A Clash of Civilizations

Samuel Huntington was right that civilizations are clashing. But he drew the wrong battle map. The conflict is not Christianity vs. Islam vs. Confucianism. It is secularism and democracy versus cronyism, theocracy, royalty, and dictatorship — people who govern themselves versus people governed by whoever has the most guns or the most convincing promise of eternal life. 

History's direction is not ambiguous. Since 1776, democracy has expanded and religiosity has declined — both steadily, and not by accident. This post is about why.

What Huntington Got Right (and Wrong)

In 1996, Samuel P. Huntington argued in *The Clash of Civilizations* that post–Cold War global conflict would be driven by cultural and religious identity. (See the Wikipedia overview: Why civilizations will clash. He claims the world was splitting along the fault lines of Western, Islamic, Confucian, Hindu, Orthodox, Latin American, and African civilizational blocs.

He identified real tensions. The Balkans, South Asia, and the Middle East all showed evidence of cultural-religious conflict along roughly the lines he described. Huntington was not wrong that culture matters.

But he drew the wrong battle map. The real divide is not between religious civilizations, it is between political systems. Between countries where the government is accountable to the governed and countries where it isn't. Between systems that have a legal, nonviolent mechanism for changing leadership when leadership is wrong, and systems where the only mechanism is violence, exile, or silence.

Do humans take charge of their own governance or are they slaves to the group that happens to have some guns or claim to be able to give you ever-lasting life? I have my preferences. What are yours?

The Real Fault Line

The critical, civilization changing fight is not religion vs. religion, but secularism and democracy vs. cronyism, theocracy, royalty and dictatorships. 

These are not four separate opponents. They are variations of a single mode of governance: rule by a small elite who claim authority beyond accountability. A theocrat claims divine authority. A monarch claims hereditary authority. A dictator claims charismatic or military authority. A crony capitalist claims authority through the capture of legal and economic institutions. In every case, the governed have no legitimate mechanism to object, correct, or replace the rulers.

Democracy is the opposite claim. Authority derives from the consent of the governed, hence it is revocable. The people can withdraw consent. They can change leadership. They can update the rules. This is not merely a different political system. It is a different theory of what humans are for.

For the philosophical grounding of this distinction, why self-governance is not just a preference but a moral obligation, see The Declaration of Independence as the Foundation of Modern Ethics (2017).

 

Why Religion Cannot Survive Confrontation With Truth

Religion's decline in the United States is not a matter of taste or irreverence. By 2021, for the first time in recorded polling history, less than half of Americans belonged to a church, synagogue, or mosque. The trend is decades old and accelerating. The reason is structural, not cultural.

Every major religion requires a claim of infallibility. This is not optional: it is a logical necessity. To have the authority to make moral pronouncements that supersede ordinary human reasoning, a religion must claim that its source (a god, a prophet, a text) is beyond human error. If the source can be wrong, then the moral pronouncements can be questioned; if they can be questioned, they must be evaluated by evidence and reason; if they must be evaluated by evidence and reason, religion has already lost — because evidence and reason are precisely what religious authority is designed to bypass.

So religions cannot admit error. And because they cannot admit error, their factual claims freeze in place while the world keeps moving. The gap between the religious model and observable reality grows:

Change in religious identification, 1950 - 2020

Percentage of Americans by religious identification (1950 – 2020)^[157]

  Protestantism

  Christian (nonspecified)

  Catholicism

  Mormonism

  Jewish

  Other

  Unaffiliated

  No Answer

Some examples of the breakdown of Religious proclamations:

• Geocentrism: The Catholic Church condemned Galileo in 1633 for arguing that the Earth orbits the Sun. It took until 1992 (359 years) for the Church to formally acknowledge it had been wrong. The scientific truth did not change. The institutional claim of infallibility prevented correction for more than three centuries.
• Young-Earth Creationism: Biblical literalism insists the Earth is approximately 6,000 years old. The geological and radiometric evidence puts it at 4.54 billion years. The gap is a factor of 750,000. No amount of evidence reconciles these. Literalist institutions have chosen to reject the evidence rather than revise the claim.
• Marriage Law: Within a single human lifetime, most major religious institutions have been forced to confront the evolution of civil marriage law — interracial marriage, divorce, same-sex marriage. In every case, the institutions that claimed divine authority on the original position either split, contracted, or quietly reversed. The ones that retained their original positions lost members at an accelerating rate.

The pattern is consistent. The institution's response to failure is not to update its model but to redefine faith, not as reasonable confidence in demonstrated truth, but as the virtuous ability to believe things you cannot prove. And inevitably, to believe things you can disprove. When your entire institution is based on a lie, it will eventually collapse.

This is why religion retreats toward authoritarian political systems, not democratic ones. Democracy requires that institutions be accountable to evidence and public evaluation. That is exactly what infallibility cannot survive. Democracies produce heresy. Autocracies suppress it. Religion needs autocracy to protect its unprovable claims from the question of whether they are true.

Democracy vs. Autocracy: The Empirical Record

The people will rule. Since 1776 there has been a steady increase in democracy and a steady decrease in religiosity. The people are taking their power from the elites. No more shall anyone be punished for the supposed crime of heresy. Political or religious. People recognize that their rights are protected in Democracies and ignored in Autocracies.

This is demonstrated by the democratic peace theory: the observation that democracies essentially never go to war with one another, is among the most robust findings in political science. First articulated by Immanuel Kant in Perpetual Peace (1795) and empirically established by Michael Doyle, Bruce Russett, and others in the modern era, the finding holds across datasets and definitions: autocracies fight each other and fight democracies; democracies, with extraordinarily rare exceptions, do not fight each other.

The mechanism is the same as the mechanism that undoes religious infallibility: accountability. In a democracy, any decision to go to war must be justified to the population that bears the cost. In an autocracy, war serves the autocrat's interests with no accountability to anyone. Autocrats who want war can have it.

Democracies are not saints. They have started wars, mostly against autocracies: sometimes on pretexts, sometimes catastrophically. But they have an institutional bias toward resolving disputes through law and negotiation, because war is expensive and voters can remove leaders who pursue expensive mistakes. Autocrats cannot be removed. There is no accountability.

The same logic applies to every authoritarian institution: cronyist corporations, theocratic governments, hereditary monarchies, military juntas. The absence of accountability produces corruption, misallocation, and violence. The presence of accountability produces correction.

For how this fault line maps onto modern American political parties, see Republicans vs. Democrats: It's Not Conservatives vs. Liberals (2019).

The Civil War: The Last Great Clash Against Autocracy in America

The last time this clash reached industrial scale on American soil was the Civil War, the confrontation between citizens who had constitutionally rejected feudalism and the Southern slaveholding elites who were determined to preserve it. It did not end well for the slaveholders. The feudal claim to own human labor was defeated by a democratic republic that considered that claim morally repugnant and legally illegitimate.

They have been resentful for 150 years. But not only did they lose then: they are losing now. The authoritarian claim that some humans are entitled to govern other humans without accountability, because of birth or race or wealth or divine sanction, has been in continuous retreat since 1865. The Jim Crow rearguard action lasted a century. Its modern successors: voter suppression, gerrymandering, Citizens United, the prosperity gospel, Christian nationalism and billionaire oligarchy are all attempts to preserve the same feudal claim under new camouflage. They are fighting the same losing battle.

The Long Arc

Since 1776, the march of history is unmistakable:

• More democracy. Freedom House and V-Dem data both confirm a substantial long-term increase in the number of democracies, though with notable reversals (1920s, 1930s, 2010s–2020s).
• Less religion. US church membership has fallen from roughly 70% in the 1950s to under 50% in 2021 — the first time in recorded polling that a majority of Americans did not belong to any religious institution.
• Less war between democracies. The empirical record is essentially unbroken.

These are not three separate trends. They are one trend. The authoritarian systems: theocracies, monarchies, feudal hierarchies, party states, cronyist capitalism, are not merely less moral. They are less adaptive. They cannot correct their errors because they cannot acknowledge them. The institutions that cannot update will eventually be replaced by those that can.

The people are taking their power from the elites. This process is not finished. In many countries it has barely started. But the direction is clear.

The human race is making progress.

Thanks for reading!

 -DrMike

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Related reading:

• The Declaration of Independence as the Foundation of Modern Ethics (2017)]. The philosophical grounding: self-governance as a moral obligation.
• Political Corruption (2025). When democratic institutions are captured by autocratic interests.
• Neither God Nor Darwin Can Tell You What Is Right (2021). Why the infallibility of religion fails as a moral guide, and what replaces it.
• The Final Great Awakening (2017). The long-arc version of this argument.

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The Social Dilemma - Sounds to me like a medical problem.

Social media feed algorithms are not entertainment. They are unlicensed medical products — psychoactive software engineered to maximize engagement regardless of what that engagement costs the user's mental health. We regulate every other substance that affects the brain this intensely: caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, prescription drugs, illegal drugs, even GMO foods. Feed algorithms are currently exempt.

This post is about five regulatory frames — any one of which would help — and why Section 230 is the leverage point that makes all of them possible.

If you're not familiar with the plot of docudrama "The Social Dilemma", go watch it now. If you haven't seen it, the short summary is the following: Social network sites get paid for you to watch their ads. The more ads they get you to see, the more they get paid. Their entire capitalistic incentive is to make you watch more of their ads. They work very, very, very hard to make this come true. They're really good at it. They suck you in and keep you doom-scrolling as long as they can. They don't care if it's bad for  your health, they want those ad dollars. They want to increase their feed's 'stickiness.' They want your attention and they'll get it any way they can. 

And how do they get it? They don't create their own content... they entice you to scroll for content you've 'signed up' for. Content that your friends publish. Content that your favorite authors publish. Content that other famous people publish. That seems reasonable. Show me my subscribed content and show me some ads... seems just like TV. But no! The Social Networks are much more insidious. You don't actually get what you signed up for. They attempt to charge famous people money to show their published posts to their followers. In other words, wringing the audience for money from both ends... charging to show published musing, and charging for and showing ads to the audience. 

This is not only a side effect that penalizes famous people and people who want to hear what they are saying: This is the Social Networks business model. The Social Networks actually hide the feeds you've subscribed to from you and try to raise money from the publishers to show it to you. But wait, it's even worse. Not only are they screwing you by hiding what you've subscribed to, they're also inserting random pseudo-ads to see if you want to subscribe, to keep you interested in scrolling and to steal your attention from anything but watching their ads. They purposefully manipulate your feed to keep you glued to the screen.

There's serious, refereed, peer-reviewed scientific papers published that show that this manipulation of your stream is injurious to your health.

I'll say that again: Social Network feeds have been proven to be injurious to your health.[2]

It's time they were regulated [1] , way past time.

But wait, you ask, how can  you regulate feed algorithms? On what basis? There's some very obvious ones. First, these ideas are applicable to all Artificial Intelligence algorithms that interact with humans. It's way past time to control these amoral capitalistic killer robots that rob you of your attention, your money and your health. 

1. It's not okay for an AI algorithm to be biased by race, religion or any other category protected by law. The AI algorithm must prove it is unbiased before its predictions are used. It's the law. We need to enforce it.
2. You should not be allowed to practice medicine without a license. These AI algorithms have more affect on your life than prescription drugs. They should be regulated as prescriptions drugs. You should not be allowed to apply these recommendations unless your physician agrees that they are beneficial to you. No more letting the Social Networks prescribe dangerous medicine.
3. If not as a drug, at least these AI algorithms should be regulated as Medical Devices. They are software systems meant to affect your mental health. They need to prove they are safe.
4. Finally, as a medical treatment, only a physician can prescribe a medical treatment. 
5. Another option is to regulate them as an addictive drug. A drug that is more prevalent than, and for adolescents potentially as harmful as alcohol, nicotine, cocaine or other highly addictive drugs. If you deal in one of these drugs without guaranteeing its purity, under a doctor's care, you go to jail.
6. The last resort is that we should treat these feeds as intellectual food that must be regulated and have proven safety like we do for GMO foods. They must be regulated, transparent (what did you filter? what did you add? why did you do it?), registered and reviewed.

How can we apply these proposed remedies?

• Primary: Regulate as a **medical device** (FDA 510(k) framework): algorithms meant to affect cognitive/emotional state must prove safety and efficacy.
• Supporting: Anti-bias law enforcement is the existing legal baseline and costs nothing.
• Escalation: If the industry resists medical-device framing, **addictive-substance** regulation is the fallback.
• Lever: Section 230 immunity is the political mechanism for all of the above.

It's way past time we regulate Social Networks; before they regulate us into oblivion.

Thanks for reading

 -DrMike

The post is from May 2021. The Section 230 debate has continued: Gonzalez v. Google (2023) addressed the issue without resolving it, and state-level legislation (Utah, California) has emerged. In early 2026, social media feeds were declared to be addictive drugs.

For the 2025 update on tech-oligarch impunity and how these regulatory gaps metastasized, see: The Techno-(Lord) Optimist Manifesto (2025).

For the political dimension of algorithmic manipulation, see: What Technology Does for Politics (2019).

For why corporations systematically behave this way and why Limited Liability Corporations need external constraint, see: Capitalism is Not Inherently Bad: LLCs Are the Problem (2023).