Surveillance states require trusted impartiality to substitute for religious Big Gods

Evidence

But these social institutions and traditions that replace religion do not come for free—they are costly, fragile, and need constant fine-tuning and upkeep. It is no surprise that in totalitarian communist states, Big Brother in the Sky was quickly replaced by Big Brother in the Party. The Party’s eyes and ears were everywhere. These institutions and tactics, which belong to the toolkit of police states, partially suppressed and replaced the functions of religion, but they were far less effective in undermining religion than the social democracies of Northern Europe. In Communist states, unlike Northern Europe, no one believed in the impartiality of the Big Brother. Everyone was under surveillance, but people trusted no one, especially not their next-door neighbor. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 556

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s core framework: Rodrigues operates under an omniscient Big God gaze — Norenzayan’s own ‘Big Brother in the Party’ parallel maps surveillance onto religious policing, and the failure condition (no impartiality, no neighbor trust) explains why the Inquisition’s fumi-e, lacking genuine impartiality, also could not fully replace genuine belief.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: is the impartiality of the omniscient agent the load-bearing variable across both religious and secular surveillance systems? Does Rodrigues’s God seem partial (pro-Portuguese priests) and thus fail to sustain the moral gaze?

Related

• Surveillance replaces religion only when the watcher is believed impartial. (similarity 0.93)
• Surveillance only substitutes for religious authority where the state itself is trusted (similarity 0.85)
• Surveillance alone cannot substitute for religion; only trusted secular authority does. (similarity 0.83)
• Gods and governments occupy the same functional niche in human psychology (similarity 0.80)