Once humans started to eat cooked food and therefore were able to extract much more energy from plants and meat and store it in an easier way, they could afford a brain that consumes up to 30% of the total energy.
Now, the early humans started to try to make sense of the things around them. Since they couldn’t see the wind or illnesses and therefore couldn’t know about them and because it is really annoying to not know why certain things happen – and humans seem to be unable to say “I don’t know” – they invented gods, ghosts and spirits. It is no accident that alcohol is called “spirit” – it makes you see things that are not real…
While drugs can make you think further or even enhance your creativity – they also blur the line between what’s real and what just resides in your individual brain.
Now you can think of religions as stories. They are being worked on and improved over generations. People traveling get in contact with new ideas, new stories and they take the best parts of them and implement them in their own stories. This improves the fitness of a story. The less fit ones will be forgotten and eventually die out (the meaning of “fitness” in this context: explaining reality better / more attractive / more emotional; whatever makes a story go viral).
In that light, you have to look at the tree of evolution (click and enlarge to read the text):
Game Theory
Social studies have concluded, that the ability of a single individual to control and manage other members of the tribe caps out right around 160 members.
But if you provide an alpha human with some tools and helpers, he can go far beyond that. Furthermore, if you add a medicine man and an invisible man in the sky who sees and hears everything – this alpha can suddenly control thousands of individuals who are being streamlined into following the orders of the “man in the sky” who you cannot argue with since he is all powerful, all knowing and has even created you.
Now this is when and how co-evolution started between humans and religion. The most successful stories garnered the biggest and strongest tribes around them. A tribe of 5,000 can easily defeat the surrounding tribes of a few hundred. Take their wives and children, indoctrinate them into the new religion, and you will see the tribe grow even faster and bigger. And: if you were skeptical and didn’t believe or second-guessed the elders, you got evicted from the tribe, which eventually led to death – if you were not killed right away.
This is most probably the reason for some of our cognitive biases: we do have a tendency to invent / believe in gods and other dogmas. And we want to blend in with the tribe and are even willing to sacrifice our own beliefs to achieve that. Our life depended on it…
If you believe this is a thing of the past, think again. The big religions are still very powerful, although they are being slowly replaced by political and (pseudo-)scientific dogmas like communism of Chinese and Russian coloring, capitalism of Keynesian coloring, fascism, totalitarian and/or oligarchical systems (USA), veganism, neoliberal leftism (very dangerous, since they are selling their dogma with “good intentions”, feeling they’re on a moral high-ground). The list continues on and on… Also conspiracy theories that are not true (like chemtrails and flat earth) belong in that category. Everything that is forced upon us by those who are truly in power, those who you are not allowed to question under the threat of severe punishment and social separation, loss of rank, position and salary – there is usually where you find the truth of tomorrow or after tomorrow…
Think about it for a moment before you continue to read. What stories are currently being forced upon us relentlessly, which you cannot question despite the lack of reliable evidence?
Pause and think about it….
The things that come to my mind are:
- Climate change (separate case study coming up)
- Political correctness
- WTC7 & 9/11 (separate case study coming up)
- The subsequent wars against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and now Iran (separate case study coming up)
- Number of Jews killed during the holocaust (while the holocaust itself is INHO undeniable, the actual number is and has to be very much debatable. The reason for it is science and objective reality. First of all, the number “6 million Jews” seems to have already existed 10-20 years before the World War II and, second of all, it violates the laws of physics (the maximum physical capacity of the ovens tops out at around 1 million if running 24/7/365). There is in no way any POSITIVE PROOF of 6 million Jews having been killed during the holocaust. The holocaust is becoming a religious construct of its own… Therefore we must be allowed to question this number and scientifically examine it, without being called an anti-Semite. As far as I’m concerned: we are all HUMANS. I couldn’t care less about your sex, color, origin, religion etc. I do have Jewish friends and I regard the Jews, on average, smarter than most people. However, they also rank higher on my narcissism index, due to their religious culture that makes them “the chosen ones” supremacists. The Americans have this tendency too. IMHO, that is total BS – but I guess we have to live with that for a few more generations. (More on this in a separate case study coming up.)
- Sex is a social construct
- Epstein committed suicide
- Censorship/ghosting on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google, Apple, and other social media outlets
- Propaganda and lying by omission on all major news outlets
- Etc.
Please write your comments & other taboo topics in the comments section below…