Colonizing by Church and State

In Spiral Dynamics, communitarian and individualist stages alternate. The state we are in, the egalitarian stage, is communitarian and the community feeling is created almost entirely by government. The communitarian stage that preceded it was the authoritarian stage, and the community feeling in it is created almost entirely by (typically monotheistic) religion. Between was classical liberalism, an individualistic stage.

In an essay I posted on Medium, I point out that we see alternations between the colonization of spontaneous orders by a single order (itself dominated by a single hierarchical organization) and the separation of the spontaneous orders. The Catholic church dominated all the spontaneous orders in the Medieval period, then the arts, the sciences, morality, philosophy, and even the religious order itself was separated off from it. Over the past century, governments have been colonizing those orders. Now that they have been as colonized as possible, they are being released yet again.

But this was the short version.