ABSTRACT
The analysis in Chapter 10 demonstrates that the ideals held up by both Hierarchical and Atomistic approaches to governance produce pathologies of bondage and isolation, and that each perspective attempts to remedy the pathology of its counterpart. A fear of systemic crisis leads to the tenuous decision to let the contradictions stand between liberalisms, or to anchor the dualism to more centrist positions that produce the pathology of calicification. Yet attempts to find a kind of Golden Mean repeatedly fail. In contemporary times, more common is the dialectical escalation of mutual critiques and calls for reform that push ideologies toward polarized dynamic ideals. In these extreme Holographic and Fragmented positions, the pathologies of absorption and alienation are quite likely to lead to existential crisis. As found in other schismogenic systems, these existential crises bring the tension between collectivist and individualist positions to a breaking point. As a result, there is a widespread and “deep existential resentment of late modernism” (Connolly 2011, 8). Because there is insufficient ontological similarity to enable fluid movement from one extreme end of the Governance Arc to the other, the only options provided by Holographic and Fragmented are either an existential leap of revolution or retrenchment back toward more static ontological terrain to form hybrid positions aligned with liberal reform movements. This chapter explores these responses to existential crisis, noting that a leap from one extreme to the other simply lands the individual in the opposite pathology-from absorption to alienation or from alienation to absorption. To explain the dynamic of retrenchment from these positions, we replace the neoconservative, neoliberal, and communitarian reform movements with their respective hybrid approaches to governance in the Arc of Reification (see Figure 11.1)—the Reified State, the Reified Market, and the Reified Community.
