Unicist Approach: What drives the evolution of cultures?


The unicist approach defines that the driver of cultural evolution processes is the adaptation of a culture. This adaptation implies that a democratic attitude prevails, providing the necessary consensus to have social cohesion, being driven by a social efficiency, and making the necessary trade offs to maintain an efficient consensus.

The consensus of an evolutionary culture is oriented towards growth, which implies having a proactive attitude in the environment to generate value. Social efficiency means that the system is institutionalized having therefore a minimum level of entropy.

This institutionalization is materialized in the habits and in the myths and fallacious myths installed in a culture.

Trade-offs are implicitly conflicts and generate crises.

On the one hand, they can be evolution conflicts when they happen within the limits of efficiency and the value earning behavior. Or they can be involution conflicts, on the other hand, when the goal of these trade-offs is “buying” consensus. In this case the culture enters a conjunctural involution which naturally eliminates the leaders that made this trade-offs if the value adding ethics prevails in the institutions.

If this is not the case, and a survivors’ ethics becomes necessary for the institutions, the culture will have entered into an over-adaptive behavior driving the culture towards involution.

The maximal strategy of evolutionary cultures is sustained by their value adding ethics. This implies that the leaders of the dominant segments have a level of consciousness that allows them to be aware of the social processes and the long term consequences of the decisions that are made.

Social evolution requires participative processes within an authoritative environment that does not require the exertion of power to be efficient.

Unicist Press Committee

NOTE: The Unicist Research Institute was the pioneer in using the unicist logical approach in complexity science research and became a private global decentralized leading research organization in the field of human adaptive systems. It has an academic arm and a business arm.