My Comments on Steve McIntosh's "Why Centrism Fails and How We can Better Achieve Political Cooperation" whose link is found at http://www.culturalevolution.org/political-campaigns/why-centrism-fails-and-how-we-can-better-achieve-political-cooperation/#comment-26607
Steve McIntosh offers a clear and excellent understanding of the current political and ideological quandaries from an evolutionary, integrative perspective and, in my view, his proposals for creatively reconciling polarized ideological camps make sense. I also think that the integrative approach is the coming solution to the excess of polarization endangering society and governing, that is, unless dominant holon-like, social factions escaping checks and balances, unless unacknowledged shadows lingering between social developmental levels constituting various types of hidden, unchecked power groups behind the scenes prove so formidable as to subvert the normal cultural evolutionary process.
We must allow faith-based, traditionalist findings to be recognized by modern and post modern ideologues and vice versa. In fact, there already exist values in common but the heroic defense of each other's valid truths or positions blinds in a cognitively disconnecting manner.
Upon overcoming the unnoticed hubris within incipient integrality, unable to see how it has also blocked away important truths from previous stages, I must say that the "Values Integration" path deftly proposed by Steve McIntosh (primarily based upon Ken Wilber's Integral Theory) is not a form of mediocre centrism sometimes understood as a lackluster Middle Ground often indistinctly catering to power and corruption or even to democratic principles as required. Rather, it is more like Aristotle's dynamic and virtuous Golden Mean which can constitute a synergistic, dynamic integration of the best society-building values from different ideological factions accompanied by the negation of the mutual negation of each other's positive values along with their negative ones as practiced today in a dogmatic fashion by polarized ideological social factions.
In fact, for quite some time, I had also been thinking along the same lines but find McIntosh's exposition quite clear and to the point. Seriously recognizing the positive contributions of all cultural ideological factions and associated developmental levels (even previous and beyond the named traditionalist, modernist and postmodernist stages) will also be a "test of integrality." I say this because there still linger important issues that are not well-considered within the integral movement which tends to be too closely aligned with acceptable issues found in cultural evolutionary stages close to the post postmodern. Thus, denials and or suppression or the submersion as subject of what could have been recognized as object a long time ago in important pre-modern traditionalist religious and pre-traditionalist religious stages have also been incorporated in the incipient integral stages of development. But this needs to change in order to provide a truly inclusive integral stage.
Divine intervention and the otherworldly are both genuine and necessary issues for a comprehensive Meta Theory that reunites subjectivity and objectivity in the single and the collective across body, mind and spirit.
Divine intervention and the otherworldly are both genuine and necessary issues for a comprehensive Meta Theory that reunites subjectivity and objectivity in the single and the collective across body, mind and spirit.
Besides income inequality, another shadow that lingers on from pre-integral stages is the formation of a kind of de facto oligarchy also hijacking and distorting the normal modern political process to a significant degree, a situation in which many of the largest corporations, the financial sector and some of most powerful families have gained an excessive ascendancy over The People as a multivariate analysis conducted by political scientists Gilens and Page demonstrated.
Besides this, there's the denial and the potential effects of recognizing what truly seems to be the existence of an assorted multi-realm-utilizing, non-human, intelligent presence associated to the truly mysterious aspects of the UFO phenomenon, something which has been either purposefully denied or suppressed due to modern social taboo and/or denied/misunderstood/vilified by some pre-modern, religious fundamentalists.
Accepting the ET presence and/or disclosing this semi-covert/partially disclosed presence interacting with thousands (or perhaps millions) of people worldwide will - naturally - be interpreted according to the various pre-integral developmental perspectives in both positive and negative terms. Furthermore, secret, highly compartmentalized and officially "plausible denied," "non-existent" research on this issue may be related to power groups almost completely outside the purview of normal politics and of constitutional checks and balances conforming what Historian Richard Dolan proposes as a "break-away civilization." They act as our caretakers, our "super egos" (in Freudian terms), operating without serious constitutional supervision, as if our collective psyche wanted them so as not to have to face reality. But we are all in this. Them and us are one just as - from a deeper perspective - we are as multidimensional and historically involved with the ETs as the ETs are with us as we both try to avoid being in a co-dependent relationship and clear-cut distinctions cannot be made.
Accepting the ET presence and/or disclosing this semi-covert/partially disclosed presence interacting with thousands (or perhaps millions) of people worldwide will - naturally - be interpreted according to the various pre-integral developmental perspectives in both positive and negative terms. Furthermore, secret, highly compartmentalized and officially "plausible denied," "non-existent" research on this issue may be related to power groups almost completely outside the purview of normal politics and of constitutional checks and balances conforming what Historian Richard Dolan proposes as a "break-away civilization." They act as our caretakers, our "super egos" (in Freudian terms), operating without serious constitutional supervision, as if our collective psyche wanted them so as not to have to face reality. But we are all in this. Them and us are one just as - from a deeper perspective - we are as multidimensional and historically involved with the ETs as the ETs are with us as we both try to avoid being in a co-dependent relationship and clear-cut distinctions cannot be made.
Finally, the potential for major enhancements in understanding about the nature of reality in connection to non-human, intelligence is applicable to religions, history, the social sciences, philosophy, law and the hard sciences is significant and not only possibly disruptive but also likely (and perhaps necessary) to stimulate a faster transition into a truly Integral or integrative, "post postmodern" phase. It will task our consciousnesses to stretch and rise up to a revolutionary/evolutionary stage perhaps beyond what we normally think is possible for "human nature" since the advent of Cro-Magnon "biologically modern" humans.
An integrative recognition of the non-human intelligent presence associated with UFOs is necessary, but also a recognition in a community that is rising through different emerging cultural manifestations heralding a different possible future; the Integrative, post postmodern community leading the way towards cultural reconciliation and a brighter future. This would be a coming together of integrative approaches and would be crucial to assist humanity at large in the healthy intersubjective processing and integration of the extraterrestrial/multi dimensional reality among all ideological sectors.
But the conventional integrative approach itself also has to evolve, with its visionaries, not only caring about personal development and issues like ecology, but recognizing the importance of the many faces of the otherworldly, something that was rejected, laughed at or condemned in many ways across the so- called mythic-religious and modern stages of cultural development. This healthy recognition of reality and of experiences of millions on board Planet Earth will allow the Integral Movement to wake up from its own unrecognized "myths" and shadows (hiding crucial aspects of humanity's past), still too closely interpreted under modern and postmodern consciousness, premises, beliefs and methods which were part of an ethos of rejection of religious and otherworldly issues.
http://www.culturalevolution.org/political-campaigns/why-centrism-fails-and-how-we-can-better-achieve-political-cooperation/#comment-26607
Giorgio Piacenza
But the conventional integrative approach itself also has to evolve, with its visionaries, not only caring about personal development and issues like ecology, but recognizing the importance of the many faces of the otherworldly, something that was rejected, laughed at or condemned in many ways across the so- called mythic-religious and modern stages of cultural development. This healthy recognition of reality and of experiences of millions on board Planet Earth will allow the Integral Movement to wake up from its own unrecognized "myths" and shadows (hiding crucial aspects of humanity's past), still too closely interpreted under modern and postmodern consciousness, premises, beliefs and methods which were part of an ethos of rejection of religious and otherworldly issues.
http://www.culturalevolution.org/political-campaigns/why-centrism-fails-and-how-we-can-better-achieve-political-cooperation/#comment-26607
Giorgio Piacenza
