On the morning of 15 May 1525, several thousand German peasants assembled on a hillside near Frankenhausen. Their grievances were many, and, astonishingly for people of their station, they had put them into print.
Two months earlier, in the free imperial city of Memmingen, a furrier named Sebastian Lotzer and a preacher named Christoph Schappeler wrote a document called the Twelve Articles. It listed complaints about serfdom, tithes, and lords who had taken over the common woods and streams and then charged rent for the fish. It asked for the right to elect a pastor and for the dead not to be taxed. (Don’t give anyone any ideas today). By most accounts, it was one of the first documents in European history to claim something like human rights for ordinary people, and it made its case not from politics but from scripture, appealing over the heads of the nobility to a higher authority.
Then something unprecedented happened. The Twelve Articles were printed. Within two months, some 25,000 copies coursed through the German lands—an astonishing feat for the sixteenth century. A local outcry swelled into a continental movement almost overnight. The printing press, barely seventy years old, had just become a tool for mass mobilization among the poor.
The lords noticed. So did Martin Luther, whose own movement had relied on the same press and the same appeal to scripture. In March, he published Admonition to Peace, admitting that the peasants’ complaints were mostly fair and urging both sides to settle without violence. In May, as the revolt spread, he published Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants, calling on the princes to crush the rebels like mad dogs. That pamphlet sold more copies than the Twelve Articles, under discussion when the princes’ artillery opened fire. Estimates of the peasant dead range from three to ten thousand, most of them killed in a few hours while fleeing. The professional soldiers on the other side lost perhaps six men. Their preacher, Thomas Müntzer, was captured, tortured, and beheaded twelve days later. By the time the war burned out, somewhere between seventy and a hundred thousand people were dead — the largest popular uprising in Europe before the French Revolution, and one most of us have never heard of.
Hold that hillside in your mind. A new information technology magnifies both the outcry and the crackdown. An economic order breeds the grievance. A religious tradition lends language to both the rebels and their executioners. And, in the end, a question lingers that no one in 1525 could answer: what could be done with all that spilled blood?
Those are the four threads of this essay. I’ll use the old see–judge–act method, a way of thinking developed in the 1920s by the Belgian priest Joseph Cardijn for working-class young people, and later adopted into mainstream Catholic social teaching. Look honestly at what is happening. Weigh it against your deepest commitments. Then do something. This approach is useful for anyone, believer or not, because it does not let analysis replace action, or action happen without analysis.
SEE: The distance between us
Start with the numbers, because they are the part of this that is not in dispute.
Globally, the richest one percent now hold roughly 43.8 percent of all wealth. The bottom half of humanity — some four billion people — hold about 0.52 percent. Put differently, the average person in that top one percent holds something on the order of eight thousand times the wealth of the average person in the bottom half. Billionaire wealth rose more than sixteen percent in 2025 alone, to a record $18.3 trillion, and for the first time there are more than three thousand billionaires on the planet.
The United States, the richest country in history, has been tracking the same curve. The Federal Reserve’s Distributional Financial Accounts show the top one percent of American households holding around 31 percent of national household wealth ~ a record in a data series going back to 1989. The top ten percent hold roughly 68 percent. The bottom half of the country holds about 2.5 percent.
Now, introduce the machine.
Every general-purpose technology changes who benefits, and artificial intelligence is arriving faster and with more investment than usual. Gross AI capital spending in 2026 is estimated at about $660 billion, focused in a few companies in a few countries. That is a huge amount of productive capacity being built and owned by a very small group of people.
The effects on workers are still debated. Some respected economists say automation usually shifts jobs rather than eliminates them, and they might be right again. But early data is troubling. Job losses are hitting workers aged 22 to 30 about three times more than those aged 40 to 55. It often shows up not as layoffs, but as entry-level jobs quietly disappearing: junior analyst, first-year associate, entry-level developer. At the same time, demand for AI skills in job postings has grown about seven times in two years. If you already have money, top credentials, or a strong network, this is a big advantage. If you hoped to work your way up, it feels like someone is taking away the first steps.
Then there is the geography. The computing power, money, data centers, and profits are concentrated in a few big cities in a few wealthy countries. Meanwhile, the training data, content moderation, and annotation work are often outsourced to workers in the global South who earn just a few dollars an hour. The Twelve Articles complained about lords who fenced off the commons and then charged for access. The comparison is not far-fetched.
Where the money meets the fist
Economic injustice does not stay economic. It shows up in bodies.
In the home. Roughly 27 percent of women worldwide aged 15–49 have experienced physical or sexual violence from an intimate partner. That violence is not confined to people with low incomes ~ it crosses every income bracket ~ turn your TV on and watch the news, but economic stress is a well-documented aggravating factor, and economic control is one of its most common instruments. Financial abuse appears in the overwhelming majority of documented domestic violence cases: the seized paycheck, the ruined credit score, the sabotaged job. Its function is to make leaving unaffordable. A woman without independent income is not merely poorer than her abuser; she is held, which means that a labor market that pushes women into precarious, interruptible, uninsured work is not a separate problem from domestic violence. It is a supply line.
Between groups. For decades, most academics believed that grievances did not predict civil war, and that opportunity, terrain, and weak states mattered more. That view has changed a lot. Research by Lars-Erik Cederman, Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, and Halvard Buhaug found that earlier studies measured the wrong thing: inequality between individuals is not a good predictor, but inequality between groups, which Frances Stewart called horizontal inequality, is a strong one. When poverty lines up with ethnicity, region, or religion, and political exclusion follows the same pattern, the risk of armed conflict rises sharply. People rarely fight just because they are poor. They fight because they are poor, they can see exactly who is not, and they have been told this is the natural order.
That is Frankenhausen, translated into the language of regression coefficients.
JUDGE: Two thousand years of arguing with the ledger
If you want a tradition that has thought deeply about wealth for a long time, and reached conclusions that might surprise many of its followers today, Christianity is a good place to look, no matter what you think of its beliefs.
The Hebrew scriptures include the jubilee laws of Leviticus 25, which require regular cancellation of debts and the return of land, based on the idea that no one truly owns anything forever. The prophets are clear on this; Amos is basically a long criticism of creditors. The early church went even further. Basil of Caesarea, in the fourth century, said it plainly: the bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry, the coat in your closet to the naked, the shoes rotting in your possession to the barefoot. His contemporary Ambrose said that giving to people in poverty is not generosity, but restitution ~ you are giving back what was already theirs. Eight centuries later, Thomas Aquinas, who was not a radical, said that a person in urgent need who takes another’s surplus has not committed theft, because in true need, all things become common.
This is not a fringe view. It was the mainstream position in the tradition for its first thousand years, and it is much more radical than anything in today’s politics.
The modern story begins in 1891, when Leo XIII published Rerum Novarum during the first industrial revolution. He defended private property against what we called communism but also insisted, against the liberalism of his time, on a living wage and the right to organize. This idea continued through the twentieth century: Paul VI’s Populorum Progressio(1967) said development is the new name for peace; the Latin American bishops at Medellín in 1968 and the liberation theologians who followed spoke of a “preferential option for the poor”; John Paul II talked about structural sin, the idea that evil can exist in systems, not just in hearts; and Francis declared that an economy of exclusion “kills.”
It is worth noting that the current pope chose the name Leo XIV to honor Leo XIII. He told the cardinals who elected him that the church faces “another industrial revolution and developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice, and labor.” Whatever you think of the institution, the historical comparison makes sense: we are in a moment like 1891.
Merton, and the violence you don’t notice
Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk whose 1948 memoir made him unexpectedly famous, spent the last decade of his life connecting the same ideas this essay explores. His main claim about war was that its root is fear ~ not just fear of each other, but a broad, general sense of dread. He argued that a society focused on accumulating wealth is a society built on that dread. He wrote that we are not at peace with others because we are not at peace with ourselves.
Merton went further by expanding what counts as violence. In a culture of overwork and frantic activity for various causes, he argued that the frenzy itself is a kind of violence because it destroys the ability to find the peace it claims to seek. He also rejected the idea that well-off people can simply watch from a distance. His most famous passage describes standing on a street corner in Louisville’s shopping district in 1958, suddenly filled with love for total strangers and realizing that his sense of being separate from them was an illusion. He titled the book Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. The guilt is important. Someone always benefits from a system that hurts others, and the benefit is usually invisible to those who gain from it.
The harder question
So: does this tradition, on balance, produce more violence or more peace?
The honest answer is that the record cuts both ways, hard.
On one side: three centuries of early Christian pacifism, when Christians were generally expected not to kill at all. Augustine and Aquinas’s just war theory, which, despite later abuses, was designed to limit warfare by requiring a just cause, legitimate authority, proportionality, and last resort. The Anabaptists and Quakers. Tolstoy, and through him, Gandhi. Martin Luther King Jr., Dorothy Day, Óscar Romero, the Berrigans, and Merton. In 2020, Fratelli Tutti went further than any recent papal document in questioning whether just war criteria can ever be met under modern conditions.
On the other hand: the Crusades. The Inquisition. The wars of religion. The theological justification of conquest, slavery, and apartheid. And Luther in May 1525, telling the princes to kill.
Two arguments are important to consider here. René Girard suggested that human desire is imitative—we want what others want—and that societies deal with the resulting rivalry by uniting against a scapegoat. This only works as long as no one sees it clearly. He argued that Christianity broke this pattern by telling the story from the victim’s side and insisting the victim was innocent. Whether or not you agree with the theology, the anthropology is revealing, and it fits uncomfortably well with an economy built on manufactured desires. On the other hand, William Cavanaugh argued that the idea of “religious violence” is a modern invention. The neat separation of religious and secular motives, created in the nation-state era, mostly serves to make our violence look reasonable and theirs look extreme.
My own reading: My own view is that the tradition does not always push in one direction. It is a language of legitimation, and both peasants and princes use such language. This does not mean the tradition is irrelevant. What matters most is which parts of it get amplified, which brings us back to the press.
The technology has changed. Autonomous and semi-autonomous weapons now reduce the time between decision and killing to just milliseconds. António Guterres and the ICRC called together for a binding international agreement on autonomous weapons systems, with talks meant to finish by 2026. More than 120 countries support a treaty, but the major military powers do not. That deadline has now passed with no treaty and no formal negotiations ever started.
“The autonomous targeting of humans by machines,” Guterres said, “is a moral line that must not be crossed.”
At the domestic level, the same logic appears in smaller ways: location tracking, stalkerware, and account lockouts have become common tools of coercive control. This is like the financial abuse of the 1970s, but with a much better interface. And recommendation systems, no matter what their designers intend, consistently find that outrage keeps people’s attention, so the reprisal pamphlet still outsells the list of grievances.
ACT: Can any of this be forgiven?
Which leaves the last question, and the one I find hardest.
There is a strong argument that forgiveness is the only way out. Cycles of revenge feed themselves; someone has to take a loss without passing it on, or the cycle never ends. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission tried to make this official, offering amnesty in exchange for full public disclosure, and probably prevented a civil war. Rwanda’s gacaca courts handled more than a million cases that no regular court could have managed. The Amish community at Nickel Mines in 2006, and the families of the Emanuel AME victims in Charleston in 2015, offered forgiveness within days, and in both cases it clearly changed something.
There is also a strong argument against forgiveness, and it should be taken seriously, not dismissed as just emotional. Jean Améry, who was tortured by the Gestapo, spent his life refusing forgiveness and argued that his resentment was a moral achievement—the refusal to let time erase an atrocity. Forgiving too soon can become a demand placed on victims for the comfort of others. The TRC delivered truth, but very little material compensation; South Africa is still one of the most unequal societies in the world. This leads to the main objection: forgiving a person is not the same as forgiving a system. You can forgive the person who fired the gun, but it is not clear that anyone can forgive a system that is still in place.
The distinctions that help, I think, are these. Forgiveness is not the same as reconciliation; one person can forgive, but reconciliation takes two. Forgiveness is also not the same as amnesty; you can forgive and still prosecute. And none of this replaces restitution. Ambrose’s insight applies here too: returning what was taken is not mercy; it is simple fairness. Zacchaeus, in Luke’s Gospel, is not praised for feeling bad. He is praised for paying back four times what he took.
So if there is action to take, it is probably not a sweeping gesture. It looks more like quietly building the things that make escape possible: the independent account, the emergency fund, the safe place to go. Fight horizontal inequality—the kind that maps onto groups and geography—because that is the kind that breeds conflict. Insist that ownership of the new machines is a political question, not just a technical one, just as it was in 1891 when the answer was shaped by those who organized. Support the treaty that seems dull. Notice what you are amplifying.
And keep that hillside outside Frankenhausen in mind. Those peasants had a printing press and a list of reasonable demands. What they lacked was anyone in power willing to read the list a second time.
We have better presses now. The list is still going around.
Note: Written for readers of any faith or none. The see–judge–act framework is gratefully borrowed from Joseph Cardijn.
Note: I am a cultural historian with thirty-five years in emerging technology, focusing today on the Anthropology of Technology, which has led me to be an AI Ethicist and a “killer” storyteller.
Sources
Oxfam, Resisting the Rule of the Rich (January 2026) — Oxfam GB inequality report; Inequality.org global figures
Federal Reserve Distributional Financial Accounts; FRED: share of net worth held by the top 1%
S&P Global, “The AI and labor landscape 2026”
Wikipedia: Twelve Articles; World History Encyclopedia: Twelve Articles; Online Library of Liberty, “The Peasants’ War and Martin Luther”; Battle of Frankenhausen
Global prevalence of intimate partner violence, systematic review (PMC); Economic abuse as an invisible form of domestic violence (PubMed)
Cederman, Gleditsch & Buhaug, Inequality, Grievances, and Civil War (Cambridge, 2013) — publisher page
Pope Leo XIV on AI and his choice of name (NBC News); EWTN, “135 Years After Rerum Novarum”
Joint UN Secretary-General / ICRC call on autonomous weapon systems; Stop Killer Robots on the 2026 deadline
Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (1961), Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1966); Jim Forest, ed., The Root of War Is Fear
Nota Bene: I write for people of any faith or none. For the family sitting in the pew on a Sunday morning with kids who really don’t want to be there.
The See–Judge–Act framework is gratefully borrowed from Joseph Cardijn.
I am a cultural historian with thirty-five years in emerging technology, in “Silicon Valley,” focusing today on the Anthropology of Technology. I explore topics such as the adoption of sustainable technologies, the social impact of digital devices, and the cultural adaptation of innovations. I analyze how technologies affect social organization, labor practices, and environmental outcomes, emphasizing that technology is never neutral but culturally situated, which has led me to be an AI Ethicist and a “killer” storyteller.