Beyond The Lie Your Path To Salvation

Beyond The Lie Your Path To Salvation By Vincent L. Scarsella Introduction The Truth Here’s The Truth: Your life is a lie. Let me clarify: Your life is a programmed lie, an illusion, constructed from cultural beliefs that infuse your life with fictitious meaning and false self-esteem. Deep down within your psyche, you are confronted with a horrible idea – that your life is a meaningless joke. This sense of meaninglessness is caused by the unsolved mysteries of life and death – the existential mysteries. These unsolved mysteries cause you embark upon a quest for meaning and human cultural groups, through symbolic belief systems, have ingeniously, though incorrectly, enabled you to attain that quest. The lie of your life constructed from your cultural beliefs enables you to repress the psychological anxiety – the existential/meaninglessness anxiety - caused by the unsolved mystery of life and death that renders life seemingly meaningless. Religious, social, economic and political beliefs of human cultural groups motivate actions and thoughts that suppress this primal anxiety lurking in the psyches of their members. Through a process of socialization, a form of brainwashing, conducted by parents, siblings, extended family members, friends, teachers, priests, politicians and the media, cultural members – you, included – come to accept cultural beliefs as truths and, from them, construct one’s life illusion. However, because such beliefs fail to provide genuine answers to the existential mysteries of life and death, all the things that you do in your life can only provide illusory meaning. Your accepted beliefs obscure life’s essential questions– why were you born, what happens to you once you die, what is your purpose, what is the universe, what is God and so on - and worse, inhibit you from confronting and answering them. In short, whatever you do or think in your life is a lie that fails to address or enable you to answer the essential cosmic mysteries that includes the stark reality of death. But all that may be beside the point. Understanding why beliefs have arisen in human cultural groups is really unnecessary in order for you to effectuate the kind of radical transformation in your life that this book demands in order to get you beyond the lie of your life and onto the path to salvation. Cultural beliefs motivate action and thought on the part of its members. Therefore, beliefs are the key to understanding human behavior. What you do or think is linked to your beliefs. Thus, to change a person’s behavior, you must change that person’s belief system. On a wider scale, if a culture’s religious, social, economic and political beliefs are changed, the behavior of its members will change accordingly regardless as to why the beliefs arose in the first place. Thus, it isn’t so important why we accept cultural beliefs as the means of motivating our conduct – it is that such beliefs determine our actions and thoughts. Based upon that central premise – that beliefs motivate action and thought - this book proposes the adoption of radically new religious, social, economic and political beliefs in order to change the behavior of human beings. Such proposed new beliefs are based upon the reality of the existential mysteries of life and death, that the old beliefs for the most part neglect to confront, and upon the principles of human dignity and the sanctity of the human species. Such dramatic change of belief and behavior will result in the construct of an authentic human being whose life is no longer a lie; that is, a human being whose actions and thoughts infuse life with genuine meaning and provide the individual with a true sense of self-esteem grounded in reality rather than illusion. But how can this universal transformation of beliefs take place? First, as this book will attempt to do, you must be awakened to the fact that your life is a programmed lie. In short, you must admit the lie of your life and then reject it. Second, you must agree to start a new life by accepting and adopting the new beliefs offered in these pages that will henceforth motivate your actions and thoughts. I have termed these new beliefs, the Genuine Belief System, guided by the following general principles: 1. That the wonder and mystery of existence, including the enigma of death, constitute the essence of reality and the individual’s failure to confront and attempt to resolve this mystery causes the existential-meaninglessness anxiety within him or her; 2. That resolving the existential mystery is mankind’s highest purpose; 3. That each human life has value and is therefore deserving of dignity and a role in resolving the existential mystery; 4. That the human species is a sacred aspect of the existential mystery that requires each of us to infuse our lives with meaning that includes actions and thoughts enhancing its eternal survival; and, 5. That to date we have not attained a genuine comprehension of the nature of God and the Cosmos and should thus embark on a quest to attain that comprehension through intellectual, spiritual and scientific study. These guiding principles will generate beliefs motivating actions and thoughts that seek to improve each human life, enhance the survivability of the human species, both short and long term, and inspire a collective quest toward a comprehension of the true nature of God and the Cosmos. Pursuing these goals will put the human species on a pathway to achieving its highest intellectual, spiritual and technological potential. In short, adopting the beliefs based upon these guiding principles will radically alter the way humans lead their lives and provide a means to genuine meaning and self-esteem for everyone. Upon adoption of beliefs based upon these guiding principles, you will no longer deem important the things that you did previously that were motivated by your old and now rejected beliefs. You will re-prioritize what is important and meaningful and be compelled to live in a way that promotes the improvement of your life and the lives of others, that enhances the survivability of the human species, and, that brings you closer to comprehending the true nature of God and the Cosmos. Unless you adopt the belief and action system proposed in this book, you will forever be haunted by the existential-meaninglessness anxiety that lurks deep within your psyche. You will, in short, never attain genuine happiness and salvation. Furthermore, unless the majority of your fellow human beings reject the old cultural beliefs and adopt the new ones proposed in this book, mankind will continue to come up short in achieving its highest spiritual, intellectual and technological potential. As demonstrated in the historical record, present cultural belief systems motivate destructive and trivial behaviors leading to endless conflict among peoples, small and largescale wars, poverty, epidemics and widespread ignorance. Unless a radical transformation of beliefs takes place among the great majority of your fellow man, the human species is doomed to become extinct either by its own hand or due to some cataclysmic natural disaster such as, in the immediate term, an asteroid strike, pandemic or nuclear war, or in the long-long term, the sun going nova. In addition to offering up this radical, transformative set of replacement beliefs, this book offers a comprehensive de-programming and re-programming regimen that will assist you in embracing and using these new beliefs as motivating factors for your actions and thoughts. By following this regimen, you will be given the opportunity of getting beyond the lie of your life and attaining genuine meaning and self-esteem. You will cease being an automatic, programmed human being and become, instead, an authentic person behaving and thinking in ways aligned with the reality of the human situation. You will be given the chance of pursuing true happiness and of achieving salvation as a human being. Thus, you have two choices: (1). You can continue living your life as a lie and remain asleep to the reality of your situation, and continue to automatically do and think things that provide you with a sense of only illusory meaning and self-esteem; or, (2). You can get beyond the lie of your life by awakening to the reality of your situation and then adopting a radically new belief system, based upon that reality, that will motivate you to infuse your life with genuine meaning by doing and thinking things that improve the quality of life for yourself and others; enhance the survivability of the human species and the attainment of its highest intellectual, spiritual and technological potential; and, embark upon a quest to comprehend the true nature of God and the Cosmos. By awakening to the Truth and selecting Choice Number 2, you will get beyond the lie of your life and attain true meaning and a sense of genuine self-esteem. Once beyond the lie, you would have escaped your automatic life and become an authentic human being. In short, you will have attained salvation. If you are ready to take this leap beyond the lie and begin your journey on the path to your salvation, read on. Part One The Lie Chapter One Why You Lie The Quest for Meaning Life is a quest for meaning. The catalyst for that quest is a vacuum of meaning caused by the unsolved mysteries of life and death that confronts each of us – that is, the unanswered ever-present questions that haunt our psyches such as why we were born, what happens upon our death, what is the universe and where did it come from and so on. Because these questions remain unresolved, we are wracked by an innate. lurking dread, what I have termed the existential/meaninglessness anxiety. This dread is related to the fear within each of us that our existence and death is pointless. That life is a game without rules or purpose. That each of us is worthless. To overcome or repress the existential/meaninglessness anxiety, each of us is driven to embark on a quest to fill this vacuum and infuse our lives with meaning; and it is the system of religious, social, economic and political beliefs of the human cultural group with which we have come to identify that furnishes the vehicle for attaining this quest. Stated another way, cultural beliefs motivate action and generate thought in the course of satisfying the individual’s inherent need to infuse his or her life with meaning and self-esteem in a seemingly meaningless world. Every human deed is motivated by this drive to infuse life with meaning in order to obtain a sense of purpose and value. The achievement of one’s quest for meaning fills the void left by the unresolved mystery of life and death and in the process, overcomes the existential/meaninglessness anxiety. Because beliefs motivate action and generate thought in this all-consuming personal quest for meaning, they are key to understanding and changing human behavior. In short, by changing one’s beliefs, you can change one’s behavior. It is therefore possible to control and adjust human behavior for the betterment of the person and the human species provided the right principles are used in guiding the formation of beliefs that motivate such behavior. The Mysteries of Life and Death As I have stated, the unsolved mysteries of life and death render one’s life a seeming futile, meaningless exercise. You are thus compelled to formulate a lie about your life, based on your culture’s belief system, to hide the fact that the primary universal questions about existence, life and death, that have gone unanswered are seemingly incomprehensible. The unsolved mystery of existence renders our lives insignificant. Coupled with the idea of death, whose reality we fight tooth and nail, we are left to grapple with our innermost fear that we are worthless pieces of animated flesh and blood doomed to die. This awareness of our apparent meaninglessness and mortality, a “curse” of mankind’s high intelligence, fills us with constant, lurking dread, the “existential/meaninglessness anxiety.” To cushion the existential/meaninglessness anxiety, symbolic belief systems have arisen within all human cultural groups throughout history to the present time enabling cultural members to infuse their lives with a sense of meaning and purpose. Cultural beliefs have become more diverse and numerous with the rise of advanced civilization following the agricultural revolution when humans gained considerably more free time to consider the mystery of the human condition. Quantitative primitive methods previously used to infuse one’s life with meaning and self-esteem - such as hunting, warring, romantic love and playing tribal games - were supplemented by purely symbolic ones. Thereupon, civilized humans, no longer at the mercy of Nature, saw the rise of more complex religious theologies and the priestly class that interpreted the human relationship with “god” and the Cosmos. Additionally, humans had more time to focus on the politics of professions, romantic love, lust, and all other social and economic beliefs motivating behavior in the repression of the existential/meaninglessness anxiety. Present cultural belief systems continue to provide their members with meaning and a sense of self-esteem. Equally important, the religious beliefs of cultural groups provide their members with the promise of immortality in some supernatural afterlife. In summary, the beliefs of the human cultural group with which you have come to identify (your nation, family, clan, tribe, gang, cult, etcetera), motivate you to do and think things that infuse your life with meaning and self-esteem and thus enable you to repress the existential/meaninglessness anxiety. However, the meaning and sense of self-esteem derived from historic and modern cultural beliefs have been unable to sufficiently overcome this lurking anxiety because such beliefs are based on either false or trivial principles or ideologies. They can offer only the illusion of meaning because they do not acknowledge or address the mysteries of life and death let alone enable the individual to resolve them. In short, historical and present cultural belief systems have caused each of their adherents to live a lie. For most people, the lie fashioned from false or trivial cultural beliefs works well most of the time in cushioning the existential/meaninglessness anxiety. They go automatically about their lives with only fleeting glimpses of the reality of their situation – that it is meaningless in the face of the unsolved mystery of existence. However, even for these automatic men the truth is sometimes revealed. Most people during their lifetimes occasionally glimpse that the meaning and self-esteem derived from the belief system in the culture with which they identify, is trivial or false, and that, therefore, the life they are leading, is a pure, unadulterated lie. During this period of awakening, however brief, caused by the death of a loved one, divorce, the end of a romantic relationship, the loss of a job, the failure of one’s team to win the championship, and so forth, the person is apt to fall into a deep, dark depression and desperately seek out new ways to fill the vacuum of meaninglessness. For most, this rare crossing beyond the lie of their life is a difficult time, hard to take. The person escapes these unsettling feelings of anxiety by retreating back to the lie of the life he or she had been living before being so briefly and sourly awakened or creating a new lie from different beliefs offered by the culture with which he or she identifies, or the beliefs of an entirely different culture. For some, the return to the lie does not readily occur and they remain steeped in depression. For others, escape is found in sometimes bizarre beliefs that medical men call delusions or schizophrenia. Even if the person recovers and develops a new vehicle that satisfies the quest for meaning and self-esteem, deep down will be the ever-present, lurking realization that such meaning is illusory. Thus, the individual is haunted by the idea that something is lacking. The problem, of course, concerns the person’s set of beliefs motivating his or her action and thought that fail ultimately to address let alone answer the unsolved mysteries of life and death. Unless a new set of beliefs grounded in the reality of the human situation are adopted to overcome such anxiety, the individual will be incapable of infusing his or her life with genuine meaning and self-esteem. The Existential/Meaninglessness Anxiety and Death This book was originally meant to be a companion to my 2009 work, “The Human Manifesto: A General Plan For Human Survival.” Based largely on the writings of Ernest Becker, primarily his 1973 Pulitzer Prize winning, “The Denial of Death,” The Human Manifesto argued that cultural belief systems provide individuals with a means of symbolically overcoming their innate fear of death. While I continue to believe that our current cultural belief systems must be rejected and replaced by new ones in order to advance the human species to a higher level of spiritual, intellectual and technological achievement, I have changed my view from The Human Manifesto as to why present beliefs so remarkably fail to do so. I no longer believe that cultural beliefs systems arose to repress our awareness of death but, as mentioned earlier, to repress the latent existential/meaninglessness anxiety; and, that death is but an aspect of a larger psychological “dread” – the human abhorrence of the existential mystery that renders life seemingly meaningless. It is our inability to answer the Big Question of the existential mystery – why we are here and what happens to us once we die – that has caused the development of beliefs among human cultures enabling its members to fill the void of meaning and provide them with a sense of self-esteem. In short, death is a mere aspect of the larger, universal mystery and not the primary catalyst for the formation of symbolic methods for meaning creation. Thus, it is now my view, and the central theory of this book, that cultural belief systems have arisen to enable a person to infuse life with meaning and a sense of self-esteem to repress the more general existential-meaninglessness anxiety than to deny death which is a mere facet of it. Indeed, it is my further position that no one really accepts death as an eventuality; rather, for each of us, and for you, death is something that happens to other people. Each of us believes that life will go on as always no matter how many people die around us. While our sense of mortality may be heightened in face of the death of our loved ones, or during times of serious illness, we never are able to completely accept that death is a personal inevitability. Thus, death is not the cause of the latent anxiety compelling humans to find meaning in symbolic actions motivated by cultural belief – our inability to find meaning in the reality of existence is. What we do know and accept, deep down, is that we don’t know why we and the universe exist and why others die. We don’t know why we were born, why we live, what we live for, and why we die. Those are the mysteries that confront us each and every day and why we are driven to infuse our lives with some kind of meaning, however trivial or false, based upon the beliefs of our respective cultural group, to blunt the emptiness and dread which such mysteries engender. The vacuum of meaning must be filled and we use symbolic cultural belief-action systems to do that. Scientific Proof for the Existential/Meaninglessness Anxiety Terror Management Theory (TMT), proposed in 1986 by social anthropologists, Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski, was inspired by Becker’s work, including, of course, “The Denial of Death.” TMT asserts that the death terror is cushioned by literal and symbolic meanings and self-esteem derived by the individual from his or her cultural belief or “hero” system – those social, religious political, and economic beliefs that have arisen in a cultural group and are adopted or accepted as true by its members. As noted above, those beliefs provide meaning to a cultural member’s life through various actions motivated by them. TMT researchers have conducted numerous scientific studies that have demonstrated the efficacy of this theory. For example, in one study it was found that persons having a strong religious faith and belief in God experience less death anxiety. [See, “Trust in God, Forgiveness by God, and Death Anxiety,” by Neal Krause, Omega Journal of Death and Dying (March 2, 2015)]. Another study demonstrated that persons of high self-esteem did not respond to the phenomenon of mortality salience (awareness of the inevitability of death) with increased worldview defense while those with moderate self-esteem did. In other words, person with a confident view of themselves, based upon use of the cultural beliefs with which they identify, were better able to deal with events that brought to the fore the inevitability of death than persons who did not hold themselves in such high regard. [See, “Terror management theory and self-esteem: Evidence that increased self-esteem reduced mortality salience effects,” by Eddie Harmon-Jones, Linda Simon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, Sheldon Solomon, and, Holly McGregor, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 72(1), Jan 1997, 24-36]. Yet another study confirmed that when mortality is made “salient,” or evident, subjects responded negatively toward those who violate cultural values. [See, “Evidence for terror management theory: The effects of mortality salience on reactions to those who violate or uphold cultural values,” by Abram Rosenblatt, Jeff, Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, Tom Pyszczynski, Deborah Lyon, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 57(4), Oct 1989, 681-690]. While TMT research has focused on death as the cause of “terror” (aka, anxiety) within each of us, the conclusions can be applied to the existential/meaninglessness anxiety of which, as noted earlier, death is an important aspect. These and other studies support the theory that one’s innate and largely subconscious realization of the mysteries of life and death is behind the symbolic methods employed in culture to cushion the anxiety such profound mysteries generate in each of us. In Summary: The Mysteries of Life and Death Compel The Lie The unsolved mysteries of life and death force us to construct our life around a lie. In the evolutionary process of becoming more intelligent and consciously aware, humans came to wonder about the meaning, or seeming meaninglessness of cosmic existence. Unable to answer these profound existential questions, humans became driven by a quest for meaning and self-worth. In primitive times, that quest was readily satisfied by a quest for survival. Getting through another day sheltered, fed and alive was meaning enough. But as mankind advanced, especially after the agricultural revolution, individuals had more time to consider the seeming meaninglessness of existence. Thus, culture developed symbolic ways through religious, social, economic and political beliefs to deal with such questions. Such beliefs motivated cultural members to act and think in ways that provided them with a sense of meaning and self-esteem. In short, the personal quest for meaning and self-esteem is driven by the awareness of the existential mysteries of life and death; and, the quest for that meaning is attained through actions motivated by the person’s adopted cultural beliefs. Accepting this proposition provides the key to understanding human behavior. It answer the question why we do and think the things we do and think. Thus, behavior can be controlled by changing one’s set of beliefs. To do so, such cultural beliefs must be changed. While this is no easy task, failing in doing so will have dire consequences for the individual and the human species. This book is an attempt to convince mankind to adopt new beliefs that motivate behavior beneficial to the individual and the species at large to avoid such dire consequences. But before getting to that, we must further explore the present nature of our cultural beliefs and how, from them, we infuse our lives with a false or trivial sense of meaning and self-esteem. In short, in the next chapter, I review how the lie of one’s life is constructed and why living such lie can never make one truly happy or provide salvation. So let us begin that journey. Chapter Two How You LIE The Socialization Process As demonstrated in Chapter One, the religious, social, economic and political beliefs that develop in human cultural groups (nations, families, clans, tribes, gangs, etcetera) motivate action and thought by the members of these groups that infuse their lives with apparent meaning as a symbolic response to the existential/meaninglessness anxiety. In short, cultural beliefs motivate behavior providing its members with a purposeful life and a sense of self-esteem that represses the spiritual and intellectual vacuum of meaning caused by the unsolved mysteries of life and death. Starting from early childhood and lasting a lifetime, beliefs are imparted as truths to each cultural group member through a “socialization” process, a kind of programing or brainwashing during which parents, siblings, extended family members, friends, priests, teachers and the media impress upon the minds of other cultural members the truth of the beliefs used in the culture for infusing life with meaning. One’s character and sense of self-esteem is the end-result of the socialization process. Once the culture’s beliefs are accepted through the socialization process, such beliefs automatically motivate the actions and thoughts of the socialized member thus infusing his or her life with meaning enabling him or her to forget the existential/meaninglessness anxiety. The bottom line is that most people come to be programmed to adopt the religious, social, political and economic beliefs of a specific cultural group and their behavior can be explained by such programming. In short, everything a person does can be traced back to a cultural belief. Thus, most socialized members of cultural groups go about their lives like programmed robots. They automatically do and think things as a response to what they have been socialized or brainwashed to believe will infuse their lives with meaning and self-worth. However, as you shall see, because the beliefs they have been socialized to accept as motivating factors fail to address the reality of life, they are leading false lives filled with illusory meaning. Throughout history to the present time, the socialization process has been used by every human cultural group to indoctrinate its members into accepting the set of beliefs that define the group’s identity and motivate the thoughts and actions of its members. It is the underlying force that binds the members of a cultural group and keeps them working toward the culture’s physical, psychological, and spiritual goals. What makes a culture unique are not its members, but the beliefs that motivate them to action and thought in developing their characters in attaining their quest for meaning and self-esteem. Thus, beliefs define not only the individual lie but the collective lie of one’s cultural group. On occasion, a person may come to reject some or all of the beliefs of the cultural group with which he or she has come to identify and adopt some or all of those of another cultural group. I have termed this phenomenon, “conversion socialization.” Religious conversion is an example, whereby a person rejects the faith of his parents and family and accepts the faith of some other religion. We see this all the time – a Christian converts to Islam, a Jew converts to Christianity, and so forth. Nevertheless, whether the individual adopts the beliefs of the culture into which he or she was born and raised, or some other culture as he or she passes through life, the adopted beliefs become the forces motivating action and thought. Those actions and thoughts infuse the life a person with meaning and self-esteem and provide a comfort that they are right with the world. The central problem for all cultural members is that the beliefs they have adopted and used through the socialization process to infuse their lives with meaning and self-esteem are either false (especially those religious or theological ones that define a largely fictional cosmology or god concept without any empirical support), or trivially do so. Thus, cultural beliefs tend to motivate inconsequential or destructive action and thought. While such action and thought may appear to infuse the individual’s life with meaning and self-esteem, in truth it does not because such action and thought fails to address the mysteries of life and death. As noted above, the beliefs adopted through the socialization process blind the person to the truth of the human condition. However, even worse, because one’s beliefs enable a person to satisfy the personal quest for meaning and self-esteem, a challenge to those beliefs, and thus a challenge to the person’s concept of meaning, is resisted, sometimes violently. Thus, contrary beliefs are often the cause of strife and warfare between different cultural beliefs, especially when it comes to conflicting religious faiths. A challenge to the basis for one’s faith is a challenge to that person’s concept of meaning. It proposes that one’s is meaningless and thus awakens full bore the existential/meaningless anxiety. Additionally, the challenge to religious belief presents an assault on the promise of personal immortality. In summary, the false and trivial nature of the historic and present symbolic belief systems that have arisen in human cultural groups, and the differences among beliefs in various cultures that threaten the “truth” of beliefs in other cultures, is largely responsible for humanity’s poverty, brutality and ignorance, and also explains why the species has failed to reach its optimal intellectual, spiritual and technological potential. The Life Immortality Elusion (or, the LIE of your life) As a result of the socialization process, the lie of one’s life is fashioned. Beliefs adopted through this process motivate a person’s actions and thoughts and result in illusory meaning. The end result of such process of I have termed one’s Life Immortality Elusion – that is, the LIE of one’s life. One’s LIE is a function of one’s beliefs motivating action and thought that lead the person to believe he or she is leading a meaningful, worthwhile life. The immortality component normally stems from the person’s religious belief and provides great psychological comfort in the face of the awareness of inevitable death. Your LIE defines your character; the person you are. A person’s LIE determines his or her everyday actions and thoughts that infused life with meaning and instills in them a sense of self-esteem in an effort to dampen the ever-present existential/meaninglessness anxiety. Moreover, the collective LIEs of cultural group members define those groups – what they are and how they operate. Members of the American cultural group construct LIEs that are often materially different than the LIEs constructed by members of other national cultural groups, say Iran, North Korea, or Russia. LIEs are key to understanding how a person will behave and think; and, it will lead back to the identity of their beliefs upon which it is based. Because beliefs are different among cultural groups, the LIEs of people from different cultures are naturally different as well. Because belief systems are relative among cultures, LIEs are as well. Furthermore, because numerous categories and sub-categories of beliefs are available to the cultural members from which to build a LIE that satisfies the quest for meaning and self-esteem in repressing the existential/meaninglessness anxiety, LIEs of the members of the same cultural group, especially one as large and diverse as America, are often markedly different from each other. Thus, almost like snowflakes, no two LIEs are likely ever to be the same; and, therefore, the characters of no two people are ever quite the same. Let’s now put these general concepts as to how we lie in the context of your own life. Your actions and thoughts stem from the Life Immortality Elusion you constructed from the beliefs of the culture with which you identify. Like everyone else, through the socialization process, you were programmed to accept those beliefs by your parents, siblings, extended family members, friends, teachers, priests, politicians and the media. And like most everyone else, your LIE has enabled you to infuse your life with meaning and a sense of self-esteem. Your LIE is thus, quite simply, YOU. Still, deep down you are haunted by a seeming nameless anxiety, a sense or feeling that something is not quite right with the world. Worse than that, you feel that your life is automatic, a reflex more than authentic action. Though aware of the unsolved mysteries of life and death around you, you rarely think about them. The lurk in the shadows of your life, the worm at the core of your happiness. In short, the existential/meaninglessness anxiety haunts you no matter how strong your illusion of meaning and self-esteem stemming from your LIE has become. A whisper of unease and dissatisfaction courses through your mind and soul reminding you that the LIE you have constructed is false in some way, that it is truly an illusion of meaning, a lie, and that ultimately, you are just another of Nature’s creatures doomed to die without having ever realized why; and, that your likely real meaning is to be a mere cog, indeed a speck, in the vast, emotionless, spiritless evolutionary engine of the life force. Take a look at the following equation that may be helpful to understanding exactly what I am getting at, to the truth to which I am trying to awaken you: Awareness of the Mysteries of Life and Death > Existential/Meaninglessness Anxiety > Cultural Beliefs > Actions and Thoughts = LIE = False Meaning = Self-Esteem As stated previously, the religious, social, economic and political beliefs of the cultural group with which you presently identify (most likely the one into which you were born and raised) determine the actions and thoughts that make up your LIE. A cultural group includes the nation, family, clan, tribe, friendship circles, or gang to which you belong. The beliefs of your identified group motivate the actions and thoughts from which your LIE is derived, and it is through those actions and thoughts that you gain a sense of meaningfulness and purpose in your life. Additionally, those beliefs/action methods are the basis for constructing your sense of self-esteem, the acceptance that you leading a worthwhile life. Thus, your LIE is constituted from the culmination of beliefs, accepted by you in the process of your socialization, which presently motivate your actions and thoughts that help you forget about the truth – that you are unable to answer the mysteries of life and death. However, because your beliefs are insufficiently related to reality, in that they make erroneous assumptions or provide a false narrative about the human condition (e.g., religious beliefs), make trivial matters (nationalism or sports or celebrity fanaticism) seem important, or deny the reality of death, your LIE can provide you with only illusory meaning and a false sense of self-esteem. All cultures offer the following assortment of general beliefs that are used in constructing their members’ LIEs: 1. Religious: This belief defines the nature of God and God’s relationship with humanity, presenting a cosmology that provides the individual with the promise of immortality in some afterlife or supernatural realm. 2. Economic: Beliefs that concern systems for the production and distribution of goods and services within and accumulation of wealth and things among members of cultural groups. Economic beliefs include the various methods of employment and entrepreneurship that fulfill basic needs for food and shelter while at the same time providing an avenue for attaining meaning and self-esteem. A subset of this belief is materialism or consumerism that stresses the importance of accumulating material things as a way to infuse one’s life with meaning. 3. Romantic: A powerful and influential subset of social beliefs due to its direct connection to the individual’s sexual drive in furtherance of species procreation, romance provides the individual with meaning and self-esteem fulfillment through physical, emotional and psychological attraction and attachment to another, that is, the love object – e.g., spouse, fiancé, mistress, partner. 4. Familial: Another subset of social beliefs, enables a person to find meaning and self- esteem in the emotional and political interest in the family unit, especially among parents, siblings and children. One’s measure of self-worth is derived from these interests and attachments through competition for love and materials among family members. 5. Friendship: Another subset of social beliefs, it involves the interests and attachments among friends that provides meaning and self-esteem to the individual via relationships and interactions outside of but similar to the family unit. 6. Leisure Activities: Another subset of social beliefs by which a person obtains meaning and self-esteem through various leisure or recreational pursuits, including participation in amateur athletes, engaging in hobbies, watching television or movies, reading, playing computer games, spectator-ism (that is, supporting a professional, college, or other sports team or individual athlete from which the person obtains vicarious or imputed meaning and self-esteem) and/or by engaging in a multitude of other possible leisure activities. 7. Artistic: Yet another subset of social beliefs involving a person’s engagement in some artistic activity, such as creative writing, music, visual arts, media arts, etc., that provides the means to meaning and self-esteem. 8. Celebrity or Cult Worship: A subset of social beliefs and/or political beliefs that provides meaning and self-esteem by enabling the person to live vicariously through the worship of others or ideas. This includes the “cult of celebrity.” 9. Political: Engaging in personal or partisan political activity, or being drawn to and driven by a political leader or ideology furnishing the person with vicarious self-esteem and connection with a greater beyond. Using the above categories, a person’s LIE, or life/immortality project, may be described by the following equation: Cultural Belief Systems = Motivate Behavior and Thought = One’s LIE = Meaning = Self-Esteem = Repression of the Existential/Meaninglessness Anxiety. Stated again, your behavior – what you do and what you think - is determined by the particular beliefs that have arisen in your culture that you select during the socialization process to infuse your life with meaning and self-esteem in order to deny or hide from the unresolved mysteries of life and death. Thus the key to both understanding human behavior, and changing it, is to identify one’s socialized cultural beliefs. The above general categories of beliefs are relative among cultures and their sub-cultural groups; that is, how each of them is fleshed out and specifically defined is somewhat and often markedly different. For example, a person from China will have a different way of fulfilling religious, romantic or artistic beliefs than a member of the American cultural group. Moreover, a person’s LIE is unique to that person. Even members of the game cultural group or sub-group within it will construct different LIEs because a person’s LIE may be based on different beliefs acceptable within the group. While bowling or golf may be how I infuse my life with meaning and attain a sense of self-esteem, you may find meaning from collecting stamps. As noted above, it is this very relativism of belief systems among cultures and sub-cultures that often-times results in destructive behavior between or among cultural members when those beliefs, especially religious ones, are in conflict. “Tales From the Crypt: On the Role of Death in Life,” an article by Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski, recognized that the relativism of cultural belief system explains the often violent clash among cultural groups: … just as the standards by which self-esteem is acquired are arbitrary in that they vary across time and space, so too are cultural worldviews arbitrary in that there is a potentially infinite variety of cultural worldviews that have existed, do exist, or could conceivably exist, each of which is believed by the aver- age enculturated individual to be an absolute representation of reality…this conceptual analysis helps us understand why human beings have such a difficult time peacefully coexisting with different others. To the extent that cultural worldviews serve to ameliorate the anxiety associated with the awareness of death, the mere existence of others who have different beliefs about the nature of reality poses an explicit challenge to the claims of ab- solute truth of one’s own point of view, thus undermining the anxiety-buffering capacity of that worldview and instigating defensive responses that serve to restore psychological equanimity through the acquisition of a new cultural worldview or enhanced allegiance to the original worldview. The historic clash between Christianity and Islam is an obvious example of this ancient and prevalent belief-based discord, but it is also evident in almost all manner of group versus group belief system confrontations. We fear other groups, at bottom, because their beliefs may render our own obsolete, insignificant or insufficient, thus diminishing the symbolic “truth” of our LIE in the quest for meaning that strives to alleviate the existential/meaninglessness hounding one’s life. If our LIE is shown to be just that – a lie, because the beliefs underlying its construction are shown to be false, then the anxiety caused by the unresolved mysteries of life and death will rise up full bore and drive us quite simply into madness and/or deep depression. Thus, humans are compelled to fight to the death to defend the merits of their belief system against all comers in order to preserve the LIE that is the basis of their character.