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But to continue on that thread about ideas determining human behavior, it's something I used to buy into. But then, once I studied history and religion (as a primary source of social and political ideas), a somewhat different picture emerged: ideas can indeed induce a certain pattern of behavior in humans, OR ITS POLAR OPPOSITE. A famous example is extreme, completely world-rejecting, and even life-rejecting asceticism, which can prompt believers to lead a strict and perfectly chaste life of perpetual self-punishment, but might just as well result in a most liberal and easy, even dissolute lifestyle. In neither case will there be much tolerance for those who strive to strike a balance between the two. If human history as an unfolding process can be represented as a tree branch, then the emergence of ideas within societies, which normally represents a radical stage in their development, can then be represented as nodes, where at every node things can go either one way or another, but most likely not somewhere in between. It is precisely this reoccurring choice between two extremes, this sociological iridescence, which makes human history quite unpredictable.

Description
But to continue on that thread about ideas determining human behavior, it's something I used to buy into. But then, once I studied history and religion (as a primary source of social and political ideas), a somewhat different picture emerged: ideas can indeed induce a certain pattern of behavior in humans, OR ITS POLAR OPPOSITE. A famous example is extreme, completely world-rejecting, and even life-rejecting asceticism, which can prompt believers to lead a strict and perfectly chaste life of perpetual self-punishment, but might just as well result in a most liberal and easy, even dissolute lifestyle. In neither case will there be much tolerance for those who strive to strike a balance between the two. If human history as an unfolding process can be represented as a tree branch, then the emergence of ideas within societies, which normally represents a radical stage in their development, can then be represented as nodes, where at every node things can go either one way or another, but most likely not somewhere in between. It is precisely this reoccurring choice between two extremes, this sociological iridescence, which makes human history quite unpredictable.