Premise

There is something present in human beings before they can speak, before they can read, before they can name what they feel. It is neither mystical nor technological. It is a direct, bodily form of understanding — an attunement between people that takes place before words or images mediate it. Here I call it the primal feeling. Other traditions speak of resonance, attunement, or co-regulation. The name matters less than the fact.

This capacity does not disappear on its own. It is unconsciously unlearned, beginning in the earliest years of life, by an educational and schooling system wholly focused on what is measurable, verbal, and cognitive. What does not fit into a test is made invisible. What is made invisible dies out.

This manifesto argues that preserving the primal feeling is not a pedagogical luxury but a condition of civilization. In a century in which artificial intelligence, automation, and mediated communication will largely take over cognitive work, precisely what machines in principle cannot do — direct human presence, non-verbal attunement, ethical judgment grounded in experience, carrying what is unspoken within a community — will determine whether a society remains habitable.

Diagnosis

What is being lost

Neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist has shown in two extensive works that Western culture since the Enlightenment has displayed an increasing dominance of a narrow, analytically fragmenting mode of attention — at the expense of a broader, relationally integrative way of perceiving that sees context, implication, and coherence.¹ He calls it the meta-crisis: an accumulation of environmental, meaning, and health crises that all stem from one underlying shift — we have learned to manipulate the world but have forgotten how to understand it.

Stephen Porges has shown through polyvagal theory that the human nervous system develops through co-regulation — through calm, safe attunement with other nervous systems in direct physical proximity. This is not a sentimental idea but a neurophysiological fact: without such attunement, the system remains permanently tuned for survival.² A child confronted from an early age mainly with screens, stimuli, and performance assessments misses the foundation upon which all later empathy, cooperation, and moral judgment rest.

How it disappears

The loss does not begin intentionally. It begins with the structure of the system itself:

• early formal literacy that gives the symbolic priority over the sensory;
• continuous assessment that teaches children to look outward for validation instead of inward;
• screen time that replaces direct physical presence with mediated stimuli;
• a curriculum that rewards what is measurable and thereby automatically devalues what is not measurable;
• teacher-training programs that teach instructional technique but rarely the art of presence itself.

None of these elements is inherently malicious. Together they form a filter that cultivates one particular type of person — focused, productive, verbal, manageable — while slowly allowing another type of person, precisely the kind society now needs most, to die out.

Why this matters now

In The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt has documented how young people's mental health has collapsed worldwide since 2010, directly correlating with the smartphone-based childhood.³ McGilchrist cites the figure that 85% of young people experience life as meaningless. These are not isolated symptoms. They are the measurable consequences of a culture that has given up on what cannot be measured.

At the same time, we are at the beginning of a technological upheaval in which systems such as these — language models, autonomous agents, robotics — are increasingly taking over the cognitive, verbal, and analytical work that schools have rewarded for decades. What school taught us to optimize, machines will soon optimize better. What remains as a specifically human contribution is precisely what schools have stopped cultivating.

The manifesto

I propose the following — not as a pedagogical experiment but as a civilizational task:

1. Recognize the primal feeling as a competence.

The capacity for direct, non-verbal attunement with other people, animals, and the natural environment is not a remnant of a prehistoric past. It is a sophisticated human skill that must be actively protected, developed, and valued — alongside and on an equal footing with reading, arithmetic, and reasoning.

2. Delay formal literacy.

The first six to seven years of life belong to the body, the senses, relationships, and play. Finland — which does not formally teach its children to read until the age of seven — demonstrates that this does not come at the expense of cognitive outcomes; quite the contrary.⁴ What is acquired in the preceding years is not lost time but the foundation on which all later learning rests.

3. Give unstructured time in nature the status of core curriculum.

Forests, water, weather, animals, and silence are not field-trip destinations but learning environments. Research into nature-based early education consistently shows better outcomes in social behavior, language development, and respect for the living environment.⁵ Make this standard, not exceptional.

4. Protect silence, boredom, and one's own pace.

A child who is never bored never learns to listen inwardly. A day without constant stimulation, evaluation, or programming is not an empty day — it is the condition for the emergence of an inner world of one's own. Permanent stimulation produces people who can function only with external input. That is not freedom.

5. Delay screens and mediated communication.

Until the nervous system has been able to establish its foundation of direct resonance — broadly until around the age of twelve — a child needs the direct physical presence of other people, not its smooth simulation on a screen. This is not cultural pessimism. It is what polyvagal theory and Haidt's research support empirically.

6. Train teachers in presence, not only in instructional methods.

An adult's ability to attune to a child without a personal agenda is itself a skill that can be taught. Gerald Hüther and the Schule im Aufbruch movement show that this is practically workable and produces better outcomes on virtually every measurable dimension — as well as on the unmeasurable dimensions that ultimately matter.⁶

7. Reorient assessment.

What we measure becomes what we reward, and what we reward becomes what we become. As long as the assessment system records only what is measurable, what is not measurable remains invisible and therefore worthless. A civilization that takes its future seriously develops ways to make relational, ethical, and intuitive competencies visible without reducing them to a number.

8. Protect the people who have preserved the primal feeling.

They are not stragglers. They are the people who, in an age of accelerating technology, hold on to the human scale. Education, work, and government must make room for their way of perceiving and contributing, instead of forcing them to adapt to a system that cannot see their particular quality.

Conclusion

What this manifesto says is not new. It has already been said in many traditions, in many languages, across many centuries. What is new is the urgency. We stand on a threshold where the technical mastery of the world is reaching a scale no previous generation could have imagined — while the inner dimension of humanity, which must carry this technology, is shrinking faster than in any previous generation.

It is not technology that will save us. Nor is technology itself the problem. The problem is that we systematically allow the people who can keep technology in service of life to wither from birth onward.

Making room for the primal feeling is therefore not a romantic appeal. It is a sober, strategic decision about who we want to be on the other side of this century. The people who still carry this connection are not relics of our past. They are the builders of what is to come.

Jacobus van Merksteijn

Malta, June 2026

openvizier.org · novademocratia.com

Jacobus van Merksteijn
Malta, June 2026