Understanding Society
Living Together in Larger Groups
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
When communities expanded beyond face-to-face trust, rulers needed a watcher who never slept. In Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A Hopeful History, Doug presents the theory that vengeful, omniscient gods helped strangers cooperate under common authority. Matthew 10:30 supplies the chilling image — every hair numbered — while the larger argument asks how shared myths made civilizations, religions, states, and economies possible on an unprecedented scale.
A Note on the Original Text
Doug’s writings are presented as originally written. Spelling, punctuation, and grammatical irregularities have been retained to preserve his words and the integrity of the original record.
ORIGINAL WRITING
The content in this post is based on the book Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman.
“When we began living together in larger groups alongside thousands of strangers, everything changed. We lost sight of each other. There’s no way to make eye contact with with thousands or tens of thousands, or a million people, so our mutual distrust began to grow. Increasingly, people started to suspect others of sponging off the community; that while they were breaking their backs all those others were putting their feet up. And so rulers needed some one to keep tabs on the masses. Someone who heard everything and saw everything. An all-seeing Eye. God.
It’s no accident that that new deities were vengeful types. God became a super-Leviathan, spying on everyone twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Not even your thoughts were safe. ‘Even the hairs on your head are all numbered, the Bible tells us in Mathew 10:30. It was this omniscient that from now on kept watch from the heavens, supervising, surveilling, and -when necessary-striking.
Myths were key to helping the human race and our leaders do something no other species had done before. They enabled us to work together on a massive scale with millions of strangers. Furthermore, this theory goes on to say, it was from these great powers of fabrication that great civilizations arose. Judaism, Islam, nationalism and capitalism—all are properties of our imagination. ‘It also revolved around telling stories, Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari writes in his book Sapiens (2011), and convincing people to believe them.
This is a captivating theory, but it has one drawback. (Which will be revealed in the following post.)