Sequence of Societal or Civilizational Change

Discussion

Hanzi Freinacht:

"“Art always comes first!”. What this means is that art is always the first step in a new metamemetic sequence of development. The first elements of a new metameme always occur within the arts, so if you want to get an impression of what the next stage might entail, you should figure out what cutting edge artists are up to.

What fewer people are aware of is that morality, or norms, is always last. I’ll return to why that is in a minute. First I’d like to show you the full metamemetic sequence of development:

Art Philosophy Entrepreneurship Politics Morality There’s a logical reason why art comes first, namely that it only takes one highly gifted person who’s ahead of their times to create an artwork that breaks with the conventional logic of the current metameme. What artists do, or more specifically, what some artists are talented enough to do, is to sense many of the yet-to-be-obtained potentialities of reality. They can, in a way, “taste” the future, or, if you’ve read my previous books and are familiar with the terminology, feel the “attractor points” and follow their direction further and deeper than other, less sensitive, and less attuned, individuals. And they do so without having a formalized language to describe what they see. They just do it. And exactly that’s why art is so important: Art can describe that which we’re yet to have a language for.

This is also the reason why philosophers come in second. They have to go through the trouble of developing a common, conceptual language to painstakingly describe all the things artists just feel. For philosophical truths to become established it also requires all the drama of scholarly peer review. Artists don’t need to bother with that shit.

And when the philosophers (and other thinkers who might not necessarily identify as such) are done with it, the new ideas start trickling down towards all those shrewd entrepreneurs and activists wanting to change the world.

And from these disruptions, politicians finally wake up and try to adapt society to the new conditions.

And finally, long after the first artist and philosophers discovered the new metameme, new values and moral codes, a new system of norms starts propagating throughout the wider population. This is, by comparison, a very slow process that always faces the inertia of the old ways: people hold each other back, the habits and customs of one sets limits for the expression of another. You can be as gay as you want; if every sibling, cousin, friend, uncle, aunt, teacher, and colleague you’ll ever meet hate gays, you won’t be able to go very liberal on that issue. Norms can change like avalanches, yes, but they by definition follow the crowd.

Morality, or more specifically the common average morality of a population, is last exactly because it requires so many more people (who generally don’t care about art and philosophy) to subscribe to the ethics of a new metameme in order to change the norm system of a society. A new morality cannot really be said to have taken hold if only an elite minority of intellectuals subscribes to it. It needs to be shared by the majority."

(https://metamoderna.org/the-6-hidden-patterns-of-history-chapter-1-a-brief-introduction-to-the-metamemes-model/)