The root of suffering

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Framework Illiteracy: The Unseen Epidemic Behind Human Suffering

Framework Illiteracy is the condition of living inside mental structures without realizing they exist. It’s not a lack of intelligence, education, or curiosity. It’s the simple fact that most people never learn to see the lenses through which they interpret reality. They inherit frameworks from culture, family, ideology, trauma, religion, and personal experience—and then mistake those frameworks for the world itself.

This blindness has shaped human history more than any single invention, belief system, or political movement. It is the quiet force behind conflict, confusion, and the repeating cycles of suffering that define so much of the human story.

What Framework Illiteracy Produces

When people cannot see the frameworks they’re using, several predictable patterns emerge:

- Certainty masquerading as truth — If a framework is invisible, its assumptions feel like facts.

- Polarization — Conflicting frameworks become incompatible realities, not differing viewpoints.

- Identity entanglement — Challenges to a framework feel like attacks on the self.

- Manipulability — Those who understand frameworks can shape the perceptions of those who don’t.

- Stagnation — Innovation slows when people can’t step outside inherited assumptions.

- Moral absolutism — People judge others without realizing they’re using different interpretive structures.

- Perpetual conflict — Wars of ideology, culture, and belief are often wars between unseen frameworks.

Framework Illiteracy is the root of most human suffering because it governs how people think about thinking—and most never realize that this is even a domain that can be understood.

How It Has Shaped History

Look at almost any major conflict or turning point:

- Religious wars where each side believed they possessed the only valid worldview.

- Scientific revolutions resisted because old frameworks couldn’t accommodate new evidence.

- Cultural clashes where each group assumed their norms were universal.

- Political upheavals driven by incompatible assumptions about human nature, power, and justice.

- Social hierarchies justified by frameworks that went unquestioned for centuries.

History is not just a sequence of events—it’s a sequence of frameworks rising, clashing, collapsing, and being replaced by new ones that are equally invisible to the people living inside them.

What a Framework-Literate World Would Look Like

Imagine a society where people can see the architecture of their own minds. A world where frameworks are tools, not identities. Where people can articulate the assumptions behind their beliefs, shift perspectives intentionally, and recognize when someone else is operating from a different conceptual structure.

In such a world:

- Disagreement becomes exploration, not hostility.

- Education teaches meta-understanding, not just information.

- Politics becomes collaborative, because people can name the assumptions driving their positions.

- Science accelerates, freed from invisible conceptual constraints.

- Manipulation loses its power, because people recognize when a framework is being imposed on them.

- Personal growth becomes natural, because people can revise the structures that limit them.

- Creativity expands, as shifting frameworks becomes a skill rather than an accident.

A framework-literate world is not utopian. It’s simply a world where people can finally see the water they’ve been swimming in. It’s the difference between navigating life in the dark and navigating it with the lights on.

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While I would never underestimate the value of literacy, I think that knowledge is not the only solution and wisdom is not only found where people are literate. In fact, literacy can blind people so that they cannot see reason, as we see in fundamentalism.

The solution to suffering is knowing what is the cause and illiteracy may be a cause, but not the cause. In Buddhism, there is the recognition that craving for sensual pleasure, for continued existence, or for non‑existence is the prime root of suffering, which manifests as grasping and attachment to experiences, people, views, and identities, which cannot ultimately satisfy us because they are impermanent. This arises from an ignorance that we have to learn to overcome.

Jesus sees the relational rupture from love as introducing suffering: separation from God, fractured human bonds, and inner turmoil from guilt or self-idolatry. Jesus’ remedy is repentance and restoring love-centered relationships.

Philosophy offers diverse existential, psychological, and social diagnoses for suffering. Existentialists like Nietzsche see suffering rooted in life’s inherent meaninglessness and the “craving for purpose.” Sartre and Camus pinpoint the “absurd” or the clash between our desire for meaning and reality’s indifference—as suffering’s core, urging rebellion or absurd acceptance rather than transcendence.

Erich Fromm locates it in alienation from labour, self, and others under capitalism, with egoistic systems prioritising profit over relational humanity. Feminists/postmodernists (e.g., Foucault) add power structures oppressing identity, amplifying ego-driven hierarchies over communal love.

In fact, literacy multiplies suggestions from philosophies, religions and therapies, creating paralysis or dilution where there were once clear foundations, such as craving (Buddha), sin (Jesus/Paul) and the ego eclipsing love. This echoes Walter Ong’s idea of ‘literacy as a consciousness shift’: writing fragments the unity of the oral tradition, giving rise to scepticism, but also to confusion, as Nietzsche warned about ‘free spirits’ lost in endless interpretation.

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This seems to fall back on the Chinese proverb of three truths.
There is mine. There is yours. And then there is the truth itself.

Being aware that you are filtering and processing reality through your subjective existence and ego is something good to take note of but also ultimately fulfills no deeper purpose.
A mirror reflects reality.
If you break that mirror into 9 billion pieces and scatter them about, each sliver will reflect the exact same reality from their own subjective little position. ALL shards reflect back the same reality. Yet none of the shards will reflect the same thing because for that they’d need to overlap both in space and time.

This is to say that being aware that we are individuals changes nothing about our fundamental position and reality.
We still are in the position we are.
We still hold the experiences we do.
We still are who we are.

Even if everyone internalized the understanding that their truth is subjective to them and that its influenced through the things they experienced growing up… why on earth do you think that would create this MASSIVE change in the way people work?
And this is before we even mention that our awareness levels are wildly different. Some think of constructs that internalize every aspect of reality, meanwhile others have a severe inability with handling something as simple as a hypotheticals or conditionals.

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Well what if the world IS meaningless, godless, amoral, unfair, a blind and pointless struggle for survival where organisms constantly fight and eat each other, without an afterlife, most other humans don’t like us while we are alive, and evil does walk among us, and once humans are gone even our memory will be lost, there’s only total oblivion in the future. Cultures shared the framework that life, existence itself must somehow be good fundamentally, but in reality, existence itself could be overall negative or at least neutral.

Many frameworks were invented in order to forget about the above possibility. So one could make the argument that instead of being the root of suffering, framework illiteracy was actually helpful more often than not. Making life bearable, or even enjoyable, for the majority.

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Well, I suppose that you would then have to decide what you are going to do with the existence you have. Are you going to say, “No thanks!” and end your life, or are you going to say, “I’m going to make something of it!”?

If you choose the latter, you start to frame your existence in some kind of narrative, because stories are what we use to make sense of what we see and experience. The stories that grow over time are slowly sorted out, and some of the time-tested, reliable ones persist, whereas others fall into obscurity.

The changes of paradigm that have occurred throughout history mean that sometimes, our understanding of the original intention of the stories is lost. We reinterpret them and, with incredible reliability, a power-based interpretation is often chosen, because the maternal, introspective and tentative interpretations are considered “weak”.

Another stumbling block, which is very modern, is that we believe that stories are only for entertainment, and we can live better with facts, but the society we have built on this assumption is causing mental instability and has lost any meaning that had been available to populations in the past.

So we’re back to where we started. Are you going to say, “No thanks!” and end your life, or are you going to say, “I’m going to make something of it!”? What do you need for that? I have the feeling that most people who rely on facts have no idea of how to make a future; they just dislike the past.

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I’ve pondered that a lot. Like you said, we’ll have to frame our existence in some kind of narrative. Even if that’s just a narrative used by one person.

I’ve settled on this simple (looking) answer: to choose life over suicide, life has to be net-positive (overall more good than bad feeling), it has to be better than nonexistence / death. (Nonexistence is neutral, and life worse than death is net-negative.)

And I think there are mainly two ways for life to be net-positive. Either life isn’t net-positive now, but we have enough hope that one day, it will be net-positive, and that hope will make us carry on. (Life becomes temporarily net-positive because of hope itself.)

Or we are so burnt out that we can’t rely on hope anymore. But we find ways to make life net-positive in the present, or it just is already net-positive.

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The trouble is that there is no life worse than death because death is non-life. What you mean is when someone wishes they were never born, but there have been many cases of people surviving and grateful that they had. The worst scenario in my mind is being buried alive but I do not profess to know what other people would deem as comparable to that.

We are living in an era that is disturbingly reminiscent of the old feudal order. That was a time when a small, entrenched elite controlled not only society’s wealth, but also the power to shape its destiny. Today, vast income and influence inequalities are creating a similar dynamic: a minority holds the levers of economic and political control, while those ‘at the bottom’ struggle to survive. History warns us that such disparities rarely remain stable: when wealth and power become concentrated, conditions can easily deteriorate further. The emerging agendas of modern oligarchs suggest that this downward trajectory is not accidental but calculated.

However, history also offers another lesson: that of endurance through cooperation. Whenever people have come together in mutual support to form communities based on shared effort and the common good, they have found a way to resist authoritarian systems. Such cooperation is not just a social ideal; it is a biological necessity. Just as the cells and organisms within our bodies interact symbiotically to sustain life, human societies also thrive when their members connect, reciprocate and care for one another. From ecosystems to civilisations, survival depends less on domination than on interdependence, and it is in the resilient fabric of community that the possibility of renewal endures.

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I meant so much suffering that one would rather choose death, euthanasia.

Yes, except this time we also have gene lab viruses, nuclear weapons, global warming and pollution. Unless some big miracle happens, human nature can’t solve these problems.

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Are you saying it’s not worth trying?

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Difficult question, as I’m a really optimistic guy buy nature, and I’ve come to the conclusion that trying the same thing would almost certainly doom us.

What IS worth trying however is improving human nature itself, via gene engineering, gene expression enhancment, and via programs to strengthen empathy in humans, and well, to raise awareness of the Cluster-B things living among us.

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Who is deciding what is a improvement? The way I see it, the people who are trying this are the oligarchs and their serfs. That doesn’t give me much faith.

Local reciprocal and cooperative communities, however, give me mre hope. It seems just a question whether you want to save the world or plant a seed.

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My best idea would be to trick humanity into improving itself. I think a 20% increase in both average IQ and average EQ would suffice, mainly via gene engineering and gene expression modification. Everyone wants their children to be intellectually and emotionally smarter, so this trick could be sold to humanity.

But even if this were to work, this would take at least 100 years or who knows, and that seems way too long.

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Do you think that we are all the same, we can all just disregard color, culture, religion, nurture, nature, and just kumbaya because at the end of the day we all want the same things and share most fundamental values?

What if i told you that raising empathy and EQ in this world would result in one single thing: Hardcore tribalism where people empathize with those who share values with them, and would BLAST out against those who’d hurt the people they empathize with?

Love and hate are not the opposite sides of a spectrum. They are a mobius strip.
The concept of love itself can result in a hundred different manifestation of hatred.
Hatred for those who hurt those you love, hatred because of nonreciprocal love, hatred due to betrayal, hatred due to destruction of self value, disregard, attachment, selfprotection tripping, etc etc etc.

If you ever wanted to even TRY for EQ and empathy to have the effect you intend, you would basically need to eliminate all forms of identity first. Religious, cultural, national, racial, heck… i’d say you’d need to carve out 80-90% of the very concept of ego as well.
Then once you have a species that has the higher thought and identity of cattle, you could have them all stand together peacefully drooling and chewing grass together.

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That’s why imo we should raise EQ and IQ by 20%. According to my calculations, 120 average IQ might just be barely enough for humans to realize the need to transcend their short-sighted tribalism, and unify the world under a benevolent one-world government. Then their enhanced empathy could be applied in the right ways. Below 120 IQ imo people are generally too stupid to be able to choose the right leaderships.

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There are people who claim that its not really possible to raise IQ because (with some nuance and caveats) its the biological reality of your potential. You cant just magically increase brain density and “enlighten” people.
But.
With that being said, sure: More awareness is always better than less. I agree with you on that note.

I am just realistic about how this would change very little about people’s disposition towards eachother.
When i said that you’d need to basically eliminate all identity, i meant it literally, not just by having people realize that they are viewing reality through their own lenses.
Because ultimately that changes nothing about the fact that they have their own lenses and continue to view the world through them. It creates a leeway, maybe a middle ground you can compromise on (if and when they are willing to do so), but its no “fundamental” change to how the world and our species works.

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I meant improving future generations. Yeah, people who are already grown today can only be marginally improved as far as I know.

Actually I quite disagree. Imo people with high IQ and EQ are quite capable of not going nuts over identity.

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Hmm… i will take a look at the american school system (just as an example) and im quite sure that any potential can be corrupted into anything.
Regardless, i will give you that “in a perfect world” , you’d have a point. Increased IQ and EQ could lead to substantial improvements.

I just think you do not account for a thousand of other major factors that would twist your “improved humans” into all kinds of directions.
Well. I guess we agree to disagree.

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I wonder if that was the first dialectic?

Welcome, ad nauseam.