An Integral Assessment of President Joe Biden

Reflections
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Hi @Charles_Marxer

I’m curious to go back to your opening question and perspective.

I do resonate with the question, “[how can] people at higher levels […] be grossly immoral [in their] ideas and decisions” ?

I feel the question could go in many directions.

In UL, maybe the person is only cognitively turquoise, but their ethics are red.

Maybe in UL their ethics are orange, but the LR situation means they have to choose between the lesser of two evils.

Or perhaps the LL culture wars are so divisive—heavy shadows everywhere—that any politician must lie constantly, and those lies are just brain damage—the politician themselves can no longer tell what’s real—and so they form an enormous dysfunctional shadow.

Maybe we just don’t really understand, as a human species, eros and thanos, nor the creative play, and if we did, we’d have a sort of liberation from chaos and order, and could surf life in an open, honest, unknowing, innocent way, rather than constantly building Atman projects, which lead to wars and suffering.

But I do agree that it’s essential to look at the levels/stages and just recognise our problem. I mean, Wilber seems to have reiterated that in his “dark” chapter in his recent book. The notion that we have orange technology but most people are not really stable at orange in the ethical line.

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I had a conversation this morning with a young lady from Russia. She is trying to line up her citizen paperwork and it is really messy. I met her mother who lives here and is as American as apple pie which is kind of interesting. The young lady seemed highly agitated about the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. She was probably in her late twenties or early thirties. She told me she grew up in the USSR and now Russia so she might be older. As would be expected she thinks capitalism is a dead end BUT she would not take up arms against capitalism because she doesn’t agree with it. The young lady was particularly impressed with the fact (if it is true) that the Ukraine was developing a nuclear bomb but abandoned the effort. I expressed how the doctrine of mutual assured destruction is insanity. Has there ever been a weapon that has been developed but never used? Not to my knowledge.

The point of all this is there are a great majority of good people at the amber and orange levels all over the world. I don’t remember what the percentages are but I believe they are the “center of gravity” for most cultures. I think the news loves “man bites dog” stories because like the ancient tragedians there is some kind of cathartic effect to see how relatively sane those who watch that stuff feel.

I traveled to all the continents (except Antarctica) and don’t claim to be an expert on cultural anthropology but it seems to me most people want to provide for their family and have some leisure time to do that which is meaningful to them. How many beautiful, good, and true religions, philosophies, social and political ideals have humans created but we keep making the same mistakes. It is part of our nature but it is a part that can be modified and mollified.

On the other hand, I believe with all my heart there will come a day when children will be born into a world where the thought of mass warfare is unthinkable. I point to the awareness that human sacrifice, cannibalism, abandoning female babies to the wilds, and most recently slavery have become unthinkable to the great mass of people. I think we are in accord with the power of nature with is intelligent and loving but we are limited and are being shaped slowly. If it isn’t our species a more deserving species will be the top of the food chain because in the current state of affairs, we are our own worst enemies. I don’t think we are done yet, not by a long shot.

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I think that’s beautifully put.

There’s that notion that the spiral goes higher and becomes more compassionate, so that by the time one is at super duper mind, it’s practically angelic love or something, but there’s also the notion that every level has its healthy and unhealthy side. And I recall Suzann Cook-Greuter mentioning her relationship with her sister, who despite being in some sense, not developed, still seemed to be a genuinely good person. And I’m not sure where that fits in with all the conceptual systematic maps.

I’m also reminded on the topic of politicians — does it matter if some political figure is turquoise or orange or amber, if they’re in some sense, corrupt? Maybe just corrupt to the principles of office—i.e., serving the people, not the power hungry shadow government groups.

I wonder if future historians will wonder how WWIII broke out (if it did). Most people alive today seem good, trying to do the right thing, wanting to live a good life, be a good person.

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I think it’s important to understand that the term “corrupt” also has different meanings at different levels.
At Orange, when Industrial Robber Barons control the Government, that is Orange Capitalism working as intended. In Green Capitalism becomes Schitzophrenic because it isn’t a Green System of Government. Green would place humans and human life as more valuable than artifical paper entities, while Capitalism places the Corporation as more valuable than human life. Socialism is a Green form of Government - but socialism collapses through corruption in an Orange society.
A Teal government cannot be created as long as physical borders are a the primary defining characteristics of a “Nation”.

Thus, when we operate within government - even a Teal individual has to use the rules of that system and work within those rules. If it is an Orange system such as Capitalism with Orange rules - you cannot “transcend” the system. That will result either in being unsuccessful like Jimmy Carter or going to jail for failing to adhere to laws.
When a Court Case like Citizens United becomes the law of the land - it is just folly to not operate within the parameters of that law. You just lose elections, plain and simple.
If a nation is at war - it is folly to try and operate under Green. This is what the Left does not understand about the Middle east and Palestine. Green does not work when the warring cultures and religions are stuck at Red for 3,000 years. To expect Biden or anyone else to implement a Green solution in Palestine, Ukraine or any other hot war zone is not Teal, but unhealthy Green.

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Yes, so then, maybe the word “corruption” only makes sense, as you say, if it is being used to see if something is, how to put it, being true to itself? Red may look bad (from higher levels) but if the dominant environment is red then red is just being red.

Another nuance then is that the levels build on each other. Amber for all its limitations of a rule/role based hierarchy, can create safety, and then that safety makes possible an orange system where people have individual freedom (which they can afford because most of the other “free” people aren’t going to raid their town and burn their crops).

Would that mean then that “corruption” is whatever is breaking up a particular level? So, orange is also supposed to be a system of democracy, but if red elements in corporations are abusing their power to buy off government agencies and create a kind of fascism, then that is a corruption of orange.

Likewise, so much of green is in some sense corrupted by other elements. When that red corruption of orange corporate power then owns governments and pushes certain development agendas, you get the global CO2 scam. [1]

Within orange mind-space of formal operational thought, 3rd person perspective, science, the ability to question one-self, the ability to recognise universal rights, universal freedom, the freedom of speech, the investigative journalist, the doctor philosopher, the Hippocratic Oath, the need for patient consent to any procedure, the principle of following and accepting evidence as it arises, of publishing all findings even if they prove one’s own hypothesis wrong, and so on — when all that seems to be getting mangled, then I wonder why that is, what’s causing that “corruption” of those modern jewels.

Maybe it is that the levels are built on top of each other. I think one of the Spiral Dynamics economics books makes the point that, the big problem we have is that money has become very abstract and basically has lost touch with any underlying basic truth about value — it’s corrupt because all the funny paper money has lost touch with Amber/Blue basic goodness and truth, it’s lost touch with Amber money.

Which reminds me that decades ago, on the environment, people would decry the specific chemical pollutants going into rivers, actual physical chemistry with observable interactions in nature, but today that’s all been subsumed into “carbon credits” and “carbon quotas” and “carbon offsets” and “carbon trading”. Even carbon isn’t CO2, it’s a proxy term into which they can add abstractions and rules about what’s a carbon “equivalent”.

There’s a sense in which, of the two statements:

“we have the power in these lands, and you must obey or be eliminated”

“we are sending in our service people and we will liberate them and bring them democracy and freedom”

it’s the second one that’s corrupt.

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I believe there is going to be corruption at all the levels of consciousness. I’ve gotten to the point that maybe the most important issue to human consciousness is not survival, not loving and belonging, and not self-actualization (thanks Maslow). It is an incessant need to make meaning. For each color it’s a different end-game–individual power, faith, progress, empowerment to all, non-identification with any end-game. I think Stefano hit the nail on the head, what is one person normalcy is another person’s corruption.

For me it’s the Fireball mystery. How weird is that we are sustained on Earth by a relatively middling sized fireball? Included with this is the belief by many that all these massive structures, planets and suns, galaxies, nebulae of galaxies are by necessity following universal properties, interactions, processes, and laws. YET there are 5"9" creatures that are the only forms in the entire universe that have the freedom (of will or whatever your favorite philosophical power is) to override these inexorable and mightily truths.

It’s freaking weird and bizzare. Ken Wilber more than his contemporaries has provided meaning to life. He has provided what seems to be the best system of classifying and ordering consciousness, ontology, epistemology, metaphysics, and mysticism that has been developed to date. Yet to me, the real meaning IS the mystery, oddity, and absurdity of all of our existence. Mystery IS the meaning of life.

I too have an insatiable need to continue to hear different versions of meanings which has no meaning and becoming more and more contently self-conscious about the nature of what cannot be known. How are we self-aware of being self-aware (mind-body dilemma). I guess it keeps me off the streets and mostly out of trouble.

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Thanks for mentioning Jimmy Carter Ray. I don’t think Washington ever knew what to make of a determined person striving to be on the right side of moral behavior. I also forgot the recent discussion about folks who have had contact with non-terrestrial beings. I have no reason to disbelieve their experience, in fact I believe the odds favor that there are non-terrestrial beings. I just need more evidence. If it is true, the situation self-conscious forms find themselves in is even stranger. I think my existentialist persona has emerged over the past few days.

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Also remember - Green in the form of “Liberty” and “Freedom” threw Europe and America into a series of Wars that lasted about two hundred years. The French Nobility would not allow Green values like Liberty of the masses or even food to the starving until several hundred of their heads were separated from their bodies. Similarly, King George would not allow such tom foolery as “Representation” until the American Colonists won two wars of Independence. Then followed a Civil War that was fought over basic Human rights.
We can also add in WWI - which was the old Nobility of Europe (Central Powers) taking their last stand against the more progressive Powers of Democratic Capitalism of Britain and France on one side and their allies Democratic Socialism of the new Russian Democracy. True, that was a short episode of Democracy that quickly morphed into Bolshevism and Stalinism, but the first few hours were fairly Democratic.

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I have yet to hear any non-terrestrial story that makes sense.
The most common flaw I see is that eye witness accounts aquire some kind of all-knowing knowledge of things that could not possibly be known from the eye witnesses perspective. They somehow aquire ESP to know the motives of their captors and Clairvoyance to know the entire non-terrestrial political system, which is conveniently dumbed down and simplistic. The eye witnesses explain motives of non-terrestrial beings that are invariably at the same level of development of the “eye witness”. They are described as far more simplistic than our current Earth geo-political-socio-economic system.

Even if a person has actually met a non terrestrial, their account is probably going to have more falsehoods than truths in it.
Having travelled and lived in Europe and Asia myself - if you ask most travelers about the goverment and economics and so forth of the country they are visiting the most common answer you will get is “I don’t know” with a casual shrug. So the most reliable witness is one that answers 90% of the time with “I don’t know” or “I never saw or heard that” type answers.
If you cross over into Siberia and are thrown into a Russian prison, in the real world you will have very little understanding of WHY. The truth won’t be expalined to you. Instead you will be told a lie unti you discover yet another lie behind that one. There is no motivation for a captor to give a captive the “Truth”. The conclusion being that the LAST person one should believe is people who had something explained to them by non-terreatrial beings.
Most science fiction uses mulligans - a plot convenience to keep the story going. This only works in fiction, where I am paying to suspend my disbelief and am willing to accept plot holes so that I can be entertained for 2 hours. For example, I accept Faster than Light Travel to keep the story exciting. In that spirit, I accept foolishness like dilythium crystals and antimatter drives and so forth. In the real world when there is a muligan or plot hole in an eye witness account, it is immediately suspect and probably a falsehood. When I hear an eye witness explain a propulsion system from science fiction, it is absurd. First of all a passenger would not automatically understand all the ins and outs of the propulsion system unless they spent a considerable time studying it and second their explanations invariably violate scientific laws. Worst of all, the so-called eye witness does not bother to think how these wonders of technology would impact a civilization that is tehnologically advanced.

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Reply to raybennett’s post on Oct 5. So liberty, freedom, and human rights were “Green” values that emerged in the 18th century? I guess Ken Wilber is wrong then to claim that Green emerged only in the 1960’s. The aforementioned values were first championed by the philosophical heroes of the early Orange modern period: Voltaire, Rousseau, Marx, John Stuart Mill, and many others. Those thinkers would have been appalled at the relativism of today’s Green thinkers and the dreadful culture wars spawned in part by their self-contradictory philosophy.

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I’d go further back for “Green” values. At least to the Greeks - and then we’d have to find who they plagarized from.
One has only to look at the Trial and Execution of Socrates to see the thorny conflict of Green vs Orange ideologies. A so-called Democracy that executed a man for not believing and espousing what he was told to on pain of death.

I’m not all that stuck on “Ken Wilbur said it so therefore it is fact.” lol
Though I’m not at all sure Ken said Green emerged only in the 1960’s. More than likely he said that Green emerged in to the mass concsiousness in the 1960’s, rather than just isolated groups of powerful elites or individuals.
It’s hilarious that you put Russeau into Orange. “Private property is the source of Inequality” does not sound like an Orange belief to me, lol. yes, he was in an “Orange Period” - but he was far from orange himself, lol. Karl Marx was similarly a Green individual in an Orange world. An Orange person would try to fit into the current economic system, not start a revolution to completely overthrow the entire planetary economy.
If Voltaire was alive in the 1990’s he would for sure have been a prominent internet troll, perhaps writing for “The Onion” or MAD Magaxine (under a pen name, of course).

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Ray, I generally agree with you, not as thought out as you present it, but it just seems far-fetched if an alien race has contacted us that so few people know about it. It seems statistically improbable. On the other hand, can we be the only lifeforms in the entire universe. To broaden it can we be the only planet with lifeforms in the entire universe? Statistically again that seems improbable, but I haven’t seen any evidence that convinces me There has been alien contact and as I said you have used Common sense observations about the way people in general, including me, combine and synthesize nonsense with sense. I like the explanation of the Russian Gulag and you’re put in jail and you don’t know why. It reminds me of Kafka‘s the trial.

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There are considerable hurdles to us finding intelligent life. The most obvious is FLT (Faster than Light) travel and communications. This is where the most obvious mulligans / plot holes can be seen. In sci fi entertainment I accept the necessity of worm holes, star gates, warp drives, teleporters, cryogenics, subspace communications and so forth as plot devices to tell fun stories.

Here are some more likely scenarios:

  • I am considering a theory that technological advancement is inversly proportional to social advancement. The more technological a civilization becomes, the less social it becomes. It is possible that throughout hundreds of thousands of years of history, our ancestors chose social advancement as preferable to technological advancement. For example, we know that they knew advanced math because the great Megaliths were built prior to recorded history. Only a socially advanced civilization could have built these Megaliths, not a technolgically advanced civilization. This means that there may be billions of socially advanced civilizations out there who could care less about radio waves and rocket ships.
  • Technological Advancement is inversely proportional to spiritual advancement. The more one delves into technology, the more it draws one away from the subtle realm. What if it was far more simple to communicate across space and time through spiritual practices? Why use a radio or some other sci-fi method to talk to a spiritually stunted race? A spritually advanced race would see no reason to communicate with us. “Rescuing” a person or civilization from their own stupidity and becoming enmeshed in their drama is an unhelathy practice, which a spiritually advanced society would not do. In human history the evidence does suggest that humans were spritually more advanced 30,000 years ago than we are today. The fact that archaeologists and historians choose to ignore or even destroy evidence doesn’t change this. Ancient Texts such as the Torah, Bagavad Gita, and Homers Illiad and Oddesey and dozens of others are complex Allegorical works. They are directions to following spritual paths encoded within children’s stories. Yet we are led to believe that because they were memorized and passed down verbally instead of written, that “Civilization” did not exist before they were written down. Historians only record when they were written in book form and ingore that they were passed down orally for a long time before that, and the non-civilization that created them were incredibly advanced spiritually. It is very likely that millions of civilizations exist in the universe, but human scientists would not recognize them as civilizations unless they wrote books.
  • Authors like Arthur C Clarke realized that intelligent alien species developing in vastly differnt environments would not be anything like us. What if we already have other intelligent species on earth, but simply don’t know how to communicate with them through technology, like mushroom colonies? We just assume things are not intelligent or self aware because we have established ourselves as the only possibility.
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Ray, one of the best Sci-Fi books I ever read was “Childhood’'s End” (I think). That was mind blowing for me and the end was a complete shocker. Do you know this book?

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I agree that Ken Wilber (how about spelling his name correctly?) may have been thinking of the 60’s as the decade when a critical mass of Green thinkers came into prominence. Were there individuals in previous ages who held some Green values? Probably, but that does not mean any of them had achieved a Green stage of development.

It’s time to clarify what we mean by the Green stage. According to Integral, Green is a postmodern stage of development in individuals and collectives that transcends and includes the earlier stages of development, especially the Orange-rational. Among other values, Green is characterized by epistemological relativism and constructivism, moral relativism, sensitivity to marginalized populations worldwide, egalitarianism, multiculturalism, environmentalism, diversity, political correctness, truth and reconciliation, and communitarianism. This worldview could not have emerged except as a creative advance beyond modernism. It follows that there was no Green consciousness prior to the European Enlightenment of the 16th and following centuries. We needn’t quibble about which thinkers of the early modern era might have been leaning Green. The main point is that, as a fully realized postmodern stage of development, Green emerged no earlier than the 20th century. There were no Green Greeks or Romans or medieval Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, or Muslims.

You can see where Green appears in the IT spectrum of development in this chart:
Altitudes of development - Salzman

Perhaps you are “not all that stuck” on Ken Wilber’s AQAL model. If you do accept it, then shouldn’t you be more careful about how you use stage-terms like “Orange” and “Green?”

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Sorry - I’m just not really concerned about you laying down some kind of wall in the timeline of civilization just because your simplistic mind needs strict boundaries.

Yes - over many discussions I see you have a difficult time comprehending gradients and grey areas. You tend to believe there are hard lines in history and that the model Ken created is a law, rather than merely a model that TENDS to be true.

So let me Go through Karl Marx:
Pluralisic - obviously yes
Believed in Equality - obviously yes
Relativistic - obviously yes
Believed in Civil Rights - obviously yes
World Centric obviously yes

Environmentlaist: maybe not

You are telling me that a man who ticks almost all the boxes for Green could not possibly have been operating at Green because some guy made a model and everyone has to fit into that model in all of time and history.
We can go through Jesus Christ. I suppose he was Amber? No wonder 21st Century Christiaqns are stuck in Amber to this day and have a hard time with even Orange values.

You seem to think that this is some kind of religion here - that Ken created a Bible and it is the LAW and there is no discussing outside that.

Note that picking out spelling mistakes in an informal discussion is a tell-tale sign of and overeducated academic with poor cognitive skills. I ran into this kind of academic early in my university - way back in the 1990’s. You are kind of a dinosaur, you know?

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This I am more tentative with. I agree I am not on firm footing with this. It is my personal theory that human social development is not linear but cyclic. It is Ken and Corey’s and many other in Integral’s belief that humankind will inevitably “progress” socially and that Human society is “developing”.
I don’t agree - but I’m not firmly entrenched in my disagreement. I see that I cannot trust Historians nor Archaeologists. Even when they are not outright destroying or hiding physical evidence that contradicts their career - most of their work is based on social science - which isn’t science at all, really.

What I see is that humanity has taken a wrong turn. My only question is how far back was it? Based on your writings, I think you believe similar to people like Jordan Peterson that humanity was fully on track and reached the pinnacle of human development - until the 1960’s. I look further back to where humanity made a wrong turn. I’d for sure go back to Karl Marx - who I say is a Green thinker whose beliefs finally reached mass appeal in the West in the 1960’s. More tentatively I go back to Greece. The Greeks are the bedrock of Western Philosophy. The West knows nothing before the Greeks, so a western thinker like Ken when developing Integral Theory just assumes that period of History to be literally “Year 0” in human social development. Since the American education system also starts Freshmen University “Western Civilization” History courses at this same Year 0, very few people even bother to question this.
Though it is Historical fact that the Greeks went to the East to study. When Alexander the Great conquered Asia, he pillaged the Ancient texts of the region and collected them all into a single building. Then a clumsy imbecile dropped a lamp or something and the whole thing went up in flames. The burning of the Library at Alexandria was probably the single biggest loss of knowledge the world has ever seen. Without those works, we do not know who the Greeks got their ideas from, but we know they did travel to Asia to study.
In Asia Minor and India, Year 0 was the beginning of the end of their Civilization. These were socially advanced civilizations that the West has only caught up with in … the 1960’s. Much of the Postmodernism of the 1960’s was taken from practices and beliefs that were in place in Asia for several thousand years. Meditation is the most obvious example. Every Tom, Dick and Harry in India has been meditating for at least 4,000 years and then when Hippies start doing it in the West they are suddenly the pinnacle of Human social development. Sometimes it is as absurd as that. The Civilizations of South and East Asia were sacked and looted during Colonialism, historical evidence destroyed or ignored - then along comes the postmodern movement and later Integral and say “We are the first to ever achieve this”.

But again - I’m not firm on this position. I just think it’s something to consider and there is equal likelihood as not that we are not the first civilization to ever achieve a world centric, egalitarian, pluralistic and environmental world view.
Even more significant, I don’t think we will be the first to ever achieve a "Holistic, kosmo-centric {sic} civilization where the majority of the population lives from both Individual Self and Trans Personal Self. My position is that this was achieved by several civilizations prior to being destroyed by Western Civilization.

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I won’t be responding to any more of your posts, Ray, until you can assure me you have read the Community Guidelines and aligned your behavior here with its rules. In particular the following:

“Also, Integral Life is a community that honors diversity and breadth of opinion and experience in all manifestations. Community interaction at all levels of experience is not only necessary, but also inevitable. Therefore, there might be times that arise when the dialogue between two or more members escalates in intensity. Even during these times Integral Life strives to hold a safe container that recognizes and respects the myriad views that we all hold. However intense the interactions may be, we ask that members refrain from personal attacks, defamations of character, and trolling, baiting, or flaming other members. For a great guideline to community interaction that is held here in high regard, check out the above Community Guidelines.”

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You’ve said that before.
And also take a look at yourself.

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Your horrible bias makes your analysis irrelevant. For example, you assume that a second Obama term would be a good thing without offering any support for that position. I, along with many others, believe that the Obama was a horrible thing for this country from a policy perspective and believe Obama has nothing but contempt for the United States of America.

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