A short story in a collection, but it counts: “Mother’s People,” by Stephen Baxter, in the collection “Evolution.”

This story is about the first human to invent religion, an early human with, as the omniscient narrator describes, a touch of schizophrenia that leads her to ascribe human motivations to inanimate objects. Her village is going through a drought and her son dies of illness; she concludes that the sky is angry at her neighbor (who just happens to not like her), and she kills her. After one more murder, the blood seeps into the ground and the rain starts falling. Her neighbors are astounded, and immediately follow her logic. The unifying power of the tribe’s religion gives them more success than their neighbors–they fear death less once they start believing in an afterlife.

But what really got me is the narrator’s meditation on how the same impulse that lead to this animistic religion ties into human complex tool use. If things are people, they can be reasoned with, bargained with, made to do what you want–our complex tool use comes from applying our brains’ natural social capabilities to non-human entities. But the story goes on to give a dark side to it–if things are people, people are things; other people can be abused to do what you want as well.

Now, you might laugh at this point, but growing up autistic, I always struggled to understand social interactions, why I should abide by social norms, the like, and wasn’t interested in making the effort to do so. But reading this story in my adolescence, it finally hit me.

People are things, and can be manipulated. They can be learned. I don’t need that empathy stuff that just comes naturally to other people, and I don’t have to despair because I lack it–I can learn it the same way I learn any other subject! And this was an epiphany for me!

I radically changed my behavior, becoming much more civil, polite, emotionally-restrained, better-dressed, closely watching how others acted to learn, and after a while I actually started, for the first time in my life, to enjoy the company of other people.

And it’s all thanks to this one somewhat-grimdark tale of a cavewoman inventing human sacrifice.

Of course, some people wouldn’t say the changes were entirely positive. I’ve got, overall, a fairly cynical view of human relations as a result of reading this book in my adolescence, and others in the same spirit I read later. I can’t help but view so much of normal human behavior as a well-dressed version of chimpanzee dominance games.