You May Ask Yourself
As you read this piece, you may wander into moments of dismissive overanalysis. I want to preface from the outset: the generalizations made here are intentional and should be accepted as such — they are approximations of reality for the sake of orientation in the midst of extraordinarily disorienting times. In reality, human beings fall along continuous spectrums and classifications of many dimensions. This piece hopes to represent one step toward a wider view of that unreachable view of reality.
…there is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing’; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this thing, our ‘objectivity,’ be.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Once In A Lifetime
Well then… what a disorienting moment we have found ourselves in.
As we enter the summer of 2020, protests of outrage are sweeping the nation. And while they were triggered by an egregious act of racially-motivated police brutality — symbolic of an ongoing tragedy that has been morphing for centuries — these protests are no longer just about George Floyd. They represent something much larger.
It is a rebellion against the entire system — which is why we see people across the political spectrum joining the fray (left, centrist allies, anarchist accelerationists, and even the amish and far-right, in their own ways). There is a desire to tear it all down — with the voracity of people with “pent up demand” but no money to channel it through, and the energy of people who have been locked away in their own homes for weeks on end.
There are no clear demands to this uproar (6/9/20 update: this has evolved since the initial publication of this article) because so many different people are mad for so many different reasons. Of course, racial inequality is at the center of it all and the articulation of those demands is critical to finding peace, but that racial inequality is symbolic of ignored grievances by many across the nation.
We need an articulable shared vision to aspire to in order to end the upheaval we are witnessing — not just in these protests, but in the culture of (out)rage we find ourselves in.
And in this most frightening of moments, we also have a President who is completely unable to bring people together in the face of crisis and tragedy. Not only is this level of upheaval unprecedented in modern history, so is this fomenting of division from the leader of the “free” world. We don’t just have a lack of leadership, we have destructive leadership.
We have had candidates who have run on division before, but they have never won. For example, George Wallace lost, and yet Donald Trump —now the most powerful man in the land — is borrowing his inflammatory language.
Shoot ’em dead on the spot… That may not prevent the burning and looting, but it sure will stop it after it starts.
- George Wallace…when the looting starts, the shooting starts.
- Donald Trump
Deep down, we all knew this was coming, but we were in denial because most of us were scared of the upheaval that comes with dramatic change. There’s no longer much of a choice. The whole sham of a system is collapsing from within.
There has been a pimple growing on the back of America (and really — the world) for centuries, and Donald Trump (and nationalists across the globe) represent the whiteheads that have finally formed on the surface. The pandemic provided the great squeeze. But that’s all these authoritarian leaders are — a nasty symptom on the surface of a severe preexisting condition.
The only way out of this is an acknowledgment of our enormous failures and a renewed vision that can get everyone excited, hopeful and in agreement on a new way to operate, govern, and interact with one another. We need a new vision so that we can grow the faith that there will be something to land on when we reach the other side of this most dizzying moment of our lives — this is “once in a lifetime”.
How Did I Get Here?
No viral memes have better symbolized the shared sentiment of our current moment than these two gems:
These phenomena baffled us all when they revealed the astounding range of diversity in human perception. I doubt anyone would disagree that these are accurate symbols of the astonishment we all feel on a daily basis when we tune into the news or our social media feeds.
No matter who you are: a far-left eco-progressive feminist, an alt-right America-first nationalist, a moderate globalized corporate-centrist, or somewhere in between (or outside), we all feel like the truth we see and the reality we believe is relatively undeniable — and the others who deny it are either crazy, part of an opposing conspiracy, or simply out to troll us.
Of course, all of these possibilities are true, but the real disconnect is that we are all stuck in a diverse range of decayed and decaying paradigms. And yet, at least we can all agree on one thing: shared perpetual shock — the world has gone f*cking mad — full of outrage (mad) and devoid of sanity (mad).
In order to better orient ourselves to this trend, we need to examine the history of value systems. We all have our own mental models of reality, our own worldview that shapes the facts we observe, and the values we believe. These value systems take hold because they achieve resonance with the time they are born into and rise to the demands and challenges of the era.
The traditionalist value system was born from ancient religious traditions (~10,000 BC). It is reliant on the faithful following of authoritative traditions, figures, and texts. It grew and flourished as empires rose and fell throughout the world, and began a slow death as the skepticism of the Enlightenment shook the minds of people(s) across the globe.
The modernist value system was born from the philosophical traditions of the ancient Greeks, and of the ancient East (~500 BC). This system remained in incubation until it exploded into maturity during the Enlightenment, kicking off the demise of the authorities of traditionalism (i.e., “killing God” in the words of Nietzsche, but also the monarchies that began to wear the cloaks of those gods). The sham of traditionalism had been exposed, and the structure of power that it embodied was explained away as blind obedience to authoritative texts and figures that were nothing more than the convenient inventions of mortal men attempting to control the masses and civilize society. And yet, the modernist system began its own (quicker) demise during the upheaval of the counterculture movement of the 1960s.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
The postmodernist value system was born as democracy and capitalism spread throughout the world (~mid-19th century AD). This system incubated very quickly and burst into mainstream consciousness nearly overnight in the 1960s, kicking off the demise of modernism (i.e., overturning patriarchal systems of government and multinational corporate power structures) and was characterized by the Civil Rights movement, experimentations in consciousness and declarations of human rights. The fathers of the Enlightenment were exposed to be equally inventive as a man descending from a mountain with stone tablets.
The “self-evident” truths of modernism were only self-evident because they were declared to be so. A better, global society was founded on its basis, but it was no more self-evident than anything that came before or after it. Even worse, its foundational values — “liberty, equality and justice ‘for all’” — were increasingly exposed to be embodied by slavery, inequality, and injustice. The internal contradictions and fractures became increasingly visible. The institutions of slavery, Jim Crow, the criminal (in)justice system, and continued disenfranchisement have made the tension between liberty and equality quite (self-)evident. And yet, here we are, now witnessing the death of the same postmodernist system that started to chip away at the modernist system only ~6 decades ago.
Same As It Ever
As we can see, these collapses have occurred at accelerating paces and with increasingly dramatic outcomes. This new death will be no exception because it is post-something-else. It does not come with a unified identity and does not provide a shared vision to move forward upon.
Interestingly, as each paradigm begins to die off, it seeps into the paradigms that came before it. For example, during the modern era, the traditionalist form borrowed the logic of modernists and replaced religious fanaticism with nationalist fanaticism (often backed by modern scientific underpinnings, such as eugenics) —in essence, a modern religion— which culminated in two catastrophic world wars.
Every civilization carries the seeds of its own destruction, and the same cycle shows in them all.
- Mark Twain
What we are seeing now, is an analogous borrowing of logic in the wake of the demise of the postmodernist worldview.
The postmodernist movement pointed out the overarching theme between the deaths of both of the previous paradigms (traditionalism and modernism): no truth is intrinsically self-evident. It does not matter whether it comes from an external divine source or from within human reason itself. Truth is contextual to a time and a place. Truth is perpetually constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed. Truths, as we currently know them, are really values in the guise of self-evident facts. As such, truths are really — relative.
Even the arts and sciences applied this new philosophical vision.
Postmodern science emerged early as Einstein formulated his theories of relativity, and Heisenberg expounded his quantum theory: the uncertainty principle. Poincaré, and later, Lorenz worked through chaos theory. These scientific applications of the postmodern ideal represented breakthroughs of unprecedented magnitude and opened up previously unthinkable possibilities for humanity: splitting atoms, stepping foot on the moon, and instantaneous worldwide communication networks.
Postmodern art brought about self-reflective examinations of the absurdities within the human condition — from dystopian science fiction like Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner to the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock.
Postmodern economics abandoned the gold standard and moved toward a fiat system in which world currencies float relative to one another. Modern monetary theory is modern in name only. In reality, it is a postmodern form of economics brought to its logical extreme.
The overarching theme of all of these postmodern expeditions is singular: relative truths are just as real as universal truths (i.e., the universal constant of gravity described by Newton, the universal principle of selection described by Darwin and the universal market forces described by Smith).
“Facts are simple and facts are straight, facts are lazy and facts are late.
Facts all come with points of view, facts don’t do what I want them to.
Facts just twist the truth around, facts are living turned inside out.
Facts are getting the best of them, facts are nothing on the face of things…
Facts are written all over your face, facts continue to change their shape.
I’m still waiting…”- Talking Heads
Am I Right? Am I Wrong?
Here’s the catch… relativism eventually wreaks havoc upon every worldview it seeps into.
First, it seeped into the modernist worldview. Relativism when applied to liberty and equality, devolves those values into narcissism and nihilism. Through the lens of postmodernism, a contradiction between liberty and equality becomes apparent — the modernist worldview wears the name of equality as a mere brand without much substance to back it up.
Infected by human greed and social Darwinism (often dressed in the cloak of “meritocracy”) — capitalism devolves into its worst form. Tax loopholes only for the ultra-wealthy, the military-industrial complex, and the prison-industrial complex plague our society, as Eisenhower warned ~60 years earlier. The pharmaceutical industry, tasked with maximizing profits, has an incentive to keep people chronically ill so that they can be continuously treated and never cured —mass manufacturing return customers.
Multinational corporations have become larger than national governments. And so we see the entrenchment of the global corporate establishment, embodied by both the center-right and the center-left.
They differ greatly in approaches, and even in some values, but ultimately share a clinging to the status quo. From the hasty generalizations of calling out the “basket of deplorables” to the overbroad branding of “Bernie bros” — everyone who wants to change the status quo is condemned by those who find themselves at least comfortable with the way things are. Despite vast injustice, widening inequality, and a war on drugs that amounts to renewed slavery, we continue to believe that the status quo is acceptable because we find it comfortable.
Wealth creates power, power creates more wealth, and both justify themselves.
These ultra-capitalists of 2020 will exclaim: “I earned it” or “I made the right choices” or “I took the right risks” — without any regard to the privileges they are born into or the advantages they are bestowed with. There is no ability to imagine oneself behind Rawls’ veil of ignorance. The reality is exposed: there can never be any true “equal protection under the law” when we are born into the real world of racial, economic, and genetic disparity.
Since the entire aim of the postmodernist project was to expose the contradictions of the modernist worldview, it established no stable ground for itself to build upon. Nearly in parallel with the decay of the worldview it set out to destroy, the postmodernist ideal began its own self-decay. This arose right out of the baby boomer “me generation” that took form in the 1960s. Sure, there was the aim of love and equality — but more often this was in words rather than actions. Sure, it had some incredible results — but under the surface, it was more ego-driven than it let on.
The relativism of values (moral relativism) became the central value.
(Following Four Paragraphs Updated 6/9/20): These ultra-progressives of 2020 will exclaim: “My perspective is self-evident, irrespective of the perspective of others. My perceived truth is of equal validity to every other relative truth. And I am entitled to my choices — regardless of its cascading impact. Society needs to adapt to me without my participation in discussing the associated challenges that come with change. My will, opinion, and worldview are incompatible with the notion of having any shared structure or worldview because I am entitled to the self-evident, self-declared truth of my own perspective, which is intrinsically intertwined with the uncompromising absolute truth of my own identity.” And so we see the rise of the progressive left.
This is not to deny the important sharing of stories by continually oppressed identities, nor is it to deny the importance of people awakening to the full magnitude of their own privilege, and the systems of oppression from which those privileges arise.
However, at its extremes, this can manifest as self-defeating narcissism of a different category. It is not the narcissistic greed of capitalism present within modernist decay, it is egocentrism — the fatal flaw of the postmodernist movement — where feelings rule over free speech and sometimes uncomfortable dialogue — where the impact of words outweighs the intent of words. Both are important, but apologies, forgiveness, and understanding are achievable through respectful dialogue rather than blanket silencing and censorship.
Words matter — as the postmodernist perspective importantly teaches us— but that logic must apply universally if its power is to be wielded to its full potential. This approach will lead to uncomfortable conversations, and it is primarily the burden of the privileged who have awoken to their privilege to come to this realization on their own (and to share it in an effort to transform other privileged individuals), but if we don’t allow the ugliness to be expressed (in language), it will fester into continued under-the-surface anger, resentment and nonunderstanding on all sides.
But here’s where things get weird. Over the last decade, something wild happened.
Modernism decayed, postmodernism decayed, but traditionalism resurfaced and surged, just as it did prior to the world wars of the 20th century (when it re-armed itself with a borrowed modernist frame of mind).
This time, traditionalism is empowered by postmodernist reasoning to overcome the modernist world that had tamed it. Religious fundamentalism, secular nationalism, and tribes of proud ethnocentricity plagued with xenophobic and misogynistic tendencies could no longer be subjected to the post-WWII power structures — that would be oppressive to their belief system and their perceived reality. These traditional worldviews, newly empowered by postmodern logic, reduced modern and postmodern rebuttals to absurdity (reductio ad absurdum). And so, we see the rise of the alt-right.
These alt-right loyalists of 2020 exclaim: “If we want assault rifles, if we want our community to impose our beliefs on those that live among us (or around us), if we don’t want to wear a mask, if we want to believe that our President had the largest inauguration crowd of all time — that’s our right and our truth. Those are our values. We are entitled to our way of life, our worldview, our heritage, and our community’s traditions. These are our ‘alternative facts’.”
My God! What Have I Done?
Now… one can see the clear problems with all of these outcomes, but there is a compounding problem that arises out of that last one.
The traditional worldviews lack the ability to distinguish between facts and values, and so it applies relativism to both — quite mistakenly, and with disastrous consequences. And so we land in a place where clearly recorded, observable, and measurable reality is disputed. Loyalty to an authoritative figure (i.e., the Bible, the Constitution, and now Donald Trump, or even QAnon) is the only credible source of truth, and obedience to that authority is the glue that holds those political myths and ideological bonds together.
Followers of the alt-right conspiracy theory QAnon have absolute faith in the anonymous figure “Q”, regardless of how many times its predictions don’t come to fruition. They refer to QAnon’s birth as the “Great Awakening”.
In the face of inconvenient facts, it has… ambiguity and adaptability. For QAnon, every contradiction can be explained away; no form of argument can prevail against it.
Similarly, when these followers are asked to provide evidence to support their belief in these bizarre claims and accusations, they almost universally respond: “‘Is there any evidence not to?’”
Michael Flynn’s son (Michael Flynn Jr.) has pushed this same logic, as he tweeted that Pizzagate would remain a story until “proven to be false”. And yet, conspiracy theories are not falsifiable, and so there is no way to put the story to rest. Now we see the rise of even more dangerous conspiracy theories like Obamagate where the current regime seeks to distract from ongoing chaos by persecuting a previous administration and political opponent.
The lack of an ability to distinguish facts from values, armed with the power of relative truth, renews blind and absolute faith that cannot be argued with. Modernism may have “killed God,” but postmodernism “killed Truth,” and the traditionalists have found a new home for themselves, inventing “new religions” like QAnon and kneeling before new authorities like Donald Trump. The traditionalists are reawakened.
Time Isn’t Holding Up
In the meantime, the dominant postmodernist worldview seeks a way forward.
It sees facts for what they are, but it also sees shared values as oppressive to identity narratives. And so, while postmodernism seeks to overturn what “is” with what “ought to be”, it stumbles because each narrative provides a different “ought” and a different truth. The foundation of the worldview is that every viewpoint is equally true and any amalgamation toward a shared vision would entail a new oppressive power structure that must be overthrown. And so, the new revolution finds itself in an endless ouroboros of perpetual revolution upon revolution with no solid ground to land upon.
And so, narcissism devolves into nihilism, and the postmodern leaders — those who should be new founders of a renewed future — cannot muster a shared vision.
Time Isn’t After Us
(Paragraph Added 6/9/20): The postmodernists aren’t able to form a cohesive enough coalition to establish a viable candidate — consequently, they are shut out of the electoral process. Bernie Sanders came close but was unable to get young voters to turn out in the primaries, unable to get black voters to escape the “safe” arms of the old Democratic establishment, and unable to gather all of the various identities under a single platform.
And so, we find no option but to look to the past — where there was safety, stability, and sanity.
The traditionalists look back to a time of nationalism, homogeneity, and discrimination as a way to make sense of the world — a time that preceded the dizzying counterculture upheaval of the 1960s — “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
The modernists look back to a more recent time — before the victory of MAGA shocked the nation, its sibling nationalist movements (i.e., Brexit) shocked the world and we all spiraled into this disorienting post-truth era. Joe Biden’s campaign is nearly a repeat of Warren Harding’s platform in 1920: “RETURN TO NORMALCY!”
History never repeats itself, but the Kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends.
- Mark Twain
But of course, it should be obvious from history that there is no path forward in looking backward. The path backward has never lasted very long. A little over a decade after Harding won the 1920 election, FDR swooped in with a sweeping New Deal for a nation that found itself floundering in a new, grander catastrophe (The Great Depression & WWII) than the crisis that led to the original need for a brief, but failed, “Return to Normalcy” (WWI & the Spanish Flu Pandemic).
Where Does That Highway Go To?
So then — what is the path forward?
…a new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move to higher levels.
- Albert Einstein
This is what some call the integral worldview. Like postmodernism, it proclaims transcendence of other worldviews, and acknowledges the relative truth of other views, but resolves that internal contradiction by relying on a concept called: nested inclusion.
The most straightforward example of nested inclusion can be seen in the progression of the atom, to the molecule, to the cell, to the organism. It is the embodiment of microcosm <-> macrocosm.
The integral framework integrates the worldviews that precede it, rather than rejecting them outright, or flattening them all into meaningless relativity. It seeks compatibility and integrates them all — it transcends and includes them. It maintains the structural integrity of the whole history of the evolution of value systems and the development of civilization.
Like postmodernism, the integral value system acknowledges relativism but not an egalitarian relativism — it calls forth a developmental relativism. It acknowledges the validity and strengths of each worldview but dissipates their flaws and weakness into the worldviews that subsume it. It finds its strengths in all of the worldviews that came before it, and that itself is its strength.
It acknowledges that traditionalism established our earliest sense of civilized and organized society — a sense of community and cohesion. On the other hand, it wreaked havoc on individual liberty and self-determination.
It acknowledges that modernism lifted more people out of poverty and instilled more people with rights than any movement in history. And yet, it left many behind in its quest for endless global economic growth (and wreaked havoc on the environment simultaneously).
It acknowledges that postmodernism awoke the world to long-ignored invisible struggles and sparked widespread movements toward greater social justice and more inclusive civil rights. And yet, it wreaked havoc on the human psyche with a growing sense of existential dread and isolation, and on national communities by unraveling the value systems that held society together. With a divorce rate above 50%, even the cohesion of the family unit has taken a tumble.
And yet there is hope. With the integral system, we have arrived at the foundations of a shared vision. It allows for the validity of other perspectives without getting swept up into any one of them. It integrates them into a multidimensional picture, and therefore, a deeper view of reality — it reveals a higher truth. And it supports people in developing an empathic understanding of the value of other truths. This is not a moment of Enlightenment, Awakening, or Reckoning — we have arrived at a process of Continuous Integration that can transform the present state of continuous revolution.
The only true voyage of discovery… would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is…”
- Marcel Proust
Perhaps most importantly, by no means does the integral value system expect to be the highest truth. In its orientation toward developmental relativism, it acknowledges that Truth (capital ‘T’) is unreachable by mere mortal and finite minds. It humbly looks forward to higher truths and opens a clearing for them to emerge. It is open to possibilities yet unseen and unknowable. It knows that there are things it doesn’t know it doesn’t know. And it loves those unknowable future truths (rather than focusing on tearing down old truths) because it knows there is no “end of history”, and that the human experiment is a journey — not a destination. And it realizes that this is the joy of being human — to stand witness to the unfolding of its own consciousness and to play an active role in its co-creation.
“The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject which is nothing but a project of the world, and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world which the subject itself projects.”
- Merleau-Ponty
Here Comes The Twister
So what comes after this post-truth era full of fake news, alternative facts, and head-spinning disbelief?
What comes after Donald Trump, xenophobia, misogyny, and toxic masculinity?
What comes after identity politics, feminism, fractured critical theories, political correctness, virtue signaling, cancel culture, and ideological purity tests?
If we are truly doomed to democratic and capitalist collapse, then what comes after the Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, the dominance of multinational corporations, and failed attempts at supplanting state sovereignty with international organizations?
For those of you begging for an answer in the name of urgency: I am of the firm belief that it’s not a matter of if — but how and when.
But if the integral movement is to prove itself as the next dominant worldview — resonant with the era — it must provide what the postmodern approach is currently failing to establish in our present moment of converging crises (ecological, economic, social, political, and so on…). As of yet, the integral worldview has been purely theoretical — purely philosophical. It has the potential for a shared vision but has not yet formulated a practical framework for the future. This author plans to change that.
“The only way to make sense of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”
- Alan Watts
For that, you’ll have to tune in for Part II. I know we live in an attention economy and only a resilient few of you have made it to this point. To those few — thank you. Take a break, go hug your family, go call a friend, go take a breath of fresh air, go express joy and gratitude to be alive, and to have the luxury of indulging in a good long read.
Next month, I hope to provide one possible concrete vision of a way forward.
See you in July → Part II Now Available!
Attribution
The subheadings of this article are all attributable to lyrics from David Byrne’s Talking Heads — Once In A Lifetime (below).
Many of the ideas presented here are inspired by the writings of Ken Wilber’s “Trump and the Post-Truth Era”. For those interested in taking a deeper dive into the origins of this piece, you can order it here.
