DocWatts

The temptation to treat Spiral Dynamics as an EXP bar in a video game is one of the main reasons why I think Spiral Dynamics is much better utilized as a dialectical sociological framework than as a personal development hierarchy. I've been thinking about how I would explain SD to someone who'd never heard of it before, and I'd probably frame it as sort of extension of Hegelian dialectics, or as a sociological development theory that deals with how meta-ideologies such as postmodernism form and interact with one another. For personal development, studying and practicing spirituality has done far more for my personal development than a model Spiral Dynamics ever could have. Think about how growth actually occurs. It's not just that you receive a new set of beliefs, but you go through an inner transformation where aspects of your character are cultivated. A scientific model without an associated practice to draw meaning from isn't going to cultivate your character, even if said model does impart knowledge.

Logic is just a cognitive tool for interfacing with the world, and quite a powerful tool at that. The problem comes when we forget that Logic is a cognitive tool, and try to force all of Reality to fit into a single modality. A good analogy would be the ego, in that we need the ego to navigate Reality and meet our Survival Needs. I'd argue that in a modern context the same is true for Logic, in that we need ways to hold to hold ideas and beliefs that motivate decisions up to scrutiny. But this modality also has limitations, and can be misused or applied in ways that obfuscates more than it clarifies.

I was active role in the Occupy Protests in the 2010s, and a decade later I'm somewhat ambivalent about how effective protests are. As a way to bring visibility to an issue, a large protest with good optics (this part is important) can be very effective in that regard. As a way to effect political change, well unfortunately in a place like the United States many of our lawmakers are in effect shielded from democracy through gerrymandering, voter suppression, and the structurally undemocratic makeup of the US Senate and Supreme Court. In the United States, if you live in a democratic city or state, protesting might be a way to bully your legislature in to Voting a particular way on an issue. If you have the misfortune to be living in a Republican region I wouldn't bother, as the Republican Party has chosen the route of trying to end democracy rather than trying to govern.

The thing is that what you perceive as oversensitivity comes across as a lack of empathy from the point of view of those whose struggles you're devaluing. If you've never been the victim of racism or sexism in your life, try to think of a time where you were struggling with something difficult in your life and needed help. And think of what it would have felt like to have been dismissed as being oversensitive for feeling distressed at something that was negatively impacting your life in a very real way. Before dismissing others it's worthwhile to try to put yourselves in their shoes and understand their perspective.

I'd argue that men benefit from women feeling valued and supported, and women benefit from society having larger proportion of emotionally secure, well adjusted men. Rather than a zero sum game addressing both benefits everyone in the society.

That just means that there are unique challenges for both men and women in our society, and that both sets of issues deserve to be understood and addressed. One doesn't invalidate the other. Pointing out that women face barriers that men do not doesn't invalidate issues that men struggle with.

More likely is that political violence becomes more far more common than it is right now, with the possiblity that radicalized groups with access to arsenals of weapons could cause serious social and economic disruptions.

In developed countries there's no reason why support structures can't be more accommodating to something that's both a normal part of life and necessary for society to continue functioning (having children, that is). Workplace hour flexibility, the ability to work remotely, rights to paid parental leave for both genders, and access to affordable child care subsidized by public funding are some examples of such support structures. Socialization to make sure that both boys and girls are given opportunities to cultivate an interest in diversity of fields is a part of that as well. Obviously since women are the ones who biologically give birth women are always going to be disproportionately affected by having children compared to men, but there's no reason why the earnings gap between men and women need be nearly as large as it is today.

Women are also expected to perform a disproportionate share of child and family care duties (in addition to work), which explains the lion's share of the earnings gap between men and women in developed countries. So not like it's an even playing field. Policies such Rights to paid parental leave for both men and women, and access to affordable child care, can help to address this issue. Here in the US the second point is a huge issue, as it's not at all uncommon for child care to cost more than what a typical person would make working at a job. Also, sex is biological but gender roles (such as what types of careers men and women are socialized towards) are socially constructed. So you've got it completely backwards.

While I was thinking more along the lines of the misuse of stage models like Spiral Dynamics when I wrote that, the idea of an 'epistemic bypassing' which repurposes stage models in a performative-recursive way is a really cool concept. Hell, I guess even my own understanding of what a meta-cross-paradigmatic modality is is self demonstrating in a way, since I can imagine what that modality might entail in a very limited, skeletal way, but haven't gone through the necessary internal transformations for embodiment and integration to truly grok it. I don't have the 'grammar' for it so to speak, in the way that I have a relatively pre-reflective 'grammar' for systematic and paradigmatic modalities. Reading Heidegger lately, the participatory aspect being of a being-in-the-world has been on my mind as of late and has been influencing my thinking in this area

@CultivateLove As far as people who are combing through Rogan's hundreds of hours of content to find offensive content to use as 'ammunition' to cancel him for his spreading misinformation on Covid and vaccines, then yeah, I agree with you. The irresponsible way that Rogan is using his platform to spread dangerous misinformation about Covid and vaccines during a pandemic is the actual issue, because it misinforms his audience in ways that lead to preventable deaths. Spotify pulling down select episodes for that specific reason is defensible in a way that pulling down episodes for offensive content is not. It's not like we as a society haven't already established some basic rules around using media to misinform and mislead the public. Which is why cigarette companies to aren't allowed to advertise to children. The huge amount of backlash that Rogan is recieving over has vaccine skepticism is completely deserved, and setting some ground rules of accountability for public figures with reach to millions of people is both reasonable and needed.

@CultivateLove You realize that the swastika symbol is something that was (and continues to be) used in a variety of Eastern religions long before the Nazis existed, right? https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2016/10/28/499475248/diwali-dilemma-my-complicated-relationship-with-the-swastika

'Retrograde amnesia' is a really good way of phrasing it, in regards to the ways that Metamodernism has the potential to insufficiently apply lessons from the paradigms it's attempting to integrate. I suspect that the topic of spiritual bypassing, which describes the act of grasping for knowledge without going through the required internal transformations that are necessary for embodiment, will be an important component of post-metamodern analysis when it arrives.

Excellent post. My own take is that this is instinctively tied to the innate drive within humans to construct meaning. In order to do so, a nomological order is required to make sense of and ground our experiences in an intersubjective world. My view on Stage models and meta-cognitive modalities is that they're modern attempts to construct a nomological order that's more truthful and more relevant compared to some of its predecessors (such as Abrahamic religions, scientific materialism, and postmodern relativism). There are limits to this way of understanding and relating to the world, as there are for every nomological order. While at the end of the day it's still just one of many valid perspectives (rather than a 'correct' view of reality), I'd argue that it's an admirable attempt to construct a nomological order that can meet people's needs in our modern era.

Considering that legislative institutions within the US operate on a form of legalized bribery known as Lobbying, the US is a good case study of how unregulated Capitalism eats democracy by capturing political institutions. The makeup of the US Senate is highly undemocratic, with California (containing 40 million people) and Wyoming (containing 600k) each getting the same amount of Representation in the Senate. Washington DC and Puerto Rico don't get any representation at all (aside from purely symbolic representation that can't vote), because they aren't States. So as bad as things have gotten within the US, it was already a pretty flawed democracy. Demagogues like Trump wouldn't have been as successful in destabilizing political institutions if democracy within the US had been in a healthy place beforehand.

I find it hilarious that conservative leaning people are happy to become caricatures of a postmodern relativist when it comes to truth claims around Covid and vaccines, despite being hostile to postmodern relativism in most other areas. 'One view is as good as any other' isn't actually a defensible epistemological position. Rather it's a misuse of skepticism.

I've listened to his podcast for close to eight years, and the quality of his show has dropped considerably since Rogan moved to Texas, as his show has become an echo chamber for conspiracy theories and for the far right. Since I'm not holding out any hope that he'll stop platforming people with dangerously misinformed views, the best I could hope for is that he'll at least take seriously the suggestion to go back to talking to people with diverse viewpoints. This is the same guy who had Cornell West, Abbie Martin, David Pakman, and Bernie Sanders on his podcast in the past, and his show wasn't always the echo chamber it's become over the past few years.

I think the utility of Ken Wilber's ideas is considerably amplified if you already have a pre-existing knowledge base of philosophical and metaphysical ideas to build off from. The main benefit I found from Wilber is the way his work was able to recontextualize and integrate the way I thought about things like postmodernism, German Idealism, Eastern philosophy, etc. I don't see Wilber's work being of much value to someone who's not already literate in at least the basics of world history, philosophy, epistemology, and science. That would be like handing a complicated philosophical work like The Phenomenology of Spirit to an 18 year old whose main concerns are finding a job and getting laid, and expecting them to parse out how 19th century philosophy is relavant to thier current situation.

That's actually quite helpful, as I haven't really seen the above point framed in a direct way (though that could because I haven't been looking in the correct places).

( Mods: could you please move this to the Self-Actualizion section ) Ken Wilber mentioned that not being able to account for the eventual entropic Heat Death of the Universe is in part responsible for the paradigm shift away from the 19th century German Idealists (well that and not having a methodology such as meditation to verify thier claims). The second law of thermodynamics may well be the most widely validated principle in all of science. It states that the level of disorder in a closed thermodynamic system will always increase over time, until it inevitably reaches an equilibrium state where no energy or information exchanges can take place. It's the reason why hot air moves in to a cold room, and why perpetual motion machines don't work. In order for a metaphysics to be plausible, at the very least it should be consistent with what we observe about how Reality behaves, regardless of what the being of that Reality is. Similiar to how an ontological model that doesn't allow for evolution or for subjective experience should be thought of as implausible, the same should be true for not accounting for the implications of entropy. So why is this even an issue? The issue is that this posits a finite (though still vast) lifespan where information and energy exchanges can take place in nature, which runs contrary to most forms of Idealism. I've yet to find an adequate accounting of this aspect of nature in Idealism, which tends to either completely ignore it or handwave it away. Regardless of whether things like atoms and time actually exist, Reality behaves as if they exist, even if the basis for those things are mental rather than physical. Likewise, Reality behaves as if the laws of thermodynamics exist, regardless of if thermodynamics is just the extrinsic appearance of trans-personal mental processes. This isn't a sneaky argument in favor of physicalism so much as a challenge for Idealism to come up with an adequate and satisfying answer to.

I'm quite familiar with Metamodernism, and I would guess that a large number of the people active on this Forum are familiar with it as well. Broadly speaking, Metamodernism refers to the cultural paradigm that arises after postmodern deconstruction. It can be seen as a synthesis of modernism and postmodernism, transcending and including both. Once postmodernism has done its job of deconstructing what's stupid and hypocritical, it leaves a meaning vacuum which in the arts can be seen in postmodern irony and cynicism (ie: "how dare you have the audacity to ask me what it is I really mean?"). Grand searches for meaning tend to be met with ridicule under postmodernism, because they've been misused as self serving ways to oppress and exploit others. Metamodernism on the other hand takes meaning seriously again, but does so from a far more informed and sincere perspective, using the insights gained from postmodernism (that narratives are culturally constructed and contextual). Going back to the arts, Metamodernism will often employ sincere irony to elucidate truths by juxtaposing sincerity with surrealist or comedic elements. A show like Bojack Horseman is a great example of a Metamodern show, because the show uses a ludicrous framing device (the main character is a talking narcissistic horse person), and uses that framing device to explore serious issues such as trauma and substance abuse in an informed, sincere, and non-pretentious way.

That's of course assuming that continued disregard of ecological constraints doesn't result in a stagnation (or decline) of living standards before this point.

I thought it was generally understood that socialism would by necessity have to be built atop the scientific and Industrial base developed by Capitalism? Someone like Marx was pretty explicit about this point, that Capitalism was a necessary stage of societal development that can't be skipped. Similar to how Capitalism was built atop Mercantilism, and Mercantilism was built atop a Feudal system. You could also point out how much of a distortion it is that a $100 McDonalds burger is priced at $1 under capitalism, and how strange it is that this peculiar system is taken for granted as the 'default' due to social conditioning

My own view is that Spiral Dynamics is much better used as a sociological model for looking at the interplay of how value systems arise, interact, and come in to conflict with one another. While it can be made applicable for individuals by giving a rough approximation of what sort of value system(s) they subscribe to, I would argue that this isn't the model's main strength. Just knowing that two individuals have a center of gravity at Blue for instance doesn't tell you a whole lot about them, since Spiral Dynamics merges several different lines of development (cognitive, ethical, spiritual, etc) down to a single axis as part of its reduction base. At best it can tell you what aspects of the collective value systems that are out there that a person has internalized, but it doesn't really tell you the depth or complexity of that individual's understanding within that paradigm. For instance, Marcus Aurelius and George W. Bush are both roughly at Blue, but are worlds apart as far as the depth and complexity of thier understanding of Reality If you're looking for a personal development model, you'd probably be better off using something like Suzanne Cook Greuter's Stages of Ego Development model. Or if you're looking for a model with a large body of emperical validation, then the Big Five Personality Traits model.