DocWatts

While 'if you're going to talk the talk then you should walk the walk' is a valid criticism to make, I do wonder how much personal responsibility a 15 year old Zoomer should be expected to have for thier personal consumption habits. Especially when there are multibillion dollar industries whose whole purpose for existing is to use knowledge of psychology to shape consumption habits in people at an early stage of development. Suffice to say that consumption habits are highly influenced by predatory forces baked in to the system. I'm all for taking personal responsibility for collective problems, but we also have to take in to account that a systemic problem like Climate Change isn't going to be solved by individual consumption choices. Whether the United States remains a democracy a few decades from now will have orders of magnitude more impact on the Climate than whether pockets of the country opt for more eco friendly options when buying groceries.

That list is pretty spot on. The next question is what's the lifeblood of this societal pyramid that's in scarce supply? I'd argue that it's capital, meaning both financial and social capital.

The question brings to mind a fun game where someone proposes a Wish for a genie, and the other person proposes a monkey's paw sort of twist to that wish. The point is to examine the hubris of your own wishes. So when someone Wishes for peace on Earth, the genie responds by setting the clock forward to when the Sun is a dwarf star and all life on the planet has been extinguished for billions of years. No life, no conflict. So maybe conflict has an actual purpose then, eh?

If someone knocks on your door, waving around an assault rifle 'asking' to be let in, it's not really a question at that point. Likewise, if someone drives to an incredibly tense protest in another city, open carrying a weapon with the intention of enforcing vigilante justice, that person has intentionally put themselves and others in a situation where someone is likely to be injured or killed. He was looking to escalate an already tense situation, and unfortunately he succeeded Third degree or negligent homicide (aka manslaughter) would be the appropriate sentence. And for what it's worth, I don't think it's unreasonable to see Rittenhouse himself as a victim of the toxic Right Wing gun culture in the US, any more than it would be to see a 17 year old kid living in a inner city who was indoctrinated in to a gang as a victim.

That's a rather good way of characterizing the current state of the two political parties; one being regressive, the other with some factional splits but on the whole conservative.

Conservatism is always going to be contextual to some degree. In some contexts that would entail maintaining the status quo. In the context of contemporary America which has been undergoing a paradigm shift towards Green over the last half century, Conservatism necessarily entails trying to roll the clock back on societal progress. So it's fair to say that Conservatism in a contemporary context is quite regressive. For example on abortion, maintaining the status quo would mean preserving Roe v. Wade, rather than trying to erase 60 years of progress on reproductive rights. Ditto for the expansion of civil rights that happened as part of this paradigm shift, as much of contemporary Conservatism is motivated in part by a resentment of the gains that have been made by communities of color in the last half century. Trying to reimpliment elements of Jim Crow by restricting voting rights with surgical precision towards communities of color is reactionary, rather than a preservation of the status quo.

The manufactured controversy about the long overdue removal of Confederate statues isn't all that dissimilar from the manufactured hysteria about Critical Race Theory. The fact that these statues of Confederate leaders were erected in the 20th century as a deliberate anti-civil rights statement meant to intimidate black people, is besides the point. The entire political strategy of the Right hinges upon emotionally manipulating low information Voters into a hysteria over issues that have no actual impact on their day to day lives. Not like the Right in America has anything to offer these people that will make their lives better, so they'll go out of thier way to move the narrative to literally anything other than socioeconomic issues.

@supremeyingyang Not sure if you've had the chance to read The Listening Society and Nordic Ideology, but they're a two book treatise on Metamodernism and Integral politics which emphasize exactly this; building a more compassionate society which makes it easier for people to self actualize.

The Good Place said it best. This is true not just for people damaged by growing up in rough circumstances. But also for privileged folks who never develop curiosity about what life is like for people less fortunate than themselves; because they were likely not surrounded by empathetic people, and thus were never encouraged to explore the possiblity of having social responsibilities for the well being of other people.

I'd say that the difference is that Conservatism picks an arbitrary point in the past to romanticize, then works to roll back aspects of societal progress that it finds distasteful / threatening. It's a regressive ideology. Centricism is more about preserving the status quo by making incremental tweaks to existing institutions. Progressivism is about transformative change.

For sure, and I wasn't trying to imply that development is deterministic, as individual volition does have an important role to play. Yet at the same time, drawing from my own experiences, the fragility or robustness of one's ego has everything to do with one's willingness to introspect and learn. Not surprising that this is a far more challenging task for people who had to construct a highly defensive ego in order to meet their survival needs.

Well said. It's important to keep in mind that development is a matter of privilege and opportunity, rather than a moral defect in people at earlier stages of development. Framing it in this way is crucial for keeping whatever worldview we happen to hold ethical by grounding it in compassion.

Yes Radicalism is relative to the culture one lives in, but the cultural differences between the US and somewhere like Canada or Britain are so minor as to be negligible. People who think that think that something like Universal Healthcare or raising taxes on Capital Gains are pie in the sky ideas tend to be aggressively unimaginative and resistant to learning from other countries. There's a reason that this type of mentality is a refuge for the egoicly fragile anti-intellectualism found at the lower levels of Spiral Dynamics. It's like they insist on driving a car with square wheels because that's the way they've always done things. And when thier next door neighbor points out that the rest of the neighborhood is laughing at them as thier car struggles to make it down the street, their response is to take issue with the mere suggestion that they could learn a thing or two from people who've figured things out that they haven't.

Focusing on 'wokeness' is easy as it doesn't entail having to challenge corporate interests funding thier political campaigns with any sort of substantiative change that might hurt thier donor's bottom lines. It's an insincere way for moderate Democrats to try and placate progressives to come out to the polls. But it doesn't work because a majority of progressives are able to see through this when people like Hilary Clinton try to come of as 'woke' without offering any transformative political reforms to address systemic problems. As for the 'success' of neo-liberalism under Bill Clinton and Barrack Obama, it's failure to actually address the decline in living standards that began in the Reagan era is partly to blame for the rise of far Right Populism.

Yeah in my mind modes of production and thier relation to social systems, which then give rise to shifts in value systems, is a more useful application of the four quadrants model. Technologies don't rise in a vacuum after all, they're always going to be situated in a survival context. Something like the widespread adoption of agriculture and the associated gestalt shift that it brought wasn't an conscious decision to switch lifestyles; rather it was a response to shifting survival needs and adopted out of necessity rather than as a deliberate choice. (Indeed, an agriculturalist's day to day life is much more laborious than that of a hunter gatherer). As for SD-Orange, the seeds of Industrialization were sown by the scientific method which was developed by an Aristocratic elite freed from day to day Survival concerns thanks to the stability of a State. The competitive advantage to be gained by applying the scientific method to modes of production is of obvious utility for syndicates and nation states in competition with one another. As the first world-centric Stage, it's no surprise that it emerges amongst a background of commerce and trade (though military conflict and imperialism are also used as part of this competition). Of course Industrialization is a double edged sword, unleashing both the productive capacity of mankind as well as a charnel house of horrors (both of which are emphasized in Marx's critiques of capitalism, Marxism itself being a thoroughly Orange ideology). The 'Post-Industrial' economies that characterize SD-Green societies (or the Social Democracies which are the closest to having a Green center of gravity) are only post-industrial in the sense that they rely on less developed countries for raw materials and basic consumer goods, in a sense 'exporting' things like sweatshops and child labor from thier own populations to poorer countries. While a portion of thier population has transitioned to a knowledge and information based economy, the material basis of these societies is still reliant on the modes of production pionered from Orange, even if the worst aspects of Orange have been exported off-shore. As far as Green modes of production, one would expect them to be non- exploitative and grounded in ecological sustainability. While these sorts of businesses do of course exist in the form of things like worker co-ops and Fair Trade syndicates, they're far from the majority in any society on Earth.

As far as being in the camp of Centrist Contrarians with poorly thought out political takes, he's in good company with the likes of Joe Rogan and Sam Harris.

@Hardkill I don't deny that AOC is further Left than much of the rest of the country. Just that calling her a radical Leftist is an inaccurate caricature advanced by bad faith actors on the Right, as she's a reformist Social Democrat. Advocating for policies that are uncontroversial in most of the rest of the developed world is hardly the mark of a Radical.

Marx was aware of this as well, though his take on modes of production as the driving force behind historical change was more Reductionist than Ken Wilber's holistic model. It's interesting to notice how different modes of production naturally lend themselves to different types of social and political organization. Beige and Purple are an outgrowth of hunter gatherer and horticulturalist survival bands, where social organization is face to face and non-depersonalized. Intimate knowledge of one's ecological environment, which plants are edible or useful, can be considered a technology at this stage every bit as much as fire or hand tools. The agricultural mode of production brought with it changes to social organization which resulted in changes in the collective interior as societies grew too large to operate on an interpersonal, face to face basis. Survival conditions are such that we begin to see the rise of dominator hierarchies and social stratification. This mode of production also necessitates the shift from a spirit haunted world to more distant power gods who are to be pleased with and appeased. The mercantile system which emerged as agrarian societies grew larger and began to operate on a basis other than pure 'might makes right' dominator hierarchies also brought with it changes to the collective unconscious. Here societies are characterized by a shared mythology (usually religion) which serves the sociological purpose of allowing large societies to operate on something other than raw power Dynamics. The mercantilist mode of production allows for the specialization of labor in to professions on a wide scale basis, setting the stage for the emergence of industrialization. Will get to the Industrial and Post Industrial stages later to keep this post from turning in to a giant wall of text

Since I see some book recommendations popping up, I've been interested in learning more about the Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna. Anyone familiar enough with the subject to toss a book recommendation my way?

What part of AOC's political platform do you consider to be 'radicaly Leftist?'

It's not that Liberals aren't at times egotistical and hypocritical, it's just that on the whole (ie. allowing for individual differences), that they're far less so than Conservatives. Sure the Liberal meta-ideology (whose center of gravity is SD-Orange with a bit of SD-Green on some social issues) has a ton of holes you can poke in it, but that's even more true of Conservative ideologies.

I'm somewhere between a Social Democrat and Market Socialist myself and broadly agree with the Progressive worldview espoused by TYT, but as a news source they're not great. Their news coverage trends towards the same types of sensationalism seen in other for Profit news networks, and they're not very good at framing other worldviews and perspectives in constructive ways. Compare TYT to (what I at least consider) a high quality news source, The Conversation, and the difference is notable between the two in being able to synthesize different viewpoints in a complex way. That said, I think Cenk and Anna and the other TYT people mean well, and in Cenk's case his most valuable public contribution is Wolf PAC, which is working towards a constitutional amendment to push back against the corrupting influence of Corporations in electoral politics.

I believe she mentioned that she wasn't interested in running for President (something along the lines of we need to stop looking for savours was the gist of it). I'm not at all optimistic about 2024, as Republicans taking the House or Senate in 2022 will effectively be the end of Biden's presidency as far as getting any Legislation passed. While it's fair to point out the problems with the Democratic Party as far as messaging and controlling the narrative, at the same time the entire system is weighted in the Republican Party's favor due to archiac and anti democratic nature of the US Senate, Supreme Court, and Electoral College. To use an analogy the Democratic Party is like a female employee entering a sexist workplace; having to work twice as hard and receiving half the recognition for their accomplishments. Something like half of Republican voters thought those nice stimulus checks they received earlier this year were due to the efforts of thier own Party, when in actuality not a single Republican voted in favor of the Stimulus Package....

@snowyowl Unfortunately there are structural reasons why the two party system is likely to remain in place here in the US. The reason stuff like this makes it in to Bills is that the Democratic Party (which consists of a conservative and progressive wing) just barely hold a majority in Congress and have an incredibly fragile coalition, and regressive policies like this are the result of conservative Dems insisting that right wing policy is shoved in to Bills like this in order for it to Pass. A single democratic Senator withholding their Vote is enough to sink the entire Infrastructure Package, something which is taken advantage of by opportunistic conservatives who take in boatloads of money from corporate lobbyists who fund thier election campaigns. (If this sounds like a corrupt system, it absolutely is). As a side note, found this interesting video a while back which details what the US political system would look like if multiple parties were actually viable

The Democratic Party is split between two wings : a Moderate / Conservative Wing and a Progressive Wing (what other countries would call Social Democrats). The Republican Party is openly undemocratic and has begun courting fascism as a way to gain political power. Thier ideal would be for the US to become a mirror of Putin's autocratic Russia, where a plutocratic elite has free reign to loot the country after they've managed to effectively end democracy