A Better World Begins With Seeing Clearly

In my previous article, „Better World Models for a Multipolar World„, I wrote about the danger of societies becoming trapped inside models of reality that no longer describe the world particularly well. As an AI researcher, the comparison comes naturally to me because we know that a model can become extremely confident while learning from narrow, repetitive or biased information. It may produce convincing answers and appear internally coherent, yet underneath that confidence it can become increasingly fragile because it has learned the structure of its training environment rather than the deeper structure of reality. Societies can do something remarkably similar through history, institutions, media, ideology, collective memory, political incentives and fear, becoming very sophisticated at explaining the world to themselves while gradually becoming worse at seeing what is actually happening outside their own frame.

My argument in that article was that a unipolar mindset cannot properly understand a multipolar world. If Western societies continue to assume that their own political and historical perspective represents the natural center of international life, they will repeatedly misunderstand Russia, China, India, Iran and much of the Global South. Independent centers of power then appear automatically as threats to an order that is assumed to be permanent, when perhaps what we are witnessing is simply the return of a world in which several civilizations possess enough economic, technological and political strength to pursue their own interests.

A recent conversation between Jeffrey Sachs, Alexander Mercouris and Alex Christoforou on The Duran pushed this idea considerably further for me (watch video below).

The discussion begins with Ukraine, Iran, China, Europe and the deteriorating international environment, but Sachs gradually connects these conflicts to something much larger. His argument is that Western foreign policy is struggling to process the end of the historical period in which the West, and particularly the United States, could organize much of the international system according to its own preferences.

Sachs makes an important distinction very early in the conversation. He does not describe this as the collapse of America or the end of Western civilization. He describes it as a crisis of power. The United States can remain extraordinarily rich, innovative and influential without being the uncontested organizing power of the world, just as Europe can remain prosperous without possessing the political influence it had during earlier centuries. The difficulty is that institutions created during the period of Western predominance have become accustomed to treating dominance as if it were inseparable from security and prosperity.

I think this distinction is essential because much of the current debate seems unable to imagine a position between supremacy and collapse. If China becomes richer, this is interpreted as America becoming weaker. If Russia develops new economic relationships in Asia, this is interpreted as a Western loss. If countries in Africa, Latin America or the Middle East acquire additional political and commercial partners, this is often described in Washington or Brussels primarily through the language of competition and influence. Yet there is no economic law requiring another country’s development to reduce our own quality of life.

Sachs approaches this from the perspective of an economist and repeatedly contrasts geopolitical zero sum thinking with a more positive sum understanding of development. Trade can benefit several countries simultaneously, technological progress can spread across borders, and civilizations that suffered periods of decline can become prosperous again without requiring the destruction of somebody else. He argues that China’s return as a major economic and technological civilization does not automatically lower Western living standards, just as Russia recovering from the extraordinary dislocation of the 1990s does not require Europeans to become poorer.

This brings us inevitably to Russia. The people who still want a wider war with Russia, or who imagine that Russia can simply be defeated, contained indefinitely, sanctioned into submission or somehow removed as an independent center of power, are naive to say the least. Understanding Russia does not require approving every Russian action, nor should anybody replace one simplistic Western narrative with an equally simplistic Russian one. It simply requires strategy to begin with the world that actually exists rather than with the world we would prefer to exist.

If a model predicts that sanctions will collapse Russia and Russia does not collapse, the model should be updated. If a model predicts that the overwhelming majority of the world will isolate Russia and large parts of Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East refuse to do so, the model should be updated. If the attempt to isolate Russia instead helps deepen Russian economic relationships with China, India and other countries across Eurasia, those developments need to become part of the analysis rather than being treated as temporary inconveniences that can safely be ignored.

Yet the political rhetoric changes remarkably little. Another sanctions package is announced, another escalation is discussed, another weapons system is presented as potentially decisive, and another demonstration of resolve is supposed to achieve what previous demonstrations of resolve did not achieve. There comes a point when this begins to look less like a strategy responding to evidence and more like a model protecting itself from evidence.

For somebody working in AI, the analogy is difficult to miss. When predictions repeatedly conflict with observation while the internal assumptions remain protected, learning has stopped. The system is no longer updating itself against reality.

The Geopolitical Bubble

One of the most interesting parts of Sachs’s argument concerns what he describes as a geopolitical bubble. His criticism is not simply that Western governments make mistakes, because every government makes mistakes. His concern is that the political and media environment increasingly requires an image of continuing control, strength and superiority even when events become more complicated.

According to Sachs, weakness becomes difficult to acknowledge because too much political credibility has been invested in the original predictions. Instead, setbacks have to be interpreted as temporary, competitors have to be described as weaker than they appear, and every new escalation has to be presented as another step toward eventual success. He points to recurring claims about Ukraine prevailing, Iran being defeated, China approaching some form of crisis, and Western technological supremacy remaining secure. The individual narratives change, but the psychological pattern remains surprisingly stable.

The interesting question is why intelligent people continue doing this when contradictory information is available. Part of the answer may simply be institutional. Once a foreign policy establishment has spent several decades thinking of the United States as the indispensable center of the international order, genuinely accepting multipolarity requires more than adjusting a few policies. It requires changing the institution’s model of itself.

Sachs illustrates this through his discussion of a recent Foreign Affairs essay (see this and this) by Kurt Campbell, in which several possible futures for world order are considered. In Sachs’s reading, multipolarity appears associated with disorder, spheres of influence are unsatisfactory, cooperation among major powers is treated as difficult or strategically unfavorable, Chinese preeminence is presented as deeply damaging, and the preferred direction eventually becomes a stronger coalition capable of balancing China. What interested Sachs was not only the proposed strategy but the architecture of the reasoning itself, because cooperation appears as a possibility only to be quickly dismissed while organized competition returns as the serious solution.

If the objective were simply American security and prosperity, genuine cooperation with other major powers could remain one option among several. If the objective is continuing primacy, however, cooperation becomes much more difficult because genuine cooperation requires acknowledging that other civilizations possess legitimate interests, capabilities and political influence of their own.

This is one reason the rhetoric surrounding China should concern us. If the issue were only particular Chinese military or political actions, then Western policy could respond to those specific actions. But if Chinese technological development itself becomes unacceptable, if Chinese industrial capacity itself is considered threatening, or if China becoming richer is interpreted primarily as a deterioration in America’s relative position, then the confrontation has no clear endpoint because China would effectively be asked not to become a fully developed China.

No serious civilization is going to accept that.

The Financial Bubble Behind the Political Story

Sachs then makes what I consider one of the most interesting connections in the entire conversation. The geopolitical bubble, he argues, has become connected to a financial bubble, and the two increasingly help reinforce one another.

The geopolitical narrative says that the West remains dominant, American technology remains dominant, AI will remain centered primarily around a handful of American companies, and the financial architecture surrounding the United States will continue occupying approximately the same structural position it has enjoyed for decades. The financial narrative then rewards this confidence through enormous valuations, particularly among the largest American technology companies. Their extraordinary market success appears to confirm continued American supremacy, while belief in continued American supremacy helps justify expectations of extraordinary future profits.

None of this means that these companies are somehow fraudulent or technologically unimpressive. Many are among the most capable companies ever created, possessing extraordinary computational infrastructure, capital, scientific talent, distribution networks and technological expertise. The distinction is simply that a great company and an unlimited valuation are not the same thing, just as a powerful country and permanent global supremacy are not the same thing.

The interesting question is how many geopolitical assumptions have quietly entered financial valuations. High valuations become easier to justify if American companies remain overwhelmingly dominant in AI, if semiconductor ecosystems remain centered around technologies controlled by the Western alliance, if global capital continues flowing disproportionately toward American markets, if Chinese competitors remain constrained, and if the dollar-centered financial system retains approximately the same international position for decades.

Perhaps many of these assumptions will prove correct, but they are still assumptions rather than laws of nature. If AI becomes more geographically distributed, if Chinese companies become internationally competitive faster than expected, if semiconductor production diversifies, if countries increasingly develop their own digital ecosystems, or if capital markets outside the United States deepen, America does not need to collapse for financial expectations to change.

The future may simply become less concentrated than the valuation assumed.

A financial correction therefore does not require the failure of American technology. It may require only the realization that remarkable American companies will operate in a world containing more capable competitors than investors originally expected. A country can remain exceptionally powerful while its relative share of global power decreases, and a company can continue growing while the price investors are willing to pay for its future earnings declines.

This is the connection between the geopolitical model and the financial model that I had not previously considered so clearly. If investors have partially priced the continuation of American technological and geopolitical supremacy into financial assets, then a multipolar world is not only a foreign policy adjustment. It potentially becomes a repricing event.

What 1914 Can Still Teach Us

The conversation eventually turns toward the First World War, and here the implications become much darker. Mercouris approaches the conflict partly through Britain’s relative decline and its attempt to preserve its strategic position, while Sachs emphasizes another aspect that is even more disturbing. Europe before 1914 was not a civilization that had exhausted its economic possibilities or reached some unavoidable material crisis. It was living through an extraordinary period of scientific, technological and commercial development.

International trade was expanding, industrial capabilities were advancing, scientific discoveries were transforming ordinary life, and Europe possessed enormous possibilities for continued peaceful prosperity. Yet political elites still created alliance structures, strategic fears and increasingly rigid assumptions that ultimately helped turn one of the most sophisticated regions of the planet into a battlefield.

The comparison must be used carefully because the present world is not 1914, China is not Imperial Germany, and historical analogies become dangerous when they are treated as mechanical predictions. The deeper warning is psychological rather than chronological. Prosperous and educated societies are not automatically protected against catastrophic stupidity, and highly intelligent people operating sophisticated institutions can still make disastrous decisions when prestige, credibility, fear, alliances, paranoia and relative power become more important than reconsidering the assumptions guiding them.

This is why casual discussions about a wider war with Russia are so disturbing. We are speaking about nuclear powers, and nuclear escalation is not another chapter in the history of conventional great-power competition. There is no meaningful geopolitical victory that compensates for the destruction that a serious nuclear exchange could produce, yet people who have never experienced war directly can speak about escalation using clean strategic terminology that psychologically removes them from the consequences.

Osho made an observation that becomes uncomfortable in this context. He described much of what humanity historically called peace as little more than a gap between wars, a period in which societies repaired what had been destroyed while the psychological and political ingredients of future conflict continued underneath. His wider argument was that genuine peace requires inner transformation as well as political change because rigid ideology, fear and unconsciousness can survive the signing of treaties and eventually recreate the same patterns in another form.

I would add a generational dimension to this. The people who actually experience catastrophic wars eventually disappear, while the institutions capable of producing wars can survive much longer. A grandmother who remembers hiding during bombing eventually dies, the soldier who watched his friends disappear eventually dies, and the child who experienced hunger in a destroyed city becomes old and disappears. Their descendants inherit photographs, books, monuments, ceremonies and historical documentaries, but they do not inherit the nervous system of the person who actually heard the explosions.

Countries eventually rebuild, cities become beautiful again, economic life returns and war becomes increasingly abstract to the generations that follow. The ministries remain, intelligence agencies remain, military bureaucracies remain, arms industries remain, strategic doctrines remain and political myths remain, while the people carrying direct memories of the previous catastrophe slowly vanish.

Human memory is short because human life is short, while institutions can persist for centuries. Jonathan, the world’s oldest known living land animal, was born around 1832 and has already lived through generations of governments, wars, technological revolutions and political systems that came and went. Perhaps one of our deepest failures is that we have become extraordinarily good at preserving institutions and surprisingly bad at preserving wisdom.

Eurasia Does Not Need Western Permission

After discussing the First World War, Sachs turns toward the international system already developing outside the Western political imagination. He points toward the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, BRICS and the growing web of economic relationships across Eurasia, arguing that the demographic and economic structure of the planet has changed so substantially that the traditional Western alliance now represents only one part of a much larger system.

Russia, China, India and the Central Asian states do not need permission from Washington or Brussels to expand trade, build infrastructure, develop technology or create financial arrangements with one another. These countries have populations, natural resources, technical capabilities and increasingly sufficient capital to build relationships that do not depend completely on Western institutions.

Sachs is particularly critical of Europe because he believes European governments damaged a relationship that had an obvious underlying economic complementarity. Western Europe possesses dense industrial capacity, advanced infrastructure, technology and capital, while Russia possesses enormous territory, energy, natural resources and significant scientific capabilities. Whatever one thinks about the politics surrounding Russia, there was a clear economic logic behind a relationship connecting these complementary strengths.

That relationship has been severely weakened while Russia has increasingly redirected economic activity toward the rest of Eurasia. Sachs’s point is that Europe separated itself from Russia far more than Russia separated itself from Eurasia.

Europe may have legitimate security arguments behind some of its choices, and serious analysis should acknowledge those arguments rather than simply dismissing them. The larger question concerns whether the economic consequences of those policies can still be discussed openly. A healthy strategic model has to remain capable of asking whether a policy is producing the intended results, while an unhealthy model begins by deciding which conclusions are politically acceptable and then organizes the analysis around them.

This resembles the sunk cost problem Sachs discusses throughout the conversation. Governments invest enormous amounts of money, prestige, institutional credibility and political careers into a particular strategy, after which reversing direction becomes increasingly difficult because changing policy also requires admitting that previous assumptions may have been wrong. Continuing becomes psychologically easier than reconsidering, even when the cost of continuing keeps increasing.

Financial bubbles can behave in a surprisingly similar way. An investor begins with a thesis, rising prices appear to validate the thesis, valuations increase further, and eventually the narrative must become more ambitious in order to support the price. Competition is explained away, weakness is declared temporary, and contradictory evidence is incorporated as another reason the original prediction will eventually succeed.

In both cases the narrative can become protected by the amount already invested in believing it.

The Dollar and the Limits of Coercion

The conversation then moves toward Iran and sanctions, which allows Sachs to examine another dimension of American power. The United States has never depended only on its military capabilities because the central position of the dollar and American financial institutions provides an extraordinary form of geopolitical leverage.

When international banks depend heavily on access to dollar transactions, Washington can influence companies and institutions that operate far outside American territory. Sachs describes how this financial infrastructure became increasingly important to American economic statecraft, particularly through sanctions, asset restrictions and the possibility of excluding institutions from dollar-based business.

For a considerable period this could work extremely well because the dollar system was convenient, deeply established and difficult to replace. Yet the more frequently financial infrastructure is used as an instrument of geopolitical coercion, the more rational it becomes for governments that fear future sanctions to develop alternatives.

Russia clearly has that incentive. Iran has that incentive. China has that incentive. Other countries do not need to become ideological enemies of the United States to reach the same conclusion because they only need to consider the risk of becoming sufficiently dependent on infrastructure another government can restrict.

This does not require the end of the dollar. Discussions about de-dollarization often become unnecessarily dramatic because they are framed as a competition between complete dollar dominance and complete dollar collapse, while real systems usually evolve more gradually. The dollar can remain the most important international currency while becoming somewhat less indispensable, just as American capital markets can remain enormous while other financial systems acquire greater importance.

Sachs argues that threatening countries because they are developing alternatives may ultimately accelerate the development Washington wishes to prevent.

This is another example of what happens when a world model becomes too confident in the permanence of its own structure. A powerful system can use its privileges so aggressively that other actors begin investing in ways to reduce their dependence on those privileges. The immediate action communicates strength, while the longer-term consequence can slowly weaken the structural advantage being used.

What Happens When Reality Breaks Through

Toward the end of the conversation, Mercouris asks Sachs what I think is the central question of the entire video. What happens when reality finally becomes impossible to avoid? What happens if geopolitical assumptions fail, wars do not end according to the expected script, sanctions fail to produce their intended political results, and financial markets eventually have to confront valuations built partly around a geopolitical world that is changing?

Sachs does not promise a painless adjustment. He points to American debt, persistent fiscal deficits, unmet social needs and historically high financial valuations, and he accepts that corrections and economic downturns are normal possibilities. What he rejects is the assumption that geopolitical catastrophe is unavoidable. With rational policy, he argues, there is no fundamental economic reason the major powers cannot coexist because humanity possesses extraordinary technological capabilities and enormous opportunities to improve living standards.

His source of hope is interesting because he does not place it primarily in political leaders. He points toward the public. His description is of people across Europe and America who largely want ordinary lives, who are dissatisfied with political institutions and who have little desire for wars with Russia, China or other major powers. He hopes that this public dissatisfaction can eventually place limits on institutions whose strategic thinking has become detached from the lives and preferences of ordinary people.

This is where Sachs’s video ends, but for me another question begins. If ordinary people increasingly dislike these policies and distrust the political class responsible for them, why do institutions continue moving in directions that so many people appear not to want?

The Human Being Inside the Institution

We often discuss institutions as though they were independent organisms, but eventually every institution acts through human beings. Ministries do not become angry, intelligence agencies do not feel humiliated, militaries do not possess egos and financial systems do not become frightened. People do these things, after which institutions amplify their decisions.

I increasingly suspect that some enormously powerful institutions are occupied by human beings who are inwardly far less developed than their positions suggest (I was aware of this many years ago). A prestigious university degree tells us something about education but almost nothing about wisdom, just as a senior political appointment can demonstrate institutional success while telling us almost nothing about compassion, emotional maturity or self-awareness. Someone can understand game theory brilliantly and remain almost completely unable to observe his own fear, resentment or need for recognition.

This is where intelligence and consciousness need to be separated. A highly intelligent person can remain deeply unconscious, and intelligence itself can become an instrument for optimizing ambition, rationalizing resentment, designing weapons or constructing increasingly sophisticated explanations for destructive behavior. Some of the darkest systems humanity has created were not designed by people incapable of thinking. They were often maintained by educated and capable people thinking very effectively inside narrow psychological and ideological structures.

George Carlin approached the same problem from a much harsher and more humorous direction. He reminded audiences that politicians do not arrive from some separate reality, but come from the same families, schools, institutions and culture as everybody else. His conclusion was brutally simple: ‘garbage in, garbage out.’ If a society produces selfish and ignorant citizens, it should not be surprised when similar qualities appear in its leaders. I think the question can be taken one step further. What kind of inner life produces people who become obsessed with recognition, domination and enemies? Perhaps some have rarely experienced enough love, silence or self-awareness to recognize what they are actually searching for, and political institutions then provide enormous amplification to impulses that began much earlier inside individual human beings.

This is why meditation becomes relevant to politics without needing to become another ideology. Meditation in its simplest sense means observing the machinery of oneself, including fear, ambition, humiliation, jealousy and anger, without immediately converting each impulse into action or projecting it onto the outside world. Osho’s argument about peace rested precisely on the idea that political arrangements alone cannot create lasting peace while the individual remains inwardly divided, and that awakened consciousness has to accompany external transformation.

This does not mean replacing diplomacy, democratic institutions, constitutional protections or responsible government with meditation. Institutions can prevent enormous suffering and constrain destructive behavior, while badly designed institutions can amplify the worst parts of human psychology. The point is simply that no institutional design operates by itself because sooner or later a human being has to make a decision.

A frightened person with little power may damage a family, while a frightened person inside an institution controlling armies, sanctions or enormous financial resources can damage millions of lives. The psychological development of the people operating powerful systems is therefore not some irrelevant spiritual question separated from politics. It can have geopolitical consequences.

Germany and the Question of Alternatives

Germany provides an interesting example of the wider dissatisfaction Sachs describes. The August 2026 ARD DeutschlandTREND found that only 13 percent of respondents evaluated the federal government’s performance positively, while 85 percent were critical, and satisfaction with Chancellor Friedrich Merz stood at only 14 percent. The same survey found that more than half of Germans believed the country needed fundamental change rather than merely individual corrections.

Those numbers show considerable dissatisfaction, but dissatisfaction creates another difficulty because people still have to decide what comes next. Another party can win an election, another coalition can govern, or another politician can promise to finally represent people who feel ignored, and some of these alternatives may indeed produce better policies. Democratic change is necessary precisely because governments need to be replaceable.

Yet changing the people at the top does not automatically change the consciousness operating underneath. Fear can present itself through the political left or political right, aggression can use progressive language or conservative language, and ego can speak about European values, national sovereignty, democracy, freedom, justice, security or peace while remaining essentially the same psychological structure.

This is why simply searching for another political savior eventually becomes unsatisfying. The new political class is still produced by the same society, and if the underlying culture remains driven by fear, resentment, tribal identity, status and the desire to dominate, those qualities eventually return through different people and different political vocabulary.

Changing governments can be necessary, but perhaps changing ourselves is unavoidable.

Intelligence Is Not Consciousness

AI has made this distinction increasingly visible to me because we are building systems capable of explaining human behavior with extraordinary sophistication. AI can analyze emotional patterns, compare historical narratives, identify contradictions, reconstruct arguments and perhaps eventually model geopolitical escalation far better than many institutions currently do.

It may soon become possible for almost anybody to receive remarkably sophisticated explanations of their own psychology. An AI can explain attachment patterns, trauma, family dynamics, cognitive biases and emotional reactions, while also generating an apology that sounds more thoughtful than the person who requested it could have written alone.

Yet explanation is not transformation.

A person can understand the psychological origin of his anger and still hurt somebody the following morning. He can understand his childhood trauma almost perfectly and continue reproducing the same behavior with his own children. He can generate an elegant apology without learning anything from the experience that made an apology necessary.

There are experiences that intelligence can describe without being able to experience them for us. A machine can analyze ten thousand possible movements in judo or aikido, but when another human body suddenly takes your balance there is only one body, one breath and one present instant. No machine can fall for you and no machine can stand up for you, just as no machine can grieve for you, meditate for you, love for you or experience your finite life on your behalf.

Perhaps one of the unexpected consequences of advanced AI will be the rediscovery that many of the deepest parts of human existence were never intellectual problems in the first place. Care, trust, attention, silence, touch and forgiveness cannot be reduced to having the correct explanation because understanding the concept and living the experience are fundamentally different things.

Where Violence Begins

This brings me to an uncomfortable thought about war because we are rightly horrified when human beings are killed, yet we move through everyday life surrounded by smaller forms of destruction that have become psychologically distant from us. Animals become products hidden behind packaging and industrial supply chains, insects are often killed simply because they entered an inconvenient place, forests become economic resources and ecosystems become externalities inside models designed for completely different purposes.

I am not suggesting that killing an insect and killing a human being in war are ethically equivalent because they clearly are not. I am asking what happens to consciousness when living beings become categories before we have actually seen them, because distance and abstraction make destruction psychologically easier. A Russian, Ukrainian or Iranian can gradually stop being experienced as a human being with parents, children, memories, fears, hopes and an ordinary desire to live, and instead become primarily an enemy, a strategic threat, a target or, in the coldest military language, collateral damage. Once the living person disappears behind the category, actions that would feel horrifying at close range can begin to sound reasonable from the distance of a government office, television studio or strategic briefing.

Perhaps war does not suddenly begin when politicians sign military orders. Some of its psychological ingredients may already exist throughout ordinary consciousness in smaller forms, including the desire to dominate, the pleasure of having an enemy, the inability to admit that we were wrong, the ease with which we divide the world between those deserving empathy and those who do not, and the speed with which our own fear becomes an accusation directed toward somebody else.

Institutions can then collect these impulses, intellectualize them, organize them and amplify them on a scale no private individual could achieve.

The question is therefore not simply why politicians create wars. The more uncomfortable question is why human beings remain so psychologically available for the stories that make wars possible.

The Forgotten Value of Presence

This is why I increasingly think presence has political significance. A human being capable of observing his own conditioning becomes harder to manipulate because fear does not immediately have to become hatred, humiliation does not automatically require revenge, and the appearance of an enemy does not immediately suspend curiosity.

Imagine simply sitting outside and seeing a small animal approach. There is no need to photograph it, classify it, ask an AI what species it belongs (like I did years ago) to or search for some philosophical significance behind the encounter. For a little while the animal looks at you and you look back, while neither needs anything from the other. Nothing has been produced or optimized, yet there has been a direct encounter with another living being before thought transformed it into information.

The same simplicity may exist underneath what we call love. We often imagine love as protecting someone, providing for them, understanding them, remembering them or solving their problems, and all of these can certainly express love. Yet perhaps something even more elementary exists underneath them because to love somebody is also to give that person a portion of the only resource that cannot be manufactured or returned to us.

Our finite life.

Not a simulation of our presence, not a recording, not a message generated in our style and not an artificial model capable of speaking with our voice after we are dead. What another person sometimes needs is simply our actual afternoon, an hour during which we are physically there and not represented by something else. This is hard to understand even for many of my closest family members or friends, who often if not always prefer writing or calling online through applications such as WhatsApp instead of wanting to meet in-person and cultivate such an approach.

This becomes increasingly interesting in a world of AI because AI may eventually provide us with better world models than any political institution in history. It can compare Russian, Chinese, American, Indian, Iranian and European perspectives simultaneously, reconstruct historical arguments, identify contradictions and model consequences that political systems routinely ignore.

But AI cannot become conscious for us.

That part remains ours.

Beyond Multipolarity

This is also why I no longer believe that multipolarity by itself is the answer. A multipolar international system may be more balanced than a unipolar one, but several unconscious centers of power can still destroy one another. Russia has its own conditioning, China has its own, America has its own, Europe has its own, and every civilization carries historical wounds, fears, ambitions and stories about itself.

No civilization possesses a monopoly on wisdom, just as no civilization possesses a monopoly on stupidity.

The deeper transition therefore cannot only involve moving from a unipolar to a multipolar international order. It must also involve a transformation in the quality of consciousness operating inside those structures.

We should demand better diplomacy, better governments, more honest economic policies and better geopolitical models. We should question narratives when they repeatedly fail, resist unnecessary wars, understand other civilizations before caricaturing them and remain willing to update our assumptions when reality contradicts them. Governments should remain accountable, institutions should be constrained, and people should be able to remove political leaders who no longer represent them.

Yet none of these reforms can substitute completely for the transformation of the person operating the system.

If people remain unconscious, they will eventually create institutions that express that unconsciousness. If people psychologically need enemies, political systems will always be able to provide enemies for them. If people cannot observe fear within themselves, someone will eventually find a way to convert that fear into hatred, obedience or war.

Perhaps this is why the Sachs conversation stayed with me. It begins with Ukraine, Iran, China and Western foreign policy, moves into the end of Western dominance, financial bubbles, the First World War, Eurasia, sanctions and the dollar, and finally arrives at the possibility that ordinary people may eventually refuse to follow institutions whose models of reality no longer correspond to their own experience.

For me the final question goes one level deeper. Can we recognize reality before reality forces us to recognize it, and can we recognize what is happening inside ourselves before our fears are amplified through systems powerful enough to affect millions of other people?

Germany can change its government, Europe can change its geopolitical strategy, America can learn to remain an extraordinarily powerful country without demanding permanent supremacy, and Russia and China can also choose cooperation over their own temptations toward domination. None of these outcomes is guaranteed because no institutional structure produces wisdom automatically.

Someone still has to see clearly.

Perhaps everything begins there, with being present long enough to see another person before seeing a nationality, another civilization before seeing an enemy, an animal before seeing a product, an insect before seeing an inconvenience, and our own fear before transforming it into hatred.

A better world model begins with better information, but a better world begins with the consciousness looking at it. Perhaps this is close to what Sergiu Celibidache experienced, and Osho called philosia, not merely thinking about reality, but learning to see it directly, without allowing ideology, fear and conditioning to stand between us and what is actually there.