Dialectic
May 4th, 2006, 10:45 PM
This is a long excerpt from the Wilber Shambhala site, taken from here:
http://wilber.shambhala.com/html/books/boomeritis/wtc/part2.cfm/
It's written in the context of an analysis of 9/11, in the form of a conversation between members of "Integral Center" in Wilber's self-referential novel "Boomeritis." It's actually a footnote, and is written in a deliberately one-dimensional manner (i.e. the characters are all flat and would never talk like this in real life).
You'll need a basic familiarity with the SD model of development, though if you're bright enough, you'll be able to understand most of it without any.
You may also consider this an introduction to my stance on liberalism and conservatism.
Why Do Humans Suffer?: The Liberal and Conservative Answers
"Okay, this is a rough draft, so bear with me. In the talk I am using the tragedy of the WTC to illustrate a few points. I then say,"--Lesa began reading--"To make matters worse, we really do not have an integral political theory that can be used to more adequately analyze this situation from a second-tier perspective. All we have right now, to put it bluntly, are conservative Realpolitik posturings--of the sort, 'You terrorists say that you are upset because America has so much wealth and power and crushes everybody else. Well, we have the wealth and the power because we earned it; if you want some wealth, go earn it yourself, and otherwise fuck off. Try to take or destroy our wealth and we'll bomb you back into the stone age.'" Lesa laughed. "Sort of a silly threat, in that they are already at the stone age. But this conservative blue-meme interpretation fails to take into account any sort of AQAL ['all-quadrant, all-level'] analysis that might disclose distributive power and distributive economic structures that genealogically came into existence under the influence of factors that even the blue meme itself would consider UNFAIR; and thus the claim that 'We earned our wealth' is not altogether true, in that these unfair infrastructures are in fact earning part of your wealth for you. This option is rarely considered by conservative analysts. They are...." She looked up, grinned, and said: "They're born on third base and spend their entire lives thinking they hit a triple.
"Alas, the liberal interpretation is just as badly skewed, this time in the opposite direction. We all the know the very general difference between the typical conservative and liberal approaches--it's not that one is past-oriented and the other future-oriented, one is reactionary and one progressive, one aristocratic and one egalitarian--although all of those play a part. But the fundamental difference was first spelled out by one of our IC members in Up from Eden . What is the real difference between liberal and conservative? Well, if you ask the simple question-- Why do human beings suffer? --you will get two different, basic answers. The conservatives will say, You suffer because of yourself ; the liberals will say, You suffer because of someone else .
"For example, why are some people poor? The conservative will say: 'Because they are lazy, they don't work hard enough, they have an entitlement mindset, they are indolent: I worked hard for my money, let them work for theirs!' The liberal will say: 'You are poor because you are oppressed, you have not been given a fair chance, you are downtrodden, you are a victim--it is not your fault, it is society's.' The conservative generally places blame within; the liberal, without.
"Thus, gun control--conservative: raise children who have family values and will not use guns irresponsibly; liberal: take away all the guns. Economic wellbeing--conservative: instill values of personal industry and free-market capitalism, and those deserving will prosper; liberal: redistribute the wealth. Abortion--liberal: abortion on demand; conservative: practice responsible sex and abstinence and you won't need abortions in the first place. Homeless--liberal: make housing available to those who are disenfranchised; conservative: teach the values of self-responsibility and industry and you will have far fewer indigent. World hunger--liberal: feed the hungry; conservative: teach them to feed themselves.
"In each case, the conservative mostly recommends interior changes, the liberal, exterior changes. Likewise, when it comes to social change, the conservative recommends interior development (character education, family values, industriousness, self-responsibility); the liberal recommends exterior development (material improvement, economic redistribution, universal health care, welfare statism). Of course, there are exceptions. But more often than not, that is a genuinely basic difference in socio-political orientation between conservatives and liberals.
"We do have a bit of a terminology problem, however, in that 'liberal' and 'conservative' have been used in many different ways. So let me point out that there are two different issues here: one is the actual scale of causality for human ills: is it interior or exterior? And two, we are dealing with the names of political orientations (liberal, conservative, socialist, libertarian, etc.), each of which is a mixture of the interior-exterior scale that we are talking about plus several other important scales, such as the average level or levels of development that the political party mostly supports (e.g., blue, orange, green, etc.); the emphasis put on individual versus collective values; the nature of political change advocated (gradual, revolutionary, traditionalist), and so on. An integral or AQAL politics takes all of those scales into account in order to fashion a more comprehensive view of human political possibilities--and a more comprehensive, balanced, effective form of political inquiry and action. Several of our colleagues are already working on this (see Gregory Wilpert, 'Integral Politics: A Spiritual Third Way, Tikkun, 16, 4, Jul/Aug 2001; see also A Theory of Everything and its endnotes; and the works of Drexel Sprecher, Thomas Jordan, Don Beck, Maureen Silos, Jack Crittenden, Sean Hargens, Paul van Schaik, Mike McDermott, Lawrence Chickering, Mark Gerzon, Tyler Norris, Kees Breed, Ray Harris, Mark Palmer, Karin Swan, Michael Ostrolenk, and other IC members).
"So let me say that in this discussion we are focusing particularly on the interior-exterior scale , and you can then apply this understanding to the various political parties, here or abroad, and see where they fall on that scale (and how they might move to a more integral or balanced view). As it turns out, in America, the traditional conservative and liberal parties happen to align themselves almost perfectly along that one scale: the conservatives believe almost entirely in the interior causation of human woes, and the liberals believe almost entirely in the exterior causation of human suffering. As you all know, this simply means that the conservative emphasizes the importance of the Left-Hand quadrants, while liberals emphasize the Right-Hand quadrants. (Don't let 'Left' and 'Right' confuse you here--the political Left emphasizes the Right-Hand quadrants, the political Right, the LH quadrants). In order to make the world a better place, the conservative mostly wants to tinker with the interior (Left-Hand) quadrants, the liberal wants to engineer the exterior (Right-Hand) quadrants.
"Accordingly, when you ask a conservative what could possibly cause the terrorists themselves to engage in such desperate acts, the conservative will not hesitate to ascribe virtually all blame to the terrorists themselves: they are evil, they are subhuman, they lack any sort of values, they lack character, they lack the true God, they lack something or other, and it's their fault , period. It's an interior problem. And the typical liberal will go to the other extreme and blame the exteriors: of course the terrorists are responsible for these acts, but something horrible in their environment made them do it. And in this case, that something horrible is a four-letter word: the West.
"Both of those views have a degree of truth to them (simply because all occasions have both Left- and Right-Hand quadrants!). The conservative position correctly recognizes the necessity for interior development if any sort of genuine values, culture, and consciousness are to take root. In other words, they are correctly emphasizing the importance and necessity of development in the Left-Hand quadrants. Of course, most conservatives only recognize Left-Hand waves and values up to blue-orange; therefore, by 'instilling values' they often mean ethnocentric values: nationalism, family values, militarism, patriotism, patriarchalism, good ole Biblical injunctions and command morality--hence their strong emphasis on interior 'character' over exterior 'capacity' in a President. But the general truth in all of that is the definite need for interior development, because without it, purple and red rule: fenced barbarity is the most a culture can hope for. The downside, of course, is that there are values higher than blue-orange, which the conservatives usually deny and fight, on those occasions they can see them.
"So the conservatives are correct in that Left-Hand development is absolutely necessary for any sort of civilization; wrong in that blue values are the highest values in the Kosmos.
"But that sort of traditional, conservative political theory--grounded in mythic-membership and the blue meme--was the dominant view of governance for most of humanity's civilized history, East and West, from the axial period up to the Enlightenment in the West, where a radically new type of political philosophy was born: liberalism. Liberalism was many things at once: a move from ethnocentric tunnel-vision to worldcentric perspectives; from aristocracy to democracy; from slavery to equality; from society informed by myth to one informed by science; from a role-identity to an ego-identity; from duty and honor to dignity and recognition; from ethnocentric values to universal values (especially freedom, equality, solidarity).
"In short, it was a move from blue to orange, from ethnocentric to worldcentric, from conventional to postconventional. It was the birth of liberalism in the modern Enlightenment.
"But, of course, it was many other things as well, not all of them healthy. And few of the values I mentioned above arrived in a fully healthy form. Remember the dialectic of progress--the mixed blessing--of modernity: the good news was that the Big Three (of I, we, and it; or art, morals, and science) were finally differentiated and allowed to pursue their own truths in their own ways, which resulted in a spectacular freedom and progress in each; the downside was that the Big Three did not just differentiate, they eventually dissociated, and this allowed an aggressive and imperialistic science to colonize the other values spheres, catastrophically reducing art and morals--the Beautiful and the Good--to unnecessary intrusions on the path of instrumental rationality. Put bluntly, the interior dimensions of I and We--the Left-Hand quadrants--were all reduced to epiphenomena of the Right-Hand world of sensorimotor Its and exteriors: scientific materialism was born.
"And liberalism was born with it. Liberalism grew up in the same flatland atmosphere, the atmosphere that recognized only exteriors--which is precisely why, to this day, most liberals can only comfortably think about what needs to be fixed in the exteriors in order to make society a better place. To think about fixing interiors would imply that some interiors are inferior to others, and liberals usually recoil at the implication--thus inadvertently paralyzing any effective interior development and focusing almost exclusively on exterior engineering of social systems.
"But there is also a positive reason for the liberal reluctance to discuss interior development, and it needs to be carefully honored, namely: the separation of church and state. The previous political philosophy (which eventually morphed into conservatism), stemming from the mythic-membership wave (red-blue), was essentially a church-state fusion philosophy: the Pharaoh, Caesar, Czar, or King was either God or God's representative, a one-party command-and-control political system plugged straight into an ethnocentric religion. Liberalism wished to go beyond this ethnocentric governance to worldcentric, universal governance based not on specific religious values or conventional family values, but on postconventional freedoms extended to as many as possible. Therefore, the general liberal stance is that the State should not overtly promote any specific or favored version of God or of the Good Life--which is often summarized as the separation of church and state. Liberalism recommends a procedural republic (where right precedes the good), not a substantive republic (where the good precedes right); it generally defends negative freedoms (don't harm others), not positive freedoms (you should value this). The liberal stance therefore theoretically advocates a type of equality and even egalitarianism: all personal or interior values are a private choice, not generally open to public adjudication; there is no hierarchy of personal values with any sort of cross-individual applicability.
"But here is the difficulty with such traditional liberalism: the very capacity to protect and promote universal equality is the product of at least five stages of interior hierarchical growth (beige to purple to red to blue to orange). The liberal stance that says all people are equal and no values are intrinsically better than others is itself an elite value reached by only a minority of the population at this time. Liberalism is the product of five hierarchical stages of growth that then turns around and denies the importance of hierarchical stages of growth.
"Liberalism thus denies the very path that produced liberalism. And one of the major reasons that it does so, I am suggesting, is that an integral historiography discloses that liberalism was born in the climate of flatland, of scientific materialism, of economic reductionism, which maintained that all the truly important realities are exterior/sensorimotor occasions. Even the psychological systems that grew up with liberalism--empiricism, behaviorism, positivism--maintained that the interior world is nothing but a series of pictures of the exterior world, which is the real world (again: liberal science maintains there are only facts, no interpretations: that is, only exteriors, no real interiors).
"From the beginning, liberalism therefore misunderstood the genesis of its own stance . It failed to grasp the fact that liberal values arise only through a series of hierarchical stages of growth--and they are fairly late-emerging values at that (beige to purple to red to blue to orange...). Therefore liberalism--because it was in fact a postconventional, worldcentric, universal wave of fairness, justice, and tolerance--immediately extended to all other stances the status of equal value: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.' Well, all men might be created equal, but very soon they reach different developmental waves, only the higher of which start producing liberal values. Whereupon liberal values, still captured by flatland, begin vigorously denying interior hierarchies and thus effectively dissolve their own genesis and work very hard to destroy the path that produced them.
"In place of interior development, merely exterior development is then recommended by the flatland liberal. Material improvement and economic reshuffling become the major aims of governance--(re)distribute the material wealth, provide physical healthcare for everybody, provide physical shelter for everybody, provide physical food for everybody, provide physical wellbeing for everybody. This leaves all values, all interiors, all meaning, all depth, and all divinity to the conservatives, who represent a lower wave of development but who at least haven't forgotten the interiors!
"Interior talk --values talk, religion talk, character talk, meaning talk--is thus left largely in the hands of the conservatives. The liberal then looks at the typical blue-meme conservative values--which are often ethnocentric and which are adaptive (and unavoidable) at that wave, but which can easily slide into homophobia and gay bashing, sexism and misogyny, militarism and imperialism--and says, 'If those are what we mean by "instilling values," then I'm staying out of the values game altogether!'--failing to see that its own worldcentric fairness is simply the next wave of hierarchically unfolding values. It thus attempts to escape ethnocentric values, not by transparently championing its own higher worldcentric values, but by claiming to be value neutral and egalitarian, whereas in fact it is championing the next wave of value structures, the next wave of interiors, failing to see which it then succumbs to flatland floundering. Instead of pioneering a new wave of interior talk--higher values talk, higher religion talk, higher character talk, higher meaning talk--it talks only of tepid egalitarianism, a plurality of authentic ultimates, tractionless multiculturalism, no interior is better than another, yada yada yada.... Whereupon every interior, no matter how lowly, is accorded not just equal respect but equal value, period--and the regressive nightmare is about to begin. Liberalism is much nobler than that, much higher than that....
"Incidentally, it has often been noted that 'conservative' and 'liberal' have in some important ways switched their positions since the Enlightenment. What liberalism originally represented--individualism over collectivism, freedom from state intervention, and free market policies--have now been taken over by a branch of conservatism, while many liberals have started recommending policies that look suspiciously like the old conservatism (state intervention, collectivism, interference with the market, suspension of individual rights, emphasis on communalism).
"There are many AQAL reasons for this major shift, but the simplest is: because the conservative impulse is just that-- conservative, or conserving the past--it tends to champion only those practices that have historically demonstrated that they work. They are not progressive or revolutionary--looking to the future for some sort of change and salvation--they are traditional, even reactionary: looking to the past for stable, proven anchors.
"Now, at the time of the Enlightenment, to be conservative meant to be blue, since that is what had worked for a thousand years; the orange Enlightenment, on the other hand, was wildly new and revolutionary (and hence liberal or progressive). In place of blue collectivism and mythic-membership, it brought orange individualism and freedom of choice (through revolutionary means if necessary).
"Even now, if you look in the dictionary, the major difference between conservative and liberal is given as: the conservative is traditional, the liberal is progressive. And there is much truth to that. But the truth is sliding....
"That is, so well did liberalism work (even in its flatland form)--in economics, in science, in technical steering problems, in free-market wealth production--that by the time that 300 years had passed, these orange practices had slowly become... conservative. The new leading-edge wave was then, of course, green, and therefore to be liberal or progressive now meant to be green-meme in your values--and this meant in many ways that if you were a good liberal then you began to fight the previous orange values. Thus the very values that a few centuries ago were the leading-edge (and literally revolutionary) liberal values had now become the values of many conservatives, who in effect began embracing and defending Enlightenment values of individualism and free-market practices--exactly the values that they fought so desperately three centuries ago! Of course, the other most influential subgroup of conservatives stayed closer to the 'old-fashioned' conservative blue values, which is why conservatism today is a strange mixture of blue and orange, just as liberalism today is a strange mixture of orange and green.
"This was a huge switch, with conservatives moving into orange and liberals moving on to green. Because all of a sudden the liberals who had gone from orange to green were no longer recommending individual freedom but collectivism; not freedom from the state but state intervention; not academic freedom but politically correct group-think. And these green-meme collectivist liberals--pomo liberals--were now attacked in the name of individual freedom by orange-meme conservatives who site Enlightenment values (the same values they despised at the time)! And green pomo liberals began attacking the Enlightenment and Western modernity with a fury--attacking their own parents! Weirder still, green liberals and blue conservatives would therefore often find themselves in the embarrassing situation of joining forces to encourage government control of individual choice: liberal feminists and rabid conservatives both insisting on state prohibition of pornographic material, for example.
"All of this makes sense if you remember that conservatives ride the waves of yesterday, liberals ride the avant-garde waves. But neither of them, to date, have been able to ride the entire Spiral. And that, exactly, is the problem. Both the conservative and liberal positions are partial, fragmented, alienated and alienating.
"Accordingly, here is what we have today: the typical conservative position correctly recognizes the importance of interior development (or the Left-Hand quadrants), but only up to blue-orange; and it devalues the exteriors in general. In order to become integral, conservatism would therefore have to acknowledge that (1) exterior development and distribution (factors in the Right-Hand quadrants) are often uneven and unfair for various people and this is responsible for a good deal of their suffering; and (2) on the interior, there are higher levels of consciousness--and higher sets of values--than blue-orange, and the entire spectrum of consciousness and values must be acknowledged and addressed for any political governance system that wishes to be comprehensive and therefore adequate to the real world, both at home and abroad.
"The typical liberal position, on the other hand, importantly moves from the ethnocentric (red-blue) to the beginning worldcentric waves of development (orange to green)--a truly higher evolutionary development--only to get trapped in flatland, thus gutting the importance of the interior hierarchy of growth that produced its own noble stance in the first place. Liberalism's values have always come from the postconventional waves (whether in the modern Enlightenment or the postmodern pluralist forms). But, caught in flatland, liberalism in all its forms failed to realize that liberalism is therefore NOT another version of egalitarianism, but elitism: the stance of liberalism itself demands the growth and development of consciousness and culture to the postconventional, worldcentric waves--which, so far in history, involve only a minority of people. That is, the liberal stance to treat all people equally is a stance embraced only by a minority of people around the world. This is not bad; far from it: it is a simple reminder that liberalism springs from the higher--and therefore relatively rare--postconventional waves of psychological and cultural evolution.
"(Quite apart from the fact that, laboring under genealogical opaqueness and false-consciousness egalitarianism, liberalism then usually champions and even promotes the lower, preconventional waves, waves that all but sink authentic liberal consciousness while aggressively hijacking its liberal slogans. I am not going to discuss this pre/post confusion that haunts the halls of today's liberalism, important as that is; rather, I am focusing on the leading-edge liberal values themselves and the inherent difficulties that a higher wave of consciousness always confronts in the world at large).
"Since liberalism itself springs from relatively high waves of development, many difficult problems follow in its wake. Precisely because liberalism historically represented the avant garde--the leading edge, the growing tip--of consciousness evolution (put differently: precisely because it is progressive)--liberalism has, so far, represented the highest developmental levels of psychological tolerance, cultural embrace, and political inclusion: not egocentric policies (what is right for me), not ethnocentric policies (what is right for my tribe), but worldcentric: what is right for all tribes, all peoples, all races. When the world was ethnocentric blue (demanding a rigid and dogmatic belief in an absolutist god, submission to one monarch, death to all heathens and infidels), liberalism arose as worldcentric orange (demanding the universal rights of humankind, regardless of race, sex, color, or creed). When the world itself, or rather its elite governing systems, then began explicitly moving into orange (embracing universal liberal values resulting in the abolition of slavery, the rise of feminism, the revolutionary introduction of the representative democracies around the world), then liberalism moved even further into green (demanding that those universal liberal values be truly and fully applied to all peoples without marginalizing or oppressing any).
"In all of those instances, liberalism represented the next, great, highest wave of consciousness development and inclusion--and therefore liberalism itself was a driving force for each of those major expansions of political theory and practice, extending and pushing political tolerance and embrace from ethnocentric to truly worldcentric (thus riding the leading edge of consciousness and cultural evolution itself, which, we have often seen, tends to flow from egocentric to ethnocentric to worldcentric).
"Thus, in every case of liberalism's noble history, it rode the leading edge of consciousness evolution--an ELITE leading edge, never amounting to more than perhaps 10% of the total population at the time--and yet it found generally benign ways to force its elitism on others . For example, the American Constitution is, for the most part, a moral-stage-5 document--an orange-meme statement, grounded in Enlightenment values. But when that document was written--and eventually implemented as the law of the land--less than 10% of America's population was at moral-stage 5. The brilliance of the Founding Fathers was that they found a way to take this rare, elite stance--demanding equality and freedom for all--and force it on an entire population as the backbone of a series of legal and behavioral codes that demanded that, even if individuals are not at moral-stage 5 in their own interiors, they must conform their exterior behavior to rules consistent with a moral-stage-5 act (e.g., you do not have to love me, but if you shoot me they will lock you up). Thus, at their best, the laws of America embodied an attempt to encode higher, postconventional, worldcentric responses--regardless of race, sex, color, or creed--implemented with the consent of the governed (the moral-stage-5 social contract), even if those laws were developmentally ahead of most of the governed. The legal, judicial, and political structures of the United States thus acted, in their best instances, as both a higher elitist stance imposed on the population at large and a magnet of psychological and cultural development for its peoples, who could grow into the worldcentric values of freedom and equality embedded in and informing the codes. In short, the Constitution was a pacer of transformation --it impressed a set of postconventional, worldcentric, liberal values into the land--but these were not hereditary values or aristocratic values or values given only to a select few and denied to all others: no, they were developmental values--that is, values into which all people could grow : it was an elitism, but an elitism to which all were invited.
"Was liberalism justified in doing this? Certainly. Why? Because liberalism represented, at its core, a truly higher, wider, more expansive set of values stemming from that period's highest average expectable wave of consciousness (at first blue to orange, and then orange to green, and then perhaps... yet higher? Let's come back to that in a moment).
"Now for the problems. They are as extensive as are those of conservatism, and for essentially the same reason: neither stance is integral. Both liberal and conservative stances represent very important stretches of the overall spectrum, but neither represents the spectrum itself--both are partial, fragmented, and ultimately oppressive.
"Liberalism demands that all people be treated legally and politically equal--which is certainly correct at this unfolding point--but that does not mean, and cannot coherently mean, treating all people as having equal cognitive, moral, or spiritual capacity, which they demonstrably do not. Liberalism fully knows this, but it constantly forgets it and thus tends to slide from the exalted, altogether noble stance that 'all values must be treated fairly and not prejudged according to one's race, sex, belief, or creed'--into the insipid, self-contradictory notion that 'all values are therefore the same, period.'
"Most liberals know this, but when they put 'freedom, equality, and democratic egalitarianism' front and center, as if that really were the whole of liberal values, they foster a flatland worldview that fails to notice that worldcentric values are better than ethnocentric values which are better than egocentric values--and thus, in effect, they deny the growth hierarchy that produced their own stance--and thus they subtly discourage interior growth and holarchical progress--an agenda that, if ever really carried out, would destroy the actual source of all liberal values--namely, the postconventional waves of development.
"Both orange-Enlightenment liberalism and green-postmodern liberalism severely gut the interiors, savage the Left-Hand quadrants, and then put almost total emphasis on fixing the exteriors (material and economic) as the sole means of alleviating human suffering, failing to realize that without a corresponding interior growth of consciousness and culture (Upper Left and Lower Left), there will be nothing to hold the exterior developments in place. Green liberalism especially claims that no value stances are better or worse than others, and that leads, of course, straight to the mean green meme and the horrors of boomeritis, all courtesy of a massive pathology at the leading-edge. And believe me, at the leading edge is least where you want to see pathology.
"In order for liberalism to become integral, it would therefore have to redress its glaring deficiencies (just as would conservatism): both of them would then be racing to find the first truly integral politics in history. We already saw the two major moves required of conservatism (acknowledge the exteriors in general, and acknowledge interior levels higher than blue-orange). The corresponding steps for liberalism would be: (1) acknowledge the interiors in general; that is, recognize the interior waves of growth--the growth holarchy--that produced its own noble, expanded, worldcentric stance, and work toward ways to foster that interior growth (not force it, but foster it, making the conditions for this growth freely available to all--one of the original purposes of a truly liberal education). Typical liberalism has forgotten one of Kant's central points: 'freedom' does not mean being able to do anything I want; it means following one's own highest dictates. Repeat: 'freedom' does not mean being able to do anything I want (and therefore personal or political freedom does not mean behavioral anarchy); freedom means following one's own highest dictates (and therefore personal and political freedom demands interior development). An egocentric person is not free, but is bound to his impulses; an ethnocentric person is not free, but is bound to his prejudices; only a worldcentric person begins to the breath the atmosphere of a freedom and equality extended to all.
"In short, you are not born free, you are everywhere born in chains. But you can become free, growing beyond your narrow perspectives to eventually embrace--and be released into the freedom and fullness of--a worldcentric, global, nonmarginalizing awareness.
"Put in our terms, one is not free by merely possessing all the material comforts imaginable, because somebody at red is a slave to his urges, somebody at blue is a slave to the herd mentality, somebody at orange is a slave to his profit drives, somebody at green is a slave to his subjectivity. Only at second tier does a person begin to transcend those lesser impulses, drives, and dictates, and rise instead to a vision of the fluid, flowing Whole that allows one to begin to be both truly Free and truly Full in an integral embrace that makes room for all.
"Thus, the second step for liberalism to become integral is.... Well, if step (1) is a recognition of the need for interior growth as well as exterior growth, step (2) involves the necessity to recognize yet higher interior waves beyond orange and green.... Just as traditional conservatism needs to recognize waves higher than blue-orange, today's postmodern liberalism needs to recognize waves higher than orange-green. But beyond green is... second tier. And friends, that would change everything."
http://wilber.shambhala.com/html/books/boomeritis/wtc/part2.cfm/
It's written in the context of an analysis of 9/11, in the form of a conversation between members of "Integral Center" in Wilber's self-referential novel "Boomeritis." It's actually a footnote, and is written in a deliberately one-dimensional manner (i.e. the characters are all flat and would never talk like this in real life).
You'll need a basic familiarity with the SD model of development, though if you're bright enough, you'll be able to understand most of it without any.
You may also consider this an introduction to my stance on liberalism and conservatism.
Why Do Humans Suffer?: The Liberal and Conservative Answers
"Okay, this is a rough draft, so bear with me. In the talk I am using the tragedy of the WTC to illustrate a few points. I then say,"--Lesa began reading--"To make matters worse, we really do not have an integral political theory that can be used to more adequately analyze this situation from a second-tier perspective. All we have right now, to put it bluntly, are conservative Realpolitik posturings--of the sort, 'You terrorists say that you are upset because America has so much wealth and power and crushes everybody else. Well, we have the wealth and the power because we earned it; if you want some wealth, go earn it yourself, and otherwise fuck off. Try to take or destroy our wealth and we'll bomb you back into the stone age.'" Lesa laughed. "Sort of a silly threat, in that they are already at the stone age. But this conservative blue-meme interpretation fails to take into account any sort of AQAL ['all-quadrant, all-level'] analysis that might disclose distributive power and distributive economic structures that genealogically came into existence under the influence of factors that even the blue meme itself would consider UNFAIR; and thus the claim that 'We earned our wealth' is not altogether true, in that these unfair infrastructures are in fact earning part of your wealth for you. This option is rarely considered by conservative analysts. They are...." She looked up, grinned, and said: "They're born on third base and spend their entire lives thinking they hit a triple.
"Alas, the liberal interpretation is just as badly skewed, this time in the opposite direction. We all the know the very general difference between the typical conservative and liberal approaches--it's not that one is past-oriented and the other future-oriented, one is reactionary and one progressive, one aristocratic and one egalitarian--although all of those play a part. But the fundamental difference was first spelled out by one of our IC members in Up from Eden . What is the real difference between liberal and conservative? Well, if you ask the simple question-- Why do human beings suffer? --you will get two different, basic answers. The conservatives will say, You suffer because of yourself ; the liberals will say, You suffer because of someone else .
"For example, why are some people poor? The conservative will say: 'Because they are lazy, they don't work hard enough, they have an entitlement mindset, they are indolent: I worked hard for my money, let them work for theirs!' The liberal will say: 'You are poor because you are oppressed, you have not been given a fair chance, you are downtrodden, you are a victim--it is not your fault, it is society's.' The conservative generally places blame within; the liberal, without.
"Thus, gun control--conservative: raise children who have family values and will not use guns irresponsibly; liberal: take away all the guns. Economic wellbeing--conservative: instill values of personal industry and free-market capitalism, and those deserving will prosper; liberal: redistribute the wealth. Abortion--liberal: abortion on demand; conservative: practice responsible sex and abstinence and you won't need abortions in the first place. Homeless--liberal: make housing available to those who are disenfranchised; conservative: teach the values of self-responsibility and industry and you will have far fewer indigent. World hunger--liberal: feed the hungry; conservative: teach them to feed themselves.
"In each case, the conservative mostly recommends interior changes, the liberal, exterior changes. Likewise, when it comes to social change, the conservative recommends interior development (character education, family values, industriousness, self-responsibility); the liberal recommends exterior development (material improvement, economic redistribution, universal health care, welfare statism). Of course, there are exceptions. But more often than not, that is a genuinely basic difference in socio-political orientation between conservatives and liberals.
"We do have a bit of a terminology problem, however, in that 'liberal' and 'conservative' have been used in many different ways. So let me point out that there are two different issues here: one is the actual scale of causality for human ills: is it interior or exterior? And two, we are dealing with the names of political orientations (liberal, conservative, socialist, libertarian, etc.), each of which is a mixture of the interior-exterior scale that we are talking about plus several other important scales, such as the average level or levels of development that the political party mostly supports (e.g., blue, orange, green, etc.); the emphasis put on individual versus collective values; the nature of political change advocated (gradual, revolutionary, traditionalist), and so on. An integral or AQAL politics takes all of those scales into account in order to fashion a more comprehensive view of human political possibilities--and a more comprehensive, balanced, effective form of political inquiry and action. Several of our colleagues are already working on this (see Gregory Wilpert, 'Integral Politics: A Spiritual Third Way, Tikkun, 16, 4, Jul/Aug 2001; see also A Theory of Everything and its endnotes; and the works of Drexel Sprecher, Thomas Jordan, Don Beck, Maureen Silos, Jack Crittenden, Sean Hargens, Paul van Schaik, Mike McDermott, Lawrence Chickering, Mark Gerzon, Tyler Norris, Kees Breed, Ray Harris, Mark Palmer, Karin Swan, Michael Ostrolenk, and other IC members).
"So let me say that in this discussion we are focusing particularly on the interior-exterior scale , and you can then apply this understanding to the various political parties, here or abroad, and see where they fall on that scale (and how they might move to a more integral or balanced view). As it turns out, in America, the traditional conservative and liberal parties happen to align themselves almost perfectly along that one scale: the conservatives believe almost entirely in the interior causation of human woes, and the liberals believe almost entirely in the exterior causation of human suffering. As you all know, this simply means that the conservative emphasizes the importance of the Left-Hand quadrants, while liberals emphasize the Right-Hand quadrants. (Don't let 'Left' and 'Right' confuse you here--the political Left emphasizes the Right-Hand quadrants, the political Right, the LH quadrants). In order to make the world a better place, the conservative mostly wants to tinker with the interior (Left-Hand) quadrants, the liberal wants to engineer the exterior (Right-Hand) quadrants.
"Accordingly, when you ask a conservative what could possibly cause the terrorists themselves to engage in such desperate acts, the conservative will not hesitate to ascribe virtually all blame to the terrorists themselves: they are evil, they are subhuman, they lack any sort of values, they lack character, they lack the true God, they lack something or other, and it's their fault , period. It's an interior problem. And the typical liberal will go to the other extreme and blame the exteriors: of course the terrorists are responsible for these acts, but something horrible in their environment made them do it. And in this case, that something horrible is a four-letter word: the West.
"Both of those views have a degree of truth to them (simply because all occasions have both Left- and Right-Hand quadrants!). The conservative position correctly recognizes the necessity for interior development if any sort of genuine values, culture, and consciousness are to take root. In other words, they are correctly emphasizing the importance and necessity of development in the Left-Hand quadrants. Of course, most conservatives only recognize Left-Hand waves and values up to blue-orange; therefore, by 'instilling values' they often mean ethnocentric values: nationalism, family values, militarism, patriotism, patriarchalism, good ole Biblical injunctions and command morality--hence their strong emphasis on interior 'character' over exterior 'capacity' in a President. But the general truth in all of that is the definite need for interior development, because without it, purple and red rule: fenced barbarity is the most a culture can hope for. The downside, of course, is that there are values higher than blue-orange, which the conservatives usually deny and fight, on those occasions they can see them.
"So the conservatives are correct in that Left-Hand development is absolutely necessary for any sort of civilization; wrong in that blue values are the highest values in the Kosmos.
"But that sort of traditional, conservative political theory--grounded in mythic-membership and the blue meme--was the dominant view of governance for most of humanity's civilized history, East and West, from the axial period up to the Enlightenment in the West, where a radically new type of political philosophy was born: liberalism. Liberalism was many things at once: a move from ethnocentric tunnel-vision to worldcentric perspectives; from aristocracy to democracy; from slavery to equality; from society informed by myth to one informed by science; from a role-identity to an ego-identity; from duty and honor to dignity and recognition; from ethnocentric values to universal values (especially freedom, equality, solidarity).
"In short, it was a move from blue to orange, from ethnocentric to worldcentric, from conventional to postconventional. It was the birth of liberalism in the modern Enlightenment.
"But, of course, it was many other things as well, not all of them healthy. And few of the values I mentioned above arrived in a fully healthy form. Remember the dialectic of progress--the mixed blessing--of modernity: the good news was that the Big Three (of I, we, and it; or art, morals, and science) were finally differentiated and allowed to pursue their own truths in their own ways, which resulted in a spectacular freedom and progress in each; the downside was that the Big Three did not just differentiate, they eventually dissociated, and this allowed an aggressive and imperialistic science to colonize the other values spheres, catastrophically reducing art and morals--the Beautiful and the Good--to unnecessary intrusions on the path of instrumental rationality. Put bluntly, the interior dimensions of I and We--the Left-Hand quadrants--were all reduced to epiphenomena of the Right-Hand world of sensorimotor Its and exteriors: scientific materialism was born.
"And liberalism was born with it. Liberalism grew up in the same flatland atmosphere, the atmosphere that recognized only exteriors--which is precisely why, to this day, most liberals can only comfortably think about what needs to be fixed in the exteriors in order to make society a better place. To think about fixing interiors would imply that some interiors are inferior to others, and liberals usually recoil at the implication--thus inadvertently paralyzing any effective interior development and focusing almost exclusively on exterior engineering of social systems.
"But there is also a positive reason for the liberal reluctance to discuss interior development, and it needs to be carefully honored, namely: the separation of church and state. The previous political philosophy (which eventually morphed into conservatism), stemming from the mythic-membership wave (red-blue), was essentially a church-state fusion philosophy: the Pharaoh, Caesar, Czar, or King was either God or God's representative, a one-party command-and-control political system plugged straight into an ethnocentric religion. Liberalism wished to go beyond this ethnocentric governance to worldcentric, universal governance based not on specific religious values or conventional family values, but on postconventional freedoms extended to as many as possible. Therefore, the general liberal stance is that the State should not overtly promote any specific or favored version of God or of the Good Life--which is often summarized as the separation of church and state. Liberalism recommends a procedural republic (where right precedes the good), not a substantive republic (where the good precedes right); it generally defends negative freedoms (don't harm others), not positive freedoms (you should value this). The liberal stance therefore theoretically advocates a type of equality and even egalitarianism: all personal or interior values are a private choice, not generally open to public adjudication; there is no hierarchy of personal values with any sort of cross-individual applicability.
"But here is the difficulty with such traditional liberalism: the very capacity to protect and promote universal equality is the product of at least five stages of interior hierarchical growth (beige to purple to red to blue to orange). The liberal stance that says all people are equal and no values are intrinsically better than others is itself an elite value reached by only a minority of the population at this time. Liberalism is the product of five hierarchical stages of growth that then turns around and denies the importance of hierarchical stages of growth.
"Liberalism thus denies the very path that produced liberalism. And one of the major reasons that it does so, I am suggesting, is that an integral historiography discloses that liberalism was born in the climate of flatland, of scientific materialism, of economic reductionism, which maintained that all the truly important realities are exterior/sensorimotor occasions. Even the psychological systems that grew up with liberalism--empiricism, behaviorism, positivism--maintained that the interior world is nothing but a series of pictures of the exterior world, which is the real world (again: liberal science maintains there are only facts, no interpretations: that is, only exteriors, no real interiors).
"From the beginning, liberalism therefore misunderstood the genesis of its own stance . It failed to grasp the fact that liberal values arise only through a series of hierarchical stages of growth--and they are fairly late-emerging values at that (beige to purple to red to blue to orange...). Therefore liberalism--because it was in fact a postconventional, worldcentric, universal wave of fairness, justice, and tolerance--immediately extended to all other stances the status of equal value: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.' Well, all men might be created equal, but very soon they reach different developmental waves, only the higher of which start producing liberal values. Whereupon liberal values, still captured by flatland, begin vigorously denying interior hierarchies and thus effectively dissolve their own genesis and work very hard to destroy the path that produced them.
"In place of interior development, merely exterior development is then recommended by the flatland liberal. Material improvement and economic reshuffling become the major aims of governance--(re)distribute the material wealth, provide physical healthcare for everybody, provide physical shelter for everybody, provide physical food for everybody, provide physical wellbeing for everybody. This leaves all values, all interiors, all meaning, all depth, and all divinity to the conservatives, who represent a lower wave of development but who at least haven't forgotten the interiors!
"Interior talk --values talk, religion talk, character talk, meaning talk--is thus left largely in the hands of the conservatives. The liberal then looks at the typical blue-meme conservative values--which are often ethnocentric and which are adaptive (and unavoidable) at that wave, but which can easily slide into homophobia and gay bashing, sexism and misogyny, militarism and imperialism--and says, 'If those are what we mean by "instilling values," then I'm staying out of the values game altogether!'--failing to see that its own worldcentric fairness is simply the next wave of hierarchically unfolding values. It thus attempts to escape ethnocentric values, not by transparently championing its own higher worldcentric values, but by claiming to be value neutral and egalitarian, whereas in fact it is championing the next wave of value structures, the next wave of interiors, failing to see which it then succumbs to flatland floundering. Instead of pioneering a new wave of interior talk--higher values talk, higher religion talk, higher character talk, higher meaning talk--it talks only of tepid egalitarianism, a plurality of authentic ultimates, tractionless multiculturalism, no interior is better than another, yada yada yada.... Whereupon every interior, no matter how lowly, is accorded not just equal respect but equal value, period--and the regressive nightmare is about to begin. Liberalism is much nobler than that, much higher than that....
"Incidentally, it has often been noted that 'conservative' and 'liberal' have in some important ways switched their positions since the Enlightenment. What liberalism originally represented--individualism over collectivism, freedom from state intervention, and free market policies--have now been taken over by a branch of conservatism, while many liberals have started recommending policies that look suspiciously like the old conservatism (state intervention, collectivism, interference with the market, suspension of individual rights, emphasis on communalism).
"There are many AQAL reasons for this major shift, but the simplest is: because the conservative impulse is just that-- conservative, or conserving the past--it tends to champion only those practices that have historically demonstrated that they work. They are not progressive or revolutionary--looking to the future for some sort of change and salvation--they are traditional, even reactionary: looking to the past for stable, proven anchors.
"Now, at the time of the Enlightenment, to be conservative meant to be blue, since that is what had worked for a thousand years; the orange Enlightenment, on the other hand, was wildly new and revolutionary (and hence liberal or progressive). In place of blue collectivism and mythic-membership, it brought orange individualism and freedom of choice (through revolutionary means if necessary).
"Even now, if you look in the dictionary, the major difference between conservative and liberal is given as: the conservative is traditional, the liberal is progressive. And there is much truth to that. But the truth is sliding....
"That is, so well did liberalism work (even in its flatland form)--in economics, in science, in technical steering problems, in free-market wealth production--that by the time that 300 years had passed, these orange practices had slowly become... conservative. The new leading-edge wave was then, of course, green, and therefore to be liberal or progressive now meant to be green-meme in your values--and this meant in many ways that if you were a good liberal then you began to fight the previous orange values. Thus the very values that a few centuries ago were the leading-edge (and literally revolutionary) liberal values had now become the values of many conservatives, who in effect began embracing and defending Enlightenment values of individualism and free-market practices--exactly the values that they fought so desperately three centuries ago! Of course, the other most influential subgroup of conservatives stayed closer to the 'old-fashioned' conservative blue values, which is why conservatism today is a strange mixture of blue and orange, just as liberalism today is a strange mixture of orange and green.
"This was a huge switch, with conservatives moving into orange and liberals moving on to green. Because all of a sudden the liberals who had gone from orange to green were no longer recommending individual freedom but collectivism; not freedom from the state but state intervention; not academic freedom but politically correct group-think. And these green-meme collectivist liberals--pomo liberals--were now attacked in the name of individual freedom by orange-meme conservatives who site Enlightenment values (the same values they despised at the time)! And green pomo liberals began attacking the Enlightenment and Western modernity with a fury--attacking their own parents! Weirder still, green liberals and blue conservatives would therefore often find themselves in the embarrassing situation of joining forces to encourage government control of individual choice: liberal feminists and rabid conservatives both insisting on state prohibition of pornographic material, for example.
"All of this makes sense if you remember that conservatives ride the waves of yesterday, liberals ride the avant-garde waves. But neither of them, to date, have been able to ride the entire Spiral. And that, exactly, is the problem. Both the conservative and liberal positions are partial, fragmented, alienated and alienating.
"Accordingly, here is what we have today: the typical conservative position correctly recognizes the importance of interior development (or the Left-Hand quadrants), but only up to blue-orange; and it devalues the exteriors in general. In order to become integral, conservatism would therefore have to acknowledge that (1) exterior development and distribution (factors in the Right-Hand quadrants) are often uneven and unfair for various people and this is responsible for a good deal of their suffering; and (2) on the interior, there are higher levels of consciousness--and higher sets of values--than blue-orange, and the entire spectrum of consciousness and values must be acknowledged and addressed for any political governance system that wishes to be comprehensive and therefore adequate to the real world, both at home and abroad.
"The typical liberal position, on the other hand, importantly moves from the ethnocentric (red-blue) to the beginning worldcentric waves of development (orange to green)--a truly higher evolutionary development--only to get trapped in flatland, thus gutting the importance of the interior hierarchy of growth that produced its own noble stance in the first place. Liberalism's values have always come from the postconventional waves (whether in the modern Enlightenment or the postmodern pluralist forms). But, caught in flatland, liberalism in all its forms failed to realize that liberalism is therefore NOT another version of egalitarianism, but elitism: the stance of liberalism itself demands the growth and development of consciousness and culture to the postconventional, worldcentric waves--which, so far in history, involve only a minority of people. That is, the liberal stance to treat all people equally is a stance embraced only by a minority of people around the world. This is not bad; far from it: it is a simple reminder that liberalism springs from the higher--and therefore relatively rare--postconventional waves of psychological and cultural evolution.
"(Quite apart from the fact that, laboring under genealogical opaqueness and false-consciousness egalitarianism, liberalism then usually champions and even promotes the lower, preconventional waves, waves that all but sink authentic liberal consciousness while aggressively hijacking its liberal slogans. I am not going to discuss this pre/post confusion that haunts the halls of today's liberalism, important as that is; rather, I am focusing on the leading-edge liberal values themselves and the inherent difficulties that a higher wave of consciousness always confronts in the world at large).
"Since liberalism itself springs from relatively high waves of development, many difficult problems follow in its wake. Precisely because liberalism historically represented the avant garde--the leading edge, the growing tip--of consciousness evolution (put differently: precisely because it is progressive)--liberalism has, so far, represented the highest developmental levels of psychological tolerance, cultural embrace, and political inclusion: not egocentric policies (what is right for me), not ethnocentric policies (what is right for my tribe), but worldcentric: what is right for all tribes, all peoples, all races. When the world was ethnocentric blue (demanding a rigid and dogmatic belief in an absolutist god, submission to one monarch, death to all heathens and infidels), liberalism arose as worldcentric orange (demanding the universal rights of humankind, regardless of race, sex, color, or creed). When the world itself, or rather its elite governing systems, then began explicitly moving into orange (embracing universal liberal values resulting in the abolition of slavery, the rise of feminism, the revolutionary introduction of the representative democracies around the world), then liberalism moved even further into green (demanding that those universal liberal values be truly and fully applied to all peoples without marginalizing or oppressing any).
"In all of those instances, liberalism represented the next, great, highest wave of consciousness development and inclusion--and therefore liberalism itself was a driving force for each of those major expansions of political theory and practice, extending and pushing political tolerance and embrace from ethnocentric to truly worldcentric (thus riding the leading edge of consciousness and cultural evolution itself, which, we have often seen, tends to flow from egocentric to ethnocentric to worldcentric).
"Thus, in every case of liberalism's noble history, it rode the leading edge of consciousness evolution--an ELITE leading edge, never amounting to more than perhaps 10% of the total population at the time--and yet it found generally benign ways to force its elitism on others . For example, the American Constitution is, for the most part, a moral-stage-5 document--an orange-meme statement, grounded in Enlightenment values. But when that document was written--and eventually implemented as the law of the land--less than 10% of America's population was at moral-stage 5. The brilliance of the Founding Fathers was that they found a way to take this rare, elite stance--demanding equality and freedom for all--and force it on an entire population as the backbone of a series of legal and behavioral codes that demanded that, even if individuals are not at moral-stage 5 in their own interiors, they must conform their exterior behavior to rules consistent with a moral-stage-5 act (e.g., you do not have to love me, but if you shoot me they will lock you up). Thus, at their best, the laws of America embodied an attempt to encode higher, postconventional, worldcentric responses--regardless of race, sex, color, or creed--implemented with the consent of the governed (the moral-stage-5 social contract), even if those laws were developmentally ahead of most of the governed. The legal, judicial, and political structures of the United States thus acted, in their best instances, as both a higher elitist stance imposed on the population at large and a magnet of psychological and cultural development for its peoples, who could grow into the worldcentric values of freedom and equality embedded in and informing the codes. In short, the Constitution was a pacer of transformation --it impressed a set of postconventional, worldcentric, liberal values into the land--but these were not hereditary values or aristocratic values or values given only to a select few and denied to all others: no, they were developmental values--that is, values into which all people could grow : it was an elitism, but an elitism to which all were invited.
"Was liberalism justified in doing this? Certainly. Why? Because liberalism represented, at its core, a truly higher, wider, more expansive set of values stemming from that period's highest average expectable wave of consciousness (at first blue to orange, and then orange to green, and then perhaps... yet higher? Let's come back to that in a moment).
"Now for the problems. They are as extensive as are those of conservatism, and for essentially the same reason: neither stance is integral. Both liberal and conservative stances represent very important stretches of the overall spectrum, but neither represents the spectrum itself--both are partial, fragmented, and ultimately oppressive.
"Liberalism demands that all people be treated legally and politically equal--which is certainly correct at this unfolding point--but that does not mean, and cannot coherently mean, treating all people as having equal cognitive, moral, or spiritual capacity, which they demonstrably do not. Liberalism fully knows this, but it constantly forgets it and thus tends to slide from the exalted, altogether noble stance that 'all values must be treated fairly and not prejudged according to one's race, sex, belief, or creed'--into the insipid, self-contradictory notion that 'all values are therefore the same, period.'
"Most liberals know this, but when they put 'freedom, equality, and democratic egalitarianism' front and center, as if that really were the whole of liberal values, they foster a flatland worldview that fails to notice that worldcentric values are better than ethnocentric values which are better than egocentric values--and thus, in effect, they deny the growth hierarchy that produced their own stance--and thus they subtly discourage interior growth and holarchical progress--an agenda that, if ever really carried out, would destroy the actual source of all liberal values--namely, the postconventional waves of development.
"Both orange-Enlightenment liberalism and green-postmodern liberalism severely gut the interiors, savage the Left-Hand quadrants, and then put almost total emphasis on fixing the exteriors (material and economic) as the sole means of alleviating human suffering, failing to realize that without a corresponding interior growth of consciousness and culture (Upper Left and Lower Left), there will be nothing to hold the exterior developments in place. Green liberalism especially claims that no value stances are better or worse than others, and that leads, of course, straight to the mean green meme and the horrors of boomeritis, all courtesy of a massive pathology at the leading-edge. And believe me, at the leading edge is least where you want to see pathology.
"In order for liberalism to become integral, it would therefore have to redress its glaring deficiencies (just as would conservatism): both of them would then be racing to find the first truly integral politics in history. We already saw the two major moves required of conservatism (acknowledge the exteriors in general, and acknowledge interior levels higher than blue-orange). The corresponding steps for liberalism would be: (1) acknowledge the interiors in general; that is, recognize the interior waves of growth--the growth holarchy--that produced its own noble, expanded, worldcentric stance, and work toward ways to foster that interior growth (not force it, but foster it, making the conditions for this growth freely available to all--one of the original purposes of a truly liberal education). Typical liberalism has forgotten one of Kant's central points: 'freedom' does not mean being able to do anything I want; it means following one's own highest dictates. Repeat: 'freedom' does not mean being able to do anything I want (and therefore personal or political freedom does not mean behavioral anarchy); freedom means following one's own highest dictates (and therefore personal and political freedom demands interior development). An egocentric person is not free, but is bound to his impulses; an ethnocentric person is not free, but is bound to his prejudices; only a worldcentric person begins to the breath the atmosphere of a freedom and equality extended to all.
"In short, you are not born free, you are everywhere born in chains. But you can become free, growing beyond your narrow perspectives to eventually embrace--and be released into the freedom and fullness of--a worldcentric, global, nonmarginalizing awareness.
"Put in our terms, one is not free by merely possessing all the material comforts imaginable, because somebody at red is a slave to his urges, somebody at blue is a slave to the herd mentality, somebody at orange is a slave to his profit drives, somebody at green is a slave to his subjectivity. Only at second tier does a person begin to transcend those lesser impulses, drives, and dictates, and rise instead to a vision of the fluid, flowing Whole that allows one to begin to be both truly Free and truly Full in an integral embrace that makes room for all.
"Thus, the second step for liberalism to become integral is.... Well, if step (1) is a recognition of the need for interior growth as well as exterior growth, step (2) involves the necessity to recognize yet higher interior waves beyond orange and green.... Just as traditional conservatism needs to recognize waves higher than blue-orange, today's postmodern liberalism needs to recognize waves higher than orange-green. But beyond green is... second tier. And friends, that would change everything."