The Spiral of Political Maturation

An Option: Look at the end result of this analysis as applied to Western societies, past and future. Then return here and discover in a stage-by-stage way how that story was developed.

Based on inquiries over many years, we can have a good idea of what the trajectory of political maturation is likely to be.

Like most social predictions… Closed we can be more confident about what will happen than when it will happen; and we can be more confident about the general nature of the change than its specifics.

The background work for political maturation includes:

  • The discovery and validation of Spirals of Growth in other areas of psychosocial reality. These have led to powerful practical applications. The pioneer study derived from decision methods (PH'1) dealt with strengthening the management culture of an organization. As well as being relevant to the development of any particular organization, this Spiral generated successful societal predictions about the past and future.
  • Appreciating the nature of politics depends on accurately naming and precisely formulating the ethical choice approaches. This inquiry commenced around 1987, was completed around 1990, and published as Ch.6 in Working with Values: Software of the Mind (1995).
  • As part of this inquiry, the Typology-Essentials Table for the ethical choice approaches has been specified in order to provide clarity about its dualities and properties. 

Only if everything so far has been named and formulated reasonably correctly can we be confident that the trajectory will be a Spiral. The heart of this inquiry is to determine the features of each Stage in the Spiral. 

Political life in a society can and does mature through discrete Stages of Development. The THEE-form of the maturational path is now known from other taxonomic studies. It is shown in this diagram.

Paradoxes of maturation: Transitions have different effects depending on how they move in regard to the X axis (Benefit for Others) and the Y Axis (Self-awareness).

To clarify details, we need to distinguish certain things:

  • the different ways to make ethical choices—completed;
  • the different political modes that emerge from them—to be formulated in this section;
  • the changes in political ethos that result from a maturational process in society—these flow from clarity about political modes.

The «political ethos» refers to those values and institutions intrinsic to political life that are widely viewed as «unchangeable» without a considerable, and usually undesired, effort. The ethos at any point is dominated by the current Mode of politics in the society while cumulatively incorporating values of previous Modes.

We must never lose sight of the two main forces affecting any political choice or governmental solution: «the people» and «the powerful». There lies the key to outcomes, irrespective of the particular stage of political development.

Societal maturation is a slow process, so you may wish to skip the rest of this section and jump ahead to

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Originally posted: July 2009; Last updated: 30-Nov-2011