The Coming Inversion

Economic Collapses Come With Paradigm Shifts

Key Takeaways:

1. The economic transition from Roman slavery to Medieval feudalism was marked by a paradigmatic shift from polytheism to monotheism.

2. A thousand years later, the transition from Medieval feudalism to modern capitalism came with another paradigm shift from monotheism to science.

3. The inevitable transition away from capitalism will be accompanied by a new paradigmatic shift that revolutionizes our understanding of consciousness itself.

Slavery & The Fall of Rome

The slave economy of classical Rome collapsed because of the short-sightedness of its ruling class, who prioritized their own fortunes over economic sustainability. The hoarding of property and resources by a tiny minority made Roman society too brittle to withstand deadly pandemics, or the sudden climate change of the 3rd century AD.

As the wealth of Rome became concentrated in ever-fewer hands, the vast majority of Romans lost any incentive to fight for an Empire that refused to share its wealth. And once the economically disenfranchised population could no longer afford to have children, military recruitment became a major problem.

The Roman government slapped a band-aid on that problem by hiring Germanic mercenaries to defend the shrinking borders of the Empire. But these hired guns eventually turned on them. A commonly proposed date for the Fall of Rome is 410 AD, when a former mercenary named Alaric the Visigoth finally sacked the Eternal City.

Christianity arose within the Roman Empire as a protest movement against the same cruel economic hierarchy that forced Rome to turn to mercenaries for protection. Jesus’ populist economic message threatened the financial interests of the Roman ruling class, who ordered violent persecutions of Christians. But, during the twilight of the Empire, the elites reversed course.

During the 4th century, St. Augustine reinterpreted Christian demands for “forgiveness” to mean forgiveness for personal sins. Not the forgiveness of debts owed TO the rich implied by Jesus’ many Old Testament references. Augustine made Christianity palatable to the Roman oligarchy by removing this danger to their balance sheets. In a desperate bid to maintain political control, the oligarchy embraced his interpretation and established it as the state religion of their dying Empire.

The Roman conversion to Christianity was a radical paradigm shift. The economic transition from the slave system of Rome to the feudal system of the Middle Ages was reflected in the political victory of Christian monotheism over pagan polytheism. For Europeans, it was nothing less than a fundamental change in the very fabric of reality itself.

Feudalism & The Renaissance

As the Middle Ages wore on, Christianity calcified into a power structure similar to the Imperial Roman authority it had once opposed. A noble minority lived in relative splendor, endorsed by the Church, while the vast majority toiled as peasants on land owned by the nobility.

Like the Roman economy, this unequal arrangement was too fragile to withstand climate shocks or pandemics. In the mid-1300s, the Black Death killed a third of the European population. The resulting labor shortage allowed peasants to stop swearing fealty, and to instead play the nobility off each other in bidding wars for labor. It was the beginning of an economic transition away from Medieval feudalism to modern capitalism, where employees enjoy the right to rent out their labor to the highest bidder. As with the Fall of Rome, this economic transition came with a dramatic paradigm shift.

The Crusades had already revived intellectual traffic between Europe and Muslim society in the Near East. In the 1400s, the Medici of Florence welcomed Greek-speaking scholars from Constantinople as the Turkish Sultan marched on their city. These events reacquainted Christendom with literature that had been banned by the Christian emperors of Rome at the outset of the Middle Ages, including certain alchemical books, dating back to Late Antiquity, that heavily influenced the Renaissance notion of magic.

Renaissance notions of magic like alchemy and astrology, in turn, strongly influenced the Scientific Revolution. Isaac Newton was a devoted alchemist. His biography reflects the fact that alchemists and astrologers gradually morphed into chemists and astronomers.

Today, science defines reality on behalf of the modern public, as the Church once defined reality for Europeans during the Middle Ages. That triumph of scientific authority over Church authority is epitomized by the discovery that the earth revolves around the sun, and not the other way around. The Church insisted that the earth was the center of a universe which God had created for humankind. But the advent of the telescope ushered in the modern era by overturning the dominant Christian cosmology. This fundamental change in the fabric of reality accompanied the transition from feudalism to capitalism.

Capitalism & The Modern Era

At the height of the Industrial Revolution, Karl Marx acknowledged that capitalism was a marked improvement over the feudal system of lords and peasants that preceded it. But he also observed that no system of employers and employees could possibly survive the mass replacement of employees with technology. With the recent advent of large language models like ChatGPT, Marx’s point has never been more salient.

He pointed out that once labor-saving technology advances sufficiently, a handful of employers will control the entire system of mechanized production. Meanwhile, the majority will become powerless former employees, displaced by technology. Marx’s key insight was that, when the means of production are privately owned, technological innovation leads to terminal wealth concentration.

If the millennia-old historical pattern holds, another major paradigm shift will accompany the eventual passage of capitalism into history, whenever that may be. It would be solipsistic to believe that all such shifts are already in our past. Further revolutions in our bedrock conception of reality must certainly await us in the future. In the meantime, perhaps some clues about the nature of the next revolution can already be found in the placebo effect and the double-slit experiment.

Science, the current authority, presupposes an objective reality, independent from all observers. Its doctrine is that valid experiments should be universally reproducible, irrespective of the observer. But the placebo effect and the double-slit experiment seem to demonstrate that the mind has some effect on reality. In the placebo effect, fake medicines significantly affect patients’ bodies despite lacking any active ingredient. And in the double-slit experiment, observation apparently determines whether electrons manifest as waves or as particles.

These clues suggest that we are not mere observers moving around within a universe, as presumed by science. It suggests that our minds are creating and experiencing the universe simultaneously, just like in our dreams.

By insisting on evidence and reason, the Scientific Revolution successfully challenged the Christian paradigm of the Middle Ages. But it never challenged the monotheistic idea that we’re limited to moving around inside of God’s grand creation and observing it with our senses.

The notion that we are not mere observers—that we actually participate in the act of creation—remains every bit as blasphemous today under our modern scientific paradigm as it was under the Medieval Church.

Notwithstanding, the assumption of an objective reality remains a powerful tool. It facilitated myriad scientific discoveries over the past few centuries, which resulted in the labor-saving technology that destabilizes the capitalist system of employers and employees. Ironically, the overturning of that assumption might be the next great paradigmatic shift lying in store for us.

Conclusion

During good times, when economic gears turn smoothly and wealth is distributed equitably, it rarely occurs to people to question the pronouncements of the authorities. But when those gears seize up, and wealth is hoarded by tiny minorities, people start squinting suspiciously at their emperors to see if they’re really wearing any clothes. That’s why major economic transitions have historically come paired with paradigmatic shifts that disrupt bedrock conceptions of reality. As capitalism lapses into dysfunction, the next great paradigm shift could be nothing less than a revolution in our understanding of consciousness itself.

Further Materials

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.
Karl Marx, German Ideology, 1845