There in a nutshell is the history of human theology. We suspect, without the capacity to know for sure, that we're on a space ship hurtling toward destruction (debited resources) with no pilot steering. So we invent a pilot: God. Then we punish those who complain that they can't see this invisible cowboy.
Kings were visible cowboys. But kings raced through the resources even faster than the headless herds of humans had been racing.
Then the US invented the marvelous fiction that the resource-wasters could be controlled by an intelligently self-interested electorate. But then every detail of the mechanism is sham: media, not truth, sets the stage. People see where their bread is buttered – by Big Brother – and behave with the same courage and independence shown by the medieval peasants:
who tolerated any travesty
rather than admit how they'd been deceived.
Oh, people will turn on the deceivers: when it's way too little, way too late.
Note: Above I referred to "God" as an "invisible cowboy." You can't understand this pk point properly without already understanding a different, core, pk point: whether or not we see an entity, or believe in an entity, has little to do with whether or not the entity "exists." The Church and Universities' disbelief in Galileo's telescope did not control whether or not Jupiter had moons. The moons were there whether or not we saw them. The moons had been there.
Human maps of the universe must not be palmed as the universe.
But Korzybskian semantics cannot be understood by humans. pk is only sometimes, only partly, an exception. And most people can never be an exception on this point, no matter what you spend to "teach" them.
Our epitaph could read, as Nigel Calder joked, "They talked a lot." It could also read, "They thought they were smart."
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