The Idealism Option

A Mini-Manifesto

Cover art by Rachel Garrard: Kamuna, 2023, rock powder pigment on linen, 70 x 56 inches

In preparation for our upcoming seminar, The Future of Consciousness, we have published a mini-manifesto, The Idealism Option. Pick up your free copy here. The Idealism Option is a publication of The Elevator, a little think tank I started with Tharald Nustad and Guy Staniforth. We publish a biweekly newsletter that covers the “global consciousness movement, which you can subscribe to here (recent topics include free will and synesthesia). Please read the first few chapters of our manifesto, below. I hope you will scoop up the rest.

We’ve extended the 25% “Early Bird” sale for The Future of Consciousness for one more week:

We are adding new amazing speakers including Jeffrey Kripal, whose wonderful books include The Flip and Authors of The Impossible. I honestly believe this course will stretch the boundaries of human knowledge as we start to shift our culture toward a post-materialist ontology that recognizes consciousness, not matter, as the foundation of reality.

Introduction

WE FIND OURSELVES IN A TIME OF RAPID CHANGE, SOCIAL TURMOIL, AND ECOLOGICAL EMERGENCY. POST-INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY HAS SHOWN ITSELF UNABLE TO DEAL WITH ITS INTERNAL CONTRADICTIONS PARTICULARLY WHEN IT COMES TO SKYROCKETING CO2 LEVELS, BUT IN MANY OTHER AREAS ALSO. FOR INSTANCE, WE SEE ANTI-DEMOCRATIC, AUTHORITARIAN MOVEMENTS GAINING POPULARITY ACROSS THE WORLD. MANY OF THE BASIC IDEAS AND CORE PRINCIPLES THAT STEERED MODERN CIVILIZATION OVER THE LAST CENTURIES NO LONGER SEEM ABLE TO SERVE THEIR TRADITIONAL FUNCTION.

Many of us have the uncanny sense that we float, untethered, in an ideological abyss. If we hold on to old ways of thinking about the world, it is because they are all we know: Nothing new has, as of yet, revealed itself.

The rapid development of technology, particularly Artificial Intelligence, only exacerbates what some thinkers call the “meaning crisis:” Many of the basic creative and interpersonal skills that seemed to define us as uniquely human can now be performed, with increasing efficacy, by machines. And this will evolve quickly. We are, apparently, at the start of another tech-driven revolution in human society, one that could lead to the loss of hundreds of millions of even billions of jobs. Entire industries may vanish in the blink of an eye, intensifying social disruption and exacerbating the meaning crisis.

Until the last decades, it was commonly believed, in the Anglo-European world, at least, that open, liberal, secular societies and dynamic markets would lead, inexorably, to progress—to universal abundance. Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (Free Press Publishing, 1992) famously made this case: That liberal democracies—open societies like the United State, France, or Germany—were the endpoint of history. Recently, we have discovered that totalitarian and authoritarian societies can also use market dynamics and technological breakthroughs to strengthen themselves. In fact, there is a real fear, as Deep Mind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman writes in The Coming Wave (Penguin , 2023), that AI could lead to “infinitely stable dictatorships.” This is a harrowing prospect.

Times of crisis and existential peril are also precious opportunities for change. If we are going to authentically address our civilizational emergency, we must cut through the branches and go to the root of it. We must meet it with something galvanizing, inspiring, comprehensive—something that resounds in the human heart, fulfilling our deepest hopes and aspirations.

At this dangerous time, humanity needs a new vision—a new unifying project—beyond reductive materialism, secular atheism, regressive Fundamentalism, technological transhumanism, or market-driven economics. We believe this new vision—also a new direction—lies in the shift to a post-materialist paradigm: The idealist alternative. Based on rigorous logic, philosophical Idealism proposes that consciousness, not matter, is the basis of reality, the “ontological primitive.” This thesis accords with recent discoveries in quantum physics as well as ancient Eastern thought.

The Idealism Option proposes it is time to retire the prevailing materialist paradigm. When we integrate the current threshold of scientific and philosophical theory, we end up with a fundamental shift in our currently accepted beliefs about the nature of the universe. In what follows, we advocate for this new ontology, one that aligns more closely with current scientific knowledge and, we believe, radically improves our prospects for collective flourishing in the future.

As we explore in what follows, the paradigm shift to idealism changes our orientation toward reality on the deepest level, opening up new frontiers of discovery for us, individually, and for civilization as a whole. It provides a new compass point for humanity’s future. It allows us to reconcile lost dimensions of soul, spirit, and the imaginal realms that were amputated from modern society with the rise of reductive materialism over the last five centuries.

The shift from materialism to idealism or panpsychism is already happening in certain elite subcultures where former reductionists now believe in psychic, supernatural and mystical modes of perception and experience. Once widely adopted, this new paradigm will, we propose, lead to benevolent social and political transformations that support universal human rights, an equitable redistribution of wealth, and urgent ecological goals. The Elevator—the organization that has produced this white paper—seeks to support and accelerate this transition, while advancing cutting-edge theoretical and scientific research and critical discourse.

ONE: CHANGE THE STORY

WHILE TECHNOLOGY CONTINUES TO ADVANCE IN SOME AREAS, WE NO LONGER MOVE TOWARD A BETTER LIFE FOR THE MASSES – TOWARD INCREASING LEVELS OF SHARED ABUNDANCE. THE DREAM OF INFINITE MATERIAL PROGRESS THAT GUIDED OUR WORLD OVER THE LAST TWO CENTURIES IS NO LONGER TENABLE. INSTEAD, MUCH OF THE WORLD REGRESSES. AROUND THE WORLD, PEOPLE CONFRONT DEEPENING ECOLOGICAL CHALLENGES; GOVERNMENTS ANTICIPATE THE PROSPECT OF SOCIAL COLLAPSE DUE TO SCARCITY OF NATURAL RESOURCES INCLUDING WATER.

This regression is revealed by the failure of countries to achieve the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as part of Agenda 2030. According to the UN:

World leaders made a historic promise to secure the rights and well-being of everyone on a healthy, thriving planet when they agreed to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 SDGs in 2015. However, the combined impacts of the climate crisis, the war in Ukraine, a gloomy global economic outlook and lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have revealed systemic weaknesses and significantly hampered progress towards the Goals... Of the approximately 140 targets that can be evaluated, half of them show moderate or severe deviation from the desired trajectory. Furthermore, more than 30 percent of these targets have experienced no progress or, even worse, regression below the 2015 baseline.

Statistics reveal more poverty, hunger, and a growing number of refugees fleeing from failed states. As knowledge advances – as digital networks become increasingly sophisticated and AI evolves in real-time – our political and financial systems are increasingly unstable, in danger of failing us. Once-optimistic commentators now see darkness closing in. Some believe post-industrial civilization has already started to collapse as a result of the “polycrisis,” which The Financial Times defines as a “collective term for interlocking and simultaneous crises of an environmental, geopolitical and economic nature.”

As a response to deteriorating conditions, authoritarian, Far Right and Neo-Fascist movements gather force in countries around the world, attracting the support of irate, disaffected masses ready to reject democracy and abandon the civil rights protections won, through hard struggle, over the last centuries. Gigantic forest fires, “once-in-a-century” super-storms, and historic droughts are the new global norm, threatening the future of farming while contributing to rapid declines in global biodiversity.

By now we know that climate change does not follow the gradual, linear projections of mainstream climate science, represented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Instead, as “doomer” climate extremists warned for many years, ecosystem breakdown can intensify quickly. As nonlinear feedback loops in the climate system engage, climate change gathers ferocious momentum. Last year was the warmest in recorded history by a significant margin, suggesting that climate change is intensifying quickly.

In 2023, we passed the threshold of 1.5 degree Celsius warmer than pre-industrial levels: Something that was not supposed to occur for several decades. Scientists have warned this will unleash a cascade of negative effects, potentially causing a “multi-breadbasket failure”—agricultural depletion leading to food shortages—in the next few years.

According to an ancient saying, “Crisis is opportunity.” If we step back to understand what humans have unleashed on the Earth and how we have reached this precipice, we can fundamentally reassess our current situation as well as our prospects for the future. As we will explore in what follows, this reassessment must start with what is most basic: Our understanding of the nature of reality.

Ontology is the invisible underpinning upon which cultures, societies, and civilizations, effloresce, fade, and decompose. The consumerist, materialist ethos of secular societies over the last three centuries was informed by the dominant paradigm of reductive materialism: The theory that mind evolves out of matter. According to this hypothesis, the universe is essentially random. Life is purely the result of a particular set of material conditions occurring due to a haphazard succession of cosmic and geophysical events. Human self-awareness, language, and culture is an extraordinary, ultimately meaningless, accident. “Selfish genes” zip themselves up in meat suits to compete for the opportunity to propagate.

The idealist paradigm argues, on rational grounds, that consciousness, not anything material or physical, is the foundation of reality. Consciousness—not matter or any physical or energetic substrate—is, in philosopher Bernardo Kastrup’s phrase, the “ontological primitive.” This makes sense of the discoveries of quantum physics over the last century, including the experimental proof that the universe is “not locally real” which won the Nobel Prize in physics in 20224. Idealism also dissolves the “hard problem of consciousness,” which continues to bedevil materialist philosophers and neuroscientists.

The thesis that the physical world is, ultimately, an expression or a projection of consciousness reverses the current, materialist understanding of reality. The secular ideal of reductive scientific materialism is the basis of our political and economic orientation. The materialist bias shapes our approach to developing and implementing technologies, whether Artificial Intelligence or synthetic biology. This new paradigm is like a new foundation for rebuilding our human house on stable ground. It may also lead to a different understanding of the global meta-crisis, as the necessary preconditions for a collective metanoia: A transformation of worldview leading to a reversal of values and priorities.

The value in our all-encompassing polycrisis, which threatens almost all forms of life on the planet down to the tardigrades, is that we must reassess the entire paradigm which has guided modern civilization for the last few centuries. Many find themselves open to radical new ideas and proposals—prospects they would never have considered while the old system seemed functional, unassailable, and air-tight. The sudden mass acceptance of psychedelic substances—taboo, legally and culturally suppressed for a half century—offers one example of this new opening. The growing popularity of esoteric practices and mysticism is another indicator of a deep shift in values and priorities that the mainstream still ignores or ridicules.

TWO: What Is Consciousness?

CONFRONTING THE CONTEMPORARY “META-CRISIS,” “POLY-CRISIS,” OR “ANTHROPOCENE,” MANY PHILOSOPHERS AND SOCIAL THEORISTS BELIEVE THAT THE ROOT OF THIS EMERGENCY MUST BE FOUND IN HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS. AFTER ALL, WE HUMAN BEINGS UNLEASHED THIS ECOLOGICAL DESTRUCTION VIA OUR EXPLOITATION OF NATURAL RESOURCES AND OUR RACE TO BUILD GLOBAL INDUSTRIAL CIVILIZATION.

Along with the meta-crisis, we face the “meaning crisis:” Perhaps the most important, and certainly the foundational, element.

At this point it is clear: Underlying the mass civilization we built over the last centuries as we expanded our scientific knowledge and technical powers, something was missing. The race toward technological mastery led to a profound disconnection and alienation.

We can ask whether it was our progressive alienation from nature, our development of abstract symbol systems, or religious zealotry and hubris, patriarchy and left-brain dominance, willful ignorance, or some other aspect of the human psyche (like the psychopath problem) that caused us to disregard the limits of natural systems. Many indigenous and aboriginal cultures understood and honored those limits. Based on thousands of years of trial-and-error, they had learned how to live in symbiosis with nature. With modernization, we attached excessive importance to the “left brain,” the hemisphere associated with rational thought and logic that separates the world into distinct objects and categories. We de-emphasized the more holistic right hemisphere, linked to intuition, vision, and what is traditionally considered the feminine aspects of consciousness.

A central subject we will explore in what follows is “consciousness.” The word gets used often, in different ways. Let’s take a moment to define it.

When we speak about our individual consciousness, we refer to the state of being aware of and able to think about one's surroundings, sensations, thoughts, and activities. From an individual perspective, consciousness encompasses our self-awareness, perception, and the experience of the world. While even microorganisms possess some primitive level of awareness, we would not consider them conscious as we are. In some sense, to be considered truly conscious, you must have meta-cognition: be aware that you are aware.

On its most basic level, consciousness—as functional awareness and responsivity to the environment—is a property found in many living beings. It is generally thought that our particular human capacity for self-reflection, our ability to remember the distant past and plan for the future, to manipulate abstract symbols, reveals a more developed or “advanced” consciousness than other species on Earth.

By “collective consciousness,” we generally refer to the set of beliefs, ideas, attitudes, and knowledge shared by a social group or society. These elements inform and shape the individual's sense of belonging, identity, and behavior. Collective consciousness includes social forms and ideologies we internalize personally, influencing psychology and behavior on both individual and collective levels.

As social thinkers like Yuval Noah Harari, among many others, have noted, human beings are motivated to act by stories and myths. In fact, beyond our basic biological functions (such as breathing), everything we do reflects the narratives and mythic structures in which we are embedded. To develop greater consciousness, then, means becoming more aware of the often-invisible stories and myths that provide structure and meaning to our experience. We cannot escape myth-making; even the philosophy of nihilism and the idea that life is meaningless is, in the end, another story humans have constructed and endowed with their belief.

What guiding stories have led us, invisibly, to this crisis point?