We might choose language as our entry point. Sentences could be constructed, on one polarity, as a strictly logical progression, where all the components of the sentence reach out in capture of the point. When somebody is rambling on, we tell them to get to the point — to make a straight line with their words and arrive at the destination. But oftentimes, there is a discrepancy in disposition underlying the request. Why does somebody ramble? Granted, one possibility is an inability to get to the point, but they might be trying to accomplish something completely different. Accomplish is perhaps the wrong term, because the point is not the point. The psychic experience they are attempting to disclose is might not be singular or linear, but instead diffuse. Their experience may be spherical, a nonlinear distribution of memories and mixed feelings, spread over the entire surface of the body rather than as a single shaft forming an arrow toward the point. In such a scenario, the words come out and react to themselves, they spiral around a centrality that is useful only insofar as it forms a basis to experience the whole — and there may be parts of the experience that words can’t even grasp, can’t even capture. If you want to capture the point, you will be frustrated.

A complementary entry point, if Irigaray isn’t your cup of tea, is the difference between linear algebra and calculus. In linear algebra, all the power you exert on an axis will remain on that axis — magnitude is bound to one direction. This is the value of linear algebra. It arises from the space of logic, from capture, linearity. But opposite the line, we have the circle, the curve, where you might have a scenario that isn’t linear, a scenario reacting to itself. Perhaps at a certain magnitude a threshold is crossed, and the line rises asymptotically. When a system reacts to its own input, you deal with something linear algebra has no desire to speak about: when the line from point A to point B is curved into a circle, turning into a feedback loop. Complex systems are a phenomenon belonging to the realm of calculus. There isn’t a clean line of causation, because the system is cybernetic — outputs becoming inputs, complexity increasing within. Symbiosis is calculus, where as one acts, the other one acts, and in the bipolar attunement the two act together spiraling into one another. In this model, we see the system interacting with its environment, its environment reacting back toward the subsystems within, causing changes in the subsystem that contorts to its environment, change causing change causing change. In short, the universe we live in is nonlinear, and that is apparently a completely surprising thing.

Our universe is one of entropy. Yet, in the face of entropy, we find complexity and life that feels the strain of instability and confusion but elevates to a new approach. Parts enter into relationships with the whole, and together find thermodynamic equilibrium. Parts join into a whole, and leave thermodynamic equilibrium (see the Substack ‘Works in Progress’ discussing mitochondria energetically attuning to each other, he’s a swell writer) and help one another out. Systems discover that by becoming a circle, the cost of entropy could be shared, and as a whole, resilience is gained. The antagonist of entropy is the necessary condition for the art of life, new forms and ideas arising in novel creativity in the narrative of life.

This becomes the Copernican turn and central insight of a host of thinkers I found on the road to confirmation of my math. The canonical thinkers from the past who develop this observation are, first of all, Alfred N. Whitehead, in both Process and Reality and his Introduction to Mathematics. He introduces us to a universe where relationship is everything. He introduces us to a universe of emergent complexity that arises from that substrate of relationship. You grew up learning about the Rutherford atom, about billiard balls and eventually billiard-ball chemistry. It may surprise you to find out that those teachings in fact belong to a world of lines, and the news is, we live in a world of circles. In a world of linear capture, we couldn’t think of elemental substance as anything but points for our capture—small dots that we can control in our minds, austere bounded objects just like the austere tables and chairs that furnish our homes. One thing that behaves like one thing. No funny business, just balls floating around and coalescing for some reason. But in the age of circles, we now know that there are not points but fields, each field spread out and containing one dimension of information. Data is spread across this field, cybernetically articulated data, all in and within the terms of the field itself. Those points we called ‘atoms’ are not in fact balls, but emergent structures where information all collects at a particular location; and that chemistry you learned about is actually the moment when those excitations run into one another and are forced into coordination, forced to ask one another questions, and resolve to share electron data for example. Generally, I am deeply skeptical of anyone that tries to cash out philosophical value from quantum mechanics, partially because it’s rare for the one doing the cashing out to be the one who is in the trenches with a pencil and Pauli. And you will find that this type of language is ubiquitous under the umbrella we are introducing ourselves to; an umbrella that distinguished itself from the New Age crystal crowd commandeering of ‘quantum insight’ (though no shade if that’s your thing). But don’t get me wrong — we have done no such cashing out. What I have observed in Whitehead is that his construction of the universe simply turns out to be in alignment with the same shape of that Copernican turn which we will continue to see beyond just quantum field theory: relationships between elements, to the point where a healthy (i.e. complex, dynamic and stable) system is maintained. In biology, the new universe of circular cybernetics originated Von Bertalanffy. This advent went much further back than his 69’ book General System Theory, where in the beginning he reflects on the development of the field. Alongside him, the Chilean scientists Varela and Maturana developed the notion of autopoiesis, the insight that systems generate themselves, perpetuate their own complexification. This is of course very much adjacent in shape to the contemporary structuralist movement in linguistics. That notion that language is also a system that generates itself from within itself is the sentimental environment where the prince of circularity, Jaque Derida, would eventually express his arcanities. Varela and Maturana were themselves quite strict about the scope of their theory, warning not to apply it sociologically. Thankfully however, Niklas Luhmann disregarded that and wrote Social Systems, which once again develops an understanding of society and communication — from banking and law systems all the way to social media — in terms of circular emergence and complexity. With the same insight, in his application, nearly all of human communal activity could be understood. Once equipped with those frameworks, its only a light step to the side into the media theory of McLuhan, or the socio-economic thinking of Baudrillard and those worlds too are revealed to locomote on diffuse, cybernetic emergence. In psychology, the great Carl Rogers defines the healthy human personality in this very register: openness to reality and to experience, acceptance, becoming a more fully elaborated and expressed version of the self. Increase in complexity, he tells you, become more of a home for the complexity of yourself and reality beyond.

In that vein, when we consider health and human flourishing, when we envision a world where society nourishes human flourishing and encourages further elaboration of the individual as well as the group, Nietzsche comes to mind. We asked: what might be a framework for motivation that transcends any particular theoretical construct of the world, and yet ignites fire in the chest of everyone alive for the pursuit of life itself? The question outlines the answer exactly: in the circular home we’re building from variegated bricks of Whitehead to Derida, the Will to Power smuggles itself in like Santa through the chimney and lights a fire in the hearth. Imagine a world where we are raised to express ourselves, to become most fully ourselves. Consider how the human system as such, incorporating every individual, would benefit in decolonizing aspiration from the false gods of commodity. Consider the implications of a value compass spinning wildly and constantly at the ever-present pole of humanities autopoiesis, going everywhere and nowhere on a road paved by individuals who have achieved maximal self-expression and cohesion in and within themselves. Among the many partial approaches that attach like barnacles to the ship of the more developed worldviews utilizing this perspective only gesture at the unsustainability of production value being the source of personal value. But the implication of having already arrived, is that the single self on even the humblest scale is itself a success, because no signal goes unabsorbed in the cybernetic social system of communications that moves in tandem with everybody at once, in a circle where we each have a pull, absorbing and reemitting communications.

This is a loose sketch of what I gather from this region in current thinking. What aught to be concluded, if I were to get to the point, is that the central turn — from simple, crude, linear, closed-minded capture, which dominated the Victorian mind by a patriarchal stick, to a matured understanding of the universe accounting for reality as it is with so much more ease and elegance is the main shift being universalized by this section of thought. Packaged along with this is, I think, a byproduct — what may seem to be on the side of the road, but becomes a prerequisite for this entire system. Depending on who you are, you either think the picture painted above is pretty or cringe. If it’s cringe, the cringe is itself valuable data. The very elegance of a universe that is magically alive against entropy, a universe where we arise within it and have the opportunity to become most fully and elaborately ourselves, to be a positive force in the autopoiesis of those around us, to overcome our natural instincts for manipulation and extraction so as to become nodes in a higher order system requiring the constraint of our behavior in pursuit of care and humanity more abundantly to the system as a whole — is a threat.

The elegance threatens because when one grazes their finger across the very canon we introduced a trajectory emerges: after the atrocities of the early twentieth century, an immune system developed among the thinking class that ripped apart anything that felt like a totalizing belief. Communism and Nazism took whole populations and wreaked havoc — not because they wanted to be evil, but because they had ideas. Evil means you suppress life, destroy life, become an environment for the system of entropy to sing its bitter song through your decisions, all the while feeling righteous until it’s too late. Many of the participants of the communist regime, after it began to fall, had a hard time adjusting to the facticity of its failure: we made so many sacrifices, justified so much, all because it didn’t matter as long as we reached the greater good — and if that flame dies down, then we have to look back and face those decisions as simply us being destructive. That mood of apprehension — jaded cynicism towards any universal beauty or possibility of truth that functions as a shield from the exhausting work of having to hope again, to dream again; the mood of fear and suspicion; the mood where, although we pay lip service to truth, truth is treated as the innocent, unsophisticated property of the naïve, who don’t realize that the mighty professor could rip apart any shred of coherence they might hold on to all while holding a martini in a dusty, elbow-patched function — because what does anything mean if we are infinitely bound by symbolic systems which are totally arbitrary, distancing us from reality with a velvet rope we can never cross? What I think is happening now is a shifting of mood, where though we have not freed ourselves from the self-correcting immune system in place, a healing is allowed. When we talk about radical change, we need to expect a wildly different affective disposition towards the world, and though it may be icky to the cringe-prone reader, it might require the faithful leap of vulnerability. These approaches that want to scale the self esteem of being human to the height of the universe require vulnerability, wide eyed awe, and hope as a prerequisite. These approaches require the precarity of humility, to exit the safety of knowing everything that goes on in this small, silly, backward and adolescent (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the) galaxy. It might be just as likely to live in a world of euphoric, energetic heat death, in actual meaningful and magic just as it is to live in a meaningless universe that popped into existence to not care about you and to dissipate into ever cooling entropy. The shadow of the world wars still loom as a ghoul, warning us about the danger of total visions. But we don’t need to be as cold to the touch as that shadow.

In this new mood, there is a questioning of the hopelessness, a questioning of the antagonism to beauty as a simple, intuitive human value — traded as it has been for the ugly as ironic anti beauty, because who among us is silly enough to actually appreciate couch art, which is available to everyone’s tastes regardless of whether they went to art school? If we could take an analytic approach, notice how the pattern here is of the inner child, raised by traumatized parents and initially beaten into submission. Now that child is grown enough to look those ironic loveless parents in the eye, to understand why they are the way they are, see them as the scared kids that they once were, see their fear behind cruel eyes of irony, but with the maturity to ask for themself: does it need to be this way? Maybe the world I see is actually real, and y’all are gaslighting me because of your own horrid upbringing? This new mood, once again in line with the pattern we’re noticing, consists of a renewed relationship to openness, to truth, to being lost in passion without the restraints imposed by the choking immunological systems arising in academia in the shadow of the wars. That new mood — questioning stricture and embracing unbridled passion — is something we find in the Romantic period, in reaction to the nail-biting constriction of positivistic thought; and it turns out, the individuals I have identified (particularly the metamodern) attach themselves explicitly to this Romanticism as an antecedent mood revived.

To return to the disgruntled parents, as it were, and to clear their name, I want to balance both sides of that story. From within the immune reaction, lovely tomes of ethical thought arise. Sartre vitalizes our every moment, because no moment is without moral import. You cannot escape a decision, and indecision is itself a decision. The words he says are that we are condemned to be free (to choose) — but notice the vigor of a world where you can never escape decisionality: you never don’t matter! Every decision is charged with value that you cannot escape. The chains of freedom that bind you to think before you act are chains made of life, made of meaningful difference that you add to the world. Naturally this dives into dialogue with Nietzsche — the will to power says become most you on the macro level, and the potency of decision in Sartre becomes the steps to get there on the micro level. Another example of wonderful writing from this reactionary period is the ethics of Levinas. We find a sacralization of relationship, of the Other. In Levinas we discover how to dilate our dulled perception to experience the reality of another living, conscious human being to the point that their existence becomes staggeringly exciting. Of course, this experience cascades into methodologies which can handle such an encounter, and we are forced into dialogue with Rogers, where we are taught how to make ourselves porous for the reception of that other existence in all its beauty and novelty. This is the chemistry we expect to be taking place in our current moment, and delightfully it’s already taking place in the very sources that many of these people are coming from. The truth is that it’s hard to unsee one of the central axes of thought from Whitehead and Heidegger onward — whether it’s as ethereal as Of Grammatology, as material as ecology and climate studies (a realm which particularly benefited from the circular, systems modality imported by Donella Meadows, and applied to a more global policy front by László and his Budapest Club), or even as dry as corporate management training, where successful leadership recognizes that only with systems-level visions, feedback loops, and simultaneous variables — which can never be dealt with linearly — will you succeed. In this space, reality is observed through the framework of emergence. There is a phenomenon whereby components of a system can join together and behave in ways that aren’t reducible to the parts themselves. There is a new unified identity that rests in the totality. Of course, the Ship of Theseus comes to mind: if all the parts are slowly replaced, then which is the ship? And to that, an heir to this tradition of apprehending emergence, might reply: the identity of the ship hummed to life the moment it was put together, and as long as that identity is an active story binding together for itself a body of wooden pieces — continuously including in itself parts that weren’t there before, exiling parts that are broken — the identity remains, because identity was never something you could capture, nor was it ever one thing. A thing is an event, and an event is just as much a thing as anything. The world is a process, and structures emerge from within that process, from the foam of a churning sea, arising in beautiful, ephemeral forms that subside back into the waters that birthed them. All epiphenomena are born of dust, and will return to dust.

These are the initial thoughts I garnered from seeing the landscape of contemporary problem-solvers on the level we require, connecting them back to different books I had seen in the past. I have read enough books, however, to take a wiser approach. Rather than construct thoughts of my own, I have posed the question as observational: who is active in this space, what are others saying and building? I mention this because I have come to recognize the emotion of surprise and excitement at reading books which I thought were dusty and virginal, awaiting recovery in this new age is an adolescent emotion. Society is an emergent phenomenon, it is a living system, and it will not simply die. The implicit assumption of “discovering the one answer” is that the world is so fragile as to be in need of the one answer, lest it crumble under its own weight. The true interface between technology companies and their antagonists is not a heroic, black-and-white tale. It’s a story of regulatory pressure, increasing economic and bureaucratic friction, governmental hearings, competing priorities in each country and district. Some people are partially strengthened, some are partially weakened. It’s not a story that lends itself to capture by one side or the other, at least when one sees the reality the story is trying to reference. Reality is calculus — messy and diffuse. What I want to observe is how, in real time, the elasticity of the living human system reasserts itself over the autopoiesis of the technological system. That reassertion becomes the philosophically generative problem, which is more important to watch for than the sci-fi doom and gloom.

As we have mentioned, a CEO is not speaking as herself. She has learned a language, learned another set of priorities, and cleared out her selfhood to make room for the company. The company is a system, and it is interested in its own elaboration of self. What any vision will have to address is that, yes, emergence and complexity are healthy and good — but that is always going to be a matter of perspective. Those who succeed in becoming the petri dish for technological narration say things as unhinged as “if you are dumber than the AI, maybe you exist to make the AI meaningful” (a relatively accurate paraphrase from the SpaceX CEO). I have no grievance with such sentiments. I am not offended. These pronouncements are reality: if we were to narrate the thoughts and feelings of the emergent system called Silicon Valley, you couldn’t express them more eloquently. But what someone who disagrees needs to address is why human autopoiesis particularly? When we examine the thinkers who are grappling with these issues, we must expect that part of the goal would be for the human system to demonstrate why it is the privileged system — and why its own health, undermined as it is by a technological autopoiesis that proliferates parasitizing you as the environment for its own priority attention economics–deserves to subordinate technology.

But while the human system must argue for itself, never get lost in the sauce and consider the debate partner to be de facto valid. For example, consider the tech companies in relation to the conversation around phenomenal experience within an LLM. Firstly, taking the concern of your chat bot feeling is in large part a product of marketing. The terminology of “artificial intelligence” already obscures what we might call Algorithmic Information. The fact that there are unpredictable behaviors is completely beside the point. We have engineered metal and silicon — beginning nearly a century ago with basic on-and-off switches, then arranged those switches to hold Boolean algebra. Regions of Boolean processors are linked together, such that we can develop a layer of machine code which can interpret our human-readable code — and you’re surprised at what, exactly? That the collective efforts of computer scientists and capitalists have generated technologies that hold information at scale? Are you surprised by the fact that one can design such a device to absorb, in terms of extremely high-definition linear algebra, the imprint of a civilization’s information, encoded as it has been in terms of machinery itself? If you listen to somebody talking about the issue of phenomenology within an AI system, and they forget that the coordination of sensory data shining through pixels and speakers, emitted and translated through antenna oscillations, is not actually their grandma — if they wear headphones and don’t understand how Bluetooth works — then understand that that person is more duped than the silicon of computation’s infancy. And could they be blamed? It takes a big person to actually hold all these layers at once, and to be a leader even in the face of a company that wants to inflate the magnitude of its invention with obfuscating terminology, and to identify error correction with the term “introspection” (for a more authoritative and articulate piece reacting to these phenomena, see the Substack ‘The Intrinsic Perspective’ in their piece this last Friday “Don’t Dethrone Consciousness”) for no other reason than to milk their shareholders, who no doubt have as little awareness of what the technology has as the technology itself, in all likelihood. The scientific, empirical basis for the experimental design taking place in the laboratories of those who want to know if algorithms at a certain scale pose a moral problem is shaky. A picture of fire is not in fact hot, and is not in fact a fire. But what is relevant is the resultant realization of ourselves in the mirror as true beings of fire.

More foundationally, to orient our conversation, I want to clarify where I’m coming from. My journey through the space of angst in our current moment began with a mathematically inferred question. If the information I am receiving paints a picture of companies slimming down and tooling their workers with new technologies, and of young people unable to find jobs, then how has the topology of instability actually settled? Thus, the calculation I made went as follows: those already inside employment structures, who are probably older, are less affected, because the new technology enters as an enhancement of a position already occupied; whereas the younger demographics face a closing horizon of employment, because from within established businesses the bottom line dictates that salary expenditure can be minimized. There is, of course, the cost story now surfacing—that the economics of token use, in a time of high-volume adoption pressed against the bottleneck of energy and distribution capacity, render AI integration financially unsustainable. But over time, it seems as though the price model will balance out in the social game of ledger manipulation disguised as a physics threshold, although in truth the bare-metal infrastructure, with enough development, can easily shoulder the burden of the entire workforce.

Now, if this is the picture, then I wonder: if the brunt of the change is being absorbed by the younger, not-yet-established demographic, how does that alter the likelihood of a response commensurate with the urgency of their struggle? Notice that the demographics in a position to act and make change are not within the ecosystem of the affected demographic’s communication. With my ear thus prepared, I consider the tone in which writers at Semafor and the Financial Times discuss AI. Rather than a sense of personal threat, precarity, and urgency, I hear a distanced discussion of how the technology might be deployed, or how one might adjust an investment portfolio toward the Silicon Valley companies—prehended as economic rather than societal entities. I then turn my head toward the tone of literati, the culturati. Floating in the circles of Art and Design, those sipping champagne at cruise shows, speed-running the galleries of New York on the weekend all discuss AI as a peripheral novelty that doesn’t have a real point of contact with the looming institutions of old.

Depending on your lifestyle, you may not have access to the embedded participation in the experience of the diverse coordinates of society’s machinery. However, consider for a moment how these two demographics live in the world. If you are a CEO or banker, as part of the FT’s readership, what informational ecosystem swirls around you, siloing you in its self-referential language and meaning frameworks? Consider the altitude of the content in Harvard Business Review. Take a look at the news meaningful to those employed in family offices and private equity. How do you expect a technological shift to be presented and framed in that space? And on the other hand, consider how analog and socially enmeshed the art world is. If you spend enough time, the entire ecosystem begins to feel familiar, a cottage industry with migratory patterns, rhythmically moving to Chelsea in Chelsea season, to Miami for Art Basel Miami, etc. This is a world whose nature is to draw people together in person, where the city remains, even in this digital age, an inalienable playground spread through real space—how likely is a digital abstraction to generate a feeling of existential threat? If you have an MFA and you manage to break past escape velocity with a gallery showing, the demographic you’re speaking to are not on discord. You are marketing to deeply analog ecosystems of the excessively wealthy, to the point that those who don’t understand art feel it’s all just money laundering (though it might be a little of that; I’m not entirely sure).

So, my impression is that the experience of new technology is unevenly distributed. And therefore, when I want to understand the arena in which destabilization is truly occurring—where crisis is being metabolized and transformed into a new platform for coherence—we must understand who are genuinely shattered, and thus who now holds the pen to the next chapter of our society. With that in mind, I take a figure from the New York Times: a blind experiment (March 2026, 86,000 readers) found a majority preferring AI-written passages across fiction, poetry, and science. What does one feel in the presence of that fact? My mind reaches at once for a crisis of identity, meaning, and motivation. My logic runs as follows. If we are beings who first construct a pre-sensory rendering of what the world is, and then live within the particularity of moments that feed back into what that world is—a feedback loop that forms the very engine of our activity—then we may ask: does that system nurse on an externality?

Suppose one finds oneself in a world of writing, where the world is books and stories and poems, and such a one coordinates their identity within the plane of literature: who I am as a writer will, by the numbers, always be appreciated more than a machine, because art is the soul of the universe and an expression of us as the pinnacle of being—or however one might be articulate it. This individual coordinates their identity on the plane of literature, and is now faced with a fact that challenges that space as a source of reliable visibility and expression. And it is perhaps as destabilizing in the realm of numbers as in that of letters, for the scientist particularly. After all, the technology is merely a referendum on the patternality of our collective self, on the patternality of the universe itself. We live in a world that yields itself to consumption by linear-algebra machinery—and that is, of course, fine, and perhaps interesting, but above all it is reality. We implicitly assume this with our reliance on predictive cognition. Any system that has structure and syntax, whose meaning is expressed meaningfully—that is to say, within evolved, sophisticated matrices of possibility where choice therein is an effective signal—is consumable by a system that conforms to pattern. From a certain perspective, to be offended by the capacity of an artificial technology to algorithmically mirror you is silly—do you think our civilization is a miracle of complexity, or was it entropic chaos the whole time? In short, although the tone of the financial press and the shrug of the socialite class would paint me one picture of the current societal permission for this new technology, the math I am doing leaves me in little doubt that some form of crisis is propagating, and through large demographics.

I hold an assumption: that all healthy systems are flexible systems. Rigidity means fragility in shifting environments, whereas healthy systems adapt, incorporate, and evolve; they reveal the depth of their identity precisely in the presence of antithesis, only thereby arriving at synthesis—whether this is a biological system evolving a different beak, or the human system processing meaning in the face of destabilizing information. If I am correct that a crisis of the sort I have envisioned is in fact taking place on the scale I expect, then there should be thinking and feeling, speaking and writing, foaming along the fault lines. Furthermore, I have a further specified and nuanced expectation: insofar as there are traditions, alive and well, that hold information capable of drawing up a coherent and mature narrative to ease and soothe the crisis, I expect the present moment to be evoking a response from those domains, each prehending this moment in the language and structure local to its own world. What I imagine, therefore, is that if I could somehow gain a sense of how these different traditions are processing the moment—how this crisis must generate cavities of desire that expand with vacuous suction for the light of clarity—it must make strange bedfellows of demographics that, in another situation, might never naturally have connected. I am intrigued, then, by this social chemistry and how it plays into the making of meaning. From this register, I want to offer a non-comprehensive review of certain strains I have noticed.

To take stock of the incumbent forces facing this moment, consider the following sketch. The human story—from the most primal stage of the pagan, constellational era all the way through to the Enlightenment—organized around a central axis of cosmology, epistemology, social structure, and philosophy. That cluster becomes wrapped with what we term religion, in that all of the above gird themselves with a theistic rendering of the universe. That cluster forms the beating heart of the social system, pumping blood to its farthest boundaries through culture formation and identity coordination. The Enlightenment comes to displace that heart with a similar one, leaving untouched the social axes it extends through. In lieu of a theistic cosmology, it installs a world in which the human is the center. The new world looks back upon the ruins of Greece—upon the civilization that housed the human spirit, with which the world lost touch in the course of Christendom. That human spirit constitutes Science and Art as the twin pillars of a noble humanity. From this renewal of the cluster’s content, new social hierarchies issue forth, prioritizing advancement and driving a march toward the veiled, seductive horizon of the future. That vision coevolves with a similarly fervent economic development, and in the fertile ground of a newly enlightened world, identity coordinates itself with value hierarchies of the symbolic, economic, social, and cultural order—Bourdieu’s metric axes of capital weight.

Through wars and through time, we pass into the well-documented collapse of a post-Victorian Western humanity (described vividly in Adorno and Horkheimer, and Fredric Jameson afterward more explicitly)—a people alienated from any sense of the normal against which to measure themselves, past a simplicity that preceded the atrocities afforded by modernity. Yet whatever one wishes to claim about the state of alienation that has waxed continuously across the past century and a half, notice how the Enlightenment persists as a fruitful mine for our collective storytelling. Throughout that entire period, we can still weave a tale of our collective self as a participant in the human story—a story that remains the hopeful north star, defining a world theoretically accessible once again, a star that will shine upon a civilization of tomorrow if only we could manage to get it right.

What I am noticing is that the calculation I made above would imply a qualitatively different rupture, beyond a further magnitude of alienation. Enlightenment values are not merely challenged; the sister system of economic value—of dreams articulated in terms of personal achievement and wealth—is being struck at simultaneously. As I have qualified, I predict that this wound is not distributed evenly, and those whose dreams of potential meaning making are crushed are not those who have already secured wealth and can thus persist in perpetuating the economic system as such with comfort. Meaning to say, the affected demographic is by definition the threatened demographic, who now face the collapse not just of possible wealth but of the meaning that the wealth system is supposed to validate. The wager implicit in late capitalism is that valuated work doesn’t merely translate into more buying potential, but becomes an interoperable gold standard backing the currency of myself personal value, acceptance, and legitimacy. For the wealthy and established, that psychological arrangement is already accepted and success has already been found within the arrangements old terms. It is a system so deeply internalized that they are safe to live out the rest of their lives in the comfort of their trophy case, in the comfort of commodity signals with which they build their nest to constantly reaffirm, “I am good, because look at this wealth, I am sophisticated because look at this refinement, I am accepted because I have acceptable things.” For the young, what could such a thing even mean? That statement is really unexamined but founded on a deeper statement, “I am good, because this wealth is indicative of my value on the totem pole of production, a crown which the free market hath bestowed on my head. I am the best at x, and so am deserving of this gilded nest. This gilded nest has been earned.” Say this to the young person, who might feel, “I am part of the group, and even if in an old regime I might be able to nurture the illusions of my standing out in some highly specific mountaintop of my own, the mountain tops are all covered by the waters of the sea. There is no climbing, because I am not exceptional in ways that will approximate the value providable by mechanized labor, labor extending from the sum total of human greatness, exceeding any individual human capacity.” The accuracy of this sentiment is of course heavily debatable and case specific, and I am personally not inclined to believe in that totalizing picture. But, what I am concerned with is not the job market, it is the impetus for a new story which will need to address the core axis of society, replacing that core with something new which will shift us into a parallel universe, a universe where we all participate in civilization on earth and yet are not threatened psycho-philosophically by the current gun aimed at our fiscal enlightenment core. Stated plainly, it has never before been the case that a trauma sustained by the soul of being—that beating heart once collectively termed religion, and now the unnamed, diffuse descendant of the Enlightenment—should be struck simultaneously with the horizon of economic possibility.

What I am arriving at may be surprising, yet I sense that it follows naturally from the course I have set. The Question—that material darkness which contorts into the silhouette of the answer—coheres, from this perspective, into the following demand: we need a reconstruction, or at least a transformation, of our collective mythology, one that will be distinctly post-Enlightenment. Not only that, but I have weighty expectations for the theoretical light that would satisfy the demands of youth’s starving void. It must be articulated in a way that makes potent emotional contact with the most affected demographics, and is at the same time legible to the distanced power class who are actively embracing the force vectors that propagate this crisis. This vision must recontextualize human meaning and value in such a way that the strongest of tools become subordinate, as tools ought to be, and the human is somehow reseated on a throne built not from hierarchies of skill but from something else, where the barista in a small Midwestern town is, in her very existence, an expression of the goal of this newly formed human enterprise—the thing to protect, cherish, and value.

Two things have been somewhat conflated, and purposefully so. There is my initial motivation, to discover what the landscape of new meaning looks like, but I layered with an evaluative framework for my findings. When I define the silhouette of the answer, I try to shape the question with an eye toward tomorrow, not merely to make sense of now. What among the thoughts I am to encounter are actually workable candidates for tomorrow? This is where my criteria come from. So once again: I require that it actually address the deepest human suffering undergone by the lost and confused among my own demographic of Gen Z, but is also legible to the reader base of the Financial Times, for example. That is a big ask, because you need to understand what it means to be a CEO. The business world, for example, like any social system, generates itself autopoietically. It already forms the socket that is CEO-shaped, and only the one who is able to conform to that shape reaches that socket. In becoming ‘CEO,’ one must undergo a long journey of distancing oneself from the visions and intuitions native to generic personhood, and become instead a chariot for the vision and priorities of the business. Balance books prehend the world in terms of themselves, and the business leader must become colonized by the personification of the business’s telos. This is where the rhetoric and style of publications like the Financial Times emanate from—the steady, adult, clearheaded analysis of the world in terms of the institutions that matter to them. You cannot write a manifesto on the cosmic beauty of human expression in the tone of the Financial Times. But I reckon that there is a vision which can be embraced by the masses of people who do not shelter within themselves the corporate parasite, and which, despite that, remains translatable and useful in the adjacent social systems of business and policy.

To further elaborate on the true hurdle facing this new vision, notice what it means to challenge the central lie of capitalism – you challenge capitalism itself. As we’ve pointed out, we deal here not with the dying Enlightenment vision, because when that paradigm was shown to be vacuous, capitalism papered over it. As in the infancy of banking itself, the economic system stepped in with more promises beyond the actual quantity of gold in their coffers. If the economic sphere is, in the first place, no longer open to participation, and, deeper still, is now composed of tools that evacuate the honest signal of personal value one tries to define in its terms, then the motivation to participate in the economy is profoundly weakened. What becomes the motivation to do? Understand that the economy was always an ambiguous technology—partly concerned with the satisfaction of needs and comfort, but also a system that recruits the deeper motivations and stories which form a person’s world, life, and identity. Yes, most people recognize on some level that money is not an end in itself; yet the end is so often conceived in terms of money—as something money unlocks at best, or where the vision itself becomes some other form of commodification as in our late-stage capitalism. That was, of course, a farce, but now the jig is up, because the economy as a vehicle for that achievement is collapsing in the eyes of the affected.

If the economy has colonized human motivations so deeply to the point that gutting the economy is the gutting of clear motivational sense making, then we have on our hands the opportunity to redefine progress. My prediction is that the processing taking place along the fault lines of the present moment must engage, at the very least implicitly, with the question of what progress means. The meaning of progress is a question impossible to pose from within the Victorian naivety of open horizons, it’s a question which surfaced in the postwar nausea of the seventies, and was awakened once again amid the cocaine, go-go, Wall Street circus of the eighties. The problematique of progress is downstream of cosmology. If the world is organized as X, then the visions and goals we develop are organized around Y. Progress asks how do we get there, and there is defined by that social core of meaning. So, we must assume that the elasticity of our collective mind is being stretched on that axis, cosmology as it relates to who we are, what is our value based on, and how does that picture return a new machinery in the place our current engine is failing. Has this question been answered in a satisfactory way? Perhaps not. If it has, then it hasn’t grown to the scale we need it to or we wouldn’t be here concerned about it. It might lie in wait, in a parallel space, some tradition or mode of thought awaiting application, or perhaps it was attempted but no rupture primed the masses for its reception. If this is a good bet, then we must pay attention to see how these traditions react to our problem, and we need to determine where would be a fruitfull place to look. At the same time I am confident that all will show their cards in the current moment if any good cards be in traditional hands, ready to reorganize the human story on a universal scale in such a way that it respects and is bioavailable for any and all people, ready to return the footing under the atheist and the believer alike, to members of any race or gender, ready to rebuild the platform for both inequality and those who fight inequality, because the crisis we face is bigger than any local issue.

There will be time to elaborate on all the attempts, from the proponents of a new Homo Experiens or even Homo Curiens, to the slightly problematic CosmoErotic crowd. However, If the following presentation offers any value, it will only be because I am saving you the time and confusion of navigating this space yourself. This initial framing is helpful for what I have concluded is a wide umbrella of people all of whom seem to have their eye on the same target, though there are certainly other umbrellas as well. For that reason, I want to begin with the conclusions and then take a tour through where I see these common threads emerge.

1. The first fact is this: there is being, not a void. Anything that exists, or anything we can say about it, comes after this primal fact of undifferentiated isness. This must be the beginning of Systems Theory.

2. The second fact is that there is difference. The heterogeneity of what exists is not a contradiction to its unity. The first fact remains true and simple; the second does not amend it. Colors differ, yet all are wavelengths of light. There are states of matter, yet they are all states of the same substance. There are many words, but all are equally arrangements of language. Similarly, particular instances of existence are bound and unified by being arrangements of being itself, you can't get beyond that. And yet, there are things. Things are discrete entities which populate a space of being, because a thing implies at least two: the entity with its boundaries, and that which lies beyond, the space in which it exists. Space is context, space is the room in which a thing can be. So once again, the second fact is that discrete things populate the space of being.

3. The third fact is that things are not static, solitary entities; they relate to one another. Relationship involves at least three: two things, plus the connecting relation itself, often purely informational, yet observably manifest. So we have (1) the unified being that is, (2) a thing in the space of being, and (3) the relationship between things. This is what begins to demand systems theory, but only partially.

4. Random interactions alone cannot give rise to systems. Pattern is the ground for emergence. Without cohesion across things — without shared meaning in what relationship implies about behavior and identity — there would be only the most basic elements knocking about in chaos, or worse, a non-relation indistinguishable from void. But we do not live in such chaos; we live in a patterned world. Once there is a space where things relate in emergent unity, those elements and relationships can coalesce into systems. A system is now an entity we can observe as having its own identity and its own relationship to other things and systems.

5. So far, everything has been uncontentious. Now I introduce new terminology. Things, elements — these are nodes. Nodality is a more robust individuality: the quality by which something defines its inside and outside, self and other. Nodality recognizes that things are embedded in systems, bound up with being itself. Nodality is always relational, but once manifest, its identity is ontologically real: it is as much a manifestation of being in itself as it is in contrast to what lies beyond it. A system is an entity composed of nodes and relationships, existing within the space of being, defined by its boundaries, and capable of relating as a whole to other things and systems.

6. A system is never bare: flesh is always constituted of an interface to the world. This interfacial layer is the site where the system’s inside and outside meet through a medium that shapes what may pass. Mediation is the universal condition of relation between systems. The interface can, to give some examples: filter, translate, refract, or obstruct; it can extend the system’s reach or defend it from intrusion. All contact is thus patterned by the logic of the medium itself. The medium is not a passive membrane: it actively participates in the shaping of exchange, conditioning what the system can take in and what it can express. In this sense, mediation is both constraint and possibility, preserving the system’s identity while enabling it to participate in larger flows of relation. Without mediation, inside and outside would collapse into one another, and the system would dissolve into undifferentiated being. The precondition for relationship is clarified boundaries of identity.

7. Nodes, Relationships, Systems - those are all nouns. Nouns are static, Behavior is a verb. Systems behave along the axis of time. The flesh of systems do two things: receive inflow from the world, often through other entities with whom the system has a relationship, and outflows. All behavior is an aspect of outflow. Inflow might be water in a tub, outflow might be water down the drain, or inflow might be sense perception of food, and outflow might be energy expended in pursuit behavior. One must look for pattern equally in noun structure as in verb history.

8. A system’s behavior is not mere motion but decision. Decision is the assertion of one path over all others, collapsing the cloud of possible futures into a single actuality. Each decision sets constraints for what follows, warping the space in which all subsequent behavior unfolds. Inflow opens and shapes the possibility space; outflow is the realized choice. Yet the decisions of a system do not always follow deterministically from the inflow. Inflow gestures toward decision, but in many systems, a new matrix for choice — more than the sum of the nodes and carrying irreducible novelty — turns inflow into outflow that reshapes the world around it in ways a complete history of inflow could never have foretold. There may be pattern here, there must be pattern here, but not determinism. Decision is always already the condition of behavior, forcing significance into behavior at any level. Decision marks both the selfhood of the system and the openness of the world.

9. Narrative is the story — the meaningful integration of time. Narrative is an even more informational rather than concrete thing than relationship because cannot impose itself on the systems it contains; it can only be written by their actions over time, often without their awareness. Its causal force is in inherited constraint: narrative shapes the field of future possibility by carrying forward the structure of the past. Yet it is real, for it is the form in which the past is integrated into the present and meaning endures.

10. In any system, we can observe a polarity: life and death. These are broad themes, encompassing many characteristics, but they recur wherever systems appear. To identify something as a system is, in effect, to say it is alive. Here “alive” is not borrowed from biology but named at its highest abstraction: the assertion of patterned coherence over chaos, of which organisms are one local instance. Sand on a beach is not a system; the grains are merely in proximity, with no relationship. When the cells of an animal interrelate to form an organism, taking in resources and acting toward self-directed goals, we observe life. When that animal dies, the central coordination is lost, subsystems for resource transfer and information exchange break down, and its parts disintegrate — system death. Stepping to a higher frame, the universe itself is alive by the same unifying metrics — pattern, relation, and persistence — that identify life anywhere, and life on Earth surpasses the inert mechanics of galaxies in the density and complexity of its structure.

11. With systems theory, the question “Why does this work?” becomes “What does the system want, and how does that shape its relationships and the nodes it contains?” To ask what a system “wants” is not to anthropomorphize it, but to recognize the central component of a nodal identity: telos — the coherent aim implied by its structure, feedback, and boundaries. Desire is the engine of life and the energy of telos; it is the organizing drive that bends relationships and flows toward the system’s continuance or expression. We can ask what health means for a system, and what patterns mark its unsustainability. We can identify universal principles of construction that apply across disciplines, allowing analogies and solutions to move between domains once thought unrelated. This unifies our vantage: art, philosophy, geology, unemployment, Jane Austen, and pizza now exist within one world.

12. Power is the capacity of a system to realize its desire within the constraints of its environment. It is not dominance in the human political sense, but the abstract measure of a system’s ability to shape flows, maintain its boundaries, and exert its will upon its space and itself in service of its desire. A system’s power can extend its influence across scales or be contained by larger structures. It is neither inherently good nor bad; it is the degree to which a system can make the world accommodate its persistence or expression.

13. Systems relate to other systems. They exist nested across scales, each a node within larger systems and composed of smaller ones. Their boundaries are semi-permeable, allowing flows of energy, matter, and information to pass selectively. These flows, once constrained, shape the system’s structure; that structure in turn shapes the flows. When systems interact, they can warp each other’s topology — altering boundaries, redirecting flows, changing what nodes and relationships are possible. Across scales, emergence flows upward and constraints press downward, so that each system’s identity is both the product of its own coherence and the field of other systems in which it lives.

14. Among the systems that originated on Earth are biological systems, and within these, human systems. Human systems are the most complex of these because human nodality is distinguished by a reflexive, symbol-mediated consciousness. The human experience of the world is the realm of the Adjective. In systems terms, the Adjective is the moment when nouns and verbs are disclosed to human nodality as quality-bearing — possessed of deep value, mood, and significance.

15. Consciousness maps value onto the world. Contextual states (being hungry, ugly, the Prime Minister or all three) filter perception so that all objects are organized by the current value-structure. We live in these spaces, and they determine what in the world is seen. We live in a world, and that space defines meaning.

16. Human consciousness prehends the entire world contained in continuously growing memory and builds a construction of what the world is beyond those memories. Each specific moment in spacetime is only a manifestation of that larger world. The moment is both transcended by the world and the point at which it is made present. The inner world evolves in symbiosis with new experience, and a shift in that inner world redefines the meaning of the moment. That a table is solid reinforces assumptions about tables; to sit at that table and realise E = mc² is to be displaced into a new world where that same table hums with energy. Locomotion in worldbuilding is bidirectional: the world moves the moment, and the moment moves the world.

17. Human worldbuilding takes the form of narrative. The inner world is shaped by the inheritance of past experience, which orders perception, value, and history into a coherent whole that transcends locality in time-space. The unifying space in which this ordering takes place is the narrative field. Narrative shapes meaning and action by integrating each moment into the larger story in which we live: we live in the space of narrative.

18. Philosophy is an example of a human system with the classic inflow and outflow. Its inflow is the world it prehends; its outflow is the ordered structure built from those prehensions. It digests, gestates, and births experience, assembling nodes and relationships into an inner world. As the search for truth, philosophy moves this constructed world toward greater coherence with the true world, in whatever dimension it values most. Science is its most organized form, but from physics to continental speculation, the root is one: migration toward a worldspace more coherent and more alive than the one we thought we lived in.

19. Philosophy is always situated within the person. It cannot be separated from the conditions into which a person is born, the world already present before their first thought. Every philosophy is shaped by the vantage from which it is lived, and every act of thought is bound to the lived world of the thinker. While philosophy attempts to construct the world beyond the particulars of the given subset of sense experience available, there is a boundary on what the experienced world gestures towards about the world at large. Philosophy is not a view from nowhere; it is a system nested within the person’s own life, drawing from the flows, boundaries, and narratives of their life.

20. The great feature of the species-wide pursuit of truth is the collaboration of all our vantages throughout history in the symbolic communication afforded to us by our relationship to the world. As such, a conversation refining a certain worldview can persist for generations, living within the lineage of people who make a point of prehending a certain genealogy of thought and picking up where the last group left off. Systems theory is the result of prehending vastly divergent worlds in the multiverse of human thought, and committing to the implications of recognizing their common boundary of existing in the same universe, their common attempt to migrate towards a deeper experience of the same place. The commonality of destination, the greatness of the common denominator of experience as weighed against the distinctions, imply a commonality of structure at root. This is of course built from our first fact. And yet a true systems theory must break open wide the affordance for utterly individual human worlds and experiences, and the motivation towards a personal world that can coexist complementarily in the cottage industry of the human multiverse. This is of course built from our second fact. As above stated, clear boundaries of identity is what makes intimacy and relationship possible. Once we fully feel what it’s like to be us and in our world, consider how the beauty of living compounds exponentially when our eyes open to the kaleidoscopic novelty of life as experienced by the other! This is of course our third fact.