Ideas emerge naturally from interactions with the environment. Creativity involves creating new links between existing concepts. Plus, people just think about stuff. This is the source of ideas mutating and new ideas entering.
Ideas, then, will traffic on a combination of their appeal and their linkage with reality, with appeal higher in pressure when the effects are far more distant. This forms the basis for the selective pressure.
Yes, that was my argument. Ideas form “randomly” (let’s say) then go through a form of natural selection. The ones that produce a stable society come out on top. My claim is that those ideas come out on top because the universe was coded with God’s Law in mind (divine decree), so whatever bullshit can get people to work halfway within it is sufficient for an ancient society to not collapse.
The obvious alternative is that my religion came from the same source as all the other religions, as you say. Dealing with that is much like dealing with any other doubt.
It’s worth noting that in @argumate‘s recent chain of posts, one user brought up that the Catholic church had stricter standards for heresy, because the common people were more eager to accuse others of witchcraft and the like. These impulses and status warring, then, can explain some of the other effects, including those of the Left eating itself.
I think if you observe the actual cases of how more radical Leftists deal with the slightly less radical Left, it’s much more about total revulsion to the beliefs of their “right-wing” opponents than personal status. After all, Ted Cruz is very similar to Bernie Sanders in the broad scale of history: he doesn’t want to kill gays, doesn’t want to directly police sex, doesn’t seem to want coverture or slavery, etc. But he’s an utterly, completely repulsive bigot. If you were to actually look at and measure a radical leftist’s response to Ted Cruz’s visceral awfulness, it’s a lot more like being triggered by a repulsive piece of fiction or the death of Mike Brown than fierce virtue-signaling.
And it’s all relative. They react to Not Left Enough Leftists in similar ways. Dave Rubin is a conservative from their perspective, as is Bill Clinton, as is Thomas Jefferson, etc. There is a considerable amount of ladder-climbing and status-seeking in the victim cult complex created by these core radicals, in their friends who want to remain friends and the people who [one would think] signal out of fear or status hunger. But the actual center of this Tootsie Pop is a lot closer to a misguided, militant Varys than Littlefinger.
That implies that people cannot meme themselves into these beliefs. Social belief isn’t purely surface level. Sometimes people even succeed at memeing themselves into religion.
And as for the very far end, much like those who go out and murder women for “fornication” out of deep hatred for them, can that not be of biological origin? The disgust reactions run deep, and because of the prevalence of risk in the past, this was for good reason. Something on the far end of the bell curve should exist if there is natural variation in these traits, even if the rest of the progressive movement is a wave of “try to be more progressive than the other guys”.
A deep and unsettling revulsion to patriarchy, private property, the nuclear family, parenthood, submission to authorities, the Rule of Law, killing violent criminals, distrust of statistically dangerous outsiders, sexual norms, the requirement of work to live… mostly things that would have saved their lives, rather than harmed them, in a human’s natural habitat.
But sure. It could be biological, on its face. Could be something else, too. The question is ultimately of premises, and whether there’s a Word of God that reveals certain truths. These are all isolated examples of a model that clearly governs nature, but they are isolated. Whether or not you connect the dots is up to you, and has much more to do with your reaction to the supernatural than logical analysis.
No righteous God would frame the world so you live if you’re good at thinking and die if you’re not. That’s not the test here.
What does “memeing yourself” mean?
But sure. It could be biological, on its face.
It sounds absurd - if you assume it really is that detailed. But it doesn’t need to be that detailed.
Take laziness or boredom. Surely this isn’t a useful trait, right? Why should it exist? Wouldn’t it be more effective if people worked hard all the time? Fatigue protects muscles, surely, but what advantage is there in true laziness?
Well, energy is scarce, especially in pre-industrial environments. It isn’t always clear what task will actually yield food. So at some point, you must give up working on the current task if it does not yield a reward, or you will literally starve to death continuing to perform a task that is useless.
And humans are complex, so it probably does not involve only one gene.
But what happens if all the genes for this shutoff end up in one individual? Then it can become pathological, as the shutoff point becomes too aggressively biased towards giving up early.
The Golden Mean is actually pretty legit for lots of behaviors.
You can posit that evil hates the light, but the more likely explanation is that dislike of authority is useful on some level as long as it isn’t extreme (because IRL sometimes authority is wrong, or you can become the new authority and get more resources, etc), and that there is more than one path to get there. A bit of sleeping around can be a successful reproductive strategy, too. Plus openness to experience is valuable at the group level for finding out what is safe to eat, since all traditions were once new.
So there are these genes out there. They don’t get bred out because they’re useful as long as you don’t have too many of them - which is also why the core people you describe are rare, since it’s statistically improbable for them to have all these genes in one person.
And these aren’t formalized genetic political beliefs. They’re… intuitions or emotions or something along those lines. Deeper. The ideology, which gives you your specific manifestations, is rooted in or goes on top of that.
What does “memeing yourself” mean?
I may have been too informal. I meant that sometimes by trying to get yourself to believe something, you can believe that thing, for some people. I’m terrible at it, personally. My intuition searches through ideas and ideologies (like yours) to find things that look like active subversion mechanisms, and then rejects them on that basis. (Part of why I reject SJWism.) Others, however, seem to have more luck with it sometimes.
I intuitively read your ideology/religion as having mechanisms intended to bypass all mental defenses and overwrite my mind, and thus feel the need to resist it.
(Bad SJ has “Shut up and listen, because you’re a [MEMBER of ETHNIC GROUP]!” which is similar.)