The Cultic Bug In The System 

Excellent podcast!

Great discussion!

Amazing podcast episode! Very interesting discussion

This is really interesting. Have you considered that #3 might be related to #2 in terms of humans evolving into the social creatures that we are? I'm thinking about how organizing into tribes is a tradeoff--one gets the benefits of being part of a group, but in the process surrenders a degree of autonomy to the chief or whatever leader of the group. So a sort of prehistoric cognitive dissonance may be alleviated along the lines of, 'well I need to follow this guy's lead to be in this group, so I might as well believe that everything this guy says is right...' Just a thought.