Your town could burn down. Your mother could make a million dollars and
then lose it all again. You could watch wars and diseases come and go. None
of these experiences directly contradicts a belief in a deity, because
supernatural entities are evidence-proof. And while atheists see this as a bug,
it can also be a feature. The robustness of spiritual religions means that the
shit could hit the proverbial fan, and your psychological stability would
remain intact. Hope can be preserved because God is always preserved.^13
Not so with ideologies. If you spend a decade of your life lobbying for
certain governmental reform, and then that reform leads to the deaths of tens
of thousands of people, that’s on you. That piece of hope that sustained you
for years is shattered. Your identity, destroyed. Hello darkness, my old friend.
Ideologies, because they’re constantly challenged, changed, proven, and
then disproven, offer scant psychological stability upon which to build one’s
hope. And when the ideological foundation of our belief systems and value
hierarchies is shaken, it throws us into the maw of the Uncomfortable Truth.
Nietzsche was on top of this before anybody else. He warned of the
coming existential malaise that technological growth would bring upon the
world. In fact, this was the whole point of his “God is dead” proclamation.
“God is dead” was not some obnoxious atheistic gloating, as it is usually
interpreted today. No. It was a lament, a warning, a cry for help. Who are we
to determine the meaning and significance of our own existence? Who are we
to decide what is good and right in the world? How can we bear this burden?
Nietzsche, understanding that existence is inherently chaotic and
unknowable, believed that we were not psychologically equipped to handle
the task of explaining our cosmic significance. He saw the spate of
ideological religions that spewed forth in the Enlightenment’s wake
(democracy, nationalism, communism, socialism, colonialism, etc.) as merely
postponing the inevitable existential crisis of mankind. And he hated them all.
He found democracy to be naïve, nationalism stupid, communism appalling,
colonialism offensive.^14
Because, in a kind of backward Buddhist way, Nietzsche believed that any
worldly attachment—to gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, or history—was a
mirage, a make-believe faith-based construct designed to suspend us high
over the chasm of the Uncomfortable Truth by a thin rope of meaning. And
ultimately, he believed that all these constructs were destined to conflict with
one another and cause far more violence than they solved.^15
Nietzsche predicted coming conflicts between the ideologies built on
master and slave moralities.^16 He believed that these conflicts would wreak