Naturalistic Theory: Core Concepts and Processes

Naturalistic Theory

The theory I have been developing over the past decade that underlies and deeply explains the RBP. Naturalistic is a neologism in NT: it names the highly destructive processes that arise within Civilization, rather than the processes of nature itself. The distinction matters. Nature includes destruction; there is no excuse for romanticizing Her as always beautiful and creative. But nature’s destruction is regenerative, as with a forest fire that creates conditions for new plants and animals. Naturalistic destruction is non-regenerative: it destroys ecological habitats and continually reduces our once-integrated psyche.

From an Earthian perspective, the emergence of this form of destruction marks something unprecedented in the history of the universe. After 6,000 years, it clearly must end—the natural purpose of the Relational Being Project.

NT’s central concern is the many ways relational being (RB) has been suppressed and reduced. These processes are too complex to define fully here, but NT analyzes and theorizes the ontohistorical (see definition below) conditions in which they arise. My hope is that understanding Civilization will help us defeat it and eventually restore our descendants to full RB.

The Ontohistorical Method (OHM)

I devised the OHM to help explain NT. It studies how being changes through history, with primary attention to human life. It traces how material conditions and the sociocultural sphere (SCS) reshape our relationships, our psyches, and our experience of reality, focusing particularly on how Civilization reduces our humanity and our ability to function independently. This includes the increasing confinement of the totality of human life to mere conscious thinking, even as the conditions for making meaning are being completely undermined.

Psyche

The integrated whole of our bodily, instinctive, emotional, intuitive, unconscious, and conscious capacities. These are not separate parts that happen to work together but capacities that optimally function in unison at the very same time.

The greatest pretension of humanity is not to consider our species superior to all others, but to elevate one small part of our being—the limited range of fallible conscious thought—over all the others. NT explains how greatly this has harmed us. Along with the individual in which we have become encased, this privileging of conscious thought helps keep us radically separated from everything else, prisoners of our own diminished modern selves.

Civilization teaches us this extreme privileging as part of its reduction of our relational being, keeping us compliant and obedient.

Being

At its simplest, the condition and experience of existing in the world. Being later became one of philosophy’s most important concepts, as philosophers asked what it means for something—or someone—to exist and what the fundamental character of existence is. But in ontohistorical terms, the concept came remarkably late. Human beings had already existed within and experienced the natural world for hundreds of thousands of years before being became an object of abstract philosophical thought.

This does not make being any less valid as a concept. Quite the opposite: it names something so fundamental that it ordinarily escapes notice. But that also makes it unusually vulnerable to abstraction and misuse. Once being becomes primarily something we think about, rather than something we experience through our entire integrated psyche and our relationships with the world, the concept itself can reproduce the separation it is supposed to help us understand.

Relational Being (RB)

A way of being fully and ontologically engaged with oneself, other living beings, the physical world, and the cosmos. A deep web of interaction between everything is implicit in reality, as are our inherently similar mass/energy constitution and equivalent value and belonging. Human beings extend these relationships in symbolically mediated ways across space and over time.

RB is an embodied way of living, not at all a metaphysical, religious, or spiritual state or process. It engages the integrated psyche as a whole rather than privileging conscious thought over our bodily, instinctive, emotional, intuitive, and unconscious capacities. It is how our hunter-gatherer ancestors existed in nature and primary reality before Civilization began systematically suppressing and reducing it.

RB is therefore simultaneously internal and external: the integration of the psyche cannot be separated from our relationships with other beings and the world. Because RB rests on our ontological birthright of equivalent value and belonging, it cannot fully exist wherever injustice flourishes.

Sociocultural Sphere (SCS)

A term NT uses for the vast human-mediated world in which we live. The neologism is necessary because no familiar term is broad enough. Society, culture, politics, economics, mythology, and ideology each capture part of this world, but none captures the whole.

The SCS includes all of these and much more: our institutions, social practices, values, customs, technologies, systems of authority, and what NT calls the ideasphere—the enormous accumulation and circulation of ideas, explanations, beliefs, theories, stories, propaganda, and other forms of symbolic thought.

Dividing this world into separate fields can obscure how thoroughly they interact. Politics changes economics; economics changes culture; culture shapes values; ideas alter institutions; technologies transform social relationships—and all of them continually act upon one another. Their combined effects can therefore be much greater than the effects of any one considered separately. SCS bypasses these divisions in order to see the human-mediated world as an interacting whole.

We are born into an SCS that already existed before us. We absorb its language, categories, expectations, rules, assumptions, and ways of understanding the world, usually without recognizing how profoundly they shape us. But the SCS is not simply something acting upon us from outside. We continually create, reproduce, modify, and transmit it through our interactions with one another. We shape the SCS, and the SCS shapes us.

Stage Theory

Naturalistic Theory divides the history of Homo sapiens into three major stages, separated by two long transitional periods. These stages describe fundamental changes in human ways of being, particularly the development, integration, and eventual reduction of the human psyche and Relational Being (RB).

Stage I — Early Hunter-Gatherers

From the emergence of Homo sapiens roughly 300,000 years ago until approximately 80,000 BCE. These were fully human beings, but they preceded what is generally called Behavioral Modernity.

First Transition — c. 80,000–50,000 BCE

A roughly 30,000-year transition during which the capacities associated with Behavioral Modernity developed and became clearly established. This was not the beginning of Civilization. Rather, it marks the transition between earlier Homo sapiens and the behaviorally modern hunter-gatherers of Stage II.

Stage II — Behaviorally Modern Hunter-Gatherers

From approximately 50,000 BCE. Stage II humans clearly possessed Behavioral Modernity while retaining an integrated psyche and living predominantly within Relational Being. Their expanding symbolic capacities did not yet produce the sustained reduction and fragmentation of the psyche characteristic of Civilization.

Second Transition — c. 12,500–4,000 BCE

Beginning in the Ancient Near East around 12,500 BCE, the conditions of Stage II began to change. Over approximately 8,500 years, increasingly sedentary lifeways, agriculture, population concentration, hierarchy, material accumulation, and other developments progressively transformed human existence. This was a prolonged transition rather than Civilization appearing suddenly with agriculture or the first settlements.

Stage III — Civilization

Beginning around 4,000 BCE. Civilization constitutes the third major stage of our species. Unlike Stage II, it is characterized by the sustained suppression and reduction of Relational Being and the progressive fragmentation of the previously integrated psyche. Over the following six millennia, these processes took increasingly complex forms through Direct Materialistic Reduction (DMR) and Symbolically Mediated Reduction (SMR).

Stage Theory therefore places Civilization within the much longer history of our species rather than treating it as synonymous with human history. Civilization occupies only the most recent stage. For most of the existence of Homo sapiens, human beings lived before Civilization, and for tens of thousands of years behaviorally modern humans lived with their psyches still substantially intact.

The two transitional periods are equally important to the theory. They prevent the stages from being understood as abrupt historical breaks. Stage Theory describes long transformations in human being: first toward the fully developed capacities of behaviorally modern hunter-gatherers, and much later away from their integrated psyche and Relational Being toward the progressively reduced forms of human existence characteristic of Civilization.

Mass Mind (MM)

A product of Civilization that increasingly took over from the far less invasive interaction of human Psyche. For most of our existence, people lived in relatively small groups in direct and continuing relationships with one another, other living beings, and the natural world. Psyches interacted with psyches within relational being.

Early Civilization radically changed those conditions. Growing cities brought large numbers of strangers together. Anonymity increased. Life accelerated. Early enclosures increasingly separated people from the natural world and one another. Hierarchy, organized violence, institutions, and increasingly powerful symbolic systems changed how human beings related and communicated. Under these new conditions, the Mass Mind began to form.

Its basic movement is simple: person → group → SCS → person. Individuals contribute ideas, beliefs, behaviors, values, fears, desires, and assumptions to groups. These enter the larger SCS, mix with those of countless other people, and become embedded in customs, institutions, ideologies, stories, rules, and ways of thinking. The SCS then feeds this transformed human-made world back into individual psyches.

The television series Pluribus offers a useful contrast. There, something like a MM appears to originate outside humanity. In NT, there are no aliens and no outside controllers. We create the MM ourselves, it acts back upon us, and in this sense we increasingly control ourselves. We influence us. This is also why changing the MM matters to the RBP. If we collectively reproduce the values and ways of thinking that reduce relational being, we can also change what we collectively reproduce. One purpose of the RBP is therefore to help redirect the Mass Mind toward RB and healthier values.

RB Reduction

The naturalistic processes through which Civilization progressively diminishes, fragments, redirects, or suppresses relational being. Reduction is crucial to NT because RB does not simply disappear. Human beings remain relational creatures, but the range, intensity, integration, and objects of those relationships can be narrowed and reorganized. An integrated psyche can become increasingly divided; relationships of equivalent value and belonging can become hierarchical; embodied engagement with primary reality can increasingly give way to abstract and symbolically mediated forms of experience.

RB Reduction is organic and naturalistic, not the product of an evil cabal directing Civilization from above. Particular elites and institutions can deliberately exploit, intensify, and benefit from reductive processes, but they did not have to invent the overall process or understand where it would lead. Reduction emerges historically through interacting changes in social organization, hierarchy, material conditions, institutions, technologies, symbolic systems, and the Mass Mind itself. Once established, these processes can reinforce one another and become increasingly powerful.

This is why NT uses reduction rather than simply loss or suppression. What is reduced often remains present in altered form. Our relational capacities survive, but Civilization repeatedly channels them into narrower forms while elevating selected capacities—especially conscious thought and abstraction—over the integrated psyche. RB Reduction therefore describes both what Civilization has done to relational being and the continuing processes through which people collectively reproduce the conditions that reduce their own relational existence.

Direct Materialistic Reduction (DMR)

The earliest predominant form of RB Reduction. Early Civilization confronted human beings still accustomed to primary experiencing: direct, embodied engagement with other people, other living beings, and the physical world. Symbolic thought certainly existed, but chains of abstraction were comparatively short. The elaborate symbolic systems that Civilization would later develop simply could not have accomplished the initial transformation on their own.

Civilization therefore first had to change the material world people actually experienced. Growing cities, walls, enclosures, monumental structures, hierarchy, physical separation, organized violence, and the control of space changed everyday experience directly. In a remarkable sense, Civilization used the concrete to teach human beings how to move beyond the concrete.

A mound provides a simple example. Its initial power is overwhelmingly material: its enormous size, height, solidity, and physical separation from ordinary surroundings are experienced through the body and senses. An ensi or priest standing above others is literally elevated. People below actually look upward. Distance, restricted access, and physical elevation are real before they become abstractions.

But repeated material experience can acquire symbolic meaning. Physical elevation can become social elevation; higher can become superior; proximity to the sky can become transcendence. Eventually the mound itself can become a symbol carrying meanings far beyond its physical properties. The concrete has become a conduit to the nonconcrete.

This is why DMR and Symbolically Mediated Reduction (SMR) can never be completely separated. They identify which form of reduction is predominant, not two independent processes. DMR predominated first because SMR alone could not yet have transformed psyches still deeply engaged with primary reality. But as material arrangements acquired symbolic meanings, SMR increasingly operated through them. Those meanings then changed how people experienced the material world itself.

The process can therefore move in both directions:

Symbolically Mediated Reduction (SMR)

The form of RB Reduction that works primarily through symbols, meanings, categories, beliefs, ideas, and other products of human thought. SMR existed in early Civilization alongside DMR, but became increasingly important as Civilization grew larger, more complex, and more abstract.

DMR helped create the conditions for this transition. Material structures and experiences acquired meanings that could increasingly travel beyond the things themselves. The mound could become transcendence; physical elevation could become superiority; the ruler could become more than a powerful person. Once meanings became established in the Mass Mind and SCS, they could organize human experience without requiring the original material encounter every time.

The rise of empire and the named gods greatly expanded this power. Large populations could not be held together by direct material control alone. Gods, divine rulers, mythology, ritual, law, imperial identity, and increasingly elaborate systems of meaning could reach across distances and generations. Authority was no longer only something people physically encountered. It could become something they carried within themselves.

SMR could also succeed because Civilization offered real practical benefits alongside RB Reduction. Empire could provide greater security and order for some of the people within it. Professional armies could move much of the immediate violence of war away from the domestic scene. The same system that reduced relational being could therefore also protect people, organize life, and provide meanings through which those arrangements appeared necessary, desirable, or natural. The violence did not disappear; much of it was displaced outward onto conquered and subjugated peoples.

This mixture of practical benefit and reduction made SMR extraordinarily powerful. People did not have to be simply forced into Civilization. Increasingly, they could participate in, reproduce, and eventually identify with the meanings through which Civilization organized their lives.

SMR is therefore recursive. Meanings produced by people enter the Mass Mind and SCS, return to shape individual psyches and their experience of reality, and are then reproduced, modified, or expanded through human activity. We influence us.

DMR and SMR always overlap. A wall can physically protect and separate while also symbolizing power, security, belonging, and exclusion. A temple can organize physical space while embodying an entire cosmology. What matters in NT is which form of reduction is predominant.

As SMR became increasingly powerful, Civilization no longer needed to rely primarily upon changing the material world to change human beings. It could increasingly change the meanings through which human beings experienced the world—and themselves.

Transcendence

One of the two principal products of Symbolically Mediated Reduction (SMR), the other being the Thought Regime (TR). Whereas a Thought Regime conditions what is available to think, believe, and even experience, transcendence relocates value, meaning, authority, or reality away from embodied Relational Being and into an abstract, elevated, or otherwise symbolically constructed realm.

Transcendence begins with a separation. Something that originally exists within the integrated relations of human beings, other living beings, the physical world, and the cosmos is symbolically removed from those relations and placed somewhere else—or made dependent upon something imagined to stand above them. What is immediate, embodied, relational, and immanent consequently becomes subordinate to what has been abstracted from it.

Religious transcendence is its most obvious historical form. Gods are increasingly separated from the material world and eventually located above it; sacred authority becomes vested in distant deities, heavens, scriptures, priests, and theological systems. Human beings themselves can then be understood as divided creatures whose highest or most valuable element—the soul, spirit, rational mind, or some other privileged essence—is distinguished from and elevated above the body and material existence.

But transcendence in NT is not limited to religion. The process survives secularization because its underlying structure can be reproduced without gods. Reason, Mind, the Individual, the Nation, Progress, the Market, Science, economic value, data, and eventually computation can all acquire transcendent characteristics when abstractions derived from lived reality are elevated above the relationships and material conditions from which they arose. The abstraction begins to organize and judge the reality that produced it.

This is why transcendence is fundamentally a form of reduction. It does not merely add an imagined realm or abstract concept to human experience. By privileging what has been abstracted, it diminishes what remains. The body becomes inferior to mind; earthly existence to heaven; relationship to individuality; lived experience to formal categories; the particular to the universal; the material world to its symbolic representation. Increasing portions of reality can consequently be experienced through abstractions rather than through direct relational engagement.

Transcendence therefore contributes profoundly to the fragmentation of the psyche. Capacities that once operated as parts of an integrated human being become separated, hierarchized, and increasingly treated as if they were independent entities. Conscious thought can come to appear to be the person; mind can appear separate from body; the individual can appear to exist prior to relationship. What has been symbolically extracted from Relational Being is then privileged over Relational Being itself.

The importance of transcendence to Naturalistic Theory is therefore historical as well as ontological. Its particular objects change dramatically across Civilization, but the underlying movement persists: something is abstracted from relational existence, elevated above it, and then used to organize, interpret, or dominate the reality from which it was abstracted.

Together, Thought Regimes and transcendence constitute the two major products of SMR. TR structures the field within which people think and experience; transcendence progressively relocates authority and value from embodied relational existence into privileged symbolic abstractions. Their interaction has been one of Civilization’s most powerful means of suppressing Relational Being.

Thought Regime (TR)

Thought Regimes arise within Civilization as one of two major forms of SMR, the other being transcendence. A TR is a form of reduction arising through the Mass Mind and the values implicit in a particular SCS. It can be understood as a relatively unified and coherent way of influencing human actions, behavior, beliefs, and experience, yet historically it has been remarkably difficult to detect.

One reason is well understood: what is extremely common becomes the background of our lives. It is always there and therefore scarcely noticed—like water to a fish. Another is that human beings learn to experience historically created ways of life as natural. Empires, taxes, hierarchy, and countless other arrangements can eventually seem simply to be facts of life.

A TR is not ideology or propaganda, although both can operate alongside and within it. It exists only within Civilization and, at bottom, consists of historically specific ways through which Civilization suppresses our humanity and relational being.

The First Thought Regime arose after approximately 1,600 years in which DMR had predominated, around 2350 BCE. The city-state system and its recurrent warfare were producing enormous instability, while Mesopotamian writings attest to the human suffering associated with war. Practically speaking, new arrangements were emerging. But specific to Civilization's development, something more was occurring: increasingly powerful forms of SMR were becoming capable of reducing RB in ways DMR could not.

The conjunction of the first empire—the Akkadian—with the emergence of the first contemporaneously evidenced named gods and increasingly organized polytheistic religion was an extraordinary development that receives too little attention. Together they helped produce the First Thought Regime: new values, practices, beliefs, and assumptions became so deeply embedded in the SCS that within generations many could simply form part of the background of life.

Critically, despite its name, a Thought Regime has relatively little to do with controlling people or directly telling them what or how they may think. It operates through two considerably more powerful mechanisms.

First, a TR conditions what is actually available to think, believe, and even experience. Possibilities outside its conceptual world can become extraordinarily difficult even to formulate. For example, the proposition that goddesses developed partly to extend or consolidate patriarchy could scarcely have arisen where patriarchy itself was unavailable as a concept. Patriarchal social arrangements existed for millennia before patriarchy became widely available as an explicit category through which those arrangements could be examined.

Second, a TR can structure the nature of thought itself. This mechanism became especially important with the Modern Thought Regime, when thought was progressively transformed through increasingly abstract, quantified, formalized, computational, and eventually algorithmic forms.

The First TR is therefore only the beginning. Below, NT identifies three further Thought Regimes, culminating in the Modern Thought Regime under which we live today. Like the first, each has had a powerful theological component.

The Relational Being Project (RBP)

The practical and intellectual project that grows out of Naturalistic Theory (NT). The RBP seeks to understand how Civilization has progressively suppressed relational being, fragmented the once-integrated human psyche, separated us from one another and the living world, and created relationships structured by hierarchy, domination, and injustice.

But understanding what happened is only the beginning. The RBP is also an effort to reverse these processes—to Burn the destructive practices, beliefs, and ideologies Civilization has taught us; Learn how

RB was suppressed and how that suppression continues; and Return to a way of being in which our internal and external lives are once again fully interconnected.

The project therefore joins theory and ontohistorical inquiry with lived experience and practice. Its ultimate purpose is not simply to understand relational being, but to help make its restoration possible.

Negative Ontological Transfer (NOT)

The process through which negative qualities first attributed to the divine or transcendent realm are transferred into human ontology and eventually experienced as inherent qualities of human beings themselves. Through NOT, concepts such as impurity, sinfulness, guilt, corruption, and unworthiness cease to describe merely a person’s relationship to supernatural authority and increasingly become qualities of what the person is. This becomes a powerful form of RB Reduction because human beings learn to experience their own being as fundamentally deficient.

Presentism

In Naturalistic Theory (NT), Presentism refers to the tendency to explain contemporary human conditions primarily through relatively recent historical developments while failing to investigate the much older processes from which those developments emerged. It is therefore somewhat different from the conventional historiographical meaning of presentism: interpreting the past through contemporary values, assumptions, or categories. NT is concerned with that problem as well, but uses Presentism more broadly to describe a truncation of historical causation. Recent transformations can become so prominent that they are treated, implicitly or explicitly, as the origins of conditions whose histories extend much further into the past.

Presentism produces two particularly important problems. First, it encourages an excessive concentration on European Modernity, colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, and related developments as the principal explanatory sources of contemporary domination and injustice. These processes transformed the world profoundly, and NT does not minimize their importance. The problem arises when extraordinary historical importance is mistaken for historical primacy. Patriarchy, slavery, social hierarchy, purity regimes, organized violence, and other forms of domination long preceded European Modernity. Similarly, many of the processes through which Relational Being (RB) was progressively reduced were already thousands of years old when European colonial expansion began. An explanation beginning primarily with Modernity can therefore provide an excellent account of an enormous historical intensification while overlooking the conditions that made that intensification possible.

Second, and more subtly, Presentism can diminish the significance of ancient history by separating the study of earlier societies from questions concerning their continuity with the present. Archaeologists, ancient historians, historians of religion, and other specialists may provide extraordinarily sophisticated accounts of particular periods while disciplinary specialization encourages those periods to be treated as relatively bounded historical worlds. Modern scholars then study Modernity, while social and political theorists concentrate upon contemporary conditions. What can disappear between these specialized fields is the longitudinal question central to the ontohistorical method: What happened to human beings across these transitions, and how did earlier transformations persist, combine with other processes, or assume new forms?

NT therefore treats ancient history neither as a remote prelude to the world that matters nor as the location of fixed origins that mechanically determine everything that follows. The ontohistorical method is inherently evolutionary. Origins matter, but an origin is not an essence preserved unchanged through time. Historical processes develop, interact, intensify, weaken, disappear, reappear, and acquire functions radically different from those they possessed earlier. The relevant question is not simply where a phenomenon began but what subsequently happened to it. NT is therefore concerned with continuity through transformation.

Patriarchy provides perhaps the clearest example. Its importance cannot be understood adequately by locating an ancient origin and then drawing a straight line to the present. Nor can contemporary gender relations be explained solely through capitalism, colonialism, industrialization, or Modernity. The historical task is to investigate how forms of male domination emerged, changed through different political and economic formations, became embedded in institutions and systems of thought, interacted with later developments, and continued to shape human life while repeatedly changing their form. The same methodological principle applies to purity regimes, slavery, hierarchy, individualization, abstraction, and other processes examined by NT.

Presentism can consequently distort historical explanation in opposite directions at once. It can make recent processes appear more causally comprehensive than they are while making ancient processes appear less relevant to the present than they are. The resulting problem is not simply insufficient knowledge of antiquity. It is a fragmentation of historical explanation. Ancient history belongs to ancient specialists, medieval history to medievalists, Modernity to modern historians, and contemporary problems to social scientists and theorists. Each field may produce excellent scholarship while the processes connecting their respective periods remain inadequately examined.

This problem is particularly important in contemporary discussions of colonialism and decolonization. Colonialism, imperialism, racial domination, and extraction profoundly transformed societies throughout the world and remain indispensable to understanding contemporary injustice. Yet expanding concepts such as coloniality to explain an ever-wider range of contemporary phenomena can inadvertently establish European colonial expansion and Modernity as the principal historical horizon within which those phenomena become intelligible. NT instead asks what colonialism encountered, appropriated, transformed, and intensified. What forms of domination already existed? What transformations in human being preceded colonialism? Which older processes became incorporated into colonial systems, and which genuinely new processes did colonialism create?

This distinction allows NT simultaneously to recognize the enormous historical consequences of colonialism and resist making colonialism the beginning and end of the history of domination. Fanon, Césaire, Cabral, Freire, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Rodney, and other anticolonial thinkers illuminate processes that cannot be understood without colonial history. NT does not seek to replace these analyses with a more encompassing label. It asks how the specific forms of oppression they identified intersect with historical processes extending much further into the past.

Presentism is therefore not corrected merely by “going further back.” A longer chronology by itself accomplishes little. The purpose of the ontohistorical method is to reconstruct historical relationships across time: origins where they can be established, subsequent transformations, material conditions, changes in institutions and thought, interactions among processes, and continuities with contemporary human being. The question is not simply what happened long ago. It is how what happened long ago became, through repeated transformation, part of what human beings subsequently became.

Presentism obscures that question by shortening the historical field. The ontohistorical method attempts to reopen it.

The Three Transitional Thought Regimes

Between the First Thought Regime and the Modern Thought Regime, NT identifies three major transitional TRs that progressively transformed the human psyche. Each developed a different form of Negative Ontological Transfer (NOT), through which theological distinctions increasingly became distinctions within and between human beings themselves.

1. The Hebrew Purity Regime

The first major transition organized human experience around distinctions between purity and impurity, sacred and profane, permitted and forbidden, and the chosen people and those outside the covenant. During and following the Babylonian experience, these distinctions acquired particular force in maintaining collective identity under conditions of conquest, displacement, and foreign domination. NOT increasingly transferred distinctions embedded in the theological order into human identity, conduct, the body, and everyday life. The psyche became increasingly subject to continual examination against an external sacred order.

2. The Pauline Thought Regime

Paul radically intensified NOT by turning the Hebrew theological inheritance inward. The crucial struggle increasingly took place within the person: flesh and spirit, sin and salvation, the old person and the new. What had been substantially organized through communal law, ritual, and purity could now become an interior condition of the human being. The psyche itself became a principal site of theological conflict. Human beings increasingly learned to examine, judge, and divide themselves.

3. The Augustinian Thought Regime

Augustine deepened this interiorization while extending NOT against the surrounding pagan Roman world and Christian heresies. Sin was no longer principally something one did; the human being inherited a corrupted condition requiring divine grace. The theological struggle became simultaneously social and profoundly internal. Paganism, heresy, bodily desire, erroneous belief, and the fallen will could all be understood through an ontology of human deficiency. The divided psyche became increasingly stabilized as a theological self.

Across the three transitional TRs, the direction is therefore cumulative:

These transitional TRs did not yet structure the nature of thought itself in the manner of the Modern Thought Regime. Their enormous historical importance was different: they progressively reorganized the psyche, preparing the conditions from which the Protestant Individual could later emerge.

Augustinian Theological Self

The historically new form of self that emerged through Augustine’s radical interiorization of Christianity. The self is understood as inherently fallen, divided, and morally deficient, requiring continual self-examination and divine grace for redemption. Unlike the Pauline psyche, where the struggle between flesh and spirit is principally experiential, the Augustinian self makes that division ontological: deficiency becomes part of what the person is.

Within NT, the Augustinian Theological Self represents the culmination of Negative Ontological Transfer (NOT). Negative qualities are no longer primarily attributed to external evil or transgression but become embedded within human being itself, preparing the conditions from which the Protestant Individual later emerged.

Modern Thought Regime (MTR)

The Thought Regime that emerged with European modernity and eventually became globally predominant through Civilization’s political, economic, cultural, technological, and intellectual expansion. It inherited important structures from the earlier theological TRs, particularly the divided self, but progressively reorganized them through increasingly secular, abstract, and technical forms.

The MTR represents a major development in SMR because it increasingly operates through both mechanisms of a Thought Regime. Like earlier TRs, it conditions what is actually available to think, believe, and even experience. But increasingly it also structures the nature of thought itself. Over several centuries, reality and human experience were progressively divided, quantified, systematized, formalized, computationalized, and finally algorithmized.

NT identifies six overlapping phases in this development:

1. Division of Unities (DoU), c. 1540–1850

Previously integrated aspects of reality and human experience were increasingly divided into separate objects, categories, disciplines, and domains. The emerging Protestant Individual became both an expression and an instrument of this division.

2. Industrial Reduction (IR), emerging c. 1750; predominant from c. 1850

Industrialization increasingly reorganized people, nature, work, time, and material life according to production, efficiency, measurement, standardization, and exchange.

3. Systematization/Mechanization (S/M), emerging c. 1800; predominant from c. 1850

Reality was increasingly understood and organized through systems, mechanisms, classifications, and standardized procedures. Human beings themselves became increasingly susceptible to the same forms of organization.

4. Formalization (F), emerging c. 1900; predominant from c. 1920

Thought and knowledge were increasingly translated into explicit formal structures, models, rules, measurements, and symbolic systems capable of operating at greater distances from primary experience.

5. Computationalization (C), emerging c. 1945; predominant from c. 1970

Formalized thought became increasingly transferable to computers. Reality, behavior, knowledge, and eventually large portions of human activity could be represented as information and subjected to computational processing.

6. Algorithmization (A), emerging c. 1990; predominant from c. 2010

Computational systems increasingly began not merely processing information but organizing what people encounter, how they communicate, what choices are presented to them, and increasingly how social reality itself operates.

The phases overlap and accumulate rather than simply replacing one another. Earlier forms remain active inside later ones. Their overall movement can be represented approximately as:

The result is historically extraordinary. Civilization increasingly reduces reality to forms that can be handled by conscious thought and then progressively reorganizes conscious thought into forms that Civilization itself can increasingly formalize, compute, and algorithmically reproduce. The Modern Thought Regime therefore represents the most extensive development yet of SMR: Civilization increasingly structures not only what human beings think about, but the forms through which they think and experience reality itself.

Protestant Individual (PI)

The historically distinctive form of individual self that emerged from European Christianity around 1500 and became foundational to European modernity. NT does not use individual merely to mean a single human being. Human beings have obviously always existed as distinct persons. The PI is a particular way of experiencing oneself as a bounded, substantially autonomous self, increasingly separated from other people, the natural world, and eventually even from much of one’s own integrated psyche.

The PI developed from the earlier theological transformation of the psyche, particularly the Pauline interiorization of religious struggle and the Augustinian Theological Self. Protestantism intensified this inward movement by placing unprecedented weight upon the individual’s conscience, belief, moral responsibility, relationship with God, and personal salvation. The individual increasingly became the privileged location of truth, responsibility, choice, and identity.

This development contained a profound contradiction. The PI experienced increasing autonomy and freedom while becoming increasingly enclosed within the self and increasingly dependent upon the SCS for the categories through which that self understood itself and the world. NT therefore describes the Protestant Individual as a prison of freedom: the individual experiences the boundaries of the self as the location of freedom while those same boundaries greatly reduce relational being.

The PI subsequently became increasingly secularized and was reinforced through capitalism, private property, rights, competition, nation-states, philosophy, psychology, and other institutions and ideas of European modernity. Its theological origins could therefore recede from view even as the form of self they helped produce became increasingly normalized.

The Protestant Individual became both a product and an important carrier of the Modern Thought Regime. Civilization no longer merely separated people from one another materially; increasingly, separation became part of who people understood themselves to be.

Necrological Era

NT’s term for the present historical period, emerging around 2005, in which Civilization’s naturalistic processes have become extraordinarily powerful, interconnected, and increasingly capable of determining what is permitted to live, flourish, retain meaning, or disappear.

Necrological derives from necrology—an account or record of death—but NT extends the term beyond literal human death. The Necrological Era includes the destruction of species and ecosystems, the extraction and exhaustion of the physical world, continuing large-scale human deprivation and violence, and the progressive destruction of cultures, communities, relationships, meaning, and integrated psychic life.

The Necrological Era is closely connected to the later phases of the Modern Thought Regime. Computationalization and especially algorithmization allow human beings, behavior, relationships, knowledge, and increasingly reality itself to be translated into data and subjected to systems operating at enormous scale and speed. At the same time, neoliberalism has extended market values and financial calculation into ever more areas of life, while effective political and intellectual opposition has greatly weakened.

These processes interact through the SCS and Mass Mind. Ecological destruction, global extraction, technological power, economic inequality, political authority, cultural production, and psychic reduction therefore cannot adequately be understood in isolation. Together they form a historically distinctive condition in which Civilization possesses unprecedented capacities to reduce both the living world and human relational being.

The Necrological Era is therefore not simply an age in which many things are dying. It is an era in which systems of reduction increasingly determine the conditions under which life, meaning, relationship, and belonging are allowed to exist at all.