Daniel Lucas: Welcome to the Universal Podcast Network. One voice, everywhere. Welcome to Abstract Essay, where thoughts take shape, find depth, and every conversation explores the art of thinking beyond the obvious. I’m your host, Daniel Lucas, and today’s guest is a writer and thinker passionate about unraveling the mystery of our lives. He is at heart a skeptic and an individualist: Mr. John Bliss. Welcome, Mr. John.

John Bliss: Thank you, Daniel.

Daniel Lucas: Can you please introduce more about yourself?

John Bliss: Sure. I was trained as an engineer. I started an engineering company, ran it for about 25 years, and then sold it. For 13 years I wrote a book. The topics we’ll probably discuss some of them from the book. The book is basically a questioning of a lot of the assumptions we have about life, because a lot of them are probably wrong, and we base our lives on these assumptions. That means our life plans are based on untruths, which means that when we’re 80 years old and dying, lying on our deathbeds, we might ask, “What did I do with my life? I should have…” It would be better not to have to ask those questions and to get it right now. That’s kind of what the book is about.

Daniel Lucas: Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge and wisdom with us here on Abstract Essay. Mr. John, we salute you. We celebrate you. Today, let’s talk about your book itself. Your book argues that we were born without a rule book, yet we desperately look to science, religion, groups, and others to guide us, and they all fall short. For someone who finds that realization terrifying rather than liberating, what is the first step toward embracing the absence of a rule book without falling into nihilism?

John Bliss: Oh my gosh, I don’t know the answer to that. I’m honestly flustered by that question. Let’s see what I can do. We were born not really knowing much. We knew how to eat, how to suckle at our mothers. We kind of knew how to crawl and move a little bit. But that’s about it. There was no operating guide or manual given to us when we were born—nothing that said, “This is your goal. This is what you’re supposed to do in life. Follow these rules, do these things, and this is what you should be spending your time on.” We don’t have a damn clue. So what do we do? We look to other people. “What are they doing?” We follow people who we think have it together. But they don’t know either. No one knows. We look to groups—maybe a church, a political party, the Freemasons, or something like that—and we do what they say. But who put those groups together? A bunch of people who also didn’t have a rule book. So where are we? That’s a big problem.Now, how do we avoid falling into nihilism? It’s never actually even occurred to me. There’s no reason to be angry or destructive or to believe in nothing. You could believe in yourself. I know that sounds really abstract. Granted that you don’t know anything, I’m just going to leave it at that. I’m not going to be able to answer that question at this moment. Maybe you can ask it in a different way and I’ll be able to answer it.

Daniel Lucas: Mr. John, you make a provocative distinction between the individual and humanity as a whole, suggesting individuals are of no consequence, but the aggregate is the real story. That runs completely counter to our culture’s obsessions with individual legacy and personal significance. Unpack that for us. Why should someone find comfort, not despair, in being a forgettable cell in a larger body?

John Bliss: That’s great. First off, you, Daniel, and I, in a hundred years, will both be dead. Maybe in 150 years no one will remember us. No one will remember your podcast. No one will remember my book. It’ll all be forgotten, and people will be thinking about different things. That’s just the way it is. There are 8 billion people here, and all of them are about as insignificant or significant as we are. People don’t like to hear that, but it’s really true. We all think we are the center of the world. If I asked you or any of your listeners, “Are you the center of the world?” they would all say no, but we kind of make decisions as if we are. And that’s okay. I do it too.

I first ran across this idea about 40 years ago in a book about a guy looking at a beehive. He said a beehive is not a collection of bees. There’s all these bees with different jobs, and it’s not about the individual bees. The hive itself is a creature. Sometimes beehives just pick up and go. That’s what creatures do. Sometimes they split into two—there’ll be two queens, and one takes half the hive with her. That’s what individuals do; we call that procreation. Sometimes hives get angry if you get close, and they attack you. People do that too. So even though a beehive is comprised of thousands of bees, it acts as one creature.

You could say the same about our bodies. There are trillions of cells in us. A blood cell is doing one thing, an eye cell is doing something different. They all have different functions. They probably don’t talk to each other. They don’t have anything in common except that they’re part of the same thing—me. Together they make me.

If you were a skin cell on the bottom of someone’s heel, and that person decided to run a marathon and got blisters that ripped off, those skin cells die along with the ones next to them. That’s kind of what happens in a small war or a massive tidal wave that destroys a whole city. Thousands or millions of people die, but people are still here. It’s like skin getting ripped off the body. All those cells die, but the human continues on. He had a goal—he was trying to run this marathon—and they’re all working together. Some died. That’s okay because the body is continuing.

It’s the same with humanity. It continues on to somewhere we have no idea, but the individual cells—a lot of them don’t make it, and it doesn’t matter. The body just continues on.

Another way of looking at it is a university. What’s it composed of? Buildings, professors, administrators, students, courses. All of those things come and go. Some buildings are torn down; new ones show up. Maybe they get rid of the basketball team. Professors come and go. There are new university presidents. Students come and go. Every 30 or 40 years, every part is different. Maybe some of the buildings and trees are still around, but it’s still the same university. That’s the basic concept: individuals are really of no consequence, but we are of consequence because we are part of one great thing, which is humanity itself. Just like those cells on the bottom of the foot have no idea why they’re getting ripped and blistered, and they’re all pissed off about it—they don’t have a clue that the guy is trying to run a marathon—we individuals have no idea where society is going, but it is progressing somewhere, and it’s something we will never understand.

Daniel Lucas: Well said. Master John, you spent 13 years writing this book. What is the question or the spark that started this journey? And did the book end up answering what you originally set out to find, or did it lead you somewhere entirely unexpected?John Bliss: When I was in my 20s, I was on the beach with my brother and some of his friends, and we all took psilocybin mushrooms. It worked for them, but for me it didn’t—or at least I didn’t think it was working. They all took off, and I didn’t see them again for the rest of the night. It worked for me a lot slower, but then it did. I have no idea what happened, but I remember becoming conscious at about 4:00 a.m., lying face down on the beach all by myself. It was nighttime, and this song kept going through my head: “O Que Será” by Milton Nascimento and Chico Buarque. It’s a beautiful, sad song. I don’t know Portuguese and have no idea what they’re singing about, but what I heard was them singing about how sad and tragic human life is, and how beautiful it is, but it’s sad.

As I was hearing this, I saw myself from an outer perspective, looking down on my life. I saw that I was young and had great ideals. I was going to fall in love, be totally in love, have a child. Did my dreams happen or not? I don’t know. But that child would grow up and be just like me. That child would fall in love, have a child, have dreams, and do the same thing I did. I saw my father, and he did exactly what I’m doing. My grandfather did what we both did. My great-grandfather did. At that moment I saw the cycles of our lives, and how we’re all repeating the same thing over and over. It was so tragic, but also so beautiful. Why tragic? Because for most of us, our dreams never really come true. We all die in the end. We get sick. When you get old, you lose everything—your strength, your beauty, your friends, maybe your spouse. That’s really tragic. I saw how it repeated over and over, and that’s when I realized that the story of history is our story. Even if we set aside specific events, all of humanity is reliving the same life—in the Philippines, in China, everywhere. It’s the same. History is the story of all of us. It’s something we all share. It’s actually what makes us all, in a way, cousins. We’re really all on the same team. A lot of times we see ourselves as individuals competing against each other—trying to win, make all the money so the other guy doesn’t, or get mad because someone insulted us. But that’s all silly when we’re all really living the same story. We’re all really part of the same creature. That’s kind of what the book started with. That’s how it all started.

Daniel Lucas: Mr. John, “Reason is the devil’s whore.” This is a subtle statement. What do you mean by it? And why do you believe that over-reliance on pure reason inevitably leads to tyranny and murder rather than enlightenment?

John Bliss: That’s quite a bit. I could talk about that forever, but I’m not going to. I’ll read a quote from Martin Luther. He’s the 16th-century figure who started Lutheranism and the Protestant Reformation, where the Protestants broke away from the Catholics. He said: “Reason is the chief prostitute of the devil, a lousy, filthy, and disgusting prostitute that ought to be trampled on and destroyed, both she and her companion wisdom. It would be a good thing to make her detestable by throwing filth in her face, for abominable wretch that she is. She only deserves to be placed in the dirtiest place in the house, the privy.” That’s actually the name of one of the chapters in this book.The point is that we tend to intellectualize everything, and reason gets really divorced from what is really true. Reason doesn’t really work with love. You can’t really reason love. You can’t reason “Who am I?” But let’s talk about something different.People who become idealists—who believe all people should be brothers and sisters and we should all share, or that we hate tyrants and want a democracy where everybody can share in government—have these wonderful plans for how society could be utopian. You can even go back to Plato’s Republic with its philosopher kings. The problem is there’s always going to be people who say, “No, I don’t want to do that. That’s bad.” Every plan is good for some people and bad for others, and the ones it’s bad for are going to oppose it. If you were the king of the world and could bring about a perfect society where everyone was happy and had enough, wouldn’t you do it? Probably yes. But what if 10 million people would be destroyed by this and were trying to stop you, and maybe they’re really powerful? What do you do? Maybe if we could just silence those 10 million, we could make this happen and then everyone will be happy—except those 10 million. What often happens when people have these idealistic philosophies and the power to make them happen is they don’t just silence opponents—they murder them or jail them. Utopia is just around the corner if we just get these people out of the way.

That’s what happened with the communist revolution. It was going to be great—everybody would have enough, everybody would share, we’d all work for everybody. But there were these people in the way, so we needed to get rid of them. You end up doing really evil things. Or the French Revolution: get rid of the king and the church—they’re running everything, they’re rich, it’s not right. Next thing you know, we’re killing all these people who are threatening the revolution. That’s the problem with idealism. It leads to tyranny if idealists get in power. Albert Camus, the famous French existentialist writer, wrote about this in his essay The Rebel. He wrote about the anarchists who were doing bombings all over Europe, trying to destroy a system they found evil. Basically he said idealism needs mass murder.I want to take it one step further. We have kind of the opposite of idealism going on nowadays: this doom-and-gloomism—the world’s going to end, there’s a CO2 problem, there’s too many people, the oceans are dying. Some of this stuff is true. I think the oceans are really troubled. There are nuclear problems like Fukushima, pollution problems. A lot of it is legit. But if you really follow a lot of these philosophies, what’s the obvious solution? For CO2, you could try solar and other things, but the obvious solution is fewer people means fewer problems. How do you get fewer people? You could kill half of them or two-thirds of them, and according to the theory we wouldn’t have a global warming problem or a pollution problem anymore. Or we could do a pandemic. Or we could sterilize people.In the United States in the 1920s there was a big eugenics movement that looked to sterilize quite a lot of people. The idealists then believed that criminality, drunkenness, drug abuse, stupidity, and poverty ran in families. So if you could take all these people who have these problems and sterilize them, they won’t have children, and the next generation will have a lot less of those problems. Society will be better and better. That was a big movement. The birth control movements came out of that. Margaret Sanger, who started Planned Parenthood, said: “We need more of the fit, but fewer of the unfit. The propagation of the degenerate, the imbecile, the feeble-minded should be prevented.” Edward East said in Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control Review: “Well-intentioned philanthropy and social service is nothing but a brutal gesture to posterity.” In other words, people are poor and miserable and illiterate—don’t let them breed anymore, and we won’t have it next generation. That whole movement fell apart when Hitler picked up those ideas and applied them to the Jews and the Slavs.

That kind of reasoning is perfectly rational. If criminality, illiteracy, drunkenness, and drug abuse run in families, then stop them from procreating and you’ve solved the problem. If global warming is going to destroy the planet, the wise, rational thing is to get rid of two-thirds of the people. The problem is that rational thinking by itself is unhinged and leads to really terrible things—killing two-thirds of the population or sterilization. It really should be tempered with a moral type of thinking. The moral thinking I think everyone should have is something Albert Schweitzer came up with. He was a Nobel Prize winner a long time ago; everybody’s already forgotten who he is. He said, “All life is sacred.” Based on that basic principle—life is sacred—you make decisions. Maybe the people so concerned about global warming and pollution are well aware of this, and that’s why they haven’t advocated destroying two-thirds of us: they recognize that life is sacred. But if you’re just being totally rational, that’s devilish. That’s awful. It’s diabolical.

Daniel Lucas: Mr. John, to wrap up our discussion for today, can you please invite our listeners to support your book?

John Bliss: The book is called The False Paradigms of Today and the Timeless Truth of Tomorrow: Essays on Meaning. That’s too hard to remember. If you want to look for it, just type in John Bliss—J-O-H-N B-L-I-S-S—and the word “essays,” and you’ll find it that way. It’s on Amazon, at Barnes & Noble, and also on my website, skeptikapress.com. I think Daniel’s going to give you a link for that. You can buy through my website; I think it’s a little cheaper there than on Amazon. It’s available in hardback, on Kindle, and also as an audiobook. The audiobook is really good—it’s got some Australian guy with a great accent, and it’s really well done.

If you want a free copy, you can go to my Skeptika Press website, click on “About the Book,” and download the PDF. I personally don’t like reading PDFs—I think it’s a real pain—but some of you do. If you want a PDF for free, go do that. If you want to buy the book, you can. By the way, in my case—and it’s probably true for most authors—I don’t make jack squat on these books. I make about $1 to $2 per book sold. So if you’re trying to support me, you’re not going to help me much. You’re better off just sending me loads of cash, which I don’t expect you to do. Don’t buy the book to try to be nice to me. If you’d just as well read a PDF, go get it for free. I have no problem with that.

Daniel Lucas: Mr. John Bliss, thank you so much for your time.

John Bliss: Thank you, Daniel. Talk to you soon.

Daniel Lucas: Thank you for joining us on the Universal Podcast Network. One voice, everywhere.