Charles Sage is an independent researcher who studies the deeper patterns behind how societies evolve, change, and sometimes lose their way. He sees history not as isolated events but as recurring human behaviors — how fear can replace compassion, how group identities harden into division, and how societies drift away from the values that once held them together. Working outside traditional institutions, Sage seeks to uncover these hidden patterns to better understand the complex forces shaping our world.

His work offers a compelling hypothesis: at the level of the human social superorganism, certain groups within society function like vital regulatory systems in a living body. In this view, the Jewish people can be seen as analogous to the pituitary and endocrine systems — acting as a cultural and social regulator that influences and coordinates broader societal functions. This critically important role, though essential, is often misunderstood and, at times, creates severe tension and resistance. Sage’s hypothesis suggests that antisemitism arises not simply from prejudice but from society’s reaction to this regulatory function — a fear of disruption or challenge to existing power structures, much like a body reacting negatively to changes in its internal balance.

At the heart of Sage’s research is the belief that true understanding goes beyond knowledge; it requires empathy — the ability to genuinely see what shapes us and others. Through this shared insight, we begin the process of healing. By opening ourselves to this deeper understanding, Sage believes we create space for renewal — the possibility of building a more balanced and compassionate society.

Preface

“It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.”

— Rabbi Tarfon, Pirkei Avot 2:16

This work arises from a long-standing conviction that history, in its broadest sense, is not merely a record of human events but the behavioral trace of a living system. Beneath the surface of cultures and conflicts lies a deeper architecture — the structural grammar through which humanity organizes itself, learns, forgets, and repeats. If civilization can be understood as a self-organizing process, then its failures and pathologies must also be understood systemically, as dysfunctions of feedback and perception rather than as isolated acts of malice or chance.

Among these dysfunctions, antisemitism stands as one of civilization’s most enduring and enigmatic recurrences — a pathology both ancient and adaptive, moral and structural. To treat it solely as a social prejudice is to miss the depth of its persistence; to treat it as a mystery immune to analysis is to surrender the possibility of repair. This project approaches antisemitism not as an aberration from civilization but as a symptom within it — a recurring distortion in the feedback loops that bind collective identity, moral order, and self-understanding.

In framing this phenomenon through systems theory and evolutionary sociology, the aim is neither to reduce history to mechanism nor to excuse harm through abstraction. Rather, it is to see clearly the conditions under which human systems reproduce their own blindness, and to ask whether greater structural literacy might open a path toward moral clarity. To understand the system is, in this view, to begin healing it — for comprehension is the first act of moral participation.

The following work is offered in that spirit: as an inquiry into the systemic logic of persecution, the evolutionary dynamics of cooperation, and the possibility that the repair of understanding — Tikkun Olam — remains the most essential and neglected task of all.