Why Current Approaches Fail | Unpublished
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Axel Dorscht's picture
Ottawa, Ontario
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Axel Dorscht is the founder and head of the Institute for Human Conceptual and Mental Development (IHCMD). He has directed the Institute's work since its founding in 1990. He holds a PhD in political economy (Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, 1988), an MA in International Relations, and a BA in Political Science (Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada, 1977 and 1975).

 

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Why Current Approaches Fail

May 27, 2026

Current approaches fail because they are built on a fundamental misalignment: they attempt to solve human problems from the outside, while the causes of those problems originate on the inside—in the underdeveloped internal mental faculties through which individuals understand and manage their existence. This misalignment produces predictable failure across sectors.

 

Most interventions focus on external behaviours, conditions, or systems. But behaviour is driven by internal mental faculties—attention, interpretation, emotion, meaning, and judgment.

  • Education reforms adjust curriculum, not the student’s internal capacity to understand.
  • Mental‑health systems treat symptoms, not the developmental deficits that generate instability.
  • Social and justice systems regulate behaviour without strengthening the faculties that govern behaviour.
  • Environmental policy targets consumption patterns, not the internal impulses and assumptions that drive them.

Without strengthening internal mental space, clarity, mental control, and independent judgment, external interventions cannot produce durable change.

Systems implicitly assume individuals already possess:

  • stable attention
  • emotional regulation
  • coherent interpretation
  • grounded judgment
  • the ability to manage pressure

When these mental capacities are missing, systems generate misunderstanding, reactivity, non‑compliance, and institutional overload.

Modern institutions approach the mind as:

  • a mechanism (psychology)
  • a brain function (neuroscience)
  • a container for information (education)
  • a target for persuasion (politics)

None treat it as the internal environment where human existence actually occurs. As a result, interventions operate on the person rather than within the person.

Human problems are treated as separate domains—health, education, justice, environment—while the underlying cause is unitary: underdeveloped internal mental faculties. Fragmentation produces contradictory interventions, duplicated effort, escalating costs, and policy incoherence. Mental development provides the integrating developmental logic these systems lack.

Current approaches fail because they operate outside the person, while the causes of modern mental, social, and ecological crises originate inside the mind. They treat symptoms, assume capacities that do not exist, fragment what is integrated, and rely on external control instead of internal mental development.

 



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May 27, 2026