Why did you have to qualify that you’re “not a bottom”? I assume you’re amazingly Transcendent and would never succumb to the Pre/Trans Fallacy issue (pun intended). Absolutely unbiased, 100% transcendent. 
And of course it’s simply incomprehensible to you that I’ve considered, then freely and happily choose a monogamous heterosexual lifestyle.
Again, another example of your incredible transcendence. Glad you’re living your free from bias and Pre/Trans Fallacy zone. LOL
And I’m also curious if my response is somehow “oppressive” of anyone that adheres to an LGBTQIA+ lifestyle? And always interested in your gaslighting tactics - you have some good ones.
For what it’s worth, in that oh so Amber Literal Mythic Ethnocentric gathering on Sundays, the congregation includes I would say about it’s 5% share of what would appear to be LGBTQIA+ based on dress, who’s hands they hold, styles, and snuggles. And everyone is treated, from what I can see, with respect, kindness, compassion. Almost as if NO ONE CARES ABOUT THAT STUFF.
Almost would appear to be Pluralistic. But it’s gotta be Pre on the Pre/Trans Fallacy scale, right?
It’s almost as if the primary commonality is the religion posted on the building entrance. What if it really is that simple after all?
Happy Good Friday and Passover!
Meh, you’re deflecting again because you refuse to accept personal responsibility for manufacturing lies about me in this thread.
I’m talking about the message AND the messenger here. The message includes lies about wanting to take property and freedom from people. The messenger is someone who is seemingly intolerant of people disagreeing with him.
This also struck me as kind of funny:
“ We also differ in that it seems you’re quite ok “plowing ahead” past psychoses baked into the various altitudes. “Onward Ho, Damn the Psychoses!” if you will.”
You have criticized me multiple times for criticizing the “psychoses” of orange, as one example. And even more when I criticize the “psychoses” of amber. But notice that when I criticize the excess of orange or green or even amber — which you usually resist, in your contrarian way — I’m not suggesting a full social regression back to amber, as you are defending here. Because the amber we have in this country is often also deeply broken.
But congratulations, you officially have the same goal as CRT — to wind the clock back to amber, to eliminate the “psychosis” of orange and green, and hit the reset switch on civilization. Strange bedfellows.
Key here is you’ve essentially “judged” and “condemned”
Something you would never do, right? Unless they are Marxist Socialist Maoist Collectivist Pinko Woke Groomers, of course.
I accept amber for what it is, good and bad, dignities and disasters. The surface structures of amber always change over time, but the deep structures remain in place. And yes, that includes the types of absolutism that naturally emerge at Amber. I’m sorry if you don’t like this fact, but that is simply how development works. We grow from an absolutist stage at amber, to a multiplistic stage at orange, to a pluralistic stage at green. Sorry man, I didn’t make up the rules, you’re going o have to take that up with the Big Guy.
“To which you replied with multiple paragraphs that I’m “acting in bad faith”.”
Making up lies and strawmen about my views, as you very clearly did, is pretty much the definition of “bad faith”, yes.
Ignore the message, attack the messenger.
You seem to be projecting your hostility again. You made up lies about me, you willfully misrepresented my arguments, you tried to attack my character. And when you are called on it, you make yourself out to be the victim. Weak sauce.
I am amazingly Transcendent in regards to sexuality. It’s a simple fact. Nobody male, female or trans has ever seriously really expressed that desire with me. That’s just reality of my life. Or if they did as in your case, it’s not serious but just awkward joking and besides you are obviously so insecure, tentative, qualifying clumsy and inept that your efforts can just be dismissed with a shrug.
I’m not really concerned about your sexual lifestyle, except - as usual - you apparently want to drag anyone and everyone down into your personal shadows - and my answer is a clear “no, thank you”
I’m not sure where you are getting that I said you are oppressive of LGBTQIA+
Please quote me where I said this.
You have a bad tendency to make up things you believe I said. I have asked you numerous times to quote things that you believe I said, and you never have
Then why are you so deep into this topic? YOU obviously care about it, otherwise we would not be discussing it.
And a Happy “Hail Satan” to you.
I just want to suggest that folks in this thread take a look at this post as a way to help better navigate our overall discourse in this space.
Particularly the distinction between early-orange and late-orange, and how that shifts us from straw-man debate tactics, to steel-man dialogue tactics.
If you are incapable of accurately summarizing another member’s arguments, if you keep receiving feedback that you are misrepresenting their views, if you keep hearing that there is a gulf of meaning between what a person says, and what you hear them say… then that may be an invitation for more interpersonal growth.
I wanted to share a little, speculate, raise some questions around some of the material Michelle has brought up.
“Regression in service to the ego” is broadly defined in the psychological literature as ‘adaptive circumvention of normal ego functioning in order to access primitive material.’ It is considered destabilization that is necessary for some kind of equilibrium, or, for growth towards higher ego functioning and greater depth, and is based on shifting into the stage or state best suited for the task of the moment or the task at hand.
This kind of regression stems from anxiety, anxiety that has typically been associated with trauma or major frustration. The “primitive material” is embedded in the trauma or frustration. This kind of regression is not just a looking back on a prior stage of development from a 3rd person perspective in order to learn from it; it is rather an inhabiting or embodiment of that prior stage. In an individual, it is usually temporary except in the most severe forms of psychological disturbance or brain injury.
It is also a therapeutic technique in psychological treatment. In therapies, not just accessing but integrating the material is of course the goal. In some therapies, there is a “mutual regression” of both therapist and client/patient, a “shared madness.”
I say all this to preface the rest, starting with the question “do groups/collectives have an ego?” We speak about collective shadow and collective trauma, but how about collective ego? Do groups have a separate-self sense? Do they have a relatively organized identity, beliefs, stories, shadow material? Does a group engage in sense-making of their own thoughts, and the world? Do groups have a reasoning ability, do they have safety concerns; do they have defensive, perceptual, intellectual-cognitive, and executive abilities? Does all of this help them navigate and function in the world? If the answer is yes to these questions, then yes, collectives have an ego.
Nations for instance can be viewed as having an ego, which we sometimes refer to as ‘national identity,’ or at least as a major part of national identity. Long-running tropes like ‘American exceptionalism’ and the ‘New World’ point to the separate-self sense. ‘Land of opportunity,’ and ‘melting pot’ and ‘democracy’ all point to historical identity, beliefs and stories and reasoning etc. the nation holds. Etc.
More to the point, does the collective green stage (or any stage) have an ego? If so, then it can certainly regress, or segments of that collective (e.g. the Woke) can break or dissociate from the whole and regress–can “adaptively circumvent normal ego functioning in order to access primitive material.” Just like with individual regression, this primitive material is in one’s history, but here it’s in a collective history (around race, sex, gender, for instance).
In my compassionate or charitable view of this, the regression of some of the green to Woke and amber does stem largely from anxiety related to past collective and epigenetic trauma and past and present frustration. That the Woke green would regress to amber makes sense in that if you are fearful and anxious, finding like-others or an “us” group with whom one feels safe and a sense of belongingness seems rational. And yes, there is that matter of “shared madness,” how the crowd with groupthink and herding instinct can keep the regression going, as can tendencies towards in-the-moment gratification and indulgence.
But I do think, in my charitable view, that the regression is also a temporary one, although “temporary” for a collective ego regression covers a much longer span of time than it does for an individual. It seems to me that we can afford to be hopeful; think of Nazi Germany-- although it took many decades, that’s been largely turned around. Progress, in evolution’s time.
All of which brings me to your statements @Michelle. You have pointed out with your idea that the Woke are “widening” or horizontal-izing the amber stage that a stage of development is neither monolithic nor unified. And I’m with you when you say you’d rather see this amber stage have some values like social justice, inclusiveness, climate concerns/action, etc. such as the woke (or unhealthy green) brings to it. My question is: how is there any conflict between seeing a regression of some segments of green to the amber stage, and the fact that the Woke are “filling-out” the amber stage through ‘evolution 2’ or ‘amber 2’? To me, it seems both can be true at once. And perhaps I’m missing something, so let me know, and thanks. (A long road here, to get to what I wanted to get at 
)
I think this is a fascinating question, which I actually hope to get into with Ken in our next episode, where we will talk about holons and their most important characteristics.
Groups, according to Ken, do not have a “dominant monad”, which I think is required in order to think of them as “having a collective ego”. As I put it in the script for a video I am working on:
So this is one of the defining characteristics of a holon – it has an interior of some kind, some kind of inner agency. It is “something” to be a holon. A more technical way to say it is that “all holons have a dominant monad”, which might sound a bit kinky, like a holon going to a BDSM party. (Which, fair enough, we all like to find fun new ways to put parts into wholes.) But “dominant monad’ really means that “all holons have an inner agency that governs all of its junior holons.” That’s why when you decide to take your dog for a walk, 100% of your atoms, molecules, cells, and organs decide to go with you. Which is useful if you want go from point A to point B without smearing yourself across the carpet and leaving a nasty stain.
However, groups (social holons) are in fact capable of social autopoeisis — that is, they exhibit patterns of self-organization that can often appear to be the result of some distributed intentionality. From later in the script:
But what about an ant colony? They certainly show a far greater range of creativity and complexity than a crystal does. Sure, a simple crystal includes more atoms than we can possibly imagine, ten to the power of brain aneurysm. But those atoms are very boring. They don’t do much, their parties suck, and their culture is about as shallow as it gets.
The average ant colony, on the other hand, only consists of a few hundred thousand ants — but each of those ants are composed of their own atoms, molecules, and cells. They have greater depth than atoms, but considerably less span. And the levels of complexity that we see in ant colonies are staggering – the sum of its behavior seem so much greater than the capacity of any individual ant in the colony. It feels almost like its own individual holon. Ken Wilber calls this sort of distributed intelligence a form of “nexus-agency”, which is a sort of pseudo-agency that emerges in the collective and organizes the behavioral patterns of its individual members.
So according to Ken, it’s not so much that “social holons/groups/collectives have an ego”, but more like “social holons/groups/collectives have nexus-agency that arises from the accumulated thoughts, structures, meanings, and behaviors of all its members.” It’s a feedback loop between Zone 7 (the inner of the Lower Right) and virtually all other zones/quadrants. It’s not a whole in itself, but an aggregate of all the individual wholes who are members of that system.
It’s an important distinction, because it suggests different sets of intervention for treating stage-related dysfunction, based on whether you are looking at an individual holon or a social holon. For example, when an individual holon does “regression in the service of ego”, that is taking place within their “dominant monad” — meaning, 100% of their interior conscious awareness is temporarily dipping back into previous structures upon which its own average-mode consciousness is built upon. And then when they dip back out into the later stages once again, 100% of their consciousness moves along with them.
However, when it comes to a social holon, there’s no real “regression in service of nexus-agency”, as I understand it, because the only way to truly regress would be to eliminate the thoughts, relationships, exchanges, and activities of individuals at later stages.
Which is precisely why we need to be very careful about this sort of thing. Every totalitarian in history has positioned themselves and their ideology as representing a “higher whole” to which we should all aspire. In fact, this is how the concept of “holons” emerged in the first place for the person who coined the phrase, Arthur Koestler:
But another problem, as Koestler saw it, was that mankind’s capacity for greatness was often undermined by its penchant for self-destruction. Which I imagine was reinforced by the many technological marvels and terrors he witnessed as a Hungarian Jew living in Europe during the early to mid-20th century.
As Koestler saw it, human beings were prone to two primary drives – we either choose individual self-expression, asserting our wholeness, our agency, and our separateness from the rest of society and our surrounding environment. Or we allow ourselves to “disappear” into something we see as being greater than ourselves, letting go of our sense of wholeness in order to feel like we are a part of something bigger, something more meaningful than we can find as isolated individuals.
In other words, Koestler observed that human beings are simultaneously capable of acting as self-contained wholes, as well as parts of even greater wholes. And it is within this critical polarity that Koestler believed all of the hope (and all of the misery) of the human experience can be found.
As Koestler saw it, the desire to become part of something greater than ourselves can often lead us to participate with social systems that are in fact far less than ourselves, because we often choose systems that were created by lower drives from more primitive parts of the brain – drives that seek to oppress and dominate other people.
In Koestler’s view, if we do not have an accurate understanding of how whole/parts emerge – and if we do not know how to navigate the great chain of whole/parts that have already emerged in nature and in human society – then our own contradictory struggle to simultaneously be a whole, and to be a part of a greater whole, can lead us down some very dark paths.
What’s interesting here, is that Koestler’s original insight into “holons” is a bit different from Ken’s enactment of the word. Ken would likely say that Koestler is combining both “agency and communion” as well as “eros and agape”. “Agency and communion” essentially describes drives toward the individual, and drives toward the collective, which all holons intrinsically possess. We can see these almost like “horizontal drives” of the holon. Whereas “eros and agape” would better describe the drives toward wholeness and part-ness, the “vertical drives” of a holon. Still, Koestler’s concept of “holons” has proven to be tremendously valuable, especially after we differentiate these two “directions” of natural drives, and see how they are often related to each other.
Later in the script:
Why is this so important? Well, as Arthur Koestler pointed out way back in 1967, human beings are fundamentally engaged in two contradictory drives – the need to be a whole individual, and the need to be part of a greater, higher whole. And just as Koestler observed, our drive to be part of something greater than ourselves can easily mislead us into becoming members of something that is far less evolved, and far more dangerous. We confuse two different kinds of drives – the drive to be a holonic part of a greater whole, versus the drive to be in community with other wholes who are similar to us.
This brings us back to something we talked about earlier — the difference between “growth hierarchies” and “dominator hierarchies”. One of the common features of totalitarian regimes everywhere is that they co-opt the language of growth holarchies and twist it into justification for dominator hierarchies, convincing people that either they themselves, or their ideology, is the “higher, greater whole” that we should all want to be part of. So let’s maybe try to keep an eye out for that, since we seem to be seeing a bit of a resurgence of this kind of thinking these days.
But what is interesting is that this Erotic drive toward increasing wholeness, can take the form of either agency (reinforcing one’s own wholeness) or communion (a “reaching out” in order to commune with other sub-holons that compose a higher whole). The same, of course, can be said of agape, our drive toward part-ness, which can either take place by “reaching into” our own individual agency and befriending our own constituent parts (such as shadow work), or “reaching out” into the collective in order to embrace others as part of our agapic love.
And of course, the stages themselves often seem to self-organize into oscillating patterns of agency and communion. It’s a generalization, of course, and does not describe all members of a system, but we can see fairly clearly how red leans toward agency, amber toward communion, orange toward agency, green toward communion, teal toward agency-integrated-with-communion, and turquoise toward communion-integrated-with-agency. Which, again, does not describe every individual’s path through these stages (both agency and communion can be seen as “types” that exist at every stage, meaning there are agentic versions of amber, and communal versions of orange), but I think we can also see how these larger cultural patterns of emphasis have a normalizing effect on most of our individual developmental arcs.
Truly fascinating stuff, I think!
All of which is to say, when it comes to the question of “how do we fix broken systems (social holons) emerging from particular stages of consciousness”, there seems to me to be only two answers. We either:
a) Heal the governing ruleset that is producing or reinforcing the dysfunction (Zone 8 rules/laws/policies that shape social self-organization (nexus-agency) in Zone 7)
or:
b) Heal the interiors of the individuals (zone 2), whose aggregate beliefs, behaviors, etc. are perpetuating the broken system, typically done via education, therapy, cultural pressures, social and legal accountability, etc.
An integralist, I think, would choose to pursue both interior and exterior interventions, though the ratio likely changes depending on the scale, scope, and specifics of the problem.
Thanks Corey for your in-depth response. All of this became familiar to me again, reading your comments. I remember in one of his books Ken talking about the dominant monad and using his own dog as an example. That’s a great example (And before I forget it, another Koestler point I like very much, that to fight against totalitarianism isn’t to fight for the truth against the lie, but “against a total lie in the name of a half-truth.” I read that just recently…somewhere.)
I think I probably agree with you, but…In reading the section about the ant colony, and providing we can speak of the collective that is representative of a particular stage of development as a social holon, what I thought of is that there are various functions on the part of individual ants within the colony: some are worker ants, some soldier ants, some queens, etc. And I think within any stage of development, there are also different functions provided by different individuals to serve, maintain and defend that stage. Just as soldier ants defend the colony by biting, spraying, stinging “attackers,” perhaps the function of some people within a certain stage is to “bite and sting” their attackers. Just as ants are more complex than crystals, so people are more complex than ants, so would not necessarily need to remain “in the nest” in order to serve the nexus-agency of the nest–i.e. the regressed-to-amber woke green could still be serving the nexus-agency of the green stage’s social holon.
I’m working really hard here at playing devil’s advocate, so let me continue.
Tell me how what I’m about to say is wrong: the way I see it, to use another example, some of the orange-stage GOP social holon has regressed to amber (and lower). You say:
If I’m understanding you, you would say the regressive Republicans are not regressing in order to serve the nexus-agency of the GOP, because they undoubtedly have not eliminated all these things. Do you see it more as just individual egos regressing in order to serve…what? their own individual egos?
I admit I’m a little foggy today. Clear me up!
As good of an excuse as any.And by the way, when is the next episode of the Ken Sho?
Whew, as always so many great thoughts and questions!
I want to first emphasize this from Corey
However, when it comes to a social holon, there’s no real “regression in service of nexus-agency”, as I understand it, because the only way to truly regress would be to eliminate the thoughts, relationships, exchanges, and activities of individuals at later stages.
I think this matters a lot. If Green is regressing, then it must mean they have access to it individually or would be actively trying to eliminate it collectively. I am not sure that’s what I see with the Woke issue. I am not sure they have access, many of whom are not old enough to have fully developed to this stage in the first place. So, when teaching Green ideas to a group of 5-18 year olds, it matters that we understand how they will integrate the material, which will most likely not be Green, but amber/orange. I don’t see any acknowledgement of this and I have seen some tragic results. I feel like I can personally manage this as a parent, but to the concerns of traditional amber/orange around certain curriculum, there are valid points being made, even if the points are “beyond their altitude”, so to speak and not directly what they are speaking to. I get most of what we are discussing is coming from 20-30 year olds, but they too were educated in Green values, even if indirectly or at a college level (18-21), still for most not in a Green stage.
This brings me to the next point which is real respect for the wisdom and learning opportunity we have from each stage. I will start with an example from Magenta. Let’s imagine we are having a conversation with a magenta tribal elder. For this example, they are Magenta, not a Harvard educated environmental lawyer. Would your first instinct be to try and “raise” their level of development or listen to the wisdom from their stage? The reality of how you integrated this stage will most likely be pretty shallow in comparison, so I would listen. I think we can use this model all the way up. I think if we focused less on “raising” levels on consciousness and just listened to the wisdom being offered we would be in a better place.
That is not to say that we shouldn’t use higher stages as well, but I think when it’s in service to the wisdom of each stage we would see better results than we are seeing from trying to “evolve” people. If we continue to think the “answer” is to get everyone to Teal, we will fail. We are failing. If Integral is really an education tool for Green/Teal development, more power to you. Sincerely. That alone is a lot. I just think if we want to benefit the world, approaching other stages with more humility and respect is essential. I think approaching a regression should be different than a developing stage.
I’m understanding you, you would say the regressive Republicans are not regressing in order to serve the nexus-agency of the GOP, because they undoubtedly have not eliminated all these things. Do you see it more as just individual egos regressing in order to serve…what? their own individual egos?
New egos emerging with a new understanding arising from their development, both individually and collectively. We are dealing with a new generation. Assuming they developed exactly like their parents is a mistake IMO. There is a new nexus-agency being served. The GOP is evolving to meet it. So is the DNC.
Another way to see this…Boomeritis changed the game.
I largely agree with you Michelle about the age issues with green, and of course, also about listening to a person from their stage. And I do think that’s a primary message of Integral, from KW and throughout the leadership–accept the person where they are, relate to others in a way that helps each person be the healthiest version of themselves exactly where they are on the developmental scale. (Unless they show interest in integral evolutionary theory, then it’s education that one can offer, if wanted.) Although not even Integralists need to accept verbal abuse, or blatant lying and such.
As for your second post, to be more clear, I’m not talking about young people or a new generation in the GOP. I’m referring to current Republican Congressional members and RNC people, some of whom are well-past middle age and older, who have seemingly had some orange credentials, and some still do, even as they embrace some pretty ugly things, like the election being stolen despite massive evidence to the contrary; even as they refuse to call out their own members for associations with white nationalism and the J6 events, that kind of amber ethnocentrism. That sadly looks like regression to me. But in the end, that too may serve some useful purpose. Who knows?
I should have added to the list of the kinds of regressive Republicans I’m talking about–those in state legislatures and in governorships as well who support some of the things we’ve been talking about in this thread; Florida’s “parental rights” bill, for example, and similar things. The question always arises: were they orange as center of gravity, or more amber to begin with?
These are great questions! And you seem very “clear” in the issue. 
So for the sake of more clarity, I think there are several reasons why social holons can regress:
First, the fact that everyone is “born at square one”, which can create a sort of social entropy if the developmental conveyor belt is no longer bringing as many people to later stages as it once did.
Second, a social holon’s “nexus agency” often self-organizes based on the sorts of zone-7 communication technologies and information flows that are available. Meaning, society organizes itself differently during the centralized network tv age, differently in the newly-differentiating cable tv age, and differently again in the totally decentralized internet age. These technologies, and the various types and degrees of psychological, cultural, and social fragmentation that come with them, have a huge impact on the shape of our overall “nexus agency”.
I think this is a particularly important factor for political parties, who are constantly reshaping themselves according to the views and values of the voters. When the technology changes, and the information flow changes, and therefore the ideas and sense-making among the voters change (for better or worse), then the political parties then need to either reflect those changing views, or reject them. I think this can be clearly seen in the GOP, as the nexus-agency of that establishment had fully rejected Trump before he was nominated by the voters, and were then forced to reorganize and reflect/reinforce Trumpism in order for them to be selected for by their own voters in the future. Parties often have to follow their base wherever it takes them, which makes them particularly vulnerable to these changing information flows in Zone 7.
This is something I think we can see on the left quite often these days — slogans that were produced by green, and repeated by amber. It’s not that these individuals are regressing back to amber, which is rare outside of therapeutic settings and head trauma, but rather that the revolving door of the social holon’s membership is bringing less-developed individuals into the discourse. (My own suspicion is that we are no longer generating as many genuine green thinkers as we did just a generation ago.)
Which, in this case, would mean that a social holon might have previously wanted their values to compete fairly in the democratic marketplace of ideas, but in regressing away from orange, they no longer care about the “compete fairly” part, and then it becomes an all-or-nothing, zero-sum game of “win at any cost”. Especially when amber is involved, since it tends to frame these conflicts in terms of black-and-white, “good vs. evil” narratives — and when it comes to defeating evil, the ends ALWAYS justify the means, even if that means turning away from orange completely by using nefarious means to overthrow a democratic election.
There are a number of other factors we could look at too, such as changing environmental life conditions in the lower right, cultural pressures and permissions and taboos in Zone 4, etc. After all, if we change something in one zone, it has an impact that ripples out and reshapes all other zones (to varying degrees — changing a single system will always have a greater impact on a social holon than changing a single individual) because these things are always co-arising and co-creating each other. These are all “8 perspectives of the same (nondual) occasion”.
All of which is to say, yes social holons can certainly regress, but it’s a somewhat different process than when individuals regress. We don’t solve Orange dysfunctions by “Making America Amber Again”. Typically, Amber is the stage that most wants to eliminate the higher stages in order to “reset” the poker game — as we see in many conservative discussions, as well as in things like Critical Race Theory on the left — because both are cases of amber absolutism hitting the wall of modern and postmodern emergence, which it regards as “evil”.
Or were they never orange or amber and we missed the way boomeritis affected conservatives.
I 100% agree with this. I would even say this might be something like a “colonialist” version of integral — we need to integrally colonize all of these interiors, and pull everyone up to Turquoise! It’s not only unfeasible, but also probably unwanted.
I think when it comes to a teal/turquoise enactment of the total social holon of civilization itself, it’s kind of like the point @LaWanna was making about the ant colony — its cohesion actually depends on multiple roles, each supporting and sustaining the others. This is described in Ken’s 20 Tenets as “holons have increasing differentiation, and increasing integration.” At each stage, there is a greater differentiation of “roles” that members of a social holon can participate with, which requires a greater integration in order to get them all working together properly.
Each of these stages, I believe, are almost like organs in our body (I know, I just spent all that time differentiating individual holons from social holons, but it’s a useful analogy), and we need them all to be functional and healthy in order for the organism to be healthy. Not that civilization is an organism. But you catch my drift.
@Michelle says: “Or were they never orange and we missed the way boomeritis affected conservatives.”
This is where perhaps we need a little more granularity, in this case adding an entirely new stage in between “amber” and “orange” — what we sometimes call the “umber” stage, or the “Expert” stage in Susanne Cook-Greuter’s work. Some conservatives were certainly at the late-orange “achiever” stage, of course, but my sense is that a great many more were at this early-orange (umber) “expert” stage, which consolidates back to Amber in times of great duress.
Which is another thing we need to look at — how individual holons AND social holons can often regress in times of great stress, chaos, etc., usually falling back to a prior stage that offers more overall stability. And there are few stages more “stable” than amber, which I think gets doubly reinforced by the fact that EVERY first-tier stage comes with its own “soft absolutism” that makes each of these stages believe their values are the only legitimate values, and which makes regression back to amber that much easier.
But we can’t by-pass amber either. I think we made a mistake in the 60’s by overdoing our attack on it. I think we are making the same mistake now.
Again, totally agree with this. Which is why I continue to describe Amber as “the foundation of civilization itself”. Without healthy amber structures, our red impulses never get put into check, and then go on to infect every new stage we layer on top. And I think that one of the big reasons why amber is so unhealthy today, is because it has been so thoroughly deconstructed by Green (and Orange) over the last several decades.
We need amber military chains of command, we need amber police forces, we need amber methods of forming national identities, etc. We don’t want UNHEALTHY expressions of amber, of course — at this point in our social evolution, we want those amber social holons in our society, but we want them “plugged into” Orange methods of accountability. The police force can be mostly amber, for example, but that amber-ness must be integrated into Orange laws, court systems, oversight, and other accountability measures, or else we risk something like non-discriminatory laws being interpreted/enacted in discriminatory ways.
Hell, I often go so far as to say that we need a new engine of healthy Amber ethnocentricity, such as a mandatory National Guard/Peace Corp-like service where all rich kids, poor kids, white kids, black kids, etc. are put together in service of something greater than themselves, which would also help re-generate a healthy sense of shared “national identity” among all of us, so we can stop making enemies of our own fellow citizens. (I also suggest mandatory gun training for all young Americans as an essential part of this service, so we can simultaneously re-own our martial heritage, while also beginning to take firearms out of our collective shadow, since we seem to be both so addicted and allergic to them in this society).
US has 8M 18&19 year olds per year x $100,000 for $15/hr min wage+expenses+overhead per year =$.8Trillion per year in addition Federal burn rate.
All to inculturate young people into a Grand Plan for America. And may we ask who writes said curriculum, staffs and manages this $.8T/yr program?
And what might the actual curriculum look like?
Didn’t you just argue that I mischaracterize you as inaccurately promoting Federal government expansion and control?
Ah yes, that’s right, I’m a Marxist totalitarian because I want government to do stuff sometimes.
It’s a utopian wishlist dude. Magic wand stuff. Along with things like ranked choice voting and repealing the Reapportionment Act. You seriously expect me to draft a curriculum for this program?
Honestly, spending .8 trillion per year in order to radically diminish gun violence and move beyond this culture war garbage in this country, sounds like an absolute freaking steal.
Tell you what — we spend over 4 trillion per year on healthcare, and guns are one of the leading causes of death and injury that contribute to that cost, so we’ll make up a healthy chunk of that .8T/yr by reducing the rate of gun-related injuries in this country, by training every American how to use and store one properly. This could also take some of the load off of other programs such as NG and FEMA, so there’s another chunk.
Also, to sweeten the pot – let’s totally end the drug war, legalize marijuana and psychedelics nationally, make addiction a medical issue rather than a legal issue, and empty the prisons of all non-violent drug offenders, while expunging their records so they can participate freely in the economy. Now government has to do less stuff, and we make more money back via savings, income taxes, and vice taxes.
We can also slash our military budget by at least 33%. There’s some more savings, and less government. Maybe that pays off some of my moral debt.
Didn’t you just argue that I mischaracterize you as inaccurately promoting Federal government expansion and control?
No, I argued that you purposely lied by claiming I wanted to take away people’s speech, arms, property, or freedoms.
