Hi all,
and quick caveat, I’ve just skimmed the thread, and secondly, I’m only curious as a random person in the street, on this issue.
But I just wanted to pick up on a point @tamarbenur made about:
“unholy connections between governing powers on both side”
First, another couple of caveats. I do have a problem with whatever I think I might know about the conflict, because it’s become apparent to me over the last 20 years that we are all living in a media saturated environment, and there’s no shortage of PR firms who are paid billions to control the message and frame our perceptions. That’s really a construct-aware, kinda Green insight — our very perceptions are constructed by the culture. It used to be called advertising, then it became “what your doctor recommends”, or “what the FDA approves”, and soon it was outright propaganda, and that has continued to be so ever since. We’ve had 100+ years of industrialised propaganda. So that’s a bit sad. And that’s not even counting the times of war where the first casualty is the truth. Where generals will say that a media message is worth 30,000 troops. So, it’s very hard to know what’s useful to perceive in a situation, that’s the first issue.
Given then that I can’t simply trust my perceptions of who is “the victim”, I can nevertheless start from first principles, and the integral model says, you’re gonna have some levels, and you’re gonna have some quadrants, and some other dimensions at play, to varying degrees.
So a naive starting point here for me, is that, most of the levels can be presumed to be active on both sides. There’s going to be (in SD colours) some purple, some red, some blue, and some orange, and maybe some green, and maybe some teal, on both sides.
So that’s a naive starting point on taking the perspectives of both sides. Some of what I read and see on each side is coming from red, some is coming from blue, and so on.
Now of course the next problem is that anyone could, say, be activating red but be using green language. So one can’t just go round labelling people very easily. Next, one has to have, say, activated some orange in oneself before one can kinda really recognise orange. So that’s going to be a bit tricky also.
But given the fog of war, the propaganda, the cloaking of values, and distance of views, and the sheer complexity of events day to day, I think for me, @tamarbenur comment seems to hit the nail on the head, that there’s some sort of “unholy alliance”, which I’m guessing is between red/amber, on one side, and its equivalent on the other.
But also, to add another scale to this, that’s embedded in global geopolitics where orange is quite happy to play dirty using blue and red factions, and so on. Plus there’s a lot of regional complexity which locks certain elements into certain courses of action. Red isn’t inherently bad if it is the wild west and honour is the best available mode of working. But if your enemies are exploiting that by making sure your place remains the wild west, to engineer your ongoing weakness and eventual “clearance”, and meanwhile the “New American Century” it itself a kind of ploy being furthered to ensure USA’s unipolar demise, well, that’s just evolution having a laugh with complexity.
Anyway, the long and short of it is that we all suck as human beings and I am grateful I don’t have to live in a war zone. (Or that, another term for “unhealthy red, blue, orange, green” is “corrupt red, blue, orange, green”, like how orange elections are supposed to represent the people, but dysfunctional corruption leads to politicians serving other interests, or applied to red, corrupt red is violence without honour).
I guess integral at least suggests that I could wonder and look for lessons on multiple dimensions.
For levels, what do you do when earlier levels are in control and in conflict across both sides?
For shadow, why do we keep giving power to the drive to make war?
For quadrants, has the lower right simply become a global system far too complex and chaotic for us to survive in?
For lines, what’s the intelligence defect which meant that, we didn’t stop at bows and arrows or even guns, and say, no those are too destructive, no more, but we went all the way up to nukes, before we even started wondering about maybe slowing down?? (and now, hypersonics, bioweapons, AIs, etc)
And types… WTF is wrong with men?