85. On Surrender 🔗

Do all traditional religions have a core notion of surrender as a central tenet? 🤔

Islam and Christianity do but I’m not sure of the rest.

Buddhism doesn’t seem to unless you treat refuge/sharanam as an equivalent idea

The Bhakti sects of Hinduism arguably do, though devotion is also not exactly surrender

This may be an axial age development. Benevolence bias in the universe triggered by opting in = surrender.

Not the capricious gods of antiquity, surrender to whom would mean nothing. You’d have to outwit them.

Hmm. Bicameral mind something something. You don’t surrender to a trickster voice in your head, only to an external silent force. Gods who don’t talk back.

Shit I’m converging on Jaynes model via a different argument. I can see why bicameral hypothesis makes sense. Only an introspective consciousness would (and arguably must) invent a surrender-based notion of the divine. So the absence pre-axial-age suggests non-introspective minds

Bit of a bold leap to jump to voices-in-head consciousness as a precursor, but it’s consistent. Though not clear if it’s the simplest hypothesis.

To want a religiosity based on surrender to an abstract divine, your sense of the world has to go from many concrete fears (lightning, storms…) to abstract fear of uncertainty which implies abstract planning etc.

Like in an ancient religion, who would you surrender to? The gods are too specific. Surrender to thunder god (oral contract with voice in head) and you’re only safe from storms. You want general amnesty from unknown unknown shittiness in universe. You want god of black swans.

Hinduism is interesting here because the evolution is unbroken. Early Vedic bicameral gods retreat and the abstract unicameral ones and avatar scheme advance by around 500BC. Have your polytheist cake and eat the monotheistic cake too.

Believe it or not I ended up down this bunny trail via thinking about planning under uncertainty and when it makes sense to surrender rather than fight it, cf Dune scene where Paul gives up trying to control the ornithopter in sandstorm because voice in head.

That struck me as a powerful metaphor. I do it all the time myself. Up to a point you fight to increase certainty in plans/contingencies and try to control outcome. Beyond that you let go and sort of dance with the chaos.

Thing is, significant efforts transform you, so when there is uncertainty and ambiguity around outcomes, you don’t know who you will be at the other end. This causes attachment to current self and reluctance. So letting go control is surrender of self to unknown transformation.

So you could say early surrender based religion was the first agile planning tool when Bronze Age waterfall planning by committee of voices in your head failed 🤣

Was unicameral mind the og Internal Family Systems? 🦋🤔

Are we going unicameral again?

So what have we learned?

We have learned that axial age religions are general liability insurance policies

Yeah definitely a convenient development for large states to have a population primed for surrender. Effect rather than cause I suspect. tweet^[1]

🧐 tweet^[2]

Monotheistic tendencies pop all over the old world around the same time and take over in a few centuries. Contemporaneously with Iron Age proper 🤔

I will now surrender to sleep and sleep on this. Not coincidentally this is how I do most of my thinking.

😴😴

Successfully nerdsniped myself with this thread on surrender and religion last night. Now thinking about what non-religious forces can trigger a surrender-like ethos.

I think 2 big ones are fossil fuels and Moore’s law. Both have that quality of general benevolence.

Note I made this AM:

Happiness is unacknowkedged surrender to faith. You don’t know you had it till you lose it.

A force you surrender to has to be a nebulous cloud of impersonal goodwill directed at you and an illegible supertribal group/imagined community you identify with.

The surprising insight for me was that secular booms powered by religion-like faith is probably not attribute to the tangibles. Apollo was inspiring but too tangible and specific. Gold rushes are closer but still too sharp and narrow. You need something vague like Reaganism.

Basically you surrender to a force of serendipity. Reagan’s genius was in getting there via negativa. Convincing people serendipity was the natural state unless the state tried to “help” (8 scariest words etc).

Very few technological forces are this generic, so usually some human narrativization into a progress narrative is needed. But oil and silicon both come close to “naked” religions. No prophets or bibles needed. Raw serendipitous benevolence and bounty of nature. Just add physics.

The relevance of this for today cf meaning crisis is — there’s no point giving people something to believe in (hopepunk, green new deal). You need to give people something to surrender to. Trumpism hit this button hard. It’s not what he offered. It’s the surrender he accepted.

The left has not offered a surrender option since the 60s (hippie/dropout culture). This is why it struggles everywhere to be seen as anything other than authoritarian power grab by a bureaucratic minority.

For those like me interested in a technological surrender option, a new Promethean force comparable to Moore’s Law, crypto, ML, and solar have been the 3 big candidates, all “children of silicon.” None as powerful as the parent.

Lithium is another, but weaker than oil

Importantly, surrender options are not ideas unless they are literal religions. They need a material basis. Arguably Reaganism had a material basis first in globalized trade, then in silicon. Americanism as a 150y old region is rooted in oil.

The US was the OG petrostate for ~20-30y. The only reason it didn’t succumb to the Dutch disease/curse of resources is, it was first so had to invent the oil industry and all the tech. The hard work stayed the curse which descended on later petrostates.

Aside, curse of resources is a degenerate surrender religion. Saudi Arabia’s first religion, ahead of Islam.

So inventing even the finest new secular -ism won’t help solve the meaning crisis. You need to claim either god or physics on your side. A bunch of philosophy or manifestos won’t do.

God is dead, so it’s either reactionary delusions or new physics.

Surrender to technological serendipity is what we usually call a network effect. An unbounded nonlinear upside dynamic hay is unreasonably easy to trigger within a broader physics rising tide (oil, silicon).

This is a satisfying theory and explains why charismatic cult leader types only ever attract a minority of idiot true believers under post-modern conditions. The axial age is long over. Simply claiming revelation and delivering messianic texts is just campy to most people.

Relatedly modern cults are NOT precursors of trad religions of 3021. Conditions have changed. The pristine ground of unicameral minds was only available for colonization that one time. It was the first and last “human resource” fossil fuel. New religions can’t evolve that way.

If I had to bet, I’d bet on machine learning as the new physics force that can drive a new surrender-based religiosity. Just surrender to the inscrutable algorithm. If Moore’s Law is OT Judaism, ML is NT Christianity. Already with eastern (Chinese) and Western branches.