I’ve been in search for justification for Integral Theory making the leap from an anthropological/human development mapping to futuristic collectivist nirvana predictive as a “higher level” on the developmental scale.
Given that these Integral Levels (Teal, etc) seem to be founded on the Hegelian - Marxist - Marcuseian philosophical line, should we not also consider “higher levels” based on the real world? Higher levels based on the “good stuff in the real world”, as opposed to arguably non-viable philosophies from Marx and Marcuse?
Would we want to call this “better”, “higher level”, new color something like Orange Prime (as in derived from Orange) or Tangerine or something along those lines?
Just a thought given that many might say that our current Green, which is highly infected with with Mean Green or Green with streaks of Amber/Red, likely isn’t going to get us up the ladder. If anything current Green is more likely to force regression below Orange (aka Anarchy we see in our largest cities).
If Green won’t enable the next rung in development, perhaps it’s a healthier Orange - aka Tangerine? We could even call this much more likely to succeed Noosphere something like Tangerine Dream (I know, a bit hokey )
I don’t accept this assumption as valid. Can you outline why you think so?
In the effort to base IT on “good stuff in the real world”, can you outline how your premise is based in reality?
Also, why is there a presupposition that progress is linear when the real world shows us that progress in almost every natural area is nonlinear, even more so when we realize that ideas about what is or is not progress are highly subjective and are usually not based on any agreed or objective criteria.
I don’t think you’re thinking Integrally here. You seem to be thinking dichotomously about collectivism vs. individualism, rather than seeing that they are not necessarily mutually exclusive. We have always lived in collectives, that is a fact, and the structure of those collectives allow for certain levels of freedom. We are forced to go to grade school, get a driver’s license, pay our taxes, etc., and many of these allow for greater degrees of freedom.
We want to structure the collective so that it allows for the greatest individuality, rather than striving for pure individualism or pure collectivism. I do not have the freedom to murder, nor do you, this allows for us to have greater freedom because we aren’t in fear of being murdered.
Healthy heterarchy and hierarchy are necessary for the healthiest holarchy.
A good heuristic for this kind of stuff is Both/And. It’s not Either/Or, it’s Both/And. And yes, it can also be Both Either/Or and Both/And
Yes, collectivism and individualism are not mutually exclusive.
Also very few models of collectivism can be traced back to Marxism.
My analogy is the family. Most families are collectives and we do not ask suckling infants to pay their way, and it would be very strange to expect a young adult to repay parents back rent, goods and services for 18 years.
Then some societies have an extended meaning for family, and again there is a kind of collectivism that has absolutely nothing to do with Marxism. Then also people can expand their “family” to include people who are not genetically related and again this has nothing to do with Marxism.
Funnily enough, Churches are also often collectives. It’s ironic that someone so into Christianity is against such a Christlike concept. Are all of these organizations in this link following Karl Marx or Jesus? https://www.ic.org/directory/christian-communities/
Perhaps not so Integral. But then I also have serious questions about just how “Integral” the Integral community is, or even the foundations of Integral Theory as Integral Theory moves from anthropological and human development mapping into what appears to be simply the next step in Hegel, Marx, Marcuse lineage.
I don’t intend for my writing comes across as, say, purely Libertarianism. I do pay my taxes gladly. Wave at the police gladly. Say hello to the beggar gladly. Struggle through communicating with my landscaper. Yes absolutely we live in a “collective” with “inalienable” individual rights (at least in the USA). The Constitution, Bill of Rights and Amendments point us on a trajectory of very judicious expansion of collectivism. This would be perhaps the Tangerine Noosphere, the alternate path if you will.
My understanding of the “culture war” we are in is the significant federalization of authority, ambiguation of power between branches of government, and wholesale removal of protections for the individual in the name of expanded collectivism.
So yes, we live in a collective society today. No debate on this. It’s the concerted erosion of individual rights vs. “greater good” collectivism that Integralists espouse as “obviously higher level, obviously better”. We’ve seen this “greater good, collectivism is obviously better” go around a few times in the last 150 years and not a single time has it resulted in anything but horrific human suffrage and death.
What I don’t see in the Integral community is basic gratitude for benefiting from, enjoying, and have the ability to shape and influence our society more so than any other major society the world has ever seen.
What I also don’t see is the Integral community having answers to some simple, perhaps Orange’ish, questions of:
How will this centralized authoritarian collectivist Noosphere not fall into the same dark abyss of suffering that centralized authoritarian collectivism has produced every time tried previously? What specifically are the safe guards?
How did Integral Theory make the leap from anthropological mapping (good, makes perfect sense at least to me) into architecting this future Noosphere over which we must engage in existential battle? Or perhaps it was as simple as adopting and modifying Marcuse’s theories.
Well firstly, I think I should recommend this article on the Mean Green Meme, or the potential lack thereof. Perhaps what we are seeing is a regression into Blue, rather than the limitations of Green. The values of Green are downward assimilated into Blue cognition. This would explain why what we would consider to be Green superficially is acting in a very authoritarian Blue manner. So the issue isn’t that Green seems to be a roadblock, but that we’ve mistakenly conflated Blue with a veneer of Green for legitimate Green.
Secondly, I highly recommend reading the Listening Society and Nordic Ideology by Hanzi Freinacht. He offers a far better response to your questions than what we could offer in a digestible forum post. I believe I’ve recommended him to you before, but in brief: he outlines what a Teal/Yellow political system would actually look like and why. I’ve read a few of Wilber’s books now and have watched several episodes of the Integral Stage, but none have clearly outlined what a Teal political system would actually look like as well as Hanzi has.
He also talks about how Green ideas can be downward assimilated to the lower levels of cognition. Most of what people like Jordan Peterson, Helen Pluckrose, and James Lindsay criticize about postmodernism is actually the downward assimilated application of postmodernism, rather than postmodernism itself.
And finally, as a side note, Hanzi is actually the penname of two authors, Daniel Gortz and Emil Friis.
I noticed @FermentedAgave that you’ve raised the question several times in various topical conversations about how IT can predict higher levels on the developmental scale.
To start with, I think it’s good to keep in mind that prediction permeates almost all spheres of society. Economists make future predictions on everything from job growth to GDP to markets. Doctors give prognoses around illness. Political strategists and pollsters predict election outcomes. Metereologists forecast the weather and various fields of science predict climate change effects, everything from animal extinctions to mass human migration. Etc. Etc. These are all forms of prediction that can be “rationally justified,” (to use a term you used in posing the question under another topic) even if in some cases they are more like probabilities than absolutely-certain-to-be events/outcomes, and even if they turn out to be wrong. (And Futurism itself is a distinct field of study.)
So if it happens around the physiosphere and the biosphere, why wouldn’t or shouldn’t it happen around the noosphere? Religious “prophets” (or, by other names, rishis/seers, oracles, diviners etc.) have been making future predictions from time immemorial.
As to IT “predicting” higher levels of future development, one of the rational reasons for that might be that some of those higher levels are already here, present (granted, in very small numbers, but still, present). That those numbers might grow, or that new even higher levels might present, is not a preposterous thought if one thinks long-term on the developmental/evolutionary scale.
You have mentioned several times that you’re not totally familiar with IT. If you want to understand more about development, the lines (or multiple intelligence) and the stages and how the lines move through stages (e.g. the moral line developing through egocentric to ethnocentric to worldcentric to kosmocentric), Wilber’s “Integral Psychology” book is a good resource. His “Integral Spirituality” book, about 10 pages starting on pg. 58, also has pertinent information, and so does “The Religion of Tomorrow.” And there are online sources, plenty of them, about this subject as well.
Of course, as with prediction in any field or area, things can happen that interfere with or prevent predicted outcomes, those unpredictable black swan events, for example.
To me it all makes much more sense if we just don’t presuppose that progress is always linear, and also if we do not presuppose that progress is always what we prefer to call progress.
I feel the Trump years were an incredible period of what I might call “backwards progress”. We were flying on cloud 9 that we had eliminated racial and sexual injustice and then - BAM! The majority of the population voted for a pussy grabbing mentally insane retard. It was progress in that we could no longer fool ourselves.
Are we in the USA bordering between orange and green? Maybe. Or maybe we have to re-do Orange completely as well and deal with some of those deep dark amber and red issues first. There’s a popular theory that we are just 10 days away from red (violent anarchy) if the infrastructure fails.
Hi @WillE
Thanks for the article link. Ive scanned it on my phone and came away with a few thoughts.
good defensive posture against MGM with some data from “profiles” supporting Blue and Orange having highest Green rejection. Ill wanr to follow the thread to understand foundational data for the suppositions.
The direct preemptive critical theory/dilectic response was funny to see in action. Author has facility with the critical OS.
i respect that Todorovic wrote this in 2002. We have the benefit of hindsight from which to review her work. I personally find time-shifting arguments and application of current knowledge against older events or writings as intellectually bankrupt.
while Todorovs data might support an argument against a Red - Mean Green alliance in 2002, i think current US polutical/cultural allignments would clearly show a Red (Antifa, BLM) Anarchist collaboration with core MGM DNC.
What i find fundamentally questionable is that Todorov made no attempt to investigate Dysfunctional Green as the cause for Blue/Orange rejection.
Just a few thoughts.
Hi @LaWanna, Apologies for delay in replying. We were vacationing weekend before last and just getting through things. Thanks for the thoughtful reply.
I agree that many postulate on futures. It’s very stimulating and thought provoking, not preposterous at all as long as we remember that IT started as an observational mapping of what is so. This very well thought out mapping based on observation was just that - a mapping. As Integral as a Theory was unfolding, IT had no influence then (it was new) and today based on size of communities has virtually no impact even today. I also postulate that the world is filled with “those people”, “those groups” that, at least in my experience are much more “Integral” than the IT community seems to want to admit.
My journey with Integral Theory started about 15 years ago. For about 5 years Wilber was my primary author. I devoured SES, Theory of Everything (2-3 times), Integral Psychology (1-2 times), A Sociable God, Integral Spirituality (2-3 times). I also read quite a lot of Foucault, Piaget, Kohlberg, Ericsson, as well as the Bible and Christian writings with a self proclaimed weak uptake (I wasn’t a psych major). Also plowed through a good section of the New Age/Self Help section at the book store. In various forums - personal, work, graduate school - I also went through several for the personality and communication styles frameworks such as Meyers-Briggs, DISC, Enneagram, EMDR, Shamanic soul retrieval and a few others. I also became very active in my Church during this time and have stayed active in at varying levels.
As a system engineer, I simply loved IT’s simplicity of design and modern language. It really worked for me.
In 2015 I had time and checked in with a local Integral/KW group. What I found didn’t seem to so Integral to me, but highly political. I spent a few months listening to the group use IT as rationalization for their political beliefs and as a Libertarian was the sole diverse viewpoint.
I remember that while Integral Spirituality (lost in a storage box ) was very though provoking, it very much came across as a marketing effort for Buddhism. I did feel KW’s treatment of Christianity was complimentary (seems he had a scoring system and it came out on top?), but his focus is was that all major religions are tapped out, stuck in ancient stages and that Integral Theory is the new light.
I would also note that while highly involved in Christian community, not once did anyone denigrate the “other stuff” I was looking into. But then I also wasn’t looking to proselytize or change anyone in the church communities views or beliefs. Also I did not find that Christianity is tapped out or limited to the shallows that KW and most of the IT pundits continually trumpet, with seemingly only a surface experience. KW acknowledges the fallacy of “study of” and “experience of”.
Perhaps I have missed out on, don’t understand, or maybe just can’t get aligned with IT 2.0 - but then I don’t really know what IT 2.0 means.
So while I see Integral Theory as an excellent anthropological, sociological, and human development mapping system I don’t see how IT has validity as a predictive or future design system. IT has never had a meaningful impact on the world, but has been an interesting endoscopy of what is.
In this reengagement, it seems that IT and the community is aligning ever more closely to the Hegelian, Marxist, Marcuseian, Woke movement that has spawned theories presented as indisputable proofs with inescapable outcomes based. The same foundational materials that when implemented result every single time in 100M’s of humans suffering or dying under the worst socialist or communist ruling classes the world has ever seen. It seems this “it works in the biological world, so must work with human interactions” may have been straight off lifted from Marcuse.
It’s interesting that when I ask, “How can we avoid the pitfalls of centralized authoritarian collectivism every other time it’s been tried?”, about the only answer is “you need to look Meta”. So that I can acknowledge as perhaps a blind spot for me - maybe I’m the slow learner. And yes, I’m probably too Orange/Green in my “great idea, but how can we implement the theory” kind of guy. Maybe that’s simply out dated thinking in this new Noosphere. But if I’m “not getting it” there are likely a bunch of folks on the other side of me that either can’t grok or don’t agree with IT.
Just some rambling for the afternoon. I clearly don’t have the answers, but did want to share my journey through all of this. This for me has been a BEAUTIFUL look into the minds of some extremely intelligent, hard working, amazingly well read people. For this I thank you LaWanna and the entire Integral Life community! THANK YOU
This is pure speculation because I obviously don’t know what work you’ve done or who you’ve met, but maybe you’re looking in the obvious place that isn’t the right place. If you’ve mostly gone to Integral Theory forums or meetups, all you’re really doing is talking to people who know about IT.
Take our conversation where the best I could say was go meta. That’s because I know nothing about global politics, don’t even think about asking me about Israel/Palestine let alone the intricate network of interactions between the various countries and how that relates to their developmental stage. If you tell me a little bit about these things I might be able to map it on what I know about IT, but that’s about it. I can (sorta kinda) identify an Orange political strategy and I can only say go meta on that because that’s what IT has informed me to do. I think most people in IT are like that.
In this Rebel Wisdom interview with Daniel Gortz, Daniel talks about how he came up with the Nordic school of Metamodernism as an answer to the limitations he saw in Integral Theory. In brief, he says that it doesn’t actually give a legitimate political plan and instead merely gives an analytical tool, a, “cheat code to stump my sociology professors.” He also talks about the fact that Integral Theory communities are liable to becoming New Age cults because they’re based around the unfalsifiable claim that I’m more developed or awake than you are. It essentially becomes a memorization of behaviours and beliefs described as Teal rather than a legitimate complexification and maturation in consciousness.
This brings us to the idea that many of the truly Integral thinkers may not even be aware of Integral Theory. If IT really has predictive power than the Integral age won’t be defined by the dissemination of IT specifically throughout the masses, but instead will arise naturally as Green thinking gives way to Teal thinking. People won’t think Integral Theory, they’ll think “Integral thoughts,” the thoughts that lead to the kinds of theories that could be described by the Teal altitude.
When I look at many of my current favourite thinkers, they are all at varying degrees of IT-aware. Some never mention Integral, others mention it all the time, and yet most of them are thinking in ways that I personally would identify as Teal. It doesn’t matter if they know about IT, it matters if they’re thinking with sufficient complexity.
So, some examples that may hold far more of the answers you seek than this forum (no offense):
Jim Rutt - podcast host, former chairman of Sante Fe Institute, negotiated a $15 billion deal, co-creator of Game B a Teal approach to politics, business, etc., Orange businessman meets Teal complexity (tangerine?)
Daniel Schmachtenberger - part of the Consilience Project, which seeks to improve societal sense making, frequent podcast guest, a VERY complex thinker
John Vervaeke - cognitive scientist, Awakening From the Meaning Crisis on youtube/spotify is about the cognitive science and philosophy of awakening experiences, I’m currently watching it and it’s amazing
Rebel Wisdom - I would consider them a mostly Teal organization/podcast/youtube channel
Hanzi Freinacht - penname of Daniel Gortz and Emil Friis, the creators of political Metamodernism, a Teal political system and sociology, they have a forum with many high level thinkers at metamoderna.org
The Integral Stage - you probably are already aware of them, but these are Integral thinkers who are actually experts in Integral Theory and interview diverse people from that expertise
If you want to start engaging with truly Integral thinking around the various topics you’ve brought up here, you need to start looking for experts who are thinking Teal thoughts even if they never mention Integral Theory. I can only speak for myself when I challenge the expertise of people on this forum, but I’m just a psychology student. I’m going to be an expert on Teal psychotherapy. That may help me raise people to that level of consciousness, but that certainly won’t give me revelatory knowledge into the inner workings of business, politics, or any number of other fields that aren’t specifically psychotherapy.
This list I’ve given you is a good enough start to begin finding the high level expertise that you seem to be looking for.
@WillEMany many thanks for the extremely thoughtful posting.
I’ve been looking at your recommendations and agree that there is a massive up swell of “integral” cross society. And almost all appears to be truly intellectual - i.e. no Critical Theory . VERY refreshing.
I’ll spend some time with these. Many many thanks Will
Hello Fermented Agave; hope your vacation was enjoyable, and thanks for sharing a little of your background and your journey with IT. Sounds like that journey started off as a kind of “love-affair,” and based on your comments here and in other posts, is now more like a love-hate kind of relationship, or attraction-repulsion. That’s a hard one to navigate, but ultimately fruitful, I believe, and I hope it turns out that way for you.
Maybe I’m being obtuse here, but I’m not fully understanding why IT being a “predictive or future design system” is a sore point for you. Maybe I don’t understand fully what you mean by that quoted phrase. I took it to mean that you object to IT proposing that the Integral stage of development is a newly emergent stage that, given certain conditions (one of them being the survival of civilization), most likely will see its numbers grow. Am I wrong in that interpretation?
I’m going to assume for the moment I am at least partially right in understanding you, and point out that Wilber himself has referred to Integral as a metatheory, that is, a theory of theories. No one just pulled out of thin air the idea that Integral is a legitimate stage of development; rather, numerous studies/research over the past 75-100 years in various lines of development (cognition, values, orders of consciousness, self-identity, worldviews, stages of faith, to name a few) have identified a stage of development that while each developmentalist/researcher working independently calls by their own terms (e.g. vision-logic, global view, 5th order, construct-aware, universalizing commonwealth, etc.), nevertheless correlates with what IT calls the Integral stage.
While the number of people estimated to be at this stage are low, if history is any gauge, the numbers will likely grow. Why do I say that? Well, because first of all, it is a legitimate stage in existence now, based upon multiple studies. Secondly, historically, other stages of development did not just all at once emerge in their full expression or full numbers. There are always forerunners or pioneers or people at the “cutting edge” so to speak of any stage. The rational stage, for instance, which holds equal rights as a central point, took about 150 years after its emergence before slavery was done away with, and another 50 years or so after that before women had the right to vote.
Save for such things as psychism or divine revelation, most “prediction” is based on what has been seen and known in the past, combined with what is seen and known in the present, perhaps with a little intuition and individual creativity thrown in. So yes, IT has mapped human development as you say, and has also said that it is possible or even probable under certain circumstances that one day, perhaps in a distant future (or who knows, tomorrow, miracles of miracles ), the Integral stage might be as common in individuals and cultures as the rational/orange stage is today. I see no problem with that thought. And I agree with @WillE that many people can be and are Integral thinkers and yet, may not be aware of IT, just as many rational people are not aware that that is an actual stage of development.
IT is deeply grounded in the theory of the evolution (development) of consciousness, and the evolution of consciousness in cultures. While there is relationship to the evolution of biological organisms in terms of complexity, these studies I referred to above are on human consciousness and its developmental complexity, and those, for me at least, provide the validity claims. If one has a basic problem with evolutionary theory, however, then I can understand how IT might not be a good fit for them, and hey, no shame in that.
I have more to say in response to your post, but I’m going to stop here for now. Thanks for engaging.
Hi @LaWanna, Many thanks for the insightful reply and more importantly THANK YOU for engaging.
I hadn’t though of a love-hate relationship but yes disappointing in the least. Perhaps my disappointment comes when I see what appears to be a tight intertwining of IT with Critical Theory/Wokeism - the evolution of some lines of thought that have brought some low altitude highly regressive human suffering into the world. For myself at least, I’m not on a quest to develop a new religion or inhabit/resist my current society. I’m completely on board with both my religion and my society evolving, just as they are evolving today - at least the way I see things.
Again, I’m a bit of a broken record in that I just can’t see how dismantling the highest altitude, most liberal, most multi-cultural, most multi-religious, most inclusive structure and belief system that humans have ever developed at any time in history, any where on the planet to give-it-a-go on ideologies that have such poor track record.
But @FermentedAgave, no one in integral is saying democracy should be got rid of or any kind of ruling religion should be created, as far as I can see(?). I think maybe what you’re fearing is the aspect of caring hierarchies? Because a hierarchy suggests someone is playing the king/queen role and calling the shots. But I would say what is meant when people in integral talk of a caring/growth hierarchy is not that anyone should be a ruler, but that people who are more highly developed have a responsibility to help people who are less developed - but only if those people want help - I would say the growth hierarchy is more similar to a boddhisatva vow. I really don’t think the integral movement wants to become an authoritarian regime - maybe I’m wrong though…
This is actually something Susanne Cook-Greuter says can be a shadow of the integral stage though - thinking one is actually able to help in other’s development and also in wanting them to be different from how they are.
And I also agree with @WillE - many people can be at the integral stage or higher while having no knowledge of integral theory. I see people all the time who I think are at high stages.
And also it can be a danger for people who have low self-esteem to find a theory that says anyone who is interested in this theory is superhuman/at the integral stage, and I think that aspect has the potential to make it somewhat cult-like, and in my opinion you can be interested in developmental theory without being at the integral stage, and also - that’s fine.
Hi @Julia248 ,
If you were to pick out a couple of the most caring hierarchies on the planet today, where would they be?
And are these most caring hierarchies trending positive or negative in this aspect?
And based on current level of and trending to for these hierarchies, is this due to the current hierarchies in place, or due to something new (relatively new like Integral Theory, Wokeism, Critical Theory,…)? Or perhaps a combination of both?
@FermentedAgave, well when speaking of caring/growth hierarchies I think that’s meant on an individual basis. It could also respond to governments. I’m not sure I would describe governments as in hierarchies over people. They are protecting and supporting people, but would you say firemen or doctors or therapists are in a hierarchy over you? Though governments also stop you from doing things, but at the healthy end that would be stopping things like murder and theft.
That being said, from what I know, I would rate the most caring societies as Scandinavian countries such as Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland.
Is there a form of democracy you think would work better than government? I’m interested in alternatives like all citizens voting on every issue, or having a similar thing to jury service where people are chosen randomly and then make policy decisions together, having had time to study the issue beforehand.
But then, would you prefer to have people with more expertise make these decisions, but make all the decisions (while they’re voted in to do so)? I’m not sure.
The answer is simple - It’s complex
Here in the US we are trying to hang on to the concept of “By the People, For the People” as opposed to a completely unchecked Oligarchy rule. Currently we still have power to elect our Oligarchs, but significant pressure is out to change this to unchecked Oligarchy rule. We can go into why Oligarchies have always resulted in much less efficient, much more human suffering hierarchies, but perhaps we already know this deep down.
And yes, on the healthy end it would be nice if our administrators, legislators and judiciary would “do their jobs” . Administrators enforce the current laws. Legislators modify, develop, and ratify laws (the adaptive nature). Judiciary interprets and executes the laws as written. We have, at least in the US, a really good system in place (best scalable system in the world). If more integrity (more Orange? lol) were applied throughout the system and processes the system would function more efficiently and quickly.
These definitely are excellent examples. If we take a wholistic view, all of these are very small population (10M, 5.5M, 5.5M, 350K respectively) highly natural resource harvest heavy economies (timber, oil, mining, fishing, etc) that will continue to grow economically due consumption globally and need for these raw exports. They are also historically monolithic/homogeneous culturally, racially, ethnically, religiously until very recently.
I’m not trying to be overly critical here but you could almost argue for cultural homogeneity of race, religion, language, ethnicity, and back-to-the-land.
And play out what would happen if we hit them with Wokeism (which they have their variants), Critical Environmental Theories, Critical Immigration Theories,… Would they be crushed financially? Would their characteristic western culture survive say a 20% immigration wave of Iraqis, Afghanis, Pakistanis? What would happen with their generous compassion systems?
At least in the US, we have a blended system already. We elect Congress and Senate to amend, develop, and ratify legislation into laws for the nation (most states have a similar structure at state level). In conjunction with our Administration advises (all of the Agencies are part of the Administration - Defense, EPA, Treasury, etc), while our Legislators craft their policy (the laws) communicating through our political process (policy is the product, politics is the communications method). Our experts (statisticians, scientists, analysts, warriors, police, etc) are in these Agencies, providing recommendations to the Legislators. Lobbyists (industry, activist, religious, international,…) provide inputs and influence the Legislators and Agencies. Usually the Academics are used to help market the ideas through studies, publications, etc…
The existing system is quite well defined “in theory”. The actual reality of the process is very messy, with competing agendas (grow an agencies budget, support bailouts for my state, support my state/donors industries, etc).
Now the feedback loop is very very real. As an example, if Senator Slushbuckets promotes killing my state’s rabbit breeding industry (aren’t little bunnies cute) and I just happen to breed rabbits, I’ll vote against, donate against, write FB posts against, write Op Eds against, stage “mostly peaceful” protests against, Dox at restaurants, have his kids picked on at school, maybe even run against Senator Slushbuckets. Or better yet, I call my fav Media outlet and write their “investigative” journalistic pieces for them. Meanwhile, the robotic Bunny Association funded by the CCP is pouring 10M’s into Media buys for both direct and indirect coverage, as well as donating to Senator Slushbucket as well as the the Fund for Leporiphobia Awareness.
So as messy as it is, the alternative to Mob Rule - i.e. everyone votes on everything - is even scarier. I bet I can get a “Free Coffee and Chocolates” referendum setup and it would pass by at least 50.0001%
With, as an example in the US, our 320M people I don’t know that we can take our fairly straight forward (it’s really not that complex - if only I wasn’t high, slept, or skipped Civics all those years - LOL) and smash it into a simplistic model that we could run.
The more Parliamentarian systems require coalition building. That might have some interesting things we could learn from.
Now if you play out how these systems work, they are extremely messy, yet the very process of coalescing the mess is by very definition INCLUSIVE in the end.
If you want to see what a Tangerine/Integral future might look like, I would follow @WillE and @excecutive recommendations to Schmachtenberger and Vervaeke.
What pressure is trying to turn the US into an oligarchy? I don’t know that much about US politics but I think it would be quite big worldwide news if the US was at risk of turning into an oligarchy.
But the US is one of richest economies in the world. What makes you think it would be unable to be like Sweden and Norway? Also what makes you think having a diverse population in terms of ethnicity, race, religion etc. stops a society from being caring? The economies of Norway and Sweden are far smaller than that of the US. I’m not sure of the figures but I also think a lot of people emigrate to Norway and Sweden.
And yes, those look like good resources @WillE has posted. I’ve read some of the Listening Society and am finding Daniel Gortz and found Emily Friis’ ideas very agreeable. I tend to read 20 books at once so didn’t reach how they plan to structure society though.
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) was very though provoking, it very much came across as a marketing effort for Buddhism. I did feel KW’s treatment of Christianity was complimentary (seems he had a scoring system and it came out on top?), but his focus is was that all major religions are tapped out, stuck in ancient stages and that Integral Theory is the new light.
), the Integral stage might be as common in individuals and cultures as the rational/orange stage is today. I see no problem with that thought. And I agree with