Buckminster Fuller butterfly

We Can Do A Lot Better Than This

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The dark ages still reign over all humanity, and the depth and persistence of this domination are only now becoming clear.

Politics is absolutely hopeless. That’s why everything has gone wrong. You have ninety-nine percent of the people thinking “politics,” and hollering and yelling. And that won’t get you anywhere. Hollering and yelling won’t get you across the English Channel. It won’t reach from continent to continent; you need electronics for that, and you have to know what you’re doing. Evolution has been at work doing all these things so it is now possible. Nobody has consciously been doing it. The universe is a lot bigger than you and me. We didn’t invent it. If you take all the machinery in the world and dump it in the ocean, within months more than half of all humanity will die and within another six months they’d almost all be gone; if you took all the politicians in the world, put them in a rocket, and sent them to the moon, everyone would get along fine.

– Quotes by Buckminster Fuller

When thinking about the financial crisis of nearly a decade ago, many people wrongly focus on the event itself as opposed to the response. I’m of the view that the most destructive aspect of that grotesque period of American history wasn’t the collapse itself, but the government and central bank response to it. This response centered around bailing out and rewarding those most responsible for the disaster, which merely served to further concentrate power and wealth in the hands of people who should be rotting in jail as opposed to guzzling Château Lafite at Davos.

Once the U.S. permitted the crime of the century to go, not just unpunished, but handsomely rewarded, we solidified an incentive structure in which elite criminality became the only game in town. If you’re a sociopathic person driven by greed and unbounded by any semblance of decency, the response to the crisis proved you’ll never face consequences for your crimes as long as you’re a top tier predator. As such, there’s absolutely nothing holding back the worst of the worst, and things are turning out exactly as you’d expect within such an environment.

There’s nothing more destructive to a society than the institutionalization of immunity for elite criminals, yet that’s exactly what’s happened since the financial crisis. Top tier predators, whether they operate within government or mega corporations, recognize that the system they control will never hold them accountable for anything they do. In the past week alone, we’ve seen two additional examples of what occurs within a culture of rampant elite lawlessness.

First, we learned that the FBI conveniently “lost” text messages between two key government officials. Politico reports:

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A Better Future Requires Higher Levels of Consciousness – Decentralize or Die (Part 3)

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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.”

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