Science Quote by Keith Henson

Henson’s line treats “cults” less as lurid fringe theater and more as a budget line item with bodies attached. The blunt pairing of “cults” with “related social movements such as the Taliban” is intentional provocation: it collapses the comforting distinction between weird, private belief communities and geopolitically consequential ideologies. In his framing, the difference is scale, not type. That’s a scientist’s move, less interested in moral taxonomy than in causal mechanisms and measurable outputs.

The subtext is a critique of how modern states allocate attention. We love to debate belief as culture war spectacle, or to quarantine extremism as an exotic pathology. Henson yanks the conversation into material consequence: when cohesive, high-commitment groups harden into governance or insurgency, they become expensive to confront. “Massive military expenses” is a cold phrase, almost deliberately unromantic, implying that the real disaster isn’t only ideological capture but the predictable, repeatable fiscal drain that follows.

Context matters: post-9/11 discourse made “Taliban” shorthand for a particular kind of organized fanaticism, and Henson leverages that immediacy to argue that irrational or absolutist movements create externalities the broader public pays for. There’s also an implicit policy jab: if these movements can be studied like systems, then prevention, disruption, and resilience might be cheaper than perpetual reaction. The line’s power is its cynicism: belief, he suggests, becomes everyone’s invoice.