DocWatts

Half of all jobs in America pay less than a Living Wage (less than the $15 an hour Minimum Wage that labor advocates are fighting for). No surprise then that the Median Wage for American workers is around $35k a year. And little wonder why younger generations that are bearing the brunt of this economic austerity aren't buying homes and starting families...

A large portion of the Root Causes behind this resurgence of White Nationalism can be traced to the demographic and economic anxiety of a dominant group whose privileged status has been steadily chipped away at over the last half century. The implicit motivation behind contemporary Right Wing populism stems in large part from whites no longer being shielded from the types of economic deprivation and social exclusion that have been prevalent for communities of color throughout most of American History. Combine a declining standard of living in the US with whites no longer monopolizing all of the economic opportunity within the country, and the result is an undercurrent of alienation and anger, as a subset of white Americans feel that thier country has somehow drifted (or was stolen) away from them. "This isn't supposed to be happening to me. I'm white!", is a decent summation of this mindset.

I meant in the sense that by transcending a merely ego-centric (Red) and socio-centric worldview (Blue), it became the first Stage capable of a adopting a global (or non ethno-centric) perspective. The two most prominent ethical paradigms of the Enlightenment, namely Utilitarianism and Deontology, were couched in an ethics which treated human beings as moral agents with intrinsic value, regardless of thier nationality, race or gender. Compare that to the moral systems of the previous stage, where moral concern was only extended to one's own ethnicity or religion, and it's not hard to see the Orange systems of ethics as a huge advance over thier predecessors (even if it was the case that in many ways Orange fell far short of actually living up to these lofty ideals). Hence why this is the first developmental stage where the notion of Human Rights is conceived of, and where we start to see Liberation movements (such as Women's Suffrage and the Abolition of Slavery). All of which would later be taken up and be more fully realized in Green.

Because the excesses of toxic Orange are all around us and obvious to see, it's easy to conflate the worst aspects of excessive Capitalism and gross Materialism for all of Orange. It's worth keeping in mind that the essence of Orange is that it's the very first genuinely world-centric developmental stage, coming as it did from the Enlightenment. And as the first truly world-centric stage, it laid the foundations for so many advances that we take for granted today, such as: Human Rights, Representative Democracy, and a more than doubling of human life expectancy as a result of the Scientific Revolution it unleashed. Deconstructing Myths from SD-Blue that were being used to prop up oppressive Power Structures (such as absolute monarchies) was another genuine accomplishment of Orange. Just because Orange has introduced new problems that can only be solved at the next Stage (like every other SD-Stage), doesn't rob Orange of its many important contributions.

For as much as I appreciate Japanese art and culture that's made its way over to the West, actually living in a country with such a dysfunctional work/life balance seems at least as bad as some worst aspects of living and working in the US.

Assuming something written in the last 20 years counts as 'recent', Ken Wilber's Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality is an easy recommendation

@Leo Gura Agreed. I found Ken Wilber's take on the German Idealist school to be compelling: Namely that they were on the right track, but because they were lacking a contemplative method to verify thier insights, their ideas were reduced to 'mere' metaphysics, and thus they were unable to build the credibility necessary to turn thier ideas to a new paradigm. I would also add the fact that they were unable to communicate thier ideas in a clear, non-convoluted way also contributed to this. Seems like they were sorely lacking what we would call today public intellectuals who could present these ideas in a straightforward way to the public.

Seems like a shame that the contributions of Hegel aren't discussed more in Integral/Developmental circles, as his dialectical model of how History unfolds was incredibly ahead of its time and influential for subsequent developmental theories. Besides being a direct influence on thinkers like Marx, one can see some of the DNA of Spiral Dynamics and Ken Wilber in his work, with his idea that that all worldviews contain an element of Truth and that societies develop in a dialectical manner. Or to put it more directly; it was Hegel's view that paradigms (a thesis) generate tension which gives rise to an antithesis, which later gets synthesized in to a new paradigm. This new paradigm then becomes the new thesis, and the cycle repeats. Not hard to see how this was an early or proto version of transcend and include...

Japan is what is known as a de-factro Nuclear Power. Even setting aside its alliance with the United States, the country has both the technological base and the industrial capacity to begin making nuclear weapons (within a little as one year) if they were ever forced to do so for reasons of national survival. Though whether a country that was psychologically scarred by nuclear weapons would ever choose to develop (let alone use) nukes under any circumstances, is another question...

I've found that most of the definitions you'll come across for this topic are either terse and broad to the point of not being helpful, or overly long winded and specific. Personal weakness on my part, but I sometimes have trouble taking extremely broad subjects and squeezing them down in to a working definition that's both concise and informative. Pondering this for a bit, I've come up with two definitions that seem workable, even if I'm not completely happy with either one (also just to lay my biases on the table, I'm approaching this topic from more a secular perspective. A definition that applies to both theists and non theists would be useful). (1) Transpersonal development work that aims to develop meaningful ways to integrate our subjective Inner experience within a wider, shared reality. (2) An intuition that we can develop a more meaningful connection to reality by deconstructing how our mind interfaces with reality, and that this knowledge will help us to live happier, kinder, and more fulfilling lives

@billiesimon Because the majority of Academic philosophy is written for other Academics, rather than for the Public, and is filled with technical jargon that is likely to make the work impenetrable for non-specialists. It will be more productive reading a book about Hegel than trying to make sense of any of Hegel's actual books or papers.

Factorio is a survival/management game developed by Czech studio Wube Software. The premise of the game is that the player is stranded on an alien world that thier spaceship crash lands on, with the eventual goal of the game being to construct a spaceship to escape the planet. The gameplay loop involves resource extraction through ever an expanding process of automization, as the player builds up Industry and develops supply chains to turn raw materials in to refined products for use in technology. Part of the reason that this game is so damned interesting is that the player is consistently faced head on with the negative and destructive consequences of this process, yet proceeds nonetheless because thier Survival Needs are inextricably linked to a process of endless expansion; "The Factory must grow". Not only is the player incentivized to view literally everything on the planet as a resource to be exploited, but this process also leads the player to re-enact colonial exploitation in the process. For not only are you strip mining an entire planet, but you're doing so on an inhabited world whose denizens (a Starship Trooper-esque race of insectoids) are being harmed by your Industrial pollution. So when they begin attacking your factories, it's only natural that the player perceives this as an aggressive attack, rather than as a response to thier own aggression. Importantly, the player doesn't set out to re-enact Imperialism; from thier point of view they've merely been optimizing supply chains and working out the logistics of resource extraction. It"s honestly a great demonstration of the Banality of Evil. Factorio is a fascinating game, and a good example of how gamifying something can be illuminating.

Any other contemporary works on Hegel that you'd recommend over Zizek? Since Hegel's actual writing falls in to the same pitfalls as someone like Derrida or Kant, with thier philosophy being notoriously impenetrable if you try to read what any of these figures actually wrote....

Very true. The most advanced thinkers from Athens might have been considered all of the various city states in Greece as equals, but they still would have seen Greek Culture as superior to that of 'barbarian' (ie non Greek) peoples. Likewise, a forward thinking Medieval European might have embraced everyone who subscribed to thier version of Christianity as thier brother, but would have considered anyone who subscribed to a different religious tradition as ignorant and abominable. The beginnings of a truly worldcentric paradigm did not emerge until the Enlightenment.

The book Nordic Ideology manages to state this in an illuminating and concise way, as part of a discussion as to why it's so important that meta-ideologies avoid these sorts of epistemological and metaphysical errors: "Marx tried to identify the meta-ideology, to formulate it clearly, so people could create political movements around it and otherwise navigate the world with its help. He made some important contributions, but he got some of the fundamental dynamics wrong. Analytical - not moral - mistakes that nevertheless cost many millions of lives. Oops."

I kind of get the sense that it was closer to being trans-rational rather than a reductionist or atomistic reason (or flatland reason, as Ken Wilber might call it).

While an experience of Infinity isn't something I have a real Frame of Reference for at this time, as to this point I agree wholeheartedly. Especially about something like Marx's dialectical materialism being a reductionist and partial interpretation of Hegel. (Though to be fair to Marx, he doesn't completely disregard developmental factors other than modes of production, they're just not at all the focus of his work).

While one's level of awareness of course is going to be filtered through thier worldview, one's worldview isn't all there is to awareness. Both Plato and George W Bush were both roughly at SD-Blue, but just focusing on thier SD-level is to miss the vast differences of complexity and depth between these two individuals. Where Orange as a paradigm actually originated from was the Enlightenment, where its core pillars were the deconstruction of mythic superstitions and the separation of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful (or morals, science, and art) in to thier own spheres, so each could pursue thier own Truths. As you correctly point out, the folks who conflate Orange with success within a Capitalist system focus excessively on just one aspect of Orange.

Heh, probably no surprise that the people I know who absolutely love Factorio and consider it to be one of thier favorite games happen to be engineers of one type or another. I'm not an engineer, but aside from the thematic elements I referred to I also appreciate it as a sort of non-linear puzzle game

@Milos Uzelac @thisintegrated Since the point was broached, there are some inherent limitations to Spiral Dynamics as a personal development model. As a model for how Culture Value Codes (or worldviews) function and evolve via a dialectical process it's brilliant and highly useful. But I would also argue that as a personal development model, worldviews are just one (albeit an important) aspect of one's growth and development. The problem with using SD to chart someone's overall development is that it collapses several different lines of development in to a single axis, and is ironically a subtle form of reductionism when used in that way. As I'm sure you'd agree, it's possible for someone to be at a level of depth and complexity significantly above or below their SD-Stage; something that a Spiral Dynamics doesn't really incorporate in to its model. A 15 year old might indeed resonate with Yellow, but it's probable that they're at a level of complexity and depth where the Yellow their working with is a flattened and simplified form. Likewise, someone like the Buddha wasn't 'Turquoise' (because that worldview didn't exist at that time), so much as an individual with a level of depth and complexity that was far greater than the Cultural Value memes that were available to him (which was likely SD-Blue)

It's definitely the sort of game that you get out of it what you put in to it. Though I get that not everyone wants to spend thier free time solving logistics puzzles and learning the intricacies of supply chains

Of course US corporate media monopolies are going to be pushing a self serving narrative. There's nothing unique about this; Russia and China each have thier own version of this, so the United States is not special in this regard. What is an outlet like Russia Today if not Russia's own version of that? If anything, the social fragmentation that's been occuring over the last decade or so in America is indicative of exactly the opposite problem; namely that shared national narratives are breaking down due in part to the decentralisation of news media, and that whatever your worldview there exists an information source to reinforce one's existing biases.

That's a flagrantly dishonest and reductionist argument. Someone like Noam Chomsky, who's well to the Left of Bernie Sanders, is a harsh critic of both US Imperialism and authoritarian Socialism (such as Marxist-Leninism). The idea that anyone on the Libertarian-Left would consider him a "tankie" is laughable. Stop defending authoritarianism. Just because the US engages in Imperialism doesn't mean that other countries automatically get a free pass for authoritarian practices. Both should be criticized.

And a broken clock is right twice a day, I know. The problem isn't that he's an idiot, it's that the criticism itself is dishonest, ideologically motivated drivel written in Bad Faith towards someone he has obvious personal animosity towards. No surprise, since anyone who watches Vaush knows that he has a very low opinion of Authoritarian Socialists (or 'Tankies'), and is quite vocal about this, seeing them as no better than the Nazis and White Supremacists whom he debates on his channel. As to authorial intent being an important part of whether or not a critique is valid, a White Supremacist who writes a character assassination of Martin Luther King might manage to get a few things factually right (ie 'MLK cheated on his wife'), but the critique itself cannot be separated from the context it was created in.

Basic Media Literacy 101 involves assessing the tone and style of a piece, along with the biases of its author, to determine how trustworthy of a source something is. So whether the guy writing a takedown piece on Vaush is in part motivated by an authoritarian ideology (ie Bolshevism and Nazism) is completely relevant. The fact that he lists China, a country that's engaging in active genocide against ethnic minorities within its sphere of influence, as an anti-imperialist state(?!), is a good evidence for the ideological bias I indicated. I'll take this guy about as seriously as I'd take a Neo Nazi or White Supremacist's "response" to one of Leo's actualized.org videos.