Wicked Problems: Bringing Wisdom and Compassion to Immigration

@corey-devos

I’ll start in reverse and play this out:

  • Biden/Democracts promote “worker collectives” from the podium (this last week)
  • Workers organize and “walk out”
  • Market place won’t pay $10 for a Big Mac or $8/# for bacon or or or…
  • Employers replace every employee they can with automation - or hire workers that like their jobs - or outsource to Phillipines or Vietnam or or or…
  • Democrats run again on UBI, since “Capitalism is broken”
  • Low skill/unskilled workers stay home playing video games and have weed and munchies delivered and mail in their ballots voting for more free stuff that perpetuates the cycle.

All of this is promoted under the guise of “fixing the external systems (that don’t work) that are oppressing internal quadrant development and creating a meaningless life”.

It’s a good plan to expand government. Same holds for say the $15/hour national minimum wage. $15/hour is likely somewhere near the right wage level for assembling a Big Mac in NYC or San Fran. Is it the right wage in Greeley CO or Prescott AZ? Likely not.

Your marketing firm example is a very similar example. I might be off on the type of marketing firm your wife is with, but typically there are people that bring in/win business opportunities and then those that execute the concepts. Execution is worth quite a lot, but the prize is in winning the business. And sadly for the employees, the longer you are with a firm the harder it is for you to help expand the business. You might get better at execution, but your network eventually becomes synonymous with the firm’s network. It’s the classic “what have you done for me lately” conundrum.

But getting back to Agency and Meaning in Life, Frank Furedi (communist, psychologist) lays it very concisely. You build yourself through vocation, skills, essentially self development and execution. Anything that creates trajectories (arches of development?) that distract people from their own development (free lunch, collective free lunches) is therefor unhealthy for both individuals and collective society.
So looking at “free stuff” to help people, free trade schools, STEM education would be fine. Free “party with your friends for a couple years programs” like Intersectionality Studies are detrimental to both the individual and society.

EDIT: This should have been posted in the Information Warfare thread. My bad!


Here’s the challenge as I see it.

Running a multiperspectival community requires members who are themselves capable of taking multiperspectival views. People who are either unwilling or unable to take multiperspectival views (such as an ability to criticize one’s own preferred political allegiances, for example) are unable to contribute to the multiperspectial space, because their contributons tend to cause the discussion to collapse into monoperspectival belief systems.

Case in point — the Wang Huning thread ended up being disrupted once a member diverted the discussion to a hypothetical future impeachment of Joe Biden. And that immediately collapsed the breadth and depth and richness of the discussion where everyone could find some point of agreement, back to a basic fact-checking “one of these perspectives is true, the other isn’t” discussion. And I participated with this — I should have caught the diversion sooner than I did, and then redirected the conversation to a more appropriate thread.

But it’s one example of how a monoperspectival comment was able to throw an entire conversation off track.

This is one reason why I emphasize 3rd-person verifiable evidence as much as I do. Because that is the minimal number of perspectives required to get a meaningful discussion off the ground. Ideally we get into 4th-person and 5th-person perspectives as well, but 3rd-person seems to be a minimum. It’s not enough to base an integral conversation off of assumptions, stereotypes, or low-resolution caricatures of your perceived opponents.

So what does “multiperspectival” mean? Doesn’t it mean “everyone is right”, and therefore “everyone is invited”?

Well, yes and no. It means that everyone has a piece of the truth — but some pieces are bigger, better, and more true than others. However, to “transcend and include” is simultaneously to “negate to preserve” — which means, integral needs to be able to carefully discern fact from fiction, and negate the fictions by grounding the discussion in verifiable 3rd, 4th, and 5th person perspectives.

In other words, the only way to maintain a mulltiperspectival “community of the adequate”, is to negate people’s monoperspectival views. It is an inherent tension, maybe even contradiction, of integral enactment itself, I think.

Now, my impulse is generally not to negate the entire person — you’ll notice I have never banned anyone from this community. But I will do my own ongoing diligence to negate the views that simply cannot fit within a larger integral framing, while doing my best to include the underlying values that animate those views in the first place. There is almost always a place where we can find agreement. But we have to be willing to dig deeper, and contact the source of those views in the first place.

I cannot enfold with the view that 2+2=5. There is simply no way to reconcile that with the rest of the integral math. However, we can talk about the sorts of conditions that generate views like “2+2=5” in the first place, and then try to address that.

Similarly, I cannot enfold with the view that the 2020 election was stolen, without a strong body of objective, falsifiable evidence to support that case. I support people’s right to demand that evidence, I support the right of a political party to challenge and verify election results, and to use our court systems in order to verify the evidence. However, if the evidence falls short, if the court systems reject the evidence because it does not fulfill the minimum 3rd-person standards of proof, then we need to be willing and able to rethink our views and let go of the ones that are simply not supported. THAT is an example of a multi-perspectival perspective, the capacity to rethink our view when either new evidence comes along, or when old evidence is critically debunked.

So, when I dig deeper, the only way I am able to really enfold with people who continue to believe without evidence that the election was stolen, is to shift the conversation away from election results, and toward the topic of “trust” and “legitimacy”. Because where I can truly resonate is in my own shared view that our institutions —media, political, economic, medical, etc. — have failed to rise to the challenge of our current cultural and social selection pressures, and have therefore squandered whatever goodwill we collectively placed in them. I understand why people have fallen into total distrust, and even cynicism. Because that trust has been battered and bruised, especially over the last decade, which is causing a collapse of legitimacy in many of the institutions our society continues to depend on. Which is exactly how we arrived at things like Qanon, and the first non-peaceful transfer of power in modern American history, which I experience as a very deep wound in our national character and identity that will fester for years to come.

And finally, let me say, that even when we disagree (and we should always feel like it is okay to disagree!) it’s important to remember to come from a field of genuine care in our engagements. I love and respect every one of you, even and especially the ones who disagree with me the most. I learn a lot from all of these exchanges — sometimes it causes me to rethink my view, other times it prompts me to sharpen my blades and better define my own views. Either way, it is always beneficial to me, and all of the heat from the friction gets immediately converted into creative juice for my ongoing programs on the site. So please remember that I love you all deeply, even when your views are just so obviously and frustratingly wrong :wink:

What I’m saying is Cato does some good work (I know one of their Sr. Analysts) but also has an agenda to fulfill on. Also, it doesn’t matter since current optics don’t look good for the Biden/Czarina/Mayorkas “Immigration” works. If they are in fact kicking ass on immigration, the message isn’t getting out.
Some of my ardent Leftist friends were lamenting (remember, we live in a border state) that they were very disappointed in Biden’s handling of the border.

Mayorkas is likely to get impeached in 2023 for his handling of the border, regardless of the Cato blurb.

You might re-read the thread and the “disruption”.
I would note that it wasn’t a “monoperspectival” discussion since there were a few people involved that clearly have differing perspectives.

Did you notice that this discussion is happening in the Immigration thread :slight_smile: Oopsies…

I agree with much of your post. And to me, it’s why we need to maintain a healthy inclusion of well-rounded perspectives from both left-leaning intellectuals, and right-leaning intellectuals. Because both sides are focusing on only a single pole of a number of critical polarities, and only by enfolding both views can we suss out the critical nuances required to move the conversation forward, and to actually start solving problems.

Agency and communion are a polarity. Individual action and collective action are a polarity, There is no “right side” or “wrong side” to either of these polarities — however, there are the negative manifestations of each pole, which occur when one pole becomes disintegrated from the other. Extreme agency, decoupled from communion, creates a sick society. Extreme communion, decoupled from agency, creates a sick society. It is our task, as integrals, to re-integrate these polarities, which simply cannot be done from within either of these narrow and polarized ideologies.

The problem occurs when we want to compare a healthy and robust expression of our own group’s preferred pole, to the unhealthy stereotypes of your group’s pole. We should be talking about — and actively integrating — both of these poles, so we can create new approaches that are more capable of reconciling multiple dimensions of our nature.

Which, honestly, is why I get so pissed off whenever someone starts coming in and labelling people as “Marxists” or “collectivists” or “deplorables” or what have you, because these judgments are coming through a very low-resolution filter based on caricatures of “the other side”.

“But getting back to Agency and Meaning in Life, Frank Furedi (communist, psychologist) lays it very concisely. You build yourself through vocation, skills, essentially self development and execution. Anything that creates trajectories (arches of development?) that distract people from their own development (free lunch, collective free lunches) is therefor unhealthy for both individuals and collective society.”

I think this is a partially true, but also painfully narrow, view. We don’t ONLY build ourselves through vocation, skills, execution, etc. We also build ourselves through relationships, communities, goodwill, and collective enfoldment. We use our social holon to build things like bridges and highways and internet infrastructures, so that each of us can better pursue our ageny and autonomy.

If they are in fact kicking ass on immigration, the message isn’t getting out.

I mean, I fully agree with that. But importantly, the message isn’t getting out TO WHOM? People who exist in a right-wing bubble, for example, would never hear that message in the first place. Just like people who live in a left-wing bubble would never hear about any positive thing that Trump ever did. And of course, if we spend the majority of our time on explicitly partisan platforms like Washington Examiner or Huffington Post or whatever, then our perception of the other is going to be even more skewed, because the selection pressures of the modern information landscape can only push people further toward extremism.

And yes, I had mentioned that Biden is getting heat from both the right and the left when it comes to immigration. But often for opposite reasons. I thought it was important to point out that, when it comes to the actual numbers, Biden is expelling more illegal immigrants per month than Trump was. We can have another set of discussions around whether that is good, bad, wise, compassionate, etc. But the numbers are what they are, and we should include them in our own personal integral analyses of the world around us.

You might re-read the thread and the “disruption”.

I did re-read it. You asked some good questions about technologies and roles that are produced by particular stages of development, and then diverted the conversation into a one-sided criticism of Biden and hypothesizing about his future impeachment. It took a non-partisan, or maybe even post-partisan conversation, and collapsed it into a merely partisan conversation.

Did you notice that this discussion is happening in the Immigration thread :slight_smile: Oopsies…

Whoopsie! Moving the thread now. Too many windows open!

Well, I’d encourage you to get out of your self-imposed box and make some friends. Even better, make friends with people who do not fall lockstep into your world view.

I find the youngest adult generation to be very interesting. In my order of preference of who I like to associate with, I’d place gen X (40-60yo) at my top preference (purely for egoistic reasons because that’s me), then Gen Z (under 20), then millennials (20-40 yo), then dead people, and then a far far far distant 5th place is Baby Boomers. I can’t think of more than a handful of Baby Boomer’s I’ve actually enjoyed the company of in my 50 years of life. Trump is basically the culmination of their work on planet earth.

We didn’t follow the thought line, but as defined our roles and responsibilities for, as an example, POTUS are not first and foremost Teal roles. First and foremost, as currently defined, is the protection of the Citizens of the United States.

I would say the population of the United States and most importantly the voting Citizenry. There isn’t a poll today, of voting eligible people that are aware that Biden/Harris/Mayorkas are “kicking ass” on Immigration.

I don’t see the polarity that you do between individual agency and communion. From my perspective they are decided distinct in their own rights.

Perhaps where we differ is in the concept of development arch or trajectory? Creating a trajectory towards collectivism for particularly young people can distract from their own development of personal agency. Grooming young people primarily on a collectivism arch can easily fuel their ego’s that the “issues” are “out there”. When we look at what we actually have control over, first and foremost is your own inner quadrant development.

My synopsis of Frank Furedi’s discussion was hardly complete. I would recommend giving it him a bit of time.

Well this may be a challenge for our ongoing discussions, as it is a polarity that lies at the very foundation of integral theory itself, which is obviously the main organizing framework for discussions in this “community of the adequate”. All these quadrants are real, all these quadrants tetra-arise, and all these quadrants are produced by multiple overlapping polarities (interior/exterior. individual/collective, part/whole, etc.)

I have pointed out ways that individual agency often finds greater autonomy through collective action. We do not need to commit our ideologies to only one or the other. In fact, that would be decidedly anti-integral, and would not live up to the expectation of multiperspectivalism in this community.

“Grooming young people primarily on a collectivism arch can easily fuel their ego’s that the “issues” are “out there”.”

Yes, that would be an example of an extreme collective pole that remains un-integrated with its corresponding pole, which is “agency”. You see similar pathologies when we veer too far in the other direction, and “groom young people” into hyper-individualism that causes them to think they are completely separate from everyone else. Too much agency produces counterdependence, and too much communion produces codependence. Both of these are pathological.

Where are you getting this from?
You just make stuff up, lol.

Name the last national legislation that promoted collectivism.
Hint - I already know the most obvious answer and have a rebuttal prepared.

By the way, this is one of the most frequent challenges people experience when they are coming into the integral space for the first time — that it seeks to genuinely include everything, including things that are outside of whatever ideology we are walking into the discussion with. People want to hear how other people’s perspectives are partial, not their own. It’s important to remember that the defining characteristics of all “first tier” stages (crimson to green) is that each stage is convinced of its own absolutism, that only their views and values are “correct” and everyone else’s are wrong.

We see this in integral psychology discussions, where people from one school of thought believe their school is the only “correct” school, and the schools that orient from other quadrants are therefore wrong.

We see this in art discussions, in the perpetual battles between constructivism, formalism, artist’s intent, etc.

And we see this with political conversations, probably the most frequently, because our political views are usually associated with various narrow epistemologies that only allow for one kind of truth in one or two quadrants, and rejects all other truths from other domains.

And sometimes there really is a clear right and wrong. 2+2=4 is clearly right, 2+2=5 is clearly wrong. If an orange person says “2+2=4”, and a green person says “2+2=5”, the green person is not more correct simply because they are coming from a more developed stage. In fact, it shows that the green person has not properly integrated their own orange layer of the stack.

So when it comes to the integral model, all discussions in this space must begin with a fundamental acknowledgement of these primordial dimensions of our being, and a recognition that different kinds of methodologies, ideologies, and orientations are associated with each of those quadrants. It’s not a question of “which quadrant is the correct or ‘really real’ one” – which seems to the conversation you and I keep getting stuck in — you keep insisting only one quadrant or one pole is real, and I keep insisting that we need to include the whole enchilada. It’s a question of “how can we fold all these different methodologies, ideologies, and orientations together, so that we can have a more comprehensive (and more impactful) way to make sense of the world, and to reduce the greatest suffering for the greatest number of people.” Sometimes that looks like a conservative individual-orented solution, other times int looks more like a progressive community-oriented solution.

I think we would do best to make sure we are trying to make room for all these seemingly conflicting views, because once we are firing the integral model on all cylinders, we see how many of those conflicts are actually coming from an absolutist enactment of certain perspectives over others, because that is what best conforms to the biases we already have.

And if any of us feels llke we are unwilling or unable to recognize and include these fundamental dimensions, I will say again, this probably is not the community for you.

Sometimes I wonder if things like this are a typo or a profound concept.

LMAO fixing that now :slight_smile:

Stupid fat fingers.

Darn I thought we were going into a transrational “things are true and also not true at the same time” discussion.

Not really - I suspected it was a typo, lol