Harvard neuroscientist Professor Robert Sapolsky regards megacultism (religion) as an evolved, adaptive response to pervasive stress. I agree. However, facts are often unusual things (and philosophers frequently debate their nature!), and sometimes facts that seem to be incommensurate go together in nature despite our disapproval and discomfort. There is little doubt that megacultism is a commonly deployed and exhibited evolved stress management device across all human societies. Does it really work? The truth is, of course, more complicated. It’s more complicated than most folk want it to be.
Overall, the stress management that Sapolsky touts doesn't really work in the sense that it does more harm than good. It works at best within limited scope and only on the surface of the psychology of the individual and social groups that adopt and deploy it. (It’s a more interesting fact than one might initially surmise that Sapolsky himself does not subscribe to it at all, and in fact outright rejects it as a method for his own stress management).
What's some of the hard social-psychological evidence it doesn't work? Megacult (religious) war. Subcult (Sectarian) violence. Abuse of women and unbelievers (apostates, heretics, and atheists). Pathological, maladaptive rejection of science and medicine. Proliferation of smaller cults. APD sufferers (psychopaths) who become religious leaders (the statistical prevalence of APD among these people is almost certainly as high as for CEOs) who hoodwink mentally sick adults with imaginary friends. People who drink animal urine. Homicides over nutty doctrines. Marital rape. There are hundreds of other outcomes - social, behavioural, group-behavioural, medical, and psycho-social, that demonstrate that it's really religious schizophrenia, and a pandemic thereof, that we are – as a civilisation - dealing with.
Theist-megacultism-based stress management doesn’t work because it’s based upon, and largely reduces to, maladaptive terror management for mortality and self-esteem, maladaptive emotion-driven re-appraisal in the face of thwarted goals, and lack of insight about the deployment of both. It's a maladaptive psychological response based upon emotion-driven re-appraisal in the face of goal-thwarting (S Folkman et al., 1986; Susan Folkman, 2013)
Megacultist (religious) theists are unequivocally mentally sick. They’re just sick from stress in different ways, and further sick from consequent maladaptive terror management (Arrowood & Cox, 2020; Castano et al., 2011; Friedman & Rholes, 2008; Jonas & Fischer, 2006; Pyszczynski et al., 2015; Vail et al., 2010, 2018).
In fact, one of the huge problems with Sapolsky’s conclusion about megacult-fideist stress-reduction is that it also doesn’t work because religious-theist schizophrenia induces more stress than it ‘manages’ by multiple mechanisms. Moreover, the additional induced stresses often don’t mitigate the allegedly managed or alleviated stresses, and in many cases just bury them under layers of psychosis and denial. This is of course – stressful. (Achtziger et al., 2015; Antelo et al., 2021; Babenko et al., 2018; R. F. Baumeister & Vohs, 2016b, 2016a; Brosschot et al., 2004; Buczny et al., 2015; Carnevali et al., 2020; Carpenter, 2019; Christiansen et al., 2012; Cohen & Wills, 1985; Dingcheng et al., 2018; Ellis & Del Giudice, 2019; Evans et al., 2016; Eysenck, 1985; Fischer et al., 2007, 2012; Fogaça & Duman, 2019; Susan Folkman, 2013; Ginty et al., 2012; Govorun & Payne, 2006; Gunthert et al., 1999; Hagger & Chatzisarantis, 2016; Ihle et al., 2018; Kaiseler et al., 2009; Klein & McColl, 2019; Lange & Eggert, 2014; Lazarus, 1984; Leventhal et al., 1998; Liston et al., 2009; McEwen, 2012; McEwen & Sapolsky, 1995; Newman et al., 2018; Polman & Vohs, 2016; Reinecke et al., 2014; Rodrigues et al., 2009; Saldaña et al., 2021, 2022; Sapolsky, 2007; Schmeichel et al., 2003; Sharif, 2018; Simpson et al., 2006; Sjåstad & Baumeister, 2018; Sliwinski et al., 2006; Spada et al., 2008; Sturgeon et al., 2016; Taylor, 2006; Vohs & Zemack-Rugar, 2012; R. Wang et al., 2020; W. Wang et al., 2020; Xu et al., 2012; Zhu et al., 2019)
Megacult community membership doesn’t genuinely solve any of the problems of poverty, alienation, loneliness, ostracism, social stigma, group-stereotyping, relational aggression, victimisation by sociopaths and psychopaths, or domestic violence. It certainly doesn’t do so any more than membership in any non-religious or non-megacult group or community. In fact it’s well known that the doctrines, narratives, and beliefs of most theist megacults seriously exacerbate these problems for many people most of the time.
Theist megacultists’ partners still leave them for reasons of sexual, financial, and situational disappointment, and simple boredom. They must suffer the additional indignance, stress, and despondence associated with having to accept the outcome even when it demonstrates the frailty and impotence of their beliefs and the doctrine they have deployed in service of stress reduction. They are often forced to be consistently exposed to the emotionally abusive person in small community settings.
Theist megacultists are highly vulnerable to charismatic and ambitious cult leaders – and that includes ‘big four’ megacult leaders – who are anti-social psychopaths and abusive manipulators. (Of course every megacult leader with anti-social and narcissistic personality disorder will deny that this applies to them!). (Burkle, 2019; Fatfouta, 2019; Lee & Ashton, 2005; Miller et al., 2013; Rosenthal & Pittinsky, 2006)
Megacultists are often exposed to even more ostracism, alienation, and stigma than non-megacultists for perceived transgressions against megacult and religio-social codes. Defellowshipping (Mormons, Jehovah’s witnesses), ejection from community and home (Amish), murder of apostates (Islam), beating and rape of apostates (Islam), disenfranchisement and excommunication (Catholic), punishment and harm for breaching class boundaries (Hindu caste), bans on intermarriage, interference with personal and intimate relationships, inappropriate breaching of personal boundaries, and racial prejudices. The list is disparagingly enormous, and I have no room to continue it here.
Moreover there are many additional more complex and narratological stresses – what we might call metastresses – that come with megacult narratives, delusions, and membership. The believer is taught - badgered - to worry about what some supreme being thinks of them, and of their every behaviour. They’re made paranoid about being constantly watched, monitored, judged, and evaluated. This applies in many cases even to thoughts and mental imagery about perfectly natural behaviours like sex, which outcome is pathological according to almost all reasonable theories in health psychology.
Healthy conscience and self-evaluation are one thing. These outcomes are not that thing. Megacult theists have performance stress and the stress of keeping up appearances in the face of unusual and usually unreasonable and unrealistic moral and social demands. They must compete with other megacult members who may have many financial, social, educational, and situational advantages. Yet their ability to compete effectively is often intentionally deconstructed and impeded by the very doctrines they’re programmed and pressured to uphold and observe.
Then of course there’s living in constant fear of damnation, demons, superdemons (Satan), and the disapproval and punishment of their own best omnipotent friend, whom they further fear both disappointing and being separated from. None of this is mitigated much by salvation and scapegoat doctrines, which tend to induce further stresses associated with more paranoia and guilt about boundary crossing and prohibited doubts and thoughts.
Moreover, then there is the considerable cognitive dissonance involved in the continual suspension of disbelief. The stress of the basic cognitive dissonance of maintaining the delusional and dissimulative belief system in the face of evolved ratiocination and information tracking that’s designed to penetrate it is a paradigm case study for ego-depletion theory (Roy F. Baumeister, 2002; Roy F. Baumeister et al., 1998, 2007; Blázquez et al., 2017; Burkley, 2008; Ciarocco et al., 2001; Fischer et al., 2007, 2008; Hagger et al., 2016; Inzlicht & Friese, 2019; Moller et al., 2006; Polman & Vohs, 2016; Ren et al., 2010; Schmeichel et al., 2006; Xiao et al., 2014; Xu et al., 2012; Yam et al., 2014).
Let's be real and bite the bullet. Sapolsky’s really saying devout religious theism is schizophrenia. He's not risking his tenure to do it openly without plausible deniability, but: get the hint. Even if he’s not saying it, he’s effectively saying it.
Journals and e-magazines like Open Culture are not going to risk losing readership with uncomfortable truths/facts either. Look what happened to Richard Dawkins.
Evolved truth tracking and - more importantly - evolved information tracking are maladaptive and deranged in the religious schizophrenic. So is their emotion-driven re-appraisal in relation to thwarted goals and their lack of insight into their disorder.
Sapolsky is fairly smart, and so he doesn't want to annoy religious schizophrenics and the often psychopathic handlers who profit from them. He doesn’t want to upset the complex web of cultural narratives which govern both the artifices and foundations of academic tenure. He’s not disingenuous or lacking in integrity. He’s just not reckless with his own house.
There are so many religious schizophrenics, and so many others that depend upon, or at least believe they depend upon, the perpetuation of the status quo, that facing down the pandemic of religious schizophrenia is daunting at best. Nonetheless, huge numbers of people have heart disease and cancer: but we don't stop calling those disease states. Even more people have religious-theist schizophrenia.
Sapolsky wants to say it. He's effectively saying it. He's got too much at stake:
The solid literature supporting the stress-reducing benefits of megacultism that Sapolsky refers to is almost certainly - in most cases - affected by the worst aspects of the reproducibility crisis and its foundations in p-hacking, HARKing, publication bias, confirmation bias, and non-fitting-data bin-filing (Bird, 2020; Brian Resnick, 2017; Lurquin & Miyake, 2017; Munafò et al., 2022; Schooler, 2014; Trafimow & Earp, 2016). More relevant, however, are the errors in premises, the cultural biases, and other kinds of problems that are better captured by what has been called the theory crisis in psychological science. This crisis is about the problems of operationalisation of concepts into variables and the premises and grounding thereof (Eronen & Bringmann, 2021). The entire approach to the question of megacultism is constrained by cultural narratives and expectations that are so pervasive and influential as to be considered normative guides to normative approaches to evaluating megacultism.
Well-tracking the information of cultural and social trends and dynamics in one’s local community by deploying evolved cognitive truth-tracking and information-tracking only provides a partial basis for mental health. The individual must also be able to reconcile into their ratiocination, on an intuitive and heuristic normative basis, the scientific episteme that's now widely accessible to all people, and to resist admitting exactly the kind of anti-reasoning (against epistemic rationality) that Sapolsky notes is prevalent in theist fideism(Ståhl & van Prooijen, 2018, 2021; Thurow, 2013; Van Der Hoek, 2005).
Put in other terms, when one appraises the data properly and without inappropriate cultural and confirmatory biases there are no meaningful or significant distinguishing psychological differences – including from the perspective of dimensional diagnostic criteria - between schizophrenia and the psychological state of adults having imaginary friends, paranoid delusions about demons, and delusions of reference centred on their imaginary power-friends (and that’s only a few of the dimensional diagnostic criteria).
I once had a schizophrenia patient as an intimate partner, and they were diagnosed significantly on the basis that they heard voices speaking to them. But they were also committed (by their doctor without my knowledge) on the basis that they thought that if a street sign was a particular colour, or some businessperson in the street was holding their briefcase in their right hand: this was a directive from the universe to return to China. How is this different from people believing they are being guided by signs in various forms such as religious texts and miracles? It isn’t. In fact my friend was significantly less ill than religious schizophrenics because she did not have an imaginary friend whom she thought responsible for the messages!
The stress-relieving benefits of megacultism-based psychological placebos for terror management are likely to be far more limited than it is commonly popular to believe and endorse. Perhaps their endorsement is yet another terror-management strategy for warding off ego-depletion and terror of mortality, loss of self-esteem, and of course loss of career, social status, and reputation! The religious-theistic schizophrenia pandemic is its own catalyst. Just as the infected dead bodies in a plague proliferate the deadly viral or bacterial pathogens that case the plague, the afflicted in the religious schizophrenia pandemic proliferate the memetic and narratological misinformation and disinformation that causes and exacerbates the religious schizophrenia pandemic (Castelfranchi, 2001). Others use the infected for their own purposes (tossing bodies over the castle wall or handing infected towels to the native tribespeople?), and the rest of us look on in subdued terror.
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