The Shield That Became a Sword

Maybe it’s time we questioned an algorithm that has gone obsolete.

I.

It Was the Best Shield Available

Imagine you’re a behavioural economist who has been asked to redesign civilisation from scratch. The problem statement is fairly clean. You have to coordinate ten thousand selfish primates whose default loyalty is to their own families. You have to get them to cooperate at scale, without centralised oversight, and without any meaningful enforcement. You have ten thousand years.

Modern behavioural science has only existed for about fifty years. Yet our ancestors, without game theory, without Kahneman, without Elinor Ostrom, solved this problem with what is honestly one of the most elegant pieces of cognitive engineering in human history.

Anthropology gives us the concept of Dunbar’s Number. There is a cognitive limit on the number of stable social relationships a primate brain can maintain, somewhere around a hundred and fifty people. Past that number, social cohesion falls apart. Gossip and communal memory aren’t enough to keep free riders from chewing through the commons.

The solution was astral stories. Narratives about invisible entities monitoring every move (call it cosmic CCTV if you like), plus the reward of heaven and the eternal punishment of hell, which together calibrate the incentive structure more effectively than any police force ever could. Then add calendars and rituals that produce temporal synchronisation. You and fifty thousand strangers praying at the same hour, fasting on the same day, facing the same direction.

That wasn’t stupidity. That was, arguably, the earliest distributed consensus protocol humanity ever ran.

And the data backs it up. Harvard’s social capital research consistently shows that active congregants have denser social networks, more support, more resilience under crisis. Groups with strong religious cohesion empirically show higher cooperation rates in social dilemmas, lower suicide rates, and stronger community recovery after disaster.

Religion is also the original social safety net. Long before BPJS, it was churches feeding the hungry. Long before UNICEF, it was pesantren providing free education. Long before hospice care, it was monasteries tending to people who would otherwise have died alone. For hundreds of millions of people today, this is still how things work.

Even Nietzsche, the famous “killer of God”, wrote that without religion humans would have to face an annihilating nihilism, and he himself never offered a satisfying solution. Neither did Camus. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy” reads, to me, like the answer of someone who has accepted that his cosmos is meaningless but still has to find a reason to get out of bed.

So here is the claim I think is worth saying out loud. If you have ever met someone who says religion is just stupidity and a con, that person has not thought about it long enough. Religion is a feature, not a bug. One of the most cost-effective solutions humanity has ever found to its coordination problem. The good consequences are real, and they are still happening.

II.

But There Is One Problem Hard to Ignore

The trouble with brilliant legacy software is that it has no update button.

When the software you wrote to bind a hundred and fifty people in a desert village gets forked, cloned, and ported onto hardware that includes nuclear reactors, ballistic missiles, and genome editing, the output can be more than suboptimal. It can be dangerous. I am not saying it definitely is. I am saying the risk deserves to be taken seriously.

Glitch Uno. When Compromise Becomes Sin.

If you peel every religious label off the Israel-Palestine conflict, what you find at the centre is a property dispute. A fight over land and resources. In the most basic game theory, land is a divisible good. You can cut it up. You can trade it. You can carve out a joint economic zone where both sides win.

Then you introduce the variable “Holy Land”, and the variable “Property Deed Signed by God Himself”, and suddenly what you have is no longer a property dispute. What you have is a theological absolute. Theological absolutes, by the way they’re built, cannot be compromised. Every trade-off gets relabelled as apostasy, or treason against heaven.

I should be honest. This isn’t the only way to read the conflict, and I’m aware Israel-Palestine has thick colonial, ethnic, and geopolitical layers I’m not engaging with here. But the theological component is hard to pretend isn’t there.

In 1995. Yitzhak Rabin, Prime Minister of Israel, is about to close the Two-State Solution through Oslo II. He’s not a naive peacenik. He’s a former general who has run the probabilities and concluded that land-for-security is the best deal Israel can possibly get.

Yigal Amir, a religious law student, shoots Rabin in the back. Not from political calculation. From Din Rodef, the Jewish law that holds anyone threatening the life of the Jewish community may be killed. To Amir, giving up “holy land” was a direct threat to the life of the community.

On the other side, Hamas, whose 1988 founding charter explicitly forbids any negotiation over “Islamic waqf land” until the day of judgment, has a habit of launching attacks precisely when peace talks are about to cross the finish line.

The mechanism is the same. Same software, different versions. Dogma converts divisible goods into sacred absolutes. Sacred absolutes tend to have only one resolution each side can accept.

I am not saying religion is the only cause. I am saying it’s hard to argue religion isn’t one of the important variables in play.

Glitch Dos. How Many QALY Is a Theological Certainty Worth?

The reasoning behind that policy? A debate about when the soul enters a blastocyst. A microscopic cluster of cells the size of a needle tip, with no nervous system, no pain receptors, no consciousness in any sense philosophy can defend.

The opportunity cost? Nearly a decade of bottleneck in the country with the best biomedical research infrastructure on Earth. On a field with the potential to treat Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, type 1 diabetes, and spinal cord regeneration.

Inside the QALY framework (Quality-Adjusted Life Year, the standard epidemiological measure for evaluating health interventions), Parkinson’s alone affects roughly ten million people worldwide. One year of delay in finding a disease-modifying treatment costs hundreds of thousands of QALYs. Multiply that by ten years. Multiply that across every other disease caught in the same bottleneck.

The honest disclaimer is that this number is rough and full of assumptions. We don’t know if full funding would have actually produced faster breakthroughs, and stem cell research has kept running elsewhere. But the direction of the argument is, to my eye, hard to ignore. A policy grounded in a theological belief about the moral status of a cluster of cells has the potential to slow down treatment for millions of human beings who already exist.

And that’s just one policy, in one country, over one decade. The same pattern shows up everywhere. Condoms and HIV in sub-Saharan Africa. Abstinence-only sex education in the US. Bans on autopsies in some traditions that slowed forensic medicine for centuries.

Leaving Childhood?

I know which direction the criticism is going to come from. “So you want everyone to be nihilists? Without religion, what’s stopping people from being psychopaths?”

Fair question. And I am not sure I have a perfect answer.

But I do think it’s a false dichotomy. You don’t need fear of divine punishment to understand that bombing a small child is evil. That can be derived from a fairly simple first principle. You don’t want to be bombed, and they don’t either. That isn’t nihilism. It’s the root of most of the ethics that can be defended philosophically, from Kant to Rawls, with no need to reference anything supernatural.

What about mass coordination? We already have something like a substitute. Not a perfect one, but at least one that can be updated. Constitutions. Universal human rights. The scientific method. International law. All of them are self-correcting systems that can be revised when proven wrong.

I do have to be honest that these secular systems have their own failure modes. Constitutions can be amended for authoritarian ends. International law often has no teeth. The scientific method has been abused for eugenics. Secular institutions can become dogmatic in their own way. Watch some political ideologies operate and you’ll see something almost indistinguishable from religion, complete with heretics and excommunication. So I’m not selling a secular utopia here.

What I am trying to say is more specific. Notice when you’re making a decision based on data and reason, and notice when you’re running software designed to keep a tribe in a desert two thousand years ago intact. The two don’t have to conflict every time. When they do, it helps to know which one is talking.

Rabin knew. It cost him his life.

The stem cell scientists knew. It cost them a decade.

If there is no invisible hand coming to fix climate change, or the next Holocaust, or Nuclear War, and I happen to estimate that probability as low, then the hands that have to move are ours. I could be wrong about the probability. But the stakes are too high to act as if someone else is on the job.

The shield that once saved our ancestors from extinction may have mutated into something else by now. Not because it was evil from the start, but because it wasn’t designed for a world like this one.

It isn’t betrayal to put down a tool that no longer fits the task. It is, however, also a mistake to pretend we have already found a perfect replacement.

Further Reading

After reading more than 350 books, the ones below were the earliest to nudge something loose in my head.

• Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman
• Factfulness, Hans Rosling
• The Elephant in the Brain, Kevin Simler & Robin Hanson
• Skin in the Game, Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• Doing Good Better, William MacAskill
• The Beginning of Infinity, David Deutsch
• Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality / HPMOR, Eliezer Yudkowsky