Playing Jenga With Epistemology

The Fragile Architecture of Knowing in the Age of Competing Realities

CAVEAT + CONTEXT

I’m no specialist. What I am is a 69-year-old polymath artist, a citizen who is intellectually curious and concerned for people and planet. I’m a student, writing to process and understand—even if my understanding is partial or contingent. This is a subject that keeps me up at night. Lose what is real and trustworthy and you can lose a civilization. It’s no joke.

The Context: We’ve played Jenga with how we know what we know and believe. The game has collapsed; it’s over. We’re all losers for it. Language and knowledge have been deconstructed ad infinitum. Which, in turn, has demolished the function and effectiveness of argument and persuasion. When persuasion dies, power fills the vacuum. The history of humanity has a very predictable pattern. Once convincing communication limps off into the shadows, coercion arrives, then control.

Free speech doesn’t matter much if words and basic concepts have no shared meaning.

A round-earth believer and a flat-earth believer cannot go into the maritime shipping business together.

While we are busy addressing all the pressing problems of life on the planet, we better focus on fixing (healing) the epistemology problem ASAP. If we don’t, we won’t have any words or meaning in common to fix any other problems.

Some readers may think this wordy, nerdy artist doth protest too much, but what’s lost when shared meaning and persuasion collapse does not disappear. It mutates into living competing realities, each claiming cosmic purpose within a single divided nation.

COMPETING REALITIES

There have been plenty of prophetic and predictive hints that this day was coming. We didn’t listen; we refused to look at the evidence. It was all there in the work of Peter Berger, Neil Postman, Jacques Derrida, Hanna Arendt, and Richard Rorty. Even as far back as Émile Durkheim (1858–1917). Recent warnings are everywhere, including Bruno Latour, and Shoshana Zuboff. This summary of recent analysis rings true, right?

Warning: Social media platforms manufacture personalized realities optimized for scrolling and engagement, not truth and trust—turning epistemic fragmentation into addiction and profit. Call it: surveillance capitalism (Zuboff).

Now that the good goals of comprehension, communication, collaboration, and compromise are paused, we neither see nor hear each other—except as competing realities.

I feel this competing reality thing very strongly. Especially so, with Trump as the American president and his inner circle, the billionaire boys club of artificial intelligence (AI), and Christian Nationalists.

I admit it. I do see these three as competing realities. Not as intellectual socio-political policy disagreements. Not as a free-will choice of opting into AI or not. And, especially not the old adage from the Christian community as a solution: In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, and in all things charity.

All I can say, all I can pray, is God, family, community, help me! I don’t want to be a competing reality. I don’t want to choose a side (or sides).

I want Christ as my steady gig¹. I want to love you, my neighbor, and to embody what my discipleship to Jesus calls the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

This is the side I’ve been on since 1982. I’m staying put. Just getting started—got a lot to learn.

THE E WORD

At the heart of this post is epistemology (the inquiry into how knowledge is formed, trusted, and used). No surprise there. It underpins pretty much everything I’m interested in, including trust or Truth with a capital T.

We really have a trust + truth problem, don’t we?

I don’t know how to say it, so I’ll just blurt it out: America is in the depression stage of epistemic collapse—the heavy realization and grief that there is no going back.

The disordering of shared trust + truth (or facts) is not a temporary disruption. It is our cultural condition and will likely remain so for years to come. Important: Epistemic collapse doesn’t eliminate our frameworks of knowledge. It crushes their credibility, coherence, and shared meaning (which is their functionality and what really hits us in our daily lives).

THE TRI-MODAL DECONSTRUCTOR

I don’t know if Donald J. Trump (citizen and president) is most responsible for this epistemic collapse (without letting anyone on the socio-political spectrum off the hook—including myself). But he’s earned the title of The Deconstructor by consistently affecting his own unique tri-modal language. A way of using speech and manipulating meaning that bypasses literacy, decency, and comprehension altogether. Instead, it appeals to power and dominance—where making sense or persuasion are relics from a bygone civic era .

1. The Language of Falsehood

Trump transformed lying from moral failure into a political and social strategy. Falsehood became performative (it’s not old-school political rhetoric). For Trump, lying without consequence is proof of dominance, not deceit. Facts no longer correct error (sorry fact-checkers), because the meaning of lying has been reimagined as congruent with, and supportive of, a personally constructed reality rather than fidelity to truth. As a result, persuasion lost its power. How? It is impossible to correct a lie without the referent of truth. As far as I’ve been able to discern, there is no reality referent guiding Trump other than what he constructs on a minute-by-minute basis. This, I argue, is why no one has successfully leveled a critique against Trump that has had any long-term political or social efficacy.

2. The Language of Deconstruction

Trump instinctively (not intellectually) weaponized post-truth theories seeded by academic deconstruction and popular relativism. His meaning became a surprising mix of nonsense, sign, and signal—where tweets, slogans, and single words function as emotional triggers and affinity identifiers. Trump normalized: 1) the previously unthinkable idea that words could completely lose their general referential reliability, and 2) that apart from the use of a teleprompter, an American president could speak extemporaneously and consistently fail to make sense (and it not matter to his audience, or the press, eventually).

3. The Language of Domination

Through sexist, racist, and predatory bullying, Trump fused the language of humiliation with entertainment, normalizing cruelty into communal sport. His coarseness became theater for the aggrieved and then license to act. First, Trump modeled how to do it in public; then he granted them borrowed power to mimic. Eventually his followers went beyond words into violence. The result: social behavioral norms eroded, and might was confirmed as right. Even those who professed to be followers of Jesus bought in, setting aside the inarguable core teachings of Christ, insinuating that empathetic, neighbor love was woke and weak (a sure sign of a competing reality since Jesus called love of God and neighbor the summary of the law—sole direction for life).

DISORDER + DYSREGULATION

Epistemic collapse is when people no longer share a common understanding of facts, evidence, or reliable sources of knowledge. It’s a societal breakdown in how we agree on what is accurate or trustworthy. It’s the process of how we know what we know, cast into a state of disorder and dysregulation, resulting in many competing perceived realities. I imagine every reader has felt this phenomenon viscerally.

When we believe our reality is reliable and our neighbor’s is not, we’re likely to end up at epistemic closure (which I confess is not where I want to be). This is where the door of communication shuts, and competing realities can no longer engage in dialogue (unless the individuals involved are inquisitive, respectful, empathetic, and willing to keep knocking and talking).

I use the words disorder and dysregulation because:

1. The regular checks and balances regarding how our beliefs are formed, tested, communicated, and revised are disrupted and failing.

2. Instead of an ordered system of epistemic regulation (where knowledge is pursued, tested, and refined), we now face erratic, unpredictable, and disordered patterns (in ourselves and all around us). You’ll recognize them: beliefs shift suddenly, evidence is ignored or distorted, trust in knowledge sources fluctuates wildly among identity/affinity groups, and even the simplest negotiations of daily life demand navigating competing realities (including within families and friendships we cherish).

3. Reason, evidence, dialectic (reasoning through disagreement), and verification—what I’d call the traditional regulatory organs of knowledge—have lost so much of their capacity to moderate learning and communication.

4. Finally, the once life-giving process of knowing isn’t the self-stabilizing work and play it used to be. The vast amount of contradictory information now available destabilizes us. Daily acts of knowledge-seeking (that once felt steady and generative) can just as easily feel chaotic and out of control. Of course, it’s not only language. Its image too, isn’t it? Can anything be trusted?

Which leads to a few, brief words about deception. Deception is not new. What is new is the scale, speed, automation, and subtlety of it. Social media and AI are accelerating the reach of deception. This is not the post to deep dive into the deceptions of AI or of Christian Nationalism. We can pause for a breath, though, and admit together just how exhausting it is to navigate a world that’s trying to deceive us at every turn—for their profit and empire-building.

I know one thing: you cannot tackle complex problems of epistemology and trust without language and meaning we all trust (even partially so). There will always be some theorist, self-help business guru, or politician who will attempt to convince citizens that complex problems can be solved simply through the repetition of one word or phrase, such as “hoax” or “witch hunt.” Not true.

TAKING BACK CONTROL OF THE NARRATIVE

We need our language, meaning, truth, and trust. Let’s stop allowing people who worship power to hijack and co-opt these for something other than what will serve us, our families, communities, nation, and world. Let’s hang on to literacy, functional shared meaning, and the ability to see and hear each other. To speak, to use words as bridges to collaboration not barricades—even when we don’t agree on everything.

Our disagreements must be navigated within the same shared reality, though. I repeat: A round-earth believer and a flat-earth believer cannot go into the maritime shipping business together.

This explains in part why it has been impossible for me to find any shared meaning with Christian nationalists. Jesus is common ground only if your definition of Creator With Us, his mission, and invitation to the human family is in common—is coherent and congruent. Without this foundation, I don’t know how to call what we believe the same, because it isn’t.

It will take an open-hearted, cross-generational rebuild of how we know what we know to collapse the competing realities fighting for our hearts, minds, and data. I want to believe we can find shared language and meaning again—and speak persuasively about everything that matters to life on this planet. (Insert previous prayer.)

All it really takes to begin is two people willing to listen and talk freely, pausing as needed to clarify the meaning of words. “Now, when you say ____, what do you mean, exactly? I’m listening.”

I would love to write more about how transformational life as a student of Jesus, the Word made flesh, has been. I’m so cautious, though. Not for any reason other than the number of “squeaky wheel” competing realities named Christian (including the people in Trump’s inner circle and their Christian affiliations).

These set up a contrast which must be addressed. Written language is effective, but comparing and contrasting theologies and practices gets complex very quickly. Thankfully, there’s no substitute for human relationship and the Spirit of God—for saying, “Follow me as I follow Christ, and we will talk along the way.” This invitation is always available to anyone who wants to take a proverbial walk with me and have a conversation.

TRUST IS GRAVITY

When all the noise and illusions fall away —like status, fame, ideology, wealth, empire-building, and the shiny distractions of life (all that you can’t take with you) —what we want most is to belong and to matter. To be seen, known, and loved for who we truly are—to know mercy and justice, and for many, to walk quietly and humbly with God. This is the “all that you can’t leave behind.” Only organic, analog, fleshy human relationships can set the stage for this good to happen.

Behind our drive for success, control, and safety is the longing to be received without condition. To have someone say to you, I love you, accept you, and do not reject you. And then stay and not leave the room. To stay with you through bad hair days, job loss, food insecurity, racial discrimination, losing insurance, divorce, misplaced anger, and your basement flooding. To feed you homemade soup after a medical treatment. To have long, circuitous conversations of consequence, and not once do you sense they’re signaling the need to walk away (or hang up).

Let’s not lose this—or worse, give away shared meaning to someone, something, anything, that does not truly love or care for us. A true friend or family member in your presence cannot be counterfeited or deep faked.

We do not need a strong man. Locking arms will do.

Remember how you win at Jenga? The tower’s stability depends on its center of gravity. Trust is gravity: it pulls meaning back toward shared reality.

I hope we see each other there.

Ecclesiastes 4:9–12

Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their labor:

If either of them falls down, one can help the other up.

But pity anyone who falls and has no one to help them up.

Also, if two lie down together, they will keep warm.

But how can one keep warm alone?

Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves.

A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.

On the subject of rebuilding from epistemic collapse, I think Andi’s contributions to our book, Why Everything That Doesn’t Matter, Matters So Much have much to offer.

Click image for deep discount hardcover and Kindle options. Audio at regular price.

Join me along with author Tamara Saviano as we reflect on our lives in the music industry and the many gifted musicians we’ve crossed paths with. Music journalist Nancy Posey will be facilitating the discussion. This coming Saturday, October 18th, in the Wolf Room at The Tennessee State Museum. 4-5PM. Click image for more info, such as parking and other authors who will be speaking.

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