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.
Thanks @Julia248 ! For those most interested in hearing Oswald’s views on Turchin, here are timestamps of the most relevant sections:
01:30:02 Optimism about Human Nature and Societal Trends
Optimistic view of the general improving secular trend in human society.
Acknowledgment of cycles with ups and downs, hoping for improvement.
Recognition of the need for major disasters to bring about positive changes in human behavior.
01:31:45 Global Trends, Elite Overproduction, and Cycles
Discussion of Turchin’s work on elite overproduction and its analogy to predator-prey cycles.
Explanation of how revolutions often stem from disillusioned elites rather than disadvantaged workers.
Speculation on the natural cycles of elites growing stronger and societal explosions.
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.
“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!
Please keep at it! Recently, I become aware of this author. This is not coming from an integral framework, but it seems pretty consistent with it. Notice the long track record of successful community development.
A little follow up with the hostile architecture.
Starbucks
Most Starbucks in my city have completely removed any seating options since COVID. There are two I have found with seating options that remain. One is in a mall and the other in a tourist area.
Bot of them have what I would consider deliberately uncomfortable seating.
It’s not like making chairs is a new technology. We have known for thousands of years what dimensions make comfortable chairs and what measurements are outside the bounds of any comfort. Also, comfortable chair height relative to table height is not esoteric mysticism.
Yet there I was, trying to sit at a table when the chair legs were not only to high to be comfortable, but also too high to be able to sit at the table comfortably. It was too low to be a stool, but so high that you could only sit beside the table, not under it - and then the table was ridiculously low for the height you had to sit at.
It reminds me that capitalism has a final stage, where the business uses increasing profits to make things worse for the customer. In this case, basically saying “buy your coffee and then leave as quickly as possible. The chairs are for décor, not to sit in.”
Coincidentally, as I was driving away this popped into my YouTube algorithm.
After 'market saturation", one of the few ways to continue to increase profits is to offer customers less value for a higher price.
On the topic of Homelessness, as usual another country found the solutions were not actually that complicated.
I’m again reminded of Starbucks - who has decided to make it more difficult to sit, lest homeless people find it comfortable there and stay for hours. So what did Finland do? Simply make a “living room” style place for people “sleeping rough”. Hmmm … basic, easy solution to Starbucks problem and I’ll bet in Finland Coffee shops have comfortable chairs to sit in like I remember 10 years ago.
Speaking of Finland, I’m supporting Lene Rachel Andersen’s upcoming US tour (Feb. 2024) to promote the release of the Nordic Secret v. 2.0.
A useful question, of course, is to what extent can social policy of the Nordic countries translate directly to the US context? There are obvious differences in national size, composition, history, culture, etc. I post a lot in Lene’s organization’s social media, acting as a sort of US correspondent underlining factors that in my view, make the US a different sort of place than the EU countries.
Against that background, the biggest thing working against “housing first” in the US is geographical mobility, coupled with federalism. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that my area (Seattle, roughly) went all in on “housing first” in an effort to become the US answer to Finland. (I would honestly love for that to happen - if there were some way to make it work). Sounds good, but what would stop masses of unhoused people from all over the country to relocate to take advantage of that, overwhelming whatever number of housing units get constructed, and creating a whole new set of campers to replace those moved into transitional housing? This does not even factor in international migration.
To be like Finland, it seems a nation really literally needs to be like Finland. Relatively small, relatively self contained, relatively cohesive. Much as a I hate to agree with anything coming out of Texas nowadays, to get that kind of social cohesion on a community level in the US, you really do need to build a wall. If not a physical wall, at least some of sort highly chiseled virtual wall defining who is “in” and who is “out”. The more conservative parts of the US tend to use religion (and race) for that in/out marker. Which explains a lot. The more progressive parts of the US want to be theoretically open to anyone. Nice vision, lousy economics. A more “integral” sort of progressivism - which is in fact my personal agenda - is going to need to leverage that second tier superpower of embracing prior levels like red, amber, and orange to make some hard decisions about how far and wide to spread the social safety net. To take care of someone in particular at the end of the day means making choices and not spreading resources to everyone in general.
Finland as a member of the EU has open borders with all the other EU countries, so I don’t see the difference. Not only that but also assisted the border countries by assisting migrants to get north from countries in crisis like Italy and Greece.
The fact is the unhoused don’t tend to migrate en mass unless a government or organization provides them with transport, or their existing circumstances are deadly enough to try fitting 500 people on a dingy to sail from Africa to Europe.
I don’t think it’s the geography. It’s more that the society has a whole has similar concepts as to what is right and what is wrong and do not make up excuses as we tend to in the USA when morality conflicts with a few dollars.
You said it yourself - “lousy economics”, which is choosing to prioritize one type of economic benefit for some rather than choosing morality first. Ironically, the belief that it is expensive to provide for the poor is only spin, not actual economics. If a real accountant looks at all long term and short term costs rather than entertainers looking at short term surface data - it’s just an mathematical fact applied to undergraduate level accounting: providing safe and clean housing is more cost effective than cleaning up toxic materials from homeless camps, and moreover it is cheaper to keep homeless people healthy with affordable preventative care and medication than to pay for acute emergency room care and inpatient hospitalization. This goes all the way back to the saying “a stitch in time saves nine”, so it is a very basic and fundamental concept.
Of course, the opposing morality is “money is for rich people” and if we want to pay for these things to give to the poor, then you cannot have obscenely rich people in society. So there are no billionaires in Finland and if you talk to Finns, they will be ok with that. In their morality, they question why should they pay for amputating limbs of frostbite victims while billionaires get richer? In the USA we wonder why we should provide food to pregnant women if it decreases a billionaires income from 10 billion to 9 billion. The argument goes that if taxes are raised to comfort the poor, billionaires will move somewhere else, and again the Finns are ok with that. Linus Torvalis made a superior Operating system than Bill Gates, and he is content to not be a billionaire. His net worth is only $55 million but almost every server in the world uses code derived from Open source code of the LINUX OS or it’s brother, UNIX. Torvalis is an example of how a member of a responsible an moral society should think, instead of the USA / Bill Gates model of “first destroy every competitor unwilling to be bought and drive them out of business - and then after ruling the world, retire and donate 1% of one’s ill gotten gains to assuage a guilty conscience”.
I don’t think we should give a pass to ideas like “giving the poor food / shelter / medicine is expensive” because such ideas only deal with immediate costs, not long term costs. In this case the moral choices are also the wiser choices economically for the largest number of people in the long term. Providing these things for the poor is only more expensive if the prevailing morality is to keep the rich rich at all costs, as it is in the USA.
In considering your latest, I thought about doing a big Lower Right systemic deep dive into housing, homelessness, and comparative policies the world over. After a Google search or two or twenty, I realized that’s not what I’m here for. So you can have the final world on this topic from the point of view of content.
From the point of view of process, what I realized is the only way I want to engage on such topics is at a local or at most a regional level. Something like an “Integral Crisis Response Team”, but focused on specific local communities. Also, it won’t just be “integral”. I’m finding that effective action communities can be philosophically pluralistic, at least up to a point. So in so far as integral theory informs local action models, it will be because local actors bring that perspective to the projects. Others will bring other perspectives, and that’s likely all for the best.
Indeed. Even within my state, the Capital seems to be mired in big programs and somewhat paralyzed while in certain rural areas people are taking matters into their own hands - even violating laws such as zoning and land use laws. Such violations are accepted at the local community level and not reported. Quite the opposite, these communities see the value of keeping their property values below a certain level and not attractive to the rich. They know that when the rich see their community land as valuable, the rich will take it. As a result, we have a portion of my state where people live off grid without electricity in open-air shacks. The people who live there are fine with that and they have convinced the rest of the state to more or less leave them alone and not try to “fix” it. A live volcano that destroys housing communities every two decades or so also helps with that.
My own individual view on the matter is that being homeless for a time can be a spiritual journey and there are many who have intentionally started along that path. Of course this is a pretty microscopic minority, but it’s important to point out that that there is nothing particularly bad about not living in a typical house. It can also be an opportunity for people to really save a very large amount of money in a very short time, which is the subject of many Youtube channels.
There is a Hindu spiritual practice where among other things, for a period of 40 days one begs for all one’s food and expresses gratitude for anything one receives. The beauty of this is that if this practice was common, you would never be able to know if a beggar was actually poor or just spiritual. You give either way - either to feed a person in need or to feed a person building the spirituality of the planet. The key is that the giver is unable to judge the beggar as less than. The beggar may very well be an enlightened being or even as rich as Gautama.
My local city council meets tomorrow and on its agenda are its legislative priorities (things it want to lobby the state legislature on). You can see from this list where housing/homelessness fits into the general scheme of things.
Enhance Public Safety (police recruitment, auto theft, property crime, police pursuit, juvenile justice, drug possession)
Support Local Government Sustainability (1% property tax cap -the city wants more “flexibility”)
Support Sustainable Housing (tax exemptions for seniors and low income home owners. Tax relief to support middle income home and condo ownership)
Maintain Local Control over Community Planning (context - the legislature recently mandated more high-density development, overriding most local zoning laws)
Modify Sex Offender Placement Laws
There are not a lot of street people in this local city. There are in a neighboring larger city. In summary, it looks like the local council is centering on the needs of the middle class. Low income/renters are seen through the lens of a mild sort of NIMBYism. Problem behaviors are viewed through a law enforcement lens. It’s very difficult to imagine this town embracing extensive low income housing developments. However, apartment construction is on the rise in any case, and the town is entering a demographic transition. The placing of public safety at the top of the wish list is telling.
I’m not active in local politics just now, but I’m consider getting more engaged with these matters as a sort of ICRT proof-of-concept exercise. Given that framing, I’d be interested with others might see as an integral approach to this set of issues.
Optimism about Human Nature and Societal Trends
