You Can Handle the Truth

“The advanced atheist… understands the world as it is—an infinitely cold universe of protons and electrons. To the advanced Christian, God’s will is just as cold and his justice just as inexorable.”

—Curtis Yarvin, You Can’t Handle the Truth

A small but influential current calling itself the Dark Enlightenment has gathered a following among those disillusioned with modern life. It speaks in the language of realism—tough-minded, unsentimental, allergic to idealism. Its thinkers, Curtis Yarvin among them, draw inspiration from Robert Michels’ Iron Law of Oligarchy: the claim that every organization, however democratic its origins, eventually concentrates power in the hands of a few. Hierarchy, in this view, is not corruption—it’s gravity. Power condenses; freedom evaporates.

Extend that logic far enough and it becomes cosmology: a universe where order can exist only through domination, and decay is the only certainty. To many, this sounds like honesty—the courage to face the world as it is. But what passes for realism here is really fatalism. It’s the conviction that cooperation is naive, that coherence is impossible, and that control is the only kind of order that works.

The real story may be simpler, and harder: we’re living through a crisis of coherence—a breakdown in our ability to think, feel, and organize together as wholes. Our brains fragment under stress, our politics mirror the same fragmentation, and our culture’s stories no longer line up with lived experience.

By coherence I mean the simple but vital ability of parts to hold together as a whole—a self not at war with itself, a society able to disagree without disintegrating, and a culture whose stories still make sense. Once that fabric begins to fray, everything else starts to unravel. In mental health this shows up as symptoms: the brain’s networks stop communicating, thought becomes scattered, and emotion and reason pull in opposite directions. The same thing happens in nations when dialogue collapses and trust disappears. The health of any system—neural or social—depends on its ability to cooperate. Coherence is that cooperation, the hidden infrastructure of health.

The Gospel of Despair

The fatalism of the Dark Enlightenment rests on an older foundation: scientific materialism, the belief that reality is nothing but matter in motion, and that consciousness somehow “emerges” from it by accident. For over a century this story has passed as science itself, but it’s really a metaphysical assumption—one that feels persuasive because our senses confirm it. We see objects, not equations; we touch surfaces, not structures. The physical world seems solid and final. From that vantage point, a cold universe feels obvious.

And yet, this worldview offers a peculiar comfort. No mystery, no responsibility, no purpose—just particles and probability. But it’s the intellectual version of giving up, a story with no next chapter. You can’t disappoint a dead universe.

Seeing Past the Senses

Rational thinking begins when we question the authority of the senses. Our perceptions evolved to keep us alive, not to reveal the structure of reality. They show surfaces, not causes. Thinking clearly means looking past immediate experience—past fear, habit, and the residue of trauma—to see how things actually work. That’s not easy. It takes both training and physiological stability.

Most people never learn to reason this way because our education prizes recall over reflection, and because a nervous system in constant stress can’t sustain inquiry. When we’re anxious or overstimulated, cognition narrows. Under pressure we default to instinct and ideology. The problem isn’t moral weakness; it’s architecture. We’ve built a society that rarely rewards calm attention, yet without calm attention, reasoning collapses.

So yes, truth is hard to handle—but not because it’s unbearable. It’s because coherence takes work. The challenge isn’t that humans are too fragile for reality; it’s that we’ve built no reliable way to metabolize it.

Truth Has No Army—Because It Has No Training Ground

“Truth has no army. No angels will ride to our rescue.”

The Dark Enlightenment treats that line as prophecy. In its view, truth is doomed because power always wins. But truth doesn’t need an army; it needs training. We built schools for information and institutions for power, but almost none for perception—for teaching attention, reasoning, and emotional regulation as public goods. Without those capacities, even the brightest minds mistake noise for depth. The problem isn’t that truth is powerless; it’s that we’ve neglected the disciplines that keep perception clear.

The Psychology of Control

When coherence collapses, domination feels like safety. Authoritarianism—political or personal—arises from the same reflex that locks a traumatized brain: too much noise, too little trust. Under chronic stress, flexibility disappears and control masquerades as strength.

In neurotherapy I see this pattern every day. A brain stuck in hypervigilance looks like a government in crisis—every signal treated as a threat, every part monitoring every other. With feedback, the brain can learn to relax. Networks begin to communicate again. New rhythms emerge. The system doesn’t become passive; it becomes cooperative. That’s coherence in biological form: stability that stays flexible. Authoritarianism, whether in an individual or a nation, is simply the pathology of a system that has forgotten how to self-regulate.

Rebuilding the Ground

To move beyond despair we have to start deeper, at the level of ontology—the study of what truly exists. Materialism says reality begins with matter. But if matter’s behavior can be described entirely by mathematics, maybe mathematics is what matter is made of. That’s the premise of Ontological Mathematics: reality is not inert stuff that mysteriously produces mind; it’s mind expressing itself as structure.

Every soul, every atom, every thought is a waveform in an infinite mental field. When those waves align, systems cooperate; when they conflict, systems suffer. Mental health follows the same rule. When the brain’s networks fall out of sync, symptoms appear—anxiety, depression, distraction. Healing means restoring communication between parts. Neurotherapy is one practical expression of this principle: bridge repair inside the brain.

Societies mirror this process. When dialogue fails and empathy breaks down, the collective mind fractures. Roads and bridges crumble not only in infrastructure but in meaning. What neurotherapy does for the individual, coherent governance must do for civilization: reestablish communication among its parts.

This is where Rousseau’s general will comes alive—not as a political slogan, but as a living metaphor for coherence at scale. In plain terms, the general will is what emerges when many individuals, each thinking and feeling clearly, begin to align around shared reality. It isn’t forced consensus or groupthink. It’s what happens when distortion and fear quiet down enough for people to hear the same underlying melody. The “will” is not a command; it’s the resonance that naturally arises when the noise between us fades.

You can see this in miniature in human relationships. Colleagues of mine who work with couples on the brink of divorce often start by meeting with each partner separately. They focus on healing old wounds—childhood trauma, stress responses, the protective habits that make connection hard. When each partner becomes a little more regulated, a little more self-aware, something remarkable often happens. Without anyone scripting it, they begin to meet each other differently. The tension softens. Communication flows again. The relationship starts to harmonize on its own.

In some approaches, the process goes even deeper. Practitioners use gentle neurofeedback to help each partner’s brain and nervous system learn to resonate with the other’s—literally synchronizing their rhythms. As coherence grows within each person, coherence between them emerges spontaneously. No decree, no negotiation—just two systems remembering how to listen and understand.

That’s the same dynamic Rousseau glimpsed in the political sphere. When citizens become inwardly coherent—less reactive, less afraid, less ruled by ideology—the social field itself begins to organize differently. A collective intelligence starts to form. What seemed like agreement by force turns out to be harmony by understanding. The general will isn’t something imposed from above; it’s something that emerges from within, once the static clears.

Coherence isn’t mysticism—it’s simply the ability of parts to work as a whole across every level of organization: neuron to mind, individual to society, matter to mathematics. A coherent mind can examine its own beliefs without identifying with them. A coherent culture can disagree without disintegrating. And a coherent civilization can change without collapsing. Coherence is not perfection. It’s composure in complexity—the nervous system, intellect, and awareness working together as one signal.

In this view, the universe isn’t cold. It’s coherent. And coherence isn’t comfort—it’s clarity. The cosmos isn’t punishing us with meaninglessness. It’s asking us to think clearly enough to see its structure.

The Failure of Imagination

The tragedy of the Dark Enlightenment is not its darkness but its lack of imagination. It sees through religion, politics, and progress but can’t picture anything beyond disillusionment itself. For all its talk of realism, it’s another form of fatigue—a worldview that mistakes surrender for maturity. Nihilism isn’t depth; it’s burnout with better vocabulary. True realism includes the possibility of renewal.

The New Enlightenment

The first Enlightenment believed reason could illuminate reality. The “dark” version keeps the reason but kills the light. It worships power because it’s afraid of purpose. But power without purpose is pathology—a feedback loop with no reference to truth.

A New Enlightenment would begin where the last one stopped: with structure, coherence, and the courage to imagine again. It would treat mental health as infrastructure and clarity as civic responsibility. It would teach citizens how to think, not what to think, and give them nervous systems steady enough to do it.

To be coherent is to think clearly: to separate perception from projection, logic from fear, and signal from noise. It’s the precondition for freedom, because only a coherent mind can choose rather than react. The same mathematics that organize the cosmos organize the brain. Healing and reasoning are versions of the same act—parts learning to hold together as a whole.

You Can Handle the Truth

The thinkers of the Dark Enlightenment weren’t wrong to see decay; they were wrong to treat it as destiny. Systems fail when their parts stop communicating, not because communication is impossible. Every time a nervous system finds calm, every time two people reason through conflict, every time a culture remembers how to listen to itself, the “iron law” weakens a little.

The universe, it turns out, isn’t cold—it’s connected. Coherence isn’t a revelation; it’s a practice. The quiet, ongoing work of keeping the parts in conversation.