top of page
“ ‘It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society’ ”
Civilisational Sanity: The Health of the Life-World
Many of us have experiences with friendships, romantic partnerships, friend groups and communities that are mutually supportive, nourishing and empowering. At the same time, we also live with broken-up friendships or families, bad experiences in educational and professional contexts, and communities that split up or fell apart.
On a macro level, most of humanity is embedded in private institutions, governing structures and international networks that often don't adequately address human needs. These conditions are characterized by corrosive dynamics that lead to intellectual or physical isolation, deteriorating epistemics and well-being; such as groupthink, evaporative cooling, gatekeeping resources, cult of personality, controlling information flow, diffusion of responsibility, frame control and status games.
We use the term civilisational sanity here to refer to human-friendly societal designs. That might include physical structures, shared narratives and values, norms, customs, laws and other mechanisms supporting cooperation and high-quality decision-making that enable human (and non-human) flourishing. A sane society is one in which humans are happy to partake. Some possible examples are a search for fair compromises and Pareto improvements, accountability mechanisms, establishing feedback loops, transmission of tacit knowledge, and increasing members' option space.
— excerpt from the Civilisational Sanity Weekend 2025 partly supported by Epistea —
❝ A society that fails to value communality — our need to belong, to care for one another, and to feel caring energy flowing toward us — is a society facing away from the essence of what it means to be human. Pathology cannot but ensue. To say so is not a moral assertion but an objective assessment.
When people start to lose a sense of meaning and get disconnected, that's where disease comes from, that's where breakdown in our health — mental, physical, social health — occurs," the psychiatrist and neuroscientist Bruce Perry told me. If a gene or virus were found that caused the same impacts on the population's well-being as disconnection does, news of it would bellow from front-page headlines. Because it transpires on so many levels and so pervasively, we almost take it for granted; it is the water we swim in.
We are steeped in the normalized myth that we are, each of us, mere individuals striving to attain private goals. The more we define ourselves that way, the more estranged we become from vital aspects of who we are and what we need to be healthy. Among psychologists there is a wide-ranging consensus about what our core needs consist of.
These have been variously listed as: - belonging, relatedness, or connectedness - autonomy: a sense of control in one's life - mastery or competence - genuine self-esteem, not dependent on achievement, attainment, acquisition, or valuation by others - trust: a sense of having the personal and social resources needed to sustain one through life
- purpose, meaning, transcendence: knowing oneself as part of something larger than isolated, self-centered concerns, whether that something is overtly spiritual or simply universal/humanistic, or, given our evolutionary origins, Nature. "The statement that the physical and mental life of man, and nature, are interdependent means simply that nature is interdependent with itself, for man is a part of nature." So wrote a twenty-six-year-old Karl Marx in 1844.
None of this tells you anything you don't already know or intuit. You can check your own experience: What's it like when each of the above needs is met? What happens in your mind and body when it's lacking, denied, or withdrawn? ❞
Core
Civilisational Insanity: this describes the inverse of sanity: the normalization of structural irrationality and "anti-human" design. It refers to a state where the dominant institutions, values, and incentives of a civilization actively degrade the psychological and physical well-being of its population. It is the condition where "madness" (war, ecocide, alienation) becomes the rational status quo, and "adjusting" to this reality requires suppressing one's own healthy instincts for connection and truth.
Social Pathology (Critical Theory): derived from the Frankfurt School, social pathology treats society as an organism that can be "diseased." It argues that structural defects in the political economy (like extreme inequality or commodification) manifest as social "symptoms"—crime, addiction, depression, and violence. These are not individual moral failings but predictable outcomes of a "pathological" social arrangement that blocks the realization of essential human needs (autonomy, recognition, solidarity).
Phenomenology
Pathological Life-World (Husserl): Drawing from Edmund Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences, this concept identifies the root "pathology" of modernity as the severance of the Life-World (Lebenswelt) from the World of Science. Husserl argued that modern civilization has mistaken the map for the territory, prioritizing abstract, mathematical models of reality (objectivism) over the intuitive, lived experience of human meaning (subjectivity). The Life-World becomes "pathological" when it is emptied of value and significance, reduced to mere data or "matter" to be manipulated. This "forgetfulness of the life-world" leads to a civilization that is technically advanced but spiritually hollow, unable to ground its powerful tools in human ends.
Healing the Life-World (Husserl): "Healing" in the Husserlian context refers to the Transcendental Return: the philosophical and cultural task of re-grounding our abstract systems (science, economy, politics) back into the soil of lived human experience. It is the restoration of the Life-World as the primary source of meaning and validity. To "heal" the Life-World is to cure the alienation of modernity by recognizing that all objective truth is ultimately derived from subjective experience. Therefore, a "sane" civilization must not suppress the subjective (empathy, intuition, values) but must make it the foundation upon which the objective structures of society are built.
-
Crucially, this return to subjectivity does not lead to relativism (where truth is merely personal opinion). Instead, it seeks to uncover the universal, intersubjective structures of consciousness that are shared by all rational beings, thereby establishing a more rigorous, absolute grounding for objective reality than the sciences themselves can provide.
History of Psychoanalysis
Madness & Civilisation (Foucault): Michel Foucault’s archaeology of madness argues that "insanity" is not just a biological fact, but a social construct used to define and police the boundaries of "Reason." By institutionalizing the "mad," civilization creates a "Other" against which it defines its own sanity. In the context of Civilisational Sanity, this warns us that what a society calls "crazy" (e.g., radical altruism or anti-capitalism) might simply be a threat to its established power structures, while its own "rational" structures (prisons, asylums) may be deeply irrational.
Civilisation & It's Discontents (Freud): Sigmund Freud posited a tragic trade-off: Civilization provides security and culture, but only by demanding the repression of aggressive and sexual instincts. This creates inevitable "Discontent" (neurosis) as the individual acts against their primal nature to fit into the social order. In a "Civilisational Sanity" framework, the goal is to redesign society to minimize this repression—to find a "sublimation" that allows for human drives to be expressed constructively rather than destructively.
Evolutionary Psychology
Human Eusociality (Wilson, Lovelock): E.O Wilson’s concept of Eusociality (true sociality) places humans alongside ants and bees as species that form complex, cooperative societies with division of labor and altruism. James Lovelock extends this to the planetary scale (Gaia). This concept reframes "Sanity" as our ability to function as a coherent, cooperative super-organism. "Insanity," therefore, is when the "units" (individuals/nations) attack the "whole" (civilization/biosphere), behaving like cancer cells rather than cooperative members of a eusocial colony.
Evolutionary Mismatch: this foundational concept describes the phenomenon where an organism's traits, which were adaptive in its original environment, become maladaptive due to rapid environmental changes. In the context of Civilisational Sanity, it posits that the fundamental friction of modern existence is not "moral" failure, but biological incompatibility. We have built a "zoo" for ourselves (cities, offices, digital spaces) that conflicts with our genetic expectations for sunlight, movement, community, and sleep, creating a chronic physiological and psychological stress response that manifests as "civilisational disease."
Evolutionary Mismatch (Weinstein & Heying): popularized by biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying in A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century, Evolutionary Mismatch argues that the root cause of modern malaise—from chronic illness to social polarization—is "Hyper-Novelty." Our bodies and brains evolved over millions of years to solve the adaptive problems of the Pleistocene (small tribes, scarcity, immediate feedback), but we now inhabit a world changing faster than our biology can adapt. This creates a fundamental friction: our "ancient hardware" is running "modern software" that it cannot process, leading to "traps of progress" where what feels good (sugar, social media validation) is actually toxic to our long-term well-being.
Evolutionary Mismatch (David Buss): evolutionary psychologist David Buss applies mismatch theory specifically to human mating and social psychology. He argues that modern technologies hijack our ancient " evolved psychological mechanisms." For example, online dating creates an illusion of infinite mate choice, triggering decision paralysis and chronic dissatisfaction (the "paradox of choice"), while pornography super-stimulates mating drives without real-world connection. Buss contends that we are navigating a high-tech social world with a "Stone Age mind," leading to sexual conflict, status anxiety, and a breakdown in long-term pair bonding because our internal algorithms are miscalibrated for the scale of modern society.
References & Materials
— Yulia Ponomarenko, Jonte Hünerbein, Ashe Vazque Civilisational Sanity Weekend partly supported by Epistea (2025)
"Our Library List includes:
— Seeing Systems (Barry Oshry)
— Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
— Fair Play (Eve Rodsky)
— The Gulag Archipelago (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)
— Simple Sabotage Field Manual (CIA)"
— Fabian Freyenhagen Critical Theory and Social Pathology Routledge Companion to the Frankfurt School (2018)
— Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture (2022)
bottom of page