to anyone with half an understanding of biology that the lies, particularly the really old ones, are not only really, really effective at making human civilization function but further that almost every other choice has already been tried and has proven itself worse.

Sure, could a better iPhone or transistor or fuel source or governance model be devised? Of course. And it’s something we need to figure out. But the idea that your dumb ass—or even your whole dumb ass tribe—has figured it out with ease and that the only problem is “those guys are evil and dumb and want to hold us back” is pure narcissism, foolishness, and arrogance (and the only thing even dumber and more arrogant than that the idea we will fix everything if we just go back to Blackberries, abacuses, whale oils, or white nationalism).

Taking The Green Pill

So if we are to even open the door to the possibility of solving the problem of lies, we must first swallow the green pill.

And once we do, upon the onset of the pill’s effects, the first thing we will realize is that the first question we should be asking is not “should we force ourselves to believe the lies” but rather “what is it about the lies that made them so believed?”

And as the pill really starts to kick in, we start to realize that the question of “is it a lie or the truth?” is not even right either. The answer is necessary, but not sufficient. It is only one data point among hundreds or thousands more just like it in the larger question of “how is it that lies can be adaptive?”. It is only from this lens that we can extract the first principles of this problem. And only with first principles can we have any chance of finding a way out of this mess.

So, how is it that lies can be adaptive? This is much more easily examined if we work bottom up; deriving principles from the micro and then applying them to the macro. There are a dozen places we could start, but in part two we will examine two I know well: entrepreneurship and the manosphere.

In the meantime, enjoy these sexy feet pix… er I mean foot notes.

1. Note that in my first reply to Tel’s tweet I forgot a few words. I meant to say “religion bluepill is hella lindy while racial bluepill is super new.”

2. this is what the new Matrix movie was about by the way. Or at least one of the main things it’s about. Read that thread before you watch the movie and you may actually enjoy it!

3. Some redpillers such as the manospherers and anarchocapitalists, actually do have “new” solutions however they still fall prey to the strawmanning-of-the-old-system problem, thus still provide incomplete and thus nonviable solutions. They could be part of the new solution, but alone they are insufficient to solve even the sub realm they propose to fix. I started expanding on the Mansophere redpill in my Burgundy Pill series, may one day write a series on anarchocapitalism also.

4. The only quadrant I’ve never been is authleft, but been reading a lot of Marx lately so hoping to fix this soon.

5. This by the way, is why Yarvin is so popular despite that he is a shitty writer and his solutions aren’t even good—because he is seemingly the only writer on the entire internet who treats society like an actual engineering problem, focused on the health of the entire society rather than of only a small subsection at the expense of another (something that cannot be said about any other ideology or political philosophy I am aware of). It’s not about the conclusions he draws but rather that he is thinking in a way seemingly no one else has ever before considered.

6. And this is not to even mention how the tails of dissident thought are cherry picked and caricatured by the regime to be used as propaganda to increase the potency of its bluepill. Dissidents, believing they are slowly defeating the regime, are actually the primary means by which it is maintained. The dissident boogeyman is the regime’s most potent and effective weapon in eliciting compliance amongst its believers. Regardless of whether you are lefty trying to take down the conservative regime or a righty trying to take down on the progressive one: all your hard work and dedication to destroy the regime does nothing more than save it from having to waste money inventing and maintaining an enemy. Dissidents are simply a regime’s unpaid interns, without which it would collapse under it’s own weight.