DocWatts

Kind of late to the party for this one, but for as much as Spirituality forms the 'core' of actualized.org, his Leo's videos on applied Systems Thinking for sociological topics has been some of the best content he's produced (in my opinion at least). Will be interesting watching this after recently finishing Jonathan Haidt's book 'The Righteous Mind', which also takes a descriptive approach to the dispositional initiations from which liberal and conservative belief systems are derived. @Leo Gura Any plans on doing a vid on Marxism or Fascism at some point? I know you've touched on these topics elsewhere, but it would be valuable to give these ideologies the 'treatment' that you've applied to the more mainstream ideologies.

Darryl Cooper of the Martyrmade podcast comes to mind, in that he's very good at perspective taking in his work which deals with history, sociology, and Ideology. While conservatism informs his work to some degree, he doesn't come across as an ideologue. Would highly recommend his series Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem. https://martyrmade.com/fear-loathing-in-the-new-jerusalem/

This might be among the best content on his channel, kudos to Dr. K for approaching this topic with wisdom and compassion. What particularly struck a chord with me as he tells his story is that one of his classmates actually making an effort to treat him with compassion in all likelihood saved a bunch of people's lives. It's also really encouraging to see a real world example of someone learning to us to use introspection and questioning to pull away from a very dark path.

It's not that people are intentionally trying to be jerks to other people, at least not most of the time. It's more about being unintentionally dismissive of other people's lived experience. It's okay to make mistakes, but at least be willing to listen when someone more intimately aquanted with whatever you've been making assumptions about tells you about thier direct experience.

The intuitions behind our moral frameworks including religion didn't evolve for the purposes of Truth, they were adaptive ways of allowing people to live and work together in communities that had become too big for kin relationships to serve that purpose. Whether religion is good or not is going to be whether it fits the adaptive needs of the society its in. Many of the problems we're seeing in Western societies today come from moral frameworks that are highly adaptive for Blue societies without any ethnic or cultural diversity finding themselves in the middle of multicultural Orange societies.

Call me a big old Green-ie or what have you, but generally speaking I'm going to advocate for actually listening to people who say that the community has been unwelcoming to them. We want LGBTQ people to feel welcome and comfortable here, and a big part of that is not assuming that people are being unreasonable when they talk about the ways that this community has been less than welcoming and dismissive of their concerns and life experiences.

What's both sad and hilarious is that reactionary snowflakes will also whine and cry about how conservatives are supposedly the Jews of the 21st century (as far as discrimination goes) when they receive justified backlash for expressing bigoted views.

Besides personal financial gain, there's also the prospect of getting to be treated as an "honorary white" as a reward for confirming to the Christian nationalist ideal of what a model minority should look and behave like. Can't talk about racism in America without also talking about classism, as the two are inextricably intertwined. When reactionaries do find their idea of a model minority who's willing to become a mouthpiece for Christian nationalism, they tend to show them off like merit badges ("see we're not really racist, it's just black culture that we have a problem with...")

From my own experience I would say the difference between the strategy and construct stages is this: At the Strategist stage you'll be likely to know in an abstract way that Constructs exist and may be able to list off some examples of social constructs (gender being an obvious one), but you probably won't be putting serious work into understanding the adaptive purpose of constructs, nor will you possess a high degree of self awareness about how your own experience of Reality is filtered through Constructs of various kinds. Once you start to move in to the Construct aware stage, you'll begin to cultivate a background awareness of the ways that human beings carve up an undifferentiated Reality for the purposes of survival. Constructs will move beyond something that only exist in the social realm, and you'll start to get an initiative sense of how the basic ways that we perceive and interact the world is pre-structured in advance of experience. You'll be less likely to see bad behaviors in a purely pejorative sense, but will want to understand what adaptive purpose those behaviors fulfill.

I would strongly caution against trying to use Spiral Dynamics for the purposes of personal development. Spiral Dynamics is far better understood and utilized a sociological model. Trying to use it for self improvement will almost certainly lead to epistemic bypassing. Give the Enneagram a look if you're looking for a developmental model that's much better suited for introspective work.

I would say that the most important issue in epistemology is cultivating construct awareness around the frameworks we use to navigate Reality, for the purpose of becoming more skillful in knowing when and where to use a particular framework. The flip side of this is the sort of epistemic inflexibility that leads to all kinds of reductionism, and to time and resource washing pseudo problems like the so called mind-body problem.

Beat me to it! Reading the book of the same title right now, and would highly recommend it. The descriptive approach of Social psychology is a very useful framework for gaining insight on the particular moral intuitions behind the various the Spiral Stages (which in the context of Haidt's book are Blue, Orange, and Green). The important takeaway being that different survival contexts cultivate particular moral intuitions, oh which our stated moral preferences tend to be post-hoc justifications. Moral intuitions which prioritize purity and a social hierarchy where everyone has their assigned role make good sense for the difficult survival challenges faced by the sorts of ethnically and culturally homogeneous communities which have been the norm throughout most of recorded history. It can become a huge problem though when these moral intuitions have to be integrated into the types of ethnically and culturally diverse societies that we happen to be living in today.

The main point of confusion here seems to come from failing to distinguish between meaning and purpose. Meaning in this context refers to the process of relevance realization which we use to navigate and manipulate our environments. Meaning is part and parcel of how Reality is phenomenologically disclosed to us, and is responsible for the automatic ways that our minds carve up an undifferentiated Reality for the purposes of survival. Our tendency to see the world as consisting of objects exists because the boundaries we draw have meaning for us; they are not arbitrary. A creature that is unable to make meaningful distinctions between the food it needs to survive and a predator charging at it through the bushes will not be able to survive. Meaning is a byproduct of being able to skillfully cope within one's environment, and is present for all complex life; as such it's baked into the structure of how we experience Reality and is not something that is 'chosen' by us (however we do have some agency as to the particular types of meaning we experience). Purpose in the context of this discussion refers to the long term goals, projects, and relationships that make a person's life worth living. Unlike meaning which is part of how Reality is disclosed to us, purpose is something that's cultivated over a lifetime and is something that we have at least some influence over. As such, purpose isn't something that's external to us, nor does it originate inside of us without any input from the outside world. Rather, purpose can be better understood as an embodied interaction that arises from the challenges and opportunities that arise from within a particular social context.

True, but Legislation needs to pass through both chambers to become law. And in addition, the Senate is the more powerful of those two chambers; Supreme Court justices which serve lifetime appointments.are confirms in the Senate.

Abolish it. There is no reason whatsoever to keep it other than to shield a decaying Republican Party that's out of touch with the rest of the country from having to complete fairly within democracy. Also it's worth noting that the electoral college is small potatoes compared to the highly undemocratic structure of the US Senate, where each State is apportioned 2 Senate seats irrespective of that State's population. So California with it's 40 million people, and Wyoming with 400 thousand both get to send exactly two Senators to Congress. If Senate seats were allocated fairly the Republican Party would likely never have a majority in Congress ever again, which is why they're so adamant about maintaining this antiquated system.

Well I for one am looking forward to seeing the Orange Man-Child's narcissism and pettiness doom the Republican Party's prospects in 2024. Though I think Leo is right that DeSantis is being propped up as the obvious candidate for a 2028 run, with the competent ideological fascism of DeSantis being a far greater threat than Trump's narcissistic buffoonery. On the other hand, that does give us potentially another 4 years to forestall the collapse of democracy. That's assuming the reactionary Supreme Court doesn't decide to nuke democracy before that point by adopting the 'independent State legislature theory '.

...well considering that the choices right now are basically: [ ] A flawed political party that at least is trying to make the country a better place, and is willing to abide by democratic norms (D) [ ] A fascistic political party that's an existential threat to democracy, which is openly advocating for political violence (R) Someone like John McCain was a principled person whom I happened to disagree with on policy. The modern GOP is dangerously unhinged from Reality, with no higher principles beyond exploiting existing cultural divisions as a means for personal gain.

Can't fully say for sure since the book's not out yet (releases Jan 1), but here are my best guesses: Quit : Cultivate the ability to walk away from things (jobs, relationships, belief systems) that have become a drain on your well being. Try to arrange your life so that you don't become trapped in these things, and have an escape hatch / backup plan. Learn how to cultivate healthy forms of detachment so as to be less emotionally reactive. Do the Walk of Shame : Gonna be honest, not really sure what this one will entail. Change Your Worldmap : Become self aware about the assumptions and beliefs you use to navigate and make sense of reality. Learn how to separate your sense of self from the Beliefs you hold about Reality. Don't become trapped in an ideology. Deconstruct your beliefs from time to time. Kill Your Guru, Find Your Meta-Team : Don't become dependent on any one person (be that Leo or anyone else) to make sense of Reality for you. Much healthier to have a team of peers with a metamodern (ie Tier2) perspective who challenge each other, rather than the one way relationship between a Guru and thier disciples. (This rule is also a play on the old precept : if you meet [someone claiming to be] the Buddha on the road, kill him).

@integral Just wanted to chime in to mention that excerpt in the OP is from Martin Ucik's book: Sex Purpose Love: Couples in Integral Relationships Creating a Better World https://www.amazon.com/Sex-Purpose-Love-Integral-Relationships/dp/0984570330 Martin is a close friend of a personal friend of mine, so I just wanted to make sure he's recognized for his work

I would say so. He was the first postmodern philosopher who had a knack for being able to deconstruct the morality systems of his day in very insightful ways. In addition, he was quite prophetic about the long term problems that would come as modernity displaced traditional value systems (ie widespread social alienation and a cultural meaning crisis that we're living through today, which various breeds of authoritarian ideologies have preyed on). That said, a word of warning; insightful as he was, Nietzsche was also a very damaged person with a huge chip on his shoulder from an unhappy upbringing. This informs his philosophy in a number of problematic ways. Nietzsche was an undeniable egoist with some very questionable ideas which are disdainful of women, democracy, and universal compassion. In a some ways Nietzsche was the 19th century equivalent of an Incel. While it wasn't his intention, there's also a reason his work was able to be so easily misappropriated by fascists. And that's because for all his brilliance, much of his philosophy can be read as the power fantasy of a weak and disempowered man. So as long as one doesn't get thier ethics and morals from Nietzsche, there's a lot that can be learned from him. Just make sure to engage with his work critically.

All due credit to the Left wingers like Vaush who have been consistent on this point (keeping in mind of course that he's still approaching this from a Green perspective); that keeping democracy from collapsing is only the only issue that matters right now at a national level.

The #1 priority right now is to keep democracy from collapsing. In order to keep that from happening, the Left needs to be able to work with Liberals and moderates When the Left alienates Liberals and moderates because it refuses to be strategic, it shoots itself in the foot, and is less effective at actually resisting fascism.

I don't get the sense that anyone here is making a false equivalence between what the Left is doing and the political violence coming from the far-right. But think of it like this. In a country like United States, the Left (as opposed to milquetoast liberals and moderates ) make up perhaps %10-15 of the population. In order to successfully resist fascism, the Left needs to be able to cooperate and make common cause with both liberals and moderates. That doesn't mean giving up on thier ideals, but it does mean knowing how to be strategic and place the democratization needs of society above thier own vision of what they would like society to be. Leftism can push the envelope of what is possible in a system dominated by liberals. That opportunity goes away if the system's center of gravity regresses to a reactionary authoritarian regime.

Considering how corrosive the political environment has become, I'm honestly surprised that political violence isn't even more common than it already is. I used to think that Leftists were being paranoid when they pointed out that it might not be a bad idea for liberals and progressives to learn how to use firearms to defend themselves and thier communities from right wing terrorism, but I'm becoming more convinced that they may have been more correct than I'm comfortable admitting (this is coming from someone who has a gut level aversion to firearms)