Sometimes using one big idea as a master key to understanding everything can, up to a point, be illuminating. I think of Crowds and Power, and Elias Canetti’s chilling notion of all power as a sting passed down the human chain of command, ending with the public executioner. Canetti used this master key to open many doors, from the anthropological to the biological, but concluded depressingly that the sting was unavoidable in human relations. At best it could be controlled, but there was no antidote to the sting of power. The only door he did not open was the theological.