Big Gods substituted for courts and police in binding strangers into cooperation

Evidence

The coconut temple courier service is a modern surviving example of something that goes back thousands of years: it is the pivotal place prosocial religions have occupied in the establishment of social networks of trade and cooperation with high degrees of trust and social solidarity. These networks have often been the impetus for the creation of large-scale societies of cooperators, resulting, in turn, in the further spread of religious beliefs and practices. In the absence of modern cultural institutions such as courts, contract-enforcing laws, and police, Big Gods have been, for most people in the world, for most of history, a major ingredient of the social glue that bound anonymous people together. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 196

Categorization

• XREF: Cores the reader’s whole analytical project: religion as the pre-state mechanism for anonymous cooperation — directly parallel to Milgrom’s law merchant and Shannon’s Big God thesis.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that Big Gods are the functional equivalent of courts, contract law, and police — visible, costly institutional substitutes for absent secular enforcement — is the book’s central thesis in distilled form and bears on the fumi-e inversion directly.