An interest that preoccupies me currently is the development of a scientific meta-semeiotic. Essentially this means that if you have a well-defined (formalized) semeiotic model of how the world is apprehended by individuals in species then how do you achieve the same goal – a formalized model – that describes the behavior of collections.

More specifically, let’s say you know how an individual (a worker or a terrorist, for example) sees herself in the world then – all conventional influence aside – what are the underlying inevitable behaviors when they are in groups? How do various group notions arise? What makes a population accept oppression or rebel? Conventions mitigate these extremes of behavior.

When I use the phrase “natural ethics” I am referring to these inevitable behaviors.

In simpler language: if we develop a scientific model of how an individual sees herself in the world and behaves – what will that enable us to say scientifically about groups? IOW how do we extend that model to account for the behavior of society – and can we draw any useful conclusions from it?

Caveat that these are early thoughts in a developing work.

So, here are some more thoughts from a developing meta-semeiotic theory of natural ethics and inevitable behavior.

Revolution is a natural ethic of first-order merit. That is, revolutions occur for their own sake not because there is identified a better system of society. They occur simply because a population refuses to continue to accept an existing society, not because a society is offered an attractive alternative.

Revolutions initiate as this tension against something, they never result as a tension for anything. Although one can rhetorically argue that the tension is “for change,” that and similar grammatical structures are simply playing with words. The motivator that causes revolutionary behavior in a society is the malcontent, not the visionary. Once a revolution is underway, then new ideas and concepts arise and visionaries can step in.

The successful communist revolutions (successful in the sense that the revolution did indeed bring revolutionary change to the society) took advantage of a pre-existing tension of inevitable revolution. It seems clear that ideas of Utopian society in and of themselves are insufficient to trigger change on a large scale. Revolution must exist as an a priori ethical imperative.

The Islamic revolution also reflects this dynamic – it is not driven by the Islamic cause, the Islamic cause takes advantage of an existing tension for revolution in certain communities. The ethical imperative is revolution, the cause is incidental.

The Islamic cause once established, indeed whatever cause, itself must inevitably suffer the same dynamic as any established system of society. Which leads one to speculate that all societies based upon a state of consensus suffer inevitable entropy as generations move away from the original motivations. The motivations evaporate as the embodiments change. To own a cause, it must be our own not that which took advantage of a prior generation’s disadvantage. When a society is under constant pressure of conflict – in Northern Ireland, for example – the revolution continues because subsequent generations develop ownership of the revolution in the ongoing conflict.

To mix semantics, considered political or religious “causes” are not the cause of any revolution. The cause of revolution is always antithetical opposition to the current social order.

I hope that some historian or sociologist is going to point me to some analysis that points to a well argued and established historical argument that makes this observation – and I may well have read such an argument myself in Paul Johnson’s analysis. My analysis here comes as a general meta-semeiotic one, as a confirmation of historical anecdote. It is not that this happens occasionally, this is the inevitable behavior of societies.

So, if you want to change the world you must first find the site of revolution before you find “the cause.”