Exploring The Idea Of "Sacredness" - Future IQ

5,210 views Wait, is this logic right? • Jan 16, 2026

Slog Reference: Understanding Sacredness

Description

Why do some ideas feel negotiable, while others feel untouchable? You can debate movies, food, or even money but the moment someone insults a god, a nation, a hero, or a principle, people are willing to fight, cancel, or die.

In this episode of Future IQ, we explore the hidden psychological force that decides which beliefs we protect with logic and which we protect with rage. It’s not just religion. The same force quietly governs nationalism, free speech, science, sports fandom, and even “rational” ideologies that claim to reject faith altogether.

We look at how ordinary ideas turn into identity, how disagreement becomes betrayal, and why humans instinctively divide the world into “us” and “them.” Most importantly, we ask a dangerous question: is this force the root cause of humanity’s worst conflicts or the only reason large scale cooperation ever worked?

Once you understand this mechanism, you’ll start seeing why some arguments are impossible to win, why compromise feels like treason, and why every society protects a few ideas at all costs even when it claims to be logical. This episode isn’t about taking sides. It’s about seeing the invisible rules that decide which beliefs rule us.

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Videos you may like / referenced in today’s episode:
The Power of Rituals: https://youtu.be/AuP9jR7nH_g
Believing is Seeing - How Bayesian Priors Trick Your Senses: https://youtu.be/bxx-My8J_kM
Showing Off is Important! Costly Signaling Theory: https://youtu.be/0YEBK7eR3Ek
The World Isn't Broken, Our Coordination Is: https://youtu.be/aoE4wEE_sb4
Fairness is Mostly an Illusion: https://youtu.be/kWHiDVjZQ7I

Do hit us up on Twitter:
@ngkabra http://twitter.com/ngkabra
@shrikant https://twitter.com/shrikant

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
00:46 Sacredness Meaning
03:20 Trapped Prior
06:26 Second Part Of Sacredness
07:50 Mind Shift Caused By Sacredness
09:48 4 Ladders of Sacredness
11:54 Recipe to Sheeple
14:59 Weaponizing Sacredness
16:58 Sacredness as Costly Signaling
18:17 Conclusion

Listen it on the podcast provider of your choice: https://tapthe.link/FutureIQRSS
Follow FutureIQ on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thefutureiq/

Source / References:
Links
- https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/05/07/weaponized-sacredness/
- Book: https://www.amazon.in/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion/dp/0307455777
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12860191/
- https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/i-believe-in-magic

#futureiq #sacredness #shivajimaharaj

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Transcript

- Why do some people completely lose their minds over certain things? Like for example, you insult somebody's favorite movie and they're fine. But if you insult Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, then they will be ready to kill you or die for in the process. Right? Please kill me. We are not insulting Chhatrapati Shivaji. We are trying to understand the concept of secretness, right? Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj is sacred to some people and in a way that cholelay or DDLJ is not sacred right and understanding sacredness is important because it is one of the best solutions to one of the biggest problems that faces humanity okay hold on sacredness as in God sacredness isn't that the cause of problems rather than a solution

0m 47s no so first let me explain what I mean by sacredness Then we will talk about the problem it is solving. Okay? So sacredness is not necessarily just God or religious. Okay? Any untouchable belief, right? Any belief that you are not allowed to question and you are not allowed to hold an opposite contradictory belief that you cannot argue against right and you are not even allowed to disrespect that. Okay? That is sacredness. Okay? So for example, of course the original definition was related to God and religion, right? You can't disrespect you disobey religious rules and so on.

1m 25s But this slowly leaks into semi and nonreligious rules. Yeah. As language develops, we not just language, right? I mean the concept of sacredness itself. So for example, marriage is sacred in most societies, right? Similarly, intercast marriage, not having intercast marriage is a sacred thing, right? or some societies are how to treat children like you just can't even question some of those concepts right and it's not just religion like I said so Shivaji Maharaj Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj is sacred loving your nation not disrespecting the flag that becomes sacred constitution freedom of speech is so sacred for so many societies right and the idea of innocent until proven guilty it is an important concept and I I

2m 15s agree. Even that being sacred, have that has that ever been questioned? Rarely is it questioned innocent until proven guilty, right? I mean, I can imagine somebody sitting there and making complex arguments about how that is actually net not a good thing, right? But it has become sacred in most societies. I I I will subscribe to it being sacred because it it uh it gives everybody a chance and everybody deserves a chance to you know not be declared guilty without okay is that this is not something that is argued fair on merits right it is taken as a sacred rule that we just you know we just follow and this has nothing to do with you know political and being

3m 00s conservative or something like that even liberals have sacred values like the scientific method is so sacred to liberal people. Uh you know the fact that you have to protect the environment is sacred. The idea of free market is sacred to a certain set of people. Right. Yeah. But all of those make sense because when you were explaining sacredness a little earlier I was thinking of sacredness in terms of essentially a bias a trapped prior of sorts. So when you agree with the sacredness for you it is like oh this is an obvious thing and when you disagree with the sacredness then it is like those dumb people they believe in [ __ ] right so but you are right it is a

3m 40s trapped prior okay whether it is your trapped prior or somebody else's uh trapped prior but it's a specific kind of trapped prior okay it is a trapped prior uh with a halo around it right trapped prior being a belief you have which is so stuck that no amount of evidence, no amount of arguments against it are going to change your mind. Right? We discussed this in a previous episode on Beijian prior. Yeah. But when a belief like this gets a halo around it, right? Which like you can't question it at all. Uh then it becomes a sacred thing. And it's a slow four-step ladder of starting with a basic belief and then going into sacredness. Okay.

4m 26s Interesting. Yeah. So first you start with a belief which a very bright line a clear separation between this side is correct and that side is wrong. Right? As opposed to just a rough thing. Okay. So I'll give you an example that if you are a community that believes that alcohol consumption is bad and evil, right? So that's it. That's a sacred bright line. Zero alcohol consumption is good. Even a little bit of alcohol, even if you take a sip, that is a bad thing. We all know people like that. Clear-cut binary, right? If you were doing this on the merits, right? That what are the causes?

5m 05s Why does why is alcohol bad and all that, you would reach a conclusion where saying that, you know, a little bit of alcohol is okay as long as you are not misbehaving, it is okay and so on, right? If that was your thing, then that would Sorry, we are not condoning alcohol consumption. This is just an example. Yeah. Continue. So my point is that if you were arguing on merits, you would have like a fuzzy rule saying that well most alcohol consumption is bad, too much is bad and things like that.

5m 37s Yeah, that is not a sacred belief. But when you say zero and then you want everyone to agree with that, then it is sacred. like a lakshmanda that cannot be crossed. Exactly. Because you know anything other than zero is a slippery slope, right? So that is and everyone has to agree on what we are trying to achieve with that rule. For example, I'm thinking of people saying Sachin is the best cricket player ever. Like that is that is it. If you if you agree with this, you are in my camp.

6m 07s If you are not, you are in the other. Not Messi being the best football. Yeah. No there's no partial things like oh Sachin except in ODI or except in Australia nothing like that right Sachin is best or Suchin is not and then you are an evil person right yeah or Messi being the best footballer I'm in that camp second part of sacredness is that there is a tribal community component to it right that all those people who believe in the same things that you find sacred they are your people us right and anywhere in the world you go that's It's your tribe. I mean anywhere you go in the world and you find a Hindu temple

6m 45s and the people in that are like your people, right? And same thing with Manu fans for example, right? Or Messi fans or [laughter] this generates an automatic creation of us versus them. Right? So if Hindu temple Hindu things are sacred to you, then all non-Hindus are like them. Right. Right. So if Messi fans, if you are a Messi fan, then all Ronaldo, Ronaldo fans are them. Correct. I almost said Bernardo. And uh you know this is related to another concept we have talked about in the past which is that this kind of a belief is a costly signal. It's a membership to a club.

7m 24s By believing something so strongly and not even allowing any arguments against it, you are competing yourself to be part of this group in a way that you can't be part of the other group. Right? So that is a strong commitment to membership of this group. Right? And that strengthens this group, strengthens your bonds to this group because everyone knows that yes, Shria never ever drinks alcohol. He's one of us, right? So that is the thing. Now once something becomes sacred, there is a psychology that actually helps with all of this.

7m 58s Right? So first of all, you get emotionally attached to your sacred beliefs. Right? So when anybody tries to question it or disrespect it, you have a strong emotional reaction way out of proportion to what the actual real uh issue is. Right? So for example, you are I mean I know people that if I have a sip of alcohol, they're going to be so disgusted with me way out of proportion with what are the actual harms of alcohol, right? Um and because of this emotional reaction then like I said earlier you become completely immune to arguments against it. Right?

8m 38s Anybody tries to come up with a logical rational argument against this belief directly. It is like because that person is a bad person that person is saying these things and you just you know all arguments are useless. Right. Right. So if somebody comes up to me saying Virat is better than Sachin or Ronaldo is better than Messi, I will I will be like you are in the them camp, you have no leg to stand on. No much more than that. Right? If come they come and tell you that Virat is better than Sachin, you will automatically say that this person has no understanding of cricket. Right? this person is an idiot and that is why that

9m 15s person is saying things like this and hence any arguments that person comes up with are useless and pointless and any statistics that person comes up with are either made up or cherrypicked right [laughter] okay and then the psychology goes into one step further which is that you get devoted to that sacredness right which is that you are willing to fight for this you are willing to suffer consequences for believing giving your sacred belief, right? And you're willing to die for it, which again we know examples of, right?

9m 48s Yeah. Plenty of examples of that happening uh a lot in recent times also. But uh Okay, I get it now. So, so you draw a bright line, please. Yeah. Sorry. So, I mean basically you draw a bright line, then it becomes a us versus them thing. Then you get all kinds of psychological and emotional attachment to it. And the fourth ladder is that because of these first three things the sacredness must be protected. Right? So not only I mean anyone who is them right who doesn't believe in your sacredness they have to be attacked.

10m 28s If you run out of them outside people to attack. What you do is people in your group who are not treating that thing with sufficient sacredness, you attack them. Right? [laughter] So if you know I am a suchin fan but I question some little teeny tiny aspect of it like oh he should not have been stuck on 99 so often then you start attacking me because I'm not sufficiently uh you know fanatic about it. Exactly. [laughter] So you have to attack. Right. Okay. So what I'm seeing here is Sachin, Virat, Messi, Ronaldo, all of these have become kind of many religions within themselves.

11m 10s Yeah. So like I said, I mean it all started with religion, but keep in mind that this is not about religion, right? It is about just a feeling of it can't be questioned. So for example, human rights, free speech, equality, free market, environment, and of course your sport team, right? All of these are sacred to certain groups of people, right? I mean, when you look at the people who are blowing up things to protect the environment. [laughter] You can see how sacred environment is to them, right?

11m 46s So it's a very weird way of uh declaring sacredness, but on some level you can try and argue it for them. But I'm not going to. Yeah. So just to summarize, it can't be questioned. It has to be enforced. The good thing is or interesting thing is that after a while it doesn't have to be enforced, right? Because people are just following it. Yeah. And also it is likely to be lindy in the sense that you know it is just going to last for a very long time because it is sacred or conversely things which are sacred today have survived a lot of attacks a lot of attempts to argue against them. So they are well entrenched and which means that

12m 29s they're going to remain sacred for a long time afterwards. Right. These four things, these four properties that you just listed, all four of them sound like trouble to me. Like massive, massive trouble. If you put them together, you basically are creating a recipe for creating sheeple, people who uh you know, blindly follow things. Well, and I can't see how that is a good thing because you're not looking at the social function of sacredness, right? Because one of the biggest problems that faces humanity is the fact that we can't coordinate with each other, right? We can't agree on things and we can't get anything done unless large groups of people agree.

13m 13s We spoke about this in the episode on coordination failures and problems. Exactly. And sacredness is one of the big solutions to large scale cooperation, right? Especially when a large group of people all have to agree on something which involves a sacrifice from some of them but not all of them. You can see how if you use rational calculation if you are sensible about it a lot of people will say why should I sacrifice right but once you make it sacred it's like all those calculations go out of the window right because now emotions come into play right because you know that's how you know a rajut kingdom gets everybody in that kingdom to fight against Mahmud of

13m 57s Gazni or whatever that's how you get a country to fight nonviolently against a violent colonial power. Right? So make it sacred. Make the concept of freedom sacred. Make the concept of nonviolence sacred. Right? It's also becomes a commitment device because now you know there is no because there is no rational calculation. It can't be bought off. It can't be traded. People cannot be bribed into doing this unless they are already corrupt people. Right. Becomes a matter of principle. Correct. Exactly. And it becomes a shelling point because you know it's sacred. So everybody agrees on that thing and even the ones who don't agree know that most other people are going to believe in it. So I might as well you

14m 45s know pretend that I believe in it. Sacredness becomes the shelling point around which everybody congregates and then sticks together most importantly. Exactly. Except all of this sounds to me like you are giving a playbook on how to weaponize sacredness. Yes. So weaponizing sacredness is one of the most common things that happens in the world by politicians and dictators and generally evil people. Right? So because originally sacredness was a moral compass, right? So it told you do these things, right? Do not drink alcohol. No room for uh you know messing around there. But once it becomes a moral bludgeon, then you can force people to accept things even when it is against their uh you know best interests. Right.

15m 34s Right. And you convince people that any compromise is a spiritual betrayal. Right. So even little compromises which actually make sense rationally, which are sensible, but from a sacredness point of view, you can convince people that this is just horrible. Which is why politicians will never frame a policy choice as okay let's just calculate all of this. It'll always say on oh you know these guys they're trying to sell out our martyrs. These guys are insulting our flag. These guys are putting a price on human life and price on human life is human life is a sacred value. Right?

16m 14s So uh that is what happens. So sacredness when used as a weapon is used to terrorize humans, right? And there is an inverted U curve of how effective it is, right? When a belief is not sacred enough, you cannot convince too many people to do it against uh their wishes, right? But you get it to a point and now everybody has to listen to it. If you go beyond that, then it becomes too much for the people and there will be a revolt, right? So you have to keep people in the middle of sacredness.

16m 49s Okay. Okay. Uh plus like that's a very weird goldilock zone. That's a very weird inverted U curve to think about. But yeah, it is an inverted. Let me take another very interesting example of how sacredness is also used as a costly signaling mechanism. Okay. Okay. So imagine the 70our work week, right? A lot of people don't really want to work 70 hours, right? What they want to do is that they want to show that they are great employees and they are the ones who should be promoted so they want to pretend to be working 70 hours uh work week right but if you just outright say this that oh this is a costly signaling mechanism

17m 30s then it doesn't have that much value right so you have to make it sacred you have to make it all about you know this is your work ethic this is like quality of work and this is you know we have to show how good India is so when you make it all about that then it suddenly becomes sacred and then it is much easier to convince people to work 70our work week but you cannot convince them to work 90our work weeks with that right if you try that then people will actually rebel 70 you can push it so that's where the inverted U curve comes I also think that it stems from a desire to extract more productivity out of

18m 08s regular people by making the 70our work week sacred like if you do not fall into this sacredness then you're no good as an employee. A generalization of that is that sacredness is used to extract cooperation out of people. It is used to extract sacrifices out of them to benefit you. Right? And [clears throat] the way to fight sacredness though you can't get rid of sacredness easily. What you have to do is you have to replace sacredness with something else that is sacred. Right? So if somebody is like oh work ethic is sacred you have to replace it with uh you know family life balance [laughter] is sacred right spending time with your kids and your

18m 56s wife is sacred and then you know you fight sacredness with sacredness. So yeah, there's a word for it that starts with J or in English called a religious war or a crusade. But yeah, looks like the only way to beat sacredness and I'm not talking just religious sacredness is sacredness. So figure out what is sacred in your life. Figure out uh what other sacredness is causing problems in your life and then use one to fight the other. I guess not much else can be done can it?

19m 31s Yeah. No. So I mean basically that's the idea right which is that there is a god-shaped hole in your heart. Whether you're believe in God or not that hole is there and if somebody comes along and fits something sacred in there now you're going to believe it without questioning it. So learn to recognize that. Learn that it is a two-edged sword. You can use it for great good or somebody else can use it for great evil. Mhm. So learn to recognize and learn to fight sacredness with sacredness.

19m 59s [sighs and gasps] Good luck in your crusade. Good luck in your fight. And I hope you win [snorts] uh for the greater good, not for the greater evil. For you to understand how uh sacredness avoids the slippery slope, we are lining up the episode on slippery slope for you. You'll find it very interesting, I'm sure. And uh because Murder Gandhi gets involved there. It's a phrase. It's just go watch the episode and let us know what you think about it in the WhatsApp community. The link is in the description. QR code on your screen. Scan join us there. We have tons of fun conversation and we'll see you there. Shriant Naven Future IQ.