Chapter three of the book opens on a joke that is not a joke, and it reframes everything the human brain is proud of. In Nevzorov's words.
Only by carrying a second ass in your head could you rack up such an unappetizing history and end up with such pitiful results in the development of the species.
Nevzorov // The Origin of Genius and Fascism
The cherries and the cake
The rovers and colliders we point to as proof of our minds are, he says, "cute little things" - but "merely the cherries on a big cake made of Auschwitzes and TV series." Lift the cherries off and "the cake will not even notice." Yet man "admires his brain, takes pride in mummies, rockets, and soda pop. He is certain there is an 'inner cosmos,' a 'soul.'" Nevzorov's flat correction: "Of course, he has been masterfully deceived."
The myth-generator
He dates the deception. About 5,200 years ago in Mesopotamia the record of civilization began - "at the same moment the generator of the myth about the 'mystery' of man switched on along with it," and "has been rattling away ever since." Before the cuneiform there were only puzzlements - "earthquakes, mudflows, echoes, landslides, geysers, ordinary lightning and ball lightning" - that the brain "could not offer correct explanations for and, as is its habit, bred potent chimeras."
Where the gods came from
Then speech arrived, and "the most perverse application was found for it at once." The conclusion is characteristically blunt:
The natural feeble-mindedness of the people of that time simply could not fail to give birth to gods.
Nevzorov // The Origin of Genius and Fascism
That is the wrinkled organ NOX puts on the table: not a temple of the inner cosmos, but a survival machine that mistakes its own chimeras for revelation. Take the cherries off. Look at the cake.