History can be divided in pre-classicism, classicism, modernism, and postmodernism. Pre-classicism is a collection of knowledge accumulated over hundreds of thousands of years until Greece, classicism over few thousand years since Greece, modernism over a century or so since 18th century, and postmodernism over few decades in the second half of 20th century. Classicism, modernism, and postmodernism removed some knowledge from previous periods, causing a drastic contemporary reduction in knowledge and increase in risk and values.

Metamodernism, coming after postmodernism, aims to restore the lost knowledge from each period making it available for contemporary use. This is enriching knowledge from each of the periods making it safer and more valuable. Modernism and postmodernism especially had little time to develop knowledge yet have great power and are therefore very unsafe. Their risks and quality would be lowered by adding pre-classical and classical knowledge.

Centralized power depends on centralized mass media and centralized ideology to avoid change. It will always produce content which reduces the overall meaning. It will not only reduce the amount of knowledge and wisdom accessible, but it will also reduce the meaning of words. It will promote the use of empirical language in which words have only one meaning, and lower the use of other forms of language in which words have multiple meanings representing multiple perspectives.

One of the symptoms of hyper centralized power which avoids change is reduction of meaning and perspectives.

As centralized system focuses on a goal, and gets closer to that goal, it promotes more and more a narrow perspective and meaning which serves that goal. Often this goal is not formalized because formalization itself is a risk which leads to undesired change.

As perspectives and meaning are reduces, frustration and need for change will increase. However, only possible way to change is openness which increases knowledge, wisdom, meaning, and perspectives. Using the reduced language and perspectives to achieve change will not cause any relevant change.

Knowledge can be defined as an ontology. Language is the dominant ontology management method in contemporary systems. It is more effective than imagery and other methods because contemporary systems depend highly on abstract yet precise ontologies. Therefore ontology, knowledge, and language are one in this article and will be presented by the “ontology”.

If a goal of a system is to increase collective intelligence and consciousness, system changes should be observed through ontology changes. Ontology changes between traditionalism, modernism, and postmodernism show what kind of language is needed for metamodernism and openness to increase collective intelligence and consciousness.

Traditionalism had a stable ontology. Modernism rapidly expanded the traditional ontology by adding to it and rarely changing it. Postmodernism is mostly focused on changing traditional and modern ontology, adding little to both. Postmodernism depends on closed centralized power to create these ontology changes.

Metamodernism and openness should direct ontology development towards following goals:
– Postmodernism expands instead of changes traditional and modern ontologies,
– Ontology changes are more open and less centralized,
– Adoption of non-binary (oscillating) ontologies.

If ontology development is directed towards these goals a system will experience increase collective intelligence and consciousness growth, and will avoid reductive conflict caused by closed and centralized ontology changes.

The rate of change is accelerating reducing the protection of traditional or empirical knowledge. This accelerated change is called hyper-change. Hyper-change will continue to accelerate. To avoid increase of damage caused by hyper-change it is necessary to apply openness and agility in the hyper-change process.

Openness will allow collection of real-time knowledge which can be used for prevention and reduction of damage. Agility will add controlled stops in the hyper-change process allowing adaptation to the openness knowledge.

Metamodernism is valuable for including all system members, visible and not visible, in openness. Metamodernism is currently the most inclusive approach to knowledge exchange and it decreases overall damage caused by hyper-change.