Integral Wet T-Shirt Contest

Every now and then we need to ponder the essential shapes and styles of activity which define our type of consciousness.  Hypothetical T-shirt slogans (aphorisms) can provide us with a playful look at the “basic proto-moves” which undergird the varieties of Integral Consciousness.  Consider the following ridiculous options:

He who believes ‘everyone is right’ -- is more right than they are.  Get used to it.

The above provocative slogan is sure to tempt a few integral hearts or at least tickle their (red) self-assertion circuits.  Here we find a classic Wilber-style formulation in which the “post-modern” equality of values is exceeded without devaluing it!   This is the kind of inner activity which produces knowledge of “holarchy”. 

Capitalism is bad for business.

This is a conversational claim (& obviously the specific implications of “capitalism” and “business” are hotly contested) but within Integral communities we find various insurgent longings for some form of advanced socio-economic understanding which could outdo today's “business as usual”.  So we are looking for ideas which promise deconstruction, reconstruction and creative openings to emergent possibilities which lie beyond the structural range of our apparent current alternatives.  And like ultra-Hegelians this means finding innovative ways to simultaneously embrace and cancel the “sides” of any issue.  

Bad mothering creates misogynists.

This thought-provoking (and possibly argument provoking) item is certainly not the whole story on the social status of genderized energies but Integral feminism is noteworthy, among other things, for its attempt to re-empower woman as participatory causes of the current system (rather than, as “green” tends to do, dis-empower women as the mysteriously victimized results OF the current system).  Women who can identify with the production of anti-feminine social trends are in the position from which new trends can be actively, rather than reactively, generated.

Does the word “God” exist?

This Wittgensten-style inquiry leaps over the apparent contradiction between “believers” and “non-believers” (who think the Supreme Being is an empty verbal category).  In fact it lands us in the realm of meta-contextual sliding signifiers but with a jaunty spirit ready to move beyond post-modernism and, notably, the possibility of a Real God is left wide open...  We see here the integral tendency to invoke, deconstruct, humorously affirm and structurally ponder the questions of ultimate value.

It came, I saw, We conquered.

This play off Julius Caesar’s famous brag combines the three irreducible viewpoint options -- suggesting not only that such a visionary tripartite solution will eventually conquer the world but that it has always been at the heart of every victory.

I’m 100% in favor of rigorous government profiling!  

(I just don’t want them using race, religion, language or nationality as profiling criteria.)  

This forward looking assertion meets the sensitive cultural complaint about exterior discrimination but exceeds it in the necessary, developmental reality of the flexible, contextual inner-discrimination that integral psychographic tools are beginning to make possible.  I’ll get on a plane with any religion or skin color... but not with any dangerous brain wave pattern or terroristic psychological profile.

What would you put on a T-Shirt to encourage integral-style thinking/feeling in whomever who saw it?