What Truly Matters? Iain McGilchrist, Un-Social Experiments and The Leviathan

Journey into the deep code of culture in our new online course: Sensemaking 102. Expand your view on what’s happening and why with the help of an amazing faculty and new practices. Connect with like-minded travellers to inquire, question, and embody. Myth. Power. Economics. Tech. Systems. Meaning. Register on studiokainos.com/sensemaking-102

What matters most, what we do or how we do it? Which is more real, a relationship or a rock? Our focus at Kainos throughout the spring has been on the polarities driving our cultural, political and spiritual upheaval.

Our recent conversation with psychiatrist, philosopher and author Iain McGilchrist was a high point. We discussed Iain’s thoughts on the political and social shifts of recent months, whether AI can become conscious, how to relate authentically to nature, and why constraints create meaning. Kainos Community Members shared scintillating questions and insights, and we left the session buzzing. You can watch it on Substack, or listen to it as a podcast on Spotify or Apple. The conversation helped me develop my recent piece Ocean of Elephants, which turned out to be one of my most polarising in years. I had a feeling it might be, as I was taking a more fixed philosophical position than I normally do. Thanks to everyone who wrote or commented; it’s helped me to hone my thinking and consider new angles.Specifically, I’ve been chewing on the paradox that our capacity for abstraction frees us and traps us at the same time. Imagining new worlds and thinking up new ideas is exactly what we need to respond to the polycrisis. But spending thirty years on the internet has blurred the boundaries between theory and reality, leading many to confuse the two. We’re still figuring out how to balance hyper-abstraction with grounded social action. If we can collectively crack that, we’ll open up a wellspring of creativity and collaboration.We have a community session to discuss this polarity on Monday, 19 May. You can join that, and many sessions like it, by becoming a Kainos Community Member, or you can choose a regular subscription to gain early access to these films and exclusive pieces.

It’s About to Get WeirdIt’s probably best I tell you up here that this is a weird piece. It’s been a while since I shared a recommended reading list, and you’ll find that below along with a list of events I think are worth checking out. I’ll also reveal why I’ve decided to limit my Instagram account to exactly 69,000 followers, and then you’ll see various world leaders having cathartic breakdowns. There’s also a cat with a calculator. But before all that, here’s the first teaser poster for our upcoming documentary.

The working title was ‘Crossroads’, but as we’ve moved toward completion the right name became clear. It’s now called Leviathan, and the first trailer drops next week, ahead of our online premiere on Substack on 26 June.

You might be able to watch it before then. We put out a call a few weeks ago to see who wanted to host a private or public screening, and I was overwhelmed by the response. I’m really grateful for your interest and support, thanks to the 50+ people around the world who have been in touch. We now have plans for screenings in 45 cities around the world. They range from living rooms to theatres, and in a few cases we had people from the same city get in touch and they’ll hopefully be joining forces. We’ll be sharing a list of the larger public screenings soon (and any smaller ones who are open to guests) so you can check if something’s happening near you. Our London premiere will be on the night of the 26th of June and we’ll open tickets for that soon. If you want to host a screening, there’s still time. It can be as small as five people or as large as a few hundred and we’ll provide you with promotional materials and a starter pack with conversation topics and some practices if you want to use them. If you’re interested, just fill out this short form.

Josh Schrei of The Emerald is heading to the UK and we’re doing a talk together. Josh is also a guest in Leviathan so the timing worked out beautifully. Two thirds of tickets have been sold already and we’ve still got a month to go, so book here if you’d like to come. Steady State Social Media

I recently hit 69,000 followers on Instagram and decided to stop. I’m sick of feeding the technofeudal machine and the more my account grows, the more money Mark Zuckerberg has to buy luxury perms, yachts and the occasional cup of recreational vacation coffee. Since my Reel went out, several people have tried to insinuate I chose the number 69 out of lewdness. I want to take this opportunity to reassure everyone that I am above that kind of puerile humour, and committed to the very serious work of cultural sensemaking and systems change. With that out of the way, here’s why I’m actually doing it. You might be familiar with the concept of a steady state economy, based on the insight that endless growth on a planet with limited resources is unsustainable. One famous model is Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics, which focuses on containing economic activity within the planetary boundaries so that we don’t exceed what the earth can sustain. I was researching it recently for the Mastery of Systems Leadership and I started to wonder whether there’s such a thing as an attentional boundary within the cultural body. If there is, I think we’re already exceeding it. The internet is flooded with content, and the Big Tech companies that rely on commodified attention always want more. More growth, more content, more money for recreational vacation coffee. What if we subvert their endless, predatory hunger by staying within attentional boundaries and focusing on quality instead of quantity? That point for me is exactly 69,000 followers. I arrived at the number through a complex mathematical process I won’t bore you with here.

What matters to me is who’s in the 69k, and ensuring everyone is giving as much as they get. In the last week I’ve gone up to 69.1k, which isn’t ideal, so we’re now in the process of bouncing people who aren’t doing anything. If it dips under we’ll have to attract new people. It’s a lot of things to remember at once but we’re getting there.

Love Force One

Speaking of Instagram, check out Ari Kuschnir’s new AI piece imagining world leaders going through psychological and spiritual awakenings. It’s struck a chord and hit 300k views in a few days. Ari is one of the best AI video artists in the world, and though these pieces are often funny and entertaining, they are also a powerful form of art. He’s described them as a response to post-modern cynicism, because they imagine beautiful but implausible futures without hiding behind irony. I see them as a reminder that the implausible can become real, and that transformation seems impossible until it doesn’t.Recommended Books and Articles

There’s an interesting horseshoe effect happening on political spectrum around the topic of bureaucracy. N.S Lyons wrote another good piece on this recently called Managerial Democracy’s Threat to Democracy and Humanity. I read it while reading Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book Abundance, in which they argue that a history of well-meaning but misguided liberal policies have created a situation in the US where regulations are strangling production and halting the progressive project.

Lyons, Klein and Thompson come from very different political tribes, and it’s striking how much energy this issue has right now. They all point to the broken incentives that drive modern democracies. The more bureaucratic a society becomes, the more managers, lawyers, and consultants it needs to keep the system going. In turn, these managers are all incentivised to create more red tape, more convoluted processes and more confusion so that there are more problems to manage.Deconstructing government bureaucracy is central to the Trump White House, and it was a core election issue. This AI edited clip that went around in late 2024 is a good indication of how democracy and excessive bureaucracy have become synonymous to many voters.

Setting aside the tactics and perverse incentives of DOGE and the technofeudal partnership of Musk and Trump, I think disassembling excessive bureaucracy is essential for healthy systems change. On one level it just helps us get stuff done. In 2023, Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro rebuilt the collapsed I-95 bridge in just 12 days by declaring an emergency in order to circumvent red tape and restrictive regulations. On a deeper level, a rejection of technocratic processes is a rejection of a disconnected way of seeing the world. I’m curious both about bureaucracy as an addiction to abstraction, and a form of spiritual domination. It literally sucks the life out of us; the structural equivalent of a vampire. In fact, the energy vampire Colin Robinson in What We Do In the Shadows has an amazing scene where he feeds by boring people half to death at a city council meeting. I’m working on a piece around this topic, and next on my reading list is David Graeber’s Utopia of Rules, in which he argues that we live in an age of “total bureaucratisation”. I’m also revisiting Franz Kafka’s The Trial and Foucault’s Governmentality.

Unrelated to the above but worth reading: Katherine Dee’s excellent piece on the IVF clinic bombing in the US and the ‘Efilist’ movement the bomber belonged to. The Mastery of Systems Leadership

In September, Small Giants Academy is launching an 8 month course called Mastery of Systems Leadership. MSL offers a toolkit for a new era, bringing together systems thinking frameworks and real-world case studies of systemic change across sectors, cultures, and forms of capital. It integrates applied philosophy to sharpen our judgment, cognitive flexibility to help us adapt, and embodied learning practices to deepen our awareness.I’m looking forward to co-facilitating, joining some of the most interesting people in systems thinking, including Nora Bateson, Daniel Schmachtenberger, Indy Johar, Helena Norberg-Hodge and many more. You can read all about it and apply below, applications close on May 31st. And if you sign up for Sensemaking 102, you’ll get the cost of your ticket taken off your MSL tuition.

Inspirational Breathing Training

Do you want to become a breathwork facilitator? I trained with the wonderful Nicola Price, and she’s running another Graduate Programme. I highly recommend it if you’ve been thinking about learning how to hold breathwork sessions. It was in-depth and beautifully held, and Nicola is a very experienced and very dedicated instructor. Doing the training also became a significant process of self-discovery for me, and I made lasting friendships with the other trainees. Right now they have two spots left and you can read more about it on their website or email life@inspirationalbreathing.com

Stay tuned for the Leviathan trailer next week. As always, thank you for reading and supporting Kainos.