The housing crisis follows exactly this pattern. Housing is treated as a financial asset (economy layer) rather than a human need (culture layer). The financial system optimises for return on investment: it is more profitable to hold housing as an appreciating asset than to make it widely available at affordable prices. The result — a generation locked out of homeownership — is not an accident or a policy failure. It is the structural consequence of letting the economy layer drive decisions that belong to the culture layer. Until housing policy is grounded in cultural values (everyone deserves shelter) rather than economic logic (maximise asset appreciation), the crisis will continue regardless of which specific policies are tried.
Why Institutions Cannot Solve Existential Problems
Institutions are hierarchies. Information flows up; decisions flow down. At each level, information is compressed — the person above gets a summary, not the full picture. This compression is necessary (no individual can process all the information in a large organisation), but it means that the bandwidth of the institution — the complexity of situations it can actually respond to — is fundamentally limited by the bandwidth of the individuals at the top. Take the wisest possible individual. Surround them with twelve perfect advisors, each receiving input from twelve advisors of their own. That's 144 people, passing information optimally, 24/7. Can that central person implement a design complex enough to address a planetary-scale ecological crisis? No. The bandwidth isn't there. It's like asking one person to design every circuit, every launch system, every life support module for the Apollo program. The problem exceeds the channel capacity of any hierarchy, regardless of how wise the people in it are. And ecological problems are not just complex — they're exponential . Risk cascading means that externalized risks don't just add up; they multiply. If benefits are privatised while risks are externalised into the commons, the accumulating risks interact — risk cascading on other risks, creating cascades of cascades. That exponential dynamic exceeds the capacity of any linear, hierarchical process to address.
This is why no reform of existing institutions will be sufficient. The problem is not that the wrong people are in charge. The problem is that hierarchical, transactional structures cannot generate the bandwidth necessary to address exponential problems. Something structurally different is needed.
The Three Governance Archetypes
Every form of governance that has ever been tried is a combination of three fundamental archetypes:
Meritocracy
(omniscient-modal): one person or small group makes decisions based on expertise or authority. Fast, decisive, clear direction. But maximally corruptible — whoever holds power can use it to serve themselves. All the dynamics of "the Rules for Rulers" apply: the leader must keep key supporters happy, which means the decisions serve a small group rather than the whole.
Democracy
(transcendent-modal): the group decides by majority vote. Appears to distribute power broadly. But democracy's fundamental function is to find whatever issue most effectively divides the community into a bare majority and a bare minority. If a community's effectiveness depends on its unity, democracy is the most perfectly disabling governance system imaginable. It is also corruptible: whoever designs the proposals, drafts the measures, or selects the candidates controls the process.
Consensus
(immanent-modal): the group decides only when everyone agrees. Produces genuinely good decisions because all perspectives are integrated. But terribly slow, unable to handle high complexity, and extremely vulnerable to blocking — a single participant can veto the entire process. These three form the complete basis of governance — every system ever tried is some combination of them. And none of them works, individually or in simple combination. If none individually works, then any straightforward superposition of them will also fail — you'll just inherit the failures of each component.
Except that the IDM provides a specific pattern — via Axiom II — by which the three can be convolved rather than merely combined. In this pattern, each process corrects the specific deficiencies of the others through a checks-and-balances metastructure. Consensus produces the quality of decision; meritocratic execution
provides the speed; democratic accountability prevents corruption. The aggregate doesn't inherit the limitations of the components because the components are in a specific cyclic corrective relationship — each one catching the failures of the previous one. This hybrid technique has been developed for small groups (roughly up to 12 people) and for communities above approximately 300 people. Interestingly, no stable governance solution exists in the middle range — between about 12 and 300, group dynamics are too complex for small-group process but too small for the emergent dynamics that stabilise larger communities. This corresponds to known anthropological findings about group-size transitions (Dunbar's number and related research).
Money, Trust, and Civilisation
Money serves three functions: it's a unit of accounting (what things are "worth"), a medium of exchange (the mechanism by which trades happen), and a store of value (the ability to shift past choice-capacity into the future). These three functions form an inseparable triple. Without all three operating together, money doesn't work. What underlies all three? Trust. I accept your money because I believe that others will accept it from me in the future. That belief rests on trust — in other people, in the marketplace, in the civilisation that maintains the conditions for exchange. The value of any currency is not in its physical or digital substance but in the shared trust that it can be exchanged for real goods and services. Now: cryptocurrency was developed because people are losing trust in national currencies — and for understandable reasons. Governments mismanage economies, start wars, fail to address critical problems. If you can't trust the government, why trust its money? Crypto promises "trustless" systems — distributed ledgers that don't require trusting any central authority. But here is what the crypto community mostly fails to recognise: the "trustlessness" operates at the infrastructure level. The blockchain solves the problem of trusting the mechanism of exchange. It does not — and cannot — solve the problem of trusting that future counterparties will exist, that goods and services will be available to purchase, that civilisation will endure long enough for your stored value to be redeemable. That trust operates at the cultural level.
Infrastructure trust and cultural trust are different things. The crypto community has confused them. They've built a better pipe — but the pipe only works if there's a functioning civilisation to connect. And if civilisation itself is under threat — from environmental collapse, from the cascading crises we've discussed — then no currency, crypto or otherwise, preserves value. The notion of "a store of value" only makes sense in the context of a civilisation that produces a surplus of choices. If the surplus disappears, the stored value goes to zero regardless of what form it takes.
If the value of all currencies ultimately depends on civilisational trust, and civilisational trust depends on the health of the ecology-culture-infrastructure chain, then the only genuinely safe "investment" is in the health of that chain itself. Invest in land restoration. Invest in community building. Invest in the cultural practices that enable people to make wise choices together. These are not altruistic luxuries — they are the substrate on which all other value depends. Every financial instrument, every career plan, every retirement fund assumes that civilisation will continue to function. Investing in the conditions that make civilisation possible is not charity — it is the most basic form of self- interest.
The Inversion That Matters
The standard institutional pattern runs: a founder develops a strategy, uses it to create a vision, and then uses the vision to manipulate culture — convincing investors, employees, and customers to buy in. Strategy → vision → culture. The IDM says this must be inverted. Culture first.
A community discovers what it values through genuine dialogue and care-based relationship. From that shared understanding of values, a vision emerges — not imposed from above but arising from the collective process. From the vision, strategy follows — how to actualise the vision given the resources and conditions available. Culture → vision → strategy.
This inversion is not utopian idealism. It is a structural requirement for any system that aims to serve life rather than extract from it. When strategy drives culture, culture becomes a tool of extraction. When culture drives strategy, strategy becomes a tool of care. The direction of the flow determines the character of the outcome. Every question about governance, economics, and institutional reform ultimately reduces to this: which direction does the dependency flow? Are we building culture to serve the economy, or building economy to serve culture? Are we treating ecology as a resource to be extracted, or as the foundation on which everything depends? The answers are obvious once the dependency chain is visible. The difficulty is that seeing the chain requires stepping outside the frame that the inverted system has naturalised — the frame in which economic logic seems like the only logic, and culture seems like a soft luxury rather than the structural precondition for everything else. That stepping-outside is precisely what the IDM provides.
Discussion Questions
1. Map the dependency chain (ecology → culture → infrastructure → economy) onto a specific issue you care about — housing, climate, technology, education. Where is the inversion happening? What would it look like to restore the correct dependency order? 2. The tuna fish experiment suggests that consumer choice, as currently structured, cannot drive ecological improvement. Why not? Is the problem with consumers (they're selfish), with the market structure (the incentives are wrong), or with something deeper? How does the extraction-abstraction- accumulation model illuminate the issue? 3. The chapter claims that no reform of existing institutions is sufficient — that the problem is structural (hierarchies can't handle exponential complexity). Is this claim too strong? Can you think of institutional reforms that might genuinely address the bandwidth problem without replacing the institutional form entirely? 4. If cryptocurrency solves infrastructure trust but not cultural trust, what would solve cultural trust? What practices, structures, or experiences build the kind of trust that makes civilisation possible?
Advocacy Scenario
Someone says: "This is just anti-capitalist ideology dressed up in philosophical language. Markets work. They allocate resources efficiently. Your 'dependency chain' ignores all the genuine benefits that economic growth has produced." How would you respond? Consider: The IDM doesn't deny that markets work — it says they work within a specific layer (economy) that depends on lower layers (infrastructure, culture, ecology). Market efficiency at the economy layer is genuine and valuable. But if market logic overrides the lower layers — if economic growth destroys the ecology on which it depends — then the "efficiency" is illusory. It's efficient extraction, not efficient sustaining. The critique is not that capitalism is wrong but that it's incomplete — it operates at one layer and ignores the dependency on the others.
Chapter Twenty
The Inner Life
Desire, Emotion, and Choice
The first twenty chapters of this book have been about understanding: understanding what knowledge is, how ethics works, what consciousness involves, how civilisations succeed or fail. This chapter turns inward. It asks: what is actually going on inside you? How do your emotions work? What drives your choices? Where does the energy of motivation come from — and where does it go when you feel stuck, depressed, or paralysed? This is not self-help. Self-help tells you what to do without explaining why it works. What follows is a structural account of the inner life — a map of desire, emotion, and choice that is grounded in the same metaphysical framework we've been developing throughout this book. It is practical in the deepest sense: it gives you tools that work because they correspond to how your inner life is actually organised, not because someone decided they were nice ideas. If any single chapter of this book could change your daily experience of being alive, it's this one.
The Plane of Perception
Let's start with a simple image. Imagine drawing a surface around your entire body — just outside your skin, like a thin envelope. Everything inside that envelope is "you" in the most basic sense: your cells, your organs, your nervous system, your inner experience. Everything outside is "world": other people, nature, objects, the whole of reality that is not-you. Now imagine simplifying this into a flat plane — one side is the subjective (you), the other side is the objective (the world). We can call this the plane of perception . Anything that flows from the world towards you — anything you sense, perceive, receive — passes through this plane inward. That's perception .
Anything that flows from you towards the world — anything you say, do, make, choose — passes through this plane outward. That's expression . Your entire life, from this perspective, is the total communication between self and universe. Everything you experience is what arrives through the plane. Everything you do is what you send out through the plane. And the quality of your life — whether you feel alive, connected, meaningful, or dead, isolated, empty — has everything to do with the quality of the flows through this plane. Whether they're open or blocked. Whether the signals are clear or garbled. Whether what you're expressing corresponds to what you actually care about, or whether something is getting lost in translation. This is a very simple model. But it sets up everything that follows.
Thoughts, Feelings, and Emotions: Three Aspects of Inner
Experience
Most people use the words "feeling" and "emotion" interchangeably. In this framework, they're different things — and the difference matters enormously for understanding yourself. Every inner experience has three aspects:
Thought is the form aspect — the shape, the pattern, the structure. If your experience were a piece of music, thought would be the melody and rhythm. Thought gives experience its intelligible structure: a beginning, middle, and end; a subject, verb, and object; a logical sequence you can follow and articulate.
Feeling is the quality aspect — the texture, the character, the timbre. If thought is the melody, feeling is whether that melody is being played on a flute or a cello or a distorted electric guitar. Feeling is what allows you to distinguish between two experiences that have the same form but a completely different character. You can have two thoughts with the same logical content — "I will be alone" — and one feels peaceful (solitude) while the other feels devastating (loneliness). The quality is different. That's feeling.
Emotion is the energy aspect — the intensity, the volume, the force. Using the same music metaphor: emotion is how loud the music is playing. Emotion is what moves you — literally. It's the energy that flows through you and compels action. It's what makes you get up from the chair, what makes your voice shake, what makes your heart pound or your chest feel tight. Emotion is energy in motion.
These three are always co-present. You can't have an experience without some form (even if it's vague), some quality (even if it's subtle), and some energy (even if it's barely perceptible — zero energy means no experience at all). But they are genuinely distinct. You can change the quality of an experience without changing its form or intensity. You can increase the intensity without changing the form or quality. And you can restructure the form without changing either the quality or the energy. Why does this distinction matter practically? Because most of the time, when people say "I feel anxious" or "I feel depressed," they're actually describing a tangled combination of thought, feeling, and emotion that they haven't separated. And the tangling is part of the problem. If you can distinguish — "okay, the thought is that I'm going to fail; the feeling is a kind of cold contraction; the emotion is a moderate intensity of fear" — then you can work with each component separately. The thought can be examined (is it true?). The feeling can be attended to (what is this quality telling me?). The emotion can be honoured as valid energy (something I care about is at stake) without the whole experience being an undifferentiated mass of "bad."
The Dynamics of Emotion
Emotions are not random. They are not weather that happens to you without cause or pattern. They follow a specific dynamic — a sequence of energy flows that can be understood, predicted, and navigated once you know the structure.
Imagine two energy channels. The first is vertical : it runs from the deepest part of you — your values, your care, what matters to you at the most fundamental level — up into your conscious mind in the here and now. The second is horizontal : it runs from your conscious mind outward into the world through your actions, your expressions, your choices. The dynamics of emotion are about the degree to which these two channels are open or closed, and the patterns that result. Love: Both Channels Open When both channels are open and flowing freely, the state is love . Not romantic love specifically — love in its most basic sense: an open, present, flowing engagement between care and world. You feel what you care about. You express what you feel. There's no blockage, no compression, no forced redirection. You're
just alive, present, and connected. Having breakfast with people you care about. Walking in nature. Working on something that matters to you. Having a real conversation. That's love: ambient, ever-present when nothing is blocking the channels. Fear: Vertical Channel Activated Now imagine you perceive a potential for loss — something you care about is threatened. Maybe your child is in danger. Maybe you see a threat to your wellbeing or the wellbeing of someone you love. Maybe you perceive that something precious is about to be destroyed. What happens? A massive surge of energy flows down the vertical channel — from care into body. You feel it land in your gut, your solar plexus, the centre of gravity of your body. Your adrenal system activates. Your muscles tense. Your awareness narrows and sharpens. This is fear . Here is the critical insight: fear is love concentrated.
The energy of fear comes from care. If you didn't love — if you didn't care about the thing threatened — there would be no energy in the fear. This is why "love is always stronger than fear" is not just a platitude: it's structurally true. Fear is a derivative of love. It's care redirected into activation energy so you can do something about the threat. When fear works correctly, it enables action. You perceive the threat, the energy activates you, and you respond — you grab the child, you dodge the car, you address the problem. The energy flows through you and out into the world through the horizontal channel. Fear served its purpose and dissipates. Anger: Energy Directed Outward But sometimes you can't act directly. Sometimes you need someone or something else to act. The child is too far away; you need the person standing next to them to grab them. Or the system you're trying to change is too big for you to affect alone. In that case, the fear energy — the vertical flow that landed in your body — gets redirected into the horizontal channel. Instead of enabling your action, it becomes a strong energy directed outward at the world: do something. Pay attention. This matters. Act now.
That is anger . Anger is a strong energy flowing from self to world, sourced in fear, which is sourced in love.