Circles of Expansion

Expansion is the movement, not the levels it produces. A drive to exosocial expansion is one of the four elements of a healthy self, standing alongside a personal membrane, euphoria and euphoric conduits, and the only obstacle Marsh names to assembling that self is the endosocial membrane. The movement has a shape. An infant is born into a lifegiver-self and at once begins establishing a caregiver-self, a nation-self should develop between roughly the age of two and 12, adolescence brings a hormonal imperative towards discovery and creation, and a person who perseveres arrives at a divinity-self that neither wants to go back nor fears death. What the shape is not is a hierarchy. Exosocial development does not occur in stages, and all types of exosocial interaction are equal in the euphoric reward they bring, so nothing at a wider circle outranks anything at a narrower one and no circle has to be finished before another begins. Health does not depend on reach either. Many people are entirely happy with interactions involving only their own land and community.

This matters because the structure most people live inside counterfeits the movement. Transcendental endogroups demarcate expansion into stages of endogroup advancement, each sublated to the one above, and the endo-ideal grows more powerful at every level, from the head of a family to a state leader to a department head to a chief executive to a church leader. Attachments made at one level become things to abandon on entering the next. Mothers are abandoned for caregivers, families for school, school for work and work for the wait for death. Each level is put at the service of the one above it, 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. That is a ladder of sublation wearing the shape of growth.

Two laws describe what happens to real expansion inside such a structure. Under the law of diverted expansion, all exosocial expansion in an endogroup is diverted into a force towards transcendence, which creates a voracious centripetal force driving a ponzi scheme of power. Under the law of uninhibited expansion, an exosocial person unable to form euphoric conduits at one circle is uninhibited from forming them at a further level and feels an increased drive to do so, so a blockage produces pressure elsewhere rather than a halt. The endoself meets the movement by substituting possession for experience at every point, collecting credentials and postable experiences in place of discovery, ownership in place of creation and a ready-made religion in place of spirituality. Where the movement runs its course the earlier protective membranes are gone, the self is held up by networks rather than by any single membrane, and bodily mortality has stopped being an existential threat. Marsh treats this as the working pattern and defers the detailed account of each circle and its obstacles to The Theft of Self.

Stage theories dominate the usual account of growth. Erik Erikson's psychosocial stages, Jean Piaget's cognitive stages, Lawrence Kohlberg's moral stages and Abraham Maslow's hierarchy all describe a sequence in which each level is reached, worked through and largely superseded, with maturity as arrival at the top. Robert Kegan's orders of consciousness come closer to a widening than a climb. The unusual move here is to accept that a staged, hierarchical version of growth genuinely exists and then to identify it as the pathology rather than the norm. What the stage theorists describe as development, Marsh reads as endogroup transcendence, a sequence of sublations in which each attachment is surrendered to enter a larger and more powerful group. Real expansion, on her account, leaves nothing behind and ranks nothing above anything else.