Interesting the 180/360 degree conundrum of Left/Right/Radical/Conservative wrapping around itself much like an Escher sketch. Seems the snake of the Left may be swallowing it’s own tail?
The Left has taken on the role of the Right. The stodgy old Conservatives who used to enforce public morality by burning books and belittling crazy reformers like Saul Alinsky, that evil madman who wrote “Rules For Radicals”. Those Conservatives now have been completely dominated by the revolution from the left.
Now the Left rules from on high, The woke Liberals now enforce public morality by doxing, deplatforming and belittling crazy reformers like Donald Trump on the right. The world has indeed turned upside down.
The defects and the values, both left and right, belong to us all. They represent the duality and from neither-side will you find balance … the Integral view is seeing the wisdom and the hysteria from all sides as the dance of reality.
Some Integral Questions … Was this by accident? Was this by design? Is this from the Devil? Is this from God? Is it from man? Is it nature? Is it from science? Is it you? Is it Me? Is it all of us?
The Integral answer to all of these questions and a million more is … Yes and No!
In the whole it’s a yes in the parts it’s a no. From the ground level as individual pieces we are just cells in the body of humanity fighting our battels as our DNA demands.
The holistic Integral Spiritual view from a above it all … we see the balance and integral connections of our biological nature as one living organism that survives and thrives as part of an amazing and beautiful eco-system to which we belong as individual parts yet connected as one whole.
This is the Integral discovery from the Spiritual Quest. 
"Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it."
Is now the time to transform humanity into a never seen before Collective administered by incorruptible enlightened leaders?
That’s another question from on the ground level … to which I’m sure you and I agree. Absolute power is in the whole (That’s God for you and me on this level)
I’m trying to bring light to the higher spiritual perspective. We are one thing made up of individual pieces.
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I would hesitate to say that enlightened leaders are incorruptible. Yasutani Roshi for example, the enlightened Zen master, was a Zen fascist who supported global Japanese dominance. You can be enlightened, but when you operate in the relative world you are still operating with the ego you’ve disidentified with.
What that means is that we need someone who has the highest altitude in terms of Growing Up and someone who is enlightened may or may not be an advantage, I can’t speak to that as I am not enlightened.
I think what we need is a system of government that can be properly downward assimilated regardless of someone’s level of development. Hanzi Freinacht, in Nordic Ideology I believe, argued that Communism was beaten by Capitalism because the former couldn’t be adequately downward assimilated to the largely Amber or lower populations of the Soviet Union and China. It necessitated a psychology at least at Green to properly function, whereas Capitalism was easily downward assimilated and worked relatively fine regardless of altitude.
If you haven’t read them already, I highly, highly recommend you read the Listening Society and Nordic Ideology by Hanzi Freinacht. In that order. They are extraordinary books that go deeply into Metamodern (Integral) politics and sociology.
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Interesting thinking @WillE . I will need to read Frienacht.
Do we have information on what level our populations are at?
And if his hypothesis that we need to be at green happened to be insufficient, how could we put in place fail safes to avoid the reliable tidy bowl collectivism has always followed?
Interesting thought occurred. At what level have the leaders who have installed Communist systems historically been at? Mao, Castro, Lenin, Chavez?
What level would the current US leaders be at personally ? Biden, Harris, Pelosi, Schumer?
I’m not sure I have the education to provide much of a response to most of your questions, but I would likely say that the Communist leaders you mentioned were at Amber. They were far too authoritarian for Green. Obviously Green seems to have authoritarian tendencies, but I would chalk that down to regression more than a major feature of Green. Green taken to it’s excess tends to regress to Amber.
I don’t have the answers either. But just questions we would need to sort out to plane above it all and go Integral/Teal.
Interesting interview of Glenn Greenwald with Coleman Hughes. Seems even in California, the Woke Revolution might be tapering off a bit.
Key takeaways:
- Elite Discourse is very different than the conversations everyone else is having.
- Elite Discourse disconnected from “how things can work” for everyone else
- Non-Elites can are not as “outraged” and can actually have fun with racial, gender, sexual jokes. They don’t “hate” or assume their friends “hate” them either.
- California Prop 16 (2020) was passed 55% to 45% reaffirming race neutrality, even with California a majority minority state. The alternative was systematic race-based preferences. While it passed by a wide margin of voters, large corporations without exception supported systematic race-based preferences. Every majority Latino or LatinX in Woke vernacular county based Prop 16 for race neutrality.
- LatinX terminology is not popular with Latino/Latina’s, but a term introduced by the Elite
- Self appointed Elite are claiming to “fight the fight” for everyone else, yet are fighting for things everyone else isn’t as concerned about.
From CNN? Could be the Woke Revolution is on life support with only 15 months left.
Cultural revolution alive and well, moving forward in California…
And onward with projecting my internal shadows into others interior spaces. Something rarely prone to error.
“To be sure,” Cantu and Jussim write,” that question “might be an expression of racism.” But, they ask, why should that be the default interpretation when there are other equally plausible explanations, for example, that the white student simply believed that her lab partner was very good at science?
And across the pond…
“The extra jobs may not appear immediately and there may be quite a long transition period during which native workers experience unemployment (or lower wages). Moreover, if there is a continuing inflow of migrants, the labour market may be in constant disequilibrium, with economic growth and new job creation lagging constantly behind the growth in labour supply due to immigration. In its extreme form the ‘lump of labour fallacy’ may well be a fallacy, but it points to a genuine issue.”
Interesting Comparative article of US/Western Wokeism vs Communist Russia. It’s seems shockingly easy to create lock-step alignments between the Authoritarian Collectivist philosophical threads and our current pop Wokeism. I would say that the “traditionalists” have ignored the extremist Left/Collectivist Authoritarians as an academic oddity - head-in-sand or perhaps even sold-out, complacent at the least.
Are the parallels and direct lineage from Nazi German, Stalin’s Russia, and Mao’s China to our current Wokeism and Integral Noosphere unjustified? How are they divergent? How can this new Noosphere avoid the horrific issues that have plagued humanity every other time Hegelian, Marxist or Marcuseian philosophies have been adopted? What specifically are the safe guards?
“The Soviet nationalities policies allowed minority groups a certain degree of self-rule and recognition, while also ensuring that their elites remained utterly under the control of the party. Sometimes other nationalities would be disfavoured because they were seen as too anti-communist or otherwise disloyal, as happened to Ukrainians, Tartars and Jews at different times, but only Russian identity was actively discouraged. Stalin condemned the “Great Russian chauvinist spirit” and the Soviet Union saw majority nationalism as by far the greater evil.”
In a nutshell, no.
There is no longer a national Fiscally Conservative Political party.
The Republican Party in 2020 surrendered on a core precept that it has held for almost a century and traded it’s conservative economic ideology for economic liberalism.
We now have Tax and Spend Republicans and Tax and Spend Democrats. The only difference in a Post Trump national budget is whose name is on the government check that arrives in your mailbox.
From the pen of Pat Buchanan:
Conservative Capitalism and Reaganomics has forfeited the field and Great Society Liberal Capitalism is now the only game in town.
Old terminology is no longer relative. Definitions have changed and ideologies are blurred into one big mess. People now use words to talk about sociopolitical concepts in ways that have no correlation to their original meanings. Communism, socialism, liberalism, woke - in standard usage over the past 5 years have all just become synonyms that mean “bad and part of another group of people”.
The majority of society is now being reorganized into different classifications of tribalism. Left and Right no longer resonate in conversations or have anything resembling their original meaning, but instead people are grouping into rational and irrational social groups. One question people want to know is “Are you vaccinated?” if meeting face to face, and now allowing children to socialize only with children of parents with similar world view. Vaccinated conservatives would rather associate with vaccinated liberals than unvaccinated, and vice versa. Or nonmilitant liberals are less likely to socialize with the militant left than the nonmilitant conservative while nonmilitant conservatives would rather just not get involved with another insurrection or civil war. Those violent extremists on either side choose to engage each other in some kind of unhealthy codependency where they cannot exist without their perceived enemy that they project all their own worst qualities onto. The extremists views are absurd in reality, so reality is walled off and everyone in this walled off reality is some kind of trope. “Woke”, “snowflake”, “millennial” “BLM Antifa”. Or on the other side “fascist”, “Trumpster” and so on.
Percentages vary according to region. It reminds me of a great Roll Playing Game called TORG - where each region in the world had an alternate reality where magic and tech existed to varying degrees, and you can cross over realities and be a 1920’s style gangster fighting dinosaurs alongside a Fantasy wizard. https://ulisses-us.com/spielsysteme/torgeternity/ I see this as an analogy to how we often when we cross “reality boundaries” and step into different communities or regions.
We currently have a large percentage of the population that operate on completely irrational presuppositions. This irrational population is easily manipulated by media of all extremes of the spectrum to such a degree that now the far right and the far left agree on key conspiracy theories. They’ll easily swap their vote from Bernie Sanders to Trump because their world view is not based on rationality or what Bernie Sanders actually stands for.
This is a crisis of Orange - in 2021 we as a society are not even anywhere close to Green much less Teal. It suggests to me that society cannot just “skip levels” any more than an individual can, and those things we refuse to deal with at a given level can bring us back down the chromatic ladder real quick individually and collectively - like a game of Chutes and Ladders. Wokism is a shadow label that people project onto Green ideologies. It’s something people dislike because they struggle to accept Green values. I want to grab women by the pussy at work. And wokism won’t let me. So I get angry and project woke communist BLM antifa onto every woman who doesn’t want to be pussy groped. Yes, that’s an extreme - but to a lesser degree that is what is happening. Boomer and gen X men are up in arms about their favorite comic book heroes being transformed into black women. Deep down it hurts them that their childhood heroes from a bygone era are transforming and leaving them behind in their walled off irrational world.
Wokeism is not in any way going to disappear any time soon. Instead, it’s methods are being co-opted in irrational double-think. Orwell was prophetic. The irrational really might as well be shouting “Four legs good, two legs bad.” as that makes just as much sense as what is being projected onto Green world views in the past 10 years. We have a small minority on what used to be the left in conflict with a small minority on what used to be the right both trying to re-define all the many good improvements of Green as somehow bad and evil. Compassionate government - Communism. Social welfare and universal healthcare for children and the elderly - Communism. Public education based in rational sciences - wokeism. Anti sexual harrassment laws, equal rights and protection against harrassment in the workplace - wokeism.
I see this all as natural growing pains of society as some of us move from Orange to Green while others are still struggling to move from Amber to Orange. Denial, anger, depression, bargaining and acceptance. I see a lot of anger in people as they react to the current crisis we are in, which leads me to think we are only at the very beginning. Further along than 10-30 years ago when we as a global society were in denial, but still a very long way to go.
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@raybennett
“I want to grab women by the pussy at work. And wokism won’t let me. So I get angry and project woke communist BLM antifa onto every woman who doesn’t want to be pussy groped.”
What percentage of people do you think comprise your extreme example here? Is this a Strawman, a place holder, that we can use to define our “fight”?
Orange is an IT term used to describe Society/Culture that we have. Given that IT simply “reports the weather”, then yes whatever societal/cultural crises exist are indeed a crises of the society/culture. Applying the term “Orange”, which is defined by assessment of society and culture in no way helps to solve the crises. Or does it?
It’s interesting that you mention “skip levels”. At least here in the US, we have the most liberal, progressive (using classical definitions, not Twitter dog whistle definitions) large scale government, society and culture that humankind has ever implemented in all of history.
Another of my broken record questions is, beyond Marcuse’s biological argument for collectivism, what basis can IT use to rationally justify the postulation of these “future levels”, “future Noosphere”.
Perhaps the Integral Model, colorful levels and all, might not be sufficient to report on the world?
Or perhaps a more rigorous decoupling of political agendas from Integral level assessments, as well as much more rigorous inspection of unhealthy level instantiations (healthy Amber, corrupt Orange, mean Green, selfish Blue, etc) might help?
It brings up one of my broken record questions - How can we implement significantly increased collectivism without the authoritarian nightmare that has always followed in the past? i.e. How can we hand over the keys to the kingdom to an enlightened elite, and not have this enlightened elite do what’s always been done every other time collectivism has been tried in the past?
I do think it safe to say that given the miniscule uptake of “Integral Theory” by the population, that it would be child like to attribute this 10-30 year progression to Integral Theory influence. Should we consider that our liberal representative democracy might be “getting the job done” with or without a handful of IT geeks?
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