Every civilisation tells itself stories about danger. The adversary is always somewhere else: across the border, belonging to a different faith, under another flag. It’s reassuring to believe that those who stone women, burn books or ban education are a different species from ourselves. Comforting – but perilous.
The comparison between Christian nationalism in the United States and the Taliban, for example, unsettles so many people precisely because it punctures this comfort. It suggests that the line between “us” and “them” doesn’t run between religions, nor between East and West, but through a deeper pattern in the human psyche: the urge to fuse absolute certainty with political power and to anchor that fusion in the control of bodies – most consistently, women’s bodies.
If that pattern is real, then it’s not confined to Afghanistan or to American churches. Versions of it recur in Hindu majoritarianism, Buddhist chauvinism, ultra‑Orthodox projects, secular cults of the nation and even in those corporate ideologies that treat the market as a quasi‑divine arbiter. Scripture changes. Slogans change. But the architecture of control does not.
As a futurist and systems thinker I am less interested in condemning particular groups than in recognising recurring designs. When we look past the banners and the rituals, what are the elements that keep reappearing whenever a movement claims to speak for an ultimate truth?
The first is the collapse of legitimate dissent. Once a group believes it carries a hotline to the sacred – whether that sacred is God, the Volk, the revolution or “the science” – disagreement stops being a normal feature of public life and becomes an act of betrayal. At that point politics ceases to be a space for navigating difference and hardens into a project to eliminate it. Do we grasp how fast that slide can occur in any society when uncertainty feels intolerable and fear is ambient?
The second is the obsession with purity closing in on perfection. Every absolutist project defines an ideal body, an ideal ethnicity, an ideal family, an ideal citizen. Impurity then becomes a catch‑all category for women who refuse prescribed roles, queer identities, doubters, artists, journalists, rival believers, and anyone whose existence reveals that life can be lived otherwise. The Taliban enforce dress codes under the banner of religious virtue. Christian nationalists enforce pregnancy under the sign of being “pro-life”. Other movements enforce ethnic separation, caste boundaries or “moral education” with similar fervour. In each case, the rhetoric differs, sometimes considerably. The deeper proposition is the same: collapse the complexity of lived experience into a single acceptable script and declare deviation a threat to the whole.
This is not some exotic pathology that happens “over there” beyond the horizon. It’s a human reflex under pressure. Wherever anxiety rises and institutions feel fragile, the temptation to tighten control around identity, sexuality and belief grows stronger. We see fragments of it in school curricula battles, in campaigns against “un‑patriotic” art, in the casual abuse of those who don’t fit the dominant mould. The Taliban represent one end of a spectrum. At the other end are quieter, more insidious arrangements where violence is largely symbolic but no less formative: the constant threat of shame, ostracism or divine retribution that keeps people compliant without the need for overt force.
The third recurring element is the association between violence and legitimacy. Armed groups like the Taliban rely on guns, public punishments and surveillance. Their cousins in more formal states rely on laws, courts, media capture and economic pressure. Both are systems for manufacturing consent through a combination of fear and habit. Which raises an awkward question: when does enforcement for “order” cross the threshold into structural terror? Is it when people are shot in the street? When they’re jailed for tweets? When their educational horizons are narrowed by design? Or when girls grow up believing that saying no is too dangerous to contemplate?
I don’t raise these questions to flatten all differences. Contexts do matter. A woman in Kabul, a trans teenager in a small town, a dissident in a single‑party state and a migrant worker under a sponsorship regime do not inhabit interchangeable realities. But from a solely systemic perspective they are all caught in feedback loops where belief and power amplify each other. A particular worldview – male‑dominated, hierarchical, certain of its own righteousness – crystallises into a structure: laws, policing, customs, media narratives, spatial arrangements. Those structures in turn teach the next generation what is “normal” and ultimately “acceptable.” Mindset becomes system. System reproduces mindset.
This is why I have long argued that the most important battlegrounds today are not between religions or nations but between different ways of holding truth. One way treats truth as a weapon to impose, another as a shared inquiry to deepen. One insists on a singular story of who we are; another accepts that in a planetary civilisation there will always be multiple, overlapping stories. One fears ambiguity, and so reaches for control; another sees ambiguity as the raw material of ingenuity.
The so‑called clash between Christian nationalists and the Taliban is, from this angle, less a clash between Christianity and Islam than a kinship between closed systems of belief. Both claim their text is absolute and beyond question. Both assert a divine mandate to rule. Both sacralise male authority and attach transcendental significance to female obedience. Are we willing to recognise the same pattern when it emerges in our own backyard dressed in more palatable clothes?
The usual defence is that “our” extremists are moderated by institutions. Checks and balances, trials by jury, independent courts, free media, diverse publics: these are believed to restrain fanaticism. That may be partly true – for now. But history offers enough examples of movements that systematically set out to capture those self-same checks and balances from within. Once a faction convinced of its own providential mission gains sufficient influence over the judiciary, the security apparatus or the school system, restraint can erode faster than most people imagine. Turkey, Israel, Hungary, Iran, pre‑war Germany, various military regimes in Asia and Latin America – do we really think such shifts are impossible wherever we happen to live now?
A deeper layer of this problem concerns identity. The more a political movement fuses religious or ideological certainty with national belonging, the easier it becomes to equate dissent with treason. Labelling critics as “un‑American”, “anti‑Islamic”, “against our culture” or “enemies of development” is not incidental rhetoric. It’s a deliberate redrawing of the boundary of who counts as “us”. Once that move is anchored in law, education and popular imagination, the slide from rhetorical exclusion to physical exclusion is merely a matter of degree and time.
From a civilisational vantage point we might then ask: can any alliance between an asserted absolute truth and state power ever remain safe in the long run? Can there be a stable arrangement in which a community holds strong spiritual convictions while the political order remains genuinely open, plural and self‑correcting? Or is the desire to give one doctrine coercive priority invariably a seed of authoritarianism, regardless of the doctrine in question?
We like to think there are benign versions of theocracy – wise elders, just caliphs, philosopher‑kings, enlightened clerics – and there have certainly been historical moments that looked like that. But how often have such arrangements avoided calcifying into rigid hierarchies that suppress dissent in order to preserve a myth of harmony? And how often have secular ideologies fared any better when they have claimed absolute status, from nationalist cults to technocratic “there is no alternative” dogmas?
We simply can’t dismiss these as abstract philosophical puzzles. They go to the core of how eight billion humans are beginning to cohabit a single, interdependent world-system. As long as we cling to narratives that locate all danger outside – in the barbarism of “those people” over there – we will ignore the authoritarian seeds in our own mindsets. Those seeds germinate whenever we say: only my group truly represents the people; only my reading of the sacred text is valid; only my nation deserves full rights; only my model of progress should govern development.
The more precarious life feels, the more attractive such certainties become. Economic insecurity, ecological disruption, rapid cultural change, the excessive clout of the billionaire class to sway public policy, uncontrolled technologies – these are exactly the conditions in which closed worldviews guarantee safety. They offer a clear map in a storm. They restore a sense of superiority to those who feel discarded, while intensifying it in those convinced they were born to rule. They provide simple villains and expunge complexity from the story. It’s no accident that rigid movements flourish in times of systemic transition. The question is whether we can evolve institutions and inner capacities that make a different response possible.
What would it mean, in practical terms, to design societies that are resistant to theocratic capture of any kind? Not only religious theocracy, but also theocracy of the market, the nation, the party, the platform. One starting point is to treat diversity – cognitive, cultural, ethnic, gendered, spiritual – not as a public relations asset but as a critical infrastructure. Systems that can hear more than one voice at a time, that can accommodate dissent without panic, and that can change their own rubrics in the light of learning, are far less vulnerable to absolutists. Yet such systems demand citizens who can live with unresolved questions, leaders who can admit error, and cultures that celebrate complexity rather than uniformity. Are we cultivating those capacities, or are we schooling children into obedience to whichever authority happens to dominate their locale?
Another starting point is to make visible the mechanisms of control. Every system has them. Some are brutally overt, like public floggings or executions. Others are subtle: economic precarity, algorithmic invisibility, social shaming, the internalised voice that whispers “you will be punished” if you step out of line. Surfacing these patterns requires voices from the margins to be taken seriously, not just as data points but as co‑designers of new arrangements. That, in turn, challenges the habitual gatekeepers of knowledge – clerics, professors, pundits, officials – who often feel threatened by the fracturing of their monopoly.
Here we confront our own complicity. It’s easy to denounce the Taliban. It’s less comfortable to ask why institutions in ostensibly open societies have so often protected abusers, silenced victims, minimised structural discrimination and dismissed those warning of creeping authoritarianism as hysterical or “divisive”. The distance between informal complicity and formal oppression is not as great as we would like to think. One makes the other possible.
If there’s a core lesson from the comparison that started this reflection, it’s not that “they are just like us” or “we are just like them”. It is that human beings, under certain conditions, will repeatedly build systems that rhyme with one another: systems in which a chosen group claims a unique mandate from the sacred; in which women and other “outsiders” are rendered subordinate for the supposed good of the whole; in which violence, whether physical or psychological, is deployed as a legitimate tool of moral correction; and in which any challenge to that arrangement is branded as an attack on God, nation or civilisation.
If we are serious about a viable planetary civilisation, we need to interrupt that rhyme. That means interrogating not only grotesque extremes but also the everyday habits of mind that feed them: the ease with which we “other” those who differ from us; the thrill some feel in belonging to a righteous vanguard; the tendency to outsource our ethical judgement to celebrities, scriptures, algorithms or flags. It means re‑imagining governance not as a competition to seize control of the sacred narrative, but as a perpetual, messy conversation among many narratives, none of which is granted unchecked authority.
Can we create world‑systems in which no single worldview can harden into a totalising regime? Can we evolve cultural mindsets that find dignity not in domination but in the ability to live alongside irreducible difference? These are not questions for one nation or one faith. They reach into every mosque, church, temple, data centre, parliament, boardroom and family home.
Ultimately, the comparison between Christian nationalism and the Taliban is unsettling precisely because it reveals how thin the patina of our claimed superiority can be. If we allow that discomfort to do its work, it might prompt a more radical inquiry: not into why some people become extremists, but into why we have built civilisations so vulnerable to extremism in the first place – and what it would take, finally, to design something wiser and less brittle.