The General Will vs. the Failure of Imagination
I probably sound like a broken record on this subject, but it feels more relevant than ever to what’s happening in the world today—and to how neurotherapy might help us build something better. Here I’m experimenting with new ways to describe both the problem and the path forward. I need the practice!
I also recently discovered Gil Duran’s Nerd Reichpodcast and have been binging every episode. It’s a goldmine of ideas that I can unpack from a philosophical angle and connect with what we’re learning through neurotherapy. Stay tuned for more explorations along these lines.
A strange kind of fatalism has taken hold of the modern mind—the quiet assumption that human beings simply can’t govern themselves. Democracy is too messy, too emotional, too slow. The solution, say a growing chorus of technocrats and philosophers, is hierarchy disguised as efficiency. The state as a startup. The citizen as a shareholder. The CEO as sovereign.
It’s a worldview that calls itself hard-headed realism, but it’s really a failure of imagination. The “Dark Enlightenment,” as its leading thinkers like to call it, believes that hierarchy is not only inevitable but rational. People, they say, are too irrational to organize themselves coherently. Freedom leads to noise; noise requires control.
But this story mistakes a temporary dysfunction for destiny. What looks like chaos may just be what happens when stressed, fragmented nervous systems try to run a civilization. Our failure to cooperate is not proof that coherence is impossible—it’s evidence that we’ve never learned how to cultivate it.
The Iron Law of Laziness
Robert Michels called it the Iron Law of Oligarchy: in any organization, power condenses in the hands of a few. It sounds empirical, almost gravitational, but it’s really just what happens when feedback stops working. Systems under stress—whether neural, organizational, or societal—tend to freeze. Flexibility disappears. Information stops circulating. Control replaces communication.
Rigid thinking, conditioned by life experience, measurably shapes behavior. Trauma, chronic stress, and cultural pressure can all narrow our mental range. There are countless examples, but one that’s particularly relevant—and somewhat poetic in this context—involves religious fundamentalism. Neuroscientists have found that strongly fundamentalist individuals often display hyperactive performance monitoring: an internal alarm system that fires even when nothing’s wrong. Their brains have learned to treat deviation itself as danger.
Of course, that’s just one example. The same pattern shows up in perfectionism, political extremism, corporate cultures obsessed with optimization—any context where flexibility gives way to control. The point isn’t that these people are bad; it’s that their nervous systems have learned rigidity as a survival strategy.
The hopeful part is that rigidity isn’t permanent. Nervous systems can be retrained. People can learn to relax their alarms, think more clearly, and reconnect with nuance. The same is true of societies. If a civilization is, in the end, a network of minds, then collective flexibility begins with individual clarity.
