Toby Russell, 9 Jun 2025
Approx. reading time: 75 minutes (9007 words)
In terms of human wisdom, understanding what a human being is and what life is for, we [Westerners] really have hit rock bottom. And as a result, you can see that people are extremely unhappy, anxious, suicidal … I mean the young are being left without anything to encourage them except more technical information. This is awful! It's … it's a tragedy! And unless we're able to do something very soon, this civilisation will collapse. — Iain McGilchrist
Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know. — Pema Chodron
We begin with reality as astounding, undeniable fact; none could be more incontrovertible or extravagantly different to the alternative: pure nothingness. There is thus no surer ground from which to start our journey.
But we encounter the unknown with our very first step: What is reality? Mechanistic and meaningless, or alive and meaningful? Answering this question is the uncompleted task of ontology. There is still no final pronouncement on what reality is. The ontological jury is still deliberating, hotly, as it has been for millennia.
In the open spaces of this uncertainty, one of my goals at Truth Transparent is to persuade you that my own ontological knowing — reality is life, is alive, is consciousness, is God — is not only a feasible position to hold, but also that it offers the most explanatory power; materialism/physicalism cannot accommodate consciousness, but a consciousness-first ontology can elegantly accommodate 'matter': energy, forces, particles, etc. It also happens to be a position shared by many big hitters in the field, all of whom punch far above my own philosophical and intellectual skills. And, most importantly of all, it is highly relevant to the basic questions Truth Transparent asks:
- What is the struggle of life about?
- What does it mean to be a civilised human being?
- What are we capable of?
Truth Transparent examines everything through the refracting lens of these questions.
One aspect of what this ontological position asserts, generally speaking, is that subjectivity, or perspective, or awareness, is fundamental. Subjectivity, it claims, is part of the very 'stuff' of reality. It is this aspect — this riposte to the mechanistic worldview of materialism — that I'm pointedly foregrounding right at the beginning of our journey.
I know this assertion upsets most Westerners. Nonetheless, I dare invite you onto this apparently fanciful terrain as my first act. I cannot do otherwise: The embittered, divisive warring in which we Westerners are again miring the whole world is doing too much harm for no good reason. Sadly, tragically, it could not be more historically predictable. The pattern just keeps on repeating even though we seem not to want our lives to be this way.
I want to know what locomotes this apparently blind process, what makes civilisation's dawn-to-decadence, promise-to-collapse melody its most essential; I love civilisation and want to play my part to help it to evolve a little further. What is the nature of our civilisational challenge, what are we looking at?
The argument I advance at this site is that the way civilisation's amassed power becomes irresistibly, even systemically attractive is a central piece of the puzzle we are piecing together. There is something in how civilisation's structuring properties influence human behaviour — in city states and nation states and multinational blocs, institutions and corporations — that seems to make the allure of total power over others systemically impossible to resist.
Iain McGilchrist has a sense of and sensibilities about these matters that closely echo my own, even though we walked very different paths to develop our respective positions. He roots the reflexive perspective I touch on above in an imbalanced relationship between the brain's hemispheres, an imbalance in which the left hemisphere dominates. At the heart of his thoroughgoing account of left brain's "way of being" is its tight focus on grabbing, getting and manipulating. The left brain, among a wide variety of attributes and qualities, also happens to be incapable of admitting error and correcting course.
The left-hemisphere's acquisitive modus operandi segues us to the second cornerstone of Truth Transparent's enquiry: money, that deceiving enabler of infinite acquisition. In my view, money is power's most loyal partner, its truest expression in the form of civilisational control tool, where I mean "control" synonymously with "power over others".
Ergo: Left-brain modus operandi + Civilisation => Deepening and culturally contagious left-brain imbalance and creeping addiction to totalising power.
The left hemisphere likes things that are man-made. Things we make are also more certain: we know them inside out, because we put them together. They are not, like living things, constantly changing and moving, beyond our grasp. — McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (pp. 79–80).
As Lord Acton put it, "The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks." Because civilisation is about control and power over the environment, increasing safety, increasing predictability and stability; because that power is best projected and protected with money and control of its smithy; because these interdependent phenomena are systemically addictive to the left hemisphere, it follows that civilisational evolution has a very hard time preventing the steady emergence of an inescapable, and finally crippling, tension between rulers and ruled — not to mention a strong tendency towards dictatorship and, with the advent of mass communication and mass formation, totalitarianism.
No matter how radiant our civilisational dawn, it always seems to darken into oligarchy and despotism … because money.
This brings us to the two trinities I use to make the essence of my case more graphically comprehensible. The first is power↔money↔value, which I hope does a good enough job of capturing some of the essential way of being that characterises the left hemisphere. The trinity I created for the right hemisphere is love↔wisdom↔health.
I'm proposing the power-based trinity as a lexical graphic to represent the systemic, and perhaps also reflexive, civilisational requirement for control. However, I also see value, its third element, as a pivot between the two trinities; value, like beauty, lies in the eye of the beholder, is irreducibly subjective.
My thesis is that for us as human beings there are two fundamentally opposed realities, two different modes of experience; that each is of ultimate importance in bringing about the recognisably human world; and that their difference is rooted in the bihemispheric structure of the brain. — Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (p. 3).
To my mind, these three defining qualities of civilisation are: power, hubris and manipulation. My core argument is that civilisational power systemically enables the left hemisphere to gain ascendancy, but that this very power is then condemned to thwart the left brain's hubristic ambition for eternal majesty by tugging it ever more strongly towards oligarchy and, nowadays, with modern mass-communication technologies, totalitarianism.
The sad sum of all this is that neither the way out, nor the fact of the problem itself, can be perceived by the problem's cause — left-brain-weighted imbalance. Civilisation must in part entail the ever-present risk of a multi-faceted, multi-compounding positive feedback loop that can last centuries.
The right hemisphere is openly, vigilantly aware of the big picture. It maintains horizon-wide vigilance about how things are developing Out There — threats and opportunities alike. It intuits its environment's rhythms and ever-changing disposition, cares about both its own needs and the needs of others, so errs on the side of caution and patience, compassionately. But it does not control speech. Hence, it can be silenced, suppressed, cast into the shadows.
In other words, honest and nuanced assessment of each situation's ever-shifting complexity is natural to the right brain, but anathema to the blinkered left. Over the long term, the right hemisphere's way of being would be gradually condemned to obscurity in the wake of the glittering civilisational successes won by the left's way of being. Bureaucracies and legalese would flourish to pathocratic excess. A left-brained civilisation becomes, in effect, an oppression of those more organically human and perhaps 'wild' factors that must, from the left brain's perspective, be tightly managed to ensure maximal stability and predictability.
Well … long live doubt. Used wisely, it is an excellent guide.
'I don't know' is a liberating stance to adopt, once we have accepted and become comfortable with it. It sets a needed undoing in motion that can lead to healthy, open-minded scepticism — an attitude that reveals and opens far more doors than fearful or fanatical obedience to ideology ever could.
To repeat, value's cultural judge and jury — money — is highly redolent of the broader left-brain issues I emphasise above: mechanistic obsession with power-based control, a price-based sense of value, greedy ambition as positive-feedback loop, a cultural inability to effectively value phenomena like wisdom and humility. Being both measure and store of value, money represents an incredibly powerful social technology. But as should be clear to everyone by now, power tends to corrupt.
To help find the courage to submit into this process, it helps to remember the simple and undeniable fact of beauty. Beauty is something we instinctively value far more than money. There is no mistaking an encounter with beauty. It can make us weep for joy and laugh in awe. In the end, it is beauty we hope for, strive for, or rather are daring to let go back into. It does not inhere in energy, or in force, or in DNA, endorphins or psychedelic drugs. Beauty is an experienced response we cannot deny. It is inherent in consciousness as a potential recognition, a rich and profound connection with something that is too true to define.
Systemically, money needs scarcity to be needed. Plenitude — enough to go around for all — is anathema to money. Scarcity is the 'problem' the social technology of money manages, recreates in its image, and sustains.
To summarise this introductory article in a single paragraph: Civilisation loves control, our brain's left-hemisphere loves control. Civilisation, among many other things, generates more and more wealth. This wealth affords increasing social complexity and population growth. Concomitant with this growth, power grows and grows; it is needed to keep large groups of people cohesive, obedient, controllable. This amassed power then attracts 'psychopaths' to those groups that control all that power and wealth. Pathocratic/ponerogenic forces are then set in motion, whereupon corruption becomes the name of the game. In other words, civilisation has in its 'DNA' the seductive and structural architecture that gives the left brain everything it thinks it wants. But the left brain cannot see that this is dangerously dysfunctional, which makes it systemically psychopathic, rigid, doomed — while valuable input from the right hemisphere is silenced or ridiculed. Because we now have weapons of mass destruction and leave far too heavy an environmental footprint on the biosphere that sustains us, we urgently need to figure out how to give the right-brain its head, and lastingly so.
Truth Transparent is a complex journey as a book. It attempts a penetrating examination of what Consciousness-As-Reality implies pragmatically, how this ontological position helps us better understand power and money, and, consequently, how Western civilisation, Western politics and geopolitics, might be renewed and recreated by learning to revere the love↔wisdom↔health trinity described above.
Related: ontological_foundation, power_money_value, love_wisdom_health