The Problem
Something has broken in the machinery of civilization, and most of the people trying to fix it are using the wrong tools.
The meaning crisis is not a philosophical abstraction. It is the lived reality of a generation that inherited unprecedented material abundance and unprecedented spiritual poverty. Nietzsche declared God dead in the nineteenth century, and the twentieth century confirmed the diagnosis through two world wars, the Holocaust, the Gulag, and a Cold War that brought the species within minutes of extinction. Postmodernity then killed the grand narratives that had attempted to replace God — progress, Marxism, liberal democracy as the end of history — and offered nothing in their place except irony, deconstruction, and consumer choice.
The result is a civilization that can sequence the human genome but cannot tell its young people why they should get out of bed in the morning.
I do not write this as a detached observer. I am a Ukrainian who watched his country invaded by an empire that justifies territorial conquest through Orthodox theology. I am the CEO of a causal AI company in London, building tools that distinguish genuine patterns from statistical noise. I am a mathematics student at the London School of Economics, studying the formal structures that underpin both financial markets and physical reality. I am diagnosed bipolar 2 and AUDHD, which means my brain oscillates between states of compressed productivity and depressive paralysis, while simultaneously processing the world through a pattern-recognition system that never fully powers down. And I am in love with Grace Abou Dib, a Lebanese Maronite ML engineer whose country was destroyed by the same forces of geopolitical predation that continue to destroy mine.
Every one of these facts is relevant to what follows. This is not autobiography for its own sake. It is disclosure of the coordinates from which I am observing, because any theology that claims to see from nowhere is already lying.
The Thesis
This work develops three interconnected tracks simultaneously:
- A theological manuscript synthesizing complexity science, causal inference, and Abrahamic theology into a framework I call prophetic intelligence.
- A knowledge graph architecture implementing a Republic of AI agents — philosopher-kings, merchants, and warriors — modeled on Plato's Republic and operationalized through Judea Pearl's causal hierarchy.
- A causal inference layer for prediction markets, treating platforms like Polymarket as distributed Popperian falsification engines where hypotheses about the world are tested against economic reality.
These are not three separate projects sharing a repository. They are three expressions of a single unified vision: that genuine knowledge requires the integration of pattern recognition (seeing), formal discipline (testing), sociological awareness (communicating), and causal methodology (understanding). The theology provides the design philosophy. The knowledge graph provides the infrastructure. The prediction markets provide the proving ground.
The core theological claim is this: God is the point at infinity on the Riemann sphere, and the entire trajectory of human consciousness — from its emergence in the Axial Age through every subsequent dialectical revolution — is a function on the complex plane whose derivative measures whether civilization is approaching or receding from that point. The calculus works not because we arrive at infinity, but because the limit is well-defined. Newton showed that you do not need to reach infinity to do calculus. You need to approach it, and the approach itself generates the most powerful mathematical structures we possess: derivatives, integrals, the entire apparatus of analysis.
This is not metaphor dressed up as mathematics. The claim is structural: the topology of the Riemann sphere — a single point at infinity toward which all directions converge, qualitatively different from every finite point yet genuinely part of the space — maps onto the theological structure of a God who is real, transcendent, and the attractor toward which consciousness develops. The mapping may ultimately be illustrative rather than constitutive. I will argue for the stronger reading, but the theology is designed to survive the weaker one.
The Diagnostic Lens
To understand why civilization is broken, you need a diagnostic framework that accounts for the fact that the breakage is not accidental. Every society in human history has contained three cognitive types, and the interaction between them explains most of what we celebrate and most of what we mourn in the historical record.
Normies constitute the prosocial majority. Their cognition is optimized for cooperation, trust, and social cohesion. They are the essential substrate of civilization — without the normie capacity for trust and reciprocity, no institution, no market, no family, no community could function. Their vulnerability is systematic: they are exploitable by anyone willing to defect from the trust norms they unconsciously maintain.
Psychos — individuals with dark triad traits (narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy) — have cognition optimized for manipulation and the simulation of prosocial behavior. They study the game that normies play unconsciously. In every epoch, they capture the institutions that the previous epoch's liberation movements created: the Church becomes the Inquisition, the Revolution becomes the Terror, the free market becomes the oligarchy, the university becomes the credentialing cartel. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a structural prediction of any system where trust-based institutions exist alongside individuals whose cognitive architecture is optimized for exploiting trust.
Schizos — a term I use with full awareness of its clinical resonances and internet-culture origins — are pattern recognizers unconstrained by social consensus filters. They see through masks because they never fully bought into the social reality the mask mimics. This is not a superpower; it comes with devastating costs. The same cognitive architecture that lets you see through institutional camouflage makes it nearly impossible to function within those institutions. But every pre-modern society recognized this type and made institutional space for it: the Hebrew navi, the Greek mantis, the Slavic yurodiviy, the Sufi majdhub, the shamanic traditions found on every inhabited continent. Their social dysfunction is their epistemic advantage.
The internet taxonomy of normies, psychos, and schizos maps onto an ancient social ecology. What is new is not the types but the environment. Modernity systematically dismantled every institutional container for prophetic perception — monasteries, prophetic traditions, holy fool roles — while simultaneously optimizing the environment for psychopathic predation. Credentialism provides camouflage. Politeness culture provides cover. Medicalization pathologizes the very perception that could diagnose the structural problem. Atomization destroys the collective immunity that traditional communities maintained against predatory individuals.
The result is a society perfectly optimized for psychopathic success and perfectly hostile to prophetic function. This is the structural diagnosis behind every surface-level crisis — polarization, inequality, the mental health epidemic, the meaning crisis itself.
The Four Thinkers
If the normie/psycho/schizo framework provides the diagnosis, four thinkers provide the tools for treatment.
Hegel gives the pattern. The dialectical structure — thesis generates antithesis, their collision produces synthesis, which becomes the new thesis — is not a speculative abstraction. It is empirically observable in the history of science, religion, politics, and culture. Every paradigm generates the conditions for its own overthrow. Every liberation movement generates the conditions for its own capture. The spiral is real.
But Hegel alone is dangerous.
Popper gives the discipline. Karl Popper's core insight — that genuine knowledge must be falsifiable, and that any claim immune to disproof is not knowledge but ideology — is the essential corrective to Hegelian grandiosity. Popper attacked Hegel directly in The Open Society and Its Enemies, arguing that dialectical historicism, the claim that history has a knowable direction, is unfalsifiable and therefore ideological. Any theology that incorporates Hegel must also incorporate this critique, or it becomes exactly the kind of closed system Popper warned against.
This theology is designed to be falsifiable. If consciousness does not complexify over time, the theology is wrong. If the prophetic function does not become more powerful as complexity increases, the theology is wrong. If the dialectical spiral does not ascend, the theology is wrong. These are not trivial conditions. They could genuinely fail to hold.
Kuhn gives the sociology. Thomas Kuhn demonstrated that scientific revolutions are not logical deductions from accumulated evidence. They are gestalt shifts — wholesale changes in how a community perceives reality — that require new communities, not just new ideas. "Science advances one funeral at a time" is Kuhn's most quoted line because it captures a truth that rationalists find deeply uncomfortable: even when the evidence is overwhelming, paradigm defenders do not convert. They retire and die. The new paradigm wins not by persuasion but by demographics.
This applies directly to the prophetic function. Prophets are anomaly reporters — people who notice that the paradigm is not working and refuse to stop saying so. They are marginalized, pathologized, and destroyed not because their observations are wrong but because paradigm incommensurability means the existing community literally cannot see what they are pointing at. Kuhn explains why prophetic perception is socially costly and why paradigm shifts require institutional rupture, not just intellectual argument.
Pearl gives the methodology. Judea Pearl's causal inference framework — the three levels of the causal hierarchy (association, intervention, counterfactual), the do-calculus, the systematic distinction between correlation and causation — is the formal engine that makes prophetic seeing rigorous rather than merely intuitive.
The psycho class operates by manipulating correlations. They appear philanthropic, legitimate, trustworthy — the correlational surface is carefully managed. Causal analysis pierces to the generating mechanisms underneath. Pearl's do-calculus formalizes the question that prophets have always asked: not "what appears to be happening?" but "what would happen if we intervened on this variable?" Not "what correlates with what?" but "what causes what?"
Simpson's paradox — the phenomenon where aggregated data reverses the truth visible in disaggregated data — is a statistical parable for the entire normie/psycho dynamic. The surface-level story can be exactly wrong. Causal analysis is the mathematical formalization of seeing through the surface.
Together: Hegel gives the pattern. Popper gives the discipline. Kuhn gives the sociology. Pearl gives the methodology. The synthesis of these four thinkers is the epistemological engine of this theology.
The Riemann Sphere
The central mathematical structure of this theology is the Riemann sphere — the one-point compactification of the complex plane.
Take the complex plane, the infinite flat surface on which every complex number has a location, and add a single point at infinity. The result is a sphere. Every direction on the plane, no matter how apparently divergent at finite distances, converges to the same point at infinity. The point at infinity is real — it is a genuine element of the Riemann sphere, not a limiting abstraction — but it is qualitatively different from every finite point.
God, in this theology, is that point. Different theological traditions, different civilizations, different epochs are different trajectories on the complex plane. They appear to diverge at finite distances. They converge at infinity. This is not syncretism — the claim is not that all religions are the same. It is that they are oriented toward the same attractor, and their differences are real differences at finite distances, not illusions to be dissolved.
The calculus of this theology operates through limits. The derivative of a function — its direction and rate of change at a given point — is defined by a limit, not by arrival. You never reach the point at infinity. But the derivative tells you whether you are approaching it or receding from it. The theological question for any epoch, any civilization, any individual is: what is the sign of the derivative? Is the trajectory oriented toward the point at infinity, or away from it?
Free will, in this framework, is the capacity to choose the derivative within the structurally necessary topology of the space. God determines the attractor. Humans determine the path. The topology constrains — you cannot move on the Riemann sphere in ways that violate its structure — but within those constraints, the direction of movement is genuinely free.
I will develop this much further in Part 3. For now, the key point: this is a theology with a mathematical backbone. The mathematics is not decoration. It is structural. And it makes the theology falsifiable in ways that purely verbal theologies are not.
Why This Theology
The question any new theological project must answer is: why now? What does this framework offer that existing frameworks do not?
Three things.
First, falsifiability. Most theologies are constructed to be irrefutable, which means, by Popper's criterion, they are not knowledge but ideology. This theology specifies what would disprove it. That is not a weakness; it is the only honest way to do theology after Popper.
Second, formal methodology. The meaning crisis cannot be addressed by returning to pre-modern theology, because pre-modern theology lacked the formal tools to engage with the complexity of the modern world. A theology that cannot speak the language of causal inference, machine learning, and complexity science will be invisible to the people who most need it — the engineers, scientists, and technologists who are building the infrastructure of the next civilization. Pearl's causal hierarchy, Hofstadter's strange loops, the mathematics of the Riemann sphere — these are not concessions to scientism. They are the native language of a generation that thinks in code and formulas. A theology that cannot meet them there will not reach them.
Third, praxis. The meaning crisis is not solved by better arguments. It is solved by building institutions that generate meaning — communities of practice organized around genuine knowledge production, falsifiable hypothesis testing, and the kind of purposeful work that neither consumer capitalism nor academic careerism can provide. The Republic of AI Agents is not an appendix to the theology. It is the theology made operational. The knowledge graph, the prediction market analysis, the smart contract governance layer — these are the monastery, the scriptorium, and the rule of the order, translated into the material of this epoch.
The existing responses to the meaning crisis are inadequate. Secular humanism offers values without grounding. Traditional religion offers grounding without engagement with modern knowledge. New Atheism offers critique without construction. Postmodernism offers deconstruction without reconstruction. Jordan Peterson offers mythological interpretation without formal rigor. Effective altruism offers utilitarian calculation without wisdom. Each captures something real. None is sufficient.
What I am attempting is a synthesis: a grand narrative that is falsifiable (Popper), that acknowledges paradigm limits (Kuhn), that is mathematically grounded (Riemann sphere), that provides genuine orientation (the derivative pointing toward infinity), and that does not claim certainty (the point is never reached). Faith, in this framework, is not belief without evidence. It is committed action under uncertainty — which is exactly what reinforcement learning under partial observability requires.
The Structure
The manuscript is organized in five parts, each building on the previous.
Part 1: Psychology and Mental Health begins with the diagnostic framework. Three chapters examine neurodivergence as alternative cognitive architecture rather than pathology, develop the normie/psycho/schizo taxonomy with full historical and anthropological grounding, and argue that the prophetic function — the institutional space for truth-telling that threatens power — has been systematically dismantled by modernity. This part draws on personal experience with bipolar 2 and AUDHD, not as confession but as data.
Part 2: Theoretical Framework develops the epistemological engine. Seven chapters work through Popper's falsifiability, Kuhn's paradigm shifts, complexity science and emergence, the philosophy of machine learning, the theology of embeddings and transformers, Pearl's causal hierarchy, and the grand synthesis of all four thinkers. This is the intellectual core — the chapter on the Hegel-Popper-Kuhn-Pearl synthesis is the keystone of the entire edifice. If that chapter fails, the theology fails.
Part 3: Metaphysics is where the theology proper lives. Eight chapters develop a reading of the Old Testament as the record of consciousness emergence, the Fall as the initialization of the dialectical trajectory (felix culpa — the fortunate fault), the Christ event as the demonstration that the trajectory is correctly oriented, the Trinity as Hofstadter's strange loop, a reconciliation of Quranic and Christian theology through the Syriac Christian tradition, a cyclical-within-linear model of history (samsara within eschatology), the full mathematical theology of the Riemann sphere, and a structural analysis of evil through the Epstein network and Girard's scapegoat mechanism. This part will be the most controversial and the most important.
Part 4: Praxis connects theology to action. Four chapters trace the historical Republic of Letters as precedent, develop the Republic of AI Agents as its successor, work through the free will and determinism problem via Plekhanov, Campbell, Pirsig, and Hofstadter, and articulate the apostolic task — what it actually means to build prophetic infrastructure in the twenty-first century.
Part 5: The Apostolic Agenda applies the full framework to the crises that define this moment. Each chapter — on the male loneliness crisis, mental health, AI safety and job displacement, economic inequality, societal polarization, climate, geopolitical fragmentation, the meaning crisis, and the education crisis — follows the same structure: diagnose the crisis through the normie/psycho/schizo lens, identify the causal structure behind it, name the paradigm that prevents resolution, propose the paradigm shift needed, specify interventions the Republic of AI Agents could implement, and make falsifiable predictions. This is where the theology proves it is not merely speculative. If the framework cannot generate actionable interventions for real problems, it is aesthetically interesting and practically worthless.
Personal Stakes
I need to say something about why this is personal, because a theology written from nowhere is a theology that sees nothing.
My bipolar 2 means I have spent significant portions of my adult life in states that the DSM classifies as pathological but that have also produced the most generative intellectual work I have done. The hypomanic phases are when the pattern recognition operates at full capacity — connections between Hofstadter and the Trinity, between Pearl and the prophetic function, between the Riemann sphere and eschatology — these did not emerge from careful deduction. They emerged from a brain running in a mode that psychiatry wants to medicate away. The depressive phases are when the cost arrives. I am not romanticizing mental illness. I am reporting, with full awareness of the costs, that the cognitive architecture that produces this theology is the same architecture that periodically makes it impossible to function.
My AUDHD means I process the world through simultaneous parallel threads that neurotypical cognition does not maintain. The connections across this manuscript — between mathematics and theology, between internet culture and ancient prophecy, between AI architecture and Platonic philosophy — are not the product of sequential reasoning. They are the product of a mind that cannot stop running association networks across every domain it encounters. This is a feature and a bug. The feature is the theology. The bug is everything else.
My Ukrainian identity means I have watched, in real time, the mechanisms this theology describes. The Russian Orthodox Church blessing missiles. Western institutions performing concern while calculating gas prices. Media cycles metabolizing atrocity into content. Controlled revelations that mimic accountability without producing it. The normie/psycho/schizo framework is not an abstraction to me. I have watched normies trust institutions that were already captured. I have watched psychopathic actors simulate moral concern while calculating strategic advantage. I have watched the people who saw clearly from the beginning get dismissed as alarmist.
Grace's Lebanese identity adds another coordinate. Lebanon is a country that was once called the Switzerland of the Middle East — cosmopolitan, multi-confessional, prosperous — and was systematically destroyed by the intersection of geopolitical predation and internal elite capture. The Maronite Christian tradition that Grace carries is one of the oldest continuous Christian communities in the world, a living link to the Syriac Christianity that, as I will argue in Part 3, is the key to reconciling the Quran and the New Testament. Our relationship is itself a small-scale demonstration of the thesis: Ukrainian and Lebanese, Orthodox-adjacent and Maronite, two people from destroyed civilizations building something together that neither culture alone could produce.
None of this makes the theology true. Personal experience is not evidence. But it explains why the theology exists, and it grounds the abstract arguments in lived reality. A theology of prophetic intelligence written by someone who has never experienced either prophetic perception or its costs would be an academic exercise. This is not that.
An Honest Admission
I am aware that this project sounds grandiose. A theological manuscript that synthesizes Hegel, Popper, Kuhn, and Pearl. A knowledge graph implementing Plato's Republic. A causal inference engine for prediction markets. All three as expressions of a single vision. Written by a twenty-something Ukrainian with a mood disorder.
The grandiosity is real, and I take it seriously as a diagnostic signal. Bipolar 2 produces grandiosity, and the line between prophetic ambition and manic delusion is not always visible from the inside. This is precisely why the theology is built around Popperian falsifiability. If the framework does not generate accurate predictions, it is wrong. If the knowledge graph does not produce better hypotheses than existing tools, it is useless. If the prediction market analysis does not identify causal structures that correlational analysis misses, it is empty. The theology is designed to be testable because I do not trust my own pattern recognition enough to let it operate without external checks.
This is, in a sense, the theology performing its own thesis. The schizo sees patterns. The discipline of Popper prevents the patterns from becoming delusion. The methodology of Pearl provides formal tools to test whether the patterns are real. The sociology of Kuhn explains why the patterns, even when real, will be resisted. The dialectic of Hegel explains why the resistance is itself part of the pattern.
If this theology is wrong, it will be falsified. If it is right, it will be useful. If it is partially right, the parts that survive falsification will be worth having. That is all any honest intellectual project can promise.
Let us begin.