Kevin Simler

Fukuyama is right that there's a puzzle, though: Individuals have almost no reason to prefer their fourth cousin to a friendly stranger. So how do tribes of distant relatives cohere?

It's not fear of supernatural retribution. Rather, the shared ancestors serve as a focal point for coordination.

If everyone formed political alliances only with their friends, the resulting network would be a stringy mesh, centerless and incoherent. Instead, when people unite around a common (patrilineal or matrilineal) ancestor, the political network takes the shape of a firm knot.

Superstitions then get grafted on later, as stories to tell children. "Don't disrespect your cousins or Great Grandpa will be mad." Crucially, these fables reinforce political ties **that make sense for other reasons**. The dead are just a Schelling point.

Fukuyama nowhere uses the term "superstition" in the quoted passage. Nor does he refer to supernatural retribution. Are you equating those notions with the religious beliefs and practices he refers to?

If so, I think you're misreading him. In a sense, *you're* the one invoking "superstition." There is a way of understanding those religious beliefs as precisely a sophisticated, culturally elaborated Schelling point, but without your deflationary "just".

Superstition: "a widely held but unjustified belief in supernatural causation leading to certain consequences of an action or event, or a practice based on such a belief." He describes many such unjustified beliefs.