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This critique is multi-pronged and hence goes in several different directions and for that I apologize in advance. Primarily, this constitutes a political critique of certain concepts and ideas as they are still propagated today. Admittedly, I never took interest in political philosophy, preferring to focus on the “pure” philosophical disciplines such as epistemology, ontology, metaphysics etc. Hence, for anyone who is versed and knowledgeable in the subject, I apologize in advance for any errors that may be contained herewith. Unlike most of what I try to keep my writing subjects limited to, I do not have expertise in this subject area, but I will do my best.

Primarily, this critique is of the concept of the Noble lie, and several associated concepts, and their relevance to religion, being, of course, that this is a site dedicated to combating that particular force.

The phrase noble lie as it is employed today, comes from Plato’s Republic, where the philosophers of his utopian society would tell the greater mass of people that the Gods’ would put heavy metals in the blood of people with gold, silver or bronze to denote social class. Gold would denote ruling class, silver for the auxiliary, and bronze for the farmers. Although such assertions were completely false, in Republic it was argued that their belief was a necessary force for social cohesion, and hence constituted a white lie, or rather, a noble lie. The notion was later continued by the philosopher Leo Strauss.

The first thing that Strauss did was draw an immediate distinction between modern and ancient conceptualizations of the “rights” of man, specifically the greater mass of men. This essay does not assess the controversy over Strauss’s supposed anti-democratic beliefs, since it is not a critique of the man, for the concept I am attacking has been propagated for centuries, long before Strauss was ever born, but he set it out in concrete terms:

The concept of the noble lie always begins with the dichotomy of the “masses” and the “elite”. The former, obviously, constitute the greater mass of people. Blindly believing, desperate to be led and unable to maintain social cohesion per se under the noble lie argument, the “masses” have always had a sense of stigma attached to them. In the Victorian era, there was reference to the “Great Unwashed”, which was merely another name for a concept that had existed long before Queen Victoria arose to the throne, which is that, in a nutshell, the greater mass of people are a herd of sheep.

In contradistinction, the “elite” in the context of this argument are not necessarily the most wealthy, since elite in this case refers to intellectual capital. Rather, the elite are a small group of people who do not need to be led, who do not need the noble lies consumed by “the masses”, and who supply the social cohesion in the form of the noble lie/lies in question. Hence, the elite are free to pursue what Nietzsche calls “deadly truths”. True propositions that must not be spread among the “masses” lest they cause discontent and the breakdown of social order.

In the context of religion, this proposition takes the form of several arguments, not for the validity of religiosity but for the desirability of retaining it. It boils down to several points:

1)      The majority of people cannot “deal” with the concepts and notions that the mythologies that permeate society are falsehoods and that as a consequence, the promises made, usually post-mortem, are falsehoods. As a consequence, most people “need religion”

2)      Religiosity is desirable because it promotes social cohesion. As long as the greater mass of people believe religious propositions are true, society and “values” will be upheld, and hence belief is more important than reason. The problem at hand as seen by those who propagate this argument is that the conclusions which one’s reason can reach are, in the words of Tolstoy, “too horrible to contemplate”.  

3)      Because of (2), suspension of one’s critical faculties with respect to religious propositions is encouraged because the retaining of mythology as true belief is good and necessary for social cohesion

Stripped to its bare essentials and put in the crudest terms, those who employ such arguments would agree with Marx’s statement: Das Religion ist das Opiate des Volkes. However, unlike Marx, they would condone religion for precisely that reason whilst Marx would disdain it.

It is this precise argument (the noble lie) which I intent to critique, employing several examples along the way. It is not only this argument I wish to critique, but also the very dichotomy on which it stands.

Note that there is a single phrase in the argument at hand which makes it especially easy to target. Most people. Not all people. Not humanity. Indeed, by definition, the noble lie argument cannot make the case that there is an innate predisposition among humans a priori to turn to metaphysical deception as a method of sustaining an otherwise meaningless existence that would cause them to turn towards nihilism and despair. Rather, a specific group, called the “elite”, has access to esoteric knowledge of the falsehood of the mythologies upon which society stands, yet they consider it a duty not to reveal their falsehood. In other words, again, to strip it to the bare essentials and put it in the crudest terms: Not everyone needs religion. Just most people. Obviously, the former proposition could be falsified in a single stroke. After all, I am sitting here, typing, explaining precisely why this claim is false, and nor am I the only one. It is impossible to maintain the claim that there is an innate human need for such metaphysical deception.

So, it is possible to now critique the idea that the “masses” need religion, the noble lie argument.

The easiest and most obvious way to go about this is to attack the dichotomy. It is completely unclear what precisely we mean by “masses” and “elite”. It is equally incoherent precisely what criterion are necessary such that a person can be part of a privileged club that for some reason whether innate or learned, can pursue the Neitzchesian “deadly truths” that everyone else, for some reason, whether innate or learned, cannot. There is no justification of this dichotomy and the associated concepts. Recall that the argument begins with the notion that not just some people but most people lack the capacity or ability to critically examine the “noble lies” upon which society is supposedly owing its foundations, and that even if they could, they would wallow in nihilism and despair and society would fall. It is this innately absurd assertion that is what causes this argument and its associated variants to be so weak. It offers no coherent criterion upon which we could say that person X needs to derive his ethical injunctions from unquestioning religiosity, and person X needs to believe in post-mortem threat/reward etc. whereas person Y does not need to derive his ethical injunctions from religious absolute, can critically examine the claims at hand, and does not believe in post-mortem consequence, nor does he feel that the derivation of ethical injunction from this belief is necessary, let along desirable. There are indeed people who act in the manner of person X, and people who act in the manner of person Y. But there is no rational criterion whatsoever for delegating innate positions in the meaningless dichotomy of “mass” and “elite” based on this.

 Much like the joke that much be made of a Scotsman if he be caught young, a curious question therefore is to what degree someone will act like person X or Y is innate or learned. Suppose, to employ to grossest and most deliberately inflated stereotypes, a child is raised among a highly authoritarian Evangelical Christian family. He is brought up with the conceptualizations of the necessity of his belief and from whence, a “strong moral foundation”. Naturally, one might expect such a person to grow up to argue for the propositions I have already outlined, and that I am critiquing. Suppose the same child, from birth, was not raised in the aforementioned Evangelical home, but in the home of an atheist philosopher and taught about method, logic and critical examination, and rejects the notion of God. Naturally, we might expect the same child, raised in this situation, to argue alongside me, instead of for the Noble lie. Obviously, this is a deviation to “nature verses nurture” but the point is that the notion that a small number of elite have some sort of innate predispositions against an otherwise universal necessity to believe in the noble lie, the “wise philosophers” of Plato’s Republic, is extremely dubious. I shall return to this point soon.

In the opening paragraphs, I cited the creation-evolution controversy, and shall new return to this example. In the United States, there is a large scale theological movement which essentially offers the following propositions:

1)      Modern society is on an irreversible trend towards total decay. Drug use, promiscuous sex, etc. are all the product of “secularization” and the “abandonment of God”. When the “traditional values” that not only include God but other supposedly associated propositions such as “family values” are abandoned, social decay results.

2)      Religion constitutes a necessary foundation not by virtue of its truth or lack thereof, but rather, and, this is crucial, more importantly, when people abandon the mythologies on which society supposedly stands, social decay, nihilism and misery result.

3)      In the case of evolution, evolution is to be rejected specifically because the tenets of evolutionary biology paint a picture of the origin and nature of the human species that, when  believed, would cause despair and hopelessness

These points have been touched upon by numerous thinkers, including Dostoevsky, who would have agreed (“Ivan solemnly observed that there was no law of nature to make man love his fellow man…and if man had practiced love and selflessness in all the preceding generations, it is precisely because man believed in his own immortality" ). These are all variants on the same theme. Indeed, it is arguable that Evangelical Christianity in the United States today is the largest propagator of the noble lie concept in the entire world, for their whole theology is based on the necessity of belief to maintain social cohesion. Rife throughout the movement is the notion that the most salient issue is not criticality of examination of belief, or reasoned discourse on matters of the truth or lack thereof of said beliefs, but rather, the necessity of said beliefs in order to maintain certain structures that those within this theological movement perceive as necessary for the continuity of organized human society.

Of course, such assertions are not merely propagandistic in nature, they are simply nonsense. There is not the slightest evidence whatsoever that “most people” need to believe blindly in religious propositions and religion is a necessary social cohesive force because of this, whereas “a small number of people” are somehow exempt from this criterion. It is especially difficult to propagate such ideas today. And if it is true that many people do behave in a such a manner as if religion were necessary to maintain social cohesion, it is not because of some sort of innate quality they lack that the ruling class do possess that inoculates them against the need for the noble lie, but rather, because the very idea that the “noble lie” is desirable permeates society in the first place. I shall return to this point soon.

Since Marx was the one who first conceived of the notion of Das Opium des Volkes, his opinion should be weighted here. In Das Kapital, to Marx, it was obvious what the problem was. The problem was not that people needed to believe in religion, but rather that people believed that it was necessary to believe in religion. This second-order lie was the fundamental corruption in the whole system, according to Marx. The ruling class would maintain two prongs. The first prong was the heaven-hell concept, the restraint-reward idea. t is an opiate specifically because it's designed in order to suppress discontent caused by the ruling class, among the Volk (often mistranslated as 'masses' ). The fear of hell and the promise of heaven are good prophylactics for the soft-minded. History is littered with examples where mythology was employed to sustain a civilization which was collapsing from outright revolt, until, of course, it could no longer be hidden that the whole thing was a hoax. The fall of Mayan civilization, who were untouched by the conquistadors, is an example. Their destruction, largely caused by the highly irresponsible agriculture practice of slash and burn irrigation, caused widespread famine and the fall of Tikal. The ziggurats that remain there are visible, and in popular culture we have an image of Mayan civilization as being one of temples hidden among jungles, although there were no jungles when their empire stood. Another example is Easter Island. When the Dutch arrived in the early 18th century, they could be forgiven for thinking that Rapa Nui's hills were so barren they were sand dunes. Yet Easter Island, with no trees, no soil, apparently no natural resources whatsoever, had almost 1000 famous stone Maoi statues, some of which were 30 feet tall, carved across the island. The island had previously been host to 10,000, which is a lot, and previously, had extremely fertile volcanic soil and the finest quarries in the Pacific. The islanders had developed a statue cult which completely destroyed the island. For they cut down trees and shaped rocks from the quarries to haul Maoi into place. The rate of Maoi building became so feverish that the islanders eventually chopped down all the trees, and the soil was washed away. By the time the catastrophe of the statue cult was through the Easter Island, there was nothing left on the island but the statues. A third example is tsarist Russia, where the protectorates of the vast empire of Russia, Alexander the II, later his son, Alex III, and the last tsar, Nicholas II, all commissioned, as part of the process of Russification, a sort of cultural ironing process, had commissioned the Orthodox Church as an arm of the state, and very specifically, an arm of the state that suppressed revolt. The Lateran pacts in Italy, which created the Vatican, also ensured that the Catholic church would promote the mouthpiece of fascism as long as the fascists did the same for the Catholics. The Concordat was a virtually identical agreement with the Nazi party. Marx may not have been alive to see some of the aforementioned examples, but his predictions hold. Humans are predictable.

Let’s address this. In the above sections, I argued that the dichotomy of “mass” and “elite” is incoherent and unable to be articulated, and is forced to make incoherent assertions and cannot articulate precisely why certain people should have an innate lack of necessity of certain beliefs that everyone else must believe. There is an important distinction. We might say, for example, that certain people have a greater natural intelligence and hence a a greater propensity towards critical thinking on certain issues, such as religious belief, but I am unaware that it would inoculate at the supposed despair that we are supposed to feel when we abandon the metaphysical beliefs of the past that gave us comfort.

The concept of the noble lie must be understood, therefore, in its historical context. Earlier, I argued for the incoherency of the distinction outlined above. This is especially applicable to modern societies, where it is less clear what is meant by “the elite” and “the masses”. But the key point here is this. For a large portion of history, such classes were clearer cut, especially in feudal societies. However, there is a problem which undermines the noble lie. The Roman tSeneca the Younger once famously declared that “religion is regarded as false by the wise, true by the common people, and by the rulers as useful”. When we are discussing whether “most people” save for a small “elite” need religion, it is important to remember what is under discussion. It is not being debated whether people will turn to religious belief in desperate situation such as poverty or grave illness, but rather, overall, that religion is necessary as a socially cohesive force for most people, who cannot handle the “deadly truth”. The “elite” that do not believe in religion are the intellectual elite. They don’t believe in religion because they are supposedly the wise. When we make arguments along this line, that the “masses” need religion, we are forgetting something…Plato’s Republic is a book. No society has ever functioned in such a manner. The “intellectuals” and the “ruling elite” were distinct classes. This point is crucial. For much of human history, how were the ruling elite sustained? The answer is divine right. This is the linchpin. As Marx argued, it is not true to state that “the masses cannot handle the notion that there is no God from an existential standpoint, but a small number of intellectuals can, and hence religion is a necessary structure”. Rather, he would say “the ruling classes who maintained religion but did not necessarily believe in it themselves. But for accident of birth, they would be no different from those they subjugated. Yet if and when such people employed religion in the manner Seneca and Plato suggested, as a prophylactic on immoral action and as a socially cohesive force…they most certainly did not do it because they thought they were doing “a duty” to the people by keeping social cohesion. The very notion that ridiculous metaphysical beliefs are necessary to keep social cohesion is the very lie that supports the entire system. Rather, it was maintained precisely because it could maintain their own power. Marx and Engels understood that Das religion ist das Opium des Volkes, but the truth is more profound than that. To the pair, the more important consideration was that people had become convinced that it was a necessary structure. And this conviction came from that they were informed of this by the class which ruled. This lie is more fundamental than the lie of religion, and in many ways, it is more important from a maintenance standpoint. It is extremely difficult to maintain a belief system when critical examination finds it to be rotten to the core. But if it can be propagated that such a belief system is necessary regardless of this, then the pressure is greatly alleviated. For most of history, most people not merely held that religious propositions were true, but also necessary. And while it is becoming more difficult to maintain the former, the latter still persists today, which is highly problematic. I shall return to this point later. For now it is important to maintain the distinction between the fictional wise philosophers of Plato’s Republic who could deal with the truth but dispensed noble lies, and the reality of the business of lie-dispensing throughout history. Indeed, a better comparison would be the notion of the “proles” in Orwell’s 1984, and them being kept in a state of mindless happiness by the state. Actually, there is precisely zero difference when it comes to ethical comparison. Consider, then, that those who propagate the argument essentially believe it is good and desirable to keep much of the populace in a similar status as the Orwellian Proles, in a state of mindless happiness. Obviously, the government in 1984 had no interest in the welfare of the proles, and this would be a more accurate description of the lie-dispensing that has occurred throughout history. I shall return to the ethical and other problems with the notion that certain people have the right to decide to keep other people in a state of mindless happiness.

 To sum up this argument and put counterfactual point in the simplest possible manner: “The noble lie”, the concept that most people simply cannot abandon religion by virtue of the necessity of the Skinner’s Box Effect that the metaphysical beliefs have on social order, is one for which there is no historical evidence whatsoever, because no society, ever, has functioned in such a manner. The idea is based on a book, written over 2000 years ago. It would be incorrect to state that “most people” need religion lest they become despairing nihilists whence society collapses. There is no evidence that such is the case. There is certainly no evidence that necessity of said beliefs are innate to humanity, and that belief is undermined simply because I am sitting here typing this. The aforementioned societies were not pure technocracies. It was not the case of a small group of intellectuals ruling over a greater mass of idiots. Such dystopian societies are reserved for Ayn Rand novels. In cases where religion acted as a “socially cohesive force”, it was by virtue of the fact that the rulers claimed divine right. But, hence, said rulers were no smarter or more inoculated against needing to believe. It is not the case that “the greater mass” of people need religion. But it may be the case that they have been convinced that they do. And throughout the rise and fall of civilizations, such a state would allow the ruling class to drain resources from the populace until such consumption could no longer be sustained and the hoax of divine right collapsed. History is littered with such examples, from Tikal to Easter Island to pre-revolutionary France.

Returning to a previous point, if you recall the list of four points I made several sections ago about an aggressive right-wing theological movement in the United States. My argument was that these people constitute possibly the greatest proponents of the noble lie argument today, stressing the importance of belief, more specifically, their beliefs, the more salient issue being that said beliefs are concomitant with traditional power structures and hierarchies they wish to protect. Hence the “social cohesion argument”. To re-list these four points, they are:

1)      Modern society is on an irreversible trend towards total decay. Drug use, promiscuous sex, etc. are all the product of “secularization” and the “abandonment of God”. When the “traditional values” that not only include God but other supposedly associated propositions such as “family values” are abandoned, social decay results.

2)      Religion constitutes a necessary foundation not by virtue of its truth or lack thereof, but rather, and, this is crucial, more importantly, when people abandon the mythologies on which society supposedly stands, social decay, nihilism and misery result.

3)      In the case of evolution, evolution is to be rejected specifically because the tenets of evolutionary biology paint a picture of the origin and nature of the human species that, when  believed, would cause despair and hopelessness

Because these points are ad consequentiam in nature and encourage the suspension of rational faculties, I can simply end the critique right here, but there is an astonishing naiveté on part of thinking in this way, and continuing is amusing. About three years ago, I wrote a critique of “primitivism”, the anti-civilization philosophy. The thrust of that thesis was that the entire thing was  delusion concomitant with Rousseau’s Noble Savage, such as the idea that pre-civilized people and primitive civilizations took care of the environment and were “in tune with nature”. In reality, ideas of conservation and environmentalism are largely modern ideas. Primitive societies and ancient civilizations understandably considered their resources boundless, with the result that most of them collapsed. The Mayans practiced slash-and-burn agriculture. Sumerian irrigation caused the “fertile crescent” to become the desert that it is today because of saline run-off. The Easter Islanders completely destroyed their island in pursuit of building Maoi statues. Even before civilization, the hunter-gatherers, as they grew more efficient and lethal after the thaw of the last ice age, exterminated well over 200 species of large birds and mammals.

A very similar delusion occurs here. The concept, and it is propagated in tandem with the “noble lie” argument, is a yearning for a period in history that did not actually exist. According to the assertions at hand, there is a proportionality between “secularization” which occurred in large waves in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, and “social decay”. The summa of human evil was committed in the 20^th century. The Nazi death camps, the Japanese conquest, the genocides in Rwanda, Cambodia, Peru, Chile, Turkey, Congo, etc. ad infinitum. Hence, the argument associated goes that such is innately the product of “nihilism”, that was directly the result of the secularization waves the followed the Victorian era. In addition, typically propagated alongside this form of argument is the reactionary assertion that previous eras, being greatly more pious and overt in their religiosity, constitute a social ideal that has been lost in the irreversible decay of the modern world. In many respects, this argument is very similar to the anarcho-primitivist romantic fantasy about the humanity prior to the Neolithic revolution, and if one intends to deconstruct the noble lie argument from this perspective, that the 20^th century provides an empirical test of the necessity of maintaining religion, then it is an easy task, which I shall do immediately:

The most obvious thing to note is that the assertion associated is that it argues for something, which, from a historical standpoint, is wholly false. The evidence stands wholly in contradiction to the assertion that the more religious societies prior to the secularization waves of the 19^th and 20^th centuries were more cohesive and “moral”. By all accounts, the opposite was true. Much like the primitivist notion that the state of the “noble savage” is innately desirable, usually by those who have access to a large number of modern conveniences, this is a propogation of a time in history that never existed. The secularization of the previous two centuries has a better explanation. Empirical method, and the Enlightenment in the century before, had severely weakened the power of the religious establishment. It is this movement and that which followed it which produced the bulk of social change for the better in Europe which brought these ideas to the soon-to-be United States.

There is a dichotomy in the noble lie argument at this point. Earlier I mentioned that it was highly problematic to maintain the belief that religion is “necessary” despite it’s propositions being cast into ever greater doubt. In this case, there are two different but concomitant arguments. The first is social in nature. Religion is a necessary for “social cohesion”. This was precisely what Marx meant by “opium”. The religion is found, virtually always, to be in service to the state, and so religion supports the cohesion of the state. In this argument, it is not that people need to believe in religion per se lest they fall into despair, but rather that the state will have social cohesion if religion is maintained, and hence religion becomes, in Marx’s words an agent of social control for the maintenance of traditional power structures. The number of examples of this is utterly enormous. We are all familiar with the notion of “God and Country”, especially in the UK in the previous centuries. Indeed, it is arguable that even in the United States, Evangelical Christianity today serves a far-right wing political religion emphasizing traditional structures and rigid authoritarianism, militarism and American exceptionalism, although the American political religion would constitute a more diluted form of the worst excesses of authoritarian states based wholly on deceiving most of the populace. I shall return to this point later.

The latter argument is different and is more personal and epistemological in nature. Arguing that people need to believe in religion lest they wallow in nihilism, despair and hopelessness. Marx argued that religion in this form is also a drug, because it constitutes a form of escapism. Marx also argued, and as you can see, I have been arguing, that the myth that people need religion lest they turn to despair is also propagated by the ruling class in order to supplement the notion that religion is in turn a necessary social structure, hence reinforcing the traditional hierarchy. This is best applicable to the first nation to become communist: Russia. In Russia, the tsars would have found rule over much of their protectorate nearly impossible without the Orthodox Church as an arm of the state, since they needed to raise popular support for the government and to promise metaphysical rewards if the subjects were loyal to the state. Better examples come from even darker times. During the Black Death, the plague of to promise metaphysical rewards if the subjects were loyal to the state. Better examples come from even darker times. During the Black Death, the plague of Yersinia pestis, from 1347-1352, the Catholic Church acted, in the words of historian John Kelly in his book The Great Mortality, as “a Moral Pez dispenser”. People could “buy” their dead relatives out of purgatory. People could purchase coupons which would put them in greater favour with God come judgement day. The whole thing was so ridiculous (and so profitable) that the venture speaks to an almost embarrassing low point on part of collective intelligence.

Throughout this paper, I have been arguing against both types of argument outlined. It should be quite obvious that the former argument is little more than a poor front for the most utterly blatant forms of authoritarianism. It is essentially a euphemistic way of saying “keep the masses docile”. The latter argument can sometimes be associated with the former argument if it is used as justification for retaining a hierarchical structure which does precisely that, keep the masses docile. Note that the former argument is not claiming there is some innate human predisposition to believe X or Y, but rather that the social structure in question is desirable for the state to maintain control. The euphemism in this case is “social cohesion”. “Social cohesion” simply means “keep the people in service of the state”. In this case, this means metaphysical beliefs associated with the state. Again, history has more examples than can be counted. The concept of divine right springs forth from this notion. Nonetheless, it should be pointed out that religious metaphysical beliefs are not a necessary antecedent to such a situation. There are other good substitutes, political religions. Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia were not religious in the sense that is being employed here. However, they were states wholly based on falsehood and deception. Actually, from a moral standpoint, it is extremely difficult to draw any sort of distinction between the far-right concept of “traditional structures” and “moral majority” and the German notion of Volksgemeinschaft, since the latter had precisely the same aim in mind. The Nazi Volksgemeinschaft was the “people’s community”, was about as right-wing authoritarian as imaginable. Indeed, the concepts they propagated should be very familiar to those deep in the buckle of the Bible belt. Women were encouraged to stay home and have as many Aryan children as possible, especially boys, who would become soldiers and model Herrenvolk. Spartan-like physical education took up 20% of the curriculum. “School” was essentially a place to deaden the possibility of critical and intellectual skills in the next generation of German Children. The Nazis had highly conservative views on gender roles. Whereas the men should go off to war, be loyal soldiers, blindly serving the nation, the women should stay at home, listen first to the husband, then the state, and have many children, who would, in turn, become more model Herrenvolk. The entire system was the pinnacle of deadening insanity. While the Italian Fascists did not go to the extravagant lengths that the Nazis did, they did not even bother to disguise their intention with a euphemism such as Volksgemeinschaft. The slogan of the Fascisto de Combattetio was “Believe, Obey, Fight”.

The latter argument, about the personal necessity of religion for most people is, if anything, more insidious. It is difficult to have any illusions about the first argument. It is transparent embrasure of totalitarianism. This argument however, is worded in such a way that it supposedly has the interest of humanity at heart, deciding that most people cannot accept the “deadly truths” and must be supplied with noble lies. In reality, however, it is extremely difficult to see how such an argument constitutes anything better then a supplementation of the first sort of argument, a sort of incredibly weak justification of the employment of religion as an agent of social control. The most insidious aspect of this is the belie that despite being a lie, it is a good intentioned lie. Again, it is almost impossible to make this distinction. There is no difference between the Orwellian concept of “he who controls the past…” in 1984, and the notion of the noble lie. This argument is probably more suitable in the application of the word “opium”, because it constitutes a form of escapism (Marx’s words). But the notion of the small elite lying to the majority for their best interest, a set of benevolent intellectuals in a technocratic society, is a fictional notion, because it comes from a work of fiction. In reality, it would be better to describe the relationship, for most of history, as “people being lied to by a small elite to retain power”.

As I have already argued, there is an untenable assertion found in the argument. The key is “most people”. If we were attempting to argue that need for metaphysical comfort is an innate human trait which is universal, such as in Maslow’s hierarchy, then my refutation would take a different tack: By my own existence, and presumably, that of many readers, such an assertion is proven false. With the “most people” assertion, the problem is different. As I have already outlined, it is extremely dubious to claim that a small group of people are innately predisposed to search for the “deadly truth” while most cannot accept it. This again, is somewhat to do with “nature versus nurture” and I will try not to delve into that too deeply because it is a different debate, but the point is there is not only no evidence whatsoever that this is the case, the evidence stands in contradiction. In Plato’s Republic, the “wise philosophers” had the capacity to deal with the “deadly truth”, which is to say they did not wallow in nihilism, whilst the “masses” must be kept from it because they would. When making claims that it is innately desirable for most people to retain religion for this reason, we forget the Republic is fiction, and human psychology does not work like that. While we might be able to claim that additional intellectual capital might give someone a greater propensity to seek the deadly truth because of greater critical thinking skills, it is a non sequitur to assert that would act as inoculation against otherwise innate despair upon finding out the truth. The sage has just as great a tendency to cry upon hearing that he has terminal illness as does the idiot.

If we do live in societies were it is believed that it is desirable that most people retain religion despite its lack of epistemological truth, it is not because most people could not cope with the lack of religion, but because we exist in a society where the idea is propagated that we could not cope without religion, just as Marx recognized. This usually comes if religion is a dominant or powerful force, for it is in precisely its own interest to spread such an idea- particularly when it is epistemologically on the point of collapse. Simply put, the notion of “the masses” needing religion and the educated elite being free to seek the deadly truth exists not because of innate despair otherwise, but because we live in a society with poor critical thinking skills. The “solution” of religion for the “masses” is a solution to a problem which is is self-created, most certainly not because most people would have an innate inability to cope with religion being false. After all,  large numbers of people today believe precisely that, and the secularizations that have come in the last centuries are the result of empirical inquiry overturning the previously held mythology. As the historian and philosopher Ronald Wright put it in A Short History of Progress: “like the child who no longer believed that the stork brought babies into the world, people grew tired of the dominating mythologies”.

Prior to this time, it was held that these mythologies were not only definitely true, but necessary. When the former collapsed, the latter went with it. It is essentially a giant social experiment, and we should have learned by now that the only people with an innate need for religion are those that are told they have an innate need for religion. As Sam Harris put it with blunt eloquence: “No society has ever suffered because its people became too rational”. If person X needs heaven and hell to derive his ethical injunctions and person Y does not, it is not because person Y has some sort of genetic inoculation against otherwise normal despair at the notion of lack of life after death. Rather, it is far more likely that person X has grown up in a society which enforces such authoritarian norms. The “solution” of religion to keep the masses complacent is an answer to a self created problem of encouraging blind belief. If person X lived in a society which encouraged rational examination and free inquiry, then neither problem would exist.

So, if the notion of the “masses” needing religion but a small minority not needing religion is ridiculous, where does the notion derive? It is a combination of two bad arguments to form a single incoherent argument. The first argument is that all people need religion, and metaphysical conform thoughts are innately human. This is the idea behind Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Maslow considered “Transcendental” beliefs about one’s own place in the cosmos so important that it goes at the top of the hierarchy, and in his mind, those people who claim not to have them are lying. The second bad argument is the “totalitarian” argument, which does not claim to tell a noble lie for the good of the masses, but rather employs religion as an agent of maintaining power (there is actually almost no difference). When they are combined, a ridiculous notion arises: Most people need religion.

Indeed, such arguments and appeals to anti-intellectualism are just as insidious as a direct assertion that religion is necessary for totalitarian purposes. For example, Pascal recognized the innate problem of his wager with that beliefs were not volitional from a standpoint of adverse consequences. It would be difficult for me choose to believe I did not walk into a wall, if I just did walk into a wall. Pascal recognized this dilemma and advocated that people should attend church “to deaden their critical faculties”. The claims made here by those who propagated the “noble lie” are no different and equally bigoted and contemptuous. Marx and Engels understood this, and Marx called religion “the sigh of the oppressed”. Marx argued that if people “needed” to believe in the carrot-and-stick approach of heaven and life after death, it was precisely because the ruling class which wielded the religion kept them in such misery. The concept of divine right is useful for the sustaining of power when those under subjugation are living in despair. It provides a false reality and is a form of escapism. It hence serves multiple purposes. One is to suppress revolt by several means, such as providing a channeling of the suffering caused by the policies of said ruling class into a false reality. Another is to ensure that the upper echelons are respected because of divine right. It is no coincidence that a wave of secularization rolled through the civilized world from the 19th century onward, for it corresponded with both the advent of empirical science that largely overturned mythology, and just as importantly, a massive rise in living standards.

Indeed, one thing that is profoundly irritating about modern theism is the tendency to spend precisely as much time arguing, if not much more, that their position is either necessary or desirable, then attempting to give it rational justification and trying to act as if the former is somehow relevant and supplements the latter. This has particular prevalence in arguments regarding evolution, and it is extremely irritating to see someone switch between trying to argue that evolution is false and that evolution is evil/undesirable/godless/amoral ad infinitum, and trying to weave them together as if the latter somehow supplemented the former, which is ridiculous and propagandistic. But one thing that always struck me as very odd about such arguments is that we have accepted plenty of other scientific truths that have far more far-reaching consequences for the existence of man in the universe than does evolution, and we accept those without qualm. Whilst evolution makes no eschatological claims (it just describes an ongoing process), the laws of thermodynamics, universally accepted, do, and it is quite depressing. Although it is extremely difficult to assess thermodynamics on a cosmological scale, in the “heat death” model of the universe, the continued thermodynamics equilibrating of systems will eventual cause a state of maximal entropy where no systems from which useful work can be extracted can ever arise again, at which point the universe is said to “die”. Or consider the fact that a proper appreciation of astronomy informs, at a most basic level, that we are such a small part of the universe both in spatial and temporal terms that there are one billion planets for every person on the Earth.

This leads me onto the next point. The “noble lie” argument is required to maintain a principle which is impossible in modern society. In the fictional Republic, the wise philosophers held “esoteric knowledge” which must be kept from the masses, for if they were to learn the truth, social cohesion would break. In a modern context, it is impossible to maintain this principle. Even the most ignorant among us simply knows more than the learned of previous centuries. All of the ideas under discussion are easily available, and all of the concepts required for one to make a sound judgement that the knowledge claims of religions are extremely problematic, are freely available. There is no “esoteric” knowledge that is being hidden. It is completely impossible to maintain the notion that critical and rational examination of religion and the ability to do so is the property of a small elite. The notion of the “noble lie” is destined to collapse simply because the social results indicate the exact opposite. If given the opportunity, plenty of perfectly ordinary people can become sharp and critical rationalists.

I have only several more things to say, and I will quickly. In hindsight, although I spent quite some time on this essay, in reality, a complex historical and political analysis is unnecessary. It is good enough to point out that any argument which begins with the necessity of suspending one’s critical faculties for any reason whatsoever, especially with regards to adverse consequences, real or imagined, is simply a terrible argument. Consider the notion of heaven. The idea is essentially a mental Skinner box, reinforcing behaviours by means of a carrot-and-stick approach. If one is in a society which makes the claim of the existence of heaven and simultaneously that the notion of life after death necessary to derive ethical injunctions, the then only thing we can expect is that it will act in a manner as if the heaven idea is a “noble lie”. To put it in another way, while there are many people who act in a manner such that it appears that without the promise of heaven and the threat of hell, would turn criminal, there must be a reason why I, who am perfectly able to sit here and have a pleasant monologue with you, the reader, and have absolutely no beliefs about the continuity of my consciousness after my brain, do not pick up a sword and run it through my neighbour. I shall give you a hint: It is not because of my genetics.

One last thing to mention is that the notion that people need religion lest they become nihilistic and despairing is concomitant with a misunderstanding of what “atheism” is. I have already completely refuted this misunderstanding and undermined the claim that despair would result from abandoning religion in the link below, so I shall spend no time on that.

http://www.rationalresponders.com/forum/12582

To put it very bluntly: If humans have certain needs, we cannot derive them by lying to ourselves or other people about the nature of reality. Both from a practical and an ethical standpoint, this is destined to collapse. As I said above, we accept notions with grave eschatological consequences and still have no problems. Why? Because any philosophy which resists such notions is simply destined to fall, because it is impossible to maintain the idea that they are false, just as much as it is impossible to maintain the idea that the Earth is flat or that animals are hollow inside. It is equally impossible to maintain some sort of ridiculous ethical distinction between the notion of “lying to people for their own good” (who decides precisely what constitutes “their own good”? How do these people know that lying will be in their best interest?) and the notion of lying to people to keep in power. The whole concept of the noble lie is rotten to the very core. The job of the philosopher is to make a rational investigation into the universe and draw conclusions by employing his critical thinking faculties. The job of the philosopher is not to sell the mental equivalent of comfort food or merchandise.

Another way to consider this is to return to my comparison I made above with the Orwellian “proles”. Those who propagate the noble lie argument have to embrace several absurd propositions I have already outlined. The first is exceptionalism. They can handle the “deadly truth” but have made the sweeping decision that essentially nobody else can, and the second is decision. They can decide what constitutes the best for most other people and their concomitant rights or lack thereof. There is absolutely no way to maintain this from a logical standpoint, or an ethical standpoint (the distinctions between simply lying, brainwashing, inoculating beliefs we would consider undesirable, employing said lies as agents of control instead of supposed benevolence simply break down). At the same time, the judgement that most people cannot handle the truth is made a priori. There is no evidence that this is the case, or that there is an innateness to it, and it is impossible to maintain such ideas. But consider the following thought experiment. In the film The Matrix, the first one, one of the characters, Cipher, makes a deal with Agent Smith that he should be returned to the Matrix. He would much rather have the illusion returned to him, and he is sick of and despises the real world, is “sick of eating the same goddamn goop every day”. He tells Smith that he wants to have is memory wiped and “be fat, rich and happy”. Cipher has chosen mindless happiness. The question posed in the Matrix is, what would most people choose? Because this scenario parallels so well with the argument under discussion, if we return to the criterion above, we see there is precisely no ethical difference between the decision of the machines to use the humans as food sources and upload their minds into a false reality than it is to mass deceive because you believe it is necessary. They both satisfy the criterion above. They both rely on a nihilistic exceptionalism and the notion that it is good and just to deceive.

I wrote this piece because I am immensely troubled by the rise of this form of defending religious belief. Indeed, it seems to be quite prevalent and intertwined with attempts at rational justification. It is an extremely problematic argument, whether it be made by religious leaders, religious followers, or indeed, non-religious people who for some reason argue for the desirability of religion.

There is another problem with the notion that despite not being true, it is basically a desirable state for most people, the notion of “belief in belief”. There is no rational criterion upon which one could decide what constitutes “noble lying” and what constitutes pure deception. Where we give certain beliefs such room to manoeuvre because of the notion of “belief in belief”, we should expect the most insidious arms of such organizations to flourish, that they believe in ridiculous ideas that would otherwise be completely destroyed were we in an intellectual climate that supported their deserved destruction. But we are not. It is unclear precisely how one would draw a distinction between the notion that certain beliefs are false but do not deserve destruction, whereas certain beliefs are false, and do, because the criterion are completely ridiculous. No ethical distinction can be made between flat out lying and the notion that you are lying for someone else’s good.

One more thing to point out may be the most obvious. The argument smacks of ridiculous elitism. As I have outlined countless times, the notion of the noble lie for the masses requires the embrasure of the ridiculous idea that a small number of people have innate lack of need for religion whereas everyone does. This assertion is hugely problematic and incoherent. If society encourages the suspension of critical faculties for certain beliefs, then we should expect the notion of the noble lie to flourish. We wouldn’t have this problem if we simply adopted a more consistent policy with respect to known falsehoods, because there is not the slightest evidence for the ridiculous dichotomy at hand that only a small elite have this innate property. To put it another way, unless you wish to propagate the highly dubious assertion that I have some genetic predisposition towards lack of need for religion…then if I can search for the Neitzchesian “deadly truths”, so can you.

Any argument for religion which begins with the suspension of one's critical faculties by virtue of any assertion that religious propositions ought to be protected from such discourse by which we evaluate other, methodologically valid ideas, such as arguing that "people need religion" or that it does not matter if it is false because it acts as a social cohesion force (the "noble lie argument) or any variant on that theme is the epistemological equivalent of groveling at your opponent's feet. It's so pathetic and deserving of contempt, so weak and mendacious, so amusingly desperate, and so terribly ironic. After all, we are discussing a belief system that for centuries ruled the world. And now...they are reduced to arguing for their continued existence by what virtue? That they are necessary? For the derivation of ethical injunctions? That they give people hope? Anything but methodological coherency and reasonable predictions? As I said before, one should relish when their opponent makes such arguments, because it demonstrates what religion has been reduced to, from an epistemological and methodological standpoint: licking the mud off our shoes. If it were a rationally justifiable set of beliefs that had a coherent method for evaluating and gathering knowledge claims, then it would have no need of such a piss-poor defense! It’s like the car salesman who is trying to sell a Ferrari. He doesn’t need to lie. Why would he? It’s a Ferrari. But the salesman with the lemon would surely have to torque the truth a great deal to get the car sold, and while the first salesman would have no problem with the most stringent examinations and test drives on part of the customer, the latter would do everything in their power to ensure that their customer performed only mediocre checking. This, arguing for the desirability of suspension of one’s critical faculties for this set of belief is precisely the same. Wherever we allow the suspension of our critical faculties for any set of beliefs, for any reason, and on the massive scale that is being done, we should be unsurprised that we see much of what we do in the news. The fact that millions of people have been encapsulated by ideas which are utterly incompatible with any sane and rational investigation of the nature of reality is testament to the insidious power, not of belief, but in the more pernicious “belief in belief”.