1,755 claims across 18 domains

Harari (2014) observes that large-scale human cooperation depends on shared fictions -- religion, nation, money, human rights. But not all shared fictions persist. The ones that endure at civilizational scale provide two things simultaneously: meaning (why should I care?) and coordination (how shoul

Every dominant world narrative accumulates contradictions -- gaps between what the narrative promises and what people experience. The Reformation exposed contradictions in Catholic authority. The Enlightenment exposed contradictions in divine-right monarchy. In both cases, the contradictions accumul

A belief seems obviously true when every institution in your environment confirms it. This is Berger and Luckmann's core insight (1966): what people experience as "reality" is socially constructed through institutions that make some beliefs plausible and others unthinkable. The mechanism is not prop

Every dominant world narrative -- religious, political, economic -- follows the same lifecycle. The pattern is structural, not accidental.

Mancur Olson's *The Logic of Collective Action* (1965) demolished the assumption that groups with shared interests will naturally act to advance those interests. The logic is straightforward: if a public good (clean air, national defense, industry lobbying) benefits everyone in a group regardless of

Dan Kahan's cultural cognition research produces one of social science's most disturbing findings: on culturally contested issues (climate change, gun control, nuclear power), individuals with higher scientific literacy and numeracy are *more* polarized, not less. People who score highest on cogniti

Susan Blackmore's concept of the "selfplex" is the application of memetic theory to personal identity. The self — "I" — is not a biological given but a memeplex: a cluster of mutually reinforcing memes (beliefs, values, preferences, narratives, group affiliations) organized around a central fiction

Mark Granovetter's 1973 paper "The Strength of Weak Ties" established one of network science's most counterintuitive and empirically robust findings: acquaintances (weak ties) are more valuable than close friends (strong ties) for accessing novel information and opportunities. The mechanism is struc

Robin Dunbar's social brain hypothesis establishes that primate social group size correlates with neocortex ratio — the proportion of brain devoted to the neocortex. For humans, this predicts a mean group size of approximately 150, a number that recurs across diverse social structures: Neolithic far

Robert Putnam's *Bowling Alone* (2000) documented the decline of American civic engagement across multiple dimensions: PTA membership down 40% since 1960, fraternal organization membership halved, league bowling collapsed while individual bowling rose, church attendance declined, dinner party hostin

Marshall McLuhan argued that the medium shapes cognition more fundamentally than the content it carries. Benedict Anderson showed specifically how: print capitalism created "simultaneity" -- the shared temporal experience of thousands reading the same newspaper on the same morning -- which made nati

Tamim Ansary draws a sharp distinction that gets lost in most discourse about global connectivity: "Technology can give us anyone with anyone, but everyone with everyone is a different kind of problem." The anyone-with-anyone condition -- the ability for any person to communicate with any other pers

The historical record presents an uncomfortable pattern for anyone attempting deliberate narrative design: no master narrative that was consciously designed as a master narrative has ever achieved organic adoption at civilizational scale. Christianity did not begin as a civilizational coordination f

Damon Centola's research distinguishes two types of social contagion with fundamentally different diffusion dynamics. Simple contagion (information, disease) requires only one contact for transmission and spreads best through weak ties and small-world networks. Complex contagion (behavioral change,

Francis Heylighen identified seven factors that determine whether a meme successfully propagates: simplicity (easier to reproduce), novelty (captures attention), utility (reinforced through application), formality (easier to encode with fidelity), authority (accepted from credible sources), publicit

Bitcoin's HODL meme -- originating from a drunken misspelling on Bitcoin Talk in December 2013 during a price crash -- functions as far more than a joke. It operates as a proscriptive moral rule and social strategy, describing an acceptable mode of behavior: one should refrain from selling. Because

Henrich's Tasmanian Effect is among the most devastating pieces of evidence in cultural evolution. When Aboriginal Tasmanians were isolated from mainland Australia by rising sea levels approximately 12,000 years ago, they did not merely stop innovating -- they gradually lost technologies their ances

The Centre for Effective Altruism developed a fidelity model placing propagation methods on a continuum from low fidelity (mass media, which strips nuance and distorts ideas) to high fidelity (in-person conversations and research papers, which preserve complexity). A key finding: EA ideas are inhere

The journey of "sustainability" from fringe environmentalism to corporate mandate is a masterclass in institutional memetic engineering. The Brundtland Commission in 1987 defined "sustainable development" as development that "meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future

Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan studied 323 violent and nonviolent campaigns from 1900 to 2006 and found that 53 percent of nonviolent campaigns succeeded versus only 26 percent of violent ones. More striking: every campaign that mobilized at least 3.5 percent of the population in sustained protes

Joseph Henrich's "The Secret of Our Success" (2015) argues that the secret of human success lies not in innate intelligence but in collective brains -- the ability of human groups to socially interconnect and learn from one another over generations. Innovations are an emergent property of cultural l

George Lakoff demonstrated that frames are mental structures shaping how we see the world, and that people reason through metaphors. The metaphor you activate determines which conclusions feel natural. "Tax relief" activates the frame that taxes are an affliction -- even arguing against "tax relief"

For most of human existence, technology was roughly static -- basic stone tools, fire, simple shelters persisting for hundreds of thousands of years. Around 70,000 years ago, without any change in brain anatomy, cultural accumulation crossed a threshold and began accelerating: complex tools, art, lo

A memeplex is a group of memes that have come together because they replicate more successfully as a cluster than individually. Blackmore identifies specific "tricks" that successful memeplexes employ, using religions as the clearest examples but arguing the pattern applies to any self-reinforcing i

The standard view treats narratives as cultural artifacts -- stories we tell to make sense of things. But the TeleoHumanity axioms reframe narratives as coordination infrastructure on par with roads or legal systems. When narratives break down, societies fracture. When new narratives emerge, they re