Political Atheism :

the cult of

Stefan Molyneux

by

Howard Hill

Godless House Posted to Scribd : Tuesday, 29 May 2012

Introduction

Now is this good timing or what ? I have just finished writing Master Race which has been lingering on for over a year, and just needs sorting out before posting to Scribd, and today, Sunday, 20 May 2012, I caught the backend of the religious propaganda slot on BBC 1 this morning, in which the question was, Is there a difference between a religion and a cult ? One women at the close talked about the estrangement of her twenty four year old son due to a Canadian based cult which she took care not to publicise. The captivating part came as she described the cult leader as an atheist ! Really, well who is this monster ? came my natural reaction. I think I found a correct trace by looking up the biggest philosophy show, which is what she said this crew touted themselves as, her son having been a philosophy student had been suckered into this cult by this route. The link I found was a bit of a dead-end and so I took another tack, the Canadian link, and this led to a site called The Student Room where someone asked my question, who was this geezer this women was talking about, and there was the answer we needed : Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio. He is a demagogue and a major concern. What the women on the show described is very close to the mark. Now a proper search took us to cult headquarters, from where I soon downloaded a clutch of seven free books :

On Truth : The tyranny of illusion, Molyneux, 2007. Universally Preferable Behaviour : A rational proof of secular ethics, Molyneux, 2007. Real-Time Relationships : The Logic of Love, Molyneux, 2008. Everyday Anarchy, Molyneux, 2008. Practical Anarchy, Molyneux, 2008. Achieving Freedom : Part One How not to achieve freedom, Molyneux, 2008. Against the Gods ?, Molyneux, no date given.

There was a further title of interest, The God of Atheists (A novel), which is certainly the kind of job we might be interested in casting an eye over, but for the moment we have a enough to be going on with.

Canada is looming large in my world just now, a place that hitherto never figured in my thoughts at all. After contacting an academic in Canada some eighteen months ago, according to my routine habit of firing off missives to anyone who says anything of interest to me that I have an email address for, he gave the most friendly, positive response ever, and recently he got in touch to say that he was about to give an item I sent him the once over. We will have to see what comes of that. But evidently atheism is an important issue in Canada. We can see that the characterisation of atheist this women gave Molyneux this morning was justified by these titles alone, clearly atheism is the primary theme in this mans ideology. So, as I was saying, I have just finished a project and this is a good time for me to start a new one, and finding out what this man is doing for atheism is something different to get my teeth into. Saying that prompts thoughts of Richard Dawkins whom I call the Gatekeeper of the Theocracy because he is such a powerful voice for science and atheism, and against religion, who nonetheless adheres to the primary false point of understanding that is the idea of the individual as an end in themselves. Without going any further, we can see straightaway that running in tandem with Molyneuxs atheist outcry, is the usual companion complaint of the vocal atheist, the cry of freedom for the individual. So we can be certain that Molyneux is absolutely no different to any other religious freak, and this is why his activities lead to the usual nasty outcome associated with all religious activities. That said, we might as well take a peek and pass some remarks on this bloke, as he is taking the name of atheism in vane if he is not evoking atheist scientific principles first, for no one can be free before they have true knowledge of reality unbiased by any human leanings. Lets say something about the word political within the context of an Atheist Science essay. Political is a word deriving its meaning from the false pivot of observation that Atheist Science sets out to negate in favour of the true pivot of observation. Therefore the word political has a subliminal influence upon our consciousness causing us to unwittingly validate the idea of the individual existing as an end in themselves, just by using this word according to its given, or established meaning. There can be no political phenomena according to Atheist Science because the individual does not exist as an end in themselves, so that all that individuals do is in reality done to them, for the sake of the human being, the superorganism, that forms the true pivot from which observations should be understood relating to all human activities. Hence the activities of individuals are not performed on their own behalf, as individuals are programmed by their acquisition of language to think they are. When we use the word political therefore, we are using it with this understanding of alternative pivots of observation in mind, which for present purposes might be called alternative pivots of meaning. It follows that when we call an atheist ideology political atheism we have it in mind firstly to identify an implicit flaw in its nature, in so far as it pretends to offer true knowledge of reality. We are not thinking about formulating a general description according to common understanding, the phrase political atheism will be taken to do just this, but we mean to offer a technical observation of the ideologys nature by identifying it thus, not to give it a popular description in keeping with ordinary values. Our primary intention must be invisible to the consciousness of those who take the meaning of political at face value, so that our discussion here must develop our meaning while negating that which people take for granted, and that is what we set about making understood below.

Chapter 1

Against the Gods ?

The title that captured my attention as an atheist just now, as I took a list of titles to record above, was Against the Gods ? Here we have no introductory data, as in a title page, we just launch into the subject matter, which seems to be an attempt to say something about the nature of belief in gods, and what is wrong with such beliefs ; and something about the nature of atheism and how it should be properly understood according to an atheist. So, lets take a look. He begins with a familiar theme, the meaning of the word atheism, and makes some routine observations. He develops this point to the extent of categorising the usual approach towards atheism in terms we would relate to the control of knowledge through language in order to maintain social power, so that he speaks of sophistic propaganda, (p. 3). This is alright as far as it goes, but it does not go very far, and one suspects the reason why this should be is that if it went all the way, as we do in our Atheist Science, then it would impact as much upon this atheist philosophers ability to tout his message garnering social power, as it does upon the usual philosophers of overtly religious values. Thus we see an emerging political atheism severing language away from the social power based upon religion, while adhering to the exact same principles of the linguistic formulation of meaning as those used to create religions. This act of linguistic severance away from religious values allows social power to coalesce about an atheistic view of life, making atheism into a form of religious belief, a belief that is capable of supporting social power and possessing an identity that can be distributed to individuals, that of atheist.

I Knowledge suppression induces political potential Such a development seems inherent in the way our Jewish theocracy has tackled the problem of atheism over recent decades, whereby atheism has been pushed into a corner where it is described as just another belief system. A coterie of atheists has been established as an official resource that the establishment can call upon for an acceptable voice of atheism that conforms to this categorisation, and can be used in propaganda productions accordingly, all public expressions of atheism that is. Thus we find atheists obediently declaring their complete acceptance of the right to religious faith, as if their position were indeed just another view of reality !! Bloody hell. We cannot escape the power of absolute autocracy in a free and open society where anyone can say whatever they please. We need to have an authority saying what is right, or, we need every individual to have equal access to the media ; and if we had that, the media would be drowned out by lunatics, we cannot win. Containing atheism according to official standards so that it becomes a sterile idea just like the science that pervades our world, has created the conditions for a political form of atheism to ariseexactly as it did with science by creating Darwinismby providing the

language of political atheism, fixed upon the individual as an authority in their own right. Fundamentally, this outcome has been possible because there is no real atheism in our society, just as there is no real science. All we have is the shell of an atheistic image made in the likeness of religion, due to the manner in which knowledge is created by linguistic force acting from a false pivot of observation, as in a core foci of social power. Thus we see in Molyneuxs movement the creation of a new religious expression of the core Jewish religious message, but one stripped of its religious garb in the process of its creation, to give it the nature of religion without the form of a religion, making it a covert expression of religion suited to the covert state of the absolute theocracy ruling our free democracy by covert means based upon the control of meaning in language. We must keep in mind that all that religion is, is an expression of linguistic force, whose biological function, of religion that is, is to organise human biomass by providing an identity and its concomitant social base from which social authority arises spontaneously. The essence of religion is what matters in this regard, so that nonreligious modes of this social form creating process are still religious in all but name. This is why Communism and Fascism, and now Atheism, may have all the appearance of a religion that is able to provide the structural support necessary to create and sustain political power. It is as if by suppressing freedom of expression in ideas, those ideas heat up, the linguistic force contained within them begins to cook. There is no possibility of release through any normal means, and soon people begin to emerge who can give suppressed ideas a political form. Political forms are inevitably rich in religious potential, given that the ideas they arise from were powerful enough to be worth suppressing by social authority in the first place, so that in a corrupt political form they become transformed into a mythology that serves the purposes of individuals by making them central to the ideology emerging from the suppressed ideas that originally simply sort to express the truth. This is a difficult idea to conceive of and give a definite form, as our reasoning feels a little contorted, but there is a clear link between true knowledge of a deep kind and mythological ideas which give rise to religious forms and social enclaves of power. This is interesting as regards the emergence of Molyneuxs atheist cult because we know the same thing happened with the creation of Communism in the nineteenth century and the creation of Fascism in the twentieth, especially Nazism, as we are witnessing here with atheism. Working class political movements were revolutionary and hence attacked by the state in the early nineteenth century, and the Fascist movement can be related to the general rise in ideas such as that of sociological organicism which were unable to come to the fore in an open and honest way, and thus manifested themselves in twisted political ideologies that eventually brought them into disrepute and allowed them to be shunned from decent society. These earlier political ideologies developed out of a linguistic flux which only tolerated Judophilic ideologies, including when they appeared in anti-Jewish mode, and we have long wondered just how this process of creating a new expression of the old message occurred, especially in the case of anti-Semitism. Now we have some sense of the process in action, because we have a live example right here, this time concerning the troublesome case of atheism. The process is obviously linguistic, but how does Judaism create this infinite expression of sub-Judaic forms meeting every need at ever moment in time, as exigency requires ? The answer is that authority imposes itself upon the public mode of expression, preventing any idea from developing upon its own terms. Hence no true atheists have ever had a public platform, we have only ever seen mouthpieces evincing their self proclaimed atheist credentials, Dawkins for example, without anyone ever making atheism come alive on according to its own self consistent principles. This of course is precisely what this fraud Molyneux is saying he is doing here. Meanwhile then, having suppressed free expression along the lines of an independent authority, theocracy develops an expression of the

offending idea of its own. This is rather like an immune system developing an antigen against a threatening invader, so that when this linguistic antigen is sufficiently well developed it bursts into life and goes viral, causing things to heat up a little. According to this idea Molyneuxs movement represents one such case of a viral antigen designed by the human superorganisms autoimmune system to bring atheism into the political framework, as happened with organicism a century ago when the fascist movement got hold of it and a rabid antisemitism developed on the basis of organicist principles. By creating a political form of a troublesome idea, that idea is placed in a setting where it can be tackled, and that is what we saw with the rise of Nazism, this was the political manifestation of genuine science, made to loom large in a form that could be destroyed, and this is why genuine science is made taboo by the work of Adolf Hitler. Now we are seeing the exact same process being applied to atheism, as the intensity of the covertly religious expression of atheism is given an ever more powerful voice through the work of the New Atheists, culminating in this political atheism of Molyneux. So, as we have always maintained, it is religion, specifically Judaism, which is responsible for all the evil movements down the ages, because it is the oppressive power of religion that first thwarts expression that would destroy it, and then facilitates a reorganising mayhem, an act of social cleansing, that allows things to explode in chaos, to return to normal about the core identity of Judaism, having spun a vortex of linguistic force about the new threat in the process, to contain it. This is knowledge control, this is how the superorganism comes to be, and to live eternally, it is created by linguistic force, and maintained by linguistic force. The continuation of his discussion of the illogicality of belief in gods remains a debate about the nature of language, though Molyneux fails to realise this and instead merely tries to control that debate to serve his ends as a self professed rationalist. Why not break away from all this toing and froing about how things are toyed with through words, and get to the nature of words, not to mention the nature of humans ! Right, now here is a good bit :

Why Are Gods Self-Contradictory ? At the very minimum, a god is defined as an eternal being which exists independent of material form and detectable energy, and which usually possesses the rather enviable attributes of omniscience and omnipotence. First of all, we know from biology that even if an eternal being could exist, it would be the simplest being conceivable. An eternal being could never have evolved, since it does not die and reproduce, and therefore biological evolution could never have layered levels of increasing complexity over its initial simplicity. We all understand that the human eye did not pop into existence without any prior development ; and the human eye is infinitely less complex than an omniscient and omnipotent god. Since gods are portrayed as the most complex beings imaginable, they may well be many things, but eternal cannot be one of them. Secondly, we also know that consciousness is an effect of matter specifically biological matter, in the form of a brain. Believing that consciousness can exist in the absence of matter is like believing that gravity can be present in the absence of mass, or that light can exist in the absence of a light source, or that electricity can exist in the absence of energy. Consciousness is an effect of matter, and thus to postulate the

existence of consciousness without matter is to create an insurmountable paradox, which only proves the nonexistence of what is being proposed. (p. 4)

You always know you have a fraud on your hands when the defamer takes the ludicrous facts of those ideas they are denouncing as their starting point for their own rational argument against those ideas, as Molyneux does here. It is not the obvious absurdities that matter, except to a childlike intelligence, it is the essence of the subject which matters. You cannot take the self styled factual elements of religious ideas as the defining point from which to begin your discussion, to do so can only lead to a facile argument, exactly as we find above. We always say that just because religion projects God onto the point of origin of the universe, this is no reason why we should accept this characterisation of God as the starting point for discerning what God is, from which we must begin if we are attacking ideas about God. Why would anyone want to play this game in this way ? To do so is to hand over control of the subject to the people you are attacking. Below we will see that Molyneux states that atheism need not concern itself with explaining why religion is such a pervasive aspect of human life, so he thereby expressly ignores the first concern of any true atheism, which is great for religion because this means that no meaningful attack can come from this quarter. All that can result from this method is a self serving denial, an atheist religion, or belief system, in fact, taking its first principles from overt religion. The other point to mention regarding the method that takes ideas at their face value and merely seeks to discover their flaws by identifying errors of internal logic, is that this is the official method of academic philosophy. Academic philosophers are trained to ignore truth and treat all ideas as equally valid, in the first instance. Such intellectual endeavour is merely an especially nasty aspect of knowledge control, applying a method that allows any idea to be ridiculed, but no idea to be made finally valid, putting all others to bed. Perfect for religious mythology, useless for true knowledge, as in science. We must expect the least strength of intellectual personality from anyone who could study philosophy at university, for how else could they stomach such an approach to knowledge ? Most normal people are reviled by the first principle of philosophy as described just now. No wonder the son of the mother on Big Questions found his reason for living in Molyneuxs superficial ideas. With the above passage we are able to compare Molyneuxs ideas on the subject of divinity directly to those we expound in Atheist Science. Here Molyneux tells us why gods cannot exist by calling upon scientific knowledge. Our approach is wholly different, and vastly more empowering, because we positively explain why God does not exist, by showing what God is in reality. Above, while swapping word contortions with those who define atheism negatively, all Molyneux could do was to offer a twist of his own, so that he spoke of atheism as The acceptance of the non-existence of . . . (p. 2) Which hardly resolves the issue, if that was as far as I had got in my ruminations then I do not think I would be trying to tell the world about my revelation of wisdom ! Thinking thus about Molyneux makes me think of David Icke, another great promoter of himself as the master key holder to freedom from oppressive authority. If Molyneuxs word play is supposed to make atheism positive, then it fails pathetically. We have the following details on the nature of God :

god is defined as an eternal being which exists independent of material form and detectable energy, and which usually possesses the rather enviable attributes of omniscience and omnipotence.

We know that God does exist, and that God is the human superorganism. The attributes of God identified by religion are found to be possessed by the superorganism, more or less, and here we find Molyneux recognises these attributes and seeks to refute the existence of anything pertaining to this nature on rational grounds, based upon the knowledge of modern science. Clearly he must be wrong, as surely as the religious freak he despises is wrong. In order to expound our scientific insights we must adjust our definition of God, explaining that the projection of divinity onto the creator of the universe has no meaning for us, this nonsensical abstraction being nothing more than an elaboration upon a myth to obtain greater inscrutability. So that bringing the religious definition of God down to earth, we find that God is indeed immortal in a very real sense, since we are part of the superorganism that God is in reality, which lived before us and will live long after we are gone and forgotten. The ethereal qualities Molyneux mentions are part of the projection of God onto the idea of universal creation, and as such they are irrelevant to the discussion of real qualities found in the superorganism, since we dismiss the universal projection as a simplistic conceptual device of no significance at all to any real understanding of religion proving that God does not exist. The superorganism is the sum of human form, and is therefore a material entity with fixed relations to energy needs. The question of enviable powers of omniscience and omnipotence is very much in keeping with the power of the superorganism as described by our Atheist Science. We invoke the nonexistence of the individual and the presence of a natural force called linguistic force, which builds all superorganic form by organising all human behaviour within the fabric of the superorganism, which that same behaviour brings into being accumulatively over time, giving the superorganism its genuinely immortal status relative to our individual human status as elementary parts of this comparatively immortal whole. As Molyneuxs discussion continues we find it descends into mindless triviality mirroring the brain-dead idiocy of the religion it despises. No lover or reason wants to read this atheist rubbish anymore than they want to read religious junk reasoning. Which explains why some plonker studying philosophy would be attracted to the malignant aspects of this creed which make it into a cult, because he evidently finds this simplistic attack on religion impressive. We know from biology that an eternal being could never have evolved . . . give me strength, what is the point of saying this ? Its like arguing with people about whether men ever went to the moon, or if there is life after death, or such a thing as past lives. Who wants to discuss such shit ? If people are expounding ideas like this then they are way beyond the limits of reason, and must be left to themselves. No self respecting atheist would waste their breath on them, at least not to the extent of making the denunciation of their ideas a point of debate in a book ! Next thing we will be arguing the toss with creationists. Hell, sod the religious lunatics mimicking science, we Real Atheists have our work cut out dealing with the so called official scientific fraternity ! Something this man knows nothing about, evidently. Consciousness without matter, what about that, is it worth saying anything about this ? In the realms of organicist debatewhen such a thing use to exist a century agothis was a big topic because the idea that society was a social organism was often countered on the basis that only individuals possessed consciousness, and hence the collective consciousness detached from and independent of individuals could not be real, and hence the social organism was not real either, it was merely a figure of speech, or an analogy.

In another one of Molyneuxs pieces I just dipped into to get the titles, I spotted something about information, how people oh no, it was the site I found when I made my first search, a blog written by some women under the umbrella of I philosophy I think it was, all about the idea of an open market where people traded freely, without any regulation. Prices were deemed information, something no official understood . . . Yes, that was it, I knew I had come upon the question of information flow somewhere that I liked. Certainly in order to debate this question of consciousness in relation to structure and mass, we need first to think about what consciousness actually is. If it is reduced to the abstraction of information, then clearly a collective consciousness does indeed exist separate from individuals, as in all that we make that carries the DNA of our thought processes, that went into the process of manufacture. But more than that I cannot bother going into for our present purposes. Is a book an item of consciousness, that is to say, a consciousness item ? Well, I do believe it is. After all, is a person who believes something that is wrong, belief in God or in Natural Selection for instance, anymore conscious than an inert book loaded with information about which it knows nothing, because it has no existence in its own right, just like the human individual in fact ? Once we have the idea that the state of consciousness we experience is of such an order of functional ignorance, serving the needs of the superorganic human animal, we may well think the answer to this question must be no.

I Why Gods ? Ploughing on, we can but get that sinking feeling as thoughts of trying to do a study of this man turn sour. Then, up pops the following :

Why Gods ? It is helpful, but not essential, for atheism to explain why the concept of gods is so widespread and prevalent among mankind. The 10,000 or so gods that lie scattered across the past and present cultures of our species must represent some form of universal content or meaning for this fantasy to be so widespread. (p. 25)

We could not disagree more with this sentiment, that it is unnecessary for atheism to account for religion, the exact opposite is self evidently the case. Flitting through the passage following on from the above we find Molyneuxs explanation is rooted in the individual, and takes the psychological form provided to protect religion from science ; the man is a priest, as we knew from the start. His precise equivalent of our superorganism, the object which God names, is the subconscious ! What incredible nonsense. So that where we envisage the external, physically real being of the superorganism, he envisages the Freudian type of subconscious buried within each individual, as the real object religion strives to deal with and represent. Which raises the question arising in debates about Gods existence where religious excuses move from one point of fiction to another, causing our questions to follow on behind, so we have the rigmarole that asks, if God is necessary as the creator of the universe, then who created God ? Here we have the conundrum that if there is no God because the notion is ridiculous on many fronts, and then we explain the pervasive ideas of divinity by invoking

the buried, unknowable subconscious, we just move the mystery one step away from its usual place of consideration. What is the subconscious, why does it exist, and why does it create this massive phenomenon of religion that rules our world ? Not to mention that this explanation is the pathetic idea we hear from the apologists for religion all the time, that religion is a means by which people look for answers in a bewildering, and often frightening world. I was only making this point with regard to Dawkins a couple of weeks ago, after seeing him explain religion in these terms in a Beautiful Minds episode in which his mind was the subject. Just as Darwins monstrous ideas produced the Nazi horror, so Dawkins and those of his fellow New Atheists are bound to open the way to disgusting exploitations along the lines of a religion, or cult, as we find we have here, with Molyneux. That is it, we can go no further, we have found the full depth of this man, it is all accounted for, we can do no more. This examination of an atheist cult will just have to be a last thought added to my Master Race as another entry in the appendices.

Completed in a couple of hours, 20/05/2012 21:54. That is more than enough time spent on this nasty man. I will have to read it tomorrow for editorial purposes, if I cant read it I cannot expect anyone else to. ___

Next Morning
I Scientific, true atheism, is an antidote for false, religious atheism. Molyneuxs atheism is religious atheism, as indicated by his adherence to the principles of absolute theocracy ruling in this worldthe principle of the individual as a being in their own right, and the idea that the knowledge called science in our world, is true and an unbiased guide to all our reasoning. It is not. The fact that Molyneux is a false prophet of atheism, does not mean he is deliberately deceiving us any more than any other prophet. The extent of his efforts to build an ideology based upon atheism is there to be seen, we have no need to question the mans sincerity on this point, he gives expression to many of the ordinary frustrations we all feel towards religion and the political authority associated with it, that oppresses us so badly. But what we find here, is a man who is just one more brick in the wall of absolute theocracy, unwittingly obeying all the principles evolved over time to ensure that all will conform to the one message, which is the linguistic genome of the human superorganism we all belong to. The man has a philosophy, but he does not have insight, true knowledge that is. He is not identifying and applying the principles of science, he is merely applying the principles of myth making that have been programmed into him, as a sentient brick unit of superorganic being, and playing out those principles according to the contemporary setting in which atheism finds it has a rare breathing space to give vent to itself. The result is a true atheist religion, with its very own prophet. Yes, so much for a couple of hours and job done. Coming to the basic outline formed last night I soon found my ideas stimulated by what I had written yesterday, as I came up with the link between Molyneuxs ideology and Communism and Fascism, and the idea these ideologies represent as political forms of antithetical ideas appearing as antigens, that allow the root of these ideas to be wiped out by the machinery of superorganic physiology. Thus truths conflicting with ruling religious myth are turned into manageable forms that can be eradicated. Nice though, I am not complaining.

II Doing for the Demagogue The best way to deal with this man Molyneux, is to develop a genuine atheist philosophy, providing those who identify themselves with atheism with a different perspective from which to understand this view of existence, which is so at odds with the world we live in important respects that create challenges for people in terms of how to live in a society which is an absolute theocracy. With a true atheism as our guide the direction that being an atheist leads, is very different to that which is provided under the auspices of a political atheist model of society. The truth is however, that people who find Molyneuxs

false atheism attractive would most likely be repulsed by the truth we offer, because literal truth offers no prospect of political reward to its subscribers, no bounty of social power, of feeling elite. We just offer knowledge, which is useless as a tool to abuse people with, and hence useless to all intents and purposes. This last point brings us back to the tragic mother on Big Questions and the role of her son in his own fate. Bearing in mind that individuals do not exist, so that we are made to be inducted into a greater social order where both the demagogue and their followers are products of this process. Her son has not a mind of his own but a personality of his own. Personality is an expression of our individuality such as it is, making for the variety of cellular units from which the superorganism is constructed. We can think of personality as the elemental variation built into our somatic form by biological evolution, in the process of making sentient brick units of superorganic being. Just as objects of gravitational force must come in a variety of constitutions called elements in order for the universal process to create the universe, so the objects of linguistic force have had to follow the same basic principle of universal creation, causing individuals to possess a variety dispositions from which social compounds arise spontaneously, resulting in social structure as we know it, composed of hierarchical arrangements characterised most prominently by leader-follower dichotomies. Added to which, the same applies to the mother. In short, we have to take more responsibility for ourselves and place more responsibility upon others, to enhance what individuality they do possess, if we wish to have some say in the part we play in the collective being that we cannot help being part of. This is the way to develop independence in ourselves and others. A demagogue offers power, and those who accept their leadership and authority accrue a portion of the power created by offering themselves to the cause. This is the basic dynamic of human superorganic physiology as it relates to our personal experience of it. An individual like this mothers lost son therefore, is not an innocent in all of this. He craves power too, otherwise he would not subscribe to bullshit, the same applies to any religious contract of this natural kind. Personal empowerment is our reward for being believers in a collective force. Demagogues may be nasty, but their dupes are not innocents, save for the fact that everyone is innocent of culpability for how human nature causes us to act. The contrast between the leader and the followers is more to do with levels of motivation towards power. Leaders may have all the negative hallmarks of power seeking, whereas the followers may only want power in the sense that they feel powerless, and only seek a place in which to belong. But even so, the motivation in both cases is still a need for inclusion within a social power base, and the result is that all parties play the game of wilful ignorance, which means waging war against truth in order to create the enclave of power they need.