I'm writing a transcript for a youtube video and I was hoping I could get a critique. I'll be doing a web series on the subject, I'm hoping you would want to help me out because this will eventually turn into marketing for a smart contract based website trying to incentivize telling and (more importantly) believing the truth. But before I can do that, I need to explain why people believe what they do and how that has changed over time.
So... Here it is
Did the printing press destroy society and spread war across a continent? Is trust destroyed by too much information? Can non-kosher foods cost you a friend? All this and more on our first episode of Bitcadia: A Story About Truth.
Meet Ezra, an Israelite of the iron age. His world was a great deal different from our own. Judges and rabbis were the rulers of society, and people ordered their lives by the principles outlined in their holy texts. You may be familiar with some of these rules...
No eating pork,
No consuming beef and dairy products in the same meal,
And no working on the weekly Sabbath.
Tens of thousands of Hebrews copied these rules in holy texts, and even more committed them to memory.
You see, Ezra lived in a time before recorded information was widely available. In these times, people created manuscripts by painstakingly writing out every word. So the things that they recorded were the things that needed to be preserved: information that was useful to the reader, not meant to merely entertain. Though people today may not see the practical value in the religious rules we mentioned earlier, they provided invaluable cultural information in Ezra’s time… Information that could create cohesion by signal trustworthiness where relationships didn’t exist yet.
When he saw that his neighbor Yosef observed the Sabbath, never ate pork, and separated his beef from his dairy meals, this signaled to Ezra that Yosef was... “kosher”, and thus trustworthy. There was a smaller chance of distrust if Ezra and his neighbors had the same values and expectations. Also, if Yosef followed costlier principles, it signaled a greater commitment and that he was unlikely to cheat. Getting caught cheating would destroy this signal of trustworthiness and all the work that had been put into it.
Thus it was, by writing down their customs and rules, the scribes actually writing down the signals which made trust possible for the Israelites.
When Yosef and Ezra are in conflict because their mental copies don’t match, they can seek out resolution by finding the information written. This is the impetus behind society enforced censorship. If Ezra wrote down a different version of these texts, it might break down trust of the society. Every change would require Yosef and his neighbors’ memorized copies to be updated. And getting people to rewrite their manuscripts would be costly. Only by changing customs and beliefs in small negotiated steps can society also maintain trust and order.
This had been the way of the world for thousands of years. Civilizations which succeeded in uniting their lands through common customs were able to last much longer. The most successful could even survive being broken up and dispersed into other cultures. Ezra’s society had one such culture. Which brings us to Johan, a descendant of Ezra. One of Johan’s ancestors had joined an offshoot of Ezra’s religion which grew to be a more widespread common value system.
But Johan lived in a strange new time. Recently, various groups had begun to spread new ideas... and had started to fight over them. People attempted to protect their common beliefs as they had done before, but something was different this time. The ideas were spreading faster than censors could stop them, and all the ideas seemed to be sprouting up all at once. Recently, a new technology for spreading ideas was created: the printing press. This machine reduced the amount of time it took to print ideas, and so they could spread and propagate much faster. Conflict broke out among different factions and divided Johan’s society.
Yet, Johan was never interested in warring over heresy. He learned and adapted to the surrounding value systems in his area, but never adopted those with much vigor. Yosef’s descendants did, and they went off to fight against “the heretics”. Those battles never had any lasting effects, and Yosef’s descendants dwindled in numbers. Johan, and people like him, became the majority of the population and they recognized that heresy wasn’t as harmful as it used to be. Johan and other liked-minded people reduced censorship. As a result, society started experimenting with ideas. This publishing experimentation led to a renaissance in art, philosophy, science, and technology.
In our next episode, we’ll discuss the cultural forces at work on Ezra and the way human brains work when they encounter new information.
