Heya - finally got round to sketching out a couple of thoughts on this. These by no means touch on everything in your intricate and detailed post, but are just a few that I've been chewing on since reading it (and that we've talked about a bit).
Taking up the analogy from complexity science, we could say that transformative cultures are those that exist on the edge of chaos. The “edge” is significant, and suggests that there are two ways in which successful flight can be inhibited: either by being too grounded (too much control), or by reaching too close to the sun (not enough control).
While the culture of control you mention can be seen in values based on accumulation, conservative attitudes to risk, and delayed gratification (first get the degree, then the job, the marriage, the house, etc. - then you can satisfy your desires), if we instead look at marketing, advertising, celebrity, the Hollywood imaginary, etc. the picture is quite different. Here the implict values don't seem to be based on control, but on lavish expenditure: indulge your impulses, be naughty, buy that thing, go on that adventure, eat all the sugar, be reckless. We could call this the culture of abandon.
While the culture of control was perhaps the dominant culture of the mid-20th century, I'd suggest that the situation today is more complex. The distinctively postmodern quality of our present condition is reflected in the fact that the culture of control and the culture of abandon can coexist together, in a kind of stable oscillation. It seems to me that it is this oscillatory structure that inhibits the formation of transformative cultures. We are forever being bounced back and forth between the pole of control and the pole of abandon, preventing us both from getting a purchase on the sweetspot in the middle and from formulating a progressive response since the target is always moving.
This oscillatory pattern pops up all over the place: we can see it in the boom-and-bust cycle of wild enthusiasm followed by disillusionment that haunts many activist movements, preventing them gathering the kind of slow momentum displayed by the civil rights movements of the 50's and 60's; we can see it in the contradictory discourse of gentrification, in which no-one complains about it more than the gentrifiers themselves; and we can see it in the art world's fashion cycles which bounce between cynical self-reference and righteous naïveté, each presenting itself as the antidote to the other.
Anyway, here's two practical upshots that arise from this way of seeing things:
1. Co-creation matters (but the details are important).
The culture of control and the culture of abandon correspond roughly to our social roles as producers and our roles as consumers. Co-creation is significant in relation to this, because what is meant by a co-creation is nothing other than a situation in which the producer/consumer division breaks down. Co-creation therefore points to a third way, beyond the oscillation. (Potential pitfall: everything can be commodified, including a decommodified space. If co-created spaces are things one has to buy into, with either money or clout, then the consumer/producer division just reasserts itself at a different level. If co-creation is to be a radical strategy it must be radically inclusive - this is guaranteed to be hard work.)
2. The liberation of desire needs to be met by the cultivation of responsibility.
Without a progressive concept of responsibility, advocacy for the liberation of desire risks feeding into consumerist norms. (Isn't this exactly what happened in the wake of the 60's counterculture?) Your mention of intitiation rites and adulthood feels revelant here, as it points toward the social importance (and interdependence) of authority and responsibility. On a tangential note, I suspect the wide appeal of Jordan Peterson has been largely due to his ability to articulate a connection between taking responsibility and finding meaning. While I do not think his way of doing so is ultimately successful (he understands responsibility in individualist terms, for a start) what is significant is that by even attempting to do so he highlights a gap in the mainstream leftwing discourse, which has for a long time avoided this topic completely, unwilling to talk about responsibility for the fear that it whiffs of authoritarian paternalism.
But the consequence has been that progressive moral injunctions have ended up codified as weird claims about authentic desires. So when someone goes on the retreat and comes back saying "well, I've looked into myself and found that my deepest, truest desire is to own a Ferrari and bash loads of cocaine," the response comes back something like "no no no, that's not your authentic desire, that's just your conditioning talking. I think you'll find that what you really want to do is run eye-gazing workshops at Burning Man." I'm exagerrating for snark, but I believe some version of this pattern is quite common - and it's hopeless (not to mention patronising).
Even if we can make sense of the notion of authentic desire, we should not base an emancipatory politics on the assumption that everyone's authentic desires will align in the pursuit of common goals, or even that they will be free from internal conflict. A politics of desire can only be truly emancipatory when framed in the context of an emancipatory ethics. A transformative culture will surely be one in which a teeming, chaotic, and contradictory field of desire is harnessed (but not stifled) by a reciprocal web of interpersonal obligation.
