I guess so, I can barely keep up with it. I think there are the pieces for something impactful here and this discussion so far has been very helpful for me. I am still orienting myself according to this stage of development so talking through it in various ways crystallizes it more and more.
Sounds good, thanks!
I think you hit a nerve. I’m starting to sense that people in general are starting to want to get beyond theory debate and onto things that are more actionable.
On the homeless part of this discussion, here is some local politics for me, but it nicely illustrates the complexity level of addressing homelessness: https://medium.com/wagovernor/investing-in-washingtons-people-and-communities-inslee-budget-prioritizes-urgent-needs-in-b6a361acb741
This is all straight from the governor’s office. Check your favorite news feed for articles and commentary much more critical about any of this. What is the integral approach to all this? Good question!
Here is some background on “antisemitism”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism
This is a key phrase from that article: “Pseudoscientific theories concerning race, civilization, and ‘progress’ had become quite widespread in Europe in the second half of the 19th century,”
An irony of all this is that the word “semitic” derives from comparative linguistics. Both Hebrew and Arabic are members of the Semitic language group. So in the current Middle East crisis, all sides are Semitic. (Except for Iran, which is Indo-European or Indo-Germanic or Indo-Aryan, depending which label one might prefer).
The idea of “Judaism” as a religion dates from Christian thinking of the Roman times. Modern Zionism (reclaiming the Levant as a Jewish homeland) is a 19th century idea, rising roughly parallel to the idea of antisemitism. It is perfectly possible for practicing Jews to not be Zionists and to not support particular actions of the state of Israel. All of that is lost on our current generation, of course, which leads to things like painting anti-Israeli graffiti on synagogues.
The crisis I see here is the US education system is pathetic and needs an overhaul ASAP.
Well, yes, that could be one of the crises that contributes to antisemitism.
Although my point would be that the word crisis seems to be thrown around quite casually and in the 21st century this happens so much that words no longer mean anything.
I think a summary of my point with antisemitism is two things. First that the Jewish people have more than enough economic and political power to prevent it from ever being a “crisis”. Second related is “my people’s genocide is more significant than your people’s genocide”. With various peoples in the world actually being ethnically cleansed now at this moment I don’t see why the crisis would be Antisemitism and not any one of a dozen other projects of ethnic cleansing or even the plight ethnic and religious minorities in the USA who are worse off than the Jewish people.
I can even elevate the plight of these other minorities to actual “crisis” status in the real meaning of the word because if Trump becomes president this time around there will be no stopping religious bans, deportation of legal migrants and activation of military forces against ethnic minority neighborhoods. The Jews will be OK, but every other minority will not.
Tend to agree. I use the word “metacrisis” mostly because a lot of people want to focus on that, but compared to say. for example, the era spanning WWI and WWII, our current “crisis” does not really measure up. That said, there is a historical cycle of tensions building up during periods of relative calm, and would it not be fair to say that tensions are building up?
When it comes to US higher education, the word “crisis” may not be all that much overblown. An ideology has taken hold to the effect that anyone white, rich, and powerful is the global bad guy, and all we need to do for a wonderful world is to flip white capitalist patriarchy on its head and celebrate everyone else. Although not that long ago, Jews were a despised minority in the US - not even admissible to Harvard - they have worked their way into “privilege” and now find themselves on team white capitalist patriarchy (in the eyes of the generally dualistic SJW crowd). So Israel must go, Hamas must be elevated, problem solved. The trouble with that is, a slight amount of digging into what Hamas believes and does reveals Hamas to be about the exact opposite of “woke”. So what to do with all that?
What we are witnessing right now is a paradigm going off the rails and things falling apart. To actually get at questions like “what is genocide?”, “what is happening all over the world”?, and “what is an effective politics to prevent Trumpian arbitrariness?” it would take discussions of some intellectual and spiritual breadth and depth. Pretty much the opposite of the opinion-driven pablum served up lately in our leading campuses.
Prophet Jeremiah stuff there, @raybennett!
My own contribution to metatheory it seems is to infuse things like Integral or metamodernism with Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations thinking. Actually, ken Wilber gave me that idea from some statements he made on YouTube a few years back. I’m just much deeper in the weeds with it. In any case, quite a bit of what you say rings true from that POV.
I don’t see capitalism as such going anywhere anytime soon. But the roster of winners and losers is always in motion. No one gets to rest on their laurels for long. You are correct about Xi - he has painted himself into a Leninist corner. Actually, this recent essay by Ken Wilber is very pertinent: https://integrallife.com/revolutionary-social-transformation/
In there, Ken engages with classic Marxist materialism and updates it from an AQAL POV. That’s my main hope for China. The “contradictions” of a high tech manufacturing economy are going to force cracks in the one-man rule model. But in general, your pessimism may be just the leading edge of a new realism. Various efforts around the world to bring back some version of the “good old days” will likely remind us all that the good old days might not have actually been all that good in the first place. But it’s a two steps forward, one step back sort of thing. Maybe two or three steps back actually.
Thanks for the link, I watched the first video in the search results between Aubrey Marcus and Paul Selig. I was just thinking about how a spiritual perspective could be applied to the specific topics presented thus far and the ICRT concept overall. Many ideas to explore there I think.
Well this came in my messaging.
This community has determined that it is offensive, abusive and and hateful conduct and has protected you.
Because, let’s all be honest - most of you need to be protected from ideas.
That’s a truth within irony.
It may also be that just one individual needs to be protected from ideas and having identified himself with a movement that is the antithesis of Integral, cannot stand any attacks against the TRUMPism. After all, it’s hateful to describe Trumpism as what it is - a despicable group of people that are the antithesis of Integral.
It could also be that I only subscribe when I see something useful I want to watch and that hasn’t been the case for about 6 months so if there isn’t content I want to watch I unsubscribe. But I rather think it is just a person who identifies with as a MAGA and got his little feelings hurt and needs to be protected and feel safe while he overthrows democracy.
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My point is that the losers have been and will increasingly resort to open warfare or other atrocities or in the USA a Coup. This is the global crisis we are now entering.
“Capitalism” is a very broad term. What I would say is that the form of Capitalism that we have become reliant on is failing - specifically Consumption based trickle down Capitalism where innovation is blocked except to advance programmed obsolescence.
Also Democratic Capitalism is under serious threat because those that believe in it are too soft and too overintellectualized to defend it and they are in denial about the scale and frankly insanity of those who want to establish Dictators.
In order to move two steps forward from the step back, a certain strength will be required that I don’t see forming until it is too late.
As an example, the Iron curtain fell in 1968 and it took 30 years to finally take “two steps forward”. So in the grand scheme of history, you are probably right. But 30 years is a very long time to live through a global step backward.
I don’t follow, will you give me an example?
My main reference on this is Peter Turchin, End Times. The basic idea is when elite positions get scarce (take a look at recent US income distribution numbers to get an idea of what that means), elites and counter-elites line up to do battle with one another. That leads to a lot of rule breaking, and in some cases things like civil wars or revolutions. Turchin does not make firm forecasts about that sort thing. He just notes when certain tensions build, something as to give. I think it’s fair to say that tensions are building.
The most optimistic case is for new leadership to emerge with a more constructive, more inclusive vision. Supporting that sort of process is really why I like to hang out here.
I don’t think humans want “elite positions”. I think many including myself are perfectly happy working in the middle. But once humans have achieved a certain thing, yes at that point we experience pain when it is removed no matter how undeserved it was. So we have vast tracts in the USA where people remember 1 person making more than enough to live. Then it shifted to 2 people needed for the same lifestyle and now many of them that lifestyle is simply not available and they are too old to retrain. First they are too old and unable to learn new things and second it is too expensive to invest in retraining them because they are near the end of their life cycle. In Russia the boomer generation had a comparatively rich lifestyle raiding Eastern Europe at gun point, then from oil revenues that were not distributed. The oligarchs point to NATO as the source of the Russian people’s lowered status. They believed themselves deserving of tribute from the world. When it became clear that robbing Eastern and Central Europe was forever being cut off from them, they went to war. China experienced an unprecedented boom that they did not even realize were the scraps from the G-8’s table. Now that the G-8 are tossing those table scraps to Southeast Asia instead, who knows what will happen there.
Here my point is that we needed that vision yesterday but I don’t see more than a handful even comprehending what the roots of the problems are. Even (or especially) the intellectual elite get stuck in the symptoms instead of looking at the messy root of the matter.
Now back to the spiritual Sidra is talking about - that root of the issue is that we cannot consume our ways out of the global problem we are in.
If Capitalism is to survive it has to morph into another form that again brings value and makes people’s lives better. It’s a basic primal instinct of humans to want to have a better life now than they did yesterday and believe that their offspring will have an even better life. The very basic foundation of the variant of Capitalisms we have chosen for the past 150 years goes against this bedrock of human desire and only survives by deception and scapegoating.
I learnt about Peter Turchin’s work at a wellbeing conference i attended at Oxford Uni in a talk from Andrew Oswald. I would recommend learning about what he’s talking about.
This is a really insightful and troubling talk about difficulties in America at the moment from Prof. Andrew Oswald:
https://www.youtube.com/live/-lWnv__cfI8?si=V80UtZS9jEfXp0yd.
People can quickly skip straight to Prof. Oswald’s talk at 1:14 by clicking on that in the description.
Edit: If you watch Prof. Carol Graham’s talk before or after at 46:13 this might make people feel better as Prof. Oswald’s talk is a scary one.
As recommended by Prof. Graham, the UK is now measuring levels of hope over time and also, from Andrew Oswald’s and my advice, whether people feel unfairly treated by society - https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/wellbeing/articles/ukmeasuresofnationalwellbeing/dashboard.
Agree with this. And it’s also moral to provide people with this
Thanks @Julia248 ! For those most interested in hearing Oswald’s views on Turchin, here are timestamps of the most relevant sections:
Optimism about Human Nature and Societal Trends
Global Trends, Elite Overproduction, and Cycles
In discussing elite over-production, Turchin uses the metaphor of the “wealth pump”. It occurred to me awhile ago that the entire economy is in effect a “wealth pump”, with each of us siphoning a bit of salary from the larger flow, the bulk of which eventually finds itself in the financial retention ponds of the economic elite. The process @raybennett outlines of one income sufficing, then two incomes sufficing, then two incomes barely making it, is what Turchin calls “immiseration”. That’s what happens when the pipelines of the wealth pump are guarded too carefully by the greedy high end and there is not enough supply to workers at the base. The US national mythology is that anyone can make it to at least the lower rungs of the elite, with only enough effort. Diminishing flows of wealth to the population at large undermines belief in such mythology, or worse still, sets off a search for scapegoats to explain away why effort that should be rewarded in fact no longer is.
I think the key thing I want to tell people, especially in this “Crisis Response Team” and especially to the Integral community is related to this.
If you (the rhetorical “you”) are waiting for some big program to be made to “bring about positive changes” so that you can then at that time jump aboard and start doing things - you are going to be waiting and doing nothing for a very long time. Turchin believes we will need a war or other terrible event first.
Every time I get into one of these discussions I’m kind of astounded at how nobody or at best very few are actually taking any concrete actions in light of this. Even the people who see it just continue on with their lives in the same way that people who don’t see it. If both those who know this and those who don’t know this actually exhibit the same behavior - there is in fact little difference if you are at 2nd tier or 1st in terms of measurable results. Both 1st Tier people and 2nd Tier people are waiting for other people to make some expensive complicated program. That is a huge flaw.
I’m curious if there were any actual concrete action steps taken after the “Well Being Research & Policy Conference 2022”. Or was it just a bunch of intellectuals gathering together and knowing stuff.
This also is “human behavior” and the consequences of human behavior apply equally to the intellectual elite. The desire of intellectual elites to know a bunch of stuff and do nothing about it is behavior that will not easily change. Unfortunately Turchin is right and I will add that his hypothesis also applies to himself - lots of intellectuals are probably going to have to die before they are willing to make a change in their human behavior and take actual concrete direct action.
This seems relevant:
“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.”
There is a lot going on in the world that any one person is relatively powerless to change. The spiritual side of integral can help with the serenity part of this. Ideality, it should help with courage also. The spiritual life is not just one endless chill pill - or at least it should not be in my view. Where integral and somewhat analogous frameworks are helping people in the moment is on the wisdom part. Information complexity, cognitive overload, meaning crisis - pick your favorite label - make it very difficult for most people to find a point of entry into big picture problem solving. It’s fairly easy to voice strong opinions about global events several time zones away. Much more demanding to do things that produce tangible local results, let alone results half way around the world.
I will tend to agree with you that integral and similar large scale wisdom frameworks seem overdeveloped with respect to cognitive mapping and underdeveloped with respect to action programs. To my way of thinking “showing up” sounds like something that should be happening at a food bank or a picket line or a voting booth. I understand that is not the current usage of the term in integral, but that sort of makes my point. My suggestion is the best way to get wisdom about what is possible is to try things. See what happens. Pull out the AQAL chart to map happens after it happens. Then try something else. Maps are fine, but only for a minute to get a fix on the territory. The real work is in the territory, with maps pocketed for awhile.
As usual, I agree. While I may not be starting a nonprofit tomorrow called Integral Crisis Response Team, I do believe I have moved a little closer to something like it because of this discussion. Sometimes it’s nice just to vent or know that there are other people out there looking at a problem or life through the same lens as you. It can get lonely when you are considering All Quadrants, All Levels, All Lines, All States, All Types, all the time. Personally, I think everything is right on schedule and perhaps all of this theorizing and thinking is necessary and has to hit a critical mass before more tangible results are produced.
Perhaps I should revisit this thread in 3-6 months to report my own progress. By that time, I will be a couple more semesters and several classes further in my Leadership and Innovation Master’s program through which I hope to learn how to start something like an ICRT. The feedback and support is much appreciated!