Reason is often seen as what reveals reality, which enables us to understand it. Yet sometimes it misleads us and locks us into a world of illusions.
We can see it at the scale of society: economic « science », by applying obviously absurd dogmas (the rationality of individuals, the efficiency of markets, the infinity of resources, etc.) has basically brought the world to the brink. of collapse.
These kinds of mistakes are inconceivable: the people who promote these theories are not morons, nor are those who believe them. In any case, how lacking in cognitive skills would it take to miss something so obvious?
As I delved into the subject, I realized that a fundamental spring of our reason was at play. Indeed, the world is absolute chaos and to apprehend it, our mind must define it, which implies impoverishing it. However, sometimes this impoverishment is, in fact, the objective of the process. I called it the anteconcept, a notion that could reshape the humanities and social sciences.
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The social sciences are fragmented, yet their nature is very relative: all seek to explain human behavior.
This book offers a framework of analysis that allows it to be studied globally and to include all of its dimensions: psychological, economic, social, individual, collective, historical, etc.
Potentially, this book would mark the beginning of an overhaul of the humanities and social sciences. This book is actually (along with Aggregate Danger, which was part of it) my first (although it’s the 9th or 10th that I’m publishing).
This is the foundation of my thought system.
Over the next few years, I will be doing a series of books developing it for different subjects. The great difficulty to do so is that, in order to study how the anteconcept applies to an area, we have to see how the discourse deviates from the truth. So we must already be able to establish what is true or not, which each time requires an entire book on a specific field.