Being in the midst of a complex civilization in decline, our minds have turned to investigating the underlying reality behind such a decline. When we investigate this reality, we find the civilization bound by the skeletal outlines of an underlying dominant ideology, which itself is always being altered and re-interpreted by those in power over time to shape the society that they want to see. In this case, the ideology would be a manifestation of a late stage of capitalist thought, typified by the neoliberal paradigm, which itself is fed by radical conceptions of selfish individualism and hard rationalism (though there are growing sectors of the population that are metastasizing into emotion-driven, authoritarian ideologues).
We see a general process in which power collects into a smaller and more powerful minority, which itself alters the official interpretation of the constitutive ideology behind the system they rule in order to rationalize and legitimize their power.
This results in the misallocation of resources and an asymmetric flow of wealth to those in control. This puts a tremendous strain on the population, resulting not only in physical suffering but social alienation and the resulting mutual distrust…all in all a general fragmentation of the social body. The change in capitalist/individualist ideology could be directly related to these deteriorating effects, which brings to mind theories of the rise and fall of civilizations proposed and discussed by philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, and historians. This raises serious questions such as whether a civilization, as an organizational system, must inevitably die off within a certain timeframe due to entropic forces and the natural aging processes of lifeforms. And if the answer to a question like that proves to be yes, what can be done to not only strengthen these systems but ameliorate the effects of decline in preparation for the next cycle? Or can we alter this cycle?
We see that the ideology behind a complex society (as produced within cultural settings as humans interact with the material world) matters as to what sort of institutions take shape. We also see that the nature of these institutions can dramatically affect the constitution of the society that implements them. Change is always occurring in this relationship: new ideologies give birth to new institutions, which in turn alter an ever-changing social body, producing new ideologies in turn, and so the cycle repeats.
Let's start here.
