Coming Soon:

Finding the Missing Parts

A new psychology for understanding the metacrisis, confronting authoritarianism, and building democratic resilience.

 

Across democratic nations, authoritarian movements are gaining power, institutional trust is eroding, and shared reality is fragmenting. Most analyses explain this through politics, economics, or media — but none answer the more basic question this book asks: why do seemingly sane, even kind, people lend themselves to movements that harm them?

 

Democratic instability cannot be understood, or interrupted, without a map of the internal systems that organize human behavior. Drawing on Internal Family Systems, developmental psychology, trauma research, and Integral Theory, I introduce "Value Managers": seven complex adaptive systems that help individuals and cultures adapt to and resolve life's core predicaments — safety, connection, power, order, abundance, inclusivity, and discernment — nested from most foundational to most complex.

 

Politically, three overlapping Value Manager systems currently compete for leadership — one rooted in order and tradition, one in reason and wealth, one in inclusion and care. Each, in its integrated form, provides foundational support that keeps the country resilient and safe. But as they polarize and harden against each other, they become more extreme and distorted, and the ground beneath them erodes. Into the vacuum of instability and uncertainty moves a fourth, less complex Value Manager: raw, unchecked self-interest. The strongman. The dictator.

​

We are at the precipice of the next stage of collective cooperation and safety. What looks like collapse is, underneath, the culture evolving and reorganizing these Value Manager systems, however violently, to meet the scale of the metacrisis. Finding the Missing Parts is a psychological architecture for democratic survival and a map for making this reorganization adaptive rather than catastrophic.