The principles that explain why some genes are transmitted more successfully than others also explain why some beliefs are transmitted more successfully than others. ... If a particular belief has some property that facilitates its own transmission, then that belief tends to be held by an increasing number of minds. ... Any belief -- even a false belief -- that increases communication has a good chance of being transmitted over and over again. False beliefs that happen to promote stable societies tend to propagate because people who hold these beliefs tend to live in stable societies, which provide the means by which false beliefs propagate.
Some implications:
The belief-transmission game is rigged so that we must believe that children and money bring happiness, regardless of whether such beliefs are true. That doesn't mean that we should all now quit our jobs and abandon our families. Rather, it means that while we believe we are raising children and earning paychecks to increase our share of happiness, we are actually doing these things for reasons beyond our ken. We are nodes in a social network that arises and falls by a logic of its own, which is why we continue to toil, continue to mate, and continue to be surprised when we do not experience all the joy we so gullibly anticipated.
