The “COOPERATION” Category is devoted to show that the evolution of Life on Earth has a direction. This direction is toward increasing the scale of cooperation among living processes. Also, the direction of evolution is toward increasing the adaptability of individuals and communities to better face the challenges of Life. The Butterfly-Community Open-Project is aiming to be the humanity step further in its evolution.

This article is compiled using texts from John Stewart’s book, Evolution’s Arrow

The “mechanism” that seems to be essential, if a process is to produce progressive change, is one that searches for improvements and reproduces these improvements. We will talk about human technological progress and human social progress.

It is insightful to observe what kind of technological progress was searched for and reproduced along human history and therefore to observe the direction of technological evolution.

All the history of the First Frontier (Beige-Magenta), the technological development served the human communities as a whole. Every invention that helped the human community to thrive was reproduced.

When the emphasis was on military technology (see Second Frontier – Conquering the World through Military Expansion) or on economic technology (see Third Frontier – Conquering the World through Economical Expansion), the technology evolved to serve either the interests of military or economic power (both belonging to the ruling caste).

We are now at a “bifurcation point”: either we continue on the road opened by the Third Frontier, or we open the fourth one. Either we continue to invent “disruptive technologies” – that actually are not able to disrupt anything, but will continue to serve our compulsive need for “power over” and exploitation – or we choose to consciously evolve a more integrative level of consciousness that will make obsolete the need for “power over” and allow us peaceful and synergistic correlation.

Humanity is preparing to open the Fourth Frontier: the co-creation of a Yellow-Turquoise civilization, a pro-commons civilization. Therefore, the direction of technological evolution is in a “bifurcation point” too: either it will evolve towards rewarding technologies that strengthen the power of the ruling caste (legislative forms of ownership that favor creation of monopolies, manipulation of the information etc.) or it will evolve toward rewarding technologies that strengthen a pro-commons economic and political society (self-government and self-sufficiency capacities of local communities), biomimetic technologies that align with nature’s processes and so on…

Regarding social progress, is insightful to note that human society has failed to produce too much social progress… Why it was so? The answer is obvious: Because human society does not included in its organizing principles a mechanism that could select and reproduce social improvements when they are discovered or proposed. The external manager (the ruling classes) has no interest in changing the form of government, in seeking and finding improved forms of social organization and in reproducing them.

At the end of the Orange-Green development cycle (Modernism-Postmodernism), it is easy to understand that, although the centralized political control and the global market was a good mechanism for promoting technological development, it was not a good mechanism for promoting social equity and fairness. The political, economic or religious ideologies, inculcated by the ruling classes among the population, always have confirmed the “inalienable right”, of the “heavenly origin” of the ruling class. In modern times we often hear the misleading political theory that democracy – with all its shortcomings – is the best possible form of leadership or the misleading economic theory that capitalism – with all its inequities – is the best form of human cooperation. The ruling class has never said that it is only temporarily in office. They never allowed in our social fabric a mechanism that could search for and reproduce social improvements.

The opening of what we call the “Fourth Frontier” or the “evolutionary leap toward a Yellow-Turquoise consciousness” is exactly about finding a “mechanism” that is being able to search for social improvements and to reproduce them. Only based on this “mechanism” (better said a “living structure”) able to search and reproduce social improvements, we will be able to build a fair planetary society and a regenerative economy, in harmony with the planetary ecosystem. It is obvious that only such a human civilization can continue in the long run to thrive on this planet, without destroying it.

Butterfly Communities frame envisions the autonomy of every local community. Each community, being free to self-govern, will find its best social organization, suited to its environment and purpose. So, by building a holarchic social structure of human-scale communities and allowing self-governance at the local level, we will manage to create a living structure able to search for social improvements. Then, based on the right to self-determination and self-government, each local community will be able to adopt and adapt to local conditions any social improvement discovered anywhere in the world.