The Douchebag Bible (21 page)

discovery and innovation have always been driven by crises.

Aviation technology has been pushed forward more by war and

the need to stay ahead of enemy competition than it has out of

love of science. Microwaves, Velcro, thermal imagining,

prosthetic limb advancements and even the computer

networking techniques that eventually led to the creation of the

internet were all designed or perfected by the military for the

purpose of being more effective as a killing machine.

IGT is a force that creates problems that only science can

fix—it is my contention that the two things are symbiotic and that

if we were a species less prone to getting into mischief, we would

lack a great deal of the scientific and technological sophistication

that we possess today.

Obey Your Master

"Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul

is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes

avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his

own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive.

Ambition is only understood if it's to rise to the top of some

imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an

undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other

interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who

abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is

considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and

salary are the sole measure of human worth. You'll be told in a

hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and

never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what

you're doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I

guarantee you'll hear about them."

Those are the words of Bill Watterson, the creator of the

comic strip Calvin & Hobbes which ran from 1985 to 1995. Bill

Watterson is a strange breed of person. People, on a subconscious

level, feel that his mentality is a threat to the American dream.

The American dream being, of course, making fat sums of money.

When Steven Spielberg called Bill because he was interested in

making a Calvin & Hobbes movie, Bill just turned him down flat.

That’s incredible. In this culture, shunning greed is the utmost sin,

the most unforgivable and incomprehensible outrage. When he

refused to license his characters (all those truck decals you see

with Calvin peeing on rival truck brands were made without

licensing) to make a profit, he was essentially making the

statement that the integrity of his artistic creation was more

valuable than any sum of money, than any life of comfort.

As much as I adore and admire his resolve, I do not

perceive that sort of integrity in myself and allusions to such

integrity would be illusions. However, just because I lack Mr.

Watterson’s immense and incorruptible virtue does not mean

that I lack all virtue or that I cannot recognize the validity of his

virtuousness or admire the strength of his convictions, just as I

have gotten a great many people to admire the strength of my

various convictions by becoming a public-speaker, sometimes-

comedian and freedom-advocate on the popular internet website

YouTube14.

Honor has essentially exploited our tendency to admire

those of great resolve by standardizing morality. Our admiration

is permissible, in the eyes of the powerful, only when it is directed

towards their ideal. Their ideal, it should be noted, is never the

ideal that they themselves live by. It’s the ideal that most

conveniences them to have others live by.

Let me say here that I don’t for a moment believe in the

idea of CEO’s and Politicians as arch-villains dividing and

conquering the populace with ingenious deceptions and

carefully-crafted propaganda. I think this vile tendency emerged

quite naturally over the course of our social evolution and have

14 My account can be located here:
http://youtube.com/user/TheAmazingAtheist

rarely, if ever, been conscious acts of malevolence.

And because this tendency has been hardwired into us by

evolution, it can only be overcome with cognition. There is a good

reason why so few films financed by major studios encourage

introspection—it is subconsciously perceived as detrimental to

the agenda of the corporations, which is to keep the population

dull and complacent. Only people disconnected enough from any

sense of self to watch MTV would be undiscerning enough to

inhale the glut of insipid and intoxicating miasma known to

mankind simply as “commercials.”

Honor is used to teach us who to admire and who to revile.

Those who adhere to the social codes for their given class—99%

of celebrities and athletes—are admired and revered because of

the misdirection of our natural love of those with strong

convictions towards those who have only the strong convictions

approved by those in power.

Those in power despise with infinite vitriol the Bill

Watterson’s of the world because the ethic that he exhibits is not

conducive to their vision of utopia, wherein everything and

everyone is for sale; where art is nothing more than a product to

be cynically peddled to the masses for a little capital gain.

What upsets the powerful more than anything about

Watterson’s case is that to berate him openly would have

displayed to the whole world what they really were. Despite all of

our programming to the contrary, many human beings can still

recognize genuine integrity when they see it—which is why