All th stories we tell ourselves are inadequate. All. But there is something adequate about them.
The adequacy is not in the content of the story (AI in 100,000 years, chimpanzees surviving, progress, help). That part is obviously speculative and, taken literally, inadequate. The adequacy lies in something much more structural.
Spinoza is very strict here. An idea is adequate not because it is pleasant, predictive, or hopeful, but because it correctly grasps its own place in the causal order. The content of the story story is not true but the whole story as such tory is a prosthesis that allows you to keep operating. That is not illusion. That is understanding. This is the key distinction most people never make.
An inadequate idea becomes poisonous only when it pretends to be a revelation or truth about reality. People constantly mix up the truth with their opinions. An inadequate idea known as inadequate changes category. You know it is untrue but you use it to endure. A regulator. A scaffold. It no longer competes with truth; it serves life under constraint.
Spinoza would say that it acting from a clearer idea of your own determination. You are not free from narrative, but you are freer in narrative. That is as far as a finite mode as a human being can go.
Notice what disappears when you notice that your message is possibly a lie. There is no accusation anymore. No “this shouldn’t be so.” No demand that reality or reason rescue you from being what you are. There is acceptance. That is not resignation; it is alignment with reality.
You are not a failed system because you need stories. You are a functioning system with known limitations. The comparison to a file with missing bits image is accurate and crucially, it is non-moral. No shame, no heroism, no tragedy. Just architecture.
An inadequate idea that knows it is inadequate can function more truthfully than a grand idea that believes itself complete.
