Two Circulatory Systems

Humans appeared on a small planet beside an ordinary star and, in a span negligible by the measure of the Universe, worked out a good deal about how it is built. We looked inside the atom, saw the light of galaxies that set out long before the Earth existed, and calculated the age of the world — just under fourteen billion years. Now we are trying to understand how life itself arose and what place in that story belongs to us.

As far as we know, we are the only ones able to grasp our own existence and ask about its causes. Perhaps near other stars there are beings who answered these questions long ago. For now we have to rely on ourselves.

A human being is made of the same matter as the stars and arose by the same laws. It follows that at some moment the Universe brought forth a creature that set about studying it. If we put aside, for the time being, the question of a higher design, this is in itself an event whose significance we have not yet appreciated.

There is a sad side to this story. The Sun will go out one day. Long before that the Earth will become unfit for life, and everything that has been happening here for billions of years will be at risk. The only way we know to extend earthly life beyond that term is to find or grow a form of life that can cross this barrier, and it is not certain that it will be us.

No one knows how to do this. The Voyagers have already left the Sun's neighborhood, but sending a living being to another star is a task of a different order. It may take thousands of generations.

Hence a supposition that seems to us worthy of attention. What if one of humanity's tasks is to preserve life and teach it to travel between the stars? Then the ability of people to pass knowledge to the next generations takes on an almost cosmic meaning. Each generation receives the world from its predecessors, changes it a little and hands it on.

For an individual, the same story is far more dramatic. Sooner or later each of us discovers that his life is finite, and usually long before the first wrinkles. A child learns about death, sees loved ones go, and gradually understands that one day the same will happen to him. We have to go on living with this discovery: make plans, go to school, do the most ordinary things.

Meanwhile the dead do not vanish from our lives. We remember their words, use things they taught us to value, and sometimes act as they would have acted. It happens that they come in a dream, talk, laugh, and for a few minutes after waking it still seems that the meeting was real.

The body is gone, yet the relationship continues. A person's ideas about the world can outlive several generations, and we often follow the advice of people who died long before we were born.

It is hard to imagine that all this leaves a person indifferent. He needs to explain what is happening and to find a place for his own life in a world that existed before him and will remain after him. And he needs someone else to share the explanation: no one lives long alone with the thought of his own finitude. People convince one another that there is meaning. This may be the very first work of religion, older than any temple.

Here, as it seems to us, lies one of the sources of the religious feeling. We are used to thinking about religion in rather concrete terms: as temples, sacred books and clergy. All of that appeared comparatively late. Behind it stands a far more ancient need — to understand why what happens happens, and where one stands in all of it.

A child asks why it rains and where the sun hides. An adult asks harder questions, but the nature of the curiosity is the same. A person needs an explanation he can go on living with, one that tells him what to expect from the world.

Before the scientific method, explanations were drawn from available experience. People noticed regularities, ascribed causes to events and tried to come to terms with the forces on which their lives depended. By and large, this is how ideas of invisible beings, of life after death and of the structure of the world took shape.

In other words, religion was the first way of knowing, and it appeared before humans learned to think in the abstract. The question "why" arises in a child long before he has the concepts to answer it; so it was with our species. Magic, fetish, totem, the spirit of an ancestor — all these are elements of attempts to explain the world somehow (and then to act on those explanations): do this and it will rain; break the taboo and trouble will come. Knowing, stripped of the inessential, is receiving information and trying to assemble what has been received into a single picture, to explain it. Long before science, and even before abstract thought, religion did this work.

Religions arose in different ways, and far from all of those paths are known to us. But the need to make sense of reality is ancient enough to count as one of the foundations of religious experience.

It is curious how little this need has changed. Every morning we switch on the light without thinking about the nature of electricity. We use money, though few could explain why a piece of paper, or an entry in a bank's database, has purchasing power. We entrust our correspondence to the internet and tasks to artificial intelligence, tasks whose solutions we ourselves would struggle to explain.

Most of his life a person spends among things whose workings he knows only approximately. He has learned to use other people's knowledge and to rely on other people's experience.

One may object that electricity is measurable and the predictions of physics are verifiable. But in daily life we measure and verify nothing. We press the switch with the same confidence with which our ancestor threw a pinch of fat into the fire for the spirits: the action will bring a result because it always has. This is not knowledge but, one might say, a very ancient reflex, and it fires in the same place where religious feeling once fired. Most likely, it is that feeling.

It is this capacity to act on the basis of ideas accepted on faith that interests us. A person constantly uses knowledge he has received from others, recognizes authorities and trusts the established order. Sometimes he is right, sometimes mistaken, but the very readiness to accept someone else's experience lets him live inside a complex society.

For this a society needs one thing: that people be able to come to agreement.

Alone, a human is weak. Physically he is inferior to most large animals, vulnerable to cold and hunger, and in the first years of life he depends entirely on others. Yet the ability to unite allowed our species to spread across the whole planet and build a civilization that now changes the climate.

But union does not come free. Everyone has to yield something: give up part of the catch, put off a desire, submit to a rule he did not choose. Culture, seen from this side, is the sum of such steps toward one another. Each gives up part of his own freedom in order to go on doing his work — hunting, raising children, surviving — but inside a group, not alone. From the beginning, religion was a way to make these concessions meaningful, to legitimize them somehow, to give them a stronger foundation: not "the chief wants it so," but "it has been so ordained from above."

The most vivid evidence of this stands on a hill in southeastern Turkey. Göbekli Tepe is a set of circles of carved pillars weighing many tons, which hunter-gatherers raised about eleven thousand years ago, before agriculture, before pottery, before cities. It used to be thought that people first learned to grow grain and then, once fed, built temples. Göbekli Tepe turns this order over: first came a shared cult that gathered hundreds of people in one place, and only then did these people need something to eat. Great religion and agriculture were born together, and it is still unknown which called the other into being.

Cooperation requires the transmission of information. One must tell others one's intentions, explain the rules and keep agreements. This, we suppose, is how shared ideas arise, thanks to which people act together even if they have never met.

One of the oldest mechanisms of such action is exchange. People shared the catch, handed one another things they had made, traded the results of their labor. In time these relations acquired rules and grew into what we call the economy.

Exchange presumes that its participants know of each other and understand the value of what is offered. And value is a strange thing. It is neither in the axe nor in the sack of grain; it appears only at the moment when two people agree that one is worth the other. Marx called this commodity fetishism, and he chose the word deliberately: fetish is a term from the study of religion, the name for an object to which a power is ascribed that it does not have (on such questions Pavel, as a professional scholar of religion, always keeps a neutral position). Faith in value is perhaps the most widespread experience of our time, and we will return to it separately, because in many respects it is indistinguishable from religious experience. Or perhaps it is that experience?

For a deal to take place, one must tell people about the goods, explain their properties and persuade the other to accept the terms. As long as people lived in small communities, a personal meeting was enough. With the growth of cities and trade, the seller had to address people he had never seen.

This is how advertising appears. Let us define it at once, so as not to get confused later: advertising is the transmission of information that the recipient did not ask for. Everything else — media, genres, budgets, degrees of talent — is detail. A hawker's cry at the market, a signboard over a shop, a newspaper notice and a message that appears on a phone screen in a fraction of a second all reach a person who asked nothing. The means and the organization of trade changed, but behind it all stood one need — to tell others about one's offer and nudge them to act.

Here lies the first likeness, the one from which everything began. Religion is a way of obtaining information about the world and explaining it; advertising is a way of passing it between people. Both answer the same, perhaps most ancient, demand of humans: they need to know and they need to tell. The other likenesses we will speak of grow out of this one.

At first glance religion and advertising are far apart. It seems odd to look for a likeness between a prayer and an ad for shoes: these acts have different purposes, and the people who perform them want entirely different things.

And yet, let us look closer.

Religious ideas help a person make sense of the world and decide how to behave toward others. For these ideas to survive until the grandchildren, a society develops ways of passing them on: shared symbols, traditions, institutions that sustain a certain order of life.

Advertising is occupied with something else, but it faces a familiar task. It has to convey an idea of the value of something so that a person takes it into account and does something. For this it takes images the audience understands, existing beliefs and the society's accepted ways of expressing meaning.

In both cases everything comes down to trust. The message alone guarantees nothing. A person must notice it, understand it and find it convincing. Sometimes this takes years, sometimes a few seconds. Much depends on what is already in his head, whom he is used to trusting and what he expects from his own life.

On this likeness we settled — the likeness of two systems whose history occupies most of the history of civilization.

Religion can be pictured as the circulatory system of a society. It carried shared ideas about the world, maintained the link between generations and gave people reasons to live together. Where religious institutions stood at the center, a considerable part of knowledge and social relations passed through them. They legitimized power, one or another, created literature and art, offered common values, and regulated and ritualized people's lives, often down to the smallest details.

Advertising is the circulatory system of the economy. Thanks to it, word of the possibility of exchange reaches people far from one another. It takes economic relations beyond personal acquaintance and takes part in creating the demand without which many markets would look different.

Every metaphor has its limits. A society rests on many institutions, and the place of religion among them has changed from era to era. The economy needs production, trade and a whole system of relations within which advertising does its own particular work.

What interests us is the cause of the likeness. Why do the ways of transmitting religious ideas sometimes resemble the methods of modern advertising? Where do the familiar mechanisms of persuasion, the shared symbols and the promises of future well-being come from? Why are people ready to follow ideas received from complete strangers?

The answer, most likely, lies in the human being. Our brain took shape long before modern religions, states and markets. From our ancestors we inherited the ability to learn from others' experience, the wish to belong to a group and the habit of looking for the causes of what happens. All this still governs our decisions, although the world around has changed beyond recognition. And it governs them in the same way, regardless of the nation, the era and the civilization in which a person happened to be born.

A person may consider himself a rational being, but his actions are often determined by what he himself scarcely notices. He imitates those around him, listens to authorities and accepts as true what he has been used to since childhood. He can explain his decision in detail, yet the real reasons for it may be hidden even from him.

That is why in religious experience we find devices we meet today in advertising, and in advertising we recognize images and moves long familiar to religious traditions. Some of these devices came into modern communication directly from religious practice. Others may have arisen independently, because they appeal to the same features of perception. Where the line runs between inheritance and coincidence, we have yet to work out.

The comparison lets us pose the question for the sake of which we took up this book: how well do we understand the causes of our own behavior? Why do some ideas unite millions of people while others go unnoticed? How do convictions arise for which a person is ready to change his usual life? What makes him trust a stranger and agree to rules set long before his birth?

There are two of us, and we came to these questions from different sides.

In the late nineties we studied in the same year in the Department of Philosophy of Religion and Religious Studies at the Faculty of Philosophy of Lomonosov Moscow State University. Pavel Kostylev stayed on at the faculty: he completed postgraduate study, taught religious studies and the history and theory of religion for many years, gave a course on new religious movements, worked on Islam and Sufism, and edited the journal "Religious Studies Research." I, Vlad Sitnikov, left in 1999 to draw the first online supermarket in Russia, became a partner of the creative agency GRAPE in 2004, then built Hungry Boys and Possible, spent two and a half years as brand director of Skillbox, and in 2023 launched безтендера.рф. The campaigns in which I took part as author of the idea or creative director have won several hundred awards, including Cannes Lions. In 2018 I seriously tried to put an advertising medium into orbit — a screen made of satellites that would be visible from Earth with the naked eye. Reuters and Wired wrote about it, astronomers were against it, and I still think it was a good idea.

But all those years a question from the student lecture hall would not let me go: where did the religious come from in the first place? I looked for the first point — the moment when humans acquired what later became faith. The traces led further and further back. To the paintings of Chauvet and Lascaux, where horses and bison are drawn so that a modern artist's hands fall. To the Paleolithic Venuses: the figurine from Hohle Fels was carved from a mammoth tusk forty thousand years ago. And finally to the Neanderthal. He buried his dead and laid the bodies in dug pits, and in Bruniquel Cave, a hundred and seventy thousand years before us, he built rings out of broken-off stalagmites, whose purpose no one has yet explained. The religious is older than our species. This became the starting point of the book.

That is how we divided the work. Pavel is responsible for philosophy and the history of religions; I am responsible for the person to whom all this is sold, and for examples from advertising practice. The logic of the book fits into a single chain: desire — cognition — faith — image — myth — collective conviction — social action. Where possible, we will look for confirmation in research and historical evidence. Where we have only suppositions, we will call them that.

This book has a practical aim, and we will not downplay it. Understanding how these two systems work gives a chance to see the first causes of people's actions — our own, our colleagues', our friends', a whole society's. Where first causes are visible, one can forecast, negotiate and avoid needless conflicts, and different economic, social and religious models cease to seem irreconcilable: they have a common root. We want the reader to come away with not only observations but working constructs that can be applied as early as tomorrow — in advertising, in business, in a conversation with one's own child. And one more thing: knowing the mechanisms of persuasion lets you notice them at work on yourself.

In the end, religion and advertising interest us as two great historical experiences of working with human convictions. Placed side by side, they let us see the familiar from an unfamiliar side and gather into one system what we had previously met only piecemeal.

We have to begin with the human being — a creature who once thought about his own death, asked where the world came from, and managed to persuade others to act together with him.

Much has changed since then. We build spacecraft, talk to machines and send a message to the other end of the planet in a second. But we still need an explanation of what is happening, we believe other people's words and look for our place among other people.