You know what stops me? This is deep, y’all. Shame before my idols.
An example of two. Sam and Frank. Here’s how it works. If i believe i would be unable to get a ‘go ahead’ from Sam and Frank to spread mayhem everywhere, smash all tablets and go total Novatorean retard on the State, i wouldn’t be able to do it with a clean conscience.
Now i bet you this kind of thing is where reverence in duty to one’s ancestors and codes of ethics originates; the spookiness of wanting and believing you are being watched by a dead relative or a prominent political figure who is judging what you do. The first metaphysical paranoia to exist and the beginning of spiritism. It had to happen during the animism stage of religious thinking in man.
We started imagining going to a place after we die and meeting up with the dead important people from our lives. We imagined them watching over us (angels, daemons, etc) as we lived. Interesting.
How much of man’s moral sense is owed to a long development of that kind of minor psychosis and metaphysical paranoia? Eventually, the idea of the spirit of the ancestor and relative as the guide is replaced by first, a set of unrelated impersonal gods, and then finally, a single god.
It wasn’t just that spirits existed in the world, but that spirit(s) actually made the shit and lorded over it. Now, he feels the entirety of the universe is being watched and judged. From there, he develops a sense of duty toward his environment in addition to the ethical codes he upholds to avoid that feeling of shame he has after some transgression. Now, the whole world is part of the plot, and there are right and wrong ways to tend to it. One of the spirit substances gave it to us. It’s not just ancestral ghosts anymore. There’s one big one that has extraordinary power running the whole show.
I’d say this process occurred relatively quickly by evolutionary time. Twenty thousand years, max. The last 20 of the roughly 80 thousand in our timelime. The last monotheistic stage kicked off with a few minor scientific mysteries that came into view with the advance of various tech. Astronomy and the nature of the erf was the first big one to get everyone thinking. The thousands of little visable dots of light in the sky that change position. Freaky shit. That giant fire ball takes the same path every day over top of us. This is all the mechanical design of some super intelligent spirit way more badass than great grandpa Harold was (rest his ancestral soul).
That one super god was posited to explain away these mysteries and, finally, a place where all things spirit-based commune and simp in the presence of this one logically necessary to explain everything super dots-in-the-sky-creating spirit god.
