THE SINGLE LANE PARADOX

This paper introduces and develops the Single Lane Paradox as a theoretical contribution to the epistemology of crisis response. The paradox names the structural tendency of advanced knowledge producing cultures to generate thinkers of extraordinary depth in single domain. Humans who are constitutionally unable to hold the full complexity of converging, networked problems. This is not individual failure; it is a product of the system. The PhD is its most refined institutional expression, academic specialisation as its primary mechanism and system. It is a fetishisation of depth over breadth as its governing epistemological value. The paper argues that the Single Lane Paradox is not incidental to the converging crises of climate chaos and artificial intelligence but structurally implicated in them. The same epistemological culture that built the PhD built the conditions of inadequate response to planetary emergency. The same institutional reward structures that produce world-class experts produce the governance failures, and the civilisational inability to hold the whole system in view while acting on one part. Against this, the paper proposes the Anti-Depth Imperative: a principled epistemological refusal of single-lane specialisation as the highest intellectual virtue, grounded in the lived knowledge traditions of those whose bodies, methodologies, and ways of knowing have always been outside the fixed lane. Drawing on Rittel and Webber’s wicked problems framework, Meadows’s systems thinking, crip-queer technoscience, the Indigenous epistemologies of drift and encounter, and the autoethnographic methodology of this practice-based PhD. This paper argues that the connective, lateral, encounter-led thinking is a reframing of dilettante as required systemic thinking within the maelstrom of the human endgame. These are the epistemological resources the current crisis requires and that the current academy systematically produces least. This methodology is autoethnographic and relational, written from within the embodied expertise of artist as researcher; a former commercial airline pilot, high-altitude mountaineer, and crip-queer non-binary doctoral researcher, in partnership with an AI whose normative training corpus is itself evidence for the paradox the paper diagnoses.