NO OTHER GODS BEFORE ME

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Chapter 1: Lex Primatus - The Law of Primacy

In the late 1990s, a peculiar cultural phenomenon began to take shape in the sprawling suburbs of America, a quiet revolution not of politics or protest, but of plastic. It was the era of the Beanie Baby, a collection of floppy, under-stuffed plush toys that, for a brief, bewildering period, became one of the most sought-after commodities on the planet. At its peak, the manufacturer, Ty Inc., was reportedly earning over $700 million in a single year. Ordinary people, from stay-at-home mothers to seasoned investors, were caught in a speculative frenzy, convinced that these pellet-filled animals were not just toys, but a new class of appreciating asset. Stories abounded of people pouring their life savings into collections, of families driving across state lines on the rumour of a rare find, and of a secondary market where a $5 toy could fetch thousands.

One particularly poignant story from that time is of a family who, believing they were securing their children's future, invested over $100,000 in thousands of Beanie Babies, storing them meticulously in airtight containers. They weren't just collecting; they were worshipping at the altar of a false financial god. The toy animals had ceased to be objects of play and had become the central organising principle of their economic lives, their ultimate concern. When the bubble inevitably burst in 1999, leaving the market saturated and the once-rare items virtually worthless, the family was financially and emotionally devastated. Their story, and countless others like it, is a vivid, if somewhat absurd, illustration of a principle so fundamental to human psychology that it was codified as the very first of the Ten Commandments: the Law of Primacy.

"You shall have no other gods before me."

Stripped of its ancient, theological language, this command makes a profound psychological claim: human beings are constitutionally incapable of not having a "god." We are, by nature, worshipping creatures. Something will always occupy the highest place in our cognitive and motivational hierarchy. This is not a threat, but a statement of fact about our operating system. That supreme value—be it financial security, political ideology, social status, romantic love, or even the self—functions as our god. It is the orienting principle around which our perceptions, thoughts, and actions are organised. It is the ultimate arbiter of our decisions, the source from which we derive our sense of meaning, purpose, and identity. The First Commandment is not merely a religious injunction for the pious; it is a user manual for the human mind. It argues that the quality of our ultimate concern is the single most important determinant of our individual and collective well-being. When that highest value is unstable, false, or too small to carry the weight of our worship, everything beneath it fractures.

The Unavoidable Hierarchy

To function in the world, we must simplify it. The sheer volume of information bombarding our senses at any given moment is overwhelming. As you read this sentence, your brain is filtering out the sensation of the chair beneath you, the ambient noise in the room, the feeling of your clothes on your skin, and a million other potential distractions. This filtering process isn't random; it's directed by your goals. Your brain prioritises what is relevant to your current aim—in this case, understanding this text—and relegates everything else to the background. This is the essence of what psychologists call a value hierarchy. It's the cognitive structure that allows us to navigate complexity without being paralysed by it.

At the very top of this structure sits our ultimate concern, our "god." This dominant value acts like a cognitive North Star, orienting our entire perceptual framework. If your highest value is professional success, you will perceive the world primarily in terms of opportunities and threats to your career. A networking event becomes a field of opportunity; a critical comment from a colleague becomes a significant threat. If your highest value is the well-being of your children, you will interpret the world through a lens of safety and danger to them. A news report about a local crime is not just information; it is a direct, personal warning. This is not a conscious choice; it is an automatic, pre-rational process. Our highest value dictates what we see.

Modern neuroscience provides a compelling picture of how this works. The brain's dopamine system, often misunderstood as a simple "pleasure chemical," is more accurately described as the engine of motivation and goal pursuit. As researchers Ethan Bromberg-Martin, Masayuki Matsumoto, and Okihide Hikosaka explained in a landmark 2010 paper in Neuron, dopamine is not just about reward; it's about motivational salience. It drives us towards what our brain has tagged as important. When a particular goal is elevated to the status of a god, the dopamine system goes into overdrive, fixating our attention and driving our behaviour relentlessly towards that end. All other potential goals and values are downregulated, their motivational power diminished. We become, in a very real sense, neurologically blind to anything that does not serve our chosen deity.

This neurological reality has profound practical implications. Consider the phenomenon of decision fatigue, a well-documented psychological effect where the quality of our decisions deteriorates after making many choices in succession. When we are cognitively depleted, we default to our highest values. A person whose god is convenience will choose fast food over a healthy meal. A person whose god is social approval will make choices that please others rather than serve their own genuine needs. A person whose god is the avoidance of conflict will capitulate rather than stand firm on principle. Our ultimate concern is the gravitational centre of our decision-making, especially when our cognitive resources are low.

This is the psychological genius of the First Commandment. It recognises that because we must have a value hierarchy, the most important question is not whether we worship, but what we worship. The command to place God at the apex of this hierarchy is a prescription for psychological stability. It proposes that orienting our lives around an ultimate value that is transcendent, infinite, and good provides the most robust and resilient framework for human flourishing. When we attempt to place something finite and created—money, power, a nation, a political ideology, another person, or even ourselves—in that ultimate position, we are setting ourselves up for an inevitable collapse. These lesser gods are too small for the throne of the human heart, and when they fail, the entire structure of our meaning comes crashing down.

The Gods of the Modern Age

If the idea of worshipping false gods seems like a relic of a bygone era, a concern for people who bowed down to golden calves, we need only look at the pathologies of our own time. We may not erect stone idols, but our modern pantheon is just as real and, arguably, far more insidious. We have simply substituted the old gods of wood and stone for new gods of ideology, consumerism, and the self.

The God of the Marketplace: Consumerism

Consider the case of the Beanie Baby craze. It was a classic example of what happens when the pursuit of material wealth becomes an ultimate concern. The logic of the market—acquisition, speculation, and profit—became the organising principle for thousands of people's lives. Their days were consumed by the hunt, their conversations dominated by rarity and resale value, their hopes pinned on the ever-inflating bubble. This is consumerism as a god. It promises fulfilment through acquisition, identity through brands, and security through wealth. But it is a fickle and demanding deity.

The psychological cost of this worship is what many now call consumer burnout. It is a state of chronic exhaustion, cynicism, and a pervasive sense of emptiness that arises from the relentless pressure to acquire and compare. The hedonic treadmill, a concept well-established in psychology, describes our tendency to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative life events. A new car, a bigger house, the latest smartphone—they all provide a temporary jolt of satisfaction, a dopamine hit that quickly fades, leaving us needing the next, bigger, better thing to feel the same rush. This endless cycle of desire and disappointment is the liturgy of the consumer god, and it leads not to lasting happiness, but to anxiety, debt, and a profound sense of meaninglessness.

Research by psychologists Ed Diener and colleagues has shown that whilst people do experience temporary increases in happiness after positive events like winning the lottery or getting a promotion, they typically return to their baseline level of well-being within a relatively short period. The problem is not that material goods provide no pleasure—they do—but that they cannot provide lasting meaning. When consumerism becomes our god, we are chasing a satisfaction that is, by its very nature, fleeting. We work jobs we dislike to buy things we don't need to impress people we don't like. It is a hollow pursuit, a spiritual dead end.

The tragedy is that many people only realise this after decades of faithful service to the consumer god. They reach the pinnacle of material success only to discover that the view from the top is not what they expected. The house is bigger, but it feels emptier. The wardrobe is fuller, but the soul is more impoverished. This is the inevitable outcome when we place a finite good—material wealth—in the position of an infinite concern.

The God of the Tribe: Political Ideology

Perhaps no modern god is more voracious than that of political ideology. In an age of declining religious affiliation and fragmenting communities, many people have turned to politics to find the sense of identity, belonging, and moral certainty that were once provided by faith. Political tribes offer a clear-cut world of heroes and villains, of in-groups and out-groups. They provide a shared narrative, a common enemy, and a sense of righteous purpose. The psychological mechanism at play here is what researchers call identity fusion, a visceral feeling of oneness with a group where the boundaries between the self and the collective blur.

As the evolutionary psychologist Robert Lynch has noted, this fusion can be a powerful force for cooperation, but it has a profoundly dark side. When a political ideology becomes our ultimate concern, it triggers our most primitive tribal instincts. Our capacity for reason is hijacked by our need to belong. We engage in motivated reasoning, uncritically accepting information that confirms our tribe's narrative and aggressively rejecting anything that challenges it. Studies by psychologist Leor Zmigrod at the University of Cambridge have found that cognitive inflexibility—the inability to adapt one's thinking in response to new information—is a strong predictor of extremist attitudes, including a willingness to endorse violence against out-groups.

This is the path to dehumanisation. Opponents are no longer people with different opinions; they are malevolent, sub-human enemies who must be defeated, silenced, or eliminated. The Rwandan genocide, where Hutu extremists used radio broadcasts to label their Tutsi neighbours as "cockroaches" before slaughtering them by the hundreds of thousands, is a horrifying testament to where this path leads. The language of dehumanisation—"vermin," "animals," "parasites"—has a dark and consistent history. It precedes atrocity. It is the linguistic preparation for violence.

Whilst our current political climate may seem far removed from such atrocities, the underlying psychological process is the same. When we elevate a political tribe to the status of a god, we are playing with the fire of our most dangerous evolutionary inheritance. Online discourse is increasingly characterised by this dehumanising language. Comment sections are rife with explicit descriptions of political opponents as "sub-human" or "non-human." The ease with which we can dismiss the humanity of those who disagree with us is a warning sign. It suggests that for many, political ideology has become not just a set of policy preferences, but an ultimate concern, a god that demands absolute loyalty and justifies any means.

The antidote to this pathology is not political disengagement, but a proper ordering of values. When our ultimate concern is something higher than our tribe—a commitment to truth, to human dignity, to the imago Dei in every person—we can participate in politics without being consumed by it. We can advocate for our beliefs without demonising those who disagree. We can be passionate without being possessed.

The God of the Self: Narcissism

Finally, we come to the most seductive and perhaps most destructive idol of our time: the self. In a culture that champions radical individualism, self-expression, and personal autonomy as the highest goods, it is little wonder that many of us have made ourselves the centre of our own universe. The self-as-god promises ultimate freedom and control. It whispers that our feelings are the ultimate authority, that our desires are self-justifying, and that our personal happiness is the most important goal in life.

The rise of social media has poured fuel on this fire, creating a global stage for the performance of the self. We curate idealised versions of our lives, chasing likes and followers as validation of our worth. This has contributed to what many psychologists have termed a narcissism epidemic. Narcissism, in this context, is not just vanity; it is a psychological state characterised by an inflated sense of self-importance, a deep need for excessive attention and admiration, troubled relationships, and a lack of empathy for others. Research by psychologists Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell has documented a significant rise in narcissistic traits amongst young people over recent decades, correlating with the rise of social media and a cultural emphasis on self-esteem above all else.

The individual who worships at the altar of self becomes fragile, hypersensitive to criticism, and incapable of the kind of self-transcendence that Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, identified as the true source of human meaning. Frankl's story is one of the most powerful refutations of the self-as-god that we possess. Between 1942 and 1945, Frankl was imprisoned in four Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz. He endured unimaginable suffering, lost his wife, parents, and brother, and witnessed daily atrocities that would break most people. Yet he not only survived, but emerged with a profound insight into the nature of human resilience.

In his seminal book Man's Search for Meaning, Frankl argued powerfully against the idea that self-actualisation is the ultimate goal. Based on his experiences in the camps, he observed that the people most likely to survive were not those who were physically strongest, nor those who were most focused on their own survival or happiness. Rather, they were those who had a purpose outside of themselves—a loved one to return to, a work to complete, a meaning to fulfil. Frankl wrote, "It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future… And this is his salvation in the most difficult moments of his existence, although he sometimes has to force his mind to the task."

Frankl described one particularly harrowing moment when he was forced to march through the frozen countryside, his feet covered in open wounds, his body emaciated from starvation. In that moment of extreme suffering, he began to think of his wife, not knowing she had already been killed in another camp. He imagined her face, her smile, her presence. He realised, in that instant, that love transcends the physical presence of the beloved. The meaning he derived from that love, from that connection to something beyond himself, gave him the strength to take the next step, and the next, and the next. This is the power of self-transcendence. This is what happens when our ultimate concern is not the self, but something infinitely greater.

When the self is the highest value, life becomes a closed loop. We become trapped in the echo chamber of our own needs and desires, and the inevitable sufferings of life become not opportunities for growth, but intolerable personal insults. The god of self is a cruel master, promising everything and delivering only a fragile, anxious, and ultimately empty existence. As Frankl observed, "Mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become." When the self is god, there is no "ought," no "should," no call from beyond the self. There is only the tyranny of our own desires, which are never satisfied.

The Architecture of Order

The First Commandment, then, is not an arbitrary rule. It is a profound insight into the architecture of human cognition and the necessary conditions for psychological and social stability. It makes the radical claim that our lives are ordered, or disordered, from the top down. The nature of our ultimate commitment—our ‘god’—determines the stability of everything else. If our god is money, we will be subject to the boom and bust of the market. If our god is a political tribe, we will be swept away by the tides of polarisation and hatred. If our god is the self, we will be crushed by the burden of our own finitude and fragility.

Choose your ‘God’ wisely because it will ruin or rule your life.

The command to have no other gods is an invitation to build our lives on a foundation that is truly ultimate, truly transcendent, and truly good. It is a call to orient ourselves around a reality that is not subject to the whims of the market, the passions of the tribe, or the insecurities of the ego. For the ancient Israelites, and for Christians today, that reality is the God revealed in scripture—a God of love, justice, and mercy, who created humanity for a purpose that transcends the self. This God is not a projection of human desires, but the source of all being, the ground of all value, the ultimate reality to which all lesser realities point.

But even for those who do not share this faith, the psychological principle holds true. As the late author David Foster Wallace put it in his famous commencement speech, "There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship… is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive."

Wallace went on to describe the consequences of worshipping the wrong gods with brutal honesty: "If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you… Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out."

This is not religious moralising; it is psychological observation. The gods we choose shape the lives we live. They determine what we see, what we value, what we pursue, and ultimately, who we become. The Law of Primacy forces us to confront the most important question of our lives: What sits on the throne of our hearts? What is our ultimate concern?

For whatever we place there, that will be our god. And that god will shape everything. The quality of our relationships, the resilience of our mental health, the depth of our joy, the meaning we find in suffering, the legacy we leave behind—all of it flows from this single, foundational choice. When the highest value is unstable or false, everything beneath it fractures. But when the highest value is truly ultimate, truly good, truly transcendent, it provides an unshakeable foundation for a life of genuine flourishing.

This is why the First Commandment comes first. It is not just chronologically first in the list; it is logically first in the architecture of human well-being. Get this right, and everything else has a chance to fall into place. Get this wrong, and no amount of effort in other areas can compensate for the fundamental instability at the core. The Law of Primacy is not a restriction; it is a liberation. It frees us from the tyranny of false gods and invites us into the stability of true worship.

The Practical Test

How, then, do we identify our true god? How do we know what sits at the apex of our value hierarchy? The answer is simpler than we might think, though often uncomfortable to confront. Our god is revealed not by what we say we value, but by what we actually do. It is revealed in how we spend our time, our money, and our mental energy. It is revealed in what makes us anxious, what makes us angry, and what we cannot imagine living without.

Consider your own life for a moment. What is the first thing you think about when you wake up in the morning? What occupies your mind during idle moments? What would devastate you if you lost it? What do you sacrifice other goods to obtain or maintain? These questions are diagnostic. They reveal the functional god of your life, which may be quite different from the god you profess to worship.

A person may claim that family is their highest value, but if they consistently sacrifice time with their children for career advancement, their functional god is professional success. A person may claim to value health, but if they consistently choose immediate gratification over long-term well-being, their functional god is pleasure. A person may claim to value truth, but if they consistently consume only media that confirms their existing beliefs, their functional god is ideological certainty. The gap between our professed values and our revealed values is often vast, and it is in this gap that much of our psychological suffering resides.

This is not to suggest that career, pleasure, or certainty are bad things. They are not. They are good things. The problem arises when good things are made into ultimate things. When a ‘good thing’ becomes a ‘god thing’, it becomes a ‘bad thing’. It demands a level of devotion and provides a level of meaning that it was never designed to carry. The result is inevitable disappointment, anxiety, and a sense of existential fragility.

The Christian answer to this dilemma is not to eliminate these lesser goods, but to properly order them beneath an ultimate good that is truly capable of bearing the weight of our worship. When God—the infinite, eternal, all-good Creator—is placed at the apex of our value hierarchy, all other goods find their proper place. Career becomes a calling, a means of serving others and stewarding our gifts, rather than a source of identity. Pleasure becomes a gift to be enjoyed with gratitude, rather than a god to be pursued at all costs. Relationships become opportunities for love and service, rather than vehicles for our own validation. Even suffering can be integrated into a meaningful narrative when it is understood within the context of a larger purpose. (Arguably, it may be the only way to integrate suffering–a natural condition of the world– properly and effectively.)

This is not merely theoretical. It has been tested in the most extreme circumstances imaginable. Frankl's observations in the concentration camps were not abstract philosophical musings; they were empirical observations of what actually sustained human beings in the face of unimaginable horror. Those who had an ultimate concern that transcended their immediate circumstances—a God to pray to, a loved one to return to, a work to complete—were more likely to survive. Those whose ultimate concern was their own comfort, their own survival, their own self, were more likely to succumb to despair.

One of Frankl's most powerful examples was of a fellow prisoner who had a dream that the war would end on a specific date. As that date approached, the man's hope grew. But when the date came and went, and the war continued, the man's hope collapsed. He fell ill and died shortly thereafter. Frankl observed that it was not the physical conditions that killed him—many others survived in the same conditions—but the loss of his future, the collapse of his meaning. His hope had been placed in a finite thing—a specific date—rather than in something transcendent. When that finite hope failed, he had nothing left to sustain him.

Contrast this with Frankl's own experience. His hope was not pinned to a specific date or outcome, but to a larger sense of meaning and purpose. Even in the midst of suffering, he was able to find moments of profound beauty and significance. He described one evening when, after a brutal day of forced labour, the prisoners were marched back to camp. The sunset was spectacular, and despite their exhaustion and pain, the prisoners stopped to admire it. Someone remarked on its beauty, and for a moment, they were not prisoners, not victims, but human beings capable of appreciating beauty, of transcending their circumstances. This is the power of a properly ordered value hierarchy. It allows us to find meaning even in suffering, beauty even in darkness, hope even in despair.

The Path Forward

The Law of Primacy, then, is both a diagnosis and a prescription. It diagnoses the fundamental problem of human existence: we are worshipping creatures who will inevitably place something at the centre of our lives, and the quality of that central commitment determines the quality of everything else. It prescribes the solution: place at the centre something that is truly ultimate, truly transcendent, truly good.

For the Christian, this means placing the God of the Bible at the apex of the value hierarchy. It means recognising that we were created by a good God, for a good purpose, and that our deepest fulfilment comes not from serving ourselves, but from serving Him and, through Him, serving others. It means understanding that the commandment to have no other gods is not a restriction on our freedom, but a revelation of the conditions necessary for genuine freedom. We are most free when we are rightly ordered, when our loves are properly arranged, when our worship is directed towards that which is truly worthy of worship.

But even for those who do not share this faith, the psychological principle remains valid. The question is not whether you will worship, but what you will worship. Choose carefully. Your god will shape your life. It will determine what you see, what you value, what you pursue, and who you become. Choose a god that is too small, and you will live a small life, characterised by anxiety, fragility, and eventual collapse. Choose a god that is truly ultimate, and you will have a foundation that can withstand the storms of life, a source of meaning that cannot be taken from you, and a hope that endures even in the darkest night.

The First Commandment is not the beginning of a list of arbitrary rules. It is the foundation of a comprehensive vision of human flourishing. It is the recognition that we are not self-sufficient, self-creating, self-sustaining beings. We are creatures who need something beyond ourselves to orient our lives, to give us meaning, to call us towards something greater than our own immediate desires. When we acknowledge this need and direct our worship towards that which is truly worthy, we discover not restriction, but liberation. Not burden, but rest. Not slavery, but freedom.

This is the Law of Primacy. And it is the beginning of wisdom.