Published 21 January 2026 – PDF
At the beginning of November last year – just before the American presidential election – I published my latest newsletter. The main article was entitled Donald Trump, Oswald Spengler and Mikhail Gorbachev – några tankar om det amerikanska presidentvalet, and was my attempt to sketch out Donald Trump’s position in the historical process as I visualise it from the meta-historical perspective of civilisation development that I have continued to develop over the years, and sometimes presented more or less successfully in book form.[2] Simply put, this perspective means that I believe that since the emergence of the ideas that are central to the modern epoch and their continued follow-up in institutional and social development, we have been in a process of civilisational change which – with all the shortcomings of historical analogies – is reminiscent of events such as the shift from the Roman Empire to the Christian sphere of civilisation.
From this perspective, I interpreted Trump’s political role and possible presidency as potentially constructive in a sense that is profound and rather difficult to grasp. I claimed that “his behaviour, which is difficult for the established elites to deal with, is a camouflaged gift that needs to be understood and handled with wisdom so that the necessary and ongoing transformation of civilisation can proceed in a reasonably constructive manner”.
And let me now further remind you of how I described Trump and what I called Trump’s gift to the United States and the world:
”To a fairly impartial observer, or at least to someone who has not been swept up in the strong enthusiasm for Trump, he may appear, in terms of personality psychology, to be a psychopathic liar and bully. But there is an entirely different factor at work here. Regardless of his personal characteristics, he is undoubtedly equipped with a leadership ability similar to that possessed by successful cult leaders, i.e. he can exploit the many problems and developmental dilemmas within the framework of the modern project that are completely unsolvable or extremely difficult to solve and poorly handled, using his great rhetorical skills to distort the perspective of citizens so that they can project their longing for credible hope onto him personally. For these people, he becomes a kind of saviour. And for others who are not as intensely drawn into the cult surrounding Trump, he becomes, despite his personality – one simply glosses over the various expressions of it – a kind of promise that one’s own ego-driven ambitions and hopes will be miraculously realised in practice. And that one’s political preferences will also have a significant and, preferably, permanent impact.
This ability is rare, especially on such a large stage as an entire country. And in this case, the world’s most powerful country economically and politically. And when you have that ability, you usually have a historic mission. You have a message for your fellow human beings that needs to be understood and handled wisely.
In my opinion, this is why it is very difficult to make Trump politically irrelevant by pushing him aside with the help of psychological or psychiatric diagnoses. Or by eagerly and more or less indignantly and aggressively pointing out that he often tells untruths. What must be understood in order to get anywhere is that Trump has instinctively understood something about the profound problems, not to say catastrophic inadequacies, of the modern project. Not that he has constructive solutions, but rather that his appearance highlights the unsustainability of the project. To the discerning eye, he appears as a kind of meddlesome, power-hungry and rather caricatured portrayer of some of the downsides and unsustainability of the modern project. And he undeniably strikes a chord with many people.
And this is Trump’s gift to the United States and the world.”
I could have followed up this analysis with various arguments about what Trump might be expected to try to achieve as president. But I didn’t. I contented myself with asking three questions ahead of the then upcoming election: “Does Trump need to be re-elected? Or have the political elite and the general public understood sufficiently well the truths Trump has revealed about American society and, by extension, about the modern project? Or is their understanding insufficient?”
My answer to these questions was influenced by my deeply held hope that humanity will emerge reasonably unscathed from the ongoing transformation of civilisation, i.e. I prefer that great and profound insights will be “purchased” with the least possible suffering. I therefore wrote: “The answer will come soon. Personally, I have a feeling that Kamala Harris will become president after more or less extensive turmoil.” But at the same time, I wisely added the caveat: “Whether she will then have understood enough to prevent new ‘Trumps’ from emerging remains to be seen.” And that caveat means, in practice, that I believed and still believe that it is impossible to ignore the fact that a constructive way forward requires that the downsides and unsustainability of the modern project be handled much more wisely than is apparent from the current power elite’s conventional vision of the path to the future.
However, regardless of what I allowed myself to hope for, the election results showed that the level of understanding was low enough to once again open the gates of power to Trump. What was needed, then, was not a term for Harris, where she would have the opportunity to show that her hopes for what she could achieve were illusory, and in reality would completely unnecessarily reinforce the political discontent that Donald Trump captures, amplifies and focuses.
So now we find ourselves in the situation we are in. Donald Trump has taken power and has set in motion a tumultuous political upheaval in which he rolls into central political arenas with the finesse and sensitivity of a bowling ball, making demands and pushing through changes. Of course, it is unclear to what extent these changes will be permanent, or what form they will ultimately take. But there are hardly any reasonably qualified political analysts who do not see what is happening as disruptive and difficult to manage.
At present, the American political system – despite its much-praised constitution – seems to be paralysed by fear and indecision. And around the world, those in power are pondering how best to understand, parry or deal with various decisions, threats and political moves.
On a more emotional level (i.e. the level that often determines election results if opinion-forming is reasonably free), the main reactions to what is happening range from exaggerated and arrogant jubilation that order will finally be restored to the world – the “swamp” will be drained, i.e. American institutions will be “freed” from all officials who are not completely and unbreakably loyal to Trump’s policies in their implementation (and, inspired by the US, similar processes are expected to be stimulated around the world), the economy will flourish after all those who have profited from the US have had their financial dealings with the country “corrected” through Trump’s customs duties and tariffs, and peace will be achieved through brilliant Trump deals – to dismayed sighs (sometimes turned into protest demonstrations) that Trump’s policies will not only lead to severe economic crises but also undermine American democracy, perhaps so seriously that it will be difficult to restore, and that the rules-based world order will also fall apart, leading in the worst case to a global development dominated by various regional dictatorships that capriciously abuse their power and drive conflicts.
However, no clear political strategies have been developed for how to successfully deal with the new Trumpian politics. For me, this means that the central question is what Trump actually understands and is doing through his political initiatives, which are both difficult to interpret and difficult to manage for the current political elites. There are certainly attempts to answer this question, but no answer that is generally accepted. In other words, there is a lot of groping in the dark in attempts to wisely interpret and manage Trump in the short and long term.
If I were to express my answer to the question as briefly as possible, it would be a metaphorical one. Trump shows where the machinery we are steering is actually heading, regardless of what fantasies about the direction we are trying to maintain our belief in. This is what I have previously described as Trump’s gift to the United States and the world.
What I mean by this is that Trump’s emergence is a consequence of the development curve of the modern project, or whatever it should be called. In other words, Trump’s emergence is not something unfortunate or almost causeless and temporary, but there are deep causes that have to do with how the modern project has been perceived and managed over the years. Trump thus has the insights and qualities required to fit in as an important and directly or indirectly transformative actor in an ongoing historical process. At the same time, however, I believe that his emergence is more of a premonition and a warning than something that is complete. It primarily has a message that needs to be interpreted, understood and then translated into wise policy. And that is why I call the seemingly destructive and tragicomic Trump spectacle a gift.
As I mentioned in the introduction, the analysis behind this assessment has to do with my meta-historical perspective, according to which we are in the midst of what I call a civilisational shift. A shift that is about transforming the fundamental vision behind the modern project into something that has a sufficiently deep and insightful future-creating power to catalyse and shape a far better and brighter future than the one we fear and portray in our gloomy disaster scenarios.
In a highly condensed form, my analysis looks like this: The modern project is guided – or justified – by what I call the dream of a rational paradise, i.e. the secularised millennial vision that during the Enlightenment was shaped into a guiding vision for social development as a kind of correction to the previously dominant theological and ecclesiastical vision that had emerged since the days of the Roman Empire and had gradually begun to lose a significant part of its guiding capacity.
However, the longer the modern project has continued its development, the narrower its focus has become. The initially broad humanistic project of liberation and empowerment, freed from narrow-minded religion, has simply gradually lost more and more power to expansive economic endeavours. In fact, in the course of its development, the guiding vision has been “emaciated” (if one can use that term in this context) so that its real focus has gradually shifted to primarily concern power and money, underpinned by a science that is unnecessarily inhibited by a materialistic philosophy.
And when the modern project is taken to its extreme with this focus, it becomes an unabashedly economically expansive expert rule which, at a certain point in its development, risks having to defend its continued power by abandoning or replacing democracy with an authoritarian oligarchic rule (with “believers” and obedient experts). Oswald Spengler saw this as early as the 1920s and called this form of government Caesarism, describing it as a phase in the inexorable collapse of Western civilisation. Meanwhile, Vlad Vexler[3] describes it in more dramatic terms as “hyper-neoliberal, fascistoid monarchism” or slightly different variations on these concepts.
Less dramatically put, it is about the centrifugal forces generated in the modern project, with its increasingly exclusive focus on economic development, becoming progressively stronger and stronger, and therefore requiring ever greater coercion for the project to continue. The logic behind this idea is that the focus on economic development drives what could be called a kind of continuing expansion (to the point of being all-encompassing) of marketisation, where the most money wins (i.e. “proves” that might is right).
This, in turn, catalyses, or is linked to, a development towards what could be seen as a variant of philosopher Thomas Hobbes’ idea of a state of nature characterised by a war of all against all. What I mean by this is that the modern project’s intense focus on economic values has a tendency to dissolve the social contract, so important to Hobbes, into hyper-individualism, with only instrumental loyalty to institutions, companies and nations. And it is this development that accentuates the need for strong and comprehensive central control to prevent the forces that undermine trust and loyalty from hindering continued economic expansion. Simply put, the economic focus paradoxically threatens to lead to the centrifugal forces of the modern project becoming so strong that a hyper-individualistic and largely unconscious recreation of the state of nature that Hobbes wanted to save us from in his day through Leviathan, i.e. a central power strong and effective enough to counteract the prevailing centrifugal forces, takes place.
That said, we had a milder premonition of the current situation when Reagan and Thatcher’s economic and political innovations were formulated as TINA (there is no alternative). And the consequence of this policy was that those in power could interpret and market the whole thing as “now we are on the right track”. A kind of sigh of relief with a touch of possibly Fukuyama-induced hubris could be heard in the corridors of power. The modern project had once again proven itself capable of formulating a political strategy that would stand the test of time.
That feeling lasted for a while, but after various crises and increasingly clear trends in the modern project, it has dissolved into nothingness, and indecision is now the dominant and at the same time unacknowledged feeling in circles of power. For nothing is more problematic for power than indecision. If it is acknowledged, power is lost. So the instinct of the power-wielding elite is to defend power with a combination of propaganda-hyped pseudo-solutions and a gradual tightening of their grip on power. One could describe the situation as the developmental direction generating a need to create a stronger Leviathan.
And this is where Trump comes in. Propaganda-driven pseudo-solutions and attempts to sideline the American Constitution enough to enable the president to have roughly the same power in relation to Congress and the judiciary as Putin and Xi have in relation to their elected assemblies and their judicial systems are therefore irresistibly attractive to Trump and his intellectual and other supporters. Simply put, Trump is more uninhibited than the conventionally minded power elite when it comes to creating a Leviathan with the presumed strength to control the centrifugal forces generated by the modern project.
With this established, I can now refine my thesis about Trump’s gift. This gift is that he will show with great clarity that, however problematic the shortcomings and unsustainability of the modern project may be, the responsibility for devising and implementing forward-looking and effective ways of dealing with the situation on an ongoing basis cannot be delegated to “saviour figures” with dictatorial ambitions.
Of course, I do not know how this all appears from Trump’s innermost and truest perspective. But when I contemplated the matter, it struck me that in his deepest sense of his life’s mission, there may be a to him unconscious but nevertheless strongly guiding thought that “since you did not grasp the implicit point of my criticism, which led to my victory in the 2016 election, this time I will try to single-handedly manifest the complete unsustainability of our direction of development”.
How Trump’s gift will be handled once it has been delivered remains to be seen. But I will now move on to discuss the issue a little. And I would like to begin my discussion by reflecting somewhat on two keys to why the modern project is in the process of completely losing its constructiveness.
The first and central key is that liberation from the shackles of religion has not been managed well enough. It has taken a form that slowly but surely not only questions but dissolves the foundation of both human morality and the experience of meaning. It is not enough to justify the values that should be held high with human rational reasoning. Then they inevitably, albeit gradually, lose their power. They must be justified by reference to something that we ourselves do not control or have power over. The human intellect has its advantages, but its reasoning has its limitations in that it cannot, on its own, reason its way to certainty, even though it can be used in many clever and knowledgeable ways to argue for or against any position. But certainty always eludes the intellect. Modern man wants to deny this. But every time we reason our way to certainty, we have achieved this certainty by smuggling in a belief – i.e. something taken for granted or assumed to be true – into our seemingly completely rational reasoning. In practice, this means that we supplement our rational reasoning with something we could call “auxiliary gods” that enable us to reach the conclusion of our reasoning. At the same time, these “auxiliary gods” can be extremely flawed, even if we feel wise in the light of our often unconscious and unquestioned belief.
It is the insight into these processes that the German sociologist Max Scheler captured so aptly and wisely by saying “that we humans either believe in God or in idols”.
So even though much of the emerging modern era’s criticism of how the Christian dimension of Western civilisation’s fundamental vision had been interpreted and administered by the religious authorities was highly justified, this does not mean that the modern era’s alternative becomes sustainable and constructive solely by virtue of this.
Regardless of the fact that the modern project’s highly justified criticism of religion and the church had undeniably constructive consequences, particularly with regard to the liberation of science from ecclesiastical dogma and the intensification of various liberation and equity processes, it also became a way of serving the people concerned an existential starvation diet consisting of a lack of understanding of the concept of God and replacing the concept of God with a kind of smuggling in of God surrogates, which has now turned the modern project into a kind of existentially confused polytheistic and hyper-individualistic project, where a chief god nevertheless emerges as a kind of super-god in the polytheistic and, in reality, cynical mess, namely Mammon.
And Mammon is a demanding god. He demands sacrifices. And we are gradually sacrificing more and more, and now most of what we can weave into what we consider to be rational calculations that we believe will show that the whole thing will be profitable.
Despite the many undeniable advances of the modern era, this development is accompanied by a culminating existential confusion. By devaluing the role of faith for humans – and by this I do not mean that faith can only play its role when it is shaped and controlled by a specific and dogmatic institutional form, but rather I am referring to the role that can be played by an individually lived belief in a reality that we can contemplate in humble recognition that we are inscribed in an unshakeably meaningful evolutionary order that we cannot grasp with our intellect, but with which we can interact to deepen our understanding of how to constructively manage our lives on earth – we have ended up in an intellectual drudgery defined by a materialistic philosophy that slowly but surely leads to the dilution and dissolution of fundamental ideals and values.
The awareness of the problems inherent in this process is growing. And there are many interpretations of where the modern project may be heading. I do not intend to delve into this line of thought beyond saying that there is a mixture of attitudes ranging from inevitable civilisational collapse, to narrowly avoiding this fate by clinging to established principles, to highly optimistic fantasies of scientific and other advances in which humans become cyborgs who use their home on Earth to gradually colonise the rest of the cosmos in Mammon’s honour.
Personally, when it comes to arguments of this kind, I like to refer back to Oswald Spengler’s insightful assessments made at the beginning of the last century. He was astonishingly prescient in that he saw how the dissolution of values and the emphasis on money would lead to the collapse of democracy, or rather a transition to what he calls Caesarism, i.e. various sorts of imperial or royal powers where strong leaders are given unrestricted power to act on their personal preferences and pseudo-ideological ideas, driving chaos and conflict. But he also realised that this process would be accompanied by a development he calls the second religiosity. By this term, he means a collective endeavour to bring about some kind of return to or revival of the spiritually based values that had a powerful civilisation-shaping force at the dawn of civilisation. And he believes that the purpose of this is that ordinary people need and will use this second religiosity to endure the suffering that can be expected to accompany the chaos and decay that will ensue when Caesarism slowly but surely destroys the once great civilisation and returns us to an impoverished zero state that Spengler calls the eternal peasant state.
At the same time, I must emphasise that I personally believe Spengler takes his insightful theory too far in the sense that he disregards the alternative paths of development that are hidden in his depiction of the driving forces behind the inevitable downfall that he expected to be achieved in practice 300 years into the current millennium. And I will shortly discuss how I view this matter.
But first, I must fulfil my promise to touch on the second key to understanding what I described above as “the modern project is in the process of completely losing its constructiveness”. And that key is about how a culminating modern project increases the threats to democracy. Using terms other than those used by Spengler, one could describe it as the modern project’s criticism of religion taking a form that is gradually dissolving values and meaning and also stimulating intellectual hubris, while generating an existential confusion which, once it has sufficiently dissolved the old and traditional Christian foundation[4], has political consequences in that it slowly but surely paralyses citizens’ living sense of social responsibility. The existential confusion simply fuels a hyper-individualism that involves a kind of gradual transformation of the individual from a fairly trusting and responsible citizen to a suspicious, rights-conscious and demanding resident. These processes undermine democracy and open up opportunities for a transition to an increasingly authoritarian or even dictatorial exercise of power.
And it was when these processes had gone far enough that the political arena opened up for Trump. He clearly has an instinctive sense of the processes that are underway and approaches them in a rather unsystematic, chaotic and therefore contradictory manner, driven by what, from a personality psychology perspective, appears to be a strongly narcissistic showman’s dreams of himself as a king or emperor who holds court in his omnipotence. And even if his vision of the future seems to allow room, and fairly free rein, for regional counterparts to himself, there is still no reason to doubt that his self-image includes the notion that he should be primus inter pares, i.e. first among equals.
However, the reaction to Trump risks being too superficial, i.e. we fail to understand that he is a strong warning signal and an indication of what is likely to become reality if we continue along the same path, i.e. that rulers will emerge who, in contrast to Trump, are truly systematic and powerful in realising the possible future of the modern project that Spengler so impressively foresaw. Leading political figures and the rest of us simply do not see that Trump is not a bizarre, albeit difficult, interruption in a development that is largely on the right track, but rather a manifestation of what we are about to create if we fail to deepen our understanding of both the nature of existence and of humanity and its long development as a builder of society.
At the same time, I do not want to overemphasise this risk because, unlike Spengler, I see many promising signs behind what he collectively termed the second religiosity and which he regarded as a comforting “existential security blanket” for powerless individuals in the civilisational chaos and downfall during the era of Caesarism. For Spengler, it did not matter whether prominent figures within this second religiosity could express claims to represent ideas of civilisation-transforming dignity. As he saw it, such claims could not be real. According to Spengler, the era of Caesarism is not associated with spiritual renewal, and any claims to the contrary are therefore nothing more than desperate but shallow, powerless and, strictly speaking, laughable. Regardless of the claims, nothing can contribute to the restoration of the once central and now inexorably waning integrating and development-driving force of civilisation. Spengler was simply completely convinced that the downfall of Western civilisation was inevitable.
So regardless of my respect for Spengler’s analytical abilities and prophetic vision, I do not believe in his doom-mongering, nor in other, more recent advocates of the inevitability of various collapse scenarios. This has to do with the processes that have gradually formed as a kind of living counterforce to the dominant aspirations within the modern project to make the distancing from religion so radical that it in practice – albeit unconsciously – means the establishment of an actively ‘missionary and preaching’ church with Mammon as its supreme god and a science philosophically limited by reductionist materialism as the supplier and justifying authority of appropriate beliefs.
Spengler had some inkling of this living counterforce, which he called the second religiosity, but he did not fully understand its power. That is to say, he did not understand that it has its source in both the true nature of human beings and of existence itself. And that its power therefore is real and consequently cannot in the long run be blocked by either thinking or acting that is overly justified by a reductionist and materialistic perspective on how scientific truths about ourselves and existence are established.
It is simply a fact that we do not live on Earth to gain control through our intellect and materialistically oriented science. Although this is a very central, but rarely clearly formulated, tenet in the approach that governs the modern project. Instead, we are here on an evolutionary journey of discovery, where we humans are nowhere near understanding either our existence or ourselves, and in particular we are far from understanding and being able to manifest our best sides on a large scale. A journey of discovery that works so wisely that when we get lost and entangled in destructive illusions, reality compensates for this by stimulating things that awaken and strengthen insights that can be shaped into a necessary counterforce.
And according to my perspective on these things, the entire modern project is a creative counterforce to previous destructive illusions, which in turn have crystallised into such a multitude of destructive illusions that a new creative counterforce has been awakened and will have a powerful transformative impact on at least the current century. During this time, many cherished modern dogmas will be abandoned. All for the sake of the possibility of creating a world, i.e. an earthly existence, that is a manifestation of the next phase in our evolutionary journey of discovery and that will do much greater justice to the nature of our existence and our own better sides than our previous attempts to get to grips with the manifestation of our essentially unconscious “colonisation plan” for planet Earth.
These thoughts may seem far removed from Trump and his ambitions for power. But that is not the case. Trump’s gift is that, through his way of handling his position of power, he awakens and strengthens the partly dormant transformative ambitions of many who, in various ways, have at least a partially articulated understanding of, or are subjectively attuned to, the evolutionary energy that is at work in the present and which they have probably previously felt hesitant about, or felt that the right moment had not yet come to try to take that insistent force deep within themselves seriously.
If I were to try to clarify this process, I would emphasise that what Spengler gave the rather misleading – and in reality modern – designation “the second religiosity” began to take shape as soon as the modern project’s attitude towards religion became so strongly antipathetic that it advocated not only hindering but seeking to completely deny or block man’s understanding of himself as an autonomous spiritual being endowed with eternal life and consciousness. Despite all the talk of freedom that has characterised and continues to characterise the modern era, paradoxically, aspects of the modern project in terms of worldview actually became a missionary force for the idea that man is a biological machine that needs to be controlled and dominated by external forces.
So we got a kind of double and contradictory mentality development within the modern project. First, we have the majority orientation, i.e. the development dominated by a reductionist and materialistic philosophy that has gradually polished out increasingly stronger variants of a kind of by Mammon-worshipping hypnotised, narcissistic and philosophically superficial hyper-individualism that blinds people to the fact that their own philosophical loyalties make it impossible to clearly recognise their own lack of freedom and real subordination to power. In other words, one does not understand that one has been enrolled in an order where one is subtly forced to stay within the framework of what is required to limit one’s development to becoming and being an egocentric servant of fairly narrowly defined personal interests. And that, as a result of this unconscious confinement, one thinks oneself wise enough to be above the need for mature engagement in the shaping of social development through politics. That task is left to the power elite. Even if one, as long as one retains enough of one’s freedom, uses it to be dissatisfied, while at the same time often developing enough cynicism and mistrust not to want to engage in concrete and constructive political work.
And secondly, we get the development of a mentality whose final phase Spengler tentatively called the second religiosity. He understood this primarily as a fundamentally dead-end backward-looking attitude that is embellished in various ways to suit modern people’s longing for something deep and true, but which, no matter how much temporary enthusiasm it may arouse, has nothing to offer that can prevent the development towards a collapse of civilisation.
My position, however, is that the development of the mentality that polarises the conventional materialistic mainstream has a completely different and broader driving force than Spengler’s idea of backward-looking and longing for impotent comfort. Certainly, there are elements of this on the surface, but the essence of this type of mentality development is a perception-based feeling or conviction that the usual materialistic way of looking at the human being misses the essential.
That human beings simply do not fit within the materialistic framework. Of course, one can dismiss such a position as romantic illusions or claim that people must have overread some kind of theosophy, anthroposophy or various new-age nonsense. And if, for example, mystical experiences or near-death experiences are involved, one can always dismiss them as hallucinations. But for those who are receptive to this perspective on the “mystery of man,” such categorisations seem mostly sad and, in the long run, futile.
If you follow this path of development as a person, your inner connection takes on an increasingly strong, heartfelt sense of reality that cannot be shaken, but of course, uncomprehending or disparaging comments can lead you as a person to feel compelled to keep quiet about how you view existence and humanity.
But the fascinating thing is that what could be called a change of power, or perhaps rather a shift in power, is taking place, and at the same time an adjustment to reality in the interaction between the two types of mental development. This has to do with the fact that the mental development driven by the standard materialistic perspective is increasingly taking the form of a dead end. And that different types of possible and more or less long-awaited changes of view and transformations of perspective are therefore beginning to rumble in the unconscious and come to light in more and more people. In fact, in so many people that it will prove to have a decisive impact on the future.
What I described above as a kind of by Mammon-worshipping hypnotised, narcissistic and philosophically superficial hyper-individualism has an inherent instability where cynicism and meaninglessness always threaten to break through. And the longer this development continues, the more difficult it becomes for the individual to keep this threat under control. So what is happening is that the modern standard defences are beginning to crack, with the result that more and more people are slowly but surely, or even radically, opening up to other, previously denied areas of consciousness. A process of transformation is thus initiated, whereby hyper-individualism begins to be experienced as an illusory identity, and the true identity, the soul and the expanded responsibility of the identity-imbued group consciousness gradually take its place.
This process has a power that is causing the polarisation between the two types of mental development that characterise the modern project to evolve into a Hegelian synthesis of the highest order. I cannot go into this in more detail here, but it is my conviction that science, in collaboration with the ongoing and currently difficult-to-assess development of AI, will be extremely important in this context. And the reason for my view is that I see how science, in its search for truth, is becoming increasingly receptive to the insight that it must completely break free from the ideological grip of materialistic reductionism in order to remain true to its mission and not, as an irony of history, allow itself to be moulded into a faithful servant of a dogmatically blinded Mammon Church.
The insights I see as within realistic reach are that ongoing shifts in position will make it possible to establish with scientific certainty that neither life nor consciousness is something temporary, something fragile and brittle that can be extinguished. That life and consciousness did not arise, but simply are. That it is the forms through which life and consciousness are expressed that are born, develop and die during a powerful evolution that, as I have previously stated, we cannot and will not be able to comprehend with our intellect. But we can develop our ability to tune in to and interact with it.
And once again, the reader who has come this far may ask: what does this have to do with Trump? So let me try to explain this briefly and clearly. From my perspective, the modern project is at a kind of developmental crossroads in what I already referred to in the introduction as a process of civilisational shift. We have simply reached a point where resistance is culminating against the evolutionary development that is driving the synthesis of consciousness that I have just hinted at and partially described. This resistance has the conscious or unconscious aim of blocking the radical changes in politics, culture and social structure that will become possible if, or rather when, this synthesis of consciousness becomes a reality.
The essence of this resistance is reactionary, backward-looking dreams of times when the modern project worked “as it should” – i.e. when it was still possible to believe that its real purpose was to replace a rigid theological empire with a Mammon empire – combined with the possibilities of contemporary modernity to achieve such stable and pervasive control over people that they are strictly reduced to worker bees in a hive controlled by a political, economic and high-tech elite that in reality serves as the clergy of the ever-expanding Mammon Church. And what Trump, or rather his most astute and strategically minded supporters, are striving for is to gain a solid foothold for such social development, or rather, development blocking.
In my opinion, Trump himself has a different role than his supporters, who genuinely believe that they understand the real purpose of his power better than Trump himself. As I see it, Trump is probably not clearly aware of this purpose, but my assessment of the project is that his deepest message about his role is: ”I am here as a skilled power-playing trickster. And in particular, when the entirety of my political career can be assessed, it will appear as a very clear warning of the great risk that we are being drawn, completely unnecessarily, into an era characterised by authoritarian or purely dictatorial obstruction of the development towards a bright future that awaits us.” Or, to put it more prosaically and succinctly: “My role is to be exceptionally good at being a bad example!”
Or if I were to describe the underlying reason why a situation has arisen in human evolution where a person of Trump’s type needs to appear, I would say: Human beings are, in essence, free, and the modern era is about a revolt against the development-blocking paternalism of a pre-modern theological era, which opens up opportunities for a bright and, in philosophical and spiritual terms, far more insightful post-modern future. It is not about replacing one form of paternalism with another.
And at present, Trump’s warning signal is sounding loud and clear. And it demands, but above all it also awakens, a longing for a deeper understanding of what is really at stake in terms of development. And thus, also about how, after Trump, we cannot continue to zombie-like, half-heartedly and disoriented pursue a political line that leads to a future where the Mammon empire risks exercising far stronger authoritarian control than the theological empire against which the modern project rebelled.
In other words, it is time to understand that the modern project is not heading towards a chaotic downfall that must be “saved” by a globally dictatorial Mammon empire, but that its development has been so successful that it can now be transformed in accordance with a deeper and truer view of existence and human nature. A view that will be able to be formulated and shaped as a result of the ongoing development of consciousness, which I previously described in this newsletter as ”a process of transformation … whereby hyper-individualism begins to be experienced as an illusory identity, and the true identity, the soul and the expanded responsibility of the identity-imbued group consciousness gradually take its place.”
A statement that encompasses the idea that this new consciousness will gradually lead to a transformation of all leadership, which in politics will lead to the development of a mature democracy. A democracy that makes it possible to shape a decentralised transformation of civilisation. As I have already stated, human beings are, in essence, free. They are not created as slaves who should be placed under guardianship. And our essential freedom means that we are all capable of making constructive contributions to the ongoing evolutionary transformation.
So the question posed to us all is how we, in our professional and other contexts, can become better at contributing to the transformation of the groups we work in, so that they become receptive to the bright future that is possible, regardless of how the future appears in the backward-looking field of vision of fear and control anxiety.
[1] Written by Karl-Erik Edris. First published as part of a newsletter in Swedish on 14 November 2025.
[2] The latest attempt is Vart är världen på väg? (Trångsund, 2015). It is still available on the book market. Adlibris, Bokus.
[3] Vlad Vexler describes himself as ‘a minor public intellectual’ who, due to his illness (ME), communicates his insightful political and philosophical reflections primarily via his YouTube channels Vlad Vexler Chat and Vlad Vexler.
[4] The modern project has a global undermining effect on all the fundamental values that underpin civilisation, although I will not go into this in detail in a short newsletter.