New Book Announcement: EPISTEMIKA Prima

A New Book: EPISTEMIKA Prima

I am pleased to announce that I have completed a new book: 

* EPISTEMIKA Prima: What the Outside Eye Sees.

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For many years, I have written about technology, management, entrepreneurship, cognitive psychology, happiness research, public policy, and the strange ways in which intelligent people sometimes manage to reason themselves into spectacular mistakes. This book brings many of those interests together.

The central question of the book is a simple one: What happens when a superpower stops thinking clearly?

Drawing upon ideas from cognitive psychology, systems thinking, decision science, happiness research, political theory, philosophy, and the study of institutions, EPISTEMIKA Prima examines the possibility that many of the political and social problems confronting the United States today are, at their deepest level, epistemic problems. That is: problems of reasoning, problems of information, problems of incentives, and problems of collective judgment.

The book is written from the perspective of an interested outsider. In the spirit of Alexis de Tocqueville, it attempts to examine American institutions, culture, and public discourse through fresh eyes and from a global perspective.

The argument is not directed at any particular political party. It is not a book of the left. It is not a book of the right. It is a book about how human beings think, how societies reason, how institutions succeed and fail, and how democracies can preserve the intellectual habits necessary for self-government.

Among the themes explored are:

• Reasoning failures in public policy.
• The psychology of confirmation bias.
• The rise of outrage-driven media ecosystems.
• The decline of trusted intermediaries.
• The challenges of democratic decision-making.
• The sociology of deindustrialization.
• Cross-cultural perspectives on governance and institutions.
• Lessons from psychology, philosophy, and happiness science.

The work draws upon ideas from both Eastern and Western intellectual traditions and attempts to place contemporary American debates within a broader global and historical framework.

An English edition is planned first. An Esperanto edition may follow later.

Whether the book ultimately proves correct is, of course, for readers to decide. My hope is simply that it encourages clearer thinking, more intellectual humility, and a greater willingness to examine assumptions that have become invisible through familiarity.

After all, one of the advantages of the outside eye is that it sometimes notices things that everybody else has stopped seeing.

EPISTEMIKA Prima What the Outside Eye Sees.

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"The crisis of democracy may ultimately be a crisis of reasoning."

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