DocWatts

I have to wonder whether Obama's personal friendship with McCain (himself an honorable guy) gave him false hope that the Republican Party eventually would come around, and that the Bad Faith obstructionism which would eventually bloom into the Cult of Trump was a passing fad. Unfortunately he was wrong on that account, something that Joe Biden fortunately learned from. Obama was obviously a sophisticated thinker and gifted politician, and probably could have been a great President in a more functional political environment where both sides were mostly operating in Good Faith. If you recall the political instability that tends to happen when streams of refugees escaping a civil war from places like Syria bring to the rest of the world, imagine what's going to happen when hundreds of millions of people are displaced due to Climate Change. That's in addition to the trillions of dollars of economic damage that's going to accumulate from currently livable coastal areas being under water, and from extreme weather events such as fires and hurricanes. A World War 2 scale mobilization towards sustainable technology is really the only appropriate response at this point. Perhaps it wouldn't need to be so if the problem wasn't swept under the rug for as long as it has, but unfortunately as substantative action was continually not taken the scope of adequate responses is narrowed over time. Getting every major country in the world off from fossil fuels needs to addressed with the same urgency as if it's the 1940s and Germany was thought to be developing an atomic bomb. A large portion of what countries like the United States spend on thier military needs to be shifted towards treating Climate Change as a national security threat. And this will likely involve the affluent nations of the world having to subsidize renewables in the developing world as well, because it's not enough for places like the US and Western Europe to switch over to sustainable energy if the largest countries in the world are still burning fossil fuels. Rather than the 'turning back the clock to pre-industrial times' that you alluded to, it would be the exact opposite; massive investments in technological development to make industrial civilization sustainable.

You can have both you know, they're not mutually exclusive. A philosopher like Hegel is a good embodiment of using both in mutually reinforcing ways.

I'd disagree with Barrack Obama being Yellow, but even if he was it wasn't to his advantage because he ended up being taken advantage of by Republicans who weren't operating in Good Faith. What substantative progress would you say that he made on any systemic problems during his time in office? Joe Biden (with the benefit of hindsight) at least has enough wisdom to realize that the other side of the isle isn't negotiating in good faith, and Biden isn't wasting political capital trying to onboard people who are trying to nuke his presidency (and American democracy, for that matter) Someone like Noam Chomsky is also a Yellow thinker, so Yellow doesn't necessarily preclude being highly critical of existing structures and institutions. Centrism, while seemingly the most 'reasonable' position, isn't by default always the most appropriate response to every situation. I would also argue that centrism isn't necessarily a mark of Yellow, although Yellow can use centrism in certain situationally appropriate scenarios. For example the 'middle of the road' stance on something like Climate Change (such as market based solutions like Cap and Trade) might have been adequate if they had been adopted and consistently applied 30 years ago. But it's entirely inadequate to avoid a climate apocalypse after three decades of doing nothing of substance to address an existential threat.

(Mods : could you please move this to Society and Politics) According to the US Department of Education: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States Yet another way that the United States is failing its citizens (add that to the list next to a predatory health care system, failing infrastructure, and a predatory economic system). Might help contextualize the widespread lack of basic media literacy in the 'States, why a large segment of the population is easy prey for political propaganda and conspiracy theories, and why predatory advertising is so successful.

@Knowledge Hoarder The notion that knowledge consists of 'one damned fact after another' is an impoverished view of what knowledgeable is. A more holistic approach, where one has a sense of why something is worth knowing and what broadly speaking are the dynamics behind it, is more worthy of taking up mental hard disc space than memorizing endless lists of facts and figures.

@Happy Lizard While I think you're on to something (as English as a second language is over-represented in these figures), I think has far more to do with inter-generational poverty. Because public schools are funded though local property taxes, the quality of the education one receives growing up is tied to the zip code that one is born to. There are a lot of areas in the country where you'd be forgiven for thinking that you're in a third world country rather than the richest nation on earth, and that's reflected in the inequalities of the US education system.

To be fair learning how to be compassionate towards other people with whom you have a gut level disagreement about basic values is an acquired skill (to put it mildly). It brings to mind how a gay friend of mine expressed the pain of having family members support political ideologies that work to rescind thier right to live openly and authentically, and I don't necessarily think thier resentment towards people who hold these views is unreasonable. Compassion often runs up against the wall of conflicting survival needs. From the perspective of those who occupy a precarious position in society, it's completely understandable how it can feel as if others are seemingly going out of thier way to make life more difficult for you than it needs to be. Developing compassion in these types of scenarios requires sociological understanding and a degree of ego maturity, and naturally not everyone has been given the opportunity to develop in both of these areas. SD-Yellow (where much of judgemental nature of Green is transcended) comes from a place of privilege, after all.

Haven't seen nearly as many threads for the Big Five as I have for other horizontal models such as Myer-Briggs, so I thought it might be interesting to start a thread where we can post our results. The personality traits being measured by this model are: Openness Conscientiousness Extraversion Agreeableness Neuroticism Here's a link to the test: https://www.truity.com/test/big-five-personality-test And my results:

To take an everyday example for illustrative purposes, consider hot and cold. The dualistic conception of this is as two distinct and opposing forces (if you have more of one that means you have less of the other). Whereas the non-dualistic perception of this same phenomena would see hot and cold as two sides of the same coin of a qualitative discernment that we call temperate. If you extrapolate this kind of discernment towards the conceptual categories that we use to atomize reality in to discrete objects, you'll begin to discover that our normal egoic ways of categorizing don't hold up to epistemological scrutiny (however useful said categorization happens to be in our day to day lives). This can be extended to subject-object dualism, and to illusion that your body is a container with a clear boundary between your body/mind and the rest of reality.

'Be compassionate towards individuals and critical towards power structures' seems like a good rule of thumb to follow.

If your chief problems and concerns are about meeting basic survival needs (escaping wage slavery, attaining financial Independence, finding fulfilling relationships, etc), philosophy probably won't be hugely helpful. Where philosophy does come in useful is where it comes to questions of meaning, self-actualization, and self transcendence. If you're curious about the world, curious about how your mind works, and if lifelong learning is something that's important to you, philosophy can be hugely enriching.

Just something interesting I noticed, after reading a book about Hegel's Absolute Idealism and a book about Vedic metaphysics back to back. I was struck by the similarities between the ontological models of Vedic metaphysics and Hegel's Absolute Idealism. Or to put it another way, my experience reading about the Vedic system was often along the lines of : some of this feels a lot like Hegel. In that both are ontologies of becoming, and that Hegel's use of Spirit and The Absolute feel like analogues of the Gross, Subtle, and Causal domains. So was Hegel directly influenced by these ideas as he was developing his philosophy? His arch-nemesis Schopenhauer made explicit reference to wisdom traditions like Buddhism, yet I've been unable to confirm whether in Hegel's case this was an instance of independent convergence resulting in similiar ideas, or if Hegel was aware of these traditions and incorporated them in to his own model.

For Hegel in particular, while it's fair to say that he was to some degrees a relativist (in that he viewed thought by its very nature as perspectival, and believed that philosophies need to be evaluated from within a socio-cultural context), he was the opposite of a nihilist. That's because for Hegel the universe had a very clear purpose, namely that it was a process of universal consciousness becoming aware of its true nature. And that this happened through a prolonged process of universal consciousness overcoming its own limitations and contradictions.

It's almost akin to a hypothetical scenario where threads about addressing Climate Change are being consistently derailed by a handful of people declaiming that Climate Change is a hoax perpetuated by the liberal media. It's a perspective that's not contributing anything of value, and only serves to drag the quality of discussions around the topic downward.

There are already plenty of 'anything goes' forums to indulge in conspiracy theories and anti-vax hysteria. While there's a reasonable discussion to be had over vaccine mandates, in practice what happens is that threads which start with that intention become debates over whether the vaccines are harmful (they're not) or whether Covid is a big deal (it is). Kudos for Leo for actually using his influence in a responsible way by not letting the forums become a Facebook or 4chan-esque breeding ground for misinformation and conspiricism.

That brings to mind the way in which the British Empire was able to colonize and exploit a region as populated and geographically vast as India, by getting this 'divide and conquer' strategy down to a science. Exacerbate existing ethnic and cultural tensions by playing different groups against one another, thereby getting local leaders to become willing collaborators in the exploitation of thier own country. Really it's not so different with how capitalism is able to keep the working classes divided today, by deliberate efforts to distract and egoicly flatter portions of the working class who feel threatened by evolving social norms.

When I was twelve or thirteen there was probably a week or two when I would have claimed to be the first human being to discover it, but point well taken

@silene It's a difficult problem to be sure, as the inventive structure of global capitalism rewards this sort of economic imperialism by giving a competitive advantage to nations and multinational corporations that are able to exploit developing countries in this way. Short of a transition to an economic system beyond capitalism (whatever that ultimately ends up being), the economic incentives to interfere with the internal development of other countries won't be going away anytime soon. 'Strong' authoritarian governments arguably make the problems of exploitation even worse for developing nations, as the public doesn't have any way to punish thier leaders for corruption and for selling off thier national assets to foreign enteties. At least in a democracy there's a mechanism that the public can use to weigh in on policy decisions (however imperfect that can be in practice). If there's a silver lining, it's that international exploitation does become more difficult to sustain as first world nations develop up the spiral from SD-Orange to SD-Green, as Green is the first stage that where these types of exploitative practices start to become socially unacceptable. Democratization efforts which bring public scrutiny to the clandestine efforts of multinational corporations, and regulations which limit thier ability to set national policy agendas is probably the best we can hope for under the prevailing socio-economic paradigm.

That's just generally going to be the case whatever the prevailing metaphysical paradigm is though, right? That is, because the prevailing implicit paradigm is always going to be constructed to some degree to fit the needs of the society. Industrialization needed an implicit materialist paradigm to get off the ground, in the same way that earlier societies needed implicit non-materialist paradigms to maintain and justify earlier hierarchical forms of social organization. (That's not to say that materialist industrialism isn't also hierarchical, just that the prevailing meta-ideology co-evolves with societal structures. And in practice the two are interdependent).

@Fleetinglife Russia’ wasn’t a repeat of Chile – it was Chile in reverse order: Pinochet staged a coup, dissolved the institutions of democracy and then imposed shock therapy; Yeltsin imposed shock therapy in a democracy, then could defend it only by dissolving democracy and staging a coup. Both scenarios earned enthusiastic support from the West.’ ‘For the country’s oligarchs and foreign investors, only one cloud loomed on the horizon: Yeltsin’s plummeting popularity. The effects of the economic program were so brutal for the average Russian, and the progress was so self-evidently corrupt, that his approval ratings fell to single digits. If Yeltsin was pushed from office, whoever replaced him would likely put a halt to Russia’s adventure in extreme capitalism. Even more worrying for the oligarchs and the ‘reformers,’ there would be a strong case for renationalizing many of the assets that had been handed out under such unconstitutional political circumstances.' ‘By 1998, more than 80 percent of Russian farms had gone bankrupt, and roughly seventy thousand state factories had closed, creating an epidemic of unemployment. In 1989, before shock therapy, 2 million people in the Russian Federation were living in poverty, on less than $4 a day. By the time the shock therapists had administered their ‘bitter medicine’ in the mid-nineties, 74 million Russians were living below the poverty line, according to the World Bank. That means that Russia’s ‘economic reforms’ can claim credit for the impoverishment of 72 million people in only eight years. ‘The movement that Milton Friedman launched in the 1950s is best understood as an attempt by multinational capital to recapture the highly profitable, lawless frontier that Adam Smith, the intellectual forefather of today’s neoliberals, so admired – but with a twist. Rather than journeying through Smith’s ‘savage and barbarous nations’ where there was no Western law (no longer a practical option), this movement set out to systematically dismantle existing laws and regulations to re-create that earlier lawlessness.’ - Naomi Klein, Shock Doctrine (2007)

Naomi Klein wrote an entire book about this practice, but in short what happened in post Soviet Russia bears similarities to how Western countries acting at the behest of multinational corporations have opportunisticly taken advantage of crises to coerce nations in desperate financial and political circumstances. This is done in order to push through pro-corporate policies such as Free Trade and Privatization, at the expense of the citizens of that country. It's a way of interfering with the internal development of other nations to make them more profitable environments for multinational corporations to operate in. In Russia's case, the country was in terrible need of international assistance after the collapse of the Soviet Union. International aid was tied to accepting neoliberal market reforms that were primarily beneficial for multinational corporations, and further destabilized the country (something that both the Russian oligarchs and Putin took advantage of). The country would have been far better off using protectionist policies to ease the transition to a market economy, similiar to what countries like South Korea used to achieve affluence That's of course not to excuse Russian leadership during this era, which had varying degrees of incompetence, corruption, and naivety at the proposed 'reforms' being suggested by Free Market think tanks and the international business community.

@Happy Lizard Here's an excellent write up on Game Denial from Emil Ejneer Friis (writing under the pseudonym of Hanzi Frienacht). It's an excerpt from a book called The Listening Society, about Metamodernism, which is the meta-paradigm that comes after post-modernism. The book builds upon models like Spiral Dynamics and Ken Wilber's Four Quadrants model to construct a Yellow Metamodern paradigm. I'd highly recommend the book. Yet, many of us frequently fall victim to what I call “game denial”: the inability to perceive, or a negligence of, the logical and behavioral rules that regulate human relations. Game denial is when you ignore or “wish away” certain uncomfortable truths regarding human relations and how reality works. Or simply when you deny the realities of life and forcefully impose your own “ought” upon what “is”. https://metamoderna.org/game-denial/

In the case of Russia specifically, economic imperialism by Western governments and multinational corporations bear at least some responsibility for the difficulties faced by the short lived Russian democracy that emerged during the collapse of the Soviet Union. The economic 'shock therapy' adopted in good faith by the naive and desperate Russian government at the behest of multinational corporations operating under the paradigm of neo-liberalism proceeded to economically devestate a stagnating country that just went through a major crisis. This 'shock therapy' basically involved a rapid shift to neo-liberalism and free trade, and gave multinationals free reign to interfere with the development of a country whose best interests would have been better served by adopting a protectionist model until it was on a more equal footing with the West (similiar to how South Korea successfully developed in to an affluent country). Granted this is far from the only reason why democracy proved unstable in post Soviet Russia, but the transition from a crumbling authoritarian system to a parliamentary democracy is already difficult enough without external actors being given a free reign to destabilize your country.

Off the top of my head: Game Denial. Not understanding how development works. Lack of compassion / empathy for the other Tier-1 Stages Lack of pragmatism, and not taking current Institutions and developmental conditions in to account. Viewing social problems through a reductionist class paradigm (ie some forms of Marxism). Overly relativistic. A return to magical thinking (aspects of some New Ages spiritualities). Elevationism, and not understanding the pre/trans fallacy

One can give due credit to the brilliant engineers and scientists working at Tesla and Space X for pioneering innovations that fulfill a societal need, without necessarily having to simp for Musk nor for the toxic elements of capitalism that he embodies. It's not even that difficult distinction to make.