Political compass for the21st century

[Eric the Green]

(05-20-2020, 03:31 AM)Blazkovitz Wrote: To enlarge the tube idea, I imagined ideas as forming layers:

Theocracy seems to have three layers:
-ancient theocracy (Biblical Israel, some elements of the Egyptian civilization)
-medieval theocracy (Catholic Europe, Islam). Today represented by fossilized old style Catholics like Marcel Lefebvre, or by al-Qaeda style Islamism.
-Industrial and Information Age theocracy (Iranian Islamism, American dominion theologists like Falwell)

Nationalism has two layers:
-ancient and early medieval warrior cultures (Assyria, the Turanian nomads, the Viking). This was suppressed by medieval theocracy.
-Industrial Age nationalism proper, culminating in fascism. Trump belongs here as well.

Securitarianism, two layers again:
-ancient and medieval dynastic states, "just father" type of king rather than a warrior king.
-modern securitarianism represented by Xi and Bashar. Typically post-communists or post-nationalists who abandoned their original ideology to put emphasis on stable power.

Proletarianist red sector, two layers:
-Industrial Age workers' movements: Marxism and its spawn, as well as national liberation movements in the Third World which viewed the class conflict as happening between "proletarian nations" and "bourgeois nations".
-Information Age proletarianism: Occupy movement, Internet groups like the Venus Project (futurist communism)

Pro-market, two layers:
-Industrial Age classical liberalism
-Information Age libertarianism

Inclusivism, the youngest kid on the block, has only one layer

The newer layers usually include more "progressive" concepts. Aquinas had no problem with Aristotle's natural science, something Ancient Israelites would avoid as godless. Falwell could accept some forms of democratic governance, unthinkable for Aquinas. Similarly, the Venus Project doesn't rely on class egoism the way Marx did. It's too evolved morally to do that. "The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice" - yes, but the basic concepts stay the same unless we attain a transhuman level, in which case we'll be dealing with concepts unfathomable today. A future theocratic system could believe genetic enhancements are ordained by God as a path to perfection, maybe Christianity wouldn't cope with this concept but something like revived Pythagoreanism could.

Yes, perhaps.

Transhumanism itself seems related to the Orange meme of Spiral Dynamics, which is listed here as Industrial Age classical liberalism. The Orange meme is described as the valuation of using knowledge to master conditions (usually physical conditions). So it's another layer of the Industrial Age and the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and the 19th century. A "new ager" friend of mine (I think he's still a friend), who also describes and follows transhumanism, calls this "technos," or the power of technology as an over-arching phenomenon with its own autonomous momentum.

Info-Age Pro market can also be described as neo-liberalism, since this emphasizes the "free" market, as opposed to the liberal values of human rights and democracy.

Information age proletarian or socialist also includes democratic socialist movements like that of Bernie Sanders and the Scandinavian countries. Bernie borrowed a lot of the Occupy rhetoric, or else Occupy borrowed from Bernie who had been saying the same things for 40 years or more prior to Occupy. These are less strictly socialist movements that don't advocate an entirely socialist economy, but a mixed one. Bernie's movement is a lot more significant than the "Venus Project," which I have never heard of.

It's a good list. The "tube" layers could be an example of what the Spiral Dynamics authors describe as the "nested hierarchy" value of the Yellow meme; or people developing from their own traditional memes and values. Our various circles represent the Yellow meme aspiration toward a comprehensive, integral philosophy or "theory of everything" like Ken Wilber aspires to, or modern physics is attempting.

It's hard to see these tube layers as necessarily "bending toward justice" though. I think the basic Spiral or Planetary Dynamic does this, but some of these layers seem to represent a regression. But I also covered this tendency as part of Planetary Dynamics. In Spiral Dynamics terms, in the Yellow meme the energy or development runs both ways, up and down the spiral, just like the spiral channels of the chakras. Regression seems especially to be an aspect of current world society. I symbolized this by the 1977 discovery of Chiron and then the Centaurs in the 1990s, which are slowly falling from the Kuiper Belt toward the Sun.