Reality vs. Morality
(Note: This is a book excerpt. Click to see the table of contents or the next page. Also, feel free to follow the author for more on the books release. Copyright 2020)
Chapter 1
Imagine you are driving down the road. Now, imagine you are suddenly waking up in the hospital. As you lay in your hospital bed, you remember nothing. You do not know your name. You do not know the people sitting by your bedside. You do not know what kind of car you were driving. Literally, you remember nothing. Everything about your life has been wiped clean. The people by your bedside, they claim to be your family. Nevertheless, you do not recognize them. As they try to jog your memory, none of it sounds familiar.
In this moment at which you lay in your hospital bed, is it safe to say you know who you are?
No. You have no clue who you are. With a memory wiped clean, all you would be able to think is, Who am I? What is this place? Why am I suddenly craving ice cream?
Jokes aside, the point of the analogy is that if you do not know your past, you cannot know who you are as a person. In the same vein, if humanity does not know its past, then humanity cannot know what it means to be human. This is why the study of history is so important. Without taking our past into context, this book would be doomed from the start. As a result, this book will start out by talking about human history.
Much like the compass on a ship, history is a tool that can guide us forward, as well as show us the direction in which we have been traveling. Now, please know that this is not a boring history book. Historians are far from having all of the answers (Sorry Mr. Thomas, I loved your class but it is true. Also, you need to trim your nose hairs if you’re reading this). And you should know, history is not the ship upon which we sail. If we really want to know how to get to our desired destination, then we need to understand the whole ship. Not just the compass. But again, the compass is extremely important.
Now, in the modern era… that is, the era in which we currently live, the general consensus is that humans evolved from a common ancestor that looked, we’ll say… a little different. This tree dwelling creature, however, is in direct contradiction to the traditional consensus, which is that we were created by a supernatural creator. And herein lies the biggest mind binder we will address. Did humanity evolve? Or was humanity created in the image of God?
Everyone holds a personal belief about why they exist. For most people, these beliefs are religious or spiritual by nature. In 2019, the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Survey found that approximately 62% of the world population claims religion plays an important role in their lives.¹ Right now, as you read these words, millions of people are contemplating God, whether that be through prayer, meditation or worship service. Just imagine trying to tell the history of humanity without religion. No one can contest the importance of these beliefs. Amongst humanity, religion is the predominant source of meaning. These beliefs affect social coherence, political policy and personal identities. They inspire everything from homeless shelters and soup kitchens to hate speech and genocide.
Some argue religion is a positive force in our world. Others argue religion is a negative force in our world. Examples exist for both sides of the argument, but we will never know if religion does more harm than good. The effects of religion are impossible to quantify. What we do know, however, is that the effects are large and far-reaching, impacting the entire continuum of human discourse.
Nearly every community across the globe has at-least one religious building. Highly populated areas such as cities can have thousands. Billions of people funnel money into these institutions. They’ve been doing so year after year, for a very long time. Think of all of the electricity pouring through the power lines on its way to these sacred places, all of the repairs that have been made and plumbers that have been called, all of the hours spent preparing teaching materials, all of the doors knocked upon, all of the cars washed, lemonade stands erected and bake sales attended. American religious donations, for instance, make up nearly 1 dollar for every 3 dollars donated to charity.² This is the same as saying that for every 3 billion Americans donate, 1 billion of that is going through a religious institution. These donations tell us that we are compassionate creatures. They tell us that, at least some of us, care enough to give. However, these charitable donations are also saying something else. They are saying we are deeply invested in religion.
Due to its importance, our discussion of humanities history will be centered around the religious and evolutionary debate. If we are going to understand this life on earth, then we must understand, or at least try to understand our origins. Did we evolve from a primate species millions of years ago? Is Jesus the son of God? We cannot all be right. Someone has to be wrong.
If the Christian world view is correct, then at-least some aspects of the Mormon worldview must be wrong. No two religions are wholly the same and each makes its own distinct claims about reality. This reasoning leads to a necessary, albeit comical conclusion. Since not everyone can be right, and our beliefs about reality are so disparate, most human beings are at-least partially delusional. Thankfully, for most of us, this just means we go to the church, rather than to the synagogue. For others, it means blowing up the car instead of washing it for charity.
Many of you might like to avoid this conversation, but I think there is merit in seeing how our beliefs match up to the beliefs of others. The belief systems discussed in this book will be challenged by me, and I fully expect them to be challenged by you. The truth should withstand both your criticisms and mine.
If all of this sounds weighty, that’s because it is. Most of us like movies, and we like them in part because they are an escape from reality, an escape from the weightiness of it all. As any movie buff knows, though, sometimes a good movie can bring out the truths of our human nature. Take for example the 1992 movie, A Few Good Men. In this movie, Jack Nicholson and Tom Cruise face off over the court-martial of two Marines charged with murder. Jack Nicholson plays the hardened Colonel on trial, while Tom Cruise plays the jag officer pressing for information. What would go down in the annals of movie moment history, Jack Nicholson shouts back at Tom Cruise.
“You want answers?”
“I think I’m entitled!” Cruise shakes passionately.
“You want answers?” Nicholson begs again.
“I want the truth!”
“You can’t handle the truth!” says Nicholson. A steel-eyed stare stricken across his face.
That one line, “You can’t handle the truth!”, is the most quoted line from the movie. Perhaps the popularity of Nicholson’s reprimand is due to it’s deep-cutting implications; in life, sometimes the truth is hard to handle. But the truth is not just hard to handle, sometimes the truth is downright evasive. Oftentimes, the truth is vague or hard to get at in the first place. In a world of information and yet so much uncertainty, it is easy to see why so many people give up or follow the herd. After all, ignorance is bliss right? And besides, if a delusion feels right and makes me happy, how bad could it possibly be?
Daniel Kahnman, Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Princeton University is known, amongst other achievements, for a best selling book titled Thinking, Fast and Slow. A spin through its 499 pages will reveal the human brain’s most remarkable feature… namely, the brain’s ability to delude, lie to and trick itself. Thanks to fields such as psychology, neuroscience and psychiatry, we now know our thought processes are riddled with thousands of unhealthy, yet humorous, propensities. These psychological propensities include various biases and heuristics… which is a fancy way of saying there are hundreds of ways in which we falsely delude our own reality.
To demonstrate the atrocities that can result from such a disconnect with reality, consider the real-world case of the Third Reich. While under the influence of state propaganda in the mid 20th century, many Germans clung to the belief that they were a superior race. Unfortunately, they also believed that the Jews were the source of all their suffering. At the root of Nazi hatred was a fundamental misunderstanding of reality. Jews were not the source of German suffering and the Germans who held this view were not a superior race. The genius of Hitler is not that he convinced a large amount of bad people to go along with his plan, but rather that he convinced a large amount of good people to go along with his plan. By changing how the German population perceived reality, Hitler was able to directly alter their morality.
We are no less susceptible than the Germans were in the nineteen forties. This is why knowing our history is so important. If we can learn anything by studying our past, it is that we are extremely gullible creatures. We will believe anything and, in some cases, we will chase that belief to the death, no matter how absurd or ridiculous.
We are all susceptible to bias. We all see our history a little differently. Despite this fact, there can only be one true account of history. Is reality such that a man named Mohammed received divine revelation in the 7th century? Is reality such that a Messiah died on a cross in the 1st century? Both of these are claims to history. Those who follow the quran believe in a different history than those who follow the Bible. Those who study evolutionary biology believe in a different history than those who study a literal interpretation of Genesis. Across humanity, there is a lack of consensus about our history. This lack of consensus means a large majority of us hold false-depictions of reality. There is no greater recipe for bigotry, racism, terrorism and every other embodiment of hate or violence you can imagine.
If you flip through the table of contents, you will see the overarching structure of this book. Hopefully you can read the contents and understand what I am trying to do here. I am going to try and iron out what the world is, and what the world isn’t. I am not skirting the issue here, and I am not going to lie to you about my ambitions. My goal in the first half of this book is to disillusion or deprogram any false beliefs that you may currently hold about the world.
There’s a reason I care to do this. Without the truth, your moral compass is awry. Without an accurate perception of reality, you are lost. This book is a record of what I have discovered in life. After years of dedicated research, I have settled on the answers contained here. Please know that these are not the divine answers. Hell, I am not even sure they are the right answers. All I can tell you is that in the confines of my fallible brain, these answers seem correct to me. What follows is a tough book, but for those of you who see it through, I can only hope you finish as joyful as I am.
