The Douchebag Bible (16 page)

sense. We haven’t the proper tools to make any real sense of

things. Our memories are shoddy, our objectivity in matters of

self is dubious and the effects we assign to certain causes are

likely more often wrong than not.

If my original precept that identity is largely derived from

our narrative for ourselves holds true under scrutiny, then in

diminishing the veracity of said narrative, I have also dealt a blow

to our current concept of identity. I think that this is far too

counterintuitive to have any real impact on our perceptions of self,

but if it can be accepted as truth, then I think there is a great deal

of freedom (and danger) to be found in it.

To say that perception is truth is something of a banal

cliché at this point, but to assert that
how we choose
to perceive

the events of our lives can actually change our identity entirely

would give us the ability to control who we are (at least in our own

eyes) to an extent rarely dreamed possible in the age of genetic

determinism.

To clarify, I don’t believe that these perceptions can turn

someone who is by almost all accounts a villain into a hero, only

2
The Photography of Cody Weber

http://www.myspace.com/weberphoto

that it can make such a person believe that he or she is heroic. Of

course, villains throughout the ages have always fancied

themselves heroes—this is nothing new.

Hitler did not see an evil man in the mirror.

The difference in my line of thinking is that it makes such

delusions permissible by their ubiquity. In other words, if all men

are delusional in regards to their self, then who can say that one

man’s delusion is any less or more untrue than any other man’s

delusion? By what means, if my reasoning holds largely cogent,

would we be able to dispute a villain’s claims of heroicness or a

failure’s perception of success? If identity is delusion, then all

perception is undermined and no ethical barometer can be said

to possess any objectivity since the good guys are only good in

their heads and the bad guys are probably good in theirs as well.

Some will here make the argument that ethics lay outside

the will and that good guys are good regardless of their perception

of themselves and that acts of evil are evil regardless of whether

or not evil was the intent of the malefactor who perpetrated them.

If God is that outside force, that non-human moral barometer,

than I would like to see proof not only of him but proof of his will.

And if that non-human mechanism of morality is not God then

what is it?

Richard Dawkins, the famed evolutionary biologist and an

outspoken advocate of atheism and rationalism, outlined in his

best-selling work
The God Delusion
, his evolutionary explanation

for the origin of morality and ethics. He explains how things like

kin selection and game theory have imbued man with a natural

sense of right and wrong. While I don’t disagree with his

assertions I have to ask why a moral code that evolved is one that

need be followed? We evolved instincts towards violence and, if

the God gene 3 hypothesis is correct, belief itself—and yet no

thinking person views non-violence or non-belief as impossible

(and only a strange few thinking people find them immoral). An

evolved or
natural
morality is a morality that can be challenged

on an intellectual basis in the same way that the value of an

evolved predilection towards violence or endocannibalism or

rape as a means of reproduction can be challenged. Any evolved

social trait can be challenged. No evolutionary biologist that I

have ever heard of has made or provided evidence for the

assertion that evolution is infallible or has our happiness at heart.

So, if Hitler views himself a good man and no concrete

ethical code exists to contradict his goodness, then can we say

that our mass perception of him as a villain overrides 1930’s

Germany’s perception of him as a hero? Or his perception of

himself as such?

Returning to Cody, does it matter how much his admirers

view him as a genius when he views his own work as ugly and

wholly lacking in beauty (as he once confessed to me)? I think that

it doesn’t. I think that a billion voices telling a man who believes

he is Thing A that he is actually Thing B are useless if that man’s

3
The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired Into Our Genes
by Dean H Hamer

http://www.amazon.com/God-Gene-Faith-Hardwired-Genes/dp/0385500580

perception of himself is unshakable.

If a genocidal maniac is called evil, he can always escape

into a more comfortable identity.
I’m not evil
, he might tell

himself,
I’m misunderstood.
I’m heroically doing what I know is

right, even though the odds are against me. I’m reluctantly

doing what is necessary to create a better future. I am a

visionary.

Our disgust with such people and what we perceive as their

shoddy justifications for their evil actions is nearly universal. Few

human beings on this planet today are not aghast at genocide and

contemptuous of genocidal maniacs. We so deeply feel this

repulsion towards mass violence that any belief system that

doesn’t hold such people as objectively vile seems unpalatable to

many of us, myself included.

I just can’t see a way around it, however. I’ll restate my

logic from start to finish in the briefest terms possible and

hopefully someone can provide me the solace of showing me

where I am mistaken.

1. Identity is based largely on the illusion of a narrative and

the establishment of an archetype of self within that

narrative.

2. This narrative is erroneous in every single human being.

3. It is impossible to object to a delusional perception of self

in another human being when one’s own perception of

one’s own self is demonstrably delusional as well. To do so