Looking for a better ideology? Quadriformism can help.

Part Two: Scattering seeds to advance an ism whose time will come

A couple weeks ago, in a sharp post titled “Humpty Dumpty Had a Great Fall,” Yascha Mounk reviewed our country’s current disarray, then asked the kind of question I keep looking for:

“What might a future look like that addresses these shortcomings in a more responsible way — one that doesn’t insist on returning to a past that is likely gone forever but can credibly promise that we will more fully live up to the most deeply held values and the most oft-repeated promises of our political order?” (Feb 14, 2024)

My answer is clear: quadriformism — even though I’m still not certain about its exact contents and implications.

Looking way back … and hopefully ahead

I’m dead serious about quadriformism. I didn’t use any quadri- words — I didn’t know them — in my first paper about TIMN: Tribes, Institutions, Markets, Networks: A Framework About Societal Evolution (1996). Even so, it was already a quadriform framework. I learned to explain TIMN as a progression from monoform to biform to triform and next to quadriform societies when I followed up with In Search Of How Societies Work: Tribes—The First and Forever Form (2007).

Checking old archives, I see I first called for quadriformism in ideological terms after I retired in 2008 and began blogging. That was in a 2009 post on “TIMN: some implications for thinking about political philosophy and ideology”:

“TIMN implies that it may be a good idea for Americans to start becoming quadriformists, perhaps progressive ecumenical neo-limitarian quadriformists, who are looking ahead to the age of networks. Better that than falling for today’s monoformist and biformist blowhards who rant against government and for the market, while trying to tribalize people so that they turn more divisively partisan than ever.

“But if those are to become punch-lines of this post, there are other points that should be made first — above all, this one: The key isms and ocracies that are scattered across the history of political evolution all amount to expressions of one or more of the TIMN forms. And that will be the case far into the future as well. Figure out TIMN and you can figure out the past, present, and future of political philosophy and ideology.” (2009)

In 2018 I tried to clarify these ideas in five long posts — collectively titled “Notes for a quadriformist manifesto” — where I compared TIMN to other frameworks that seemed likewise headed in quadriform directions: Kate Raworth’s ideas about four “means of provisioning,” Michel Bauwens’ ideas about four “relational modalities,” and Kojin Karatani’s about four “modes of exchange. I even got a bit angered about the dearth of quadriform ideas from theorists on the Right:

“• TIMN is not derived from or committed to any specific ideology. TIMN expects and allows for a broad future political spectrum, from Left to Right. It leaves room for the endurance of conservative and progressive orientations along a new quadriformist spectrum. In contrast, the other three frameworks clearly belong on the Left — Bauwens’ and Karatani’s even aspire to a final future triumph of the Left over the Right, in keeping with their Marxist orientations. To my disappointment, I’ve found no theorists or philosophers on the Right who are pondering the future within anything like a quadriform framework. They seem stuck in their triformist mindsets. Politicians and pundits on the Right may even react that the quadriformism I seek would jeopardize America’s traditions of capitalism and individualism. Rubbish nonsense — what they may not see is that creating a quadriform system should lead to stronger, healthier families and communities, a smaller, less burdened, less burdensome government, and a freer, fairer, more efficient market system — all key goals of most conservatives.” (2018)

During the next five years I kept mentioning this prospective ideological stance now and then. But I faltered at writing up a full-fledged manifesto. I also didn’t try to extend beyond my own blog(s) — until lately.

Dropping a seed on rocky ground in 2024

The quadriformism I have in mind means that people working in the fields of health, education, welfare, and the environment should begin talking with each other, seeking common ground and a mutual language. Not easy to do in our siloed structures, I figured. But I also figured I might as well see what happens if I insert quadriformism into comments at others’ posts about their specialties.

Thus I tried to plant a seed last year after reading Donna Smith’s excellent article, “Foundational Steps Vital on the Road to Universal Health Care,” May 9, 2024, at Wendell Potter’s formidable HEALTHCARE un-covered site. In her view, America’s healthcare systems had “morphed” into a “medical-financial-industrial complex” (MFIC) whose call for “incremental change” was proving obstructive. What’s needed, she said, is “foundational change”:

“The industry expanded its turf. Hospitals grew larger, stand-alone urgent care clinics, often owned by corporate conglomerates, opened on street corners in cities across the country, private insurance rolls grew, disease management schemes proliferated, and hospital and drug prices continued the march upward. The money flowing into the campaign coffers of political candidates made industry-favored incremental changes an easier lift.

“The MFIC now enjoys a hold on nearly one-fifth of our GDP. Almost one of every five dollars flowing through our economy does so because of that ever-expanding, profit-focused complex.

“To change this “system” would require an overhaul of the whole economy. Single-payer advocates must consider that herculean task as they continue their work. We must understand that the true system of universal health care we envision would also disrupt the financial industry – banks, collection agencies, investors – an often-forgotten but extraordinarily powerful segment of the corporate-run complex.” (May 9, 2024)

Solid points. Good material for a TIMN analysis. So I ventured a lengthy comment a few days later — a comment I now wish I’d posted right away here too:

“I’ve admired and followed HEALTHCARE un-covered for over a year. Partly because I regard Wendell Potter as a mighty illuminator of a key challenge facing American society: healthcare. But also because I’m interested in the future evolutionary potential of complex societies. A framework I use tells me to take an interest in healthcare as one of a set of pivotal matters for social evolution’s next phase.

“I welcome your advice for healthcare advocates to seek “foundational change” and play the “long game.” I quite agree, and here’s what I’m wondering: The ultimate answer to realizing foundational change in the healthcare sector may not lie within that sector, nor within the broader “medical-financial-industrial complex” (MFIC). The answer may depend on the eventual emergence of a new realm of society that health and other care-centered matters move into.

“Our society, like all modern societies, is loosely organized in terms of three major realms of actors and activity: civil society, with its largely voluntary sectors; government, with its public sectors; and the market economy, with its private sectors. Healthcare does not fit neatly into any one of them; it gets bounced around. Some leaders claim it’s a public-sector responsibility; for others, it’s a private-sector matter; or it is keyed for mixed public-private cooperation. Plus, it’s a problem that civil-society actors have a role in addressing too. Healthcare is thus a vital matter without a true consistent home in the American system.

“That has been the case for decades, even centuries. And by now, as a result of growing enormity and complexity, it seems evermore evident that healthcare cannot be fit, properly in our existing public and/or private sectors, and is too overwhelming to leave to civil-society. It’s a dilemma; and it’s likely to get worse.

“Curiously, healthcare is not the only societal matter stuck in this kind of systemic doldrums. Education, welfare, and environmental matters are stuck there too — they are all stuck in it together. None is exactly a matter for civil society, or government, or the market economy to resolve. That lack of fit is now too big and burdensome to ignore; it's constraining America’s future evolvability

“Here’s my point: While all four matters — health, education, welfare, and the environment — are viewed and treated separately by analysts, policymakers, and other actors, there’s a key commonality that’s being overlooked. All four are about maximizing care: people care, life care, planetary care; the care of body, mind, and soul, individually and collectively. Plus, each activity affects the others; their dynamics and vectors interact. Better health can lead to better education, and vice-vera, especially if welfare and environmental conditions are improved as well.

“Furthermore, the set of policy principles and positions that may be raised for any one of the four is pretty much the same for all of them. For example, debates exist for all four as to whether it/they should be recognized as a legal right, whether to approach matters individually or collectively, how to protect against risks and vulnerabilities, etc.

“What I deduce from this is that health, education, welfare, and the environment have so many affinities and are so intertwined as policy problems that it will make increasing sense for policymakers and other actors to view them as a bundled set — and eventually as bedrock components for constructing a new care-centric realm (sector) of society.

“Today, even if that analysis may sound potentially sensible to some people, it will still seem like fanciful unwelcome academic speculation in many circles. As I’ve been told, government agencies and capitalist enterprises presently have “hammer-lock” grips on healthcare and education. There is no way they will let go in today’s political and economic environments, much less allow health, education, welfare, and environmental matters to be bundled. But I see a path opening up in the years ahead.

“Per that evolutionary framework I mentioned earlier, societies have relied across the ages on four cardinal forms of organization: kinship-oriented tribes, hierarchical institutions, competitive markets, and collaborative networks. These forms have co-existed since people first began to assemble into societies — there was always someone doing some activity using one or more of those basic forms. But each has emerged and taken hold as a major form of organization, governance, and evolution in a different historical era. Tribes were first millennia ago (with civil society becoming its modern manifestation); institutions developed millennia later (e.g., states, armies); then centuries later came market systems for growing our economies — hence modern societies with their three major realms.

“If that were the end of the story, our prospects for evolving still more complex societies would be nearing an evolutionary cul-de-sac (“the end of history”). Notice, however, that the network form is only now coming into its own, starting a few decades ago. Network forms have been around, in use, for millennia. But they have lacked the right kind of information and communications technology to enable them to take hold and spread. Each preceding form emerged, in turn, because an enabling information technology revolution occurred at the time — i.e., speech and storytelling for tribes, writing and printing for institutions, telegraphy and telephony for markets. The ongoing digital information technology revolution is finally energizing the network form, enabling it to compete with the other forms and address problems they aren’t good at resolving.

“As a result, information-age network forms of organization and related strategies, doctrines, and technologies (not to mention ideologies) are currently spreading far and wide. One way or another, they lie behind and help explain nearly all the turmoil disrupting our society and the world at large. Network factors and forces are modifying the natures of civil societies, governments, and markets everywhere, often via the creation of hybrids with the earlier forms — sometimes for the better, sometimes not. The growth of so-called health and hospital networks in the profiteering hands of venture capital firms and giant insurance corporations is a manifestation of this.

“But it’s one thing to disrupt and modify what exists, quite another to transform and radically improve a system’s complexity. Still missing so far are clear signs that the rise of the network form will have the major evolutionary consequence that each earlier form has had: the generation of a distinct new realm/sector of society, through a long hard-fought process of structural-functional differentiation.

“Maybe it’s too early for signs of that. Or maybe I don’t know how and where to look yet. Nonetheless, assuming my deductions are correct — i.e., that a fourth realm will emerge in the decades ahead, and its core purpose and function will be care-centric — then I’d like to say it’s advisable to start anticipating and planning now for its emergence and construction.

“Here are some signs I’ll be looking for, and questions to wonder about. I’ve derived them from wondering what makes the earlier three realms so distinctive.

“• Have actors in the fields of health, education, welfare, and the environment started talking together, making common cause, finding mutual concepts, developing a language around care that spans all their fields — much as civil-society, government, and business actors have distinctively done for their own realms of activity?

“• To the extent this next/new realm may be identified as a particular sector of society, what would be a good name to reflect its essence? My own sense is that it will (and should) be a “commons sector” per writings by Elinor Ostrom, as well as other pro-commons theorists. Or a “social sector” per an old proposal by Peter Drucker. Other theorists already have other intentions for those concepts, so my view is bound to be debatable.

“• What specific types of network organization and governance are going to be needed? I’m not sure they exist yet. It’s encouraging to see experiments with DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) and DisCOs (distributed cooperative organizations) moving ahead, but so far mostly for small artisanal business ventures that are not care-centric. New kinds of internetted collectives and cooperatives may be what are needed. But my sense is that something unusually vast and dense, that spans and integrates all four care-centric fields, and that is transnational as well as national in scope is what will be needed. Such networks don’t exist yet, but I like to think of them as “equinets.”

“• If the above is roughly correct, then lots of additional questions and issues will surely require attention, say about instituting new forms of property, finance, and administration. The answers will surely be, and will have to be, very different from what people have developed for the existing three realms and their various sectors.

“I’ve raised these ideas and observations with a few evolutionary and complexity theorists in recent years. This is the first I’m trying to do likewise with sectoral experts.

“Any review comments? Advice? I shall hope so, for I mean to keep working on clarifying the underlying framework and its implications for future policy and strategy. Onward.” (May 12, 2024, comments section)

All to no evident avail, but for one stray like emoji. But whoa, as I reread that today, after failing to log it here last year and forgetting about it until a month or so ago, I see it’s unexpectedly thorough, already making many of the points I want to revitalize this year.

Scattering a few more seeds earlier this year, 2025

In a similar vein, on January 7 this year, as the presidential transition loomed, Anand Giridharadas’ stimulating newsletter The Ink asked his readers, “What’s your posture? … Resistance? Retreat? Returning to the local? Reorganizing? Rethinking the basics? Something else? Tell us in the comments. We’d appreciate it, and so would your fellow readers.” (January 7, 2025)

With that question already on my mind, I couldn’t resist and drafted a reply:

“I know exactly what I’m going to do: pursue “quadriformism” — though right now it’s surely too theoretical a posture to attract many others.

“We currently live in an advanced modern society that has a triform design — meaning it has three major realms: civil society, government, and an economy, variously arranged and each relying on its own form organization. This triform design emerged several centuries ago. It still holds sway today.

“Indeed, nearly all of today’s ideological isms — capitalism, liberalism, conservatism, progressivism, and populism, as well as trendier anarcho-capitalism, neo-libertarianism, neo-monarchism, accelerationism, national conservatism, techno-humanism, techno-colonialism, cosmo-localism, etc. — are triform in nature. They address how civil-society, government, and/or the economy should be shaped, and how their actors are supposed to think and behave. All of today’s politicians are, at best, triformists.

“But triform societies are now nearing their end. Because of growing social complexities and complications, they have nearly exhausted their capabilities as designs that can address and resolve all they need to.

“Quadriformism is where future evolution is headed — a distinct fourth realm will emerge and take shape in the decades ahead, absorbing particular kinds of actors and activities that the current three realms are no longer able to handle well. There are reasons to project that this next new realm will consist largely of health, education, welfare, and environmental actors and activities — matters that are about care, broadly defined, rather than identity, power, or profit. These care-centric actors and activities will move (and be moved) into this new realm, which will be as distinct and independent in design as the current three realms are from each other.

“This evolution from triform to quadriform designs will radically redefine the nature of societies as a whole, and improve the performance capabilities of all four realms. New philosophies and ideologies will arise.”

To no avail — for an unexpected reason. As I tapped the Enter key, the site rebuked that only paying subscribers can comment. Oh well, at least I’d fashioned a brief summary statement, always a difficulty for me. And now it’s logged here. Even if this post itself proves to no immediate avail, at least it can serve as a log for ideas and observations I want to note down.

Next, on January 26, Liz Greene’s Nautilus magazine newsletter about new goings-on in science and culture asked her readers, “What adaptation do you hope humans develop next? … Send us your answer! Reply to this newsletter with a brief explanation of your response, and we’ll reveal the top answers in a future newsletter.”

So I dropped another seed — sensing I better be very brief in keeping with their format:

“Modern societies have three formal realms: civil society + government + economy. Most all actors and activities fit (and are made to fit) somewhere in that triform design. But it’s under stress, reaching its limits; some activities have become too complex to fit easily anymore. This is particularly so for health, education, welfare, and the environment — a set of matters far more about care than identity, power, or profit. As health etc. become more interconnected, actors will come up with new organizational forms and principles for them, creating a distinct new realm. What will evolve next then are societies with four cardinal realms: those three + a-yet-to-be-formalized fourth realm, probably a pro-commons realm based on egalitarian network principles. Its evolution will enable the other three realms to function and thrive better than they presently can. Quadriform societies will supersede today’s triform societies.”

Again to no avail. I suppose my increasingly labored writing style doesn’t help. But at least I’d tried to drop another seed somewhere new.

But enough with quoting myself. Indeed, this post is now fraught with so much repetition that I wonder whether it feels like I’m subjecting readers to reflexive conditioning. Or could that be a good thing, in light of what we are up against?

[Sidenote: Gradually maneuvering people’s minds over time to succumb to “reflexive control” is one Russian-style operational art (and science) that Far Right activists have reportedly used to polarize our society and culture for over a decade. Theoretically, if an adversary skilled in information-age methods and technologies finds ways to shift public opinion by 2-3% each year, say regarding immigration and refugee issues, then the compound cumulative effect over ten years would sum to a 22-34% shift — enough to make a difference for election campaigns. Which worries me.]

Coda: A Little Nightcap Music #2

Since I’m feeling wishful for quadriformism, let’s listen to one of the greatest whiskey nightcap accompaniments of all time: Billie Holiday singing “I wished on the Moon” (1935) with Teddy Wilson piano, Benny Goodman clarinet, Roy Eldridge trumpet, Ben Webster tenor sax, plus others. And my gosh, I just noticed, the lyrics were written by one of our greatest American poets, Dorothy Parker!

In Closing

Lately, “Onward…” has again picked up even more readers. I’m pleased, as well as puzzled. Two even pledged to pay — quite a shock! I didn’t even know that could be done, since I’ve always left my sites open and free. So I’m wondering about turning on Substack’s pledge function, while leaving it set so no one actually is charged unless I someday turn on the payments function too. I remain averse to doing so, since my publication rate has been so off-and-on. On the other hand, knowing a few people are willing to pay could help energize me to keep pressing onward. We’ll see.

P.S.: With this post, as with a few before it, I once again have a squirmy feeling that I am on track but off path. On track in the sense it’s headed in direction that matter for this blog’s purposes. But off path in that it’s not the post I initially said I’d do next. This post was initially going to be about “How to think like a quadriformist.” And I have indeed drafted about 2/3s of it.

But then I happened to read a few articles about recent ideological trends in American Right circles that substantiated my sense that GOP politicians, “tech-bro” elitists, and others on the Right are backsliding toward neo-medieval biform views that idealize tribal loyalty and institutional hierarchy to such degrees that market ideals and their key offspring, political democracy, will end up corrupted and suborned. So I hastily shifted to begin a draft about that for this slot. And it too is now about 2/3 done, with a title that says to Beware The American Right’s Reversion To Biformist Ideals.

Then I got slowed down on finishing that post too. I felt I should do more research to substantiate points I want to include about Russia’s enduring incapacity to accomplish a modern +M transition, and about how this helps explain Moscow’s pernicious efforts to propagandize its neo-medieval biform (T+I) ideology of Eurasianism in Far Right circles outside Russia. Not an easy argument for me to research, but I’m slowly getting there.

That’s when I rummaged around and decided to quickly assemble this side-step of a post around notes and quotes I’d neglected to log. Now I’ll cycle back to finish the other pending posts. But I better refrain from claiming I know which comes next.

I hope you bear with me as I stay on track, even though I impulsively hop pathways more than I mean to. Onward.