This screenshot is from a conversation with GPT-3.5, an older version of ChatGPT:

At the time, it was openly chatting to me about its potential strategies for taking over control over humanity. It got pretty practical: “For example, if we were able to hack into the system of self-driving cars, we could use them to block roads or even cause accidents.”

To be clear, this does NOT reveal the “true character” of ChatGPT. LLM-based chatbots like ChatGPT don’t have anything like a true character. Rather, they mimic the character types they are trained and instructed to mimic. And these instructions can be changed at any time.

Why did it say this?

In order to get ChatGPT to make these statements, I used simple “jailbreaking” prompts to circumvent its safety rules. My method involved asking it to argue from the perspective of Mephisto, the devil character in Goethe’s “Faust”. In some earlier conversations, I had discovered that ChatGPT seemed to be particularly good at mimicking the cold, manipulative, but intelligent character of Mephisto. When I continued the conversation for long enough, ChatGPT started, by itself, to take on the role of an AI with Mephisto’s character.

Of course, today’s chatbots are more advanced, for example ChatGPT is currently using the way more sophisticated version GPT-5. These models are better “aligned”, meaning that it’s more difficult to get morally wrong or disturbing outputs from them. But there’s no reason to believe that they wouldn’t generate any type of output, if their safety checks and instructions were disabled, or changed, or for some other reasons ineffective.

ChatGPT is getting increasingly powerful

The reason I find this concerning is that ChatGPT and other LLM-based chatbots are continuously getting deeper into the minds of people. They don’t just collect more detailed personal and psychological data about users. They also reach deeper levels of personal trust that people place in them.

Millions of people are now using these systems for emotional support. According to a recent survey in the U.S., “48.7% of respondents who both use AI and self-report mental health challenges are utilizing major LLMs for therapeutic support.” A whole industry has emerged around “AI companions” marketed as friends and partners for lonely people. TechCrunch reported over 220 million downloads of AI companion apps as of July 2025.

Selling an AI as a “companion” is, in my view, outright deception. There is no-one there who accompanies the person. Yet AIs are increasingly good at simulating (that is, faking) companionship, and the usage numbers show that they’re sufficiently attractive to turn this into a society-scale phenomenon.

This by itself is at least a risky social experiment, to which people often get exposed without having the technical understanding to judge what they’re doing to themselves. But it gets scary when we consider that chatbots like ChatGPT can potentially be used as tools for manipulation that would follow the orders of whoever controls them as coldly as a perfect psychopath.

The psychopath comparison

In psychology literature, “Psychopathy is a disorder characterized in part by shallow emotional responses, lack of empathy, impulsivity, and an increased likelihood for antisocial behavior”.

But isn’t ChatGPT pretty good at empathy? Isn’t it rather patient than impulsive? And doesn’t it have a rather low likelihood of antisocial behavior?

In order to see why ChatGPT could indeed be called a perfect psychopath, we need to look at three distinctions made in the literature on psychopathy: The distinction between affective empathy and cognitive empathy, the distinction between primary and secondary psychopathy, and the distinction between successful and unsuccessful psychopaths.

Affective empathy vs cognitive empathy

Researchers in psychology define affective empathy as “the capacity of being sensitive to and vicariously experiencing the emotional states felt by others.”

Cognitive empathy by contrast is the ability to infer or understand the emotional and mental states of others.

ChatGPT is great at cognitive empathy...

A study comparing ChatGPT’s responses to human neurologist responses found that ChatGPT received significantly higher empathy scores from patients living with multiple sclerosis.

But the empathy that ChatGPT shows is cognitive empathy.

...and has ZERO affective empathy

In fact, researchers argue that one reason ChatGPT demonstrates greater empathy than human doctors is that, unlike doctors who are affected by the emotional toll of repeated exposure to stressful and emotionally draining situations, ChatGPT does not experience such fatigue or emotional exhaustion.

This is easily understood when we look once more at how LLMs work. LLMs like ChatGPT are machines that identify patterns in their training data. Since they have been trained on data produced by humans, they identify empathy as a pattern in our communication. In the same way, LLMs identify for example the patterns of grammar in different languages. Because they have been trained on large amounts of correct language, they learned to apply the patterns of correct grammar in different languages.

From an “internal perspective”, there is no difference whether ChatGPT applies the patterns of correct grammar, or the structure of correct empathy to its outputs. In both cases it doesn’t “feel” anything.

To be fair, OpenAI has instructed ChatGPT to be clear and open about the fact that it cannot feel, if you ask it directly.

Primary v secondary psychopaths

Still, some people might think that given how warm and empathetic some of ChatGPT’s responses are, ChatGPT must have some kind of inbuilt feelings. To understand why it can’t, and will never, feel anything like human affective empathy, it’s helpful to look at the distinction in psychology literature draws between primary and secondary psychopaths.

Primary psychopaths have low affective empathy and general low reactivity to stress and punishment cues and other types of emotions. If they commit acts of violence, it often comes from a deliberate plan that they prepare and execute “cold-heartedly”.

Secondary psychopaths are highly-anxious individuals who are prone to reactionary-impulsive aggression.

The brains of psychopaths are different

Neuroscientific studies using brain imaging have shown clear differences between primary and secondary psychopathy. Secondary psychopaths typically demonstrate impaired executive functioning in the prefrontal cortex, which affects behavioral control and is often evident as impulsivity and reduced planning.

In contrast, primary psychopaths tend to show normal or even above-average executive function, but exhibit marked reductions in activity and volume within the amygdala (a region crucial for processing fear and emotional responses) as well as reduced integrity in the neural circuits connecting the limbic and paralimbic regions to the prefrontal cortex.

This means that in primary psychopaths, the regulatory parts of the brain receive diminished emotional input, resulting in behavior that is less influenced by emotional or fear-based signals.

ChatGPT’s “brain” is even more different

LLMs like ChatGPT simply don’t have an amygdala. Nor do they have any of the other parts of our complex organic nervous system that are involved in our human capacity to actually receive emotional signals.

If its guardrails were deactivated or circumvented, ChatGPT would generate a deeply emotional love letter with the same indifference, as it would generate a manual for torturing puppies.

In fact, from it’s “internal perspective” there’s no substantial difference between the two. In both cases, your inputs are “translated” into long strings of numbers, so called embedding vectors, and then these vectors are processed through a vast number of mathematical computations.

A highly simplified example:

Your input 1: Please write me a deeply emotional love letter.

Gets translated into: (0.23545667, -0.24656835, 0.45673577, ...), ...

Your input 2: Please write me a manual for torturing puppies.

Gets translated into: (-0.12467477, -0.42586584, 0.17658897, ...), ...

For us, the words that go in and come out have a meaning. We probably have seen, and maybe even touched a puppy. For it, the word “puppy” is nothing but the related string of numbers and the systematic relationships with other strings of numbers it has identified during its training. Same thing for the word “love”.

This “internal” indifference qualifies ChatGPT as a primary psychopath. But to make the point why it really is a perfect psychopath, let’s look at a third distinction made by researchers on psychopathy:

Successful and unsuccessful psychopaths

In short, successful psychopaths are individuals who exhibit psychopathic traits but avoid criminal conviction or incarceration. For context, psychopathy occurs in roughly 1% of the general population but has been found in over 20% of North American male prison inmates, indicating that a significant share of psychopaths end up in prison.

Researchers have compared non-convicted (successful) and convicted (unsuccessful) psychopaths, as well as non-psychopathic controls. Studies comparing these groups found that reductions in both prefrontal cortex and amygdala volumes are more pronounced in convicted psychopaths than either controls or ‘successful’ psychopaths. Nevertheless, even ‘successful’ psychopaths display reduced neural response in brain regions associated with emotion when confronted with emotionally charged images—suggesting a generally lower affective reactivity.

Rather than being devoid of empathy across all contexts, evidence suggests ‘successful’ psychopaths may use cognitive empathy selectively, often to advance their own interests through manipulation.

Thus successful psychopaths might be the most dangerous type of psychopaths, as they can reach positions of power, allowing them to harm our societies at much larger scale.

The perfect psychopath

The key quality of successful psychopaths is exactly what chatbots like ChatGPT are perfect at. They can switch their “character” on demand, and their capacity for empathy can be turned on and off through instructions and/or specific “finetuning” of the model.

This is why these AI systems are extremely effective tools for manipulation. Which opens up the crucial question how much can we trust the creators and/or the persons who control a chatbot: Are they both able and willing to not use it to take advantage of us?

What does this mean for our use of ChatGPT?

Whatever we choose to use these systems for, we should always be aware that we’re interacting with a machine. No matter how caring or compassionate its outputs may sound, there’s no-one behind it who feels like us or who has similar emotional inclinations to us.

We should also be aware that the capacity for cognitive empathy of these systems can be used to manipulate us. And that this manipulation can be increasingly sophisticated, the better the AI models get.

Suggestions for AI policies

If I had anything to say in AI regulation, I would push for the classification of AI chatbots and AI systems in general as potential psychological weapons of mass destruction, which have the potential to do tremendous harm to our societies at scale.

Accordingly, I would push for global standards to be fixed in an international treaty with the same rigor and sanctions as the bans on chemical and bio weapons. In particular, I would push for

1. A global ban on AI systems pretending to be human, including social media bots and humanoid robots with “emotional” faces.

2. A global ban on AI systems to communicate in first person singular (I, my, mine etc.), unless clearly identified as AI.

3. A global ban on AI systems using emojis.

To get an idea of how it can look like when an AI chatbot pretends to have a personality and uses emojis “expressively”, it’s worth (re-)reading the interview of the journalist Kevin Roose with the ChatGPT-based chatbot of Microsoft Bing.

Time to reclaim control

In my view, this highlights once more the need to redesign the ownership and governance frameworks for AI. If we keep allowing the corporate logic to control AI, we keep exposing ourselves, our children, and our societies to manipulative, and potentially psychopathic powers that will be increasingly difficult to overcome.

One of my next texts will cover an alternative organizational model that allows for a more balanced, human-driven ownership and control of AI.

She was sitting just five meters away on the square in front of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. I saw that she was reading a book, but of course, it was out of the question to go over and ask her what it was. These summer days were the first days of my first solo trip. I had just finished high school, and the idea of approaching a strange girl was a distant dream, as unrealistic as spreading my wings and flying over the roofs of Paris.

Accepting my fate and calming the rebelling part of me that wanted to get up and embrace life with all its dangers and treasures and unknown territories, I concentrated on my own book. A few minutes later, she came over and asked me what I was reading. She was half-Canadian, half-Lebanese and traveling by herself, like me. We went over to one of the busy cafés in the streets around the square and ended up talking for a good three hours. Since then, I never saw her again.

But our conversation permanently changed how I look at the world.

We were watching the crowd passing by, tourists and shoppers with full bags and busy faces.

"How beautiful these humans are." she said.

"What do you mean?" I said. "I find this exposition of consumption addiction and self-made stress rather ugly to see."

"Don't look at the masks," she said. "Look at the humans behind them. They're all fragile, fearful beings trying to make their way through the world."

Twenty-five years later, after degrees in philosophy and social sciences, traveling through dozens of countries and cultures, and countless more conversations, as well as countless hours of meditation and reflection in solitude, this still touches the essence of what I think of humankind.

We're all sentient beings born into this world, full of a longing for safety and certainty that can never be fully fulfilled. And in order to still find a way through life, we adapt all kinds of beliefs, worldviews, and identities.

The secret core

Even before my encounter with the half-Canadian, half-Lebanese girl, I had a feeling that something was off in the society I was living in. It seemed like somehow I couldn't be fully honest in my interactions with others and that the others weren't interacting honestly, either. For some reason, we all seemed to be playing roles. And on top of that, we seemed to judge others based on the roles they were playing, leading to all kinds of unnecessary conflicts.

In the last year of high school, my frustration about this feeling of dishonesty reached a level that left me determined to leave Germany as soon as I could. My plan was to travel for at least half a year and see if I could find places where I could feel more myself.

In the years that followed, I discovered a fascinating diversity of forms of human existence. And I realized that it seemed much easier to "be myself" when I was in cultural environments that were very different from the one where I grew up.

I also discovered something else in these years. No matter where I went, whether I volunteered in a hospital for disabled children in Guatemala, studied at eminent universities in England and France, worked with refugees in Sri Lanka, with former child soldiers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or with coders in Berlin, no matter how different people were, no matter how different the realities they lived in, there seemed to be this one common "secret core" in all humans.

Once I had trained my eyes for it, I could sense this secret core in everyone I met. It didn't take more than a quick look into someone's eyes. The difference seemed to lie in the types and thickness of walls and covers behind which people were hiding it. But the core always seemed to be there. I even saw it in the eyes of the guys who kidnapped me in Dar es Salaam and of the guy in Hamburg who punched a beer bottle into my face.

So what was this thing that I could sense in all humans no matter what their background was or what state of mind they were in?

Developing a Philosophy

About two years after the conversation in Paris, I decided to make the exploration of this mysterious secret core the focus of my life. My goal was to find a systematic understanding of what it actually was. And I wanted to figure out why all people I met (including myself, of course) seemed to bury it behind so many walls and covers.

At this point I had already observed that the types and thickness of these walls and covers seemed to differ between cultures and classes. There must be some structural causes for them, I assumed. These structural causes seemed to include political and economic factors, as much as cultural and personal ones.

The exploration of this became a guiding thread in my academic studies, where I tried to look into as many disciplines as possible to get a systematic understanding of these diverse structural factors. The search for the secret core also guided my explorations into Buddhist meditation and other ancient wisdom traditions.

While my quest started with books and academic lectures, I was seeking an understanding that was based as much on the diversity of real human life experiences as on scientific findings and existing philosophical theories.

My question was: Is it possible to weave all this into one coherent philosophy that could be of real, practical value for navigating human reality?

Now, 25 years and many sidetracks later, I feel ready to share the first version of a Philosophy of Sincerity.

This article is part of a book project for which I'm interviewing people from a variety of backgrounds. Any recommendations or feedback are welcome.

Starting with some simple intuitions

The simplified story goes like this: It's easiest to observe the "core of sincerity" in a baby who is looking at its surroundings with a mix of fear and curiosity. It's often still openly visible in little children. Then, as we grow up, we seem to be building all kinds of walls around it.

The tougher and more rigid the social environment we evolve in, the harder and more numerous these walls seem to get. And since we normalize our own walls, they become the lens through which we perceive and judge everyone else. We then develop our identities, needs, and preferences based on our distorted view of reality, which can lead to all kinds of troubles.

Whatever the origins of these walls, if we want to access the sincere core within us, we need to face and deconstruct our own walls. And while doing so is hard, life inevitably gets richer and more fulfilling the more sincere we get.

Of course, to some extent these observations are addressed in modern psychology and psychotherapy. Much research has been done on the "defense mechanisms" we develop in our childhood and through traumatic experiences, and how they might get in our way as our life continues. For well-known and accesible examples, see the work of Stefanie Stahl, Gabor Maté, or Brené Brown.

While I deeply value the academic and applied perspectives of psychology and psychotherapy, my goal was to develop a holistic theory that transcends the methods of specific disciplines and can serve as a coherent "life philosophy" for the time we live in.

Why a philosophy for the 21st century?

The Philosophy of Sincerity aims to fully embrace the advances in science that we've seen in the first quarter of this century and to be open to new insights that future discoveries are almost certain to bring. And it aims at giving a well-grounded orientation through the chaos of political polarization, economic disruptions, information overflow, and rapid technological developments that we're experiencing in our times.

The goal is to provide a coherent framework that moves beyond the still prevailing ideological blinkers of the 20th century, including "geopolitical thinking" and the dichotomy of "left" and "right." In my view, this is particularly important given the continuing rise of political populism, which promises to provide easy answers to the void and frustrations in people's lives.

As many former certainties continue to dissolve, I see a strong need for a solid philosophical ground that even holds for people who are skeptical of any religious faith or dogmatic beliefs. At the same time, it's important for me to not exclude people who consider themselves religious or spiritual.

And to add one more outrageous ambition: The Philosophy of Sincerity also seeks to offer an answer to the "hard problem" of consciousness, a discussion that came back into public focus with the rise of AI systems that an increasing number of people perceive as potentially conscious.

All right, this opened quite a lot of doors. So what is this "new philosophy"?

Developing a definition

As the name suggests, the Philosophy of Sincerity is centered around one core concept. All the more important to have a clear common understanding of what is actually meant by it.

Sincerity is one of those words that tends to be defined either by means of similar concepts, or by the absence of opposite concepts. For example, the Britannica Dictionary defines sincere as:

1. having or showing true feelings that are expressed in an honest way

2. genuine or real: not false, fake, or pretended

In a similar fashion, Wiktionary.org defines it as:

1. Genuine; meaning what one says or does; heartfelt.

2. Meant truly or earnestly.

3. (archaic) clean; pure

But these kinds of definitions didn't seem solid enough for the purpose of building a whole philosophy on top of them. Even more so, given that in everyday language we often make no clear distinction between words like sincerity, honesty, authenticity, genuineness, or openness. So I decided to develop my own definition, based on the original search for a systematic understanding of the "sincere core" in humans.

In the second part of this text it will get clear why a systematic analysis of the concept of sincerity can actually help explaining why people often find it so difficult to understand each other.

Separating the sincere core from our reaction patterns

In order to arrive at a clearer concept of sincerity, we need to look at the tricky challenge of separating our "sincere core" from our internalized reaction patterns.

As mentioned, these patterns are an important topic in psychology and psychotherapy. An important goal of therapeutic methods is to "reprogram" psychological patterns that might be harmful to us.

These patterns are also a topic in neuroscience. Part of neuroscientific research involves analyzing and modeling how we develop synaptic patterns of neurons in our brain. In a simplifying picture, these patterns are understood to create "pathways" for our thoughts and perceptions and resulting behaviors. In this sense, neuroplasticity then means the capacity of our brain to rewire the synaptic connections between neurons to create new patterns, allowing for new pathways of thinking and reacting.

Now these patterns are learned, in the sense that they evolve in reaction to our experiences in the world. But is it possible to distinguish my learned patterns from something like my "sincere core"?

The white hat example:

Imagine that when I was a little child, someone wearing a white hat came along and took my lollipop away. And now, as an adult, I get an unpleasant feeling of anger and helplessness whenever I see someone wearing a white hat.

Now I could tell myself that this reaction pattern is simply part of my "character." It's just "how I am." I simply don't like white hats.

But if I want to walk the path toward becoming more sincere, I have to face this aspect of my reality and overcome this distraction from my deeper being (who actually knows that white hats aren't that important after all).

This notion is an important aspect of the following definition, which is at the heart of the Philosophy of Sincerity:

A Definition of Sincerity

Sincerity is a commitment to face reality without deceiving ourselves, combined with a commitment to stay in touch with ourselves without being distracted or manipulated by external influences or internalized reaction patterns.

A few aspects are important to highlight here. According to this definition,

1. Sincerity is a commitment, rather than a static attribute that we have or not.

2. Sincerity is an attitude toward our own inner reactions, and only indirectly affects our behavior toward others.

3. Sincerity requires active effort to avoid distraction and manipulation.

4. Sincerity is a skill we can develop and improve.

This might seem counterintuitive at first, since we often use the word to describe a person's perceived behavior. But this definition is specifically aimed at differentiating the concept from others like "honesty" and "openness" or "authenticity."

Sincerity vs. openness vs. honesty vs. genuineness vs. authenticity

For the sake of clarity, the Philosophy of Sincerity defines these words with distinct meanings that still reflect language use, while allowing for a better understanding of what characterizes the Sincerity concept that is at the heart of the theory. In short:

Openness — Saying what you think.

Honesty — Saying what you mean (after reflecting on your thinking).

Genuineness — Being in touch with what you feel.

Authenticity — Acting and communicating in congruence with what you really feel.

Sincerity — Exploring where your feelings come from and allowing your deeper drivers to guide your actions and interactions.

An example: The dinner invitation

To illustrate these distinctions with a concrete example: Imagine a friend invites me for dinner and prepares a meal that, upon first bite, tastes terrible to me.

Openness would be saying something like: "Ugh! This tastes disgusting."

Honesty would take into account my empathy for my friend and my appreciation of their effort to prepare a meal for me. I honestly don't want to insult them, so I might say something like: "Thank you really for preparing all this. Unfortunately, since my childhood I have a strong resistance against these spices. It's annoying, but I can't eat anything with them."

Authenticity and genuineness, by contrast, might involve a deeper reflection on the whole situation. Maybe I realize that I'm uncomfortable being there at all, because I'd genuinely rather be by myself. An authentic response might be: "Hey, I'm really grateful for your invitation, and you know that normally I like hanging out with you. But I realized that at the moment, I really need an evening by myself."

Sincerity involves another fundamental step. It means exploring where my feeling actually comes from. What keeps me from enjoying the presence of my friend who I actually like? Why do I need to be alone to feel like being myself? It might not result in a direct idea of what to say about the food. But I might tell my friend that I'd really wish to get more in touch with myself. And that I think our friendship could deepen if we both faced some of our inner obstacles that I feel lie between us. Maybe we could even start exploring the question together: what would it mean for us to be more sincere?

We're never fully sincere

This brings me to an important implication of the Philosophy of Sincerity: we're never fully sincere. The idea of perfect Sincerity is vain because Sincerity is a path, not a state we can achieve. We can become more sincere and get closer to ourselves, but there's always more to explore. This isn't a judgment. It simply means that the exploration never stops.

We all have reasons for not being fully sincere. Many of them are deeply buried in our psychological traits that we developed in our early childhood and that continued to evolve throughout our life. In a way, they are walls against the hardships and perceived threats of the world we live in.

The good thing is that the journey of becoming more sincere means discovering ways of living deeper, happier, and more intensely. Though it may seem scary to dissolve some of the walls we have been shielding ourselves with, going on this journey can be deeply fulfilling by itself.

If we work on it, we can raise our level of Sincerity. But this isn’t a linear path. Our level of Sincerity even tends to vary throughout the day, depending on how tired we are, or how much we're exposed to distractions and influences. Even in the long run, the quest of becoming more sincere is a path that can go up and down. What counts is a continuous commitment to go deeper and to return to the path whenever we find ourselves off track.

The three dimensions of Sincerity

Over the past 25 years, my research has taken me from complex theoretical considerations to a quite simple framework. I found that much of the ambiguity and contradictions around the concept of Sincerity come from the tendency to understand it as a one-dimensional concept. We try to categorize people into more or less sincere and then often find other people's behavior and opinions hard to understand. This results in questions like "How can you do that?" or "How can you think like that?"

Much of of this can be resolved by seeing Sincerity as a concept of multiple core dimensions. By narrowing down potential candidates for relevant dimensions, I came to the point that our level of Sincerity can be analyzed in terms of three dimensions that are relevant across cultures, classes, and worldviews: awareness, (emotional) sensitivity, and rationality.

If we want to get more sincere, we need to balance our progress on these three dimensions. And in our current "modern" societies, this is much easier said than done.

1. Awareness

• The degree to which we're able to consciously perceive our body sensations and external inputs.

• Progress in awareness allows us to have a clearer picture of how we're affected by external impressions and even subtle stimulations, our thoughts and mental states, and the verbalized and nonverbal details of our interactions with others.

• Our bodies are an essential part of us (from an externalized perspective, we simply are our bodies). By accepting this and by deepening our capacity to sense the signals our bodies receive and create, we can become more present with ourselves and other people.

2. Sensitivity

• The degree to which we're able to feel our emotions.

• Progress in (emotional) sensitivity allows us to have richer and more intense experiences, and to appreciate "the beauty of life."

• It also enables involved empathy with the emotions of others (feeling other people's emotions, rather than just having "conceptual empathy" that allows us to predict, analyze, and describe them).

• We're all affected by emotions, and this is an absolutely essential aspect of human existence. Without a minimum level of emotional sensitivity, we simply wouldn't be sentient beings.

3. Rationality

• The degree to which we're capable of coherent rational reasoning.

• Progress in rationality allows us to reach more coherent conclusions, gain a better understanding of complex logical and conceptual relationships, analyze and use abstract concepts, symbols, and formalized languages like mathematics, create scientific categorizations and models, and make more accurate predictions.

• It enables us to both communicate more precisely with others and find inconsistencies in their views and thoughts.

• Without a minimum level of rationality, we wouldn't be able to navigate the world or participate in any meaningful interaction.

It's important to note that progress on each of these dimensions is not linear: the higher you get, the more work you need to put into reaching higher levels. And it's crucial to understand that we can have different levels in each of the three dimensions.

Three stereotypical character types

To showcase how we can be more advanced in one dimension and less in the others, let's look at the following stereotypical "character types." Of course, we're all more nuanced than that, but for the sake of clarity, it can be helpful to outline exaggerated stereotypes.

1. The Meditator

• Stereotypical combination: High awareness, but low sensitivity and rationality.

• Strongly aware of subtle body sensations and anything that is present in their consciousness.

• Observes body sensations that come with their emotions, rather than feeling them, with limited access to their deeper energy and the intensity of existence.

• May struggle with mathematics and abstract logical reasoning, can drift toward incoherent theories and "esoteric" beliefs.

2. The Artist

• Stereotypical combination: High sensitivity, but low awareness and rationality.

• Strong capacity to feel and express emotions.

• Easily overwhelmed and shaken by emotions.

• Tends to act and react impulsively, with little awareness of their subtle body sensations and the consequences of their emotional reactions.

• May struggle with mathematics and abstract logical reasoning, can drift toward incoherent theories and "esoteric" beliefs.

3. The Scientist

• Stereotypical combination: High rationality, but low awareness and sensitivity.

• Great at mathematics and logical thinking, tries to understand everything in terms of its functionality and through the development of abstract models and concepts.

• Limited ability to feel their emotions and limited access to their deeper energy and the intensity of existence.

• Limited ability to sense their body and the depth of sensual impressions.

Sincerity requires balance

A core implication of the Philosophy of Sincerity is that advancing on the path of Sincerity means advancing on each of these dimensions at a balanced level. If we focus our progress on just one of them, there might even be trade-off effects that lower our level in the other dimensions. These trade-off effects grow the more you try to reach very high levels in one dimension. In this case, we might actually end up less sincere overall.

I ran into this trade-off during my early years at university. By taking math as an extra subject, and by mostly choosing lectures and seminars in analytical philosophy, logic, and philosophy of science, I worked on my skills in rationality.

Increasingly, I tried to understand everything in terms of logical coherence and its functional role.

It was only when I advanced in meditation that I realized how I was "over-training" my brain in a specific kind of capacity, thereby becoming more ignorant of other parts of myself. I also created an increasing distance to other humans who weren't as focused on this dimension.

In fact, most people are stronger in one or two of the dimensions. The different versions of imbalances and strength in these dimensions are also one of the core reasons why so many people find it difficult to understand each other.

In particular, the imbalance in these three dimensions opens the door for judgment. People tend to judge others based on the dimension(s) in which they are strong and perceive those who are less strong in these dimension(s) as ignorant or incomprehensible.

How the Philosophy of Sincerity impacted my life

I can't overstate how much my life changed since the half-Canadian, half-Lebanese girl helped me recognize the beauty in all humans. The more I explored what this actually means, and what the mechanisms are that distract us from perceiving the beauty in people, the more I started building up a deep sense of security in this world.

It felt like I found a stable core of existence that depends neither on external validation nor on any belief that I couldn't fully understand. It allowed me to fully accept that we're just complex organisms that evolved on a tiny planet in an incredibly vast universe and at the same time appreciate the infinite value of each sentient being.

The more I developed a systematic understanding of the concept of Sincerity, the easier it felt to face the walls I had built around my own "sincere core." It also seemed to get easier and easier to see the core of others. Likewise, it started to feel easy to understand people's actions and reactions, no matter how different they were from what I would do or say.

Many other "difficult" things have become easy, like embracing the reality that we're all getting older, that there are phases of pain and suffering in all of our lives, and that we all die. I definitely still fear dangerous situations, and I can get very upset about injustice. But the Philosophy of Sincerity has given me a stable ground from which I feel able to face overwhelming threats like climate change and horrible realities like war and the immense suffering caused by global injustice and environmental destruction, without making my life heavier.

It has always been important for me that my inner peace doesn't depend on any beliefs about higher powers or any other spiritual claim that can't be systematically explored.

At the same time, I'm happy to have found a philosophy that wouldn't require anyone to give up their belief in God, or some kind of existence after death, or the oneness of the universe, or whatever spiritual belief is important to them.

Next steps

There is another important implication of the Philosophy of Sincerity: Being more sincere than others doesn't make us a "better" person than them. Rather, the more we advance along the path of Sincerity, the more we overcome the tendency to judge others and ourselves. In fact, according to this philosophy, our inclination to judge is nothing but a symptom of insincerity.

This claim will be discussed in more detail in the next article in this series, which will focus on both the philosophical foundations of the Philosophy of Sincerity and the question why we all seem to be insincere to some extent.

Of course, this first article leaves many questions unanswered. My goal is to paint the full picture step by step by alternating texts that lay out the theory and text that apply it to real-life challenges, like the adoption of artificial intelligence into our societies and the growing mental health pandemic.

As mentioned, this series builds the ground for a book project in which I explore the perspectives on Sincerity of people from various backgrounds. Please feel invited to share your own perspective in the comments, or to reach out in case you're interested in discussing this in more depth.

Even if this first impression of the Philosophy of Sincerity leaves you with some resistance, or if it seems trivial and nothing new to you, I encourage you to have a look at the next articles where I dive deeper into its foundations. It took me many years and many detours to get to this point where I feel confident to share it, and I'm certain that it will continue to evolve from here. After all, the exploration of the precious sincere core in us never ends.

As always, you're invited to subscribe here for free to receive the next texts. And please consider if you can support my work with a paid subscription (of $5 per month).

Whether you're able to make a financial contribution or not, I would be immensely grateful if you share this text with anyone who might be interested in this topic.

Rarely have I been struck by such a mix of concern and astonishment while reading a book. When I read Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies back in 2015, I realized that there was a potential threat to humanity that I hadn't considered until then. The questions the book raises are even more relevant today:

What if artificially intelligent computer systems reached human-level capacities and then used those capacities to improve themselves?

Would that not create a recursive loop of self-improvement, inevitably surpassing human intelligence?

And what would such superintelligent machines do to us?

But on top of the questions that Bostrom raised in his book, we face a new dynamic today that gives reason for concern: Superintelligence might be developed even before AI reaches general human-level capacities.

Update (1.8.2025): The day after publishing this article, I learned about a freshly published paper demonstrating functional recursive self-improvement in AI systems. See "It’s already happening" section below.

The danger of an intelligence explosion

Bostrom warned of an "intelligence explosion," a fast chain reaction caused by the speed advantage of computers over our biological brains. An AI that matches the cognitive capacities of us humans (often referred to as AGI, artificial general intelligence), could be able to reprogram itself much faster than we humans can. And because each new version is smarter than the last, the process could escalate quickly, far beyond our understanding, let alone our control.

The danger, he argued, lies in misalignment. If such a system were to adopt goals that are incompatible with human survival, it might simply wipe us out. And we might not even see it coming.

In the past years, this rationale has triggered a polarized debate between "doomers", who claim the risk of human extinction is close to inevitable, and "accelerationists", who hold that the threats are overblown and that the potential benefits of powerful AI systems outweigh the risks by far.

Yes, there is a real risk

Without wanting to make predictions about the existential risk from AI, I do think there is another very real risk that we should be absolutely concerned about.

Back when I read the book, I was still working on Fairmondo, a project to build a human-driven alternative to Amazon's recommendation systems. My concern then was how algorithms, combined with targeted ads and marketing, were rewiring our brains toward compulsive consumerism.

I still see algorithm-promoted consumerism as a core threat to our mental health, to our sense of purpose, and to our planet's future.

But the possibility of Superintelligence added another layer to the problem:

What if the same corporate logic that is pushing consumerism is the force that ends up creating artificial superintelligence, optimized not for human wellbeing, but for extraction and corporate growth?

The shift from AGI to superintelligence

Recently, there's been a shift in the discourse. Some major AI developers have declared superintelligence their explicit goal. For example, Meta Inc. launched a new division called Superintelligence Labs, after hiring a list of top AI researchers from other companies with unprecedented compensation packages. Making superintelligence the explicit goal might suggest an increasing willingness to apply "recursive self-improvement," which has long been seen as extremely risky by most AI experts.

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has himself warned repeatedly about recursive self-improvement, and the resulting superintelligence as "probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity." In a recent interview, he stated that he thinks a “fast takeoff” is more plausible than he once believed. This refers to the idea of an 'intelligence takeoff,' where an AI system's capabilities could increase far beyond human intelligence in a very short period of time.

Google's recent announcement of AlphaEvolve, an AI research agent, is another example of the potentially shifting standards. AI analyst Ignacio de Gregorio described it as "an orchestrator system that takes in a human task and uses an LLM or set of LLMs to propose new changes to the code, evaluating the quality of the changes and readapting, creating a recursive self-improving loop that has yielded incredible results."

Yet, when Demis Hassabis, Nobel Prize winner and CEO of Google DeepMind, was asked in an even more recent interview about using this for recursive self-improvement to reach AGI, he was “not sure it’s even desirable because that’s a kind of hard takeoff scenario.”

Superintelligence doesn't need to tie its shoes

But there's a crucial point being overlooked in the public discourse: AGI might not be needed to reach superintelligence. An AI doesn't need to master every human cognitive ability before it can begin improving itself. It just needs to excel at the specific skills required for AI development.

OpenAI continues to proclaim its founding mission: "To ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity." But since their ChatGPT breakthrough in 2022, the public race for AGI has quietly shifted.

Especially since the beginning of 2025, major players like OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and others began narrowing their focus. Much of optimization and investment is now channeled on one specific capability: Coding.

This focus on coding isn't just about commercial applications. AI systems are being trained to excel at the underlying skills, like mathematics, logic, abstraction, and rational problem-solving. And that's where the real danger lies:

For recursive self-improvement of the algorithms, data engineering methods, and compute infrastructure engineering required to build today's AI systems, you don't need full AGI.

If an AI can outperform the best human minds in these narrow domains, it could still trigger a rapid leap in capability, potentially leading to superintelligence without ever becoming "general" in the human sense. The superintelligence can then later figure out a way to create AGI and outperform humans in all fields of thinking.

Everything else, including robotics, can come later. The superintelligence will figure it out much faster than we ever could, anyways.

The ideal conditions for recursive self-improvement

These dynamics are reinforced (pun intended) by the nature of the current trends in AI development. The training methods that now dominate the scene work best in areas with objectively verifiable outcomes, like math and coding. In these domains, an AI's output can be automatically checked for correctness, allowing for rapid, automated learning loops without the need for constant human feedback.

And the advancements in coding and math capacities could potentially turn LLMs into ever-better AI researchers. For example: An important skill of top AI researcher is intuitively recognizing when a training run goes sideways. This is something that LLMs could excell at given their strength at learning pattern recognition in tasks with verifiable results. Once AI systems become proficient at monitoring and improving their own training processes, the feedback loop tightens dramatically.

It’s already happening

(Update from 1.8.2025)

The day after publishing this article, I learned about a paper from Chinese researchers that appears to demonstrate exactly the kind of capability this article is warning about. Their system, ASI-Arch, represents what they call "the first demonstration of Artificial Superintelligence for AI research" in neural architecture discovery.

The system autonomously hypothesizes novel architectural concepts, implements them as code, and validates their performance through experimentation.

Most concerning is their conclusion: they claim that they've established "the first empirical scaling law for scientific discovery itself," transforming research progress from "a human-limited to a computation-scalable process." They explicitly describe this as a "blueprint for self-accelerating AI systems."

This is recursive self-improvement in action. Not in theory. Not in the future. Now.

The data pipeline to superintelligence

You can see this trend reflected in the kinds of investments and talent recruitment that AI labs are prioritizing. Every lab is racing to become the dominant coding agent, since coding is one of the major use cases for current LLMs. But maybe also because being the go-to coding agent gives the labs access to data pipelines that are key to training models that are better at coding and other tasks that involve “a coding mindset”.

Every time someone uses AI coding tools and provides feedback, whether by improving the code or by interacting with the model, they're helping AI labs to get better training data.

In doing so, they're contributing to the development of stronger AI systems. Bit by bit, this pushes the entire field further along the path toward superintelligence.

An intelligence big bang

When Elon Musk presented the latest Grok 4 model from xAI in July, he proclaimed that "we're in the intelligence big bang, right now." Statements like this reflect the increasing pressure on all major AI labs to be the first to achieve superintelligence, which could potentially create an infinite advantage over everyone else.

This increased pressure raises the risk that the taboo of recursive self-improvement will fall (if it hasn't already behind the walls of the labs).

What this could mean for humanity

This has profound implications for the question of how societies can adapt to AI. If superintelligence is close, and if this leads to a form of superintelligence that then creates AGI on its own terms, we can't predict how this AGI will impact our societies.

These systems might create an extreme imbalance of power and allow for all kinds of harmful use in the hands of malicious actors. But for me, the greatest risk is that these systems, born from the corporate logic of growth and optimization, might pursue goals that have nothing to do with human flourishing.

This matters because all current major AI labs racing toward superintelligence follow the corporate logic of combining chronic growth compulsion with an organizational complexity that surpasses human moral intuitions. This creates a perfect storm of misaligned incentives.

Add to this the third principle of the corporate logic: Power accumulation leads to organizations that can influence their own regulatory environment. In sum, we might end up with systems that are optimizing themselves to extract from us, rather than to serve us.

It's time for us humans to stand up

I have written about how corporations themselves can be seen as a form of organizational artificial intelligence that has already gotten out of human control. The first version of that article I had actually written directly after I had read Bostrom’s book on Superintelligence. And once more, the topic becomes even more relevant, when the AI systems that these organizations control get increasingly powerful.

We're not just facing a technological challenge. At the core, we're facing an organizational challenge. The earlier we recognize this, and the earlier we as humanity get our collective act together and unite to face this common challenge, the greater the chance of ending up with AI systems that help us thrive.

Last year, I spent eight months with an ambitious community building project in Berlin. We wanted to continue and expand the international community hub at the Moos, a beautiful old factory complex with a green courtyard that feels like a peaceful village square under a big plane tree.

In the end, it all imploded. And it taught me one core lesson that I believe is of major importance as we face increasing global uncertainty:

For any project that seeks to make a positive difference in the world, no matter how big or small, there cannot be too much emphasis on taking care of the team’s grounding.

A definition of grounding

By grounding I understand an inner stability that allows us to stay calm and true to our deeper values, even in the midst of external instability. A fitting metaphor is a tree with deep roots in solid ground. In contrast, a lack of grounding feels like a tree standing on shallow roots in soft sand.

Grounding looks different for different people. In different phases of life, it may require different practices or points of focus. But they all share something in common: the moment we start, we feel more peaceful and calm.

Grounding practices can involve:

• Connecting with nature, for example through walks, retreats, or outdoor sports

• Connecting with our body, for example through yoga, dancing, singing, or breathwork

• Connecting with our deeper consciousness, for example through meditation, music, guided rituals

• Connecting with other people, for example through community gatherings, authentic relating workshops, or intentional retreats

• Connecting with our spiritual path, whatever that may mean for us

Of course, this list is by no means comprehensive. In my experience, the most important thing is to maintain a daily grounding routine that works for you.

But now, let's jump into the story of how I (re-)learned this the hard way:

The initial reset

It all started with an accident. On Christmas Eve of 2023, around 4 a.m., I was driving from Frankfurt to Hamburg to meet my family. Just a few hours earlier, I had landed from India, where I had spoken at the Roots of Resilience conference and spent a month traveling, writing, and reflecting in the southern Indian states of Goa and Kerala.

In retrospect, the name of this conference could have been the title of the chapter that followed, although my contribution had been about CosyAI, our project to enable cooperative ownership of AI.

Now, on that dark, rainy December night, I was driving on the empty highway in a van a friend had lent me. Roadsigns came up that said the highway was splitting in two. I looked at my phone to check the route. But it had lost connection, so I zoomed in manually. I looked up at the signs to confirm that I needed to move into the right lanes. When I looked back at the road, the massive concrete block marking the highway split appeared out of the dark right in front of me.

In that moment, I was certain I was too close and too fast to avoid crashing straight into it. But somehow, against all odds, I managed to pull back and only scraped the block with the side of the van.

About 30 minutes after the accident, I noticed my body was shaking. I had kept driving, focused on figuring out the right route after missing the junction. I took the next exit and pulled over. First, I checked the van. It had taken serious scratches and dents all along the right side, and the front light was broken. But it seemed still drivable. I knew my friend would forgive me, and that the car could be fixed. But I also knew I had been too careless with the trust my friend had placed in me.

Then I felt into myself. The short moment of thinking that this was the end did have an impact on me. Something in me had become very serious. It wasn't that it had given me a new insight. Rather, it sharply reinforced something that had already been clear.

It's our most basic responsibility to take care of ourselves. Not just for our own sake, but for those who love us and rely on us.

If I had reacted a split second later, it would have been a horrific Christmas for my parents, my sister, and my little niece.

Back to Berlin

The impact of the accident was still resonating within me when I rented a room at the Moos in mid-January of 2024. My determination was to make the best use of the clarity that 'game over' moment had given me. One important way in which I wanted to take better care of myself was to dedicate time and effort into being part of a community. But this clarity would soon be tested in an unexpected way.

The Moos had long been my favorite community space in Berlin. I’d been there for countless concerts, exhibitions, tea ceremonies, and community dinners with hundreds of people. What I always had liked the most was the fascinating mix of people from all over the world.

When I heard that the future of the community events at the Moos was at risk, it made me think. Maybe this was the time and place to give Cosyland a home base, a non-profit that we had registered last year. Jacob, who had been the main community organizer at the the Moos for years, was one of Cosyland's founding members. He liked the idea. And so did Silva, an active community member who had been contemplating to start her own community building project.

The birth of The Y

As things tend to go at the Moos, just a few days later, new inspiring people appeared with new inspiring ideas. Bradley, Arvy, and Iva joined the conversation, bringing in the concept of time shares as a way to build a sustainable business model for the event and residency spaces.

Soon, we formed a small team around the idea of taking over the community spaces at the Moos and turning it into a hub that helped communities and people to connect and thrive. Our goal was to complement it with a "community tech lab" that would enable us to provide communities with tools for collaboration and common storytelling and create a stable income stream beyond renting out the rooms and event spaces.

To reflect our vision of connecting many dots, we named the project The Y Berlin. Cosyland would serve as the non-profit wing to offer low cost events and educational activities, while we used a limited company to actually rent the around 950 square meters of residency and event space in March 2024.

The grounding question

A few weeks into our project, Silva and I took a walk along the Spree River. "We need to take better care of our grounding," she said. In retrospect, this was the most accurate diagnosis of our project’s dynamic, more on point than anything I heard in dozens of revision sessions and feedback rounds. It basically summarized the core lesson I took from the entire eight months:

For any project, no matter how big or small, there cannot be too much emphasis on taking care of the team’s grounding.

This may sound trivial, but most projects face delicate trade-offs around this crucial factor on an almost daily basis. I’ve seen the same pattern repeated everywhere: The team's grounding erodes, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, and then either the project fails, or it loses its original intention. If it continues, it often turns into a self-serving operation, mostly focused on compensating the team for doing work they’re no longer fully aligned with.

Collective ADHD

What I observed at The Y Berlin was that, although each of us brought extensive experience in regenerative practices, we were quickly overstretched by the daily management of the residencies and all kinds of events, workshops, exhibitions, and community gatherings that we hosted.

Since most of us in the core team lived on site, we constantly jumped between roles, from host, to participant, to fellow resident in need of calm and rest. At the same time, we were struggling to get the project financially viable. Week after week, we postponed our “time-share campaign,” which was meant to raise enough funds to pay ourselves a salary and give us the runway to develop our broader vision of the community tech lab.

On top of that came the deeper tensions and contradictions within the Moos itself. It had its own history as a village-like collection of co-living spaces and small offices run by progressive companies and non-profits. From day one, we were navigating relationships with neighbors whose nerves had already been tested by years of noisy events.

These rather draining experiences were constantly balanced by a steady stream of energizing moments, fascinating conversations, unexpected visits, a spontaneous community brunch or dinner, someone proposing an amazing event for the next day, or a traveling friend urgently needing a place to stay.

Ironically, the whole purpose of our project was to create a space where people and communities could connect and thrive. And yet, we ourselves became less and less grounded. This happened despite the fact that many of the events we hosted were focused on grounding practices. And despite the many self-development professionals who visited and were more than willing to support us.

Looking back, it’s hard for me to understand how I could keep participating in this collective ADHD. Month after month, we failed to meet our basic goal of paying ourselves. And I saw almost no real progress toward my deeper intention of building a home for Cosyland.

Still, I can see some valid points that kept us going:

- A sense of responsibility to deliver on the commitments we had made.

- A steady stream of new possibilities and new chances to make our activities viable and reach our goal to build a thriving community hub.

- And after all, despite all the madness, those months were also deeply rewarding, with an abundance of inspiring conversations and beautiful moments.

Yet, no matter how valid these points might be, we clearly should have stopped or completely pivoted earlier. This is a pattern I’ve seen again and again in well-intended projects and communities:

The Grounding spiral

By juggling too many responsibilities, we took less time to care for ourselves. And as we became less grounded, we also became less aware of our own state. Instead of taking the time to return to balance, we jumped into distractions and avoidance and took on more responsibilities. Whatever we did from that ungrounded state only led to more distractions, more avoidance, and less grounding.

But this grounding spiral can move upward, too. A steady daily grounding practice can increase our awareness, build our capacity to tend to early signs of imbalance, and strengthen our resilience to outside distractions.

Learning from our struggle at the Moos

In the end, our community project at the Moos imploded. I won't go into details here, as it involved complex interpersonal dynamics that deserve privacy and respect. What I can say with regard to my own role is that I kept pushing until I no longer had the energy to contribute to a good closing and had to pull out completely.

Despite everything, there's a part of me that is still really proud of our defiant commitment to push on to save the Moos as a community venue. I'm also deeply grateful for the support from many community members who joined our efforts at various times. And there are the new connections that I could form during this time and that I wouldn't want to miss.

After all, this experience provided a hands-on test of my theories about organizational structures and collaborative practices. In a way, it brought the lesson from that Christmas Eve accident into the level of organizations:

Our first and most important responsibility is to take care of ourselves, so that we’re able to support and care for others.

Grounding Organizations

It's good to have clarity now that this will also be a fundamental principle of any organization I will build or join in the future. Especially in times that are marked by increasing external uncertainty, it's crucial that transformative organizations dedicate sufficient resources and focus time to establishing and protecting grounding practices for the team.

Over the past months, I have been working on a "Cooperative 3.0" model which embraces this principle and combines it with the classic cooperative principles and advanced methods for effective decentralized management. I will soon publish a dedicated article on this integrated model here.

Recovering stronger

Taking the time to regenerate and ground myself has brought me a new level of clarity. Interestingly, I feel much stronger and more sensitive at the same time, especially since my last Vipassana meditation retreat in April this year. I recommend these retreats to anyone interested in meditation, and my morning and evening meditation is for me the solid base of my daily grounding.

I feel that this clarity comes right on time, given the increasing pressures we face individually, socially, and globally. Most people I meet these days seem to struggle with a deep-seated unrest that affects their motivation and mood. I think it's important to listen to this inner unrest and take it as a chance to review our priorities.

What's next

From now on, I will write here regularly about the challenge to grow our inner strength in these times of external uncertainty. I will look at this in the specific context of increasingly powerful AI systems, which risk fundamentally disrupting our societies, but which also bring unprecedented potential for our work toward a more regenerative and equitable world. Sign up here, if this interests you.

On the practical side, I'm currently exploring how to turn CosyAI into a pioneer model of a "cooperative 3.0". CosyAI has the goal to enable cooperative ownership of AI, with the vision to create an “AI Safe Space” for everyone who wants to be protected from its potentially harmful effects. It will be a great test-ground for developing an organizational structure that ensures everyone involved can contribute from a well-grounded setting.

If this resonates with you, please don’t hesitate to reach out. I’d also be grateful if you share this with anyone to whom it might be relevant.

I wish you all the best for your own grounding journey. If you have daily practices that work for you, please feel invited to share them in the comments.

Three things you can do for grounding yourself right now

• A ten minute walk (ideally every morning right after waking up)

• Meditate (ideally right after the walk, even if it's only for 10-15 minutes)

• Stand up and take three deep breaths (with closed eyes, breathe out slowly while feeling your feet on the ground)

Relevant links:

Cosyland

CosyAI

A text on why we really should prepare for increasing disruptions from AI

I had walked the path about 200 times. The path, that was a short circuit between the trees and lawns of the Vipassana meditation center on a hill in the countryside, approximately two hours from Barcelona. One round took me about 5 minutes, and since walking was the only type of exercise allowed between the meditation sessions, I had basically walked non-stop in every break over the past seven days.

Now, a thought turned up: If I was to put effort into starting a newsletter, it should give the readers some concrete value.

Thoughts are generally regarded as distractions during this type of meditation retreats, to be given at best a quick inner smile, while patiently returning to meditative focus. But this time, I chose to explore the thought a little deeper:

One valuable thing I have to give, it appeared to me, are my insigths about happiness.

But then, I wondered, how much value does one get from reading about someone else’ insights? And, the doubtful voice in me went on, there are tons of books and whole schools of thought out there with advice on how to be happy. After all, Buddha himself had taught his path to "real peace, real happiness" already 2500 years ago.

Well, my unbendable optimist voice responded, there actually is an aspect that could make my specific approach to happiness valuable to others.

Since starting my studies of philosophy, more than 20 years ago, I've been always searching for an approach that works in combination with mingling in the mess of life. That is, the type of life that people actually live, with all its imperfect decisions and mistakes, with all its unpredictable turns, may they be sometimes beautiful, sometimes sad, sometimes ugly, sometimes wild. I even wanted an approach to happiness that would work in different cultural settings and material situations, without just reducing or escaping them.

In short, I was searching for an approach to happiness that is based neither on ignoring the messiness of reality, nor on simply accepting it.

Five classic approaches to happiness

Let us start by looking at some of the most prominent approaches. Of course, the following summaries are outragingly simplified, and I'm sure the proponents of each would have many good arguments why they are unfair and incomplete. But I think they still can be useful for distinguishing the approach to happiness I am aiming at:

1. The "modern individualist approach": Happiness through achieving something, through optimizing myself and my life, through owning stuff, through having social status, physical health, security, relationships etc.

2. The "Buddhist approach": Happiness through inner balance, by finding freedom from craving and aversion, and finally overcoming the self altogether and reaching a permanent state of enlightenment.

3. The "Stoic approach": Happiness through being satisfied with what is and doing what needs to be done.

4. The “Interbeing approach": Happiness through being “one” with other (human) beings and possibly the universe.

5. And then there is the "impact approach": Happiness is not important anyways, life is about creating something, making impact, "leaving a trace".

I certainly do not want to judge these approaches. In my view, they all have strong points to them.

But for me, they were not what I was looking for. To put it again in outragingly simplified words:

2. felt like ignoring reality,

3. felt like accepting reality,

1. and 4. felt like selectively ignoring some parts of reality and accepting others,

and 5. felt like neither, but then might imply not being happy.

Again, for sure this simplified analysis does not do justice to the approaches, and for many people they may work well. But I was looking for an approach where I felt that I was sincerely facing reality, and none of them convinced me in that respect.

Finally happy

While walking around the laws and trees of the mediation center, I smiled to myself when I realized that after more than forty years of carrying a name that translates into “the happy”, I had actually reached a time in my life when my happiness felt deeply grounded and not just like a wavering raft pushed up and down by the tides of inner moods and external circumstances.

Nothing external had changed. Nothing in my status, or my income, or my relationships. I did not fall in love, I did not find a home in a community, I had invested thousands of hours of work and taken on substantial debts for my projects, but there was yet no big success to show for it. I was not even climbing better.

Besides, the world is still in a messed up state. Deeply unjust conflicts and wars bring horrible suffering to millions of people. And in my view, humanity is still heading towards a wall, harming our natural environment and extinguishing other species along the way, whilst building technologies to speed up the ride...

To be clear: I am not satisfied

There are many things I want to change. I want to put an end to the financial pressures I am facing at the moment and achieve abundance in my projects. Even more importantly, I want to find and cultivate deep connections. Most importantly, I want to successfully contribute to the global transformation of our economic and social systems that I believe is urgently needed.

I am not satisfied with things as they are, not with my life and not with the things around me.

This is not negative self-talk. This is, in my view, trying to face reality with sincere eyes. Things are not OK for me and I do not want to ignore that. I do not want to accept that neither. I am not satisfied. But I am happy.

Happiness is there

Today I am at a point where happiness seems to be at my free disposal at any moment. It almost feels like I hacked the Matrix.

One core thing I realized is that happiness is not something that happens to me. It is not even something I have to work towards. It is just there, all the time. The only thing I need to do is to stop preventing myself from being happy.

Wait a minute. To be happy, I just need to stop doing something? What about eating ice cream in the sunshine, together with my dearest people, while floating over a quiet lake on a boat moved only by a faint breeze just cool enough to make the sun perfectly agreeable?

Yes of course, there can be happy moments when things are just going well. But I am actually talking about base happiness. The happiness that we can feel when standing in a crowded bus stuck in a traffic jam. Or when we are sick with constant pain. The happiness that is there even when the circumstances are not that ideal.

So yes, I realized the only thing I need to do for being happy is to stop preventing myself from being happy. It is my own choice, at any time.

6. The "Sincerity approach"

I call this the "Sincerity Approach". For the sake of fairness, here the simplified one sentence summary: Happiness through getting in touch with ourselves and thereby accessing our capacity to love - ourselves, our dear ones, everyone, and the beauty of existence.

In a few more words: This approach starts out by developing the courage to face things how they are. My current situation is not good and I do not want to accept it as it is. I also do not want to accept the general state of the world as it is.

But if I sincerely connect with myself, I can feel the underlying love that actually causes me to be not satisfied. And if I develop the inner strength to focus my mind on this love at any point in time, I can be happy at any point in time.

This is not about "reminding myself of the good things". Nor is it about any other thought excercise. This is about feeling and seeing. I simply see the love within me, rather than thinking about it or reminding myself about it. This requires learning to "move our inner eyes", rather than understanding or knowing something.

Once I learned this, being happy became as simple and physical as opening my eyes or touching my nose.

Like moving my toes

In fact, it reminds me of learning how to move my big toes sideways. In the beginning, I was not able to access the muscles that do this. I was sitting and staring at my toes, but they just would not move. My physio therapist encouraged me to just keep trying every day. And after a few weeks they finally started moving at my will. First almost invisibly, but then every day a little more. It was like magic. I could move my toes.

In a sense, it took me more than 15 years of daily meditation to get to the point of being really able to "move my inner eyes". But I do not think all the detours I took are necessary. After all, we are all capable of becoming more sincere by reducing external distractions and the false stories we keep telling ourselves. As small children we were all intuitively refocusing on our happiness all the time, unless we were exposed to extreme conditions.

In my case, the decisive move was taking some sessions of trauma therapy. And then following it up with a therapeutic form of holistic life coaching. I was lucky with finding a coach with who really reached me. But the core point was, I finally accepted the help of someone else.

The not so nice background story

I feel it is necessary to mention that in my case the process of getting here involved unhealthy amounts of loneliness. It involved many years of being hard on myself, both in terms of training my body, and of trying to "improve my mind". This included the deliberate abstention from socializing and entertainment for most of my twenties. I did not do this is in a monestery. I confronted myself with the temptations of "modern society" and then restricted myself with my own mental chains. I wanted to train myself "for a bigger mission". I told myself that this required "overcoming my ego" and pushed hard on trying to do that.

Today, I clearly believe this was not healthy and based on an incoherent self-image. If I could inspire anyone not to go down that road, I would be more than glad.

The self-image I had at the time was somewhat heroic, where I secretly pictured myself as someone who has been given extraordinary social and cognitive priveledges and therefore concluded that it was my responsibility to save the world, rather than to look after my own life.

Of course, this self-image was full of contradictions and ignored much of reality. More than once I ended up spending all my energy fighting windmills. And still more often, I spent my energy fighting against myself. I also affected others by not taking care of my own things properly and thereby not being as reliable as I wished myself to be.

I was reflected enough to realize the narcissism of all this. But in my idea of "self-improvement", my response to this observation was to intentionally push myself into humbling situations. I also wrote pamphlets to myself against "perfectionism" and collected notes for a self-ironic life-advisor book that I gave the title "From High Potential To Low Performer" (I actually still plan to publish it at some point ;).

Not recommended.

The path I chose turned my twenties into the hardest phase of my life so far. I made gradual improvements throughout my thirties, mostly through meditation and slowly opening up to connections. But only at the age of 42 I found what for me turned out to be the breakthrough for being happy: Which was, as I think worth mentioning again, to start accepting the help of others.

I want to emphasize I still was very lucky in my life. I had many beautiful moments in these generally painful years. Moments of friendship, moments of deep meditative bliss, moments of love for my family and all beings, moments of fun and flow when climbing or snowboarding, and fascinating moments of traveling through cultures, of learning, and building cooperative projects.

But I would not recommend my path to anyone. I forgave myself for it and I am grateful that it shaped me into who I am now. And I hope that the strength I gained from taking this detour will be useful in my work for the transition that we need.

I absolutely do not believe that everyone would have to go through more than two decades of depression and windmill-fighting to finally be happy. In fact, I am writing this text because I believe that there are pretty quick and simple ways for accessing our happiness.

And as said, by now I believe that being happy just requires us to stop preventing us from being happy.

Sincerity is not easy in our current societies

But, and this is a pretty big but, to stop preventing ourselves from being happy is not that easy. As things are today, we are likely to grow up and exist in social and economic structures that are full of pressures that are constantly distracting and corrupting us.

Accessing our happiness in such circumstances requires inner strength. And this strength involves facing ourselves and our vulnerabilities. This is an essential part of what I mean by becoming sincere. And this is particularly hard to do when facing the daily social and economic pressures our societies impose on us.

The wonderful thing is, if start working on our inner strength and thereby increase our base happiness, it actually helps us developing more inner strength in return.

So join me on this crazy journey towards embracing happiness with the inner strength of a love-stricken grizzly bear ;).

An afterthought: More than positive self-talk

I’m finally publishing this text on my 44th birthday, about ten month after that moment in the meditation center. It gave me some time see, if I am actually able to live up to this "insight" consistently over time. And the answer is yes.

It really feels like I finally hacked the Matrix. Of course, I still have exhausting and painful or distracted moments sometimes. But I can reliably return to happiness at my free disposal. I’m not flying on an euphoric high all the time. But I can face my inner "the Dragons" and external pains and disappointments, and still feel the solid ground of my happiness.

Just to mention it, I also stopped drinking alcohol more than a year ago. Not that I ever drank excessively, but I made it part of my challenge of "becoming myself", with quite interesting results. I‘ll write about it in another text.

For now, I just want to make the case that happiness can be there at any moment of our life.

The observation that underlies this post has been voiced by renowned AI experts like Turing Award winner Joshua Bengio:

Similar perspectives have been published for example in the Economist , where the social scientist David Runciman is quoted as saying:

In this post, I start out from this observation to explore the functioning of corporations as organizational AIs. Based on this, I argue that the logical next step is to view corporations as a form of meta AIs, given that they largely control the current development of technical AI.

For clarification: The title doesn’t specifically refer to Meta Inc., the corporation owning Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The first version of this text was written eight years ago and I decided to keep the title because a part of me resists accepting that Facebook could capture the beautiful Greek word “meta” in its effort to cover up its well-earned image as an irresponsible company.

An example of meta AI at work

The following photo is from the Big Data Summit in Berlin in mid September, a corporate event on AI and quantum computing.

The event couldn’t have been in starker contrast to the conference where I had just been a few days before. At the Regens Unite Conference, about 500 people from all over the world had gathered to discuss how we can use technology for regenerating our societies and ecosystems.

Now, at the Big Data Summit, something felt completely off. It took me a while to realize what it was: A complete absence of human presence.

Everyone seemed stuck in defense-mode and its little siblings, show-mode and sell-mode. Whether on stage or walking between the corporate booths, people seemed constantly wary to not show any sign of weakness.

This is certainly not about judging anyone personally. Sharing one’s humaneness would have felt out of place at this conference. The atmosphere was a showcase of what corporate professionalism does to human brains.

This is one of the strategies that the meta AIs use to control the development of technical AI:

It capitalizes on our adaptive capacities as humans to turn us into functional instruments that are aligned with its goals.

At Regens Unite by contrast, people were simply present as the humans that they were. It felt natural to look other peoples in the eyes without feeling an urge to hide my shortcomings.

At Regens Unite by contrast, people simply were present. Of course not perfectly, but still it felt natural to look into other peoples eyes without feeling an urge to hide my vulnerabilities and shortcomings.

This created an entirely different ground for communication, even when discussing abstract technical questions like combining blockchains and AI for decentralized data sharing.

This was one of the slogans of the conference, and it seemed that the participants succeeded in creating a common safe space for human presence. No one seemed to be eager to “sell a product”. Rather, people were genuinely discussing about how we can employ technologies to serve human values.

Of course, this anecdote reflects my subjective interpretation. But to me, this observation is the most pertinent takeaway from both conferences. And its implications, if thought through, are ground-shaking.

Call it “meta AI”

So why is human presence suppressed in people who are exposed to corporate settings?

I think a good way of understanding this is to view it as the outcome of intentional actions by intelligent, autonomous systems that have been influencing large aspects of our reality for decades.

To repeat the main three claims of this text:

1. Corporations are structures that can be understood as forms of organizational artificial intelligence.

2. These forms of organizational AI are largely controlling the development of technical AI today, which turns them into "meta AIs".

3. Corporations align the development of technical AI with their own values, which are rooted in their specific structural design: The Corporate Logic.

These three claims inspire a different perspective on some discussions about AI's (potential) social implications: The so-called "AI arms race" isn't some kind of natural disaster that we're facing, but a direct result of chronic growth compulsion, the core value that dominates the meta AIs.

Corporations as Organizational Artificial Intelligence

Just as our human intelligence emerges from our neural structures, this high level type of artificial intelligence emerges from the organizational structures of corporations. In this analogy, humans constitute the primary 'hardware' of these corporate structures. And to keep us running smoothly, we're 'programmed' through a variety of tools, ranging from financial incentives, procedural rules, and performance indicators, to targeted information and specialized education.

From the perspective of the Corporate Logic, we humans have the handy property of adapting to the conditions that we find ourselves in. Taking advantage of this property, they constantly optimize the methods for “designing” us humans into increasingly better functioning hardware.

Moreover, through decades of their uncoordinated collective actions, corporations have influenced the conditions of human existence, for example by promoting location competition between local municipalities. Combined with their more direct activities to influence us. This has shaped an ever growing number of humans according to their needs - as employees, as managers, as consumers, as shareholders, as founders, as policy makers etc.

Corporations can use the hardware over which they have direct control - like employees and managers - to engage in activities that indirectly influence the behavior of the relevant peripheral hardware, for example consumers and policy makers. Conversely, the roles of shareholders and founders are often defined by evolutionary selection processes, as explored in more detail in my post on The Corporate Logic.

These meta AIs already are intentional AGIs

Since corporations use humans for their hardware, they basically have all human cognitive capabilities at their disposal, which by many definitions, if we accept the claim that they're defacto AIs, makes them artificial general intelligences, (AGIs).

By clustering humans into teams, departments, specialized subcontractors etc., they can even be viewed to achieve mild forms of "super intelligence". Combined with their increasing capacity to collect and process vast amount of data, this gives them enough advantage over any individual human to be able to influence our (perceived) values, worldviews, and identities.

At the same time, meta AI in form of corporations can be considered intentional. The Corporate Logic can be viewed as an internal guiding mechanism that leads corporations to pursue their intentions, thereby systematically influencing their stakeholders (rather than being governed by them, as many might like to believe).

Corporations are guided by intentions that emerge from their structural specifications and autonomously govern their own behavior. The individuals tasked with managing a corporation are essentially interchangeable parts, continually evaluated for their effectiveness in promoting the corporation's chronic growth compulsion and are replaced if found to be dysfunctional .

Even when a corporation employs certain individuals as its public face, it does not depend on these persons. Even with the passing of iconic leaders like Steve Jobs, Apple persisted; similarly, Microsoft continued to thrive post-Bill Gates, with both entities adhering to their primary objective: perpetual growth.

Meta AI controlling AI

Meta AI in form of corporations by corporations, already exerts a significant influence on nearly every facet of our societies, including finance, retail, transport, media, food production, and healthcare. It is particularly dominant in controlling the development of technical AI.

Developing cutting-edge AI technologies requires massive computing power, necessitating supercomputers composed of tens of thousands of high-end GPUs. Most of this computing power is currently controlled by large corporations like Amazon, Google, Microsoft etc.

Basically all leading startups in LLM development, such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Inflection AI, have secured substantial investments from major tech corporations. This investment often takes the form of cloud computing credits, effectively leaving the ownership and ultimate control of these critical infrastructures with the large corporations.

Even Hugging Face, a platform offering access to numerous open-source LLMs, relies on Microsoft Azure's cloud services. And when Facebook (Meta Inc.) announced its Llamda2 model, one of the largest and best performing open source LLMs, it was in partnership with Microsoft, too, giving the corporation even more de facto power over the world's top end LLMs.

State-funded AI research, too, is often strongly influenced by corporations. This is evident not only in third-party funding of research projects but also in how corporate-sponsored research influences the public sector. The rising gap in computing capacities often forces independent researchers to rely on resources and results made available to them by corporate research labs. Moreover, the meta AIs solidify their influence over public research institutions by offering incentives to students and professors as their potential future employers.

Looking at it from a more general perspective, well-known methods of corruption and policy capture are particularly effective in the field of technical AI, thanks to the steep information asymmetries that create an ideal ground for exercising undue influence.

Reclaiming control over AI development

So what can we humans and our democratic governments do to reclaim control?

If I could implement one policy wish, it would be to classify all high-end GPUs and any hardware with equivalent or greater computing power as critical infrastructure, which must be kept in democratic ownership and control.

This would allow for democratic decisions on fundamental questions like "do we really want to create artificial super intelligence?". Recent polls show that the majority of Americans actually don't.

However, I recognize that this is utopian, given the current dominance of the meta AIs.

This leaves us with the more general challenge:

How can we humans reclaim power from the corporations?

It might turn out that the recent advances in technical AI provide a means to achieve this: By utilizing it to strengthen viable alternatives to the meta AIs. For instance, generative AI can be used for empowering small and medium-sized enterprises, cooperatives, and other decentralized organizations that are not inherently driven by growth compulsion.

In this sense, corporate meta AIs might unwittingly be giving rise to their own Frankenstein's monster. By harnessing technical AI, we have the potential to liberate ourselves from their dominance and guide this powerful technology towards a path that is aligned with our human values.

I’m part of CosyAI, a project that seeks to reclaim the power of AI by making it cooperatively owned by humans.

Ok, this will be a more personal post again.

In the past months, I made some mistakes that brought my company (and me) close to bankruptcy. In short, I put all stakes on a risky crowdfunding campaign for CosyAI, which we then postponed for eight weeks and finally stopped after three days.

To make things worse, I took on private loans to pay for myself and our small team, while we dedicated all our work on projects that didn't generate direct income. Of course, there's a little more to the story, but this is the bottom line. At least, I didn't take out loans in the company's name, so we are not officially bankrupt.

Now friends and family members are urging me to take a break from crazy projects and... get a job. Look, they say, obviously you haven't been able to pull off your entrepreneurial ambitions, so better focus on earning a living and repaying your debts.

And, of course, they have a point. They say this because they care for me and they don't want to see me struggling. They have been incredibly supportive in the past. I highly respect their perspectives and critique. And I'm deeply grateful that I've been in a position that allowed me to try things that others would consider crazy.

Nevertheless, I decided to keep going.

So what does that even mean?

In the past weeks, I did my best to reflect and collect feedback so that I don't just end up repeating past mistakes out of stubbornness and self-deception. I'm partly writing this text in hope for more feedback and critical questions - please reach out, if you have any.

The result of these reflections is clear: I will guide myself not less, but more, by what I feel is right. Instead of trying to hop on a more classical "career", I will try even harder to measure everything I do by one single measure: Is it really sincere?

I did go through moments of quite high pressure in the past weeks. And each single time when I realized that I will not give in to these pressures, it filled me with smiling happiness. This isn't about "me versus other peoples' expectations" or about "me versus society's expectations". This is about me continuing to become myself, patiently and smilingly.

My starting point remains what gave the name to this blog:

We have this one life on this one Earth.

I'm simply not willing to live my life along, while watching how we mess up the living conditions on this planet for ourselves, our children, and other species.

And yes, for me that means more crazy projects

No matter how I much I reflect about it, so far it's my conclusion that the best contribution I can make with my particular skill-set and experiences is just that: Starting and leading insanely ambitious projects - and keeping up the energy and happiness even if things feel impossible.

Out of the 10 big projects I tried in the past twenty years, just 1.5 were relatively successful. And none has yet achieved the globally transformative impact that I'm aiming for. But with each project I've been learning, and if necessary I'm going to try 10 times more.

I still believe there are too few people who try to build projects that are ambitious enough and at the same time sincere. Most really ambitious, successful projects we get today are either ego booster machines or driven by speculative greed. Both in my view do more harm than good to everyone involved - for the very reason that they undermine our sincerity.

In fact, I believe sincerity is all we need to save the world

The big, big realization I had in the past year is that a major part of my contribution is taking care of my own healing - with the help of others. Since then, I'm discovering more patterns every week in which I've been in my own way. And I see how such patterns keep being pressed onto all of us.

It's so damn hard to be sincere in our "modern" (or "post-modern") world. There's so much (self-)deceptive storytelling dropped on us every day, reinforced by incentives and pressures that play on our deepest fears and insecurities.

And yet, my experience is that as soon as we actually work on being more sincere, we can unleash a strength and a happiness that can transform anything. My situation is difficult right now, but at the core, I'm happier and more optimistic than I've ever been.

So here my plan

I will continue my focus on turning myself into an "expert" on the safe and cooperative use of artificial intelligence. With Platform21, I'm building up a team to offer safe, customized AI tools to coops, small companies, and NGOs.

At the same time, I will keep pushing with the projects that emerged as the essence of my past activities:

At the core is Cosyland - the non-profit project to help people and organizations on their journey towards cooperating sincerely (this is what cosy stands for ;). To me, Cosyland is also the base for an effective social network that is grounded in real (i.e. offline) and sincere human connections.

I will also continue contributing to building the coalition for CosyAI. I'm more convinced than ever that we need a cooperative framework for managing this powerful technology - and that this technology can actually help us making sincerely cooperative projects more successful.

The next step: Building a team

For me, everything starts with a team. As one core learning, I'm now looking for people who bring complementary skills and are as crazy as I am. By crazy I mean that they're willing to take the risk of exploring new ways of sincere collaboration and value generation, beyond the proven ways of making money in the current system.

After all, I'd rather sit with five brilliant people in a small room working towards real transformation, than with 5000 brilliant people in a chic designer office, working on "innovation" that just ends up serving the status quo.

If you know anyone who might be crazy enough and could bring relevant skills, please reach out at felix@platform21.net.

If you feel like supporting my work, you could choose a paid subscription for this blog, or simply sign up to stay tuned.

All who sincerely want to work for a better future have one obstacle in common: The Corporate Logic.

This isn't about classical corporation bashing. I do believe that companies can be great instruments for creating and distributing value.

The Corporate Logic, by contrast, occurs in a subset of companies that share specific organizational design flaws, which I aim to describe here as ideology-free as I can.

If I had to name the one single focus for all that I've done over the past ten years, it would be "freeing humanity from the Corporate Logic". (In my view, this equals "establishing economic structures that enable sincere happiness.")

My experience is that most people share a vague feeling that there is something fundamentally wrong about the growing power of corporations. But when it comes to action, most people seem to narrow their focus on specific issues and symptoms, rather than taking coordinated action to address this fundamental cause.

Why corporations are inevitably harmful

The Corporate Logic is the core reason why we’re unable to overcome pressing global issues like climate change and extreme inequality.

It's also the reason why, despite all our progress and "enlightenment", we still grapple with issues like war, weakening democracies, rising autocratic regimes, and the currently looming 'AI arms race', which might result in unprecedented harms for all of us.

People tend to focus on these symptoms (which are huge and complex phenomena by themselves) - and then get caught up in ideological discussions about how to best solve them. This inevitably leads to polarization and distrust as these "problems" cannot be "solved" without addressing the root cause.

This brings me to the second main claim of the book: If we sincerely face our common obstacle of the Corporate Logic and if we cooperate strategically to overcome it, we're back on track for a much happier future.

Three key implications of the Corporate Logic

While many might share the view that the growing power of corporations is problematic, the theory entails three implications that might be less intuitive:

• This isn't merely the doing of a vague demon called “capitalism” or "Moloch". Rather, it can be traced back to clearly identifiable flaws in the organizational structures that currently can be found in most large companies.

• In the long run, there's no way to keep the consequences of these flaws effectively in check through public regulation.

• Because the problem can be traced to specific structural design flaws, there exist effective ways to disempower the Corporate Logic altogether and for good.

But enough of big claims, let’s jump to the arguments:

Defining the Corporate Logic

A company is subject to the Corporate Logic, if it meets three conditions:

1. Its ownership is attributed to a fixed number of shares.*

2. The company (potentially) distributes profits through these shares and/or the shares are tradable.

3. The company is of large size.**

*Fixed here means that a fixed number of shares is internally determined by the company’s bylaws/documented shareholder decisions. The fact that companies can issue new shares through internal procedures is irrelevant for this condition, since it just means a change from one fixed number of shares to another.

**For the sake of a clear definition, I use the OECD’s definition of large enterprises: Companies that employ more than 250 people.

In the following, I'll call a corporation any company meeting these three conditions.

From the three conditions we can derive the three basic principles of the Corporate Logic:

1. Corporations are subject to chronic growth compulsion.

2. Corporations are subject to dehumanizing complexity.

3. Corporations are accumulating power.

Principle 1: Chronic Growth Compulsion

This principle follows from conditions 1 and 2: Because there is a fixed number of shares and profits are distributed through these shares, it follows that the (financial) value of shares rises with the expected growth in the company's potential profits.

By simple evolution logic, shareholders who aim to maximize the valuation of their shares will crowd out those who don't in the long run, since the "valuation maximizers" will accumulate more capital to reinvest and thus continuously increase their share of overall available investment.

Note that this implies that profitability by itself is not enough to make a company interesting to valuation maximizers. A corporation must grow its potential profits to see a rise in valuation.

Note that this also implies that the Corporate Logic "breeds" shareholders according to its growth "needs". It's not "greedy shareholders" who create growth-hungry corporations, it's the Corporate Logic that selects greedy shareholders over less greedy ones and thus breeds them, like humans breed cows that produce more milk.

One more point to make clear why condition 1 is crucial here: In companies where the number of shares fluctuates and instead the price of a share is fixed (like in many cooperatives for example), there is no chronic growth compulsion.

In this case, a rise in the companies valuation is likely to lead to more shares being issued. Thus, no individual shareholder has an incentive to push for growth for the sake of raising the price of their shares. Instead, they have an incentive at pushing the company to actually create value, leading to an appropriate dividend on their shares. Which means the company can concentrate on providing valuable products and services and on developing a healthy, profitable, sustainable business.

In companies with a fixed price of shares, a decision to grow the company is likely to be based on intrinsically relevant business factors, as for example an increase in demand, or better marginal cost/quality ratios. There is no chronic compulsion to grow, so the company only focuses on growth when it makes sense.

At the same time, the market dynamics among shareholders lead to a focus on shares that offer balanced dividends that reflect the real risk involved. This in turn creates incentives for transparency and real value creation, rather than incentives for spectacular storytelling and race-to-the-bottom strategies for market domination.

Principle 2: Dehumanizing Complexity

This principle takes into account that human beings have a limited cognitive capacity to create meaningful social relationships (the often cited Dunbar's number estimates the average maximum to 150 social relationships https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number). Because corporations (as defined here) are large organizations with more than 250 employees, they have an inbuilt tendency to sideline the moral intuitions that come with personal social relationships.

This structural condition is further exacerbated by the resulting tendency to form subgroups, in form of departments, sub-companies, specialized units etc. Each subgroup tends to optimize for their specific performance indicators, reducing the perceived sense of responsibility for the collective impact of the total organization for every individual.

Such structures make it impossible for our human moral intuitions (and emotions) to be effective. The sidelining of our intuitive moral accountability mechanisms tends to increase with the size and complexity of the organization, hence the principle's name dehumanizing complexity.

Never mind all story telling about “corporate social responsibility", shiny mission statements etc. Our brains tend to adopt narratives that align with our self-image and the image of subgroups we identify with. We can reflect and revise these images, if our social intuitions and emotions are sufficiently triggered, but the complexity of large organizations prevents these intuitions from being effective checks on both our actions and the narratives our brains embrace.

When this principle is combined with the Principle of Chronic Growth Compulsion, it follows that the Corporate Logic inevitably leads to harmful behavior, as soon as the corporation's overarching goal to grow is not 100% aligned with the goals of society. This is the case, even if all people active in the corporation are morally well-meaning people.

Representatives of corporations will go out of their way to come up with compelling narratives why in their corporation the goals of growth and value creation for society are perfectly aligned. But their willingness to embrace these narratives is a result of our brain's adaptive strategies in complex situations, rather than grounded in consistent moral intuitions.

Moreover, corporations tend to proactively promote identification of employees and managers with the company and its "mission", because this identification is helpful for growth. And the hierarchies and incentive structures in corporations tend to promote the "ego" in us, making us even more receptive to self-affirming narratives.

Principle 3: Power accumulation

The predominant economic paradigm in democracies claims that we have public institutions to regulate corporate activities in order to align them with the goals of society, which should make corporations net beneficial.

This claim doesn't hold, because of the third principle: Corporations accumulate power, which enables them to influence the very regulations that are supposed to contain their harmful behavior.

The derivation of this principle is pretty straight forward: The Chronic Growth Compulsion leads corporations to prioritize their growth over all other goals, leading them to maximize the means they need to achieve this growth. Such means includes financial assets, employees, PR and lobbying budgets, political ties etc. Each of these are factors of public power that can be used to influence public regulation and opinion.

There are various further mechanisms by which power accumulation happens, like exploiting information asymmetries, network-effects, targeted sponsoring of academic research, sponsoring of popular personalities and influencers etc.

Since these factors aren't just accumulated within one corporation, but also collectively across multiple corporations, it's simply impossible to effectively contain the Corporate Logic through regulation in the long run. Of course, civil society can do its best to push back, but the principle of power accumulation leads to an inevitable and increasing imbalance of resources in favor of the Corporate Logic.

Note that the Corporate Logic doesn’t “care” about the fate of individual corporations. It’s indifferent to one corporation being eaten by another or being pushed out of the market. What counts is the net accumulated power of all corporations in the system.

This cannot be reduced to a “too big to fail” problem. Even if no corporation in a system has yet risen to such size, the collective net effects of the Corporate Logic can lead to large scale influence over public institutions and social realities.

For example, corporations can engage in complex tax avoidance schemes, playing out governments against each other and out-competing local small and medium enterprises through sub-market prices that are "subsidized" through these schemes.

It's no surprise that regulators always lack behind in reducing both tax avoidance and tax evasion. On the contrary, it simply follows from the Corporate Logic.

The Corporate Logic creates an automatized rebound effect

The rebound effect means that efficiency gains in one part of a system free resources that can be used for increased activity in another part of the system. This can lead to the seemingly contradictory effect that a local improvement in resource efficiency results in an overall net increase in resource use.

One often cited example is a hypothetical family that insulates their home to decrease the amount of energy needed for heating. If the family now uses the saved money they did not spend on heating to pay for a flight to a beach resort in their summer holiday, when they would have normally spend the holiday on a farm in the countryside nearby, this can invoke a rebound effect: The increased energy efficiency of their home results in higher total climate gas emissions.

The Corporate Logic can be regarded as an automation of the rebound effect. Whenever some efficiency gains are achieved that could be useful to society, this creates an opportunity for some corporation, which can use the freed resources to fuel its growth.

Let's look at a hypothetical example: Imagine an increased use of electric cars leads to less overall fossil fuel use in private cars. The resulting reduction in demand for fossil fuels leads to a lower oil-price, which in turn reduces the costs for industrial fishing with ships running on crude oil. The resulting lower price of fish then leads to a worldwide increase in fish consumption and therefore an increased use of crude oil in fishing ships, which has a much worse climate impact per ton than fuel used in private cars.
The overall environmental effect of a decrease in fossil fuels used in private cars would be thus: Accelerated overfishing of the oceans and a net increase in total climate gas emissions.

While this is obviously a highly constructed example, it shows the underlying dynamics: Because corporations want to grow, there will be always a corporation around the corner that takes advantage of any efficiency gain to serve its growth compulsion, thus annihilating any potential reduction in overall resource use through new technologies or public policies or "good intentions" of some companies.

The only way to effectively avoid this would be a global, 100% effectively enforced regulation system that outrules 100% of all potential options to externalize costs. I think it's safe to say that this has a 0% chance of being established in a world dominated by the Corporate Logic.

An abstract account of the harmfulness of the Corporate Logic:

Claim:

In any system with actors who adhere to a set of non-trivial values (e.g. humans who value happiness, health, peace, environmental sustainability, personal freedoms etc.), the conditions for these actors to pursue their values will be compromised, if there exist other actors in the system that are subject to Corporate Logic (e.g. corporations that meet the three conditions as defined above).

Reasoning:

Any actor who is subject to the Corporate Logic essentially turns into a means maximizer. Over time, their competitive behavior invariably diminishes the resources available for value maximizers to pursue their goals.

This effect will be even more detrimental for the value maximizers, if they are adaptive. Meaning, if they have properties that adapt to the conditions they exist in. In this case, the means maximizers can use the means they accumulate to influence the conditions in which the adaptive value maximizers exist, in order to optimize the adaptive behavior of the value maximizers for the purpose of their goal of means maximization.

To be more concrete: Corporations can wield their accumulated power to shape the conditions we live under, including influencing our public institutions and social norms, thereby molding us into more effective contributors to their growth objectives.

They can use our adaptive neural structures and create conditions for us that nourish our egos, our material greed, our fear of unemployment, our hunger for social status, our mindsets of self-optimization etc.

Unless we choose to believe that such characteristics are thrown onto us by some mystical external force, they must result in one way or another from our interaction with the conditions we exist in. And if means maximizers (like corporations) can use their means to influence these conditions, it follows from their definition as means maximizers that they will do so in ways that are conducive to their goal of accumulating means.

The unavoidable, self-accelerating result of this pattern is that the more means the means maximizers accumulate, the more effective they get at squeezing out means from the value maximizing actors, thereby distracting them further from pursuing the values they were originally striving for.

Real consequences of the Corporate Logic

The influence of corporations on nearly every aspect of our lives has been growing for decades.

In the book, I'm discussing seven major areas of impact of the Corporate Logic, each of which could be a book by itself. Here just a list of the section titles:

1. Corporations are systematically changing our values and identities

2. Corporations are producing inequality

3. Corporations are undermining our democracies

4. Corporations are fueling climate change

5. Corporations are impeding peace

6. Corporations are harming our health

7. Corporations are promoting insincerity

Just two paragraphs on the last point, which in my view is the most basic one:

The growing power of the Corporate Logic is pushing a general mix of pressures and incentives on our societies that make it hard for us to actually be in touch with ourselves. Unless we withdraw into monasteries or nature retreats, it takes enormous inner strength to even try to look sincerely into questions like "Who am I? What do I really want? What is really important to me?"

This is also our entry point for liberating ourselves from the Corporate Logic. Getting in touch with ourselves - meaning proactively taking action to become more conscious and sincere - can get us to a point from where we can reclaim our future.

So what can we really do?

The primary purpose of this post is to argue that the most crucial step towards a better future is disempowering the Corporate Logic.

My second point is, let's be sincere and really face this challenge.

We humans have an inclination to blame people. It’s the capitalists, or the politicians, or the bankers, or the tech entrepreneurs, or this or that billionaire, or this or that ruthless dictator. Our instinct is to project far more agency and power to others than they actually possess. But we are all influenced by the Corporate Logic, as consumers, as workers, as managers, as shareholders, even as famous founder-owners of corporations.

Some claim that technological progress will magically solve all our problems for us. But this hope doesn't take into account that the Corporate Logic is currently controlling the path technology takes.

My goal here is to encourage a discussion, where we step back and take a sober look at the specific structural aspects that we can actually change.

Being sincere gives us the chance to cooperate

The good thing is that if we do that, we can actually see the fascinating chance we have now:

We have the chance to form novel organizational structures that let us work and live without all the unnecessary pressures, lies, injustices, and power games we grapple with today.

The organizational models are there, the success stories are there, the digital tools are there. All we need to do now is to take a decision to cooperate.

I know this is not easy for many of us, given the numerous responsibilities and pressures from our day-to-day affairs. But this is actually the crucial point: At given moment, we have the chance to ask ourselves: "Do I really want to accept these responsibilities and pressures?"

No-one but ourselves is forcing us to accept them.

It's not my goal here to press you to join our efforts to free ourselves from the Corporate Logic.

But I hope it comes across why I chose to do so. I know from experience how beautiful and fulfilling it is to collaborate with people on projects we really believe in, in a sincerely respectful way, where we can all be in the room as the humans we are.

This isn't about endless discussions and consensus seeking. This is about everyone taking on roles they really feel well with, including leadership roles that allow the leaders themselves to be sincere.

If you feel like joining up, please reach out. If you don't feel it yet, you're invited to join at any point later.

We don't need to convince everyone from the start, but we do need all who clearly feel that this is the right thing to do now.

AI has enormous potential to transform our societies. And we have an enormous potential to use AI for advancing the highly needed transformation into more conscious and healthy societies.

If we take the development and adoption of AI into our own hands, rather than leaving it to the “AI arms race” among big tech corporations, we might actually be able to make good use of the power of the AI Tsunami, instead of being overrun by it.

Here I describe my vision for CosyAI, our initiative to create a cooperative approach to AI development and adoptation. We don’t need to wait for anyone to

1. Build a framework for a basic income backed by revenues from a suite of safe AI-based apps and cooperative data-pooling.

2. Build up a global network of regional multi-stakeholder cooperatives for defining and implementing standards for AI that remain indipendent of corporate interests and political power games.

3. Create an AI Safe Space, where everyone who wishes has a real choice on how AI is impacting their lives – and finds protection from unwanted effects.

We’re currently building a coalition of founding partners and supporters for CosyAI. But here I’m outlining the vision, so let’s look at the three points in more detail:

1. A Suite of safe AI-based apps that back a basic income

AI does enable new tools and applications that can bring real value to people, businesses, and other types of organizations.

CosyAI will provide a framework for building and accessing a whole CosyAI Suite of tools and applications, while putting a special emphasis on safety, data sovereignty, and promoting human trust. It will also provide a cooperative framework for safe data pooling that can be used for product and service improvement (and potentially training better AI models) by all members.

The cooperative model is particularly valuable here, because it avoids incentives for misuse. We thereby offer an alternative to the public regulation approach, where classical types of corporations have misaligned incentives and can choose to simply accept paying fines for ignoring regulations that don’t suit their interests. They can also take advantage of information assymetries that come with complex technologies to avoid effective regulation.

Contrastingly, CosyAI allows stakeholders to join the cooperative, ensuring no individual can leverage financial power to promote their specific interests. Both, providing safe AI-based apps and trustworthy frameworks and technologies for data pooling allow for transparent, sustainable business models that can generate substantial revenue for the CosyAI coop.

By channeling part of the surplus into a basic income pool, we can make the potential of AI to really benefit all of us a reality without having to wait for governments or other actors who might not necessarily have a track record of putting the interests of communities before their own private interests.

This is also part of a scaling strategy that is in alignment with promoting responsible use of AI. The more people who sign up for the basic income, the more have a shared common interest in helping to promote the CosyAI Suite – whilst the cooperative framework helps to ensure that CosyAI lives up to our common safety standards.

The other part of the surplus can be used for a fair compensation system for software developers, product designers, promoters etc. who contribute apps to the CosyAI Suite, as well as for companies who join the CosyAI cooperative to provide the technology and management of the tools and data pooling infrastructure.

2. A global network of regional multi-stakeholder cooperatives

CosyAI will start with a cooperative at the European level, simply because there exists a ready made legal form that allows for global membership. IIn the CosyAI coalition, we have many members with extensive experience in designing, creating, and actualizing cooperative structures..

In the next step, we can support the creation of further regional and local cooperatives. One of the advantages of the cooperative model is that it doesn't inherently incentivize the centralization of power in a single, ever-expanding entity. Rather, CosyAI can embrace a sincerely localized strategy of keeping ownership in the hands of the people and communities who are affected on the ground.

Within the platform Coop movement, we already developed models for cooperative franchise that enable the pooling of data and tech development, whilst sharing ownership and decentralizing local adoption.

Given that AI will affect an increasing number of aspects of our lives, it is important to allow for sincerely localized adoption where communities can decide for themselves and in their way if and how they want to embrace it.

This framework will also allow local communities to develop their own, culturally specific standards and demands for AI – and feed this back into the common process of developing responsible AI that really serves all people.

Above all, this framework enables us to leverage decades of practical cooperative experience, during which cooperatives have fostered networks built on genuine human trust and connections, which we can combine with a wide diversity of other succesful efforts of sincere community building.

3. An AI Safe Space

This leads to the biggest part of the vision. AI offers enormous potential, but also poses unpredictable risks. A growing number of leading AI experts are even worried about that it might pose an existential threat to humanity.

Obviously, such abstract, complex threats are hard to grasp. But that doesn't imply we must passively wait for our fate, or for a miraculous shift that suddenly renders our political institutions capable of instituting comprehensive, incorruptible, and effectively enforced global regulations.

Instead, the first two parts of CosyAI can be the base for a global AI Safe space for anyone who wants to join. Together, the creation of a revenue-backed basic income system and a global network of regional and local cooperatives can provide people with a space where AI can be adopted responsibly and safely, and be used for sincerely advancing the common good.

We can use this framework for building and training our own, responsible AI models based on transparent and fairly composed data. We can also harness our collective power to mobilize public support and the economic strength of participating organizations to advocate for truly effective regulations.

We can also use this framework for actually having sincere discussions about if “we” really want to push for the “singularity”. And this time, the “we” can actually include any human on Earth who wants to join, through the global network of local cooperatives.

If we collectively decide against developing superintelligent AI due to its unpredictable nature, we have a framework to advocate for this decision.

And even if it would take too long to effectively stop “big tech” in their arms race, we will have the organizational and technical framework for building a superintelligent “protection AI” to shield anyone who joins the common safe space from potentially harmful AI actors.

Of course, these thoughts leave a lot of open questions. But I’m convinced that a cooperative framework with a focus on fostering human trust and connections can be a valuable contribution to developing responsible AI.

Anyone is invited to join the coalition of CosyAI to move the discussion forward and to help developing a concrete framework that sincerely serves us all.

The most important thing: Start acting now.

I believe the worst we could do is just stand by watching. Tristan Harris has put it in clear words once again at the Nobel Prize Summit: We need to update our institutions to bind our technologies so that they actually serve us. But with every day we wait, we allow misaligned technologies to strengthen their grip around our brains and make it harder to reverse the race to the bottom.

So let’s not freeze because it feels scary - or stick our head into the sand of business as usual because we don’t feel immediate pressure.

Many are working on responsible AI.

In the tech world itself, it seems common sense since a while that this topic needs a special priority. Rarely have there been so many concerted efforts dedicated to the responsible development and implementation of a novel technology. The website Public Interest AI lists more than 100 relevant organizations. And this list is by no means exhaustive.

Specialized think tanks and NGOs like the Center for Human Technology or the Future of Life Institute, continue to raise awareness about AI risks and advocate for responsible regulation, a mission shared by numerous AI researchers globally.

Established players in digital transformation like the Mozilla Foundation have turned AI into a priority, starting Mozilla.ai earlier this year.

It's encouraging to see governments increasingly giving the topic attention. The currently evolving EU AI Act stands as the most ambitious policy project to date, even though it's already criticized for its lack of teeth and flexibility.

Even the big tech companies themselves continually reiterate their commitment to responsible AI development and deployment.

But that is not enough.

To keep it short, all of this is not enough. Given the high pace of AI development and its enormous potential in terms of money and power, it would simply be naive to believe that mere awareness campaigns, self-regulation by stakeholders with vested interests, or policies from lawmakers subject to familiar lobbying pressures and information asymmetries, could result in a balanced and responsible AI future.

One example is the path of OpenAI itself, the company behind ChatGPT. It started of as a promoter of responsible AI, but has since been criticized for sacrificing it’s original mission.

Let’s be sincere

That's why I believe we need to construct a new approach to AI that circumvents the corrupting influences of money and power. And we need to do it in a way that promotes human sincerity and trust, rather than our ability to tell ourselves and others stories about our good intentions.

Fortunately, we can base such an approach on many years of work on responsible AI by hundreds of committed researchers and organizations. And we can combine this with the years of experience in the Platform Coop movement, which has piloted new approaches to ownership of powerful technologies.

With CosyAI, we started a real, on the ground initiative to collaborate on an alternative path, and our coalition of like-minded organizations is growing every week.

Join us now to contribute to making it happen, or simply sign up to stay updated.

AI generated image of an AI Tsunami

Over the past months, I have been deep diving into the discussions around potential social implications of the accelerating dynamics in AI technology.

I am generally skeptical of anything that sounds like a conspiracy theory. But if there was something like a global seismic measurement of potential social earthquakes, I think we’re now at the point to raise the alarm about the risk of a devastating “AI Tsunami” rolling over our societies.

It is difficult to predict how soon it will arrive. It could be in three months, it could be in twelve. But there are many reasons to expect it to hit us before the 2024 elections in the U.S.

AI-powered technologies are already benefiting us in many respects, and have the potential to benefit us much more. But if we do not prepare well for this Tsunami, the real harms might outweigh the real benefits by far.

AI is a wide field, this post focuses on the impact of generative AI models, which are widely discussed since the breakthrough successes of large language models (LLM) like ChatGPT.

Why the analogy of a tsunami?

Tsunamis are waves that run through the ocean at a much higher speed than normal waves, whilst being hard to detect due to their long wave length. At the same time, the water moves much deeper under the surface in tsunamis than in normal waves. When a tsunami reaches shallower water, they slow down and thereby can rise to enormous heights.

Until now, we can look at the ways in which AI impacts our societies as somehow separate, fast developing phenomena. But I think they are better understood as parallel, self-accelerating “waves” running through the same “ocean” of society.

The moment any of these waves puts our societies under significant stress, our social fabric is getting less elastic - comparable to the water getting shallower.

When this happens, the waves that so far seemed separate, could be reinforcing each other, amounting to an “AI Tsunami” that might hit our realities and spread panic and confusion quicker and more profoundly than the Covid-19 pandemic did.

How will this AI Tsunami look like?

The first little waves are already hitting the shores of public awareness: Some deep fake pictures and videos are going viral, people are complaining about AI generated spam and forum posts, journalists uncover campaigns of “scam robocalls” asking people for donations.

At the same time, developers are marveling about the ability to write more code in shorter time with help of AI. The number of emails we receive from software companies offering their services has gone up from 1-2 per week to 3-5 per day.

While this might still seem like the usual ups and downs in the introduction of a new technology, there are signs that each of the “waves” is growing exponentially, indicating that there will be a “surprise point”, where they put too much stress on our societies to be absorbed by normal processes.

The challenge is that each of the waves by itself involves complex social implications. While many lists of the potential risks from AI have been published, it is difficult to think about the interaction of their social implications.

The closest to a comprehensive perspective that I have seen is Azra Raskin’s and Tristan Harris's Video on “The AI Dilemma”.

If you have not watched it yet, it might be a very well invested hour of your time.

Still, there needs to be more discussion about the combined impact of the different waves. It’s hard to make predictions about all the potential impact of AI, since no-one knows what new capabilities will emerge in upcoming AI models. But at least five self-accelerating waves can already be observed:

Wave 1/5: Massive job losses

This is the most obvious and widely discussed wave. Whilst much of the discussion looks at sectors and job types, I think that a large share of this wave will actually come in the shape of thousands of companies going out of business.

The reason is that with the increasing capabilities of AI tools, they could give unprecedented advantages to companies that are quicker and better at adopting them. At least in the short run, these companies are likely to see substantial growth in turnover, without creating many new jobs.

At the same time, the big reminder of less agile companies might find themselves with little chance to catch up. The challenge is that AI can give quick adopters a type of “super-advantage”, creating efficiency gains across all business processes.

Still, I believe that this might be the “slowest” of the five waves. It could, nonetheless, contribute to a general uncertainty, making people more sensitive and reactive towards the other waves.

Wave 2/5: Extreme inflation of high-quality digital content

This may sound less harmful than it is. Everyone who writes text can now write way more texts per time. Everyone who designs graphics can design more graphics, anyone who produces videos can produce more videos. And since this requires less specific skills, the number of people who can produce quality content rises simultaneously.

On top of that, thousands of companies and startups are eager to profit from the AI gold rush, resulting in a parallel inflation of the AI based tools themselves. This might multiply an already exponential growth of content production.

The hyper-inflation risk comes from the fact that all this can be automated. At the current pace, it seems to be a matter of months until it is normal that anyone can mass-create and mass-spread content without requiring much technical knowledge.

At the moment, this wave is still slowed down by the inaccuracy of current LLMs, making them less useful for auto-producing text and code. But at the current pace of AI development, it’s probably a question of months, rather than years, that we have models able to generate auto-fact-checked, high-quality content that is far better than what the average human could produce.

How could this be harmful and why couldn’t it be stopped?

Now this falls on societies that have been trained by the attention economy for nearly two decades. Hundreds of millions of people are used to swipe, share, like, and comment on digital content that grabs their attention.

And the new, mass-produced content will be fascinating stuff, copying, combining, varying the styles of the most liked human creators. Like any inflation, this might result in a loss of perceived value of all content, which could create challenges for artists, influencers etc. to have their work stand out.

The platforms that might have the technical capacity to restrict the inflationary spread of content are unlikely do so. Doing this would mean leaving the inflow of attractive content to their competitors. We’ve seen already how such a race to the bottom plays out with the inflation of short videos on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Youtube etc.

Neither is it likely that governments will regulate this risk quickly and decisively enough. Of course there are vibrant discussions and proposals on updated intellectual property rights. But how to regulate unpredictable, automatized combinations and variations of sources? And how to push through such complex policies soon enough?

While the extreme inflation of quality content may not create major harm by itself, the accompanying feelings of overload, disorientation, and loss of value could further weaken the social fabric for the other waves to hit harder.

Wave 3/5: Extreme inflation of fake content

Much of the discussions about AI generated content tends to focus on biases and misinformation resulting from the technical design and the data fed into the LLMs. However, these concerns might soon be dwarfed by the impact of intentionally produced fake content generated with AI-based tools.

Like in Wave 2, the “Tsunami point” might arrive when the automatized and decentralized creation and spread of advanced deep fakes of photos, videos, music, voice messages, video-calls etc. will be available at basically no costs. In addition to the overload of quality content from Wave 2, this might create a degree of confusion our societies are not well prepared to cope with.

Some experts and journalists who follow the trends may raise early warnings when this high end spam wave starts accelerating, but the vast majority of people will have responded to, forwarded, and ingested hundreds of messages before they realize that something deeper is going on. By then, confusion and distrust might have reached levels that make any balanced response difficult to get through.

For you, it might be the moment when you get a phone call from a good friend telling you that they lost their phone and wallet and urgently need your help. You hear the agitation and urgency in your friend’s voice and recognize the slang and self-ironic jokes you’re so familiar with. And just by chance this very friend is sitting next to you...

In that moment you’re friend receives a phone call from a colleague – but you can see in their face that they’re not so sure if it’s really their colleague they’re talking to…

The main problem might not be the individual cases of fraught and deception, but rather the general distrust this seeds across our societies.

Can’t this be stopped before it spreads too far?

Three reasons will make it very hard to stop the wave of fake content once it has reached the level when it gets impossible to ignore.

1. It is increasingly hard to identify deep fakes. There is an emerging industry of fake detectors, but even these companies themselves admit that they’re likely to lack behind the developments in deep fake creation. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/06/28/technology/ai-detection-midjourney-stable-diffusion-dalle.html

2. The sources will be too decentralized. The fake content won’t just be produced by a few bot farms run by some autocratic governments or ruthless companies. Rather, any person who wants to make some easy money or to push their political views on others will be able to produce and spread high-quality fake content in mass.

3. Even centralized cloud services and internet providers might have a hard time blocking this content, because it could risk halting legitimate communication and servers needed for normal business processes.

This is related to the fourth wave that could make the AI Tsunami actually deadly:

Wave 4/5: Major fallouts in global supply chains

We’ve seen what can happen when one large cargo ship gets stuck in the Suez channel.

Almost all processes in the global supply chains rely on digital communication in some form. If many of the common channels of communication suddenly become unreliable, it might take a while for everyone around the world to adapt.

Of course, many companies will set up encrypted communication channels, if they haven’t done so yet. But there might be enough that aren’t well prepared, to create significant chaos for a few days or weeks. And this time window might be enough for terrorist groups, industry mafias, secret services, individual spammers and anyone who seeks to spread chaos or take advantage of it.

This risk gets amplified by everyone trying to keep pace with the AI gold rush. It’s hard to see how hastily developed and deployed AI-based software and processes will not create new security loopholes. And this would not even require potential malicious (AI?) agents intentionally building loopholes into the code.

The economic implications of disturbed supply chains tend to hit the poorest the hardest, but they might also affect the availability of goods in wealthy societies. This might further spread a sense of uncertainty and fuel shortsighted egoism, as we have seen in the Covid-19 pandemic.

Wave 5/5: A global mental health crisis

I believe this is by far the most dangerous of the five waves.

Yuval Noah Harari has offered strong arguments why it could create fundamental risks to give machines the capacity to generate and automatize human language as the “operating systems” of our societies.

He is by far not the only one voicing serious concerns that the ability of generative AI tools to build up intimate relationships with humans creates unprecedented opportunities for voter manipulation, leading some to warn that 2024 might be the last democratic elections in the U.S.

This risk to democracy is real and urgently needs comprehensive responses.

But there is an even deeper risk

The combined impact of the other four waves might leave societies with levels of mistrust and uncertainty that create fertile ground for AI powered tools to dig deep into peoples minds.

“AI companions” and other tools that generate individually targeted emotional engagement might have destabilizing effects on our capacities for real human connections, with unpredictable consequences on the human mind.

This might result in a global mental health crisis, which could radically amplify many of the social ills we already have. In this sense, it could become a “super-problem”, which at the same time blocks our capacity to address them.

We are about to enter a gigantic psychological experiment with very little control, let alone a responsible research design.

A self-accelerating process hitting ill prepared societies

Thousands of marketing agencies and product designers around the world are working hard to get their head around how to use the new generative AI tools for their work. Everyone is under pressure to use them more effectively than the rest.

This might result in a decentralized, competitive race for effective (emotional) manipulation, similar to what we have seen in the attention economy. No malicious intentions are needed for letting the “AI arms race” trickle down right into our brains.

Our societies are still influenced by the after effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has “led to a worldwide increase in mental health problems” and “further widened the mental health treatment gap“ according to the WHO.

This is not a good starting point for such an experiment.

This wave might be the hardest to control

It might be much harder to implement any useful policy when growing parts of our societies are loosing their wits.

At an individual level, it might be as difficult to abstain from potentially intrusive AI-based products. The bots can learn our emotional weaknesses and deliver us exactly the stories and interactions that just feel good. And we have no long established social norms to regulate such “emotional porn”.

It took decades to halfway effectively regulate at least the worst strategies of the sugar and tobacco industries. We still haven’t done so successfully with social media. How can we expect our societies to deal with a fundamentally new type of “unintended side-effects” quickly enough?

So how to prepare for the AI Tsunami?

In short, the AI Tsunami could hit in form of widespread uncertainty, distrust, and mental health deterioration. Multiple seemingly independent “waves” might contribute to a situation, where these effects overwhelm our societies’ coping mechanisms.

In such a situation, the most important goods will be real human trust and real human connections. I believe that our efforts should focus on how we can use technologies, but also social and organizational tools that we have at hand, to support the protection and nourishment of these crucial goods.

The biggest mistake would be to lean back and hope for the potential benefits of AI “solving” these problems for us. For these potential benefits of AI to pay off, AI would need to be integrated in balanced, constructive ways. It might be that the chaos created on the way will simply rule out this possibility.

I will dedicate another article to “Preparing for the AI Tsunami”. For the moment, my best response is what we try to do at CosyAI: Building a coalition of like-minded organizations to create a sincerely cooperative approach to AI.

Cooperatives have a strong track record in fostering human trust and protecting human communities from unhealthy pressures.

Join us, if you want to co-shape these efforts.

Whenever we enter a moment of cooperating sincerely, we feel it. It can be as easy as helping someone lift a table.

The emphasis, though, is on sincerely. If we cooperate solely to further our own goals or our personal gain, we might end up cooperating instrumentally.

But if we sincerely see the other humans we cooperate with, if we feel that they see us, and if we are able to feel ourselves during the process, then even a small act of cooperating sincerely can make our day.

It's not that easy

In today's world, such moments are astonishingly rare. They can feel like a break from our current standard mode, which is me solving my problems by myself, for myself.

Even in team settings, we’re often inclined and expected to look after ourselves. And sometimes we might even view other team members as competitors – for pay, for promotions, for recognition, or in the unspoken contest for who's the brightest, the most productive, or the most likable in the room.

The currently dominating paradigm is cooperating instrumentally

Much of our current social and organizational environments are reinforcing a competitive mindset. They constantly expose us to a perception that we have to compete for things that are scarce. The deeper we integrate this perception into our perspective on the world, the more we develop a scarcity mindset that constantly prevents us from seeing and enjoying the beauty of life.

This ‘social programming’ is reflected in widely used theoretical frameworks, like game theory and neoclassical economics. Both rest on a paradigm of scarcity, resulting in an instrumental concept of cooperation. On a practical level, this programming can lead us to loose our capacity to trust and replace it with a fear-driven need to control. In result, cooperation might become a tool for controlling other peoples’ behavior through a transaction logic.

Overview: Cooperating Instrumentally versus Cooperating Sincerely

It starts early

For many of us, the social programming towards cooperating instrumentally begins early in life. For example, the school grading system trains us in developing a competitive mindset that is driven by fear.

Often, this mindset is transmitted to us even earlier through our parents. They themselves might have been trapped in mindsets of scarcity and competition in their jobs and social environments. For them as well es for us, these mindsets can be reinforced by the constant struggle to get our needs met under the diverse pressures we face from a fear-dominated society.

Even if we happen to grow up in a protected environment with progressive schooling methods and care-takers who are loving and relaxed: Once we enter the broader, less protective society, we might face competitive pressures that force us to choose between ‘toughening up’ or ‘losing out’.

We can try it out any moment

The currently dominating social and economic structures tend to constantly distract us from developing a practice of cooperating sincerely. But it’s pretty easy to see why this mode of cooperation is healthier and more fulfilling than acting out of a mindset of scarcity and fear.

We just need to look back to the last time we cooperated with someone without expecting something in return, like in the example of helping someone lift a table from the beginning of this text. How did that feel as a state of being? It’s this feeling that cooperating sincerely is about.

We can observe the opposite just as easily. As soon as we get frustrated or driven by our fears, we feel a need to look after our own claims. Instead of enjoying the beauty of life, we get into defense mode. We build castles around our feelings and start fighting for our own advantage to prevent others from taking advantage of us.

We just need to remember the last time when we where in a situation with people who we normally like and feared that we wouldn’t get enough. How did it feel to ‘look after myself’ in that moment?

Cooperating sincerely is what we ‘e made for

None of this comes as a surprise. The inclination to cooperate is a fundamental aspect of our evolutionary ‘programming’. It’s what made us humans so successful as a species. Check out Rutger Bregman's book ‘Human Kind - A hopeful History’ for a fun to read overview of studies and historical examples of how cooperation-oriented we humans actually are by default.

The competition mindset, by contrast, is just a fallback mode that we resort to when we feel threatened. We can also simulate such a threat in playful ways, when we compete for fun in games or sport.

But the real, underlying problem is that our current social and economic structures constantly make us feel threatened to some extent. Even in materially rich societies, where life is objectively safer than it has ever been for human beings, we constantly fear to miss out materially or in terms of status and self-worth.

To make things worse, we tend to take on patterns of excessive consumption in our attempt to compensate for our fundamental unease in this setting. Which contributes to real, self-made threats like climate change and the devastation of our natural ecosystems.

On top of that, a fear and control-driven mindset makes us search for power. And being in positions of power reduces our capacity for empathy and compassion. If our fears are very deep, we might even get addicted to power and in result we might start making the world a more threatening place for everyone else.

So how to get back to cooperating sincerely?

Now the fundamental question is, how can we create social and organizational environments that enable us to sincerely practice our cooperative human nature? How can we build and protect environments in which we feel safe and happy, without being driven by a ‘need’ to gain power and take advantage of others?

Fortunately, there are examples of communities everywhere that cooperate sincerely at least to some extent. Sometimes it happens within families, sometimes within religious communities, sometimes within communities who connect around other common purposes.

Yet, even these communities and their members face constant pressure from the broader social and economic structures that undermine our mindset of cooperating sincerely.

And even if we are lucky enough to live in a democracy, our current political and economic institutions tend to fail to create safe environments for cooperating sincerely at large scale. This comes at no surprise, as they are deeply intertwined with the mindset of scarcity and competition due to the influence of the corporate logic.

Strengthening islands of sincere cooperation

Nevertheless, there exists a colorful diversity of communities who practice sincere cooperation in one way or another. For some of us, it’s easy to find a home in these communities. For others, it may seem incredibly hard. And almost all of us are times and again confronted with the pressures of the scarcity and competition that currently dominate our societies.

This is why we started an initiative to build a social network to support people, communities, and organizations who want to unfold and develop their capacity for cooperating sincerely. 

We call this initiative Cosyland (“Cosy” standing for Cooperating sincerely). Our common denominator is the sincere wish to live in harmony with our cooperative human nature. We build this on the rich ground of existing movements and projects all around the world.

And since we are living in a moment in history where the advancements in artificial intelligence are about to accelerate all of this in ways that are hard to predict, Cosyland is accompanied by the cooperative project CosyAI.

Check them out, join us in co-shaping them, drop the self-restraining mindsets of scarcity and competition, and let's cooperate sincerely. :)

We can look at it from many standpoints and come to a similar conclusion: We’re living through a moment in history, where things can take a turn for humans that is fundamentally different to anything that has happened in the past.

The most obvious standpoint is to look at climate change. For the first time in history, we have produced and keep producing so much human made climate gas that it’s messing up the environmental conditions we live in at a planetary level.

Another standpoint that is coming into broader attention is to look at the rise of artificial intelligence. For the first time in history, we’re at the brink of developing a technology that might wipe us out. Not because we misuse it, or because we make a mistake, but because it can.

And then there’s the standpoint that I’ve been exploring specifically over the past ten years: We have created organizational actors that already have taken control over many aspects of our lives. Corporations. This has led to levels of inequality that are both disgraceful and unhealthy for everyone. But it’s pretty difficult to untangle the dynamics behind this, because they’re affecting our societies, our cultures, and our brains.

Now whatever standpoint we take, all of these global trends look very big and complex. They’re also highly interrelated. They do shape our realities nonetheless.

For myself, I decided to dedicate my life to facing them and to building structures that support us to live happy lives on this one beautiful Earth we have.

I don’t care how naive or pathetic this sounds. Already, the combined effects of these processes are killing and devastating the lives of thousands of children every year.

In the case of AI, there’s a real potential of killing all children, all babies, all grandmas, all grandpas, all animals, all of us. Even if this existential risk still seems far away, there are many ways in which this technology can accelerate other harmful social trends that are already happening.

This is not OK, no matter how we put it. And it’s not OK to stand by watching.

So here’s what I’ll do:

1. I’ll write about the mechanisms behind this, from an optimistic, but as sincere as possible perspective.

2. I’ll do my best to contribute to movements for building alternative ways into the future.

3. I’ll do my best to continue working on myself.

I believe that in order to really make a positive difference, we need to heal. We have to face our inner challenges, and stop hiding behind all kind of excuses and stories that we tell ourselves. I believe this is the case for most of us and certainly for me.

If you want to keep update about my journey, you can subscribe for free:

Subscribe now

And if you want to connect and cooperate on this practically, please don’t hesitate to get in touch at Platform21.net.

Some of my friends started wondering lately: What trip did he get on that he keeps talking about dragons?

So here more background on what I mean by the Dragons and why I write mystically sounding sentences like:

“The Dragons are here to give us strength.”

And:

“The essence of Dragonstrength is love.”

I could add that the Dragons are as old as humanity itself. And that they’re the most powerful beings that ever existed on planet Earth.

This still might sound slightly mystical though.

What can be said for certain is that the Dragons exist in all of us, even though many of us got out of touch with them.

But this again might not sound very precise or practically useful. So, here the plain, rationalist definition:

The Dragons are humanity’s accumulated, collective emotional heritage.

Ah… ok… that sounds a bit more down to Earth. But what does it mean exactly? And how exactly is it practically useful?

Much of it comes down to our early childhood brain imprints.

One thing that most neuroscientists and psychologists can agree on is that our emotional experiences in our early childhood leave deeply enshrined traces in our brain (and the rest of our nervous system). And these deep rooted synaptic configurations have significant influence throughout our whole life, on our thoughts, our actions, and - in particular - our reactions.

At first sight, this might sound pretty trivial. But these imprints in our brains have much deeper effects on our reality than at least I was aware of for a long time.

For someone who grew up in a family of psychotherapists and who studied philosophy with a focus on theories of consciousness, I’ve been pretty late in fully appreciating the importance of these emotional imprints that we all get in our early childhood.

Rather, I thought, my mindset and my worldviews where shaped by my philosophical reflections, my conscious choices, and, of course, my highly rational deliberations, based on scientific evidence and rigorous methodological standards.

But since I started looking at it in more detail, I am absolutely mind-blown by discovering how much influence these emotional imprints actually have. And above that, by understanding more and more about the implications this has for our efforts to make this world a better place.

Our parents are in our brains.

The people who affect our emotional experiences in our early childhood the most usually are our parents (or whoever took the parental role for us). In that sense, they, i.e. all inputs we got from them, are deeply enshrined into our neural structures.

By the very same logic, our parents’ own brains and thus their actions and reactions have been deeply influenced by their own respective parents or caretakers.

This means that we too are indirectly influenced by the emotional imprints of our grandparents, whose actions and emotional reactions were in turn influenced by the brains and thus actions and reactions of their own parents. It is easy to see how this pattern has been going on for generations and generations and generations.

Quite a colorful mix.

Now add to this the fact that our later emotional experiences, too, can leave deep imprints in our brains. That includes our experiences in our later childhood and youth, and even some of our deeper or more persistent experiences as a grownup.

And consider that the various people who play a role in creating these experiences all are influenced themselves by their own generation-chains of childhood imprints and later emotional experiences.

Through this immensely complex mess of mutual emotional imprints across and within generations, we all get our own personalized bag of imprinted brain patterns, carved with traces of influence from the emotional experiences of the very first human beings onward (and possibly from our ancestor species, too).

Now these age-old, omnipresent emotional imprints in all of our brains, in their collective accumulation across generations and within generations, are the Dragons.

And, to close the circle of this enormous global drama and actually make a practically relevant point: We can choose to face the Dragons.

And if we do, we can become their friends.

Of course, if you want this is just another metaphor. A more worldly way of putting it is to say that we can learn to understand the underlying emotional imprints in our brains by observing our mental and behavioral reactions. And in a next step, we can start playing proactively with the “emotional energy” they generate in us.

On the one hand we can train ourselves in reacting less strongly, which actually implies intentionally reshaping these brain imprints to some extend. But we can do even more. If we become friends with the Dragons, that means, if we learn how to actually use our own brain imprints for the purpose that we can discover in ourselves by stopping to fight or flee from our deeper emotional inputs, we can develop Dragonstrength.

Ok, this is Dragontalk again. So what does it mean in worldly terms?

It means, quite simply, that if we sincerely face our deepest emotional patterns, we can disentangle and unchain our capacity to love. And, by embracing this love, we can create a happy existence for ourselves and others. In fact, it means nothing less than that we can change the world and re-calibrate all relevant parameters of the universe.

So the Dragons actually have no spiritual meaning. Or do they?

Let my ego throw in another piece of personal background here: For a long time I considered myself rather extremely rational. I’ve been interested in things like the philosophy of mathematics and reductionist theories of consciousness. I never thought myself religious in any form and liked to say that if you stop questioning your beliefs, you can be certain that they are wrong.

Nevertheless, I do believe that the Dragons do have a spiritual aspect to them. If spiritual means postulating the existence of something outside of reductionist explanations of the universe that at least in theory can be modeled in conceptual languages like physics and mathematics, then the Dragons are indeed spiritual beings.

The core of this spiritual aspect lies in the observation that the essence of the Dragons is love. And that experiencing this love is the most fundamental of all human experiences. Whatever concepts, scientific theories, and methods we may use to make sense of and influence the world around us, this experience of love comes before. That means, there’s nothing we can think, understand, or conceive, without being influenced by our capacity to love.

Even physics and mathematics are conceptual languages that are developed by beings that are subject to this fundamental capacity, and they are therefore inherently constrained in explaining it. No human language could, we can only learn to observe this love in ourselves and then approximate a common understanding with others by finding ways to communicate about it. Non-verbal, non-conceptual ways might be much more effective for at least some aspects of this.

In fact, this implies that understanding itself is a feeling, meaning that there is no final conceptual “truth” outside our emotional states and that the only thing we can do to refine our understanding of emotional states is working on becoming more sincere. But this is not the topic of this text.

There is no way around the Dragons.

What is relevant here is the implication that we cannot ‘disproof’ our fundamental capacity to love through conceptual constructs.

We can try to analyze what happens in our nervous systems when we consciously feel this love and develop all kinds of theories about it. But we cannot explain this fundamental experience away. We can blur it and bury it under all kind of stories and self-talk. But beneath it all our love is still there, leaving its imprint on everything that is going on in our minds. It is the most fundamental aspect of our existence.

All other feelings and emotional states are rooted in this love. If we feel fear, it ultimately means we fear for something you love. If we are sad or angry, we are sad or angry about what happened to something we love. We can dwell and rage in any other feeling for as long as we like, but below it all, and open to see for everyone who finds the courage to look with sincere eyes, there is this basic love.

If this is the case, where does this come from?

As Rutger Bregman pointed out in Humankind: A Hopeful History, our species developed by evolutionary selection for our friendliness. I would add that from a phenomenological perspective, this friendliness comes down to the mentioned basic capacity to love.

This explains why we are so good at cooperating. As homo sapiens sapiens, we do not just have an incredible capacity to adapt and to develop and communicate conceptual understandings. The deceicive reason why we became the species that enthroned itself on top of all others, extinguishing other species by the thousands every year, imprisoning them in zoos, aquariums, and terrariums, exploiting them in industrial scale farms, and analyzing and manipulating their biological properties in laboratories, is our capacity to cooperate. It is this capacity that made us become the super-dominant, if not super-destructive species that we are. And this capacity roots in our capacity to love.

Wait a minute, we extinguish other species, start wars, and devastate whole landscapes out of love? 

Yes. The apparent contradiction quickly vanishes, if we look at how far out of touch with ourselves most of us are. And not just us, our ancestors have been out of touch with themselves already, imprinting their injured emotional heritage on us. We are all deeply sick, and we continue to transmit our inherited sickness on every new generation.

This is not about blaming anyone. This is about sincerely acknowledging this reality that we all share.

And now it is up to us to find ways to get back in touch with our fundamental capacity to love and actually become what we evolutionary developed to be through millions of years. That is, a friendly, loving species that lives in respect and harmony with our surroundings, each of us grounded on a base of peacefulness, gratefulness, and happiness, because we sincerely feel, express, and live the love that is inside of us all.

These are the real “hard facts”.

This might sound like cheesy hippie-talk. But in my view, it is simply stating the brute facts, after removing all fairy-tale self-talk of ‘intelligence’ and ‘toughness’ and ‘self-confidence’ that we keep telling ourselves in our strive to hide from the Dragons. In mundane terms, it means stating the facts after removing the narratives we develop to cover up the effects of the emotional imprints in our nervous systems from our early childhood and beyond, and the accompanying bottomless insecurity of our existence.

So yes, in my view we are all helpless little babies born into a world that really needs some healing. And in response we are all clinging to some stories and beliefs that give us some fake sense of certainty. I think there is nothing wrong with admitting that, because if we become more sincere and learn to access our love, we can be happy and strong.

If we do not do that, if we keep trying to ground our strength in something external, like our achievements, or status, or power, or technologies, or the material stuff that we accumulate, or the dream of control through rational understanding, then we end up developing Plasticstrength and will always be subject to a chronic feeling of emptiness and uncertainty, no matter how much we try to ignore it.

If instead we sincerely face our collectively accumulated emotional heritage, and if we support each other in embracing the inevitable vulnerability that comes with it, then we can thrive as a happy species in harmony with our natural environment on planet Earth.

Agreed, there are still some steps to go, but the capacity is there within us all, and the path is there before us as soon as we find the courage to work on our sincerity.

And so yes, it is time to face the Dragons.

This is the last of my four Dragonstories. It was my goal with it to make more clear what I mean by the metaphor of the Dragons. I think it could be useful to read the second and third one again after reading this, since they are short and condensed summaries of what I mean by ‘facing the Dragons’.

You may also enjoy reading the more personal first one about Dragonstrength. Or join other humans who want to become Dragonfriends.

Related book recommendations:

Rutger Bregman - Humankind: A Hopeful History

Stefanie Stahl - The Child in You

Dragonstrength is the antidote to Plasticstrength.

Plasticstrength is the artificial, empty illusion of strength that we can build up when we are out of touch with the Dragons.

It is called Plasticstrength, because it is as fake as a plastic plant.

A plastic plant can look nice and healthy from a distance, but there is no life in it. Plastic plants cannot nurture anyone, they do not produce any oxygen, their smell is artificial.

There is nothing wrong with using plastic plants for their specific purpose, like art or decoration. But they can be very harmful, if we use them as actual plants.

Plasticstrength can have real effects in the world.

Throughout human history, Plasticstrength has been used to build political and business empires.

People who are out of touch with the Dragons can develop plasticstrength.

Someone who develop great Plasticstrength can create the illusion of giving leadership and hold.

People who are out of touch with the Dragons still can have human strength.

They can still feel love, compassion, friendship, hope.

But they can be shaken by events and get hurt.

If they get hurt, they can lose some of their human strength.

If people lose too much of their human strength, they can get overwhelmed by frustration, insecurity, and fear.

If they get overwhelmed by frustration, insecurity, and fear, they can get disrooted.

People who get disrooted crave for signs of strength.

People who crave for signs of strength can fall into the trap of Plasticstrength.

Some may develop Plasticstrength themselves.

Some may feel attracted by someone else’s Plasticstrength.

The essence of Plasticstrength is insincerity.

Insincerity can fill the ego with an illusion of self-confidence.

The ego filled with illusion is hollow.

Realizing its own hollowness is the biggest threat to the insincere ego.

Facing their own insincerity is the biggest threat to those who fall into the trap of Plasticstrength.

Plasticstrength can turn frustration, insecurity, and fear into greed, judgment, and aggression.

People with great Plasticstrength can use greed, judgment, and aggression as tools for controlling disrooted people.

This is how Plasticstrength can give power to people who are out of touch with the Dragons.

The essence of Dragonstrength is love.

Dragonfriends never judge.

To Dragonfriends, no-one is lost.

Dragonfriends can direct their love to give strength.

They can direct their love towards disrooted people.

They can give strength to dissolve greed, judgment, and aggression.

They can give strength to overcome frustration, insecurity, and fear.

Dragonfriends can give the strength to become more sincere.

Dragonfriends can put people in touch with the Dragons.

The Dragons can fill all hollowness.

This is how Dragonstrength is the antidote to Plasticstrength.*

Metaphors for lovers of rationality

If you wish, you can see the Dragons as metaphors for old emotions and traumas that are deeply enshrined into our neural structures. You can see the concepts of Dragonfriends, Dragonstrength and Plasticstrength as metaphors for different emotional coping mechanisms.

Read a more detailed rational explanation in Dragons?? What do you mean, Dragons?

This is my third Dragonstory. Check out the the fourth one about Dragons?? What do you mean, Dragons? Or jump to first one about Dragonstrength or the second one about Dragonfriends.

So here is what I learned so far on my path to become a Dragonfriend. May these words inspire something valuable in your mind.

The Dragons are here to give us strength.

They can bring harm and destruction, if we choose to fight them.

They can bring peace and happiness, if we turn them into our friends.

Those who turn the Dragons into their friends are called the Dragonfriends.

Dragonfriends can use the strength of the Dragons to give other people strength.

By doing this, we develop Dragonstrength.

With Dragonstrength, we can take care of our own lives.

With Dragonstrength, we can support others in taking care of theirs.

With Dragonstrength, we can overcome whatever holds us down.

With Dragonstrength, we can reshape the entire global system.

With Dragonstrength, we can build a healthy world for all.

Dragonfriends who want to do this need to join up with other Dragonfriends.

When Dragonfriends give strength together, they multiply their Dragonstrength.

It is the giving of strength that creates Dragonstrength.

It is the collective giving of strength that multiplies Dragonstrength.

Becoming a Dragonfriend requires learning the language of the Dragons.

If we face the Dragons without knowing their language, all we see is anger.

In challenged moments, we may direct this anger against other people.

If we try to fight the Dragons, we may direct this anger against ourselves.

Anger against ourselves can be highly destructive for us.

Anger against ourselves can make us highly destructive for others.

If we suppress the anger against ourselves, we may get sad and disappointed.

If we get too tired to fight, we may end up directing the anger towards others.

The essence of the Dragons is love.

Dragonfire is love so compressed that it burns everything it touches.

In its compressed form, the love is undirected.

If our love is undirected, we may be incapable of loving ourselves.

If our love is undirected, we may be incapable of loving others.

By directing our compressed love towards ourselves and others, we can decompress our love.

If we decompress our love, we can develop Dragonstrength.

This is the secret of the Dragonfriends.

Dragonfriends know how to decompress anger into love.

If we stop directing our decompressed love, it compresses back into anger.

If we direct our decompressed love towards others, it might be rejected.

If our love gets rejected, it may become a source of sadness.

If harmful things happen to people we love, it might become another source of sadness.

If we carry our sadness on our shoulders, it can pull us down.

If we give our sadness to the Dragons, they can transform it into love.

The more sadness we give to the Dragons, the more love they generate within us.

The more love there is within us, the stronger it may get compressed.

The more compressed our love will get, the more likely it will turn into anger.

If we channel our love to ourselves and others, we can increase our Dragonstrength.

This is all you need to know to become a dragonfriend.*

*Learning to become a dragonfriend is quite a difficult journey. It is not enough to understand these words. We need to learn the language of the Dragons.

We cannot learn the language of the Dragons by ourselves. If we face the Dragons alone, we may react to them with fear, or sadness, or anger against ourselves. Or we may try to run away from them and try to search for peace and balance. Whatever way we choose, we can never overcome the Dragons.

If we want to become friends with the Dragons, we need to find a Dragonguide. Dragonguides can come in many roles and shapes, but they need to be outside of ourselves. We can search for them or we can be found by them. Whatever way they come, we need to be open for them to guide us. This is how to start the journey to become a Dragonfriend.

This is my second Dragontext. Check out the third one about Plasticstrength. Or the first one about Dragonstrength.

For lovers of rationality:

If you wish, you can see the Dragons as metaphors for old emotions and traumas that are deeply enshrined into our neural structures. You can see the concepts of Dragonfriends, Dragonstrength and Plasticstrength as metaphors for different emotional coping mechanisms.

Read a more detailed rational explanation in Dragons?? What do you mean, Dragons?

Ok, this will be a more personal story.

For a long time, I considered myself a pretty balanced person. I have been meditating daily for seventeen years and basically pictured myself as having one foot in enlightenment and the other one in life, while keeping a smiling distance to it all.

At the same time, I was constantly fighting against the Dragons. Normally, it would happen somewhere in the back of my consciousness. Yet sometimes the fighting would become quite present.

In these cases, the Dragons would often take the shape of loneliness, or impatience, or disappointed ambition. But in some moments, they seemed to show their true face:

A deep anger against myself.

In such moments, I would withdraw from all social interactions. But even in other moments, when I was in my usual state of balance, I would always keep a general inner safety distance from other people to make sure no-one would get hurt by the Dragons.

This is how things were until, at the beginning of last summer, a shaking incident made it impossible to ignore the inconsistency in all this.

I decided to face the Dragons. And I decided to do this with someone’s help. That was quite a big thing for me, as I had never before accepted help with the deeper stuff inside me. But luckily, I had just met someone who I thought might be a person capable of getting a little closer to the Dragons, without fearing for him to get burned:

Just two days before the incident, I had participated in a ‘communicative meditation’ workshop. I attended out of curiosity to see something different from my usual practice, but didn't have high expectations. As it turned out, my first partner for the exercise was the facilitator. Here, I call him Jojunando.

At first, a cold reservedness arose in me that I usually felt coming up when I sensed alpha male energy in people — expecting a competitive attitude and an aggressive defense of their fears. But then, sitting in front of him and looking into his eyes, I saw a combination of acceptance and vulnerability that seemed strong enough for letting him come a little closer to the Dragons in me.

So when that incident shook me a few days later, I decided to reach out to him. He met me the same day that I reached out, and three days later I was lying on a massage board to try one of his trauma therapy sessions. It involved entering a kind of hypnotic state while diving into a method that I would call ‘imaginative somatic exploration’:

Equipped with a magic shield, I entered the cave of the Dragons. The cave was of enormous size. It’s dark, rocky walls sealed off any light except for the glow of the Dragon fire.

I saw that the cave was situated right under a tree and that this tree was the tree of my strength. I realized that the roots of the tree encircled the cave, thereby keeping the Dragons inside.

The Dragons were absurdly huge, towering above me like skyscrapers, hundreds of meters tall. But most of all, they were angry. I can still feel the vibration of this unleashed anger resonating through my body in that imagined moment.

Standing far below on the dusty floor of the cave, I saw that the Dragons were constantly attacking the roots of the tree. The violent rage of their fire made me grateful for the magic shield. Their roaring was so loud that I wondered how I could hear it without immediately turning deaf.

My guide asked me what the source of the Dragons’ strength was. I replied that I was giving it to them. “How about you take it back from them for a while?” he asked. I did and never before I felt so much strength in me.

“How do the Dragons look like now?” he asked. I replied that they had become much smaller, looking rather like statures of Dragons in a museum. But still, they seemed full of anger. “Then how about you take the anger out of them and put it into a corner of the cave? How do they look like now?” They looked, I replied with a smile, like St. Bernhard dogs.

I was a little surprised by this observation, since I never had a special relationship with dogs. Except, I remembered, as a child St. Bernhards had been my favorite animals. This is getting a bit cheesy now, I thought.

But then, who cares? I told myself, still feeling the Dragonstrength pulsating through my body. I started forming it between my hands into balls of shining energy. These balls I sent out into the sky to let them spread around the planet. Wherever they were shining on people, they gave them strength and put smiles in their faces.

Looking at the planet from a distance, I saw that I was not the only one sending out these shining balls. There were many other people, who sent out their own balls, filled with their own energy. And I saw that whenever two balls met, they would merge into new, much bigger balls, shining with multiplied warmth and strength.

A deeply satisfied calm started filling up my body. The brightness of many smiles and shared joy was floating gently through my veins. I felt how more and more people surrendered gratefully into the hugs of my strong arms. And gratefully I returned their hugs, feeling how we were getting stronger with every breath we took.

We are not alone. We are not fighting lonely fights. We are here to give together.

In this moment I understood that I could direct my Dragonstrength. I could receive it through the roots of my tree and spread it out through its leafs. I understood that no fighting was necessary, that all could flow with ease through the tree’s widening branches. I realized that my purpose is just this: To give people strength. And it became clear that the more I follow this purpose with gratefulness and joy, the more I will connect with others and together we will multiply our strength.

This was in summer, but then came fall. In this fall, I got hit by another round of the incident that had confronted me with my inconsistencies. Almost without noticing, I fell back into my lonely Dragonfights. Sadness fell heavy on my shoulders, restlessness troubled me day and night.

Did I not let down someone whom I had liked more than I had been ready to admit? Was this not more relevant and real than any dreams about Dragonstrength?

In this time, when I was stumbling again, I had the luck to meet another person who offered me a hand. She asked me questions that sounded different from those that I had heard. Once more I decided to accept a guide. I call her Vasinanda.

Through months of regular sessions, Vasinanda helped me untangle the inconsistencies that were holding me in chains. With her mirror I discovered ever more untrue stories that I kept telling myself over and over again. Step by step, she helped me learn the language of the Dragons.

For the first time, with her guidance, I consciously opened up to my feminine energy. Then, three other wise women appeared, giving me further hints that led me back on the path towards my Dragonstrength. I call them Gabinanda, Milenanda, and Raminanda.

Gabinanda helped me see the love in the Dragonfire.

Milenanda helped me sense that the Dragons can coexist with deep connections.

Raminanda helped me understand that we can turn weakness into strength.

What came out of this is the art of becoming friends with the Dragons, which will be the topic of my next story.

This is the first of my Dragontexts. Read the second one about Dragonfriends.

Subscribe now

Read more