From its inception, the Modern West had unrecognized structural flaws that were inevitably going to cause it to self-destruct. It has finally reached the tipping point – an unavoidable fork in the road. We will either tragically descend, as all previous great societies have done and that we are doing now, or we will create a way to overcome the systemic problems and gloriously ascend to an unprecedented and unanticipated new way of life.

 

This synopsis provides an executive summary of a series of planned online articles that report on three decades of research and theory building by Dr. Barry Borgerson that has finally conquered some dysfunctional quirks of human nature, which have caused many important aspects of the West to degrade. This new general theory of the mind will empower us to transform ourselves to take the ascendency path.

 

In his international bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Harari stated that history made its most momentous choice in creating the Science Revolution. He then mused about why it happened when it did and why in the West, and he claimed that scholars have proposed dozens of theories, but none of them is particularly convincing. You can now see a convincing theory about the nature of that monumental physical-domain revolution along with the much-weaker advance for the mental domain, the European Enlightenment.

 

You will learn how a fundamental mismatch between the astounding results of the Science Revolution and the teetering legacy of the Enlightenment created an unnoticed ticking time-bomb for the West that started exploding in some activities about a half-century ago and has now reached the tactical nuke level in a crucial aspect of our lives. We are justifiably proud that we operate at a mature adult level for physical-domain issues with our amazing products, especially those built upon digital technologies. However, you will learn that we must now humbly admit that we act like impetuous teenagers regarding how we operate in the mental domain because we increasingly cannot manage some success-determining human ramifications of our technology progress.

 

A fable states that if you put a frog into a pot of water and turn the burner on, the frog will swim until the water boils and it dies, but if you toss it into boiling water, it will immediately jump out and save itself. Crucial social systems of the West have been getting increasingly hot, but citizens keep treading water while watching many parts of their life deteriorate. The West has now been thrown into boiling water in one critical area of our lives, so its citizens should leap out, but they can’t figure out how.

 

Fortunately, the same theory that explains the underpinnings of the Science Revolution and exposes the devastating abilities mismatch also lays the groundwork for another enormously consequential revolution. This one focuses on the mental domain and will supplant the legacy of the Enlightenment, which disastrously for the West has exhausted its effectiveness. Symbolically, this theory of the mind also provides the platform from which to leap out of the boiling water we just got tossed into in our political systems, so we now have the opportunity not just to survive but to escape to a more desirable way of life than was previously possible or even imaginable.

 

In addition to providing mechanisms to transform Western democracies from failing experiments to stable realities, these articles identify many other types of currently intractable problems and provide new types of processes to solve them. Among the other troublesome issues are leadership and other business inadequacies, runaway drug addictions, dreadfully high prisoner recidivism, the inability to make systematic transformational changes to meet escalating needs, and the West’s loss of our unfair advantage over autocracies. This new mental-domain revolution will also construct a new worldview that will empower scholars to put a root-cause foundation under their current work to extend it beyond what is now possible.

 

Another devastating problem is that we disastrously have two unrecognized distinct ways in which we experience “truth” that emanate from different mental mechanisms and routinely lead to dysfunctional results.

 

You may feel diminished to be told that our whole society is trapped in a teenage phase of human development. However, as you work your way through the many problems that we do not, and surprisingly today cannot, solve adequately, you should also realize that we are just pretending that we have reached the overall adult stage of being. This highlights our current status – we chronically pretend, and we are fantasizing ourselves into autocracies and mediocrity in many areas of our individual and collective lives. The adolescent phase of human development has finally crashed into an insurmountable wall! The only way to secure a gratifying future is to finally figure out how to transform our society into overall adulthood!

 

As information comes at us through fire hoses, many people have become accustomed to imbibing sips through narrow straws. To snatch a desirable destiny from our current descent into a mediocre existence in many activities, we need to become different, not gain more information. If you want to make a grand advance in your personal and professional life and perhaps participate in transforming the US and the West from our current dreadful descent into a grand new form of ascent, you must get beyond nibbling at information morsels. Studying this set of inspiring articles will not be as difficult as a tough class you took when you were a student, it will consume just a small fraction of the effort-investment you made to secure your career, and the benefits will be enormous and lasting.

 

Many of the problems discussed in these articles are quite visible and extremely severe, so why haven’t experts solved them by now? You will see many difficult-to-penetrate barriers that have blocked scholars from conquering several mysterious aspects of human nature, and learn why our most powerful problem-solving process, science, cannot rescue us.

 

We have reached the point where we must openly acknowledge that we operate in two distinct modes. We have learned to maximize the effectiveness of our thinking mode, but we are terrible at managing our automatic mode. The root cause of this defect lies in chronic failures to explicitly recognize, comprehensively understand, and systematically manage stealth aspects of human nature.

 

These articles explain how to stop losing unfair fights including for the mainline press and sober politicians who keep focusing on providing wise information to the thinking mode, while manipulators work feverously at constructing dysfunctional certainties (masquerading as “truths”) into the involuntary part of the mind.

 

Currently unmanageable human-nature oddities are creating huge negative consequences. These articles will open up a surprising new world by showing how experts and even ordinary citizens can defeat these enigmatic mental dysfunctions. They explain the most consequential human-nature oddity in the form of the devastatingly deceptive certainty-illusion that has escaped even meager understanding and management until now, which is sadly causing the Modern West to pretend its way into self-destruction.

 

We currently discuss worldviews casually. We can greatly empower ourselves by instead modeling them, along with paradigms, organizational cultures, and the colloquial “box,” as specific incarnations of the hidden mental property of certainty illusions that provide the foundation for problem solving and that determine societal transformations at all levels. You will learn that the underlying mental mechanism that actually produced the Science Revolution was indirectly and imperceptibly transforming from a supernaturalistic to a naturalistic worldview to provide the foundation to understand and use physical-domain science processes. There is widespread recognition that many of our social systems in the West have gone unstable, but pundits flail and even the best scholars do not create convincing theories about what is happening to us because they lack an empowering worldview to understand the mysterious underlying human-nature mechanisms causing our problems.

 

Some types of pretending can be useful, such as rationalizing when someone suffers a career setback, motivating oneself to make heroic efforts, or coping with life’s tragedies. Most of these are situational and initiated by our thinking mode. The types of fantasizing that have become so devastating, including to individuals, businesses, and societies, are the ones embedded into certainty illusions – these frequently become chronic dysfunctions. Known processes that any charlatan can use, coupled with ubiquitous digital-communications channels, makes constructing widespread pretending a growing source of failures and one we must overcome. Most people who persistently pretend do not realize they are just fantasizing, which is yet another decisive indicator that we remain trapped in the juvenile phase of human development.

These articles show how to transcend this debilitating fantasy characteristic of human nature.

 

The main transformation to accomplish our necessary mental-domain revolution to reverse our current descent will be hugely challenging. Instead of reconstructing a single powerful certainty, we must now transform our belief that our certainties are inherently “true.” That process will be so difficult and uncomfortable that it could only occur now because we have just been tossed into boiling water that we must escape to secure a desirable future for ourselves and our posterity! We have irretrievably reached the point where our future greatness requires the West to finally ascend to the adult phase of humanity, even if we do that kicking and screaming because of the cognitive dissonance it creates, as happened with the Science Revolution. We must endure short-term transformational discomfort to avoid the long-term failure agony!

 

You will also encounter the potent comfort imperative, which causes people, tragically including average voters and surprisingly even wise businesspeople, to succumb to seduction traps in many forms, including ubiquitous simplistic solutions and diabolical obfuscations that we model as proxymorons, for which we must create widespread initiatives to name and shame. You will learn about the counteracting principle we can use of overcome unfair fights on specific issues, and a new type of human-specific worldview-based evolution, supraevolution, that we now can understand and manage to transform the West and its citizens to a hopeful destiny.

           

The last time the West went unstable, and populists emerged, resulted from WWI and the Great Depression events. That led to an enormous tragedy, but those events passed, and order returned. Now many parts of the world have become unstable again, only this time the cause is systemic, so we are facing massive, widespread chaos. As a result, we should expect devasting consequences, which are already well underway and will continue until we launch our mental-world revolution!

 

Prior to the Science Revolution, citizens of the West’s Dark Age could not possibly have imagined the startling physical-world technology benefits we now enjoy as normal. As we face this unavoidable transformation of Western societies, most citizens cannot possibly imagine the amazing mental-world benefits we now have the opportunity to enjoy. However, these articles demonstrate why and how the mental-domain revolution will create the same level of spectacular new types of benefits as the physical-domain (science) revolution produced.

 

As with the physical-domain Science Revolution, this mental-domain revolution will cross the Rubicon – there will be no going back to the previous mental impairments because the accumulating benefits will be too great. The country, or aligned set of countries, that launches this next phase of humanity’s maturation to overall adulthood will establish an unfair advantage over the rest of the world, as happened for the West for about 2.5 centuries after we launched the Science Revolution. The West again has the opportunity to lead the world in this next dramatic social revolution, which is now inevitable because the capabilities to do that finally exist, and they were created here. That is, if don’t let the current widespread manipulations destroy us first and end up meandering down the descent path to stay trapped in our adolescent, pretending stage, which self-governance and other desirable aspects of our lives can no longer withstand!

 

To escape our imprisonment in the adolescent phase of development due to the foundational abilities-mismatch, which is now causing the inevitable demise of the grand experiment in Western democracies and descents other important aspects of life, there’s no alternative to conquering the automatic mental activities of human nature.

 

To launch a transformation to an unanticipated, wonderful new adult way of life of similar magnitude of advances made by the physical-domain Science Revolution that created the escape from the West’s Dark Age childhood existence, there’s no alternative to launching a mental-domain revolution.

 

To accomplish both of these outstanding transformations of the West, there’s no alternative to using a general theory of human nature that includes defeating success-destroying aspects of our involuntary activities, and the theory explained in these articles is the only current one that accomplishes that.

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