The human capacity for abstract theorising soon produces a host of new rules for mastering the environment and regulating social behaviour that go well beyond anything that exists among chimpanzees. In particular, ideas concerning dead ancestors, spirits, Gods and other invisible forces create new rules and powerful incentives for following them. Religious ideas of various sorts enormously increase the scale on which human societies can be organised and constantly generate new forms of social mobilisation. The highly developed suite of eemotions related to norm following ensure, however, that no mental model of how the world works is ever regarded as a simple theory that can be discarded when it no longer conforms to observed reality. Even in the domain of modern natural science, where there are clear rules for hypothesis testing, scientists develop emotional attachments to theories and resist empirical evidence indicating that their pet theories are wrong. The tendency to invest mental models and theories with intrinsic worth promotes social stability and allows societies to bulk up enormously in size. But it also means that societies are highly conservative and fiercely resist challenges to their dominant ideas. This is most obvious in the case of religious ideas, but secular rules also tend to be invested with great emotion under the headings of tradition, ritual and custom. The conservatism of societies with regard to rules is then a source of political decay. Rules or institutions created in response to one set of environmental circumstances become dysfunctional under later conditions, but they cannot be changed due to people’s heavy emotional investments in them. This means that social change is often not linear — that is, a process of constant small adjustments to shifting conditions — but rather follows a pattern of prolonged stasis followed by catastrophic change. This in turn explains why violence has been so central to the process of political development. As Hobbes points out, the fear of violent death is a very different emotion from the desire for gain or economic motivation. It is extremely difficult to put a price tag on one’s own life, or the life of the loved one, which is why fear and insecurity typically motivate people to do things that mere material self — interest does not.
According to the above passage, various religious ideas prompt new forms of
