Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is the drink.
Spread the word to all the venture capitalists you know: I have the secret to eternal youth, immortality, invulnerability, invisibility, time travel, instantaneous transport, and control of all matter and energy. Right now it’s in the secret idea development stage, but just a few billion dollars will turn me and few lucky dupes into the saviors of humanity and make us wealthy beyond the limits of earthly human reason.
An investment of a million dollars will buy you “nice try” status, and you will receive a promissory coupon for an unlimited number of rides in the Mach 99 fat-tire stroller to oblivion. Two million dollars gets you twice as many rides. And so on until math runs out.
An investment of 400 million dollars will get you on the board of directors, 150% of voting shares, and an invisible royal garment.
I can take just a drop of your blood and turn it into enough loaves and fishes to feed a great multitude.
Now is our time! The time of infinite promise and zero fulfillment! We shall be gods, promising good fortune and, ultimately, heaven, but delivering only that which a mythical savior who lacks actual existence can deliver.
We promise you high-speed rail but we can’t even deliver potable water to people in Michigan, a state surrounded by the Great Lakes. We promise you 100% surveillance but we can’t even give you justice when cops are caught on video killing your children.
We are the best and brightest: when it comes to promising, we can do it all. When it comes to luxuries and miraculous sights, sounds, flavors and sensations, we procure them for ourselves.
And when it comes to solving the actual problems afflicting humanity, we, just like God, do absolutely nothing, almost as if we didn’t exist.
But we do. We are the living church, glories of architecture, marble and gold, the paragon of all the arts and sciences, and you can visit us long enough to worship and drop a few coins in our collection plate. After all, the people create the gods, and feed them with their blood and money.
You know who contributed the altarpiece? Henry Kissinger. Just think, you could pray to a sculpture that Henry Kissinger paid for! The man who won the Nobel Peace Prize for killing the greatest number of Indochinese in a single war.
We have all the money. Do you want some? You’ll have to make it worth our while. Shine some shoes. We’ll pay you as little as possible. You know what the ideal wage is, from our point of view? Zero dollars. That’s what we call a perfect wage. If we could show that we paid all our workers exactly zero dollars, our stock price would go through the roof! It would fly through the roof and up and up an infinite distance.
It is my dream, as an entrepreneur, to create a company so dazzlingly new and world-changing that all the money I accumulate will rise up to me like prayers. Money and love and dreams will lift me above all fear and need, and I will dwell forever in the sun, out of reach of the sorrows of this world. Only the most beautiful music, played by the most masterful artists, will shimmer around my ears, and only the most pure and sublimely prepared food, from the most fetishistic farmers, brewers, bakers, gatherers, or vintners, will pass between my lips. With noble sadness will I look down and observe all the violence, deprivation, and depravity, the follies of you, humankind, about which I can only do my tiniest part, because were I to do more I would deny myself something, and that can never be. Beings who respect themselves never deny themselves anything, because they love themselves, and that is above all the goal: to love the self, to shower love upon oneself.
That is why you suffer, puny humanity: you don’t love yourselves enough. You haven’t found something you’re passionate about, and pursued that with every ounce of strength, as an act of love for the self. No wonder you’re always killing each other, forced to drink poisoned water, lacking quality schools, unable to access medicines you need to live. People who love themselves will always find a way. But not you. It’s no wonder you don’t love yourselves. You’re weak.
I hope I’ve shown you the true way, now, with this little sermon of mine. Learn to love yourselves. Learn to fix what’s lacking in yourselves, that’s what’s lacking. Whatever you do, don’t try to dismantle the church or dethrone the gods. The gods cannot be pulled down.
Or at least that’s what we’d like you to believe. Please believe us. Please us by believing. Believe! Believe!
This has been the Moment of Truth. Good day!