Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…get closer to God. They’re not as straight-laced as the Christians. Like, they just, you know, they just allow alcohol; it’s like the blood of Christ. So also, Stoned Sapiens is a book about religion. Also, Islam and intoxication is also a very interesting topic, because you have the Sufis who intoxicate themselves to get into ecstasy, to be closer to God, and then you have, like, the conservative Islamic scholar, Ibn Taimiyya, who defended Damascus against the Mongols by combining anti-drug rhetoric, like, “They’re bringing drugs to us and they are not good Muslims.” So drugs in religion, sometimes drugs kind of help religion to, like, are used in religious contexts, but then you can also see that religions work as prohibitionist movements against drugs, like the Christian church. Also the Purity Law, for example, it’s very famous in Germany. It’s called the Reinheitsgebot. Beer can only contain three things: water, hops and barley or something like that. That’s the Purity Law. And that was done by the church in the 16th century. And in Germany, for a long time, this was seen as like, this is like a quality control, like beer has to be pure, it only has these ingredients. But it’s actually a move by the church to weed out all the other ingredients that had been put in beer before, like nightshade plants. So beer… Also, witches were brewing crazy beer you drink and you have visions and you dance around the fire. It’s like… And the church didn’t like this, so the church said, “This is the beer now,” and especially the hops was the new ingredient for the beer. And so the Purity Law is the first prohibitionist law in the Middle Ages in Europe. Another fascinating… Yeah. I- I think as society becomes, develops more and more, it d- seems to resist, certainly psychedelics, s- seems to resist drugs. I don’t know what that’s about. One of the very fascinating turning points that I have been able to kind of pinpoint, or at least I think this is what happened, is when did the first kings come up? They weren’t kings for a very long time. The first king that I can identify was in the so-called Sumerian high culture, was in Uruk, was Gilgamesh, and they wrote the Gilgamesh Epic about, you know, the great king. But that was four or 5,000 years ago, something like that. But what happened in the thousands of years before, there’s no source that there were rulers. It seems like humans were quite good in organizing themselves without kings before these first kings came. And I mean, thousands of years from the end of the Ice Age until the Sumerian high culture, there were no kings. So people were quite able to organize their communities. There was, for example, Çatal Hüyük in Eastern Turkey- that was working for like 2,000 years without any hierarchies. I think that is, that is quite interesting, and then why do suddenly the hierarchies start and what makes the hierarchy stronger? And again, I’m still researching this, but in Sumeria, we can see that it’s the beer that destroys the hierarchy-free society, because they are able… I mean, beer is quite old. The first beer was made in Gobekli Tepe, the famous first kind of structure of mankind. I also write about that, because it’s very interesting. Small detour, what is Gobekli Tepe? No one knows. How did they make it? No one knows. But why did they make it? I think they made it because they were creating a meeting place, and why was that so important? There were not so many humans at the time, there were like one to four million, those are the estimates, on the whole planet. And they were usually living in small communities of like a hundred people up to 500, not more. But so the problem then is, again, inbreeding. Inbreeding means it’s a degeneration, so it’s a problem. We are genetically not so diverse, actually, as humans, so it… But Gobekli Tepe people were meeting from different areas, having sex with people they usually wouldn’t see… … Creating healthy children. And Gobekli Tepe was working for 1,600 years, and I think it was an evolutionary kind of machine. Like, without that idea, we’re going to create a fucking place… …Or a party place. It was a party, basically. They were eating very well. They found a lot of bones, but no one lived there. They just came together for parties. And after 800 years, they started making beer there, and then the situation slightly changed. They found these places where they made beer; you can still find the chemicals, and it’s sure that they made beer there. And then once they make beer, they create different stone circles, and it changes. We can see clearly how it changes in the Sumerian high culture when beer becomes a business. Beer is being done by the priests, by the ruling class, or a ruling class emerges.…

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