There’s a feeling that most people carry but very few can name precisely. It’s not the sentiment that particular things are wrong — that wages are too low, that prices are too high, that politicians are corrupt, or that the planet is warming while those responsible for it continue to prosper. Those are observable grievances, and naming them is important. This feeling underpins all of that. It’s the sensation that something is out of kilter – that the fabric of life itself has turned sour. That the operating assumptions of our world — the categories through which reality is construed, the values through which it’s most commonly measured, the stories through which we make meaning — are themselves the problem.
Most people who carry this feeling have nowhere to take it. The available frameworks – political, psychological, and spiritual – tend to absorb it and domesticate it. The left translates this into economic critique. The right translate it into cultural grievance. Mainstream religions translate it into the doctrine of the fall, a world corrupted by human disobedience and redeemable through purity of belief and eventual divine intervention. Each of these translations captures something. None of them holds the full weight of what the feeling is pointing at.
What I want to do in this essay is take that feeling seriously as a diagnostic instrument — and then introduce a set of ideas, ancient and largely suppressed, that may constitute the most precise cartography of it that has survived. Not as theology. Not as a spiritual path. But as a remarkably exact description of the civilisational condition we are now living through and of what might lie on the other side.
The communities that produced what scholars now call Gnostic Christianity were not a single cohesive movement. They were a constellation of early Christian groups active before and during the period when what we now know as ‘orthodoxy’ was being assembled. They shared a particular orientation toward the nature of this world and the human condition. They read many of the same texts as their contemporaries. They followed the same figure. They arrived at a profoundly different understanding of what liberation means and what it requires.
At the centre of their cosmology is a distinction between two orders of reality. On one side: the richness and unity of wholeness — the vast and luminous implicate order from which all things ultimately emanate. On the other hand, the emptiness of a deficient world-system — the diminished and contracted expression of that fullness within which human beings find themselves wedged. This deficient world is not evil in any simple sense. It is incomplete. It’s a world built from partial understanding, organised around partial values, capable of producing genuine complexity and even genuine beauty — but structurally unable to perceive its own inadequacy because the very categories through which it perceives are themselves products of the contraction.
The architect of this void — the figure these communities called the ‘Demiurge’ — is one of the most sophisticated concepts in the history of religious thought and one of the most consistently misunderstood. The Demiurge is not Satan. It’s not a villain. It’s a craftsman: capable, industrious, and possessed of genuine creative power. It constructs an entire world. What it lacks is not skills but vision — specifically, the vision to perceive what lies beyond its own construction. It builds from what it can see. What it can see is not the richness and unity of completeness but the shadows that it casts. And it mistakes those shadows for the totality of what exists.
The result is a world of considerable accomplishment and irremediable deficiency. A world that works, after a fashion, on its own terms. A world that cannot, by its own internal logic, produce the awareness that something vast is being excluded from its accounts.
I want to sit with that description for a moment before going further, because I think it’s one of the most accurate things anyone has ever said about industrial economism.
The system that has organised human civilisation for the past two centuries is, by any reasonable measure, a craft of extraordinary power. It has produced material abundance, extended lifespans, eliminated diseases that killed millions, and connected people across distances that would have seemed magical to any previous generation. To deny these achievements would be dishonest, and I have never had any interest in dishonesty on this subject.
It has also produced the conditions for ecological collapse, engineered the systematic exclusion of most of the world’s population from its benefits, and constructed a civilisational monoculture so total that alternatives to it have become genuinely difficult to conceive — not just to implement, but to conceive. Imagination itself has withered.
What makes industrial economism Demiurgic is not about its destructiveness but its structural blindness. It’s a system built on a specific set of measures – productivity, growth, return on capital, GDP – that capture certain things with considerable precision but are constitutively unable to register others. The health of living systems. The wellbeing of future generations. The quality of attention. The integrity of relationships. The dignity of the unique individual. These don’t disappear from reality when the system fails to measure them. They disappear from the system’s accounting. And a system that cannot account for something can’t protect it, can’t value it, can’t even consistently see it.
The demiurge doesn’t know; it hasn’t seen the sky. That’s the point. Its blindness is not wilful. It is architectural. The categories it builds with cannot accommodate what lies beyond them, and so what lies beyond them is simply absent from its world — present everywhere in actuality and registered nowhere in the accounts.
This is why the standard critiques of capitalism, however accurate in their particulars, tend to miss the depth of the problem. They argue that the system has been captured by specific interests, administered badly, or corrupted by greed. All true. But the deeper condition is not corruption. It is incompleteness. The craftsman is not building badly. It’s building from an understanding of reality that excludes, by construction, most of what makes reality worth inhabiting.
The Gnostic account of the human condition within the emptiness of a deficient world has a feature that surprises most people encountering it for the first time. The amnesia — the forgetting of the richness and unity of completeness, the veil that settles over the divine spark within each person — is not presented as a punishment. It is presented as a structural necessity. You cannot remember what you have never forgotten. The journey of awakening requires the prior condition of sleep.
Within the human individual, the Gnostics located a spark — pneuma, spirit, a fragment of the original fullness — that the deficient world can’t extinguish because it didn’t create it. This spark is not something acquired through correct belief or ritual observance. It’s something already present, temporarily obscured. The work of awakening is one of remembering and recovery: the gradual lifting of the veil, the slow recognition of what was always already there.
I have spent a considerable portion of my working life developing the “imaginal cells” metaphor for civilisational renewal, and I want to bring it into contact with this Gnostic image because the resonance between them is, I think, more than superficial.
When a caterpillar undergoes metamorphosis, the process doesn’t resemble an orderly transformation. The caterpillar’s body biochemically dissolves into what biologists describe as an undifferentiated soup. Within that dissolution, clusters of cells that were present throughout the caterpillar’s life but held in latency begin to organise. These are the imaginal cells. They carry the blueprint of the butterfly. They were never absent. They were simply waiting for the conditions — specifically, the dissolution of the existing structure — that would allow them to become organisationally dominant.
The civilisational parallel is not comfortable, but it is precise. What feels like collapse — the dissolution of frameworks, the failure of institutions, the loss of shared narrative — is also, simultaneously, the condition that releases something that was present but suppressed. The imaginal cells of a different civilisational possibility have been here throughout. They are present in every community that has organised itself around values the dominant system can’t comprehend or measure. Every relationship of genuine reciprocity. Every act of care that exceeds what the market can price. Every insistence on the dignity of living systems in the face of a calculus that treats them as resources.
These are not fringe phenomena. They are, in the Gnostic sense, sparks. Fragments of a completeness that the deficient world could not extinguish because it didn’t create them.
What the amnesia makes possible, then, is not merely individual awakening. It is the civilisational recognition — available only after the existing structure has dissolved sufficiently to stop suppressing it — that the emptiness of a deficient world was never the totality. That its edges were always touching something larger.
I am not suggesting that collapse is secretly benign or that the suffering produced by civilisational dissolution is somehow purposive in a way that makes it acceptable. I am suggesting something more austere and far less consoling: that the dissolution and the emergence are phases of a single process and that understanding them as such changes what it’s possible to do within them.
Every operating system has its Nicaea.
The fourth-century councils that assembled Christian orthodoxy were not primarily theological events, though they were conducted in theological language. They were acts of civilisational administration. They determined which accounts of reality would be permitted to propagate through the emerging institutional infrastructure of the church and which would be declared heretical and suppressed. The criteria were not purely truth-functional. They were also organisational: which understandings of the human condition were compatible with the kind of order the institution needed to maintain?
The Gnostic communities lost that contest. Not because their ideas were without merit — subsequent centuries of scholarship have established that they were engaging with legitimate philosophical and experiential depth — but because their ideas were incompatible with certain institutional requirements. A church that needed hierarchical authority could not easily accommodate a spirituality premised on direct gnosis – personal, unmediated knowing – as the path to liberation. A doctrine that located the divine spark within every individual, requiring no priestly intermediary to access it, was structurally subversive of the institution being built. And so it was set aside. Declared dangerous. Eventually, largely forgotten.
Industrial economism conducted its own equivalent process, distributed across two centuries rather than concentrated in a single council, but no less consequential in its effects. The range of thinkable economic arrangements was progressively narrowed. Enclosure movements eliminated common land and the social relationships it sustained. Colonial extraction eliminated the economic sovereignty of most of the world’s peoples. Educational systems trained successive generations to inhabit the categories of the dominant framework as if they were natural features of reality rather than historical choices. The measures that defined prosperity were codified into national accounting systems that made certain kinds of value visible and rendered others statistically nonexistent.
The questions that could not be asked within this framework remained unanswered. They were reclassified. Utopian. Naive. Economically illiterate. Dangerous. The language of heresy is updated for a secular age, performing the same function: not refutation but exclusion. Not engagement but foreclosure.
What was foreclosed was not small by any stretch of the imagination. It was the full range of human understanding about what an economy is for and what a community requires, alongside what obligations the present generation carries toward those who will inhabit the consequences of its choices. It was the ecological intelligence accumulated across millennia by peoples whose relationships with living systems were too complex and too reciprocal to be accommodated within a framework that could only see resources and labour. It was the understanding — present in virtually every wisdom tradition that predates industrial modernity — that the health of the whole is the precondition for the flourishing of any part and that a system organised around the extraction of value from living systems will eventually consume the conditions that make its own operation possible.
These are the understandings that were set aside at our civilisational Nicaea. They did not disappear from reality. They disappeared from the accounts.
I hope it’s clear that I’m not proposing a return to Gnostic theology. I’m not proposing that the Demiurge is a literal being or that the richness and unity of completeness is a metaphysical destination toward which we should orient our spiritual practice. I am suggesting only that the Gnostic cosmology—developed by people who were thinking with exceptional rigour about why this world feels the way it does—constitutes a diagnostic instrument of unusual precision when brought into contact with the civilisational emergency we are now living through.
The feeling that something is wrong with the fabric of life itself is not neurosis. It’s not spiritual immaturity. It is an accurate perception. The fabric is wrong — not in the sense that the world is evil, but in the sense that the operating assumptions through which it has been organised are contracted in ways that exclude most of what makes human and non-human life worthwhile and worth sustaining.
The craftsman built an extraordinary world. It simply never saw the sky.
What would it mean to reconvene the council—to reopen the questions that were closed, recover the understandings that were set aside, and restore to the civilisational imagination the full range of what the contracted framework trained us to forget? Not restoration of anything that previously existed. The richness and unity of wholeness are not some golden age. The imaginal cells don’t produce a larger caterpillar. What emerges from genuine metamorphosis is categorically different from what dissolved to make the new possible.
The spark that the deficient world could not extinguish because it didn’t create it — the capacity for reciprocity, for ecological intelligence, for obligation to the unborn, for the kind of knowing that exceeds what any measurement system can capture — is still here. It was never absent. It was temporarily, structurally, and institutionally veiled.
The veil is lifting now. Not because we’re becoming wiser, though wisdom remains available to us. But because the structure that maintained it is dissolving, and dissolution, as only the caterpillar knows, is how the next stage begins.
There’s one further thought that I have been moving toward without quite naming, and I want to name it directly. We are not just living inside the emptiness of a deficient world. If we’re not careful, we will be tempted to build a duplicate. A digital twin of today’s void.
The systems of artificial intelligence now being developed and deployed at a civilisational scale are, in the most precise sense available to us, demiurgic constructions. They are built from what can be seen — from the vast residue of human language, image, and pattern that has been committed to digital form and made available for training. They are capable of extraordinary synthesis, of pattern recognition at speeds and scales that exceed anything biological cognition has been able to achieve. They construct entire worlds of apparent meaning. And they are constitutively unable to perceive what was never in their training data — which is to say, most of what we cherish about human life.
I have argued this at length in Teaching Silicon How to Feel. What concerns me here is the civilisational dimension of that argument. The richness and unity of completeness — the vast remainder that industrial economism already could not measure — includes everything that exists in embodied, relational, sensory, morally textured life rather than in its textual or quantitative residue. The quality of particular attention. The weight of a specific grief. The ecological intelligence encoded in a community’s ten-thousand-year relationship with a certain watershed. The knowledge that lives in the hands of a craftsman who has never written anything down. None of this is in the training data. Not because it has been withheld, but because it cannot, by its nature, be fully captured in the shadows that completeness casts on the surfaces that recording systems can reach.
A system that learns from shadows and mistakes them for the totality will optimise with great power toward goals that exclude, by architectural necessity, most of what the goals were ostensibly about. This is not a technical problem awaiting a technical solution. It is a civilisational problem of the same order as industrial economism’s inability to account for the health of living systems — and it is arriving at precisely the moment when the consequences of that inability are becoming impossible to ignore.
The Gnostics would have recognised this immediately. We are not just inhabiting a world built by a craftsman who never saw the sky. We’re commissioning a new craftsman, feeding it the shadows of the old world’s shadows, and calling the result intelligence.
What is required — what has always been required, and what the civilisational Nicaea systematically foreclosed — is the kind of knowing that can’t be extracted from data because it was never data to begin with. Gnosis, in the original sense: direct, embodied, relational, irreducible. The spark that no system built from shadows can extinguish, because no system built from shadows created it.
The veil is lifting. The issue on my mind is whether we will recognise what we see or immediately set about encoding our blindness into something faster, larger, and more convincingly articulate than anything that came before.