Why Our World Is Escalating – and What Our Thinking Is Missing

The world feels tense in a way that has become almost familiar. Military build-ups are increasing across the globe, political communication is losing reliability, and digital attacks have become part of everyday reality. At the same time, humanity has more knowledge, more computing power, and more connectivity than ever before.

This coexistence is unsettling.
How can a highly developed, informed, globally connected world repeatedly fall back into primitive patterns of escalation?

The usual explanations are insufficient. They point to bad politicians, aggressive states, economic interests, or moral failure. All of these play a role—but none of them explains why escalation occurs systematically, across cultures, ideologies, and forms of government.

Perhaps the problem lies deeper. Perhaps our world does not escalate because we know too little, but because we operate with models of thinking that are no longer adequate.

Escalation Despite Knowledge

Never before has access to information been so easy. Never before has scientific expertise been so widely available. And yet, this very world appears especially vulnerable to overreaction, enemy images, and chains of misguided decisions.

This is not accidental.

Our dominant worldviews originate in a time when complexity seemed manageable. Actors were analyzed, interests identified, strategies optimized. Systems were decomposed, processes controlled, responsibilities assigned.

This way of thinking was successful—as long as systems remained relatively contained.

Today, however, we live in a reality in which everything is entangled with everything else: economically, technologically, communicatively, psychologically. Decisions no longer act linearly but propagate through fields of interaction. Small impulses can trigger global resonances. Escalation often arises not from malicious intent, but from misaligned coupling.

The Blind Spot of Modern Theories

Most established theories share a common blind spot. They treat entities—states, organizations, individuals, machines—as primarily isolated actors.

Relationships appear as secondary effects. Interactions as something that can be “taken into account” later.

In a highly interconnected world, this is fatal.

Escalation does not emerge within the actor, but between actors.
Not within the decision itself, but within its resonance.
Not within technology, but within the way it is embedded in relational fields.

Without a viable theory of interaction, coupling, and responsibility, we are left with reaction rather than orientation.

Technology Without a Theory of Relationship

This deficit becomes especially visible in our handling of new technologies.

Artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, and digital infrastructures are usually discussed in functional terms: What can they do? How efficient are they? How can they be controlled?

What is missing is a theory of the relationship between these systems and their environment.

What happens when technical systems become permanently entangled with human decision spaces?
How does responsibility change when agency is distributed?
When do interactions stabilize a system—and when do they destabilize it?

Without answers to these questions, a paradox emerges:
Highly advanced systems operate within a theoretical vacuum.

Disinformation as a Structural Coupling Problem

One of the most consequential symptoms of this vacuum is our difficulty in dealing with disinformation and blatant untruths in the public sphere.

Not long ago, political lying was considered a liability. Today, for leading actors, it often appears consequence-free—and sometimes even strategically successful. Conventional explanations point to media dynamics, attention economies, or moral decline. But they do not explain why persistent untruth can become systemically stable.

From the perspective of traditional models, this is paradoxical:
If information is freely available, lies should be exposed.
If facts are verifiable, they should prevail.

That this often does not happen indicates a deeper structural issue.

Disinformation does not primarily operate through its truth value, but through coupling. It generates short-term resonance, captures attention, and stabilizes group identities—even when its factual content is weak or demonstrably false. In highly networked systems, this is often sufficient to produce real effects.

The theory of quantum monads allows for a different perspective.
Untruths are not merely false statements; they are disturbances within interaction fields. They modify couplings, shift resonances, and create local stability at the expense of the overall system.

From this viewpoint, it becomes understandable why lies are not automatically “punished.” As long as they generate short-term coupling energy—attention, loyalty, emotional alignment—they remain effective. Truth alone is insufficient to neutralize these dynamics.

The implication is significant:
Fake news cannot be countered by fact-checking alone. They require an understanding of which interactions stabilize systems and which undermine them in the long run.

This also reframes the phenomenon of seemingly consequence-free lying by those in power: not primarily as individual misconduct, but as an expression of systems that reward short-term resonance over long-term field stability.

A Different Way of Thinking About Unity and Relationship

It is precisely from this deficit that the idea of quantum monads emerged.

It begins with a simple but far-reaching shift:
Entities are no longer understood as isolated objects, but as nodes of possibility, relationship, and stability.

Such an entity—whether a human being, an organization, or a technical system—does not exist independently of its interaction field. Its stability depends on how it is coupled with other entities. Interaction is not an add-on; it is constitutive.

Within this framework, escalation is no longer morally judged, but structurally understood:
as the result of unstable coupling, loss of resonance, and over-steering within complex fields.

Hope Through Precision

If escalation, disinformation, and political irresponsibility arise from structural misconceptions, then they are not inevitable.

They cannot be changed through outrage, but through better understanding.

The theory of quantum monads does not promise simple solutions. It offers no recipes for peace, no political programs, no moral shortcuts.

What it offers is something more fundamental:
a conceptual framework that aligns more closely with the actual complexity of our world than many established models.

Perhaps hope today is no longer an emotional category.
Perhaps it is a matter of theoretical precision.

An Invitation

The following texts—from the foundational considerations (QI) to the further explorations of interaction, artificial intelligence, ethics, and meaning (QVI)—are addressed to readers willing to engage with unfamiliar ways of thinking.

They are not easy. But they are intended as a contribution to a time in which orientation has become more important than opinion.

Readers who wish to explore the theory of quantum monads in greater depth will find the extended texts at tenckhoff.eu.