Mission Statement:
The Foundation for the Study of Societal Metamorphosis, incorporated under the laws of New York State, supports research into the hypothesis that global human society is undergoing a naturally organic and necessary metamorphosis, maturing out of a materially-focused industrial age childhood, and recently in mid-20th century entering an information age adolescence.
By this hypothesis, the direction of societal development, at a meta level, is shifting from material expansion to structural integration. Global society’s developmental potential lies less in continued and ultimately unsustainable material expansion and more in revamping the formal and informal relational institutions that connect us together, i.e. laws, governance institutions, technologies, cultural globalization, and much, much more. The expanding role of technology is only a part of this overall picture of fundamental metamorphosis involving all of global human society. When we emerge, metamorphosed, we will be hardly recognizable, almost entirely transformed, as a caterpiller is to a butterfly.
The metamorphic nature of this shift, now well under way, is evidenced by changed developmental direction and dramatic transformations seen a range of phenomena: in the emergence of the environmental movement to nurture rather than exploit the environment, female empowerment broadly defined, liquification of social connections, globalization of economies and cultures, flattening of hierarchies, dissolution of authorities, demographic urbanization and slowing of population growth, shift in employment from manufacturing to services and government work, digitalization, the limits of consumerism, diminishing violence, emergent cooperation, and more.
The thesis ranges widely, and the separate phenomena that support the thesis have been extensively observed, but not in an overarching context of a maturing and metamorphosing societal organism. The Foundation seeks to both construct a coherent narrative out of the divergent strands, and sort through existing academic research, popular writing and phenomenological evidence to buttress a case for the thesis, and then to project the implications.
If indeed the metamorphosis can be established as the natural maturing of an organic system into and through its inherently prefigured middle-phase development stage, analogous to for example human adolescence, the pupa phase of a caterpillar/butterfly, the scientific phase in organizational development, and middle phase development elsewhere, then implications may be drawn for addressing many of society’s problems, including environmental sustainability, income inequality, rational governance reform, alienation and the loneliness epidemic, consumerism, individual purpose, and more.
The Foundation issues grants to research and produce books, academic articles, websites, blogs, magazine articles, and/or other media presentations. Studies may draw from academic research into living systems, emergence, evolutionary biology, as well as philosophy, political science and other disciplines, but also on speculative analysis of matter, information and energy holisms and sequential versions of this tri-partite analysis distinguishing early, middle and late phase organic development.