DocWatts

@Leo GuraIf your impressions of Detroit came from Robocop, I'll parallel that with my impressions of Vegas coming from Fear and Loathing

'If you don't like it in America, why don't you just leave?' is perhaps the most idiotic response imaginable as a reply to social criticism, and the fact that its used so repetitively by Conservatives is indicative of low consciousness and lazy thinking of people who subscribe to right wing ideologies. What it's implying is that we shouldn't put the time and effort in to identify ways that our country isn't living up to its potential, and that instead of working to fix things that instead we should just give up. That instead of confronting difficulties we should flee from them. So not only is that line of thinking lazy and dishonest, but it's also cowardly.

David Foster Wallace comes to mind when I try and come up with an example of a Yellow literary author, whos novels and essays delve into topics such as the limits of post-modernism, the corrupting influence of consumerism, and substance abuse and addiction. He was also highly influential in the development of post-postmodernism, or the literary and artistic movement known as 'the new sincerity'.

While people like Aristotle and Plato were very advanced for thier time, it helps to place them in a historical context. The dominant SD-stage during thier era was Red, with Athenian Democracy representing very early Blue. Aristotle and Plato would probably be better classified as incredibly high functioning Blue. Remember that the emergence of Blue was a sign of moral progress at that time. The Systems Thinking approach of Yellow would have been highly unlikely to develop in such an early era, before there was a cultural, philosophical, and scientific framework available to help facilitate it. As to Jesus and Buddha, that's a bit trickier, since it's hard to separate the historical person and thier teaching from the thousands of years of mythology that developed around them; someone else might have more insights here.

Star Trek is a great example of using Spiral Dynamics to inform its setting and factions, without it necessarily being about Spiral Dynamics.

Incredibly well said. Great example of 'transcend and include' as well, which also demonstrates a core difference between the statistical approaches of Orange and Yellow. I might also emphasize to Green that adopting a Vegan or a highly Eco-conscious lifestyle in a developed country like the United States is something of a privilege, and that there's a number of constraints that make this an unrealistic option for ordinary people who may be living in food-deserts, lacking in education, or facing survival challenges that make your values inimical to their way of life.

As to Gorbachev, Green seems like a fair characterization for him because of his sincere attempts to bring democratization and progressive reform to an outdated authoritarian system (I believe he saw the Scandinavian Social Democracies, with Finland in particular, as an aspirational model for what a democratized Soviet Union might look like). I do know that he's not popular in Russia, due to the unintended side effects of his policies, and the economic chaos and lawlessness that followed in the aftermath of the unintended collapse of the Soviet Union. It's not like Green ideas are immune to failure or unintended consequences. Also the guy is still alive today, and his political advocacy includes support for social democracy, international cooperation on issues such as climate change, and nuclear disarmament. As for Karl Marx, I think it can be helpful to draw a distinction between the man himself, and the numerous interpretations of his philosophy over the past two centuries. Reason for this is that the actual practice of his ideas can range from all the way from Red (Lenin, Stalin) to Green (which is more representative of how Marxism is pursued within a democratic context in our current day) . As for the man himself, I see aspects of both Blue and Orange in his representation of dialectic materialism, with perhaps even a tiny tinge of Yellow due to the influence of Hegel on his work (the Hegelian Dialectic has some overlap with Systems Thinking). I'll definitely agree that there's some ambiguity as far as mapping him onto the SD model, so I won't belabor the point.

After sinking 10 or 15 hours into Disco Elysium, I'd highly recommend it as an alternative for any looking for an RPG that has superb writing and characters, an incredibly well realized world, with highly novel and unique role playing mechanics derived from pen and paper role playing systems. Only caveat is if you're put off by a lot of reading, as the game is in some ways almost akin to an interactive novel.

From Cinema Therapy, a Youtube channel that looks at films from the perspective of a licensed therapist. Aragorn from Lord of the Rings is a great example of the sort of Healthy and Compassionate Masculinity that emerges at Green.

Trump advocating for something that might actually help people? Let's go ahead and add +10 to his evaluation card, for a cumulative total of -999,990 for his entire Presidency. Considering the criminally negligent way he handled the Covid epidemic, this is basically the equivalent of burning down your house and then tossing you a quarter to call a Cab on a payphone. I have to wonder whether the primary motivation here is to spite Mitch McConnel for not supporting his coup attempt (not that I'm not all for making Mitch McConnel's life difficult).

As a small aside, I read an interesting article a while back about how disruptive of a technology 3D Printing has the potential to turn out to be in regards to public safety. Once the technology matures, the potential arises for any individual to use it to print and assemble firearms that are basically untraceable. Even with lax gun control laws in the US, at least there's still some level of oversight and restrictions on who's able to obtain a firearm. The sense I got is that while this is not practical right now (since there are easier ways of obtaining a weapon than buying a 3D Printer and assembling a printed gun), that could change in the future as the technology matures. Could be that these concerns are alarmist and won't pan out, but the idea doesn't seem implausible on the face of it.

Here are some well known worldwide historical figures: Red : Julius Ceaser. Ghengis Khan. Hernan Cortez. Moctezuma II. Augusto Pinochet. Joseph Stalin. Saddam Hussein. Donald Trump. Blue : Marcus Aurelius. Thomas Aquanus. Karl Marx. Fidel Castro. Nikita Khrushchev. Fyodor Dostoevsky. Ho Chi Minh. Orange : Adam Smith. Immanuel Kant. Winston Churchill. The American Founding Fathers. Green : Martin Luther King Jr. Mahatma Gandhi. Nelson Mandella. Mikhail Gorbachev. Pope Francis. George Orwell. Yellow : Albert Einstein. Niels Bohr. Noam Chomsky. Bertrand Russel.

As a fan of the cyberpunk sub-genre of science fiction, the irony of Corpos defanging and commodifying something that started off as a cautionary tale about the alienation and destruction that results from unrestrained Capitalism, isn't lost on me.

I really hope the push for Unionization in the games Industry continues to gain momentum. Working for these companies needs to be redefined as a reciprocal relationship, rather than a privilege, and that's going to be hard to do if there's twenty people fresh out of school ready to take your place if you cause too much of a ruckus. Maybe the loss of talented people to other industries due to burnout and poor working conditions will be a catalyst for change. Working conditions are of course much better on the Indie Studio side of the business, but that's generally going to be true of any business that operates with more of a Green mentality. One hopeful aspect of the way the games Industry is structured, is that smaller places have a much more realistic chance of competing against these monolithic companies, or at least carving out a market space and surviving, than in most other Industries.

Also skilled trades are heavily resistant to automation; the work of plumbers and electricians won't be automated any time soon.

Even worse when you realize that some poor shmucks spent 7 - 8 years of their life working on this game while it was in development hell, only to have eight years of work squandered to some degree by management pushing to release the game before it was ready, and insisting that the game be squeezed down to a barely functional shell for older console hardware.

Good evidence for why we need to fix our Democratic Institutions before we can make real headway on this or a host of other issues. If Corporations can just buy politicians through legalized bribery, aka Lobbying, and can spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections,all of these Reforms are pretty much dead in the water. Capture of the Political System by Corporations and the Wealthy Elite is a Root Cause that needs to be solved first. Overturning Citizens United and revoking Corporate Personhood would be a good first step, but there's also decades of Fear Mongering against any and all Reforms to Capitalism that needs to be fought against. As sad as is to say, I wonder if it might be a situation where it will take the Boomers, who haven't suffered to the same degree under Late Stage Capitalism, dying off from Old Age before we have any realistic chance for making substantive reforms.

Haven't seen literature discussed much in this thread, so how about postmodernism's seminal literary work, Gravity's Rainbow? "...a million bureaucrats are diligently plotting death and some of them even know it."

The challenge is to find a system that retains the good parts of capitalism, namely its marked success in generating wealth and fostering innovation, while transcending its limitations - its inability to deal with externalities such as Climate Change, and the distribution problem where its gains are shared so unequally that it begins to distort Democracy and threaten the stability of the whole system. Transcend, and include... Social Democracy, Market Socialism, and a Resource Based Economy are all possible outgrowths of Capitalism that fix some of its associated problems, but whatever system ends up supplanting it will need to be adopted gradually, rather than being imposed in short order; social revolutions have a bad track record of actually making life better for people living under it. I could see the United States transitioning to the beginnings of a Social Democracy over the course of my life, as it seems like the next logical step from where we're at right now, but anything beyond that is just speculation...

Jeff Bazos is pure Orange imo. Elon Musk is more of blend of Orange and Green. Bill Gates made his billions in an Orange paradigm, but due to his philanthropic work and his pledge to give away almost all of his Wealth to the poorest people in the World, that he's solidly Green by this point, maybe even Yellow in some respects.

Oh and of course Knights of the Old Republic 2, which was a philosophical deconstruction of Star Wars, written by the same person who wrote Planescape Torment, Chris Avellone. Puts the Ideology of the various factions in the setting under a microscope, and explores many of the implications of those belief systems in nuanced and interesting ways. It might have perhaps the best written character I've ever encountered in a game as well.

Fallout New Vegas also comes to mind for being as Gold standard when it comes to in depth writing, a well realized world, nuanced and believable characters, and player choice.

Please tell me you've played Planescape Torment, this game's spiritual predecessor

Another excellent video from Second Thought. I know the whitewashing of controversial historical figures isn't unique to America, but from a firsthand perspective this is highly pervasive in the United States, to the point where I've seen incredibly ignorant Conservatives use out of context MLK or Malcolm X quotes to try and somehow 'debunk' social justice movements like BlackLivesMatter. She wasn't mentioned in the video, but Helen Keller is another example that comes to mind. Most American school children only learn how she overcame blindness and deafness to communicate with the outside world and lead a productive life, while completely overlooking what she spent the rest of her life fighting for; namely social and economic justice for poor and disabled people through her advocacy of Socialist ideals and reforms.

I'll caveat this by admitting that I haven't made my way through the entire series yet (a lot of ideas to consider and unpack, and not the sort of thing I can just put on in the background and listen to while writing code for my day job), but wouldn't a more accurate name for this series be Deconstructing the Myth of Materialist Reductionism? Not sure if this was intentional or not, but your mention in part one of trying to study a frog by putting it through a blender and then looking at its cells under a microscope brings to mind a famous essay by the philosopher Thomas Nagel called What Is It Like to Be a Bat?, which raises many of the same points you do about the limitations of Materialist Reductionism. In Part One, I do wonder if maybe you're conflating fields of knowledge which are Scientifically Informed from the process of Scientific Discovery. Hell, even the Catholic Church has updated its worldview in response to scientific discoveries. I also wonder whether trying to come up with clear boundaries for what is or is not Science ultimately becomes a questions of semantics at some point, rather than being helpful for the purposes of clarity. Great series so far by the way. I think your videos are fantastic at bringing up questions of epistemology for things that go unquestioned in the broader culture, even if I end up disagreeing with some of the points you make.