Transcendence

Transcendence in this framework is a movement of groups rather than of persons, and the direction is upward absorption. Smaller endogroups are sublated into a higher authoritative one, which means their endo-ideals become reflectors of the larger centre and the smaller group's members identify more strongly with the higher endo-ideal than with what they were. Marsh wrote it as a law. With no egalitarian counter force, endogroups will be continually sublated to larger transcendental endogroups, so the movement is the default and only the levelling force opposes it. Each level increases the power at the centre, from the family head of the caregiver-self to the state leader of the nation-self to department heads of the discovery-self to chief executives of the creation-self to church leaders of the divinity-self. What the sequence costs is stated plainly. Attachments made at one level are surrendered on entering the next, so mothers are abandoned for caregivers, families for school, school for work and work for the wait for death, and allegiance to the higher group is proved by damaging the lower one, which is what the militia recruit ordered against their own community and the follower ordered to sacrifice a child are doing. The virtues of the previous endogroup are enfolded into the new one, which is why people speak of obedient reflectors attending to their work religiously now that religious endogroups have been transcended by economic ones. The law of diverted expansion supplies the fuel, since exosocial expansion inside an endogroup is converted into a force towards transcendence.

Transcendence in religious and philosophical usage means surpassing ordinary experience or the limits of the material, and in developmental psychology Maslow added self-transcendence above self-actualization. Marsh's usage is almost the inverse, naming a movement she treats as loss rather than attainment, which is deliberate given that the language of rising above is exactly what makes the surrender of attachments feel like growth. State formation literature describes the absorption of smaller polities into larger ones, and organizational research studies acquisition. What is unusual is the claim of continuity between those and personal development, which the framework needs since both are the same operation on her account.