THE THREE TECHNOLOGIES WHICH MADE US HUMAN
Language, money, and religion are humanity’s 3 most important technologies. Together, they work to solve the same fundamental scaling problem: enabling cooperation beyond the clan.
Language lets strangers communicate across tribal boundaries without shared context or values. The universal substrate for information exchange.
Money lets strangers trade without trust or repeated interaction. Without it, “I’ll help you now if you help me later” is a prisoner’s dilemma where defection pays. Collectibles turned this into simultaneous exchange: I give you meat, you give me shells, done. The universal substrate for exchanging value. See: 
Religion creates shared ritual, collective consciousness, and moral obligations that bind groups together. It generates the social solidarity that makes people honor commitments, respect boundaries, and cooperate in ways that individual self-interest alone cannot explain. See Durkheim below:
Together these 3 form humanity’s scaling architecture:
• Language = communicate with anyone
• Money = trade with anyone
• Religion = coordinate deeply within groups
Without them, we’d be just monkeys limited to groups of Dunbar’s number. With them, humans conquered the planet and increased carrying capacity 10x over Neanderthals.
Most miss this following Graeber’s debt-money thesis, which only works within societies that already have all three technologies - you cannot run a ledger with people you’ll never see again who have different moral frameworks.
That #Bitcoiners can grok this is what puts them so far ahead - they’re the only ones who understand how the game actually works.
We’re HODLing proto-money whilst we develop our memetic language and spread the orangepill religion to all corners.
Shelling Out: The Origins of Money | Satoshi Nakamoto Institute
By Nick Szabo, 2002
Been a while since my last review for #bookstr, but I’m back with a good one.
The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life is a 1912 book by French sociologist, Emile Durkheim.
It’s considered a foundational text in sociology as essentially the first book to parse religion as a social phenomenon which allows for extended group harmony by means of shared practices, morals, and behaviours.
Durkheim makes his case by studying Australian Aboriginal totemic societies in a manner which fans of #Austrian economics would appreciate, as he strips religion back to its most basic form, and builds his suppositions from there.
I could write entire reviews through different lenses - as a someone who grew up in Christian White #Australia, as a well-travelled Westerner, as a #Bitcoiner and member of the maxi cult, as someone now living in Buddhist/Confuscian/Socialist #Vietnam.
Part of what you’ll gather from this text is how all religions have similar ideas and concepts. They are pervasive, intractable, and inescapable; because they are the external framework which allows people to NOT constantly be at war with one another. They’d all be very different but Durkheim manages to distill the essence of religion as a social glue in a way that had never really been articulated before him, and one we basically take for granted today.
Just read the Conclusion if you want his ideas, the actual exploration of Aboriginal totemism is dull. Having been exposed to their practices, you don’t actually need to know about how they cover sticks in feathers and then dance around it for hours; they actually do this shit and the people who think we ought protect their ancient wisdom are truly morons. They were and are so primitive we can’t learn more than what this book tells us; we need to explore higher religions in detail beyond this.
Top 5 book for me this year. I gained a lot from this. A lot of hard to articulate things distilled to their essence for you to put different lenses on.
But do not read this if you think the Australian Aborigines are some sacred people whose practices need to be protected; that myth is going to be quickly dispelled as you dig into this and understand just how primitive they are.
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