The Faces of X: Making Peace with the Culture War

We live in a strange time. We carry the entire world around with us in our pocket, our social media feeds flooding us every day with more perspectives than we know what to do with. Yet rather than this incredible interconnectivity helping us to expand our perspective, understand each other better, and bring people closer together, it seems to be having the opposite effect. Our minds have become more entrenched and polarized than ever, our culture more fractured and fragmented, and we seem to be burning more bridges between us than are being built.

As a result, conversations are breaking down. Empathy is breaking down. Our capacity to enfold with each other is breaking down. The spaces between us have become colonized by social media algorithms that exploit our cognitive biases and directly influence what we perceive, how we think, and how we view each other. And the results have been disastrous.

We see these corrosive effects just about everywhere we look — in our politics, in our media, and sometimes even here in our own integral community. Many think this state of affairs only has one outcome: increasing conflict, which some fear may even spiral into civil war.

But my guest today, Stephanie Lepp, is pointing us toward a different path — where all of this polarization and fragmentation represents an opportunity to rekindle our connections, to deepen and expand our meaning making, and to reinvent the lost art of conversation.

In her Faces of X media project, Stephanie is role modeling a different kind of discourse, one that is based on mutual respect, good faith, humility, and genuine curiosity in other perspectives — all of which have become such scarce resources in today’s attention age.

This incredibly well-produced video series is doing something truly extraordinary, and something that is deeply resonant with the integral heart — encouraging us to reach across the divide, and to open ourselves up to new points of view without compromising our own deeply held principles and dignities. There is an important aspect of “Growing Up” here, allowing us to take greater, deeper, more comprehensive perspectives that are more aligned with our developmental capacities.

And perhaps more importantly, Faces of X also invites us to some critical “Cleaning Up”, helping us to notice that all of the conflicts that we are seeing “out there” are really taking place “in here” — in our own minds, in our own consciousness, in our own relationships with each other — allowing us to re-integrate the disowned pieces of ourselves that are driving so many of these culture war conflicts. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy, and in our mental models of reality — and Faces of X can help show each of us what we might be missing.

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Corey was there a link to an article? If so it doesn’t seem to be included only transcended lol

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Thanks for the heads up Namal! Fixed!

Here are some extra words so I can hit the minimum character count for this comment.

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My intuition is that the opposite is also true.

The mind can learn and develop, by contrasting and comparing, through being forced to look at things which don’t make sense.

Or the mind can retreat to old ways and ignore and deny the things which don’t fit — cognitive dissonance.

Technology is (as Ken puts a lot of things), a mixture of good news and bad news. And there’s possibility that the good slightly outweighs the bad.

The internet is probably similar. Yes, it is a sort of green-technology open networking, and rather than everyone becoming green, it highlights the fractures, and even amplifies them, as all the like-minded people can now find each other, and even get the weird impression they’re a majority.

However, two things are worth noting. The fractures were already there. The spiral already exists. Always has, always will do.

Second, integral awareness is a kind of pattern of patterns or patterns, but first you have to be exposed to the patterns. Be exposed to the fracture and chaos of worldviews. Be able to see other worldviews. Even just be made aware that they exist.

And maybe even start to inhabit perspectives which seem anathema to us. Maybe that’s the spiral wizard move.

But meanwhile, remember also that modernity and postmodernity have imposed their own will (and power) on everyone else. The internet is starting to open that up and make alternative power somewhat accessible.

That means, yes, anyone can post anything, and maybe what they post is extremely wrong, or maybe what they post has a valuable partial truth, and yes it can run against the mainstream narrative (and thus starts to expose the existing orange and green power structures).

If we are ever to move to a world government in some form—let’s call it a world harmony—we’re going to have to get very sophisticated about power structures.

“The Great …” seems to be a phrase in vogue. I’m wondering, “The Great Exposure”

I think that’s what strikes me about the last 20 years or so. Gradually seeing more of what goes on out there on planet earth.

And it is horrifying.

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