Is the meaning crisis universal/global or culturally specific to the "West"?

Research and Sense-Making
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This is something I’ve seen discussed a few times and directly flagged in a recent comment of @Naeema

I think this would be a great question to inquire into further. More specially:

  • Is there a meaning crisis in the West? (what data/evidence do we have for this)
  • Is this happening elsewhere

Bonus (almost certainly separate threads)

  • What is the history of the meaning crisis societally and intellectually (e.g. Durkheim was flagging increased rates of suicide in late 19th century, Weber talked about disenchantment etc)
  • What are the causes?

NB: In a sense the first 25 episodes of Vervaeke are exactly this genealogy of the meaning crisis addressing these last two points.

My 2c

IMO the meaning crisis is a feature of (late) modernity so it shows up most strongly in places which are pretty far in modernity – e.g. i notice this strongly in western europe but not so much when i go to Taiwan (where my partner is from).

In e.g. Taiwan my sense is that people are still in early modernism mode e.g. consumerism is a big deal, people have recently (e.g. parents generation) moved out resource insecurity, democracy is pretty novel etc. Now maybe i’m misreading this and in fact there’s an entirely different cultural tradition (e.g. Confucian / Zen / indigneous) which accounts for this – rather than the location in the cultural paradigm. However, it is significant that I do notice the beginning of the Western anomie in very young people there (but still largely covered up by things like consumerism – as it was in the West.

In short, a cultural paradigm framing would suggest that the meaning crisis is unequally distributed – not because it is culture specific but because it is specific to where you are in the evolution through the (universal) sequence of cultural paradigms e.g. if the centre of gravity in a given country is still pre-modern you aren’t going to be getting a meaning crisis instead it will likely be an autonomy and legitimacy crisis (as happened with Catholic church in western europe 1000 years ago).

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Thanks you @rufuspollock really appreciate the way you’re opening this up. I’ve been sitting with many of the same questions, and your post offers a great opportunity to deepen and widen the frame.

Your distinction between a universal human predicament and a culturally situated crisis within the Western lineage feels like a crucial starting point. I share your intuition that what we call the “meaning crisis” is not universally distributed in the same way across cultures, but emerges more vividly in contexts that are further along the arc of late modernity; where traditional meaning-making structures have been disembedded, and where hyper-individualism, secularization, and consumer capitalism have become dominant.

That said, I think the deeper move here is not just to locate where the crisis is most acute, but to expand the ontological vocabulary we’re using to make sense of it. As you noted, a lot of the discourse (even in attempts to reach beyond the West) tends to orbit around Buddhism, Neoplatonism, and a handful of familiar frameworks. But what might we discover by more fully engaging with, say, Confucian relational cosmology, Indigenous animisms, Islamic metaphysics, or African moral ontologies like Ubuntu? These aren’t just exotic alternatives… they’re full-blown meaning-making ecologies with their own diagnoses of dislocation, alienation, and the fragmentation of order.

Your reflections on Taiwan are a really helpful example. The sense that consumerism functions there (as it once did in the West) as both a salve and a mask for deeper tensions is telling. And I wonder if what’s happening isn’t just a delay in the arrival of the meaning crisis, but the co-presence of multiple semiotic logics (ancestral, neoliberal, democratic, cosmological) held together in a kind of unresolved layering. The resulting friction may not look like a “meaning crisis” in Western terms, but it could still represent a profound dissonance in how people situate themselves in the world.

In that sense, perhaps it’s not one crisis but a plurality of crises (meaning, legitimacy, autonomy, coherence) surfacing differently depending on the cultural-historical substrate. The West framed its version as a crisis of meaning because of its emphasis on individual purpose and narrative coherence. Other traditions might experience similar destabilizations through different registers: a breakdown of cosmological order, relational harmony, or ancestral continuity.

Which brings me back to your framing of this as a question of where one is situated in the evolution of cultural paradigms. That model is deeply generative it allows us to see these crises not as culture-bound anomalies, but as patterned developments in the transformation of collective worldviews. It also opens space for what might be called a decolonial approach to the meaning crisis one that doesn’t just diversify our sources but questions the implicit centering of Western crisis-narratives as the global template.

Appreciate the provocation and your clarity in laying this out… feels like a conversation with a lot of terrain still to map.

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Probably different from your framing of the meaning crisis, but I’ll add my understanding for consideration. I think that meaning crisis is system specific and its root cause is incoherence. Both social systems (institutions) and individuals have compulsion to maintain coherence. Incoherence can psychologically look like rot and decay - leading to death. We react to these signs of impending death by disassociating ourselves and that results in the loss of optimism and idealism. We’re sad and grieving good that’s about to disappear.

So, systems, societies, institutions, communities and individuals all care about incoherence (or coherence) - the loss of idealism in collective structures results in corruption, in individuals - meaning crisis.

The “cracks” happen when narratives stop maching people’s lived realities. I have many examples - some of them more universal, some localised. Why do narratives start diverging from reality? It’s because of the tension between preserving legacy coherence (of the legacy system) and having no choice but to acknowledge the emerging realities. Attempting to extend coherence to link 2 incoherent systems is like a liar adding lies to avoid getting caught and eventually running into such a complexity mess that it crashes the entire structure. When incompatible systems with their own logic start clashing and become intermittently (and unpredictably) applicable - meaning gets slaughtered.

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To me, this is a good approach. As a key example, this from Habermas:

“The revolution in worldviews of the axial age can be explained as a response to the cognitive dissonance generated by developments at the level of knowledge and moral consciousness. … Under contingent conditions … intellectuals responded to this cognitive pressure by converting it into morally motivated criticisms of social conditions and political practices.” (_Also a History of Philosophy, vol. 1, p. 209).

Habermas has some specific cases in mind (early iron age Israel, Greece, India, China), but I believe the model works in general. Lately for example, I’ve been delving into both Christian and Islamic origins. “Meaning crisis” is a decently good description of ambient social scenes in Galilee and Mecca respectively at the time those religions emerged. Lots of conflicting worldviews with social churn and lack of clear social structure. People wanted and needed new directions. I moveover believe such cognitive dissonance is the motive force behind all of what Gebser calls mutations of consciousness. New cognitive structures emerge when there is a mismatch between lived experience and the available stories to unpack and frame that experience.

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I particularly like linking incoherence to the loss of optimism and the death of idealism to the imminent death of systems - because there’s no optimism if there’s no future.

Systemic corruption and human corruption are the signs of distress, like people walking over each other trying to escape a sinking ship. You have no faith in the boat anymore, so your existential needs come to the fore. Even your own humanity gets suspended as you try to be the one that will survive on account of someone else drowning.

What I believe we’re all experiencing now is a strong trend of “neo-solidification” of the world. I think I can attribute all the major events to it and logically present the rationale. The rise of China, far right movements and Trumpism, meaning crisis, the death of Agile in software design and finally the techno utopianism of Musk and Co.

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Hi @Naeema, you’ve brought this up a couple times, so I wanted to respond at some point. To me, a lot of this is down to cognitive style, and also Vervaeke’s specific research focus on cognitive science. A common thread through some of the commonly favored systems in this research program such as Zen or Stoicism is detachment. It’s an effort to disambiguate reality by getting some distance from emotion, sensation, or anything that smacks of entanglement. (Pretty much the opposite of any sort of “womens’ ways of knowing”.)

I’m OK with Zen or Stoicism or contemplating the One as far as all that goes, but ultimately I tend to get bored with all that detachment and want to wallow around in sensual content. That God is God interests me a bit. That God created the World interests me quite a lot more. Having tried on just about every available worldview to see what fits, if I had to settle on a single architecture for everything, it would be Vedanta. Why? Because it takes an all-of-the-above approach. Jnana yoga, bhakti yoga, karma yoga. All that Zen/Stoic/Model of Hierarchical Complexity theorizing is pure Jnana yoga - the path of insight. It’s the path of theoretical clarity. Much of what interests you by contrast, (like indigenous traditions) has a large element of bhakti. These are all embodied practices. For a jnana practitioner, the sensuous, ritual, and relational elements of bhakti are distractions. Anyone who leads with love, however, is going to want some attachment to someone or something, and the vast array of rituals in the world have love and relationship at their core. As for me, karma yoga without a doubt. I don’t sort through Vervaeke and co. because I think endless theorizing is the best way to spend a life. I do it because I’m good at it, and my sense of duty to the world is that by clearing up theoretical conundrums, and I can pave the way for people to engage with the world in more devotional ways. In a nutshell, my sense of duty is to put theory is its proper box, so it won’t suck up all the bandwidth and distract people from more fruitful relational action. So when it comes to staring at blank walls all day long or arguing about whether Ideas coexist in union with the One, I understand why people do that sort of thing, I just don’t find it especially necessary for me or for most everyone else.

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Thank you both, Martin and Robert :folded_hands: This thread has opened up rich terrain, and I’m deeply appreciating how it’s helping to refine the framing of the meaning crisis, not just in terms of what’s breaking down, but how we respond depending on our cognitive style, cultural location, and existential orientation.

@Martin your imagery of the sinking ship is piercing in its emotional precision. The loss of optimism, the retreat from shared ideals, and the corrosion of trust, all as symptoms of systemic incoherence, speak powerfully to what many are sensing. Your framing highlights a crucial dimension of the meaning crisis: when our collective narratives no longer map onto lived experience, disorientation sets in, and survival instincts begin to eclipse relational and moral coherence. Yet I find myself wondering whether what we’re witnessing is not simply the end of coherence, but the threshold of its transformation the disintegration of one mode of meaning-making creating the conditions for another to emerge.

@RobertBunge I appreciate how you’ve drawn our attention to the role of cognitive style in shaping both our perception of the crisis and the responses we gravitate toward. Your invocation of Vedanta as a framework that holds jnana (insight), bhakti (devotion), and karma (action) together offers a helpful lens for making sense of divergent approaches… from the abstract clarity-seeking of Stoicism or cognitive science to the embodied, relational resonance of indigenous and devotional traditions. It feels increasingly clear that what we call the “meaning crisis” is not merely the collapse of grand narratives, but also a deep epistemic tension a breakdown in the legitimacy and integration of multiple ways of knowing.

What begins to come into view, then, is a more layered framing of the crisis: not just as cultural or existential dislocation, but as a mismatch between inherited cognitive regimes and emergent complexity. In that light, perhaps the crisis is not a singular event, but a polyphonic unraveling where different traditions, temperaments, and epistemologies each register the rupture in their own voice.

The work, then, may not be to restore a lost coherence, but to learn how to reweave meaning across fragmented styles of thought, feeling, and practice. If the old vessel can no longer hold, then perhaps the invitation is to become skillful at navigating open waters… together, but differently.

What other threads (historical, cultural, spiritual, or deeply personal) might offer themselves to this weaving? Especially those quieter strands that have lived at the margins of dominant narratives: forgotten lineages, relational ways of knowing, or localised expressions of rupture and renewal that don’t always make it into the global discourse. What have you seen, or lived, that speaks to a coherence still possible, even if fragile or emergent?

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@Martin your reflections have stayed with me, especially that visceral image of systemic breakdown and the scramble for survival when coherence begins to dissolve. I’ve been turning it over slowly, and perhaps because of where I’m from, growing up in the long shadow of the Lebanese civil war, I feel these questions not just as abstractions, but as atmospheres I’ve known in my body. In places where trust fractures, where stories fall apart faster than they can be replaced, coherence becomes something far more tender and elusive… so I’ve been wondering whether what we’re calling a “meaning crisis” might not be the absence of truth, but a shift in what truth is asking of us.

What if coherence is no longer best understood as fixed consistency within a sealed worldview, but as something more alive, a dynamic, adaptive coherence? A kind of truthfulness not in the static sense, but in the ability of a framework to breathe, to stretch, to take in complexity without tearing at its seams.

I have the sense you’re already touching this in your own way reading the signs in the local, the fractured, the not-quite-articulated. And so I wonder with you:

Might pluralism become less about managing differences, and more about learning to listen across worlds (science, myth, memory, place) without collapsing them into a single logic?

Could systemic coherence mean more than alignment of parts, and begin to mean resilience of meaning? That which allows a life, a community, even a fragile institution to stay responsive under pressure?

Is there a kind of coherence that lives not in consistency but in felt-sense, in the embodied recognition that something holds, even when it defies tidy articulation?

And maybe the work isn’t to design a new grand system, but to cultivate a capacity to hold multiplicity, an integrity that lives between truths, in tension, with care.

I don’t bring these as answers, but as contours of a question I suspect you’re already inside. When the old structures fail, what forms of coherence do we turn toward? Not as solutions, but as ways of staying human in the midst of fracture?

I’d love to hear where you see signs of that already… perhaps quietly emerging in the corners of practice, story, or encounter that don’t quite fit the dominant frames.

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@Naeema - there are many questions here and I’m not exactly sure how I should respond. If people are interested, maybe we could have a themed research call around this subject?

Just to address some of the points and give you a totally random perspective to illustrate how discursive this topic is!

System coherence in non-authoritarian systems is required because people won’t participate in incoherent systems. Coherence gives credibility to the system in the shape of legitimisation.

In authoritarian systems - participation is not optional - it’s demanded.

When systems become incoherent - ordinarily that presents an opportunity to build a better system. We still believe in the explicit promises and the underlying values - we only think that the system has become operationally corrupt. At this point there’s no meaning crisis.

Since we’re talking about non-authoritarian systems - we “believe” that the system would allow us to challenge the incoherence and “correct” the malfunctioning. After all - we believe that the system has always been standing behind its foundational values.

The next level of escalation happens when you realise that the system is “not obviously Not” authoritarian and that it lies about itself - explicit vs implicit specs. When you try to bring this up - you’re met with gaslighting.

Finally, when you try to articulate your emotional feelings about something being fundamentally wrong on so many levels - you realise that you’re all alone - the extreme individualism of our era has individualised the risks as well. You’re virtually alone because the sense-making is fragmented and perspectively multi-faceted.

Ultimately meaning crisis as experienced is a psychological issue. Trying to make sense of the senseless world and not being able to even raise a valid concern about the incoherence leads to existential anxiety. There’s impotence, opacity, discretion, moral abdication, - it literally turns into a chaos and a certain kind of hopelesness and paranoia sets in because the future is uncertain.

If we knew we lived in autocracy - we could theoretically “learn” our place in the system and teach ourselves not to interfere with things that are not our jurisdiction. Like politics, in autocratic countries. Anyway, this is just random and vague, but hopefully gives you an idea what’s needed to get to the bottom of what this crisis is all about.

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I think the the embodied recognition is the one that rings truth - the articulation is needed for communication and cohering with others.

The only reason why I’m doubling down on coherence is because it’s the only measure that comes close to objectivity. Everything else is a worldview tinged perspective. The idea of “invalidating” incoherent systems is where I’m heading at the moment.

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Appreciate this @Martin your framing traces something essential… how systemic incoherence, when sustained and denied, sinks inward and becomes psychic, an isolating dissonance between what we’re told and what we sense is true. It captures a progression I’ve both observed and lived.

Growing up during the Lebanese civil war, I came to understand that collapse in non-authoritarian settings often unfolds not through a single rupture, but through a slow erosion of trust and shared sense-making. No singular moment of crisis just an accumulation of contradictions, misalignments, and silences.

What remains striking is how coherence in Lebanon, even to this day, is not held by governance or institutional vision, but by relational resilience, a living ethic of coexistence practiced among citizens across 18 sects and spiritual traditions. It’s a fragile, improvisational coherence often strained by the weight of geopolitical interference, that persists not because of the state, but despite it. A small, densely plural cosmos constantly negotiating its own continuity.

I would welcome a thematic research call. These questions resist finality, but they deserve space especially across contexts where coherence, if it exists, is something made daily by people rather than declared by systems.

It may also be worth exploring how external forces (political, economic, technological) shape or distort coherence in fragmented societies today. In places where internal cohesion is already tenuous, external actors often amplify division, not always through direct conflict, but through more subtle means: proxy alignments, financial dependencies, media influence, ideological export.

In such contexts, the struggle isn’t only for governance, but for narrative sovereignty. When a society’s sense-making is co-opted or overwhelmed by outside agendas, coherence becomes harder to sustain not just politically, but culturally and emotionally. People live in multiple, often incompatible realities; local truth entangled with global pressure.

What does coherence look like under these conditions? What kinds of resilience are still possible when the internal fabric of a society is continuously pulled by external hands?

These seem like urgent questions, not just for Lebanon, but for many parts of the world navigating fragmentation under the long shadow of global power.

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This got me looking for an “objective” view on coherence. The best I could find readily is this.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220607660_Measuring_coherence

As the paper notes in its introduction “A common complaint among
those who deny coherence any epistemological or methodological import is that the notion of coherence is hopelessly vague.” The paper then goes on to propose some mathematical formalisms. I’m wondering, though, if sophisticated mathematical set theory is truly the light 2R wishes to shine on issues such as the metacrisis? Personally, I’d be more comfortable focusing on the qualitative, informed by feeling, intuition, perception, and lived experience.

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I proposed that we use explicit specs to analyse motivations, frustrations, opportunities, values, threats etc… and compare that to the implementation (or implicit specs) to determine where the divergence happens and to what degree. We could use some methodology or an inquiry tool similar to what I called “Spec Drift Dialogues”…

Again, the main premise is that we’re analysing systems which are explicitly “non-authoritarian” and therefor need to be coherent to earn participation, validation and legitimacy. I think that’s the precise “attack” point that can be used to force systems’ accountability.

It’s quite possible that it takes more than just isolated snippets to explain the problem we’re trying to solve, the diagnostics and the solution.

I’m not proposing an algorithmic or mathematical solution

I just want to add one more thing because someone is bound to question it.
Authoritiarian systems can also be corrupt and incoherent - but that’s (usually) not the deliberate mystification (even though it could cover for incompetence or some other ulterior motives) - it can simply be design corruption, implementation corruption, operational corruption - but the point is - the autocrat who is the owner of the system is the one who can demand the system to be fixed - it can invalidate it at will.

I’m looking for a similar concept in non-authoritarian systems - a key to their invalidation or a big stick that its stakeholders can carry with them to enforce accountability. Wihtout proper diagnosis - you can’t claim incoherence - therefore this exercise comes first, then the principle of “demanding coherence and accountability”

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To me this illustrates the interplay between metacrisis and meaning crisis. Metacrisis is a field of complex social contradictions. Meaning crisis is what happens when such contradictions are internalized. Beyond that, it strikes me progress will be made when persons overcome the internalized contractions and articulate a new, more coherent vision. Social realignment can then proceed, starting with small circles and expanding outward to wider communities and peoples.

My analysis above is not especially original (other than maybe importing our current terms “metacrisis and meaning crisis”). It’s pretty much well known sociology of religion, and can be found historically in the careers of many great movement founders.