I’ve been re-studying Integral Theory after an 8-10 year hiatus from about a decade of study. Primarily through Wilber’s books.
I joined a Meetup group in 2015 and found the group to be primarily focused more on promotion of leftist and perhaps even moreso on anti-conservativism.
While I very much enjoy Integral Theory, it seems that the focus now is primarily on promotion of collectivism wrapped in Integral lingo.
Perhaps I’m just not getting it, but I see much academic prognostication on a Collective Happy Nirvana with a beautiful guru enlightened elite designing and running the show. While I enjoy alternate future scenarios, eat I can’t quite wrap my mind around is how this newly designed Collective Nirvana will avoid the corruption and human misery that these collectivist attempts have led to throughout the last 100 years. I have high skepticism of the Leftists politicians’ motivations and in Integral terms their altitude/level.
Key to this concern is the difference in the brilliant academic hypotheses that intellectuals such as Wilber put forth and the implementation by the administrators and architects.
Study correlation of bribery with collectivism. Perhaps regulated graft should replace capitalism?
Is it “bad” here? We have a proclivity for ‘bad news’.
Try erasing our Liberal democracy and free trade compared to the all of history…
“In its political and economic consequences, in fact, large-scale corruption has the same effects as communism, which, in the last century, fostered repressive governments and sub-optimal economic performances where communists gained power. Moreover, twenty-first-century corruption resembles twentieth-century communism in yet another important way: as a cause of international conflict. Just as the aggressive global communist movement, spearheaded by the Soviet Union, posed the chief threat to world peace from the end of World War II to the end of the Cold War, so grand corruption lies at the heart of the greatest challenge to global peace and stability today. It follows that fighting such corruption is a way of making the world a more peaceful place.”
Following the Iranian Hezzbolah corruption thread to Lebanon today with real people living in real horrible conditions. It isn’t academic…
Except that it’s not a somnolent in faculty lounges populated by economics PhDs who sniff haughtily at the mere mention of Adam Smith and other “dead economists.” The modern economics profession believes it can fine-tune growth with money taken from the growers. Lebanon is one of the profession’s many Afghanistans. And it doesn’t stop there.