WTF is social? Religion

This blog is part of a series.  WTF is social?  Using Human Completeness as the core ability of the human brain, we examine various facets of social life and how communication technology and size of social circle,  impact our ability to be socially effective.

Religion, Gods and Humanity 

People have been fighting for as long as they have been people. In fact fighting with others is main use case for being people/group in the first place, instead of a lone wolf. Religion then seems to be a saviour. Seems to come from some frustrated soul asking "why can’t people be nice to each other?” But when we make people try to be nice to everyone, trust and help each other, what we get is a dumb society. And a dumb society is a great resource for someone smart. It is Kalyug all the time and it is rightly so because it can't be anything else. The social animal is not a nice animal. The social animal is not even just self interested. Social animal is self interested considering the self interest of others but only upto a point. After that point, the animal is gone and we are left with something abstract, classifiable, easily comparable, computable, less human, ununderstandable.   

  

God didn’t make us in his image. We made God in our own image. All kinds of Gods get angry, help, are just, listen to our prayers, get jealous, feel insulted, seek revenge, want to teach a lesson, etc. It couldn’t have been any other way simply because it would be hard to even communicate it and make it understandable to most humans. The easiest thing to tell a human is something about another human or something humanlike.  This to some extent also explains why it is easy to teach new religion than to say teach democracy or rule of law or even physics or calculus or economics because they just don’t make much sense to the social mind or the savage mind or the uncivil mind. And they shouldn’t! Most of our evolution has been spent negotiating the power relations among each other, figuring out what can and cannot be said, what can and cannot be done, and where. Anything that isn't rooted in the fundamental premise of social living, should appear useless or at least not too important to human brain. 

Next: Being Human at scale

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