I’ve mentioned something of Nietzsche recently, but it’s another German philosopher I’ve in mind today. (Of Nietzsche, see Nietzsche and the Dark Hope Against a Better Local Politics.) Centuries before Nietzsche, a German theologian observed that everyone has a god, if not a faith in God:
So, too, whoever trusts and boasts that he possesses great skill, prudence, power, favor friendship, and honor has also a god, but not this true and only God. This appears again when you notice how presumptuous, secure, and proud people are because of such possessions, and how despondent when they no longer exist or are withdrawn. Therefore I repeat that the chief explanation of this point is that to have a god is to have something in which the heart entirely trusts.
(This is why there is no better aspiration for a man or woman than to be of the common people.)
Even those of the deepest skepticism have a god of some sort. That it’s merely a god — a human desire of theirs — is variously tragedy or farce. Farce, for example, from those who live with exaltation of politics as though it were a divine calling, rather than a human thing. (See, Public Choice Theory and Its Opposite.)
Tragedy, for example, when people turn human wishes into inviolable and unalterable rules, by which some dominate others. Many a victimized spouse is victim not through brutality alone, but through another’s manipulative demand that her condition must be so, as an expression of a (false, supposedly inviolable) principle.
Some who place their trust falsely, through another’s lies, come to see better of it. Others remain deluded and damaged.
One would hope that a child would not learn to walk only to do so, as an adult, on his or her knees.
It is a notably sad thing that some — even in a free society — remain forever servile before political authority and bureaucracy.
There’s no need, though, to enlarge that group by even one more person. They may keep only their own company, as they do now, perpetually.