For Now We See Through a Glass, Darkly

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

— 1 Corinthians 13:12

The meaning crisis is not all too unlike the ecological one. It starts slowly enough that it’s almost impossible to perceive at first. Then, a few years in, a creeping feeling starts to flicker in the YouTube algorithm. Can we even understand each other anymore? Before we know it, we’ve become utterly fractured and disconnected, trapped in algorithmically incentivized bubbles that turn our outrage and desire for belonging into targeted ads. The consequences of this socio-technical Gordian knot are being felt already and will only continue to accelerate.

A recent podcast conversation hosted by Aubrey Marcus with John Demartini, provocatively titled “No Such Thing As Evil? (SHOCKING DEBATE),” offers one story among many in which true dialogue or dialogos becomes impossible as shared structures of meaning break down.

If you watched that conversation, or read Aubrey’s subsequent reflection on it, you may have felt something that’s hard to name: a kind of ontological vertigo. Two people genuinely grappling with some of the oldest and most consequential questions available to human beings: What is evil? Does suffering have meaning? What do we owe each other when harm occurs? Both men not quite reaching each other, despite real effort on both sides.

When Aubrey invited contributions to explore a meta-analysis of the dialogue, I saw an opportunity to experiment with the emerging AI sensemaking tools I’ve been developing in service of experiments in the regenerative and open civic innovation movements. Steve Jobs once described the personal computer as a “bicycle for the mind,” a reference to the radical empowerment and access a bicycle provides. I believe AI could be called a “bicycle for the collective mind,” a tool that reveals the deeper patterns of shared meaning across what would otherwise be gulfs of misunderstanding.

Towards that end, I’ve been building tools that attempt to expand the scope of dialogue and sensemaking. The results are available at dialecticaltopology.xyz. What follows is the context for why it matters for the moment we’re in.

The Medium Is Not the Message

One of the deepest and most unspoken stories that holds our world together is the assumption that shared understanding is possible and that it’s taking place when we communicate.

I vibrate my vocal cords. The air moves. You receive the sound. We both agree, subtly, that certain arrangements of phonemes correspond to certain units of meaning. We proceed as if the transmission were clean because we must, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary.

What’s actually happening is something far stranger and more beautiful and more dangerous. Every word I use arrives in your mind already pre-shaped by the full architecture of your experience, your embodied history, your formative losses and discoveries, the particular way you came to understand what “evil” means, or “God,” or “balance,” or “understanding.” Language is not a transparent medium. It’s a compressed approximation of inner worlds that are each genuinely, irreducibly unique.

The cognitive scientist would call this the “grounding problem.” The philosopher might invoke the hard problem of consciousness. The contemplative traditions have always known it in their bones: true communication is unspoken, and it requires something more than shared vocabulary.

At minimum, real communication relies on a literacy about worldviews.

This is what the metamodern philosopher Hanzi Freinach calls a “listening society,” a civilization that has developed the capacity to recognize that different people aren’t just holding different opinions but are operating from different cognitive-emotional-philosophical frameworks, different ways of being a self in relation to reality, and that these frameworks shape what a person can even see, let alone say. The goal isn’t to abandon the project of truth. It’s to recognize that our access to truth is always mediated, always perspectival, always shaped by the invisible background assumptions we’ve accumulated on the path to becoming who we are.

Becoming literate in worldviews means becoming able to read the subtext, the conversation beneath the conversation.

This is what I set out to do with Dialectical Topology.

Dialectical Topology: A Different Kind of Listening

Dialectical Topology is a multi-modal approach to expanding how we analyze dialogue. Rather than simply listening to what two people say, it asks: what is the shape of this conversation? What is its terrain?

The framework examines the dialogue through six distinct lenses, each illuminating something different.

The semantic landscape treats language spatially. Using vector embeddings, the mathematical representation of meaning that underlies modern large language models, it becomes possible to visualize how concepts relate to each other in three-dimensional space. Words that cluster together in semantic similarity occupy proximate regions; words that diverge in semantic relationship occupy distant ones. When two people use the same word to mean different things, the semantic landscape makes that visible. The map of a conversation reveals whether its participants are even traversing the same territory.

The claims analysis asks: what are the actual propositions being asserted? What type of claim is each one: empirical, ontological, ethical, methodological? What evidence backs it? What are the logical warrants? How strong are those warrants? This layer strips away the rhetorical texture of conversation to expose its skeletal architecture. What is actually being argued, and how well?

The dialogue flow treats conversation as narrative. Every exchange has a temporal arc: beats, rhythms, moments of convergence and rupture, inflection points where the entire dynamic pivots. Mapping this arc reveals something about the movement of understanding: where did genuine contact happen? Where did the thread break? When did emotions escalate? What was the shape of the missed opportunity?

The worldview map evaluates the various axes of fundamental disagreements between Marcus and Demartini’s core assumptions. By breaking the worldviews of each speaker into multiple dimensions, we can better see how and where they diverge. This map helps to contextualize the dialogue by making visible the implicit assumptions that both men carry.

The epistemological tree is perhaps the most philosophically dense of the lenses. It traces the logical genealogy of each claim, from surface argument, down through the intermediate warrants, all the way to the foundational commitments: the root metaphysical assumptions about the nature of reality, self, and knowledge that a person has almost never explicitly chosen, because they were absorbed before conscious reflection was possible. These roots determine what arguments a person can even evaluate as valid. Two people with incompatible roots can exchange surface-level arguments indefinitely without ever touching what actually divides them.

Finally, the steelman arena asks a counterfactual question: what would this conversation look like if both parties genuinely sought to represent the other’s position at its strongest? What emerges if we remove the defensiveness, the rhetorical habit, the mutual misreading, and simply ask, as honestly as possible, what insight each worldview is protecting?

Together, these lenses don’t resolve the dialogue so much as expand it, revealing the full dimensionality of what meaning is actually at stake.

What the Analysis Revealed

The meta-analysis of the Marcus-Demartini conversation examined 42 philosophical claims, mapped eight dimensional spectrums of disagreement, traced the epistemological genealogy of each position to its roots, and identified every point at which genuine synthesis was possible but missed. Here is what emerged.

The ontological divide is real, and it’s enormous. At the deepest level, Marcus and Demartini hold incompatible beliefs about the nature of evil itself. For Demartini, evil has no independent existence: it is an epistemological artifact, a label we apply to events when our awareness is too limited to perceive the balancing good. This is a classically monist position: at sufficient levels of awareness, the distinction between good and evil dissolves, because reality is fundamentally unified. For Marcus, evil is not a perceptual error but a real force, an active conspiracy, as he puts it, against love and life and flourishing. Some acts are wrong not because we haven’t seen their hidden benefits, but because they genuinely violate something intrinsic. This is a dualist position: the distinction between good and evil is cosmically real, not epistemically constructed.

This is not a disagreement that can be dissolved by better listening because the divergence is occurring deeper than facts at the level of metaphysics. These two frameworks generate different interpretations of the universe, and they have been doing so for the entire history of human civilization: in the tension between Advaita Vedanta and Zoroastrianism, between nondual Buddhism and Abrahamic theology, between Stoic equanimity and Christian moral urgency.

The conversation got most confrontational at the moment Demartini stated, with clinical calm, that there are “upsides to the murder of children.” Marcus’s response: “I think we’re going to have to stop here” was not mere emotional reactivity. It was the recognition of ontological bedrock. They had reached the place where the frameworks not only diverge but become mutually unintelligible.

And yet the deepest divide in the conversation was not the one they were fighting about.

The analysis identified something subtler and ultimately more resolvable: a temporal domain confusion that accounted for the majority of their apparent disagreement. Demartini’s framework, finding the hidden benefits, dissolving judgment, achieving equanimity, is a therapeutic framework. It operates, and works extraordinarily well, in the domain of after harm. His clinical record is real: 150,000 documented cases of people finding liberation through perspective shifts. Post-traumatic growth is not a metaphysical claim; it is an empirical phenomenon. People do find transformation after terrible things happen to them.

Marcus’s framework: some acts are wrong, we have obligations to stop them, the victim’s perspective matters independent of anyone else’s healing, is a preventive and protective framework. It operates in the domain of during and before harm. The child being tortured cannot be helped by knowing that their suffering will transform their family. The irreversibility of death creates an asymmetry that a framework of cosmic balance struggles to account for: you cannot balance a transaction in which one party ceases to exist.

Both frameworks are right. They are right in different temporal domains. The great tragedy of the conversation is that this distinction was almost articulated. Marcus gestered at it when he said, “I can appreciate the therapeutic value of finding meaning in tragedy while still believing some acts are fundamentally wrong,” but neither speaker developed it into the synthesis it contained.

The epistemological tree explains how every surface disagreement between Marcus and Demartini traces back to irreconcilable root commitments. Demartini’s monism generates a rationalist epistemology (true knowledge transcends emotional reactions), which generates a consequentialist ethics (evaluate by outcomes; seek balance), which generates a methodology of technique (systematically dissolve emotional charges). Marcus’s dualism generates an empiricist epistemology (we know through embodied encounter), which generates a deontological ethics (some acts are inherently wrong regardless of consequences), which generates a relational methodology (healing embedded in ethical context). Both systems are internally coherent. Neither is complete.

And they weren’t even using the same words. The semantic analysis revealed three critical instances of what could be called definitional drift, terms both speakers used throughout the conversation that meant opposite things to each of them:

“Evil” — for Marcus, a real cosmic force; for Demartini, a label for incomplete perception.

“Understanding” — for Marcus, comprehending why while still judging it wrong; for Demartini, seeing both sides until the judgment dissolves.

“Morality” — for Marcus, embodied knowledge transcending culture; for Demartini, a cultural construction evolved from primitive amygdala reactions.

When Demartini said “understand the pedophile,” he meant: dissolve your judgment of their acts. When Marcus heard “understand the pedophile,” he heard: comprehend their psychology while still knowing the acts are wrong. They were not disagreeing. They were not even agreeing to disagree. They were inhabiting different languages that only superficially resembled each other.

What the data ultimately supports is a position Marcus gestures toward but doesn’t fully inhabit: evil has genuine ontological status AND Demartini’s therapeutic insights are empirically valid AND these two truths belong to different domains. We need the moral framework to prevent harm and protect the vulnerable. We need the therapeutic framework to help people find meaning and liberation after harm has occurred. We need the epistemological humility to know which framework we’re in. And we need the relational sophistication to practice shadow work, to locate in ourselves what we find reprehensible in others, without using that recognition to dissolve our obligations to act and prevent harm.

This is not a compromise position. It is a more complete position. And the conversation pointed toward it, repeatedly, without quite arriving.

Why This Matters Now

Ideas have never been merely abstract. They shape behavior, behavior shapes culture, culture shapes institutions, and institutions shape the conditions under which billions of people are born and live and die. The stories a civilization tells itself about the nature of good and evil, about whether suffering has meaning, about what human beings owe each other when harm occurs, these stories have always had consequences.

But we are living in a moment where the stakes of getting this wrong have escalated to something bigger than human civilization.

We possess, today, the means of destroying all Life on Earth. The fractures in our worldviews are no longer merely academic. They appear in our political conflicts, the collapse of trust in institutions, and, most importantly, in our capacity to organize collective action to regenerate our planet.

What makes the Marcus-Demartini conversation paradigmatic is the same pattern playing out at scale across virtually every domain of public life: people who are genuinely grappling with real problems, using the same words, inhabiting incompatible frameworks, are generating conflict instead of creativity because we keep talking past each other.

As reality becomes more extreme in ways that are difficult to fully process, the ability of any single ideology or worldview to provide a complete account of what is happening diminishes. The accelerating complexity of the challenges we face is, in a sense, an evolutionary pressure on our epistemic culture. The worldviews that survive will be the ones that can actually account for more of what is real. The ones that can hold internal tension without collapsing into false certainties. The ones that have developed the capacity, as Freinach puts it, to be “both more sensitive and more informed.”

When two intelligent people with real commitment to understanding can spend two hours and leave more polarized than they began, we should not take that as evidence that dialogue is futile. We should take it as evidence that dialogue itself is a technology, one that we’ve forgotten how to utilize correctly.

What Dialectical Topology attempts to offer is not the right answer to the questions Marcus and Demartini were wrestling with. It reaches imperfectly towards a more complete view of the question itself.

All In for All Life

I am not, however, a neutral analyst. I am someone who believes, with full philosophical seriousness, that we are embedded in a shared reality, that the interbeing of all things is not a spiritual metaphor but a description of how existence actually works, and that this embeddedness generates obligations. Not abstract obligations, but the kind that ask something specific of you: that you become a better steward of the conditions that make life possible. That you develop the tools to see the raw and honest complexity of Life more clearly.

I am, as Christopher and Sophia Life like to say, all in for all life. That commitment is what drives the work of building infrastructure for better collective intelligence: the bioregional organizing, the governance experiments, the coordination tools, the philosophical frameworks. All of it is in service of the same basic wager: that if we can actually hear each other and the living world more completely, we are more likely to make choices that align with life rather than against it.

Dialectical Topology is a genuine attempt to make new realities possible by expanding the purview of what we can see when we sit across from someone who experiences reality differently than we do.

“For now we see through a glass, darkly,” but when the masks and walls around our hearts fall, we may come to learn what it truly means to see each other face to face.

The full meta-analysis — including the complete claims map, worldview spectrums, epistemological tree, dialogue flow analysis, and steelman arena — is available at dialecticaltopology.xyz.