Metasophism seeks to answer one question: how can we create and perpetuate a creative and cohesive society? The book below is a first attempt at an answer. Here is the introduction.
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Is it the destiny of the West to die? For Oswald Spengler, the answer was yes. In The Decline of the West he argued that all civilisations go through a similar life-cycle. According to Spengler, the Medieval Era was the spring of the West, the Renaissance its summer, and the Baroque era its autumn. He predicted that the West would enter its Winter around the year 2000…
In the first chapter, we learned that the societal rot begins with a decline in creativity among the elites. But why does the creativity of elites wither in the first place? According to Toynbee, the decline of creativity originates from the elites idolising outdated ideas, laws, and institutions, which hinder the adaptation of society to new problems. He illustrated this point with…
When one glances back at the disaster for Europe that was the twentieth century, who are the prime candidates for blame? A straightforward mind would blame the Communist and Fascist ideologies for the havoc they wreaked upon Europe. The logical conclusion could be that all extremist ideologies, defined as anything that deviates from…
The University may seem to be a curious place to start when designing a new socio-political system. I do so for three reasons. First, given that we have a clear albeit provisional definition of good, the next logical step is to re-examine ethics and policies with a view to seeing what best furthers the Metasophist Imperative. This is a gargantuan task, too big for any individual…
Travelling through Europe, one is often struck by the spires, fine houses, and grand public buildings that create the skyline of the medieval city. Equally striking is the fact that few landmarks of the same calibre are being constructed today, despite society being many times wealthier. This reveals a lack of interest in creating an attractive environment, and an indifference…
The rise of China has led many to question the effectiveness of Western democratic institutions. This was particularly the case following the spread of the Coronavirus. While large tracts of China went into lockdown, some Western elites castigated panic while preaching complacency, allowing the virus to spread unchecked. But even before the Coronavirus…
At a time of declining trust in institutions, the media is among the most severely affected. Who still trusts the media as a class? Very few, according to a 2020 report from the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford. Out of forty countries, the proportion who trust most news most of the time exceeds 50 percent in only six countries. In the US, the UK, France, and Italy, it is below thirty percent. Trust is not only low, but declining…
As the West stumbles its way into the 21st century, it does so with a burden of debt on it’s back which, should it not be lightened, may incur death by exhaustion. This situation requires correcting, but any attempt to do so must confront the power of money, the rise of which is an essential part of Spengler’s civilisational life cycle…
In 2014, French economist Thomas Piketty released the English version of his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century. A heavy tome on wealth inequality, it became a sensation, selling around 1.5 million copies. Piketty’s theory was, at heart, a simple one: as the return on wealth is greater than the rate of economic growth, inequality is destined to go up for ever, absent a global tax on wealth or a major destructive event such as a war…
In the movie Children of Men, it is the year 2027 and no child has been born for 18 years. Huddled masses search for a new home, and civil order is tenuous. While the story of the movie is the quest of a miraculously pregnant women to sanctuary, the true mystery is the cause of the demographic crisis. Perhaps real-life society is headed in the same direction. We already have the migration crisis…
Some doubt the potential of Metasophism. They consider its ambition impractical, its design utopian, and its appeal, limited. We see so little change these days in the West, they say: surely it is impossibly optimistic to think that we could reform so much, so quickly. Another argument claims that the entire venture is too cerebral, and would have no appeal to the common individual. This chapter — perhaps the most important in the book — will show exactly how Metasophism can avoid falling victim to these predictions…
If we could say that the West has a soul, what would it be? For Spengler, it was a longing for infinity, which manifested in mathematics, architecture, and art. A Christian theologian such as Benedict XVI might say that it was a search for truth — and that this search for truth is the most important commonality of both Western civilisation and its Hellenic predecessor. The reach towards infinity epitomised by dizzying Cathedral spires was just…
It is commonly argued that artificial general intelligence (AGI), unaligned with human values, represents an existential risk for humanity. For example, in his recent book The Precipice, philosopher Toby Ord argued that there is a 10 percent chance that unaligned artificial general intelligence will result in existential catastrophe for humanity. Less attention is devoted to whether or how aligned AGI could introduce additional existential risk, such as through increasing the probability of conflict.
An increasingly familiar analysis begins with a vague tale involving rising dissatisfaction with elites, spiralling inequality, and growing political instability. The “twist” is that this describes not a modern Western society, but republican Rome. These comparisons often tend to be shallow, and therefore potentially misleading; is there anything to be learned from them? To answer this question, I turned to the book Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny by Edward J. Watts.
Civilisation is a recent development in world history; at just 6,000 years old, it is a young organism compared to the human being who has now walked this planet for around 300,000 years. And yet, in its short life, so many of its kind have already fallen: Sumerians, Ancient Greeks, Romans, and Mayans, once so great, perished long ago. There is a school of thought…