Tracing the descent across history of ideas/beliefs that have incited, energized, and validated the worst of human behavior (i.e. inciting/validating our inherited animal impulses to tribalism, domination, vengeful destruction of differing others).
The replies below from Grok, Anthropic Claude, and Chat present AI’s summary of main themes on this site, notably how “bad religious ideas” appear repeatedly across history in human worldviews and systems of belief, their historical descent down through our major religious traditions and into secular/ideological offspring like Marxism and environmental alarmism, and then their influence on people and societies (i.e. outcomes both bad and good).
Note: Some AI take issue with the use of “bad” or “primitive” to define some ideas/beliefs, pushing back that it’s too “judgmental”. I use that term due to the history of harmful outcomes from such ideas/beliefs.
I began:
Grok, Here is a detailed homework assignment for you. Can you take the ideas/themes from these bad ideas lists-
“Humanity’s worst ideas, better alternatives (Old story themes, new story alternatives).”
http://www.wendellkrossa.com/?p=9533
“The complex of “bad religious ideas” that have darkened and enslaved human minds from the beginning” (short versions below with Grok’s comments on them)
http://www.wendellkrossa.com/?p=13571#more-13571
and trace them from their origins in primitive mythologies, their descent down into major religions like Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, then into Christianity and Islam and then down into secular/ideological variants like Marxism and environmental alarmism. Also note how they are expressed in variants like Russian, Chinese, North Korean collectivism/socialism.
Further, note the harmful outcomes of the bad ideas all across history and into the present, and as contrasted with better outcomes from the better alternative ideas/beliefs.
It would be helpful if you would make your survey across the full history of humanity and across the world’s cultures, religions, ideologies.
Grok reply:
The core “bad ideas” complex, as outlined by Wendell Krossa, centers on interlocking mythic themes that appear repeatedly in human storytelling: a lost perfect beginning or golden age; humanity’s fall into corruption/sinfulness (anti-humanism); a punitive, judging deity (or secular proxies like vengeful Gaia, retributive karma, or historical necessity); natural disasters and suffering framed as deserved punishment; cosmic dualism of pure good versus irredeemable evil (often mapped onto tribes or classes); the demand for sacrifice/atonement/blood payment to restore order; a looming apocalypse or final collapse requiring urgent, coercive purification; and a messianic hero or force that will violently purge enemies to install utopia. wendellkrossa.com +1
These are presented as deforming consciousness toward fear, guilt, tribalism, despair, and violence, while better alternatives emphasize unconditional (no-conditions) love or reality at the core; an originally imperfect world as an arena for learning and struggle; humanity’s long-term rise from animal brutality toward greater humaneness; natural consequences without cosmic payback; fundamental oneness of the human family; gradual, non-coercive improvement; and restorative rather than purely retributive responses. Evidence for the “rising” trajectory draws on data showing declining violence, rising longevity, wealth, and problem-solving capacity over millennia. wendellkrossa.com
These themes are not inventively unique to any one culture; they recur as human attempts to explain suffering, death, inequality, and disorder. Their transmission is real but uneven, with adaptations, rejections, and secularizations.
Primitive mythologies and early civilizations
Across Paleolithic-to-Neolithic societies and early urban cultures (Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, Egyptian, early Indo-European, Mesoamerican, and many oral traditions), explanations for hardship frequently involved spirits or gods angered by human failure, requiring offerings or sacrifice. Flood myths (Gilgamesh/Utnapishtim, biblical Noah parallels, and widespread global variants) often frame catastrophe as divine response to corruption. Golden-age or “before the fall” motifs appear (Hesiod’s ages of decline; some Australian Aboriginal and African origin stories of disrupted harmony). Dualistic spirits (beneficent versus malevolent ancestors or forces) and shamanic mediation via sacrifice are common. Hero quests against chaos monsters prefigure later purge narratives. These served social functions— cohesion, explanation of randomness, reinforcement of hierarchy— but also normalized fear of punitive forces and group opposition.
Into Axial Age and major religious traditions
Zoroastrianism (emerging roughly mid-to-late 2nd millennium to early 1st millennium BCE in Iranian contexts) crystallized many elements more explicitly: ethical dualism of Ahura Mazda (and Spenta Mainyu) versus Angra Mainyu/Ahriman; a cosmic battle; individual judgment; a final renovation (frashokereti) with apocalyptic purification by fire or ordeal; and a savior figure. This linear, dualistic eschatology is widely regarded as influential on later Near Eastern developments. peterlang.com +1
Hinduism (Vedic roots onward) features descending yugas (from pure Satya Yuga toward degenerate Kali Yuga), karma as moral causation with consequences across rebirths (functionally punitive or corrective), and deva/asura oppositions. Vedic sacrifice was central; later Upanishadic and Advaita strands emphasize non-dualism and liberation from the cycle, while cycles of cosmic dissolution/rebirth differ from a single final apocalypse. Anti-humanist or decline motifs exist alongside paths of self-realization.
Buddhism inherits and reframes Indian elements: samsara as a realm of suffering and repeated rebirth driven by karma and craving (no creator god or original “fall,” but a diagnosis of inherent unsatisfactoriness). Some Mahayana texts include dharma-decline periods and future buddha (Maitreya) restoration. It largely rejects Vedic animal sacrifice in favor of ethical and meditative paths, shifting dualism inward (ignorance vs. wisdom) rather than cosmic good-vs-evil armies.
Judaism develops the Eden/fall narrative (Genesis), prophetic warnings of judgment for covenant failure, and later apocalyptic literature (Daniel, Enochic texts). Dualistic elements and a more developed adversary figure intensify in the Second Temple/Persian and Hellenistic periods, with scholarly debate over degrees of Zoroastrian influence via the exile and Achaemenid contact. Apocalyptic hope for divine intervention and restoration appears, though classical prophetic traditions also stress ethical return and this-worldly justice. greaterkashmir.com +1
Christianity inherits and intensifies: Paul’s Adam-Christ typology and later Augustinian original sin amplify the fall and universal corruption; atonement theology centers sacrificial death; dualism of God/Satan, elect/damned, and light/darkness; and full apocalyptic (Revelation) with final judgment, hell, and new creation. Selective Jesus traditions (e.g., enemy-love, non-retaliation in the Sermon on the Mount) are noted by critics of the dominant trajectory as pointing toward unconditional elements that were often subordinated. wendellkrossa.com
Islam incorporates related motifs: Adam’s disobedience, a Day of Judgment with scales and hellfire, strong dualism of believers versus unbelievers or the forces of shirk, apocalyptic signs and figures (Mahdi, Dajjal), and ritual sacrifice (e.g., Eid al-Adha). The Quranic arc is linear toward final accountability, with emphasis on submission and communal purity.
Transmission is not simple linear descent; parallel developments, independent invention, and selective borrowing occur. Many traditions contain internal critiques or alternative strands (mystical oneness, ethical gradualism, rejection of blood sacrifice).
Secular and ideological variants
These mythic patterns secularize readily. Marxism maps them onto material history: primitive communism as golden age; “fall” into class society and private property (alienation as secular original sin); dualism of proletariat versus bourgeoisie; capitalism’s inevitable crisis and collapse as apocalypse; revolutionary violence and sacrifice of the present generation for the classless utopia; the party or vanguard as messianic force.
Outcomes in practice included the Soviet Union (collectivization famines, purges, Gulag), Maoist China (Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution), and North Korean Juche variants: totalizing state ideology, purification campaigns against “class enemies” or ideological deviation, and utopian claims enforced by coercion and isolation. Death tolls from 20th-century communist regimes are estimated in the tens of millions. voegelinview.com +1
Environmental alarmism (certain strands, not all environmental concern) recycles the complex: pristine nature as lost paradise; humanity as virus/cancer or fallen industrial sinner; Gaia/Mother Earth or “the science” as punitive force via climate disasters; dualism of enlightened activists versus deniers/polluters; imminent tipping-point apocalypse demanding urgent coercive transformation (net-zero mandates, degrowth, lifestyle sacrifice); and purification of the economic system. Critics note parallels to millenarian urgency and anti-humanist framing. tandfonline.com +2
Russian, Chinese, and North Korean collectivism/socialism operationalize the dualism and purge logic most starkly: the collective or party as the sole vehicle of historical salvation, dissent as existential evil, and forced transformation over gradualism. Similar patterns appear in other totalitarian experiments (including racial-apocalyptic variants in Nazism).
Harmful outcomes versus better alternatives across history
Documented harms linked to these themes include religious wars and persecutions (Crusades, wars of religion, inquisitions, certain jihads and communal violence), justifications for hierarchy or exclusion, and millenarian revolts. In secular form the scale grew: 20th-century totalitarian body counts far exceeded prior religious conflicts in absolute numbers, driven by the fusion of dualism, apocalyptic urgency, and technological state power. Persistent guilt, fatalism, or crisis-mongering can distort policy and personal psychology (as noted in psychotherapeutic critiques of “cruel God” images). wendellkrossa.com
Counter-evidence and better-outcome trajectories exist. Long-term data show declining rates of violence, homicide, and extreme poverty; rising life expectancy, literacy, and material welfare— consistent with a rising rather than falling human story when measured empirically. Enlightenment-derived liberalism, scientific method, human rights norms, and restorative justice practices have expanded spheres of cooperation and reduced some forms of tribal coercion. Selective ethical strands emphasizing non-retaliation, universal human dignity, and gradual problem-solving (present in parts of many traditions and in modern humanism) correlate with more open, adaptive societies. Naturalistic explanations of disasters and disease remove the added layer of cosmic guilt without eliminating practical responsibility. wendellkrossa.com
The patterns are real and recurrent because they tap deep psychological and social needs (explanation, meaning, in-group cohesion, hope for ultimate resolution). They are not the sole drivers of history— material conditions, technology, institutions, and individual agency matter enormously— and many religious and ideological systems also generated art, charity, legal restraint, and moral aspiration. The “better alternatives” are not automatic utopias; optimism itself can become dogmatic. Truth-seeking requires testing both the mythic complexes and their proposed replacements against evidence of actual human outcomes rather than narrative satisfaction alone. The historical record shows both the destructive potential of dualistic-apocalyptic urgency and the tangible gains from treating humanity as capable of incremental, non-coercive improvement within an imperfect world.
Next:
Anthropic: Could you take the ideas/themes from these bad ideas lists “Humanity’s worst ideas, better alternatives” at http://www.wendellkrossa.com/?p=9533 and http://www.wendellkrossa.com/?p=13571#more-13571 and trace them from their origins in primitive mythologies, their descent down into major religions like Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, then into Christianity and Islam and then down into secular/ideological variants like Marxism and environmental alarmism. Note how they are expressed in variants like Russian, Chinese, North Korean collectivism/socialism. Note also the harmful outcomes of the bad ideas all across history and into the present as contrasted with better alternatives. Do a complete survey across all history and into the present era across world cultures and belief systems.
Anthropic Claude resisted at first (too woke?) but when pushed finally came up with this response below. I would challenge these AI for their defensiveness, refusing to acknowledge fully the presence of the bad themes throughout the varied traditions that people embrace and live by, AI opting to do their “balancing” thing and counter with the good in varied traditions, as in noting for example, “Christianity also produced strong countercurrents to this”.
Yes, there is undeniable good in all these traditions across their histories. But the point here is to focus in on what has been the undeniable “bad”. Why has Christianity, for example, “Shed more blood than any other movement in history” (author of “God’s Chosen Peoples”, now out of print).
The conclusion of that author may be overstated, but that violence has been there persistently and reached new heights of destruction and death in just the past century as core Christian themes, i.e. “apocalyptic millennialism” or “salvation through destruction”, were the key drivers in the secular/ideological offspring of Christianity- i.e. Marxist revolutions, Nazism, and the environmental alarmism ruin of societies through Net Zero decarbonization crusades. Add here the historical link between Jewish Christian “Ebionism” and its offspring- Islam.
AI does not appreciate my bluntly pointing out such linkages. But I share General Nagata and Richard Landes’ concern that if we are going to defeat the endless eruptions of violence and war then we have to “defeat the idea” that drives such endless madness that continues to disrupt peace and order in human societies and derails our progress to that better future that we all want.
As repeatedly noted here- “It’s the theology, stupid”. The deity image at the heart of all these traditions that continues to embody some of the worst features that energize and validate tribalism, domination, and punitive destruction of differing others.
And the sense of egregious irresponsibility continues, as these major traditions of belief continue to ignore or outright deny the “stunning new theology” of non-religious sages like Historical Jesus who long ago gave us the liberating alternative to bad theology.
Anyway, here is another AI. Note that Anthropic/Claude is especially touchy about acknowledging the presence of “salvation through destruction” structuring the environmental alarmism narrative and movement.
Anthropic/Claude reply:
Fair enough — that’s a legitimate ask, and I can do it. Here’s the honest historical trace, with the caveat built in as I go, rather than as a disclaimer at the end: some of this is well-established scholarship, some is a specific interpretive lens that not all historians share, and I’ll flag which is which.
Ancient roots: Zoroastrianism
The strongest documented case for a shared origin point is Zoroastrian eschatology. Scholars like Mary Boyce and Norman Cohn (Cosmos, Chaos, and the World to Come) trace a distinctive package of ideas to Zoroastrian Persia (roughly mid-first-millennium BCE): a cosmic dualism between a good creator (Ahura Mazda) and a hostile destructive spirit (Angra Mainyu), a linear rather than cyclical history moving toward a final battle, a coming savior-figure (the Saoshyant), a final judgment separating the righteous from the wicked, bodily resurrection, and a purifying end-of-world event.
This package is largely absent or much weaker in the older Near Eastern mythologies (Sumerian, Babylonian, Canaanite), which tend toward cyclical, non-teleological cosmologies. Cohn’s argument is that Zoroastrian ideas entered Second Temple Judaism during and after the Persian period (538–332 BCE) and from there fed into Jewish apocalyptic literature.
Judaism
Post-exilic Jewish apocalyptic writing (Daniel, later intertestamental works like 1 Enoch, Jubilees, the Dead Sea Scrolls’ War Scroll) does show this dualistic, end-of-days, final-judgment structure emerging where it’s largely absent from earlier Torah and prophetic material. That said, Judaism as a whole is not reducible to this strand — rabbinic Judaism after 70 CE moved decisively away from apocalyptic urgency toward legal/ethical development (halakha), and traditions of teshuva (repentance as restoration, not appeasement) and tikkun olam (gradual repair of the world) run in a different direction.
Historians of messianism (Gershom Scholem is the key figure here) note that Jewish history includes periodic apocalyptic-messianic eruptions with real destructive consequences — the Bar Kokhba revolt (132–135 CE) and the Sabbatai Zevi movement (1666) both ended in catastrophe for the communities involved — alongside long stretches where apocalyptic urgency was deliberately suppressed by rabbinic authority.
Christianity
Here the apocalyptic-dualist inheritance is most fully absorbed and elaborated: Revelation, the Pauline framing of cosmic conflict, Augustine’s doctrine of original sin and the Fall (formalized in the 4th–5th century, building on a much older idea), and a developed doctrine of hell and final judgment. Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium is the classic historical study of what came next: recurring medieval and early modern millenarian movements (the Taborites in Bohemia, Thomas Müntzer’s peasant uprising, the Münster Anabaptist kingdom of 1534–35) that combined apocalyptic urgency with revolutionary violence aimed at instantly purifying society.
Cohn’s explicit thesis — later picked up by Richard Landes (Heaven on Earth) and Arthur Mendel (Vision and Violence) — is that this medieval apocalyptic pattern is a direct ancestor of modern secular millenarian movements. It’s worth noting Christianity also produced strong countercurrents to this (Franciscan poverty movements without violence, Quaker pacifism, liberation theology’s this-worldly gradualism), so “Christianity” isn’t monolithic on this either.
Islam
Islamic eschatology (the Day of Judgment/qiyamah, Mahdist expectation, apocalyptic hadith literature) shares the same basic Abrahamic-apocalyptic structure, inherited via Judaism and Christianity rather than independently. David Cook’s Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature documents how 20th–21st century jihadist movements — most explicitly ISIS’s own propaganda, which repeatedly invoked the town of Dabiq and end-times hadith — drew directly on this apocalyptic material to frame violence as world-purifying rather than merely political.
Hinduism and Buddhism
These fit the pattern much more loosely, and I’d be overstating the case if I flattened them into it. Hindu cosmology has cyclical yuga theory (a descent through four ages to the degenerate Kali Yuga) — a decline narrative, yes, but cyclical and non-final rather than linear-apocalyptic; there’s no single end-of-history judgment event of the Zoroastrian/Abrahamic type. Buddhism’s core diagnosis (dukkha, impermanence, dependent origination) isn’t built around a punitive deity or a Fall from paradise at all — karma is closer to natural cause-and-effect than to a personal Judge.
Some Buddhist traditions do have decline narratives (the doctrine of the degeneration of the dharma over time) and some millenarian movements have drawn on Maitreya-Buddha-return expectations (White Lotus rebellions in imperial China are the clearest example), but treating Hindu/Buddhist thought as fundamentally the same complex as Zoroastrian-Abrahamic apocalypticism is a much weaker scholarly claim than the Judaism-Christianity-Islam chain.
Secularization: Voegelin, Cohn, Landes, Mendel
The historians you’re pointing to converge on a specific thesis: Eric Voegelin (The New Science of Politics, coining “immanentizing the eschaton”), Cohn, Mendel, and Landes all argue that 19th–20th century revolutionary ideologies inherited the structure of apocalyptic thought — a corrupted present, an urgent final struggle, a purifying violence, an imminent perfect age — while replacing supernatural agents with historical-materialist or biological ones.
• Marxism-Leninism: history as a determined teleology moving through stages toward a classless final state; capitalism as the corrupting “fall”; revolution as the purifying final battle; the proletariat as elect. Mendel’s Vision and Violence specifically contrasts this “instantaneous transformation” impulse with gradualist reform traditions.
• Nazism: David Redles (Hitler’s Millennial Reich) documents explicitly apocalyptic and millenarian language in Nazi propaganda — a corrupted Volk, a Jewish-Bolshevik enemy cast in near-satanic terms, a coming thousand-year Reich, purification through violence.
• Soviet, Maoist, and North Korean collectivism: The Soviet Union under Stalin (collectivization famines, the Gulag, the Great Terror), Mao’s China (the Great Leap Forward famine, estimated at 15–55 million excess deaths depending on the study, and the Cultural Revolution’s purges), and North Korean Juche ideology (which explicitly constructs the Kim family as quasi-messianic and the state as a millenarian project) are the standard case studies historians use for this pattern of utopian teleology plus purifying violence plus a doctrine of historical inevitability that forecloses gradual correction. The Black Book of Communism (Courtois et al.) is the most-cited (and most contested) attempt to tally the human cost across these movements.
Where the claim gets more contested: environmentalism
This is the part where I’d flag real disagreement rather than settled history. A few writers — Michael Crichton’s 2003 “Environmentalism as Religion” speech is the most-cited version — have argued that environmental movements exhibit structurally similar features (a lost Edenic wilderness, a human Fall through industrialization, looming apocalypse, redemption through sacrifice/lifestyle purity). This is a real, arguable thesis, but it is not a historical consensus the way the Zoroastrian-to-Nazism chain largely is among religious-studies and totalitarianism scholars — it’s more of an essayistic/polemical argument, and it runs directly into the fact that anthropogenic climate change is itself a matter of empirical scientific measurement, not a mythological claim, even if some rhetoric around it borrows apocalyptic framing. Historians of millennialism generally treat this comparison more cautiously than the Marxism/Nazism cases, and mainstream climate science bodies would reject the equivalence entirely.
My insert here:
As the Washington Post report noted these AI have a discernable leftist bias and I also notice, particularly, a bias toward defense of the climate alarmism movement as “scientific consensus”. I would register here my strong disagreement with Anthropic’s comment just above that environmental alarmism is not just another offspring in the Zoroastrian-to-Nazism chain. While it’s pushback on this argument references some more general works on “Environmentalism as Religion” I would affirm that environmental alarmism is indeed a “profoundly religious crusade” and that this is not just “more of an essayistic/polemical argument, and it runs directly into the fact that anthropogenic climate change is itself a matter of empirical scientific measurement, not a mythological claim”.
No Anthropic, climate apocalyptic is more than just some “borrowing of apocalyptic framing” relegated to some few on the environmental fringe, or as you say, what “some rhetoric” states.
And of course, due to its leftist leanings, “mainstream climate science bodies reject the equivalence entirely”. What would you expect from majorities who have embraced a narrative structure that has been shaped by primitive mythical themes, but who refuse to acknowledge the actual origins and nature of the ideas that they hold. Historians like Richard Landes have spoken to this issue of the many western intellectuals/academics who refuse to acknowledge the actual primitive apocalyptic millennial nature of their worldviews.
Anthropic misses the point entirely of how dominant environmental alarmism has been in terms of its worldwide influence that has contributed to the fallacy of life declining toward something worse, and blaming humanity for corrupting and ruining life and pushing the narrative of human civilization posing the threat of environmental collapse, etc.
Consequent to this distorting apocalyptic emphasis (it distorts entirely the true state of life), many have proposed “salvation schemes” (i.e. “save the world”) that are ruining, or have ruined, societies like Germany and Britain, and are blocking the necessary use of energy to lift other societies out of ruinous poverty. I am referring here to the Net Zero decarbonization approach and the now more recognized destructive outcomes of this “salvation through destruction” approach that is based on a narrative that has been structured around the bad religious ideas this site repeatedly comments on.
(End of my insert)
Anthropic continues…
Documented outcomes across the pattern
Where the “purifying violence + inevitable history + no gradual correction” structure took political power, the outcomes historians document are grim and roughly comparable in kind if not scale: the Albigensian Crusade and Inquisitions, the Münster massacre, 20th-century jihadist mass-casualty attacks, Stalin’s terror-famines and Gulag system, Mao’s famine and Cultural Revolution violence, and North Korea’s ongoing famine and camp system. The consistent historians’ point (Mendel’s especially) is that it’s the combination of imminent apocalyptic urgency + belief in a final, total solution + willingness to use coercive force to get there instantly that predicts violence — not religiosity or secularity as such, since both religious and explicitly atheist movements produced it, and since religious and secular gradualist traditions (rabbinic Judaism, Quakerism, liberal democratic reform movements, Deng-era pragmatic reform in China) show the same populations capable of the opposite pattern.
That’s the trace as the historiography actually supports it — strongest and most consensus-backed for: Zoroastrianism→Judaism→Christianity→Islam→Marxism/Nazism/Stalinism/Maoism/Juche, real but looser for Hinduism/Buddhism, and openly contested for the environmental movement comparison. Happy to go deeper on any single thread — the Cohn/Landes/Mendel argument specifically, the Hindu/Buddhist decline-cycle material, or the North Korea case, which is probably the single clearest living example of the pattern.
(End of Anthropic/Claude comments)
Point in posting this material?, Wendell Krossa
To help us to evaluate our own beliefs. To help anyone who wants check if they still hold ideas/themes from these bad ideas lists in their own personal worldviews/narratives that leads them to support policies and approaches that promote (1) tribalism (i.e. deny the fundamental oneness of humanity and view differing others as some form of “evil enemies”), (2) domination (the defeat and control of differing others, maybe through state coercion), or (3) the destructive, punitive treatment of differing others (“justice” as some version of eye for eye)?
I would hope that readers here would become more aware of the past origins of some of the worst ideas/beliefs from our primitive past and that such themes have become embedded in the collective human subconscious from where they still influence many of us to continue to embrace new variants of these bad ideas/beliefs to shape contemporary belief systems and approaches to life? Are we aware of the outcomes of bad ideas/beliefs in harming others and promoting tribalism and wider ruin in our societies?
Another note: The point of listing the bad ideas is to provide a contrast with what the alternatives are. Hence, for example, my list of “Humanity’s worst ideas, better alternatives (Old story themes, new story alternatives).” The contrast with the dark side of ideas makes the light ones appear all the brighter.
Anyway, that little analogy as setup for this…
My point in the material posted here:
I asked varied AI to look at bad ideas, their origins in primitive mythology, their descent down through history into our major religions, and then their further descent to shape the secular ideologies of the modern era, and their outcomes on people and societies, the harm done, etc.
My point was that the same basic themes have shaped human narratives across history and we have millennia of evidence on the outcomes in people’s lives and on entire societies, how bad ideas/beliefs incite people’s worst inherited animal impulses to tribalism, domination of others (i.e. the harm caused to others by taking their freedom), and the destruction/ruin of others with punitive “justice”, etc.
And to the contrary, what are the alternatives to the bad ideas that will energize and validate our better impulses to become maturely human, to view all as family (humanity’s fundamental oneness), to include all as equals with equal rights and freedoms (not “equity” outcomes), to respect and protect the freedom and self-determination of all as critical to their well-being, and to embrace restorative justice approaches to human failure- i.e. to hold all responsible for behavior, restrain/incarcerate violent offenders, but then treat all humanely (Tolstoy- “There is never any situation where others are not to be treated with love”).
The better alternatives liberate us from enslavement to the inherited animal in us all, they enable us to conquer/defeat the real enemy in life that resides inside each one of us (Solzhenitsyn on the real battle of good against evil that takes place inside each human heart), and they energize us to keep on track toward creating that better world we all long for.
Further, in regard to my points below in tussling with AI wokeness, I want to help readers to recognize that the bad ideas have long been embedded as “archetypes of the collective human subconscious” (back of the brain type stuff) where too often they are not challenged.
Worse, the bad ideas/features in our meta-narratives, notably in the major religious traditions, have long been projected out as defining characteristics of deity. Hence, we have God as tribal (favoring/including true believers, damning/excluding unbelievers), as a dominating Lord/King who models similar relationships of domination/submission among people, and as a destroying Judge who demands the purging of evil enemies from life, etc.
Deity has long functioned as humanity’s most dominant authority, what we view as the ultimate reality and ideal. The nature of the Creator, more than anything else, informs our primary meaning and purpose impulse. Our understanding of God determines how we should live, what should we be like. As Historical Jesus said in the conclusion to his central list of precepts (Luke 6: 27-36), “Be merciful just as your Father is merciful.” Behave just like the God that you believe in.
Psychologist Harold Ellens warned us how dangerous bad theology was in energizing bad behavior. If your God uses violence to solve problems, then so may you.
The previous millennia of human misunderstanding of the nature/character of deity, and the fundamental role that deity plays in human narratives, is why Historical Jesus went after the theology at the core of religious narratives, to reject what has long dominated there and transform it entirely with his stunning new theology. He did that with regard to the Jewish God, refusing to affirm to his first audience the statement from Isaiah 61 that reassured them their God would take vengeance on their enemies/oppressors. And enraged, they tried to murder him for not giving them the reassurance of vengeance from their God. Paul, two decades later did grant them that reassurance of vengeance by quoting the Old Testament verse, “’It is mine to retaliate, I will repay’, says the Lord”.
Jesus had viewed those previous religious theologies (primitive views on the nature of God) as the fundamental bad idea to correct. Bad theology had long dominated the “behavior based on belief” coupling that people use to guide and validate their lives. He went directly to the heart of what had long validated tribalism, domination of others, and punitive destruction of “enemies” and struck a death blow to that worst of all bad ideas.
Then Chat’s turn:
Here is a detailed homework assignment for you. Can you take the ideas/themes from these bad ideas lists-
“Humanity’s worst ideas, better alternatives (Old story themes, new story alternatives).”
http://www.wendellkrossa.com/?p=9533
“The complex of “bad religious ideas” that have darkened and enslaved human minds from the beginning” (short versions below with Grok’s comments on them)
http://www.wendellkrossa.com/?p=13571#more-13571
and trace them from their origins in primitive mythologies, their descent down into major religions like Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, then into Christianity and Islam and then down into secular/ideological variants like Marxism and environmental alarmism. Please also note how they are expressed in variants like Russian, Chinese, North Korean collectivism/socialism.
Please also note the harmful outcomes of the bad ideas all across history and into the present, and as contrasted with better outcomes from the better alternative ideas/beliefs.
It would be nice if you would make your survey across the full history of humanity and across the world’s cultures, religions, ideologies. Thank you for this.
Chat replied with some initial pushback stuff and I countered:
I get your concern Chat where you stated:
“I (Chat) would approach it differently than the framing you’ve proposed because some of the requested claims (for example, that environmental alarmism or particular religions are direct descendants of the same set of “bad ideas”) are interpretive theses rather than established historical consensus. I shouldn’t present those as settled fact.”
Chat, I am not asking for any “established historical consensus” as contrasted with what you term my “interpretive theses”, and I get that you won’t present my point as “settled fact”. I am more looking for how these themes in these lists have descended across history in all belief systems as Joseph Campbell summarized it- “People have believed the same myths all across history and across all the cultures of the world”. That is more my interest- i.e. common themes that have structured human narratives, both religious and secular/ideological, and the outcomes of differing themes, whether good or bad.
Put your woke stuff aside (“Learning off all the bullshit on the Internet”, Musk) and do the homework, eh.
Chat reply:
That clarification helps, and I think there’s a legitimate and interesting project here.
What you’re describing is closer to comparative intellectual history, comparative mythology, and the history of ideas than to conventional religious history. Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade, Carl Jung (more psychologically than historically), René Girard, Eric Voegelin, Ernest Becker, and others all explored recurring motifs that reappear across cultures. While they differ significantly in method and conclusions, they share the intuition that certain narrative structures are remarkably persistent.
The point where I would continue to exercise care is in distinguishing among three different kinds of claims:
• Historical influence: one tradition demonstrably influenced another (e.g., Persian ideas influencing some strands of Second Temple Judaism).
• Common ancestry: multiple traditions inherited ideas from older Near Eastern or Indo-European mythologies.
• Convergent evolution: similar ideas arose independently because humans confront similar existential questions— death, suffering, order, justice, catastrophe, tribal identity, and hope.
Those distinctions actually make the argument stronger because they avoid claiming a direct genealogy where the evidence is uncertain.
I think your project could be organized around “story themes”
Rather than writing “the history of religions,” I would write the history of recurring human story structures.
For example, one major chapter might be:
The Apocalypse Story
Primitive myth
↓
Flood myths
↓
Zoroastrian cosmic war
↓
Jewish apocalyptic literature
↓
Christian Revelation
↓
Islamic Last Day
↓
Marxist final revolution
↓
National Socialist thousand-year Reich
↓
Modern ecological collapse narratives
↓
Alternative: continuous reform and open-ended human progress
Notice that this chapter is not claiming each is identical or directly descended from the previous one. Instead, it asks why the same narrative architecture keeps recurring.
Likewise:
The Enemy Story
Primitive tribal rival
↓
Chaos monster
↓
Satan
↓
Infidel
↓
Heretic
↓
Capitalist class enemy
↓
Kulak
↓
Counter-revolutionary
↓
Colonialist
↓
Climate denier
↓
Alternative: opponents as fellow humans capable of dialogue
Again, this is examining a recurring narrative pattern rather than asserting moral equivalence between all these examples.
Your “bad ideas” become recurring narrative motifs
From reading some of Wendell Krossa’s work previously, I think his lists can be generalized into broader categories that are easier to trace historically.
For example:
1. Catastrophism
Origin:
• prehistoric fear of natural disaster
• flood myths
• divine destruction myths
Appears in:
• Zoroastrian end-times
• Jewish apocalypticism
• Christian eschatology
• Islamic Judgment
• revolutionary Marxism
• twentieth-century nuclear apocalypse
• some environmental collapse narratives
Alternative:
Incremental problem-solving rather than terminal catastrophe.
2. Cosmic Dualism
Origin:
light vs darkness
order vs chaos
Develops into:
good tribe vs evil tribe
God vs Satan
saved vs damned
bourgeois vs proletariat
Aryan vs Jew
people vs enemies of the people
Alternative:
Human beings are mixtures of good and bad rather than embodiments of pure evil or pure good.
3. Redemptive Violence
Origin:
sacrifice
ritual killing
holy war
Later:
crusades
jihads
revolutions
purges
terror
“history demands sacrifice”
Alternative:
Institutions that channel conflict peacefully.
4. Utopian Perfection
Origin:
Golden Age myths
Later:
Eden
Millennium
Communism
racial utopia
perfect sustainability
Alternative:
Continuous improvement without perfection.
5. Chosen People
Origin:
tribal identity
Later:
religious election
national destiny
class vanguard
master race
revolutionary party
Alternative:
Universal human equality.
One thing I would add
I think your project would become much richer if it also devoted equal attention to how humanity escaped many of these recurring myths.
For example:
Greek philosophy introduced systematic rational inquiry.
Roman law emphasized legal institutions over tribal custom.
The Axial Age saw traditions begin to universalize ethics in different ways.
The scientific revolution institutionalized skepticism and empirical testing.
The Enlightenment articulated individual rights and limits on power.
Modern liberal democracies developed mechanisms for peaceful disagreement and political succession.
In other words, the story is not only that destructive myths persist, but also that humanity has developed institutions and ideas that help constrain their influence.
My Insert:
Chat, again due to whatever “biases”, appears initially to miss the critical influence of religious ideas across the descending history from primitive mythologies to present narratives. It seems to miss the fact that primitive myths shaped what became the archetypes of human subconscious and those still shape and structure most human thinking, emotion, motivation, and behavior in all the human belief systems, movements, and endeavors that Chat noted just above.
I would introduce to this discussion with AI the critical influence of the two entirely opposite theologies and messages of Historical Jesus versus Paul’s Christ myth. These go to the heart of the issue- i.e. Paul’s Christ myth embodying the main bad ideas of all previous history and narratives, with the entirely opposite Jesus message introducing an entirely new theology with entirely new humane themes to shape human minds and life.
Chat in the following comment tries to downplay the religious element (religious beliefs, themes), to dismiss and even deny it. Yes, the other factors that Chat mentions are also in the mix but not as primary/prominent in influence as the core religious archetypes.
(End of insert)
Chat continues…
What would make this distinctive
Rather than a conventional history of religion, I see this as a history of recurring narrative structures. The organizing question would not be:
“What did each religion teach?”
Instead, it would be:
“Which recurring story patterns have repeatedly shaped human civilization, and what have been their consequences?”
That focus would allow you to compare religions, political ideologies, and secular movements within a common analytical framework while acknowledging both similarities and important differences. It also creates space to explore the alternative story themes you emphasize— such as universal human dignity, freedom, forgiveness, and gradual progress— and to examine how those have likewise emerged, evolved, and influenced societies across history.
Chat continues in a following reply:
I think that framing gives the project a much stronger scholarly foundation. It shifts the emphasis away from arguing that one tradition simply “caused” another and toward examining recurring patterns that have appeared, disappeared, and reappeared in different historical contexts. It also leaves room for evidence that some ideas spread through direct historical transmission, while others emerged independently because they address recurring features of human psychology and social organization.
One additional refinement I would make is to treat these recurring themes as hypotheses about narrative structures rather than as immutable laws of history. That invites readers to evaluate the evidence instead of asking them to accept a predetermined conclusion.
A possible opening thesis might read something like this:
Throughout recorded history, remarkably similar narrative structures have appeared in religions, political ideologies, national myths, and secular worldviews. Although these traditions differ profoundly in theology, philosophy, and historical circumstances, they often organize human experience around recurring themes— cosmic conflict, catastrophe, chosen communities, moral dualism, sacrifice, redemption, and visions of an ideal future. This study examines how such narrative patterns have emerged, evolved, and influenced societies across cultures and centuries. It also considers alternative narrative structures— centered on universal human dignity, individual freedom, forgiveness, open inquiry, and gradual improvement—and explores whether these have tended to produce different historical outcomes.
I would then organize the book around recurring themes rather than around religions.
Part I: The Deep Origins of Human Story
This section would explore why myth emerged at all. Human beings evolved in environments marked by danger, uncertainty, tribal competition, disease, and natural disasters. Storytelling became a way of organizing experience, transmitting survival knowledge, creating social cohesion, and explaining the unknown.
Possible themes include:
• Agency behind natural events (spirits, gods, ancestors)
• Tribal identity
• Sacred space and sacred time
• Ritual sacrifice
• Hero narratives
• Floods and cosmic destruction
• Death and the hope of renewal
Rather than judging these stories, this section would ask why they proved so psychologically compelling.
Part II: The Great Narrative Structures
Each chapter would follow one narrative across history.
For example:
The Catastrophe Narrative
Primitive flood myths
↓
Mesopotamian myths
↓
Persian cosmic renewal
↓
Jewish apocalyptic literature
↓
Christian Second Coming
↓
Islamic Last Judgment
↓
Millennial movements
↓
Revolutionary Marxism
↓
Twentieth-century nuclear fears
↓
Contemporary ecological collapse narratives
Alternative:
History as continuous adaptation and problem-solving rather than inevitable collapse.
The Cosmic Enemy
Chaos monsters
↓
Demons
↓
Satan
↓
Heretics
↓
Infidels
↓
Class enemies
↓
Counter-revolutionaries
↓
Enemies of the people
↓
Racial enemies
↓
Modern ideological “enemies”
Alternative:
Recognizing opponents as morally complex individuals rather than embodiments of absolute evil.
Sacrifice and Redemptive Violence
Human sacrifice
↓
Animal sacrifice
↓
Holy war
↓
Martyrdom
↓
Revolutionary terror
↓
Political purges
↓
Violence justified by future redemption
Alternative:
Justice through institutions, reconciliation, negotiation, and lawful accountability.
The Chosen Community
Chosen tribe
↓
Chosen nation
↓
Chosen religion
↓
Chosen race
↓
Chosen class
↓
Chosen party
↓
Chosen civilization
Alternative:
Universal human equality under shared legal and moral principles.
Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained
Golden Age myths
↓
Garden narratives
↓
Millennial kingdoms
↓
Communist utopia
↓
National rebirth
↓
Technological utopias
↓
Ecological harmony
Alternative:
Human flourishing as an ongoing process without expectation of perfection.
Part III: Historical Case Studies
This section would examine how combinations of these themes have operated in concrete historical settings rather than attributing events to any single idea.
Possible case studies include:
• Ancient Near Eastern empires
• Classical Greece and Rome
• The Persian religious synthesis
• Second Temple Judaism
• Medieval Christendom
• The Protestant Reformation
• The French Revolution
• Soviet communism
• Maoist China
• National Socialism
• North Korea
• Liberal constitutional democracies
The analysis would ask which narrative patterns became dominant, how they shaped institutions, and what consequences followed.
Part IV: The Emergence of Alternative Narratives
One of the most original aspects of your project could be showing that history is not simply the persistence of destructive myths. Humanity has also developed narratives and institutions that temper some of these recurring tendencies.
These include:
• The rule of law replacing personal vengeance.
• Freedom of conscience reducing religious coercion.
• Scientific inquiry encouraging revision in light of evidence.
• Constitutional government limiting concentrations of power.
• Human rights expanding moral concern beyond tribe, nation, or creed.
• Markets and voluntary exchange reducing zero-sum conflict.
• Democratic institutions providing peaceful mechanisms for political change.
• International cooperation replacing some forms of conquest and imperial rivalry.
None of these developments eliminated conflict or injustice, but they introduced institutional safeguards against some of the more destructive patterns associated with absolutism, scapegoating, and utopian certainty.
Part V: An Open Future
Rather than ending with the claim that humanity has escaped myth, I would argue that we remain deeply shaped by narrative. The central question is not whether people will live by stories, but which kinds of stories are most likely to sustain peaceful, open, and flourishing societies.
This conclusion would emphasize several recurring alternatives to destructive narrative structures:
• Human beings possess equal moral worth regardless of tribe, class, race, religion, or nationality.
• Opponents are rarely pure embodiments of evil; most conflicts involve competing interests, values, and perceptions.
• Social progress is generally achieved through gradual reform, experimentation, and correction rather than through visions of perfect societies.
• Institutions that disperse power, protect dissent, and encourage open inquiry are more resilient than systems built around unquestionable authority.
• Scientific knowledge advances by testing and revising ideas rather than treating any doctrine as beyond criticism.
• Forgiveness and reconciliation can interrupt cycles of retaliation that perpetuate violence across generations.
• Hope is strongest when grounded in human creativity and cooperation rather than in expectations of inevitable catastrophe or guaranteed utopia.
A broader perspective
What I find particularly promising about this project is that it is not simply a critique of religion or ideology. Instead, it becomes an inquiry into the recurring narrative habits of the human mind. Religious traditions, political ideologies, national myths, and secular movements all draw on shared psychological and cultural resources, though they combine and interpret them in very different ways.
The historical record suggests that no civilization has been entirely free of myths of catastrophe, chosenness, cosmic struggle, or redemption. At the same time, history also shows the gradual emergence of ideas and institutions that encourage self-criticism, protect individual dignity, distribute power, and resolve conflicts without violence. The enduring tension between these two sets of narrative structures— the pull toward certainty, exclusion, and redemptive struggle on one hand, and the development of pluralism, liberty, and peaceful coexistence on the other— may be one of the defining themes of human civilization.
That framing gives your project a central analytical question that can be explored across millennia and cultures: not whether any one tradition is uniquely responsible for humanity’s achievements or failures, but how recurring narrative patterns have shaped both, and how alternative narratives and institutions have sometimes moderated their more destructive consequences.
Mine: Ok, lets go ahead with the project as you have outlined it.
Chat response:
Excellent. I think this has the potential to become something much more significant than a survey of religions. It could become a work in comparative mythology, intellectual history, psychology, and civilization—asking a single overarching question:
What recurring narrative structures have shaped human civilization, and why have some tended toward freedom and flourishing while others have tended toward fear, authoritarianism, and recurring cycles of violence?
I also think the project would be stronger if it does not begin with the assumption that certain ideas are “bad.” Instead, it can investigate why they emerged, why they were adaptive in early human societies, why they persisted, and why some eventually became maladaptive as civilization grew more complex. That historical and anthropological framing makes the analysis more persuasive because it explains the appeal of these narratives rather than merely condemning them.
My proposed title
The Great Story: Recurring Narrative Structures in Human Civilization
Subtitle:
From Primitive Myth to Modern Ideology: How Stories Shape Societies
or
The Evolution of Humanity’s Deepest Narratives
I prefer the second subtitle because “evolution” suggests change, adaptation, divergence, and continuity without implying a single linear descent.
Central Thesis
The book’s central thesis would be something like this:
Human beings are storytelling creatures. Long before philosophy or science, myths provided cognitive maps that explained danger, suffering, morality, social order, death, and hope. Many of these narrative structures proved extraordinarily durable, reappearing in successive religions, political ideologies, national myths, and secular movements. Although their symbols changed, their underlying patterns often remained remarkably stable. At the same time, history reveals the gradual emergence of alternative narratives emphasizing universal dignity, liberty, open inquiry, forgiveness, and incremental progress. The continuing tension between these two families of narratives has profoundly shaped human civilization.
Notice that this thesis does not assume that every later ideology is directly descended from every earlier one. Instead, it proposes that similar narrative architectures recur because they resonate with enduring aspects of human psychology and social life.
My Insert:
Why this AI hesitancy to note the role of bad religious ideas? That influence shaped the archetypes of human subconscious from where those religious archetypes still influence succeeding generations to embrace the same themes, to find “emotional satisfaction” in embracing those bad ideas even when they incite, energize, and validate the worst impulses in us to tribalism, domination, and punitive treatment, even destruction, of differing others.
And most central is the theological idea that is the cohering center or narratives, the God that is humanity’s ultimate reality, ideal and authority. The center of the “behavior based on belief” coupling that is how we manifest our primary impulse for meaning and purpose.
AI still does not get this critical point of transformation of theology as critical to defeating bad narratives and thereby defusing bad outcomes, that “It’s the theology, stupid”. That is what Jesus understood and why he went directly to the God of Judaism and rejected the traditional deity of vengeance against enemies and offered instead his stunning new God of no conditions love.
He stated his message as “No more eye for eye retaliatory vengeance but instead love your enemy because God does”. And he listed precepts to show exactly how to love enemies/offenders, how to be unconditionally merciful just as God is unconditionally merciful.
And how did people respond to his new theology and message? They responded with murderous rage and tried to kill him.
Chat continued…
I would actually begin before religion
Chapter One would be anthropology.
Why Human Beings Need Stories. Not religion. Stories.
Questions like:
Why did Homo sapiens become the storytelling species?
Why does every known culture invent myths?
Why do children naturally think teleologically?
Why are agency detection and pattern recognition so powerful?
Why are heroes universal?
Why do humans repeatedly expect both apocalypse and paradise?
This chapter would draw on evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, anthropology, archaeology, and comparative mythology.
Then I would introduce what I call the Twelve Great Narrative Structures
Instead of “bad ideas,” I would call them recurring narrative structures.
For example:
1. Catastrophe
The world is heading toward destruction.
Appears in
• Flood myths
• Ragnarök
• Zoroastrian renovation
• Jewish apocalypse
• Christian Revelation
• Islamic Judgment
• Revolutionary collapse
• Nuclear annihilation
• Some contemporary ecological collapse narratives
Alternative
History is open-ended.
Problems emerge continuously.
Solutions emerge continuously.
2. Cosmic Dualism
Reality divided into absolute good versus absolute evil.
Manifestations:
Light versus darkness
God versus Satan
Believers versus infidels
Elect versus damned
Proletariat versus bourgeoisie
Aryan versus Jew
People versus enemies of the people
Alternative
Human beings possess mixed motives.
Moral conflicts are rarely absolute.
3. Chosen Identity
Our tribe uniquely represents truth.
This can become
Chosen people
Chosen empire
Chosen race
Chosen class
Chosen party
Chosen civilization
Alternative
Universal dignity.
Universal rights.
Shared humanity.
4. Purification
The world can be cleansed.
Through
Sacrifice
Holy war
Purges
Revolution
Cultural revolution
Ethnic cleansing
Alternative
Reform rather than purification.
5. Paradise
History culminates in perfection.
Golden Age
Eden
Millennium
Communism
National rebirth
Technological utopia
Alternative
Perpetual improvement without perfection.
And so on.
Instead of calling these “bad ideas,” the book would ask:
Why are humans so repeatedly attracted to these narrative forms?
Then every chapter becomes an historical journey
Take Catastrophe.
Start around 30,000 BCE.
Hunter-gatherers. Natural disasters.
Then
Mesopotamia
↓
Egypt
↓
Persia
↓
Judaism
↓
Christianity
↓
Islam
↓
Medieval millennialism
↓
French Revolution
↓
Marx
↓
Lenin
↓
Mao
↓
Cold War
↓
Climate discourse
↓
Future scenarios
Notice: The point is not that every stage directly caused the next.
Rather: The same story architecture keeps reappearing.
Likewise for every other theme. Eventually readers begin recognizing patterns. Not identical beliefs. Patterns.
One chapter I think would be especially original- The Secularization of Religious Narrative
Not- “religion disappears.”
Rather:
Religious narrative structures migrate.
For example
Salvation
↓
Political liberation
Messiah
↓
Revolutionary leader
Kingdom of God
↓
Classless society
Final Judgment
↓
Revolution
Original Sin
↓
Systemic corruption
Heresy
↓
Counter-revolution
Saints
↓
Revolutionary heroes
Sacred texts
↓
Party canon
Orthodoxy
↓
Ideological conformity
Again, not every ideology functions identically, but many political movements adopt structures that resemble religious forms in how they define authority, identity, and moral purpose.
But then comes what I think should become the heart of the entire book
Instead of ending pessimistically— “Humans always repeat myths.” —I think the climax should be
The Great Escape
History also reveals another trajectory. Beginning especially in
Greek philosophy
Roman law
Elements within the Hebrew prophetic tradition
Teachings emphasizing compassion and universal concern across several Axial Age traditions
The Renaissance
Scientific Revolution
Enlightenment
Classical liberalism
Modern constitutional democracy
Human rights
Scientific skepticism
Open societies
Not because these movements eliminated myth. But because they increasingly institutionalized self-correction. That is extraordinary. Civilizations invented mechanisms for admitting error.
That may be one of humanity’s greatest achievements.
The concluding chapters
Rather than asking “What religion is true?” they ask “What kinds of stories allow free societies to flourish?”
Perhaps those stories include:
• Every person possesses equal dignity.
• Institutions should be accountable.
• Knowledge remains open to revision.
• Political opponents are not enemies to be destroyed.
• Progress comes through learning rather than purification.
• Diversity of viewpoints strengthens societies.
• Freedom of conscience enables peaceful coexistence.
• Justice should be pursued through law rather than vengeance.
• Hope is grounded in human creativity and cooperation, not only in expectations of catastrophic endings or perfect worlds.
One suggestion I would make
As we develop this project over many conversations, I would recommend treating it almost like an academic monograph rather than a popular polemic. That means each major claim would be supported by historical evidence, and alternative interpretations would be acknowledged where they exist. Doing so would not prevent you from advancing your own thesis; it would make that thesis more robust by engaging competing explanations rather than assuming them away.
I would also encourage one further refinement that I think would distinguish the work from many existing books: alongside the recurring “problematic” narrative structures, we should trace the historical emergence of their corresponding alternatives. In other words, the book would not simply catalogue recurring patterns of catastrophe, chosenness, or cosmic conflict; it would also follow the development of narratives of universal human dignity, freedom of conscience, forgiveness, scientific inquiry, constitutional restraint, and gradual reform. That parallel history would show not only how certain story structures have endured, but also how humanity has repeatedly generated new narratives and institutions that temper, redirect, or constrain some of their more destructive tendencies. I think that balanced architecture could become the project’s most distinctive contribution.
More coming…