Re: OT: American Politics
Anyone read Sapiens by Yuval Harari? Its a very interesting read about the history of our species and how we got here.
It changed my perspective on religion. Religion has absolutely caused a ton of damage throughout history, but his argument is it is also one of the most important developments in the rise of our species. Essentially the argument is humans are genetically programmed to live in small communities of 150 or less, which we did for most of human history. What allowed us to exceed our genetic limitations and cooperate on a global level is our ability to communicate about things that do not actually exist e.g. god, money, corporations, rights. No other species has shown the ability to do this. Other primates can communicate about things which exist, or even lie about things which exist, for example monkeys have been observed yelling "LION" when there is no lion to scare other monkeys away from food. However, humans are the only ones that have evidence of mythology which goes back 100,000 years to cave drawings of humans with lion heads etc. This includes other human species.
The ability to communicate about myths allowed the creation common ground and trust between different small human tribes to cooperate in larger and larger groups. It created goals beyond the survival of your tribe. This trust extended beyond language barriers, geographic barriers. This allowed sapiens to come together and trade, worship, build structures like Stone Henge or Gobeckli Tepe, and that opened pandora's box. Trade leads to a currency, which leads to specialization, to the point where we have a market driven world entirely based on trust between a small number of large tribes.
His definition of religion is broad and includes things like capitalism, liberalism etc. which are far more powerful today than theistic religions. People have historically, and continue, to exploit religion for personal gain, however, religion is also fundamentally important to humans evolving much faster than our genetics allow.
Anyway great book.
