The FT offers this insight.

Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s veteran sidekick, died this week. The vice-chair of investment group Berkshire Hathaway had a penchant for zingy aphorisms. The one I always remember is: “Capitalism without failure is like religion without hell.” […] Some Europeans do not get the success/failure-yin/yang thang.

To which I say, this writer is clearly a few cards short of a full deck. Their most remembered aphorism is broken with simple logic.

Religion says going to hell is punishment, whereas capitalism says repeated failure is common and even necessary to reach success. Does anyone say try going to hell a few times to get heaven? No, because then people would live without fear of failure, accept “go to hell” threats as a step to heaven.

Also, some basic wisdom about world religions poses a huge problem for the aphorism.

Taoism uses Yin/Yang to show an indivisable whole, a duality represented as parts in balance and inseparable to prove that fear of division (e.g. any moral dichotomy of good versus bad) is an unreal perception.

When you dig deeper into all this, and see what Europeans in fact DO get (e.g. quality of life balance, resistance to accelerationism), is that many (most, really) religions are practiced without any hell at all and for some perhaps obvious reasons:

• “Jesus isn’t talking about heaven [and thus doesn’t believe in a hell] because he doesn’t believe – he’s a Jew – he doesn’t believe in the separation of soul and body. He doesn’t think the soul is going to live on in heaven.”
• Hell was created by people positioning their religion to be more influential than family, community, and government. It’s a political tool, especially alluring among those seeking power and a way to undermine other effective forms of (moral) regulation.
• Hell then becomes an escape from accountability, because for those spreading the idea it “has never been anything more than a strategy for sparing themselves the unpleasant task of confronting the real implications of the beliefs they profess.”

Vengeful eternal punishment, while many self-professed capitalists claim to love such an idea, is literally the exact opposite of their actual road to success (dependent on charity and good will of others such as family and government, saving them from true or permanent loss).

In that sense capitalism — where healthy market functionality matters more than ostentatious brags by a select few about their rapid and unstoppable privilege to repeatedly fail — is just one part of a life that is better described as many failures inseparable and infused with some success.

Capitalism typically requires acceptance of failure coupled to robust systems for recovery, very unlike how some outlier religions try to manipulate sentiment (undermine other social constructs) by using a fear of some vague future (theoretical) possibility of an absolute unescapable hell.

I’ve previously discussed a global focus on Gaza relative to a lack of attention on violence elsewhere. It’s an issue that is having a direct and profound impact on upwards of 6 million displaced people around Sudan. This crisis in Africa, particularly highlighted in a stark new warning from the World Food Programme (WFP), appears to be so overlooked now that a reported 1.4 million people crossing the border to escape Sudan are on the brink of collapsed support systems.

In just the last six months of conflict in Sudan, as many refugees have fled into Chad as had crossed the border in the preceding 20 years starting from the outbreak of the Darfur crisis in 2003. This brings the total number of refugees in Chad to over a million, making the country host to one of the largest and fastest-growing refugee populations in the whole African continent.

[…]

Dwindling funding and soaring immense humanitarian needs, is forcing WFP into making brutal choices. In December, WFP will be forced to suspend assistance to internally displaced people and refugees from Nigeria, Central African Republic, and Cameroon due to insufficient funds. From January this suspension will be extended to 1.4 million people across Chad – including new arrivals from Sudan who will not receive food as they flee across the border.

Chad is one of the poorest countries in the world, and it’s been quietly facing millions of refugees who arrived in just the past few months to escape “ethnically motivated” violence against civilians.

The fighting between two rival military factions that had started in Khartoum in April rapidly spread to other parts of the country, including the western Darfur region where it reignited long-standing ethnic and inter-communal tensions. West Darfur State has become the epicentre of conflict in the region with reports of widespread violence against civilians.

The border town of Adre, Chad this year for one example reported a population of 40,000 people. In just three months after April it had to take in more than 200,000 refugees.

Notably, the level of terrorist violence in the region of Chad is at an unbelievable high, which the Wilson Center earlier this year attributed in some part to… divisive effects of social media platforms as well as the presence of Russia.

The Sahel now accounts for 43 percent of the world’s terrorism deaths—more than South Asia and the MENA region combined. That percentage is on the rise. […] So why is this region particularly vulnerable to terrorism? Many are quick to blame ethnic and religious conflict made more destructive by the growing availability of weapons from outside the region. But there are other contributing factors that are fueling deeper stressors and frustrations within and between communities. Weather extremes, unpredictable growing cycles, desertification, and diminishing arable land all contribute to the sense of declining economic opportunity that many feel—especially the region’s youth. Instead of using their authority to resolve disputes and build inter-communal understanding, many political leaders, armed with social media, appear all too ready to exploit these pressures for their own political gain. […] The Russian paramilitary organization Wagner Group is… suspected of operating—or soon to be—in Burkina Faso and Chad.

To put that in perspective, in fifteen years the latitude just south of the Sahara Desert has risen from barely any terrorist activity to the most in the world. That’s the kind of alarming spread happening without sufficient attention, fueling the humanitarian crises, which I suspect time will show was linked to Hamas’ invasion of Israel and terrorist attacks on civilians.

Think of this map as a large blue arrow pointing to the North-East:

Indeed, according to reports, Adam Barima was murdered in Sderot by Hamas as he was walking in the street. This innocent Masalit man had fled to Israel to escape genocide in Sudan.

And in a particularly shameless disinformation campaign, videos of violence in Sudan are being fraudulently relabeled as Gaza and spread by social media platforms.

The claim a video shows an Israeli bombing of Palestinian children gathered at a water tank in eastern Gaza is false. It shows footage of the Sudanese military bombing the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces at an airport fuel depot in the capital Khartoum, as reported by Al Jazeera Sudan on October 12.

Misleadingly circulating a video of violence in Sudan as purported evidence of Israel attacking Gaza not only fuels ignorance of genocide in The Sahel but also detracts attention from the genuine challenges facing the growing millions displaced around Sudan, diverting focus from crucial issues within the region… which further exacerbates tensions towards and in the Middle East.