While I’ve read and absolutely loved Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality, Theory of Everything, Spirituality, as well as some Kohlberg, Erikson, Piaget, Fouquet, Pinker, McWhorter (early work on language) frankly I’m wondering if the Integral community hasn’t lost sight that Integral Theory as “another map of the world”.
KW was extremely clear in his earlier writings and talks that Integral Theory is one map of the world, not the actual world. And while he keeps reiterating this even today (30 seconds out of 30 minute interview), I don’t know how often the Integral community really considers this.
When comedians like Bill Maher (who I suspect has genius IQ) start using terms like Progressophobia (coined by another genius Steven Pinker) to highlight what Integralists would perhaps call aperspectival madness and a common person might say “well that’s a bunch of bullshit”, isn’t it time to perhaps perform a true introspection on how Integral Theory is mapping to the Real World, or not?
When young, I absolutely LOVED science fiction (starting with Heinlien, Asimov, Clarke, …) looking at highly detailed technology, social, economic, spiritual, and human development possibilities unencumbered by the reality we live in. Did each novel or “noosphere” created by brilliant authors impact thinking? Of course, but it was still clearly labeled as “fiction”.
Having seen the old thread on “can we just skip green”, what I’m left with is that it seems the Integral community is looking to skip many levels - green, blue, orange, fuchsia and just head straight into a Teal Noosphere. No infrastructure (that’s holding us back), no meaningful buy-in (those people can’t get it), and back to the title of the post little true acknowledgement (i.e. Subsume, Inclusion) of everything that came before and is today continuing to progress.
When a comedian is basically chuckling on a weekly comedy show about aperspectival madness (aka - a bunch of bullshit), shouldn’t we take a breath to see if perhaps the world is progressing, has progressed well past the stages Integralists want to “fix”, and do we have the maturity to acknowledge, honor and included what came before?