Post #11: Society Series: Why Economies, Governments, & Religions?
Our institutions- including our economies, governments, and religions- are all trying to do the same thing.
These systems exist to help us make good decisions and do good stuff. In different ways, they are each a judge of moral actions + executor of deeds deemed moral. This process of judgment and execution could leverage economic forces like supply and demand, it could be through a political process like voting, or it could be a religious interpretation of existential relevance based on the insights of a prophet.
Regardless of the method, each system is trying its darndest to take us to the same place: a better future.
So why then are there separate systems? And why these three specific ones?
How Did We Get Here?
Human civilization has been winding and weaving its way into the future for millennia. From a biological perspective, modern humans are roughly 300,000 years old, with “civilization” starting towards the end of that timeline. Our civilization is a patchwork system of ideals and institutions sitting on top of a global communications & transportation network. This operating system has gone through ebbs and flows and failed experiments, but has ultimately enabled the flourishing of our species. In 2022, we will hit 8 billion living humans on Earth- an all time high. In that sense, we are winning.
Institutions like an economy, government, and religion represent key elements of this patchwork operating system. If they push us in a bad direction, then in a bad direction we will go.
While it is theoretically possible for an individual person to make decisions completely outside the influence of civilization’s operating system, in practice it almost never happens. Point being, we are at the whim of our operating system and our future depends on that OS leading humanity somewhere good.
So how did we end up with economies, governments, and religions?
To answer that question, let’s see what each system does for an individual person. Each of these systems is responsible for a different “need category” every human possesses. Consider Maslow’s hierarchy, a clever pyramid that organizes the requirements we each have in order of relevance to keeping us alive. Maslow’s pyramid matches quite nicely with the benefits we reap from each of these three institutions. A government protects a person, an economy comforts a person, and a religion fulfills a person.
These institutions provide the benefits of protection, comfort, and fulfillment by answering three questions:
Government: How do we help human life flourish over the short-term?
Economy: How do we help human life flourish over the medium-term?
Religion: How do we help human life flourish over the long-term?
Governments help people flourish over the short-term by ensuring activities critical to maintaining life get carried out. Examples include defending against physical threats, avoiding famine, ensuring access to clean water and shelter, paying for healthcare.
Economies help people flourish over the medium-term by innovating new things that become “life flourishing” activities later. Examples include technology, healthcare methods, safer transportation, communications tools, efficient energy production.
Religions help people flourish over the long-term by setting a path through existence that keeps people safe. Examples include going to heaven by following rules like “Thou shalt not kill” from Judaism & Christianity or attaining Nirvana by following rules like “Refrain from taking what is not given” from Buddhism.
It’s worth noting that the timelines involved here are longer than you might think. The government is determining moral actions and carrying them out on a multi-decade timeline (~0-20+ years). The economy innovates on a ~10-50+ year timeline, often attempting to create something new and valuable but finding through trial and error that the conditions aren’t right yet, like the journey of building artificial intelligence which began in the 1950s but hasn’t succeeded until recently. Then religion attempts to set a meaningful course on the longest timeline we can imagine- infinity.
If categorizing these three institutions in this time-centric way is correct, then it brings us to a creative opportunity where we can ask the question: are these three systems the best way to enable the flourishing of life over different time horizons?
Before we get to exploring that question, let’s look at how these systems interact with each other.
How Do Our Institutions Interact?
Using this lens of enabling life to flourish over different time frames, let’s look at an example of this in action.
Here’s an example of the economy interacting with the government. The economy innovates, creating a new valuable service for people: electricity. Electricity illuminates and heats indoor spaces without dangerous fumes and flames. It saves many lives. Thank you Nikola T. and Tommy E.
Electric companies, like Tommy’s “Edison Illuminating Company,” sprout up around the innovation to meet the growing demand. Once enough people become reliant on electricity, the government recognizes that “we need to ensure people always have access to this stuff.” They then regulate the electric companies to ensure the general public is provided electricity at a fair price and in a safe manner.
This example shows the economy innovating to create something that will eventually help many lives flourish once that innovation has spread, and then the government says “we have to make sure people stay protected today and keep their electricity,” so they do their thing and regulate. It’s as though the economy hands off the matured innovation to the government so the economy can get back to creating more innovations and the government can ensure the existing innovations are consistently provided.
Whether we’d want to continue this dynamic I’m not sure, but this exemplifies the relationship between an economy helping life flourish in the future while the government ensures life continues to flourish today.
Let’s look at another example, this time between religion and government. All major religions have some flavor of “don’t kill each other.” All the prophets seemed to agree on that one…
This type of long-term moral guidance often originates from religion, along with some incentive to follow the guidance like going to heaven or hell. However, religions aren’t super hands on the wheel, which is where government comes in. Government creates “laws” that are enforced by entities like the police and judiciary system, attempting to closely monitor and strongly discourage people from killing each other. Government has typically borrowed its definition of morality from religion, as is the case with the first known recorded law. From 2,000 BC Mesopotamia, we found a stone called the “Code of Ur-Nammu” which lists a bunch of laws, including don’t kill each other. The introductory paragraph on this old stone invokes the word of their deities, basically justifying the list of rules that follows with a “its god’s will” type of sentiment.
Even 4,000 years after that Mesopotamian stone was etched, the founding fathers of America wrote in the Declaration of Independence in 1776 “the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them.” Once again drawing on “God’s support” as a justifying preface to the declaration that followed.
It’s clear that these three systems- economies, governments, and religions- have developed in parallel to complement one another. That said, there are blurry lines, unhelpful redundancies, and blindspots that make this operating system suboptimal for our future.
It’s time we develop an upgrade.
Next Up
Earlier in this post I posed the question “are these three systems the best way to enable the flourishing of life over different time horizons?” As you may have noticed, I didn’t answer that question as I realized it requires its own post. Next up I will explore that question, looking at possible ways to improve the operating system that decides and builds our future.
What’s this substack all about?
We need to upgrade our civilization’s operating system. This newsletter explores how our current operating system came to be, which improvements would be helpful, and how we can make an upgrade happen.
I chose to write this publicly to get feedback on these ideas. Don’t hesitate to get in touch. Upgrading our OS and building our future has always been and will continue to be a team effort.
I love the DALL-E images - this "persistence of memory" is one of my favorites. Kind of scary and amazing how AI can create something so similar to what the artist would create.
Perhaps another way of approaching this daunting subject is chronological. Imagine when a small group of people emerged and needed to survive. Then imagine each step along the way toward that end. Eventually if it went on long enough it would likely, maybe inevitably, look like what exists around the world today regardless of premeditation.