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天津纺织工学院幼儿园1981届名单 – Yanwei's Blogs

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 19:00:00 +0000

共31人

41王晓光、42吕毅、43孙彦玮、44吴宏斌、45袁凯、46李珉、47张晓喧

31李红艳、32贾红丽、33翟悦悦、34刘钰、35张芳、36崔颖、37管明睿、38黄建仿、吴老师

袁老师、21娄隽、22黄勇、23宋炜栋、24杨明、25骆宇、26王晓健、27郭巍、28王鹏远、孙老师

11李欣、12杨萌、13姜宁、14赵霞、15刘彩妹、16韩晶洁、17李晓晖、18柴晶

编码规则

第一个数字代表从前往后数第几排。
第二个数字代表从左往右数第几个。

注释

定稿日期：2026年7月15日
共同回忆：管明睿、周溱、吴宏斌、冯志刚、娄隽；执笔：孙彦玮
扫描：孙彦玮；扫描日期：2001年；分辨率 200 dpi
惠普扫描仪：天津工业大学理学院（原天津纺织工学院基础课部）
扫描后，原照片与孙彦玮家的老照片，未放回相册，永远丢失。

扫描原件

评论区

周溱：我记得是张晓喧，不是张晓轩。他爸说他小时候太能哭，所以叫这个名字。

管明睿：这三个老师我都印象深刻。戴眼镜的吴老师比较厉害，孩子们都比较怕她。袁老师和孙老师都比较温和。我记得那时候比较喜欢袁老师和孙老师，比较怕吴老师。

吴宏斌：王晓光后改名高怀。

孙彦玮：咱们这个幼儿园合影在“中国照相馆”拍得非常有水平，镜头的选择、灯光、人物站位、后期显影。水平明显高于我初中、高中、大学、工作单位的合影。人生第一张合影即是今生水平最高的合影。

秦毅媚：好可爱，看到很多熟人小小的样子，不知道这么多人都是纺院的。黄健舫，我记得是这几个字。
孙彦玮：我问了黄建仿，她说，“就是这个 – 黄建仿”，历史上也没有用过“黄健舫”。谢谢你关于名字的质疑，时间太久了，得交叉验证才好。

相关阅读

告别摄影 – Another Dayu

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 06:19:18 +0000

Another Dayu

告别摄影

23 Jun, 2026

期望

韩炳哲在《爱欲之死》里聊到：如果说有一样东西需要对当今社会日益频繁发生的「失望」负责，那么它不是不断升华的想象力，而是不断提高的期望值。

过去，人们先经历，再留下记忆和图像。现在，我们还没有真正进入一个地方，就已经在观看它最漂亮的样子：最好的光线，最干净的构图，最适合发布的角度。

经验反过来变成照片的生产过程。

现实

现实从来不是这样。

天气可能不好，街道可能杂乱，行人可能很多，展览可能普通，餐厅可能拥挤，人可能疲惫，关系也可能尴尬。这些并不是现实的瑕疵，而是现实原本的质地。

图像世界和网络会把这些东西过滤掉，留下「最好」的瞬间，传播那些易于展示和观看的一面。

所以我们真正拿来比较的，并不是现实和想象，而是现实的完整经验，和图像筛选之后的理想片段。

当现实的粗糙感被抹平，世界就像是说明书，不再体验，而是在核对；不再认真相处磨合，而是确认对方是否符合某个清单。

告别

摄影和其他艺术不同的地方也在于此。照片看起来最接近现实，却也最容易暴露现实的不可抵达。

摄影用最接近现实的方式，提醒我们现实无法被真正占有。

既像证据，又像告别。

#摄影

Why Am I Left-Handed? | Quanta Magazine

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 18:32:45 +0000

When I was first learning to write, my letters and words ran from right to left, reversed as if in a mirror. Being left-handed, I was imitating the hand strokes of my right-handed teachers instead of reversing their strokes to replicate the letters. I gradually got the hang of writing in the correct direction, but it still feels natural for me to mirror-write. I have a mirror-written childhood diary. Leonardo da Vinci, another lefty, did that too.

Being left-handed is mostly no big deal. It is annoying how ink smudges under my hand. And I did once have to jump out of the way of a circular saw that I was holding backward; indeed, left-handers have more accidents while operating machinery. That aside, overall, I enjoy being left-handed. It grants entry into a smug little club, whose members — 10% of the human population — carry the secret knowledge that we are overrepresented among U.S. presidents, famous artists and musicians, and top athletes.

But our difference hasn’t always been welcome. My 91-year-old Texan grandmother remembers starting out left-handed (she, too, has examples of mirror-writing from early childhood) before being forced to switch, a common practice in much of the world until about the 1970s. The deep-seated disdain for left hands runs through our very language. “Left” comes from Old English lyft, meaning weak, foolish, worthless, or useless, while “right” means correct or proper. In other languages, the word for “left” can also mean awkward, unlucky, clumsy, suspicious, or sinister.

In college, I decided to spend a semester in Ghana, unaware that left-handedness is still stigmatized across much of Africa. Upon arrival, I kept accidentally offending people by eating or paying with my left hand, because, traditionally, the left is reserved for dirty tasks and the right for social interactions. When my Twi language instructor, Professor Kofi Agyekum, demonstrated how ceremonial robes are draped around the left shoulder and arm, leaving a chief’s right arm bare and free, I asked what happens if the chief is left-handed. “Oh no, no, we don’t go in for that,” he said.

Fortunately, our brains are plastic. My grandma developed beautiful handwriting as a right-hander. I easily changed my habits in Ghana. And as a kid I learned to use scissors right-handed. Today, given a choice, I don’t think I’d be able to cut with my left.

That we can fully retrain our hands (and brains) reinforces how little it matters which hand naturally dominates. And that’s part of what makes the circumstance so mysterious. If it makes no material difference, then why am I left-handed? Or perhaps more pertinently: Why are 90% of people right-handed?

An astronomical amount of research has gone into trying to find out. Geneticists, developmental biologists, behavioral and cognitive psychologists, neuroscientists, and evolutionary biologists all seek explanations. No one has put all the pieces together yet, but over the last few years, some major new clues have emerged.

First, some key facts. Crucially, left-handers aren’t mirror-image people. My heart is on the left where it belongs, and my liver is on the right. Whatever causes left-handedness isn’t related to situs inversus, a much rarer condition where a person’s internal organs mirror the usual arrangement.

My brain might be more or less normal, too. Or maybe not. I probably process language in the left hemisphere of my brain the way almost all right-handers do, but there’s a 20% to 30% chance that I process language on the right or that I split the task between the sides. That’s one puzzle about left-handedness: As a group we have more diverse patterns of brain hemisphere specialization.

Left-handedness does not seem to be purely genetic. Two left-handed parents have a left-handed child only 25% to 30% of the time. If one identical twin is left-handed, there’s only a 20% to 30% chance the other is too. This suggests a genetic component alongside some developmental randomness.

Also, the rightward bias of human handedness is unique. Some other mammals can be right-footed or left-pawed, but there’s no statistical imbalance toward left or right across the species, except for our extreme 10-90 split.

Is there a theory of left-handedness that fits all these facts?

Scientists (and I) long assumed that handedness must originate in the brain. After all, my left hand is more dexterous than my right because of the more richly interconnected neurons that map to it, on the right side of my motor cortex. It’s a reasonable guess that the causal arrow leads from brain to hand. In fact, remarkably, it seems to be just the opposite. Our hands sculpt asymmetry in our brains.

Ultrasound studies indicate that a fetus’s dominant hand is decided before its brain even connects to its limbs. We start flailing one arm around much more than the other starting about 10 weeks post-conception, as a fishlike fetus the size of a kidney bean. The movements are entirely reflexive, yet the arm that flails more predicts future handedness with a high level of accuracy.

A 2017 study in eLife reported evidence that this asymmetry originates in the spinal cord. The authors analyzed tissue from fetuses between 8 and 12 weeks post-conception (the window when arm-movement asymmetries become detectable) and found extreme differences in gene expression, or the building of new proteins based on genetic instructions, between the left and right sides of the spinal cord. This asymmetric expression could rig up motor circuitry, such as an abundance of neurons with long, signal-carrying fibers, that leads to more involuntary movement on one side than the other. Only after this does the brain get involved, as sensory feedback reaches the developing motor cortex, strengthening the neural representation of that limb.

That could explain how handedness happens. However, it doesn’t account for why the right side wins nine times out of 10, or why there is the occasional veer to left.

Researchers in the 1970s talked about a mythical left-handedness gene, but none exists. The genetic connection is more diffuse. Recent large-scale studies have identified variants of about 40 genes that each slightly elevate the chances of left-handedness. The more of these gene variants a person has, the more likely they are to be a southpaw.

The big surprise is that most are tubulin genes, which form some of the structural components of cells. “I don’t think I had this [gene family] on my list 10 years ago, to be honest,” said Sebastian Ocklenburg, a behavioral psychologist who co-authored both the 2017 eLife paper and a 2025 review paper in Trends in Genetics on the tubulin findings. Some of these same genes are also linked to neurological disorders including schizophrenia, dyslexia, and autism. People with these conditions are more likely than the general population to be left-handed or mixed-handed.

So what might be going on?

Tubulin genes encode proteins that form “microtubules,” long filaments that act both as the skeletons of cells and as highway networks within them. It’s possible that some process involving microtubules unfolds in the neural progenitor cells that give rise to neurons of the spinal cord in a way that functionally “leans right.”

We know that proteins attach to the surfaces of microtubules and move along them to transport molecular cargo from place to place inside cells, and thus that the structure of microtubules helps determine where many molecules accumulate within cells. So perhaps a certain signaling molecule preferentially accumulates more on one side of a neural progenitor cell than the other. When the cell divides, one daughter cell might then inherit slightly more of the signaling molecule than the other. Over many rounds of cell division, the imbalance could create a discrepancy between the left and right sides of the developing spinal cord. Feedback loops would amplify the difference, strengthening gene expression on one side of the spinal cord and suppressing it on the other. Two different modes of neural development result in an asymmetry — structurally favoring the right most of the time.

The gene variants associated with left-handedness might cause proteins to lock onto the microtubules in a slightly different way, so that more of the relevant signaling molecules accumulate on the opposite side of a neural progenitor cell. Or perhaps the initial rightward bias is so weak (and further weakened by the gene variants) that sometimes chance fluctuations give the left side the upper hand.

This fits the observation that handedness is somewhat heritable, heavily biased to the right, and also quite random. The details remain mysterious, but this provides at least a plausible origin story for handedness. And yet this is only one aspect of the causal explanation I’m looking for. Why would evolution build in a bias?

A coin flip during fetal development lands on one side 90% of the time. This suggests that right-handedness is advantageous for some reason, but if so — and here I feel a slight sense of defensiveness kicking in — why are the left-leaning tubulin gene variants still around? Chris Venditti, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading, isn’t a lefty, but he points out that the proportion of left-handers has been consistent across time and continents. “Usually in evolution when that happens there’s a reason for it,” he told me.

In an April 2026 study in PLOS Biology, Venditti and co-authors Thomas Püschel and Rachel Hurwitz of the University of Oxford looked at any and all data on the handedness preferences of primates, such as which hand a baboon uses to reach into a tube to retrieve food. They found that many individual primates have hand preferences, and that these preferences are stronger in species with bigger brains. But across species, left- and right-favoring individuals usually balance out. Only humans exhibit an extreme population-wide bias.

By analyzing evolutionary relationships among species, the authors concluded that our strong preference to use one hand over the other (before any species-wide rightward bias emerged) began roughly 7 million years ago, around the time our ancestors became bipedal and developed big brains. We had to stand upright before we could start deploying our hands asymmetrically, and it was more efficient for our growing brains to distribute key functions to different sides, only devoting resources for fine motor skills to one hand (while remaining plastic enough to wire up the other hand if necessary). But then, the authors estimate, sometime after the emergence of the genus Homo, 2.8 million years ago, evolution coded a preference for right over left.

Of the various speculative theories for the emergence of this extreme preference, one that seems plausible to me points to our unprecedented capacity for violence.

In 1996, psychologists proposed the “fighting” hypothesis, which posits that left-handers persist at low levels in the population because, so long as they are relatively rare, they have an advantage in hand-to-hand combat; their opponents are likely to be unfamiliar with left-handed attacks. It’s not a bad theory; indeed, the element of surprise probably accounts for lefties’ success in sports. But that doesn’t explain why right-handedness prevailed in the first place.

Then, in 2023, psychologists advanced the “modified fighting” hypothesis, which says righties have a more basic advantage dictated by the position of the heart on the left side of the body. Since they wield weapons in their right hands, their most effective and potentially fatal blows can be delivered to the left side of their opponents, where the heart is. At the same time, right-handed attackers lead with their right — protecting the more vulnerable side. In 2026, the scientists behind the modified fighting hypothesis supported their case with a review of the literature on sharp-force injury. They found that people are stabbed significantly more often on their left sides, and these attacks are more often fatal.

This would, the hypothesis goes, offer a general survival benefit to the gene variants that favor right-handedness, while still allowing just some left-handers to benefit from their surprise combat advantage, “particularly in fights that do not involve sharp weapons,” the authors noted.

According to Venditti, this aligns well with his finding that right-handedness is unique to the genus Homo. “Humans are pretty violent creatures,” he said. “In most animals, fighting is not to kill your opponent. That’s not what anyone involved in the fight wants.”

On the other hand, it’s unclear whether subtle combat dynamics could fully explain the consistency and persistence of the 10-90 left-right split.

I can’t help wondering if the stigma of the kind I experienced in Ghana and my grandmother faced as a child played any role. Perhaps a small surplus of right-handers emerged early in hominin evolution because of the modified fighting hypothesis, and this fueled cultural norms that reinforced the genetic disparity over many thousands of years. Some scholars I spoke to dismissed the stigma as a recent phenomenon — a “flash in the pan” on evolutionary timescales, in Venditti’s estimation. But to me, the widespread linguistic association of “right” and “left” with good and bad suggests that the stigma may be older and more profound. Ocklenburg further pointed out that the socially mandated division of labor between hands still observed in Ghana and many other places today — right for eating, left for hygiene — would have offered a major survival benefit in helping people avoid spreading germs and contaminating food. “It’s seen as discrimination, but it’s actually a genius way to keep people from poisoning themselves and dying,” he said, noting that the taboo has surely saved countless lives.

There may never be a certain, or simple, answer to the question of why I am left-handed. Or why humanity is so right-handed. Or why left-handed people are overrepresented in some fields and slightly more likely to have certain health conditions. But as I’ve followed the clues through developmental biology, genetics, evolution, and culture, I now see that our peculiar handedness is inextricable from our humanity.

The will to power will return

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 02:50:42 +0000

In the 1980s, France started 43 nuclear reactors across 14 sites. On average, each reactor took just seven years to build. Forty years later, all but one of these reactors are still running, and they continue to produce nearly half of France's electricity.

Can you imagine France doing something like this today? Or any other country in the West for that matter? The past is a foreign country. But why is this? Why did the West lose the will to power?

A popular meme would explain it as the inescapable good-times-hard-times circle: Hard times (WWII) create good men, good men create good times (Les Trente Glorieuses), good times create weak men (The End of History), weak men create hard times (now).

The Fourth Turning by Strauss and Howe offers a theory for this wheel of time by tracing the last five centuries to the same four recurring phases: High, Awakening, Unraveling, Crisis.

It was the good men of France's hard times who planned the country's incredible nuclear build out. This hero generation, as Strauss and Howe calls them, planted the trees of power that would provide shade for several generations to come. It seems inconceivable to expect similar bold plans and action from the current cohort of the European political establishment.

But The Fourth Turning argues this was ever thus. The decline that always sets in once we enter the unraveling phase of the century (or saeculum, as the book calls it) inevitably leads to a crisis. We're on the cusp/in one of those right now. So pessism is perhaps a rational response.

And yet, the night is darkest before the dawn, and the current Crisis is likely to lead to another High, if the past five centuries and Strauss and Howe's theory are any guide. If so, we should expect the next hero generation to reject this managed decline of our present turning, and once again taking up the mantle of ambition.

The circle of the saeculum is both a prophecy and a roadmap. We're not supposed to live like this forever: weak, ineffectual. This too shall pass. And when it does, once the Crisis becomes another High, we'll marvel at the time wasted, but with the pity due a pathetic period of the past, not from within an eternal prison of decline.

We just have to make it out of the current Crisis alive. The last one brought us a total war. Would be nice if we could get back to the High without something quite as devastating, but don't bet on it.

丫丫因为“天性善良”得了一张奖状 – Yanwei's Blogs

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 23:24:00 +0000

2016年10月8日，丫丫六岁（快满七岁）。

丫丫带回家一张美国“三好学生”证书，获奖原因是“天性善良”。老外很重视孩子独立于学习、体育之外的品格培养。证书是班主任和校长联合签发的，每个月，每个班，有一人获奖。获奖其他原因包括: 责任感、尊重、激情、值得信赖、诚实、乐观、忠诚。

丫丫三岁

丫丫六岁

我觉得丫丫（二女儿）是有些与生俱来的贵族气质的，她可能是在另一个时空（天堂）发现我对妮妮特别尽心，才主动要求投胎到我家做女儿的。【注：凡人，比如妮妮，是没有特别投胎权的。】所以，在我心里，妮妮是亲生的，丫丫是高贵的，一个我必须客客气气照顾好的小公主。

拿到证书，我的第一反应是觉得好笑，还有因为“天性善良”获奖的。第二反应是回想我小时候，三好学生都是学习好。

评论区

刘玥：我特别喜欢二丫头 [grin]. 丫丫的眼睛里有一个纯净清透的世界看了让人感觉平静心无杂念[愉快]
我回：这是她收到的最高的褒奖[害羞]

刘敬文：从小就对老二偏心啊[撇嘴]
我回：妮妮是老大，就像直接从我心里长出来的一样。丫丫刚出生的头一年里，我一直护着妮妮，那时两岁半的妮妮要面对妹妹到来所带来的冲击，还有上幼儿园的冲击。老婆说我偏心，我反驳说，“我一点都不偏心，因为我的心里全是妮妮。“ 后来，丫丫完全凭借自己的个人魅力，把我和老婆都征服了。

汤芳：两个不同时期的丫丫都透着一股与众不同的气质
我回：我觉得你的评价总能穿透尘世的云雾。
汤芳：你的评价倒让我钻到云雾里去了[呲牙]
我回：我在思考一个问题：是不是天下脱俗的美女都是从一个地方来的，你们彼此都认识。一眼就看出来身上那股共同的气质。你认识丫丫，丫丫也认识你？我是你的同学，是丫丫的爸爸，但我却是肉眼凡胎，纵和你们有万千关系，却永远参不透你们的来历。
王鹏远：会聊天 [thumb up]
我回王鹏远：我真这么想
汤芳：聊斋范儿了 [晕]

刘莹：做父亲的是不应该这么偏心的[偷笑]

Religion as Software Business - by Tomas Pueyo

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 16:23:07 +0000

What will be v6?

The contest for Uncharted Territories posters is ongoing. Go here to view the current entries and vote for your favorites so far. So far, my take is that there are many interesting concepts, in part thanks to AI, but that AI adds lots of meaningless details that don’t easily produce a great end product. The contest will remain open for a couple of weeks. Go here to submit your own entry!

I spent 15 years designing software products and businesses: reducing friction in onboarding, creating viral loops, building new features to increase retention, designing for improved network effects…

The more I did it, the more transparent the tactics that religions have used to grow became to me. It’s like the veil of complexity falls and the true structure of the world appears. Patterns that seemed incomprehensible suddenly make sense.

Yes, religion is like software: both produce ideas and rules instead of physical products, they have goals they translate into repeatable instructions focused on shaping human psychology and behavior, they have version control (anti-heresy) and forks (new sects), they optimize the onboarding, retention, viral loops, network effects…

With this lens, you start understanding why Christianity is the most widespread religion on Earth and why Islam spread so fast, having replaced smaller local religions like Facebook replaced Hi5 and SmallWorld. Why there are few Jews but the religion has survived 3,000 years, why each of these religions holds the beliefs it does, why their borders have barely changed in over 1,000 years, how they have evolved from one form to the other… You can understand why they emerged in the order they did, and why they were successful or failed. And it gives us a sense of what will happen with current religions in the future, and what new religions might arise.

And new versions come over time that improve on the previous ones, to make them work better and grow faster. In the previous articles, I showed how this is the case for Christianity and for Islam. The best way to illustrate this is through their evolution, from the v0 of animism and polytheism, following the software updates v1, v2, v3, v4, and v5.

v0: The Origin of Religious Belief

Finding Patterns

Which hominid was most successful: Those who saw patterns and drew quick conclusions to explain their causes, or those who didn’t? Obviously, the ones that reasoned through causality: Those who heard rustling in the bushes and thought “Lion!” would live longer than hominids who heard rustling in the bushes and thought “eh, who knows.” The hominids who saw their brother get struck by lightning and thought “The gods don’t want us on that hill, especially during thunderstorms” would live longer than hominids who thought “I wonder if that happens every time.”

Hominids who were constantly seeing cause-and-effect patterns were probably wrong most of the time, but if you’re superstitious and avoid repeating any behavior that preceded something bad, then you’re going to pass your genes on, and a thousand generations down the road your descendants are going to have brains that are great at imagining patterns, even those that aren’t really there.

Social Rites

When too many humans gather and they don’t have rules to code their conduct, tension arises. This makes collaboration hard, which keeps them poor. The groups that were prone to ease these tensions through some sort of activity would be able to collaborate more, and prevail. We call these activities rites. From this article by Rob Henderson:

San Bushmen (modern hunter-gatherers) will occasionally engage in a dance to dispel what they call “star sickness.” This mysterious force encompasses jealousy, anger, interpersonal conflicts, and a failure to exchange gifts. Such pressures give rise to hostilities and damage cohesion in the group.

One of the most disturbing social elements is young males, especially those deprived of social, economic, and mating opportunities. Disputes between them can easily spiral into reciprocal violence, especially when large numbers of allies can be recruited. Rites tailored to them are especially important. Dunbar studied them in early societies, and found religious rituals, feasting, singing, and dancing that have been shown to enhance social cohesion. Other social innovations (e.g., men’s clubs, socially recognized leaders) and regulated relationship arrangements (marriage, kinship, dowries) are all geared to lowering young male violence.

Ceremony

Ceremony is an important part of these social rites. From the book Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living, as explained by Henderson:

In a video, a man performed the ordinary action of picking up a glass, cleaning it with a cloth, pouring the drink, and inspecting it before setting it on a table.
In another video, the event was ritualized: after picking up the glass, he waved the cloth at it without touching it, raised the container high up before pouring it into the glass, and bowed to the glass before setting it on the table.
When the researchers asked participants whether the two glasses were the same in terms of their physical qualities, the participants generally said yes. But when asked which one was more special, a significant difference emerged: they favored the ritual drink. When asked which beverage they would prefer to have, participants were three times more likely to pick the “special” drink. And when participants were told that the gestures were part of a traditional ceremony practiced in Fiji, Gabon, or Ecuador, participants were even more likely to select the ritual drink.

So it looks like we’re naturally geared towards religious belief. What did it translate into?

v0 to v1: From Animism to Polytheism

When your daily experience is of nature, plants, animals that hide in bushes or under cover of darkness, their skeletal remains after death and consumption… The natural thing is to assume they share a similar experience to yours: Spirits inhabit every animal, like they inhabit every person. This is why most early societies were animist.

And since your daily experience is that of humans and animals, you bestow upon them the abilities of humans and animals, just more powerful. Gods eat, sleep, lust, lie, and get fooled like humans do. They feel love, sadness, anger. They’re also pretty amoral and selfish: They don’t care much about what happens in the big picture, just about what happens to them and their supporters.

Then came agriculture and suddenly humans start controlling their environment. A clear hierarchy starts emerging: humans above plants and animals. It makes sense that now not all animals and things are spirits, and humans emerge as having a special relationship with gods.

Gods become more and more human-like.

As agriculture becomes more widespread, life and death don’t depend on the animals and plants around you, but rather on weather, pests and wars. So it makes sense that each of these big factors of survival develop their own gods.1

Humans think gods trade favors with them: If you give them the right gift or the right sacrifice, they will be happy with you and will help you with whatever power they have. The relationship with them is like with a patron: You sacrifice something when you need something—rain, victory, a child. If you anger them, they’ll side against you.

Rituals are attempts to get these fabulously powerful but mysterious entities on your side, and they’re designed through trial and error: You gave a part of your harvest to the farming goddess, and the next year the harvest was great? Surely, that made her happy. We must continue. But we don’t know exactly what part of the rite worked, so we should try to copy it very precisely to make sure it works again. The clan that knows a specific rite controls a god and gets social advantages. The more rites and gods you control, the more power your clan has.

You prayed to your god before a battle, but you lost? Surely, your god is weak, and the god of the conqueror is stronger, so you might as well pray to him instead. That means they have specialties and territory over which they have jurisdiction, just like humans and animals. This means gods are local to specific regions. They can only perceive what they see or hear, which is why in the Iliad Hera seduces Zeus so that he doesn’t watch the battlefield, or why Diomedes wounds Aphrodite with a spear.2 There can be many gods, no exclusivity. There’s no ritual to convert or to be a member, no commitment, because there’s not really a full concept of a cohesive religion, just a bunch of gods that exist.

The further a society removed itself from nature, the more human its gods became.

Notice how these features make these religions weak:

Since gods are local—with their homes in specific cities or regions—they can’t spread much.
That ties them to the local state. When the state crumbles, the religion goes with it: Surely, the god must not have been very powerful if his protected state failed.
Everybody has a different version of the gods, and few of their features get recorded, because nobody knows them definitively: Everyone is just trying to figure out what they want through trial and error. So they evolve across time and space, they merge with other deities, they lapse…

If you like The Avengers, you understand these gods’ appeal.

The modern polytheism stack: (mostly) human-looking figures that spend a lot of time in the sky, with supernatural powers, very human desires and flaws, and a penchant for good and evil, moral judgment and epic fights. I’d like the god Ironman to help me build startups. The only difference is that we know the Avengers are fake and they can’t give you anything, whereas people used to think gods could help them.

Within these belief systems, some features of future religions start peeking through.

In Ancient Egypt, there’s an afterlife. People’s hearts are weighed at death, the wicked are annihilated, and the good survive. If you think about it, that’s pretty natural: Evolution has given us a fear of death, so coming up with an afterlife is the most reassuring belief. Tying it to proper behavior is pretty intuitive too, as that’s what happens in human interactions: Be nice to people, and they reward you. In the case of Egypt, good meant avoiding violence, exploiting the weak, theft, cheating, cruelty, lying, sacrilege, and public disruption. We can see an ethnic system emerge.

But this proto-feature is only accessible to elites, is only summarily defined,3 and isn’t tied to spreading the religion.

Zoroaster came to change this.

v2: Zoroastrianism

The religion of Ancient Iran started moving towards monotheism between 2000 and 1000 years BC. Then, between ~1200 and 600 BC appears Zoroastrianism, spurred by the religious reformer Zoroaster4. Zoroastrianism displays some interesting religious innovations.5 The most important is the crystallization of good and evil for everybody. There is still a judgment after death, but now it applies to everybody, not just the elites or those who could afford it. People do good things because they’re good, and vice versa. You should do more good things to be good, and fewer bad things. When you die, your specific soul is judged.6 This enables moral enforcement for every individual among the population. This judgment gets linked to an afterlife, and a proto-heaven and hell appear, which is very convenient because they’re a super cheap way to enforce behavior.

PRIEST ZOROASTER: Something very very very bad will happen to people if they don’t behave properly!
PRIEST DARIUS, whispering to ZOROASTER: But how can we know somebody did something wrong? How do we identify them? Punish them?
ZOROASTER: We go get them.
DARIUS: With what power?
ZOROASTER: Soldiers!
DARIUS: What if the soldiers don’t want to do it? Or are too expensive? Or at war? Or are the perpetrators? Or there are too many bad people? Or we can’t witness the deeds?
ZOROASTER: Good points. Hmmm…. OK OK, hear me out: What if we say the judge is God, not us, and he sees much more than us?
DARIUS: Okay, but how will people know we’re telling the truth? They’ll do a bad deed, wait for retribution, it won’t come, so they’ll carry on.
ZOROASTER: OK hold on… What if it happens after death?

DARIUS: What do you mean?
ZOROASTER: That way, they can’t say it’s false. They have no proof! They’ll be punished after death!
DARIUS: Genius! But we need to make sure the stick and the carrot are huge, otherwise people won’t care.
ZOROASTER: What if the punishment is really bad and it’s like forever? And vice versa: If you’re cool, you get a cool afterlife forever?
DARIUS: Yeah, totally, that would do it!

By introducing the concept of being good to each other, we suddenly get a religion that can enforce moral, collaborative, positive behavior across an entire region. People work more together instead of killing each other, wealth can accumulate, and society thrives.

Farvahar, the famous Zoroastrian symbol

Another innovation is that religion becomes dualistic: Only two main gods, for Good and Evil. All other deities become secondary. That’s just one step removed from monotheism: Obviously, everybody should follow the good one.

These innovations were certainly not designed with intention as I described in the conversation above, they likely came about through evolution. But as we know from the debate between intelligent design vs evolution, you don’t really need intelligent design for something significant to appear. With enough time, evolution can make it happen. The mechanism would be something like:

Lots of different prophets and priests are always coming up with new software ideas.
They debate ideas and combine them.7
The cleverest, most charismatic, or luckiest ones come up with a (software) combination that is more productive than any other version. This one spreads.
Entrepreneurial and efficient priests (which might or might not be the same as the theoreticians) take these ideas and help them spread faster and farther.8

In any case, Zoroastrianism was so successful that it became the state religion of the Persian Empires until the 600s AD, when Arabs conquered the Sassanid Empire and introduced Islam. Zoroastrianism persisted for centuries, but eventually dwindled. Yet today, there are still over 100,000 Zoroastrians in Iran. That’s the power of installing valuable new software.

But why did it appear then and there? Karl Jaspers and Peter Turchin speculated that they were the result of technological development. Here’s my interpretation.

Several innovations happened between 4000 BC and 1000 BC, including the domestication of horses, their mutation to be able to carry humans on their back, the invention of the wheel, and the discovery of iron smelting. These inventions made farming much easier and scalable. And war. Horseback riding enabled horse-mounted roaming. Curiously, as soon as the secret of iron smelting became widespread, most eastern Mediterranean civilizations collapsed, probably enabled by bandits who now had easy access to weapons.

All of this suggests that, through these thousands of years:

Empires became viable, because agriculture improved and now farmers could generate calorie surpluses, while technologies of violence allowed these farmers to conquer others.
At the same time, roaming bandits became viable too. The unconquered people would rather raid the farmers with their horses and iron weapons than do the farming themselves.
The bigger the empires, the harder to maintain their cohesion, and they would fall apart.

Prophets would witness these problems and propose solutions that had to be moral because the problem was of social coordination.

As nomad military superiority forced agrarian states to scale up to resist pressure from the steppes, one cultural mechanism for holding together ethnically diverse people in new mega-empires was the presence of unifying, ‘meta-ethnic’ (supranational) ideologies, such as Zoroastrianism in the Achaemenid empire, Buddhism in the Maurya empire, and Confucianism in the Han empire. Turco-Mongolian nomads (perhaps going as far back as the Xiongnu) had their own integrative meta-ethnic religion, Tengrism, although it is not usually viewed as a world religion.—Peter Turchin

Alas, although Zoroastrianism is productive software, that doesn’t make it everlasting: It doesn’t really focus on acquiring believers or retaining them. The next iteration would improve one of these aspects.

v3: Judaism

Good Tools Are Invisible - gingerBill

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 10:46:14 +0000

Good Tools Are Invisible

2026-07-10

TL;DR: A good tool is and ought to be invisible—striving to make such tools is the goal of a toolmaker.

One habit I see a lot, and have to push back on, is taking a tool’s shortcomings and reselling them as a “puzzle game” which is “fun” to solve.

I don’t want my tools to be “fun”. I want my tools to be invisible.

Text Editor Wars

Let’s take vim as an example This is just an example, and applies to other editors too.. I constantly see some people praise it not for what actually makes it good, but by taking the things it’s bad at and turning them into a puzzle to have “fun” solving.

I’ve had people tell me how “fun” it was to build a macro to handle some one-off text-refactoring problem. But when I looked at what they were doing and how long it took, my honest reaction was: I could have done that in Sublime in a minute with multiple cursors, or just written a quick script.

To be clear, I’m not saying text editors don’t matter to your workflow. I’m questioning the near-religious devotion people have to a tool because it gives them a “hacker vibe”—which is basically the whole appeal for newcomers to vim or emacs.

That’s what I mean by “invisible tools”. When you’re proficient with your editor of choice—whatever it is—it disappears into the background. But the moment it cannot handle something easily, it stops being invisible. What baffles me is that so many people treat that friction—the effort of working around a tool’s limitations—as the “fun” part, and then advertise it as evidence that the tool is great.

I know plenty of things wrong with my own editor of choice: Sublime. I don’t dress those flaws up as fun little puzzles to solve. I just get annoyed that it lacks the tools I actually need, forcing me to write a plugin or reach for a separate program to write to transform text the way I want.

I’ve been using Sublime for 15 years now. It’s my editor of choice for a few reasons: its shortcuts are a superset of the graphical OS environment (which minimizes the mental context-switch when moving between applications), multiple cursors really are better than macros 99.999% of the time I think I’ve only “needed” a macro in Sublime twice in the past decade, and in both cases, setting up the macro took longer than if I just wrote a script to do the same thing. (since they give direct visual feedback), and it leaves me with the fewest “puzzles” to solve in my text-editing workflow. I’ve found something like vim to be better at basic editing but worse at bulk operations—and I don’t mean grep-like operations—which is why I’ve stuck with Sublime for so long. I never found vim motions to be that much more productive than my Sublime workflow either, and that wasn’t just down to lack of trying or familiarity To be honest, I have forgotten most of my “vim motions” knowledge over the years, because I don’t regularly exercise it, nor do I need to.. And since I virtually never write code in a terminal, my need for a terminal-oriented editor is effectively nonexistent.

If people find vim, emacs, or whatever genuinely good and productive, I’m not going to criticize them for using it. People are most comfortable with what they know. But for the people I am discussing, that same familiarity blinds them to their tools’ flaws, and leads them to celebrate those flaws, flaunting them as games.

Tools as an Identity

Part of why these debates turn religious is that a tool choice becomes a flag you plant—it says something about who you are. The “hacker vibe” isn’t a mere aesthetic; it’s tribal signaling, and that’s the real trap. Once your identity is invested in a tool, admitting its flaws starts to feel like admitting something about yourself. So people don’t just tolerate the flaws—they defend them, and eventually flaunt them. You cannot have an honest conversation about a tool with someone who’s decided the tool is part of their personality.

Feeling Productive versus being Productive

The text-editor-macro anecdote I mentioned is really about a gap between feeling productive versus being productive. There’s a sensation of cleverness that comes from solving a fiddly problem, and it’s easy to mistake that feeling for actual output. A tool that makes hard things feel heroic and clever feel like an achievement can register as “powerful” while quietly being slow. The honest test isn’t how engaged or clever you felt, it’s wall-clock time and how many mistakes you made getting there. A lot of the tools people evangelize would lose that test.

If productivity is actually the goal, actually question your own views on this, and try to see what makes you more productive. You will be surprised when you do.

Terminal UIs vs GUIs

Another example in this same vein is when people advocate for terminal apps over GUIs. If you’re stuck in a terminal all day, then I completely get the obvious advantage, but most programmers aren’t stuck in a terminal all day.

From those people who generally advocate for a TUI over a GUI, one of the criticisms of GUI apps tends to be: “I cannot navigate them with the keyboard alone”.

Okay? That doesn’t make GUI apps inherently bad. It just means the GUIs people build aren’t good enough to be keyboard-navigable. There’s nothing inherently impossible about making a GUI navigable with a keyboard, rather it’s just that most toolmakers never bother to implement, and usually because they don’t realize how much more productive keyboard navigation is than reaching for the mouse a lot of the time. If the argument was that a specific TUI app is better than the other alternatives which are GUI based, then that is a fair argument, but arguing that TUIs are inherently better than GUIs is very misinformed.

And this is the common mistake: people look at the current state of a category of tools and assume its current limitations are inherent/essential, when really no one has put in the work to make those tools better.

Linux’s (Lack of) Popularity as a Desktop

The year of the Linux I know I am going to get people saying “Linux is the Kernel, the OS is the [insert distro name]”. I’m sorry but that’s not how most people talk about Linux, and I don’t really care too much for your pendantry which aids nothing. Especially since to critique it, you clearly had to understand what was being said about it. desktop still isn’t upon us (in 2026), and part of the reason why it has taken so long to get to that point is fundamental: a lot of the people who use Linux love fiddling with configuration files to reshape their system—it’s their idea of “fun”, their puzzle game.

I went through that phase myself. But after a while, I just wanted things to work. Spending hours (if not days) configuring everything isn’t something I want to do any more. I want the defaults to be good and just work, and when I do need to tweak something minor, it should take seconds.

Maximal configurability shouldn’t be a tool’s goal, it should be an option for when it’s actually necessary. Designing an ergonomic tool is fundamentally about having good defaults, while still allowing escape hatches where they’re possible/needed.

The appeal of accidental Characteristics that an object has contingently and can change without altering the object’s essential identity. complexity is something a lot of programmers/techy-folk love, giving them a weird sense of security.

Having good defaults is fundamentally a toolmaker’s responsibility. We as toolmakers have a tendency to put the burden on the user: to configure it, to tweak it, to learn it. A lot of that burden is really a designer declining to make a decision. “Highly configurable” is often just an excuse for shipping no opinion at all and calling the resulting work your problem. Good defaults are a form of respect for the user’s time: the toolmaker does the thinking once so a thousand users don’t each have to. And part of designing a tool is to allow for some escape hatches tool; those escape hatches are there for the genuine minority who need something unusual; they should not be a substitute for getting the common case right.

Steep Learning Curve as a “Feature”?

Another defence I’ve seen is that the difficulty is the whole point, it filters out the uncommitted, and once you’re over the hump you’re rewarded for life. But a learning curve is a cost, not a virtue. It could hypothetically be absolutely a cost worth paying, but the payoff has to be genuine productivity, not the satisfaction of having paid it. Too often the reasoning is just sunk-cost dressed up as merit: “I spent months learning this, so it must be worth it, and you should copy in my footsteps too”. That’s the puzzle game again, only now the puzzle is the tool itself.

Conclusion

None of this is an argument against any particular tool. It’s an argument against a way of thinking. Use vim, use emacs, use Sublime, but use whatever disappears into the background and lets you get on with the work. That is the whole test, and it’s a personal one. What I’m pushing back on isn’t the choice, it’s the storytelling that grows up around the choice: the reframing of limitations as features, the effort of working around a flaw sold as the reward, the tool quietly promoted from the thing-you-use to the part-of-who-you-are.

The clearest sign a tool is serving you is that you stop noticing it—it becomes invisible. You don’t celebrate its flaws because you’re not turning them into a hobby, rather you just get mildly annoyed and route around them. You don’t defend it because nothing about your identity is riding on it. And you don’t mistake the feeling of cleverness for the fact of productivity, because you’ve bothered to check the difference.

So by all means, enjoy your tools, for the joy of programming itself. Just be honest about which parts are genuinely good and which parts you’ve talked yourself into loving. The best tool isn’t the one with the best story. It’s the one you forget you’re using.

A good tool is and ought to be invisible—striving to make such tools is the goal of a toolmaker.

Chatto is now Open Source!

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 21:54:25 +0000

Hot damn. This is the big one.

I’m happy to announce that Chatto, the group and team chat application that I’ve been working on for the past year or so, is now officially Open Source, and available for anyone to self-host.

The fastest way to give it a try is through Homebrew:

brew install chattocorp/tap/chatto
chatto init
chatto run

See Chatto’s Getting Started Guide for details. Or stick around to hear more!

Chat Just Got Real

Chatto aims to be the group chat application that you actually enjoy using. You’re probably familiar with the one that rhymes with “knack”, or the one that rhymes with “beams”, or the one that rhymes with “this gourd”.

Chatto is just like those. Except you’re going to love how compact and snappy it is. And that it’s Open Source. And you can just self-host it. For free, too! (A weird thing to write, but the OSS chat app space has become very weird in many ways!)

This is what it looks like:

If you want to see it in action, drop by the Chatto HQ Community!

It’s designed to be extremely easy to self-host on your own infrastructure. In its most basic shape, you just run the executable, and that’s it. It even serves its own frontend!

It’s very light on resources, and probably has the snappiest frontend that you’ve ever used in an app like this. It puts data protection and privacy first, with all personal and chat data fully encrypted at rest with per-user keys that get shredded when a user decides to delete their account.

Each Chatto server powers a single community, with no federation of data between servers, nor any third-party tracking or analytics. If you want to hang out in multiple servers at once, the client will simply connect to all of them directly. If you want to host multiple communities, just spin up multiple Chatto processes. Easy!

Chatto comes with full support for voice and video calls, with screen-sharing, built in. Calls are fully end-to-end encrypted and will scale to as many participants as your infrastructure can handle.

And you can use it today, for free, by self-hosting it on your own server. Binaries are available for Linux (x86_64 and ARM64), macOS, and Windows; head over to the Chatto Self-Hosting Documentation site to get started.

Chatto Cloud

If you prefer someone else to take care of the hosting, I’m also happy to announce that Chatto Cloud will soon enter public beta. Chatto Cloud’s offering is very simple: it provides paid hosting for Chatto servers — and that’s it. No premium subscriptions, no ads, no icky bits. Just hosting.

And it’s really good hosting! Chatto Cloud is launching with fully European and European-owned infrastructure, with more regions slated for launch in early 2027. Every Chatto server on Chatto Cloud benefits from automatic scaling, nightly backups of all data, and zero-downtime version upgrades.

There’s no lock-in; servers hosted through Chatto Cloud are 100% compatible with self-hosted ones, and you can pack up your data and move into or out of Chatto Cloud at any time.

If you want to get notified about the start of the beta, please see the end of this post for a low-volume newsletter you can subscribe to.

What’s Next for Chatto

Chatto is now at version 0.4. I consider it stable enough for production use, but there are a few important features still missing — head over to the Chatto Roadmap if you want an overview.

The focus for Chatto 0.5 will be on additional safety features (content reporting and moderation) as well as polishing the client, particularly its multi-server functionality. I have some fun stuff planned for this that I can’t wait to put into people’s hands.

I expect Chatto to hit 1.0.0 in about 6-12 months. Until then, there may still be breaking changes, even though I’ll be trying to keep them to a minimum. If you do decide to self-host, please be ready to update to new versions as they are released.

Get in Touch

It’s been an exciting journey so far and I’m looking forward to finding out what’s ahead. If you’re self-hosting Chatto, I’m super eager to hear from you about your experience — please don’t hesitate to head over to the Chatto HQ community and get in touch.

Also please feel free to drop by and say hello if you’re interested in Chatto for your company, Open Source project, or similar. I’d love to learn more about your requirements, and help you get set up.

Links

Chatto HQ Community - we have a #self-hosting support channel!
Chatto Self-Hosting Documentation
GitHub Repository
Chatto on Bluesky

If you want to be notified about new releases or the start of Chatto Cloud’s beta, you’re invited to subscribe to the Chatto announcements newsletter. It’s super low-volume (~1 email per month), and is only used for notifying you when exciting new stuff becomes available.

Automation Makes The World Cup Worse. But We Can’t Help Ourselves, Can We?

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 23:58:10 +0000

An epic World Cup has been marred by an overreliance on technology and automation.

In this year’s competition, FIFA has used cameras, sensors, AI systems, and other automated tools to make the game more precise. But these tools, and the accompanying video assistant referee, have taken the soul out of the game.

FIFA’s tech tools have tipped the scales over touches and technicalities that would never be caught by the human eye, and exposed what’s lost when we hand too much to the machines. They’ve also revealed that even when automation noticeably degrades our products, we seem to be unable or unwilling to free ourselves from its grasp.

In soccer, or football as it’s known globally, consequential calls typically rely on human judgment and all the nuance, subjectivity, and context that come with it. An offside call, for instance, relies on the referee’s ability to notice a player making their way behind the defense before a pass heads their way. Video review can aid with that process on borderline calls, using a mix of AI, cameras, sensors, and other tech to theoretically make calls more accurate, more consistent, and protect against alleged bias. But the problem is the sport isn’t designed for this kind of microscopic precision, and relying on it degrades the game.

The worst-case scenario occurred in a July 2 match in which Croatia lost to Portugal. After Croatia scored what looked like the tying goal in stoppage time (aka: at the buzzer), sensors in FIFA’s connected ball detected it apparently grazed the tip of a Croatian player’s hair, leading to another player to be declared offsides while setting up the play, and the goal was then taken back.

Croatia’s hair graze didn’t register to the naked eye, or even on a big screen, but the reading from the sensor was enough for the human referee to let it change the game. The replay showed it as a “heartbeat graphic” spiking at the same moment it passed the player’s head.

“Technically correct,” wrote Roger Pielke Jr. of The Honest Broker in response to the robot call. “Good for the game? I think not.”

The latest flashpoint came ahead of tonight’s U.S.-Belgium match, after President Donald Trump reportedly urged FIFA to review the automatic one-match suspension for U.S. striker Folarin Balogun. FIFA suspended the ban while leaving the VAR-reviewed red card on his record, drawing objections from Belgium and a rebuke from UEFA.

The episode is a high-profile example of how technology can muck up a match. The referee did not initially show Balogun a red card, but a VAR review that slowed down the play made it appear to be a different kind of blow worthy of a send-off offense. While it might seem like a technicality, the example shows the difference between human and tech judgment: Protocol says slow motion can be used to establish factual issues such as point of contact, but normal speed should generally be used to judge the intensity of a foul.

Beyond the World Cup, there have been plenty of other recent examples of AI’s limitations across other industries. Last month, reports noted Ford has re-hired more than 300 veteran “gray beard” quality inspectors to help train younger staff and reprogram the car maker’s AI tools after its systems failed to match quality checks. And in May, Starbucks reportedly scrapped an AI program for automating inventory counts almost a year after it was deployed across North America. The cited AI error feels almost hilariously human: miscounting and mislabels items such as similar milk types.

From assisting refs to replacing other roles, time will tell if new tech will become a universal problem or just an isolated series of own-goals. But for now, it seems like we can’t help ourselves either way.

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Some of the other tech in this year’s World Cup:

Here’s a brief look at some of the other tech FIFA is using this World Cup in partnership with various companies:

VAR is powered by tech provided by Hawk-Eye, which FIFA has been partnering with for years. While it was also used during the 2022 tournament, this year includes updates for computer vision systems which are using more cameras and that capture more skeletal points for each player than before.
Like in the last World Cup, matches again use a connected ball featuring a 500Hz motion sensor chip that detects every ball movement and helps referees make decisions in real time. Developed by Adidas, the ball also captures game highlights such as Messi’s hat trick against Algeria.
Lenovo’s partnership with FIFA is powering other tech including referee body cams, AI-stabilized footage and 3D avatars of 1,200+ players to give fans first-person views of games. Other data collected using Lenovo’s tech helps inform coaches, e-commerce systems and venue operations.
Hyundai and Boston Dynamics are working with FIFA to provide “Spot” robot dogs that patrol stadiums in Dallas and New Jersey for added security. The companies also just announced today that they’re bringing the Atlas humanoid robot to the Round of 16 to use in halftime activations. It was also used on Sunday to deliver the match ball during the Norway-Brazil match.
There are also reports of FIFA reportedly using biometric and surveillance tech, including anti-drone systems, to improve stadium security.
Google’s also working with Argentina’s national team, with Gemini being used to help analyze team plays, performance and stats. (That’s something other tech companies like IBM and Microsoft have been doing for years with other sports.)

The Intelligence Report

Google faced criticism for a new Independence Day commercial that imagines what it’d be like if the founding fathers had used AI to write the Declaration of Independence.
Anthropic redeployed its new Fable model to Claude after the U.S. government forced its suspension shortly after it debuted last month. It also announced a new AI workbench called “Claude Science.”
AWS said it’s investing $1 billion into a new AI unit focused on embedding engineers with customers. The move follows what other companies like OpenAI have also done recently, which resemble Palantir’s use of “forward-deployed engineers.”
OpenAI has reportedly proposed the U.S. Government on taking a 5% stake in the company, a pitch that reports say would involve other AI companies in the U.S. also giving the government a similar stake.
Nvidia said it’s partnering with AI cloud providers to expand compute access for startups, model builders, enterprises and researchers.
Meta is reportedly planning a new division called Meta Compute, which would allow it to create a cloud infrastructure business and sell compute to make money beyond advertising.

The latest on Big Technology Podcast: Who Wins The AI Superapp Battle?, Apple’s Consumer AI Victory, World Cup Automation Mistake

M.G. Siegler is the author of Spyglass.org. Siegler joins Big Technology to discuss the race to build the AI super app and which companies are best positioned to win. Tune in to hear why OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Apple are all converging on the same idea: an AI interface that can handle more and more of your computing life. We also cover Apple’s new Siri, whether consumer AI will be won by default on the iPhone, and what World Cup automation says about our growing reliance on machines. Hit play for a sharp, wide-ranging conversation about where AI products are headed next.

You can listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your podcast app of choice

两个 2-1 之间 – JustGoIdea

Sat, 04 Jul 2026 01:25:18 +0000

两个 2-1 之间

03 Jul, 2026

葡萄牙 2-1 险胜克罗地亚。这是一场比赛，也是一场终将到来的告别。

这一夜的情绪，早已溢出比分之外。C 罗 41 岁了，Modrić 也即将 41。他们仍然站在球场中央，仍然能够改变比赛，不禁让人想起「烈士暮年，壮心不已」。对于很多人来说——不只是球迷——他们不是突然老去的。他们是在仍有光芒的时候，慢慢离开时代的中心。

这场球，葡萄牙先落后，C 罗点球扳平，Gonçalo Ramos 补时制胜；克罗地亚最后的进球被 VAR 判定无效。C 罗得以继续往前走，Modrić 的世界杯征程，却也就此止步。

这比普通的告别更让人难受。英雄衰败时，人们容易接受结局；英雄尚能奔跑、传球、射门、指挥比赛时，结局反而更难承认。因为我们知道，他们终于要把自己交还给时间。

这场球，对葡萄牙而言，还有另一层意义。一年前，Diogo Jota 与弟弟 André Silva 因交通事故在西班牙离世。更令人唏嘘的是，Jota 为国家队打进的最后一粒进球，正是 2024 年 6 月 8 日对阵克罗地亚那场。那场的比分也是 2-1，克罗地亚获胜：Modrić 点球首开纪录，Jota 第 48 分钟扳平，Budimir 随后反超。

此番，葡萄牙又遇见克罗地亚，又是 2-1，只是胜负换了边。体育运动往往浪漫与残忍并存，它让相似的比分、相同的对手、相近的日期重新出现，像把命运的纸页翻回去，再轻轻合上。比分可以被改写，晋级可以被争取，遗憾可以被下一场比赛暂时覆盖……唯有缺席，无法补上。

所以这一场球里，其实有三种告别。

C 罗和 Modrić，是时间意义上的告别。他们让人看见一个时代如何迟暮，如何在掌声里继续坚持，又如何终究无法抵抗年龄。

Jota，则是生命意义上的缺席。不是渐行渐远，而是骤然消失在高光之中。

而我们看球的人，也正是在这些缝隙里感到落寞。年轻时看他们，以为足球就是胜负、冠军、金球、欧冠、世界杯。到后来才明白，足球也记录人的衰老，记录一个时代怎样散去，记录某些名字怎样停在最后一次进球、最后一次拥抱、最后一件 21 号球衣里。

「关山难越，谁悲失路之人；萍水相逢，尽是他乡之客。」这句话放在这里，写球员，也写看球的人。素昧平生，不过是多年隔着屏幕相逢。可他们老去的时候，我们也不再年轻；他们告别的时候，我们也在告别自己曾经经历的那个足球世界。

葡萄牙赢了，克罗地亚离开了。C 罗继续向前，Modrić 停在黄昏里，Jota 留在了再也无法抵达的夏天。

两个 2-1 之间，足球继续滚动。

只是有些人，再也不会跑向它了。

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#LisbonDiary

The best response to AI slop, infinite advice, and online noise is from Robin Williams

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 07:23:12 +0000

If I asked you about art, you’d probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo? You know a lot about him. Life’s work, political aspirations, him and the pope, sexual orientation, the whole works, right? But I bet you can’t tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You’ve never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling. Seen that.
If I asked you about women, you’d probably give me a syllabus of your personal favorites. You may have even been laid a few times. But you can’t tell me what it feels like to wake up next to a woman and feel truly happy.
You’re a tough kid. I ask you about war, and you’d probably, uh, throw Shakespeare at me, right? “Once more into the breach, dear friends.” But you’ve never been near one. You’ve never held your best friend’s head in your lap and watched him gasp his last breath, looking to you for help.
And if I asked you about love you probably quote me a sonnet. But you’ve never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable. Known someone could level you with her eyes. Feeling like God put an angel on earth just for you, who could rescue you from the depths of hell.
And you wouldn’t know what it’s like to be her angel and to have that love for her to be there forever. Through anything. Through cancer. You wouldn’t know about sleeping sitting up in a hospital room for two months holding her hand because the doctors could see in your eyes that the term "visiting hours" doesn't apply to you.
You don’t know about real loss, because that only occurs when you love something more than you love yourself. I doubt you’ve ever dared to love anybody that much.
I look at you; I don’t see an intelligent, confident man; I see a cocky, scared shitless kid. But you’re a genius, Will. No one denies that. No one could possibly understand the depths of you. But you presume to know everything about me because you saw a painting of mine and you ripped my fuckin’ life apart.
You’re an orphan right? Do you think I’d know the first thing about how hard your life has been, how you feel, who you are because I read Oliver Twist? Does that encapsulate you?
Personally, I don’t give a shit about all that, because you know what? I can’t learn anything from you I can’t read in some fuckin’ book. Unless you wanna talk about you. Who you are. And I’m fascinated. I’m in. But you don’t wanna do that, do you, sport? You’re terrified of what you might say.
Your move, chief.

不用支付寶和微信支付能在中國生活嗎？（2026） – 一天世界

Sat, 27 Jun 2026 21:10:29 +0000

我們經常聽說在中國不用支付寶、微信支付和其它一些中國軟件就會寸步難行。果真如此？二零二六年六月，我在深圳和廣州兩個城市就此做了約兩個星期的實驗，現將結果彙報如下。

一言以蔽之：The narrative that you can’t function in China without Alipay and WeChat Pay is greatly exaggerated。

由於條件所限，這回我只能在一定範圍內測試的士、軌道交通、便利店、和餐廳。難免掛一漏萬，望讀者包涵。

首先，很多廣州朋友也不知道的是，廣州地鐵可以直接拍 Visa, Mastercard, American Express, JCB，以及銀聯信用卡入站——包括外國信用卡。這意味着外國人到埗廣州後，無需額外準備任何工具便可直接搭乘地鐵。

深圳地鐵不支持信用卡入閘，不過在人工購票窗口可以刷信用卡買單程票。幫我買票的工作人員態度友善，但大概是 POS 機萬年不用，收在某個抽屜裏，花了一些時間才走完整個流程。

若不走人工購票窗口，在不用支付寶和微信的前提下，我們的選擇就剩下了 IC 交通卡（深圳通）和現金。深圳通只能在大約三、四個地鐵站購買，且其製卡成本費（30 元左右）是不退的。用現金則可在自動售票機買單程票。

深圳通一度可用來付的士費，聽說當時是免費給的士用，但試用期過後，佣金問題談不攏，刷卡設備全都拆掉了。（便利店似乎也都用不了。）目前在的士上只能用現金、微信支付、支付寶。很多人都說今時今日司機很可能沒零錢找給妳，但我自己打車大約八次，只有一次遇到沒有零錢的司機。此外，如果經常在地鐵自動售票機用現金購買單程票，也自然能積累不少零錢，從而也就不需要司機找錢。

我原想避免使用中國叫車軟件，但 Uber 已不可用。最後我的權宜之計是用高德地圖叫車，然後開一個新的支付寶賬號，綁定外國手機號和信用卡，每次進入高德地圖只給它單次定位權限。這是我唯一不得不使用支付寶的場景。（高德地圖打車只支持微信和支付寶。滴滴支持綁定外國信用卡，但我試了幾次都沒成功。）

公交車自然可用 IC 交通卡。所以若熟悉公交線路，儘可能少用的士，也就減少了使用微信和支付寶的頻次。共享單車顯然不支持信用卡。高鐵這次沒怎麼測試。可以確定的是在香港西九龍站可以去人工售票窗口用信用卡購票。但廣州和深圳能否用非銀聯信用卡，於我還是個未知數。

便利店並不都支持信用卡，因爲有些店沒有 POS 機。麥當勞的自助點餐機都不支持信用卡，需要去人工櫃檯。有一家的服務員說 POS 機壞了，不能用。另一家的 POS 機不支持閃付，只能插卡使用。在廣州東站的星巴克遇到的服務員似乎比較懂行，能主動看出我想用 Apple Pay。在大部分場景，想用信用卡時說「刷卡」，店員都能明白。而如果能刷實體卡，基本也就能刷 Apple Pay 裏的虛擬卡。

點餐是另一個問題。哪怕在對實體媒介依然保持敬意的日本，掃碼點餐也日漸普及。我本來帶着不太可能在深圳和廣州見到紙質菜單的期待，但除了一家只有 iPad 菜單以外，只要開口問，侍應都會拿紙菜單給妳。我想沒有人會否認哪怕是半張 A4 紙大小的紙菜單也比小小的手機屏幕舒服多了。

我想可以這麼說：「來了就是深圳人」這句話，在支付和出行上並不成立。相比之下，在香港，信用卡幾乎可以在任何場景使用，支付寶和微信支付也越來越普及。那種開放和自由的感覺是深圳無法比擬的。（目前坐港島的有軌電車刷信用卡還比八達通便宜一港元。）不過，網上常見的那種反烏托邦論調——微信支付和支付寶幾乎壟斷了中國一切生活場景——確實與現實不符。如果可能，我希望生活在中國也有選擇完全不用微信和支付寶的權利，那會是一個更美好的中國。但即便是當下，也還是有很多機會使用現金、信用卡、紙質菜單。妳還是可以堅持選擇更好而非更新的生活方式。

（點此讀豎排版）

How Christianity Went Viral - by Tomas Pueyo

Sat, 27 Jun 2026 20:34:01 +0000

I’ve been thinking about this and gathering insights for 10 years. I don’t know of another analysis that maps Christianity’s rise this systematically as a growth engine.1

Christianity is the biggest religion in the world: ~2.3B people, nearly 30% of the world’s population.

Why has it been so successful?

Based on that chart, you’d probably assume that most growth happened in the last few centuries: From the European conquest of the Americas in the 1500s onwards, to the conquest of Africa in the late 1800s, and the 20^th century baby boom.2

If instead you looked at this map of the early growth of Christianity, you’d suspect something different:

Emerging Christian communities in the Roman Empire. Source.

From this, you’d guess that the big milestone of Christian growth was the takeover of the Roman state in the 300s AD.3 Well, here’s the same graph as above, but logarithmic:

In fact, Christianity grew like crazy until it took over the Roman state! From ~1000 followers around the time of the death of Jesus, to ~35M when it became the official religion of Rome, Christianity grew by ~40% decade over decade.4 How is that possible? How did a ragtag group of Jews from a frontier colony of the Roman Empire create a new religion that took over the most powerful empire, and from there the world?

In my previous careers, I created and grew software, including viral applications. The insights on viral growth are what allowed me to quickly understand COVID, and when I look at the rise of Christianity, I see the exact same patterns: a piece of software hyperoptimized for growth.

Seed stage pitch

Indeed, Christianity, like all religions, is software, an operating system that guides people on what they should and shouldn’t do. And Christianity optimized every aspect of its business for growth:

Big audience
The value proposition of its product
The segmentation, to specialize in a few key audiences
Advertising, to spread the message to new audiences
The sales force
Low friction to convert customers
Viral growth: Existing customers attract new customers
“Reproduction rate” (growth within existing customers)
Retention rate: The degree to which you keep your audience
Competition suppression
Customer monetization

Today, we’re going to look at each.5

1. Big Audience

A good business has a huge TAM, or Total Addressable Market: All the people who can potentially consume the product.

Christianity comes from Judaism, but Jews think they are Chosen People: Only them have been chosen by God to receive the Torah and follow his commandments. It’s a religion mixed with an ethnicity. A private club. Back then, virtually all religions were private clubs.

Christianity killed that and declared itself open to all:

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.—Galatians 3:28

Religion gets disconnected from ethnicity.
Does it though? No! That’s not what Jesus said! He said to try to convert Jews only!

Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.— Gospel of Matthew

I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.— Gospel of Matthew

The ones to increase the TAM were his disciples; that first quote was from Apostle Paul. Why would the apostles change Jesus’s message? Because they had to travel across the Mediterranean to convert Jews, who lived in pretty mixed communities: Many Jews only spoke Greek, and they were surrounded by pagans. By accepting non-Jews, early Christians dramatically grew the TAM,6 and with it the scope of Christianity.7

2. Great Value Proposition

The Christian pitch was so much better than that of the competition that good missionaries could convert thousands of people. For example, after the apostle Peter preached to a multitude:

There were added that day about three thousand souls.—Acts 2:41

How was the pitch so competitive?

Love

Greek & Roman life was pretty brutish, violent, and mean. Think Roman circus.

Judaism was an improvement on that: Although the Jewish god is feared, and Judaism focuses on Jews, it does preach loving each other and thy neighbor.

Christianity went further though:

You have heard that it was said, "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." But I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.— Jesus Christ (Matthew 5:38–42)

When mixed with universalism (everybody can be Christian) and the mutual obligation to help each other, this message became extremely powerful. It created a community of people who were morally much more admirable than the competition, and who gathered in loving and kind community.

All of this was very counterintuitive at the time! You can imagine how compelling that pitch would have been.

Progress, Agency, and Legibility

When you design videogames, you learn that the single most important motivator to a player is actionable progress, whether through reactions to your actions (e.g. you shoot, somebody dies), level or quest completions, progress bars, points… You can act, that action brings progress, and that progress is visible.

Polytheisms tended to be terrible at this: You, the player, were subject to the whims of gods. You couldn’t really know what they wanted; you had to guess. You performed some sacred rite and hoped it worked. You didn’t know what parts worked, so you just tried to get it as close as possible to the time when somebody did something similar and ended up lucky.

Christianity changed all that. You knew exactly what you needed to do (love, respect and help others, etc.); even if you failed you could still get back on the wagon; you could comment on your progress with a priest (confession), who would tell you what you needed to do to get back on track (penance)... Based on all this, you had a pretty good sense of whether you were going to end up in heaven or hell.

Miracles

In the ancient world, the point of religion was for gods to help you, to get supernatural help… miracles. If your god couldn’t make them, she was weak. Christianity claimed that it could perform lots of miracles. A healing or exorcism was a public demo. Even when a miracle was only reported, the report itself traveled as social proof.

Social Security

That belief translated into specific benefits.

Let the strong care for the weak, and let the weak reverence the strong. Let the rich man bestow help on the poor and let the poor give thanks to God.—First Letter of Clement to the Corinthians

Christianity was a mutual-aid society. People took care of the poor, of the sick, of the neighbor in need.

This was especially valuable in the past, because the world in general, and cities in particular, were extremely dangerous: disease, fire, famine, abandonment, patronage dependence, widowhood, infant mortality, slavery, migration… The Church gave members a second family.

In this way death, waging war with these two weapons, pestilence and famine, destroyed whole families in a short time, so that one could see two or three dead bodies carried out at once… Then did the evidences of the universal zeal and piety of the Christians became manifest to all the heathen. For they alone in the midst of such ills showed their sympathy and humanity by their deeds. Every day some (Christians) continued caring for and burying the dead, for there were multitudes that had no one to care for them; others collected in one place those who were afflicted by the famine throughout the whole city, and gave bread to them all; so that this thing became noised (spoken of) abroad among all men, and they glorified the God of the Christians and, convinced by the facts themselves, confessed that they alone were truly pious and religious.—Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica, 324 AD8

Did this matter? So much so that the emperor Julian launched a campaign to meet the value proposition:

Julian complained in a letter to the high priest of Galatia in 362 that the pagans needed to equal the virtues of Christians, for recent Christian growth was caused by their “moral character, even if pretended,” and by their “benevolence toward strangers and care for the graves of the dead”.—The Rise of Christianity, Rodney Stark

This was even more compelling in times of crisis like famines, pests, or earthquakes, when society fell apart except for the Christians. If you lost everything and none of your pagan priests were there for you, but the Christian community was surviving together, that made for a pretty compelling sales pitch.

Role Models

Showing love, gathering together, helping each other… They were patient, disciplined, peaceful, sexually restrained, generous, willing to suffer… These are things no other religions did. The product demo was great and unique.

This was even truer of Christianity’s power users: monks, virgins, martyrs, confessors… Their costly self-denial made the product more credible, like a product’s community having power users as evangelizers, a name used to this day for this purpose in software products.

Heaven and Hell

As I’ll describe in the next article, the older religion of Zoroastrianism had invented a version of heaven and hell, which Judaism had adopted. But the process was slow, lasting centuries. Initially, people believed there was nothing after death. Then, a state of stasis. Then, that all the dead would eventually rise on the final judgment day, and the good would be rewarded and the bad punished. Then, that during the waiting period, the good would have a more pleasant experience than the bad. That last part is closest to what Jesus believed.

Early Christians made an addition: They made heaven and hell destinations you enter just after death. Why? Well, Jesus had just died and been resurrected within 3 days, so that proved it could happen fast. And where was Jesus now? The final judgment day had not arrived, so he must be somewhere. That somewhere had to be pretty cool, right?

CHRISTIAN PROSELYTIZER: Did you know there’s a life after death, and it lasts for a very long time, and if you’re good you get an amazing place to enjoy until the final judgment, and if you’re bad you suffer?
ROMAN: How do you know that’s true?
CHRISTIAN: Well, Jesus died and was resurrected. We have plenty of witnesses. How do you know it’s NOT true? Are you willing to risk suffering for what could be forever?
ROMAN: Hmm…
CHRISTIAN: Oh and by the way, the one who makes that judgment is my God. And he sees EVERYTHING and can do ANYTHING. Unlike your weak gods.
ROMAN: Sh*t… OK where do I sign?

This creation of a clearer vision of heaven and hell where your soul goes while you wait for the final judgment really gelled as Christians mixed with Greeks. Early on, Christians thought resurrection was literal (the body came back). But with Greeks, who conceptualized the duality of body and soul, the idea became sturdier: Clearly, the bodies of the dead were not coming back, and many Christian martyrs were being persecuted. There was urgency to come up with a solution for them to continue believing in Christianity. That’s how the idea of a soul leaving your body and flying to the sky to hang out with Jesus emerged.

Later on, the Church would make heaven a kick-ass place and hell the worst place ever, forever. They were basically the biggest stick and carrot you could conceive, if you wanted your flock to do as you say. Pretty convenient.

Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, ~1500

Mass = Meditation

Meditation is good for the mind, and later on in the history of the Church, everything around mass was designed to induce a meditative state:

When you enter a church (even more so a cathedral), all your senses awaken, as if you were passing the threshold into a sacred space. The temperature is different from outside due to the solidity of the walls and the height of the ceiling; light is filtered through colored glass, sound is quiet and the little noise reverberates as if everything was a murmur, the smell of incense lingers… All its architecture is designed for this.
I think most sermons are designed to be boring. It’s not a coincidence that the word litany originally refers to a prayer led by a priest, and has come to mean a long, monotonous, or repetitive catalog of complaints or issues. Boring sermons achieve two goals: Suffering them in silence displays adherence to the belief, but more importantly, they induce a meditative trance. People escape their minds for a moment, their thoughts, very much like guided meditation
The topics push the audience to reflect, to take stock of life and to project into the future.

3. Great Segmentation

At the time of Jesus Christ (JC), the main target segment to convert to Christianity was Jews.

Convert the Jews

Source

Like many other ethnicities (Greeks, Romans), Jews had spread through the Roman Empire, mostly as traders and artisans, which meant they stayed primarily in cities. Unlike other ethnicities though, they preserved their Judaism strongly, so that there were Jewish communities in cities around the Mediterranean—a perfect target for conversion. That’s why early Christian missionaries traveled so much around the Eastern Mediterranean. It’s also why most early conversions of Christians were in cities. The word “pagan” originally meant “rural”...

Being far from Israel, these Jews were likely less orthodox. Some were integrating into their host cities already, and were probably easier to convert.

Convert Jewish Adjacent

Many Gentiles would have become adjacent to Judaism, but might not have converted yet. Remember, it was a private club, not easy to join. So if a religion adjacent to Judaism appeared and made it easy to join, it would have been quite successful.

Localization

You might well say your TAM is everybody, but if you don’t speak their language, your product won't travel far. So as Christian proselytizers traveled around the Mediterranean, they adapted their texts to local languages.

Christians went beyond translation. For example, when the Church had to translate religious texts into Slavic (which didn’t have an alphabet), they created the Cyrillic Alphabet.

Women

Women in general are a better target than men for early conversion to a new religion: They tend to make up the biggest share of new members in cults, are more religious, more prone to believe in the supernatural (e.g. astrology), and in certain circumstances are more easily persuaded9.

And in the Ancient World, they were the most underserved audience.

The status of Athenian women was very low. Girls received little or no education. Typically, Athenian females were married at puberty and often before. Under Athenian law, a woman was classified as a child, regardless of age, and therefore was the legal property of some man at all stages of her life. Males could divorce by simply ordering a wife out of the household. Moreover, if a woman was seduced or raped, her husband was legally compelled to divorce her. If a woman wanted a divorce, she had to have her father or some other man bring her case before a judge. Finally, Athenian women could own property, but control of the property was always vested in the male to whom she “belonged”.—The Rise of Christianity, Rodney Stark, via Astral Codex Ten

Meanwhile, Christians thought everyone was equal under God, and that having sex created an exclusive covenant that created an eternal bond between men and women.

The two shall become one flesh.—Jesus, Matthew 19

As a result, Christianity condemned divorce, incest, marital infidelity, and polygamy, all of which are bad for women (who could lose their status and income, or have to share their husband’s wealth with other women), especially for high-status women (who had the most to lose).

Also:

No early marriage: Christian girls were two thirds less likely to be married by age 13 than pagan women.
No forced remarriage after becoming a widow: Widows were pressured to remarry under Roman law (and thus lose their inheritance, which became their husband’s), but not in Christianity.
Status: Women could also hold high-status office in the Christian Church.

The result was a lot of early conversion of women:10

The early church was so especially attractive to women that in 370 the Emperor Valentinian issued a written order to Pope Damasus I, requiring the Christian missionaries to cease calling at the homes of pagan women. Although some classical writers claimed that women were easy prey for any "foreign superstition," most recognized that Christianity was unusually appealing because within the Christian subculture women enjoyed far higher status than did women in the Greco-Roman world at large.—Reconstructing the Rise of Christianity: The Role of Women

The Downtrodden

Slaves also seem to have been a significant part of the early Church and in some cases even found themselves in leadership roles. Early Christian communities were accused of targeting the illiterate, enslaved, young, female and under-educated.—Brett Devereaux

This makes sense, as the people most likely to want to upend the system are those who are losing in the current one. The same was true for communism 1800 years later.

Has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith….is it not the rich who are exploiting you? Are they not the ones who are dragging you into court?—James 2:5

Elite Overproduction

Peter Turchin has this theory that lots of revolutions are caused by secondary elites, who are close enough to power that they can see it and experience it, but for whom full access is barred. They become the angriest and tend to lead revolutionary movements. That’s indeed the segment that Christianity targeted:

The main strength of Christianity lay in the lower and middle classes of the towns, the manual workers and clerks, the shop keepers and merchants—Jones, 1963

The Rich

All of this makes a lot of sense. If you want to take over an existing power system, you have to create a coalition of the losers of the existing system. That means you must take the power away from those who currently have it.

Go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.— Matthew 19:21

This is why it was so important for the spread of Christianity that Jesus shun the rich. By telling them they won’t reach heaven through riches, and that they must give to the poor instead, he was able to get the resources needed to broaden Christianity’s reach.

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.—Mark 10:25 / Matthew 19:24 / Luke 18:25.

That said, the rich are by definition more powerful, so more likely to fight back and with the resources to do it. The only way to win there was to make Christianity intellectually respectable. A religion of fishermen, slaves, widows, artisans, and urban migrants could grow from below, but to conquer the empire it also had to climb the prestige ladder. Many Christian thinkers worked to reframe Christianity as a true philosophy that had superior answers to the questions Greek philosophy had been asking for centuries.11

4. Great Advertising

Martyrs

The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.— Tertullian, Apologeticus 50

Normally, when you kill people for belonging to a religion, that religion weakens or disappears. But when Christians were persecuted in the Roman Empire, the religion spread. Why? A lucky combination of factors:

Rome didn’t systematically eradicate Christians, mainly because Christians were generally good: They respected the state and gathered to sing and to tell each other to be good people. The killings were sporadic, and frequently done for show.
Christians were not just killed, they were asked to convert or die. Many decided they’d rather die. What a great marketing message! See? He’s so sure this is the right religion that he’s willing to die for it.
Part of this acceptance of death was from the section above, the introduction of the concept of heaven & hell. Christians thought they were going to heaven.
This is even more true when Christians were killed because of their belief. They became like Jesus, martyrs for the belief. That was compelling. Muslim suicide bombers have also willingly died as martyrs, and today many people wish to become martyrs in Islam.
The Roman display of killing Christians was meant to inspire fear, but it backfired because Christians would endure these ordeals with unusual composure, which inspired others: They truly believe in their religion, they truly believe in an afterlife, they truly believe they should act like Jesus, because they’re willing to die for it. Therefore, Christianity must be the way to go.
This, by the way, is probably why Romans tended to avoid killing Christians, as Roman leaders knew they’d become martyrs to the cause. Christians, taking power later, no doubt tweaked the story to make it look like they had been persecuted more than they actually had been.

The Christian Martyrs’ Last Prayer, Jean-Leon Gerome, 1860–1883

“[Martyrdom] was a glory that was open to all, regardless of rank, education, wealth or sex.—Catherine Nixey

That said, the execution of Christians for religious nonconformity was extremely rare, since most Roman rulers were smart enough to realise that there is nothing to be gained from making religious extremists into heroes. In 111 CE, Emperor Trajan insisted in a letter to Pliny, the governor of Bithynia, that he should punish only the most recalcitrant rebels; anyone willing to offer prayers to “our gods” could be pardoned, “however suspect his past conduct may be”.12

Brand Bible

Greco-Roman religion was very visual: temples, statues, processions, sacrifices, sacred objects, priestly costumes, inscriptions... Early Christianity began comparatively light on its visuals, so that’s not very competitive. So it quickly developed its visual brand: codices, crosses, fish, anchors, Good Shepherd imagery, and later basilicas, mosaics, icons, relic containers, and sacred architecture. We’ve talked in the past how much the Church pushed Gothic architecture for example as a way to inspire Christians.

5. Sales Force

If you have a great product, a big market, and plenty of effective advertising, it’s time to unleash your sales force. And Christianity had a very good one.

Missionaries

Jesus asked his disciples many times to spread the Gospel: “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of people”, “Proclaim the kingdom of God”, “The good news must first be proclaimed to all nations”, “make disciples of all nations”, “As the Father sent me, so I send you”... And they did. They traveled far and wide to spread the Gospel, especially Peter and Paul.

Traveling Healers

Traveling healers were common at the time. Christianity adapted that role for its missionaries, adding the teaching component, using that mechanism as another channel for growth.13 It was easy, since Jesus had been a traveling healer, too. So we can view part of Jesus’s life as modeling the traveling salesman role to teach his disciplines the craft.

APOSTLE JOHN: We have not been taught to be physicians. How then will we know how to heal bodies as you have told us?
JESUS: Rightly have you spoken, John, for I know that the physicians of this world heal what belongs to the world. The physicians of souls, however, heal the heart. Heal the bodies first, therefore, so that through the real powers of healing for their bodies, without medicine of the world, they may believe in you, that you have power to heal the illnesses of the heart also.—Acts of Peter

This actually allowed Christianity to differentiate itself from the competition through miracles. In Greek and Roman times, most miracles were site-based. You had to travel to a place to benefit from them. But Jesus tied them to his name, and from there, missionaries also became mobile miracle workers, allowing the stories of miracles to travel further.

Objection Handling

You’re telling me all these stories of a guy who died and then was resurrected, he walked on water, he turned water into wine… That sounds pretty preposterous to me. How do I know it’s true?

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, which could not be provided for these types of claims.14 Yet good salespeople are prepared to handle their prospects’ objections. So what did Christianity come up with? A role model.

St Thomas was the skeptic apostle15 and he didn’t believe that Jesus had died and rose again. “I’ll believe it when I see it.” So according to the Bible, St Thomas did see Jesus and did touch his wounds, at which point he believed. Then Jesus said:

Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed. Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.

In other words, suspend your disbelief and start accepting the claims without verification.

This is reinforced elsewhere in the Bible:

We live by faith, not by sight.—2 Corinthians 5:7

Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.—Proverbs 3:5-6

The foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom.—1 Corinthians 1:18-25

Celibacy

One key innovation by the Medieval Church to its sales force was making its main employee base—priests—celibate:16 They’d dedicate their entire lives to the Church without diluting their efforts. More importantly, having children creates a conflict of interest, as what’s good for the children (inheritance) is not good for the Church (accumulating wealth). No children, all your efforts go toward growing the Church.

6. Low Friction Converting Customers

If you have a strong sales pipeline, but your prospects don’t convert to customers, you will be wasting your time.

Food & Penises

Judaism had what we call a high friction acquisition funnel for men: You had to cut a piece of your penis. Imagine what the end of the sales pitch sounded like: “There’s one last little detail that I haven’t mentioned yet…”.

You also had to follow plenty of complicated food requirements, along with many other rules of daily life.

The Council of Jerusalem got rid of all of that in ~50 AD. Interestingly, this was not because of Jesus, who mostly preached to Jews. His apostles changed the rules to accept gentiles (as we mentioned), and once they did, they thought, “God accepts gentiles, so we don’t need to make the followers of Christ into Jews”.17

It suddenly became much simpler to become a Christian, easing the path to conversion.18

Homes = Temples

Reducing the requirements to convert was not the only way Christians reduced the friction of the conversion funnel. Another was lifting the requirement of having temples. Every home could be a temple, so missionaries could go from home to home to spread the message, without the need to build expensive temples.

Grandfathering

When building software products, grandfathering is how you let previous users continue with a great deal they had in the past. For example, you might increase the price for all new users, but let existing ones keep the lower rate.

Christianity grandfathered Jews, basically incorporating the Torah as their Old Testament, and just adding a new one on top of it.

Feature Parity

When the competition has cool features, you want to add them to your own product to be more competitive. The Church took pagan gods, festivities, and temples, and incorporated them into Christianity.

Romans had a very convenient feature: Each god would look out for specific people and interests. Want love? Talk to Venus. Trade? Ask Mercury.

That doesn’t work with a single god. So how do you co-opt this feature? You just take the gods, lower their status (because they’re not equal to God) and change their labels. In the case of Christianity, the new label was “saints”, which I assume was good marketing because these were actual people who actually did good things in the world before ascending to heaven, so surely they must be able to help you now!

The best example is Saint Brigid of Kildare, the patron saint of Ireland, who is suspiciously similar to the pre-Christian goddess Brigid: Same name, same feast day,19 patroness of the same things (fire, fertility, livestock, smithing…). Her shrine at Kildare reportedly kept a perpetual flame tended only by women, a carry-over from pre-Christian cult practice.

The other obvious example is St Mary, who basically replaced all mother/fertility goddesses (Isis, Cybele, Demeter).20 Other examples include sailors replacing Poseidon / Neptune with St Nicholas, the cults of St Cosmas and Damian (physician-martyrs) replacing Asclepius (the Greco-Roman healing god),21 the electrical phenomenon of St Elmo’s fire that was earlier associated with Castor and Pollux…22

On festivities:

“Oh you have the winter solstice celebrations of Saturnalia and Sol Invictus around December 25^th, when nights start getting shorter and the light starts growing again? Well, we’re not sure when Jesus was born, and we don’t really celebrate birthdays, but let’s switch Jesus’ likely birthday in spring to December 25^th, and start celebrating Christmas!”23

Other examples include:

The Roman Robigalia became the Christian Rogation Days
The Jewish Passover became Easter. Shavuot became Pentecost. Shabbat (Saturday) was transferred to Sunday (Sun-day, the Lord’s Day)
Temples were converted into churches, festivals with sacrifices into Christian celebrations with banquets

On temples:

The temples of the idols in [Britain] ought not to be destroyed; but let the idols that are in them be destroyed [...] For if those temples are well built, it is requisite that they be converted from the worship of devils to the service of the true God; that the nation, seeing that their temples are not destroyed, may remove error from their hearts, and knowing and adoring the true God, may the more freely resort to the places to which they have been accustomed.
And because they are used to slaughter many oxen in sacrifice to devils, some solemnity must be given them in exchange for this, [...] no more offer animals to the Devil, but kill cattle and glorify God in their feast, and return thanks to the Giver of all things for their abundance; to the end that, whilst some outward gratifications are retained, they may the more easily consent to the inward joys. For there is no doubt that it is impossible to cut off every thing at once from their rude natures—Letter from Pope Gregory to the Abbot Mellitus, then going into Britain (601 AD)

7. Viral Growth

OK so we have a great product for a big market, we’ve done our advertising, our sales team has been selling to the target audience, and we’ve made it easy for prospects to convert. Now they are converting! How can we accelerate the business? By recruiting our customers as the sales force!

Software can start growing really fast when each user converts more users. That’s how Facebook or TikTok grew, or viruses like the Coronavirus. The key reason why Christianity grew so explosively is that it stumbled upon a series of hyperviral tactics—only some of which came from Jesus.

Everybody’s a Missionary

Christianity transforms every believer into a sales person, a node that can spread the software.

Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.—Jesus’s Great Commission (Matthew 28:19–20)

This is probably the most powerful way in which Christianity spread. If you think about it in terms of viral spread, that’s like getting the R (transmission rate, remember from COVID?) from near 0 to much closer to 1, and even above 1 for missionaries.

Studies of new religions show that most conversions are not between people who don’t know each other, but between those who know each other well. The better you know a person, the easier you can convert her. We’ll see an important example of that when we consider women later in this section.24

High Bandwidth Channels

The Roman Empire's network of roads and waterways facilitated travel, protected by the safety of the Pax Romana.

Source

Christianity didn’t just travel contained in the brains of missionaries. They made use of the amazing Roman postal system to communicate via letters.

Superspreader Events

As we said, the Jewish diaspora was concentrated in cities across the Roman Empire, and that’s perfect for viral spread: It’s much easier to convert a lot of people if they’re all together. In a way, the Jewish diaspora enabled many “superspreader events”. This is why the map of Christianity looks like this:

Look first at the dark blue:

Most early conversion was near Israel, where Christianity started
Within its vicinity, it spread mostly in the Eastern Mediterranean (and not Arabia or Mesopotamia) through the Roman highway that was the sea
The farther you went, the smaller the Christianized regions by 325 AD, but always concentrated in cities.

Then, once Christianity was supported by the state, it took over the rest of the empire (light teal).

Women

We saw before how early Christianity probably had many more women than men. Women then converted their husbands and their families, winning political influence for Christianity in the process.

Many women became the first converts in a family, often leading their husbands to conversion but even more so raising their children as Christians. It was often through wives that Christianity penetrated the upper classes of Roman society, with the result that Christians became increasingly influential.—The amazing growth of the early church, Dreyer (2012)

But women were not powerful in the Roman Empire, so how could they make this happen? Peter was specific on the sales pitch:

Wives [...], submit yourselves to your own husbands so that, if any of them do not believe the Word, they may be won over without words by the behavior of their wives, when they see the purity and reverence of your lives.—1 Peter 3

Community Spread through Support

We saw before how social security generated viral growth. If your Christian neighbor is always helping you, you’re more likely to open up to his religion. If your recently-converted sister has a cool group of friends who are always helping her, that’s a club you want to join, too.

8. Reproduction Rate

So far we’ve seen how Christianity could grow by converting others. But the more it grew, the more the reproduction rate of Christians mattered.

Judaism already had a mandate to be fruitful and reproduce (typical in agricultural societies), which Christianity inherited, but that mandate was not just for Jews, but for all of God’s creatures. Christianity took that to heart and dramatically optimized reproduction. The main way was with a simple philosophical change with massive repercussions: Considering life sacred (because we’re all the children of God). This optimized the reproductive funnel: find stable partner → have sex → conceive → have the baby → keep the baby alive.

Vaginal Intercourse

The Christian Church famously bans any sex that isn’t vaginal: oral, anal, masturbation. It even bans coitus interruptus, so you can’t have vaginal sex without finishing inside. And of course, any kind of contraception. Basically anything that doesn’t lead to reproduction is banned. Weird, right? It’s a bit of a stretch to go from: Life is sacred to Avoid blow jobs. How did that happen?

What happened with masturbation is an interesting example. It comes from the biblical story of Onan, who was killed by God because he wasted his seed. But the story is misinterpreted:

Onan's crime is often misinterpreted as masturbation, but it is universally agreed among biblical scholars that Onan's death is attributed to his refusal to fulfill his obligation of levirate marriage with Tamar by committing coitus interruptus.

What does that mean? Onan had an older brother, Er, who died without having procreated with his wife. That meant his male line was going to disappear, and that was bad in the patrilineal Jewish culture. So as a younger brother, Onan had a duty called levirate marriage: Have sex with the widow so that she can have children, who will be deemed to be the progeny of Onan’s older brother.

Onan did have sex with her, but he didn’t want her to have a child who would be his brother’s heir (presumably because his other children would not inherit as much), so he didn’t finish inside of his sister-in-law. The problem was in not giving children to his brother, NOT in ”wasting the seed”!

This was the proper interpretation for over 1,000 years, until Christians changed it. Through what process?

Remember that early Christianity was bathing in Greek culture. Aristotle and the Stoics had written centuries earlier that semen had a divine aspect, and that it contained most of what was needed to create a life.

The theologian Clement of Alexandria around 200 AD, and later Augustine around 400 AD,25 put it all together: If God says you have to reproduce, and God said you shouldn’t waste your seed, and semen is divine and contains everything needed for life, then surely all semen should be used for vaginal sex. And Jesus said the bond between a man and a woman is sacred, surely all sex should happen within the marriage, should be vaginal, and geared towards reproduction. Over the following centuries, non-reproductive sex would become more and more vilified.

Contraception

In the Greek and Roman world, contraception had been common, but Augustine forbade it for the same reason: Sex had to be reproductive. Roman women managed their menstrual cycle to avoid pregnancy and used plants to such an extent that the contraceptive (and abortive) silphium plant went extinct.

Silphium was such an important part of the Cyrene economy (in modern-day Libya) that it appeared on coins

Abortion

If contraceptives failed, abortion was also an option. It was widely practiced in the Greco-Roman world, because they thought fetal development formation was a gradual biological process, not imbued with some sacred meaning. Like a plant or an animal growing. Judaism, meanwhile, discouraged it.

Christians banned it since the beginning.

Thou shalt not procure abortion, nor commit infanticide.—The Didache, ~late 1st or early 2nd century

Infanticide

“If you are delivered of a child before I return home, if it’s a boy, keep it, if it is a girl, expose it.—Hilarion, Roman citizen writing to his pregnant wife.

For Romans, men owned their wives and children, so they could do with them as they wished. That included infanticide, which was a double penalty on fertility.

First, because all the children you kill won’t procreate later.

But second, because of sexism. Romans tended to favor sons, so infanticide of girls was common. The fewer daughters you had vs sons, the fewer potential mothers.

Female infanticide was not an isolated incident: There were ~130-140 males per 100 females in Rome, which suggests about 20% of baby girls were killed!26

Even in large families, more than one daughter was practically never reared.—Lindsay (1968:16), via this

But Jews believed all humans are God’s creatures, so you can’t just kill them like that. Christianity inherited this and banned infanticide, as we just saw in the Didache quote above. That meant more Christian children survived than pagans.

Women who use drugs to bring on an abortion commit murder, and will have to give an account to God for the abortion . . . for we regard the very foetus in the womb as a created being, and therefore an object of God’s care.—Church father Athenagoras, 2^nd century

Survival Rate

Finally, given the social security service of the Church, Christians received more care than pagans when they were sick. According to Rodney Stark, 30% of pagans died during the plague, but only 10% of Christians!

Adoption was only common among elite pagan classes, but widespread among Christian orphans (e.g. by godparents). That meant many more Christian children survived to adulthood (this is at a time when half of children didn’t reach adulthood).

With all these measures, it’s likely that Christians had many more children, who survived much longer than other Romans’ offspring.

9. Retention Rate

Now that we’ve been growing our Christian groups so much, we need to make sure the bucket doesn’t leak, that there aren’t more people leaving the faith than those arriving. How? Christianity didn’t have the death penalty for apostasy that Judaism (and Zoroastrianism) had, because it was not a state religion. They socially shunned it, but couldn’t forbid it until it was the state religion. So what did they do?

Writing & the Codex

Chrisitianity inherited from Judaism the writing of religious texts and doctrine. Words didn’t easily get corrupted over centuries of repetition. The fact that Christianity communicated so much in writing and had so many gospels made it much easier to bundle teachings in a codex (similar to a book) than the prevailing scrolls. The codex survived for longer and helped communicate and keep a record of all the relevant theology. It also became a symbol of Christianity (the Bible).

The codex format of a pile of pages bound along one side is still used in most books today, but they mostly used sheets of vellum, parchment, or papyrus, rather than paper. Source.

Bundling

Catholicism has many once-in-a-lifetime rites of passage:

Baptism for entry into the group
Confirmation for the passage into adulthood
Marriage for access to sex
Anointing for illness or preparation for death
Burial and mass for after death

All of these require the priest and the community, providing social pressure to stay in the religion. Think about how many people want to get married through the Church even though they’re not believers anymore.

But Christianity bundles all these services together: If you want marriage, you must be baptised, have taken the communion, and be confirmed.

This is not something fully new in Christianity: Rites of passage exist in virtually every religion, Judaism had an equivalent of baptism for men (circumcision), Zoroastrianism had priest-led funerals, etc. Christianity’s innovation was to merge all of these together and make them all social and led by priests. It took it many centuries to get there.

Lifecycle Management

All the rites follow the entire life, but Christianity colonized every year, and every week too: Sunday worship, fasts, feasts, saints’ days, Advent, Lent, Easter, Christmas… It became the rhythm that organized life, and that made it impossible to forget.

10. Suppress Competition

One of the best ways to increase retention is suppressing competition, and Christianity’s main weapon for that was…

State Takeover

I’ve mentioned before that Constantine legalized Christianity in 313 AD, when ~10% of the empire’s population was Christian. That share grew tremendously, so that in 380 CE, when Theodosius made it the state’s official religion in the Edict of Thessalonica, about half the population was already Christian.

That takeover allowed Christianity to spread everywhere the empire was present. Remember:

The state takeover brought sticks and carrots.

More Benefits

Before Constantine, becoming Christian could cost you status, safety, and opportunity. The carrot was that, after Constantine, suddenly there was a massive benefit in joining the Church. Confiscated Christian property was restored, bishops gained imperial access, churches received gifts, clergy received privileges, and Christian affiliation became increasingly useful for careers and patronage. The conversion funnel was subsidized.

Religious Coercion

The stick is that, by co-opting the empire, Christianity became much less tolerant. It latched on to a power that had already been established for nearly a millennium, and repurposed its tools for its own benefit. Starting in the early 300s AD, Roman law gradually:

Condemned sacrifices
Ordered temples to be closed
Destroyed effigies and other sacred items, to show the gods couldn’t defend themselves and demonstrate their humiliation
Defined heresy and opened the door to its suppression
Removed testamentary rights for Christians who become pagan
Forbade public religious debate
Ordered rural temples to be destroyed

Violations of what we would now call human rights and civil liberties were allowed for the sake of religious conformity. In Alexandria in 415 CE, the philosopher and teacher Hypatia was dragged from her carriage, taken to a church, stoned, flayed, ripped to pieces and burned by a gang of Christians, who accused her of witchcraft. Classical learning, literature and philosophy were now all suspect.—Source

[Temple] roofs are uncovered, walls are pulled down, images are carried off, and altars are overturned.—source

Source: Triumph of the Cross, Tommaso Laureti

Why this change? I don’t know, but I can venture a few guesses.

Early Christians were probably self-selected as the most virtuous people (who else would go against the world preaching love?). Their charisma would carry the crowds.
But there are only so many virtuous people, and once you convert the vast majority of a group, you won’t have only virtuous people. The average hateful guy might say they prioritize love, but might still have the instinct to hate the Others.
If you were downtrodden and suddenly you’re part of a new group where you have status, you’re going to enjoy your new status and be quite aggressive with the former system that kept you down.
Power doesn’t change people, it reveals them. Once you’re in power, you start doing things you didn’t dare to do before.

Censorship

Aside from sticks (religious coercion) and carrots (advantages for Christians), the other advantage of Constantine becoming Christian is that the religion could start advertising and selling in the open. Before 312, much Christian growth happened through households, urban networks, letters, local communities, and occasional public controversy. After legalization, Christian advocates could preach and debat publicly, build churches, perform imperial ceremonies, produce inscriptions, crosses, music, processions…

Anti-Forking Software

One of the biggest concerns of Christianity after it had become the state’s religion was quelling alternative versions—what we call in software forks in the code. There was Gnosticism, Marcionism, and especially Arianism.

Source

That’s one more reason the Church wanted a close cannon, and hence the ecumenical councils or the Bible. Everything that was not approved could be called heresy and quelled.

Kin Suppression

Joseph Henrich’s book The WEIRDest People in the World suggests that the Church banned cousin marriage in the Middle Ages, among other reasons to undermine clans: If you don’t put your clan first, you’re more likely to put the Church first (or second, only behind the nuclear family).

This would have had the side-effect of reducing congenital diseases and hence improving survival rates27 and reproduction of Catholics,28 bolstering the religion’s success.

11. Deterritorialization

Christianity took over the state to use it to grow. But when the state died, it moved on.

As we will see in the next article, most gods were linked to locations and states. If somebody conquered you, it was proof that your god was weak, and that god disappeared. By some unique set of circumstances, Judaism transcended that, and became independent from land and state. Christianity inherited that.

Barbarian Reverse Conversion

This was very handy when first the tribes of barbarians destroyed the Roman Empire in the west: It was not common for conquerors to completely throw their religion out the window and adopt the religion of the conquered! In fact, the timing couldn’t have been better: The Roman Empire disappeared just as Christianity was reaching its maximum power. When the Barbarians arrived, they killed the state but had no reason to do the same to the Church. Yet the Church had inherited its strong structure and hierarchy from the Roman Empire, so it remained as the most capable structure for power. The Barbarians wanted its legitimacy and efficiency, so they converted and thereby gave the Church immense power. For example, when Rome disappeared, so did its administrators, and hence all schools that taught literacy. The Church still needed literate employees, so it took over all education. And because education was valuable to kings, they employed clergymen, which put the Church at the helm of information power.

Enterprise Sales

We talked about a sales force before, but that was the normal type of sales force, the one that converts small prospects into customers. Enterprise sales tries to get massive companies (“enterprises”) as customers. These require their own elite sales force and a dedicated strategy.

Christianity did just that. It used bishops and other elite clergymen to convert kings into Christianity before the rest of the population. Once the king was Christian, missionaries had a much easier time moving around their lands, harnessing resources, and using the king as the example to follow. This happened with Clovis of the Franks, Vladimir of the Rus, Mieszko of Poland…

Control over Secular Power

It was also very handy to become a power independent from the state. Kings had to obey the Church or risk being excommunicated—something many of them might not have feared personally, but feared because their citizens believed this was terrible. The Church was able to create a system parallel to the state’s, with its own lands, its own leaders, sometimes its own soldiers, its own wars… For centuries, the Church got its own state outright—the Papal States—and they were powerful enough to delay the unity of Germany and Italy by several centuries.

Franchising

Once states were weak, it was hard for them to settle new land. But monasteries could. The Middle Ages Church would plant a new monastery at the edge of Christian territory (or in an underpopulated area), and bring with it investment: farming, schools, guesthouses, clinics, artisanal industry, manuscript factory… This enabled it to grow its assets and its believers.

12. Monetization

Software businesses tend to focus first on growing their audience, and only once they’ve succeeded do they focus on maximizing revenue from their audiences. The Church was no exception. It started with a very promising philosophical base:

You cannot serve both God and money.—Matthew 6:24 and Luke 16:13

Ah, dammit. What does that mean concretely?

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.—Mark 10:25, Matthew 19:24, Luke 18:25

OK so I should not die rich, or otherwise I won’t go to heaven! What should I do with my money then?

If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.—Matthew 19:21

RICH CHRISTIAN: OK, let me do that. But there are a lot of poor people, how do I know who to help?
THE CHURCH: Don’t worry, give it to me, I’ll take care of it.29

So that meant bequests were a primary way for the Church to get a lot of money. Here, we can see how some other factors from earlier matter. There was much less pressure for women to marry, and especially for widows to remarry. If they died with a fortune but no children, where did that fortune go? To the Church.

If clans had been strong, they would have been the primary recipient of the money. In fact, in clans, property is not as much part of the individual as it’s part of the clan. By eliminating clans, the Church co-opted more bequests.

These donations were unidirectional: The Church kept most of these assets and made money out of them. The more it accumulated, the more money it made. Back then, wealth meant land, and the Church became the biggest landholder in Europe in the Middle Ages. The Church hired farmers to produce wealth from these lands. It also owned other types of infrastructure that it monetized: granaries, mills, bridges…

Also, remember that the Church ensured asset accumulation by preventing clerics from having children.

But they weren’t the only source of income. Early on, the Church received some income through charity, but once it was part of the state, it received tax benefits and direct transfers from the state. Eventually, the tithe (one tenth of people’s income) would become mandatory for all. This is substantially better than the episodic payments that polytheist temples received. On top of that, the Church received fees for sacraments and burials, relic-based pilgrimages, monastic enterprises (wine, wool, brewing), the sale of indulgences, papal taxation of clergy…

Like Facebook and Google showing too many ads, the Church overplayed its monetization hand, and people started defecting. The sale of indulgences was the proximate trigger of the Reformation.

Other Growth Tactics

It’s impossible to cover them all, but here are a few:

The Church invests heavily in education, financing it for many people to this day. That allows it to insert Christian education, through which people are retained and converted.
The anti-forking software I mentioned before also included things like the Inquisition. But also, Jesus didn’t have a doctrine against new branches of Christianity.30 So once the Church lost its monopoly on information, many versions of Christianity appeared. These compete with each other, allowing for the most efficient ones to prevail. It meant lots of wars early on, but also many more approaches today.
Christianity also spread through crusades. The ones we know the most about are actually the failed ones in the Levant. There were many successful ones in other parts, such as the Baltic Crusades and the Spanish Reconquista.

So Why Did Christianity Grow So Much?

This breakdown of the Christian Church’s business tactics is not exhaustive, but even then, you can see how it came up with ~100 innovative mechanisms for growth.

In some cases, these mechanisms came from Judaism, such as:

The monotheism
The deterritorialization that allowed Christianity to survive the state
The tendency to write everything down (which allowed for more retention of the content, more spread of doctrine, and reducing forks due to misinterpretation)
The benefit of target populations in urban areas spread around the Mediterranean, ripe for conversion

Others emerged from new religious doctrine:

From the concept of “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” came a huge TAM that included gentiles (especially the Jewish-adjacent), appealed to women and the poor, a missionary sales force, viral spread through each believer, the elimination of circumcision and food restrictions, made homes into temples… But remember, this did not come from Jesus!
That phrasing of “in Christ Jesus”, plus the concept of love, entail the ideas that all humans are sacred, which led to tactics of anti-contraceptives, anti-abortion, anti-infanticide, care for the sick, orphan support, higher survival rates, social security services, enabled traveling healers… It formed the core of the value proposition of loving yourself and your neighbor.
If you adopt faith as a virtue, you reduce your skepticism, you are more open to new doctrines, you’re more likely to advertise the religion through martyrdom…
If salvation becomes super high stakes, legible, and actionable, you suddenly have a massive incentive to do what’s right for the community

Yet others were a result of the Roman Empire:

The early multilingual nature of Christianity
The unified market of the Roman Empire, enabled by the Mediterranean highway and Rome’s famous roads
The ability to evangelize in big cities across the empire, which acted as superspreader sites
The ability to harness the power of the state to spread
The Roman Empire also provided the administrative structure the Church adopted

Some are a combination of these, like for example, the success of Christianity with women is a combination of making women more equal and the terrible treatment they received in antiquity.

And many others are completely untethered to any of these, including:

Many of the monetization tactics
Kin suppression
Anti-forking software
Destruction of alternative temples
Making priests celibate

I’m going to write more about how religions are designed, including how to design religions for the future.

How can we summarize all of this?

Judaism had many compelling aspects to become a huge religion (monotheism, deterritorialization, heaven and hell…), but was missing a few key levers.
There were many prophets within Judaism who proposed variants, but the one Jesus invented was the most fit for growth, thanks to a few concepts: all are one in God, love each other, have faith. They unshackled Judaism’s software barriers to growth.
But Judaism lacked network infrastructure. When the Roman Empire conquered Judea (just 60 years before Jesus was born!), it brought the infrastructure needed for the massive spread of Judaism’s successor religion.
Jesus’s followers were deft enough to continue changing and adapting Christianity (or even inventing new concepts altogether) to optimize growth. The optimization was ruthless and lasted more than a thousand years.

I talk a lot about Christianity being designed in this article, but I don’t always mean it as purposeful design, as… intelligent design. A potential process was more like… evolution: Judaism was a new religious species that had evolved from others, the Roman Empire provided a new environment, lots of religious variety emerged from that, natural selection meant the fittest one—Christianity—exploded… and as it became an institution, it started being managed as such.

But as we saw, many of the changes didn’t happen at the time of Jesus, but after his death. It would be surprising if all of Christianity’s mutations happened so fast, and always coincidentally geared towards growth. It’s as if it had been helped by some enterprising human hands.

Or maybe God’s purposeful hand.

I hope you enjoyed this theory! If you think this article was insightful, share it with people who might enjoy enriching their conversations about Christianity, religions, growth mechanics, or the underlying patterns of how the world works.

I’m opening the newsletter to sponsorship. If you have a business that is moving the world towards a techno-optimistic future and would like to reach 125k+ curious, globally-minded people to learn about it (founders, researchers, investors, policymakers), reach out here.

My confidence on that statement is 60%. There are other books who cover the topic (I’ll share details on each below) but I don’t think any covers the topic as exhaustively from a growth perspective:

Very few works focus on Christianity as a software mechanism. They tend to focus on the story, and narrate the growth, rather than understanding the actual growth mechanics at play. I think this is sensible: The people who write about this topic tend to be historians or theologicians, not people who have actually designed viral software products—which I have.
Many of the sources I’ve read mention these other books, but they frequently point at holes or flaws in their pages.
That said, I have not read these books personally, so the information that reached me through them might be too limited, and they indeed covered everything.
To clarify, I asked ChatGPT to compare this article’s additions to those of other books, and it sees many contributions from different books, but none that covers them all (plus, some novel additions, like the feeling of progress).

One key additional point here is that I purposefully didn’t cover the advantages that Christianity had compared to the Roman polytheism because I don’t think these are Christianity’s contributions, but Judaism’s. I cover them in the next article.

Below I have a short summary of each book on the topic, and the take from ChatGPT.

The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies is a 1,000+ page interdisciplinary reference on early Christianity, covering history, literature, thought, practices, material culture, church/empire, women/gender, councils, canons, and geography. As such, it doesn’t focus only on growth mechanics, and it doesn’t either see many of the changes of the early Church through the lens of growth.

Ramsay MacMullen’s Christianizing the Roman Empire: A.D. 100–400 does focus on growth, but is limited to the years 100-400 AD, and is very focused on the state- asks how Christianity gained dominance in the Roman world, with sections on Constantine, nonreligious conversion factors, public campaigns, intellectual conversion, incomplete conversion, and coercion.

Alan Kreider’s The Patient Ferment of the Early Church is another direct competitor on early Christian growth, asking why the church grew despite disincentives, harassment, and occasional persecution, but according to ChatGPT it missed many mechanics. I didn’t stumble upon very frequently with quotes of it.

The two biggest competitors are Bart Ehrman’s The Triumph of Christianity and Rodney Stark’s The Rise of Christianity. I’ve seen them quoted in many of my sources. Both cover many of Christianity’s aspects, but not all.

This is illustrated by this video.

First by emperor Constantine, who made Christianity legal in 313 AD, and then by Theodosius, who made it the state’s religion in 380 AD

I calculated the number based on the data, which comes mostly from Stark’s The Rise of Christianity, 1996.

We can divide the growth into 4 phases: Between JC and becoming an official religion of the Roman Empire, Christianity as the empire’s religion, the Middle Ages until ~1500, and then the hypergrowth during the Age of Discovery and the Industrial Revolution. I’ve focused mostly on the first two, and especially early Christianity, because that’s when its success was shaped. But I cover up to the Middle Ages, since many innovations only came later but are still relevant to helping us see the patterns it followed. Christianity’s growth after that is more straightforward: It was the religion of the countries that eventually won the Age of Discovery and the Industrial Revolution. Christianity might have had a hand in these, but it was also a tool that hindered them, so I decided not to cover that period here.

There were only about 7M Jews in the Roman Empire, but 50-60M non-Jews.

The theological version is that some angels / God appeared to a Roman centurion (pagan). At the same time, Apostle Peter had a vision where God told him to kill and eat all sorts of animals, not only the ones Judaism considered pure. When Peter said no, a voice told him three times “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean”. He then saw the centurion, put two and two together, understood that the message meant “It’s not just the Jews that are part of Christianity, also others”, and that became the most compelling argument such that, later in 50 AD, Christians decided to open up to all peoples at the Council of Jerusalem.

Via The amazing growth of the early church, Dreyer, 2012

In a big part because they're more susceptible to peer pressure than men.

There is some debate about whether this is fully true, but from the evidence I’ve seen, I think it’s 80% likely that women were at least 5 to 10% more common than men in the early Christian Church.

Things like What is the ultimate reality behind the world? Is it matter, atoms, Forms, the Good, the One, Nous, Logos, divine fire? Christianity said: one transcendent Creator, God. Or Why is the universe ordered and intelligible? Divine reason? Logos? Forms? A demiurge? Christians saw the divine reason of God. Or What is the good life? Flourishing, happiness, blessedness, the highest good? Christians said: True happiness is union with God. Virtue matters, but it is completed by grace, love, worship, and salvation. Other questions include: Why does evil exist? Are we ruled by fate, chance, or providence? How do we know truth? What happens after death?

There’s an interesting hypothesis too that the most likely Christians to be martyred were women and clergy, which is interesting because they tend to inspire more compassion than men.

The amazing growth of the early church, Dreyer (2012)

Even if these things had been true.

I’m named after him, I’m sure you’re not surprised.

Monks were celibate since early on, 3^rdcentury or so. For priests, it started around then, but only became fully enforceable around 1100 AD.

That sentence beginning “There is neither Jew nor Greek…” was said by an apostle, and another apostle was proselytizing to gentiles when he said he got a visit from the Holy Spirit, validating the entire approach of converting gentiles.

It was not immediate though. For example, baptism took years of preparation early on. It was simplified over time, presumably to accelerate the speed of conversion.

Feb 1, the pagan festival Imbolc

This one is kind of crazy to me. Isn’t it surprising that Christianity has one God that is in fact three, and then has Mary who is not a goddess at all, and yet is incredibly revered? In this case, I reckon sometimes this switch was purposefully designed, others it just happened naturally.

A church to Cosmas and Damian was built in Rome near the old forum in the 6th century.

Buddhism also took over deities from Hinduism as it spread. They became devas and protector figures (Indra, Brahmā, Bishamonten, Emma). Bodhisattvas appeared in Buddhism to fulfill the same functionality as a saint in Christianity. In Japan, Buddhism merged into the local animist ideas to form honji suijaku: Buddhist deities became Japanese Kami. Later, in the Meiji Restoration era, elites extracted Buddhist concepts from the local Shintoism, but merged it with monotheistic ideas, elevating the goddess Amaterasu to the chief God, and making the emperor her successor, therefore making him a god too.

This change happened in the 300s AD. Another theory is that early Christians might have thought that Jesus was conceived the same date as he died (March 25^th), so 9 months later is December 25^th. This sounds very dubious to me, because (1) early Christians didn’t care at all about birthdays, and (2), how on Earth would they come up with that conception date? This sounds to me like retrofitting the conception to the target, which had to be December 25^thfor the other reason.

That said, this probably didn’t happen just after Jesus’s death, as the apostles were doing most of the missionary work. This is one of the key points made by Alan Kreider in his book The Patient Ferment of the Early Church.

Before, all sex was OK within marriage. It’s interesting to understand why Augustine reached this conclusion. He was Bishop of Hippo (today in Algeria) and a former sex-addict who had to give up a mistress and casual sex to marry an heiress. Faced with the requirement to limit sex to only his wife, he decided to stop his lust by not having sex altogether—hence why he became a bishop. Then, he coupled the Biblical concepts such as being fruitful and the sin of Onan to recommend that all sex be reproductive. The ultimate consequence of that was, indeed, more reproduction.

There are 105 boys per 100 girls born in general, so 130 boys should have produced 124 girls. 24 girls are missing from those 124, that’s 20%.

And IQ.

This is disputed. The main argument against it is that some Catholic areas already didn’t have cousin marriage before the Church mandated its end.

Very convenient

Unlike in Islam

Islamismophobia - by Tomas Pueyo - Uncharted Territories

Tue, 09 Jun 2026 14:51:16 +0000

This timely article is probably the hardest, most important one I’ve written this year—maybe in years. I might not get it all right, so I look forward to your comments and corrections. If you believe it can help heal society, please share it.

“Muslims are violent and try to impose their beliefs on others! We should send them all back to their countries!”

“That’s just islamophobia! You’re a bigot!”

Both of these are not just wrong: They’re blurring concepts of freedom, equality, immigration, race, and politics at such a fundamental level that they’re threatening the foundations of our society. Today, we’re going to try to make sense of it all. By the time you’re done, you should be able to see a conflict related to Islam in the West on the TV, on social media, or on the street, and have a better sense of what we should do about it and why.

At the heart of this is the mixing of two concepts: Islam and Islamism.

Islam vs Islamism

Islam is a religion followed by 2 billion people in the world, ~25% of the population. It is a personal belief, protected by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Like in most religions, most adherents of Islam are kind, welcoming, peaceful, and productive. You can witness it yourself traveling to places like Turkey, the UAE, Malaysia, and Indonesia, where this was certainly my experience.

Abu Dhabi, in the UAE, is not only impressive visually. It also hosts the Abrahamic Family House, with a mosque, church, and synagogue side by side. Freedom of religion is enshrined in the constitution.

Islam has over 1,300 years of history, and has produced some of the most distinguishable aesthetics.

Top and middle: interior tilework and dome of the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque in Isfahan, Iran. Bottom: interior of the Mosque-Cathedra, of Córdoba, Spain.

Its position in between the biggest world civilizations allowed it to preserve knowledge from older empires, increase the exchange of knowledge across civilizations, and produce fundamental new contributions.

The world in 1000 AD. Muslims, in green, are between Europe on one side and China and India on the other, which meant they controlled all commerce and transit between them. Source.

But within Islam, there’s a problem of Islamism: a political movement that says Islam should influence politics because it’s superior to liberal democracy, capitalism, and any other alternative. Islamists want Sharia (the law derived from Islam1) above civil law, they want it to apply to non-Muslims, they seek pan-Islamic political unity, and the creation of Islamic states. So by nature, it’s not individual and persuasive, but social and coercive in its attempts to spread. That’s why the European Court of Human Rights declared Sharia incompatible with the fundamental principles of democracy. It’s why Turkey banned the leading political party in the late 1990s: Its Islamism went against democracy and the country’s secular constitution.

There is a blurry line between Islam and Islamism. It’s crucial to understand it though, so let’s take specific examples.

I hope the difference is clear: Islam whispers to the soul; Islamism shouts on the street. Islam wants believers to get on their knees, Islamism wants you to get on yours. Islam breeds pilgrims, Islamism conquerors. Islam saves souls, Islamism drafts laws. Islam wants the freedom to believe, Islamism wants obedience.

Islam is a personal religion, a set of personal beliefs. Moderate Muslims respect that others don’t share the same beliefs. This is protected by the Universal Human Rights. Islamism is a political movement that tries to impose its views on others. This is against Universal Human Rights.2

Islam is protected by Universal Human Rights, Islamism is against them.

If you want a test to differentiate between Islam and Islamism, here are seven questions you can ask:

Is it voluntary or coerced? If it’s voluntary, it’s consistent3 with Islam. If it’s coerced, it’s consistent with Islamism.
Is it just for the believer (consistent with Islam), or also for others (consistent with Islamism)?
Is civil law supreme (Islam), or is Sharia (Islamism)?
Are all citizens equal (Islam), or do Muslims prevail (Islamism)?
Is it persuasion (Islam) or intimidation (Islamism)?
Does it make room for dissenters inside the community (Islam) or not (Islamism)?
Is the same standard applied to all religions (Islam), or does Islam have privileges (Islamism)?

Now, these are extremes. As we saw in this article, in the West:

About 20 – 50% of Muslims are moderate Muslims
About 15-20% are Islamists
In between, about 10-50% are Conservative Muslims. They might, for example, think that the precepts of Islam should apply to all, but they might use persuasion instead of coercion to achieve this goal.

If we were to draw this:

The best way to understand the difference between each extreme is to dive into each separately.

The Moderate Muslims

They believe in Islam, and they also tend to think that:4

The Quran is not the literal word of God
There are many ways to interpret Islam
Democracy is above Islam, and they’re compatible
Men and women are equal
Homosexuality should be accepted in society
Jews don’t have too much power, they can be trusted
Israel has a right to exist
School should be secular and mixed genders
It should be legal to show a picture of Muhammad and burn the Quran
Halal food is not necessary everywhere

If you’re a Westerner and you know Muslims, odds are higher that they belong to this group. That’s been my experience: I’ve had friends and colleagues from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Iraq, and probably more that I can’t remember, and every single one of them was kind, fun, tolerant, and hard-working.

These Muslims know and understand the threat posed by Islamism. They think:

Islamism is a problem
Political violence is never acceptable
Jihad in general, and organizations like ISIS, Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Muslim Brotherhood are bad

Moderate Muslims would want nothing more than the elimination of Islamism.

This goes to the highest levels of several Muslim countries. For example, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, the UAE, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Libya have all outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood, in most cases designated it a terrorist organization.5 Many prolific Arab commentators agree.

Here is Mohamed Bin Salman, ruler of Saudi Arabia, about Islamism:

We want to go back to what we were, the moderate Islam that is open to the world, open to all the religions. We want to live a normal life. We represent the moderate teachings of Islam and the right is on our side. We will eradicate the rest of extremism very soon.

Here is the UAE’s Foreign Minister in 2017, talking about Islamism in Europe (a bunch of additional quotes follow. If you get the gist, you can move on):

There will come one day when we’ll see far more radical extremists, and terrorists, coming from Europe, because of lack of decision-making, trying to be politically correct, or assuming that they know the Middle East, or they know Islam far better than we do. That’s pure ignorance.

Mosab Hassan Yousef, son of a Hamas founder, was so repelled by the organization that he defected to Israel, and later to the US, and has been criticizing it ever since. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan have banned the organization.

Here is the a Lebanese Shia Muslim preacher:6

We need to review Islam from beginning to end. The human being no longer has value in this religion. You [Islamists] have distorted the true image of Islam. You have made us feel that Islam is only gunpowder, rockets, killing, and crime. There is the silence of one and a half billion Muslims across the globe. Silent about all this destruction. Silent about the massacres. Silent about killing in the name of God. Every crime committed is being accompanied by the slogan “Allahu akbar.” We can no longer leave Islam as a playground for these so-called Islamists, these criminals, these terrorists.
The whole world has come to hate Islam and Muslims. Campaigns of hatred against Muslims and Islam are rising because of the behavior of Muslims, and because of the behavior of Islamic leaders who remain silent about crimes and justify them. How is the far-right Christian movement rising in Europe? Because it has become afraid of you as a Muslim. What are you offering to break this stereotype? What are you offering so you can say to him: “No, that isn’t true”?
All our calls are calls to violence. All our calls are calls to killing. All our calls are calls to exclusion and eradication. I do not feel peace. I want to feel peace. There has to be a corrective movement in the Islamic world. I want the Islam that came and opened this message with: “In the name of God, the Most Merciful, the Most Compassionate.”

Commentator Ahmed Khalifa:

We Arabs from the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf the original heart of Islam don’t tolerate extremists in our countries. Our societies are genuinely tolerant. We welcome people from all backgrounds whether they’re different in race or religion.
The real hardliners and extremists run away from our region and head straight to Europe, America, Japan, & places like that. They take advantage of your freedom of speech in the worst way possible and try to tear down your customs, your culture, & your way of life. Sadly, you keep giving them that space & then later you blame Islam for the mess.

Here is the Emirati commentator AQ Almenhali:

A friend of mine travelled to the West recently and went to pray at a mosque there. He told me the [sermon] started normal, then slowly became political and started talking about jihad. He literally said: “I can see how people here get radicalized hearing this stuff.” He got up and left halfway through.
This is exactly why the UAE and other GCC countries regulate mosques through Ministries of Awqaf. It’s not about “controlling religion”, it’s about stopping religious spaces from turning into political recruitment centers.
The Muslim Brotherhood mastered this years ago: mix religion with politics, build grievance narratives, then slowly create ideological loyalty.
The West keeps viewing this as “freedom of speech”. Gulf countries view it as national security.

And Amjad Taha, Emirati expert in Middle East politics:

Why does Britain today have more extremists than the Middle East, and more rapists rivaling the Islamists of Port Sudan in Africa and Pakistan? And why does the UK system protect Islamist jihadist thugs and rapists instead of protecting its own people? We fear visiting London, it is no longer safe. Your people deserve better. Your streets are crowded with 300,000 homeless in London alone, yet while poverty grows, the Muslim Brotherhood, banned in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, is free to run your streets.

Here is the Gazan Arab Muslim Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib:

The "pro-Palestine” movement refused to acknowledge the criminality of hostage-taking & killing innocent Israeli civilians, condemn Hamas’s actions including against Gazans, call for the terror group to step down, or engage in pragmatic activism and targeted demands for specific outcomes that actually help Palestinians [... It] will forever be looked at as the pinnacle of embarrassment, failure, and wasted opportunities—all while the people of Gaza suffer horrendously.

Maliq, another Muslim commentator:

Truth be told: The #1 cause of Islamophobia isn't outsiders. It's us Muslims. Our resistance to reform, silence on extremism, and victim mentality. If we fix ourselves, the fear will fade.

And:

One thing I absolutely hate about us Muslims is our dishonesty. ISIS, Taliban, Boko Haram, they name their groups "Jihad" and "Sunnah", wave the Quran, scream "Allahu Akbar" during attacks, force hijabs on captives, and forcibly convert people at gunpoint. Yet we still rush to say "They're not real Muslims!" Bro, we can say they don't represent Islam. That's fair debate. But pretending they have zero connection to the faith while they quote our books and use our slogans? That's pure denial. We can't keep lying to ourselves and the world forever. The truth isn't Islamophobia. It's honesty.

UAE commentator Majed, on the rapes of several thousands girls for decades in the UK, in what’s called the Grooming Gangs scandal, of which allegedly7 a majority of perpetrators were Pakistani men and a majority of victims White British:8

To imprison a 13-year-old girl, drug her, and abuse her for profit is pure evil. Predators like this do not deserve the name of men. They are monsters who prey on the innocent. What’s even more shocking is the so-called “justice” in the UK. Six years? Nine years? A child’s life has been shattered forever, yet these criminals will walk free while their victim is still young. If this happened in our region, the punishment would have been swift and merciless.

Another take:

Another take.

I hope this gives you a good grasp here: There are many moderate Muslims—20% to 50% of Muslims in the West, as I mentioned.9

And many moderate Muslims very publicly decry the radical Islam speech and behaviors that have been festering, especially in Western countries. How is this happening? Who are these Islamists? What do they say?

The Islamists

In the previous article, we saw that about 15% of Muslim immigrants in Europe are Islamists.10 What does that mean?

Islamist Speech

The best way to understand Islamism is through the eyes of the imams who preach it.

The Imams

Here’s a cut of some imams in the US

Source

These are examples of Islamic viewpoints that are consistent with human rights:

The goal is to make sure Islam is well established in society. To integrate Islam in the USA.
You dedicate yourself to establish justice in the world. That’s what Allah created you for.
Allah mentions he has sent the prophets to establish justice on Earth.
Allah teaches us that there is one purpose: Establishing justice on Earth.11

I haven’t sampled mosques, but I assume this type of message to be the majority. The following are Islamist though, inconsistent with human rights:

We’re supposed to bring Islam to regulate society according to divine law and purpose.

Allah made it obligatory upon the Muslims to change society.
You need to completely replace the system with an Islamic system.
When we say America will be an Islamic country some day, that’s our goal.
Islam has a second round, where Islam will rule the world again.

Here are some other examples of imams sharing Islamist positions in the West:

California: “Islam will enter every household in the US.”
California (San Diego): “America will be a Muslim country, Russia will be a Muslim country. We have to be part of that change. Never apologize, never compromise.”
Again San Diego: “We must understand Islam as a comprehensive way of life, which includes political influence. In Medina, at the beginning, Muslims were a minority. For some it took weeks, months, years to accept Islam, but Muhammad taught us how to build that power.”
Texas: “Mamdani as the mayor of New York is a victory for the Ummah, and if you don’t understand this, you don’t understand the role of civilizational strength. Everyone has a role to play. (Muslim) politicians have a role to play. [...] Across the Western world, Muslims are rising to the point it’s terrifying them. Sweden, Oslo, 10% Muslim. Vienna is 10% Muslim, the Ottomans Turks tried for 200 years and couldn’t do it.”
Colorado: “We’re still fighting Jihad, just not with swords.”
Detroit: “For Muslims, it’s an obligation to prepare against your enemies. The first obstacle is the Wordly life: When you are too attached to it, you’re not prepared to sacrifice. They say ‘You’re too few, just 1%, you can’t do anything, overpower the military.’ But how many times have small groups of dedicated believers overcome groups far more powerful than them?”
UK: “The first blow to the US was Afghanistan. Now we can give our final blow to America. It’s the opportunity to project Islam as an alternative world order. Now is the time to put the final nail in the coffin of Western liberalism.”
UK: "No integration, no multiculturalism, no diversity, no tolerance. You have democracy, we have Sharia."
England, UK: “We (Muslims) have to be Allah’s solution to England.”
Northampton mosque (UK):12 “Victory to Islam. Destroy the enemies. Bless the Mujahideen (holy warriors). Heal from the usurping Jews and every enemy of Allah. Count them and kill them, leave none of them alive. Make them war booty for the Muslims.”
Dublin (Ireland): “Many of the major problems in the Western world today are because women do not know the status of men in Islam. Since we live in the Western world, women prefer to think that men are equal to them. In Islam, the man is the master of the woman, and the woman obeys the man. The man is the master of the woman. A woman should not raise her voice against her husband. A woman should not leave her house without her husband’s permission.
Germany:13 “Is it permissible to stone someone for adultery? Yes. Obviously, here in Germany you cannot stone someone for adultery. But if there were an Islamic state, then it would be the duty of its ruler to enforce these rulings of the Quran."

Why is this Islamist rhetoric so widespread? Among other things, because it’s politically pushed in the West by Islamist organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood (MB).

The Muslim Brotherhood

The UAE, France, the UK, Spain, and Austria have recently published reports on how it’s organized and how it pushes Islamism by penetrating all levels of society from the bottom.15

Muslim Brotherhood logo with the Arabic word for ‘prepare’ in calligraphy below the two crossed swords

It avoids using its own name in the West, keeps membership secret, establishes front organizations and umbrella groups.16 It builds parallel societal structures like schools, nurseries, or funeral homes. In France, it operates over 60 schools. It trains imams across Europe and organizes activities for children. It promotes political candidates in national and local elections and actively lobbies police.

It actively isolates Muslims in the West to preserve its ultra-orthodox views. It created an organization17 to issue religious rulings specifically tailored to Muslims living in Europe, which often promote segregation, discourage assimilation, and push a literature of victimhood of Western societies.

It funds itself with tens of millions of dollars.18 Its biggest donor is Qatar.19 It also has a network of NGOs that host large-scale fundraising events, concerts, and dinners that attract Muslims far beyond their base, thereby expanding their influence, and gather the Zakat (charity). In the UK, charities have found to be important infrastructure for the MB and the terrorist group Hamas. The MB also engages with politicians to secure public funding.20

The proliferation of Islamist speech in Western countries, enabled by these Islamist organizations, is one21 of the reasons why, in some of these countries, next-generation Muslims are actually more radical and more Islamist than their parents.

This, then, finds its way into Western politics.

Islamism in Western Politicians

Elected officials in Belgium intended to implement aspects of Sharia Law in the country. This is very direct Islamism in action.

Chaudhry Sarwar, former Pakistani politician,22 previously UK MP for the Labour party, and father of the current Scottish leader of the Labour Party, stated: “Time will come that there will be a law all over the world that there can be no disrespect to our beloved holy prophet. Any disrespect of the Quran will be inacceptable, intolerable.”

Here is Zul Mohammed, a Muslim who ran for Mayor of Carrollton, Texas:

No vet has made any sacrifice. I want to make that clear. I do not support the US military. No, I do not support the United States. I look down on both entities.

These are politicians!

Unsurprisingly, the head of the German domestic intelligence agency has warned that Islamists were deliberately trying to influence German parties to change the state and society.

Islamism in Everyday Life in the West

Obviously, this trickles into education. In Canada, 11 teachers of North African descent were suspended for teaching “Islamist religious concepts” to elementary school children.

It bleeds into political rallies, like this one in NY:

There is nothing more glorious than a martyr. The Western world is a lie. The members of Congress will be prosecuted, all over the world. Let’s remind the mainstream media that Goebbels was going to stand trial before he shot himself, and we intend to prosecute every media outlet.

And it bleeds into interviews of the public, like this one:

We’re not here to take part, we’re here to take over.

Or this one:

We’re here to take over your country. You can’t stop us. We’re here to uphold Sharia Law.

Or this one:

“As a Muslim, I don’t really identify with British values. I’m Muslim first, second, and last. I’d like to see Britain governed by the Sharia. I believe it’s far superior to democracy.”

Or this one:

INTERVIEWER: Would you undermine the German constitution if you could?MUSLIM INTERVIEWEE: Absolutely. We are commanded to take over Germany.
INTERVIEWER: How do you intend to establish Sharia here and create an Islamic state?
MUSLIM INTERVIEWEE: When Muslims are the majority, and if needed, by force.

Or this example, which I shared in my previous article:

INTERVIEWER: How satisfied are you in Germany?
MUSLIM INTERVIEWEE: Zero. Mainz [German city] belongs to us foreigners.
INTERVIEWER: Would you fight for Germany?
MUSLIM INTERVIEWEE: I wouldn’t do anything for Germany. Just marry a German woman, get a German passport, and I’m all set. [...] I’m from Kurdistan. I have no country, They can’t deport me. [...] Germans out, foreigners in.

You can see more examples here and here. You get the picture.

All of this is speech, and if it remained as such, it would be OK. But it doesn’t.

Islamist Behavior

The worst, of course, is terrorism, which we discussed here.

Terrorism

Over 80% of terrorist attacks in the world are carried out by Islamists—groups like Islamic State, Al-Shabaab, Hamas, JNIM23, etc.

This is also true in the West.

We’re unfortunately used to men killing people while yelling Allahu Akbar, with several dozens of such attacks in the last 10 years. The last Allahu Akbar attack was one just a few weeks ago in Switzerland.

Crime

Terrorism is unique in its impact, but also in the ease of proving its causality. It’s very clear when a terrorist attack has been caused by Islamism. It’s less clear in everyday crime. As a reminder, there is an overrepresentation of Muslims in crime statistics in the West, but is that due to Islamism? Or the age of people? The specific culture in some origin country? Islamism is certainly not at fault in all cases. But in some.

Last week, an MP in the UK Parliament read testimonies of some of the British girls who were raped by the Grooming Gangs I mentioned earlier—some of them by several hundred men. The testimonies are graphic, so I won’t repeat them all, but you can watch them here.

Here are the relevant ones for this article:

“Comments were constantly made suggesting that White girls, that Christian girls, were viewed as having fewer morals, or lower values, whereas Muslim girls were described as having dignity and higher moral standards. These comparisons were used to justify the way I was treated, and to further humiliate and control me.”
“Race did play a part and motivated the selection and demographic of the victims. Throughout my exploitation, the other girls I encountered or who were abused alongside me were almost exclusively White.”
“Things would escalate around Eid [the festivity at the end of Ramadan] and holidays, parties got bigger, got worse, got more violent.”
“The main clash that I had with the religion side of it was I grew up as a Christian. I would wear my cross because it was something really special to me. It was just used as a way to break me down. They said: ‘Where is your god now? Has your god forsaken you?”
“It was all of the White girls in every home that I went to. I remember a man that went to the back of a van, and I saw 15, 20 girls locked in dog cages.”

Of course, these crimes were most likely not perpetrated to further Islam, but they’re frequently the result of a mindset in which the Muslim in-group is protected and the out-group attacked, given the most common national heritage of the perpetrators, the fact that sometimes hundreds of them were involved,24 the nature of the victims, and the quotes above. The most likely read is that this is downstream of the Islamism we mentioned before: Many of the perpetrators shared an Islamist belief where the law of the land was less important than the protection and advancement of the community.

This, however, would have been impossible without abetting from the rest of society—again, because of Islamism

The Deliberate Fudging of Islamophobia and Islamismophobia

In the Rotherham case (~1,400 girls raped):25

Several [council] staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so.
There was a widespread perception that messages conveyed by some senior people in the Council and also the Police, were to 'downplay' the ethnic dimensions of CSE.

This fear of being called racist is relevant, as this is in fact a consistent accusation from Muslim organizations. Many times, these are valid. Islamophobia is real, and has serious consequences. Muslims in the West have been shot, run over, and stabbed because of it. They have faced discrimination in employment, housing, and schooling, and suffer from insults and harassment. It is right to decry it.

Other times, however, the criticism is not of islamophobia, but of islamismophobia. It’s not against Islam, but against Islamism. Yet many Muslim leaders purposefully fudge these two, to protect Islamism under the umbrella of Islam.

"Islamophobia" is the password Islamists whisper to walk past the gates.

For example, something stunning happened in Australia last year. A few Muslim nurses boasted that they had killed Israeli patients, and that they would do it again.

Source

In that situation you’d expect the moderate Muslims to decry them. Over 50 Muslim organizations or leaders came out to defend them!26

Let’s lay out the problem clearly:

There are some normal Islamic behaviors and some Islamist ones.
The Islamic behaviors get improperly criticized (islamophobia). The Islamist behavior gets properly criticized (islamismophobia).
Islamist leaders purposefully fudge the two and call both “islamophobia”.
Since Western leaders don’t know how to differentiate between islamophobia and islamismophobia, and they want to treat people equally (human rights), they start policing each other to eradicate islamophobia. Inadvertently, they also shut down islamismophobia.
This opens a path for Islamism to grow.

The key points above are 3 and 4. Let’s take examples of them. First, how Islamist leaders fudge islamophobia and islamismophobia, like in the case of the Australian nurses.

An Islamist group created the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), which the UK government has said consistently opposed programmes by successive Governments to prevent terrorism. For example, it opposed naming 21 Islamist organizations (including Al Qaeda) as terrorist.27 The MCB spent 80% of its charity budget on the Center for Media Monitoring, or CfMM, whose entire goal is to monitor British media to accuse them of islamophobia. This could be a great goal if, indeed, it called out only islamophobia. It doesn’t.

The CfMM called a report of “a knife-wielding man yelling Islamic slogans” islamophobic.28 It called the reporting on the grooming gangs “shoddy science underpinning a narrative favoured by the media.” A coordinated takeover to islamize state schools, proven by the government? According to the CfMM, it was a hoax. It recommends eliminating the terms Islamism and Islamic extremism: If they don’t exist, you can’t accuse people of them, and thus any criticism must be islamophobia!

This would not be a problem if the CfMM was an obscure organization without repercussions. Alas, it has engaged with over 1,000 journalists, editors, regulators, and policy makers, including the BBC29, the Sun, the Express, the Daily Mail… It organized feedback sessions for the BBC and fed into its terminology book. It was instrumental in developing the press regulator’s guidance on the reporting of Islam.30 It has trained journalists from The Standard, The Independent, and Scottish TV. It pressured the BBC to withdraw an inconvenient interview clip (the BBC caved). It recommends flooding newspapers with complaints when they report negatively on Islamism:

If they don’t verify what they are reporting, they are going to get flooded with people emailing them and complaining. And that will discourage them from doing it in the first place, because it costs them, in effect, money, because they have to pay their staff for every hour that they are looking at corrections and looking at complaints.

Let’s move on to another organization. Still in the UK, the National Association of Muslim Police (NAMP) represents the most Muslim police officers. This should immediately heighten your senses, because it’s precisely the type of organization where Islam the religion can translate into Islamism the political movement. As such, you should expect them to be extremely thoughtful in separating Islam and Islamism. Yet last year, it published this document, Confronting anti-Muslim hatred and Promoting Human Rights. The entire document tries to claim that Islam is always good, that what bad people do in the name of Islam is therefore not Islam, and so we should completely remove the concept of Islamism. Of course, if Islamism doesn’t exist, any criticism of Islamism must be… Islamophobia. Here are some excerpts.

Terms such as 'Islamist' blur the distinction between extremism and the peaceful practices observed by the majority of Muslims, perpetuating anti-Muslim hatred and casting unwarranted suspicion over the entire religion.

See what they did? They say calling people “islamist” is racist! Absolutely not! It’s the exact opposite! Terms like Islamist allow us to separate between extremism and peaceful practices!

The following passage is also informative:

Islamic teachings advocate for peace, compassion, and fairness, principles diametrically opposed to the motivations behind religiously justified violence. Media, policymakers, and society at large must exert concerted efforts to distinguish between the distorted political or violent interpretations of religion and the genuine practices of its followers.

Later, it tries to erase the word “Islamist”, and replace it with words like “right-wing terrorist”31. In other words, it’s trying to hide the fact that the extremist religious beliefs behind political Islamism cause Islamic terrorism! And then blame these instances on the right! This represents the police speaking!32

You can see the pattern here. First, Islamism is too broad, it doesn’t represent Islam, let’s not use the term. Then, call criticism to Islamism islamophobia. Accuse the authors, and train the media in avoiding any criticism altogether.

What is the result of all this effort? What is the attitude of Western leaders about criticising Islamism? Reporters have said that accurate stories were not published for fear of being branded islamophobic, that the CfMM and other activists would be able to use any official definition of “Islamophobia” to suppress their reporting, that a newspaper discouraged a journalist from writing about Muslims because the CfMM complained he wrote too many stories about Muslims…

This fear of being called racist, xenophobic, or islamophobic33 has enabled what The Telegraph reported on the Telford Grooming Gangs:

Aware that taxi drivers were offering children rides for sex, in 2006 [the council] suspended licensing enforcement for drivers, allowing high risk drivers to continue practicing, “borne entirely out of fear of accusations of racism; it was craven”.
Senior council staff were terrified that the abuse of children “had the potential to start a ‘race riot’”. The result was stasis, despite officials acknowledging in at least one case that abuse by Asian men had gone on for “years and years”.
A senior police officer allegedly said the abuse had been “going on” for 30 years, adding “with it being Asians, we can’t afford for this to be coming out. Politicians were terrified [of the impact on] community cohesion.
As a result of this combination of factors, the council went to great lengths to “cover up information and silence whistle-blowers”. In the words of witnesses, “if you want to keep your job, you keep your head down and your mouth shut”.

The police, the council, and the entire community failed to stop behaviors downstream of Islamism because of their fears to be called islamophobic. Here are other examples of anti-Islamist actions stifled by the fear of being labeled islamophobic:

In the Islamist Manchester Arena bombing that killed 22 people and injured over 1,000, a security guard didn’t stop the perpetrator before the attack for fear of being branded racist.
After a French teacher was beheaded by a Jihadist over the false accusation of a student34, the response from the state and the media was not supportive enough, and now 40% of French teachers say they self-censor on sensitive topics.
According to the UK government, “fears of being accused of being racist, anti-Muslim, or culturally insensitive may inhibit Islamist-related referrals”.
Channel 4 had a documentary about grooming gangs ready to air in 2004, but didn’t “over fears that it could lead to race riots”. Grooming gangs would continue for over a decade.
The South Wales police has been told to log every event where a person is accused of islamophobia, therefore leaving a public record against critics of Islam and Islamism. No other religion has anything like that.
On New Year’s Eve of 2015, over 1,000 women were sexually assaulted in Germany (especially in Cologne) by large groups of North African and Arab appearance. The police originally labeled the night as “Cheerful mood—celebrations largely peaceful”. A later report included the word rape, which a minister’s office allegedly35 asked to remove. Newspapers had to apologize for covering them up
An Islamist who killed 14 people in California in 2015 was not reported by neighbors for suspicious activity because she didn’t want to profile him.
Denmark has made it illegal to burn the Quran, to placate Islamists.36

So that’s the mechanism by which Islamists stifle freedom of speech, which then prevents the West from calling out its problems. And that bleeds into day to day coercion.

Daily Crime and Coercion

This Sikh had to close his restaurant because of Pakistani harassment when he said he didn’t serve halal food:

This debate ended when a Muslim student stood up to threaten a Jewish student and then repeatedly yells “Allahu Akbar”.

This is a Church being desecrated in the UK:

I’m reminded of the behavior of pro-Palestinians in New York a few years back:

Apparently37, this video depicts girls in Antwerp, Belgium, being verbally attacked and groped on a bus for not wearing veils, and for showing too much skin.

These women were harassed on the street because of what they wore:

The poster, an Iranian journalist, added:

“When I say that Germany has its own “morality police,” I am referring to the so-called “Sharia Police,” self-appointed enforcers of Sharia law. I have received direct messages from many Iranian women sharing their concerns about morality enforcers in European countries, who are often silenced and labeled Islamophobic, anti-immigrant, or right-wing.
Whether we like it or not, these Sharia or morality police known as “Amr bi al-maruf”, a collective duty of Muslims to encourage righteous behavior and discourage immorality, exist in many European countries. Often linked to mosques, they impose their version of religious law, targeting women and girls for not wearing the “proper hijab.” This mirrors the experiences of women in Iran. In Iran, when Sharia Police violently harass women for not covering their hair, officials often mislead the world by claiming these are just religious groups, not the official police.
Sources in the Muslim community in Germany report that these so-called Sharia Police have appeared in cities like Wuppertal and Berlin, harassing women under the guise of promoting hijab and Sharia laws. This issue extends beyond isolated incidents, with moral enforcers emerging in schools and neighborhoods with Muslim majorities.”

Here’s another woman harassed by this local Islamist policing.

This Spanish girl had to leave the beach because of sexual harassment by North Africans. She didn’t want to be racist and sat nearby. She didn’t report it for the same reason.

Going to a beach and pointing fireworks at beachgoers while screaming “Allahu Akbar” should not be allowed.

Source

This man is saying that blasphemy deserves death.

Source

This guy harasses girls and old men, but is not in prison because people don’t report him, and they don’t report him because police, the media, or society might call them islamophobic.

Another example here.

Just to be clear, all these behaviors are not just anti-social. They’re illegal: coercion and harassment. Their erosion of public life might not be ideological (these people are not trying to impose Islam) but they’re fueled by Islamism in two distinct ways.

The first is impunity. These acts exist because reporting them, policing them, or naming the pattern carries a social cost, the cost of being called racist or islamophobic, which is precisely the cost the organizations described earlier work to manufacture.

The second is the imposition of an Islamist world view: a woman's visibility is a legitimate object of male policing, blasphemy is an injury that warrants force, burning a church’s door is acceptable because Christians don’t fight back, screaming Allahu Akbar scares people… all of these are downstream of a political project that taught the Islamist script. An ideology works most powerfully once it stops looking like an ideology and becomes simply how things are.

This is how the universal human rights for which Western societies have shed so much blood die a slow death.

So what can we do about it?

My Message to Conservatives, Liberals, Politicians, and Moderate Muslims

As we said, Islamophobia is real and many Muslims suffer from it as a result. It’s bad because it attacks a religion and the people who follow it.

But it’s also bad for the islamophobes themselves. The more islamophobia there is, the more Muslims feel bundled as a whole, rejected by their religion. They get radicalized, or don’t stop the extremists anymore (they’re in the same bundle, at the end of the day). That galvanizes Islamism, which then promotes actions that fuel further islamophobia, in a terrible vicious cycle.

But also, the examples in the previous chapter are not an expression of Islam. They’re an expression of Islamism, and Islamism is a threat to human rights that can’t be tolerated.

To break the cycle, we must differentiate between islamophobia and islamismophobia.

Moderate Muslims are islamismophobic too. They are as appalled as you or me by these behaviors. They want them to end. And they can only end when we call them out for what they are: Not isolated incidents, but the expression of Islamism, the political side of Islam that tries to coerce others into the religion or face consequences, which means it’s against universal human rights.

So here’s my message to each group.38

To Moderate Muslims

You’re in a difficult position. You have your personal, legitimate faith, which on one side, Western society pressures you to abandon, and on the other, Islamists push you to radicalize. When these two sides clash, you’re caught in the middle.

You can help solve this problem by drawing a clear line between yourselves and Islamists. That way, you can blame the problems on the true cause (Islamists), and not on Islam.

Always keep that narrative in mind. If there’s a terrorist attack? You can say: “These are Islamists. Islamism is a political ideology that tries to impose Islam on others. It’s a scourge and we need to get rid of it. This does not represent me, nor a majority of Muslims. I defend human rights.”

If you do that, it will be clear that you are on the side of human rights, and you are enemies of Islamism. It will be much easier to fight it.

The harder fight might be on a day to day basis. When somebody decries islamophobia that is islamismophobia, we should all correct them, but your voice carries more weight than anybody else’s. When somebody coerces, harasses, or erodes civil life, we should all call them out, but if the perpetrator seems to be Muslim, it’s even more important and valuable that you do.

Some conservative Muslims might prefer to fudge the line between Islam and Islamism, but it’s important that you help them clarify it. There really are only two sides to this: Either you’re in favor of human rights, or in favor of Islamism. There isn’t an in between. Islam is compatible with human rights; Islamism is not. As conservative Muslims’ strongest connection to the rest of Western society, it’s important that you help them see that.

To Western Conservatives

Stop conflating Islam and Islamism.

It’s OK to want to eat halal.
It’s OK to want to wear a hijab.
It’s OK to abide by Sharia Law for yourself, as long as you also respect civil law.
It’s OK to build a mosque.
It’s OK to sound a call to prayer in public.
It’s OK to pray in public, when your creed tells you to.
It’s OK to disapprove apostasy and blasphemy.
It’s OK to be a Muslim immigrant.
It’s OK to open a new mayoral term with a Muslim prayer.
It’s OK for Western schoolchildren to go to the mosque to learn about Islam.39
It’s OK to celebrate a specific Islamic event in public.40

All of these are Islamic, and they’re OK. You should not denounce them. That’s Islamophobic. You should be able to differentiate them from Islamism, for four reasons.

First, if you don’t, you’re against the universal human value of freedom of religion, a core bastion of the Western values that you claim to respect.

Second, when you attack a legitimate religion, you attack all of its members. More specifically, you alienate the 20–50% of moderate Muslims who are also fighting the Islamists, because you’re putting both in the same bucket, so they’ll want to defend themselves together. The more Islamophobic you are, the more you’ll radicalize Muslims.

Third, you also alienate the left, who will have a legitimate beef with you.

Fourth, by eliminating your islamophobic thoughts and remarks, you can leave only islamismophobic ones. Every time somebody accuses you of islamophobia, you will know they’re wrong, and you’ll have a good opportunity to educate them on the very important difference between Islam and Islamism.

To Western Liberals

It’s important to call out islamophobia, and any other type of discrimination.

It’s equally important to make the distinction with islamismophobia, because Islamism is quite common. Otherwise, you’ll be unwittingly abetting Islamism, losing your moral clarity, and undermining the human rights that are so important to you.

Islamism is against some of the most important rights you’ve fought for: those of women and LGBTQ+ people. But they’re also against other very important rights: freedom of religion, freedom of speech, animal rights (dogs). Virtually everything Liberals fight for is against what Islamism wants.

Finally, the Left allied with the Islamists in Iran in the 1979 revolution. As the Islamists took power, they turned against the Left. The alliance between Left and Islamism is a one-way relationship.

So first, realize that one of your biggest enemies is Islamism.

When you see a behavior that triggers your concerns about islamophobia, stop for a moment and think about whether you’re actually seeing islamismophobia. If it’s against Islam, you should decry it as islamophobia. If it’s against Islamism, you should join the criticism.

This also means you have to stop the knee-jerk reaction of labeling everything as far-right islamophobia or racism. For example, the head of a French extreme-left party called a law against the Muslim Brotherhood islamophobic. It’s not, it’s islamismophobic. He's enabling Islamism. Banning another Islamist organization has also been called islamophobic.41

To Western Politicians

Politicians who want to do the right thing are also in a tough spot:

Right-wing politicians conflate Islam with Islamism to stoke hatred and call for the expulsion of all Muslims and immigrants
Left-wing politicians call any reaction to Islamism “islamophobia” and use racism to incite conflict with the right
Emotions garner votes, so moderate parties bleed voters on both sides
It’s not always easy to tell what should be acceptable and what shouldn’t.

But I believe the vast majority of people are reasonable. They want Islam and don’t want Islamism. So here’s what politicians should consider:

Is an action consistent with a personal belief? Then it’s OK.
Is it consistent with Islamism (or any other politically extremist view that tries to undermine universal human rights)? Then it should be fought.

This has ramifications for many policies to fight both islamophobia and Islamism, such as policing, free speech, and immigration. We’ll cover these and more in the next article.

Takeaways

Islam is personal and persuasive. Islamism is communal and coercive.
If you’re in favor of human rights, you’re in favor of freedom of religion, and you’re in favor of Islam.
If you’re in favor of Islamism, you are supporting a political movement that is trying to eliminate other religious beliefs and individual freedoms. You’re against human rights.

So it’s crucial that we differentiate between Islam and Islamism. If you want to do that, you can ask questions like:

Should civil law always be above Sharia law?
Are women equal to men?
Is homosexuality acceptable?
Should people be allowed to have dogs?
Should it be legal to eat pork?
Should it be legal to leave the Muslim faith?
Should it be legal to burn the Quran and draw the Prophet Muhammad?

A moderate Muslim would answer yes to each.
A conservative Muslim might say: “I disagree with these personally, but I respect the rights of others to do and think these things.”
An Islamist would say no to some or all of them.

This will highlight the bright line between Islam and Islamism, drawn by universal human rights.

Up next: What can politicians do to reduce this problem, and two-tier policing

Judaism and Islam emerged from pastoral societies, where the state was weak. As such, they both proposed rules that cover spirituality and state law. They give plenty of details on what you should and shouldn’t do, and what the consequences are for each action. Meanwhile, Christianity emerged under a very strong state, the Roman Empire, and so it purposefully focused on morality and spirituality, avoiding the state’s role in shaping law. This is why Jesus said “My kingdom is not of this world.” These roles quickly blurred (Christianity became part of the Roman Empire, Islam created states), but the original influence explains this divergence we see nowadays. The result for Islam is much more prescriptive on people’s day to day life, from what to eat, how to dress, who to marry, how to divorce, how to deal with foreigners, etc. This law is not always clear in the Quran, so the Hadiths tried to interpret it a few centuries later, based on what was written in the Quran, and what was known at the time from the living memory passed down over generations, including reports about Muhammad’s sayings, actions, approvals, and conduct. Since the Quran is frequently ambiguous, the Hadiths were much later than the Quran, and the process to gather them was highly political, there are different Hadiths, who differ in substantial aspects. We can see the interpretability of these texts through the Shia / Sunni gap, which emerged immediately after the death of Muhammad, and was cemented over the following centuries, including through Hadiths: Each school follows different ones. From then, there has been a scholarly evolution of interpretations of Quran and Hadiths, which have led to very different interpretations of what Sharia law should be. This means that there’s not one single Islam, that legitimate Islamic beliefs can differ widely from each other.

The Islamism table above is doing two things at the same time: It’s bundling within Islamism coercive behaviors and, sometimes, speech. This is purposeful, because Islamism is not a behavior, it’s a system of thought. That thought is against universal rights and can sometimes translate into behavior. But shouldn’t free speech be protected, including Islamic speech? Otherwise, isn’t that specifically targeting a religion? This is what this article is about.

“Constistent” doesn’t mean that all Islam says this. It just means that Islam can be consistent with the views on the left of this series of questions, while Islamism will tend to be consistent with views on the right. Traditional interpretations of Islam (like those of other religions) are in some areas tolerant, in others less so, depending on who you ask.

Notice this is slightly different from what I said before on the Islam column. There, I mixed moderate and conservative Muslim views, but excluded Islamist views. Here, I’m highlighting moderate positions.

Note crucially that Turkey and Qatar have not.

From here, transcribed with Turboscribe, translated with ChatGPT

The national data in the UK is not good enough to tell. There are four Grooming Gangs that are known, though. In those, the perpetrators were usually Pakistani. In some cases, also North African or East African. The victims nearly all White. The reports consistently showed that authorities suppressed action in fear of being called racist. When you look at lists of convicts, the individual names of perpetrators include Asad, Ajmal, Mohammed, Ahmed, Taukeer, Mohsin, Javid, Haroon, Zahir, Wajid…

Case in point, Pakistan just condemned two men to death for raping a French tourist woman in front of her children.

And dozens and dozens of moderate Muslim organizations. From ChatGPT: UK: British Muslims for Secular Democracy; Muslim Women’s Network UK; Inclusive Mosque Initiative; Nisa-Nashim; The City Circle; Muslim Youth Helpline; Ahmadiyya Muslim Community UK.Germany: Liberal-Islamischer Bund; Ibn Rushd-Goethe Mosque; JUMA — jung, muslimisch, aktiv; HEROES Germany; CLAIM; Muslim Jewish Leadership Council.France: Musulmans Progressistes de France; Lallab; Homosexuel-le-s Musulman-e-s de France; Coexister; Les Bâtisseuses de Paix.Netherlands: Stichting Maruf; Femmes for Freedom; Al Nisa; Yoesuf Foundation; European Queer Muslim Network.Belgium: Merhaba; Kif Kif; BePax; European Muslim Network; European Queer Muslim Network.Denmark: Democratic Muslims; Exitcirklen; Sabaah; KVINFO-affiliated Muslim women’s initiatives.United States: Muslims for Progressive Values; Muslim Reform Movement; American Islamic Forum for Democracy; Muslim Public Affairs Council; Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity.Canada: Canadian Council of Muslim Women; Muslims for Progressive Values Canada; Noor Cultural Centre; Canadian Muslim Vote; Ahmadiyya Muslim Jama’at Canada.Australia: Muslim Women Australia; Australian Muslim Women’s Centre for Human Rights; Islamic Council of Victoria women’s initiatives; Together for Humanity.

This is a simplification. Depending on the country and questions, this estimate is going to be 10-20% for radical Islamist positions, with a large group of 20–50% additional people who hold conservative views that might bleed into Islamist attitudes.

With the caveat that, sometimes, the word “justice” is used as a stand-in for Sharia, especially when

All Arabic is transcribed by TurboScribe, translated by ChatGPT (shared when ChatGPT allows), edited by me for length to focus on what I consider the Islamist positions.

Transcribed by Turboscribe. Translated by ChatGPT.

This is not an imam but the leader of the MB in the UK

All the data below is extracted from these reports, through NotebookLM. It might contain some mistakes, but I spot-checked and didn’t see any.

In the UK they established the Islamic Society of Britain (ISB), dominated the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB), and played a critical role in establishing the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), which successfully sought dialogue with the UK government. In France, the movement built a solid network over 40 years around a central umbrella structure, Musulmans de France (formerly the UOIF), which currently manages 139 affiliated places of worship (about 7% of all mosques in France). Across Europe, they established the Federation of Islamic Organisations in Europe (FIOE)—now the Council of European Muslims—to act as a massive umbrella for MB-linked groups across the continent. They also created the Forum of European Muslim Youth and Student Organisations (FEMYSO) to mobilize youth and conduct political lobbying.

European Council for Fatwa and Research (ECFR)

There’s no data on this, and the MB is a broad umbrella anyway, but if you add up all the money uncovered by different reports from different countries, it can easily reach that number, and probably higher.

The Qatar Charity NGO has poured millions into Europe to finance MB mosques and projects through its "Ghaith" program. In Spain alone, Qatar Charity funneled approximately 17 million euros by 2015 to construct and expand MB-linked hubs, including the Islamic Cultural Center of Catalonia in Barcelona.

The Islamic Cultural Center of Valencia (CCIV) became so active in local integration and youth issues that they successfully secured hundreds of thousands of euros in public subsidies from regional governments and city councils. They even established partnerships for sociocultural projects with private entities like the Obra Social Caja Madrid.

It is not the only one. For example, countries with a lot of immigration that settle in enclaves will be living among peer immigrants, and the pressure to integrate will actually be weaker than that of the previous generation, which was a smaller minority so suffered more pressure to integrate.

Governor of Punjab until 2022.

Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin

How can you find hundreds of people willing to participate in such a crime if they are not all willing to protect each other?

This mixes religion, immigration status, race, and government action, so it’s out of full scope for this. I will cover it more in another article.

Here’s the original letter, here’s a transcript. Here’s exactly what it says about the behavior of the nurses: “Healthcare should be provided justly to all. [...] We recognise the importance of professionalism and ethical responsibility within healthcare and that the nurses' actions breached the codes of conduct for health professionals. The statements made by the nurses regarding "killing Israelis" were clearly emotional and hyperbolic, as supported by subsequent investigations. Healthcare professionals are bound by their duty to treat and care for all individuals.” If you pay attention, there is zero condemnation. The rest of the message is about how this is manufactured outrage to cover uphide the deaths in Gaza.

Just to give you more examples. Here you can see it claimed 45% of all hate crime offenses targeted Muslims. But in fact it’s only 45% of religious hate crimes. It was 2.2% of all hate crimes. It probably purposefully mixed denominators (religious hate crimes instead of all hate crimes) to make the stat look shocking. It has continued making similar claims

The section is introduced as: “Certain articles are embellished with extraneous details to the story and don’t provide any further context to the incident being reported on. The purpose of their inclusion seems to be targeted at portraying Muslims and/or Islam in a negative manner.” Among others. Many more examples in the link. Table 13, page 104.

The CfMM met with the director general (who was “very impressed”) and the managing editor of the BBC (who called the CfMM a “powerful machine”).

The only religion for which this was done

It also proposes Irhabist, which is Arabic for terrorist, and Anti-Western Terrorist

There are a few more examples in this document:

These certainly overlap a lot, as over 30 countries are over 90% Muslim. As a result, grooming gangs that were completely Pakistani were also completely Muslim. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell the difference, and they blur. This can lead to either racism, xenophobia, islamophobia, or a combination of them. Here, I am focusing on the impact of Islamism, trying to disentangle it as much as possible. But it’s impossible to do perfectly given the correlations.

She claimed he had expelled Muslim students from a freedom of speech class in which he was going to show a picture of Muhammad. This didn’t happen, and the girl wasn’t even in class that day.

Officers said the state interior ministry's control centre wanted the word 'rape' deleted from an internal report. The minister denied he had mandated that.

Another: In the UK, there are more right-wing terrorism reports than Islamic terrorism ones, despite the Islamic terrorists being much more active and dangerous.

I can’t get the transcription to work, so I’ll rely on the text in the tweet, which might in fact be a mislabel. There were no community notes though.

These aren’t perfectly described groups, but I think they’re good enough.

Same as Muslim children should go to churches to learn about Christianity, but since they already live in a majority-Christian society, they get more exposure than the other way around.

Here’s an interesting example of an NYPD officer who wears a hijab. I think it’s OK to wear a hijab at work. But also, police is a public job, so it should be treated as religiously neutral. Overall, I think it should be possible to wear one as a police officer, but I also respect that other countries might have a different position on this. If they don’t want to allow a hijab though, then no other religious symbols should be allowed, like in France of Quebec. The principle must be the same for all.

Another example: US Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib used the term “From the River to the Sea”. This is a slogan traditionally used to say that the entire region of Palestine (present-day Israel, Gaza, and West Bank) will become Muslim. This is considered Islamist, as it promotes the political expansion of Muslim rule over what is today not Muslim rule. She was censored for it. The censoring was called Islamophobic. I think this example is a bit muddier, because it’s arguable whether the entire logic here is valid. Maybe actually Tlaib didn’t mean that, and maybe that’s a contentious edge case of Islamism. But for the same reason that it’s unclear whether her statement is Islamist, it’s unclear whether her censuring is islamophobic.The movement Queers for Palestine legitimately worries about the plight of Gazans, but it should note that ~95% of Gazans don’t accept gay relationships, that the ruling Hamas is supported by a large share of Gazans, and that Hamas is a terrorist Islamist organization.

Why kinship societies kill their old - David Oks

Fri, 19 Jun 2026 08:27:16 +0000

A resident at a “witch camp” in northern Ghana

Here is the story of a murder.

In northern Ghana, on the western bank of the Volta river, there is a village called Kafaba. There’s not much I can say about Kafaba that would make it seem special or remarkable in any real way: indeed there’s no real sense in which Kafaba is very different from the other villages nearby. Like the other villages around it, Kafaba is a farming community, populated by members of an ethnic group called the Gonja; and like the other villages around it, Kafaba is very poor.

Our story starts in the summer of 2020. It was a difficult time for the people of Kafaba.

The rains that year had been spasmodic and disappointing, heralding a bad harvest to come. So things were already uneasy. Then, in early July, Kafaba’s “youth shed”—a gathering place for the young people of the town, affiliated with the local branch of Ghana’s ruling party—burned down. One misfortune might be bad luck: but for the people of the town, superstitious and fearful, two misfortunes in a row suggested some malevolent force at work. People began to talk of witchcraft: Kafaba, they said, had been cursed.

And so the people of Kafaba invited a soothsayer into town. The soothsayer called herself Sherina Mohammed, though she operated under other names; and she spent her days traveling around the Gonja region, performing miracles and hunting witches. She arrived in the third week of July, spoke with the locals, and soon announced that she’d identified the witch who was cursing Kafaba. It was, she said, none other than the oldest woman in the village, a 90-year-old widow named Akua Denteh.

Akua Denteh had resided in Kafaba for decades. She had raised six children there, and since the death of her husband she’d lived with one of her granddaughters, farming yams and maize. After her death, she was described as a pious and simple woman. But clearly there was some reason to dislike her: among those accusing her, it seems, was the same granddaughter who looked after her. And so people began to talk of Akua Denteh the witch.

Witches, of course, must be confronted.

And so one night, the soothsayer and a few accomplices—the granddaughter among them—confronted Akua Denteh at her home. They dragged her to another location, where they spent a long night attempting to torture a confession out of her. They whipped her, beat her, and forced her to drink concoctions that the soothsayer had prepared. The soothsayer demanded that Akua Denteh give her the names of the people she had killed through magic; but the old woman continued to deny that she was a witch. At some point, the soothsayer held a machete to Akua Denteh’s chest, and the old woman’s resistance broke: she admitted that she was a witch. The soothsayer had what she needed. She told the granddaughter that she was lucky to be alive: Akua Denteh would have killed her next.

And witches, of course, must also be dealt with.

And so on the morning of July 23, the soothsayer and the granddaughter dragged Akua Denteh to the town square, announced that she had been “limiting the progress of the town” through her witchcraft, and began to beat her with whips and rocks. Soon the whole village gathered to watch. Several people took out smartphones to record the scene: a few women even joined in. Akua Denteh begged the attackers for mercy: but it was no use. Eventually she fell unconscious, and when she stopped responding her attackers simply left her body in the street. The next day, never having regained consciousness, Akua Denteh died.

Such things, horrible as they are, are not unheard of in northern Ghana. It wasn’t even the soothsayer’s first murder: she had been involved in two previous killings of alleged witches. The next month, in the same Gonja region of northern Ghana, another alleged witch was attacked by a mob and nearly killed. Murders, though, are only the most extreme expression of the witch phenomenon: typically those accused of witchcraft flee before they can be killed, relocating to one of the “witch camps” that dot the region.

But the Akua Denteh killing was different. Videos of it circulated widely on WhatsApp and Facebook: and the public was furious. Soon Ghana’s president condemned the murder; lawmakers introduced a bill to make witchcraft accusations illegal; and the police descended on Kafaba and arrested the chief of the village and various others who had been involved in Akua Denteh’s death. Almost all of them were eventually released for one reason or another; ultimately only the soothsayer and Akua Denteh’s granddaughter were convicted of a crime.

Akua Denteh’s family, for their part, defended her memory. She had simply been a loving mother and grandmother: she had certainly not been a witch. Indeed, as her eldest son told a radio interviewer: “If my mother was a witch, I would have killed her myself.”

There are quite a few people in the world who agree with that sentiment.

It’s strange to think, in our age of self-driving cars and mythically capable machine intelligences, that so many people around the world not only believe in witchcraft but are also willing to murder their relatives on its account. Witch accusations and witch killings remain alive and well not just in northern Ghana but in much of the world. We see them in Papua New Guinea; in eastern Indian states like Bihar and Jharkhand; and across much of sub-Saharan Africa, from Burundi to Liberia to the Central African Republic.

And there’s something peculiar about many of these cases.

Consider, for example, a few recent stories from Zambia. In January 2026, an 80-year-old man was poisoned to death by his children and grandchildren, “on suspicion of practicing witchcraft.” In March, a 17-year-old beheaded his 80-year-old grandmother with an axe “accusing her of practicing witchcraft.” And then in April two village elders—one 70, the other 67—were “accused of practicing witchcraft” by the people of their village, confronted by “an expert witch-hunter,” and made to drink a poisonous concoction that killed them.

You’ve probably noticed the pattern here. The victims are elderly; and they are killed by people who know them well, typically by younger members of their own family. Sometimes this occurs directly, with a family member murdering an older relative; in other instances it happens through the intermediation of a hired witch hunter.

I find this pattern very strange and very surprising.

A few weeks ago, I wrote an essay on funerals in sub-Saharan Africa. I talked a lot about kinship: the reason that people are willing to spend such enormous amounts on funerals, I suggested, was to signal adherence to the sharing obligations that define family life in kinship societies. In a kinship society, your family is the basic unit of economic and social life; you support them when they’re in need, and they do the same for you; and these sharing obligations are the price of membership in the kinship network, which amounts to the only safety net you have. At the apex of the kinship system, of course, sit the elders: the members of the group who have accumulated a lifetime’s worth of social debts owed to them. Kinship societies are societies that venerate elders. Among the Gonja, for example, each day starts with a younger member of the household prostrating at the open door of an elder in order to greet them.

And yet these same elder-venerating societies also murder their elders in horrific ways. Why is that? Why do kinship societies kill their old?

I want to propose a cold sort of answer: witch killings function as a way to ration resources.

Kinship societies are redistributive societies: they redistribute from the young, productive, and healthy to the old, unproductive, and sick. Of course, all societies have some sort of redistribution. But in kinship societies, that redistribution occurs within the household: and—particularly in bad years, when households are close to scarcity—amounts to a zero-sum choice between feeding the young and feeding the old. The young, productive, and healthy would like some way to escape these obligations: but they can’t do that without violating the fundamental norms of kinship.

So witch killings are a way out: they allow you to repudiate kinship obligations while publicly reaffirming your commitment to them. By accusing your grandfather of witchcraft and killing him, you can dispose of an unwanted dependent without ever admitting that you wanted him gone. Of course, you might really believe that your grandfather is a witch: but that’s also a tremendously convenient thing to believe. There’s a reason why the people targeted by witchcraft tend to be marginal members of the household whose consumption can’t justify itself. Witch killings are a perverse sort of resource management.

And to understand how people arrive at that point—how the logic of venerating elders is also the logic of killing them—we should think a little about what families do in the first place.

A woman in hiding after being accused of witchcraft in the Central African Republic

Kinship societies are tense societies

You can think of the human family unit, in a very bare-bones sense, as a mechanism for sharing resources across time. When you’re young and unable to provide for yourself, your older relatives feed you and care for you. Eventually things flip: you become old enough to provide for yourself, and you have children of your own who you need to feed and look after; and your older relatives become unable to provide for themselves, and need you to look after them as well. Eventually you’ll be too old to look after yourself, and your children, and their children, will look after you, just as you looked after them.

And that means that at any given moment, family life is a constant process of redistribution from net producers to net consumers—with the identity of those producers and consumers changing over years and decades.

Of course, giving up your resources for your relatives is always painful. Usually you do so because you love them. But even setting aside the question of love and filial piety, there are ways to justify the expense. Children, for example, are an investment: you care for them now, and eventually they’ll care for you.

But it’s a different story with the old.

Let’s say you’re a farmer in a poor and traditional society, and you live in an intergenerational household of some kind: you live with your wife, your children, your mother, your grandmother, and perhaps a few others who are more distantly related to you. (Or, as is often the case, not really related at all, but “part of the family.”) You and other able-bodied adults are the net producers; everyone does something, whether it’s farming or working around the house or selling your surplus in the market. Your grandmother is the oldest person in the household. For a while she does her part, helping raise the kids and such; but at some point she won’t be able to do that. At some point, she’ll have become a pure dependent.

Of course, some version of this problem surfaces everywhere in human life: every society has some process of redistribution that takes from the net producers and gives it to the net consumers. In modern societies, that redistribution is mediated by impersonal institutions, like pensions, schools, and healthcare programs; and that means that the cost is spread across millions of strangers, with no individual household bearing the full weight of its dependents, whether they’re young or old.

But that’s not the case in traditional societies. In such societies, redistribution takes place inside the home, with producers forfeiting resources to support their elders directly: and because those societies tend to be poorer and much closer to scarcity, that reallocation is much more painful. You are taking food off your plate, or your children’s plate, to give to your grandmother. Probably you love and care about her a great deal. But as a purely material matter, it would be better for the household—for everyone, really—if she were just gone.

You can see where this logic might lead.

Looking at the historical record, we can find quite a few examples of societies that practiced one form or another of elder-killing. The Aché hunter-gatherers of Paraguay, for instance, traditionally killed women who were too old to be useful with an axe to the head, and killed men who were too old to be useful by sending them away and telling them never to return. Sometimes senicide occurs with the consent of the elders: accounts of Inuit elder-killing practices, for example, typically suggest that victims were willing to die, and might even request the killing in order to spare others the burden of supporting them. (Immanuel Kant, discussing Inuit senicide practices in his Lectures on Ethics, called it a “loving service” motivated by “true filial love.”)

But such open killing of elders is typically only a feature of nomadic hunter-gatherer societies, in large part because social groups tend to be small, mobile, and relatively egalitarian. But in settled societies, elders are able to accumulate decades’ worth of standing and social debt: and that authority makes open senicide not just taboo but structurally impossible. You can’t simply dispatch the person on whom the entire social order of the household depends.

And this results in a great deal of suppressed tension. Elders are burdens; but no one can say so. Kinship societies, under the surface, are very tense societies. We can see that tension sublimated in traditional folklore: countless societies around the world have stories that focus on why old people are useful as repositories of wisdom despite being materially unproductive. (This is the “wisdom of the hidden old man saves the kingdom” motif, which you can see everywhere from Serbia to Ghana to Japan.) You might occasionally see senicidal or “death-hastening” practices—like the Tamil practice of thalaikoothal, in which elders are made to drink coconut water until their kidneys fail. But these are not, and never can be, acknowledged in the open.

And so life in kinship societies is defined by the demands of the elderly. It’s only natural, then, that this breeds a simmering resentment toward them, a resentment best expressed, to comport with kinship obligations, in the language of witchcraft: it is not you who betrays the kinship obligation, but the elder. The anthropologist Sjaak van der Geest, who spent years in the southern Ghanaian town of Kwahu Tafo, regarded this “ambivalence towards old age” as the central fact of the town’s intergenerational life. In public, the young people of the town honored the old for their wisdom and spiritual authority; but in private, they spoke of the old as practitioners of bayie, witchcraft, who had achieved their advanced age at the expense of their relatives.

When van der Geest asked young people what made them resent the elderly, the most frequent answer was that they “did not go.” The old would tell van der Geest the same thing. Why were old people accused of bayie? “It’s because you’ve grown old, that’s why you are being called a witch. You won’t go,” one old person told him. Won’t go where? Simple: “you won’t die.”

A woman suspected of witchcraft in the Central African Republic

Witch killings are about rationing resources

In 2005, the economist Edward Miguel published a study of witch killings in Sukumaland, a poor and almost entirely agricultural region of northwestern Tanzania. Sukumaland was a hotbed of witch killings. Between 1970 and 1988, it had seen about 3,000 people killed as witches, not counting those merely driven from their villages. And the pattern of those killings was always the same. The targets would be elders, typically older widows; some negative event would occur, for which the elder would be blamed; and as things reached a crescendo a younger member of the household would arrive at their hut at night and kill them with a machete. In the words of one woman, who had escaped murder by fleeing to a witch camp:

I ran away from Rusule in Shinyanga District after being suspected of being a witch. … There were many deaths in the family … then rumour began to spread in the village that I was the one who killed them. … [M]y own children started to hate me, … some of them started taunting me as a witch. I tried to explain but they did not give me the chance to vindicate myself. I knew what would befall me in view of what had happened to others previously, for they were brutally killed. Thus, when … one of the grandchildren whispered to me that they were about to kill me, I left the same evening. … I have lived in this camp for three years now, and though I love my family, there is no way of going back to face certain death.

But the most interesting part is the pattern that Miguel found in these murders: they clustered in years of irregular rainfall, either droughts or floods, and thus when agricultural conditions were worst, and thus when households were most desperate for food. The frequency of witch killings roughly doubled in years of irregular rainfall, while the frequency of every other type of murder stayed flat. And there was no spike in witch killings during disease outbreaks, even though witches were thought to be responsible for disease. Witch killings correlated with economic stress in the household, and only with economic stress in the household.

That pattern suggested a disturbing reading of the Sukumaland witch murders: they were a way for households to ration resources. In a famine year, an elderly relative is the most expendable member of a household, and their death frees food for everyone else; so you have plenty of incentive to get rid of them. But you can’t just kill them openly: you need to find a framework through which the killing is not only excusable but even virtuous. Witchcraft is that framework. By accusing your elder of being a witch, you can declare that the elder defected first: she had been cursing the family for her own evil purposes.

So killing her isn’t a breach of your kinship obligations: it’s an enforcement of them. The same with hiring a witch hunter. Witch hunters exist because there’s a market for their services: and the essence of the value they provide is providing an outside verdict that sanctifies what the family already wanted to do. Strange as it sounds, accusing your elderly relative of witchcraft and murdering them with a machete is the respectable option.

And this perverse logic also shapes who is targeted.

If witch killings are a way to shed dependents in difficult times, then they’ll tend to target the household members who are costliest to carry and least able to defend themselves. Widows are vulnerable because they are old, consume without producing, and lack the protection of a living spouse. And they are particularly vulnerable when they’re not surrounded by their own kin. Societies with high rates of witchcraft murder tend to be patrilineal—where descent and inheritance flow through the male line—and patrilocal, meaning a wife moves at marriage into her husband’s village and typically stays there even after her husband’s death.

The town that van der Geest was staying in, for example, was an Akan town; the Akan are matrilineal and matrilocal, so elderly widows were surrounded by their own kin, and while there was plenty of witchcraft gossip there were no witchcraft murders. The Sukuma, by contrast, are predominantly patrilineal and patrilocal. The elderly widow, in such a system, is surrounded by in-laws rather than kin: structurally, she is by far the most vulnerable person in the village, and the first to be a witch when things get tough.

This logic is particularly brutal in times of deprivation, like famines: but the same basic logic applies when inheritance is at play. In the tribal belts of eastern India—states like Jharkhand, Bihar, and Odisha—witch killings are usually instruments of land grabs. A widow holds a claim on her dead husband’s plot; her brothers-in-law want the land for themselves; some misfortune occurs, or is manufactured; the brothers-in-law pay an ojha, a local diviner, to name the woman as a witch responsible for the incident, and then either kill or excommunicate her; and the plot reverts, after she’s gone, to the men who accused her. (Researchers who interview the accusers find the property motive barely concealed.) We see the same on the Kilifi coast of Kenya, where elderly people are regularly accused of witchcraft by their families and then murdered for their land. So common is this pattern that elderly people have taken to dyeing their hair to look younger: “When they see the grey hair of their grandmother,” one local activist told the BBC, “they claim she is a witch and execute her.”

And that same brutal logic also explains why it’s not only old people who are accused of witchcraft.

This is what we see, for example, with the rise of the “child witch” in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Until a few decades ago, Congolese society had no concept of child witchcraft: witchcraft was understood as something practiced by elders, not children. But starting in the 1980s, the DRC experienced several mass mortality events—two civil wars and a brutal AIDS epidemic—that left hundreds of thousands of children orphaned. Those orphaned children went to live with their relatives: but in their new households they were marginal members without close blood ties. And so when times got tough, households would turn on them the way they might otherwise turn on an elderly dependent. Families would go to revival churches and pay pastors for “deliverance” services: the pastor would diagnose the child as a witch, attempt an exorcism, and when the exorcism inevitably failed the child would be expelled from the household and left to roam the streets. In the 2000s, 70 percent of the tens of thousands of “street children” in Kinshasa had ended up there because of a witchcraft accusation.

Who, then, is the witch? The witch in all cases is the member of the household whose consumption is most difficult to justify: witchcraft is simply the dark side of kinship. This doesn’t mean that people don’t actually believe that their relatives are witches: it’s very easy to believe something that’s advantageous to you, especially if you resent the burden they impose. But it’s not a coincidence that witches are always the most unwanted members of a kinship group: the belief is flexible enough to justify the need.

Mediating institutions mean you don’t have to kill dependents

When people talk about witch killings, or about other practices that seem archaic or grotesque, they tend to treat them as problems of belief. And indeed belief in witchcraft plays an important role in justifying the murder of family members. But witchcraft accusations, expulsions, and killings have a particular function: there’s a reason why we’ve seen them in so many different societies across history, from early modern England to contemporary northern Ghana. They are an excuse to kill dependents, and particularly the old and infirm.

There’s something deeply ironic about the fact that the societies that place the greatest emphasis on family obligation are also the ones that butcher those who can no longer support themselves—the very people who would benefit most from a warm and loving family. In kinship societies, the family is above all else an economic unit, a pool for the sharing of resources; and whatever measure of love enters into the equation, its members cannot escape the cold logic of necessity. That logic does not require declaring your grandmother to be a witch in order to justify murdering her. But the tension between family love and economic necessity is a constant force in societies defined by kinship: it is, indeed, the central antinomy of traditional life.

The best thing that can be done, then, is to divorce the one from the other: to make the family less of an economic unit and more of a personal one. Human societies will always have to deal with the problem of dependence: some share of the population will inevitably require resources they can’t generate themselves. But mediating institutions—like pensions and social insurance—turn that inevitable redistribution from a household burden into a societal one: and by doing so they defuse the resentment that builds when a household must choose between its young and its old.

That, I think, is the deepest case for impersonal institutions: that they weaken the link between love and material obligation. Families, of course, will still be economic units, dedicated to the sharing of resources, and that will always lead to tensions: these questions are the substance of daily life, whether in rich countries or poor ones. But the more that family life is governed by love and affection rather than material necessity, the better for everyone.

The Akan have a proverb, abusua do funu: “the family loves the corpse.” I quoted it in my essay on funerals, as a sort of wry comment on the tendency to spend more on funerals than on the living. But really it’s much darker than that: it’s one of the proverbs that Ghanaian taxi drivers paint on the backs of their cars as charms against witchcraft, alongside others like sura nea oben wo, “fear the one who is close to you” and otan firi fie, “hatred comes from the home.” They are sayings about the dangers that lurk within the family unit. The family loves the corpse because the corpse no longer eats. The living elder, in bad times, is not always loved at all.

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