Belief Systems

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Markets and Values
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Development of superorganisms to the nation-state level required that its component human organisms become capable of participating in their markets by making free-choice individual decisions. These decision-making market events were necessary to match supply and demand within the superorganism's market-based circulatory system.
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Completion of a market transaction requires that both buyer and seller come to an agreement on the "market" value of the object whose ownership is being transferred. In a free market, this involves mutual valuation that is based on comparison of alternatives. The existing market helps establish a range of desired prices, features and terms for the object, but it is up to the participants to work out the details. In his valuation, the buyer considers alternative ways to meet his need for something like the object being sold, how much he can afford to pay for it, how soon he must act on the need, and other possible objects and ways to satisfy that need. The seller considers alternative ways of marketing the object in terms of price, features to be included, and his current financial pressures to make the sale.
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These decisions often require a quick evaluation mechanism that transcends the complexity of attempting to consciously review an individual's multitude of past experiences that may bear on the current situation. This fast rule-of-thumb mechanism is provided by a set of values that overlays the person's history of event experiences.
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Values Help Make Decisions
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As a human organism learns and becomes educated by his family, community and other superorganism sources, he develops a set of values about what kinds of situation and action are good or bad for himself, for his family, for his community, and for his nation-state. In this learning process, his various levels of social interaction provide agreed-upon culture-prescribed sets of values, which he augments and modifies based on his personal experiences.
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During early development, a newborn infant immediately begins to learn about the world in terms of what situations and actions produce physical pleasure (good) and pain (bad). As his awareness develops and he begins to undergo training, he is taught that certain kinds of situations and actions are "good" or "bad." Further education and development produces a more sophisticated set of labels that are assigned to specific kinds of events, such as degree of goodness/badness, short-term versus long term effects, scope of impact (self, family, friends, community, nation-state).
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Values Provide Quick Good/Bad Judgements for Types of Events

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As a developing human organism becomes indoctrinated with these good/bad values, they become applied both to his ongoing experiences and to their higher-level abstraction hierarchies. This allows him to quickly apply a more generalized evaluation to a current event situation, rather than undergo the more time consuming process of finding a detailed match. In cases where a quick decision is required, this will be the best he can do. In less urgent cases it provides an initial evaluation that can be further analyzed as time allows. This ability to make quick value-based decisions is closely tied to his beliefs about the world in general.
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Belief Systems Encompass Both Knowns and Unknowns
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When a person talks about his values, he often refers to them as his "beliefs," as in "Based on my values, I believe that this is the right decision." These values in which he believes (or accepts) contribute greatly to the way he comprehends his external environment. When making a quick but important decision where time does not permit a detailed analysis, a person must trust, or have faith in, his values. At that moment, his values represent what he understands about the kind of event situation he is facing, the action he is taking, and the outcome he can expect from the event.
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As a child grows and matures, his range of values enlarges to encompass everything he knows about his external environment and how he should interact with it. It becomes the belief system framework that guides his day-to-day activities and provides the mechanism he uses to make decisions, when there is insufficient information or time available to perform an analysis based on his detailed experiences. For a busy person who is continuously involved in social interactions and decisions, this belief system of values provides an ever-present tool for interfacing with both his external environment and his internal model of that environment.
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As human organisms mature, they become aware that there are many life situations where knowledge derived from direct experience is simply not available or is simply unknown, such as what happens to "me" when I die? In constructing their internal models of the external world, human organisms have an innate drive toward completeness, where the model covers all possible situations that the person may face.
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Values are Also Used to Judge Events Where Factual Information is Unknown

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With no direct personal knowledge about these unknowns available either from their own experiences or those of others in their community, people have looked to their leaders for guidance. Given this responsibility, leaders have felt compelled to come up with answers. Since early tribal days, leaders have invented stories to explain the unknowns in some plausible way that will bring comfort to, order and allegiance from, members of their tribe. This has enabled the members to complete their internal models with values that can be applied to all situations. The availability of prescribed values relieves individuals from having to spend time attempting to figure all these things out for themselves. From a superorganism's viewpoint, their time is better spent performing work that carries out its life functions. In today's age of ever-growing information overload, this mechanism has become increasingly important.
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Religion and the Development of God
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Tribal leaders, recognizing that they had authority over members but no control over most unknowns, devised specific actions to be taken by members for key unknown situations. These prescriptions were sometimes individual actions to be performed by the participant, and sometimes ceremonies by families or the whole tribe. Some typical unknown situations involved birth, treatment of severe illness or injury, severe changes in weather, death, and treatment of a deceased person's body.
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As tribal superorganisms became more sophisticated, their members became more knowledgeable and more able to question the authority of their chief to make such pronouncements about the unknowns. After all, they knew him before he became chief and recognized the limits of his base of knowledge. On whose authority was the chief taking it upon himself to dictate their actions in these unknown situations? Here, the chief could avoid the conflict by appealing to the words of the esteemed leaders of past generations.
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In pre-literate times, the values, beliefs, and prescribed actions for unknowns were passed down from generation to generation in the form of sacred stories that were attributed to revered ancestors. Over time, the memories of previous deceased leaders became elevated into mystical father-like figures of authority. To interpret the words of these saintly figures required great study by persons devoted to their meaningful interpretation. As superorganisms continued to develop, the belief system stories that had been presided over by high priests evolved into formal religions. The idea of benevolent saintly figures from ancient times evolved into supernatural gods, which in many of today's religions coalesced into a the belief in a single all-powerful and all-knowing God.
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The Concept of God Provides Authority for Values Regarding Unknowns

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As superorganisms developed into nation-states, powerful government leaders often found their authority being undermined by prophets who constructed independent belief systems for their adherents. Some leaders relinquished their authority on unknowables to contemporary religious leaders. In some nation-states this was accomplished by formal separation of church and state, while in others it took place through an unstable alliance and sharing of power between secular leader and church leader. From a citizen's personal perspective, it was all a matter of where he could find the best authority to fill in the unknowns and complete his internal model of the world. In the western world, acceptance of a religion and belief in an all-powerful God became the generally prescribed way of filling in the blanks.

Next, Genes and Memes are examined as groundwork for explaining how living systems are being impacted by the advent of digital technology.