The General Will vs. the Failure of Imagination
I probably sound like a broken record on this subject, but it feels more relevant than ever to what’s happening in the world today—and to how neurotherapy might help us build something better. Here I’m experimenting with new ways to describe both the problem and the path forward. I need the practice!
I also recently discovered Gil Duran’s Nerd Reichpodcast and have been binging every episode. It’s a goldmine of ideas that I can unpack from a philosophical angle and connect with what we’re learning through neurotherapy. Stay tuned for more explorations along these lines.
A strange kind of fatalism has taken hold of the modern mind—the quiet assumption that human beings simply can’t govern themselves. Democracy is too messy, too emotional, too slow. The solution, say a growing chorus of technocrats and philosophers, is hierarchy disguised as efficiency. The state as a startup. The citizen as a shareholder. The CEO as sovereign.
It’s a worldview that calls itself hard-headed realism, but it’s really a failure of imagination. The “Dark Enlightenment,” as its leading thinkers like to call it, believes that hierarchy is not only inevitable but rational. People, they say, are too irrational to organize themselves coherently. Freedom leads to noise; noise requires control.
But this story mistakes a temporary dysfunction for destiny. What looks like chaos may just be what happens when stressed, fragmented nervous systems try to run a civilization. Our failure to cooperate is not proof that coherence is impossible—it’s evidence that we’ve never learned how to cultivate it.
The Iron Law of Laziness
Robert Michels called it the Iron Law of Oligarchy: in any organization, power condenses in the hands of a few. It sounds empirical, almost gravitational, but it’s really just what happens when feedback stops working. Systems under stress—whether neural, organizational, or societal—tend to freeze. Flexibility disappears. Information stops circulating. Control replaces communication.
Rigid thinking, conditioned by life experience, measurably shapes behavior. Trauma, chronic stress, and cultural pressure can all narrow our mental range. There are countless examples, but one that’s particularly relevant—and somewhat poetic in this context—involves religious fundamentalism. Neuroscientists have found that strongly fundamentalist individuals often display hyperactive performance monitoring: an internal alarm system that fires even when nothing’s wrong. Their brains have learned to treat deviation itself as danger.
Of course, that’s just one example. The same pattern shows up in perfectionism, political extremism, corporate cultures obsessed with optimization—any context where flexibility gives way to control. The point isn’t that these people are bad; it’s that their nervous systems have learned rigidity as a survival strategy.
The hopeful part is that rigidity isn’t permanent. Nervous systems can be retrained. People can learn to relax their alarms, think more clearly, and reconnect with nuance. The same is true of societies. If a civilization is, in the end, a network of minds, then collective flexibility begins with individual clarity.
The Forgotten Alternative
Rousseau believed that when individuals became clear and inwardly balanced, their collective intelligence would self-organize. He called this the general will: not the will of the majority, but the will of reason itself as it arises through many minds in harmony. It isn’t forced consensus. It’s coherence.
Neurotherapists see versions of this process in their work every day. A client’s brain, mapped through quantitative EEG, might show networks that refuse to communicate—overactive in one area, underactive in another, locked in rigid rhythms. The result is anxiety, indecision, or emotional reactivity. Traditional therapy might target the stories and beliefs that grow from these patterns—the content of thought—but neurotherapy begins a level deeper, at the form itself.
Through real-time feedback or gentle stimulation, we help the brain remember how to flex. The shift begins in structure and ripples upward into meaning. People often describe a new sense of spaciousness, curiosity, and calm. Their inner narratives start to change on their own, not because someone argued them into a new worldview, but because their signal stopped distorting.
And that’s where Rousseau’s dream becomes practical. A society that learns to train its collective form of thought—the underlying pattern of attention and emotional regulation—doesn’t need to be coerced into agreement. Coherence would emerge naturally, as it does in the nervous system when noise fades and communication returns.
There are, of course, limits to what we can train ourselves to improve. We’ll always have biases, preferences, and beliefs that aren’t just artifacts of distorted thinking. But even so—how far might mental flexibility take us if we could at least learn to think more clearly? What would we find if, instead of fighting over truth, we started to arrive on the same page?
The Tools Rousseau Never Had
To understand how this works, it helps to borrow a distinction from both linguistics and information theory: syntax and semantics.
Syntax is structure—the grammar of thought, the architecture of how ideas connect. Semantics is meaning—the story that structure carries. Every mind, every society, has both. And when syntax breaks down, semantics becomes unstable.
In ontological mathematics, this syntax is immaterial—the pure mathematical structure of thought as it exists in the frequency domain. It’s the invisible logic that organizes experience before it becomes anything we can sense or name.
What’s fascinating, and central to my thesis, is that this same immaterial syntax appears mirrored in our biology. Our brainwave activity seems to echo the same mathematical architecture that structures mind itself. In other words, the brain provides a physical reflection—a readable interface—of something fundamentally nonphysical.
This is, in a sense, the pinnacle of meta-cognition: recognizing not just what we think, but how thinking itself is structured. The syntax—the pattern and timing of those waves—sets the form of experience, while the semantics—the lived meaning—arises from it. When those underlying patterns lose coherence, experience itself begins to fragment.
You can also imagine a mind as an instrument. The syntax is the tuning: the tension of the strings, the intervals between notes. The semantics is the music that emerges. If the tuning is off, no melody will sound right, no matter how inspired the musician. You can keep rewriting the song, but until you tune the instrument, the distortion remains.
Most of what passes for “debate” in our culture is semantic—battles over story. But the deeper issue is syntactic. We’re trying to harmonize through broken tuning. Neurotherapy is, quite literally, a tool for tuning. It works on timing, rhythm, and coordination—the physical correlates of syntax. When those patterns stabilize, new semantics—new meaning—emerges spontaneously.
Rousseau didn’t have this language, but he grasped its spirit. He saw that the health of a society’s ideas depends on the health of its minds. He knew that reason was not just an intellectual faculty but a physiological condition—a rhythm the collective body must learn to sustain.
Coherence as the Physics of Civilization
When coherence collapses inside a brain, we call it mental illness. When it collapses inside a civilization, we call it crisis. The pattern is the same: parts that once worked together begin to distrust each other. Communication becomes competition. Energy goes into surveillance rather than creativity.
Authoritarianism is simply the nervous system’s panic reflex writ large. When uncertainty feels unbearable, we reach for control. But control is brittle. It suppresses chaos without resolving it.
Real order is not imposed—it’s tuned. Like a choir finding harmony, coherence emerges when individual signals learn to listen, to adjust, to find common rhythm. The point isn’t uniformity. It’s resonance—difference organized by relationship.
A coherent civilization would measure its health not by GDP or military strength, but by the clarity of its collective thought. How flexibly can its citizens reason? How calmly can they disagree? How open are they to feedback? These are neurological questions as much as moral ones.
Why the Elites Don’t Want This
If the elites of our age truly wanted to lead for the good of humanity, the promise of the general willwould be irresistible. The idea that a society could become intelligent as a whole—that harmony could replace coercion—should be every enlightened leader’s dream.
Even figures like Elon Musk publicly claim to support meritocracy and the evolution of human consciousness. If that’s true, then why not explore what a coherent civilization might look like? Why not invest in the infrastructure of thought itself?
Perhaps because, for all their talk of progress, many elites quietly share the fatalism of the Dark Enlightenment. They invoke consciousness and meritocracy as banners for a world where they remain on top. It’s not malevolence; it’s inertia—the same rigidity they decry in others running through their own nervous systems.
It’s also convenient. So long as ideas like consciousness or the soul remain undefined, they can be used rhetorically rather than responsibly. A vague ideal is easy to champion and impossible to measure. “Expanding human consciousness” sounds noble until someone asks how—and whether that expansion should serve everyone or only the few who can afford it. Keeping consciousness mystical or amorphous ensures that no one can hold power accountable for what it claims to advance.
A society that can think for itself is difficult to manipulate. That’s why power so often depends on noise. Leaders may talk about innovation and disruption, but what they actually preserve is agitation—a constant state of cognitive arousal that keeps people reactive, scrolling, buying, and believing.
Coherence doesn’t require revolution—it only requires contagion. Calm spreads. Clarity resonates. When enough minds regain internal balance, the external structures that depend on confusion will quietly dissolve. The old hierarchies will collapse not through revolt, but through obsolescence.
Toward a Meritocracy of Mind
Imagine if the highest mark of leadership weren’t wealth or charisma, but coherence—the ability to stay clear and grounded in complexity, to generate calm rather than crisis.
A new kind of meritocracy could be built around that. Neurotherapy, contemplative practice, and rational education are the foundations. They train the syntax of mind—the structure that makes reason stable. From there, the semantics of culture—the stories we live by—begin to repair themselves.
If we take seriously the idea that reality is mental, then mental health is not a side project of civilization. It’s its operating system. Roads, water, power grids—these are infrastructure. So is clarity.
The New Enlightenment
The Dark Enlightenment tells us that order requires control. But the true Enlightenment still waiting to be born knows that order requires understanding.
Religious dogmatism, political extremism, and the cult of productivity are not moral failings; they’re what happens when nervous systems stay locked in overdrive for generations. They can be retrained—gently, scientifically, rationally.
As the underlying rigidity softens, belief gives way to curiosity, debate to dialogue, and obedience to comprehension. That is the beginning of the general will—not the will of rulers, but the resonance of reason itself.
The next Enlightenment will not unfold in parliaments or protests. It will unfold in nervous systems learning to trust their own balance. It will be less about overthrowing power and more about recalibrating perception.
When that happens, the word enlightenment will recover its literal meaning: the return of light to the mind. The illumination of a world finally learning how to think together.