‘Cognitive Ecologies’: understanding mutual misunderstanding between polities

no polity can afford brittle cognition

How do we make sense of politics? Contemporary politics is often analysed by political scientists as a contest of interests, policies, institutions, nationalities, or ideologies; it’s also often analysed by media blowhards as a horse-race - who’s up, down, leading the polls, who’s in, who’s out, or whatever.

While sometimes useful, these ways of viewing the world completely disregard a deep and underlying layer of explanation: namely, how politics is determined by the conditions under which societies organise themselves to think:- how societies allocate attention, treat evidence, process dissent, correct mistakes, and preserve memory as a guide to future actions. But public life generally does not ensure our institutions are designed so that they can learn in public under conditions of low trust, limited attention, and even under conditions of persistent bad faith.

The deep risk we run in society is not a conflict over interests (for these will be always and ever present), but instead a deep conflict of mutual illegibility: where our differing political systems come to no longer share enough epistemic ground to interpret each another’s actions reliably.

Democracy doesn’t fail because people disagree (disagreement can be very valuable); democracy fails when we lose the shared methods for finding out what’s true, and fixing what’s broken.

(Si apre in una nuova finestra)

When a polity’s conditions of thinking, learning, and processing information shift over time, polities do not simply change their policies and behaviour: they also change their epistemic metabolism - they begin to inhabit different cognitive worlds from each other, which in turn often leads to mutual misunderstandings and a subsequent loss of shared realities and shared assumptions about the nature of our political and social worlds.

Last time:

MAGA is an ‘identity-centred’ political form - take it seriously (Si apre in una nuova finestra)

I call the environments by which polities differentially process and prioritise cognitive ecologies (Si apre in una nuova finestra), a phrase intentionally blending ecological and psychological terms.

(Si apre in una nuova finestra)

‘Cognitive ecology’ does not mean some sort of “essential national character”, or (worse) some ‘fixed’ cultural essence; it simply means the designed-and-evolved environment in which collective minds operate within polities: and this includes the information provisioning and processing architectures, institutional memory systems, incentive regimes, legitimacy norms, legal systems, correction routines, and time horizons shaping how a polity attends to reality and acts under uncertainty. And ‘differentially’ simply recognises that there are differences that really matter a lot in between these differing cognitive ecologies.

In some systems, information is shaped to pay obeisance and homage to the great, all-knowing, leader - even if this means violating the fundamental rules and logic of simple arithmetic (Si apre in una nuova finestra). This sort of idiocy wouldn’t be tolerated in a Vegas casino or by mortgage providers for calculating changes in interest rates on bank loans; systems that shape information like this come apart in the end, of course - reality can only be evaded for a while, but can’t be avoided indefinitely (the bond market will find you out…).

Cognitive ecologies are not just a background to politics and political life; they are one of politics’ primary determinants.

A cognitive ecology is the structured environment in which collective minds operate: the information architectures, institutional memory systems, incentive regimes, and legitimacy norms that shape how a polity attends to reality, forms beliefs, processes disagreement, and corrects error over time.

This definition:

• Treats cognition as situated in times and places

• Makes cognition institutional rather than focusing on individual cognitive biases

• Keeps the unit of analysis collective, not individual, as the collective (political parties, legislatures, gatherings, etc.)

Cognitive ecologies matter because the acute and repeated failures of many liberal democracies look less like one-off errors than like systemic cognitive dysfunction:

• Repeated crises are processed as spectacles rather than learning opportunities

• Policy becomes a performance of certainty, rather than a disciplined encounter with uncertainty

• Error correction becomes a humiliating process, and therefore admissions of error and changes of course are rare

• Institutional memory decays with election cycles and staff turnover

• Citizens, facing cognitive overload, increasingly outsource meaning to tribal narratives.

The resulting politics is not simply “polarised” (although it most certainly is); politics, political life, and political thinking are epistemically degraded, no longer able to deal with our problems, except reactively and very often inadequately.

When cognitive ecologies diverge (because of different time horizons, different treatments of dissent, different norms for admitting error) mutual illegibility and incomprehension occurs.

Actors will find they struggle to read one another’s constraints and signals reliably: restraint can be misread as weakness; compromise as deception; uncertainty as incompetence; dissent as collapse. We can see this in real time at this very moment - the US and Iran are working from fundamentally different operating assumptions about the nature of the world, and of the strengths of their own and the opposing regime.

(Available below the line: the core claim; dimensions of a cognitive ecology; mutual illegibility; familiar cases - housing and low-emission zones; against the rules-based order; a methods-based order; answering a persistent and corrosive scepticism; and an exclusive link to a downloadable Cognitive Ecology Diagnostic Grid to allow easy measurement of differing cognitive ecologies)