'Games People Play' An Essay in Three Parts Part 3

Part 3

It has become useful in these times of creative destruction to speak of Grand Narratives or metanarratives when speaking of civilization [Lyotard, 1979]. We study the past to predict the future. The wisdom achieved in the study of history becomes the Grand Narrative of prescriptive myth. That is the process of civilization. It is a quest for Truth and has little to do with science and the evolution of truth which is a contingent petite narrative and nothing to do with technology which is ad hoc and amoral.
One does not cast History as Narrative without both context and intent. These attempts to rationalize a chronology are useful and worthy of study in the process of myth creation. They are not the Truth. Such narratives are approximate and almost certainly in error. That being said, an approximate historical narrative and the mythos implied by it are valuable hypotheses in that quest for Truth. In these times, it is politic to speak of personal myth. However any such myth must be drawn from chronology, history, and narrative to have meaning. There must be a shared vocabulary even if one is dealing in personal contingent truth for it to be social behavior. Here is the vocabulary, chronology, of this piece which composes a narrative that informs it. It is simply my interpretation of events and a prediction of what could be, small 't' true. It is a contention of this narrative that the Grand Narrative of Western Civilization reached its zenith in the year 1776 and was replaced by 1929 by a Grand Design which is no more than a technological set created by the Invisible Hand of the market deploying efficient technology which is the end result of what could be called Utopian Anarchy. The final result of this process is a stable technological set defining a new narrative civilization and making the Grand Design incidental to social existence.


The Chronology

Foundations of the Grand Design-
Empiricism                                                            The Scientific Revolution
Hobbes, Rousseau, and the Social Contract           The Rational Society
Market Games and Adam Smith                            Utopian Anarchy
Innate Behavior and Immanuel Kant                       'Whereof we cannot know'
Utopian Anarchy-
American Revolution and Constitution                     The Rational Government
French Revolution                                                   Utopian Anarchy in Becoming
Andrew Jackson                                                     Chaos Formalized
Grand Design in Becoming-
Steam Locomotive                                                   Technological Ecosystem
Transcendentalists                                                    Grand Design Reaction
American Civil War                                                  Creative Destruction
La Belle Epoque                                                       PostIndustrialism
The End of the Grand Narrative-
First World War                                                       Grand Narrative Bankrupt
Jazz Age                                                                   Chaos Culture
Technological Ecosystem in Becoming-
Great Depression and World War II                         Grand Design at Work
Postwar Era                                                              The Economic Bar Raised
Systems Theory and Game Theory
Information Theory                                                    The Vacuum Filled
Lyndon Johnson                                                         Counter Chaos
Postmodernism                                                          A New World Being Born
From IBM 360 to 2060+/- as pure guess.

Civilization is the highest form of social existence. It is a destination of social development and a journey to the Truth. As social existence it is a game of market contracts however vague those contracts are and however volatile the currency that scores them.

The End