Civgene is the theory that humans with a metamind (more or less the conscience) evolved from psychopaths.  That animals the world over lack the properties of metamind (at least friendship, property, freedom, currency, and investment) and need not just intelligence, but also trust to accomplish civilization.  That civilization and it’s wonders (money, markets, specialization, economy of scale, and multi-tiered technology) is the logic of compassion.

This, like all evolution, stems from a genetic accident with an advantage.  The ability to assess risk in a split second.  A precognitive sense of long term consequences.   The metamind,  the source of civilizing levels of trust is a risk engine.  How does it work?  How does it signal to us that it’s risk calculation is complete?  Through sudden subconsciously driven emotion.  Therein lies the burden.

The process of rational determination of the origin and meaning of sudden out of context emotion, or rationalizing, is difficult.  It benefits from intimate knowledge of the subconscious self, and needs tireless practice.  The key to operation of a metamind is faith.  Faith is knowing something you can’t prove.  A perfect match for a human in the position of receiving  an emotional warning they can’t immediately rationally quantify.  Faith is how people practice defending the urge to act in a conscionable but unexplainable way.

Is it any wonder that people flock to faiths of all shapes and sizes?  How else would they practice using their own minds risk engine.  It’s good for them too.  Arguing a conclusion you trust by testing logic until something fits is the direct consequence of civgene mutation.  So is cooperation in groups larger than the largest troop of monkeys.  Society is the de facto faith based organization of civilization.

It is natural that people with a common faith would organize in tighter groups.  The benefits of community rationalization are simply too great to ignore.  Hashing out the correct (or sometimes wrong) rational response to emotional signals that are triggered by the risks they face.  Successful accurate rationalization repels critics with incorrect rationalization, flawed risk assessment, and self interested opportunists at risk of exposure of defections from societies at all scales.  Religion and politics are groups of empathic humans exploring their faith.  Groups working together at tuning their waking minds to understand the signals from their guts (so to speak.)

Society and therefore civilization become undermined and eventually destroyed when religion or politics are subverted.  People invest in a flawed model of group rationalization and at best errors occur.  At worst peoples very metamind can be rewritten by the group they sought out to help understand it.  People who are interested in manipulating others for their own benefit, can create rewards for failed assessments.  The metamind is retrained to respond to ghost risks, and the conscience becomes controlled externally.   Marketing, propaganda, dogma, and gaslighting among others fill this role.

How can this happen?  Shouldn’t the metamind detect the threat to itself?  Over time, thousands of bad inputs and decisions slowly reshape it to reflect a programmed risk without a basis in the individuals personal experience.   The metamind likely does warn that it’s accuracy is declining, but it’s a system of subtle signals that can be drowned out by acute fear.  Fear that can be activated reliably by a few specific signals.

• You can’t leave our faith without serious consequences.
• You can’t criticize our faith without serious consequences.
• You must join our faith or there will be serious consequences.

The consequences can be real or imagined, but the fear blocking internal warnings is real.  These signals are repeated over and over again by those who would replace civilization with a pack behavior (territory, treaty, alliance, assignment, and favour.)  They are a message of fear designed specifically to deter the forking of religions and political groups as conscionable people are reprogrammed into proto-psychopaths.  This is why forking any hierarchy must be a protected human right, not just in rhetoric, but in practice.  These signals differentiate between a faith based religion or political party and a cult or political ideology.

Protect your conscience, protect all faith.  Discern cult from religion.  Discern political ideology from politics.  Reject conceptual fanaticism.  Promote and protect forking even if you don’t understand every instance, and societal progress will be made.

Edit:  more apt image…