Legitimacy Crisis
This week's theme deals with the pattern of a legitimacy crisis in our belief systems and mythology. As I personally grapple with the question of how ready I am to legitimize Fractal Praxis in broader discourses (showing my "proof" and effectively defending my philosophy to other thinkers), I am faced with a collapsing of a long-term internalized belief system (and protective stance) on my essential marginality in these spaces.
As I reflected on my own mini-crisis, the broader theme of how we "legitimize" of our belief systems, and what happens when a legitimacy crisis is faced, became this week's emergent focus.
When I reflect on it, for the majority of my adult life, I sought validation for my belief system through direct feedback from the world. I carefully analyzed my experiences, feedback "from the world," adjusted my beliefs, and attempted new approaches. And this was entirely sufficient to me. Meanwhile I strictly eschewed social validation for my ideas—abandoning efforts to gain social approval or recognition of any kind for my work.
Now, however, I want recognition for my work. For the first time, this is more than an idea. It's not "I think Fractal Praxis ought to receive recognition." It's not that I want to gain influence for Fractal Praxis because I believe it will have good effects in the world.
I want recognition. I want to be recognized for my attainments. From others, in my body.It is a want arising from my body, from my soul. A totally normal human want that I surmise I must have detached from, and formed barriers against, a very long time ago. And I hope (and expect) that this newfound desire, and my body's increased capacity to feel it, shall reshape my & Fractal Praxis' path in the world from this point on.
Legitimacy Crisis
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There comes a time in every civilization's lifecycle,
usually around its exeunt,
when the society shall face a legitimacy crisis.
In a legitimacy crisis, it doesn't matter how vociferously the performers (read: political leaders) are performing/enacting their performance upon the people.
The veneer starts to crumble away nevertheless.
People start to realize, on their own, that the old tropes and revered structures will not work for them any longer.
Yet it is a volatile and dangerous time.
This phase is necessary if new world orders (metaphorically, or literally, speaking) are to be established. And they usually cannot break ground until there is a series of big disruptions to the old order.
Because by definition, “order” tends to maintain things into a certain existent structure. And so only through critical disruptions can a new, more elegant order emerge among the people.
Generalizable (Fractal) Pattern
“A legitimacy crisis refers to a decline in public trust and acceptance of an institution, government, or system of authority. This can manifest as a loss of confidence in leadership, increasing social unrest, or a questioning of the system's ability to function effectively and fairly.” - AI search results for “legitimacy crisis”, 7/21/25
I believe we are very much facing a legitimacy crisis in the United States where I live as we speak. But the unraveling here has only just begun.
I also believe that legitimacy crises exist any time a civilization is about to undergo collapse. We have to understand that.
Social order (culture) emerges to help people survive and thrive.
And a legitimacy crisis is when an old order for how to interpret the world begins to critically fail, and is undergoing decline or even death. When a belief system that previously framed and explained the world adequately, is no longer adequate and falls apart under emerging pressures.
So today I want to invite us to consider how this phenomenon may fractally apply to the individual scale, as well: A person experiencing a legitimacy crisis of their existing belief system, or, belief system collapse. Where we start to see the shadows themselves—to see into the limitations of what our belief system is enabling us to feel and to see.
This typically is precipitated when we encounter a phenomenon that our maps of the world don't quite work for. And the gap between our interpretations and reality generates friction. That friction may ultimately lead to a quaking, a shaking, a trembling of the root belief system of that individual.
As individuals, our core belief systems are encoded into our very nervous systems in childhood. Sometimes people go through very minimal changes or questioning of their belief system as they come of age, whereas others go through great changes in regard to our belief systems and to our operational story of self.
And this is what I'd like to explore today. Because, who do you become when you no longer have a map for the world or for you that's working? What kinds of risks and opportunities does this kind of disorientation unlock?
If we were to generalize the pattern of legitimacy crisis to all cognitive structures (cultures, belief systems, etc.): we might say it's when an old order fails and a new order has not yet come through. First we have to let the old order fail. This is the importance of something that elsewhere I've called apocalypse medicine. It is the often bitter, painful experience of having your cherished assumptions that constituted your identity stripped violently away through challenge.
When the new order comes through, the entire world and you in it will look different. But this emerges. It cannot be forced to arise before it's ready. Until then, you're stuck in the mire, in the liminal, in the transformation that is unresolved.
And if, when that happens, you tend to reflexively retreat back into safety, then you might never end up crossing the threshold of courage into new worldviews, new beneficial understandings. 🚪
Personal Story
When it comes to worldview challenges and transformations, this is something that I've learned to not just befriend, but to actually encourage and cultivate across my life. I've become profoundly intimate with transformation, with the evolution of worldviews, and it's central to my life certainly and to Fractal Praxis. But that doesn't mean that there isn't still more that I must learn at my new levels of development.
I've been through a pretty big insight process lately the last month or so culminated in this experience last week, where I tried to share my love for these transformation processes with a wonderful new connection that I had made, but my openness backfired into his retreat. And in those moments of relational precarity, it's a good idea to reflect on one's belief system and one's conduct, and the belief system and conduct of the other person involved, and to look for the divergences. It's a type of internal legitimacy questioning that can be really healthy. Asking, is what I'm feeling legitimate? Is what I did and chose and said legitimate? Did I achieve my intention or fail in that interaction? Is my attitude or approach legitimate? This is healthy internal legitimacy questioning.
And there's another level to testing the legitimacy of your belief which involves testing it in reality against direct feedback—and we'll get to that in a moment. But first I want to talk about the normal kind of external legitimization that so many of us are conditioned to seek from others.
Most folks tend to seek from others a kind of external legitimacy found through others’ validation or approval. Although this is something we engage with on some level our whole lives, I have personally found this to be a trap.
At a relatively young age, 13 to 14, I began encountering challenging new beliefs that resulted in me divesting from certain mainstream social standard beliefs. Including Christian belief systems; patriarchal and consumerist beauty standards; and faith in the supremacy and grandeur of the United States and its benevolent nature in world affairs. Around age 13-14, all these beliefs became threatened and disrupted all at once. (And as harrowing as this was, this was only the beginning of my journey of major worldview evolutions that would characterize the next 15 years of my life.)
But because my personality desired to diverge from these old belief systems, I began moving to free myself from them—in part because it was just socially expected that I go along with them. And that's what I was resisting. I was on my way to developing an autonomous belief system—to this methodology for arriving at my own conclusions. Differentiating me necessarily, then, from the social fabric.
But this was no simple thing. For to the extent my fearful peers detected the presence of divergence in me, their own fear would be triggered. The social rejection I invited into my body & soul through this lifestyle was considerable. But I was fighting a bigger beast and something I will be sure to unpack in depth later, which is this choice of committing my life to integrating karma.
I wanted to reduce and eliminate oppression. I personally felt and endured oppression as a woman growing up in that culture. I felt the oppressive nature and stymieing force of conforming to mainstream culture at the time. I felt the harms of injustice happening across the world as if they were blows on my own body.
I joined with my peers at around the ages of 15-17 in the Amnesty International club at my high school to write letters asking for the release of political prisoners. To let the world know we cared and were watching; and to make meaning, to make meaning, to make meaning with my life. To make everything I felt and knew begin to matter and mean something to the rest of the world.
And I wanted a world that involved cooperation and solidarity... that celebrated meaning-making and truth-finding… one in which we stood up for each other, in which we cared for each other. I wanted a world beyond the one I had entered into, which seemed profoundly avoidant of truth and deeply traumatized, yet unconscious about it. I wanted to move beyond that, to live in community of people who would live ethical and moral lives, and seek to be in greater harmony with their true spirits, their selves, and their neighbors.
So, like a little fractal, no matter how small or big my movements were, I just kept moving in that direction—and developing my autonomy as a result.
And in doing so, I also generated a great deal of legitimacy, but very much not in terms of existing social discourses and spheres. Rather, and this is important, between me and the world.
Yes, I developed legitimacy for my worldview between me and the world.
My belief systems have been legitimized by my successful interactions with my environment and my adaptability over time. My belief systems have been radically sculpted through an interaction with the world in which substantial and illuminating direct feedback, pointing to generalized principles of existence, could be felt by my system and could be learned through analysis. My increasing ability to obtain what I want and to improve the definition of what I want (so that it better supports the existence of all of my kin and the greater good). I developed an original method (that I am looking forward to sharing with you here in Fractal Praxis) for stress-testing my belief systems. And I've deliberately, rigorously done so and remolded myself to fit the greater truth that I would find in those processes. In other words, I have undergone at least a dozen major legitimacy crises within my own life of my entire belief system. We’re talking massive upheavals and reorganizations in what I thought things meant—and my subsequent behaviors.
These, I speak of as insight events, or breakthroughs.
Sometimes that has looked like a total spontaneous overhaul of viewpoint in a matter of moments. Classically understood as a spiritual experience, or peak experience. (Since my early 20s, I've had many of these.)
Other times I have cascading-type insights that grope at a new paradigm until I eventually arrive at it, through continued effort. Like layers of an onion, peeling back, the root truth is arrived at through progressive claims.
And that's kind of what I've been experiencing lately. It was the beginning of this month on the annual Independence Day unplugged camping trip that I take, when I had what I thought was a major reorganizing insight about my life, that seemed to help everything cohere and unify. ...But then, just a few days ago, I had an even more major insight on the same material—almost like a more mature interpretation of the same content. It includes and transcends the prior insight, doing more to account for the intuitive movements in my world and what my next steps are. (Like a more elegant synthesis, but two different versions of the same material got interpreted at different times.)
And this is the incredible vulnerability of the method that I embrace... I, and my whole life path, is radically subject to change depending on the meaning I'm making. And I'm making meaning very dynamically, continuously, as is my way. With what is here and what is sensed in my body, mind, and spirit—and with the outer world as if it is in dialogue with me.
Now, I believe our interpretations are always at least somewhat faulty because our interpretations, our belief systems, are alive and so they're fallible. However, I believe our reasoning and deducing of what is true (or what is more true) can improve over time. Our prescriptions and assumptions can improve if we train them.
Occam's razor is one of the key training tools that I've used. I'll be getting into Occam's razor and how I use it soon in these talks. But what's interesting about Occam's razor that I want to highlight is that it deals in the likelihood of something to be true. It doesn't say something IS true. It says something is more probable, more likely to be true. And there's something deeply profound about that. If we personally can't know for sure what is true about our worlds, but there's an enormous amount of information “out there” that is evidence of the truth—that attests to reality… then what we can do is make better and better inner models of the outer world, and become more and more adaptive to the truth of things.
So what I carry today is a kind of medicine, both for the breaking into new world orders and for the total collapsing of old ones. This piece around apocalypse medicine. I offer a kind of intimacy with those processes and a kind of ministry and salve (not salvation... careful!) to people who are undergoing apocalypses.
When the logic and the framework of the entire game that you have played up to this point suddenly grotesquely shifts… Imagine it is like a skyscraper shifting atop a pillar of crumbling concrete. You actually don't know if you've got minutes or hours to get out of the building before it fully crumbles upon you. The scenario of total mythos collapse that is arising now for many of us is frightening, and is a major crisis in reality for most of us.
Perhaps the latest news saga regarding the Jeffrey Epstein files indicates that the mythology or kayfabe 0f the MAGA base is shook to the point of significant fracturing, and is on its way to further dissolution and defection. So we have to be cognizant of the fallout of collective mass scale disillusionment, as well as personal disillusionment. This is a time of meaning to be upheaved and questioned. And it tends to be a volatile and unstable time.
And the best course of action amid this volatility is to engage, folks. We have a lot of sense making and meaning making to get to. And time is only running out on this “old order” of things. So we've got to jump in now and engage in the meaning making and sense making that has the power (if we apply it) to transform (and to save via transformation) our world.
In conclusion
Everything we do shapes us and we it.
Legitimation of our belief system is important.
We must test our belief system against reality and receive the feedback of the world in reality.
Our beliefs should work for us.
Our beliefs must make the world more workable.
And the shedding of false belief systems will naturally stem from their being found faulty… from their not having sufficient explanatory power… from their not offering a sufficient position from which to act or perceive.
From their failing under pressure—under load. And this process will bring about the need for developing more refined tools (belief systems).
Think of our belief systems like an appendage—an extension of our intrinsic ability to make the world intelligible. Belief systems are an extension of our ability—like an extra sense, or a tool, or an instrument. This appendage, this extra sense, is subject to evolution. And it can be sculpted by intentional, applied change-making. It can be adapted and refined to be a more crafted honed tool. And this path will lead us eventually to a place where great wisdom and love proliferates freely among us through the culture.
And there's an important distinction I want to highlight here.
Which is that we can't quite know the truth but we can always get at it a little bit better, get closer to it.
There's a distinction between the truth and what we make of it. Between objective fact, and intersubjective meaning-making. Between the existence of so-called ultimate or objective truth, and the messy flawed process of meaning-making. Both things are very important. Truth is really important. Meaning-making is also really important. And meaning-making is the fleshy, messy, imperfect, raw domain of living beings—of the people, of all living organisms actually (a common, collective process). Whereas, truth… well, truth is something else.
As I start to re-cognize this new meaning in my own life, and what it is that needs to shift as a result, it always entails a decision. Sometimes these decisions can be very uncomfortable. But at minimum it's a decision of where to put my attention and energy going forward. Because I am now navigating from a different assignment of meaning in the world. I'm morphing and changing as a result of my interactions—and so are you.
So, in the face of catastrophic mythos collapse, one method is to get softer, looser… Next week we'll talk about methods for loosening up the mind. After all, the more rigid your mindset when the crisis becomes, the harder your crumble.
Your process is untouchably legitimate.
Your worldview is guaranteed flawed.
When you do better at being, we all do better in kind.
Disregard external judgments and instead seek feedback from life measured by close examination of your resulting sensations, feelings, and thoughts.
And there's more to it, but that's a good place to start.
With love from Fractal Praxis… and blessings from C., the devotee.