Theme: Cooperation

The Central Problem of Religion is Cost.

In my work, I have found, that the central problem of religion, that is solved by the imaginary device of all knowing gods, is very difficult to replace in a wide distribution: a normal population. This is in no small part to differences in abilities of the classes, no small part to differences in needs of the classes, and in no small part to the differences in the costs of each form of education of the classes.

FUNCTIONS

1) Truthfulness: an all knowing god makes it harder to lie to one’s self and therefore to others.

2) Mindfulness: Monotheistic Prayer, Buddhist meditation, Japanese Ritual, Stoic Discipline

3) Extension of Kinship Trust Beyond Kin: Church/temple submission of self in emotional, intellectual, and status-signal safety, invokes the pack’s response.

4) Feast and Festival: provides the pack’s feast-response in relative safety.

5) Replication of Group Evolutionary Strategy: All religions contain an value judgments that produce a competitive evolutionary strategy (either moral or immoral) including a method of resistance to change. Ritual and myth transfer these strategies across generations, tribes, clans, families, and classes.

6) The west is unique in that our mythos are not conflated into a single corpus but reflect the three possible means of coercion, and the three classes that specialize in those forms of coercion:

– Force/Avoidance of Punishment – Military, Legislation , Rule

– Trade/Gain or Loss of Opportunity – Commerce and Contract Law

– Gossip/Ostracization from Insurance – Religion and Cultural Law

Of these methods Stoicism is the least false and most utilitarian. Shitoism is the next, buddhism the next, and the monotheistic religions are largely comprised entirely of falsehoods that serve the purpose of trust building at lower cost of education, training, and practice.

By and large the Greek and Roman methods were superior in that they held the most promise of least falsehood. But they evolved for a mixed martial managerial class and ‘slave’ clerical and laboring classes. As the population of underclasses expanded under the empire, just as we have recently seen under the american empire, standards are lowered in education, law, politics, and religion to assist in the management of expanding underclasses.

The question is, can we train large underclasses in expensive methods of truthful tools of compensating for post-tribal life, or will we see the expansion of false religions with little room for variation as a cheaper method of ruling large underclass populations. Or will we discover some newer method of ruling large underclass populations.

We europeans, and anglos in particular, forget that we have been misled for centuries. We are members of a very old civilization that has systematically hung or starved large numbers of our underclasses for millennia, leaving nearly all modern europeans as descendants of the middle genetic class. And in addition we’ve had over five hundred years if not a thousand, training a middle class to imitate the aristocracy.

The reason that the warmer climates are populated by failed states, is that they have not been able to reduce the scale of their underclasses such that the local means of production can be used to create a voluntary organization of production (economy), sufficient to drag the people out of ignorance, disease, and poverty.

One of the principle problems is that trustworthiness declines with abilities, as does the ability to trust. this lack of trust impedes the spread of risk taking. For this reason, there is a relatively low limit to the further compression of the world’s relative poverty in countries where the scale of the underclass is prohibitively costly.

What this all means is that while we replaced the greek and roman religions with lower cost religions for the expanding underclasses, with more deceitful religious dogmas. And while various europeans countered with the anglo empirical and continental moral enlightenments a millennia later in various countries and forms. And while the Cosmopolitan Jews countered with a new pseudoscientific ‘secular’ religion (Boaz, Marx, Freud, Adorno+, Cantor-Keynes, Strauss, Rand/Rothbard), and while we are in the midst of countering their pseudoscientific religion thanks to late 20th century genetic and cognitive science, it seems as though we are no closer to reforming our education so that we neither teach cosmopolitan pseudoscience, or continental pseudo-rationalism, or the anglo fallacy of the possibility of an aristocracy of everyone.

We cannot extinguish the lies of the great religions without providing a means of creating the necessary behaviors that religions have provided.

Sure, its fraudulent product, but it does the job, with extraordinarily damaging external consequences.

That doesn’t mean atheism is a replacement. It means we have failed to find one other than to look back to stoicism. (I mean, the church of TED is another bastion of pseudoscience, that is very popular with the educated left. But it is very hard to sit through most of that nonsense without feeling as offended as the secularists feel about the mystics.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev Ukraine.