Free The Douchebag Bible by TJ Kirk Page A

technology has been pushed forward more by war and
    the need to stay ahead of enemy competition than it has out of
    love of science. Microwaves, Velcro, thermal imagining,
    prosthetic limb advancements and even the computer
    networking techniques that eventually led to the creation of the
    internet were all designed or perfected by the military for the
    purpose of being more effective as a killing machine.

    IGT is a force that creates problems that only science can
    fix—it is my contention that the two things are symbiotic and that
    if we were a species less prone to getting into mischief, we would
    lack a great deal of the scientific and technological sophistication
    that we possess today.

    Obey Your Master
    "Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul
    is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes
    avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his
    own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive.
    Ambition is only understood if it's to rise to the top of some
    imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an
    undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other
    interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who
    abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is
    considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and
    salary are the sole measure of human worth. You'll be told in a
    hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and
    never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what
    you're doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I
    guarantee you'll hear about them."

    Those are the words of Bill Watterson, the creator of the
    comic strip Calvin & Hobbes which ran from 1985 to 1995. Bill
    Watterson is a strange breed of person. People, on a subconscious
    level, feel that his mentality is a threat to the American dream.
    The American dream being, of course, making fat sums of money.
    When Steven Spielberg called Bill because he was interested in
    making a Calvin & Hobbes movie, Bill just turned him down flat.
    That’s incredible. In this culture, shunning greed is the utmost sin,
    the most unforgivable and incomprehensible outrage. When he
    refused to license his characters (all those truck decals you see

    with Calvin peeing on rival truck brands were made without
    licensing) to make a profit, he was essentially making the
    statement that the integrity of his artistic creation was more
    valuable than any sum of money, than any life of comfort.

    As much as I adore and admire his resolve, I do not
    perceive that sort of integrity in myself and allusions to such
    integrity would be illusions. However, just because I lack Mr.
    Watterson’s immense and incorruptible virtue does not mean
    that I lack all virtue or that I cannot recognize the validity of his
    virtuousness or admire the strength of his convictions, just as I
    have gotten a great many people to admire the strength of my
    various convictions by becoming a public-speaker, sometimes-
    comedian and freedom-advocate on the popular internet website
    YouTube14.

    Honor has essentially exploited our tendency to admire
    those of great resolve by standardizing morality. Our admiration
    is permissible, in the eyes of the powerful, only when it is directed
    towards their ideal. Their ideal, it should be noted, is never the
    ideal that they themselves live by. It’s the ideal that most
    conveniences them to have others live by.

    Let me say here that I don’t for a moment believe in the
    idea of CEO’s and Politicians as arch-villains dividing and
    conquering the populace with ingenious deceptions and
    carefully-crafted propaganda. I think this vile tendency emerged
    quite naturally over the course of our social evolution and have

    14 My account can be located here: http://youtube.com/user/TheAmazingAtheist

    rarely, if ever, been conscious acts of malevolence.

    And because this tendency has been hardwired into us