Oeaohoo

I’ve been thinking about this recently, nice answer.

That makes sense, I just can’t bring myself to play the bit… Maybe someday I’ll have to. What does it look like for you? The trouble with not playing the bit is that you end up in a weak and vulnerable position, more and more conditioned by the very system which you are trying to escape. This has basically happened to me. Well, I feel the same, only the other way around… Then again, I’m not in America! By the way, Trump’s rise reminds me of Spengler’s theory of Caesarism:

I imagine a Wilberian would say that you have regressed to Stage Green. Accepting that model, it makes sense to me that you would do this since you seem quite attached to the pleasures of modern life - partying, girls and so on - which are all very Green in our time. Most “cool” people in European cities are Stage Green. Being Stage Yellow would probably make you feel much more out of the loop…

Yeah, basically.

Interesting. What made you turn away from Ken Wilber? Maybe I had something to do with it… I never got that into Spengler, something about his style always turns me off — it’s like Nietzsche but lacking the same depth of insight. I do like his idea of the “second religiosity”, the debased form of spirituality which one finds in a late and decadent civilisation — it fits the “new age” phenomenon, including most of what you will find in the Spirituality tab on this forum, very well. Anyway, maybe one day I’ll get you reading Guénon and Evola…

Imagine Tony Robbins on a stage, raping a woman whilst enthusiastically shouting at her: “You are not a victim!” That is the perfect metaphor for the way this god-awful system uses self-help.

Screw mindsets, it’s the truth. Self-help and modern spirituality are just a way to pretend you’re free within your prison cell. As the wind blows more and more of your life away, you can chant magical platitudes into your third-eye chakra: “I am not a victim!”, “I am the master of my own reality!”, “Change your attitude, change your world!”

It’s because this society sucks for a young man.

@Leo Gura I think your cynicism about humanity is a way for you to cling to your delusional view of what life should be.

Yes, this is all true… But where is the light and love in the present year? Have you seen Taxi Driver? It’s basically a case study of this phenomenon.

Yes, fair enough. Though I also think that, since the system today is so invasive in all aspects of life, this line is somewhat blurred. Sure, that works. Maybe Trumpist anti-democracy is one of the cancerous growths ravaging the dying body which is America… As a concrete example, here in Britain the Conservative Party were repeatedly elected on a program of reducing mass immigration to tens of thousands. Of course, they did less than nothing and immigration went on increasing. This lead people to vote for Brexit which also changed nothing. Having been in power for fourteen years, under the last two years of the Conservative government under Rishi Sunak, over 3 million people were imported into the country. This doesn’t seem very democratic to me… Probably why voter turnout was only 60% at the last election! As to the broader point of what constitutes democracy, it’s something I need to think about more.

Exactly, you can psychologise anything if you want to. And of course, if you are a psychologist then you will always see the psychological aspect of things… One can just as well say that environmentalists are projecting their mother onto Mother Earth, liberals are just turning their internal psychological drive towards freedom into a political stand, feminists are projecting their shadow onto men, or whatever else. One chooses to psychologise as a way to reduce one’s opponents position and bolster one’s own.

Yeah. Somebody tweeted that out a while back and I thought it was an excellent metaphor. Just like a decomposing body loses its immunity and the ability to discriminate between its own cells and foreign pathogens, America has lost any sense of itself. The basic structures which make up American society are dissolving just like those of a dying body. Well, I understand the tweet as referring to the GOP more generally. To an extent, Trump breaks that formula since part of his appeal to people disaffected with the whole system (of which there are many nowadays) is being neither a neocon nor a neoliberal, which is all one has come to expect Republicans and Democrats to be. In that way he actually is reminiscent of fascism as a “third way” outside of the dialectic presented by the system. I also don’t believe that many people on the left in America care about the Founding Fathers or their vision. It’s just empty rhetoric, in the same way that appeals to “liberal democracy” more generally are. Modern Western society is neither liberal nor democratic, at least not in the sense that people used to understand those terms. The Founding Fathers would be tearing their hair out if they could see what America has been turned into. It reminds me of this funny meme:

Thanks for your interpretation! I’ve been meaning to for a long time. David Lynch loves it and I love his films.

By the way, I don’t really agree with your post because a lot of the modern Right (what you call “Fascism”) is rooted in a victim mentality. The most obvious example of this is the Anti-Woke movement, in which right-wing grifters make a living whining about the latest woke cultural product. Another example is white nationalism, which bemoans the feeling of becoming a minority in one’s own land, being culturally marginalised by other groups, being left behind and looked down upon by the ”cosmopolitan” and political elite, and so on. They aren’t afraid to be victims at all; in fact, a lot of them love it…

Remember when we lived in a society and not a nursery? Make America Great Again! Only joking… Since you are interested, let me tell you about a dream I had many years ago: A key had come in the post. However, it wasn’t just an ordinary key: it was golden, circular and magical. The key came with a letter which said that I had to give this key to a higher authority. I was going to just take it to the local council*. However, as I was going out to do this, my mother’s radio** was on and it announced that Donald Trump was staying in my home town. Since I had to give the key to a higher authority, I decided to give it to Donald Trump. I went to the house where he was staying and when I got there the door was already open, so I just let myself in. There didn’t seem to be anybody in there, so I called out and said: “Hello? Is anybody there? I’m here to give you my key.” From behind a closed door, an authoritative, quasi-religious male voice said: “You should knock before you come in”. That door then opened and Melania Trump came out. I said: “Oh hello, I’m here to give you my key.” To which she said, angrily: “What are you talking about? What key? Get out of my house.” To which I said, pleadingly: “Oh no, it’s really important, I’ve got to give you this key.” She said, “No, no,” and our argument became more and more heated. Finally, it ended… as a wet dream with Melania Trump! *I live in England. **At this time, my mother used to listen to a radio show which blamed all of the world’s problems on Brexit, Trump and Putin. Naturally, I didn’t agree with this… What do you think this means?

“I just want my government to import less migrants.” ”Ah, the dreaded Authoritarian Personality rears its head again! Will we ever learn?! Sit down in my armchair, inmate, we have a lot of work to do on you… Now, tell me about your Mother.”

Why psychologise it? The resurgence of the Right in the West is happening for political reasons, not psychological ones.

It’s not about “mankind”, it’s about America. Whatever role America had in “advancing mankind”, it has long lost it.

Just here to wish all of you beautiful Americans a splendid next few years living under Adolf Satan Trump! Democracy triumphs, yet again!

This graph explains EVERYTHING: Change, Progress, Evolution, Growth, Development, Actualisation, Becoming, the Future, the Path… Copyright: This graph is borrowed from Ken Wilber’s little known work Integral Progress. It shows all of the Stages of Development in their dignity and simplicity.

This is one of the central delusions of this place: anything other than invoking a constant state of existential crisis through psychedelics or nihilistic deconstructionist philosophy is a “mind game at the avoidance of truth”. The implicit heresy here is the idea that the mind and Truth are diametrically opposed to one another; the reality is that the rational mind is a lesser emanation of Truth, subordinated in the hierarchy to intellectual intuition, the divine Logos and the Absolute. There is no real antithesis here, only degrees of realisation.

This is another thing that I find quite odd about Wilber: he inhabits a strange middle-ground between espousing the esotericism that you are describing and selling out to whatever is trending in postmodern academia. I think he probably thought - as Mircea Eliade, Henry Corbin, Louis Massignon and a few other academics had done before him - that by combining the Perennial Philosophy with contemporary academic developments, he might be able to reintegrate genuine metaphysics into secular academia. This seems like a rather futile effort to me; I suppose we will have to see…

Yeah, that is definitely the reason. There is the additional component that - since Hegel and the adaptation of his ideas by Marx, along with the “enlightenment” Philosophes - modern philosophy in general has tended towards progressism. Even here, though, we could wonder why Schillber fails to integrate all of the criticisms of these developments, for example those of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in the first case and Burke and Carlyle in the second. It would seem that all of this is just dismissed as belonging to a “lower stage of development”: this is a false argument, however, because the people who created the theories of progress to which these people were reacting belonged to the same “stage of development”! To me at least, it all comes off as an arbitrary personal preference for liberal progressism masquerading as “integral” thought. I must admit that I am not so familiar with developmental psychology. I do know, however, that it was a field based on the most extreme form of positivistic rationalism and scientific materialism. It is not surprising that, if genuine progress was to be found anywhere, it would be found in a field with these premises: nobody could deny that, within certain limits and in merely material terms, progress can be demonstrated. The trouble is that, even when this material progress does not serve to actively deny spirituality, it generally only serves as a comparatively empty compensation for a lost spiritual potency. It also seems very strange to me to combine the discoveries of this field with the revelations of what Schillber himself calls the Perennial Philosophy, whose epistemology is completely antithetical, as though there is no real discrepancy here? @A_v_E I don’t understand everything that you have said. I suspect that we have slightly different reasons for objecting to Schillber; nonetheless, some of what I do understand is very funny and on-point! Particularly: This is my impression too. Schillber seems more concerned with creating a cosy private fantasy world - in which lines, streams and waves of developmental growth and evolutionary progressivism must infinitely ascend into the clouds of relativistic integration, forever and ever - than engaging with reality as it actually presents itself… Thanks for the suggestion. I watched a little bit of this video when it came out, though I didn’t get very far… I will consider watching it again!

Of course. To paraphrase one of Leo’s favourite phrases: “That’s not a bug, it’s a small creature!” At the same time, whilst there is an obvious affinity between reactionary thought and Perennial Traditionalism, they aren’t the same thing. Wilber himself opens his book Spectrum of Consciousness with a quotation from Frithjof Schuon and the first footnote in his book Integral Psychology is a reference to the main exponents of the Perennial Philosophy, who I have mentioned above. Why doesn’t he include their negative vision of history, not as Spiral Progress but as cyclical decay, in one of his handy little “developmental charts”? Schillber’s writing can be very beautiful but it’s essence is: progressive. When it isn’t an appeal to a purely hypothetical future in which the degradations of postmodern nihilism and deconstruction have magically given rise to a spectacular New Age inhabited only by Tier 2 Systems Thinkers, “honouring” and “embracing” every “stage of development” (for lack of any humans left still worth honouring and embracing!), his defence of modernity is literally just the same old tired appeals to “liberal democracy” and “feminism”… Why does he fail to “integrate” any of the completely valid objections that have been raised against these demonstrably terrible ideas? I call him Schillber because, as I have demonstrated, his so-called “Integral Theory” is conveniently selective as to what it “integrates”…