The Growing Gap Between Purpose and Discernment
We are living through a crisis—but not the one we keep naming: truth, reason, meaning.
Democracy is, at root, an ethical project. When it falters, the cause must find its roots in an ethical lapse that pervades the society.
Certainly the problem of reason and truth are very real. But these feel more like a symptoms than the disease itself.
I seek a better, bigger, and simpler explanation. Our time is defined by a dramatic expansion in Homo sapiens’ ability to assert purpose at speed and scale through computational power. We can decide, execute, replicate, and propagate intentions faster than any previous civilization.
This is not a moral failure. It is a historical threshold with great opportunities and dangers.
Our difficulty begins when purpose and discernment fall out of sync. We now possess the ability to act, replicate, and scale intentions far faster than our inherited capacities to register consequences. When this gap widens, orientation falters. What we often describe as a meaning crisis is better understood as a temporal mismatch: ethical habits formed under slower conditions are struggling to guide faster forms of action.
Appeals to healing, meaning, truth, or reason tend to moralize the problem. They relocate it inward, treating disorientation as a failure of interpretation or belief. The risk is ressentiment: the creation of moral values out of the denigration and condemnation of the world. Practices of consoling withdrawal are elevated just when engagement is most needed—when rapidly moving change demands active discernment by people capable of judging consequences without retreating from the world that produces them.
The pressure we feel is not abstract. It arises from three conditions our older ethical frameworks were never built to register.
First, our computational power is designed and financed to move much faster than law, policy, and ethics—all of which developed alongside technologies whose speed we could basically understand and therefore regulate.
Example: When we invented nuclear weapons to bring World War II to an end, we had a pretty good idea of the dangers and opportunities that this technology automatically created. We had political institutions that functioned well enough to contain the dangers and extract the benefits.
Second, computational economies weaken the old negotiation between labor and capital. Where exploitation once required some level of mutually parasitic cooperation between capital and labor, value creation increasingly relies far less on labor than on algorithmic computations. Exclusion replaces exploitation. Invisibility replaces conflict—and invisibility is harder to contest, harder to organize against, and easier to ignore. As Pope Francis wrote in The Joy of the Gospel, ‘The excluded are no longer the “exploited” but the outcast, the “leftovers”’ (28).
Third, accelerating power burns energy, and energy always produces excess. Ecological strain, informational noise, social volatility, and psychic exhaustion are not accidental side effects. They are structural remainders of success itself.
Georges Bataille named this excess the accursed share: what accumulates whenever purpose is effectively imposed on the world. Michel Serres later adopted this term to capture how these excesses emerge today faster than our ability to see or measure them. Consequences take shape before assessments catch up, and costs are distributed before responsibility can be assigned.
Seen this way, our moment is not defined by the collapse of meaning but by a demand for sharper discernment under accelerating conditions that far outstrip our ability to assess them ahead of time.
The ethical task before us is not to recover lost values, but to learn how to perceive consequences while they are still forming. Rejuvenation begins here—not as renewed belief, but as a recalibration of attention and judgment.
We are not losing meaning. We are living through a revaluation of values driven by unprecedented power. Learning to see what our purposes now set in motion is the first step toward guiding them, rather than being carried by their wake.
Putting This into Practice
Three small practices help cultivate this capacity. Each are linked to more complete descriptions of the practice.
Repentance or Metanoia
Metanoia is an orientation to time that delays meaning, resists judgment, and learns by moving forward. Drawing on Mark’s Gospel, this practice explores how patience, listening, and restraint can open a different experience of the future—one not governed by ressentiment or premature certainty.
Ressentiment Check
When you feel the urge to condemn, mock, or disengage, ask three quick questions:
1) Am I judging a consequence—or the existence of the world producing it?
2) Am I clarifying responsibility—or seeking moral distance?
3) Does this judgment invite engagement—or excuse withdrawal?
If the answers tilt toward distance, you are no longer discerning consequences; you are manufacturing values from resentment.
Discerning Accursed Shares
Look for moments when good intentions generate unintended consequences, not as errors to condemn but as excess to be noticed. Every successful action expends energy, and every expenditure leaves a remainder. Accursed shares name that remainder. Ethical discernment begins when we learn to see it without rushing to judgment.
Read more from the Wednesdays series.
Read more about our Computational World.
On the modern phenomenon of accursed shares, see my assessment of Michel Serres’ use of this term in L’Incandescent: Reading The Incandescent: Human Scale and Accursed Shares.
On the problem of fate as our ongoing human struggle, see these essays: The Return of Fate, Fate, Computation, Purpose, and Out-Computing the Gods.