zazen

Didn’t know I had to spell out everything man common. What’s your definition of harm? 8-10million lost their homes, families thrown onto the street, lie savings evaporated. The knock on effects of all that - suicides, divorces, kids pulled out of school etc etc. Entire generation’s wealth vaporized - trillions of € gone. But that’s a bad example of harm cos no one got shot? That’s the same surface level eyeballs saying Dems aren’t bought off - cos you think it must mean they have to have briefcases of cash snuck to them under the table lol cartoonish. You want a name and a boogeyman to make it easy. Goldman Sachs helped create toxic mortgages, sold them to pension funds, bet against them, made billions when people lost homes - then got bailed out. Goldman Sachs and Citigroup alumni staffed the same administration that was supposed to regulate them, right after the crash they helped cause. Nice game of revolving door. Affordability has decreased and is squeezing everyone on the fundamentals - housing, healthcare and education have increased multiples more than wages. My parents generation could afford a home on a single income, today’s generations can’t barely on two without a mortgage - etymology is mort-mortality (death) gage (pledge). Death pledge maxxing. Housing - vulture funds buy entire neighbourhoods, jack up rents, outbid families, convert homes into permanent rental stock, reduce homeownership into a financial asset ie financialization. Blackrock, Blackstone etc. Healthcare - medical bankruptcies, $100k+ cancer treatments, insulin price gouging (€12 in Canada vs €98 in US). UnitedHealth made $22 billion in profit last year while denying claims left and right. Education - from AI “Sallie Mae lobbied to make student debt non-dischargeable in bankruptcy (making it inescapable), aggressively pushed private high-interest loans on students, lobbied for higher federal lending limits while funding groups that advocated for tuition increases, and securitized the debt into Wall Street financial products—creating a self-reinforcing system where schools could charge infinite amounts because students could borrow infinite amounts with loans they could never escape, while Sallie Mae faced zero risk and extracted maximum profit through interest payments that lasted decades.“ Read the following: https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ But don’t worry - people got Instagram, lots of ice cream flavours and like a gazzilion porn vids at their disposal - “consumer choices”.

Your missing the forest for the tree's. No ones saying people are zombies with no agency or they don't have choices - it's that their agency is limited within structural constraints by a few key players who you think ''serve people'' over themselves. Over the decades living standards have gone down and the middle class has been hollowed out due to the point we now have populism on the right and the left emerging - if the system and status quo served the people we wouldn't have wide spread discontent. Tobacco was a pure vice good - it isn't a utility, infrastructure or essential the way housing or healthcare are. You can quit smoking and suffer no functional loss in your ability to participate in society - try cutting out the major tech giants from your life. Tobacoo didn't just fall due to the market - although pressure was applied from there. The state clamped down via lawsuits, taxes and advertising bans. Tobacco is dispensable in a way a lot of these modern giants aren't which are fused with the state. Your focusing on small fish. BlackRock is the backbone of the retirement system - the system will defend its vital organs in a way it never defended tobacco. Corporations have a fiduciary duty to serve private shareholder value - not people. People are served as as secondary order effect, but not as a primary motive. If a corporation can cut costs, hike prices and lobby for regulations that favor it at the expense of the consumer - they will. This is legally mandated - this is what I mean by the system being structurally rigged in favor of capital. I also already pointed out 2008. People lost out, the big guys didn't and still go their bonuses. It's not capitalism or socialism - its capital socializing its losses and privatizing its gains - despite whatever we want to call it, its parasitic and extractive. Housing, healthcare, food and education - essentials wielded by a handful of corporations, who's directive is to maximize shareholder value, and not the value it provides to the customer. We can point to the illusion of choice in non-essential goods to ignore the tyranny of a lack of or limited choice in essentials we can't opt out of. If people had the choice they would opt out of crushing student debt to educate themselves, mortgages to house themselves which blow up in their face as in 2008, and not be medical emergency away from bankruptcy.

@Elliott From AI to explain what I mean by financial architecture and ''plumbing of the system'' being structurally designed in favor of capital. ''The Index Fund Mechanism (Passive Investing) How it works: Most Americans don't pick individual stocks. 401(k)s, pensions, IRAs default into index funds. Index funds (S&P 500, total market) are market-cap weighted This means: the bigger a company already is, the more money automatically flows into it The feedback loop: Company gets big → enters S&P 500 Trillions in passive funds must buy it (they track the index). Stock price goes up (from forced buying, not fundamentals). Market cap increases → gets even more weight in the index. More passive money flows in → stock goes higher. Repeat. Nobody chose this individually: Your 401(k) automatically buys Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta. You didn't "vote with your dollars" for Big Tech dominance. The structure of retirement savings mechanically concentrates capital into whatever's already biggest. It's structural, not democratic The Big Three own everything: BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street manage $20+ trillion in passive index funds. They're the largest shareholders in virtually every major corporation. Not because of "consumer choice"—because retirement money flows through them by default.They vote the shares (corporate governance) but it's YOUR money. You didn't choose to make Apple the most valuable company. Your retirement account did it automatically.The system is designed to concentrate capital into mega-caps. Consumers aren't steering—the index structure is.'' Another point is Michael Burry (Big Short) who predicted the 2008 crash just closed his fund down because the market is detached from the fundamentals "My estimation of value in securities is not now, and has not been for some time, in sync with the markets," https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/sustainable-finance-reporting/michael-burry-big-short-fame-deregisters-scion-asset-management-2025-11-13/ In plain english : the ''consumer'' can't affect these stock valuations to the degree they think they can with their consumer choices (to buy or not to buy, to empower or not to empower) because the state backstops and pumps liquidity towards these companies that have fused with the state to the point they are considered ''critical''. Their behemoth size underpins the US dollar empire ie too big to fail. This is why there is a divergence between main street and wall street - why is it that as main street suffers (everyday people being squeezed) - but wall street hits all time highs? Because liquidity - money printer goes brrrr and the regular person goes ahhhh ''cost of living crisis''. Traditional value investing becomes impossible. Burry can't find mispriced assets because the market isn't pricing anything properly - it's just channeling flows into whatever the index structure and imperial necessity demand to keep the empire afloat. Capital is the empire. When companies become infrastructure for empire, "consumer choice" becomes completely irrelevant. The state will prop them up regardless of their profitability or fundamentals justifying their valuation. Dollar hegemony requires strong US asset markets which is why i say capital is empire - and it is a financialized one. Michael Hudson is the goat at explaining all of this.

Your looking at how they got rich (consumer spending) but ignoring what they do when rich (regulatory capture, monopoly consolidation, political influence). Corporations start out through consumers choosing, but then they become something different after accumulating wealth from those choices - to the point they can end up shaping consumer choices through advertising and eliminating alternative ''choices'' through monopolistic consolidation. Decisions and desires are also engineered through advertising and algorithms. Even back in the Mad Men era - Edward Bernays influenced women to smoke by associating cigarettes with feminism (torches of freedom.) The advertising industry exists to create demand that doesn't exist - and modern day algorithms are that just ratcheted up. We are in cages influencing us at all times and ''inserting'' desires we didn't know we had. That proves my point - private capital became too powerful and could no longer be ''disciplined'' by the market or individual consumer choices ''in the form of the most direct-democracy possible'' as you put it. If they democratically grew these companies via their choices why can't they democratically tackle them? It took state force to do so. That's where anti-trust laws came from (response to Rockerfeller). These same laws are no longer enforced to the degree they should be due to state capture by capital. Symbolic slap on the wrists for some firms occur - but the core organs aren't harmed ie the structural power dynamic. Lina Khan was obstructed by the structure itself ie structural power. https://www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2025/11/10/lina-khan-former-commissioner-of-ftc-speaks-on-panel-about-divide-in-digital-policy-between-united-states-and-europe/ ''Khan said that Congress has been slow to check the power of tech companies while allowing them to hinder the lawmaking process by lobbying. “Just the endless torrent of money, which has, candidly, influenced both parties, I think has kept things from getting over the finish line” Today’s power isn’t smaller but is more systemic and so is less visible - it's financialized into a financial empire which is why it goes unnoticed if we simply look at the surface. It's structural ie financial plumbing and architecture - not cosmetic ie the house which is visible to all of us in the form of store fronts and ''consumer choices''. This is also why American's saying they have a better living standard than the rest of the world don't understand how - by a financial imperial arrangement maintaining the dollar as reserve currency which offers the US empire it's ''exorbitant privilege''. It's not solely because of market genius and capitalism - dollar dominance subsidizes American affluence and consumption (customer choices). JP Morgan became JP Morgan Chase the institution - Rockefeller became Exxon, BlackRock and a web of energy finance conglomerates. Private capital now upholds US hegemony in a symbiotic relationship - which is why they are treated as ''critical'' and beyond being challenged. State and private interest / capital has fused. If capital has global interests then they can subvert national interests. It's true Americans buy big cars and like big roads. But its also true that oil companies have been for decades lobbying against public transit also. Leverage isn’t overt control but about structural dependency - it' infrastructural and causes mutual capture or inter-dependency. Palantir doesn’t need to rule anything if it’s embedded in the defense, intelligence, and health data infrastructure the state relies on. Same with big tech and finance. So it's not about individual transactions - commerce, communication, and the state operate on privately owned platforms. It's hard to boycott our way out of monopolized infrastructure any more than we can boycott roads ie platforms. When Biden was faced with a standoff between capital vs labor during the rail strike he chose capital : https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-signs-bill-block-us-railroad-strike-2022-12-02/ He later brokered a deal, but that was after pressure and backlash - hence, concessions made - pressure release valve policy. But what was the first instinct? In the service of capital. And why is that rail strikers could pressure to the extent they did? Because they could leverage a critical chokepoint ie infrastructure that the economy and country depends on - the same way these corps have infrastructure / platforms. Biden conceding wasn't about the workers but about keeping the machine running. In this sense I agree with you - we do have power, but it must be en mass, strategic and disruptive to the structure of power. Sold out doesn't mean briefcases of cash handed under the table. Money is literally in politics - that money influences politics - politicians depend on a pipeline of funds from their donor class. Lina Khan who Biden appointed (and is now appointed by Zohran) said so herself as I shared earlier. Lobbying isn't charity where no return is expected. Secularism championed separation of Church and state but somehow we just accept that money has become the new Church and that it shouldn't be separated from politics. Instead it corrupts our politics and cannibalizes society. This is why all empire can do is crudely contain rival nations - because it can't compete against them. It's hard to compete globally when your own elite class is feeding on you locally lol so all that's left is saber rattling. Capital elites don't care for national interest because they are a-national, trans-national. And yet they are fused with the nation state to the point that national interest has become code for capital interest. That doesn't mean private capital can't work with national interest or be in alignment - it just means they have dual loyalty and that they can hedge against your demise. They are the real parasites that need containing - so that the nation state can remain strong enough to compete rather than need to default to muscle and bullying tactics to try contain those they can't compete with - which only brings out world closer to WW3. All the videos I shared above explain it all better than I could. Financialization seems like a dense word and kind of abstract but this video is quite clear:

@Elliott The issue isn’t where the money comes from (people), it’s what happens after and as it accumulates (market capture). Once these companies pass a certain threshold they gain structural power by converting their accumulated wealth into a form of control and leverage. They can exert leverage over laws via lobbying, dominate the market by consolidating competitors and supplies, own the platforms and infrastructure everyone including the state depends on. Network affects lock people in - try not using WhatsApp, Amazon’s logistics, Zoom etc. If the government is a customer and a regulator, who has leverage over who? The state runs on Google, Microsoft, Amazon’s AWA, collaborates with big tech for data access, Elon’s starlink is contracted with pentagon, Palantir is embedded in the defence and intel apparatus of the state etc. None of those companies started essential - they became big through discretionary spending, that bigness allowed them to consolidate and entrench themselves with the state. Now their too big to fail or to “sticky” to detach. Democratically funded implies we can democratically defund them. I think what you’re saying is that people can notice themselves feeding into these monopolies in real time, then decide to pull away to counter that monopoly power that will end up exploiting them later (techno-feudalism). Or that free market competition will break them and check their excesses of power. But capital compounds faster than awareness - like a frog boiling in water. People are too distracted and value convenience to care about funding the next monopoly that is yet to exploit their dependence. It becomes increasingly difficult once dependencies get entrenched (especially at a state level) and when the “consumer choices” shrink by being bled out of the market or being bought up and consolidated.

The real question is where has capital shifted, left or right? ...the question doesn't make sense because money has no ideology or party loyalty except to itself - its own accumulation and preservation. Has real power been structurally challenged despite these surface level cultural / political shifts left or right? Every trickle down concession made in the form of a more left leaning policy coming through is a pressure release valve to keep the platform afloat - on which private capital depends - from which it simultaneously extracts from. Capital can cannibalize the host up to the bone, but not the bone itself which is the structure it depends on. Taking a slight hit to profits by re-distributing a slice of the pie doesn't change the core power dynamic where capital influences the state more than the other way round. A lil slice for the proletariat to keep them at bay and the system alive: It's patchwork maintenance (maintaining the status quo / power structure ) like a landlord doing the bare minimum so his building is at least rentable but not kept to such a high standard as to cut into profits. The country can overall be moving left culturally (liberalizing), with a little resurgence of right wing conservatism (not enough to reverse the wider cultural trend), with some minor political concessions (re-distribution) to keep the system afloat and away from total revolt / revolution, whilst maintaining the structural power dynamic (capital-corporatism supremacy) the entire time. The cultural shift absorbs dissent that economics can’t and doesn't fix - its a pacifier until it's not (Zohran - leftist populism). But even leftist populism done at a local level is still operating within a structural framework of capitalist supremacy in which it will be constrained, sabotaged, unsustainable or underwhelming in outcomes. The issue with re-distribution is you need something to re-distribute and to keep on re-distributing int he first place. You can't keep slicing the pie if the people who make the pie leave the kitchen for other kitchens that tell them they can keep more of they pie they make (lower taxes etc). The only thing keeping bakers and makers wanting to keep baking in a certain kitchen over another, beside the incentive of how much of their pie they get to keep - is the quality of the kitchen (ingredients, safety measures, facilities, more customers to sell to). So any increase in hostility towards capital (higher business rates or taxes) can be compensated for by other factors. If a system introduces policies that punishes capital investment but remains open for that same capital to leave - the tax base that re-distribution depends on risks shrinking. So the policy alleviates some pain short term but ends up eroding in the medium-long term. Socialist policies need some containment (of capital) to work to disciplines capital’s flight instinct. But containment only works where cohesion legitimizes it and competence can enforce it. Money needs to keep circulating (contained) long enough to see results - by recycling money back into the system (local investment, welfare) rather than being sucked up to the top and out of the system into tax havens and speculative assets. Enough profits earned within a society are kept to feed into that society, which loops back to private investors as they have a wealthier consumer base to profit from. That needs cohesion and competence (execution, management) - which provide capital the certainty it needs to concede to less profit now for more stable profits long term. This is why China was invested into despite capital having to concede to China's terms (re-investment, joint ventures, capital controls etc) - because investors would take a hit at some profit if they can still gain access to a large market and where their money will be safe. Also why Singapore and Nordic countries do well - small but competent and cohesive so capital doesn't feel the need to vanish to the next highest return jurisdiction if where they are is stable and predictable. A market, city or country need to be ''investable'' and the people need to be cohesive enough to where they don't mind a hit in profit (for the ''collective'' good) - especially if they see visible results of paying higher taxes in the form of better education, infrastructure, safety etc. Cohesion gives legitimacy, competence brings outcomes, containment makes it self-sustaining. All that fails if capital can't be contained due to having more mobility than the state has authority - where cohesion is breaking (larger multi-cultural societies) and where competence is misdirected. The US/UK are competent at serving capital, not citizens. Money enters the system but is routed through parasitic structures that extract before anything trickles down to public life. This is why ''we pay high taxes'' yet see little and end up frustrated, whilst other countries do better with equivalent taxes or low to nothing (UAE etc). Lack of cohesion is obvious (cultural divides, left vs right etc). Containment of capital by the state is difficult because it's structurally captured by the same entity (capital) it needs to discipline in the first place. But also - the US can't discipline capital (contain it in any serious way) because the US is largely a financialized empire dependent on dollar dominance - and the dollars dominance is dependent on the mobility of capital. The reason the world holds dollars, buys treasuries, and treats Wall Street like a global central bank is because of that mobility. Starting to restrict or contain it will unravel US hegemony. Financialization replaced production (to serve private capital), debt became the growth engine (liquidity to keep things afloat, inflate assets, widen inequality), interest on that debt became a parasite that is now cannibalizing the system after the elites already had their share. Containment unravels the US empire, but so does the current status quo which is unsustainable - the unravelling happens either way.

Yeah it's far from a tourist lens but if you want to base your self somewhere strategic where you can reach most regions of the earth then its not 'that bad. Depends how often you need to go to the US, but most of the planet lives within Asia/Middle East/Africa/Europe and its bang in the middle so it works well for European's. This is why Europe is so appealing compared newer cities like Dubai or in the US. Europe was designed for humans before cars, the modern cities were made around cars and for efficiency and function. Dubai has the old town (Deira) and souk Madinat + old Arabian style architecture which is much warmer. Also, there's plenty of alcohol and nightlife / beach parties. All the top DJ's headlining in Vegas, Ibiza, Mykonos etc are in Dubai October-May before summer starts in Europe/US. Cringe Vegas style pool parties too:

😂 Destiny actually had the better takes. Hijab diluted his own points by getting personal and trying to throw him off - making him look foolish. But also Destiny didn’t make an argument for atheism - he kept smuggling in liberalism and secularism which are related but distinct.

I agree. A good way to look at it is container (structure, construct) vs consciousness. Religions and government structures (democracy vs monarchy) are containers - that the peoples conciousness within them is distinct from. Although there is a relationship between the two also. So it’s not about the doctrine alone but about the development of those engaging with it. Some containers are perhaps better than others at elevating our conciousness - because some containers have more trappings than others. This is why non-duality and actualized (Leo’s body of work) is better at elevating conciousness - it just has way less trappings than religion does. For example in Islam the idea of jihad (struggle) or in Judaism - the chosen people. Both of these can be approached form a lower or higher place. A lower conciousness turns jihad into ISIS and the notion of chosen people into candy for the ego. A higher conciousness turns jihad into struggle against ego/impulses and chosen people into a burden or responsibility to embody good virtues. These trappings are higher risk than a neutralised scientific approach to spirituality which has less baggage, words or ideas that can be conflated or confused. Osho actually did this and said it was his intention - he spoke from a higher place on all the world religions. He drew in people of all walks by doing this, and then he went onto the next step and said to even drop those containers (religions) and approach spirituality without them ie more scientifically. But like I said to breakingthewall - there is a place for both the scientific approach to spirituality, and the art of spirituality which is more colourful and localised to where people are from. We don’t necessarily have to drop our identity - otherwise how do we culturally “belong” with everyone around us without feeling alien. We need to synthesise the two approaches and view the scientific approach like a formal universal language and the artful approach like a local cultural language. In other words transcend the container but live within it - the same way we’re told to be in the world but not of it.

Remember when you and BlueOak thought BRICS is trying to end global democracy and turn the world authoritarian lol as if there aren’t larger and internal forces causing that. Brazil, India and South Africa are democracies - that’s 3/5 of the BRICS nations. You guys don’t even know what BRICS is or what brings them together. You guys think they’re exporting an ideology rather than pragmatically coming together to equalise the global order in such a way as to not have 15% of the world population dictate to 85% of the world through the institutional leverage these colonial legacy powers have. This 40min video is a great watch: Ignore the few biased takes and comments - the video has much to learn from. Adults don’t get triggered at trigger words or comments and can extract value when value is there. Just like we could learn from Hitler when he spoke of the parasitic rentier elites back in the day. Trumps now floating a 50 year mortgage at 2% - I hope everyone understands the implications of that ie a trillion dollar bailout for the banksters while the ordinary person pays to keep a dying system afloat. Socialised losses, privatised gains.

@Breakingthewall Sharing a old comment that goes into what we’r talking about. I think your after purity of essence and against anything that can dilute it ie institutions. But that’s the nature of the beast. Once a “real pure mystic” is there - it’s human to build around it to keep that flame alive - and eventually that flame diminishes or dies down. That doesn’t mean institutions (religions or structures) shouldn’t exist - it’s just a baked in flaw that they are bound to diminish the spirit of whatever value they were inspired by or hoping to keep alive down the ages. We can start to judge who’s more “enlightened” than another - again being puritanical about it. But just like in sports where we have gold, silver and bronze medals - and everyone else who tries. Do we then say the whole institution of sports (training, coaches, camps etc) aren’t correct because not everyone will be 1st or not everyone can be taught by the best? This is a good short from Ram Dass on the trap of structures, methods, gurus:

Correct (humans are flawed) - but I said the core flaw in this system is such and such. Feudalism was corrupt too but we don't say "what to do, all systems are corrupt anyway" or ''humans are corrupt bro'' like its a discovery LOL. That's exactly why system design matters. If humans are corruptible (they obviously are) - then the entire point of building political and economic systems is to structure incentives so that corruption is costly and punishable rather than profitable or in the US's case legally mandated. Your asking why blame capitalism for human nature? I'm saying that this specific arrangement of capitalism weaponizes and mandates the worst of human nature. The system is deliberately restructured to make capital accumulation the supreme logic, overriding all other values - and it will legally punish anyone who resists. You can have the most ethical, principled person in the world - like a Buddha. Put them in a C-suite with fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value, and they either extract wealth or get fired and replaced by someone who will. This is a legal, structural requirement - corruption is literally the operating system. In a better system, labor checks capital, the state checks both. Media checks the state - citizens check the media. Different power centers check each other. This is also why in multi-polarity we have powers checking one another - and today we have China checking the US telling it to pipe down or it'll nuke its military industrial complex with rare earth controls. This is why the US is trying to secure the realm by preying on weaker players now (Venezuela, talks of Nigeria now lol). What we have now is: capital checks capital (it doesn't), the state is captured by capital (so it can't check anything), media is owned by capital (so it justifies the status quo), and citizens are too divided and propagandized to check any of it. Check ya self before ya wreck yourself.

Dubai somehow manages to have 1st world facilities and luxuries whilst hosting a labour force at almost 3rd world rates, whilst having the stability (politically, economically, and geographically) that the developing world and now even the “developed” world lacks. This is one reason the quality of life for the price is unmatched - ethics aside. For example people get the facilities and luxuries of the 1st world, including safety that is increasingly absent in the 1st world, whilst also having access to a cheaper labour force for every day services - as if you were in a less developed country with that sort of buying power. Say you have elderly parents that need care for example. In the UK it costs anywhere from £5-£7k a month for a full time carer or £60-£85k yearly. In Dubai you can get that service for £2-£3k. Cleaning, cooking or a driver also at way lower rates. If you’re running a business it’s 0% income tax and 9% corporate tax on anything over 100k (first 100k is tax free). So imagine the cost - benefit analysis going through people’s heads. Your making money, saving a lot of it, getting 1st world facilities and infrastructure (not institutions which are lacking), and getting creature comforts and the possibility of buying back time (cooking, cleaning) at much lower cost. It’s also an international city (like what Westerners are used to), isn’t as foreign as Asia, or far away from anywhere - within 8hrs of Africa, Asia, Middle East, Europe. 15hrs to Merica ain’t too bad either. You also don’t have to get involved any polarized politics because it’s not a democracy. Just focus on your life (health, work, spirituality and social) and enjoy watching the Western world of politics from afar. Property is also better value for money and appreciating as a asset better than already developed mature markets. Hmm I wonder why so many people are moving there lol. They have become better in labour laws from what I know - not like what it used to be. The air quality is one of the worst in the world too and summers are ovens - but you can just go Europe then with all the tax free savings you make. Also, quite a bit of dark money and sugar baby type shit going on - nothing new if your from any major city like London, NY or LA though.

@Breakingthewall Those mystics are the flowers of their respective traditions. The issue is that Westerners (not all jeez -don’t @ me) belittle or demote the religious or cultural soil they grew from. It’s one thing to criticize the dogmatism of religion, another to say that religion itself is rigid and silly beyond repair and must be left to the dustbin of history as a stage blue relic. Stage blue (and others) aren’t about form but orientation. The form of religion doesn’t just belong in stage blue but can have a stage blue orientation - which is dogmatic. There can be stage orange, green and yellow religious practitioners and mystics. I think the error is that Westerners secularise these mystics and saints into the “enlightened individual” who became liberated from the backward religious dogma and culture all around them. They’re trapped in their own historical narrative of rebellion (against the Church etc) and project it. They see eastern saint's radiating love and light - then jump to conclude the only way they could get that way was through rejection of the path and cultural soil that led them there. For example - did Sadhguru reject and shed his own cultural soil, language and metaphysics? Or is it possible that it in fact aided him, as it does others who he teaches it too? The shift in perspective is that Rumi wasn’t a rebel against Islam but was Islam’s flowering. Just like with the others. Maybe the error is we mistake transcendence within the form of religion for rebellion against it - because we can’t imagine total devotion within a religious framework leading to awakening. I think we need to separate awakening from understanding. For example - all kinds of people from different backgrounds and religions have had awakenings or are awakened - yet that doesn’t mean they understand it at the same level as say how Leo Gura does. This is where I appreciate the West’s approach to spirituality. We could say it’s a scientific one and that it using a technical / neutral language is what allows it to be a sort of lingua franca of spirituality for everyone. Eckhart Tolle did this really well by using words that purposely had no historic baggage or conflations ie presence instead of God. But that doesn’t and shouldn’t erase the localised expression of the spiritual through various cultures, traditions and religions. Those are like local dialects and accents that bring richness to life and allow people to engage with the spiritual in their own way, in their own tongue. We could say that’s the art of religion. I’ve seen some videos on meta-modernism that goes into meta-modern religion. There could be a world where both scientific (neutral) and artful (culturally colourful religious) spirituality co-exist as complementary to each other. Let’s say we all got enlightened one day - what would we do anyway? Before enlightenment chop wood carry water, after enlightenment chop wood carry water. People will still live and want to express and share awakening in various forms, traditions and religions. But it will be done at a different level “from above”. Then the next generations slowly become less enlightened and make the same mistakes of the religions of old - introducing dogmatism and fundamentalism - and the cycle begins again where later generations mock the old religions for being “untrue” lol

Me being smart includes me ignoring his biases and learning from any other insights he has that are interesting - which he does. But for sure he definitely has as pro-Islam bias. He's actually a revert - so if he was jealous of Western civilization he would have remained a non-Muslim and been a Western supremacist instead lol. Expansion happened yes, just like with all empires at the time. Conflating empire with religion is a issue, though religion/ideaology is co-opted and used as a pre-text. For example today, liberalism has spread / is still trying to be with democracy bombs in the Middle East. Does that say anything about liberalism itself or make it inherently bad? No. Also, on average if you take a look you'll find that Islam spread much more through exchange and trade than just simple wars of conquest, compared to Christianity. The point of the video is this. The West metaphysically uprooted itself due to greater emphasis on science, rationality etc. They then mined for spiritual meaning and transcendent significance in other cultures and traditions, then proclaim to know the ''deeper spiritual truth'' of those cultures and traditions better than its own people. Spiritual appropriation and arrogance. That then gets re-enforced via Spiral dynamics that ranks them as higher up because they have approached religion ''from above'' - cementing their own sense of supremacy and righteousness. The West believe in evolution yet can't extend that logic of evolution to religion itself - that religion can't evolve or operate from and at a higher place. Even if it does, it proclaims that only Westerners seem to know how because they are higher up the linear ladder of development. As if stage yellow religious people didn't or couldn't have existed before. Western spiritualists and liberal types also mock religion despite it being the foundational pivot and orientation which introduced the very same values they hold today. Its like a child ridiculing their parents and thinking that their independence from them means some sort of enlightenment. They don't have to deny their heritage, they can just keep evolving within it or even from it if they want whilst shedding the religious shell - but no need to deny the roots and soil they grew from. Ironically, they went looking for roots elsewhere due to the emptiness. The Western mind universalized its own arc of development, moral logic, and metaphysical assumptions and claim them to be universal - including the path and aesthetic itself. Stage green is only green if it looks like Western stage green - with pride flags waving around, debates about whether chicks can have dicks, gender neutral bathrooms etc. They must also de-construct everything without constructing anything to ground and help them feel a sense of rooted belonging. The world must go down this same path of nihilism just like the West apparently or its still ''behind''. This is retarded. Not only was much of the worlds land colonised, then its politics and global institutions, but now even development and spirituality is colonised lol. That's what Shahid is pointing to. And he's not entirely wrong. The West dismantled its own Christian metaphysic through rationalism and materialism and instead of evolving that tradition they discarded it. The void left them spiritually disoriented but intellectually confident enough to go extract from other traditions and teach its adherents about it better than they ever knew. They broke their own spiritual ladder, built a new one from everyone else’s wood, then insist everyone climb it to reach where they already stand as if their standing in the highest place ahead of everyone else. Spiral dynamics says to transcend and include - but what I see is exclusion and amputation of religion without any appreciation for it. It's like a civilization orphaning itself and being proud about it. Silly willy. Just see - Sadiq Khan is mayor of London and now Zohran Mamdani of New York. Muslims governing the two financial hearts of the Western world. Are these cities going to be Sharia hell holes that aren’t inclusive? Or is it that there is nuance among Muslims in that they can also be developed and practice the religion at higher level? You don’t want to offer that nuance though and instead have this caricature that every Muslim must be like the Taliban who are practicing the “real Islam”. Yeah, just like how Neocons are practicing the “real liberalism”.

If the core flaw in the system is that capital controls the state rather than the state disciplining and checking the excess parasitic nature of capital - then what it will take to invert that dynamic is a state that has the capacity to act with authority to do so. But the West are culturally opposed to such a thing due to various cultural reflexes of distrust of the state and notions of liberty and slipper slope of authoritarianism. Yet, the citizens liberties are being trampled upon by a capital class that has soft-couped the state and colonized its own. How is the West going to wrestle the control capital has over the state, out of their hands? All these economic problems that get papered over with patch work solutions by right or left politics will never resolve the underlying issue which is structural. The economic problems have to be fixed at the political level, and that needs be fixed first at a cultural level. Because the political solution is something the culture is opposed to. And even if it weren't - the West is culturally divided and distrustful of the ''other'' side that they would never work together to create that structural change in the first place - because they would also never trust the ''other'' side to control that level of state power which could be exercised upon them, imposing a vision of America they culturally disagree on. Ya'll cooked basically. The system has to up end it self and be built from the bottom. The three pivot points that structurally allowed capital to dick-tate things to the state were the un-pegging from the gold standard (that fictionalized the economy), re-defining law so that companies had a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value (short term profits for the few over anything else), and the citizens united act basically let money speak louder than the people only distorting and capturing politics even more.

True, it's not that their equivalent but that they are on a continuum. Their different degrees of the same phenomenon - different in degree but not in kind. I think the best word to describe it is that there is distinction within consciousness, but not separateness. Consciousness and sentience are distinct but not separate. Sentience is in and of consciousness just like a wave is in and of the ocean - the wave is in the domain of and of the same substance as the ocean. From that view, sentience is never added or imported into consciousness as something separate. And if nothing new is being added from outside, then anti-natalism has no foundation - because anti-natalism requires separateness, and idealism denies separateness. That idea of separateness only works within a materialist paradigm. Idealism acknowledges distinction but not separateness. Materialism acknowledges everything as separate to each other - different materials coming together to be configured. In this case humans are made as if on a factory assembly line being configured like Lego. The logic follows that if separateness is the case, then anti-natalists can argue something was added to reality (rather than emerging from it) - a new ''sentient being'' ie baby. Then they can make an argument against adding that new consciousness that will suffer and that didn't consent to that suffering. Anti-natalism hinges on that gap and separation existing - which idealism dissolves because it claims consciousness as a continuity. In idealism or a non-materialist worldview - everything only ever comes out of consciousness, rather than gets added and thrown in from somewhere else outside it. If consciousness is primary and fundamental then birth isn't creation of a new consciousness but a transformation of existing consciousness. In that paradigm nothing new (a sentient being) is being brought into reality from the outside, but is emerging out of consciousness itself. Concioussness is just individualising or localising itself into a particular form, like the ocean forming a wave. In the same way then - sentience is just consciousness configuring itself to such a degree as to become sentient and ultimately aware of itself. Ice, water and steam are all water in kind, though they differ in form. There’s no clean break or gap between consciousness and sentience in which we can say that something new was added to consciousness from the outside - there was no addition to consciousness only transformation. Again using the ocean/wave analogy: Materialist view: Each wave is a NEW entity that gets ADDED to the ocean. Before the wave, there was just ocean. After the wave, there's ocean PLUS wave. Idealist view: The wave IS ocean. It's not added TO the ocean, it arises FROM the ocean. It's ocean expressing itself in wave form. No addition occurred - just transformation. Your trying to have it both ways which mixes a materialist ontology with a idealist one which then causes some incoherence - "everything is ocean (consciousness is primary)'' but waves are genuinely new separate things that get added (sentient beings emerge as new entities)" or ''everything is consciousness, BUT new sentient beings emerge as genuinely new separate entities that can then be morally wronged." But if everything is ocean, waves aren't separate entities - they're temporary forms the ocean takes.We (sentient beings) don't arrive from somewhere else into this universe/consciousness. We arise out of it - like apples on a apple tree. The apple tree doesn't "create" the apple as something separate from itself. The apple IS the tree, expressing itself in fruit form. Similarly, parents don't "create" consciousness as something separate. The child IS consciousness, expressing itself in human form. Humans can decide to participate in that impulse or not. Creation is happening within consciousness and emerges - but creation isn't happening externally and then getting added to consciousness or reality as something separate.

@Twentyfirst @Jodistrict speaking of Bolsen and Muslims liberating I don’t think Comrade Zohran will achieve much unless structural changes happen ie the dynamic being flipped from capital controlling the state to the state controlling (disciplining) capital. Until then all these left vs right solutions just paper over issues that need to be resolved at a deeper level. Can’t have social welfare programmes if the programmers (controllers) of money aren’t incentivised. A lot of it comes down to financial sovereignty and who controls and directs credit flows. Obama 2.0 unless structural changes happen. Short term relief will be there but perverse incentives undo all those gains over time. Why would developers build more homes if they can’t raise rents to keep in line with inflation - that will cut into profit margins? Capital is mobile and will just go elsewhere to seek better returns which are hard enough to get these days. That means even less housing being built, supply side squeeze, which means price goes up. Liberals celebrated when Mayor of London Sadiq Khan got in and it’s only gotten worse under him too - due to larger dynamics at hand. He’s blamed instead - just as Zohran could be blamed for not meeting expectations. But a lot is out of their hands as they are at the mercy of capital to fund their aspirations and “solutions”.

Not sure if you were also asking whether anti-realist views can exist within an idealist world? In which case yes, but belief being able to exist is different from it being true. Subjective anti-natalist views can exist within existence but that doesn’t make their universal claims about existence true. Just like someone can believe in Santa, without it being true. As for idealism (non-materialist worldview) and anti-natalism being incompatible or not - they just don’t resonate with each other at the ontological level of how they view existence. Anti-natalism assumes creation as causation - that you can “bring a being into existence” who previously wasn’t. That idea only makes sense in materialism, where matter precedes consciousness. But in idealism, consciousness is fundamental and eternal. No one “creates” a conscious being - consciousness already is and simply manifests through different forms. There’s no non-being to violate or new entity to “impose” existence upon. So the antinatalist’s moral claim - “it’s wrong to force life into being” - loses its metaphysical ground. From idealisms pov it’s like saying the ocean is morally wrong for making waves That’s why I said it’s not about their worldview being bad as much as it is about being untrue - unless seen from a purely materialist paradigm. But it doesn’t reflect how reality operates in an idealist paradigm. Their ethics depend on the metaphysics of materialism - which see’s a world of separate agents manufacturing life as if in a factory. Once the premise changes, the conclusion evaporates with it. In other words: the idealist paradigm (that conciousness is primary) is at odds with the materialist paradigm on which anti-natalism depends. The foundational premise from which all assumptions are made is materialist. If the paradigm is widened to include a spiritual metaphysics then the old one is no longer coherent. The premise changes, and along with it the assumptions and the conclusions. The conclusion of the material paradigm is that life is a non-consensually imposed net negative on a new life - therefore anti-natalism makes the correct conclusion that life is best not perpetuated.

I agree - it's fine as a personal intuition and choice they make, but where I challenge it on is that they take a subjective moral intuition and turn it into a universal claim about reality. They believe their subjective anti-realist view is actually a objective view of reality - by taking something which is particular, relative, and subjective and making it objective, absolute, and universal. The claim isn't that ''giving birth for me is wrong'' - its that ''giving birth itself is wrong''. It's the same error dogmatic religious people make - even if they don't impose their views on others, from within their moral paradigm they view others as sinning because their actions aren't in line with their universal truth and moral law. It's in the name itself - anti-natalist (against, birth) - that's a moral position against the act of birth itself, claimed as a universal wrong. So it's not just a personal preference based on case by case circumstance that may be relatively true for a certain individual - its a philosophy believing it describes a absolute truth about existence. Yeah - no doubt even non-materialists care about suffering, they just contextualize it differently. For the materialist, suffering is unredeemable except by its elimination. The moral logic is that if life produces suffering, the ethical ideal is to stop life. They treat suffering as ultimate because there’s nothing beyond it - no larger field (meta-physic/physical) in which pain and joy have meaning or can be redeemed by higher goods beyond measure like love, awareness, beauty etc. It makes sense why the logical endpoint of the materialist paradigm would lead to minimizing ''potential'' lives because life is (mainly) suffering, so fewer beings = less suffering. Anti-natalism emerges from that, as I mentioned - they do have coherence within the materialist paradigm. Non-materialists can still care about suffering and choose to not give birth - but it won't be for the same reasons ie based upon consent violation or from the view that life is suffering and inherently bad - a universal claim and verdict of existence. One can still view the value of life, the inherent beauty and goodness - whilst still deciding not to procreate based upon the relative truth that their circumstances would most likely cause more suffering for the child than not - including for the parent themselves. It's simply a assessment on your circumstances not being viable - not a verdict that life itself is a cosmic mistake. Note also how they usually talk of suffering and not just pain. Suffering is the experience of pain, experience implies someone who experiences ( a sufferer ), which implies a consciousness that suffers - which undermines the materialist paradigm itself. A moral intuition and value judgment of suffering being a bad that should be minimised (instead of also contextualised) comes from a consciousness being there in the first place. The anti-natalists own capacity to contemplate existence, make moral judgments or value life enough to want to prevent suffering and philosophize about it - point to something beyond just the material. Even for spiritual anti-natalists (who are opposed to natalism yet still believe in the spiritual) - they simply haven't gone full circle to the point of understanding a metaphysics (spiritual reality) within which suffering can be redeemed by states that are themselves spiritual and beyond any material measure. The issue is less of their worldview being bad or good and more about it being untrue. It essentially boils down to a materialist vs anti-materialist debate because its from that premises that follows all the assumptions and views being made. That's the foundation. Doesn't actualized.org and Leo etc already cover how the materialist worldview is untrue? Like that thread where someone shared Bernardo Kastrup and Alex O'Connor discussing materialism and idealism on the philosophy sub-forum. Eternity can't be imposed on that which is already eternal - consciousness. This is why each paradigm approaches this so differently. Without a spiritual lens, anti-natalisms logic is hard to refute, because it’s made inside a materialist worldview where we should minimize suffering. Trying to debate that from their paradigm is already a loss because we've conceded to their paradigm and all the assumptions that follow it (which are then coherent) - instead of debating the paradigm itself. If we include a metaphysical dimension - soul, evolution of consciousness, divine play etc - the logic dissolves. If life is the universe experiencing itself, then birth isn't a imposition but a participation. Deciding not to participate is a choice - but it isn't a condemnation of life itself being bad. It can be bad from a relative sense, but not a absolute sense from which we then make existential universal claims about life. Anti-natalists mistake suffering in life, for the the nature of life. From a materialist view it makes sense that life is imposed upon a being because life looks like a product made in a assembly line - two physical meat suits rubbing each other and bang (big or small lol) - a new consciousness appears that needs to suffer a life it didn't consent to. It makes sense if the universe is a dead machine (mechanistic) and that consciousness is a by product / side effect of biology and matter rather than its source. But from a metaphysical view there only ever is Consciousness or a Being that is eternal, only shifting in form. In that paradigm we aren't condemning a life to exist and suffer forever because it already was existing - just in different form- as the formless. From that paradigm its not a question of a new being, being created from thin air - Being already is the case, existence already is the case and is eternal - it isn't imposed but only unfolds. The ocean and wave metaphor (Alan Watts) is useful: the ocean doesn’t ask the wave if it wants to exist, the wave is the ocean expressing itself and was never separate to begin with. Violation can still happen between forms (waves), but never to Being (ocean) itself. At a metaphysical level - Being can't be violated, because nothing stands outside it to harm or destroy it. The ocean isn't damaged by one wave smashing another. Ethical dynamics (consent, violations etc) emerge in the relative sense within the domain of forms - between waves, not in the absolute sense of violating Being itself. When the wave rises, it doesn’t violate anything - it just fulfills what it already is, the impulse of the ocean / life / Being. The burden of proof is on the antinatalists to show that the inherent impulse of life is not to be and that life is solely material. Everything says otherwise - including the antinatalists themselves who are standing as a being - living, breathing and not ceasing to be themselves. The impulse of life is to be and Being wants to be. That's why most people oppose the notion of anti-natalism that makes universal claims about life as a net negative of little to no value. On some level most people feel it to be off. Anti-natalism is moral intuition that’s right but incompletely applied to life because its stripped of a larger metaphysical context within which to make sense of suffering. Whether people can articulate it or not - the same thing in people that responds to art, love and beauty is the same thing that rejects anti-natalisms universal claims about life being net negative. Anti-natalists themselves are living proof of the thing they condemn. They are a life passionately arguing that life shouldn't continue to exist through natalism - while demonstrating through that very passion that life finds meaning, purpose, and value in its own expression.

Related:

Going further into this. The consent argument can logically be dismantled. But the argument for life having more suffering and pain than pleasure is trickier. We can weigh things up to conclude (based upon conditions) that certain lives will suffer more than they will experience pleasure. Which is why I said the coherence is there “if coming at it from a purely materialist view”. But the deeper experiences of life aren’t quantifiable, but are instead qualitative and transcendent - which includes them transcending the measurement of the balance sheet on which we are trying to weight up life as a net negative or positive. Love, meaning, beauty and presence transcend the entire calculus and binary of pain / pleasure - they include yet transcend them. Like a mother going through motherhood with sleepless nights and all it entails - there’s pain and discomfort, but immense meaning and love at the same time that transcends it all. Quality is denser than quantity - we can quantitatively count the same number of gold and silver coins - yet the gold coins weigh more than the silver. Quantity measures the surface, is horizontal. Quality is of depth, vertical. The anti-natalist is applying a mathematical logic to a realm that is fundamentally alogical. The fact that those transcendent states are alogical makes them even harder to logically discuss and convince an anti-natalist of them - or of the asymmetrical value in them against the more measurable moments of suffering. It’s basically the calculator vs the poet - asking someone to weight the soul on a scale built for bricks. The cold calculus of suffering is logically coherent but existentially hollow - because it fails to account for the very things that make life worth living, even despite the calculator showing we suffer more on paper. It’s almost impossible to logically convey the value of that which is beyond logic - but that is of value that trumps logic altogether. That is the domain of the master and the mystics - who use mechanisms to bring us to an experience of life, that shows us life definitely isn’t just mechanistic. That it isn’t simply physical matter, but that a meta-physical reality exists. I can never point directly to the value of life, or logically explain it. That’s where art, music, poetry step in - or the experience of love, beauty and presence. Love, presence and meaning don’t erase suffering, pain or loss but instead redeem them. Anti-natalists are the accountants of existence using a sterile weighing scale. The lovers of life or even those who have experienced love just once - know life transcends the scale altogether. Logic coldly asks why? Love asks why not? “Metaphysical syllables riddled by the invisible”

@zurew Separate responsibility from consent. We can do our best to create good conditions for current and future life on earth - without any violation of consent for that future life occurring - which is an impossibility to begin with. We can be responsible for creating conditions, but can’t be guilty for violating consent of a being or subject that doesn’t yet exist. Otherwise how are you making all your decisions day to day - which are violating trillions of future lives consents? Was your own birth a violation of consent? Or just morally irresponsible because you’ll suffer and die one day? If it’s a violation of consent, who violated it? If it’s irresponsibility - then you’re admitting the question depends on conditions, not a universal moral law which anti-natalists depends on. Anti-natalism needs the “consent violation” framing to maintain their universal ethic of non-consensual birth being bad, thus procreation itself being bad. Without it, they’re just saying “be a good parent if you have kids” which isn’t a revolutionary position - it’s common sense and just being responsible. If someone finds life to be hard, and that them having kids would compound that suffering and be passed onto the kids - then don’t have them. That’s responsible and fair - but it isn’t about violating consent. These are distinct from each other. Once the consent argument flops the next one is that life itself is more bad than good. This is where anti-natalism can actually have some coherence - if one comes at it from a purely materialist view - hence the thread is even called “a solution for ending materialist human suffering”. But most humans intuit the metaphysical (soul) beyond just the physical (material) - which is why most people don’t overreact to their experience of suffering with nihilistic philosophies and a negative universal claims about life itself. Something in us wants to live, despite suffering and outside of just biology -something beyond matter, that seems to matter enough to enough people to keep on living. People are still out there creating and risking the heartbreak of love, and contextualizing the inevitability of death in various ways to deal with it. There’s a metaphysical pulse running through the physical - that if we don’t numb ourselves to and sever ourselves from - help us have a appropriate relationship to suffering. Often it makes life even more beautiful. I shared the part I used for AI and said it’s from Chat GPT. Go back to my older posts or topics before AI was even a thing to see that I don’t just write and explore things in such a shallow manner, or that I’m incapable of depth without AI. Feel free to use AI yourself and bring clarity to the subject.

You haven’t engaged any of the points but instead moved the goalpost because I keep playing whack a mole by shutting down your points. You haven’t even responded to Basman making the same point about consent and responsibility being distinct. Anti-natalism can’t survive on its own logic, because it keeps borrowing the language of life to argue against life. They talk about ethics while denying the subject that makes ethics possible, talk about consent while erasing the being that can consent, and talk about compassion while annihilating the context where compassion has meaning. It’s the terminal stage of a disenchanted, disillusioned and metaphysically displaced culture. How sad. I don’t even say this as a dig - I am Western and in the West myself. You still haven’t answered how you live day to day life and make decisions - haven’t you made multiple consent violations of future non existent people before breakfast this morning? Your logic is only for the prophets who can forsee the future and teleport in some multi-verse to seek consent of the non-existent. Maybe you are a prophet and ahead of us - maybe when we’re all prophets at stage turquoise we’ll take up this logic and incorporate it into our own laws. If this logic was sound, coherent and most of all applicable - we’d see it codified into law and practiced. From Chat GPT: Zurew’s logic doesn’t appear anywhere in real-world legal or medical ethics, because it’s philosophically incoherent and legally unusable. Let’s break that down with examples: ⚖️ 1. Criminal Law (Rape and Consent) In criminal law, consent is strictly present and relational — between existing persons capable of giving or denying it. Example: In a rape case, if a victim is unconscious, the act is considered non-consensual because the person exists and has rights that persist during unconsciousness. However, no court recognizes “future consent violations.” You can’t be charged with “violating the consent of a person who doesn’t exist yet.” That’s why paying someone to commit a rape is punished under conspiracy or solicitation, not as “violating the future victim’s consent.” The law distinguishes between intent and violation — exactly what Zurew blurs. 🏥 2. Medical Ethics Medical ethics operates on informed consent, again requiring an existing, identifiable patient who can understand and agree. Example: Performing a medical procedure on an unconscious patient is only ethical if prior consent was given (e.g. a DNR form) or if the situation is life-threatening and consent is presumed. No medical system treats a future person as a moral subject whose consent can be violated. That’s why doctors don’t need “consent from future generations” to perform life-saving research — they’re judged by current professional duty, not speculative future consent. So in both criminal and medical ethics, Zurew’s logic fails completely. It doesn’t map onto any framework because consent presupposes subjecthood, and subjecthood presupposes existence. If his logic were real, you’d have absurd results like: Doctors being guilty of “violating the consent of future patients” by discovering antibiotics. Parents being guilty of “pre-consensual harm” for conceiving children. That’s why no legal or medical code uses it — it’s philosophically fanciful and legally unusable.” I’m only this cheeky and blunt because you called my comment stupid, weird and claimed me to be butt hurt. Next time you’ll think twice about being naughty and rude. Naughty zurew.

“Whether you call it consent violation or moral responsibility doesn’t matter” - of course it matters. The rhetorical position of antinatalism rests on framing procreation as a consent violation. That’s what elevates a personal choice into a moral emergency and totalizing ethic. Strip away the consent language and what are we left with? “You’re subjecting someone to experiences including negative ones and mortality” Yeah - that’s called existence lol you’ve discovered the human condition. If that’s framed as consent violation then suddenly we’re not just describing reality - but making parenthood analogous to assault. We’re weaponizing liberal individualist frameworks (autonomy, consent) and extending them into metaphysical absurdity (demanding consent from the non-existent). Your collapsing the distinction to maintain your narrative - which depends on treating potential people as right bearing individuals whose consent can be violated. @Basman Related to your comment and to Zurew bringing up how I tie in an unrelated topic when it’s very much is related. These stage green philosophies aren’t errors due to compassion or their original intent that is sincere and valid - it’s that they’re taking what are situational individual choices and universalizing them into a cosmic ethic. Why can’t lifestyle choices remain as such? Why do they need to become moral crusades and isms? The wider point about this phenemona emerging in the West is that these moral overextensions keep emerging in the context of a culture trying to re-soul itself through moral absolutism - because for a long time it submerged itself in rational scientific materialism that metaphysically unmoored it. They are symptoms of what happens when you have a correct moral intuition (suffering is bad) but no metaphysical container for it (no understanding of suffering’s role in growth, or a transcendent meaning that contextualizes earthly pain, or spiritual framework that grounds existence as fundamentally good despite its difficulties). So that moral impulse - which in a traditional framework would be tempered by wisdom, cosmology or initiation into life - instead becomes absolute. It eats itself. “Suffering is bad” becomes “therefore existence is bad” becomes “therefore reproduction is unethical.” This is the West’s particular pathology: we rejected a transcendent metaphysics, kept the moral sensitivity, and now that sensitivity has nowhere to go but into increasingly totalizing, life negating philosophies that we call progress. Spiral Dynamics assumes a linear, universal trajectory of development that’s actually Western centric in both its aesthetic and milestones. It interprets progress through the lens of the Western psyche: material mastery (Orange), then moral overreach and empathy (Green), then synthesis of the tensions and contradictions in the below stages (Yellow). Other cultures with a spiritual or metaphysical anchor already resolved these tensions without collapsing into nihilism. Spiral Dynamics can’t see that because it reads history through a Western teleology and developmental arc, where everyone else looks like a “lower stage” for not following. It universalizes the Western developmental arc - as if that trajectory is the natural path for all humans. Every other culture is measured against this Western timeline and implicitly cast as “behind in development” rather than “differently developed”. The West lost its metaphysical grounding and then tried to reconstruct it through psychology - then mistake its own rediscovery of balance as “the next stage of evolution.” It’s civilizational amnesia posturing as progress. As if these colour coded values never existed before and only “came online” in Ken Wilber’s terms - in recent history. How does stage green or yellow values only come online recently - as if they never existed before lol. It’s called spiral dynamics yet approached as if it’s ladder dynamics in some linear manner. Concern for the environment and marginalized is a recent evolution? Tell that to Jains who’ve been practicing radical non-harm for 2,500 years, or indigenous cultures with sophisticated ecological wisdom embedded in their cosmologies, or mystics who experienced universal divine love. Tell that to every traditional culture that understood humans as embedded in - not separate from - the web of life. Apparently none of that counts because it was wrapped in “mythic” or “magic” worldviews. It only becomes a real developmental stage when white Western baby boomers discovered empathy after dropping acid lol. The model literally takes Western culture’s temporary pathological detour through mechanistic rationalism and calls it a necessary path of evolution for the entire globe. It treats these values as novelties that “emerged” rather than a recovery from lost and found. I’m not saying spiral dynamics is junk - just that “the map is not the territory” - and this map doesn’t map onto the territory of reality so cleanly and neatly in the way we think it does.