Before presenting evidence supporting society’s adolescent metamorphosis, let’s consider the intention of and rationale for this especially long-term developmental model spanning centuries. Given such a perspective, do ideals play a role, and if so, how?
Everyone needs to believe in something, to give life direction and meaning. It could be family, career, religion, science, consumerism, a hobby, a cause. Ideals are beacons that can give direction to our lives. We believe in them. Is there a belief and a passion we all can share? God and gods have mostly lost their credibility. The limitations of science are increasingly acknowledged. Reason may be a current god, but rationality goes only so far; it’s proved fallible. Standing up for the planet’s environment? It has an obvious unifying and global appeal because it impacts us all. The idea of a maturing global society is a constructive belief that includes environmental activism as just one piece of a much broader transformation. A maturing global society could become a common denominator belief system among disparate factions and peoples globally. The hypothesis might be a reality, whether we believe it or not; believing would simply help it along. If we believe in a maturing society, an image of the mature society, one that approaches its potential, becomes our ideal and a beacon.
Ideals and an image of mature potentiality point us in a progressive direction. But not all organisms reach maturity. Human society may fail to develop healthily even if the three-stage developmental model proves applicable. And yet, imagining an objective, a goal for societal adolescence, what we would like society to achieve and what might be possible in its hypothetical adolescent stage, is a worthwhile exercise as it can inspire, guide, and thus align us as individuals with the collective human project to help society grow up, unfold and progress. Envisioning a societal project we can all believe in can give purpose and meaning to us individually as belonging to that collective endeavor.
Some goals are short term and others longer. Ideals are just very long term goals. There are long-term goals suitable for society’s eventual actualization in its distant adulthood maturity and shorter-term or intermediate goals or ideals appropriate for societal adolescence. Some goals and utopias are ill-defined and abstract, such as heaven on earth, the millennial kingdom, a land of milk and honey, or an end to physical toil. Some ideals exist within a specific context, such as racial and gender equality or an end to wars. My interest here is those intermediate but still distant ideals applicable to society in its adolescence, ideals that relate to the structure of society. This includes but is by no means limited to best governance practice, environmental sustainability, minimizing alienation. Plato and Aristotle were perhaps the first to explore the details of ideal governance and social structure. Many others since have delved much deeper. It’s an exercise with a long history.
But three distinct types of political ideals stand out as spanning the broad range of philosophical alternatives: capitalism, communism, and cooperativism. The three can be seen as defined along material, bureaucratic and spiritual dimensions respectively. Their differences come down to which dimension they prioritize.
Thomas Piketty demonstrated that unbridled free enterprise, i.e. capitalism in its purest form, leads to the concentration of capital, which in turn leads to maximal savings, investment, and maximal economic growth for society as a whole. The economy reaches maximal physical size, a societal ideal along the material dimension, but ignores distributive justice, the negative consequences to those without resources and therefore without voice in the marketplace. The poor, the natural environment, public resources generally, future generations, none of which participate in the market, are discounted. The unfairness and damage to these people and interests detract from overall societal well-being. The disenfranchised may or may not, in the end, receive fair treatment, depending on the beneficence, selflessness and maturity of the rich.
By contrast, communism, in its purest form, by collectivizing the means of production and centrally planning all aspects of the economy, ideally for the collective good, addresses fairness, the distribution of income and wealth wealth and also public externalities. In the process, it needs to collect, organize, and analyze vast amounts of economic data and, in so doing, maximize the bureaucratic apparatus that manages all those economic variables, a function that market economies achieve spontaneously without bureaucracy. Thus ideal of communism maximizes an information bureaucracy, one that extends from the center out to the very edges of society, with a hand in every single material transaction. It represents an ideal in the sense of bureaucratic extension and control, a maximand along an informational and structural dimension.
The essence of cooperativism, sometimes called communitarianism or utopian socialism, is maximal decentralization of hierarchy and authority with the aim of empowering individuals to become fully engaged in whatever organization and endeavor they’re involved in, thereby boosting their sense of connection, meaning, purpose and spiritual vitality. Anti-trust and other measures defend and promote small scale enterprise. The maximand is spiritual vitality, the energy dimension of human existence.
Is there some overarching ideal that acknowledges and incorporates the benefits and objectives of all three models? Consider how as individuals we naturally find a balance between body, mind and spirit, or emotions. Over the course of a day, moment or lifetime we may engage our physical, thinking and emotional faculties sequentially, simultaneously or in various degrees. Too much of one exclusive type of effort, be it physical, mental or emotional, brings us to a point of exhaustion, and we switch gears. A rhythm unfolds. A whirlpool balances centripetal and centrifugal forces rhythmically. Is there a comparable mechanism or spontaneous means by which society might simultaneously strive for material abundance while efficiently managing collective concerns and facilitating maximal spiritual vitality?