Read The Douchebag Bible Online
Authors: TJ Kirk
sense. We haven’t the proper tools to make any real sense of
things. Our memories are shoddy, our objectivity in matters of
self is dubious and the effects we assign to certain causes are
likely more often wrong than not.
If my original precept that identity is largely derived from
our narrative for ourselves holds true under scrutiny, then in
diminishing the veracity of said narrative, I have also dealt a blow
to our current concept of identity. I think that this is far too
counterintuitive to have any real impact on our perceptions of self,
but if it can be accepted as truth, then I think there is a great deal
of freedom (and danger) to be found in it.
To say that perception is truth is something of a banal
cliché at this point, but to assert that
how we choose
to perceive
the events of our lives can actually change our identity entirely
would give us the ability to control who we are (at least in our own
eyes) to an extent rarely dreamed possible in the age of genetic
determinism.
To clarify, I don’t believe that these perceptions can turn
someone who is by almost all accounts a villain into a hero, only
2
The Photography of Cody Weber
http://www.myspace.com/weberphoto
that it can make such a person believe that he or she is heroic. Of
course, villains throughout the ages have always fancied
themselves heroes—this is nothing new.
Hitler did not see an evil man in the mirror.
The difference in my line of thinking is that it makes such
delusions permissible by their ubiquity. In other words, if all men
are delusional in regards to their self, then who can say that one
man’s delusion is any less or more untrue than any other man’s
delusion? By what means, if my reasoning holds largely cogent,
would we be able to dispute a villain’s claims of heroicness or a
failure’s perception of success? If identity is delusion, then all
perception is undermined and no ethical barometer can be said
to possess any objectivity since the good guys are only good in
their heads and the bad guys are probably good in theirs as well.
Some will here make the argument that ethics lay outside
the will and that good guys are good regardless of their perception
of themselves and that acts of evil are evil regardless of whether
or not evil was the intent of the malefactor who perpetrated them.
If God is that outside force, that non-human moral barometer,
than I would like to see proof not only of him but proof of his will.
And if that non-human mechanism of morality is not God then
what is it?
Richard Dawkins, the famed evolutionary biologist and an
outspoken advocate of atheism and rationalism, outlined in his
best-selling work
The God Delusion
, his evolutionary explanation
for the origin of morality and ethics. He explains how things like
kin selection and game theory have imbued man with a natural
sense of right and wrong. While I don’t disagree with his
assertions I have to ask why a moral code that evolved is one that
need be followed? We evolved instincts towards violence and, if
the God gene 3 hypothesis is correct, belief itself—and yet no
thinking person views non-violence or non-belief as impossible
(and only a strange few thinking people find them immoral). An
evolved or
natural
morality is a morality that can be challenged
on an intellectual basis in the same way that the value of an
evolved predilection towards violence or endocannibalism or
rape as a means of reproduction can be challenged. Any evolved
social trait can be challenged. No evolutionary biologist that I
have ever heard of has made or provided evidence for the
assertion that evolution is infallible or has our happiness at heart.
So, if Hitler views himself a good man and no concrete
ethical code exists to contradict his goodness, then can we say
that our mass perception of him as a villain overrides 1930’s
Germany’s perception of him as a hero? Or his perception of
himself as such?
Returning to Cody, does it matter how much his admirers
view him as a genius when he views his own work as ugly and
wholly lacking in beauty (as he once confessed to me)? I think that
it doesn’t. I think that a billion voices telling a man who believes
he is Thing A that he is actually Thing B are useless if that man’s
3
The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired Into Our Genes
by Dean H Hamer
http://www.amazon.com/God-Gene-Faith-Hardwired-Genes/dp/0385500580
perception of himself is unshakable.
If a genocidal maniac is called evil, he can always escape
into a more comfortable identity.
I’m not evil
, he might tell
himself,
I’m misunderstood.
I’m heroically doing what I know is
right, even though the odds are against me. I’m reluctantly
doing what is necessary to create a better future. I am a
visionary.
Our disgust with such people and what we perceive as their
shoddy justifications for their evil actions is nearly universal. Few
human beings on this planet today are not aghast at genocide and
contemptuous of genocidal maniacs. We so deeply feel this
repulsion towards mass violence that any belief system that
doesn’t hold such people as objectively vile seems unpalatable to
many of us, myself included.
I just can’t see a way around it, however. I’ll restate my
logic from start to finish in the briefest terms possible and
hopefully someone can provide me the solace of showing me
where I am mistaken.
1. Identity is based largely on the illusion of a narrative and
the establishment of an archetype of self within that
narrative.
2. This narrative is erroneous in every single human being.
3. It is impossible to object to a delusional perception of self
in another human being when one’s own perception of
one’s own self is demonstrably delusional as well. To do so