I think it’s interesting how cults’ self-imposed isolation from outside memespace inverts their error-correcting mechanisms. Their incorrect beliefs conflict with reality. Instead of admitting wrongness, they double-down and tighten their self-imposed isolation.
This feedback loop is why independently-spawned cults with different professed beliefs converge to similar phenotypes. For example, they get confused and lash out when you say something like “You are factually incorrect, but I’m going to be nice to you out of a sense of basic decency”, because they’ve doubled-down on “outsiders are the enemy” so many times.
It makes me wonder why the Latter Day Saints (Mormons) didn’t implode during their early formation. If cults self-destruct because they have an autoimmune reaction to outside ideas, then I wonder if the greatest benefit of LDS missionary service isn’t recruiting new members, but instead dirtying their children with outside memespace to prevent an autoimmune reaction when they mature.
I’ve long had a hobby-level interest in the sociology of religion. It helps understand humans to understand this “human universal” process.
Also it might help one think clearly-or-better about theological or philosophic ideas if you can detangle the metaphysical claims and insights that specific culturally isolated groups had uniquely vs independently (and then correlate “which groups had which ideas” together with “which groups had which sociological features”).
In the sociology of religion, some practitioners use “cult” to mark “a religion that is nonstandard for its geographic region and historical period”. So “Hinduism” in 1970s San Francisco is (arguably (by this definition)) “a cult” while a nominally identical “Hinduism” in India in the 1970s is “traditional” and “not a cult”. By this metric, anything other than Mormonism is “a cult” in Utah.
If you really want to be “traditional” (rather than “culty” or “unchurched”), and move to Utah, arguably you should convert to Mormonism?! Arguably?
(I’ve looked into the evidence on “the churched having better life outcomes vs the unchurched” and that sociological evidence seems to mostly hold up, even for really crazy and bad-seeming-from-outside religions. It isn’t a certain and 100% reliable claim, but a pretty good model of this stuff is that you’ll have better health, financial, and educational outcomes from being churched almost no matter what the doctrines are simply because social cohesion is just thatgood.)
A key point in Mormon cultural evolution was that, in 1890, the leaders of Mormonism were “spoken to by God” and the entire church gave up on polygamy, then in 1896 Utah joined the United States of America with reasonably harmonious marriage laws (with polygamy banned in the old and new states both).
That is a reasonably good proxy for “the historical period and geographic region where Mormonism stopped being a cult”.
Modern Mormons can somewhat safely use “being called polygamists” as a proxy for their critic being mindlessly downstream of standard boring random “anti-Mormon sentiment” because that criticism hasn’t hasn’t even been true for well over a century.
(A wrinkle here: I suspect based on mechanistic priors that there might have some some schistmatic movements to retain polygamy in some less connected subgroups? So sectarian “Mormonisms” might exist out in the boonies in various places that still have polygamy in practice? The “polygamy thing” is the “older and weirder” version. Usually, in the overall sociology of schismatic movements, such movements start with religious innovation on a generational time scale from the top down (as elite desires for doctrines shift over the decades), and then some of the lower reaches of the religion reject the change and “keep to the old ways” by formally schisming (with a new entrepreneurial leadership structure but “old seeming” doctrines) the claims on both sides to be “the real thing”. Giving up on polygamy would, logically, have been a natural juncture point for schisms.)
It makes me wonder why the Latter Day Saints (Mormons) didn’t implode during their early formation.
This was a very reasonable thought! In fact, it almost kind of happened!
The “Battle Near Blue River” of 1833 was an early scuffle (3 dead, 1 of whom was Mormon) that gained enough mythic weight to have a name like that.
In 1838 the first “Mormon War” (composed of multiple battles) occurred in Missouri.
The second Mormon War was fought from 1844-1846 proximate to Nauvoo, Illinois.
Prior to these, there were was conflict in Ohio and farther back also in New York State that caused emigration “to the west” each time they occurred, but these early cycles of “tribo-cultural hostility” (to make up a word off the top of my head) just weren’t called “wars” with the same mythic model...
The violent death of the founder in Carthage, Illinois, is arguably “OG Mormonism imploding and a new thing arising from the ashes” and that’s when Brigham Young became the official leader of the central cluster of Mormons and moved to Utah.
(I didn’t realize this until I read this wikipedia article just now, but since Joseph Smith was technically running for President at the the time of his killing by an angry mob, he might be the first candidate for POTUS to be assassinated!)
If I had infinite research budget and a time travel machine, one of the things I’d be interested in doing is scrying the period from 1872 to 1896, when “the culty era of Mormonism” seemed to end “somehow” and presumably “for reasons”?
Sociologists of religion have multiple competing theories for the mechanism when this sort of thing happens (though I don’t know if any of the mechanisms apply to Mormonism specifically in the era when it seems to have chilled out a lot).
One of the proposed mechanisms is (paraphrasing) “religious lifestyles cause child raising to work BETTER, and the success of later generations is because of the religious doctrines being ‘good’, but then this success causes the kids to want to change the doctrines in various ways (since they become elite, and start wanting what elites normally want (like different status goods, less veneration of poverty and charity and dancing with snakes and so on, and more ability to profitably affiliate with business partners outside of the religion)) and that causes the top-down changes and the schism-from-below”.
In the 1980s Bainbridge & Stark (who I tend to use as my default general model in the absence of better and more local models) proposed an alternative theory as part of a larger book that claims (paraphrasing again) “maybe the people who need crazy religions are just unusually weird humans, and maybe their kids get ‘better’, and less needful of a weird religion, because of simple regression to the mean”.
Of course, it could logically be a bit of both… plus other factors. Its hard to say in general :-)
Everton, in 2005, tried to replicate and re-test the “regression to the mean” theory with the alternative “actually, good doctrines are good” theory as something that could hypothetically show up in the data based on how the data was sampled and analyzed, and found some evidence that sorta agrees with regression, and some evidence that maybe “(Conservative?) Protestantism” has some extra mojo of some kind that actually causes better intergenerational outcomes than you’d expect just from regression to the mean? Basically he got “its probably complicated”. Everton’s paper is here.
One possible line to draw between “religions” and “cults” is how much they depend on recruiting new people / how much they burn out the existing ones. Whether they can live with a stable population—of course, many religions would be happy to take more converts, but what happens when they can’t, and they need to spend a few decades with the existing ones (and their children) only—or whether people are so damaged by being in the group that recruiting new ones and discarding the old ones is necessary for the group to function.
For example, you can have stable Catholic or Protestant populations. But Scientology depends on new people giving all their money to the group, then working hard for a few years until they get burned out, and when they become a burden on the group and their performance statistics become bad and no amount of punishment can fix that, they get kicked out. So an isolated population of Scientologists on some island would soon run out of money, and then gradually also run out of people.
I think the early Mormons had a lot of dynamic like “the old high-status guys take many young wives; the young incel boys get a lot of abuse in hope that they will rebel which will give the group a pretext for kicking them out”. Monogamy stabilized this a lot, but the question is what exactly caused the old high-status guys to change the rules. Did the young guys who stayed in the group long enough remember how bad it was, and instead of enjoying that it’s finally their turn, they decided to change the rule? Or was it something else?
(Also, from this perspective, Zizians without new recruits would run out of members in a decade.)
I’ve followed this line of thinking a bit. As near as I can tell, the logic of “evolutionary memetics” suggests that parent-to-child belief transmission should face the same selective pressures as parent-to-child gene transmission.
Indeed, if you go hunting around, it turns out that there are a lot of old religions whose doctrines simply include the claim that it is impossible for outsiders to join the religion, and pointless to spread it, since the theology itself suggests that you can only be born into it. This is, plausibly, a way for the memes to make the hosts not waste energy on anything except transmission to progeny.
Quite a few “Hinduisms” work this way, if you squint, although there have often been religious entrepreneurs who were willing to pretend that foreigner/outsiders LARPing as new members of their old religion might perhaps at least get those foreigners the ability to be reincarnated as proper real Hindus. Once communication and resources are flowing, further evangelism and memetic innovation can get pretty weird pretty fast.
Still, for myself, as someone with no coherent familial religious inputs (all four grandparents had wildly different beliefs, as did both parents) I generally up-weight the likelihood that particular doctrines are healthy based on the degree to which their source community rejects evangelism. If two or three non-evangelical religions have convergently evolved the same pragmatic ideas (norms or educational processes or visualization techniques or whatever), then the ideas are plausibly worthy of a second look and some practical experiments <3
To clarify, I don’t see evangelism as a problem per se, but I see it as a problem when the community needs evangelism to survive—e.g. because the existing members get burned out and are discarded.
A difference between a symbiont and a predator, kind of.
That makes sense as a “reasonable take”, but having thought about this for a long time from an “evolutionary systems” perspective, I think that any memeplex-or-geneplex which is evangelical (not based on parent-to-child transmission) is intrinsically suspicious in the same way that we call genetic material that goes parent-to-child “the genome” and we call genetic material that goes peer-to-peer “a virus”.
Among the subtype of “virus that preys on bacteria” (called “bacteriophage” or just “phages”) there is a thing called a “prophage” which integrates into a host, and then rides parent-to-child for many generations, and then (usually triggered by stress responses (and radiation is a pretty reliable stressor to induce this in a lab)), the prophage causes descendant bacteria to re-express the “viral form” of the prophage, and explode in a suicidal/evangelical frenzy.
The only hope that most hosts infected by prophages have is for the full genome of the infection to mutate in a small number of generations, so that the “lytic machinery” (that causes suicidal evangelism) breaks before a trigger occurs, so that when the trigger does happen, the host survives, while keeping the symbiotic genes.
(((This is probably THE KEY SOURCE of nearly ALL non-trivial upgrades to large genomes with slow evolutionary cycles. For example, something vaguely similar probably is the source of the “V(D)J Combinatorial Immune System” that has existed in our ancestors all the way back to the common ancestor of “humans and sharks but not lampreys”. The VDJ system uses genes with a clear viral provenance to construct antibodies, and so it is reasonable to suppose that (1) some lamprey-like-thing was infected with a virus, (2) the virus integrated with the genome for a few generations and then left over and over, (3) the virus evolved a helpful way of fighting off other parasites (possibly because “having a proto-mouth with a proto-jaw and preying on lots of different species is an intrinsically dirty life strategy”), (4) in some lamprey-and-shark-like-ancestor (keyword “gnathostomata”) the viral machinery for the half-symbiotic virus to escape the genome broke, and (5) all subsequent descendants (or from-our-perspective-as-humans all subsequent “post-shark ancestors”) have kept this “former symbiotic viral subsystem” as a super badass immune system for remembering entire clades of infectious or harmful things and fighting them off based on remembering “how they smell” via antibodies, that could be tweaked into slightly more useful shapes over the next ~400 million years.)))
There is some debate about the details, and it is hard to be sure because most sub-varieties of these viruses are never-seen-before because there are probably still millions or billions of unobserved prophage species in the total life system of Earth still...
However, as a general pattern, the “horizontal/vertical incentive difference pattern” is so durable and clean that nearly all prophages internalize it, and express very different genes depending on “which mode” they are in.
Compare and contrast: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the future itself by not volunteering for holy jihad based on stuff that was in books your great-granddad was tricked into believing in and passing on to his descendants as a family philosophy, for thereby one can meekly avoid being foolishly inspired to join an army and eventually have their genome erased from all of future biology forever when they are Killed In Action.”
One of the reasons “the hint(s) provided by the visible badness of evangelism” this is such an interesting and important topic is that it doesn’t just help explain the biological evolution of non-trivial microbiological tricks in large animals with very slow reproductive cycles, and it doesn’t just provide a feast of analogies to the sociology of religion, it also relates to “inner alignment” in general :-)
...and just to lay some cards on the table, and be “epistemically hygienic” in proximity to possible-infohazards...
There are potentially some situations where “speaking to non-kin” is economically rational and thus in some sense “biologically rational” but almost all of these situations relate to things that are quite naturally expressed in terms of public goods, which could be funded via dominant assurance contracts, with executive management selected via vaguely sane electoral procedures liked Ranked Pairs or Borda.
The reason that “a government-or-religion-or-theocracy” is a natural category is that humans have been using confused metaphysics to defend bad governance protocols for a LONG time… like probably at least 12,000 years? If you look at most of this history, a huge portion of the level-ups in protocol design seem to have come from divesting the protocol justifications from metaphysical claims, and switching to protocol justifications based on basic prudence and math and externalized social reasoning. Thus, if someone proposes some New Idea that might be “a better way to do a government-or-religion-or-theocracy” it very reasonable and “naively-infohazard-protective” to try to translate it into the language of rationalized political-economy, subtract all the specific people from the proposal, and reason about the abstract roles using game theory and prudence and so on.
Note that (1) this proposed “abstraction process for converting governance ideas about individuals into governance ideas about roles” is kinda similar to Kant’s proposal for “universalizing maxims under the categorical imperative” and (2) I don’t know of a single scary cult that has been based on (or obsessed with) Kant… and this safety property seems pretty safe even though Kant is not my daddy and his ideas don’t count as “vertically transmitted” for me or anyone …since he never got married or had kids).
My understanding is that Mormons banned polygamy because the US government was cracking down on polygamy around that time. Their choice was to change their doctrine or be destroyed by the State, and they chose to change their doctrine.
I wonder if the greatest benefit of LDS missionary service isn’t recruiting new members, but instead dirtying their children with outside memespace to prevent an autoimmune reaction when they mature.
From what age do the Mormons do this?
It sounds plausible that a small child would not be able to evaluate new arguments correctly, so it will just ask an elder and receive some bullshit excuse which sounds okay. And at later age, it will not even listen to the arguments, because “I have heard it all before many times”.
EDIT:
There is a traditional atheist way of bringing up children to faithlessness, where you first read them about the Greek gods, and later some Bible for children. Both in context of “stories that people believed in the past”. So when they encounter the meme in real life, they have some antidotes.
Compare to various Chick tracts, where the story often ends with the good guy asking the villain “have you ever heard about Jesus?” and he’s like “never, who’s that?”, “well, let me give you this book”… and soon the villain is begging to get baptized. I don’t know how much that is wishful thinking, and how much that happens in real life, but… maybe there is a reason why this was considered plausible by his audience.
I think it’s interesting how cults’ self-imposed isolation from outside memespace inverts their error-correcting mechanisms. Their incorrect beliefs conflict with reality. Instead of admitting wrongness, they double-down and tighten their self-imposed isolation.
This feedback loop is why independently-spawned cults with different professed beliefs converge to similar phenotypes. For example, they get confused and lash out when you say something like “You are factually incorrect, but I’m going to be nice to you out of a sense of basic decency”, because they’ve doubled-down on “outsiders are the enemy” so many times.
It makes me wonder why the Latter Day Saints (Mormons) didn’t implode during their early formation. If cults self-destruct because they have an autoimmune reaction to outside ideas, then I wonder if the greatest benefit of LDS missionary service isn’t recruiting new members, but instead dirtying their children with outside memespace to prevent an autoimmune reaction when they mature.
I’ve long had a hobby-level interest in the sociology of religion. It helps understand humans to understand this “human universal” process.
Also it might help one think clearly-or-better about theological or philosophic ideas if you can detangle the metaphysical claims and insights that specific culturally isolated groups had uniquely vs independently (and then correlate “which groups had which ideas” together with “which groups had which sociological features”).
In the sociology of religion, some practitioners use “cult” to mark “a religion that is nonstandard for its geographic region and historical period”. So “Hinduism” in 1970s San Francisco is (arguably (by this definition)) “a cult” while a nominally identical “Hinduism” in India in the 1970s is “traditional” and “not a cult”. By this metric, anything other than Mormonism is “a cult” in Utah.
If you really want to be “traditional” (rather than “culty” or “unchurched”), and move to Utah, arguably you should convert to Mormonism?! Arguably?
(I’ve looked into the evidence on “the churched having better life outcomes vs the unchurched” and that sociological evidence seems to mostly hold up, even for really crazy and bad-seeming-from-outside religions. It isn’t a certain and 100% reliable claim, but a pretty good model of this stuff is that you’ll have better health, financial, and educational outcomes from being churched almost no matter what the doctrines are simply because social cohesion is just that good.)
A key point in Mormon cultural evolution was that, in 1890, the leaders of Mormonism were “spoken to by God” and the entire church gave up on polygamy, then in 1896 Utah joined the United States of America with reasonably harmonious marriage laws (with polygamy banned in the old and new states both).
That is a reasonably good proxy for “the historical period and geographic region where Mormonism stopped being a cult”.
Modern Mormons can somewhat safely use “being called polygamists” as a proxy for their critic being mindlessly downstream of standard boring random “anti-Mormon sentiment” because that criticism hasn’t hasn’t even been true for well over a century.
(A wrinkle here: I suspect based on mechanistic priors that there might have some some schistmatic movements to retain polygamy in some less connected subgroups? So sectarian “Mormonisms” might exist out in the boonies in various places that still have polygamy in practice? The “polygamy thing” is the “older and weirder” version. Usually, in the overall sociology of schismatic movements, such movements start with religious innovation on a generational time scale from the top down (as elite desires for doctrines shift over the decades), and then some of the lower reaches of the religion reject the change and “keep to the old ways” by formally schisming (with a new entrepreneurial leadership structure but “old seeming” doctrines) the claims on both sides to be “the real thing”. Giving up on polygamy would, logically, have been a natural juncture point for schisms.)
This was a very reasonable thought! In fact, it almost kind of happened!
The “Battle Near Blue River” of 1833 was an early scuffle (3 dead, 1 of whom was Mormon) that gained enough mythic weight to have a name like that.
In 1838 the first “Mormon War” (composed of multiple battles) occurred in Missouri.
The second Mormon War was fought from 1844-1846 proximate to Nauvoo, Illinois.
Prior to these, there were was conflict in Ohio and farther back also in New York State that caused emigration “to the west” each time they occurred, but these early cycles of “tribo-cultural hostility” (to make up a word off the top of my head) just weren’t called “wars” with the same mythic model...
The violent death of the founder in Carthage, Illinois, is arguably “OG Mormonism imploding and a new thing arising from the ashes” and that’s when Brigham Young became the official leader of the central cluster of Mormons and moved to Utah.
(I didn’t realize this until I read this wikipedia article just now, but since Joseph Smith was technically running for President at the the time of his killing by an angry mob, he might be the first candidate for POTUS to be assassinated!)
And even after that, the Mormons kept having “wars” but then (mostly) with the native people in Utah, with the last “War” running from 1865-1872, leading to the deaths of ~140 Black Hawks and ~70 Mormons.
If I had infinite research budget and a time travel machine, one of the things I’d be interested in doing is scrying the period from 1872 to 1896, when “the culty era of Mormonism” seemed to end “somehow” and presumably “for reasons”?
This period seems to have somehow had the opposite of the evaporative cooling of group beliefs!
Sociologists of religion have multiple competing theories for the mechanism when this sort of thing happens (though I don’t know if any of the mechanisms apply to Mormonism specifically in the era when it seems to have chilled out a lot).
One of the proposed mechanisms is (paraphrasing) “religious lifestyles cause child raising to work BETTER, and the success of later generations is because of the religious doctrines being ‘good’, but then this success causes the kids to want to change the doctrines in various ways (since they become elite, and start wanting what elites normally want (like different status goods, less veneration of poverty and charity and dancing with snakes and so on, and more ability to profitably affiliate with business partners outside of the religion)) and that causes the top-down changes and the schism-from-below”.
In the 1980s Bainbridge & Stark (who I tend to use as my default general model in the absence of better and more local models) proposed an alternative theory as part of a larger book that claims (paraphrasing again) “maybe the people who need crazy religions are just unusually weird humans, and maybe their kids get ‘better’, and less needful of a weird religion, because of simple regression to the mean”.
Of course, it could logically be a bit of both… plus other factors. Its hard to say in general :-)
Everton, in 2005, tried to replicate and re-test the “regression to the mean” theory with the alternative “actually, good doctrines are good” theory as something that could hypothetically show up in the data based on how the data was sampled and analyzed, and found some evidence that sorta agrees with regression, and some evidence that maybe “(Conservative?) Protestantism” has some extra mojo of some kind that actually causes better intergenerational outcomes than you’d expect just from regression to the mean? Basically he got “its probably complicated”. Everton’s paper is here.
One possible line to draw between “religions” and “cults” is how much they depend on recruiting new people / how much they burn out the existing ones. Whether they can live with a stable population—of course, many religions would be happy to take more converts, but what happens when they can’t, and they need to spend a few decades with the existing ones (and their children) only—or whether people are so damaged by being in the group that recruiting new ones and discarding the old ones is necessary for the group to function.
For example, you can have stable Catholic or Protestant populations. But Scientology depends on new people giving all their money to the group, then working hard for a few years until they get burned out, and when they become a burden on the group and their performance statistics become bad and no amount of punishment can fix that, they get kicked out. So an isolated population of Scientologists on some island would soon run out of money, and then gradually also run out of people.
I think the early Mormons had a lot of dynamic like “the old high-status guys take many young wives; the young incel boys get a lot of abuse in hope that they will rebel which will give the group a pretext for kicking them out”. Monogamy stabilized this a lot, but the question is what exactly caused the old high-status guys to change the rules. Did the young guys who stayed in the group long enough remember how bad it was, and instead of enjoying that it’s finally their turn, they decided to change the rule? Or was it something else?
(Also, from this perspective, Zizians without new recruits would run out of members in a decade.)
I’ve followed this line of thinking a bit. As near as I can tell, the logic of “evolutionary memetics” suggests that parent-to-child belief transmission should face the same selective pressures as parent-to-child gene transmission.
Indeed, if you go hunting around, it turns out that there are a lot of old religions whose doctrines simply include the claim that it is impossible for outsiders to join the religion, and pointless to spread it, since the theology itself suggests that you can only be born into it. This is, plausibly, a way for the memes to make the hosts not waste energy on anything except transmission to progeny.
Quite a few “Hinduisms” work this way, if you squint, although there have often been religious entrepreneurs who were willing to pretend that foreigner/outsiders LARPing as new members of their old religion might perhaps at least get those foreigners the ability to be reincarnated as proper real Hindus. Once communication and resources are flowing, further evangelism and memetic innovation can get pretty weird pretty fast.
Still, for myself, as someone with no coherent familial religious inputs (all four grandparents had wildly different beliefs, as did both parents) I generally up-weight the likelihood that particular doctrines are healthy based on the degree to which their source community rejects evangelism. If two or three non-evangelical religions have convergently evolved the same pragmatic ideas (norms or educational processes or visualization techniques or whatever), then the ideas are plausibly worthy of a second look and some practical experiments <3
To clarify, I don’t see evangelism as a problem per se, but I see it as a problem when the community needs evangelism to survive—e.g. because the existing members get burned out and are discarded.
A difference between a symbiont and a predator, kind of.
That makes sense as a “reasonable take”, but having thought about this for a long time from an “evolutionary systems” perspective, I think that any memeplex-or-geneplex which is evangelical (not based on parent-to-child transmission) is intrinsically suspicious in the same way that we call genetic material that goes parent-to-child “the genome” and we call genetic material that goes peer-to-peer “a virus”.
Among the subtype of “virus that preys on bacteria” (called “bacteriophage” or just “phages”) there is a thing called a “prophage” which integrates into a host, and then rides parent-to-child for many generations, and then (usually triggered by stress responses (and radiation is a pretty reliable stressor to induce this in a lab)), the prophage causes descendant bacteria to re-express the “viral form” of the prophage, and explode in a suicidal/evangelical frenzy.
The only hope that most hosts infected by prophages have is for the full genome of the infection to mutate in a small number of generations, so that the “lytic machinery” (that causes suicidal evangelism) breaks before a trigger occurs, so that when the trigger does happen, the host survives, while keeping the symbiotic genes.
(((This is probably THE KEY SOURCE of nearly ALL non-trivial upgrades to large genomes with slow evolutionary cycles. For example, something vaguely similar probably is the source of the “V(D)J Combinatorial Immune System” that has existed in our ancestors all the way back to the common ancestor of “humans and sharks but not lampreys”. The VDJ system uses genes with a clear viral provenance to construct antibodies, and so it is reasonable to suppose that (1) some lamprey-like-thing was infected with a virus, (2) the virus integrated with the genome for a few generations and then left over and over, (3) the virus evolved a helpful way of fighting off other parasites (possibly because “having a proto-mouth with a proto-jaw and preying on lots of different species is an intrinsically dirty life strategy”), (4) in some lamprey-and-shark-like-ancestor (keyword “gnathostomata”) the viral machinery for the half-symbiotic virus to escape the genome broke, and (5) all subsequent descendants (or from-our-perspective-as-humans all subsequent “post-shark ancestors”) have kept this “former symbiotic viral subsystem” as a super badass immune system for remembering entire clades of infectious or harmful things and fighting them off based on remembering “how they smell” via antibodies, that could be tweaked into slightly more useful shapes over the next ~400 million years.)))
In bacteria, Prophages often evolve helpful genes for their hosts for the “laying in wait” period. For example, symbiotic incentives like this probably explain the convergent evolution of whole new ways to “do photosythesis” in the viruses of photosynthetic marine bacteria, but they also are net harmful to the initial host’s long term genomic interests, because infection will reliably cause nearly their entire set of descendants to durably/predictably/eventually suicidally explode.
There is some debate about the details, and it is hard to be sure because most sub-varieties of these viruses are never-seen-before because there are probably still millions or billions of unobserved prophage species in the total life system of Earth still...
However, as a general pattern, the “horizontal/vertical incentive difference pattern” is so durable and clean that nearly all prophages internalize it, and express very different genes depending on “which mode” they are in.
Compare and contrast: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the future itself by not volunteering for holy jihad based on stuff that was in books your great-granddad was tricked into believing in and passing on to his descendants as a family philosophy, for thereby one can meekly avoid being foolishly inspired to join an army and eventually have their genome erased from all of future biology forever when they are Killed In Action.”
One of the reasons “the hint(s) provided by the visible badness of evangelism” this is such an interesting and important topic is that it doesn’t just help explain the biological evolution of non-trivial microbiological tricks in large animals with very slow reproductive cycles, and it doesn’t just provide a feast of analogies to the sociology of religion, it also relates to “inner alignment” in general :-)
...and just to lay some cards on the table, and be “epistemically hygienic” in proximity to possible-infohazards...
There are potentially some situations where “speaking to non-kin” is economically rational and thus in some sense “biologically rational” but almost all of these situations relate to things that are quite naturally expressed in terms of public goods, which could be funded via dominant assurance contracts, with executive management selected via vaguely sane electoral procedures liked Ranked Pairs or Borda.
The reason that “a government-or-religion-or-theocracy” is a natural category is that humans have been using confused metaphysics to defend bad governance protocols for a LONG time… like probably at least 12,000 years? If you look at most of this history, a huge portion of the level-ups in protocol design seem to have come from divesting the protocol justifications from metaphysical claims, and switching to protocol justifications based on basic prudence and math and externalized social reasoning. Thus, if someone proposes some New Idea that might be “a better way to do a government-or-religion-or-theocracy” it very reasonable and “naively-infohazard-protective” to try to translate it into the language of rationalized political-economy, subtract all the specific people from the proposal, and reason about the abstract roles using game theory and prudence and so on.
Note that (1) this proposed “abstraction process for converting governance ideas about individuals into governance ideas about roles” is kinda similar to Kant’s proposal for “universalizing maxims under the categorical imperative” and (2) I don’t know of a single scary cult that has been based on (or obsessed with) Kant… and this safety property seems pretty safe even though Kant is not my daddy and his ideas don’t count as “vertically transmitted” for me or anyone …since he never got married or had kids).
My understanding is that Mormons banned polygamy because the US government was cracking down on polygamy around that time. Their choice was to change their doctrine or be destroyed by the State, and they chose to change their doctrine.
Thank you for filling in so many historical details.
I find this hot take hilarious.
I know you’re not supposed to laugh at your own jokes, but… I also find this perspective hilarious <3
From what age do the Mormons do this?
It sounds plausible that a small child would not be able to evaluate new arguments correctly, so it will just ask an elder and receive some bullshit excuse which sounds okay. And at later age, it will not even listen to the arguments, because “I have heard it all before many times”.
EDIT:
There is a traditional atheist way of bringing up children to faithlessness, where you first read them about the Greek gods, and later some Bible for children. Both in context of “stories that people believed in the past”. So when they encounter the meme in real life, they have some antidotes.
Compare to various Chick tracts, where the story often ends with the good guy asking the villain “have you ever heard about Jesus?” and he’s like “never, who’s that?”, “well, let me give you this book”… and soon the villain is begging to get baptized. I don’t know how much that is wishful thinking, and how much that happens in real life, but… maybe there is a reason why this was considered plausible by his audience.
18-19 (formerly 18-21).
When I wrote “children”, I meant “next generation descendants”. Missionaries are young adults.