DocWatts

Not so much a comment on Jordan Peterson who's at least a bit more nuanced about the idea of 'personal responsibility', but the way that 'personal responsibility' is typically used by conservatives is as a highly self serving ego defense mechanism, completely taking for granted the role that privilege and luck have had in thier own success. "I know that I succeeded because I'm honest and hard working, so if someone else isn't as successful as me it must be because they're lazy."

This ^ %100. Nor is this incomparable with taking the time and effort to understand what causes someone to adopt the role of a victimizer. Just that our first ethical obligation is to extend empathy and compassion with people who have been disempowered and victimized, and only secondarily towards thier victimizers and abusers.

Just one person's considered opinion, but it would be wise to mindful of the limitations that come with treating Spiral Dynamics as a proxy for an individual's overall level of development. The reason for this is that the meta-ideology or paradigm that forms the basis of one's conceptual system is only one part of an individual's overall development, and is something that can be related to at different levels of depth and complexity. Namely that individuals can be at a level of depth and complexity that's either above or below the meta-ideology they've been imprinted with. Consider Marcus Auerilus and George W Bush, two figures who used Blue as the basis of their conceptual systems, and the differences in depth and complexity between the two. On a personal level I may use Yellow as part of my conceptual system, but I also know that the Yellow I've been imprinted with is a flattened and simplified version compared with the likes of someone like Noam Chomsky or Ken Wilber. In my view Spiral Dynamics is much better used as a sociological model which describes the interplay of how meta-ideologies develop and interact with one another, and how Survival Needs play out in different historical and social contexts.

Not only does Ted Kuzinscki gets his 'meta' anaylsis wrong (not understanding the developmental and dialectical aspects of society), but is fundamentally mistaken about the solutions to the problems of Modernity. Regressing to an earlier anarcho-primativism is a non-starter for a planet will close to 8 billion people on it. Solving the problems caused by Modernity is only accomplished at the next level of development, rather than regressing to an earlier era. Going Meta isn't actually a benefit if you manage to get your analysis at that level very wrong...

While I'm not disputing the overall point of the video that people act for understandable and self-justifying reasons, from a pragmatic point of view there is a question of how ethically appropriate it is to extend our full compassion towards people who abuse and victimize others, versus reserving that compassion for those who are victims of abuse and maltreatment. After all, we still need to reconcile our understanding of why people behave they way they do with the pragmatic reality of needing to hold people accountable for thier actions. Is it appropriate to extend to the architects of the Holocaust our compassion when they themselves built a system which denied any compassion whatsoever to millions of other human beings? If so, does extending compassion to people who abuse and mistreat others cause indirect harm to those who have been victimized by such people because it devalues their suffering? Even if most examples from everyday lived experience aren't so extreme, at the same time it's not hard to find examples where it's fairly easy to delineate who is the abuser and who is the victim in a given situation. What you have here is in some ways a classic Free Rider problem, not too dissimilar to questions such as how far Tolerance should be extended to those who are Intolerant of others. While I won't claim that there's an easy and unambiguous answer to these problems, I do think it's completely fair to at least ask the question.

I'm quite familiar with Wilber's take on the Great Nest of Being (of Matter to Mind to Soul to Spirit). My question was more along the lines of how Leo's ontology does (or does not) match up with with Wilber's metaphysics. Placing physical reality inside of a holarchy (as its most fundamental but least significant component) does not deny it ontological existence, so much as it disputes its claims to exclusivity; something that I broadly agree with, for what it's worth. An ontology where physical reality is a projection of consciousness (as Leo is asserting) is a different and more radical claim, at least if I'm understanding him correctly. Feel free to correct me if I'm mistaken about either Wilber or Leo's views.

I expect you'll disagree, but my initial impression is that this does sound a bit like an Idealist mirror of naive realism (either that reality is exactly how it appears, or our experience of reality is done via unproblematic representation of an external pre-given world). Also, how does the notion of Interiors and Exteriors (in the Wilberian Four Quadrants sense) work in that sort of ontology?

Perhaps you could clarify a point for me then, just to make sure that in disagreeing with you I'm not distorting your views on metaphysics. When you claim that physical reality is a projection of consciousness, that is intended as an ontological claim about reality, correct? Rather than as a more limited claim about the world of appearances (in the Kantian sense) that we inhabit in our everyday lived reality, that is. While I have no disagreements with the latter more limited claim, I do have trouble seeing how swapping out one type of Reductionism for another is much of an improvement over Materialism.

To offer another perspective on this, it's not that the Materialist account of consciousness is flat out wrong, so much is that's highly partial and incomplete. While it is true that the subjective nature of consciousness has physical correlates, such that if the physical brain is damaged or altered it changes the nature of how consciousness is experienced, where the materialist account makes a crucial mistake is by trying to reduce consciousness to a physical or mechanical processes. While I recognize that I disagree with Leo (and a number of other people here) on this point, I do think that in rejecting the Materialist paradigm the pendulum can swing towards the other extreme, that of a sort of radical Subjectivism. Which is really just another sort of Reductionism, the main difference being that instead of trying to reduce Consciousness to physical processes, one reduces all physical aspects of reality as a projection of consciousness. A sort of Middle Way (to appropriate the term from Madhyamaka) between either of these two extremes, where reality has both physical and non-physical dimensions (neither one being reducible to the other), seems far more defensible as an ontological basis for one's metaphysics. But that's just one person's considered opinion

The core of Socialism simply means giving workers access to the means of production (and thus autonomy over their Labor), which in practical terms means worker owned workplaces and industries.

@ArcticGong Tough one. Orwell himself was a democratic Socialist and probably closer to an emerging Green. As far as his work I suppose you could say it perhaps resonates with the value systems of both Orange and Green, but I wouldn't say that it's a particularly clear cut embodiment of either one. What's interesting about his work is that it's Universalist enough that several different ideologies have attempted to appropriate his work (sometimes misunderstanding it in the process). Another thing about his work is that it doesn't really fit neatly into an established Literary style (such as Orange Modernism or Green Postmidernism), like some of the other works that have been mentioned.

I was going back and revisiting some works of literature recently, which got me to pondering artistic expression at different levels of the Spiral. As an interesting thought experiment I began consider which works of literature would perhaps best embody the ethos of the various worldviews, and thought that this might make an interesting idea for a Thread. Here's what I've come up with so far: Red - The Illiad and the Odyssey : Homer. Blue - Crime and Punishment & The Brothers Karamozov : Fyodor Dostoyevsky Orange - Les Miserables : Victor Hugo. Ulysses : James Joyce. Moby Dick : Herman Melville. Green - Gravity's Rainbow : Thomas Pynchon. Yellow - Infinite Jest : David Foster Wallace

@trenton While it makes sense to treat human beings as a category of Holons with important qualitative distinctions from other animals, the notion does become problematic if one attempts to use Holons to assign more intrinsic value to one group of humans over another. Because such judgements are prone to self bias and easily abused. At the extreme end this can be warped in to social darwinism and eugenics, which is obviously to be avoided. Better by far to treat all Humans as category of Holons possessing equal intrinsic Value. Growth hierarchy models such as Spiral Dynamics offer a good solution to this, by recognizing that there are important progressive qualitative distinctions as to how Survival Needs work in different socio-cultural environments, while at the same time stressing that all Stages are in fact necessary and have an equal right to exist.

I thought that what Ken Wilber termed the Basic Moral Intuition, meaning that we should work to promote the greatest depth for the greatest span, an insightful way of approaching Ethics which explores the implications that arise from a metaphysics consisting of Holons (a structure that is both a whole and a part). The basic gist of it is that because more complex Holons need a more complex support structures to Survive, it allows us to make qualitative distinctions as to what Rights and obligations we extend to different categories of Holons. A chimpanzee is reliant on a far greater number of Holons to sustain its existence than an ant, so it can be said to have greater depth. And precisely because Holons with greater Depth need more complex support structures for its continued existence, it makes sense to extend more rights and protections to a Chimp than to an Ant. But because the Basic Moral Intuition covers span as well as depth, the chimp does not hold infinite intrinsic worth above Holons that are less complex than itself. An entire species of ants would likely have more intrinsic value than a single chimp in this imagined scenario. Likewise, as to an issue like abortion, the Basic Moral Intuition would suggest that a fetus still has intrinsic value, but not more value than the Life of the mother who is a fully formed adult human being. What's interesting is this is something that we already intuit (for example even many pro-life advocates are willing to max exceptions if a pregnancy would result in the death of the mother). This Basic Moral Intuition is a good alternative to both Consequentialism and Deontology precisely because it is flexible (which deontology is not), and because Self Actualization is a far less crude Value metric than pleasure and pain (a metric preferred by Materialist paradigms that deny most qualitative distinctions between subjective states).

Sounds like you're in a fortunate enough position to have a relatively high degree of autonomy as far as your participation in the workforce. The idea of Wage Slavery is more appropriate for people who do not have such autonomy because they are forced to survive on near-subsistence wages, and are thus unable to accumulate enough Capital to escape exploitative labor conditions.

The idea that Wage Slavery is just (or primarily) an attitude or state of mind is not true for the vast majority of mankind. Sure, an enlightened being like the Buddha may have found a way to turn inward and find happiness working in a coal mine for 18 hours a day, but you also know full well that very few people have attained a level of development where that would be possible. Also in the case of Buddha don't forget that he came from an extremely privileged upbringing, which afforded him the freedom to travel, self actualize, and pursue enlightenment. So framing Wage Slavery as a state of mind, while not wrong, does ignore the actual lived reality of people who are being harmed by labor exploitation. While the technical definition of a Wage Slave simply refers to being denied the full value of one's Labor because of a lack of access to Capital (so on a technically speaking yes most wage laborers are wage slaves), what the term Wage Slave has come to mean in contemporary usage means having one's personal autonomy severely restricted due to structural economic exploitation. Good litmus test for this is do you have the freedom to quit your job if conditions become intolerable? Or would doing so lead to starving in the street, because the conditions of your employment have been such that you've been unable to aquire enough Capital to survive if you leave? How free can someone actually be if they're one or two missed paychecks away from homelessness?

In many ways the YouTube radicalization pipeline is just an extension of propaganda outlets such as Fox News, which obviously predate Social Media by a few decades. If you look back to the heyday of for-profit 24-hour Cable News (in the 90s and 2000s), you'll see the beginnings of the Echo Chamber problem that became much worse in the decade or two since. Only one thing to do now, and that's to set up Child Locks on TVs across America to prevent non tech-savvy Boomers from being able to watch Fox News

I don't know a ton about him myself, other than that he was an arch-nemesis of Hegel (who was the most prominent of the German Idealists, and a philosopher whose work I'm much more knowledgeable about). So I'd also be interested for someone more familiar with his work to chime in.

For anyone who hasn't read Hanzi's two books (The Listening Society and Nordic Ideology), I'd consider them necessary and logical extensions to move on to after learning Spiral Dynamics for the added perspective it brings on Developmental Stage Models. Not only do the two books hit upon many of the same points as someone like Ken Wilber, but they do so in a very accessible and engaging way (due to the somewhat disarming tone of sincere irony that the authors give to the fictional Hanzi).

Thanks for the recommendation, not sure how I avoided her channel for so long.

@AtheisticNonduality Perfect. Thanks!

The problem with Nietzsche in this regard was that he was too damned selfish and insecure to become a truly enlightened person. For as insightful as he was at times, much of his philosophical system basically amounted to the Power Fantasy of a weak man.

@AtheisticNonduality If you have a link handy that you'd be willing to share, i'd appreciate it (didn't see a video with Nietzsche in the title on ContraPoint's youtube page). Also interesting to note that the Sith from Star Wars are in many ways a direct refutation of Nietzsche's system of philosophy and ethics (if you're at all interested in using critical examination of pop culture to tease apart popular representations of different philosophical and ethical systems).

@AtheisticNonduality I quite enjoyed the great Bertrand Russel's eviscerating takedown of Nietzsche's system of ethics, which includes a wonderful section near the end where he portrays an imagined conversation between Nietzsche and The Buddha. For myself, I think there's still enough that's worthwhile in Nietzsche if you're a bit older and already have a worldview or philosophical principles grounded in compassion, and aren't tempted to adopt Nietzsche's deliberately amoral system of ethics (which are indefensible in my view). There's a reason why Nietzsche's philosophy is so easily appropriated by SD-Red ideologies, namely that if one doesn't come in to it with a grounding in compassion, you'll find nothing in Nietzsche's philosophy which makes an affirmative case why other people are deserving of dignity and respect. I think Nietzsche shares some similarities to Marx in that both are valuable primarily for sketching the outlines of a very real problem, rather than for the problematic solutions they offer.

A ton to unpack here for a figure as complex and culturally important as Nietzsche, but the thrust of his work was that he was an early deconstructionist who teased apart the hidden motivations and assumptions behind the meta-ideologies that were prevalent in his day (namely Mythic religious values that were being supplanted by Modernity). One of his lasting insights was that the advent of a scientific, rationalist worldview would have massive disruptive changes to society, and not all of them were positive. He was among the first philosophers to foresee that one potential outcome of the 'death of God' (which refers to Mythic belief structures that provide Meaning and Value becoming untenable due to scientific materialism) was the potential for alienation, social fragmentation, and nihilism. He also showed that Morality is something that is Socially Constructed, using the example of a Master and a Slave to demonstrate how the Morality that each one adopts is created ad-hoc to suit thier survival needs. The school of thought that he helped to define came later to be known as Existentialism, which based around the idea that Humans cannot rely on God or on the Universe to provide them with meaning or purpose, so by necessity Humans must create thier own meaning and purpose. So obviously this is just a basic summation of a complex and wide ranging philosophy, one that doesn't get in to the problematic and ethically indefensible aspects of Nietzsche's work, but that is the basic gist of it.