DocWatts

Sometimes all you can do is post a Picard face palm meme to certain comments...

China's a hyper-capitalist technocratic authoritarian state, and about as far removed from socialism as the United States was during the Gilded Age when Pinkertons were busting worker's heads open for trying to Unionize. Calling China a socialist State is frankly an insult to socialism, if socialism is understood as workers having democratic control over their workplaces along with the right to live a life of dignity that's free from exploitation by unaccountable power structures. The Revolutionary Vanguardism that brought the 20th century communist parties into power was frankly a betrayal of the democratic spirit of socialism. That said, one can give the CCCP due credit for lifting hundred of millions of people out of poverty without conflating thier system with socialism.

Finding it somewhat difficult to grok so far, but that could be that I don't yet have a solid frame of reference for the material. I tend to approach epistomology from a dialectical, systems thinking perspective that's grounded in embodiment... Certainly haven't had that 'aha!' moment where the material has clicked for me yet (as I have with other difficult works on epistomology).

Far from a hot take, but ideological defenders of both systems are deluded. Both capitalism and communism are built on a rather distorted view of human nature. Evolution has equipped us with a psychology that's predisposed towards to being group-ish by nature. We're selfish yes, but for the most part that selfishness takes the form of trying to make sure our group survives and prospers, rather than being individually hyper-rational selfish agents in the way that capitalism imagines. Human beings evolved to survive and cooperate within small groups of less than 150 people. Living in large societies with millions of people is not something that evolution gave us a cognitive toolkit for, so it's foolish to imagine that human beings are willing to be selfless for a highly abstracted community of strangers, as Communism imagines.

Thought I might share something I've been reading lately, which should be of obvious relevance in the wake of a power grid attacks by fascist militias in the United States that have left tens of thousands of people in North Carolina without power. Barbara F. Walter is a political scientist who has spent much of her career studying Civil Wars from all around the globe, and has identified a number of risk factors that are highly predictive of Civil Wars breaking out. Worryingly, these risk factors are becoming increasingly prevalent in the United States. The full video is below, but here are two main Risk Factors: 1) Anocracy - this refers to form of government which is neither an autocracy or a democracy, but an unstable transition point between the two. Anocracy can be reached from an autocratic society transitioning to a democracy, or from a democratic society backsliding into authoritarianism. The more rapidly this transition proceeds, the more likely a Civil War is to break out. 2) Factionalism - This refers to political factions in a country being split along identitarian (religious, ethnic, or urban/rural) rather than ideological lines. Sociological changes which alter the existing power structures within society tend to be the trigger for this kind of factionalism, leading to a situation where the dominant identitarian group feels existentially threatened by the loss of its status within society, and fears reprisals from the identitarian groups which are displacing in. Factionalism tends to be weaponized by what experts call 'ethnic entrepreneurs', which is a term that refers to bad faith actors who exploit and deepen fears from existing cultural divisions as an avenue to power.

The idea that people get more conservative with age is a witticism without much truth to it. While it's true that on the whole older people tend to be more conservative than young folks, that's largely because as generalization older generations tend to be more conservative. It's less about people radically changing their worldview as they get older, and more about the paradigms that people get locked into becoming more progressive over time (or at least that's been the trend in the Western world for at least the last century). That vast majority of people don't significantly change their worldview after they reach a certain age (I would guess this would be their 30s). People tend to become more liberal as society becomes more urbanized and better educated, so the paradigms that different generations gravitate towards simply refects that

I wonder how much of this may be motivated by nationalist fears of declining birth rates.

Meanwhile, in the States...

If you want to see how Red tends to be expressed within a modern political context, Trump is actually a pretty good embodiment of the Opportunist mindset in action. Fascism as a political ideology can be seen as a mix of the Opportunist and Conformist mindsets.

I'd say this is correct. Ben Shapiro is actually a great example of the Expert stage; in that he uses rationality along with (largely cherry picked and decontextualized) facts to evangelize for a traditionalist world view. I'd say that this largely representative of how Conservatism has adapted to modernity, as rationality and scientific emericism are seen as the voices of authority in modern cultures, so conservatives will at least make an effort to use these to buttress thier worldview.

Short answer yes, but it's a bit more nuanced than that. In my experience the Conservative worldview tends to fit the Conformist and Expert stages, since there's a ton of pseudo-intellectualism within that domain as well (think of all the armchair experts doing their own "research" about vaccines or about supposed voter fraud in the 2020 election). I would say the Progressives rather than Liberals are a better fit for the Pluralist stage. Liberals tend to want to make the existing system more functional and equitable, rather than envisioning transformative social change like Progressives. So the Achiever would probably be a better fit for the Liberal mindset. But keep in mind these are all generalizations, and you'd be better off by not trying to force a 1:1 match between ego development and political ideologies.

@Leo Gura Also kudos man for making strides in the way you present triggering topics. While a provocative and iconoclastic tone can be engaging and situationally appropriate for certain domains, there are times when it's felt counterproductive as well. You've done a really good job at presenting the conservative worldview in a relatively even handed way that's palatable for Green sensibilities, which is obviously the folks who would benefit most from this information. It will also be interesting to see how you go about presenting the Liberal worldview to more conservatively minded folks.

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.