The Science of Applied Metaphysics

An exercise in lateral thinking.

Photo credit: Adhemar M. Duro Jr., courtesy of the European Southern Observatory.

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

My previous post betrayed some frustration about my (unsuccessful) attempts to fit my writing into a culturally acceptable format. Whether consciously or unconsciously, I’ve been taking on the didactic style adopted by the vast majority of today’s content producers—the familiar cadence of podcasts, YouTube videos, and essays: “Here’s what you need to know about X. Here’s the potted history of X, which is a dumber version of better explanations from actual experts. Here, for the thousandth time, in nearly identical language to the other thousand people who have already written on the subject, are the fundamentals of X.”

It’s partly my fault. I’m sure this means I need a more varied media diet. But it’s also an unavoidable part of publishing in These Dark Times. If you want to squeeze any amount of money out of this racket (and don’t we all?) you need to do one of two things:

• Option 1: Shoot the moon with something absolutely gonzo. Blow the doors off. Take the format in a completely new direction. Find a niche audience; forget everybody else. Let them come to you. Option 1 takes a great deal of courage. If you fail—and there’s a high likelihood of failure—you will have committed the mortal sin of Posting Cringe, betraying a fatal combination of earnestness and tone-deafness. You will be made anathema and driven into the outer darknesses.

• Option 2: Play it safe. Appeal to a broad audience by giving them what they’re familiar with. Don’t spook the herd. If you’re writing about something outside the norm, break it down into digestible bits and slip it in gradually. Then, once you’ve established some trust (and demonstrated that you’re not insane) veeery carefully steer your audience in the direction you want to go. This takes patience, restraint, and a deft hand; when it’s done well, it’s like a magic trick, suddenly making people realize that they’re looking at the world in a new way without noticing how they got there.

There are authors I greatly admire in both categories. While many new writers probably imagine themselves as Option 1 rockstars, it’s much easier to be a bombastic failure than a successful long-term cultivator. Substack seems to be particularly rich ground for those who have taken Option 2: it’s gratifying and humbling to be part of a community producing so much subtle-yet-compelling work.

Unfortunately—I’ve found my own work slipping into some unsatisfactory middle ground, where I’m writing obliquely about what I actually want to be putting out, without quite nailing the accessible tone that reaches a wider audience.

It seems to be a common pitfall of writing about the kind of weird stuff I’m interested in. Once you get past wading depth in the more ontologically challenging topics, there’s a habitual self-consciousness, trying not to sound like a raving lunatic to your friends and family. Those of us who don’t have the confidence to take Option 1 end up spending huge amounts of time on table-setting—carefully explaining our thinking from one careful step to the next, as proof we haven’t had a full-on psychotic break.

See—I’m doing it right now.

What follows is (hopefully) my final concession to that cautious impulse. From now on, I’ll do my best to ditch the market-tested, didactic approach, and focus on what I actually think is important. This might exclude me from reaching a mainstream audience; still, it’s better than continuing to tiptoe around and play it safe. Maybe I just don’t have the patience. But with so many people feeling like the apocalypse is looming on the horizon, in one form or another, it seems like the time for appealing to mainstream sensibilities has passed.

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I’ve spent the past several years studying what we might call “the science of applied metaphysics¹.”

Many people don’t realize that it’s one of the oldest branches of science. Going back before the end of the last Ice Age, we have archaeological evidence of applied metaphysics developed by humans who were once thought to be aimless hunter-gatherers. It grew up alongside—and doubtless inspired—some of the earliest examples of the more familiar hard sciences, including engineering, pharmacology, and astronomy. The discovery of sites like Gobekli Tepe and Nabta Playa have pushed the starting dates of these sciences further and further into the past. This corresponds with similar trajectories in long-lived cultures like the “aboriginal Australians,” who have maintained since their earliest contact with primitive Westerners that their own scientific development began when half the world was still covered with ice.

From this perspective, the discipline of applied metaphysics has been a consistent feature of human development for most of our time on the planet. Only in the past few hundred years has it been forcibly separated from what we now consider “real” science—even though all the currently-recognized fields of “real” science evolved directly from applied metaphysics.

We admire the cultural achievements of monumental civilizations around the world—ancient Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica, Greece, Egypt, China. But because we’ve ignored the historical prevalence of applied metaphysics, we have an incomplete picture of how these civilizations developed. We’re left with the mistaken impression that these were dumb savages playing dress-up, who accidentally hit on some of the most advanced feats of mathematics, astronomy, engineering, and medicine in human history.

Even more significant are the living records of elder cultures who couldn’t be bothered to push giant stones around. While they’ve been largely left out of historical timelines that favor big buildings, supposedly “primitive” indigenous groups have maintained a continuous development of applied metaphysics—in some cases for millennia—with extraordinary results, working in jungle laboratories and desert observatories.

Today, applied metaphysics is regarded as “unscientific.” This is disingenuous: we have ample evidence of even the earliest metaphysicians conducting experiments, gathering data, developing hypotheses, and producing concrete results. Unfortunately for them, the imperial projects that built the modern world could only be perpetrated against ignorant barbarians—not intelligent people, and especially not people who were, in many ways, more intelligent than their usurpers. Indigenous scientists were put to the sword by superstitious zealots. The conquerors and their jealous book-burning left us with an incomplete picture of what our predecessors developed. Nevertheless, the remaining fragments are powerfully suggestive.

Even in modern times, despite its lack of credibility, the science of applied metaphysics has quietly shaped the world. The spread of the British Empire, the rise of the Third Reich, the American space program: for better or worse, time and again, the presence of a few commited metaphysicians led to some of the biggest global transformations in human history. If this sounds conspiratorial, it’s only because our mainstream accounts have deliberately omitted some crucial elements from the story, for fear of granting applied metaphysics too much influence.

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As a science, applied metaphysics is radically democratic. This is probably why it’s so diligently suppressed during periods of authoritarian control: it’s just as effective at the individual level as it is at the civilizational level. While cultures with the resources to build megalithic research centers tend to inform the regional style of their metaphysics, individuals and small groups can use the same principles to tackle local problems. Historically, when the big civilizations fall apart, the smaller vernacular metaphysics pick up the slack, helping people survive in the wilderness until they get settled again.

Democratic power is dangerous to authoritarian rule. If small communities can sustain themselves with their own metaphysics, they’re not entirely dependent on a centralized superstructure. The technologies they develop might prove more effective than the calcified forms of provisional governance. Applied metaphysics must be carefully regulated.

This regulatory framework is what shapes the modern world. Officially-sanctioned metaphysics are broken up into credentialed fields: religion, “soft” sciences like psychology and philosophy, and the arts². These are understood to be the province of elites—well-educated (well-indoctrinated) functionaries who understand where the red lines are. Illicit use of metaphysics by uncredentialled civilians is tarred as superstition, mysticism, or, worst of all, magic—the fringe pursuits of unstable (and potentially dangerous) misfits. When social pressure isn’t enough to enforce order, public witch-burnings (both real and metaphorical) are usually enough to keep people in line.

Caution isn’t entirely unwarranted, of course. In the wrong hands, applied metaphysics will occasionally throw up the odd cult, and end in a mass suicide every so often. But this is always framed as a need for greater regulation—and not a consequence of modernity’s poverty of alternatives.

The fundamental flaw in authoritarian metaphysics is that it eventually becomes unconvincing. If people are prevented from independently verifying their own interactions with the non-material world, then the official doctrine becomes what it supposedly prevents: baseless superstition. Universal human experience is reduced down to dogmatic enforcement. What was once immediate, transformative contact with the numinous becomes a lethally boring book club, with only one text on the shelf. People start to realize they’ve been given a placebo³. Side effects may include alienation, depression, nihilism, impulsive violence, nationalism⁴, and reduced immunity to Scientology.

Widespread outbreaks of these symptoms can be managed for as long as the central power structure maintains discipline. They become epidemics when the dominant ontology starts to break down. If the crisis becomes terminal, people are left with the same options they’ve always had after an apocalypse: die in despair, or find a way to shift their focus (back) to the more-than-human world, the reality outside our little terrariums.

Applied metaphysics is, in part, the science of traversing the immaterial thresholds that we travel across throughout our lives, as individuals and communities. Some of those thresholds are optional; some aren’t. At some point, every living person has to grapple with the inevitable end of life, especially those who have created new lives. We can choose to burden ourselves and our children with the thoroughly unscientific superstition that we’re a brief flicker in a dead, empty, meaningless universe, with nothing but oblivion waiting on the other side⁵. Or, we can trust the science—well-established after thousands of years of research—which tells us we’re all active participants in the continual unfolding of a living cosmos, with worlds beyond the material universe to explore⁶.

I know which side I’m choosing.

Even if it’s all just make-believe⁷—at this stage in the game, it beats the hell out of the alternative.

1. Not the New Age version, mind you. The original stuff. This could loosely be defined as “the development of a collaborative, evidence-based process for determining ontological status,” or recognizing the reality of things. If you’re wondering who (or what) gets to participate in the process—and what counts as "evidence”—that’s the central question concealed within the various -isms (materialism, animism, monotheism, etc.) Is it a paradox, since ontological status must first be established by somebody in order to extend the franchise? Maybe! Another subject for another post.

2. Artists are the least trustworthy of the bunch (and, consequently, the first to get pilloried during authoritarian crackdowns) because they occasionally—sometimes accidentally—plug into something uncontainable. Still, they’re grudgingly permitted, so long as their work can be commodified and penned in by the self-referential recursions of material culture, to keep some cheerful wallpaper up on the soul-murdering landscape of modernity’s excesses.

3. Quite literally, in some cases, depending on who you believe.

4. Animism’s degenerate cousin: a perfect example of underdeveloped and poorly-applied metaphysics.

5. Hard enough to deal with at the best of times; doubly hard when modernity—the supposedly better alternative to what we had before—insists on careening from one extravagant display of global stupidity to another, with no end in sight.

6. Shout-out to

Some Guy

over at Extelligence, for having the courage to share one of the most compelling (and also hilariously written) personal experiences I’ve come across recently. While I have my own questions about the overtly monotheistic interpretation of it (and it emphatically wasn’t my experience, so who cares what I think) this is the kind of data we need to bring respectability back to the field of applied metaphysics.

7. It’s not. I’ve had enough weird experiences to know better. But just for the sake of argument.