This book is the story of how ideas become culture. It shows how intuited ideas and feelings come to interpret the world in terms of the human condition and the desirable way of responding to it. It shows how such perceptions become articulated as world-outlooks—religions, philosophies, or ideologies that can be shared by others. And finally—out of their embedded sense of the human condition and how to respond to it—these world-outlooks give their particular logic to variations in cultural development. This logic is seen in the consistency of form and function found in such universal cultural features as art, reason, education, warfare, ethics, psychology, inventiveness, government, law, industriousness, class-structure, and economics. Modify a world-outlook and—even under the same name—these cultural features will begin to change in understandable ways. This book introduces a theory making all this understandable.

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Using psychological dispositions in explaining individual behavior or assertions of human nature in explaining the foundations of civilizations, people have always expounded their understandings of other people’s approaches to life by describing specific mentalities behind these approaches. As part of their belief/culture systems, all societies have examples of human mentalities within their myths, histories, and literature. When stripped down to their essences, it turns out that the range and types of mentalities recognized are remarkably the same within all societies. What differs is which of these mentalities are allowed to grow into religions, philosophies or ideologies that interpret the human condition and how to respond to it as opposed to which mentalities are blocked in their expression. Within this pattern are the starting points of the agreements and disagreements that are most distinctly human—ultimately concerning what people will live or die for or send their children to die for. Grounded at different levels of this struggle are the elements that are most unique to the humanities and social sciences and that form the basis for an integrated understanding of their subject matters.

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The phenomenon of people interpreting the human condition and approaching life differently out of different mentalities has long been recognized by scholars and thinkers as a starting point for explaining variations within the belief/cultural systems of the world. Yet, the elements, connections, and processes involved have never been fully recognized or understood within a single framework of thought—that is, from an Archimedean perspective or within a single sweep of the mind. The elements, connections, and processes of this phenomenon remain only partially understood and in fragments as did the pattern of the solar system prior to Copernicus or the explanation of variation within flora and fauna prior to Darwin. By mentioning these breakthroughs in science, I am suggesting the magnitude of what has been attempted in this study—and I am inviting criticisms suitable for claims of this order.

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Regarding the human phenomenon that I have been describing as having been understood in imprecise and fragmented terms, I have reduced its elements to their natural essentials and shown how the interplay between them can be viewed in terms of logical outcomes rather than rough correlations. What I am offering is a comprehensive theory for understanding the emergence of—and variations within—the most important intellectual and uniquely human cultural expressions of individuals, groups, societies, and civilizations. I have shown this to be understandable within a single framework—allowing new material to be integrated with older material as it is being learned and allowing older material, long held in isolation, to be newly discovered as connected to other knowledge. This theory should prove useful at all levels of teaching and learning as well as to those involved in understanding and implementing social decisions.

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