WEForum "Great Reset" - How Integral is it?

@excecutive @raybennett
On Salzman’s recent podcast (I’m really trying to get this IL thing to work to the point I made it through a Salzman marketing pitch) he did make a good point that relative to humanity’s history we are living in a time of “debate and discussion” NOT a time of widespread physical war. There are no immediate existential threats to humanity so we live in this Noosphere. Just long term ideological threats and opportunities.

In this “discussion space” or “Noosphere” we now perceive disagreement as “hostility”, “oppression”, “abuse” and even “violence”. This is the Woke movement (dysfunctional Green, hijacked by elite Red/Amber) projecting their own Amygdala hijacking on the world.

Policing how others communicate is a very very slippery slope always leading to massive exclusion.

Now I think it completely appropriate to have different conversations with different people and groups.

One thing I find interesting is that there’s this kind of disease (my bias) where people and organizations often invent problems when things are going well. And then they create a real problem. This seems to me to be a commonality in the “Q Anon” paradigm. People on both the left and the right are constantly predicting the next Armageddon. But while I see that they are kind of hyped up, I also see they might be 10%-20% correct in the "big picture - both conspiracies on the left and the right.
Or I also see that while on the global scene they may be just 20% correct, in their life this issue may be 100% of their life. For example, Monsantos spraying illegal chemicals may not result in a breakdown of society, but it does affect some people’s lives to a 100% level, and that may have a knock on effect down to me personally of 1%. But even though I’m only affected 1% - why the heck should it even be that much just to give a corporation more profits than they could possibly need and driving competition out of business with unfair business practices (not to mention criminal activity).
Someone can punch you in the face and say “You weren’t really hurt that bad” but does that mean you should just take it? They didn’t kill you, so everything is fine?
I think there is a lot of exaggeration, conspiracy and doomsday nonsense out there on both sides - but also at the same time I think it is very healthy to challenge things that we believe are just dead wrong. Because the alternative is to suppress it until it boils over irrationally, which I believe is what we are seeing now. If we take the extreme left 30% and the extreme right 30% - that means more than 60% of people are extremists. That’s a very bad situation for the United States to be in, and it can’t be blamed on just one side or the other. Doing so just contributes to intensification of the extremism.

There comes a point, even after all kinds of various approaches have been taken - that the person or group just seem to be stuck and unwilling to budge in their mindset. The other group is the problem. Always. Surely not “US”. “WE” are perfectly above any criticism, and we have to focus all our energies on the people we see trying to point out our flaws. No, not one inch of accepting that we have any flaws at all.
Is Green really the only problem? Are all the WOKE movement’s points completely invalid? Is our Economic and Political system really the pinnacle of human achievement and cannot be improved upon?

On the Original Topic of The Great Reset, I found this article from The Hill (slightly leans right) humorous.
I think a summary of their point of view is: “Capitalism Reset is actually Socialism”
While my opinion was: “Capitalism Reset will just be a false veneer of Socialism but will actually continue with business as usual and will not address the roots of the problems”


Edit / Add:
The more videos I watch about “The Great Reset”, the more I see it as “The Great Unravelling”. lol

Note - these aren’t necessarily my views in the video and article - I’m just noticing the reactions to it.

Is what we have today not an improvement over what we had a decade ago? A century ago? A millennia ago?
What major nation (>50M pop) would you want your grand daughters to grow up in, assuming you are not part of the hereditary or economic elite? Then look at your top 5 choices and look at their racial, economic, religious and ethnic diversity. Maybe look at things like majority religion and perhaps majority language. Pretty basic stuff really when you ground it into “what’s best for my grand daughters”, right?

My wife and half of my very best friends moved her from other countries. They left their comfortable communities, native tongue, and cultures to uproot themselves and put down roots in American. Why America and why not say Indonesia, Turkey, Russia, China, Pakistan, India, or another large country? It’s a hypothetical question since everyone here knows the answer why people move here. And I don’t think the Woke created the America that everyone is moving to.

But sure there are some good things about Woke, but so far what we’ve seen is “give an inch and oops now your city is burning”. But the progressive elite that have been running these states and cities for decades somehow think a conservative somewhere is to blame for their issues. Now that makes perfect sense.

One of the beauties about the US is that we get to see how all of these progressive and conservative ideas work out. Think of Portland as our drug decriminalization “test market”. Minneapolis might be our defund the police test market. South Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California will be our open borders test markets. San Francisco can be our Sanctuary city test market. Maybe we could test a few Sharia Law in Detroit or Anarchy in Seattle. Why not, right?
So yes, there are some good things with Woke. Maybe the world is much more Woke than the Woke give credit.

Enjoy your mythology. The United States isn’t the only first world country and there are far more than only two options. But if you refuse to see all but the extremes that’s your choice

I agree, Heidi. The Integral movement has a lot to offer but its seems to be stuck it is own bubble. Even Susan Cook Greuter was concerned about it back in 2013 when she wrote this article in the Journal of Integral theory and practice. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/292493687_Assumptions_versus_assertions_Separating_hypotheses_from_truth_in_the_integral_community

In addition, I’ve been reading books by Dennis L Kingsley and I’m disappointed in IL that they do not interview insightful thinkers like Kingsley whose writing is profound, meaningful, and more relevant to the immediacy of the psychological and existential problems we find ourselves in. In his book The Struggle for Your Mind: Conscious Evolution and the Battle to Control How We Think he says,

With all the goodwill and intentions within our hearts, why is it we cannot collectively rise above this malaise? And why does it seem that the majority is being ruled by a minority of mad people? Are we all the inmates on some lunatic-asylum planet? Don’t the universal laws of creation and sustenance support life-engendering traits rather than suffering? With these questions alone it would seem that there is something amiss within the general psyche of humanity. It could well be that for far too long the majority of humans have been under the yoke of the powerful few—from priestly elites of Egypt and Babylonia; from the Romans and the cyclic domination of empires and from the various religious institutions that have herded the many. In the end, we may know nothing other than servitude. Centuries of social slavery could, after all, have hard wired us to become passive and meek to authority. We have only to refer to the infamous Stanley Milgram experiments to realize that we would do almost anything if a person in a white coat told us to. In other words, we have been quite thoroughly socially conditioned to accept and submit to various displays of power. The question today is how these forces of control seek to pacify and distract the human conscious spirit. It is the hypothesis of this book that ongoing elements within human societies have been interfering with the natural growth and expression of human consciousness, which, at our present stage, may affect the potential for the next phase of neurogenetic evolution.

In Dr. Robert Firestone’s’ book The Self Under Siege he says

Painful events and negative programming during the developmental years constitute the most serious threat to the evolution of the authentic self. Psychological defenses, which were once adaptive as an attempt to dull or block out early inter-personal trauma, later become limiting and dysfunctional and, at their worst, can predispose psychopathology. 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. These destructive personal attacks become part of the child’s developing personality, forming an alien system, the anti-self, distinguishable from the self system, which interferes with and opposes the ongoing manifestation of the true personality of the individual. Remaining undifferentiated renders one unable to fully accept the gift of life and, instead, leaves one merely living out the life of another!

Maybe I’m beside the truth, but the manner in which these two authors write and what they write about needs to be told with the same urgency as the vaccine did for Covid-19 since ignorance and stupidity can be just as deadly as Covid- if not more. The crisis we have is an impoverishment of “an ever increasing awareness of ourselves” as Dr. Karen Horney said 50 years ago. Our lack of self awareness turns us into automatons, like cogs in this cruel fucked up competitive capitalistic machine that deprives us of our humanity and creativity. And where is the Integral community in all this madness? Where is the urgency!? I cancelled my IL membership because it’s always looking at the world through the lens of integral theory and I’m tired of Corey interviewing yes men and women and talking about topics that are far removed from dealing with the immediacy of our problems.
If Ken Wilber is the Einstein of consciousness, why isn’t he speaking at the united nations?
Why isn’t he mad as hell about the way the world is headed? Why aren’t WE mad as hell?
How many more books, lectures, videos, and retreats (on all things integral) do we need in order to make a transformative difference that would once and for all tell our political leaders to shut the fuck up? Are we hopelessly hard wired into complacency as Dr. Kingsley said? I don’t know about you, Heidi, and those reading this but I have no hope for the future. As much as I mourn the kids I never had, I’m glad I don’t have them. No one deserves to live in a world like this and the way its becoming. I can see why some people snap and commit atrocities. I believe the storming of the capital is a warning of what is yet to come. As it was said in Politico of Shawn Rosenberg’s paper at the International Society of Political Psychologists’ annual meeting

Democracy is hard work. And as society’s “elites”—experts and public figures who help those around them navigate the heavy responsibilities that come with self-rule—have increasingly been sidelined, citizens have proved ill equipped cognitively and emotionally to run a well-functioning democracy. As a consequence, the center has collapsed and millions of frustrated and angst-filled voters have turned in desperation to right-wing populists. His prediction? “In well-established democracies like the United States, democratic governance will continue its inexorable decline and will eventually fail.”
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/09/08/shawn-rosenberg-democracy-228045

The Youtube AI Overlords tossed this into my front page today.

What I found interesting was a part in the middle about Vaclav Havel’s idea of “Parallel Structures”.
Vaclav Havel and his colleagues had to form structures within a totalitarian system in order to promote democratic ideals that later came to fruition and led to the democratic Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia.
Whatever organization is hoping to promote change in the future will have to start actually building parallel structures within our current totalitarian system of binary thought control that counteract the psychosis the majority are in.

@gnosisman @Heidi Thank you for dropping breadcrumb trails for this integral journey!

I’m not sure what you meant by that…

Thanks for the links and discussion!

Thanks Ray for this video! It really nails down the problem we have in this world today- now more than ever. This mass psychosis is what I was hoping IL would address but the way it is right now, it never will. I can’t help but suspect they don’t have to change. As long as the members keep paying, IL will continue preaching the Integral gospel to the evangelical faithful-I’m just glad I’m not one of them.

I just purchased Joost Merloo’s book The Rape Of The Mind and look forward to reading it. His book is begging to be made into a 3 part documentary especially now with the radicalization of Trump supporters and the 24/7 propaganda news media machines. Perhaps Wisdom Rebel could do this documentary but, then again, Merloo’s concern deserves better treatment. I wish I was a multi millionaire. I’d hire the best documentarians and spare no expense in striving to make Merloo’s book a transformative film experience. Dr. Robert Firestone, Ben Kinsley, and Steven James Bartlett could be interviewed at length. Dr. Bartlett wrote the book Normality does not Equal Mental Health: The Need to Look Elsewhere for Standards of Good Psychological Health It’s profound and thought provoking. It puts into serious question our educational system and our mental health providers with archaic psychological theories of mental disorders that are flat out wrong; it criminal what they are doing.

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I think what is required is for people to take the essence of Integral and frankly knock out 90% of it, streamline it and make it accessible to the masses, re-brand it and deliver it as a process rather than an intellectual analysis.

Integrate Integral theory into an existing structure and create something substantially new. (that is also a saleable product / service)
For example, IntegralZen.org just added “cleaning up” to a traditional “waking up” spiritual tradition (Zen Buddhism).

Aren’t “Clean Up”, “Wake Up”, and “Grow Up” already covered extremely well and broadly in mainstream structures? Isn’t this what healthy Oranges like Jordan Peterson get Millions of views (and $'s) from already?

Even, as an example, in the Book of Mark doesn’t he kind of cover “Clean Up” with "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

Lmao. No. Jordan Peterson gets millions of views because he represents an audience who is unable to process their shadows regarding Green.

And Religion? Sorry, completely no. Religion is a spawning grounds of shadows.

There are VERY VERY few resources for cleaning up. If they were more widely available then society would not be in the state it is now.

Equally with growing up. Our tertiary education system produces mostly people overqualified in irrelevant areas. That’s why many times if I just want a job I leave my degrees off of my resume unless it’s specifically related - and why young people around 25 find their degrees cannot get them a job that pays enough to pay their student loans.
Yes, there are many “self Help” programs like Tony Robbins - but these are a mixed bag and are mostly oriented towards building monetary wealth, not actually developing people as well rounded individuals.

I’m not saying there are not ANY programs - but the field is far from full of effective products or we’d have a much more developed society.

@raybennett
I disagree Ray. I think you cannot see much/any good in the world that produced each of us and the environment we wallow, whine, and grow in. I prefer to laugh and play and grow in my world. Recommend you give it a go.its a lot of fun…

I see good in the world - but in the actual world and actual people.

Not in Orange structures or anti-Green delusions. Structures created by humans are not humans.

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As I see it, the world we live in leaves a lot to be desired in terms of being able to live in it peacefully and sustainably. While it’s good to go about our lives enjoying the time we have on earth, we ought to do our part in finding ways to change the collective mindset of the population.

Would that start with us as individuals discovering and taming our own ego’s as Eckhart Tolle suggests in his book a New Earth?

I agree we ought to do our part in finding ways to change the collective mindset of the population and the only work we have to do on that front is to fix ourselves.

When we fix ourselves perhaps the world fixes itself in our perception?

@excecutive How do we fix perception of violence and burning when tribes are committing violence and lighting ablaze the physical world we live in?