Information Warfare Education, Propaganda, and How to Tell the Difference

Town Square
1224

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!

1 Like
1225

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.

2 Likes
1226

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!

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As good of an excuse as any.

And by the way, when is the next episode of the Ken Sho?

1227

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.

1228

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.

1229

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?

1230

These are great questions! And you seem very “clear” in the issue. :slight_smile:

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.

  • Third, a “values/view” fallacy, (or perhaps better, a “structure/content” fallacy) where the views and contents of later stages (i.e. the products of later-stage values) are taken up by folks with early-stage structures/values. For example, my nine year old kid can memorize “a2 + b2 = c2”, without knowing how to actually apply it, and without being able to show the rational proof. 50 years ago the Beatles can sing “all you need is love”, which can then be enacted quite differently by any prior stage.

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.)

  • Fourth, changing developmental makeup of a social holon’s members. Ken has talked before about imagining social holons as a poker game, where the altitude of the game depends on the average altitude of each player. I like to expand this analogy, by adding the idea that the players decide the rules of the game between each hand. If you have 5 green-altitude players, the rules will look fairly different than if you have 5 red-altitude players, or 3 greens and 2 ambers, etc. So, for example if we have a social holon that was originally populated by 50% amber and 50% orange, the “rules of the game” will reflect that. But if over time that social holon shifts and becomes populated by 80% amber and 20% orange, the rules will shift, the strategies will shift, and the victory conditions will shift.

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.

  • Fifth, and perhaps most obvious, a mismatch of cognitive lines of development, the values line of development, and moral/ethical lines of development. Big beautiful green cognitive ideas, for example, that become surrounded by, and enacted through, an amber set of values, morals, ethics, etc.

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”.

1231

Or were they never orange or amber and we missed the way boomeritis affected conservatives.

1232

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.

1233

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.

1234

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).

1235

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?

1236

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.

1237

At least you’re aiming high and unbounded by reality.

Should we cut 33% of the military budget before or after China completes the 450 ICBM silos to launch 100 warhead missiles that can hit any coordinate on planet earth?
Or perhaps we cut the budget right after we stroke the pen on the Iran nuclear deal that Russia is negotiating for us? That’s sure to yield amazing peace dividends.

Anyway, my point is that $1T to essentially indoctrinate every young adult into whatever ideology the curriculum dictates isn’t on the surface looking like it would allow you or I to keep more of our income, our financial resources - aka property.

Should we also look at global context?
Is the US society holding back global development today?

Are there non-governmental structures broadly deployed today in society that already stripe across all demographics today with similar missions?
What would the ACLU have to say about mandatory service?

1238

Let’s see if we can get to the bottom of a few things.

There is clearly an ongoing conflict between the two of us. The vast majority of your comments to me come across as confrontational, contrarian, even antagonistic. I am not the only one who has pointed this out, and this has been true ever since the very first message you sent to me.

Now, for me this has often been a very creative tension. As I’ve said many times, it gives me an opportunity to think and reflect, to articulate and re-articulate my views in different ways. To see where I might be able to agree with you, where you might expand my view, even if I might put a different twist on it. I’ve spent a good amount of time writing to carefully outline my views. It’s been fruitful, and I am appreciative of that.

And yet….

These sorts of constant conflicts — the misrepresentations, the nitpicking, the low-resolution caricatures of my views — it gets exhausting.

It gets tedious to have someone constantly misrepresenting, exaggerating, interrogating, or dismissing your views, no matter how carefully you try to present them.

It gets tiresome trying to create enfoldment with someone who clearly only wants to argue and criticize and disagree with everything you say, and who is unwilling or unable to enfold in return.

All the more so when it’s taking place on a website that you yourself built, manage, and produce content for, and when it’s coming from the most frequent commenter (by far) in the community — making it all the more difficult to ignore. I have all of my skin in this game, and you are just a screenname.

So that has been my experience of our relationship. Often fruitful on the one hand, but also often totally depleting of my time, my energy, and my mood. I wish we could have the former without the latter, frankly.

I’m not sure how we can shift this dynamic and make it more of a healthy creative tension, and less of an unhealthy and exhausting conflict. I’ve tried a few things over the time we’ve spent together — I’ve tried to identify some of the primary polarities and fault lines we tend to disagree about, I’ve tried to explore ways to better manage those polarities, I’ve tried to suggest multiple reasonable, integrally-informed compromises around issues as difficult as gun control, abortion, and sex/gender education. But none of those seem to work, because it keeps feeling like I am the only one making the effort, and you just want to find something else to disagree with me about.

So where do you suggest we go from here?

1239

I just want to say something about Amber and Red - and the importance to offer the opportunity of individuals in those structures to separate themselves from the structure.
We need Police - and if the police officer wants to be 100% police as his 100% identity, that is fine - but we also need to offer the concept that this isn’t necessary. Soldiers as well.
The outward form and action can be Amber or Red or Orange or Green - but the SELF can still be distanced from the outward action. The only one who knows the difference between blind red and selfless red is the interior.
There’s this concept of the warrior-poet. I think we need more warrior poets in all areas of life. This is not just warriors learning to read, but poets learning that fighting can be selfless.

2 Likes
1240

Have you watched Beforeigners by any chance? It’s a TV show on HBO. It’s very interesting and I think a great illustration of all of this. It’s a Sci fi story where Norwegian people from the ice age, the Sami (magenta) the Viking era (red), the 1800’s (amber) spontaneously time travel to our time and how the world has to adapt.

What’s interesting to me is the way Green holds the Beforeigner’s world views. I totally agree with the Umber need, I wonder if there is also a Green/Teal stage where we first learn how to manage all these world views?

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.

What I see in this conversation and the world conversation, is a lack of skill for handling the “stress” people are feeling. What’s interesting about this show, is the stress the Beforeigners feel in the modern world is a given and is treated with compassion (we need to develop this). The stress on the modern society is there too, but not being fully addressed (it’s all on them to integrate, sound familiar?) so the main character ends up with an addiction to the medication the beforeigners receive.

We need to look at the stress effect dealing with multiple stages at this magnitude and with this much consequence is having on our individual and collective psyche and find better management strategies. Social media fighting is not working, no matter how much skill we try to employ,

Beforeigners: Official Trailer | HBO - Bing video

1241

This is interesting to me too. I do see Corey’s idea, details aside for a moment, as an effort to address developing a new healthy amber, which is a collective stage and will need a collective solution.

The essence of the question to me is how do we develop Amber, new rules, roles and National identity when we, as a country, are no longer a “Christian country” or collectively wanting war or foreign threat to be what defines our sense of nationalism? I think this is what Corey is trying to address with his solution. Instead of “debating” lets creatively brainstorm…offer up another idea! I really want creative conservatism to be in this game! I see conservatives now just wanting to be obstructionist and stop all creative development. Let’s shift that. If you don’t want new creative solutions, can you explain why and what you see happening when this process stops. To me it seems very unhealthy.

I would also like to make a distinction here that is maybe relevant to Umber/Orange conversation as well. There is a difference between spending money and investing money. When you spend $5 on apple vs $3 on chips, yes you are spending more money, but you are also investing in your health, that in the long run will probably pay off, both financially and in an elevated standard of living. I am very financially conservative too and appreciate small government, BUT I also like to invest in my future and the future of my community and country. Too much individuality and living for the now is typically unhealthy in the long run.

I pay high local taxes and my community is amazing. I have a public school that meets private school standards. My taxes are an investment for my daughter’s future and cost me less than a private school. Add to that we have a large population of low income kids in our community that are also receiving a great education that, for many, will lift them out of a poverty cycle, an investment in the country.

I would love this distinction folded into your ideas if possible. I want to emphasize, get that conservatives want amber to held by religion and military service and investment to be for business, I think the time for that is over. We need a new way. Liberal ways may not be the answer, honestly, I don’t like them either, but to just block them and offer nothing else up is what has set up the void the Woke filled, something we can all agree is a problem. We need to work together, stop “debating” and start “creating”! Doing this solely through elections means we are just building a lot of poorly designed structures (right and left). A bad idea is one thing, a bad structure stays with us a long time.

1242

I think over the past 30 years what was considered Conservative and what was considered Liberal are no longer true at all. All through the 1990’s, I could have gone either way, tbh.
But I don’t think these words actually mean anything to anyone now - except “enemy”. It’s almost as soon as someone says the word “liberal” or “conservative” - I know their predict their world view is severely limited and also somewhat manufactured for them.
The form of capitalism we have had since the 1920’s is based on consumption, and now political or social outrage is just another consumer product one can purchase. Yes, you get a lot of free samples, but the ultimate goal of all those free offerings of opportunities for outrage and drama is to make a sale. Even clicks of the mouse generate revenue or weigh an algorithm slightly more in a company’s favor.
Then, the clicks generate patterns of behavior that become habits and then eventually after seeing that picture of an actual physical product enough times, they convert to a sale of a physical consumer product that you probably don’t actually need.
There is a great effort to “inform” people that they are lacking in some area of their lives such as health, diet, fitness, love, education, qualifications, and so on - and then provide an expensive solution to the artificially created problem. Yoga mats, yoga blocks, diet and exercise programs, glass water bottles, blenders to make kale smoothies - whatever. It’s all just another level of marketing that the individual is somehow lacking and needs a product to be better.
I don’t see the educational system as much better. I have a cumulative 23 years of formal education and when I review what I learned, it’s mostly trivia. Most of what makes me money or gives me quality of life I learned outside of primary-secondary-tertiary education. Education is also a consumer product people believe they need, but in most cases do not. Many times if I want a quick temporary job, I leave my higher levels of education off my resume completely - and it’s in those jobs where I learned the most useful and rewarding life skills.

I agree with this, and I would add that we need to stop identifying and classifying ourselves, and then there’s no need to classify others. Then the only debate is when people try to classify you, lol. But that’s much easier to reject their classifications of you if you have not classified them.

An idea is either a good idea or a bad idea. The whole concept of if it is a Liberal idea or a Conservative idea or right or left ow woke or not woke - all that is just rubbish. The idea. Is it good or is it bad.
Let’s take the idea of Patriotism. what are the pros and cons of being identified with one’s country? We could make a list and make the best choice, but if we identify as conservative or anarchist, we don’t make that list and don’t make the best choice - we choose what people tell us our identity is and what others tell us our opinion should be based on what group we belong to. Religion the same thing.
Worse, there is often an emotional charge projected onto people who oppose group identity. Every time I mention some historical facts about Christianity, some forum participants feel I am attacking that religion. If I mention historical facts about the United States, patriots get upset and if I raise questions about New Age ideas, woke people tend to get upset. The whole problem in all of these is identifying as a member of the group first before even looking at the issue.

Oh well, I’m starting to ramble.

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1243

I also track this as a central challenge right now. Over the last 6 or 7 years, something has dramatically shifted in this country, which has in turn changed our own operating systems, and few people seem to have noticed — all of a sudden, our political identities have become absolutely central.

Political arguments aren’t anything new, and of course we’ve been bickering for generations. But it’s only been in recent years that those identities have become so incredibly opaque, we can no longer see through them at all. All of this is reinforced by our media, both the fragmentation of “mainstream” media, and the social media algorithms that are designed to seek profit for unseen entities by confirming our biases as often as possible.

Which is why it takes a little bit of growing up, waking up, and cleaning up, just to make our own political identities a little more translucent, so we can actually begin to see each other once again.

It’s a huge problem.

Which is why I want collective action taken in order to better reinforce our national identities, which should supersede our opaque partisan identities. I think a program such as I suggest would do exactly that. I’m sure there are some other options as well. But doing nothing, as we are currently doing, is only making things worse.

And hey, it turns out that 4 out of 5 countries with the highest quality of life on the planet, all have mandatory service programs.

@Michelle says: “There is a difference between spending money and investing money. When you spend $5 on apple vs $3 on chips, yes you are spending more money, but you are also investing in your health, that in the long run will probably pay off, both financially and in an elevated standard of living. I am very financially conservative too and appreciate small government, BUT I also like to invest in my future and the future of my community and country.”

Yes, we are aligned here as well. It used to be that the right and the left were capable of identifying social problems together, but their solutions would diverge — the stereotype was that the left liked to throw money at problems, often with poor results, while the right tried to find investments that would act as “multipliers” — spend $1 today to save $5 tomorrow. Which meant that the Democrats were often playing the short game (people need this help NOW!) while the Republicans were playing more of a long game. If you ask me, we kinda need both.

Now we see a bit of a shift — the Dems often still often want to throw money at problems, but they are also looking for leverage points and multipliers in order to invest more wisely in society. I’ve often used the example of the IUD program we used to have in Colorado for young women — the state invested some resources into this program, and as a result the citizens saved a ton more money on total medical costs, allowed these women to participate in the economy and produce more wealth/value, while also cutting abortions in those age groups in half. This was a very smart investment by the Democrats of Colorado, with measurably positive effects, both in terms of fiscal savings, as well as dramatically lower rates of abortion.

And sadly, that program was ended by conservatives who insisted on abstinence-only approaches to the abortion problem. Religious beliefs got in the way of genuine progress, and genuine reduction of suffering. The program ended, and abortions increased once again.

Which points to the “social entropy” I mentioned a few posts back — if we are running Orange solutions on an Orange operating system, while 50-60% of the public remain at Amber levels (as is their right), then there is always a risk of rational solutions being undermined by pre-rational beliefs and dogmas.

And sometimes, that is totally okay! If an Orange solution cannot be proven to improve the lives of all citizens, including Amber citizens, then that forces new solutions that can translate better to different kinds of value sets. Other times, however, it becomes purely regressive, especially when the resentment is coming from our opaque tribal identities.

And there’s also the ethos of the parties as they exist today. I believe that the GOP runs on a code that says “government can only make your life worse, elect me and I will prove it.” This has become part of their brand, as I see it. I think there is a zero-sum game being played, where the GOP cannot allow people to see Democrats solving any real problems, because that would show that a) Democrats are not evil immoral baby-eaters, b) government can do good things sometimes, and c) corporations do not have the public’s best interests at heart, and therefore need to be sensibly regulated, all of which run counter to that core GOP messaging. This is where all the obstruction from the right comes from, in my view, whether we are talking about stealing Supreme Court seats, killing programs that have proven effective, or resisting any and all policy proposals coming from the left.

And we can actually track that obstruction directly back to Newt Gingrich, who helped radicalize the GOP back in the mid-to-late 90s to no longer seek or allow any compromise with Democrats — to not even sit with them at lunch any longer — which only reinforced the growing divide between the parties. 20+ years later, and all of our media and political culture has reorganized itself into these warring tribes, with absolutely no overarching, commonly-shared national identity to unite them.

Which, to me, is the partial truth I saw with Trump’s ascendency, which was carried on messages of “nationalism” that many on the left found crude, narrow, and even dangerous. And often, they were crude and narrow and dangerous — especially since it was a very narrow view of “nationalism” that specifically excluded the left, who were branded as “Marxist Commie Pinko Stalin-Loving Socialists” whose views should be expelled from the nation. And of course, the Left counter-fired by framing everyone on the right as “Deplorable White Supremest Fascists”. But the partial truth that I saw, was that this malignant form of “nationalism” can only grow in the empty spaces where a healthy nationalism — a robust patriotism that is extended to all fellow citizens — should be. Only then can we begin to restore our parties as the “loyal opposition” they once were (these days we have all the “opposition”, and none of the “loyalty”, which can only come from a commonly-shared national identity), and only then can we grow into more stable worldcentric identities and structures, as many on the left want to take us.

Which is why the “mandatory service” part is only part of my overall recommendations here.

The first is to repeal the 1929 Reapportionment Act, which placed an artificial cap on the number of representatives in the House, and resulted in deeply inequitable representation, where some in the House represent many, many times more people than others. The House was specifically designed to be a fair and equitable representation of the people (while the Senate was designed to be inequitable, by representing states instead of people), but the Reapportionment act turned the House into an affirmative action program for conservatives. We don’t need to throw out the Electoral College or have a constitutional convention or anything like that, because simply repealing the Reapportionment Act (and implementing something like the Wyoming rule) would itself fix the electoral college, by giving each state Electoral votes that fairly correspond to the relative population of each state.

The second is to implement Ranked Choice voting in all 50 states. I have no idea how to achieve that, of course, since it is decidedly not in either party’s best interests to support that sort of system. But much of the dysfunction we see in our politics is not actually cultural — it’s systemic, meaning it is the inevitable result of our “First Past the Post” voting systems. Ranked Choice is a far better system, as it helps solve the problem of “voting for the lesser evil”, or even more accurately, “voting against the greatest evil”. It takes power away from the extremists, on either side of the aisle, and makes it easier for moderates to be selected by our voting system.

More “magic wand” solutions, for sure, but these feel much more attainable than creating a national service program for young people, as much as I think something like that is deeply needed in our society right now. These are the sorts of “leverage points” I was talking about earlier — the simplest solutions with the greatest impact. Applying just a little bit of pressure right here will have massive benefits for all citizens, and for democracy itself.