Ripping Yarns and Epistemic Collapse

The Power of Story to Make Us or Break Us

Ed Note: we’re just about to kick off our Power of Story course, if you’ve got a tale to tell and you want to hone it and launch it—check it out!

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Once upon a time, our stories told us what it meant to be a good person.

Or showed us where we might go looking for the Good Life. They explained why bad things happen to good people. Or where we might go when we die.

Over the last century, and increasingly over the past decade, the narratives that used to hold us up and explain things have been unraveling at a frightening clip.

And it doesn’t seem to matter which kind of story we’ve been clinging to, either. Traditional or progressive, utopian or dystopian–they’re all getting ripped out of our hands by the forces of accelerating change.

Whether we bought into the Myth of Progress and believed that everything is getting better all the time (a la Steven Pinker), or we preferred a Fall from Grace tale where we’re forever trying to get back to our idyllic hunter-gatherer roots (a la Yuval Harari)…

Our favorite stories are losing their usefulness. Regardless of where we pinned our particular hopes and fears. Regardless of who’s been playing our heroes and villains.

The technical term for this crisis in meaning, this crossing of wires where no one can seem to agree on anything anymore, is “epistemic collapse.”

But really, all we need to know is that most of our grounding and comforting narratives have gone kaput.

The historian of science Thomas Kuhn coined a term for this in a book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In it, he described how, over time, an old story grows increasingly threadbare and ineffective at modeling the world as it actually is.

That dominant narrative becomes less and less helpful to explain and predict what’s going on. As those error messages accumulate, they eventually tip the scales. The old story stops working altogether.

A new paradigm, centered on all the things that didn’t fit, then emerges to take its place.

That’s what’s happening now. Except it’s not just one old story that’s collapsing. It’s all of them.

We’re seeing signs of this collective distress everywhere we look. Culture wars are ripping apart democracies that have prevailed through centuries of prior challenge. Diseases of despair like addiction and suicide are crippling entire communities. Younger generations are slipping into anxiety and depression in record numbers.

In one recent Pew study, one in three Americans under the age of twenty-five believed that we’d be better off with a military dictatorship than a democracy! In another global survey of 16-25 year olds, 75% believed “the future is frightening” and over half believe “humanity is doomed.”

The world leaders and thought leaders we typically turn to in times of crisis to help right the ship seem just as rudderless. They veer from muttering platitudes and soundbites to offering up scapegoats and denial.

They’re just as ill-fitted to the current moment as the rest of us.

As unsettling as it’s been getting, it would be a mistake to try to just patch our old comforting tales back together–no matter how much we’ve invested in them.

Instead, we should take a page out of Kuhn’s book. Sift through the pile of error messages that have been accumulating and see what deeper, truer tale is wanting to be born.

It’s time for a new story.

Only this one needs to locate us more accurately in our history and purpose. It’s got to give us more satisfying answers to the kinds of questions our children ask us.

Questions like:

• Is there a meaning to life?

• Why is there suffering in the world?

• How can we fix what’s broken?

• What hope is there for the future?

These aren’t just academic curiosities. For an increasing number of us, finding satisfying answers to these questions has become a matter of survival.

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A few years ago I made the well-intentioned but disastrous decision to invite my teenage kids to a think-tank in the mountains of Utah.

It was a gathering of complexity science experts, existential risk analysts, cryptocurrency architects and community builders. I thought that it would be an inspiring and empowering introduction to the big wide world of ideas and problem-solvers.

Except that’s not what happened.

One panel discussion in particular, held in a Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome, undid everything I’d planned. (though it would take another couple of years before I realized the extent of the damage).

There, onstage sat three “Galaxy Brain” super geniuses who had been hard at work trying to prevent human extinction.

After mapping out “the polycrisis,” i.e. all of the overlapping conflicting and compounding ways we could possibly snuff it, from climate change to geopolitics to macrofinance, to AI and bioweapons, they solemnly suggested that civilization had ninety-six months left before collapsing forever.

Not “about a decade.”

Not even “sometime in this coming century if we don’t really get our act together.”

Ninety-six months.

The fine-grained specificity and certainty of their prediction was horrifying.

And destabilizing.

It sent several adult attendees into suicidal depression and therapy.

(and for those keeping score at home, by the Galaxy Brains’ count, we’ve got less than twelve months left)

But it wasn’t until much later that I learned the full impact it had on my own kids.

As I was sitting on one of their beds, having a heart to heart about their struggle focusing on school, they explained to me:

“Look, it really seems like the planet is screwed and it’s all our fault. The adults ‘in charge’ clearly have no idea what they’re doing, and kids my age are lost in a hall of mirrors on Instagram and TikTok.

It seems like the planet would be better off if we did get wiped out. At least then the animals, oceans and forests would have a chance to recover! So, when the wheels do fall off, I will show up and be useful, but until then, I’m gonna stick with video games.”

I didn’t have a good answer.

I stammered:

“well, there’s probably less than ten thousand people alive on the planet who have satisfying answers to your questions. But, you know, as bleak as things seem, we’ve got to have hope for the future.

Otherwise, we’ll never be able to find our way through! Besides, as crazy-messed up as things may seem right now, the human experience has always been chaotic and tragic.

Just think of the World Wars, the Depression, the Dark Ages and Genghis Khan! So we really need to be grateful for the times we do live in, and make the most of this opportunity, otherwise, we’re just part of the problem! ”

But my reply wasn’t satisfying either of us.

Because what they were really asking was even deeper than finding workable solutions to our current crises.

It was closer to “tell me a story that feels good enough, true enough and beautiful enough for me to hang around long enough to see how this all turns out.”

So if you’ve got a sensitive child who’s coming of age in a topsy-turvy world, or if you’ve been feeling a bit adrift yourself…

Or if you’re a leader who feels the burden to make sense of the escalating non-sense for people that depend on you…

Let’s sketch out at least the outline of a new story that can see us through the years ahead.

A story that can lead us to the kind of practical, durable optimism we’re going to need a lot more of.

But to do that, we’re going to have to “get off our current problem to solve it.”

Not going to debate how to fix democracy, solve the global refugee crisis or forgive debt in Africa.

Not going to discuss recycling plastics, securing voting machines or rebalancing college admissions.

Or even cleaning up the oceans and planting forests.

As vital as all those may be, they’re too immediate for this particular exploration. To really diagnose what’s gone wrong with our old stories and what we have to get right with our new one, we’re going to have to develop a longer term perspective.

That’s because the polycrisis we’re in these days has so many tentacles it stretches across society–from economics to ecology, from politics to culture. And its root causes go way back in time, long before our current moment ever arrived.

To figure out what’s really going on, we’re going to have to take a Big History approach. To get clear on what to do next, we have to understand exactly how we got to now in the first place.

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Most of our old stories share two foundational flaws: Presentism and Anthropocentrism.

We’ve massively over-privileged our modern moment (Presentism) and we’ve presumed that the meaning of all life on Earth is defined by the human experience (Anthropocentrism).

In other words, we’ve made it all about us, and all about now.

As we try to predict and plan for our future, we default to studying a tiny and unusual data set–the last few hundred years of the fossil fuel era. These days we take a global population of eight billion humans and virtually unlimited energy consumption as natural and inevitable conditions, instead of the wild historical outlier they actually are.

That leads to skewed assumptions and wobbly projections.

Let’s unpack the problem of Presentism first, so we can see exactly how these biases impact our thinking.

Most of our grand explanatory stories–conservative or progressive, free market or socialist, spiritual or secular–focus on a sliver of human history.

If we’re following most school textbooks, we tend to pick up the tale at the start of the modern world and the birth of nation states–around 1500 C.E.. If we’re feeling bookish we might begin all the way back at the rise of civilization around ten thousand years ago.

But really, whether we’re focusing on the last few hundred years or the last ten thousand–hardly matters. Both chunks of time are fractions of a much longer tale that we need to understand first.

As famed Harvard biologist E.O.Wilson once put it, “we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technologies.”

If we’re going to learn how to manage those god-like technologies in the future, we’ll have to look back to figure out what made those Paleolithic brains of ours tick in the first place.

To get a sense of this longer-term perspective, consider the past three million years of hominid existence–ever since we were walking upright and using tools–condensed into one human lifespan:

First 70 years: Various species of the genus Homo roam around the Earth (3M yr)

Last 5 years: Homo Sapiens come into prominence (200,000 yr)

Last 15 weeks: Civilizations rise and fall (10,000 yr)

Last 4 days: The age of science and revolutions (400 yr)

Last 36 hours: The age of fossil fuels and combustion (200 yr)

Last 12 hours: The onset of accelerating technological development and rapid ecological destruction (50 yr)

That means that the last four months of humanity’s seventy-five year lifespan, comprise the entire “march of civilization” from caves, to farms, to cities to Now.

Hammurabi’s Code and the ancient city of Ur, all the way to culture flamewars and the latest social media craze.

The last six days is all that makes up the span from the Renaissance to reusable rockets.

And that final forty-eight hours of our hominid lives?

That’s the entire fossil-fueled blowout of the Modern World, from steam engines and oil gushers to skyscrapers, jet planes and server farms.

If Shakespeare was right and “all the world’s a stage, and we’re merely players on it” then “civilized” humans don’t even speak their first lines until the very end of the final act.

What have we missed because of our last-minute entrance?

What crucial plot details might those earlier acts reveal to us?

As Robert Pirsig observed in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,

“You look at where you’re going and where you are and it never makes much sense, but then you look back at where you’ve been and a pattern seems to emerge. And if you project forward from that pattern, then sometimes you can come up with something.”

Because looking at where we are and where we’re going right now isn’t making a whole lot of sense. That’s why all of our stories are breaking down, and why we’re experiencing such anxiety and uncertainty.

But if we take a look back through the deep past we can see what bigger patterns have emerged over time. From there, we can project forward into the future to “come up with something”–a better destination than where we appear to be heading.

After all, if we’re writing the definitive biography of the Life of Humankind, wouldn’t it be helpful to know a little more than what we’ve been up to in the last week of our lives?

So that’s our first problem, Presentism, summed up. And the way to fix it is to assess the full sweep of human history in terms of eras and epochs, not moments and minutes.

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On top of this persistent last-minute focus, we have a second problem–Anthropocentrism. We’ve presumed that the Story of the World was all just a preamble to the more important Story of Us.

It’s an understandable error. We’ve always insisted we were the main characters in our own movie instead of bit players in something much bigger.

As a result, most of our stories begin in the wrong spot because we’ve consistently placed ourselves at the center of the universe. That’s making it really hard to process what’s happening now, or predict what’s going to happen next.

This isn’t the first time it’s happened. We can’t help putting ourselves smack dab in the center of the worlds we create. Renaissance map makers, for example, put their countries and continents in prime position, often inflating the relative size of Europe at the expense of other far larger (but presumably less important) land masses like Mexico, Africa and India.

Where the mapmakers centered themselves geographically, religious leaders centered themselves theologically.

Scriptures the world over have insisted that their chosen people are not only God’s favorite, but uniquely destined to inherit the Earth.

When different cultures collide, these irreconcilable differences have left us wildly at odds with each other. If we’re all equally convinced we deserve to sit on the throne, simply taking a seat at the table can feel like an insult.

Sometimes, we’ve overreached even further than that. Insisting that humans don’t just sit at the center of life on earth, but sit at the center of the cosmos itself.

The ancient astronomer Ptolemy famously claimed that Earth was the hub of the universe. But there was only one problem with his idea: he couldn’t account for the motion of the planets or why they appeared to do backflips as they made their way across the heavens.

That’s because the planets are so much closer to us than distant stars, they don’t trace a clear arc across our night skies. Instead, they will occasionally stall, and appear to head backwards–like the dreaded “retrograde” of Mercury–before moving on again.

For Ptolemy, the only way to reconcile this baffling motion with Earth’s prime position was to insist that the planets had epicyclic orbits. Loop the loops. According to his model, “the Wanderers,” as Mars, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn were then known, spun like the tea cups on the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party ride at Disneyland. Circles rotating within circles.

All of that crazy math just to keep Earth in a centrally starring role as “the hearth of the universe.” Ptolemy failed to acknowledge the actual anchor of our galaxy–the Sun. But his geocentric model upheld a sense of humanity’s self importance for philosophers and theologians alike.

That epicyclic solution was so ingenious that it remained the most accurate modeling of celestial movement for the next fourteen hundred years. Despite being factually wrong, it was predictively accurate. In other words, for all practical purposes, it worked.

While it’s easy to feel smug about those misguided ancients, they’ve got a few lessons for us today.

Like them, we can arrive at explanations that correctly predict events–like the march of the wandering planets across the sky–while incorrectly describing root causes like the whole galaxy spinning around the Earth.

And like them, we can badly misjudge how central we are in the grand scheme of things, simply because we are so central to our own scheme of things.

So what are the Mad Hatter’s Tea Cup contortions hidden in our stories today? The wheels within wheels frantically spinning to keep our predictions working? What epicycles have we built into our model of reality to cover up the mistake of placing ourselves at the center of a perfectly ordered universe where everything we do makes perfect sense?

A few recent examples:

How about the stories we tell ourselves in our own lives, like the captivating power of the American Dream?

When two kids, SUVs and picket fences can’t hack it, we end up medicating with retail therapy, plastic surgery and designer pharmaceuticals. Prozac to feel 10% happier, Ambien to soothe our sleepless nights or Oxycontin to feel nothing at all.

We don’t address the hecticness, hollowness, or increasingly inescapable destructiveness of our society. We double down on doing more, being more and having more.

And if that doesn’t work, we create fictional airbrushed versions of our #bestlives to live online instead. Distant friends and total strangers validate that version of us as even more real than the real us.

Or how about market democracies?

We’ve assumed for some time that free market capitalism is the pinnacle of economic and political organization. For all humans, everywhere. While it took us a minute to finally get here, academics like Francis Fukuyama have famously argued, now that we’ve arrived, there’s no higher ground to climb to.

When it doesn’t work the way economist Milton Friedman insisted it should, we explain away the excesses and oversights, and patch up the leaks.

We rely on charities and subsidies to make up for the shortcomings of trickle-down prosperity. We load up on debt, borrowing from our future to finance the present.

We contemplate utopian ideas like Universal Basic Income to buy off the proletariat before they get bored enough or mad enough for revolution.

We don’t worry too much about the collateral damage, either. Those unfortunate “externalities” of smoldering rainforests and giant garbage patches in the ocean are just one more variable to plug in and solve for in our spreadsheets of market incentives and deterrents.

When news of overshoot and imbalance tests our confidence, we cling to soothing TED talks and white papers from Davos. There, clever people with burnished credentials assure us we’ll invent our way out of this mess through the very same market mechanisms that got us into it!

Cloud seeding, carbon capture and planting a trillion trees mean that we can outwit the creeping consequences of carbon combustion and keep consuming forever, no tradeoffs needed!

But never in all of this do we question that “free” markets sit at the center of our firmament or that infinite growth on a finite planet is an unalloyed good.

Epicycles, the lot of ‘em. Wheels within wheels.

But a quick survey like this shouldn’t leave us feeling cynical or depressed. There’s a real opportunity here, if we can make the most of it.

After all, if the revisions of Copernicus freed us to discover distant planets, launch religious reformations and scientific renaissances, what might we unlock when we move beyond our own self-centered, present-tense view?

Wouldn’t it be nice to stop all those backbends and contortions? We could finally make sense of all that nonsense with a bit more humility and curiosity about how we got here.

After all, a hyper-consumptive fossil-fueled civilization that is threatening to unravel after barely three hundred and fifty years, hardly gets to claim the last word on anything.

To solve the twin issues of Presentism and Anthropocentrism, our new story will have to situate us in the larger cycles of evolution–across millions and even billions of years of life on Earth.

It will have to reconcile the role of suffering within the grander sweep of progress. It needs to be a story that explains a purpose to life that doesn’t rely on blind belief to cover up its flaws in logic.

It needs to be a story that charts a path forward through uncertain times and gives us hope that can span generations.

We could call it The Story of How We Begin to Remember.

Once we do remember though–who we are, where we’ve come from, and where we’re heading–it’s 100% on us not to forget.

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