Arbitrary Self Denial & Fasting: Hard vs. Soft and Pop Cultures
So far, we have vaguely alluded to the co-evolution of culture and the human brain and how pop cultures erode hard cultures in a way that damages individual adherents. Let’s take a moment to dive into a specific example of this phenomenon to better understand how it works.
Almost all hard cultures have some ritual focused on voluntary self-denial, such as Ramadan, Lent, or the Fast of the Firstborn. The question is, why? Why do cultures that practice something that makes membership less pleasant historically outcompete cultures that encourage people to indulge in whatever they want? This question becomes more pointed when we look at how common it is for pop cultures to emotionally reward people for succumbing to their base desires, as is seen in pop culture outputs like the Intuitive Eating Movement, which entails telling people they are being healthy by eating whatever they want whenever they want in an age in which we’re surrounded with an abundance of foods that are designed to be highly addictive. Movements telling people to indulge in their immediate desires have been around since the ancient Greeks. These movements resurface during every civilization’s brief golden age and only seem to be successful in the short run. While the pop cultures that produce them consistently die, stodgy hard cultures persist. Why?
A cursory look would imply that arbitrary self-denial is really just about creating a sunk-cost fallacy to reduce cultural bleed. After all, the more someone invests in a culture, the harder it is, psychologically, to leave. That said, because self-denial is disproportionately represented in hard cultures despite a myriad of other sunk-cost-fallacy levers available, we suspect there’s more to self-denial than the mere role it plays in reinforcing commitment.
Our theory is that self-denial and fasting impart advantages to hard culture adherents (despite these practices causing hardship) because these practices encourage adherents to strengthen their inhibitory pathways from a very early age. Training this part of your brain to function at peak efficiency plays a critical role in mental wellbeing.
Almost all processes in our brains require “exercise” to work at optimal efficiency (if you want to get better at a mental task, practice it repeatedly). One critical pathway in our brain subject to this broad “use it or lose it” principle is called the “inhibitory pathway.” This pathway is in the prefrontal cortex and is used to shut down thoughts in other parts of our brain. It is also one of the last parts of our brain to fully myelinate (a process that leads to more optimal function), which is why teenagers have trouble shutting down obviously bad ideas and intrusive thoughts.
You are using your inhibitory pathway when you decide not to reach for that third donut or lash out at a friend in anger. Your inhibitory pathway will even help you shut down intrusive and snowballing thoughts. This may partly explain why religious people are often shown in studies to be psychologically healthier than non-religious people.
Those critical of religion often paint the rules associated with hard cultures as arbitrary. They imply Christianity survived to this day merely because a manipulative ruling class threatened a bunch of uneducated rubes with eternal (or very real and immediate) punishment if they did not fall in line—but this is not the case. The surviving forms of Christianity competed against hundreds of thousands of other memetic sets (all threatening people with eternal damnation) while constantly splitting into new variations that competed against each other. Any ancient hard culture that survived to this day imparts lifestyles and worldviews to adherents that help them outcompete others.
Pop cultures are toxic because there’s a big difference between what you might want to do in the moment (which is what pop cultures cater to) and what you need to do (which is often unpleasant).
Nevertheless, past and present hard cultures have plenty of flaws. For example, because gay people have offspring at lower rates, homophobic cultures have historically outcompeted more open cultures, which has led many hard cultures to be fairly homophobic—despite this homophobia not being “necessary” today to ensure higher birth rates, thanks to IVF and surrogacy.
We stand at a unique point in history where we can mine the traditions of our ancestors with a sober mind instead of angrily reacting against them and regarding them with disgust due to their lack of surface-level logic. We have the power to intentionally design cultures and see how they play out in an increasingly virulent sea of memes.
Note: For examples of other fitness-imparting social technologies evolved by cultures, see: “Cultural Amenities” in the Appendix on page 725.
Side note: Harsh rules decrease bleed rates for religious communities but not for their secular counterparts. Anthropologist Richard Sosis found that 6% of secular communes survived after 20 years, compared to 39% of religious ones. Religious communes featured one common variable: A higher number of obligatory costly sacrifices (there was a perfectly linear relationship between costly sacrifices and staying power in religious communities but not secular ones).[[88]](#_ftn88)