Every era leaves behind more than buildings, bones, books, or institutions. It leaves behind habits of thought. These habits quietly shape what feels normal, reasonable, and legitimate, and what feels possible long after the original conditions have disappeared. We don't select these habits. We inherit them. And when the world changes faster than our habits can adapt, we're in trouble.
The Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the Age of Reason together forged the mental architecture of the modern world. That architecture produced extraordinary progress. It also took the human mind down a dead end street. To a place the mind was never meant to be.
That mismatch is now breaking systems—and exhausting the humans inside them.
A World That Made Sense From the Inside
For thousands of years humans mostly lived inside inherited certainty. Truth was certain and provided by institutions and authorities. One didn't have to work for their own answers, or seek them out.
Life could be brutal, unfair, short and constrained—but it was understood. People knew who they were, where they belonged, and which forces governed their lives and provided answers with certainty.
The burden of judgment rested largely outside the individual. Life's big questions were all answered by authorities, and shared frameworks of meaning. This did not make societies more just, or more accurate. But it made them cognitively lighter!
By cognitively lighter, we mean individual humans were not expected to know much, or make many big decisions. People were not required to continually evaluate competing versions of truth, determine which authority was legitimate, or reconcile unresolved disagreement. Those burdens were carried by institutions and authorities.
In the language of this series, earlier societies consumed fewer Transformational Energy Units (TEUs) simply to function. TEUs describe the finite human energy required to absorb change, exercise judgment, regulate emotion, and maintain meaning under uncertainty.
When ambiguity is structurally and institutionally contained, TEU expenditure for individuals is low and replenishable.
Life might have been materially harder, but it was mentally simpler for humans.
When Knowing Became Personal
The Renaissance loosened this world without fully overturning it.
By re-centering human perception—through art, anatomy, navigation, engineering, and literature—it introduced a quiet but powerful idea: reality could be studied directly.
Perspective (in the artistic sense) taught people that the world looks different depending on where you stand. Printing made ideas portable, comparable and scaled. Once explanations could be placed side by side, certainty became conditional, debatable and uncertain.
Knowledge began shifting from inheritance to inspection. This was not skepticism yet. It was curiosity with confidence—the belief that humans could look, measure, draw, and improve. Authority still existed, but it was no longer unquestioned.
TEU expenditure for humans increased—but gradually, and within human limits.
When Authority Moved Inside the Human Mind
The Reformation pushed this shift inward, into the core of authority itself.
Its most enduring impact was not doctrinal fragmentation, but cognitive decentralization. All truth claims now had to be researched, explained, justified, and defended. Mediation could be challenged. Conscience became a site of responsibility.
Even when people remained deeply faithful to rituals and religions, they learned and adopted a new mental posture: authority must account for itself. It was a metabolic shift. From this point forward, individuals were expected to decide for themselves what was true, what was legitimate, and what they were responsible for believing. This was a dramatic increase in TEU consumption for humans!
Judgment moved inward into the mind of individuals. Responsibility followed. TEU expenditure increased because judgment, once buffered and provided by institutions and authorities, now became an individual's responsibility, whether they wanted it or not.
Societies never returned to a unified certainty. They learned instead to live with contested legitimacy as a permanent condition. Something fundamental changed—and never changed back.
The Scientific Revolution transformed this cultural readiness into method.
- Observation replaced deference.
- Experiment replaced argument.
- Mathematics replaced narrative.
- Nature became something that could be interrogated rather than interpreted.
If a method is sound and repeatable, the character of the observer matters less. This unlocked science, medicine, engineering, and industry at scale. It also trained the human mind to expect that uncertainty can always be reduced—with enough data, enough rigor, and enough time.
That expectation masked a growing risk: Human TEU consumption was rising, but replenishment was not.
When Society Became a Machine
The Age of Reason carried this expectation outward into society itself. Governments, markets, legal systems, and organizations were redesigned as rational machines. Rules could replace arbitrariness. Rights could be codified. Progress could be planned. The modern administrative mind was born—the belief that legitimacy flows from explanation, coherence from procedure, and responsibility from documentation.
These ideas delivered extraordinary gains and scale. They also assumed that humans could endlessly supply the energy required to continuously explain, verify, document, and justify every judgement and decision. That assumption, however, would one day break humans.
The Inheritance We Carry
Taken together, these eras gave us a powerful mental inheritance:
- Reality is debatable.
- Truth is testable.
- Authority is contestable.
- Progress is engineerable.
This mental architecture built the modern world, but it can't support the world to come. We, humans, are now mismatched in the time and world we inhabit.
The Dashboard
Consider a modern executive sitting in front of a dashboard. The data is real-time. The charts are precise. The models disagree. One forecast shows growth. Another signals the risk of collapse. A third recommends immediate action.
Each model is defensible. Each is sourced. Each is explainable—at least in theory. The executive asks for more analysis. More data arrives. More models follow. Confidence doesn't increase. It fragments. Meanwhile, decisions cannot wait. Customers move. Markets react. Consequences accumulate.
The problem is not incompetence. It is TEU depletion in humans.
A mind trained to believe that more verification will eventually settle the question is operating inside a system where speed ensures it never will.
The Broken Assumption
In tightly coupled, high-speed systems, inquiry diverges.
- More data produces more models.
- More models produce more disagreement.
- More disagreement produces more demands for proof.
Human decision-making slows just as consequence velocity increases. Human TEUs are consumed faster than they can be replenished. Confusion and exhaustion is the result.
This is the broken assumption of our age.
Verification is now required everywhere and all the time. Evidence can be generated, manipulated, or simulated at scale. Algorithms make decisions that no human has time or energy to fully trace. Artificial systems produce arguments faster than organizations can think to answer them. Under these conditions, “prove it” no longer stabilizes reality. It fragments it—and exhausts the humans inside the system.
Why Legitimacy Feels Fragile
This is why legitimacy feels fragile everywhere at once. Institutions explain more and are trusted less. Leaders are surrounded by data and accused of blindness. Societies are saturated with information and starving for meaning.
The failure is not a lack of intelligence or evidence. It is the absence of governors—constraints that manage where judgment lives, how often it is demanded of humans, and how much human energy it consumes.
Acceleration without containment turns cognition into combustion.
What the Future Will Require
The future will not reward humans who can verify the most. Machines now do that better than humans. The future will reward those who can make decisions responsibly under uncertainty, preserve legitimacy under acceleration, and maintain human viability by governing (controlling) human TEU expenditure rather than assuming it is infinite.
This does not require abandoning reason. It requires disciplining it. Explanation is not wisdom. Verification is not judgment. More data does not automatically produce coherence.
- The Renaissance taught us to see.
- The Reformation taught us to question.
- The Scientific Revolution taught us to test.
- The Age of Reason taught us to systematize.
- The Sixth Great Transition demands something harder: to govern all of that without breaking the humans inside the system - polyintelligence.
That is the inheritance we must now address and revise—and the assumption we must finally let go.
This article showed that the modern crisis is not a failure of intelligence, ethics, or effort. It is the result of an inherited way of thinking colliding with a world that surpasses human speed.
The habits of judgment forged over centuries—questioning authority, testing truth, demanding proof—once protected societies from error and abuse. Under acceleration and massive scale, those same habits now overload humans.
This is why modern leadership feels uniquely heavy. They are carrying responsibilities that were never designed to be carried by individuals, continuously, and at scale. Judgment has been internalized. Verification has become endless. Time has been compressed. Mental energy has been drained.
To move forward, we must understand —how it happened, what it changed, and what it cost. Only then can we see why today’s mental exhaustion are not anomalies, but predictable outcomes.
The task of our era, the Sixth Great Transition, is not to give up on the modern mind—but to govern and position it, to pair its power with architectures that preserve human energy, judgment, and viability.
That is polyintelligence and the work that follows.
*I use AI in all my work.
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Kevin Benedict
Futurist, and Lecturer at TCS
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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.
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