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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

When Adaptive Reorganization Becomes a Moral Theory

A Critical Review of Joseph Dillard's 'When Spirituality Justifies Genocide'

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

Joseph Dillard's new essay, “When Spirituality Justifies Genocide: Self-Justification, Moral Identity, and the Collapse of Adaptive Intelligence”, is one of his more ambitious attempts to connect contemporary political controversies with his Adaptive Reorganization Theory (ART). Its central argument is compelling: people who regard themselves as compassionate, spiritually advanced, or morally sophisticated can become remarkably adept at defending arrangements that contradict their professed values. The more deeply their moral self-image is invested in a particular worldview, the more elaborate their rationalizations may become when that worldview is challenged.

Dillard applies this argument primarily to the destruction of Gaza and the responses of Western governments, political institutions, media organizations, and spiritual communities. He argues that the problem is not simply ignorance of suffering but the failure to allow that suffering to reorganize established loyalties and priorities. Integral complexity, nonduality, equanimity, and developmental sophistication can all become instruments of self-protection rather than means of moral clarification.

This is a serious subject, and much of Dillard's analysis deserves attention. His distinction between understanding multiple perspectives and actually allowing evidence to change one's conduct is particularly valuable. His criticism of spirituality that elevates detachment above responsibility also strikes at a genuine weakness in contemporary spiritual culture.

Yet the essay has a substantial theoretical problem. Dillard repeatedly redescribes recognizable psychological and institutional phenomena in the terminology of ART without always demonstrating what the new terminology explains beyond the concepts from which it is derived. His political conclusions are sometimes more categorical than his psychological argument warrants, while his proposed theory of adaptation remains insufficiently specified to establish its own explanatory superiority.

The result is an essay whose moral argument is often stronger than its theoretical apparatus.

1. The Strongest Argument: Moral Identity Can Become a Defense Against Reality

Dillard's most persuasive observation is that a person's moral identity can become detached from the behavior it was originally intended to guide. Being compassionate can become more important than acting compassionately. Being spiritually advanced can become more important than questioning one's spiritual assumptions. Being Integral can become more important than permitting unfamiliar evidence to challenge one's established worldview.

This is an effective formulation of a familiar but important psychological problem. People do not evaluate evidence in a social vacuum. Their beliefs are connected to relationships, reputations, political affiliations, professional interests, and deeply held conceptions of themselves. Revising a belief can therefore threaten much more than an isolated proposition. It can threaten an entire network of attachments.

Dillard is also right to distinguish between recognizing suffering and responding to it. Someone may acknowledge the deaths of civilians, express sympathy for their families, and nevertheless oppose measures that might constrain the institutions responsible for their suffering. Moral language can coexist with practical accommodation.

The same pattern appears far beyond the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Environmentalists may defend economically convenient practices that undermine their ecological commitments. Political movements may excuse abuses committed by their own side while condemning comparable abuses by opponents. Religious organizations may proclaim universal love while protecting influential members from accountability. Academic institutions may celebrate intellectual independence while discouraging conclusions that threaten their reputations or funding.

Dillard's argument is strongest when it identifies this general discrepancy between professed values and observable behavior. His question—whether our convictions are allowed to change what we actually do—is more penetrating than the familiar demand that people become more conscious, tolerant, or open-minded.

It also provides a useful corrective to developmental theories that equate increasing cognitive complexity with increasing moral maturity. A person may understand more perspectives without assigning them appropriate weight. Sophistication can expand one's capacity for critical reflection, but it can also expand one's repertoire of excuses.

This insight deserves to be taken seriously independently of whether ART eventually proves to be a distinctive or successful theory.

2. Does Adaptive Reorganization Theory Explain More Than Established Psychology?

Dillard organizes his analysis around a growing vocabulary of concepts, including “restrictive precipitation,” “psychological geocentrism,” “adaptive immunization,” “adaptive weighting,” “moral anesthesia,” and “adaptive dependency.” These concepts are intended to describe different aspects of a system that becomes increasingly resistant to correction.

The underlying pattern is understandable. Initially useful habits, beliefs, and institutions become rigid. They protect themselves against contradictory evidence. Their members learn to justify their behavior in ways that preserve group identity. Institutions reward conformity and penalize dissent. Eventually, the system becomes better at maintaining itself than at responding to its environment.

But how much of this is genuinely new?

Social psychology has long examined cognitive dissonance, motivated reasoning, identity-protective cognition, confirmation bias, and moral disengagement. Albert Bandura's research, which Dillard explicitly invokes, examines how people morally justify harmful conduct, displace responsibility, minimize consequences, and dehumanize victims. Research on institutional incentives and organizational rigidity addresses the ways established systems resist change even when their performance deteriorates.

Dillard is not wrong to integrate these phenomena into a broader framework. Integration can be intellectually useful. The question is whether ART provides a more precise explanation, generates new predictions, or helps distinguish mechanisms that established approaches leave confused.

The essay does not consistently demonstrate that it does.

Consider “adaptive immunization.” Dillard describes the process through which a threatened identity generates defenses against information that might force it to change. The metaphor is vivid: contradictory evidence is treated as an invading threat, and rationalizations function like antibodies that neutralize it. But the metaphor largely restates motivated reasoning in evolutionary and organizational language.

Likewise, “moral anesthesia” describes a diminishing emotional response to contradictions between professed values and actual conduct. This is a potentially useful term, especially when distinguished from healthy emotional regulation. Yet the essay needs to establish how moral anesthesia differs empirically from habituation, desensitization, disengagement, or other recognized processes.

Dillard does acknowledge that moral anesthesia is a proposed concept rather than a clinical diagnosis. He also suggests possible empirical tests, including examining whether strong identity commitments and incentives for rationalization predict greater resistance to contradictory evidence. These are welcome qualifications.

Nevertheless, a concept does not become an explanatory advance merely because it has been given a new name. ART needs to show what it allows researchers to identify, predict, or measure that they could not already identify, predict, or measure using established psychological theories.

The essay supplies a promising research program, but it does not yet supply the evidence that would establish ART's added value.

3. The Problem of Conceptual Inflation

A recurring difficulty is that ART seems capable of absorbing almost every kind of resistance to change. A person who revises a belief exhibits successful reorganization. Someone who refuses to revise it may exhibit restrictive precipitation. An institution that preserves itself despite changing circumstances falls into an adaptive dependency trap. A person who no longer experiences discomfort over moral contradictions may be experiencing moral anesthesia.

These descriptions can be illuminating. The danger is that they become retrospective labels for whatever happens.

If a framework can explain both change and resistance to change, both psychological distress and comfortable inaction, and both institutional stability and institutional collapse, it must specify the conditions under which each outcome should occur. Otherwise, its apparent comprehensiveness comes at the expense of predictive precision.

Dillard does begin to address this problem by proposing that researchers measure defensiveness, emotional responsiveness, behavioral change, and the influence of identity-threatening evidence. But these suggestions need to be developed into operational definitions and research designs. What, precisely, counts as successful adaptive reorganization? How much revision is enough? How should researchers distinguish a rigid identity from a justified refusal to accept unreliable information? Which observations would count against ART?

That last question is particularly important. Dillard recognizes that resistance to change can be adaptive when it protects people against manipulation or misinformation. Therefore, neither openness nor revision can automatically be treated as evidence of successful adaptation.

A person who refuses to abandon a well-supported scientific conclusion in response to a misleading political argument may be demonstrating sound judgment, not pathological rigidity. Conversely, a person who changes positions whenever social pressure shifts may be highly malleable without being particularly rational or ethical.

The decisive distinction cannot simply be between change and stability. It must concern the quality of the evidence, the appropriateness of the response, the relevant goals, and the consequences of the resulting behavior.

ART would become more convincing if it made these distinctions measurable rather than relying predominantly on evocative organizational metaphors.

4. From Psychological Diagnosis to Political Judgment

Dillard's essay has a clear political direction. It condemns the devastation of Gaza and examines the ways in which political loyalty, historical trauma, Western strategic interests, and institutional incentives may help sustain it. It argues that people who profess universal compassion can nevertheless tolerate severe violations of Palestinian rights when confronting those violations would threaten their established commitments.

The moral concern is legitimate. Criticism of Israeli government policy should not be dismissed merely because it is uncomfortable, and the suffering of Israeli civilians does not make Palestinian civilians less deserving of protection. Equally, criticism of Hamas and recognition of the crimes committed on October 7 do not justify collective punishment or place an entire population beyond the protection of humanitarian law.

Dillard's emphasis on reciprocity is therefore well placed. Universal principles mean little if their application depends on the identity of the perpetrator or victim.

However, a psychological theory of motivated reasoning cannot, by itself, establish the correct interpretation of a particular geopolitical conflict. It can help explain why people might selectively evaluate evidence, but it cannot determine which claims are true, which policies are effective, or which proposed remedies are justified.

That requires independent historical, legal, and empirical analysis.

For example, someone who rejects the characterization of a particular military campaign as genocide might be motivated by political loyalty. But the possibility of motivated reasoning does not establish that this is their motivation. They might instead be making a legal argument about the relevant evidence, intent, or definition. That argument may be correct or incorrect, but it must be evaluated on its merits.

Conversely, someone who uses the word “genocide” may be motivated by moral outrage, political commitments, or an accurate assessment of the available evidence. The label alone tells us nothing decisive about the quality of the argument.

Dillard recognizes that not everyone accepts the genocide characterization, but the essay's psychological framework risks treating disagreement as a symptom of the very pathology it seeks to explain.

This is where the argument needs greater methodological discipline. A theory of motivated reasoning should be applied symmetrically. It should investigate how identity shapes the reasoning of one's opponents, but also how one's own political commitments influence the selection and interpretation of evidence.

Dillard's essay is strongest as a warning about selective moral concern. It is less convincing when its conceptual machinery appears to place those who disagree with its political framing under suspicion of psychological or institutional maladaptation.

5. The Five Responses to Gaza: A Useful Typology with a Problematic Edge

Dillard classifies responses to Gaza into five broad groups: those who recognize and support the destruction; those who support Israeli military operations but reject the genocide designation; those who remain silent; those who condemn the destruction but tolerate its continuation; and those who recognize the gravity of the crimes and advocate accountability and institutional change.

The distinction between condemnation and action is useful. Expressions of sympathy can coexist with policies that perpetuate the conditions being condemned. The classification encourages readers to ask what practical consequences their professed values have.

But the categories are not quite parallel. Some describe judgments about what is happening; others describe political preferences; still others describe conduct or the absence of conduct. A person might condemn the destruction, reject a particular legal designation, oppose arms transfers, support humanitarian assistance, and disagree about sanctions. Which category would that person occupy?

Similarly, silence may reflect indifference, fear, professional constraints, uncertainty, or a considered judgment that public commentary would be counterproductive. Dillard acknowledges several of these possibilities, but the fivefold classification does not fully accommodate their complexity.

More importantly, it risks creating a moral hierarchy in which the final category represents the most successful form of adaptation. Yet supporting accountability and institutional change does not guarantee that one's preferred policies are well designed or likely to succeed. A person can be morally serious and politically mistaken at the same time.

A stronger typology would separate at least three dimensions: factual and legal assessment, moral evaluation, and practical response. This would allow Dillard to examine inconsistencies between what people believe, what they value, and what they do without prematurely assigning them to a single moral category.

The central insight would survive this revision. Indeed, it would become more useful because it would be less vulnerable to the charge that ART simply redescribes agreement with Dillard's conclusions as successful adaptation.

6. Spirituality Under Suspicion: A Strong Critique That Needs Qualification

One of the most engaging sections concerns the ways spiritual concepts can be recruited to protect the self-image of the spiritually developed person. Dillard identifies several familiar manoeuvres: invoking nonduality to dismiss moral distinctions, equating anger with immaturity, demanding forgiveness before accountability, interpreting political conflict as collective karma, or insisting that spiritual people should rise above politics.

His point is not that spirituality necessarily produces moral evasion. Rather, spiritual practices and concepts can be used to avoid precisely the moral challenges they supposedly help us face.

This is a valuable criticism of the tendency to confuse inner equanimity with ethical achievement. Remaining calm in the presence of suffering does not establish that one responds appropriately to it. Transcending personal resentment does not require abandoning judgments about injustice. Understanding the psychological roots of violence does not excuse the violence itself.

The same criticism applies to Integral Theory. A sophisticated understanding of developmental stages and multiple perspectives can become a means of explaining away inconvenient criticism. Someone who demands accountability may be accused of dualistic thinking, while someone who offers an elaborate account of the historical and psychological background to violence presents themselves as more inclusive.

The crucial question is whether greater complexity improves one's ability to discriminate between competing claims or merely provides more sophisticated ways of avoiding a decision.

Nevertheless, Dillard should be careful not to turn this criticism into a blanket suspicion of spiritual practice. Meditation, contemplative reflection, and emotional regulation can help people tolerate distress, examine their prejudices, and act without being overwhelmed by anger. They can also be used to avoid uncomfortable responsibilities. The practice itself does not determine the outcome.

The same is true of nonduality. A philosophical distinction between ultimate and conventional truth does not logically entail that suffering is unreal or that conventional moral obligations can be ignored. Such conclusions require additional arguments, and many spiritual traditions explicitly resist them.

Dillard is right to expose spiritual bypassing, but the most effective critique distinguishes the misuse of a doctrine from its defensible interpretations. Otherwise, he risks reproducing the very simplification he criticizes in Integral thinkers: treating a diverse set of perspectives as if they shared a single psychological function.

7. Historical Trauma and the Danger of Asymmetric Empathy

Dillard argues that collective trauma can become incorporated into institutional identities in ways that undermine reciprocal moral judgment. A community may regard its own historical suffering as uniquely significant while treating the suffering of outsiders as secondary. Its own violence becomes defensive, while the violence of its opponents becomes evidence of their essential character.

This is a powerful account of how historical memory can be transformed into a justification for present-day injustice. Remembering past persecution is indispensable, but remembrance becomes morally dangerous when it confers permanent immunity from criticism.

Dillard is careful to state that this mechanism does not characterize all Jews, Israelis, or trauma survivors. He also points to Jewish critics of Israeli policy as counterexamples. That qualification matters: collective identity does not mechanically determine political judgment.

His broader argument is applicable to many societies. Historical victimization can be used to legitimize expansionism, repression, discrimination, or revenge. The fact that a population has experienced genuine suffering does not entitle its leaders to violate the rights of others.

However, the essay could distinguish more clearly between collective memory, political instrumentalization of memory, and the actual motives of particular actors. These are related but different phenomena. A government can invoke historical trauma strategically without every supporter accepting its policies for that reason. A citizen can fear genuine threats without endorsing unlimited military action. And a political movement can contain both sincere concern for security and opportunistic exploitation of that concern.

The most convincing version of Dillard's argument would examine how these motives interact rather than treat institutional identity as a sufficiently complete explanation.

His concept of “institutional geocentrism” is memorable, but the metaphor should not substitute for a careful account of the political, historical, and psychological mechanisms involved.

8. The Most Promising Part: Making ART Testable

Dillard deserves credit for moving beyond abstract moral commentary to suggest empirical tests. He proposes examining whether people whose identities and livelihoods depend on particular political positions become more defensive when confronted with credible contradictory evidence. He also suggests investigating whether conditions that support autonomy, perspective-taking, and low-cost behavioral experimentation can reduce such defensiveness.

These are productive questions. They can be investigated without assuming that ART is already the correct explanatory framework.

A rigorous research program could compare ART's predictions with those derived from established theories of motivated reasoning, cognitive dissonance, social identity, and moral disengagement. Researchers could investigate whether Dillard's proposed concepts identify distinct variables, explain additional variance, or predict behavior more accurately than existing models.

The distinction between emotional regulation and moral anesthesia also deserves investigation. Does reduced distress lead to more effective engagement with suffering, or does it accompany a decline in responsiveness? Under what conditions does emotional distance enable constructive action, and when does it facilitate withdrawal?

Similarly, researchers could distinguish genuine institutional adaptation from mere institutional survival. An organization may successfully preserve its authority while failing to achieve its stated purposes. Yet an organization that changes continually is not necessarily more effective. The relevant measures must concern outcomes, responsiveness to evidence, and the quality of the institution's relationship with those affected by its decisions.

These investigations would give ART something more substantial than an expanding conceptual vocabulary: a body of findings by which its claims could be assessed.

The limitation is that Dillard's essay mostly outlines these possibilities. It does not report a systematic empirical investigation that establishes the explanatory superiority of his framework. The distinction between a promising hypothesis and a demonstrated theory should remain clear.

9. The AI Question: Can an Artificial Intelligence Become an Expert Rationalizer?

The essay's discussion of artificial intelligence is especially relevant to its own production. Dillard and ChatGPT are credited as co-authors, and the essay warns that AI systems can generate increasingly sophisticated defenses of predetermined conclusions.

That warning applies directly to the text itself.

A language model can organize an argument into a coherent sequence, introduce distinctions, generate illustrative examples, and connect ideas across psychology, politics, spirituality, and evolutionary theory. These are genuine capabilities. But fluency and conceptual integration do not establish that a framework is empirically sound.

An AI-assisted essay can make a theory appear more comprehensive by repeatedly translating familiar observations into its preferred terminology. The resulting text may be internally coherent while leaving unanswered whether its central concepts have independent explanatory value.

This is not a reason to dismiss AI-assisted scholarship. It is a reason to scrutinize its products with particular care. Which claims are supported by independent research? Which are interpretive extensions? Which concepts are being introduced, and what evidence would distinguish them from established alternatives? Which conclusions follow from the evidence, and which depend on assumptions built into the framework?

Dillard's essay raises these questions implicitly, but its own presentation would benefit from applying them more systematically.

There is an irony here. The essay argues that sophisticated systems can become exceptionally good at preserving their established organization while losing the ability to respond to correction. AI-assisted theoretical writing could reproduce precisely that problem if its capacity to elaborate a framework outpaces its capacity to challenge the framework's assumptions.

The remedy is not less conceptual ambition. It is stronger external criticism, explicit uncertainty, and a willingness to let evidence change the theory rather than merely expand it.

10. Does the Conclusion Follow from the Argument?

The essay's larger ambition is to connect individual self-justification with institutional rigidity and, ultimately, civilizational failure. Dillard argues that organizations may preserve arrangements that remain successful in isolation but undermine the wider systems on which their continued existence depends.

This is an important systems-level insight. An economic sector can remain profitable while imposing ecological costs on society. A political institution can retain power while eroding democratic accountability. A military alliance can achieve immediate strategic objectives while increasing longer-term risks. Local success does not guarantee system-wide viability.

Dillard also makes an essential qualification: the biological analogy of eliminating dysfunctional components cannot justify the involuntary destruction of human beings. Human societies are constrained by moral principles, including necessity, proportionality, rights, and accountability. Evolutionary usefulness is not a sufficient ethical justification.

That qualification prevents the systems metaphor from becoming an argument for sacrificing individuals in the name of collective survival.

Yet the move from psychological rigidity to civilizational collapse remains more suggestive than demonstrated. To establish the connection, ART would need to specify how individual cognitive processes aggregate into institutional behavior, how institutional incentives influence political decisions, and how those decisions generate identifiable risks to systemic viability.

The mechanisms may be plausible, but plausibility is not proof. Civilizations collapse for many interacting reasons, including warfare, ecological stress, economic disruption, political fragmentation, and administrative failure. A framework that emphasizes resistance to correction needs to show how this factor operates alongside those other explanations and when it becomes decisive.

The Gaza case illustrates the moral urgency of institutional accountability, but it does not by itself establish a general theory of civilizational collapse. That broader claim requires comparative historical evidence and clearly specified causal mechanisms.

Conclusion: A Compelling Moral Critique, an Unfinished Theory

Dillard's essay succeeds in identifying an important contradiction in contemporary spiritual and political culture: people can become increasingly sophisticated at explaining why their convictions need not change their behavior. Integral complexity, spiritual equanimity, historical memory, and universal moral language can all be enlisted in the service of established loyalties.

His insistence that compassion must be assessed through conduct rather than self-description is particularly valuable. So is his distinction between understanding multiple perspectives and allowing them to influence actual decisions. These arguments deserve a hearing well beyond the Integral community.

But the essay's central weakness is the gap between its persuasive moral psychology and its theoretical claims. Adaptive Reorganization Theory offers an ambitious vocabulary for describing the persistence of maladaptive beliefs and institutions, yet the essay does not consistently demonstrate what this vocabulary explains beyond established accounts of motivated reasoning, cognitive dissonance, moral disengagement, and institutional self-preservation.

Its political analysis also needs a sharper distinction between diagnosing motivated reasoning and establishing the truth of disputed claims. Those who disagree with Dillard's conclusions may indeed be protecting their identities, but that possibility cannot substitute for evaluating their arguments. The same scrutiny must be applied to Dillard's own framework and political commitments.

The ultimate test of ART is therefore not whether it can redescribe familiar human failures in a more comprehensive language. It is whether it can identify mechanisms more precisely, generate discriminating predictions, survive serious attempts at falsification, and improve our understanding of how people and institutions change.

Until that work is done, ART remains a potentially useful interpretive framework rather than an established explanatory theory.

And the essay's most important insight does not depend on ART being correct. We should judge spiritual development, political morality, and intellectual sophistication by their responsiveness to evidence and their consequences for others—not by the grandeur of the theories through which they justify themselves.