Pinchbeck opens a series he calls the Metacrisis Dossier by asking why the world appears to have gone insane, and argues that the usual explanations — lost traditional values, social media and filter bubbles, capitalist nihilism, techno-authoritarianism — each hold some truth but stop short. His claim is that the disorder is developmental and civilizational. Traditional societies built initiation into the life cycle through structured ordeals that brought the young into contact with the transcendent, and Western modernity removed it, so that a person can now live an entire life without any structured encounter with the numinous. He draws on a developmental psychologist's account of a fourth stage of nervous-system development and on Iain McGilchrist's The Master and His Emissary, and closes by naming Walter Benjamin as the subject of part two.
In brief
- Pinchbeck argues the present derangement is not a healthy system malfunctioning but a civilization that has been structurally wrong for so long that no one remembers what a healthy society feels like.
- He holds that initiation, understood as a deliberate ordeal producing a visionary or transpersonal state, was near-universal in earlier societies and has been absent from Western life for roughly four hundred years.
- He treats that absence as an arrested developmental stage that yields adults with great material power and no completed maturity.
- Citing McGilchrist's The Master and His Emissary, he argues modern culture has inverted the cerebral hemispheres, building a world to the left hemisphere's abstract, atomized, instrumental specifications while remaining unaware of what it excludes.
- Pinchbeck proposes that initiation was the technology by which the two hemispheres were kept in proper relation, since the encounter with mystery is what the left hemisphere alone cannot survive.
- He frames this episode as diagnosis only, deferring to part two both the question of what can be done and Walter Benjamin's account of what replaced initiation once civilization forfeited it.
Full text
It is Tuesday morning. You are scanning the news, doom scrolling, and for a moment your brain freezes. You cannot understand how any of this is happening. There have been another five atrocities. One headline warns of an artificial intelligence building a new synthetic supervirus for no reason that makes sense. Another headline announces a 5-year time window for neural implants. CEOs tell us AI agents and physical robots will soon eliminate the need for human agency in almost all industries as data centers heat up the planet and drain the water and mineral resources we need to survive. An incredibly ominous report on the climate emergency is released to resounding silence.
The price of food has gone up again. fuel has skyrocketed. A politician who looks like a mannequin has said something nobody believes is true, yet it gets reported without comment. A cognitively decaying president posts AI slop of himself with aliens or pressing the button to launch nuclear war. Yet, nobody seems to care. And somewhere underneath all of it, you feel the strange exhaustion and anxiety that has become the background sensation of your life. Not depression exactly, not fear exactly. It is almost a sense of nullification, non-being and defeat. One part of you wants to hold on to a belief in something, anything, the goodness of humanity, the preciousness of life.
One part of you wants to fight. Another part of you feels ready to utterly detach and surrender. You close the open tabs. You sip your coffee. You go on with your day. But the question lingers and clings to you. The question every honest person is asking now. Why has the world gone insane? And perhaps more urgently, what if anything can we do about it? To reach a meaningful answer to this question, we will need to investigate possibilities outside of the confines of the mainstream paradigm beyond what our academic institutions will allow. We will need to investigate the evolution of consciousness and society over many thousands of years and how that led to where we are now.
An incredibly perilous and unstable global situation, a postindustrial civilization that seems on the verge of cracking apart, taking all of us down with it. We will need to consider the deep structure of the human psyche. Two key figures in our inquiry will be a developmental psychologist almost no one reads anymore working at the end of his career trying to describe what he believed was happening to the human nervous system in industrial modernity. The answer also encompasses the work of a neuroscientist who has spent two decades documenting how the modern mind became hemispherically lopsided. And it ends with a German Jewish thinker and critic writing in the 1920s and30s who saw the present arriving a 100red years ago and named it more precisely than almost anyone has since.
Their argument taken together is the one that can change your entire relationship to the madness we see around us and help you find peace and solace even within the chaos and destruction. Of course, many have attempted to understand why our world is rapidly spiraling into insanity. For some, it is the loss of traditional values that defined proper relationships and hierarchies. If we can restore those systems of authority and even traditional religions and imposed moral structures, we will be better off once again. For others, it is the rise of social media and algorithmic content that imprisoned everyone in filter bubbles and made people prefer outrage and fury to care and community.
For some, the breakdown of our society is a direct result of capitalist nihilism and materialist rationalism, which sees the world as a utilitarian store of value and only treats the accumulation of wealth and material goods as meaningful. For others, the problem is techno athoritarianism that seeks to overwhelm and pulverize all of us into submission. Each of these offers some level of truth. Perhaps none of them is sufficient because the kind of derangement we are living through is not the derangement of a healthy system gone wrong. It is the derangement of a system that has been wrong for so long that none of us can quite remember how a healthy society should look and feel.
It is structural. It is civilizational. And this is the part the standard analyses cannot bring themselves to name. It is rooted in some flaw or failure in human development. The system has not malfunctioned. The system is doing precisely what a civilization of adults who have not undergone initiation and lost any direct relationship to transcendence will inevitably do. initiation. The word is used frequently in anthropology, derived from the study of almost every human culture that came before the one we now live in. Generally, initiation means a carefully defined event in the lives of young people where they are taken away from the community and put through intentional orals.
These may involve fasting, walkabouts, consuming psychoactive plants, and other forms of deprivation. The goal of the ordeal is to force the young person into a visionary or transpersonal state where they transcend their egoic conditioning and understand themselves as meaningful parts of a greater whole. Every traditional society we have records of built into its life cycle some structure of initiation. Ritual encounters with the larger than human, the transcendent, the visionary, encounters with death, encounters with the mystery. The purpose of these rituals was not to maintain empty customs or uphold traditions. initiations gave life meaning and purpose. Also, it gave men in particular a sense of connection to the community and the sacred which kept them from getting consumed by their own ego-based desires.
Indigenous societies generally understood that women were partially initiated by nature through menstruation and their connection to the rhythms of nature and the living cosmos. Men in particular needed to undergo an intentional ordeal if they wanted to claim adult status. Early on, Judeo-Christian civilization converted from a society based in direct communion with the divine to a society of indoctrination and control by a priest class and a ruling elite. But by the time the Bible was codified, the religion had shifted from a focus on personal illumination to a faith in Christ's divinity as the path to salvation. By the start of the modern era, the focus of western civilization had shifted to a leftbrain dominant mode of thinking and calculation that the development of the scientific method and industrialization only intensified.
Since then, we have spent 400 years building a civilization in which it is possible for a human being to live the entire arc of their life, childhood, adolescence, midlife, old age, without ever once being brought into direct structured contact with the numinous, with anything larger than themselves. Some people find their way accidentally into an initiation anyway. This can happen through war, a dire emergency, a sickness, or by surviving some terrible privation. But the culture itself no longer carries the responsibility. The result is what we are experiencing now all around us. In 2002, the developmental psychologist Joseph Chilton Pierce published the biology of transcendence, a blueprint of the human spirit.
It concluded three decades of work on the human nervous system, neurological development, and what Pierce called the intelligence of the heart. His argument is powerful and compelling. Pierce spent his career mapping the way the human brain unfolds in stages. Each stage requiring specific environmental and relational inputs to complete itself. Our first brain, the reptilian brain, wires first. The second brain of the lbic system, wires next through our deep relationship to our mother and other caregivers in infancy. The neoortex or preffrontal cortex, the region most associated with abstract thought, with foresight, with moral self-regulation, is the third brain. It comes online later and only fully integrates with the rest of the brain when the entire developmental sequence is allowed to complete.
But to access what Pierers called our fourth brain requires a deeper synthesis and an initiatory shock. Our fourth brain is the way by which the intelligence of our heart can guide the intellect in our head from its ancient survival strategies to a new and greater form of intelligence. What Pierce came to believe, drawing on neurological evidence accumulating across the late 20th century, was that the final stage of human development required something specific. It required direct embodied structured encounter with what he called transcendence, with awe, with reality at a scale the individual self cannot reduce. traditional initiation rituals were the cultural technology for producing that encounter on schedule.
He identified the preffrontal cortex or preffrontal loes, the most recently evolved fourth brain located directly behind the brow as the specific part of the brain engaged and awakened during spiritual initiation. In his accounts of Shaktipat, spiritual initiation in spiritual initiation and the breakthrough of consciousness, Pierce repeatedly describes the initiation experience being triggered by a master touching the initiate directly on the bridge of the nose, between the eyes or on the center of the forehead. In the biology of transcendence, he explicitly connects this anatomical location to the guru chakra and links its neural awakening to our capacity to escape cultural survival instincts and experience higher realities. He wrote in eastern spiritual systems this center of the forehead is variously called the third eye, guru chakra, ajna chakra and sixth chakra. A chakra or wheel being a center of energy.
Eastern and occult philosophies claim that the awakening of this area of the brain can open us to higher worlds. the imaginal worlds of the Sufi, for instance, and to various subtle realms of possibility, all of which may indicate aspects of preffrontal function. Without it, Pierce argued, the developmental sequence stalls. Without a crisis such as an initiatory leap into transcendent visions, the higher brain centers do not properly engage or integrate with the limbic system. The capacity for transcendence which he saw as a biological inheritance not a religious myth is stifled at the phase of life where it needs to activate. He described the result directly. When integrated, these three systems offer us an open-ended potential, an ability to rise and go beyond all constraint or limitation.
But when that integration fails, our mind is a house divided against itself, our behavior a paradoxical civil war, and we become our own worst enemy. Pierce noted that young people often feel this great yearning to be part of something greater than themselves and will point to their heart as they speak about this feeling. Many teenagers seek to push themselves to the edge with drugs or alcohol or other forms of danger, unconsciously seeking a way to undergo initiation that their society denies them. Without developing this aspect of our being, we can end up trying to stimulate ourselves through artificial means by idealizing or romanticizing violence. Pierce writes, "While this ability can lead us to transcendence, paradoxically, it can lead also to violence.
Our longing for transcendence arises from our intuitive sensing of this adaptive potential. And our violence arises from our failure to develop it. The violence Pierce names is not only the violence of war. It is the everyday wreckage of a culture that cannot tell what is wrong with itself. failed marriages, the cruelty of online life, the addictions, the slow drift of millions toward authoritarian and millinarian movements. These are all degraded substitutes for the authentic satisfaction of initiation and communion that we have lost access to. Without it, people are easy to manipulate and control because they are disempowered. Pierce was insistent that initiation was a basic developmental requirement.
Just as an infant's brain needs to learn speech at a certain stage of development or forfeit its capacity for language, as teenagers or in late adolescence, we have an innate need for a means to access transcendence and deeper purpose. Strip that out of the culture and the system does not produce rational and balanced adults. It produces immature egfixated kids who may possess great power in material terms but are still utterly lost. At this point we can see that our entire civilization is stalled and collapsing due to this lack of development. In his 2009 book, The Master and His Emissary, Ian Mc Gillchrist finds something complimentary at the level of the cerebral hemispheres.
The right hemisphere, the master, perceives reality as a living whole. The left hemisphere, the emissary, operates by abstraction, categorization, control. A healthy mind keeps these in proper relation. The right grounding experience, the left clarifying and unpacking it, the right then reintegrating what the left has produced into a richer hole. What Mc Gillchrist observes in modern western culture is a sustained inversion. The emissary has displaced the master. We live inside a civilization built almost entirely to the specifications of the left hemisphere. Abstract, atomized, instrumental, certain of its categories, and in his phrasing, exclusive, either slash or analytic and fragmentaryary, but crucially unaware of what it is missing.
initiation when it worked was among other things the technology by which the hemispheres meshed together properly. The encounter with the mystery is something that the left hemisphere alone cannot survive. We do not provide it to our young and so we lack for adults. The diagnosis ends here. What we can do about it and what we cannot picks up in part two. Walter Benjamin writing between the wars saw what would replace initiation in a civilization that had forfeited it and named what the substitute would cost us. We turn to him next. Subscribe to follow the investigation. Like and share if this is the kind of work you want more of.
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.