---
title: Symptoms and sources
summary: The core distinction of charitology. A symptom is a problem as it shows up in people’s lives. A source is what keeps producing it upstream.
aliases: [root causes, upstream causes]
conditions: [symptom-trap]
related: [/method/, /record/encyclopedia/source-depth/, /record/cause-atlas/]
sources:
  - title: 'Humanity’s Checklist: six things to fix so we can fix everything else'
    publisher: Humanity’s Checklist
    year: 2026
    url: https://humanityschecklist.org/
---

A **symptom** is a problem as it shows up in someone’s life: hunger tonight, an untreated fever, a flooded home. A **source** is something upstream that keeps producing problems, often many at once.

## Why the distinction matters

Symptoms are urgent, visible and real, and helping with them is good. Some needs recur because the conditions producing them persist. A food bank feeds people tonight, and tomorrow there is a line again. Charitology asks every gift where it acts on the chain from symptom to source, and asks the system as a whole whether its mix is right. That is the [Symptom Trap](/diagnosis/symptom-trap/).

## The six sources

Humanity’s Checklist argues that the world’s problems grow from a few shared sources inside humanity’s collective life:

- **Story**: the story we tell ourselves about what is possible
- **Coordination**: whether the people who could solve a problem together ever meet
- **Vision**: whether we can picture the future we want to build
- **Attention**: what our feeds and media reward
- **Status**: what a culture admires
- **Gatekeepers**: who gets to build and be seen

Fixing a source, the checklist argues, stops it feeding the problems below it and starts it feeding the cure. Charitology adopts these six as the top of its [depth scale](/record/encyclopedia/source-depth/) and treats the claim that fixing them would help everything downstream as a hypothesis to test.

## Between symptom and source

Most work sits in between. Charitology’s depth scale has five levels: relief, repair, prevention, structure and source. Bed nets are prevention: they stop malaria for the people who sleep under them. A ban on lead paint is structure: it changes the rules that produced the harm. The scale describes where the work acts. It does not say which level is better. A healthy system funds all five on purpose.