“THE WORLD ORDER IS DEAD, LONG LIVE THE WORLD ORDER!”

 

Civilizations in Transition: Societal Worlds as Transforming Determinator
A Clarifying Reflection by J. Michael Heynen *

I   Freedom in the International System
Human beings are born free into a universal space of free will—too often not into external freedom, but certainly into the evolutionary process of liberation. Thus, individual and societal development is always first and foremost emancipation toward freely knowing consciousness. The more this succeeds, the more the understanding of order as the immanence of freedom matures. Order thus becomes, above all, the external condition of freedom, and its determination comes from mind as the principle-founder of all normativity. And this applies to every subject of international relations, first and foremost to human beings.
Shaped by the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, as well as horrific empirical evidence, the long-lasting Westphalian system of peace and order in international relations (between states) emerged. According to regional self-perception, this system of order was thus transferred "to the world". This artifactual universalism has now become obsolete and laments its self-inflicted paralysis. – A selection of reasons, presented from an anamnestic perspective:

II   On the Decline of the “Old and New World Order”
- The illegitimate “globalization” of the Westphalian system has been systematically undermined by double standards and a lack of self-regulation of real, especially purely material and technological, globalization. As a consequence, political attempts ended in pure geopolitics and projected internal and external “culture wars”, often resembling the still-unresolved “Mein Kampf”. Liberal normativity and orders were quite successfully used and thus countered as camouflage for the outdated and overstretched Anglo-Saxon concept of property and its dialectical “twin”, crude Marxist egalitarianism. A current “transitional” shift to technoid-material feudalism and plutocracy is likely both just consequent and intentional. International law of a liberal order – dependent on the highest degree of voluntariness – is only “followed” insofar as it serves neo-colonialist and -imperialist goals and, due to minimal transparency, helps to maintain the form of “compliance” and “integrity”.
- The overcoming of absolute monarchy (with the exception of the Vatican in the West) was ultimately a purely formal exchange of official representation. The paradigm "by the grace of God" simply changed its projector; an egocentric auto-/plutocracy—embedded in fantasies of equality and projections of participation—with a self-righteous claim to global dominance, even has the potential for worldwide systems’ harmonization, which could be useful for peacemaking in the UN context. What remains unresolved, however, is the persistent and ultimately civilization-threatening disconnect between state and society. This is vividly illustrated by numerous foreign policies: the representation of petty-bourgeois provincialism and diplomatic incompetence, as well as illegitimate actions, fantasies of omnipotence, hegemonic centripetalism, imperial chauvinism, short-sighted escalation of violence, and warmongering. The social contract mandate placed on the state and world of states has been rendered absurd, making human and civilizational visions, and thus futures, unattainable. Necessary minimal approaches to transnational governance are systematically evaporated.
- The remaining “small format” of ego-centripetal foreign policies is measured in a messianic, global sense, thus becoming purely quantitative, paternalistic statehood. The corresponding internal decoupling of state and society, with the consequence of illegitimate governance (regardless of incompetence, lack of integrity, and transparency), has destroyed the West's own (Westphalian) order of freedom and peace modality: Constitutions are hollowed out, impersonal forms of governing and soulless governance artifacts replace the foundations and substance of freedom and are directly reflected in the absence od diplomacy as well as in the feudalistic-imperialist “foreign policies”. The resulting post-national, and especially increasing, post-state irreversibility leads to the systematic and systemic emptiness of societies and abandons them to their historically ingrained fate.

Governing as an expression of timeless, classical statecraft has thus been supereded by both factual and, in particular, intellectual "insolvency". Consequently, statehood as the foundation of international order, as a necessary continuum of transnational creative development and peacemaking, is no longer viable. This is especially true for the current attempts at domination by technocratic, materialistic, and militaristic so-called new elites. But messianic self-perception—from religious wars to regional universalism to today's egocentric capital accumulation, etc.—teaches that origin is not necessarily future, and external absolutism does not exist, because the universal world is relative. And this applies first and foremost to a free policy of international relations, specifically in the sense of transnational order policies in the spirit of shaping the future of civilization.

III   Transnational Order Policy
Every order, especially as a free order, is minimally rule-based and—analogous to a feedback loop—dynamic in order to anticipate developments and changes early on. Beyond its immanence, an order can also dissolve and—in the case of an order of freedom—vegetate without replacement. Human beings, born into a universal space of free will, are then at the mercy of a raw, reptilian existence when living under unfree conditions, thus completely contradicting their civilizational evolution. Lawlessness, anarchy, and chaos, or rigid order, are then simultaneously the triggers of a potential civilizational collapse. ‘Having’ instead of ‘being’ and consciousness have thus conjured up a fundamental global crisis, ultimately a foreseeable consequence that messianic transhumanism further catalyzes.
If the power-political egocentrism of the last few centuries has betrayed the European Renaissance and Enlightenment—humanism—then it has been definitively proven that only societies and their transpersonal elites, especially within the transnational, peaceful, co-creative coexistence of people, can guarantee political and intellectual leadership based on consciousness, and thus shape the future. For international order policy must therefore first and foremost be derived from and legitimized by a transnational-universal, individually and societally grounded and legitimized intellectual order of freedom. Every other method of establishing international order will, as before, fail again and again, because it ignores the evolutionary core of humanity. Thus, the great post-war order of the United Nations and its fundamental crisis—a tragic failure—leads quite precisely to the potential for change within a global transformation, especially in the politics of international relations: Transnationally associative societal formats are therefore the only legitimizing driving force for the civilizational determination of human futures.

IV   Society – Market – Administration
It is clear that statehood is necessary – as a counter-model to anarchy: professional, transparent, and ethical – for the organization, coordination, and derived regulation/order of free spheres of action. This includes precisely legitimized monopolies of force and formal sovereignty, also in foreign policies: the state as a minimal administrator between societies and markets – both domestically and internationally. The power factors of such a transnational order policy lie exclusively within the sphere of societies that determine free will. While markets organize the "foundation", the emancipated bearers of societal will establish the qualitative and intellectual power of their political will. Not fear and paternalism, but rather balancing consciousness and free will guide civilizational development and the normativity of the immanence of constantly transforming dynamics of order – both internally and externally.

V   Evolutionary World Orders: The Civilizational Primacy of free Societal Worlds
As mentioned above, the international system - measured against the conditions of human evolution - has failed in recent centuries: the generation of fear, regulatory dominance and violence, illegitimate control, and above all, the associated limitation of human developmental dynamics—often camouflaged by religious and ideological justifications—have led civilizations to their decline and potential armageddon. Lacking any humanly adequate legitimacy and accountability, they have abused their administrative and coordinating mandate and caused the structural entropy of the international system. This global disorder can only be remedied by a Copernican change or a kind of quantum leap into centropy, an emancipating, peaceful, co-creative societal world order dynamic, in order to shape futures firstly in accordance to human dignity.
These civilizational futures, and thus also orders, depend more than ever on humanitiy’s individual Self and its societal capacity to reconnect with its transcendent evolutionary laws. This determination—likely never the task of the state—can only be defined by societies: A world worth living in for humans is only a world of free societies. Within this individual  transpersonal and transnational societal self-awareness, an adequate world order policy, a humane policy of international relations, can be shaped and implemented as a real universal order of freedom. The alpha and omega of any global governance therefore lie under the unconditional primacy of a free societal world and their peaceful transnational collaboration.
Thus empowered governing is far more than mere state administration: It is Self-based governing with universal responsibility and, above all, with appropriately dynamic normativity, deducted from intellectual insight, cognition, and free will—albeit within societal relativity and equilibration processing. Reflective leadership from within the individual creates a sustainable, future-oriented world order with continuous progressing and the highest possible finding of justice and truthfulness: for "man's will is his/her heaven"! Such a world order, based on the primacy of societal world determination, transforms the future into a dynamic, co-creative present and the planet into a universal analogue as an unconditional space of free will.
https://worldpowerself.blogspot.com/2026/02/the-world-order-is-dead-long-live-world.html
* The author is the founding president of the International Senate of Cultures (ISC) http://internationalsenate.org. The preceding reflections also form the programmatic background of the ISC's organizational policy. - Curacao, Februray 14, 2026

ANASTASIS: THE QUANTUM LEAP INTO THE ‚NOUS‘

 

Reflections about the central societal challenge for the

second quarter of the 21st century: the Human Anastasis

by J Michael Heynen

I. What was it?

The international Societies entered the uncertainties of the 21st century based on the certainty of their 20th-century experiences, yet the insights gained from empirical evidence were largely ignored. And right from the start—in a strategically consistent and post-imperial manner—the old fatal game of artificially dramatized antagonisms was resumed, this time largely internationalized and militarized. The purely speculative narrative of the "clash of civilizations" became the paradigm of simple people and their leaders, ultimately becoming the normative framework for state action based on globalizing, egomaniacal projections.

9/11 then shaped the further course of the first quarter in the same bitter patterns and escalations of violence: the fragmentation of the fragile international system and the obviously intended entropy of "democracy" through the definitive abandonment of transparency and integrity in the processes of finding truth and justice. The apparent irreversibility of this development was further reinforced years later by civilizational measures such as epidemics on a global scale. The dissolution of any order as the basis and condition of freedom led directly back through the 20th century to the 18th/19th century: a backwardly time lapsed, dystopian process leaving a reptilian labyrinth as so-called world order.

II. The Omnipotent Ego of the substructure

This systematically initiated and expanded process—deliberate conflict escalation, the complete dissolution of order coupled with a politicized explosion of bureaucracy, state-sanctioned overconfidence in "governing," generally incompetent leadership, individual freedoms existing only as a "diaspora," etc.—results in the widespread evaporation of societies and states and their constitutive connection to the legitimacy of statehood.

Above all, formerly democratic societies have been quantitatively conditioned by collectivist, materializing ideologies instead of being qualitatively determined, deepened, and dynamized on the basis of the subject's autonomy. Consequently, the so-called democratic orders of international relations have also become entangled in endless antagonisms and double standards as pure interest-driven politics and have thus been eliminated. The so-called “democratic universalism” thus revealed itself as an imperial and feudalizing strategy and ended in a dead end: “The West and the Rest”!

The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Peace of Westphalia fell victim to egomaniacal projections of power—underpinned by technological and economic considerations, nihilistic materialism, and camouflaged by transhumanism. Instead of governing the present and future in a meaningful and peace-creating way from the superstructure, the substructure, derived from reality and its "normativity of the factual," becomes the sole modality of governing, thus illegitimate and necessarily escalating violence. Societies thus founded the state only at least to ultimately serve as an egomaniacal projection screen for decoupled statehood and soon to be abandoned to themselves through complete depletion of substance: The new beginning!

III. A Way Out?

The first quarter of the 21st century, with its multi-causal and multilateral crises and conflicts, definitively proves the inadequacy of governing factual reality from within its immanence. Human life means choosing, but choosing does not mean egocentrically selecting the conditions of reality that suit one's needs. Furthermore, it does not mean egomaniacally bending the constants of cosmic law, but rather, on the contrary: shaping and ordering the conditions of reality based on the determination of universal (cognitive) lawfulness. Only in this way can the individual freedom and creativity of the subject arise. And therein lies perhaps the only way out of the civilizational crisis, enabling us to reach the future and shape it in a way that is worthy of human dignity.

Those who recognize this crisis and its causes automatically open themselves to transition and transformation: to emancipation in the sense of finally becoming adults, to the reconnection of inner and outer worlds (consciousness first and as the driving force), and to the return of human development to the evolutionary grid of universal creation (Teilhard de Chardin) – from full self-empowerment and self-determination, initiated and legitimized by individual universality.

The ultimate end of civilizational development becomes a new beginning through reopen up to the true power of creation: from the reconnection with the inner world/self as the foundation of an emancipatory self-awareness, the civilizational world is reshaped, from the real world of the individual's inner self-determination as a responsible agent of human development.

This kind of Copernican revolution, the quantum leap into and out of the self, describes freedom and order arising from creative humanity. Such a fundamental shift from the material to the immaterial, from matter to guidance from spirit and consciousness, is the leading principle of human development in the second quarter of the 21st century. With this finally begins the true evolution of humanity: from adolescent to adult. The associated return to guidance from spiritual substance is simultaneously the definitive re-entry into the evolutionary process in accordance with creation as the central civilizational achievement of humankind: from object to subject, the co-creator of creation!

The ongoing Anthropocene is the historical nexus of transition and transformation into the self-dynamized nousphere, the space for shaping and resonating with humanity's dignified life—individually and (inter-) societally self-determined and balanced: a kind of anastasis from the soulless person to the human being of spirit and consciousness - the "Phoenix rising from the ashes!"

J Michael Heynen

Montana, Curacao

November 22, 2025

METANOIA AND WORLD ORDER

 

Reflexion by J Michael Heynen

I   „State“ of the Art?

The world could live in an "eternal peace" if the inner peace of the individual self would be a truly determining factor. Ideas and noumenal normativity are developed in a highly civilizational manner and are at least formally valid. Regional phases of peace can be experienced – a blueprint for the greater whole? What is the "missing link" between a world order of peace, the principal universality of "eternal peace", and the resulting foundation for the realization of genuine peacefulness?

The true "statecraft" of establishing a regime of universal peace is not discernible, although the world of states claims responsibility for it. On the contrary: the order of states tends toward dissolution, toward deepening divergence and egocentric "absolute power" of a neo-imperialist nature.

The international system of states and its capaity for peace essentially describes a systematic state failure. The internal state functions are reflected in foreign policy: Legitimacy-free power politics necessitates governing and administration that is alien to people, and consequently, formally stabilizing interest-based geopolitics of a classic imperialist nature. Smart, far-sighted, and genuinely legitimate policies are rare exceptions; even the ability to resolve conflicts is not identifiable. Even a merely abstract "good will" is unthinkable. State power in its current manifestations continues to increasingly operate in contradiction to the laws of thought, at least of reason. Statecraft appears irreversibly over. What remains? - Humanity and their societies in Transition ...

II   Metanoia in Societal World

Human life, above all, is choosing and taking responsibility. What does that mean, when the physical laws of creation have been fulfilled, and being and having are understood. The meaning of life is, of course, not fulfilled in the substructure of existence, but by the intellectual / spiritual laws of the superstructure. With the arrival of the Anthropocene, it can finally be considered that humanity can no longer postpone further development, its centrally essential emancipation, but to reconnect with the laws of evolution as a whole. This conversion or transition - to the Noocene - has long since begun, yet the "Copernican" step into the transformation that shapes the future has a central entry point: metanoia.

Even independent of state systems and the world of states, their formal sovereignties and monopolies: the rethinking, the empowerment of self-determination, has long been pending and is tt be fulfilled now. From the individual self and its reconnection, life is to be spiritualized and spirit to be enlivened. Consciousness determines being, inner guidance controls the external conditions of existence. Thought and feeling create the meaning and quality of life, as well as future development. Perception and sensation, imagination and fantasy, contemplation and faith/mysticism, sensitization and sensual-aesthetic self-experience and self-knowledge, as well as meditation and reflection, cognition and cognitive processes in the inner space of the human being, secure the foundation for interaction in the outer spaces, especially as resonance spaces.

In the resulting freedom and commitment of the self, responsibility is generated in the societal space. In open perception and creative communication, as well as in constant equilibration, ideas and will are synergistically intertwined and enhanced. The "categorical imperative" must be consistently facilitated in each case; states and their governments—to the extent still necessary—then become pure coordinating authorities of the societal will. The entry point, the necessary individual-societal metanoia, must therefore be urgently initiated: Crisis conversion is, above all, a kind of reset to evolutionary development after long periods of blockage.

III   Evolution and Emancipation: Homo Genesis

As mentioned above, the physical evolution of Homo sapiens is essentially complete; and with it, the existential orientation of being and philosophy of life as previously defined has been achieved and finalized. Comparable to the Copernican Change—and yet of greater significance—Homo Genesis now stands at the center of further human evolutionary development.

[Quote:] "...This human, Homo Genesis, is not a superhuman, i.e., a humanoid or transhuman, but all the more transpersonal, a human being, a cultural human being. For he emancipates himself from external egocentrism toward the centrality of his always leading, derived self. Thinking, reflecting, meditating, contemplating, and feeling capacities determine his inner leadership and the radially driving force of his being. This is no longer ego-competitive, but rather the consequence of inner, unlimited universality and totality, then equilibrated externally as a social capacity. With this reversal of thrust, open to infinity, human consciousness connects with the noosphere as the eternal resonance space of creative individuality and, at the same time, cosmic-normative universality. After (too) long a late-pubescent development, human evolution enters its true determination: to shape and dominate conditioned reality from the determining noumenality. In the self of Homo Sapiens lie the reasons and potentials for the activation of the human being, for Homo Genesis has long been present within him and requires his long-overdue emancipatory metamorphosis.

Homo Genesis is not a new human being, but a transforming human being: Being is lived from consciousness, that is, from the inside out. In this current transitional development, it is also crucial that not only the individual understands and experiences himself as Homo Genesis, but that a consolidating collective consciousness as a cultural human being is increasingly constituted from this. In the transition, this process will appear more likely to be based on elites or minorities, since, in particular, any kind of superego generation of the masses and their "democratic" quantitative procedures must be excluded by reason, universal laws of thought, and thus spiritual legitimacy (overcoming a classic phenomenon of transient ego worlds and their compensating substitute projections)...."

Source: https://worldpowerself.blogspot.com/2025/03/homo-genesis.html

IV   Consciousness and Noumenality

Individual-societal leadership will experience and engage in essential introspection/introversion in the first step of metanoia: inner leadership from consciousness, from within to without, from spirit into the enlivening of external space. The self first determines itself and then stimulates/facilitates the conditions of being that need to be equilibrated. After metanoia, societies will then be constituted by individual bearers of open, creative spirit in mutually learning, synergistic, and transformative discourse.

Accordingly, intra- and inter-societal conflicts will also be understood as consistent opportunities for resolution and optimization. The era of divergent resolution of competing, egocentric power surrogates and the abuse of derived statehood will then be over and will merely be a historical lesson of misguided power systems (an absolutized substructure). Above all, the supreme commandment of societal processes of justice and truth-finding will finally be given real substance.

V   World Order – Transition and Future of Human

In the process of world history, not only the comprehensive leadership of the aristocracy was largely replaced, but emancipation and freedom movements formed the modern state. Based on that, only the liberal-democratic constitutional state was able to develop a temporary proximity to these ideals. Here, too, the rule of law, at least in the Western style, was undermined, and political-ideological, oligopolistic governments largely utilize the historical form. The state became an artifact, a paternalistic projection surface for a soo called free will. The real legitimacy of governing has evaporated.

As a consequence of this disconnection between people and representation—after the Peace of Westphalia, Wilson, the UN, and the achievement of high levels of normativity in international law—the international system could only describe short phases of a tendency toward peace. A world order that refers to the legitimacy of power processes based on the will of the "free citizen" does not exist. Since 9/11 at the latest, geopolitical interests have largely become the "dominant culture" of law, i.e., the right of the supposedly strongest. Transhumanist-technological-military overkill visualizes the apocalyptic dramaturgy of the self-finalization of human civilization. Smart politics and diplomacy of humanistic provening are largely undermined, solely due to inconsistency in the pursuit of collective principles and the incompetence of leading government personnel.

At the same time, parts of public perception are identifiable as being in a global transition: the currently generated state of the world and the human world resonate only marginally. Largely alienated, enslaving systems of "objectivity" and overregulation no longer solve even urgent problems, to the extent that they are still recognized. Thus, a recognizable willingness to face the impending metanoia process is growing.

Opening this metanoia process, the conversion to the paradigm shift – prioritizing consciousness and inner leadership – probably depends exclusively on societally leading individuals who correspond to the real and necessary elite concept of true excellence in the sense of future viability. Individuals, organizations, societies – in this three-step process, change can succeed, expand virally, and dissolve the blockages of egocentrism and its comfort zones.

The current individual-societal human being has the ability to precisely identify and define this metanoia point and process from the reconnected self. Self-confidence and responsibility, creativity and imagination are the central elements of the dynamics of change, at the same time means of crisis resolution, transition, and transformation. The procedural and distributive justice, which is primarily based therein as a leading global principle, as well as the renewed, trust-based capacity for synergy, are simultaneously the catalysis in inter- and societal equilibration and the noumenal-normative redefinition of a real human world order – as a self determined unit in the universal order in adequance to creation.

© J Michael Heynen, Founding President of Senate of Cultures| Baden-Baden June 9, 2025