All Aboard the Ship of Fools! Recursive Self-Moronization, Diaphany and the Tragedy of the Commons
Path Notes # 10
It may be true that the success rate of our expert elites in resolving (or even barely managing) our various social, health, economic and technological problems has declined over the decades, as those problems have gotten steadily more complex. But as our problems get harder, the answer is to make our societies smarter, not stupider.
Thomas Homer-Dixon, Globe and Mail, January 17th, 2025.
First of all, a shout out to Thomas and his colleagues at the Cascade Institute - Canada’s leading complexity-focused research centre. The Institute is dedicated to:
…addressing urgent and entangled global problems. We anticipate future crises and identify high-leverage interventions to change humanity's course for the better.
It’s very reassuring to know that somebody’s got that file!
So how do we make our societies smarter, not stupider?
We’ve figured it out with AI. Recursive self-improvement. It’s the algorithmic process that takes place without human intervention where an artificial intelligence progressively enhances its own capabilities.
The network learns and makes itself smarter without any external help[i].
But you could be forgiven for concluding that, as a species, we’re at risk of the precise opposite.
Recursive self-moronization.
The term was originally coined by political journalist Kevin Williamson to describe the cumulative effect of cable news, political radio and social media on his fellow conservatives and evangelicals. Fuelled by political disagreement, cultural anxiety and predatory commercialization, he suggested that this unholy infosphere could be understood as a complex system that literally degrades the cognitive and sense-making capabilities of those who participate in it.
An erosion of beneficial complexity.
Entire social systems that are making themselves more stupid without realizing it.
I worked for a while as a nightclub doorman in Northern England and spent many long nights watching the progressive stages of intoxication. Someone would come into the club sober and subdued. As their blood alcohol levels went up, they became increasingly disinhibited; their confidence increased and there was a sweet spot where they became less fearful about expressing themselves authentically in a social setting while still maintaining an ability to self-regulate.
The sweetness tended to wear off, but most people knew their limits; their wallets, friends or social conditioning provided effective constraints to their alcohol intake.
Others had no such boundaries. They kept drinking and the quality of their decision-making grew steadily worse – especially when it came to accurately assessing the risks related to evolution’s two great behavioural modulators.
The fear of death and the promise of sex.
A runaway self-reinforcing feedback loop ensued; the more they drank, the smarter it seemed to buy more! This frequently resulted in injuries, illness, bar fights and broken hearts. Every night, intelligent and capable adults would behave like dangerous lunatics requiring hands-on intervention from the door staff. Thankfully their reaction speeds, coordination and balance were also severely compromised - otherwise I might not be writing this right now.
Alcohol-induced regression is temporary. As our liver enzymes metabolize ethanol, its effect on our central nervous system begins to wear off and normal service is resumed. Complex neuro-physiological tasks like standing upright, forming coherent sentences or crossing the road once again become relatively easy.
But as our machines grows exponentially smarter by the day, we seem trapped in a constellation of dynamics that are proving to be equally stupefactive but much harder to metabolize.
We’re at risk of turning into a ship of fools!
One of the catalysts for starting this blog was watching somebody I knew – an intelligent, compassionate and practical person – become seduced by paranoid conspiracy theories.
Let me clarify how I’m using the term:
A myth or parable is a story that conveys an essential truth without the use of literal facts.
A conspiracy theory is a story that uses selective facts to convey an essential falsehood.
My acquaintance became progressively enmeshed in an intoxicating information vortex that simultaneously alleviated and amplified her anxieties. As her enmeshment deepened, she became increasingly intoxicated. Her certainty about the world grew along with an authentic belief that she was an independent thinker who was not easily influenced by fake news and corrupt elites.
She would offer compelling stories about what was “really going on in the world”.
And I would ask clarifying questions. Things like:
Where do ‘they’ make microchips small enough to pass through a vaccine syringe needle?
Or…
What’s the causal mechanism by which HAARP is simultaneously able to cause localized blizzards in Iowa, selectively control people’s minds and trap human souls?
When such questions perturbed the internal coherence of the narrative, the response was always the same. She would pass me her phone and ask me to watch a lengthy video from some madcap YouTube prophet.
And it would invariably have millions of views and likes.
I realized that every day of her life, vast numbers of people were validating her beliefs while stoking her fear and outrage. She has joined a global support group that is corrupting almost everything in the modern world.
The numbers are staggering. Leave aside for a moment your personal opinions on the risk/benefit values of vaccines and consider that, prior to the COVID pandemic, anti-vaxxer social media sites were already generating over a billion dollars per year in annual revenue for the large tech platforms. The sophisticated monetization of conspiracy theory video content and affiliate marketing sites highlights the underlying system dynamics of runaway disinformation.
From a financial perspective alone, there is vast pressure to groom, recruit, advertise and keep people active within such informational networks. The business case is undeniable.
Add in ideological and political influencers. Whether you are a millenarian, an apocalyptic accelerationist, an ISIS recruiter, an evangelist, or running a local political campaign, the network is prime hunting ground for hearts, minds, souls and wallets.
Add in cynical manipulation, self-interest and contestation. The weaponization of disinformation to amplify social tension and manipulate collective sentiment by state actors, intelligence agencies and corporate interests is now an industrial-scale global phenomenon.
So you take 8 billion people, many of whom are experiencing deep uncertainty and understandable fear in the face of rapid global change and systems collapse.
- You enable them to self-organize within a algorithmic network designed to leverage the vulnerabilities and addictive tendencies of human brain chemistry.
- You financially incentivize quantity over quality and rapid multiple engagements over thoughtful deliberation.
- You weaken any attempts to introduce healthy negative feedback loops such as regulation, accountability mechanisms or transparency laws.
- You unleash the recursive self-improvement capabilities of artificial intelligences.
- Oh….and you definitely get rid of those so-called fact-checkers!
And what do you end up with?
A giant, exponentially metastasizing web of recursive self-moronization.
- An information ecosystem - seemingly designed by and for our wounded sub-personalities - that holds us in a state of perpetual arousal, anxiety and anomie.
- An emergent meta-system that grows more subtle and more insidious by the day.
- A global community of lonely, severed strangers where post-modernism – conservative and progressive alike – has tipped beyond parody. Where all objective truth is deconstructed. All authority and expertise delegitimized. Where subjectivity and sentiment has been fetishized. Where belief – no matter how absurd – becomes the condition of belonging. A seemingly infinite number of epistemic communities of belonging with strict ideological purity tests that have become impervious to self-critique and incapable of dialogue with others.
- A mimetic system that seems almost perfectly designed to keep us from attending to the critical developmental and socio-cultural tasks that this planetary inflection point so desperately requires.
And that’s a major problem.
For all of us.
Rational thinking alone is insufficient to navigate a metacrisis.
But irrationality can only make it worse.
A systems perspective reminds us that virtually any behaviour can be rational at one scale, but irrational at another. You can make contextually rational decisions within a flawed paradigm.
Shift the temporal/spatial/conceptual boundaries and everything else changes too. The collapse of the cod fishery in Newfoundland offers a perfect example. As fish stocks began to dwindle, the financial pressure to harvest smaller fish with increasingly sophisticated technologies grew. And suddenly an entire ecosystem, along with a way of life and an economy, crossed a critical threshold and functionally disappeared.
Within the shrinking logic of an existing system, actions and behaviours that are clearly bonkers from an absolute perspective can end up making perfect sense within the artificial boundary conditions of a relative and thus partial perspective. The ‘system’ ends up rewarding the very behaviour that leads to its own demise.
It's the way fish stocks collapse, cultures die and civilizations end.
This fishery/forest/cigarette factory/cartel/opioid supply chain supports hard-working families.
Arationality refers to behaviors, decisions, or processes that exist outside the realm of rational or irrational reasoning. It describes phenomena that cannot be meaningfully evaluated through logical or rational criteria. Things like aesthetic experiences, emotional responses, intuitive actions and deeply personal or subjective experiences that don’t follow logical reasoning.
So being ‘called’ by a particular image or place on the land because it speaks to you in some way is arational. It may not be a logical decision, but neither is it illogical. Arational thinking can include phenomena like intuitive medical diagnoses based on pattern recognition, gut-level decisions and aesthetic choices. A classic example would be Dmitri Mendeleev’s discovery of the periodic table of elements. It is a different way of knowing than rationality.
By contrast, boycotting the polio vaccine because of rumors that it causes infertility would be irrational, as it actively goes against both evidence and self-interest. It uses the same method as rationality – weighing a decision against the available evidence – but uses partial or inaccurate data that has been weaponized for ideological reasons.
I’m a fan of the rational. Of critical thinking and evidence-based decision making. And at the same time, I agree with Thomas Berry’s reminder that "we cannot solve our problems through the same rational processes that have created them." Rationality has provided the cognitive architecture for modernity and many of our current challenges flow from contextually rational choices made by those who came before us. It’s a critical part of our toolkit, but by itself, it is insufficient to escape the gravitational pull of our current paradigms.
I’m also a fan of the arational. The founding principles of most cultures are rooted in the visionary arational. It’s a critical part of how we sense, feel, listen, dream, imagine and envision our way into new possibilities. It’s a vital capability that was largely exiled by modernity, leaving superstition and doctrine to fill the void.
It’s how we stay permeable and connected to the sacred, to the sentience of the natural world and to the life-giving waters of the underworld.
Without our arational capabilities, we will not be able to navigate our way across the perilous threshold of this moment and build the foundations for human and planetary flourishing. But alone, they are insufficient.
Because it’s not either/or. It’s going to have to be both/and.
This is what Berry advocated for in what he called "the new story" - an understanding of the universe and our place in it that combines scientific knowledge with a sense of wonder, reverence, and emotional connection to the living world.
It’s what Jean Gebser called diaphany – the ability to simultaneously access multiple modes of consciousness while remaining aware of their distinct qualities and limitations. As each mode becomes transparent to one another, it allows for a new order of perception, understanding and truth-seeing – we are able to apprehend the whole amidst the parts, along with multiple orders of time and reality simultaneously. Much more than simply being an integration or synthesis of different ways of knowing, such diaphany might represent a genuinely new structure of consciousness that is emerging across the human family.
Metamodern mutation!
Positive deviance and the evolution of consciousness.
There are echoes of the same idea in multiple places. In Gregory Bateson’s Ecology of Mind. In Tyson Yunkaporta’s Five Minds. In Bill Plotkin’s Wild Mind. In Gregory Cajete’s Native Science. In Gloria Anzaldúa’s New Mestiza. In Sri Aurobindo’s Supramental Consciousness. In Vine Deloria’s Metaphysics of Modern Existence. In Ken Wilber’s Marriage of Sense and Soul. In Howard Thurman’s Creative Encounter. In Jean Houston’s Possible Human.
When I say there’s something beautiful emerging below the horizon, this is part of what of I’m talking about. The diaphanous. A shimmering pattern of consciousness that has been embodied, sensed and described by a growing number of deviants, mystics, psychonauts, dreamers, poets, scientists, seers and sceptics alike.
It’s hard to see – not because it isn’t there but because it is literally beyond the frame of reference of a partial perspective. Something like the Flatland Story that imagines the experience of encountering a three-dimensional entity from the perspective of a sentient two-dimensional figure.
But I’m guessing you’ve tasted it too.
There’s no certainty that the system dynamics animating our ship of foolery can be easily turned around or changed from within. We’ve let the clowns out of the bag and unleashed the id. We’ve invoked and elevated the threshold trickster deities. Handed our sovereignty to the lords of misrule. We’ve inherited the unresolved pain and suffering of our ancestors and we’re dealing with the cascading consequences of their discoveries and decisions that are reshaping the world right before our eyes. And while we can run for the margins, there’s no getting off this ride! There’s no Planet B. Just the possibility of a Game B.
It's an unnerving place. But new things become possible in a zone of fertile transitional instability.
It might seem an unlikely proposition, but I’m convinced it is more possible than ever to make a difference. To intervene effectively and wisely in the swirling currents of systemic change and cultural evolution. To shape the course of events while they are unfolding here at the critical threshold, poised between chaos and stability. To plant the seeds of renewal and remake the world around us. The pattern of tomorrow depends on what we do today. No matter who we are and where we are situated, we have a part to play.
How we participate in this moment matters.
It holds the power to change the story.
And the quality of our participation rests on invisible foundations – what we could call our state of being. It emerges from a complex ecosystem of interiority – our unique soul gifts, metaskills, behavioral competencies, attitudes, ways of knowing, mindsets, feelings, sensibilities and developmental capabilities. Our state of being is important. Not in a bullshit self-indulgent way. In a fiercely practical, self-transforming, world-serving way.
These times call for courage, clarity and commitment. Our ability to access the many ways of knowing helps us to see clearly and act wisely in a dark time. How we participate in our own unfolding matters.
For in the end, we cannot take the life of our times any further than we ourselves have travelled.
Patterns of old-growth culture do not emerge from the adolescent mindset.
Patterns of deep connection do not flow from patterns of severance and isolation.
The means beget the ends.
We’re heading into the storm friends. It’s going to be a wild ride.
But the dawn will come. It always does.
And something beautiful is not only possible. It’s palpable.
We got this…
Julian
[i] For a broadly informed overview of both the perils and the extraordinary possibilities of this technology, take a look at the Digitalist Papers. Highly recommended. The five challenge domains laid out in James Manyika’s overview thought experiment will be of particular interest to anyone interested in catalyzing and tracking beneficial emergence in this field.