INTRODUCTION PART I PART II PART III Page 1 Page 2 PART IV Page 1 Page 2 PART V NOTES Notes 1-8 Notes 9-19 Notes 20-30

     Let's pause in the theoretical account and give some concrete historical examples of the emergence of new probability waves, using as a point of departure some of Karl Marx's enduring insights about sociocultural transformation.

     We hear much today of the need for transformation, the need for new paradigms, and even the need for a "revolution" in society, and certainly in leadership and new modes of thinking. What we see less of is any in-depth analysis of what actually constitutes societal transformation, genuinely new paradigms, or authentic revolutions. So let us see if an AQAL analysis of these key terms--transformation, paradigm, revolution--can shed any light.

Base and Superstructure Must Tetra-Mesh

     Start with the nature of some of the major and acknowledged societal transformations that we have seen in history--such as from foraging to agrarian, or magic to mythic, or feudal to industrial. What drives these major shifts or transformations from one mode to the next?

     One of Marx's central points, and a point that still rings true, is that around a particular "base" or mode of techno-economic production (e.g., foraging), there grows a particular worldview or "superstructure" (e.g., a magical worldview). Now for Marx, of course, the base (LR) determines the superstructure (LL), whereas for us they tetra-evolve (as a play of all four selection pressures). It is not that "the base" is more real or more fundamental, and "the superstructure" is an afterthought resting on and determined by the prior material base. Rather, they both arise together and mutually tetra-act as part of the AQAL matrix. (We will still refer to "base" and "superstructure," but unless otherwise stated, we mean the AQAL version.)

     One of the easiest ways to get a sense of the important ideas that Marx was advancing is to look at more recent research (such as Lenski's) on the relation of techno-economic modes of production (foraging, horticultural, herding, maritime, agrarian, industrial, informational) to cultural practices such as slavery, bride price, warfare, patrifocality, matrifocality, gender of prevailing deities, and so on. With frightening uniformity, similar techno-economic modes have similar probabilities of those cultural practices (showing just how strongly the particular probability waves are tetra-meshed).

     For example, over 90% of societies that have female-only deities are horticultural societies. 97% of herding societies, on the other hand, are strongly patriarchal. 37% of foraging tribes have bride price, but 86% of advanced horticultural do. 58% of known foraging tribes engaged in frequent or intermittent warfare, but an astonishing 100% of simple horticultural did so.

     The existence of slavery is perhaps most telling. Around 10% of foraging tribes have slavery, but 83% of advanced horticultural do. The only societal type to completely outlaw slavery was patriarchal industrial societies, 0% of which sanction slavery.

     In short, the type of techno-economic base of a society constrains its various probability waves in very strong ways. Thus, it appears that there is a crucially important (if partial) truth contained in Marx's most famous statement about these facts, namely (to paraphrase): "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their reality but their economic-material realties that determine their consciousness." That is, the Lower-Right quadrant (which includes the techno-economic base) clearly has a profound influence on the types of beliefs, feelings, ideas, and worldviews of men and women. For us, of course, this is in every way an AQAL affair--we needn't buy into Marx's tendency to absolutize the LR quadrant. At the same time, it is very hard indeed to overestimate the impact of the LR quadrant on the various modes of consciousness and culture.

     There is another way to state this important point: namely, third-person materialities have a profound effect on first- and second-person realities. That was Marx's essential and enduring insight, and it remains true to this day because it reflects an important aspect of the AQAL matrix.

     To continue Marx's historical overview: around a particular techno-economic base grows a particular superstructure of cultural beliefs and worldviews. But sooner or later there occur technological innovations (which means, for example, that at some historical moment, some forager figured out how to plant seeds and harvest crops--thus moving from a foraging base to a horticultural base). Precisely because there are obvious survival advantages to planting and harvesting (advantages so obvious that virtually all foragers adopted them if necessary), the techno-economic base fairly quickly transformed from foraging to horticultural. Once this happened in more and more tribal holons, it eventually settled into a Kosmic habit in the LR available readily to subsequent holons.

     But the fascinating point that Marx spotted was this: the technological innovation happens very fast (in the LR), simply because you can change the materials of production fairly quickly: put down your bow and arrow, pick up a hoe, dig a hole like this, put in the beans, watch. But the superstructure--the worldview, the cultural accoutrements of religion, meaning, beliefs, shared values, and so on (LL)--moves much more slowly, because this involves not just picking up a new piece of matter (in the Right-Hand world), but an interior subjective transformation of consciousness (in the Left Hand)--a notoriously slow and difficult process. Therefore, with almost any widespread technological innovation, the superstructure of values and beliefs now lags behind the transformations in the techno-economic base. In short, there is a disjuncture between LL and LR (between old superstructure and new base, between old paradigm and new realities, between old culture and new social system, between old meaning and new functional fit, between old semantics and new syntax). And that spells disaster.

     As we would put it, technological innovations, in order to be innovations that actually supplant their predecessors, are ones that are more evolved and carry more depth (i.e., in this case, planting that is attuned to the seasonal cycling of nature demands extensive foresight and temporal planning--demands, that is, a conop wave of cognition, whereas much of foraging-in-the-moment demands only preop). This increased technological depth (the product of increased cognitive depth) is evidenced in the fact that technological innovations show an irreversible evolutionary sequence. That is, if we look at the technological evolution from foraging to horticultural to agrarian to industrial to informational, that sequence is never run in the reverse. Barring social disintegration, no industrial society ever decided to go back to agrarian, which decided to go back to horticultural, which decided to go back to foraging. There is an Eros to the sequence: time's arrow, as Prigogine would say, is asymmetrically evolutionary.

     In short, this increased technological depth (in the LR) from foraging to horticultural could now support an increased depth in the worldview (in the LL)--namely, a move from magic to mythic. But the foraging tribes that first started horticultural planting still had a magical worldview that was adapted to, or tetra-meshed with, the old foraging mode. Thus, there was a disjuncture, a friction, a contradiction, between base and superstructure (for us, between LR and LL). They had a techno-economic base capable of supporting a new and advanced mythic worldview, but they were stuck with an "old paradigm"--the old magical worldview adapted to a foraging base that no longer existed as the significant mode of production. (As Marx would put it, the relations of production were out of sync with the forces of production.)

     Because the LL and LR no longer meshed, something had to give: some quadrant will get a painful deconstruction. There will have to be a profound cultural revolution to in order to tetra-mesh with the techno-social revolution that just occurred.

     It was Marx's genius to spot these internal tensions and contradictions between base and superstructure (LR and LL) as new techno-economic bases historically emerged, and he intuitively understood that if there is not tetra-mesh, all hell is about to break loose, as the newly rising culture (meshed with the new base) is attacked by the old culture (functionally fitted to the old base). This is usually translated as the idea that history is driven by class warfare, but the crucial point for Marx was that classes themselves are defined in relation to a particular mode of production--the warfare is between different techno-economic modes and the worldviews they support. As new technological modes emerge, more progressive and expansive worldviews become available, but societal revolutions are often required to put the quadrants back in sync (more about this in a moment). Time, history, depth, and Eros are on the side of the newly rising culture, but the transition from the old paradigm to the new paradigm is usually less than pleasant.

     To put it bluntly, one of the main causes of culture wars is that there is a break in the AQAL matrix, a disjuncture between LL and LR that tears the communal fabric, often violently. And that happens because transformations in the LR or techno-economic base (which only involves changing matter) can be put into play much more quickly than changes in the LL, superstructure, culture, or reigning worldview (which demands a change, not just in material, but in consciousness). Thus, as is often said, technological developments run ahead of our wisdom in how to use them (among other things).

     Now, of course, this is not a one-time or singular affair. What Marx failed to see is what virtually everybody else has failed to see in this regard: it is not that each society has a single monolithic technological mode and a single monolithic worldview, and that the two somehow have to match up. Rather, each society is a spectrum of AQAL actualities: there are individuals at every level of the spectrum of consciousness, at least up to the average level of that culture (with a few moving beyond). And there are pockets of every mode of techno-production up to the leading edge: even in industrial societies, there are red street gangs foraging for their existence, and the farmers of Kansas are still out there planting seeds. So there is no single base and no single superstructure, such that an internal contradiction between them could propel the major transformations that have marked history. Marx's general idea--that of a mismatch between LL and LR causing internal communal contradictions and tensions--is still true, but the mismatch spans the spectrum of consciousness up to the highest average wave in that society, and in all four quadrants with their many waves and streams (all of which have to tetra-mesh in the AQAL configuration, or something has to give).

     In the modern West, the major culture wars involve not just traditional versus modern versus postmodern values, but techno-economic modes of farming, industrialization, and informational sectors, with worldviews of mythic, rational, and pluralistic (respectively and correlatively). In the nonwestern world, the major conflicts are between tribal-foraging and mythic-agrarian at war with modern-industrial and postmodern-pluralistic modes.

     Thus, the socio-cultural tensions (and legitimation crises) span the spectrum, with various cultures and sub-cultures in various mixtures of stable and unstable mesh. With regard to the LR social system and its techno-economic base, what generally happens is that a technological innovation begins in the mind of some creative individual (UL)--James Watt and the steam engine, for example. This novel idea is communicated to others through the inventor's verbal and cognitive behavior (UR), until a small group of individuals eventually understands the idea (LL). If the idea is compelling enough, it is eventually translated into concrete forms (e.g., the building of actual steam engines), which now become part of the socio-economic base (LR). Precisely because adopting the base requires only a change in material, and not a change in consciousness, then the technological revolution can speed through the social system extremely quickly--leaving the old cultural worldview completely out of sync with the new realities.

     To change that cultural worldview requires, of course, a difficult subjective transformation of consciousness in order to tetra-mesh with the new social realities of increased depth. And the only way that generally happens is: a group of individuals who have precociously developed to the higher wave of culture and consciousness eventually--through means peaceful or not--end up at the helm of a novel governance system whose characteristics are those of the new probability wave (in consciousness, culture, and technics)--that is, the same new wave that produced the new technics.

     Thus, for example, concrete operational cognition, which produced horticultural technology, could also support a move from preconventional tribal governance to sociocentric, conventional, trans-tribal forms of governance that united various tribes into larger non-kinship-lineage political blocks, as well as a shift from magic worldview to mythic worldview. And in turn, the new horticultural technics itself, created by and embodying a greater cognitive depth, supported and actively inculcated a mythic worldview: hence the tetra-evolution. (Marx was right in that, for most people, the techno-economic base is a major determinant of their consciousness; but he overlooked where the base originally came from: namely, the consciousness of the inventor, which clearly determined the base. In other words, Marx overlooked the AQAL matrix and tended to absolutize the Lower-Right quadrant, an absolutism we needn't share in order to appreciate his important if partial truths.)

     Likewise, formal operational cognition, which could produce a steam engine, could also support the move from conventional to postconventional modes of governance (e.g., from aristocracy to representative republican democracy)--as well as a shift from mythic to rational worldview--so that, once again, all of the quadrants, at the same level of depth, would tetra-inculcate the others.

     Using the example of the shift from tribal-magic-foraging to village-mythic-horticultural, even though the new mythic culture is governed from the leading-edge of collective evolution, nonetheless there are still pockets and subcultures of archaic and magic values--the existence of which causes internal culture wars of great significance (the historical battles between magic and mythic are legendary; see Up from Eden). So it is not that there is simply a wrenching culture war between one epoch and another, but that within any given epoch, there are internal culture wars representing the pockets of Kosmic habits still available on their own.

Paradigms

     Incidentally, this account of historical change via AQAL selection pressures is consonant with Kuhn's observations on scientific revolutions, which are simply a subset of the AQAL transformational matrix we are outlining. Briefly: certain factual discoveries in the Right-Hand world cannot be accounted for by any scientific worldview in the Left Hand, and thus a severe disjuncture occurs between base and superstructure, such that an often painful revolution in belief structures and worldviews is now required to keep pace with factual information. Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, outlined hundreds of such paradigm shifts or revolutions in scientific practice.

     The way Kuhn used the term "paradigm," of course, has been badly misunderstood by the public and by most critics and appropriators of the term, who incorrectly use it to mean some sort of theory or super theory. Fritjof Capra, Stan Grof, Duane Elgin, Richard Tarnas, Charlene Spretnak--the list is virtually endless--would say that a new holistic or ecological theory should replace the old atomistic, Newtonian-Cartesian worldview, and that would be a new paradigm. But that typically incorrect use has Kuhn exactly backward. "Paradigm," for Kuhn, does not mean the theory or the superstructure, but the base or social practice. Paradigm is an almost exact equivalent of techno-economic base, social practice, behavioral injunction, or exemplar.

     That is, a paradigm is a set of social practices and behavioral exemplars--specific types of experiments, for example, that generate a specific set of data or factual occasions. A paradigm, exemplar, or injunction brings forth, enacts, and illumines a particular set of phenomena, data, experiences, or apprehensions. (This is why my own broad theory of good science has three major strands: injunction or paradigm, enacted data or apprehensions, and confirmation/rejection. The first strand was modeled to take account of Kuhn's important work, while setting it in a larger context of phenomenology, falsifiability, and other equally important if partial factors.)

     Thus a paradigm, as Kuhn used it, might be a particular set of experiments that produce X-rays. These experiments, injunctions, or social practices (the Lower Right) becomes the models or exemplars of how good science in that field is to be done. Other scientists use and model those exemplary practices to produce (enact and bring forth) more data, phenomena, or factual occasions. And--almost exactly as in Marx (because they were both onto the AQAL nature of this thing)--around this base or paradigm (LR) grow various superstructures, theories, or worldviews (LL) that are molded and determined by the base.

     Thus, for example, around an entire set of physical experiments and paradigms had grown the entire edifice of Newtonian physics theory. That is, around the LR base of technological production grew LL theories and worldviews. Or again, around the LR base of data production and injunctive paradigms (which enact and bring forth various types of data, experiences, and phenomena) grew various LL theories, superstructures, and worldviews that attempted to explain the factually enacted data. The base or paradigm helps determine the consciousness of the scientists in this regard (just as the techno-economic base helps determine the consciousness of individual in any society--although, again, for us it is an AQAL affair that does not privilege any single quadrant, level, line, or state). As we saw with Marx, the essential point is that third-person materialities have a profound effect on first- and second-person realities.

     This arrangement--which is Kuhn's "normal science"--works well as long as the data generated by the paradigm continues to fit within the prevailing worldview. The Newtonian theory, for instance, worked very well for a very long time to explain all of the data that had been generated to date. With a few exceptions... such as black body radiation. That is, as more and more sophisticated experiments were invented, new data were generated that could not in any way be explained by the old theories. Thus, the base of technological production--the new paradigm--was generating experiences that could not be accounted for by the old theories. The new base needed a new worldview, and thus science was set for yet another "revolution," or dramatic change in worldview to account for the progressive increase in depth of the new paradigm demanding an increase in depth in a new theory.

     And yes, this was scientific progress, as Kuhn made very clear ("I am a firm believer in scientific progress"), again showing his (correct, I believe) agreement with Marx in this essential regard (namely, there is a progressive Eros to the sequence, or else "revolutions" are not really revolutionary but are merely the old cyclical going nowhere).

     Of course, virtually all of today's "new paradigm" theorists--including all of the authors just mentioned, and literally hundreds of others--claimed that they had a new paradigm, when in fact they had no such thing. All they had was a new theory, not a new base, not a new set of injunctions to generate new data, not a new exemplar at all. The wildly popular version of "paradigm" had the cart before the horse, and simply presented a new theory with no new paradigms at all--that is, the "new paradigms" were entirely a boomeritis version of Kuhn's important research (see Boomeritis, chap. 8).

     Whenever a new (and real) paradigm enacts and brings forth new data, the old worldviews and theories are thrown into a crisis that can only be resolved by a progressive increase in depth to keep pace with the increase in depth in the new paradigm or techno-productive base. Whether this crisis (or paradigm clash--which means, clash between various technological forces of data production, or a clash between the types of experiments and exemplars that will be taken as producing the most significant data)--whether this crisis is resolved through overt revolution or quieter reform (see below), the results are the same: an increase in depth in both Lower Right and Lower Left (and therefore Upper Right and Upper Left for all those involved). In short, all four selection pressures in AQAL space swing into play and conspire to move Eros yet another notch forward in the Kosmic game. (This does not mean that all progress is sweetness and light; as we will see below, new progress and new pathologies often go hand in hand, but that fact in itself is not enough to deny the aspects of development that can and do represent genuine and progressive increases in depth.)

     But let us immediately note that a paradigm clash is actually a small subset of a much larger and more important phenomena, so let us move forward to that larger discussion.

Legitimation Crisis

     A paradigm clash is actually a good example of what is more generally known as a legitimation crisis.

     First, a few technical terms. In my own approach, legitimacy refers to adequacy in horizontal translation, and authenticity refers to adequacy in vertical transformation (see, e.g., A Sociable God, CW4). Thus, authenticity is a measure of the degree of depth or height of a belief system (so that a turquoise worldview is more authentic than a blue worldview), and legitimacy is a measure of how well that worldview functions at its own level. A particular worldview can be very legitimate (or happily accepted by most members of the culture) but not very authentic (e.g., it might be a purple or red belief structure). On the other hand, some worldviews might be very authentic (representing, say, turquoise or vision-logic cognitions) and yet not very legitimate (or not accepted by the ruling or ruled classes).

     A legitimation crisis, in the broadest sense, is a breakdown in the adequacy of a particular mode of translating and making sense of the world--that is, a breakdown in the adequacy of a particular worldview and its capacity to command allegiance. This can occur in any culture or subculture (including the scientific, as we just saw), but it has particular relevance in the political arena. Thus, a governing body (chieftain, ruler, monarch, plutocracy, aristocracy, democracy, etc.) is said to be legitimate if it is widely accepted by the governed (or if, alternatively, there are good legal/moral reasons for supporting it). Legitimation is the process by which members of a society believe (and thus follow) the governing bodies of that society. And theories of legitimacy attempt to explain (and/or justify) why a particular governing system has the acceptance and allegiance of its members (the explanatory reasons for this acceptance can range across a spectrum from mere functionality at one end to more substantive reasons at the other).

     A political legitimation crisis therefore means a sociocultural crisis in the prevailing modes of translation (at any given level) in reference to the governance systems of that culture (whether that culture be political, scientific, medical, educational, etc.). A legitimation crisis, in the broadest sense, is a crisis of faith in the prevailing worldview and in the governing bodies representing that worldview.¹²

     At the turn of the century, Max Weber authored an extremely influential treatise (Economy and Society) in which he identified three major sources of political legitimacy (or reasons that people have followed a particular governance system or regime): customs or traditions; legal-rational procedures (e.g., voting); and individual charisma. Although those three sources of political legitimation do indeed exist, Weber's analysis of those sources of legitimacy was mostly functional--that is, those sources were not viewed as good or right, but simply as ones that have worked. This essentially functionalist view of legitimacy continues (implicitly or explicitly) to be embraced by most systems theorists, including most famously Niklas Luhmann.

     Other theorists, disturbed that Weber's analysis was merely functional and not moral or normative (and thus could be used to confer legitimacy on, say, the Nazis, as long as they functionally worked--i.e., in functionalism, legitimacy is reduced to the state's capacity to generate belief in its legitimacy: the standard systems theory reduction of all Left-Hand values to LR functional fit), have added other views of legitimacy and its justification, particularly those focusing on rights (a view running through Hobbes, Locke, Kant, Rawls, Habermas). In this view, a governance system is legitimate (and thus deserves the allegiance of its members) if it guarantees certain human rights, usually secured through some form of social contract between the governed and the governing. We will return to this important view in a moment.

     A fifth view of legitimacy might be added, namely, the postmodern, which abandons a search for universal grounds of justification and returns to local narrative traditions under the banner of plurality and diversity (at which point it becomes pragmatically indistinguishable from the first form of legitimacy, that of customs/traditions, and thus is forced to justify every form of local barbarism: as with so much of postmodernism, it degenerates into regressive displays).

      Now, all of those sources and views of legitimacy (rightly or wrongly) are present in today's world, including traditional customs, charismatic leadership, and implicit or explicit social contracts. A legitimation crisis occurs when the belief in the governing worldview and its representatives begins to break down, and this breakdown is in every way an AQAL affair--factors from all the quadrants, levels, lines, states, and types swing into play, summarized as "selection pressures in all four quadrants"--and if this turbulence is severe enough, then "societal revolutions" are often set into motion.

Societal Revolutions

     During any widespread political legitimation crisis (just as we saw with any profound scientific crisis), when turbulence in the AQAL matrix reaches a critical threshold point, translation breaks down and transformation ensues--that is, horizontal modes of translation cease to be effective and vertical transformation to new modes altogether are required in order to meet the new selection pressures.

     But "societal transformation" can be either progressive or regressive--that is, the vertical shift in levels can be either breakthrough or breakdown, a leap to higher levels of organizational complexity or a retreat to lower, less complex, more primitive states. We will see examples of both.

     At the same time, many "societal revolutions" are really neither higher nor lower; they are simply different ways of translating at essentially the same level of culture, consciousness, and complexity. In fact, the original meaning of "revolution" was not progressive or transformational at all, but merely circular. That is, for virtually all political theorists throughout most of history, a social or political "revolution" was not any major breakthrough to a higher or deeper level of anything, but merely a cyclical, circular, or revolving affair--the very word "revolution" comes from "revolving," and it meant just that, a revolving "same ole same ole" pattern basically going nowhere. Thus, Plato and Aristotle analyzed the cyclical changes in governments from aristocracies to tyrannies to democracies and back again. Renaissance Italian scholars introduced the term revoluziones to describe the alternating pattern of popular and aristocratic factions. Thomas Hobbes used the English word revolution to describe the circular transfer of power from king to parliament and back again. Nothing in any of those changes was thought to be progressive, permanent, or transformational.

      And then, for the first time in history, "revolution" was used by a political theorist to mean a vertical shift or transformation to higher levels or modes of being and governance. The theorist? No surprise: Karl Marx (and Frederich Engels), in The Communist Manifesto (1848), which attempted to demonstrate that all of history is actually a series of revolutions (or higher transformations) tied to economic progress. Believers in transformation and new paradigms have been talking about their "revolutionary" new ideas ever since.

      Still, as we were saying, Marx was on to a series of enduring insights. First and foremost, he was writing in the wake of the historical realization that history is significant: that is, the realization that evolution touches all areas of the manifest world. This crucial insight, first enacted by the orange probability wave--and intensified with yellow--had driven the profound changes in humanity's understanding of itself that were expressed in the rise of the evolutionary interpretations of the Kosmos that began to appear in everything from biology (Darwin) to sociology (Spencer, Comte) to psychology (Baldwin) to philosophy (Schelling, Hegel): not only species, but ideas themselves evolve and have a history.

     It was Marx's peculiar genius to realize the need to link these evolutionary historical unfoldings to techno-economic structures (even if he went a bit overboard), and that is why it is always a good idea to at least touch bases with Marx whenever we talk of social "transformations" and "revolutions," because otherwise the discussion becomes focused merely on changes in ideas, consciousness, or culture, without understanding the absolute necessity of linking any real changes to the Lower-Right quadrant of social materialities as well. (As we saw, a real paradigm is a LR social practice, not a LL theory or worldview--as we earlier put it, third-person materialities have a profound effect on first- and second-person realities--and it was Marx who first spotted that crucially important point.)

     For Marx, history was therefore marked (at least in part) by a series of revolutions linked to progressive (or vertically transformative) changes in techno-economic capacity. In each case, an older, more primitive, backward, and often oppressive economic class (with its outmoded worldview, philosophies, and belief structures), which had benefited from the old techno-economic base, was overturned by a new and rising class whose power stemmed from more advanced forces of techno-economic production. The important moment of truth in all this is that there is indeed a slow, overall Eros to the sequence--there is a slowly increasing developmental depth in cognition, culture, and techno-economic forces of production (rock to spear to plow to steam engine to computer). And if a particular societal crisis happens to occur on the cusp of one of those major increases in developmental depth, then the only thing that will resolve the tension and turbulence in the AQAL space is a vertical social transformation and cultural revolution (or, at the least, profound cultural reform). In short, the only real cure for a crisis in legitimacy is an increase in authenticity.

     Marx's initial insights into that process are sound and enduring. But, much like Freud, although Marx's general ideas were often sound, he got virtually every detail wrong. And his notorious reductionism, also like Freud's, is something we can happily jettison. (Marx's statement that we earlier quoted--"It is not the consciousness of men that determines their reality but their economic-material realties that determine their consciousness"--becomes interesting only insofar as the meaning of the word "determines" approaches "causes," which in fact in never does. Rather, the social-economic realities of the LR are part of the crucial elements that tetra-determine the nature of any actual occasion.) But for just that (limited) reason, Marx's insights are an important part of any AQAL analysis of social transformation and cultural revolution. Every revolution, every transformation, every shift in consciousness and culture that actually sticks has of necessity a Lower-Right component, and if that component is not present and prominent, you can dismiss any claims to have a new paradigm, a great transformation, or a new and revolutionary anything.

      For the most part, of course, most political "revolutions" have not been riding the cusp of any truly vertical shift in any of the quadrants. Like mutations in nature, revolutions in politics are usually lethal, not beneficial, or are at most what their name originally meant, merely a circular or superficial change of the guard in the fundamentally same underlying regime (i.e., they are a surface structure shuffling in the same deep structure in AQAL space). Only a small handful of true revolutions are riding the cusp of Eros. The American revolution caught the beginning wave from blue to orange, and therefore represented a profound vertical transformation. But in the twentieth century there have been over a hundred "revolutions"--most of them merely a barbaric reshuffling of the cards.

     As one historian has pointed out, "What is perhaps most striking about revolutions in this century is their sheer volume and variety. From the beginning to the end, in every area of the world, revolutions have shaped political life." Mexico, Saudi Arabia, China, Turkey, Iran, Russia, Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Vietnam, Algeria, Nicaragua, Argentina, the Congo, Zimbabwe, Cuba, Columbia, Portugal, the Philippines, Cambodia--the list of twentieth-century revolutions is virtually endless. Few of these revolutions were hooked to any vertical current in any of the quadrants, but rather were "cyclical" or surface-structure changes in essentially the same AQAL space. Call these "horizontal revolutions," if you will.

     Historians, such as Jack Goldstone, have identified four major factors that account for most of these horizontal revolutions, and the more of these factors you find in the AQAL configuration of any given culture, the more likely there will be a (horizontal) political revolution:

     1. A weakened government, usually due to economic reasons. This weakness leaves an opening for a revolutionary coup.

     2. A change in the balance of power between the major elites in the culture. Typical elites include army officers, political leaders, high bureaucrats, cultural and religious leaders, labor and business leaders, and intellectuals. These elites usually compete for power following various implicitly understood "rules of the game" in that culture, but occasionally, due to various factors, there is an upset in elite power distribution and one elite seizes control or a new elite emerges--"such elite leadership is a prerequisite for revolutions" (Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World). Contributing to elite turmoil in the AQAL matrix are international trade of goods and ideas, new investment, foreign aid, military support, new economic modes and opportunities.

     3. Rapid population growth, which tends to increase poverty and resource depletion, undermines workers and peasants, and stresses governments.

     4. Erratic international intervention. International consensus often halts revolutions, and lack of it encourages them.

     Empirically it has been the case that the more of those factors present in any society, the greater the likelihood a revolution will occur. As we would put it, the more of those factors that are present in the AQAL configuration of any society, then the greater the probability that this AQAL space will also contain, as an actual occasion, a legitimation crisis that will reach a critical threshold, followed by a (horizontal) political-social revolution.

     Further, scholars agree that such revolutions increase nationalism, mass mobilization, and state power, all of which often lead to war, which are common byproducts of revolution.

     The only places in today's world not touched by those four factors are Europe and North America, which means that the rest of the world is still open to--and will very likely continue to suffer--violent revolutionary altercations, and human suffering will rise proportionately.

     In fact, apart from the world wars, the most human suffering in the twentieth century has come from revolutions and subsequent attempts to prop up revolutionary institutions: in the Soviet union, Eastern and Central Europe, China, Africa, Asia, Cambodia: tens of millions of people were executed, starved, tortured, or imprisoned to create revolutionary states, all of which promised sovereignty to the people when the people were nowhere near capable or even desirous of such. The difficult fact for "revolutionaries" of all varieties--political to academic to cultural--to realize is that an authentic revolution is in every way an AQAL affair, demanding not just a "new paradigm," not just a new worldview, not just a new techno-economic base, not just a new social system, and not just a new set of ideas--but all of them and all together. Failing that, social revolutions are more often than not simply an occasion for more human carnage of one variety or another.