Amen. It was Lyons who first opened my eyes to the extent of Managerialism, and now I can't unsee it. I was dismayed recently by the announcement of a new DEI initiative at a tiny non-profit that I support. Their team advocates for a remote hiking trail and performs trail maintenance. These are good people who love the outdoors, serving a community of people who will often backpack for weeks in the wilderness. When I sent them some literature about the unintended harms of such policies their response was that without such a rulebook in place, they'd be unable to "responsibly" deal with any future event of discrimination that might arise. Rather, they have hamstrung themselves, abandoning the fluid response-ability to deal with future events with wisdom.
It's painful to see managerialism seep so far into the culture that a tiny outdoor-rec non-profit considers it a self-evident good.
Let’s not throw out the baby with the bath water here. How policies are applied in an organisation is important, but to have a policy promoting diversity, equality and inclusion is not itself a bad thing, quite the opposite. You are arguing for diversity of views to be included and treated with equal respect. The newsletter from the organic vegetable box scheme I use and support tackles this very issue. The result of DEI for them is that their gender pay gap has disappeared, they have more women in senior positions and their staff turnover has halved. He concludes: ‘So we will not be joining the stampede of regressive businesses falling in behind Trump’s bullying rejection of DEI. Making the effort to listen and see the world through others’ eyes helped (our organisation) to become a stronger, more resilient business.’
Nothing. But the principles of embracing diversity, treating people as equals and including people in the conversation have everything to do with any organisation, small or large. The problem arises when an ideology is substituted for real principles.
Well, the E in DEI is "equity," not "equality." And the further intention is equity of outcomes. It's not about equality and fairness and good judgement, but a new hierarchy and a new calculus for "unpersoning" and ignoring the vital differences and vital grounds for good judgement. All of the most important gains for women were made long before DEI hit the scene. Sounds like the vegetable scheme was way behind the times if it needed DEI to hire women and treat them well. The fact is that many smart, openminded people had quite enough of DEI. To seek to give it up is hardly universally a regressive position. That sounds like a comment with little actual thought behind it. Moreover, one doesn't need to agree with Trump or be a supporter of his policies to see the harms and ignorance at work in DEI policies.
If that has been their experience I’m happy to hear it, but research suggests they are in the minority, and I have seen marginalized friends hurt by these policies in my own life.
Don't take my word for it. The link below alone includes over 100 studies on the many ways that diversity programs can backfire, actually harming the communities they aim to help. While the article focuses on diversity trainings, one can see by reading it that many of its arguments apply more broadly and would be equally applicable to more informal attempts at shaping workplace culture.
Here’s a quick excerpt: “Unfortunately, a robust and ever-growing body of empirical literature suggests that diversity-related training typically fails at its stated objectives. It does not seem to meaningfully or durably improve organizational climate or workplace morale; it does not increase collaboration or exchange across lines of difference; it does not improve hiring, retention or promotion of diverse candidates. In fact, the training is often counterproductive with respect to these explicit goals.“
If anyone has been marginalised, they haven’t been included. All these problems arise when the principles of diversity, equity and inclusion are not actually applied and instead you have ideological training. The organisation I referred to did not impose training on the workforce, they employed a coach to hold management to account. The great irony is that Iain’s whole piece is an argument for real diversity of opinion, real equity of respect and he is really inclusive.
From my perspective it's not ironic at all, it's an example of keeping the horse in front of the cart. Consider weight loss as an analogy - when people make weight loss their goal, they tend to fall into crash dieting and consumption of ultra-processed low-cal food-like substances, and the result is poor health and rebound weight gain. If a person instead focusses on living a healthy lifestyle, they will probably lose weight naturally and sustainably.
From my perspective, trainings and coaches and bureaucratic systems to enforce one idea of what DEI should look like are the equivalent of prioritizing weight loss. Instead, if members of an organization orient themselves towards a McGilchristian worldview, the result will be a healthy community that reflects natural and sustainable diversity, inclusion and a model of equality that makes sense for that particular context.
If you read the article I linked, you'll see how it is unfortunately the 'application' of these ideas that can cause the harm, in spite of everybody's very best intentions.
I think we are talking at cross purposes. I am not defending ideological training. I was subjected to some ‘anti-racist’ training 35 years ago and found it insulting. Yes, left brain goal setting will not work without right brain reality checking. I was just giving an example of an approach that worked because instead of training, it proceeded by actually implementing these principles in the organisation in the way people were treated, by changing the behaviour of management. The coach was part of the right brain reality checking.
Why prioritize one approach over another with regard to weight loss?
There is a whole system, an entire culture involved, and if we ignore that, we will get stuck.
Through my 20s, i had to be attentive or I would end up UNDERweight. On the other hand, occasionally, if i gained a few pounds extra, I would run a few extra miles that week, and the weight melted off (I also led an extraordinarily active life, biking around NY City and performing intensely percussive piano music for hours every day)
In my 30s, I started to gain weight - a lot of it, and more so in my 40s. I had no idea why, and having absolutely no interest in calories, I just continued to eat a mostly healthy diet and living a healthy lifestyle (lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, very active physical life, many good social connections, etc)
I discovered my blood pressure had shot up from normal to 160/100 when I was 51. I didn’t know about “good calories” vs “bad calories” so i just decided, “Well, 1500 calories a day sounds good” and lost 35 pounds in 3 months, and pretty much effortlessly kept it off since.
What does this have to do with DEI? Well, why did I gain weight in the 1980s and 90s? Though I kept eating mostly healthy foods, the junk food culture influenced me without my being fully aware of it.
Similarly, you can live by “McGilchristian” principles and still have a profoundly unbalanced society where all the intuitive, mindful relating and hiring will not make up for astounding levels of “inequity” (and NO, it does NOT stand for equality of outcome).
Do you have to rebalance this through rigid, left hemisphere managerial power, control and manipulation? No. Is some DEI very LH? Of course. Is it all that way? Of course not.
One would think attempts to balance RH and LH thinking (not always evident in Iain’s writing and talks despite his clear intuition about the value of it) would be expressed with some greater care.
The other day looked up the website of the school camp location I have fond memories of attending in high school 40+ years ago.
Most of it is devoted to listing the various codes of conducts and staff policies for handling every possible situation imaginable. There appeared to be virtually zero staff discretion in handling 'incidents'. All this 'Process' is fear-driven -- fear of lawsuits, fear of being subject to bureaucratic punishment from higher up the chain, ultimately fear of cancellation and professional ruin if a checklist box is missed.
Just a vignette. But there's plenty more where that came from.
One of the biggest casualties of an overgrown administrative mindset, wedded to a narrow ideological vision, is genuine agency. Where there was once room for individual initiative—professors and students who dared to explore big questions—there’s now a minefield of endless forms, box-ticking rituals, and a political correctness that suffocates open thought.
People who once burned with passion for teaching or healing now find themselves shackled to a system that demands compliance above all else. And when these institutions forget their original mission, they instead become factories of political control. And once that happens, it’s only a matter of time before we lose our own voices as well.
And the real worry is the next generation are selected for low agency from the get go. So it has an amplification effect over time.
This has long been suggested for medicine. The length of study alone tends to weed out the mavericks, so only the plodders get through the university portion then a long residency kills off anyone who slips through.
Bureaucrats of our day focus on creating the right kinds of people; like machines, instead of confronting the hardship that is improving their own personalities.
While I heartily agree with your analysis, and while I think hemisphere functional differences exist and are important, I don't think mentioning them adds anything to your argument here. I tell my patients, when they say "My brain tells me …", "No, you don't even know you have a brain except you have been told. You see and hear, you experience, you have learned, you perceive, you sense, and from all that experience you now think and conclude...." A bit pedantic, but I think more accurate speech. I am a psychiatrist, old enough to get away with it, but I think distinctions, clarifications, are important in psychotherapy especially, as in all of life.
You're pointing to something important here, and I think you're right that focussing on direct experience is often much more fruitful than a mental model. Experience can show me that I exist as a field of consciousness, and that my body appears in the field in the same way as the tree outside my window or the sound of a passing train. Nowhere in that field is an experience of a brain, and recognizing those experiences without the veil of interpretation allows for major insight.
However, I agree with Iain's decision to make the hemisphere framework central to many of his arguments. We're embattled by bad abstractions that are deeply-held assumptions by people accustomed to thinking in a left-hemisphere mode. Giving them an updated model is, in my opinion, a strong step towards helping dissolve the bad models, and that in turn can help them open up to direct experience - pulling back the veils - more readily. I believe we benefit by having both conversations in parallel.
If your world is being destroyed by a thick layer of bureaucrats convinced they understand some abstract vision that eludes you despite all evidence to the contrary, then a discussion of its possible origins is useful. It may not convince the afflicted, but it helps the rest of us.
We all lived through Covid and watched as trained scientists and doctors ignored decades and centuries of established knowledge and practice. Some of that was conformity and mass hysteria, but some of it was left-hemisphere thinking. So I think it does matter.
While out of my depth here, I agree that the left/right hemisphere framing feels abstract and frankly rather cold, even if objectively correct. I can feel and engage with heart/mind or intellectus/ratio much easier and lets face it, it's the approach of thousands of years of wisdom tradition.
With scientific accuracy, explicitness is a virtue. Unfortunately this can come at the price of loosing a lot of the rich metaphor that slips into many other types of writing, usually without our notice. Very few people would, before heading to bed, curl up by the warm glow of a fireplace and read the latest issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (perhaps Michael Levin would).
But it's not what we are describing, but how we attend to it, that makes the difference. When science is seen as a window into, and reflection of, much deeper processes, then biological asymmetries of all kinds, including the evolution of brain lateralisation, can reclaim much of the richness and depth that merely clinical descriptions often tend to obscure from our view. But even Darwin, who saw beauty in evolution everywhere, lamented he didn't spend more time with poetry.
Yes, wisdom traditions are still among the best ways to engage. Thich Nhat Hanh once gave a talk in which he said "Buddha and Māra were a couple of friends who need each other. They look like enemies, but they can support each other. If you have understanding and wisdom, you will know how to handle both. The Buddha needs Māra in order to grow beautifully as a flower, and also Māra needs the Buddha, because Māra has a certain role to play ...Mara didn’t understand. Ananda also didn’t understand. But the Buddha, he understood." It's truly fascinating to consider how both neurology and religion can gesture toward the same underlying reality.
What is most difficult, writes Arendt, is to love the world as it is. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection, but the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
McGilchrist is alerting us to things we might not otherwise have recognized, had those links between the sciences and humanities not been made. Indeed, addressing the metacrisis that is gripping our culture today may depend upon insights that, at first, may appear highly counterintuitive and difficult to access. And so I'll echo CS Peirce, who famously said "Do not block the way of inquiry."
Hear hear. Alas our society is in the grips of those with a vision of their own. And that vision colours all they do and see. For a while I just assumed psychopaths ran everything. They endorsed unpopular views to get on in life but believed none of it. I now realize many believe it all, in thrall to their mental models.
Look at polite society's view of Trump; I am no fan, but nor do I think he is a Hitler. And yet many are deranged at the thought of him as president despite him winning a democratic election. That seems to cut no sway, and nor will calls for courtesy and compassion noted above. Although I agree we should be gracious, and we should work towards a better world with more balance. But it seems further away than ever.
I experience these tensions daily working in an industry whose technology genuinely helps save lives, but which is increasingly regulated both internally and externally by a paralyzing administrative apparatus.
I think often of Auden’s great poem “Under Which Lyre,” which describes our world with an eerie precision, not least his admonitions,
“Thou shalt not worship projects nor / Shall thou or thine bow down before / Administration.”
It’s a perfect summation of the dynamic you describe.
Very well said. It has been said that man feels about truth and God the way he feels about himself. We have been told as long as I have been in the world that humanity are parasites. Not just inclined to selfishness, but utterly disposable upon the earth. Our institutions have been deliberately infected with this manifest nonsense.
It destroys our link to nature and God. It pretends to elevate nature while deifying it's enslavement & destruction, including us. In days gone by people caught on to the ploy of cultivated infections of this kind. They kicked the perpetrators out of the country. They did all they could to stop the infection of lies used to build a man as God religion in the Society of Jesus. Subversion of all liberty of conscience and truth has always served the full agenda of total power over all humanity. It may sound far fetched, because we are living in days where this is so deeply hidden from us, as to make people who tell the truth seem a bit mad. That is no accident.
Our ancestors knew. We need to understand the infection, if we are to actually treat it. Your information is absolutely vital to our search for truth. And God as love. As love freely given, not merely demanded at the point of terror and force. I cannot thank you and all who are coming to this battle in genuine pursuit of the only worthy goal. Truth. Character knows nothing is higher. And this is God. The only one who can raise us up to our full potential, as made in His image.
This is wonderful Iain, thank you! John Vervaeke has this great clip I’ve shared with people at work, talking about how bureaucracies become this complex systems that attempt to navigate the environment, but at some point become so complex (maybe complicated?) that they are harder to navigate than anything they encounter, and collapse. I often think of shipbuilding - it’s probably literally harder to navigate the process of buying a ship for a navy in the west than it is to build it now (a fact that has limited both Europe and Australia, but may be changing). Meanwhile, China, the communist state, pumps them out at an absolutely phenomenal rate. That seems…a strange result.
And I loved your concluding lines! I’ve been chatting to Matt Segall, and he mentioned a term I’ve been thinking about continuously - the infernal logic of much contemporary thinking. We were talking about nuclear deterrence theory but I think you can see it everywhere - a desire for control, the apotheosis of which you can see in (I think) transhumanism and AI.
Every time I read your words Iain, I want everybody I know to read them! And, well, just everybody!
Nietzsche. Are we reaping the results of killing God and still trying to replace him?
Amen. It was Lyons who first opened my eyes to the extent of Managerialism, and now I can't unsee it. I was dismayed recently by the announcement of a new DEI initiative at a tiny non-profit that I support. Their team advocates for a remote hiking trail and performs trail maintenance. These are good people who love the outdoors, serving a community of people who will often backpack for weeks in the wilderness. When I sent them some literature about the unintended harms of such policies their response was that without such a rulebook in place, they'd be unable to "responsibly" deal with any future event of discrimination that might arise. Rather, they have hamstrung themselves, abandoning the fluid response-ability to deal with future events with wisdom.
It's painful to see managerialism seep so far into the culture that a tiny outdoor-rec non-profit considers it a self-evident good.
Spot on ... how sad
Let’s not throw out the baby with the bath water here. How policies are applied in an organisation is important, but to have a policy promoting diversity, equality and inclusion is not itself a bad thing, quite the opposite. You are arguing for diversity of views to be included and treated with equal respect. The newsletter from the organic vegetable box scheme I use and support tackles this very issue. The result of DEI for them is that their gender pay gap has disappeared, they have more women in senior positions and their staff turnover has halved. He concludes: ‘So we will not be joining the stampede of regressive businesses falling in behind Trump’s bullying rejection of DEI. Making the effort to listen and see the world through others’ eyes helped (our organisation) to become a stronger, more resilient business.’
I cannot for the life of me grasp what any of this managerialist cant has to do with the provision of organic vegetables.
Perhaps I need a Master's in Public Policy?
Jaysus Wept. And then promptly filed a workplace bullying complaint with HR.
ngmi.
Nothing. But the principles of embracing diversity, treating people as equals and including people in the conversation have everything to do with any organisation, small or large. The problem arises when an ideology is substituted for real principles.
Well, the E in DEI is "equity," not "equality." And the further intention is equity of outcomes. It's not about equality and fairness and good judgement, but a new hierarchy and a new calculus for "unpersoning" and ignoring the vital differences and vital grounds for good judgement. All of the most important gains for women were made long before DEI hit the scene. Sounds like the vegetable scheme was way behind the times if it needed DEI to hire women and treat them well. The fact is that many smart, openminded people had quite enough of DEI. To seek to give it up is hardly universally a regressive position. That sounds like a comment with little actual thought behind it. Moreover, one doesn't need to agree with Trump or be a supporter of his policies to see the harms and ignorance at work in DEI policies.
Ok. Point taken.
If that has been their experience I’m happy to hear it, but research suggests they are in the minority, and I have seen marginalized friends hurt by these policies in my own life.
Don't take my word for it. The link below alone includes over 100 studies on the many ways that diversity programs can backfire, actually harming the communities they aim to help. While the article focuses on diversity trainings, one can see by reading it that many of its arguments apply more broadly and would be equally applicable to more informal attempts at shaping workplace culture.
Here’s a quick excerpt: “Unfortunately, a robust and ever-growing body of empirical literature suggests that diversity-related training typically fails at its stated objectives. It does not seem to meaningfully or durably improve organizational climate or workplace morale; it does not increase collaboration or exchange across lines of difference; it does not improve hiring, retention or promotion of diverse candidates. In fact, the training is often counterproductive with respect to these explicit goals.“
https://musaalgharbi.com/2020/09/16/diversity-important-related-training-terrible/
If anyone has been marginalised, they haven’t been included. All these problems arise when the principles of diversity, equity and inclusion are not actually applied and instead you have ideological training. The organisation I referred to did not impose training on the workforce, they employed a coach to hold management to account. The great irony is that Iain’s whole piece is an argument for real diversity of opinion, real equity of respect and he is really inclusive.
From my perspective it's not ironic at all, it's an example of keeping the horse in front of the cart. Consider weight loss as an analogy - when people make weight loss their goal, they tend to fall into crash dieting and consumption of ultra-processed low-cal food-like substances, and the result is poor health and rebound weight gain. If a person instead focusses on living a healthy lifestyle, they will probably lose weight naturally and sustainably.
From my perspective, trainings and coaches and bureaucratic systems to enforce one idea of what DEI should look like are the equivalent of prioritizing weight loss. Instead, if members of an organization orient themselves towards a McGilchristian worldview, the result will be a healthy community that reflects natural and sustainable diversity, inclusion and a model of equality that makes sense for that particular context.
If you read the article I linked, you'll see how it is unfortunately the 'application' of these ideas that can cause the harm, in spite of everybody's very best intentions.
I think we are talking at cross purposes. I am not defending ideological training. I was subjected to some ‘anti-racist’ training 35 years ago and found it insulting. Yes, left brain goal setting will not work without right brain reality checking. I was just giving an example of an approach that worked because instead of training, it proceeded by actually implementing these principles in the organisation in the way people were treated, by changing the behaviour of management. The coach was part of the right brain reality checking.
Why prioritize one approach over another with regard to weight loss?
There is a whole system, an entire culture involved, and if we ignore that, we will get stuck.
Through my 20s, i had to be attentive or I would end up UNDERweight. On the other hand, occasionally, if i gained a few pounds extra, I would run a few extra miles that week, and the weight melted off (I also led an extraordinarily active life, biking around NY City and performing intensely percussive piano music for hours every day)
In my 30s, I started to gain weight - a lot of it, and more so in my 40s. I had no idea why, and having absolutely no interest in calories, I just continued to eat a mostly healthy diet and living a healthy lifestyle (lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, very active physical life, many good social connections, etc)
I discovered my blood pressure had shot up from normal to 160/100 when I was 51. I didn’t know about “good calories” vs “bad calories” so i just decided, “Well, 1500 calories a day sounds good” and lost 35 pounds in 3 months, and pretty much effortlessly kept it off since.
What does this have to do with DEI? Well, why did I gain weight in the 1980s and 90s? Though I kept eating mostly healthy foods, the junk food culture influenced me without my being fully aware of it.
Similarly, you can live by “McGilchristian” principles and still have a profoundly unbalanced society where all the intuitive, mindful relating and hiring will not make up for astounding levels of “inequity” (and NO, it does NOT stand for equality of outcome).
Do you have to rebalance this through rigid, left hemisphere managerial power, control and manipulation? No. Is some DEI very LH? Of course. Is it all that way? Of course not.
One would think attempts to balance RH and LH thinking (not always evident in Iain’s writing and talks despite his clear intuition about the value of it) would be expressed with some greater care.
Indeed. The problem is not DEI but what happens to it when the management mentality espouses it.
Those who can - do. Those who can't do, but can schmooze - manage.
The other day looked up the website of the school camp location I have fond memories of attending in high school 40+ years ago.
Most of it is devoted to listing the various codes of conducts and staff policies for handling every possible situation imaginable. There appeared to be virtually zero staff discretion in handling 'incidents'. All this 'Process' is fear-driven -- fear of lawsuits, fear of being subject to bureaucratic punishment from higher up the chain, ultimately fear of cancellation and professional ruin if a checklist box is missed.
Just a vignette. But there's plenty more where that came from.
Amen! Reading this makes me want to pray and take up smoking again.
So true, and just when I was giving up my daily cigar, every other day, for lent!
One of the biggest casualties of an overgrown administrative mindset, wedded to a narrow ideological vision, is genuine agency. Where there was once room for individual initiative—professors and students who dared to explore big questions—there’s now a minefield of endless forms, box-ticking rituals, and a political correctness that suffocates open thought.
People who once burned with passion for teaching or healing now find themselves shackled to a system that demands compliance above all else. And when these institutions forget their original mission, they instead become factories of political control. And once that happens, it’s only a matter of time before we lose our own voices as well.
And the real worry is the next generation are selected for low agency from the get go. So it has an amplification effect over time.
This has long been suggested for medicine. The length of study alone tends to weed out the mavericks, so only the plodders get through the university portion then a long residency kills off anyone who slips through.
Bureaucrats of our day focus on creating the right kinds of people; like machines, instead of confronting the hardship that is improving their own personalities.
What a treat to receive such regular posts from you, Dr McGilchrist. Many thanks!
While I heartily agree with your analysis, and while I think hemisphere functional differences exist and are important, I don't think mentioning them adds anything to your argument here. I tell my patients, when they say "My brain tells me …", "No, you don't even know you have a brain except you have been told. You see and hear, you experience, you have learned, you perceive, you sense, and from all that experience you now think and conclude...." A bit pedantic, but I think more accurate speech. I am a psychiatrist, old enough to get away with it, but I think distinctions, clarifications, are important in psychotherapy especially, as in all of life.
You're pointing to something important here, and I think you're right that focussing on direct experience is often much more fruitful than a mental model. Experience can show me that I exist as a field of consciousness, and that my body appears in the field in the same way as the tree outside my window or the sound of a passing train. Nowhere in that field is an experience of a brain, and recognizing those experiences without the veil of interpretation allows for major insight.
However, I agree with Iain's decision to make the hemisphere framework central to many of his arguments. We're embattled by bad abstractions that are deeply-held assumptions by people accustomed to thinking in a left-hemisphere mode. Giving them an updated model is, in my opinion, a strong step towards helping dissolve the bad models, and that in turn can help them open up to direct experience - pulling back the veils - more readily. I believe we benefit by having both conversations in parallel.
If your world is being destroyed by a thick layer of bureaucrats convinced they understand some abstract vision that eludes you despite all evidence to the contrary, then a discussion of its possible origins is useful. It may not convince the afflicted, but it helps the rest of us.
We all lived through Covid and watched as trained scientists and doctors ignored decades and centuries of established knowledge and practice. Some of that was conformity and mass hysteria, but some of it was left-hemisphere thinking. So I think it does matter.
While out of my depth here, I agree that the left/right hemisphere framing feels abstract and frankly rather cold, even if objectively correct. I can feel and engage with heart/mind or intellectus/ratio much easier and lets face it, it's the approach of thousands of years of wisdom tradition.
With scientific accuracy, explicitness is a virtue. Unfortunately this can come at the price of loosing a lot of the rich metaphor that slips into many other types of writing, usually without our notice. Very few people would, before heading to bed, curl up by the warm glow of a fireplace and read the latest issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (perhaps Michael Levin would).
But it's not what we are describing, but how we attend to it, that makes the difference. When science is seen as a window into, and reflection of, much deeper processes, then biological asymmetries of all kinds, including the evolution of brain lateralisation, can reclaim much of the richness and depth that merely clinical descriptions often tend to obscure from our view. But even Darwin, who saw beauty in evolution everywhere, lamented he didn't spend more time with poetry.
Yes, wisdom traditions are still among the best ways to engage. Thich Nhat Hanh once gave a talk in which he said "Buddha and Māra were a couple of friends who need each other. They look like enemies, but they can support each other. If you have understanding and wisdom, you will know how to handle both. The Buddha needs Māra in order to grow beautifully as a flower, and also Māra needs the Buddha, because Māra has a certain role to play ...Mara didn’t understand. Ananda also didn’t understand. But the Buddha, he understood." It's truly fascinating to consider how both neurology and religion can gesture toward the same underlying reality.
https://plumvillage.org/transcriptions/mara-and-the-buddha-embracing-our-suffering
What is most difficult, writes Arendt, is to love the world as it is. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection, but the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
McGilchrist is alerting us to things we might not otherwise have recognized, had those links between the sciences and humanities not been made. Indeed, addressing the metacrisis that is gripping our culture today may depend upon insights that, at first, may appear highly counterintuitive and difficult to access. And so I'll echo CS Peirce, who famously said "Do not block the way of inquiry."
Hear hear. Alas our society is in the grips of those with a vision of their own. And that vision colours all they do and see. For a while I just assumed psychopaths ran everything. They endorsed unpopular views to get on in life but believed none of it. I now realize many believe it all, in thrall to their mental models.
Look at polite society's view of Trump; I am no fan, but nor do I think he is a Hitler. And yet many are deranged at the thought of him as president despite him winning a democratic election. That seems to cut no sway, and nor will calls for courtesy and compassion noted above. Although I agree we should be gracious, and we should work towards a better world with more balance. But it seems further away than ever.
I experience these tensions daily working in an industry whose technology genuinely helps save lives, but which is increasingly regulated both internally and externally by a paralyzing administrative apparatus.
I think often of Auden’s great poem “Under Which Lyre,” which describes our world with an eerie precision, not least his admonitions,
“Thou shalt not worship projects nor / Shall thou or thine bow down before / Administration.”
It’s a perfect summation of the dynamic you describe.
Very well said. It has been said that man feels about truth and God the way he feels about himself. We have been told as long as I have been in the world that humanity are parasites. Not just inclined to selfishness, but utterly disposable upon the earth. Our institutions have been deliberately infected with this manifest nonsense.
It destroys our link to nature and God. It pretends to elevate nature while deifying it's enslavement & destruction, including us. In days gone by people caught on to the ploy of cultivated infections of this kind. They kicked the perpetrators out of the country. They did all they could to stop the infection of lies used to build a man as God religion in the Society of Jesus. Subversion of all liberty of conscience and truth has always served the full agenda of total power over all humanity. It may sound far fetched, because we are living in days where this is so deeply hidden from us, as to make people who tell the truth seem a bit mad. That is no accident.
Our ancestors knew. We need to understand the infection, if we are to actually treat it. Your information is absolutely vital to our search for truth. And God as love. As love freely given, not merely demanded at the point of terror and force. I cannot thank you and all who are coming to this battle in genuine pursuit of the only worthy goal. Truth. Character knows nothing is higher. And this is God. The only one who can raise us up to our full potential, as made in His image.
This is wonderful Iain, thank you! John Vervaeke has this great clip I’ve shared with people at work, talking about how bureaucracies become this complex systems that attempt to navigate the environment, but at some point become so complex (maybe complicated?) that they are harder to navigate than anything they encounter, and collapse. I often think of shipbuilding - it’s probably literally harder to navigate the process of buying a ship for a navy in the west than it is to build it now (a fact that has limited both Europe and Australia, but may be changing). Meanwhile, China, the communist state, pumps them out at an absolutely phenomenal rate. That seems…a strange result.
And I loved your concluding lines! I’ve been chatting to Matt Segall, and he mentioned a term I’ve been thinking about continuously - the infernal logic of much contemporary thinking. We were talking about nuclear deterrence theory but I think you can see it everywhere - a desire for control, the apotheosis of which you can see in (I think) transhumanism and AI.
Anyway, thank you again!
Can you post a link to the Vervaeke talk? I love his work.
So it was just a little clip in his longer talk with Theo Von. It was only a few minutes long but hit straight between the eyes!
What I read in this post:
"Let's be reasonable and agree with me."
What I didn't read in this post:
Any resolution to the Paradox of Tolerance
Tolerance -- the inner arising of "I accept the universe" -- is a wonderful state. You
cont'd) *You must be tolerant* is vile coercive attempted witchcraft -- worst-case left hemisphere?
‘Woman with cigarette’ v 🫃
We are here.
Thanks to your work, we can articulate why. 🙏