William Blake’s “Reunion of Body and Soul”
Exogenous, Inc (EXO) helps business, finance, and political leaders recognize psychosocial conditions that shape cultures 10-20 years in advance. EXO does this through a form of “net assessment,” derived from Andrew Marshall, the late director of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment (ONA), as stated many times in this Substack column.
The main principle that underpins EXO’s net assessment approach derives from Aristotle’s definition of living things as hylomorphic: that is, an inextricable composite of matter and energy or “soul.” In humans, this means the body and all its physical systems and its energetic or soul component, measurable and immeasurable, are integrated and inseparable. Like the body, the soul has its own “organs” (functional traits) that negotiate between the body/soul’s intrinsic needs (nourishment, emotional attachment, movement, rest, transcendence) and the natural world.
At the dawn of the 20th Century, Western modern psychology and social science buried a once-robust understanding of the hylomorphic human in nature and replaced it with a Darwinian “mind-as-flesh-computer” model. The widespread acceptance of this purely material, somato-mechanistic, modern psychological definition has led not only psychologists and social scientists, but also political and business leaders into living the classic definition of madness—repeatedly doing the same thing and getting the same wrong outcome.
The list is long, but superficial. Marshall McLuhan, borrowing from Gestalt Psychology, called such superficialities “figures,” effects of a deeper cause, which McLuhan referred to as “ground.” In this case, the rejection of the hylomorphic human.
Here’s a “figure” shortlist, composed of items cited by thinkers as famous and important as Peter Thiel and RFK Jr and as anonymous as citizen-reporters with smartphones and X accounts:
· Stifled technological and scientific innovation, especially in the energy, transportation, and health care sectors, contradicted by daily headlines of “breakthroughs” and investor mania around AI.
· Skyrocketing medical costs despite ballooning rates of chronic disease and mortality.
· Incessant lines of drugs for mental illness in synchrony with significant increases in known and novel mental illnesses.
· Bloated government and public debt, accompanied by shrunken prosperity and standards of living.
· Idealized, equity-promoting social engineering solutions to racial, biological, and education disparities that actually disorder race, biology, and education.
· Western claims of superior values undercut by the full display of the disintegration of those values without a shred of irony (e.g., the trans-Dionysian “Last Supper” skit performed at the 2024 Paris Summer Olympic).
The murderous, Orwellian, political, media campaign to promote world peace through waging or goading war with Russia, Iran, and China deserves special mention on this anti-hylomorphism shortlist of “figures.” In response, Russia and China &al have produced their own “figures” of military and financial alliances (BRICS) to liberate themselves and other nations from the constraints of Western military and financial control.
Wondrous Strange
As for the more significant subject of “ground,” China and Russia, along with India, have retrieved their respective, substantially deep understanding of human hylomorphism.
In China's case, the CPC has retrieved Daoism, perhaps Mohism. Russia has revived the powers of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) as the basis for Russia's sacred identity. India also has restored its identity in terms of Hinduism, perhaps the oldest religion, which gave the world yoga, now a globally-accepted name for body-soul integration.
The “Middle East” (a British designation) is also rapidly becoming “West Asia,” as shown in the recently announced “Golden Road” initiative—the revival of an ancient Indo-Roman trade route that passes through the Arabian Peninsula.
Also noteworthy: the coordinated US-Israel bombing of Iran’s nuclear development facilities has raised the possibility that the Islamic regime may be relaxing its iron grip on the nation’s historic Persian character. The “ground” for ancient Persia is Zoroastrianism, a first principle of which is the dichotomy of Dark and Light, which resembles and is roughly the same age as the Daoist/Mohist principle of Yin and Yang.
As Horatio says after seeing Hamlet’s father’s ghost, This is wondrous strange.
Because China and India retained their ancient hylomorphic systems of belief, reclamation was easiest. The India that Narendra Modi inherited had 75 years of recovered Hindu identity under its belt.
The retrieval process for China was comparatively harder, because communism is “modern” and rejects “religion” and “spirituality.” But a principal aim of Daoism, Mohism, Confucianism, and Sino-Buddhism is longevity and good health, which dovetails seamlessly into 2000-year-old Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and Qi, the Daoist cosmological concept of “life force” born of the interaction of the primal natural principles of Yin/Yang (which Aristotle would have likely considered a form). Under Mao, TCM was preserved and pushed initially through the “Barefoot Doctor Campaign,” which was thereafter integrated into municipal Western medical hospitals by the late 1960s. All the while, modern Chinese medical, scientific, and engineering institutions devoted intensive study to Qi as a demonstrable “energy” that modern Western technology not only can’t detect but also obfuscates. There should be little doubt that Chinese institutions have made progress on this and that the CPC has made use of that progress.
In Russia, the fall of Soviet communism made possible the restoration of the thousand-year-told ROC, Russia’s original formative tradition, replete with ancient rituals, icons, temple structures, harmonic chants, and Hesychastic breathing practices that aim to merge the body and soul with Christ by sensitizing the body to the Holy Spirit. Moreover, ROC leadership has reintegrated with the government, demonstrated most recently with a “consecration ceremony” following President Putin’s reelection in 2024.
These are tough acts for the West to follow, and looking at the current batch of leaders on either the left or the right—a 2-headed beast sharing Lindsey Graham’s puffy torso—it looks impossible. But there are a few signs that Western hylomorphism is set to return.