Transparency and the Social Imaginary

'We hold these truths to be self-evident' is a widely quoted part from the US Declaration of Independence, and it gestures to the nature of priors as constitutive of a social imaginary - a coherent axiomatic deep structure of so-called transparent truths. These priors are so deeply embedded in the collective psyche that they don't require proof or conscious reflection anymore.

The intent behind this exploration is not to make you a good amateur neuroscientist. The aim is to offer a felt sense and imaginal grasp of the processes, infrastructure and bits of information involved in assembling your conscious experience, so you start to feel your agency and discernment grow. It is to ready minds for a system of practices that develops construct-aware consciousness in order to see through accepted social constructs, and can effectively weave new imaginaries into being that help us relate to reality in ways that are not founded on delusional priors.

Knowledge of priors, understanding the active nature of the processes and whole-part relationships, can move us towards a new social ontology and practices of creative unfolding, opening new paths of exploration and insight. (See also Part 1 of this two-part series).

 

Below is a non-exhaustive taxonomy of priors that form the surface layer of the axiomatic substrate for our Western social imaginary.

 

When I once asked my parents why they decided to have children, they replied 'that's just what you did.' In the times and culture they grew up in, the idea that having kids was optional and available as a personal choice was not on the menu. Such are the pressures of social priors on the mind. They afford action through transparent, or even absent decision-making, but also form imaginal constraints around what's considered possible. In order to manifest anything, you need constraints, like the airflow without resistance from your vocal chords doesn't produce sounds.

Selection of social priors is a political game. 'There is no alternative!', cried Margaret Thatcher, the United Kingdom's prime minister in 1980. Her statement even became an acronym – TINA - further cementing the injunctive power of her slogan. Obviously, the reason why she said there was no alternative was because there were: communism and socialism. Her self-evident truth was neoliberal economics, privatisation of public goods, a move away from big government and driving an ideology of personal responsibility and rational self-interested action.

She went even further to say: 'there is no such thing as society, there are individual men and women and there are families.' With that, she denied an entire ontological category of a complex web of relationships.

Her communication effort was aimed at installing the prior of neoliberal economics deep in the axiomatic background structure, so it would look like there was no alternative indeed. She imposed the kinds of collective imaginal constraints that would have cultural critic Mark Fisher coin the term 'Capitalist Realism' 30 years after Thatcher: 'the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.'[1]

The stubbornness of priors and the resistance to belief updating means that the 'we need a new story' approach to social change is half the story. Some of the contents of a new story may make it in, when the current generative model is no longer working or the new story affords more energy efficiency in terms of action, but it is generally no match for the ingrained and deeper priors, the attractor patterns and predictive mechanisms that run in the depts of procedural memory and keep us stuck in routine behaviours. The neoliberal story is compelling precisely because it couples with the deeper prior of agency and that of nascent individualism in culture.

That is why Thatcher was successful; her story was coherent, promised individuals more freedom and control and was therefore able to take root. Coherence is key - just as mitochondria could only be assimilated into human cells as fully formed and functional entities, capable of communication with their environment, similarly, new potential priors also need to be coherent and emit possibility in order to integrate and exist endosymbiotically within the host - the social imaginary.

 

The same symbiotic principle applies to social systems. The German Sociologist Niklas Luhmann borrowed the concepts of operational closure, structural coupling and autopoiesis from biology to describe the interplay of social systems in which communication between them creates the boundaries and maintains their differentiation as systems. Only because they are closed but coupled can they integrate and function as parts in a larger whole.[2]

Stories, heuristics and myths also have to connect to the psychic substrate, primarily as navigation tools as they need to capture something of the deeper, causal structures and workings of the world. They afford direction and meaning in a world presenting us with problems. They are supposed to lead us from frustration to actions that satisfy. We desperately want a happy ending, and any teleology that offers a more difficult alternative loses, especially whenever a sense of urgency is absent.

 

This is why comforting lies are often favoured over hard truths. A new truth, climate change resulting in possible societal collapse, for example, is not of immediate concern for our survival and thus corrective actions can be postponed until they can't any longer. The processing and selection mechanics of the human bodymind are simply not evolved to deal with things that are very fast or slow and temporally deep, very large or very small. We don't see these things outside the narrow bandwidth of our cognition as matters relevant enough for updating our beliefs.

It is not the most accurate story about reality that makes it in, but the most urgent, promising, energy efficient and imaginally and emotionally resonant. Russian propagandists and politicians (especially on the right), know this all too well, and this is why they tend to speak to deeper and older, physical tribal and mythical priors - fear system, family values, national identity - than those on the left speak to: equality, gender or even more abstract ideas like intersectionality. The latter speak to potential futures, the former to a realised past which has much more hold on our minds.

Dark Priors

The boundary as the site between actualised past and emergent possible future is where the struggle happens. New hyperpriors, akin to master narratives, are attempting to install themselves in the background web of meaning and aim to get so deep that we have them implicit in our collective procedural memory and live them out on autopilot. All religions aspire to inhabit this depth of transparency so the 'truths' don't get questioned. Our social practices rest upon these master narratives and are the reason we're a hugely successful species when it comes to collaboration, aligning self-interest with the hyperprior of progress for example.

We can represent the priors and their location of origin in time and space as the social self's horizontal dimension - a set of nested concentric circles. In the centre sits the island of You-Here-Now, including your conscious thoughts, feelings, emotions. It's everything we may say when someone asks us how we're doing.

Then we have the slightly more extended self with an identity shaped by family life and close friends, where we first internalised social mores and habits and styles of communication and learned what was allowed and what not. Further out and with increased temporal depth, a circle embraces us as culture, consisting of the business world and education systems. The further out we go, towards institutions that guard the most foregrounded processes of society like law, the more diffuse and backgrounded it gets as we enter the territory of the social imaginary, which has a deeper origination in time – woven of myth and stories that sort of mark the horizon of collective self-understanding, until the hyperpriors go completely dark, but remain as the deep context of exformation.

Distance doesn't mean out of reach as the boundaries of systems touch and exchange information and you are shaped by the entirety of the circles as an adult. Reflect on how the deep hyperprior of Progress shapes you, and how unbearable it is for most moderns to feel that our life is going nowhere. Before we shifted our conception of time as linear, away from a circular one determined by repetitive seasons, life without a sense of direction, progress or self-actualisation was just fine. This disposition of future-orientation, accumulation of resources and realisation within the life-span, not for the afterlife, is another deep prior of modernity around which our lives are structured.

An example of a new social prior that is in the process of nestling itself so deep that we're no longer questioning it, is that of techno-optimism. It comes with relatively new ideological contents of its own making, like accelerationism, an alienating characteristic feature of late-stage modernity according to the sociologist Hartmut Rosa, but a means to govern according to philosophers and political theorists such as Nick Land on the right and others like Mark Fisher on the left of the political spectrum. It is a multi-faced, ascendant movement, also influential among Silicon Valley tech bros.

I think it is important to single out techno-optimism as it carries a dangerous promise - I don't have to change, but others will fix it for me. Technology and AI will likely have many benevolent impacts, but the optimism part risks dangerous intellectual bypassing when it is taken as gospel. Seen through the lens of priors and the active inference framework, it is a memetic bulwark against belief-updating because it promises that we'll always MacGyver ourselves out of any troubles we'll get ourselves in. This means we can simply ignore inconvenient facts of the present moment and won't have to revise the foundational priors and start using different protocols and ideas that undergird our cultural and economic practices.

This trust in our future ingenuity and availability of resources to deal with current issues is a huge amoral gamble as it wilfully ignores physical reality in order to serve the superordinate goal to maintain the narrative coherence of the hyperprior[3] of progress itself. Our extractive economic model, which rests on a prior of maintaining at minimum a 2% economic growth as society's homeostatic set point, may prove to be fatal. Prediction does not equal promise, but in our minds, it does.

Thinker and podcaster Nate Hagens, is trying to shine a light on this functional ignorance of our systems' metabolism, through what he calls energy blindness – the fact that our progress and society is fully dependent on the physical substrate called planet earth, primarily oil, but is not factored into our long-term thinking. The well-worn message that you can't have infinite growth on a finite planet, captures this blindness and intellectual bypassing, but nonetheless sits behind the prior (inferential) promise of future access to infinite energy. Energy blindness is a Dark Prior.

 

Hence (effective) accelerationist dreams of harnessing the energy of first our sun, then other star systems, next our galaxy and boldly beyond. These kinds of ascendant imaginal dreams are exactly the products of the energy vectors emerging from the set of priors that a small group of powerful tech-elites have installed as their axiomatic substrate.

It looks futuristic, but arguably these visions are merely a reworking of the transcendent myths of Christianity. The older Magic and Mythical modes of thought are prior to and still inform rational thought, and as such form the history of the future. The packaging is different, but the vector points in the same direction – up and away to the stars and heavens.

However, the accelerationist ideology is not without ontological grounding and as a sci-fi geek, I am sympathetic to a lot of the ideas like space exploration. Other Accellerationist logic concerns the above-mentioned of postponing corrective action until we are forced to, so better speed capitalism up, let it crash and burn so we can get to the next thing. But my sympathy does not go as far as to conflate it with destiny, just because of a deep prior mechanism that all organisms seem to follow, from single-cell organisms to complex ones – the drive to increase access to more energy and resources while taking the path of least resistance.

The drive to seek power in order to increase this access and persist over time in the most energy-efficient way is a fundamental process. Attempts at Hospicing Modernity should, in my opinion, not be about undoing this deep process prior but rather aim at bringing it into right relationship with other opponent processes, just like the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems function in dynamic harmony following attuned coupling with the environment. Social systems ideally also balance each other in this way that ecosystems do.

We can frame that dynamic plural unity in more resonant ways - as the forces of Love and Power. These need to be in right relationship of opponent processing, such that a third force - right direction - can emerge as the teleogenic energy vectors driving our collective unfolding. A rebalancing is long overdue. Power has gained the upper hand in the past centuries, but Love in the form of care for the sacredness of life has been marginalised for lack of materialist ROI. Power gestures to the future, what can be. Love to what is, right here and now. Having one without the other means entering defuturing trajectories.

Prior pluralism

I hope that these examples offer a good enough grasp of priors not just as beliefs and chunks of information but also as teleological pointers and conduits, their depth aspect and their casting of imaginal constraints by ruling out counterfactuals for purposes of ease of action.

But when we base society on too narrow a set of priors, as Thatcher did by pushing alternatives out, the mechanisms of cultural reproduction, selection and integration have little to work with and as such only allow for a shrinking possibility space, narrow goals and rigid paths forward. Or bounded spaces, like social systems are in Luhmann's view, may grow too big, if we optimise for only one metric, like economic growth. The balance will get lost and boundaries get compromised, as was the case in 2008 when the financial system's size dwarfed other social systems and compromised the integrity of the whole.

A social imaginary, as the axiomatic deep structure of priors, emits and organises potential and forms the river banks and basins of the flow of life energy towards common goals, which are for most people now purely economic. But when there is not enough diversity in the foundational set of priors – patterns, protocols, processes, potential, ideas and so on - our world shrinks. There are simply not enough counterfactuals to consider acting on. This has a personal side too. When we cut off our emotions for example, emphasising fact-based, rational decision-making to solely optimise for efficiency and productivity, we reduce the sources of embodied sensory information and shrink our range of possible action and insight.

Late-modernity itself can arguably be reframed as a process of collective reciprocal narrowing[4], a self-reinforcing, constrictive dynamic of mutual niche-constructing between systems, individuals' minds and their environment, ultimately resulting in monoculture. (Look no further than your Netflix feed featuring yet another Jurassic Park sequel) Patterns of attention, perception and behaviour and the possibilities offered by the environment become progressively restricted in a mutually reinforcing and accelerating cycle, resulting in Fisher's Capitalist Realism, which I believe soon will become Accelerationist Realism.

Can we ensure prior pluralism and strengthen love as a worthy opponent to power? One approach can be to envision new forms of social organisation and engage in practices that allow collectives to stay open enough to new information, even inviting in what may feel like noise, to not get trapped in loops of reciprocal narrowing. It may be helpful to visit two modes of interbeing that clarify the difference between two states - those of cohesion and coherence, the latter being more dynamic and able to integrate differences better. Love in this view is a practice of active openness and a willingness to integrate what is split off, other, or unknown into the self-boundary.

Cohesion is vital for building trust and focuses on the bonds that unite individuals within a group based on shared identities or values. Cohesion emphasises similarity among group members, offering a strong sense of belonging. This can lead to an exclusionary attitude towards those outside the group. Cohesive groups rely on emotional connections that reinforce unity and order relationships. Often there is a charismatic leader, a founder figure and their vision around which members gather – this figure is called the Source.

While these bonds strengthen group identity, they may also limit openness to diversity and new ideas. High levels of cohesion can create rigidity within a group, making it difficult to adapt when faced with new challenges or perspectives. Or they limit growth of a collective, when subgroups form, bonds are less warm and differences become harder to integrate. This can lead to echo chambers where dissenting opinions are marginalised and can lead to increased pressure to conform. Splitting off is common if a strategy or vision is not 'roomy' enough for all members. Also, truly novel trans-paradigmatic insight doesn't arise from cohesion as the predictive processes limit the permeability of a group's boundary.

Coherence refers to the ongoing dynamic alignment and integration of diverse elements within a system that allows for effective functioning despite differences. Coherence is crucial for navigating uncertainty and complexity within and with social groups. It facilitates the emergence of shared understanding and purpose, enabling members to work together effectively even when they hold differing views or identities. Coherence is characterised by the coexistence of multiple identities that fit together harmoniously where needed. When conflict and tension arise, they are worked with as energy, fuelling the unfolding process, not as events to avoid. It involves the discovery of shared values through collaborative work, or a way to hold them in various polarities of the social fabric and space of ideas.

Rather than imposing a top-down order like attempts at cohesion often do, coherence primarily emerges from the bottom-up interactions among a system's elements. Coherence emphasises action towards common goals or problems but without pressure to converge on a single narrative or one right answer. Ultimately, it creates an alignment and harmonious order in a network of relationships among individuals who share common interests and objectives, allowing for a dynamic and inclusive group environment that can adapt to challenges while respecting individual uniqueness. Coherence also affords sensory clarity, collective intuition and the possibility for emergence of trans-paradigmatic insight.

Both modes have pros and cons and are appropriate for different contexts and goals. In essence, both are forms of unity and oneness with specific means of differentiation, boundary architectures and information flows across them. They also differ in their capacity for course correction of direction of unfolding, coherence offering more agility.

The shaping and engaging of vectors potentiated in goal-present relationships, via development of a participatory stance I call Dispositional Realism. 

 

That stance can address the inertia resulting from stubborn priors and forms the creative disposition behind a praxis approach that entails excavating the hyperpriors embedded in the social imaginary. In time, collectives are capable of freeing themselves up and become active participants in building the worlds they envision. 

Deepening our understanding of social priors and their nested, historically extended nature is where I argue enormous potential for innovation, insight and change can be found. There is a case and foundation for a spiritually-informed depth sociology, furthering the lines of inquiry of critical realist philosopher Roy Bhaskar and sociologist Margaret Archer, but with a stronger emphasis on first-person embodied experience.

We can apply the same first-person scrutiny to our social reality, its structures and mechanisms, with equal curiosity, discernment and intensity as spiritual practice has directed in towards the self. We can expand and direct our inquiry to include the models of Other and World and their boundaries and relationships - particularly social reality and the priors inherent in our social agreements and structures and assumptions about reality in general to open up new possibility spaces, not via new means of control, but surrendered alignment with creative intelligences inherent in the present moment and the social field.

[1] Mark Fisher – Capitalist Realism

 

[2] Hans Georg Moeller - Luhmann Explained: from Souls to Systems https://luhmann.ir/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Luhmann-Explained-From-Souls-to-Systems.pdf

 

[3] The term hyperprior means it is foundational, transparent and an assemblage of various other subpriors, some of which are: narrow teleogical thinking; the linear unfolding of time along a past-present-future axis and others like agency, controllability, efficiency, etc.

 

[4] I borrow the term from John Vervaeke who uses reciprocal narrowing to describe a core dynamic of addiction, focusing on the interaction between an individual’s agency and their environment. In his framework, addiction is not merely a matter of chemical dependency or disease, but a process in which both the person and their world become increasingly constrained and rigid through repeated cycles of behavior. Both the agent and the arena ‘reciprocally narrow’ until imaginal constraints cause the person to feel there are no alternatives and no future. The possibility space becomes a prison.