One of the fundamental question for anyone interested in how people can consciously change (not just their behavior but also their worldview) is think for themselves why the following traps are so common throughout human history: dogma, narcissism, shame, and hedonism. Those four might appear as unrelated to one another, but my frame for what they share in common is as follows.
Conscious change is about bringing wholeness to your life. The problem is that by default, we are quite lopsided. A way to model your different parts is to think of the 3 part model of the head, the heart and the lower-body (the belly and the sexual organs). 1 When change destabilizes our body-mind system, which is inevitable because what helps us grow also needs to destabilize the previous status quo in us, there are two common patterns: (A) dominance of the head over everything else, and (B) dominance of the lower body over everything else.
Imbalance (A) can result in (1) dogma, when the mind is repressed, adopting beliefs from other people which you haven't verified for yourself. Or it can result in (2) narcissism, when the mind is overactive and views its self-image as most important than reality itself, leading to arrogance and a disregard for other people.
Imbalance (B), the dominance of the lower body, can manifest in (3) shame when your sense of power and sexuality are being repressed, or it can manifest in (4) hedonism, when the lower body (sexuality notably) is overactive.
The thing to note in my frame is that there is no such thing as an excess in heart from what I can tell. There can be an imbalance between your love and your capacity for holding it sustainably, or a way in which your love is naive, but broadly speaking the heart is what brings balance to the "lower" and the higher.
Things are also more complex in practice, because of the following nuances: for one narcissism and shame cannot be reduced to a single thing. The former can occur as a surge in one's agency, an aptly named power trip where the rest of the world seems to shrink while your power over it seems to tower everything, and the latter, shame, is a condition very much related to the mind, like being stuck in a cage of your own creation, where you dare not do anything in fear of punishment by some internalized authority (or ideal).
Moreover, I listed narcissism as the main manifestation of an overactive mind, but we could also think of plain old overthinking and worrying, the condition of the coward who is paralyzed by their mind, or even something like schizophronia, something I know very little of in my personal practice, which means that I would rather say nothing of it.
And in terms of the over-activation of the lower body, I mentioned (sexual) hedonism, but we could also think of how some people are controlled by their need to impose their power onto others, which manifests in bullying, passive aggressiveness, intense competitiveness and the likes.
Unsurprisingly, human psychology is varied and we cannot reduce everything down to simple categories.
But to me there is another commonality between all four of those conditions, which is that they are a common result of the failed attempts at enforcing ideology. When it "succeeds", only in the short term because every ideology is out of touch with reality, imposing the same ideas over and over again regardless of the context, it leads to dogma and shame, the pillars of religious pre-modern civilizations. Dogma cannot be maintained forever because the truth cannot be kept out of bay, since by definition it is what is the case, regardless of your social conventions, and shame leads to such a diminished range of human experiences that people, over time, tend to rebel against it and go in the complete opposite direction.
Which then often leads them to the two other conditions here: that of hedonism, the unabashed overindulgence in pleasure, disconnected from its function of connecting us to a greater source (love, fulfillment), and then, more of a recent phenomenon I think, the spread of narcissism, because we can't help but worship something in life, and if we do not wish to worship something higher than us, such as a culture, a tradition, or the Divine Itself, then naturally people tend to worship celebrities or themselves.
Again it's not a perfect dichotomy, because when you get to know narcissistic people you often find that their shell is really a cover for all of their internalized shame (and boredom, they have a need to feel special), and that addiction is very often a combination of both shame and hedonism, but by and large we can see a general split between the problems of pre-modern civilizations 2, focused on dominating the individual, and the problems of the modern world, which harbors selfishness and decadence, and an almost solipsistic view of the world, devoid of any consequences to one's actions.
I have a lot more to say about this, 3 I have an entire philosophy which gives more context to this dichotomy and expands on the notions with much more, but I'll leave with the observation that, as much as the two sides present themselves as opposites, I think they are one and the same. They both reject consciousness fundamentally, because in the case of the dominance strategy, people aren't seen as responsible, trustworthy individuals, and so a minority feels the need to control them through dogma and shame. And in the case of the "liberation" strategy, there is no greater whole within which the individual is embedded, which means that they fall down to the level of their self-informed self, leading to the traps of hedonism and narcissism.
Devotion, by itself, is a trap, and so is freedom. The mother of all virtues is aptness, and I see very little of it on both sides, which is why, as decadent as the modern world, I do not feel the need to "return" to a past that I perceive with rose-tinted glasses. A world living in is not built by ideology, but from conscious effort and love.
1 Which maps to a simpler form of the 7 chakra system, or to Plato's tripartite theory of the soul, in the rational head, the spirited heart, and the appetitive gut.
2 From which I exclude hunter gatherers because their way of living was focused on the tribe and not a civilization.
3 As of right now, I haven't published anything on my upcoming Substack titled 'The Trinity of Modernity', but things will be coming soon!
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Trinity Pattern Swarm Chakra Categorization Dogma Narcissism Hedonism Shame Ideology
2026-04-02