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e.pierce's avatar

I got here from Steven J Lawrence's substack.

As punishment for some major sin in a past life, my older brother had to babysit me when my mom was sick and my dad was overseas (USAF fighter pilot), so he took me to rock concerts since he had free backstage passes from an underground hippy-rock radio station he worked for. I quickly developed deep skepticism about the sanity of most of the people in the late 60s counterculture, the "left", "liberals", etc.

I did however read every Whole Earth Catalog (which had a strong "libertarian-left" flavor) that had ever existed.

I was in the Bahai community for about 30 years, starting as a teenager in the early 1970s. They had/have a very specific, grand plan for "world peace" and a bunch of other superficially "liberal/progressive" stuff that they claim will be possible via spiritual transformation (requiring a Islamic type oath of belief to gain official membership in the Bahai organization and then spiritual salvation).

The religion emerged in Iran in the early to mid 1800s and claims to fulfill the prophecies of the return of Jesus, and it claims that we are in the "end times" (Apocalypse) described in the Bible, Qur'an, etc. Bahaism came to the USA and Western Europe from Iran around 1900s during a peak of interest in "eastern mysticism", including a lot of guru fetishism by wealthy socialities. It then began to evolve into more of a religious bureaucracy. I was told by some older "subversive" Bahais in the 1970s that the organization had been infiltrated by the FBI and/or CIA during the J. Edgar Hoover era, and had become de-radicalized. I was around the periphery of a dissident group of activists and academics starting in the late 1980s that had similar ideas about how the religion's "administrators" had gained power and marginalized "radicals".

If you want a mindlessly enthusiastic religion that seems "liberal" on the surface, with some Sufi-like spiritual texts and themes, but that is actually just a fundamentalist Islamic system of patriarchy, check it out. lol

I transitioned from Bahaism to studying Ken Wilber's integral theory, which was an improvement in many ways (Wilber tries to account for evolution, but kind of screws things up), but Wilber's movement turned out to be more of a neoliberal paradigm about making money from Trust Fund Kidz via alt new age type seminars-workshops-books than I think makes sense.

Back in the 80s and 90s, Wilber was very aspirational, but as is usually the case, a lot of problems with organizational culture developed with Wilber's movement and business spin-offs in the early 2000s.

Wilber's problems are similar to those of Adi Da, who Wilber was a cult-follower of when young.

There seems to be a pattern of spiritual groups and movements being cultish and their "guru" types recycling failed, manipulative group dynamics over and over (Blavatsky).

What I do now (retired), besides studying evolutionary psychology and related fields as a hobby, is to try to find individuals involved in the search for new paradigms and evolutionary possibilities and support them (when I'm not on van camping trips or caring for my increasingly 93 year old mother).

I see the entire left-vs-right narrative itself as an evolutionary dead end, incapable of satisfying emergent coherence needs (spiritual, economic, social, moral, political) at the level required to prevent the big disasters that exist now from getting worse.

If I had to identify one thing that is probably essential, it is development of anti-fragility to disruption. That is where the evolutionary leap to a new version of western civilization is probably going to really show up, beyond all the fragmented, scattered but necessary discussions about human nature and what is going bad.

Jim Rutt and his Game-B group seem like they did the best prototype of how to build an anti-fragile social-change group. Their hardened attack surface of sophisticated content moderators repulsed a couple of major attacks by "woke left" kooks, and one major attack by the alt-right Doolittle "Propertarian" kooks. But is hasn't gone much of anywhere in the last couple of years, even though they had hoped (before COVID) to have developed an ambitious independent tech stack to replace just about everything above the level of the internet backbone: servers, a social media platform, a cell phone, maybe e-money, and so forth.

Breaking through the "infoglut", constant change, crisis, and complexity is a real problem.

Side note: population genetics are one of the biggest limits on how "liberal" or "post-liberal" a given society can be. See Joseph Henrich's (Harvard) WEIRD model and genetic determination of personality traits. And Kurt Fischer's Dynamic Skills theory.

This is one (post left-vs-right) way of potentially making sense of the mess that people might find useful:

(jargon warning)

https://metarationality.com/stem-fluidity-bridge

Kegan stage 3: traditional-conservative mythic religious social order

stage 4: modern rationalism, Enlightenment, democracy (objective, Constitutional order)

stage 4.5: postmodern road bumps and deconstructive chaos (relativism, construct awareness, nihilism)

stage 5: holistic-fluid (post left-vs-right) culture

One of Chapman's core goals is to resolve the *pattern-nebulosity conundrum* in human consciousness, philosophy, etc. (similar to Iain McGilchrist's work)

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sorry for the length of the above comments.

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Mark Hecht's avatar

Carol, this a poignant piece.

Someone suggested Putnam's book as a good resource. Seems to me that Putnam's thesis is, "We have been here before. We'll get throught it, again." For what it's worth, I think he may be wrong.

It seems to me that as a society, we have lost our unifying creation story, and we're in the process of creating a new one. Actually, many new ones. Woke have found theirs. Native American nationalists have their's, and so on. But Liberalism has been knocked off its chair, and its former adherents are wondering where their creation story went. It's very difficult to live without an underlying creation story and it seems we are now in a disquieting place without purpose. Recognizing the old creation story is not coming back, leaves us with your question, "now what?"

I look forward to reading your journey, musing and insights in Re/Generate.

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