Beyond close biological kinship or direct individual familiarity, the only thing that can consolidate a group larger than the Dunbar number is a fairy tale.

@skado As a race we really are pathetic then?

@FrayedBear
We can make moral judgments, or we can just view it scientifically, as we would with any other animal. It’s all exactly as evolution made it.

@skado not all aspire to rule the world though or lie & cheat their way through life to the detriment of others.

@FrayedBear Depends on what fairy tale you pick. I think that some of the modern ones, like environmentalism, human rights, humanism, and internationalism are a big improvement on the old ones like theism.

And yes they are all of them fairly tales, since non of them are based on any logical historic proof, only our natural instinctive feelings. ( We could for example, all say. "f~~k the environment, let us be the last humans on a survivable earth. And it would be perfectly logical, it just would not feel good. ) But the big benefit of the modern "belief systems", which is perhaps a more dignified word than "fairy tales", is that they are to a greater degree honest. It is fine to admit that they have no support other than instinct and ad populum, and by not setting up fake sources of authority such as old books, supernatural revelation, tradition, guru based wisdom etc. You do not create a lie friendly culture, where the sources of fake authority set up for one thing, can be picked up and used by the anti social, for quite others. Such as where nazies picked up cultural Christianity, and use its authority and its preconditioning of people to accept high levels of cognitive disonance to manipulate the population.

The modern belief systems at least 'try' to fit within a scientific sceptical framework. When once you start down the road however of the "useful lie" idea then you create a lie friendly cultural environment and you can then be led down any path. As much as anything, it is not what a belief system stands for, that counts, so much as whether by trying to be honest, and showing high levels of respect for sceptical thinking, it trains the population to be honest and sceptical.

@Fernapple when I read about American behaviour, cognitive dissonance, religiosity, selfish narcissism & stupidity¹ I am amzed that they did not disintegrate years ago.

@FrayedBear
That’s right. It’s never all, and it’s never none.