The Transition We Are In

A Three Dimensional View

Nothing lasts forever. Hence, our lives are always lived in transition. There are two questions that follow this reality.

What is the transition that we are in?

Where is it leading us?

Three Dimensions

There are three ways to answer these two questions. They align with the three dimensions of my Circle of Impact model. We need to look at the dimensions of ideas, relationships, and structure.

For over twenty years, I have used this model as a tool for helping people find understanding about the transitions that they are in. I designed it so that people solve problems, resolve inner emotional conflicts, and look to the future with clarity and hope. Let’s use the tool to answer our two questions.

What is the transition that we are in?

If we look at the structure dimension, we are going to ask about the structure of society. To do we want to ask how has the structure of society changed over, let’s say the last hundred years.

Ferdinand Tönnies in the 1800s first published his Gemeinshaft und Gesellshaft (Community and Civil Society). It became an important work of sociology because it provided insight into how society is structured.

“Gesellshaft means life in the public sphere, in the outside world. In Gemeinshaft we are united from the moment of our birth with our own folk for better or for worse. … We have a community of language custom belief, but a society for purposes of business, travel, or scientific knowledge. Commercial partnerships are of particular importance, but even though a certain fellowship and community may exist among business partners, we would have speak of a ‘commercial community’. … On the other hand community ownership certainly exists, as in the case of fields, woods, and pasture.”

Over the past century or more, our lives have transitioned from primarily spent with family and community to life in the public square. Social media offers us a public square that creates the illusion of community. This is one structural transition that I see.

A second is how society has been structured organizationally. The industrial revolution brought factors to places where they had been none. The factor became a place of work and also of growing prosperity. It shifts life from the community of home to the public space of work. As prosperity grew for people, another shift took place as the commercial world led us to see ourselves less as factory workers, and more as consumers.

The coming of the digital technology age brought about another shift in perspective. We were no longer simply consumers of products, we can become consumers of personalities and digital content. The structure of the modern world is not the structure of the community as Tönnies described it. The reality is that for many people the modern world is one of alienation and detachment from the relationships of community.

One of the outcomes that result from the transition from an industrial culture to a consumer culture to an ideological culture. Every part of our lives now are exchanges, contracts, transactions where we buy affiliation with a certain party or group based upon their ideology. The point is not to create transformative relationships but rather social cultures where we pay for our inclusion through ideological conformity.

The result of this transition is the loss of relationships of depth where respect, trust, and mutual accountability are essential. Instead, we must choose the side that we follow. We are not included as participants and contributors, but rather as followers.

The transition through the ideas dimension has been the erosion of a basis for personal meaning. Instead, we absorb the institutional ideology of the company or the party. Instead of thinking as independent persons, we become components that fit into the structure of modern institutional society.

From this perspective, the transition that we are in is one of growing detachment from who we are as persons in a community of persons. A culture of institutions has replaced the culture of community that used to be the center of society.

Where is this leading us?

If nothing lasts forever, this stage in history is also in transition. As Joseph Tainter has shown in his work on the collapse of civilizations.

“Collapse is recurrent in human history; it is global in its occurrence; and it affects the spectrum of societies from simple foragers to great empires. … Collapse is fundamentally a sudden, pronounced loss of an established level of sociopolitical complexity. … A complex society that has collapsed is suddenly smaller, simpler, less stratified, and less socially differentiated. Specialization decreases and there is less centralized control. The flow of information drops, people trade and interact less, and there overall less coordination about individuals and groups.”

The transition through cultures of industry, consumerism, to ideology, has had the effect of making life more complex. We are more interconnected than ever before. We see how a pandemic and, now, the war in Ukraine has had an effect on local communities around the world. Rising gas prices and food scarcity are all effects of this growing complexity.

The effect in terms of the three dimensions is that institutional structures cannot keep up with change. Our relationships to these institutions are now broken. They no longer represent us. Instead, they are trying to survive. A part of this is because the pace of ideological change in the social and political sphere has changed so rapidly that it has forced a new level of complexity into the system. This complexity has little to do with products, sales, and services, and everything to do with not being excluded from the current ideological culture.

This transition leads us to the collapse of the institutions that have come to command our allegiance over the past century. Every step forward is a step closer to what Tainter calls “a radical simplification of an overly complex system.”

What are we to do?

A third question concerns our response to this societal transition.

We begin by identifying what is truly important to us as individuals, families, organizations, and communities. I am talking about coming to an agreement about the values that define us. In this sense, our engagement with the public sphere is transformed into one of a relationship of shared values and purpose.

From that recognition, we can build the relationships of respect, trust, and mutual accountability that will be necessary to begin to rebuild that which has been lost.

The structural dimension functions in two ways. There is an organizational structure that is needed to create order that serves the operational order of the institution. And there is a social structure that provides social order that is essential a healthy community.

Where do we start?

I am convinced that you start by working on your relationships. Create a network of relationships based on a shared purpose for achievement. As a group, what would you like to change? Start small with a focus on local impact.