In his most recent dialogue with Integral Life director Corey deVos entitled “Marx, Mysticism, and Mathematics: Navigating Our Epistemic Collapse,” Wilber concludes the series by exploring the evergreen question “what is to be done?” What’s a poor integralist to do in a world full of first tier narcissism?
I urge those interested in what Wilber has to say to watch the whole thing.
As for me, I confess myself unimpressed with most of his observations in this final episode, but not by way of negative criticism. We are in the midst of obvious evolutionary phase change, and so it is difficult if not impossible to give a definitive answer to such a tricky and vexing question.
Wilber lamely falls back onto what he has been saying for at least four years since the “Trump and a Post-Truth World” essay: if we were in teal everything would be better. And, of course, if pigs could fly, Boulder would rule the world.
I don’t fault him too much for his anodyne sentiment, for it might actually be true, and in the long run of evolution we will eventually find out but, Wilber’s touching optimism notwithstanding, not likely in the near term.
But ironically in a commentary on Marxist epistemology, Wilber is unwittingly setting up the same straw man that Marx and all his revolutionary progeny found so tempting to employ. Utopian wishful thinking is apparently a universal human trait; its political version says, “if we can theorize a better world, then such a world can and should replace this one. Our promise of this better world should inspire everyone. And if they resist this obvious good, we are justified to apply brute force to eliminate the unreasoning, selfish opposition.”
This is a version of a fundamental error Wilber identified decades ago: mistaking the map for the terrain. The theory that the proletariat seizing the means of production will create a more just and wealthier world is just that: a theory. The tragedy comes when we let our infatuation with our theories overlook the reality we wish to escape. Lenin, Mao, Chavez, Ibrahim Kendi, and Bernie Sanders have all succumbed to the same hideous fantasy: that their imagined improved humanity is a reality-in-waiting, if only someone has the will to force it into being.
It beggars the rational mind to have to point this out after the irrefutable evidence of the utter folly of this delusion: the millions of corpses strewn across the planet, the victims of the Marxist utopian lunacy.
