John Vervaeke says in his lecture series, “Our culture is experiencing a profound meaning crisis.”[1] The crisis is characterized by a lack of trust in old institutions, a pervasive sense of nihilism, and a widespread worsening of mental health.
The lack of faith in old institutions is gradually creating a confusing farce on the world stage, currently visible in Western politics. Venkatesh Rao calls this time the Great Weirding,[2] and it is contributing to mass anxiety about the future. This anxiety is caused by the threat of collapse of our civilization. Naturally, we’d rather stay alive and, ideally, keep all of the nice things our advanced civilization affords us.
The imminent collapse of our ecosystem is also a major contributing factor in this dynamic, and this topic is also incorporated by Vervaeke, but I will focus solely on civilizational collapse for the purposes of this article.
The question is, how do we remove the negative effects of our civilizational culture, such as increasing materialism without access to satisfying spirituality, or working mainly bullshit jobs for no reason,[3] while also maintaining those good things we all appreciate about living in a complex society.
Many people are turning to personal development and exploration tools to make sense of what is closest to hand: themselves. People are showing increased interest in things like mindfulness, Buddhism, ancient philosophy, psychedelics, and transformative experiences to address their personal sense of meaning, or lack thereof.
But if we are to keep the nice things we have now on a larger scale, we need to effectively work together to keep civilization going. This issue’s theme is collective navigation and how to do it, and in this article I will suggest that the same tools we use for personal navigation of the meaning crisis are highly relevant to collective navigation of the same.
It is tempting to assume that the meaning crisis is due to lack of meaning in one’s life. David Chapman however argues that today, in 2020, and since about the early 2000s, we have been in what he calls the atomized mode and in fact “there’s overwhelming quantities of meaning.” In other words, the problem is not a lack of meaning, instead “the problem is that without structures and boundaries, shards of meaning do not relate to each other.” We currently experience “a firehose of meaning . . . in senseless kaleidoscopic, hypnotic reconfigurations, with no context or coherence.”[4]
From this point of view, the meaning crisis is not a lack of meaning, but a lack of fixed structures that can make sense of billions of unrelated shards of meaning. Okay, that’s fine, but what does all this have to do with collective navigation?
Well, there is this post from @literalbanana, which has haunted me ever since I read it:
The reason we only have 80s Movie Part 25 now is not lack of originality but an excess of it—items of shared culture must be borrowed from a time when such things existed. Originality meaning difference from what’s expected—lack of some shared, stable expectations limits the prospects of originality because expectations are part of interestingness.[5] (Emphasis mine)
If we marry these insights—too much meaning, without a shared culture or framework—then I believe we’re currently at a point in time where it’s not possible, in broad stokes, to make sense of all the meaning floating around, and it’s also not possible to be original, creatively, because there is too much originality, or novelty, floating around and not enough shared expectations within which to ground it.
I’m going to argue that in order to collectively make sense and collectively navigate, we need to create at least some shared context in order to be able to riff with each other. But how do we do that? I’ll describe what seems to be happening already.
The interest in Buddhism, Stoicism, cognitive science, transcendent experiences, and so on, as Vervaeke points out, is a meta move made on behalf of the meaning maker. Since we have so many shards of meaning, but no framework to pin them to, there is a sense of needing to get back to the very basics, in a Cartesian way, and that means to begin again with the self.
There seems to be a growing awareness that in the West people are disconnected from their bodies and have an aversion to many of their own thoughts. So, in the absence of exterior structures of meaning, people are being drawn to methods for connecting to what they think and how they feel. This desire has its roots in the past, at least as far back as the 1960s. However, in this moment, never have our time-honored institutions looked so fragile, nor have we ever had such unprecedented access to democratized information.
Everyone seems to be bootstrapping themselves right now—bootstrapping their own cognitive and physical functions. From podcasts about cognitive science to yoga videos on YouTube, we’re figuring out the possible nature of our thoughts, and we’re learning what it’s like to feel and what it means to have a body.
There are many methods available for improving or deepening these relations to the self, and different methods appeal to different kinds of people. Some people like their methods dressed in spiritual clothing and are drawn to meditation or prayer, while others prefer a science-y wardrobe, and so are drawn to flow states or enhanced cognition. Still others prefer play and release, so they research theatrical improvisation or psychedelic drugs.
The over-anxious thinkers, like me, have researched them all.
What’s happening seems to be that people who like the same method of personal exploration are congregating together to share their experiences. They have a topic of conversation to share (the method), and the method comes with its own lexicon. These communities invent their own in-jokes and ultimately will start generating their own creative content (e.g., memes).
Tiny buds of creative output are already starting to flourish in my groups.
This is what people have always done, of course, around any hobby, goal, or shared interest. But what’s interesting about the meta version of these interests (the self, the body, thoughts, emotions, communication, meaning, etc.) is that these methods train personal skills with which one can navigate the atomized meaning shards of our present reality.
To ground this out in an example, one framework for navigating meaning, as it relates to “the self,” is Robert Kegan’s theory of adult development,[6] which he outlines in his books The Evolving Self and In Over Our Heads. Kegan’s theory “attends to the development of the activity of meaning-constructing,” and describes a “zone of mediation.” This is the place between an event, and a person’s reaction to that event. He continues, “The zone of mediation where meaning is made is variously called by personality psychologists the ‘ego’ the ‘self,’ the ‘person.’”[7]
Kegan describes personal development as a continuous process of evolution within a person and their meaning-making apparatus, a process which never ends. He takes inspiration from Jean Piaget’s work on childhood developmental stages and extends these stages into adulthood. Just as a child’s sense of how the world works, and of their own place in the world, is continually remade in light of new information obtained while growing up, so it is with adults in light of their ongoing experiences.
Kegan’s model is a linear one with at least five discernible “stages” (not his word) of potential meaning-constructing competencies, the final three of which are typically adult stages. For a fully fleshed-out summary of this framework, see Chapman’s summary,[8] or, in more plain language, see this nice summary from Natali Morad.[9]
To return to the atomized mode mentioned earlier, it is this need to make sense of an atomized world that drives this interest in personal development. As David Chapman says,
Atomization supplies the critical realization that perfect coherence is neither necessary nor even desirable . . . incoherence—the lack of large-scale structures of meaning—does not particularly seem a problem. The task is to surf your own incoherence. Increasingly, this is a practical problem, not an existential threat. We are gradually building skill at it—and this points toward the fluid mode, which accepts incoherence, but can also discover and build patterns within it.[10]
As increasing numbers of people learn to surf their own incoherence, they are building their own local patterns. Then they can begin to surf the world’s incoherence, as well. Currently, these people are getting together around campfires based on specific surfing methods, but increasingly these groups are interacting over other topics. With robust surfing techniques, the same person can now surf around multiple groups and interests, and can gain the skill to drop into, or at least empathize with, almost any other group.
This is how personal development is key to collective navigation.
This skill of surfing uncertainty isn’t easy. Kegan’s model puts this ability, among others, last in his five-stage framework. Chapman would say that our culture is being forced into learning this skill now, as a result of long-term building and competency at the levels of tribal life (premodern), followed by systematic or civilizational life (modern). Now, we are being forced to surf the postmodern age. To think that collectively building great nations, international commerce, globalized trade, and sending rockets to the moon is still not enough to solve all of our problems is extremely daunting, but the need for it is obvious.
Personal development skills start with feelings and the self, but they cannot end there. The online culture war is what communication looks like when we go back to tribal communication styles. There is a lot of work to be done on a personal level to achieve Kegan stage four, which is all about constructing an identity and becoming able to be subject to un-empathetic systems of interaction between people—such as working for a company—that solve some of the problems of tribalism, and from which our notions of free speech and rational debate spring.
At the moment, it is actually harder than before to construct a rational system of identity or to affiliate with some large-scale structure of meaning because culturally these very systems are (correctly) under attack for not working the way they claim to work. To incorporate this stage and then to move forward is a lifelong task, and perhaps is not appropriate or possible for most people. Luckily, it may be that it’s not really necessary for the entire population to arrive at this stage—perhaps a guiding cohort of elders is enough. And of course this is only one framework, with limits to its usefulness.
Either way, I believe there is great potential for personal development to drive and facilitate collective communication and collective action. At every level, people should be able to find others who, by way of personal development strategies, such as the meditative practices that Vervaeke highlights, are discovering and creating local patterns and a local context. Within these patterns, as people gradually travel along personal developmental stages, they learn to riff and create things collectively. We used to adhere to those patterns and meanings that were given to us extrinsically, by institutions, but now that we’ve travelled through the atomized mode, where meaning exists without reference to specific structures, we are learning how to build patterns of meaning by and for ourselves.
Notes
[1] John Vervaeke, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, retrieved online https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpqDUjTsof-kTNpnyWper_Q
[2] Venkatesh Rao, “Weirding Diary: 1,” retrieved online https://www.ribbonfarm.com/series/weirding-diary/
[3] On this topic, see the following summary of David Graeber’s work, retrieved online https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
[4] See David Chapman, “Atomization: The Kaleidoscope of Meaning,” retrieved online https://meaningness.com/atomized-mode
[5] See https://twitter.com/literalbanana/status/1147566443036172294
[6] For a summary, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kegan
[7] See the Rebel Wisdom series, “Robert Kegan: The Evolution of the Self,” retrieved online https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhRNMj6UNYY
[8] David Chapman, “Developing Ethical, Social, and Cognitive Competence,” Vividness, retrieved online https://vividness.live/2015/10/12/developing-ethical-social-and-cognitive-competence/
[9] Natali Morad, “Part 1: How to be an Adult: Kegan’s Theory of Adult Development,” retrieved online https://medium.com/@NataliMorad/how-to-be-an-adult-kegans-theory-of-adult-development-d63f4311b553
[10] Chapman, “Atomization,” para. 27, retrieved online https://meaningness.com/atomized-mode