Modern life makes it easy to forget the world in which we evolved (the EEA—Environment of our Evolutionary Adaptedness). Most people in developed societies live at a considerable distance from predation, starvation, and violent death. We can simply buy food without giving much thought to the possibility of starvation, let alone the struggle required to stay alive through most of human history. The institutions that protect us from once-routine dangers work so well that we can lose sight of why we need them. From this comfortable distance, it is tempting to regard competition or scarcity as artificial products of defective social systems. If only society were organized more rationally or compassionately, perhaps these disagreeable features of existence could finally be eliminated.

Anyone who has seriously studied the natural world knows otherwise. Life is a continuing contest for limited resources. Organisms compete for resources such as food, water, territory, shelter, and status, as well as mates and opportunities to reproduce. Predation is routine and disease pervasive. Death is one of the defining features of the natural order, and most organisms that have lived left no descendants. That, of course, does not mean that nature supplies a moral code. Disease, for example, is natural, yet we devote enormous effort to preventing and treating it. The same distinction applies to social life: recognizing that competition is part of our evolutionary inheritance does not oblige us to celebrate its cruelties. It does, however, mean that political institutions must be designed for the organisms we actually are.

Yet competition presents an apparent evolutionary puzzle. Human beings do not merely compete. We also cooperate, on a scale unmatched by any other animal. In today’s world, millions of strangers collaborate every day without meeting, speaking, or even knowing of one another’s existence. Are we therefore self-centered or cooperative? The research suggests that the question poses a false choice.

Why We Cooperate 

Humans possess both cooperative and self-protective dispositions. We can display generosity, loyalty, and a willingness to punish unfairness, although such displays may also serve strategic purposes. In The Prince, Machiavelli famously observed that appearing merciful and upright can be politically useful even when those appearances do not fully reflect a person’s conduct. More generally, human behavior is sensitive to many incentives and expectations, reputational pressures, one’s group membership, and even the conduct of other people. A small number of defectors, for example, can induce conditional cooperators to withdraw, while a visible core of reliable cooperators can sometimes move a group in the opposite direction.^1, 2 Human beings are capable of genuine attachment and sacrifice, but these capacities arose within an evolutionary process governed by survival and reproductive success. We are not unconditionally altruistic; we are conditionally and strategically cooperative. 

Cooperation evolved within competition because, under the right conditions, cooperators can outperform individuals who act alone. Natural selection favors strategies that improve survival and reproduction. Cooperation can be one of those strategies, but it requires an explanation: an organism that pays a cost to help another risks exploitation by an organism that accepts the benefit without returning it. Harvard biologist Martin Nowak has summarized five broad mechanisms through which cooperation can evolve: kin selection, direct reciprocity, indirect reciprocity, network reciprocity, and competition among groups.³

Kin selection helps explain sacrifices for relatives who are likely to carry copies of the same genes. Parents care for children, siblings assist one another, and social insects perform extraordinary acts of self-sacrifice within colonies of close genetic relatives. Kinship, however, cannot fully explain human cooperation. People routinely assist friends, associates, customers, employers, employees, and strangers with whom they share no close genetic relationship. Robert Trivers supplied one of the most important explanations in his 1971 theory of reciprocal altruism,⁴ under which an individual provides a benefit when there is a sufficient probability that the recipient will return a benefit later. The exchange need not be immediate or exactly equal. One person may provide food today, information next month, protection during a crisis, or support years later. Cooperators must distinguish reliable partners from opportunists. They must reward reciprocity, distrust cheaters, punish exploitation, and sometimes forgive defectors who return to cooperation. 

Conditional Cooperation 

Psychologist Leda Cosmides and anthropologist John Tooby, pioneers in the field of evolutionary psychology, argued that social exchange repeatedly confronted ancestral humans with a specific adaptive problem: how to obtain the gains from cooperation without being systematically exploited by cheaters.⁵ Human reasoning is especially alert to violations of conditional rules when benefits are taken without required costs. We do not merely calculate material outcomes; we track who has fulfilled the terms of an exchange. We build and value reputations and are often willing to incur personal costs to punish those who claim benefits without contributing. In fact, tolerating a free rider threatens the credibility of the entire cooperative arrangement.

In the early 1980s, political scientist Robert Axelrod and biologist W.D. Hamilton, renowned for his work on kin selection and inclusive fitness (widely considered one of the 20th century’s most important evolutionary theorists), demonstrated how reciprocal cooperation could emerge in the absence of central authority.⁶ Their work drew on the Prisoner’s Dilemma experiments, a game in which two players independently choose whether to cooperate or cheat. Both earn points if they cooperate, but a player can earn more by cheating while the other cooperates, leaving the cooperative player with the lowest payoff. If both cheat, both do worse than if they had cooperated. In a single encounter, cheating earns a player more points regardless of what the other does. But when the same players meet repeatedly, cheating can cost them the benefits of cooperation in future encounters. Axelrod’s famous computer tournaments showed the power of strategies that begin cooperatively, respond to defection, and restore cooperation when the other player returns to it.⁷

This “shadow of the future” is absolutely crucial in the real world. Reputation allows reliable workers and firms to attract better partners, while trust lowers the cost of monitoring every transaction, and the prospect of future exchange makes a short-term act of exploitation expensive. When costs can be shifted indefinitely to strangers or rescue is guaranteed—incentives to defect become stronger.

We are not unconditionally altruistic; we are conditionally and strategically cooperative.

Recent research also cautions against treating repeated interaction as a complete explanation. A 2024 study combining evolutionary models with behavioral evidence found that repeated interaction alone and competition among groups alone did not reliably sustain cooperation across a broad range of strategies. Cooperation became much more robust when reciprocity within groups operated together with competition among groups.⁸ People cooperate internally, while the resulting groups compete externally.

That pattern is visible throughout modern society. For example, scientists cooperate within research teams while competing for discoveries and recognition, and athletes cooperate with teammates while competing against other teams. Nations depend on internal cooperation while competing economically, technologically, and sometimes militarily. This demonstrates that properly structured competition can discipline cooperation by requiring cooperative groups to produce results.

The problem, however, is even more complicated.

Hierarchy, Dominance, and Prestige

Human societies also form hierarchies. Human social groups repeatedly organize themselves according to differences in power, seniority, knowledge, skill, and reputation. Societies differ enormously in the form, permeability, and legitimacy of their hierarchies, but no large society has eliminated hierarchy itself.

Status can arise through at least two routes. Dominance obtains deference through control, intimidation, or the power to impose costs. Prestige attracts voluntarily conferred deference because others value a person’s knowledge, skill, judgment, generosity, or accomplishments. Anthropologists Joseph Henrich and Francisco Gil-White argued that prestige evolved partly because social learners benefited by identifying and copying successful individuals.⁹ A healthy society should restrain coercive dominance and encourage earned prestige. 

No system, no matter how fairly or thoughtfully designed, can entirely abolish social strata because individuals are not interchangeable. People differ in intelligence, health and physical capacity, creativity, social skills, risk tolerance, or even willingness to delay gratification. Men and women also differ on average in some physical, behavioral, and reproductive characteristics, even though their distributions overlap and group averages never determine the abilities of every individual.

The existence of differences, importantly, does not make every hierarchy just. Hierarchies can be distorted by many factors, including discrimination, corruption, fraud, or even simple luck. People can and do acquire wealth or status without creating corresponding value. The (political) challenge is therefore to be able to distinguish productive hierarchy from predatory hierarchy: prestige from dominance, contribution from extraction, and earned reward from political privilege. When economic competition is suppressed by the design of a political system, hierarchy does not disappear. It migrates into the state. People then compete for bureaucratic rank, party membership, favored occupations, access to planners, and influence over the distribution of resources such as licenses or housing allocations. In other words, society may compress visible differences in income while creating enormous differences in political power.

The Role of Choice 

Reciprocal cooperation depends upon the ability to choose interactive partners—personal, professional, or otherwise. People reward reliable associates and avoid unreliable ones. Employers select workers; workers choose employers; customers choose producers; lenders choose borrowers; friends withdraw from exploitative relationships; and communities exclude persistent cheaters. Recent research shows that mobility across group boundaries can extend cooperation. A 2025 experiment, for example, found that even limited freedom to move between groups helped participants reward cooperators, avoid free riders, and promote cooperation beyond their original group.¹⁰ Mobility did not abolish group loyalties, but it gave individuals a way to select better relationships. 

Freedom of exit—the ability of a skilled worker to seek a better employer or a dissatisfied customer to seek a better supplier—is one of the principal mechanisms through which reciprocal cooperation is enforced. When the state controls domains such as employment, housing, finance, or production, the citizen cannot easily choose another partner. Instead of being able to leave an unsatisfactory relationship, she must petition the same institution that created it, creating a vicious negative cycle. 

Years ago, when I was conducting research in the Soviet Union, I sometimes felt that the relationship between producer and consumer had been completely reversed. The employees did not work for the customer—the customer worked for the employees! On one occasion, I attempted to purchase an airline ticket from Moscow to Kamchatka, where I conducted my field work. The process required three separate lines: (1) an employee checked my identification; (2) another employee booked the flight; (3) a separate employee accepted payment. It was about an hour in each line.

From the customer’s perspective, the arrangement was absurd. One transaction that could have been completed at a single counter consumed much of a day. Yet the procedure made sense from the standpoint of the organization. It created several positions, divided responsibility into narrow tasks, and required each employee to perform only a small administrative function. The passenger’s time was treated as though it had no value. Such an arrangement was compatible with a Soviet system that promised employment to virtually everyone and measured success partly by maintaining jobs rather than by minimizing the customer’s time or improving the quality of service. 

In a competitive market, producers generally must accommodate consumers because dissatisfied consumers can leave.

The institution had no compelling reason to redesign the process around the traveler. It had been optimized for the bureaucracy rather than for the person the bureaucracy ostensibly served. In a competitive market, producers generally must accommodate consumers because dissatisfied consumers can leave. In a state monopoly, consumers must accommodate producers because they have nowhere else to go. In contrast, a queue in a market is usually information. It tells potential suppliers that demand exceeds available supply or that the transaction is poorly organized. The supplier who adds capacity or consolidates procedures to shorten the wait may profit. A bureaucracy is more likely to treat the same queue as an administrative condition: something to number, monitor, regulate, and distribute fairly.

Markets, obviously, do not eliminate every queue. People still wait at airports, hospitals, and popular sporting or music events, and monopolies and regulation can limit the market’s response. But competitive markets give businesses a continuing incentive to recognize waiting time as a cost and find ways to reduce it.

Who Supplies the Bread? 

Economist Paul Seabright famously recounted a revealing conversation that occurred approximately two years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He was speaking with a senior Russian official who had been responsible for directing bread production in St. Petersburg. The official wanted to understand the mechanics of a market economy and asked a simple question: Who was in charge of supplying bread to London?¹¹ The answer was that nobody was in overall charge.

Thousands of people—farmers, millers, bakers, truck drivers, warehouse operators, shop owners, and customers—coordinated their behavior without a single administrator directing the complete process. Each participant possessed only a fragment of the required knowledge. Yet Londoners could ordinarily purchase bread without waiting for a government office to calculate how many loaves the city should receive. 

Importantly, markets are not devoid of planning. Every actor—from farmers to households—makes plans. What markets lack is a single comprehensive plan. Austrian economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek noted that the knowledge required to coordinate an economy is, in a sense, unknowable to a single institution or individual. It is dispersed (among many people and geographies), incomplete, temporary, and often tacit. It cannot simply be collected by a central authority because much of it emerges only through “experimentation,” i.e., decisions, successes, and failures.¹² Prices, for example, help communicate these changing conditions. Rising prices can signal scarcity or greater demand; falling prices can signal abundance or declining interest. Profit attracts resources toward arrangements customers value. Loss warns that labor, materials, and capital are being used in ways that do not justify their cost.

Prices are not perfect. People can be manipulated, poorly informed, or simply constrained by poverty. External costs such as pollution may not be captured without law or regulation. But prices supply feedback that a comprehensive central plan cannot duplicate.

Capitalism as Spontaneous Cooperation 

Capitalism is often described as a celebration of selfishness. That description misses its most extraordinary feature: a functioning market economy is a system of cooperation among strangers. Nearly every object in a modern household exists because thousands of people coordinated their activities. They may live on different continents, speak different languages, practice different religions, and disagree on nearly every political question. They need not love one another! They need only identify a mutually beneficial exchange in which the buyer prefers to have the product and the seller the money. Both expect to gain.

This is reciprocal cooperation extended beyond intimate personal loyalty. Money, enforceable contracts, property rights, and the rule of law allow people to cooperate far beyond the small circles of kin and acquaintances for which much of human psychology originally evolved. Government has an essential role in maintaining those institutions, but the expectation of a future remains essential. Sellers, for example, depend on repeat business and reputation, while buyers depend on warranties and the prospect that suppliers will still exist tomorrow. Markets work best when neither side expects the transaction to be a final opportunity for exploitation.

Communism requires something fundamentally different. If private production and exchange are prohibited or severely restricted, an authority must decide what will be produced, in what quantities, by whom, with which resources, at what locations, for which recipients, and according to what priorities. The absence of markets transfers allocation to administrators. When official prices, production targets, and distribution rules fail to reflect actual supply and demand, black markets predictably emerge to satisfy needs that the formal system leaves unmet. 

This produces a paradox: Socialism often promises to transfer power from owners to the people, yet extensive central planning necessarily transfers immediate decisions to government officials. The more comprehensive the plan (someone must rank competing needs, distribute scarce goods, set wages, approve investments, etc.), the more domains of life become dependent upon administrative permission. Power is shifted away from voluntary relationships and toward the institutions that control allocation—the very concentration of power socialism claims to overcome. 

Nor does socialism eliminate competition. People continue to compete, but the object of competition changes: they compete for political influence (instead of competing for customers), persuade planners (in place of persuading consumers), and cultivate relationships with the officials who distribute resources. Economic competition shifts toward political competition.

Socialism and the Free-Rider Problem 

Public-goods experiments repeatedly find that cooperation is vulnerable to free riding. A 2023 meta-analysis covering more than 48,000 observations from 20 different studies of centralized public-goods experiments found that punishment was the only mechanism that reliably sustained cooperation over time—otherwise, regardless of hierarchy that could conceivably enforce sustained cooperation by its mere presence, contributions inevitably decay over time.¹³ The result underscores a recurring socialist dilemma. If voluntary effort declines, the state must monitor, compel, or punish. In other words, a system that begins with the promise of universal cooperation becomes increasingly dependent upon administrative enforcement. 

Socialism often promises to transfer power from owners to the people, yet extensive central planning necessarily transfers immediate decisions to government officials.

In my own Soviet experience, the cash rewards attached to very different kinds of work often appeared surprisingly compressed. Women sweeping streets and highly trained researchers could seem separated by much less pay than their differences in education, responsibility, and potential contribution would suggest. That observation should not be converted into the inaccurate claim that all Soviet workers earned the same wage. The Soviet system did contain wage differentials, status hierarchies, bonuses such as special housing or access to scarce goods, and other noncash privileges. The more defensible point is that administratively compressed wage structures weakened returns to education and shifted rewards into political and organizational channels. Indeed, economic research using Soviet household data found positive returns to education, but those returns were very low by comparison with many market economies and were intertwined with nonmonetary advantages.¹⁴ When material rewards do not adequately track training, effort, responsibility, and results, institutions must rely more heavily on prestige, privilege, and ideological duty. Yes, markets also misprice work and sometimes lavish wealth on activities of dubious social value, but the evolutionary point is narrower: persistent separation between contribution and reward weakens the expectation of reciprocity. 

Punishing defectors creates a second-order free-rider problem. Enforcement is itself costly. Who monitors the workers? Who pays the monitors? Who ensures that the monitors are performing their duties? Who prevents them from using authority against personal or political enemies? Soviet authorities often relied upon informants and workplace surveillance to identify ideological or administrative violations. The Australian historian of the Soviet Union, Sheila Fitzpatrick, described how official complaint systems and political surveillance in Stalinism would often become entangled with neighborhood resentments, workplace conflicts, patronage, and personal grievances.¹⁵ Naturally, not every Soviet citizen envied every successful neighbor, but success and nonconformity were politically vulnerable when allocation and advancement depended upon administrative judgment. 

Competition was not eliminated. Instead of gaining by producing something others voluntarily valued, an individual could gain by demonstrating loyalty, exposing a rival, or securing favor from those who controlled scarce opportunities. Every new layer of enforcement generated another principal-agent problem. 

China’s Hybrid Experiment 

China is an interesting case study that illustrates the tension between rewarding political loyalty and cultivating the expertise needed to compete with the rest of the world. Its claims to meritocracy have clear political limits: advancement can, and often does, depend on ideological conformity and obedience to state authority. Yet its leaders recognize that success in scientific and technological competition requires technical competence, whatever the prevailing political doctrine. China subordinates intellectual freedom to political control while treating technical competence as more important than demographic representation or ideological aspiration. Its 2024–2035 education strategy emphasizes identifying exceptional talent, the training of elite engineers and scientists, technological innovation, and evaluating performance according to quality, effectiveness, and contribution.¹⁶

The relevant lesson here for Western countries is that a society engaged in serious international competition cannot afford to subordinate demonstrable competence to ideological symbolism. We should be radically inclusive in discovering talent and uncompromisingly meritocratic when assigning responsibility. Inclusion enlarges the competition. Equity, when defined as predetermined equality of group outcomes, attempts to determine the result before the competition occurs. 

Importantly, China’s enormous economic expansion followed the market-oriented reforms which begun in 1978: decentralization, greater reliance on prices as economic signals, expansion of non-state enterprise, opening to foreign investment and trade, and greater freedom for producers to retain gains from their work. Indeed, China did not become prosperous by perfecting Maoist central planning but by retreating from it.¹⁷ Yet the Communist Party retained much control, by means of state ownership in strategic sectors and the power to direct investment toward political priorities. The resulting hybrid can be extraordinarily productive where markets, entrepreneurship, and competition are permitted. It can also generate massive distortions where political incentives override consumer demand and the discipline of loss. 

A successful society should channel the struggle for status away from coercive dominance and toward prestige earned through competence and contribution.

China’s housing sector provides a striking example. Popular accounts often refer to vast ghost cities and tens of thousands of empty buildings. For obvious reasons, precise national vacancy estimates are difficult to obtain, but completely abandoned cities are only the most spectacular part of the problem. Underutilized developments are more common and more measurable. A 2025 study published in Nature Cities, a peer-reviewed Springer Nature journal devoted to urban research, estimated that housing-utilization efficiency in 108 Chinese cities fell from approximately 84 percent in 2010 to 78 percent in 2020.¹⁸ Official Chinese figures reported 766.32 million square meters of commercial property awaiting sale at the end of 2025, including 402.36 million square meters of residential property; residential sales had also continued to decline.¹⁹ These figures have limitations (e.g., they do not count every privately owned but vacant apartment), but they document extraordinary unsold inventory. Compare the roughly 22 percent underutilization in China with the fact that in the U.S. and Western Europe those markets typically run with low single-digit vacancy rates and face the opposite problem (undersupply). 

The outcome did not result from a single national command to build empty apartments; private developers, investors, banks, and even local governments all participated. But their choices operated within a politicized system. This is not unlike a larger version of the three Soviet airline lines I discussed earlier. Both arrangements made sense for the institutions administering them while imposing costs on their supposed beneficiaries.

Why Socialism Keeps Returning 

History has shown us the results of the failure to understand how cooperation actually works. The twentieth century produced abundant evidence of the failures of centralized communist systems. Yet socialism continually returns as though it were a new idea. Historical memory fades, while the moral aspiration remains attractive. In 2022, Pew found that younger adults were more likely to hold favorable views of socialism and less favorable views of capitalism than older adults.²⁰ In 2025, Gallup reported that capitalism remained more popular overall, but its favorable rating had declined to 54 percent, while socialism was viewed favorably by 39 percent.²¹

These polls require caution. Some respondents use socialism to mean Soviet central planning while others mean universal health insurance, higher taxes, public education, or Scandinavian social democracy. Many people who express approval of socialism also approve of entrepreneurs, small businesses, and free enterprise. Socialism also benefits from an asymmetry in judgment. Capitalism is compared with its actual outcomes: inequality, recessions, unaffordable housing, or even corporate misconduct such as environmental pollution. By contrast, socialism is compared with its aspirations: equality, dignity, solidarity, security, and universal provision. When socialist institutions fail, advocates often attribute the result to insufficient socialism, bad leadership, foreign interference, historical conditions, or the claim that the system was never truly socialist. Then, definitions shift: The Soviet Union was authoritarian rather than socialist, China is capitalist because it permits markets, and Venezuela failed because of dependence on oil and corruption. Meanwhile, Scandinavia is described as socialist even though it preserves competition, bankruptcy, private property, and market prices. 

The argument I wish to make here concerns centralized socialism: extensive political control over production, investment, prices, employment, and allocation, combined with substantial weakening of private ownership, competition, and exit. Voluntary cooperatives, local mutual-aid associations, particular public services, welfare programs, and regulated market economies raise different questions and should not be dismissed by changing labels. 

The Strongest Counterargument: Successful Commons 

The Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom demonstrated that communities can sometimes manage common resources without either complete privatization or centralized state control.^22, 23 Her work is often presented as a rebuttal to the claim that shared resources inevitably produce a tragedy of the commons. But Ostrom’s successful cases did not abolish the game-theoretic problem; rather, they solved it! Successful commons usually had identifiable participants, clear boundaries, locally accepted rules, monitoring, graduated sanctions, conflict-resolution mechanisms, and the authority to exclude persistent defectors. They were decentralized, adapted to local knowledge, and governed by people who interacted repeatedly. 

These are precisely the conditions under which evolutionary theory predicts that cooperation can survive! A family can share resources because its members know one another, monitor behavior, interact repeatedly, and maintain powerful emotional commitments. Likewise, a worker cooperative can function because participants are identifiable and can link rules and rewards to contribution. None of these examples demonstrate that the same arrangement can expand without limit to millions of anonymous citizens who cannot select one another, directly observe contributions, or withdraw from the system. 

Conclusion 

Human civilization is one of evolution’s greatest cooperative achievements. It emerged because social and economic institutions allowed individuals to advance their own interests by helping others. Reciprocal altruism turned assistance into an advantageous long-term strategy. Reputation allowed cooperators to find one another. Moral emotions helped detect and punish cheaters. Partner choice allowed people to leave exploitative relationships. Competition among groups rewarded forms of internal cooperation that produced better results. Markets extend these mechanisms across enormous populations. 

Centrally planned socialism works against these mechanisms when it separates contribution from reward, weakens partner choice, obscures responsibility, protects organizations from failure, and replaces horizontal exchange with vertical administration. Its central problem is that human cooperation is conditional. A successful society should channel the struggle for status away from coercive dominance and toward prestige earned through competence and contribution. It should widen participation while preserving standards, protect the vulnerable without rewarding avoidable defection, and prevent both public and private institutions from transferring the costs of failure to others. 

Markets are by no means morally perfect. They can and do generate inequality, instability, environmental damage, exploitation, and fraud. The alternative to socialism is not indifference toward misfortune, nor is it the belief that every existing distribution of wealth is deserved. The objective that can increase human flourishing should be an inclusive market society that protects people from catastrophe, develops human capabilities, maintains open competition, prevents political privilege, and—in line with the facts outlined here—preserves the connection between contribution and reward.

Suppose you are shown a shadow moving across a wall. You can measure its length. You can watch its direction change. You can record its speed. With enough observations, you may even predict what it will do next. But how much do you actually know about the object casting it?

The shadow may preserve some information about its source, but it also destroys information. Different objects can cast similar shadows. The same object can cast radically different shadows under different conditions. And a convincing shadow might even be generated without the object you imagined being there at all.

That simple problem offers a useful skeptical rule for an age of UAP videos, ghost photographs, sensor anomalies, eyewitness testimony, and AI-generated media: Never attribute more structure to a hidden source than the evidence can carry.

Anomalous evidence is almost always a projection of some sort. A blurry light in the sky, an infrared signature, a photograph of an apparent figure, or a short video clip is a representation produced by an instrument, a witness, an algorithm, or some combination of them. A witness may even report an experience with extraordinary clarity and sincerity. Those facts can be real facts about the evidence without settling what caused it.

Consider a UAP video. The observation may justify a modest claim: something appears in the recording that the observer cannot presently identify. That is already interesting. But “unidentified” does not necessarily mean “extraterrestrial,” just as “anomalous” does not entail “supernatural.” The evidence may establish that there is an unresolved observation, but it does not automatically establish the ontology of whatever produced it.

The skeptical task is not to ban possibilities; it is to prevent possibility from masquerading as probability or evidence.

Whenever we encounter exaggerated inference about anomalous evidence (pretty much any time the topic is brought up in the media, podcasts, or conversations on social media), a useful way to discipline our reasoning is to pass the claims through five thresholds:

1. What was actually observed? Describe the evidence without smuggling the explanation into the description. “A bright object crossed the frame” is an observation. “An alien craft crossed the frame” is already an interpretation.

2. What must be true for this evidence to exist? This is the realm of necessary inference. A digital image requires some causal history. A radar trace requires a signal-processing event. A reported experience requires an experiencer and a memory report. But necessity usually takes us much less far than we want.

3. What remains underdetermined? Could multiple causes produce the same observation? Almost always, yes. Atmospheric effects, aircraft, sensor artifacts, perspective, misperception, hoaxes, classified technology, software processing, or genuinely unknown phenomena may overlap at the level of the evidence.

This is where the shadow analogy is most useful. A two-dimensional projection may be compatible with many three-dimensional sources. If several hidden structures could produce the same visible pattern, the visible pattern cannot by itself tell us which hidden structure is real.

4. What is merely possible? Possibility matters, but it is cheap. Aliens are possible. Unknown atmospheric phenomena are possible. Unknown technologies are possible. A supernatural explanation can be stated as a possibility too. The skeptical task is not to ban possibilities; it is to prevent possibility from masquerading as probability or evidence.

A realistic image or video can now function like a shadow cast by no corresponding event at all.

5. Where does inference become metaphysics? This is the boundary we cross when we begin describing the hidden source in detail even though the observation does not uniquely support that description. At that point we are no longer reading information from the evidence but adding information to it.

AI-generated media makes this problem even sharper. For most of photographic history, an image at least carried a default assumption that some external scene stood in a causal relationship to the picture, even if the scene was staged, misleading, or manipulated. Generative AI weakens that assumption. A realistic image or video can now function like a shadow cast by no corresponding event at all. We may now first have to ask, “Was there an object or event of this kind behind the image in the first place?”

Obviously, this does not mean that every extraordinary image is fake and every witness mistaken, or that every UAP is mundane. It means that extraordinary claims increasingly arrive through layers of mediation: cameras, compression, sensors, software, and now generative AI models. Each layer can distort or even manufacture patterns that invite fallacious or misguided interpretation.

The deeper lesson here is about how human beings reason whenever we are trapped on one side of an informational boundary. We see effects and infer causes. When we see outputs, we infer systems. To refer back to our analogy, when we see shadows, we tend to imagine the objects that cast them.

The error lies in forgetting when inference has outrun the information available.

Often, that is exactly how knowledge advances. Science routinely infers unobservable structures from observable effects. But, good inference earns each step by showing why the proposed hidden structure explains the evidence better than its alternatives and by generating tests that could prove it wrong.

So the next time a strange video, anomalous sensor trace, ghost image, or AI clip appears on your screen, try a simple question before asking what it “really is”: What can this shadow actually tell me about the thing—if any—that casts it? Then ask the harder question: At exactly which step did I stop observing the evidence and start supplying the hidden world myself? That boundary may be the most important thing in the picture.

In the foreword to Why We Believe in God(s): A Concise Guide to the Science of Faith, Richard Dawkins invites us to take an imaginative journey back thousands of years in human history, to a moment in Africa when we are a small hunter-gatherer hominin wandering in search of food. Suddenly, he hears a noise in the tall grass around him. That ancestor of ours faced at least two possibilities: the wind moved the branches and caused the sound, or the rustling in the brush meant a large-fanged predator was lurking nearby. If our ancestor fled assuming a predator when it was only the wind, the cost was low—some wasted energy and a little embarrassment. But if our ancestor stayed put and there really was a big cat, the cost could be death.

In short, the human mind tends to over-detect agency.¹ Wind is an inanimate force with no intention behind it, while a predator does have intention. This logic helps explain why the human brain may be predisposed to attribute intention or presence to ambiguous phenomena—a tendency that can, in turn, feed belief in invisible agents.

Those early humans began attributing intentionality to everything around them—in other words, they began to think that everything was alive, even things that were invisible. This gave rise to what is sometimes called the hyperactive agency detection device (HADD): a mechanism describing the mind’s tendency to detect agency from minimal information and to imagine invisible agents, laying the groundwork for animism and theism—that is, belief in gods or spirits.² If a Homo atheus ever existed, it evidently did not thrive against the Homo religiosus that emerged from this mechanism of attributing human-like intentionality to the natural world. In Darwinian terms, we are the descendants of those who fled the rustling grass, whether or not they guessed its cause correctly.

That human beings came to believe in one or several gods is perfectly understandable … their minds were already primed to detect agents.

Evolutionary psychology does not claim that humans began believing in gods all at once, nor that a “religion gene” exists. The most robust thesis holds that human beings inherited mental mechanisms useful for survival—agency detection, intention inference, the search for protection, the search for purpose, a tendency to remember striking narratives, and the cohesion produced by rituals—with ideas about spirits or gods emerging as a by-product of these mechanisms, later selected for culturally. Or, as anthropologist Pascal Boyer puts it,³ having a human brain does not mean “having religion,” but it does mean being able to acquire certain kinds of religious notions with relative ease. From there, mistaking a shadow for a burglar, attributing intention to the wind or a storm, or believing that an invisible agent can influence our lives and must be prayed to, can all be explained by the same underlying mental mechanisms.

A widespread quality found in the notion of deities is their strategic agency, which draws on theory of mind. Just as it is useful, when dealing with other humans, to attribute intentions, plans, and knowledge to them, it is easy to imagine that invisible agents like gods know, strategically and privately, what we do: who stole, who lied, who deserves punishment, who deserves protection. This makes them relevant to our moral systems and helps explain why so many religions end up linking gods, ancestors, and spirits with morality. Seen this way, morality does not originate in religion; and as has been demonstrated experimentally,⁴ priming (i.e., pre-activating linked mental associations) religious concepts can increase prosocial behavior in anonymous economic games—a finding that supports the idea that a watching god can function as a psychological mechanism of moral surveillance.

Another evolutionary pathway shaping our tendency to believe in one or several gods is the attachment system. Human infants depend on caregiving figures, and seeking the protection of a stronger figure is a basic adaptive mechanism. Believing in a divine attachment figure—invisible, protective, available, and onto whom early emotions of dependency, comfort, and security-seeking are transferred—is therefore an expected outcome. Not all gods are loving or protective, but it is common for them to take the form of a “father” or “mother” figure, which in a sense are natural templates for representing deities as attachment figures.⁵

The human mind tends to over-detect agency … a tendency that can, in turn, feed belief in invisible agents. 

And what about rituals? Evolutionary psychology has studied their role in belief in deities and in the intensity that religious experience can take on. One dimension of rituals is that they function as costly, hard-to-fake signals of commitment to the group—fasting, sacrifice, physically painful initiations, exhausting dances, or monetary donations—through which the group strengthens its cohesion.^6, 7 Additionally, our brains become highly activated by the excitement that typically accompanies religious rituals involving music, dance, cooperation, physical contact, trust, meditation, and heightened emotional arousal. Religious rites can activate reward pathways (dopamine), attachment and trust pathways (oxytocin), calm (serotonin), alertness (norepinephrine/adrenaline), and euphoria and analgesia (endorphins)—a combination that helps explain why rituals feel so intense and engage body, emotion, group, and brain all at once.^8, 9

That human beings came to believe in one or several gods is perfectly understandable from this view: our minds were already primed to detect agents, attribute intentions, seek protection, perceive purpose, imagine minds separate from bodies, remember mildly supernatural stories, and use rituals to bind groups together. It was a gradual process—as evolution always is—that led ordinary cognitive mechanisms to produce extraordinary concepts, such as the existence of one or several beings with divine characteristics.

So, where does spirituality come from?

Skeptic recently published “God Isn’t Dead: The World Is Becoming More Religious,”¹⁰ which showed that, globally, religious affiliation is projected to keep growing overall—driven not by conversion but by demographics, particularly higher fertility rates and younger median ages among Muslim and Christian populations, especially in Africa. That picture is accurate, and it is a useful corrective to Northern Hemisphere assumptions about religion’s terminal decline. But it describes a different phenomenon from the one this article is concerned with. The demographic story is about population-level growth in affiliation worldwide; what follows here is about individual-level psychology within the specific populations—chiefly the United States and Western Europe—where formal religious affiliation is, in fact, declining. The two pictures are not in tension: a population can be religiously non-affiliated in growing numbers in the West while religious affiliation still grows globally in absolute terms, driven by fertility elsewhere. The question this section asks is narrower and more psychological: among the people who are leaving organized religion, what happens to the cognitive machinery that evolutionary psychology has just described?

The same cognitive mechanisms that lead to belief in God(s) can also produce a “spirituality without gods.”

Just as evolutionary psychology and neuroscience (neurotheology) explain religion and belief in God(s), they can also shed light on “secular spirituality.” Several U.S. surveys show shifts in how people experience their spiritual lives. The Pew Research Center study “Spirituality Among Americans”¹¹ finds that 70 percent of U.S. adults consider themselves “spiritual” in some sense, while 22 percent identify as “spiritual but not religious,” 48 percent as both religious and spiritual, and 21 percent as neither. The share identifying as “spiritual but not religious” rose 8 percentage points over five years. In addition, the share of adults with no religious affiliation reaches 28 percent overall and 43 percent among adults under 30. Furthermore, 88 percent of those who are “spiritual but not religious” believe something spiritual exists beyond the natural world, even if they cannot see it, and 42 percent say religion causes division and intolerance.

Gallup’s “Religion and Social Trends” survey finds that just under half of U.S. adults describe themselves as religious, while 33 percent say they are spiritual but not religious, and 18 percent say neither—alongside a historic low of 20 percent of Americans who now say they believe the Bible is literally true.

A final data point, from the Springtide Research Institute,¹² focuses specifically on young people: 71 percent identify as at least somewhat religious and 79 percent as spiritual; three-quarters claim a specific religion, tradition, or worldview, including “spiritual but not religious,” while a quarter identify as atheist, agnostic, or “none.” 

The same cognitive mechanisms that lead to belief in God(s) can also produce a “spirituality without gods.” That is, HADD, theory of mind, attachment systems, and ritual do not disappear when religious affiliation declines—they simply find expression in activities such as yoga, meditation, contact with nature, or a felt connection to “energy” or “the universe.” In this sense, the demographic decline of organized religion in the West and the persistence—even growth—of secular spirituality are not contradictory trends; they are two faces of the same evolved psychology, one losing its traditional object of belief while the underlying mechanisms remain fully active.

We’re human. Not believing in God(s), not living a spiritual life, or not taking part in religious rites is, considering the evidence, something extraordinarily difficult to stop from happening—even when the god is gone.

Consciousness is often defined as “what it’s like to be something,” inspired by the philosopher Thomas Nagel’s 1974 classic paper, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” As he explained the problem: “An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something that it is like for the organism.”¹ Let’s make dolphins our subject of inquiry. If I added echolocation to my sensory systems, perhaps I would be able to “see” the shapes of things with sound waves, and that would nudge me a bit closer to dolphin-ness. Strapping on one of those giant monofins to my feet to serve as a tail would allow me to feel what it’s like to power through a viscous aquatic medium, which would be made all the smoother if I donned one of those rubbery Olympic full-body swimsuits to mimic the dolphin’s sleek, smooth, rubbery skin texture. Adding a snorkel that serves as a blowhole for breathing, an appetite for squid (sushi, anyone?), and the ability to make clicks and whistle sounds might nudge me further along the dolphin-ness scale.

But the only way to have the full-on qualitative experience of dolphin-ness is to actually be a dolphin with all that entails anatomically, physiologically, neurologically, and cognitively. In that case, then, I would no longer be a human wondering what it’s like to be a dolphin. I’d just be a dolphin, and very likely not asking what it’s like to be a human. This is what is called the hard problem of consciousness. 

As first proposed by the philosopher David Chalmers, the problem is trying to explain how we are able to experience the world from inside a wet neurochemical brain machine.² The easy problem of consciousness would be to explain how, for example, the color red is processed in the retina of the eye and then transduced into neurochemical processes back to the visual cortex of the brain. The hard problem is explaining how it is that we can experience “redness.” 

That qualitative experience is called qualia, and in the history of philosophy, this is also known as the mind-body problem—how nonmaterial mind emerges from material body. As Nagel reflected, “Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless.”³ The neuroscientist Christof Koch put it this way: 

How can activity in the brain trigger feelings? It’s just squishy stuff. How can mere meat, as cyberpunk novels dismissively refer to the body, engender sentience? Putting it more generally, how can anything physical give rise to something nonphysical, to subjective states?⁴

The hard problem is not only hard for all these anatomical, physiological, neurological, and cognitive reasons, I put it into the category of a known unknowable because it is logically impossible to solve for the simple reason that it would violate Aristotle’s Law of Identity—A is A. Thus: A cannot also be non-A. 

You cannot at one and the same time be one thing (a human) and another thing (a dolphin). If I were able to shape-shift from human to dolphin, I would not retain my humanness while inside the body and brain of a dolphin. I would just be a dolphin, full stop. Put another way, asking what it’s like to be one thing precludes one from knowing what it’s like to be a different thing. It’s conceptually contradictory. Understanding how the brain machinery works is different from experiencing the brain machinery itself. 

The hard problem’s thought experiment of wondering what it’s like to be something is also conceptually flawed in that it implies a form of dualism, in which my soul or homunculus or mini-me transports into the body of a dolphin to experience its physical and mental state of being. This is not possible because there is no ghost in the machine, no soul in the body, and no mind in the brain, as if these are different entities that can separate and travel elsewhere. 

This essentialism about the self, as it is called, leads us to intuitively feel like we have a soul or mind, separate from the body and brain. So we get the humor of films like All of Me, in which the gendered soul of Steve Martin’s character switches places with that of Lili Tomlin so that each knows what it’s like to be the other sex (with all the gender bending comedy that follows), or the film Freaky Friday, in which the teenage essence of Lindsay Lohan swaps places with the middle-aged mom essence of Jamie Lee Curtis, and hilarity ensues as the middle-aged mom is suddenly filled with teenage angst mingling with her youthful peers, and the immature teenager suddenly finds herself in adult situations for which she is ill-equipped. 

Novelists have explored similar themes. In Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, a man falls asleep and wakes up as a cockroach, while his human personality remains intact inside the insect. But that is not what would happen. After the metamorphosis from human to arthropod, the essence of humanness would simply dissolve away while the essence of cockroach takes its place. Yet, such Gedankenexperiments fill us with imaginative worlds we can never experience in real life. Here is how the psychologist Paul Bloom explains the process: 

In fact most people around the world believe that an even more radical transformation actually takes place. Most people believe that when the body is destroyed, the soul lives on. It might ascend to heaven, or descend to hell, go off into some sort of parallel world, or occupy some other body, human or animal. Even those of us who do not hold such views have no problems understanding them. But they are only coherent if we see people as separate from their bodies.⁵

Here, the distinction in worldviews is that between dualism and monism. Dualists believe that we consist of two substances—body and soul, brain and mind (called “substance dualism”). Monists contend that there is just one substance—a body and a brain—from which consciousness is an emergent property; “mind” is just the term we use to describe what the brain is doing, and the soul is just the pattern of information that represents our thoughts, memories, and personalities. 

As such, monists hold that the death of the body—the disintegration of the material body and the degradation of memory patterns in the brain—means the death of the soul. By contrast, dualists assert that the soul, like the mind, is a separate entity from the body, so even after the death of the body, our sense is that the soul will continue. 

Most people are dualists because dualism is intuitive—it just feels like there is something else inside of us, in the same way that the thoughts floating around up there in our skulls feel like our mind is separate from our brain. Thus, Bloom calls us “natural-born dualists,” as reflected in our language when we use phrases such as “my body aches” (rather than “I ache”) or “my mind is muddled” (rather than “I am muddled”), as if “my” and “body” and “mind” are separate things.⁶

Understanding how the brain machinery works is different from experiencing the brain machinery itself.

Not everyone agrees that the hard problem of consciousness is an insoluble one, and there are at present at least 22 theories of consciousness as documented by Anil Seth and Tim Bayne in their review article of the subject, including (to name but a few): 

Higher-order theory (HOT), Self-organizing meta-representational theory, Global workspace theories (GWTs), Integrated information theory (IIT), Information closure theory, Dynamic core theory, Neural Darwinism, Predictive processing, Neuro-representationalism, Active inference, Attention schema theory, Electromagnetic field theory, Orchestrated objective reduction theory.⁷

The psychiatrist Ralph Lewis has pruned the 22 theories of consciousness down to four he thinks have the best chance of succeeding: 

Higher-Order Theories (HOT): thoughts become conscious when basic perceptions (“lower-order” representations) become re-represented as higher-order representations at higher levels of the brain, specifically in the prefrontal cortex. 

Global Workspace Theories (GWT): perceptions, thoughts, emotions, etc. become conscious when they gain access to a “workspace,” or to apply another analogy, when they make it into the “spotlight”—as if the mind were a theater where conscious thought is the activity in the spotlight on the stage at a given moment. 

Integrated Information Theory (IIT): how parts of a brain interact to create a unified experience. Consciousness is theorized to be related to how much information is integrated among the different parts of the brain. IIT tries to mathematically measure this. The more information that is connected and integrated, the more conscious the system is thought to be. The theory suggests that not just brains but any complex system with the right level of interconnectedness and integration of information could exhibit consciousness, with simpler systems manifesting only an insignificant modicum of consciousness. IIT attempts to explain the quality of conscious experience, suggesting that the unique pattern of relationships between the elements of the system is what defines a particular conscious experience. 

Re-Entry and Predictive Processing Theories: conscious mental states are associated with top-down signaling. Top-down signaling refers to the process by which higher-level brain regions send information, expectations, or context to lower-level brain regions. This communication helps shape how the brain perceives and interprets bottom-up information received via its sense organs from the world around it.⁸

Which of the 22 (or 4) theories are likeliest to be true? Lewis cautions that “it would be unrealistic for us to expect to have been completely solved at this early stage in the still-young science of consciousness,” and he may be right. Then again, Lewis identifies a conceptual problem in the entire enterprise, that is, a problem with the concept of consciousness itself, when he notes that “as soon as the first cell evolved there was an inside and an outside, and therefore the beginnings of a subjective-objective divide between the body and the outside world.”⁹ That is, how can something or someone outside of something or someone know what it’s like inside that system? 

The Weak Consciousness Principle vs. the Strong Consciousness Principle 

Here is how Deepak Chopra described consciousness in his 2017 book You Are the Universe: 

Consciousness is fundamental and without cause. It is the ground state of existence. As conscious beings, humans cannot experience, measure, or conceive of a reality devoid of consciousness.¹⁰

Since you have to be conscious to experience anything, when Chopra proposes that consciousness and the universe are equivalent, in the sense that it is an “undeniable fact that any universe is only knowable through the human mind’s ability to perceive reality,” he is stating the obvious. Call this the Weak Consciousness Principle (WCP): you have to be conscious to experience consciousness. 

But Deepak goes further than this when he says, “if all human knowledge is rooted in consciousness, perhaps we are viewing not the real universe based on limitations of the brain” and “that the apparent evolution of the cosmos since the Big Bang has been totally dependent upon human consciousness.” That’s reversing the causal arrow, from perception to determination, from being consciously aware of the universe and trying to understand it, to our own consciousness bringing about the universe. Call this the Strong Consciousness Principle (SCP). Which one is right? 

In my understanding of the neural correlates of consciousness, the hypothesis that the brain creates consciousness has vastly more evidence for it than the hypothesis that consciousness creates the brain. Damage to the fusiform gyrus of the temporal lobe, for example, causes prosopagnosia, or face blindness, and stimulation of this same area causes people to see faces spontaneously. Stroke-caused damage to the visual cortex region called V1 leads to loss of conscious visual perception. Changes in conscious experience can be directly measured by fMRI, EEG, and single-neuron recordings. Neuroscientists can predict human choices from brain scan activity before the subject is even consciously aware of the decisions made. Using brain scans alone, neuroscientists have even been able to reconstruct on a computer screen what someone is seeing.¹¹

In other words, brain activity = conscious experience. 

Thousands of lab experiments, in conjunction with naturally occurring experiments in the form of brain tumors, strokes, accidents, and injuries, confirm the hypothesis that neurochemical processes produce subjective experiences. 

In other words, neural activity = qualia. 

In the end, I agree with Steven Pinker’s final assessment of the hard problem of consciousness, which he articulated in his 2018 book Enlightenment Now: 

Our best science tells us that consciousness consists of a global workspace representing our current goals, memories, and surroundings, implemented in synchronized neural firing in fronto-parietal circuitry. But the last dollop in the theory—that it subjectively feels like something to be such circuitry—may have to be stipulated as a fact about reality where explanation stops.¹²

With all these facts in mind—themselves part of the answer to the easy problem of consciousness, for which neuroscientists have made great progress—the hard problem is asking us a question that is impossible to answer: what’s it like to be the neural wiring? That is, what’s it like to be you? How should I know? I’m not you and never can be. I can imagine what it’s like to be you, and I can apply the Copernican Principle that we’re not special to myself—I’m not special and reasonably infer that your internal states are similar to mine if I see in your actions and emotions patterns similar to those that I express. But the final step of knowing what it’s actually like to be you—or a dolphin or bat or anything is one thought too many. Only you can experience you. A is A. 

In my assessment of the hard problem, then, consciousness is a known unknown that is very likely unknowable, at least as the concept is conceived of at present.

It has now been over 30 years since Australian philosopher David Chalmers posed the “Hard Problem of Consciousness,” one that has intrigued philosophers of mind, neuroscientists, and psychologists ever since.¹ The problem can be summarized in three “what, how, and why” questions:

1. What is consciousness? 
2. How does the brain give rise to or produce consciousness?
3. Why does consciousness exist? 

In this brief article, I will suggest answers to these questions. 

What is consciousness? 

Here are some of the great minds of our time defining consciousness: 

Philosopher Thomas Nagel: “An organism is conscious if there is something that it is liketo be that organism.”²

Neuroscientist Christof Koch: “Consciousness is experience … Collectively taken, consciousness is lived reality. It is the feeling of life itself. Consciousness is the way the world appears and feels to me.”³

Philosopher Daniel Dennett: “Wherever there is a conscious mind, there is a point of view. This is one of the most fundamental ideas we have about minds-or about consciousness. A conscious mind is an observer, who takes in a limited subset of all the information there is.”⁴

Philosopher David Chalmers: “When I talk about consciousness, I am talking only about the subjective quality of experience: what it is like to be a cognitive agent.”⁵

My own definition aligns with the views of these experts. I think “consciousness” has two meanings: 

1. A mental state of awareness, alertness, and receptivity. “John became conscious again two hours after the auto accident.” 
2. A mental state with a first-person or subjective point of view. “Only John was conscious of the pain in his belly.” 

These two meanings may be combined into one definition: Consciousness is the subjective feeling associated with the real-time collection of information by the brain in the state of awareness, alertness, wakefulness, or receptivity. 

When a person goes to sleep at night and is not dreaming, he is unconscious, and when he awakens in the morning, he is conscious. But when he is conscious, it is a subjective and (so far) private state. Consciousness becomes operative in the human organism when the brain reaches a certain size and complexity, approximately 24 weeks after conception.⁶ Over the past two decades, there has been a convergence to consensus on the definition of “consciousness,” and so I think we have a good answer to the first question relevant to Chalmers’s Hard Problem. 

When we talk about the brain-and about consciousness or the mind-we use two different vocabularies. Regarding the brain, for example, we use words like “neurons, synapses, neurotransmitters, axons, dendrites, action potentials, ion channels, electrical-chemical transmission, brain waves, neural fibers, sensory organs, and neuromuscular junction.” In regard to consciousness or the mind, we use words like “sights, sounds, feelings, emotions, thoughts, images, memories, dreams, and qualia.” 

It’s as if we live in two separate worlds, an objective one and a subjective one. Perhaps René Descartes was pointing in the right direction after all with his notion of dualism.⁷ More on this below. 

How does the brain give rise to or produce consciousness? 

This question presumes materialism, at least to some extent. There are many people, even intelligent and educated ones, who do not believe that the brain gives rise to or produces consciousness. They believe that something outside the brain-perhaps a force of nature, a universal mind, some unspecified deity, or even the Judeo-Christian God-is the source of our consciousness. I think their view is severely undermined by all the research showing the correlations of mental states with brain states. 

Damage to specific areas of the brain often produces specific mental deficits or problems. (Note the famous case of Phineas Gage,⁸ but there are thousands of others.) The use of medications, psychedelics, and alcohol frequently produce definite alterations in mental states. The states of sleep, coma, dreams, and hallucinations have correlates in brain waves measured from groups of neurons. The evidence for materialism in the undergirding of the relation of the experiential to the neuronal is just too strong to take the spiritual, religious, or nonmaterial advocates seriously. 

It is probably the case that for every event in consciousness-e.g., the sound of a train passing by, the image of an apple, the sweet smell of a rose, or a covert sentence-there is some corresponding specific event in the brain that gives rise to the former. We do not yet know what those events in the brain are. They could be events in the microtubules of neurons, as Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff have speculated.⁹ Or they could be events at neuronal synapses, or the movements of neurotransmitters. There are over a dozen theories of consciousness in the modern debate on the hard problem. 

But I suspect that the relevant events are the firings of specific neurons connected in a specific way, a kind of circuit. The verification of this one-to-one relationship between conscious events and neuronal events will probably require a breakthrough in brain monitoring and mapping technology. Imagine a “brainscope” that detected the state of firing (on or off) of all 85 billion neurons in the brain at the same time and delivered all of this information to a powerful AI. For any given person, we could instruct them to think or feel a thousand different things in their minds, repeatedly, and then let the brainscope and AI identify the relevant neuronal patterns that were consistently associated with or gave rise to those mental contents. I think the experts in biophysics will eventually invent something like a brainscope, which we will need to verify the material basis of our mental lives. 

On the other hand, could the panpsychists be right? They are also materialists, but they have a rather odd view of the relation of consciousness to matter. The philosopher Phillip Goff¹⁰ and others in this camp believe that every physical thing-even stones, planets, chairs, bacteria, trees, lobsters, amoebas, electrons, and quarks-has some consciousness-it’s just a matter of degree. 

When a person says that by a force of their consciousness they moved their arm, they are mistaken. Brain processes moved their arm, and their consciousness merely reflects the actions of those brain processes. 

I suppose their idea that consciousness is ubiquitous could be correct, but it seems improbable. What is the primary unit of consciousness, and how can it be identified? What is the threshold for the quantity of consciousness in an object such that we can clearly conclude that the object is conscious in the ways that we deem humans to be conscious? The panpsychists have a lot of work to do to make their theory testable, falsifiable, and probable. 

In my view, there is probably a number of physical units, like neurons, connected and interacting in a particular way, that gives rise to or produces consciousness. For the sake of simplicity, let’s just call this hypothetical set “the consciousness network.” Progress in neuroscience and philosophy of mind will depend on doing careful, systematic, and rational research on the correlations of behaviors, internal structures, arrangements, processes, and mental events, starting with humans and working in the direction of less complex organisms. 

Given the excellent track record of science, I believe we will discover something like a “consciousness network“ that will tell us which organisms have it and which don’t, and that, based on this knowledge, we may even build electronic or robotic “persons” who will be conscious! I suggest increased research on consciousness in the following areas: blindsight, sleep, coma, hallucinogens, hypnosis, anesthesia, brain-mind correlates, lucid dreaming, brain stimulation, and psychophysics. 

Why does consciousness exist? 

A useful model for consciousness is the experience of pain. Imagine that you damage an index finger, perhaps by burning it on a stove, cutting it with a sharp knife, or smashing it with a hammer. Most of us have had one or more of these experiences. I have had all three. What usually happens? You quickly recoil or retract the finger. You scream or yell, sometimes accompanied by profanities. Natural processes in your body kick in to reduce or heal the damage to the finger. You remember the experience, learn from it, and devise ways to avoid it in the future. 

But there is something else that inevitably occurs-you feel pain. This is the nature of your consciousness in the moment. Does the pain cause you to retract your finger, does the retraction of your finger cause your pain, or do these two processes occur in parallel? I think the evidence mostly supports the latter view, with the retraction perhaps occurring slightly before the pain. 

It is easy to see how the first four reactions-recoil, screaming, natural healing processes, and enhanced learning-have survival value and probably resulted from mutations and natural selection; in short, evolution. But what about the pain? Does it have survival value above and beyond what the other four reactions provide? This doesn’t seem to be the case. Pain seems like an unnecessary add-on. Perhaps mutations occurred that produced a “pain circuit,” one kind of consciousness network, and this circuit neither enhanced nor impaired survival, made survival neither more likely nor less likely. The pain circuit may be a kind of accidental byproduct, and maybe all of consciousness is like that. The “right” material just happened to come together during the history of life on Earth, enabling consciousness in some animals, especially humans. 

I suspect that consciousness is an emergent property of the consciousness network, a special arrangement of energy-matter or material stuff, which I described earlier. There is a sense in which Descartes’s dualism is correct, but more ways in which it is incorrect. On the one hand, consciousness seems to be a different kind of thing from energy-matter, but it emerges from energy-matter under the right conditions. There is nothing mystical, magical, spiritual, or supernatural about this. It’s just a natural phenomenon, even though nature seems to have two aspects in special circumstances. 

Patterns in the brain simply give rise to patterns in the mind.

On the other hand, contrary to Descartes’s view, there is no interaction of the physical and the mental. The mental has no causal influence on the physical; the mental is merely epiphenomenal. Patterns in the brain simply give rise to patterns in the mind. If dualism is true, then it is likely that consciousness represents or reflects what is happening in the brain. When a person says that by a force of their consciousness they moved their arm, they are mistaken. Brain processes moved their arm, and their consciousness merely reflects the actions of those brain processes. 

Another important inference from the model I am proposing here is that because consciousness is completely dependent on the brain, when the brain dies, the consciousness of the person is extinguished. No matter how much we wish there were an afterlife, there isn’t one. Dead is dead! No good evidence of an afterlife has ever been presented. In support of this view, physicist Sean Carroll has strongly asserted: 

Claims that some form of consciousness persists after our bodies die and decay into their constituent atoms face one huge, insuperable obstacle: the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely understood, and there’s no way within those laws to allow for the information stored in our brains to persist after we die.¹¹

♦ ♦ ♦

The components of this model are not new. They have been proposed before. I have just assembled the puzzle so that we can more easily see the whole picture. I hope others will come up with a better name, but for now, let’s call this model “Brain Dependent Dualism“ in homage to Descartes and to the hundreds of neuroscientists of the modern era who have demonstrated how consciousness is dependent on the brain. 

Here are the main assumptions of Brain Dependent Dualism: 

1. Reality is bifurcated into the physical and the mental, the objective and the subjective, energy-matter and consciousness. 
2. Consciousness is an emergent property of brains and is completely dependent on or contingent on brains. 
3. There is some arrangement of physical units, probably neurons, which gives rise to consciousness, here called “the consciousness network.” 
4. Some living organisms are conscious, but others are not. 
5. Every content of consciousness is associated with, representative of, and produced by events in the brain, probably a spiking pattern of neurons. 
6. Consciousness does not survive the death of the brain. 

Much research is needed to flesh out, operationalize, and test this model, but we are on the way to substantiating it.

Following a public lecture I gave in 2005 at the L.A. Public Library, I was buttonholed by a documentary filmmaker with ambitions of exposing the conspiracy behind 9/11.

“You mean the conspiracy by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda to attack the United States?” I asked rhetorically, knowing what was to come.

“That’s what they want you to believe,” he said. 

“Who is they?” I queried. 

“The government,” he whispered, as if they might be listening at that very moment. 

At this point in the conversation I declined to be interviewed, knowing precisely where the dialogue was going next: 

• the Pentagon was hit by a missile,
• Air Force jets were ordered to “stand down” and not intercept Flights 11 and 175 that struck the twin towers, 
• which themselves were razed by demolition explosives timed to go off soon after the impact of the planes, 
• a mysterious white jet shot down Flight 93 over Pennsylvania,
• New York Jews were ordered to stay home that day (Zionists and other pro-Israeli factions, of course, were involved), 
• that 9/11 was orchestrated by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the CIA in order to implement their plan for global domination and a New World Order, to be launched by a Pearl Harbor-like attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, thereby providing the justification for war. 

The 9/11 Truther movement began in 2002, when the noted French left-wing activist Thierry Meyssan’s 9/11 conspiracy book, L’Effroyable Imposture (The Appalling Deception) became a bestseller in France, then soon made its way across the Atlantic, resulting in such books as Inside Job by Jim Marrs, The New Pearl Harbor by David Ray Griffin, and 9/11: The Great Illusion by George Humphrey.

Let’s begin with where many 9/11 Truthers start: the melting point of steel. According to the website 911research.wtc7.net, steel melts at a temperature of 2,777 degrees Fahrenheit, but jet fuel burns at only 1,517 degrees Fahrenheit. No melted steel, no collapsed towers. Therefore explosive devices must have been used.

Wrong. 

In an article in the Journal of the Minerals, Metals, and Materials Society, M.I.T. engineering professor Dr. Thomas Eagar explains why: steel loses 50 percent of its strength at 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit; 90,000 liters of jet fuel ignited other combustible materials such as rugs, curtains, furniture, and paper, which continued burning after the jet fuel was exhausted, raising temperatures above 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit and spreading the fire throughout the building; temperature differentials of hundreds of degrees across single steel horizontal trusses caused them to sag, straining and then breaking the angle clips that held them to the vertical columns; once one truss failed, others failed, and when one floor collapsed (along with the ten stories above it) onto the next floor below, that floor then gave way, creating a pancaking effect that triggered the 500,000-ton building to collapse. 

For the special issue of Skeptic on 9/11 we consulted a demolition expert named Brent Blanchard, who is Director of Field Operations for Protec Documentation Services, a company that documents the work of building demolition contractors. Since the rise in popularity of 9/11 conspiracy theories, he too has been inundated with requests to explain why the buildings appeared to have “collapsed as if by a controlled demolition.”

Blanchard and his team of experts at Protec have worked with all major American demolition companies and many foreign ones to study the controlled demolition of over 1,000 of some of the largest and tallest buildings around the world. Their duties include engineering studies, structural analysis, vibration/air overpressure monitoring and photographic services. On September 11, 2001, Protec had portable field seismic monitoring systems operating at other sites in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Demolition specialists were hired to clean up Ground Zero and remove the remaining damaged structures, and these experts called on Blanchard’s company to document both the deconstruction and the debris removal. Here are nine of the best arguments made by 9/11 conspiracy theorists and their rebuttal by Protec:

Claim #1: The collapse of the towers looked exactly like controlled demolitions.

Answer: No, they did not. The key to any demolition investigation is in finding out the “where”—the actual point at which the building failed. All photographic evidence shows World Trade Center buildings 1 and 2 failed at the point of impact. Actual implosion demolitions always start with the bottom floors. Photo evidence shows the lower floors of WTC 1 and 2 were intact until destroyed from above. If you search “building demolition” on YouTube you will find hundreds of video clips of buildings collapsing by controlled demolition. I could not find one that collapsed from the top down, as did the World Trade Center buildings, including building 7. Instead, what you see is what demolition experts tell us is how it is done: the charges are set to explode from the bottom up.

Claim #2: The World Trade Center buildings fell right down into their own footprint.

Answer: Not exactly. They followed the path of least resistance and there was a lot of resistance. Buildings of 20 stories or more do not topple over like trees or reinforced towers or smokestacks, primarily because they are mostly empty space within designed for office space with 95 percent of the structure’s interior consisting of nothing but air. Imploding demolitions fall into a footprint because lower stories are removed first. WTC debris was forced out away from the building as the falling mass encountered intact floors. As well, the collapse began on the side where the planes impacted, and so were tilted slightly toward that weakened collapse point, which you can clearly see in the numerous videos of the collapsing buildings.

Claim #3: Explosive charges are seen shooting out of windows from several floors just prior to collapse.

Answer: Air and debris can be seen being violently ejected from the building but not because of explosive charges but as a natural and predictable effect of rapid structure collapse of the upper floors on the lower floors thereby pushing out the smoke from the burning fires. As well, the impact and explosion of the airplane crashes into the buildings knocked off most of the fireproofing drywall material surrounding the steel beams, considerably increasing their vulnerability to flames.

Claim #4: Witnesses heard explosions.

Answer: All Seismic evidence from many independent sources on 9/11 showed none of the sudden vibration spikes that result from explosive detonations. What people might have heard are common office items that explode in massive fires, such as cleaning supplies, CRT TVs and computer monitors, large motors with an oil reservoir for lube, like in elevator lift motors, tires in vehicles in the parking structure, and propane tanks.

Claim #5: A heat-generating explosive (thermite?) melted steel at Ground Zero.

Answer: No demolition workers report encountering molten steel, cut beams, or any evidence whatsoever of explosions or explosive charges.

Claim #6: Ground Zero debris—particularly the large steel columns from towers 1 and 2—were quickly shipped overseas to prevent scrutiny.

Answer: Not according to those who handled the steel. The chain of custody is clearly documented, first at Ground Zero by Protec and later at the Fresh Kills site by Yannuzzi Demolition. The time frame (months) before it was shipped to China was normal.

Claim #7: WTC Building 7 was intentionally “pulled down” with explosives. The building owner himself was quoted as saying he decided to “pull it.”

Answer: Building owners do not have authority over emergency personnel at a disaster scene. We have never heard “pull it” used to refer to an explosive demolition. Demolition explosive experts anticipated the collapse of WTC7, and also witnessed it from a few hundred feet away and no one heard detonations.

Claim #8: Steel-frame buildings do not collapse due to fire.

Answer: Many steel-framed buildings have collapsed due to fire. For example, on May 13, 2008, a large part of the tall concrete-reinforced steel architecture tower at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands caught on fire and burned, and shortly thereafter collapsed nearly straight-down, almost precisely into its own footprint.

Claim #9: Anyone who denies that explosives were used is ignoring evidence.

Answer: Most of our comments apply to the differences between what people actually saw on 9/11 and what they should have seen had explosives been present. The hundreds of men and women who worked to remove debris from Ground Zero were some of the country’s most experienced and respected demolition veterans. They of all people possessed the experience and expertise to recognize evidence of controlled demolition if it existed. None of these people has come forward with suspicions that explosives were used.

The collapse of World Trade Center building 7 has grown in importance to conspiracy theorists, especially since standard non-conspiracy explanations for the demise of WTC buildings 1 and 2 became accepted. Since building 7 was not struck by a plane, and it did not collapse until 5:20pm on 9/11, hours after the twin towers collapsed, the cause of its collapse, say the conspiracists, must be different from that of WTC 1 and 2. According to wtc7.net, for example, “fires were observed in Building 7 prior to its collapse, but they were isolated in small parts of the building, and were puny by comparison to other building fires,” and that any damage from falling debris from WTC 1 and WTC 2 would have needed to be symmetrical to trigger the pancaking collapse of WTC 7. 

In point of fact, the fires burning in building 7 were extensive, not isolated. 9/11 conspiracy theorists tend to only show the north side of WTC 7, which does not look nearly as damaged as the other side. As the building burned all day, emergency response workers realized that collapse was imminent, and at 3pm that day they began evacuation of all emergency personnel. In fact, according to FDNY fire Chief Daniel Nigro, he and his firefighters noticed structural deformations of Building 7 hours before its collapse, and he said later, “I feared a collapse of Building 7 (as did many on my staff).” When the building did collapse, it went first on the south side of the building, which is where the most extensive damage was from the falling debris of the WTC 1 and 2 buildings. 

For my money, the oddest of all the 9/11 conspiracy theory claims involves the Pentagon. The idea, first floated in Thierry Meyssan’s book, was that the Pentagon was struck by a missile because the damage was too narrow and limited to be the result of an impact from a Boeing 757. In the 9/11 conspiracy film, Loose Change, dramatic reenactments are presented, arguing that the hole in the Pentagon was too small to have been made by American Airlines Flight 77. 

First, how would any of us know how big a hole a plane should make colliding with a massive building like the Pentagon? These conspiracists are talking through their hats.

All of the 9/11 conspiracy claims are this easily refuted.

Second, according to a structural engineer named Allyn E. Kilsheimer, who arrived on the scene shortly after the impact: “I saw the marks of the plane wing on the face of the building. I picked up parts of the plane with the airline markings on them. I held in my hand the tail section of the plane, and I found the black box.” Kilsheimer’s eyewitness account is backed up by photos of plane wreckage inside and outside the building. Kilsheimer adds: “I held parts of uniforms from crew members in my hands, including body parts. Okay?”

All of the 9/11 conspiracy claims are this easily refuted. On the Pentagon “missile strike,” for example, I queried my documentary antagonist I mentioned at the start of this chapter about what happened to Flight 77, which disappeared at the same time as the Pentagon was struck. “The plane was destroyed and the passengers were murdered by Bush operatives,” he solemnly revealed. “Do you mean to tell me,” I retorted, “that not one of the thousands of conspirators needed to pull all this off is a whistle-blower who would go on TV or write a tell-all book?” 

Think about all the examples of disgruntled government bureaucrats and ex-politicians who can’t wait to go public with their insider information that we tax payers will presumably want to know about. Not one of these 9/11 insiders, witness to what is arguably the greatest conspiracy and cover-up in the history of the United States, if not all of Western civilization, wants to go on CNN or 60 Minutes to reveal their secret? Not one of them wants to cash in what could very well be one of the bestselling books of the year, if not the decade? Not one of them, after a couple of drinks and a twinge or two of guilt, has leaked to a friend (or a friend of a friend) their deep secret? Not one? 

The ultimate failure of the 9/11 conspiracy theorists is their inability to explain away the overwhelming evidence of the real conspiracy by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

Then there is the conspiracy theory that NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) supposedly told fighter jets to “stand down” and let the commercial jets reach their targets, thereby implicating the U.S. military in the conspiracy. In point of fact, in a special issue of Popular Mechanics on 9/11 the editors report:

On 9/11 there were only 14 fighter jets on alert in the contiguous 48 states. No computer network or alarm automatically alerted the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) of missing planes. And NORAD’s sophisticated radar … ringed the continent, looking outward for threats, not inward.

Remember the Hindsight Bias: after the fact it seems obvious what should have been done. Before 9/11, hijackers of planes typically demanded ransom or some political action be taken, then they would land the plane at some pre-determined destination. Hijacking a plane and flying it into a building was something new that almost no one anticipated. Also, on 9/11 the hijackers disabled the onboard radar transponders, making it much harder to track. Without that, NORAD would have had to search 4500 identical radar blips on its screens, not knowing precisely which ones were hijacked planes. 

Another conspiracy claim is that there was a suspiciously high volume of “put” trading of airline stocks in the days just before 9/11. A “put” trade is a bet that the price of a stock will decrease, which is why this is sometimes called “selling short” a stock. Conspiracists think that a lot of trading “insiders” knew the attacks were coming on 9/11 so they bet the airline stocks would decline after. In fact, the level of put trading in the days before 9/11 was not so different from other peaks earlier in the year, plus American Airlines had just recently released a report predicting possible losses in the coming quarter, and when that happens put traders increase their trading activity.

Then there’s the matter of cell phone calls made from the planes, which conspiracists claim could not have happened in 2001, given the technology of the day. First, some passengers used the in-flight cell phones available on seat-backs. Second, cell phones in 2001 could be made from high-altitude flights, albeit the coverage was spotty as the plane moved through tower cells. According to Paul Guckian, vice president of engineering for cell-phone maker Qualcomm, “at the altitude for commercial airliners, around 30,000 or 35,000 feet, phones would still get a signal.”

By definition, then, 19 members of al-Qaeda plotting to fly planes into buildings without telling us constitutes a conspiracy.

Dozens more 9/11 conspiracy claims go on and on in this vein of anomaly hunting, all grounded in the argument from personal incredulity—if I can’t think of an explanation for anomaly X besides a conspiracy, then that proves there is a conspiracy. No, it doesn’t. It just means you can’t think of an explanation.

So, all that said, I ask again, was 9/11 a conspiracy? Well, yes, it was. Say what?

In my book Conspiracy, I defined a conspiracy as two or more people or a group plotting or acting in secret to gain an advantage or harm others immorally or illegally. By definition, then, 19 members of al-Qaeda plotting to fly planes into buildings without telling us constitutes a conspiracy. The ultimate failure of the 9/11 conspiracy theorists is their inability to explain away the overwhelming evidence of the real conspiracy by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. For example:

• The 1983 attack on the Marine barracks in Lebanon by a radical Hezbollah faction. 
• The 1993 truck bomb attack on the World Trade Center.
• The 1995 attempt to blow up 12 planes heading from the Philippines to the U.S. 
• The 1995 bombings of U.S. Embassy buildings in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 12 Americans and 200 Kenyans and Tanzanians.
• The 1996 attack on Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 U.S. military personnel.
• The 1999 failed attempt to attack Los Angeles International airport by Ahmed Ressam.
• The 2000 suicide boat attack on the U.S.S. Cole that killed 17 sailors and injured 39 others.
• The well-documented evidence that Osama Bin Laden is a major financier for and the leader of al-Qaeda. 
• The 1996 fatwa by Bin Laden that officially declared a jihad against the United States.
• The 1998 fatwa calling on his followers “to kill the Americans and their allies—civilian and military is an individual duty for any Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.”

Given this background, since Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda have officially claimed responsibility for the attacks of 9/11, we should take them at their word that they did it.

Stand at the edge of the Grand Canyon and something happens in your chest that a photograph can never capture. See a celebrity in person and they seem lit from within, even when you know better. Fall in love and the other person briefly stops being a person and becomes a kind of doorway. Walk into an old cathedral, or a stadium before kickoff, and the atmosphere seems to change.

We reach for tired words to describe this phenomenon: Awe. Magic. Aura. The sacred. None of them quite lands, because none names the thing precisely—the sense that a particular person, place, or object carries a special weight, a significance that seems to radiate from it, as if it contained something the ordinary world does not.

The claim worth examining is that the weight is not out there. It is in us. It is a response the brain generates and then projects onto the object, in a manner so convincing that we experience it as a property of the thing itself.

There is now a candidate word for this: hagioptasia, from the Greek for “sacred appearance.” It is not yet an established term in psychology, and the theory behind it is young. But it names something real, and once you have the word, you begin to see the thing everywhere—including in places that are actively lying to you.

The Same Organ, Elaborated

The framing we find most useful comes from evolutionary biology. Our brains were assembled by natural selection for life in small foraging bands, and a great deal of what confuses us about modern life follows from running that old equipment in an environment it was never designed for. Hagioptasia is a good example, and possibly a very old one.

The claim worth examining is that the weight is not out there. It is in us.

Consider the eye, which varies across species not merely in sophistication but in the specific adaptive problem it evolved to solve, while remaining recognizably the same organ from a scallop to a hawk. Hagioptasia may work the same way. The primitive version would be a differential response to certain stimuli as though they carry a weight out of all proportion to their physical substance—a peahen transfixed by a tail that does nothing but exist, a bowerbird drawn to a bachelor's carefully arranged pile of blue, or a dog gazing up at its owner with what looks like reverence. The human version layers culture, narrative, and self-awareness on top of that same basic mechanism, and out come glamour, holy sites, romantic idealization, the mystique of art, or the seductive notion of glory in war. The same organ, at vastly different levels of elaboration.

If that is right, hagioptasia is something selection has been building on for a very long time—which would help explain why the experience feels so deep and timeless when it arrives, and why it precedes and outruns our capacity to reason about it. The feeling comes first. The explanation, when we bother to supply one, arrives afterward and tends to ratify whatever the feeling already decided.

This is where a skeptic should apply the appropriate caution. Adaptationist stories are easy to tell and hard to test; the literature is littered with plausible narratives that dissolved under scrutiny. Hagioptasia is presently a hypothesis with a measurement instrument attached, not a settled finding. What makes it more than armchair speculation is that its originators did the unglamorous next step: they tried to measure it.

Origin of the Hagioptasia Idea 

Hagioptasia was developed by Daniel Laidler, in England, who worked out the theory while holding down a day job in a factory—with no academic post and no institutional backing. The idea eventually reached John A. Johnson, an evolutionary psychologist and Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Penn State, who took it seriously enough to help give it empirical legs. Together they constructed a scale to measure individual differences in the disposition and published the initial validation in 2020.¹ Laidler first presented the theory at the Human Behavior and Evolution Society’s annual conference in Aarhus, Denmark, in 2024, and in October 2025 was invited by Constantine Sedikides to present it to his research group at the University of Southampton, where the core reasoning held up under detailed questioning. The concept has drawn further engagement—Rory Sutherland, the famed British advertising executive and author, has been an active correspondent.

The feeling comes first. The explanation, when we bother to supply one, arrives afterward and tends to ratify whatever the feeling already decided.

We mention the provenance partly because it is a good story and partly because it is on-theme. The instinct to trust an idea only once it arrives wearing the right robes—a title, an affiliation, a prestigious address—is itself a mild case of hagioptasia. We let the aura of the institution stand in for the quality of the argument. Laidler’s idea had to travel from a factory floor to a professor’s desk before most people would give it a hearing, though the idea itself did not change. The small resistance a reader may feel toward an unaffiliated theorist is precisely the mechanism under discussion, operating in real time.

None of which makes the theory correct. It makes it testable, which is the only thing that ultimately matters.

The Counterfeit

Hagioptasia activates in the presence of real things: genuine natural grandeur, genuine social rank, a genuine mate. But the mechanism of activation cannot tell you whether the weight it assigns is earned. It simply activates, and we experience the result as a property of the object. That gap—between the feeling of significance and the actual worth of the thing—is a door exploited by advertising.

Advertising is hagioptasia for hire. A luxury brand sells aura—the implied promise that specialness will transfer from the object to the owner. Celebrity culture is an industrial-scale apparatus for manufacturing that inner glow and then charging admission to stand near it. The glow is real, in the sense that people genuinely feel it. It is false, in the sense that there need be nothing behind it—and even where there is something, a genuinely great musician, a genuinely beautiful place, the glow is not that merit. It is a separate signal, and it fires as readily for the empty as for the earned. The luminous quality you perceive in the famous face is your own response, sold back to you, rather than something inherently true about that person.

The machinery has since been automated. Recommendation algorithms discovered that human attention snags on the glamorous and the sacred-seeming. They now serve a diet optimized to keep the response firing. Politics runs on the same current: the leader who seems to carry a light, the movement that feels like a cause larger than the self.

Advertising is hagioptasia for hire.

There is a further implication that should interest anyone tracking the sociology of secularization. As traditional religion recedes across the developed world, the machinery for perceiving the sacred does not recede with it. If hagioptasia is a stable feature of the evolved mind, the response remains, still active, still scanning for something worthy of reverence. When the old altar empties, the mechanism looks for a new object and attaches to whatever is available: a brand, a politician, a celebrity, an ideology, a wellness regimen, a fandom. This is a testable prediction, not merely a rhetorical flourish—it implies measurable displacement of hagioptasic response from declining religious contexts toward secular ones.

Use of the Word and Concept

No one stands outside of such concepts. I feel the pull at monuments and inside cathedrals I do not believe in, and, more embarrassingly, in proximity to fame. Knowing the name of the mechanism confers no immunity from it; that is not how the mind works. What knowing the word and understanding the concept offers is a beat of delay: a moment, when the weight descends, in which it becomes possible to ask a question that was previously unavailable.

Is this significance coming from the object, or from the observer—and who benefits if one fails to tell the difference?

The response is old—older than language, older than religion, older than reason. What is new is a marketplace full of people who understand it better than we do, and who aim it, on purpose, at whatever they would prefer we revere or fear next. A word for the mechanism will not disarm it. But you cannot examine what you cannot name, and a skeptic's first loyalty is to seeing the machinery clearly, including the machinery running such concepts.

Hagioptasia was originated by Daniel Laidler and validated empirically in collaboration with John A. Johnson, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Penn State, with whom he co-authored the 2020 paper establishing a measurement scale for it. This article was a collaboration among the three authors.

Several decades ago, when I was a student at the Chouinard Art School, out of curiosity I dropped in at a local Scientology center. I attended a few introductory lectures there, one of which included a filmed interview of L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology. In these lectures Hubbard was touted as a genius, not only a nuclear physicist, but a brain surgeon as well.

In reality, the extent of Hubbard’s education was that he attended George Washington University to study engineering but dropped out. In the interview it was obvious the man knew nothing of the nature of the human brain, and he generally came off as a complete nincompoop. In any case, I didn’t buy any of the pseudoscientific nonsense the Scientologists were peddling. However, had I been leaning toward trying Scientology, Hubbard’s performance in the filmed interview would have driven me away. For years after witnessing the manifest ignorance Hubbard exhibited in the film, I couldn’t understand why the Scientologists would show it to prospective recruits. 

It was only a few years ago, when I was researching flying saucer cults for my book (co-authored with the geologist and paleontologist Donald Prothero) UFOs, Chemtrails and Aliens, that I stumbled onto the Scientologists’ strategy: The film effectively drove off anyone inclined to be skeptical of their claims. Those who saw the film and still bought into their message were likely to remain loyal believers even in the face of massive evidence that Hubbard was a fraud and that the theology behind this quasi-religion was more absurd than the stuff of low-grade pulp fiction. (This is not unlike those Nigerian spam scam emails filled with typos and all caps—purposefully included to drive away the skeptically-minded so as not to waste the time of the scammers.)

What led to my enlightenment was researching the Seekers, a Christian flying saucer cult that flourished in the early 1950s led by a Chicago housewife named Dorothy Martin who, using automatic writing, believed she was receiving telepathic messages from space aliens she called the Guardians, who purportedly lived on the planet Clarion. The Guardians, she claimed, had told her the United States would be destroyed by a massive earthquake and tidal wave on December 21, 1954 (the winter solstice, of course). However, the Seekers would be saved from this apocalyptic disaster by the Guardians, who would whisk them away in flying saucers to the planet Clarion.

Those likely to be skeptical when experiencing disconfirming evidence were screened out. Those who stayed … were stauncher in their support.

Of course, December 21 came and went without incident, and that should have been the end of the Seekers. But no! The cult continued to flourish, as chronicled by Leon Festinger and his colleagues in the 1956 book When Prophecy Fails.¹ Those members with less conviction left the group when the prophecy failed, but those with greater conviction stayed, strengthening the group’s resolve. Initially, they believed that their original estimation of the date of the apocalyptic event was slightly inaccurate but that the prophecy was true. Like the Scientology film, the failure of the prophecy served as a winnowing tool. Those likely to be skeptical when experiencing disconfirming evidence were screened out. Those who stayed in both cases were stauncher in their support and unlikely to be critical of the purveyors of either pseudoscience or failed prophecy. 

Failed prophecy likewise did not affect the celebrity status of Hal Lindsey. In his first end-times best-seller, The Late Great Planet Earth (the bestselling nonfiction book of the 1970s), Lindsey predicted the Tribulation—the seven-year period leading up to the Battle of Armageddon—would begin within the generation that saw the founding of the modern state of Israel in 1948. According to Lindsey: 

A generation in the Bible is something like forty years. If this is a correct deduction, then within forty years or so of 1948, all these things will take place. Many scholars who have studied Bible prophecy all their lives believe that this is so.²

The year 1988 came and went without any sign of the Tribulation, which logically should have thoroughly discredited Lindsey. However, as with the Seekers this failed prophecy didn’t dim Lindsey’s star. In fact, many in the fundamentalist community came up with rationalizations concerning the year 1988 to prop up Lindsey’s basic assertion. World Bible Society President F. Kenton “Doc” Beshore, for example, asserted that a biblical generation is 70-80 years, based on this passage in Psalm 90:10: “The days of our life are 70 years; and if by reason of strength they are 80 years.” With new calculations, published in Beshore’s books When Will the Rapture Take Place? and The Millennium, the Apocalypse and Armageddon, the Second Coming should happen between 2018 and 2028. Adjusting for the seven-year Tribulation period, Beshore predicted that the rapture would take place sometime before 2021.³

So, despite the failure of his prophecies, Hal Lindsey remained popular in fundamentalist circles and was a frequent guest on evangelical network radio talk shows. He continued to publish his online blog, Hal Lindsey Report, and had amassed considerable wealth from his supposedly non-profit ministry when he died at age 95 in 2024. Reportedly, between 2013 and 2023, Hal and his wife JoLynne Lindsey took in $18.5 million from the Hal Lindsey Website Ministries, but “spent only $1,105,360 in charitable assistance to groups and individuals.”⁴ As with the Seekers, Lindsey’s prophetic failures merely served as a winnowing process, excluding those inclined to be to any degree skeptical. 

It appears the more absurd the claim, or the more outrageous the demand, the more effective it is as a winnowing tool.

A similar winnowing process took place among the Branch Davidians when David Koresh announced that all the women in the world—and particularly all those within his compound outside Waco, Texas—belonged to him.⁵ Those men unwilling to give up their wives at Koresh’s demand, along with those women unwilling to be part of his harem, left the cult. Those who remained were intensely loyal to Koresh. 

It appears the more absurd the claim, or the more outrageous the demand, the more effective it is as a winnowing tool. One such absurd claim recently caught my eye, because it fit the narrative trope of alien abductions I had researched for UFOs, Chemtrails and Aliens: 

Katie Souza, whose show Healing Your Soul airs on Trinity Broadcasting Network and Faith Broadcasting Network, told her YouTube channel Friday she was a child victim of an extraterrestrial conspiracy to create alien-human hybrids. “I was visited when I was a young girl and aliens—alien beings—implanted an interdimensional device in me that harvested my eggs over my lifetime,” said Souza, 63. “This device obviously was harvesting them right when they would mature so that they could then … try to create a hybrid child.” Souza, who founded a popular prison ministry in 2006 after her own release from prison, said thousands of other women have had this happen to them too, though many remain unaware. She said alien implantation is a cause of infertility, as well as other mysterious illnesses and unexplainable anger.⁶

Since claims of alien abduction often come from people with a New Age spiritual orientation, they tend to be dismissed by evangelical Christians. However, evangelicals have an explanation for alien abduction and alien implantation stories that fits their own mythology: Those posing as extraterrestrials are in fact demons, out to deceive humans and turn them away from Christianity. Souza’s view of the aliens she claims stole her eggs is one variant of this explanation: 

Souza offers a spiritual interpretation. She says extraterrestrials exist but are not physical creatures that evolved in another solar system. Instead, they are fallen angels warring against God’s plan of redemption … Souza connects her story and contemporary stories about flying saucers to the “sons of God” mentioned in Genesis 6. The Bible passage says they “went to the daughters of humans and had children by them,” called the Nephilim.⁷

The biblical passage to which Souza alludes is Genesis 6:1-4 (New International Version): 

When human beings began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose. Then the LORD said, “My Spirit will not contend with humans forever, for they are mortal; their days will be a hundred and twenty years.” The Nephilim⁸ were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went to the daughters of humans and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown. 

The predominant belief among evangelical and fundamentalist religious authorities is that UFOs are demonic apparitions, rather than actual extraterrestrial aliens.

It is tempting to dismiss Souza’s claims as patently absurd and to relegate her to the lunatic fringe. However, her popularity is such that her net worth is said to be upwards of $5 million.⁹ Nor is her assertion that extraterrestrial aliens are actually fallen angels in disguise a fringe belief. In fact, the predominant belief among evangelical and fundamentalist religious authorities is that UFOs are demonic apparitions, rather than actual extraterrestrial aliens. Hal Lindsey folded this trope into his end-times scenario.¹⁰ Another proponent of this mythology-based theory is none other than U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance: 

Promoting his new book about his conversion to Catholicism, Vance told right-wing political commentator Benny Johnson that he came into office “obsessed” with learning the truth about UFOs. But he also said his faith led him to suspect that scientific and government observers have historically misidentified beings from other dimensions. “I don’t think they’re aliens; I think they’re demons,” Vance said.¹¹ “When I hear about, sort of, extra-natural phenomenon—that’s where I go to is the Christian understanding that, you know, there’s a lotta good out there, but there’s also some evil out there.” 

Vance returned to the idea last month in a conversation with podcaster Joe Rogan. “If we’re talking about an extraterrestrial being that is humanlike but not human, that contains effectively infinite powers and is torturing human beings, you can call it an alien if you want, but I think there’s a lot of historical precedent to call that a demon,” the vice president said.¹²

Considering that someone with the degree of credibility of the Vice President of the United States can believe that demons are trying to seduce gullible people by posing as extraterrestrial beings, perhaps Souza’s claim that aliens stole her eggs could be viewed as a mere eccentricity on the part of someone whose views are otherwise well within the spectrum of Christian belief. As such her popularity and monetary success might not require her followers to accept anything otherwise absurd. Thus, as a reformed criminal who was involved in manufacturing and trafficking methamphetamine and who now has a prison ministry, she might be reasonably worthy of a devoted following. Thus, her supporters might simply overlook her one quirk. That, however, is not the case. Her belief that aliens harvested her eggs is not an isolated oddity: 

Souza then shifted into faith healing and deliverance, speaking more and more frequently, as time went on, about spiritual warfare and generational curses. Her life story has also grown darker as time has gone on. In 2025, for example, she told Christian podcaster Dan Duval that her grandmother was sexually assaulted by a Nazi officer during World War II.¹³ She said that she had to break a family curse connected to Adolf Hitler’s attempt to harness the power of a Satanic altar. She added that another family member was a sex trafficker with the Illuminati, a group that some conspiracy theorists believe controls major world events. 

“You can’t make this stuff up,” Souza said. “You wonder why you’re fighting stuff your whole life? Because people are controlled by demons and they come in when you’re a child and submit you to that kind of behavior, that demonic behavior.” Souza has also made statements about believing in time travel, astral projection and werewolves. More recently, she has talked about a “spirit spouse”¹⁴ trying to take her from her husband, Robert Souza.¹⁵

One bridge from orthodox Christian belief into the absurdities Souza claims to espouse could be the Christian concept of spiritual warfare, the idea believers are involved in a war not just against unbelievers, but against demonic forces as well. In the New Testament this concept is most specifically spelled out in martial language in the Pauline epistle to the church in Ephesus (Ephesians 6:10-17): 

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Therefore, put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. 

The believer’s metaphysical armor would seem to derive from the Wisdom of Solomon, from the Septuagint (LXX), the Jewish scriptures translated into Greek (Wis. 5:17-19): 

The Lord will take his zeal as his whole armor and will arm all creation to repel his enemies; he will put on righteousness as a breastplate and wear impartial justice as a helmet; he will take holiness as an invincible shield. 

The Wisdom of Solomon is considered apocryphal by Protestants and Jews and is excluded from the Masoretic Text (MT), the official Jewish scriptures, as well as from the Protestant Old Testament, which is based on the MT. Likewise, the epistle to the Ephesians is seen by many scholars as deutero-Pauline, i.e. likely written in Paul’s name by someone other than Paul. However, this isn’t the only scriptural underpinning for the curious concept of spiritual warfare. The genuinely Pauline epistle, 2 Corinthians, states (2 Cor. 10:3-5): 

For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh, for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses. We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ. 

Such warfare terminology likely reflects the siege mentality of first century Christians, who were genuinely under threat in the hostile climate of the Roman Empire. 

The absurdity of the narrative screens out the rational and the skeptical, and tragically snares the credulous.

Many evangelical and fundamentalist Christians in America today, however, also see themselves as beset by a secular system full of threats and seductions, including not only agnostics and atheists but alternate religions as well. Here is fundamentalist minister and lecturer John MacArthur on the message above from 2 Corinthians: 

Paul is describing how the church must respond to false religion, worldly philosophies, psychologies, theories, and every other ideological fortress that stands in opposition to the truth of the gospel. Spiritual warfare is a battle against all anti-God ideas. He’s calling believers to fight against the religions of demons.¹⁶

The demons MacArthur is referring to in the quote above are not limited to those of us skeptical of religion, but any other religion as well: 

Such a conclusion is incompatible with the view of those who contend that somehow Hindus, Buddhists, and people of all other religions and worldviews can find their way to God through intuition, natural reason, and spiritual inclinations. If Paul is correct—and he is—those other faiths don’t present alternative avenues to heaven, nor does human reason present an alternate means of obtaining grace. The Apostle bluntly says that those pursuits can’t lead people to God because they’re actually demon worship. And while devotees of other religions wouldn’t self-identify as demon worshipers, demons are nonetheless behind all false religion and at work in all false systems. Satan is the father of lies who masquerades as an angel of light, and his ministers disguise themselves as angels of light and bearers of the truth (2 Corinthians 11:13-15).¹⁷

The idea that Satan’s servants “disguise themselves as angels of light and bearers of truth” dovetails neatly with the belief on the part evangelical Christians that those who report encounters with extraterrestrials are being deceived by demons. Also, as noted by the late Carl Sagan in his 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World, forced sexual unions between demons and mortal women bear a striking resemblance to alien abduction narratives: 

There are no spaceships in these stories. But most of the elements of the alien abduction account are present, including sexually obsessive non-humans who live in the sky, walk through walls, communicate telepathically and perform breeding experiments on the human species.¹⁸

Speaking of sleep paralysis and the hypnagogic state, when the brain is awake, but signals from it to the motor nerves are blocked, Sagan noted other aspects of alien abduction narratives reminiscent of Katie Souza’s belief that aliens had stolen her eggs: “If you are a man, they may take sperm samples; if you are a woman, they may remove ova or fetuses or implant sperm.”¹⁹

Thus, via the physiological ramp of sleep paralysis and the hypnagogic state, the concept of spiritual warfare slides easily into Katie Souza’s narrative of aliens harvesting her eggs. Meanwhile the absurdity of the narrative screens out the rational and the skeptical, and tragically snares the credulous.

To most of us, at least at a first glance, maps appear to describe reality. They show states, borders, capitals, and frontiers with the reassuring precision of geography. We learn them at school, consult them in newspapers, and rarely question the assumptions they contain. A mountain either exists or it does not, and a river follows its course. A border appears equally factual.

But maps don’t simply record the world “as it is”—they record political settlements. Every border reflects decisions made by people under particular historical circumstances, typically through wars, negotiations, or revolutions. Unlike mountains and rivers, they are neither inevitable nor permanent. They are products of history. Yet something curious happens with time. Political settlements gradually lose their appearance of contingency. What began as one solution to one historical problem or circumstance comes to be treated as reality itself, and the map appears to describe the natural order of the world. 

This is not an argument against borders. Almost every political community requires them. Nor is it an argument that every territorial claim deserves recognition—most do not. The question I pose today is a different and more skeptical one: Can political settlements become so familiar that we stop asking whether they still describe political reality?

Look at a modern map of the Middle East and you will find, among many, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. But you will not find a state called Kurdistan. The Kurds are commonly described as one of the world’s largest stateless peoples. Estimates vary because the states in which Kurds live do not all collect ethnicity data in comparable ways. Roughly 30 to 35 million Kurds live primarily across Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria, with a large diaspora in Europe and elsewhere. They speak several closely related varieties of Kurdish, principally Kurmanji and Sorani, and have maintained a distinct cultural and historical identity for centuries. Modern Kurdish nationalism developed mainly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 

Today Kurdish political life ranges from constitutional self-government in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, with its own parliament, presidency, government, universities, courts, and security institutions, to autonomous or party-led structures elsewhere. Kurdish armed forces are equally diverse: the Peshmerga serve the Kurdistan Region in Iraq, while Kurdish-led forces such as the YPG, YPJ, and later the Syrian Democratic Forces emerged during the Syrian civil war. The expression “the Kurds,” therefore, describes not a single political organization but a dispersed people living under very different political systems. 

Borders and Spectrums 

Long before diplomats drew the borders of the modern Middle East, Kurdish communities inhabited the mountainous region stretching across what are today southeastern Turkey, northern Iraq, western Iran, and northern Syria. They spoke related languages, cultivated rich literary and oral traditions, developed local institutions, and sustained a historical memory tied to a recognizable homeland. For centuries, Kurdish communities lived within the Ottoman and Persian empires. These empires exercised authority unevenly, often governing through local rulers, tribal confederations, religious leaders, and hereditary principalities, rather than through a single centralized administration. Imperial rule could be harsh, arbitrary, and violent, but it often left substantial room for local institutions to manage everyday life. 

As the great empires gave way to modern nation-states, governments increasingly sought a different kind of authority: one language, one educational system, one army, one bureaucracy, one national history, and one political identity. Diversity that imperial systems had often accommodated imperfectly now appeared increasingly as a problem to be solved. The Kurdish question emerged within this transformation, created by the encounter between an older political community and a newer model of statehood that increasingly struggled to accommodate communities whose identities did not fit neatly within its national framework. 

The First World War shattered the political order that had governed much of the Middle East for centuries. As the Ottoman Empire collapsed, its territories became the subject of negotiation among the victorious powers. Across the region, peoples who had long lived under imperial rule suddenly found themselves confronting a new political language: national self-determination. 

Once the new borders gained international recognition, they acquired legal authority and, consequently, a presumption of permanence.

For the Kurds, this appeared to offer an unprecedented opportunity. Kurdish representatives argued that they constituted a distinct people with their own historical homeland and therefore deserved political recognition within the emerging international order. They were not alone in making such claims. Armenians, Arabs, Zionists, Persians, and other communities and governments were also advancing claims about sovereignty, mandates, borders, national government, or self-determination as the Ottoman order was dismantled. 

But Kurds faced a particular disadvantage. Unlike several neighboring national movements, they possessed neither a unified government nor a single diplomatic leadership capable of speaking for all Kurdish regions. Their political reality exceeded their level of political organization. Among the most prominent Kurdish advocates was Şerif Pasha, a former Ottoman diplomat who presented a memorandum on Kurdish claims to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Acting as a leading Kurdish representative in Paris, he argued for recognition of a Kurdish political homeland in the post-Ottoman settlement, and submitted maps and territorial claims intended to give the Kurdish case diplomatic form. His position did not represent every Kurdish leader or region, but it was one of the clearest attempts to place Kurdish self-determination before the victorious powers in formal international diplomacy. 

In 1920, the Treaty of Sèvres recognized, at least in principle, the possibility of Kurdish autonomy and, under certain conditions, eventual independence in parts of the former Ottoman Empire. The treaty settled almost nothing, but it briefly established that the international order at the time acknowledged a Kurdish political future as conceivable. Barely three years later, that possibility disappeared. 

Military victories by the Turkish nationalist movement transformed the diplomatic landscape. In 1923, the Treaty of Lausanne replaced Sèvres, recognized the sovereignty of the new Turkish Republic, and abandoned the earlier provisions concerning Kurdish autonomy. 

By the mid-1920s, the basic framework had been set. The Ottoman Empire was gone. The Republic of Turkey had been recognized. Iraq had been constructed under British influence with Mosul included. Syria had been placed under French mandate. Iran continued its own centralizing state project. Kurdistan was divided among Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. The Kurds did not move. The borders moved over them. A Kurd in Turkey now faced one state, one army, one ideology, one school system, one prison system, one legal vocabulary. A Kurd in Iraq faced another. A Kurd in Iran another. A Kurd in Syria yet another. 

Once the new borders gained international recognition, they acquired legal authority and, consequently, a presumption of permanence. Questions that had recently belonged to international diplomacy were reclassified as domestic affairs. Kurdish demands for self-government were no longer debates about the political order of the Middle East. They became internal problems for the states that governed Kurdish populations. 

In Turkey, Kurdishness was long treated as a defect in the project of one Turkish nation. The republic presented itself as modern, secular, civilizing, and unified. Kurdish language, memory, and self-rule appeared as backwardness or a threat to national unity. In Iraq, Britain acknowledged Kurdish distinctiveness when useful, then subordinated Kurdish self-rule when it interfered with the Iraq it wanted to build. Later Iraqi regimes, especially the Baathist state, would take this contradiction to catastrophic extremes through Arabization, village destruction, chemical attacks, and the genocidal Anfal campaign. 

Maps don’t simply record the world “as it is”—they record political settlements. Every border reflects decisions made by people under particular historical circumstances.

In Iran, Kurdish leaders negotiated, organized, or declared self-rule in moments of state fragility, only to face execution or repression once Tehran regained strength. Iranian state forms changed—Qajar, Pahlavi, Islamic Republic—but Kurdish self-rule was repeatedly treated as a threat to central authority. In Syria, denial often worked more quietly. It operated through language restrictions, Arabization, and administrative erasure. Many Kurds in Syria were rendered stateless after the 1962 census. Kurdish identity was made faint in public life, not always through spectacular massacre, but through the slow violence of non-recognition. 

This shift profoundly altered the burden of justification. Now, those seeking to change the (newly) established borders had to explain and advocate why they should be changed. The question was no longer What political arrangement best reflects the peoples of the region? but rather How can political aspirations be accommodated without disturbing the existing map?

If the Kurdish question were simply the story of a people denied a state, its history would read like a sequence of unrelated defeats and occasional victories. One rebellion follows another. One uprising succeeds briefly before being crushed. One generation places its hopes in diplomacy, another in armed struggle, another in constitutional politics. Look more closely, however, and you’ll notice that Kurdish self-government has often advanced when central governments were weak or when outside powers provided protection, only to become vulnerable when the regional balance of power changed. 

Brief Experiments in Kurdish Statehood 

The collapse of the Ottoman Empire created several opportunities for Kurdish self-government, although none produced a durable state. One of the first arose around Sulaymaniyah, in what is now the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. After the First World War, British authorities appointed Sheikh Mahmud Barzanji, an influential religious and tribal leader, as governor of the area. He soon sought greater independence from British control and led an uprising in 1919. 

After a period of imprisonment and exile, he returned to Sulaymaniyah and in 1922 assumed the title King of Kurdistan. His authority extended over a relatively small territory and depended heavily on religious standing, tribal alliances, and personal loyalty. British and Iraqi forces eventually ended the experiment. It was a limited and politically fragile precursor to modern Kurdish nationalism, but it established an early precedent for Kurdish attempts to turn the collapse of Ottoman rule into political sovereignty. 

A more developed experiment appeared in northwestern Iran after the Second World War. The Republic of Mahabad was proclaimed in January 1946 under Qazi Muhammad, leader of the newly established Kurdish Democratic Party. The republic established a government and promoted Kurdish-language education, publishing, and political organization. Its emergence was closely connected to the Soviet occupation of northern Iran, however, and Soviet military and economic support was important to its survival. When Soviet forces withdrew in 1946, the republic lost its principal external protection. Iranian forces reoccupied Mahabad in December, and Qazi Muhammad was executed in March 1947. 

The most durable Kurdish political project began in Kurdistan after the 1991 Iraq Gulf War. Kurds rebelled against Saddam Hussein’s government, and the regime’s counteroffensive produced a mass exodus toward Turkey and Iran. The international response included Operation Provide Comfort, a security zone in northern Iraq, and restrictions on Iraqi military aircraft. These measures helped create an area beyond Baghdad’s effective control in which Kurdish political institutions could develop. 

Kurdish identity was made faint in public life, not always through spectacular massacre, but through the slow violence of non-recognition.

In May 1992, Kurds in Iraq held parliamentary elections and established a regional legislature and government. The political system was imperfect from the beginning. The Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) dominated political life, and their rivalry developed into armed conflict in the mid-1990s. The two parties effectively governed separate zones until a U.S.-brokered agreement in 1998 helped end the fighting. Nevertheless, the Kurdish administration survived and gradually developed into a durable regional government. 

The overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003 strengthened its legal position. Iraq’s 2005 Constitution formally recognized the Kurdistan Region and its existing authorities as a federal region. Kurdish self-government was therefore incorporated into the constitutional structure of the new Iraqi state rather than existing solely through foreign protection or Baghdad’s weakness. Over more than three decades of substantially autonomous Kurdish government in Kurdistan in Iraq, the Kurds have demonstrated the ability to administer territory, maintain public institutions, conduct elections, provide security, and negotiate with foreign governments over an extended period. 

Another Kurdish-led political system emerged during the Syrian civil war. Beginning in 2012, as Syrian government forces withdrew from much of the north, the Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its armed forces, the YPG and YPJ, established control over several predominantly Kurdish areas. These territories later developed into a broader autonomous administration encompassing Kurdish, Arab, Assyrian, and other communities. The governing project, commonly associated with the Kurdish name Rojava, placed unusual emphasis on decentralized administration, political participation of women, and multiethnic representation. 

The rise of the Islamic State in 2014 gave Kurdish forces a much larger military role. ISIS captured Mosul, conquered large areas of Iraq and Syria, and carried out a genocidal campaign against the Yazidis of Sinjar. The Kurdish response was not uniform. Peshmerga units, the armed forces of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan Region, withdrew from much of Sinjar as ISIS advanced in August 2014, leaving Yazidi communities exposed to mass killing, enslavement, and forced displacement. Syrian Kurdish YPG fighters and forces associated with the Turkey-based Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) subsequently helped establish an escape route from Mount Sinjar. Kurdish forces in both Iraq and Syria then became increasingly important in the wider campaign against ISIS. 

In Syria, the YPG and YPJ played a central role in the defense of Kobani, and the later Syrian Democratic Forces became the principal local partner of the U.S.-led coalition in much of the campaign against ISIS. In Iraq, Peshmerga forces fought alongside Iraqi and coalition forces across a long front. The war demonstrated that Kurdish institutions were capable of fielding organized military forces and cooperating extensively with Western governments even in the absence of an independent Kurdish state. 

That experience contributed to the Kurdistan Regional Government’s decision to hold an independence referendum on September 25, 2017. The ballot covered the recognized Kurdistan Region as well as disputed territories then under Kurdish control, including Kirkuk. According to the regional electoral commission, 92.73 percent of participating voters supported independence, with turnout above 70 percent. The size of the majority provided unusually clear evidence of support for statehood among those who voted, although the inclusion of disputed territories made the referendum more contentious. 

The referendum had little international backing. Iraq rejected it as unconstitutional. Turkey and Iran, both of which have large Kurdish populations of their own, strongly opposed it. The United States also opposed holding the vote at that time, arguing that it could destabilize Iraq and complicate the final stages of the war against ISIS. The United Nations likewise warned against a unilateral referendum. 

The stronger contemporary case rests on self-determination and demonstrated political capacity.

The consequences came quickly. In October 2017, Iraqi federal forces moved into Kirkuk and other disputed territories that Kurdish forces had controlled since the collapse of the Iraqi army in 2014. Divisions between the two main Iraqi Kurdish political parties, the KDP and PUK, contributed to the rapid Kurdish withdrawal. The referendum therefore produced an unusual result: an overwhelming vote for independence followed almost immediately by a reduction in Kurdish territorial and political leverage. 

These episodes form an important part of the modern case for Kurdish statehood. They show repeated attempts to establish political institutions across several parts of the Kurdish-populated Middle East, as well as sustained popular support for self-government. 

Kurdish-majority territory remains divided among four existing countries; many of the areas claimed by Kurdish nationalists contain substantial Arab, Turkmen, Assyrian, Armenian, Yazidi, and other populations. 

Institutions and Governing Capacity 

Past persecution supplies only part of the argument for Kurdish statehood. The stronger contemporary case rests on self-determination and demonstrated political capacity. The Kurdistan Region in Iraq in particular has functioned as a largely self-governing political entity since 1991 and as a constitutionally recognized federal region since 2005. Its institutions have serious deficiencies, but they have also endured for more than three decades. The 2017 referendum showed that independence has broad support among its electorate. Whether those facts justify changing Iraq’s borders is ultimately a political and moral judgment. 

The Kurds have repeatedly shown they can establish institutions when the geopolitical space allows. Sheikh Mahmud’s short-lived government around Sulaymaniyah combined personal, religious, tribal, and administrative authority, but remained narrow and fragile. The Republic of Mahabad went further, creating a government, political administration, Kurdish-language education, publishing, and organized national institutions before Iranian forces reoccupied the area. 

After 1991, the Kurdistan Region in Iraq developed the most durable example: parliamentary elections in 1992 produced an elected legislature, a regional government, and a judicial council; after 2005 these institutions, as well as universities, gained formal recognition within Iraq’s federal constitution. In Rojava (Syria), Kurdish-led authorities developed local councils, civilian administrations, security forces, and other institutions we commonly associate with modern governance, including gender parity and multiethnic participation. 

These relatively recent experiments with Kurdish statehood in Iraq and Syria do not prove that a future Kurdistan would necessarily be democratic, but they do show that Kurdish political life has already produced institutional experiments that can be evaluated, criticized, and improved rather than dismissed as purely hypothetical.

Humans love patterns. Trying to find patterns even where they don’t exist is our way of making sense of the world. Place a million parallel lines before a human observer and they shall immediately know it if one of them is askew. Likewise, that random act of violence must be a conspiracy, those two presidents must have some ontological connection to each other to explain so many coincidences (Lincoln and Kennedy), and that random array of bushes and shrubs must be a human.

Pareidolia is the phenomenon of noticing familiar shapes, patterns, and especially human faces where they don’t exist, the result of a busy human brain trying to make sense of an often-chaotic world, and especially in the case of seeing faces, to recognize signs of friendship or enmity in the external world. Bushes, shrubs, or even car headlights—these are all things we are indifferent to. But a fellow human? Their presence could save a life, or end it. Pareidolia is fascinating as it emerges from an evolutionary instinct that comes to us part and parcel of being social creatures. Our eyes see what the mind wants them to, and what it wants, or fears, is often another human being.

Pareidolia also has a higher chance of occurring when individuals are isolated, and thus under high amounts of stress.

Pareidolia also has a higher chance of occurring when individuals are isolated, and thus under high amounts of stress. Deprivation, whether of food, or oxygen, or even shelter, can exacerbate symptoms, as we are forced to look around more for external support, or to fear that which we cannot see. Interestingly, pareidolia is affected by cultural contexts. If one sees a monkey-like creature for example, whether it is naked or clothed, whether it can speak or not, whether it is malevolent or benevolent, is decided by the social-cultural environment in which the brain has been conditioned.

Another aspect to keep in mind is that instances of pareidolia are self-reinforcing. Once a creature gets spotted, the reports of its sighting get implanted in the minds of other observers, who may thus end up seeing the creature themselves, even if they didn’t believe in the initial reporting and dismissed it as a hoax. The mere implantation of an idea is incredibly impactful upon an impressionable, desperate, and lonesome individual, and has led to multiple cases of mass hysteria, or more technically, Mass Psychogenic Illness (MPI). Pareidolia is one of the most fascinating cases of our minds misconstruing things because we always see creatures that are almost human enough, but lie right in the uncanny valley of uncomfortable recognition. Isolated from society, we wish to see figures similar to ours, but something always feels awry.

Bigfoot

This is why stories of the Yeti and Abominable Snowman, more commonly known in the west as Bigfoot, are so prevalent. The first sightings of these creatures always occur at the interstice of nature and civilization, as humans encroach more and more into Mother Earth’s domain, and in that case of isolation, imagine themselves to be not the only human-like thing around. In the case of Bigfoot, loggers in Northern California spotted a large ape-like creature in 1958 near a construction site, and to them it appeared similar to “man-in-the-wild” creatures sighted earlier in the 19th century. The Yeti has no single defining sighting, for it finds its origin in the mythos of glacier beings, or in the Gods of the Hunt in the pre-Buddhist Bön religion, which later got carried over to the Buddhist religion followed by the locals of the frigid, lonely high-altitude regions of Tibet, Nepal, and Bhutan. It is noteworthy that Yetis are spotted by mountaineers and explorers who are almost invariably either hungry, thirsty, lost, alone, or oxygen deprived.

We always see creatures that are almost human enough, but lie right in the uncanny valley of uncomfortable recognition.

Reinhold Messner, arguably the greatest mountaineer of all time (he summited Mt. Everest twice), is best known for attempting high altitude climbs in the Death Zone (above 8000 meters) without the use of supplementary oxygen. Famously, when he claimed to have seen a Yeti in 1986, or at least a creature that had hitherto remained undiscovered, many believed that oxygen deprivation had finally got to him, and had made him see things that didn’t exist. After 12 years of investigation Reinhold (with a clearer mind!) finally closed the case himself when he concluded that he had seen a bear.

Monkey-Man

This brings us to the 2001 “Monkey-Man” case of Delhi, which is particularly fascinating not only that it took place in an environment where humans existed in close proximity to monkeys—thus being close to actual human-like entities, unlike in California or Tibet—but also in close proximity to other humans. If isolation and deprivation add to the pareidolia process, and in combination with other factors, lead to cases of MPIs, what we observe in the Monkey-Man case isn’t a geographical or an environmental isolation, but one of a socioeconomic origin.

A majority of the sightings were reported by people from low-income households—people affected by shortages of food, electricity, and water. Not only this, but many victims were slum dwellers, whose very housings were not only cramped, but technically illegal. These factors played a huge role in deciding who Monkey-Man appeared to. Additionally, in an environment where monkeys are ubiquitous, and humans had to negotiate with them by feeding them, threatening them with violence, or simply ignoring them; in a system where Monkey deities had a powerful hold over the imagination, it is no wonder that the instances of a few actual monkey attacks played the role on the popular imagination that they did.

Poverty, heat, and darkness came together as sources of stress to cause the outbreak.

I recently sat down with sociologist and skeptic Benjamin Radford, who has nearly three decades of experience investigating unexplained mysteries, paranormal activities, and mass hysteria cases, as we revisited the Monkey-Man case more than two decades later. The following contains extracts from the interview interjected with my commentary:

The Monkey-Man Interview with Banjamin Radford

Singh: What fascinates me about this case is… were people seeing a creature with monkey-like features because they already saw actual monkeys around them?

Radford: It certainly makes sense that the embodiment, the characterization of the Monkey Man would be informed by the culture, right? The public image of it was informed by sensationalized media reporting. It happened in New Delhi, India. What might a figure that scares people and then is able to leap big distances look like? A monkey, right? 

There are monkeys everywhere. You have Hanuman, you’ve got monkeys around, you have all these cultural aspects to it. So, it makes sense. If it wasn’t the “Monkey-Man,” would it be the “Elephant Man”? No! Elephants are big, bulky, and they don’t jump, right? So, if you’re living in New Delhi at the time, and you’re trying to imagine what this barely visible attacker that sort of leaps out of from nowhere and is never actually caught, might look like, the obvious answer would be, it might look like a monkey. The sightings were always ambiguous, (in) low light, where the human eye fills in the details.

It seems that in this case, pareidolia worked in tandem with logical reasoning to shape the Monkey-Man’s image. The victims saw the figure they did as that would be the only explanation for the abilities it displayed. Most of these attributes might have been assigned by the victims retroactively, as they would be questioned about the Monkey-Man by the authorities. Close proximity with monkeys provided the basis for a gap in logical explanation that the victims’ minds worked to eliminate.

Singh: Most of the people who saw these were men, the primary breadwinners of families which were in the lower income spectrum of society.

Radford: So, you have the city, it’s a poor city, you have rolling blackouts, right? You have sweltering heat. People are sleeping on rooftops because they don’t have any air conditioning. The context is important here. So, you’re right. The Monkey-Man was not reported by Bollywood stars. The Monkey-Man was not reported by well-to-do people. 

This was an attacker or a predator that was seen to be stalking the working man, the working class, everyday people. And because of that, that’s who you would expect to have reported seeing it, right? That’s who’s interacting with or feeling threatened by it.

Different types of stress played a big role in the cases of hysteria that were observed in the Monkey-Man incidents. According to a study conducted by Satish K. Verma and D.K. Srivastava, published in the Indian Journal of Medical Sciences in 2003, most of the attacks happened in the early hours of the morning, between 12:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m., when visibility was low. Only two out of 18 people had a family income of more than 50,000 rupees ($550) per annum. The majority of the cases had male victims, most of whom had to sleep outside houses in terraces due to a combination of the factors of excessive heat and limited space in the houses. It can also be assumed that as the primary breadwinners in a majority of the cases, the males of the household faced an additional financial pressure. Thus, poverty, heat, and darkness came together as sources of stress to cause the outbreak.

What is haunting about the Monkey-Man incident is the loneliness that the victims felt. Many of these victims, faced with the figure of the Monkey-Man, instead of fleeing, tried to grab it. Initially, I had hypothesised that the desire to grab Monkey-Man stemmed from the profound isolation that had defined the lives of the victims, i.e., to attempt to grab Monkey-Man was to attempt to make contact with it—contact with a human-like figure in an attempt to alleviate isolation. I had thought similarly of the injuries that some victims had inflicted upon themselves.

My theory, influenced by an article titled “The Monkeyman of Delhi” by reporter Aman Sethi, published in The Guernica in 2012, had been that the injuries had almost been a form of stress-relief for the victims, some of whom had injured themselves in their sleep. Radford describes the case perhaps more realistically:

Radford: (There were) people who were hoaxing and pranking. Now, the motivations for that are interesting. One of them is attention. Keep in mind that if you’re going to make up a Monkey-Man attack and going to say that you hurt your back or your elbow or your leg or you broke your foot, it’s more interesting and brave to say, “I fought. I tried to grab it,” right? “I was going to grab it and hold it down and tie it up and call the authorities,” because it makes them the hero of the story. You don’t want to say, “Yeah, something scared me and I ran and I hit the door and fell down the stairs.” You’re not the hero of that story then—you’re an idiot. There’s a motivation for people to build themselves up and say, “I was the hero. I tried to capture this evil, scary thing. And I didn’t get it, but boy, I was injured in the process.” So, I think that’s part of what was going on.

On the strange injuries caused by blunt objects, marked by unusual lacerations, with scratch marks also being found on the dorsal aspect of the forearm, while given the orientation of the two bodies with the Monkey-Man being grabbed by the victims, they should have been found on the ventral aspect:

Radford: It’s more likely, in my opinion, that people who faked their injuries were doing so for attention or sympathy or for notoriety. You’re being interviewed on the TV news that night, or whatever else, or you’re quoted in the newspaper. So, I think, most people who saw the Monkey-Man were perfectly normal. I think the motivation was attention and sympathy and, being part of a national story—an international story. So, if you’re a day labourer, you work in a factory, you sell, you know, trinkets on the sidewalk, whatever it is you do. Or you work in the fields and all of a sudden there’s this national story that everyone’s talking about. And you’re like, “Hey, I was, I’m part of this story.”

So, I don’t think most of them were relieving stress. This actually gets into other injuries that have no clear origin. There are people who say that aliens abducted them, they took them up in a spaceship, and they did experiments on them. So, they would have like an injury, or a scar somewhere, and they’d say, “I don’t know why I got this.” In our everyday lives, people can hurt themselves. Without noticing it, you step on something, you brush against something, you get a little wound, just something small. It could happen at night if you’re sleepwalking, in bed, whatever else. And so, it’s not uncommon for people to have small, unnoticed injuries that they later attribute to something extraordinary, such as an alien or a phantom attacker or Monkey-Man.

Fittingly enough, the conclusions the victims made about the injuries converge with what this report began with; the tendency for humans to find patterns where chaos exists. The Monkey-Man’s nocturnality coupled with the stress of daily life for these people led to them believing that injuries which might have occurred accidentally, were in fact deliberately caused by an external and malevolent source. The motivations for the encounters with Monkey-Man are, as Radford describes, still due to societal neglect and isolation, just not in the manner I had earlier conceived.

The Monkey-Man case highlights intractable human isolation, even while being contained within a crowded, concrete jungle.

The conscious need for attention, to be the hero of a story, to be the centre of attention is not only more probable than the unconscious, it is almost a masochistic desire to touch Monkey-Man and cause injuries to the self; perhaps it is an even sharper manifestation of the socioeconomic conditions and isolation implicit here. Hundreds of people, neglected by the society around them, suffering in the horrible summer heat of Delhi, living in “jhuggi-jhopris” at a constant threat of getting demolished, and working despite perjury being an actual condition of life, saw the Monkey-Man incident as an opportunity to finally be heard, to be part of something bigger than the misery of their lives.

The Monkey-Man case highlights intractable human isolation, even while being contained within a crowded, concrete jungle—paradoxically, an isolation that emerges from being trapped within such an environment. The cases of the manifestation of the Monkey-Man are not to be romanticized, instead they should be studied as what they are—consequences of the failure of a society to provide safety nets for the people belonging to its lowest strata; the yearning of an isolated, neglected section of the populace to feel some sort of comfort in social interaction.

Conclusion

I had initially planned on getting interviews from people who had actually seen Monkey-Man. Though overly optimistic, I still set out one dusty evening to Krishna Nagar in East Delhi, which had been the location for a many of the reports. I’m not sure what conception I had had in my mind regarding the neighbourhood, but I was quite surprised by it. Shops lined the streets, there were parks full of trees and other green areas. It looked like any other neighbourhood in Delhi! I couldn’t even find many monkeys near the crowded roads.

Further, to my disappointment, not only did I not find any people with first-hand accounts of the case, but I did not find anyone who had even heard of Monkey-Man. The case was almost a quarter of a century old. With time, it seems people have moved on. MPI cases often fade as such. As Benjamin Radford recounted about his investigation of the Chupacabra in Puerto Rico:

Radford: I go into a store in San Juan, the capital, and there’s all these t-shirts. And I asked this guy behind the counter, I was like, “Hey, do you have anything with the Chupacabra?” And I realized this kid’s like 20, and was like two when the chupacabra was a thing.

I now understand, having spoken to Mr. Radford, that the fact that people don’t even remember Monkey-Man is welcome evidence of the argument I’ve been making throughout this essay, namely that it is evidence of the isolation that tormented the victims having been greatly allayed.

Krishna Nagar, along with East Delhi as a whole, has seen significant economic development since 2001. People don’t remember Monkey-Man because their reality isn’t the same as it was. Socioeconomic isolation isn’t nearly as rampant, people now feel that there are more people around them, and there are no monkeys around in Krishna Nagar anymore—real or imaginary.

This is a response to Klaus Ziegler’s critique of my moral case for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I want to thank Klaus Ziegler for taking the time to read and respond to my essay, “The Moral Case for Dropping the Atomic Bombs.” He challenges my three propositions that (1) the atomic bombings contributed to Japan’s surrender, (2) without them substantially more people would likely have died, (3) therefore, the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was morally justified.

Despite Klaus’s thoughtful critique that reveals the many challenging issues involved in the U.S. government’s decision to drop the two atomic bombs on Japan, I stand by these propositions. In fact, since writing that analysis I have read James M. Scott’s fabulous new book, Empire of Ashes: Truman, Hirohito, and the Descent Into Total War, which not only reinforces my conclusions but makes it abundantly clear that President Truman’s decision to use this new weapon to end the war was absolutely the right one. Through 400 pages of gripping narrative grounded in nearly 400 references to primary and secondary sources, Scott concludes, and I agree, with Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s assessment in Harper’s Magazine in 1947 that this was “the least abhorrent choice” among those on the table considered by the administration:

The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki put an end to the Japanese war. It stopped the fire raids, and the strangling blockade. It ended the ghastly specter of a clash of great land armies.

Japan’s Navy Minister Admiral Mitsumasa Yonai agreed:

The atomic bombs and the Soviet entry into the war are, in a sense, gifts from the gods.

Of course, Stimson’s “least abhorrent choice” must always be remembered for what it was by comparison, as Scott concludes his great work:

For the people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the atomic attacks were anything but a gift. The horror that befell those cities was unimaginable. Equally so was the devastating impact the attacks had on hundreds of thousands of lives, not only those killed but the survivors who battled everything from radiation sickness and painful keloids to the loss of loved ones and homes.

Why didn’t Japan end the carnage earlier, say in 1944 when it was unambiguously obvious they were going to lose the war, or even in 1943 after suffering major battle losses that made it clear the Americans were not going to let Japan have all that it had captured in the way of territories in Indonesia and the Pacific that would fuel their militarism (which is what the nation’s militarists in power hoped would happen after the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor)?

So committed were they to leading Japan into a final Götterdämmerung of death and destruction that they threatened to assassinate anyone who stood in their way…

As Scott reveals in excruciating detail down to the minutes and hours, the six men who ran the country (over which Emperor Hirohito had next to no control), were in unison that the army and the navy would fight to the bitter end, especially after the Potsdam Declaration President Truman signed insisting on unconditional surrender. So committed were they to leading Japan into a final Götterdämmerung of death and destruction that they threatened to assassinate anyone who stood in their way—including Pearl Harbor mastermind Isoroku Yamamoto, fellow generals who slept with pistols under their pillows, and even the Emperor himself.

After turning-point American victories such as at Midway, and especially after the many blood-soaked island-hopping battles in the Solomon Islands, the Gilbert Islands, the Mariana Islands, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, all won by America’s ever-growing military production capacity, one would think even military-hardened veterans in Japan would have finally given up, especially when they could see all around them their starving citizens who, as one recalled after the 1945 Tokyo bombing, lived like stray dogs in what remained of Japan’s bombed-out cities.

But no! Even after Curtis LeMay’s B-29 bombers reduced Tokyo to rubble and killed over 100,000 Japanese citizens in one night, the Truman administration didn’t hear a peep from the Japanese government, and so America marched on to complete the Manhattan Project, test the bomb at Trinity in New Mexico on July 16, and ship two bombs to Tinian and prepare them for launch. And still not a word of surrender emerged.

August 6. Hiroshima. 90,000–166,000 dead. Silence.
August 7. Nothing.
August 8. The Soviet Union declaration of war against Japan. Dial tone.
August 9. Nagasaki. 60,000–80,000 dead. All quiet on the Western Front.

Finally, the Big Six Japanese leaders who held the fate of the entire nation in their hands, met the afternoon of August 9 to discuss what to do next. “The ensuing discussion revealed that the six leaders all agreed that Japan’s imperial structure must be preserved,” Scott writes, adding “but opinions beyond that proved sharply divided.”

Three favored accepting the Potsdam Declaration of unconditional surrender as long as they could retain the monarchy in the form of Emperor Hirohito (Foreign Minister Togo, Admiral Kantaro Suzuki, and Navy Minister Admiral Mitsumasa Yonai), whereas the other three “all imbued with the samurai ethos, wanted to add three additional conditions,” which included “limiting the occupation of the homelands, allowing officers to demobilize their own troops, and permitting Japan to oversee the trials of any suspected war criminals” (War Minister General Korechika Anami, Army Chief of Staff General Yoshijro Umezu, and Navy Chief of Staff Admiral Soemu Toyoda). 

When Togo told the three holdouts that this was never going to happen, Umezu boasted that Japan was not defeated because the main islands had not been invaded, adding: 

If we are lucky, we will be able to repulse the invaders before they land. At any rate, I can say with assurance that we will be able to destroy the major part of an invading army, that is, we will be able to inflict extremely heavy damage on the enemy.

Although Yonai growled “the war is lost,” Anami countered that it was “far too early to say that the war is lost,” adding “we must fight the war through to the end no matter how great the odds against us!” Umezu, expressing the sunk-cost fallacy (reluctance to abandon a heavily-invested in strategy), opined that “unconditional surrender now would only dishonor the heroic war dead.”

Instead of focusing on what America did to end the war, perhaps more attention should be paid to considering why Japan let it go on for so long…

Finally, at 2:20 a.m. the next morning, the Big Six turned to Emperor Hirohito to break the 3-3 split, who at long last found his spine and moral compass to override the military holdouts, rose to his feet and declared:

I have given serious thought to the situation prevailing at home and abroad and have concluded that continuing the war can only mean destruction for the nation and a prolongation of bloodshed and cruelty in the world. I cannot bear to see my innocent people suffer any longer. Ending the war is the only way to restore world peace and to relieve the nation from the terrible distress with which it is burdened.

On August 15, 1945, Hirohito delivered his “Jewel Voice Broadcast” to the citizens of Japan, and while never using the word “surrender” made it clear what led to his decision:

The enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to damage is indeed incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, it would not only result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization. Such being the case, how are we to save the millions of our subjects or to atone ourselves before the hallowed spirits of our imperial ancestors? This is the reason why we have ordered the acceptance of the provisions of the Joint Declaration of the Powers.

A final point (and counterfactual): there are between 250,000 and one million American families who did not receive letters from their government explaining that their sons had died in the final battle for Japan. Imagine how those families would have responded to President Truman if they learned that we had a weapon that could end the war overnight?

The historical record is now clear: both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were necessary to end the killing. It sounds absurd—kill some now to prevent even more being killed later—but this is not a social psychologist’s laboratory in moral reasoning but a tragic ending to an even more tragic war begun by the Japanese, who could have surrendered unconditionally any time before August and saved hundreds of thousands or even more of their citizens. Instead of focusing on what America did to end the war, perhaps more attention should be paid to considering why Japan let it go on for so long in the teeth of overwhelming evidence that they could only lose.

This is a critique of Michael Shermer’s moral case for dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Michael Shermer has spent much of his career teaching others how not to fool themselves. As the founder and editor-in-chief of Skeptic, he has made a profession of demanding evidence, distinguishing what is known from what is inferred, warning against confirmation bias, and urging people to apply the same standards to their own beliefs as to others’ beliefs.

There is, however, one superstition before which even professional skeptics can be tempted to kneel: the moral innocence of their own country. In his recent essay, “The Moral Case for Dropping the Atomic Bombs,” Shermer revives one of the most consoling tenets of the American civic catechism: Hiroshima and Nagasaki, dreadful as they were, saved “very probably millions of lives, both Japanese and American,” because the alternative was an invasion of Japan.

It is an efficient doctrine. It explains horror, absolves those responsible, and turns victims into instruments of a higher providence. The civilians who died are weighed against the soldiers and civilians who might otherwise have perished. History is considerably less elegant. 

Three propositions must be distinguished. First, the atomic bombings contributed to Japan’s surrender. Second, without them, substantially more people would likely have died. Third, therefore, the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was morally justified. 

These propositions are not equivalent: Causal efficacy is not counterfactual necessity, and neither alone establishes moral permissibility. 

The Arithmetic of the Unborn Dead 

Shermer writes that Truman’s advisers estimated that an invasion could cost between 250,000 and 1,000,000 American lives. The historical record, however, is far less settled. 

At the White House meeting on June 18, 1945, the Joint Chiefs explicitly stated that the Pacific experience was too diverse to justify a numerical estimate for the Kyushu invasion. The memorandum nevertheless provided comparisons: Luzon had cost about 31,000 American casualties—killed, wounded, and missing—and it stated that the first thirty days on Kyushu might not exceed that price. Admiral King suggested that a realistic figure would fall between those for Luzon and Okinawa. The same meeting also recorded General Marshall’s view that Soviet entry might prove decisive in pushing Japan toward capitulation.¹

Hypothetical deaths do not have the evidentiary status of observed deaths. 

But casualties are not deaths, and wounded and missing soldiers cannot be quietly counted as “lives lost” and then compared with the dead from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. More fundamentally, nobody knows how many people would have died in an invasion that never happened. That does not make counterfactual reasoning illegitimate; every serious evaluation of wartime decisions requires it. But hypothetical deaths do not have the evidentiary status of observed deaths. 

Shermer is entitled to argue that an invasion was probable and would have been catastrophic. What he cannot do without further argument is treat a disputed projection of an unrealized future as though its victims had already been counted. 

Arithmetic is not morality. 

Even if the casualty estimates were certain, a separate moral difficulty would remain. Imagine a terrorist group holding fifty children hostage in a kindergarten. Unless stopped, the terrorists will detonate a device inside a military installation, killing one thousand soldiers. The government cannot locate the device, but it can destroy the school before the signal is sent. The attack will certainly kill the fifty children but save the thousand soldiers. 

Would we therefore say that bombing the kindergarten is justified because the arithmetic saves 950 lives? The arithmetic is impeccable, but the moral conclusion does not follow. 

The analogy is deliberately schematic. Hiroshima was not a kindergarten, and wartime cities contain military, industrial, and civilian functions simultaneously. The thought experiment isolates a narrower question: whether the deliberate destruction of civilians can become morally permissible merely because it is expected to reduce a larger number of deaths elsewhere. 

The point is not that every soldier voluntarily accepts the risks of war; many are conscripts. The deeper distinction is normative. Combatants and civilians occupy distinct roles in armed conflict. If civilian destruction becomes a means of coercion rather than an incidental consequence of an attack on a military objective, arithmetic alone cannot settle its permissibility. Even perfect arithmetic would not settle whether a state may intentionally destroy an inhabited city in order to reduce expected military losses. 

Shermer broadens the argument by claiming that the bombings probably saved Japanese lives as well. That makes the calculus less nationalist but not philosophically simpler. It now depends on a demanding consequentialist principle: deliberately exposing a smaller civilian population to destruction may be permissible whenever doing so is expected to prevent a larger number of deaths later. 

A consequentialist may defend that principle, but it must be defended as a moral principle. It cannot be smuggled into the argument as though it were merely arithmetic. 

The counterfactual must work both ways. 

There is also an epistemic asymmetry in the standard defense. The preferred counterfactual runs like this: without the bombs, the United States would have invaded Japan; the invasion would have been catastrophic; therefore, the bombs saved enormous numbers of lives. 

But why must the next event in the unrealized history be an American invasion? 

At the aforementioned June 18 meeting, Marshall described Soviet entry as potentially decisive. On August 8, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and launched an offensive against Japanese forces in Manchuria, destroying Japan’s remaining hope that Moscow might mediate an end to the war. 

If a moral principle is genuine, the nationality of the actor cannot alter it. 

So, consider another possible history: Hiroshima is bombed on August 6, but Nagasaki is not destroyed three days later. Washington waits while Tokyo confronts Hiroshima’s atomic destruction and the Soviet entry into the war, almost simultaneously. Perhaps Japan still refuses to surrender. An invasion may eventually become necessary. But perhaps it does not. 

Shermer cannot dismiss that possibility merely because it is speculative. His million saved lives are speculative too. Once counterfactual history is admitted, competing counterfactuals must be admitted as well. Alternatives were not guaranteed to work; nothing in war is certain. But the real question is whether their expected consequences were sufficiently worse, and the evidence sufficiently strong, to justify the destruction of inhabited cities. 

Hiroshima is not Nagasaki. 

Nagasaki makes this problem particularly difficult. Hiroshima was destroyed on August 6. The Soviet Union entered the war against Japan on August 8. Nagasaki was destroyed on August 9. Japan had scarcely begun to absorb the first catastrophe when the strategic situation shifted again. 

The atomic attack order issued in late July authorized the first attack to be conducted after August 3. It also provided that additional bombs were to be used against the listed targets as they became available.² Thus, Nagasaki was not preceded by a wholly new presidential decision following an extended assessment of Hiroshima’s effects. This is worth noting because Hiroshima and Nagasaki need not stand or fall together morally.

Even if one granted, solely for the sake of argument, that Hiroshima was necessary, Nagasaki would still require its own justification. Only one day after the Soviet entry and three days after Hiroshima, was it already necessary to destroy another inhabited city? 

Remove the flag. 

A cleaner test is available: Remove the American flag. Suppose Stalin’s scientists had developed a weapon capable of burning a city in a single attack during the final campaign against Germany. Soviet generals estimate that destroying two German cities would kill 200,000 civilians but save 500,000 Soviet soldiers and perhaps another million Germans who would otherwise die in a prolonged conquest. 

Skepticism that stops at the border of national innocence has ceased, at precisely the moment it is most needed in order to be skepticism.

According to the arithmetic of the bargain, Stalin has not killed 200,000 civilians. He has saved 1.3 million lives. Would we accept the calculation? Would we regard the deaths of German children as a necessary sacrifice if it meant saving more lives? Would we approve choosing an inhabited city over an empty demonstration site because civilian destruction would exert greater pressure on Berlin? 

Changing the perpetrator is a test of universality. If a moral principle is genuine, the nationality of the actor cannot alter it. 

Civilians and Psychological Effect 

At the May 31 meeting of the American Interim Committee, participants sought the “greatest psychological effect.” They described the most desirable target as a vital war plant employing many workers and closely surrounded by workers’ houses.³ A separate group of Manhattan Project scientists, in the Franck Report, urged a demonstration of the bomb in a desert or barren area rather than a surprise attack on Japan.⁴

While this does not prove that American policymakers desired civilian deaths as an end in themselves, the destruction of an inhabited city was considered to hold strategic value, in part because of the psychological effect it was expected to have. 

Civilian suffering was therefore not wholly incidental to the coercive mechanism if the devastation of a city was valuable partly because it shocked a government and its population into surrender. In that case, civilians were no longer merely accidental bystanders to the strategy, instead, they had become part of the strategy. 

Shermer also argues that without atomic bombing, Curtis LeMay’s B-29s might have continued destroying Japanese cities, with equal or greater loss of life. Perhaps so. But if the alternatives had become “kill civilians this way” or “kill more civilians another way,” that tells us something horrifying about the range of methods already normalized. It does not by itself confer moral legitimacy on either. 

More Than Two Variables 

American officials were considering more possible courses of action: blockade and conventional bombing, Soviet entry, possible modification of surrender terms regarding the Emperor, and a demonstration of the atomic weapon. The Franck Report is direct evidence that the demonstration option was proposed. These alternatives may have failed. Their existence nevertheless demonstrates that the retrospective perceived binary of choice was artificial. 

Geopolitics also played a role. Before Trinity, American leaders sought Soviet assistance against Japan; the minutes taken on June 18 make that explicit. After the successful test, Stimson’s diary records discussions about whether Soviet entry was still necessary and notes Truman’s increased confidence after receiving the detailed report from Trinity.⁵ After Japan’s surrender, Stalin sought a Soviet role in the surrender and occupation of northern Hokkaido; Truman rejected the proposal.⁶

None of this proves the crude thesis that Hiroshima was bombed to frighten Stalin. The evidence does not justify that certainty. It establishes something more modest and more defensible: American decision-making was based on much more than only the two variables of Japanese deaths and American deaths. Soviet power, occupation, territory, and the emerging postwar balance also belonged to the strategic environment. 

Once that is admitted, the immaculate retrospective equation—destroy two cities now or sacrifice vastly more soldiers later—begins to look less like history than moral simplification. 

Victory and Moral Vocabulary 

Shermer is probably right that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not usefully described as genocide. Truman did not seek the extermination of the Japanese people. But not every atrocity is genocide, and rejecting that category does not settle the larger moral question. 

The harder issue is whether a state may intentionally destroy an inhabited city, knowing that enormous numbers of civilians will die, when the destruction is expected to coerce an enemy government into changing its behavior. 

Power changes moral vocabulary more easily than it changes moral character. 

Saint Augustine understood the privilege of power long ago. In The City of God, a pirate tells Alexander the Great that they do essentially the same thing; the difference is that one commands a small vessel and is called a robber, while the other commands a great fleet and is called an emperor.⁷ Power changes moral vocabulary more easily than it changes moral character. 

Robert McNamara made a related point in Errol Morris’s film The Fog of War. Recalling Curtis LeMay’s remark that they might have been prosecuted as war criminals had the United States lost, McNamara agreed and asked, what makes an act immoral if one loses but not immoral if one wins?⁸

Victory may confer immunity. It may determine who conducts the trials, issues the communiqués, builds the monuments, and writes the schoolbooks. It cannot alter the moral character of an act. 

The Skeptic’s Test 

And this brings us back to skepticism. 

Shermer’s argument uses counterfactuals. He should. He also weighs consequences, and consequences matter. American leaders faced an appalling decision after years of extraordinary brutality and with incomplete information. 

The problem with Shermer’s argument is the asymmetry. Actual civilians are weighed against hypothetical victims drawn from a disputed future. One counterfactual—catastrophic invasion—is granted enormous evidentiary weight, while competing alternatives are dismissed as speculation. A moral conclusion is allowed to emerge from aggregate numbers before the independent problem of civilian immunity has been resolved. And a strategic world involving Soviet entry, surrender terms, blockade, demonstration, occupation, and geopolitics is compressed into a binary: bomb now or lose vastly more lives later. 

That is a great deal of certainty to extract from an uncertain history and there is something almost theological about the structure: Terrible suffering occurred, yet it served a higher purpose. Innocent people died, but a greater evil was averted. The victims did not die in vain, and out of evil came a greater good. 

Lourdes is easy. Astrology is easy. Ghosts, creationism, telepathy, and alien abductions are easy. The serious test of skepticism begins when the same discipline threatens a belief tied to one’s nation, political tribe, or sense of historical innocence. The dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are one such test. Skepticism that stops at the border of national innocence has ceased, at precisely the moment it is most needed in order to be skepticism.

Read Michael Shermer’s response to this article.

Through the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA),¹ the U.S. Department of the Interior’ National Park Service at Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado plans to repatriate bags of human feces to tribes for reburial.

NAGPRA was passed in 1990 to assist federally recognized modern tribes in claiming affiliated human remains, funerary objects, sacred entities, and materials of cultural patrimony from federally funded institutes, such as museums, national parks, and universities. Human remains and these specific types of artifacts insufficiently linked to a modern tribe through a preponderance of evidence, which included historic documents, biological evidence like DNA, archaeological data, geographic links, and oral histories, were to remain at the institutes for further research and exhibition. 

Artifacts and other materials found at sites that were not funerary objects, sacred objects or objects of cultural patrimony, regardless of the links to modern tribes, were to remain in institutions for research and exhibition. The definitions for these categories are clear. Funerary objects are “objects that, as a part of the death rite or ceremony of a culture, are reasonably believed to have been placed with individual human remains either at the time of death or later.”² Thus, for an item to be a funerary object, the object had to be placed in the grave intentionally, for an individual deceased person. 

Since 2024, regulatory changes have required institutions to consult with tribes and to accept traditional indigenous knowledge without question, prior to displaying or researching any materials found at any archaeological site that may have been at one time occupied by indigenous peoples.³

The consultation allows tribal members to name what is a funerary object, what is a sacred object, and what is an object of cultural patrimony. With a consultation first strategy, everything at a site that cannot easily be placed into one of the other two categories (i.e., sacred object or object of cultural patrimony) is being listed as a funerary object by tribal knowledge keepers. 

Artifacts and other materials found at sites that were not funerary objects, sacred objects or objects of cultural patrimony, regardless of the links to modern tribes, were to remain in institutions for research and exhibition.

Prior to 2024, these decisions were made by archaeologists based on the archaeological record, historic documentation, and ethnographic data. Then, tribes were consulted about repatriation of the materials determined to fit into these categories. 

The consultation first system has led to a list of absurdities. The latest of which include a notice of inventory completion from Colorado that identifies “bags of human feces” as “funerary objects” and, thus, subject to repatriation.⁴ From Mesa Verde National Park, Montezuma County, Colorado: 

At site 5MV640 (Spruce Tree House) “[t]he 148 associated funerary objects are 91 human-chewed fiber quids, one bag of human feces, and 56 animal bones.”
At site 5MV650 (Square Tower House) “one bag of human feces” was listed as a funerary object.
At site 5MV1200 (Long House) “46 lots of human feces” were listed as funerary objects. 
At site 5MV1452 (Badger House) “one bag human feces” was listed as a funerary object. 

There are other sites with feces listed as funerary objects. From the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma, “one lot of feces” from an unknown species of animal is listed as funerary objects.⁵ The College of Marin in Kentfield, California has listed “three pieces of feces” as funerary objects.⁶ And, since the 2024 regulatory changes, fifteen sites list “coprolites”, which is the term for fossilized feces, as funerary objects, including a swamp site in Florida that includes alligator feces as funerary objects.⁷

Most recently, two notices from California’s State Office of the Bureau of Land Management in Sacramento has listed animal feces (which is referred to as scat in the notices) as funerary objects. In Lassen County, California, associated funerary included “skat” [sic].⁸ In Washoe County, Nevada “37 lots of associated funerary belongings include lithic flakes, stone tools, charcoal fragments, faunal bone, and scat. The entire collection is considered associated funerary belongings.”⁹

Even before 2024, however, some museums, universities, and government institutes were consulting with tribes and going beyond compliance with NAGPRA rules, which resulted in the loss of materials never meant for inclusion in the repatriation process. This also likely lowered the resistance to the regulatory changes in 2024. For instance, in 2007, the Burke Museum at University of Washington in Seattle, Washington listed “2 lots of rodent feces” as funerary objects.¹⁰ From the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in Jackson, a 2021 correction likely resulting from ongoing consultation with tribes, raised the number of funerary objects from “50 associated funerary objects to 83 lots of funerary objects” and within those, “one lot of coprolites” were included.¹¹

Our ability to truly understand the past–and, therefore, our shared humanity–will be buried.

One may wonder whether Native Americans really did intentionally bury their ancestors with feces. Are feces funerary objects? No archaeological evidence of this practice exists in the Americas. There are many articles on coprolites, paleofeces, and feces in the archaeological literature, but none of them point to evidence that feces were funerary objects in the Americas. 

One possibility is that the feces were collected at a different part of the site than the burials; trash heaps are often excavated. Another possibility is that human remains were treated as waste in some cultures. When human remains are commingled with trash and feces, this is actually evidence that the human bodies were also considered waste. This is often the case where cannibalism has taken place. Evidence of cannibalism and evidence of treating human remains as waste have been found in Mesa Verde National Park, where the bags of human feces mentioned above originated from. According to Katherine Brooks, in 50 events that Shaped American Indian History: An Encyclopedia of the American Mosaic: 

A large number of the middens [i.e., trash pits] excavated were identified at the base of the cliff where the residents of the cliff dwellings disposed of their refuse. Trash heaps offer insight into the foods that were eaten, the products that were used, the animals that were hunted and consumed, and even the disposal of the dead. Human remains were frequently intermixed with garbage in the trash pits.¹²

In a 1996 review of the materials held by National Park Service’s Western Archeological and Conservation Center, James Dildine wrote about the vast number of artifacts and other materials at sites which would not be subject to NAGPRA because they were not funerary objects, objects of cultural patrimony or sacred objects. He wrote that this should provide some comfort to archaeologists who are worried that NAGPRA would greatly hinder archaeological research. He wrote: 

Many of the items cataloged in relationship to burials are organic materials not intentionally placed there as part of the burial rites, but useful in making archeological determination. These “fill” items include rodent feces, unworked rock and unworked fiber.¹³

Dildine rhetorically asked: “are mice feces to be considered grave goods, especially considering they probably occur in burials as a result of scavenging for human remains?” Unfortunately, he was wrong; even rodent feces are being repatriated as funerary objects. 

Feces are useful research materials because they may contain evidence of parasites¹⁴ and past meals,¹⁵ can be used for radiocarbon dating,¹⁶ and can even be used to obtain DNA.¹⁷ When human remains are reburied, the hope for some archaeologists may have been to continue research using feces and other waste materials. Unfortunately, these materials are being taken away from researchers too, perhaps because of the truths they reveal about the past. 

The field will be lost to activists–if it has not already been lost. Narratives about America’s past will be controlled by those with no interest in the truth. 

The reasons given by tribal consultants for repatriation of feces, especially animal feces, are perhaps unknowable because tribal consultants need not provide a reason for defining materials as funerary objects, sacred objects, or objects of cultural patrimony. NAGPRA regulations, going back as far as 1995 and strengthened in 2024, advise officials involved in repatriation efforts that since sensitive cultural information is not excluded from freedom of information requests, “the best way to prevent sensitive information from being released is to not write it down in the first place.”¹⁸ They also recommend that tribes may wish to prohibit audio or video recording of consultations. Yet, in the past, there have been actions to deny evidence of cannibalism.¹⁹

Regardless of the reason for the increase in repatriation of feces, there’s clear evidence that feces–whether human or other species–are not funerary objects. By accepting the repatriation and reburial of feces, archaeologists are opening the door to even more absurd repatriations. The field will be lost to activists–if it has not already been lost. Narratives about America’s past will be controlled by those with no interest in the truth.

When all the collections–from human remains to feces–are reburied, our ability to truly understand the past–and, therefore, our shared humanity–will be buried too.

I was a chiropractor between 1983 and 2010. I started at Palmer College of Chiropractic-West (PCCW) just as Bill Meeker, DC, Joe Keating, PhD, and Cynthia Dutro, DC, were ready to take chiropractic research seriously. They believed rigorous evidence could validate chiropractic and secure its place in mainstream health care. I was serious enough to write PCCW’s president, John Miller, DC, before enrolling, to gauge his commitment to research. He wrote back that research was essential for the profession to “survive and thrive.”

Many believed the profession would be remade by evidence, moved at last beyond its fallacious nineteenth-century vitalism. Today their success is, at best, equivocal. The most striking thing is that more than a decade of sustained and rigorous chiropractic research across North America, Europe, and Australia has largely vanished from professional memory. Students, practitioners, and researchers may now be retracing our ground, thinking the questions were never asked or never answered. And since the answers we uncovered were not what chiropractors wanted to hear, results were tossed into the elastic biopsychosocial and “more research is needed” bins.

Until then, chiropractic research had chased biomechanics and speculative models of how chiropractic worked—before establishing that it worked at all.

My entry into chiropractic owed less to ideology than to gravity. While visiting the Kentucky farm of a lifelong friend, I fell out of a tree. A few days later I developed an acute torticollis that made turning my head a serious negotiation, and someone at work recommended their chiropractor.

Improvement after treatment is not always improvement caused by treatment, since much of it arrives with time and attention. 

For the previous few years, I had lived with chronic throat-clearing and the sensation of something lodged deep in my airway. About three months into treatment, those symptoms and much of my asthma faded. The causal inference—the adjustments had cured me—is the one I would spend a career learning to question: improvement after treatment is not always improvement caused by treatment, since much of it arrives with time and attention.

Chiropractic Research 

The first thing I discovered at Palmer West was that chiropractic was not one profession but many: true believers, entrepreneurs, technicians, philosophers, clinicians, and a small but growing number of reformers who believed its future was science. Many of us believed that we might treat conditions like back pain better and safer than drugs or surgery. The curriculum was rigorous, but beneath it a larger argument was taking shape. What, exactly, was chiropractic, and what would happen if its claims were subjected to serious scrutiny?

Despite its modest resources and small size, PCCW became one of the first major centers of chiropractic research. The timing was good because the Wilk antitrust case against the American Medical Association was still unfolding. Judge Susan Getzendanner would ultimately rule, in 1987, that organized medicine had unlawfully restrained competition by attempting to isolate chiropractic. While she did not “declare” chiropractic scientifically valid, her ruling removed the legal barriers that had prevented the profession from competing on equal footing.

The Wilk ruling opened the door to legal collaboration between chiropractors and physicians, and other openings followed over the next several years. The Office of Alternative Medicine, funded by Congress in 1991 and staffed the following year, signaled that complementary therapies had become legitimate subjects for federally funded scientific investigation. By the mid-1990s, Andrew Weil and the University of Arizona were giving academic credibility to a new field of integrative medicine. Meanwhile, chiropractic colleges and organizations such as FCER were building research programs unlike anything the profession had previously attempted.

The doors to medical acceptance were opening. Research funding was increasing. If chiropractic possessed a distinctive clinical contribution, we finally had both the opportunity—and no longer the “chiropractic as victim” excuse—to demonstrate it. For the first time, failure to answer that question could no longer be blamed on exclusion from the scientific community.

Integrative Medicine 

It is difficult now to convey how electric alternative medicine felt in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Academic medical centers were beginning to acknowledge what patients had already decided for themselves: chiropractors, acupuncturists, massage therapists, nutritionists, meditation teachers, and other unconventional practitioners had become part of American health care whether universities approved or not. 

Then David Eisenberg and colleagues published their landmark study documenting the enormous use of unconventional therapies by Americans, often without informing their physicians.¹ The paper landed like a small earthquake. Alternative medicine ceased to be a fringe curiosity and became a public-health phenomenon. The professional opportunities followed quickly. 

Shortly after I arrived, the Foundation for Chiropractic Education and Research funded what was then the largest chiropractic research grant ever awarded to our team at PCCW: a $350,000 trial comparing chiropractic care, physical therapy, and standard medical management for low back pain. I was the research statistician: I wrote the power calculations and the analysis plan. The profession would finally be judged by the same standards as the rest of health care!

As I pushed for more research, word of my interests eventually reached Gene Carragee at Stanford University. Carragee—who served in the U.S. Army as a battalion and command surgeon and forward surgical team commander, and was later editor-in-chief of The Spine Journal—invited me to lunch at Stanford’s Faculty Club. I remember realizing almost immediately that my ambition had outrun my preparation.

A literature that will not resolve after enough well-powered attempts is not unfinished. It is null.

What surprised me was the generosity. Carragee encouraged me to send manuscripts before submission so he could strengthen them, later brought me into Stanford’s spinal research group and its conferences, and introduced me to residents and faculty. I had been handed a rare view of how major clinical research programs worked. My heart wanted it; my head was still occupied with chiropractic and its future.

The Stanford connections led to others. I was assigned to provide chiropractic students with medical rotations at PCCW. At the time, there were three general approaches to intractable back pain: anesthesiologists, orthopedists, and neurologists. Today, I would add physiatry.

I brought students on clinical rounds to observe intradiscal electrothermal therapy (IDET). I placed some in a San Francisco workers’ rehabilitation clinic. Some watched the action at Stanford’s Emergency Department. I was in discussion for several months about getting chiropractors certified in emergency medicine at Stanford University Medical Center, and physiatry training at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF). The former failed for liability reasons and the latter failed for the requirement that chiropractors would become licensed as phlebotomists, which chiropractic leadership deemed a bridge too far—too medical.

I became the first chiropractor appointed to Andrew Weil’s Program in Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona. I developed and taught the program’s manual medicine curriculum; a course later delivered to physicians internationally. I also taught continuing medical education programs at El Camino Hospital, participated in research meetings at the Arizona Cancer Center, and wrote a two-part series on chiropractic for the Johns Hopkins Integrative Medicine newsletter.

In 1986 I visited Tyringham, an old English estate converted into an ambitious integrative health center backed by Sir Maurice Laing. The project brought physicians and complementary practitioners together to explore whether integrated care could improve patient outcomes. While in the UK, I proposed a program-evaluation approach to validating therapies to a group convened under the Prince of Wales’s interest in complementary medicine. I invited myself in through persistent phone calls to Mr. Colin Dove, Head of the British School of Osteopathy. As a follow-up, Mr. Dove said the committee ignored my suggestions because I was not on the agenda.

In all this, chiropractic leadership dug in their heels and showed no interest. Thus, the problem was never that chiropractic lacked opportunities. Every open door needed someone with the authority and resources to hold it open—to turn a visiting arrangement into a post, a collaboration into a program—and chiropractic’s leadership was simply not interested. It could not be done without institutional support. What unsettles me most now is how little of what happened survived as institutional memory. Today’s chiropractors know almost nothing of these attempts. That, as much as anything, is why I am writing this down.

Manipulation Works Best When Surrounded by Everything Except Manipulation 

During the 1980s and 1990s chiropractic researchers launched clinical trials, comparative-effectiveness studies, and collaborations with universities and medical centers.

Then, the larger, better-designed studies made the clinical picture go soft. Patients improved—sometimes substantially—but the improvement proved stubbornly hard to pin on manipulation. Natural history, spontaneous recovery, reassurance, exercise, attention, expectancy, and plain contextual healing kept blurring the causal thresholds.² Manipulation generally performed about as well as any other conservative care including placebo, and when superior, it closely tracked the false positive rate expected under null hypothesis significance testing.^3, 4 In fact, to this day you will see chiropractic research conclusions proudly assert that manipulation is no less effective than other treatments for low back pain, including controls—a damnation by faint self-praise.

The problem was not only scientific but psychological, cultural, and institutional, which is why supporters and critics could read the same trials as Rorschach blots and come away convinced of opposite conclusions. When one body of evidence underwrites both conclusions, the fault is rarely bias; more often the evidence was never built to answer the question asked of it.⁵ The remedy is unglamorous: decide in advance which single measure could settle the question, weigh several rival hypotheses at once,⁶ and recognize when further information can no longer move the decision.⁷ In short: name in advance the result that would change your mind. Chiropractic, though, thrived in the ambiguity. When outcomes were positive, manipulation worked; when they were negative, prejudice or incompetence was clearly afoot.

So the center of gravity in chiropractic research quietly retreated from the awkward clinical effectiveness question, towards safer, fundable territory: biomechanics, sensorimotor physiology, adverse-event surveillance, health-services research, and broad biopsychosocial models.

Does spinal manipulation itself produce large, reliable, clinically transformative effects beyond natural history and contextual healing?

I eventually tried to answer that question—at scale, assembling a meta-analysis of spinal manipulation for low back pain: a hundred and twenty randomized trials, some nineteen thousand patients, modeled against the natural history of recovery. The results did not rescue the story I had spent my youth defending. Once natural history and contextual healing were given their due, the slight effect we detected turned out to be natural history carrying manipulation for acute pain and a faint placebo carrying it for chronic pain.^8, 9 Years later, a contemporary from those reform days, chiropractor, influencer, and fellow researcher Greg Plaugher, remarked to me that “evidence-based chiropractic” was an old and abandoned paradigm.¹⁰

The strongest outcomes came not from an isolated mechanical input but from a comprehensive human encounter with many routes to recovery. 

Meanwhile the clinical literature kept telling the same story. In the modern military trials led by Christine Goertz—herself a symbol of the profession’s evolution—active-duty patients who received chiropractic care did better than those on usual medical care alone.¹¹ Pain, function, and satisfaction all improved: at first glance, exactly the evidence reformers hoped to see. 

Look closer, though, and the chiropractic “arm” was not manipulation but, in reality, the effect of repeated visits, education, exercise, reassurance, coaching, ergonomic advice, self-management support, and the whole atmosphere of attentive care. Patients improved; the contribution of manipulation itself stayed unknown. And when mechanistic studies looked for the distinctive physiological signature—balance, postural sway, neuromuscular response—the effects were weak, inconsistent, or absent.¹² The anticipated effects of chiropractic refused to show up. 

The strongest test arrived recently. In a trial published online in late 2025, a team led by Gert Bronfort reported on a thousand patients.¹³ Adults at elevated risk of chronic back pain were randomized to manipulation alone, a biopsychosocial self-management program, both, or guideline-based care. Over a year, manipulation by itself was statistically indistinguishable from ordinary medical care on pain and disability—half a century of hope for the adjustment, tested cleanly at last, returning null. A companion report the following year found that the self-management program outperformed both guideline-based medical care and manipulation alone!¹⁴

Which left an uncomfortable possibility, one that would have sounded like heresy in the reform years and gradually condensed in my mind into a single sentence: Manipulation works best when surrounded by everything except manipulation.

The strongest outcomes came not from an isolated mechanical input but from a comprehensive human encounter with many routes to recovery. 

There is another way to judge the reform movement. If research functions as intended, one would expect it to produce measurable changes in clinical practice. Yet after three decades, the average chiropractic office remains remarkably familiar. Technique systems continue to proliferate. Subluxation remains central in much of the profession. Weekend seminars still exert enormous influence. Clinical decisions are often shaped as much by tradition, philosophy, marketing, and personal experience as by systematic reviews. The profession unquestionably learned more about itself. Whether the profession itself changed very much is not so apparent.

Chiropractic research is alive and well in Denmark, New Zealand, and a handful of other centers, often more rigorous than anything the reform years produced. But the results of more research will not make spinal manipulation more acceptable. It cannot rescue a treatment this marginal; it will only measure it more precisely.

Palmer West closed its doors in 2025. And chiropractors who believe “more research is needed” continue to practice as they did a century ago, confident of eventual vindication. However, we did not leave a summary of what we found or did not find—no capstone or mile marker that said we did the work, and here is what we did or did not observe. So let this article stand as the mile marker: we did the work, and the work came back equivocal. That is harder to say than a clear finding, and easier to ignore. But a literature that will not resolve after enough well-powered attempts is not unfinished. It is null.

Our natural aptitudes enabled humans to thrive for ages, even in harsh environments. People observed regularities in their world (e.g., Inuit understood when ice was safe to travel) and manipulated nature to serve human ends (e.g., breeding corn in Mesoamerica). Several centuries ago, these natural ways of thinking evolved, and scientific methods emerged from diverse cultural foundations to build on traditional knowledge, separate fact from myth, reveal a deeper understanding of underlying mechanisms (e.g., DNA), and generate advanced technologies previously unthinkable (e.g., satellite imagery).

A scientific way of thinking about the world and its successes thrived despite repeated challenges from religious and other ethnocentric traditions. The first scientific journal, Philosophical Transactions (Phil Trans), was founded in England by the multilingual German Henry Oldenburg, who ensured its transnational scope, spread a universal perspective that overcame major conflicts between nation-states, and helped create what we today call Europe. Science then spread globally to ultimately achieve an inclusive worldwide reach, leading to a “shrinking world” based on global contributions, international collaborations, and worldwide appreciation of science-based explanations and applications.¹ Indeed, unequal access to the benefits of science, including modern healthcare, is at the heart of many concerning inequities within and between nations. For example, in a study of over 400 Ethiopian women, harmful practices before and after pregnancy (e.g., food taboos, unsterile materials) were more common for poorer women with little education, in rural locations, and without trained assistants, all suggesting modern science-based medicine was wanting.²

Science has always faced efforts to undermine its universality, including academic critics such as Sandra Harding who claimed in the 1980s that the “epistemologies … of the dominant forms of science are androcentric and … also racist, classist, and culturally coercive.”³ Today, science faces diverse and more threatening proposals for culture-specific “ways of knowing,” hereafter Ethno Epistemics. In contrast to universality, Ethno Epistemics promote partisan epistemologies purported to rival or surpass science, which is wrongly relegated to just another culture-specific (i.e., Eurocentric) science. Extensive literatures on this theme exist in various corners of academia. 

Philosopher Osman Bakar argues that “modern science is just one of several major forms of science … Islamic science … is another.”⁴ As are “Vedic sciences,” which include Jyotish (astrology) and Ayurveda (healing).⁵ Traditional Chinese Medicine adopts “Epistemic hybridity,” which entails “multiple legitimate evidence bases … diverse ways of knowing.”⁶ Likewise, “African ‘ways’ of knowing” include “supernatural beings—spirits, ancestors … intuition … clairvoyance and telepathy.”⁷ Philosopher Roberto Di Ceglie promotes a Christian epistemic, “a ‘spiritual turn in epistemology’ … on the basis of firm commitment to God,”⁸ while psychotherapist Teresa Marsh and colleagues writing about decolonizing methodology in the International Journal of Qualitative Methods observe that “In most Indigenous epistemologies, knowledge is acquired through revelation, such as dreams, visions, and intuition, and … is … spiritual … from the spirit world and ancestors.”⁹

Dismissing supranatural explanations liberated natural understandings of the world and contributed not only to a universal worldview but also to innumerable societal benefits often taken for granted.

That these “other ways of knowing” are rooted in supranatural elements is especially problematic. Science offered material explanations and won hard-fought battles over the supranatural, as manifested by a diminished role for theology in universities and widespread decreases in religiosity, especially among scientists. Dismissing supranatural explanations liberated natural understandings of the world and contributed not only to a universal worldview but also to innumerable societal benefits often taken for granted and with unintended irony (e.g., computers used to disseminate anti-science critiques). 

Also concerning, Ethno Epistemics can “validate” idiosyncratic beliefs that puzzle those not sharing the relevant provincial perspective and could foster negative reactions across cultures. According to the Vedas (the oldest sacred scriptures of Hinduism), toe rings ensure a healthy pregnancy, and Maori epistemology teaches that the Kauri tree and whales are siblings. More egregiously, President Jammeh of Gambia acquired an herbal cure for AIDS in a dream from ancestors who were traditional healers; absent empirical evidence, he decreed it to replace science-based anti-viral treatment. 

In advancing a plurality of “sciences,” Ethno Epistemics generally foster antipathy towards science, besmirching it as “Colonial science” and “White epistemology.” Rutando Ngara, an African Indigenous Knowledge Systems practitioner and transdisciplinary researcher, asserts that “Western science … has … subjugated other forms of knowledge … a form of epistemic genocide or ‘epistemicide.’”¹⁰ Research methods professor Bagele Chilisa states: “that no subject area or theory, be it biology, physics … has escaped Eurocentric colonialism and modern imperialism or globalization.”¹¹ Under Ethno Epistemics, unifying peoples around the world (i.e., globalization) becomes a negative rather than a positive goal. 

Promoting Ethno Epistemics and denigrating the universality of science makes it less likely that people will adopt its benefits. For example, trust in science within and between nations is associated with support for vaccination. Nor will science-skeptics replace misguided pre-scientific practices that are inevitable given common-sense thinking is so fallible.¹² It was scientific findings and well-founded theory that ultimately led people to reject bloodletting as a cure-all for innumerable ailments.

Promoting Ethno Epistemics and denigrating the universality of science makes it less likely that people will adopt its benefits.

Ethno Epistemics raise difficult questions about which, if any, warrant parity with science and how, if accepted uncritically, to reconcile inevitable contradictions among themselves and with established science. Incompatible epistemologies will preclude resolution about such contentious claims as that Maori ancestors discovered Antarctica or Muslims from Africa reached America long before Columbus.¹³

Instead, legitimizing these other ways of knowing will make more likely intractable positions like those held by an Indigenous archeologist, as reported way back in 1996 in The New York Times: “There’s a real feeling that we’ve been here forever … The Bering Strait theory makes logical sense, but … the traditional belief … comes first.”¹⁴ Most faith-based epistemics already entail such narratives about the origins of the universe and its peoples that contradict one another and science, a conflict that rages still today, albeit largely outside universities until now. 

Imagine the chaos in all aspects of science, including classrooms, if diverse Ethno Epistemic sources are deemed equivalent to science, and the vociferous attacks by outside political or public forces that could follow rejection of “alternative” sources they deem credible. Rather than scientific citations in student assignments, instructors could face religious and other disputable sources about the age of the earth. Such concerns are not hypothetical. In 2025, a University of Oklahoma student pleaded religious discrimination when her paper on gender for a psychology course received a grade of 0. According to the instructor, she only expressed personal opinions based on her understanding of God’s will and failed to review a scientific paper as required. A highly politicized furor resulted.¹⁵

Science has unified diverse peoples through an appreciation of its benefits and its inclusive perspective on the natural world free of cultural constraints.

Supporters of science cannot ignore such external forces, including political leaders who disparage expertise and question scientific findings that contradict their ideologies. As noted, proponents think of Ethno Epistemics as liberating peoples from the hegemony of science, but as historian of science Meera Nanda observed over 20 years ago, “reactionary political groups are redefining science to fit their agenda.”¹⁶ Claiming a culture-specific “science” promotes nationalist pride, even if unwarranted. Turkish president Recep Erdogan endorses creationism and Islamic faith-based post-secondary institutions. Politicians in India mandate university programs in astrology to further a Hindu nationalistic agenda with uncertain consequences for personal liberties, including religion. All buttressed by congenial epistemologies. 

To be clear, recent claims about culture-specific “ways of knowing” are distinct from traditional knowledge based on years and often generations of observations about the world, much of which merits respect within academia and provides a foundation on which science can build. Inspired by traditional herbal medicine and ancient literature, for example, scientist Tu Youyou was awarded a Nobel Prize for isolating the compound Artemisinin from the sweet wormwood plant. It is now used to treat Malaria, saving countless lives. And Ethno Epistemic epistemological claims likewise deserve attention in relevant disciplines, including history and philosophy of science.

Although precursors of science, however, traditional knowledge and epistemologies should not be conflated with contemporary science, a universal way to validate beliefs about nature and, notably, to reveal its underlying mechanisms. Ever since its inception from multiple cultural roots, science has unified diverse peoples through an appreciation of its benefits and its inclusive perspective on the natural world free of cultural constraints.