The Roots of Collapse, Part 3: High Personal Association

Most adults lack the cognitive capacity to hold multiple realities at once.

In the first two parts of this series, we explored how lack of systems thinking and constant, high negative messaging are part of the structural rot that drives systemic failure. But when a system collapses, it is because the individuals within it inherently lack or lose a specific cognitive and emotional capacity: the ability to hold a reality that does not center themselves.

We call this High Personal Association.

Self-reference is the baseline of our shared reality. It’s how we form a coherent sense of self to interface with the rest of the world. We navigate the world through our own eyes, filtered through our own histories. Some degree of personal reference is necessary for survival. It is critical. After all, you are here to curate your own experience, based on your preferences and what matters to you. That is how it should be, anyway.

However, when a person requires that everything in the external environment reflects their personal experience back to them in order for that environment to feel “real” or “safe,” we are no longer looking at self-awareness. We are looking at a fragile identity built on self-fragmentation. And in a globalized, hyper-connected world, this fragility is a primary driver of collapse.

The Logic of the Nervous System

High Personal Association occurs when an individual evaluates systems, movements, or other people’s lived truths based solely on how those things impact them personally, rather than on systemic data or broader reality.

We see it in the common refrains that stall progress:

• “I’ve never seen racism, so I don’t believe it’s a systemic problem.”

• “That didn’t happen to me, so it must not be true.”

• “I’m not offended by that word, so why are you?”

  
  

On the surface, these look like “opinions.” In reality, this isn’t informed systems thinking, as much as it is nervous system dysregulation pretending to be rational logic. When an identity is not grounded in core values, but rather in the constant need of mirroring one’s own comfort, then anything unfamiliar — any truth that contradicts the personal narrative — is processed by the brain not as a “difference,” but as a threat. To accept a reality where someone else is suffering in a way you are not requires you to “de-center” yourself. For the person stuck in the trench of High Personal Association, de-centering feels to them like disappearing.

This is where we must introduce and learn the concept of Theory of Mind (ToM).

In developmental psychology, Theory of Mind is the milestone where a human begins to understand that others have mental states — beliefs, desires, and perspectives — that are different from their own. It is the cognitive capacity to “simulate” another person’s reality without losing the thread of your own. While this is a milestone said to be traditionally reached between ages 3 and 5, we are witnessing a global crisis of adult developmental stagnation.

Many adults fail to fully mature this capacity, or they lose it under the pressure of systemic stress. In the context of High Personal Association, the brain literally lacks the cognitive flexibility to simulate a reality it has not personally lived and touched. When someone says, “I don’t see color,” or “I’ve never seen that, so it isn’t real,” they are exhibiting a neurological deficit. To their nervous system, the act of “mapping” another person’s suffering feels like an existential threat to their own sense of self. Because they cannot “hold” a reality that doesn’t center themselves, they perceive the mere existence of a different perspective as an attack on their own stability.

They aren’t just lacking empathy as an emotion; they are lacking the neurological architecture required for complex social and interpersonal relations. Most people are not deliberately plotting evil, as much as they lack the nervous system and brain circuitry to hold multiple realities at once. When a large enough percentage of a population fails this developmental milestone, the collective Theory of Mind collapses, and the system follows.

How Injustice Survives the “Good”

This is the origin of a thousand bad-faith arguments. When personal comfort becomes the metric for shared objective truth, empathy doesn’t just fade. The capacity for interconnection and cooperation also completely collapses.

Systems stall because the people within them start mistaking their own limits for someone else’s boundaries. This is how injustice survives the “good” people. It’s not always through overt cruelty. Often, it is maintained by well-meaning individuals who simply cannot hold a reality that doesn’t center or mirror them. If they can’t see themselves in the struggle, the struggle isn’t real. This creates pattern disharmony amongst the collective. The system tries to evolve, but it is held back by the anchors of individual egos that require the world to stay small enough for them to remain the sole protagonists.

But this also means that for those who refuse to develop Theory of Mind, they can’t see the creep of systemic threat to themselves because they have so limited their own worldview through one lens. And this is how you get people to vote against their own interests. When they stay in this state of constant myopia, they cannot see the predators and threats to themselves in their own backyard until it is too late. Sometimes, this systemic blindness results in them inviting the predator in through the front door, because they think the leopard will never eat their face, and that the others who warned of face-eating leopards were delusional.

That is what is happening in the U.S. now.

Maturity as Coherence

A healthy, mature identity can coexist with contradiction. It can withstand being wrong. It can handle what feels like paradox and integrate conflicting narratives into a bigger, broader whole. A healthy identity possesses the ability to maintain internal pattern harmony — the ability to continually weave new and conflicting information into a coherent whole even when the mirrors in the room are reflecting something unfamiliar or unflattering.

True maturity is:

1. The realization that the world is not an extension of solely your own nervous system, and;

2. The cognitive flexibility to hold identity not as a thing, but as a process. 

   
   

If you hold identity as a “thing”, you will stagnate and become a static fixture amongst the collective. You become a barrier to collective and systemic evolution. We must learn to hold that the concept of “You” is not a noun, but a verb. You are not a static “you” who happens to do things. You are “you-ing”. If you hold identity as an ever unfolding and reweaving process, there is then room to explore, to grow, to always become more, and other people’s differences can then enhance your becoming as unique threads that can add to the ever evolving tapestry of you, rather than feeling like a threat.

The Antidote: Stability over Sensitivity

The antidote to High Personal Association isn’t about being “less sensitive” or “more logical.” It’s about becoming more stable. It’s about building a self-concept that is so grounded it no longer requires the world to be its constant mirror.

There are two primary shifts required:

1. Expansive Self-Reference: This is an identity rooted in principles and values rather than arbitrary rules and emotional reflexes. If your value is “justice”, you can acknowledge an injustice even if you aren’t the victim of it. Your sense of justice is not rooted in what is currently “legal” but still immoral. Your internal state remains stable because it is instead anchored to a concept larger than your immediate comfort.

2. Collective Association: This is the ability to see beyond personal preferences and acknowledge that most humans are not having the exact same experience as us. It is the capacity to hold your own experience in one hand and the collective experience of the “majority” or (especially) underrepresented groups in the other, without needing one to cancel out the other.

   
   

The Closing Circuit

When our self-worth depends on everyone seeing the world the way we do, we lose the capacity for complexity. And without accepting and processing the complexity of the world in which we live, there is no capacity for truth.

Systems fracture when they can no longer process the truth of their own components. A system that cannot see all if its components cannot see itself, and is then an unconscious system. An unconscious system produces unconscious outcomes and stalls progress. High Personal Association and lack of Theory of Mind is the “sand in the gears” of human progress. Collapse is no longer the inevitable outcome of human civilization when we learn to be whole without needing to be the center.

This essay is part of a series on the cognitive roots of societal collapse. Follow along as we explore how to rewire our thinking — and our world.

(Acknowledgment: much of my understanding on the “Roots of Collapse” comes from what I have learned from the organizational culture work of my colleague and mentor Chris Armstrong, and his colleague Vince Brantley, both very excellent human beings and incredible systems thinkers.)

For Further Reading:

Stanford University Social Learning Lab. “What is Theory of Mind?” https://sll.stanford.edu/tom.html

Lipton, Bruce H. The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter, & Miracles

Lasch, C. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations

Gilchrist, I. The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

Wilkerson, I. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

Foundational Theory of Mind Research:

Gopnik, A., & Wellman, H. M. (1992). Why the child’s theory of mind really is a theory. Mind & Language, 7(1–2), 145–171. doi: 10.1111/j.1468–0017.1992.tb00202.x

Wellman, H. M., & Liu, D. (2004). Scaling of theory‐of‐mind tasks. Child Development, 75(2), 523–541. doi: 10.1111/j.1467–8624.2004.00691.x

Gweon, H. & Saxe, R. (2013). Developmental cognitive neuroscience of Theory of Mind. In J. Rubenstein & P. Rakic (Eds.), Neural Circuit Development and Function in the Brain: Comprehensive Developmental Neuroscience. Elsevier.