Business and sustainability are not incompatible, it's the people I worry about.

  I have been a capitalist since around age 17-18 yrs old and remain so even now with all the economic problems.  Ken Wilber's discussion abut business and sustainability points out how I can remain being a capitalist, while also maintaining my spiritual way.  I have put up several blogs previously relating to integral capitalism that more or less go along with Ken's discussion.

  However, I'm still quit shocked that with this economic crisis and the obviousness of the moral underdevelopment of the CEO's of the these investment houses, that there hasn't been some sort of popular ground swell to resolve this problem.  I even joined the FOCUS group that is working on "Conscious Capitalism" to see if they were doing anything significant, but everything I read appeared pretty monological. Thus, while there are probably several ways to solve things, the integral way is the one I'm most familiar with, so I will use that as a model for what I think could be done.

  So, how do I see integral theory as solving this problem?  The answer is "easily" and yet with "great difficulty."  The "easily" relates to how to theoretically solve the problem, the "great difficulty" is related to not merely getting this idea into practice, but getting support for the idea in the first place, since it's probably a teal level idea and so not really understandable by the people that would have to be supporting it to make it happen.  Not to mention needing tons of money and a significant culture change.

  However, based upon the crises we are having, not merely economic, but terrorism, genocide, etc, I think it is pretty clear that the assumptions we are presently using in our culture, i.e. the meme level of development, is too low to solve them.  Since we, as a culture, generally follow a "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" or in Ex-President Bush's red meme, "If I don't say it's broke, I'm not going to let anyone fix it", I guess I would say we're finally seeing that it is broke and we damn well better fix it or it's going to eat us all up...except for the extremely rich with cash reserves, who will extremely benefit from the excessive deflation that is and will be occurring, so they can scoop up deals at crisis prices and become very extremely rich.  That reminds me of what, I believe, the Rothchild's did immediately after they received early notice of Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo; they sold English stocks short and created a panic, then bought up the shares for a song.

  Well, I diverge, so let me go to the "easy" part of fixing the problem: we need more Teal/Turquoise leaders in business and politics.  Next, there are two parts to the "great difficulty" part.  The first is that it has to be a continuous process, since as Ken notes, every generation creates more "ethnocentric" people, to use a more gentile word than what he used.

  The second part relates to my observation that I don't think there are presently any mechanisms set up, other than theoretically through being raised by one's family, where a person is taught how to morally develop.  I say theoretically, since I contiuously see physical, emotional, and other abuse being passed down through several generations, with no interventions being done to prevent this, while the family is incapable, given their limited resources.  However, to even suggest such a thing be done by a secular group is to cause a hew and cry by several major groups that think they have cornered the market on morals.  This is not to say that many of these major groups are not trying to do the right thing and many are putting their money where their mouth is.  The problem is, their worldview just won't solve these problems.  We've plenty of examples from the past, I think, and while a person could argue that that was then and this is now, and they've learned their lesson, it remains that without changing the worldview, everthing still looks like a nail to that cultural hammer.  What I seem to be recently observing is that more and more people are actually regressing and suspect that is partially or strongly related to the failure of the orange meme to serve up all those answers they promised.  On the other hand, this has created such a pain for us that we now also have the opportunity to not regress, but to progress and develop to those higher, more inclusive memes, where there are different solutions than the old ones that have repeatedly failed.

  As Einstein said: "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome."  I've wondered that if this were true, why does it continue to happen?  While I'm not an expert in this area, my initial thought is that it could be because it is not the same generation making those same errors and with each generation, we have yet another crop of "ethnocentric" people.  This is part of what I call "The Big Lie" theory.  A "Big Lie," by my definition, is a lie that isn't found to be untrue until it's too late to do anything about it.  In other words, a lie that might take a generation or so for it to percolate through the system such that enough people experience its falllacy and stop following that particular cultural admonition.  I think the Viet Nam and now the Iraq War are examples of how we can do really dumb things over and over, because it is different generations doing them.  Perhaps if Bush would have had the experience of being shot a few times like Kerry did, he might not have been so fast to get into another debacle so quickly.  But I diverge once again.

  So, the bottom line is what I have posited in some other blogs:  Integral Life and/or other integral or related thinking groups are going to be the ones doing the pulling on the teal bootstraps, because I don't see it coming from anywhere else.  While I see things being started with the Master's in Integral Studies program, I think that is like trying to melt an iceberg by pissing on it, but also with no slander meant to the program with which I wish I could enroll in it.  What I mean is, I don't see it working fully until integral studies/development are part of the K-12th grades in all our schools.  I think much of the problem is that presently our educational system is set up to get people, at best, to the orange level, while what we really need is not more orange scientists or green meme'ers, but teal and turquoise.  Now I'm talking serious development.  I don't about you, but I really struggled to get to green and I thought I was pretty hot stuff when I got there.

  The punchline is that moral and cognitive development to the teal/turquoise level is what is needed and yet there is no formal or other cultural support for it.  I've struggled mightily and I'm hoping I'm presently holding onto the hem of teal, but since I tend to overestimate myself and regress, I can only hope.  However, I do have enough transient excursions into teal to see the seriousness of the systemic problem that we are having and that obviously the present day leaders just aren't (mostly) developed enough to even SEE the problem, much less solve it.  This sub-prime mortgage mess is a prime example if I may use this horrible pun.  It was an orange weapon used by red level CEO's that did not have a clue how it could backfire.  The supposedly orange level mathematicians who developed this weapon also did not have a clue that this could happen...or at least they didn't tell anyone of this possibility.  This is because teal and turquoise worldviews are needed to even see the problem.  Hello marking to market, good bye sub prime mortgages.

  So, what do we do next?  Does anyone else out there in integral land have any other ideas about how to pull up society by their teal bootstraps?