THE GRID: World of the Technocrat

Symbol Orthogonal grid

Civilization:

• The international commercial and industrial network as the largest cohesive social unit
• Economy based on mass production and trade
• Extreme specialization and fragmentation
• Many roles of the family and community appropriated by large institutions
• Declining peasant population as people move to industrial urban centers
• Prevalence of systems involving large groups of people organized into managable machine-like components (industry, bureaucracy, the military, colonial governments)
• Political mechanisms and ideologies ostensibly seeking the decentralization of poilitical power-republicanism, democracy, communism, capitalism, socialism (although the Grid may also serve Radiant Axes imperial governments as a means of organizing the masses)
• Decline of cultures, empty repetition of old forms, bloating and collapse of institutioins, loss of confidence, difficulties with maintenance of existing systems and facilities, lack of spiritual thrust, lack of creativity
• Dominance of the marketplace in determining values
• Highest accomplishments in engineering
• Extreme standardization of products, language, currency, uniforms, education, housing, record-keeping (census), taxation, welfare, etc.
• Examples: declining phase of the Roman Empire; Ptolemaic Egypt to the present; Aztec and Incan empires shortly before the Conquest; communist China and Russia; Europe md America since the Industrial Revolution; contemporary Japan; any industrialized nation

Psyche:

• Cosmos as a great machine knowable by the human intellect through science
• In adulthood, confrontation of the realities of the world and finding one's place as an ordinary person, concern with survival of oneself and one's family
• Perceiving the world as 'a Grid of conceptually uniform measureable units, or as a machine, or as inert matter giving off certain appearances because of chemical and electrical interactions
• Prevalence of relativism in education, eclecticism in religion, nihilism and materialism in philosophy
• Strongest techne-logos orientation of all the archetypes; emphasis on enumeration and measurement as in census-taking, statistical surveys, empirical sciences, the "objective" documentation of events, mathematics, reading and writing, information storage and data processing
• Time is linear and uniform, extending infinitely into the past and future
• Progressive view of history (in some cultures)
• Sense of liberation/alienation from spirit, matter, nature, the inner Self, history, and tradition
• Mythic images and rites concerning human intelligence and the rational mind; mastery of ranked disciplines (graduations, promotions, investitures); demonstrations of human skill and character (e.g., sports, after they became entertainment rather than a spiritual activity; closed system logics (art-for-art's-sake, the job well done), pure essences of abstract forms; existentialism; conquest of the natural world; mastery of technelogos functions; faith in progress, statistical uniformity, and predictability
• Psychological stagnation in the Grid can produce the deflated ego overwhelmed by a sense of anonymity, purposelessness, existential malaise, and loss of contact with the inner spiritual Self
• Psychological liberation in the Grid can present great freedom of choice, releasing one from centralized authority and tradition. It can also contribute to the balanced perception that each individual is by turns the Great Spirit, Goddess, Hero, God-King, and Emperor the archetypes are internalized in each of us; that we each embody the sum total of human experience and wisdom; and that we are individually capable of finding our own paths to illumination

Space:

• Space is a uniform, three-dimensional Grid, which distributes everything into isolated uniform units and has no center
• Rectilinear spatial division, such as the Cartesian coordinates, the nomes of ancient Egypt, the padas in Vedic mandalas, squares in Chinese town planning (as in Kublai Khan's plan for Peking), the tatami mat system of Japan
• Architecture and town planning reflect the Grid in orthogonal street layouts, rectilinear rooms, modular building facades (as on modern office buildings); repetitions of uniform units (suburban tract houses, workers' housing, army barracks, the office pool of desks); and grids of land divisions (agricultural fields, political provinces, counties, townships, etc.)
• The most dominant architectural structure is the marketplace (e.g., the agora, the 19th century factory, the World Trade Center, the shopping mall)