What is the Medieval Mind?

In my book Harmogenics, I devote a chapter to something I call the medieval mind. Most of us are still living with psychological structures that crystallized during the medieval period and never really updated. We're walking around in the 21st century with 12th century operating systems, wondering why everything feels so wonky.

To understand what I mean by “medieval mind,” you need some basic familiarity with Spiral Dynamics, a developmental model that maps how human consciousness evolves through distinct stages. Think of these stages as psychological operating systems, each with its own assumptions about how reality works, what matters, and how to make meaning. You can upgrade your OS, but most people don't. They run the same software their great-grandparents ran.

The medieval mind operates primarily from what Spiral Dynamics calls the Amber and Red stages. Red is about power, dominance, immediate gratification, and the use of force to get what you want. Amber is about order, tradition, absolute truths, clearly defined roles, and submission to rightful authority. These aren't bad stages. They were absolutely necessary for human survival and civilization building. They got us here. But they're increasingly inadequate for where we're going.

The medieval period, roughly 500 to 1500 CE, didn't invent these psychological structures. It perfected and institutionalized them. The Church, the feudal system, the guild structure all reinforced the same patterns for about a thousand years. Long enough that these ways of thinking became deeply hardwired, passed down through generations as the obvious and natural way to be human.

Medieval people weren't less intelligent than we are. Thomas Aquinas was brilliant. Hildegard of Bingen was visionary. People loved their children, though they frequently beat them. They enjoyed sunny days. They had desires and dreams and inspirations. They were fully human with the same cognitive and emotional capacities we possess. What made them medieval wasn't diminished humanity. It was the meaning-making structures that dominated that period and still dominate today.

So what are the specific characteristics of the medieval mind?

First, authority-based meaning systems. Truth comes from external sources rather than personal discovery. Someone else narrates reality for you. The priest tells you what scripture means. The lord tells you what your duties are. The guild master tells you how to practice your craft. Your job isn't to question or discover, it's to accept and apply. This creates authoritarianism, the psychological need for someone else to be in charge of meaning itself.

Second, hierarchical worldview. Natural order requires clear chains of command. Someone must be in charge. Someone must be at the bottom. Knowledge flows top-down from those who possess truth to those who need teaching. Power flows from position, not merit. You're born into your place. The king rules because he's the king. The serf serves because he's a serf. Challenge to hierarchy is challenge to reality itself. This isn't organizational preference, it's ontological assumption. The universe is hierarchical. Period.

Third, certainty over ambiguity. The medieval mind craves clear answers, binary categories, fixed definitions. Things are either right or wrong, true or false, sacred or profane. Uncertainty feels dangerous rather than navigable. Ambiguity threatens the entire system because if categories aren't fixed, how do you know your place? How do you know what's true? How do you know who has authority? Certainty isn't just comfort, it's survival.

Fourth, ethnic group identity over individual development. Your sense of self comes from the collective rather than conscious cultivation. You are your affiliations. The clan, the religion, the nation, the political party, the ethnic group provides your identity. Individual discovery and personal transformation threaten group cohesion. This creates ethnocentric thinking, where your group's narrative defines reality and other groups are judged by how well they conform to your standards.

Fifth, story over fact. The medieval mind organizes reality through narrative, not empirical verification. What matters isn't whether something is factually true, but whether it fits the established story. When Galileo presented evidence that the Earth orbits the Sun, the Church didn't evaluate his data—they tried him for heresy because his facts contradicted the sacred story. When Giordano Bruno proposed an infinite universe with countless worlds, he wasn't refuted with counter-evidence, he was burned at the stake for challenging the narrative. Facts that don't fit the story must be suppressed, and the proclaimer of such facts must be tried by the story's standards. Innovation threatens the system. Personal experimentation is dangerous and must be conducted secretively.

Sixth, static worldview. The medieval mind assumes reality is fundamentally stable. What worked for previous generations should work now. What works now should work for future generations. Change is suspicious at best, dangerous at worst. The world is supposed to stay mostly the same. Your role is to maintain order, not transform it. This creates profound discomfort with anything that disrupts established patterns, even when those patterns clearly don't work anymore.

Seventh, violence as social technology. Physical force is an accepted tool for maintaining order, enforcing hierarchy, resolving disputes, and expressing dominance. Violence wasn't pathological during the medieval period, it was structural. Beat your children to teach them obedience. Burn heretics to protect truth. Go to war to settle disagreements. Publicly execute criminals to maintain order. The medieval mind doesn't see violence as a problem to solve, it sees violence as a solution to use. This is particularly characteristic of Red psychology, but Amber accepts and justifies it within proper hierarchical channels.

These seven characteristics define what I mean by medieval mind. Not a quaint historical curiosity, but a living psychological structure that still dominates human consciousness today.

Now, you might think I'm exaggerating. Surely we've moved past medieval thinking. We have democracy, science, technology, human rights.

Have we?

Look around. Most organizations are hierarchical. Most people crave authority figures to tell them what to think. Most cultures are ethnocentric. Most institutions resist innovation. Most conflicts still involve violence or the threat of violence. Most people treat their beliefs as absolute truths rather than working hypotheses. Binary thinking dominates our politics, our media, our everyday discourse. The established story is still preferred over contrary facts.

The medieval mind isn't a museum piece. It's the majority operating system running right now in most human brains, including very intelligent brains, including people who use advanced technology every single day. That is why I have always said we are not living in modern times.

But some of these medieval characteristics are becoming less applicable due to what I call Constant Becoming, the accelerating pace of transformation that defines our current reality. The world is changing faster than medieval psychology can handle, creating situations where these once-functional patterns increasingly fail.

Authority-based meaning systems break down when information is abundant and obsoletes rapidly. Authority has become distributed across networks instead of concentrated in institutions. No single source possesses the truth because truth itself keeps shifting. The priest's interpretation of scripture competes with thousands of other interpretations available instantly. The expert's advice becomes outdated before you can fully implement it.

Hierarchical worldview faces pressure when rapid change demands flexibility, lateral communication, and distributed decision-making. Power increasingly flows from network position, not hierarchical position. The ability to connect information, synthesize perspectives, and adapt quickly becomes more valuable than formal authority. Rigid hierarchies become bottlenecks rather than organizational tools.

Certainty over ambiguity becomes actively maladaptive when categories won't stay fixed. Gender used to be a simple binary. Now it's a spectrum. Career paths used to be linear. Now they're improvisational. Truth used to be stable. Now it's contextual and evolving. The medieval mind experiences this fluidity as assault on reality itself, but the fluidity isn't going away. Constant Becoming ensures that more aspects of life become ambiguous, negotiable, subject to reinterpretation.

Group identity creates problems when global interconnection means your wellbeing depends on people who don't share your group identity. Climate change doesn't care about national borders. Economic systems are globally integrated. Information flows across all boundaries. You can't solve planetary problems with tribal psychology. Ethnocentric thinking keeps generating conflicts that require post-ethnocentric solutions.

Story over fact becomes obsolete when knowledge transforms so rapidly that yesterday's narratives become today's limitations. Previous generations never faced questions about AI, genetic engineering, virtual reality, algorithmic personalization, or climate engineering. The Bible doesn't address social media addiction. The Quran is silent on cryptocurrency. Buddhist texts don't mention neural implants. You can't rely on ancient narratives for situations the narrators never imagined.

Static worldview is perhaps most directly threatened by Constant Becoming. The assumption that reality should stay mostly the same runs headlong into reality that transforms constantly. Every year brings changes that would have taken decades or centuries in previous eras. The medieval mind keeps waiting for things to settle down so it can apply familiar patterns, but nothing's settling down. Ever.

Violence as social technology persists but faces increasing challenges. The scale of modern weapons makes violence catastrophically risky. Global interconnection makes violent conflict economically destructive. Legal and institutional alternatives to violence exist in ways they never did historically. Yet violence continues because it's still baked into medieval and pre-medieval psychology. The impulse to dominate, to punish, to resolve conflict through force remains strong.

So these medieval characteristics are under real pressure. They're becoming less applicable, less functional, less adequate for navigating reality. Yet they remain dominant. Most people still operate from these patterns. Most institutions still reinforce them. Most of human consciousness still runs this medieval operating system.

Generation Alpha, born between 2010 and 2025, is developing something different through immersion. They're being shaped by Constant Becoming from birth, their brains developing flexibility, comfort with ambiguity, and adaptive capacity as default settings. They're not trying to overcome medieval patterns because they never developed them in the first place.

Yet for most of the current population, medieval psychology persists. Why?

The prevalence of medieval psychology has nothing to do with intelligence or technological competence. Some of the smartest people I know have profoundly medieval minds. They can talk quantum mechanics while craving authoritarian certainty. They can build sophisticated AI while maintaining hierarchical worldviews.

Intelligence is universal across developmental stages. Technical competence is stage-independent. Medieval people built cathedrals that still stand, created art that still moves us, developed agricultural techniques that fed civilizations. Today's medieval minds can master any technology you put in front of them.

The medieval mind persists because it perpetuates itself. That's what developmental stages do. Authority-based thinking actively creates and maintains hierarchical structures. People with medieval psychology build institutions that require medieval psychology to navigate. They create conditions where their operating system remains functional. Certainty-seeking actively resists change to keep the world stable. Group identity creates and enforces tribal divisions. Violence perpetuates violence as expected conflict resolution. The medieval mind is a self-reinforcing system.

And here's the uncomfortable truth. For most of daily life, medieval psychology still works. Most organizations are still hierarchical. Most people still need paychecks from employers who maintain traditional power structures. Most social belonging still comes from group affiliation. Most meaning still comes from received traditions. Most routine existence still operates on stable assumptions. Get up, go to work, do your job, come home, repeat. The patterns that worked for your parents mostly still work for you.

This is why medieval psychology remains dominant. Not because people are stupid or backwards, but because it genuinely functions for the majority of human experience. The pressure from Constant Becoming is real but partial. It creates zones where medieval patterns fail, but doesn't eliminate the zones where they work.

The real problem is fundamentally psychological. We're trying to use traits that are becoming irrelevant while failing to cultivate traits that are becoming essential. Psychological flexibility is suddenly becoming more necessary than authoritarian systems. Comfort with ambiguity makes certainty less of a need. Personal discovery trumps received narratives.

Take curiosity as an example. Curiosity exists across all psychological stages. Red warriors can be curious about battle tactics. Amber traditionalists can be curious about religious texts. Orange rationalists can be curious about scientific discoveries. The capacity for curiosity is a basic human trait.

But curiosity becomes increasingly valued, increasingly necessary, increasingly central to functioning as you move up the developmental spiral. In Red and Amber, curiosity is constrained and often suspicious. Ask too many questions and you threaten authority. Explore too much and you undermine received wisdom. In Orange and Green, curiosity becomes essential. How else do you discover what's true rather than just receiving what you're told? How else do you innovate rather than just maintain? How else do you understand different perspectives rather than just asserting your group's view?

The same principle applies to other essential capacities. Psychological flexibility, comfort with uncertainty, individual development, personal discovery, adaptive thinking. These exist in all stages but become increasingly necessary as reality becomes increasingly fluid. The medieval mind possesses these capacities but doesn't cultivate them because they threaten medieval structures. We have the equipment, we're just running software that doesn't fully utilize it.

This is our fundamental crisis. Not political, not economic, not technological. Psychological. We're collectively trying to navigate 21st century reality with psychological patterns designed for 12th century stability. Some of us are stuck because we're genuinely at medieval developmental stages. Others are stuck because medieval structures still dominate and reward medieval psychology. Many are caught in between, sensing that old patterns don't work but not yet embodying new ones.

The transformation happening now isn't just social or technological change. It's the transformation of human consciousness itself. Constant Becoming is forcing psychological evolution by creating conditions the medieval mind can't perpetuate or control. This doesn't happen smoothly. It doesn't happen without suffering. The medieval mind experiences this as apocalypse, the end of everything meaningful. And in a sense, they're right. Their world is ending.

But something else is being born. A psychology adapted to transformation rather than stability. A consciousness that creates meaning through discovery rather than receiving it through authority. A way of being human that embraces rather than resists constant becoming. Generation Alpha embodies this shift. They're developing post-medieval capacities as their baseline operating system. They navigate fluid categories, distributed authority, rapid knowledge obsolescence, and constant transformation as normal features of reality, not threats to it.

Demographics alone ensure this transformation continues. Over 40% of the world's population is under 25, and younger generations show markedly less medieval psychology than older ones. The momentum is irreversible.

You're in charge of which path you take. The medieval mind will feel right, will feel natural, will feel like the only sane response to chaos. And for much of daily life, it will keep working. But the zones where it fails will keep expanding. The moments when you need flexibility will keep increasing. The situations demanding curiosity will keep multiplying.

The medieval world is ending. Not because it was bad, but because it was adapted to conditions that no longer exist. The modern world is being born, though we don't yet know what it will look like. You're living in between. That's uncomfortable, disorienting, sometimes terrifying. But it's also the most remarkable moment in human history.

The world that rewarded medieval psychology is dissolving. Constant Becoming ensures that. You can spend your energy trying to force reality back into medieval categories, or you can start cultivating the psychological flexibility this moment demands.

The transformation is happening with or without your participation. Your kids and grandkids are already developing post-medieval psychology. The choice isn't whether human consciousness evolves. It's whether you evolve with it.

The medieval mind is your inheritance. What you do with that inheritance is up to you.