My Family Built Civilizations With Stories. Now I Study How They Work

My ancestor William Tyndale was strangled and burned at the stake for translating the Bible into English.

My other ancestors fled England on the Mayflower for the right to practice their faith. Generations later, their descendants joined a new American religion so threatening that Missouri's governor signed an extermination order against them—the only time in U.S. history that a state authorized killing citizens for their religious beliefs.

My great-great-great-great grandfather, Edward Partridge, was the first bishop of the Mormon church. In 1833, a mob tarred and feathered him for refusing to deny his faith. He spent weeks in Richmond jail after the Mormon War, was expelled from Missouri under that extermination order. His daughters, Eliza and Emily, both became plural wives of Joseph Smith. I descend from Eliza–through her second husband.

These weren't just religious pioneers—they were builders of coordination technologies so powerful they could transform entire towns overnight. When Mormons settled somewhere, they didn't just bring new beliefs. They restructured the economics, politics, and social fabric so completely that existing residents felt their entire world threatened. That's not conversion. That's revolution through coordination.

I tell you this not to establish religious credentials, but to explain why I see the world differently. I'm descended from people who built systems that governments tried to destroy because they worked too well. My DNA carries the pattern of using collective belief to reshape reality.

This inheritance gave me three lenses for seeing how invisible systems shape our world:

First, through religion—watching my own faith evolve from revolutionary movement to global corporation, seeing how stories coordinate millions into collective action.

Second, through money—discovering our entire financial system runs on the same faith-based coordination as any church, with its own priests, catechisms, and excommunications.

Third, through technology—recognizing that AI is about to become the newest, most powerful coordination system we've ever built, and we're designing it blind.

Which is why I can tell you something most people can't: I see exactly how these systems work, and I still choose to participate.

Show me the incentives, and I'll show you the outcome.

The Machinery of Belief

I'm a practicing Mormon—I attend services, hold a calling coordinating congregational activities with my wife, recently baptized my son, teach my children our values, pray with my family. But if you asked orthodox members about my beliefs, they'd call me a heretic. I don't pay tithing, which means I can't enter the temple where I was married. I question most doctrine. I see the corporate machinery of the modern church as a far cry from my ancestors' revolutionary movement.

But I also see something else: a coordination technology that turns shared stories into civilizations through brilliantly aligned incentives.

The LDS church is a masterclass in incentive design:

Tithing: 10% creates sunk cost and financial commitment
Missions: Two years of identity formation at crucial age
Temple Work: Sacred secrets that bond insiders
Callings: Unpaid labor positioned as growth
Testimony: Public commitment leveraging consistency bias

Every piece reinforces every other piece. The system runs on stories—of pre-existence, eternal families, continuing revelation—that coordinate millions of humans into collective action. Whether these stories map to scientific fact is almost beside the point. They create outcomes: strong communities, resilient families, mutual aid networks, and yes, sometimes insularity and rigidity.

My ancestors didn't walk into the desert because they had proof. They walked because they had a story powerful enough to coordinate thousands of people into building something from nothing.

The Second Revelation: Money as Faith

My first lesson about money as coordination technology came from an unexpected source: Mormon history. In 1837, Joseph Smith founded the Kirtland Safety Society, essentially a bank that printed its own currency. When it collapsed within months, it nearly destroyed the early church. The prophet who could coordinate thousands to walk into a desert couldn't make people believe in his paper money.

That failure fascinated me. Why could the same leader create lasting religious belief but not monetary belief? The question haunted me through my economics classes, through my software career, until 2020 when I read "The Creature from Jekyll Island" and discovered our entire financial system runs on the same faith-based coordination as any church.

The Federal Reserve, created in secret by bankers in 1910, doesn't manage money—it creates debt that requires more debt to service, forever. It's Joseph Smith's failed bank writ large, except this time the coordination technology worked. The dollar succeeded where the Kirtland Safety Society failed, not because it was more real, but because the incentive structures were better designed.

Think about what money actually is. Paper with pictures. Digits in databases. Yet we'll trade our time, our labor, our lives for these symbols. Why? Because the system makes believing profitable and disbelieving costly. Just like religion.

The parallels stunned me: both systems run on faith, both have their high priests interpreting sacred texts, both can excommunicate you for violating their rules. Central bankers reading economic indicators aren't fundamentally different from prophets receiving revelation. Both claim special knowledge about invisible forces that govern our lives.

But here's what keeps me up at night: Does seeing the machinery break the magic?

Bitcoin proved we could build new monetary coordination systems—its incentive structure is so elegant that selfishness strengthens rather than corrupts the network. Every aspect, from the mining rewards to the difficulty adjustment to the fixed supply, aligns individual greed with collective security. It's a church where being selfish makes everyone better off.

Yet even as I hold Bitcoin, I still use dollars. Even as I see the Federal Reserve as a faith-based system, I participate in its rituals. My ancestors didn't analyze the incentive structures of their faith—they lived it, suffered for it, built civilizations with it. There's a hubris in thinking I understand something they didn't.

These aren't truths—they're technologies. Tools for coordinating human behavior at scale. But maybe the tool only works if you don't see it as a tool.

Once you see one coordination technology, you can't stop seeing them everywhere.

The Heretic's Advantage

Here's what my ancestral pattern taught me: the people who build new coordination technologies are usually heretics in the old ones. Tyndale wasn't trying to destroy Christianity—he was trying to democratize it. Joseph Smith wasn't anti-religion—he was creating a new one. Satoshi Nakamoto wasn't anti-money—they were reimagining it.

The heretic's position—seeing the machinery while choosing engagement—offers unique advantages:

You can spot corruption: When coordination technologies serve their priests instead of their people
You can build alternatives: Understanding the pattern lets you create new systems
You can work within: Sometimes reform beats revolution
You can choose your level: Full believer, partial participant, conscious actor

I practice Mormonism not because I believe every truth claim, but because I've seen what happens to humans without coordination technologies. We fragment. We isolate. We lose the capacity for collective action.

The Question of Truth

"Is Mormonism true?"

Wrong question. It's like asking if English is "true" or if the dollar is "true." The better questions: What did these stories build? What behaviors do they coordinate? What kind of humans do they create?

My ancestors built a civilization in the desert with nothing but shared belief. That's not true or false—that's powerful. The stories and rituals that made it possible are worth understanding, maybe even worth preserving.

There's a principle I've come to believe: Show me the incentives, and I'll show you the outcome. But there's a corollary that haunts me: the harsher the environment, the stronger the coordination technology needed to survive it.

Think of Frank Herbert's Dune—on Arrakis, the desert planet, the harshest conditions produced the Fremen with their water-discipline and religious intensity. The comfortable cities produced philosophers; the desert produced survivors. My ancestors were America's Fremen, driven into their own desert by persecution, emerging with a coordination system so robust it could make the desert bloom.

But I struggle with the tension: Does the magic require belief, or just participation? Can you see the machinery and still make it work?

I don't have clean answers. Some days I think understanding these systems gives us power to improve them. Other days I worry that too much inspection destroys the very coordination that makes them valuable. When we all see money as shared fiction, does it stop working? When we recognize religion as technology rather than truth, does it lose its power to create meaning and community?

What I do know is this: the incentive structures underneath these systems shape our behavior whether we see them or not. A tithe paid grudgingly still builds churches. A dollar accepted skeptically still buys bread. The machinery works even when exposed—but does it work as well?

This uncertainty shapes how I engage. I participate enough to stay connected to my ancestral tradition, but not enough to fully belong. It's a precarious position—too heretical for the orthodox, too engaged for the skeptics. But maybe that's exactly where the most important observations come from: the borderlands between belief and analysis.

The AI Frontier: New Coordination, New Possibilities

Which brings me to the third lens, the one that excites and terrifies me equally. We're building the next generation of coordination technologies—AI systems that will shape thought, behavior, and belief. And unlike religion or money, we're doing it consciously, deliberately, with the chance to get the incentives right from the start.

I'm optimistic about this technology. Large language models have already transformed how I work, think, and create. They're coordination technologies that augment rather than replace human intelligence. Bitcoin showed us we could design systems where selfishness strengthens the network. Maybe AI can show us how to design systems where individual flourishing strengthens collective wisdom.

But I also see the patterns repeating. I watch my children interact with AI assistants, already treating them as authorities on truth. I see people having deeper conversations with ChatGPT than with their spouses. We're creating new oracles, and I recognize the human tendency to transform tools into gods.

The incentive structures we're building into these systems matter more than their capabilities. When we optimize for "engagement" or "helpfulness" without thinking about what behaviors those incentives create at scale, we risk encoding our worst tendencies rather than our best. The same inability to connect with humans that makes us treat AI as friends might get amplified rather than solved.

My ancestors built coordination technologies with blood and faith. The Federal Reserve built one with backroom deals. But AI is different—we're building it in public, with open discussion about alignment and safety. That gives me hope. Maybe this time we can create coordination systems that enhance human connection rather than replace it.

Show me the incentives, and I'll show you the outcome. With AI, we're still writing the incentives. We still have a chance to get them right.

The Heretic's Dilemma

I'm descended from heretics who built new worlds. But here's my heresy: I see how the machinery works, and I'm terrified that seeing it breaks it. Every post I write, every pattern I expose, might be destroying the very coordination systems that built civilizations. Including my own ancestors'.

Yet I can't stop looking. The same compulsion that drove Tyndale to translate, that drove my ancestors into the desert, drives me to understand. Even if understanding is destruction. Even if the magic requires mystery.

I want to be inside the systems I'm deconstructing. I attend church while showing you churches are technology. I use money while revealing it's collective fiction. I hold Bitcoin while questioning whether any store of value can survive universal comprehension of its arbitrary nature. I'm building my own exile, one insight at a time.

The orthodox believers think I've lost faith. The skeptics think I have too much. They're both right. I have absolute faith in the power of coordination technologies and zero faith in their claimed truths. I believe in the civilization my ancestors built while questioning every story that built it.

This is the heretic's position: outside looking in, inside looking out, forever suspended between understanding and belonging.

Welcome to the incentive layer. Let's see what survives the seeing.

What systems do you participate in while seeing their machinery? What coordination technologies run your life even as you understand their construction? Are you brave enough to keep looking once you realize that seeing might be destroying?