Tyranny and the Horror of Being God
The thought experiment of recognizing the plight of being a deity

Suppose you woke up one day and found you were the last person on Earth. What kind of person could endure those dire circumstances and what kind of life could you expect to have?
You’d have enormous freedom to go anywhere and do anything you wanted. Indeed, you’d be free from morality and all social laws, assuming those restrictions make sense only in a societal context where there’s more than one person. Your freedom might be spoiled by your sorrow for all the death and destruction that must have occurred to end the world. But suppose that when you awaken to this empty world, you’ve lost your memory of how it all happened, and you no longer remember having lived with anyone else.
The scenario, then, is that you’re the only one alive, and as far as you know you’re the only one who’s ever lived. What sort of person would you be under those circumstances?
This scenario might seem farfetched or irrelevant to you, but this is hardly the first time it’s been imagined. This thought experiment is a few thousand years old, and we know it as monotheism.
Imagining the divine character
As Daniel Dennett explains in Breaking the Spell, brainy social mammals like us instinctively try to read each other’s minds, and when there’s no mind to read, we imagine there’s one there anyway. We invest all of nature with vitality and presume that just as powerful people rule over others in society, powerful gods rule over natural processes. This social instinct surfaces in prehistoric animism and most of the world’s religions and superstitions.
The most extreme projection of human mentality is the monotheistic kind that proclaims the singularity of the mind that’s at the root of all things. This first mind, called “God,” is timeless so it has no memories of growing, and God is seemingly free, having no barriers to achieving its will or applying its knowledge. But being the only thing there is beyond time, there’s not much for God to know or to do.
Having so much experience imagining what each other is thinking for social purposes, we wrestled with the question of what the gods must be like, so we fashioned religions and whole civilizations around the priestly mindreading of such fictional characters. This preoccupation with divine minds began in shamanic tribes and then in such civilizations as Sumer, Egypt, and Persia. The preoccupation continued in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and it was implicit in Eastern mysticism.
We social mammals should still be inclined to imagine what it would be like to be the chief god. We can use our mindreading tools to empathize with God’s predicament. Yet we’re taught to do no such thing since this thought experiment would be impudent and blasphemous. Priests and the scriptures already tell us what God is like: he’s loving, benevolent, gracious, merciful, but also jealous, just, self-righteous, and vindictive.
These characterizations are like the efforts of a team of movie producers who make their movie by committee. Without the artistry of a single visionary director or writer, this kind of movie is typically doomed to be shallow, incoherent, and cynical. Likewise, the orthodox conception of God is a work of political correctness, meant to forestall our native skill in putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes. The priestly producers of the religious narrative concoct a shallow, incoherent, and cynical portrait of God’s character.
Of course, we couldn’t know for certain the contents of God’s mind and character since we’re far removed from the divine source of being, according to standard monotheism. But we’re not helpless when it comes to imagining what it would be like to be someone else who’s faced with different circumstances. We have natural talents for empathy and imagining the wildest possibilities.
We can imagine what it would be like to be an astronaut in outer space, a greedy Wall Street banker, or a starving child in a war-torn country. The details and perhaps even the essence of these possibilities might escape us because imagination is limited without direct experience, but this is often the best we can do to extend our knowledge.
And we can ponder what it would be like to be the only person left alive or the only one who’s ever really lived. Post-apocalyptic stories are usually grim, wistful, and terrifying. Why do you suppose that’s so? For social creatures like us, it’s because we prefer to live in the company of others, and we become lonely and even insane when left alone for too long, as in solitary confinement in prison or an end-of-the-world scenario.
Love and fear of God
When we try to imagine what it would be like to be God, independent of any manipulative religious tradition, we naturally project our social longings onto that ultimate being, so the oneness of God would seem not glorious at all, but horrific. God wouldn’t be the magnificent endpoint we should hope to reach in an afterlife, but a nightmare of derangement and insanity we should attempt to flee.
Hence the double-sidedness of the Jewish attitude we’re supposed to have towards God: love and fear, the one turning into the other. We’re supposed to love God but also fear him. Thus, Isaiah 11:1–3 praises a prophesied greatest Jew, a “shoot” from the “stump of Jesse” (who was King David’s father). This greatest Jew will have the spirit of God upon him, he’ll be wise and strong, “and he will delight in the fear of the Lord.” Proverbs 9:10 says that “fear of the Lord” is “the beginning of wisdom.” And most of the Quran is a meditation on the need for fear of and for submission to the mighty oneness of Allah.
In stark contrast, there’s Deuteronomy 6:4–5: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.”
The fear of God here is fundamental, flowing as it does from our primal capacity for mindreading, while the love of God is based on pious wishes and theocratic platitudes. We wish God would be loving and merciful and interested in us, but we surmise that being perfectly alone would be torture for any intelligent mind. At best, guided by our inescapable appreciation for the appalling state of being almighty God, we’d love that divine being out of pity, just as we’d pity anyone condemned to dwell in a post-apocalyptic world.
This subversive recognition of the monotheistic scenario emerges in other ways too.
God’s desperate act of Creation
Again, pretend you’re alone and society has ended. What would be your most fervent wish in the event of such a cataclysm? To create a new world, of course, one in which you could escape the nightmare of that excruciating isolation. Thus, religions depict God as being the creator of the universe.
The pious creeds have it that God creates out of love and generosity, sharing his inexhaustible wealth with his creatures. This notion looks like the Jesuitical fudging you often find on CVs or like political spin from a polished liar.
There could be no cause of divine love in the monotheistic scenario. Love is a social thing. God would be alone for eternity, alone to stew in his self-transparency. Far from being a font of generosity, God would be a haggard, desperate, forlorn victim, or an infantile, decadent, tyrannical madman. At least, that’s the best we could do in understanding God by exercising our primary skill of identifying with someone else’s situation.
The real God, then, would create to escape the plight of being himself or to have something over which to rule, to complete the relationship between master and slave. As the Upanishads suggest, God splits his consciousness into myriad ignorant persons, taking a vacation from his enlightened state of self-knowledge, and delighting in being humbler creatures who are less burdened with God’s crushing awareness of the horror of cosmic reality (of the oneness of Atman and Brahman, subject and object).
Naively, intellectuals or outcasts may rush to regain that godlike comprehension, enlightening themselves with a grim realization that the oneness of everything is a recipe for divine madness that can be dispelled only with a cosmic cycle of creation — and with an escape from godhood.
In this context, God’s declaration in Genesis 1:31, that the universe he’s just created is “very good,” should strike us as an understatement. As written, the biblical idea is that God was pleased with the beauty of his handiwork. But according to our best understanding of what the monotheist’s God would be like, God wouldn’t have created a natural order as an idle work of art. God would have created the world to lose himself in the dynamics of something other than him.
The world for God wouldn’t have been just a “very good” moral or aesthetic accomplishment. Creation would have been a balm, an escape hatch, a way of rescuing God from divine madness.
Alternatively, Creation would have been necessary as a teaching device, enabling God at first to pour out the wrath and horror he’d have stored up in his eternal solitude, and perhaps later to overcome that trauma. The theologian John Hick speculates that God created the universe to enable creatures to learn how to improve their souls. But the very same reasoning should apply to the Creator.
Perhaps the most logical Creationism is that of the nineteenth-century philosopher Philipp Mainlander who suspected that God’s act of creation was one of self-destruction, so that we’re currently dwelling in God’s decaying carcass. God would have transformed himself into something material so that he could be systematically eliminated, thanks to entropy; such was God’s need to escape his monstrous condition.
Tyrannical theocracy mirroring divine reality
Then there are the social expressions of these implications of monotheism. These expressions are theocratic and monarchical. We impose a pyramidal social structure, represented mythically by a high God at the pinnacle of being, followed by God’s angelic henchmen, and the lowest, weakest, most servile gods at the bottom of this theistic pantheon. We design our societies around that same dominance hierarchy, worshipping a king or emperor as a godlike being who rules through his family, priests, and military commanders.
Most likely, the human social hierarchy came first, which is where we got the idea of projecting that structure onto everything else. We didn’t have to imagine what God would be like since we experienced the analogues of human tyrants. Some kings were wise and generous while others were brutal and infantile, so our conception of political sovereignty was mixed. But putting all the characteristics together and imagining an absolute version of this social structure resulted in the classic images of God.
The religious myths and the reality of theocratic politics reinforced each other. And however wise or well-intentioned they might be, absolute rulers tended to become autocratic, the longer they stayed in power. There could be only one endpoint, then, if we think of anyone who’s been in power forever and ever. That’s the deity depicted in monotheistic myths. But it’s also the ideal that’s realized in theocratic history.
Judging from how they edited their scriptures, ancient Jews imagined that they were once dominant in their region and that they disposed of wayward peoples left and right in God’s name. Mostly, however, Jews were the conquered, not the conquerors, which led to Jews overcoming the monotheistic temptation to be sanctimonious. Instead, Jews became jaded, pragmatic, and satirical, as you can tell, for example, from Job and Ecclesiastes.
Still, Jews dominated vicariously through the Roman construct of Christendom, and popes and Christian kings ruled Europe in a godlike, dystopian fashion, persecuting heretics, burning nonexistent witches, and conquering territory on behalf of a world-famous pacifist. Then came Islam, and the onslaught continued: the imposition of brutal regimes, submission to inhuman codes of law, wars with Christendom, and eventually militant jihad against nonbelievers who show the least disrespect towards Muslims.
Echoes of God in secular myths
Lastly, there’s how monotheism mutated after modernity’s “killing” of God, as Friedrich Nietzsche might have put it. With scientific advances in understanding our place in nature, the old religious myths lost their power to enchant Europe’s intellectual class during the Enlightenment. High culture became deistic and effectively atheistic. But the logic of secular myths that filled the void eerily echoed the monotheistic scenario.
There was Arthur Schopenhauer’s synthesis of Eastern monism with reductionist Western philosophy, resulting in pessimistic pantheism that Mainlander sought to perfect. Schopenhauer brought the monotheist’s tyrannical God down to Earth, identifying him with the Will behind all signs of natural energy that use us up as fodder.
Then there was Nietzsche’s myth of the Übermensch, the internally superior person who has the strength of will to accept the harsh facts of nature that science discovers and to carry on under these tragic circumstances by creating new value systems and worlds. In short, people will replace the dead God as unleashed, godlike creators. Nietzsche’s aphoristic writings were often ambiguous, which invited the Nazis to interpret them as prescribing ruthless social Darwinism. Thus, we had the twentieth-century paradox of secular fascist regimes ruling in a totalitarian fashion — just like the ancient and medieval theocracies.
And in the early twentieth century, there was the pulp fiction writer H.P. Lovecraft’s transformation of the one God’s madness and amorality into the inhumanity of alien overlords, which he featured in his science fictional pantheon. Lovecraft developed a cynical philosophy he called “cosmicism,” which draws out the existential implications of deep time. In the long view, he surmised, human values count for nothing and could easily be overshadowed by those of much more powerful species that would view us as we view insects. All human history could be terminated, and our species’ demise chalked up to the equivalent of roadkill.
The likely reality of the monotheist’s God, then, would be thoroughly unpleasant. The idea of this God takes the best of human characteristics and packages them in the least tolerable form. We know what this God would be like since we can imagine being locked away in solitary confinement or being the last person left alive on the planet.
Of course, Jews, Christians, and Muslims will be anxious to reply that God’s perfect so he wouldn’t degrade under that condition of eternal solitude. But that way lies atheism: if God wouldn’t deteriorate, reaching monstrous levels of insanity and megalomania after being the only thing in reality forever, he wouldn’t be like a human person after all, which was supposed to have been the conceit of theistic religions.