DocWatts

While there's validity to the idea that selfish behavior is inherent to some degree in human nature, what I would take issue with is that the extreme form of selfishness that Capitalism posits as basic 'human nature' is closer to a self serving social construction rather than a Universal truth. Understand that I'm not accusing you of saying this, but it's something that largely goes unquestioned in many parts of our culture. We don't have to romanticize earlier societies to understand that for the majority of our existence on this planet, humans lived in relatively egalitarian hunter gatherer tribes where extreme forms of selfishness by individuals posed an existential survival risk to the tribe. That's not to say that human beings are inherently selfless, just that human nature is malleable and shaped by the survival context it finds itself in. For what it's worth I think we should also avoid the other extreme, which is the mistake that comes from positing that human nature as infinitely malleable, which is a form of Game Denial with disastrous consequences. Under an atomized system where human beings are put in artificial competition for the basic necessities of life it's not surprising that selfishness plays a more prominent role in social interactions. (For the sake of clarity when I say 'artificial competition', by that I mean there's enough material abundance in first world societies so that there's no justifiable reason why the basic necessities of life such as shelter, food, and health care should be scarce in a wealthy country like the United States). Of course contemporary capitalist societies are hardly unique in this regard in pushing socially constructed values as universals of human nature. I'm far from an extreme Relativist and have good reason to think that there are many universals to human nature (because contrary to the idea that 'contexts are boundless', biology and psychology place limits on the number of contexts). Devily (as Leo defines it) is part of this, but it's far from the whole story. How much that gets emphasized has a material and sociological component (or a 'Collective Exterior' quadrant, in Ken Wilber's model).

From a dialectical perspective, World War II could be seen as the way that issues like eugenics and great power hegemonic competition got 'resolved' in Western cultures. I would argue that a war that killed 80 million people is a sub-optimal way for that to happen (to put it very mildly). While it's perhaps justifiable to see the outcome of that conflict as beneficial for mankind, it's easier for us to say some 80 years later because later generations benefited from things like fascism and eugenics being discredited without having to pay the human cost of that conflict.

Being horrified at genocide happening on the other side of the globe is 'easy', in the sense that one doesn't have to introspect about violations of human dignity close to home that one may be indirectly complicit in. It brings to mind watching 'To Kill a Mockingbird' with an SD-Blue family member, seeing them emotionally moved by the story, but unable to comprehend how the story they're watching is still relevant to contemporary conditions (in thier mind racism was something that happened in 'the old days', not something they could possibly be complicit in).

For sure. I would never claim that the dynamic you mention is unique to capitalism, the Marxist experiments of the 20th century (which to be more accurate were versions of State rather than Private Capitalism) had this same problem to the same if not a greater degree. I would argue that the Social Democracies of Western Europe have probably done the best job of accounting for this aspect of human nature, but even if it's preferable to what exists in the US it's far from perfect since in some sense the worst aspects of exploitation have simply been 'exported' to other parts of the world.

@Tech36363 My primary point was more that capitalism and democracy work at cross purposes. The reason that simply raising capital gains taxes doesn't work is that the extremely wealthy will always find ways to bend political systems to thier will, because of the incentive structure inherent to capitalism, where corporate wealth and political power are heavily intertwined. In the US, the gains of the New Deal successfully being rolled back by business interests over the later half of the 20th century is a good example of this. This is my primary critique of mainstream liberalism, by the way, namely the Game Denial about exactly this dynamic. Which is what makes it such a difficult problem, and a Catch-22. I recognize that there's no quick and easy solution, and that substantial structural changes will almost certainly be necessary to address problems like widespread wealth inequality. So I guess you can tell me whether we're actually disagreeing or not.

Allowing individuals and small syndicates to amass more wealth than a significant portion of the entire society is unsustainable in a democratic society. If left unchecked it will eat democracy, due to the divergent incentive structures between what is good for the entire society and what is good for a relatively small group of socio-economic elites. To prevent this from happening society would need to prevent individuals from amassing more wealth than entire countries. But the catch-22 is that this would require fairly aggressive wealth taxes, which is exactly the sort of thing that extremely wealthy individuals are in a position to obstruct through political system capture.

What aspect of philosophy are you interested in? Moral philosophy? Epistemology? Metaphysics? Was there a particular philosopher you had an interest in? Maybe there's a novel implication of thier work you could articulate?

Well I never said he was a particularly wise or insightful role model. If he has any utility at all, I could see him helping some young men in his audience transition from SD-Red to SD-Blue. I'm not ready to disregard people who say that JP's advice has helped them, though of course that doesn't mean he has an informed or particularly insightful view about political topics. Aside from the regressive political takes he sprinkles in to his self help, he's always come across to me as a mediocre communicator owing to the fact that he uses convoluted language to obfuscate answers to relatively straightforward questions. If something can be expressed simply it should be said simply, as Noam Chomsky put it.

Unfortunately Biden entered office with a weak hand, in that the razor thin majority that Democrats hold in the US Senate is at the mercy of obstructionism by just one or two Senators choosing to place the interests of their corporate donors over the good of the country. Biden could have done more to advocate for things like the $15 minimum wage and Build Back Better, but without any actual leverage to work from it's not surprising that his legislative agenda has been obstructed. Bernie definitely would have done a better job of advocating for his positions were he elected president instead of Biden (and thus moving the Overton window Left), but it's doubtful he would have had much more luck getting his legislative agenda passed had he entered office with the same hand as Biden.

It's probably more the case that Jordy P isn't taken seriously in those circles. Compare Jordy P with someone like Noam Chomsky, and it should be obvious which of the two is an actual Intellectual, and which is what a person lower on the Spiral imagines an intellectual to be. That said I can certainly see the appeal of JP for young men who lacked a male role model growing up.

Glad to see David Foster Wallace and Emil Ejneer Friis (author of The Listening Society) get mentioned alongside the likes of Ken Wilber, as Metamodernism is an important (and in my view somewhat under appreciated) application of systems thinking. I think Jared Diamond also deserves a mention as an important systems thinker as well, for helping to make system based thinking accessible to the broader public through works like Guns, Germs, and Steel. I'd extend that depiction to someone like Michael Pollan as well, for his approach to food, nutrition, and psychedelics.

By my own estimation, I read anywhere from 15 to 25 fairly dense books in a given year. My interests tend to lie with philosophy, metaphysics, science, spirituality, and sociology. Would highly recommend any of these works if you share these interests: Sex, Ecology, Spirituality - Ken Wilber The Listening Society, and Nordic Ideology - Hanzi Frienacht The Embodied Mind - Evan Thompson, Fransisco Varella, Eleanor Rosch Philosophy in the Flesh, and Metaphors We Live By - George Lakoff The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - Thomas Kuhn A Theory of Justice - John Rawls The Accessible Hegel - Michael Allen Fox The Ancestor's Tale, and The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins Buddhism Without Beliefs - Stephen Bachelor The View from Nowhere - Thomas Nagel Making of the Atomic Bomb - Richard Rhodes The Precipice - Noam Chomsky

I approach the issue from a harm reduction approach, as in I'm almost completely vegetarian / vegan (in that I may have something with cheese in it maybe once or twice week), but will make occasional exceptions for the circumstances I find myself in. For example if I'm a guest in someone's house and they're serving me a meal. Seeing that I'm the only vegetarian in my family, this is a compromise that I've decided to make to maintain social relationships. Approaching the issue from a stance of moral purity never made much sense to me. Just by existing and meeting your survival needs in an industrial society you're contributing to climate change and habitat destruction. The goal should be able to find a balance between meeting your own survival needs and being socially responsible. Being a vegetarian or vegan requires time and money, and only really became sustainable for me once I had access to both after landing a stable middle class job. Our culture subsidizes food that's terrible for both our bodies and the environment (that's aside from the ethical cost of factory farming), so breaking out of that takes extra effort and resources.

@Preety_India Yeah to be honest I was a bit surprised to see Blue ranked higher than Orange in my results, could be that I've had positive Blue role models in my life. Or could be that problematic aspects of Orange are something that have had more of an impact on my life than problematic aspects of Blue

I agree, this seems to be one of the better SD tests out there.

Not sure if this has been posted already, but I found this to be a highly informative and productive discussion on metaphysics and epistemology from two very insightful thinkers representing different ontologies. The debate is interesting in that Vervaeke posits a number of compelling challenges to the notion of objective idealism that Kastrup does a very admirable job of defending from physicalist scrutiny. Also useful for a good example of what a constructive dialogue looks like between differing (indeed conflicting) paradigms.

I think there are several avenues to one can take to get to the point that Mr. Girl was alluding to, and not all them are necessarily productive. Really it wouldn't have been that hard to make that same point in a way that was more palatable to Vaush and his Green audience, as a more full expression of values that they implicitly subscribe to. For myself, I probably came across as more combative in this thread than I intended to, as it's likely I haven't fully integrated Red (and perhaps some aspects of Blue as well). That and the problems we've been discussing are basically happening in my backyard, so to speak, so there's likely some personal bias born from my lived experiences in there as well.

For what it's worth I don't think the debate-lord efforts of Vaush is productive, and I'm completely on board with building a bridge between Green and Orange. I think your assessment of a societal ego whiplash from a rapid transition to Green is fundamentally correct. I did watch that Mr Girl / Vaush stream, and I didn't think Mr Girl made a convincing case for the Yellow values he was advocating (there are a million better ways to do so than the topic he chose). I haven't watched Mr. Girl's other content, so perhaps he articulates his points better elsewhere. Not sure if you're familiar with Dr. K from HealthyGamerGG, but he's a psychiatrist with training as a monk who does a much better job (in my view) of articulating and embodying what Mr. Girl was trying to get at in that stream.

Again I don't disagree with a lot of what you're saying, so for the sake of a more productive discussion what do you see as a more productive way of addressing political polarization and radicalization?

Of course fascism is a symptom and not a cause, one that arises for sociological and developmental reasons. Anyone with literacy in these subjects should be able to tell you as much, and I wasn't trying to imply otherwise (quite the opposite in fact). Yes, fascism is a symptom of other long term systemic issues having to do with socio-economic factors, widespread polarization, and declining social solidarity. But lest we forget, symptoms still need to be attended to or they can be fatal to the patient while you're busy addressing root causes (which takes time). Also I think you have the impression that I'm approaching this from a conspiratorial angle, when my perspective is sociological and developmental. Address the systemic sociological issues, and you'll begin to address the polarization that's fueling extremism.

@Scholar I actually agree with many of the points in you bring up, and broadly speaking we may agree more than we disagree. It's absolutely true that the public is poorly educated about fascism (not to mention socialism, marxism, and many other ideologies), something that fascist ideologies exploit by attempting to make thier arguments sound far more reasonable than they actually are (ie sanitizing white supremacist ideology as the far more benign sounding 'race realism'). In the minds of a majority of the public thier understanding of fascism doesn't go any farther than obvious and surface level associations with Nazi Germany. So of course there aren't fascists so much as people who were manipulated and deceived by egoicly gratifying lies. And I also fully recognize that by thier own internalized values, people enacting the egoic power fantasy of fascism are (by thier own definition) righting the wrongs of the world: 'Garbage in, garbage out.' To add to that, an SS guard working at a concentration camp also believed that what they were doing was for the good of the world. That doesn't change the fact that just because that's what makes sense to people at a particular level of development, that the rest of the society should indulge thier delusional fantasies. Social harmony is valuable insofar as it's to the benefit of everyone in the society, and allowing these narratives to go unchallenged and achieve a degree of tacit mainstream acceptance harms everyone in society. I also agree that there are likely very few explicit fascists among Trump's Cult. The fascism among the far right is largely implicit and invisible, because it takes a degree of sociological understanding to see these things. Trying to convince people who have an egoic attachment to fascist narratives is a waste of time IMHO. Not that it can't be done, just that it's not an efficient use of time, energy, and resources. Hell, it took Germany losing a world war and a multi-generational process of introspection to begin to deal with the trauma of fascist narratives. On a pragmatic interpersonal level, I think the best we can hope for is to make what's implicit explicit. And to work to ensure that fascist narratives aren't tolerated inside of whatever communities we happen to inhabit, be they physical or in the online space. That and to work towards greater social solidarity towards people who oppose these narratives, as part of a broader effort of democratization.

Political scientists and historians haven't had any trouble defining and identifying fascism. Are experts on this subject just flat out wrong when they identify a number or early warning signs of fascism in a place like the United States? I have to wonder if in your view enforcing social norms against harmful and destructive behavior has any utility at all, if you see identifying and calling out fascism as counter productive. I do agree that we shouldn't treat fascists as 'The Other', but at the same time we also have a basic social responsibility to make sure that fascism isn't something that becomes socially acceptable.

The benefit of calling out fascism is to push back against a violent fringe ideology becoming normalized in our culture. Subscribing to fascist ideology should remain as socially unacceptable as openly declaring that you're okay with pedophilia. Fascists have been working to make this ideology more palatable for mainstream acceptance, and it's something that needs to be called out and pushed back against. You can do that without dehumanizing people who've been manipulated and exploited by fascist ideology.

1) Marx is one of the most influential political philosphers in all of world history, and his critiques of exploitation under capitalism are worth understanding regardless of whether one considers themselves a 'Marxist'. If you consider BLM a Marxist organization, it sure sounds like you don't have any understanding of the things your criticizing. You're basically sock puppeting recycled McCarthy era propaganda that was directed at the Civil Rights movement, which tried to discredit any and all social reform movements as 'Marxist' (and also claimed that Marth Luther King was the most dangerous person in America). 2) Sure sounds like you're equating vandalism and looting with terrorist violence, murder, and organized attempts to end democracy.