How to build a religion
First, take atomic ideas from books. In medieval times, books and texts were copied wholesale. It’s only worth doing this if you can’t discern what’s important from what’s not. No, take key bullet points and only record those.
What’s an atomic idea?
Say we’re talking about the scapegoat mechanism. The idea is what unites us can eventually divide us. Naturally, people like those who are like themselves. After all without some common ground, no communication of any kind can happen. But now suppose that the most valuable thing in your tribe is scarce and not everyone can get it. Now, every debate will start to be driven by the competition for the scarce resource, even in subtle ways. Leaders might respond by finding the most argumentative people: independent thinkers, and banish them or burn them at the stake. For a moment, this helps unite everyone again, but only for a while.
Then, take all these fragments of wisdom, and start compiling them into essays. Suppose all intellectuals do this. These would be blog posts.
Now, we have a culture of essays that refine all of the wisdom of the ages. This already exists. Instead of trying to express the ideas of each philosopher and thinker, instead, only the inflection points of their arguments are recorded.
At some point, there are tons of great ideas. Now, you take these atomic ideas, and you start puzzling them together in new ways. For example, start taking out essential elements out of each idea to create gaps. This is important. You don’t want answers. Now, the atomic ideas are more interesting because the reader can tell there’s something there, but they just don’t get the hit. They’re left wanting more, and as they read on, they get new answers and new questions.
Eventually, these ideas then become anthropomorphized into stories. Instead of ideas being ideas, ideas become people. Instead of people having names that mean nothing, the names of the ideas are themselves are personified. So you have Lindy, Scapegoat, Chesterton, Goodhart, etc as actual characters. They interact with one another and suffer for their principles. You teach these stories to your kids.
The kids ask if these stories are real and you’re like, hell yeah they’re real. Why wouldn’t they be? They distill thousands of years of wisdom into simple stories that a child could understand.
Related: