Thread by @Freesoilyeah

@Hasmanean @GFrancis420 I mean I get how you're theorizing - basically "more complex system, more can go wrong" , and in a sense that FEELS truish to me. After all it SEEMS that humans are more likely to get depression and schizophrenia than other animals. But maybe we just don't know.

@Hasmanean @GFrancis420 That said, what would we look at? I can certainly see this in the sense of "that idea is so stupid only a professor could believe it" and how US academia was something like 40% explicit Marxist in 1980 before the USSR exploded.

@Hasmanean @GFrancis420 I just came to a hypothesis: bigger neuron-brains are more likely to cook up their own falsehoods, while smol neuron-brains are more likely to be tricked (all else being equal). But there's also a pliableness in people (brains) unrelated to neuron count, and that's seen in the...

@Hasmanean @GFrancis420 ...universal "left-right" split. Of course this split is really a split in pliability, with "the right" being less pliable. That's why "right wing", to the extent it's called "conservative" has basically been the same, everywhere on the planet, throughout all human history.

@Hasmanean @GFrancis420 This "conservative" thing is just default values and being unsocialized. It's people who aren't into whatever the big cult is at their place and time. Be it the religion in your area or the civic religion like "communism" or "liberalism" or whateverthefuckthewestisrightnow

@Hasmanean @GFrancis420 And the less a person buys into the big cult of their place and time, the more "conservative" they are. Which is why in Nazi Germany and Islam, you had such unity. "Conservative" types generally support their country / group right or wrong, oppose weird sexual or community...

@Hasmanean @GFrancis420 organization, and have varying degrees of skepticism to outright hostility to anyone foreign. So if your cult is parallel to these default, unsocialized (genetic) values, like Islam and Nazism mostly were, that's going to be extremely resilient.

@Hasmanean @GFrancis420 And this is why in Islam you get the more pliable, culty people and the more ornery conservative types unified because the cult is, for the most part, a fetishization of default evolutionary norms (and I don't mean that pejoratively).

@Hasmanean @GFrancis420 This relation between Islam and Nazism are similar in their ability to unify the "culty" and the "ornery" into one "cause". The state of Israel and the oppression narrative of the Jews works the same way. Israel / Jews function as both a "liberal victim cause" and a volk.

@Hasmanean @GFrancis420 And b/c of this, I can tell you the day "communism" in the USSR died: June 22, 1941. Not that the USSR died, but Stalin reopened the churches and anti-nationalist propaganda was dropped, and never really brought up again. From there, "communism" became a Russian ethno-religion.

@Hasmanean @GFrancis420 Interestingly, a Soviet archaeology team opened Amir Timur's tomb on June 20, which had a curse that promised terrible destruction on anyone who opened it. Stalin reportedly believed the Nazi invasion was Timur's curse playing out. This event may have caused Stalin to become...

@Hasmanean @GFrancis420 ... if not Christian, at least deistic, as he believed a curse from a Muslim was real, and then re-opened the Christian Churches in Russia. I don't think Stalin became a Jesus-believer or Mohammedian, but I think he became religious in some vague, general sense.

@Hasmanean @GFrancis420 And since I believe that, I also believe Stalin stopped being a Marxist because he knew as well as anyone that theism was expressly contrary to Marxist teachings.