The Social Meta-Theory is a guideline for understanding human evolutionary growth as an individual, group, organization, country and the world. It leverages numerous existing social sciences with their own generally accepted theories to help describe the stages of evolution. Crisis emerges as the rules holding together the group no longer satisfy an emerging new truth. Many social sciences do not currently have an evolutionary component to describe how to evolve. For these sciences, a derived understanding of the stages of development is provided given knowledge of the other sciences that do fit in this model. This book contains the simplified descriptions of the various theories for reference and context.
The intention is to provide a view into the theory from whatever discipline the reader has mastered prior to reading this document. For the Psychology-oriented reader, the sciences of Economics and Politics should read as easily as their trained science. Similar terminology is used across the scientific discipline summaries provided to aid in understanding. This book is not the end resource for any of the sciences, including those that are represented here for the first time. It is incumbent upon the reader to study other books referenced in this book to get a more complete understanding of the original theories.
This theory is not intended to become a call to action against any society. It is intended as a framework for the analytical description of a society, and what would be necessary to assist in the continued evolution based on that analysis. The call to action, if one is necessary at all, will be generally pointed at a particular growth opportunity for a given culture, not pointed at the destruction of a given society. The argument is that to evolve a society, address the weakest segment of that society, and all of a given culture will then have the ability to evolve.
Numerous theories are presented here to provide architecture, not to defend or refute any given theory. For instance, Freud’s theory of psychosexual development is provided for its evolutionary stages and descriptions, not to conjure up debate as to the validity of the pseudoscience used to substantiate this theory. The framework provided by Freud has explanatory power only in the gross understanding of his theory (it has been read and studied the world over), and the architecture of his theory, the growth patterns, and the identified evolutionary and revolutionary segments.
Additionally, Marxian theory is provided to explain much of the evolution of an economy and political system, without trying to get into the baggage associated with the improper and forceful implementation of his theories (such as the Soviet Union). It is my hope that I can prevent another Lenin/Stalin revolution from arising by properly explaining a larger picture. This theory helps to identify exactly why the Totalitarian political system (Stage 1) connected to a Communist economic system (Stage 5) simply cannot work because it is unhealthy.
This is a Meta theory. Don’t get bogged down in the details of the implementation. The framework is provided for discussing the evolution of societies while leveraging the strength and research of contemporary reigning theories. Many of the theories provided have 5 distinct stages. Some are not neatly broken down into 5 distinct phases but can be divided into 5 based on the definition of the stages. Still other theories require relatively obvious stages to allow the model to fit. These additional stages are provided with descriptions of how they do not contaminate the original theory, but extend it to areas not originally considered. For instance, Kiyosaki does not contemplate a dependent stage in his 4-stage theory, allowing a preceding obvious first stage to be inserted.
This is a living concept that will be updated as deeper understanding and feedback are provided. This theory will escape the qualitative nature of this description and enter into the quantitative. Specific measurements should be available to identify stages of development and the state of a culture. Population growth, for example, is a leading indicator for how healthy an economy can be based on the wealth of the culture.