DocWatts

Why is that Black communities have a much higher homicide rate then? Do you recognize how you're looking at this issue in a vacuum, rather than systemically?

You realize that Black Americans make up less than %15 of the population, right? If %30 of Police killings are of black men and women, that roughly translates to black people being twice as likely to end up a victim of police homicide than thier white counterparts. That Homicide figure you mention is itself an outcome of structural economic discrimination towards communities of color, who were denied opportunities to build wealth through practices such as housing discrimination and forced ghettoization. Unless you happen believe that black communities are inherently violent, the elevated homicide rate you mention is entirely an consequence of external Social Conditions (ie poverty) rather than anything having to do with Race.

The whole point of CRT is to de-emphasize the whole notion that someone has to personally be racist to benefit from white privilege. As a white person living in America, through no fault of your own you are simply born in to a structural system that benefits you at the expense of other people. It's a way of looking at racism from a systemic and structural perspective as an institutional problem to be solved. If what you're taking away from CRT is that it's just meant to shame white people for being born in to a system they had no hand in creating, then you're missing the point entirely.

Most of the people doing this kind of demonization do not know that there's even a difference between social democracy and socialism, and almost certainly wouldn't be able to articulate the differences between the two systems if pressed. While there are valid critiques to make of both systems, they are not going to come from an egocentric/sociocentric worldview (ie where the majority of the hysteria about socialism is coming from).

Try to imagine how policymakers in the United States would react if a rival power started supplying nuclear weapons to an island just off our coast. Only you don't have to imagine it, because this scenario actually happened during the Cuban Missile Crisis, where the Soviet Union imported nuclear missiles in to Cuba to prevent an invasion of the island from the United States, bringing the world dangerously close to a nuclear war (something that was only narrowly avoided through the efforts of both Kruschev and JFK). Giving nuclear weapons to Taiwan is a terrible idea, and a classic case of not learning from history.

While I appreciate the importance of vertical developmental models such as Ego Development Theory, I do wonder if there's a reliable way to self assess one's placement on a Vertical (as opposed to a Horizontal) model. I can resonate with the ethos of a particular stage, but how much of it do I actually embody in my day to day life? That's a lot harder to say.

If I had to recommend a single book that's broadly representative of (a relatively healthy version of) Orange as a paradigm, I'd direct them towards Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker. It's a good window into Orange's perspective on a variety of topics include science, metaphysics, and geo-politics. It's also a great reference as to Orange's disagreements with both Blue and Green.

I'd concur with this. As to Spiral Dynamics in particular: As useful as Spiral Dynamics is for a shorthand way to refer to a particular worldview, it's also somewhat limited due to the fact that it attempts to merge several different types of development (such as cognitive complexity, emotional depth, etc; all of which may be at different levels) on to a single axis. For example it doesn't have anything to say about individuals who are at a level of complexity and depth that's significantly above or below the Value Meme they've been imprinted with. Which is important because how you enact that particular meme is going to depend on whether your understanding of it is flattened and simplified (if you're at a level of complexity and depth below your SD-Meme) or explicit and nuanced (vice versa). The fact that it doesn't have a clear answer to whether a nuanced Blue thinker (such as Marcus Auerlous) is at a higher developmental stage than someone with who's been imprinted with a flattened version of Green (say a hippie teenager), is a good demonstration of this. Which isn't a problem if you're using it as shorthand to refer to a particular sociological paradigm or to a set of cultural values that someone has been imprinted with, but it is inadequate if you try to stretch the model to encapsulate someone's overall development, where it becomes a form of subtle reductionism (or flatland holism when it's applied in this way, as Ken Wilber might call it).

I think your metaphysics might be biasing your thinking here. Even if there are underlying teleological factors at play here, whose to say that the continued existence of Civilization is an inevitable outcome of this process? Not like consciousness would be Thanos snapped out of existence if Human civilization collapsed, after all. If this is the perspective you're coming from, then what role does human agency have in deciding how these problems get resolved? Just because something is possible doesn't mean that it's an inevitable outcome. Can the interests of the Elites be reformed in time to avoid a global climate apocalypse? I believe they can, but that's far from an assured outcome.

If you overlook the fact that what's Good for the self interest of Individuals (or groups) is often at often at odds with the self preservation of the Society, then sure. Jared Diamond goes to great pains to point out in Collapse (perhaps his best work) that civilizations tend to collapse when the interests and needs of the decision making elites are contrary to the long term survival needs of the society. [Insert obvious parallel to structural problems we are facing today here] Factor in to this that the majority of humans are still at an egocentric or ethnocentric stage of development rather than an identifying with all of mankind. Sounds like you're falling prey to a subtle form of Game Denial when you make these assertions.

You laugh, but we were incredibly lucky to get through the 20th Century in one piece, as a civilization ending thermonuclear war could have broken out at several different points during the Cold War had events played out just a little differently. Not like there was any real plan in place to prevent that from happening; we were just incredibly fortunate to have individuals with good judgement in place during those key moments. Likewise, it would seem incredibly presumptuous to consider an eventual ecologically caused civilizational collapse an impossibility if things are bungled badly enough, despite forecasts of it happening in the next few decades being off the mark. Hell, if global civilization continues with 'business as usual' without making significant changes, such an outcome is not only likely but probably inevitable.

More likely that the brunt of the suffering and conflict will take place in poorer regions of the planet that had little to do with creating the problem, as completely unfair as that is. That's not to say that the rich nations will come away from the Climate Crisis unscathed. Expect a worldwide refuge crisis over the next century as parts of the world become unlivable, with all of the political instability that entails. Add to that potential for resource wars over things like water, and things could get ugly indeed. Wealthy areas that lie along coastlines (or are below sea level) in places like Florida or the Netherlands may simply have to be abandoned due to rising sea levels, if significant resources aren't set aside for things such as sea walls. A significant portion of the world's economic and technological output may have to be redirected to addressing Climate Change, which may translate in to lower (or at least stagnant) living standards for much of the world; something that could have been mitigated if the problem was addressed sooner. All of these are far more likely than a global civilizational collapse, especially in the next 50 years. I don't see such an eventuality being completely off the table if things are bungled badly enough, but it's highly likely it will be a long, drawn out affair that won't happen everywhere at once. Unlike case studies such as Rome, we have no idea what it would take for a civilization with nearly 8 billion people to collapse, nor what that would look lile.

As an aside, not going out and engaging with the rest of society is a huge problem I see with the likes of a number of popular Intellectuals (such as Sam Harris), who massively overestimate the influence that Academia has on the rest of society, and subsequently use Academia as a distorted (or more charitably a highly partial) lens to evaluate all of SD-Green (or just to theorize about social trends more broadly). When in actuality if they spent more time among the lived realities of ordinary people they would understand that a large portion of the country (at least in America) living hand to mouth, with the feelings of anxiety and resentment which that entails, is a much more relevant attractor point for societal trends than what's taking place on a handful of college campuses (or in the online debate space).

Arnold Schwarzenegger on the myth of the "self made man."

I'm fine with a 1000 page book, but I do wish he didn't have to devote so much space to re-explaining things he's already written about in ten other books. Maybe different starting points for newcomers and returning readers might be useful in a hypothetical revised and edited edition of some of his longer books.

As it would be a good extension of your Spiral Dynamics series, and it would be interesting to get your take on other types of developmental models (such as the video you did on Susanne-Cook Geuter).

That's correct but it largely misses the point. It's basically the equivalent of when Libertarians take great pains to point out that the United States is a Constitutional Republic rather than a Democracy. When you know full that when someone from the contemporary era mentions democracy they're referring to a Republic rather than an Athenian style democracy. Likewise, since the aforementioned stateless society has never been achieved, Communism is a perfectly functional label for Socialist countries with a Centrally Planned Economy, even if it's not 'correct' in a technical sense.

I'm sure the irony of an 'all quadrants all levels' approach itself being true but partial is not lost on Ken Wilber That said, I do think the model is more useful in some ways than Spiral Dynamics, though I'd imagine it would be of limited utility to someone who's not already versed in developmental models.

@Radu97 Just out of curiosity, how knowledgeable are you about the Roman Empire to be making such a comparison in the first place? Because if there is a (very loose) analogy to be drawn, the final Century of the Roman Republic would be a far more instructive case Study than the eventual collapse of the Western half of the Empire centuries later.

As someone who listens to a huge volume of podcasts, audiobooks, actualized.org content, etc, I actually completely agree with this. You're not going to get nearly as much value out of any of these things if you don't take time to pause, reflect, and integrate them in to your life. I would also say the same thing is true of reading Books as well. I question the Wisdom of finishing a dense book on any topic, and then just diving in to another dense book immediately, without allowing the mind time to integrate and synthesize new ideas and concepts.

Thanks!

:Title: Been meaning to change mine, but I must have missed the widget to do so on the page to edit your profile.

Game Developer/Artist here. We live in a time where it's easier than it's ever been for one person (or a few people) to create a game. Game engines like Unity use a streamlined drag and drop interface, along with a simplified scripting language that's much easier for non Coders to pick up and learn than Programming Languages of olde (such as C or C++, which are quite a bit more difficult for newcomers). Other engines like GameMaker Studio or RPG Maker allow someone to make a game with limited or even no coding. That said, there's a lot more to making a game than knowing how to Code; game design is a Skill, every bit as much as learning how to play an Instrument is a skill. Furthermore, it's a skill that involves many hats such as Digital Art, Graphic Design, and UI Design just to name a few. But these are things you can learn if you have the motivation to. And things that aren't your strong suite (such as sound design or digital painting) are things that you can bring another person in for. That said, will one or two people working on a game in thier spare time create the next Skyrim or Fallout? Of course not. But there are plenty of highly successful and innovate games that were made by either one or just a few people. Something like Undertale is one of the most highly rated games ln Steam, and was made by one dude who learned game design by working on ROM Hacks (ie mods) of old Snes games.

Renting a House is in many ways the best of both worlds: avoids the downsides of being crammed in to an apartment complex, as well as the downsides of actually owning a House: namely maintenance costs like having to fork out $10k to replace an aging leaky roof for instance, or the possiblity of being underwater on a mortgage if your Life circumstances change.