Why have we been telling ourselves for thousands of years that we suck?

Do you think that convincing man that he is bad can be a way to control him?

The Old and New Testaments are propaganda to control people to prevent them from leaving the tribe. The Jesuits used to say: give me a child until the age of seven and I will give you a man. In other words: what you teach a child he will carry with him for the rest of his life. They know what they are doing, and yes they do it to scare us and control us. But the way they do it is very bad, it is an abusive relationship! Ask someone who is in an abusive marriage why he didn't leave, he will tell you that he stayed because he needed love. We, however, see from the outside that it is abusive. We have been abused by history for thousands of years. And it is no longer even a religious story, I think of Schopenhauer, I think of the scientists who say that the planet was perfect and that we destroyed it. That we are a selfish, narcissistic species... You don't even need god to hear that message anymore, you just look at the news, go to a bookstore, read twitter. I think in a way, the book was a way to understand why I have this loathing of myself, and why humanity hates itself.

But not all scientists say that man is bad, on the contrary...

Not everyone says it, but many people say it all the time. We are inundated with stories telling us that men are tribal, that they kill each other. I was absolutely of this opinion when I was young. I lived in a comfortable pessimism, which gave a sense of superiority, an arrogance... Then I realised that this way of thinking led nowhere, it led to despair, to resignation, not to not trying to do things better. If we sit around a table and tell ourselves all day long that we are horrible, we will end up acting like it. If you get told by the perfect man, by God, that you suck, the very one who knows everything about you... A father doesn't have to be Mr. Happy-go-lucky, always cheerful, but neither does an alcoholic who beats his kids. God is a terrible word model. At least the god they told me about. For example: we teach children not to be hypocrites, we don't smoke so that they don't smoke, but then we have a god who says 'you shall not kill', but he kills, so what is the lesson? He can do things that we cannot do. This narrative makes us all terrible. When I go to bookstores, at least in the US, the section that grows the most is the self-improvement section, it takes up half the shop. Books on how to feel better, how to be more fun... The message is always the same: 'you're not enough'. No wonder there are also many books on how to get rid of shame, often written by the same authors as the others...

And so, to destroy this nefarious narrative, she decided to use humour....

It is the best weapon I had. Twain once said: 'against the onslaught of laughter, nothing can stand'. And then I grew up with authors like Voltaire, Kafka, Beckett, Heller, Vonnegut, all of them used humour to change the world. The Greeks said that tragedy was man's view, but comedy was god's view. There is something about humour that makes us accept ourselves for who we are. Humour doesn't say to you, 'you suck', as god does, it says to you, 'you make mistakes, and you are funny'.

Did writing this book work? Did it do her any good? Did it liberate her?

People often ask if writing is curative and it is not, but it is therapeutic. Today I am aware when I am doing something wrong, I know that it is part of the story I have been told, and that this is just a bad story. Take the story of the three piglets: when the three piglets speak, it is the wolf that is bad; when the wolf speaks, it is the three piglets that are bad. Whereas we humans, no, we do the opposite: we tell ourselves that we are the bad guys. It is totally insane!

What is happening in the Middle East, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, do you think it could be in some way a result of this narrative?

Definitely, all conflicts. God is a really bad role model. He tells you this is your land and you have to kill people to get it. He says some people are chosen, some people are not. In America we say god bless America. I don't know of a god worthy of the name that would choose one group of people or another. But in general, much of what happens in the world I believe is due to money. In this the Old Testament was right. For example, did you know that in America prosperity theology is the fastest growing branch of Christianity? They argue that God wants his believers to be rich. Therefore they should not give money to the poor. The poor are poor because they have done something wrong. They say that Jesus was rich because he was a successful carpenter, an entrepreneur, and the faithful must be like him. The story we tell ourselves determines what we become. If you say that Jesus was a capitalist, then you become a capitalist, if you are told that we are born in sin and raised in evil, then humanity must be punished and destroyed. The story we are told is incredibly important. And the story we are told the longest is that we are evil. I can see how this will lead to the end of the world.

And then Auslander, looking at the antediluvian methods used to transcribe the interview, observes:

Have you ever tried to do an interview with ChatGpt? I tried using ChatGpt, I asked him to write in my style....

Did it work?

No, it came out really crap, it made me really insecure about my writing. I really looked like an asshole. I'm so insecure that I thought ChatGpt couldn't be wrong, that it was me who was wrong....

No, maybe the attempt to tell another story didn't work very well... Another book needs to be written!