How to Navigate a Changing World: The Map of Hope
Map of Ideology, Cultural Wars and How to Navigate What is Next
This post is designed to be like a map. A map that can give you clarity on where we are as a society, how we got here, and where we are going next.
With this map, you will be able to get a big-picture view of how our values and ideology shape our world. How they have help us solve big problems but also created new problems in an ongoing sequence, forcing us to evolve.
Finally, you will get a sense of where we are now, the next wave in the cycle of change, and what you can do about it.
Let's begin…
Our Grand Human Adventure
Once upon a time, humanity was in the Hunter-gatherer age. Humans lived in small nomadic tribes, and most of their time was spent forging for food.
Then someone discovered an interesting pattern in nature, that seeds produce plants. (1)
This discovery was further explored, and more and more people experimented with seeds and were able to grow food. (2)
These discoveries were then codified into language. Theories and best practices were passed from person to person, and eventually, larger groups began farming. (3)
As more people began farming, it becomes clearer what was valuable (e.g.: sunlight, water). (4)
As farming was adopted by tribes, it fundamentally changed the structure of their societies.
There was a massive shift from small tribes to larger societies and it became necessary to protect the farms from thieves, create water delivery systems, and learn to use animals to help in farming.
Social values, relationships, and beliefs were transformed to support farming societies. (5)
The values, trials, and triumphs of life on the farm were then expressed in their stories, myths, and culture. In this way, the core essential values that supported the agricultural lifestyle got codified into an Ideology. (6)
The ideology then got passed down from one generation to the next generation, giving them a map of who they are (farmers) and how to act in the world (farming) and how to produce value (food & tools). (7)
After the ideology and value produced by farming transformed human societies, it reached its natural limits, the limits of human labor, and a new set of problems was born. (8)
On a fundamental level, farming gave humanity more time and space, more time to think, reflect, and create. This eventually led to the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, which solved farming's labor problem. (1)
And with the Industrial Revolution, the cycle started all over again.
So, in total, here is what the cycle looks like:
1) New Discovery & Creation → 2) Exploration & Consolidation → 3) Foundational Philosophies → 4) Emergence of Value Systems → 5) Integration of Values & Social Transformation → 6) Knowledge, Culture, Myths & Systems of Thinking → 7) Ideological Evolution → 8) Environmental Transformation → New Opportunties Emerge → Back to 1
Values are valuable relative to the environment that they are in.
As our values and ideologies change the world, they change the environment so much that new sets of problems and opportunities emerge.
In our new world, the old solutions are no longer viable, and there is also a strong incentive to discover new ways to produce value.
The new world requires a new set of values, beliefs, and ideologies.
In moments like this, there is typically a battle of the ideologies, where the old way and the new collide.
It took humanity about 6,000 years to fully adopt farming! Many tribes resisted it because they enjoyed their freedom, mobility, smaller size, and way of life.
Today, we are in such a moment.
We are experiencing hypersonic technological growth, which is transforming our societies and economies faster than ever before and propelling us into a raging cultural war between three different ideological systems.
As we shall see, what typically comes next is what needs to come next.
Like water traveling downstream, like the pull of gravity, we will move towards that which produces the most value.
The 4 Eras & Corresponding Ideologies
When humanity comes into a new age, a new paradigm is born out of it.
Each new paradigm gives us a new way to perceive the world, and with it, we quickly begin to believe that we have reached the apex of evolution, the end of history, a singularity of sorts, and that we understand the nature of the world, reality, and ourselves.
However, as we shall discover, life is not that simple.
With time, we discover this was just another step on the ladder of evolution.
Each era brings progress and problems. It transforms the world and creates a new set of problems and the context through which yet another Era emerges. And again, the world will be full of hope, believing once again that we have arrived.
Let's look at the Human Journey.
Hunter-Gatherer Era
Life was a daily adventure of foraging and hunting. Communities were close-knit, decisions were made together, and the land provided for their needs. Good Shamans turned intuitions, insights, and knowledge into stories that helped the group find food, address life and death issues, and move together as a unit.
Chief Problem: Food scarcity.
Agricultural Age
Farming stabilized the food supply, and it led to profound social changes. Agriculture allowed us to produce more food than we could consume, leading to trade, larger communities, and the birth of complex societies. With these advances came new challenges:
Land disputes.
The rise of social hierarchies.
The hard labor required to maintain the crops.
Through the Agricultural Age, humanity faced several social and intellectual challenges.
The first set of solutions was power-based. Whoever had the power made the rules, hence the Bronze and Iron Ages.
In the Classical Age, there was a growing emphasis on governance and philosophy, and power began to expand to include political and cultural power.
Rule of Power: Bronze Age → Iron Age → Classical Age
The Problem with the Rule of Power is that it is subtractive in nature. As they plunder and pillage, Power-based Empires proliferate.
Their massive initial gains turn into a logistical nightmare as the Empire grows. Finally, the rule of diminishing returns suffocates any further expansion and value extraction.
In the end, Power-Based Empires become powerless, because they lack the ability to extract any more value or create new value. They are like a great big fire that eventually burns itself out.
Power-based Empires depend on cultural values that would make such an empire possible in the first place, and here we run into another massive problem.
The Romans are a great example of the cultural issues that a Power-based system produces.
Their lore for conquest was such a part of Roman culture that being a General was not just to bring glory to Rome but to return as a hero poised to claim the ultimate prize: the imperial throne.
As a result, the most successful Generals would vastly expand the Roman Empire and then go on to challenge the authority of the sitting emperor, often leading to civil unrest or even civil war.
Rule of Order: Middle Ages → Renaissance → Birth of Enlightenment
The Middle Ages solved the problem of the 'Rule of Power' via the 'Rule of Law'. The Rule of Law meant that everyone played by the same rules, and ultimately, even Kings had to answer to God.
The benefit of the 'Rule of Law' is that it laid the groundwork for modern statecraft and legal systems within hierarchical societal structures. From this, the Renaissance and later the Enlightenment sprung forward.
Chief Problem: Limits of human labor and mass production of food.
Central Ideology: Traditionalism
» This Lord of the Rings scene with The Council of Elrond encapsulates Traditionalism through the gathering of different races to discuss the fate of Middle Earth, emphasizing unity, heritage, and a shared duty to fight the ‘Rule of Power’.
Industrial Age
Mechanization and the Industrial Revolution quickly began to dissolve the limitation and efficiency of manual labor.
Machines could now automate much of the work and produce goods on scale. Additionally, we see a big productivity jump as humanity can address the three primary drivers of productivity: Communication, Transportation, and Energy.
Better access to food, shelter, goods, and opportunities significantly increases our living standards.
The great opportunities were no longer in farming; now, they were found in industry.
Industrialization lead to a major shift towards urbanization.
In 1840, about 8% of the US population lived in cities, and by 1920, the majority of Americans, ~51%, were living in cities.
Today, that number is about 85%!
The Industrial Revolution also led us to a new set of perceptions and beliefs about the world.
We began to see nature and reality as a big machine that follows natural laws and works like a clock. Collectively, we started to see the world as deterministic, materialistic, and objective.
What was valuable now was individualism, rationality, science, logic, and realism.
Our beliefs about the world spring forth, and naive realism, physicalism, determinism, and reductionism become part of Modern Ideology.
This era of industry solved many problems of agricultural society, bringing about wealth, innovations, and an improved standard of living for many.
Yet, it also introduced issues such as pollution, worker exploitation, and the alienation of individuals as it turned worker bees into cogs in the giant machine.
Chief Problem: Alienation, Disillusionment, Environmental pollution, labor exploitation, urban overcrowding, loss of humanity, etc.
Central Ideology & Values: Modernism
Logical, Rational, Deterministic, Scientific, Capitalistic, Reductionist
» This scene from Metropolis shows the harsh realities of the workers operating the massive machines below the city. It starkly contrasts technological progress with human costs.
Digital Age
If you think about what was most valuable during the Industrial Age, what separated one company from another usually boiled down to knowledge and Information.
As businesses expanded in the mid-20th century, the need to process Information more efficiently became paramount, setting the stage for the advent of the Digital Age.
The digital age turned bits into bytes.
By turning it into Information, we could store it, manipulate it, and share it more easily than ever before, marking the beginning of the Information Age. Through computers, we have connected the majority of the world's information, knowledge, and people with each other.
And Information is way more than just Information.
Information and language itself is the change agent. Through the use of language, we are computing and transforming the world around us.
A computer uses language (code) to run complex programs, compute, and change 'state'.
We also do this subjectively; as new Information comes into our lives, it interacts with our psychology and profoundly impacts us.
The power of language is profound.
This brings us to a new way of seeing the world.
The world is no longer just made of matter but also Information.
Even though information is not tangible, you can't touch or hold it, yet it can produce effects on our physical world and has profound impacts on our lives.
And with this, we plunge into the wold of the Psychological.
Two World Wars, Korea and Vietnam
The catastrophes of the 20th century, including Two World Wars and over 100 Million deaths, made many people question the progress we were actually making.
Even after WW2, when women helped the war effort and African Americans sacrificed their lives, racism and sexism were still fully alive and well into the 1960s.
Many more people began questioning Modernism and Enlightenment values.
The words of philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, who questioned the limitations of reason and the existence of absolute truths, rang true.
Postmodernism was born.
On the positive side, postmodern thought helped address segregation, women's rights, etc.
It helped us see each other as humans, not just cogs in the Machine of Modernity. It asked us to consider the 'other' person's point of view and perspective and to see life through their eyes.
And this brings us back to technology because, in so many ways, the Information Age is the quintessential Postmodern Technology.
Here are is how:
Multiple Perspective: The digital era has democratized the production and consumption of Information, allowing for a multitude of voices and perspectives to be heard.
Information Overload: Multiple conflicting sources of Information with no grand narrative or objective truth.
Community Fragmentation: Rise of small, personalized communities.
Curated Identity: As we construct and curate our virtual online identities.
Power structures are becoming decentralized via crypto and the blockchain.
Art: The ability to easily remix, appropriate, and distribute art challenges traditional notions of authorship, originality, and copyright.
Hyperreality: VR and the Metaverse make it more possible to see from other people's perspective.
Flatland: The flattening of values and hierarchies makes it difficult to discern 'truth' and accurate Information from fake news.
As you can see, we are only at the beginning of this. As technology gets better and better at creating experiences, it will fully submerge us in postmodernism and make us question reality, humanity, values, identity, and what it really means to be human.
Chief Problem: Privacy, miss-information, hacking, and digital addiction all become a part of our lives, loneliness and a deep sense of meaningless, limits of subjective personal meaning, etc
Central Ideology: Postmodernism
Psychological, Sensitive, Pluralistic, Multi-cultural, Communal
» In Blade Runner 2049, K realizes that his memories, which he believed defined his identity, might not be his own. Here, we question the nature of memory, identity, and reality.
Want to go deeper?
Below, I created a chart connecting each of these areas along with the problems they solve, the values they produce, and their corresponding Ideologies that make it all so easy. You can also see it here in full screen.
The Lifecycle of Ideologies
Now that we know how powerful information is, we realize that it is a lot more than just information, and as a result, we can realize the massive power of Ideology.
Ideology is like our operating system.
It can be defined by its set of district perceptions, values, and beliefs about the world and how a person ought to act.
Like everything else, ideologies are born, grow, and eventually die.
The Meta Framework of Ideology:
Framework: It is linguistically based on a set of ideas and concepts that give it a framework. We can discern what it is.
Coherence: When such a framework is coherent, it makes sense, especially within its own context.
Meaning: The framework gives rise to meaning-making. It means being able to use the system; it's like a tool.
Produces Value: Ideology acts as a map to a set of values, which are like tools for creating/extracting value from the environment. You can live a better life by living out and actualizing the framework.
Technology: Each ideology opened up the human mind to image a set of corresponding technologies that would further help embody its ideologies to the fullest.
Hunter Gather → Forging → Simple Tools, Fire, Communication
Agricultural Age → Labour → Plow, Domestication of Animals, Metal Weapons, Markets, City States, Governments, Laws, etc..
Industrial Age → Mechanical → Energy, Electricity, Corporations, Capitalism, etc
Digital Age → Informational → Algorithms, Big Data, Internet, AI, Automation, etc..
Power: power comes from the framework's ability to make sense of the world, to give it meaning, and to produce and extract real value.
Power structures form in order to organize resources to produce the most value. So, power has a dual component here: the power to grow and the power to protect.
Defense Mechanism: Like any organism or group, the Ideology will defend itself against critics and other systems via its most powerful members, organizations, and institutions.
Decay: Without the abilities mentioned above, the system will be abandoned, so decay is the real threat to any system.
Weaknesses of Ideology
Every Ideology has inherent weaknesses.
They are bound to the environment and the context that helped produce them and struggle to see or solve the problems of their own making.
Let's look at the core weakness of Ideology:
Assumptions: Idealogical Frameworks are founded on a hidden layer of assumptions. These assumptions presume that the world, reality, is constructed in a particular way. These assumptions are projected onto the way reality is seen, interpreted, and understood.
Beliefs: Hidden assumptions give rise to inaccurate beliefs. Our beliefs inform us what the world is about and what our relationship with the world ought to be.
Limited Values: Ideologic allows us to perceive a limited set of values. For example, farmers can identify and utilize seeds in ways the Hunter Gathers couldn't.
Value Extraction: As our system produces value, it changes the environment. It changes it enough that there is an oversupply of the things the system itself values. Ironically, this supply means that the very things the system produces become less and less valuable.
Decreased Opportunity: As more people produce value and extract value, there is less opportunity to do the same over time. As a result, the overall Ideology becomes less and less valuable over time.
Exposes False Assumptions: Hidden assumptions about our values are revealed.
For example, Modernists believed that having enough would make us happy. Yet, we see some of the richest, most successful, and most prosperous people in the world commit suicide. This problem isn't an anomaly. As a society, we are the richest we have ever been, yet we are at all-time highs for loneliness, depression, etc.
Unintended Consequences: As we adapt and change to create and extract value, the process changes us and gives rise to new values that support the current value structure
Paradox: Profit led to globalization and a flight to cheap labor, which hollowed out cities in the Rust Belt. This increased poverty rates, hollowed out the middle class, and simultaneously flooded the market with cheap Chinese goods. So, we have both greater poverty and greater material abundance.
Examples: Pollution, Fake news, the War on Drugs, Wars for profit, and flight to cheap labor hollowed cities.
Here, time and change become the real enemies of Ideology.
The thinking that produces problems isn't sufficient to solve the problems of its own making.
As such, Ideologies provide a specific set of solutions to a set environment and perhaps this is the best way for us to think about our own beliefs; as tools that are there to help us get a specific job done.
What replaces a flawed ideology is a better ideology.
Nature of Power within a System
Power is a lot more Powerful than you Think.
It is not merely a few powerful individuals at the top who make decisions and move the direction of society as they wish.
It is not powerful countries like the US or Russia doing whatever they want or deem to be in their best interest.
No, it goes much deeper than that,
Power resides in the 'why' and why people and groups are motivated to act
Power is the ability of our beliefs and ideas about the world to produce and extract value in the world
And it is this value that we are fighting for
And as long as an ideology can produce value, it will have power.
Then, the people who benefit most from the said ideology, the people who are the embodiments of the values that the ideology proposes, will see to it that the ideology survives and thrives.
Any threats to their system of values are inherently destabilizing and will be met with great opposition.
Ironically, it isn't deconstructionism or other systems that are the main threat; instead, the main threat is their own weakness, which is expressed in their defensiveness, growing lack of self-awareness, and unwillingness to change. These make it difficult to address core issues and ultimately lead to decay.
The Way Forward
As we have seen, every Ideology and belief system has a corresponding set of values that bring forth real-world benefits.
A highly viable ideology will be great at producing value, and it will be easy to implement.
These types of belief systems can be adopted by the masses and become pillars for entire civilizations.
They typically provide a variable framework for being in the world and address many of the core issues needed to live a 'good life.'
They bring forth positive real world changes by addressing many of the core needs of most of its people however they are finite.
As the world changes, so do they.
With time, they can become toxic and decay.
Even in the most extreme circumstances, where an ideology is toxic and harmful, what replaces a bad ideology is a better ideology.
And the process of change is very difficult, as it is inherently destabilizes a person, a culture and a civilization.
And this is where we are now.
There is an active friction between Traditionalism, Modernism, and Postmodernism.
Postmodernism is inherently deconstructive.
It deconstructs and tears apart grand narratives in Modernism and Traditionalism.
As one would expect, this triggers the defense mechanisms of Modernists and Traditionalists.
They feel that their ideology and way of life are under attack, that it is threatened.
Their core beliefs, way of life, and a part of their identity are being attacked, and so they lash out.
And all of this lashing out, owning one another, fights between right and left, and so on are becoming more and more extreme, more and more toxic.
And without missing a beat, online platforms and algorithms are here to profit by ignite the flames, rewarding and incentivizing the most extreme behavior all because it fits their business model.
They are splintering off and driving people into more and more extreme communities and subcultures.
And so we are failing with all of our current ideologies.
What is needed isn't more fighting or toxicity
You can destroy the devils you see by becoming evil
What is needed now is restoring stability to a disordered World.
Restoring Stability to a Disordered World
In the same way that water flows downhill, Disorder eventually leads to Order.
And we are in the ZONE now.
What the world needs is a path forward toward renewal and stability.
So how do we do that?
In short, we need to acknowledge the value and contributions of the existing value systems and ideologies.
Each of them provides tremendous value in helping solve problems for people in certain environments and contexts.
We need to integrate them and use them like a set of tools. This way, we are not stuck with what amounts to one operating system, one way of thinking, one set of values and solutions.
We need to be able to switch between systems and be flexible to the environment's needs.
Here are the overall qualities of the Integrative Path forward:
Acknowledge that nature of our world is a fast, constant state of change
Realizes that as the environment changes, so does what is deemed valuable
Consider what's necessary, natural, and next
Focusing on functionality, competence, flexibility, and what is needed in a given situation.
Authority is contextual
This way, we can integrate the different value systems and ideologies into a coherent framework.
We can gain tremendous insight into the great wisdom traditions that can help us ground ourselves.
Modernism, rationality, and logic are great tools for achieving prosperity and accomplishing our goals.
Postmodernism can help us embrace complexity and ambiguity as we question the nature of our own reality and evolve our identity.
As we integrate these values, we can get the most out of all of them.
We can become the masters of these ideologies instead of their slaves.
We can gain our freedom, and through our freedom, we can become a restorative and stabilizing force.
In a world spinning out of control, the stabilizing forces become what is most valuable, necessary, and next.