Mar 23, 2020, 11:54 AM

THE MARKET DEMAND IS FOR “AN EXCUSE TO HAVE LOW AGENCY WHILE STILL FEELING GOOD ABOUT MYSELF AND EVEN FEELING SUPERIOR TO OTHERS”.

by John Mark

I’ve been pondering along these lines, don’t have full answer fleshed out yet by any means.

A couple things I’m confident of:

  • Asking Christians to “keep their faith private” will piss them off. Won’t work. For the reason Daniel gave. It’s a monopoly religion – “If you don’t believe, you are evil and going to hell.”
  • However, it’s not a monopoly religion (in America today’s version) that tries to force itself on you (there’s no “believe or we’ll kill you”), they believe conversion must happen by genuine persuasion.
  • If we do (continue) what Bill describes regarding keeping faith out of the courtroom, and just implement P-law (enforce reciprocity), where nothing is an excuse to violate reciprocity or bait the public into hazard, (I think) we can let Christians keep the outward expression of their faith & let them “evangelize” (they’re not winning many/any converts in the west anyway by the way) but if they cross the line into irreciprocity/baiting into hazard, they find their butts in court like anybody else. This combined with “reciprocal christianity is real christianity” could work. In limited experimentation in convos with rightwing-instinct Christians, they “get” reciprocity and fairly quickly give into my total intolerance for irreciprocity & hazard baiting. Cuz it makes sense to them & they quickly realize “my faith can’t contradict reciprocity or it’s nonsensical & harmful”.
  • We high agency unadulterated truth-speakers cannot compete with Christianity in terms of persuading the low-agency/intuitive/emotional crowd (spectrum chart Curt posted last couple days). My wife still attends church, she watched online service yesterday by a somewhat well known preacher – sermon addressing coronavirus situation using bible verses & “God told me” type stuff. It was masterful. Mix of stoicism (fine) with bible verses loosely interpreted (classic trick) and supernatural claims, humor injected, total alpha vibe “I’m not afraid, I’m full of joy”. Messages:

“God will protect you.”

“You don’t have to be afraid.”

“We Christians are the only ones full of joy and not afraid during this time.” (Effective out-grouping of anyone attempting to think rationally and act with agency during the crisis. Excuse for lack of agency presented as a positive.)

“The Bible foretold this” (quotes a Bible prophecy about pestilence/plague and people being afraid.)

“God is accomplishing a purpose through this – He is purifying His church” (provides meaning -answers “why is this happening?”). (Common tactic – anything bad that happens is presented as punishment/correction for bad people.) Again, this provides excuse for low agency and encourages it – why fight God’s will?

This stuff is like crack for the low agency. I talked to my wife about it and she admitted I was right. She is pretty high-agency for a woman and high IQ and ultra right wing, understands baiting into hazard but I can tell it is still like removing an addiction. Imagine what it is like for a lower-agency person,medium-low IQ to hear us talk.

For comparison, our message, the unadulterated truth:

  • No one is going to help you except you, and your immediate family, and our fellow grassroots rightwingers.(Did God save millions of christians in soviet russia from being killed by the commies? No. So what guarantee do we have that He’ll help us?)
  • The only reason this is happening is that there are too many crappy people in the world (e.g. chinese peasant wet markets, chinese govt face-before-truth liars, and/or elite scumbags), and we have not sufficiently separated from and/or eliminated them.
  • The only meaning this event has is as a wake up call to the consequences of not doing that.
  • It is our responsibility to fix this.

Notice that every one of our points demands high agency. Which they are either incapable of, or need a lot of training for. If given a free market choice, they will choose the “excuse for low agency” message every time over ours.

And this is the problem I don’t know how to solve: How to lead such people without lying to them, and/or provide them a religion/mindfulness that does not lie to them.

Because what they demand is lies – which are their excuse for low agency. Removing the lies removes the very reason they are attracted to the religion in the first place.

(There are exceptions, high-agency Christians exist and for them Christianity operates as just a pre-packaged “defense container” for conservative instincts – but most Christians their religion is also an excuse for low agency.)

Maybe it is possible to provide a lie-free mindfulness “religion” or version of Christianity that promotes agency rather than reducing it, but who will buy it?

The actual market demand is for “an excuse to have low agency while still feeling good about myself and even feeling superior to others”.

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