Celestial Dictatorship and the Primal Psychology of Intellectual Servitude

Summary

Christopher Hitchens identified a political and moral feature of religion that he called “the desire to be a slave.” To avoid the risks of making their own decisions, people sometimes turn to an authority they believe has the final answer to every question. When that authority claims the power to watch over a person’s innermost thoughts and judge them even after death, it becomes what Hitchens called a “celestial dictatorship.” Erich Fromm’s theory of the escape from freedom, Freud’s account of dependence on a father figure, and research on social status and psychological stress help explain different aspects of that surrender. One question brings out its moral cost. If an order harms someone, can the person who carries it out escape responsibility by invoking the authority that issued it? The question has practical force in settings as different as the religious story of a child’s sacrifice and attacks on freethinkers in South Asia.

Key Points

Introduction: The Sources of Intellectual Servitude

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the British-American writer and essayist Christopher Hitchens was one of the sharpest critics of institutional religion. At the heart of his criticism was a question easily lost even in debates over God’s existence. Would anyone really want a master who could judge every decision they made and whose jurisdiction they could never reject? Speaking at Google about God Is Not Great in August 2007, Hitchens brought together the fear of freedom, devotion to cruel leaders, and the desire to be told what to do. He called religion a distillation of this tendency. ^[1]

Religion, in my view, is a reification, a distillation of this wish to be a serf, to be a slave.

Hitchens called this system of rule a “celestial dictatorship.” Its jurisdiction extends from conception through death and into an imagined afterlife. Under ordinary political surveillance, a ruler has to rely on witnesses, devices, or confessions to find out what a subject is thinking. The divine ruler Hitchens criticized knows people’s secret desires and what goes through their minds in their sleep, and passes judgment on their inner lives. Anyone who accepts that claim gives up even the private space within their own mind where they could be answerable to no ruler. ^[2]

Freedom and certainty can appeal to the same person. When a decision is hard, it can be comforting to have a rule that tells you what to do and an authority you can blame if it goes wrong. The cost of that comfort becomes clear when the rule demands something you would otherwise judge to be wrong. You are then taught to distrust your own judgment instead of examining whether the rule is just. This is where Hitchens’s criticism of religious authority moves from the existence of God to the question of moral freedom.

The Psychology of Escape from Freedom and Dependence on a Father Figure

In Escape from Freedom, Erich Fromm argued that breaking free of old social ties gives people the opportunity to make their own decisions and can also cost them a familiar sense of security and belonging. In the fifth chapter, he describes one aspect of authoritarianism as a surrender in which people give up their independence and identify with a power outside themselves to share in its strength. Even when someone says, “I do what I think is right,” their view may come from their family, group, or religious authority without their noticing where it came from. On Fromm’s account, the test of freedom goes beyond whether a person can disobey an order. It also matters how the decision they call their own came to be theirs. ^[3]

In The Future of an Illusion, Sigmund Freud linked the desire for religious protection to childhood helplessness. On his account, adults facing natural disasters and death imagine an extension of the protection they once sought from their fathers. The fatherly god thus becomes both protector and ruler. Freud’s psychoanalysis meets Hitchens’s moral criticism at this point. Once people entrust their safety to an authority, doubting its orders can feel like a threat to that very safety. The emotional reasons for obedience can therefore remain strong even when the evidence for an order is weak. ^[4]

The issue of self-respect becomes acute when a religious doctrine teaches people that trusting their own conscience is arrogance and that making themselves small before a master is a virtue. The mere capacity to make mistakes is then taken as proof that they cannot trust their own judgment, when mistakes could give them a chance to learn. Yet people still have to use that judgment to recognize the rule, understand what it means, and decide whose interpretation to accept. The same person whose judgment is deemed unfit to guide their own life is expected to exercise reliable judgment when choosing an authority.

Evolution and Authority: Fear, Prestige, and Agency Detection

Responding to authority and inferring an agent behind an ambiguous event are two different aspects of human behavior. The first concerns whose instructions to follow to avoid a threat or secure cooperation. The second helps explain why a branch moving in the wind can make us think someone is there. In a religious account, these tendencies can come together when people imagine a powerful being behind a natural event and make their safety depend on understanding and acting in accordance with its intentions. ^[5]

Frans de Waal’s comparison of chimpanzees and bonobos shows different patterns of social power. Alliances and competition for dominance matter in chimpanzee groups, while coalitions among females can shift the balance of power among bonobos. Influence has more than one source in humans too. Joey Cheng and colleagues found that people could gain social influence both by establishing dominance through intimidation and by earning prestige through sharing expertise. A person’s skill gives others a reason to learn from them. It creates no obligation to follow their instructions on an unrelated matter. Religious authority erases this boundary when expertise in scripture or a religious office is taken to confer the right to have the final word on science, family life, or civil rights. ^[6]

A noise in the bushes helps illustrate Justin Barrett’s idea of hypersensitive agency detection. The cost of retreating when there is no predator may be small. The cost of ignoring the sound when a predator is there can be far greater. In the first case, there is a cause for the sound. The mistake is to infer that its cause was an intentional agent. Shongshoy discusses the relationship between agency detection and religious belief separately. In five experiments by Michiel van Elk and colleagues, prompting participants to think of supernatural beings did not make them detect more agents overall. Some results varied with participants’ prior religious beliefs. What people already believe can therefore also shape how they interpret ambiguous signals. ^[7]

Inferring that an agent is behind an event creates no obligation to follow that agent’s orders. Even if lightning were the work of a god, what the god wants, why the god has the right to punish, and who gets to speak on the god’s behalf would each need a separate basis. One way to establish religious power is to teach these distinct claims together. Anyone who then asks for a natural explanation challenges both the proposed cause of the event and the authority of those who claim to know what the god intended.

Fear, Reward, and the Strain of Conflicting Beliefs

Fear and relief can coexist in the experience of religious obedience. The same person may be terrified by the prospect of punishment and feel relief when assured of forgiveness. When the same authority produces both feelings, a particular kind of dependence takes hold. The person has to look for relief within the very system of rules they were taught to fear. Research on stress, reward, and how people deal with conflicts between belief and experience helps explain different aspects of this dependence.

Several neural systems, including the amygdala, help process threat signals. Amy Arnsten’s review shows that stress perceived as uncontrollable can disrupt prefrontal networks involved in sustained attention, working memory, and adapting decisions to changing circumstances. When a religious setting links doubt to the threat of punishment, people may feel pressed to ease their fear before they can calmly consider the question. There is no basis for assuming that the same teaching causes equal stress in everyone. The degree of fear depends on what people are taught, how strongly they believe it, and what they might actually lose by asking questions. ^[8]

Michael Ferguson and colleagues conducted a functional MRI study of 19 devout Mormon young adults. When participants reported spiritual feelings, the researchers detected signals in the reward-related nucleus accumbens, the medial prefrontal cortex, and several regions associated with attention. The study measured changes in blood oxygenation. It did not measure how much dopamine was released during religious feelings or how the participants’ ability to reason changed. The findings help explain why participants may have found spiritual experiences meaningful and compelling. ^[9]

One way people deal with a conflict between belief and experience is to reinterpret what happened. In Leon Festinger and James Carlsmith’s experiment, participants performed a tedious task and then had to tell someone else that it was enjoyable. Those paid one dollar later described the task as more enjoyable than those paid twenty dollars did. The researchers argued that the smaller reward gave participants too little external justification for what they had said, putting more pressure on them to change their own attitude. A similar conflict can arise in religious life when evidence contradicts a claim that someone has publicly defended for years. Accepting the evidence also means reconsidering earlier decisions and relationships. ^[10]

Suppose a religious group announces that a miracle will occur on a particular day. Once the day has passed, people might ask how the date was chosen. If the leaders then say that the members’ prayers averted the disaster, they turn a failed prediction into a triumph of obedience. This may ease the strain of holding on to the belief while closing off any way to test it. The group takes the event as confirmation if it happens, and takes its failure to happen as confirmation too. The group no longer has an answer to the question of what outcome would prove it wrong.

The cost of changing a belief also varies from person to person. Examining an idea on your own is one thing. Giving up a belief in front of your family when their standing and relationships are bound up with it is another. In the second case, people may stay silent to protect their relationships. It would be a mistake to treat that silence as a sign of strong conviction. Once an institution makes expressions of doubt punishable, even the number of people who speak in its favor tells us little about how many reached that position freely.

Celestial Dictatorship: The Politics of Constant Surveillance

Hitchens had visited North Korea. In his 2007 Google talk, he compared its cult of the leader to a celestial regime with no way out of its jurisdiction. Even a North Korean citizen unable to leave the country is beyond the reach of state punishment after death. In Hitchens’s comparison, rule in the afterlife does away with that limit. In his 2010 debate with Tony Blair, Hitchens showed another side of this power. He asked how a claim that God had promised a territory could obstruct political compromise among the people alive there. This move from private belief to political authority was central to his example. ^[11]

This is what gives the phrase “celestial North Korea” its force. A dictator may want perfect surveillance, but cannot hear what every person thinks. Religious accounts imagine a ruler who knows what goes on in the mind and whose subjects begin to answer before his court at death. In Surah Qaf, the Quran says that Allah knows what a person’s soul whispers and that a watcher is present to record every utterance. The following verses turn to death, resurrection, and judgment. The passage places a person’s inner life, the record of their words, and the court of the afterlife in the same sequence. ^[12]

وَلَقَدْ خَلَقْنَا الْإِنسَانَ وَنَعْلَمُ مَا تُوَسْوِسُ بِهِ نَفْسُهُ ۖ وَنَحْنُ أَقْرَبُ إِلَيْهِ مِنْ حَبْلِ الْوَرِيدِ ﴿١٦﴾ إِذْ يَتَلَقَّى الْمُتَلَقِّيَانِ عَنِ الْيَمِينِ وَعَنِ الشِّمَالِ قَعِيدٌ ﴿١٧﴾ مَا يَلْفِظُ مِنْ قَوْلٍ إِلَّا لَدَيْهِ رَقِيبٌ عَتِيدٌ ﴿١٨﴾

English translation (Marmaduke Pickthall): We verily created man and We know what his soul whispereth to him, and We are nearer to him than his jugular vein. When the two Receivers receive (him), seated on the right hand and on the left, He uttereth no word but there is with him an observer ready.

In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Party seeks to suppress thoughtcrime. Even when Winston Smith is alone, he fears that his facial expressions or what he says in his sleep could give him away. In Hitchens’s comparison, divine surveillance takes that fear further. Hiding offers no escape from what the ruler knows. Part of the work of policing thus passes to the individual. Even with no guard in the room, people may suppress questions that come to mind because they believe the questions have already been noticed before they can voice them. ^[13]

The political power of surveillance becomes clear when it is no longer necessary to punish each violation separately. People can internalize prohibitions taught by relatives, teachers, or religious leaders and enforce them on themselves. When deciding whom to form a relationship with or what to question, they begin by testing their own obedience before asking what harm there would actually be. Control runs deepest when people can still doubt the rules but regard even the first stirrings of doubt, let alone expressing it, as a moral failure of their own.

Knowing everything and having the right to punish are two separate claims. Someone who knows what is going on in my mind has that information. Having it gives them no right to rule me. Claims of religious authority obscure this gap when they take the creator, the witness, and the judge to be one and the same and derive the justice of the verdict from the power of the one who issues it. The greater the power, the more important it is to judge how it is exercised. The claim of eternal punishment makes the question of proportionality between the offense and the punishment more pressing still.

Morality and Obedience: The Crisis of Intellectual Sovereignty

Hitchens’s moral objection rests on a distinction. Someone may refrain from doing harm because they understand that another person’s suffering matters. They may also refrain because they fear punishment. In the second section of Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant describes autonomy of the will as acting on principles that a rational will can adopt as laws for itself. Under heteronomy, by contrast, the will is governed by an outcome or condition imposed on it from outside. One way to draw the distinction is to ask whether the moral reason for acting would still hold if the punishment were removed. ^[14]

In his Google talk, Hitchens asked the audience for an example of a moral statement or action that a believer could make or perform but an unbeliever could not. He then turned the question around and asked what kinds of harmful acts people can be led to commit by religious belief. The first question tests the claim that faith has a monopoly on morality. The second shows how presenting a particular act as a divine command can set aside the ordinary moral objections to it. A believer and an unbeliever can both rescue a stranger in danger. When declaring an act sacred strips people of the right to judge its harm, it also takes away their grounds for rejecting the command, however cruel it may be. ^[15]

The story of Abraham preparing to sacrifice his son makes this conflict clear. In Genesis, God tells Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, and Abraham binds him and takes up the knife. In the Quran, Abraham tells his son that he saw himself slaughtering him in a dream. The son tells his father to carry out the command. The sacrifice is stopped in both accounts. In Chapter 15 of God Is Not Great, Hitchens criticizes the celebration of a father’s willingness to kill his own child as a mark of great faith. A father has a duty to protect his child’s life. In the story, the test of obedience takes precedence over that duty. In Bengali literature, Arj Ali Matubbar compared Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice a loved one with the customary sacrifice of animals. ^[16]

فَلَمَّا بَلَغَ مَعَهُ السَّعْيَ قَالَ يَا بُنَيَّ إِنِّي أَرَىٰ فِي الْمَنَامِ أَنِّي أَذْبَحُكَ فَانظُرْ مَاذَا تَرَىٰ ۚ قَالَ يَا أَبَتِ افْعَلْ مَا تُؤْمَرُ ۖ سَتَجِدُنِي إِن شَاءَ اللَّهُ مِنَ الصَّابِرِينَ ﴿١٠٢﴾ فَلَمَّا أَسْلَمَا وَتَلَّهُ لِلْجَبِينِ ﴿١٠٣﴾ وَنَادَيْنَاهُ أَن يَا إِبْرَاهِيمُ ﴿١٠٤﴾ قَدْ صَدَّقْتَ الرُّؤْيَا ۚ إِنَّا كَذَٰلِكَ نَجْزِي الْمُحْسِنِينَ ﴿١٠٥﴾ إِنَّ هَٰذَا لَهُوَ الْبَلَاءُ الْمُبِينُ ﴿١٠٦﴾ وَفَدَيْنَاهُ بِذِبْحٍ عَظِيمٍ ﴿١٠٧﴾

English translation (Marmaduke Pickthall): And when (his son) was old enough to walk with him, (Abraham) said: O my dear son, I have seen in a dream that I must sacrifice thee. So look, what thinkest thou? He said: O my father! Do that which thou art commanded. Allah willing, thou shalt find me of the steadfast. Then, when they had both surrendered (to Allah), and he had flung him down upon his face, We called unto him: O Abraham! Thou hast already fulfilled the vision. Lo! thus do We reward the good. Lo! that verily was a clear test. Then We ransomed him with a tremendous victim.

Abraham faces the moral question before he raises the knife. When someone says, “I was ordered to do it,” they are giving their motive for acting. The words add nothing to the case for taking the life of the child whose throat is under the knife. For the same reason, there is a difference between doing someone a favor in the hope of a reward and helping them because you understand what they need. The act can have good consequences in either case. If someone’s distress gives you reason enough to help, there is no need to wait for the promise of heaven. And if an act harms an innocent person, the harm itself gives you a reason to refuse.

In the Quranic account, the son’s assent makes the question of obedience clearer. The father describes a dream, and the son takes it to be a command. The story describes both of them as submitting. The person who relays the command is the very person whose relationship with the son has taught him to obey it. So even after the son agrees, the question remains. Why should treating a dream as grounds for taking another person’s life count as a noble act? The son’s assent supplies no evidence to justify the father’s decision.

From Respect to Obedience: The Social Basis of Religious Authority

The strength of religious institutions cannot be explained by assuming that people defer to authority solely for fear of punishment. People also want to emulate someone whose knowledge, experience, or conduct their society values. Joseph Henrich and Francisco Gil-White distinguished this kind of respect from submission secured by force. Learning a subject from a teacher and placing every instruction they give above one’s own judgment are different things. The problem begins when the trust earned through teaching becomes grounds for demanding unquestioning obedience. ^[17]

Boris Purzycki and colleagues used resource-allocation games in eight societies to examine how belief in divine surveillance relates to behavior beyond one’s immediate group. Participants who rated their gods as more knowledgeable about human conduct and more punitive allocated resources more impartially to distant co-religionists. Giving a fair share to fellow believers far away is an example of cooperation that extends beyond local ties. The relationship here was based on a shared religious identity. If who receives fair treatment depends on what they believe, solidarity within the group cannot measure the fairness of the rule. ^[18]

Prestige and fear can operate together in this arrangement. A follower may first respect a teacher for what they know. If changing their mind later earns them the label of traitor, the relationship that began in respect becomes a barrier to leaving. The follower now has to weigh more than whether a belief is true. They also risk losing their standing in their family or group. To see how much autonomy an institution allows, look at what happens when members call one of its decisions wrong, rather than at how devotedly they cooperate.

South Asia: Religious Authority and the Tradition of Freethought

In South Asia, religious authority becomes political when a party or leader presents itself as the sole defender of the faith. Criticism of a political decision can then be passed off as blasphemy. In 2015, the writer Avijit Roy was murdered and Rafida Ahmed Bonya was injured as they were leaving the book fair in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Roy wrote about science, atheism, and freedom of expression and had received threats from Islamists before he was killed. The effects of such violence reach beyond the murdered writer. A writer or publisher who wants to address the same subject the next day has to weigh the risk of an attack. Attacking a critic instead of arguing for a claim is a way to enforce obedience in public life. ^[19]

Repression can also take the language of the law. Section 295A of the Bangladesh Penal Code provides for punishment for insulting the religion or religious beliefs of a class with the deliberate and malicious intent of outraging its religious feelings. The political question is what kinds of speech people are demanding punishment for. Threatening a person and publicly calling a religious doctrine false are different acts. Criticism can offend believers, but making that offense grounds for state punishment gives those who advance the belief a tool for shielding it from public scrutiny. ^[20]

In South Asian philosophy, Cārvāka, also known as Lokāyata, rejected the authority of the Vedas and gave weight to experience in this world. Most of the Cārvākas’ own writings have been lost. Much of what survives of their views comes from quotations and rebuttals by their opponents, which Ramkrishna Bhattacharya has examined separately. There is therefore no reason to treat every popular saying attributed to Cārvāka as authentic. The position that matters here is that declaring a text sacred does nothing to establish its claims about the afterlife, the soul, or the effects of ritual sacrifice. If a religious institution’s livelihood and prestige depend on acceptance of those claims, questioning the text’s authority also has political consequences. ^[21]

Classical Sāṅkhya distinguishes two principles, prakṛti and puruṣa. It explains the development of the world through transformations of prakṛti, or nature, and treats puruṣa as the principle of consciousness. There is no need to explain every change in the world by the will of an omnipotent creator. Sāṅkhya’s dualism differs from Cārvāka materialism. Yet both traditions show that South Asian philosophy could ask how the world works without taking the existence of a ruler of the universe as its starting point. ^[22]

Buddhist and Jain traditions also offer different grounds for authority. In the Mahāparinibbāna Sutta, the Buddha tells Ānanda to take refuge in himself and in the Dhamma. In the Vāseṭṭha Sutta, he judges who is a brahmin by deeds and conduct rather than birth. This challenges the claim to moral superiority by birth. In Jain philosophy, the world has no beginning and needs no creator. Its doctrine of anekāntavāda holds that a thing can have several aspects and that a statement’s truth depends on specifying the aspect under consideration. On this view, treating any one standpoint as the whole truth is a mistake. ^[23]

This philosophical tradition has political significance. The idea that citizens who question a religious ruling are following a practice imported from abroad conflicts with South Asia’s own history. People in the region have long debated hereditary rank, the authority of sacred texts, and the need for a creator. In a modern state, equal rights provide the civic basis for that debate. One person can express a religious belief, and another can criticize its claims or social consequences. Recognizing the first right while suppressing the second makes freedom of expression conditional on religious obedience.

Conclusion: Intellectual Maturity

Hitchens’s phrase “the desire to be a slave” identifies a hard problem of freedom. If the decision is yours, so is the risk of being wrong. An all-knowing master’s orders promise an escape from that risk, but people still have to decide how to recognize, interpret, and carry out the order. Believing that responsibility can be handed over to an authority hides the decision they make themselves. If the result is harmful, everyone can claim that they were only following orders, while nobody answers for who had the duty to refuse.

There is no need to imagine an obedience switch in the brain to see the force of this criticism. When an institution treats questioning as an offense, its members may put their intelligence to work proving that its decisions are infallible instead of looking for the answer. And when raising questions can cost people their family, their work, or their life, their public agreement says little about how freely they consented. The cost of disobedience shows why freedom of thought requires both personal courage and social protection for people who ask questions.

Freethought demands that no person or text be held in such esteem that the consequences of its orders are exempt from scrutiny. If protecting a child’s life, keeping people safe when they ask questions, or granting equal rights to dissenters conflicts with a sacred rule, the rule itself needs to be justified. Intellectual maturity is the ability to apply the same moral judgment to our own master or our own group that lets us recognize wrongdoing in others.