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 focused on society’s relational structure.
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 restructuring 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, entirely transformed, as a butterfly is to the pupae is to the caterpiller.
The metamorphic nature of this shift, now well under way, is evidenced by changed developmental direction and dramatic transformations seen a range of phenomena, epitomized in the emergence of the environmental movement transforming humanity’s relationship to it’s surroundings from one of exploitation to one of nurture, a feminization. Parallel manifestations include female empowerment broadly defined, liquification of hitherto hierarchical social connections, globalization of economies and homogenization of cultures, demographic urbanization, slowing population growth, shifts in employment from manufacturing to services, and more.
The thesis ranges widely, and the phenomena that evidence the thesis have been separately and extensively observed, but not in the context of an overarching maturation and metamorphosing of the global societal organism. The Foundation seeks to both build a coherent narrative out of the divergent strands, and sift academic research, popular writing and phenomenological evidence to buttress the case for the thesis, and then to explore the implications.
If indeed society’s evolving transformation can be shown to be a natural maturing of an organic system through its inherently preprogrammed middle-phase developmental stage, analogous to for example human adolescence or the scientific phase in organizational development and middle phase developmental phases elsewhere, then implications may be drawn for addressing many of society’s thorniest problems, including environmental sustainability, income inequality, social isolation, and governance reform, and more.
The Foundation issues grants for academic research and writing of books, magazine articles, blogs, construction of websites, and pursuit of other promotional activities, the theme of which is to research, enlighten and awaken humanity as to its historical situation within in its adolescent and thus give it a collective purpose of maturation. Studies may draw from academic research into living systems, emergence theory, evolutionary biology, as well as philosophy, political science, sociology and other disciplines, but also on analygous reasoning and speculative tri-partite analysis of mater-energy-information holisms, the holisms manifesting both cross-sectionally in human society at a point in time, and sequentially in an early, middle and late phase holistic developmental pattern.