---
type: claim
domain: collective-intelligence
description: "Degraded collective sensemaking is not one risk among many but the meta-risk that prevents response to all other risks — if society cannot agree on what is true it cannot coordinate on climate, AI, pandemics, or any existential threat"
confidence: likely
source: "Schmachtenberger 'War on Sensemaking' Parts 1-5 (2019-2020), Consilience Project essays (2021-2024)"
created: 2026-04-03
related:
  - "what propagates is what wins rivalrous competition not what is true and this applies across genes memes products scientific findings and sensemaking frameworks"
  - "AI alignment is a coordination problem not a technical problem"
---

# Epistemic commons degradation is the gateway failure that enables all other civilizational risks because you cannot coordinate on problems you cannot collectively perceive

Schmachtenberger's War on Sensemaking series (2019-2020) makes a structural argument: epistemic commons degradation is not one civilizational risk among many (alongside climate, AI, bioweapons, nuclear). It is the META-risk — the failure mode that enables all others by preventing the collective perception and coordination required to address them.

The causal chain:

1. **Rivalrous dynamics degrade information ecology** (see: what propagates is what wins rivalrous competition). Social media algorithms optimize engagement over truth. Corporations fund research that supports their products. Political actors weaponize information uncertainty. State actors conduct information warfare.

2. **Degraded information ecology prevents shared reality.** When different populations inhabit different information environments, they cannot agree on basic facts — whether climate change is real, whether vaccines work, whether AI poses existential risk. Not because the evidence is ambiguous but because the information ecology presents different evidence to different groups.

3. **Without shared reality, coordination fails.** Every coordination mechanism — democratic governance, international treaties, market regulation, collective action — requires sufficient shared understanding to function. You cannot vote on climate policy if half the electorate believes climate change is a hoax. You cannot regulate AI if policymakers cannot distinguish real risks from industry lobbying.

4. **Failed coordination on any specific risk increases all other risks.** Failure to coordinate on climate accelerates resource competition, which accelerates arms races, which accelerates AI deployment for military advantage, which accelerates existential risk. The risks are interconnected; failure on any one cascades through all others.

The key structural insight: social media's externality is uniquely dangerous precisely because it degrades the capacity that would be required to regulate ALL other externalities. Unlike oil companies (whose lobbying affects government indirectly) or pharmaceutical companies (whose captured regulation affects one domain), social media directly fractures the electorate's ability to self-govern. Government cannot regulate the thing that is degrading government's capacity to regulate.

This maps directly to the attractor basin research: epistemic collapse is the gateway to all negative attractor basins. It enables Molochian exhaustion (can't coordinate to escape competition), authoritarian lock-in (populations can't collectively resist when they can't agree on what's happening), and comfortable stagnation (can't perceive existential threats through noise).

## Challenges

- "Gateway failure" implies a temporal ordering that may not hold. Epistemic degradation and coordination failure may co-evolve rather than one causing the other. The relationship may be circular rather than causal.
- Some coordination succeeds despite degraded epistemic commons — the Montreal Protocol, nuclear non-proliferation (partial), COVID vaccine development. The claim may overstate the dependency of coordination on shared sensemaking.
- The argument risks unfalsifiability: any coordination failure can be attributed to insufficient sensemaking. A more testable formulation would specify the threshold of epistemic commons quality required for specific coordination outcomes.

---

Relevant Notes:
- [[what propagates is what wins rivalrous competition not what is true and this applies across genes memes products scientific findings and sensemaking frameworks]] — the mechanism by which epistemic commons degrade
- [[AI alignment is a coordination problem not a technical problem]] — AI alignment is a specific coordination challenge that epistemic commons degradation prevents

Topics:
- [[_map]]
