ecosophia | A Cosmic Doctrine Hypothesis

A few days ago I spent some time reading Dion Fortune's The Cosmic Doctrine, looking for material to help explain polarity magic -- yes, I've got a manuscript on that subject in process. In the process, though, I reread a section that might just explain the weirdness of the times in which we live.

Some background will be necessary. In Fortune's cosmology there are seven Cosmic planes. Our solar system, and every other star system in the universe known to astronomers, is on the seventh of these planes. The six other planes are composed of varieties of matter our senses cannot detect -- yes, it's been pointed out that this corresponds rather closely to the "dark matter" today's cosmologists have to postulate in order to explain the results of their experiments. (Fortune got there first -- The Cosmic Doctrine was originally written, and circulated in mimeographed form, in the 1920s.)

The other six Cosmic planes have their own star systems. These, like the systems in our plane, are seen as revolving around a common center, which Fortune calls the Central Stillness. The attraction of the Central Stillness holds the whole vast system in balance, in the same way that the gravitational attraction of the sun holds the solar system in balance. In Fortune's cosmology, of course, we are not just talking about astrophysics, but spirituality as well, so the balance in question is spiritual -- and it affects the intelligent inhabitants of any planet that happens to have them.

Here's where the complexity comes in. The Cosmic planes aren't actually separate in space -- they're all present right where you're sitting now -- but it helps schematically to think of the other planes as closer to the Central Stillness than our seventh plane is. When a star system of one of the other planes passes between our solar system and the Central Stillness, metaphorically speaking, it replaces the influence of the Central Stillness with its own attraction, and things get weird.

You can tell which Cosmic plane is the source of the disruption, in turn, by paying attention to which of the sub-planes here in the seventh Cosmic plane get shaken up. There's a straightforward correspondence between Cosmic planes and sub-planes:

First Cosmic plane --> Upper spiritual plane, governing relations with the Divine
Second Cosmic plane --> Lower spiritual plane, governing relations with meanings and ideals
Third Cosmic plane --> Upper mental plane, governing abstract thinking
Fourth Cosmic plane --> Lower mental plane, governing concrete thinking
Fifth Cosmic plane --> Upper astral plane, governing the emotions and the arts
Sixth Cosmic plane --> Lower astral plane, governing the passions
Seventh Cosmic plane --> Physical plane, the realm of physical and etheric matter

With this in mind it's not too hard to sketch out what might be happening.

First, sometime around 1900 a star system on the fifth Cosmic plane got close enough to our solar system to start having a disruptive influence. It was after this that the arts abandoned millennia of focus on beauty and started pursuing deliberate ugliness instead; it's also when a lot of human relationships started getting problematic in odd ways. People's aesthetic and emotional lives got very strange and stayed there.

Second, sometime around 2016 a star system on the second Cosmic plane did the same thing. It was after this that a great many people suddenly lost the ability to relate their actions and words to their supposed ideals -- when civil libertarians started rejecting the idea of free speech, people who'd spent years insisting that natural healing methods were better than corporate medicine turned on a dime and insisted that everyone had to get the latest and most inadequately tested product of Big Pharma, Green parties in Europe abandoned their longstanding pacifism and started baying for war with Russia, and so on. People's grasp of meaning and value got very strange and stayed there.

My working guess is that the first process peaked sometime in the early 1960s and has been fading out since then -- it's not accidental, in other words, that modern art remains stuck in place only because of institutional inertia, and most of the really interesting new trends in art and music involve returning to classic technique and its forms. My guess is that the second process, which is much faster because it's on a higher plane, peaked sometime in 2021-2022, and has just started to fade out -- though I'm less certain of this.

This is a hypothesis from which predictions can be made. If I'm right about the first part, the collapse of interest in what used to be modern art will accelerate in the years to come, and nearly all of what's been produced during the Age of Ugliness will be stuck in warehouses if it isn't simply consigned to dumpsters. Older forms of art and music will be revived by new artistic movements, and everyone will shake their heads and wonder what they were thinking back then.

If I'm right about the second part, we're going to hear a spreading silence when it comes to the extreme claims and actions of the last few years. As the influence of the second Cosmic plane system passes off, a good many people will be embarrassed and shamed by their actions; human nature being what it is, most of them will do their best to pretend that it never happened, and may respond with frantic rage when their behavior gets brought up. If the consequences of those actions turn out to be as bad as some of them seem to be, that may make things very, very brittle for a while. But of course we'll just have to wait and see.

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One phenomenon that I think about, that could be related, is people doing something like a kind of fakery about thinking vs. social thinking-imitation, that they don't realize they're doing.

You know the thing about chatbots, as argued by Gary Marcus, where they memorize a ton of simple patterns associated with people having interiority or even just deliberation, in connection with topics that came up in the training set? And then the chatbots can work from that memorization to convincingly mimic deliberation or even having interiority, so long as the conversation stays within the bounds of situations that came up a lot in the training data. But go outside that range and they start confidently confabulating nonsense. That's one thing that it's like. (Though more recent chatbots have a broader notion of "pattern" and so it's gradually getting harder to be sure what's going on.)

Or like if someone learned to play chess by memorizing a bunch of patterns of single moves in expert play in isolation, without ever picking up on the idea that a game is a series of events and there's a future with multiple moving parts. So they'd never get the idea that you have to calculate through multiple scenarios, and learn to recognize patterns relating possibilities, and not just patterns to be found in what can be seen at any one time. They might be able to make individual moves that weren't terrible. But if you asked them about what it was like to make chess moves you might have to probe a bit to realize that they're unknowingly faking playing chess in the full sense.

It seems to me like there's this discrepancy between two kinds of thinking people can do.

One kind of thinking is to try to understand some part of the world, as something that has its own internal structure and details and rules and potentialities. And then you conform your thinking to those mechanical qualities. And you gradually work out that some conclusions about that domain are right or wrong, or some heuristics are fruitful or fallacious.

Another kind of thinking is to try to pick up on social patterns around the acts of believing or saying things about that part of the world. One kind of social pattern is the structures of coalitions around different positions to believe about that part of the world. Another kind of social pattern is the stereotypes that your identified-with coalitions have about the emotional motivations of different kinds of respected or deprecated thinkers. And then you try to conform your belief-related behavior to the concept you've acquired, of what it would mean to be a person who believes "true" (responsible, upright, innocent-defending) things and not "false" (irresponsible, licentious, wicked) things.

But people who do an unbalanced amount of the second thing don't say things like, "I'm following a complicated jumble of social calculations, which directs me to say 'the earth is flat' because the round earth hypothesis is associated with legitimating the scientistic conception of authority and a meaningless universe where they can have an excuse to tyrannize us however they want (because no human dignity exists in such a universe, because [insert reference to introspectively opaque jumble of folk-psychological plus game-theoretic intuitions]) and pretend it were somehow 'safe' to reject God, like Communism, we all want to distinguish ourselves from those rebellious Communists and the deserved doom they brought upon themselves, therefore the only relevant reason anyone could believe or pretend to believe in a round earth is because of having qualities I don't want to have that would get them rejected from coalitions I identify with." Instead they say things more like "the earth is flat", and then assume that the same style of thinking will also safely guide them through the task of speculating "truthfully" about what will happen when people try complex surveying techniques, eventually producing incoherent nonsense like the chatbot.

Instead of ideas of "truth" and "falsehood" as things that depend on the world, they have a sort of aggregate idea of "deserving to be accepted for upholding the moral authority of truthiness-related moral identities" and "deserving to be rejected for corrupting society by empowering falsehoodiness-related moral identities", but think of these as "truth" and "falsehood", and don't understand that there's any possibility of a difference or anything they could be doing wrong, or how one would even look in the direction necessary to realize they could be doing anything wrong.

(Inconveniently, the second style of thinking is often needed in practice to restrain the thing that, human nature being what it is, actually happens when people try to do what they think is the first kind of thinking.)

When people have some exposure to the first style of thinking, they at least have a playbook for what an argument oriented to an independently existing universe looks like. But sometimes, maybe after a society suffers more than a certain amount of involution, some people don't even have that. If you try to argue with those people using a style of thinking that references structures of justifications and principles and logical relations, all they can parse your argument as is a weird kind of social move that's trying to ape the style of respectable thinkers in a way that's undeserved, because the structure of verbal rallying behaviors that it forms doesn't support respectability-related conclusions. Like "stolen valor" except it's respectability.

Or so I guess. I'm outside the sphere where I run into such people and maybe that's not what actually happens in practice most of the time.

I haven't noticed this happening more in 2015-2022 particularly; I just had a vague sense that it had been getting worse in practice, and social media seemed to be contributing.

David Chapman talks about a hypothesis as to a broader trend here, relating it to Robert Kegan's ideas about developmental stages and the support a society needs to give people if they're going to learn to function under more than one coalition's identity-worldview:

https://metarationality.com/stem-fluidity-bridge

Zvi Moshowitz has developed a sort of meme about Baudrillard's ideas of the "precession of simulacra", a kind of taxonomy of socially driven descent into unreality. Here he develops a correspondence between Baudrillard's idea and the four children who have roles in the Seder ceremony. A person who doesn't really have of the idea that there's an independent world of truths and falsehoods corresponds to the fourth child, the one who doesn't know how to ask:

https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/09/07/the-four-children-of-the-seder-as-the-simulacra-levels/

A Cosmic Doctrine Hypothesis

Re: useful metaphors