Is Religion False But Good Anyway? - Part 2

Adaptive Lies, Maladaptive Truths

This is part two 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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In part one of this series, I made the case for:

1. The redpill bluepill dichotomy—the dichotomy of “truth vs lies”—as flawed.

2. considering the concept of the green pill; useful or “adaptive” lies.

3. Why all modern Western philosophies (progressivism, conservatism, libertarianism, communism, etc) ultimately fail to actually “engineer” society. Namely:

   • They are rarely if ever motivated by “emotionally detached engineering”, instead by personal resentments and feelings of oppression (biased, irrational, tribal).

   • they all must fill the hole in meaning and belonging left by the Protestant Reformation, and thus are not even designed to be a methodology by which engineers build a product but rather are themselves a (naturally occurring) engineered product which is sold to consumers to meet these unmet needs (important footnote)¹

   • This requires them to strawman the system they aim to replace, ensuring their purported replacement is insufficient and only gets everyone killed if ever actually implemented.

   • Anytime the above isn’t true, and they do actually get down to engineering, their solutions are still always bad due to their three flawed core axioms of:

     1. truth is better than falsehood

     2. humans prioritize truth over survival

     3. exposing and spreading “truth” is the primary necessity for society to improve and flourish

In this piece, I will dive deeper into the concept of “adaptive lies”, exploring how they can be useful on a micro level, which I will then piggy back off of in part three to bring this into the macro (and maybe eventually address the original question of what to do about religion). First, let us examine my business failures.

Entrepreneurs Who Lie to Themselves Are the Only Ones Who Build

Back in 2019, I hired an expensive business coach to help me make my own coaching business more profitable. In some sense she was worth the money. She got results. The three month cost of her coaching was paid off in business growth in only three months after that (profitability which was maintained until I took a hiatus in 2021 to focus on Minor Dissent). But it was also anticlimactic and left me feeling kind of cheesed. Because the majority of what she taught me was literally just the same stuff you hear on week one of entrepreneur Twitter. Specifically, of building a practice of positive affirmation and believing in yourself. I, like many struggling entrepreneurs, just never took it seriously until I had massive skin in the game (her coaching cost).

Ideas I had about myself like “I am bad at sales” “I am not manipulative enough to make money” “I am exploiting people by charging high prices” were replaced with counters like “I am simply inexperienced in sales. I can learn”, “there are plenty of non-manipulative ways to make money”, and “I am harming people by being too afraid of rejection to offer them my service”, and my most important task of the day soon became to recite these new beliefs to myself.

The specific beliefs above are more “holistic”—providing an on net more balanced or “truthful” perspective—than the ones they replaced. However, just as many on my list could be described as nothing other than flat out irrational delusion.  

Here was my full list. I haven’t looked at or touched it much in a year or two, but it should demonstrate my point well enough.

As you can see—and as I and anyone else who has used similar strategies can attest—it doesn’t matter whether these were “holistic” views that were “more true” than the one sided negative beliefs they were replacing or whether they were totally deluded made up stories completely detached from reality in every possible way. All that mattered is that they made me feel powerful and motivated and willing to put in effort to do the work. And thus, they worked. They were lies but they were adaptive. And the truths they replaced were maladaptive by comparison.

As a pessimistic thinkboi this was something I had to learn and make a daily concerted effort to reinforce (and first required dismantling all the ego investment I had tied up in “pursuing truth no matter the cost” which made me feel righteous but was ultimately harming me). The best entrepreneurs however, the “naturals”, are the ones who do this automatically and without effort. Optimists, people from whom telling themselves the most effective lie is a personality trait are the only ones who end up running these unicorns (and most everything else). Only the guy who is axiomatically certain of his greatness, success, importance, and ability to impact the world, who doesn’t have to waste hours every day fighting against the part of him that thinks he’s a loser and failure, can put in the eighty hour work weeks necessary to build the next unicorn.

Facebook, Google, Uber, Microsoft, Tesla, and all the rest only exist because their founders were experts at telling themselves adaptive lies (and perhaps just as importantly, knowing when to tell themselves adaptive truths instead, more on this later).

And this is the rule, not the exception. Take flight for example: only a century ago the reasonable position, the one most aligned with “truth”, was the belief that it would take hundreds or thousands more years to invent a flying machine. Instead, it took two high-school-dropout bike repairmen with hubris and a dream to say “I don’t give a shit what is rational” to go and do it anyway in a few months. And within decades we not only had commercial air travel but were landing on the heckin’ moon.

All the naysayer scoffing “it can’t be done” “it’s impossible, no one has done it for thousands of years” “all odds are stacked against them” were right—or at least more right, more “aligned with truth”—than the people who actually did it. All the “reasonable rationalists” of today would have—through rigorous Bayesian analysis—denounced the Wright Brothers as illogical, irrational, and even deluded. And they would have been wrong. And just about every great philosophical or technological discovery or invention of history would have—and has—a similar story.²

And herein lies the fatal flaw of rationality. The entirety of human progress comes as a result of the times when reason failed. Of the rare times the iron rule of “new things are worse than old things” is wrong; of the time the unmapped territory is categorically different than the mapped.

Remember those “statistically insignificant flukes”, that “noise in the data” from part one? Yeah, they are the only reason we aren’t still banging rocks together in the dirt.

Any creator of any kind can tell you: zero to one never comes from reason and evidence, but instead from “arational” things like accident, inspiration, and obsession or fully “irrational” things like dreams, visions, “the voice of God”, etc. And this is because you cannot reason your way into something that has never before existed. Creativity requires delusion. Or at least what is functionally RNG. And thus, rationality is a one-to-many function; it cannot create, only organize that which has already been created.

Meaning that “being rational” “following the truth” only really works when most of the territory is already mapped. The problem however is that not only is the majority of the territory unmapped (and how are you supposed to get accurate results when your sample size isn’t even close to representative?) but worse, most of the mapped territory is mapped wrong by people with even worse methods and sample sizes than you!

Yes, some things can be scientifically validated to where we can probably trust their “truths” despite their shoddy origins (physics, math, some other hard sciences), but these are rare.

Referring back at the micro example of entrepreneurship: Your core beliefs about yourself are almost universally based solely on your early experiences, many as far back as childhood; likely less than a dozen “kinds” of experiences with half a dozen people formative in your personality and beliefs. What are the chances those are actually representative the rest of the world? or still the most effective strategies and beliefs now that you are an adult? And yet they are the unexamined axioms which undergird all of your so called “rational” decision making. Garbage in, garbage out!

Similarly, on the mezzo: Your core beliefs about society are similarly based on things you were never reasoned into, but rather were implicitly installed in you by people who themselves were not reasoned into their positions. When your fundamental understanding of how to even read a map is corrupt—which it inherently and irreparably is—rationality and reality are often not even in the same dimension.

And this applies just as much to the macro. To take one example: Human rights, equality, egalitarianism, democracy, the fundamental goods in all Western or Enlightenment thought. They are all based on souls which themselves are based on God. Without God and souls, the justification for all these evaporates. Meaning Liberals’ own materialism (and further, Progressives’ arguments of things being “spectrums” rather than “binaries”) applied actually consistently completely dismantle the categorical distinction between “human” vs “not human” that makes their entire egalitarian worldview coherent. Meaning, Atheism and egalitarianism are mutually exclusive. And for the same reason, Christianity and racism, sexism, nationalism, etc are also mutually exclusive.

Either God exists and human beings have souls which categorically distinguish us from all other living beings, and we cannot logically justify depriving our “equals” of the same rights and privileges (delicious feet pic here →)³

Or human beings evolved, and the distinction between us and bacteria is of degree rather than kind; our (and all) species’ seeming categorical differences only an illusion created by the millions of years we spent developmentally isolated from one another, making “equality” and “human rights” philosophically baseless, useful fictions (equally delicious feet pic here →)⁴

There is no in between. Or, if there is, no one is making the case for it—just riding on the coat tails of “everyone knows, everyone knows”! Meaning 90% of modern Western philosophical positions are incoherent.

Such contradiction is the rule rather than the exception for almost all moral, social, cultural, and governance frameworks. And it is the job of every metanarrative product to make this abundantly clear about its competitors, meanwhile conveniently ignoring that it is just as bad if not worse.

But we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves. Let’s back up and dive deeper into the micro with our next example: picking up chicks.

Men Who Lie to Themselves Are the Only Ones Who Get Laid

For most of my life I’ve had issues with women. Not that women didn’t like me—for some reason I still haven’t quite deduced they actually tend to like me a lot— but rather that I would get overly invested in the first one I could tolerate after the relationship with the last one I could tolerate fell apart. I was a serial monogamist, dysfunctional enmesher for the majority of my post pubescent existence. That story is for another time but TLDR eventually after one too many times where all my eggs were in the basket of one intimate relationship, and then it blew up and basically destroyed my whole life, I eventually discovered John Bradshaw (Post Romantic Stress Disorder, Healing the Shame That Binds You, Homecoming, On The Family, etc) then No More Mr Nice Guy, and eventually The Red Pill where I started to learn about the utility of disagreeableness and the evolutionary psychology behind what women need in a man and why (which contrasted strongly with my natural more mystical and romantic views on “love” and “chaining yourself together and making it work”), etc.

And when I was going through my “approach girls” phase, one random little comment I saw in some random thread on /r/theredpill with like 3 upvotes changed how I saw the world forever. It basically just said you need to find some reason for why a woman rejected you that isn’t “women don’t like me” or “I am a loser” or “she’s out of my league”, etc. such as “Maybe she’s just having a bad day, and there’s nothing you could have done better” or “maybe you dodged a bullet, maybe she’s just a bitch” or “Maybe she has herpes” or “She wasn’t that good looking anyway". Whatever it may be, it was just about opening the door to the possibility that there could be some other reason for why things didn’t go how you wanted.

This was when I first realized why defense mechanisms—something I’d always been exceptionally deficient at—existed. The idea that you can externalize blame, that there is even a possible cause of something bad happening that isn’t “I’m a defective and irredeemably inadequate pile of trash” was a life changing realization for me. I finally understood how most people found themselves tolerable, despite that they were retarded losers (many compared to me even!). They were just experts at telling themselves adaptive lies; lies that protect their ego enough to keep them getting up every day and going to work rather than just offing themselves.⁵

But there’s more to it than this even.

Tell me, which is more true “she rejected you because you’re too awkward” or “she rejected you because she’s just having a bad day”? The answer is you don’t even know. A question as simple as this, there is still ambiguity. And further, she doesn’t even know. Even if you asked her, and she answered as honestly and forthrightly as she could muster, you wouldn’t get the whole truth. Because human motivation is complicated. For all we know she “just got a bad feeling about you” because you looked like a guy who tried to assault her a few years ago, and even she doesn’t remember this. All she knows is you made her “feel icky”.

The reality is that often—maybe even most of the time—the truth is ambiguous. Sure, there’s times where it is not but the unambiguous times sort themselves out rather quickly.  It is the ambiguous times you have to worry about. Because you still have to make a decision.  If you wish to survive you must act. You must conclude something, even when you don’t have all the information. And you do this all the time. So often in fact, that you don’t even realize you are doing it.

If you didn’t spend a decade trying to figure out why existence exists before you decided whether you should eat your next meal, you are acting despite not having all the information. You think you’re seeing the whole truth but you’re actually just filling in the ambiguity with your preconceived notions, aka “your bias” (in this case, the assumption that living is good, despite that you probably never even asked whether it actually is until your teens or twenties and still have yet to find a conclusive answer). And which preconceived notions win? Well we don’t know. It depends. But we do know that overtime, some will. And they won’t be based on some kind of explicit logical process, but instead on some implicit one. (ie despite few ever having questioned let alone proven that living is good, those who presupposed it ended up surviving, and those who presupposed against it did not, and thus most everyone who is still alive is biased toward believing or at least acting as if living is good).

So given the complexity and ambiguity here, who is going to win? The guy who defense mechanisms his way to brushing off the rejection and lives to approach another girl? Or the guy who takes it another affirmation of his already deeply reinforced belief that women don’t like him and approaches women even less? The first guy of course.

The same as the case with the entrepreneur. The “irrational”, “narcissistic” certainty of one’s own value—despite a complete lack of actually valid foundational philosophical reasoning for it—is a prerequisite to success. Strategic irrationality, strategically believing made up bullshit that just fuckin‘ works regardless of why, is the superior survival strategy. Meanwhile a more accurate, “truthful” position seemingly most aligned with reality leads only to failure.

Even disregarding foundational axioms about the nature of existence, just even in this example situation: it is probably true that most women reject you because of some fundamental thing about you that is irreparably deficient. God knows you are flawed as hell and will never be even close to what you could be let alone what many other men already are! But the guy who just ignores that and stays in the game will outcompete a guy burdened by the awareness of it—even if the latter is actually better on all “objective” metrics than the former—every single time.

Now, I perhaps haven’t read enough of the rationalists or post modernists to get their answer for ­why they believe we are so prone to bias (rationalists) or stuff is so corrupted by power (post modernists) but given that I’ve read a rather reasonable amount of both, I can only assume it just isn’t something they have explored at length. So, I’ll say it here: this is why we are so prone to bias and why stuff is so corrupted by power.

If it’s not crystal clear just yet how, don’t worry: part three will go into excruciating detail how bias and power are the only viable choice for a conscious species to function.

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1. I didn’t actually explain in part 1 how this related specifically to the Protestant reformation so TLDR: for all of the middle ages Europe was a theocracy and the Catholic Church was the sovereign (above kings and princes) and prioritized God, society, and community above the individual. Then Martin Luther came around and said “no the individual is sovereign” and for the next hundred years we had lots of wars and instability arguing about it and ultimately Luther and Protestantism (the root of all modern Christianity with its lack of popes and bishops and shit; also the root of Enlightenment thought) won. However this left a giant hole in the question of “how do we organize society?” which is why we have been in a perpetual state of conflict between competing ideologies for the last three hundred years.

2. Some modern enlightenment or rationalist fags may protest “no it was the naysayers who weren’t following truth!” however they can only say this in retrospect, because today it is obvious that those old beliefs were wrong. At the time, however it was not. Given what was known at the time, Occams Razer and Bayesian reasoning would have led to believing it insane to consider the earth orbited the sun, or that humans and animals evolved, or that we could build a flying machine. At the time, these things were as “rational” and “consistent with logic and observation” as ideas that 9/11 was an inside job, ghosts exist, or the earth is flat are today.

3. Progressivism is a sect of Protestantism. Historically, it’s pretty clear that Progressives are just Christians who got so blackpilled at “Conservative” Christians being moral hypocrites (for not truly acting as if everyone had a soul ie being racist, sexist, imperialist, etc), that they disavowed God (“if God was real and good why would he allow his people to commit such evil?”) and kept on about their moral crusade for equality. Over recent decades, Secular Protestantism aka Progressivism has simply shed more and more of its roots to focus more and more on this one aspect, but genealogically it is pretty indisputably a fork of Protestant thought.

4. do Cro-Magnons deserve human rights? Homo Erectus? Neanderthals? We did genocide their literal entire population out of existence after all (far worse than all the weak pussy stuff white Colonists did in recent centuries. wen reparations?). At what stage of development in simian history did we cross the categorical distinction to deserve human rights? I can assure you, this is not a conversation the left is having, because they are all just as “deluded and believing made up shit that feels nice” as their Protestant cousins.

5. Defense mechanisms are usually rather high time preference adaptive lies. Many people have terrible lives because they are too over reliant on defense mechanisms which prioritize their short term ego over their long term well being. The adaptive utility of lies is highly time preference dependent.We will talk more about this later.