The Taproot Podcast - Collide-A-Scope: How the Internet is Fusing Our Brains and Changing Therapy, Culture and Politics

Episode Date: March 15, 2026

How do you know the blue you see is the same blue I see? We use the same word, but do we share the same experience? This ancient philosophical puzzle has become the defining crisis of our time. We're living through a moment where people use identical words and mean completely different things—where the same sentence can be a factual claim, a tribal signal, a joke, and a weapon simultaneously. In this episode of The Mirror World series, clinical director and psychotherapist Joel Blackstock, LICSW-S, explores the "collide-a-scope"—the moment when parallel realities can no longer stay separate through reflection and begin grinding against each other like gears that don't mesh. THE FUSED BRAIN What happens when you surgically connect multiple living brains? They synchronize. They reorganize. They form a collective organism. This thought experiment from qEEG brain mapping provides the perfect metaphor for what's happening to us now. The internet has wired us together into a vast neural network—and just like an individual brain can develop neuroses, this collective brain is experiencing profound cognitive dissonance. THE DUAL LANGUAGE OF THE INTERNET Media theorist Walter Ong predicted that electronic media would thrust us into "secondary orality"—combining the permanence of print with the participatory rhythms of oral culture. The internet meme is the ultimate artifact of this fusion: mythic archetypes paired with hyper-literal text, operating on two frequencies simultaneously. We have never before spoken different languages using the same words. THOUGHT AS A SYSTEM Quantum physicist David Bohm warned in 1994 that thought is not something we do—it's something that happens to us. Collective thought has become so automatic that our individual thoughts are increasingly controlled by the collective without our noticing. And that was before social media, before smartphones, before algorithmic amplification. The system has been turbocharged. THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE Guy Debord saw it coming: all that was directly lived has become mere representation. The spectacle isn't just entertainment—it's a social relationship between people mediated by images. It colonizes everyday life, structures our thought, captures even our resistance. You can know social media is manipulating you and still be manipulated, because the knowing happens within the spectacle. THE COLLECTIVE PATIENT Here's the radical claim: collective psychology now functions like individual psychology. Pathology, personality disorders, grandiosity, delusions, splitting from reality—they're happening at the collective level, in near real-time. Groups of humanity can now be analyzed almost the same way you'd analyze a patient in therapy. You can identify the defenses, trace the trauma, watch the collective do exactly what an individual does when confronted with something they can't face. DIGITAL COLONIZATION The Steve Bannon, Trump, 4chan, alt-right phenomenon wasn't just politics—it was networks of the collective brain expanding, sussing out weaker regions, finding wounds and grievances, colonizing them at the speed of thought. Traditional colonialism needed ships and armies and decades. Digital colonization happens before resistance can organize. The neural pathway is laid before anyone notices. THE STAGES OF DEFLECTION Watch humanity move through the same defense mechanisms as a therapy patient avoiding change: It didn't happen Okay it happened, but it's not real Okay it's real, but it doesn't matter Okay it matters, but we can't do anything about it Okay maybe something could be done, but someone else will do it Okay it's not getting solved, but it's someone else's fault Okay it's going to take us all out, but we deserve it Watch climate discourse. Watch inequality discourse. You'll see these exact stages playing out collectively in real time. THE MIRROR WORLD The parallel objectivities aren't just tribal disagreements—they're self-contained systems of representation that are coherent and reproducible but not valid. They don't point back to anything real. When official metrics say the economy is doing well while patients can't afford a $30 copay, those metrics are reliable but not valid. We feel this disconnect—but we've been convinced the solution lies inside the metrics. This is gaslighting at civilizational scale. THE 1960s PARALLEL "Turn on, tune in, drop out" recognized the system was sick. And they weren't wrong—the institutions were corrupt, the Vietnam War was built on lies, consumer society was producing alienation. But the counterculture won the cultural war and lost everything else. By 1980, rebellion had become a marketing strategy. Symbolic victory was captured and neutralized while material defeat was total. We're at risk of making the same mistake. THE COLLISION Peter Sloterdijk described modern life as "foam"—countless bubbles providing micro-environments, each its own immunological container. The bubbles worked for a while. But material crises don't care which reality you inhabit. Climate change crosses all boundaries. Pandemics don't check your epistemological commitments. The bubbles are colliding now. Not reflecting—colliding. Grinding like gears that don't mesh. In a kaleidoscope, mirrors create beautiful patterns. In a collide-a-scope, the mirrors themselves are moving, crashing, shattering. THE WAY THROUGH The biggest step is recognizing that trauma treatment is self-evidently necessary—not as luxury, as foundation. Trauma fuels the blind spots. The parallel realities are trauma responses at collective scale. Therapy itself has to change. We have to learn to actually live together—not manage or avoid each other. Western history is largely the story of managing avoidance: tolerance as sophisticated avoidance, transactions as connection without vulnerability, rights as protection from rather than relationship with. Connection without internal avoidance. That's the task. The parts of yourself you can't face become the parts of others you can't tolerate. We need to see ourselves as multiplicities—communities of parts—and stop splitting thought from emotion. The Cartesian divide is part of what broke us. The mirrors are shattering. The gears are grinding. The collision is here. What we build from the fragments depends on whether we can finally stop avoiding—ourselves, each other, reality itself. ABOUT THE SHOW: www.GetTherapyBirmingham.com   TAGS: metamodernism, collective psychology, trauma therapy, David Bohm, Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, Walter Ong, secondary orality, meme culture, digital colonization, parallel realities, post-truth, Peter Sloterdijk, collective trauma, IFS therapy, parts work, Internal Family Systems, depth psychology, cultural criticism, media theory, political psychology, social media psychology, consciousness, cognitive dissonance, polarization, tribalism, epistemology, philosophy of mind, psychotherapy, mental health, collective healing, systems theory, Jungian psychology, trauma-informed, neoliberalism critique, Frankfurt School, critical theory, internet culture, 4chan, alt-right, counterculture, 1960s, Timothy Leary, collective unconscious, mass psychology, social psychology, complexity theory, emergence, neural networks, brain science, qEEG, Birmingham therapy, Alabama therapist, complex trauma, PTSD, dissociation, emotional regulation, somatic therapy, body-based therapy, Brainspotting, ETT, integrative therapy, holistic psychology, transpersonal psychology, spiritual psychology, meaning crisis, nihilism, existential psychology, phenomenology, hermeneutics, postmodernism, sincerity and irony, authenticity, alienation, anomie, social fragmentation, culture war, political polarization, fake news, misinformation, disinformation, information warfare, attention economy, surveillance capitalism, algorithmic amplification, filter bubbles, echo chambers, radicalization, deradicalization, healing polarization, bridging divides, difficult conversations, conflict resolution, relational therapy, attachment theory, developmental trauma, adverse childhood experiences, ACEs, intergenerational trauma, collective memory, historical trauma, cultural trauma, social healing, community healing, collective resilience, post-traumatic growth, meaning-making, narrative therapy, constructivism, social constructionism, embodied cognition, 4E cognition, extended mind, distributed cognition, enactivism, phenomenological psychology KEYWORDS metamodernism explained, collective trauma therapy, why society feels broken, David Bohm thought as a system, Guy Debord society of the spectacle explained, understanding political polarization, trauma and politics, why we can't agree on facts, parallel realities psychology, meme culture analysis, internet psychology, collective psychology theory, therapy for our times, parts work IFS, internal family systems explained, depth psychology modern, cultural criticism podcast, media theory podcast, understanding the culture war, healing political division, trauma-informed society, systems thinking psychology, consciousness and society, meaning crisis solutions, why communication is impossible, post-truth psychology, collective healing trauma, Birmingham Alabama therapist, complex trauma treatment, Brainspotting therapy, somatic experiencing therapy, integrative psychotherapy, holistic mental health, transpersonal therapy, spiritual psychology podcast, existential therapy, phenomenological therapy, social psychology podcast, mass psychology explained, collective unconscious modern, Jung and politics, critical theory psychology, neoliberalism and mental health, capitalism and trauma, social media mental health, algorithm psychology, attention economy effects, filter bubble psychology, radicalization psychology, bridging political divides, healing polarization therapy, difficult conversations psychology, relational psychotherapy, attachment and society, developmental trauma society, intergenerational trauma healing, collective resilience building, post-traumatic growth society, narrative therapy culture, embodied cognition society, extended mind theory

Hey, guys are upon on the other side horn field turn beige and waves to Hey guys, it's Joel, and welcome to the fish watch the forest, to fill the stage within it. Guys, it's Joel and welcome to the Tapu Therapy Therapy Collective podcast. Today, we're going to be following up on the Mirror World series and talking about the kaleidoscope. How do you know that the color blue that you see is the same as the color blue that I see? I mean, we both call it blue and we point at the sky and we use the same word.

But we actually share the same subjective experience of that wavelength of light. Well, some people don't. They might be colorblind and see it as a different color. We're just assuming that because the word matches, the experience matches too. This is an old philosophical puzzle, and it used to be the kind of thing that you discussed in a dorm room at 2 a.m. And then you forgot because it didn't seem to matter. And it didn't. Or did it?

We could all agree that the sky was blue, whatever blue meant to each of us privately. And so the word worked. And communication happened and life went on. But something has changed. And that old philosophical puzzle has become the defining problem of our time. You know, we are now living through this crisis where people use the same words and they mean completely different things. You know, freedom or Christian or a lot of big, important words. They don't mean what you mean.

The same sentence can be a factual claim and a tribal signal and a joke and a weapon all at once. you know, so you can look crazy if you point some of these things out because language has become so doubly and triply coded, you know, like computer code. So, well, you can spend an hour arguing of someone online and realize at the end that you weren't even having the same conversation. Or maybe you don't, and that changes the way that you see people. You know, this is a big idea, but it's not just frustrating and sort of breaking politics and relationships. And I would argue the mind, you know, this is a therapy podcast, I guess. I want to try and explain something that's happening. You know, why communication feels so impossible now,

the way facts don't matter. And I don't mean, you know, alternative facts, facts don't matter. I mean, the actual facts that we think are factual do not affect us anymore in the way that we think they do, our facts, not somebody else, having the wrong ones. You know, we feel both simultaneously hyper-connected and utterly alone. And I want to suggest that what we're experiencing is not just confusion. It's actually a transition or an attempt. to make a transition.

You know, it's a painful disorienting passage between two different ways of being human. And that doesn't mean that one is bad. It means that all of us are doing both at the same time. This is not an us against them podcast. It's, I don't know if you want to be an English major and make me pick with the tension as I think it's an us against us podcast.

You know, the theorist in me wants to call this the metamodern condition. But I'm going to call it the digital dream time. to keep it in line with Jungian psychology. I think that understanding it is the only way that we're going to survive what's coming. And the first part is this kind of fusion of the brain. You know, at Taproot where I work, you know, we have through peak neuroscience, Jay Michelani and Deanna Pizarro and Rachel and a couple other people,

you know, we have this quantitative electroencephalography, You know, QEG. And it's brain mapping that, you know, is used to treat autism or dopamine disorders and anxiety, different things by making different parts of the brain send information either a different way or talk more, especially more quickly, or talk less. Don't talk as much. Talk to another part. You know, and it's this way of measuring electrical activity in the brain, wavelengths.

How fast the neurons moving and what is it sending information to it. and seeing which areas are, you know, overactive or underactive and identifying patterns that might contribute to symptoms. So you can sort of bypass me. I don't have to listen to you and then diagnose you. Your brain can just tell the machine exactly what it's doing, and then the engineers can tell that to you. And so I once asked, you know, when Jay and Deanna were joining,

and luckily they have a good sense of humor. It's kind of hard to work with me if you don't. I was asking Jay, because he was talking about how the machine worked on the idea that the brain would mimic frequencies. That when the nerve, the cap that does the treatment starts to put out a frequency really strongly, the neuron will drop the frequency it's on and say, oh, wow, you're a top level neuron that's being a little bit louder. I'm going to mimic that frequency.

I'm going to do what you are doing. That's how it works. You know, basically it's a lot more complicated than that. But that's the grossest reduction of how, you know, neuromodulation works. And I ask Jay, because he's super smart, this dual pH. and then Deanna's got a PhD in electrical engineering. And Jay's a clinical psychologist and experimental research design. I don't forget the other one was in.

But it's just, you know, infinitely curious people that I like being around and that kind of person. And I was like, look, if you could keep brains alive, right? If they mimic frequency like that, you know, you're the neuroscience. It's not me. Like, if we duct tape them together, would they start to sync up and kind of see, you know, drop redundant structures and make new networks? and Jay was like, oh my gosh, wow, what if I, yeah, oh, wow, yeah, they would. And like, he had a lot of science that I still don't quite, you know, understand.

But essentially, you know, they would do that if you could, you know, hypothetically pull five or six people's brains out that are still attached to the person, keep their brain alive, keep the person alive, duct tape their brains together where they connected, they would start to function similarly. You would influence each other. And I think that, you know, that Internet and the hypernetwork reality that we were in. And the infinite amount of context points, you know, reflecting that we have to swim through is doing something similar to that to us now, you know.

That's a good metaphor for where we are. And, you know, the individual's minds, if you did that, it wouldn't disappear. Everybody would still be, you know, five people, four people, how many brains you want to tuck tape together. But they would gravitate, you know, towards specialized roles within unified, within, you know, a unified whole. Like they would start to prioritize information differently so that the creature that you had made was not being as redundant. People would immediately serve more specialized functions. We think. I mean, this is not been tested, obviously, outside of some kind of J. Horror RPG, some kind of Japanese like, you know, Silent Hill or Hideo Kojima or something.

You know, so they would develop this new kind of individuality where they're not separate, but they were interdependent and they were offloading information to each other. So each brain became a node in something large, would become, you know, a node in something larger than itself. So this is science fiction, obviously, you know, for now, we're working on something that I hope to reveal next week, but I'm just kidding. You know, we can't actually wire brains together, but we've sort of done that anyway. We've just used a different kind of wire. And so the accelerating speed of digital communication is entwining us into this vastly complex interdependent neural network. Every time you scroll, every time you post, every time you react to something online, every time you like and share this podcast with everyone in your family to make them wonder

where you're getting therapy. I'm just kidding. You know, your patterns are being recognized and your frequencies are being incorporated and you're being woven together into something larger. You're offloading a certain amount of critical thinking and you're sort of picking up assumptions from something else that just become part of your wiring, same as a computer. And, you know, we're fusing into this scene. larger being.

And just a single brain can develop neuroses in this massive collection, you know, the social brain is experiencing a profound cognitive dissonance. I think the culture being hyperwired together has to be diagnosed on mass as it's sort of a giant brain. So let's dig into it. And let's see in the DSM-5 TR what we would diagnose this giant collective mass of humanity with. Not exactly, but I mean, that's the feeling. That's the anxiety, the polarization, the sense that reality itself has become unstable, and then individuals are going crazy or something.

I think that is a more common perception than it was, you know, at the beginning of my life when I was, you know, 10 or 20, not as many people were like, everybody's stupid, everybody's going crazy. You know, what's the world coming to? I mean, old people kind of always said that, but it was about much simpler things, like that they didn't teach cursive in school or something. not the sort of things that you see today. And it's that, you know, collective organism that we're becoming. It's going through this developmental crisis. That's what I'm trying to analyze.

You know, to understand what's happening to our communication, we need to take a step back and look at how human language has worked historically. You know, the media theorist Walter Ong, you've ever read him? He spent his career studying the difference between oral cultures and literate culture. And, you know, this may sound like this academic. distinction, but it's actually a pretty profound difference. You know, in oral cultures, think of Homer's Odyssey or a bard, you know, singing at campfires or elders passing down tribal knowledge through stories.

Language worked in a particular way. It was participatory. It was performative. It was mythic. You know, there are the amount of books in the Odyssey is the same that there was in the Greek alphabet at that time, so that you could just sort of yell out the letter of the book of the Odyssey that you wanted the person to read. But there wasn't a permanent record.

You know, the stories existed only in the telling. The Odyssey probably changed a lot. We have some evidence that it changed a lot. The Bible changed a lot until it got canonized in the council. And I see a lot of these things were passed down early because that's what information was. We didn't have the idea of static information. Of course it would have to grow and change with the culture. So meaning wasn't fixed.

Or not exactly. It was flexible. It was forged in this communal space between storyteller and audience, and the story changed depending on who was listening. And what the occasion demanded sometimes, and what felt true in that moment, or needed, true to the audience, not true to the teller. You know, oral cultures thought differently because of this.

Memory worked different. Knowledge worked different. Truth itself worked differently. It wasn't about correspondence with some external reference, record, it was about resonance with lived experience. And then came writing and eventually printing and everything changed. Print culture prioritized permanence. You could write something down, walk away, and would say the same thing a hundred years later.

And this shifted us more towards a literalism, an idea that we could accumulate, you know, not immediately, but this building towards this idea that we could accumulate scientific fact, an objective mapping of the world that would just sort of fill up. We used to not know what the map looked like. I'm on this island. Now it's Europe. Now there's this other thing. Oh, now it's connected to that.

Now the known world of land ends. Whoa, somebody's selling on a ship. Here's a gap in the ocean. Oh, the map's. Blank edges of the map are filled in. We thought that that same thing would happen with knowledge until we, I don't know, basically knew everything. That's what the idea of literal representation. describes or points you on a path towards in a way that oral representation of language doesn't.

You know, the invention of printing, the printing press. It didn't just give us books. It gave us modern science. You're printing the same thing over and over and over because it doesn't ever need to change. Unless you have a new addition and then you sell it for $500 more, call it the DSM5TR. I'm kidding. Well, I'm not. But, you know, modern law, modern bureaucracy, it gave us this idea.

That there's one correct interpretation of a text. And that disputes can be resolved by pointing to what the document actually says. That there's sort of a canonical version out there. Unless the author wants you to debate or disagree. And then the point of the text is that. And then I guess that's the canon. Now, this is the world where most of us were trained to navigate that we were born into. We weren't yelling out a Greek letter for Homer to read,

for the bard to read that book of the Odyssey. we would just look it up and it would always be the same. You know, the world of citations and fact checks, but actually the dictionary defines it as, the world where language is supposed to be precise, where words have specific meanings, where communication is about transmitting information accurately from one mind to another,

you know, that was this new thing. And so the reason I think Walter Ong is interesting. And I say, if I can't exploit a philosopher in a paragraph, I'm not going to bring them up on here. I'm not going to expect you to bring anything to it. But if you ever want more information about any of these guys, a lot of it is on our blog and they're relevance to what I think, you know, trauma psychology, especially depth psychology.

If you ever curious, you know, I don't expect you to have read them. I usually talk about somebody that I just read. You know, so Walter Ong said that there's electronic media that would thrust us into an era of secondary morality where we would gain the tools of literacy, the permanent archives and searchable databases and the ability to, you know, cite and quote and fact check. You know, but we would use them more in the rhythms of an oral culture. It would be participatory and performative and improvisational.

It would return to mythology, but not in our literal belief in mythology. It would return more to a personal expression of the self and the function of religion, essentially, through literal texts, not in place of them. And, you know, that's what is sort of happening. You know, the internet is this library, and it's also a campfire. Every conversation is simultaneously archived forever and created in the moment, and we're operating in both nodes at the same time. And this is unprecedented in human history. You know, we've had people speak different languages with different words before, but we've never spoken different languages with the same words.

That's something that is a new phenomenon. The internet is this ultimate artifact of this fusion. Or it's the most visible metaphor, I guess. You know, look at any successful meme. It operates on two frequencies at once, sometimes many more. Now, the image is usually kind of mythic or is archetypal. The distracted boyfriend looking at the red or the blue dress girl. You know, the woman yelling at the confused.

cat at the table. The dog, you know, sitting in a burning room saying, this is fine. They're not really just kind of a picture that you would share that says, like, I'm happy, I'm sad. They carry this emotional resonance that transcends any particular context. They usually describe a fairly complex relationship with several context points that map on to the reason you're sharing the meme, the situation that you're responding to with a meme. And so the text, meanwhile, it's hyper literal.

It's a specific complaint about today's inflation rate. It's a precise critique of pieces of legislation. And, you know, it's reference to something that happened yesterday that will be forgotten tomorrow. But the meme works by fusing these two registers. You know, each aversion is successful based on how well it does that. It takes your immediate specific anxiety and it links it to a timeless human pattern. And it makes your particular suffering feel like part of something internal. E-Term.

Sorry. I didn't make my E-E-E-E. So it does what. myths have always done. It provides a framework for making sense of experience, but it does it with this material draw, you know, from the 24-hour news cycle, where the memes spread this way. And this is why they feel so satisfying to share. They're not just jokes. They're tiny acts of myth-making, of mapping your context onto a giant, you know, story of others' contexts or, you know, archetypal context. And there are campfire stories of the digital age.

And a lot of times, literal polemic arguments at the same time. But here's the problem. I mean, there are things like this that have happened before. Like, what is it? A lot of people think that the reason the prince was written was it was like a dual intention to give the actual bad advice to the royal family, the rich family. Other people think that it was like sort of to make fun of them, like something that they would take seriously, like a billionaire class or the equivalent

of a billionaire class would take seriously. But everybody else would be like, Oh, they actually did it. And then you also have things like in the reign of Nero. Petronius, you know, people think the satiricon, which is this play that's incredibly lewd, very blue, all this debauchery is happening, was something that Petronius wrote to sort of like please Nero. But Nero would like it because he was gross.

But also everyone else would see it and be like, oh, you're making fun of how gross he is because this is like so gross. This is like, you know, Quinn Tarantino, the Coen brothers version of the court. And then, you know, some people say the same thing about perpurchus when we're talking about Roman poets. His love elegies are being like kind of lewd to defy Augustus, but at the same time talk about like love is slavery and devotion to like make fun of how Augustine has all this control. And so Augustus is, you know, I don't think that theory holds up as well. But anyway, back to the thing. You know, culture doesn't evolve overnight.

Of course there are examples of this happening before. But not at all. I mean, to the extent of the shorthand we have on the Internet now, where it's almost something that everyone is speaking multiple times per day. And so when everyone's speaking two languages at once, and also those are just sort of two meetings. Many memes have like multiple extended metaphor type meetings, right? You know, so it's easier now for bad faith actors

to easily colonize weak nodes of the network. And this is a troll's paradise. If you attack someone's literal argument, They can just say, oh, I'm just joking. Well, really wink, wink, nudge, nudge, and everyone else, like, I'm not joking. I mean it. And they can retreat into the symbolic register. But if you attack their, you know, toxic symbolism, then they can pretend that you're just

seeing patterns everywhere and that you're crazy. You're making random connection in the kaleidoscope of the internet. You know, they can demand that you prove it with data. Tell me. Well, I don't know. I'm just pretty sure. That's what you mean, man. I'm looking at your Facebook page.

You know, if there's always this a scale. escape hatch built into everything. And so the idea of being able to prove something, I think a lot of people are realizing, oh, man, debate club doesn't really work. What we need to do is just sort of realize like, hey, this is self-evident. This is kind of what adults know that you mean. This is kind of things that we think are self-evidently true. So we're moving away from that sort of like 90s West Wing, you know, debate type deal.

Just by necessity, I think we exhausted it. You know, there's a media scholar I like Whitney Phillips, and she talks about Poe's law, or this internet adage that it's impossible to distinguish from, between extreme views, you know, that are parody and parodies of those views that the internet sort of said, I guess kind of like the satiricon. You know, we're going to make this like a hundred times billion bigger version of what I'm, what I, you know, of you. I'm going to make this exaggeration or follow all of your beliefs to their ultimate penultimate conclusion. Well, if you do that, are you doing it because you're making fun of me or because you like me, right? And I mean, granted, some of the emails I got on the show, you know, I have no illusions.

Most of people don't like it. But I think that sometimes I can't tell, you know. And so if you genuinely can't tell if someone is being serious or ironic, literal or symbolic, sincere or trolling, maybe they can't either. And this isn't, this kind of ambiguity is not a bug. You know, for some people, that's a feature. They get to pretend like they believe everything, and then depending on what happens, they get to pick the one that is preferable.

They get to pretend that that's what they always thought. So, you know, think about the political paradox of the last decade. Like when Donald Trump got elected in 2016, you know, the political right recognized a societal void of meaning, the narrative. And they projected their need for this modernist heroic myth onto this guy. And yeah, there was some going on with Clinton, too. It just, I guess, wasn't as popular of the myth.

There really wasn't much to either of those candidates other what you projected onto them. I think that's what made a lot of people upset the people that weren't doing much projected. And so, you know, there's these elevated 80s and 90s characters that got elevated into, you know, emperors or, you know, wise sages or projections they probably didn't deserve. And the political, you know, the liberals, you know, attempted to counter that mythic projection by using the, you know, tools of postmodern literalism. They wanted to deploy fact checkers and have companies that told you whether or not the information in the meme was accurate. Like you could police the internet in real time. You know, didn't work out by the way. Those companies folded. And they pointed out that, you

know, Trump's wealth wasn't dead so he wasn't actually rich or something. But I mean, hell, the guy's sitting on a gold throne for most of his life. He looks pretty rich to me, you know. So this failed as a project. All of these ways to sort of take Trump apart. You can't really defeat myth with fact-checking. That's not the role that myth plays. And so the American electorate has repeatedly rejected, you know, the sterile procedural language of modern liberalism because it lacks any compelling mythic vision of the future.

You know, the Democrats brought spreadsheets to a mythological battle. And if you check page, you know, 14 of the website, you'll actually see that she thinks something about that. That just didn't work. And they spoke on this literal register while their opponents, you know, were speaking on both. They were more memetic and they won. Whether or not, whatever was true, they won.

And this isn't about one party of being smarter than the other because it goes back and forth and there are a lot of things that both campaigns did wrong and both sides of the aisle now still do wrong both parties. And I don't mean wrong like I disagree with it. I don't disagree with most of it. I mean wrong like it's clueless. It doesn't work.

They don't understand what's effective right now. And it's about understanding the linguistic terrain we're operating in. You know, you can't defeat the myths of the modern with literalism of the postmodern. You have to synthesize both and make a new thing. And you have to be able to speak mythically and literally at the same time with full awareness of what you're doing in each register. And if you're working with younger people in therapy, this is something that older therapists, middle-aged therapists, need to learn to do because it's a big part of doing therapy with a younger population. It's a language that they speak. It's not really a language I speak at home,

but it's a language that I speak in therapy with some people. And at this point, a reasonable person might object. Hasn't it always been like this? Haven't humans always, you know, fused facts and myths together? Haven't politicians always wrapped policy in patriotic symbols? You know, hasn't politics always been a religion? We're a football team. Haven't religious leaders always, you know, enforced mythical belief through literal rules? I mean, yeah, but that's a fair critique. You know, human nature has changed that much, like I say in therapy pretty often. If these problems go all the way back to the Bronze Age, if they're in the Bible, don't count on them getting solved in your life. Figure out how to have a happy life while they exist, because they've been with us for a long time.

People have been speaking out of both sides of their mouth since language began. What's changed is the medium in the past and the speed. Marshall McLuhan would say that the medium is the message. You know, in the in the past, the method register and the literal register, were somewhat separate, and the mythic belonged to the church and the theater and the festival and the campfire and the culture, and the literal belong to the courthouse, the laboratory, the newspaper, and the bureaucracy. And you knew which mode you were in based on the context, not just of what was being said, but where you were. And the architecture of social life kept them somewhat distinct, and you could sort of go to one

when you needed one and the other for something else. The internet has forced both modes into the exact same text box. Yeah, and I know that if we never invented the internet, that churches probably still would have started to play politics of science more. And, you know, the science would have maybe continued to evolve until it sort of became this existential religion or something. I've heard those critiques too. I don't, that's not really what I mean.

You know, it's not the same thing as the same platform where you file your taxes is where you encounter apocalyptic memes or the same feed that contains peer-reviewed research, you know, having tribal war cries and selling you pyramids to sharpen razor blades. Or the same 280 characters have, you know, the same language as like the 13-year-olds on the Internet and the White House. Or, you know, vice versa. You also see a whole lot of teenagers talking about geopolitics in a way that it's like, what? There's a lot of cross-contamination, and that sort of made everything a different cultural node, a different context.

point. And this isn't just a faster version of what we've always done, though. The speed is a big part of it. But the speed of the architecture have created something qualitatively new. When everyone with a smartphone is forced to be a curator of cultural, you know, just to participate in a basic conversation, that's a psychological toll that causes a lot of anxiety. And there's another factor, the surveillance and profit infrastructure that's been put on top of all of this. You know, the platforms aren't neutral pipes. A lot of the memes are about that. They're making fun of the platform that they have to use or talking about the limitations of it like surveillance. They're designed to maximize engagement. An engagement is maximized by content that triggers strong emotional responses,

which means the algorithms are systematically amplifying the most mythic, the most tribal, the most emotionally charged content. And while suppressing the measure, the nuanced, and the merely informative, this is also not an original or new, are you? We just sort of at this point agree that that's happening, but nobody knows how to stop it. The fused brain isn't just performing organically. It's being shaped by incentive structures that reward the most destabilizing forms of communication. We are making the collective brain sick. The cognitive dissonance isn't accidental.

I think that it's profitable. Panic is profitable. Trauma is profitable. And what I've started to hear in therapy is a lot of people saying, Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can get rid of my panic. I can get rid of my trauma. I can get rid of my anxiety. But how do I function in the world?

Because you sort of have to have that in order to be connected now. I don't have a fast answer to that question. It's what leads me to make podcasts like this. You know, here's something that we need to confront honestly. The viral political moments often fail. Not just fall short of their goals. They fail completely at the material level, while appearing to succeed everywhere else.

Think about Occupy Wall Street. On a symbolic and mythic level, it was an extraordinary success. It changed the vocabulary of American politics, and the 99% entered the language. Income inequality became mainstream talking point. The images spread everywhere, and the memes propagated wildly. And Occupy dominated the symbolic landscape. But on a literal and a procedural level,

the level where, you know, actual laws get ridden, and institutional power gets wielded, it was a complete material failure. No lasting policy change sustained. No organizational structures endured. No actual power and specifically money changed hands. And the banks that crashed the economy in 2008 are bigger now than they ever were. A lot of them took, well, one of them took the money that was used for the bailout, said we're closing the bank, paid it to themselves as bonus.

and that was perfectly legal. Occupy Wall Street failed. There's sort of a similar trajectory with other giant mainstream cultural movement. And cancel culture, Black Lives Matter, where they attained an enormous amount of cultural control but didn't really affect any real change. The literal level of material change,

not the oral culture of the myth? Police budgets weren't cut after BLM. They increased. Qualified immunity wasn't ended. The structural reformed that might actually have accomplished some of the goals of the movement didn't happen. You know, these movements illustrate the trap that Adam Curtis was talking about, and I talked about Adam Curtis three episodes ago,

they're kind of proving his point. That symbolic register of cultural control, you know, oral culture, it doesn't really do anything to affect the literal culture. And it doesn't make, you know, a cultural symbolic oral win doesn't turn into a literal written material culture win. They're two different things, even if they share overlapping symbols. And those movements often mustook the symbols for the same thing. Because they use the same symbol, they must be the same thing.

The movements failed because they weren't. You know, when you win symbolically, it feels like you won. The brain lights up with recognition and you see your language used everywhere. You see yourself on the news and you feel like that's part of something powerful. But it's not. The sense of momentum is real. but the material conditions haven't changed. And I don't think that our culture, especially people my age, given similar opportunities,

are going to make that same mistake again. That trap of digital activism, not even digital activism, because Occupy Wall Street was buried not digital, was on the ground. You know, companies pander to these things all the time, like, you know, BLM or MAGA or any of these movements, and they get symbolic alignment to drive material gain, but it doesn't really change their material practices and the aims of the movement.

This confusion between the symbolic and the material victory, it's not just an innocent mistake, or at least not always. There's this powerful interest, I think, actively cultivate some of this stuff. But people are noticing that, and as they're noticing that, they're not as resistant to it anymore. The collective brain is changing.

And how could it really know how to deal with these new forms of control until it tried the old solution over and over and over again and watched it fail. That's how people in individual therapy realize that there is a problem, that they need a new solution. So I think culture is kind of the same. You know, maybe some of the more savvy people pointed this out for a long time and got angry, but that's not how change works. You know, and that's why I call something like, you know, that viral internet world, the dream time, like the aboriginals talked about, that symbolic layer.

because it has literal elements, but it also has mythical timeless ones. It's sort of our, not religion, but like our shared mythology, has become more complicated. David Bum's a physicist and a philosopher that is kind of interesting. And, you know, he wrote this book called Thought as a System, where he argues something that sounds kind of obvious, but it has bigger implications he flushes out. That, you know, thought is not something we do. It's something that happens to us. It's a system that operates through us, not the tools we control.

We are filtering mechanisms for the world, and our thoughts are us applying our predictive filter. They're not just things that we create. They're things that we filter out of all of the noise of existing. And Bohn was a quantum physicist, and he worked with Einstein, at least until Einstein, you know, until he started doing quantum physics because Einstein was classical and didn't really like that stuff. But, you know, he spent his last years trying to understand why human beings seemed incapable of solving problems that are clearly solvable. Climate change, nuclear weapons, inequality, you know, protecting children from being abused, having, you know, a world that is relatively fair financially. Like these were things that he would thought would be self-evident.

People would say, hey, let's all go ahead and pursue this. Yet in life, he looked around, nobody's really pursuing those. And we could even see the solutions. People could talk about them. But huge groups of people couldn't sit down and do them. Why? His answer was that thought itself was the problem. Not wrong thoughts that need to be replaced with right thoughts, the structure of thought,

which is a weird idea, but this is what he meant. You know, we assume that our thoughts are our own, that they arise from our individual mind, and they reflect our individual perception and express our individual will. But Bohm argued that the vast majority of what we think is, not individual at all. It's collective. He got to the same place with math that Jung, you know, Carl Jung, had gotten to with phenomenology. Bome said it's inherited. It's the residue of everything that our culture has thought before us running automatically through our nervous system. And we need to be

aware of those old thoughts. Thought he said had become systematic. It operated like an immune system, automatically defending itself against anything that threatened its coherence. When you encounter information that contradicts your worldview, thought doesn't calmly evaluate the evidence. It reacts. It defends it attacks. It does this faster than you yourself can consciously intervene because conscious intervention is itself just more thought operating within the same system. And this means that collective thought, the shared assumptions, narratives, and frameworks of a culture, the dream time, as I would call it, that increasingly controls individual thought without anyone noticing. You think you're thinking your own thoughts. You're actually running inherited

programs. The system is thinking itself through you. But humans, you know, are bad giving up individual agency. We don't want to see it that way. And he said this in 94, you know, before social media, before smartphones, before algorithms, before amplification of everything. Now imagine what Bohm would say if he was to look at meme culture now. about a world where collective thought forms propagate at the speed of light, where the most viral ideas are the ones that trigger the strongest automatic reaction, and where the algorithm's infrastructure is specifically designed to hijack the immune system, or that immune response, the quality of thought, to make ideas spread,

not because they're true, but because they are triggering. This system's been turbocharged. The collection, you know, that collectivized, thinking that Bohm warned about has been given technological steroids, and the loss of individual authenticity he described has accelerated to the point where many people don't even have a concept of what individual thought would feel like. They've never experienced it. The collective has colonized them completely, but they're still ready to, you know, fight hard to defend this thing that feels like them. The guide aboard is another one that I've talked about before. In 1967, you know,

he wrote the Society of Spectacle, a book that reads like prophecy now, but it was considered this obscure theory at the time. DeBoard argued that modern capitalism had transformed social life into an accumulation of spectacles, representations that replace direct experience with mediated images. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation. He says,

life under the spectacle isn't lived, it's watched, it's consumed, it's experienced, at a remove through screens and images and narratives that stand between you and reality. The spectacle isn't just entertainment or distraction. It includes those things, but it's a social relationship between people mediated by images. And it's what happens when the representation becomes more real than the thing represented, when the map doesn't just obscure the territory, but it replaces it entirely,

like we talked about in the last episode. Now, DeBoard was writing about television, about advertising, sometimes how you couldn't tell the show from the ad, but about the emerging media environment of the 60s. You know, his analysis applies with pretty good precision to the internet now. But here's where DeBoard connects with Bohm. The spectacle thinks through us. DeBoard understood that the spectacle wasn't just something that we watch.

It's something that our structures thought. The images and the narratives of the spectacle become the categories we use to understand experience. And we don't just see the spectacle, we see through it. It becomes the lens, not the object. And this is why you can know that social media is manipulating you and still be manipulated. The knowing happens within the spectacle.

The critique happens within the spectacle. Even your resistance is captured and displayed as another image in an endless flow. And a board called this the colonization of everyday life. The spectacle doesn't stay on the screen. It colonizes your relationships. your desires, your sense of who you are. You start to experience your own life as content

and think about content as it relates to your life. You start to perform your existence for an imagined audience. You become a character in your own personal spectacle watching yourself from the outside. I was kind of shocked to hear when I was in college that psychologists were starting to see this new delusion where people felt like they were being watched and recorded all the time and they were exhausted from having to stay in character and act and set a good example

and for all these people watching them, but they were completely alone. You know, this phenomenon had created a new kind of psychosis that had not been seen before. And you know, and the younger and the more online you are, the more you feel this, and it's why people that are younger tend to like these kind of episodes more, and older people tend to say what the hell are you talking about. The more natural it seems to narrate your experience as your, having it if you're younger and to frame moments for their shareability to evaluate your emotions by how you would work an audience and it's because these

kids started feeling this at four at six two not at 45 and look what it did to the 45-year-old and there's a temptation that comes with the awareness of the network once you feel connected to everything is once you sense the power of viral propagation and you start to look for soft spots you start to see how far your tendrils can get you start to see what new regions of this network that you can hack into and exploit and how much power you have something humans are very good at doing and you start to play the game of influence trying to colonize others before they colonize you and multiple networks push against each other multiple spectacles competing for attention and all

of them running through the same nervous system the same thought process the same humans who have less and less sense of where the collective ends and they begin. And it's exhilarating and sometimes it's thrilling, but it's exhausting. And it's ultimately hollow if it doesn't connect to actual material change to something that happens in reality rather than in the endless circulation of the image. And here's what I'm trying to say precisely. We are so fused together now that the collective psychology is functioning like an individual psychology. Not matter. Metaphorically, not loose analogy, the same process that happens in an individual mind Pathology defense mechanisms personality disorders grandiosity delusion psychosis

They're happening at the collective level and I'm not saying that this is entirely new people have been making arguments about the collective psychology since the 1970s Youing talked about the collective unconscious Systems theories talk about emergent group behavior and there's a whole transpersonal psychology movement and the new age thing signs different etiottis but the same idea. There's a whole literature on how crowds think differently than individuals and how nations develop something like personality, how culture can become pathological. But here's what's different now. It's happening in real time. The speed of connection has collapsed the timescales and what used to take generations now takes months. What used to take years now takes weeks and the feedback loops are so fast, so tight, so interconnected, that you can watch the collective pathology to develop the way that you'd watch a time lapse of a disease spreading through the body.

And I want to be clear about what I'm saying. I'm not saying that the planet, in some vague mystical sense, or Gaia, you know, has a headache. I'm saying that more specific and more disturbing collective groups of humanity can now be analyzed almost the same way that you would analyze a patient in therapy. You can identify the defenses. You can trace the trauma. You can see the splitting, the projection, the denial. You can almost run an MBTI on certain collections.

And you can watch the collective do exactly what an individual does when they're confronted with something that they can't face or that they don't want to when they don't want to change, which for people is most of the time. What you see on the internet now is collectivized brains fighting against other networks of brains and trying to expand. Assessing out weaker regions, finding the nodes that weren't well defended, going in, taking them over.

But what are they looking for? Wounds, hurts, grievances, trauma, the fuel that runs the world. More valuable than gold and more valuable than oil. Populations that felt abandoned, humiliated, forgot. They keep that unconscious and want to project it on something else. The colonizers weren't creating pain. They were finding existing pain and exploiting it.

I know that sounds like imperialism. I know it just sounds like what colonialism and exploitation and neoliberalism have always done. But there are theories about that. Scholars have been documenting how powerful interests find vulnerable populations and exploit them for centuries. And I'm saying there's a new layer now, something that operates on the top of the old colonial dynamics,

but it moves faster and it works differently. In traditional imperialism, colonialism, you needed ships and armies and supply lines and years, decades, propaganda, printing presses. And the digital colonization, the collective brain, this happens at the speed of thought. A wound gets identified, a narrative gets crafted, a meme gets deployed. Before anyone can organize a response, the colonialization is complete, and the population has already internalized this new story. The new oral pathway has already been laid down.

And pain, trauma, is the unhealed psychological sublayer. for the road. There's two things that are scary to me about this. One, how do you incentivize a world to heal trauma that profits from it? And then two, what happens when you make this process even faster with AI that doesn't know what it's doing, that is operating inside of a black box,

and it's given control of the data that can identify this information? You know, this is happening constantly. What I'm talking about is just right now, not the future of this thing. Multiple networks competing to colonize the same vulnerable populations. Looking for any wound, any hurt, any grievance that can be leveraged. The collective brain is a battlefield where different factions fight for control of attention. It's a hacking competition.

Not a battlefield. That was a bad analogy. It's a hacking competition. It's cyberpunk. And here's where the therapy analogy becomes more literal. If you've ever looked at a patient who's confronting something, they don't want to face an addiction a trauma a pattern of behavior that's destroying their life their chance of survival you know there's a consequence or you know a sequence consequence to you

pointing it out or a sequence of working through it you know a predictable set of defenses that the patient moves through first you know it didn't happen okay it happened but it's not real okay it's real but it doesn't matter okay it matters but we can't do anything about it okay maybe something could be done but someone else will do it. For me to do it is unreasonable. Okay, it's not getting solved, but it's someone else's fault. And so I don't have a choice. Someone else did it so they're the real person at fault for the thing that I'm doing

because they made me. Okay, it's going to take us all out, but we deserve it. You know, there's all of these problems that you see in the therapy room that you can work through because they're the path to change. You can't jump straight from that to acceptance. You have to help somebody accept something. But right now, how does this culture help it accept itself or any of its problems on a mass scale? You know, the denial, all of these things are things that we are doing right now.

Can a collective do the solution? Can humanity as a whole hit bottom and decide to change? That's the question that we don't know the answer to. We've never been fused together so tightly enough to find that out. And we've never had a collective crisis that moved fast enough to force collective reckoning. And the crisis is starting to move even faster. We now live in parallel objectivities. Different populations inhabit different realities, sometimes in the same country, the same state, the same household.

Not just different opinions about the same facts, but genuine different facts, different evidentiary standards, different criteria for what counts. For some people, literal truth is literal truth. For other people, their mythic world is literal truth, and they don't know what scientific fact is. Some people just make their phenomenological, internal, subjective, and religious experiences. They're literal facts. They operate entirely on intuition, leaving them blind to where their intuition is colored at the source by trauma. And that's something that is increasing its scope in our world. These parallel objective realities are not just tribal disagreements.

They're something stranger. There are systems of representation that have become self-contained. They're coherent internally. They're reproducible. They're reliable in the sense that they generate consistent outputs when they get consistent inputs. But they have all these features that we associate with objectivity. That's why I brought up the cargo cult last time. But they're not valid.

They don't point back to anything real or anything actually true. So here's a concrete example. You know, I watch patients drop out of treatment, not because they're not better, or therapy's not working. it's because they can't afford $15 or $30 copay. Recently, this has been more of a problem. We've all seen it, and I talked to other therapists. They're choosing between their mental health and groceries, and so they have to choose groceries.

But the official metrics say that the economy's fine. The GDP's up. Unemployment is down. The stock market has helped. All the objective metrics of this thing say that everyone's doing good, but it doesn't feel that way to me. What does that do to my brain? By every measure that the institutions track, we're in good shape, but my patients can't afford a $30 copay.

And those metrics are coherent. They're reproducible. If you run the calculations again about trickle-down economics or whatever we're doing, then it tells you that everything's healthy. They're not valid because they're not capturing the reality of people's lives, what's important and what they use money for. You can see these same things in education and psychology and all of the soft sciences. like we talked about in the last episode. And here's the thing, you feel this, whether or not you notice that you feel it.

The same reason why the grand scale of the soundtrack of a movie works. It influences your feeling whether or not you were aware why. Which David Bowen might like that analysis of watching a film. But we've been convinced that the solution is inside the thing

that no longer works. And then if we just tweak the model and we adjust the variables and we get better data, clothes, that the problem is technical, not fundamental, and definitely not beneficial to the system not working. And that the mirror can just be polished until it reflects the territory accurately. You know, that's the trap that I talked about before, but now I'm talking about the feeling. Last time was literally what's happening.

And this time is the subjective, how it feels. The mythical, the poetic dimension. The uncanny, you know, Freud's ummelik. is the experience of something familiar that has become strange, something that should feel like home, but it doesn't anymore, something that should feel normal or feel safe or feel good, that we're telling ourselves does, but we know that it doesn't really. It feels wrong. We're living in a world that looks functional, that institutions are operating and the metrics are being produced, but the procedures being followed doesn't result in the thing that they are

supposed to produce. That's an uncanny valley. And so this dual language problem, how does it fit into that? Because when people try and articulate the wrongness, when they say, the metrics don't match my life, the economy isn't actually good, I don't feel safe, the institutions aren't actually helping. They get dismissed. They're being emotional. They're not looking at the data because there's so many escape valves built into the way that we create truth now.

They're letting their feelings override their facts. But their feelings are data. when the experience is information and the felt sense of wrongness is the territory trying to communicate through the noise of the map. We're all dissociating and we're all going through this dissociative split, you know, at a collective level. And, you know, again, there were moments like this before, you know, in the 60s and 70s. Leary's, you know, turn on, tune in, drop out. It was this response to leave those systems, man, they're not real anymore and we're not going to participate in them until they come back to us. And Leary wasn't entirely wrong.

You know, the Vietnam War was built on lies and consumer society that. We talked about, you know, Bernays' role in that, Florence, grandson, and all of this stuff was not good. But when they left, so there was this idea that they weren't going to participate in the metrics of success, the suburban house, the stable job, the nuclear family. You know, they weren't making people happy. Something was wrong and people could feel it. So they turned on and expanded consciousness and they dropped out of the system. that seemed so broken and they believed, you know, where they were building this alternative by not participating.

What happened was they lost, they maybe won the culture war, and then they lost everything else, which will just lead you to become co-opted because they must have the mythic for the literal. The New Age movement is good at doing that. Western esoteric magic sometimes is good at doing that, the people that espouse those types of goals, you know, as a collective solution. You know, the material structures, the distributions of the distributions of power, the economic arrangements, those didn't change. And so your aesthetic will be co-opted

because it's something that they can take from you. Um, you know, by the time Reagan took off in the 80s, the counterculture had been fully absorbed into the consumer economy. And, you know, it thought it was opposing something, but it was just being taken over. Rebellion became a marketing strategy and authenticity became a brand and the symbolic victory had been captured and neutralized, like this happened over and over again. But I'm seeing, saying is I do think one of the benefits of consciousness right now, or you know, this sort of collective consciousness is that people aren't willing to fall for that again. And so there's sort of this stalemate where people have a whole lot of power and other people know that they haven't

and they don't like it, but no one's really doing anything because the old solutions were sort of arriving at the fact that they don't work anymore. How do we navigate a world where individual identity is constantly being assimilated into a massive memetic hive mind? You know, I'm not not going to do an episode on anime like a lot of people have requested or at least not yet, but like if you are writing me about Neon Genesis Evangelion, yes, I do think that this sort of collective merging and the terror of it is what a show like that is about. If you don't know what that is, um, moving on. Um, you know, the dream time, like I talked about in the beginning, you know, it's, this is the useful framework, I think, because it comes and where that comes from,

and again, you can read more about this on the blog if you want is, Aboriginal Australians and they have that concept. They had this idea that the dream time was really their, you know, cosmology. They weren't Gnostics and that they were like, the material world is fake and we weren't born here and we'll go back to something else. They also didn't, they didn't completely reject it, but they didn't completely embrace it either. What they did was they made the entire world, this liminal space,

where both things converged. And the place where they overlap the most heavily in this diagram was the dream time. The goal wasn't to overcome the material and, you know, go into the spiritual world or, you know, reject the spiritual and live purely in the material. It was to bridge them together. You know, the literalism of the material and the spiritualism of the oral and mythic world, you know. And so because the dream time was an attempt to do that, and I'm talking about the metamodern, and that's why I think that it's a good metaphor for this moment. Like, Gnosticism was a metaphor for last thing that I described. No. You know, it's on the last episode. You know, the dream time is this eternal symbolic realm that, you know, it interpenetrates ordinary reality at every moment. And the ancestral beings who created the world and all of the ancestors who were the thing that got me here are still with me and I'm participating with them in a mythic pattern that shapes existence and is still shaping it. And time isn't a line moving from past to future. It's this depth dimension.

There's a, it's not time like a timeline, it's time like a time less. And in the dream time, you know, individual beings are not separate isolated entities. There, we are all collective. We're all the same. We're nodes on a vast web of kinship that extends to animals and plants and to the land itself. And yeah, Christian mystics like Meister Eckhart, you know, they went here. So do Hindus with concept like Andresnet, or many of them, or many parts of Hinduism. so do

you know the Buddhism in some ways Mahayana and Taravada both have you know a conception of this but I'm asking you to say that the internet is kind of our new dream time because the phone is the way that we are connected

to the rest of the world now and I mean this sort of literally you know if the internet is creating a collective organism a massive interconnection connected neural network or hyperneural network. We're all a part of it. But what it's experiencing now is growing pains. It's in a developmental crisis. It's becoming a teenager. The brain is forming when it hasn't really found coherence. And like we like to tell our teenagers, it should probably

drive careful and it probably shouldn't drink. This is what a neurosis looks like from the inside. You know, conflicting impulses, fragmented identity, the sense that different parts of yourself are at war with each other. anxiety without a clear cause, depression without a clear reason, the feeling that something is deeply wrong but you can't articulate what? The collective brain is experiencing all of this and we feel it individually because we're part of the collective. Our individual anxiety is in part the anxiety of a larger organism working through these

contradictions and sitting with these tensions. And this could be interpreted as a call for despair, but I'm not despairing. You know, the problem is systemic, but the solution is systemic too. You know, the metamodern condition is sometimes described as an ice oscillation or swinging back and forth between the sincerity of modernism and the irony of postmodernism, you know, the literality of communication and also its symbolic function. But we're really trying to contain both, you know, to have a tension between these opposites. And we do oscillate. We reach for grand narratives and we see through them. into ironic detachment and then we yearns for something real, or, you know, more fulfilling.

But back and forth, neither position is stable. And the oscillation is not an end state. It's a phase. The pendulum swings until it finds this new echolibrium, or it's not a pendulum. The fused brain doesn't have to be a monster. The collective organism doesn't have to be pathological. And the dream time doesn't have to be a nightmare. But whether or not it becomes something beautiful or something terrible or something just more,

human or sort of the in a cycle of both of those things we contain we contain both um you know it depends on how we navigate the transition we have to kind of endure attention we have to find some way to clean up collective trauma and we have to learn to sit with uncertainty to step into the unknown with some kind of more than scientific and also more than spiritual faith in something in ourselves in a in a future that is bigger they're better than this for a long time the parallel objectivities could stay separate. You know, your reality is over there, and their reality is over there, so go where you belong.

In different populations inhabiting different worlds, each, you know, internally coherent, each reflecting its own assumptions back to itself. In these bubbles floated alongside of each other without touching, and the mirrors faced their own mirrors and reflected indusely. You could go your whole life without seriously confronting the fact that other people live in a completely different factual universe from you. That's one of the things that I want to be real clear is not new. But those bubbles couldn't stay separate forever.

The crises that we face are now too large to be contained in a single bubble. Because these things are starting to collide based on the way that we've hypernetworked the world. And we can't hide from each other in the way that we used to be able to, based on where we went in our free time and who we talked to. That's why I'm calling this a collided. scope. You know, these parallel realities that could coexist through mutual avoidance and being forced together now, and they're grinding against each other like gears that don't mesh. You know, their teeth that don't fit, they're mechanisms that are clashing. And the

whole apparatus is kind of shuddering until it figures out a new way to run, a new type of lubricant. You know, in a kaleidoscope, mirrors create beautiful patterns, and they reflect fragments into symmetry. But what happens when the mirrors themselves start moving, when they're no longer fixed in place, but they're sliding and crashing and breaking, the pattern shatter and the fragments collide and the reflections become collisions. And that's where we are. The separate realities can't stay separate, and the material world won't let them go, and the crises are too big, too fast, too indifferent to respond to our constructions, and a lot of times we don't even notice them until they're gone. The 24-hour news cycle has become a 24-second news.

cycle. You can feel this in every conversation that goes wrong in every, you know, place where you feel disconnected from things like family or communicating or therapy or medical things or art or community spaces that just either aren't there or don't feel right anymore. You know, this grinding is painful and it's disorienting and it feels like the end of something. But here's what grinding does. It wears things down that don't fit and removes the parts that don't make the thing run. Grinding does make things fit back together. And the parallel realities have to come back together somehow.

Because we have to find things that we all think are self-evident, that we all agree on again. Even if we can't agree on how things work, we need to start by agreeing on what the goals are. This is kind of a brittle hope, you know, a brutal hope, you know, living in this collision. The bubbles were never sustainable. The parallel objectivities were always a temporary condition, so what comes after the collision? The separate perspectives that we've had have been reflecting each other for decades now. You know, building power before they collide at potential energy. In a mirror facing a mirror, each one is confirming its own assumptions by seeing them reflected back.

But reflection without contact is just narcissism. It's each bubble admiring its own. constructed reflection. And the collision breaks the narcissism. It forces contact with what's outside. We may have lost the ability to be as avoidant as we wish we could be. You know, the metamodern condition isn't just oscillation anymore. It's collision. And the poles were swooned between. They're crashing together. And in that crash, something is going to give. A kaleidoscope is turning, and the mirrors are moving, and the patterns are shattering. And what we build from these fragments is the new picture. And I hope it can hold us. I hope it can hold us really tight.

And I hope it can make us feel safe. The biggest stuff that I see is the recognition that trauma treatment is self-evidently necessary. But before that, that we are traumatized, we're being traumatized by this. It's not a luxury. It's a foundation. It's a right. And because trauma fuels the blind spots, it makes these things worse. It makes us less. likely to ever solve them. Trauma is why we built the bubble. Trauma is why we defend representations that don't connect anything real. The collective organism is sick, it's traumatized, and the parallel realities, the grinding gears, are these responses groaning at collective scale. We have to learn how to actually live together, not to manage each other,

not to avoid each other, actually live together. In Western history is largely the story of how we managed avoiding parts of self even when we had to live in proximity. Connection without internal avoidance, that's the task. You can't connect with others unless you understand, you know, the parts of yourself and you can't face, you know, parts of yourself that you can't tolerate. Internal avoidance has become external avoidance. We need to see ourselves as multiplicities, not unified selves. It was always a fiction.

We need to stop splitting through. emotion. We can hold our own multiplicity. The parallel realities are not just political. They're psychological, and the external fragmentation mirrors the internal fragmentation. You can't fix one without addressing the other. The internal system is the external system. That's what the collective brain metaphor of the dream time gives us. You know, what we build from these fragments depends on whether we can finally stop avoiding ourselves. Avoiding reality itself because the parts of ourselves or the parts of other people that we don't like are just there. And they're just there like it's raining outside or they're just there that like there's a mountain in your way.

It doesn't matter what you think about it. It doesn't matter what you feel about it. Those things are real. We didn't choose this. But the collision is happening whether we want it or not. And the only question is whether we participate consciously. whether we bring the witness consciousness, the dual, language fluency, the shamanic navigation to the collision, or whether we just get ground up in the gears because we refuse to see reality, inside of us and inside of other people.

That's where it always was. Build a bridge. It's never stayed. It's with you here. Yes, I've gone away. Stories ever stay. Please ever stay.