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.
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 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.