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1:40

(In »Everything is religion«)

This means that we are still not measuring up to Sigmund Freud’s lofty expectations. And there is precisely nothing to indicate that we will ever do so. At a basic level, we feel and act religiously, not least those of us who incessantly allow ourselves to be convinced by our own officious little press secretary. We tie ourselves knots in order to motivate the most absurd positions and actions with common sense. And the overall pattern of all these hastily improvised decisions that require more or less laboured defences is solicitude for the group and its cohesion, as well as one’s own position within the group, or in other words, exactly what religion basically is all about and is concerned with. It is, as psychology professor Jonathan Haidt maintains in his book The Righteous Mind, impossible to understand the human being – as well as politics and religion – if we do not realise and bear in mind that our ancestors could not have survived and procreated with any success unless they had been extremely adept at belonging to groups. This is what people do and devote their lives to. We are, as Haidt writes, no saints, but sometimes we are really good team players. “Religion is loyalty to the world”, as the forefather of syntheism Alfred North Whitehead puts it.