Wang Huning is arguably the world’s most influential and powerful intellectual. And you’ve probably never heard of him, as he has sat quietly at the top of China’s power structure, advising three presidents over 30 years.
The architect of many of China’s most significant contemporary ideological and strategic efforts, he’s deeply studied in the philosophy and ways of the west. Long before Robb’s own analysis that the west is amidst a monumental breakdown he called a “Great Release”, Huning came to the conclusion that the decadence of the United States, its culture and capitalism will lead it to ruin, and China must be steered in a different, and in some ways more integral, direction.
The stakes couldn’t be higher: to understand this century, we have to understand the geopolitical and philosophical power struggle between China and the United States and the differing global “Operating Systems” they’re fighting for. And to better understand that struggle, we have to better understand whether the cognition of China’s leaders are integral or not: are they capable of bringing the Teal “Power to Integrate” to bear on the world system?
For that answer, we must look to Wang Huning. Join Robb as he holds an impromptu commentary-monologue on a recent profile of Wang Huning published in Palladium Magazine:
I appreciate Robb’s commentary. It helped to place N S Lyons writing for me within an integral framework. Karl Rove came to mind as someone with the ear of a U.S. president in shaping our political direction. I marveled how Wang in his book America against America could examine and see clearly the crises in our system as early as 1991. Look forward to hearing further discussion on whether China’s leaders are capable of bringing the Teal “Power to Integrate” to bear. So far they sound more regressive.
Do we have rough intellectual/political leader equivalents to Wang Huning in the West, US?
Or do we have more collectives that cycle through levels of influence as administrations, advisory councils and cabinets change based on constituent feedback?
Interestingly Western civilization was founded upon the idea of by consent of and by non-professional citizen leaders. Is it even possible for Western civilization to be congruent with an Integral Leadership?
I tend to disagree with Rob Smith on his locating present information technology at green or talking about them as green technologies. To me all these “green” technologies, like facial recognition and the plethoray of surveilance technologies already used to control and suppress the Uygur minority in China, or the technology used to control the outbreak of an in silico fabricated virus, are still only orange technologies, used to establish an amber social system. If I am wrong about seeing present technologies at orange, I would appreciate a detailed argument, why I am wrong.
It appears that even superlative intellectuals and political leaders can have blind spots and their own form of narcissism, in which they are absorbed in and cast upon the populace their own ideas of what is right and correct, their own biases and beliefs. As we know and as Robb pointed out, China has not addressed human rights sufficiently, the treatment of the Uygur as @rainweb referenced being one example.
It seems strange to prioritize as concerning the “fracturing of the language” over the fracturing of actual humans/groups of people. A segment of the population in any country proposing umpteen pronouns seems to me, in integral language, a surface structure that points to the underlying deep structure of people wresting with personal identity and legitimate presence in the world. Yes, there is some “narcissistic individualism” there and grasping at power and groupthink, but perhaps if others took the deep structures a little more seriously, these pronoun players would take themselves and their wordplay a little less seriously.
Language does expand, evolve. Fifty years ago, a female in the West was addressed formally according to her marital status, then along came the word Ms. Blacks/African-Americans in the past have been called and have self-identified as ‘colored’ and as ‘Negro,’ but we rarely hear those words now. There does seem to be relationship between the empowerment of a group and language/terms used to describe or refer to them.
Banning an LGBTQ presence on the internet, “erasing” a person, and referring to gays as “sissy men” (killing two birds with one stone there) does not seem to bode well for an integrated population in China, at least not without some hard-core control and many unhappy people; or for China’s influence on the rest of the world in this regard.
Hmmm … so I agree with you that the implementation of the technology is not just Orange (though I don’t need COVID to explain it), but I’d go to Amber. The whole past 20 years has been a steady agenda of creating something nobody really needs (like social media or VR technology) then trying to make people think it’s a necessity - or even a human right, lol. The control these technologies has on so people is so absolute it’s astounding.
But I don’t think we should be classifying actual technology as a green, orange, amber, etc.
Is a hammer red or green? It can be used to bash someone in the head or to build homes. Social media can connect (green) or be used to divide, attack, or manipulate.
I don’t think it’s just “shadows of green” - I think the technology is agnostic and the same technology can be applied and used at any tier.
One way I like to think about it — certain stages of development are capable of creating particular technologies, but once created, those technologies can then be used by any stage.
The electric guitar could only have come from an orange industrialized society. But does that mean that all music that uses an electric guitar is orange? Of course not.
Agree completely @corey-devos .
Just as a group of Teal Integralists are highly unlikely to develop a nuclear bomb or machine gun, a group of Orange level technologists are highly unlikely to develop psychological/socialogical profiling and ubiquitous surveillance technologies to manipulate humanity as a whole and down to each and every individual.
@raybennett but you also are completely correct. The technology itself is not Teal or Orange or Red or Burple, it’s the use of said technology.
So could we say that say Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Tiktok, Twitter, (Spotify?) and the Global Platforms are in fact essentially Teal technologies? With perhaps the caveat is that it’s perhaps not so aligned with “for the greater good” as many claim?
Great question. I personally consider them green technologies (totally flattened, zero enfoldment mechanisms, far more incentive for “span” than “depth”, based on the naive idea that “everyone’s voice should be heard equally”, producing endless Warholian nightmares where everyone’s 15 minutes gets stretched to infinity) with orange “winner/loser” extractive profit motives behind them (“if it’s free, then you are the product”).
This is exactly why I personally consider Trump to be our first postmodern president, despite none of his own lines of development coming anywhere close to green
I think Teal technologies would explicitly try to solve those very problems — creating networks based on growth hierarchies, with heathy enfoldment mechanisms that incentivize depth over span, so that the loudest arguments aren’t necessarily the ones that always win. Green technologies end up incentivizing division (ironically), because just like green values themselves, they are easily hijacked by red impulses. I think Teal technologies would be wary of this dynamic from the very beginning, and engineer systems that balance the critical polarities (centralization vs. decentralization, for example) in order to help our culture and society begin to enfold with each other once again, and create a new shared reality together.
Have you considered that a President of the United States executing his/her duties might by definition be Orange’ish?
From an “execution of duties” as opposed to character assessments of 45 might yield extremely different scorings.
Same might hold true for SCOTUS, Senators, Administrators, etc as well. Our current form of government was not designed by Ken or Karl so just isn’t laid out the way the Left would like. But it is adaptive and ever changing - just gather up the support and “gitter done”.
Note that SCOTUS paused ruling on “non-delegation doctrine” during the RGB/Coney Barrett transition, but did essentially plan on ruling later. If they reinforce the “non-delegation doctrine” the administrative apparatchik would be dealt a severe blow to scope creep and non-democratic administrative actions.
i.e. Congress would have to start doing their jobs again and the Citizenry would then vote them in or out based on where the population wants the country to head.
This could have dire consequences for anyone espousing an essentially non-democratic shift towards authoritarianism.
Would you consider a more originalist functioning of our Congress to be more or less integral than what we have today?
Like technology, I see the ROLE of President as an emergent of orange, which can then be enacted from anywhere on the spiral.
Same with something like CEOs. Corporations, and the kind of executive leadership associated with them, emerge between amber and orange (specifically the “umber” stage). But that doesn’t mean all corporations are running on orange values. Some are running on red, some on green, and even a few on teal/turquoise.
Would you consider a more originalist functioning of our Congress to be more or less integral than what we have today?
Depends. In terms of deep structures — such as repealing the 1929 Reapportionment Act so that we can return to the Founders’ vision of a House that represents people equally, then yes. But in terms of surface structures, I think that a genuinely originalist take would caution us against originalist takes. As Thomas Jefferson said,
“I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”
Also:
“Some men look at Constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, & deem them, like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. they ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment.”
A cave man who is elected president would not all of a sudden be by definition Orange, so no.
Nixon tried that trick and spent the rest of his life in exile.
The man = the Position isn’t even Orange - that’s Amber.
Orange has laws and regulations that send people to prison or other censure for violating the boundaries of their position. So that is why there exists Impeachment, for example - and why a strongly conservative SCOTUS has not sided with Trump, and why he is furious about it, because he does not even remotely display Orange characteristics, but predominantly displays Amber to Red strategies and characteristics.
I don’t think so, no.
I think a perfectly Teal society would be much easier when people focus on their own physical lives right in front of them rather than some abstract make-believe life in a virtual world.
I’m not sure that given a role as well defined and constrained as POTUS that you would have the choice to enact as say Teal.
Case in point is President Biden’s performance against his duties. He actually doesn’t have the authority to create a system of open borders to the detriment of the Citizenry. As a reminder it is a “by consent” rule, not “tops down authoritarianism”. Congress is required to “can the laws” with the President/Administration to execute the laws. It’s kinda how the gig works here.
Given Conservative momentum, it’s highly likely that Biden, Harris (although she hasn’t done anything), Myorkas/Homeland Security, Blinken/State, Austin/Defense, and Garland/AG will be impeached for dereliction of duty and/or crimes against the US. Yellen/Treasury is likely ok.
Given Pelosi’s trivialization of Impeachment, this clown crew is toast.
Hmmm, President McCarthy has an interesting ring to it… Should this discussion be considered “Insurrection”? Perhaps Qanon “Conspiracy theory”? Whacko jacko?
The idea that Biden is for “open borders” is another one of those right wing media inventions with no basis in reality, but love repeating for some reason. “Zombie lies”, I’ve heard them called, because the live on long after being debunked.
“Practically since his first week in office, President Joe Biden has faced repeated criticisms from Republicans and some Democrats that his border policy amounts to “open borders.” This criticism is not simply inaccurate: it is unhinged from reality in a way that distinguishes itself from normal political hyperbole. Indeed, U.S. immigration policy is effectively closed borders, and Biden’s immigration policies and goals are largely the same as those of President Donald Trump.“
Why do you keep returning to these invented accusations about left, while ignoring the actual proven transgressions of Trump and company’s planned autocoup?
As for whether the GOP will impeach Biden, yes I am fairly confident that they are prepared to do whatever it takes to establish permanent minority rule.
So Biden, Czarina Harris and Mayorkas have the border well in hand? That’s reassuring.
You left out Catos statement " The number of immigrants arriving from outside Mexico and Central America has exploded in the last few months, increasing from about 10,000 to more than 62,000 per month, requiring farther flights and more resources."
Wonder why the surge? Bad ruck? Unforeseen consequences? Integral thinking?
It’s too bad all the disinformation regarding Biden and Mayorkas. All those videos showing plane loads of single adults getting dropped off in the interior is really bad optics when you couple with push for insecure elections and non citizen voting. Throw in a couple “non standard” immigrant murders and rapes and the optics aren’t favorable.
All those State lawsuits against the Biden/Harris Administration definitely don’t help either. A loss here or there could be crippling for all of Bidens “good intentions”.
More zombie lies. How many cases of voter fraud have been proven?
And who is pushing for “non-citizen voting”? Federal law already prohibits non-citizens from voting in national elections.
I assume you are talking about the New York bill, which would allow certain legal residents (Dreamers and individual with Temporary Protected Status), to vote in local elections? Which is an interesting issue, and I can see both sides (particularly the idea that these people are permanent residents, and the whole “taxation without representation” thing). Personally, I think I’d rather create an onramp for those who would be included in the law to simply attain full citizenship status.
That said, isn’t that basically up to the state to decide, according to you? As long as only legal citizens can vote in federal elections (which, again, is already the law of the land and cannot change without a Constitutional Amendment) then don’t you want states to be given permission to run their own elections however they want?
I mean, that’s the more interesting question to ask. Trying to find ways to directly blame Biden for it — when he is doing the same things Trump did, even more so in many cases (as the article points out) – is just playing games. Immigration has been a steadily growing problem for at least the last four Administrations, and each Administration’s approach has been basically similar to the last (except for Trump and Session’s temporary “split all families” policy.)
But yes, we need to better understand what is driving immigration right now, and enact policies that can help address those conditions, rather than focusing only on the symptoms.
The largest drivers of immigration, as I understand it, are basically best seen as “push and pull” factors. The major push factors, which vary from individual to individual, are:
Climate change
War, crime, and violence
Economic instability
Quality of life
And the largest pull factor is, as you often like to point out, that America remains one of the best and safest places in the world to live. Especially when it comes to the North and South Americas, which makes it the obvious place to emigrate to for people living on those continents.
Now, what should be done, which no previous administration has done? I think that is probably the most important question. Again, we want to address the sickness, not the symptoms. I think the first step is something like extending our sense of “national pride” to a more “continental pride”, and work with Canada to create more partnerships and incentives to help bring stability and safety to our Southern neighbor. Let’s change our drug policies to eliminate the black markets, and form military compacts with Canada and Mexico to stamp out the cartels. And then we continue to work to bring more stability and economic opportunity to the other 20 nations on this continent. All while working on the climate change problem, which will soon become the greatest single push driver of global migration, especially as it “trickles down” into the other major drivers — economic instability, violence, etc.
