With all the different emotional reactions on either side of the political spectrum, especially in the U.S., since Trump's presidential victory, we need to find larger perspectives for analysis and not merely be caught up in the either/or binary of arguments and aggressive fighting back n' forth.
So, the other day, thanks to Dan McKinnon in Calgary, I received a copy of a draft that Ken Wilber, the integral philosopher, has been sending out to some people on his application of Integral theory (and Spiral Dynamics beneath it), of why there is an evolutionary correction going on that had to come out eventually, and it came out in the 2016 US presidential elections. Like it or not.
Wilber, is one of my mentors, and as a philosopher he understands cultural evolution, especially in America, like no one else I know of, especially with his meta-theory and contextual worldcentric and kosmocentric view. His arguments I find very compelling, and always have in his critique of postmodern excess and pathologies (e.g., narcissism and nihilism via relativism). Anyways, I won't say more but I'll post his 90 page document here KEN%2BWILBER%2BTrump%2Band%2Ba%2BPost-Truth%2BWorld.docx
I only got to page 6, I haven't read the rest. And on page 6 I found the "truth" I was expecting would be in his argument, but I love the way he said it. This may not make full sense to the rest here on the FM ning, but I'll put it into the perspective of fear, and the culture of fear which I study.
Basically, Wilber is saying that cultural evolution had gone forward on a leading edge for quite awhile, at least in human terms, since the 1960's especially (in the Western world). This was the time of radical cultural (r)evolution, and the Love Generation. I grew up in that too. We thought Love would take victory over Fear basically and make the world a better place.
Wilber, using Integral theory, tells how the leading-edge of cultural evolution (i.e., postmodernism) got twisted and extreme (especially in academia in the humanities and arts) but also in the general popular culture. The idea was in this Love culture of equality and pluralism (Lower Left quadrant reality) and all the good stuff of postmodernism there was an problem with what I call Culturalism, in that cultural ideas (media) had taken over casting a better view of life than was actually being had. This is the virtual (unreality) of Culturalism and people believed it until the structural social reality (Lower Right quadrant reality) was so grossly out of synch with the Culturalism view, because greater disparity of health, income, and freedom, etc. was occurring as the "middle class" myth collapsed (especially, in the US). This gulf or gap between Cultural and Social Reality, to use Wilber's analysis, really brought the whole System into such contradictions that something big had to change.
Wilber says on page 6 "the culture was lying" (and had been for about 60 years, more or less). This, from my perspective, is because we were living in a growing culture of fear (as many critics have recently claimed) not a culture of love. Darn! This has brought the evolutionary system into a bit of regression and chaos, and who knows what else... but Trump rode the falsity of it all, the anger and frustration of the contradiction. And, he led with contributing and flying along the waves of the culture of fear not the culture of love--and, his predecessor Pres. Richard Nixon, once said exactly that-- it is not love that changes people but fear, that is, if you are a leader and want your way to dominate. Welcome to the power-game. Trump is riding in there well suited, more than any other candidate to play that game. But what will the next (r)evolutionary correction be after Trump's time in office? We'll see...
