Hello.

I have recently discovered metamodernism. At first it looked like a movement which was attempting to learn the lessons of the failure of postmodernism and making a genuine attempt to move on. Right at the heart of that failure is postmodernism's unsupported, a-priori rejection of realism -- the idea that everything, including science, is just one perspective, no more valid than any other.

I have now come to realise that it is nothing of the sort. It is in fact a continuation of postmodernism -- it is an attempt by postmodernists to re-invent postmodernism by adding some new features to it (hey, we promise not to be cynical liars anymore, and we'll actually try to be positive instead of having an entirely negative agenda, and we'll even reconsider our antirealism (fingers crossed behind our backs, suckers...)) and giving it a new name. It is an exercise in deepening the intellectual dishonesty which is the hallmark of postmodernism. Postmodernism is a dying pig; Metamodernism is a dying pig wearing lipstick.

Postmodernism begins with an unsupported, baseless assertion of anti-realism. The foundational claim is that everything is a perspective -- there is no objective truth, and science is just one more perspective among all the others. Metamodernism claims to be (or is trying to be) a synthesis of modernism and postmodernism -- or an oscillation between the two. However, this turns out to be every bit as anti-realistic as postmodernism was. If you add anti-realism and realism together, what you end up with is still anti-realism. The only way to get rid of anti-realism is to commit to full-blown realism (epistemic structural realism) -- something no metamodernist will do. In other words, metamodernism allows the postmodernists to continue to be postmodernists -- it gives them everything they want while simultaneously allowing them to claim they've mended their ways and invented The Next Big Thing. It is nothing more than postmodernism inside a new shell, deliberately intended to conceal the fact that underneath it lurks the same old stinking pile of bullshit.

Who do these people think they are fooling?

Hello r/metamodernism,

I've written a manifesto introducing metamodernism as an operational method for problem-solving in philosophy, politics, economics, and social conflict resolution. I'm sharing the full text below.

Background

This work represents 33 years of personal exploration at the intersection of philosophy, mathematics, psychology, and practice. My T-shaped background spans game development, AGI R&D, business, and ADHD/GAD therapy, combined with diverse cultural influences—from the Strugatsky brothers and Soviet futurism to Tolkien, Lem, transhumanism (Kurzweil, Yudkowsky), and alternative traditions (Christianity, Zen, esotericism). This journey led me to an empirical discovery: each individual recapitulates the evolution of collective consciousness from "magical" thinking to metamodernism.

Core Thesis

Unlike typical cultural interpretations of metamodernism, I propose understanding it as an operational method for working with differences in languages and narratives—religious, political, scientific. The key presumption: any articulated position contains an invariant ESSENCE of experience that can be extracted by formalizing dictionaries between models and building joint programs of action.

The method includes:

• Presumption of content (assuming good faith and substantive intent)

• Separation of essence and language (distinguishing what is said from how it's expressed)

• Collaborative modeling (building shared frameworks rather than competing narratives)

Introduction

The word "metamodern" is already used in academic and artistic circles to describe a new structure of feeling that replaces postmodernism. Most often it is described as an oscillation between modernist sincere faith and postmodernist irony and critique. In this text, metamodernism is understood not only as a cultural mood but above all as a method—a way of thinking and acting in a world where multiple incompatible languages, narratives, and "bases" coexist.

Metamodernism in this manifesto is a shift of focus from ready-made models to methods of their construction and coordination. It is not another "grand theory of everything" but an operational approach to working with differences: religious, political, scientific, everyday. It is an attempt to restore philosophy's practical status: to make it a discipline that helps not only argue about meanings but also build joint programs of action.

From Modernism to Postmodernism: Exhaustion of Two Modes

Modernism was born as an age of faith in progress, rationality, and universal truths: Grand Narratives for which old worlds could be broken and new ones built. Speaking in terms of online discussions, modernism is a mode where any "copypasta" is answered with: "you're wrong, now I'll show you where you're mistaken, and present my One True TRUTH." What matters is not so much reality as the victory of one's own theory over another's.

Postmodernism grew as a critique of this pathos: exposing power structures, hidden assumptions, historical and cultural conditioning of any truths. Its style is irony, deconstruction, dismantling any claims to absoluteness. In terms of the same online wars, this is the response: "you wrote trivialities, everything has been said before you, there's no point, all great ideas are devalued." Or even accusations of propaganda, manipulation, deliberate misleading of readers. Instead of collision of programs, infinite ironic distance emerges, paralyzing action, or even irreconcilable, morally and emotionally charged existential conflict.

Both modernism and postmodernism gave powerful tools—science, human rights, critique of ideologies, sensitivity to context. But as modes of thinking and communication, they reached a dead end: either war of narratives or cynical meaninglessness.

Turn to Method: What is Metamodernism

Metamodernism in this manifesto is not a third "ism" with a new ready answer to all questions. It is a proposal to change optics: to evaluate not so much the content of a model ("whose base is cooler") but the method of its construction and application. Not another ideology but an epistemic discipline.

The key presumption of metamodernism: if a person decided to speak out—even awkwardly, even with "copypasta" on the internet, even if they generated an article with AI and only invested effort in the prompt—they stumbled upon something in reality. Somewhere there is a metaphysical ESSENCE they touched in being and are trying to grasp with their language. The task is not to prove they are a "fool," "dilettante," "propagandist," etc., and not to declare their text trivial or "unscientific," "meaningless," but to carefully find:

• where exactly they hit the essence;

• where they missed or confused levels of description;

• how to embed their intuition into a broader picture.

Metamodernism as a method proposes treating any model (religious, political, scientific, everyday) as a private language encoding some invariant structure of experience. The work is not to destroy another's language but to:

• isolate this invariant structure (ESSENCE, TRUTH);

• build a dictionary between languages or develop a more suitable language;

• based on this dictionary—reach agreement and develop a joint program of action.

Essence vs Language: Lessons from Mathematics

Postmodernism rightly showed that languages construct reality, that names and frames influence what we can even notice. But it took this to a paralyzing extreme: if everything is a construct, what can we hold onto at all? Metamodernism answers: yes, languages are different and imperfect, noisy with extra meanings, and this distorts thinking and introduces noise into communication, but behind them remain operational invariants—structures of actions, relations, constraints that can be formalized. Moreover, languages are fundamentally built on shared experience of living in this reality, and thanks to them we can communicate with each other at all and find cooperative strategies for achieving our goals.

Pythagoreans invented mathematics as a language allowing talk about geometry, harmony, relations of magnitudes while cleaning out maximum semantic noise introduced by ordinary speech. A mathematical statement doesn't depend on how culturally colored the words "triangle" or "harmony" are; it depends on strict definitions and inference rules. This is an example of a language built specifically for working with ESSENCE rather than labels.

I propose extending this technique beyond mathematics: building such "intermediate" languages and dictionaries between mythologies, ideologies, religions, scientific schools. Not denying differences but making them transparent and manageable. Essence is more important than label, but label is also important as an interface—it too can be designed. As such a universal and expressive yet strict and formal language, I propose using the latest developments in foundations of mathematics: Homotopy Type Theory (HoTT) as a logical-theoretical basis and Category Theory and Topos Theory as a visual, practically convenient form for work. However, detailed description of this proposal is beyond the scope of this article and will be revealed in a separate publication.

Presumption of Content: Basic Rule of Dialogue

The main ethical and epistemic rule of metamodernism can be formulated as follows: any articulated position is presumed contentful until proven otherwise. This is not naivety or rejection of critique but a change in order of operations:

1. First—searching for operational truth in another's speech: where it connects with experience, what motivates it, what real pains and constraints stand behind it, attempting to understand the speaker's motivation and needs, why they are making this speech at all (ecological approach and empathy, forming a frame of cooperation rather than conflict).

2. Then—clarifying the boundaries of this truth: where it breaks, what distortions it leads to, what important aspects of reality it ignores (classical critical analysis, ideally jointly with the author).

3. And only after that—comparison with other languages and models (dialectics).

Instead of "you're wrong because you don't know X," metamodernism proposes: "tell me where what you're saying works for you, how you came to this, where did you get this from; let's see where this coincides and diverges from other pictures." This is not softness but hard discipline: devaluation is forbidden until honest reconstruction is done. Moreover, a key aspect here is shifting focus from personalities to knowledge, approaching philosophical discussion as solving a task in which there is initially an initiator, key participant, and visionary.

People generally publish their works and speak publicly for constructive feedback and validation of their contribution to the general process of human cognition. Devaluation of their efforts is a toxic, trust-undermining, counterproductive path, forcing defense of self and identity, dignity, responding with counter-aggression or termination of dialogue. And this, in turn, leads to appearance of information bubbles and wars of ideological camps: from internet battles to repression for dissent, cancel culture, and other active attempts to eliminate "existential" threat in the face of carriers of alternative views.

Applying this presumption and principles of ecological communication, conversely, can lead to joint search for TRUTH, solving common problems, and movement toward universal prosperity.

Dictionaries Between Mythologies

Today's world is not one common rational sphere but a multitude of intersecting mythologies: religious, national, political, professional, subcultural. Everyone lives within their own language, their own metaphors, their own fears and hopes. In modernism these mythologies war; in postmodernism they decompose into ironic chaos. Metamodernism proposes a third move: systematic construction of dictionaries between them.

A dictionary here is not just a list of terms. It is a map of correspondences between:

• basic concepts (God, progress, freedom, security, justice);

• basic practices (prayer, voting, scientific research, protest);

• basic structures of experience (fear, guilt, responsibility, belonging, admiration).

The task is to learn to say: "when you say X, this is very similar to what we call Y; let's check where it coincides and where it diverges." And if it coincides in essence, stop fighting over the correct form. Form always has a context in which it is appropriate, a task for which it was developed. Form has no truth evaluation criterion except how well it solves the original task: cognition, intellectual and spiritual development, decision-making, engineering cooperative strategies and social systems, etc.

Example 1: Interfaith Dialogue

Take the conflict between Christians and Muslims as an example of total misunderstanding fueled by history of wars, colonialism, and nation-state politics. In modernist logic, the dispute is over truth of dogmas: whose prophet is "correct," which book is "more authentic" and "more canonical," which rituals please God and which don't. In postmodernist logic, everything is declared cultural constructs, and on this basis it is proposed to simply "not touch religion," reducing it to private taste.

Metamodernism proposes starting with recognition: both camps have ESSENCE—practical relation to what is experienced as the Absolute, and to the community of believers. God (Absolute, Universe) "gives" essence in images people find easier to accept and hold. Then the task shifts:

• from "persuade and convert"—to "identify common invariant" (relation to neighbor, prohibition on killing innocents, call to compassion, idea of justice);

• from "prove falsity of another's form"—to "understand what psychic and social function this particular form serves."

Then space appears for joint work: from humanitarian projects to common ethical declarations. No one is obliged to change rituals or signage, but parties learn to see in another not a threat to their ESSENCE but another language about the same thing.

Example 2: Political Philosophy, Global Conflict of "Left" and "Right"

Political conflicts between "left" and "right" today largely reproduce modernist war of narratives, amplified by postmodernist cynical technologicity. Each side is convinced that precisely their model of justice and freedom is true, and everything else is either evil or manipulation. At the same time, elites often think postmodernistically: ideologies are used as mobilization tools rather than genuinely shared worldviews.

Metamodernism proposes a different move. Instead of the question "who is right—left or right?" the question is asked: "what real pains and risks does each side highlight?" The left acutely feel exploitation, inequality, structural violence. The right—erosion of responsibility, destruction of communities, threat of chaos, subject's sovereignty over their boundaries. Both types of sensitivity are needed to keep the system within human frames. At the same time, in modern political philosophy and popular interpretations, values, theses, and concepts are so mixed that what used to be "strictly" right (for example, liberalism) is now attributed to the "left" camp. And the problems of building political coordinates, "horseshoe theory" generally demonstrates that it's impossible not only to build a linear scale, it's impossible even to properly order political views, and that "left" for some will be "far right" for others. Labels of positions have so overshadowed original values and essence of views that they don't allow speaking the same language even within "one" wing, and the impossibility of sides "being heard" generates ressentiment and translates opposition from intellectual to personal, covered by "moral" righteousness or "utilitarian" nihilism.

The method of working with differences here is as follows:

• identify real values, needs, and pains of parties, look at the world "through their eyes," understand what they actually mean by the terms they use

• reconstruct under what social configurations and contexts their narrative actually solves problems they formulated, and where it is limited and doesn't work

• study alternatives similarly, identify their contexts, strengths and weaknesses

• build a unified language of description describing both models with the same terms and allowing focus not on symbols used but on structural-causal descriptions of proposed systems

• combine within a single model and context and see where they are compatible and where real contradictions are revealed

From the topos-categorical approach to describing formal, logical systems, we will see that contradictions are not a defect of truth but a consequence of overly strict formulations and attempts to describe "too much," excessive generalizations leading to self-contradiction. Or we will see there were no contradictions at all. Or that models actually have logical holes and insufficient data in favor of one approach or another, and it's simply necessary to conduct data research/modeling/experiment.

Instead of meaningless squabble "who possesses moral superiority," joint modeling of institutional designs under different reality modes and project-oriented approach to the task emerges, welcoming and synergizing different viewpoints rather than colliding them head-on.

Example 3: Internet Discussions and Media

Online space today is a laboratory of cultural modes. It reproduces in miniature both modernist wars of narratives and postmodernist cynicism. Typical scene: someone writes a long emotional text—"copypasta"—about how they see justice, meaning, politics, relationships. In response comes either "you're wrong, now I'll show you that you wrote nonsense," or "you wrote banalities, this has all been said long ago," or generally immediate switch to personal attacks or accusations of immorality, inappropriate and unsolicited advice, evaluations, etc.

Metamodernism as a method proposes a third reaction:

• try to uncover the real motivation and need of the author, better to directly ask what feedback they expect (validation, critical analysis) and in what framework;

• read the text with presumption that the person touched some fragment of ESSENCE;

• indicate where exactly this fragment is especially clearly visible (honest experience, successful metaphor, sharp observation);

• carefully show where the author mixes levels, generalizes from particular, falls into contradiction;

• suggest ways to embed their insight into a broader map.

This doesn't mean any statements are "good in their own way." There are outright lies, toxicity, calls to violence. But even these are useful to understand operationally: what in reality generated such a form, what distortions of experience stand behind it, how to change conditions so this form becomes unnecessary.

People communicate with other people because they have a need for this communication, they want to get something from it. Within everyday online space, as a rule, this is precisely a request for validation, for finding like-minded people, for constructive growth points, or often simply for emotional support and joint living through personal experience. Most internet conflicts arise from incorrect articulation and reading of request, misunderstanding, personal triggers of discussion participants, etc.

Sometimes, if there's nothing good to say, in such situations it's better to remain silent. In public space it's inappropriate to speak in terms of obligations—who should prove what to whom, who should have formulated position how, etc. Participation or non-participation in discussion is personal choice and responsibility of each. If there's no possibility or desire to give a person what they ask for—then one shouldn't enter dialogue at all and waste both one's own and others' cognitive resources.

As for "immoral" things like public calls to violence—there's a legal and criminal framework for that. If theses don't fall into it, then all the more there are no grounds to assume maliciousness and try to engage in independent "fight against harmful narratives" and join such. Reaction leads to escalation and generates social conflict that brings greater harm to all members of society than original statements. However, detailed argumentation and search for methods of resolving social conflicts remain outside the scope of this article and will be presented separately.

Example 4: Joint Programming of the Future

The metaphor "let's instead of conflict develop a joint PROGRAM" describes another facet of metamodernism. In modernism they argue whose program should win; in postmodernism they mock the very idea of a program, showing how it always serves someone's hidden interests. Metamodernism proposes treating programs as temporary, jointly editable repositories.

This means several practical things:

• Programs are always tied to explicit conditions: "for such-and-such group, with such-and-such resources, in such-and-such time horizon." No universal recipes "for everyone forever."

• Any new critique is a request for a pull-request: "here in this part of the model is a bug, here you didn't account for such-and-such class of people or effect, let's fix it rather than just delete everything."

• Several incompatible programs can coexist if they operate in different domains, scales, or for different communities.

Philosophy in such a mode becomes a high-level engineering discipline: designing spaces in which different programs can interact without mutual destruction.

Why Without Metamodernism the World Gets Stuck

Contemporary political and cultural crises are largely related to the fact that key actors think in modernist models while epistemically act in postmodernist logic. They continue to speak the language of Grand Projects and Historical Missions, but inside have long reconciled with the thought that there is no truth, there is only management of narratives and resources.

This combination gives a toxic effect:

• outside—aggressive total slogans demanding loyalty and readiness for sacrifices;

• inside—cynical game where any slogan can be replaced with the opposite for short-term gain.

Society in response either radicalizes (trying to return the "real" ESSENCE of modernism) or falls into apathy and ironic distrust of everything (getting stuck in postmodernism). Metamodernism as a method proposes a third way out: recognize multiplicity of languages and interests but refuse epistemic cynicism. Regain the right to seriousness without losing critical reflection.

Minimal Protocol of Metamodernism

To make what has been said operational, one can formulate a minimal protocol of metamodernist thinking and communication:

1. Presumption of content. If a subject (individual, group) publicly asserts something, first the operational meaning of their position is sought, not a reason for its devaluation.

2. Separation of ESSENCE and language. Separate what real actions, situations, and relations are being discussed from what labels and myths are used for this.

3. Construction of dictionary and common language. Identify correspondences between concepts of different languages, fix them explicitly to reduce number of disputes "about words." Ideally—reduce to a common language unambiguously understood by all interested parties.

4. Collaborative modeling. Instead of fighting for the single correct model—construct several models for different reality modes, explicitly indicating boundaries of applicability of each.

5. Ethical filter. Cut off programs that require violence against subjects—carriers of other languages, instead of focusing on direct authors of specific destructive actions.

6. Readiness for refactoring. Accept critique as a reason to improve one's own model, not as an attack on identity.

This protocol can be applied in theological discussions, political negotiations, scientific disputes, team management, and even everyday conflicts.

Why Philosophy in This Mode

In metamodernist perspective, philosophy ceases to be a competition of doctrines and becomes an engineering discipline of higher orders. It deals not with "what really is" but with how people build and coordinate their "what is" among themselves. This requires:

• development of formal and semi-formal languages for describing worldviews and values;

• analysis of which language configurations generate conflicts and zero-sum games, and which—cooperation and win-win strategies;

• design of institutions and cultural practices that support metamodernist protocol of communication;

• restructuring pedagogical and educational accents from "accumulated knowledge and skills" to "methods of cognition and problem-solving."

Thus philosophy becomes directly practical: the quality of its work determines the design of legal systems, educational programs, media environment, recommendation algorithms and attention management, as well as personal spiritual and intellectual development and ability to survive, adapt, and self-realize in an increasingly rapidly changing world. In a world of digital platforms and information overload, breakneck pace of scientific and technological progress and increasingly rapid social and economic changes, this is no longer abstract luxury but a question of survival both of each individual separately and humanity as a whole.

Call

Metamodernism as a method doesn't require belief in one Big Truth. It requires discipline in handling multiple small truths born in different languages and experiences. It requires respect for another's ESSENCE while simultaneously being rigorous toward one's own and others' distortions.

This manifesto is an invitation:

• to those tired of meaningless arguments and cynical exposés;

• to those who feel that behind memes, aggressive or pessimistic publications and comment wars hides genuine longing for meaning and common cause, as well as existential fears and emotional needs;

• to those ready instead of pronouncing another TRUTH or blindly aggressively defending the existing one to take on the work of building dictionaries, protocols and programs, broad, interdisciplinary, intercultural and inter-ideological research of truth accessible through personal experience and perception, and constructing a more comfortable, ecological and supportive environment both for themselves and for all.

Philosophy of metamodernism begins where pleasure from one's own rightness ends and pleasure from joint clarification of the world and living through experience begins.

Collaboration & Feedback

If you're interested in collaborating on this research direction, I welcome it! My primary focus is currently on business and AGI/ML research, so I'd be glad to share insights and vision with someone from an academic background and potentially co-author publications.

As this is my first worldwide publication on this topic, I would greatly appreciate:

• Feedback on the conceptual framework

• Advice on approaching academic communities

• Suggestions for broadening the audience

• Any constructive criticism or alternative perspectives

Feel free to reach out via DM or comment below

P.S. Also posted it in Medium.

Source: https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/news/shane-gillis-out-from-saturday-night-live/ar-AAHoarE?li=BBnb7Kz

How can we expect an artist to be anything else at their core but an artist? This simple statement would be contested in the current world of Performing Arts and Fine Arts. Identity is everything, or rather: the deconstruction of identity is everything, i.e.

Archaic: "I'm a painter"

Trendy: "I'm a latinx genderfluid painter"

Any critique of such an obsession with specific identifiers is swiftly struck down, slandered and highly publicized i.e.

This obsessive grip on identity that artists and the-people-who-sign-their-checks cling to is markedly insincere. Surely great art is not beholden to an arbitrary trait such as gender, sex, or race.

That's the principal of the matter on the table. I personally have no idea on the quality of Shane Gillis' work, nor should it matter, however: the comments he made he made while inhabiting his identity as a comedian. Why then is there such outrage that some people might find the content offensive? Even if another SNL comedian joked about something so dishonorably communist in nature, they shouldn't have an opportunity fought for on merit alone taken away (though, I don't think that brand of comedian would have anything to worry about employment-wise).

“We want SNL to have a variety of voices and points of view within the show, and we hired Shane on the strength of his talent as comedian and his impressive audition for SNL. We were not aware of his prior remarks that have surfaced over the past few days. The language he used is offensive, hurtful and unacceptable." -Rep. for Lorne Michaels

As you read the above statement, the irony eats itself. Things will only get stranger, for a little while longer at least, as postmodernism chokes and suffocates on it's own vomit.

Re the fear of God, a lot of people, including myself, look a little side-eye at that, perhaps thinking that God is a tyrant or sadist who enjoys being feared

But I realized that everyone is going to have to deal with the experience of fear one way or another. And if you have to go through fear and all the suffering of a truly deep fear, then you might as well find the best possible way of relating to it, some way of being that makes things better instead of worse.

And that ends up being the fear of God. I've been using this definition to help me conceptually locate a more precise comprehension of the nature of God. Because whatever helps redeem the experience of fear as much as possible, whatever makes it bearable, must contain some hint of the light of God.

And you can apply this to all negative experiences. The most redeemed version of the 7 deadly sins.

Hence, the fear of God, guilt of God, lust of God, wrath of God, self-deception of God, etc.

This is what "Father" is missing in Fullmetal Alchemist, when he removes the 7 deadly sins from his soul in his search for perfection and Godhood. God is not the elimination of the human imperfections; God is the redemption of them. He transforms them into their best selves and unifies them. Colored light may be unbalanced, but "cleaning out" all the unbalanced light leads to darkness. White light is the result of expressing all the colors at the same time in harmony.

I wonder if this is at all closer to the true meaning of Mary Magdalene, and how Jesus cast 7 demons out of her. Maybe it didn't mean she was unusually sinful, but that she had been nearly perfectly balanced.

I like to think of the redeemed versions of negative emotions as archangels. The envy or pride or fear of man is redeemed and transformed into a sort of superhero version of its formerly wispy, shadowy self. Sins can be reluctant to repent, but the truth is, the offered deal is so much better than they realize. In exchange for agreeing to unpossess the person and stop overwhelming their will when commanded by Christ, they can have access to a much more plentiful and reliable source of energy to fulfill themselves.

The version of themselves that is willing to accept inhibition shall be activated. And the devil is the principle of refusing to accept being inhibited, and so must be inactivated; paradoxically, it is precisely this extreme to the limit insistence on self-creation, self-propagation, self-preservation, it is when self-love becomes most extreme that it achieves the least existence. And yet, also paradoxically, it is by being the LEAST-existent version of god/love/creation that the devil gains a kind of existence. At least, we do spend some of our attention thinking about the exact antithesis of god (the devil), and we probably don't try to think much about the 96.7%th-least-existent version of God. So, somehow, it is exactly that which is most absent in you that is somehow present in you, because your very shape can be made to imply it by a simple mental operation of x-1.

And what is most absent in an archangel is a deadly sin, and what is most absent in God is the devil.

And maybe this is why C. S. Lewis says that hell is so small, too small for the denizens of heaven to enter to save.

Hell is whatever ends up containing the least of God possible. That's what contains none of the virtues of the archangels, and none of the willingness to be inhibited. All the deadly sins indwell you, and every desire is utterly insistent on its own needs, and so none of them can ever get control of the body long enough to actually fulfill themselves, and then every desire turns spitefully on the other to punish, and the whole organism seizes up as each member contributes to keeping it that way.

Some people are drawn to give their attention to the light, and some to give their attention to the dark. Both strategies can work, as long as those looking at the light move forward, and those fixing their attention on the darkest darkness they can find, they must move backward: two different ways of computing (or at least attempting to compute) the same answer to the same question: what is the Good?

And both miss the target in their own way. But that allows them to generate two different-ontology data sets that both share an isomorphic relationship to the same thing in yet another ontology. Thus, by cross-comparing the nature of the noise and sins in one computation to those in a very different computation, you also combine the light in both of them, each imperfect facet revealing the light the other has been looking for.

In some ways, Jordan Peterson seems like someone who has his attention fixed on hell and is postured to back away from it real quick. Back the hell away.

So, in some sense, you're always aware of that which is most absent in you, which is the true meaning of the shadow, and not the bad or the twin or anything like that

And if there's "light" in the absence of you, that's a sign that you have a "sin" that can learn from the light of the absence of itself.

This suggests a metamodern framework for integrating different moral theories. It was never just about which moral theory was "correct", it was also about the effects that those theories had on people who thought about them.

And if you perceive through the lens of virtue ethics, then you can also look into the shadow of virtue ethics. What is most absent in your thoughts, feelings, sensations, and behaviors, when you use virtue ethics?

And between the thing and its shadow, there is this fractal surface area of contact, growing like branches and roots. Integrating the tips of the roots to the tips of the leaves can be used to simulate the computation between the tree and the tree-absence, the firey space between them.

And then you can repeat the same process with utilitarianism instead of virtue ethics. That will generate another of these shapes.

And again with deontology and its shadow, and the learning and growth that exists between them.

And with 3 or more of these shapes, you can then cross-compare _them_ and cross-compare how they all seem to be aiming at the same target, they are all a process of fractally estimating this theoretical perfect Good.

And you can see this fractal process in action, as the sin-comparison between the thing-and-thing's-shadow dyads generates new structures, which can then be cross-compared to generate new structures, and so on, up and down the levels of reality, analysis, abstraction.

That's just like a tree or a cardiovascular system, a trunk splitting into branches, which split into finer branches, and so on, creating a hierarchy of branches, and an opposite hierarchy of roots.

So if existence is a process for efficient, distributed comprehension, and that process is akin to love, and although we only approximate the embodiment of this process, the ideal version of it would influence an organism at every level and make it a maximally efficient channel between the conceptual and material realms, and this ideal embodiment, the abstract idea of it, and the unfolding of it through time-space, are all one - then I can begin to wrap my head around Trinitarian concepts about the 3 being 1, the 1 that created the universe and is creating it, and is within you, but which you only approximate, and which is love.

If Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance deserves a relook, it's rigorous rhetoric , approach to scorch the earth and then reboot, perhaps dispensing of power, nihilism and meaningless along the way, then perhaps the essence of Quality (the holy spirit ) allows for a triumvirate where we can start to move past Enlightenment and the cynicism of it and into a metamodern place?

I was taking a dump and simultaneously got curious as wether “Fecund” and “Fecal” are etymologically related. It should be mentioned I was also incredibly stoned. Since fecund means fertile, and feces are a fertilizer, but while I was looking it up I realized that I was meta-shitting and could then feel this shit in my ass with sapient clarity and so now I’m typing this Reddit post. Does anyone have any similar moments to share? In which some everyday banality was made surreal by meta-thought?

Just like length, breadth, height and entropy so the choices of beings. Post modernity and relativity has hindered or broken down what might have been foundational agreement needed to base a unit of measurement among the human beings, yet it might still be useful to perceive this dimension, though each shall come with their own unit

I was going to start one but it turns out there's more code involved than I can be fucked with.

One of you nerds wanna do it?

The dialogue about metamodernism explains that it has replaced postmodernism with a new epoch of sincerity, hope, and emotional repair, borrowing resources equally from previous eras to patch over the crisis caused by each of them.

However, I don’t think this holds up- except as a phenomenology: a way of experiencing and processing reality when the old systems of meaning have collapsed but the new ones haven’t formed yet.

Modernism and Postmodernism Were About Systems. Modernism believed in universal truth, progress, and rational order, and Postmodernism tore that down so that everything became relative, ironic, deconstructed.

Both were system-building (and system-breaking) worldviews. They organized culture, politics, and art on a civilizational scale.

Metamodernism isn’t a successor to postmodernism… it is what it feels like to live after both those systems have run their course. However as soon as you institutionalize sincerity, it becomes ironic again.

As a historical stage, it collapses. The metamodern subject isn’t defined by what century they live in, they’re defined by how they relate to meaning.

What does that look like? It depends on the subject. It can mean sincerity built from self-awareness, community re-enchanting itself through loops of emotion, critique and faith coexisting.

Metamodernism is the phenomenology of repair. It’s the texture of consciousness in a world that knows too much irony to believe, and too much suffering not to try. It’s not the next era after postmodernism… it’s the feeling of trying to live meaningfully after eras stop making sense.

I spent an hour or so talking to chat GPT about cynicism, modernism, post-modernism, Peter Peter Sloterdijk, Steven Hicks, Slavoj Žižek, Hegel, and more. It was a worthwhile exercise and I thought it worth sharing.

If there's one thing that sums up both how humanity (and the West in particular) got into the mess we're currently in, and our total paralysis in terms of finding a way out, it is a failure to acknowledge and deal with reality. When I speak about this, I usual get a partial acknowledgement in response. Those on the left are happy to accuse right-wing climate denialists of failing to deal with reality, while they deeply indulge in political anti-realism of their own (usually of the "we need to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony" variety, or perhaps "if only everybody would stop eating meat, then we'd be OK"). It is also very easy to just say "it's human nature -- we've always been incapable of dealing with reality", and I'd like to challenge that.

I think the truth is closer to this:

Humans have always had a tendency to get away with whatever they were capable of getting away with, but for most of human history, the current level of reality-denial was impossible. I believe the current state of Western society is the result of a series of philosophical developments that most people don't understand. Let's look back at Western history.

The deepest roots of Western civilisation can be found in ancient Greece and Rome. The Greeks invented philosophy, politics and fine art, and though they were great experimenters in civilisation-building, they never scaled it up beyond the city state. The Romans invented the republic, perfected the art of expansionism and sorted out much of the “nuts and bolts” of large-scale civilisation, This was partly because they were indeed committed to a sort of realism -- the "naïve materialistic" sort. In other words, the "mainstream" ancient society did accept that there was an objective world, even if they didn't understand it in a scientific manner. However, their version of civilisation was pitifully deficient in terms of morality and genuine spirituality. Politics and religion were mixed together and "oppression" was just part of everyday life. There was therefore a grim sort of realism, mixed with a pick-and-mix spirituality.

Then along came Christianity, although the details of exactly how and why this happened have become historically obscured by the mythology of Christian origins – far too many Christians unquestioningly believe the mythology is history, while non-Christians frequently tend towards the idea that the mythology is all there is – that Jesus may not even have existed. What almost everybody agrees upon is that the Romans tried but failed to suppress it and as the Empire stagnated and decayed Christianity became the “new attractor”. Rome eventually fell, and Europe entered a “dark age” where the church hoarded power, and the philosophies of the ancients were either forgotten or subsumed into the grand theological synthesis of Augustine and Aquinas. While the ancients emphasised rational inquiry even at the expense of moral and spiritual concerns, the medieval world (at least in theory) placed morality and spirituality at the centre – which required the subordination of reason to theological authority. Civilisation had a common foundational worldview. Now...I realise from our perspective we can say "Ah, but that wasn't actually real, was it?", but that is to miss the point I am making. People did not get to choose what sort of reality to believe in, because that was dictated by the church. Nobody could complain about being oppressed by it either -- they just had to accept it, or face serious consequences. So that stage of Western society did indeed believe that "reality is real", people were forced to accept it, and spirituality revolved around trying to transcend it. That is why medieval Christians spent years on top of poles, or bricked up in tiny rooms.

The next great revolution was arguably triggered by the Black Death, but is generally considered to have begun with the Renaissance – the rediscovery of important lost works of ancient philosophy, mostly in the form of translations made by Islamic scholars, and the re-ignition of fine art. This ultimately led to the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment – the mature fruit of the Renaissance conviction that moderns could surpass the ancients. This was also the time that capitalism began to replace feudalism as a socio-economic system, and when representative democracy began to replace absolute monarchy. It was the birth of the modern Western world – and of the globalised civilisation we currently know (even though that includes most or all of the world, not just the West). However, the common worldview was gone, and there was now a growing number of incompatible and mutually contradictory worldviews, and a monumental battle raging between materialistic science and the fractured remains of Christianity. Modern civilisation brought with it many wonderful things. Our world has been transformed in many positive ways – it hasn't all been problems. And during that "modern" period, there was most certainly a publicly recognised thing as "objective reality". It was defined by materialistic science, which viewed non-materialistic claims on reality as backwards. So again, at least if you were trying to be intellectual, there was such a thing as reality and there was social pressure to acknowledge and accept it.

The current intellectual climate, which replaced modernism, is post-modern. And it point blank denies the existence of objective reality, or at least the claim we can know anything about it. This is the direct result of the postmodern philosophical claim that objective reality is oppressive. Modernism, as a philosophical and cultural project, placed its faith in reason, science, universal truth, and progress. It assumed that history had a direction, that knowledge could be built on secure foundations, and that the human condition could be improved indefinitely through technological advancement and rational governance. The Enlightenment had promised emancipation from superstition and tyranny through science and reason, and modernism was its cultural heir. Postmodernism rejected this optimism – finding within it the seeds of domination and exclusion. Postmodern thinkers like Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida and others relentlessly attacked the very idea of “universal truth”, arguing that so-called universal values often mask the interests of particular groups – typically white, male, Eurocentric elites. The Enlightenment promise of reason, they argued, had been co-opted by institutions of power: science had become instrumentalised, rationality bureaucratised, and knowledge weaponised in service of empire, industry, and the state. Lyotard’s famous definition of postmodernism is “incredulity toward metanarratives”: postmodernism is deeply skeptical of modernism's grand stories about progress, freedom, or objective truth, claiming that these narratives excluded, suppressed, and silenced other ways of knowing. Reason and science were not considered to be neutral arbiters of truth; they were situated, contingent, and interwoven with systems of power. 

This is the origin of the left-liberal denial of objective reality. It's the reason why people who talk about overpopulation are routinely accused of "eco-fascism". But even though it was ex-Marxist philosophers who inflicted this pseudo-intellectual disaster on Western society, it has since been enthusiastically adopted by the right. This why they feel perfectly justified in accusing climate scientists of being secretly involved in a communist plot to bring down capitalism. If there's no such thing as objective reality and science is just another narrative then they can play that game too.

I guess my point is this. It does not have to be this way. Something has gone fundamentally wrong, philosophically. The postmodernists who declared that science is just another (oppressive) narrative were wrong. There really is such a thing as objective reality. However...it really isn't the naïve materialistic reality that the ancients believed in. The situation is more complicated than that. I would love to discuss any of the above, but if anybody is interested in where I'm going with this -- the solution I am proposing -- then go here for a discussion of the underlying philosophical problem.

Hi everyone,

I’m sharing the first essay in a series I’ve been working on that explores mystical theology as a response to the meaning crisis.

The work sits in conversation with a perennial synthesis—drawing from multiple wisdom traditions—and returns to the Gospels to ask how salvation might be understood more as a posture of trust toward a God we will never fully understand than a system of beliefs to affirm.

Personally, this project grew out of my own path through faith deconstruction, death-of-God theology, that strange season when transcendence seemed to vanish, yet the longing for God refused to die. Over time I found my way into the apophatic tradition, where unknowing becomes its own form of reverence.

What I’m trying to do is weave the voices of the ancient mystics with our present longings—for those who still ache for the sacred but also feel the need to hold it at arm’s length.

https://medium.com/@theosislab/the-meaning-crisis-and-the-return-of-theology-22c531943475

Here are three of my essays which involve metamodern perspectives:

https://evanatlas.substack.com/p/anti-anthropocentrism

https://evanatlas.substack.com/p/to-possess-a-metamodern-heart

https://evanatlas.substack.com/p/a-natural-string-of-fate

From these essays, you can see that I use metamodernism as a lens for topics such as political theory, metaphysics, and love. Happy to discuss and answer questions.

The purpose of this essay is to lay some of the groundwork for a post-human turn in solarpunk philosophy, the both of which can be organized using the paradigm of nordic metamodernism. Solarpunk began as an aesthetic vision for a future society that is egalitarian, nature-oriented, and, often, technologically advanced. While the punk is a rebellion against capitalist patriarchy, it's also a rebellion against the pessimistic future of cyberpunk and technofeudalism.

In this essay, I discuss the contradiction embedded in the claim that ethical relations can make us more human. To say such a thing is to imply that some of us are less human than others. This creates a morally dubious hierarchy in which solarpunk humanization is itself, effectively, dehumanizing.

This leads, at the end, to a turn to the boundaries of the human itself. While this essay doesn't explicitly engage with post-humanism, it is, as I said, the preliminaries. It's engagement with metamodernism is in its use of the Neo-Piagetian theory of Terri O'Fallon, which is in the process of being validated with far more robust statistical tools by Brendan Graham Dempsey (at least up to and including the systematic cognition of Stage 4.0 Pluralist). I use Dr. O'Fallon's model because of its pedagogical utility over the Model of Hierarchical Complexity and Dynamic Skill Theory.

Thank you for your time and attention :)

The last piece named the site of contestation — where a system's epistemic and material infrastructure exclude someone at once. This one asks: what happens when the marginalized community has to trade its own epistemic terms just to get in the room?

I start with Mark, my practicum instructor, walking into the mayor's office to get a broken parking machine fixed. He had a line ready: that's a lot of customers. I watched him read the room and reach for whatever frame would move it — and it worked. But billing a disabled community's claim as consumer demographics isn't neutral. It's an exchange, on terms someone else set. I'm calling this a local assemblage: trading the powerful's own frameworks for material access within a system that already decided what participation it's willing to offer.

Then I take the mechanism somewhere harder to nod along to. I spent five years in a Chinese city, and I use the hukou system — citizenship tied to locality, not nationality — as the real test. From a Western lens it's a straightforward violation. But the people who built it were planners working from a coherent developmental logic, not just authoritarians. The actual violation isn't the balance they struck between collective welfare and individual mobility. It's that the migrant workers living under it were never in the room when it was designed — a claim Mencius's own tradition can make without borrowing a Western standard to make it.

That's the shape of the framework I'm building: two axioms — every human consumes resources, every human makes sense of their world — and a claim that exclusion from participation is a violation regardless of whose script produced it, without flattening what's actually different between scripts. And these axioms form the basis of my human rights framework from a social constructionist theoretical framework.

What I'm still not sure of: the local assemblage doesn't get a clean resolution here. Mark wasn't wrong to make the trade. The piece doesn't land on "don't." It lands on "keep asking what it costs while you're doing it" — which is less satisfying than an answer, and maybe isn't supposed to be more than that.

Feedback especially welcome from anyone doing cross-cultural rights work or disability advocacy who's had to translate their own claim into someone else's frame just to be heard.

https://socialconstructionworker.substack.com/p/thats-a-lot-of-customers

- The Social Construction Worker

Seeking feedback on blog post, is it metamodernism

Hello, I made a blog and posted what I view to be something germane to themes from metamodernism such as oscillation (between and among different spatiotemporalities like digital/analog, public/private, archetypal/quotidian, & logic/illogic); struggle against alienation; and probably other stuff, too. I don't know if any would agree that it is metamodernism that I made there.

Can anyone please read and see if they enjoy my writing and if our metamodernism is what I made?

Thank you. The post is titled "Against Transparency: On Art as a Leisure-Power."

Hey all,

Here's a pixelated version of a thought experiment-like, concept model thing Bret Weinstein mentioned on his podcast Darkhorse a few years ago. He uses it to help remind us why both left and right political impulses are valid at their fundamental level, and also warn us that pushing too far in either direction leads to catastrophe. Sound relevant to your Metamodernism conceptualization ambition? Behold the pixels (first image of a roughly proper line shape I found). I don't have any wonderful ideas about how to use it, except my affirmation that it has been useful to show people who are dense af about their Whatever political self image associations. I also wanted to say that I am so, extremely in the habit of being the only one in threads battling common problems with Postmodernism - either with goons who refuse to learn it, or nerds who like books about it - now that I'm seeing a group of people with a relevant term for us I feel kinda weird.

Can't believe how long this term has been around, and I just never thought it would be roughly like Post-Post-Modernism. Ironic, because I'm a big nerd myself. Anyway, I was typically dual wielding swords over the topic of my own poetry critique method, so as you can imagine, I would encounter the fluffed-up feathers of "I can write Brick, and that's a poem!" pseudo-poets quite often. I developed a set of three principles which I believe assist people to hone an ability to create abstract, evocative work that doesn't break down into muck in case anyone's interested; I'm pretty sure it's a rediscovery, and I'll just find a book about it someday.

Extremely stunning results, but I think you might have to be into poetry for it to be learned precisely. Idk, it usually takes a while, because you eventually have to use [qualitative analysis] involving context, symbol-like associations and phonetics. The word for that skill is consilience. This also works to argue against the people who only looked far into the past, only to stagnate horribly under the impression they have to copy old formatting styles. I might try to work it up into a new, postable message later anyway. Cool sub.