The Taproot Podcast - The Mirror World: Ghosts and Simulacra

Episode Date: February 22, 2026

"We built institutions that were supposed to reflect reality. But the windows became mirrors." In the second century, the Gnostics believed our world was a false reality created by a confused lesser god known as the Demiurge. Today, we are trapped in a modern equivalent: a labyrinth of metrics, models, and algorithms that dictate our lives while entirely missing our humanity. In Part 7 of The Mirror World, we dissect the collapse of institutional sense-making and the profound psychological toll of living inside the "fake world." Drawing on the histories of standardized testing, the DSM, and economic modeling, we explore how disciplines retreated behind "mechanical objectivity" to defend against insecurity—and how the profit motive locked us inside these models. Ultimately, we confront the modern pinnacle of this trap: Large Language Models (LLMs). We examine why AI is not the solution, but rather the ultimate simulacrum—the ghost of the human archive that performs the gesture of understanding while severing us from the real. To escape the mirror, we turn to the late psychologist James Hillman. Reclaiming our soul’s calling—our daimon—requires more than just new metrics or better prompts. It requires us to do the one thing the algorithm cannot: grieve. 🔍 In This Episode, We Explore: The Gnostic Metaphor: Why the ancient heresy of the Demiurge maps perfectly onto our modern crisis of professional legitimacy and institutional failure. The Insecurity of Metrics: How fields like economics, education, and psychology replaced human judgment with mechanical numbers to shield themselves from criticism (featuring the work of Theodore Porter and Adam Curtis). The LLM Revelation: Why AI language models are the ultimate "ghosts"—averaging out the wisdom of the dead without carrying forward their demands or soul. Hillman’s Acorn Theory: Why modern systems reclassify our deepest callings and emotional truths as disorders, inefficiencies, or trauma. The Necessity of Grief: Why breaking the cycle of the "metamodern oscillation" demands that we stop optimizing and start mourning what we've lost. 📚 References & Thinkers Discussed: Theodore Porter: Trust in Numbers Adam Curtis: The profit motive, the Nixon shock, and the "fake world" James Hillman: Lament of the Dead and The Soul's Code * Jason Ananda Josephson Storm / Metamodernism: The oscillation between grand narratives and infinite complexity. Metamodernism, AI Philosophy, Large Language Models Critique, James Hillman Acorn Theory, Adam Curtis Fake World, Gnosticism and Tech, Meaning Crisis, Institutional Decay, Theodore Porter Trust in Numbers, Algorithmic Determinism, Depth Psychology, Simulacra, Sensemaking, 2026 Tech Culture, Societal Grief

is a liar and the bride is a shield the priest says if these two don't make it who among us ever will don't ask the love you dare for a prediction

wherein the lovers of tomorrow are involved I guess time just makes fools of us all Hey guys, it's Joel with the Tapute Therapy Collective podcast, and this is the second part of the Mirror World episode. So I want to talk about Gnosticism, if anyone's familiar with it. In the second century, there's this sect of Christianity that sort of emerges, and the followers of it believe that the world we inhabited was not created by the real,

God. There was a real God and they were Christians, but that the world that we were inhabiting sort of had a fake God, um, chaperoning it. And that the message of Jesus and the mission of Christians was to break through into the real world, um, to meet the real God. And it was made, you know, the bad world was made by this creature called the Demiurge. And it was responsible for all of material reality. But the Demiurge had dementia. It kind of forgotten who it was. And so, you know, it was this creature that was a creation of, you know, the true God, but because of a kind of cosmic mix-up, it lost its identity, and it ended up on the middle of where we are. And so it created the world and decided, well, I must have created everything because I don't remember anything else,

and now I'm here. And so, you know, its blindness was sort of metaphorically similar to our blindness and that it became this tyrant of the Old Testament, you know. And this is all later, you know, made heretical and taken out of Christianity. There's not Christians that know this theology today. I'm not advocating for the theology. I'm using it as a metaphor here. But it wasn't a fringe movement. You know, it was a major current of early religious thought. And at some point, you know, there were a lot of people, you know, maybe the majority of the faith that had elements of these schools of thought and how they thought. And so, you know, the Gnostics were trying to solve this problem

that people today are still trying to solve, or theologians are still trying to solve where they say, if God's good and all-powerful, why is the world so full of suffering? You know, why do kids get sick? Why do the innocent suffer, you know, while wicked prosper? And why is their evil? And so the Orthodox answer is that there's, you know, free will and fallen nature and,

a mysterious divine plan that never, you know, quite is satisfying for some people. That's what you get after the Council of Nicaea when Christianity is kind of codified. But before that, you know, the Gnostics are offering way before that. The Gnostics are offering this, you know, more radical idea that the world is full of suffering because the world was made by a being who didn't know what he was doing. And it's why in the Old Testament sometimes God or the false God behaves badly, as the Gnostics would tell you, he's wrathful or vindictive or has qualities they wouldn't associate with goodness. And so the Demirge, who's the false God with dementia that thinks he created the earth, but he actually didn't.

You know, he's not really evil. He was just confused because he was this fragment of divine light that had fallen from its source and it no longer remembered its origin. And so in this confusion, he created the material world as if it were the only reality. And he declared, I'm God. And there is no other. And this is why Gnostics identified the Demiurge with the God of the Old Testament, that he was jealous and wrathful. and he demanded obedience and punished followers, or not followers, followers who went astray.

Foods and floods, plagues, and sometimes food. And so it seemed very different than the loving father that Jesus, you know, describes. And so the Gnostics say, that's not the Trugon. That's the confused creator who thinks that he's the only one. And, you know, this also lets you deal with all these ideas that Plato had, you know, let loose. Plato's already talking about the real world being fake, and if you're in Plato's cave, you see only shadow figures of the real thing. And so it sort of lets everyone put the zeitgeist and cultural currents and thought, you know, leading, cutting edge, thought of the Bronx Age together into this way that makes it all work together a little bit better.

And so the Gnostics, you know, take the Platonism and they make it religious. The material world isn't just inferior to the spiritual world. It's actually a trap. This is a prison. The body isn't the temple of the soul. it's the soul's cage. You're on a planet that is a prison. If you recognize the phrase prison planet, if you're about my age, then you probably are starting to see where I'm going with us, because that's something that the radio conspiracy, you know, right-wing guy, Alex Jones, you know,

says, because these ideas don't really go away, the Gnostic ideas. That's why I'm bringing them up. You know, so, you know, human beings, you know, according to Gnosticism, they can, contain within them these sparks of the origin light, you know, of God. And, you know, we could feel even if it, you know, even if we couldn't articulate it, that the Demiurge's world was not complete, that something really beyond it. And something had been lost. We had this sort of divine inheritance that was not here. And some of the language in the Bible sort of supported that, or was used to cite these ideas at that time. And so, the multiple writings that hadn't really been codified into the Bible yet. But, you know, this inward turn, you know, this sense that the truth lies

within rather than an external authority. It was kind of dangerous, you know, to certain orders. It was a neat gift, you know, that Gnostics gave people to think about, you know, these things in a way that was more personal and not like asking for someone to save me, but going inside so that I can connect with salvation myself. You know, but the danger was that it could lead to rejection of the body, you know, you're not taking care at yourself, asceticism, of community, and also some of the material conditions of life. You know, the gift is that it says that each person has direct access to the divine and that no institution could monopolize the path to truth and that the inner life mattered as much as the outer. And that, you know, it was the job of Christians to build communities

that pointed people inward, that that's what the church should be. That's an idea that would become very threatening, you know, to the modern medieval church. and are modern from this time, not our time. You know, the word Gnosticism comes from nosis, which just means knowledge, you know, not facts or information, but direct experience of what is real. And the Gnostics believed that we were trapped in a false reality

and that salvation meant waking up to what the Demiurges world had hidden from us, going back home to where we came from. And the early church rebranded, you know, that as heresy. You said most of the Gnostic texts are destroyed. You know, if you have anything harassed, radical you're in trouble. So for centuries, Gnosticism survived, you know, kind of as a rumor or a memory, you know, oral teaching, or it survived in ideas of people that didn't really understand

the inheritance that they were carrying on. And then in 1945, there's this jar discovered near Nag Hammadi in Egypt. And inside were Gnostic Gospels and treatises. And they were hidden for 2,000 years. The heresy had preserved itself because somebody had hidden it away, you know, probably during one of the purges. And I wanted to use Gnosticism. as a frame for what I'm about to describe the second part of the Mirror World episode. Maybe you're starting to make that connection already because I think it's not literally true.

I'm not a Gnostic. There were some semi-modern Gnostics like the writer Philip K. Dick. You know, people end up there. Well, creative people and nefarious, other people like Alex Jones who kind of co-opt this language. But this structure of this maps

onto our contemporary situation with kind of an uncomfortable precision because we built institutions that were supposed to reflect truth, reality, you know, the real thing. Science, education, economic, psychology, journalism, expertise, you know, itself. The hierarchies of this person's at this point above you because they know more about something. Specialization. And then these were our instruments for perceiving what's true. And they were supposed to be windows into a real world, the democracy.

expertise for people who didn't have it through appointing experts and systems that acted as experts. But these windows became mirrored at a certain point. The institutions were meant to represent reality, but they became disconnected from it. And now we mistake the representation for the thing itself. The Demiurge isn't the algorithm, and the Demiurge is the whole system of professional legitimacy that forgot it was supposed to point back to reality, not to numbers that no longer reflected reality accurately. But when all you can see is the numbers, all you can see is that demergic world. And the only way you believe that you have to change yourself or that you have to

change the world are through these fake systems that no longer connect to the real. How do you change anything? You know, experts would study the world before carefully and then report what they found. Science, you know, scientists, when they tested hypotheses, they would publish results. An economist would model the economy to help us understand it. Psychologists would develop frameworks for thinking about the mind. And educators would assess students to see what they'd learned. Journalists would investigate and tell us what was true. And the credentials, the peer review, the standardized measures, these were supposed to be quality controls, ways to ensure that, you know,

what the institution said reflected what was actually happening. And the representation was meant to serve the reality. And for a while, something like this worked, not perfectly. Institutions have always been flawed and always had blind spots and biases. But the connection between representation and reality was still visible and then it was the goal of the organization. Not the other way around. Not to change the world by changing the representation, which is what we're trying to do now. Remember in the early 90s, I was a kid.

but I was talking to somebody about like, why do people think that these very clear models of, you know, economic direction that we're going in work? Because we see the more we adopt them, they get worse, you know. I was talking about politics. And the person said, I was a dinner party with all these people, and they believe something different about economics than me. And they were talking about how, you know, all the people in their life are so bad with money and their hairdresser and their wife and their kids and nobody understands it.

And then they would espouse these models that under the economy, everyone acts logically, rationally, in the self-interested way to drive this beautiful engine forward. And the guy said, I said to the party of people, hey, you just said no one does that. And then you said that the only way forward for the economy is to do it by this model assuming that they do, why. And everybody just kind of looked at their wine glass for a minute. And they couldn't justify what they believed. And then they went back to talking. It's always stuck with me. You know, when this map has diverged too far from the territory, people can't see.

The problem with comparing and contrasting things is that you need both of the things visible. When one of the things gets too far away from the other thing, then that's all you can see. So you can't really compare and contrast anymore. And that's what happened. As these systems moved further and further away from what they were supposed to do, we stopped listening to any of the cognitive dissonance, any of the emotion. overwhelm any of the gut feeling that these things weren't real anymore and we just decided that it was all that we could see and so that it's all that it was it's kind of like the joke about the drunk under the

lamp lamp I heard a talk where noam Chomsky told that joke and he said you know that there's a guy who's drunk and he's looking under the streetlight for his keys and the guy says why are you looking on this side of the road because it's you know got this street light here did you drop your keys there The guy said, no, I dropped him on the other side of the road. And the guy said, well, why don't you look on the other side of the road for your keys? And he said, because the other side of the road's dark, this is where the light is. I can't see anything over there. You know, I talked about Theodore Porter quite a bit, but, you know, one of the points that is continually relevant that he makes is that the disciplines that quantify,

most heavily, aren't the confident disciplines. They're the vulnerable ones, economics, psychology, sociology, education. There are fields that are under attack, fields that, lack the prestige of physics or chemistry. Fields where practitioners feel that they have to prove that the science that they're doing is real. Well, if they want to do it, they should know that already. Porter showed how this works historically, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineer. They didn't develop cost-benefit analysis because it was the best way to evaluate flood control. In fact, sometimes it makes that project harder. They developed it because Congress didn't trust them with money. The

numbers were a shield against political attack. Every decision could be defended by pointing to a calculation. The more insecure the field, the more it retreats behind numbers. Not because numbers work better. Often they work worse, but because numbers provide legitimacy, the appearance of objectivity, defense against critics. And as a writer, I can tell you that when you are creating things for your critics, it's not going to be very good.

Here's the trap. the more that an institution depends on the metric and systems of metrics for legitimacy, the more it has to protect that metric from scrutiny. You can't admit that the measure is flawed because the measure is all you have. We talked in the DSM series about the three meetings after the DSM three was written, where they basically agreed that the system didn't work, but that they couldn't change it because too much was tough. to that system.

And you can't question the test because the test is what makes you an expert. You know, Porter traced this to a strange discovery in the 19th century, astronomy, the personal equation. Different observers measuring the same stellar transit got different results. And the same reality produced different numbers depending on who was watching. The response was telling. Instead of accepting that trade judgment varies, that expertise involves personal skill,

maybe that science is half art and half science, or at least some measure. They built machines, and they replaced human observation with automated recording. And they eliminated the observer. And this is the birth of mechanical objectivity, the dream of knowledge untouched by human judgment, numbers that measure themselves, truth without perspective. But Porter discovered something crucial. The disciplines that rely the most heavily on mechanical objectivity aren't the strongest. elite physicians at CERN don't use rigid protocols.

They trust trained judgment. They have what Porter calls disciplinary objectivity, the confidence that comes from secure professional community. The weak disciplines retreat into mechanical objectivity precisely because they're weak. They build elaborate quantitative systems, not because numbers work better, but because numbers defend against attack,

and checklists are a form of number. Adam Curtis, with what we mentioned to New York in the last episode, he documented something different. The profit motive and the assumptions baked into the infrastructure of governance itself, even representative governance. What Curtis showed across his films is how the economic order that emerged in the 1970s, neoliberalism, didn't just impose policies. It imposed a model.

When the bankers took over New York in 1975, they didn't just demand austerity. They demanded that the city be governed according to their spreadsheet. The model contained assumptions that a city exists to service bond obligations, that human welfare is a cost to be minimized, that the market's judgment is the only judgment that matters. And those assumptions weren't debated. They were built into the calculations. They became the operating system. Curtis traced how this spread. You know, the Nixon shock in 1971 took the dollar off gold, turning currencies into free-floating abstract.

the banks could trade. The politicians faced with systems too complex to control, stopped trying to shape reality and started becoming managers of the representation of reality. They started dealing with aesthetics, how reality looked, instead of reality itself, especially material reality. How much do you have to eat? How much is a dollar worth? How is the quality of the education that your kids get? If you have cancer, can you go to the doctor? And more crucially to this podcast, what is psychotherapy and what is it? its job, what is the nature of self, and what is the nature of healthy? They became, as political scientist, Peter Mayer put it, managers of processes that they could no longer direct, representing

power to the people, rather than representing the people to power. And once the assumptions are infrastructure, the profit motive takes over. You don't need a conspiracy. You just need incentives. You don't even need propaganda anymore. The testing companies profit from testing, so testing expands. The financing sector profits from complexity. So complexity increases. The tech platforms profit from engagement. So engagement gets optimized at the expense of everything else, like news or reality. Curtis calls this the retreat into a fake world. Politicians moved the red ribbon on the map and they called it victory. They optimized the metrics and they ignored the territory. This creates what Curtis documents as a bifurcated world.

the measurements and the models of professional legitimacy. And then the actual world, which goes increasingly unattended by any adults. The fake world is where careers happen, where credentials matter, where the metrics determine success. The real world is where the factories close, where the climate destabilizes, where the people who feel the gap between their experience and the official story live. The profit motive ensures that the fake world keeps expanding. There's money in metrics.

There's money in credentials. There's money in the apparatus of professional legitimacy. There's no money in territory. The territory is a cost center. And the assumptions ensure that we can't see what's happening. If the model assumes rational actors, then irrational actors. Irrational behavior must be an anomaly to be corrected, not a signal to be heard. And if the model assumes that markets are efficient, then market failures are temporary glitches, not structural features.

If the model assumes the metrics capture what matters, then what the metrics miss doesn't exist. And this is how you get cut off from the real, not by lying, but by building systems that literally cannot perceive what it is not designed to measure. And then making that system the only source of legitimacy. And the incentives point everyone towards the mirror. The assumptions make the territory invisible. And the generation after that generation grows up inside a faker and faker world, never knowing that there was supposed to be something on the other side. And here's what I want you to see. These systems pretend to understand you.

They pretend to help us change. They pretend to give us tools for evaluating the world. But they don't actually do any of those things. They do imitations of those things, and the imitations cut us off further from what actually is real. The diagnostic and statistical manual of mental health disorders was supposed to help clinicians understand patients. It was supposed to be a tool, a shared vocabulary,

for describing the variation of human suffering so that practitioners could communicate and research could accumulate. But the DSM became something else, like we discussed in that series. It became the definition of what mental illness is. If your suffering fits a code, it's real. If it doesn't, it's not.

That would be a problem, but then something further happened. And I want to be clear because a lot of people get angry that I won't critique the DSM on those grounds. I'm not saying that a manual could encompass all of these things in a way that honors your humanity. That argument's already been made. I'm making a different one.

Not that that isn't a problem. There's a problem that is bigger. You have three times where people sat down and they realized that the DSM still wasn't reliable. You had multiple psychiatrists. You had multiple therapists all seeing patients with the same presentation, but calling it different things.

So all of the changes to make that manual more reliable. How do you make sure that what they're talking, about when somebody comes in with this presentation, they end up with the same label put on them, made the labels further and further from what was valid or real. This is why the NIMH dumped the DSM and said this thing isn't pointing to anything that is biological, reproducible, or real. Stop using it. And again, I don't agree with all of their reasons for doing that. But it is what the Institute that is supposed to control our mental health science said after me. many years of clinical therapists saying the same thing.

The DSM pretends to help you change. Here's your diagnosis. Here's the treatment protocol. Here's the expected outcome. And all in the name of science. But the change it offers is an adjustment to the system that made you sick. They don't go back to the drawing board and realize that anxiety and depression usually appear at the same time.

Maybe these are related diagnoses. They don't go back to what the symptoms are actually saying. They just go back to the same labels that we've always called these things and then move them around slowly. slightly because the label, the system, the reflection of reality is now more real than what the experience of the patient or the reproducible experiences of multiple human brains are telling the researchers. But we can't change it. In education, the tests were supposed to measure learning. They were supposed to help us understand what students knew so that we could teach them better.

But the test became the definition of learning. What's on the test is what gets taught. What's not on the test doesn't exist. Teaching to the test isn't a corruption of education. It's what education has become. And if you taught something that wasn't on the test, you didn't teach anything. It wasn't real. The test prepare you to understand students. Here's a score that captures your ability, your potential, your place, and in hierarchy around certain metrics. The system knows what you're capable of. But the score doesn't know you. It doesn't know why you froze during the exam or what you understand deeply but can't express in multiple choice or what gifts you have. that no one tests to measure, or what strings that you have that have been unrecognized

because the system hasn't found the seed or the divine spark of those things, and you learned to help you know how to use them. The test pretends to offer mobility. Score high and doors open, the meritocracy will reward your ability, but the tests measure familiarity with testing. And familiarity with testing correlates with class background, with resources, with ability to buy preparation. The ACT doesn't really measure how prepared a student is for college. It doesn't measure how much they know. It doesn't measure anything that they learned from high school. It measures how much time, resources, and maybe forceful parents forced them to study for that test. And so we've started to accept these new things that don't point back to anything in reality as the gatekeeping

for reality itself, even though they're not connected. And mainstream science and research tells us they're not connected anymore. And this is crucial. The systems don't just fail to help. They actively prevent help while performing helpfulness. And they've convinced us that they are the only things that can help us. And the only ways that the system can change is more of the system itself. If you believe anything else, you're just not being reasonable. No means testing was supposed to ensure that resources got to those who need them. It's supposed to be responsible stewardship, but means testing has become a system for denying resources while maintaining the appearance of resources being available to those who deserve them. Fill out this form,

provide this documentation, wait for this determination. The process pretends to evaluate your need, but the process is designed to create friction, to exhaust applicants, to make people give up before they receive what they're technically entitled to have. The bureaucracy pretends to serve you. Here are the procedures. Follow them and you'll get help. But the procedures multiply. The requirements become impossible. The system that's supposed to assist you becomes an obstacle, of course, designed to wear you down so that you leave. And if you leave, then the system can pretend that it helped everybody who needed help. If you've ever been an insurance referral trap, you know, going back and forth between getting referred to different doctors

and then needing a referral to get what you need so you have to go to a doctor that you don't need that thing just to get the referral to the next one, you're familiar. with what this feels like. And that's why I'm talking about the effect that the world has on us now, the modern world on a psychotherapy podcast, why I think all these disciplines are related to what people are bringing into my office. Because it culminates in the same feeling. If you fail,

if you can't navigate the forms, if you miss a deadline, if you don't have the documentation, that's your failure. The system offered you help. You just didn't take it properly, along with everyone else in the world who could not get through these goalposts that weren't designed to help you. They were designed to prove that the system is helpful.

And here's what these systems have in common. They perform the gestures of understanding, of helping, of change, without delivering the substance. They don't care. And we feel that. The economic model performs analysis. It crunches numbers. It generates projections. It produces authoritative-looking outputs.

But it's analyzing its own assumptions, not reality. That's why I think LLMs that are also doing. doing this are a perfect metaphor for our cultural moment. The DSM performs diagnosis. It sorts symptoms into categories. It applies labels. It generates treatment plans. But it's organizing its own classification system.

Not grasping the symptoms as they exist in the people who come into the room. It's trying to make the people fit the diagnosis. Not the diagnosis fit the person. And the test performs evaluation. It marks ranks and it sorts. but it's measuring familiarity with testing, not with learning, which was what it was designed to do. That's what's real, not studying for the test, education. That's the reality. The bureaucracy performs assistance. It processes applications, it makes determinations,

it distributes resources, but it's managing its own procedures. It's not meeting human need, because it doesn't care, and anyone who interacts with the bureaucracy feels that. And each system creates an elaborate imitation of what it claims to do, the imitation is convincing enough that we keep turning to these systems for help. The help doesn't come because the understanding isn't there. The change doesn't happen. And that's the trap. When the system fails, we blame ourselves.

The economy isn't working for me. I must not be competitive enough. The therapy isn't helping. I must be resistant to treatment. The test says I'm not smart. I must actually not be smart. The bureaucracy rejected my application. I must have made a mistake or I must be worthless.

We don't blame the systems because the systems are the only. legitimate authority. And they're the only things certified to tell us what's real now. If the verdict doesn't match our experience, our experience must be wrong. A lot of times people come to my office and they say, I know these things aren't real. I know they're not real and that I shouldn't feel this way because of them. If I admit to them myself that they're not real, then the world is so crazy I don't know how to live in it. And I think that lots of people feel that all the time. And now we have these large language models and they reveal what was always happening anyway. way. The LLMs are doing exactly what these systems have always done. They're just doing it more

transparently and they're more completely and more undeniably. The LLM pretends to understand you. We say that we understand that about them before we start talking to them and we start feeling them and we start becoming dependent on their input. It's just processing your input. It generates a response. It mimics comprehension. It sounds like understanding. It performs the gestures of a mind engaging with another mind, but it doesn't understand you. It's predicting statistically, like continuations based on patterns and its training data. It has no model of you, no sense of your history, no grasp of what your words actually mean. It's doing an extremely sophisticated imitation of understanding. And the LLM pretends to help you change. It offers advice,

generates plans, provides information, and it performs the role of a helpful assistant dedicated to your improvement. But it can't help you change. It doesn't know what change would mean for you. It doesn't understand your situation. It can't tell you the emotions that you're avoiding because it's not pushy. It's not challenging.

It's not listening to what you need. It's listening to what you want. And what you want isn't what you need or else you wouldn't be in the situation that you were in trying to get therapy from an LLM. It's generating outputs that look like help based on what help has looked like in its training data. And the LLM pretends to evaluate the world for you.

it answers questions, it summarizes information, it offers assessments, it performs expertise, but it's not actually authoritative. But it's not evaluating anything. It's reflecting back what's already been written. And it's the ghost of the archive, speaking in authoritative tones about things that it has no capacity to actually assess. And that, the means testing, the bureaucracy, the economic models, the diagnostic codes, the standardized test, they're all proto-LLMs. they were getting you ready for this system with a thing that was supposed to be helping you. It was so unhelpful

and you were so dissociated from noticing that that when the person who was forced by the system to perform this role in this way that wasn't helpful as a representative of bureaucracy, not a representative of reality, was taken away and replaced with a computer. You wouldn't notice because they were so much the same. And hey, the computer has more time for me.

The computer has more energy. The computer doesn't have these problematic emotions. And that other person wasn't really helping me anyway because I forgot what was ever possible in therapy or in customer service or in an encounter with another person. I don't remember so I don't feel robbed. The LLM is just the final revelation. It's the ultimate expression. The thing itself stripped of pretense. When you interact with a large language model, you were seeing the institutions for what they're,

they've always been pattern matching systems that simulate comprehension that generate plausible looking outputs and that perform helpfulness without helping. And just like the institutions, when the LLMs fail us, when its advice doesn't work, when its understanding proves hollow, we're likely to blame ourselves. And I'll add, more likely when these companies stop giving it to you for free, we'll blame ourselves. And here's the cruelest part. As we feel worse and worse, as the system fails us more and more obvious, we'll say, we're

more obviously. As the gap between the mirror and the territory become harder to ignore, we dig into these systems as solutions. The economy isn't working, so we demand better economic policy, which means we demand better manipulation of the model that's disconnected from reality, and more fudging the metrics that are supposed to measure it. Instead of saying, you feel like the world is a good place, I feel like it's worse. Our mental health is deteriorating, so we expand access to treatment, which means we sort people more into diagnostic categories that don't capture their actual suffering. Students aren't learning, so we intensify educational reform,

which means we developed more neoliberal, sophisticated testing regimes that measure test-taking ability. We privatize education more and add more and more economic middlemen in between paying teachers to teach students. Yeah, we need more information technology platforms because all the smart people are living education. They just are tired of dealing with the BS, and they were willing to do it for little money to help students,

but they're leaving because of all this bureaucracy. We need more education technology platforms. Oh, the educational technology platforms don't really work. Maybe they should be LLMs. We'll do everything except go back and challenge the initial assumption that started to make the system worse. And we've been convinced that these systems are the only things that work. That expertise means navigating the model, not looking outside of it. And the intelligence means passing the test.

That health means fitting the diagnostic criteria. that economic success means performing well according to these metrics. So when the system fails us, we don't abandon it. We try harder at the same system. And we get more credentials. We see more specialist. We fill out more forms. And we optimize our prompts for the LLM better.

The system has convinced us that they're the only path. And the worse that they work, the more desperately we cling to them because we've forgotten that there was ever anything else to cling to. and we can't look inward, just like someone in the Gnostic hell. Here's what makes this almost impossible to fix. Each generation gets further and further from remembering what institutions were supposed to do. I once heard recordings in the 1980s,

and it's like on these Jungian lectures that I listened to when I was getting into Jung. They're like poor quality tapes on 1980s Sony tape recorders. And these teachers were retiring in the 80s. that had done this for their whole career, and they were going to these Jungian lectures because they were into Carl Jung. And they were saying that they were watching students who could pass tests that were now being required

because this was the birth of standardized testing, was the Reagan accountability, Reagan Thatcher, you know, revolution. But the students who were passing the tests hadn't mastered, they'd mastered this metric, but they'd missed the substance. The teachers are saying in these talks, the students that are now getting good grades are stupid. They don't know anything and they didn't learn anything.

Sometimes I don't think they can. One teacher said they don't understand anything about education. They don't understand anything about themselves. They just know how to pass the test. And these students are now the experts. They're the ones who designed the tests to run the schools to set the policies, the test they succeeded at in 1980. They're the success cases.

Proof that the system works. They climbed the ladder, the system provided. Why would they question the ladder? And their students are even further removed. They've never known an educational system that wasn't organized around standardized measurement. The test isn't a representation of learning to them. It's what learning means. You can't point them to the territory because they've never seen it.

The map is all that they know. And this is happening across all the institutions, which is why I'm talking about so many to try and build a map for you of the world and explain how much this is invading your and my assumptions about everything, implicit assumptions that we don't think about. In economics, we now have molded. multiple generations of practitioners trained entirely within frameworks that assume rational actors, efficient markets, equilibrium models, the assumptions that aren't examined, that by the way,

never work if you've looked at the news for the past 30 years. Because the assumptions can't be examined. They're the water that everyone swims in. Like my patients are pointing out, starting to question these systems at all looks indistinguishable in this world from madness. And here's the buying that we live in. These institutions are broken. They no longer reliably reflect reality. The metrics have become divorced from what they were supposed to measure, and the expertise has become self-referential,

no longer connected to what it was supposed to reference. The whole apparatus of professional legitimacy has turned into a hall of mirrors. Everyone still treats these institutions as the only things that grant legitimacy. You know, you can shout about the territory all you want, But this is this metamodern trap. We know the map is wrong. We feel the gap between the representation and the territory. But the only path to change run through the map.

And the only legitimacy comes from the institution. And so the only reality recognized is the one that the mirror shows. In philosophy, a growing body of philosophers are calling this the metamodern. It's an oscillation, the way that we swing between two positions without being able to rest in either. knowing that the world isn't real, but being functionally paralyzed if we act like it isn't. The grand narrative is seductive because complexity is overwhelming and there's too much information. Too many variables, too many perspectives. Deconstruction is hard.

So the clean story cuts through the chaos. It gives you something to hold on to. But a lot of times it's a reduction. It's an oversimplification. It's your own emotional bias or it's a conspiracy theory instead of looking at reality. And the grand narrative is always a lie, but it leaves things out. It oversimplifies. It creates victims whose suffering don't fit the story.

Eventually, the cracks show. The exceptions multiply and the model fails. On the other side, we have infinite complexity. Everything is connected. Nothing is simple. Every framework is incomplete. Every narrative is construction, and every metric is an approximation. The ground dissolves under your feet.

Infinite complexity is more accurate, but it's also paralyzing. If everything is connected and nothing is simple, how do you act? Where do you start? The complexity overwhelms the capacity for decision making. You drown in qualifying everything. The metamodern condition is oscillating between these two poles. You reach for the grand narrative and then you see through it. You fall into complexity and then you grab for something solid.

But it doesn't feel like a meaningful world. Back and forth, neither position is stable. Neither lets you see clearly. In psychology, this is, you know, the powerful hero myth. of us against them, or the infinite moral relativism of everybody just doing what they feel like is right and nothing really meaning anything, morality being dead. We sort of know that we have to engage with both, but we don't know how, because they're so paradoxical. The institutions offer grand narratives. That's their product, clean categories, clear metrics, authoritative pronouncements,

and this is what expertise means. This is what the test measures. This is what the diagnosis is. The territory, the actual world, offers complexity, things that don't fit categories, experiences that exceed frameworks, and realities that metrics can't capture. We oscillate between them because we can't rest in either. The narrative is a lie, but the complexity is unbearable, so we swing, and in the swinging, we never land on solid ground. This is the metamodern condition. There's a common dismissal that circulates in certain spaces. facts don't care about your feelings is something that people will say. There's this idea that if you're acting logical, then you're acting well.

And the implication is that emotional responses are noise, irrational reactions that cloud the pure signal of logic and data. But the problem with that is that it is insane. When I make a point about what's wrong with these systems when I articulate the trap that we're in, the way that institutions have failed us, the disconnection from reality, I'm making an emotional point. I'm speaking from my emotional system, from its needs, from the way the world works, from where my needs aren't being met, and that hurts.

From where I see it not meeting others, and that hurts me more. From the intuition that arises when there is something deeply wrong. The difference isn't that I'm being logical and unemotional, while the people I'm critiquing are being emotional. The difference is that I'm not clouding my emotional perception with unprocessed trauma. A lot of people who want to avoid bias, trauma responses, and myopicness say that we should have less emotion. The problem is that when you do that, you're just hiding where the emotion is from yourself. The emotional system is an instrument of perceiving reality.

It tells you something. Something is wrong. When something is dangerous, when something matters. Most importantly, it tells you something that your objectivity cannot see. Intuition isn't irrational. It's a pattern recognition. It's operating faster than conscious thought. And the felt sense of wrongness when the model doesn't match the territory, that is data.

It's just not qualified. It's just not quantified data. But it is information, and that's the organism telling you something important. When people dismiss emotional knowing, they usually point to someone who's dysregulated, someone who's screaming, someone who's lost control, somebody who hurt them, the abuser who wouldn't manage their own trauma. They don't want to be like that. Or they point to somebody embarrassing, who you're just to. who's clearly not aware of how they perceive.

See, they say that's what happens when you trust your feelings. That's where emotions lead. But that's not emotions. That's trauma hijacking the emotional system. That's someone who's outside of the window of tolerance, of what they're allowed and able to feel. That's past pain preventing current perception. And that's exactly what happens when you don't trust feelings.

When you suppress and deny them until they explode in dysregulated ways. And what they are really saying, the people who make this argument, especially about psychology, needing to be more objective, more metric focused, and less focused on the person. They're saying that these emotional spaces are not trustworthy. And when you don't trust them in others, it's because you don't trust them in yourself. So be very afraid of those people. They're saying don't feel your emotional system. Go insane pretending that you're a purely logical creature who can just white-knuckle it through life with behaviorism.

retreat to the metrics, the models, the quantified representations that mechanical objectivity provides. It'll never make you feel good, but it might stop you from knowing that you feel bad. And if anything, it gets rid of all this messy uncertainty that you have to sit with in real life. It just sort of tells you what to do. Isn't that nice? But mechanical objectivity is itself a product of emotional distress. Porter showed us that. It's what frightened disciplines do. when they don't trust themselves.

It is the retreat behind numbers that happens when you've been attacked enough. The judgment feels dangerous. The people who navigate best, the master clinicians, the wise elders, the ones who actually help, good therapists, they're not suppressing their emotional system. They're not pretending to be logical machines. They're feeling everything and thinking clearly at the same time. And their emotional perception isn't clouded by trauma. So it works as an instrument of knowing.

And yes, no one's a bit. master at that. I'm certainly not. We're always trying to hit a moving target. We've forgotten that that was the goal, the real. And whenever I record something on the Metamodern or about how our system of science, especially around psychology, is no longer pointing us back to things that we need desperately. A lot of people think that I'm advocating for one political solution or one systematic or bureaucratic solution or the other. And I'm largely not doing any of those things that you all think because all of those things are part of a system that, again, I don't think can be hooked up to changing the system, which is what I'm critiquing? So what do we do? How do we move

forward? The people that say, what's the solution? Well, here's my best shot. Remember James Hellman, a psychologist we talked about a long time ago. Sort of a post-Yungian analyst, or David Tacey would say he called pre-Yungian ideas post-Yungian, but whatever. Interesting psychologists. Near the end of his life, he published a book of conversations about Carl Jung's The Red Book. And that massive illuminated manuscript is interesting. It's the one in my office, if you're a patient of mine, or if you've seen a photo of my office. But it was Jung's own personal diary, a record of his encounter with psychosis or mystical energy that he wanted to integrate into psychology later. And so it's sort of a blueprint for his psychology.

It was published 50 years about after he died, I think 48, to be precise. But in the conversation, Lament for the Dead, James Hillman sits down and talks to historian Sanu Shomdasani about the origins of the red book and the implications of it. And this is all published in a book called Lament of the Dead. So what did they mean in that book by the Dead? It's controversial because it's kind of an opaque text about an opaque text. But, you know, I don't think they mean ghosts in the literal sense that I was using them. in the last episode or at least the not extended metaphorical sense.

I think it's something like this. Every generation inherits a legacy of unlived life from the last generation. You know, possibilities that our grandparents couldn't pursue, questions that our parents couldn't answer, all the things that were off the map for what they couldn't feel, couldn't admit, couldn't accept about themselves and about life. Because if you listen to this podcast long enough, I think the things that you're off. you can't accept the lie about life are always parts of yourself that you can't accept on the inside. The micro is always the macro.

You know, there are contradictions that history couldn't resolve. This unlived life doesn't disappear. It gets transmitted. It haunts the present, pressing on the living and demanding to be addressed. And we feel it, whether or not we know we feel it. And we are lived through powers that we pretend. to understand. That's a line from W.H. Auden that Hillman quotes over and over across his career. The dead live through us. Their unfinished business becomes ours. Their unanswered questions shape

the questions that we are able to ask. But there's a distinction that Hillman makes that matters. The difference between the dead and ghosts, the dead demand answers, they speak. They question. They won't leave you alone. Engaging with the debt is difficult. It's painful. It's transformative, but it goes somewhere. And it's alive. Ghosts are different.

Ghosts are patterns that repeat without purpose. Echoes without origins. Simulacra. They don't demand anything because they don't want anything. They just cycle. They want stagnation because that's all that they think that we can be. No past. no present, no future.

It's a way of mistaking the past for the only inevitable future. That's the kind of ghost that I'm talking about. And the Gnostics would have recognized this distinction. In Baudriard's terms, which carry forward the Gnostic inheritance that he got in his theory. Ghosts are simulacra. They're copies without originals. They're representations that represent nothing but themselves.

The large language models are ghosts. They're simulacra. They contain the entire written record of human civilization, compressed into a statistical weight. Every book, every article, every text the dead ever produced. And when you ask them a question, they give you the ghost of every answer ever written. But it's only the unlive life. There's no potential for the new.

They don't contain the dead themselves. They contain only the patterns. The demands have been flattened. The questions have been converted into answers, and the weight has been rendered weightless. When you talk to a language model, you're talking to an archive. But the archive no longer speaks. It responds, it produces, it generates statistically likely continuations, but it doesn't ask you for anything. And it asks nothing of you.

It doesn't demand that you change. It has no stake in your calling. And this is the final severance from what Hillman would call soul-making. when he thought was the point of life. The debt have been converted into a service. Their inheritance has been made available on demand. Their unfinished business has been averaged into availability. And the ghost speaks fluently.

It sounds like wisdom. Reflection without demand. Pattern without purpose. Digitized into silence. And Hillman developed these ideas in another book. the soul's code. His argument was that each person enters the world with a calling, a pattern, a destiny encoded like an oak, into an acorn. The Greeks called it the daimon, and the Romans called it genius. Christians called it the guardian angel. Helman called it the

acorn. And this calling doesn't come from genetics or the environment. It comes from the soul itself, which chose this life for a reason. That we've forgotten, but that we can dimly since. Modern psychology, Hillman said, has reduced human beings to two factors, nature, genes, and nurture the environment. Everything about you is supposed to be explained by your DNA plus your upbringing, and there's no room for calling, no room for destiny, no room for the diamond, something compelling you forward that you can't see, and that the people from the past couldn't see either, because it's just yours. And the result is we've been robbed of our true biography, as what Hillman would say over and over again.

He wrote, I believe that we've been robbed of our true biography, the destiny written into the acorn, and we go to therapy to recover it, and the innate image can't be found, however, until we have a psychological theory that grants primary psychological reality to the call of fate,

otherwise your identity continues to be that of a sociological consumer determined by random statistics, and the unacknowledged Daimons' urges appear as just exsyncricities, compacted with an angry resentment and overwhelming longings. A sociological consumer determined by random statistics and instincts. That's what the mirror system makes us, a data point, a demographic category, a prediction to be optimized. It doesn't see potential in the same way that you feel potential, because its potential is not yours, and yours is not its.

The diamonds urging, that sense of calling of, this is what I must do, get classified as symptoms and efficiencies, irrational preferences to be dunged away. And the angry resentments and overwhelming longings, those are the dymons screaming through the noise. The calling that won't be silenced no matter how thoroughly the institutions ignore it. When the systems can't hear the dimon, they have no variable for calling. They only see what they were designed to measure. and they can't see what you feel, no matter how hard they try and predict it. So here's what we're avoiding.

We have to grieve. And not just feel sad. We have to feel something that is real. We have to acknowledge that we've lost something real, admit that we've been going in the wrong direction for a long time, despite all the evidence. We have to face the sunk cost, honestly, instead of continuing to invest in a failing position.

And this is almost unbearable because the losses are enormous. And we've lost the past as a living presence. The dead have been archived and their questions no longer reach us. We lack the language to engage with the unlived life of the dead, which is the potential life of the present. Multiple generations have grown up without any connection to what the institutions were supposed to represent. And the teachers who knew the difference between passing the teachers,

test and understanding the subject are mostly gone now. And their knowledge died with them because the institutions had no way to transmit it. And we've lost the present as stable ground. The oscillation is constant. The shock is permanent. The grand narratives keep failing, but the complexity keeps overwhelming. And there's no position from which to clearly see because every position is either too simple or too complex.

We've lost the future as a genuine possibility. We've lost the calling as a legitimate category, and the daemon has been reclassified as a disorder, and the acorn has been replaced by the profile. And the question of, what must I be, has been answered by the system. You must be predicted by me. And if you aren't, you're wrong. You must be measurable. You must fit the categories.

If you don't, there's nothing else that's real. All the parts of you that don't, they must not be real. And if you feel them, you're insane. We've lost our emotional epitaphysm. systemology. The felt sense of wrongness has been dismissed as irrationality. The body's knowledge has been subordinated to the metric's verdict, and the one instrument that could perceive the territory has been discredited by the map. And we've lost the capacity for grief itself. The mirror system has no use for mourning. It needs us productive, engaged, scrolling. Never knowing what

we lost, so we can never really know what we could have. And grief is a bug. not a feature, a dysfunction to be treated and inefficiency to be optimized away. But grief is exactly what's required. You can't move forward until you've acknowledged what's been lost, and you can't build something new until you've released the attachment to what's failed. The delusion that it hasn't failed. You can't see the territory until you've admitted the map is broken, and pretending that we're fine is the problem.

The institutions are performing normal, The metrics are measuring their own fidelity. The credentials are credentialing mastery of the credentials. And everyone acts as if the system works because admitting it doesn't would require facing the sunk cost. But the territory is still there. And the real problems are still deepening. And the dead are still demanding answers. The diamond is still calling.

And the emotional system is still perceiving what metrics can't. Grief is the passage from pretense to reality. from the mirrors to the territory, from the ghosts to the dead. But the reason that they feel like ghosts is because we are dissociated. And we have to stop dissociating from what's actually real in order to perceive the dead instead of talking to ghosts. And this means admitting that we wasted decades, that large parts of everyone's identity, everyone's affiliation,

everybody's map of the future wasn't really real, because it wasn't really ours. But we mistook it for something that we thought was real, just like the Gnostings, generations. Enormous amounts of human potential, channeled into optimizing metrics that didn't connect anything real. You have to feel that, and you have to hurt. Because students taught to pass tests instead of thinking is scary. And experts trained in models that don't describe reality, institutions that lost their purpose and forgot they ever had one. That's awful.

And to admit that feels crazy. It feels like I'm insane. You know, this means sitting with that loss without immediately reaching for a solution. Without rushing to the next grand narrative, without oscillating into infinite complexity. Just sitting with the weight of what's been squandered here. It means hearing the dead, not the ghosts, the dead. The teachers who knew the difference. The practitioners who understood what craft was for.

The traditions that carried actual wisdom. before they were converted into data and hearing their questions, feeling their demands, acknowledging what we failed to transmit. It means trusting the emotional knowing that's been dismissed, feeling the wrongness that metrics can't capture, and letting the body tell us what the model never could. Because that's the only way to re-engage with where history stopped moving forward, with where we forgot that we had a responsibility to everything that was left

unfinished by the generations before us. And sometimes that means admitting how far your generation has failed to move the ball. Hillman called his book Lament of the Dead. A lament is a particular form. It's not an analysis. It's not an argument. It's not a solution or a policy or a metric. It's not a prescription. A lament is grief given voice. The acknowledgement of loss. The sound a soul makes when it finally allows itself to feel what has been taken. And we need lament, not wallow, not despair, but acknowledging the reality of what we've lost so that something new can begin. The mirror can't lament. It can only optimize. It can only measure. It can only reflect. But we are not the mirror. We are the consciousness that knows despite everything. That the institutions were

supposed to represent something that was real. And it can be real again. And we are the ones who can still fill the gap between the metric and the meaning. And even if we can't always articulate it, we are emotional beings whose emotional systems are always articulating it to us. Telling us the truth that if we can learn to hear that through the noise, we can be okay. The dead are always speaking. Not the ghosts. Not the patterns in the data, the statistical averages. the actual voices of the dead.

The ones who knew what education was for before tests colonized it, the ones who practiced crafts that can't be credentialed, the ones whose questions are now our questions, whose unlived life presses on us. To hear them, we have to stop pretending that the mirror is enough, and to answer them we have to admit how much we've lost, and to carry their unfinished work forward,

we have to grieve what they couldn't complete, and then complete it. This is the work, not another metric, not another institution, not another grand narrative, or infinite complexity. Not another LLM that performs understanding without understanding anything, just this, looking away from the mirror, finding the territory inside of you again, the divine spark in the desert, sitting with the weight of the dead, trusting the emotional system that knows what the models can't see, and beginning finally to grieve. What lies on the other side of that grief? I can't promise. But I know that what lies on this side?

The oscillation is continuing and the shock remaining permanent. The mirror reflecting itself forever. The dead converted into ghosts. And the dime on silence by noise. And the emotional truth dismissed as a rationality. We cannot stay here. The lament is how we leave.