Religious Drift as Adaptive Lottery

When a dominant religion or creed drifts in a large, peaceful society, most changes are maladaptive but occasionally enable rare large‑scale social jumps (e.g., tolerance + individualism → capitalism). Policymakers should treat religious and cultural drift as a high‑variance process—one that can produce both collapse risks and occasional transformative luck—rather than as steadily progressive or regressive. — This reframes debates over secularization, reform, and cultural engineering: rather than assuming steady improvement, societies must manage drift, preserve variation, and avoid relying on a chance beneficial reversal.