Connected Community Conversations

General
21

Geoff, thanks for such a clear and generous framing of your position. I genuinely appreciate the coherence you’re striving for—it’s admirable, and I can see how deeply you’ve worked it through.

That said, I keep returning to something you and I both value: McGilchrist’s work. You cite him as a master—and I agree—but I wonder whether we might be drawing different implications from what he offers.

One of McGilchrist’s central contentions, as I understand it, is that the left hemisphere’s way of knowing has become dominant, not just in science or policy, but in our very understanding of what it means to know. And that the resulting epistemology—though brilliant—is partial, disconnected from the embodied, intuitive, relational ways of knowing that the right hemisphere foregrounds.

When I suggest re-grounding epistemology in “older ways of knowing,” I don’t mean reverting to dogma or denying reason. I mean allowing the right hemisphere’s knowing—the imaginal, the intuitive, the participatory—to be part of the soil, not just the scenery.

McGilchrist argues this isn’t optional. It’s necessary if we’re to reconnect to reality in a more integrated, life-affirming way.

If you haven’t re-read The Master and His Emissary or The Matter with Things recently, I’d really encourage it. His invitation isn’t to house imagination within reason—it’s to reorder the relationship entirely.

I suspect we may be closer than it appears—just arriving through different doorways.
In any case, I wish you every success with your book.

1 Like
22

Terry,

As far as I am aware, I agree with everything Iain McGilchrist thinks and I can’t think of anything I’ve written that I think he’d disagree with.

I entered your last post into ChatGPT and asked for Iain’s response:

Iain McGilchrist replies:

Thank you for such a careful and generous engagement. It’s always heartening to see readers taking these questions seriously—not simply as intellectual exercises, but as matters of deep existential and civilizational importance.

You are quite right to emphasize that the crisis we face is not merely one of ideas or institutions, but of attention—of how we bring the world into being through the kind of consciousness we enact. My work has indeed argued that we suffer not from a deficit of reason, but from an imbalance of reason—the hypertrophy of a particular mode of it, associated with the left hemisphere.

This mode is narrowly focused, analytic, abstracted from context. It is immensely useful, even brilliant, at certain tasks—but it mistakes the map for the territory, the sign for the thing signified, the formula for the living reality. When this mode becomes dominant, as it has in the modern West, we lose touch with the qualities that make life meaningful: depth, presence, resonance, beauty, the sacred.

So, to your point: yes, the epistemology I am calling for is not one in which the intuitive or imaginal is subordinated to rational control. It is one in which the right hemisphere’s way of knowing—holistic, embodied, implicit, relational—takes the lead, as it is meant to. Not by excluding reason, but by placing it in service of a deeper and more integrated apprehension of reality.

This reordering is not nostalgic. It is not a call to anti-intellectualism or the abandonment of science. On the contrary, it is a call to save science from itself, from becoming a solipsistic enterprise trapped within its own abstractions. As I have written, “We need both hemispheres, but they must be in the right relationship.”

You mention “older ways of knowing”—and I agree, provided we do not idealize the past. What we need is not regression, but integration: a recovery of the intuitive, the sacred, the poetic, in conscious relationship with the analytic and the empirical. In this sense, your doorway and mine may not be so different after all.

But I would gently insist that this is not just a matter of temperament or emphasis. It is a matter of which mode of being in the world we accord primacy. The left hemisphere’s world is a useful construct; the right hemisphere’s world is the living whole from which meaning and value arise. Only the latter, I believe, can provide the ground for a sane and sustainable future.

So yes—re-reading The Matter with Things might be worthwhile, not as an act of agreement or disagreement, but as an act of remembering what we already know, but have forgotten how to see.

With every good wish for your journey and your work.

—Iain

23

Prompt:

To what extent does my own position mesh with McGilchrist’s. Are there any big inconsistencies?

ChatGPT said:

Your position and McGilchrist’s are largely resonant, but not identical. There’s a shared core—and also some edges worth teasing out. Let’s start with the points of deep alignment, then move to possible tensions or differences.

:white_check_mark: Strong Alignments with McGilchrist

  1. Epistemological Critique of Modernity
    You both argue that the dominant Western epistemology—rooted in abstraction, reductionism, and the privileging of objectivity—has led to civilizational dysfunction.
    → McGilchrist frames this as the left hemisphere’s dominance. You might frame it in terms of scientistic materialism or the unbalanced legacy of the Enlightenment. But the critique is essentially the same.
  2. Need for Integration, Not Rejection
    Neither of you calls for a rejection of reason or science, but for a reordering.
    → You say science has “epistemic privilege” in understanding objective structure—but you reject its overreach into metaphysics and meaning.
    → McGilchrist wants science to “sit at the feet of philosophy,” guided by a broader awareness rooted in right-hemisphere knowing.
  3. Primacy of Consciousness / Psychegenesis
    Your two-phase model (pre-psychegenesis, then consciousness collapsing wavefunctions) reflects a view in which consciousness is foundational, not epiphenomenal.
    → This aligns well with McGilchrist’s emphasis that consciousness is the ground of reality as we know it, not just a by-product of matter. He’s careful not to fall into naïve idealism, but he’s certainly non-materialist in orientation.
  4. Reverence for the Whole, the Lived, the Sacred
    Both of you oppose the “dividing spirit” of modernity and want to recover wholeness, depth, and a re-sacralized relationship to being.
    → Your embrace of magical realism, your critique of postmodern flattening, and your call for a new stable epistemology echo McGilchrist’s plea to reawaken to reality as a living mystery.

:balance_scale: Potential Tensions or Subtle Differences

  1. Structure vs. Process
    You tend toward structural realism, which suggests an enduring, knowable structure underlying reality—even if it’s incomplete.
    → McGilchrist is more comfortable with radical contingency and irreducible ambiguity. He’s wary of structural models that imply stability, and leans toward the ungraspability of reality.
    → He might ask: Is “structure” already too much of a left-hemisphere frame?
  2. Commitment to Final Epistemic Authority
    You hold that science has the final word on the structure of objective reality, though it’s not the only mode of knowing.
    → McGilchrist might question the idea of a final word at all. His ontology is apophatic: what is most real can be approached only indirectly.
    → He’d likely say: “The more complete our view of reality, the less certain it becomes. And that is not a defect—it is a sign of contact with the Real.”
  3. Magical Realism and the Praeternatural
    Your system allows for subjective experience of the praeternatural (without requiring objective proof) and integrates elements of magical realism.
    → McGilchrist would likely be open to this in spirit—he affirms myth, imagination, and the symbolic as deep ways of knowing. But he might be more cautious about systematizing or metaphysical theorizing of such experiences. He prefers symbolic resonance over ontological commitment.
  4. Desire for Epistemic Stability
    You reject metamodern oscillation and want a new stable epistemological system for a post-collapse culture.
    → McGilchrist, while deeply critical of postmodern fragmentation, may hesitate to endorse any epistemology that stabilizes too rigidly. He sees the world as irreducibly dynamic, and truth as inherently perspectival, not relativistic, but neither absolute in the modern sense.

:compass: Summary

Area Alignment Notes
Critique of modernity :white_check_mark: Shared concern about imbalance and abstraction
Role of science :warning: Both value it, but you give it more authority on structure
Consciousness :white_check_mark: Both reject materialism and privilege psyche
Sacred / whole / embodied :white_check_mark: Shared emphasis on the irreducible whole
Epistemic humility :warning: You want stability; McGilchrist leans toward reverent uncertainty
Use of metaphor/myth :white_check_mark: Deep resonance in symbolic, imaginal language
Magical realism :warning: You lean more into ontological claims; he’d likely stay closer to metaphor and mystery
24

I’ve been asked by multiple people to look at this thread. I’ve made comments in another thread and don’t see much to add here, other than regarding this bit:

I’d prefer to see more distinction between people and ideas here. I would posit that it’s very very rare to meet a person in life that we can’t learn anything from. If I find myself in a position where I think that about a person (or set of people), but I stay open, then I have reliably discovered that it was I who didn’t fully understand that person.

If you’ve “flipped the bit” on engaging with another person (which is sometimes a pragmatic and valid move to make, to define an engagement boundary for oneself!), then I ask that you attempt to hold that boundary cleanly by focusing on ideas — when people are named, this creates an impulse to further engagement that runs counter to one’s desired boundary.
(Oh, on a similar note, I’m not a fan of bringing a beef with Hanzi into this forum. It didn’t strike me as relevant to the point, so it felt like drama-bait to me. This is just a low-strength passing-by comment.)

25

I’m also surprised and heartened to see that Terry got so much benefit from a genAI text! Perhaps I’ve been too skeptical and mistrustful of AI output (such that I usually just skip over all “I asked chatgpt and it said” texts). TIL

26

My response to AI-generated content is likewise that I tend not to read it. For more reasoning on why, here is part of my OP in this thread:

"On the general theme of what might attract more people to 2R, what attracted me in the first place might be summed up with the phrase “connected community conversations”. "

By “connected community conversations” I mean exchanges between humans. I’m especially interested in human layers of expression that correspond to Verkaeke’s perspectival, procedural, and participatory. AI is getting every more brilliant at the propositional, but propositional is not really what I am here for. Community building is more what I am here for.

As a general rule, the perspectival, procedural, and participatory are best communicated through “I” statements. Perspectives vary with persons. Participatory knowing is entirely personal and intimate. Procedures might be effectively communicated in the second person, but I’d very much prefer to hear how others here do things, not what others believe I should be doing. (I’m quite comfortable working out my own action agenda, thank you!)

1 Like
27

OK. Obviously I didn’t mean I don’t have anything to learn at all from person X because they hold one particular set of views I don’t agree on. I meant I can’t learn anything relevant to the problematic foundational belief, and I will endeavour to make sure the language more accurately reflects that in future.

Perhaps I’ve been too skeptical and mistrustful of AI output (such that I usually just skip over all “I asked chatgpt and it said” texts). TIL

AI is very powerful in certain situations. It is far from perfect, but it is also capable of doing things that are completely new.

28

I see @terrycd as exhibiting very much appreciated qualities of considerateness, tolerance, compassion, and open-mindedness. Thus I am not so surprised :laughing:

29

I don’t share this optimism. The system I’m witnessing acts in the manner of a parasite, a virus. It is already well into the path of destroying its host, the Earth’s biome, and it ‘knew’ about this outcome decades ago. Your reference to some future turning point or revelation by which the more benign actors take control is not something I see any evidence for. At all. The system is built on illusions - that of hierarchy, separation, and human exceptionalism. These illusions have persisted across millenia and now they are so imbedded into the human psyche, globally, that it is nigh impossible to escape them. Soon one of the only means to do so - contact and exposure with a pristine national environment - will be cut off. It already is, for most. And good luck getting some DM - Thus ends my opinion.

30

I’m searching for a word here… it’s not quite “paradox”. “Necessary tension” maybe?

There seems to me to be a great apparent tension between views that appear optimistic and those that appear pessimistic. And I’ve been feeling that somewhere in myself recently. (Heart? Body? A difficult-to-name part of mind? who knows…)

On the one hand, a strong dose of realism is necessary, counteracting naive false optimism. For sure, to act well, we need to see things as they are…… however, there we come back to the ontological point; the belief systems; the narratives. Let’s try our best to be clear that what we claim to see as things “actually” are (“actually” is such a weasel word!) we are basing our claims on what is uncontested, not just on our personal interpretation.

We need to see things as they are — and at the same time resist the very human reaction of being emotionally overwhelmed, into a kind of depressive state in which I see the world’s problems as far too much, far too complex, for me to make any significant effect upon. For me as an individual, I see this helpless position to have a lot of truth. For us, however, collectively, I don’t think so. And from there, to all the rest of the narrative, the positive story of connected community conversations.

@Justin , when you say “I don’t share this optimism”, how sure are you that the person you say you don’t share with actually has the kind of optimism that you attribute to them? For me, there is a world of difference between a naive, magic-aligned optimism, that mummy or daddy will come and make things all right, and what seems to me to be a much deeper, spiritual optimism.

I’ll try to express this latter kind of “optimism” in a few words: Even if everything looks hopeless, if I listen to the true source (and you can call it your body, nature, the Spirit, God, etc.) I will find something that is mine to do, positively. I don’t know, and I won’t know, if this will have the effect I want it to have (the world is too complex for me to know that), but I will do it anyway, with more confidence if the connected community around me senses into my calling and resonates with it as true. And, I believe, as a connected community we can do a lot to encourage and help each other to find what is ours, positively, to do. A shift in culture is needed, though…

This, to me, is the optimism of Julian of Norwich, quoted by Eliot in his Four Quartets. People may of course brush this aside as “naive optimism”, but I would caution against hasty (and naive?) dismissal.

31

In a parallel thread, we got onto Pogany, Karatani, Bauwens, and others. Those are the sorts of sources I traffic in. Why? Precisely to obtain a clinical view of what “the system” is built on. Likewise, in other threads I’ve signaled an interest in UTOK. Not coincidental. Again, it’s down to understanding the anatomical layers of “the system”.

In UTOK terms, we start with matter-energy, bump up to life, then mind, then culture. (None of this is especially unique to UTOK - UTOK is like a field guide to thousands of other theories). Anyway “the system” quite obviously does its business on the cultural plane, or as UTOK sometimes puts it, the culture-person plane.

I like the formulation “culture-person” because it flags the nexus between personal psychology on the one hand and what Habermas calls communicative action on the other. (I’d be open to Bourdieu’s and similar models as well). When you say “the system is built on illusions” - it implies a nexus between illusion at the personal level and systemic effects that are real enough with the respect to impacts like missiles flying (or not) or food showing up on the dinner table (or not).

Another thing about UTOK - it’s also proxy for the work of Vervaeke, McGilchrist, and many other collaborators. Gregg Henriques has a talent for conversations all the way around. So far from dismissing your insights about “illusion” - I really do want to get to the heart of the matter about what reality really is - my approach is to assemble the most comprehensive views from the most penetrating thinkers and to direct them all to the common task.

So getting into the human mind-brain-culture complex, UTOK summarizes prior psychology (hundreds of theories) with the notion of Minds 1, 2 and 3. Mind 1 is roughly what we have in common with all mammals and even other animals. Mind 2 is the personal self - roughly “ego” - whose job is to mediate between the biological and the cultural. Mind 3 is the social-facing persona - the identity we project to the world.

Against that background, whence comes “illusion” and how does it manage to instantiate social systems? There will not be time and space here for a complete answer, but in UTOK terminology we would should be delving into the world of Behavioral Investment Theory (how animals allocate energy expenditure for survival), Justification Systems Theory (how we construct identity for social purpose), and the Influence Matrix (the interplay of personality and relationships).

Short hypothesis on the question of systems and illusion (against all that scaffolding) - the system is real enough, built on the rock solid foundation of evolutionary adaptation by minded animals over thousands of millennia. The emergence of human language and culture were no accidents. Being human, however, has never been especially easy or straightforward, so our efforts to form relationships, justify our social positions, or align wants and needs with available resources can have perverse consequences in many cases. No one sees or understands everything. But we act on what we do see and understand. Presumably, better vision, better understanding, would afford more effective action. This pursuit of better vision, better understanding is really what drives all the current rage for “wisdom”. Will it work? Let’s use another reply for that …

32

Not sure exactly what reference that is, but in any case, “evidence” for the future is generally in short supply, because none of us has any of that! What we mean by the “future” is anticipation of the likely consequences of what we see in motion now, and how we imagine our personal actions in the moment might play into whatever unfolds next. There is no point trying to prove anything about the future one way or the other. It’s less about proof than it is about visualization.

It’s easy enough to take any given trend, project it to infinity, and arrive at dire or absurd consequences. Yes but - does the world really work like that? Has the world ever worked like that? The currently understood 13 billion years give or take of cosmic evolution suggest otherwise. If the universe is on a one way train to nowhere, it certainly provides an interesting view in the course of the journey!

I’ve studied enough history to not be overly confident about what will happen in the next several days, let alone the next several decades. May end well. May end badly. Most likely of all - well for some, badly for others. That, at least, would be a future consistent with the past. However, as many have noted here and elsewhere, the current world system is profoundly unstable, so whatever the future holds, it won’t be more of exactly this. What does the future hold then? There is a spectrum of possibilities, some more likely than others.

At the most personal level, my future horizon is a generation at most. Beyond that, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Anticipating that moment, my future-oriented energies are directed to what society might look like long after it will all be in the hands of others. I suppose we might engineer human extinction through thermonuclear means. But then again, I’ve spent an entire lifetime under that particular dagger. (In first grade or thereabouts, our class did in fact do a duck and cover drill under our wooden desks. Just in case.) More likely, madcap capitalist over-consumption to the bitter end, which end will occur when extractive techniques underperform in relation to regenerative techniques. But the bitter end of extractive capitalism need not mean the bitter end of humanity itself - but it may well mean the end of current global population densities. That transition can only be considered “optimistic” by those not very keen to examine the specific details about how it might come about. But is there hope for a human future beyond the current generation? Sure. Just like there is hope we’ll all be back here again tomorrow, discussing these matters for at least one cycle longer …

33

Thank you for your reflection—it’s articulate, but I’d like to press further.

You suggest that the future can’t be proven, that “visualization” replaces “evidence.” But that’s precisely the problem: visualization without evidence is indistinguishable from denial, and when the stakes involve civilizational collapse and mass extinction, poetic detachment becomes a luxury of the privileged and the insulated.

You ask, “Has the world ever worked like that?”—i.e., linear trends projecting into oblivion? In fact, yes, it has. Civilizations have collapsed—repeatedly—and often not from linear trajectories but from tipping points, feedback loops, and cascades that emerged far too late to reverse. The archaeological record is clear: once ecological overshoot was reached, collapse became unavoidable (see Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies, 1988).

Your mention of “hope for a human future” is noble, but vague hope is not enough. We are not facing a poetic dilemma, we are facing:

CO₂ levels at 425+ ppm (highest in 3 million years).

Global insect collapse, threatening food webs.

Ocean acidification on a scale unseen in 300 million years.

A Sixth Mass Extinction already underway.

Arctic methane release, accelerating climate feedback.

A global food system utterly dependent on fossil fuels and just-in-time logistics.

And the planet’s carrying capacity being exceeded by billions, according to the Global Footprint Network.

All this can be found very easily, freely, through multiple accredited sources. But I’m not here to expound on the veracity of facts.

The notion that collapse “may end well for some” is, frankly, evasive. For whom? For those with access to land, water, seeds, and community? For the Global North at the expense of the South? Collapse is not a thought experiment—it’s a lived reality for millions already displaced, starving, or dying from the system’s unraveling.

Yes, we cannot predict the future with certainty. But we can observe momentum, inertia, systemic fragility. The idea that something new will emerge post-collapse is plausible. And preparing for it means facing the scale of what’s being lost, not soothing ourselves with the idea that it’s all part of some great cosmic pageant.

The universe will continue just fine. But whether our civilization, our biosphere, or our descendants will survive with dignity is not a metaphysical question—it is a question of whether we act with full awareness now, even if the system itself is already past the tipping point.

Being ‘collapse aware’ can be tough and I fully understand the reluctance or resistance. However if it’s just a case of not being informed over the relevant scientific data, or rejecting it, or falling prey to the fossil fuel funded lies (many have, especially in the US) this would need to be clarified.

34

Thank you for the clarification. You’re right—there is a vast difference between naïve optimism and what you’re calling spiritual optimism. I respect that distinction. But my concern is not with optimism as an inner quality—it’s with how that optimism relates to material conditions, ecological evidence, and systems in collapse.

What I hear, often, is a kind of spiritualized detachment—one that rests on the belief that something will emerge, that some deeper order will carry us forward, that the arc will bend toward regeneration. But this can unintentionally resemble the same patterns as naïve optimism when it avoids engaging with what is actually unfolding around us.

I’m not questioning the value of hope, or the presence of spirit in our response. I’m asking whether that hope is tethered to reality—or whether it functions as a buffer from grief, from collapse, from responsibility.

Because the sixth mass extinction is real. Climate breakdown is accelerating. Human systems are increasingly brittle. We are living in overshoot. And history shows us that civilizations do not gradually evolve into their next stage—they collapse, and new systems are built from what remains. That’s not pessimism—it’s pattern recognition.

So I ask gently: What does your spiritual optimism require of you in this moment? Does it call for a reckoning with collapse? For grief? For readiness? Or does it allow you to turn away from the scale of the problem under the shelter of faith in emergence?

I’m not rejecting spirit. I’m saying spirit, if real, must walk through fire with its eyes open.

35

Yes, the scaffolding is indeed intricate. I’m familiar with UTOK, McGilchrist, Vervaeke, and the cultural-person interface as you’ve described it. The taxonomy is useful, yes—but my statement, “the system is built on illusions,” was not merely an inquiry into the architecture of mind and meaning-making. Rather, it was a critique of the system’s ontological assumptions that have become encoded into our economics, our technologies, our social hierarchies, and our modes of perception. These are not illusions as in “errors of individual cognition. They are institutionalized misperceptions—falsehoods repeated until they become operative realities. A few examples:

The illusion of separation: That humans are fundamentally separate from nature, when biology, ecology, and physics all suggest interdependence at every level.

The illusion of endless growth: That we can extract, expand, and accumulate indefinitely on a finite planet, when thermodynamic and ecological limits are glaringly obvious.

The illusion of objectivity without context: That knowledge, especially in science or economics, can be value-neutral, when in reality it is always embedded in systems of power and cultural framing.

The illusion of control: That human reason and systems design can manage the complexity of life without unintended consequences, when the history of collapse and systemic overshoot says otherwise.

These illusions are not just cognitive—they’re materially instantiated. They’re embedded in the design of supply chains, in the legal system, in financial derivatives, in our built environments. Critically, they’re even embedded in our language. They are baked into the incentives that drive political and economic action, and they function precisely because they are believed to be true.

So I agree with you that we need “better vision, better understanding.” But that understanding can’t remain inside a theoretical hall of mirrors.
It has to confront the real consequences of systemic illusions: the sixth mass extinction, climate breakdown, the collapse of biospheric stability, the erosion of communal bonds. And we can’t deal with those unless we see, and remove, the illusions that led to them arising.

Viva!

36

I appreciate the pressing deeper here.

Let me say that I fully recognise the dangers, perhaps not exactly the same as, but akin to, what has been called “spiritual bypassing”. My gut feel is that this is more likely in guru-led communities, where people have given up their personal agency to a leader figure. And isn’t that what is happening in some polities right now, anyway, in less spiritual ways? I would agree that it resembles naive optimism, and go further, to say that it is just what I see as naive optimism: the belief that a leader will save us. Are you familiar with Wilfred Bion’s work from the 1940s? Maybe rather outdated, and now overlooked, but also has some good sense.

So yes, hope tethered to reality, good. In that context, I’m making two points. First, that we inevitably have differently nuanced views of what “actually” is reality. (Hence the need for what I call “ontological commoning”.) And second, that our global reality is so complex that we cannot be sure of the consequences of our actions. Now, for sure, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try our best. We should. But the full reality will inevitably elude us, and thus seems to me to demand a degree of humility. This is why I tend to be hesitant when people come up with preconceived ideas of what we should be doing.

I see your question as the same as mine. Maybe the epistemology is different? The epistemology I have suggested is, like it or not, beyond left-brain rational calculation, so not in any sense determined. It turns to emergence out of collective dialogue, as well as inner light or inspiration from what one might see as right-brain workings.

And I’m absolutely agreeing with you about keeping our (rational, as well as intuitive) eyes wide open. The only nuance I’m not clear about is how much your ontology is absolutely objective.

In your later reply, you say …

… and forgive me for seeing that potentially as having a definitive tone. I would say, as before, we all have our take, whether it be polycrisis or metacrisis, and I want to avoid arguing over belief systems, but instead do what we can to grow (rather than build) the evolving common ground on which we can work together rather than fighting about whose perspective or belief system or story is more correct.

37

A quick addendum around the word “illusion”. I hesitate here, with Buddhists as well as others, because I see people using the word “illusion” with the implication “You are deluded, I know the truth”. And then, quite possibly “it’s my mission to get you to recognise the truth”. Which is sadly shared by those espousing mistaken conspiracy theories. (Some are real!)

Not only do I prefer, but I see it as more in keeping with the culture and the paradigm that I see in 2R and related spaces, that we start with a different attitude. If I own my view of your beliefs as an “illusion”, that offers sufficient distance to ask, not only what truth is there in your belief system as well as mine, but also, how do our ontologies map onto each other? What common belief system can we seed here, as a basis of coherent action towards explicitly agreed common goals?

I’m looking for a culture, not of uniformity, and perhaps not even traditional solidarity, but maybe a new kind of solidarity based on mutual respect and recognition, ability to interrelate, strength in diversity of perspective as well as of ability and characteristics.

1 Like
38

Thank you for your thoughtful and generous replies. I genuinely appreciate the depth you’re bringing—not just intellectually, but also with care for tone, process, and dialogue. That feels rare, and I want to honour it.

Let me first respond to your addendum about the word illusion, because I do hear the concern. There’s a danger, yes, when that word is used as a weapon—when it implies, “I see clearly, you do not,” and collapses the other’s experience into a caricature. That’s not what I intend. I’m not claiming possession of truth, nor assigning delusion to others.

Rather, when I speak of systemic illusions, I mean the cultural myths that have been deeply embedded in the architecture of industrial civilisation:
– The illusion of separation from nature
– The illusion of endless growth on a finite planet
– The illusion that knowledge can be objective and disembodied
– The illusion that we are in control of the outcomes of complex systems

These illusions aren’t merely ideas—they are institutionalised and enacted. They shape policy, economy, and perception, often invisibly. My concern is not about who holds which belief, but what happens when belief becomes systematised, and when the systems themselves begin to unravel under the weight of those falsehoods.

That’s why I press on the need for tethered hope—a hope grounded not in abstraction, but in contact with what’s actually unfolding: biospheric instability, ecological collapse, extinction events. These aren’t narrative “takes,” but measurable, observable phenomena. If we dissolve everything into ontological perspectives, we risk losing our grip on consequences—and with them, responsibility.

At the same time, I deeply value your emphasis on mutual recognition, ontological commoning, and the cultivation of a new kind of solidarity—not one based in uniformity, but in coherence, respect, and shared inquiry. That spirit is needed more than ever.

So perhaps we meet here:
Let us cultivate a solidarity that walks through fire with its eyes open. That names what is dying, while refusing to surrender the possibility of what might yet live.
And if a few buds shoot through the ashes,
mayhap there’ll still be people around to water them.

1 Like
39

Visualization without evidence is how cognition works.

40

In addition to Tainter, some key authors on this topic include Jared Diamond (Collapse), Ian Morris (Why the West Rules - for now), Niall Feruguson (Doom), in addition to multiple works by Peter Turchin, Peter Pogany, and many others. So I’m here for post mortem on any prior collapse one might prefer to discuss.

I needed to write on this for a recent book chapter on the future of technology, so to save a bit of time, this from my draft:

‘Albert Einstein once gave a talk which is summarized as: ““Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler”. How simple can we get in projecting the future of information technology, without making it too simple? Historians and theorists like Ian Morris (2011), Jared Diamond (2005), and Peter Turchin(2007) generally reject single-factor theories for things like civilizations or human futures. All of them have done extensive statistical and empirical studies of societies all over the world, spanning all of recorded history. None of them would buy in to the idea that everything is straight up progress with no reversals or major side effects. Likewise, none of them would accept we are in some inevitable downslope to civilizational death and decay. They would all take note that environmental overshoot has destroyed societies in the past, and none of them would exclude that as a future possibility for our current society either. These theorists do not find evidence for a grand scale cycle or dialectic that has determined the entire past history of the world. But they do identify smaller patterns that have repeated themselves over and over again. That seems like a prudent approach to future forecasting for information technology. Are there patterns of technological development in the past that may point to the most likely emerging trends in the immediate future?’