The diagram above plots a life-line of any cultural meme.  In our analysis, any given meme has the four aspects: Substance, Style, Syntax, Spirit.  These aspects may or may not be parsimoniously integrated.  Note that the intial periods of Emergence and getting a "foothold" that we term Viability may be quite lengthy in time.  The time period is in some fashion directly proportional to the "size" of the meme.  That is, "Big Ideas" take a long time to gestate and establish themselves.

Congruently, for a meme to become codified into cultural practices and social institutions in a sustainable fashion, also may take a long time.

Because the intitial and ultimate stages usually involve long time-scales, their continuing unfolding is usually imperceptible to the ordinary attention span.  They are for the most part subliminal.

The period of Acceptance-Flowering-Ripeness is when the meme comes to the conscious attention of the group who are the subject/context of the meme.  Then things happen fast, again in proper scale.

The diagram also shows that at any particular stage of the Life-line, there are ranges of outcomes possible, their overall range set by past unfolding as available for expression in the present contexts.  Thus the main path shown represents perhaps an ideal Life-line shape of a smooth sigmoid curve.  In real Life there is nothing smooth about a meme's unfolding.

Introduction

For those of you who have found this page, we offer the basic theoretical underpinnings of our approach.

The main thrust of the Fair Planet analysis of the human condition has been to:

• Understand the development of human consciousness in its cultural dimensions
• Understand the dynamics of key human interactions in their individual and group manifestations
• Understand how general evolutionary principles involve embodying holarchies of dynamic wholes
• Understand how a combination of natural precepts and teleological propositions can inspire universal moral and ethical guidelines for the Human Project

We introduce these topics briefly on this page. Each introduction contains a number of links which lead to pages where aspects of our thinking are explained with more rigor and in greater detail. There, you will also find links to outside websites which contain additional relevant discourse.

Cultural Dimensions of Human Development

The key point here is that individual and social self-development of by self-aware, growing-in-autonomy, self-conscious beings proceeds wholly unlike any "natural" evolution. This is because the active role of such beings creates a completely different "playing field", one that is constantly being reshaped to each of the participants' advantage, often regardless of feedback from the situational contexts.

Human Interactions

A self-aware entity/system, living or non-living, seeks to optimize its possible world-line both synchronically - at any given time, and diachronically - over a span of time. Here we are concerned with the latter aspect. The ability to predict - or better yet, control - the future is essential to this task. Here we can distinguish three primary approaches that can be taken. Of course, no active entity/system is able or chooses to pursue any single tactic exclusively. Still we can characterize them to a reasonable degree for the purpose of our discussion.

The way of power for an entity/system is to exercise force to control a given system's milieu, in order to limit the range of contexts, and to skew the feedback so that only those outcomes perceived (by itself) to be favorable are likely or at all possible.

The way of prowess for an entity/system is to exercise ingenuity to expand the its range of possibilities so that a greater flexibility of responses to feedback is built up. This enables it to simultaneously "go with the flow" and to a create a favorable outcome for itself.

The way of passivity for an entity/system is to exercise accomodation to adopt itself to the prevailing power relationship it is subject to.

General Evolutionary Principles

Our understanding and interpretation of these principles sees them as applying to every process, be it physical or in the realm of consciousness.  The incalculable number of interactions occuring simultaneously in any selected level or scope of  Being and Becoming generate anew possibilities of not just mere change, but of evolution.  We can therefore define evolution as a set of changes which promote arising of novel answers to the challenges of Being and Becoming.  This implies that certain simple changes ultimately don't make a evolutionary difference.

Universal Moral and Ethical Precepts

Without adopting a new universal morality and a new code of universal ethics to guide us, we are likely to be limited in our choice of workable solutions leading toward a Fair Planet. Existing moral codes, those subscribed to by majority of humanity, are primarily proferred by the major religious institutions. Each has its own "blind spot" due to circumstances of its historical development within the context and confines of a particular group of cultures.

Criteria derived from analysis of natural holoarchies provide a reasonably neutral "yardstick" to enable us to assess/ characterize the degree of life-enhancing ethos of a given culture. Neutral, in the sense that when reviewing a culture's technological accomplishments in terms of the amount of energy/matter that can be controlled and used, it implies evaluation of whether this control and use are actually benefitting life, or instead represent control only for the sake of centralizing power in the hands of the elites.