Why are humans so powerful?

Humans are a kind of ultimate predator. Predators require a specific territory to survive and specific prey they are able to make use of to survive. We are not reliant on a specific prey or a specific territory, but have in a way abstracted the concept into a universal adaptation and made the world itself our prey, our territory.

So what are these amazing abilities? What is it that gives us our power? I believe the answers are family and religion. What do I mean by that? What is the minimum definition of a family unit, and what is the minimum definition of religion? Minimum definitions are important, because of course there is a huge sliding scale to which both structures can be iterated. But what is the fundamental cellular unit that divides and grows and becomes a functioning adaptive organism?

Family is perhaps the easiest to answer, in some ways, because it has so much precedent for comparison in the rest of the natural world. A similar strategy has been used by virtually all complex life for uncountable eons, and has been terrifically successful. And that is, simply, diocetious sex. You can build or rebuild an entire civilization from scratch if you have just that beginning, that single complete unit of humanity.

If you look at other highly dominant species that exist at the top of their territories, like wolves, elephants, and orcas, who are able to go almost anywhere and succeed and are almost unchallengeable (except by humans), they share similar powerful social structures to humans. They have the power of the pack. And you can reduce them down to a single pair, but just that single pair, with time, has the power to build a new dynasty. And a single pair entering a new territory can, with time, make it their own, expanding and iterating from that single cellular structure. They hold the power of creation and adaptation, just as it exists in parallel on an actual cellular level, and the two gametes hold the power of combination, recombination, adaptation, and growth. X and Y together hold the power the create a a new living, growing organism, and the dance between them allows for variation and adaptation.

Yin and yang, creation and destruction, order and chaos, sun and moon, father and mother, sky and earth, bird and sea, Gaia and Uranus, Apsu and Tiamat, Izanagi and Izanami, Vishnu and Shiva, Shu and Tefnut, and all the various ways that dyad has been represented, give birth to the universe. Our universe, specifically. The world of human life and experience and endeavor. That is its basis. These are all ways of representing this process and the nature of our experience and our world. Put these two together, and you get a creative force that produces all the world of human experience and civilization you see around you.

So humans have a power that is common to all complex life, and in particular have the power shared by the apex species we see around us. The power of sexual differentiation (shared by virtually all complex life), on top of that the power of family (bonded pairs that can create and raise their young, adding to the structure, an ability shared by other mammals), and the power of the pack (a durable and extendable social connection between the family members that gains complexity as it grows, allowing competition and cooperation in a joint endeavor united around the family unit, making them a kind of super organism).

Wolves win against virtually any top land predator because you’re never dealing with just one wolf. And a wolf alone isn’t complete, they’re vulnerable. But two wolves, given time, can become an unstoppable force. Orcas are similar, able to take on even the largest animal ever to have lived, the blue whale, because you’re not dealing with just one orca, you’re dealing with the pack, a super-organism with distributed parts.

Elephants are slightly more unusual because they’re not predators, but they are also dominant shapers of their environment, not passive hard animals. They are as dangerous as any predator, and use their abilities to dominate and shape their territory, as predators do. They just happen to also eat grass. On its own an elephant is a pretty serious threat, but lone elephants are still weak and vulnerable and incomplete. It is their family structure that keeps them alive, the knowledge and protection and guidance of the family unit that makes it possible for such a large animal to survive in such challenging conditions.

Why talk so much about animals? Well, partly because sometimes you have to get outside of yourself to see yourself. Seeing some of the same qualities you possess and take for granted and observing how they look and what they do in someone else, or even something else, can help you understand yourself better.

Religion is a much trickier matter to explain. The fact that humans are fundamentally religious should should be plainly obvious by now. There are over six billion people in the world, thousands of cultures across the globe of all different kinds of people, spread across time, and yet we find the same things repeated again and again. We find religions everywhere we go. There’s a wonderful variety, but a lot of commonality too. Our brains seem to have a circuit for it.

When it comes to the question of what make humans human, religion seems to be a big part of that. I wouldn’t exactly say that it’s the cause, so much as that’s what we call the net effect of humanity. Humans are aware of time, of causes, of the past and future, in particular they are aware of themselves. And they possess the ability to abstract from their experiences, represent the world to themselves through their ideas, words, and images, and that gives them access to a special kind of power and a level of interaction with the world that no othe creature possesses. And I would call that level of interaction religion. We are conscious, we have ideals, we have an understanding of time, and we are able to choose to act in the present in a way that conforms to a vision of the world that we believe in, that we desire, or that we want to embody.

Religion is a narrative. It is a conceptualization of ourselves and the world around us (and other fellow creatures). It is a way of representing what these things are and what we are to ourselves and to others. It is a way of describing our understanding, as well as our purposes and goals and values. It explains the meaning behind these things. Objects, people, actions, decisions. The more developed it becomes, the more things it brings into its narrative. And that in turn brings them into our world of understanding and action and gives us power over them. We can name things, we can pull them as distinct entities out of the undifferentiated miasma of sensory experience. We know what they are, what they mean to us, what we can do with them. We can manipulate and decompose and modify and recombine them.

Intelligence, in a way, makes this possible. Or it makes it easier. Higher level intelligence helps with abstraction. Consciousness is surely a large part of it, whatever it is that makes that work as it does. Having a concept of me, you, that, now, then, these are the sorts of things that we take for granted and hardly appreciate because everything we do is built in them. We can’t imagine our existence without them. We could imagine being more or less intelligent that we are, comparatively, but unconsciousness lies beyond the scope of our imagination, except as a purely negative concept. Not-thought, not-being.

Religion is simply the way that we articulate our cumulative narrative abstraction of our existence to ourselves to we can think and act in the world. It doesn’t matter who you are or what your particular beliefs are. If you’re alive and you’re human and you’re conscious, you have a religious framework. You have a structure of value and meaning that allows you to comprehend and act in the world. You may use all kinds of tools within that framework; maybe there is even some fundamental underlying architecture that is common to us all that explains so many of the similarities between us, despite the gulfs of time and space and culture.

But we all have a framework, and that is what makes the universe intelligible to us and what makes us able to act within it. And good lord, are we able to act in it. Especially when you have a sufficient number of people who minds and actions are united in their frame according to a common purpose and understanding. The power is incredible. The danger is incredible too, in much the same way that no one can hurt you like your family can. The most powerful things are all fundamentally dangerous simoly because they are powerful and effective. And they can be effective for good or effective for evil. And the strongest angels make the worst devils

I’m not making any judgments whether any particular religions are or aren’t true, or even what the relation of the whole category of religions are to some separate objective reality is. Those are important internal questions. I’m simply describing what religion, functionally, is, what it does. Why it must be wherever there are humans, and why it is the locus of so much of our power over the world (ourselves included).

And so, to come back to my original question, what is the foundation for a durable, anti-fragile, prosperous, life? A life that can grow and endure despite the vascilations of circumstance? What is the fundamental technology of humanity that lets them adapt and grow and succeed, everywhere?

Faith and family. That’s the fundamental formula. It’s not a specific formula. It doesn’t provide the details. But you won’t find a stronger means to build your foundation, or one with a greater ultimate limit. In fact it’s still not clear what the limits of these mechanisms of human capital are. The Jews are an excellent example. If any people group has been the subject of the accidents of circumstance, as well as the subject of deliberate counter-winds, it’s the Jews. They have a rich history of things going badly. And yet they are one of the most ancient intact people groups in the world, one that has not only survived despite their difficult circumstances, but remained strong and prospered in spite of them. And they originated in a single family. How much has that one group accomplished and survived because of the power of their family and their faith?

Faiths are a kind of wager, a theoretical framework that its members bet on, that it will provide a framework that will overlay on whatever the world really is on some deeper level, and in a way that will be meaningful and useful for human life and development. You have to choose something, and since we lack unmediated and unlimited access to the underlying nature of reality, including ourselves, and certain answers to our most fundamental questions of value and meaning, it will always be a wager. Not choosing is a choice not to be, to become a mere sponge, below the level of human consciousness and activity.

A good faith should speak to all the various dimensions of human life and the world, touching each part of life and experience and bringing them into the realm of intelligibility and action. Faiths that are simple and limited in scale usually fall more into the category of ideology. They work by reducing life down to less than it is, by interpreting all elements of meaning through a single lens. And even a well-developed faith can easily degenerate into ideology if its deeper and more difficult concepts are ignored.

One of the markers of a good faith is that it has iterated its concepts into workable models that span the many dimensions of human life, finding articulation in art, music, architecture, literature, performance, philosophy, scholarship, relationships, the small areas of daily life, and the lives of many different people in different places and circumstances. The ideal religion is, fundamentally, the largest possible playable game, the most universal theory, that brings everything into its unity, that makes them more themselves in that unity rather than ignoring or eliminating their character. A good faith needs to represent the difficult truths about ourselves and about life and the world, not only the ones we prefer, to be honest and effective. That is why faiths invented purely for our own pleasure of affirmation or to fulfill our own limited desires are so shallow and useless. Life demands more of us than that, so any good theory about the world must include more than we would individually wish or need or understand.

On a final note, it’s worth remarking that all human relationships have power. A human’s relationship with a cat or with a volleyball with a face can be enough to keep them alive. And friends and neighbors and countrymen and guildmates are all meaningful relationships. Even the relationships we have with dead people whose thoughts we merely read, or relationships we have with purely fictional characters, can be powerful and meaningful. That’s what’s amazing about people. We’re so darn good at being social that our potential for what we can do with the materials available (fictional, feline, or football as they might be) is astounding. All relationships have value and power. But none have so much power and potential for good or for evil as a union between the sexes before God.