Really good analogies in here. You use memable ideas to get your point across about memeable ideas - how meta of you.
I think that's why the right has reacted so strongly to the left in the past ten years - the left became a party of pure theory, pure thought, pure arrogant moralizing, and the right felt that the whole country had become all pulpit. As you said, they stopped attending. They felt abandoned.
The best vehicle for culture isn't moralizing or "expertise" - it's stories. And that's why the folksy side doesn't like when it hears a negative story about itself. It needs a good story to live up to, not one where it's the villain and needs to be punished. Who the hell would want to hear that story?
This! It's become almost comical watching each side try to force the other one to see the obvious errors of its ways (sarcasm), both using psychologically ineffective means to do so.
The left using shame, blame & guilt - which typically work only on individuals with low levels of self-worth/low self-esteem (clearly not their target audience). The right using condescension and mockery (just about as effective). Both using name calling. Then getting angry when the other side doesn't magically see what horrible people they are and decide to change (I'm laughing even as I type this; so bizarre).
Appears to be nothing more than performance art and virtue signaling for their respective echo chambers. No stories are being exchanged here.
Since you mention pedants, here's a fun correction for everyone - it's the cow burps, not farts, that contain all the methane.
There is a huge amount of energy lying around in the world in the form of grass and sticks, and it's only ruminants (or rather the cocktail of bacteria/archaea/protists/fungi in the rumen) that have the tools to digest cellulose and use that energy. The rumen is an anaerobic fermenter (like your compost heap if you don't turn it); the bugs digest the cellulose and then the cows digest the bugs.
Well, this one doesn't land well, largely because your starting assumptions ignore a--to use the technical term--whole lotta stuff.
Yes, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism are the big three in terms of numbers, but you make a big jump in the reasons for that. Christianity made the leap from a charismatic leader to a full-fledged religion/state with Constantine (see Constantine's Sword for the deep dive). That gave it the structure and numbers that enabled it to grow. It is also a universalizing religion, which means that converting others is part of its DNA.
Islam is also universalizing and melds a charismatic leader to an existing (albeit very different) societal structure.
So, irrespective of a compelling narrative and set of core beliefs, both those religions are deeply investing in growing. And were not shy about using force to do so.
Hinduism is another story. It is an ethnic religion that exists in a particular region with a particular people that had, in effect, thousands of years to develop organically. (I will note that it is one of four Dharmic religions, the others being Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism.)
So lumping the three together on the basis of size ignores the differences in geography that led to the relative isolation of Southeast Asia.
Maintaining core values, ethics, practices while still having the flexibility to change is a necessity for any society/religion to survive for very long. Both Durkheim's definition of religion and Ninian Smart's more extended version enable a better analysis of what makes societies succeed over time or fail.
Finally, if having both a compelling and simple story along with lots of intellectual chatter led to large numbers of adherents, Judaism would win hands down. The Jewish core narrative of slavery to freedom is compelling and has been used to inspire enslaved people in the US and liberation theology in South America. And if you want intellectual debate--there's a reason people say "two Jews, three opinions." And yet, world Jewish population is all of 15 million.
Awesome ideas in here. I love the analogies and the brainy/folksy distinction. Great tools for making sense of politics, religion, and other messy human stuff. Thanks again, Adam!
Very interesting article. The religions that lasted weren’t optimized for fun; they were optimized for coherence at scale.
Wild that the ‘unsexy, rule-heavy’ religions won not by being cool, but by being scalable. The only ideologies that figured out how to keep the nerds and the normies in the same room without murdering each other. Politics might work better if either side could manage even half that memetic flexibility.
I keep encountering more and more people like your friend. They are retreating into a space where being right is more important than changing minds or affecting society in any meaningful or practical way.
I wonder if the brainy-folksy factions of these three religions are really an effect rather than a cause of their success. Anything that’s been around long enough and that has reached the attention/interest of a large enough number of people will show this divide: e.g. Disney is a huge corporation which has had cultural influence globally for many decades now and you get people who study the history and evolution of their works, corporate endeavours etc (shoutout to Defunctland) but also lots of people who just scroll around on Disney + or take their kids to Disneyland once in their lives
It was a deliberate cause, at least in the case of Christianity; in Europe the early Christian church found ways to enfold and adapt long-standing pagan (“folksy”) traditions into the liturgical calendar, requiring less straight-up conversion and more just sort of mashing everything into one blurred version of the existing culture that felt more or less of-a-piece. See: Christmas, Easter, for example.
I'm reading this after midnight, can you tell which group I belong too? I can't believe how much enjoyment I get out of reading your pieces! How can academic stuff like this be so hilarious? Ever consider stand up comedy?
When thinking of brainy and folksy versions on believers, I would go with examples from parasitology, not blockchain. I think of it this way - some memetic parasites' genotype size is just too big to comfortably fit into a regular host, which is why it splits into two versions - a full one that's uploaded over a long time of studies (for clergy and other theologically-studied dudes) and a small one for regular folks. Heh, some religions even developed a castrating version of full parasite that discourages the host's reproductive drive and redirects it into more effort of storing and spreading itself (it is actually a well-known parasitic strategy in biology, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasitic_castration).
because brainy folks most likely put in the work to become brainy, they can not accept their theory be watered down to a more folksy folks version. making their theory easily and common sensibly acceptable would be seen as an insult to themselves and dismissive of their value.
Also, brainy folks tend to be so enamored of their theories that they don't notice when they don't correspond to reality, whereas folksy folks don't have the luxury of ignoring reality.
Yes, investment into their theories tunnels their vision (confirmation bias) and causes them to value their theory above anything else (endowment effect)
Increasingly I believe that liberals are adapted to deal with strangers, conservatives with people in their near environment (whom they may not 'know,' but are far from faceless or even nameless). Education is threatening to certain conservatives because it *is* likely to produce liberals...mainly by reorienting the student toward a bigger, inevitably more anonymous picture of the world. Abstraction is a powerful tool for thought, and for the many gains that thought can bring. It does also tend to tear up local communities--it urges you to move away from racist Uncle Ed, not put up with him for the sake of local harmony.
I agree. I live in North Carolina where the pockets of liberalism tend to stay in their little cocoons, refusing to interact with people right around them. It can be very frustrating.
It's tough to avoid the seemingly inescapable truth that liberals are bad at selling good ideas, while conservatives are good at selling bad ones. Why is this? Because the complexity of the modern world demands solutions that move beyond simple sloganeering, which today's Left does very badly (Defund the Police, anyone?). Yet the average person on the street is too busy just getting by to sort out the nuances of various ideologies, so (s)he grabs on to the one that demands the least congnitive effort: "Build the Wall" is vastly easier to internalize than "Expand the Immigration System to Process More Applications While Prosecuting Corporations That Employ Undocumented Workers." The latter is what we need, and a minority of our fellow citizens understands this, but it won't fit on a bumper sticker.
Christianity, Hinduism etc are what I think of as 'legacy religions'. The real present religion is science. The scientific method is great, but not one is actually applying this - everyone just slurps up whatever science publications put out. Reproducibility crisis? What crisis? It is a belief based system, with no believers checking anything against reality. It's all 'in silico', looking at charts on computers, assuming that the charts relate to something meaningful. It's one way to live your life I guess...
The three historically great religions each address a dimension of human suffering. Jesus representing the Dharma of the Sacrifice of self/ego; Krishna the Dharma of the Sacrifice of mind; Guatama the Dharma of the Sacrifice of desire.
Each avatar was liberated from one of those afflictions and demonstrated it plainly in every dimension of their lives.
The religions that formed around them were pretty much as Monty Python depicted them in The Life of Brian: efforts to emulate them by repeating words they'd said, eating foods they favored...
Vanishingly few of their many disciples actually emulated them in practice under their personal supervision.
And until the 20th century, nobody had noticed the significance of this trinity nor realized the simultaneous transcendence of ego, mind and desire.
Really good analogies in here. You use memable ideas to get your point across about memeable ideas - how meta of you.
I think that's why the right has reacted so strongly to the left in the past ten years - the left became a party of pure theory, pure thought, pure arrogant moralizing, and the right felt that the whole country had become all pulpit. As you said, they stopped attending. They felt abandoned.
The best vehicle for culture isn't moralizing or "expertise" - it's stories. And that's why the folksy side doesn't like when it hears a negative story about itself. It needs a good story to live up to, not one where it's the villain and needs to be punished. Who the hell would want to hear that story?
This! It's become almost comical watching each side try to force the other one to see the obvious errors of its ways (sarcasm), both using psychologically ineffective means to do so.
The left using shame, blame & guilt - which typically work only on individuals with low levels of self-worth/low self-esteem (clearly not their target audience). The right using condescension and mockery (just about as effective). Both using name calling. Then getting angry when the other side doesn't magically see what horrible people they are and decide to change (I'm laughing even as I type this; so bizarre).
Appears to be nothing more than performance art and virtue signaling for their respective echo chambers. No stories are being exchanged here.
Since you mention pedants, here's a fun correction for everyone - it's the cow burps, not farts, that contain all the methane.
There is a huge amount of energy lying around in the world in the form of grass and sticks, and it's only ruminants (or rather the cocktail of bacteria/archaea/protists/fungi in the rumen) that have the tools to digest cellulose and use that energy. The rumen is an anaerobic fermenter (like your compost heap if you don't turn it); the bugs digest the cellulose and then the cows digest the bugs.
This is a terrific comment, thank you
Well, this one doesn't land well, largely because your starting assumptions ignore a--to use the technical term--whole lotta stuff.
Yes, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism are the big three in terms of numbers, but you make a big jump in the reasons for that. Christianity made the leap from a charismatic leader to a full-fledged religion/state with Constantine (see Constantine's Sword for the deep dive). That gave it the structure and numbers that enabled it to grow. It is also a universalizing religion, which means that converting others is part of its DNA.
Islam is also universalizing and melds a charismatic leader to an existing (albeit very different) societal structure.
So, irrespective of a compelling narrative and set of core beliefs, both those religions are deeply investing in growing. And were not shy about using force to do so.
Hinduism is another story. It is an ethnic religion that exists in a particular region with a particular people that had, in effect, thousands of years to develop organically. (I will note that it is one of four Dharmic religions, the others being Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism.)
So lumping the three together on the basis of size ignores the differences in geography that led to the relative isolation of Southeast Asia.
Maintaining core values, ethics, practices while still having the flexibility to change is a necessity for any society/religion to survive for very long. Both Durkheim's definition of religion and Ninian Smart's more extended version enable a better analysis of what makes societies succeed over time or fail.
Finally, if having both a compelling and simple story along with lots of intellectual chatter led to large numbers of adherents, Judaism would win hands down. The Jewish core narrative of slavery to freedom is compelling and has been used to inspire enslaved people in the US and liberation theology in South America. And if you want intellectual debate--there's a reason people say "two Jews, three opinions." And yet, world Jewish population is all of 15 million.
What a great response, i think that illuminates rather than refutes his point
Thanks. Yeah, I don't actually disagree with where he went. But how he got there...that's another story.
Awesome ideas in here. I love the analogies and the brainy/folksy distinction. Great tools for making sense of politics, religion, and other messy human stuff. Thanks again, Adam!
Very interesting article. The religions that lasted weren’t optimized for fun; they were optimized for coherence at scale.
Wild that the ‘unsexy, rule-heavy’ religions won not by being cool, but by being scalable. The only ideologies that figured out how to keep the nerds and the normies in the same room without murdering each other. Politics might work better if either side could manage even half that memetic flexibility.
I keep encountering more and more people like your friend. They are retreating into a space where being right is more important than changing minds or affecting society in any meaningful or practical way.
Thanks for writing this!
I wonder if the brainy-folksy factions of these three religions are really an effect rather than a cause of their success. Anything that’s been around long enough and that has reached the attention/interest of a large enough number of people will show this divide: e.g. Disney is a huge corporation which has had cultural influence globally for many decades now and you get people who study the history and evolution of their works, corporate endeavours etc (shoutout to Defunctland) but also lots of people who just scroll around on Disney + or take their kids to Disneyland once in their lives
It was a deliberate cause, at least in the case of Christianity; in Europe the early Christian church found ways to enfold and adapt long-standing pagan (“folksy”) traditions into the liturgical calendar, requiring less straight-up conversion and more just sort of mashing everything into one blurred version of the existing culture that felt more or less of-a-piece. See: Christmas, Easter, for example.
I'm reading this after midnight, can you tell which group I belong too? I can't believe how much enjoyment I get out of reading your pieces! How can academic stuff like this be so hilarious? Ever consider stand up comedy?
When thinking of brainy and folksy versions on believers, I would go with examples from parasitology, not blockchain. I think of it this way - some memetic parasites' genotype size is just too big to comfortably fit into a regular host, which is why it splits into two versions - a full one that's uploaded over a long time of studies (for clergy and other theologically-studied dudes) and a small one for regular folks. Heh, some religions even developed a castrating version of full parasite that discourages the host's reproductive drive and redirects it into more effort of storing and spreading itself (it is actually a well-known parasitic strategy in biology, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasitic_castration).
because brainy folks most likely put in the work to become brainy, they can not accept their theory be watered down to a more folksy folks version. making their theory easily and common sensibly acceptable would be seen as an insult to themselves and dismissive of their value.
Also, brainy folks tend to be so enamored of their theories that they don't notice when they don't correspond to reality, whereas folksy folks don't have the luxury of ignoring reality.
Yes, investment into their theories tunnels their vision (confirmation bias) and causes them to value their theory above anything else (endowment effect)
Wow. 100% Love the section on "fractalizing beliefs." Being able to break down complex concepts is essential for communication in general ;)
hello, Adam
I cited you in an anti-AI article this morning, after following you, after James Marriott cited you.
https://theconversation.com/ai-slop-is-macquaries-2025-word-of-the-year-i-applaud-the-choice-but-was-bored-by-the-shortlist-270432?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20November%2026%202025%20-%203594136693&utm_content=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20November%2026%202025%20-%203594136693+CID_c71f959c3b396888418840262d2be03e&utm_source=campaign_monitor&utm_term=AI%20slop%20is%20Macquaries%202025%20Word%20of%20the%20Year%20I%20applaud%20the%20choice%20%20but%20was%20bored%20by%20the%20shortlist
Increasingly I believe that liberals are adapted to deal with strangers, conservatives with people in their near environment (whom they may not 'know,' but are far from faceless or even nameless). Education is threatening to certain conservatives because it *is* likely to produce liberals...mainly by reorienting the student toward a bigger, inevitably more anonymous picture of the world. Abstraction is a powerful tool for thought, and for the many gains that thought can bring. It does also tend to tear up local communities--it urges you to move away from racist Uncle Ed, not put up with him for the sake of local harmony.
> Increasingly I believe that liberals are adapted to deal with strangers,
And then, only strangers who think just like them.
Well, yes. That follows.
I agree. I live in North Carolina where the pockets of liberalism tend to stay in their little cocoons, refusing to interact with people right around them. It can be very frustrating.
Bizarre column this time.
Agreed
It's tough to avoid the seemingly inescapable truth that liberals are bad at selling good ideas, while conservatives are good at selling bad ones. Why is this? Because the complexity of the modern world demands solutions that move beyond simple sloganeering, which today's Left does very badly (Defund the Police, anyone?). Yet the average person on the street is too busy just getting by to sort out the nuances of various ideologies, so (s)he grabs on to the one that demands the least congnitive effort: "Build the Wall" is vastly easier to internalize than "Expand the Immigration System to Process More Applications While Prosecuting Corporations That Employ Undocumented Workers." The latter is what we need, and a minority of our fellow citizens understands this, but it won't fit on a bumper sticker.
> It's tough to avoid the seemingly inescapable truth that liberals are bad at selling good ideas, while conservatives are good at selling bad ones.
It doesn't help that most liberal ideas aren't actually good.
Christianity, Hinduism etc are what I think of as 'legacy religions'. The real present religion is science. The scientific method is great, but not one is actually applying this - everyone just slurps up whatever science publications put out. Reproducibility crisis? What crisis? It is a belief based system, with no believers checking anything against reality. It's all 'in silico', looking at charts on computers, assuming that the charts relate to something meaningful. It's one way to live your life I guess...
The three historically great religions each address a dimension of human suffering. Jesus representing the Dharma of the Sacrifice of self/ego; Krishna the Dharma of the Sacrifice of mind; Guatama the Dharma of the Sacrifice of desire.
Each avatar was liberated from one of those afflictions and demonstrated it plainly in every dimension of their lives.
The religions that formed around them were pretty much as Monty Python depicted them in The Life of Brian: efforts to emulate them by repeating words they'd said, eating foods they favored...
Vanishingly few of their many disciples actually emulated them in practice under their personal supervision.
And until the 20th century, nobody had noticed the significance of this trinity nor realized the simultaneous transcendence of ego, mind and desire.