Mars Isn't Enough

How We Resolve Our Civilization's Legitimation Crisis

Contemporary post-industrial civilization is in the life-or-death throes of a slow-motion legitimation crisis: We must understand it that way. But what does this mean: legitimation crisis?

Jürgen Habermas

I’m borrowing this term from the heavyweight political philosopher Jürgen Habermas’ Legitimation Crisis (1973). That work, although fifty years old, is still quite fresh and helpful. The problem with Habermas — considered the most important German thinker of his generation, following in the tradition of the Frankfurt School, Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and so on — is that his prose is almost comically dense and forbiddingly difficult. Try chewing on this, for instance (I parse it down below):

If world-views have foundered on the separation of cognitive from socially integrative components, if world-maintaining interpretive systems today belong irretrievably to the past, then what fulfills the moral-practical task of constituting ego- and group-identity? Could a universalistic linguistic ethics no longer connected to cognitive interpretations of nature and society (a) adequately stabilize itself, and (b) structurally secure the identities of individuals and collectives in the framework of a world society? Or is a universal morality without cognitive roots condemned to shrink to a grandiose tautology in which a claim to reason overtaken by evolution now merely opposes the empty affirmation of itself to the objectivistic self-understanding of men? Have changes in the mode of socialization that affect the socio-cultural form of life perhaps already come about under the rhetorical guise of a universalistic morality that has lost its force? Does the new universal language of systems theory indicate that the “avant garde” have already begun the retreat to particular identities, settling down in the unplanned, nature-like system of world society like the Indians on the reservations of contemporary America? Finally, would such a definitive withdrawal “mean the renunciation of the immanent relation of motive-shaping norms to truth?”

As I understand it, Habermas is saying that modern society has lost the unifying worldviews that used to provide people with a sense of identity and shared purpose. The old, now obsolete systems—religions, traditional values, or grand ideologies—once tied together how people thought about the world (the cognitive aspect) and how they lived and interacted socially (the integrative aspect) through a unifying, over-arching narrative. In the modern era, those systems have broken down. They seem irretrievably lost (but if you read to the end, I will argue they aren’t: We now have a way to resolve the legitimation crisis).

If we try, as secular liberalism has tried, to define a universal moral framework—like human rights or global ethics—that isn’t rooted in a shared understanding of the world as meaningful (such as cultural or religious narratives), does it hold up on its own? Can such a self-referential framework provide people and societies with a stable sense of identity and purpose? I think we now see clearly that this is not enough.

Without a grand, unifying, somehow transcendent, narrative, our shared world becomes increasingly devoid of value. It opens up huge gaps for post-truth neo-Fascists, for Christian nationalists, for crypto scammers, and so on. For those seeking power and control over others or pure exploitation as a kind of substitute thrill, supplanting the banished absolute.

Way back in 1973, Habermas saw that changes in how modern people socialize and relate to one another hollowed out the new universal values, reducing them to rhetorical gestures lacking real force. He pointed to systems theory or cybernetics theory—essentially the logic of modern bureaucracies and technologies—as a new “language” to organize society. But this system-driven approach only isolates people further, pushing them into smaller, fragmented groups, like isolated tribes or communities, rather than fostering a shared global identity. We end up adapting to a shattered and haphazard global order, with no sense of collective agency or will to actively shape it.

Habermas feared that modern life was drifting toward fragmentation, as moral frameworks and systems lose their grounding and no longer shape people’s motivations or actions in a significant way. He wrote about Nietzsche’s nihilism as a challenge that we still could not answer:

For more than a hundred years, it has been possible to observe the cynicism of a, as it were, self-denying bourgeois consciousness—in philosophy, in a consciousness of the times determined by cultural pessimism, and in political theory. Nietzsche radicalized the experience of the retrenchment of the ideas with which reality could be confronted: “For why has the advent of nihilism become necessary? Because the values we have had hitherto thus draw their final consequence; because nihilism represents the ultimate logical conclusion of our great values and ideas—because we must experience nihilism before we can find out what value these ‘values’ really had.” Nietzsche assimilated the historical loss of force of normative validity claims as well as the Darwinian impulses to a naturalistic self-destruction of reason. He replaced the question: “How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?” with another: “Why is the belief in such judgments necessary?” “Valuations” take the place of “truths.” Theory of knowledge is replaced by a perspectival theory of the affects whose highest principle is “that every belief, every taking-for-true, is necessarily false because there is no true world.” … Nietzsche counted on the shock effect of his revelations; and his heroic style also reveals the pain that cutting the umbilical cord to the universalism of the Enlightenment caused him after all. … Today the pain has either been reduced to nostalgia or given way to a new innocence—if not precisely to the innocence that Nietzsche once postulated—for which positivism and existentialism have prepared the foundations. Anyone who still discusses the admissibility of truth in practical questions is, at best, old-fashioned.

We still suffer from a Nietzschean hangover. Traditionally, a "theory of knowledge" or an epistemology seeks to understand how we come to know things, aiming to uncover universal truths or objective foundations for belief. In contrast, a "perspectival theory of the affects" shifts the focus away from objective truth and toward the subjective, emotional, and contingent nature of human understanding.

When Nietzsche writes that "every belief, every taking-for-true, is necessarily false because there is no true world,” this is because our beliefs and truths are no longer grounded in an external, absolute reality (a "true world") but are instead pure products of perspective—individual, cultural, or emotional frameworks through which we subjectively interpret in the world. In this view, truth is no longer something objective and universal that exists independently of human perception but is always relative to the perspective from which it is viewed.

For Nietzsche, the search for objective, universal truth was itself a product of particular human values and drives, rather than an encounter with a metaphysical "true world." What we call "truth" was, for him, entirely a construct shaped by power, utility, and perspective: Accepting this required courage and willpower. Nietzsche rejected the metaphysical assumption of a singular, ultimate reality to be uncovered. Without a "true world" as a reference point, we must understand all beliefs and “truths” as contingent, transient, and context-dependent. Nietzsche rejected traditional claims to objectivity and universal validity, suggesting instead that all truths are expressions of particular perspectives and affective states. Habermas notes that it is difficult, if not impossible, to build a shared, moral and political universe on top of this nihilist evacuation of truth and meaning.

What I propose in my work is that we now have the tools to resolve this legitimation crisis that underlies modern liberal civilization, causing the deepening “metabolic rift” and geopolitical collapse. Although most don’t realize it, this legitimation crisis of unresolved nihilism threatens everything — literally all life on Earth, as well as human continuity.

Based on a century’s worth of experiments in physics and advances in philosophy, we are logically and scientifically justified in making an ontological shift, from rational materialism to monistic idealism: This really is the task at hand. And as with the past shift from theism to atheism, it requires discipline and courage.

Before I go deeper into why this is necessary — why it is something that now requires serious intellectual work and disciplined personal effort for, at least, a relatively small group of “early adaptors” — I want to look at the current efforts to resolve the legitimation crisis, which magnetically attract and fixate huge numbers of lost, desperate, alienated, pre-programmed (by indoctrinating media or religion) people.

Stepping back for a moment, it is obviously of tremendous historical, sociological and philosophical importance that the people of the United States have essentially rejected the admittedly strangled Democratic tradition of the last 250 years with this last election. The American Revolution preceded the French Revolution and unleashed the transformation from monarchical, despotic rule to constitutional republics, where mercantile, bourgeois society developed and flourished. This corresponded, also, with the development of the secular, science-based empirical worldview that sees nature as an instrument with no inherent value, to be used (reshaped, exploited, devastated) for human industrial and commercial purposes. This is culminating in the “AI revolution,” which is further transforming natural landscapes into poisonous data centers.

Industrial technology led to accelerated population growth (from two billion people in 1900 to eight billion today), which made societies increasingly massive in scale, requiring various forms of control and social engineering. Apparently, it was Walter Lippman who coined the phrase “engineering consent.” Whatever “Democracy” was in the 19th Century, it certainly became more attenuated over time, as we find in mass, industrial societies like the US today. Habermas wrote about the legitimation crisis in relation to the modern perversion of democracy:

Democracy… is no longer determined by the content of a form of life that takes into account the generalizable interests of all individuals. It counts now as only a method for selecting leaders and the accoutrements of leadership. Under “democracy,” the conditions under which all legitimate interests can be fulfilled by way of realizing the fundamental interest in self-determination and participation are no longer understood. It is now only a key for the distribution of rewards conforming to the system, that is, a regulator for the satisfaction of private interests. … Democracy no longer has the goal of rationalizing authority through the participation of citizens in discursive processes of will-formation. It is intended, instead, to make possible compromises between ruling elites. Thus, the substance of classical democratic theory is finally surrendered. … In this way, a pluralism of elites, replacing the self-determination of the people, makes privately exercised social power independent of the pressures of legitimation and immunizes it against the principle of rational formation of will.

For Habermas, the "principle of rational formation of will” refers to the process by which individuals and groups come together to deliberate and arrive at decisions or norms through rational, communicative practices. In his theory of democracy and deliberative politics, legitimate authority arises from collective processes of reasoned discussion, rather than coercion, tradition, or mere aggregation of preferences. In Habermas's view, the “formation of will” should be grounded in principles of rationality, which means that all participants engage in discourse with the goal of mutual understanding, free from domination or manipulation. This involves the use of argumentation where claims can be challenged and justified, and decisions are made based on the best argument rather than power dynamics or arbitrary preferences.

The "rational formation of will" contrasts with other forms of decision-making, such as those driven by mere strategic interest, emotional appeal, or blind obedience to authority. It requires that participants have equal access to the discourse, that their contributions are considered without bias, and that outcomes are justifiable in terms of shared, reasoned agreements. For Habermas, this is the basis of democratic legitimacy. For him, democracy is not merely about voting or procedural mechanisms but about creating spaces where citizens can engage in rational deliberation to shape collective will.

I suspect we can all recognize our anger and frustration with the American system of governance and, in particular, the Democratic Party (who are supposed to be the instrument of collective redress) in Habermas’ analysis of an illegitimate form of decision-making, based on choosing between elites representing private interests. Unfortunately, the expression of this populist anger against a broken system has led to the election of a potentially world-annihilating tyranny when we consider the impacts on climate and what increasingly appears to be a drive toward a new form of militant imperialism (with the despot-in-waiting already issuing threats against Canada, Mexico, Greenland, and Panama) that would violate the UN charter and essentially end the current system of global coordination, however frayed or fraudulent the system is in reality.

The fragile alliances making up the MAGA movement are already breaking down in ways that highlight the underlying, unresolved legitimation crisis. This is a huge relief and opening, as it provides some hope that the contradictions of the movement will lead to chaos rather than efficient totalitarian control. The feuding factions offer different approaches to resolving this.

The Heritage Foundation faction of the Right fuses Christian extremism (American evangelicals and Opus Dei, the secretive Catholic organization that ran Franco’s economic policy in Spain and also had deep involvement with Pinochet’s destruction of Chilean society) with libertarian ideals, resulting in Project 2025, which seeks to centralize control of the US government under Christian extremists with the goal of permanent one-party rule. For the masses, the goal is enforced piety, patriotism and family values, with abortion and contraception banned. If this faction dominates, we will see a determined attack on all progressive institutions, including the establishment media and Ivy League universities, despite the damage this will cause to American prestige, wealth, and capacity for innovation.

The tech elites who fled the Democratic Party for an opportunity to directly control the U.S. government via unconstitutional means seek to remove regulations and restrictions to unleash rapid technological and commercial innovation and further enrich themselves. It is an interesting question whether or not Elon Musk’s stated goal of settling Mars is an actual ideological imperative for him, or a kind of Trojan Horse that provides cover for seeking control and amassing of resources for purposes of power and domination (including individual life extension). It could be both. The drive toward transhumanist technological dystopia or Singularity is based on a pure, atheist rationalism that sees the Earth and the vast mass of human beings as tools to be exploited for a transcendent aim, ignoring the immanent plane of existence in the Now.

Both of these ideological projects — the one based on imposing a distorted form of Christianity plus nationalism as a counterattack on Enlightenment ideals of “public reason” and personal freedom to create a semblance or simulacrum of legitimation (as we see in other societies that have retracted or crumbled into religious fundamentalism like Iran or enshrined a postmodern form of leader deification as in North Korea), and the other based on sterile rationalism seeking to accelerate technology and Artificial Intelligence to extend the human lifespan no matter what cost — are ultimately, I would say, very sad and do not honor the emancipatory possibilities inherent in our shared human experience.

Another effort at an ideological solution to the legitimation crisis has emerged through the “transformational” culture found in festivals like Burning Man and elite bastions like Ibiza as a kind of light-weight neo-animism that seeks to integrate certain watered-down aspects of indigenous spiritual practice with neoliberalism or libertarian values. This ideology toggles between reductive materialism given neo-spiritual tonalities and a kind of therapy culture focused on an interminable quest for individual “healing” which has sought to co-opt the psychedelic experience as an adjunct to the neoliberal “cult of the self.” This ideology provides no coherent response to the deeper crisis and has ended up being co-opted into MAGA via MAHA. But in a sense, I still write for people in this culture because they have the potential to do the hard work to break through, from self-serving forms of neo-spirituality to a logically coherent monistic idealism which requires a new realization of social and political responsibility in a time of tremendous danger and opportunity.

Monistic Idealism as a Response to the Legitimation Crisis

I have already explored this repeatedly, including in The Elevator position paper, The Idealism Option (pick up a free E-copy or buy the book here). Essentially, the discovery of quantum physics that the universe is “not locally real,” combined with the work of investigative thinkers like Bernardo Kastrup, Amit Goswami, Fritjof Capra, Jude Currivan, Donald Hoffman, Robert Lanza, and Neil Theise (among others) point toward monistic or analytic idealism as a logically stable and coherent alternative to reductive materialism or physicalism. According to idealism, human self-awareness is not an accidental byproduct of billions of years of physical processes colliding in a purposeless universe. Consciousness is the underlying reality, the “ontological primitive” in Kastrup’s terms, and the physical universe arises or emerges from the instinctive ground of consciousness just as dreams arise in the individual mind. That underlying field of primordial awareness or what Buddhists call “nature of mind” has an innate tendency to explore its own creative capacities, which it can only do by creating separate or individuated expressions of consciousness (like you and like me) with various levels of self-awareness.

This ontological shift not only resolves (or dissolves) the “hard problem of consciousness” but allows for the vast range of psychic, paranormal, and synchronistic phenomena reliably experienced by people now and through history. It also allows for the existence of subtler levels or dimensions of reality, which can be experienced directly through visionary states, psychedelic states (nn-DMT etc), Near Death Experiences (NDES), and the like. It also allows for the possibility or even theoretical certainty of some aspect of our being that continues beyond this physical incarnation, perhaps via physical reincarnation for which the work of Ian Stevenson provides fascinating evidence.

As I have explored and will continue to explore, this ontological shift has, potentially, tremendous implications for society, politics, economy, ecology, and other tangible as well as ideological facets of our shared life-world. First of all, it posits an underlying unity of consciousness. This means that each human being is equally an expression of the source-field of potentiality, with equal value in the most basic sense, despite any difference in skillsets or intelligence. It also allows for harmonization of the religious and mystical traditions, instead of atheism’s smirking rejection of the various religions, which exacerbates the system’s tendencies toward fragmentation and destruction.

Monistic idealism points toward immanence instead of transcendence, hence a positive result of embracing this ontology is a return to a comprehensive concern for the immediate betterment of human beings and the planetary ecology in an unmediated sense. There is no “better” or “other” place to go, whether the destination is Mars, Artificial Super Intelligence, or indefinite life extension. We are all who, where, and why we need to be, exactly now.

More to come next time. Please let me know your thoughts and ideas in the comments.