Ken Wilber spiral dynamics

Americans are Rapidly Descending Into Madness

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I don’t live in an echo chamber, partly because there aren’t enough people out there who think like me, but also because I constantly and intentionally attempt to challenge my worldview by reading stuff from all over the political map. I ingest as much as I can from a wide variety of intelligent sources, picking and choosing what makes sense to me, and then synthesizing it the best I can.

Though I’m certainly grounded in certain key principles, my perspective on specific issues remains malleable as I take in additional information and perspectives. I try to accept and acknowledge my own ignorance and view life as a journey of constant mental, emotionally and spiritual growth. If I’m not growing my capacity in all of those realms until the day I die, I’m doing it wrong. Life should be seen as a battle against one’s own ignorance, as opposed to an obsession with the ignorance of others. You can’t legislate morality, nor can you legislate wisdom. The only way the world will improve on a long-term sustainable basis is if more of us get wise. That’s a personal journey and it’s our individual duty to accept it.

While I’m only in control of my own behavior, this doesn’t mean that the behavior of others is irrelevant to my life. Unfortunately, what I see happening to the population of America right now seems very troublesome and foreboding. What I’m witnessing across the board is hordes of people increasingly separating themselves into weird, unthinking cults. Something appears to have snapped in our collective consciousness, and many individuals I used to respect (on both sides of the political spectrum) are becoming disturbingly polarized and hysterical. People are rapidly morphing into radicalized mental patients.

What’s worse, this environment is providing a backdrop for the most destructive people of my lifetime — neoconservatives and neo liberals — to preen around on corporate media as “the voices of reason.” This is one of the most perverse and dangerous side-effects of the current political climate. As I noted earlier today on Twitter:

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Must Read of the Day – Energy, Money, and the Destruction of Equilibrium

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I see many economists and entrepreneurs as opponents even if that is not the intention of the economists. Academic economists are most needed by those who have power and want to keep it. Multinational corporations, banks, and governments. The last thing those entities want is disruption, their principal and interlocking goals are stabilization and optimization of the existing order. They have an incentive to “optimize” the current system and extract rents.

I would argue that hyper focus on optimization is the enemy of creative beings such as ourselves and makes us very unhappy and leads to blow-back from human beings. And rightfully so. But that blow back can get ugly.

– From the piece: Energy, Money, and the Destruction of Equilibrium

Earlier today, a reader named Brett Maverick Musser, who works in Operations at Airbitz sent me an article he published on Medium, which I thought was excellent.

With permission, I have reposted the entire piece below:

Energy flux is the driver of change in our galaxy. Nothing happens without a flow of energy. And what is energy? Energy is the ability to perform useful work. And in physics, what is useful work? Work is useful if it overcomes inertia or resistance in order to generate motion.

Energy not money makes the world go round. Energy is destiny.

A Failed Paradigm and Fake Prices

To paraphrase Paul Romer author of the scathing paper “The Trouble With Macro”, economics has had a ‘considerable observed regression since the 1970s’ yet hides behind mathematical elegance and authority that the public at large is not sophisticated enough to rebuke nor powerful enough to eschew. Never ending zero interest rate policies, negative interest rates and other forms of financial alchemy perpetuated by central banks all over the world are intellectual concessions that the existing paradigm of economic thought and authority is just flat wrong. No matter what the economic leaders say, these actions prove to me and many others that their mental models of the world have failed. The status quo has ventured into the shallow sea of un-reason just to keep the global socio-economic system afloat. They’re able to hide behind authority and academic vocabulary which if put in plain terms for the lay person could be described as theft, ponzi, tyrannical and moronic.

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How a Breakdown in Liberal Ideology Created Trump – Part 2

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If you didn’t read yesterday’s post, today’s will read like a bunch of indecipherable nonsense (perhaps it will anyway!).

What follows is a continued analysis of the recent thoughts Ken Wilber outlined in his e-book, Trump and a Post-Truth World: An Evolutionary Self-Correction, which attempts to understand contemporary American politics through the lens of human consciousness development.

To summarize what we learned in recent posts, a new leading-edge consciousness started to emerge on the planet around the 1960’s, and it has been color coded “green” within the framework of Spiral Dynamics. The are many positive attributes of green consciousness, but almost as soon as it got started, it began a decades long decay into nihilism and narcissism. This divergence between “healthy green” and “unhealthy green” essentially led to a momentary halt in the evolution of human consciousness, a diseased condition that existed far before Trump was elected. Trump was merely a very visible manifestation of this, an evolutionary canary in the coal-mine, which was inevitable given the circumstances.

To understand more fully, let’s examine a few excerpts from the book:

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