Dago Steenis: brief outline of his ideas

Through teaching history, Dagobert T. Steenis (1925) became interested in didactics and psychology. Due to his critical outlook, he started to fundamentally object to the basic assumptions of current cognitive psychology. Eventually he developed his own theory as to the structure of the human mind.

In line with his ideas about universal evolution, in which reality as a whole progresses from lesser to gradually greater spheres of potentiality, he sees man as having exceptional mental abilities.

These abilities are twofold. On the one hand, man has a capacity for empathy, being the ability to – unwittingly – feel one with what surrounds him. On the other, man is – wittingly – able to distance himself from his surroundings, to be more or less objective. Both capacities as a rule cooperate (in the noetic ability, transcending the two previous ones), enabling him to simultaneously experience reality and analyse it, i.e. to arrive at insight.

Steenis’ criticism covers all of society and its culture. In his perception, mankind has not passed beyond the prehistoric stage, as we are still bogged down in attitudes and a way of thinking that originated some tens of thousands of years ago. We still do not heed the fact that reality is subject to chronic change, and therefore arrive at a view of the world that is all too static. Furthermore, we constantly confuse reality and concepts.

Steenis exhorts us to make the phenomenon ‘change’ the object of systematic research and the basis for the development of a theory concerning science as a whole. In his terminology, the world should be approached metabletically.

Prophet of metabletics and arch-heretic
"I urge you to think about change - and I urge you to a change of thought! The present manner of thinking is primitive, as it no longer meets the needs of our times. It reveals attitudes and set ways of thinking that originate tens of thousands of years ago, and thus cause us to go on behaving like prehistoric men!"

Dago Steenis is the founder of: Mankind United (click to see the website).