Systems theory gives us an underlying matter-energy-information analysis applicable across all systems, from mechanical to living to social. This analytical tool helps categorize systems and subsystems across their various components at a moment in time. We will be applying that model to societal analysis, identifying separate but intertwined realms of economics, governance and culture as primarily oriented to material, relational and spiritual dimensions. But systems theory does not help in categorizing metamorphoses.
By categorizing portions of living systems and realms of society this way, and then categorizing developmental phases and historical epochs, I find that material, structural and spiritual aspects of living systems take turns leading the developmental growth, and metamorphosis from one developmental phase to another involves a pivoting of developmental growth from one dimension to another, and I project this model onto societal adolescence. In the present case, societal adolescence involves the pivoting of progress from a material to a structural or relational dimension. Systems theory gives us a tool for cross-sectional analysis, and a model based on analogy and built on top of this analysis is the tool I’ll use for exploring and projecting societal development through time, i.e. in this case an adolescence.
How different is this from the debunked theory that ontology recapitulates phylogeny? The theory has no scientific validity, and only loosely seems to fit in select cases. And yet, since it does occasionally apply, it is a developmental model worth entertaining. Abram Maslo (Maslo xx) posits that individuals strive to satisfy a hierarchy of wants sequentially, from material through relational to spiritual wants. We have no generally recognized phylogeny of human beings, but to the extent that an individual’s healthy maturation carries them through Maslo’s hierarchy, to that extent their development does indeed development sequentially across material, relational and spiritual components that match the analysis suggested by systems theory. Similar developmental paths can be traced in organizational theory and physiologically in plants, animals and humans.
Our analysis will thus blend cross-sectional systems theory models with sequential developmental models in its exploration of societal adolescence.