Prior to modernity, individuals were born into families rooted within kin-based institutions that provided everything, livelihood, sustenance, meaning, and that were for the most part inescapable. No "official documents" were needed or useful as people rarely traveled beyond the boundaries of those they knew well. Such institutions were eroded by the Roman Empire and the spread of Christianity in its wake.[^WEIRDest] As European cities grew in the first centuries of the second millennium of the common era, impersonal pro-sociality of citi-zens began to take shape through the emergence of a diversity of extra-kin social institutions such as monastaries, universities and guilds. Paper-based markers of affiliations with such institutions began to supplant informal kin knowledge. In particular, Church records of baptisms helped lay the foundation for what became the widespread practice of issuing birth certificates. This, in turn, became the foundational document on which essentially all other identification practices are grounded in modern states.[^universalreg] [^universalreg]: It is worth noting, however, that universal birth registration is a very recent phenomenon and only was achieved in the US in 1940. Universal registration for Social Security Numbers did not even begin until 1987 when Enumeration at Birth was instituted at the federal level in collaboration with county level governments where births are registered. This helped circumvent the reliance on personal relationships, building the foundation of identity in a relationship to a state, which in turn served as a trust anchors for many other types of institutions ranging from children's sports teams to medical care providers. These abstract representations enabled people to navigate the world not based on "who they know" or "where they fit" in a tight social world but as who they are in an abstracted universal sense relative to the state. This "WEIRD" (Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic) universalism thus broke with the social embedding of identity while thereby "freeing" people to travel and interact much more broadly using modern forms of identification issued by governments like passports and national identity cards. While other critical credentials such as educational attainment are more diverse, they almost uniformly conform to a limited structure, implying one of a small number of "degrees" derived from courses with a particular "Carnegie unit" structure (in theory, 120 hours spent with an instructor), in contrast to the broad range of potential recognition that could be given to learning attainment as illustrated in Figure A. In short, just as modernity abstracted ownership private property, removing it from its many social entanglements, it also abstracted personal identity from the social anchoring that limited travel and the formation of new relationships. <figure> <img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pluralitybook/plurality/main/figs/taxonomies.png" width="100%" alt="A diagram displaying a range of different forms of recognition of leanring achievement in terms of formality and importance."> **<figcaption>Figure 3-2-A. Flexible taxonomies across a broad spectrum of recognition. Source: Learning Agents Inc. (https://www.learningagents.ca) <figcaption>** </figure> <br></br>