My first book is quite long. I think it’s worth your time, though.
One of my main hopes was to introduce you and other readers to a pair of concepts: Metacrisis and metarevolution. This post quotes the key definitions and mentions of both found throughout the 486 pages of my book. These selections do not have to be read from start to finish, but it may provide a useful overview of my book’s content. At the very least it is an organized list for anyone wishing to reference quotes on either of the two key concepts of metacrisis and metarevolution.
Metacrisis
In recognition of what some have started to call a metacrisis, there is a growing need for a higher-order revolutionary framework—one which isomorphically matches the growing complexity of our interconnected crises. This book proposes that we must first be metarevolutionaries before we can be effective in the revolutionary domain, much less the political and social domains of our daily lives. So let us turn revolution upon itself and radically transform the underlying conditions of radical transformation. We will take on our metacrisis with a metarevolution, and also demonstrate metarevolutionary principles which will be applicable to any future metacrisis.
We live in a time of too-many-crises-to-count. They are all swirling in shared waters—blurring the edges between them. Because of this, there will be many varieties of crises and revolutions which are not specifically addressed in this book. But therein lies the metarevolutionary mindset: We are addressing all of these areas at once. Some readers may find it callous that some specific crisis was not addressed directly. Yet, please believe, all such crises (and their resolutions) are the subject of this book. This manifesto is not meant to devalue the things you care about by leaving them out, but to empower you with brand new tools and perspectives by approaching what you care about from new perspectives. The shift in perspective, namely, involves the movement from crisis to metacrisis, and from revolution to metarevolution.
Today, crises interact at high-speed and twist together like strands of an intricate spiderweb. We are faced with systems of crises in which it is hard to tell where one stops and another begins. That is what we call a “metacrisis”. A metacrisis is a complex system whose elements are crises, and exhibits, as a unified whole, its own unique behaviors and properties beyond those found in its elemental crises.In addressing our metacrisis, rather than individual crises or even a “set” of crises, we are acknowledging that many crises are interacting like the diverse organisms of an ecosystem. These interactions generate new systemic properties—which is to say that a metacrisis makes its own crises, and has features and patterns not seen at the level of individual crises. This implies that we must pay attention to this between-space of crises if we wish to resolve any individual crisis. That is the first meaning of a metarevolution: Action oriented towards the interaction of crises, and the unique properties of the complex system called a metacrisis. The first step in addressing a metacrisis is meeting it at its own level of complexity, rather than the level we are used to, which would simply be the revolutionary mode of action.
A metacrisis, then, is a complex system of crises. An ecosystem is to an animal what a metacrisis is to a crisis. “Meta” conveys a dual meaning of “between” and “beyond”.
But for now it is important to know that metacrisis and metarevolution together form a worldview which takes into account the chaotic, nonlinear dynamics that exist in all complex systems, and especially this one which includes the whole Earth and beyond.
Complex systems, as unities-of-multiplicities, must then be treated as entities unto themselves, and this understanding is a significant factor in our metacrisis. A metacrisis is itself a complex system, not a “heap” of individual crises.
Our metacrisis is the totality of challenges which present us with life-or-death choices. And a metacrisis, at any time, must be met by a metarevolution: The only kind of action which renews and beautifies and perfects life at the moments of greatest need.
Crises within a metacrisis, as we will see, can be deep or shallow in relation to the whole system. As such, part of the metarevolutionary orientation is the desire to address the deepest-possible crisis at any given moment—because the deeper the crisis, the more it touches every other crisis. A shallow crisis is still urgent, but has less relationality to the metacrisis as a coherent whole; i.e., it is not, compared to other crises, one which acts as fuel for others, and its resolution will have a smaller effect on the metacrisis in which it is contained.
We take Value and Action to be the most fundamental features of reality; whereas meaning is contextual value, and Action is what embodies and transforms meaning. So a meaning crisis is the result of the process of value-in-action moving in the wrong direction. And, similarly, if Value and Action are the most fundamental features of everything, metarevolutionary change which addresses our meaning crisis has the deepest implications for our metacrisis.
Our meaning crisis is one of these points of leverage that interest metarevolutionaries. It is perhaps the deepest crisis within our metacrisis.And if value and meaning are indeed at the center of our metacrisis, then the zombie apocalypse, as a symbolic phenomenon, represents one of our most important modern myths. It is more than fiction. Zombies symbolize something real in our world, and the entirety of our metacrisis depends on our response to this crisis.
Our metacrisis has presented us with a life-or-death bifurcation point, for which the only suitable response is metarevolution.
And our metacrisis will certainly continue to get worse if it contains within it a zombie apocalypse—that’s just common sense. In response, we need to begin the hard work of ending our meaning crisis, which includes developing a new metaphysics directly opposite to all that is symbolized by zombies: The meaningless, nihilistic, hopeless, vacant, mindless, or depersonalized world.
Asserting our humanity through the construction (or reconstruction) of a viable and optimistic metaphysics is an undeniably urgent challenge in the context of our present metacrisis. Indeed, every crisis within it seems to branch off from the questions which are raised through our standing in the middle of our two orientations.
To summarize, our meaning crisis and loss of worldviews is adding fuel to the fires of our metacrisis as a whole.
At this moment, it’s important to understand that our metacrisis is a reflection of the fact that we have created no viable replacement for religious-type self-transcendence, or the antireligious response which leads to quite literal dis-integration of society.
Thus, our metacrisis (and meaning crisis especially) is determined in large part by a deficit of attention to the Good, which is simultaneously the cause of our diminishing freedom—because both meaning and freedom are ontological principles informed by the sovereign Good. Attention to the Good and the moral actions we take in necessity of its beauty are requisite conditions for a free, meaningful, and loving society.
And if our metacrisis is defined, in part, by an absence of either God or Good as a discoverable, objective, absolute possibility (what is found outside the cave), then our metarevolution can’t succeed without the illuminating quality of at least one of these.
It is our hypothesis that our metacrisis will be a prolonged and unmitigated catastrophe without new worldviews which emerge from a collective shift of attention towards the Good as the absolute first principle of everything possible and actual. Reality is composed of the Good, which most directly makes itself known through Value, Action, and the love between them.
Our meaning crisis has been our portal into our broader system of crises known here as a metacrisis, as well as the system of action-centers known as a metarevolution.
Metamodern and complex-system-informed worldviews are needed to mend our relationship with (and within) complex systems. As we build our understanding of complexity in the present sections of this book, it will become clear why it is so important to see both our metacrisis and metarevolution as complex systems. In short, to navigate a complex system of crises, we must come together in the complexification of action—a core feature of metarevolution. Complexity is, among other things, the antidote to one-sided, dangerous ideologies. Perhaps the most fundamental difference between a revolution and a metarevolution is that the former is more directed at problems—and the latter, at problem-solvers.
When crises are viewed as states or elements of a metacrisis, each individual crisis increases the variety/complexity of that whole system.
The presence of any new crisis makes it more difficult to adequately address any other crisis in that system. As the variety of possible states increases in a metacrisis, it becomes more and more likely that those seeking to address any single crisis will do so with unforeseen results rippling through the rest of the system.
This formal understanding of commonly-used words such as information, uncertainty, difference, and surprise is an important step towards understanding the principles of our metacrisis and what distinguishes it from a solitary crisis.
The increasing complexity of a metacrisis creates a situation of competition, and leads in the direction of energy scarcity. Calories, then, can directly convey the amount of energy used in any revolutionary action directed at any crisis. By way of this, when judging that energy use in the context of a metacrisis, one may arrive at the conclusion that calories are a measure of morality.
The energy demands of each crisis within the system of a metacrisis creates pressure on action-centers to make the most-effective use of energy. A metacrisis will naturally tend towards obfuscating the best use of energy, as its constituent crises dynamically interact and compete for attention. This means that metarevolutionaries must actively strive towards ideal energy use as moral usufructuaries—morality being defined by the alignment of energy flows and transformations with the perfect actualization of the Good.
A meaning crisis is particularly potent within a metacrisis because it deals with principles which are prior to (or deeper than) those found in almost every other crisis, including the ones most familiar at the time of writing, such as the ecological (or climate) crisis. Pollution and destruction of our “material” environment is in fact a symptom of the broken metaphysics we discussed earlier; meaninglessness and nihilism are the chief maladies of both the inner environment we call “mind” and outer environment we call “Earth”; and our meaning crisis is the child of a broken ontology which imagines much of the world as lifeless, soulless material.
To underscore what this means for our meaning crisis and metacrisis overall, let us recall that religions have been shaped by the scapegoat mechanism which perennially ameliorates mimetic crises arising from misplaced appetition (or mimetic desire). We can say, then, that the intensity of a mimetic crisis (which involves distorted appetition resulting from misdirected perception) is directly proportional to the obstructedness of a monad’s perception of the Good.
In general, feedback is a simple yet formal way to understand the relatedness of everything. It connects us to ourselves and to each other: Nothing is truly disconnected in our universe—everything sharing bonds of causality and analogy. That all instantiations of Action feed back on themselves is a basic feature of our interconnectedness. Recognition of these facts in the context of crises is what leads us to believe we must learn to view our whole metacrisis at once.
In any complex system, outputs turn into inputs which turn into outputs—feedback loops which, in our present context, amplify destruction and despair in the milieu of a metacrisis.
The movement towards ontological first principles is correlative with the movement from shallow to deep crises within a metacrisis (though it is not the only variable which can lead in that direction).
Viewed in isolation, a meaning crisis is bad enough. When seen in the context of a metacrisis, in which it is one of many states in a state-space, it gets (to understate it) scary. Its depth within our metacrisis means its effects (outputs) cause more significant changes in the other crises (states) which are connected to it (by receiving input). A more shallow crisis does not cause such a storm in the sphere of a metacrisis—nor does its revolutionary resolution. This is what justified the choice to attend to our meaning crisis as a point of focus throughout this book; and, by the same reasoning, it exemplifies why metarevolutionaries always pay attention to the whole complex system of crises, and the deepest crisis within it.
Picture fish in a pond and you will be able to understand how the crises in a metacrisis interact as a complex system. They share the water, the sunlight, the food; every movement ripples out and touches other fish. They permeate each other’s existence.
In a metacrisis, we witness negative (devaluing) synergies and emergent properties: a new crisis can enter the “pond” of crises; complex systems, once formed, are not reducible to a reductive analysis of its parts, and instead must include the synthetic (holistic) view of the whole; synthesis reveals synergies and emergent properties of the whole which are unique to any specific “mixture” of elements (or subsystems); therefore, the addition or subtraction of any crisis within a metacrisis will potentially lead to a change in its composition of synergistic/emergent properties.
A crisis being “deeper” within a metacrisis can now also be understood as relating to its status as an initial condition to which a given metacrisis is nonlinearly sensitive.
Nonlinearity in the relationships between crises in a metacrisis means that a small change in one can produce a large change in another (or multiple others). It can also mean that as a series of linear changes occur in certain states of a complex system, it can create nonlinear changes in other states.
A fragile or antifragile system depends on every “layer”, as it were, just as in our metacrisis we can’t totally isolate any individual crisis from the others. The stability of a larger system depends, to some degree, on the stability of the smaller systems which compose it. In that sense, stability is an instance of synergy (as a quantitative phenomenon): Subsystems are more fragile or antifragile, and the larger system in which they are integrated may be either more or less fragile than a simple sum of subsystem fragility.
Further, it is clear that it is not enough to address our meaning crisis—we must address any such crisis in relation to every other one within our metacrisis. Metarevolutionaries seek coherence. If we are on the road which leads to the recovery of meaning, we must simultaneously attend to the many features and behaviors of complex systems, such as its stability, or else we risk the wheels coming off the proverbial vehicle before we reach that destination.
Given our human condition within the framework of a thermodynamic natural law, we can see how our meaning crisis and metacrisis have, at their core, the romance of Value and Action. Our meaning crisis is an actuality trending in the wrong direction—truly, an antimoral direction. So how might we use this knowledge in our metarevolution? In what follows, we are seeking a metarevolutionary solution to our meaning crisis—or, in other words, a solution which is itself a symbol, and points beyond itself to other domains of our metacrisis.
Our metacrisis contains a crisis of games in the same kind of sense as John Nash’s conundrum at the bar or the formal Prisoner’s Dilemma. It is a crisis which affects all other crises, because the conditions of a game at any moment create emergent attractor states which incentivize certain actions more than others.
As a factor in our metacrisis, game theoretic conditions generate and exacerbate other crises, and pull crucial attention and energy away from where it is needed most. A Nash Equilibrium acts as an attractor state which exerts a constant pull on us to take certain actions rather than others.
The metacrisis we face contains crises of trust, coordination, cooperation, competition, and action in the world’s most serious games. Once the self-organization of monads reaches human-level complexity and consciousness, the further actualization of the Good in ourselves and the world requires serious play—a reflective process of metagaming, or choosing which microcosmic game to play within the context of the macrocosmic game set in motion by Value and Action.
When disparate problems coalesce into the complex system of a metacrisis, the decisive moment of choice implied by the word “crisis” necessarily involves actions which make the problem-solvers even more complex and conscious, and their interactions more coherent and more loving.
A metacrisis is best understood by its interconnections and the emergent properties which it exhibits as a metasystem of crises. And we have explored this concept as a whole by way of our meaning crisis, which we see as the prototypical crisis-which-drives-crises. This is because every complex system has points of “leverage”—meaning that small changes can produce huge effects. And, likewise, actions which resolve a certain (deeper) crisis within a metacrisis may have a larger effect on this whole system than the resolution of other (more shallow) crises.
In other words, if an individual is capable of solving a personal psychological crisis, it is a complex system of individuals which is best suited for taking on a planetary metacrisis. In making this motion, from person to planet, our intention is to preserve “I” and “We” simultaneously—to form a new whole while retaining our individual wholeness.
A society of minds has synergistic and emergent properties not available to an individual mind. And to solve any of the major crises of our present metacrisis, we need to learn how to participate in, and benefit from, collective intelligence.
Through the individuation process of the hyperorganism, we hope to embody the progressive illumination of minds, the perfection of our moral duty to love, and the deepening appreciation of our universal interconnection. In so doing, we will be walking a path that serves not only the resolution of any crisis, but fundamentally changes our relationship to any current or future metacrisis.
In our complex global society, making sense of our metacrisis as individuals has become a losing game. Bringing our abilities together through this next metasystem transition is a prerequisite for further social, political, or economic action which is not doomed to make a bad situation worse. A metacrisis requires action on multiple fronts at once, and one must be aware of how crises dynamically interact with each other.
We’ve said that our individual-of-individuals embodies many systems and metasystems, such as those relating to collective intelligence. Our hyperorganism also embodies game dynamics, and we should assume that our metacrisis will only get worse if this particular domain doesn’t receive proper attention. That’s because game theory contains lessons about Action, and how interaction plays out when many action-centers coexist.
Hell is Earth without God or Good. And we don’t have to argue over the existence of either in this case, because the effects of making the wrong choice in a Pascalian wager on either is self-evident through our growing intimacy with an all-consuming metacrisis.
Bringing in historical contexts and real examples, we will find that transformation involves the synthesis of opposites: spirit and soul, exoteric and esoteric, Apollo and Dionysus, transcendent and immanent, absolute and relative. This will result in the perfection of transformation, the overcoming of our meaning crisis, and the illumination of broad metarevolutionary principles which may be carried forward to any metacrisis.
If our meaning crisis makes our metacrisis insurmountable, then it is transformation’s dimensions of soul and spirit that we must understand if we wish to change course.
This discussion of immortality is metarevolutionary because the quest for it leads in the opposite direction of the “zombie apocalypse”—our mimetically self-perpetuating meaning crisis—yet what we learn will be applicable to all action and any future metacrisis.
In our present world, in the midst of a metacrisis which contains a crisis of meaning and loss of viable worldviews, avenues of escape from this predictably dreadful reality are likely to capture our attention. That doesn’t mean our goal is to escape reality; on the contrary, our goal is to understand what makes these “other” realities so appealing and transformative, and develop a dynamic unity between these potentially oppositional realms.
Finally, these ideas will be placed in the context of our metacrisis and meaning crisis, and it will be argued that these ideas, when combined with ideas from the discussion of our hyperorganism, lead to metarevolutionary change: The way out of our meaning crisis is itself symbolic of the path which can overcome the challenges of our metacrisis.
To say it again, meaninglessness is certainly one of the defining crises of our time. We have strengthened this claim by showing how deep it is in a hierarchy of crises, as defined by its proximity to first principles. In other words, as a crisis within a metacrisis, it has a large effect on almost every other crisis (and relatively small changes within it can have disproportionately huge, cascading effects through other crises).
Our proposed solution to the life-or-death moment presented by our current metacrisis, and our meaning crisis most acutely, is active optimism. Nihilism pulls us in its own nefarious direction, so we must ritually and perennially renew Love—that attractive and entwining force between Value and Action which causes them to mingle and thereby manifest meaning.
Our meaning crisis is itself symbolic of our metacrisis, and the way we address the former will link it analogically with the latter. We searched for the deepest area of our metacrisis, and found that the Good stands as first principle; this leads to optimism, and the loss of this true optimism results in a nihilistic meaning crisis.
These are the concepts and conditions at the core of our meaning crisis and metacrisis, and the purpose of the present discussion is to convince readers that the gears of meaninglessness and hopelessness are reversible: The same energy basis which flowers into the complexity-consciousness of humanity opens us to the choice between the actualization of nihilism (Love’s murder by Power) or optimism (Love as the transcendent function which connects us with the absolute Good).
Our metacrisis is a tractable moral concern if and only if we can understand the energy basis of everything well enough to be stewards of the Good—which exists absolutely but is not actualized automatically.
The metasystem transition which is bringing about our hyperorganism is a redirection of momentum: We took the principles of complexity which are driving our metacrisis to further enflame itself, and used them to promote new modes of action which scale up in complexity and consciousness in order to meet our present challenges.
Love is the natural magic of our world. Love is Action yearning for Value, and Value yearning for Action. And it is the common thread of any metarevolutionary response to a metacrisis—not as a trivial, after-the-fact description of our motivations, but as the true description of the ongoing ritual which brings us into closer contact with the Good. Eros is the tendency of everything.
Metarevolution
And now we may understand the second meaning of metarevolution, which is its “beyondness” in relation to this revolutionary (nonlinear) pattern which are epoch-defining moments of change. It involves a “step up” in complexity—the parallel of the shift from crisis to metacrisis. All complex systems experience “political” change as in the steady beat of a drum, and “revolutionary” change as in the crescendo of a symphony. Thus, if systems, like political systems, are defined by these kinds of change, then a system-of-systems (as in the nested political institutions which span from town to state to planet) also has its own pattern of punctuated equilibrium. A metarevolution is action which includes and transcends individual threads of revolutionary action; metarevolution is action directed between and beyond the complex system of crises known as metacrisis; metarevolution is complex heroism. The hero is the mythological revolutionary—they are equivalent, but operational in different domains.
With a complex system, revolutionary change is insufficient and overly narrow. It is (sometimes) a well-meaning attempt to make the world better—to solve a crisis close to home. Whereas revolutionaries confront a single problem in a linear fashion, metarevolutionaries face the challenge presented by the complex system of crises called a metacrisis, which is chaotic and nonlinear.
If you see a crisis worthy of revolutionary change, understanding our metacrisis and becoming metarevolutionary will make you more effective in confronting the great challenges of our era.
In going between and beyond crises and revolutions, metarevolutionaries have no objectified Other. Metarevolution is the way of compassion and wholeness.
We become metarevolutionary to minimize the externalities of our actions—to take only those actions which are good from every perspective, and not just our own. This is because the kind of change which externalizes its costs dooms us to betray our own values, however good our intentions.
Our goal is to understand and overcome our meaning crisis—and, via this exploration, become metarevolutionaries who are ready to confront our metacrisis and any crisis within it.
Where revolutionaries propel action outwards towards some narrowly-defined crisis, metarevolutionaries turn action inward towards itself—being oriented towards greater complexity and coherence of action and thereby changing the underlying conditions of all change.
Our metarevolution must be directed at complete personhood, wholeness, and continually transcending our limitations. It must move us beyond.We need this to be part of our metarevolution because we care about each other, and personhood is a group project. We must protect and nurture and love the minds of others, or we will surely lose our minds instead.
If we wish to be metamodern metarevolutionaries, we must orient ourselves towards creating and refreshing new worldviews in which there is a common (non-relative) understanding of goodness, truth, love, and freedom.
The hero is the mythological revolutionary, and the revolutionary is the literal hero—they are reflections of each other. Metarevolution is metaheroism—a coherent, organized complex of revolutionary action.
Because this is a metarevolutionary manifesto, and not just a revolutionary or political manifesto, the journey which resolves our meaning crisis will also be our entry into broad metarevolutionary principles. In other words, what we learn about the love between Value and Action in the following sections of this book will apply equally to our meaning crisis, and to any metacrisis in any time or place.
The Good, rediscovered in our metamodern era, is not static; it is not purely absolute or entirely transcendent, and does not relate to our world as a “second” world. We are active participants in its actualization and transformation. It is also not entirely immanent—thus it is not entirely relative or personal, and so it requires discovery of something absolute. Following this general structure of a generative unity of opposites, we could say, in a sentence, that the Good is both immanent and transcendent, and that the goal of our metarevolution is an actual world which is continually transformed by its possibility of perfection.
The hope of this book is nothing else but to take on our metacrisis with a metarevolution, and to demonstrate metarevolutionary principles which will be applicable to any future metacrisis. In the second half, when we shift from crisis to action, metacrisis to metarevolution, it will become clear why we need the Good as a metaphysical “energy source”—as a light to guide our actions. The various aspects of our metacrisis we have yet to explore will challenge us to create a metarevolution based on these principles of endless transformation in the illumination of the Good.
Our metarevolution has no particular deity, nor desire to create a new one. We need something else which fits our uniquely metamodern era. In that sense, neither traditional religion nor antireligion are the answers. What we need is the Good, not God. But we also need to make the case for the Good to a largely unreceptive (or even hostile) crowd. How can the Good re-enter a land flattened and annihilated by Power?
Really, it is only through our attention (and obedience) to the Good that we can overcome our meaning crisis and metacrisis in general. And, as such, our metarevolution is the beginning of a world centered around the Good instead of God, guns, or gold.
A metacrisis is a complex system (or metasystem) of crises; a metarevolution is similarly a complex system of revolutions, or a metasystem of heroes (to use mythological language) who might also be called philosophers, revolutionaries, artists, saints, or (surprisingly) politicians.
This book is metarevolutionary, because it is about your country and your government and your politicians, but it is also about all future instantiations of these. The reader is trusted to make these connections, and know that innumerable political manifestos may be written using metarevolutionary principles.
It would require the space of many books to fully due justice to the subject of complexity, so it is our hope that this overview will help begin to shift the reader’s attention to the general patterns of complex systems, and thus appreciate what makes a metacrisis and a metarevolution different from a crisis or revolution. It is the theme of this book that action itself evolves towards complexity, and that when things seem hopeless, it is because the complexity of our crises has run ahead of our systems of action: The metarevolutionary orientation renews hope via action directed at the transformation and complexification of action.
So let us keep our eyes on our meaning crisis while broadening the view to include our whole metacrisis. One goal of metarevolutionaries is to understand which crises tend to propagate or exacerbate other crises within a metacrisis. Our meaning crisis will continue to be a poignant lens through which to see more general features of any metacrisis. This is because, as metarevolutionaries, we are interested in the differences between deep and shallow crises. Within a metacrisis, a deep crisis has more (and stronger) connections than a shallow one. In other words, we understand value (and thus meaning) to be the most basic feature of reality, and for this reason it is most like a body to which other crises are limbs—thus we are focused on the rediscovery and renewal of meaning, as this change has the deepest implications for every other area of our metacrisis.
Further, we claim that a metacrisis is a complex system of crises, and that the effectiveness of any action within that system depends, too, on complexity. It is not enough to be oriented towards deep rather than shallow crises. In short, if the problem is more complex than the problem-solvers, the problem generally gets worse. Thus, metarevolutionaries are oriented towards action which increases the complexity, consciousness, and coherence of humans and other centers of action.
Through the lens of our meaning crisis, we aim to demonstrate metarevolutionary principles applicable to the resolution of all crises.
As a planet, we have hit an ascending, nonlinear curve in complexity due to the globalization of politics and economics, the abundance of information made possible by the internet, and the ongoing development of artificial intelligence and other technology. Even the amazing human brain can no longer keep up with this complexity, which means that metarevolutionaries are oriented towards the complexification of action-centers (which may include ourselves, our governments, or humanity as a whole), and meeting the demands of the Law of Requisite Variety.
This makes the separation between the revolutionary and metarevolutionary more clear. Revolutionary (or heroic) change is associated with the timely exploration of unknown or repressed domains, whether geographic or psychic, and the effective integration of that content into oneself and one’s society. Coming at just the right moment, as demanded by the crisis at hand, the revolutionary person elicits a moment of nonlinear change, or transformational experience, in the world. To do all this is to take part in the rhythm of life, in which crisis-complexity increases and living beings respond with an ever-expanding complexification, an expansion of consciousness, and a never-ending, imaginative self-overcoming. The metarevolutionary domain synthesizes all of these potential revolutionary actions into a coherent new whole—the purpose of which is to have the greatest-possible effect with the smallest amount of energy. A natural result of that endeavor is that we tend towards a maximally efficient use of the value-endowed energy. In other words, given a state-space including possible revolutionary change in various domains, the metarevolutionary orientation involves answering to the Law of Requisite Variety—and other principles of complexity—which tell us we are always in the business of making the most out of the least.
The idea behind our metarevolution is that sometimes the best way to resolve one crisis is by shifting our focus towards an even deeper crisis, which, as long as it persists, will fuel many others. Our attention is being directed at our meaning crisis, because it relates to metaphysical first principles, and acts as a deep crisis in relation to all others within our metacrisis.
A metarevolutionary approach would allow for, and conditionally encourage, the sort of abundance which makes it easier to meet our basic needs as humans. But it would place crises relating to poverty or scarcity or starvation within the framework of a metacrisis. Action which addresses any such crisis within a metacrisis must not globally externalize more harm than it reduces locally; and there must be no better use of energy available to the action-centers who may choose between possible energy transformations. Such metarevolutionary stratagems have the potential to guide all revolutionary and political change.
One of the key differences between a revolution which addresses a crisis and a metarevolution which addresses a metacrisis is that the latter is explicitly oriented towards greater complexity, consciousness, and coherence within and between action-centers. The former is like the sardonic “shortcut” which reveals itself to be the longest path between any two points: Somehow, charging directly at a crisis turns into a Zeno-esque endeavor where one always halves one’s distance without ever reaching the desired destination. The metarevolutionary “long road”, conversely, seems to entail detours while, in retrospect, it becomes obvious that no shorter path would have sufficed.
The informational entropy (measured in bits) of a metacrisis must be compared to the bandwidth of action-centers; if the complexity of the former exceeds the complexity of the latter, instability and collapse become inevitable. As such, metarevolution is oriented towards meeting the requirements of the Law of Requisite Variety.
We may now clearly see that the revolutionary approach pits itself against a crisis, without considering its energetic cost—either within itself or comparatively with other crises and revolutions. In a metarevolution, such questions take center-stage. Before we address any single element of our metacrisis, we must consider every element and determine, as best we can, where action is needed most. Units such as calories provide a standard metric for this consideration.
To understand complex systems, specifically in the forms of a metacrisis or metarevolution, will require a brief explanation of the concept of self-organization or autopoiesis. Which means we will ask: If a person is an indivisible center of action, how can such a system come into being, especially if it is composed of other indivisible centers of actions?
We received the name “January”, the month of transition from the old to new year, from Janus. And he symbolizes, with his two faces sharing one body, that we must find a way to live harmoniously despite internal contradiction. Neither of the extreme ends of life’s polarities may dominate if we wish to create healthy holarchies. It is the way of metarevolutionaries to create unities of opposites.
We are holons: complex systems nested within many other complex systems—Earth itself included. Our metarevolutionary goal in this context is to form Janus-facing holarchies, not unidirectional hierarchies where power only flows from top to bottom. This is a necessary conclusion following the fact that we need action on a planetary scale to confront our metacrisis, and that a top-down (tyrannical) approach as a means to this end is not desirable or even viable.
A metarevolution is a metasystem composed of centers of action—which we will henceforth also refer to as monads.
A rock, a cow, and a metarevolution are all metasystems of monads, which means as systems-of-systems they are informed by (but not a mere sum of) the perceptions and desires of the elements (the centers of value-in-action we are calling monads) which compose them.
Crises are the holons of a metacrisis, and revolutionaries are the holons of a metarevolution.
Today we are more likely to hear about complexity theory instead of cybernetics. Regardless, we are concerned with the principles of complex systems, and their implications for any metacrisis or metarevolution.
A metarevolution makes it its task to discover the synergistic and emergent properties in the between-space of crises—knowing that the complex interaction of crises within a metacrisis inevitably leads to that unified whole to be different from its holons.
It is supposed that the deepness of a crisis is correlated with the production of larger “shock waves”, from changes to that crisis, through the complex system of crises within which it lives. And, as a corollary, certain crises are points of leverage for metarevolutionaries—i.e. to resolve the right crisis at the right time is to maximize one’s impact. When this metarevolutionary orientation towards deep crises within a metacrisis is paired with the kind of optimism we discussed, our actions become wed to the most moral, meaningful, and beautiful first principle: the Good.
A metarevolution is directed at all crises and revolutions simultaneously—attempting to take in the whole picture in order to understand the significance of every individual element within it. Arriving at actions which produce nonlinear reverberations—through a metacrisis linked by hierarchical feedback loops—is a straightforward consequence of this kind of metarevolutionary behavior.
Fractals can also help us understand risk and reward as we interact with and within complexity. Our habitual misunderstanding of risk is a crisis of its own within our metacrisis, and it threatens to derail all of our other metarevolutionary efforts.
The metarevolutionary mode is one that is oriented towards developing the antifragility of holons, accurately modeling risk as to maximize reward, collectively generating predictions which help us navigate the future, and transcending catastrophic and existential risks whenever possible.
Metarevolutionaries are concerned with the foundational conditions of all change. And the free-energy principle is about how life resists the disorder which is the natural direction of things—and, as such, is one of the most important aspects of meeting our needs, however complex. Meeting these needs, in turn, opens new opportunities for the actualization of yet-to-be-fulfilled potential.
The Metasystem Transition Theory is what we need in order to understand the evolution of control and its implications for a metarevolution. Note that “control” here is non-pejorative, and essentially a synonym for the effect of information and energy channels upon each other in a complex, hierarchical and symbolic universe.
As a complex system of crises, a metacrisis has certain hierarchical characteristics—such as how metaphysical first principles, natural laws, and thermodynamics are built into every crisis, and are therefore prior to (or hierarchically above) all of these. This prompted us to examine the ongoing crises which pertain to these domains, which can ultimately be reduced to Value and Action. In sum, the metarevolutionary mode is, firstly, directed at finding the deepest domain in which there is a crisis, and, only after this, affecting nonlinear changes at bifurcation points between life and death, otherwise known as crises.
Every actual change is a change in the relationship of monads. And, as monads are embodied units of quality which enter into complexes, the evolutionary complexification of our plenum is always, in every sense, a spiritual matter—i.e. a process with a naturalistic moral telos. These considerations lead to another metarevolutionary modus operandi: Whenever possible, take action which increases the complexity-consciousness of action-centers. This mixes with value-ontology to create the axiom: Whenever possible, discover new ways to fall in love, more perfectly, with Value.
Games, given proper gravitas, unify everything we’ve discussed so far. For metarevolutionaries, game theory is the study of how the holons (monads, people, cities, etc.) of a complex system articulate and transform the rules, conditions, and perceptions of their games.
Metarevolution is oriented towards discovering, building, and playing new games when the old ones outlive themselves.
A key factor in our metacrisis is this kind of game theoretic condition which habitually derails our incentives, goals, and actions. Likewise, a key metarevolutionary principle is to understand and transform our game conditions before actually playing one or many real-world games of life-or-death importance.
Game theory has much to teach metarevolutionaries, starting with the idea that every action or process is part of a larger strategy, and that every strategy is like an organism in life-or-death competition with other organisms.
The ability of any strategy to survive depends on the presence and prevalence of all other strategies and the agents embodying them. We will return to this idea in more detail. But first let’s consider the desire to address our meaning crisis through the lens of gameplay. Addressing it, or any crisis or metacrisis, will happen through the adoption of some strategy; the increased prevalence of one strategy changes the relative strength and survivability of other strategies; thus, embodying a strategy mutes or amplifies others, and gameplay evolves via interaction of strategies the way animal species evolve via interaction in the biosphere. The necessary conclusion of this is that metarevolutionary action is oriented towards evolutionary stability. Or, in other words, if your revolution was a person, would he survive long enough to accomplish his goal?
The second half of this book will continue to show how the structures, incentives, traps, equilibriums, and perceptions shape the way we play, and how can we redirect these aspects of game theory from being a liability in our metacrisis into an asset for our metarevolution.
And in confronting our metacrisis, or any crisis within it, we must remember that every action is actually interaction, and not every strategy is viable when viewed from the holistic perspective. Metarevolutionary action is thus informed by game theoretic conditions in the same way metaphysics and complexity science have guided us so far. Action which ignores any of this is doomed before it begins.
The metarevolutionary approach to confronting a metacrisis involves considering how any plan of action (strategy) interacts with other available strategies. And, consequently, further revolutionary and political action is nested hierarchically within a decision to apply only those strategies which are evolutionarily stable. Applying unstable strategies results in short-term gains which are promptly undone as unethical strategies inevitably encroach. Let’s dive a little deeper into this subject of evolutionary stability to see why it is so important for our metarevolution.
A metarevolution is a nonlinear change—often a phase shift or metasystem transition—in the underlying conditions which constitute the foundations of all nonlinear change. It is a complex system whose holons are revolutions. It addresses the base layers of all crises, and it is revolution applied to the base layers of revolutions. A metarevolution leads in the direction of greater complexity and consciousness of, and coherence between, action-centers. It is a state of orientation towards a metacrisis as a unity, and a striving to address the deepest crises within it—in a way which does not simultaneously lead the metasystem as a whole into worse crises.
The aim of the first half of this book was to demonstrate that a metacrisis is distinct from any individual crisis which is a holon of that complex system. And, in many ways, a metarevolution is a mirror image of what we’ve just explored. Where, for example, the interactions of crises within a metacrisis leads to an increase in problem-complexity, the interaction of revolutionaries within a metarevolution leads to an increase in action-complexity.
We are continuing our journey through our metacrisis, beyond our meaning crisis, and into new territory as metarevolutionaries. Having come this far, it should be clear that our meaning crisis is illustrative of everything we wish to accomplish as metarevolutionaries. We understand that it is one of many crises within a complex system called a metacrisis; it is a deep (and perhaps the deepest) crisis, because it relates to actualization of the metaphysical first principle of everything, which is the Good; it is believed that the deeper the crisis, the more profound the implications of its resolution for the system of crises within which it exists; and, finally, the resolution of this crisis, like many others left to the reader’s imagination, requires action which is more complex than the crisis itself, which creates the metarevolutionary impulse to build upon basic and universal conditions of action such as those indicated by thermodynamics and Information Theory. Thus, to resolve our meaning crisis, we must, so to speak, take the long road. This is not a job for one person; this is a job for a center-of-centers, a complex system of revolutionaries.
Combining these preceding ideas—our metaphysical optimism, our new modes of action, and our theory of transformation—we will finally arrive not just at a resolution of our meaning crisis, but metarevolutionary principles which will permanently change our relationship to any metacrisis.
When action-centers are less complex than the crises they face, the crises will tend to get worse. So-called “problem solving” will be nothing more than moving around the proverbial chairs of a sinking ship. This is why metarevolutionaries are oriented towards increasing the complexity, consciousness, and coherence of centers of action. This means, for example, “scaling up” our channel capacity in the domain of information, but also finding new ways to engage as a center-of-centers in the domains of intelligence, imagination, love, and all that is exemplary of our humanity.
Done correctly, this means establishing a hyperorganism which can, in an evolutionary sense, resist “invasion” by ruthless, amoral superorganisms. In other terms, which we will develop in depth later on, a hyperorganism must embody a game-theoretic strategy that is evolutionarily stable in relation to the field of possible strategies. As metarevolutionaries we must be oriented towards establishing a hyperorganism that acts as an anti-tyrannical mechanism.
A metarevolutionary person, as such, has a story of selfhood that includes both “I” and “We”, and does not fanatically preference either. And the future we seek reflects this deep commitment to the dynamic balance of organism and hyperorganism.
So part of what we must engage in as metarevolutionaries is a conscious effort to increase the coherence between centers of consciousness; we must know that a “global brain” can be intelligent, without necessarily being compassionate, wise, or oriented towards good goals; and so our metarevolution needs to include the kind of collective intelligence which preserves and even strengthens the individuals which compose it, while affording those individuals an avenue for meaningful self-transcendence through participation in a mind-of-minds.
Metarevolutionaries understand that a metacrisis can’t be resolved without coherence between complex systems of all kinds, which ultimately means learning to organize in new ways that are up to the present challenges of our metacrisis: Meeting complexity with complexity.
We are organisms within a hyperorganism—and a primary challenge for metarevolutionaries is forming the kinds of metasystems which maximally support the freedom and wholeness of individuals.
Metarevolution must perennially close the doors which lead to the nightmarish realities of our metacrisis, rather than closing our eyes to its grim possibilities and hoping for the best.
Metarevolution, in this scenario and others, seeks the timely, spontaneous, cooperative, and utterly necessary union of two oppositional tendencies: self-assertion and self-transcendence.
Hence, our metarevolution seeks a worldview which encompasses the idea that there are no true “parts” and “wholes”, only holons within holons.
Our metarevolution seeks a dynamic holarchy which unifies the oppositional drives of holons at the personal, local, and global levels.
So we must, in one motion, make our metarevolution about global and personal development. We want, for example, collective intelligence which makes us individually more capable people, not deterministically controlled gears in a grand machine.
When the complexity of a metacrisis exceeds our complexity as action-centers, metarevolutionary principles tell us that we must achieve some kind of center-of-centers which will benefit from synergy, emergence, and amplification of individual traits such as intelligence.
If our environment has greater variety than our variety “regulators” (such as a personal or global brain, or any information channel), then we have not achieved requisite variety in regard to our metacrisis. It is a formula which spells chaos and death, and challenges us to get on “the right side” of complexity. We will always fall short, but trying is everything. In this context, the metarevolutionary principle to keep in mind has to do with brain-like metasystems which act as reservoirs and amplifiers of human and artificial intelligence (by releasing action-potential selectively, in forethought of its exhaustibility), such that it serves our highest goals.
The world changed faster than we did, and now the complexity of our metacrisis far exceeds our complexity-based abilities to face our biggest challenges. So, rather than jumping into the fray of crises as revolutionaries, it is our job to act as metarevolutionaries by first addressing the underlying principles of all change.
We need to overcome the ancient and present challenge of free-energy minimization in a world of accelerating complexification. It is a metarevolutionary goal—one whose fulfillment transforms the process of change itself, and opens the door which leads to all the splendid and maddeningly vast possibilities of life.
Will we simply become more intelligent while playing a game in which we are racing to the bottom and destroying the underlying conditions of the game?Collective intelligence without conditional cooperation would tragically accelerate our race to the bottom. Thus, there is a metarevolutionary principle which says we must be oriented towards creating game dynamics which liberate our tendency to trust, support, help, share, and love.
An important step for metarevolution, therefore, is to create a new “internet of senses” (IoS) or “sense web” which can be in touch with pollution, over-extraction, and other such things that, taking the holarchic view of a hyperorganism, waste what is valuable and disfigure what could be beautiful.
Our metarevolution is oriented to the simultaneous transformation of action-centers who go by “I” and “We”.
A hyperorganism embodies the progression of these systems towards metasystems which are even more complex and conscious. If we seek intelligence, sensation, and other necessary and desirable abilities at the level of a hyperorganism, then surely control and ownership of these systems are of key importance. Our metarevolution must, therefore, include a revolution of trust—and trust happens to be the beating heart of a technology called “blockchain” or “decentralized ledger technology” (DLT).
Thus the puzzle for metarevolutionaries: If we wish to nourish our tendency to expand our sense of self to include other people and the planet as a whole, and to contribute to the ongoing creation of a loving society, how can we support the open exchange of information and avoid surrendering our wholeness and autonomy to a centralized conglomeration of self-interested governments and corporations?
Our metarevolution aims to extend multifractal modeling a step beyond the financial domain. In the view that financial markets are self-organizing, complex systems whose patterns of turbulence are fractal in nature, it is proposed that a tool like the MSM, which models that turbulence, is applicable to all systems which can be described in the manner above. That includes living systems, economies, self-organized government, and more.
A key goal of our metarevolution, in this light, is to fully understand and harness the power of human stigmergy.
Even more deeply, we should seek to harness human stigmergy as what brings us together as the distributed intelligence of our hyperorganism. In other words, metarevolution seeks the creation of a self-organizing metamind whose intelligence is greater than the sum of its parts.
A crisis is an extreme problem; a revolution is an extreme opportunity. We may build further open these concepts by using “challenge propagation”, which adds to the powers of stigmergy as a universal coordination mechanism, and affords metarevolutionaries a mode of purposeful, self-organized action.
Later, we will return to the subject of challenge “forums”, which can also be called “arenas” or “meeting grounds”, and how we can use them as spaces of metarevolutionary action when combined with another form of human stigmergy: Markets. In financial markets, people take actions (buy/sell), leaving a trace of that action in the market price of an asset, which mediates the further action of other investors who are interacting with that same market. Markets are stigmergic coordinating mechanisms which enable self-organization and emergent properties, which metarevolutionaries view as preferable in many ways to centralized solutions, and likely the only viable way to organize ourselves in a complex world.
The goal of our metarevolution is to develop all of these self-organizing human systems (including but not limited to markets) to their full potential, and ultimately to intertwine these systems in the metasystem of our hyperorganism. Through the endlessly-scalable process of stigmergic self-organization, our hyperorganism will become more intelligent and better prepared to confront the challenges of life.
Our metarevolution pictures a world which is complex, but does not overcomplicate things. Stigmergy and challenge propagation are perfect examples of how we can make our modes of action more complex, rather than more complicated. Remarkably simple mechanisms can produce amazing complexity and emergent patterns. These processes allow individuals to create complex systems which do not rely on centralized control, and achieve things none of them could alone. Adapting the universal coordinating mechanism of stigmergy to human society is metarevolutionary because it helps form the cooperative, bottom-up structures from which further progress emerges.
Metarevolutionaries care about good predictions, because bad ones haunt even the best-intentioned actions.
Metarevolution is oriented towards the complexification of our best individual abilities—such that we achieve equivalent qualities at the scale of our hyperorganism. The goal of our metarevolution is to achieve goals which fundamentally enable the achievement of further goals, thereby coming into closer contact with the Good.
Metarevolutionaries must work towards these same prediction-related goals. We are always oriented towards a metacrisis, instead of individual crises. And part of that orientation involves finding ways to become better problem-solvers before we actually try to solve problems. A scaling-up of the powers of prediction is a necessary step in the development of our hyperorganism. A hyperorganism has many of the same imperatives as an individual organism, and the design of any new systems should reflect that.
The metarevolutionary world of self-organizing systems and metasystems is more free than any alternative, because it creates harmony between actions which are self-actualizing and self-transcending; between individual and community.
But the orientation of markets towards answering the question of at-the-moment value of goods and service is hardly the only thing a stigmergic, self-organizing complex system can do. Here, instead, we can see that a prediction market serves our metarevolutionary goals by helping us collectively minimize free-energy—meaning whatever kind of value we orient ourselves towards, our aspirations will be more fundamentally within reach.
Our metarevolution seeks to merge this idea with our sense web, blockchain-related technologies, challenge propagation, and the many systems which compose our hyperorganism. And we can use this distributed, decentralized, collectively-intelligent network as a much-needed upgrade to our governments and organizations. This means that static top-down hierarchies will be replaced by dynamic Janus-facing holarchies.
Taken all together, our metarevolution rejects dogmatic views of all-private or all-national institutions. It takes its inspiration instead from the self-organization of nature and concludes that, given certain conditions, society’s stakeholders can self-govern the commons.
Our metarevolution is therefore a path of evolutionary self-organization which leads in the direction of complexity-consciousness and the perfection of love and freedom.
Our metarevolution is guided by love, and this can’t possibly be expressed in passive terms.
The metarevolutionary movement in the direction of complexity, consciousness, and coherence is demanded by the conditions of our metacrisis.
On the premise presented near the start of this book, that our metacrisis includes a meaning crisis, there is a “blind alley” of human potential from which our metarevolution seeks to step back in order to leap forward. Certain crises are points of leverage within a metacrisis, and their resolutions have disproportionately large effects; such is the case with our meaning crisis. At the same time, we are orienting the discussion beyond this one crisis to reveal the common ground of all metarevolutionary action. This means we must explore the topic of transformation as it pertains specifically to our meaning crisis, while demonstrating general metarevolutionary principles.
While the zombie apocalypse is gnawing away at humanity, transformation is the metarevolutionary condition we seek to change at its metaphysical core.
As metarevolutionaries, we seek to change degraded patterns of transformation into that pattern called Love, which is energy refined and illuminated by the Good.
Our metarevolution has a trajectory of immortality in that we seek a society in which time, experience, meaning, love and freedom tend toward abundance.
Naturally, then, it is the metarevolutionary view that having a totally immersive experience from the perspective of another living being is one piece of a more complete immortality. Just as, in a similar train of thought, we said it was necessary to perceive from the perspective of an organism and hyperorganism simultaneously, without either view erasing or dominating the other.
Transformation, enlightened by the Good, can be a countervailing force in relation to the meaning crisis that was revealed near the beginning of this book. Beyond that immediately urgent crisis, the commonalities of transformation in all domains will be explored here—such that we will arrive at broad metarevolutionary principles of action. The quest for immortality, the mythological mirror-image of our endless efforts to actualize the Good, is movement towards perfection. And it is through the transformational work of shamans that metarevolutionaries see a piece of the solution to our “loss of soul”—an increasingly zombie-like, depersonalized society.
Metarevolutionaries need worldviews which inclusively value these modes of seeing/being—for example, combining the imagination of shamans, the rigorous methods of science, and TED (Transformative Experience Design) technologies—leading to a new generation of metamodern shamans.
Being oriented towards an abundance of ecstatically transformational affordances, therefore, means reaching towards the farthest edges of our personal and collective potential; it means putting ourselves on the road to immortality; and it means following a metarevolutionary path which puts us in the best position to respond appropriately to any metacrisis at any time.
Transformation is the process of painting the best of all actual worlds from a palette of possible colors. And shamanic ecstasy is one of the most time-tested and consistent tools for forming a bridge between the domains of possibility and actuality. Thus, by integrating shamanism into our metamodern worldviews, our metarevolution is oriented towards the inexhaustible goal of actualizing beauty, wisdom, and perfection in centers of action at every scale of existence.
This profound respect for the Eleusinian Mysteries was widespread, and the conspicuous absence of a metamodern Eleusis is undoubtedly a factor in our meaning crisis and metacrisis in general. We are missing an important subsystem in our transformational metasystem. Our metarevolution must therefore be oriented towards the rebirth of something analogous to a culturally and mythologically-supported transformational experience, such as was found at Eleusis.
To recapitulate, the metarevolutionary quest for immortality explored so far has to do with the union of inner and outer transformation. This happens both in a slow and steady development, a ripening of souls, and in moments of powerful, nonlinear transformational changes to intermonadic relationships.
While the metarevolutionary view of immortality does not exclude (and indeed, contextually encourages) the extension of life and physical transformations towards better health, our quest here is primarily spiritual and soulful rather than material.
Harry, along with his close friends, Ron and Hermione, and the Hogwarts school as a whole form a picture of alchemy which is indispensable for our metarevolution: They are on a quest of mutually-sacrificial, redemptive, purifying transformation and movement towards wholeness-within-wholeness.
The motivation for a synthesis of these subjects is, of course, our metacrisis, and the realization that it is necessary to become metarevolutionary to overcome our present turmoil. To that end, what follows is an attempt to address our meaning crisis—while, in turn, the proposed resolution reveals metarevolutionary principles beyond its initial domain.
Transformation and transformational experiences are metarevolutionary, because we are addressing how centers of action are always reinventing themselves and forming new centers-of-centers; i.e. the evolution of value-in-action is the ongoing self-organization of monads; it is Becoming, per se.
Just as complex organisms do not spring into existence, but rather emerge through so many metasystem transitions which lead in the direction of complexity and consciousness, these very organisms are “complex souls”—self-organized metasystems (Leibniz’s “composites”) of monads. With monads as our material-spiritual holons (embodied units of quality), we are ready to propose a resolution to our meaning crisis while demonstrating metarevolutionary principles. And, for that, we need a language of value-in-action.
Our next step is to combine what we know about transformation with what we know about complexity and the evolution of our hyperorganism, because our goal is not just to find a revolutionary resolution to our meaning crisis, it is to use this crisis-revolution pairing to simultaneously demonstrate metarevolutionary principles. If we succeed, what we learn about overcoming this crisis will be applicable to our whole metacrisis.
As a whole, this is an extension of what Leibniz pursued under the name of characteristica universalis, a neighbor of what Hermann Hesse described in his Glass Bead Game, and a metarevolutionary solution to our meaning crisis.
With this fictional but prescient outline—of a game-like, musically-inspired, philosophical pursuit of perfection in the form of a symbolic language—we may now take up our own pieces of this puzzle and form a complete image of our metarevolutionary goals. What we desire is the emergence of a universal language composed of symbols and the analogical connections of everything; such that it will be as capable of describing something mundane, like the flows and transformations of electrical energy as it journeys towards an outlet in your home; or something as monumental as the actualization or destruction of the Good as it evolves through the loving mixture of Value and Action; and finally that it is conceptually and practically joined with the ideas we explored about our hyperorganism.
While discussing this path which leads us out of our meaning crisis, we explored ideas with implications for addressing any metacrisis: Our revolution in meaning is, in turn, a symbol which points beyond itself into the metarevolutionary domain. No revolution will ever be the same.
Our metarevolution is an escape from apocalypse, and an unflattening of Flatland.
In sum, we must make it our job to treat everyone and everything as though our very existence depends on their spiritual development and depth of soul—their self-actualization and self-transcendence—because truly it does. We must be just as concerned with the immortality of our neighbor as we are with our own. Our metarevolution seeks to be those first steps towards a loving, moral, beautiful, wise, free, enlightened, and therefore immortal society.
A state of perfect connection between Value and Action is our goal—one which remains impossible but undeniably worth pursuing. And in the previous sections we unveiled a symbol-centric game whose explicit purpose is the perfection of love, the reversal of our meaning crisis, and the development of metarevolutionary principles.
A core metarevolutionary principle we’ve been elaborating is fractal, holarchic individuality. You are indivisible; you are whole. You are also composed of indivisible unities known as monads. Earth, too, is an ensouled individual. And so, our metarevolution’s “unit of analysis” is not the atom or bit or any other strictly reductive “part” within a “whole”, but rather the more flexible “holon” which is a contradiction-preserving unity of partness and wholeness.
Love is metaethical. It is the energy of moral perfection; and it is a metarevolutionary pursuit of universal justice.
Any revolutionary action directed at any crisis is symbolically pointing beyond itself towards a metacrisis. In discovering love as the tendency for Value to inspirit Action, and Action to ensoul Value, we have simultaneously demonstrated metarevolutionary principles which come from domains such as thermodynamics, metaphysics, game theory, and ultimately their synthesis into something even greater. In love, we perfect each other in a gradient approach to the absolute Good. In short, our metarevolution is aimed at bringing about the most meaningful, moral, and experientially beautiful existence. We can only do this through love.
This is a metarevolutionary manifesto. Political manifestos deal in relatively simple and linear action (as in transformation); revolutionary manifestos deal in relatively complex and nonlinear action (as in transformational experiences); and metarevolutionary manifestos deal in the recursive complexification and consciousness-expansion of the action-centers whose choices shape the political and revolutionary domains. Metarevolution exists in the space between all political and revolutionary action, even as it makes a transcendent leap beyond this milieu.Our metarevolution is composed of actions directed at centers of action and their underlying metaphysical condition: the Good. As such, we have ventured into the space between and beyond all revolutionary manifestos, and made an attempt to address both our contextually situated metacrisis, and the general dynamics of any such system of crises. Success shall be measured by this metarevolutionary manifesto’s applicability to all action, and the degree to which it influences the trajectory of our actuality towards perfect representation of the Good.