Chapter Six: Collective Reason

Abstract

What is the reason for recent prodemocracy causes failing to push through? Frameshift does not suffice in itself to break the deadlock and implement social change. A second way out of the simplex, and effective in combination with frameshift, is to move sphere. This operation concentrates on the second dimension of validity, following social analysis. An example is an ecological intervention leaving party politics behind to engage with the judicial sphere, where sanctions are imposed on a failing government.

Enlightenment and Marxism were feats of de-simplication to achieve freedom and equality respectively. The first matrix on free-thinking individuals taking rational decisions deconstructed collective traditions, specifically the religious simplexes of evil and sin. The second matrix rejected the employees’ obedience to the employer by revealing that the former were the actual sources of the latter’s capital because they produced commodities. Is the battle inevitable between the two matrixes, the West’s twin paradigms, the French Revolution’s first two values? The third value of inclusion, a necessity since globalization, turns out to be the missing link to uphold the other two values. A mysterious logic transpires in our structuralist analysis: ‘The sources of reason are collectively produced.’ To escape Luhmann’s dilemma stating ‘No inclusion without exclusion’, we have to shift our attention to the species, the source of collective reason, situated in the future. The species has a common fate. The chapters of Part II illustrate how to think inclusively; how to be ‘tensorial’. 

For each decade, this century has spawned a prodemocracy movement. Alter-globalization in 1999. Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring in 2011. Yellow Vests in 2019. Black Lives Matter in 2020. The calls for social reform have been interspersed with marches against global warming. Whether the goal has been to end structural inequality and racism, to curb the sway of multinationals, or to save the planet, none of these causes seem less justified than a previous series that engaged broad sections of the population: the French Revolution in 1789, abolishment of slavery in 1865, enfranchisement of the working class in the late nineteenth century and of women after the Second World War, and decolonization in the 1960s. Both series of causes were driven by a sense of urgency sweeping society, but only the older series led to change in the form of rights and a transformed political system. Are such milestones of democracy still possible at present? What renders a sense of urgency ineffective?

A New Prodemocracy Wave

The reason for recent prodemocracy causes failing to push through is not censorship or fear of reprisal, neither ignorance, nor even lack of political support. The French president hosted a ‘grand national debate’ in 2019 in response to the Yellow Vest protests.¹ Since the fall of the Iron Curtain, anything from newspaper specials and social media threads to art exhibitions and class discussions have warned members of the wider public about the neoliberal order emerging.² Politicians do not deny toeing the party line and openly discuss strategies to survive the next election.³ They admit that the drastic international measures against Covid-19 expose the vulnerability of the system (i.e., the disadvantages of a global economy) as pandemics did throughout history,⁴ and many of them have warned about the State’s eagerness to intervene in personal lives without winding measures down later.⁵

Nobody will deny that national governments and the financial sector lost much credit after the banking crisis in 2008. The absurdity of economic globalization is no secret anymore. Most of us have heard of container ships crisscrossing the oceans to export unhealthy diets to areas where local food was nutritious. We know about the dangerously uneven distribution of profit, as international corporations possess a staggering $36 trillion stashed in tax havens to lobby for their unsustainable interests.⁶ International organizations and governments, it is true, shily eye the corporations and capital investors, but are incessantly scrutinized by both social scientists and mainstream media in their resolution to diminish income disparities, to rein in the offshore capital and to moderate polluting production.⁷ Factory workers, school children, intellectuals and CEOs alike can be quoted to support social and ecological reforms. Antiracist discourse is entrenched in American political history, and the great majority of voters in European countries denounce racism.⁸ Never before has such a large section of the world population acquired information resulting from open debate, increased education and continuous access to media. Since about two decades we are said to be living in a knowledge economy, which implies that all sorts of media communicate about the state of the world. Awareness abounds. Some call it wokeness. Mobilization by activists has surged in the digital era.

The assumption of the social sciences is that communicating about social problems raises awareness about them, which in turn leads to positive action changing the course of society. A democracy guarantees the process at each step. And yet, governments progressively dilute promises and policy targets. In four million years the Earth’s atmosphere never had as much carbon dioxide, all owing to industrialization.⁹ Policymakers emphasize what has already been achieved and postpone eco-transition projecting an equilibrium in 2050 in disregard of increasing inertia.¹⁰ Activists sue their governments hoping that at least the courts will make a difference and impose fines to lift the obstacles to action (see infra). Still in the best scenario, protests on social media and in the streets are impacting legislation minimally, relatively less than one would expect from the increased information and awareness of problems in the last twenty years. Petty annoyances fill our conversations while we pass over the big injustices by regimes great and small. Thousands of lives are lost in wars based on flimsy legitimation stories, before in Iraq and Syria, now in Ukraine. We watch powerlessly, and after a while impassively. No revolution, silent or other, will take place. Words are plenty but weigh little. What has become of us? Do we have reason to panic about the world, about ourselves?

If millennials have the reputation of being oversensitive and are labeled as ‘snowflakes’ for shouting out their indignation about their endangered future, it is because they truly sense the challenge of getting one’s message across in the late phase of knowledge society. This book is not primarily about them, but for them. They and generation Z that grew up with the internet are the protagonists experimenting with the weakening bond between individual conviction and societal change.¹¹ What causes the disconnection between the two? I have pointed to a structural impasse and a mental obstacle, the latter diluting our sense of urgency, the former the impact of whatever remains of that sense. To break the deadlock, we must re-sphere and reframe respectively. And something more: re-source.

Re-sphere: The Law Against Ecocide

When a French citizen in 1789 exclaimed on the market square ‘down with kingship and the regime!’ those words more directly caused (re)action than they would today. The freedom of expression in a democratic society has as structural consequence the lesser impact of expressions. Calling law enforcers racists has minimal consequences. Treated as opinions next to many others, their low capacity of shocking the public and thus of spurring a reaction from the State reduces the chance of the established order being toppled. The inflation of words, due to people speaking out faster because of the limited consequences, is a side effect that democratic voters are willing to accept. Also individually we are aware of the weakening purchase of opinions, having entered a post-Fordist economy wherein language replaces capital.¹² It is unlikely that a critical statement will receive unanimous support, given the amalgam of viewpoints in a communicative field populated by actors as diverse as the mainstream press, social media and policymakers. The structural tendency of disconnecting the feeling from the meaning of a statement has a mental effect in diluting the salience of one’s position. Also from what is taught in school and university, many of us mean less one-sidedly what we say, because we have smartened up. That’s just the way it is, with more freedom and more education, in a democratic society.

Sooner or later, with the diluted salience of opinions, a cogent argument means little anymore, and membership in a sphere comes first. Spheres overlap and divide families at the dinner table. Siblings with similar life standards can be ideologically opposed. The struggle for distinction may explain the absurd significance of the 50-percent mark around which democratic elections divide nations like the US. No objective reason will suddenly push opponents in one’s direction.

Additionally, with the diluted salience of opinions, normalization of formerly unacceptable speech and behavior threatens.¹³ Smartphone use sums up the tendency. Citizens of a post-knowledge society are users content ‘to know’. The distraction by new messages is constant, while the emotional detachment from those messages is possible thanks to ‘the cloud’ retaining the information.¹⁴ We can perfectly agree with an analysis without having to do anything about it. The answer is sent out there, where it will remain. Do not disturb me in my bubble: the meaning is this and I feel that. Normalization of injustice, racism, poverty, corruption, degradation is possible because of the structural disconnection of feeling from meaning. Post-knowledge society fragments the spheres, tolerating that they determine their rules and frames. Eco-transition languishes if a government can determine the tempo of implementing policy.

The fragmentation can be countered, I argue, by moving an issue from one sphere to a closely interrelated sphere. This requires insight in logics linking spheres across the network. As a case in point, sensitization campaigns by ecologists supported by scientific studies did lead to legislation on curtailing carbon dioxide emissions after an engaged minority of civilians appealed to the Supreme Court. That shift of sphere is how they managed to compel their government into implementing the (admittedly already toned down) international treaty.¹⁵ The process had grinded to a halt at the level of executive power, and so activists turned to the judicial in support of the legislative. The network has spheres with frames to which Montesquieu’s theory of the three powers in democracy refers and which makes the court a ‘logical’ place to pressure a government. The cultural logic also informed the recent appeal of ecologists at the International Criminal Court to designate ‘ecocide’ as a fifth international crime for which states and corporations can be convicted.¹⁶

The logic circumvents the structural impediment to change by involving all scales and cutting right across the social system. A subversive act is done in name of the species and the commons by tackling the alienating division of society into political, economic, legal, educational and other subsystems.¹⁷ To cut across the spheres is to reappropriate the sources of life which the state and later on multinationals took over from communities, such as food, water, forest, land, sky, energy, fertility, desire, knowledge and justice.¹⁸ By taking a government to court, justice is not a separate sphere anymore but has become a source of production again.

Anthropology’s contribution is to point out these (onto)logics and how their distinct arrangements of things and thoughts may conflict. Despite their sensitivity to ontology, explanations derived from Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT) do not account for these arrangements imbricating, because ANT ‘laterally’ (flatly) situates ineffective protest in a network of associations between various actants, human and nonhuman.¹⁹ Many parts contingently form wholes at various points in history. The parts include the lobbyists’ manipulations, the pending elections at that time, the controversy about a climate report, and the shift of media attention toward a pandemic because of nonhuman actants and their viral invasion. The powerful and their lobbyists eventually win the struggle over resources. ANT’s seminal paradigm for the social sciences, however, excludes the other direction of (bidirectional) influence, which admits the vertical dimension of meaning: the connections from whole to part, as in the ‘logics’ that make certain outcomes more likely. What else are journalists and researchers investigating and sometimes jailed for? Dictatorial states do not fear facts. They fear to be unmasked as ‘a regime’ affecting people’s sources of production.

The recourse to courts follows from realizing the relation between court and government. The relation does not depend on coincidental events, to which ANT lends primacy. A logic trickles through at all levels of the layered arrangement from macro to micro to explain and solve the gap existing between awareness and action in politics. The macro refers to the triad of network, species and meaning system structuring human consciousness, namely to the possibility for members of our species to understand each other across time and space by tapping into that shared order of signification. How to retrieve the dark matter of forgotten simplications underlying the edifice of established values and institutions? The elegance of structuralism and its cognitive approach is that possibilities that were opted out of in the past remain available. Human thought is not overborne under the weight of evolution and the passage of time. It is a sign of the times for a socio-scientific paradigm like ANT to dominate that underestimates the capacity of the humanities at discerning cultural logics. The underestimation has a delusional aspect. Without awareness of such higher-order logics, how could a social scientist be writing a social critique and designing an intervention without it feeling like pure guesswork?

Reframe: The Matrix of Enlightenment

Experiments since the 1980s with information processing models have shown that sensitizing campaigns (e.g., for health promotion, equal rights and cultural diversity) impact an audience’s attitude and behavior much less than knowledge.²⁰ Information and debate at best shake but do not convert. The mind has a strong emotional component. In the exceptional case that the mind does succumb to the campaigner, the next challenge is (social) structure. Once the mystery occurs of an attitude changing due to knowledge, and of behavior adapting to it, the task of the influencer shifts to the macro-level of the social network, as argued in the previous section: will the various behaviors adapt in a similar direction, or rather interact with and react against each other? To force the entire system into a new track, the necessity of change, ‘the push’, does not suffice. There has to be a strong desire, ‘the pull’. A clear intuition about the future can give that impetus, overcoming the petty antagonisms and lingering doubts paralyzing the collective. A vision. A strong intuition rooted in a collective experience.

In the old prodemocracy movements, protest continued and intensified until the system changed. The poverty the workers experienced was directly linked to the unfair system of production, with little discussion about who were the social classes oppressed and oppressing, the ingroup and outgroup. Their protest stemmed from a shared frame of experience in a sphere crucial for their survival. They were ‘pushed’. The current challenge for activists is tough. Factory owners in the nineteenth century were more clear-cut enemies than today when energy company executives plead for eco-transition and repudiate their own company’s greenwashing, and empathize with street kids. Striving for peace and climate stability at planetary scale has thickened the picture. The planet has no outgroup. What I argue in the next paragraphs is that the global scale intended by future interventions demands a linkage of frame and sphere into the social network, via the sources of production. The goal is to learn from earlier revolutions to create pull.

The old prodemocracy movements left scars that altered the political landscape, one of them being the divide progressive/conservative. Ecologists and social democrats cannot permit further antagonism. Reinforcing the cohesion of the ecologically minded into a tight-knit group is counterproductive. It lowers the chance of meeting the planetary goal. To reach the network with non-divisive energy and activate to change attitude and behavior, the vision must have a logic with verticality, a linkage trickling through at all levels, from ecosystem disasters and international agreements, over national and regional organizations to collective norms and personal desires. The caveat holds for any contemporary activism applying a frame to reinforce the sphere of the likeminded: it will be counterproductive because at the expense of overarching humanity. A matrix proposes a paradigm shift, plumping for one perspective over another. A tensor keeps frames shiftable in view of viability.

The prodemocracy movements of the past were simultaneously paradigm shifts. They made audiences aware with a story intuiting the future and befitting the sphere they lived in. A (speciated) history of the French Revolution will begin by describing how the Church disciplined the masses. Catholics recast the neolithic simplex of normal/deviant into good and evil. Duty versus ‘sin’ were the terms wherein priests conveyed the simplex frame in Sunday Mass. That is how they laid claim to devotees. The feat of Enlightenment has been to reframe by unlocking the simplex of sin. The priest’s framing in terms of sin implies as well as prohibits two things: individual choice and the rationality to question the commandment. The matrix of Enlightenment adds that concealed dimension: individuals are able to reason whereas duty derives from tradition, which is collective and thus may impose irrational commandments. Kant, Hume, Rousseau, Voltaire wrote the philosophical version. The freer the individuals are left to think, the more rational their decision.

The diagonals in Fig. 1 de-simplicate by inserting in the opposition ‘collective versus individual’ the extra semantic layer ‘rational/irrational’ replacing good/evil. The diagonals invert the simplex’s association. Let’s face it: there is something dubious about the Enlightened assumption that nothing good or rational can be expected from the people (the collective). The experience of the witch craze, of a mass victimizing a marginal individual (perhaps a genius) and scapegoating may have been the specter they and their rationalist predecessors had been writing against, like the holocaust in recent Europe. However, the Church’s idea of duty equated the collective with a congregation obeying the Scriptures. In a strange alliance, for both Vatican and Enlightenment nothing good could come from pagan traditions. As far as the second was concerned, the first was still progress somehow, religion presumably reaching a higher stage of evolution than magic and preceding science. The project of Enlightenment persists in Rorty’s concept of communal truth and in Habermas’s communicative rationality counting on an ‘ideal speech community’, that is, individual rationalities interacting (see “Chapter Eight: Healer or King”). ‘Individual reason intuits the collective’ is how the figure can be read, if the bland term ‘irrationality’ (counterpart of rationality) becomes a verb like guessing or intuiting. Contemporary philosophy maintains that humans have no other source than themselves and the group they form and discuss in. Could there not be such a thing as a collective reason, as in a destiny, a truth whose seed was planted to ripen and one day delight the recipient? The next chapters demonstrate how anthropological knowledge from non-Western societies may change our minds.

Fig. 1

Matrix of Enlightenment vs. simplex of sin

The Enlightened could have produced a tensor, yet their outright association of the collective with irrationality was matrixial. Their partiality and suspicion served the revolution. Thanks to the matrix of Enlightenment, people realized that their place was not as servants in the hierarchy depicted by aristocracy and Church. They were to be free citizens in a republic: liberté.

Marx’s Matrix

When almost a century after the French Revolution, this republic grew into a nation plagued with inequality, the workers devised a new matrix for the revolution. They found out thanks to Marxism that their sphere was a social class crosscutting nations: égalité.

Simplexes alienate us from experiential frames. Karl Marx’s attempt in the mid nineteenth century to generate class consciousness for a revolution was an exercise in de-alienation, and more specifically de-simplication. His approach was to delimit the sphere that the workers belong to, and to retrieve their frame. The Communist Manifesto, like the lectures he gave to laborers across western Europe, was Marx’s and Engels’s attempt to stimulate class consciousness in the proletariat.²¹ The crises of capitalism were not sufficient in themselves to do so. Antagonism with the bourgeoisie had to be recognized as such to initiate class struggle. Otherwise the laborers could go on investing in the religious sphere where they and the bourgeoisie went to church together. Or they might identify with the community around an aristocrat’s estate, with the football club the employer sponsored, with the nation they fought for in war, or with the factory as a collective in competition with other factories. In uniting all the workers of the world, as eternalized in the anthem of the Internationale, communists defined their sphere as international and not factional like other socialist movements at the time.²² Paradoxically, despite the mantra of historical materialism, that not ideas (superstructure) but economic structures (the base) determine change, it was Marx’s idea that had to instigate the communist revolution (such as the one in Russia in 1917).²³ Any ‘false’ consciousness of the working class needed to be tackled to change the life of that class, and yet any reform of the base of society through the superstructure was supposed to be a miracle.²⁴

The miracle happened anyway. How? The situation was unlike that of today’s fragmented and individualized society. The workers realized that they formed a class of its own and had been alienated from it. Their definition of the sphere was made possible by kindling the frame of experience the workers shared.

In Capital, Marx specified the principles of capitalist economy and the position therein of the working class.²⁵ For the workers it was not self-evident to form a separate class. Their factory, church and football club, financed by the notables, as well as the sheds nearby they lived in were their neighborhood. As Taussig wrote about plantation workers in Columbia, employees were taught to obey employers in analogy with children obeying their father.²⁶ This analogy of employee and employer forming a dyad was their simplex, an idea that limits awareness and thus disempowers.²⁷ Marx had retraced the origin of the analogy. How to reframe the situation as exploitative? He demystified the simplex of employees working for their employer’s pay by showing that factory workers had actually become means of production whose produced commodities were owned by employers. The comparison with slavery informed debates at the time. Stronger still, ‘The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly.’²⁸ How could the source of production become a means, and its produce be owned?²⁹ Capitalism came with a commodity logic. The simplex frame combined four meanings: sources as means, commodities owned. By sources we should think of the workers. Applied to concerns today, the source is the planet and its natural resources. The capitalist trick is to treat the workers, or the planet, as means. The use of resources as mere means is a simplex, a frame covering up its origin, because a source nobody owns, as exemplified by the commons. Similarly, companies in the digital age grow into multinationals not because of inventiveness but because they mine something they do not own: the number of people interconnected through the internet, and their privacy.

Taussig recognized Marx’s matrix of commodity fetishism in the Columbian plantation workers doing the unnatural deed of selling their soul to the devil to participate in capitalism, namely to own things one did not produce oneself, like capitalists claim.³⁰ Insight in commodity fetishism enriched the second layer of means/owners with an opposition between (the class of) production, on the side of the employees, and (the class of) capital, on the side of the employers. The diagonals in the matrix below specify the Marxist claim. Employers produce commodities in an exploitative market economy. The employees are the sources of capital, so they should own or change the system of production. The simplex ‘Employees obey the employer’ simplicate this relation, rearranging the meanings to twist them. If the analysis in “Chapter Four: The Human Experiment” is correct, a violent energy could be harnessed from the twisted meaning. The workers’ systematic misinterpretation of their production (which a cultural analysis could unravel) prolonged the exploitation (observed through Marx’s social analysis). Capitalist owners looked down upon the workers. Surely, not out of a natural sense of superiority? They felt the condensed energy of concealed meaning, as schematized here.

Yet again, let’s face the matrix. Figure 2 reads: ‘sources of capital produce commodities.’ Are workers the sources really, and the only ones we should take into account? The Enlightened all too blandly dismissed the premodern or mystical idea of collective reason. They failed to decenter the individual mind. Marxists for their part had little room for the sources of production, an ancient ecological take on life. They could not decenter the production of commodities. However, are individual rationality (being smart) and commodity production (making money) not two obstacles to ripened insight? Against the classic assumption of incompatibility between equality and freedom, the following section argues that the third value is exactly what keeps the other two together in a triad, like the third leg of a tripod. Democracy’s unstable balancing act between liberalist and socialist views testifies to it. The various case studies of the subsequent chapters make intercultural comparisons to ethnographically reconstruct this tensor.

Fig. 2

Matrix of Marxism vs. simplex of exploitation

The Tensor of Inclusion

The social and ecological issues that we must be aware of today concern the globe, a special kind of sphere everyone talks about but nobody is familiar enough with because of knowledge lacking about its principles and frames of experience. Even the Arab Spring, the more regional of the recent prodemocracy movements, gained impetus from a global frame of reference regarding good governance, and fell flat once the revolution turned inwards and away from the globe.³¹ We have only begun to develop shared frames of experience for this widest sphere, so how could we even have a vision of the future, one to believe in? The cultural diversity of the global sphere antagonizes some and inspires others to call for inclusion. Have we come to terms yet with this third value of the revolutionary motto that marked the beginnings of modern democracy: fraternité, ‘brotherhood’, an archaic term to mean inclusion?³²

Brotherhood or sisterhood imply a feeling of belonging together. Does this feeling come naturally? A matrix has one perspective to frame all other viewpoints. How to ensure their inclusion? According to Luhmann, the value of inclusion is an illusion because including a meaning is always excluding its opposite.³³ Banning a song title in order to be inclusive for Arab listeners means exclusion of certain music lovers, who in turn exclude if their playing the song is heard by the first group. A society that does not accept equal rights for all human categories opts out of the inclusive globe. The new prodemocracy movements are after the inclusion of all. They defy Luhmann’s axiom. For that they will have to seriously reframe. My proposal is to move away from individual reason (integrating meanings and norms) to sources of production because these do not exclude anyone. A meaning cuts and opposes. An energy permeates. Across many cultures, collective reason is treated as a kind of energy named destiny (e.g., Imana in Rwanda). Destiny is inclusive, Part II argues toward the end, because it stands for a point of convergence of the species where nobody is yet and which no individual can claim.

Both Enlightenment and Marxism kindled the revolution through a matrix, which means that one relation between terms is seen as correct. For Marx, capitalism was bound to succumb to its own contradictions. There could be no sustainable way of life wherein the sources of production (first column) are paired with capital and commodity (second column). Yet, nobody will want to ban from society capital and commodity. As for Enlightenment, the primacy of individual rationality (first column) suggests the masses to have an irrational inclination (second column). Yet, democracy attributes truth to the majority. In both cases we see that the matrixes stirring the revolution are left behind once they did their job. The next step is to find a tensor, which places us in the position of a Bateson when he realized the specific relation between the British and the American frame of education, or a Descola putting animism and naturalism in a rapport of communication.

The value of inclusion is attained, Fig. 3 shows, if the options excluded in the values of freedom and equality are safeguarded. The matrix of Enlightenment becomes a tensor if we allow the possibility of collective reason besides individual rationality (without relapsing in blind belief or religious orthodoxy). We can think of the complementarity (instead of antagonism) between rationalism and romanticism. Marx’s matrix gets tensorial if we admit a capital of commodities that respects the sources of production (without returning to capitalism). Eco-friendly consumption and production envisage exactly that.

Fig. 3

Tensor of inclusion vs. simplex of essentialism; missing link between equality and freedom

How to integrate the two matrixes in one tensor? Mere supplementing of the columns does not work. The dynamic should be based on empirical evidence.³⁴ What we need is to identify the simplex that prevents inclusion. The roads to freedom and equality were blocked because the masses were alienated by simplex frames (‘Know your duty, sinner!’ and ‘Employees obey the pay!’) which however conflated the layers of meaning that could also unblock the roads. “Chapter Four: The Human Experiment” concluded on the simplex formula of contemporary society: ‘Different cultures (with their modes of production) are separate sources of production.’ I argued it to be the arch-simplex condoning exclusion and exploitation of the Global South by the Global North. Its essentialist pluralism justifies a relativistic, ‘post-knowledge’ attitude about injustice in the world. Figure 3 disentangles the simplex into two parts and recasts them as ‘sources of production’ and ‘collective reason’. Their diagonal relations yield a remarkable insight: ‘the sources of reason are collectively produced.’

Global exclusion persists as long as the individual is seen as the source of reason. The human species is the basis for inclusion of the most diverse identities, a collective inclusion.³⁵ What else than the speciated connection do we mean by ‘humans are not machines’? Humans are organisms sensing the viability of a practice. The best possible computer processing all data cannot. The species is at work in the hunch about peace and justice. Collective reason is one of the sources humans have, next to earth, water, cognition and so on.³⁶ The tensor connects collective reason to sources of production and thus counters the arch-simplex separating cultures as sources of production. The species has a common fate. 

The communist matrix for equality reminds that the workers are the source of capital. The liberalist matrix for freedom emphasizes individual reason. A tensor does not privilege one relation between terms. The tensor of inclusion reshuffles the terms to approach collective reason as a source of production. Anthropological studies of community life share that approach. Figure 2 in the introduction described such centrifugal directions of feeling meaning, which Part II intends to cover through ethnographic interpretations and cultural comparison.

Of equal importance is the alternative, centripetal direction of feeling meaning. Its moment of the real creates a space for insight while keeping both rationality and personal interest at bay. A universal example of such moment is divination. Reading the entrails of a bird has ‘vectorial’ reputation because a diviner can manipulate the client. The practice also stimulates life-sensing though. It makes room for an intuition of destiny helping the patient to overcome the reflex of guilt and fear of paying with a life for having breached a profound social law. From democratic elections and medicinal chiefs to football, music and love, tensors remedy simplexes in the coming chapters. What is the point of rooting for a team in a football match, or for an actor in a movie? Wishing well will make no difference to the end result. Oracles too have to be read in the subjunctive tense, describing a dream instead of a representation.³⁷ Yet, like winning a football game or an election, they are real. In kingship, despite earlier contestation of succession, the incumbent now wears the crown and sits on the throne. Rather than symbolizing power, the tensor establishes power.³⁸ In an origin-oriented history, the winner links past to future. The participants peek into destiny (see “Chapter Fourteen: Intuition, Destiny, Love”).

The tensor leaps out in a humanities context. The notion suits my purpose of distilling richly textured human phenomena into patterns without denying the reduction. In mathematics a tensor is an array of components exerting an effect more general than a vector (one-dimensional) or a matrix (two-dimensional). Tensors have proven their value in physics to see gravitation not as a ‘force’ of objects but as the curvature of indivisible (four-dimensional) spacetime.³⁹ Applied to the example above of class consciousness, exploitation continues not because of material necessity or social forces but owing to a simplication, a historical event, energy and meaning, sedimented over time and thus reparable.

Re-source to Reform

To return to our opening question, democratic government beats rule based on the vector of force, but remains a matrix by organizing a vote to decide who decides. The winning frame is played off against the losing frame. Democracy’s dynamic is predicated on continuous confrontation with empirical information. It works as long as the ‘facts’ are framed and reframed to design interventions, sometimes labeled leftist or rightist or claimed as such by political parties. In post-truth society, where the empirical dynamic plays no role and (r)evolution is impossible, the difference between progressive and conservative policies has become a dichotomy (“Chapter Nine: A Model Leader”). Democratic elections and debate then degrade into mere ritual, making little difference, legitimizing the statics of state policy and more broadly ‘control society’.⁴⁰ How far-fetched is the feeling of alienation among people, that their thoughts and their children’s are manipulated by communication technologies, themselves reflective of untransparent interests of an elite or more broadly ‘psychopolitics’?⁴¹ In the digital era the rise of artificial intelligence and surveillance further weaken the impact of electoral, deliberative systems. ⁴² At the same time however we see the undertow grow. Do we observe in the rhizomes of critique and disobedience a revolt (e.g., implied in Hardt and Negri’s Empire)? Not exactly. Antagonism, the exclusive disjunctivity of two opposites, is the tenor of the matrix. Real revolt is nondual, the inclusive disjunctivity of the tensor. The Bhutan way.⁴³

The cultural analyses of “Chapter Seven: The Oracle and the Real” and “Chapter Eight: Healer or King” expound the dynamics in east African communities that humanize and regenerate society. In Western democracy, empirical data admit a non-machinic moment at the heart of decision-making. Counterintuitively, so do the ancestral knowledges of initiation and divination, we will see. Stronger still, their capacity to subvert and humanize the chief’s political system appears more effective in comparison to the ritual of contemporary Euro-American politics (“Chapter Nine: A Model Leader”). Re-sourcing, I argue next, which is going back to the sources of production, can make up for the systemic lack of empirically driven ‘pull’ to reform.

Living the same circumstances activates a ‘push’ to reform. The prodemocracy movements of old met the challenge because their spheres were fairly homogenous each time: factory workers, women, Blacks, unlike the motley social categories that Yellow Vests or Arab Spring had to unite during the Great Recession.⁴⁴ Yellow Vests span a wide political spectrum in their warning about globalization, remarkably comprising the conservative defenders of local traditions and community life as well as the progressive defenders of social equity.⁴⁵ Outsiders are antagonized by either of both, unless they recognize that the Yellow Vests are preoccupied with the logic of a well-functioning system, and not with their ideological identity.⁴⁶ This is another crucial moment when matrix becomes tensor in view of the value of inclusion. The pull can make up for the lack of push. A better term than ‘well-functioning system’ is life. We ‘feel the meaning’ of the Yellow Vests if they manage to link their opinion with logics rooted in life and concerning the world. That more likely seizes the inner person and fuels a sense of urgency about global interventions.

To allow for pull, the social system has to be re-sourced, that is: modern subsystems have to release the production sources they hold hostage. The spheres of life that the State took over from communities to manage in democratic fashion, such as food, water, forest, land, sky, energy, fertility and desire, are actually sources of production. They have been torn apart. Those parts, via States, national and international systems of exchange, wound up in the hands of multinational companies. An agrobusiness consortium determines the production and distribution of seeds, the chemical treatments of fields and crops, and the range of produce, which are interlinked and organized to standard procedure.⁴⁷ Through the simplex of profit, the multinationals make policy without democratic control, and this across more spheres than do the governments people vote for.

The specific situation of reform in the twenty-first century is that opposition between classes (or any other spheres) no longer works because of the political, economic and ecological challenges being global. Policy now should benefit humanity. To not endanger the earth’s atmosphere, oceans, energy and peace, the national governments and their school systems could mainstream eco-philosophy like the deep ecology of Arne Naess, seeing humans as part of nature, contrary to the dualism of the ‘domestication complex’ which is the default ecology of the global economy.⁴⁸ The origin of our indignation cannot be a local sphere anymore, but must be located in the sources of production. The sources can return to humanity. All members of the species are entitled to life. Every source of production derives from life and exists as a viable entity. Water, land and energy, but also desire, love and respect are available to us in perfect balance. Political, economic, ecological and other dimensions cut them apart to manage a part of the source, but those dimensions cannot exist on their own (despite their existence as scientific specializations). The economic ‘system’ is not a viable entity like hills, water, trees and birds. The ecosystem is unreal without integrating social, biological, economic and other dimensions.

Reframe.⁴⁹ Re-sphere. Resource. The real is the tool of the undertow to be explored next.