Learning To See In The Dark

Learning to See in the Dark is a philosophical work unlike most books about civilisational crisis. It doesn't deliver conclusions from a position of achieved understanding. It practises, in real time, the quality of perception it argues for. Richard David Hames - philosopher-futurist, strategic adviser to governments and heads of state across four decades, and president of the Asian Foresight Institute - weaves together two registers throughout: diary entries anchored in specific places and moments, and analytical chapters that move from the immediate to the civilisational and back.
The diary entries are not illustrations of the argument. They are the argument in its most palpable form - a gun at a border crossing in 1968, a room in Bangkok in 2004, a ten-year-old asking why people have wars on the morning Russia invaded Ukraine, and nine monks blessing a house in a Thai village while a white thread connects everyone in the room. The analytical chapters do the harder conceptual work: diagnosing industrial economism as the civilisational operating system that is failing; tracing the gravity of ghosts that keep institutions organised around beliefs their founders have long abandoned; developing the 'expanded now' as a recoverable perceptual capacity, syntrophic inquiry as a different relationship between knower and known, and wayfinding as the epistemological alternative to navigation in conditions of genuine uncertainty.
Together with the Hames-Oka Doctrine, the trimunary, and ecority, these form a compass - not a blueprint - for a civilisation in metamorphosis. The book is addressed to practitioners inside institutions who can feel the inadequacy of their tools; to campaigners whose work is more connected than they know; to independent scholars carrying conclusions that have had nowhere to land; and to witnesses - those who bear the consequences of the compounding folly and are no longer willing to remain silent about it.
Learning to See in the Dark does not promise that everything will be all right. It argues that the perception adequate to what we are navigating is possible and that developing it is the most consequential work available to us.