Coltan Scrivner

I think what's going on there is people have historically used

agentic beings that they can't see to explain misfortunate events.

There's a long recorded history of that.

There's a lot of good anthropological work on that, witches in particular.

And so I think what's happening is that's tapping into dangers that we don't understand.

We tend to give those agentic beings, right?

We tend to say, oh, well, the ghost made that knock in my house or the witch cursed me, right?

Exactly.

Because how else are you going to take an action against it, right?

If you don't have a thing that you can take an action against, you feel helpless.

And that's a terrible feeling.

It's better to guess.

In human life, almost everything that happens to us happens to us because someone else does.

Did something.

Most of the things that happened to us are because we live in communities and for most of our history lived in small, tight-knit communities.

The good things and the bad things that happened to us often involved other people.

So it makes sense that we would have this bias to kind of think that if a misfortunate thing happened to me, maybe someone else did it.

Yes.

And maybe they're really powerful because I didn't see them do it.

Yeah, we use that as a way to just try to explain it and then get a grasp on it.