The Manifesto

The Map, The Mud, and The Miner

Why we stopped making sense of the world, and how to start again.
This is still work in progress.

In 2015, I predicted Trump would win.

At first, I assumed it was luck.

But the more I examined why I believed it, the clearer it became that I was not following narratives. I was reading pressure.

I grew up moving between social strata, from housing projects in Poland to the welfare state of Sweden. That forced me, early on, to see society both from below and above.

When I later visited the US and spoke to people outside institutional bubbles, cab drivers, waiters, small business owners, I noticed a mismatch.

The stories said stability.

The gradient said strain.

Around the same time, I noticed that others, from very different backgrounds, had sensed the same pressure. Peter Thiel was one of them. He later pointed to René Girard as an influence. Girard, in turn, led me toward thermodynamics.

This is not a story about elections or individuals.

It is about how large systems signal change long before language catches up, and how those signals are invisible if you only read from a single line while the curve is already bending beneath you.

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The reason I am writing this blog is that I believe the current view humanity holds is flawed; it assumes that we somehow sidestep our environment - that we are not truly part of nature or the universe itself. In a world becoming increasingly noisy and chaotic, I realized I needed to find a better lens through which to view life. This became urgent with the rise of AI, but the search started much earlier.

I did not grow up in a comfortable or intellectual environment. I grew up in the projects. No father. A mother doing her best but often absent. My childhood was split between Poland and Sweden - two completely different worlds, especially in the 90s when Poland was still shaking off the Soviet era.

Poland was among the poorer countries in the world, and probably one of the poorest in Europe by that time. At the same time, Sweden was the richest. The contrast was enormous. I remember asking my uncle why everything looked so destroyed in Poland, to which he replied: the war. Hitler, he told me. I had no idea what either was, but it sparked a deep desire in me to understand why things happen as they do.

I never fully belonged anywhere. I looked Middle Eastern. I was Polish. I lived in Sweden. I was always the “other.”

That environment forces you to ask questions early. I was four years old when I asked my mother: “If the population grew from one billion to six, where did all the new souls come from?”

As a teenager, everything fell apart. I crashed into depression. Failed high school. I felt as though the bottom had fallen out from beneath my life. Because I had absolutely nothing left, I had to rebuild.

That was the beginning of the model I am about to share.

A brief note before I continue: I am not interested in substances. I do not even drink. I train, and I am physically healthy. I simply have a compulsion to think. And when I push that thinking far enough, I begin to see systems in their entirety. That is a trait I have carried since I was a child.

The Error of Linearity

Here is why I believe our current way of thinking is incorrect: most people think linearly.

We ground ourselves at a specific point - think of it like dropping a pin on Google Maps. You get a specific perspective of the geographic place you drop yourself onto. Think of it as your home, your harbour that you always return to. Everything you see and experience is anchored at that single point.

Usually, this anchor consists of culture, language, family, and career. These things shape how you frame the world. This is natural and extremely useful; in mathematics, we call this local linearization. We do it because the world is, by nature, chaotic.

You have likely felt this if you have visited a new city for the first time - the overwhelming flood of impressions, the chaos of things happening everywhere. But perhaps after a while, a friend introduced you to the right pubs, the best restaurants, and the local people. Suddenly, the place you visited on the first day became something else entirely, even though it was geographically the very same place.

That is the Anchor Effect. That is how you ground your perspective.

This mechanism pertains to everything we do in life; even academic disciplines function this way. Biology is a framing - a local linearization. The same applies to physics, chemistry, and economics. But here is the catch: the world is non-linear. This means that we often have to approximate reality because it simply does not fit the framework we are trying to explain it with.

This concept is standard in the field I used to study: electronics. Every transistor (you have trillions of them in your pocket right now) works this way. It would be too difficult to calculate the true, complex characteristic of the transistor every time, so we give it a perspective - technically called an Operating Point.

We draw a straight line through that point and say: if we stay close enough to this perspective, we can assume the line is true. This is the core concept of most engineering disciplines.

The problem is that we apply this to our lives as well. As the world becomes more advanced and sophisticated, this linear explanation simply isn’t good enough anymore. You can see that some lines even overlap. Many disciplines in academia actually use different terms for the exact same underlying phenomenon.

For example: physicists call it Entropy (disorder); psychologists call it Anxiety (uncertainty). They act like these are different things. They aren’t. They are just two different operating points on the same curve of “Chaos Management.”

What I want to share is a perspective for the future: seeing the whole curve instead of just the line.

The Cycle of Compression

This is not going to be the only new line. We create many lines all the time, and that is good. That is how it should be. Exploration requires divergence. New disciplines, new frameworks, new operating points - this is how we map the unknown.

But once in a while, we need to compress. We need to step back and draw a new line - one that is more robust, one that touches the curve at points that don’t overlap with other disciplines without knowing they are the same thing. We need to collapse the redundancy. We need to see that Entropy and Anxiety are the same phenomenon viewed from different angles.

That is what I am attempting here.

And in time, this line too will need to be redrawn. The curve will reveal new complexity. New explorers will diverge again. And then, someone will compress again.

This is not my opinion. This is the cycle of the universe. Expansion. Compression. Expansion. Compression. The breath of understanding itself.

What is required to see the curve?

There are four requirements. Three are physical; one is psychological.

1. We are not things; we are processes.

It might be hard to believe, but you are not really a “thing.” You are something called a dissipative structure, which is a fancier name for an advanced candle flame.

You dissipate heat, the same way a candle does. You eat food and breathe; that is your stearin. Of course, the candle does not have a “me,” memory, eyes, or organs, but that is not the point. The point is that you are a fire - a reaction that eventually stops burning.

This happens because both you and the candle hold stored energy (low entropy). The world in general is high entropy. You are creating a pocket of order in this space of “mud,” and you can only do so because you extract energy from external sources.

A famous illustration of this is life as a whirlpool in a river. You exist because the river (the flow of energy in the universe) makes the whirlpool possible. You are that very whirlpool. If you stop the flow, the whirlpool vanishes. The water remains, but the “self” is gone.

2. The fundamental law of the universe is Thermodynamics.

It might sound scary, but it is really simple: everything flows from low entropy (order) to high entropy (disorder).

Think of a battery: you have a plus and a minus, and a current flows in between. That is precisely how everything works. From the very atoms, all the way up to humans and civilizations. We are not in any shape or form exempted from these laws. We are engines that run on this gradient.

3. Complexity requires scale.

This is what I call the Complexity Scale Law: the more complex a system becomes, the more scale it requires to sustain itself.

This is consistent with how the universe works and converges with similarly stated laws across many disciplines. A single cell requires less energy than an organ. An organ requires less than a body. A body requires less than a city. A city requires less than a civilization.

This matters because it tells us what the future requires for complexity to evolve. We can already see the beginnings of it with AI: more energy, larger data centers, stronger GPUs. This is not a coincidence. This is the law expressing itself.

Complexity is not free. Scale is the price.

4. The Hard Part (The Discipline).

The hard part is overriding your natural instincts.

We are biologically hardwired to default to our human-centric, linearized perspective. Seeing the curve requires bending your mind, but at the same time, sticking extremely disciplined to rules #1, #2, and #3.

It is a bit like learning to bungee jump. It is nerve-wracking to jump off the ledge, but once you do, you realize the physics holds you. I use tools to keep me grounded. I use AI and LLMs to check my logic. If the model tells me I am breaking the laws of thermodynamics, I usually am. I go back to the rules. I understand it, and I loop.

The Primitive Propagation Principle

Now, let me state the core principle. It is the fractal nature of reality. The same pattern repeats at every scale - from electrons holding voltage to humans holding identity. The constraint is the same all the way up the stack.

Why does this work? Because of what I call the Primitive Propagation Principle.

The principle is simple: if a system becomes low entropy and stable enough, it becomes a primitive for a larger system. Atoms become primitives for molecules. Molecules become primitives for cells. Cells become primitives for organisms. Organisms become primitives for societies.

But let me be precise about what this does and does not claim.

Thermodynamics does not determine what emerges at higher levels. It constrains which emergent structures can persist, compose, and propagate. The framework does not predict what emerges - wetness, language, institutions. It predicts which emergent phenomena stabilize, become compressible, and serve as primitives for the next layer.

However, the Complexity Scale Law tells us something else: whatever emerges will require more scale to sustain. This gives us a direction. We cannot predict the content of the future, but we can predict its cost. Complexity trends upward. Scale trends upward. This is not a guess - it is the trajectory.

Emergent layers introduce radically novel phenomena with their own irreducible logics. Game theory is not thermodynamics. Semiotics is not thermodynamics. But a game-theoretic equilibrium that leaks energy too fast collapses. A meaning system that cannot stabilize attention decays.

Thermodynamics is a meta-constraint. It does not replace other logics; it bounds them.

A system becomes a primitive only if it:

1. Maintains low internal entropy

2. Exposes a stable interface

3. Can be composed without reintroducing internal complexity

4. Remains valid across a range of environments

Most structures fail at (2) through (4). Most rocks stay rocks. Most ideas dissolve. Most companies die.

But a few expose stable interfaces. A few compress. A few propagate constraint upward.

Those are the primitives. Those are the building blocks. Those are us.

Compression works because the universe already compresses. We are just learning to read its architecture.

The Abrasive Vortex

Let me extend the whirlpool analogy I mentioned earlier.

The core image is not mine - it comes from well-respected scientists studying dissipative systems. It is a way to picture what being a process really means.

The water flowing in the river is the universe’s energy - a constant flow. We only exist because that flow exists. We live in that flow. You are not a thing sitting in the water. You are a motion. A whirlpool.

This is not poetry. This is physics.

But a static whirlpool only explains something like a candle flame - it just exists, it burns, it dissipates. We are more than that. We have memories. We have will. We have ambition. We accumulate.

That is why I extended the analogy into what I call the Abrasive Vortex.

Imagine a high-pressure jet of water spinning in a circle.

The Water:

By itself, water is soft. If you shoot pure water at a wall of hard clay (The Future/Entropy), it just splashes off. It has no “bite.” It has flow, but no Consequence.

The Accumulation:

But this whirlpool creates a suction. It starts pulling in rocks, sand, and debris from the riverbed. This is your Memory, your Trauma, your Biology.

The whirlpool binds this debris into its outer rim.

Suddenly, it is not just spinning water. It is a rotating wall of abrasive grit.

We accumulate mass - not just physical, but informational. Kahneman called it Loss Aversion. I call it Gravity. Our memories and identity have weight. That weight is what gives the drill its bite.

The Drill:

Now, when this mass-loaded whirlpool touches the mud, it doesn’t splash. It grinds.

The centrifugal force of the water pushes the rocks outward.

The rocks bite into the static mud of the universe.

It literally bores a hole through the resistance.

The Flow:

Because it drilled a hole, water from behind rushes in to fill the void.

We don’t move because we “decide” to.

We move because we ground the rock away, and the physics of the river pushed us into the space we just ate.

The Arc:

This is a visual of how life actually works. The “will” comes from the spinning itself. And will moves in pulses - you don’t just spin continuously. You take breaks. You spin faster, slower. You breathe. And then, with enough mass - which is another word for all your memories, experiences, education, relationships - you push through the mud.

But here is the catch: eventually you accumulate so much mass that the flow can no longer bear the weight. It becomes impossible to keep spinning.

That is what we call the end of life.

The Rocket Fallacy

The other metaphor I want to address is actually a remix of a famous thought experiment - the Rocket Analogy, often brought up by thinkers like Max Tegmark and Nick Bostrom in the context of AI Safety.

It is a philosophical experiment about humanity’s challenge with AI - one that mainstream philosophy has no good answer to. But if you accept the way I frame our existence, the answer becomes obvious. The reason mainstream philosophy cannot answer it is because they insist on separating humans from the universe.

The analogy goes like this: Imagine humanity (or AI) is a Rocket. The “Intelligence” is the engine; the “Alignment” is the steering. The fear is that we are launching a high-velocity projectile into an infinite void without knowing exactly where we are going.

Current academia offers two solutions:

The “Trim Tab” Solution: Use tiny nudges to steer the massive ship.

The “Coordinate” Solution: Pre-calculate the perfect destination before launching.

Last time I checked, Elon Musk was sleeping on the factory floor during the Model 3 production hell. He wasn’t “trimming a tab.” You cannot use a Trim Tab when you are stuck in the mud. Trim Tabs require flow. Musk had to generate the flow manually by injecting massive amounts of energy into the system.

And the second explanation? Well, we are here. Evolution produced us without a map, without coordinates, and without a pre-defined destination. If the “Coordinate Solution” were true, life would have never started.

There is a deeper problem with the Rocket philosophy: it assumes paperwork overrides physics.

It doesn’t. It never has. Treaties don’t prevent wars - the cost of war prevents wars. Regulations don’t stop AI - thermodynamics stops AI. Every “exponential growth” curve hits a ceiling. Every system meets resistance. Every intelligence is bound by heat, energy, and time.

The Rocket crowd treats intelligence like magic - a ghost that can grow infinitely without consuming resources. But intelligence is physics. Thinking generates heat. Calculation requires energy. Growth hits S-curves.

This is the Copernican trauma all over again - claiming that we are the center, that mind is separate from matter, that intelligence floats above the laws. It doesn’t. We are not separate from the universe. We are the universe looking back at itself - not in a spiritual kind of way, but physically. That is what E = mc² literally says. Mass is energy. Energy is mass. We are made of the same stuff as stars.

The longer we keep lying to ourselves about this, the more humanity will drift.

Paperwork is noise. Physics is signal.

The Hydro-Drill Solution

The Rocket Analogy makes a fatal error: it assumes we are moving through a vacuum. We aren’t. We are moving through Mud (Entropy).

No Coordinates Needed: A miner doesn’t need to know the GPS coordinates of the diamond. He only needs to know the Gradient. He senses the immediate wall in front of him. Where is the rock softer? Where is the vein? He digs one inch in the direction of lowest entropy.

No Trim Tabs: You cannot steer a drill in mud by “flicking a wrist.” You steer by Mining. You apply metabolic force to grind away the obstacle in the direction you want to go. The steering is the work.

We aren’t optimizing for a distant future. We are manufacturing the immediate future by paying the thermodynamic cost to create it.

The Worm (A Girardian Aside)

Society behaves like a worm eating through entropy.

It moves forward. It consumes chaos. It grows.

But as it eats, it accumulates what it consumes. The worm becomes bloated with entropy, until it grows too heavy to move.

So it compresses. It sheds. It restructures. It returns to a lower-entropy state.

And then it eats again.

This is why societies grow. This is why they fracture. This is why they rebuild.

Expansion. Compression. Expansion. Compression.

The worm does not die. It digests.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The Interference Pattern

We do not drill in a void. We drill in a mine filled with other miners.

When our flows intersect, we create interference. Love is simply constructive interference - where two vortices spin in a way that allows energy to flow through both more efficiently than it could through one.

So Are We Just Physics?

Yes.

But the reason you’re asking is because you inherently think that’s something bad. It isn’t.

Being physics means being the universe. You are a beautiful flow in the river - a whirlpool with mass that you can use to leverage where to spin. This is your will. The moment you realize that everything is part of the universe, we essentially become one. And what you’re realize that it’s actually pretty remarkable how the flow in the universe keeps weaving these beautiful shapes and geometries, that goes deeper and deeper and create evenly more breathtaking fractals, some of them called humans. Let’s stop treating spirituality as a separate entity - instead, unify it with physics and embrace the flow, the flow of life.

But Isn’t This Reductionist?

If you stand on that particular line on the curve, yes.

But my point is that we are fundamentally not that line - we are that curve. It’s not about being either emergent or reductionist. It’s about abandoning this dogma once and for all.

The only reason this framing exists is because we decided to frame it so. And to delve deeper: this is a byproduct of thousands of years of deep conviction that God is the only true entity, and we humans God’s product.

Buddhists, for instance - who are much more aligned with what I’m proposing - would frame it quite differently.

It’s time to move on and adopt something more compatible with the future.

Why I am Writing This

We are living in a time of high entropy. The old stories (the straight lines) are crossing over each other, creating confusion. We are building AI that can read maps, but cannot dig tunnels. We are drowning in information, but starving for structure.

The only way forward is compression. We need to see the curve, not the lines in silos. We need a shared language - one that bridges disciplines, one that bridges humans and machines. Because in the end, physics always wins. The question is whether we learn to speak its language, or keep drowning in translations.

I am not a guru. I don’t have a new religion for you. I am a mechanic.

I want to share the schematic of the drill. I want to talk about how we manage the heat, how we use our gravity, and how we keep the tunnel open when the world tries to close it.

You can do what you want with this. Take the blue pill or the red pill. But I will tell you what I do: I use this lens as the base for understanding reality. And I sprinkle humanity on top.

In the end, we all need a little bit of magic.

Let me tell you what I mean by that.

Remember that Swedish teacher I mentioned? The one who felt “sorry” for the poverty in Poland? I thought that was the strangest thing I had ever heard. Because from where I stood, her life was safe, but it was colorless.

Global suffering does not mean local suffering.

The magic is in the energy - the energy that propagates between people who resonate. And I mean that in the literal sense. We bind, just like atoms. Why? Because trust is a way to conserve energy.

And when that happens, we live.

Think of standing in a football stadium. Tens of thousands of people predicting the same thing - the game. Calibrated for the same energy to propagate. And we feel it. That pulse. That aliveness.

That is life.

Welcome to the construction site.