> Well I am an amateur as well so don't take my words for anything. I just offered a perspective (that is probably obvously wrong in some way if an anthropologist/sociologist/historian would look at it).
Oh, me too. I'm not an expert at all. I'm just thinking out loud here with you.
I think things like religion, state-- any relationship of domination between people that is regulated by violence, really is completely parasitic. By that I mean that instead of thinking of things like states and patriarchs and masters as enabling social structures, we should think of them as coopting social structures in order to get more out of the collective than they put in.
A lot of it can be phrased in terms of ownership. Religion, priesthoods, claim ownership over morality, over good behavior. By doing so, they become parasites. People are naturally receptive to cooperative relationships that benefit everyone. We are a communal species. By forcing themselves into the equation of every relationship between people, priests are now seen as valuable. Are they? I will say no. I refuse to accept that they are. They wormed their way into goodness and spirituality (which are, in my mind, truly essential to our humanity) and now thrive off of it unjustly.
Patriarchs claim ownership over families by establishing concepts like blood line and inheritance. They create the idea of social identity that persists and propagates itself far beyond their own presence. They have taken a very human relationship: respect and trust, and turned it into something one can own. Patriarchs are parasites. Family is the natural, human idea that has been expropriated to justify their parasitism.
> They don't necessarily. But slowly over the ages groups that held those beliefs somehow proliferated more than those that din't. It could just be a fluke, a correlation with some other hidden variable. But maybe it was the cause and a light statistical advantage over a thousand+ years can make a large difference.
I don't think we have to see it as a fluke. There's a very obvious causal mechanism: Violence. Lots and lots of violence. Man beats the crap out of woman. Men subjugate women under threat of violence. Men set up a fence around land and call it property; they demand it be respected, under threat of violence. Priests yoke gods into pantheons, build temples, claim authority and ownership over all human social relations... under threat of violence!
A fist isn't a clever thing. Maybe we should just accept that since the neolithic our societies have been shaped by a human fist punching a human face-- for millennia.