IN ORDER TO DESCRIBE a process through which something new emerges, we have to begin by examining the salient features and processes present in the old system that trigger the rise of the new.

In this and the next post, I will offer a quick-and-dirty, general model that describes and explains how movements happen. As you read, you may find it useful to apply the framework to your favorite obsolete institution - it could be a particular industry, the big-corp culture as a whole, or social institutions such as money and education systems.

If you have been thinking about social change, I’m pretty sure your mind will spontaneously map the general to the specific. Read on - you may even recognize yourself in there somewhere.

Consider a social system which has attained a state of hegemony: for the most part, the members are interacting according to its shared culture and social norms.

Members live and operate within common social structures. They are betting, whether they be aware of it or not, on the continued success of the system. Everyone has some stake in the preservation of the structures. For instance, some may simply value the order and security that it provides. Others, who hold a privileged position in that system, may value the perks that come with that position.

A social system has an inside and an outside, but it is never perfectly closed. It functions within a larger universe and interacts with it. Inhabitants make sense of what happens on the inside through the lens of the system’s culture. They also view and understand the external world through that lens. The external world (or environment) typically changes, and the system has to adapt to these changes.

Let us consider the case where the social system is unchallenged. This means that there isn't anything happening in its environment that the system can't deal with without changing its culture. The system adapts to external changes by using its power to act on its surroundings, basically reconfiguring its environment in such a way that it can continue to conduct business as usual without having to reconfigure itself internally in any fundamental way.

If the situation of non-challenge we have described persists for a long period of time, an interesting shift happens. The continued internal stability means that, for most of the people on the inside, the only thing that matters anymore is their set of (culturally-mediated) relationships with other people on the inside. You could say that they inhabit a shared symbolic world.

People basically care about their position inside the social system, and assess their motion against this common frame of reference.

In such a situation, the higher ranks of the system naturally become filled with people who behave in self-serving fashion. Those people care a whole lot more about their position in the system than about what's happening on the outside: their ranks are essentially comprised of sociopathic social climbers and talented zealots. (Double agents are the exception, but remain undistinguishable from the others until later phases.)

As long as the system remains unchallenged, that is, external conditions don't change, most people don’t notice this shift happening. Remember: for all practical purposes, the outside world doesn’t matter. They keep paying attention to internal political musical chairs-style games, instead of focusing on where the real change is happening: on the outside, and at the interface.

From this point on, the social system will basically become a victim of its own success.

The long-running homogenizing effect of culture means that everyone now carries the same assumptions about the external world that were instrumental to the efficient success of the system in its early days.

The problem that hits the system now is that conditions have changed in such a way that those assumptions are no longer warranted.

The new reality is first sensed by those few people in the system who interface with the outside world, but is essentially invisible to the people on the inside. The difficulty here is that the new reality threatens the order of the whole edifice - there is no sustainable adaptation that doesn't involve giving up key fundamental assumptions of the culture. Because reality does not negotiate, the system faces a transformative challenge.

What happens then? In a perfect world, everyone would immediately change their minds and reorganize to face the challenge. In actuality, most of the members enter a stage of reality denial where their mind filters out inconvenient truths. To a lucid observer, it's only a matter of time before the system collapses - it’s a walking dead. But to insiders, everything's peachy, thank you. Thus no significant rearrangement can be made.

It is worth noting that even at this stage the system still pulls in hapless recruits, too. It is easy for uninformed youngsters or outsiders who don't have a solid critical frame of reference to look at the past success and current grandeur of the system, and take for granted that things will go on like they have, for a long time still. 

The last section made the important point that a social system does't reach its expiration date for everyone at the same time. Obsolescence is observer-dependent. It is for this reason that the system can remain standing for a long while after its death has first been diagnosed.

In the emergence phase, people we will call free radicals start making noise from inside the system. The cultural immune system does its work: their ramblings make no sense at all to people within the system, and these people are dismissed as cranks and ignored.

However, they typically begin networking and spreading all sorts of disturbing ideas around. The ideas are disturbing because they call into question the fundamental assumptions of the shared culture.

At this point, it seems like every kook comes from a different direction and makes up a crazy moon-language of their own. Noise is everywhere. Groups may form, but they have weak coherence and little capability; they may safely be ignored.