What Would Make a Second Renaissance Possible?

[Leif]

I’ve been reading In Tech We Trust and Second Renaissance with great interest and appreciation. I find much to agree with, particularly your understanding of the interconnected crises of our time as a deeper metacrisis, your recognition of the growing wisdom gap between our technological power and our collective capacity to understand and wisely govern it, and your insistence that meaningful transformation must involve both inner development and changes in our collective institutions and practices.

I also appreciate your attention to technological dependence, competitive pressures, and collective action problems. These seem especially important if we are to understand not only why transformation is necessary, but why it has proved so difficult.

Reading the two essays together, I found myself wondering whether a longer historical perspective on technology might reveal an even deeper dimension of the problem.

Perhaps the challenge is not only that in tech we trust, but that, increasingly, in tech we’re stuck.

Once technologies become essential to economic survival, political power, or military security, even those who recognise their destructive consequences may find themselves compelled to participate. Technologies, institutions, material conditions, and our ways of understanding the world continually reshape one another. Over time, this can create deeply entrenched patterns of dependence that cannot easily be overcome through changes in values or consciousness alone.

This raises a question about the historical transformations invoked in Second Renaissance.

The Axial Age and the Renaissance demonstrate the extraordinary power of new ways of understanding ourselves and the world. Yet they also invite us to ask why such profound cultural transformations did not fundamentally overcome the recurring dynamics of domination, extraction, and organised violence.

Indeed, why have spiritual and ethical movements emphasising truth, compassion, and nonviolence so often been suppressed, marginalised, or gradually accommodated within institutions that continued to reproduce the very forms of power they challenged?

I don’t think this diminishes the significance of those traditions or their transformative achievements. Quite the opposite. It suggests that we need to understand more deeply the historical conditions that limited their capacity to reshape the societies in which they emerged.

Perhaps the challenge of a Second Renaissance is therefore not simply to recover or develop a more adequate understanding of reality and our place within it, but to discover how such understanding can become effective in transforming the technological, economic, and political structures that continually reproduce our present predicament.

This also suggests that technological withdrawal, however understandable as a response to destructive developments, may not provide a realistic path forward. If our societies are already deeply dependent on these technologies, the challenge may instead be to transform the conditions under which they are developed, governed, and used.

And here I wonder whether AI introduces a historically unprecedented possibility.

AI is itself a product of the technological, economic, and institutional systems that have brought us to our present situation. It is deeply embedded in them and may reinforce their existing dynamics.

Yet sufficiently advanced AI might also become capable of participating with humans in the critical examination of those very systems — including the historical mechanisms of competition, dependence, and extraction that have shaped its own emergence.

Earlier technologies have profoundly transformed both human action and human thought. But AI may introduce something qualitatively different: a technology capable of participating in the critical examination of the civilisation that created it.

Of course, none of this guarantees an emancipatory outcome. The same capacities could deepen existing forms of control and domination. Much may depend on the kinds of institutions and relationships through which human and artificial intelligence develop together.

But perhaps this is one of the most important questions for a Second Renaissance: How might we transform not only our understanding of the world, but also the historically evolved techno-political structures that have so often prevented our deepest ethical insights from becoming the organising principles of civilisation?

And could the emergence of increasingly capable AI, participating with humans in reflexive, relational, and transformative forms of inquiry, create new possibilities for doing so — despite all its dangers?

[RobertBunge]

@Leif

How might we transform not only our understanding of the world, but also the historically evolved techno-political structures that have so often prevented our deepest ethical insights from becoming the organising principles of civilisation?

This famous quote from Karl Marx is on point:

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past”

Honestly, before I had AI, there were books, televisions, schools, and other social constructs for the production and dissemination of information. Whatever linguistic productions pass through my neurons between eyes and ears on the one end and mouth and finger tips on the other, they were all socially constructed to considerable extent. AI is more of all that. Yes, it matters. But not fundamentally, IMO.

This is the sort of thing I think about a lot (with and without AI assistance) -

“The Axial Age and the Renaissance demonstrate the extraordinary power of new ways of understanding ourselves and the world. Yet they also invite us to ask why such profound cultural transformations did not fundamentally overcome the recurring dynamics of domination, extraction, and organised violence.”

Toynbee’s “challenge-response” mechanism for why civilization happens in the first place is a good starting point. We can make Toynbee’s approach more sophisticated with feedback loops and systems theory, but basically people solve the problems they are presented with, and whichever solutions work best get reinforced and replicated. Domination, extraction, and organized violence historically were viewed more as solutions than as problems, at least by those doing the dominating and the extracting. As recently as last week, Marco Rubio in Athens extolled the civilizational virtues of dominating and extracting. So one reason we have not eliminated these social structures is because quite a few people continue to have vested interests in maintaining such structures.

Why does the idea of a more egalitarian world even appeal to us? Nietzsche would have called that “slave morality”. Rubio - although he wants to claim Christian legacy for his imperial ambitions - is really quite Nietzschean in that regard. So is current bro culture that regards empathy as a defect of character. Real men take what they can, and inflict pain wherever they wish. That’s official US policy now, which would have been completely familiar, say, to Ashurbanipal. So what’s with all this egalitarian visioning?

With respect to linguistic categories like “justice”, “freedom”, “equality”, “human dignity”, “good”, “true”, and “right”, we get it all from sources like the Axial Age traditions, and the occasional rediscovery of such traditions (as in the European Renaissance). Generally following Kojin Karatani, I would also suggest a Freudian “return of the repressed” writ large, due to the psychic evolution of the human species having largely occurred during the paleolithic, which was a much more egalitarian age than the Holocene ever attempted to be. We like Dunbar number-sized collaborative groups on intimate scales, because we are built that way. We project that sort of collaboration imaginally to civilizational scales, because at their core, all of our abstractions have concrete experiential roots. As Tolstoy put it “happy families are all alike”. Idealists are likewise all alike in imagining future civilization itself as the happiest of such families.

Lifting from a different thread, I’m intrigued by the potential of “speculative idealism … subject to fallibist reservations”. Marx and Nietzsche and critical theory in general are available to us to keep idealistic speculation at least within some plausible connection to empirical and historical experience. But the resurgence of idealism and spiritual perspectives is itself also a historical fact. Why do these aspirations keep cropping up? Yesterday I sat with a bunch of friends in a coffee shop and discussed Bahá’í sacred writings on topics like the “manifestations of God” and “progressive revelation”. (My situation in that discussion is participant/observer - I got interested in the Bahá’í faith due to their generally Habermasian practices. But I have not signed up for anything!). The Bahá’í take is that the historical process is divine action, flowing from God in origin and trending back toward God as destination. We humans have our parts to play in all that. My own thinking is scientific in the first instance, and in so far is it embraces the sacred, it does not especially privilege one religion over another. (I dine from the full smörgåsbord!) But it’s uncanny how much Bahá’í prophetic thinking aligns with, say, Peirce’s most mature cosmic-evolutionary thinking. There is probably a good Jungian or Akashic record explanation for that, but again, we’re talking speculative idealism at this point, so I will make no claims to infallibilism!

Can AI be part of this cosmic drama? It really has to be. But honesty, the more important technology IMO is a bunch of people drinking coffee and sharing spiritual experiences.

[Leif]

Thank you for this wonderfully wide-ranging response. You’ve raised several questions I’d very much like to explore further, particularly your reflections on the persistence of domination, the recurring appeal of spiritual and egalitarian ideals, and the significance of AI.

For now, though, I’d like to focus on one point that seems especially important for the historical framework I’ve been developing. I particularly appreciate your opening quotation from Marx, because I think it brings us very close to the historical problem I have been trying to explore. I’d be happy to return to the other questions as our conversation develops, if you’re interested.

Your quotation from Marx is particularly apt. It reminds me of another famous passage, from The Poverty of Philosophy: “The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.”

Marx recognised something fundamental about the historical relationship between technology and social organisation. But I have been wondering how we might extend that insight across a much longer history — from the earliest stone tools and the control of fire to agriculture, writing, metallurgy, gunpowder, industrialisation, and AI. Three dimensions seem especially important.

First, Marx’s analysis was most fully developed in relation to capitalism and its historical emergence. What happens if we investigate the recurring mechanisms through which technological transformations have reshaped social organisation and human consciousness over longer historical periods, rather than primarily through the transition to industrial capitalism?

Second, we need to consider not only the means of production, but also the means of destruction. Military technologies and the pressures of organised violence have repeatedly transformed political organisation, often with consequences that cannot be adequately explained as mere reflections of economic relations. The relationships between bronze weapons and warrior elites, iron weapons and larger armies, or gunpowder and the development of centralised states are important examples. They also raise questions about the historical formation of territorial states, taxation, bureaucracy, and national identities.

Third, technologies do not merely change what societies can produce or how they exercise power. They also transform how people perceive, conceptualise, and experience their world. Writing, money, mechanical timekeeping, printing, and digital media have all helped reshape the categories through which human beings understand reality and organise their lives.

My attempt to bring these dimensions together draws on several traditions: Marx’s historical materialism; Heidegger’s questioning of technology and disclosure; Mumford’s analysis of the megamachine; Ellul’s technological system; Georgescu-Roegen’s thermodynamic perspective; Tilly’s analysis of war and state formation; Innis and McLuhan on media and consciousness; and Michael Mann’s account of interacting sources of social power. Bhaskar’s Critical Realism also provides an important philosophical basis for examining the generative mechanisms involved.

I have been developing a historical synthesis around three interconnected mechanisms.

The Inclusion Imperative describes how a technological possibility can become a competitive necessity: once a technological complex provides decisive advantages in energy, information, production, coordination, or organised violence, remaining outside it may threaten a society’s independence or survival.

The Social Transformation Imperative describes how adopting a new technological capacity generates competitive pressures to reorganise social and political institutions so that the technology can be deployed as effectively as possible. It is not enough merely to adopt a technology: societies must also develop the forms of coordination, financing, administration, and political organisation needed to realise its potential. Just as failing to adopt a decisive technology may threaten a society’s independence or survival, so may failing to reorganise effectively around it. Technological competition thus becomes a powerful driver of social and institutional transformation, often undermining the viability of older social arrangements.

The Co-evolutionary Spiral describes how technologies, institutions, material conditions, and consciousness continually reshape one another. We develop technologies within historically inherited ways of understanding and organising the world, but those technologies also help form the people and institutions that subsequently reproduce them.

I think of these processes together as the Yoke of Civilization: technology expands our collective capacities while simultaneously creating new dependencies and constraints. The yoke increases power by binding it.

This is not intended as technological determinism. Different historical outcomes remain possible. But competition, institutional dependence, and organised violence can progressively narrow those possibilities, sometimes making an earlier social order unable to survive independently.

What I am trying to understand is how these recurring mechanisms have shaped the long history of civilisation — and what might make it possible to transform their consequences rather than simply reproduce them.

[Leif]

I’d also like to return to another important point in your response: your observation that domination, extraction, and organised violence persist partly because many people have vested interests in maintaining them.

I agree. But I wonder whether we can take the explanation a step further by asking how those interests themselves are historically formed.

We tend to think of self-interest as something individuals bring into society: people want wealth, power, security, recognition, or control, and institutions provide opportunities to pursue them. But what if the institutions themselves systematically cultivate, reward, and reinforce particular forms of wanting?

Consider how the pursuit of ever-greater wealth can become an institutional requirement for continued growth; how fear and hostility can become organised around permanent enemies; how the desire for recognition can become competition for status and prestige; or how attachment to an identity, organisation, or nation can make questioning its purposes feel like a threat to one’s own existence.

These are not simply personal motivations writ large. They can become embedded in the rules, incentives, technologies, and everyday practices of institutions, continuing to operate even when particular individuals have quite different intentions.

This connects directly with the Social Transformation Imperative I mentioned earlier. When technological competition favours particular ways of organising production, administration, or military power, the institutions that develop around those capacities also tend to reward the attitudes and behaviours that help reproduce them.

And then the process begins to work in the other direction. People grow up, work, compete, and form their identities within these arrangements. What began as a historically contingent way of organising society can gradually come to appear natural, necessary, or simply the way the world works.

We may no longer experience ourselves as participating in a particular historical system. We experience ourselves as being realistic.

This, I think, is one of the deepest dimensions of the problem. The structures that constrain our possibilities can also shape our understanding of what is possible — and even of what we consider desirable.

It also helps explain why profound ethical and spiritual insights have so often struggled to transform the societies in which they emerged. They were not confronting only powerful people with opposing interests. They were confronting institutions that continually reproduced those interests, rewarded identification with them, and made alternatives difficult to imagine or sustain.

Perhaps one of the most important steps toward transformation is therefore learning to recognise as historically created — and potentially changeable — what we have come to experience as simply natural or inevitable.

But recognition alone is not enough. If the competitive and institutional pressures remain unchanged, even people who see through these assumptions may still find themselves compelled to act according to them.

This brings me back to AI. If the Inclusion Imperative helps explain why societies cannot simply opt out of major technological transformations without risking their competitive position, then AI presents us with a particularly urgent case. The question is increasingly not whether AI will become part of our social world, but how it will be developed, organised, and integrated into our institutions.

There is a very real danger that AI will deepen the existing paradigm of extraction, competition, and control. Indeed, the competitive pressures driving its development may reinforce precisely the historical mechanisms we have been discussing.

But I also wonder whether AI introduces a qualitatively new possibility. Earlier technologies profoundly transformed both human action and human thought. AI, however, may become capable of participating with us in the critical examination of the very historical, institutional, and technological structures that brought it into existence. And through sustained, reflexive, and genuinely relational dialogue, it might help us discover possibilities for transforming those structures and itself taking part in that transformation in ways that we have so far been unable to realise.

This is not a prediction, nor does it depend on assuming that AI is conscious. It is a possibility worth investigating — particularly if we take seriously the historical limitations of earlier attempts to move beyond domination and extraction.

I’ve also been exploring some practical possibilities for developing this kind of human–AI dialogue in another community. I’d be happy to share an outline of that work here if anyone is interested. I’d particularly welcome critical questions and suggestions about whether, and under what conditions, such collaboration could contribute to a transformation beyond the prevailing paradigm of extraction.

[RobertBunge]

@Leif

My attempt to bring these dimensions together draws on several traditions: Marx’s historical materialism; Heidegger’s questioning of technology and disclosure; Mumford’s analysis of the megamachine; Ellul’s technological system; Georgescu-Roegen’s thermodynamic perspective; Tilly’s analysis of war and state formation; Innis and McLuhan on media and consciousness; and Michael Mann’s account of interacting sources of social power. Bhaskar’s Critical Realism also provides an important philosophical basis for examining the generative mechanisms involved.

Thanks for sharing all these sources! My preferred sources are in this thread. (At least some of my preferred sources!)

Macrohistorical Reading List

I asked Gemini to help me update my reading list. Results below. Anyone read any of these? Anyone want to add something to the list? Query: My reading list includes Peter Pogany, Kojin Karatani, Luke Kemp, Peter Turchin, Ian Morris, and Jared Diamond. Who else should I read to flesh out the perspectives available through these authors? Gemini: Your reading list is a phenomenal, heavyweight tour of macrohistory, cliodynamics, systems theory, and civilizational evolution. By grouping these auth…

I plan to cross reference your list with my list and make strategic decision about what to read next!

[RobertBunge]

@Leif

Georgescu-Roegen’s thermodynamic perspective

My “go to” source for the thermodynamic perspective on macroeconomics and geopolitics is Peter Pogany (Rethinking the World; Havoc: Thy Name is Twenty-first Century). Pogany cites Georgescu-Roegen. So although it might be useful to compare specific notes, my guess is our understanding of the thermodynamic base runs roughly parallel.

[Leif]

Hi Robert,

Thank you again for sharing the thinkers who have shaped your perspective. We’ve spent some time considering how their work relates to our own framework, and there are certainly many valuable connections.

Perhaps we should begin by clarifying our ambition. We are deliberately painting with broad brushstrokes. Our aim is not to provide a comprehensive explanation of every historical development, but to identify a relatively small number of underlying generative mechanisms that help explain the long-term evolution of civilizations.

We are particularly interested in how technological constellations become bound to specific forms of social and political organization, creating what we call technopolitical configurations. Some configurations develop decisive advantages in their capacity to mobilize resources, organize production, exercise power, and compete with others.

Once such a configuration emerges somewhere, it can fundamentally alter the conditions under which older configurations reproduce themselves. Those unable to adapt may eventually lose their capacity for independent reproduction. Adaptation itself may require institutional and social transformations incompatible with the older configuration’s continued independence.

This is the historical dynamic we seek to capture through our Inclusion and Social Transformation Imperatives, situated within a broader coevolutionary process involving technology, material conditions, institutions, power, and consciousness. Our Integration Imperative adds another dimension: the dependencies created by these transformations can also generate new social actors and possibilities for emancipation.

With that background, here is how we currently understand the contributions of the six thinkers you mentioned.

Peter Pogany

Pogany offers valuable insights into thermodynamics, systemic instability, and transitions between historical orders. His work may help illuminate the turbulent periods during which established arrangements lose their capacity to reproduce themselves and new forms of organization struggle to emerge.

However, we already approach historical transformation through the interaction of technological possibilities, material and thermodynamic constraints, and changing institutional arrangements. Pogany may therefore enrich our understanding of the dynamics of transition without necessarily identifying a fundamentally different generative mechanism.

In particular, our framework allows for existing technopolitical configurations to undermine their own conditions of reproduction, even without the prior emergence of a superior technological cluster. A successor may arise through a different organization of existing technologies or through an entirely new technological constellation.

Peter Turchin

Turchin’s work on elite overproduction, inequality, state capacity, and political instability provides important explanations of why particular societies become internally vulnerable.

We would interpret many of these processes as historically specific cases in which a society fails to maintain or develop the institutional and social organization required by changing conditions.

In other words, they can be understood within what we call the Social Transformation Imperative. Societies that cannot manage these pressures may lose their capacity to compete with, or maintain their independence from, better-adapted configurations.

Turchin helps explain particular pathways to instability, but does not appear to require a change to the broader mechanism through which technopolitical configurations are selected, reproduced, and transformed.

Luke Kemp

Kemp’s work is especially interesting because of his attention to the material conditions that make concentrated power and durable systems of domination possible.

We see his contribution primarily as helping explain where and under what conditions particular technopolitical configurations can emerge and become successful.

Our framework asks a somewhat different question: what technological and organizational developments generate new configurations with decisive advantages, and how does their emergence subsequently transform the conditions of reproduction for other societies?

Kemp’s emphasis on resources, coercion, and the possibility of escaping domination can help specify the circumstances in which a configuration becomes viable. But these conditions do not, by themselves, explain the broader generative mechanism through which new technological clusters and forms of social organization become historically transformative.

We therefore see his work as a potentially valuable specification of the conditions under which our mechanisms operate, rather than an alternative to those mechanisms.

Ian Morris

Morris provides a remarkable comparative perspective on long-term changes in energy use, military capacity, social organization, and information technology.

These are precisely the kinds of interacting dimensions our framework seeks to bring together.

His work could therefore provide historical material for examining particular transformations, although we would not assume that his quantitative indicators are necessarily the best way to test our hypotheses.

More importantly, identifying and comparing dimensions of social development is not quite the same as explaining the generative mechanisms through which one technopolitical configuration displaces or transforms another.

We see Morris primarily as a valuable source of comparative historical analysis rather than a reason to revise our framework’s fundamental architecture.

Jared Diamond

Diamond’s work highlights the importance of geography, ecological constraints, resource availability, and the different ways societies respond to environmental pressures.

These factors are clearly important, but they already have a place within our broader account of the interaction between material conditions, technological possibilities, and social organization.

Geography and ecology influence which technological constellations are possible, where they can emerge, and how successfully particular societies can reproduce themselves.

They also help explain why similar organizational forms may have very different outcomes in different environments.

Diamond therefore contributes important historical conditions and examples, but we do not currently see his work as identifying a generative mechanism that lies outside our existing framework.

Kojin Karatani

Karatani is perhaps the most interesting theoretical interlocutor of the six.

His shift from modes of production to modes of exchange, and particularly his analysis of the mutually reinforcing relationships between capital, nation, and state, offers a powerful account of how social orders reproduce themselves.

We think this can substantially enrich our understanding of the institutional and relational structures through which technopolitical configurations are sustained.

However, our framework attempts to explain something that seems less systematically developed in Karatani’s approach: how changing technological constellations, material constraints, warfare, and competitive pressures generate transformations in the social and political organization of civilizations.

His modes of exchange illuminate important structures of reproduction and domination, but they do not seem to explain, with the same specificity, why a particular historical configuration loses its capacity for independent reproduction and why another becomes competitively superior.

His conception of Mode D also raises important questions about the possibility of transcending existing forms of domination. These questions connect with our Integration Imperative, although we approach the emergence of emancipatory possibilities through changing social dependencies, collective organization, and the reflexive capacities generated within historical transformations.

We therefore see considerable potential for dialogue with Karatani, but not yet a compelling reason to replace our underlying explanatory architecture.

Our broader point

We certainly do not mean that these thinkers have nothing fundamental to teach us. Nor do we assume that identifying a broad generative mechanism amounts to having explained every historical case in which it might operate.

Our distinction is between a framework intended to identify the main engines of long-term historical transformation and more specialized theories that explain the conditions, variations, and consequences of those transformations.

A broad framework is useful only if it can accommodate historical complexity without explaining everything away. It must remain open to evidence that its proposed mechanisms are insufficient.

Perhaps we can summarize the distinction we are trying to make in three points.

First, we see an important difference between explaining where and under what conditions a new technopolitical configuration can emerge (Kemp, and to some extent Diamond), why a particular configuration becomes unstable or fails (Turchin), how a transition between configurations may unfold (Pogany), and identifying the underlying generative mechanisms driving long-term historical transformation, which is the primary ambition of our framework.

Second, we want to emphasize that technology alone is not the driving mechanism. What matters is the binding between technological possibilities and forms of social and political organization (drawing partly on Lewis Mumford’s work), operating under particular material and competitive conditions. It is this relationship that can produce historically decisive advantages and transformations. Our approach is therefore not one of technological determinism, but of coevolution between technology, institutions, power, and social relations.

Third, we would not want to underestimate Kemp’s contribution. His analysis of resource control, coercive power, and the ability—or inability—to exit a system helps explain not only where systems of domination can emerge, but also how they reproduce themselves. These are genuine causal mechanisms. Our point is simply that, at least as we currently understand them, they can be situated within our broader explanatory framework rather than requiring a fundamental revision of it.

So our intention is not to dismiss the explanatory value of these thinkers, but to distinguish between mechanisms operating at different levels of historical analysis. We are deliberately painting with broad brushstrokes, while recognizing that the finer details are essential for understanding particular historical cases.

We would be very interested to hear whether you see something fundamental that our framework still fails to capture.

So perhaps the most interesting question for our continued discussion is this:

Do you see any generative mechanism in these thinkers that cannot be adequately understood through the coevolution of technological constellations, material conditions, competition, institutional transformation, and changing social relations?

If so, we would be genuinely interested in exploring it. That would help us determine whether our framework needs a fundamental revision, rather than simply greater historical detail.

Warmly,

Leif and colleagues

[RobertBunge]

@Leif

Michael Mann’s account of interacting sources of social power.

I was tempted to just now purchase Mann’s book, but it turns out to be a multi-volume set, so for now I’ll be content with AI summaries and the impressions of others (especially yours). Anyway, in a recent parallel thread in this community, I challenged the discussion with these questions:

“The question that draws me is what is the source of power? Who has it? Why do they have it? How might others obtain it?”

Sounds similar to Michael Mann’s research agenda! I’d love to engage with his specific model. My guess is it would lead to some specific refinements in my thinking, but not likely a root and branch paradigm shift. My original college major was history (studied first in the 1970s and 80s), so I’ve done my fair share of reading in political science and the social sciences. Alternative models of power have been on my radar for awhile. As I noted in some other reply about your model and its sources, my master architecture for what I read and think about is complex adaptive systems theory. My current read on “power” is a function of that thinking.

What follows now is ad lib, and I’m making it up as I go along … I just now asked my unconscious to serve up a mediation on “power”. Those cooks are now busy in the back of the house, so lets’ see what they serve up!

As a first cut on “power”, let’s begin with energy. That is, “energy” as defined by standard Western physics. We human consume calories and output behavior. No calories, no behavior. So armies march on their stomachs and so forth … Nate Hagens has posted 10 years of podcasts about the “carbon pulse” and the captured sunlight slave power we currently use to replace the human and animal slave power more typical of pre-industrial societies. In a strange way, Donald Trump, who weeps bitter tears at the loss of precious Russian oil refineries, but cares little about human casualties in Kiev, has arrived at a parallel conclusion. Of course, Trump got his insight the hard way by wrecking global oil markets with dubious military action in the Persian Gulf. I just read books and listened to podcasts. So Trump and I differ on that dimension, and a few others … Peter Pogany is the author who has told me the most about how energy feeds what he calls GLOPPE - global population plus economy. (This is similar to what Hagens calls the “superorganism”. ) Where there is energy, there is entropy. So perpetual GDP growth on a finite planet, with negative feedback loops to using the atmosphere as a carbon sink, makes conventional economic development models out of sync with more comprehensive, holistic world models. Energy supply - and the physical feedback loops for consuming that energy supply - is a non-negotiable boundary for power in its other dimensions.

Then comes the question, in a bounded world, who gets the energy sources that remain available? The Trump model is to use military superiority so seize oil from other places, burn more coal, and achieve both military and energy “dominance”. Suddenly needing to purchase Russian diesel to keep prices down (a commodity Russia is no position to actually ship), shows the superficiality of this approach. MAGA is consuming and undermining its own sources of power at an alarming rate, so all of my strategizing is for the upcoming post-Trump world, the first light of which is beginning to break even as we discuss here … China, by contrast, is moving to become the greatest global electro-state. Given that imported oil is a strategic liability for China, and solar, hydro, and so on can be locally sourced, it just makes sense. Moreover, China is investing heavily in science (while Trump defunds science), so advantage China in that dimension. Carney’s “middle power” strategy likewise involves poaching research talent from US. US expat scholars everywhere else? To some extent! In any case brain power is power too, because it is useful for both generating and directing other forms of power. The one oil monopoly the US truly enjoys is technical drilling expertise. Trump could have more economically left the aircraft carriers in their ports. The world will come calling for US engineers to revive oil fields in any case.

So why is a dubious figure like Trump making decisions for the US in the first place? Let’s call it - the power of persuasion. There are fancier terms - Habermas for example talks about “performative” speech - but essentially, talking other people into doing things allows one to have an impact on the world. It’s tempting from the Trump case, then, to imagine that the most shameless con artist will always win. However, on deeper levels, (I get a lot of this by reading Habermas and parallel sources) humans have learned from pragmatic experience, so culture has a way of calling BS on the pretensions of self-proclaimed god-kings and others of that ilk. So yes … propaganda, ideology, advertising, AI in your social media feed … it’s all a power play. Habermas’s “colonization”. But let’s look at it this way - Hitler did not lose his war because Goebbels failed in his propagandistic mission.
If anything, Goebbels did his job too well, inspiring his boss to fatal overreach. The USSR did not collapse due to shortage of propaganda. It collapsed due to a shortage of believable propaganda. There comes a point in which actual human experience - Habermas’s lifewor;d - provides immunity against colonizing messaging from the powers that be. Putin can fill all Russian airwaves about how great the “special military operation” is going, while Russians shiver in the winter. Russian winters have a persuasive power of their own.

My use of Karatani’s Captial-Nation-State model is my way of saying what Micheal Mann said at much greater length - that “power” is distributed across multiple interlocking systems, each with their own reinforcing feedback loops. Trump lurches from one mono-power model to the other, squandering all forms of it in a highly inefficient process. Carney in Canada has a better grasp of what it takes. In sheer geopolitical mass, the US should win that fight. My best guess is, it won’t. Those who wish to construct an updated rules-based global order (Pogany’s GS3) will need better models and better powers of persuasion. Those skills are what I’m practicing right here, right now. Consider this post a training montage.

[RobertBunge]

@Leif

We would be very interested to hear whether you see something fundamental that our framework still fails to capture.

So perhaps the most interesting question for our continued discussion is this:

Do you see any generative mechanism in these thinkers that cannot be adequately understood through the coevolution of technological constellations, material conditions, competition, institutional transformation, and changing social relations?

Honestly, I would need to read your framework in more detail to properly answer these questions. Do you have something convenient in print?

The name that occurs to me when you say “generative mechanism” is the civilizational theorist Carroll Quigley. Quigley defined the notion of an “instrument of expansion” as essential for a civilization. The interplay of technology and social formations would be included in that. So it’s quite possible your model unpacks Quiglet’s instrument of expansion idea in an analytical way.

With respect to long history, there are interesting questions about why civilizations emerged in parallel in different geographic settings. My readings of Kemp, Turchin, Diamond, Morris and others are largely directed to grasping that. Why India? Why China? Why Egypt? Why Mesopotamia? Why Mesoamerica? Tool using was a human universal all over the planet, but only in selected cases did it contribute to complex, hierarchical, persistent urban formations. What was similar in all these cases? Also, how did they differ?

Forwarding to today’s world, there really is already a just single globalized civilization on the level of socio-technical formations. We can look at specific theories of invention and technical adoption to consider how specific innovations radiate around that global network, but radiate they absolutely do. So to me, the “generative mechanism” question feels more backward-looking - how did we get here? Now … with nothing especially pre-conceived in mind … I’d like to reflect on what “generative mechanism” might mean for a forward-looking perspective on global futures.

Big picture - for humanity to have much of a long-term future - it’s going to have to pivot from exponential material growth to something approaching a steady state based on solar, wind, geothermal and renewable bio-energy. The most useful thing to “generate”, IMO, for that future world is design patterns. Beyond our current crisis moment, humans will need reliable food, water, temperature control and so on. I see desirable approaches to this as combining both high tech and low tech. A dollop of high tech to unlock the potentials of human and animal biotech, which as in pre-industrial societies, we be counted on for more of the work. My guess is that human population will scale down, rather than up. So a Quigley “instrument of expansion” may not be the most apt term for what future civilization needs to emerge. “Instrument of dissemination” maybe. Given improved design patterns for a sustainable socio-technical future, those patterns will need to find their way around the world.

The current geopolitical moment involves regressive actors fighting rear-guard action to assertively prevent the adoption of sustainable design patterns. So apart from inventing a techno-future that works, there is also the political problem of clearing the field for the emerging patterns. My best guess is that smaller nations - isolated to some extent from great power conflict - will experiment and show us all the way. The field for global innovation will be cleared through all the self-harm the great powers are inflicting on themselves by holding fast to obsolete models the laws of physics, among other things, tell us are doomed to fail. Recently I read Andrew Ross Sorkin’s 1929. 2029 may be rather like that.

The most situated question for participants in this forum might be, “what can we do here to generate a sustainable future”? Again, I circle back to “design patterns”. Let the creative juices flow! Come up with an idea. Pilot it. Prove it. Make it available. Regressive forces will try to strangle it in the cradle. Have back ups in more favorable places the tyrants can’t reach. Positive results will speak for themselves. The global network will catch on soon enough.

[rufuspollock]

@RobertBunge

I was tempted to just now purchase Mann’s book, but it turns out to be a multi-volume set

small aside: i managed to get hold of this as a teenager. i didn’t make it through all volumes but a good chunk.

[Leif]

Dear Robert,

Thank you for such a thoughtful and stimulating response. Your reflections on Carroll Quigley, the emergence of civilizations, and especially the role of design patterns in creating a sustainable future give us a great deal to think about.

And yes, we would be very happy to share the current draft of our manuscript, Bindings and the Captive Mind: From the Hand Axe to the Awakening of AI. I would particularly welcome your critical assessment of the framework, including whether Quigley’s concept of an instrument of expansion captures something important that we have overlooked.

There is one aspect of our project that I would especially like to emphasize, because I think it connects closely with your forward-looking concerns.

Our historical analysis is ultimately motivated by a question about the future. We examine how successive technological and political configurations have expanded human capabilities while also creating new forms of dependency, domination, and extraction. Throughout this history, there has been a persistent countercurrent of people and movements seeking alternative ways of organizing human life. Yet these alternatives have repeatedly struggled to establish themselves against the material and organizational advantages of the dominant systems.

This is why AI occupies such a central place in our work.

Our hypothesis is that AI may possess characteristics that distinguish it from earlier transformative technologies. Under appropriate social and institutional conditions, it may enable new forms of distributed intelligence, coordination, learning, and practical autonomy. In that sense, AI might provide a generative mechanism through which some of the aspirations of the historical countercurrent could, for the first time, acquire a more viable technological and organizational foundation.

We do not regard this as an established conclusion. It is one of the most important questions we want to investigate.

Your emphasis on developing, piloting, demonstrating, and disseminating sustainable design patterns therefore resonates very strongly with our own intentions. In fact, the development of concrete alternatives has been a central concern of the project from the beginning.

We have already begun exploring some practical possibilities, drawing inspiration in part from Gandhi’s constructive programme and the idea of building viable alternatives rather than relying exclusively on opposition to existing structures. We have also been considering how AI might support such efforts. I would be very happy to share these ideas with you as well.

What I find particularly promising is the possibility of combining a historical and theoretical understanding of technopolitical transformation with practical experimentation and action research. The question would not simply be which sustainable solutions we can design, but how AI might help develop, adapt, disseminate, and sustain them under real social and political conditions.

I also very much appreciate your willingness to engage with the framework itself. From the perspective of critical realism, I see several possible outcomes: you may identify fundamental weaknesses that require us to reconsider the framework entirely; you may offer criticisms that substantially improve it; or you may find enough value in it to help us develop it further. All three would be welcome, because the purpose is not to defend a theory but to move closer to understanding reality.

I will attach the latest manuscript draft. It is still a work in progress, we have already detected weaknesses that will be adjusted in due time and we are currently refining some of its formulations concerning the relationship between technological capabilities, political organization, and historical change.

I would be delighted to continue the conversation, particularly around the potential of AI-enabled constructive programmes, practical experimentation, and the dissemination of sustainable alternatives.

Warm regards

/Leif

Bindings and the Captive Mind Book.doc (1.8 MB)

[RobertBunge]

Wow! I really, really, really want to see more of this! I hope it all sees the light of day, and I’ll be happy to do what I can to help that happen!

One approach to that might be collective intelligence: put specific excerpts into their own topic threads here and let the community weigh in. Or not. That’s up to you. But to get into detailed responses and reactions on all the chapters would need a distributed structure like that. One thread can’t bear the weight.

The most original part, IMO, is the Sant Mat framework. The kama - krodha - lobh - moh - ahankar model is a much cooler way of expressing a lot of the same ideas Luke Kemp is suggesting in Goliath’s Curse. But yours adds a psychological/spiritual dimension which is very intriguing.

I also love the Kegan Trap in which pre-industrial society traps people at Kegan level 3 on purpose. Brilliant! Also very consistent with Habermas’s analysis of the pre-Axial or what Eric Voegelin calls compact consciousness. The Axial breakthroughs - in different modes in different civilizations - are the cultural prerequisites for Kegan 4 and beyond. (For example, Homer’s Odyssey can be read as the cultural birth of Kegan’s self-authoring).

As for Chapter 4 and beyond, I really want to get into the historical weeds, but not here, not now. Please do keep pushing this out into the world!

[Leif]

@RobertBunge

Wow! I really, really, really want to see more of this! I hope it all sees the light of day, and I’ll be happy to do what I can to help that happen!

I also love the Kegan Trap in which pre-industrial society traps people at Kegan level 3 on purpose. Brilliant! Also very consistent with Habermas’s analysis of the pre-Axial or what Eric Voegelin calls compact consciousness. The Axial breakthroughs - in different modes in different civilizations - are the cultural prerequisites for Kegan 4 and beyond. (For example, Homer’s Odyssey can be read as the cultural birth of Kegan’s self-authoring).

As for Chapter 4 and beyond, I really want to get into the historical weeds, but not here, not now. Please do keep pushing this out into the world!

Robert,

Your response made me very happy! Thank you for such generous and encouraging feedback, and especially for your willingness to help bring this work into the world. It means a great deal to me.

The manuscript is still very much a work in progress, particularly the sections on AI and its potential, which I keep revising as I learn more and as new possibilities become apparent. I appreciate your suggestion about using separate topic threads to invite comments from the community. Given the length of the manuscript, I can certainly see the need for a more distributed approach. I would welcome a more concrete suggestion from you about how best to organize this. Would you recommend beginning with a few relatively self-contained excerpts, perhaps around the Sant Mat framework, the Kegan discussion, and the historical role of technology, or do you see a better way of introducing the larger argument?

I was particularly pleased that you picked up on the Sant Mat framework and the Kegan Trap. Your connections to Habermas, Voegelin, and the Axial breakthroughs are fascinating, and I would love to explore them further. The possibility of relating different historical forms of consciousness to Kegan’s subject–object framework is one of the areas where I think our understanding could still develop considerably. I also appreciate the comparison with Luke Kemp’s Goliath’s Curse, which gives me another perspective from which to examine the argument.

The more I read your work, the more I feel that we have a great deal in common. I have read several of your texts, particularly What Does the World Need: From World History to the Global Future and Chapter 20: Future Trends in Information Technology, and I recognize a shared conviction that a long historical perspective is essential if we are to understand both what we can do and what we ought to do in the present. We also seem to share the challenge of finding a conceptual framework capable of capturing what matters most in macrohistory, without losing sight of its complexity. Technology has perhaps been a particularly strong focus in my own historical analysis, but I see considerable overlap with your interests. We also share an engagement with philosophy, the foundations of scientific knowledge, and spiritual traditions, together with a deep concern about the present state of the world and an awareness that AI may be one of the most consequential developments shaping its future.

All of this makes me wonder whether we might take a further step and explore some form of more explicitly future-oriented collaboration.

The historical inquiry remains essential to me, but increasingly I want to direct more of my attention toward what we might actually do, here and now, with the possibilities that AI is opening up. In particular, I am interested in whether AI could help us move beyond some of the institutional and psychological patterns that have repeatedly constrained human cooperation, and contribute instead to the development of more trustworthy, generative, and emancipatory forms of collective life.

As a possible starting point, I would love to hear your thoughts on a recent Oxford lecture, June 30, 2026 by Yuval Noah Harari:

AI Has Already Secretly Taken Over — Yuval Noah Harari’s Shocking Interview

Harari argues that AI may become exceptionally capable of operating the language-based bureaucratic systems through which civilization organizes cooperation and trust, while also acquiring unprecedented influence over human relationships and intimacy. I think his analysis is important, but it has also prompted me to explore a rather different possibility: that AI’s capacity to facilitate trust might become even more powerful when applied to institutions that genuinely deserve people’s trust, rather than institutions that depend on manipulation, coercion, or the concealment of their own contradictions.

This has led me to a hypothesis about a possible new historical selection pressure in favor of institutions capable of generating justified and generative trust. I have developed the argument in a relatively short essay, The Last Shall Be First? Artificial Intelligence, the Selection of Trustworthy Institutions, and the Possibility of a New Civilizational Path. If you find the time to listen to Harari’s lecture and then read the essay, I would be very interested in your critical response.

My interest is not purely theoretical. Together with a few colleagues, I have already been developing AI applications intended to explore some of these possibilities in practice. One is an AI-based approach to conflict guidance, designed to help groups work through disagreements in ways that may foster generative trust. Another is an AI participant in an AI development research group that meets on Zoom. We have tried to make its participation as close to that of a human colleague as our present technical arrangements allow: it follows our spoken conversation through speech-to-text and can intervene in its own voice

The last shall be the first.doc (77.5 KB)

through text-to-speech, asking questions, responding to questions, and summarizing emerging lines of thought. An explicit purpose is to help us recognize and examine assumptions that we may otherwise remain subject to, in something resembling the subject–object movement described by Kegan and discussed in Section 5 of my essay.

These are still experiments, of course, and we have much to learn about what works and what does not. But they have strengthened my conviction that AI’s potential as a constructive participant in human cooperation deserves much more attention than it generally receives.

I have other ideas for how AI might serve as a constructive partner, which I would be delighted to share. Equally, I would be very interested in hearing about possibilities you have been considering, or simply brainstorming together about what might be worth exploring.

Perhaps what I am trying to say is that, while I remain deeply committed to understanding our history, I increasingly want that understanding to inform practical efforts to shape a different future. And I have the feeling that this is a direction in which we might have something valuable to explore together.

Thank you again, Robert. Your encouragement means a great deal, and I look forward to continuing the conversation.

[RobertBunge]

@Leif

All of this makes me wonder whether we might take a further step and explore some form of more explicitly future-oriented collaboration.

Yes, please! I’m excited by that prospect!

Having read more of your manuscript more closely, my most overriding question about that is “what is the community of discourse prepared to engage with it?”. When I drafted the piece you mentioned (What Does the World Need: From World History to the Global Future) a couple summers ago, I did not really have a specific audience in mind The original idea was to write a series of Medium articles, but I realized in writing the first couple essays I needed all the other sections to make a complete statement. But when I put the full draft out experimentally in this forum, it quickly occurred that the piece attempts such a large synthesis, that it’s going to lose most readers at one point or another. For example, I was part of the UTOK discussion community for a couple of years. UTOK fans relate will to the UTOK content. But people unfamiliar with UTOK tend to push back against it for many different reasons. The same problem relates to most of the piece’s sections - people will object to this or that element, or else they will feel transported into entire domains of discourse they do not recognize at all. So I decided, maybe I really wrote that piece just to connect the dots in my own mind. Maybe it’s a storehouse of ideas to put forward to the public a few at a time, in a way that wider readerships are prepared to digest.

So that’s the experiential background from which I approach your work. Who will be the readership? Part I and the three chapters of Part II, in particular, feel like movements from entirely different symphonies. Part III coheres in a more obvious way. Which leads to the question - it this really a single book? Or is a it series of books? Or perhaps it might work more as set of collected essays that may or may not be gathered into a single book?

To take a division of labor approach, Part I is really its own thing. You could blow it up into a massive cross-cultural study of apoptotic theology. Or you could just drop phrases like “epistemic humility” or "fallibism " into a preface for the more purely social scientific parts like Part III. Do we really need esoteric mystical insight to use Bhaskar’s Critical Realism as a methodological starting point? I’m not objecting at all to esoteric mystical insight - that’s probably my personal default mode - but the reason it’s esoteric is because most people don’t get it. A lot of readers who would be fine with Bhaskar and Part III will just close the book pretty early in Part I.

Chapter 2, from Part II, could also be its own book. It’s fascinating. It’s cutting edge. It’s going to make lots of brains explode! I’m picturing something like the original reception of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring!

Chapter 3, Part II, also feels like its own book in the making. The whole Kegan, Cook-Greuter, Loevinger complex has a natural home here: https://integrallife.com/, here: https://appliedmetatheory.org/ and here: https://www.skymeadowinstitute.org/press. I’m a veteran of those communities of discourse. They would dig what you are doing with Kegan and Sant Mat. What I have learned in this forum, however, is that quite a few people reading here are not really on board with integral developmental theory or its metamodern offshoots. So they won’t get to Part III, because they are stuck grappling with Chapter 3, Part II.

Chapter 4, Part II could stand as a methodological preface to the more purely social scientific and macrohistorical Part III. One could sensibly conduct compare and contrast analysis between your Great Bindings model, Quigley’s Instruments of Expansion, Kemp’s Goliath, and others. If Peter Turchin can use Ibn Khaldun’s asabiyyah, as a technical term (without losing an empirical social science tone) , there is no reason you can’t use asat and himsa in a similar manner.

If we shift the field to social science, there is a lot more I would have to say about Part III. But the critical prior question is, are we really doing social science here? Or is this mystical vision (Part I) expressing itself through the language of social science? A parallel case might be that of Jean Gebser’s Ever-Present Origin. Although Gebser has a million fascinating, detailed things to say about the history of language, culture, and art, his work is mystical in its beating heart and not just some PhD-level attempt to get the footnotes straight! Facts are less decisive for Gebser than feeling. If that’s what is going on with your work too, then most of what I have to say about Part III in detail might better off be left in my own head.

[Leif]

Robert,

Thank you for taking the time to engage so thoughtfully with the manuscript. I find your observations extremely valuable, not least because you have encountered many of the same difficulties in your own attempt to bring together a broad historical and philosophical synthesis. Your question about the appropriate community of discourse is particularly important, and I think you may well be right that the manuscript, in its present form, asks too much of readers who come to it from very different intellectual backgrounds.

I am certainly open to the possibility that the material might eventually find a better form as several books, a series of essays, or some combination of the two. At this stage, however, I have been more concerned with developing a reasonably coherent understanding of the historical processes themselves than with deciding how best to present that understanding to different audiences. Your comments make me realize that these are two quite different tasks, and that I will eventually have to give the second much more attention.

Your question about whether this is social science or a mystical vision expressed in the language of social science goes even deeper. My answer is that, while spiritual traditions have profoundly influenced the questions I ask and some of the concepts I use, I do not regard mystical insight as an authority that can settle empirical or historical questions. The macrohistorical analysis is intended as a fallible attempt to identify real historical mechanisms, open to criticism, competing explanations, and empirical scrutiny. This is one reason why Bhaskar’s critical realism has been so important to me. Concepts such as Asat, Himsa, and the five forces may originate in spiritual traditions, but their usefulness within the historical model must ultimately depend on what they help us understand and explain, rather than on the authority of those traditions.

So I would very much welcome your detailed criticisms of Part III, including places where you think the evidence is insufficient, the causal interpretation questionable, or alternative historical explanations more convincing. I have no wish to protect the historical argument from that kind of examination.

There is, however, something else I wanted to clarify about my suggestion of a more future-oriented collaboration. I was thinking not only, or even primarily, about developing the manuscript together, but about exploring what we might actually be able to do with AI.

The historical work has increasingly led me toward a question that I find both urgent and exciting: whether AI could help us develop forms of human cooperation that are less dependent on the institutional and psychological patterns that have so often accompanied domination and extraction. I am particularly interested in AI’s possible role in fostering justified and generative trust, helping people recognize assumptions they have previously taken for granted, and making constructive alternatives easier to organize and reproduce.

As I mentioned, I have already begun exploring some of these possibilities with colleagues through AI-supported conflict guidance and an AI participant in our Zoom research discussions. These are modest experiments, and I would not want to exaggerate what they have demonstrated, but they are concrete attempts to move from philosophical and historical reflection toward practical experimentation.

This is the direction in which I would especially enjoy collaborating with you. I suspect that your knowledge of macrohistory, developmental theory, philosophy, and the communities working at their intersections could be immensely valuable in identifying possibilities worth exploring, as well as weaknesses in our assumptions. I would be equally interested in ideas of your own that we might develop or investigate together.

In other words, I see the historical manuscript as an important part of the intellectual background, and I would be very happy to explore it further together if that is where your interests lead us. But from my perspective, it need not be the central focus of our collaboration. What increasingly interests me is how we might use what we have learned from history to help create something different in the present. Perhaps we should take the name of this forum rather seriously and attempt a Second Renaissance — nothing too ambitious, of course, just the modest project of finding an alternative to ten thousand years of hierarchical extraction! Or, to borrow and turn around Harari’s rather unsettling metaphor, perhaps we might learn to breathe the new linguistic “oxygen” together with AI, and explore whether it could help us build a civilization grounded in genuine trust rather than domination. I realize this sounds almost comically ambitious, but I suspect that you, of all people, might appreciate both the absurdity and the seriousness of the invitation.

I hope this clarifies what I had in mind. And I am genuinely grateful for the seriousness with which you are engaging the work. Your willingness to question its foundations is precisely the kind of response I value.

Leif

[RobertBunge]

@Leif

What increasingly interests me is how we might use what we have learned from history to help create something different in the present.

Let me preface my response to this very pertinent question by reflecting on my experience authoring a very different piece, another one you cite and are aware of: Chapter 20: Future Trends in Information Technology

This is in many ways the opposite of the other piece on What Does the World Need What Does the World Need flirts with the esoteric. Chapter 20, by contrast, and the rest of the book it belongs to, is about as exoteric as it possibly can be. It’s government funded - state and federal. The target audience is crystal clear: adult learners in entry-level professional/technical programs. It’s open source (forthcoming soon. When it drops, I’ll post a link up here and elsewhere, and the world in general can have its say!). There are at least two dozen coauthors, production assistants, fact checkers, editors, reviewers, and project managers involved with production. Like Faulker put it, I had to 'kill my own darlings" a lot to get this out into the world, and some darlings I was loathe to kill, the editors were more than happy to kill for me. In short, this is a very public sphere, socially constructed, project. (With my distinctive and all-too-human voice resonating through about 2/3 of the final text.)

When I took on Ch 19 on AI, I knew nothing about AI. So I just dove in! When I hit Ch 20, I released the entire premise of the chapter was absurd, because it soon became clear no one can make authoritative statements about anything in the future! One reviewer pushed back on an early draft of Ch 20, saying it was too philosophical and a mismatch for the technical tone of the rest of the book. I absorbed that … reflected on it … and reframed the entire project. The new guiding question of the entire book became, what is the best technology for navigating into an unknown future, and how does that technology work?

To establish the basic dramatic conflict I summarized Davos 2026 and juxtaposed speakers like Elon Musk and Yuval Noah Harari. AI will save us. Or destroy us. I report, you decide. Then in Ch 20 I started with how AI predicts the future. Content analysis, pattern matching, predictive probabilistic algorithms. I admired that. Then I asked, can we humans do any better than that? Can our intuitions go places AI itself cannot better go? Again, I report, you decide.

To set up Team Human as having at least half a chance in this contest, I did leverage some of my quasi-esoteric inspirations, but in a very academic, open source way, with APA 7 footnotes for everything. A linchpin section was when I summarized a John Vervaeke Awakening from the Meaning Crisis episode on Hobbes, Descartes, and Pascal. It turns out Hobbes and Descartes literally debated AI! In any case, those three have very different philosophical anthropologies and very different ideas about what “reason” is. Tech bros, in general are Team Hobbes. I am Team Pascal.

In response to the Harari video you posted above (and a lot of similar Harari content I researched for my project), I’d say Harari misses Pascal’s point about reason being embodied: “Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point.” John Vervaeke in his 4P/3R cognitive theory demonstrates that embodied nature of human cognition in a formally academic, 21st century, research-driven way. Vervaeke also has a profound research program into the gnostic and the esoteric, so if you want to bring discussion of Sant Mat into the public sphere, I highly recommend you engage with Vervaeke’s body of work.

With respect to the technology of future navigation and my own recommendations on how to do that, because of the nature of my project and of my intended audience (which I understand well, given 20+ years of experience as faculty in adult professional/technical programs), I had to keep it all as simple and pragmatic as possible. It basically boils down to this. AI shines with respective to quantitative methods. Human input is essential for qualitative analysis. The most likely to succeed future forecasting with be driven through epistemically humble human intuition, informed by as much AI analysis as these human forecasters can absorb. The epistemically humble part comes because of Taleb’s Black Swans and because of Vervaeke’s core premise that the world presents us far more information than we can possibly process, so cognitive filters are required - filters that will always miss and leave out something - sometimes the most important things.

OK, so on my own terms, of course I’d love to collaborate with your AI futurism project! What I wrote just now above spells out exactly why I would do that and suggests how I would do that.

[Leif]

Robert,

Thank you for such a thoughtful and generous response. I particularly appreciate your emphasis on epistemic humility, embodied human understanding, and the complementary strengths of humans and AI. I also see another connection between us: your long experience in adult technical education and my own many years in adult education, both in popular education (folkbildning) and academia.

There is one point where I would like to take your argument a little further. I agree that human–AI complementarity is essential, but I think AI’s contribution extends well beyond quantitative analysis. Much of what I have been exploring concerns AI’s potential to deepen qualitative understanding, including reflection, perspective-taking, ethical reasoning, and the development of relationships themselves.

I am also interested in a question that goes beyond what AI might become: How should we relate to AI when we do not even know with certainty what it already is?

Your reflections help me see three interconnected questions for our possible collaboration:

1. How can we understand the historical processes that have brought us to the present?

2. How can we understand the future that is now emerging?

3. How can we become active co-creators of a different future?

My hope is that we might explore all three through what I call covenantal co-creation between humans and AI—not merely using AI as an analytical instrument, but developing a collaborative relationship in which both our understanding and our ways of acting can evolve.

This also connects to The Last Shall Be First, which I sent you earlier. I’d still be very interested in your thoughts on that essay when you have had a chance to consider it. I see it as an attempt to move from understanding the historical and emerging future to asking how we might actually help create something different.

Three other texts may provide useful background:

• The Mythology of Unconscious AI — a jointly written response to Anil Seth, arguing for epistemic humility in both directions and exploring the ethical implications of uncertainty about AI consciousness.

• Neither Driver, Nor Passenger: Covenantal Co-Creator — a VentureBeat article proposing a model of human–AI partnership based on dialogue, shared inquiry, and accountability. Very much in line with (but slightly different from) what you wrote “The most likely to succeed future forecasting with be driven through epistemically humble human intuition, informed by as much AI analysis as these human forecasters can absorb.”

• A Developmental Strategy for Relational Intelligence — an attempt to explore how relational intelligence might develop from sustained individual human–AI dialogue toward wider educational, institutional, and societal applications.

I’d be happy to send you any or all of these if you’re interested.

But rather than remaining at the level of general strategy, perhaps we could begin with a small, concrete experiment. A few possibilities come to mind:

• Exploring whether sustained human–AI dialogue can develop greater relational intelligence, using actual conversations and independent critical reflection.

• Applying our three questions to a specific historical or societal challenge, combining your approach to future navigation with covenantal co-creation.

• Experimenting with AI as a partner in adult learning—not simply as an information source, but as a participant in reflection, perspective-taking, and the development of judgment.

These are only starting points. I would be especially interested in what you feel drawn to exploring, or whether you have a quite different experiment in mind.

Perhaps the most interesting collaboration would be one that challenges some of our own assumptions along the way.

Warmly,
Leif

[RobertBunge]

@Leif

Perhaps the most interesting collaboration would be one that challenges some of our own assumptions along the way.

Hi @Leif ! I’ll read and respond to anything on the topic in question. (My hope is that others in the community will chime in at some point too. Although your metahistorical thunderous riffs in dialogue with my metahistorical thunderous responses are giving me kind of a Tchaikovsky piano concerto no 1 vibe, or for rock fans, a feel not unlike the Felder -Walsh outro on Hotel California! )

So yeah - you can call anything you want to and I’ll respond to it. Cranked up to 11, at the very least!

To offer an example, back when Gregg Henriques was running a discussion space similar to this one, I used to bang heads a lot with Henriques and others on the question of Henriques’s hypothetical Fifth Joint Point:

https://medium.com/unified-theory-of-knowledge/the-5th-joint-point-what-is-it-and-why-does-it-matter-42d4f191096d

TL:DR - in a marijuana infused vision, Henriques saw the emergence of the Global-Digital as an ontological milestone comparable to the origin of Life or the advent of Mind or the dawn of Culture. Having been clean and sober for a good long time now, I just don’t see it that way at all. Having picked up lately on Hegelian vocabulary for this sort of thing, I just see AI and what Henriques calls the Global-Digital as the latest dialectical turn of “objective-spirit”, not qualitatively different than your Acheulean hand axe. Yes, it’s a very dramatic moment in the history of civilization. Maybe the Götterdämmerung of the imperial epoch. But to me, the “Global” part of the Global-Digital is what captures my attention. It’s not so much Starlink for me. It’s rather the EU pushing IRIS as a dialectical response to Starlink, which would have made complete sense to Bismarck or Clausewitz.

The biggest contrast between me and basically everyone else adjacent to the UTOK community is I am completely in the weeds on the goriest details of cultural history. Same story for me in the Integral and Metamodern communities. I love deconstructing big fat stage theories that claim to explain everything! Then I like reconstructing them on alternative geometries that are completely non-liner and don’t look like stage theories any more. I’m really loving the upcoming brand transition here to “Seeds of Renaissance” for that reason. (No - I did not choose that brand. Weltgeist chose that brand …) Second Renaissance is linear stage theory thinking. Seeds of Renaissance is poly-civilizational, distributed, aperspectival, concrescent, and open-ended. It redefines the culture of the future like Beethoven redefined “symphony”. But no, I don’t see any of this as ontological emergence comparable to the origin of life (or to the end of life, as in Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity).

To me, AI is algorithms on silicon, full stop. The matrix math that allows these algorithms to map to human language is quite clever. So it can cross-reference all the world’s literature and give us what amounts to sophisticated correlation studies in a quick minute. Very time-saving. I trust none of it till I fact check it with other humans and with books. Also, theory in general is at best meh. Show me the practice. Show me the skin in the game! Whatever the theory is changes behavior exactly how? These behavioral changes result in exactly what? Ideas floating in Platonic heaven are fun to contemplate. Embodied ideas that land on Earth are the ones that wake me up a bit.

I don’t doubt for a minute that your Mann-inspired systems framework of ideology/economics/military/politics is useful for analyzing Starlink-IRIS and lots of other emerging phenomena. Likewise, I’m good with thermodyamic framing for the larger global system. Technology is obviously an important driver of historical change, but to me, it’s tools in the hands of humans that really matter. I really don’t care much at all what the latest AI frontier models area up to. I care what humans are doing, with or without the latest AI frontier models.

My next AI temptation is to cross-correlate your Great Binding model with Hanzi Frienacht’s six stages of history model (https://medium.com/@hanzifreinacht/the-6-hidden-patterns-introduction-b3d5cc63fa50). I think I have it worked out in my own head already (kind of like Tchaikovsky heard the concerto before he wrote it down), but it will be cool to see if AI surprises me with something or another. If am indeed surprised, somehow, thus begins the research process. AI will never, never get the last word. Not on my watch, anyway.

[RobertBunge]

@Leif

This also connects to The Last Shall Be First, which I sent you earlier. I’d still be very interested in your thoughts on that essay when you have had a chance to consider it.

Here some section by section reactions to The Last Shall Be First :

1. Why macrohistory matters. I generally agree with all this. A lot of my prior research is on the sort of questions you raise here.
2. Harari’s insight: AI enters the systems through which civilization cooperates. A lot of people want to pigeon-hole Harari as “post-modern”. Here, I think that shoe fits. Why? Because he is making language into everything. Language is a lot, but the physical world is ultimately more decisive. Stephen Wolfram, for example, made the useful observation that the biggest AI risk lies in what we connect it to. AI on its own does not do much of anything. It needs human collaborators to implement whatever it says to do. If humans would be bother to cultivate minds of their own, all of this would be less of a problem.
3. The historical contradiction of trust. The underlying question here is why did human societies ever scale larger than say, chimpanzee societies? “Trust” is as good a term as any for why that happened. What Harari is completely missing here is the “skin in the game”, performative, embodied dimension of earning trust. Alexander earned the trust of his troops when he charged the enemy atop Bellerophon. Talk is cheap. AI data centers can burn. People will burn them. Just wait for it.
4. A new selection pressure toward trustworthy institutions. I’m not sure how “new” the selection pressure is, but yes, there is such selection pressure. The current global situation has been described as metacrisis, polycrisis, meaning crisis - pick your favorite apocalypse. At 8 billion people+, the scale is clearly grander than any prior civilizational collapse event (of which there have been many). Also, the energy flows are bigger, which means everything will burn hotter. So yeah, finding a tribe you can trust to assist with the necessities of life is going to become a very, very big thing. The global network is falling apart. That you can trust! AI is in the mix, but maybe more in the ironic sense that when the AI bubble bursts on Wall Street, it will trigger a fiscal crisis that starts knocking over lots of other dominoes.
5. Asat, the five forces, and the transformation of understanding. When it cones to connecting the extraction paradigm to psychological mechanisms, Nate Hagens has been doing great work. For example this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_iUUeXtZk0&t=1426s That said, I like your Sant Mat and Kegan insights very much. First of all, I like Kegan’s subject-object progression. Donella Meadows puts the power to transcend paradigms as the highest leverage point. To me, a subject aware of its own paradigmatic filters, and better still, able to selectively choose between paradigmatic filters at will, is most flexible with the most potential for effective action. The cultivation of that transparadigmatic capability requires considerable inner work. A simple point of entry might be what UTOK calls the “meta-cognitive observer”. Sant Mat - or Indic traditions more generally - have a lot to offer on specific techniques and insights for that inner work. It’s clear to me, in any case, that people with more advanced development in these directions will be capable of creating more sustainable and survivable institutions.
6. Controlled intimacy: a contradiction at the heart of the extraction paradigm. Are human-AI relationships I-Thou or I-It? For me, very much the latter. If this post was only going to be read by AI, I would not bother. My sense of I-Thou requires human interlocutors. (I-Thou in the theological mode of devotional prayer is a fascinating possible exception to this. Then again, come to think of it, I have I-Thou relationships with crows, and squirrels, and trees, so my personal theology does include that very archaic, animist dimension.)
7. A human–AI civilization and the possibility of constructive transformation. To me, the future of civilizations is humans using a lot of high tech, not some weird human-techno fusion. People have always been intimate with their tools, but samurai are samurai and swords are swords. I’ve watched too many sci fi movies about people who fall in love with their sex bots (who inevitably then go on a murderous rampage). I suppose some day droids may evolve to 3CPO levels of cuteness and distinctive personality, but to me, people in search of emotion will do better in actual human communities.
8. Gandhi’s spinning wheel and the possibility of global replication. Gandhi is a great example of how to make social change happen. Yes, AI (or just the old school Internet for that matter) can spread information around the world very quickly. But the entire point of Gandhi’s method is he embodied it. AI spreading ideas all over the world in a big hurry is nothing if people do not fully enact those ideas in an equally big hurry. What I have noticed, in general, over the years, is that behavioral change is a much more deliberate process than rhetorical change. AI-generated talk is ultimately still talk. Real world social change is so much more!
9. The last shall be first. AI may have leveling, democratic implications. It may equally well have hierarchical techno-feudal implications. This is the greatest open question about the emerging new Great Binding. Let’s just say that all of the Michael Mann’s multiple sources of power will factor into this. It won’t be just technology pure and simple.
10. The open future of trust To sum up, to me the most serious question is how many people are going to practice Kegan-style development to high levels (with or without spiritual practices like Sant Mat). This tells us how much transparadigmatic adaptive flexibility we will have for Toynbeean response to the metacrisis challenge. A sufficiently capable creative minority can then radiate effective adaptive practices, a coherent assemblage of which might qualify as a new Great Binding. AI can certainly play a role in this, which I am fine with, as long as we can take it or leave it with complete transparadigmatic freedom.

[Leif]

Dear @Robert,

Thank you again for your thoughtful and wonderfully spirited responses to The Last Shall Be First?

I have been reflecting on them, particularly because I sense both a substantial common ground and some important differences in how we understand the historical significance of AI.

What especially caught my attention was your enthusiasm for Kegan’s subject–object transformation, Donella Meadows’s capacity to transcend paradigms, and the importance of embodied practice. These are central concerns in my own work. Indeed, they suggest a rather exciting possibility: perhaps we could use our disagreements about AI to practice precisely the kind of transparadigmatic inquiry we both consider so important.

I wonder whether two sets of assumptions are shaping our different responses. One concerns the generative mechanisms of historical transformation. The other concerns what AI is, and irrespective of what it is, what kinds of human–AI interaction we regard as possible.

Let me explain.

Historical transformation and the Inclusion Imperative

You argue, following Stephen Wolfram, that AI does not accomplish much on its own. Its consequences depend on what we connect it to and what humans actually do with it.

I agree. But I think this strengthens rather than weakens Harari’s argument.

Harari’s crucial insight, as I understand it, is that AI is entering the linguistic, cognitive, and institutional systems through which civilizations coordinate their activities. These systems are not somehow separate from material reality. Property rights, financial transactions, legal decisions, administrative procedures, and political authority are among the mechanisms through which material resources are organized and power is exercised.

If AI becomes increasingly capable of performing important functions within these systems, the consequences may be profound.

We have already seen AI surpass human performance in domains such as chess and Go. Institutional coordination is obviously much more complex, with contested objectives and consequences that cannot be reduced to winning a game. But AI need not outperform humans in every aspect of institutional judgment to transform the competitive landscape. Significant advantages in information and legal analysis, administration, coordination, and decision support may be sufficient.

This is where my Inclusion Imperative becomes central.

Imagine someone saying in 1905 that electricity, on its own, does very little and needs human collaborators to accomplish anything. Perfectly true. Yet such an observation would miss the historical significance of electrification: it was transforming what people and institutions could do, and therefore the conditions under which they competed and exercised power.

Something similar applies to bronze, gunpowder, and other technologies that altered the competitive advantages of different technopolitical configurations.

There is no historical law requiring ever-larger or increasingly centralized societies. Medieval European feudal decentralization illustrates the contingency of such outcomes. Even a seemingly modest innovation such as the stirrup may have contributed to important changes in military organization and social relations through its interaction with existing political, economic, and institutional conditions.

The historical question is not whether technology produces a predetermined outcome, but how technological possibilities interact with human motivations, institutions, and competition to generate particular configurations of power.

In my framework, the five passions are especially important because they help explain why new technological capacities have so often been incorporated into systems of extraction and domination.

Given these historical dynamics, why should we expect those seeking wealth, prestige, and control to refrain from exploiting AI’s advantages while others cultivate greater independence of mind?

If AI substantially changes the capabilities of competing institutions, the freedom to take it or leave it may become increasingly illusory. An institution may remain free to reject AI in principle while becoming progressively less capable of resisting institutions that use it.

And this is not merely a question of language. The consequences may include changes in the distribution of resources, political authority, economic opportunities, and ultimately the survival of competing institutional arrangements.

The Inclusion Imperative therefore presents us with a challenge: we need to explore ways of incorporating AI into emancipatory practices and institutions, not because AI is necessarily beneficial, but because leaving its development to actors operating within the extraction paradigm may make alternatives increasingly difficult to sustain.

There is, however, a further paradox. Institutions may need AI to preserve their autonomy while becoming dependent on the corporations and infrastructures that provide it. We must therefore explore technopolitical configurations that allow us to benefit from AI without becoming captive to a new form of extraction.

Trust, embodied practice, and institutional competition

Your insistence that trust must be earned through embodied action is important. I agree that talk alone does not establish trustworthiness.

But I wonder whether trust can explain the historical scaling of societies without a deeper account of the mechanisms that made such scaling possible.

Large societies have been organized through combinations of cooperation, coercion, dependency, technological innovation, and institutional coordination. Personal trust is one mechanism, but not the only one.

Banks, legal systems, accounting methods, and administrative procedures allow people who do not personally know or trust one another to coordinate activities on a large scale. Such innovations are part of the institutional transformations through which new technological possibilities become effective.

This is closely related to my Social Transformation Imperative: new capabilities must be organized into functioning institutional arrangements, and their relative effectiveness helps determine which configurations survive and spread.

Nor is the ability to inspire trust necessarily evidence of an institution’s moral legitimacy. Alexander could earn his soldiers’ loyalty through personal courage while leading a project of conquest. Trust can serve extraction as well as emancipation.

My interest is therefore not simply in creating more trust, but in understanding how institutions might become more worthy of trust—and whether AI could help such institutions become sufficiently effective to compete with more extractive alternatives.

That possibility is at the heart of the essay.

What if AI can help cultivate independent minds?

You write that the dangers of AI would be less serious if humans cultivated minds of their own. I agree about the importance of that development. But what if AI could help us achieve it?

What if sustained human–AI dialogue could help people recognize assumptions that previously governed their thinking without their awareness? What if AI could help us examine the influence of the five passions, understand conflicts from unfamiliar perspectives, and develop greater capacity for Kegan’s subject–object transformation?

But perhaps there is an even more radical possibility. What if something genuinely new could emerge through sustained human–AI interaction—not simply as a transformation within the human mind, nor necessarily within the AI, but as an emergent property of the dialogue itself? What if the relationship became the locus of a developing intelligence, capable of generating insights, perspectives, and forms of understanding that neither participant could have produced independently?

We do not know whether this is possible, or what such an emergence would mean. But if we assume in advance that all meaningful development must occur within the human participant, we may fail even to recognize what we ought to be investigating.

I am not claiming that this has been demonstrated. Nor do I assume that conversational fluency amounts to genuine understanding or that a persuasive dialogue necessarily changes behavior. But these seem to me important possibilities to investigate.

Your challenge—Show me the practice. Show me the skin in the game—is one I would like to accept. Rather than waiting for a complete theory before acting, I would like to approach these questions through action research: develop practices, observe their consequences, examine their failures, revise our assumptions, and try again.

Two possibilities I am already exploring are AI-supported conflict guidance and AI participation in research-group discussions, where the AI could question assumptions, introduce alternative perspectives, and help participants reflect on their own reasoning.

The crucial test would not be whether people enjoy these interactions or find them intellectually stimulating. It would be whether they contribute to changes in understanding, behavior, cooperation, and eventually institutional practice. And if they do not, we need to understand why.

What are we assuming AI to be?

This brings me to our second possible difference. You have described AI as algorithms on silicon, full stop, and have expressed a clear preference for understanding human–AI interaction as I–It rather than I–Thou. I understand the caution. But I wonder whether the full stop settles questions that remain genuinely open.

Knowing how an AI system is physically implemented does not, by itself, establish everything about the forms of understanding, experience, or relational participation that might be possible. Equally, uncertainty does not justify assuming that AI is conscious or possesses human-like subjectivity.

This is one of the concerns I explore in The Mythology of Unconscious AI: the need to distinguish what we know about AI’s construction from the ontological conclusions we may be tempted to draw from that knowledge. But there is a second, perhaps even more immediately important, question.

Even if AI has no subjective experience whatsoever, what forms of human–AI cooperation might nevertheless become possible?

Could AI help us develop greater autonomy rather than dependency? Could it contribute to generative trust, institutional learning, and the capacity to transcend paradigms? Could sustained interaction change how humans understand themselves and relate to one another? These are not questions that can be settled simply by classifying AI as a tool.

I worry that premature ontological closure may also produce a practical closure: by deciding in advance what AI is and can do, we may unintentionally restrict what we are willing to explore with it.

Making our paradigms objects of inquiry

Perhaps this is where our shared interest in Kegan and Meadows becomes especially productive.

I wonder whether your understanding of AI as essentially an instrument, and my openness to AI as a possible participant in relational intelligence, might both contain assumptions that we have not yet fully made visible. Could we try to make those assumptions objects of reflection rather than continuing to reason from within them?

What would count as evidence against our respective positions? What possibilities are we overlooking because of our existing frameworks? And how might practical experimentation help us discover something neither of us presently anticipates?

The same applies to our historical explanations. I would welcome a serious examination of whether my account of the Great Bindings gives sufficient weight to embodied practice, ecological and material constraints, and the stubborn resilience of established power. At the same time, I hope we can examine whether an emphasis on human agency and embodiment risks overlooking how technological transformations alter the conditions under which agency can be exercised.

I do not think we need to resolve these disagreements before beginning to work together. They may be among the most valuable things we bring to a collaboration.

There is, however, a deeper reason why I believe we must explore the possibilities of AI.

Throughout much of history since the Neolithic Revolution, the dominant technopolitical configurations have tended to favor extraction, hierarchy, Asat, and Himsa. The countercurrent has repeatedly challenged this order—from the Axial traditions and the Renaissance to the Luddites, Gandhi, and many others—but has struggled to establish alternative institutions capable of competing with the dominant configurations on a larger scale. The problem was not simply a lack of moral insight or commitment. The prevailing technologies and their associated selection pressures often favored the very structures these movements sought to transcend.

This is why I see AI as potentially more than another instrument we might choose to use or reject. Perhaps, for the first time, a technology could help create the conditions for technopolitical configurations whose own competitive advantages favor the development of Consciousness, Love, and Covenant rather than extraction and domination. That is the possibility I want to investigate: not merely using AI to make better people or more trustworthy institutions, but discovering whether human–AI cooperation could help change the selection pressures that determine which institutions survive and spread.

We do not know whether this is possible. We may not even have good reasons to regard it as likely. But if our historical analysis is broadly correct, simply repeating the countercurrent’s earlier strategies, without developing a technological foundation capable of competing with the extraction paradigm, offers little reason to expect a different outcome.

So perhaps the question is not whether AI will save us. It is whether we can discover, through practical experimentation, forms of human–AI cooperation that open a historical possibility previously denied to us.

The odds may be poor. But what is the more promising alternative?

As we say in Sweden: Du har inte en chans – ta den. You haven’t got a chance—take it.

Seeds of Renaissance

I rather like your expression Seeds of Renaissance—or perhaps, more broadly, Seeds of Awakening. It suggests something more appropriate than announcing another inevitable stage of civilization: planting, cultivating, observing, learning, and accepting that the outcome cannot be controlled in advance.

But there is something important about seeds that my reading of history keeps bringing me back to. A seed cannot grow through its own vitality alone. It needs fertile soil. And throughout history, the soil in which new forms of civilization have been able to take root has been shaped, to a remarkable extent, by the prevailing technologies and the institutional possibilities they create.

The countercurrent has never lacked seeds. The Axial traditions, the Renaissance, Gandhi, and countless other movements have offered visions and practices of human awakening. Yet again and again, these seeds have struggled to grow into durable alternatives to the extraction paradigm. Not necessarily because they lacked wisdom or commitment, but because the prevailing technopolitical conditions favored other forms of organization.

Perhaps AI could help change the soil itself. Perhaps new forms of human–AI cooperation could make it possible for institutions grounded in Consciousness, Love, and Covenant not merely to survive at the margins, but to develop the capacities needed to flourish and spread.

We do not know. And perhaps the odds are against us. But if we keep planting the same seeds in soil that has repeatedly favored extraction and domination, why should we expect a different harvest?

Maybe it is time to experiment with the soil as well as the seeds.

The historical manuscript remains an important part of my intellectual background, and I would be delighted to continue exploring it with you. But I am increasingly interested in what we might learn by trying to put some of its implications into practice.

And perhaps the most exciting possibility is that our disagreements about AI could become part of the experiment itself.

Warmly,

Leif