Science, literacy, and atheism each need multiple simultaneous conditions to survive

Evidence

Literacy, atheism, and science obey the same Anna Karenina Principle: they are hard to arrive at. They are alike in their fragility and complexity; they need many things at once to be viable, and the absence of one critical factor can doom the whole enterprise. But once all the necessary conditions are firmly established, they can flourish. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 629

Categorization

• XREF: The Anna Karenina Principle formulation dovetails with the reader’s integration of Big God mechanisms: it explains why secular institutions (which the reader maps against Rodrigues’s crisis of belief) are so fragile to single-point failure.
• CANDY: Tolstoy’s famous line applied to science and atheism is an elevator-worthy tidbit.