We know well enough the effects of sleep deprivation: it makes clear thinking harder, decreases energy levels, increases stress levels/irritability.
But what about the chronic inability to rest in a foundational an unalterable Truth construction?
One can posit accurately, I think, that a part of our biological inheritance is a need–a biologically rooted need–for synchronization with a group. Now, a continuum exists between animals, say insects, whose behavior is almost entirely instinctual, to monkeys and dogs, whose behavior is a mix, to humans, whose behavior is largely volitional. No other animals in nature, that I know of, take 15 years or more to mature socially. This is because of the enormous quantity of mutable information that has to be ingested to inhabit our biocultural niche, information that can change in as little as years.
[Note: I have never seen any reason to object to the putative history of mankind evolved by the evolutionists. What I object to is the mechanism offered. I think we exist within measurable but non-obviously-manifest biological fields, that retain information, and which react as systems to changing environmental circumstances. Natural Selection happens, but non-randomly.
The view we are to accept, today, is that biological systems “fall together”, consistently, and across centuries. The image I have is this: take a time lapse picture of a building being built, and eliminate all traces of the people building it. It will appear to build itself, and great precision will be possible with regard to what the building materials are, what order they come together in, and how replication of the structure happens. This view would be internally consistent, and wrong. I think that is where we are at.
Forget “evolution”, which is to say the purported mechanism of speciation through random change coupled with random benefit: every time ANY living creature comes into being, we can trace the same “intelligent” guidance that presumably has facilitated the gradual decrease in entropy in our biological systems over the millenia. It is inconceivable to me that DNA can both contain the raw material, and the instructions for the use of the raw material. There is an architect, albeit not one modelled on Greek sculptures of Zeus. Digression completed.]
Having posited this need for belonging, can we not frame this need as the need for what I suppose I could term Truth Synchrony? In order to feed this need to belong, we need a relatively EXACT match, or we suffer the fate of a dog left alone in a cage too long.
As I commented in my paper on atheism, it seems to me that if all our social emotions are artifacts of “evolution”, then clearly and ineluctably the religious sentiment–ubiquitous in human life–is instinctual.
Why not conflate the religious instinct with the need for Truth Synchrony? What becomes obvious is that atheists, far from having transcended this instinct, have laid themselves completely open to it, such that their vociferousness is considerably in excess of all but the most immoderate religious adherents.
If Communism was and is a collective madness, then it is one that takes as its starting point the very worst elements of the religious instinct, which in the Christian world at least contained the seeds of its own transcendance. Love recognizes no creed. It is non-local, and applicable anywhere, even if the specific use of the crucifixion is not.
Clearly, in sum, I feel we need to believe. If we fail to take care in what we believe, we are liable to stumble and fall into much worse dogmatisms than those which characterized the religious wars of old.
God may not be clearly manifest, but neither are History, Matter, and the People, if by the People is intended an abstract group with no nameable members.