It’s the same thing in 90% of your 2,000 + posts.
Right good Left bad - to such an extreme degree that you rarely say anything else. You either have no other interests or for some reason don’t want to discuss them.
I have no idea what you are like outside of this website - but your posts in here are extreme both in sheer number as well as point of view. You use inflammatory rhetoric like “self righteous”, “caterwaul”, “religious orthodoxy”, “fear mongering”, “bankrupt media establishments”, “mantras”, “relegate to obscurity”, and so on. One or two of these might be reasonable - every once in a while, but they are so pervasive and ever present in your posts that a reasonable neutral and educated reader would judge you to have a very clear and pervasive bias that you use to make your arguments more extreme.
That specific post was just more of the same thing - the left is bad and scary and that’s why the right has to attack them.
I see this as the early-orange “debate” mode of engagement, where we compare the most idealized version of our own views to the most exaggerated version of our opponent’s views, where the goal is a zero-sum “win/lose” dynamic. Not a lot of dialogue, discourse, or the sorts of enfoldment-based engagement we would expect in a community like this.
And debate is fine, we can inhabit those stages if we want to/need to. As I say, later stages can inhabit the earlier stages, but early stages cannot demonstrate the capacities of later stages. Which means, if this is the only stage a person is willing or able to engage from, it might tell us something about who we are taking about, as much as what we are talking about.
I had an interesting exposure to the far left on Sunday. I stopped by my friends house to check on some things for him. In his living room was a white board one of his renters left there, with her group’s brainstorming session notes of on it. Really far left terminology on it. Native plant species, sustainability, organic, sunrise shack, and so on. I’ve spoken with her before, and apparently someone has given her a couple hundred acres to manage, and they are working out their plan for it.
Nothing at all on that board had any word at like “Republican”, “Democrat”, or frankly any other political term. The Farthest Extreme of the Left is completely unconcerned with all that rubbish. Everyone knows those are just words to divide, and when they meet it is the last thing they want to discuss.
Now - some people with a certain political orientation will absolutely not be able to “hang” with groups who refuse to talk in the language of separation. They are not excluded form these groups, but they tend exclude themselves and make up all kinds of stories. We see a lot of those stories in here. Nobody attending these Far Left gatherings requires anybody to be anything or hold any belief. The interesting thing is how people who cannot stand freedom of expression or want to always see reason to divide choose to exclude themselves.
People on the Far Left are far to busy living their own lives and planning their own futures outside of political structures to bother with wanting to “rule over” … whomever.
What I see in here describing the “Far Left” may have been the Far Left 20 to 40 years ago. I don’t know, I was more conservative in those years and I probably am more 1990’s Conservative than anything else. But it surely is not the Far Left in 2022.
Sorry. Wasn’t looking for a debate, just laying out the most likely scenario for Leftists in the up coming decade.
If you or I judge as good or bad, higher altitude or lower, progessive or regressive, against our personal/tribal utopian or dystopian visions is somewhat irrelevant given our influence levels.
But I do hear your point about “that’s just where he is” developmentally. Same can be said for every post and every discussion really.
What’s interesting is this thread, with the cast of characters has produced the most and arguably some of the best dialog on Integral Life.
No - not “best”. Not by a long shot.
Drama is not best. Longest is not best. Repetitive is not best. Saying in 2000 posts what was already said in the first 100 posts is not best.
I’m curious how you define “best” because I have a much higher standard for best.
This I quite apropos as several of us are “branching out”, trying “put down roots”. Lol. I don’t drink much tequila, but do raise and propagate agave, cacti, and other desert adapted plants - fig, citrus, pomegranate, herbs…
It’s funny one of our teammates worked up a presentation with premise of the presentation to promote a dystopian cataclysmic apocolyptic racist future to justify zero carbon, zero chemical, zero energy, and putting in your own compost pile. And everyone is already doing zero carbon, zero energy, no pesticide gardening and landscaping. But virtue signal noted.
I think these are great insights to grief. If we can see the development process as a grieving process it may help us bring more compassion and skill sets to how to process development and lead culture to acceptance and not despair. For myself, I find the loss of my “white, straight America” a real loss and one that actually has nothing to do with POC or orientations. It’s just the loss of this America that was symbolized by the cowboy, the west, Waylon Jennings and Merle Haggard. An America of self reliance and determination. It was my America. It’s gone, development tore it to shreds.
I can also see that the development was necessary and inevitable, but I still grieve the loss. Imagine if you could not see development and only experienced the loss. Projecting your despair on those that development was not picking up makes total sense to me. Calling them racist idiots is not a skillful or compassionate way to handle someone’s grief. Creating space for the loss matters. Skipping this step and just engaging in endless debate or insults is preventing our grieving process from happening.
I think there is also grief expressing in orange. It will be different, more mental, less heart centered. It is creating more fear, less despair. Again, I can feel into this.
A part of this fight, that is healthy is these stages have not been fully transcended culturally, so what aspects of them are dying is still being worked through. I think this is especially meaningful in orange.
This is great. The question I have for you, social media director, is how we enact these ideas instead of just pointing them out? From what I observe, I see you reacting to the most controversial post, I am inclined to run away, all like he is saying.
I get this is no small task to rewrite these platforms. That’s one real problem, the other is there will be more money made in the capitalism of outrage. I am curious how you see this as someone who has control over a social media site. Is what he is proposing possible?
One last thought…this is the essence of it right. They would have to do this without regulation forcing it, regulation would be regulating free speech. It’s controversial if they touch their algorithms, there is very little incentive. I listened to The Rabbit Hole. The women who runs Youtube seemed very concerned but didn’t have a clear vision of what to do about it, and steps they took to bring in opposing ideas to the stream didn’t really work. I am interested in what you think could be done.
Don’t we all self select the threads we wish to dialog within? The vast majority of threads on Integral Life I watch flow by like watching leaves on the river’s surface or sea foam on the oceans waves. And somewhat rarely, I see the “bottle with perhaps a message” bobbing by and feel the need to read or perhaps even dialog.
We’ve discussed previously the concepts of how we communicate Emotive-Qualitative-Quanitative, Time Horizons of Past-Present-Predictive, Analysis-Assessment-Judging-Predictive. Also it was brought up that there might be communications modes that might better work for visual vs verbal, audible vs textual, feminine vs masculine, emotive vs quantitative. There might be some awesome Startup ideas for communications platforms in this.
What I personally try to assess is:
Am I attempting to domain-shift the discussion and why do I feel the need to do this?
Am I willing to telegraph when and why I’m shifting domains?
Can I let the dialog continue organically or must I attempt to shift? (leaves on the river surface)
Does the dialog confront my internal states?
To further complicate things, we each are multi-faceted. I might want to “blue sky” a concept that you want to “historically judge”. Or someone might want to take a single present topic, and then predict future dystopian scenarios - or future nirvana scenarios, and perhaps communicate these predictive scenarios as “obviously given”.
Where we are right now in this thread is a seemingly excellent example is some want to have an External Collective/Teal/Emotive-Predictive dialog in a thread that was very much an Internal/External Present/Assessment thread specifically on current Disinformation. Corey has already started an Integral Journalism thread that would seemingly be a wonderful foundation for External Collective/teal/Emotive-Predictive discussion.
There are hundreds of other threads on Integral Life in which to engage. Just looking at the current dashboard the bulk of threads result in little or no dialog. For some reason this one does illicit dialog. Any thoughts as to why?
There’s two things that I find interesting about this.
The first thing about this is perceptions. I grew up in Brown America. My Kindergarten and the Apartment building I lived in was mostly Japanese, Vietnamese and Phillipino. Yes, most of America was white. And, I don’t think that has been lost except in perception. The vast majority of America is still White. So the first perception you have is that all of America changed from white to brown, when it may just be your local area or your chosen entertainment that changed. With straight or queer, again it’s this idea that queer people didn’t exists before, but of course they did. It was just dangerous to admit it or allow others to describe you as queer. Gay characters were depicted on TV in the 1960’s and 1970’s - LOTS of them when you look, lol. It’s just we never thought of it that way and the topic was danced around.
Then with nostalgia, there is often the tendency to imagine a world that never was. Cowboys as depicted in the movies are a complete mythology. We can choose to believe that mythology or not, and that has nothing to do with what anyone else believes. Those movies still exist and I still watch them. I still enjoy watching Clint Eastwood’s Westerns, but also understand that cowboys never faced off like that in the middle of the street, and I surely never did.
But this all goes back to the idea of mourning the past. Whether it was a real lost past, an imagined lost past, or an imagined past that we can still experience in movies - attachment to the past is one of the first shackles that has to be busted on the path to Waking Up. I would just barely place it in the spiritual, and say people can’t even experience a full life if they are attached to the past.
The pity here is that Christianity doesn’t teach any methods to overcome this, so people think they are Waking Up when in fact they are still in bed pressing the snooze button. Mindfulness Meditations are becoming increasingly popular, and this is a good import from the East to help people cross the threshold of Waking Up.
Now, what to do if people refuse to cross this initial threshold? Well, I guess they are kind of stuck because you can’t force Waking Up. Do we continue to engage them in debates about the past? No, hat’s kind of a waste of time. Did George Washington have slave slaves - yeah, probably. Heck, since my last name “Bennett” pops up in African American family names, my extended family owned slaves, too.
The question is how much do we dwell on the past? I believe that people on the Left who dwell on the past are just as stuck as people on the Right who do so, and pretty much anyone who continues the debate beyond setting the factual record straight is hindering their own Waking Up process.
My ancestors probably beat and raped slaves. That is probably an accurate depiction of what happened. 1,000 years earlier my Celtic, Roman and Anglo Saxon Ancestors waged war and raped and pillaged each other across the British Isles. I myself am detached from those pasts, and any other dark history of the British Isles and America as a whole before 1970. If someone else wants to either live in attachment to either the good or the bad of those pasts, they can if they want, and I’m also detached from whatever they have to say about events from 10,000 bc to 1970 ad.
Yes, there are people on both the Right and the Left stuck at the threshold of Waking Up. Reparations, affirmative action, shame of their privilege and yes calling people racists for not toeing the line. Yes, of course all that happens. And also, yes, racism is still alive and well also. Both subtle and overt, and many people are in fact racists both on the left and the right.
But allowing that external debate to affect one’s internal state is a pity and unnecessary. It IS. Allowing oneself to be dragged into that psychodrama also delay’s one’s Waking Up.
I honestly see this thread as the “General Chat” Thread, regardless of however it started out.
There is also a lot of trash posts in here, as in this:
Let’s face it - discussing what is and what isn’t Information Warfare, propaganda, etc. and how to tell the difference faded out in the first 100 posts or so, and the vast majority of posts are you just posting Information Warfare and Propaganda without being willing to discuss how to tell the difference.
I totally agree with all of this. It’s the death of the American mythology. I feel like civil rights gave us a new mythology to build on, but that too has been crushed. Globalism was trying to build a world mythos, but that seems to be failing.
I don’t yet see a new myth emerging and worse yet there seems to be a purposeful intent to not create one. Our psyches need mythos. Hopefully the new one will come at some point. I don’t know, but losing your cultural myth is no small loss. When I view the crazy through this lens it helps me have more compassion for those who were most identified with it and more appreciation for the role of myth in our lives.
That’s a theme I find myself often returning to. Here’s a brief quote from a piece I wrote several years back, after the death of Osama Bin Laden:
"…the notion of “American Exceptionalism” has nothing to do with an innate sense of superiority on behalf of the American people, but refers to the idea that America is founded upon abstract concepts like liberty, egalitarianism, and individualism, rather than local characteristics like geography, religion, and ethnicity. In other words… the American identity is manufactured from intangible qualities that can only be sustained and propagated through the shared symbolic matrix that underpins the American way of life—and this symbolic matrix was the true target of the 9/11 attacks. The buildings that were attacked — the two towers of the World Trade Center, and the Pentagon — were themselves architectural representations of the strength, scope, and military might of the American Empire, and Bin Laden knew that their destruction would inflict way more damage than any bullet or bomb ever could. Even the numerical date of the attack—9/11—was itself an act of psychological terrorism, perpetuating the sense of panic and emergency every time the phrase is repeated.
Osama bin Laden did not just attack the American people or the American economy, he attacked the American subconscious. Even as we can breathe a sigh of relief that justice has been served and this monster has been finally eliminated from our world, the fabric of our shared American mythos remains as tattered as ever."
Well, it depends on where you look. There are new Myths emerging, but there are some problems with them:
They are often still based on Literal All of Nothing Truth and Literal Mythic concepts rather than just accepting “we don’t know that part yet”. An example is “Therefore Aliens” or the various Global Elite Illuminati Conspiracies, which IMO has turned Rebel Wisdom into yet another whacko off the rails content producer. We now know there were cities built 30,000 years ago. This is an archaeological fact. Just because Historians didn’t know this previously does not mean Rama was an alien, for example.
Similarly in the New Age communities there is this Spiritual Mythology that some special people were living in Orion or another uninhabitable star system and decided to go a special mission to rescue planet earth and the Universe.
The Matrix mythos where we are living in a simulation. This also unfortunately people take too literally and believe we are actually physically imprisoned in this reality and need to keep taking larger and larger doses of psychedelics to see 'Reality" and escape.
The “We Are One” nonbinary mythos.
And so on.
I think the entire problem with these Mythos is most of the people joining them are not Grown Up or Woken Up enough to understand the subtleties.
Maybe we need still separate Mythos - one for the masses and a secret one for the elites, as existed in previous ages and was only torn apart by the Information Age and the Internet. What is good is that the formerly Esoteric Knowledge was torn out of power structures who tired to monopolize it for their own benefit and power. The drawback is that your average person is not yet developed enough to be able to process the Esoteric or handle the conclusions.
Ah, Corey, I think you are conflating some things.
This WAS the case, and so long as it remained in this light, it was fine. What happened was over time more and more Americans started to believe they were superior, and that American lives were more important than lives of people from other countries.
You seem to be in a bit of denial about what led up to 9/11, and the really dirty aspects of American involvement in the Middle East. I don’t say this to abdicate responsibility or culpability of Arabs and / or Muslims, but to point out that it wasn’t a simple matter of America was Great and Noble and that’s why the Muslim Devils attacked us.
You’re far too educated of a man to deny that the United States did very terrible, vile things in a lot of places in order to support this idea of American exceptionalism morphed to American Superiority. Moreover, I’m sure you are aware that what the United States did next - Invade Iraq on the basis of a complete lie - smashed any remaining concept of American Exceptionalism into tiny bits in the eyes of the world and The United States lowered itself down to just another country vying for political and economic dominance.
I think we are in half agreement here. Which, for the internet, is pretty good! I’ll take it.
I absolutely agree that my own enactment of “American exceptionalism” has sadly become rare, when compared to the sort of tribal jingoistic chest-beating that we see so often. But I don’t thank it makes it any less valid — if anything, it feels that much more urgent to re-assert this frame whenever and however we can, or else we risk totally losing the baby of this kind of “rationally-based mythology” to the bathwater of amber imperial superiority.
So none of this is to deny the terrors and tragedies that Pax Americana has inflicted onto the world, often in the name of this sort of broken and down-sampled “exceptionalism”. However, I do try to make a strong case that without these sorts of shared stories, without this sort of rational mythology that helps plug our national identity into worldcentric streams, we risk further regression as “smaller” amber identities carve the nation into their own image.
This is why I think national identities are important, even while I agree with you that, from a higher stage, they may seem somewhat “arbitrary”. But insofar as we have systems and social contracts that extend to all citizens of the nation, those systems and contracts require shared stories and identities in order to support and sustain. Which is why I continue to see the nation-state as a critical stepping stone toward genuine global interdependence, and the national identity as a healthy stage expression that we must better cultivate, and then better transcend.
And the collapse of this shared identity, I think, is what has led to our notions of “loyal opposition” in our political systems to shift away from “loyalty”, and toward 24-7, all-or-nothing opposition.
@raybennett Or we spin this in Integral terms - We had to resort to Red dialog in order to communicate with Red societies in order to provide the best possible Integral development opportunities.
@corey-devos - How would you rank from best to worst political entities/parties that could reinstill a healthy national identity?
There still has to be a reason.
Can you explain to me the reason for invading Iraq from a 2nd Tier Perspective? Not just “We felt like being Red that day”
