DAILY EVOLVER LIVE PODCAST, EDITED TRANSCRIPT | 10.20.

2015 | Boulder Colorado | Jeff

Salzman

THE HIDDEN POWER OF POLITICAL POLARIZATION

Relax, everybody, gridlock is a stage of the path...
Jeff: Hello everybody, and welcome to the Daily Evolver Live. It's Tuesday October 20th, 2015,
I'm Jeff Salzman coming to you from beautiful Boulder, Colorado, where it is a stunning fall
night. The yellow leaves from the ash trees are pouring down like a rainstorm outside my
window as we speak. I'm here as always with our DailyEvolver Producer, Brett Walker. How's it
going Brett?
Brett: I love this cool fall weather.
Jeff: We're joined by Corey deVos, who is handling things over at Integral Radio. Thank you
Corey for putting it together, and a thanks you all of you who are joining us live tonight at our
new home at Integral Radio, which is a new feature of Integral Life, the leading web portal for the
worldwide Integral community, and the web home for Ken Wilber's latest work.
I know that we have a lot of listeners these days who are not necessarily Integral junkies, and
don't know Integral jargon. For that reason, I try to minimize it. The Daily Evolver is about
expanding the audience for Integral ideas, but there are some terms and a couple charts that are
that are really fundamental, and really helpful. One is the Altitudes of Development chart, and the
other is the Quadrant Chart, which lays out the dimensions of reality. I really do encourage you
to pull them up if you can. You can find them at dailyevolver.com, where you can click on the,
"Theory," tab at the top of the homepage.
Alright, so what we talk about here generally, on the Daily Evolver, are current events...in politics,
culture, spirituality, economics, war and peace...we look at all of what's happening in our
evolving world, through the lens of Integral Theory. Tonight, I want to focus on the issue of
political polarization. We hear often about the legislative gridlock between the Democrats and
the Republicans in Washington DC. The republicans are even polarized among themselves right
now, unable to choose a speaker of the house, which is, the third in line to the presidency.
They're polarized amongst themselves.
But never fear, fellow integralists, because in our procreative kosmos nothing stays the same.
Nature abhors a vacuum, and evolution abhors constipation, even in Congress. We can only
hope that the resolution, when it does come, is smooth and easy, comes with a minimum of
pain, but don't bet on it. Which is why we say, here at the Daily Evolver, that evolution may be
beautiful, but it's not pretty.
At any rate, in a few minutes we'll look at the issue of polarization, and the hidden powers buried
in it, and how an evolutionary view helps us to find our way forward.
Before we do, however, I want to focus on a couple things that have come out of the Integral
world, a couple works that I think really move the ball forward on something that I've really
wanted for a long time: a true indigenous integral spirituality, one that is distinct from
progressive spirituality (the spirituality of the green post-modern meme). The difference is that an
integral spirituality absorbs the lessons of evolution and it presents the lessons of evolution.

NEW SPIRITUAL THINKING FROM KEN WILBER

There are two really significant new offerings that I want to focus on. One is a self-directed web
course, created by Ken Wilber himself, called Full Spectrum Mindfulness that was released
yesterday by Integral Life. What's most exciting to me about this course is that Ken really shows
up as a spiritual teacher. He presents a mindfulness practice that is not just a mixture of the best
of existing contemplative practices, which is typical. In Integral we say, "Okay, there's
meditation from this tradition, and there's prayer from this tradition," and we would add them
together and we mix them together. But there's an integration, not just a mixing, that wants to
arise. I really feel like Ken has got his finger on it.
As I said a minute ago, one of the things that Integral philosophy brings to the spiritual quest -- it
brings to everything -- is its insight into the evolution of human consciousness and culture. The
Buddha didn't see culture as evolving. For him and for orthodox Buddhists today, the world is
represented best as an endless wheel of suffering. I often say that Integral at least improves that
picture by making it an endless spiral of suffering -- and thats progress. Still, there's no
evolutionary view in Buddhism. That's also true of Christianity, which sees the world as a
hopelessly corrupt place and offers salvation in a new world to come, the world of God: heaven.
There is a potent spiritual teaching here, in both of these religions. That is, that this world, this
world that we live in is an illusion. Even Albert Einstein said that the typical world that most of us
live in that is bounded by time and space is, as he put it, "An optical delusion of consciousness."
Jesus said, "This world is not my home." So the core teaching is to expand our identity to
include this much bigger reality, the ultimate reality. The reality of God, of liberation, of Nirvana.
It is the reality outside of time and space. Indeed, it is the reality within which time and space
arises.
The realization of this ultimate reality is what we typically call enlightenment." In integral terms,
we refer to this as the "enlightenment of waking up." Waking up to ultimate reality.
But Integral theory also adds another axis of enlightenment, and this is an insight that comes
online at modernity, and in fact, probably in the last hundred years. Modern developmental
psychology and neuroscience reveal that there are predictable stages of development that
human beings go through as they grow up. People grow up through childhood, to be sure, and
we've mapped the stages of childhood development to a fare-thee-well.
But what we have also come to realize is that there are stages of development that continue
through adulthood. We call this second axis "the enlightenment of growing up. So we have
waking up and growing up, the horizontal and vertical axis. Now, you don't have to remember
any of this, expect to know that what Ken has done with his new video series is created a
spiritual practice that incorporates both of these, as far as anybody can tell, for the first time in
human history.
Now I, as an Integral egghead, have for years been thrilled with the understanding that one type
of enlightenment is waking up to ultimate, timeless, primordial realityand the other type of
enlightenment is growing up to ever higher stages of my own identity. That has been a very
fruitful realization to me. It made so many of my spiritual conundrums fall into place.
For instance, I can see that there are people who can deeply realize the unity and bliss that are
underlying all of reality. (That is of course, the waking up axis.) But they can still be ethnocentric
or even egocentric in this axis of growing up, and be developed in their identity at the level of a
teenager, or even a child. We have spiritual teachers who fit that profile; they have great spiritual
realization, but arrested moral, or interpersonal, or emotional realization.

As integralists, we want to do spiritual practice in a way that helps us to do both of those

things. I've worked with Ken for years, I know him and love him and I've always wanted him to
come up with a real program for integral spiritual practice As a teacher, not just as a
philosopher, because Ken has a lot of realization on both of these axis. And so now he has: it's
called, "Full Spectrum Mindfulness." I think there's a special deal too, but I'm forgetting what it
is, but you check it out on Integral Life.
NEW SPIRITUAL THINKING FROM STEVE MCINTOSH
The other major event that I want to mention here, in terms of the evolution of evolutionary
spirituality, is the publication of Steve McIntosh's new book, which is called, The Presence of the
Infinite: The Spiritual Experience of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness.
Now, on the Daily Evolver last week we posted a full interview, "The emergence of evolutionary
spirituality," a conversation with Steve and me, on his new book. It will also be on Integral Life in
a few days.
We focused on Steve's thesis that an evolutionary spirituality must bring forth the practice of -get this -- the practice of the love of God. Surprise!
That, in addition to the non-dual realization, that comes online in the green post-modern, or
progressive spirituality which a lot of us have been marinating in for many years. You know,
meditation and yoga, and Eastern practices, and even contemplative prayer. For those of us
who are practicing progressive, nondual spirituality it's a startling assertion that the love of God
is actually next. A lot of us spent a long time growing out of the mythic level of belief, and
thought we had grown out of God.
Anyway, Steves and my conversation got a good bit of response. One of which was a voicemail
from a listener named Daneen. She left a message on SpeakPipe, a voicemail system that's on
the dailyevolver.com site. I encourage you, if you want to give me some feedback or
commentary or whatever, click the button and talk. I may respond, I may use it on the show,
whatever. At any rate, Daneen did and here's what she had to say about Steve McIntosh's thesis
about recovering the love of God in our spiritual practice:
Daneen: I left Christianity about ten years ago. I listened last night to the emergence of
evolutionary spirituality, and I'm sorry, I could not go back to a God who watches, a God who
looks after us. I am at a place where I can use the word God again, which is wonderful. I can sit
in nature and feel this amazing presence of love and this energy that holds the universe together.
That's such immense progress and wonderful. But trying to wrap my mind around going to a
God who is personal, that loves us personally, knows who Daneen is, knows who you are ... that
just doesn't work for me. I really, really enjoyed listening to it. It was fascinating to hear and
wonderful to engage the way you were in real listening and possibility. Thanks again.
Jeff: Thanks Daneen. I get it. I mean, I have the same kind of problem. I really have a lot of
antibodies to that mythic God. There's no way I want to go back to that. That feels suffocating
and contracted, it doesn't feel liberated at all. But is there something about the nature of reality,
and particularly divine reality, where there is a personal quality. Ken [WIlber] pointed this out in
his thesis in [his book] Integral Spirituality, where he talks about God in first person, second
person, and third person. The God in second person is very personal. We can relate to him, her,
as a creator, as a mother, father.
I might lean a little more in the theistic direction than Daneen. I'll at least sort of work with it as
an experiment, and pray as an experiment, just to see what happens. It's not about developing a
new belief system. It's about opening to a new energetic that modernity and postmodernity has

been pretty closed off to. (And rightly so, evolutionarily speaking, because part of modernity and
post-modernitys job is to wring out the myth and superstition that keeps people at pre-modern
stages, where mythic stories of good and evil, and conquest and war, are still bedeviling the
world).
One of the things that Steve talks about in his book is that there is an indestructible polarity that
is built into the universe: the polarity between non-duality and theism. And that there is a
potency that arises between the two of themso that each of them become more interesting,
and more, as Steve says, "trued up" by incorporating the other.
One more point: at the integral stage of spiritual development, it's not about belief in the way
that we use to think about how we had to believe in things ... to believe in God, to believe in
religion, to believe in doctrines. It's about experiencing the divine in real-time, using these
perspectives as tools. Just right there, we can see the potency of polarity thinking. That theism
and non-duality are more juicy when received together than either of them are when they're just
practiced on their own.
THE POTENCY OF POLITICAL POLARIZATION
That's really a point I want to make about polarity in general as we get into the main story, which
is political polarization. I'm going to use American politics here. There is actually a potency that
arises out of the polarity between political left and the political right. A couple weeks ago I
mentioned on the show here that I was about to go to a conference at Esalen, in California, the
famous retreat center where post-modernity was basically born in the United States.
The conference was on political polarity. It was an invitational, people were invited, and it was
mostly people who were working on the issue of political polarity from various national think
tanks. We had people from the left, people from the right, there was twenty-five people or so.
People from the organization called, "Third Way." Perhaps you've heard of the organization, "No
Labels." People who are working to get money out of politics. People who were specializing in
creating big town square meeting with voters. It was a really, really interesting group of very, you
know, happening people.
The orienting premise for the conference was that political polarization is a bad thing. It was
assumed that everyone agreed with that premise. Of course, we can just see with plain eyes and
common sense why people come to that conclusion, because we can see that there are indeed
many big problems that are not getting solved in Washington. From the right, the problems are
entitlements, deficits, too much regulation, immigration problems, people overrunning our
culture. From the left, the complaints are about income inequality, wars, foreign entanglements,
civil rights, that sort of thing.
From an Integral perspective, we can see that there's a reason that these big problems are not
being solved. The reason is -- it's almost too simple -- the American people are very divided on
how to solve them. It's not just the government that's polarized, the people are too. From an
Integral, evolutionary perspective we can see that this kind of polarization where people
disagree and are in conflict, is built in to the evolutionary fabric of the cosmos, and always has
been. We see it in nature as animals compete, get eaten and run out of their nests. I mean, it's
hideous to watch, but that is the nature of creating a species that is evermore fit, and evermore
capable.
We see that in the history of humanity as well, and even American history. You know, we had of
course intense polarization when the country was founded. We had the Revolutionary War where
the patriots were fighting the Tories, and we had a hundred years later the Civil War, and what a
hideous experience that was. Two percent of the population of the country died in that war. Just

for context, that would be the equivalent of six million people dying today, if we were to have
that kind of a conflagration. You know, brothers against brothers, sisters against sisters. It was
astonishing.
Then World War Two. We often think of World War Two as the Great War and the greatest
generation, the time when America got together to fight the Nazis. Well, that's true in retrospect,
but in real-time Americans were far from united. Ive been reading a book called, "This Angry
Time," which is a history of the pre World War Two era, when Roosevelt was President. We think
that there's an anti-immigration bias in American now. But back then, as the Nazis were
ascendant in Europe, German-American clubs were being bombed all over the country. There
was a hysteria from what they called the super-patriots, which has a certain resonance with the
patriot movement now. They believed that there was a famous fifth column of secret Nazi
sympathizers who were coordinating a German attack on our East coast. Many, many people
believed this, and it makes todays anti-sharia sentiments look like nothing. Heck, after Pearl
Harbor we put Japanese Americans in detention camps.
Now, there's a certain feeling that after World War Two there was a consensus in the country. I
think there was in a certain way. We had a great common enemy of course, fascism, and we
defeated it soundly in World War Two. You know, the victors sort of all felt like brothers, there
are no Republicans or Democrats in the foxholes, as they say. There's no politics there.
But were the fifties really so united. Fareed Zakaria wrote a column last week on this topic that I
thought was really good and really educational. He talked about that the fifties weren't so
peaceful. There was a lot of polarization then too. I'll read a little bit of what he wrote, he said:
"I was struck by how today's mood resembles that of the 1950s. We now think of that decade,
the fifties, as the United States high-water mark, but at the time the country's foreign policy elites
were despairing that Washington was passive and paralyzed in the face of Soviet activism.
He quotes Henry Kissinger from a book called, "The Necessity for Choice," written in 1961.
"Fifteen years more of such a deterioration of our position in the world would find us reduced
to fortress America, in a world in which we had become largely irrelevant."
This is Fareed Zakaria still writing: "The fifties abounded with what seems in retrospect, to be
deeply dangerous proposals designed to demonstrate US vigor. Including deposing Egypt's
Gamal Abdel Nasser. Military confrontations in Hungary and the use of nuclear weapons over
Taiwan.
There were a lot of people, including Kissinger, who were advocating the use to limited nuclear
weapons in the fifties.
Zakaria: Pundits were outraged that North Vietnam and Cuba had gone communist, while the
United States just sat and watched. In the midst of this clamber for action, one man, President
Dwight Eisenhower, kept his cool even though it sank his poll numbers. I believe that decades
from now we will be glad that Barack Obama chose Eisenhower's path to global power, and not
Vladimir Putin's.
As we see in this account, there is a pole in America that says that America is the exceptional
country and that we ought to impose our will on the rest of the world. It would be to the good for
all of humanity, and it is irresponsible not to. There's an enduring argument for that coming from
the right.

Then there's the pole from the left that says, you know, that if we look at Vietnam, if we look at
Iraq, if we look even at Afghanistan, Libya, all of the places where we have interfered in the last,
well since Vietnamthat it really hasn't gone well. This is the lefts view.
These two points of view represent an enduring polarity in the country, one that continues to this
day.
And of course in recent history it was played out in other ways, too. We had the riots of the
sixties, we had Watergate, we had the problems with Iran, with Jimmy Carter and the hostages,
and with Reagan and the Iran-Contra affair. We had Bill Clinton's blowjob, you know, we had
Bush versus Gore in 2000, and now Obama. You know, there are ways to argue that it's worse
now than ever, but jeez, really? Worse than any of what I just talked about?
BECOMING FRIENDLY WITH POLARITY
We realize that as integralists, we actually have to get friendly with the idea of conflict, and
understand that fighting is one of the engines of evolution. And then we can see an evolution in
how humans fight each other. First we did it with clubs and stones, we knocked each other over
the head. And then we evolved into bombs and bullets. There are obviously still people -- at the
traditional altitude and below -- who are still doing bombs and bullets.
But once people get to the modern altitude -- at least modern countries dealing with other
modern countries -- we operate not from this physical realm anymore, we're not actually trying
to hurt each others bodies, you know and kill each other. We're now competing in what we
would call in Integral, "the subtle realm," or the realm not of physicality, but the realm of the
mental. With the realm of ideas.
We see that in American politics. Nobody's really getting hurt physically. I mean, that wasn't
always true. There's a big show now on Broadway called "Hamilton," about Alexander Hamilton
and his great feud with Aaron Burr that ended up in a duel with pistols, and Hamiltons death. In
that era we literally had fights breaking out in Congress, and they weren't just assassinating
each others character, as they are now, they were punching and hitting each other. That has
changed.
So we can say that we've evolved, at least in the developed world, from fighting with bullets and
clubs to fighting with ideas, and maybe cyber warfare and economic warfare. But you know
these are still better than physical warfare.
Still, in all first-tier structures the problem is mono-perspectival thinking. The thinking that, "The
way I think is right, and people who think differently from me are wrong." If they refuse to be
convinced, then they're bad. If they further refuse to change their behavior then they are evil.
That is the basic assumption of every first-tier meme, including the green or postmodern meme.
This is just the nature of mono-perspectival thinking, which only opens up to multi-perspectival
thinking when we get to the integral altitude.
We see it in our politics today. We talked about how the Republicans are the majority party in
the House of Representatives. They're in charge of electing the Speaker of the House but they
can't, because there's a subset of the Republican Party called the Freedom Caucus, which use
to be the Tea Party, that are passionately committed to small government. I mean, on the pole
between security and liberty, they are way over on the side of liberty. They deeply believe that
the way for society to be organized is for everybody to be left alone. "Get your hands off of me,
don't tread on me," and that when that happens it will create a better world.

Every Republican politician promises some version of this, that they're going to shrink
government. This has been happening rhetorically for a long time, but it never happens in reality.
Government grew under George Bush, the last republican President. It grew of course under
Clinton, but we would expect that, hes a Democrat. It also grew under Bushs father, George
H.W Bush, before Clinton. It even grew under President Reagan, who is the hero of the small
government folks. Now, he's forgiven because he was the first one to take on big government, at
least in modern times, and Reagan has become mythic as a result.
Of course a lot of conservatives are still at the traditional stage of development. One of the
markers of that stage of development is that there are great mythic stories and great mythic
leaders that lead us out of the wilderness. Reagan has become that, of course, for the monoperspectival rightists. I think Ted Cruz is the Republican candidate who best exemplifies this.
You can hear it in his rhetoric where he talks about, "We have to stand strong against this
juggernaut of government propagation. We're David versus Goliath but like David we can win
against the giant, because God is on our side."
There's a secular version of this, where we have deified the American Founding Fathers. We
have a scripture, which is the Constitution. This is the nature of traditionalists thinking, is that
there are great leaders, there is a holy scripture. "All we need is to stand and fight, and we will
win." With that kind of an attitude you would actually rather go down in flames than
compromise. Compromise feels like Well from a traditional standpoint, when you see the
world as a traditionalist does, when you see the world as divided between good and evil,
compromise means supping with the devil. "I'd rather die and become a martyr and go to
heaven, and get my reward there."
You can begin to see some of the problems with this kind of thinking. We see it with Donald
Trump, with his terribly politically incorrect views of immigrants, etc. Where his policy is to
deport eleven million people. My liberal friends are appalled by his ideas and his language, and
the fear is that it'll open up the flood gates to open hostility to minorities, and I think there's
some worry there. Ultimately,though, I think it's good to unabashedly air this view because a lot
of people agree with Trump. They feel that their culture is being threatened, and in fact overrun
by people of different cultures. "We have to stand up and take America back," That view is
running the Republican Party right now.
So with Trump that point of view actually gets to be trotted out into the marketplace of political
ideas. Let's just see what happens to it. We already know what happens. What happens is the
same thing that happened last night in Canada, where Stephen Harper the Prime Minister, who
was also running on a vaguely anti-immigration platform, was unceremoniously voted out.
The simple fact is that the majority of Americans don't agree with the Freedom Caucus, with
Donald Trump, with the Tea Party, or with the anti-immigration movement. I mean, they may
have some sympathy and they may agree with some of their ideas. But that hard monoperspectival anti-immigrant ideology is not going to prevail.
It gets to be defeated, in the full light of day, instead of just held onto as some sort of a vague,
fused, emotional complexion that has me feeling like my country is being overrun. I actually get
to tease all of that apart, take it out into the public's arena, and see it be defeated.
That's what happened to ideological liberalism back in the sixties. Liberals then had ideas of
social engineering and busing, aggressive affirmative action, and pacifism in foreign policy. In
terms of culture, we had the counter-culture, featuring rock and roll, drugs, and the sexual
revolution. Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern carried that into the arena back
in 1972. He was obliterated by Richard Nixon in one of the biggest landslides in American
history, where he lost all but one state (Massachusetts).

This is, like I said, progress. After George McGovern's ignominious loss, Democrats didn't touch
this kind of extreme liberal orthodoxy, and they still don't. They're just now wading back -Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and a little bit of Hillary -- beginning to talk about an
oligarchy and that sort of thing. That's new, it took thirty plus years for Democrats to begin to reenter that territory. That's actually one of the great benefits of polarization.
Polarization gets us to tease apart fused, vague, emotionally laden ideas, into clear ideas. When
one of those ideas is clearly defeated, then people do one of two things. Most people give up.
They change their mind. People don't want to hold onto defeated ideologies. The liberals didn't.
Nobody's arguing for busing anymore. Even Bernie Sander, a conscientious objector in the
Vietnam era, today takes pains to insist that he is not a pacifist. It is just the nature of the human
urge for progress and creativity, is that people give up when their ideology is defeated. Of
course not everybody does; there are the dead-enders and they just have to die, you know?
They'll hold out till the last dog, and then we wait for their funeral and we get to chalk that up to
progress. Maybe we wait three days just to be respectful.
There's an integral lesson in all of this. It's a bit like meditation. When you sit in meditation, and
let's say you sit in meditation and you're working with the fact that you're in a bad mood, and
you're really angry. In mediation you can sit and look at this big thing called, "Anger," and realize
that, "Okay, I can tease this thing apart, and see that there's a movie playing in my mind about
my friend who let me down and I'm angry with her. I have a narration and I have a whole story
that I'm telling, and I can watch that story arise out of mind. Its like a movie; there's sound and
there's imagery, and then there are also body sensations. I can see that this anger is a red hot
ball in my belly that has sort of a flange that goes out into my throat and chest." You know, you
can just watch it, you just tease apart this bad mood into its component parts.
As we do that we diminish its power, because we see with more and more clarity what's actually
going on. This is the same thing with this sort of vague anti-immigration policy or vague antiimmigrant feeling. We learn how that teases apart into trade policy, and education, and
employment, and culture. Where there was this one thing that was driving me, now in my more
enlightened state if you will, my more intelligent state, I just have far more components to work
with. When this happens there are a lot of new opportunities. We see that in many cases, the
extremes of both of the polarities begin to bend around and meet. You have this phenomenon in
American politics where the Freedom Caucus, the so called, "Tea Party," actually is making a lot
of common cause with the Occupy Wall Street people on the left. Who see that indeed, our
economic system is rigged for the rich, and that there is unacceptable corruption, and an
oligarchy that hasn't been at this stage of prominence since the late twenties, before the Great
Depression.
We see this happening in criminal justice. Where we have Obama praising the Koch brothers for
their financing of criminal justice reform. The extremes will meet.
Human beings will not be stopped. We will not be constipated for long and we will work around
frozen institutions. We see this with our constitution, you know, this sacred document is actually
pretty flexible. We now have Presidents who issue more executive orders. I think it would be
astonishing to the founders of the United States Constitution, to think that a President could
launch a war without consulting Congress. It's unconstitutional but it has happened over and
over again in modern times, because Congress can't get there.
Or that we would make a treaty with Iran with the comprehensive consequences of the
agreement -- it's not called a treaty because the Constitution stipulates that treaties are the
purview of Congress -- that Obama negotiated with Iran without Congressional approval. At
least not a majority Congressional approval, and that is again not what the founders imagined.
It's interesting how we just create work arounds.

I notice there's always a bemoaning of this, and we saw it today in a column by David Brooks
who I normally like and who I think has a lot of Integral impulses. Once again, (and he does a
version of this same column every three or four months) he's lamenting the lack of faith that
people have in our central institutions in the country. How these institutions are decreasing in
terms of people's regard.
I'll read a little bit from his column today in the New York Times. He says, "Each central
establishment," he's talking about the institutions of government and culture, "are weakened by
their own hollowness of meaning. They're being ripped apart by the gravitational pull from the
fringes." He says, "Democracy, especially in the United States, has grown dysfunctional. The
uncertain Republican establishment cannot govern its own marginal members while those on the
edge burn with conviction. Jeb Bush looks wan," I love that word, "Wan." "But Donald Trump
radiates confidence. In the economic sphere, mass stupidity and greed led to a financial
collapse and deprived capitalism of its moral swagger. Where is all this heading? Maybe those in
the fringe of politics really will take over. Say hello to President Ted Cruz. We are heading
towards an age of exhaustion. Losing confidence in the post Cold War vision, people will be
content to play with their private gadgets, and will lose interest in greater striving."
I'll read that last sentence again, he said, "Losing confidence in the post Cold War vision, people
will be content to play with their private gadgets, and will lose interest in greater striving."
Well, okay! I think that maybe we will lose interest in a greater striving, at least through the
institutions that have been in place up to now. If that turns out to be true, if we indeed grow tired
of our current institutions, that would be in keeping with all people of all times. That's what
people do; we get tired of what we have, which leads to innovation and change. We know that
this is one of the insights of Integral Theory, each stage of development creates problems that
can't be solved at the stage at which they were created. It calls for the solutions to come from
the next stage. This is just part of the deal.
I might even argue with David Brooks that playing with our gadgets is actually part of the
solution. With my gadgets I am at once a citizen of the world. I am a passionate member of the
global culture. In addition, I am also a member of whatever subculture that I am particularly, or
individually passionate about. Whether it's wood working, or bee keeping, or parenting, or art, or
music, or dance, or games, or sports, or spirituality, or philosophy...I can find friends and
colleagues from all over the world who share my particular idiosyncratic interests.
For instance if I have a problem with my dog, or with my boyfriend, I can go post my problem on
Reddit, which is one of the big internet community sites, and within twenty-four hours I will get
dozens, if not hundreds of answers from people who have an opinion about my situation.
Furthermore, these answers and opinions are voted up or down by the whole community, so the
best answers are at the top. Wow! Its in many ways better than if I had consulted a friend, or a
psychotherapist, or a clergyman, or even my wise father or grandfather, or Dear Abby. There's a
wisdom of the crowds effect, that adds exponential experience and wisdom to the equation.
This is one of the gifts our gadgets. I don't have to talk politics just with my neighbor Dorothy or
my Uncle Ralph anymore. I have bigger options. I can join any number of political forums and be
with people who see the world the way I do, or at least mostly the way I do. To the degree that
we differ, I can argue and I can get other perspectives. Or I can go to the forums where they
disagree with me and argue things out there.

This is where humanity is moving. These are new institutions, David Brooks. We want to of
course honor what's good about what we currently have, but let's not get blinded to the idea
that better stuff is coming or that we have to preserve what we have when it is suboptimal.
So Ive shared some of my insights into the power of polarity. Again, polarity takes my fused
conglomerations of ideas, emotions, opinions, things that I heard from my grandparents,
teachers, and my bible, and teases them apart through a process of social conflict and
consternation, so that I can see the component parts and begin to work with them in an ever
more intelligent way. This is how polarity moves the ball forward. It's basically just the stage of
the path. It can be a painful one, and we can see from history that it can be a dangerous one. I
don't want to be an apologist for polarization and for bad government, but I also don't want to
see in it that we are in somehow living in some kind of an unprecedented contraction that is
leading to the end of the world. Which is an old story that's always been told by humanity and
integral thinking helps us grow out of it.
STEVE MCINTOSH ON THE INTEGRAL METHOD
I want to end the show with a recording that I did with Steve McIntosh yesterday, where he
talked about some of what we were talking about now, polarities and how we actually move the
ball forward. He makes the point that every stage of development has what he calls "a method"
for interpreting the world. The classic one, of course, is the scientific method, which is the
method of observation and experimentation. Rather than just offering written scriptures, which
was the method of the previous stage (traditionalism), the scientific method delivered humanity
from the to the modern stage of development. Steve maintains that there is a method that needs
to arise around moving people into the Integral stage of consciousness.
For the next six or seven minutes we can listen to Steve talk a little bit about this and how it
relates to his new book, "The Presence of the Infinite." Brett, could you play that for us please?
Steve: Well, thanks for asking about it. Chapter eight, the final chapter is entitled, "Toward a
Method for Evolving Consciousness." With the idea being that the emergence of this Integral
stage, if it really is to be the next major stage of human history as we think it is, and it seems to
be showing all the signs, then it's going to have many affinities with the emergence of
modernism during the Enlightenment. In other words, the events of the Enlightenment from 1650
till about 1800 have a lot of elements of emergence, which we can look to in terms of what we
can anticipate with the emergence of the Integral or the evolutionary world.
Jeff: Right.
Steve: Obviously, modernism emerged through a variety of keys features, but the scientific
method was a big part of it. I mean, indeed the rise of science was paramount in the emergence
of the Enlightenment. We can see, in a way, that the scientific method a distillation of the values
of modernism. It gave it a power to see more deeply into reality and improve the human
condition in amazing ways. Scientific medicine is perhaps the greatest way of improving human
wellbeing ever envisioned by humanity.
This points to the fact that the emergence of the Integral worldview may indeed have the
potential to create a method. What would that method be? What would be the equivalent of the
scientific method?
I think it would be a kind of a social medicine that could help us gently persuade people to move
from one stage of consciousness to another. In other words, gardening for emergence is actually
something that Integral allows us to do with new clarity. I don't have a full blown manifesto of
the method for the Second Enlightenment, but I'm beginning to explore the possibilities and the

premises that make such a method seem possible. The key premise is that if we look at history
and see what moved people from one stage to another throughout history ... in some ways it is
the new truth, the beauty, and the new ideals of morality that are exemplified by an emergent
new stage that have the gravity to pull people from one stage to another.
When we begin to understand that the beautiful, the true and the good are forms of spiritual
experience, then one conclusion that we might reach is that it's really spiritual experience itself
that raises consciousness. That does the persuading. This idea that the beautiful, the true, and
the good lend themselves to a kind of a method for evolving consciousness, and maybe method
is too analytical a word. I mean it gets our attention and sounds promising, but a more accurate
word might be, "Approach."
Jeff: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Steve: You know, we're gardening for emergence. We can't do social engineering and expect it
to happen, we have to persuade people on their own. The idea that the values of a higher stage,
in both its emergence stage and as it exists, pulls people up the spiral through what Ken Wilber
calls "conveyor belts." That this understanding of how higher values gain traction -- that they
have a sort of gravity -- is an important part of the method.
Just one more point about this ... One of the premises of the method that I try to describe in
chapter eight, is that the openings for emergence within one stage up into another, exist where
people have existentialist problems that they can't solve at the level that they're at, right?
Einstein's famous quote is that, "Some problems require thinking at another level of awareness
than the one that created them," right?
The existential problems for example in pre-traditional consciousness is that they're always at
war. The values of traditionalism gain traction on that existential problem which can't be solved
within [the Red warrior stage of development], because it provides social order and some degree
of law. Then of course the very success of traditionalism, creates another existential problem,
oppression and lack of upward mobility, which then helps bring forth the values of modernism,
which solves those problems at a higher level. Modernism in turn creates problems of meaning.
People get all the status and material that modernism has to offer and then they say, "Is this all
there is?"
Postmodernism then gains traction on that existential problem of modernism with a higher values
of postmodern, which pull people into a wider horizon of self-actualization.
Postmodernism too, has an existential problem which is created by its very success. That is the
problem of political impotency. In other words, the recognizing that climate change and social
justice are higher and more evolved values are huge accomplishments of post-modernism. But
because those accomplishments have been made by pushing off against the establishment and
the mainstream, they're stymied in the ability to persuade the larger society to vote and consume
in ways that take these larger values into account.
Integral gains traction on that problem of political impotency and cultural isolation, and offers a
synthetic view that can better include modernism and postmodernism. This integral view
presents the truth of the spiral of development, the truth of the stages of consciousness, this
internal cultural ecosystem in which we all participate. That truth itself raises consciousness.
When we then understand that almost every human problem is at least partially a problem of
consciousness ... You know, if we were as effective at raising consciousness as we are at curing
disease, then we'd have a real method that we could use to gently persuade people to move up
across the spiral throughout the world. This would have a tremendous effect at addressing some
of the challenges that we face at this time in history.

Jeff: Thank you Steve, thank you Ken, thank you everybody for tuning in to the Daily Evolver
tonight. I hope we shed a little bit of light on the problems -- and potentiality -- of political
polarization. It can be painful, but again as we say, "Evolution is beautiful, but not pretty."
Okay gang, thanks for listening!