Perhaps There Is A Big Elephant In The Integral Room

Hi Brent,  I like the post. I have been down this path with Integral before. I wish you luck. Do you know Ken personally? Maybe you can get his attention. Or have him meet with me. I live close to him. Maybe he would like to see the Center I am opening soon. Too much reality might make Integral's and Ken's Vision, have to be revised. The LR would look much different with the truths your pointing to .

Have you noticed Brent how the Elite have infested Integral with Jim Garrison and others. The story you are working on hits closer to home than you think. Robb Smith and Ken have been duped. They are unable to take the red pill. Unless some close friends can get in their faces and smack them for the 6 billion other people, to wake up to the horrible truth right infront of their faces. I think this is not the forum for this stuff of Alex's. Integral thinks it has a grasp of the LR. But does not understanding banking 101. Integral needs a LR awakening and quick before the Elite blob takes over Integral hopes.

God speed Brent

hey brent and brian,

alex is definitely an interesting character, but it's important to remember that he makes his living by making terrifying, sensational claims (e.g. his allegation that the u.s. government was behind 9/11).

AHAHAHAHAHA!

GUESS WHOS BACK! AGAAIIN! aha ha

...

cough* *cough

uhhh. zardoz voice is very weak right now... maybe he caught the swine flu...

however... the day of zardoz' revenge is not far... he conspires with his friends Night Owl and Rohrschach... soon the whole plot will be unconvered... just be patient, my friends, be patient... trust in god, but still lock your motorcycle...

see you soon..

Z.

Hi Brent,

"I am going to try to summerize my inquiry into simple academic-like statement: The nature of integral is to include all perspectives. The inclusion of all perspectives typically leads to a moderate-ish position on all perspectives as the process is one that tries to find a kind of balance."

I think it is more accurate to say that integral (when used as a term to mean a type of lens on reality) states that reality itself gets enacted first and always through perspectives, and if one wants to find the greatest sense of wholeness from an ever-enfolding and ever-unfolding reality, one must recognize and accept that these perspectives exist.  The statement you make about integral including all perspectives turns on the scope of the word "include:" if by include you mean recognizing that a perspective exists than I agree with that conclusion. If by include you mean give it equal credence in a given context when setting out with a specific objective in that context, than I do not.  Hence there is no reason why integral should yield a "moderate-ish" position because it is not trying to find balance, per se.  You set the objective based on the context you're confronting.  So if you set out to find balance, then perhaps you will end up with your result.  But often balance is counter-productive to the context at-hand.

All of this to say that for me the rest of your inquiry turns on this essential point.  To get a good integral answer, one always has to ask a very precise, very contextual integral question.

To Brian's critique, I find his point of view non-sensical.  I mean this not in a mean-spirited way, and I accept that he has it, but I find a mode of discourse that starts with ad hominem assertions and ends with sweeping generalizations to be generally useless as a service to rational community-based learning.

Robb Smith

Hey guys (and gals, though i've noticed it's mostly guys who are interested in conspiracy theory)--i am thoroughly enjoying watching this discussion unfold.  As a life-long enthusiast of conspiracy theory, i've kept an eye on everything from Alex Jones to the Masons, to the Bilderbergers, and all the way to glass domes on the moon, structures on Mars, ancient astronauts, and various forms of (occasionally illicit) extraterrestrial liaison.  Not only is it wildly entertaining to wrap interesting mythologies around the complexity of modern life, it's also a great way to remind myself of everything i don't know—and i personally think that it is extremely important for even our best maps of reality to acknowledge the mind boggling mystery at the periphery of understanding, dark seas of incomprehension scribed with warnings that plainly read: "Here Be Dragons."

The problem with most conspiracy theory is that, when followed through to the end with a critical eye, any particular theory ends up appearing hopelessly naive.  However, it is equally naive to think that, in a world with as dramatically imbalanced a distribution of wealth as ours, there are no conspiracy theories at all.  American and European history has been decidedly influenced by a plethora of secret societies, each with its own sphere of influence, control, and power.  Let's be clear—those with the most wealth and power will almost always manipulate the system so they can maintain that power.  And they use tactics that have been in play since at least the Roman Empire—even the Babylonian, if you listen to Alex Jones.  But, outside the world of comic books and caped crusaders (the Guild of Calamitous Intent notwithstanding), it is hard to imagine any single room of people powerful enough (or competent enough with their power) to successfully manipulate and control the thoughts and values of over six billion individual agents around the world.

Conspiracies certainly exist, but no prison is strong enough to confine Eros.

Much of the confusion, i believe, is due to an unnecessary personification of the "nexus-agency" of the lower right quadrant—e.g. Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand"—there is a very real "intelligence" to the LR quadrant, a self-organizing force that we have begun to intuit, but have found difficult to account for (at least before Ken Wilber's four-quadrant map made it explicit)—and while looking for some way to "ground" this LR intelligence in the real world, we naturally project it onto the power elite.  After all, if there anyone who could influence the political, industrial, military, and entertainment worlds, it would certainly be the top .0001% of the wealthiest people in the world.  But to think that any of them would be capable of subverting more than 500 years of individual liberty, enslaving the free-thinkers of the world under some sort of monolithic New World Order aegis of global totalitarianism (as Alex Jones suggests) is hopelessly naive, and radically overestimates our own sway on the forces of evolution in this lonely pocket of the galaxy.

It reminds me of my favorite argument against those who believe the Bush administration was responsible for 9/11—do you really think that those responsible for the FEMA, Guantanamo Bay, and Iraqi WMD fiascos could really carry out an operation as incomprehensibly complex as a 9/11 coverup?*

As to Brian's comment that "the LR would look much different with the truths you're pointing to"—would it really?  Isn't this thirst for wealth and power pretty much covered by the "Red" stage of development?  And isn't it made pretty explicit that any level of cognition can be hijacked by ego-centric values, and that these power-hungry values can even be dressed up (double-speak style) with the language of pretty much any other stage of values?  While i agree that the integral treatment of political science has remained highly abstract and conceptual, and its real-world implementation needs to take into account the enormous obstacle offered by the fact that the power elite and the developmental elite seem to share almost no overlap whatsoever, i don't think our distribution of wealth and power does anything to "break" the integral model.  I also think it can accommodate the concept of "esoteric" and "exoteric" power dynamics as they exist today and throughout history, which is what most political conspiracy theory concerns itself with.

Personally, i have noticed that i have grown far less interested in conspiracies of imprisonment, and more interested in conspiracies of jailbreak—that is, if any one of the thousands of possible conspiracies was actually true, it would be extraterrestrial contact that would have the potential of radically reconfiguring our integral maps.  Nothing would stretch our definitions of the word "integral" more than interplanetary contact.  Just a couple weeks ago at Ken's loft, he said something along the lines of "right now in history, we have the biggest opportunity we will ever have to integrate all the world's knowledge and to get a real sense of the universal—until we make extraterrestrial contact, when we will have to compare our integrated world-truth with all the other integrated world-truths that are out there."  But we don't even need to be so visionary—i think that even finding a single microorganism in the seas of Europa would be enough to galvanize a massive upswell of human consciousness, as we would have a new symbolic "other" by which to contrast a new global sense of "us."

You can almost smell the pot fumes with this sort of dorm-room philosophizing ^_^

Again, i think it is foolish to believe any given conspiracy theory, on it's own merit.  The truth is too big, too complex, and most likely too compartmentalized for even the conspirators themselves to fully understand.  And it is easy to become seduced by the sorts of generalizations people like Alex Jones throw around so easily—one only needs to look at the deeply-embedded culture wars of America to see that, on an ideological level, the Left and the Right represent some very real distinctions in modern political thought.  That is, even if the American political system has been manipulated on a structural level by the power elite, it is still inhabited by a plurality of different perspectives—some red, some amber, some orange, some green, some teal, and some turquoise.  Some valuing individualist libertarianism, some collectivist socialism.  Some emphasizing interior values, some emphasizing exterior conditions.  Some socially liberal, some socially conservative; some fiscally liberal, some fiscally conservative.  Again, although i agree that the integral community still needs to find more pragmatic interpretations of real-world power dynamics, we already have all the conceptual tools we need to do so—we just need to continue unfolding the map and unpacking some of these insights.

* Which is an entirely different group of people than those who believe the Bush administration wasn't directly responsible for executing the 9/11 attacks, but knew it was going to happen and allowed it to, precipitated by Cheney's confession that we "need" a "new Pearl Harbor"—which i find to be a far more believable accusation, without necessarily believing it myself.

* Just so i don't come off as a typical liberal Bush-basher (though it can sometimes seem like shooting whales in a barrel) i will say in self-defense that i am horribly disappointed that the media has been ignoring the admirable success of his AIDS work in Africa, as it's been recently estimated that his actions are responsible for saving the lives of over one million people.  It was a shining diamond in the eight-year rough that should receive far more acknowledgment than it does.  For some reason i doubt very much that Dick Cheney was closely involved in that one.  (Yes, i am a typical liberal Cheney basher.)

PS - I had an ex-girlfriend once who didn't know who the Freemasons were until i told her.  She went home and made a big production to her family accusing her grandfather of being part of a secret global conspiracy to control the world.  It turns out he wasn't--he was just a bricklayer.

--

Corey W deVos
(dj rekluse)

Writer, Content Producer, and Webmaster
Integral Life, Integral Naked
Managing Editor, KenWilber.com

"Include the Values, Negate the View!"

Well I don't necessarily buy into the conspiracy, I am of the view that the Republicans are the conservatives and the Democrats are the liberals paradigm no longer holds.  I think the two part system based on conservative/liberal is archaic and obsolete.  For instance, take a Republican from New York City and put him in Jackson, Mississippi and he would likely be viewed as a liberal.  Likewise, take a Democrat from Jackson, Mississippi and put him in New York City and he would likely be viewed as a conservative.  You can find similar examples in my home state of California.  Take a Republican from the Bay Area and put him in Fresno, and he would be viewed as a liberal.  Take a Democrat from Fresno, and put him in the Bay Area and he would likely be viewed as a conservative.  So, if the Republican and Democrat parties no longer hold to the Republicans are conservative and Democrats are liberal, what is the purpose of the two party system:  to determine which special interests get Washington money!  It is like a game of catch and only two people are allowed to play, the Republicans and the Democrats...the one that has the ball is the one who gets to decide who gets the money.  Every so often the electorate decides that one party has to throw the ball to the other party, and then that party gets to give the money to its special interests.  The really smart special interests are the ones that play both sides of the field.  Which is why we never get meaningful change.  If you look at pork barrel spending over the last 16+ years, it doesn't matter who was in power, the pork barrel spending was about the same all the way through.

It is time to abandon the political parties and become Independent or Undeclared.  Partisan party politics does nothing more than promote the multi-billion dollar electioneering business.  If you need an example, just like Christmas, the party primaries come earlier ever election year.  You make more money if the election season is longer! 

The majority of Americans are moderates and want the parties to work together to achieve common goals...why does it never happen?  Because, the partisan politics is good for the businesses that make money off of it.  Which includes all the news commentators and their talk shows.

"The single greatest threat to American democracy will be blind party politics.",  John Adams, 2nd President of the U.S.

Stephen Kladder

Greetings and Salutations,

I like your comment Brent, and I love that it ended up on this week's homepage of IntegralLife with an insightful response from Robb Smith among others. Wondering if this comment is filtered into what I first see based on my recent searches or if that technology still isn't up and running here. For what its worth, here is a link to The New Synthesis - http://www.revolutiontalk.net/   - a comprehensive presentation by Bob Avakain, the chairperson of the Revolutionary Communisty Party, USA (RCP).

The movie Waking Life introduced me to AlexJones. Even though I find his passionate rants an admirable call to dance on the grave of apathy, it often leaves a sour taste behind which became impossible to ignore when I heard his interview with Noam Chomsky. I'm not all that worried that the Ruling Class is conspiring to kill of 95%  of the world's population as Jones postulates... although his movies eventually lead me to 'Money as Debt ' http://vodpod.com/watch/1544492-money-as-debt 

  In my opinion, Corey de Vous does an excellent job of focusing the context here on the question of the overlap (and lack thereof) between the power elite and the developmental elite. The RCP and Integral Life are facing similar the challenges of developing an On Ramp and building a movement. Moreover, both of these organizations are hell-bent on uniting with the greatest number of people and then struggling to progress the dialectic, then again reaching unity. Unfortunately, the only material I've found on Communism in the world of Wilber, has been a handful of sentences that accurately identify Marxism as before its time, and the religion of scientistic materialism as pathetically dreadful.

What is really going on, and how can we most accurately make meaning of the political and economic governance in this country and in the world? According to the lastest BLS survey there are about 155 million people in the US labor force. I haven't done the detailed work of separating out supervisors and self employed from the clerical, service, blue collar and farm workers, but even a conservative estimate of the number of proletariat in this country has to be around 70 million. My elephant in the Integral room is the question - Does Capitalism (even enlightened capitalism) fundamentaly require exploitation?; Are the interests of those 70 million inherently antagonistic to the rest of the labor force? How important is the higher moral ground in developing meaningful right livelihood?

An even crazier question - Where are all the Integral Communist?!?