A new idea spreads by fitting the narrative it lands in, not by being better. Ansary's axial founders were distillers rather than inventors: Confucius claimed only scholarship, Thales resonated because his contemporaries swam in the same sea, and Socrates could not have gained traction in China. A master narrative welcomes what confirms it and resists what undermines it, so an idea that has to travel should be distilled out of what the receiving community already holds.

Evidence 15 passages

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  Confucius made no claim to prophetic originality, only to scholarship.

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  Socrates and his ideas could not have gained traction in the Middle Kingdom.

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  His thinking resonated with his contemporaries because they were no doubt swimming in the same sea.

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  People who share such a narrative resist ideas and information that undermine their framework and welcome ones that enrich and confirm it.

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  First, it fit in well enough with the Greco-Roman idea that the secular and the divine both existed but were separate spheres.

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  Once a kernel forms, new kernels adhere to it, because once a framework has coalesced, it shapes the judgments and values of people living within it.

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  The trailblazers of science were men of the church, one and all.

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  he thought God's creation must reflect God's perfection.

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  In China, movable type technology went nowhere because the Chinese script is not alphabetical.

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  And if the clock was competing with time of prayer, the clock was bound to lose.

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  they took no deep interest in the time of day.

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  Elsewhere, machines fit less easily into existing social frameworks, so these worlds proved more resistant to machine culture.

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  because in the feudal framework an odor of moral criticism was attached to the landless rich.

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  Profit was different. Profit had no ceiling.

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  This fit right in with the progress narrative, which conferred ultimate meaning and purpose upon doing better every day, gaining ground, having more.

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