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The Current K-wave - Wave Five
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The current K-wave has been powered by the growth in microprocessor technologies invented in 1971. For those of you as old as I am, you have personally witnessed the world we grew up with as children completely remade. The changes have been primarily driven through communications through the Internet and with computers via the PC. Most people refer to this time as the information age. This is somewhat of a misnomer from those who clearly do not understand Long Waves. In the previous K-waves we saw information accelerated through steam ships, railroads, telexes, telephones and on and on. In this age we have only added the latest technologies to continue the acceleration of human development. Both technologically as well in worldview.
The very beginning of the current wave was in the end of the Inheritance Period from the perspective of the Industrial Era as a whole. The model in its current state says that we have entered the Impact Period and I think this can be said to be true not because we are now in the information age or that we have moved into digital technology but rather because worldview has taken a radical shift.
The prior four waves were driven from the root cause stemming from Schelling's ideas requiring government and individual worldview being directly symmetrical. The build out of ideas concerning socialism and existentialism clearly started early in the Industrial Revolution and have now crested. worldview on government is rather unified in various states market management rather than the legacy discussions of socialistic governance. There are no governments which do not regulate industries. Therefore to discuss socialism is to discuss history and not the current state of governments in industrial era economies. However worldview for the individual has gone in another direction entirely in wave five when compared to the step refinements for governmental structure and policies.
Measuring worldview real time is difficult because there are so many different ideas floating around all at the same time. However since the major update in worldview features the resynchronization for all of humanities subjects we need to look for a kind of worldview which is something old and at the same time something very new. The New Age thinking fits this description very nicely. By examining New Age theory we can see they are working on evolutionary thinking.
In academia you see evolutionary economics, physiology, psychology and many others working to understand the trajectory through time in their disciplines. This can also be said for what is at the core of New Age theory. I say theory because New Age philosophy features a wide array of thinking which is not all that new to humanity. However the core of Ken Wilber, Don Beck, Steve McIntosh and a host of others are really focused on the spirituality of resynchronizing worldview within a rational scientific construct. This is even true for the evolution in traditional theologies as seen through the writings of the Catholic theologian Hans Küng.
There is also another aspect to the New Agers which features causes buried within all of the updates to worldview for the industrial era. That is the East meets West aspects in thinking. Schelling and his wife had both been exposed through their fathers to Far Eastern culture and this friction in the differences between the two regions has been the cause for Western philosophers to rethink and attempt to update their worldview.
The cause for New Age thinking from those who are termed Integralists can be seen as following in this now lengthy tradition. Therefore New Age thinking has some new thinking contained within it that could potentially impact the next update in the following K-wave and may even run as far the Axial Age and the major update for the economic era. It is through the scientific exploration in mapping the human brain and neurobiology where some of their thinking can be seen as potentially applicable to the Axial Age for the industrial era.
What science has shown is that our thoughts, our intentions, impact our personal health. One who focuses on negative thinking in other words poisons to some degree their own mind and body. The New Agers have taken this further to postulate that ones intentions actually effect other people as well. Science has yet to prove this therefore this concept falls into the spirituality context at this point in history.
The concept of intent rather than the golden rule which is action based might very well be the kernel of what constitutes the coming Axial Age. However since technology is moving at an exponentially progressive rate it is very difficult to say what may or may not constitute the update in the coming new worldview. Further intention based ideas is not completely new. The Catholic Church in the 4th century had compiled a list of the seven deadly sins. Most of them were intention based. However they were on the periphery and not the core. Therefore I can see how intention based thinking could be adopted by the classical religions somewhat along the lines of Hinduism which clearly grew out of the hunter-gatherer worldview and was updated through the major agricultural update.
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Rise in popularity for updated worldview thinking.
I have Selected Ken Wilber to graph because his AQAL model is a direct integration of science and spirituality. Wilber's AQAL model embodies updates in worldview thinking as it is the synchronization of most existing survival guides. Wilber's model is built on earlier spiritual thinking where he attempts to show that there was truth in the earlier world views; however, as they occurred earlier, people were not as evolved and interpreted the stories as literal truth instead of primarily allegorical. Wilber's model can be described as evolutionary philosophy in action.
What the data shows is that Wilber popularity has steadily increased from his earliest writing during the eruption phase. By the Inflection Point period his output in writing has almost doubled over the previous phases. By the frenzy phase books are then being written about him and his AQAL model. The discussion of ideas has grown considerably shown by the over 25,000 web pages and climbing which discuss Wilber and his AQAL model. Wilber is however not unique in this regard.
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More data supporting the rise in popularity in the current k-wave for updated worldview thinking.
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The charts show a dramatic increase in the books written on updated worldview. Since the books were published by traditional publishing houses – not self published, they were published for profit which they are delivering or the publishing companies would have stopped publishing them. Since they are selling increasingly better, the authors have continued to publish more of these books. Some have sold more than two million copies of a single title at this point. One does not require a degree in marketing to see an expanding market forming. This is shown in the area of the circle on the chart. Authors which had written few books during their life such as Huston Smith have become veritable book writing machines by the Inflection Point period.
Aside from the wonder where these individuals get the time to write this many books and maintain quality in writing in order to keep people reading their offerings, one can clearly see that they are gaining in adherents. Initial diffusion is clearly taking place in the current synergy phase. All of these people were old enough to have written their first title prior to 1960 which would have put them in the maturity phase of the prior k-wave. However, only Huston Smith did this in 1958 and he was almost 40 when he did write that book. Wilber on the other hand wrote his when he was 22. It was the waves phase which dictated whether a publishing house would even accept a title on updated worldview thinking as a result of the atmosphere created by the K-wave. The demand is directly related to the visible changes from the techno economic K-wave.
Though the traditional religions still have the vast majority of adherents and will so for quite a long time, they have seen decreasing popularity both in Europe as well as the US. The change of the economic environment due to the technologies powering the k-wave and changing the world, has reduced the degree of resonance within traditional religions membership. Had there not been a surge in emigration from South American countries, the Catholic Church would be in even worse shape with membership today in the US. Since most of the emigrants have come from agricultural economies their choice has been predominantly for the traditional Catholic Church. In Europe the decline has been much larger as they industrialized much sooner than the US did. Therefore the Europeans experienced the effects from the cumulative prior K-waves sooner than the US, which is why the Catholic theologian Hans Küng remarked in his book Eternal Life that the enrollment for young people has declined to single digits.
The stock market crash of 2008 provides additional data validating the model as additional insights into the model. I have added a new section onto the model where those insights and discoveries are reviewed in greater detail.
Next stop onto the stock market crash of 2008.
Onto Section 2.3a - DOW & K-wave comparisons or Model Index
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