#83. Ideas that May Become Posts [mostly evolutionary psychology]

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[Quotes indicate metaphor.]

• Organized religion is a counter-adaptation to the anti-invasion adaptations of a neighboring, powerful country; one anti-invasion adaptation may be to weaken all neighboring countries. For the Abrahamic religions, that powerful but geographically vulnerable country would be ancient Egypt. For the Eastern religions, the powerful but vulnerable neighbor would be ancient China.

• People are "amphibians": each of us has an individualistic part existing in genetic superposition with a collectivist part. In systems that officially celebrate the former, the latter cannot be owned and must be pushed into the Jungian Shadow. And vice versa. In Freudian terms, the unacceptable wishes emerge in disguised form: religion in individual-celebrating systems, and hero worship in collective-celebrating systems.

• The longstanding debate in philosophy between rationalism and empiricism is a false dichotomy resulting from a narrow focus on one or the other of the two legs by which scientific knowledge advances: theory and experiment.

• We don't have free will in the big things; we have free will in the little things. However, one of the little things can be "planting a seed" that may one day grow into one of those big things and be more to our liking than the big things we see now.