how we psychologically survive and thrive. It’s how we find hope. And even
if you have a vision for a better future, it’s too hard to go it alone. To realize
any dream, we need support networks, for both emotional and logistical
reasons. It takes an army. Literally.
It’s our value hierarchies—as expressed through the stories of religion,
and shared among thousands or millions—that attract, organize, and propel
human systems forward in a sort of Darwinian competition. Religions
compete in the world for resources, and the religions that tend to win out are
those whose value hierarchies make the most efficient use of labor and
capital. And as it wins out, more and more people adopt the winning
religion’s value hierarchy, as it has demonstrated the most value to individuals
in the population. These victorious religions then stabilize and become the
foundation for culture.^46
But here’s the problem: Every time a religion succeeds, every time it
spreads its message far and wide and comes to dominate a huge swath of
human emotion and endeavor, its values change. The religion’s God Value no
longer comprises the principles that inspired the religion in the first place. Its
God Value slowly shifts and becomes the preservation of the religion itself:
not to lose what it has gained.
And this is where the corruption begins. When the original values that
defined the religion, the movement, the revolution, get tossed aside for the
sake of maintaining the status quo, this is narcissism at an organizational
level. This is how you go from Jesus to the Crusades, from Marxism to the
gulags, from a wedding chapel to divorce court. This corruption of the
religion’s original values rots away at the religion’s following, thus leading to
the rising up of newer, reactionary religions that eventually conquer the
original one. Then the whole process begins again.
In this sense, success is in many ways far more precarious than failure.
First, because the more you gain the more you have to lose, and second,
because the more you have to lose, the harder it is to maintain hope. But more
important, because by experiencing our hopes, we lose them. We see that our
beautiful visions for a perfect future are not so perfect, that our dreams and
aspirations are themselves riddled with unexpected flaws and unforeseen
sacrifices.
Because the only thing that can ever truly destroy a dream is to have it
come true.