> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.gabestein.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Searching for meaning in the twilight of the neoliberal order - URL: https://www.gabestein.com/searching-for-meaning-in-the-twilight-of-the-neoliberal-order/ - Published: 2026-10-09T19:21:35.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-09T19:21:35.000Z - Description: A personal journey in four acts. - Author: Gabriel Stein ### Act I: Tension Early last year, needing something to distract myself from the [rapid collapse of the American project](https://www.gabestein.com/vfwnl291/), I became enthralled by a somewhat more distant crisis. New results from some of the most advanced studies of the cosmos ever conducted appeared to confirm suspicions that, depending on how you measure it, the nearby Coma Cluster of galaxies may be 38 million light-years [farther away](https://www.space.com/space-exploration/hubble-space-telescope/hubble-tension-is-now-in-our-cosmic-backyard-sending-cosmology-into-crisis?ref=gabestein.com) than current models of the universe's rate of expansion predict. Researchers still can’t explain why. If the results continue to hold, they could portend a breakdown in the standard model of physics that has been the basis of our understanding of the universe’s inner workings for the last century. Far from serving as a useful distraction, the [Hubble Tension](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-hubble-tension-is-becoming-a-hubble-crisis/?ref=gabestein.com), as it's known, became something of a personal crisis. The apparent breakdown of the standard model suggests that there is [something fundamentally wrong](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/frozen-cosmic-sound-bubbles-suggest-dark-energy-is-shockingly-changeable/?ref=gabestein.com) about our understanding of the universe. Yet, instead of bringing us closer to the answer, collecting more data only seems to be pushing us further away from understanding what's really going on. Like [a quantum entangled particle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum%5Fentanglement?ref=gabestein.com), I began to notice this feature of the Hubble Tension spinning at the heart of nearly every issue we face here at home. From [combatting misinformation](https://www.cip.uw.edu/2023/12/06/rumors-collective-sensemaking-kate-starbird/?ref=gabestein.com) to [building artificial intelligence](https://www.techradar.com/pro/catastrophic-overtraining-could-harm-large-language-ai-models-that-are-trained-on-more-data-for-the-sake-of-training?ref=gabestein.com) to [making important individual decisions](https://www.stevens.edu/news/want-to-make-better-decisions-ask-for-less-information-not-more?ref=gabestein.com), we're increasingly finding that more and better information does not inevitably lead to better understanding or satisfaction — in fact, in many instances it's profoundly destabilizing. And yet, we seem to be in the process of betting the future of our global economy, and our ability to inhabit the planet, on the idea that world-saving conscious super-intelligence can arise out of a large enough pile of data. Philosophers and scholars have long grappled with this seeming paradox. Theorist Timothy Morton, for example, [calls it](https://www.gabestein.com/jz6cim0e/) the “Age of Asymmetry,” where “increasing science is not increasing demystification." Thirty-six years ago, before widespread adoption of the internet, before blogging or social media, before the glut of LLM-derived slop, media theorist Neil Postman [argued](https://www.gabestein.com/your-local-coffee-shop-probably-has-ai-brain/) in a speech to the German Informatics Society that "everything from telegraphy and photography in the 19th century to the silicon chip in the twentieth has amplified the din of information, until matters have reached such proportions today that for the average person, information no longer has any relation to the solution of problems." On one particularly sleepless night during my period of cosmos-spanning dread, while my then-pregnant wife was half a world away on a multi-week business trip to the Middle East, I decided to type what I was experiencing into Google, then still my oracle of choice. "Meaning crisis," I offered to the familiar blue box. In a blink of postmodern magic, out popped the website for a 52-episode podcast series by a University of Toronto cognitive science and psychology professor called "Awakening From the Meaning Crisis." I started listening the next day, during a long drive from upstate New York to an event in Boston. The first few episodes diagnosed all of my ills and assured me I was not alone. They told me the glitch I had recognized in our flagging attempts to understand the universe was, in fact, part of a global crisis caused by a fundamental disconnect between modernity's individualistic meaning-making tools – technology and science – and the human mind's innate need for more "embedded" ways of understanding the world, as demonstrated by pre-modern cultural practices. If I studied carefully, I was promised a solution to my problems in the form of a new way of engaging with the world, a synthesis of "psycho-technologies" old and new. Exhausted and mildly depressed, hurtling north at 71 miles per hour in my wheeled pollution box, alone yet surrounded by other wayward souls making their own drab journeys, I believed for a moment that I had found an answer to my problems. This man gets it. This man is awake. This man, I started to notice, is banging on his desk with every single point he makes? Despite running late, I pulled over to watch the video version on YouTube. A middle-aged man dressed in black, his remaining hair cropped short, stands in front of a whiteboard in a wood-paneled lecture hall, peering at an out-of-frame audience over nondescript rectangular glasses. By the middle of the third episode his delivery has shifted from calm and professorial to intense and animated. "No!" he shouts, his cheap lavalier microphone distorting his voice, "that's horrible! What you're trying to do is get free from those cycles! Because doing this again, and again, and again, and again, and again" – this is where he starts rhythmically banging his desk – "is terrifying. Moksha! You want freedom! Nirvana! You want cessation! You want release from the cycle! Because there is no purpose to it!" As he went on, I scrolled to the discussion section to see if anyone else had noticed just how odd the series had become. I lingered over one particularly curious top comment: "I've discovered you as a result of your recent discussion with JBP." Why are those initials familiar, I wondered? The host's initials are JV, for John Vervaeke, professor at the University of Toronto, not JP. My throat tightened as I made the connection. JBP is Jordan B. Peterson, Vervaeke's former colleague at U of T and the [sexist](https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/mar/19/beyond-andrew-tate-the-imitators-who-help-promote-misogyny-online?ref=gabestein.com), [climate-change denying](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/commentisfree/2023/feb/02/jordan-petersons-zombie-climate-contrarianism-follows-a-well-worn-path?ref=gabestein.com), [disgraced ex-academic](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/01/21/jordan-peterson-retires-u-toronto?ref=gabestein.com) stalwart of the [manosphere](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manosphere?ref=gabestein.com). A few days later, after the shame of having almost fallen for a guru lifted from its heavy perch on my shoulders, I started looking more into Vervaeke. Unlike Peterson, he’s done a good job of wading right up to the edge of pseudoscience and the culture wars without jumping in. He [publishes](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/John-Vervaeke/2877268?ref=gabestein.com) a lot of peer reviewed articles in cognitive psychology and philosophy journals, and in public appearances seems genuinely open and curious rather than polemical. But it's difficult to find other experts engaging with his popular work. This could be a manifestation of the [Sagan effect](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6602043/?ref=gabestein.com), where peers and institutions punish academics who find too much mainstream success. Or it could be, as [many](https://www.reddit.com/r/DecodingTheGurus/comments/1in0nk3/high%5Fguru%5Falert%5Fjohn%5Fvervaeke/?ref=gabestein.com) [Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/cogsci/comments/z9kjzy/john%5Fvervaeke%5Fcognitive%5Fscientist%5For%5Fmystic/?ref=gabestein.com) [threads](https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/10khbqp/is%5Fjohn%5Fvervaeke%5Flegit%5For%5Fis%5Fhe%5Fa%5Fcrank%5Flike/?ref=gabestein.com) and [blog](https://medium.com/@ggreer153/john-vervaekes-pure-bullshit-1-2-1fdc1004e35e?ref=gabestein.com) [posts](https://thisisleisfullofnoises.substack.com/p/a-critique-of-john-vervaeke) assert, that his popular work is merely interesting bullshit. Over the next few days of research, a familiar pattern re-asserted itself. The more threads, articles, and commentary I read about Vervaeke, the murkier my understanding of him, his work, and particularly his proposed solutions became. If there is a meaning crisis, I realized, he is not immune from it. --- ### Act II: Loss In early 2015, the culture wars claimed a friend of mine for the first time. It was right at the peak of [Gamergate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate?ref=gabestein.com). Bitcoin was worth around $250\. Seattle's $15 minimum wage ordinance had [just started](https://council.seattle.gov/2014/06/02/city-council-approves-15hour-minimum-wage-in-seattle/?ref=gabestein.com) going into effect. The early Black Lives Matter [protests](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015%5FBaltimore%5Fprotests?ref=gabestein.com) over the murder of Freddy Grey were in full swing in Baltimore. I was not expecting to discuss any of those topics – except maybe Bitcoin – when I setup lunch with an old boss I hadn't seen in years at a diner in the West Village. The catch-up seemed normal enough until he started talking about what he'd learned investing in crypto. I expected him to discuss some technical or financial details, given that we had worked together as reporters covering the rise of cryptocurrencies in 2013\. Instead, he leaned over the table, looked me straight in the eye with a conspiratorial grin, and started ranting about the news. Despite some awful fringe elements, he told me, Gamergate in general had a point: a nebulous "we" was losing control of society. Crypto, he was sure, was the key to taking back control by freeing the masses from the tyranny of state-directed funding. His fingers began tapping out a staccato rhythm on the formica tabletop as he ticked through a laundry list of examples of state investment gone awry. Eventually, he arrived at the two that most deeply concerned him. The first was how America had put so much into improving black people's lives, specifically black women's lives (generally a good thing, he assured me!), that everyone else was at risk of being left behind by comparison if we continued. The Black Lives Matter protests were absurd, he said, given the relative gains "they" had made during the Bush and Obama years. The second most pressing issue on his mind was how the $15 minimum wage being adopted in Seattle and debated in New York and elsewhere was an absurd handout that every economist, left, right, and center, agreed wouldn't work. Over a decade later, I remember the walk back to the subway with almost perfect clarity. It was a crisp, early spring day, the sun shining brightly enough for sunglasses but not yet warmly enough to leave my army surplus four-pocket jacket unbuttoned. As I approached the station, an unsettling sensation that would become all too common suddenly leapt from my gut into my conscious mind: loss. Somehow, in the space of just a few years, a person I thought I knew well had been replaced by a stranger. How that had happened, I didn't yet know. The former boss was eventually accused of fraud and has since disappeared from the internet. Gamergate metastasized into a plethora of conspiracy theories that eventually converged with the greater MAGA movement. Crypto has found a modest niche for enabling scamming and speculation. The Black Lives Matter protests reached their peak in the summer of 2020 but did not transform society the way many of us hoped. And the minimum wage? I can still feel the tingle of despair that bubbled up in me as I learned on the ride home that the near-universal consensus among economists, across the ideological spectrum, was that Seattle's experiment was doomed to fail. I refused to follow the logic that if my old boss was right about that part of the story, he might be correct about other parts, too. Instead, I decided that losing some economic growth to a policy that would improve the lives of those least well off was worth the tradeoff, and mostly stopped thinking about or advocating for it. A few months ago, I encountered an article revisiting those policies in *The Atlantic*. Eleven years later, we now know that my former boss, and every single one of the economists who predicted doom, [was completely wrong](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/05/minimum-wage-experiment-worked/687255/?ref=gabestein.com). As I read about the doctrine-shaking evidence of successful minimum wage experiments across the country, the old feeling of despair dissipated. What replaced it was just as uncomfortable. --- ### Act III: Purpose In July, several of the group chats I'm part of lit up with the news that Michael Kratsios, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, had released a new report. Both Trump administrations have been [openly hostile](https://www.npr.org/2026/09/24/nx-s1-5931971/trump-nih-science-funding-disruptions-charts?ref=gabestein.com) to research, so I was surprised, and worried, to see many friends and open science advocates praising a document born of the tangled ideological web of MAGA. The report in question, "[Science: A New Golden Age](https://www.whitehouse.gov/science/?ref=gabestein.com)," draws its title, structure, and ambition directly from science advisor and administrator Vannevar Bush's legendary 1945 report "[Science: The Endless Frontier](https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/2023-04/EndlessFrontier75th%5Fw.pdf?ref=gabestein.com)." The original report launched the modern "linear" research funding model, where the government takes on the risk of funding basic undirected research at universities, and then allows the private sector to productize and distribute successful discoveries. In so doing, Bush laid the groundwork for the information, biomedical, and economic revolutions we're living through — more directly than most people realize. In his more famous 1945 publication, "[As We May Think](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/?ref=gabestein.com)," Bush described the "memex," a machine that could effectively filter the vast amounts of new knowledge his proposed funding model was bound to create. The combination of that funding model and his technical predictions created the need for, directly inspired, and directly funded both [hypertext](https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/brief-history-hypertext/?ref=gabestein.com), which would form the basis of the world wide web, and [citation indexing](https://bid.ub.edu/en/37/urbano.htm?ref=gabestein.com), which [became](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3967521/?ref=gabestein.com) the primary way research is discovered and judged. The two technologies eventually converged in the 1998 launch of Google, which originally used an algorithm [that built on](http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf?ref=gabestein.com) academic citation indexing to judge page quality from graphs of website hyperlinks. Google also ultimately adopted the [same predictive, surveillance-based business model](https://elephantinthelab.org/surveillance-publishing/?ref=gabestein.com) that academic publishing companies use to monetize their academic citation graphs. Even as he foresaw these technologies, Bush failed to anticipate two key weaknesses in his system. First, that the need to objectively judge the success of research funding would give rise to the commercial publishing industry and the costly and limiting rents it [collects](https://issues.org/how-academic-science-gave-its-soul-to-the-publishing-industry/?ref=gabestein.com) from the innovation economy. And second, that the decline in American manufacturing as a result of globalization and financialization would make his model susceptible to [corporate capture](https://hewlett.org/disentangling-the-economy-from-neoliberal-financialization/?ref=gabestein.com) in the second half of the 20th century as firms moved production overseas and returned an [increasing percentage](https://conversableeconomist.com/2022/09/13/financial-services-share-of-profits/?ref=gabestein.com) of profits derived from government-funded innovation to the shareholder, rather than working, class. Kratsios's report proposes sweeping changes to the way American research is funded, purportedly to fix these flaws in Bush's system, which even the staunchest supporters of research agree has become [too bureaucratic, narrow, and slow](https://goodscienceproject.org/articles/how-to-actually-reduce-the-administrative-burden-on-research/?ref=gabestein.com). Reading the summary and introduction, I found myself agreeing with much of his diagnosis. I understood why advocates were praising some of his proposals, many of which come directly from the [metascience](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metascience?ref=gabestein.com) community. And yet, midway through the first chapter, I began to recognize a familiar rhythm right around the point where the report calls an "over-reliance on foreign students" a threat to American leadership and security. The desk-banging continues through discussions of favorite MAGA tropes like diversity as a threat to meritocracy, "opening" laboratories housed at elite universities, and protecting our discoveries from foreign exploitation in the "geopolitical battlespace" of commerce and research. Around this point, in a Chapter III section on the "failure of the passive model," these pronouncements reach their crescendo in a searing, nationalist critique of neoliberal economics: > For decades, the United States assumed that open markets would naturally produce American prosperity and that free trade would lift all boats by maximizing global efficiency. Instead, unilateral openness hollowed out the American industrial base. Competitors exploited our markets while protecting their own. The gains from trade accrued to a narrow slice of the economy while entire communities lost their livelihoods. President Trump has delivered a necessary correction, recognizing that economic security is national security. > > The same logic applies to science and technology. The assumption that federal research investment alone would sustain American technological dominance has proven naive. We funded the discoveries, trained the researchers, and published the papers, but did not ensure that the benefits accrued to our nation. The ideas, as well as the time- and resource-intensive parts of the development cycle, are taken abroad to benefit others. As I read that righteous screed, a shudder pulsed its way through my body. The logic behind it comes [almost directly](https://chrisrglass.substack.com/p/post-vannevar-bush-science-the-high) from Palantir founder Alex Karp's book *The Technological Republic*, one of [late MAGA's core texts](https://www.techpolicy.press/palantirs-manifesto-is-as-subtle-as-a-maga-hat/?ref=gabestein.com). In it, Karp and co-author Nicholas Zamiska (Palantir's Head of Corporate Affairs) excoriate the titans of Silicon Valley for abandoning American ideals in pursuit of pure profit born of trivial innovations. They blame these industrialists, along with the academic "woke left" and "woke right," for eroding America's national identity and purpose. Their proposed solution is a "new Manhattan project," focused on AI and conveniently run by private-public partnerships with "patriotic" companies like Palantir, to help Americans rediscover our national purpose and ensure "the West" wins the battle for AI supremacy against authoritarian rivals, primarily China. Karp and Zamiska's book is interesting as a cultural artifact, but tedious as a piece of philosophy. Even potential conservative allies [agree](https://scholars-stage.org/book-notes-the-technological-republic-2025/?ref=gabestein.com) that it reads like an advertisement for Palantir, and that the pair stopped well short of taking their thesis to its logical conclusion of rethinking the value of the nation-state in 2026\. Far from envisioning a revitalized national purpose, they seem to think it obvious that America should be reorganized to give billionaires – but don't worry, only the good, patriotic ones like Karp – even more money and power so they can build us artificial gods that will smite our enemies and bathe us in eternal glory. I'm exaggerating slightly on the last part. Even Karp [thinks](https://www.businessinsider.com/palantir-ceo-ai-companies-leaders-unlikeable-fde-competition-2026-6?ref=gabestein.com) the transhumanist AI CEOs are insane. But that hasn't stopped him – or Kratsios – from arguing that we should organize the entire national project around developing AI. As I parsed the reactions to the Kratsios report sent by friends and colleagues – some [attempts](https://chrisrglass.substack.com/p/post-vannevar-bush-science-the-high) at good-faith analysis, some [reflexive dismissals](https://www.techpolicy.press/ostp-vision-for-science-is-a-golden-age-for-corporations/?ref=gabestein.com), and even some AI-focused government partnership announcements – one emotion washed over me: exhaustion. We [got here](https://www.gabestein.com/zkme9ef3/) in the first place by believing would-be philosopher-kings who assured us their technology would save the world if we just gave them enough money and power. Why are we spending any time at all debating whether their latest ideas will make us happier? I want release from the cycle. There is no purpose to it. --- ### Act IV: Myth Three years ago, I had a vision. Maybe it was the podcast about traditional cultures my wife and I had listened to on our long, slow drive into the Yucatecan jungle. Maybe it was the searing heat of the midday sun reflecting off yellow-painted limestone walls. Maybe it was the mezcal and lack of sleep from the night before. But as the guide pointed to a half-century-old statue of the Virgin Mary watching over the colonial plaza and explained how she had come to stand in for Mayan mother deities of old, I swear I saw it blink. For just a moment something strange, powerful, and impossibly ancient peered out at me from behind Mary's eyes. I'm an atheist. I'm Jewish. I have no Mexican or Mayan heritage. I had never heard of [syncretism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syncretism?ref=gabestein.com), the gradual merging of discrete belief systems that our guide was describing, before. But in that fleeting moment, I rediscovered something fundamental about the world that I had lost somewhere on my journey from adolescence to middle age. I just had no idea what it was. The problem with visions, I've come to learn, is that their insights tend to be visceral. The rationalist in me knows that they are the product of [slow hunches](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/learning-work/202002/slow-hunches-curiosity-and-innovative-ideas?ref=gabestein.com) about unexpected patterns that build up over time until, given the right sensory experiences, the brain [suddenly recruits](https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-your-brain-creates-aha-moments-and-why-they-stick-20251105/?ref=gabestein.com) a diverse network of structures involving sight, emotion, and memory that overcome its tendency to throw away observations that defy its predictions and allow those unexpected patterns to click into place. That explanation doesn't make the work of applying thoughts, words, and meaning to insight any easier. Too often in my life I've ignored hunches – about people, ideas, jobs, you name it – frequently to my detriment. I'm sure we all have. Most of us grew up in a culture that rewards decision-making based on reason and punishes everything else. We're all living with decades of cultural reinforcement that tells us that converting energy and ideas into money is growth, which is progress, and that if you don't see or feel that in your day-to-day life it's because you're measuring the wrong thing. Perhaps that's why even the smart, powerful people who have started to see our society's foundational myths for what they are think they can fix them with sounder arguments, better measurements, more complete philosophies, new technologies, or reimagined ancient political systems. Perhaps that's why so many of the people searching for meaning are falling for con artists and gurus promising easy solutions based on eliminating propped-up enemies, repackaging distorted wisdom from an idealized past, or making just the right set of policy tweaks. It's far easier, and more convenient, to make choices you can rationalize or measure than it is to pursue deeply personal feelings you often can't even identify, whose paths may lead to unpredictable and uncomfortable changes that you will struggle to explain to yourself, much less your family and friends. I'm sure I will spend much of the rest of my life trying to fully understand what I saw, or what my brain was trying to tell me, in a yellow city somewhere deep in the Yucatan. But one lesson I've been able to take from trying to make sense of it is that the choice between different ways of making meaning our culture forces on us is a false one. Alongside every economic doctrine, no matter how data-driven, lies an old web of power. Alongside every new technology, no matter how well meaning, lies a deep history of control. Alongside every flash of insight, no matter how brilliant, lies a dense network of neurons, the product of billions of years of adding, subtracting, and even [trading](https://www.the-scientist.com/bacteria-and-humans-have-been-swapping-dna-for-millennia-32779?ref=gabestein.com) biological code, that has somehow managed to conjure concepts as fragile as "meaning" out of immutable laws of electrochemical physics as ancient as the universe itself. These explanations don't replace each other. They're not even wholly understandable on each other's terms. But if you're able to hold and examine each of them on their own terms, they can co-exist. I've come to believe that if there is meaning to be had in this era of upheaval and uncertainty, it is in learning to understand and accept the multifaceted nature of our existence without trying to fuse everything together. We are syncretic beings, living in a syncretic universe. Nothing endures forever. And nothing ever completely erases what came before it. Pieces of forgotten decisions, gods, economics, [particles](https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/permanent/the-universe/stars/a-spectacular-stellar-finale/we-are-stardust?ref=gabestein.com), and even [fundamental forces](https://physics.mit.edu/news/it-all-started-with-a-big-bang-the-quest-to-unravel-the-mystery-behind-the-birth-of-the-universe/?ref=gabestein.com) are always peering out at us from just beyond the veneer of new creations, patiently waiting to be remembered, examined, broken apart, discarded, and carried forward.