Truth and a Post-Trump World

It was never about President Trump.  It was always about us.

As the political wheels turn in the aftermath of the American elections, we may begin to consider what we’ve learned about ourselves and the evolution of consciousness over the past four years.

When Ken Wilber undertook this task with publication of his essay “Trump and a Post-Truth World” in early 2017, he chronicled the utter failure of the Boomeritis variant of the green wave of consciousness to serve as the leading edge of the evolution of consciousness.  Our coastal elites, who as adolescents expressed the first inklings of green in the 1960s, have fallen far short of realizing its expansive potential.  

Green’s improvement of orange is its acceptance of the egalitarian nature of the human individuality that characterizes modernity.  (If the identity expressed in orange is “I = this particular individual human,” then green identity is “I = this particular individual human like everyone else does.”)  So far, however, this very young emergence has been undermined by the still-vital tribalism of amber premodernity, which has reduced green’s universalizing egalitarianism into the preening self-righteousness of the Woke against the backward.  Boomeritis has failed to transcend and include the gifts of orange, and so it has blindly been recruited into the amber counterrevolution against modernity. 

In his essay, Wilber ruthlessly laid out how this happened as Boomeritis collapsed into a barren combination of nihilism and narcissism.  

[T]he most influential postmodern elites ended up embracing, explicitly or implicitly, that tag-team from postmodern hell: nihilism and narcissism—in short, aperspectival madness.  The culture of post-truth. 

. . . Nihilism and narcissism are not traits that any leading-edge can actually operate with.  And thus, if it’s infected with them, it indeed simply ceases to functionally operate.  Seeped in aperspectival madness, it stalls, and then begins a series of regressive moves, shifting back to a time and configuration when it was essentially operating adequately as a true leading-edge.  And this regression is one of the primary factors we see now operating worldwide. And the primary and central cause of all of this is a failure of the green leading-edge to be able to lead at all.  [Italics in the original]

Of course, there is no actual agency to leading edges; there is only the tedious trial and error, back-and-forthing that characterizes evolution as its underlying impulse pushes ever outward.  This alone is reason enough to neither mourn the Boomeritis detour nor condemn it too sternly.  Like happens in our individual lives, we collectively face each day with no predetermined destination, even as what we did yesterday contributes its experience to our overall trajectory.  

Mistaken Identity

Ever since Ken Wilber inaugurated the Integral Institute to establish a formal platform for launching integral inquiries among both academic disciplines and entrepreneurial and business ventures, the rigor of his earlier work has dissipated and the value of the Integral Model has been watered down by many of his students and critics.

We find a similar phenomenon among those attracted to the Beck & Cowan interpretation of Clare Graves’ work—although this could be a result of the fact that Graves did not elaborate upon or further develop his research as extensively as Wilber could.

In particular, we have slammed hard up against the barrier separating first and second tier, and failing to make the Momentous Leap™ in any noticeable numbers, have collapsed back into the higher stages of First Tier.

This is in large part because the Integral Model, by the very terms enunciated by Wilber in Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality and the unpublished follow-up insights in the so-called Kosmic Karma series found on his web site, cannot be fully internalized as a purely conceptual construct.  It cannot be merely thought of; it is not ultimately an object of study, particularly in the modern sense.  But because Wilber necessarily had to present it in prosaic terms, missing this critical perception is probably unavoidable.

Wilber’s Integral Model is a framework for understanding our experience as humans in the unending unfolding of dimensional reality out of the supranaturnal, metaphysical Void which, as Wilber puts it in No Boundary, always already is.  It is the attempt to apprehend via a specific injunction that which is dynamic and ever-changing.  Thus it is not an academic endeavor but rather a faith walk seeking to embrace and identify with (as), through the amazing range of diagnostics available to humans, the totality of the Kosmos.  Thus applying methods of critical analysis of an academic inquiry alone will entirely miss the mark.

Green’s Failure as “the Leading Edge”: Some Comments on Wilber’s “Trump and a Post-Truth World”

I’m happy to welcome Ken Wilber back to the resistance to the postmodernist, Boomeritis green worldview that has generated such nasty and revolting behavior among so many otherwise decent and civilized people in the Advanced Sector.

In his recently published “Trump and a Post-Truth World,” Wilber surgically dissects the contradictions, pomposities, and insecurities that riddle almost every Boomeritis green analysis of and policy prescription for today’s lawfully chaotic world.

This is particularly welcome as it seemed that, with his post-Wyatt Earp emphases on “integral spirituality” and “the fourth turning,” he had withdrawn his sharp insights into what his own model revealed about our political economy, thereby leaving the field of integral political analysis to the very Boomeritis green perspectives he knows and now has pronounced to be a spiritual and cultural dead end.

What virtually all of the above [Trump] voters had in common was ressentiment—they resented the cultural elite, whether in government or universities or “on the coasts,” and they wanted, if “revenge” is the wrong word, it’s not far off.  But there was, I am suggesting, another and very strong, hidden current in all of this, and that was the antagonistic reaction and turning away evidenced by a leading-edge that had gone deeply sour and dysfunctional, and wasn’t even serving the 25 percent of the population that were themselves at green.  The deeply self-contradictory nature of “there-is-no-truth” green had collapsed the very leading-edge of evolution itself, had jammed it, had derailed it, and in a bruised, confused, but inherently wisdom-driven series of moves, evolution was backing up, regrouping, and looking for ways to move forward.  This included activating an amber-ethnocentric wave that had always been present and very powerful, but that had, for the most part, been denied direct control of society starting around a century or so ago (as orange and then green stepped in).

As I’ll indicate below, while I think much in his analysis of the amber and orange wave is weak or incomplete, his critique of the Boomeritis variant of green is dead-on, including his recapitulation of a potentially strong and vibrant “healthy”—or, as I prefer, “mature”—version of the actual and necessary postmodern green which is struggling to survive suffocation by the Boomeritis believers.


Diagnosing the Postmodernist Madness

Wilber, when he’s set his mind to it, has been consistent in his critique of this very immature version of green since the 1995 publication of Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality, and emphatically in the 1997 release of The Eye of Spirit: An Integral Vision for a World Gone Slightly Mad. 

Transcend and Exclude: the Postmodern U-Turn

Ken Wilber has argued, and I completely agree with him, that humanity’s current task is the extension and maturing of the orange, modern, individualistic wave of consciousness.  Globally, only around 20% of us have our “center of gravity” in orange, although the contributions of those at orange have radically altered all of us for the better in the past 200 years.  And, as I have explored previously, we have yet to fully integrate the earlier waves so that even our current occupation of/by orange has a long way to go to operational maturity among a critical mass of us.

This challenge is complicated by the emergence of green in a very immature and reactionary version he calls, appropriately, “Boomeritis.”  The mass appearance of green as a wave distinct from orange can be dated to the 1960s, even as we can see expressions of it showing up in the mid-nineteenth century.

The discontinuity from orange that green has generated is that individual identity (the gift of orange) is the birthright of every human being, no exceptions, and thus no one person or group can be privileged over another.  In the long run, for green to mature into a separate and superior wave with probabilistic characteristics that transcend and include all the inferior waves, it will have to demonstrate and express this embrace consistently.

To date, the Boomeritis version of green which appears to predominate in Europe and the United States does not yet transcend and include, much less integrate, the earlier stages.  Indeed, in its left-wing postmodernist expression, it explicitly rejects the rational domain which, as a necessary condition for individual identity, was a categorical advance over amber.  This transcend-and-exclude dynamic has all kinds of impacts on our current situation, most of them (apparently) leading away from the expansion of consciousness.

The Opportunity in Trimemetic Chaos

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.