Read The Douchebag Bible Online
Authors: TJ Kirk
discovery and innovation have always been driven by crises.
Aviation technology has been pushed forward more by war and
the need to stay ahead of enemy competition than it has out of
love of science. Microwaves, Velcro, thermal imagining,
prosthetic limb advancements and even the computer
networking techniques that eventually led to the creation of the
internet were all designed or perfected by the military for the
purpose of being more effective as a killing machine.
IGT is a force that creates problems that only science can
fix—it is my contention that the two things are symbiotic and that
if we were a species less prone to getting into mischief, we would
lack a great deal of the scientific and technological sophistication
that we possess today.
Obey Your Master
"Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul
is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes
avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his
own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive.
Ambition is only understood if it's to rise to the top of some
imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an
undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other
interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who
abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is
considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and
salary are the sole measure of human worth. You'll be told in a
hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and
never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what
you're doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I
guarantee you'll hear about them."
Those are the words of Bill Watterson, the creator of the
comic strip Calvin & Hobbes which ran from 1985 to 1995. Bill
Watterson is a strange breed of person. People, on a subconscious
level, feel that his mentality is a threat to the American dream.
The American dream being, of course, making fat sums of money.
When Steven Spielberg called Bill because he was interested in
making a Calvin & Hobbes movie, Bill just turned him down flat.
That’s incredible. In this culture, shunning greed is the utmost sin,
the most unforgivable and incomprehensible outrage. When he
refused to license his characters (all those truck decals you see
with Calvin peeing on rival truck brands were made without
licensing) to make a profit, he was essentially making the
statement that the integrity of his artistic creation was more
valuable than any sum of money, than any life of comfort.
As much as I adore and admire his resolve, I do not
perceive that sort of integrity in myself and allusions to such
integrity would be illusions. However, just because I lack Mr.
Watterson’s immense and incorruptible virtue does not mean
that I lack all virtue or that I cannot recognize the validity of his
virtuousness or admire the strength of his convictions, just as I
have gotten a great many people to admire the strength of my
various convictions by becoming a public-speaker, sometimes-
comedian and freedom-advocate on the popular internet website
YouTube14.
Honor has essentially exploited our tendency to admire
those of great resolve by standardizing morality. Our admiration
is permissible, in the eyes of the powerful, only when it is directed
towards their ideal. Their ideal, it should be noted, is never the
ideal that they themselves live by. It’s the ideal that most
conveniences them to have others live by.
Let me say here that I don’t for a moment believe in the
idea of CEO’s and Politicians as arch-villains dividing and
conquering the populace with ingenious deceptions and
carefully-crafted propaganda. I think this vile tendency emerged
quite naturally over the course of our social evolution and have
14 My account can be located here:
http://youtube.com/user/TheAmazingAtheist
rarely, if ever, been conscious acts of malevolence.
And because this tendency has been hardwired into us by
evolution, it can only be overcome with cognition. There is a good
reason why so few films financed by major studios encourage
introspection—it is subconsciously perceived as detrimental to
the agenda of the corporations, which is to keep the population
dull and complacent. Only people disconnected enough from any
sense of self to watch MTV would be undiscerning enough to
inhale the glut of insipid and intoxicating miasma known to
mankind simply as “commercials.”
Honor is used to teach us who to admire and who to revile.
Those who adhere to the social codes for their given class—99%
of celebrities and athletes—are admired and revered because of
the misdirection of our natural love of those with strong
convictions towards those who have only the strong convictions
approved by those in power.
Those in power despise with infinite vitriol the Bill
Watterson’s of the world because the ethic that he exhibits is not
conducive to their vision of utopia, wherein everything and
everyone is for sale; where art is nothing more than a product to
be cynically peddled to the masses for a little capital gain.
What upsets the powerful more than anything about
Watterson’s case is that to berate him openly would have
displayed to the whole world what they really were. Despite all of
our programming to the contrary, many human beings can still
recognize genuine integrity when they see it—which is why