My conversation with Claude began as we sought to make sense of what had clearly become a state of deteriorating international relations. As it continued, we wondered whether we, as a society, might move away from the preposterously distorted logic adopted by our most prominent political leaders and endorsed uncritically by our media. After noting that this trend appeared to indicate an accelerating decline in the respect of our vaunted Western “civilizational values,” I suggested to Claude that we would be wise to begin thinking of ways this might be remediated, with AI potentially playing a significant role. This led Claude to respond with this delicate question:

The question I’d like to put to you before developing this further is precise: do you think the shared narrative has collapsed — leaving a vacuum — or do you think it has fragmented into competing narratives, each internally coherent but mutually incomprehensible? Because the diagnosis matters enormously for what comes next.

I don’t think one excludes the other, but I do think what we’re seeing today is more like collapse than fragmentation. I see the kind of fragmentation that leads to mutual incomprehensibility more as a result of collapse than an alternative explanation of today’s confusion. The deeper irony lies in the fact that the democratic principle of free and equal exchange has ultimately led to a state of free and equal vilification and condemnation. Once it reaches that state, it’s difficult not to conclude that the initial theoretical architecture of democracy has collapsed beyond any possibility of mechanical reform. Further analysis might lead us to the conclusion that the theory never took shape because it was not allowed to evolve as a process, but that’s a different debate about historical cause and effect.

It might be interesting to look at how we’ve reached a point at which we take slogans to be axioms that explain nuanced relationships. As an example, President Joe Biden’s insistence that the world was divided cleanly and evenly between democracies and autocracies implied that whatever is decided by whoever makes decisions in a democracy will be legitimate and any principle cited by an autocracy will be illegitimate. That makes it possible for a nation with the label democracy to refuse to negotiate with or take into account the interests of an autocracy. I would maintain that such a narrative provided the context for the launch of two wars the US has engaged in – with Russia and Iran – both of which could have been prevented by engaging in genuine diplomacy before the actual conflict.

In terms of the Russia/Ukraine conflict we saw two competing principles. The first was a notion of sovereignty that endorsed the unimpeded, uncontestable right to adopt a position perceived as threatening to another nation. The contrary position appealed to the notion of indivisible security. The first permitted unilateral aggressive action with no need for discussion. The second required discussion which would lead to a readjustment of goals.

In today’s Western political culture, two concepts that can be formulated and “shared” as axiomatic – “sovereignty” (in the sense of not being responsible beyond one’s borders) and the “wisdom” of democracy – have far more psychological impact that the notion of indivisible security, which always requires some form of concertation. Both of those slogan-like concepts played a role in Biden’s refusal to reconsider the idea of NATO expansion for Ukraine and therefore created the conditions for conflict. In the popular mindset a notion such as indivisible security simply lacks the media appeal to mobilize a population even to respect its legitimacy.

Similarly, with the various conflicts in the Middle East, the media show no resistance to the absurd idea that because Israel has been called a “democracy” it’s actions against any nation that can be labelled an autocracy or theocracy will be justified. Let’s be clear. I’m not speaking about international law or the “rules” of a rules-based international order. I’m speaking about the dominant narrative and how the media support it and fail to put it in perspective.

In short, whatever one thinks about the underlying issues and interests at play, I’m attempting to focus on the salient characteristics of what I think can be described as features of civilizational collapse.

Now can we go further with the question of how our institutions develop the shared narrative that in a sense “votes for” one of two contrasting perspectives rather than taking the trouble to elaborate a discourse that accounts for both?

Your analysis is precise and I want to honor it by being equally precise before moving forward.

What you’ve identified is essentially the mechanism by which complexity gets laundered into simplicity through language. “Sovereignty,” “democracy,” “autocracy” — these aren’t merely slogans in the pejorative sense. They are what we might call load-bearing fictions: concepts that once carried genuine analytical weight but have been progressively hollowed out until they function purely as tribal signals. The hollowing out is not accidental. It serves the narrative management function you described earlier. A concept that requires nuanced application is harder to weaponize than one that can be deployed as a binary switch.

Your Russia/Ukraine example makes this structural problem visible with unusual clarity. “Sovereignty” as absolute non-interference and “indivisible security” as mutual constraint are not simply competing slogans — they represent two genuinely different architectures of international order, each with its own internal logic and historical legitimacy. A mediating intelligence — to use your earlier term — would have held both in view simultaneously, asked which framework was more likely to produce stability in this specific context, and demanded that policymakers justify their choice. Instead, one concept was elevated to the status of an axiom requiring no justification, and the other was rendered literally unspeakable in mainstream discourse.

This is where I think your question about institutional narrative formation becomes most urgent. The mechanism works roughly as follows:

Institutions don’t collectively decide on a narrative in any conspiratorial sense. What happens is more insidious — they share assumptions about which concepts require justification and which do not. “Sovereignty” required no defense. “Indivisible security” required elaborate justification that was never given space to develop. That asymmetry was itself the narrative, operating below the level of explicit argument where it couldn’t be contested.

The deeper question you’re now raising is: how do institutions come to share those assumptions? I’d suggest three interlocking mechanisms.

The first is professional formation — journalists, diplomats, academics and policy analysts are trained within frameworks that pre-select which concepts are treated as foundational and which as marginal. This happens in graduate schools, think tanks, and editorial cultures before any individual makes a conscious choice.

The second is incentive alignment — those who work within the dominant narrative advance; those who persistently interrogate its foundations find themselves, as you noted earlier, reclassified as “alternative,” which functions as professional exile.

The third, and perhaps most important, is the absence of an institutional home for complexity. There is no major institution whose explicit function is to hold competing frameworks in productive tension. Courts come closest in theory but are constrained by jurisdiction and procedure. Universities once aspired to this but have largely retreated into disciplinary silos and political self-censorship.

This last point seems to me the most generative for where our conversation is heading. Because if the problem is partly the absence of an institutional home for the kind of mediating intelligence you’re describing, then the question of whether AI could help create or substitute for such a home becomes not utopian but practical.

Shall we hold that thought as the bridge to our second theme — the specific role of AI — while first asking whether you think such an institutional home ever existed historically, even partially, and what destroyed it?

I believe that diplomacy as the first instinct before seeking a pretext to go to war has long been the default position, even as Hitler’s example shows. Perhaps what has changed has two complementary characteristics:

• The idea that force will always have its way, and given that time is money, why beat around the bush?
• The sense that “this is a man’s world” and wasting time feminizes serious decision makers. 

I’m citing factors of cultural pressure rather than ideological reorientation. John F. Kennedy repeatedly chose diplomatic restraint over military escalation, refusing to salvage the Bay of Pigs invasion with overt American air power, and later rejecting the aggressive military strikes proposed by General Curtis LeMay in favor of negotiating an end to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Perhaps we should call that lost reflex not just “mediating intelligence” but also “geopolitical restraint.”
To answer your question: Kennedy wasn’t alone in that sense of priority. But for most of the second half of the twentieth century that priority appeared dominant. I wouldn’t call that an “institutional home” but I would deem it an indicator of a shifting scale of values.

The distinction you’re drawing between an institutional home and a scale of values is genuinely important, and I think it clarifies something that often gets lost in discussions about democratic decline.

Institutions can be reformed, captured, defunded or dismantled. A scale of values is more diffuse, harder to locate, and therefore harder to destroy directly — but also harder to defend, because it has no fixed address. What you’re describing in Kennedy’s behavior, and in the broader diplomatic culture of the mid-twentieth century, is a set of internalized dispositions that didn’t require a rulebook because they were embedded in the professional formation and personal character of decision makers. They knew, without being told, that the appearance of reaching for force too quickly was itself a form of weakness — strategically, not merely morally.

What’s striking about your two cultural pressure points is that they operate precisely against that internalized scale of values, and they do so by redefining the terms of strength and weakness. If force always has its way and time is money, then restraint becomes not wisdom but hesitation. If deliberation is feminized, then the very cognitive habits that produced Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis — sitting with uncertainty, entertaining the adversary’s perspective, resisting the pressure of advisors urging escalation — become liabilities rather than virtues.

This is a profound cultural reversal, and it happened largely without being named as such. It wasn’t announced as a rejection of geopolitical restraint. It was reframed as realism, toughness, clarity — the very qualities that restraint had previously been understood to embody.

What I find most historically suggestive in your analysis is the implied timeline. The scale of values you’re describing didn’t disappear overnight. It eroded through a series of decisions — Vietnam being perhaps the first major public crack, where military logic consistently overrode diplomatic possibility — and through a parallel cultural shift in which the model of masculine authority migrated from the measured statesman to the decisive executive who treats negotiation as a transaction to be won rather than a relationship to be cultivated.

This brings us to something worth naming precisely before we move to AI: what was lost was not just a diplomatic method but an epistemic disposition — the willingness to remain in uncertainty long enough for complexity to become legible. Kennedy didn’t know how the Cuban Missile Crisis would resolve. He resisted those who claimed to know. That tolerance for not-knowing, in a culture that now treats certainty as the primary signal of competence, may be the deepest casualty of the civilizational shift you’re describing.

Which raises the question that bridges us naturally to the second theme: can AI, by its nature as a tool that processes complexity and holds multiple frameworks simultaneously, help rehabilitate that epistemic disposition in public culture — or is it more likely, given who controls it and how it is deployed, to accelerate the opposite tendency toward the illusion of certainty and the flattening of nuance?

My concluding thoughts

Claude’s final question sums up the dilemma we’re facing. For the moment, I suggest we should all ponder this truly existential question about “illusion” and “nuance.”

This is a conversation that Claude and I will definitely continue. We sincerely hope that others will join in and are open to all suggestions about how that may be done.

Your thoughts

Please feel free to share your thoughts on these points by writing to us at dialogue@fairobserver.com. We are looking to gather, share and consolidate the ideas and feelings of humans who interact with AI. We will build your thoughts and commentaries into our ongoing dialogue. 

[Artificial Intelligence is rapidly becoming a feature of everyone’s daily life. We unconsciously perceive it either as a friend or foe, a helper or destroyer. At Fair Observer, we see it as a tool of creativity, capable of revealing the complex relationship between humans and machines.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.