This paper explores Turchin’s metasystem transition concept in social systems, analyzing collective evolution principles and competitive/synergetic configurations. It highlights how similar systems engage in negative sum competition, hindering group optimization, and suggests shared controls to foster cooperation. Examples like multicellularity and human sociality illustrate this transition. However, ongoing competition among cooperators yields ambivalent sociality and weak integration. The study reviews social control mechanisms’ strengths/weaknesses and acknowledges the complex optimization challenges in societal evolution, suggesting a long, challenging path to global integration.
Published in World Futures: the Journal of General Evolution, Issue 45.