Kant Said You're Only Seeing a Filtered Reality. The Enneagram Shows You the Other 8 Filters.
A lecture called "Secret History #4: How Evil Triumphs" has racked up nearly 2 million views on YouTube. It was delivered by Jiang Xueqin — a Yale-educated Chinese-Canadian educator who teaches Western Philosophy at Moonshot Academy in Beijing — and posted to his channel Predictive History, which is approaching a million subscribers.
Jiang is a Harvard Global Education Innovation Initiative researcher and contributor to the Wall Street Journal and CNN. His channel — inspired by Isaac Asimov’s concept of “psychohistory” from the Foundation series — applies structural historical analysis and game theory to predict geopolitical events. He went viral in 2025 after his predictions about Trump’s re-election and conflict with Iran appeared to materialize, earning him the label “China’s Nostradamus.”
In this particular lecture, Jiang walks his students through Kant, Hegel, Plato, Dante, Gnosticism, game theory, and ritual sacrifice. He explains why secret groups hold power, why transgression creates cohesion, and why the material world might be a prison. He says all this while telling his students “this is just a theory” and “don’t believe this is truth.”
It’s a wild ride. Parts of it are intellectually fascinating. Parts of it are evidentially thin — a tension The Free Press noted when profiling Jiang’s more conspiratorial content. But buried in the middle of this lecture about evil and power is a philosophical framework that — whether Jiang realizes it or not — makes the strongest possible case for something very different from conspiracy theories.
It makes the case for perspective-taking.
Kant’s Filter Problem Is 9takes’ Entire Foundation
Jiang’s most important philosophical move comes from Immanuel Kant. Here’s the core claim: we never see reality directly. Our brains add filters — space, time, categories of understanding — and what we experience is not the world as it actually is (the “noumena”), but the world as processed through our mental architecture (the “phenomena”).
Jiang puts it plainly: “There is no objective reality that we see. Our brains are filters.”
He then raises Kant’s third question — the one that should keep you up at night: If we are all seeing the world through our own filters, how do we know that we’re seeing the same world?
This is not an abstract philosophy question. This is the question that governs every argument you’ve ever had. Every time you’ve thought “how can they possibly see it that way?” — that’s Kant’s third question, playing out in real time.
9takes was built on the premise that the answer is: you don’t see the same world. You’re only seeing 1/9th of reality. Your Enneagram type IS your filter. Not the only filter — but one of the deepest ones. It’s built on which core emotion dominates how you process reality: anger, fear, or shame.
Ask 9 personality types “how do you handle conflict at work?” and you don’t get 9 opinions. You get 9 different realities described.
- A Type 8 (anger/instinct) says: “I address it head-on. Five uncomfortable minutes beats weeks of tension.”
- A Type 5 (fear/analysis) says: “I step back and observe. The stated problem is rarely the real problem.”
- A Type 2 (shame/feeling) says: “I check in with both sides privately. People can’t hear solutions when they feel unheard.”
Same question. Three completely different phenomenal worlds. Kant would recognize what’s happening here instantly.
The Lecture Explains Why Evil Wins. 9takes Asks a Different Question.
Jiang uses Kant’s filter problem to build toward a specific conclusion: powerful groups exploit the gap between noumena and phenomena. They keep people trapped in the material “shadow world” and deny the spiritual reality underneath. That’s his theory of how evil triumphs — through coordinated secrecy, shared transgression, and the systematic denial of truth.
It’s a compelling narrative — “rhetorically strong but evidentially weak,” as one analysis put it. A story that feels true even when the evidence is thin. The framework is self-sealing: missing evidence gets interpreted as proof that the secrets are being kept. (In fairness, the Enneagram itself faces evidence debates — its empirical validation lags behind models like the Big Five, even as its clinical usefulness keeps practitioners coming back. The difference is that the Enneagram doesn’t claim to explain global power structures — just the patterns in how individuals process reality.)
But separate the philosophical infrastructure from the conspiracy framework, and something interesting remains.
Kant’s filter problem is real. Hegel’s insight that shared symbolic systems coordinate how groups perceive reality is real. The observation that people in power benefit from keeping others locked into a single perspective is real.
Jiang uses these ideas to ask: Who is hiding the truth from us?
9takes uses the same ideas to ask a different question: What truth are we hiding from ourselves by refusing to see through other lenses?
That second question is harder. It doesn’t have a villain. It puts the responsibility on you.
Plato vs. Dante — and Why 9takes Doesn’t Pick a Side
Jiang builds to the lecture’s biggest philosophical tension: two paths back to what he calls the Monad (the ultimate reality, the source of everything).
Plato says: knowledge. Pursue geometry, philosophy, sacred mathematics. Understand the structure of reality through intellectual rigor. The problem? Plato is an elitist. The lecturer himself points this out — “Only if you come to my school and learn geometry will you access heaven.”
Dante says: love. The Monad wouldn’t create a system only the educated can access. The capacity to love is universal. Everyone has it. That’s the path home.
Jiang frames this as a debate between two schools of thought. But there’s no reason to pick one. Any system that takes perspective-taking seriously has to do both.
- Give your take first — share your honest perspective before seeing anyone else’s. This echoes Dante: you start with authentic self-expression, not performance.
- See the other 8 perspectives — discover how people with different emotional architectures processed the exact same situation. This echoes Plato: understanding the structure behind reactions that initially seem irrational.
The interesting thing about this tension is that it resolves itself in practice. Curiosity IS the knowledge path. Suspending judgment IS the love path. You don’t have to choose between understanding human patterns and developing empathy for people who see the world differently — they reinforce each other.
Cohesion Through Vulnerability, Not Transgression
Here’s where 9takes becomes a direct counter-model to the lecture’s central thesis.
Jiang argues that transgression — shared taboo-breaking — creates the deepest cohesion. Shared secrets, shared violation, shared guilt. The group bonds because they’ve crossed a line together and can never go back. He traces this pattern through Sparta’s hazing rituals, the Sacred Band of Thebes, and hypothetical secret societies.
He’s not entirely wrong about the mechanism. Costly signaling theory confirms that extreme shared experiences can create powerful bonds. Fraternities, military units, and cults all exploit this.
But Jiang presents transgression as the superior coordination mechanism — the one that beats family, religion, language, and every other bonding system because it’s hidden.
9takes proposes a different bonding mechanism: shared vulnerability through honest perspective-taking.
The give-first mechanic creates its own form of exposure. You commit your authentic take before you see anyone else’s. There’s no groupthink to hide behind. No upvote count to chase. No algorithm feeding you what you already believe. You’re exposed — and then you discover that the person you thought was “being difficult” was processing through a completely different emotional architecture.
The lecture’s model: shared transgression → cohesion → synchronicity → power.
9takes’ model: shared vulnerability → understanding → curiosity → connection.
Both create bonds. One through shared violation. The other through shared authenticity.
Jiang would probably call the second version weaker. But within his own philosophical framework — where Dante says the path to ultimate reality is through love — the version built on understanding and connection is the one that moves toward the Monad. The transgressive version, by definition, moves away from it.
His own framework may point in a different direction than his conclusion.
The Geist and the Enneagram’s Universal Patterns
Jiang introduces Hegel’s concept of the Geist — the shared spiritual reality that connects all minds. He finds it significant that Buddhism, Hinduism, Plato, and Dante all independently arrived at similar conclusions about the nature of reality. He argues this convergence itself is evidence of a shared source — a “gist” (his English gloss of Geist) underlying all human experience.
The Enneagram makes a parallel observation at the psychological level.
Across all cultures, all backgrounds, all eras, humans process reality through the same 9 archetypal patterns rooted in 3 core emotions. The Enneagram’s three centers — Gut (anger), Heart (shame), Head (fear) — keep showing up independently:
- Plato’s Tripartite Soul: Appetite (instinct), Spirit (emotion), Reason (analysis)
- Freud’s model: Id, Superego, Ego
- Neuroscience’s triune brain: Reptilian brain, Limbic system, Neocortex
These aren’t perfect 1:1 mappings — Plato’s “Appetite” isn’t identical to the Enneagram’s Gut center, and Freud’s superego isn’t the Heart center with a different label. But the structural observation is striking: independent thinkers across millennia keep arriving at a three-dimensional model of human motivation. That pattern is hard to dismiss.
Jiang asks: “Why do different religions in different places arrive at the same conception of the universe?” His answer is the Geist — a shared spiritual source feeding ideas to all of humanity.
A more grounded explanation: universal emotional architecture. Humans are wired with the same three processing centers. The patterns that emerge from those centers are recognizable across cultures because they’re built into us. You don’t need a metaphysical explanation for convergence when the hardware is shared.
Evil as Anti-Love, Isolation as Anti-Connection
Jiang defines evil through Dante’s framework: evil is whatever moves you away from the Monad. In practical terms, evil is anti-love — the denial of authentic connection, the suppression of free will, the construction of systems that prevent people from genuinely relating to each other.
Jiang gives a specific example that hits close to home, given his career reforming Chinese education: school. Parents stop caring about your happiness and start caring about your grades. The system denies your free will and agency. Authentic relationship is sacrificed for institutional compliance.
The same diagnosis applies to how we communicate now. Social media turned conversation into performance. Reddit became tribes defending territory. Everyone talks. Nobody listens. We’re past polarization — we’ve moved into isolation.
Current platforms are anti-connection by design. Algorithms feed you what you already believe. Upvote systems surface the most popular take, not the most honest one. The architecture rewards performance over vulnerability.
In Dante’s framework, this IS evil — not the dramatic, conspiratorial evil of the lecture, but the quiet, structural kind. Systems that make it impossible for people to genuinely see each other. And unlike the conspiratorial version, this one is fixable — not by exposing hidden secrets, but by building structures where honest perspective-taking can actually happen.
What Jiang Gets Right — and Where He Stops Short
Jiang is a serious thinker. His channel’s premise — inspired by Asimov’s fictional “psychohistory” — is that recurring historical patterns can help us predict the future. That’s an ambitious project, and the philosophical infrastructure he builds in this lecture — Kant on perception, Hegel on shared symbolic systems, Plato on understanding, Dante on love as universal access — is genuinely interesting.
Where Jiang goes sideways — and where The Free Press and other critics have pushed back — is in applying these ideas exclusively to explain power and evil. He takes a framework about human perception and uses it to build conspiracy theory. The argument becomes self-sealing: any counter-evidence becomes proof of the conspiracy. Jiang himself acknowledges this tension repeatedly (“this is just a theory”), but the presentation carries a confidence the evidence doesn’t support.
The philosophical bones are solid, though. And they support a very different conclusion.
If Kant is right about our filters, the most valuable thing you can do is learn what other filters look like. If Dante is right about love, the most valuable thing you can do is build structures where people can genuinely see each other. Not bonding through shared transgression — but through the harder, quieter work of recognizing someone else’s reality as valid.
The Real Conspiracy Is Your Own Perspective Bubble
Jiang wants you to ask: “Who is manipulating reality behind the scenes?”
Here’s a harder question: What are you refusing to see because your own filters won’t let you?
You have blindspots. Not because someone put them there — because that’s how perception works. Your core emotion, your intelligence center — they give you clarity in one direction and near-total blindness in others.
A Type 1 sees what’s wrong and needs fixing — and misses that not everyone wants to be corrected. A Type 4 sees the emotional depth others are skipping over — and misses the practical solution sitting right in front of them. A Type 7 sees possibility and opportunity everywhere — and misses the grief that someone needs to sit with before moving on.
None of them are wrong. All of them are incomplete.
Kant settled whether you have filters 250 years ago. The only question left is whether you’re willing to look through someone else’s.
One situation. Nine ways to see it. The conspiracy isn’t out there. It’s the one your own mind is running on you.