Glad to hear from you, Mbohu, and I appreciate the time you took to reply to what we’ve been discussing. Speaking candidly, it was not easy for me to put an end to my disagreement with @executive. Mainly because he did not ponder -as you did- on the meaning of what I was saying. Instead, he was in a defensive posture. If intuition serves me well, it was because I believe what I said was a threat to his belief system hence he disingenuously equated me with Donald Trump as a means to alleviate his discomfort. In subsequent comments, I realized that it was best to let this go because his line of thinking is vastly different from mine. I also believe we are all at different stages of psychological development. When I say psychological development. I’m referring to growing up -not waking up. Growing up, as you may know, is not for the faint hearted.
It requires a hell of a lot of courage, humility, and willingness to rigorously question our belief system at a deep existential level. Long before Lynn Fuentes said in one of her lectures about integral theory that we must grow up first before we wake up, I was already on the path to growing up because I fell into a deep depression. It took me a long time to realize that it’s not my fault for having been born in such a fucked up society that is largely culpable for my suffering and of humanity. We believe we are living normal lives but we are not. In various ways and degrees, all of us have been traumatized but remain unaware of it because it runs deep in us. I believe this trauma is the formation of our shadow. In Dr. Robert Firestone’s book, The Self Under Siege, he said
To lead a free life, a person must separate him- or herself from negative imprinting and remain open and vulnerable. This differentiation is difficult to accomplish and requires considerable effort because, as children, people not only identify with the defenses of their parents but also tend to incorporate into themselves the critical or hostile attitudes that were directed toward them.
The above quote is not some new age Integral jargon. Dr. Firestone and the aforementioned authors’ words are anchored in the collective dire immediacy of our psychological realities. And what they say is quite understandable, insightful, and disturbing because they reveal the truth as to how the human mind becomes corrupted by all manner of bad parenting, our archaic educational system, the entertainment industry, and political and religious ideologies that are an utter disgrace to humanity- the latter piss me off to no end.
Dr. Firestone’s book and the ones I cited are just a few of many unknown authors who reveal how our psyche is so dysfunctional because we were born into a sick world and the world is getting sicker with each passing day. The only way out of this societal madness is to free ourselves from having been infected by it. However, and as Dr. Firestone said, differentiating ourselves from our negative imprinting from parents, politics, religion and the world we live in is not for the faint-hearted. It requires rigorous self awareness and the willingness to accept the truth no matter how we may feel of the outcome. For me, this is what growing up means. By knowing how and why our psyche has been severely compromised from those who have better eyes to see, we can begin to see the truth about ourselves; that growing up is a formidable task, requiring far more of our attention and effort than we realize. For me, the right kind of books and the right kind of psychotherapy can have a transformative effect in developing our individuation and freeing ourselves from cultural conditioning, our shadow, and pent up unexamined feelings that go as far back as childhood.
On another issue that I believe takes up too much of our energies is God. I often wish we should shut the hell up talking about who God is -and isn’t. I say this because anyone who calls himself integral should know that the idea of God is just that, an idea. And when we believe in these ideas without question, we don’t have the idea. The idea has us and it controls us accordingly. As Joseph Campbell said, God is beyond all categories of thought hence any idea we have of God is not God. That we haven’t gotten this through our thick skull is infuriating because man made ideas about God is making us utterly stupid as it ends up killing millions of people throughout history and manipulates the masses to all manner of submission and conformity as we’ve seen with Evangelicals supporting Trump and Sarah Huckabee claiming that he was sent by God. And so, for me to say that Trump’s behavior is toxic and his followers have been radicalized should not be controversial because, if anyone knows enough about growing up, they would know that all is not well within the Republican Party, Trump, and his followers.
Furthermore, when FermentedAgave said
Thinking of a discussion (political discourse in this case) as a physical battle is the methodology used by politicians and media to raise their level of perceived importance.
I agree, but I’ll amend it with the qualification that politicians, on both sides of the aisle -with few exceptions- do not give a rat’s ass about the well being of the American people and the Republicans are the worst offender. This is why I took issue with Dr. Hansen’s
video. When @executive called me out for not offering “positive” ideas, ironically, it is Dr. Hanson who has nothing positive or transformative to say about the present madness we are in politically. Unlike Dr. Riane Eisler, Dr. Hansen has no new theories on how to rise above the acrimony, dysfunction, and problems we face in the world. All he does is just talk about issues that give a semblance of something new but it’s still confined within his own perception of political reality. In fact, for decades, the entire Republican party has offered nothing truly substantial, i.e. transformative ideas on how to make the US a better place to live as we see in Scandinavian countries. As Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein said in their book, It’s Even Worse Than It Was.
Today’s Republican Party, as we noted at the beginning of the book, is an insurgent outlier. It has become ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition, all but declaring war on the government. The Democratic Party, while no paragon of civic virtue, is more ideologically centered and diverse, protective of the government’s role as it developed over the course of the last century, open to incremental changes in policy fashioned through bargaining with the Republicans, and less disposed to or adept at take-no-prisoners conflict between the parties. This asymmetry between the parties, which journalists and scholars often brush aside or whitewash in a quest for “balance”, constitutes a huge obstacle to effective governance.
So, I agree with FermentedAgave, that we should include and understand but we must do it with a discriminating penetrating mind whose mission is to seek the truth above all ideologies. It means standing alone because it’s the only way towards freedom from our limited perception of reality and the cultivation of individuation.
Unlike Dr. Hansen, FermentedAgave’s post on Dr. Glenn Loury was quite different. Loury said.
Everybody comes with a mother tongue and so forth.We are given these things, those are the initial facts about ourselves. They are not alive, they’re just the raw material. We still have to make a script for our lives. We still have to fashion a vision for ourselves. We still have to be in the world -that’s a challenge that everybody faces and the reason that I can read- oh I don’t know- the great Russian novelist of the 19th century, the Dostoyevsky’s and the (toll?) stories. The reason I can read them and be enriched by them is not because I see my life in their narrative but it’s because their narrative is in the service of this existential challenge that all of us face -which is how to grow out of where we start into the fullness of our humanity -exactly the fullness of our humanity. That’s what the university is there for.
I believe the above quote is very true and I highly doubt that Tucker and Dr. Hansen would agree to Loury’s concern because what Loury said is what a progressive would say. We often hear of cancel culture. It seems the Republicans have cancel culture built into their ideology as they fear change and innovation. They want to go back to the old days of living a simple life. Understandably so, but I believe this stance is governed by fear and it’s holding us all back.
Look at what Orwell said. It’s been decades since he uttered those words and -here we are- madder than it was during his life and we should be mad as hell about it now!!
When will we grow the fuck up?
