Death of a knowledge system

Rethinking Value in a Post-Propositional Economy

This is Part one of a two-part series on the collapse of our dominant knowledge system. It offers something like an obituary, tracing how AI, epistemic overwhelm, and institutional decay have rendered our overreliance on propositional knowing obsolete. In the final piece I ask: what might be the ritual? What is the burial?

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In a previous piece, I introduced the idea of the Wisdom Economy, a future built not on information, but on right-relation. Not on more data, but on deeper being. This piece goes one layer deeper. It’s about what’s dying, and what the experience of that might be like. We’re not just seeing job loss. We are witnessing the collapse of our dominant Knowledge System. The Great Displacement (the notion that AI will replace the propositional knowledge class) isn’t just AI replacing analysts, copywriters, or consultants. It’s the death of a knowledge system that trained us to believe: if you master the game of propositional knowledge, you’ll be safe. That system is crumbling under its own weight. The numbers are staggering:

• 1+ billion workers globally in knowledge-based roles

• 300 million jobs could be impacted by AI (Goldman Sachs, 2023)

• $7 trillion global education industry built to produce these workers

• $1.7 trillion in U.S. student debt meant to buy entrance into this now-disappearing economy

But beneath the statistics lies something more intimate: an epistemic unraveling. For many of us, especially those trained to navigate the world through abstract thought, the crisis isn’t just economic, it’s existential. We weren’t just taught what to know; we were taught how to be through knowing. Our value (internally and societally), our confidence, our sense of self-worth were wired into our ability to process, analyze, and articulate. Now, as AI outpaces us at the very game we were trained to play, a deeper question emerges: What exactly was the game?

To understand what’s dying, we have to name what lived. And that means looking squarely at the architecture beneath our collective sense-making: the Knowledge System itself.

What Is a Knowledge System?

A knowledge system is the structure by which a society defines, transmits, validates, and rewards what it considers “true” or “valuable.” It includes:

• The primary mode of knowledge (e.g. propositional, procedural, embodied, relational)

• The institutions that transmit it (schools, universities, media, think tanks)

• The economic structures that reward it (jobs, salaries, credentials)

• The culture that elevates it (status, norms, ideologies)

For the last few centuries, the dominant system in the West, and by extension much of the globalized world, has prioritized one type of knowledge, propositional knowledge: abstract, factual, disembodied information. Think: test scores, degrees, theories, white papers, and strategy decks.

It’s not that propositional knowledge is bad, it is extremely important. It’s that we made it the only valid form of knowing, and built an entire society around it being the only valued way of knowing. This form of knowledge gave us modern science, global trade, and technological scale. But it also produced a monoculture of mind, where to be valuable (both in economic and social sense) was to be smart, and to be smart was to know about things and have the credentials to show for it. The main pillar of the knowledge system is now being automated to a large degree.

And in a strange way, that makes sense. Because we’ve spent decades contorting ourselves to become more machine-like: sit still, structure your output, have a strategy, perform certainty, think like a robot. We optimized for clarity, speed, and control. Now, the machines are simply better than us at being machines.

The Addiction to certainty

But, this isn’t just economic. It’s also neurochemical. Many of us in the cognitive class, consultants, analysts, strategists, synthesizers, aren’t just skilled in propositional knowledge. We are, in a very real sense, addicted to it. Every clear model, every fresh insight, every clever articulation, every new piece of information delivers a dopamine hit. Our motivational systems are wired to chase the next fix, and the world around us cheers us on.

Think about it: everything in this culture rewards the performance of certainty. It’s how we manage fear. How we avoid vulnerability. How we earn social value. So what happens when a billion people addicted to propositional knowledge get cut off from their stash?

I’m not a neuroscientist, but I’d wager the withdrawal looks eerily similar to substance dependence. When our ability to produce certainty becomes obsolete, the IV drip of social value is severed, and all we’re left with is the silence and discomfort of not knowing. I’ve felt it personally. In those moments, I’ve scrambled to latch onto something, anything. Reaching for that piece of certainty to stay afloat in the ocean of vast unknowingness. Agitated. Frantic. Empty. Like a junkie trying to get another hit.

And just like substance withdrawal, the symptoms aren’t only neurological or psychological. They’re also existential. What’s collapsing isn’t just a career path. It’s the inner voice that told you: “If I know enough, I’ll be okay.”

I certainly know this myself as I have built my identity around being “the smart one,” the person who knew things. That scaffolding is dissolving. And like so many others, I’m left in a reckoning. My mind still reaches for certainty. Still wants to “know.” Still believes that knowing will keep me safe. But that belief was always a misunderstanding. Because it only ever pointed to one way of knowing.

What comes next won’t be certainty as this knowledge system taught us to expect it.
What’s emerging doesn’t offer control. It asks for something else: relationship. Participation. Presence. Attunement. Not mastery over the world, but communion with it.

What we forgot, other ways of knowing

Humans have always known in multiple ways. And other civilizations and societies have built entirely different knowledge systems based on this plurality. Let’s briefly repeat three other core modes of knowing that were forgotten by the modern knowledge economy, and which now hold the key to what comes next:

1. Procedural Knowledge – Knowing how

This is the intelligence of practice. It lives in the body, not the brain. You don’t read your way into it, you repeat, refine, embody. Examples:

• A carpenter running their fingers across a beam and feeling if it’s true

• A startup CTO who can smell technical debt before it breaks anything

• A trader whose body tightens before a market turn, no data yet, just years of somatic pattern recognition

• A regenerative farmer adjusting planting patterns not based on soil tests, but on the subtle feel of ground moisture under bare feet

• An artisan potter knowing, without measurement, when clay is ready to throw

2. Perspectival Knowledge – Knowing from within

This is the intelligence of felt context. The ability to take on a point of view, to know what it’s like to be inside a system, a role, a body. Examples:

• A founder sensing that a pitch isn’t landing, not because of words, but the shift in collective attention

• A family office steward feeling when a succession plan sounds right but feels wrong

• A designer walking through a city and seeing not just objects, but flows, of mood, movement, and meaning

• An elder speaking through parable because they know transformation isn’t delivered, it’s evoked

3. Participatory Knowledge – Knowing through relationship

This is relational and emergent. It arises in contact with others, the land, the invisible. It’s the least legible to modern systems, but the most crucial for reweaving meaning. Examples:

• A co-founding team that coalesces into clarity, not through analytics, but through collective attunement

• A land investor realizing the due diligence was incomplete until they sat quietly under the trees and listened

• A ceremonial circle where a decision arises in the silence after everyone speaks, not from debate, but from coherence

These ways of knowing aren’t “alternative” because they’re marginal. They’re alternative because we didn’t place any societal value on them. They are irreducible, relational, and embodied. And they cannot be outsourced to algorithms. They point the way toward a post-propositional culture, one that values wisdom over cleverness, coherence over control.

The Hand as an Epistemological Metaphor

In his book, Sandtalk, Tyson Yunkaporta Yunkaporta presents the hand not just as a symbol, but as a practical tool of thinking, where each finger represents a distinct aspect of relational intelligence. Unlike the the dying knowledge system I refer to here, of compartmentalized knowledge, other knowledge systems see these aspects as always working together, as a coherent, embodied, relational system.

Each finger, in his framing, corresponds to a different mode of relating and knowing:

1. Thumb – Kinship and Identity. This is about who you are, your relation to others, and your responsibilities. It’s the foundation of ethical behavior and context for any knowledge.

2. Forefinger (Index) – Direction and Inquiry. The Western world overemphasizes this one: pointing, naming, analyzing, and isolating. This is propositional knowledge—abstract and reductionist.

3. Middle Finger – Responsibility and Law. Not in a punitive sense, but in terms of obligations to land, community, and spirit. It's about understanding boundaries, protocols, and what's sacred.

4. Ring Finger – Belonging and Connection. The relational glue. It’s how knowledge travels across generations, families, and ecologies. It’s about intimacy, ceremony, and shared meaning.

5. Little Finger – Humility and Listening. The smallest finger, closest to the land. It represents openness to receiving knowledge from beyond the self—from elders, animals, weather, ancestors.

When you use your full hand, all five fingers together, you’re engaging in holistic, integrated, relational thinking. But when you rely only on the index finger (as Western science and education often do), you point, dissect, and dominate. You lose the rest. You lose the relational context, the humility, the ceremonial depth, the felt understanding.

Place or Be Re-placed

In a time when abstraction is being automated at scale, anchoring in place becomes a strategy of both resilience and relevance. The further we float into disembodied cognition, the more replaceable we become. But the more grounded we are, in land, in craft, in community, the harder we are to dislocate.

The forest steward, the midwife, the childhood educator, the ceramicist, the community herbalist, they all remain, and their value is rising. Not because their work is technically un-automateable. In many cases they could easily be automated. But because humans prefer to be with humans in moments that involve trust, care, ritual, nourishment, and presence.

The closer we move toward real relationships, the more irreplaceable we become.
The further we get from abstraction, the closer we get to human connection. It’s almost paradoxical:

What we once called “advanced” turns out to be brittle, disconnected, extractive, easy to replicate. The most “basic” work, the tending, the listening, the holding, proves the most enduring. It’s not techne that carries us forward, but communitas. Not knowing how, but knowing-with. The cognitive cloud is dissolving, but the village endures.

This is why the return to bioregional and cosmolocal economies is not merely ecological, it’s existential. We are rebuilding lifeworlds rooted in reciprocity with land, relationship with people, and relevance to place, while still participating in the shared nervous system of a planetary civilization. This isn’t a regression into some romanticized native past. It’s a transcend and include moment.

Nor is it a rejection of digital technology, but a reorientation, using it to strengthen connection rather than sever it. In a world where the abstract turns digital, and the digital turns disposable, place is no longer a constraint, it’s a sanctuary. And the more locally rooted we are, the more resilient we become amid this great displacement.

The Wisdom Turn

What we need to strengthen now, more than anything, is the integration of all forms of knowing: Not just propositional, but embodied, intuitive, relational. The ability to feel, to discern, to attune, to hold paradox, and to relate well. This is what is meant by wisdom.

And this is why the Wisdom Economy isn’t just a cultural flourish or moral luxury.
It’s a survival strategy. It demands:

• New schools for adults: spaces of unlearning and reattunement, where inner development, relational intelligence, and complexity fluency are foundational

• New work paradigms: not centered on performance, but on purpose and right relation

• New pathways of vocation: where what you offer the world emerges from who you are, not just what you know

• New models of value: where care, coherence, and contribution are recognized as capital

• New economic structures: where emotional maturity and ethical depth are weighted as heavily as technical skill or cognitive speed

But before we build what’s next…….we need to grieve.

Because something is ending. And, anything that ends must be remembered. Honored.
Not to cling, but to move on cleanly. We thank it for its gifts. Propositional mastery gave us science, infrastructure, global knowledge. It built the modern world.

But now, it must be integrated back into a larger whole. Not discarded, not deified, recontextualized. We must let go of the illusion that certainty makes us worthy.
And in doing so, we make space for wisdom to return.

Not everything can be pointed at.
Some things must be held.
And you can’t hold much with one finger.