For hundreds of thousands of years, our species has been based on tribes, then also families within villages. It has also been based on a deep interdependence with the natural world. Individuals didn't even exist as such for most tribal people, as each person could not be defined without a reference to the bonds that bind them to tribe, land, sky and water. Tribes, families, villages and the relationship with nature not only helped people survive, but met deep needs within individual humans so that they thrived. Hunter gatherer individuals do not need a God to fill a deep vacuum within them. Their needs are met from each other, from nature and from a sense of belonging to the tribe and the land. They might have stories about various spirits, who are rooted in the land or the sky or the oceans. But they would never dream of giving up the relationships with each other or the natural world for one of these spirits, or even all of them. The piraha are one example. And these spirits were external to them, though there might be resonance of certain spirits with certain individuals.
Families within villages also provided deep belonging and interdependence with people and nature. If there was a God involved, there was usually not the idea or the possibility that this God would replace the relationships between people or between people and the land.
The idea of focusing one's life on a relationship with God arose in village culture within Judaism. I'm not sure how it arose, probably innocently from mystics like Jesus who were misfits and did not get their basic needs met from a family within a village. Maybe because sometimes their family and village were destroyed by an invading nation.
The idea also arose in India with similar environments among misfits. And in the middle ages in Europe and Persia with a few mystics who needed an outlet for their strong sexuality in a sexually repressive society. Listen to songs and read poems about mystical experiences, or take entheogens, and the presence of sexuality or a similar force that feels ecstatic and connective is hard to miss. You don't get pagans or native people or most villagers who are sex positive, advocating dropping everything and focusing on God. Perhaps this is not quite what "seek ye first the kingdom of God" means, maybe it means prioritizing this God, external in tribal and village cultures, internal for moderns. It seems to me that prioritizing is innocent for the external God, but with the internal God, in combination with seeing the global market as a source of economic goods and services, it leads to an extreme individualism and lack of genuine care for others. On the other hand, perhaps the external God is more prone to disagreements with other external Gods than the internal God, which is not about dogma but about inspiration and creativity.
Still, this idea of prioritizing God didn't take off and go viral till late stage global capitalism which encourages individuals to interact with (prioritize) a global market instead of with each other for their basic needs. The greatest profit comes from individuals; also villages and families get in the way of people's dependence on the market. If people can produce what they need for each other they don't need the global market. Conversely if they can get their basic needs from the global market, they at least superficially don't need each other. Sex becomes a commodity which they can get from porn or human trafficking instead of a sacrament that binds them to each other and makes them deeply care about each other. An ideology which tells them they don't need each other reinforces this dependence on the market and is selected for by capitalism. The end result is the destruction of tribes, villages and families.
Enter Ayn Rand and her poisonous ideology of objectivism (see here a satirical description of the irony of conservative christians adopting objectivism as an ideology). Now not only do people not need each other, but greed and selfishness become virtues. Ayn Rand was reacting to the brutality of the soviet regime, which took collectivism to an unhealthy extreme, allowing free riding in the form of Stalin and party apparachniks to take over. In the Marxist ideology, everything is a cause of social environment and large economic forces, and so there is no room for personal responsibility. The opposite of this is that personal responsibility is the sole cause of everything in human matters. Both ideas are terrible and lead to different forms of hell. People need each other on a personal and small collective level, and can't have much deep connection beyond the family level, with still some emotional connection possible at the village or tribe level (about 200 people max).
The solution that evolved out of the medieval mystics that gets selected by global capitalism is a parallel story about how people can get their deepest emotional and spiritual needs met only from a God (similar to the global market), either an external God for conservatives or an internal source God for liberals (especially in the american yoga community). And that the relationships with each other and the land are either not necessary, or that they are only instrumental to a relationship with a God.
There is no conspiracy of capitalists trying to get people to not need each other or the nature around them, or to destroy villages, tribes and families and the relationship between people and land. There is just a resonance between belief systems that encourage these sort of things, and an evolutionary selection pressure for these sort of belief systems within global capitalism.
Just like cells in a multicellular organism, people can survive alone for a while, but to thrive for a long time they need each other (and nature). There is nothing wrong with interdependence as long as the parts/cells/humans are healthy, and as long as the needs of the cells are resonant and not to far from the needs of the whole organism. But in global capitalism it is fashionable to believe that dependence on other people or the natural world is unhealthy and only a dependence on the global market is healthy. The spiritual equivalent is to believe that only a dependence on an internal source/God is healthy, and a dependence on other people or nature is unhealthy.
How do I know that there is no internal God that can fill the deep vacuum left by global capitalism by destroying villages, tribes, families and our connection to nature? Because nobody has ever seen this God. Most believers feel creativity, intense belonging, peace, joy, intense energy, and euphoria induced by entheogens, by meditation, sex, ritual, music, prayer, dance or being in nature. Also, if there were such a God, it would have revealed itself to our tribal and village ancestors, not waited till now when it is suspiciously conducive to global capitalism.
What I am concerned with is a sort of psychopathic egotism that is unable to feel compassion, care and curiosity for other beings because it declares itself to be happy and godlike and only sees others as instruments for one's own needs and goals.
Still this does not rule out the possibility of a deep ontological interconnection between people (and other living organisms) that transcends face to face communication, perhaps through some sort of field, either a known long-range field such as gravity or electromagnetism, or a yet unknown one to science. It is also possible that this field is involved in creativity and mystical experiences and that most of what people consider their selves are representations of this field, not the field itself. This sort of interpretation of the inner source is then compatible with having real care, compassion and curiosity for another part of the field. A more mundane psychological interpretation of the internal source/God is that it is simply an individual's knowing of their own needs, a deep understanding of themselves that is essential for not only their health, but the health of their family, tribe or village. Without such an understanding, it is possible for an individual to become unhappy and become prey to people who use them for their own needs without contributing to the needs of the whole family or tribe or village (i.e. freeloaders). It is also possible for such an individual to become a free loader, using other people to compensate for their lack of understanding of themselves. This disease of the part(s) (e.g. individual) can lead to a disease of the whole (e.g. tribe). We might call it co-dependence, but health does not consist in pretending to not be dependent on the family, village or tribe, or pretending to be dependent on only the global market, internal or external God. Health comes from both an inner understanding of one's needs and the needs of others in the tribe, and of the needs of the tribe as a higher order entity. Health also comes in situations when those 3 needs can be made congruent and resonant with each other.
Perhaps tribal and village people did not individuate as much as modern people and did not have very complex individual needs that differed much from other members of their tribe or village. I wonder if a modern person could be happy living under such circumstances once they've tasted individuation. Perhaps out of tribal deep interdependence and modern extreme individuation we can synthesize a middle sweet spot...
