This is part 3 of an examination of the various ways we can predict the future, their strengths and their weaknesses. Part 1 is available here, which focuses on data and when it becomes misleading. Part 2 is available here, which focuses on incentive structures and limiting factors. And the conclusion in part 4 is available here.
Another way we can make predictions about the future is to use historical analogies to describe the various patterns we observe from the past, and make extrapolations. This is similar to the first set of methods I described, the data-driven ones, but this one drops the need to quantify things and appear "scientific", which in many ways is the religion of our time, and instead uses metaphors. 1
The one I subscribe to in this category is Spengler's view of civilizations as living organisms, with their rise and their inevitable fall. The interesting thing about Spengler's ideas is that he doesn't try to ascribe causes to such a process of rise and fall, and rather focuses on noticing similarities and differences between the main types of societies throughout time.
People after him, such as Joseph Tainter in his book The Collapse of complex societies, have tried to explain how those processes happen exactly, but Spengler's fundamental insight is still very relevant because it does indeed seem that the Western world is in the Winter part of its cycle, though I haven't spent enough time reading The Decline of the West to provide many specific points, but when I do, I will be sure to write about it, because the little I have read of it seemed very relevant to our times.
Another example of an analogy of History is given by Hegel, in his idea of the dialectic of History, the view that civilization tends towards more and more consciousness, through the resolution of conflicting ideas, which leads to the synthesis of the two opposing sides.
It's difficult to know exactly what Hegel is saying because his writing is so difficult to decipher, and perhaps what I just described is flawed in many ways, but Hegel's ideas have influenced a host of thinkers which have influenced our world, and most notably Karl Marx, who was famous for holding onto the idea that capitalism is a necessary stepping stone in the inevitable path towards the socialist utopia he described in his writing.
I am personally not a fan of Hegelian dialectics, because I think that there is a lot of handwaving around the last part, the synthesis. I think that individual development is by and large dialectic, because it is true that we often have to go through opposing extremes to experience the limitations of both sides, and come to realize that there is often a third alternative that we haven't been considering.
However, at a collective level, I think this dynamic fails for many reasons. First of all, whereas a human being can remember every major event which has happened to them, and learn and integrate the lesson each time, we as a collective have a deep amnesia when it comes to our past. The horrors of Nazi Germany happened less than 80 years ago, and yet they do not live in us. To the extent that they do, they sit inside people's mind, infused with a sense of guilt and horror about what happened, but they haven't been internalized, the same way that a heartbroken person truly understands what it is to love. And this is not to speak of the much more distant past, of which we only have very biased and limited fragments of, which we can only interpret, but never recall because it didn't actually happen to us.
The second problem is that large scale collectives do not have access to a unifying consciousness, the same way that individuals do. The disembodied mind is splitting, dualistic, and only consciousness is unifying.
The way that an individual brings more coherence to their life is first of all by grounding in their own body, which is the basis of our access to Reality. The body, when consciously experienced, is a unity with an incredible amount of sensitivity. The way I know that I love someone, or am feeling tired, or am afraid of something, or feel at home in a certain place, is first of all through my body, not my mind. My mind can make consistent statements with one another and what I experience, but the ground of Truth is conscious experience rooted in my body, not my mind.
But at a collective level, we do not have access to a unified body. Our local environment used to be the equivalent, but as the scale of societies increased well beyond Dunbar's number, our ability to care about our collective "body" has well escaped what we can feel, or even make sense of. This is why large scale societies run again and again into the tragedy of the commons, whereas smaller scale ones can avoid it. It is possible for everyone in a village to feel responsible for their local environment, because they directly interact with it, and healthy people naturally feel the need to take care of themselves and their surroundings.
But at a large scale, people can get ahead of one another by not caring about the environment, such as how large companies reliably dump their waste in the ocean or the atmosphere, because there isn't a shared sense of responsibility to our land.
A third reason why hegelian dialectics doesn't apply to large scale collectives is that excesses are the norm in those contexts, whereas they are abnormal in more natural contexts. What we hope from the process of synthesis is to have more integrated people, which isn't the same thing as a naive ideal of balance, in the sense that integrated people can hold one charge without losing themselves in it. They can for instance think rationally without channeling all of their attention to their mind, and instead remain grounded in their body. Or they can fully drop into their body when needed, such as when they are making love, without the interference of the mind, and without becoming obsessed with their own selfish sexual pleasure.
But the problem is that large scale collectives consistently reward lopsided behavior. This is because fundamentally, coordination increases in scale by becoming more literal, more crude, requiring less conscious discernment. This is why religious dogma appears again and again in History, because belief is much easier to spread than conscious realization and integration. It is also why the most successful people in any endeavor are typically very neurotic and unbalanced in their life.
Every large collective is bound by legible goals and reward systems in order to maintain coherence, which favors people who focus all their resources on those goals, at the expense of everything else. This is why Goodhart's Law appears again and again at large scales, because coordination happens through narrow channels, such as how the market reduces everything to monetary value, or how schools compete with one another over the grades of their students.
It's impossible not to be lopsided if your attention is fundamentally narrow. The only way to be more integrated is to have a more expanded awareness, which requires consciousness of a greater whole. But the problem is that such a process is not legible, it cannot be rigidly codified in the same way that narrow attention can. You can coordinate a country by getting people to optimize for GDP, but you can't coordinate them by pointing them to the ineffable Goodness of the Universe.
You can inspire a few individuals through living consciously, which is what spiritual masters have done throughout time, or you can impart some of your love to the people around you, the same way that a parent does with their children, but those acts are not scaleable, because they require presence with one another, and cannot be communicated purely at the level of information.
The fourth and final limitation of hegelian dialectics I will examine is what happens when you try to synthesize a large amount of highly divergent worldviews. Some people are concerned with reaching a sort of global human coherence, a state in which human beings can by and large understand one another no matter how different their worldview is, so that our increased access to technological power doesn't result in the termination of our species.
I can see some of the validity in that, but the major problem that those people don't consider is that there might be limitation to how much divergence a single mind can hold.
Intellectuals don't talk much about limits, for the simple reason that the mind, by itself, doesn't have any. It tries to grasp everything in its web of concepts, it tries to control every situation, and it tries to impose its will onto the body. The problem is that the mind cannot function by itself, but it still keeps trying, like a tyrant desperately holding onto any crumb of power he may still have.
This is why people who mostly operate from their mind tend to burnout, or at least run into a long list of physical problems, because they are not in touch with their body. They also tend to be plagued by worry and anxiety, because it is preferable to the disembodied mind to spin in its own negative tales than shut up at all, for silence is akin to death for it. Death, the paradoxical, and the ineffable quality of direct experience are all things that the mind, by itself, cannot grasp, which is why it prefers to ignore it, retreating into its ironclad fortress of rationally graspable concepts.
The mind can be grounded in something more coherent, but this requires it to be able to let go, to allow the conscious experience of my body to be primary, and the mind to be a secondary tool which I can call when needed. The problem is that this ability to let go is not a rational one, one which you would develop by becoming more and more clever, more and more informed, which is why clever people can be so out of touch with basic reality, in a way that regular folk are not.
Coming back to my point, the way I see it is that there is a limit to how much divergence in worldviews the mind can hold. Just like eating too much food leads us to have an indigestion, I think something similar happens with the mind. In fact, it's even more interesting what happens in this case, because it seems to me that there is a split in trajectory depending on what type of person you are.
Some people are exposed to the radical diversity of worldviews in our world and basically go schizo, the point I wish to expand here. Others go in the completely opposite direction, which is to say that they double-down on the sense of stability provided by the dogma they are familiar with.
This is why the top-down push for multiculturalism led to the backlash we are currently experiencing, of religious fundamentalism. Instead of having people gradually come into contact with people different than them, and learning over time that there is much in common between human beings, no matter their origins and culture, people have been thrown, in large part due to the agenda of the technological system, with people of a vastly different background, and forced to contend with them. It certainly doesn't help that the Western economy is steadily declining, as mentioned in part 2 which discusses peak oil, which means that there is a very easy scapegoat to blame in the form of foreign people.
The issue is much more complex than that, but the way in which excesses manifest in two seemingly different poles is still a pattern that shows up again and again, in our world which breeds lopsided people.
I am using the term 'schizophrenia' in a more colloquial sense, rather than the way than a mental health professional would use it. 2 A schizophrenic person is one whose experience is so utterly dominated by their mind that their sense of Reality becomes scattered, losing touch with any unifying consciousness. Their experience of time is no longer a continual one, the river of time which embodied people drink from, but rather a series of snapshots detached from one another, punctuated by occasional moments of unbearable boredom.
They are unable to regulate themselves, being constantly dissociated, which means that they are highly anxious, very prone to flights of fantasy in their imagination, or conversely, spinning catastrophic tales of what might happen to them in the future. As a result, they often oscillate between unbearing self-obsession, the sense that they are invincible and misunderstood geniuses, or crippling low self-esteem, a sense that all their act is being monitored, and that everyone around them is secretely making fun of them.
The schizophrenic is not grounded, never present. They might be very intelligent, and some of them can in fact be quite functional in our highly dissociated times, but they are not healthy by any means. They are possessed by their mind, which is why their eyes seem often so empty of any life, because in a sense they are not "here", something else is in charge, something which, dare I say, could be qualified as demonic.
My thesis is that the highly online world, which presents us with an astounding divergence of radical worldviews, and a series of decontextualized snapshots with little to no overlap with one another, through the spectacle of the screen, creates schizophrenic people, not integrated ones.
After all, why should we expect the latter instead of the former? Ideas are supposed to help us navigate the contexts we find ourselves in, but if all we have are ideas decoupled from the contexts they originate from, what we have is not wisdom but insanity.
Wisdom is not just knowing things, it's also integrating them into your life, and it's not necessarily the case that more ideas and information make your life better, as the analogy of the stomach indigestion highlights.
In practice, those who preach the idea of exposing yourself to a lot of different worldviews do not do as they say. They say that they are highly open people, but from what I have seen, they are overall left-leaning, even if they can be critical of many of the aspects of the left, and have next to no ability to understand the right-wing in any intelligent manner.
This is why those who talk about synthesis so much end up adopting some form of linear hierarchy of worldviews, which they try very hard to present as being an unbiased model of how humans relate to Reality and one another, but is in fact laced with their globalist agenda. This is how we get models such as Spiral Dynamics, or Kegan stages, or Susanne Cook-Greuter's model of ego development, which all exalt the ability to interface with more (and increasingly complicated) worldviews as the most important trait to develop in yourself.
The idea that there might be downsides to such an openness in worldviews is never found in those circles. You would never hear for instance that people who are obsessed with synthesizing worldviews, or "upgrading their sensemaking" (that's usually how they call it), are constantly on the chase of new ideas. They are never satisfied with anything, and are honestly quite addicted to novelty and to thinking.
As such, they could never dedicate their efforts to building something akin to a cathedral, a monument of awe-inspiring beauty, the result of mind-boggling dedication and coordination, and something which ultimately will last for centuries to come.
The idea that close-mindedness might actually have its advantages in certain situations, because every trait is part of a greater whole, and human beings operate in different tradeoffs from one another, is ironically something that is quite difficult to suggest to those highly "open-minded" people. 3
Just like cowards will look at everything except their own cowardice, or loveless people will blame everything and everyone around them except their own lovelessness, so are schizophrenic people constantly blind about their own condition, because to see themselves clearly requires them to look at their entire life, not just isolated snapshots of it, which requires a unifying consciousness which they have lost access to.
The schizophrenic mind is not blind because it doesn't know facts, it is blind because it only knows facts.
There is a lot more to say about the limitations of Hegelian dialectics, and each point needs much more substance than what I have given here, in fact each one is easily one or two pieces in and of themselves. The same can be said about the models of human development I have mentioned—Spiral Dynamics, or Kegan stages, or Susanne Cook-Greuter's model of ego development—because that's its entire can of worms.
I only have so much time to write, and these days I prefer to focus on getting an overview of a topic, because big-picture thinking is more important than getting lost in minutia, which has a tendency to lock you into the same set of assumptions, so I don't want to constrain myself with the need to write in-depth about everything before actually publishing something.
1 Fundamentally, Science also uses plenty of metaphors to build its concepts, but we don't see them as such because they have become self-evident in a scientific world. The idea of a mechanistic Universe for instance, one composed of discrete parts which interact causally with one another, is a metaphor. We could also see the Universe as something analogous to a living organism, a metaphor which also has plenty of validity because it puts the focus on processes rather than mere parts and how they relate with one another.
2 Mental health professionals which, has to be stated, I do not respect, and view them as basically the modern equivalent of the priestly class, with the same systemic abuse of power that we know happened in medieval times. See Darren Allen's essay on the Psychocrats for instance.
3 We could say that open-mindedness maps to the element of air, whereas the discipline and commitment required to build cathedrals maps to the element of earth. In our highly volatile and changing times, the virtues of air are promoted about everything else, but by itself, air, like the other elements, leads to imbalance, not harmony.
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Hegeliandialectics History Marx Narrowawareness Goodhartslaw Consciousness Tragedycommons Lopsided Schizophrenia Expandable
2025-12-23