HOW TO START YOUR OWN RELIGIONStep Five: Promise Heaven, Deliver Hell
If you’ve made it this far in starting your own religion it means you’ve
assembled a nice group of hopeless people desperately avoiding the
Uncomfortable Truth by studying a bunch of bullshit you’ve made up,
ignoring their friends, and telling their families to fuck off.
Now it’s time to get serious.
The beauty of a religion is that the more you promise your followers
salvation, enlightenment, world peace, perfect happiness, or whatever, the
more they will fail to live up to that promise. And the more they fail to live up
to that promise, the more they’ll blame themselves and feel guilty. And the
more they blame themselves and feel guilty, the more they’ll do whatever you
tell them to do to make up for it.
Some people might call this the cycle of psychological abuse. But let’s not
allow such terms to ruin our fun.
Pyramid schemes do this really well. You give a scumbag some money for
a bunch of products you don’t want or need and then you spend the next three
months desperately trying to get other people to sign up for the scheme under
you and also buy and sell products nobody wants or needs.
And it doesn’t work.
Then, instead of recognizing the obvious (the product is one big scam
selling a scam to a scam to sell more scams), you blame yourself—because,
look, the guy at the top of the pyramid has a Ferrari! And you want a Ferrari.
So, clearly the problem must be you, right?
Fortunately, that guy with the Ferrari has graciously agreed to put on a
seminar to help you sell more crap nobody wants to people who will then try
to sell more crap nobody wants to more people who will sell it . . . and so on.
And at said seminar, most of the time is spent psyching you up with music
and chants and creating an us-versus-them dichotomy (“Winners never give
up! Losers believe it won’t work for them!”), and you come away from the
seminar really motivated and pumped, but still with no idea how to sell
anything, especially crap nobody wants. And instead of getting pissed off at
the money-based religion you’ve bought into, you get pissed off at yourself.
You blame yourself for failing to live up to your God Value, regardless of