Thread by @Meaningness

🏴‍☠️ Post-rational nihilism (Kegan stage 4.5): the only academic study I know of.

Strongly recommended for postrats, and for rationalists who wonder what that’s all about.

∮ Rationalists’ stubbornness in the face of evidence that rationalism doesn’t work is based in a well-founded fear that letting go of it could cause catastrophic personal disintegration.

That is short-term wise, but retards more sophisticated integration by parts longer-term…

I have speculated about whether the stage 4 (systematic) to 5 (meta-systematic) transition has awful, what makes it more or less awful for different people, and what we could do to help: metarationality.com/stem-fluidity-…

😇 Swan & Benack’s see trouble deriving from using rationalism as a narcissistic self-definition, which makes one “special.” That can compensate for lack of a more realistic basis for self-worth, and as long as stage 4 remains stable, one can function well enough…

∮ If rationality is a tool you use, and your competence with it is only one of several sources of self-esteem, recognizing its limits is disappointing but tolerable.

If rationalism—or any systematic ideology—is your identity, the realization is crushing. meaningness.com/eternalist-sys…

“Narcissism in the Epistemological Pit” follows the progress of a brilliant college student for whom stage 4 begins fraying in his junior year. He realizes the search for the One True System will fail…

link.springer.com/article/10.102…

A common next step is to try to build a grand meta-system that is itself systematic. This is impossible; and a misunderstanding—probably necessary at first—of what meta-systematicity consists of. You can get sucked deep into pomo at this point…

When meta-system building fails, you can fall into the pit of nihilism. All the symptoms here: rage, depression, anxiety, twisted intellectualization, grandiosity with self-loathing, contempt for the “herds of idiots” who can’t understand or face the truth meaningness.com/emotional-dyna…

Unfortunately “Sean’s” story ends in a suicide attempt and psychiatric hospitalization. All too common in 4.5 nihilism.

There is light at the end of the tunnel! At minimum, once the collapse of ideological certainty you feared and defended against actually happens, there’s the sense of relief that you don’t have hold it off any longer.

You can relax. Epistemology can’t get any more horrifying!

How can one help? Swan & Benack suggest taking the epistemological crisis seriously *as such* and not pathologizing it as mere “intellectualization” (despite postrational nihilistic justifications being typically twisted and nonsensical).

This is a necessary step toward stage 5!

“Is cognitive growth itself a valid therapeutic goal in working with this group?”

If Kegan was right re linkages between transitions in different domains, promoting development of meta-rational epistemology may support parallel development in relationships, selfness, & emotions.