DocWatts

I thought it was generally understood that socialism would by necessity have to be built atop the scientific and Industrial base developed by Capitalism? Someone like Marx was pretty explicit about this point, that Capitalism was a necessary stage of societal development that can't be skipped. Similar to how Capitalism was built atop Mercantilism, and Mercantilism was built atop a Feudal system. You could also point out how much of a distortion it is that a $100 McDonalds burger is priced at $1 under capitalism, and how strange it is that this peculiar system is taken for granted as the 'default' due to social conditioning

My own view is that Spiral Dynamics is much better used as a sociological model for looking at the interplay of how value systems arise, interact, and come in to conflict with one another. While it can be made applicable for individuals by giving a rough approximation of what sort of value system(s) they subscribe to, I would argue that this isn't the model's main strength. Just knowing that two individuals have a center of gravity at Blue for instance doesn't tell you a whole lot about them, since Spiral Dynamics merges several different lines of development (cognitive, ethical, spiritual, etc) down to a single axis as part of its reduction base. At best it can tell you what aspects of the collective value systems that are out there that a person has internalized, but it doesn't really tell you the depth or complexity of that individual's understanding within that paradigm. For instance, Marcus Aurelius and George W. Bush are both roughly at Blue, but are worlds apart as far as the depth and complexity of thier understanding of Reality If you're looking for a personal development model, you'd probably be better off using something like Suzanne Cook Greuter's Stages of Ego Development model. Or if you're looking for a model with a large body of emperical validation, then the Big Five Personality Traits model.

Where I live in the United States, the center of gravity shift towards Green is looking to be incredibly rocky and drawn out. I can't say I'm very optimistic about the political situation in the United States, as I foresee a sizeable chunk of my adult life being played out against the backdrop of trying to forestall the collapse of democracy. That said, it seems likely that things will be better for future generations, and what we're going though right now are growing pains. I'm far more optimistic about my personal situation, so I guess it depends on what I choose to focus on.

After listening to the whole segment, it appears I was missing some context. And yeah, what you're saying is correct. I should try to be more mindful that the majority of people have a very poor understanding of even recent history, as the idea of someone not comprehending that the basics of Nazi ideology baffles me sometimes, before reminding myself that basic historical literacy is a type of privledge....

Susan Cook Greuter's Stages of Ego Development for a hierarchical stage model better suited to individual development. And the Big Five Personality Traits for a model that has the most emperical validation and credibility in the scientific community

I agree with an earlier comment that Spiral Dynamics is much better used as a sociological model rather than as an individual actualization model (where much better options exist). I'd be curious what psychological and emotional needs that Christianity fulfills better for these individuals than New Age belief systems. I'm an outsider to Christianity myself, but I wouldn't be surprised if the sense of community from being part of a Church wasn't a big part of it.

Yeah it seems pretty clear to me that she misspoke by wording the point she was trying to get at somewhat poorly, rather than trying to convey anything malicious (quite the opposite in fact).

I don't want Joe Rogan to get canceled, but I'm glad he's getting a ton of shit for using his podcast in such a flagrantly irresponsible way. I'd be okay with JRE episodes that spread misinformation about Covid getting de-listed from Spotify (so that Rogan would have to find alternative ways of getting those episodes out, were he determined to do so). Similiar how to you can find porn if you go out of your way, but you can't find it on YouTube. Rogan might call himself 'just' a comedian, but when you have 20 million people who take your opinion on these matters seriously (regardless if many of those people are morons), you don't get to use that excuse anymore. Back in the 2000s and 2010s John Stewart tried playing that card that he was 'just' a comedian, despite the fact that The Daily Show was being used as a primary news source for tens of millions of people. If it rung hollow for John Stewart (who was much more responsible about how he used his media platform), it should ring hollow for Joe Rogan. Pointing out that for profit media conglomerates are also problematic is a case of 'what about-ism', that doesn't change anything about the deserved criticism that Rogan's been receiving. Also, do 'all' voices need to be heard? Does that include cigarette companies advertising to children? How about fascist propaganda that motivates individuals to commit hate crimes against their fellow citizens? Or does the notion of 'personal responsibility' not extend to how individuals choose to use their freedom of speech, even in instances where it causes lasting harm to other people?

MSNBC is a corporate organization, so keep in mind that there's a profit motive at work there. Consequently its this structure as a for-profit organization, rather than hysteria about an imaginary 'liberal bias' from Bad Actors on the far right, that's actually worth being concerned about and keeping in mind. I'd recommend The Associated Press for direct reporting of events. And The Conversation as a possible alternative for high quality, complex news analysis that's non-partisian and not tainted by a profit motive. Vox isn't bad either, they're open about the fact that they're a Left leaning news organization, but they provide high quality news analysis and aren't run as a for profit organization. I'd stay clear of Young Turks, they tend to fall in to many of the same pitfalls as large corporate media (such as sensationalism), since they're reliant upon YouTube clicks to keep the lights on.

Science can tell you how nature behaves, but not what nature is. Quantum mechanics and relativity theory still work regardless of whether the substrate of Reality is physical, mental, or something else. Idealism isn't a threat to science, it only appears to be a threat to those that conflate science with ontological assumptions inherent to materialism.

That's it precisely. Thomas Kuhn was quite persuasive about this overall point in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Investigation never begins from a 'neutral' perspective, what sort of problems are investigated are always guided by a pre-existing paradigm (whether one is strictly within that paradigm or pushing against it, it serves as an anchor point in either case). What often happens is that a revolutionary scientist will have an intuition that they develop into a theoretical framework, and this can happen before they have emperical data to validate thier claim For example, emperical proof of general relativity came years after Einstein developed his theory, carried out by scientists in Russia observing light bending around the moon during an eclipse, precisely as Einstein's theory predicted. In the case of Graves, my guess is that he had a pre-existing intuition that the hierarchical process of adolescent development that Piaget described continued in to adulthood, which gave him a framework to begin gathering evidence. And at some point (perhaps from his collaboration with Don Beck, or perhaps before this), that there was a further intuition that adult development had something interesting or important to day about collective psychological development for societies. The reason I brought up Hegel and Marx earlier is that both sought to identify and articulate a broader meta-paradigm via a dialectical framework, with Spiral Dynamics being a more modern attempt at such, with the added benefit of Spiral Dynamics having access to a more rigourous emperical method for grounding its claims than earlier attempts.

I guess that my own view is that empiricism is always going to run up against limitations when it's trying to model something that's inherently qualitative in nature, namely that of internal value systems. In order for a model like Spiral Dynamics to work, I would argue that its body of emperical evidence would have to be situated within something like an intuitive dialectical framework in order to be useful.

While Spiral Dynamics does use scientific evidence to inform and give credibility to its claims (and has been successfully used in places like South Africa), I would argue that its true strength is more akin to something like Hegelian dielectrics, or Marx's theory of alienated labor. In that it's more useful as a framework for re-contextualizing a particular set of problems in a systematic, meta-textual way.

@Abc109 I think the problem is the way that the issue is being framed: that there's two narratives, a 'mainstream' narrative, and a counter (conspiracy) narrative. And that the truth is somewhere in between these two. The problem is that framing it in this way is that it gives the false impression that experts are roughly 'evenly split' between the two narratives. Fossil fuel companies for instance used exactly this tactic to disinform the public on climate change, by creating a false impression that there was broad disagreement among climate scientists and the issue was largely unsettled. Cigarette companies used basically the same tactics to disinform the public about thier products. Rather, a less misleading way to frame it would be that for something like vaccines or climate change, %99 of professionals in that field are in agreement on the 'mainstream' narrative, and %1 of thier colleagues have a counter narrative that they're promoting.

Worth pointing out, and this is just my personal experience, but the individuals that I've known who've fallen in to a conspiracy rabbit hole have tended to have serious unmet deficiency needs (such as a failing marriage, poor health, a terrible and unfulfilling job, etc). Or just more generally they were people who were in want of a purpose in life. While this could be just a sampling bias from the individuals of my various social circles, my intuition is that this speaks to society not having enough outlets for people to build meaning in thier lives. In want of healthy outlets for individuals to find meaning and community, should we be surprised that a society plagued by widespread alienation, cynicism, and loneliness is also one where pathological ways of finding these things are as common as they are?

I'm gonna guess it's probably in the ballpark of something like a Ted talk, which has a ticket price of around $5,000. Difference being that Jordy's audience doesn't consist of highly affluent socialites and entrepreneurs, so much as young men with access to YouTube...

I've been interested in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, but I've been having some trouble wrapping my head around his ideas (they haven't been clicking for me the same way that say, Hegel's philosophy did). Would anyone here be able to suggest some resources for making his work more approachable? What's the gist of what he's trying to convey in something like Being and Time?

@Bernardo Carleial Thanks! That's pretty much exactly what I was looking for. I've been putting off Heidegger for a while since I knew his work had a reputation for being somewhat impenetrable, so having some contemporary sources to help make his ideas more accessible is really helpful.

While it would have been interesting to see a novel argument against Idealism, his argument falls prey to a common assumption that a shared, objective reality has to have a material ontological basis. I'd be genuinely curious as to whether he's aware that objective idealism is something that exists, as the main thrust of his argument seems to be directed towards solipsistic subjective Idealism. I won't go so far as to call this a strawman as a lot of people aren't aware that there's even a distinction to be made between different types of idealism. If I were to try and make the strongest case possible against Idealism, I might have focused on the entropic heat death of the universe. I would have asked why an ontologically mental universe should present itself to us as a metaphorical clock winding down towards eventual thermodynamic equilibrium. And if time's arrow is an extrinsic appearance of an excitation of a transpersonal mental field, what is it an extrinsic appearance of exactly?

Fair enough, and I can empathize with someone being in an irritable mood from being in physical pain. From what I've watched of him, even in discussions where he's not being triggered, there seems to be a somewhat surprising lack of self awareness for someone whose chosen field is psychology, and who talks as much as he does about cross paradigmatic study and analysis. Not that I'm placing these two figures in remotely the same league, but compare JP to someone like Ken Wilber who has enough self awareness to recognize that he's developed a shadow around Green from his time in academia, and admits as much. I don't think most reasonable people would have a problem with JP if he were upfront about his biases, and if he wasn't treated as an authority by millions of people on issues where he's very clearly uninformed and/or highly biased.

I'll give her major credit for being open and upfront about her perspective (as a conservative), and for at least trying to engage with other perspectives in Good Faith. By those metrics she's leagues ahead of her father.

Thanks for posting this by the way, after watching it I feel like I understand Mr. Girl's perspective better, even if I'm not any more endeared to him now than I was during that Vaush stream. I think the problem with using an intentionally inflammatory rhetorical style is that it entails giving a huge benefit of the doubt that the person is actually operating in Good Faith and has a salient point to make (rather than being a toxic asshole). Maybe I just find it an extremely off-putting way of trying to communicate, even if that doesn't necessarily invalidate the larger points he brings up. And more of a meta-point, but I'm not sure that a message can or even should be separated from the style and tone of its delivery.

Thought it might be interesting and helpful to have a thread to discuss the challenges of development. For me, it's been being in a place of having developed fairly keen meta-awareness of my habitual propensities to judge and criticize conflicting value systems, without being able to fully transcend those habits. Which is a bit of a weird place to be in if I'm being honest, though I suppose it's better than the alternative (going the rest of my life being unaware of this tendency). While I recognize that I'm pretty good at being open minded about integrating new perspectives into my conceptual system and not inflexibly hitching myself to any one paradigm, I also recognize that I'm still working on integrating aspects of the lower stages so that I can empathize with them more fully (Red in particular in my case).

Thank you! Perhaps someone more developed than myself can have a productive conversation with anyone in absence of that shared context But for me I find that without some way to ground the conversation my other option is to cede Reality to that other person, which my ego isn't prepared to do. Or at least not for discussions around topics which have consequences in the real world. Around the SD-Stages that I haven't fully integrated, this expresses itself as a defensiveness and me being less willing to give that person the benefit of the doubt that they're arguing in Good Faith. While I don't niavely assume that every opposing view is operating in Good Faith all or even most of the time on every issue, I do have enough meta-awareness to recognize that I'm much more willing the benefit of the doubt towards Stages that I've integrated. Of course meta-awareness is one thing, and translating that meta-awareness in to action is a lengthy process. Or at least it is for me, at any rate.