This "Bad Culture" is deliberately manipulated by marketers and politicians for profit and power more easily than a healthy culture. You can see it in Trump's speech patterns, for instance. He conveys talking points instead of ideas, gets buy-in by leaving sentences unfinished but obvious in intent so the susceptible listener (whose identity is defined by their media-driven tribe instead of internally) becomes a collaborator, finishing the thought and believing the lie because they, by participating, have made it their own. That cuts them off from nuanced evaluation. They resist and reject any non-congruent idea instead of being able to evaluate it.
Keep working on a response that is nuanced. It sounds like you’re scripting an intellectual response from a Bad Culture framing. Try to resist the engineering that keeps one mimicking the emotional dysfunction that comes from fixating on anything Trump.
Well said and seemingly the whole point of the article.
There’s a guy on Facebook that posts a lot and his byline is “Dear white people, can I be your friend?”
He is taking one small area of bad culture (racial) and focusing on a healthy culture norm which is to receive someone “not like me” (racially) as a friend.
What could still us? Only the knowledge that we aren't facing the scarcity alone. That’s why we build the Phalanx. To create a space where we can finally close our eyes because someone else is watching the door. Beautifully put.
This is a genuinely refreshing understanding of the culture war we live in today. We must tear the blinders off of our competent charismatic leaders who are held back by some weird fallacious cognitive breakdown. We can awaken from this slumber. Set the alarm an hour earlier. It's time to get up and shine some new unique ideas on our dissembled society
'Disassembled society.' That is the perfect phrase for it, Rick. They took it apart so we couldn't organize.
And you’re right—the cognitive breakdown is the lock on the door. But we don't need to wait for the leaders to wake up; if we shine those 'new unique ideas' bright enough, we become the leaders.
Tje cognitive breakdown = the Darkforce. 2. It's not on just leaders. It's 99.9999% of everyone.
3. No, shining the light of good ideas doesn't make us leaders, it triggers thee cognitive breakdown in everyone around us, making us isolate, ignored, judged, bitter, and powerless.
This is what I’ve been seeking. I’m intuitive. Not really political at all. Had not the right words to describe what I was seeing let alone identify it. Thank you. I only knew society had become dis-eased in every sense of the word. This explains it.
I am also , the pain is relentless in a graphic scenario I cannot find peace with either . The constant bombardment of fear is crushing.. I wish you Peace Jade . 🥰
Congrats, the text strikes the exposed nerve of our era: we’re not dealing with a collapse of intelligence, but a collapse of depth. Public conversation has become performative because the environment was calibrated for that — an ecosystem where slow thinking is an evolutionary disadvantage and where language no longer describes reality, only what is permitted to be said.
The cultural autopsy is urgent.
Without understanding the software that shapes us, we’ll keep confusing symptoms for causes. This essay doesn’t accuse an invisible enemy; it exposes the architecture that has turned us into more anxious, more defensive, and less curious versions of ourselves.
It’s uncomfortable because it’s true.
And it’s necessary because there are still people who want to relearn how to speak… and how to think… without a script.
For those interested in the topic, I leave here a post of mine where I delve deeper into these ideas:
Ethan, this is exactly the kind of structural clarity everyone has been circling; the recognition that what feels like “everyone has lost their damn minds” is actually what happens when a culture replaces cognition with performance and identity defense. None of these glitches is a personal failure. They’re environmental outputs. You drop human beings into a system engineered for speed, surveillance, and social punishment, then act shocked when they start talking like NPCs and treating curiosity as a threat.
What you’ve mapped: schema collapse, identity-protective cognition, bandwidth failure, performative selves, fragmented reality, isn’t pathology in people. It’s pathology in the conditions. This is the recurring pattern across eras: destabilize the environment, and humans retreat into the cheapest cognitive shortcuts. Certainty instead of thought. Slogans instead of meaning. Performance instead of self.
And yes, the middle bandwidth zone, the space where trust, nuance, and democratic reasoning live, is always the first casualty.
Everything you’re describing is what it feels like to live in a culture whose cognitive immune system has been hacked, overloaded, and turned against itself.
This is what Epistemic Warfare looks like, and what it feels like from the inside.
'Epistemic Warfare.' That is exactly what it is. You nailed the core thesis perfectly—the pathology isn't in the people, it's in the conditions. When we understand that, we can stop hating each other for 'glitching' and start dismantling the machine that's jamming the signal. Thank you for this clarity.
Honestly, it hasn’t been a “theory” for decades. We’ve been living through a 40-year sustained erosion of shared reality, an Epistemic War that has actively degraded truth, context, and our ability to read other minds/intent at all. I wrote about it here: https://twvme.substack.com/p/ewr-part-1-welcome-to-the-battlespace
The working memory exhaustion framework really hits home. When you think about how algorithims are designed to overload our cognitive bandwidth, it makes sense why people retreat into pre formed identity scripts. Its not lazyness its survival mode.
This explains my obsession and habit of catching up on the previous days news on MS NOW, dissecting every word for a few hours while I have my coffee when my brain forces me to shut it down, tape still running, to turn on soothing sounds and nap. Brain fatigue.
Substack also offers a method for bypassing algorithms for massive sharing. You see me in chat threads posting the link to 100's of thousands of people a day. Other platforms don't give you such access.
Thank you for a very in depth and intelligent break down of societal norms, culture and human behavior. God it’s like everything I’ve tried to understand and avoid for myself and don’t like to see happen to anyone. Being the square peg that doesn’t fit in a round hole has really kind of plagued my life. It’s not popular to go against the flow even when it’s the right thing do. Or what feels like the right thing to me, on the inside. And. It’s Unpopular. But fuck ‘em!
All those traits reminded me what I feel like on a really bad day. I purposely avoid people and interactions with them on days like that, when I can. It takes way to much effort to be me on days like that.
You sound like me, Christina. I function from 300% use of my intuitive reactions to everything. Ethan, that document you posted is excellent, even in my opinion--a highly educated professional who feels like a "challenged" student of what you and others understand, like technology, sciences, politics, ... and STILL! ... the information you impart has a lot of meaning meaning to me. It closed a gap I had after drawing only from the History and Law I've studied and practiced. You wrote almost identical points about some opinions that I have struggled to have out of necessity. Some, I had developed are so similar, but I am way behind you...in the Fourth Grade.
In 2016, I read that a particular group Citizens searches the same subject matter online and were identified as non-voters. The article stated that the Algorithms were geared to remain two clicks away from conspiracy theories of a Party. Soon, a dear friend was swept up in them and has remained a recluse since.
Forced to TRY to figure out what was happening because of a special group of Clients I have, I was completely unequipped to deal with it. I have stated, often, your example of, "Questions answered with slogans." I "made up" a type of response to what sounded like mesmerized speech, speech that said nearly identical one-liners or puppeted responses. AS I UNDERSTAND FROM READING YOUR DOCUMENT, it is "conforming speech" without a bit of depth of understanding or knowledge to converse about the issue. I had polite questions about the main "slogans" that I used to ask the person's opinion of, or knowledge of, simple facts related to the slogan's issue. Rarely, could the person respond and, to several of my questions, I got zero answers from people, dead silence - 100%.
I finished reading your article and had the immediate thought, "This is why you have had so much difficulty." I, SOMEHOW, maintained my own thinking and questioning of the rhetoric I heard (but I did avoid many people who occupied or drained my brain space necessary to respond to the person. Responses required far too much energy and effort for a reply to their knee jerk, emotional outbursts of Pathos Rhetoric--Plato warned of that particular form of rhetoric as being more dangerous than the other two types, Ethos and Logos. Pathos Rhetoric is the one that bypasses thought and can evoke the loud, explosive, Blitzkrieg Warfare responses when the topic is heard or the person is reminded of the topic. It took me a while to guard my reactions. I saw the use of that rhetoric in causing extreme changes in people...changes that I worried wouldn't be repaired without Professional Deprogrammers of people who were in Cults...I think I better stop typing. The Fourth Grader Comments probably aren't of much interest to the rest of you. It was extremely interesting, Ethan!
I long for the day when we can engage in genuine, deeply nuanced conversation and self-reflection and learn from each other rather than have a knee jerk black/white reaction or spout tribal dribble. Wouldn’t it be something to say you disagree with someone else and have that person be securely curious enough to really want to understand why? That would be an earth-shattering shift from the performative to the profound.
Thank you for articulating what i "know on a soul level" but always have trouble putting into words myself! We were never meant to know or be bombarded with all information, all the time, all around the world! I love dis-engaging from fluffy social media, as the world then seems good and "normal" again!
Absolutely love Substack though, and your writings Ethan! Thanks for sharing with us 🤩
I wish everyone would just stop. Divorce yourself from the idea that there are political solutions. Religious supremacy. Ideological virtue. Vulgar deception and criminality. Let’s start with honesty and integrity. Hey. I don’t have the answers. All I know is that my consciousness has to keep ascending. What is happening here is remarkable. It is right. We are forging our way out truth bullet at a time. The ancients said it long ago the truth will set you free.
I think you have written a lot of truths about the Machine and evolution of bad culture. It is enlightening. Humans are built for connection, and the Bad culture does not cultivate that, of course not. Humans are built to go within, to find the truth in their hearts and bodies. Not listening to outside influences and directives allows them to be authentic, and get grounded rather than dysregulated; to feel and be their humanity. You have to slow down to turn down the noise, and do this.
Epistemic Thermodynamics, or Why Everything Feels So Loud and So Stupid at the Same Time
Here is the missing frame that helps this essay snap into terrifying clarity.
This is not just cultural decay.
It is epistemic thermodynamics.
Every system that processes information obeys the same basic rule as physics: entropy increases unless energy is deliberately applied to maintain order. Meaning is no exception.
What the "Bad Culture Engine" does is dump heat into the system.
-- Outrage is heat.
-- Identity performance is heat.
-- Algorithmic churn is heat.
-- Constant crisis framing is heat.
-- Infinite scroll is heat.
And heat destroys the signal.
Healthy epistemic systems create low-entropy zones where ideas can be held, compared, updated, and refined. They invest energy into cooling. Time. Context. Trust. Shared reference points. Cognitive slack.
Our current culture does the opposite. It extracts value by maximizing epistemic friction while pretending it is “engagement.”
People are not becoming irrational.
They are being thermodynamically overwhelmed.
When working memory is saturated, the brain behaves like any overloaded processor. It drops precision. It defaults to cached routines. It collapses nuance into binaries. It protects identity because identity is cheaper than thinking.
This is why conversations feel uncanny.
You are not talking to a bad person. You are trying to communicate in a heat-soaked system that cannot dissipate energy fast enough to form new models.
This is also why moralizing fixes nothing. You cannot shame entropy out of a system. You cannot vibe-check physics. You either redesign the environment to reduce heat, or the system continues to degrade into noise.
Faulkner names the machinery. Epistemic thermodynamics explains the inevitability.
If you build a culture that rewards maximum excitation and minimum coherence, you do not get enlightenment. You get NPC scripts, identity armor, and reality fragmentation.
Not because humans failed.
Because the system is doing exactly what it was optimized to do.
The question is no longer “why are people like this?”
The question is whether we are willing to rebuild cultural cooling systems before shared reality boils over entirely.
This "Bad Culture" is deliberately manipulated by marketers and politicians for profit and power more easily than a healthy culture. You can see it in Trump's speech patterns, for instance. He conveys talking points instead of ideas, gets buy-in by leaving sentences unfinished but obvious in intent so the susceptible listener (whose identity is defined by their media-driven tribe instead of internally) becomes a collaborator, finishing the thought and believing the lie because they, by participating, have made it their own. That cuts them off from nuanced evaluation. They resist and reject any non-congruent idea instead of being able to evaluate it.
He’s talking about you! TDS
Keep working on a response that is nuanced. It sounds like you’re scripting an intellectual response from a Bad Culture framing. Try to resist the engineering that keeps one mimicking the emotional dysfunction that comes from fixating on anything Trump.
Who writes this crap?
What's wrong?
Dude who writes your crap??
Did you read it? Why is it crap? I find it provocative.
STFU bot 🤖
Well said and seemingly the whole point of the article.
There’s a guy on Facebook that posts a lot and his byline is “Dear white people, can I be your friend?”
He is taking one small area of bad culture (racial) and focusing on a healthy culture norm which is to receive someone “not like me” (racially) as a friend.
"This is a cultural autopsy.
A forensic breakdown of how an entire society drifted into a shallow, anxious, hyper-reactive mode of being--"
And what homeless person isn't hyper-vigilant?
And what hollows humanity's heart like the very waning of resources like water?
What could possibly still us all now?
In the face of what actions could occur?
What could still us? Only the knowledge that we aren't facing the scarcity alone. That’s why we build the Phalanx. To create a space where we can finally close our eyes because someone else is watching the door. Beautifully put.
This is a genuinely refreshing understanding of the culture war we live in today. We must tear the blinders off of our competent charismatic leaders who are held back by some weird fallacious cognitive breakdown. We can awaken from this slumber. Set the alarm an hour earlier. It's time to get up and shine some new unique ideas on our dissembled society
'Disassembled society.' That is the perfect phrase for it, Rick. They took it apart so we couldn't organize.
And you’re right—the cognitive breakdown is the lock on the door. But we don't need to wait for the leaders to wake up; if we shine those 'new unique ideas' bright enough, we become the leaders.
Tje cognitive breakdown = the Darkforce. 2. It's not on just leaders. It's 99.9999% of everyone.
3. No, shining the light of good ideas doesn't make us leaders, it triggers thee cognitive breakdown in everyone around us, making us isolate, ignored, judged, bitter, and powerless.
This is what I’ve been seeking. I’m intuitive. Not really political at all. Had not the right words to describe what I was seeing let alone identify it. Thank you. I only knew society had become dis-eased in every sense of the word. This explains it.
I am also , the pain is relentless in a graphic scenario I cannot find peace with either . The constant bombardment of fear is crushing.. I wish you Peace Jade . 🥰
And to you my sister
Thank you Ethan
Yah. Surprised the days centers still stand
Congrats, the text strikes the exposed nerve of our era: we’re not dealing with a collapse of intelligence, but a collapse of depth. Public conversation has become performative because the environment was calibrated for that — an ecosystem where slow thinking is an evolutionary disadvantage and where language no longer describes reality, only what is permitted to be said.
The cultural autopsy is urgent.
Without understanding the software that shapes us, we’ll keep confusing symptoms for causes. This essay doesn’t accuse an invisible enemy; it exposes the architecture that has turned us into more anxious, more defensive, and less curious versions of ourselves.
It’s uncomfortable because it’s true.
And it’s necessary because there are still people who want to relearn how to speak… and how to think… without a script.
For those interested in the topic, I leave here a post of mine where I delve deeper into these ideas:
https://open.substack.com/pub/euclawnshow/p/depthexe-corrupted-western-systems?r=61f992&utm_medium=ios&shareImageVariant=overlay
REVIEWED RESTACKED FOLLOWED
Ethan, this is exactly the kind of structural clarity everyone has been circling; the recognition that what feels like “everyone has lost their damn minds” is actually what happens when a culture replaces cognition with performance and identity defense. None of these glitches is a personal failure. They’re environmental outputs. You drop human beings into a system engineered for speed, surveillance, and social punishment, then act shocked when they start talking like NPCs and treating curiosity as a threat.
What you’ve mapped: schema collapse, identity-protective cognition, bandwidth failure, performative selves, fragmented reality, isn’t pathology in people. It’s pathology in the conditions. This is the recurring pattern across eras: destabilize the environment, and humans retreat into the cheapest cognitive shortcuts. Certainty instead of thought. Slogans instead of meaning. Performance instead of self.
And yes, the middle bandwidth zone, the space where trust, nuance, and democratic reasoning live, is always the first casualty.
Everything you’re describing is what it feels like to live in a culture whose cognitive immune system has been hacked, overloaded, and turned against itself.
This is what Epistemic Warfare looks like, and what it feels like from the inside.
'Epistemic Warfare.' That is exactly what it is. You nailed the core thesis perfectly—the pathology isn't in the people, it's in the conditions. When we understand that, we can stop hating each other for 'glitching' and start dismantling the machine that's jamming the signal. Thank you for this clarity.
ToM - theory of the mind - it’s not a theory anymore
Honestly, it hasn’t been a “theory” for decades. We’ve been living through a 40-year sustained erosion of shared reality, an Epistemic War that has actively degraded truth, context, and our ability to read other minds/intent at all. I wrote about it here: https://twvme.substack.com/p/ewr-part-1-welcome-to-the-battlespace
Thank You :) I will read it. My research paper
The Unified Theory of AuDHD self-Regulation
is not being taken seriously either
The working memory exhaustion framework really hits home. When you think about how algorithims are designed to overload our cognitive bandwidth, it makes sense why people retreat into pre formed identity scripts. Its not lazyness its survival mode.
This explains my obsession and habit of catching up on the previous days news on MS NOW, dissecting every word for a few hours while I have my coffee when my brain forces me to shut it down, tape still running, to turn on soothing sounds and nap. Brain fatigue.
Kids in school are having difficulty writing more than a one page essay. The features of "Bad Culture" are infused into us at an early age.
As an aside, one of the features I like about Substack is the ability to write long content like this post.
Substack also offers a method for bypassing algorithms for massive sharing. You see me in chat threads posting the link to 100's of thousands of people a day. Other platforms don't give you such access.
I’m so thankful I found you, I entered the right door, I found my tribe. 🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽
Yaaaaas 🤘
I hate when the machinery changes names!
Thank you for a very in depth and intelligent break down of societal norms, culture and human behavior. God it’s like everything I’ve tried to understand and avoid for myself and don’t like to see happen to anyone. Being the square peg that doesn’t fit in a round hole has really kind of plagued my life. It’s not popular to go against the flow even when it’s the right thing do. Or what feels like the right thing to me, on the inside. And. It’s Unpopular. But fuck ‘em!
All those traits reminded me what I feel like on a really bad day. I purposely avoid people and interactions with them on days like that, when I can. It takes way to much effort to be me on days like that.
Good article. Thoughtful. Insightful. Thanks.
Have hope! 🫶🏽🫶🏻
You sound like me, Christina. I function from 300% use of my intuitive reactions to everything. Ethan, that document you posted is excellent, even in my opinion--a highly educated professional who feels like a "challenged" student of what you and others understand, like technology, sciences, politics, ... and STILL! ... the information you impart has a lot of meaning meaning to me. It closed a gap I had after drawing only from the History and Law I've studied and practiced. You wrote almost identical points about some opinions that I have struggled to have out of necessity. Some, I had developed are so similar, but I am way behind you...in the Fourth Grade.
In 2016, I read that a particular group Citizens searches the same subject matter online and were identified as non-voters. The article stated that the Algorithms were geared to remain two clicks away from conspiracy theories of a Party. Soon, a dear friend was swept up in them and has remained a recluse since.
Forced to TRY to figure out what was happening because of a special group of Clients I have, I was completely unequipped to deal with it. I have stated, often, your example of, "Questions answered with slogans." I "made up" a type of response to what sounded like mesmerized speech, speech that said nearly identical one-liners or puppeted responses. AS I UNDERSTAND FROM READING YOUR DOCUMENT, it is "conforming speech" without a bit of depth of understanding or knowledge to converse about the issue. I had polite questions about the main "slogans" that I used to ask the person's opinion of, or knowledge of, simple facts related to the slogan's issue. Rarely, could the person respond and, to several of my questions, I got zero answers from people, dead silence - 100%.
I finished reading your article and had the immediate thought, "This is why you have had so much difficulty." I, SOMEHOW, maintained my own thinking and questioning of the rhetoric I heard (but I did avoid many people who occupied or drained my brain space necessary to respond to the person. Responses required far too much energy and effort for a reply to their knee jerk, emotional outbursts of Pathos Rhetoric--Plato warned of that particular form of rhetoric as being more dangerous than the other two types, Ethos and Logos. Pathos Rhetoric is the one that bypasses thought and can evoke the loud, explosive, Blitzkrieg Warfare responses when the topic is heard or the person is reminded of the topic. It took me a while to guard my reactions. I saw the use of that rhetoric in causing extreme changes in people...changes that I worried wouldn't be repaired without Professional Deprogrammers of people who were in Cults...I think I better stop typing. The Fourth Grader Comments probably aren't of much interest to the rest of you. It was extremely interesting, Ethan!
You have got to the heart of the malaise that's affecting society.
I long for the day when we can engage in genuine, deeply nuanced conversation and self-reflection and learn from each other rather than have a knee jerk black/white reaction or spout tribal dribble. Wouldn’t it be something to say you disagree with someone else and have that person be securely curious enough to really want to understand why? That would be an earth-shattering shift from the performative to the profound.
Thank you for articulating what i "know on a soul level" but always have trouble putting into words myself! We were never meant to know or be bombarded with all information, all the time, all around the world! I love dis-engaging from fluffy social media, as the world then seems good and "normal" again!
Absolutely love Substack though, and your writings Ethan! Thanks for sharing with us 🤩
I wish everyone would just stop. Divorce yourself from the idea that there are political solutions. Religious supremacy. Ideological virtue. Vulgar deception and criminality. Let’s start with honesty and integrity. Hey. I don’t have the answers. All I know is that my consciousness has to keep ascending. What is happening here is remarkable. It is right. We are forging our way out truth bullet at a time. The ancients said it long ago the truth will set you free.
I think you have written a lot of truths about the Machine and evolution of bad culture. It is enlightening. Humans are built for connection, and the Bad culture does not cultivate that, of course not. Humans are built to go within, to find the truth in their hearts and bodies. Not listening to outside influences and directives allows them to be authentic, and get grounded rather than dysregulated; to feel and be their humanity. You have to slow down to turn down the noise, and do this.
Thanks for the excellent treatise on the current state of our culture. It explains why critical thinking is so difficult now.
Excellent and thank you I appreciate all of this. The more we know they more we become aware so we are not TRAPPED!!!
Phenomenal work. Upgrade worthy💯🫡🙌
Appreciate you!!
Epistemic Thermodynamics, or Why Everything Feels So Loud and So Stupid at the Same Time
Here is the missing frame that helps this essay snap into terrifying clarity.
This is not just cultural decay.
It is epistemic thermodynamics.
Every system that processes information obeys the same basic rule as physics: entropy increases unless energy is deliberately applied to maintain order. Meaning is no exception.
What the "Bad Culture Engine" does is dump heat into the system.
-- Outrage is heat.
-- Identity performance is heat.
-- Algorithmic churn is heat.
-- Constant crisis framing is heat.
-- Infinite scroll is heat.
And heat destroys the signal.
Healthy epistemic systems create low-entropy zones where ideas can be held, compared, updated, and refined. They invest energy into cooling. Time. Context. Trust. Shared reference points. Cognitive slack.
Our current culture does the opposite. It extracts value by maximizing epistemic friction while pretending it is “engagement.”
People are not becoming irrational.
They are being thermodynamically overwhelmed.
When working memory is saturated, the brain behaves like any overloaded processor. It drops precision. It defaults to cached routines. It collapses nuance into binaries. It protects identity because identity is cheaper than thinking.
This is why conversations feel uncanny.
You are not talking to a bad person. You are trying to communicate in a heat-soaked system that cannot dissipate energy fast enough to form new models.
This is also why moralizing fixes nothing. You cannot shame entropy out of a system. You cannot vibe-check physics. You either redesign the environment to reduce heat, or the system continues to degrade into noise.
Faulkner names the machinery. Epistemic thermodynamics explains the inevitability.
If you build a culture that rewards maximum excitation and minimum coherence, you do not get enlightenment. You get NPC scripts, identity armor, and reality fragmentation.
Not because humans failed.
Because the system is doing exactly what it was optimized to do.
The question is no longer “why are people like this?”
The question is whether we are willing to rebuild cultural cooling systems before shared reality boils over entirely.
Because once meaning vaporizes, power moves in.
And it never gives it back.
You are a genius. Once I expand I'm hiring you.
Ethan please put my name on the list of future hires. 🫡 You don’t know it yet, but I’ve got what it takes. I am a powerful force.
Noted & excited!
It was top of mind because I have a tangentially related piece coming out in the AM. Epistemic Thermodynamics isn't my invention, you can download the PDF here: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rsta/article/381/2252/20220275/112409/Thermodynamics-2-0-Bridging-the-natural-and-social