Actually, you may suck even more. Research shows that the more well informed and educated
someone is, the more politically polarized his opinions. See T. Palfrey and K. Poole, “The Relationship
Between Information, Ideology, and Voting Behavior,” American Journal of Political Science 31, no. 3
(1987): 511–30.
This idea was first published in F. T. Cloak Jr., “Is a Cultural Ethology Possible?” Human Ecology
3, no. 3 (1975): 161–82. For a less academic discussion, see Aaron Lynch, Thought Contagion: How
Beliefs Spread Through Society (New York: Basic Books, 1996), pp. 97–134.
Chapter 5: Hope Is Fucked
Nietzsche first announced the death of God in 1882, in his book The Gay Science, but the quote is
most famously associated with Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which was released in four parts from 1883 to
After the third part, all publishers refused to have anything to do with the project, and Nietzsche
therefore had to scrape together the money to publish the fourth part himself. That’s the book that sold
fewer than forty copies. See Sue Prideaux, I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche (New York: Tim
Duggan Books, 2018), pp. 256–60.
Everything spoken by Nietzsche in this chapter is an actual line lifted from his work. This one
comes from F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (1887; repr. New York:
Vintage Books, 1963), p. 92.
The story of Nietzsche with Meta in this chapter is loosely adapted from his summers with a
handful of women (the others being Helen Zimmern and Resa von Schirnhofer) over 1886–87. See
Julian Young, Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 2010), pp. 388–400.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. by R. J. Hollingdale (1890; repr. New York: Penguin
Classics, 1979), p. 39.
Some anthropologists have gone so far as to call agriculture, because of its inevitable tendency to
create inequality and social stratification, “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.” See
Jared Diamond’s famous essay “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race,” Discover, May
1987, http://discovermagazine.com/1987/may/02-the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race.
Nietzsche’s initial description of master and slave moralities comes from Beyond Good and Evil,
pp. 204–37. He expounds on each morality further in The Genealogy of Morality (1887). The second
essay in The Genealogy of Morality (New York: Penguin Classics, 2014) is where I was first exposed to
the concept of “the moral gap” discussed in chapter 3. In that essay, Nietzsche argues that each of our
individual moralities is based on our sense of debt.
Haidt, The Righteous Mind, pp. 182–89.
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition (Oxford, UK: Oxford University
Press, 2006), pp. 189–200.
It’s interesting that most polytheistic religions haven’t had this obsession with conversion that the
monotheistic religions have had. The Greeks and Romans were more than happy to let the indigenous
cultures follow their own beliefs. It wasn’t until slave morality that the religious Crusades began. This is
probably because a slave morality religion cannot abide cultures that hold different beliefs. Slave
moralities require the world to be equal—and to be equal, you cannot be different. Therefore, those
other cultures had to be converted. This is the paradoxical tyranny of any extremist left-wing belief
system. When equality becomes one’s God Value, differences in belief cannot be abided. And the only
way to destroy difference in belief is through totalitarianism.
See Pinker, Enlightenment Now, pp. 7–28.
My biggest qualm with Pinker’s book is that he conflates the scientific revolution with the
philosophical Enlightenment. The scientific revolution predates the Enlightenment and is independent
of the latter’s humanistic beliefs. This is why I make a point of stressing that science, and not
necessarily Enlightenment ideologies, is the best thing to have happened in human history.
Estimates of GDP per capita growth done by author with data from Angus Maddison, The World
Economy: A Millennial Perspective, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
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