“Life is achingly beautiful and creative once you free yourself from the mind-numbing shackles of neo-Darwinian dogma.” — Mae-Wan Ho1

“I have no doubt that life is quantum coherent. Organisms are quantum jazz players, dancing life into being.” — Mae-Wan Ho2

Mae-Wan Ho (1941-2016) was a proper badass. She was a Chinese-English geneticist, biophysicist, science activist, artist, critic of genetic determinism, neo-Darwinism, and GM biotechnology, and later a defender of ideas about quantum coherence, liquid-crystalline water, subtle energy, and the idea that living organisms are shimmering wholes rather than a collection of parts.

Her big word was “Coherence.” For Ho, the body wasn’t just a sack of biochemical reactions with genes pulling the strings. It was a living whole: rhythmic, responsive, luminous, and self-making. A process so deeply coordinated that the usual machine metaphors simply didn’t fit.

I came to Ho the way I’ve come to a lot of things: through Ray Peat. He mentioned her now and then in interviews, usually with the air of a man pointing at something most people had walked straight past. In one conversation he told a story about Michoacán in Mexico, where the fishmongers used to lay their catch out on newspaper. One of them was so fresh and clear you could read the print through its body. Bones, blood vessels, organs, all visible, and yet the whole thing was so transparent it was like looking through glass. To Peat, that made sense only if Ho’s way of seeing things was correct. As he summed up her view, “she sees the body as a liquid crystal…it’s an ever-changing crystal.”3

As I’ve written about a lot, especially through the McGilchristian lens of the left hemisphere, modern science is brilliant at parts. Divide the organism into genes, proteins, membranes, enzymes, neural circuits and molecular pathways, and you can learn a lot. But the living body isn’t chopped up. It’s a whole in motion, and Ho wanted a science that could do justice to that motion.

You can get an immediate feel for her energy and vibe in this short clip (2 mins) from On the Back of a Tiger:

The Rainbow and the Worm

In the summer of 1991, Ho was in Mexico City when she saw a huge carved disc of stone, about three metres across, showing the Aztec moon goddess who’d been killed and dismembered by her brother, the sun god. What caught her attention wasn’t the violence but the shape of it. The symmetry seemed to pull the severed parts back towards each other, with the tearing apart and the putting back together both held in one image. She later found out it was a calendar, its thirteen joints marking out the divisions of the year, the whole cycle of death and rebirth carved into a single wheel. She called that moment “the immediate prelude” to her theory of the organism, which she started writing up not long after.4 The stone seemed to show her that wholeness isn’t a state a thing arrives at and keeps but more like a tendency, always coming apart and always trying to gather itself back together.

That realisation would be confirmed a year later by an image at the centre of her work, which gave her best-known book its title. In 1992, Ho persuaded a visiting BBC microscopist to point a polarising microscope at some fruit-fly embryos. What they saw became a new imaging technique, and what it showed astonished her: all the colours of the rainbow in a living, crawling larva, about a millimetre long.5

This wasn’t colour in a metaphorical sense but actual colour. The kind you get when polarised light passes through ordered materials.6

Ho described it like someone who couldn’t quite believe her eyes. The larva, she wrote, “weaves its head from side to side flashing jaw muscles in blue and orange stripes on a magenta background.”7 The segmental muscle bands switched from turquoise to vermillion as waves of contraction ran along the body. The first time she saw it, she said, it was breathtaking, like a “psychedelic worm,” and even after seeing it again and again, she never lost that sense of wonder.8

It mattered to Ho because crystals produce those colours through molecular order. But the larva wasn’t a dead crystal. It was alive, moving, growing, and metabolising. The molecules were in motion everywhere, and yet the organism still showed pattern and order. She took that as a clue that life isn’t order imposed on motion but order through motion.

The colour was evidence, or at least a strong hint, that organisms are liquid crystalline: not solid, not chaotic fluid, but dynamically ordered, with aligned molecules and structured water that can carry energy and information very efficiently.9 For Ho, living organisms weren’t just coherent in the ordinary systems sense. They were also, in a deeper way, quantum coherent. The body, she thought, is a shimmering field of coordinated activity, with water playing a central role in all that coordination.10

And for Ho, water wasn’t just the backdrop to that coordination but the thing that made it possible. The body is mostly water, and she thought that water, structured and lined up around the molecules it surrounds, was what let signals and energy move through the organism fast and coherently enough for it to act as one thing rather than a load of separate bits. So not just the stuff life happens in, but the stuff that lets life happen as a whole. The rainbow in the worm, as she liked to say, is a rainbow within, a watery echo of the one in the sky.

A machine doesn’t do that. It holds together because it has fixed parts that someone has bolted together from the outside. The piston or gear doesn’t improvise or wonder what it’s doing. Machines are impressive because they repeat themselves. For Ho, life is impressive because it doesn’t.

A living organism is stable, but it isn’t static. It maintains itself by changing all the time: skin repairs, bones remodel, blood renews, the immune system learns, the gut listens, and the heart adjusts. Cells divide and die so the body can live. What looks like a thing is actually a stream of small remakings.

The mechanical worldview struggles here because it imagines wholeness as assembling the bits together in the right order. But in an organism, the whole is already present in the parts from the beginning. An embryonic cell can become many tissues; remove one part and the rest can reorganise. A salamander can regrow a limb. A wound can heal. The part isn’t just a detachable spare component but part of a living field that’s always becoming itself.

Ho wasn’t the first to suggest this. She knew she was following in the footsteps of the process philosophers, and she said so. She leans on Henri Bergson, for whom time isn’t the measured, clock-divided quantity of physics but “duration”—the lived, flowing quality of experience that the language of science flattens into a “simulacrum.” And she takes from Alfred North Whitehead his definition of an organism as “a locus of prehensive unification”—a field of activity that draws on its experience of the environment to make itself whole. The organism, on this view, isn’t a thing in time so much as a gathering of time. I’ve written about both Bergson and Whitehead elsewhere; what matters here is that Ho’s worm is their philosophy made visible, flashing under a microscope.11

That’s why she describes an organism as having an “irrepressible tendency towards being whole.”12 The key word there being tendency. Not a finished thing but a directional leaning and striving. A living pull toward wholeness. The organism isn’t simply a whole as though the job were already done. It’s always becoming whole, always adjusting, integrating, repairing, and recovering. The embryo does it. The wounded body does it. The psyche does it. Even a good conversation does it.

And Ho followed that pull all the way out, suggesting the same tendency that heals a wound is at work in what we call love. “Love is a desire for wholeness,” she wrote, “a longing to embrace and complete a larger whole,” and it’s what drives our social and creative acts and even our knowledge of nature. Whether it’s a cell reaching to rejoin the body, a person reaching for another, or a scientist reaching to understand, for Ho, these aren’t separate phenomena but the same tendency showing up at different scales.13

It’s important to note that Ho wasn’t against analysis. She was a passionate scientist, after all. Her problem was the arrogance of analysis when it forgets what it’s done. If you cut an organism into bits, you might learn something useful. But the bit you’re studying is no longer living the life you claim to be studying. You’ve gained clarity by taking the thing apart. That’s fine sometimes. But it should make you humble, not full of grand theories.

She’d felt the gap herself. She went into biochemistry, she explained, because a professor had quoted Albert Szent-Györgyi saying that life “was interposed between two energy levels of an electron,” and she thought that was “sheer poetry” and wanted to know what life is. But what she found was a discipline that “was about cutting up everything, grinding up everything, separating, purifying,” and that “told you nothing about what life is.”14

As someone who spent years inside the academy, I think the arrogance Ho is describing here isn’t just a personal failing of bad scientists but structural. The whole publish-or-perish game rewards the clean result you get by isolating a part.

Modernity Made It a Worldview

A big issue is that modernity has turned the analytical method into the dominant way of seeing the world. We started treating reality itself as if it were made of isolated parts. The body became a machine. The mind became software. The gene became code. Nature became a resource. Society became a mechanism. Education became input and output. Health became optimisation. Work became productivity. Attention became fuel. Even our self-improvement talk sounds like an engineering manual written for anxious machines.

Hack your habits. Track your macros. Rewire your brain. Optimise your morning. Upgrade your system.

Ho’s work is a revolt against that language. She was especially suspicious of the idea that genes run life. DNA mattered, of course. But for Ho, the gene wasn’t some little boss sitting inside the cell handing out orders. The genome was fluid, responsive, and embedded. Genes are switched on and off depending on the cellular, bodily, ecological, and developmental setting. They don’t stand above the organism. They belong to it.15

This wasn’t just a grumble. With the mathematician Peter Saunders, Ho argued for a positive alternative to neo-Darwinism. In their picture, development steers evolution rather than the other way round. The organism doesn’t just wait for random copying mistakes and then hope selection picks the winners. It makes non-random changes in response to what’s around it. The fluid genome isn’t a lump sitting there being mutated. It responds. That made neo-Darwinism, for Ho, not just incomplete but the intellectual licence for genetic engineering. It’s the same control-from-above logic, just dressed up as biology.16

That’s why “genetic programme” is a bit of a dodgy phrase. A programme runs because the code tells the machine what to do. But the organism isn’t a machine, and the gene isn’t the boss. Life is more like an ongoing conversation, with messages moving in many directions at once: genes to cells, cells to tissues, tissues to organism, organism to environment, and the environment back again into gene expression.

Ho put the difference pretty bluntly. Mechanical systems, she said, work through “a hierarchy of controllers and the controlled,” and you can see that same logic in a lot of our institutions: bosses deciding, managers passing the instructions down the chain, and workers carrying out orders. Organic systems are the opposite. They work, she said, through “intercommunication and total participation.” In the organism, “no part of the system has to be pushed or pulled into action.” Everyone, in her words, is “simultaneously boss and worker, choreography and dancer.”17

A mechanical system, she wrote, “works like a non-democratic institution.” An organism has “no bosses, no controllers and no set points. It is radically democratic, everyone participates.”18 Late in life she made the point even more provocatively. In a 2010 interview, she complained that Western education “divides you up into the observer and the observed, the controller and the controlled,” when life is nothing like that. “Life is spontaneous and free,” she said, “and everything works by intercommunication. It’s a perfect social anarchy because each player is as much in control as he or she is sensitive and responsive.”19

That image of a body without a boss may be the most important thing in Ho’s work, because it doesn’t just apply to biology. A body gets ill when communication breaks down. Not always, and not in a neat simple way, but often enough to matter. Cells stop listening. Systems fall out of rhythm. Inflammation becomes chronic. Feedback loops distort. The organism no longer hears itself clearly.

A psyche does the same thing. Parts split off and feelings go underground. The body says one thing while the life story says another. A person starts to feel less like an organism and more like a little internal bureaucracy, with one bit issuing commands and another quietly sabotaging them. But, as Ho writes:

“The whole is never static, it is constantly dying and reborning, decaying and renewing, breaking down to build up again. The same cycles of disintegration and re-integration occur whether one is looking at the energy metabolism of our body or the stream of consciousness out of which we individuate our psyche. During the normal ‘steady state’ of our existence, the multitudes of infinitesimal deaths and rebirths are intricately balanced so that the old changes imperceptibly into the new. However, whenever the attracting center of the new is radically different from the old, a larger, and at times, complete disintegration may be needed before the new can individuate. It is like a caterpillar which must completely dissolve so that the beautiful butterfly can emerge.”

That last move, the dissolving before the new can come, is exactly the one capable people resist. I spend a fair amount of time with people who run things, and the most common error I watch able people make, with their own lives as much as with what they run, is to apply more control at exactly the point where what was needed was more coherence. Organisations do it too. So do whole societies. Control expands when trust collapses and procedure multiplies when communication fails. Everyone gets managed because nobody’s listening and the living whole turns into administration.

Ho’s organism gives a different picture of order.

Jazz Instead of Clockwork

When she wanted to explain what coherence actually feels like, Ho didn’t reach for clockwork but for music. Coherence, she insisted, doesn’t mean uniformity of everyone doing the same thing all the time. You can think of it, she suggested, like “a large jazz band, where everyone is doing his or her own thing, as yet keeping perfectly in tune or in step with the whole.” Then she pushed the image further, into an “immensely huge superorchestra” with instruments spanning seventy-two octaves, each one playing its own line, endlessly varying, changing key and tempo as needed, all without losing the shape of the music.20

This clip (2 mins), from the documentary Being in the World,21 links jazz to Heidegger’s philosophy, but I think it’s equally relevant to what Ho is saying, too:

Jazz isn’t chaos. It has form, timing, memory, discipline, and listening. But it also has freedom. A player doesn’t just execute a score. The music happens between the players. The whole comes together as they play. Ho thought the organism worked the same way: every molecule, cell, tissue, and organ taking part in a vast improvisation, with no conductor standing outside the music.

Her more technical way of saying this came from her physics: a coherent state “maximizes both global cohesion and also local freedom.”22

Whether or not you accept her full quantum account, the philosophical force of that line is immense. Most of the ways we’ve been taught to think about freedom and belonging treat them as opposites. Either the individual is free and the collective is weak, or the collective is strong and the individual gets squashed. Ho’s organism suggests a third way. In a living whole, local freedom and global belonging rise together. The cell isn’t less itself because it belongs to the body. It becomes itself through the body. Its autonomy isn’t isolation, but participation.

And that isn’t just a fluffy bit of sentimental biology either. Cancer is also a kind of freedom, but freedom without relation. The cancerous cell refuses the whole. It grows, but no longer belongs. It pursues its own expansion at the cost of the organism that makes its life possible, which isn’t vitality but coherence breaking down.

A Syntropic Moral Philosophy

A good life isn’t one in which every impulse gets what it wants. And it isn’t one where every impulse gets crushed by discipline either. A good life is one where the different parts can get into a better relationship with each other. Desire, thought, habit, vocation, body, memory, love, work, place. Not all shoved into obedience, and not all left to fight it out, but held in a living pattern.

That’s also where the idea of syntropy makes sense.

If entropy is dissipation, things scattering and running down, syntropy isn’t just stiff “order.” A prison is ordered, as is a bureaucracy. A corpse can be arranged neatly. Syntropy is better understood as living coherence: energy gathered into forms that can keep creating. So not frozen or rigid order, but generative, rhythmic order.

Ho kept coming back to that point in her thermodynamics. Living systems don’t just burn through energy and collapse into waste. They hold energy in cycles. Breath, heartbeat, metabolism, sleep, seasons, and ecological loops. Energy gets captured, stored, mobilised, and returned. The organism delays dissipation by coupling processes together. What’s released here is taken up there. What would become waste becomes a resource.23

She called this “circular thermodynamics.”

To her, that was nature’s own economy. “Everything goes in cycles, and is recycled to minimize waste and dissipation.” It is, she said, “how nature continually recreates and renews itself,” how an organism keeps transforming material and energy “to regenerate and recreate themselves from moment to moment.” Put that beside the straight-line economy we’ve built for ourselves, which she saw as basically a maximum-waste, maximum-dissipation machine, and you can see what she meant.24 A living thing doesn’t just run down. It runs round.

She came to hear something old-school in all this. When asked how to picture the coherent organism, she said it was like a symphony, and then added something more revealing: “I’m a Taoist at heart. And quantum coherence and Taoism are one because coherent action is like effortless action.”25

That’s basically wu wei wearing physics clothes.26 The coherent body doesn’t have to bully itself into action. It moves without strain because every part is already in tune with every other part. Nietzsche, who saw striving as the very essence of life, would be spinning in his grave at this, but effort, in this picture, is mostly the sound a system makes when it’s fallen out of coherence and is trying to compensate by forcing.

Ho even suspected the same might be true of aging. She put it almost as a koan:

“If you have a fully quantum coherent system, you will never age and you will never die. But we do age and we do die. That's because of incoherence of varying degrees.”27

Time itself, she suggested, is really the accumulation of incoherence, so in true Peaty style, a happy, coherent person might age more slowly than someone full of strain and angst.28 Whether or not the thermodynamics works that out neatly, it makes intuitive sense to me: a good life is a life that’s stopped fighting itself.

And that’s why the machine metaphor is dangerous. Machines are useful because they externalise purpose. They don’t ask what they’re becoming or suffer if they’re used until they break. When we imagine ourselves as machines, we make ourselves available for machine treatment. When we imagine nature as machine, we feel entitled to redesign it without listening to it. When we imagine society as machine, we start looking for engineers instead of cultivating citizens.

A Language of Wholeness

The history of knowledge is full of things that couldn’t be seen because the metaphor on offer had nowhere for them to go. The organism has suffered from that especially. It’s too active to be a thing, too integrated to be a pile of parts, too intelligent to be a mechanism, too embodied to be just information, and too relational to be reduced to genes. Ho saw how shallow biology becomes when it doesn’t have a serious language for wholeness.

She thought the problem ran right down into the way we think about knowledge itself. To really understand nature, she once said, “a scientist needs to have the sensibility of the romantic poet and the artist’s feeling for wholeness and coherence.” Mechanistic science had cut that out, she thought, by separating the knower from the thing known and trusting only the rational mind, “divorced from feeling or passion.”29 A biology built on that sort of split will always struggle to see the whole, because it has trained itself not to feel it, as she explains here (2 mins):

That’s why her work still feels lively. She’s not just asking us to make mechanism more complex but to change the metaphors completely. From machine to organism. From control to communication. From programme to participation. From fixed structure to rhythmic coherence. And that change changes how you actually live.

Take health. If the body is a machine, the job is repair: find the broken part, replace it, suppress it, and optimise it. Sometimes that’s exactly what medicine needs to do, and it saves lives. But if the body is also an organism, then health isn’t just repair. It’s restored coherence. So alongside “what’s broken?” you start asking “what’s fallen out of rhythm here, and what would help it find that rhythm again?” Sleep, light, nutrition, movement, company, etc. Not instead of repair but underneath it.

Take education. If the mind is a machine, learning is just information transfer. Put the content in and test the output. But if the person is an organism, then learning is transformation. So the job isn’t to cover more material faster. It’s to give people time and the right conditions to digest, connect, and embody what they’re learning, until it actually changes them.

Take work. If human beings are machines, productivity is extraction. Get more output from the system. But if human beings are organisms, the practical question becomes where rhythm has been stripped out, and what would put it back. Rest that’s actually restful. Work that connects to something. A pace a body can keep without eating itself.

Take ecology. If nature is a machine, sustainability becomes resource management. If nature is organismic, the question is which cycle you’re standing inside, and what participating in it honestly requires of you, rather than what you can extract before it breaks.

None of this stays abstract for long. The practical work is always much the same: stop forcing things, and restore the conditions where a living thing can sort itself out. My potatoes won’t grow by me optimising the allotment. I have to tend it. Similarly, you don’t command your body back to health; you remove what’s jamming its signals and give it what it needs to hear itself again. Coherence can’t be bolted on from the outside, but you can clear the ground for it. Which is the difference between engineering and cultivation, and most of what Ho cared about sits right in that gap.

The Results are Everywhere

Exhausted bodies, anxious minds, brittle institutions, stripped-down ecosystems, lonely networks, and clever technologies wrapped around impoverished forms of living.

Against this, Ho doesn’t give you some neat little programme to follow. She’s not a lifestyle guru selling you “seven habits of quantum coherence” or any of that nonsense. What she gives you instead is an image: a tiny worm under polarised light, alive with colour; a body with no conductor; a whole that isn’t shoved in from above but composed from within. It’s a way of thinking about freedom without separation, and a science that hasn’t forgotten how to wonder.

The deeper question is what sort of world finds her way of seeing so threatening? Maybe a world built on control that likes dead matter because dead matter doesn’t answer back. A world that wants life to be complicated enough to use, but not mysterious enough to humble us. Mae-Wan Ho refused that world. She wanted to know what life is from the inside. She saw the organism as a temporary victory over dissipation, a dancing coherence, a self-making whole that holds together by communicating across every scale of its being. Science, she insisted, was never supposed to be about laying down eternal laws and telling us what we can and can’t think. It was, in her lovely phrase:

“to initiate us fully into the poetry that is the soul of nature, the poetry that is ultimately always beyond what theories or words can say.”30

That might be science, philosophy, or even poetry trying to become biology. More likely, it’s a bit of all three, which is probably the point. The question she leaves us with is one modern life keeps burying beneath its machinery: Where have we mistaken control for coherence? In our bodies, our work, our institutions, our idea of freedom, in the way we treat the earth, and in the private way we talk to ourselves.

The organism isn’t a machine. It’s something different altogether: rhythmic, participatory, self-renewing, open to the world while still becoming itself. And if Ho is right about even some of that, then the job isn’t to optimise our lives like engines, but to listen for the music they’re already trying to make.

I’ll leave the final word with her and the optimistic vision she had for combining the love of people and the love of science to save the world:

I recorded a Ho-inspired mix to accompany this essay if you fancy getting your groove on like a psychedelic worm 🐛

Ho’s The Rainbow and the Worm is well worth a read. My copy, and therefore page references in this essay, are to the 2nd edition (World Scientific, 1998). The book was reissued in a substantially expanded 3rd edition in 2008, where the pagination differs; chapter titles are stable across editions, so I give those alongside page numbers where it helps.

“I have done that,” says my memory. “I cannot have done that,” says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually—memory yields.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886)1

In the TV series The Affair (2014), Noah Solloway puts a question to his therapist: Is it possible to be both a good man and a great man?

You can watch the scene from Season 2, episode 10 below (6 mins), but in it he points to Hemingway, Picasso, Jefferson, and Hamilton—and to Omar Bradley, the Second World War general he’s planning to write his next book about. Figures remembered for what they achieved, but whose personal lives were often marked by infidelity, selfishness, or neglect. The implication is that history seems full of people who accomplished extraordinary things while failing to live up to ordinary moral standards.

Noah’s question gets at something lots of people feel, even if they rarely say it out loud. Can you devote yourself fully to your family, your spouse, or your community and still produce something remarkable? Can you be virtuous and ambitious? Or do the qualities that drive greatness inevitably clash with the qualities that make someone good?

Long before Noah Solloway wondered this, Friedrich Nietzsche spent much of his philosophical career exploring a similar tension. But Nietzsche’s answer is far more nuanced than a simple yes or no. In fact, he would challenge the question itself because he thought most people have never really stopped to ask what they even mean by “good” or “great” in the first place.

The Good Man

At the beginning of The Affair, Noah (played by Dominic West, who’ll always be McNulty in The Wire to me) appears to have it all. He’s a husband, a father, a teacher, and an aspiring novelist. By conventional standards, he’s a good man.

But underneath that picture, there’s a growing sense of unease. He feels boxed in by obligations. He feels restless and unfulfilled. There’s a gap between the life he’s living and the person he thinks he’s becoming. He ends up having an affair with Alison (played by Ruth Wilson), a waitress he meets while on holiday with his family in Montauk.

Most viewers see that affair as the central event of the story, but Nietzsche probably wouldn’t. For him, it’s more like a symptom. He’d want to know what made it possible in the first place: why a man with a loving family risks everything, why someone who seems to have enough keeps reaching for more, and why stability can start to feel like a kind of suffocation.

Nietzsche never takes moral labels at face value. When someone appears virtuous, he asks what’s underneath the virtue. Is this kindness the expression of strength or weakness? Is this humility the result of confidence or insecurity? Is this self-sacrifice freely chosen or just something social pressure has trained into a person?

Most moral systems judge actions. Nietzsche looks at the forces that produce them. Which is why he can feel so provocative. He doesn’t really care whether something looks moral on the surface. He cares whether it comes from strength, vitality, creativity, and self-mastery or from fear, resentment, exhaustion, and conformity.

The uncomfortable possibility he raises is that what we call “goodness” isn’t always life-affirming. Sometimes it is. Often it’s not. And the challenge for us is learning to tell the difference.

The Self as Fiction

In my last essay, I looked at the similarities between Nietzsche’s thought and Madhyamaka Buddhism.2 That piece centred on one of Nietzsche’s most radical claims, from On the Genealogy of Morality:

“The ‘doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything.”

At first glance, that sounds absurd. Of course people act. But Nietzsche is pushing against a much deeper assumption. Most of us imagine ourselves as a stable self sitting behind our thoughts and actions, like an inner commander giving orders to the rest of the personality.

Nietzsche thinks that picture is mostly an illusion. Instead, he sees human beings as collections of competing drives, instincts, desires, habits, fears, and ambitions. The self is less a ruler than a battlefield, with different forces struggling for control. Whatever force wins in a given moment comes out as action. The action shows which part of the self is currently in charge, nothing more.

That changes how we view Noah’s choices. Instead of asking whether he’s basically good or bad, Nietzsche would ask: What forces are pressing to the surface? What desires have become too strong to suppress? What ambitions have been denied expression? What instincts have been buried under years of responsibility?

As he puts it in Beyond Good and Evil:

“To our strongest drive, the tyrant in us, not only our reason bows but also our conscience.”

Seen that way, the affair looks like a revelation. Something hidden has broken through, and the tidy identity Noah has built for himself starts to crack.

Perspectives and Perspectivism

One of the most interesting things about The Affair is its narrative structure.

Each episode shows events from different perspectives, and each version differs, with details and motivations shifting. Memory proves unreliable, and nobody seems to hold the whole truth. Which is very close to Nietzsche’s idea of perspectivism.

Nietzsche never claims truth doesn’t exist. His point is that every truth is seen from somewhere. There’s no God’s-eye view available to human beings. Every interpretation comes shaped by particular interests, experiences, values, and desires.

The Affair effectively dramatises that idea. Each character builds a story about themselves, explaining their actions in ways that protect their self-image. In effect, they become both narrator and defence lawyer, which is exactly what Nietzsche thinks we all do.

We’re always revising ourselves, editing our memories, and building narratives that let us live with what we’ve done. The result is that morality is a lot less tidy than it first appears.

Heroes become villains. Villains become victims. Victims become perpetrators. The lines blur into shades of grey, and that blurring is exactly where Nietzsche wants us to look. Because once moral certainty starts to fall away, deeper questions come into view. In Beyond Good and Evil, he writes:

“There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.”

Few TV shows illustrate that insight more vividly than The Affair.

Good and Great

Noah speaks about greatness as though it were a clearly identifiable quality. Nietzsche was less certain. Again in Beyond Good and Evil, he writes:

“What? A great man? I always see only the actor of his own ideal.”

The remark is characteristic. Nietzsche is constantly pulling us away from simplistic hero worship and back toward the physiological and psychological forces operating beneath it.3

Today, we usually link greatness with fame, wealth, status, or influence, but Nietzsche means something different. For him, greatness is about an exceptional power to create. The great person expands what’s possible, shapes culture, and brings new values into the world. They change both themselves and the people around them.

That’s part of why Nietzsche admired people like Goethe and Napoleon. They weren’t morally perfect, but they showed an unusual mix of creative force, discipline, intellectual depth, and energy. Greatness, in this sense, isn’t just success but the expression of a powerful and integrated life.

But that brings up a difficult point.

Many of the forces that produce greatness are morally messy. Forces like ambition, pride, rivalry, the hunger to stand out, and the refusal to settle for average. Traditional morality often treats these impulses with suspicion, while Nietzsche sees them as potential sources of human flourishing.

Noah assumes greatness and flourishing belong together. But as you might have noticed in the clip we started with, his therapist throws in some doubt. Hemingway may have produced great work, but, she says, “he blew his brains out at 60.”4 Is that an example of a life well lived?

Nietzsche wouldn’t automatically answer yes. Which is why Noah’s examples are so revealing—and why the pattern keeps repeating long after Hemingway and Picasso. We see it in countless artists, leaders, entrepreneurs, innovators, and athletes.

Take Tiger Woods, maybe the cleanest modern case. From the outside, the discipline that built the most dominant career in golf and the compulsions that wrecked his marriage looked like separate compartments. Nietzsche would doubt the wall between them was ever real. The same ferocious drive ran through both, and his collapse, like Noah’s affair, showed which drives had been running the show all along.

Then there’s Paul Gascoigne, who cuts the other way. Prodigious raw talent that never became self-mastery. By Nietzsche’s measure of greatness as a powerful and integrated life, he may be something sadder than a great man with flaws: enormous power that never found integration. Which tells you more about what greatness actually requires than any trophy cabinet does.

History keeps giving us people whose creative achievements sit alongside personal failings.

Whether the failings should be excused is a separate matter. What Nietzsche doubts is that greatness and moral goodness are always aligned. And that doubt lies at the centre of his critique of modern morality.

Dionysus and the Crucified

In his later work, Nietzsche condensed much of his thinking into a single contrast: Dionysus versus the Crucified.5

It’s tempting to read it as a simple opposition between pagan Greece and Christianity. But Nietzsche means something deeper. For him, Dionysus and the Crucified stand for two very different ways of relating to existence itself. The Crucified represents a worldview that looks for redemption from life, where suffering is bearable because it leads somewhere else (i.e., heaven). The highest virtues become obedience, humility, sacrifice, and self-denial, and life is measured against an ideal that transcends life in the here and now.

Dionysus stands for the opposite impulse. Not just pleasure or hedonism, or simply doing whatever the hell you want, but the ability to affirm existence in all its messiness. Joy and suffering. Creation and destruction. Success and failure. Love and loss. The Dionysian person doesn’t want to escape life; they say yes to it, even when it hurts and disappoints or refuses to fit moral expectations.

That helps clarify Noah’s situation.

Across the series, he seems torn between two competing visions of himself. One wants stability, duty, and moral respectability. The other wants passion, risk, creation, and transformation.

It would be a mistake to reduce that tension to family values versus selfish desire. A devoted husband can be Dionysian if his commitment comes from strength, abundance, and affirmation. An artist can be deeply Christian in Nietzsche’s sense if his creativity is driven by resentment, guilt, or self-hatred. What matters is the spirit a person acts from.

Does this way of life affirm existence, or does it seek shelter from it? That’s what Nietzsche is always asking. His criterion was neither duty nor desire but life itself. As he writes in Twilight of the Idols:

“To have to fight against the instincts—this is the formula for décadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness equals instinct.”

He isn’t telling us to obey every impulse. Rather, his target is a moral worldview that treats instinct itself as suspect and demands that life be lived in permanent opposition to its own deepest energies.

The issue, then, is whether Noah’s instincts are expressions of a fuller life or symptoms of decline. And that’s why his question is so hard.

Necessary Destruction

Which brings us to nihilism.

These days, nihilism usually means believing nothing matters. Nietzsche’s version is more sophisticated than that. For him, nihilism is a historical condition that appears when inherited values lose their power. The old certainties collapse, and the beliefs that once gave life meaning no longer convince.

One of Nietzsche’s most famous lines, “God is dead,” captures this moment. It was a diagnosis as opposed to a victory cry. He’d seen that the old foundations of religion had broken down, which left a new question hanging in the air: What now?

A lot of people think nihilism is simply the end. Nietzsche disagrees, believing it can be a stepping stone toward something better. But in his notebooks, he distinguishes between two kinds of nihilism.6

• Passive nihilism responds to the collapse of meaning with resignation. Here, nothing matters, so nothing is worth the effort. Comfort becomes the highest value, and security replaces aspiration. This is the psychology of what Nietzsche calls the Last Man: someone who no longer believes in anything higher than safety and ease.7

• Active nihilism is different. It recognises that inherited values have become hollow and starts tearing them down. There’s energy in it. Courage. Aggression. A willingness to question sacred assumptions. But it still remains negative because it defines itself by what it opposes. It destroys, but it doesn’t yet create.

This helps explain why Nietzsche can speak positively about nihilism.

Sometimes destruction is necessary. Old structures have to collapse before new possibilities can appear. The danger is getting stuck there. So active nihilism is a stage to pass through, and the goal is what comes after it. And that’s where Dionysus comes in, because Dionysus is what becomes possible once nihilism has done its work: the creation of values where before there was only their destruction.

Why Hegel Matters

At this point, it’s worth saying that Nietzsche parts ways with Hegel.

For Hegel, history advances through contradiction, which I’ve written about before from a Peatian perspective.8 An opposition arises to the way things currently are, the contradiction gets worked through, and a higher synthesis emerges. That new synthesis creates fresh contradictions, and the cycle continues.9

Nietzsche is suspicious of that model. Again and again, he dissolves apparent oppositions that seem solid (e.g., truth and falsehood, selfishness and selflessness, and reason and instinct) and shows how intertwined they really are.

But there’s one distinction he refuses to dissolve: the distinction between ascending life and descending life.

For Nietzsche, the difference between them is a matter of direction. Here, he’s deeply indebted to Heraclitus: life is movement, everything is a process, and nothing stays fixed. Noah keeps asking whether he’s a good man or a great man. Nietzsche would likely reply that he’s neither. He’s becoming.

The question that matters is which direction a thing is moving in. There’s no synthesis between ascent and decline. No higher reconciliation between saying yes to life and saying no to life. For Nietzsche, those are genuinely opposed tendencies.

Yet he was equally suspicious of philosophies that sought to eliminate tension altogether. As he writes in Twilight of the Idols, sounding very Blakean:10

“One is fruitful only at the price of being rich in opposites.”

The strongest lives aren’t free of conflict. They contain competing drives, ambitions, loyalties, and desires that generate creative tension. The goal is the capacity to transform opposition into vitality rather than resentment.

This is why Noah’s predicament is so difficult. He contains contradictions (everyone does). The question is whether he can live them in a way that leads toward growth rather than decline.

Noah’s New Religion

What stands out most about Noah’s conversation with his therapist is that he’s not really talking about Omar Bradley at all. He’s trying to answer a question that’s already taken hold of him: What if I have it in me to be great?

The names he drops aren’t really examples. They’re justifications. Noah is searching for a story that can make sense of the sacrifices he’s contemplating. At first, it looks like he’s rebelling against conventional morality. He leaves his marriage, abandons the identity of the dependable husband and father, and rejects the script that had structured his life.

From a Nietzschean angle, that can look like a kind of active nihilism. He tears down a value system that no longer feels alive to him. He refuses to keep living inside a role that feels suffocating.

But did Noah actually abandon meaning? Or did he just transfer it somewhere else?

The more closely we look, the more the latter seems true. The marriage gave him one story: sacrifice now and meaning will come later. The affair gives him another: the pain was worth it because this love is real.

Noah seems to have rejected one faith only to take up another. The difference is that his new faith centres on passion, authenticity, and true love rather than marriage, family, and duty. Psychologically, however, the structure is remarkably similar. He still needs a story that explains why the destruction was necessary, and he still needs to believe that everything happened for a reason.

The Collapse

That becomes painfully clear in one of the more revealing scenes in the season 2 finale (2 mins):

After finding out that Alison has betrayed him by sleeping with the very man she left when she began her affair with Noah—and that the child he believed was his isn’t—Noah says the following:

“I had this stupid idea that you and I could make a new start together and all the pain we caused everybody else... it was for a reason.”

Then:

“I wanted to be brave and make a choice and be happy.”

And finally:

“I never thought it would be all pointless.”

Now we’re beyond the language of heartbreak and into existential collapse. What breaks him isn’t that Alison has left him, or even that she betrayed him. It’s the thought that it was pointless.

The relationship might have survived conflict. It might even have survived guilt or social disapproval. But what it can’t survive is meaninglessness. Because if Alison cheats, maybe they were never destined to be together. Maybe they weren’t soulmates or special after all. Maybe all that suffering was never redeemed. So the affair stops being the main issue.

The story which gave the affair meaning is falling apart, and what follows is one of the most Nietzschean moments in the whole series. Noah says:

“Maybe this was the mistake.”

Then:

“Maybe nothing’s a mistake.”

Then:

“Maybe it’s all just fucking meaningless.”

That progression is crucial. He goes from questioning one choice to questioning the meaning of choice itself. One belief loses credibility, the justification drops away, and the second faith crumbles like the first. He ends up staring straight into the abyss Nietzsche thought modern life would eventually face.

The Real Test

At this point you might expect Nietzsche to approve of Noah’s original decision. After all, Noah rejected conformity. He chased passion and risked everything for a life that seemed more fully his own.

But Nietzsche’s challenge cuts in a different direction. Following your desire is easy to admire. The harder thing is affirming the life that desire produced once the justification disappears.

That’s where Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence comes in.11

The ultimate test isn’t whether you’d make the same choice again if it all worked out. Almost anyone would. But would you make the same choice again even if it failed? Even if the relationship ended, the dream collapsed, and the meaning vanished? If the story turned out differently than you hoped, could you still say yes to it? Could you affirm the experience without appealing to destiny, soulmates, providence, or a happy ending?

Nietzsche had a name for the disposition that passes this test: amor fati, the love of fate, wanting nothing about your life to be different, not even the parts that broke you.12

Noah can’t. At least not yet.

Dionysus and the Abyss

That’s what makes The Affair more than a story about infidelity. It becomes a tragedy in the Ancient Greek sense Nietzsche loved.

Bad behaviour has nothing to do with it. Tragedy is older than morality. Its deepest conflicts pit one good against another. Family, love, responsibility, creation, growth, and vitality all matter. There’s no simple villain forcing Noah into the wrong choice. The tragedy comes from the clash of values, where every choice hurts something else. A lot of the best TV and film works this way: partial self-awareness, repetition, inevitability, and the sense that you can never fully reconcile competing parts of life.

Noah isn’t just a selfish monster. Nor is he a misunderstood hero. He’s both creator and destroyer. The same drives that push him forward also help cause other people’s pain. The qualities we admire in one context can become dangerous in another.

That ambiguity is deeply Nietzschean. But Nietzsche might still feel uneasy watching The Affair because the show often seems unable to escape the moral framework it reveals. Desire keeps ending up in the dock, vitality keeps being put on trial, and transgression keeps leading to guilt.

That’s where Nietzsche would probably sense the influence of Christianity still at work, not so much theologically but psychologically: the idea that desire has to justify itself, that self-assertion needs atonement, and that vitality must eventually answer to a moral court.

Nietzsche wouldn’t just ask whether Noah was right or wrong. He’d ask: What did Noah become?

Did his choices lead toward a richer, stronger, more integrated life? Or toward fragmentation, resentment, and decline? Did destruction clear the ground for creation? Or was it just destruction?

Beyond Good and Great

By now Noah’s original question has changed. What began as a question about goodness and greatness has become a question about meaning itself.

Nietzsche would probably reject the terms as Noah uses them: by now we’ve seen what he does to both. Underneath, it’s a question about the relationship between morality and life. Can you stay loyal to ordinary obligations while still reaching for extraordinary possibilities? Can you create without destroying? Can you become more without betraying what you already love?

Nietzsche gives no easy answer. But he does leave us with a harder question: Can you affirm your life without needing it to be redeemed by the story you tell about it?

That’s what ultimately separates Dionysus from the Crucified. The Crucified needs suffering to be justified by where it leads. Dionysus asks something tougher. Can you affirm life without demanding redemption? Can you say yes to love, mistakes, joy, suffering, creation, and destruction without insisting that the universe explain itself to you?

Nietzsche’s ideal was never comfort or inner peace. In Twilight of the Idols he writes in true Heraclitean style:

“One has renounced the great life when one renounces war.”

He saw the struggle between ambition and responsibility, love and freedom, belonging and becoming not as something to be eliminated but as part of what makes a life substantial. In Beyond Good and Evil, he writes:

“Whatever is done from love always occurs beyond good and evil.”

This isn’t a defence of every action committed in the name of love. Rather, it’s a reminder that some of life’s most significant experiences resist neat moral classification.

The Crucified asks: What was it all for?
Dionysus asks: Could you say yes to it anyway?

Maybe that’s the real question behind The Affair. Not whether Noah was good or great, or even whether he made the right choice. But whether any of us can bear the possibility that our most important decisions may never be justified by how the story ends.

Most of us aren’t only looking for happiness. We’re searching for a story that makes our suffering worthwhile. Nietzsche’s challenge is that life may not give us one. Or rather, it may give us something harder: the chance to create meaning without pretending it was guaranteed in advance.

Perhaps greatness lies less in arriving at a final identity—good man, great man, husband, artist—than in the capacity to keep becoming. Maturity begins where the need for cosmic justification ends.

The show itself seems to reach the same conclusion. The final scene of the final season finds Noah, now an old man, dancing alone on a clifftop in Montauk while Fiona Apple’s cover of The Waterboys’ “The Whole of the Moon” plays over him. Underneath the clip on YouTube, one commenter said it better than I’ve managed in four thousand words:

The Affair ran for five seasons on Showtime from 2014 to 2019 and first aired in the UK on Sky Atlantic. At the time of writing, all five seasons are streaming on Paramount+ and free (with ads) on ITVX.

My philosophical novel, The Syntropist, is available worldwide on Amazon. All royalties go to Hospice at Home.

“And just exactly as the people separate the lightning from its flash, and interpret the latter as a thing done, as the working of a subject which is called lightning, so also does the popular morality separate strength from the expression of strength…But there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is a mere fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything.”

—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals (1887)

I’ve had a couple of conversations lately with people about Nietzsche and Buddhism and whether they’re basically saying the same thing when it comes to whether we have a self or not. Then, in a nice bit of synchronicity, I saw this tweet making much the same point:

It’s an accurate comparison, I think, that tends to miss the interesting part.1 Yes, both reject the idea that there’s some fixed, permanent self behind everything you do. But they get there in very different ways, and what they do with the insight afterwards couldn’t be more different. On that point, the two are dead opposed, which is the most important thing when it comes to how you might live.

The Easy Agreement

Nietzsche’s attack on the self starts with language. When we say things like “I think,” “I act,” or “I choose,” the grammar quietly convinces us that there must be some solid “I” behind the verb, like a captain steering the ship of your life. Nietzsche thinks that’s a trick, reinforced by grammar, metaphysics, and morality all at once.2 The action comes first. The “doer” gets added afterwards so we’ve got someone to praise and someone to blame. Take the grammar away, and you don’t find a tiny commander inside choosing what to do and issuing orders. You find a mess of different drives, urges, instincts, and appetites, mostly unconscious, all jostling for position. And “you” is just the name we give to whichever arrangement happens to be on top at the time.

This means your personality isn’t a thing you possess but more like a temporary truce between competing forces. Nietzsche isn’t being edgy or nihilistic for the sake of it here. He’s adamant these fictions are a bad thing, making us weaker, more guilty, and less able to say yes to life.

Madhyamaka is a major school of Buddhist philosophy, usually translated as the “Middle Way” school.3 It goes back to Nāgārjuna (c. 150–250 CE), an Indian Buddhist philosopher and monk, widely revered as the “second Buddha” and best known for the idea that things are empty of any fixed, independent essence. Madhyamaka says that everything we take to be solid and self-contained turns out to depend on other things. So nothing has some inner permanent core of its own.

“Empty” here doesn’t mean nothing exists at all, but that things don’t exist in the way we usually assume: as independent, self-standing entities with their own permanent nature. A table exists, for example, but not as some ultimate, unchanging “table essence.” It exists dependently, on wood, form, name, use, context, and so on.

Madhyamaka is trying to avoid two extremes: eternalism, where things have a fixed essence, and nihilism, where nothing exists at all. So the “middle way” says things are real in a conventional sense, but not ultimately self-existing. The Madhyamaka bumper sticker might say something like, Reality is made of dependent, empty, interrelated phenomena, not fixed essences.

So the two traditions genuinely agree at that level. Both throw out the idea of a fixed essence. Both look at the apparent solidity of the self and call it a fabrication. Nietzsche says it’s built out of grammar and need; the Buddhists say it’s built out of habit and misunderstanding. Both stop treating the self as a thing and start treating it more like an activity.

Now if the comparison stopped there, as in the tweet above, it would be technically correct, but the real question still hasn’t been asked.

The Fork Isn’t Where People Think

The temptation is to say the difference is in where they end up. The Buddhist path, the story goes, drifts toward calm, toward the quieting of all craving and attachment, toward a kind of stillness, while Nietzsche heads toward intensity, toward saying yes to life and creating something. Winding down versus winding up. The same insight with opposite endpoints.

It’s a nice tale of contraries, but it’s not really fair to Madhyamaka. Saying this kind of Buddhism “aims at switching off” just gives you the cliched cartoon monk who wants to blow out the candle of existence and feel nothing forever, but Madhyamaka is basically built to refuse that cartoon.

One of Nāgārjuna’s central claims is that the world of suffering and the state of liberation aren’t two separate realities. There’s nowhere else to go.4 Enlightenment isn’t a quieter room you escape into but this very world, seen without the illusion of solidity laid over it. To read the tradition as a longing to switch off is to accuse it of exactly what Nietzsche accused Buddhism of being: a tired wish for nothingness and turning against life.

The honest contrast is harder to pin down, but I think it’s more useful.

Madhyamaka worries that the moment you turn emptiness into a project of self-creation, you’ve missed the point. The insight isn’t supposed to become a new identity, worldview, or a new foundation to build on. You’re not supposed to discover emptiness and then make it the basis of some grand personal plan. The calm it speaks of isn’t just a nice feeling that turns up after realisation but a disciplined refusal to turn realisation into another object of attachment.

You’re supposed to see there’s no fixed self, and that’s supposed to loosen your grip on things. The moment you take that insight and start putting it to work or making it serve a goal, you’ve grabbed hold again. You’ve turned the medicine back into the disease. Even clinging to not clinging is still clinging. And clinging to becoming something, to the will, to the great project of affirming life, that’s the most cunning grip of all.

Which is exactly what Nietzsche does.

Nietzsche Does the Forbidden Thing

It’s worth being careful here. A Madhyamika doesn’t become passive. The tradition’s central practical text, Śāntideva’s Way of the Bodhisattva, is a training manual of the most demanding kind: an ascending discipline of patience, effort, and meditative cultivation, sustained in principle across lifetimes. Nobody who’s read it could call the path slack. So the disagreement can’t be about effort, or even about self-cultivation as such.5

The disagreement is about which way all that effort points. The bodhisattva’s discipline, for all its intensity, is aimed at release: at transforming self-cherishing into other-cherishing, uprooting craving, and dissolving the very self-clinging that makes us suffer. It’s hard work, but all of it’s spent in the service of letting go. The direction is subtractive. Which is exactly the move Nietzsche refuses.

Nietzsche takes the very thing Madhyamaka tells you to see and then leave alone (i.e., the discovery that there’s no fixed self underneath you), and he puts it to work.

Oh, there’s no fixed self, just a pecking order of drives? Fine, he says. Then organise the pecking order.

Personality is just a truce between forces, is it? Fine. Then get cracking and make it a better, stronger one, a shape you impose on the chaos instead of just suffering it.

He called this “giving style to your character.”6 For him, the absence of a fixed self is the cleared ground for an artistic process. You survey your competing drives, strengths, and weaknesses, then shape them into a coherent (but never permanent) whole, like an artist imposing form on chaos. This isn’t about forging some rigid new ego or “building harder” in a crude sense; Nietzsche has nothing but contempt for fixed identities and celebrates flux and self-overcoming. The “self” you make stays a temporary, dynamic achievement, held together by effort and will, in full knowledge that it too will one day be overcome. And yet, for Nietzsche, that very lack of foundation is precisely what makes genuine creation possible in the first place.

From the Buddhist side, that’s a disaster. Or at least from one influential Buddhist angle on it. It’s the exact mistake the whole discipline is trying to prevent. You were shown there’s no solid ground, and instead of letting go, you started pouring foundations. FFS! You took the deepest available insight into how the self is constructed and used it to construct harder.

Nietzsche wouldn’t have blinked at the accusation. Even though he much preferred Buddhism to Christianity, for all his admiration, he baulked at what he saw as the resignation in it, calling it a religion of decadence, a passive nihilism for the weary.7 There was too much energy in him, too much appetite, to settle for a wisdom whose highest point was wanting nothing.

Now we get to the real disagreement: is doing nothing with the insight actually neutral?

The Syntropic Claim

Madhyamaka presents its calm as if it’s just what’s left when you stop pushing the insight around. But there’s no such thing as a lack of direction. At least, that’s where I part company with Madhyamaka.

Choosing not to organise something is still a choice. Refusing to push the insight toward making a form means refusing to make self-creation a goal, and drifting toward no form isn’t neutral (the tradition does reintroduce enormous discipline through the bodhisattva path, but that discipline, as I said, points back toward release, not away from it). It’s the entropic direction things take when nobody’s tending them.

What presents itself as non-goal-directed can still look, from a syntropic perspective, like a directional preference: it’s the goal that water has when it finds its level, or the goal a fire has when it goes out. It’s the state that needs no more effort because there’s nothing left in it to keep going.

I think the diagnosis is correct: there’s no fixed self, no essence or doer behind the deed. Both traditions see that clearly. But once the false solidity is gone, the insight doesn’t come with an instruction manual. You can let it spread you out and call the spreading-out “peace.” We’ve all met the person who reads enough airport books about non-attachment and stops chasing the hard thing they actually wanted. They walk away from the difficult project or the difficult person and file the retreat under serenity. The letting go is genuine, but so is the quiet relief of not having to try anymore.

Or you can use it: take the absence of a fixed self as your licence to make one, over and over, with more organisation and more intensity each time, knowing full well that whatever you make is temporary, and building it anyway because its being temporary is no longer a reason not to.

Nietzsche’s “mistake,” from the Buddhist point of view—his refusal to just rest in what he’d seen and his insistence on doing something with the nothing—is the attitude I’d call syntropic and alive. It’s life refusing to take the easy downhill path even after being shown, with complete rigour, that downhill was always the only natural option. The drives pull themselves into order against the slope. Form gets imposed and held up by effort alone. And that’s what a living thing actually is. Not a solid object lasting through time (on that I agree the Buddhists are right), but a process that takes its own lack of foundation and drives it uphill, toward intensity, instead of letting it slide down toward rest.

That perfect calm is just what happens to a system when it stops doing this. We’ve got a word for the state where every gradient has flattened, every difference has evened out, and nothing needs maintaining anymore. A Buddhist would reject the comparison entirely, but from a syntropic point of view the resemblance is hard to ignore. In every other corner of the universe, the state where gradients vanish, differences dissolve, and nothing further needs maintaining has a familiar name: death.

Get Busy Living or Get Lazy Dying

You essentially have a choice: emptiness can be put to work, or it can be dissolved into. Only one of those directions is alive. The self gets taken apart either way. The question is what happens next. Do you treat emptiness as something to rest in, or something to build from?

Nietzsche and Madhyamaka give opposite answers. One says the absence of ground is finally a reason to let go. The other says it’s the only place anything worth building has ever begun.

I had this on repeat while writing this one:

My philosophical novel, The Syntropist, is available worldwide on Amazon. All royalties go to Hospice at Home.

Plato is often seen as the top dog in Western philosophy. Indeed, Alfred North Whitehead famously quipped European philosophy “consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” But Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) disagreed. He thought we’d made a huge mistake two and a half thousand years ago, and we were still living with the consequences. He thought Plato was a coward because he couldn’t bear reality as it was.

This essay is about why Nietzsche thought that, and the three thinkers he reached for whenever the Platonic infection started flaring up again: Heraclitus, Thucydides, and Machiavelli.

It’s also about why I think his perspective matters for the broader syntropic thread I keep tugging on. Because Plato’s ancient metaphysics is more than a bit of philosophical background noise. It may even be the original entropy of Western thought. And the cure Nietzsche found in three of his favourites is, at its core, syntropic.

The Original Error

Most people first meet Plato (c. 428–348 BC) through the Allegory of the Cave: prisoners chained facing a wall, watching shadows on it, mistaking the shadows for reality, until one escapes and sees the “real” world outside in sunlight.

Read one way, it sounds like a hopeful little story. The brave escapee. The light of understanding. Education and critical thinking as liberation. Very flattering to anyone holding a book. But the structure of it also does something a bit darker.

What Plato is saying is that there are two worlds. The apparent world we live in is the one of bodies, weather, hunger, and mess. But it’s a copy. A shadow on a cave wall. The real world is somewhere else: eternal Forms, perfect circles, and pure Goodness, the sort of thing you can only get at by thinking very hard while sitting very still.1 The blueberry bush outside my window is a shabby imitation of the True Blueberry Bush, which lives in the realm of ideas and has never had to deal with aphids.

On the face of it, that sounds like a bit of harmless metaphysics. Who cares. But Nietzsche saw the trick that was being played.

Plato’s whole structure exists to put the world we actually live in below the one we don’t. To say that thing you’re walking around in, the one with the body and the moods and the hunger and the aging, isn’t the real one. The real one is somewhere else, and it’s cleaner, purified, rational, and above all this.

Life as it is gets demoted, and something better is dangled in front of you in exchange for the betrayal. This, for Nietzsche, was the original mistake of Western thought: the decision to turn away from the messy, Dionysian chaos of existence and look towards some higher, tidier, more rational realm.2

It’s worth saying upfront that this is Nietzsche’s Plato, not the whole man. Plato wrote about politics, education, friendship, the soul, and erotic life in ways that don’t reduce to “this world is fake.” What Nietzsche is doing is reading Plato for the structural move at the bottom of the whole edifice. He isn’t entirely fair to Plato, and a careful reader of the dialogues would have plenty to push back with. But the structural move is the thing that got inherited downstream, and that’s what we’re tracking here.

Plato Becomes God

Fast forward a few centuries and Christianity inherited the Platonic perspective.3 Plotinus read Plato. Augustine read Plotinus.4 By the time you reach the Middle Ages the eternal Forms have morphed into God, the realm of pure Goodness is Heaven, the immortal soul has replaced the philosopher’s intellect, and the messy visible world is the fallen world of sin and flesh.

This was Platonism for the masses. But instead of reading the philosophy, most people got the Sunday-school version of it: that this life is a vale of tears. Suffer now, be meek, deny your instincts, and wait for the proper world after death.

Nietzsche saw this as “life-denying” and the ground for passive nihilism, as it turns strength into sin, calls instinct wicked, and convinces a healthy animal that the real prize is the world it can’t see. It was “ressentiment” dressed up as humility. An ethic sold to people too tired to notice what it was costing them.

For long stretches of Western culture, this became the dominant moral atmosphere.

Plato Becomes the Scientist

Then the Enlightenment came along, and lots of people decided they were sick of God. Fair enough. Off he pops. Except the structure stayed behind.

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) kept it in a new form, with his unknowable “thing-in-itself.”5 He was trying to mark the limits of what minds like ours can actually know, making us humble about the reach of human cognition. But Nietzsche read the limit-marking as the dodge itself. By saying we can’t know things-in-themselves, Kant preserves the assumption that there are things-in-themselves to not know. The True World is still assumed. It’s just shielded from anyone who might check on it.

Then the positivists came along in the nineteenth century and said, “Nah, we know exactly where the True World is, and we’ve got the instruments to find it.” The True World is whatever science discovers. Objective laws. Mathematical order. The view from nowhere. What the data is really telling us, underneath all our messy human perspectives.

Nietzsche called this Platonism without the myths. Same shit, different day. The sensory world is still suspect and in need of correction by something purer. There’s still one objective reality behind appearances. Reason still gets you there. Life is still wrong about itself, and somewhere outside life there’s a court of appeal.

You don’t get heaven anymore. Instead, you get progress, objectivity, and evidence-based truth. The lab coat replaces the priest’s robe. But you’re still being told that the real party is somewhere else, that what you see and feel and want is just a distortion, and that the real picture is waiting for the right people, with the right methods, to find it and tell you what’s what.

Now it’s important to note here that Nietzsche wasn’t totally against science per se but the dogma about science. The version that mistakes itself for the True World and the final court that every other way of seeing must answer to. Plenty of actual modern science has moved a long way from this. For example, quantum mechanics is probabilistic, while complex systems theory, ecology, embodied cognition, and emergence are all concerned with flow and process rather than fixed, timeless order.6 Much of what’s most interesting in contemporary science actually looks more Heraclitean than Platonic. Nietzsche’s target is the metaphysics that gets smuggled in when science forgets it’s an interpretation. The practice of it, the actual looking, he’d have admired.

That’s why Nietzsche could see modern scientism (the dogma, not the practice) as continuous with Christianity. Both are versions of the ascetic ideal.7 Life saying no to itself in the hope that the “no” will be rewarded. One promises God, the other promises Truth, and both ask you to look away from where you actually live.

The Antidote

A disease this deep doesn’t yield to arguments alone. You can’t out-think it, because the act of out-thinking it is part of how it spreads.

What you need is examples. You need to read writers who never caught the infection, or who recovered from it. People you can sit with for long enough that your own thinking quietly recalibrates around how they pay attention.

Nietzsche had three favourites who each gave him a way of thinking that started in the world and stayed there.

Heraclitus and the world as flow

Heraclitus of Ephesus (c. 535–475 BC) is the philosopher of becoming I’ve written about before.8 His basic move is that everything flows. Reality is tension, struggle, and opposites locked together. Fire turning into water, water into earth, and earth back into fire. War and strife are the father of all things. The bow and the lyre working by the same principle.

What Nietzsche liked about him is that he doesn’t flinch from change.

The Platonic tradition treats change as a problem. Something to be explained away, anchored in something more stable, or redeemed by reference to the eternal. Heraclitus treats change as the thing itself. There’s no hidden stability behind the flux. The flux is what there is.

Once you stop treating becoming as a defect, you stop needing a True world to prop it up. The world is just doing what it does, and your job is to look at it properly.

There’s also a tragic clarity in Heraclitus that Nietzsche loved. The world makes sense, but not the comforting or moral sort of sense. His style matches his thought: aphoristic, energetic, paradoxical, and full of short, cryptic fragments. He hands the reader a challenge, not a system. That makes him feel closer to life than abstraction does, because life doesn’t sit still long enough to be captured in a system.

When Nietzsche later writes about eternal recurrence, amor fati, and will to power as the inner principle of becoming, Heraclitus is already there, two and a half thousand years earlier, pointing at the same thing without the German.9

Thucydides and the world as fact

Thucydides (c. 460–400 BC) is where Nietzsche really comes alive. The praise he gives him in Twilight of the Idols (1889) is unusually warm for a man who tended to greet most of his intellectual ancestors with a brick through the window.10 He wrote, “My recreation, my predilection, my cure, after all Platonism, has always been Thucydides.”

Thucydides made Nietzsche feel better because he was telling the truth about a war. Twenty-seven years of it: Athens vs. Sparta, the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC). And he told it as if no gods existed, no providence was guiding events, no moral law was being vindicated, and no philosopher’s neat little scheme was hovering above the whole thing, making it all meaningful.

People did things. Other people responded. Power, fear, and self-interest moved. “The strong did what they could, and the weak suffered what they must.”

That line, from the Melian Dialogue, is the centre of it.11 The Athenians rock up to the small island of Melos and tell the Melians to submit. The Melians tried to argue and appeal to justice. The Athenians don’t bother pretending. We’re stronger; you’re weaker. You’ll do what we say or we’ll destroy you. The Melians refuse. So the Athenians destroy them.

Thucydides records all this without trying to make it a pretty story. No god turns up to punish the Athenians. No moral framework applies. He shows you what happened, and the “why” is simply human nature doing what human nature does when there’s nothing to hold it back. He doesn’t need to be reassured that the world is just. He can face what’s there. Nietzsche puts it like this:

“Courage in the face of reality ultimately distinguishes such natures as Thucydides and Plato: Plato is a coward in the face of reality—consequently he flees into the ideal; Thucydides has himself under control—consequently he retains control over things.”

There’s a phrase in Thucydides that captures the whole vibe: “kata to anthrōpinon.” Roughly meaning “according to the human thing“ or “because of how humans are.” Because humans are the way they are, events recur in roughly similar patterns. You don’t need divine causes or eternal Forms. You just need to observe people properly, and you can work out quite a lot.

That’s a kind of positivism, but not the lab-coat sort that ends up sneaking Plato back in through the back door. It’s a positivism that stays in the world. There’s no higher court. There’s just what happened, why it happened, and what that tells you about what will happen.

Thucydides also strips out the myth-making and propaganda. He’s deeply wary of how people invent and believe any old story about the past. So he tries to get past the Athenian version and the Spartan version and reach something closer to what actually happened. And, to Nietzsche’s eye, he treats greatness without resentment. He can describe Pericles and the Athenian leadership as they are, without needing to diminish them. The eye of the artist and the discipline of the historian, working together.

For Nietzsche, this is peak Greek instinct before Socratic decay set in: severe, unsentimental, alive to human types, and refusing the consolations the philosophers would spend the next couple of thousand years chasing.12

Machiavelli and the World as Power

Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) is the third thinker in Nietzsche’s squad.

The Prince is what happens when a clever man stops pretending political life works the way Christian moralists say it does.13 Princes who try to be good in every respect will be beaten by men who aren’t. Fortune favours the bold. It’s better to be feared than loved if you can’t manage both. Founding a state is a violent act, dressed up afterwards in noble language. This is simply observation as opposed to cynicism.

Nietzsche put Machiavelli in the same bracket as Thucydides for exactly that reason.

“Thucydides and perhaps Machiavelli’s The Prince are most closely related to me, owing to the absolute determination which they show of refusing to deceive themselves and of seeing reason in reality—not in ‘rationality’, and still less in ‘morality’.”

“Rationality,” in the Platonic tradition, is something you apply to the world from outside it, as if the world ought to conform to your rules. “Reason in reality” is what you find by paying attention to what’s actually going on. The world has its own intelligibility. It runs on causes. And those causes are mostly things like power, fear, ambition, and necessity. You understand the world by watching what it does, not by importing better principles into it.

Machiavelli’s prince doesn’t try to be good. He tries to be effective. And the effectiveness Machiavelli admires is the kind that builds, founds, and holds things together. There’s nothing nihilistic about this perspective. Just very unsentimental.

What Links Them

Each of these three gave Nietzsche something the Platonic tradition couldn’t.

• Heraclitus gave him becoming. The world as flow.

• Thucydides gave him historical realism. The world as fact.

• Machiavelli gave him political realism. The world as power.

None of them needed a True World to make sense of this one, or a moral framework imported from elsewhere to know what was worth saying. They all started in the world and they all stayed in it.

That’s what Nietzsche meant by “life-affirmation.” Saying yes to this place, this life, this body, and these conditions, without insisting that something else has to stand behind them to make them respectable. A resounding “Yes!” to becoming, to power, and to the human condition.

You can hear in Nietzsche’s praise of these three what he thinks philosophy is actually for: cultivating the kind of attention that can stay with this world. The business of building nicer worlds in the head is the disease.

The Syntropic Alternative

Once you’ve clocked the structure of the two-world Platonic move, you can see what Nietzsche’s own philosophy is up to. It isn’t just another metaphysics with different content in the same old shape but an attack on the shape itself.

Perspectivism is his direct answer to Platonism. There’s no True World standing above the interpretations. There are only the interpretations themselves, each one somebody knowing, from somewhere, with a body and a history and a set of interests and desires. The dream of the view from nowhere, whether it’s God’s view, science’s, or pure reason’s, is exactly the dream that has to go. There’s no nowhere. There are only the somewheres, and that’s where life happens.14

Will to power replaces the static Forms. The world isn’t an order of eternal essences imperfectly reflected in matter but a field of forces growing, struggling, organising, and intensifying. Life isn’t rational order but creative struggle. Mastery is something you build, not something you discover sitting in the realm of ideas waiting to be approximated.

This is where it all links up with the syntropic thread. As ever, I’m using syntropy here as a metaphor more than a tightly defined scientific concept. It points at something I see across living systems, healthy thinking, and good lives: the pull against entropy toward integration and working with this world rather than appealing to another one. I’ve tried to pin it down more carefully in earlier pieces.15 For now, treat it as Nietzsche’s life-affirmation given a name that travels beyond him.

Plato’s move is the original entropy of Western thought. It’s the draining of vitality out of the living world into a static beyond. The exchange of life for an ideal. A court of appeal set up outside reality so the world could be perpetually judged and found wanting.

Syntropy pulls the other way. It’s the tendency of living systems to organise, intensify, complexify, and move in this world under these conditions. It works with what’s there and doesn’t ask the world to be elsewhere before it gets going.

Heraclitus, Thucydides, and Machiavelli are syntropic thinkers in that sense. They don’t drain the world to fill a container outside it. They look at the world hard enough to see how it actually moves, and they trust that what they find there is worth knowing. The currents, the conflicts, and the human things are the material life works with.

The philosophers Nietzsche admires aren’t the ones who’ve worked out where the True World is, but the ones who have the nerve to think and live without one.

The Cure as Company

That’s the cure, in the end. You spend time with people who never caught the disease. After a while, you notice you’ve stopped reaching for the second world because the first one is enough. And it was always enough. The whole long detour through Forms, heavens, laws of nature, and evidence-based True Pictures was the symptom you needed to recover from, rather than the destination you were meant to reach.

I think this is the deeper reason many of us go back to the old books. We go for the company. For nerves. For models of how to keep yourself together while looking at hard things, and not making up nicer versions of them in your head.

Nietzsche’s verdict on these three thinkers was that they embodied life-affirmation through unflinching amor fati toward reality’s brutality and beauty. They could love what was, because what was was the only thing there.

That’s what philosophy is for. Practically cultivating nerves steady enough to stay with this world. And, if you stay with it long enough, finding that it has more to give than the True World ever promised.

Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols (1889) is a fierce attack on Socrates, Plato, Christianity, German nationalism, Wagner, and “free will,” all of which he reads as symptoms of decadence: life‑denying, life‑turning‑away‑from‑itself. It’s a defence of the body, the senses, and the tragic acceptance of life as it is, not as it should be according to moral or religious ideals. In it, he was trying to clear the ground for a philosophy that stays firmly in this world and says “Yes” to it.

“Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this conception of it, to which today we particularly pay homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology.”

—Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology1

A few months ago, I had a go at producing music. I’d been bedroom DJing for a while, and making a tune of my own seemed like the obvious next step. Call me a quitter, but I lasted about three hours.

What put me off almost straight away was the way the software made me see music. Open up a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) like Ableton or Logic and a tune you love turns into a grid of data. BPM, key, waveform, MIDI notes, automation curves. You can zoom in on a single snare hit until it takes up the whole screen. You can chop it, isolate it, rearrange it, stretch it over four bars. You can see the bones of the thing.

And once you’ve seen the bones, something dies a death. At least it did for me. The track stops being a track. It becomes a set of inputs arranged in a particular order. The next time I put it on in the kitchen, part of me was still seeing the grid.

It might just be cope, but I think Martin Heidegger’s idea of “gathering” helps explain why it bothered me so much. And, as I’ll come on to, why it sits right at the heart of the entropy/syntropy drum I keep banging.

What Gathering Means

In Martin Heidegger’s (1889-1976) later work, like his essays on technology, his readings of the pre-Socratics, and his obsession with the poet Friedrich Hölderlin,2 “gathering” keeps cropping up.

The basic idea is simple enough: to gather is to bring things together into a meaningful whole, where they can show up properly. It’s the opposite of scattering, breaking apart, and reducing something to bits so you can see what it’s made of.

Heidegger gets at this through the Greek word logos, though he reads it in a pretty unorthodox way.3 Most people hear “logos” and think logic, reason, argument. He hears something more Heraclitean, closer to “a laying-together,” or a “bringing-into-relation.” So rather than a pile of objects sitting there while you wander around them, a world, in this sense, is a gathered field of meaning. Things show up together, already entangled, and what each thing is shifts with what’s around them.

That might sound a bit abstract, but it’s really not.

A Table

Take something really ordinary. Heidegger used examples like a jug and a bridge, but we’ll go with a dinner table.

Look at it one way and the table is wood. A flat surface at a certain height, built to hold a certain weight. It cost a certain amount of money. It does the job of holding plates while you eat. Swap it for a different table and not much would change.

Look at it another way and it’s the thing your grandma used to lean her hands on while she watched you eat the sandwich she’d made you. It’s where your kids did their homework. It’s where every Christmas dinner you can remember happened. It’s got that dark patch in the grain where someone always rests their elbow, and maybe there’s still a stain from a glass that didn’t have a coaster under it. The whole rhythm of the house passes across it every day.

Both descriptions are true. But only the second one tells you what the table is, properly. The first tells you it’s furniture while the second tells you it’s a thing that gathers a world.

This can sound sentimental, but Heidegger’s point is that the second description gets at something the first one misses. The table really does hold all of that. It’s not that you’re slapping meaning onto a lump of wood. You’re letting the table show up as what it already is: a place where people, habits, history, rituals, roles and shared life hold together long enough to be seen.

Enframing

Heidegger spends so much time on this because he thinks our age has a particular way of making that sort of seeing harder. He calls it “Gestell,” which is usually translated as “enframing.”4

Enframing is the kind of attention modern technology trains us into. Everything starts showing up as a “standing reserve”—a stockpile of resources waiting to be optimised, extracted, and put to use. The forest becomes timber. The river becomes hydroelectric potential. The athlete becomes a set of metrics. The employee becomes human capital.

It’s a way the world reveals itself once technology becomes the main lens. And it’s not exactly false. There really is timber in the forest. The problem is that it becomes “total.” Once enframing takes over, nothing gets to show up any other way. The forest can’t just be a forest anymore.

Gathering is the counter-movement, with the two modes pulling in opposite directions:

• Enframing isolates. Each thing gets pulled out of the relations that gave it sense, and inspected on its own terms.

• Enframing reduces. What’s left is whatever can be measured, optimised, and deployed.

• Enframing flattens. Everything gets treated as the same sort of thing: standing reserve, ready for use.

Whereas:

• Gathering connects. A thing is allowed to stand in the relations that make it what it is.

• Gathering holds. Those relations stay together long enough to become legible as a whole.

• Gathering reveals. What shows up is a presence, something that means, not just something useful.

You can probably feel the difference without me belabouring it. It’s the difference between cooking a meal and assembling macros. Between watching a football match and analysing the performance.

What Gets Lost

Heidegger’s worry is sometimes read as a bit of mood music: the grumpy German philosopher in his Black Forest hut, moaning about technology while everyone else gets on with the future. But that misses the sharper point. He thinks we’re losing the capacity to gather. Not just losing meaning, in the vague modern sense people like to talk about. More basically, losing the ability for things to hold together as meaningful in the first place.

So you can have all the right ingredients (family, work, place, friends, beauty, time), and still find they won’t add up to much. Nothing is missing and everything is in place, but it doesn’t come together. That, to me, is what people mean when they say modern life feels fragmented. Or entropic.

Language as Gathering

The other place this idea takes Heidegger—and fair warning, this is where a lot of people lose patience with him—is language.

He starts to treat language itself as a form of gathering. A place where a world gets called into being. When you name a thing, you call it forward into the company of other named things, where it can show up as what it is.

This is why he gets so interested in Hölderlin. Heidegger thought poetry, at its best, doesn’t describe a world already sitting there waiting to be described. It gathers a world into presence.

In the first stanza of Hölderlin’s Hälfte des Lebens (Half of Life, 1804), the lake, the swans, the pears, the kisses, the water are all held together in one suspended moment of summer.5 The second stanza is what happens when that gathering fails: the flowers and sunshine remembered as absences, the walls standing speechless, the weathervanes creaking in the wind:

With its yellow pears
And wild roses everywhere
The shore hangs into the lake,
O gracious swans,
And drunk with kisses
You dip your heads
Into the holy and sober water.

Ah, where will I find
Flowers, come winter,
And where the sunshine
And shade of the earth?
Walls stand cold
And speechless, in the wind
The weathervanes creak.

You don’t have to swallow the whole thing to feel the pull of it. Anyone who’s tried to write a eulogy for someone they love knows the difference between describing them and gathering them. One is a list while the other is something else entirely.

The Producing Thing Again

Which brings me back to the DAW.

I think what put me off producing wasn’t that it showed me how music is made, but the way the software framed music as nothing but its mechanics. The track became its parts. The vibe, the lift in the chorus, the way a synth line feels on a sunny day, none of that was in the grid. The grid could show me everything except the bit that made it worth listening to.

DJing, oddly enough, is fine. You can mix two tunes together for hours and never lose the sense that each one is a whole. You’re putting tracks into conversation. You’re gathering. Whereas producing, at least the way I came at it, felt like the opposite, with the song already split apart and laid out on the mortuary slab.

I’m not saying nobody should produce music. People do extraordinary things in DAWs, and if they didn’t I’d have nothing to play anyway! I’m just saying I kept walking away from the screen unable to listen properly for a few hours after. The mode of attention the software trained didn’t switch off when I put the computer to sleep.

Once you see that, it’s hard to unsee it, and you start noticing it everywhere. Your phone trains a kind of attention. Your inbox trains a kind of attention. AI Chatbots train a kind of attention. Each one is, in Heidegger’s sense, a little enframing engine. None of them is a problem on its own. The question is whether anything in your day is still gathering.

Entropy and Syntropy

There’s a way of saying all of this that fits the broader thread I keep tugging on.

Entropy is the drift toward dispersion. Things fall apart. Heat spreads out. Patterns dissolve. Coherence costs energy, and energy doesn’t come for free. Left alone, any complex arrangement tends toward the same featureless soup.

Syntropy is the counter-tendency. The pull, in living systems and meaningful lives, toward integration. Toward parts holding together as a whole that’s more than the sum of them. Toward order that’s alive rather than forced.

Gathering, in Heidegger’s sense, is what syntropy looks like at the level of human meaning. It’s the work, mostly invisible, by which a table becomes a hearth, a song becomes a wedding-day walk down the aisle, or a bunch of people become a life shared. Enframing is a bit like entropy with a slick user interface. It speeds the breakdown along, all in the name of clarity, optimisation, or throughput.

So, if the drift of modern life is toward fragmentation, what we need is less arguing about technology and more recovering the habits and practices that still let things gather.

What That Looks Like

I don’t want to land this in some neat little moral, because Heidegger himself doesn’t, and the people who try usually end up sounding like a wellness brand.

But the practical version is something like this. There are arrangements in your life that gather. The cafe you keep going back to. The Sunday lunch that’s been the same shape for twenty years. The workshop with your tools laid out. The garden you’ve tended long enough that it’s started tending you back.

What makes them gather is simple: they’ve been lived with long enough, and met with enough attention, to become more than the sum of their parts.

The same kitchen, the same walk, the same friend can scatter just as easily: eaten in a rush, walked while thinking about something else, met with half your mind. The form doesn’t decide it. Whether you let the thing stand together does.

I cross the line between gathering and scattering all the time. I’ll catch myself listening to a philosophy podcast on what was meant to be a quiet walk. I’ll have my phone out when my wife is telling me about her day. I’ll spend an evening half-reading a book and half-checking messages and then wonder why nothing’s landed. Each time I’m breaking the moment up a bit more, un-gathering and refusing to let what’s in front of me settle into place.

Heidegger’s point is that this is the deepest thing at stake in our age. It’s probably not going to end in some dramatic collapse with Skynet crushing humans once and for all. Just the slow fading of our ability to notice what was there all along.

In what feels like a former life as an academic, I wrote loads of journal papers. Proper dry stuff, read by about eleven people, three of them peer reviewers poking holes.

But thanks to my Mam, I’ve always loved a good story. I’ve had my nose in books since I was little: The Hardy Boys, Roald Dahl, and C. S. Lewis’s Narnia are still firm favourites. Over the years, that grew into a quiet urge to have a go at writing fiction myself. Not in a romantic, “sitting-in-a-Parisian-café-with-a-leather-notebook” kind of way, just a nagging itch that never really went away.

The messy middle

I had plenty of ideas and half-starts that went nowhere. Then, a couple of years ago, I sat down and wrote a short story about a teenager who finds a living seed inside a factory pump. It was only a few thousand words: a grey city, a weird object, and a character I liked.

I thought that was it. It wasn’t.

The short story slowly morphed into a novella, then grew into a novel that I ended up abandoning more than a few times. The Word doc sat untouched on my computer for months at a time, then I’d get a second wind and dive back in. Eventually, the story got its hooks into me.

The novelist Frank Norris once said, “I don’t like to write, but like having written.” That’s definitely been the case for me. Writing this book has absolutely done my head in at times! Academic writing is nice and tidy; you know the rules and you’ve usually got a few co-authors to lean on. Fiction is far messier. You’re just bumbling around in the dark on your own until you find your way.

Well, all that bumbling eventually led to something I’m proud of: The Syntropist.

Living the Ideas

It’s a philosophical novel for teens and young adults, but hopefully anyone can get something out of it. I wanted to take the thoughts of some of my favourite syntropic thinkers and weave them into a story, where philosophy is something lived rather than explained.

You’ll find ideas inspired by people like Ray Peat, Iain McGilchrist, William Blake, Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ernst Bloch showing up in the choices the characters make and the consequences they face.

Here’s the back cover blurb:

In a grey city run by a machine that has forgotten its own purpose, a seventeen-year-old tinkerer pulls a living seed from the guts of a dead pump.

It will lead her beyond the walls, into a hidden world the Grid tried to erase. It will connect her to people who remember what life tasted like before the suppression. It will show her a gift she shares with the mother who vanished when she was seven.

And it will ask her a question no one in Vithra has been allowed to ask for three hundred years:

What do you want to become?

Where the money goes

I didn’t write this to make a profit. All royalties from the book are going to Hospice at Home, a local charity that does incredible work supporting people at the end of life in their own homes.1 If this book can do some real-world good, that feels like syntropy to me: things becoming more than they started as.

Get it here

The Syntropist is out now on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle formats:

US | UK | Canada

Also available in Germany, France, Japan, and other international stores.

I’ve put the first chapter below so you can see if it’s for you (or your kids). If it is, the book’s waiting. If not, no worries—not every seed lands in the right soil 😁

THE SYNTROPIST

PART I: THE SUFFOCATION

Everyone is the other, and no one is himself.
— Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

1

Elara’s hands were black with grease. She crouched in the dim corner of Factory 17, fingers working a seized bolt in the gear-pump’s guts. The metal resisted her, corroded into place by years of neglect, but she knew this machine. Knew its rhythms, its complaints, the whine it made when the third cog slipped.

She’d been fixing these pumps since she was twelve. Five years of rust and oil, and her hands had learned what her mind couldn’t name: how to listen to a thing that was stuck and help it move again.

The bolt gave. She felt the release in her wrist before she heard the click, and something in her chest loosened with it. A small victory. The only kind the Grid allowed.

Above her, the factory’s bones groaned with the Mechanism’s slow pulse, that low, ubiquitous thrum that ran through every wall and floor in Vithra, through the pipes and the streets and, she sometimes thought, through her own marrow. The air was thick with iron and ash. Each breath left a film on her tongue, metallic and stale, the taste of a city that had forgotten what wind was. She wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist, leaving a dark smear, and turned back to the pump.

Around her, the shift churned on. Bodies moved between the machines, tinkerers like her, grey-clad and silent, hands dancing over gears and levers with the mechanical precision the overseers demanded. No one spoke. Speaking drew attention, attention drew quotas, and quotas drew the gaze of the drones that circled overhead.

One of them hovered nearby now, its turbine whir cutting through the factory’s low roar. A red sensor-eye swept the floor in lazy, predatory arcs. Elara kept her head down. She’d learnt that lesson young. She dug into the pump’s cavity, pushing aside corroded springs. Her fingers brushed against a blockage deep in the intake valve. She worked it loose, anticipating the satisfaction of a clear line, and pulled it free.

It was just a fused gasket. A piece of twisted rubber, melted by friction and time into a useless black knot. She tossed it into the waste chute with a sigh. Just trash.

The shift whistle was minutes away. Her muscles protested, a dull ache radiating from her lower back, but Pump 4 was still stuttering. If she left it, the night crew would report it, and her efficiency rating would drop.

She moved to the final housing. This one was worse than the others, the intake completely choked. She reached in, her fingers scraping against the rough interior casing. “Come on,” she whispered, her voice lost in the din. Her fingers closed around the obstruction. It felt dense and jagged, wedged tight against the valve. She braced her boot against the housing for leverage and pulled. With a wet grinding sound, the blockage gave way.

Elara rocked back on her heels, the object clutched in her hand. She looked down, expecting another piece of slag or a calcified rat. It looked like coal. A rough, black lump of carbon, ugly and scarred, no bigger than her thumb. It was the kind of industrial refuse she swept up every day, dead, burnt, and heavy.

She shifted her grip to toss it into the recycler. Then she froze. The fragment burned feverish against her skin, defying the industrial chill. Elara stared at the black lump. It looked like dead rock, like the fossilised remains of burnt wood. But it was frantically, terrifyingly alive.

It beat against her palm. Thump-thump. A slow, heavy rhythm that matched her own blood. She held it up to the dim light. The rough surface seemed to absorb the shadows rather than reflect them. It was ugly. It was waste. Thump-thump-thump. The heat climbed up her wrist and lodged beneath her ribs. The vibration was organic, an intentional, living rhythm. Like a river trapped in stone.

A shadow fell over her. The drone had returned. It hovered ten feet away, its red eye fixing on her, the aperture dialling in. It sensed the anomaly. Elara’s hand closed instantly around the mass. She shoved it into the pocket of her overalls, beneath the fabric, pressing it tight against her thigh.

“Unit 734,” the drone’s speaker crackled, a voice of synthesised authority. “Report status.”

“Pump cleared,” Elara said, her voice steady despite the frantic drumming against her leg. “Debris removed. Resuming flow.”

The red eye lingered. It scanned her face, her grease-stained hands, the closed pocket of her overalls. Thump-thump. A secret heartbeat, loud enough to drown out the factory’s roar. It felt like holding a piece of fire that refused to go out.

“Proceed,” the drone said finally. It turned and drifted away, seeking other inefficiencies.

Elara let out a breath she hadn’t realised she was holding. She looked down at her pocket. The lump lay hidden there, ugly and impossible, beating with a life that had no business existing in a factory of dead things. The shift whistle blew. Elara stood, wiping her hands on a rag. She didn’t know what she’d found, only that it felt like the answer to a question she’d never dared ask.

She knew she wasn’t leaving it behind.

Elara joined the stream of workers shuffling toward the exit. The floor vibrated with the heavy tread of a thousand steel-toed boots, a rhythmic marching sound that usually lulled her into a trance. Today, it felt jarring. Every step drove the weight against her thigh. Thump. Thump. Thump. A frantic counter-rhythm to the factory’s mechanical pulse. She kept her hand pressed over the pocket, feigning a casual posture, fingers curled around the jagged shape through the fabric. She needed to get through the scanners. She needed to get home.

“Elara.”

The voice cut through the factory noise, sharp and familiar. She stiffened but didn’t run. Running attracted drones. She turned slowly.

Kael leaned against a support pillar near the main blast doors, arms crossed, watching her. He was several years older than her and wore the blue uniform of the Enforcement Corps, the silver badge on his chest catching the harsh overhead lights. His dark hair was cropped short, just as regulation stipulated. He’d worn it that way religiously since making Squad Leader.

He pushed off the pillar and walked toward her. His boots rang on the metal floor with the heavy, deliberate tread of an Enforcer, but his eyes were soft. Worried.

“You’re the last one out,” he said.

“Pump 4 was stuck,” she lied, the words gritty on her tongue. “I didn’t want to leave it for the night shift.”

“You always were too diligent for your own good.” He stopped in front of her, close enough that she could smell the starch of his uniform, masking the factory’s grease. He looked tired. There were shadows under his eyes that hadn’t been there years ago.

He studied her face, tracking the sweat on her brow, before his gaze dropped to her hand, which was still pressed against her thigh.

“You look pale,” he said. “Are you sick?”

“Just tired, Kael. It was a long shift.”

“It’s always a long shift.” He reached out, as if to touch her shoulder, then dropped his hand. The badge between them felt like a third person in the conversation. “Walk with me. I’ll escort you through the checkpoint.”

It wasn’t a request. Elara recognised the tone: protective and insistent, edged with the authority he tried to hide when they were alone. She nodded and fell into step beside him.

They walked through the factory gates, past the scanners that beeped rhythmically as workers passed through. The drones hovering above the exit tracked them but didn’t approach. Kael’s presence was a talisman, a signal that this worker was accounted for.

Elara held her breath as she passed the sensor arch. The device usually scanned for unauthorised tech or stolen components. She didn’t know if it scanned for whatever this was.

Beep. Green light. The tension leaked from her lungs in a slow, controlled exhale.

“You’ve been quiet lately,” Kael said as they stepped out into the plaza. The air here was colder, biting at her exposed skin, carrying the chemical tang of the processing plants in Sector 8.

“I’ve been working.”

“We’re all working.” He glanced at her sideways. “But you’re different. Distracted. Looking at things you never used to look at.”

Elara’s fingers tightened around the object in her pocket. “Like what?”

“Like the sky.” He gestured vaguely upward at the ceiling of smog that choked the city. “You stopped in the middle of the plaza yesterday. Just stood there, staring up, like you expected to see something other than grey.”

“Maybe I did.”

“Don’t.” His voice dropped, losing its softness. “Don’t start talking like that. Not out loud. Not where anyone can hear.”

He stopped walking and turned to face her. They were near the edge of the plaza, in the shadow of a cooling tower. His eyes were dark and intent now. Scared.

“The perimeter exists for a reason, Elara. The Wastes are death. And people who ask too many questions about what’s above the smog—”

He didn’t finish. He didn’t have to.

People who ask questions end up like your mother.

He didn’t say it. But she heard it in the silence between them.

“I’m not asking questions,” she said, lying again. “I’m just tired.”

He looked at her for a long moment, searching for the girl he’d once felt like a big brother to, the one who used to steal rations with him on the rooftops before the badge, before the distance. He seemed to find only the grease-stained tinkerer standing before him.

“Go home,” he said finally. “Eat something. Sleep. Real sleep, Elara. Not just staring at the ceiling.”

“I will.”

“I mean it. If you burn out, I can’t help you. The Grid doesn’t tolerate inefficiency.”

“I know.”

He hesitated, as if he wanted to say something else. Then he straightened, the Enforcer mask sliding back into place. “See you tomorrow.”

He turned and walked away, his blue uniform swallowed by the grey crowd. Elara watched him go. She waited until he was out of sight before she turned toward Block 4.

She walked quickly, head down, hand curled around the hidden weight. It had grown warmer. Like carrying a coal that seared her nerves but wouldn’t burn her skin. She climbed the stairs to her unit: 4A, third floor, identical to every other unit in the block. The door recognised her bio-signature and slid open.

Inside, there was a cot, a nutrition station, a waste processor, and a single window looking out at the grey. The sum total of her life. She locked the door. Only then did she pull the lump from her pocket.

In the dim light of her unit, it looked even uglier than it had in the factory. A jagged piece of black slag, pitted and scarred. It belonged in a furnace. It belonged in the trash. But when she set it on the small metal table, it rocked slightly. Thump. A faint tremor ran through it.

Elara sat on the edge of her cot, watching it. She reached out, hesitating, then pressed her fingertip to the rough surface. The reaction was instant. A shock of heat travelled up her arm and the black sweated. A tiny bead of moisture welled up from a crack in the carbon, clear and pure. And in that crack, for just a moment, she thought she saw something beneath the black. A glimpse of deep, translucent purple, before the shadow swallowed it again.

Find your spark. Her mother’s voice echoed in her mind, a standing order. Seris, with her dark hair and her secret garden and her hands that could make things grow in a city that had outlawed growth. Seris, who had whispered those words in the dark of their old apartment ten years ago, and then vanished into the Mechanism’s maw, never to come back.

Elara looked at the ugly, breathing rock. She didn’t know it was a seed, encased in the hardest, deadest armour it could find to survive the furnace of time. It was waiting.

She curled her hand around it, feeling the rhythm sync with her own heart. The factory was gone. Kael was gone. The grey city outside her window fell away.

For the first time in years, Elara wasn’t suffocating. She took a breath, and it felt like the first real breath of her life. And beneath the warmth, beneath the pulse that matched her heartbeat, something else stirred. Something she couldn’t name. Like a child pressing its face to a window, watching the world outside with wonder and longing.

The feeling passed so quickly she wasn’t sure it had been real. But for just a moment, the ugly lump of carbon in her hand had felt less like a thing and more like a someone.

Read the rest

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As I’ve written about a lot, closed systems naturally drift toward entropy, which is a state of disorder, sameness, and energy loss. Life, on the other hand, is syntropic. It actively fights that drift by building complexity, organisation, and agency. When we think about human relationships, we usually assume that “helping” someone is automatically a syntropic act that adds energy to their life.

But Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), who’s one of my favourite philosophers to unpack for people, saw a darker side to help. In his beast of a book, Being and Time (1927), he digs into what it means to be an authentic human facing mortality and the gravitational pull of “average everydayness” and the crowd (what he called “The They”).1

Along the way, he drops a lesser-known insight: certain forms of help can actually hollow out the existence of the person being helped. Instead of building them up, this kind of help acts as a force of entropy, degrading their agency.

Heidegger splits how we care for others into two modes: “Leaping-In” and “Leaping-Ahead.” Looking at these through the lens of syntropy shows us exactly how one leads to human decay, while the other provides the necessary architecture for growth and freedom.

The Mechanics of Care

Heidegger argued that humans are never just isolated individuals and being human is never a solo job. We’re fundamentally wired for “Being-with” (Mitsein), meaning our existence is constantly tangled up with others. He called the structural way we relate to people “Solicitude” (Fürsorge).2 It’s his technical word for the care we direct toward other people, which isn’t an optional add-on but a basic way our existence is put together.

Think of it less as an emotional bond and more as a purely practical look at how we actually intervene in someone else’s life. When someone we know is facing a burden, like a tough choice, a complex project, or an existential crisis, we have to decide exactly how we’re going to step in.

The Entropic Path of “Leaping-In”

The first option is “Leaping-In” (einspringende). This happens when the helper steps directly into the other person’s shoes and takes over the burden. You just do the task for them.

Heidegger says that this “disburdens” the other person. On the surface, this looks like pure kindness. It’s taking the phone out of your dad’s hands to fix his settings rather than talking him through the menus. It’s feeding your mate the exact word-for-word text to send their partner during an argument. It’s getting ChatGPT to do your kid’s entire science project to save them the stress. But from a syntropic perspective, this is a degenerative force.

• Systemic Atrophy. By taking away the struggle, the helper removes the exact friction needed for growth. Just as our muscles waste away without physical resistance, taking away someone’s existential “care” leads to a shrinking of the self and robs them of their own “ability-to-be.”3

• Domination. Heidegger points out that Leaping-In actually “dominates” the other person, even if it’s done with a smile. It creates a dynamic of dependency where the helper is the active subject and the person being helped becomes a passive object to be managed.

• Entropy. Over time, something shrinks and the whole system loses complexity. Instead of two capable, autonomous people, you end up with one fixer and one who waits to be fixed. The helped person loses their knack for organising their own world and requires constant external input just to stay afloat.

The Syntropic Path of “Leaping-Ahead”

The alternative is “Leaping-Ahead” (vorspringende), which is a fundamentally different movement. The helper completely avoids taking on the burden. Instead, they leap ahead to clear the path, empowering the other person to carry the weight themselves.

Heidegger describes this as helping the other become “transparent” to themselves. You leave the actual problem-solving up to them, focusing entirely on helping them build the understanding they need to get there. This acts as a massive syntropic force.

• Generating Complexity. Leaping-Ahead requires the other person to stay in the driver’s seat. They have to organise their own thoughts and take action, which increases the total intelligence and resilience of the system.

• Self-Creation (Autopoiesis). By refusing to take the easy way out, you respect the other person’s struggle as their own. It gives them the space for self-creation. Because they fought the battle, they get to own the victory and the competence that comes with it.4

• True Freedom. The end goal of Leaping-Ahead is what Heidegger calls “Self-constancy” (Selbständigkeit). The person becomes free for their own possibilities, rather than just being free from their responsibilities.

The Biological Blind Spot

I do think Heidegger is missing a trick, though. Because he operated entirely in the realm of existential philosophy, he assumed that if you clear the path and hand the burden back to someone, they automatically have the capacity to carry it.

But as anyone who’s read my essays on Ray Peat knows, you need raw metabolic energy to be able to think, act, and engage meaningfully with the world.5 Syntropy isn’t just a philosophical idea but a real biological process driven by cellular energy.

If a person is depleted (i.e., hypothyroid, running on stress hormones, and lacking baseline metabolic energy), Leaping-Ahead might actually just leave them stranded. You can hold the space open for them all day long, but if they lack the energetic resources to participate in their own struggle, they’ll simply collapse.6

Grounding Heidegger in biology means recognising that true care sometimes requires helping someone restore their physical vitality first. You have to build the energetic foundation before you can demand existential responsibility.

Leaping In and Diminishing Ourselves with AI

Even with the biological reality check, Heidegger’s distinction is basically a skeleton key for understanding our current weirdness with tech, especially AI.7 There’s no denying that we’re increasingly building a world completely saturated with “Leaping-In” tools.

Most software today anticipates, predicts, and auto-completes, lifting the burden off our plates before we even feel it. For mindless drudgery and busywork, that’s amazing. Nobody needs an authentic, character-building journey to format a spreadsheet or write a boilerplate corporate email.

The danger kicks in when we let these tools leap into the realm of human creativity and actual thinking. Generative AI is so good now it’s increasingly doing just that. It leaps right to the finish line, spitting out the final code, art, or essay, completely bypassing the messy, frustrating, and often brutal human process of creation.

Recently, my wife and I enjoyed the documentary series “Mr. Scorsese” about the life and career of the American filmmaker Martin Scorsese.8 It was directed by Rebecca Miller and took years to produce, morphing from an originally intended feature-length piece into a sprawling 5-parter. Miller has said that making it was one of the defining experiences of her career. And Scorsese’s own career is, of course, a legendary tale of obsessive struggle and suffering in the name of his craft. The friction of making some of the greatest films of all time is partly what forged his genius.

There’s a quote from him right in the trailer that captures this perfectly: “I knew I could express myself with pictures, but I had to find my own way.”

Contrast that with a typical example I saw just this week, where people are bragging about using AI to pump out “Hollywood-style” films in a single day:

We happily trade our agency for this convenience because it feels like a relief, but it’s a massive entropic trap. If we let tech leap in on the things that actually matter, our mental muscles waste away. We get so used to being “disburdened” that authoring our own lives starts to feel optional, and we start drifting through systems we don’t really understand.

A genuinely syntropic approach means taking responsibility for how we use the tools at our disposal. Right now, you can ask an AI to leap in and write your article, or you can ask it to leap ahead, instructing it to act as a sparring partner, to poke holes in your logic so you can navigate the terrain yourself. That keeps the heavy lifting of creation firmly on your own shoulders.

Holding the Space

At its core, Heidegger is reminding us that true care means prioritising a person’s authenticity (including our own) over their immediate comfort.

Leaping-In is the path of least resistance. It’s seductive and highly efficient, but it solves the immediate problem at the cost of diminishing the person. Leaping-Ahead is much harder. It takes real patience to watch someone you care about struggle, and the wisdom to know how to intervene just enough to empower them without taking over.

I don’t always know which mode I’m in. Sometimes I tell myself I’m empowering my Mam when I refuse to show her how to send an email for the 115th time, but maybe I’m just avoiding responsibility 😁. Other times I step in because I’m impatient, not because it’s wise.

Most of the time, being more syntropic just means biting your tongue and resisting the urge to take the wheel. And knowing you won’t always get the judgement right, learning to leap ahead and let others step fully into their own existence.

If you want to go deeper down the notoriously deep rabbit hole of Heidegger’s Being and Time, Simon Critchley’s podcast series “Apply-Degger” is an excellent entry point.

My wife and I were reminiscing recently about the TV shows we watched as kids growing up in the UK in the 80s. I told her nothing on television has ever topped ThunderCats for me. I was half-joking. The other half was ready to defend this hill to the death. That theme tune still gets me pumped, like I could charge through a brick wall.

Now you might dismiss it as cheesy 80s rubbish, or, like my dad, claim Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men was miles better back in his day. But I think it’s a brilliant example of culture lining up just right.1 In 1985, American producers and Japanese animators produced a small masterpiece of syntropic coherence—a world where the story, music, look, and moral feel all pulled in the same direction.

I want to make a playful but serious claim here: for a certain generation, ThunderCats was a high point of Western life. It packed syntropic philosophy into 22-minute blasts of energy after school. And that was enough.

Peak Culture as a Feeling

When people say “peak civilisation,” they rarely mean it literally. They’re talking about times when things felt right: everyone on the same page, full of buzz, a sense of hope and possibility, a common imaginative world. ThunderCats hit that spot.

Mid-80s children’s TV existed before the internet destroyed attention but after global media had learned to build worlds at scale. Four channels, no on-demand, no pausing or skipping, no scrolling a second screen. If you missed an episode, tough. That scarcity made each show feel big. Kids across the country sat down at the same time for the ritual: theme tune kicks in, titles roll, a new adventure on Third Earth. By “peak culture” I just mean that brief moment when the show, the medium, and the people watching are all tuned to the same frequency.

Seventy Seconds of Syntropy

The ThunderCats introduction grabs you straight off the bat: pounding drums, horns blasting, “Thundercats Hooo!” and kinetic, explosive visuals. No messing. Nothing subtle. One job: yank a kid from normal life into ThunderCats mode.

Have a watch and feel the energy. Some people even say it’s the greatest piece of animation ever produced:2

The animation was outsourced to Topcraft in Japan, the very studio that would soon morph into Studio Ghibli. That’s why the movement seems so fluid and alive.

The sequence lays out the basics: jacked cat-people, lightning, swords, goodies against baddies. Nothing ironic or half-hearted. Bold as brass, giving kids an unembarrassed hero anthem at teatime. If syntropy is about things moving toward order and coherence, this opening feels like it squeezed that into a minute. Sounds, sights, and story all in sync.

And it hits your body first. Before a kid understands the plot, they already feel the timing, the speed, the danger, the weight of things. The Sword of Omens lighting up with the Eye of Thundera. Cheetara accelerating, Lion-O jumping, Panthro’s ThunderTank smashing through rock—these land in the right hemisphere long before left-hemisphere analysis kicks in. The theme doesn’t try to persuade you. It just pulls you along, with meaning arriving through motion.

Syntropy on Third Earth

The basic plot is simple. It’s a story of escape, collapse, and re-ordering. Thundera, the home planet of the ThunderCats, blows up as the series starts. A small group of survivors flee. They crash on a strange planet, Third Earth, a wild, future Earth swarming with a variety of different beings and aliens. There, they build a replica of their fortress while fending off an ancient evil, Mumm-Ra.

It’s a simple set up, but really about what happens when everything falls apart and you still have to build something from whatever’s left.

Each episode follows a familiar loop. Something goes wrong: a betrayal, an attack, an internal conflict, or a new monster turning up. The team responds through courage, cooperation, and some combination of technology and magic. By the end, balance is restored. But it never settles into comfort. Third Earth is always unfinished and under threat. Order here is something you have to keep earning. Each episode re-strings Heraclitus’s bow.3

Unlike peers such as He-Man—where every episode tended to hit a hard reset button—ThunderCats had a memory. It built multi-part arcs with lasting consequences across 130 episodes. Characters learned things in episode 4 that they still knew in episode 20. It was a story about people slowly “becoming” something more than they were at the start.

There’s almost always a clear moral lesson: courage over fear, honesty over deceit, self-control over rage, duty over selfishness, perseverance over giving up. Every week you watched them try to fix a small piece of a broken world. Ernst Bloch’s Principle of Hope in action.4 This pro-social nature was baked in: every storyline and script was reviewed by a consultant psychologist to ensure it would be a positive experience for young viewers.5 The show was even advertised to parents as such in newspapers:

In practice, the ThunderCats are like a syntropic force pulling things back into shape. They turn a crash site into a home, a group of survivors into a community, a dangerous planet into a place worth fighting for. The message to kids is simple but potent: chaos can be faced, shaped, and transformed.

Ludwig Klages’ distinction between “soul” and “spirit” fits here.6 Soul lives in rhythm, image, and participation. Spirit abstracts, controls, and dominates. ThunderCats is soul all the way: bright colours, motion, mythic symbols, embodied loyalty. Mumm-Ra is spirit gone feral—sneaky, bitter, unable to participate in life except by exploiting it. The weekly struggle is Klages’ living image against dead abstraction, played out in primary colours.

Archetypes in Spandex

Part of the show’s power lies in its characters. Each one is an exaggerated but recognisable archetype.

Lion-O is the most interesting: he’s a boy forced into leadership too soon. Due to a malfunction in his suspension capsule during the escape from Thundera, his body aged while his mind didn’t. He’s literally a twelve-year-old in a man’s body. The series keeps returning to his impulsiveness, his need for guidance, his gradual maturation by integrating his mentors’ wisdom with his own youthful energy. It’s the perfect metaphor for the 80s latchkey kid—externally expected to cope with the world, internally still figuring it all out.

Then there’s Panthro, the engineer-warrior. He builds the ThunderTank from the remains of their wrecked spaceship, maintains the lair, solves mechanical problems, and fights with nunchucks. He’s grounded competence, craft, and reliability in one package.

Tygra is the stoic intellectual who serves as the architect and scientist of the operation. In a particularly wild episode, he essentially battles drug addiction when he becomes hooked on a fruit that offers blissful hallucinations, draining his will and endangering the team. A mature look at how even the smartest mind can surrender to chemical entropy.

And then Cheetara, who I had a massive crush on. I’d like to think it was because she represented pure, competent vitality. She wasn’t a damsel in distress. She was speed, intuition, and foresight. To admire Cheetara was to admire the idea that life should be fast and capable.

WilyKit and WilyKat, the twin “ThunderKittens,” are young tricksters and scouts who fight with gadgets and hoverboards. Even Snarf, often played for comic relief, stands for care, worry, and the messy side of attachment.

On the other side, Mumm-Ra is entropy personified. While the ThunderCats generate their own energy, he has to beg for his. He’s literally a mummified corpse who requires an external battery to function, stuck in repetitive transformations that never truly fix him. His dark lair, the Black Pyramid, is enclosed and cluttered with relics. The ThunderCats keep moving outward, building, exploring. Mumm-Ra turns inward, hoarding and hiding.

Although he gave kids the creeps, Mumm-Ra has a tragic side too, bound by pacts to the “Ancient Spirits of Evil” that grant him immmortality (I’m resisting another Bryan Johnson comparison here 😁). His evil has a personality, a depth that makes the ThunderCats’ struggle against him feel like a battle against a distinct, ancient force, not just a monster of the week.

There’s something of Alfred North Whitehead and Henri Bergson here—life as creative surge, improvising itself as it goes.78 Lion-O’s leadership is responsive rather than procedural. Panthro feels his way into solutions. Even the action sequences privilege flow over calculation with lots of leaps, twists, and spins. Mumm-Ra, by contrast, is stuck in rigidity. The ThunderCats move forward by inventing. Mumm-Ra survives by replaying.

None of this arrives as a lecture. It comes through the colour, design, sound, and animation. As a kid, you don’t need a philosophy dictionary to feel the difference between Panthro’s grounded competence and Mumm-Ra’s shrieking desperation.

Shared Ritual

Another reason ThunderCats felt so good is how it worked as group ritual. In the pre-internet, pre-streaming world, kids’ TV was one of the few mass, synchronised experiences outside sport and national events. You knew, more or less, that all your mates were watching the same battle, laughing at the same joke, hearing the same moral lesson.

The playground the next day was full of references and role play: “Did you see when…?”, “I’m Lion-O, you be Panthro.” It was embodied too. We didn’t just talk about the show: sticks became swords, cardboard boxes became lairs, the playground became Third Earth. It was culture as something you did, not just saw. I still remember debating and recreating the race between Lion-O and Cheetara:

From the vantage point of today’s media landscape, that looks like a golden age. Now, children’s worlds are highly personalised, split by algorithms so no two feeds look the same. Attention scatters rather than converges. More choice, more representation, more niches, but far fewer big shared stories. ThunderCats belongs to a moment when a single theme tune could anchor a whole micro-generation’s imaginative life.

Owen Barfield described the modern drift from living inside meaning to watching it from outside via “onlooker consciousness.”9 ThunderCats belonged to a still-participatory culture. Kids didn’t watch from a distance. They jumped in.

The Innocence of Unapologetic Heroism

These days culture often keeps sincerity at arm’s length. But something was gained, briefly, in the ThunderCats era from taking heroism at face value.

Consider the difference between this and the Warner Bros. classics like Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. They were brilliant, but they were built on irony, inside jokes, and double entendres, always winking at the audience. ThunderCats, along with peers like He-Man and She-Ra, dropped the wink. They traded in adventure rather than subtext. They focused entirely on the struggle between good and evil, and on teamwork.

Lion-O and his crew aren’t tortured by moral ambiguity. They’re good, in a straightforward way. They make mistakes, they grow, they argue, but the show never doubts the value of bravery, loyalty, or protecting the vulnerable. The baddies aren’t misunderstood geniuses trapped by circumstance. They align with decay and domination, plainly. The ThunderCats answer with unashamed nobility, affirming life rather than exploiting it. It pulls kids toward clear values instead of leaving everything blurry and confused.

This clarity won’t win any prizes for sophistication, but it’s existentially potent anyway. For a child, it’s a clean compass. “This is what we admire. This is what we reject.” As adults we can see every caveat. As children, we needed something solid to push off from. ThunderCats gave that without irony.

And it quietly trains something important in you: a sense of what’s actually worth standing behind. You don’t work out that Lion-O is courageous through some logical process: you feel it in how he moves, hesitates, fails, and tries again. Long before you can explain anything, your body already prefers how Panthro stands and moves to how Mumm-Ra lurks and lashes out. The show sharpens gut-feel value-perception. It trains what Max Scheler called the “vision of the heart” before it teaches any rules.10

Here’s an example from season 3 with Cheetara and Lynx-O (a blind wise elder), in what might be the most syntropic scene of all time:

Peak ThunderCats

Calling a cartoon “peak culture” sounds absurd if you measure culture by museums and opera. But if you measure culture by its ability to bind a generation in a shared moral rhythm, ThunderCats stands tall.

It represents a high point for a particular kind of cultural formation, what Clare Graves would call a shared value structure: analogue, collective, myth-heavy, morally straightforward, and energetically scored.11 Since then, we’ve gained complexity, diversity, and nuance, but lost some of that raw, unembarrassed vitality.

The real miracle isn’t just that it was “good,” but that Myth managed to hijack Commerce. On paper, this was another vehicle for plastic toys. In practice, it ended up teaching us about soul.

“Peak culture” here is a feeling of coherence. ThunderCats mattered because, again and again, it gave people the same moments to care about together. It shows, in a small way, what culture feels like when it remembers how to aim its energy at something living.

ThunderCats Hooo!

In 1913, while most of Europe was sleepwalking toward disaster, the philosopher-psychologist Ludwig Klages (1872-1956) stood on a German hillside talking to a crowd of young people. He delivered a speech called Mensch und Erde (Humankind and Earth) that now sounds like terrifying forward planning:

“Like an all-devouring conflagration, ‘progress’ scours the Earth, and the place that has fallen to its flames will flourish nevermore, so long as man still survives. The animal and plant species cannot renew themselves, man’s innate warmth of heart has gone, the inner springs that once nurtured the flourishing songs and sacred festivals are blocked, and there remains only a wretched and cold working day and the hollow show of noisy ‘entertainment.’ There can be no doubt: we are living in the era of the decline of the soul.”

This was before the World Wars. Before the atom bomb. Before smartphones, social media, and all the algorithms. Klages had already seen the trend: life getting flatter, more managed, and more cut off from anything that feels properly alive.1

If you’re wondering why modern life often feels so depleted—and what a more syntropic, life-first orientation might look like—Klages gives you a solid guide. His major work, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele (The Spirit as Adversary of the Soul), published in 1932, is a 1,500-page beast that still hasn’t been fully translated into English.2 But the title alone captures his central point: “spirit” is the enemy of life.

The Great Split of Soul vs Spirit

To understand Klages, you have to grasp his central distinction between life-affirming Seele (soul) and life-destroying Geist (spirit/mind/intellect/rational will).

Like many of the thinkers I write about, Klages had no time for Cartesian dualism, where mind and body are separate substances. Body and soul, for him, are two poles of a single living reality. The body manifests soul; the soul is the meaning of the body. You can’t have one without the other. A living being is body-soul through and through: “wherever there is living body, there is soul; wherever soul, there is living body.”

He calls this basic unit of life the “life-cell” (Lebenszelle): a dynamic unity in which body and soul are inseparable poles of one living process, not two substances pushed together. When that life-cell is in tact, experience has depth and feeling.

Geist is the external intruder crashing the party. It comes in from “outside” (metaphysically speaking) and drives a wedge between body and soul. It splits what was unified. It abstracts and categorises, calculates, plans, and controls, and in the end tries to dominate life instead of participating in it.

For Klages, this is a world-historical disaster. He sees modern history as a “war to the knife” between all-embracing life and a power “outside space and time” that wants to break body and soul apart:

“Body and soul are poles of the life cell, which belong inseparably together, into which, from outside, the spirit, like a wedge, inserts itself, in the endeavor to split them apart, to de-soul the body, to disembody the soul, and in this way, finally, to kill all the life it can reach.”

If that reminds you of Iain McGilchrist’s ideas on the brain hemispheres, it should. The right hemisphere deals in the living whole, context, and embodiment. The left is abstract, categorical, good at grabbing and using. Klages was onto this nearly a century earlier.

Soul is receptive, rhythmic, and relational; spirit is grasping, conceptual, and obsessed with practical application. Spirit asks about causes; soul asks about meaning. Klages loved Goethe, who said it plainly: “The point of life is life itself.” Spirit always wants life to be for something.

Our “objectivizing intellect” has alienated us from the intuitive and emotional side of ourselves. We’ve got better tools for precision and efficiency, but at the cost of feeling disconnected from something essential:

“As souls we are inescapably intertwined in what is essentially a fleeting reality, but as spirits we are based literally outside this reality, unable, even for the briefest moment, to merge with it.”

A modern cartoon of Geist—and I feel like I’m bullying him at this point as I’ve previously compared him to Rudolf Steiner’s Ahriman—is someone like Bryan Johnson.3 Instead of living in a mortal, “earth rooted” body, his project is to transcend it. To become data. To be immortal, perfectly managed, a system that never fails. The ultimate machine man.

In that mode, people live as if they literally won’t die.4 They hand themselves over to something abstract and external—dead logical concepts, rigid diets, quantified protocols, dashboards of statistics—and drift away from the actual energy of life those numbers were supposed to serve.

Three Stages of Spirit Taking Over

Klages didn’t think spirit was always the enemy, just that the balance shifted:

“At the dawn of history, and for many subsequent generations, spirit existed in a creative symbiosis with the soul. In the course of time, the balance of the poles shifted more and more towards the dominance of spirit over the soul. That development has continued all the way down to the present age. Among every people that we consider to be civilized, spirit eventually severs its ties with the soul.”

He maps this shift through three big historical phases.

• First, the good old days of the Pelasgians: the pre‑Greek Mediterranean peoples he romanticises as living out of a symbolic, image-soaked consciousness.5 Their festivals, myths, and erotic bond with the land show what it looks like when human life is knit into the rhythms of earth and cosmos instead of trying to stand outside and manage them.

• Then, the Promethean age, running from Plato and classical Athens through Christianity into the Renaissance. Prometheus embodies the rise of willpower and technical knowledge, the move that “made men masters of their minds” and started to pull soul and world apart.

• Finally, our own Heraclean age, where we go all-in on hard work, purpose, and production. Hercules chooses effort over ease, and we end up with a civilisation that treats the pleasure of the moment, and the life of the soul, as collateral damage.

Just open your calendar and you can see spirit running the show.

It’s a neat grid of time-blocks, colour-coded, and synced across devices. It doesn’t care whether you’re buzzing with energy or knackered. 2pm means this meeting; 3pm means that one. End of story. If you’re reading this via email, it’s probably underlined those times already so you can add them nice and easily.

Work gets described the same way: KPIs, productivity metrics, performance reviews. Human effort gets flattened into cold digits. The chart never asks if the work was meaningful, just whether the line went up or down.

Klages saw this coming in 1913:

“Most people do not live, they merely exist, wearing themselves out as slaves of ‘work’ like machines in the service of big factories, blindly relying on the numerical delirium of stocks and foundations as slaves of money, to end up as slaves to the intoxicating distractions of the city.”

He’s not saying we’re morally worse. Just that once you decide reality is what can be captured in concepts, measured in numbers, and controlled by plans, the rest follows. The soul becomes awkward and something to medicate or manage.

In Klages’ view, pen-pushing bureaucrats and petty administrators have seized hold of everything with their cold, “instrumental rationality.” That’s the same spirit in the hypothyroid organisations I’ve written about before.6 They’re obsessed with rules, policies, and targets; the human being is just a customer, a client, a case number on a spreadsheet.

But spirit hasn’t won completely.

When the Soul Sneaks Back In

Soul, for Klages, is the living, meaningful, creative essence that connects us to nature, myth, and the cosmos. It’s how we feel alive and sense the life of other beings as more than objects.

Authentic experiences—such as in art, poetry, love, ritual, true friendship, certain kinds of work—are moments when the life-cell lights up and we reconnect with the deep flows that make the world feel whole and alive.

You’ve felt these moments when spirit backs off:

• Last time you were genuinely moved by music and transported somewhere else. Your boundaries dissolved into the tune. Your ears were in it, not hearing.

• A hike on the fells, where you forgot to check the map, count your steps, or take a photo. You just stood, letting the view sink in.

• A proper chat where the time flies, and ideas pop up that neither of you could have had alone.

• Real play where you get lost in something for its own sake, not to tick a box or optimise anything. Kids nail this instinctively, full of wonderment and magic.

In those moments you stop grabbing and managing and start receiving. Spirit quietens for a bit, and soul can breathe.

Feeling, in the sense of a profound engagement that draws on all our intellectual and physiological resources, is the key to understanding ourselves and the world. In his essay Consciousness and Life (1915), Klages writes:

“Life is not perceived, but it is felt with a strength that obscures everything. And we need only reflect on this feeling to become aware, with a certainty beyond which there can be none more certain, of the reality of being alive. Whether we judge, think, will or wish, dream, phantasize, all of these are sustained and shot through by one and the same torrent of an elementary feeling of life, which can be compared to nothing, traced back to nothing, that cannot be thought through and analysed, and also of course never ‘understood’. And because we feel ourselves as being alive, what is vital meets us in the image of the world.”

The Reality of Images

One of Klages’ key ideas starts from a simple claim: the world shows up first as living images (Bild) before we turn it into objects.

An image, in the Klagesian sense, is the way reality presents itself to the soul before the intellect chops it up into things with properties. Not a picture in your head, more like the world arriving before you’ve had time to label it. His whole take essentially boils down to two lines from On the Essence of Consciousness (1921):

“The image that falls into the senses,
That and nothing else is the sense of the world.”

He talks about “intuitive images” (Anschauungsbilder) or “primordial images” (Urbilder). The oak tree outside your house isn’t just another pile of wood and leaves; it taps into something deeper—the image of “oak‑ness” running through every oak. Same for mum, river, mountain, birth, death, transformation. We don’t invent these patterns. We receive and live in them.

“The image of the oak, the image of the pine-tree, the image of the fish, the image of the dog, the image of the human being recurs in every single individual carrier of the species. ‘Reproduction’ means the physically eternally inaccessible process of the handing-on of the primordial image of the species from place to place and from time to time.”

When you see a storm gathering, you encounter a looming, charged presence that means something. “Barometric air pressure and moisture content” comes later, if at all. The weather app’s handy but dead next to it.

For Klages, the only reality is the present moment:

“An image has presence only in the moment of being experienced; a thing is ‘determined’ once and for all - an image flows along with ever-flowing experience; a thing persists…an image is only there in the experience of the person who experiences.”

Spirit’s trick is freezing these living images into static objects it can use. Think of snapping a photo of a beautiful moment instead of actually living it. The camera converts the living scene into pixels. You gain a record and lose the event.

Perhaps the below video is a good example of this, where the lad is looking at his phone instead of experiencing the moment itself.

Modern visual culture is full of what Klages would call drained images: stock and AI generated photos, backgroundable TV, memes, corporate slides, endless scrollable “content” optimised for clicks. Visually, we’re drowning. Soul-wise, we’re starving.

The real images go underground, but they don’t disappear. They turn up in dreams, in art and poetry that stay with you, in a face across the room. They’re why certain stories hit you hard even when you can’t say exactly why. Something deeper is being recognised.

Rhythm vs. Beat

One of Klages’ most helpful ideas for naming our cultural weirdness is his contrast between rhythm and beat.

Picture a hummingbird’s wings versus a steam engine’s pistons. The hummingbird has rhythm: always similar, never exact or identical, tweaking as it goes. The piston has repetition: the same exact stroke, the same interval, over and over.

Rhythm is the language of the soul. Warm, alive, supple, off-the-cuff, pulsing. Klages traces it back to the Greek rheein, “to flow”—the same root as “Rhine.” Rhythm flows like a river, always moving, never exactly the same:

“No wave of water has precisely the same shape and duration as the previous one, no breath and pulse exactly the same length as the following one, no left side of a leaf, an animal, or a human being exactly mirrors the right side.”

Beat is the language of the spirit. Mechanical. It wants what’s predictable, controllable, and copyable. In Foundations of the Science of Expression (1936), Klages writes:

“Steam engines, drop-hammers, pendulum clocks function to a beat, but not in a rhythm; a piece of perfect prose has a perfect rhythm, but certainly not a beat. Life expresses and manifests itself in rhythms’ by contrast, in a beat the spirit compels the rhythmic life-pulse to submit to its own peculiar law.”

As he puts it more succinctly in On the Essence of Rhythm (1934): “the beat repeats, but rhythm renews.”

We’ve built a world on repetition. School bells, 9am starts, Slack alerts, train timetables, notification pings, workouts counted in reps, “productivity” sliced into identical chunks of time.

The soul doesn’t thrive on that. It needs the unevenness of a walk in the woods where no two footsteps land quite the same, work that follows its own internal timing, conversations that wander. Klages’ favourite example of living in a rhythmical way is dance. In real dancing, you get swallowed by the movement:

“The more the dancer is granted the grace of becoming completely absorbed in the dance, the more it is not about movements, not about a change of locations and a measuring of line segments, but about the will-less, indeed almost impulse-less, resonance in the element of a wave-creating motion, which henceforth experiences and, while it is experiencing, at the same time is ‘worked and woven.’”

The ideal is a life that feels more like that dance and less like a clocking‑in machine. By losing yourself in the rhythm, you paradoxically find yourself through becoming one with it. This opens up a different quality of perception, one spirit can’t grasp. The soul “receives the world as ‘images’ as discrete, rhythmically pulsating intermittences.”

A Universe That’s Buzzing

Klages is often labelled a “biocentrist” or “panvitalist,” but it might be better to call his view an “erotic cosmology.” He sees a universe that’s a living, harmonious whole in which beings pull, push, seek, and transform one another.7

Spirit wants a universe built out of contracts, contacts, and control. Eros gives you a universe of encounters and entanglements, where to know something is always, in some measure, to be moved and changed by it.

Eros, for Klages, goes far beyond romance or sex. It’s a primordial, world-creating force—what he calls “Cosmogonic Eros.” It shatters everyday consciousness and dissolves the boundaries of the self, opening you up to a living, breathing, “ensouled” cosmos.

Here he’s close to Ray Peat. The British academic Paul Bishop says that Klages was aiming to “provide a new foundation for psychology on a biological basis.” In Peat’s bioenergetics, energy and structure are inseparable. How much energy a system can process shapes what it can be and do. Life is ordered flow, something way more than just fuel‑burning. That logic scales up: from cells all the way to the cosmos.8

Klages says much the same in different language:

“The doctrine of life states: the universe is alive, the earth is alive, the creatures of the earth—plants, animals, human beings—are alive. Correspondingly, there are cosmic, planetary, and organismic individual life forms.”

On that view, a forest or a river isn’t just “resources” or “infrastructure.” They’re participants in cosmic life. Modern environmentalism tends to say, “We should save the rainforest because it’s useful,” for oxygen, medicines, carbon, tourism. Klages points out the older attitude: when you build a bridge over a river, you apologise to the river‑god; when you chop down an ancient tree, you expect consequences. This goes way beyond superstition to treating the river or tree as a “Thou” rather than an “It.” Something closer to how those Pelasgians lived, before Prometheus handed us the tools to stand apart.

Like Peat, Klages was also thoroughly against the Darwinian notion of the “struggle for existence” and natural selection. In Humankind and Earth he says:

“Nature knows no ‘struggle for existence’, but only the one arising from care for life. Such little weight is placed by Nature on survival that many insects die after the act of procreation, as long as the tide of life sweeps on in similar forms. What makes one animal hunt and kill another is the need of hunger, not acquisitive desire, ambition, lust for power. Here lies a yawning abyss, which no logic of development will ever be able to bridge.”

The Trap of Words

Klages coined the term “logocentrism” to describe Western culture’s obsession with language, concepts, and neat systems over real life. It’s the habit of mistaking the menu for the meal.

You can hear it in corporate speak: “leveraging synergies to optimise the talent pipeline and deliver stakeholder value.” Functional, instrumental, humanly dead. Klages calls it “functional values devoid of living substance.”

He sits alongside Owen Barfield here, who I wrote about in my last essay.9 Barfield thought language starts as living participation in the world and gradually hardens into dead, technical labels. Klages is saying something similar from another angle: spirit turns words into tools.

Language is spirit’s main instrument. With it we carve up the flow of experience, tag the bits with names, and arrange them for use. That’s genuinely useful. But when we act as if what can be said is the whole of what’s real, big chunks of experience fall out of view: the exact taste of this orange juice in this light; the particular feel of this friendship; the vibe of this sunset.

Klages’ interest in handwriting fits here too.10 He believed the soul expresses itself through movement, not just content. A typed email strips the body out. A handwritten letter carries the trace of a person moving: timing, hesitations, pressure, flow. Body connecting to body.

The trick is using language in ways that carry soul. Vary rhythm instead of hammering the same sentence pattern. Use images as well as abstractions. Leave room for silence. Remember there’s a body reading whatever you're writing.

“The praxis by which the poet expresses his inner vision is magic,” Klages says. Good language brings life back into view rather than pushing it out.

What to Do With All This

Klages can seem pretty pessimistic. He thought we’re already living in a post-apocalyptic world and it’s too late to go back to a golden age. He also didn’t think we can manufacture happiness, still less a permanent state of fulfilment. What he wants is a positive, caring attitude towards life—one that emerges naturally, without commandments or compulsion. He wants us to “turn around” from brute will‑to‑power toward a quieter ambition: to do each thing we do “as perfectly as possible.”

When work, attention, and world line up, we get what he calls “moments of great experience”—true happiness that you didn’t engineer. The ego fades, the image of the world shines, and we feel ourselves alive in a way that’s both fragile and eternal. You can’t schedule these moments, and you can’t keep them, but you can live in such a way that they have somewhere to land.

His lens suggests some simple shifts:

• Spot where repetition has replaced rhythm. Can you swap the rise and grind routine for things with more give: walking instead of gym machine, cooking by taste instead of macros, working to actual energy rather than the default time slot?

• Make space for real images. Not more scrolling, but time where you actually let stuff hit: a landscape you stand in without photographing, a film you watch without a second screen, ideas you jot down before they disappear.

• Catch spirit in the act. When you feel the urge to measure, optimise, and control, ask if that reflex is helping, or if you could let this one stay messy and alive.

• Let expression carry soul. Whether it’s an email, a meeting, or a talk: can you put some rhythm, warmth, and image into it, rather than defaulting to sterile templates?

• Treat yourself as body-soul, not brain-on-legs. Sleep, food, movement, warmth, touch—these aren’t “inputs” to optimise. They’re how your soul exists.

We live in a spirit‑dominated culture. But if Klages is right, life itself hasn’t gone anywhere. The cosmic current is still flowing beneath our habits and systems; we’ve just trained ourselves not to feel it. So the work now is simple and difficult at once: step back in.

If you’d like to dig deeper into Klages, this book by the British academic Paul Bishop is a really good entry point.

This is a good interview with him on the Hermitix podcast too:

In my last essay, I tried to explain Ray Peat’s argument against Noam Chomsky’s idea of “universal grammar.” Peat said that when we see language as a closed-off, formal system, we lose touch with how it’s actually alive, shaped by our bodies, cultures, and relationships. That loss leads to speech that feels flat and empty. In this piece, the English philosopher, writer, and poet Owen Barfield (1898-1997) helps us see why language feels so shallow today—and how that shallowness mirrors the stage of consciousness we’re in right now.1

“We are well supplied with interesting writers, but Owen Barfield is not content to be merely interesting. His ambition is to set us free. Free from what? From the prison we have made for ourselves by our ways of knowing, our limited and false habits of thought, our ‘common sense’.”

— Saul Bellow, Nobel Prize–winning novelist

In another recent piece on “Netflix cringe,” I argued that much of today’s dialogue in films and TV is fine for sharing facts but lifeless as real human expression.2 It’s too literal and lacks energy. That flatness in speech points to a bigger issue: we’ve made our whole view of reality feel thinner. To understand why our language has become so empty, we need to see why the world itself started feeling empty.

Enter Big Owen Barfield.

Barfield, known as the “First Inkling” (an early member of a group of writers including C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien), shaped their ideas from the start.3 He was also a dedicated follower of Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy—a spiritual philosophy about how human awareness grows over time. Barfield built on Steiner’s thoughts but turned them toward literature and language.4 He wasn’t just creating another clever theory to sit on a bookshelf. As Saul Bellow saw, Barfield’s goal was liberation: helping us escape a trap we don’t see, because it looks like “normal” reality and “common sense.”

If cringe dialogue in shows like Stranger Things is the sign of trouble, Barfield provides the explanation: we’re stuck in a particular way of thinking that’s tied to history. It’s an important and necessary step in our development, but it’s getting harder to live with. The good news is it’s not the end. It might be leading to a bolder, more challenging way of engaging with the world.

The History of Our Inner World

To get Barfield’s point, we have to let go of the comforting idea that the world has always been “out there,” a finished, neutral thing just waiting for better measuring tools to study it with. His take is more jarring: our awareness (what we call consciousness) and the cosmos grow and change together. The “inside” of the world and our own inner life aren’t two separate pieces that later came into contact. They’ve been unfolding side by side from the beginning.

Barfield maps this growth through three broad phases or epochs, based on historical evidence from ancient languages, myths, and philosophies: original participation, onlooker consciousness, and final participation. They’re overlapping tendencies rather than strict time periods, but they show how we got here and what it will take to move forward.

Running through this is his analysis of three modes of thinking: figuration, alpha-thinking, and beta-thinking. These are interwoven processes that shape how we perceive, explain, and then consciously reflect on the world.

At the heart of all this is language acting like a “fossil” of consciousness, a record of how minds and the world once connected. For example, the word “individual” once meant “undivided” or inseparable from the whole, hinting at how our thinking shifted toward feeling separate.

1. Original Participation and Figuration

Back in the day, early humans lived with blurry lines between themselves and the world around them. Things we’d now call “natural forces,” like wind, felt like living presences or powers. Wind wasn’t just moving air; in Greek it was “pneuma” or in Hebrew “ruach”—a single word blending breath, spirit, wind, and life-force. Those word origins show how ancient languages bundled up what we now separate into physical, mental, and spiritual categories, reflecting a consciousness where meaning grabbed you all at once.

Here, Barfield talks about “figuration,” the basic process by which the “unrepresented” world becomes a represented “world of appearances.” This activity is largely unconscious: our sensing and thinking work together to turn what we see, hear, and feel into organised pictures of things and beings—what Barfield called “collective representations.” These are shared patterns of how things show up in culture. Figuration is what makes a coherent world of appearances appear in the first place.

In that state, Barfield said, people “did not feel themselves isolated by their skin from the world outside” like we do. They were “less like an island” and “more like an embryo,” linked to everything by invisible threads. Language wasn’t something you picked up like a neutral tool. Rather, words were “concrete and unified” happenings, full of stories. Myths weren’t made-up tales or mere rules to follow but the air everyone breathed, a way to express real truths. Poetry today can momentarily restore this kind of “semantic unity,” as Barfield explains in his book Poetic Diction (1928). This vision shaped how Tolkien and Lewis built their own worlds like Middle-Earth and Narnia. They saw this “myth-making” (or “mythopoeia”) as humans creating tales that reflect how God might have made the real world, giving them a layer of deeper truth and magic.

Imagine a pigeon just knocking about, living it’s best pigeon life. It does it instinctively. There’s a natural biological flow, but no biographical inner voice narrating or self-reflecting. That’s similar to original participation: nature’s wisdom flowing through you rather than from you. An “originally-participating” human didn’t think of an “I” as separate. There was no hard split between a private inner self and an outside world.

It was a vibrant, magical way to live. But the downside was there was no real freedom or independence. So some separation was needed.

2. Onlooker Consciousness, Alpha Thinking, and Idolatry

Over time, consciousness pulled back—a shift Barfield linked to early Greek philosophers (like Plato, who split ideal forms from material) and saw speeding up during the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment. What once felt alive and inward got pushed outward. Spirit left things like wind and water and ended up mostly in our heads. The world got quieter and flatter. A new focus emerged: the reflective “I.” The world stopped “talking” to us and became something to measure, predict, and control.

Here we move from pure figuration into “Alpha-thinking.” Alpha-thinking is our reflective, explanatory mode of thought about the already-given world of appearances. It’s when we step back from what shows up and start forming concepts, theories, laws, mechanisms, and models. Done well, it gives us science and philosophy. Done badly, it forgets that its concepts are abstractions drawn from a deeper, lived world.

In this phase, a familiar split becomes entrenched between:

• 1st Person view: your own “I” or consciousness.

• 2nd Person view: the relational “you,” and the world as a living “thou.”

• 3rd Person view: objects, facts, data, models.

Science brackets out the first two for the sake of objective facts. That move gives us immense technological advances and analytical clarity. But the trap—what Barfield calls “Idolatry”—is treating the 3rd-person, fact-based view as the the whole, as if the map created the territory. We start to see our abstractions as reality itself.

Idol vs. icon

Barfield draws a sharp line between a “lost appearance” and a “saved” one.5

• The idol: If I stare at a tree and think, “There’s nothing there but cellulose and chlorophyll,” I’ve reduced it to its surface appearance.

• The icon: If I see the same tree as a shadow, a symbol, or a hint of something greater—a phenomenon representing an unseen depth—then I’m able to look through the thing into real meaning.

Modern life trains us to see only idols. We live in what Barfield called the “real world” of particles and forces, but our everyday life experience is the “familiar world” full of colours, sounds, and meanings that science can’t fully capture. We have immense power without belonging, and information without deeper significance. As Byung-Chul Han says, we no longer “feel at home in the world.” That word, “feel,” is key for Barfield.

In The Silver Trumpet, which we’ll come to in a sec, he writes (with emphasis):

“The Dwarf spoke so fast and used such funny long words that the Prince understood a good deal less than half of what he said. And yet he somehow felt in his bones that this queer little creature was good and meant kindly by him. HE FELT IT IN HIS BONES.”

In an interview in 1984, Barfield said he wrote the story partly to highlight “the importance of the feeling element in life.”

Instead, we’ve fallen into what William Blake called “Single Vision” and “Newton’s Sleep”—accurate enough for machines and engineering, but not enough for a full human life.6

This is onlooker consciousness, our default mode: a self sealed off from the living world. We take it as obvious, like the fish unaware it swims in water. Barfield warns that we’re guilty of “logomorphism”—projecting our modern divide back onto ancient times, when people experienced things differently. Iain McGilchrist would call it the left hemisphere running amok: all mechanisms and models, no big picture or connections.

The Silver Trumpet

Barfield dramatised this cultural loss (and how to fix it) in his first book, The Silver Trumpet (1925). It’s a brilliant fairy tale for kids but also a preview of the ideas he later developed in Saving The Appearances (1957), his seminal work on the evolution of consciousness.

Two sisters anchor the story: Violetta, who’s truly beautiful and good, and Gambetta, her identical but hollow twin. Prince Courtesy loves Violetta; her dancing and movement give everyone around her a buzz. His father, the King, gives him a magical Silver Trumpet with one rule: never, ever part with it.

But the Prince wants Violetta’s love so desperately that when she asks to play with the Trumpet one day, he hands it over. She loses it, and Gambetta stashes it away. With the Trumpet gone, a “Fall” follows. Violetta slips into a deep sleep like death, and the Prince, unable to distinguish reality from appearance, ends up with Gambetta. He lives in a reign of inner falsity, devoted to an empty idol who looks like his beloved but contains none of her spirit. The whole kingdom slides into a dull, spiritual stupor.

Years later, a new prince, Peerio, falls in love with Princess Lily (Violetta’s daughter) after seeing her portrait. Crucially, he loves the real person behind the image, not the image itself. He recovers the lost Silver Trumpet and by blowing it, the curse is lifted. The “dead” world comes back to life, Gambetta’s hollowness is exposed and she’s eventually forgotten. Sanity returns.

The Silver Trumpet symbolises “Poetic Imagination”—our ability to “see through” appearances into the realm of meaning.

• Violetta is a “participated image,” beauty transparent to a deeper spiritual reality.

• Gambetta is the “idol,” the surface without depth, pure materialism.

• The Loss: When Prince Courtesy parts with the Trumpet, he loses the ability to distinguish icon from idol. That’s us today: we’ve mislaid the Trumpet and dulled our imagination. We deify matter and ignore spirit.

• The Recovery: Prince Peerio is a redemptive figure. He uses the Trumpet (imagination) to reverse the curse. The story hints that only a disciplined, poetic imagination can undo the “idolatry” of a purely left hemispheric, science-only view and bring a dead world back to life.

Violetta also represents Sophia (Divine Wisdom from the bible). The Book of Proverbs pictures Sophia dancing on the circle of the world before the face of God.7 That “Great Dance” shows up in C.S. Lewis (Aslan singing Narnia into being) and Tolkien (the Ainulindalë, the music of the Ainur).8 Etymologically, to “en-chant” is literally to sing into existence. When the Trumpet is lost, the song stops and we’re left with dead matter. When it’s found, the music resumes and the world lives again.

This plants the idea for Barfield’s later thoughts: imagination as the bridge between human consciousness and divine reality. As the dwarf in The Silver Trumpet says, “‘Music hath charms…Harmony, you know, harmony—Form versus Chaos—Light v. Darkness…It’s all one.’” That line echoes Heraclitus’ unity of opposites, Blake’s “without contraries is no progression,” and the Taoist yin-yang balance. Drawing on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s concept of “polarity,” Barfield sees this tension—between wholeness and parts, spirit and matter, Luciferic (overly-spiritual) and Ahrimanic (overly-material) forces—as the engine of evolution.9 Barfield is another thinker who recognises harmony emerges from holding tension in balance, not by getting rid of it.

3. Final Participation, Beta-Thinking, and The Syntropic Turn

Most critiques of modern life stop with the diagnosis. Barfield offers a way forward. We can’t simply regress and go back to original participation. The alienation of modernity, for him, was needed to build a free, independent self. Only someone who’s stepped back from nature and reality can freely join in with it again.

Barfield calls this “Final Participation,” a phrase he develops out of Rudolf Steiner’s account of how human consciousness must pass through separation and return freely to a new kind of unity. His anthroposophical Christianity puts Christ at the centre as the balancer—holding opposites together, channeling the “Logos” through imagination, which reunites spirit and world again.

• Original Participation: Meaning happens to us; figuration creates appearances unconsciously.

• Onlooker Consciousness (Modernity): Meaning is denied or downgraded as illusion; alpha-thinking introduces analytical detachment.

• Final Participation: Meaning is consciously carried; beta-thinking enables self-aware reflection and a more integrated relationship with reality.

“Beta-thinking,” is the highest level of reflection: thought that turns back not just on the world but on our own thinking. It’s metacognition in the deep sense: examining how our representations arise, how language shapes them, and how consciousness participates in what it knows. For Barfield, beta-thinking is what lets us see figuration and alpha-thinking for what they are, instead of being unconsciously driven by them. This is crucial for Final Participation. We’re not trying to slide back into the old, unconscious unity of original participation. Beta-thinking allows a conscious, freely chosen participation: we know that meaning arises between a human consciousness and a responsive world, and we take responsibility for that relationship.

For Barfield, imagination isn’t an escape from logic and reason, but a higher form of it—an organ of perception. Where intellect and analysis break stuff apart, imagination puts it back together again. It’s not silly daydreaming but joining in with what Blake called “the world of Imagination, which is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow.” In later works like Unancestral Voice (1965), Barfield explores prophetic intuition as a foretaste of this, while Rediscovery of Meaning (1977) refines participation as conscious co-creation.

Barfield saw the evolution of consciousness not as human invention but as the universe coming to know itself through human attention. Each stage has a purpose: instinctive togetherness, reflective detachment, and then the conscious reunion of spirit and world. That vision also resonates with contemporary ecological concerns, where seeing nature as a participatory “you,” not just a “resource,” helps resist treating it as an idol and eases some of our climate-era alientation.

He never used the word syntropy, but the concept fits. If entropy is drift toward disintegration, syntropy is movement toward higher coherence and integration. Ray Peat described health as “organised energy flow;” Barfield saw imagination as the same pattern at the level of consciousness. We’re now called to actively participate in the world’s meaning, as collaborators and co-creators rather than detached observers. Final Participation is a syntropic act in a living universe. It echoes Ernst Bloch’s idea of “anticipatory consciousness”—reading the world for its “Not-Yetness,” its unrealised potential.10 For Barfield, the Logos is like music deep down. Discord and harmony aren’t just moral categories of right/wrong but ways of knowing. When we truly listen, matter and meaning resound together.

The Problem with Plato

Here’s where some friction shows up for me. The Inklings—Lewis especially—leaned into a Platonic worldview, where the physical world is a “shadow,” a reflection of a higher, perfect realm. Nietzsche’s jab that Christianity is “Platonism for the masses” captures that suspicion: the real party is somewhere else, and this world is second-rate.

Regular readers know I’m way more drawn to becoming than to static being—a dynamic process we’re actively shaping, with the world as work-in-progress.

But Barfield’s ideas still work. In many ways, he’s already turning Platonism on its head. Instead of timeless perfect Forms reflected in matter, he sees living meanings unfolding through time. His world isn’t a static hierarchy of being but a story of becoming, with spirit expressing itself through matter.

Even if we strip away the more rigid Platonic parts, The Silver Trumpet still offers the same core lesson: the world is alive with potential and possibility, and our imagination helps it unfold. Final Participation isn’t about escaping to a world of ideal Forms but about co-creating this one. It refuses to see reality as finished.

Syntropy in Practice

Barfield said to think of Final Participation “as a direction in which we had all better be moving,” rather than a destination to tick off. We can start small, using his ideas as daily habits to push back against “shallow” language in media and AI. As a solicitor, Barfield valued practical steps, applying participatory ethics to law—treating contracts as living agreements instead of stiff idols. He warned against escapist fantasy, stressing balance between reason and imagination to avoid over-romanticism. You could even test these out empirically by keeping a journal of perceptual shifts and changes in things like empathy or creativity as you practice.

1. Being over having

Erich Fromm’s contrast fits here: “Being” mode vs. “Having” mode. Idolatry lives in “having”—treating the world as a possession, a resource, a dead noun. Final Participation lives in “being”—using living verbs. Try saying “I’m colding” rather than “I have a cold,” or “I’m deciding” rather than “I have a decision to make.” Life as process, not possession.

2. Dig out dead metaphors

Everyday craic is full of dead metaphors. “Make it grabbable” once meant a physical hand closing around something (“grasp an idea” hints at lost unity). “Focus attention” pointed to a burning point of light. “Inspire” meant to breathe in spirit. Stop and visualise them, maybe checking origins in a good dictionary or Barfield’s History in English Words (1926). He writes:

“In the common words we use every day the souls of past races, the thoughts and feelings of individual men stand around us, not dead, but frozen into their attitudes likes the courtiers in the garden of the Sleeping Beauty. The more common a word is and the simpler its meaning, the bolder very likely is the original thought which it contains and the more intense the intellectual or poetic efforts which went to its making.”

As you re-animate the images, the words feel fuller. Speech becomes more like sketching or painting than algebra, which is one way to counter cringe dialogue.

3. The double look

Look at a tree. First, with modern eyes: a biological machine, an object “out there.” Then, drop the label. See it as a verb—a slow, upward burst of growth. Feel the tension in its branches. If you keep going, your thinking changes. That shift is you moving from observation into participation. You can deepen this with Steiner-inspired practices Barfield liked: watching a plant’s growth over weeks, writing poems that “save” appearances, or even trying eurythmy (a movement art from anthroposophy) to feel language in your body.

Barfield’s own poem An Autumn Bicycle Ride (1919) shows the vibe:

The leaves, grown rusty overhead,
Dropped on the road and made it red.
The air that coldly wrapped me round,
Stained by the glowing of the ground,
Had bathed the world in the cosy gloom
Of a great, red-carpeted, firelit room;
It filled my lungs, as I rode along,
Till they overflowed in a flood of song,
And joy grew truculent in my throat,
Uttering a pompous trombone-note;
For this elegant modern soul of mine
Was warm with old Autumn’s rich red wine.

See how internal feelings (joy/song) blend with the external world (leaves/air)? Try the same with whatever’s near you: a cup, a plant, a lamp. First as a dead object (idol); then as active presence, a “saved appearance” (icon).

4. The “just” fast

For one week, drop the word “just” from your explanations. Don’t say “it’s just the wind” or “it was just a dream.” “Just” erases depth. Without it, reality starts to feel much weirder, richer, and more demanding of your attention.

Finding the Trumpet Again

Long story short, we’ve become a civilisation of surface-dwellers. Led by detached, logic-only thinking, we’ve deified the outer image—taking things at face value, not deeply. “There’s nothing more to it than what meets the eye,” we think. And we miss everything.

At the end of Saving the Appearances, Barfield offers a sobering reminder: In Hebrew, an idol isn’t only a “false god,” but something experienced as totally devoid of spirit. That’s the hollowness pushing down on us now. We’ve lost the Silver Trumpet—our creative imagination that lets us see through to meaning. Our task is to find it again: to stop worshipping the world’s empty shell and learn to play the tune that brings it back to life.

Language is where all of this plays out most intimately. Barfield saw words as fossils of consciousness—each one preserving an earlier way the world and mind once met. As meanings split and thin, so does our sense of participation. The modern mind treats language as a neutral code or engine for information, from Descartes to Chomsky’s “universal grammar.” But for syntropic thinkers like Barfield and Ray Peat, language is metabolically alive—an organ of relation, not a machine of syntax. Speech doesn’t just (😁) describe the world; it embodies the world’s becoming.

Our speech reveals our consciousness. Dead words shrink imagination. The recovery of participation begins in language itself: re‑learning to talk as if the world’s alive, because it is!

I was listening to this tune by Glassio a lot while finishing this piece off. It feels very Barfieldian as it builds. The album cover it’s from does too.

I'll keep on waiting and wishing through the dunes
And the nighttime will tear me away from the things you do
When you're trying your best to dance
Oh, you're trying you're best to dance
And I'm all in love again
Now I'm spreading my wings until someone holds my hand

The Silver Trumpet has just been republished by the Barfield Press. It’s available on Amazon here.

In my last essay, I explored how “Netflix cringe” seems to be taking over scriptwriting, producing dialogue that’s experientially dead.1 I suggested that our left-hemisphere, low-energy culture might be part of this shift. I also made a brief aside about Ray Peat’s views on the American professor Noam Chomsky, who’s sometimes called “the father of modern linguistics.” This prompted a couple of friends to ask what I meant. This piece is a clarification and will also serve as a bridge to my next essay on Owen Barfield and the recovery of meaning.

Chomsky’s great claim was that humans share an innate “language faculty” in the brain, equipped with a largely hard‑wired “universal grammar.” This deep grammar sets the range of possible human languages, and particular languages are variations on that inbuilt template. The focus of his project is the abstract structure of sentences, deliberately bracketed off from the messy details of how people actually speak.

Ray Peat often took aim at this whole picture of language as “utterly fraudulent.”2 At one stage he remarked that “everything in reality falsifies Chomsky.” Peat meant that once you look closely at how language actually lives in bodies and situations, the theory starts to look like the map that has replaced the territory.

Three Immediate Clashes

1. Language as living interaction, not a sealed module

Chomsky’s language faculty is located inside the skull as a specialised cognitive capacity that constrains the range of possible grammars. Peat’s objection isn’t that Chomsky imagines a literal grammar machine producing speech, but that he treats grammar as something children cannot plausibly learn through ordinary processes of exposure, imitation, and pattern recognition.

More broadly, Peat sees organisms as energetic fields in constant interaction with their surroundings; consciousness for him is “interaction,” not a machine operating in isolation. Real language use involves voice, breath, energy state, posture, attention, and social context. It’s embodied, relational, and continuous with other forms of perception and action, which clashes with the idea of a sharply bounded internal grammar organ.

2. Real speech is messy and meaning‑saturated

Chomskyan linguistics largely brackets off performance—slips, hesitations, dialects, jokes, intonation, context—as “noise,” and builds its theory around an idealised competence. Peat is suspicious of this style of abstraction in biology and in language.

For Peat, what Chomskyan linguistics calls “noise” is better understood as rich learning material. Accents, clichés, humour, metaphor, and the way stress or nutrition changes how someone speaks or follows a conversation are not obstacles to acquisition but the very medium through which language is learned, accumulated, and creatively extended. That adaptive, creative, context‑driven behaviour is the thing to be understood. A clean, context‑free formalism can’t really account for it.

Peat saw this as part of a wider educational habit. “A few patterns, formulated in language, are substituted for the processes of exploration through metaphorical thinking,” he wrote. Early learning is expansive and metaphorical; once “a question is closed by an answer in the form of a rule that must be followed, subsequent learning can only be analytical and deductive,” moving through “a system of closed compartments.” That’s exactly the kind of closure a transcendent universal grammar invites.

Peat’s deeper objection is that once you acknowledge the sheer density of linguistic exposure—thousands of repeated constructions, stock phrases, and metaphorical patterns—there’s no compelling reason to think grammar requires a special inborn rule-system, rather than being learned through the same analogical processes as the rest of language.

3. The reductionist attitude—and its authoritarian edge

Peat’s broader criticism of modern science is that it breaks life into rule‑governed parts and sidelines intention, purpose, and self‑ordering activity. Chomsky’s generative grammar becomes, in this light, a linguistic version of the same move: language turned into a closed symbolic calculus, with meaning, history, and energy pushed to the margins. When Peat says that “everything in reality falsifies Chomsky,” he’s pointing to the gap between that style of abstraction and the reality of people actually talking.

He also watched how quickly Chomsky’s doctrine spread through universities in the 1960s and drew a conclusion about temperament and power. The speed of “Chomskyism,” he said, confirmed his sense that much humanities and social‑science teaching functioned as indoctrination rather than inquiry. “In being introduced into a profession,” he wrote, “any lingering tendency toward analogical‑metaphoric thinking is suppressed. I have known perceptive, imaginative people who, after a year or two in medical school, had become rigid rule‑followers.”

In that sense, universal grammar fits a left‑hemisphere world in Iain McGilchrist’s terms: technical, closed, convinced that real understanding lives in formal structures grasped by experts. It easily drifts toward an elitist split between those who “really” know language (the theorists) and those who merely speak it, and toward a style of discourse that is precise yet strangely indifferent to lived experience.

Peat’s concern is that theories of language can end up justifying authority rather than serving truth. “Theories of mind and language that justify arbitrary power,” he warned, “are more dangerous than merely mistaken scientific theories, because any theory that bases its arguments on evidence is capable of being disproved.”

The Bigger Picture

Peat is using “universal grammar” as shorthand for a whole style of thinking, and he sees three big commitments baked into it.

1. Materialism

Chomsky’s theory locates language in a specialised physical “organ” or module in the brain, with a built‑in structure. The reality of language is, in that view, ultimately a property of brain matter organised in a particular way.

Peat’s orientation is almost the opposite: he treats organisms as energetic, relational fields where mind, body, and environment interpenetrate. Language, on that view, isn’t just something the brain “has,” but something that happens in the whole organism–world process: breathing, posture, history, social context, metabolism, culture. A purely brain‑based, code‑like “grammar” feels to him like a materialist truncation.

2. Determinism

Universal grammar proposes a fixed underlying rule‑system that tightly constrains what counts as possible human language. The details of any language (English, Japanese, etc.) are variations on this pre‑set template.

For Peat, that reads as another deterministic schema with behaviour flowing from an inner program. He’s suspicious of any model where deep, unchangeable structures dictate life from behind the scenes (e.g., genes, drives, grammatical modules). He prefers to see organisms as open, plastic, history‑dependent, and constantly reorganising under changing conditions. Treating grammar as a fixed underlying system clashes with that plasticity.

3. Innatism

Chomsky’s key claim is that the core of grammar is innate: children are born with a universal grammar already in place, and experience just “triggers” its parameters.

Peat hears “innate” and becomes wary of how quickly it functions as an explanatory stopping point. His objection isn’t to biological constraint as such—organisms obviously have structure—but to the way innateness is invoked to bypass the real work of explaining development, learning, and adaptation under changing conditions.

He tends to emphasise how much can change with altered conditions (nutrition, stress, social field), including what we notice, how we think, and how we speak. A strong innatist position feels, to him, like it freezes something that’s actually actively forming itself.

Put simply, Peat hears “universal grammar” and hears a bundle of assumptions:

• Materialism: language reduced to something a specialised brain‑module has.

• Determinism: behaviour explained by a fixed, underlying rule‑system.

• Innatism: a tendency to treat underlying structures as pre-installed and largely explanatory in themselves, with experience reduced to a trigger rather than an active, formative process.

From this angle, Chomsky’s theory looks less like a neutral description and more like a symptom of a culture that prefers closed systems, expert authority, and biological inevitability to open‑ended, cultural, and energetic creativity. That same combination—authoritarian certainty, technical pedantry, and a background ideology of control—is exactly what Peat and, in a different register, Owen Barfield were pushing against. Peat writes:

“I think Chomsky discovered long ago that the people around him were sufficiently authoritarian to accept assertions without evidence if they were presented in a form that looked complexly technical. Several people have published their correspondence with him, showing him to be authoritarian and arrogant, even rude and insulting, if the person questioned his handling of evidence, or the lack of evidence.”3

Two Angles That Lead Straight to Barfield

All of this dovetails with the themes I’ll explore in my next essay: the need to reclaim meaning and history.

1. Meaning vs. form-only

Chomsky famously shows that a sentence can be grammatically perfect yet semantically bizarre (e.g., “Colourless green ideas sleep furiously”). Grammar, for him, can be studied as pure form. Peat’s starting point is almost the reverse. Metabolism, perception, and language are steeped in meaning from the outset. There’s no neutral “form‑only” layer that can be peeled off and examined in isolation. Real speech is always addressed to someone, in a mood, in a situation. It carries tone, value, and intention. Treating language as pure structure sidelines exactly those qualitative, relational dimensions that matter most for Peat—and, as we’ll see, for Barfield.

2. History and change vs. timeless structure

Universal grammar is largely ahistorical: the same deep grammar for all humans at all times, with surface variation. Barfield and Peat are both preoccupied with history and development. Barfield shows how meanings, and even basic experiences of the world, change across epochs; language carries that evolution. Peat stresses how physiology, perception, and even “instincts” can be reshaped by environment, culture, and energy state.

From this angle, a fixed, timeless grammar underestimates how deeply language and consciousness co‑evolve with history. New metaphors, new images, and new forms of speech literally change what’s thinkable and sayable.

Once you watch actual living speakers—bodies, histories, cultures, stresses, creative acts—you see something open‑ended, contextual, plastic, and energetic. It doesn’t sit comfortably with a static universal grammar.

From Rules to Participation

All of this brings us back to the question of meaning, and to the bridge toward Owen Barfield.

Chomsky’s project brackets meaning to get at a clean system of form. Peat’s criticism is that this move encourages a culture in which a few high‑status patterns and rules replace the earlier, exploratory life of language. Metaphor and imagination get downgraded. Education becomes training in rule‑following. The language faculty becomes, in effect, a transcendent authority.

Barfield will take this further. In his philosophy, the “closed‑rule” picture of language and mind is a late and necessary phase in the evolution of consciousness—a kind of withdrawal that gave us analytical clarity and individual freedom, but that now traps us in a thin world of particles, diagrams, and “Netflix cringe.” The task ahead isn’t to deny science or structure, but to move beyond a universe of rules into a renewed participation where language is again experienced as a living meeting between inner and outer.

Peat’s throwaway line that “everything in reality falsifies Chomsky” is a small doorway into that larger project. It reminds us that real speech is a creative, historical, embodied act in which meaning, energy, and relationship come into form together.

That’s where Barfield—and syntropy—will pick up the story.

Regular readers know I often bang on about Ray Peat’s bioenergetics and Iain McGilchrist’s brain hemisphere theory. What follows is a real-world example viewed through both lenses: a pattern in storytelling that many people sense but struggle to name. Increasingly, films, TV shows, and books seem to distrust the audience. Rather than inviting viewers to imagine and engage with subtle cues, characters now often state their motives and actions outright, as if we can only grasp what’s explicitly spelled out.

My aim in this essay isn’t to blame everything on low energy. Instead, I want to explore how attention, physiology, and culture influence each other. These forces quietly alter how stories are told and reflect broader shifts in how we think and perceive.

The Cringe Dialogue Trend

In recent years, Netflix screenwriters have reported a recurring instruction to make characters explicitly “announce what they’re doing.” This makes plots easy to follow even if the show is playing in the background.1 Critics describe this as a move toward simpler, more expository scripts optimised for “casual” or “second‑screen” viewing. Essentially, it’s writing optimised for people scrolling on their phones.23

This trend violates the longstanding “show, don’t tell” principle of screenwriting, which trusts audiences to notice and interpret what’s happening through behaviour, action, and visual metaphor rather than direct narration. As Jason Hellerman says, “it’s the difference between a character stating they’re an expert marksman and a scene showing them hitting a bullseye.”4 Modern writing assumes divided attention, so everything must be explained outright. The result is dialogue that often ends up feeling flat, unnatural, and a bit “cringe.” It serves more as a delivery system for plot points than as authentic character interaction.

Though these are anonymous insider reports and not official policy, the pattern they highlight is hard to miss. Netflix has popularised a type of “backgroundable” content, where heavy exposition ensures stories remain understandble with minimal focus.5

A striking example is season 5 of Stranger Things. Watch almost any minute or two from the first few episodes and you’ll hear characters describing their emotions and plans in tidy, overly direct sentences that no one would say in real life. At times, it sounds like they’re literally just reading their stage directions out loud.

In this clip you’ll get an immediate feel for this (no spoilers):

Viewer reactions on X (formerly Twitter) capture the frustration: a common complaint is that the show no longer trusts the audience to pick up on anything subtle or implied.

Data as Dialogue

Iain McGilchrist’s work helps explain what’s happening here. The left brain hemisphere prefers clear, step-by-step information without context. The right hemisphere, by contrast, handles nuance, tone, implicit meanings, metaphor, and the unspoken elements that give life to a scene. The directive to “have characters say what they’re doing” is a classic left-hemisphere approach: it strips away ambiguity and subtlety, allowing half-distracted viewers to follow without needing to infer from small cues like silences, glances, or atmosphere.

This isn’t to demonise the left hemisphere—it’s vital for tasks requiring precision and analysis—but when its mode of attention dominates culture, storytelling flattens into checklists of discrete informational units rather than immersive worlds to explore. “Backgroundable” content prioritises surface-level details and neatly packaged facts over emotional depth or unexpected twists. This aligns with McGilchrist’s warnings about a cultural drift toward mechanical, fragmented perception.6

Peat on Language, Metaphor, and Rigid Thinking

The other piece of the puzzle comes from Ray Peat, who, beyond his work on hormones and metabolism, spent decades exploring how language influences thought.7 He distinguished between an “exploratory analogical mind” that learns by forming and testing broad metaphors and comparisons, and a “rule-bound” mode confined to narrow, pre-defined, “closed compartments.”8

In his book, Mind and Tissue (1976), Peat elaborated on this by contrasting a “verbal-symbolic” style of thinking, where attention fixates on isolated concepts marked by labels, with an intuitive “landscape-like” mode that perceives a broader field of patterns and relationships.9 The verbal-symbolic mode restricts thought to deduction from fixed symbols, emphasising sameness and repetition. The landscape mode is expansive and synthetic, leaning toward novelty and discovery. Some people get stuck in the verbal-symbolic mode. They fill their inner world with words and abstractions that make their understanding of science, art, and nature feel hollow and disconnected from lived experience.

This maps closely to McGilchrist’s hemispheres: the “flags on peaks” of verbal symbols align with the left hemisphere’s preference for explicit, pin-pointed information, while the unifying landscape reflects the right hemisphere’s holistic integration.

Peat believed early learning is naturally expansive and metaphorical. Children probe new experiences, compare them to what they know, and build flexible worldviews. But when rigid formulas, jargon, and authority shut down curiosity, thinking becomes deductive and boxed in. Instead of questioning or exploring, you just manipulate tokens within a closed system. The joy of discovery gives way to the comfort of ticking the right boxes.

Language, for Peat, is both a preserver of understanding and a potential barrier. Words begin rooted in sensory, intuitive experiences, but over time, they can detach into free-floating abstractions. This allows “understanding” without direct encounter. People accept ideas as true simply because they’re articulable. By our mid‑20s, most of us carry a load of unexamined assumptions embedded in our language.10

In a 2021 newsletter, Peat described language as a kind of energetic flow:

“Energy, thought, and language flow in one direction, through time, building up persistent structures. The structure of a flame, or of a sentence, is definite, but it takes its form from its situation. The symbolic aspect of language is trivial, subordinate to the energy that supports it.”11

A sentence isn’t static code but a contextual event shaped by energy. When symbols are treated as self-contained objects, language loses its relational vitality, as in Netflix’s on-the-nose dialogue, which pins everything down with verbal labels rather than inviting intuitive engagement.

Alfred North Whitehead, whom Peat admired, emphasised what’s lost: a sentence or symbol alone is inert, just marks or sounds. Its value comes from the imaginative leap it inspires, using ambiguity to open new possibilities for integration into personal experience. Reduced to formulas and clichés, language becomes an administrative tool, closing off those possibilities.

Peat linked this to personality and politics.12 Drawing on psychologist Bob Altemeyer’s model of authoritarian personalities, characterised by conventionalism, submission to authority, and aggression towards outsiders, Peat noted that these traits involve compartmentalised reasoning that tolerates contadictions if sanctioned by power.13 In hierarchical cultures that prioritise rote learning over creativity, such patterns become embedded in institutions. This was certainly my experience in academia: rule-heavy, jargon-laden language protects dogma, rewards recitation, and discourages genuine inquiry. Paired with McGilchrist’s hemisphere imbalance, it shows language evolving from exploratory to procedural, progressively closing down worlds of meaning.

Low-Energy Attention and Why Literalism Feels Good

Peat added a physiological dimension to all this. Good metabolic function, especially efficient glucose oxidation in the brain, supports flexible, context‑rich thinking. Low metabolism, however, pushes us toward rigid, simplified patterns. When energy is scarce, nuance and subtlety become exhausting, while black-and-white answers feel reassuring.14

Chronic stress hormones, sluggish thyroid function, excess polyunsaturated fats, and poor sleep reduce cerebral blood flow and impair glucose oxidation. This shrinking metabolic margin limits the ability to tolerate complexity and hold multiple threads of meaning. Ambiguity becomes metabolically expensive. Literal statements provide relief because they cost less to process: no need to decode a glance or silence; the character simply says, “I’m angry at you.”

Peat compared it to a violin that has been soaked in water:

“…it will sound very odd when it’s played. Its various parts won’t resonate properly. Similarly, the living substance has to be in a particular state to resonate properly with its environment.”

Even if you bow it in exactly the same way, the swollen wood and glue won’t resonate properly, so the sound is thin and wrong. Similarly, a stressed, under‑fuelled nervous system can’t easily “resonate” with the complexity of a scene. It receives the signals but can’t organise them into rich patterns. Clear, explicit statements are like loud, single notes on a compromised instrument in that they’re easier to produce and process.

Peat didn’t see this as laziness but as a systemic metabolic shift reshaping perception. Modern environments amplify stress, constricting attention, dulling imagination, and making literalism seem practical. A society of fatigued nervous systems gravitates to verbal-symbolic thinking, hopping between fixed labels rather than exploring landscapes. Expository dialogue fits this constrained space perfectly: low-effort media for “consumption” without tracking relationships or uncertainty. Corporations exploit this, tilting culture toward rigidity. Yet, Peat argued, restoring energy revives metaphor, curiosity, and tolerance for complexity.

Language, Exploration, and the Orienting Reflex

Netflix‑style dialogue exemplifies a broader change in how language is used. “Show, don’t tell” activates the “orienting reflex” I wrote about in my last essay.15 Our innate drive to turn toward something that might matter, interpret tones and expressions, infer meanings, and refine mental models. “Tell, don’t show” bypasses this reflex, delivering pre-packaged labels instead.

Peat saw consciousness as active participation: an organism’s response to its environment. Even dreams and hallucinations, in his view, imply a reference to something real. A scene’s purpose isn’t just information transfer but drawing viewers into a shared field of attention. Expository dialogue short‑circuits that participatory process by standing in for it with a description.

This aligns with Peat’s metaphorical vs. rule‑based distinction: metaphors prompt “In what ways is this like that?” while rules dictate “This is that; repeat after me.” Expository writing closes questions rather than opening them. It says: “This is what’s happening; don’t look further.”

Ivan Pavlov highlighted that humans have a first signalling system (direct sensory cues and conditioned responses) and a second signalling system: language, or “signals of signals.”16 In healthy cultures, this second system should deepen perception. But here, it substitutes for perception, overlaying thin verbal labels instead of enriching engagement.

A perfect festive counter‑example is Raymond Briggs’ picture book The Snowman (1978). It has no words at all, yet it has sold more than five million copies across 19 countries.17 In the classic 1982 film adaptation, there’s no expository dialogue (with the exception of the central song, “Walking in the Air”), no narration filling in the gaps, just visuals and music that invite you to inhabit a child’s world directly.

The magic is precisely in what isn’t said. Both the book and the film pull you in and let you feel the texture of childhood in ways words would blunt or ruin. You have to participate, to supply your own associations and emotions, and that participation is part of the pleasure.

The Snowman shows what’s possible when a work trusts the reader’s orienting reflex and intuitive “landscape‑mode” attention. Much of today’s expository streaming content does the opposite.

The Endings Problem

This intolerance also appears in reactions to ambiguous endings. The film No Country for Old Men, widely regarded as a modern classic (it’s definitely in my top 20), periodically sparks complaints that it “doesn’t end properly.” The finale of The Sopranos—the greatest show of all time 😁—is probably the most infamous example of this, with anger still lingering years later over its open-endedness.18 It’s as if a story without a clear bookend and moral has somehow failed.19

The left hemisphere craves clean, filed away conclusions while the right dwells in unresolved, nuanced, open experience. Peat’s bioenergetics suggest low metabolic reserves amplify this, as ambiguity demands resources that are scarce in stressed states.

The Two Lenses Together

Combining McGilchrist and Peat reveals a self-reinforcing loop that’s easy to see once you notice it:

• Fragmented, low-energy attention leads to narrow, left-hemisphere-dominant styles of representation.

• Left-hemisphere-dominance demands explicit exposition and rule-like language.

• Explicit exposition fosters media needing less energetic, metaphorical engagement.

• Low-engagement media trains fragmented, stimulus-driven attention.

• Fragmented attention reinforces low-energy physiology and authoritarian, cognitive habits.

Eventually, low-energy literalism starts to seem “normal.” This isn’t just a simple tale of “executives have ruined art and storytelling.” Rather, it’s a systemic interplay between physiology, attention, language, technology, and institutional incentives. It’s a symptom of corporations serving a left‑hemisphere cognitive style, expressed in rule‑like language, to high‑cortisol, low‑thyroid audiences who experience ambiguity as a metabolic strain.

What the Cringe is Really Telling Us

The “cringe” viewers feel when characters narrate their lives is their right hemisphere, our authenticity sensor, recoiling from fakery. The body senses art being degraded to labelled fragments by collective fatigue. If Peat is right about energy and language, and McGilchrist is right about hemispheres and attention, then this isn’t just a matter of taste. A tired culture makes and craves tired art, which reinforces tired thinking.

The way out isn’t complicated in theory: restore metabolic vitality, reclaim exploratory language, and embrace resonant “unfinishedness.” When energy rises, subtlety feels easy, complexity becomes inviting again, and stories stop needing characters to read us their notes aloud. They can breathe a bit, and so can we.

A Soundtrack for Tired Attention

I recorded this mix last year. It opens and closes with Iain McGilchrist sharing some essential wisdom, with deep, flowing beats in between to pull you out of low-energy fog. Grab a Coke, hit play, and let the subtlety sink in 😁

“The Soviet concept of the orienting, or exploratory, reflex is the most important single holistic ‘informing principle’ in biology and psychology. It comes close to being the definition of an organism.”

— Ray Peat, Mind and Tissue1

If you asked a typical evolutionary biologist or Freudian psychologist about the main drive of a living thing, they’d likely give you a familiar answer: survival, avoidance of pain, or reproduction. The organism is portrayed as a defensive system, on perpetual alert against a hostile world.

Ray Peat, however, offered a very different emphasis, drawing from a century of largely overlooked Soviet physiological research. He argued that a healthy, energised organism naturally gravitates toward active engagement with novelty. The Russians called this systemic response to the unexpected the “Orienting Reflex”—a coordinated process by which the organism turns toward the new, assimilates it, and incorporates it into itself internally. This isn’t a “drive” in the motivational sense but an expression of the organism’s energetic capacity to confront and integrate the unknown.

The “What Is It?” Reflex

This reflex signifies a fundamental difference in how East and West have approached brain function. In the late 1800s, Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov became famous for his experiments on dogs and conditioned reflexes.2 During these studies, he noticed that any unexpected stimuli, like the sound of a door creaking or a sudden shadow moving on a wall, would interrupt the animals’ behaviour and pull their attention toward the new event. Pavlov called this the “What is it?” reflex.

Decades later, in the 1950s, Soviet researcher Evgeny Sokolov expanded this idea by proposing a new way to understand how the brain processes information.3 He argued that the brain isn’t a passive mirror simply reflecting what we sense. Instead, it acts as an active prediction engine, constantly creating an internal “neural model” of what it expects to happen next. When the real world doesn’t match these predictions (i.e., when something unexpected occurs), the orienting reflex kicks in. This reflex triggers a full-body alert: muscles tense, posture shifts, senses focus on the new stimulus, and brain activity intensifies. The purpose of this response is to help the brain update its internal model, sharpen perception, and adapt behaviour accordingly.

Love him or hate him, Jordan Peterson thinks Sokolov should have been awarded a Nobel prize for this discovery (1 min video):

Unlike the defensive startle reflex, which triggers a sudden jump or recoil to protect the body, the orienting reflex is expansive and inquisitive. It represents the body leaning in and actively “questioning” its surroundings through a coordinated physical adjustment that turns attention and posture toward what’s new. This is supported by autonomic changes like altered heart rate and heightened brain activity. Together, these responses prepare the organism to take in whatever just appeared, rather than simply recoil from it.4

The Cortical Trap

Peat extends this physiological framework to critique the modern “cortical person”—the abstract intellectual, bureaucrat, or Cartesian scientist—who splits mechanical thought from embodied reality.5 He explains that such people are dominated by what Pavlov called the “second signal system” (language, symbols, abstract concepts), while neglecting the “first signal system” based on direct sensory perception.6 As Peat puts it:

“The cortex is the mediator between inside and out... But the cortex is activated by processes in lower or older parts of the brain, so that it functions with the greatest energy and intensity when it is openly collaborating with the instincts.”

Peat warns that when the cerebral cortex becomes a rigid dictator, suppressing the body’s instinctual wisdom, life turns brittle and energy-starved. The organism becomes alienated from the vitality needed for creative and adaptive engagement with novelty. This disconnection undermines the natural flow between perception, feeling, and action that sustains life.

Contemporary thinkers, such as Iain McGilchrist and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, echo the theme that rigid, abstract forms of cognition create a disconnection from embodied perception and meaningful experience. Merleau-Ponty sees perception not as a detached mental process but as an active bodily engagement with the world, where the body and environment exist in a reciprocal relationship.7 McGilchrist highlights how understanding ultimately must return to the body, as embodied experience grounds all meaning. Viewed through Peat’s bioenergetic lens, this disconnection is explained as a fundamental metabolic insufficiency that weakens the orienting reflex and coherence of perception, undermining our capacity to engage fully with life’s dynamic and embodied nature.

The Energetics of Coherence

Synthesising a complex world into a unified, holistic understanding requires substantial energy. A jumbled up, chaotic pile of facts represents high entropy, or disorder. While a coherent, integrated understanding reflects low entropy, or order. Creating and maintaining order is metabolically costly, but a well-functioning nervous system invests energy to sustain a flexible and integrated grasp of reality. As Peat suggests:

“It’s reasonable to guess that a unified, generalized picture of the world will take less energy to support than will a jumbled, chaotic collection of images... A higher degree of holism would be the existence of a tendency toward completeness.”

When energy levels are low, due to stress, hypothyroidism, or impaired mitochondrial respiration, the brain struggles to preserve its coherence. The orienting reflex weakens, reducing the organism’s ability to filter irrelevant stimuli and maintain the inhibitory control needed for focused, anticipatory attention.

Peat proposed that symptoms often associated with ADHD, such as distractibility and hyperactivity, may arise from this low-energy state. He noted that stimulants enhancing metabolic and adrenergic function can improve these symptoms, supporting the idea that insufficient energy limits the proper functioning of frontal lobe inhibitory processes:8

“Various theories of what causes hyperactivity, e.g., low blood sugar, weak radiation from fluorescent lights and TV, or food additives, and the observation that drugs which stimulate the sympathetic or adrenergic nerves (ephedrine or caffeine, for example) will relieve the symptoms, are all consistent with the idea that not enough energy is being supplied to permit this tissue to function properly.”

Appetite as Exploration

Peat extends the idea of the orienting reflex beyond the brain to include the gut. Hunger is not a passive emptiness but an active orientation towards what’s missing: a kind of metabolic “gap” between the current depleted state and a more complete one of satiation. This involves a mental “intention image,” or craving, representing what would restore balance.

As Peat explains:

“This intention image is the means for regulating behavior--for ‘collating the actual and the intended’--and is sometimes called the ‘acceptor of action.’ That is, the action is refined, until the perceived result of the action corresponds accurately to the guiding image of the desired situation.”

From a “Marxian,” or Soviet dialectical materialist perspective crucial to Peat, the organism is inherently self-organising and goal-directed (teleological).9 It doesn’t simply respond mechanically but is pulled purposefully toward restoring functional integrity, whether through food, knowledge, or social connection.

This mental image embodies an accumulated history, like a kind of working hypothesis the organism tests through interaction. When faced with something truly novel, with no ready-made plan, the organism mobilises perception to learn more and create a new image. This mobilisation is the orienting reflex: a turning toward the unknown to update the map.

Therapy and the “Growth Reflex”

Soviet researchers applied these insights clinically through “conditional reflex therapy,” which aimed to break maladaptive patterns by altering sensory environments and retraining the nervous system’s expectations.10 Peat took this further philosophically, interpreting the orienting reflex not merely as a mechanical survival response but as a “growth reflex”—a biological correlate of openness, transformation and continual becoming. As Peat explains:

“The orienting reflex is always a growth reflex, since it allows the self to approximate itself to a novel aspect of the world, becoming something different in the process of assimilating strangeness.”

This idea aligns with Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy, which views life as an ongoing embrace of infinite possibilities:

“Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of life is to grasp as much as we can out of that infinitude.”

A stressed or hypothyroid organism struggles to grow when confronted by novelty.11 Rather than explore, it may withdraw into submissive passivity or respond with anger. The orienting reflex diminishes, leaving the individual trapped in despair or rigid control; both signs of a failed engagement with life’s unfolding possibilities.

Waking Up

In today’s world, the orienting reflex is often suppressed. Algorithms keep feeding our existing biases and beliefs, blocking the “mismatches” that would trigger learning and growth. Meanwhile, chronic stress shifts our physiology toward defensive “startle” responses, making novelty feel threatening rather than inviting.12

Peat describes a “dependency or insecurity culture” particularly in Western education. He suggests:

“One aspect of mild ‘psychopathology’ probably relates to the simple fact that a child can become accustomed to looking exclusively to others to resolve questions, rather than being carried by the orienting reflex directly to the relevant practical, material reality for his answer.”

Reclaiming this reflex requires a physiological foundation that supports curiosity and coherence: healthy thyroid function, efficient mitochondrial respiration, stable glucose, and adequate CO₂ production. It also demands openness to the “dreamy,” intuitive synthesis beyond rigid cortical reasoning. A well-fuelled brain faces the world openly, while an energy-starved brain withdraws.

Importantly, Peat extends the orienting reflex beyond individual environmental engagement to relationship building. From infancy, mutual orienting—such as a baby tuning into a mother’s voice and expressions and vice versa—is the basis of emotional bonding, empathy, and learning. The reflex grounds how we pay attention to and connect with each other, emphasising relationships are embodied, energetic engagements rather than mere cognitive exchanges.

Ultimately, Peat reminds us that living beings aren’t built only for defence or mechanical survival but for adaptive growth. With a well-fueled brain and supportive environment, we can face novelty and others with a full-body question: “What is it?” This gesture opens the door to creativity, connection, and a vibrant life of becoming more than we were.13

Cultivating the Exploratory State

If the orienting reflex marks healthy engagement with the world, then true health transcends merely avoiding disease. It requires a sustained metabolic capacity for flexible, coherent interaction. Practically, this entails:

1. Energy as the Foundation

Coherent perception and flexible orientation demand significant metabolic resources. When metabolism weakens, organisms default to older, less energy-intensive programmess. Supporting oxidative metabolism—with stable blood sugar and readily metabolised carbohydrates like fruit, honey, and milk—helps sustain the energy base essential for curiosity and mental clarity.14

2. Safety before Exploration

Psychological safety is important, yet without physiological safety it amounts to a superficial haze of learned helplessness. Chronic stress hormones push the nervous system toward reactive inhibition. Minimising stressors, avoiding metabolic suppressors like polyunsaturated fats, and supporting mitochondrial function reduce internal noise and free energy to fuel exploration.

3. Re-engage the First Signal System

Peat emphasised the importance of the first signal system: direct sensory engagement. Complex, novel environments that demand active perception foster orienting processes. Immersion in art, nature, rich music, or learning new physical skills promotes this. Passive digital novelty or endless abstraction fails to engage the system.

4. Embrace Mismatch

In the Soviet model, mismatch drives learning. A rigid mind rejects it, while a healthy organism uses it to continually refine internal models. This ongoing physiological and psychological flexibility enables growth rather than stubborn fixation.

5. Walk the Talk

Walking creates a dialogue between body and world, dissolving overthinking through active presence. From Aristotle to Kierkegaard, philosophers valued walking as perception in motion, where insight emerges through movement, mirroring the orienting reflex’s whole-body inquiry toward novelty and adaptation.15

6. Meditation

Many meditation practices cultivate the orienting reflex by nurturing a sustained turning toward experience, softening the rigid self into ongoing novelty. This loosens the brain’s reductive filters, allowing abstract thought to float over a foundation of bodily sensation and intuition.

In recent essays, I’ve explored Ray Peat’s bioenergetics, Iain McGilchrist’s hemisphere theory, and the developmental stages of Spiral Dynamics. This one takes those ideas further. It diagnoses what I’m calling “organisational hypothyroidism”—a low-energy slump that shows up as bureaucracy and burnout. We’ll look at what’s causing it and suggest practical ways to boost energy and help systems regain their spark. The goal is to get work flowing smoothly again instead of hitting a wall.1

To keep things actionable, I also lean on Ken Wilber’s four quadrants model (AQAL).2 This framework splits what’s going on inside (our thoughts and culture) from what’s happening outside (our behaviours and structures), and considers both individual and collective levels. This shows how everything in an organisation, from personal energy to team dynamics, links together biologically. Combining this with Spiral Dynamics’ Stage Yellow (an integrative, systems-thinking level), we get a broader, meta‑systemic view of what’s going on, grounded in how energy drives development.

Psychological safety is the current buzzword du jour, but it stands on shaky ground. At its core lies physiological safety—the cellular signal of abundant energy—an indispensable foundation for any thriving organisation.3

Collective Physiology

Ray Peat saw life as a dynamic dialectic, where form continually emerges out of flowing energy, like a river slowly carving its banks. When metabolic energy (the steady production of ATP and CO₂) is abundant, an organism can afford complexity, adaptability, and heightened consciousness.4 But when energy drops, everything tightens up. Structures stiffen, awareness narrows, and survival mode kicks in. Peat believed metabolism is literally the basis of consciousness itself.5

This fractal pattern shows up everywhere, from individual cells right through to whole organisations. Companies aren’t lifeless machines but living entities. Their “metabolism” turns raw inputs (ideas, capital, human effort) into tangible outcomes like decisions, products, and progress. And since perception ties directly to metabolism, how energised the system is affects how well it understands the world.

The Energetics of Perception

When energy runs low, whether in a person’s brain or a company’s boardroom, it becomes difficult to see clearly. Drawing from McGilchrist, the brain’s Left Hemisphere likes static maps and fixed categories, mirroring Parmenides’ idea of unchanging “being.” The Right Hemisphere, on the other hand, is attuned to flow and change. It perceives the living, shifting world, echoing Heraclitus’ idea of “becoming,” where everything is always in motion.6 When energy falls, the Left Hemisphre dominates. Complexity gets reduced to rules and labels, missing the “gestalt” (the bigger picture where the whole is more than the sum of its parts).7

On the flip side, a high-energy system can afford to relax into the Right Hemisphere’s wide-angle view, spotting links and nuances. How well an organisation thinks and acts isn’t that different from what’s happening at the cellular level—it’s the same logic just on a larger scale. When energy’s high, insight unfolds; when it’s low, awareness contracts as a survival hack. No fancy strategy beats this reality. A “hypothyroid” organisation mirrors a hypothyroid body, feeling sluggish and defensive. Signs like “bureaucracy,” “burnout,” or “stagnation” reveal this biological slowdown, costing firms big.8 It begins in perception, when muddled signals cause people to stop syncing, and the whole place starts talking past itself.

Healthy metabolism feels warm and generative. Dysfunctional metabolism is cold and stuck. To fix workplaces today, we’ve got to address this underlying metabolic issue, not just throw more quick-fixes or “well-being” perks at the problem. Wellness apps and free yoga won’t cut it if the core energy is tanked.

The Anatomy of Organisational Hypothyroidism

I’m stretching Peat’s ideas here beyond what he said directly, but the links between hypothyroid biology and stalled companies feel practical, not just metaphorical.

1. Metabolic Slowdown (Bureaucratic Drag)

Hypothyroidism hampers Cytochrome oxidase (a key energy enzyme), cutting ATP production and CO₂. The pulse slows, calcium builds up, and “brain fog” creeps in, making quick action almost impossible.

In organisations, this shows up as Stage Blue in Spiral Dynamics—a solid order and hierarchy that turns toxic when it gets stuck. Rules tighten, manuals grow, and meetings multiply to mask the inertia, keeping everything frozen in place. “Analysis paralysis” becomes a cultural mood and the Left Hemisphere takes control, favouring maps over reality. Nothing gets done, everyone’s waiting on someone else, and risk get vetoed with triple sign-offs.9 Blue’s stability is good, it’s only pathological when the organisation can’t evolve beyond it, blocking growth.

2. Systemic Inflammation (Defensive Operations)

When oxidative metabolism falters, stress hormones like cortisol and estrogen rise to keep things limping along. Tissue is broken down for fuel, lactic acid builds up, and inflammation spreads.

Organisations shift from creative flow (oxidative) to defensive hoarding (inflammatory). Siloed turf wars form and collaboration tools end up being places where people dodge responsibility or subtly blame each other. Job security drops and people focus on self-preservation. The place runs on the stress equivalents of knee-jerk reactions, control freakery, and endless “firefighting.” Instead of proactice root-cause solving, energy is wasted on politics.

3. The Glycolytic Shift (Performative Busyness)

When mitochondria fail to use oxygen, the cell falls back on glycolysis, an ancient, inefficient pathway yielding just 2 ATP per glucose molecule (vs. up to 36 in full oxidation). It keeps you alive but leads to fatigue and toxicity.

Teams hustle harder but get less done. Effort pours into the “performative work” of meetings, memos, “Cover Your Ass” emails, snarky Slack messages, and compliance theatre. David Graeber called these “bullshit jobs,” those meaningless tasks that feel busy but add no value.10 It’s a Left Hemisphere trap of obsessing over spreadsheets and dashboards instead of actually changing anything in the real world. Busyness wins, vitality fades, and cynicism grows.11

4. Coldness and Disconnection (Alienation)

Blood is pulled from the periphery to protect the core. The extremities grow cold and numb (hands, feet, nose), shrinking awareness.

Leadership isolates itself at the top, out of touch with the frontline realities. The “core” (leadership) hordes information while the “limbs” (frontline teams) starve. People check out and “quiet quitting” grows.1213 The “social thyroid” (basically the workforce’s pulse) gets suppressed, and the system grows slow and unresponsive. Interactions become scripted, mechanical, and devoid of life. The workplace spark dies, replaced by isolation and confusion.

5. The Hibernation Reflex (The Serotonin Haze of Sameness)

Dopamine falls and serotonin rises, inducing a torpor linked to inflammation and learned helplessness. Energy is conserved by reducing curiosity and movement, but at a cost of degeneration.

Culture retreats to “safe spaces,” not those of the psychological safety everyone bangs on about, but rather zones of avoidance. Novelty feels scary and complexity overwhelming. Mantras like “Let’s not rock the boat” and “This is how we’ve always done it” echo this serotonergic vibe. Procedures trump principles and empty routines kill the drive to learn. What gets called “sustainability” is really hibernation, a kind of comfortable, stagnating mediocrity that slowly stifles vitality.

The Environment is the Cause

Peat saw dysfunction as adapting to a hostile environment: “Energy and structure are interdependent at every level,” even socially. Hypothyroidism protects against starvation, toxins, or stress. Fix the environment, and function returns.

Organisations become hypothyroid when strapped for resources. They rely on “junk calories” like quarterly returns and financial tricks over real value. They cannibalise themselves through layoffs, cost-cutting, and erosion of quality—chasing short-lived energy spikes like a body running on adrenaline.

Biologically, polyunsaturated fats (PUFAs) suppress the thyroid and block respiration.14 Business “PUFAs” are constant “re-orgs,” trendy management fads, “business bullshit” (as André Spicer terms the jargon that empties language and stifles thought),15 surveillance tools, noisy open-plan offices, and harsh blue lighting. These create “oxidative stress” that makes everything stiff and brittle. More literally, even the corporate cafeteria (and the industrial seed oils it often serves) can fuel hypothyroidism too.

Restoring Organisational Vitality

Healing needs an energy surplus. It fuels evolution from rigid Blue through driven Orange and caring Green to flowing Yellow, and maybe beyond to holistic Turquoise. This isn’t something you can just decide to do; it requires metabolic work to engage Heraclitean becoming over stuck being.

Solutions work best when simple, clear, and team-owned. Small steps anyone can start tomorrow include:

1. Raise the Temperature

Warmth invites complexity. It comes from light, fuel, and safety. Get energy (information, decisions, resources) flowing freely.

Ditch cold blue lights for daylight or warm incandescents to boost alertness, mood, and reduce strain. Let people adjust their own workspace to feel good, increasing engagement and cognition.16 Stock kitchens with thyroid supporting fresh juices, good coffee, quality dairy, and saturated fats like coconut oil. Sugar is clean fuel here, just like trust and transparency in the organisation.17

Cut pointless meetings and reports. Empower choices and cycle “energy events” like team breakfasts, walking meetings, lunchtime games, or creative play activities to recharge interpersonal bonds and break ruts. As Ray Peat says below, “If you’re far from the euphoric condition, it means you’re basically degenerating.” These bring rhythm and life back. Adding art and nature to office sparks sparks curiosity and brain growth.1819

Update competency frameworks and performance criteria to reward people who bring different perspectives together and can handle complexity. Look for skills like “integrating multiple perspectives,” “designing feedback loops,” “experimenting and iterating,” and “thinking systemically rather than in silos.” Give talented people chances to work on complex, cross-team projects that build their comfort with uncertainty. Use practical tools like causal-loop mapping and after-action reviews to make progress visible and align with Yellow-level leadership thinking. (Wilber’s Upper Right: Exterior-Individual)

2. Reduce Inflammation (Calm the Defence State)

Chronic defensiveness wears down what it’s trying to protect. Swap blame for flow, replacing “Who’s at fault?” with “Where’s the energy blocked, and how do we improve it?” Break silos, rebuild safety, and dial down stress. Mimic protective hormones like progesterone and pregnenolone which buffer stress and promote clear thinking.20

• Start meetings with energy check-ins and focus on clearing bottlenecks together. This shifts the culture toward collaborative problem solving.

• After setbacks, hold learning-led reviews that highlight systemic causes and solutions, not blame games.

• Appoint “stress clearers” who cut red tape, broker deadlines, and bridge gaps so others can create and connect.

• Encourage real breaks and regular movement, laughter, silliness, play, and social time to reset stress-chemistry and signal safety.

Position the organisation as a living organism within a dynamic ecosystem. Its shared purpose transcends individual agendas, aligning collective intelligence toward adaptive growth. Encourage members to see tensions and disagreements as sources of creative energy rather than conflict. This reframes complexity as a field of learning where diverse perspectives contribute to systemic health. Use dialogue that blends values (e.g., Blue stability, Orange efficiency, Green care, Yellow integration) so the culture remains open and non-dogmatic. (Wilber’s Lower Left: Interior-Collective)

Cultivate “perspective literacy” through programmes in philosophy, systems thinking, dialectics, bioenergetics, and developmental frameworks like Spiral Dynamics and Integral Theory. Encourage leaders to develop the capacity to hold ambiguity and multiple truths without collapsing into “either/or” binary thinking. This nurtures metabolic stewardship, sustaining integrative intelligence and evolving wholeness. (Wilber’s Upper Left: Interior-Individual)

3. Re-engage “Oxidative” Work

Oxygen in a cell is like presence in a team. It’s the Right Hemisphere’s holistic attention. CO₂ helps deliver oxygen (Bohr effect: CO₂/pH shifts release oxygen where needed).21 Cultures “hyperventilating” on constant urgency and panic lose CO₂ and suffocate.

• Create no-notification zones for focus on substantial tasks.

• Set aside quiet time every week for focus and reflection, building collective CO₂ and restoring attention.

• Distinguish between urgent and important and stop the constant “all hands on deck” broadcasts that create panic and burn out CO₂.

4. Nourish the “Social Thyroid”

The thyroid senses and signals energy use. Those closest to the real work fulfil that role.22 Feed them meaningful autonomy, fairness, and trust. Metabolic stewardship clears inflammation and fuels mitochondria, ensuring people grow and differentiate into energetic frogs, not fat f*cking tadpoles (FFTs).23

• Let frontline staff rotate leading on team check-ins/projects, receiving feedback and trust rather than micromanagement.

• Open up transparency on resource sharing, budgets, and decisions to allow everyone to track resource flows and cut starvation fears.

• Celebrate “energy givers” who spark teams through kindness, ingenuity, or practical help, just as thyroid hormones spark meaningful growth.

Evolve beyond rigid hierarchies toward modular, project-based structures. Stable “home” teams anchor belonging and shared identity, while fluid cross-functional pods tackle complex, emergent challenges. Design governance and strategy as adaptive circuits, with real-time feedback loops bridging operations, metrics, and learning to sustain responsiveness and intelligence throughout the system. Adopt the principle of “Good enough for now, safe enough to try” to foster experimentation through small, reversible bets. This evolutionary rhythm allows the organisation to expand and renew itself organically, maintaining coherence while embracing change. (Wilber’s Lower Right: Exterior-Collective)

5. Embrace Hysteresis (Rhythm Over Rigidity)

Peat talked about “hysteresis,” the physical memory of a system. A healthy system retains useful patterns (rhythm) without being trapped by them (rigidity). Vitality comes from rhythmic tension where the structure can flex and flow. Just like in the cell, gradients drive flow and life thrives in tension, not frozen patterns.24

• End each week reviewing: What served our vitality? What created rigidity? What could be adjusted?

• Balance steady rituals (fixed check-ins, weekly contests) with experiments (venue changes, skipped reports, invited guests) to keep the system breathing and responsive.

• Cycle intensity and rest by structuring meetings, sprints, and feedback cycles to align with natural flows (i.e., periods of intensity followed by rest).

The Cellular Basis of Culture

No system can exceed the vitality of its parts. Organisational metabolism is simply the sum of the energy flowing through the nervous systems within it.

Low ATP signals “danger,” spiking cortisol and narrowing perception into the Left Hemisphere’s detail-focused map. High ATP signals physiological safety, inviting the Right-Hemisphere’s broad, generous, novelty-seeking view.

You can’t build a thriving, Yellow culture on depleted biology. When people run low on fuel and light, riding a wave of stress hormones, the organisation becomes hypothyroid: cold, paranoid, and rigid. Evolution to Yellow requires a metabolic surplus, having enough capacity to take in the whole picture without tightening up or panicking.

Revitalise with biological basics: light, sugar, rhythm, and physiological safety. Stoke the metabolic fire so rigid structures soften, coherence arises, and life begins to self-organise. When people have the energy they need, the organisation can move beyond basic survival and start developing in a more integrated, effective way.

Your organisation’s vitality hinges on its metabolic temperature. Check your state:

A Soundtrack for Collective Flow

I recorded this mix a while ago. It kicks off with Ray Peat himself, setting the tone for some deep, progressive beats. Whack it on, sip some fresh OJ (maybe milk and honey), and feel the warmth kick in 😁

In my last piece, I explored the common perception that time seems to pass more quickly as we age, arguing that it’s a direct, subjective experience of metabolic slowdown.1 A critical component of this phenomenon is novelty. This essay gets deeper into that theme: the profound, physical relationship between our metabolic energy and our ability to perceive the “newness” of the present moment.

The catalyst for these thoughts is the unedited “On the Back of a Tiger” interview with Dr Ray Peat (Day 2).2 Thanks to for the inspiration. The full interview is a four-hour beast, but Peat’s core insights on this topic begin at 2:31:44. The 6-minute clip below captures his response when asked about the importance of novelty, where he discusses the “Heraclitian” nature of consciousness, the “suppression of the experience of novelty” by abstract indoctrination, and the energetic demands of truly “experiencing the world.”

Peat’s ideas provide the foundation. My goal here is to build on them, integrating his bioenergetic framework with Iain McGilchrist’s hemisphere theory, the vitalist philosophy of Henri Bergson, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy of life. Together, they form a powerful argument: that a life lived by abstract labels is a low-energy, defensive mode, and that true, novel presence is, above all, a biological and metabolic achievement.

The Cost of the Present

The human brain is amazing at pattern recognition. It’s an unparalleled instrument for abstraction, categorisation, and stereotyping. We’re told this is the pinnacle of intelligence. But in this process, we pay an unacknowledged price: the “suppression of the experience of novelty.” We learn to “start thinking abstractly” and begin “seeing things in stereotyped ways,” a process that, as Ray Peat notes, creates a “kind of depression that reduces our motivation to contact novelty.”

We’ve bought a pig in a poke: that this world of labels, concepts, and static “maps” is reality. The bioenergetic framework posits that this is a lie. This conceptual, “stereotyped” world is not a higher state of consciousness. Rather, it’s a low-energy coping mechanism.

The core thesis is this: an organism with low, unstable metabolic energy cannot afford the biological cost of perceiving the present moment. It must rely on the “cache” of past experiences—on labels, habits, and prejudices—to navigate the world. Conversely, a high-energy, metabolically robust organism has the “excess” energy to “afford” re-experiencing the present as an ever-unfolding novelty. This is the “natural Heraclitian state”: the perception of a world defined not by static things, but by constant, flowing change.3

The Left Hemisphere’s Labels

The work of Iain McGilchrist provides the perfect anatomical map for this metabolic dilemma.4 The brain’s Left Hemisphere (LH) is the master of the map. It handles abstraction, breaks the world into decontextualised parts, and affixes labels. It’s the “what,” the “concept,” the “stereotype.” It’s supremely useful for manipulating the world, but it’s utterly blind to the living reality of the present.

The LH-dominant world is the low-energy world. When an organism is under threat, stress, or metabolic suppression (e.g., hypothyroidism, hypoglycemia, or high-stress hormones), it cannot waste energy. It must rely on the “good-enough” shortcuts of the past. It sees a “tree,” not the specific, unique, wind-blown, light-dappled organism in front of it. It sees a “problem,” not the unique constellation of events that “constitute” the present.

This reliance on the map over the territory is the very “suppression of the experience of novelty” described by Peat. This starts as a single direction but quickly evolves into a self-perpetuating cycle. A predictable, constant, or “safe” environment that removes novelty naturally downregulates energy production. The energy demands to interpret a constant environment are lower, so the system logically scales back its metabolic output to match the low-demand world.5 This creates the very low-energy state that then “fears” novelty.6

This feedback loop is obvious and vicious: your desire for novelty decreases, as does your ability to gain novel insight from a regular experience. The organism becomes “less adventurous” and starts “fearing change and adventure.” Any novelty, any new data from the “Heraclitian flow,” is a threat to its outdated, static, low-energy map. It forces a “demand for action” and “reinterpretation” that the organism, in its depleted state, feels it cannot meet.

The Right Hemisphere’s “Relaxing into Complexity”

The Right Hemisphere (RH), in contrast, is the master of the “present moment.” It sees the “gestalt,” the whole picture, the context, the flow. It’s the hemisphere that understands metaphor, humour, and the implicit. In short, it perceives the “Heraclitian consciousness” of constant, novel change.

This is the high-energy mode of perception. To perceive the world anew in every moment requires an immense and stable supply of metabolic energy (i.e., efficient oxidative phosphorylation). But this high-energy state presents a paradox: the more complex the reality you perceive, the less you can consciously, deliberately, and in a part-by-part (LH) fashion, manage it.

As Alexander Spotnitz suggests, “the more complex a movement becomes, the less you can consciously orchestrate all its moving parts, and the more you have to dissolve into pure feeling.”7 This “dissolution” is the surrender of the Left Hemisphere’s demand for control. It’s a metabolic affordance to stop “trying” and to simply perceive.

In this state of “pure feeling,” you’re no longer imposing a pattern (a label, a stereotype); you’re discerning the inherent, syntropic, and often spiral-based pattern “within” the flow.8 This is the essence of “relaxing into complexity.” It’s the “wu wei” (effortless action) of Taoism; a feeling of being moved by the flow rather than fighting against it.9

As Peat notes, this is a state of profound efficiency: “you can achieve more by doing less” because you’re no longer navigating reality with a flawed map. You’re moving with the “chronically more and more stimulating” flow of the environment. This state is both perceptual and metabolic. As you “generalise your understanding” by integrating this flow of novelty, you’re “accumulating structure” and “increasing the rate of metabolism, rate of energy production, but also the efficiency with which it’s used.”

This is the positive feedback loop of a healthy, syntropic organism:

1. High energy allows you to “move and create a changing environment.”

2. This “exploration tendency” provides new, non-stereotyped novelty that overwhelms the LH’s control.

3. This forces a dissolution into “pure feeling” (the RH mode).

4. In this state, you “generalise your understanding” and update your model by discerning the deep, inherent patterns (the “acceptor of action”).

5. This “generalisation” is the “energy reward”: it increases metabolic efficiency and “sets up new circuits” in your brain, fuelling more exploration, driving a hunger for more novelty, and fostering deeper engagement with the richness of reality.

Bergson’s Filter and Nietzsche’s Conscience

This bioenergetic model isn’t new. It’s the material, scientific basis for the most profound “process philosophies” of human history. Heraclitus is probably the closest Western philosopher in spirit to Taoism. Both are philosophies of process, non-dualism, and interrelation. They both reject the static, separate “things” favoured by the Left Hemisphere. The “Tao that can be named” is not the eternal Tao precisely because a name is a static label (LH), while the Tao is the unnamable, living process (RH).

Henri Bergson, whom Peat admired, provides the mechanism. He argued the brain’s primary function is not to create consciousness, but to filter it.10 He posited that “memory” is not stored in the brain’s “file cabinets” but is inherent in the fabric of reality itself (the past co-existing with the present). The brain, in this view, is a “reducing valve” that filters out this overwhelming totality of “duration” to allow for practical, moment-to-moment action.11

This is a perfect metaphor for Peat’s metabolic thesis.

• A low-energy brain is a clogged filter. The valve is clamped shut. It must “reduce” reality to the barest, most practical, and most stereotyped symbols to survive.

• A high-energy brain “opens the valve.” It can afford to let more of reality’s “Heraclitian flow” and “novelty” in. It’s not remembering so much as it’s perceiving the depth of the present moment, which inherently contains the past.

This leads directly to Friedrich Nietzsche and the question of morality. Nietzsche’s “herd” (the low-energy) needs external moral frameworks. They need “good” and “evil” as static, a-contextual labels to navigate the world because they cannot afford the metabolic cost of perceiving the unique, complex context of each situation. Their “morality” is a fear-based, low-energy map.

The “strong conscience” of Nietzsche’s “higher man” is the exact opposite.12 It’s the internal, vital compass of a high-energy organism. This individual doesn’t need an external map of “right vs. wrong” because they’re in direct, high-resolution, novel contact with reality itself. Their “conscience” is the “acceptor of action” in real-time, the “wu wei” of a life-affirming energy that can “relax into complexity” and see the whole picture. Their navigation transcends the pettiness of external rules, relying instead on the rich, flowing, vital, and present “why” of the situation.

The Metabolic Imperative for Presence

The modern world, with its promotion of metabolic poisons, its celebration of stress, and its “indoctrination” into abstract thought, is a machine for suppressing novelty.13 It creates “a kind of depression that reduces our motivation to contact novelty” by first inducing a low-energy, metabolically compromised state.

To reclaim the “natural Heraclitian state” isn’t a psychological or philosophical choice, but a biological and metabolic imperative.

By supporting efficient, high-energy metabolism (through nutrition, thyroid, stress reduction, and light), we enable the biological foundation for consciousness.14 This metabolic vitality dissolves the “stereotyped” cognitive maps, allowing us to engage directly with the ever-changing “stimulating but also easier” flow of the territory itself. It’s through this energetic foundation that we gain the capacity to perceive the present moment fully, rather than just remembering the past.

A Soundtrack for the Right Hemisphere

To accompany these thoughts, I’ve put together a mix designed to speak directly to the metabolic flow. It opens with the voice of Ray Peat himself, setting the tone for an hour of melodic, progressive rhythms.

Whack it on, dissolve the labels, and see if it helps you find some “pure feeling.” 😁

Please note: This essay is for educational purposes only and is not medical advice. Always consult a caring, qualified healthcare professional before changing your diet, lifestyle, exercise, or medication. Your health is your responsibility, please take good care of it.

One of the most common, and perhaps profound, gripes I hear about modern life is that time seems to be flying by, or that there never seems to be enough of it. Once we hit middle age, the seemingly eternal summers of childhood give way to the frenetic slog of adulthood. We’re often told that the clock is objective and constant. Therefore, this perception must be a subjective illusion, a psychological quirk.

Common explanations for this are tidy but dismissive. The “Proportionality Theory” suggests a year is a larger fraction of a 10-year-old’s life (1/10th) than a 50-year-old’s (1/50th), so it feels longer.1 Meanwhile the “Novelty Theory” argues childhood is dense with “firsts”—novel experiences that the brain must encode—creating a rich mosaic of memory, whereas adult life blurs into routine.2

These explanations aren’t necessarily wrong, but they might be profoundly incomplete. They describe the effects without addressing their root cause; explanations born of a scientific establishment that, as Ray Peat noted, substitutes “a very neat and clean knowing for a hopelessly messy and really unknowable material reality.”3

A bioenergetic framework, one that takes matter and energy seriously, offers a more radical thesis: Our subjective experience of time is not a psychological illusion but a direct, physical perception of biological reality. Chronic stress, for instance, can compress subjective time even in youth, as seen in shift workers and the overworked, whose “blurred” days stem from energy deficits rather than mere routine.4

Our “internal clock” functions through and reflects our metabolic rate.5 We don’t simply perceive time; our very biological structure, energised by our metabolism, generates our temporal experience. The acceleration of time is the felt sense of metabolic decline: a slow, “progressive freezing.”

The Metabolic Clock and the Coherence of Consciousness

The idea that biology dictates time perception has a firm, if often ignored, scientific footing. Cross-species studies use “Critical Flicker Fusion Frequency” (CFF) to measure the “temporal granularity” at which an organism perceives the world. This is the speed at which a flickering light blurs into a steady, constant glow.

• A hummingbird, with its ferociously fast metabolism, has an incredibly high CFF, processing more visual “frames” per second than we do and perceiving the world in what amounts to slow motion. This isn’t some sort of hummingbird superpower, but a metabolic necessity for its high-speed life.67

• A tortoise, with its slow metabolism, has a very low CFF, sampling reality at a much lower frame rate.

This principle applies within our own human species. Children, with their higher metabolic rates (per unit of mass), consistently perceive time as passing more slowly than adults. This is the biological basis for the psychological experience.89

But metabolism isn’t just a vague term for burning calories. In the bioenergetic view, it’s the process of efficient oxidative phosphorylation: converting glucose into ATP, water, and, crucially, carbon dioxide (CO2). Governed by the thyroid, this process builds and maintains complex structure and coherence in the organism.

Hypothyroidism, increasingly common thanks to modern diets and chronic stress, slows metabolism and dulls experience. It affects cognition and can distort time perception by reducing neural speed and shifting speech frequencies.10 Restoring thyroid function, whether through nutrition or carefully supervised hormonal supplementation, can restore this “spaciousness” by enhancing metabolic rate.11

This leads to what Ray Peat called “calm alertness”—the subjective feeling of a high, stable, and efficient metabolism. It isn’t the wired, jittery energy produced by stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol, nor the inefficient energy from glycolytic metabolism. Instead, it’s a state of abundant energy reserves, where the brain is so well-fuelled that it can process the world in high-definition, with depth and sharp focus. Athletes in “the zone” sometimes describe this: the ball slows down, the crowd noise fades, and the field becomes spacious.12 This sensation, often treated as mystical, is simply the body working at full coherence, supported by CO2’s role in dilating cerebral blood vessels, enhancing oxygenation and perceptual resolution.13

As we age, or are worn down by chronic stress, inflammation, hypothyroidism, and the consumption of polyunsaturated fats (PUFAs) that disrupt oxidative metabolism, our metabolic rate falls.14 We shift from efficient, CO2-producing respiration toward inefficient lactic-acid-producing glycolysis. Our energy reserves dwindle, and our biological structure loses its dynamic coherence.

The brain, starved of efficient energy, can no longer afford to “render” the world in high-definition. It lowers its “frame rate” to survive. The objective world, still ticking by at the same pace, now feels like it’s rushing past.

Syntropy and the “Progressive Freezing” of Age

Mainstream physics explains aging through the Second Law of Thermodynamics (Entropy). We’re told that life is a temporary, uphill struggle against an inevitable, universal tendency toward disorder and “heat death.” Aging, in this view, is the final victory of entropy, a chaotic breakdown of the system.

This view is profoundly pessimistic and, according to the bioenergetic model, incorrect. Life is not an anti-entropic fluke.15 Life literally is the expression of Syntropy—an inherent, active, and creative force in the universe that drives energy to build order, complexity, and coherence. As Albert Szent-Györgyi said, “Putting things together in a meaningful way ... is one of the basic features of nature.”

Drawing on the work of Russian biophysicist Alexander Zotin, who measured metabolic rates in aging tissues, Peat challenges this view: aging is not simply an increase in entropy or chaotic disorder. Instead, aging is characterised by a decrease in entropy, akin to a kind of progressive crystallisation or “freezing.” As metabolism slows, flexibility and dynamism are lost, and our biological structures harden into a simpler, low-energy order. We don’t merely fall into chaos; rather, we lose creative flux and become rigid and static, much like liquid water becoming ice.

However, localised spikes of entropy—bursts of degenerative chaos and disorder—do occur within the aging process, often triggered by inflammation, estrogen excess, or iron overload.16 These appear as secondary effects or points of failure within this broader trend toward rigidity.

High-energy cells maintain a gel-like state through structured water, resisting this “freezing.”17 PUFAs destabilise cell membranes and promote rigidity, while saturated fats and sugars help maintain fluidity.18 Progesterone supports this syntropic coherence by raising temperature and opposing inflammation, whereas estrogen fosters entropic breakdown and lowers the brain’s temperature regulator.19

This “freezing” is the material cause of our accelerated time perception. As our internal, dynamic, syntropic processes slow to a crawl, the energetic, flowing world outside seems to fly by at an impossible speed. It’s as if we’re stuck in quicksand while everyone else struts around effortlessly.

Time as Active, Physical Energy

If metabolism “interacts” with time, what is this “time” we’re interacting with? The Newtonian view of time as a passive, empty “container” that events “happen in” is insufficient. The Einsteinian view of time as relative and inseparable from space and matter (process over static essence) is closer.20

But a more radical, and far more fruitful, line of inquiry was pursued by physicists who were, as Peat noted, isolated from the “establishment” for their rejection of randomness and their desire for a knowable, lawful, material reality.

Nikolai Kozyrev, a Soviet astrophysicist, proposed one of the most comprehensive theories. He viewed time not as a passive dimension, but as a dynamic, physical energy with its own density, direction (“arrow”), and ability to interact with matter.21 For Kozyrev, time itself was a source of “neg-entropy” (or syntropy) that fuelled the stars and drove the processes of life.

He believed this “arrow of time” was physically linked to the asymmetry we see in living systems (e.g., the leftward placement of the heart and the spiral structures in shells and DNA).2223 Life, by being metabolically active and structurally asymmetric, was able to tap into or “consume” this flow of time-energy. Kozyrev’s controversial experiments with rotating gyroscopes and torsion balances were attempts to measure the physical effects of this “time-energy density.”

It gets a bit woo here, but building on these ideas, Kozyrev speculated that manipulating the density of time could open the door to phenomena like telepathy, remote viewing, or even time travel.24 Inspired by his theories, researchers developed “Kozyrev mirrors,” spiral or concave reflective structures designed to focus or amplify time-related energies.25 While Kozyrev himself didn’t directly build or use these devices, many anecdotal reports and experiments describe altered time perception and enhanced extrasensory experiences inside these mirrors.26 Though his theories remain outside mainstream physics, they fit Peat’s view that metabolism and asymmetry enable life to interact with time’s energy.27

So if time is a flowing energy, what medium does it flow through? This is where the work of Horace Dudley and David Bohm can contribute.28 29They revived the concept of an “ether,” not as a 19th-century “luminiferous” jelly, but as a “sub-quantic medium” or “neutrino sea”—a vast, unmeasurable energy that supports all of reality.30 This “implicate order,” as Bohm called it, is not empty space but a seething, energetic field from which all matter and structure “unfold.” Note that Bohm’s framework is more holistic and quantum-oriented than a classical ether.31

This “neutrino sea” provides the material basis for Kozyrev’s theory. It’s the medium through which the energy of time flows.32

The Metabolic Antenna and the Coherence of Structure

Pulling these threads together provides us with a hypothetical framework:

1. There is a physical, energetic, and directional “flow of time” (Kozyrev) transmitted through a subtle, universal medium (Dudley/Bohm).

2. This flow is syntropic, building order and fuelling life.

3. Living organisms build and maintain complex, asymmetric structures through metabolism.

4. These energised, coherent biological structures—our brain and body—act as “antennas” or “resonators.”

5. Our ability to perceive time, and the richness of that perception, is determined by the quality of this “antenna.”

J.L. Anderson (who suggested that structured materials could alter radioactive decay rates)33 and Rupert Sheldrake (whose “morphic resonance” posits that patterns persist via a shared field) support the importance of structure.34 It isn’t just inert “stuff.” A highly-structured, high-energy brain (i.e., high metabolism) can resonate more deeply and coherently with the temporal field. It “catches” more of time’s flow.

Efficient respiration, producing CO2, maintains cellular asymmetry, potentially enhancing this resonance. Red and near-infrared light therapy energises mitochondria, improving metabolic function and possibly influencing perceptual depth through increased ATP and membrane potentials. Experiments show light’s effects on glucose metabolism and decay rates, grounding this idea.35

This explains the experience of “calm alertness” and the “zone:” metabolic coherence is allowing the brain to resonate with the temporal field so profoundly that it gains access to more information and “frames” of reality. Time literally slows down for it.

Conversely, the “progressive freezing” of aging and metabolic decline dampens this resonance. Our antenna “de-tunes.” We lose our connection to the deep, syntropic flow of time. Our consciousness, now sustained by a “thinner” stream of this energy, experiences a reality that is flat, routine, and rapid.

Rescuing Time Through the Bioenergetic Imperative

When people say time speeds up as they age, they may be describing more than an inevitable psychological feature of aging. It could be the lived effect of underlying metabolic slowdown, a kind of “biological freezing” that uncouples us from the energetic flow of reality.

This is a grim diagnosis, but the good news is it isn’t fate. It also contains a radical and hopeful prognosis. Unlike the fatalism of genetic determinism or the nihilism of pure randomness, a material, bioenergetic model restores agency.36 If the problem is metabolic, the solution is metabolic.

While we can’t stop time, we can change our relationship to it by “un-freezing” our biology and re-tuning our antenna. By restoring energy flow we can recover depth and spaciousness in experience. The practical steps aren’t exotic:

• Fuel Well: Eat enough sugar, protein, and saturated fats to maintain warmth and steady energy. Avoid the metabolic poisons that “freeze” us like PUFAs, excessive stress hormones, and inflammation. Practices like a daily carrot salad can help detoxify PUFAs and estrogens.

• Keep Energy Flowing: Support the thyroid and mitochondrial respiration, which are the engines of metabolism. Low-dose aspirin may help by uncoupling inefficient metabolism.37

• Shape the Environment: Embrace the environmental signals that promote and reinforce coherence like red/infrared light, sufficient CO2, and the avoidance of chronic stress.

• Experiment: Track pulse and temperature as metabolic proxies alongside subjective time perception. Improvement often correlates: the warmer and more energetic you feel, the slower time will pass.

Health, in this sense, isn’t just about living longer but about maintaining the metabolic vitality that supports a rich, clear, and spacious experience of reality. When energy flows efficiently, our perception of time remains balanced and stable, and we can recreate a childlike summer. To live well, therefore, means staying metabolically awake, keeping our inner clock bright enough to meet each passing second in high definition.

You can listen to Ray Peat discussing some of these ideas on episode 19 of the Generative Energy Stream, here:

As I’ve written before, Ray Peat sees life as a dynamic interplay of opposites, where energy and matter shape each other in a constant, creative transformation.1 This way of seeing is rooted in the philosophical tradition of dialectics and offers a lens for understanding how living systems, such as cells, organisms, teams, and societies grow, adapt, and thrive. In this essay, I wanted to trace how that dialectical thread runs from Hegel’s idealism through Marx’s historical materialism, Lenin’s dialectical materialism, and Vernadsky’s materialist vitalism, culminating in Peat’s revolutionary biology.

This is a long one, so probably best read when you’ve got some time. A quick note: when Peat mentions figures like Marx, Lenin, or even Stalin, he’s referring to their contributions to dialectical thought, not their political actions or regimes. Clearly, much harm was done in the name of those ideas, but Peat’s worldview is fundamentally anti-authoritarian. His philosophy is deeply life-affirming, grounded in freedom, creativity, and vitality.

What follows is an exploration of that intellectual lineage and how Peat’s concept of metabolic dialectics reimagines life as an ongoing exchange between energy and form. This piece is drawn from a session I’ve been developing recently, so I’ve included screenshots for additional context and visual clarity.

Let’s begin.

Hegel’s Idealism

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), the famously impenetrable German philosopher of the 19th-century, saw reality as a living, thinking organism unfolding through time. Every idea, social system, or historical period, he argued, contains the seeds of its own opposite, a “negation” that pushes it to evolve into a more complex form. Although he never used these exact labels himself, this process if often described as three stages: Thesis (an initial idea or state), Antithesis (its contradiction), and Synthesis (a new, higher-order resolution that integrates both and becomes the next thesis).2

Think of someone confronting a limiting belief. The “thesis” is the comfort of that belief; the “antithesis” is the life event or insight that contradicts it; the “synthesis” is the person integrating both to see themselves and the world in a more nuanced way. Growth, for Hegel, always begins as contradiction felt from within, and this contradiction is the engine of progress.

The ultimate reality, his “Absolute,” is not some static state of perfection but a living process of self-development. He illustrated this with examples such as “Being” turning into “Nothing” to become “Becoming,” showing how every concept develops by confronting and transforming its opposite. Likewise, societies are expressions of “reason” gradually becoming aware of itself through history.

Hegel was essentially describing a massive feedback loop.

Where post-Enlightenment thinkers often saw knowledge as passive fact gathering, Hegel saw it as a participatory process of actively reorganising reality through thought and action. It’s basically the stages in the classic narrative arc of the Hero’s Journey, emphasising the evolving relationship to self and world. Think Frodo, Luke Skywalker, Neo in The Matrix, or Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz.3

Although Hegel’s philosophy is idealist, it’s not detached from the real world; instead, the “Idea” is reality’s inner logic, made visible through the unfolding life of “Geist” (Spirit).4

Yet, Peat believed that Hegel’s view of dialectics, as the motor of history leading to a final end, ultimately rationalised the ruling class’s perpetual power, a vision of an eternal, stable authority. For Hegel, the “end” is the realisation of absolute freedom and self-consciousness, a culmination where history’s contradictions are resolved in the full awareness of Geist. But this end-state, while dynamic, carries a sense of closure or completion for Peat.

In contrast, Marx (and Engels), as Peat saw it, rejected any teleological closure. They conceived of development as ongoing and open-ened, that it is “in the nature of people, society, and substance to go on developing,” a continuous process without predetermined conclusion.5

Marx’s Materialist Flip

Building on Hegel in the mid-19th century, Karl Marx (1818-1883) took this dynamic system of ideas and brought it down to earth. Ideas, he argued, don’t drive history, material conditions do. The dialectic, Marx claimed, begins not in abstract consciousness but in our material labour. By shaping the world with our hands, we simultaneously shape ourselves.

Marx famously said that Hegel’s dialectic was “standing on its head” and needed to be turned “right-side up.” In his view, material conditions determine consciousness, not the other way around. “Consciousness,” he wrote, “is from the beginning a social product,” formed and conditioned by real material circumstances. The driving force of history, therefore, is not pure logic but the mode of production: the specific ways humans organise their labour to secure the necessities of life.

Central to Marx’s theory is alienation.

Imagine an artist who begins painting for joy. They’re exploring ideas, expressing emotion, engaging the world directly through their medium. That is labour as living, self-shaping activity. But if the artist takes a job mass-producing generic images for a company, that same creativity becomes externalised, no longer an expression of self, but a commodity owned by someone else.

Their energy and intelligence still flow into the work, but the meaning drains out of it. The more they produce, the more distant the result feels from who they are. Marx called this alienation: when our labour, instead of enlarging life, begins to exhaust it. In essence, we create things that no longer belong to us, and in the process, lose a bit of ourselves. For Marx, this is the structural condition of capitalism itself: the system thrives by absorbing the very life forces that animate it.

Marx saw history as a vast dialectical movement through unity, alienation, and a higher-level reconciliation. Early communal societies reflected an unconscious harmony between humanity and nature. Feudalism and capitalism deepened division and estrangement. A future communist society, he hoped, would restore that unity at a higher, conscious level, a synthesis achieved through class struggle and transformation.

Peat recognised this pattern in biology.

Just as workers under capitalism become alienated from their creative power, the stressed organism becomes separated from its own energetic intelligence. Under stress, metabolism shifts from efficient oxidative processes to defensive, energy-wasting modes like lactic acid fermentation. A cell with low thyroid activity, Peat noted, mirrors the alienated worker: overactive in protective routines, drained of vitality, and trapped in cycles that sustain survival but suppress creativity.6 He said:

“If mental activity has a sense of obligation, of being pushed, it can raise the same stress mediators (serotonin, TSH, prolactin, CRH, cortisol, etc.), but if the attitude is one of opening and exploring new possibilities, it activates restorative processes throughout the body.”

In other words, the body’s chemistry follows its orientation toward the world: openness fuels regeneration; coercion breeds decay.

Lenin’s Scientific Method

In the early 20th century, Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924) systematised Marx’s dialectic into a universal scientific principle. For Lenin, dialectics was the fundamental law of motion for all existence: not just society, but all of nature. “Development,” he wrote, “comes through contradictions which are resolved only to be renewed on a higher plane.” Progress, then, is more of a spiral than a linear accumulation, where each turn carries forward elements of the past, reworking them into a more complex form.

Lenin’s principles capture this in several key ideas: development as a “negation of negation,” where every resolution reopens at a higher level; transformation unfolding in spirals rather than straight lines, as systems revisit earlier states without repeating them; and quantitative change giving rise to qualitative leaps, when gradual shifts reorganise a system’s structure entirely.

Crucially, Lenin stressed that internal contradiction is the driving force of growth. Every organism, system, or process contains opposing tendencies whose dynamic balance sustains life. Nothing exists in isolation and everything is interdependent. Separate any part from the whole and you distort its reality, because existence itself is relational. The only constant is transformation.

Peat was drawn to these principles, which he believed offered an almost perfect picture of biological life.7 Just like societies and histories, organisms maintain coherence by moving through instability. Cells operate in rhythmic feedback loops of excitation and rest, expansion and renewal. As Peat observed, living systems thrive not by avoiding stress but by actively adapting and reorganising in response to it.8 In biological terms, rather than contradiction being a pathology, it’s a creative mechanism and how adaptation happens.

This framework anticipates the concept of “hysteresis,” which Peat often referenced: the tendency of systems to “remember” past states and change without exact repetition.9 Organisms, economies, and even materials evolve through cyclic memory and creative reorganisation. Each adjustment preserves what was viable, discards what was not, and moves toward greater complexity. For both Lenin and Peat, this dynamic of life as a process of self-renewing instability is the true engine of evolution, not static equilibrium.

Peat’s Dialectical Philosophy

If Hegel offered a dialectic of ideas, Marx one of society, and Lenin one of nature, Ray Peat integrated them into a living, metabolic philosophy. In his view, energy is not just fuel for life, but life’s way of knowing and engaging with the world. Dialectics, for Peat, was a living rhythm: the pattern through which matter becomes conscious and self-organising. “Ever since Heraclitus,” Peat observed, “materialists have emphasised change, while idealists have emphasised stasis.” Development, then, is the essence of existence: a perpetual drive to move beyond the present state, with no final or completed form. A team, a society, a cell, or an idea begins to die the moment it mistakes itself for finished.

Peat was especially drawn to Lenin’s bold conception of matter as “possibility in the future.” This insight aligned perfectly with biology, which shows that matter is defined less by its past than by its potential. A seed, for instance, is not inert but a bundle of organised tension, a poised imbalance ready to burst into growth. To speak of matter, Peat suggested, is to speak of openness: of life’s capacity for renewal and transformation.

This idea bridges physics, biology, and consciousness. The dialectical organism behaves like a self-creating process, one that thrives not through static equilibrium but through rhythmic feedback loops—periods of activity and recovery, building and repair. Cells illustrate this perfectly: they don’t operate in mere cause-and-effect chains but in cycles of renewal, consuming energy to continuously rebuild themselves.

The Split in Western Thought

Peat argued that European thought fractured after the Enlightenment, which he characterised as a split between two traditions. Western Europe drew on Roman law, Platonic ideals of fixed forms, and Darwinian ideas of natural selection. From these roots came a worldview centred on control, hierarchy, and external force. The universe, in this model, is made of inert particles governed by immutable laws, where competition weeds out the weak. From René Descartes’ separation of mind and body to modern genetics’ emphasis on the fixed “code” of DNA, the pattern repeats: form without history, matter without memory. The organism becomes a random survivor, driven not by its own intelligence but by external pressures.

Peat called this orientation a “metaphysics of emptiness,” a perspective that mistakes analysis (breaking things apart) for understanding, and stillness for order. The body becomes a machine to be managed, the world a collection of separate parts, and the scientist an engineer presiding over them. In this frame, control replaces communication, and authority stands in for perception.

By contrast, Eastern Europe (and Soviet science in particular), Peat thought, followed a different inheritance. Drawing from Aristotle’s “telos” (inner purpose), Asian traditions like Taoism, and Marxist dialectics, it saw movement, relationship, and interdependence as fundamental. Matter, in this view, is not passive but active: alive with its own tendencies and intelligence. An organism is defined not by what it is at a fixed moment, but by what it is becoming.

Peat called this as a “metaphysics of fullness,” an optimistic worldview beginning from abundance rather than scarcity. It assumes that life naturally moves toward coherence and complexity, not just mere survival. This, he suggested, was why Soviet and Eastern biologists (shaped by dialectical materialism), often studied adaptation, metabolism, and development of unified processes, rather than reducing them to rigid genetic code. Their science, like Peat’s philosophy, arose from the belief that life is an open dialogue between matter and meaning: a living dialectic, not a mechanical script.

Biology as Dialectical Materialism

For Peat, biology itself is the ultimate expression of dialectical processes. The flow of energy through matter doesn’t just sustain life but builds it’s very structure. Without a steady supply of energy, order collapses into entropy.

Experiments in the 1960s by the biochemist Sidney Fox (1912-1998) illustrated this principle vividly. When simple amino acids are exposed to heat, they spontaneously organised into complex, chain-like structures known as proteinoids—the basic precursors of living cells.10 It’s a dialectic in miniature: energy interacting with matter to shape new forms of order from apparent chaos.

The above video shows a study from Stanford’s Complexity Group, which provides a striking modern parallel.11 By suspending tiny ball bearings in castor oil under an electric field, researchers watched them spontaneously organise into wire-like networks that adapted, branched, and reformed—behaviours reminiscent of living systems. These examples capture Peat’s central thesis: “The flow of energy through substance increases the order in that substance.” Energy acts as a master sculptor, continuously reshaping matter into patterns of life.

From the Russian geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky (1863-1945), who integrated biology with cosmology, Peat drew the idea of the Earth’s biosphere as a single, dynamic system sustained by the constant influx of solar energy. Life, in this view, doesn’t fight disequilibrium; it is the disequilibrium, locally concentrated, intelligently maintained, and always in motion.12 Peat said:

“I see Kropotkin blending in with Vernadsky, Vernadsky saying that the flow of energy from the sun into the earth is trying, the substance responding to that flow of energy is creating a living structural system that is assimilating and accumulating the interactions of the different levels of the ecosystem, permitting the optimising of the metabolism of the big animal, developing a big brain and doing the things that are appropriate, like animals tearing through the jungle are improving the fertility of the system, not damaging it...”13

Henry Louis Le Chatelier’s Principle, which was very influential in Vernadsky’s thinking, provides a classic thermodynamic analogy: living systems don’t passively absorb or neutralise solar energy.14 Instead, like a chemical reaction countering external pressure, life stabilises itself locally at higher energy states. Organic matter forms precisely through that local resistance, creating self-organising flows and structures by continually recycling energy, rather than dampening it out.15

Ilya Prigogine’s theory of dissipative structures takes this further. As energy continually flows in, positive feedback and local instabilities (“hysteresis” or “order-through-fluctuation”) produce new, complex forms, not by returning to old equilibrium, but by accelerating and multiplying the ways energy cycles through the system. The result is a series of self-amplifying reorganisations: from simple proteinoids to bacteria, to plants, to multicellular life, and onward.

What Peat calls a “hysteresis loop,” is this creative feedback cycle, where the imaginative use of energy at each step leads to new complexity, and that complexity, in turn, compounds the capacity to channel and shape energy. This isn’t a metaphor, but a real cascade that underlies everything from photosynthesis to cognition. In essence, nature is nurture.

Here’s Ray Peat describing that process:

While Vernadsky himself wasn’t explicitly Marxist, his conception of the biosphere mirrors dialectical logic: the living and inert matter continuously transforming one another in higher syntheses.16 In his 1926 book, The Biosphere, he said:

“Living matter as a whole - the totality of living organisms - is therefore a unique system, which accumulates chemical free energy in the biosphere by the transformation of solar radiation.”

For Peat, this was dialectical materialism made biological, the cosmos as a creative feedback loop of energy and form. This grand engine, the ceaseless interplay of energy and matter, reveals life as a self-ordering flow: a process of becoming. Life, like a flame or a vortex, maintains identity only through activity. Peat and Vernadsky’s “materialist vitalism” makes no appeal to mystical forces, the spark of life is simply the emergent capacity of matter to organise itself against disorder and metabolise chaos into coherence.17

Thyroid as the Human Engine

Within the human body, Peat identified the thyroid gland as the archetypal dialectical organ and the central regulator of life’s energy flow. In mammals, the thyroid determines the rate at which mitochondria use oxygen, effectively setting the body’s metabolic pace.

The thyroid system integrates internal metabolism, the external environment, and even the social world into a single, living field. It sustains the “inner imbalance” that makes adaptation possible: the ability to shift between activity and rest, tension and release, persistence and change. When this system is undermined by chronic stress, poor nutrition, or environmental toxicity, the dynamic loop begins to falter, and the creative flow of life slows down.

Norbert Weiner, who coined the term “cybernetics” (from Greek for “proficient pilot” or “good steersman”), described such control systems as “teleological mechanisms.” For Peat, a goal-directed system is one that senses its actions and adapts them to achieve a purpose. The thyroid embodies this harmony of opposites: the nexus of energy and form, improvisation and structure, stability and renewal. A well-functioning thyroid keeps the organism open, curious, and responsive, its vitality expressed by its ongoing capacity to reorganise itself rather than merely endure.

Capitalism as Hypothyroidism?

Peat’s bio-philosophical framework extends directly into social critique. He argued that the dysfunctions of modern society stem not just from economic inequality but from a deeper metabolic disturbance: a kind of cultural hypothyroidism, where the social body becomes sluggish, inflamed, and inefficient.

Western culture, with its left-hemisphere obsession with quantification, control, and linear notions of “progress,” mirrors the rigid, gene-centric biology that the Soviet agronomist Trofim Lysenko opposed.18 It’s an ideology that restricts energy flow, suppresses vitality, and inhibits adaptation. Capitalism, in Peat’s view, functions like systemic low thyroid: a collective metabolic slump that deprives the organism (humanity) of what it needs for robust health and creativity. It prioritises abstract profit over concrete, material value: the embodied energy of food, resources, and people.

This produces a fundamental contradiction: a system built on endless extraction within a finite world. The result manifests biologically, with a population living under chronic stress, endocrine imbalance (such as estrogen and serotonin dominance), and a slowed metabolism. As Peat warned, “People need to understand the system is systematically murdering them… solidarity with life, against Capital, is their hope.”

The Social Thyroid

If the health of the physical body depends on mitochondria efficiently processing energy, the health of society depends on its workers (the proletariat) who act as its collective thyroid. They are the living, metabolic core regulating the entire social and economic flow. When this workforce is alienated, its energy extracted, its agency denied, the social body becomes hypothyroid: slow, cold, and disconnected from its own vital centre.

The solution, Peat argued, is not simply political revolution but metabolic restoration: a renewal of the social organism through restored energy, purpose, and coherence. Society must, as he put it, improve its collective diet, environment, and energy expenditure. The task for the working body is to reclaim its role as the social thyroid: a dynamic, self-regulating organ capable of tuning the whole system toward life, growth, and awareness.

The Task of Vitality

Peat’s ultimate challenge is for humanity to create what he called a “self-conscious diet of social organisation,” to deliberately cultivate energetic and metabolic health at a collective level. This means rejecting the “planned disorder” that normalises decay and embracing organising principles rooted in the biology of life itself. Safety, development, and renewal are not accidents; they arise from systems that honour life’s basic metabolic foundations.

In Peat’s terms, this is the dialectic made real: a living, generative tension between energy and form, self and world, matter and meaning. The social body, like the physical one, must live as an open system: responsive, adaptive, and in continuous conversation with the forces that sustain it. A thriving society, like a thriving organism, cannot be engineered or frozen, it must metabolise change into coherence as a living dialectic.

Postscript

I really like the clarity of the below charts by @aihtheory on Twitter.

They visually bridge the gap between cellular biophysics and higher levels of behaviour and organisation. By tracing how bioenergetic status—the cell’s capacity for order, repair, and adaptation—sets the stage for either resilience (coherence, order, and creative adaptation) or vulnerability (entropy, anxiety, and authoritarian control), they make abstract arguments tangible.

Mapping these pathways from core metabolic processes up through patterns of behaviour and social structure, the diagrams show that vitality and fragility never emerge in isolation, but through dynamic, system-wide feedback loops.19

Metabolic and energetic coherence at the cellular level scales up through psychological health, community functioning, and the capacity for creative, adaptive life at scale. The smallest processes in living matter reverberate out into the broadest patterns of culture and society, making the case that the architecture of life is continuous, creative, and ultimately collective.

Peat’s 1976 book, Mind and Tissue is an excellent read on many of the ideas covered here. It can be accessed on the Internet Archive.

Some 2500 years ago, the first Greek philosophers began asking questions that went beyond mere curiosity about nature. They wondered not only what the world was made of but also how we should live within it. For these thinkers, separating the study of the physical world from ethics was impossible; to understand the cosmos meant understanding one’s own place within it.

Grouped loosely and retrospectively as the Ionian School, these thinkers worked in the bustling port cities of western Asia Minor (now modern Turkey) around the 6th century BCE. They turned away from mythic stories of capricious gods to explore the world using reason and observation. Thales, often called the first philosopher, proposed water as the primary element, Anaximenes favoured air, Pythagoras emphasised mathematical principles, and Democritus later introduced atoms as basic building blocks. Aristotle would later call these thinkers “physiologoi”—“those who talk about nature”—and recognised their lasting impact on science and our understanding of the world. One thinker stood out, however, who proposed a radical vision of life and the cosmos with change as its first principle.

The Weeping Philosopher

Born around 535 BCE in Ephesus to a wealthy aristocratic family, Heraclitus was unlike others of his time. He cared little for privilege, power, or popularity, and was famously misanthropic. Ancient biographers depict him as seeing most humans as ignorant, shallow, and obsessed with trivial pleasures like food and sex, blind to the deeper truths of life. Disillusioned, he withdrew from civic life, earning the nickname “The Weeping Philosopher.”

Rather than giving public lectures or writing systematic treatises, Heraclitus composed On Nature, a short book of terse, poetic fragments. Like a trail of cryptic clues, these fragments forced readers to wrestle with meaning themselves rather than receiving easy answers, earning him another moniker: “The Riddler.” He is said to have left his book in the Temple of Artemis (which later burned down after an arson attack). Few fragments remain, but they convey a bold vision that resonates to this day.1

Everything Flows

While others looked for unchanging stability behind appearances, Heraclitus insisted on endless flux. One of his best known fragments states: “On those who step into the same rivers, different and again different waters flow.” He used the image of a river to show that each time someone steps in, new water is flowing past, so it’s never exactly the same river as before. The person stepping in is also changing from moment to moment. This means both the river and the person are always in flux. A modern parallel might be our Twitter or LinkedIn feeds, where the same “timeline” is never the same from one instant to the next. The famous tagline “panta rhei”—“everything flows”—is a later paraphrase, but it captures the gist of multiple fragments.

Heraclitus’ master symbol was fire, not as a literal element but as a metaphor for constant transformation. The universe, he wrote, “was not made by gods or men, but always was, is, and will be an ever-living fire.” Like fire, change consumes and renews; it is an essential, creative pattern of existence. By understanding this, we’re invited to embrace change rather than resist it, finding peace in the ever-moving flow of life.

Centuries later, the Scottish philosopher David Hume echoed this insight, seeing the self not as a fixed core but a “bundle” of perceptions in perpetual flux. Both he and Heraclitus remind us that our identity is an unfolding process, not the illusion of a static “I” to which we often cling.

The Unity of Opposites

If all things change, then what holds the world together? While thinkers like Parmenides and Plato imagined a harmonious, stable cosmos of fixed “Being,” Heraclitus saw harmony born of tension and opposition. Stability, for him, was merely a patterned change of becoming: “They do not understand how a thing agrees at variance with itself: a back-turning harmony, like that of the bow and the lyre.” Just as pulling the bowstring back while pushing the bow forward creates the tension that energises the arrow, things only exist and function because of the push and pull between opposites: day and night, hunger and satiety, illness and health, youth and old age, life and death. The anxiety you feel before a big presentation is the same energy that fuels a great performance. Other fragments drive the point home: “Cold warms; warm cools. Wet dries; dry wets.” “The way up and the way down are one and the same.”

There’s a parallel here with Rudolf Steiner’s insight into the need to balance the dynamic tension between Lucifer and Ahriman—forces whose tug of war runs through us internally and shapes our orientation to the world. As I wrote recently, Steiner described how “Lucifer and Ahriman must be regarded as two scales of a balance, and it is we who must hold the beam in equipoise.”2 This struggle is a living equilibrium, a dynamic middle path where contrary strengths generate individual and communal growth. True balance is therefore never static, but always negotiated and evolving through inner and outer conflict.

In the Heraclitean worldview, nothing exists permanently or independently; everything belongs to a holistic, interconnected flow. Yet perspective is still critical: sea water is wholesome for fish, but drinking it is fatal for humans. What appears contradictory from one vantage point resolves into a coherent pattern from another. The lesson here is not mindless relativism but a deeper unity in which contraries generate each other and the whole.

Strife

Heraclitus named this generative tension at work in the universe “war” or “strife.” He wasn’t glorifying violence but recognising strife as a fundamental cosmic structure that underpins existence: “We must know that war is common to all, and all things come into being through strife.” Far from chaos, this conflict is what produces order, which is Heraclitus’ very definition of justice. As he said,“War is father of all and king of all; some he made gods, some men; some slaves, some free.”

Strife is the life-giving tension that holds opposites in balance, driving the perpetual cycle of creation and destruction that sustains the cosmos. Without opposition and conflict, there would be no differentiation, no movement, and no life. To illustrate, Heraclitus used the metaphor of kykeȏn, an ancient mixed drink: “Even the kykeȏn separates if it is not stirred.” Similar to how a vinaigrette separates when left still, the point is that agitation keeps things integrated and alive. He would likely scoff at our modern obsession with creating “safe spaces” from opposing views; for him, the tension is where life happens.

When I first read Heraclitus, his ideas felt a bit disjointed and pessimistic. A weeping philosopher who celebrated strife? FFS! It wasn’t until I started looking at his world through Nietzsche’s eyes that the fragments began to click into a beautiful, dynamic whole. Nietzsche heard in Heraclitus not pessimism but courage and a profound affirmation of life: a sacred “Yes” to the measured struggle that makes order. In his Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks,3 Nietzsche marvels:

“It is a wonderful idea, welling up from the purest strings of Hellenism… that strife embodies the everlasting sovereignty of strict justice, bound to everlasting laws.”

He adds:

“According to Heraclitus honey is at the same time sweet and bitter, and the world itself an amphora whose contents constantly need stirring up…war is not at an end; the wrestling continues to all eternity. Everything happens according to this struggle, and this very struggle manifests eternal justice.”

Our task, then, is to seek out and embrace this tension, rather than trying to relieve or escape it.

The Logos

Beneath the turbulence of constant change, Heraclitus saw a deeper order: an ever-present rational principle he called the Logos. In Greek, “logos” means word, reason, or account, but for Heraclitus, it was far more. He saw it as the hidden logic guiding the universe’s flow into a coherent, harmonious whole. As he wrote, “The unseen design of things is more harmonious than the seen.” A loose analogy can be drawn to the “Tao” in Taoism, whereby the Logos is not a doctrine so much as the way the world goes, often invisible but profoundly real.4

Yet, most people fail to perceive this universal law. “We should let ourselves be guided by what is common to all,” he urged, but our egocentrism and stubbornness blind us to it. We live as if we each have a “private intelligence” of our own, thinking we know better and becoming disconnected from the greater cosmic order that connects all things.

To live wisely, Heraclitus counsels, is to transcend narrow ego by attuning ourselves to the Logos, aligning our lives with the deeper current of reality’s unifying flow. To hear him is less important than to hear the Logos itself: “He who hears not me but the Logos will say: all is one.” This means trusting the “unseen design,” even when the visible parts seem chaotic, finding faith not in a fixed plan, but in the process itself.

Living with Perspective

The Greeks studied nature to ask a fundamental question: How should I live? Heraclitus urged living in harmony with nature, avoiding greed, drunkenness, and shallow pleasures. “Eaters of food, sleepers toward death,” he grumbled. He believed anyone could kindle their “inner fire” through self-control and reflection on life’s bigger patterns. The French philosopher Pierre Hadot revived this as “cosmic consciousness,” a practice of seeing ourselves as tiny eddies in a vast river, accepting pain and trouble as part of a greater order.5 Contemplation was ancient therapy, teaching perspective and calming anxieties with awe.

Modern psychology parallels this in techniques like “cognitive distancing,” and astronauts describe an “overview effect” when seeing Earth from space. Apollo 14’s Edgar Mitchell said:

“You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it... From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’”

Mitchell’s cosmic awakening mirrors Spiral Dynamics’ “Turquoise” stage of unity, fluidity, and deep interconnectedness.6 Heraclitus stood here thousands of years earlier: when you release your fixation on a rigid identity, the hidden harmony behind apparent chaos comes into view. Seeing life as this flowing process humbles us, but it can also set us free.

From Stoicism to William Blake and the Philosophers of Becoming

Though Heraclitus puzzled many of his contemporaries, his ideas inspired later traditions. The Stoics, emerging in the 3rd century BCE, embraced his vision of a world made of living fire and shaped by the Logos. The Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius later wrote, “All things are interwoven with one another, a sacred bond unites them.” For the Stoics, the Logos was an active, creative reason organising the cosmos through cycles of fiery destruction and renewal. Early Christians, influenced in part by Stoic ideas, took this further, identifying Christ as the Logos—the divine Word through whom all things were made.

Centuries later, the visionary English poet and artist William Blake echoed Heraclitus’s embrace of paradox. Blake’s doctrine of “contraries” as necessary creative tensions resonates deeply with Heraclitus’s “strife” as the basis of cosmic order.7 Both men rejected static being for a dynamic process where opposites reconcile in living wholeness.

Heraclitus’ ideas on change and opposites also influenced later thinkers who developed philosophies of “becoming.” Hegel developed a dialectical logic in which concepts move by self-contradiction, echoing Heraclitean flux. And Nietzsche expanded these ideas in his doctrines of “eternal recurrence” and the “Will to Power,” affirming struggle as creative becoming. He admired Heraclitus as a solitary and original truth-finder who was “hewn from a single stone,” declaring:

“In Heraclitus’ proximity I feel warmer and better than anywhere else… the affirmation of passing away and destroying… saying Yes to opposition and war… becoming… all this relates closely to me.”

Henri Bergson’s philosophy of “durée” and creative evolution emphasised time’s fluidity and creativity, his “élan vital,” or vital impetus, resonates with Heraclitus’ ever-flowing fire.8 Alfred North Whitehead, the founder of process philosophy, drew on Heraclitus to argue reality consists of an ongoing flow of events rather than static substances.9 Similarly, existentialists like Heidegger and Sartre emphasised “being-in-time” and the tension of opposites within human existence, their focus on authentic living reflecting Heraclitus’ spirit.

In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, biologist-philosopher Ray Peat articulated a bioenergetic worldview close to Heraclitus’ vision of life as an “everliving fire.” For Peat, health and vitality depends less on fixed mechanisms than on the body’s capacity to generate and circulate energy at the cellular level, a living fire within us. Metabolism, for him, was not mere fuel consumption but the essence of life’s flexibility and creative potential.10

Extending this to language and culture, Peat warned against reducing reality to digital abstractions and static categories. Like Heraclitus, he urged fidelity to life’s fluid, dialectical movement, inviting us to sense the warmth, intelligence, and possibility in reality’s flow, and to live creatively within it. Contemporary process philosophers and some panpsychists also extend the sense that mind and order pervade nature—an echo, if not an identity, with the Heraclitean Logos.

Echoes in Modern Science

Heraclitus’ vision resonates with uncanny precision in modern science. Quantum mechanics reveals a world of indeterminacy and constant interaction, not fixed particles. Complexity theory studies how new order emerges dynamically in systems far from equilibrium, echoing Heraclitus’ fire of creation and destruction. Modern cosmology, with galaxies forming and fading, black holes consuming and birthing stars, also mirrors the ever-living fire. As Professor Bob Coecke, chief scientist at Quantinuum, suggests, science might have evolved radically differently if it had begun with Heraclitus’ process-oriented view rather than Democritus’ world of static atoms.11

Living Heraclitus’ Wisdom

Heraclitus pictured the world as a living fire, ever-changing and renewing. Strife and harmony, conflict and unity, are partners in this deep logic of change. To listen for the Logos in the rush of things is still, after all these centuries, the beginning of wisdom. Here are a few ways we might stop fighting the current and instead learn to navigate it:

• Embrace the Flow: Accept that change is the only constant and inevitable. Instead of clinging to fixed plans or identities, learn to adapt, improvise, and move with life’s transformations.

• Find Harmony in Tension: Recognise that adversity, conflict, and opposition are not failures to be avoided but necessary, creative forces that generate growth, strength, balance.

• Listen for the Logos: Practice a deeper awareness, through reflection, mindfulness, or simply paying attention to sense the hidden order beneath the surface of apparent chaos. Trust the process.

• Nurture Your Inner Fire: Have a Coke, fire up your metabolism, and follow your curiosity, avoiding habits and stressors that dull consciousness.

• Adopt a Cosmic Perspective: Zoom out. See yourself and your struggles as part of a vast, interconnected whole. This cultivates humility, compassion, and wise action.

To live by these principles is to navigate life’s constant flux not with anxiety, but with wisdom, balance, and purpose.

Imagine you’re at a crossroads. One path leads up toward dreams, creativity, and spiritual freedom. Another descends down toward logic, technology, and machines. Between them runs a third path that blends both, using love and wisdom to balance the extremes. Which path are you on right now, and how do you know?

This metaphor captures how Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) saw the human journey. Founder of the spiritual science he called Anthroposophy,1 Steiner taught that three main forces shape history, culture, and our inner lives: Lucifer, Ahriman, and the Christ being. He believed we can live better if we can learn to notice these forces in ourselves and keep them balanced.

The Three Forces

Lucifer’s Creative Spark

From the Latin lux (light) and ferre (to bring), Lucifer is the “light-bringer.” For Steiner, this force draws us toward imagination, excitement, and daring ideas. It fuels art, music, visionary founders, and the sense that the universe is alive with meaning.

Steiner said Lucifer’s peak influence was during the “Age of Myth” (prehistory to around 500 BCE), when societies were guided mostly by myth, ritual, and inner spiritual wisdom. Yet, too much of Lucifer’s influence leads to us drifting away from practical reality, and we risk floating off into fantasy and egoism, losing touch with day-to-day life.

Ahriman’s Cold Logic

In contrast, Ahriman (derived by Steiner from the ancient Persian figure Angra Mainyu)2 drags us the other way toward material things: facts, machines, rules, and strict order. Since about 1500 CE, the “Age of Mechanism,” Ahriman’s influence has grown with science, industry, bureaucracy, and now, AI.

This force isn’t simply “bad.” We need it because it compels us to think clearly, build useful tools, and get sh*t done. However, too much Ahriman leaves life cold and rigid. Efficiency, metrics, formulas, and technology overshadow meaning and human warmth.

As Steiner warned in 1919, Ahriman is “infinitely clever,” driving technological advance faster than our moral nature can keep pace:

“In our present age, Ahriman is a greater threat to us than Lucifer. He is infinitely clever and is helping us to develop our technological civilisation. He wishes us to advance at breakneck speed, long before our individuality and moral nature are ready for such advances... The scientist, the technologist and the inventor are Ahriman’s natural prey but all of us can fall victim to his temptations.”3

Christ’s Integration

Between these extremes is the Christ being. For Steiner, Christ isn’t just the historical Jesus but a living force of balance and compassion. Emerging during “The Age of the Soul” (~500 BCE to ~1500 CE), this impusle bridges Eastern mysticism and Western pragmatism, bringing balance and new kinds of awareness.

In the sculpture The Representative of Humanity (1917–1922), which Steiner created with Edith Maryon, Christ stands between Lucifer’s creative energy and Ahriman’s cold logic, calming and guiding both. The aim is not to pick sides but to maintain the threefold creative tension. To give it a slightly cringey business metaphor: Ahriman is the COO, Lucifer the CCO, and Christ the integrating CEO who grounds ideas without losing soul.

Ahriman in Action (Here and Now)

In modern life, Ahriman is taking over. We meet him daily, not as a cartoon villain, but as habits and systems that show up in familiar places:

• AI and algorithms: Digital devices shape what we see, predict behaviours, and nudge desire. Deepfakes chip away at truth, automation replaces craft, and optimisation becomes the tech bro’s creed.

• Social media: Platforms engineered for engagement harden thought into echo chambers, turning connection into comparison and fueling outrage and conformity.

• Datafication: Modern societies increasingly value only what can be measured: grades, credit scores, fitness trackers, and endless statistics often define worth or success.

• Pharmaceutical quick fixes: Chemical solutions promise swift relief yet often cause dependency or side‑effects, overtaking real wisdom and care.

• Transhumanism and biotech: Neural implants, gene editing, and life‑extension treat bodies as upgradeable devices, neglecting the whole person.

• Bureaucracy: Forms, metrics and KPIs transform relationships into dashboards, prioritising profit over people and process over presence.

• Crypto and blockchain: Decentralisation promises freedom, but often fuels speculation over solidarity, echoing Steiner’s warning about technology outpacing moral progress.

• Information overload: Technology’s flood of data overwhelms people with fragmented facts and constant news, encouraging surface-level thinking instead of deep understanding.

There’s no denying that Ahriman’s strengths help us build bridges and power grids. But when unbalanced, life can feel joyless and mechanical.

Bryan Johnson as a Mirror

A contemporary figure who invites Ahrimanic comparison is entrepreneur Bryan Johnson. His “Don’t Die” religion and “Blueprint” longevity programme is rooted in extreme quantification, monitoring hundreds of health metrics, adhering to AI-driven diets, taking handfuls of supplements, and experimenting with therapies like plasma transfusions.4 The goal is to achieve “age escape velocity,” meaning to biologically remain the same age or younger as time passes. But as Iain McGilchrist wrote recently:5

“The opposite of life is not death, but the machine. You are not a machine, and every person who suggests you are should be firmly, but politely, put right on the matter.”

Johnson’s hyper-disciplined approach treats the human body as a machine to be constantly optimised and life as a graph to be climbed, reflecting Ahriman’s tendency to reduce the organic and spiritual to data, calculation, and control. The result is a focus on technological mastery and measurable outcomes to dominate nature and conquer death, often at the cost of the more holistic or qualitative aspects of life.

Johnson’s regimen brings to mind philosopher Günther Anders and his idea of “Promethean shame.”6 Anders described the unsettling feeling when technology outperforms us, producing inferiority and surrendering our judgement and decision-making to machines. We end up adapting ourselves to suit technology, letting it shape our routines and self-image—a pattern easy to see in modern optimisation cultures.

In this sense, Johnson mirrors a broader cultural trend: outsourcing judgement, care, and even self-worth to advanced systems. Anders suggests this “shame,” a sense that humans don’t match up to their own creations, arises when trust is placed more in algorithms or metrics than our own instincts.

Johnson’s case raises useful questions we all face in an Ahrimanic world: how much do we let metrics or external systems decide what matters? Where do we trade nuance, intuition, or connection for control and certainty? And how do we balance being proactive about health with respect for the natural rhythms of life?7

These aren’t just theoretical questions, but profoundly personal and cultural dilemmas, magnified in an age where immortality seems to tempt ever closer through data and algorithms. To understand what might be lost in chasing such control, it’s worth recalling the American writer and environmentalist Edward Abbey, who resisted the cult of endless optimisation with blunt candor: “I do not believe in personal immortality; it seems so unnecessary. Show me one man who deserves to live forever.”8

In Abbey’s spirit, perhaps the challenge is not to calculate life’s extension, but to inhabit it more deeply, respecting the mystery and wildness that metrics can never measure.

A Quick Biochemical Aside: Serotonin and Rigidity

If you’re a regular reader, you’ll know I love nothing more than crowbarring in a connection to the biologist Ray Peat. Well here’s another intriguing echo: Peat challenged the popular image of serotonin as the “happy hormone,” describing it instead as a biochemical agent of stress, inflammation, and even depression.9 From a Peatian perspective, high serotonin parallels Ahriman’s rigidifying influence: it dampens energy production, fuels authoritarian traits, and contributes to aging and disease. Just as Ahriman grounds us in cold matter, serotonin enforces a biochemical conformity that stifles joy and creativity, turning life into hibernation and a grind of material survival.

Steiner’s Human Being

Steiner pictured the human being as layered: the physical body; a “life” (etheric) body which animates and energises the physical; an emotional (astral) body that contains feelings and desires; and a spiritual “I” or true self which provides individual consciousness and self-awareness. Lucifer pulls the astral upward into dreams; Ahriman drags the physical down into habits and numbness. The Christ impulse helps us integrate and choose wisely.

You can feel the tug-of-war between these forces play out in everyday choices. Why does scrolling social media (Ahriman) feel addictive yet empty? Why does daydreaming (Lucifer) inspire but distract? Why does a small act of care (Christ) restore proportion to a frantic day? As Steiner puts it:

“Human beings are dwellers in two worlds. Our uniqueness amongst the creatures of the earth lies in this role that we have as half beast and half angel. A dynamic tension exists because of the contrary demands which living in each of these realms places on us. We experience this on a daily basis, an internal tug-of-war, pulling first in one direction, then to the opposite pole. Whenever we are called upon to make a choice, a decision, the earthly and the heavenly draw us one way or the other and often both at once!”

Other Thinkers See Similar Patterns

Steiner’s triad echoes in many thinkers, evidencing a persistent pattern across traditions:

• Martin Heidegger warned of modernity’s “enframing,” where everything becomes a calculable resource (a reductionist Ahrimanic mindset), and called for “poetic dwelling,” akin to the Christ impulse’s integration.

• Iain McGilchrist describes the brain’s hemispheres: the left prioritising control and facts (Ahriman), the right meaning and metaphor (Lucifer), recommending balance as Christ does.

• Carl Jung’s archetypes match: Lucifer as eternal youth, Ahriman as old ruler, Christ as Self integrating opposites.

• Teilhard de Chardin’s “Omega Point” envisions matter-spirit convergence, echoing Christ’s synthesis.

• William Blake portrayed Urizen (reason/Ahriman), Los (imagination/Lucifer), and the divine human (Christ).

• Heraclitus saw opposites as integral parts of the same process, paralleling Steiner’s dynamic balance.

How We Might Practice Balance

Steiner said, “Lucifer and Ahriman must be regarded as two scales of a balance. It is we who must hold the beam in equipoise.” Practical steps we might take include:

• Using technology humanely: favour tools that serve people, relationships, and communities rather than profit or control. This week, audit an app: does it foster connection or isolation?

• Bringing creativity into everyday work: bring design, story, or play into “non‑art” roles like accountancy, engineering, and operations.

• Grounding ideals in kindness: tie spirituality into small acts like listening, hospitality, honest craft, and care for bodies and communites.

• Making room for tech-free spaces: device‑free mealtimes, unmeasured exercise, or analogue hobbies.

• Strengthening discernment: practice saying “no” to habits that drain meaning, and “yes” to simple joys that enliven you.

• Working with head, heart and hands each week: learn something, love someone, and make something, ensuring no single force monopolises your life.

The point isn’t to live in a neutral grey zone between extremes. Instead, it’s about moving with awareness: feeling the warmth of Lucifer’s fire without losing touch with reality, and standing firm in Ahriman’s steel without becoming cold and rigid. The Christ impulse is a wise love that holds both forces in balance and uses them for humanity’s good.

Embracing Steiner’s balance brings technology and dreams into harmony, turning crossroads into paths for growth.

You can get a fuller picture for Steiner’s work in this documentary, Science of Spiritual Realities:

In 1912, biologist J. F. Gudernatsch made a curious discovery about tadpoles. When fed thyroid gland tissue, they leap ahead in their development, transforming into frogs earlier than nature intended.1 The thyroid hormone acts like a developmental switch, boosting metabolism and triggering the metamorphosis into adult form.

Add an anti-thyroid chemical, however, and the transformation stalls. The tadpoles keep growing, becoming fatter, heavier, and more grotesquely swollen, but they never become frogs.2 When that switch is blocked, growth loses its direction.

The lesson is clear: without a change in form or function, growth is just more of the same thing, only bigger.

Growth Without Change

The biologist-philosopher Ray Peat once wrote in an email:

“Bodybuilding, like success in business, is something that tends to give me aphasia.”3

In other words, some growth is so hollow it leaves you speechless.

Bodybuilding and rapid business scaling often get celebrated as markers of ambition. But when the goal is simply to get bigger, growth can turn pathological. In nature, unchecked and undirected growth becomes cancer. Without something like thyroid hormone to guide energy towards differentiation and transformation, all you get is bulk without progress:

• Ideas that spread widely but change nothing, like viral trends that vanish without impact.

• Businesses adding headcount but not capability, as expansions outpace systems and collapse under their own weight.

• Bodies that gain mass but lose function, built for size but prone to injury.

• Knowledge that expands but doesn’t improve judgement.

• Skills that improve on paper but fail under real-world pressure.

The shape stays the same. Only the size changes.

Surplus Energy and the Fat Tadpole

The French philosopher Georges Bataille explored a parallel idea in his book The Accursed Share (1949). He argued that all living systems generate more energy or resources than needed to survive, and that surplus must go somewhere.4 Channelled well, surplus energy builds complexity and drives transformation, much like a tadpole becoming a frog. Left unfocused, it merely inflates what’s already there until it spills out destructively as waste, war, or pathological growth.

The same dynamic shows up in human social and organisational systems. In business, well-directed surplus creates resilience and new opportunities; for example, when a company pivots into a new model. Misused, surplus energy fuels bureaucracy, bloat, and inefficiency. In bodybuilding, it produces size without usable strength. This is the difference between simple expansion and genuine integration.

Complexity as a Sign of Maturity

Seen through a syntropic lens, growth is more than “getting bigger.” It’s about the emergence of new structure, connections, and capabilities.5 Yet in much of modern business culture, especially with the West Coast “scale fast” mindset, complexity is seen as a flaw or liability. Simplicity gets worshipped for its speed and lack of friction.

But the right kind of complexity, the interwoven kind that comes from integrating parts into a coherent, resilient whole, is a hallmark of maturity. Mature systems are specialised, interdependent, and adaptive. They’re intricate yet capable.

Biologically, it’s like moving from a lump of undifferentiated cells to an organism with functioning organs, nerves, and feedback loops. The former grows quickly but is fragile. The latter develops more slowly but adapts and endures.

The Arc of Healthy Growth

True development moves from simplicity to structured complexity, from mere size to new capability. This is the path from tadpole to frog: potential realised through transformation, not just accumulation.

In nature, transformation often means slowing down raw expansion so energy can be redirected into building new structures. Thyroid hormone accelerates growth while also changing what is being built, forming limbs and lungs rather than just swelling existing tissue.

The same applies in business, creative work, and personal development. Sometimes the wisest move is to pause expansion and invest in the systems and structures that will sustain the next stage. Without this, growth doesn’t make you stronger, more adaptable, or more capable; it simply weighs you down.

The Big Question

Patterns like this turn up everywhere: in work, in health, in organisations, in ideas.

Which path are you on? Are you building the kind of wisdom, capacity for change, and resilience that lets you leap, adapt, and thrive? Or is your energy simply inflating what’s already there: a bigger form, but no new function?

Growth without change doesn’t carry us forward. Only new structure, new capability, and new form will take us somewhere worth going.