The Structural Inability to Transmit Human Meaning

The metacrisis is typically framed in systemic terms — as a convergence of ecological, geopolitical, and Institutional failures. This analysis cuts deeper, locating the generative core of the crisis in a structural failure of Intergenerational transmission. Modern mass education, shaped by the Enlightenment settlement between secular governance and Religious authority, adopted a posture of axiological neutrality: it would produce capable citizens and productive workers while deferring questions of value, meaning, and the good life to private and Religious spheres. That settlement has dissolved, and what remains is an educational infrastructure constitutively incapable of transmitting what most needs transmitting.

The mechanism is what this framing calls the 'education commodity proposition': the progressive colonization of pedagogical relationships by quantification, credentialization, and algorithmic feedback, converting reciprocal intergenerational formation into a transactional exchange of measurable outputs. But the deeper pathology is epistemological and metaphysical. Secular academic culture has normalized a tacit nihilism — an enchantment with disenchantment — in which value is assumed to be constructed rather than encountered, meaning is a projective act rather than a responsive one, and the catEgory of the sacred is treated as a cognitive error. This does not present itself as a worldview; it presents itself as intellectual maturity.

The transformation demanded by the metacrisis is the breaking of that enchantment: a post-secular reorientation in which axiological realism becomes thinkable again and the question of the good life recovers its urgency. This is not a return to pre-critical Religiosity but a recovery of the capacity for genuine normative orientation. An educational system that forecloses this recovery is not neutral — it is actively producing the human incapacity at the crisis's core. The introduction of AI into educational socialization, without any adequate framework for these stakes, represents the sharpest current instantiation of the problem.