The Crisis of Ukraine – A Functionalist Approach to Scenario Building
Ukraine has basically evolved in a transition stage for centuries. Transition stages are such when there is more than one cultural nucleus seeking dominance in a culture. Transition stages drive naturally towards a need to survive to avoid being submitted to alien values.
In Ukraine there are now two different cultures in conflict. Now, this conflict assumed the extreme state of war, which in fact is the consequence of external interests that are associated with one of the archetypes of the population of Ukraine.
When there is a transition stage, the dominant values that ensure survival are individualism and materialism, which generate social dysfunctional behaviors. Dysfunctionality is always hidden behind fallacious cultural myths that avoid the perception of being endangered.
The chaos produced by war might generate three different consequences that cannot be predicted, because there is chaos, the influential forces are unclear, and there is an actual conflict of archetypes:
- Solving the problem of the internal cultural dispute.
- Generating an excision of the country
- Degradation of the culture to a deeper survival stage without solving the conflict.
A social mutation is produced when the functionality of a social entity has been lost, and there is the necessary available energy to generate a change.
The values of cultures are implicit in the values of their elites. Therefore, the understanding of the archetype of a culture implies researching the evolution of their establishment and the facts that were produced.
If you enter deeply in the history of a country, which is the way to try to discover the nature of a culture defined by its archetype, you will see that most of the changes happen at an operational level and not at a structural level.
But you can find turning points in culture like the one that was produced in Sweden more than 100 years ago. It might or not be the case of Ukraine. It fully depends on its establishment.
Peter Belohlavek
NOTE: The Unicist Research Institute has been, since 1976, the world-leading research organization that introduced the functionalist approach to science to manage the functionality of the real world. www.unicist.org