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All the world's political and religious systems offer their believers the conviction that there is less human waste, irrelevance, and hostility under their rule than under that of other systems, as if to say that everybody matters, and is beneficial to each and everyone. However, in practice all such systems can do is more or less mask the manifest hazard of individual failure and the fact that the success of others is commonly achieved at the expense of some or every other individual. Since our spontaneous intuition of these facts is very strong, it has proved necessary for political and religious systems to anticipate our doubts by creating a category for the "lost", into which believers can project heretics, infidels, and the evil. Hence the various kinds of hell. This realistic touch makes the religio-political fictions of mankind all the more plausible, and is perhaps the source of all their power.