Today’s NY Times is about the Transformation Age—a time of structural morphogenesis—the Metacrisis, and the Great Release all in one. Here’s a primer, then the article.

I am a never Trumper precisely because I'm conservative. I distrust grand narratives and social holisms. I believe deeply in the fundamental fallibility of human nature and that society needs strong, values-centered guardrails. I believe in natural hierarchies (though not static ones). I think power should generally be pushed down to the smallest unit of social action, often the individual, family and community. I believe we live in a morally real universe. I believe in incremental change rooted in local, contextual judgments based on the prudence of lived experience and tradition. I believe custom and institutional memory mostly trump values engineering. I believe incentives and means matter far more than outcomes and ends, and are also less dangerous. I believe mostly in a realist view of politics as interests in terms of power. I believe in society-stabilizing structures. I believe in rigorously-regulated national borders. I believe society is an organic totality and that duty grounds citizenship. Finally, like all true conservatives I am very wary of mobs and popular passions as being the ground for the rise of tyranny. I've read a lot of the conservative political philosophical canon—Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hume, Adams, Hobbes, Burke, Hegel, Smith, de Tocqueville, Kirk, Kendall, Hayek, Strauss, Scruton, Deneen et al.— and believe I have a workable understanding of its claims and commitments. I could go on, but I'm pretty comfortable in my self-understanding as a sophisticated conservative. In my view, it is evident that classically-liberal conservatives clearly see when a demagogue is leveraging the passions of mobs to engage in a norm-destroying, values-eroding project of radical revolution, who is inciting a Jacobin-like storming of the Bastille, rather than work through the rule of law, the temperance of custom and norms, the modeling of virtue, and who labors fiercely to keep the national fabric whole and intact. It is clear when he is making the government A Totality, an all-powerful purveyor of fear and submission across media, business, academia, finance, and law, while also discarding Federalism in order to bring smaller units of political sovereignty to heel. He is almost a perfect living embodiment of everything that the Founders were at extreme pains to warn us against, that they attempted to design a system to guard against, and every serious conservative of the modern era militated against. But I'm a sophisticated conservative. Because I see each of the qualities of conservatism above also each enmeshed in and thereby qualified by polarities that are also dialectical, contextual at higher octaves, necessarily integrative, and epistemically relative and developmental. As I argued in my integrative metatheory of conservatism, it can be understood as 1) an ontogenetic structure arising largely from the agrarian stage of sociocultural evolution, and this structure can be honored but must also be transcended—as it was in the US Constitution, 2) a transcendental typology as one-half of the Eros & Agape polarity, so it must always be harmonized with progressive Eros, and 3) a particular typology as one-half of a neurobiological polarity between threat detection versus openness-flexibility brain structures—stabilizers vs innovators—and so always must be harmonized with those members of our society who would push us forward into new frontiers. So conservatism only represents half of what a well-functioning society actually requires to function, and even then conservatism itself cannot be understood only in its Traditional-Agrarian register, it also needs to be expressed and defended in its Modern, Postmodern and Integrative registers, too. As does progressivism. And each have to be prevented from engaging in the pathological extremes at each of those structural-worldview levels: for conservatism, we cannot allow a theocratic state; we cannot allow financial capital to dictate the terms of the polis; we cannot allow demagogues to use epistemic anarchy to incapacitate society from making moral judgments. For progressivism, we cannot allow ideological totalitarianism; we cannot allow context-blind, abstract-rational technocracy; we cannot allow a narcissism of the oppressed. And yet we've allowed all of these, and few see how they co-arise and energize each other, all while those who are profiting from them continue to fuel them in any way possible. We can do better, and every attempt I make at offering perspectives on X is an attempt to take either an integrative view that helps people break out of the false consciousness and demi-realities they're swimming in, or take a contrary position to one of the specific worldview pathologies above. Only my followers can decide if I'm being helpful or not. If I'm not, someone should unfollow me and find someone else whose views are more valuable to them.

Only a matter of time before people see that Charlie Kirk was a tragic victim of the metacrisis. The FBI now believes Tyler Robinson was motivated by "nihilistic violent extremism." The meaning crisis, one of five major forces of the metacrisis, is nearly synonymous w nihilism.