How Human Parasites Dupe Us By Running Out Our Clock

The frauds of religion and capitalism

We have some freedom to develop our personal potential. We get to decide how we want to use our capacities and our limited time. Some are more fortunate than others: they have more doors open and opportunities to explore.

Doors can also close for us if we’re unlucky. Perhaps we’re met with a natural disaster: our house might be struck by a tornado, or we might be afflicted with a disease. We work around these additional constraints imposed on us by nature’s indifference to our welfare. Our bad choices can further reduce our options, and we’ll struggle to work around those self-imposed constraints, to improve our situation and to avoid regrets.

But there are more nefarious constraints devised by crafty predators and parasites. Arguably, the fruit of the most common parasites has plagued civilization for thousands of years, this being organized religion.

The Fraud of Organized Religion

Whatever benefits religion brings are like the illusory hopes of the victim of a con. A proficient con artist can prolong the victim’s reckoning by maintaining the illusion that this victim hasn’t been exploited and robbed. The fraudster keeps lying and manipulating the victim to preserve the conned person’s ability to focus on her fantasy rather than on reality. The word “con” is short for confidence, so if the victim has confidence in the fraudster, the victim assumes she’ll make tenfold what she paid the scammer. But that’s a dream conjured by the scammer.

It’s the same with organized religion. Christianity and Islam are most notorious in this regard for perpetrating the myth that if you sacrifice your earthly life, you’ll be rewarded after you die. With that fraud in place, billions of people voluntarily restrict themselves, not as part of an elementary social contract to keep the peace, but to enrich or to empower a class of social parasites such as the priests or the imams or the secular rulers who indirectly rely on the religious fraud.

As far as we can reasonably tell, religion tends to materially benefit a minority at the expense of the majority. It might not seem that way because ordinary practitioners love their religion. They seem to get something out of the bargain, such as a community of fellow believers, the pride of being on the winning side of a spiritual battle, or the pleasure of imagining what they’ll do in Heaven.

Those advantages pale, though, next to what religion takes from us, from pride in our creative potential, to a clearheaded understanding of how the world works, to humanistic solidarity in the face of our common foe which is nature’s indifference to our welfare. Theistic religion closes more doors than it opens.

Again, the Church likes to say that the modern world grew out of medieval Christendom and would have been impossible without the religious ideals. For example, scientists began looking for laws of nature only because they assumed God created a natural order. But that’s only more con artistry.

Just imagine what might have happened if Christianity hadn’t inherited the collapsing Roman Empire, if the ancient naturalistic, Greco-Roman values alone were able to inspire whatever empire would have risen to fill the power vacuum. The Westerners who live at the beginning of the 21st century could have been sitting on almost two thousand years of added scientific and technological progress rather than just the four or five centuries since Europeans shook off the Christian theocracies and started thinking once again like secular humanists.

Modern science and humanism follow directly from ancient Greek and Roman philosophy. There was no need for the interim of Christendom, as far as earthly progress is concerned. Rather like how the Republicans’ belligerence prolonged the Cold War, even though Ronald Reagan was lucky to usher in its conclusion, Christendom systematically delayed secular progress because of its otherworldly preoccupations, but the Church got to preside at the transition points of the Protestant Revolution and the Renaissance. To credit the Church for modern progress would be like thanking the bully who’s had his boot on your neck for decades, for finally releasing you.

Likewise, in the East, Hindus had all the resources for secular progress, thanks to their rich philosophical heritage. But India, too, was plagued by organized religion, by the Vedic con of a caste system which has impoverished most of that country to this day, and which even dovetailed with the schemes of British imperialists. Islam also has its enlightening and fraudulent aspects, inspiring some Muslims to broaden their minds, but compelling the majority to submit to corrupt regimes that justify the economic inequality by appealing to rigid, barbaric scriptures.

The Secular Fraud of Capitalism

However, things aren’t so black and white. What we call secular progress is marred by another form of the same fraud, of the one that would delay the alleged gratification until it’s likely too late to enjoy it. Roughly speaking, this is the fraud of capitalism.

Organized religion preoccupies the majority with fantasies and with apologies for grotesque theocratic dystopias. And capitalism turns the majority into workers that slave away their productive years as most of the profits are siphoned off to provide the luxuries for a disproportionately sociopathic minority of wealthy parasites.

Consider how this Kurzgesagt video quantifies our lives. Our early years as babies, children, and teens are spent learning and experimenting, and falling back on our parents to protect us. Then we either enter advanced education or begin to work. At some point as young adults, most of us enter our healthiest productive period at the end of which we’re expected to retire. The younger we’re able to retire, the more freedom we’ll enjoy to do whatever we want, without having to work as labourers to enrich the boss.

Most of us in postindustrial societies live to around 80, and the period between death and our retirement age of 65, our so-called “golden years,” are beset by the infirmities of old age. This is when diseases catch up to us. Indeed, the more technologically advanced our societies, the more modern plagues we create to spoil the freedom we’re promised in retirement. The pollution, plastics, bad meat, and sedentary lifestyle turn into cancers, heart attacks, strokes, and diabetes. And because capitalistic economies are often rigged by the wealthy to prevent the majority from enriching themselves, we may find we have to work past the age of 65 to earn enough to retire comfortably.

Thus, the secular Heaven of retirement is often a vanishingly slim period, depending on when and how we retire and die. In many cases, this secular payoff is a mirage, a myth, not a reality at all. If we think that with our more productive years, we’re sacrificing that time to build up a “nest egg” and reward ourselves in retirement, we’re often deluding ourselves. Even if we have the money to fund adventures in our old age, we might find as we age that we no longer want to embark on what seemed exciting to us when we were much younger. If we want to travel or to pursue our hobbies, our old bodies may impede us.

Instead, what often happens is that older people lower their expectations, making do with their disappointing circumstances and enjoying the little pleasures, such as merely receiving a visit from their grandchildren or relishing certain meals at their retirement home.

Our wiser course would be to extract meaning from our work during those middle, productive years. Instead of thinking of a distant reward in retirement, like a monotheist who dreams of bliss in the afterlife, we might ensure that we don’t waste our healthier, more productive period when we’re forced to work in a rigged economy that tends to extract wealth to create a relatively small number of billionaires.

The problem is that few of us can make a living in our dream job. The latter is only our side hustle or hobby, and we often can’t quit the day job we loathe, for fear of falling behind. We’re locked into the secular sacrifice for a reward that likely never arrives — just like in the fraud of organized religion.

No, those who truly escape this capitalistic fraud are the lucky few who manage to inherit or to make a fortune while they’re still young. According to one report, one man retired at 24 after “saving aggressively for seven years, banning his wife from Starbucks and making a profit from their wedding.” Another retired at 33 by becoming a self-made millionaire.

Even this kind of early retirement can have its downside since wealth tests the merit of your character. Wealth empowers you to do whatever you want, but if you don’t enrich your character by reading and studying how the world works and how you really fit into it, you may find that your wealth will spoil you. You’ll squander your money on selfish trivialities, or your privileges will infantilize you until you end up like those appalling specimens that rent luxury yachts and terrorize the crew.

Parasitism and Misdirection

The procedure of these two frauds is the same: convince the majority to sacrifice themselves to enrich you, and you do this by proliferating a myth that obliges the majority to delay their reckoning until it’s too late to realize they’ve been conned. This is the strategic delay whereby you run out someone else’s clock.

The irony is that modernity was supposed to be a progressive alternative to medievalism and to the theocratic con. While it’s possible that the architects of capitalism intentionally copied the priestly strategy for controlling society, and applied it in a secular context, such a largescale conspiracy would have been unlikely.

What’s more likely is that the two grafts have one or more common, underlying causes, and there are at least two such causes. First, there’s the relevance class of informal fallacy, called the “red herring.” This is a fallacy of misdirection, of misleading someone by distracting them with a decoy instead of addressing the real issue. In the cases of religion and capitalism, one real issue would be economic inequality or material exploitation, and the fantastic contents of religion and of the promises of corporate advertisements for workaholics act as distractions that run out the clock of the hapless flocks and herds.

You can see a kind of red herring play out in movies that feature a MacGuffin. This is a device or an excuse for transitioning from one scene to the next to reach the movie’s end, but the device might be otherwise unimportant. Superior writing might weave the device into the plot or pick a device that already has symbolic meaning to capture the viewers’ attention. Think of the One Ring in “Lord of the Rings,” the Arc of the Covenant in “Raiders of the Lost Arc,” or the Horcruxes in “Harry Potter.” Or think of the rug in “The Big Lebowski,” or the missing Doug in “The Hangover.”

Of course, movies are supposed to entertain the viewer, but suppose the filmmaker has no artistic vision and only wants to con viewers out of their money. This filmmaker might use a formula to carry the viewer’s attention from one scene to the next without offering substantial entertainment or insights in the movie. A cheap MacGuffin would be a shiny object, an empty excuse that motivates the characters and stirs up the action, but that leaves the viewer feeling cheated at the end. This MacGuffin only runs out the clock. Think of the various hollow MacGuffins that bring Rey to Palpatine in “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.”

In the worst cases, then, distraction can be fallacious and dangerously deceptive. But this kind of misdirection has another, prehistoric basis in hunting, which is a second cause of these frauds. The predator misleads the prey to capture or to kill this animal. A hunter might throw a rock or have his companions make noise to lead the prey to a kill zone.

Camouflage is an evolutionary technique of misdirection in many animal species. To ward off danger, prey might disguise themselves to look like a predator. Animal predators typically don’t need to resort to such deceptions since they rely on speed, strength, and excellent senses to overpower their prey.

But there’s a less honourable type of hostile organism that relies on camouflage. This is the microscopic parasite known as a “pathogen.” As one biologist explains, “A virus uses camouflage to trick the cell. Its capsid or receptor proteins look like nutrients the cell needs. When the virus receptor binds to the cell receptor, the cell thinks the virus is a nutrient, and pulls it in. Now the cell is infected!” This parasite uses the Trojan Horse stratagem.

Human predators don’t have the physiology to overwhelm fellow humans. Some people are stronger, faster, or more aggressive than others, but not so overpowering that they’d be able to repel a gang of weak victims seeking revenge. So human predators act more like parasites, using stealth to dominate the masses, to infect them with harmful memeplexes or “mind viruses.” That is, human dominators of other people often trick their prey by convincing them with lies or with fallacies of misdirection.

Hence the systemic frauds of organised religion and capitalism. It’s not a coincidence, then, that modernity failed to capitalize on its promise of universal progress after the demise of theocracies. What we’re facing here isn’t just one set of con artists or another that happens to emerge, that of the theocrats or the plutocrats. What unites them are the human susceptibility to the red herring fallacy, and a parasitic evolutionary strategy of dominance by misdirection.