39. Fitting With Personified Nature: Social Stability

The model of the world reproduced by a community defines that community in relation to others and provides a commonality — of construals, values and emphases — that unites and binds members of a community into an integrated social system. The inclusion of more powerful personifications of Nature in that social system amplifies the force of the model that binds individuals together.[1] This amplification extends greater authority to the social contracts — rights and responsibilities — that provide social stability and evolve as the moral code of the community, later insitutionalised as legal and justice systems, not least because the moral code can be modelled as meanings expressed by personified higher powers. It thus naturalises — and provides authoritative justification for — the means of maintaining social organisation, as well as the organisational type of the social system. The biological value of this process is the increased probability of social stability, and through this, increased probability of individual survival. 

Footnote:

[1] It also provides a degree of certainty in the model, and so confidence.

ChatGPT revised:

Personified Authority and the Stability of Social Systems

The model of the world reproduced by a community defines that community in relation to others and provides a shared framework — of construals, values, and emphases — that unites its members into an integrated social system. The inclusion of more powerful personifications of Nature within that system amplifies the binding force of the model.[1]

This amplification lends greater authority to the community’s social contracts — its network of rights and responsibilities — which provide the basis for social stability and evolve over time into the community’s moral code, later institutionalised in systems of law and justice. These contracts gain authority because the moral code can be construed as expressing the meanings of personified higher powers. In this way, the very organisation of society — including its specific structural type — is naturalised, and thus justified, by appeal to the authority of Nature construed as semiotic being.

The biological value of this entire process lies in its contribution to social stability — and thereby to an increased probability of individual survival.