Are We on the Cusp of a Revolution?

I recently wrote about the possibility that 2020 would be a major turning point in the U.S. Now there is an interview with Chris Hedges in which he suggests we are on the cusp of revolution.

Hedges is honest in his assessment that we cannot know if the outcome of any revolution would result in a right-wing or left-wing regime (is it too much to ask that we have neither kind of illiberal regime, thank you very much?) , and his piece is worth reading to understand the perspective most people have on the world. We can quibble about whether he and his ilk get the underlying problems right or wrong, but that does not affect the perceptions involved. (I mean, connecting government cops shooting people willy-nilly and getting away with it even when there is video proof they murdered people to corporate power is really stretching it, no matter how many problems we can legitimately connect to the connection between the government and corporations.)

I do think we are in a time of major transition. If more and more people are moving into Clare Graves' second tier of  psychosocial development, that is going to be majorly disruptive. Mostly because that is a major exponential jump in complexity. Further, as Hedges observes, we have old ideas rubbing up against new ideas. He thinks his leftists ideas are the "new" ideas, but he could not be more wrong. Those are the old ideas. The old, decrepit, corrupt and corrupting ideas. The only thing worse are the culturally conservative ideas against which they seem new. Hedges -- and most people, I would surmise -- is almost completely unaware of what the "new ideas" against which his old ideas are rubbing against are.

I know, you probably think that I'm going to argue that the new ideas are "libertarian," but I'm not going to argue that at all. Classical liberalism is an old idea, too. It is weak and lying in the gutter, having been beaten up by the cultural conservatives and the illiberal left, so it's not a major factor. More, if the revolution doesn't initially succeed, we will find ourselves with either a culturally conservative or illiberal left dictatorship in charge -- with pretty much identical outcomes in either case. But if it does succeed, the result will not be identifiable as either right or left. Because the old categories are concerned with the survival of their own groups, while what is emerging is concerned with the survival of the system as a whole. It is global and systemic and cosmopolitan in very sense of the word.

I have begun thinking about what will emerge here and here. I need to do more thinking of what an integrationist society may look like. The World Wide Web is a model.