Chapter Twenty
Where Do We Go From Here?
You've made it through the whole book. You know the Western canon — its arguments, its debates, its genuine achievements and its structural failures. You know the Immanent Metaphysics — its axioms, its principles, and its applications across epistemology, ethics, the philosophy of mind, the question of God, and the design of civilisation. You have a map of your own inner life — desire, emotion, and choice. You have a model of friendship, communication, and community practice. The question you're asking — the one this chapter exists to answer — is: now what?
What You Now Have
Let's be precise about what the last twenty-two chapters have given you. First, literacy in the Western philosophical tradition . You can read Plato, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Mill, Nietzsche, Chalmers, and Singer — not as alien texts but as contributions to debates you understand. You can engage with philosophy at the university level. You can recognise when someone is making a utilitarian argument, a Kantian move, a virtue-ethical claim, an empiricist objection, a sceptical challenge. This literacy is not just academic — it's the shared language of every serious conversation about ethics, policy, meaning, and knowledge in the Western world. You now speak that language. Second, a coherent framework for addressing the questions the canon leaves open. Not a set of opinions — a framework. The IDM doesn't tell you what to think. It gives you structural tools: the three modalities, the axioms, the knowing/understanding distinction, the symmetry and continuity principles, the path of right action, the dependency chain. These tools don't produce answers
automatically. They produce better questions, clearer analysis, and more effective choices. The framework is testable: identify the triple, check the axiom patterns, see if the predictions hold. If they don't, the framework needs revision. That's how it should work. Third, practical skills for navigating your inner life and your relationships. The dynamics of emotion give you a way to understand what you're feeling and why. The need/want/desire distinction gives you leverage on what's driving you. The six aspects of friendship give you a diagnostic for your relationships. The three rights of communication give you a practice for genuine connection. These aren't abstract — they're things you can do today, in your next conversation, in your next decision. Fourth, a structural understanding of why the world is the way it is . The ethical gap. The dependency chain inversion. The bandwidth argument. The extraction-abstraction-accumulation cycle. These explain — not as conspiracy theories or ideological narratives but as structural analyses — why housing is unaffordable, why climate action stalls, why institutions fail, why you feel the way you feel about the future. Understanding the structure doesn't fix it. But it keeps you from wasting energy on false solutions or sinking into paralysis.
The Three Practices
Given all of that, there are three things you can do — starting now, without permission, without resources, without anyone else's cooperation. Practice One: The Inner Work The path of right action begins inside you. Not because the inner world is more important than the outer — it's not — but because the quality of your choices depends on the quality of your inner process, and you are the only person who can work on that. The inner work is not meditation (though meditation may be part of it). It's the ongoing practice of distinguishing thought, feeling, and emotion in your own experience. Of tracing your emotions back through the dynamic: what am I afraid of? What am I afraid of losing? What is the love at the root? Of checking whether you're pursuing a want or serving a desire. Of integrating thinking and feeling when you face a decision, rather than defaulting to one at the expense of the other.
This practice has no endpoint. It's not something you complete and move on from. It's something you get better at over a lifetime, and the getting-better is the point — it is the cultivation of the discernment and attunement that make wise choice- making possible. Start where you are. The next time you feel a strong emotion, pause and trace the dynamic. The next time you face a choice, check both thinking and feeling. The next time you want something, ask whether it's a need, a want, or a desire. Small reps. Consistent practice. The effects compound. Practice Two: Genuine Relationship Everything the IDM says about ethics, about community, about civilisation ultimately depends on the quality of the relationships between people. And you build that quality one relationship at a time. The six aspects of friendship are a practice, not just a framework. Share. Celebrate. Support. Encourage. Learn together. Discover shared values. Do this with the people already in your life — not perfectly, not all at once, but consistently. Grant the three rights of communication: be present, seek to understand, demonstrate that understanding. Act with people, not for or at them. This is the hardest practice, because it requires vulnerability. Genuine relationship means being seen — not your curated image, not your aesthetic, not your brand, but you . It means letting people matter to you in ways that can hurt if the relationship breaks. It means investing care without guarantee of return. The IDM doesn't promise that this will always work out. It says that this is the only way the deeper projects — community, governance, civilisational redesign — become possible. Without genuine relationship, everything else is institutional scaffolding with nothing inside it. Practice Three: Advocacy Every chapter of this book has included an advocacy scenario. This was deliberate. The ideas in this book are not just for your private contemplation. They are tools for engaging with the world — with your friends, your community, the broader culture. Advocacy doesn't mean proselytising. It means being able to articulate, clearly and calmly, what you think and why. It means being able to engage with disagreement without collapsing into defensiveness or aggression. It means being able to explain the framework to someone who's never encountered it, in language they can follow, connecting it to questions they actually care about.
The advocacy scenarios throughout the book are training exercises for this. Each one puts you in a conversation with a sceptic, a critic, or a confused interlocutor, and asks you to respond from the framework without being dogmatic or dismissive. That skill — the ability to hold your ground while remaining genuinely open to the other person's perspective — is one of the rarest and most valuable capacities a person can develop. It is the communicative expression of the path of right action: the win-win conversation, where both participants leave understanding more than they did before. Practice advocacy in low-stakes situations first. Explain the dynamics of emotion to a friend who's going through something difficult. Use the knowing/understanding distinction in a conversation about misinformation. Apply the need/want/desire framework to a purchasing decision and talk about it with someone. See how the ideas land. Notice where they need to be translated, adapted, made more concrete. This process of translation — from abstract framework to lived conversation — is itself a practice of the path of right action.
The Three Connections
The three practices — inner work, genuine relationship, advocacy — are not separate activities. They are three dimensions of a single project: developing the capacity to be in right connection with the three fundamental domains of experience. Connection to self (spiritual practice):
How the flow of experience — from world and from others — moves into you. Can you receive it without being overwhelmed? Can you integrate joy and pain, success and failure, love and loss, without losing your coherence as a self? The inner work develops this capacity. It is what the IDM calls spiritual practice — not because it involves religion, but because it involves the integrity of the first person, the wholeness of the one who experiences. Connection to others (relational practice): How you express yourself outward, toward other people. Can you communicate in a way that genuinely creates understanding? Can you participate in community practices that hold care rather than just transacting? Can you be seen, be vulnerable, and be trusted? The genuine relationship practice develops this capacity. In the IDM's framework, this is where community happens — not in institutions, which are held together by transaction and power, but in relationships held together by care.
Connection to world (engagement practice):
How you relate to reality beyond the human — to ecology, to the material world, to truth as it exists independently of your wishes. Can you perceive the world accurately, without filtering everything through ideology or desire? Can you act in the world effectively, without damaging the foundations you depend on? The advocacy practice develops this capacity — not just advocacy for ideas, but engaged, skillful action in the world based on genuine perception of what is actually happening. These three connections are like a three-legged stool: any two support the third. If you doubt yourself, check against reality and check with trusted others. If you doubt another person, check your own conscience and check against the facts. If you doubt reality, check your inner sense and check what others are seeing. Each form of connection serves as a corrective for the others. And the braiding of all three — interior integrity, relational depth, and accurate engagement with the world — is stronger than any one could be alone. The IDM connects these three kinds of connection to the three transcendental values: connection to self deepens your access to goodness . Connection to world deepens your access to truth . Connection to others deepens your access to beauty . The good, the true, and the beautiful are not abstractions — they are the lived qualities of a life where all three connections are genuinely held.
The Long Game
The ethical gap — the distance between what we can do and what we are wise enough to do — took fifteen thousand years to open. It will not close in a single generation. The mastery of choice is a civilisational project, not an individual one. It requires new cultural practices, new governance forms, new relationships between economy and ecology. These will take decades to develop and centuries to mature. Your role is not to solve the whole problem. Your role is to be one of the people who begins. The three theorems of the path of right action apply here. The path exists (Theorem 1): there is a way through the current crisis that serves all parties, even if nobody can see it clearly yet. The path is walkable (Theorem 2): each step in the right direction makes the next step easier. And you can sense the direction (Theorem 3): even without a complete map, you can feel which choices move toward greater relational integrity and which move away from it.
What this means practically: don't wait for certainty. Don't wait for a complete plan. Don't wait for someone with more authority or more resources to go first. Start with the inner work. Build genuine relationships. Learn to articulate what you know. And trust that the compounding of small, wise choices — yours and others' — will produce a trajectory that none of you could have designed individually. The mastery of change took a hundred thousand years. The mastery of causation took fifteen thousand. The mastery of choice has barely begun. But it has begun — and you are part of its beginning.
Philosophy Is Not Self-Help
A necessary clarification. This book — especially its final chapters — might look like a self-help manual dressed in philosophical clothing. It is not. There is a fundamental difference between self-help and philosophy, and understanding that difference matters. Self-help says: here is a technique that will make your life better. Do this thing and you will be happier, more productive, more successful. The measure of success is subjective wellbeing — how good you feel. Philosophy says: here is a way of seeing the world that is more accurate than the way you currently see it. The measure of success is not how good you feel but whether your understanding corresponds to reality — and whether your actions honour that understanding. Sometimes the two overlap. Seeing the world more accurately often does make life better. Understanding the structure of joy and pain (Chapter 21) can reduce unnecessary suffering. Understanding the dynamics of choice (Chapter 11) can improve decision-making. Understanding the structure of communication (Chapter 22) can deepen relationships. But these are side effects, not the goal. The goal is understanding — and understanding sometimes makes life harder , not easier. Seeing systemic injustice clearly is painful. Recognising the ethical gap is disorienting. Understanding the limits of your own agency is humbling. Philosophy doesn't promise comfort. It promises clarity.
The IDM takes this further. The three practices — inner work, relational depth, and structural engagement — are not "wellness tips." They are demanding disciplines that require sustained effort, tolerance for discomfort, and willingness to be wrong. The integration of thinking and feeling is not a matter of "trusting your gut" (which is self-help advice) but of developing a rigorous perceptual capacity that takes years of practice to mature (which is philosophical development). The path of right action is not "follow your bliss" but "navigate toward the choice that serves the genuine good of all parties" — which may require sacrifice, uncertainty, and the courage to act without certainty. If this book has done its job, you leave it not feeling better but thinking more clearly. The feeling better — when it comes, and it often does — is a consequence of the clarity, not its substitute.
A Final Word
This book began with a promise: that philosophy is not an academic exercise but a survival skill. That the questions your generation is asking — about meaning, identity, agency, connection, and the future — are genuine philosophical questions that deserve genuine philosophical answers. That the Western canon contains real wisdom and real failures, and that a framework exists that honours both. We've kept that promise as well as we can. The rest is up to you. The world doesn't need more people who can recite philosophical theories. It needs people who can think — clearly, rigorously, and with their whole selves.
People who can feel — not just emotionally react, but genuinely sense the quality of a situation and respond with discernment. People who can choose — not just optimise for their own benefit, but navigate toward outcomes that serve the genuine good of everyone involved. You have the tools. The practice starts now.
1. Write your own "philosophy of life" in one page. Not a manifesto — a working document. What do you care about most deeply? What framework (from this book or elsewhere) helps you make sense of the world? What practices do you commit to? Revisit this document in six months and see what's changed. 2. Choose one person in your life and practice all six aspects of friendship with them over the next month: share something with them, celebrate something of theirs, offer support, encourage an aspiration, learn something from them, and explore a shared value. Notice what changes in the relationship. 3. Identify one systemic problem you care about (housing, climate, AI, loneliness, education — anything). Map it using the dependency chain: where is the inversion? What layer is being treated as foundational when it shouldn't be? What would restoring the correct dependency order look like? Write a short analysis using the tools from this book. 4. Have a real conversation with someone who disagrees with you about something that matters. Practice the three rights of communication. Seek to understand their position before responding. Ask a question that demonstrates your understanding. See if the conversation goes differently than it would have before you read this book.
Glossary
A posteriori
Known through experience. Contrasted with a priori. (Ch 6)
A priori
Known independently of experience, through reason alone. (Ch 6)
Abductive reasoning
Inference to the best explanation. Reasoning from observed evidence to the hypothesis that best accounts for it. (Ch 2)
Act utilitarianism
The version of utilitarianism that evaluates each individual action by its consequences. (Ch 8)
Attunement
In the IDM, the capacity to sense the state of another person — to perceive what they need or experience without being told. A feeling-based skill, paired with discernment. (Ch 22)
Axiom I (Fundamentality)
The immanent modality is more fundamental than the omniscient and transcendent modalities. The omniscient and transcendent are conjugate. (Ch 3)
Axiom II (Precedence)
In practice, a directed cycle: transcendent-class → immanent-instance → omniscient-instance → transcendent-instance. (Ch 3)
Axiom III (Identity)
The three modalities are always distinct, inseparable, and non-interchangeable. (Ch 3)
Bandwidth argument
The claim that the complexity of planetary-scale problems exceeds the processing capacity of any hierarchical governance system. (Ch 19, 20)
Basal motivations
The two fundamental orientations of any living being: to create and to experience. (Ch 21)
Behaviourism
The view that mental states are nothing more than dispositions to behave in certain ways. (Ch 17)
Categorical imperative
Kant's supreme moral principle: act only on maxims you could will to be universal law. (Ch 9)
Causal closure of the physical
The principle that every physical event has a sufficient physical cause. (Ch 16)