Why Does the World Feel Like It's Falling Apart? A Quintessential Perspective

Most humans experience the present cultural and socioeconomic environment as stressful, confusing, and dangerous. Let's explain why, from a cosmic perspective.

      When virtue does not flourish, this is due not to the “presence of evil” in the 
      world, but rather to widespread psychological and spiritual confusion. 
            .The Daoist Tradition

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For many folks these days—a great many folks—the world around us seems collapsing into dissolution. Deep-seated expectations about how life should unfold no longer find purchase in our social sphere. A vibrant new vocabulary has arisen to express the experiential gap between our social expectations and our social reality:

• Doomscrolling

• Late-Stage Capitalism¹

• Hyperpolarization

• Blackpill

• Cultural Silos

• Neoliberal Precarity

• Retrenchment of Inequality

• Cancel Culture

• Epistemic Crisis

• Climate Crisis

• Science Crisis

• Crisis of Care

• Civility Crisis

• Polycrisis and Permacrisis

• Lying Flat / Let It Rot

I myself don’t feel such dislocation or unease, which makes it easier to contemplate and evaluate the social dynamics of our age from a broad perspective. I feel joy, peace, connection, and a great love for the world unfolding around us. I think it’s one of the very best times to be alive.

I should emphasize, again, that I am not political. I am not partisan. My joy does not arise because I perceive my personal politics reflected in the society around me. No, I see no sign or evidence of my personal politics in American society and possess no hope that American partisan politics will eventually accommodate my views. My political sensibility is not represented within any American faction.

It is absolutely not the case that I secretly prefer one party over the other and I’m just hiding my preference. No. They are both equally responsible for conditions in American society right now. Both equally blameworthy and unwise and incoherent—which is to say, both are tribal and I hold no interest in tribes or tribal thinking or tribal social dynamics, except as opportunity for superlearning.

Though I am not at all partisan, I am keenly aware of the social, political, economic, and military turbulence of our age. But my perspective on human life on Earth in the 2020s is rooted upon my expansive understanding of the nature of reality. My union of physics and mindscience, my communion with the Quintessence, my superlearning unity of knowledge and action.

In this article, I list what I perceive as five of the main drivers of the present turbulence in America and across the globe, based upon a Quintessential perspective. Based upon a “god’s eye” perspective on the Commonality—a perspective rooted upon the grand unification of physics and purpose.

I will describe each factor briefly in this article, then devote one or more articles to each.

Five Drivers of Twenty-First Century Social Turmoil

• Elimination of STRUGGLE.

• Digital deconstruction and distribution of SELF.

• Rejiggering the Human SEX CYCLE.

• Neverending SOCIAL ACTIVISM.

• Individual KNOWLEDGE SATURATION.

All five factors are related. They are all related to an emergent form of mental dynamics appearing on Earth for the very first time in the twenty-first century:

Hypermind dynamics.

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The most concise description of the source of all the apparent social turmoil and unrest around us is to say A hypermind is beginning to form out of the digital conjoining of human brains.

The hypermind is the mechanical mode of thinking we find on the fifth rung of the Ladder of Purpose.

Just as the unfolding of aimless physics gives rise to aimless cosmic structures like galaxies and black holes, the unfolding of purpose in the universe gives rise to purposeful cosmic structures, the most important and universe-spanning of which is the Ladder of Purpose.

The dynamics of consciousness emerge on the third rung, in module minds.

The dynamics of language emerge on the fourth rung, in superminds (such as a human community or city).

Internet technologies are establishing new supermind-to-supermind dynamics that are giving birth to a hypermind on Earth.

Humans are perfectly equipped for living a life in a supermind. Our brain is loaded up with an abundance of supermind circuitry—neural dynamics for language, and social cognition, and tribal politics. A natural propensity for forming groups, adopting social norms, establishing and honoring community beliefs and traditions, and communicating effectively in groups. The idea of countries and sports teams and feminism and communism and fascism and unions and protests and NGO’s all come very naturally to the brains of Homo sapiens.

Our biologically evolved minds are designed to think in terms of tribes and tribal conflict. We are built to think in terms of supermind dynamics.

We are not built to think in terms of hypermind dynamics. So we experience confusion, disorientation, dislocation, fear in this new psychological regime.

This isn’t the first time humans have encountered radical new social dynamics that our biological brains never evolved to confront. The first major blow to human spiritual integrity came with the rise of the MARKETPLACE in Bronze Age civilizations, which then became all-encompassing in the Iron Age (roughly 1200-500 BCE).

Human brains did not possess circuitry for managing the strange new social dynamics of the market. Buying, selling, cheating, gouging, stealing, saving, investing. Brand new concepts of rich and poor emerged, followed by a new social hierarchy arranged around these concepts. Humans who deployed new social skills like ACQUIRING and HOARDING and CORNERING THE MARKET could attain power over other humans by virtue of accumulating wealth, creating new power dynamics rooted upon the confusing new marketplace dynamics.

The marketplace was a spiritual crisis for humankind, and led to the blossoming of the Axial Age religions which offered new spiritual frameworks for coping with market dynamics—frameworks rooted upon the existing supermind dynamics of the human brain. Spiritual figures like Buddha, Jesus, and Socrates preached kindness towards one’s neighbors and moral responsibility. They preached love, compassion, restraint, self-discipline, and fairness in the marketplace.

The Axial Age prophets offered a new vision of social and psychic dynamics that enabled humans to live a life of fulfillment, meaning, social harmony, and moral rectitude in the face of the disruptive social forces of the marketplace.

Similarly, the hypermind thrusts humans into another radical new social environment completely unsuited to our evolved brains. We do not possess the necessary neural wiring to cope with social media and the immense social changes wrought by the Internet. What is ultimately needed is a new spiritual framework suited for the new disruptions and disorientations of social media.

The religious frameworks worked out 2,500 years ago are not at all suited for our novel world of digitized interactions.

Let’s quickly review five disruptive factors emerging from our new digitized hypermind that wreck our brain’s hard-wired social dynamics.

.3 Elimination of STRUGGLE.

Struggle is a deep concept, essential for understanding thought, consciousness, meaning, and the Commonality itself.

What struggles, exactly? Purpose struggles.

Struggle is an attempt at making a desired change in the world, and encountering resistance that you must willfully push through to enact the desired change.

Your brain is designed for struggle. Your body is designed for struggle.

Your body is designed to struggle with whole foods. Your body is designed to change almonds and lentils and oats and cabbage and mangoes and carrots. Your body is designed to break down fiber and collagen, tough, digestion-resistant materials.

Ultra-processed foods like cheese puffs and Pop Tarts and Pepsi and hot dogs sidestep the struggle. They don’t require intense effort from your gut bacteria. They slide on through.

It’s like having an army trained to fight a war lying around with nothing to do. Eventually, if the army isn’t struggling with almonds and cabbage and carrots, then it will find something else to attack—namely, your gut. This is the most perilous consequence of consuming ultra-processed foods—your gut bacteria start to eat you.

Another example is your immune system. It, too, is designed for struggle. It is designed to get exposed to pathogens from the moment of birth and struggle with them in order to build up an immune response and resistance. But by creating a sterile ultraclean living environment for infants and toddlers, the body does not experience the struggle it expects. So the unoccupied immune system army finds something else to struggle with—your body. That’s the source of allergies and asthma and other immune problems.

Similarly, your brain is designed for struggle. Learning about the world is a struggle, and your brain is well-equipped for the struggle. Your brain has the neural equivalent of gut bacteria designed explicitly and exclusively to help you learn. Your neural “gut bacteria” is designed to struggle with new ideas and skills in order to learn them.

And just like your gut bacteria, if you decide to sidestep your brain’s natural biological processes and consume ultra-processed knowledge (from chatGPT, for instance), all the circuitry designed for the struggle of learning goes unused. It, too, is designed for constant effort, so if you abandon that effort your brain will find something else to struggle with—most commonly, conspiracy theories.

Left unchecked, our natural human desire to create a painless, frictionless, disembodied world of instant gratification and no suffering dooms us to endless suffering.

Every soul needs struggle to grow, connect, understand, and love.

Every soul needs struggle to continue existing as a soul.

.4 Digital deconstruction and distribution of SELF.

This is perhaps the single most destructive and dangerous aspect of social media.

The human self is built out of very specific mechanical dynamics. You—your sense of who you are, your personal identity—is constructed out of cyclical neural activity.

The neural activity that forms the human self evolved to function in communities of humans who interact face-to-face. The neural activity that forms the human self did not evolve to function in online communities. There are particular mechanical design features of Internet-mediated interactions that severely disrupt these natural Self-establishing and Self-maintaining biological dynamics.

I will devote one or several articles to this urgent and illuminating topic. For now, here is the core idea.

The self is formed out of loops of social interaction with other minds. If you grow up alone on a desert island, you will not develop a self. (This has been empirically demonstrated.²) When humans evolved the neural circuitry for managing these social loops that generate the self, all the social loops were based upon face-to-face interactions between you and another person as well as all the face-to-face interactions within your local community. What mattered for defining your self was what other people said about you, in person or behind your back, as behind-the-back gossip could influence the way other people interacted with you in their social loops.

Ultimately, your self was based upon your local community who knew you directly and interacted with you daily and discussed you internally. All the loops that generate the self looped through the tribe you belonged to and through the network effects of your native community.

All the mental dynamics involved with the creation of human selves has been radically disrupted by social media. Now the social loops that establish and maintain self are not traveling through local, physical, face-to-face communities, as they evolved to do. They are traveling through inchoate, formless, digital vectors utterly lacking the material reality our brain’s Self-system expects and needs.

Because our selves are now getting created and sustained by digital forces rather than the face-to-face struggle our brain was designed for, the human self in the Digital Age has become far more fragile and brittle and distorted, leading to all manner of pathological behavior.

Our Self is getting decentralized and distributed across the Internet, instead of getting embedded within our local community.

The social media problem is ultimately the same as the problem with ultraprocessed food, ultraclean environments, and ultraprocessed knowledge: the brain expects to struggle with real-world human animals to form a self, but instead gets a self formed of Cheetos, Skittles, Clorox, and ChatGPT.

.5 Rejiggering the Human SEX CYCLE

I’m most reluctant to discuss this one because it is politically loaded, and I am not partisan. I will discuss this factor in detail in several other articles where I will share extra-large helpings of data and evidence, but for now recall I am author of A Billion Wicked Thoughts.

The biggest story of the twenty first century is probably the emergence of the hypermind. But the single biggest human story of the twenty-first century is the ascension of women. Women discovering themselves. Women asserting themselves. Women defining themselves.

It’s hardly possible to believe this, but the twenty-first century—right now!—is the very first time in human history when women possessed anything remotely like the current level of empowerment. There is no precursor. There’s been special women, and aristocratic women, and communities of women who were empowered and spent introspective effort to define themselves on their own terms—such women have existed, but not in a widespread manner and not across an entire society.

Women’s attitudes, values, beliefs, habits, behaviors, sexuality, finances, psychology, and politics have all transformed radically over the past fifty years, but really since the advent of social media. The beachhead for the Internet-driven revolution of women was fan fiction, the first time women enjoyed a private, open-ended creative community where they could share and explore their own fantasies without fear of male pushback or peer judgment. A community that formed spontaneously once the opportunity was there.

What made this radical revolution possible was three essential and overlapping conditions—society-wide safety and security for women in Western democracies; a stable, affordable, easy-to-use Internet that empowered female brains to maximally engage in the social dynamics their brain evolved to specialize in; and a dramatic reduction in the social spaces and social interactions that favored male-brain dynamics (such as clearing land on the American frontier).

In short, women’s brains are designed for high-intensity social cognition and social interaction. For stories and relationships and communities, all of which are everpresent and frictionless on the Internet.

So there are brand new and unprecedented female dynamics, social dynamics, human dynamics on Earth, shaping and served by the Internet.

But men and women are biologically and mechanically locked into an inviolable cycle of sexual procreation. Our brains are designed to interact with one another. Male brains evolved to interact with female brains and bodies, and female brains evolved to interact with male brains and bodies. Our biology is loaded with mechanics designed to perpetuate the male-female cycle of interaction.

But now, these mechanics no longer function as designed.

The human cycle is askew.

.6 Neverending TRIBAL ACTIVISM.

In nineteenth century America, blacks were slaves, women could not vote, and gays were ostracized or attacked.

Civil rights movements arose to rectify these social injustices. Marvelous and marvelously effective civil rights movements. So effective, in fact—they won!

But with activism, victory is never acknowledged. It’s a neverending treadmill, like the euphemism treadmill, because every human can find a reason their own life could be better, if only someone else would change their behavior.

Social and civil activism in the West has become divorced from genuine struggle and instead has become largely performative and tribal, contributing to hyperpolarization, empathy reduction, and the suppression of productive social goals.

All hypercharged by social media, so folks feel justified in attacking strangers online because of the attacker’s tribal activism.

.7 Individual KNOWLEDGE SATURATION

We’re all familiar with economic inequality—Elon Musk’s net worth is more than four million times the national average—but another grave problem that’s rather new is knowledge inequality, a problem that will only grow worse with AI.

We all imagine that just because the human race gets smarter, we get smarter individually, too. We’d like to think that we’d be smarter than an average person from the nineteenth century, or certainly the third century.

But regardless of the amount of knowledge stored in a society, an individual brain is limited to what they can learn over the course of a lifetime. A person cannot study physics for 500 years. A person cannot practice the piano for two centuries. All a person can learn is what they interact with over the course of their short life.

Currently, human education is set up around the world so that young people attend school, then college, then possibly graduate school, at which time most humans’ period of focused learning comes to an end. Some people continue on to research or scholarly roles where they will continue learning, though in this case the additional knowledge being learned is almost always narrow and career-specific.

For most people, they will learn a major or a trade (chemistry! accounting! coding! hair styling! saxophone! Incan knotted talking strings!) that they will continue actively learning about over their career, but outside of that, there will be very limited learning.

The problem is—the human race has now accumulated so much knowledge that this traditional approach to learning is now wholly inadequate for the epistemic challenges of the twenty-first century.

As a consequence, everyone now feels bewildered by the world. There’s too much new stuff for most people, too many changes, too many movements, too many products, too many choices and options and dangers to keep track of and understand. Cryptocurrency, generative AI, self-driving cars, drone swarms—most people don’t have the room in their lives to learn about all these new technologies and their mechanics. (My elderly parents, in their 80s, are stranded because the ever-changing updates of Apple products have left them unable to use their phones and television, familiar appliances they’ve used all their lives, now too complicated to operate.)

There’s a deep and ever-growing mismatch between what our educational system teaches and what citizens need today to make sense of society and make good choices. The perniciousness of this problem is compounded because the Western educational system has bifurcated, so that “good” educational opportunities are available to affluent families, while “bad” educational opportunities are available to everyone else—yet, the “good” educational opportunities are not objectively good, they are simply better than the public options. Affluent families are not motivated to change the system because they are getting a better relative education, which is all that matters in the competition for good careers and lives. Less affluent families are motivated to change the system—but only so they get the same opportunities as the affluent families.

We’re creating citizens who don’t really understand anything in the world around them, but instead of blaming themselves and their lack of education, they are compelled by tribal activism to blame others, or compelled by their lack of struggle to engage in conspiracy theories.

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All five of these factors contribute to hypermind dynamics and are influenced by hypermind dynamics.

A highly-industrialized and highly-networked society eliminates struggle, thereby facilitating hypermind connectivity.

The digital deconstruction and decentralized distribution of the Self is pure hypermind dynamics. This is what happens to the fourth-rung mental structure of the self when placed inside fifth-rung dynamics.

The rejiggering of the human sex cycle is strongly facilitated by online living and hypermind dynamics.

Social media fuels social activism with the power of nuclear fusion, so what was previously a formidable problem has become an intractable problem. Social activism powers the hypermind in large part, the purposeful dynamics of activism both giving shape to the hypermind and getting empowered by the dynamics of the hypermind.

And even though early advocates of the Internet suggested that future humans would be much more educated and intelligent through their engagement with the Internet, the opposite has proven true. There is a low ceiling on how much people can learn from watching videos or scrolling through pictures or responding to tweets, and chatGPT is ultraprocessed knowledge that disrupts learning.

Rather than promoting INDIVIDUAL SELF-IMPROVEMENT AND LEARNING, the Internet and social media promote hypermind dynamics that redistribute knowledge in an unprincipled and decentralized fashion that reduces individual perspective and intelligence.

The human race is getting swallowed by the hypermind.

Without a brand new spiritual framework that acknowledges the radical new human predicament, we will continue to feel the world around us is falling to pieces, when in fact something huge and new is being created that humans are oblivious to.

1. I’m always curious—in another 5,000 years, what will we call capitalism? Post-post-post-very-very-late-stage-capitalism?

2. In Chapter 17 of our book Journey of the Mind, we explore individuals who were raised in complete isolation and never formed language. They are wholly unable to survive on their own, and have no sense of personal identity.