The passage draws our attention to the influence of

The human capacity for abstract theorising produces a host of new rules for mastering the environment and regulating social behaviour that go well beyond anything that exists among chimpanzees. In particular, ideas concerning dead ancestors, spirits, Gods and other invisible forces create new rules and powerful incentives for following them. Religious ideas of various sorts enormously increase the scale on which human societies can be organised and constantly generate new forms of social mobilisation. The highly developed suite of emotions related to norm following ensures, however, that no mental model of how the world works is ever regarded as a simple theory that can be discarded when it no longer conforms to observed reality. Even in modern natural science, where there are clear rules for hypothesis testing, scientists develop emotional attachments to theories and resist empirical evidence indicating that their pet theories are wrong. The tendency to invest mental models and theories with intrinsic worth promotes social stability and allows societies to bulk up enormously in size. But it also means that societies are highly conservative and fiercely resist challenges to their dominant ideas. This conservatism with regard to rules is a source of political decay: rules or institutions created in response to one set of circumstances become dysfunctional under later conditions, but cannot be changed due to people's heavy emotional investment in them. Social change is therefore often not linear but follows a pattern of prolonged stasis followed by catastrophic change. As Hobbes points out, the fear of violent death is a very different emotion from the desire for gain, which is why fear and insecurity typically motivate people to do things that mere material self-interest does not.