According to Jonathan Swift, “You do not reason a man out of something he was not reasoned into.”
But this is only part of the problem, and a small part at that. If the orthodoxies of civilization were like those of religion, it would be a simple matter of injecting tiny corrosive packets of uncertainty here and there, sowing seeds of doubt fertilized with a balanced application of critical thought and skeptical reflection, waiting for the ground to swell with the first signs of ripening disbelief, and then—and this is an extremely important step—demonstrating that there are more satisfying alternatives, alternatives grounded in the reality of our situation as temporary beings immersed in symbolic worlds of our own creation.
A civilization heretic with evangelist leanings, with desire and drive to pull the veil from the eyes of the faithful, faces a double challenge. Unlike the religious situation, where appeals to logic and reason can only be met with avoidance and denial, civilization presents something approaching an epistemologically closed system, where almost every potential threat from reason is met with a rational sounding counterpoint. To mount a successful attack, it is first necessary to undermine deeply embedded presuppositions and assumptions about the nature of human nature itself, starting with Hobbes and his claims that uncivilized life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” And then there are the demonstrable facts of medical technology aimed at treating civilization’s many iatrogenic disorders, and after that, the sheer convenience civilized life affords to its privileged classes.
And even if this first part of the deconversion process could be successfully employed, the second part is very likely to end in failure. Civilization allows for no alternatives to itself, denying even the possibility of the binary choice: are you in or out?
