The Christian idea is to create high trust by extending kinship ‘love’ to non-kin, by ignoring our animal impulses evolved for status competition and accumulation, thereby reducing the friction of familism, clannishness and tribalism, and increasing the velocity of cooperation.
By attributing status to the extension of kinship love to non-kin, Christian groups eliminate the possibility of gaining status by ‘cheating’ in favor of the family or tribe. Although this means that many Mediterranean Catholics practice low trust chirstianity by retaining familial insurance and kin selection. While protestant Christians eliminate even familial insurance via the absolute nuclear family.
This behavior is necessary for the development of an advanced economy. And it separates the west and Japan from the rest.
This high trust behavior is also the opposite of the Levantine religions which advocate dualist, polylogical ethics by exacerbating kin selection at the tribal level even while eliminating it at the familial level. So we can see lowest-trust Islam, next-lowest trust Judaism, low trust catholicism, and high trust Protestantism. And when we order them this way we see that this order reflects the number of territorial competitors.
It is also (probably) true that westerners are less genetically biased against outsiders (due to more circumpolar hunter-gatherer evolutionary pressures) and less aggressive (lower testosterone) and more able to take advantage of it (higher average verbal IQ).
But all that means is that westerners are more fertile genetic ground for extension of kinship love to non-kin.
The church outlawing cousin marriage in order to break up the great families was equally influential.
So it is one thing to acknowledge the central subtle principle of Christianity, and to grasp its dramatic economic and political benefits, and quite another to conflate the dogma, rules and justifications as other than primitive law.
Cheers
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine
Source: Curt Doolittle