When Everything Feels Existential.
4D thinking matters most when it seems to matter least.
Someone asked me a question at a talk last week that I’ve gotten before (a lot, actually):
“What do you do when the binary is real? When the stakes are genuinely existential? When radical moderation sounds like suggesting a compromise between fire and gasoline?”
The question usually relates to something like conflict in Gaza or Ukraine or maybe rising fascism.
It’s a good question and dismissing it too quickly is its own kind of failure.
And in truth, in some moments, when the violence has already started and the institutions have already cracked, I’m not sure 4D thinking saves you. A framework for navigating complexity doesn’t do much good after you’ve already driven off the cliff.
But that’s exactly the point.
We Get to Crisis Because We Stop Thinking in 4D
Existential crises don’t materialize out of nowhere. They’re built, slowly, out of years of brittle institutions, zero-sum thinking, and the steady hollowing out of the spaces where people once worked through disagreement. Foreign policy is a useful example here. Power politics has always been the dominant logic of international relations, for all kinds of structural reasons. But even there, we’ve actively made things worse. When we hollow out the State Department, to take one recent example, we don’t just lose bureaucratic capacity. We lose the four-dimensional networks of diplomats and regional experts whose relationships on the ground are actually what prevents conflicts from becoming conflagrations. Those relationships take decades to build. They get dismantled in a budget cycle.
The result is that we arrive at genuine binaries, genuine moments where the choices feel like fire or gasoline, having spent years creating exactly the conditions that make those moments inevitable.
Stanislav Petrov and Resistance
The story has become almost a cliche, but it’s still worth retelling (most cliches have an element of this to them). On September 26, 1983, a Soviet lieutenant colonel named Stanislav Petrov was on duty at a command center outside Moscow when the early warning system flashed a single word: LAUNCH. Five American missiles, allegedly inbound. Protocol said to report it immediately. Escalation would have been automatic.
Instead of escalating though, Petrov paused. He thought about the 4D picture: a genuine American first strike would involve hundreds of missiles, not five. The system was known to be glitchy. Ground radar wasn’t confirming anything. He concluded it was a false alarm and sat on the information.
He was right. The satellites had mistaken sunlight reflecting off clouds for a missile launch. His pause, that refusal to let the binary logic of nuclear doctrine override everything else he knew, likely prevented nuclear war.
Petrov wasn’t practicing radical moderation as a political philosophy. He was practicing it as a cognitive habit. It’s a commitment to asking: is this actually as simple as it looks? Even under maximum pressure, even with every institutional incentive pointing toward escalation, he held the four-dimensional picture in his head long enough to see that the situation wasn’t what it appeared to be.
We need more of that, especially when the pressure to collapse into a binary is most intense.
The Danger of Behavioral Consistency
One obvious objection asks: isn’t this just status quo bias dressed up in philosophical language? A disposition to prefer existing arrangements over disruptive ones, to counsel patience when what the moment demands is action?
No, and the Petrov case is the reason why. He didn’t act slowly. He acted with extreme urgency. The difference is that the urgency he brought to that moment was the urgency of refusing to collapse, not the urgency of escalating. He tested whether the binary was real before he let it govern his decision. That test took seconds. But it’s what mattered most in that moment.
That’s what 4D thinking actually demands: not gradualism as a default and not revolution as a default, but a genuine structural test of whether the situation warrants the response being demanded of you. A radical moderate will sometimes look like a gradualist and sometimes look like a revolutionary. What she won’t do is collapse into the binary without first testing whether the binary is real. That can look like ideological inconsistency from the outside. Edmund Burke got that criticism so frequently there’s an entire literature on whether he had any principles at all (spoiler: he did). What looked like behavioral inconsistency was theoretically coherent: it’s not the principles that shift, it’s the context those principles are being applied to.
Petrov Is Each One of Us
Petrov’s case was unusual, though. He faced a collective action problem compressed into a single decision made by a single person in a single room. Most of the crises we actually face don’t work that way. Institutional decay, civil conflict, and democratic backsliding are diffuse processes driven by thousands of individual decisions made by people who often don’t know each other and aren’t coordinating. No single Petrov moment saves a hollowed-out legislature or a captured media ecosystem. The structural problems are real and they require structural responses (more on that in a future post on institutional decay).
That’s what 4D thinking actually demands: not gradualism as a default and not revolution as a default, but a genuine structural test of whether the situation warrants the response being demanded of you.
But it’s also still true that each of us is making Petrov-like decisions every single day. When you decide whether to share the outrage-maximizing headline or pause long enough to read past it. When you decide whether to write off your MAGA uncle or stay in the relationship. When you decide whether to treat the algorithm’s version of your political opponents as accurate, or go find out what they actually think. None of those individual decisions averts nuclear war. But aggregated across millions of people, they either feed the brittleness or resist it. Petrov didn’t save the world by having a better system. He saved it by refusing, in one critical moment, to let the system think for him.
That move is available to all of us, more often than we think.
What Happens After
The other thing that doesn’t get enough attention is that even when crises do tip over into genuine conflict, the 4D thinking we bring to the aftermath determines whether that conflict ends or just pauses.
We know some things about this with reasonable confidence. Zero-sum solutions, where one side is heavily penalized and forced to absorb the full cost of the conflict, tend to produce the conditions for the next conflict. The standard reading of how World War I became World War II is basically that story, at least as one of the common arguments: the punitive terms of Versailles didn’t resolve the underlying tensions, they just compressed and deferred them. The Marshall Plan worked because it operated on a different logic: Reconstruction instead of punishment and a recognition that you still have to live with these people.
Restorative justice practices operate on the same insight, and there’s actually decent empirical backing for this now. Multiple meta-analyses have found that restorative justice programs produce higher victim and offender satisfaction, greater restitution compliance, and meaningful (if modest) reductions in recidivism compared to traditional punitive approaches. The research on post-conflict applications is more mixed, and context-dependence matters enormously. But the broad pattern holds: processes built around acknowledgment, accountability, and eventual reintegration outperform pure punishment on almost every outcome we actually care about, including whether the conflict stays over. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Rwanda’s gacaca courts aren’t perfect models, and scholars debate their limits at length. But they’re attempts to do the harder thing: hold complexity, keep the 4D picture in view, and ask what it would actually take for people to live together afterward. They require leaning into all four dimensions, but particularly the fourth.
None of this is soft or naive. Genuine reconstruction requires you to hold complexity, to think about what comes next, and to keep asking the harder questions even when everything in you wants to just call it done. Punishment is emotionally satisfying and structurally simple. Restorative approaches are neither. They require exactly the kind of 4D thinking that crisis conditions make most difficult.
The Danger of Existential Inflation
It’s also the case that we’re systematically overusing the word “existential.”
Not every political conflict is a civilizational emergency. The habit of framing normal political disagreement in apocalyptic terms has real consequences. It licenses crossing institutional guardrails. It makes compromise feel like collaboration with evil. It gives political actors permission to do things they would otherwise know better than to do, because this time, surely, the stakes are too high for normal rules to apply.
I was talking to a friend recently who pointed out that the “punch a Nazi” rhetoric does precisely this. Sure, punch Nazis if you’re living in 1945 Germany or Poland. But in non-apocalyptic situations, we should not be punching people simply because they have terrible views. Down that road is a cliff and a particularly ugly one.
It’s not just political violence we have to fear though. Well before we get there, we have to deal with people quiet quitting politics because it sucks so badly when every debate is framed as existential.
Existential threats that never manifest exhaust people. When everything is existential, nothing is. People tune out, retreat into their own lives, and stop engaging with the political world altogether. Which, conveniently, leaves the field to exactly the people most committed to keeping the crisis narrative alive.
Adam Smith has a passage in The Theory of Moral Sentiments I think about a lot. He describes what he calls “the man of system,” the political leader so enamored of his own ideal plan that he cannot tolerate any deviation from it. Smith writes that such a person imagines he can arrange the members of society “with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board,” failing to reckon with the fact that in the great chessboard of human society, every piece has a principle of motion of its own. Force the pieces where they don’t want to go, and the game “will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.”
Much human suffering has been caused by people who think that pushing other people around like chess pieces and (often) using existential threat narratives to do so is a legitimate way to win or keep power.
That’s a reason for serious caution about radical solutions, even when they’re emotionally compelling. It’s an argument for building and maintaining the institutions that metabolize conflict before it becomes catastrophic, rather than waiting to find out whether the catastrophe was worth it.
So What Do We Do?
We watch for brittleness. In universities. In media. In political institutions. Brittleness is detectable before it becomes crisis, if you’re paying attention and honest about what you see. It often takes the form of false binaries, zero sum solutions, and tribalistic impulses. When we see that developing, we need to take a Petrovian pause.
We also build the four-dimensional networks, the diplomatic relationships, the community trust, the restorative mechanisms, that give people off-ramps before they need them and paths back after they’ve gone too far. This is a way of building out the landscape so that people have truly pluralistic ways of navigating it and where there are fewer direct conflicts over resources, power or whatever else. This is not just about avoiding zero sum binaries, but building the actual non-zero sum solutions.
And finally we resist the habit of reaching for the existential frame as a reason to stop thinking carefully. Because the moments when someone tells you there’s no time for complexity are usually exactly the moments when complexity is most necessary. Don’t let anyone drive you off the cliff. Chances are very good there’s an off ramp if you look for it.
There are very few situations where the options are genuinely reduced to a single binary. What’s much more common is that we’ve stopped being able to see the other dimensions. The work of radical moderation, a lot of the time, is just the work of insisting on looking.
Your Turn
What do you think? Are there cases where you’ve seen the existential framing shut down exactly the kind of thinking we needed most? Or cases where it were actually warranted? How can we tell the difference? As always, I’d love to hear from you in the comments!
If you liked this post, you might like this one from earlier this year: Is Trump a Fascist?
“…recognition that you still have to live with these people.” This is wisdom I find more often in some of the more historically isolated rural areas that fall victim to the 2D thinking producing the “rural/urban divide.” Stewart Brand talked recently about what back-to-the-land hippies learned from their commune experiences. “Another thing that we discovered was that the countryside is actually kind of boring, especially if you don’t connect with your neighbors — which we did not, mostly.” In many ways that has flipped. The countryside has become inflammatory because those outside truly rural areas and those moving in still don’t connect with their neighbors mostly. They are under the delusion that they don’t have to live with their neighbors, don’t even have to try.
As usual a very good essay! I might quibble a bit with the 4D versus 3D, I’d be happy for the media and politicians to think in just one more dimension than 2D. Taking a deep breath and realizing our nation is not nearly as divided as media and some other pundits try to make us believe is useful. I think that by and large those of us who have and take the time to be informed may be better at thinking in more than 2D than our political leaders and some media are. So thank you for contributing your efforts to be more informed and not black and white in your views.