To recap, the problem we're exploring is that a lot of people fervently believe what just isn't true. This is nothing new, obviously. But many of the currently popular false beliefs engage very directly and specifically with public policy, and who people vote for, and how they behave in civic spaces. This is happening while the nation, and all of humanity, face some very daunting problems and dangers.
We don't know what people believed, or how they made sense of their world, prior to the invention of writing. Quite mysteriously, that happened nearly simultaneously, a little more than 5,400 years ago, in four different places -- Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and Mesoamerica (what is now Mexico). It happened in the context of settled, agricultural states, so what people believed and how they thought after they started writing doesn't help us understand much about those gatherer-hunter plains apes. The apes apparently started talking sometime between about 250,000 and maybe 100,000 years ago (I definitely favor the earlier date) but we can only surmise what they were talking about from what we know of their circumstances, with some indications from those non-literate, stateless societies that survived in recent times.*
Obviously, the most important knowledge the plains apes had was quite directly empirical. Somebody tried eating a plant and it tasted good or bad. If it tasted good and the person ate a good bit of it, maybe it sated their hunger, and maybe it made them sick, or at least they attributed their subsequent sickness to the plant. Either way, they told others and the people told their children and the children told their children. That kind of snake is dangerous, these rocks can be shaped into tools, this is where the lion hunts. Anybody who chose not to believe these things would likely end up dead.
We surmise that people had other kinds of beliefs, some of which were in the category of morality -- the right way to behave, who should be granted authority. These had to be shared in order for the band to function, and there needed to be ways of correcting and controlling violators, or eliminating them from the group. They no doubt varied somewhat from one group, place or time to another, but we do know that there are some commonalities among all people. In any case, varying social and moral systems have been functional in various times and places, as long as the people share them. When they don't, obviously, there is trouble, until the conflict comes to some sort of a resolution.
Finally, people no doubt had more abstract beliefs about how the world works. We think they probably ascribed sentience and agency to natural phenomena such as weather and trees and even rocks and mountains, as well as other animals. They may have believed in non-corporeal spirits, or continued existence of the dead. Whatever, all this didn't have much practical importance. They had free time to indulge these beliefs, and whatever it may have taken to propitiate unseen forces didn't cost much. (Actually, if the Hebrews are any indication, the good part of the sacrifice ended up being eaten anyway.)
So the point is, false beliefs that actually mattered practically got weeded out pretty quickly, at least if they mattered a lot. Plenty of false beliefs could persist through the generations so long as they didn't much matter -- or possibly even if they did matter somewhat but there wasn't a competing better belief available. (That gets a bit complicated.) But when society, and technology, got more complicated, the problem of what to believe and how to decide what is true also got more complicated. The earliest record we have of somebody actually thinking about this systematically is from about 369 B.C., so long after the apes walked out of Africa. We'll get to that next.
*They may not be truly representative of paleolithic people because some or perhaps all of them may be descendants of settled agriculturalists who took to a hunter-gatherer way of life, and many of them had some contact with states -- certainly in Africa.
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