Truth Is Not to Be Feared - Dialectical Meaningfulness
Recently, we ourselves dismantled the logic on which we had spent years predicting burnout. We came to understand that burnout forecasting is, in many cases, superficial, because real loss and tragedy are already “written into” life itself. The only approach that genuinely encompasses both preparedness for burnout and sustainable development is the strengthening of the individual (individual resilience) - the capacity to recover from the blows of fate and from the consequences of one’s own mistakes through the acknowledgment of truth. Resilience can no longer be understood today as a merely psychological variable. The more existential the nature of a situation’s tragedy, the more resilience reveals itself as a moral variable.
The Dialectics of Meaning
When Fichte articulated the logic of dialectical thinking - thesis, antithesis, synthesis - I fell in love with it immediately. Or rather, at the moment when I discovered it for myself. Although it was Hegel who turned dialectics into an everyday concept and a historical schema, there is something in Fichte’s original logic that was world-changing for its time: dialectics not as a mere description of history, but as a mechanism through which meaning comes into being.
The mechanism of thesis–antithesis–synthesis, and its essentially endless repetition, has also become for me an explanation of the relationship between science and religion. More precisely: science cannot exist in complete isolation, because it always presupposes and requires something on which to rest - even when it attempts to define itself in opposition to that very foundation. The synthesis, therefore, can once again be reality itself, a reality that includes a religious dimension rather than excluding it.
Both Alfred North Whitehead, as a mathematician, and, in parallel, C. S. Lewis in the twentieth century, recognized that science in itself is not sufficient for forming a human worldview. If we now apply Fichte’s dialectic “in reverse,” we can move practically endlessly backward along the causal chain: every synthesis is, in its essence, an antithesis to a prior thesis, beneath which lies an earlier synthesis, and so on. Seen through this logic, there is no alternative but to acknowledge the inevitable - and even essential - role of religion in the practice of science itself.
Even the most critical atheist scientists must acknowledge (or at least usually do) that truth exists. Yet this observation already contains an internal tension within atheism itself: if truth exists, it cannot be merely subjective or entirely constructivist. From here follows the true nature of many so-called scientific “discoveries”: most of the regularities through which we come to understand the world emerge through a gradual logical unfolding that obeys a dialectical process. We understand the world ever more clearly, yet we inevitably require axiomatic premises in order to articulate that understanding at all.
Consequently, we can never arrive at a “scientific ethics.” What we need instead - today more than ever - is ethical science, grounded in a value ethics. Artificial intelligence demonstrates this with particular clarity: we are capable of producing ever more facts and correlations, yet none of them contain moral weight in themselves, nor an answer to the question of “how one ought to act.” The impossibility of scientific ethics arises from the absence of any demonstrable link between an increase in facts or computational complexity and the emergence of normative guidance. This is precisely why we require a synthesis between science and religion - not as mutually exclusive, but as mutually complementary discourses.
This can be summarized in a simple yet rigorously logical claim: the foundation of our ordinary experience of reality is a metaphysical structure that can be uncovered by “rewinding” the dialectic, in a manner akin to how Martin Heidegger described aletheia — the unfolding of truth as Dasein’s return from concealment into unconcealment (returning to truth). Layer by layer, and, as I see it, above all through decoding the reciprocal relationship between science and religion.
Web 2.0 – Web 3.0 – Web 4.0
For me, the clearest illustration of applying a dialectical approach to large-scale structural changes in society emerges precisely in the context of corporate organization and personnel management. In this respect - although I remain critical of him - Michel Foucault was right in his use of epoché: we tend to assign meaning to history while we are still embedded within events, whereas genuine understanding becomes possible only from temporal distance. The capacity to anticipate this, moreover, is what separates those who succeed from those destined for extinction.*
Here, however, my path diverges from Foucault’s. In my view, such meaning-making from outside of time is impossible without a moral structure grounded in timeless values, hierarchy, and a narrative cosmology. It is precisely this structure that can serve as the carrier of dialectics- one that enables not only the transformation of systems, but also the moral development of the human being.
Let us now look at this in practice.
Web 2.0 ideology is predominantly platform-centric and centralized. Although it is not purely one-directional (users do generate content), all agency nevertheless operates strictly within the boundaries set by the platform. The flow of information, visibility, relationships, and even the continuity of identity remain under platform control. User agency exists, but only within a limited “bubble” whose boundaries are defined by the platform itself. The platform thus owns not only the infrastructure, but de facto also the user’s behavioral logic - up to and including the eventual “termination” of the user’s virtual life cycle.
Web 3.0 emerged as a direct counterposition to this. Its central ideological core is the sovereign user: identity, assets, and decision-making authority are decentralized and secured through blockchain technology and smart contracts. The user is no longer an object of the platform, but the owner of their own digital existence. The platform is reduced to a tool or service provider, rather than a normative authority. It is important to emphasize, however, that this remains primarily an ideological ideal- technically partially realized (notably in parts of Asia), but socially and psychologically adopted only to a limited extent, largely due to the absence of mature and usable interfaces.
Web 4.0 is not a continuation of Web 3.0, but its dialectical synthesis with Web 2.0. Here we reach a situation in which the influence of artificial intelligence has grown so significant that the user can no longer fully detach it from the decision-making process, nor fully retain control over it. Decision-making logic becomes shared: the human being and their personalized artificial intelligence form a functional whole.
The opposition between user and platform disappears - but not through a return to centralized control. Instead, a form of mixed or hybrid agency emerges, in which the user retains identity, historical continuity, and responsibility, yet relinquishes a degree of autonomy in exchange for competitiveness, speed, and cognitive capacity. Ownership is no longer located solely in the human or in the platform, but in a hybrid identity: the human together with their personalized artificial intelligence.
As Nassim Nicholas Taleb has repeatedly emphasized- albeit in different terms and not in dialectical language- the true meaning of such systemic shifts becomes clear only retrospectively. More precisely: they cannot be understood in any other way than by looking backward.
Lenin – Huxley – García Márquez
Vladimir Lenin formulated a fundamental observation about the meaningfulness of time when he said: “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.” This is not a poetic metaphor, but a technical observation about the divergence between temporal duration and meaningful significance. We all know what time is and what meaning is, yet defining these concepts precisely proves extremely difficult - perhaps even impossible. From Lenin’s remark it follows that linear time and the meaningfulness of reality do not correlate directly or proportionally. To tie the length of a period to the amount of meaning it contains is a biased illusion; in reality, a deep disproportionality often prevails between the two.
In this sense, Lenin was right. The mechanics between time and meaning are uneven: it is often within weeks that historical nodal points emerge- points that determine the course of centuries. Centuries can be contained within weeks. Lenin thus points to an interesting shift between ontological and epistemological perspectives: history cannot be treated ontologically as merely linear; we always understand it epistemologically, in retrospect, through what later proves to have been meaningful.
Aldous Huxley shifts the perspective to another level when he writes: “It’s a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than ‘Try to be a little kinder.’” If Lenin describes the disproportionality of time and meaning in the mechanics of history, Huxley brings that tension inward, into the individual, adding a clearly moral - axiological - dimension. Huxley does not detach the individual from historical context; instead, he treats the human being as a microcosm: every living being is a condensed model of its environment and its history.
One of Huxley’s most important contributions, in my view, is the dismantling of the illusion of intellectual superiority. An increase in the number of facts one knows does not make a person better if there is no inner value-based filter by which those facts are selected. It would be misleading to read Huxley’s remark merely in terms of emotional “softness” or the pursuit of greater well-being. At its core, he points to a moral tension within the human being: the good within a person must be capable of overcoming the evil within. Time and environment do not ultimately define a person; what proves decisive is the individual’s inner moral choice. It is not history that determines a person’s fate, but whether good prevails over evil within them.
A powerful illustration of the synthesis of linear time, the disproportionality of meaning, and personal morality can be found in the opening line of One Hundred Years of Solitude: ”Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” Here we see, simultaneously, history, the uneven distribution of meaning, and the human inability - at the moment one believes to be the end of one’s life - to look past that moment toward the origin of meaning and hope.
Gabriel García Márquez does not describe a mere memory here, but a warning: a historical moment, even the moment of death, does not in itself possess final meaningfulness. Meaning is anchored in an earlier moral and existential origin, not in the temporal intensity of the event.
The same logic appears in The Brothers Karamazov, in the scene of the Grand Inquisitor, where Jesus responds to the Inquisitor’s rational order not with arguments, but with a kiss. Both García Márquez and Dostoyevsky point to the same principle - the former through warning, the latter through example: rules and order, and not even moral absolutes, guarantee meaningfulness in themselves, even though they are often its precondition. What grants life its meaning is the courage to face the truth and to follow it even at the cost of personal sacrifice. Without this, the human being remains trapped in an endless cycle of repetition - seemingly stable and comfortable, yet in substance devoid of meaning.
The Destructively Strengthening Power of Truth
Most people do not admit that they fear the truth - yet in retrospect it becomes painfully clear how often they do (and have done) exactly that. The consequence of refusing to acknowledge truth is far more tragic than people imagine: it destroys a person’s capacity to change in the way Nassim Nicholas Taleb describes with the term antifragile - to become stronger through (partial, and at times almost complete) breakdown.
One can try to understand this also through the act of looking away from truth: as a kind of self-hardening through constant “small sufferings.” Yet in most cases, facing the truth is bound up with greater suffering, because truth rarely touches mere discomfort; more often it touches moral responsibility at the most existentially weighty periods of life.
One of the key reasons we replaced our long-standing solutions for predicting burnout in key employees and leaders (burnout forecast) with solutions for individual resilience was precisely this observation. A constant focus on avoiding future burnouts does not bring a person close enough to the kind of deliberate, intentionally planned “breaking” of the self - something that occurs only through cyclical dialectics: looking straight at truths, acknowledging them, and undergoing the change that follows from them.
From a life-philosophical standpoint, people can be divided - conditionally - into two groups. First, those who fear the truth to such an extent that they approve of their entire past, describing it in terms of acceptance and, at times, even a kind of unconditional, heart-warming self-forgiveness. Second, those who condemn certain episodes of their past unequivocally, recognizing in them something regrettable and morally wrong.
In theory, one could speak of a third, ideal variant: a person whose life has unfolded in such a way that their past contains not a single episode deserving condemnation. But in that case we would inevitably drift into idealization and arbitrary myth-making, where facts can be distorted almost without limit. Any alleged absolute can then be made to serve the interests of whatever deviant interpretation one prefers (for instance, claiming that the New Testament is essentially an expression of Jesus’ supposed Buddhist training in India between the ages of 12 and 30, and so on). In short: it is practically impossible that a human life would contain no episodes that are, by their nature, regrettable. None of us is truly Jesus Christ - and the absence of boundaries in self-justification is a crime against both oneself and one’s descendants.
If a person adopts the approach that everything that happened was “in its place” and “in some sense necessary,” they may attain a temporary inner peace. Yet at the same time they build for themselves a moral structure that, over the longer term, makes them weak and breakable in the face of existential blows of fate. Such people often become trapped in endless repetitions - like Aureliano Buendía, who spent his life making little gold fish and then melting them down again to make new ones. External kindness later in life is a sign of suffering that has been carried well and rightly only when it does not mask an inner cowardice to face the truth - unfortunately, it often does exactly that.
If a person does not acknowledge that certain short periods in their life can have an impact that outweighs decades - as Vladimir Lenin noted -and does not see in them the victory of inner evil over inner good - as Aldous Huxley emphasized morally -then they may still assign meaning to events within fixed frames, but they do not make an inner developmental leap. Instead, they flee into repetition, as Gabriel García Márquez warned.
I have seen, both in myself and in others, that the unequivocal condemnation of certain life episodes- regret, repentance, apology , and adornement - is a precondition for the growth of inner personal strength. The English term resilience is the best equivalent here. It is worth underlining that a person is capable of a moral developmental leap only when they condemn certain periods of their life unequivocally, take 100% personal responsibility for them, find not a single justification, and live the rest of their life within boundaries that prevent them from repeating similar acts toward themselves or toward those who matter to them.
For example, a person who has cheated on a partner in an intimate relationship may find thousands of narratives, culprits, and rationalizations, performatively cast themselves as the victim, and receive endless reassurance from friends, “sensitives,” and internet forums. Yet as a person, they do not undergo any inner transformation toward the better until they condemn their behavior totally and unconditionally, regret it, and apologize. Likewise, a leader who lies, fails to keep agreements, and behaves cowardly in personal life may succeed for a time in hiding their inner failures from colleagues and members of the organization - but sooner or later an unavoidable encounter with reality arrives.
The kinds of situations Žižek and Lacan describe through the term “the Real” reveal the harsh consequences of becoming trapped in patterns of endless repetition. A person simply breaks, because they realize that the level of one’s individual resilience is never, in its essence, stable - it either declines or it rises. And it rises only when one allows truth to break oneself, through a conscious search for one’s own faults and through the unequivocal condemnation of prior behavioral episodes, regret, and asking for forgiveness.
In an era in which, through the logic of Web 4.0, the human being inevitably becomes a hybrid of the self and one’s AI version, moral boundaries and a value ethics matter more than ever. We constantly see corporate consultants downplaying the capability of artificial intelligence in therapeutic interventions - this is naïve and harmful. In reality, AI capability already exceeds the technical level and intervention quality of most therapists. All the more important, then, becomes a person’s own moral strength and a structured inner hierarchy of values, in order to make life decisions smoothly and in a value-based way.
Without an unshakable foundational clarity in the vertical ordering of values, a person cannot apply a dialectical approach to themselves for meaningful self-correction - they simply fear the truth.
Truth is not to be feared.
Truth must be sought out, faced directly, allowed to break you - and then, with what remains, followed.
Resilience as a Moral, Not a Psychological Variable
One of the most therapeutically short-sighted approaches of recent years is the stubborn classification of resilience as part of an individual’s “mental psychology.” This framing creates a situation in which the tools used to develop and strengthen resilience are directed primarily at managing internal states. We have seen the primitive superficiality of such an approach in dozens, even hundreds, of cases. A gunshot wound is not treated with ointments or bandages - let alone with eco-medicine or the incantations of sensitives. In existential situations, surgery is required, and surgery inevitably breaks the body. In principle, every bullet can be removed; the only real question is whether the person survives.
At Self Fusion, we frequently encounter situations in which the pressure placed upon an individual exceeds their logical capacity to cope. This means that American-style self-help is self-evidently ruled out - a fact acknowledged by most therapists and HR leaders alike. The question that then arises is: by what means should one approach existential problems? Most still do so through intensified self-management practices, attempting to locate hope in the future, happiness in small things, or reasons for cheerfulness. At times, such interventions are simply comical.
In these situations, the temporal dimension of survival is no longer a day, or even an hour, but - figuratively, and sometimes quite literally - a single breath. Situations that demand recovery one breath at a time are not resolved by repeating motivational slogans or gratitude prayers. When a problem or a cluster of difficulties is existential in nature, it always reduces to something deeply moral - often to a fundamental understanding of good and evil. Such situations are not cured by neo-Taoist practices, café-spirituality, or even panteistic walks in nature.
Unfortunately, most who apply such approaches also lack a coherent understanding of the world in ontological, epistemological, and axiological terms, sufficient to explain the inner logic of their intervention honestly to someone in need. Contradictions thus arise inevitably. We can always introduce new gods, speak of everything flowing into a unified whole, or of directing energies; but in practice, the more intensively such approaches are applied, the more an individual’s personal agency diminishes. Most cultivators of these approaches do not even perceive that the “solutions” they offer effectively exclude human free will and causal responsibility in what follows. At best, they become tools for enduring a situation - and more often than not, they deepen the problem.
If there is one genuinely original idea in all of this, it may be the following: today, resilience is no longer a psychological capacity of the individual to recover from blows. It is the moral capacity of the individual - and increasingly of the hybrid identity formed by the person together with their artificial intelligence - to rebuild themselves after being struck. Put simply: individual resilience is a measure of moral recovery through truth.
