Three Cultural Dimensions in the Human Society

Let’s start our topic from ancient Greece. ?Plato advocated ruling the country with virtue and philosophers as rulers to transform society and the country into his Republic of Utopia. Such an “ideal country” is believed to originate from social work division. Thus citizens are divided into three levels: rulers, warriors, and workers, representing the three virtues of wisdom, courage, and desire respectively. The ruler is a respected philosopher-king relying on his philosophical wisdom and moral power to rule the country; the warriors assist in governing and defend the country with their loyalty and courage; the workers provide living materials for the country; and the slaves at the bottom of society, obviously equivalent to the Shudra caste of India (Plato was once trafficked to India according to legend). Here we can see that, whether called caste, level or class, all sorts of social division are just different names for three institutionalized resources of religion, politics and economics.?

That is to say,?there are structurally three cultural dimensions in human society:

Ideology (religion): relationship between human and Idea(spirit);
Economics: relationship between human and material;
Politics: relationship between human and human.

Based on the interactions among these three aspects, there are more complicated forms or modes, such as:

1) the balanced and coordinated, as aristocracy, democracy and monarchy in ancient Greece;
2) the ideology-dominated as in the Medieval Europe;?
3) the economy-dominated as in the Western developed countries in modern times;
4) the politics-dominated as in the Orient;?
5) the various mixed ones as in under-developed nations;
6) the artificially-integrated ones in some countries of one-dimensional over-development as the former Soviet Union, and other former and current communist countries, as well as the Nazi Germany and the Fascist Italy.

I use the term artificially means it is not a natural social mode but a transgenic one, hence politically the autocracy, ideologically the Utopanist or racist heresy, and economically the state-monopoly. There are infinite conflicts within, contained only by state coercion, violence and lying. However, this is somewhat off the topic of this article.