May 28, 2026
Dear Leland and Everett,
Looking back, I’ve talked about false gods on a number of occasions. Today I want to talk about one particular false god I see complicating much of the world around me.
First, let me redefine what I mean by “false gods”. One of my theses is that none of us live fully governed by reason, and that if we interrogated our belief systems thoroughly enough, we would find areas where we place implicit faith and trust. People put faith in the scientific process or capitalism or democracy or education or Marxism, just to name a few. Most commonly, people put their faith in multiple places: it’s not hard to find Americans who implicitly trust science, democracy, education, and human intelligence, for example. These articles of faith are what I refer to as gods.
Putting faith in something is not inherently bad. Indeed, humans aren’t designed to reason from first principles, and inevitably take shortcuts in our thinking patterns. Putting our faith in something often proves a useful time and energy saver; without faith in our institutions, for example, much of civilized society would grind to a halt. What I will note is that it’s useful to observe and acknowledge where we put our implicit faith; even better, it’s useful to interrogate whether those foundations are worth our implicit faith and trust. I don’t think most people are aware of the degree to which they have placed implicit faith and trust in certain areas, far fewer have explored whether those areas deserved such faith.
Also, putting implicit faith in something does not by itself make it a false god. In my telling, something only becomes a “false god” once we begin to form an attachment, particularly a rigid attachment, to it. People who condemn those who don’t subscribe to their interpretation of the Bible, or those who scream “follow the science!”, or Marxists in general…these are examples where people form such an attachment to an article of faith that these become false gods. In the process of becoming false gods, these beliefs start to impede not only thought but also awareness of our needs and emotions and our ability to experience the fullness of life. We become blocked and, in the process of blocking new information coming into the world, we inherently block the progress of others.
The specific false god I want to explore today is what I call “secular nirvana”. On some level, I’m tracing this idea all the way back to Adam and Eve, and I think Adam and Eve resonated over the millennia because the story captures something deeply true about the human condition: that humans once lived in harmony with the world around us (and, by extension, God). Somewhere along the way our frontal cortexes developed to the point where we convinced ourselves that we could trust our own intelligence over the need for harmony with the universe. That separation has haunted us ever since.
Skipping far ahead, the Enlightenment promoted democracy and individual liberty, thus turbocharging this belief in human intelligence, and our collective ability to create a better world. America was born out of the Enlightenment, and Enlightenment ideals permeate our way of thinking to this day.
At this point I have to personalize my explanation of secular nirvana, because while I’m certain their are common elements to this belief system, I’m by no means confident in my ability to demarcate which elements are more universal vs which are more particular to me. Anyway, I grew up assuming that we Americans, along with democratic leaders around the world, were in the process of perfecting a form of government separated from religion whereby citizens could believe in whatever religion or gods they wanted, including none at all. In this world, god and religion truly would be optional, and some would consider god anachronistic while others used god and religion to bolster their sense of wellbeing…all while the levers of governmental power were safely secured away from any and all such belief systems. Within this worldview, I grew up Christian and maintained some version of my faith throughout…but also viewed that as something of a personal choice. Regardless, I genuinely believed 1) more of the world was moving toward democracy, 2) through democracy we would achieve lasting peace, 3) people would be able to pursue their interests and passions without unnecessary intervention by others, and 4) these governments would be permanently secured by enlightened technocrats elected by an enlightened electorate.
Unfortunately, I underestimated how badly people really need to believe in God or, in the absence of God, a god. What’s fairly clear to me, looking out at the world around me, is that 1) over the course of my lifetime people have abandoned religion in favor of increasingly agnostic worldviews, and 2) most folks have unknowingly subscribed to unofficial religions (take just two examples: the pursuit of wealth and it’s opposite in Marxism). Secular nirvana doesn’t account for this deeply human need to place our ultimate and fundamental faith in something and that, in the absence of a belief in God, people will find secular pursuits to fill the hole left behind.
As a result, I grossly overestimated our ability to act rationally. This affects the capacity of both the enlightened technocrat as well as the enlightened electorate to fulfill their roles. When we worship at the altar of money or the government or “the science” or education, we grow attached to a particular idea or worldview, calcifying our understanding of the world and restricting our ability to react flexibly to circumstances as they evolve. To a large degree, the increasing acrimony we see in the world today is the result of different false gods failing, causing people to react poorly and defend those false gods with increasing fervor.
In the case of secular nirvana, it’s becoming increasingly clear that we were not, in fact, moving toward a permanently enlightened world. So far as I can tell, those who held onto that view most strongly tend to blame Donald Trump and his party. To be fair, Donald Trump is very much taking a battering ram to the idea we are building toward secular nirvana. The problem is that we were never in fact building toward secular nirvana anyway. Unfortunately, those who unconsciously believe in the secular nirvana hypothesis are experiencing an assault on their false god, and are reacting accordingly. To be clear, I am not elevating Donald Trump as some form of savior, nor suggesting his party does not worship their own false gods; I just mean to highlight that Trump’s voters generally do not appear to subscribe to the secular nirvana thesis.
And so, now we watch what happens when a critical mass of society experiences their false god under attack. So far, the reaction most closely parallels that of cult followers. When cult followers find that their leader’s predictions (for example, of the world ending on a specific date) those followers counterintuitively tend to increase their fealty to the cult; their identities have become so entwined with the cult that losing faith in the cult would create an identity crisis, and so they double down on their cult identity in the face of increasingly obvious evidence against the cult’s beliefs. Similarly, the secular nirvana crowd increasingly disproves their own thesis by behaving in increasingly undemocratic and unenlightened ways, because their identities have become too entwined with their belief that we were building toward secular nirvana.
I’ve come to believe that secular nirvana is something of a modern day Tower of Babel. The book of Genesis tells a story of people attempting to build a tower that would reach heaven, and God punishes them for their effort. My interpretation of the story is that God takes exception to full scale efforts to replace God, and secular nirvana represents nothing if not a full scale effort to replace God. I don’t necessarily mean that God is punishing us as a result, more that our efforts were inevitably doomed to fail spectacularly, and we are beginning to see that failure play out.
So…what does this mean for me? I’m not entirely clear. There is only so much one can do to convince the cult member that their leader is a charlatan and that they have been duped. As far as I can tell, one can only 1) protect oneself from the cult and 2) be prepared to come to the aid of those prepared to renounce their cult association. So it is with secular nirvana: I can only attempt to protect myself, and you guys, from the ugliness increasingly playing out around us, and 2) prepare to welcome those who are willing to acknowledge they were wrong.
The good news is that people are waking up. Alas, I always wish it could go faster. The challenge, I think, is maintaining faith that everything is as it should be, that I am where I am supposed to be, and that I have everything I need available to me. From there, I can trust that my needs will be met as the situation unfolds, and that I will know what actions to take when the time is right. Here’s hoping.
Thank you for letting me get that off my chest. I needed that.
I love you.
Love,
Dad
Letters to Leland 