Inoculating Ourselves Against Fascism By Reconstructing Meaning

[DocWatts]

Hello, I thought I might share a write-up Reconstructing Meaning, which delves into how updating our sensemaking narratives to be more flexible, compassionate, and expansive is a promising path for addressing the societal Meaning Crisis that's feeding fascism.

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The Need For Reconstructive Epistemology

To appreciate the need for reconstructive epistemology, we can ask what happens when a culture’s foundational narratives become maladaptive. When institutions calcify against change, their legitimizing stories erode, leaving a society unmoored. Without a more expansive and compassionate story to take its place, the resulting abyss breeds monsters - darker narratives that feed on alienation, fear, and resentment. Weaponized nostalgia for a lost world has bred some of the darkest chapters in human history, from the Ku Klux Klan to Hitler’s Germany to contemporary Christian Nationalism.

What’s crucial to understand here is that these constructed narratives aren’t just stories - they’re the invisible scaffolding that holds civilization together, transforming millions of strangers into a functional society through shared forms of meaning and identity.  To understand why we need such narratives at all, let’s trace their emergence in human social evolution. These binding narratives became essential once populations grew beyond what hunter-gatherer bonds could sustain. Just as bees are adapted for a hive and wolves for a pack, human sociality evolved within a tribe - where everyone knows everyone else through face-to-face interactions and extended kinship. While living among a sea of strangers is something we’ve come to take for-granted, a ‘tribe’ of millions would have been an unthinkable contradiction for our ancestors. The evolutionary fingerprint of our tribal origins persists in modern humans - we can only maintain meaningful face-to-face relationships with about 150 individuals, a limit known as Dunbar's number.

To bridge this gap, we developed social-technologies that would allow interactions with strangers to become a routine part of life. Chief among these was the creation of constructed social identities - shared stories that sustain social trust without requiring face-to-face bonds or kinship ties. These narratives aren't merely cultural artifacts - they're the foundation that makes modern society possible. Human rights, democracy, money, and science are constructed narratives that built the modern world. If people stopped believing in them they would cease to exist, yet calling them ‘imaginary’ is to miss how they shape our material reality.

Despite their appearance of stability within a human life, these constructed narratives inevitably break down - through internal contradictions, mounting external pressures, or both. We'll call this process Construct Collapse. While civilizations can and do collapse entirely, our focus here is on societies that endure a narrative breakdown. In these cases, the void will be filled, one way or another.

Construct Collapse itself isn’t positive or negative - its impact depends entirely on what replaces the fallen narrative. Very few people today would openly argue that the collapse of narratives that supported slavery was a bad thing. On the flip side, totalitarian ideologies which exploit Construct Collapse during states of crisis demonstrate its inherent dangers - as Nazism’s rise from the trauma of World War 1 and the austerity of the Great Depression make painfully clear. It’s a lesson we may have to live through again, as today’s democracies find themselves under the assault of authoritarianism from within and without.

Between these extremes of clear benefit and catastrophic harm, Construct Collapse typically creates more ambiguous outcomes - addressing existing problems while introducing unforeseen consequences. Consider Friedrich Nietzsche's famous declaration that 'God is dead, and we have killed him.' He was describing the displacement of organized religion as the foundation of meaning in Western life. Writing amidst the rapid changes of 19th century Europe, he foresaw how traditional cultural narratives would become increasingly untenable, swept aside by the forces of modernity - science, industrialization, and secular values.

His warning was tat existential needs for meaning and purpose aren’t so easily excised. And that in lieu of suitable replacements, cynicism, despair, and empty consumerism would rush to fill the void. While his proposed solution - moving 'beyond good and evil' to pursue individual will regardless of ethical consequences - was deeply toxic, Nietzsche correctly diagnosed the looming crisis.

In our own era, we find ourselves amid what cognitive scientist John Vervaeke has termed the 'Meaning Crisis.' Its symptoms are evident in the widespread adoption of conspiracy theories, political extremism, and bullshit in public discourse. The cumulative effect has been nothing short of disastrous for the civil society that sustains democracy. Social media platforms, whose business models push user engagement through divisive, inflammatory content, have only accelerated this decline. While these may seem like recent problems, they're an intensification of profit-driven media's long history of exploiting social fragmentation for private gain.

Amongst this rising polarization, we’re facing an unprecedented mental health crisis in the West - millions are feeling alienated, lonely, and displaced. In the United States, 'deaths of despair' - through suicide and substance abuse - have driven a decline in life expectancy. An unfolding ecological crisis, poised to reshape human civilization over the upcoming century, is deepening this collective trauma. A global resurgence in fascism has been ruthlessly exploiting this trauma, promising to make our societies ‘great’ again while worsening the very crises it feeds upon. This cumulative upheaval weighs heaviest on young people, where profound anxiety and despair about the world they’ll be inheriting is commonplace (here in the United States, a shared meme among Millenials and Gen Z is that our retirement plan is to die from climate change before old age). Gen Alpha, our youngest generation, has never known a world before today’s hyper-polarized dysfunction.  Amid skyrocketing inequality, basic milestones of adult life - buying a home, starting a family, saving for retirement - have become impossible dreams for most.

Yet economic and political dysfunction flows downstream from culture. While these material factors are very real, we’re also facing something deeper: an epistemological crisis in the West, with different segments of society no longer inhabiting the same Reality. Beyond different interpretations over basic facts that we can more or less agree upon, reaching a foundational consensus for productive disagreements has become nearly impossible. The rise of artificial intelligence is poised to deepen these epistemic rifts even further. These developments poison our ability to cultivate shared understanding. As this crisis deepens, our social dysfunction will only worsen - making epistemological literacy more important now than ever before.

Of course, no epistemology - Enactivism included - can be a silver bullet for this crisis. What perspectives like this can offer is greater self awareness around our sensemaking narratives. Enactivism is reconstructive because it acknowledges that constructed narratives play an essential role in meeting our individual and collective needs, while recognizing that some constructions serve us better than others. And the path forward lies in narratives that are flexible, compassionate, and inclusive.

In sum: reconstructive epistemology isn’t about returning to the ‘good old days’ of a romanticized past. The framework we’re proposing offers no quick-fixes for complex problems. Nor is it meant to be a dogmatic, one-size-fits-all approach. Rather, Enactivism is meant to exist in dialogue with other epistemological perspectives - not because all views are equally valid, but because the perspective if offers is true but partial.

Edited Sunday at 06:22 PM by DocWatts

[Davino]

Good read, thanks for sharing!

A few questions that came up in my contemplation:

On Meaning making and law:

• Would you say that the minimum collective shared Meaning is expressed by the constitution of a country? Therefore, a change in narrative provokes a change in the constitution?

On the Meaning Crisis:

• How can societies address the existential void left by the collapse of traditional narratives without resorting to authoritarian or extremist ideologies?

On Technology’s Role:

• In what ways can technology, particularly AI and social media, be repurposed to combat rather than deepen epistemological crises?

(btw, I felt a bit of AI pesimism by your text. I agree that it has potential both for immense bad and immense good)

On Reconstructive Epistemology:

• How can frameworks like Enactivism encourage a balance between flexibility and stability in societal narratives?

On Future Generations:

• What narratives might resonate with younger generations, like Gen Z and Gen Alpha, to provide hope and meaning in the face of new global challenges? (particularly for young men)

[DocWatts]

@Davino Thanks for reading, and for your thoughtful questions.

5 hours ago, Davino said:

Would you say that the minimum collective shared Meaning is expressed by the constitution of a country? Therefore, a change in narrative provokes a change in the constitution

Interestingly, there are examples of highly successful democracies which have never had a written Constitution, such as the United Kingdom, Canada, and New Zealand. A written Constitution is really just a shared reference point for the social contract of a country - it only works if enough of a country's citizens are willing to participate in the norms that a Constitution is a codification of. The institutions it provides a blueprint for only work if people believe in them - the best written Constitution in the world can't save a democracy if a large proportion of its citizens are feeling alienated from the civic society that sustains democracy (something the Weimar Republic found out the hard way). What we're living through now in countries like the United States is the breakdown of that shared meaning. Moreover, written Constitutions can be both a boon and a curse to a democracy - in the United States, our written Constitution has shackled us with antiquated institutions that are very difficult to reform, such as lifetime appointments for the Supreme Court, and the highly anti-democratic Electoral College.   

5 hours ago, Davino said:

How can societies address the existential void left by the collapse of traditional narratives without resorting to authoritarian or extremist ideologies?

That's the million dollar question. One avenue is through honest self appraisal and selective change (emphasis on the 'selective' part). Societies need to identify: 1) what their Core values actually are (things they would rather die than lose) 2) Which aspects of their narratives are still working well. 3) Which aspects of these narratives have become outdated and are no longer serving them.

Another is through a deliberately reconstructive approach to traditional narratives. The challenge is that these traditional narratives served an incredibly important purpose in cultivating collective forms of meaning and purpose, yet they've also proven inflexible and maladaptive for the complexity of the world we're living in. Instead of dismissing something like organized religion out of hand, we need to take the existential needs they address very seriously, while offering people healthier alternatives. LGBTQ friendly churches seem like a step in the right direction. HealthyGamerGG, an online mental health and spirituality community run by a licensed psychiatrist who's had training as a Vedic monk, is another. Healthy communities are key here - traditional narratives offered this at one point, but they've been co-opted by bad actors who are exploiting their fears to push toxic, divisive narratives (Trump himself has turned this into an artform).

5 hours ago, Davino said:

In what ways can technology, particularly AI and social media, be repurposed to combat rather than deepen epistemological crises?

You're correct in your sense that I'm an AI pessimist. While I recognize that in theory it could be used for the benefit of all (and maybe some day that will be true), in practice its easily abusable by bad actors who are using it for nefarious purposes. The algorithms behind sites like Twitter and Facebook and YouTube are written for the benefit of their host companies - not for the public good. Their business model of driving engagement through divisive, emotionally engaging content has been corrosive for the public trust that our civil society depends on.

The only way out of this, as far as I can see, is to treat social media platforms as public utilities that are much more heavily regulated than they are right now. Their algorithms need to be made public and reworked to not addict people. Disinformation, propaganda, and blatantly hateful content on these platforms needs to be much more tightly regulated. Of course, zero chance of any of this happening any time soon, unfortunately - this problem is going to get much, much worse before it gets better

5 hours ago, Davino said:

How can frameworks like Enactivism encourage a balance between flexibility and stability in societal narratives?

By emphasizing how societal narratives can be true but partial, without falling into the Relativist trap of treating all constructed narratives as equally true, moral, sane, etc. Frameworks should be engaged with in good faith, without necessarily having to agree with the conclusions they reach. That said, not every social narrative needs to be given a seat at the table (we don't need to take Nazis at their word, or give them a platform to spread hate) - but this needs to be paired with a good faith effort to understand what draws people to these narratives. The gist of Enactivism is to cultivate a higher degree of flexibility and self-awareness around our sensemaking frameworks. Doing so involves learning how to introspect about the emotional attachments we form to these frameworks. Are we clinging to something like Socialism or Christianity or psychedelics because it makes sense for us given our life experiences? Or are we using it as a one-size-fits-all blunt instrument? 

5 hours ago, Davino said:

What narratives might resonate with younger generations, like Gen Z and Gen Alpha, to provide hope and meaning in the face of new global challenges? (particularly for young men)

I'll need think more on this one. For now I'll say that men's issues need to be taken more seriously. Do men still have a number of social privileges over women? Obviously - but it's not a one way street. The loneliness epidemic has hit men harder than it's hit women, due in part to how men are socialized - but also due to how things like dating apps are designed, which can leave men who use them feeling like shit (since it's much easier to get matches on these apps as a woman than a man). Outdated social expectations that men need to be 'providers' to not be failures is wildly out of step with changes in the economy over the last half century, where it's become virtually impossible for a single earner to provide for a family. Young men need healthy masculine role models, and access to healthy masculine activities. They need to be talked with from people who understand and empathize with their perspective, rather than talked down to.  If the Left doesn't talk to these people, the Right will.

Edited Tuesday at 12:38 AM by DocWatts