"I Literally Can't Even..."

Turning the Heart of Man into a Machine

These words are not real.

I’m writing them. You’re reading them. But they have never been spoken. The letters you’re decoding, to create the simulacrum of sounds in your auditory cortex, which then gets translated into intelligible thoughts by the language centers of your brain, exist as projections only. They are illusions created upon your screen by a complex flow of ones and zeroes which are instructing the pixels to blink on and off, at certain intensities, in synchronization with other pixels, to create color and contrast so you can see these words which are, in fact, just a phantom.

But even though all that is true…

You don’t care.

You don’t care because that complex chain of intermediary steps are incidental to the point of the whole game: to load my thoughts into your head so that you can play with them and enjoy the stimulation, provocation, or (if you’re a hate-reader) sensations of disgust that you’re feeling right now.

The black squiggly projections that carried this thought from my brain to yours are merely the medium, not the message.

And the fact that you don’t care proves something very important about you:

You’re willing to use symbols in order to experience meaning.

So, at least so far, we have something we can build on.

The Symbol and the Metaphor

Allow me to regale you with a tale:

A boy and his father were imprisoned in a palace tower, suspected of treason. After a few days, when they were sure of the feeding schedule (and hence, their privacy), the father, a master craftsman, revealed to his son a great secret:

He knew how to fashion wings. The two of them could build a couple sets and use them to fly to safety.

The son readily agreed, and the two set to work. They used the wood from their bed frames, the feathers from their mattresses and pillows, strands of cord they made from their sheets, and wax harvested from the candles in their prison. At the end of their labors, they had two perfect sets of wings which, when strapped to their backs, would allow them to soar as high as any bird. The next morning, as they were preparing to take off from their high perch, the father cautioned his son:

“The feathers on these wings are held in place by wax. If you fly too high, and get too close to the sun, they will melt.”

The son nodded gravely, and the two men flew the coop.

The son, a young man brimming with vim and vigor and joy at his newfound freedom, burst into a stunning display of aerobatics, soaring ever-higher until the heat of the sun bore down on his wings.

The wax melted, the feathers came loose, and ecstatic Icarus lost control and plunged into the sea. His broken body was never recovered.

It’s an old story, one I’m sure you’ve heard, or heard reference to. It serves as a reference marker for caution: “Don’t fly too high.”

It even shows up in pop songs:

We’re free to fly the crimson sky
The sun won’t melt our wings tonight
Take me higher.
—Even Better Then The Real Thing, U2

We can do this because we recognize the story is not just a story, but a metaphor that illustrates how ambition and enthusiasm can be undone by cruel twists of fate, or by its drive exceeding its judgment, or by foolishly disregarding the words of the wise.

The story, in other words, is a metaphor. It communicates this “moral” without ever stating it directly, and it does it so well that a linguistic reference to the story conveys the point about rash enthusiasm or ambition even to people who’ve never heard the original tale.

Metaphors are, I shit you not, the foundation of human culture. Symbols, representations, and abstractions carry layers of meaning that words cannot, and they can slip past your defenses…if you have the ability to notice.

Ability, I said, not intelligence.

Intelligence is not in doubt when talking with engineers, or philosophers, or the plethora of late Millenials and early Zoomers I know, but all these groups are notoriously poor when it comes to grasping metaphor.

And if one wishes to be free, to be adult, to be self-possessed, to be capable of living life on one’s own terms (or, indeed, living it at all)—this is not a metaphorical statement—it would be preferable to have an eye plucked out or a leg amputated than to lose (or never grow) the ability to engage with metaphor.

The Death of Metaphor

A strange fate indeed, that a mere generation-and-a-half after the bulk of our consciousness became mediated entirely by metaphorical and abstract concepts (web “pages,” “folders” full of “files,” “notebooks,” and “icons” are all metaphorical repurposing of terms that refer to real-world objects), the ability to even understand what a metaphor is would bleed out of our culture.¹

But it’s not exactly a sudden problem. It’s been proceeding apace since the first Internet—back then it was called “the printing press”—made its appearance in the Western world. Before that point, mental categories were permeable. Life was seen as a kind of waking-dream, the world suffused with magic (witches, forest spirits, ghosts, priests) and governed by spiritual principalities (gods, saints, etc.). This reality was perilous, but it wasn’t weird to the people who lived in it. It was a world where everyone (even the literate eggheads who were seriously trained-and-disciplined rationalists) was in thrall to narrative as their primary sense-making apparatus.

The features of the real world were seen as reminders of the eternal and of the “non-material” (meaning, anything that couldn’t be manipulated with the body—emotions, devotions, relations, etc.), and arts—from smithing to warfighting to stonemasonry—were perpetuated through the use of metaphor and analogy and poetry.

Poetry?

Well, in a world without books, you had to learn the facts about your world through memorization. Poems helped you keep the calendar, remember facts about your profession, and orient your mind, body, and spirit towards the vital work of the day. People back then weren’t dumber than we are now, and neither were they “more spiritual,” they simply had to learn things with their whole selves in order to make sense of the universe in which they lived.

If you’ve read (or seen) Dune, you’ve no doubt been struck by one of the odder features of that fictional world: the poetry. Everyone’s got a litany, a proverb, or a poem that articulates their understanding of something important. The most famous is the Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear:

"I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."

It’s a prayer that contains instructions on how to cope with an extreme threat. Though it does not rhyme, nor does it have a strict meter, it does have a cadence: It sounds like the breathing one does during a panic attack. It thus feels like the thing it’s meant to help you cope with, and therefore is easy to recall in a moment of fear.

You may be familiar with more pedestrian mnemonic rhymes:

Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky at morning, sailor take warning. A heuristic for predicting stormy weather at sea—red skies being more common when the sun is shining through thick haze.

Thirty days has September, April, June, and November—all the rest have thirty-one (save February). A way to remember the number of days in each month.

Red-on-yellow kills a fellow, red-on-black, friend of Jack. Allows a hiker to distinguish between the deadly coral snake and the harmless imitators (only accurate in certain geographical areas—your venoms may vary).

They used to be everywhere, for everything. The human memory can hold a lot of information, and you can pack a lot more in if it’s all stuck to your neurons with as many associations as you can pack in—rhyme, meter, literary allusions, story structures, metaphors, similes, what have you [I’ll be talking about this in a lot more depth in an upcoming chapter of The Autodidact’s Bible. Become a paid supporter now for full access].

Then Gutenberg came along, and our ancestors learned to read—and the more they could read and write, the less they needed to remember, so the less practice their memories (and metaphors) got.

It’s no coincidence that it wasn’t long after Gutenberg that a lawyer decided that reading the Bible as if it were a legal argument regarding salvation made a whole lot of sense. Martin Luther’s revolution brought something new to the European world:

Literalist religion.

“Literalist” because the words of the text—and nothing else—were seen as the actual words of God.

Before this point in European history, the Bible wasn’t really something people worried much about. The priests could read, and the people could not, so the people learned the stories in the Bible, and these stories (as well as other stories from their local folk history) gave them the metaphors they needed to engage with larger ideas, to understand their place in the world, to reason through novel things.

Oh, by the way, you know that thing that internet atheists like to point out about how the Bible contradicts itself all over the place? Before literalist religion, that was a feature, not a bug. The fact that thebBible does not tell a single, coherent story, or have a single, coherent moral vision, or even a single, intelligible theology gives it the power and flexibility of a mythic framework—there’s a metaphor available for every occasion, every need, and calling upon it doesn’t push you down a narrow mental corridor where you can simply predict what you’re going to wind up thinking based on your starting point.

That’s a far cry from the mental processes of people in today’s world, where simply knowing their religion or political tribe pretty much guarantees you can predict their every intellectual and rhetorical (and lifestyle) move before they even pause to take their first breath.

And if the Bible and the local folktales weren’t enough, there was always the cult of the saints—legends of martyrdom, service, devotion, and divine handiwork syncretized from old pagan religions and embellished from real historical figures.

Someone who can call upon Daniel or Samson or Esther to understand courage, David to understand audacity, Solomon to understand wisdom, Jeptha to understand tragedy, and Abraham or Job to understand the caprice of the universe has got a pretty good start at thinking creatively about life—not to mention understanding the world in a contextual fashion.

The printing press and the Reformation got the ball rolling on putting an end to all of that nonsense. It was only a handful of generations later that reading was a solitary vice and exciting stories were “sensationalist” and “morally suspect” to the point where even the Bible and Shakespeare were being censored and sanitized.²

The literal believer in Christianity worships a book, not a god:

“God said it, I believe it, that settles it.”

And it was literalist Christians who built the United States of America, and who eventually won the centuries-long religious wars for control of Britain, and of Germany.

Once you can dispense with the pesky and imprecise poetic nature of learning in the before-time, you can work on purifying knowledge and refining it to a razor’s edge, throwing out everything that isn’t literally true, because literal truth is the only kind of truth you can define, measure, and verify.

Seems reasonable, and it is.

But it’s not wise.

To understand why, consider this:

Knowledge is a nutrient. A vital nutrient. You can’t live without it, just like you can’t live without glucose (all the calories in your food eventually gets metabolized into glucose). So if you want to make sure you’re eating a proper diet, you want to make sure you get enough glucose. The easiest way to do that is to extract that glucose from the food you’re eating, so that you don’t have to worry about being poisoned by pollutants.

Therefore, for optimal health, one should eat a diet consisting exclusively of refined white sugar. Right?

We require glucose to live, but we shrivel and die if we get only glucose, because those pollutants in our food contain other things which we also need for our bodies to function—including actual honest-to-god poisons which we will literally die if we don’t get just a touch of from time to time.

We also must have knowledge to navigate the world. But just as we are not so-evolved that we can survive on glucose alone, we are also not evolved to be able to think, understand, or, indeed, know anything if all we have to work with is factual information. We are evolved to digest complex chemistries to build our bodies, and we are evolved to navigate the world, not through facts, but through the complexity of story.

Consider, then, how the printing press moved us from being a metaphorically-deep civilization to being a metaphorically-shallow civilization:

We replaced story with theology

We replaced metaphor with moral codes

We replaced custom with law

We replaced poetry with instructions

And, in doing all of that, we built a world for machines, where humans struggle to function well.

An Uncertain Gambit

Take a quick inventory of the people in your orbit, and you’ll see the slide over the age distribution—those who are older are more likely to be comfortable with metaphor and other sorts of non-rational reasoning.³ Those who grew up in a world before the Internet had an experience with stories (old and new) that was less mediated by mass opinion, tribal membership, and other such things that encourage literal thinking, narrowness of interpretation, and ideological correctness. They therefore learned to speak, think, and live with forms of sense-making that weren’t limited to simple straight-line reasoning.

You can see the last gasp of this kind of world in the first two Scream films—their distinguishing feature among slasher films is that the characters within the movies use the conventions and symbolic vocabulary of 1970s and 1980s horror movies to make sense of the bloodbath they find themselves trapped within.

But, as you take that kind of inventory, you will also notice that those who are more prone to anxiety, those who are more autistic, and those who are dealing with emergencies or traumas tend to lose their ability to engage with symbols and metaphor that aren’t already entirely habituated. The attempt to strip reality down to the studs in order to make it easier to manage is a way of turning a chaotic threat into something manageable—and it’s why people who spend long periods in emergency-mode tend to suffer a thinning of relationships, loss of meaning, depression, and develop inappropriate reactions. They’re doing the emotional equivalent of looking at the world through a protective squint, filtering out everything but the brightest lights, so that they can feel sure of seeing the greatest threats and protecting themselves from them.

If this description feels like you, then you may find the rest of this article disturbing—but I hope that, nonetheless, you also find it hopeful.

The Death of a Criminal God

If I were to tell you that you could fit an entire religion—from birth to death—into a single, 2-hour pulp adventure film, with enough sophistication that it would shame theologians, you’d call me crazy, wouldn’t you?

If I told you that it’s also a reflection on the nature of sin, redemption, heroism, and the entire history of western civilization, but that it’s still the kind of movie you’d be happy to take your seven-year-old to see, you might think I was ready for the loony bin.

But such a film does exist, and chances are you’ve watched it and never even noticed.

It was released in 1981, with a story from the creative mind behind such art-house classics as The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Henry and June, and Quills and a screenplay by the director of the meta-western Silverado:

The Raiders of the Lost Ark

A Quick Summary

You probably know the story, but in case you don’t, the plot moves along these lines:

The year is 1939. Indiana Jones is an archaeology professor by day and a semi-competent tomb raider in his off-hours. He’s recruited by the US War department to try to locate the Ark of the Covenant—an artifact from ancient Israel that plays a major role in several Bible stories—before the Nazis do, because the Nazis are trying to find magical artifacts to aid them in their war effort. On the off-chance that magic is real, the Americans have to keep Hitler from getting his hands on it.

Indy knows a bit about the subject, and takes the job. In order to have a prayer of finding the Ark, he first has to get an Egyptian artifact from his thesis advisor—the man under whom Indy did a field internship before a falling out occasioned by grad-student-Indy’s romancing of the professor’s teenaged daughter, Marion. This quest takes him to Nepal, where Marion is running a bar.

She reveals that her relationship with Indy ruined her life, she hates him, her father is dead, and she’s not sure she’s willing to part with the artifact. She sends him packing, but a few minutes later a troupe of Nazi mercenaries show up and attempt to torture the artifact out of her.

Indy doubles back and saves the day just in time, but Marion’s bar burns down in the process. She insists on coming along with him to make sure she gets properly paid for the artifact.

Their next stop is Egypt, where legend says that the Ark of the Covenant was lost. They enlist the help of a local construction boss named Sallah, but before they can get anything done they are beset with Nazis trying to capture and/or kill them—and, despite Indy’s attempts to save her, they succeed in doing both to Marion.

Indy descends into a suicidal drunken depression, in which state he meets his nemesis in a bar and nearly kills him rather than endure the knowledge that he and his enemy are of a kind with one another: equally mercenary, self-serving, and destructive forces in the world. The confrontation is saved from a grisly end by the intervention of the Sallah’s children, who drag Indy away.

After decoding the writing on the artifact, Indy and Sallah figure out where the Ark must have been buried. Indy also discovers that Marion has been captured and is being held for questioning, but he can’t rescue her safely, so he leaves her with a promise to come back for her when he can. She has only her feminine wiles to protect her as she is thereafter interrogated by an escalating series of bad guys.

That night, Indy and Sallah locate the resting place of the Ark and, facing down a roomful of snakes, extract it from its centuries-long hiding place. But before Indy can extract himself, the Nazis show up, steal the Ark, and throw Marion down into the snake pit with him, before sealing them in.

The two of them, while at each other’s throats, then find an escape and set out chasing the Ark. They re-capture it, but as they sail away with their treasure their ship is hijacked by a Nazi U-Boat. Marion and the Ark are both taken to a remote island.

The Nazis decide to open the Ark to make sure its magical properties are intact. Indy is captured while trying to rescue Marion, and the two are tied to a stake to witness the opening of the Ark.

When the Ark is opened, the power of God springs forth. Spirits accost the observers, and then—in accordance with the stories in the Bible—all who dared look upon the Ark without being properly ritually purified are killed. Only Marion and Indy survive, and only because Indy remembered this part of the story and told Marion to keep her eyes shut.

Back in Washington D.C., the Ark is deemed too dangerous to study, and is stuck in an anonymous box in a vast warehouse full of other anonymous boxes. Indy has failed, utterly, at everything…but at least Marion likes him now.

Peeling Back the Layers

It would literally take a book to do justice to the metaphorical depth in this story—many of the individual scenes (such as the confrontation between Indy and his nemesis) contain efficient-but-subtle-and-deep conversations (backed up by thematic and symbolic visual elements) that dance with theology, faith, deep time, good and evil, value and nihilism, and the meaning of life all at the same time.

So, in the name of efficiency, let’s just look at the four basic layers of this movie.

On the top layer, we have what everyone enjoys: a rip-roaring adventure story with exotic locations, a beautiful woman, colorful villains, divided loyalties, betrayal, mystery, and a bit of supernatural horror thrown in for good measure. There are booby traps, snake pits, killer monkeys, sword fights, gun fights, knife fights, frying-pan fights, fist fights, fruit fights, explosions, intrigue, lust, torture, and even an impromptu musical number. It’s straight out of Doc Savage adventure serials, or the tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs (albeit with less noble heroes). There’s even moral danger to the hero throughout, and he literally comes face to face with God’s judgment at the end.

One layer below that, we have a tale of redemption. Indy is a calloused, mercenary individual with lots of charisma but little in the way of a moral center. His adventures force him to face up to his sins—seducing Marion when she was too young to understand the hurt she was opening herself up to, robbing tombs for profit, treating (and choosing) his friends carelessly—and also lead him through a series of humiliations. Indy, in this tale, never wins. He’s a hero without a triumph. His only consolation at the end is that he has discovered and cultivated a noble heart within. He has demonstrated courage and selflessness, and he has atoned for his sins against Marion enough that she’s now happy to be with him.

So far, a basic morality play, just like one might expect in a children’s-story-written-for-adults, right?

Let’s dig deeper.

For the third layer, let’s look at the creative team here:

Philip Kaufman, Steven Spielberg, and Lawrence Kasdan (all Jews with family connections to the Holocaust) and George Lucas (a man who turned his love of comparative religion and his hatred of antisemitism into a multibillion-dollar media empire).

Raiders of the Lost Ark is, by the testimony of those who made it, a revenge tale. It’s a gift to the Jewish community—a story where the Nazis are made to pay for the Holocaust in the most eternal, grisly fashion available to a PG-rated film. It is, in a very real sense, the precursor project to Schindler’s List (also by Spielberg, and sharing some of the back-end talent that worked on Raiders). All the religious themes, the explicit use of magical symbols from the Kabbalistic, Rabbinic, and Christian traditions, the themes of sin and redemption, of righteousness and depravity, take on a new meaning on this reading. This is a film that is wrestling with what it might mean to believe in God in light of the horrors of World War Two. It’s a message of hope—maybe there is a God. And maybe He will save us, after all, if only we stay the course.

But there’s one more layer here. And it is revealed by a very straightforward observation:

During World War Two, God did not show up.

During the Holocaust, a young man witnessed a Rabbinic court convening in the bunks at Auschwitz. The men in the barracks strove to render a verdict against the defendent, Yahweh, God of Israel, who stood accused:

Yahweh was faithless in his covenant with the Jewish people. He did not honor their centuries-long fidelity to him. This persecution came at a high point in Jewish culture, when the synagogues were full and the Jewish community was strong in its faith and solidarity. Did God deserve excommunication for his crimes?

God was found guilty.

Ellie Wiesel recorded this event in his book The Trial of God, and the event was a microcosm of the ultimate fracture of the Jewish people. The Holocaust split the community of faith between those who actually believed, and those who merely honored their traditions because they were traditions. It changed the nature of Jewish identity, and with it much of the intellectual fabric of the Western world.

Raiders of the Lost Ark also recalls the trial of God. It serves as an indictment of the cold silence of the heavens as the Chosen People were marched into the maw of an industrial killing machine that—while certainly not the worst example of such an event in the 20th century—set the tone for so many of the industrialized human extermination programs that were to come.

But the indictment is not a cold and angry one—it is desperate, and screeching. A decade or so before, another Jewish artist⁴ released a single detailing his own struggles with alienation from his people because he couldn’t believe in their God (recall that Yahweh is Hebrew for “I Am”):

“‘I Am!’ I said.
To no one there.
And no one heard at all
Not even the chair.”

This is the image that wraps up the Ark sequence in Raiders:

A pillar of fire taking the burnt offerings of the Nazi bodies up to heaven for the delight of Yahweh.

The Pillar of Fire is a physical manifestation of God in the tale of the Exodus—the foundational myth of the Jewish people.

This image is the indictment, conviction, and humiliation of Yahweh. It’s showing God his own naked pictures. It’s the primal scream of THIS IS WHAT YOU PROMISED—DON’T YOU SEE WHAT YOU’VE DONE!?

It’s the cry of the lost child, bewailing the absence of a desperately-longed-for-father— “‘I Am!’ I said…to no one there.”

It’s not a message, but a meditation, told through a story that recapitulated Western religious history through the Jewish lens. Raiders takes the viewer from the sin of seizing the property of the gods (the opening tomb-raiding sequence), to the unbeliever being burdened by God’s calling (paralleling the tale of Abraham), to slavery in Egypt, to wandering in the desert, to securing a covenant with God, to the righteous judgment of the Almighty and his mercy in sparing his servants (happens too many times in the Bible to count), to the death of God in ignominy, buried in mountain of boxes by bureaucrats in search of the useful forms of truth…which is okay since, in real life, God seems to have abandoned us long, long ago.

“Good” is Blindness

Almost nobody gets this deep into Raiders. Why would anyone want to? It’s just a simple adventure film.⁵ To the modern mind, isn’t all this symbolism crap? It’s just a kind of artistic masturbation. It doesn’t matter. It’s not real. What matters is morality. Setting a good example for our kids and for others. We should do our best to make sure that our entertainments convey our values, and on that scale, a story like Raiders is seriously wanting.

“Oh my god, Indy was a pedophile! We’re supposed to root for this guy?”

“Marion is a total drunk, and a slut, too. This is no role model for young people.”

“The character of Sallah is a colonialist stereotype that insults the Egyptian people. And Marion kisses him, and he’s married!”

“The heroes redeem themselves because they’re fighting the Nazis, and everyone involved with the Nazis deserves to be executed.”

“The whole thing is about stealing the native treasures of oppressed peoples. It’s immoral to watch and enjoy this kind of colonialist propaganda!”

A literal mind, being constrained fully by the mores of the current moment (mistaking them always for eternal truths)⁶, sees this kind of thing—and only this kind of thing—when looking at story. Morals. Messages. Propaganda.

It is akin to walking through a forest, and seeing only unfinished lumber.

Totalitarian Blinkers

There’s been a lot of chatter in recent years about traditionalism, progress, religion, reform, restoration, purity, virtue, and the other usual bullshit you hear when a people loses its way.

I myself have talked a lot about why we’ve lost our way, mostly focusing on our place in the civilizational cycle: times of decay and rebirth/reboot are always marked by tremendous ferment and uncertainty.

But the other sense in which we’ve lost our way—the one I’ve been talking about for the last few thousand words—is more basic, and more dire, than a mere turning of the civilizational wheel.

Sin and sensation, poverty and depravity, decadence and its depredations have always been with us. They’re part of the human condition. They’re no more remarkable than sand on a beach.

But the literal-minded person has no tether, no culture, and no center. And people tend to become literal-minded both when they feel like they don’t need metaphor to make sense of the world (hey, you’ve got Wikipedia and Substack!), or when they feel threatened by their inability to understand the world.

If you want to control a population, it helps if they all follow the same religion. All you have to do then is to capture the priesthood, and you can control the thought-patterns of all below you.

But, failing that, there’s another method…and it’s even more effective. Sow enough confusion in the ground, and you can push the public any way you like. It’s even better if the people have no coherent sensemaking apparatus in the first place—and you can arrange that just by pushing on the pre-existing prejudices that have been built into the culture since the Reformation:

Make them conceive of truth and right in a very narrow way, make sure they can’t defend their ideas coherently, and do your best to make sure that they only ever interact with their entertainments as entertainment, not as art.

Keep the cultural stream moving. Keep it shallow. Make it easy to get swept away, and hard to dive deep. Most people will go with the flow.

But that kind of control comes at the price of the culture itself…and, eventually, of the coherence that makes ruling power possible. People that can’t think in metaphor cannot feel deeply. They can’t form solid connections or relationships without great difficulty. They can’t communicate or make sense of the whisperings of their own hearts.

So they don’t meet.

They don’t talk.

They don’t mate.

They don’t breed.

They don’t make art.

They have no past, so they will have no future.

Morality is a poor substitute for metaphor.

The intemperate mind can get lost in short-term pleasures, for a while.

The venial mind can murder for money or lust.

The brutal mind can murder for power.

Only the literal mind can write a rulebook and call it “culture.”

Only the literal mind can hear a joke and pretend it’s endorsement.

Only the literal mind can murder a god and call it “devotion.”

And only the literal mind can look at the world of loneliness, disconnection, desperation, depression, and confusion that it has created over centuries of strip-mining meaning for facts and think “our problem is that we don’t follow my ideology.”

Sic transit gloria mundi.

1. Some parts of this section closely follow an argument made by James Burke in his book The Day the Universe Changed

2. See the life of Thomas Bowdler. Also see my articles Enter the Dream and Unleashing Mystery and Madness.

3. A full fifth of The Autodidact’s Bible is taken up with the techniques and protocols for non-rational reasoning. Keep an eye on that serial for more on this topic.

4. Neil Diamond

5. For that matter, why would anyone go that deep in the Alien movies?

6. The dogma of the modern world is, as one would expect from a civilization shaped by the Christian Reformation, Universalism: What is true morally for one person, is true for all. All people are basically equal, and relativism is entirely evil and nihilistic. It’s a doctrine that does not survive the slightest contact with reality, as any glance at any text from another era will reveal.
Of course, that assumes you endeavor to read those older stories without your contemporary biases (i.e. judging as “fucked up” those things you don’t understand, while feeling smug about things they “got right”). I offer some tips to this end in Understanding Before Thinking, but to really go deep into the ways that the truth changes over the ages, and you’re willing to dive into the deep end, I recommend starting with Sexual Personae by Camille Paglia.
The English used to have a saying: “The past is another country; they do things differently there.”