Self-described “atheistic libertarian” Brendan O’Neill, editor of the British e-magazine Spiked Online, has written an important article entitled “The Crisis of Character,” which looks at the progress of the postmodernist campaign to hollow out the advances in human evolution achieved by Western civilization. The attack on modernity has many fathers going back to the rages of François-Noël “Gracchus” Babeuf during the French Revolution, but this particular viciousness was created and promoted by the embittered clerisy at the Frankfurt School and its promulgation of “critical theory.”
The signal contribution of the orange modern stage of Kosmic evolution is the liberation of the individual from the tribe. The critical importance of this to the spectrum of consciousness seems to elude many integralites. Only the individual, confident in his self-identity as such, can prepare the way for transcendence into the transpersonal, second tier stages where identity shifts to a much more comprehensive collective such as humanity as a whole. This development can only occur when the individual is free to release his self-identity, and this can only occur once we fully occupy our discrete autonomous self.
I have written elsewhere about how underdeveloped the structure of this stage of evolution remains in both LH quadrants. As Ken Wilber has noted, integral postmetaphysics suggests that the stages of consciousness behave as probability waves of interiority; the more we occupy and work them, the higher the likelihood that they will conform to predictable patterns. All the prepersonal stages up to orange have been around for millennia and therefore present relatively stable structures.
Orange, Wilber’s “rational/egoic” stage, is only five hundred years old as a mass phenomenon of development. Further, it is the center of gravity of consciousness for only 20% of humanity. Even among the 20% the evidence strongly suggests that we still have quite a way to go before orange displays the same stability as the prepersonal stages.
