The first two posts in this series focused on what the current political environment looks like, and why it provides a perfect opportunity for experimentation and decentralization. Today’s post will examine what it will take to get there. While I think the future can be a very bright one, this is by no means written in stone and will take a herculean effort by millions of globally enlightened and motivated humans to achieve it.
In order to properly frame today’s post, I will be relying heavily on information discussed in my five-part series on Spiral Dynamics published back in February. While I will try to provide context, it might be helpful to check out those older posts before continuing if things start to get confusing.
Let’s begin by me quoting Ken Wilber in the post, What is Spiral Dynamics and Why Have I Become So Interested in It?
So it is that the leading edge of consciousness evolution stands today on the brink of an integral millennium—or at least the possibility of an integral millennium, where the sum total of extant human knowledge, wisdom, and technology is available to all. But there are several obstacles to that integral embrace, even in the most developed populations. Moreover, there is the more typical or average mode of consciousness, which is far from integral anything, and is in desperate need of its own tending.
I have, in numerous previous publications (especially Integral Psychology) given the details of many of those researchers. Here I will simply use one of them as an example. The model is called Spiral Dynamics, based on the pioneering work of Clare Graves. Graves proposed a profound and elegant system of human development, which subsequent research has refined and validated, not refuted. “Briefly, what I am proposing is that the psychology of the mature human being is an unfolding, emergent, oscillating spiralling process marked by progressive subordination of older, lower-order behavior systems to newer, higher-order systems as an individual’s existential problems change. Each successive stage, wave, or level of existence is a state through which people pass on their way to other states of being. When the human is centralized in one state of existence” —as I would put it, when the self’s center of gravity hovers around a particular wave of consciousness— “he or she has a psychology which is particular to that state. His or her feelings, motivations, ethics and values, biochemistry, degree of neurological activation, learning system, belief systems, conception of mental health, ideas as to what mental illness is and how it should be treated, conceptions of and preferences for management, education, economics, and political theory and practice are all appropriate to that state.”
Graves outlined around eight major “levels or waves of human existence,” ranging from autistic, magical, and animistic, through sociocentric and conventional, to individualistic and integrated. As is usually the case with Western researchers, he recognized no higher (transpersonal) levels, but the contributions he made to the prepersonal and personal realms were profound.
The first six levels are “subsistence levels” marked by “first-tier thinking.” Then there occurs a revolutionary shift in consciousness: the emergence of “being levels” and “second-tier thinking,” of which there are two major waves. Here is a brief description of all eight waves, the percentage of the world population at each wave, and the percentage of social power held by each. Remember, these are all variations on archaic to magic to mythic to rational to integral, which is the common “developmental space” revealed by most research.
But what none of those memes can do, on their own, is fully appreciate the existence of the other memes. Each of those first-tier memes thinks that its worldview is the correct or best perspective. It reacts negatively if challenged; it lashes out, using its own tools, whenever it is threatened. Blue order is very uncomfortable with both red impulsiveness and orange individualism. Orange individualism thinks blue order is for suckers and green egalitarianism is weak and woo-woo. Green egalitarianism cannot easily abide excellence and value rankings, big pictures, hierarchies, or anything that appears authoritarian, and thus green reacts strongly to blue, orange, and anything post-green.
That last paragraph represents a crucial point with regard to today’s post. One of the biggest threats we face as American citizens is the centralization of a grotesque and dangerous degree of power in the hands of unrepresentative politicians and bureaucrats in Washington D.C. People who by and large work for oligarchs and large corporations, not the public. If I’m correct, and there is no longer a “center” in U.S. politics, just various competing gangs looking to rule over everyone else, real progress necessitates altering the centers of power themselves, as opposed to hoping for some mythical savior politician will ride into D.C. on a unicorn and save everyone. That is not going to happen.
Part of the reason it isn’t going to happen is too many Americans have very different views of how society should be governed and how certain emotionally charged issues should be resolved. They think their particular way of viewing the world is the correct one, and are simply vying for power in order to impose their particular pet paradigm on a population of 320 million very diverse people.
This is what humans operating on a first-tier level of consciousness tend to do. It’s not their fault, it just happens to be the stage they’re at. You can’t logic them out of their stage of consciousness. Centralized power combined with competing hordes of people who agree on virtually nothing is a recipe for disaster. Thus, decentralization is no longer just a quaint pipe-dream of an idea. If we want freedom and liberty to flourish, decentralization is mandatory.
That being said, a live and let live mentality does require some degree of second-tier thinking. So what is second-tier consciousness?
As described by Spiral Dynamic Integral the Netherlands (yellow is the first color tier in second-stage thinking):
Firstly, he noticed that a Yellow orientated lifestyle is much more free than a lifestyle in any of the other value systems. Yellow oriented people seemed to move and express themselves completely free and independent of their life environment. Contrary to people in other value systems, they were not afraid anymore to be rejected and they didn’t fear other people’s or God’s judgment. They didn’t show the need to make an impression on others and to reach the top at the cost of everything.
They also didn’t strive anymore for absolute truths and they didn’t have the need to belong to something anymore. In short: these were people without irrational fears, compulsive needs and compulsive behaviors. However, this Yellow freedom doesn’t mean that people in the Yellow value system are not connected to their environment. On the contrary, Yellow oriented people are very much involved and show a lot of compassion. The biggest difference with people from other value systems is that their life environment is not fearfully or compulsively leading them.
Even better, is Ken Wilber’s observations of what happens when you put a red, a blue, orange, green and yellow in a room at the same time. Makes perfect sense to me.
This is partly why a higher level of consciousness is needed for successfully ushering in a widely beneficial decentralized future. We can’t just profess support for political and corporate decentralization, we need to truly understand why it’s important on a much deeper and fundamental level. While that’s difficult enough, it’s just the first step in what is necessary to really create a better, freer more ethical world.
It doesn’t take long to come up with all sorts of huge issues that will need to be tackled for decentralization to be widely beneficial, as opposed to just successful for a few regions/communities that are already well positioned for success. Dealing with resource disputes between various areas, decisions on when to wage warfare (our current centralized model makes no sense), pollution from one area affecting a neighboring area, etc, etc. The issues are endless and figuring out how to live in peace and kindness with one another while maintaining more independent governing structures will take thinking on a level of consciousness far above what I can offer.
Fortunately, I think there are plenty of people out there with the vision and thoughtfulness to propose creative solutions. I became convinced of this with the emergence of Bitcoin. As I wrote in the piece, Why Increased Consciousness is the Only Path Forward:
If Bitcoin blew you away when you first discovered it, and continues to do so to this day, Spiral Dynamics can help explain why. Bitcoin was an expression in the physical world of the newly emergent leading-edge integral level consciousness. It drew lessons from history and attempted to take the best of orange and green worldviews and incorporate them into an entirely new form of money. We see the clear presence of free markets and individualism, as well as the intentional separation of the system from dominator hierarchies (bureaucratic government meddling), which had corrupted all money before it. Its greenness is evident in the fact that by design no individual or company controls the network. Global, decentralized, revolutionary technology. This is perhaps the perfect example of integral consciousness operating on our planet at this time from an economics standpoint, and why it has captured the imagination of so many, while at the same time being violently rejected by so many others (mainly those operating within the pathological green framework, with Paul Krugman being the perfect example).
I added to this a few months later in the post, A New Financial System is Being Born
My passion for Bitcoin was always framed by my ten years working in the financial industry. Many of us who lived through the 2008 crisis knew the financial system was dead. We knew it was corrupt, archaic and terminal, so many of us began bracing for what might come next. We did what we thought made sense at the time, which included buying precious metals like gold and silver given their historic track record of protecting wealth in periods of paradigm-shifting financial disruption. Others took more extreme measures to protect themselves from the end of the financial system, but a small group forward thinking geeks decided to do something much better. They decided to build an alternative.
The type of thinking that brought us Bitcoin, is the exact type of thinking that will be required to make an evolutionary leap when it comes to structures of governance and community. This will take the efforts of people far more intelligent, wise and conscious than myself. I’m really just a messenger trying to inspire people and get you thinking.
The way I see it, our national politics is dominated by different gangs each operating on levels of first-tier consciousness, with the ultimate goal of grabbing the centralized ring of power and imposing their worldview on the rest of us. This doesn’t make any sense to me, and I think we need to move beyond that. The first step is to tackle issues of power concentration, whether they reside in the corporate or government sector. The second, and far greater challenge, is to offer alternative, decentralized structures of life that make every day existence materially better for the vast majority of us. Anything less will be an abject failure.
This was originally going to be a three-part series, but I have found it necessary to write a fourth installment that I will write and publish tomorrow. It will examine the ways in which I am trying to apply the concepts of decentralization and second-tier thinking to my work here at Liberty Blitzkrieg.
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In Liberty,
Michael Krieger
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Well! I almost left a comment on your last post, asking how ‘today’ fits in the spiral dynamic process…. and here it is!! Voila 🙂
wow, amazing food for thought.
Word Mike, keep it rolling
There is much to chew on here. This is a short synopsis of my world view. Human society and the way it enforces itself on its members has not moved a great deal since humans gave up their hunter gathering ways and created permanent settlements. What existed before is replicated today. Rule by law with violence to back up law is still done by those with wealth in a mafioso feudal style. And while there has been some allowance of self governance for the populous under democratic practices there is a limit involved and an array of systematic control measures that keep society with the desired bounds of those that have the power to manipulate the direction society is to follow. Those that rule are very nimble and calculating in just how much they can get away with before revolt with the greater population takes hold. When to relax their grip at the precise moment and when to shear the flock, especially with the advancements that have been made in psychoanalytic forms, from the individual to mass psychographics.
What hasn’t changed very much in the ebb and flow is the levels of cruelty, greater or less, that can be imposed by the rulers in their own interests on the rest of society but the times have changed and all of humanity, from the rulers to the economically desvastated, now finds itself at a crossroads. The ‘system’ itself has run as far as it can on a finite planet with no new frontiers to bring on line and a human population that has filled the globe. Either the old system is reset by lowering the human population which keeps the old system in play or a totally new way of conducting human affairs arises. Along with a new system should it prove successful in over throwing the old paradigm has to come an era of enlightenment as to what it means to be human. The problems of running a successful human economy are many but not insurmountable under a new enlightened paradigm as Michael Krieger writes of here. The question is one rather of has humanity reached the wall before it is ready to set itself free from the darkness of preexisting ideas and thought processes that have been purposely maintained to keep the populous in an infantile state and the easier to rule with control of the human economy safely within the hands of bankers. Either way forward, but if we continue as we have humanity and its glorious civilization as a technological achievement is going away.
The current economy with debt based money is one of the key obstacles to be overcomed in order for a naturally economic cooperation between people. We need decentralized money that is not enriching some people on the cost of others. Bitcoin has shown us a working technology. Next is to put labour-backed tokens on the blockchain.
I totally agree with your observations on the debt based monetary system we all slave under. The problem I see with the current technology in block chain currencies is that they are all open to the pump and dump manipulations of the wealthy. One based on labour is an excellent idea and would complicate such manipulations. I might buy into that….wonderful idea!
@BRF: A labour-backed crypto essentially means that there is an upper cost limit in producing a unit of money, or token. At some price level you, and most other people, will find it profitable to make the money yourself. Hence, money supply will be non-deterministic and only regulated by demand. This is common sense when we think about most commodities, but our current monetary system is so rigged and convoluted that it can be difficult to understand the simplicity of natural work-backed money.
I dont know what color I am in. Maybe green? I believe in these levels but I also believe in the danger of defining these levels too much. Everyone is different. Some people may be on two different levels at once. I had a problem with religion. In the end I came to the conclusion was that I could not define what the true religion was. I guess that makes me closest to Unitarian. Also I found peace in this non-defining stance. I also drew a conclusion that most world conflicts and war were battles fought between people that had different definitions of religion and failed to accept other religious views.
I am 52 years old. I was in my early twenties when I began to form my religious beliefs. My religion became this idea that man made up all these different religious beliefs which were all supposed to be blindly followed and which were differing from each other religious beliefs. I drew the conclusion that these were humans ways of trying to interpret what god is. The fact that more than 100 different religions disagreed with each other meant that the blind faith one was supposed to have had an accuracy of less than 1%.
So I simplified my beliefs. I believe in God. I dont try to define what or who he is. I believe that if you are a good person. You go through life not harming others and trying to make the world a better place. If you do that god will reward you.
Unfortunately this view isolated me from the catholic church and caused me to drop out. I could identify with the Unitarians and did get involved a little bit but just found religion to time consuming.
I like the idea of these levels of existence. I read some of Kaz Dabrowski and his idea of 5 levels of existence and Positive Disintegration. That is when I began to realize that I myself have passed thorough different stages of existence and have advanced to a higher level. I still do not think I am at the highest levels yet but I know I am at a higher level then most people I communicate with.
Just be-careful of falling into the over-definition trap.
Hi John, you are correct to be wary about this kind of labeling, which is something I am very aware of and addressed in detail in my original piece on SD.
Second, I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to not think of this evolutionary process as simplistic or linear. I know it’s very tempting to do this, but it will lead you astray. People aren’t wholly yellow, or orange, or red or green. Each of us consists of a complex combination of these elements, and the way they all combine together into a whole human being makes us who we are from a consciousness standpoint. So someone you could characterize as orange, is actually far more complicated than that. This person could demonstrate levels of second tier-thinking in certain aspects of life, yet remains stuck in a worldview characterized primarily by orange. It’s far more complicated than it appears at first glance, and one of the biggest risks we all face in exploring Spiral Dynamics is to oversimplify the whole thing. Recall:
The important point is that these various waves of existence (or stages of development) are not just passing phases in the self’s unfolding; they are permanently available capacities and coping strategies that can, once they have emerged, be activated under the appropriate life conditions (e.g., survival instincts can be activated in emergency situations; bonding capacities are activated in close human relationships, and so on). We can be red in one context, green in another, turquoise in yet another. Moreover, as Beck puts it, “The Spiral is messy, not symmetrical, with multiple admixtures rather than pure types. These are mosaics, meshes, and blends.”
Here’s that entire post: https://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2017/02/07/what-is-spiral-dynamics-and-why-have-i-become-so-interested-in-it/
Maybe ‘predominance’ might best describe a person’s ‘color’… and a yellow’s, presumably increasing, awareness and flexibility allows increasing understanding of the other colors’ perspectives. Acceptance even? Feeling understood and accepted is a powerful attractant, I think, leading to a possible fuzzy sense of commonality… even occasional cooperation? (This, of course, is the opposite of the DNC’s continued, current, desperate, ‘Resist the devil!!’ screaming. Does it tell us what the DNC/RNC are most afraid of? 🙂
I am more familiar with Dabrowski than spiral dynamics. It seems spiral dynamics is a more thought about version and thus more developed than Dabrowski was.
Dabrowski believed that 80% of the population didn’t have the intelligence capabilities to advance past levels 1 and 2. He believed level 3 was a transitional level that is very painful. In order to advance from level 3 to 4 you had to have your old level 2 self break down first. This loss of identity is very painful. Sometimes it was so painful that the individual would just give up and go back to his old level 2 self.
Other times the individual would take on a new higher level identity and advance to level 4.
I went through this starting at 16 years old and came out the other side when I was 19. Those past three years were really painful for me. I started towards a goal of having my own business. My new self was a strong independent entrepreneur. I started a business at age 26, got married, bought a house, had kids, raced cars, invented things and wrote patents. In the nineties I started to concentrate on energy efficiency in heating systems and felt that was a way I could give back to society. I was on the cover of many trade related magazines and won some design contests. After reading Spiral Dynamics I would say I was mostly Green.
Late 2014 I began another strong transitional journey that again was very painful. I quit my Heating business and gave up my old identity again. Throughout 2015 I had huge anxiety and could barely function. 2015 was one of the most painful years of my life.
A new strange version of myself began to emerge in late 2015. It is who I am now. I have a new set of goals and values. I think the biggest difference is the scale of my new goals. My old self was concerned with making changes and a better world on a more local level.
Now my goals are of a more transitional level aimed at changing and improving the world. I have a whole new and unique educational method I would like to teach others. It is geared towards technical improvements. Also I have a “World Wide Energy Efficiency Standard for Buildings” I would like to see adopted. I could greatly reduce co2 world wide.
The problem is that now without my old job I have no money and find myself stuck in a emergency mode. So I am concentrating on trading stocks options and futures. I need a certain financial independence to accomplish my new goals and haven’t been able to achieve that yet. I believe being a trader will be my best option for that right now. My last self took 6 years before he was able to start his own business. So I understand I need patience.
In late 2015 a certain clarity of myself emerged. The anxiety started to go away and I was able to concentrate and able to move on. I than began to start to set goals around this new idea of myself. The strange thing is I am uncertain of exactly where this new self is heading. Back in 1983 at 18 years old I knew exactly what and how I would become this great entrepreneur. I ended up in 2006 exactly what I thought I would become.
Now I feel I need the help of others to achieve my new goals. I just don’t believe people are ready or advanced enough to help me. I feel that I may just end up writing at some point my plan in detail for future generations to follow. In the hope that the next generation will understand.
But I am not a writer. So this is all strange. This new path seems to have a lot of unknowns. Goals that might be unachievable.
The fact that the anxiety is gone and I’m working again on goals is telling me I’m on the right path.
An outline for the WWEEBS is at http://www.SaveNRG.org. But the website is just a rough draft of my plans.
In order to accomplish the goals I have set for myself I have to become a Great leader. Though I have achieved independent living in my life, I never have been a great leader. I am not even convinced I can become a great leader.
Yet I started down this path late in 2015 and it still feels like this is the right path. So I will just keep going and see will life leads me.
In late 2015 I was able to accept a failing business plan. By accepting failure helped to clear anxiety. My new self started down this new path with the idea that failure is acceptable but doing nothing or living without plans and goals wasn’t acceptable. I felt that technically I was a valuable asset to society. I felt that getting the stuff out of my head and into the minds of others was important to making the world a better place. By accepting failure it means my goals and plans are dynamic and are to change as time goes on to best fit the situation I am in at the moment. Hence the uncertainty of my future.
You have changed the order of levels. There is Individualistic level, which is a primitive precondition. Bush gatherer people picking fruits are individualistic, they care only about their own full belly. They did not develop anything and all their happiness is to individually pick up fruits, that somehow happen to ripen arround…
But the highest level of people is voluntarily societal. We are _Homo Socialis_ and our greatest achievements are done by Teams of people, competing while cooperating. We have built this civilisation and we make it advance further.
As St.Exupery has shown: the true Meaning is like a Cathedral. It is made of stones of various purposes and kinds, some are floor, walls, roof, statues. But the purpose of the Cathedral is not in the Stones that make it, the purpose is the Space between the Walls. Equality is then like taking all the Stones and lining them in one Row, or dropping all down to a Rubble. Fine dust and row of equal stones are most equal, but the Purpose has been lost, because the Stones dared to think, that the Purpose of the Cathedral should be in an Equality of the Stones.
We are all different, but together we make a large Stream, that leads to somewhere… And we need to ask: how, and where…
The Purpose of the Civilisation is not in putting a single Human onto piedestal and worship his individual uniqueness. The Purpose is to bring that Stream of People into the Future. To bring various different Streams, since they differ and what is beneficial may change some day… Then some unique Human leads the effort and shows new directions and paths, in each neighbourhood there are some leaders of the effort. But they are not to be praised for their own self, but for the impact, by which they influence the Rest…
Then, by changing order and putting “Individualistic” above “Societal” you are part of those leading us astray from the Societal advance of the Whole, into private dens of individualism…
From American perspective, already center-centric hyper-large oligarchy, many things look different than from the free and small nations… You still harder and harder identify with “American”, because that group is too large and vague, and you are right it is governed by various gangs, struggling for too large-scale power…
(I write “Center-centric”, because USA already feels itself like a center of the world or like an isolated something, where nothing else counts or matters, and it is so much centric on that americanism… Even here in your liberty decentralization text you hardly can surpass that american cage mentality… Your psychology centralism is so obvious, but probably can be overlooked from within?)
With which Group do you identify ? Because “American” is too wide and too much ill to identify with, your Titanic party is not very much appealing, which leads you to the blind rail of Individualism, healing that wound of Bad-Group-Identification breaking… It is not a spiral step up, it is step aside from the Bad Stream, which could allow you to identify with some better Stream, or just fade away in a common chaos of unaligned individuals… Do you identify with “Humanity” ? It’s too wide either, there actually is no such Group, it is just a phantom, devised to disolve bad groups into the environment and override them with better identifying and aligned groups…
Sometimes it may be more obvious to see, with which Group you identify, by watching, with which Groups you do not identify, which are Foreign and even possibly Hostile…
Because what really counts are the Groups, the Nations and Ethnics. The individuals straying arround are for their own amusement, they may start a new better course, or they should just not obstruct in their futility… Look onto the Humanity from a wider perspective in space and time, and you see large Streams of people advancing somewhere, among some unaligned and irrelevant chaos of individualists…
(And some groups and teams, the one Team which I would not name here, struggles to make all others disunited, chaotic and individualistic, so to more easily defeat and govern them, from the perspective of that strongly united ethnic team…)
Somewhere I’ve written: Meaning is in that, which Continues Further, and what have you done, so that it will continue better than hitherto, and that, what you have done for the others, so that in the Whole, because in all parts, will the Good be extended, so that continuously and particularly will the Good become the Norm, so that the future world will be better than current one.
Meaning is in the Good, that you do for Others…
(Because watching humanity development from further distance of millenia, the world moves from violent and evil and selfish toward just and good, cooperating. Helping to advance in this direction you help the progress of Humanity, and working in opposite direction yoy just temporary hinder…)
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Then, the Regional level is most meaningful. The Democracy is possible only on Regional level, because large Unions are just about balanced statistics, allowing gangs (with party Mascots) to govern… Democracy is possible only among people, who understand each other with a common language and similar perspectives. Deregionalization of economy leads to de-economization of regions. Deregionalization of the Power leads to disempowering and disolving of the Regions and their People…
And back also about ecology and CO2 – it’s always better to consume locally produced goods, to avoid shipping and transport costs onto environment, and to help your Neighbours…
But then the effort is not about breaking Structures to the Individual Equality of the Dust, but rather about selecting better fitting Regions and Groups…
This is a very frustrating comment, because while I agree with a huge amount of what you wrote, you had to grossly mischaracterize what I have been writing about all year, as well as my understanding of Spiral Dynamics, Integral theory, etc, in order to make your point.
First, “I” did not change the order of anything. Since my first post on the topic, I used Ken Wilber’s descriptions of the stages of existence, and he in turn is basing his descriptions on the work of Clare Graves, Don Beck, Chris Cowen, etc. Decades and decades worth of work. As I outlined in in the original series on this topic in February.
https://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2017/02/07/what-is-spiral-dynamics-and-why-have-i-become-so-interested-in-it/
As explained in that post, this is the absolute most base level:
1. Beige: Archaic-Instinctual. The level of basic survival; food, water, warmth, sex, and safety have priority. Uses habits and instincts just to survive. Distinct self is barely awakened or sustained. Forms into survival bands to perpetuate life.
Where seen: First human societies, newborn infants, senile elderly, late-stage Alzheimer’s victims, mentally ill street people, starving masses, shell shock. 0.1% of the adult population, 0% power.
This is exactly why I emphasized the need to read my 5-part series on the topic published in February, otherwise all sorts of misinterpretations are possible, if not likely.
As consciousness evolves, the individual increasingly begins to understand that everything is connected and as the ego falls away, live and exist increasingly different from what is described above. Indeed, much of what you explain as a higher level of existence “teams of people competing and cooperating” voluntarily is precisely what characterizes higher levels of existence, and is exactly what I want to see happen. This idea that I think humans on the individual or tribal level walling themselves off in hunter-gather societies again is where we need to go is absolutely not what I believe, nor what I have written, and it’s a shame that this is the conclusion you came to. I’ve had these pieces read by people who have been in the Spiral Dynamics community for decades and none of them came to the conclusion you did about what I think, so that is truly bizarre to me.
In any event, there is no point in obsessing over that fact. Just know that they way you described my perspective is not my perspective, and that I actually agree with a lot of what you wrote.
I will read some of that “Spiral Dynamics”. (Here I’m just a passer-by…)
By “you” who have changed levels (individual above collective) I’ve meant all those authors collectively (sic). A whole thinking orientation (Liberals), that puts Individualism on a piedestal… Since with still higher level of consciousness, I believe one will see, that individuals connect to larger cells, and that meaning is in the structures and it transcends them (Exupery), not in their constituents. That each one or most individuals (unless you are Da Vinci or similar) are from the point of view of history aeons negligible, but those which unite and form a coordinated stream within outer chaos, stand out and may become really remarkable… (is this your “Integration” level ? I’ll see when I’ll read that… Actually, this is an _integration_ of humans, a Society…)
[(And as I am a Heretic, no prestigious list of thinkers and philiosophers will convince me… Just theoretically and generalized, they could all be wrong, as they are often in certain scientific and social areas… Consider the “Big Bang”, in which they invested a century worth of prestigious thinkers, which is the “Biggest Blunder” as was rightly remarked by Einstein… Consider that CO2 scam and fraud…)]
Meanwhile I’ve contemplated:
Problem with USA (and large Unions), is that people do not identify with the Center, with the Nation as a Group. So your “Decentralization” is actually a “Regionalization” (cohesiveness, otherness, specificity, …).
People (Homo Socialis) better form Societies in Regions than in Empires…
How to restore or even recreate Regionalization in larger Unions ? Specially USA is more homogenously mixed and not much specific, but this fate may soon be faced by Europeans (after a mere century).
Probably and best by: local Culture, local Feasts, some “brand” name for a Nation. By regionalization of economy and waking Patriotism for the Region…
But you already have a Nation, an American nation, which achieved much, because it was united, with large resources, not only but also human resources… But recently it is so much governed by the gangs of judases, sucked by various parasites, ill… It’s increasingly harder to identify with “American” in whole, and some regionalization, restoration of regional patriotism, may be good for the folks…
So after all, I just disagree, that “Decentralization” should be run on “Individualism” wave, while instead it is “Regionalization”, to help form local Societies…
(Because “Individual” you can be in USA same as in a Region, alone on a small Island or on Earth planet, still same individual. But to form a “Society” you need people, with which you are able to at least partially identify and align, and you often need someone for a negative identification, that which you are not.)
—-
Meanwhile I’ve watched and little extended a TV ad:
“NO” makes of us, what we are. (“YES” are just our desires.)
[“Ne” z nas dela to, cim jsme. “Ano” je to, co touzime…]
Sometimes you may be better identified by that, what you are certainly not…
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(Writing this from a perspective of a small european white nation with very specific language that differenciates us from the rest, but now threatened to be replaced by a different genotype (race), culture and faith of primitive invaders, boosted by all liars and judases, selling us for their profit and for unification of The Union… While threatened, we must defend, by words better than by weapons, still… Because traitors are worse than enemies. And so I’m little more sensitive on the collective-solitary distinction… United we will survive, but it’s much better to unite on little more homogenous regional level, more so if the Center betrayed us and sold for a profit… Because “Individual” we are all, both black and arab invaders as we are. They are all “Human”, they deserve same benefits as we do – on the individual (leftist) level. But there is a level, that transcends us, our collective “Nation” soul, that is better than the non-nation of uprooted invaders escaping and abandoning their compatriots. Our culture, history, achievements, heritage. We as a group are better than them, and we deserve to survive, distinct from them, not because individual qualities, but as a distinct and special Ethnic Group. We white people already are a minority, now threatened to be intentionally destroyed and replaced by better servants of all the judases, struggling to unite homogenous world under their rule. Ten years ago this distinction was not that much important, as it has become now.)
I knew this commentator was going to unravel into archaic, racist stuff. Despite much interesting insight and obvious deep thinking capability, this person has firmly chosen to exist in the very rudimentary levels of existence. Left vs Right, black vs white, foreign vs native. This is a dangerous view because it demands an all or nothing approach and leads to nothing but war, sadness and death.
I hope, P. A. Semi, that you use your evident intelligence to allow yourself to trancend the hostility and fear of those who are different. We have one planet, one shot so let’s use it to Co-operate.
Yep, I should have known better myself. Typically when someone so mischaracterizes what I wrote in the manner this person did, there is something else at play.