Everybody has a hero system, and just because you think this other hero system is outdated does not mean it will fade away any time soon.
As the decades go by, the masses keep clinging to their guns and to their religion and to their tobacco and to their unruly ways no matter how much the elites try to bully, badger and educate them.
Academic and elite institutions sit inside high-status, high-mobility coalitions. Their daily experience is with people who benefit from porous boundaries, credentialism, and abstract norms. Alliance Theory predicts that groups like this will overgeneralize from their own incentives. From their vantage point, religion looks like a belief system. When belief systems lose empirical credibility, elites expect them to dissolve. That is the category error.
Fundamentalism is not primarily a truth claim. It is an alliance architecture. Religious fundamentalism excels at three things modern elites systematically undervalue. First, it creates hard boundaries. Clear in-group and out-group distinctions reduce coordination costs and betrayal risk. Second, it enforces transitivity. Allies share the same friends and the same enemies. This produces trust and predictability. Third, it guarantees interdependence. Members rely on one another for marriage markets, childcare, economic support, and moral defense.
None of these functions depend on modernity, education, or scientific literacy. They depend on social insecurity and rival pressure.
When life gets tough, you really need a strong in-group. Fundamentalists take care of each other. For example, compare the level of sacrifice that Orthodox Jews make for each other compared to less religious Jews. There’s no comparison in the intensity of communal living.
Modernity increases the demand for closed alliances. Elites assume modernization dissolves fundamentalism. Alliance Theory predicts the opposite under many conditions. As societies become more mobile, anonymous, and competitive, informal trust collapses. Individuals lose thick community ties and are exposed to status volatility. Closed alliances thrive in exactly this environment because they offer certainty, protection, and belonging.
Modernity erodes weak identities first. Strong, boundary-enforced identities persist.
Academics are trained to analyze doctrines. They ask whether beliefs are true, coherent, or compatible with science. Fundamentalist communities care far less about belief accuracy than belief loyalty. Doctrines function as loyalty tests. Their implausibility is a feature. Costly belief signals separate true allies from casual participants. Alliance Theory predicts that the harder a belief is to accept publicly, the stronger the signal it sends. Elites miss this because their own alliances rely on credentials and reputational signaling, not sacrificial belief.
Elite moral frameworks emphasize universalism, individual autonomy, and tolerance. These norms facilitate coordination across diverse populations but weaken local cohesion. Fundamentalism rejects universalism in favor of particularism. Loyalty is owed to the group, not humanity. Alliance Theory predicts this tradeoff. You cannot maximize openness and boundary enforcement at the same time.
When elites push universalist norms aggressively, they unintentionally strengthen fundamentalist alliances by clarifying the rival.
From the elite perspective, fundamentalism keeps resurfacing because it never left. It recedes only when rival pressure is low and economic security is high.
When conditions deteriorate or elites push rapid cultural change, fundamentalist alliances reactivate. They provide ready-made coordination in moments of uncertainty. That is why they often surge during crises, migration shocks, or moral upheaval.
Elites often believe secular ideologies will replace religion. Alliance Theory says they already have. Secular ideologies function the same way. They enforce loyalty, define enemies, moralize dissent, and reward conformity. What elites fail to see is that fundamentalism competes well against secular ideologies because it offers thicker interdependence and clearer exit costs.
Here is why fundamentalism surprises elites every time: Elites expect persuasion to work. Fundamentalism is not designed to be persuaded. It is designed to persist. Elites expect beliefs to update with evidence. Fundamentalism updates alliances, not propositions. Elites expect openness to win. Closed alliances often outperform open ones under pressure.
The enduring error is mistaking alliance behavior for belief error. Fundamentalists are not behind history. They are playing a different coordination game. Alliance Theorypredicts they will continue to surprise elites as long as elites keep confusing modernity with social stability.
Religious fundamentalism is not a failure of enlightenment. It is a success of alliance engineering. Modernity does not dissolve it. In many environments, modernity selects for it. Until elites understand that fundamentalism is about who protects whom rather than who believes what, they will keep being shocked by something that is doing exactly what it evolved to do.
Yes. It adds something real. The core contribution is reframing elite surprise as a status-preserving maneuver, not an analytic failure. Below is a tightened, sharper version that keeps what works and removes drift.
The recurring elite shock that religious fundamentalism refuses to disappear is not a forecasting error. It is an alliance error.
Under David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory, beliefs are not neutral descriptions of reality. They function as scouts for alliance interests. The academic and media elite belong to a meritocratic-secular alliance whose identity is built around what Charles Taylor called the buffered self: an identity insulated from the supernatural and from thick communal authority.
For this alliance, the “disappearance of fundamentalism” is not a sociological hypothesis. It is a status claim. Declaring fundamentalism obsolete signals that the secular elite represents the future and that rival forms of life are remnants of a past already judged and surpassed. To concede that fundamentalism remains durable or ascendant would be to admit that a rival alliance organized around traditional authority and the porous self is not backward but competitive.
Elite surprise performs reputational work. When movements such as Orthodox Judaism or Pentecostal Christianity expand, elites frame them as “backlash,” “reaction,” or “pathology.” This language demotes the rival’s success by redefining it as deviation rather than adaptation. History is preserved as a one-way escalator with the elite safely riding upward.
This is where strategic ignorance enters. To understand fundamentalism as an alliance technology would force elites to acknowledge its internal coherence and fitness. Instead, they sustain a myth of irrationality. Fundamentalism is described as psychological deficiency, economic desperation, or false consciousness. This keeps elite followers loyal by implying that only the enlightened coalition understands reality.
Expertise plays a key role in enforcing this blindness. Figures such as Marc B. Shapiro and Stephen Turner are useful precisely because they expose how “expert models” often function less as neutral maps and more as boundary maintenance for the dominant alliance. When experts are surprised, it is usually because their frameworks were designed to reassure allies, not to measure enemies.
From an alliance perspective, fundamentalists are not confused by modernity. They reject it because modern rules were written by a rival coalition to ensure their loss. Their persistence is not defiance of progress. It is rational coordination under pressure.
The elite error is mistaking alliance competition for belief error. Fundamentalism keeps “surprising” elites because elites keep insisting it is about wrong ideas rather than about who protects whom.
Once you see that, the surprise disappears.
Religious fundamentalists keep getting their own predictions wrong too and yet they keep on trucking. Fundamentalists are not failing when their predictions are wrong. They are succeeding at something else. From an alliance perspective, prophecy is not a forecast. It is a coordination device.
Religious fundamentalist predictions do three things regardless of accuracy. First, they intensify boundary enforcement. Failed prophecies sort true believers from casuals. Those who stay after disconfirmation demonstrate costly loyalty. Alliance Theory predicts this. Beliefs that are falsified but retained are among the strongest loyalty signals available. Second, prediction failure increases interdependence. When the outside world mocks or attacks a failed prophecy, members turn inward. Exit becomes socially expensive. The group tightens. This is why failed end-times movements often grow more cohesive, not less. Third, failure reframes the world as hostile. Wrong predictions are reinterpreted as tests, persecution, or spiritual warfare. This converts embarrassment into meaning. The alliance gains a shared narrative of endurance rather than collapse.
Elites assume belief revision is the goal. It is not. Survival is the goal.
Fundamentalists are not running Bayesian updates. They are running retention protocols.
Prediction error does not threaten the alliance unless it undermines trust in leadership. And even then, leadership failure is often blamed on human weakness, not the structure itself. The doctrine remains intact. The coordinator is swapped.
This is why fundamentalism “keeps going” while elite ideologies fracture under error. Elite coalitions tie legitimacy to predictive accuracy and moral consistency. Fundamentalist coalitions tie legitimacy to loyalty, sacrifice, and shared identity.
When elite models fail, elites defect.
When fundamentalist models fail, fundamentalists double down.
That is not irrationality. It is a different fitness function.
Once you stop treating prophecy as epistemology and start treating it as alliance maintenance, the resilience stops being mysterious.
The reason elites are perpetually “surprised” by this persistence is that they operate under the “myth of rationality.” They believe that once a fact is disproven, the belief should dissolve. But as Stephen Turner might argue, “expertise” in sociology often fails to account for the raw power of social coordination. The fundamentalist does not follow the prediction; he follows the prophet because the prophet provides him with an alliance that offers more status, community, and meaning than the “buffered” and isolated life of the modern secular world.
To keep the alliance intact, the group must lower the status of the “evidence” provided by the physical world. This is where the concept of the “porous self” or the “spiritualized” interpretation comes in. If the Messiah did not arrive physically, the leadership may claim he arrived “spiritually” or that the group’s intense prayer actually stayed the hand of God.
This maneuver shifts the goalposts from a falsifiable claim to an unfalsifiable one. In Alliance Theory terms, this is a “propagandistic tactic.” It allows the group to claim victory (their prayers worked) while simultaneously reinforcing the “friend/enemy” distinction by mocking the secular “experts” who are too spiritually blind to see the invisible miracle.
New members serve as “social proof” that the alliance is still a winning team, which reduces the “cognitive dissonance” of the original members.
I love this new book, End of Days: Ruby Ridge, the Apocalypse, and the Unmaking of America by Chris Jennings, but I wish the author had read Hugo Mercier’s Not Born Yesterday. Religious fundies don’t believe in the end of the world and the Illuminati and QAnon in the same way they believe they need to show up to work to do their job to get a paycheck. I wish Chris Jennings understood that people did not evolve to be gullible with their vital interests and that stated beliefs are largely about signalling and forming alliances rather than epistemic claims. We are not obligated to take people at face value. Just because someone says, for example, that Jews are responsible for all the wars does not mean that they want to put Jews in gas chambers. They might just be trying to get a rise out of their audience or to blow off steam.
In Not Born Yesterday, Mercier argues that humans possess “open vigilance” rather than blind gullibility. We do not simply “soak up” dangerous ideas; we selectively adopt them. When Chris Jennings tracks the tragic trajectory of Ruby Ridge or apocalyptic cults, he often treats the participants as victims of a “contagion” of ideas. But as you noted, these individuals almost never apply that same “apocalyptic” logic to their “vital interests,” like ensuring their kids are fed or that their physical perimeter is secure.
The Alliance Theory perspective clarifies this discrepancy by categorizing these beliefs as “high-cost signals” rather than “epistemic maps.”
If a fundamentalist truly believed the world would end on Tuesday, they would not schedule a dental appointment for Wednesday. The fact that they do suggests a cognitive partitioning. Practical reality—the world of paychecks and physics—requires accurate “epistemic” beliefs because the costs of being wrong are immediate and physical. Symbolic reality—the world of QAnon, the Illuminati, or the Apocalypse—functions on a different plane. In this realm, the “truth” of the claim is secondary to its utility as a boundary marker.
By professing a belief that sounds “crazy” to an outsider, the individual provides a “proof of work” to their alliance. It is a way of saying, “I am so committed to this group that I am willing to incur the social cost of looking foolish to the elite secular alliance.” This is not gullibility; it is a calculated trade of external status for internal protection and belonging.
Jennings and other historians often fall into the trap of thinking that charismatic leaders “brainwash” followers. Mercier’s research suggests this is a myth. People follow charismatic leaders because those leaders offer a compelling “coordination point” for an alliance. The followers are not “dupes” who believe every word; they are “investors” who see the leader as the best vehicle for their collective interests.
The “End of Days” narrative is particularly effective here because it creates an ultimate “friend/enemy” distinction. If the world is ending and the Illuminati are in control, then the existing “rules” of the elite alliance are void. This provides a moral justification for the fundamentalist to stop seeking status within the mainstream system and to start building a rival power structure. It is a strategic exit from a game they feel they are losing.
This is where Stephen Turner’s critiques of expertise come back into play. The “expert” view—represented by authors like Jennings—often assumes that if people are given “better facts,” they will abandon their “irrational” beliefs. This assumes the fundamentalist is trying to solve an information problem. But the fundamentalist is actually solving a “belonging” problem.
The “epistemic” error is not on the part of the fundamentalist, but on the part of the observer who mistakes a battle flag for a laboratory report. When a group at Ruby Ridge or in a QAnon forum adopts a wild theory, they are not failing to be vigilant; they are being hyper-vigilant about their social standing within their chosen tribe. They are choosing the alliance that offers them the most “protection” against a modern world that they perceive as hostile or indifferent.
Hugo Mercier argues that we often mistake “reflexive beliefs”—statements people make to signal identity or affect an audience—for “intuitive beliefs,” which are the deeply held convictions that actually guide behavior. When a fundamentalist or a provocateur makes a radical claim, the elite alliance tends to treat it as a literal roadmap for future action. Alliance Theory, however, suggests the statement often serves as a “flame-throwing” device designed to incinerate any bridge back to the rival alliance.
By making an extreme or “taboo” statement, an individual creates a “burning of the boats.” If I say something that makes me persona non grata in polite society, I have signaled to my own alliance that I have nowhere else to go. I am now fully dependent on the group for my status and protection. As you noted, this is often about “getting a rise” or “blowing off steam,” which are social maneuvers, not military ones. The “epistemic” content of the statement is often irrelevant; the “social cost” of the statement is the point.
Chris Jennings and other mainstream historians often engage in what we might call “moral over-interpretation.” They see a radical statement and immediately extrapolate it to its most violent logical conclusion. They assume that a belief in “The End of Days” must lead to a desire for total destruction. But humans are strategically inconsistent. We are capable of “compartmentalizing” our symbolic alliances away from our vital interests.
The “expert” who takes every radical statement at face value is actually falling for a specific kind of propaganda. They are playing into the provocateur’s hands by granting the statement more power and “seriousness” than it may actually hold within the speaker’s own life. This creates a feedback loop where the elite’s “horror” becomes the very “payoff” the speaker was looking for to satisfy their audience.
In many of these fundamentalist or fringe circles, the “truth” of a claim is secondary to its “impact.” If a statement about “the Jews” or “the Illuminati” successfully triggers a massive reaction from the “New York Times alliance,” the speaker has successfully “lowered the status” of the enemy by showing they can be easily manipulated or provoked.
Low-cost signaling: Posting a meme or making a wild claim costs nothing but gains immediate “clout” within a specific subculture.
Vital interest protection: The same person will still pay their taxes and follow traffic laws because the costs of “rebelling” against those systems are physical and immediate.
By ignoring this distinction, authors like Jennings miss the “evolutionary vigilance” that Mercier describes. People are very good at not letting their “crazy” ideas interfere with their “paycheck” reality. They treat the apocalypse as a hobby or a social club, not as a business plan.
Carl Schmitt provides the final piece of this puzzle because he identifies the core of political life not as a set of rules or debates, but as the high-stakes distinction between friend and enemy. When a provocateur makes a statement designed to “get a rise” out of people, they are essentially performing a “Schmittian” maneuver. They are drawing a line in the sand to force a moment of decision. By choosing a taboo that they know will provoke the secular or elite alliance, they create a clear, visible boundary.
Anyone who joins in the laughter or the “steam-blowing” signals themselves as a friend. Anyone who reacts with moral outrage or calls for a “cancellation” identifies themselves as the enemy. The content of the statement matters much less than its ability to act as a sorting mechanism.
This is why “taking people at face value” is often a category error. If you treat a symbolic provocation as a literal policy proposal, you are analyzing a “theological” or “social” act as if it were a “technical” one. Hugo Mercier would argue that our “open vigilance” allows us to see through these maneuvers. We intuitively know when someone is “talking trash” to build solidarity and when they are actually preparing for a physical fight. The establishment elite, however, often lose this intuition because their own alliance is built on the idea that words are “technical” tools for management and expertise. They forget that for much of the world, words are weapons used for “status-lowering” and “alliance-building.”
When a fundamentalist talks about the Illuminati, they are often engaging in what Stephen Turner might call a “critique of expertise” by other means. They are saying that the “official” version of reality is a lie maintained by a rival alliance. This doesn’t mean they have a coherent alternative map of the world. It means they are rejecting the authority of the mapmaker. They continue to go to work and collect their paychecks because they are still participants in the physical economy, but they have emotionally and socially emigrated to a different “political” territory. They are “buffered” against the influence of the mainstream, even if they are not yet “porous” enough to actually believe the sky is falling.
This gap between rhetoric and action is the ultimate proof of Mercier’s thesis. We are not born yesterday; we are born to navigate complex social hierarchies. The “crazy” belief is often the most rational way to survive in a community that feels under siege by a distant and “expert” elite. It is a way of saying “I am one of you” in a language the enemy cannot speak and refuses to understand.
Gemini says: Modern political trolling represents the ultimate expression of Carl Schmitt’s “friend/enemy” distinction in a digital environment. Under Alliance Theory, a troll does not seek to persuade a rival; a troll seeks to consolidate an alliance by making the distinction between “us” and “them” as painful and obvious as possible. By using aggression, humor, and deception, the troll creates a “Schmittian moment” where the bystander must choose a side.
One of the most effective tools for the modern troll is “plausible deniability.” As recent diplomatic and political studies show, leaders and digital actors use trolling to take maximalist positions while remaining able to retreat by claiming the comment was “just a joke.” This creates a “strategic ambiguity” that is highly effective for alliance coordination.
Identification: Trolling signals ideological consistency to a domestic audience. It says, “I am willing to break the norms of the polite elite alliance on your behalf.”
Delegitimization: By mocking an out-group, the troll lowers the status of the rival alliance. If the rival reacts with fury, they appear humorless and easily manipulated; if they do not react, they appear weak.
(Dis)ordering: Trolling corrodes the established “rules” of the liberal international order, replacing them with a system based on raw power and tribal loyalty.
Contrary to the view that trolling is just random anger, it often functions as a highly organized “culture of production.” In places like the Philippines or Russia, trolling is a professional industry with established hierarchies. These “troll farms” use “open vigilance” mechanics against their targets. They don’t just spread lies; they “prime” audiences to perceive future events through a specific, polarized lens. They strengthen the existing signals within a network, ensuring that the alliance members stay focused on the “enemy” rather than on internal contradictions.
Hugo Mercier’s theory suggests that we share “interesting-if-true” news because the reputational payoff for being the first to share a provocative idea often outweighs the cost of being wrong—especially if you are sharing it within a “congruent” political group. Trolling exploits this. The “lulz” (laughs) act as a reward for members of the alliance, creating a shared emotional experience that bonds the “friends” together against the “enemy.”
The elite alliance often views this as “misinformation” or “irrationality.” But for the troll and their audience, it is a perfectly rational way to maximize their social status within their own camp while simultaneously making life difficult for a rival that they believe holds too much institutional power. They are not trying to find the truth; they are trying to find each other.
ChatGPT says: Chris Jennings’s End of Days treats apocalyptic belief too literally. He assumes people relate to end-times narratives the way they relate to instrumental beliefs, like knowing how to do a job or pay rent. That is the mistake Hugo Mercier dismantles in Not Born Yesterday.
Humans did not evolve to be gullible about their vital interests. We are selectively credulous. We scrutinize claims that affect survival, income, and immediate risk. We are relaxed, playful, or performative with claims that function socially.
Apocalyptic talk lives in the second category.
Religious fundamentalists do not “believe” in the end of the world the way they believe the bridge will hold or the paycheck will clear. End-times language is not an epistemic commitment. It is a signaling system. It marks identity, loyalty, grievance, and readiness. Alliance Theory predicts this. Beliefs often function as badges, not maps.
That is why failed prophecies do not collapse these movements. They were never forecasts in the first place. They were coordination rituals. They sorted insiders from outsiders, dramatized moral urgency, and intensified group cohesion. From an alliance perspective, they worked.
This is where Mercier matters. Humans reason socially. We use claims to persuade, provoke, bond, and posture. Taking every stated belief at face value is a category error. We are not obligated to pretend people mean every utterance literally.
That matters politically and morally.
When someone says “the Illuminati run everything” or “Jews are behind all the wars,” that does not automatically mean genocidal intent. Sometimes it is rage-venting. Sometimes it is boundary signaling. Sometimes it is an attempt to shock, amuse, or gain status within a peer group. Sometimes it is stupid. But stupidity is not the same as homicidal commitment.
Elites routinely collapse expressive belief into literal intent. That is a failure of social cognition. It leads to inflated threat perception, moral panic, and overreaction. It also obscures real danger, because genuinely instrumental violent planning looks very different from expressive nonsense.
Jennings’s book is strong on atmosphere and history, but weak on cognitive ecology. He treats belief as something people “fall into” rather than something they use. That leads him to overestimate credulity and underestimate agency.
Fundamentalists are not naive children hypnotized by bad ideas. They are adults using narratives to coordinate, posture, and survive inside rivalrous social worlds.
Once you see that, two things become true at once.
One, you stop romanticizing or pathologizing them.
Two, you stop taking their rhetoric more seriously than they do themselves.
That is the Mercier correction. And it would have made End of Days a sharper, more honest book.