Traditions and perpetuating stories
Humans have been telling stories since they developed language.
Imagine an ancient tribe. The oldest person in the tribe is a woman and the tribespeople respect her. She likes spinning stories. One day she says, “In my youth, people never died and never became old. But due to (some random thing she doesn’t like), the Gods cursed us and gave us old age and death.”
The people cannot check if what the old lady claimed was true because of course she was the oldest person and they did not have any written history which contradicted her. The people then start to trust her and perpetuate the story that some curse brought death to their tribe and now everyone must die. The actions of generations of humans were changed by that one story.
Or think that the old woman from that tribe claimed: “Young boys must bear excruciating pain to become men.” And generations down the line, the people are still putting their young boys through a weird and messed-up tradition. Watch the video.
Millions of such stories must have come into existence and vanished. Just like billions of life forms have come to life on earth and then died. Some of those stories have the right amount of everything in them that makes them stick in the minds of humans. And they take on a life of their own, surviving through generations and not dying, despite being just that: a story.
Richard Dawkins first thought about this idea and called them “memes”. Please look it up. It is fascinating.
We must wonder: what things that we believe in now are just stories that have a powerful hold over the collective human psyche?
