Chimps to Gods: New Thought’s Evolutionary Psychology

Clutched in our collective Mental Appendage, God’s not “dead”—they’re embryonic.

Too many deride New Thought as fluffy-headed positive thinking popularized by the cheesy book and movie The Secret. It’s not all naive magical thinking or victim-blaming; you can explain it via evolutionary psychology and track your own achieved objectives through its lens, whether or not you spend time intentionally visualizing. But don’t stop there: use technological trends to extrapolate desire-manifestation into the future, and the Mental Appendage powering New Thought becomes the womb gestating an embryonic God.

To elucidate, let’s explore four kinds of tools: an improvised club in the hands of a panicked primate, the termite-fishing sticks chimpanzees use, the knapped stone axes of Homo Habilis, and a modern college degree. 

The Mental Appendage

Starting with the club in a roundabout sort of way, our subconscious became necessary around the time our primate ancestors evolved opposable thumbs. To avoid becoming lunch for megafauna predators, my great-to-the-ten-thousandth-power grandfather had to maintain present attention and put any gripped branch toward the back of his mind. 

It wouldn’t serve to forget about the branch entirely though. When that saber-toothed tiger popped out of the grass, the Mental Appendage that held the branch in his subconscious would thrust it back into his conscious mind. Then he’d give it use: he’d desperately crack it in half over the tiger’s head, giving him time to scramble away and ensuring that one day, I’d be born.

That giga-great grandfather probably looked more like a chimpanzee than like me, so as we move forward through evolution, we’ll look at our contemporary cousins.

A chimp wanders through the woods and finds a mound of tasty-looking termites. This time, the Mental Appendage holds an objective: a crunchy snack. Stowing that objective away, the chimp wanders through her forest—again maintaining the present awareness necessary to survive—until her intuition calls to him. The Mental Appendage pokes her conscious mind via instinct, pointing at a short stick on the ground that, by simply stripping off the outcroppings of leaves and twigs, the chimp can plunge into the termite mound. The stick becomes a tool through one step of modification.

Catching Bait to Catch Bait to Catch Bait to Catch Fate.

A knapped stone axe requires a few more steps to become an effective tool, but the process is the same. 

According to popular theory, Homo Habilis was the first hominid to make these axes by smacking a certain kind of rock with another, denser rock in a careful way, breaking off slices and creating a sharp edge. To accomplish that, the Handyman would have to hold “getting the last meat off the bone” in his Mental Appendage, and wander his surroundings until he spotted that certain kind of stone. His intuition told him it might get him closer to his goal, but he’d have to wander more to find another rock with which to strike it. 

That’s three steps for those keeping track: Find a rock that can become an axe, find another rock to bang against it, and use the axe to scrape hard-to-reach meat. Homo Habilis’ bigger brain propelled him through the process, suggestions from the objective held in his Mental Appendage constantly guiding his wandering.

Homo Sapiens make that look trivial. A modern woman might hold the objective of financial independence in her Mental Appendage from the age of twelve and, if she remains focused, go through the thousand steps to get a college degree that provides her with a well-paying job. 

Intuition will suggest that she should study while her friends are partying, that she should join extracurricular clubs in high school, that she should apply to some specific college, speak to a career counselor, choose a particular major, make network connections, achieve a perfect gpa.

The piece of paper she gets at the end of that decade-long journey is a tool that allows her to carve meat from the bone of the economy. She gets a prestigious job. She is financially self-sufficient.

Human civilization does it too: for millennia, our species has held the idea of God in our longest-lasting literature—a kind of subconscious for all of society. Collective intuition is driving us to manifest that Supreme Being.

I Wanna Be a Billionaire…

Why manifest God? To be optimistically reductive, nearly every human holds “changing the world for the better” in their Mental Appendage. 

It’s logical optimism though. Nevermind that different people define “the world” differently—self, children, family, community, country, religion, gender, whatever; Dunbar’s Number keeps us in the red on the global consciousness balance sheet. Nevermind that “better” is just as subjective… we’re here to leave a mark and I want mine to be a big one.

Since it’s 2021, I’m steeped in celebrity culture and drawn to the Founder Myth: bright kid, limited education, builds something we didn’t know we needed, hits the big time. I admire Russel Brand’s moral compass and humility. I covet Mark Zuckerberg’s global influence and boundless financial freedom. Ambition drives me to emulate them—you know, without any of their flaws or controversies. Famous people are vulnerable to judgement, gawking and interruption; a perpetual, chaotic social-nudity more unfortunate side-effect than objective.

Forty years ago, I’d have grown up in the shadow of musical legends like The Beatles, so I might have been an aspiring rockstar.

Eighty years ago, the most influential people were world leaders and I might have dreamt of a day when I could go toe to toe with the next Hitler, emulating Churchill or FDR.

Remember, John Lennon’s famous “we’re more popular than Jesus” line was only partially hyperbolic—that band has sold 184 million records while FDR’s America had 50 million fewer people. And, of course, half of all humans in the world have a Facebook account they access once a month. 

Each of these legends has succeeded in wielding more influence than the last one. They accomplished that by being virtuosoes in the medium of their age. 

FDR delivered “fireside chats” on the newly invented radio. The Beatles took advantage of television’s Ed Sullivan Show to get a country screaming. Facebook was invented in 2007, arguably the same year the internet hit an inflection point on its rise to ubiquity: the same year Steve Jobs—another Founder—put the first iPhone on the market.

Inventions currently in development enable framing Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity as the moment when technology stops making virtuosos popular, and starts making them omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, and immortal gods. 

Technology’s Transhuman Terminus

In Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harrari argues that the path we’ve been on since the Enlightenment’s Humanist revolution leads inexorably to transhumanism. Individuals are in the sacred spot previously occupied by God, so we’ll become gods.

Omniscience will be manifested via microchips in the brain that give immediate access to Wikipedia—to the entirety of the internet. Elon Musk’s Neuralnink will enable anyone who can afford one of these chips to know everything.

Omnipresence is unlocked via mass surveillance. Your phone sees you when you’re sleeping and knows when you’re awake. Musk’s Starlink is evidence it’s getting cheaper to launch satellites and, soon, every inch of the world will be accessible via their cameras. The same chip that gives a person omniscience could also grant access to Big Data and satellite live-streams.

Omnipotence, according to Kurzweil, will be possible with foglets—swarms of nanobots that a person can control with their chipped mind to reconfigure matter.

Immortality is being actively pursued by scientists at Google who are looking for a cure to aging. Barring catastrophe, they’ll achieve their objective. Mice with lifespans doubled by CRISPR gene editing stay young and spry much longer than they evolved to.

Founders are on top of the influence totem pole today because they have mastered the Internet; celebrities because they’ve mastered film and television. Kids younger than me aspire more literally to becoming Influencers—geniuses at social media—but upgraded transhumans will be the next technological virtuosos. 

That means that if my grandchildren are ambitious enough to desire making the maximum impact on the world, they will aspire to be living gods.