(Den här texten är skriven i skönlitterär dialogform, därav alla citationstecken osv... Observera att Wilber har gjort genidraget att gå bort från Spiral Dynamics färgerna, men att behålla deras innehåll, vilket gör att det hela blir ganska förvirrat om man känner till SD sen tidigare. Blå har blivit Amber, annars är färgerna rätt lika)
In order to simplify that address
when it comes to politics, we use four major variables (and several minor ones), and we attempt
to integrate all of them in Integral Politics. Those variables are interior/exterior quadrants,
individual/collective quadrants, altitude or levels, and transformation/translation type.
“Interior/exterior (or internal/external) we just introduced. It covers the reputed cause of
human suffering: where does the political movement look for social reform, to individual
responsibility or to state responsibility? Individual/collective refers to the Upper quadrants and
the Lower quadrants: does the political movement most emphasize individual rights or collective
rights? Altitude, of course, refers to the level of consciousness from which the political party
stems, as well as the level to which it is aimed—in other words, the levels part of the matrix
equation. And transformation/translation type refers to the type of change process that is
recommended: progressive and transformative, or conservative and translative? There are other,
minor variables, which we will mention, but those are the main items. They constitute three
independent axes (internalist/externalist, individualist/collectivist, progressive/conservative)
at each of the major levels, and using that scheme allows us to index and accurately classify every
single major political movement in existence.
“Integral Politics, very simply, means a politics that includes and integrates all of those
items disclosed to us by AQAL —particularly all quadrants across all levels. Any politics that fails to take all the dimensions into account is doomed to wander in the prison of partiality, cutting and torturing and
enslaving those it claims to help and govern.”
“As an example of levels of consciousness in politics, I will focus on one area that is
dramatically affected by levels. And we will do so by briefly reviewing the history—the
genealogy, if you will—of vertical political movement in the West, in a very broad orienting generalization—which is spotted by using AQAL
….
“Let’s begin our story by noticing that in this country, mainstream Republicans or
conservatives have very strong amber/traditional values. Hence, when they say that ‘character
counts,’ or that they want to ‘instill values in people,’ or that they are ‘the party of values,’ they
almost always mean amber values only, traditional values, ethnocentric values: nationalism, family values, militarism, patriotism, patriarchalism, good ole Biblical injunctions and command
morality. They do not mean green values (pluralitstic relativism), red values (power gods/impulsive self), teal values, turquoise values, etc.
“But that sort of traditional, conservative political movement—grounded in mythicmembership
and the amber value system—was the dominant form of governance for most of
humanity’s civilized history, East and West, from the great Axial Period (around the 6th century
BCE) up to the Enlightenment in the West. This amber value structure, and the governance
systems that it supported, were those of the great Republican empires and ancient nations, East
and West, North and South, Rome being one of the mightiest. These were agrarian societies (in
the Lower Right), and therefore typically they had a corresponding mythic-membership culture of
amber or traditional values (in the Lower Left). At their best and healthiest, and for their time,
these cultures were a thing of beauty and wonder.
“Of course, prior to those amber, traditional, ethnocentric, agrarian societies,
there were mostly the red, egocentric, warlord societies of raw power and enslaved
humans, all set in tribal warfare and frequent social anarchy. Every now and then a present-day
political party will appeal to the red anarchical, tribal, and power instinct in people, especially
males, but there are few governments in today’s world that can sustain these values solely on
their own, although some dictatorships—and we must include Saddam Hussein’s—have come
awfully close to doing so. And when you see the breakdown of the Soviet Union, with its amber
totalitarianism—however much that totalitarianism needed to be dismantled—instead of
transformation upward there was transformation downward, a loss of altitude; and thus as amber
crumbled, red resurfaced, and the Russian mafia is now the most feared red-tribal society
anywhere on the planet.
But the important point to note is that, precisely because the spectrum of
consciousness and the spiral of values are constantly regenerated—everybody is born at square one and begins their growth through the spiral as it exists in their culture at that
time—then, even in today’s modern/orange world, magic/magenta values are still around,
and egocentric/red values are still around, and traditional/amber values are still around—
and hence there will always be human beings who, stopping at those value stations in
their own lives, will be attracted to political leaders, philosophies, and systems that give
voice to these values—their values. And thus, as we will see, there are red blocks of
voters, and amber blocks of voters, and orange blocks and green blocks and so on….
Historically, the magenta or magical-animistic stage emerged in humans perhaps
as early as 500,000 BCE. By 50,000 BCE, the red wave had begun to emerge and start
its long and colorful career. Starting around 10,000 BCE, with the invention of farming,
the amber wave began to emerge, and it gained a mature and dominant form during the
first millennia CE, with Greece and Rome being typical, and it continued to be the
dominant mode of consciousness certainly up to the nascent nations that existed in
Europe at the time of the Renaissance. Of course, the whole point is that even if a
society’s dominant culture is amber, there are nevertheless pockets or subcultures of all
the earlier stages, where many people still reside, and a small percentage at a few of the
higher stages as well. And thus in a culture whose center of gravity is amber, we will still
find large pockets of magenta and red alongside amber, as well as some nascent orange
and green. Thus, a running series of culture wars is always played out in various ways
within every society. (We also find small pockets of one or two stages higher than the
dominant mode—pockets from which future revolutions or progressive transformations
will be born.) Nonetheless, most societies have center of gravity and thus a dominant
mode of discourse that especially reflects the altitude of the governing or steering
systems of that society, and this Governance system effectively marginalizes—and must marginalize—competing modes of discourse and power. (It can do so in a healthy or
unhealthy fashion: functionally or dysfunctionally. We will return to this.)
Up to around 1200 BCE in the West, the highest major mode of average
consciousness was traditional amber. In its sophisticated forms, the great Republics
organized at that stage produced the roots of what we today would call Republican or
conservative political philosophy—aristocratic, hierarchical, disciplined, agrarianpatriarchal,
traditional, amber-value oriented, with emphasis on military defense, national
identity, and ethnocentric religion. Over 90% of such societies had slavery.
“But beginning around the Renaissance and culminating with the Enlightenment, an
entirely new level of values began to emerge—namely, the orange, modern, worldcentric value
system—and with it, a radically new type of political philosophy was born: liberalism.
“Liberalism reflected many things at once: a move from ethnocentric to worldcentric
perspectives; from monarchy/aristocracy to democracy; from slavery to equality; from a 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 involved a vertical transformation in levels of consciousness: a move from
amber to orange, from ethnocentric to worldcentric, from conventional to postconventional. It
was the birth of liberalism in the modern Enlightenment.”
“But, of course, the Western Enlightenment was many other things as well, not all of
them healthy. Remember what we call the dialectic of progress—the mixed blessing—of
modernity: the good news is that the quadrants themselves were finally differentiated in a
conscious, large-scale way. The four quadrants—or simply 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 domain. Science, for
example, could pursue its own truths without the Spanish inquisition breathing down its throat,
art could pursue natural themes instead of religious themes, and moral action could be conceived
as a natural right apart from a mythic God giving it sanction, all in the freedom bought by this
extraordinary new differentiation—what Max Weber called ‘the differentiation of the value
spheres,’ which has also been called the dignity of modernity, which indeed it was.
“The downside was that the Big Three of art, morals, and science did not just
differentiate, they soon began to dissociate, and this allowed an aggressive and highly successful
science to colonize the other values spheres, inadvertently reducing art and morals—the Beautiful
and the Good—to mere tools of instrumental rationality. This has been called the disenchantment
of the world. This disenchantment was not a definition of modernity, but of unhealthy modernity.
“But as for that disenchantment, what happened? Well, put bluntly, the interior
dimensions of ‘I’ and ‘we’—the Left-Hand quadrants—were all reduced to puppets of the Right-
Hand world of sensorimotor ‘its’ and exteriors: scientific materialism was born. The modern
version of flatland was born.
“And liberalism was born with it. Liberalism grew up in the same flatland atmosphere,
the atmosphere that recognized only exteriors, only matter, only things you can see ‘out there’—
which is precisely why, to this day, most liberals can only comfortably think about what needs to
be fixed in the exteriors (such as economics) in order to make society a better place. To think
about fixing interiors would imply that some interiors are better or worse than others, and liberals
usually recoil at the implication—thus inadvertently paralyzing any effective interior
development and focusing almost exclusively on the exterior engineering of social systems. “But there is also a very positive reason for the liberal reluctance to discuss interior
development, and it needs to be carefully noted, namely: the separation of church and state.
The previous political philosophy (conservative traditionalism), stemming from the mythicmembership
wave (amber), 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 and its one-and-only God.
Liberalism wished to go beyond this ethnocentric governance to worldcentric governance
based not on religious mythic values or conventional family values, but on postconventional
freedoms extended to as many individuals as possible.
“Therefore—and this is incredibly important—the defining general liberal stance, when it
first emerged, is that the state shall not officially promote any specific or favored version of the
Good Life—it shall not promote any particular religion—which is often summarized as the
separation of church and state.
“In simple terms, this means that the State cannot force you to belong to any religion.
Prior to modernity, if you belonged to any religion other than the state-church, your existence was
tenuous. Often, the head of state was also the head of religion (as was true for many Pharaohs,
Caesars, Khans, etc.), and thus to disagree with that office was to be guilty of both the political
crime of treason and the religious crime of heresy, a double punishment known for its barbarity. “Remember than in the 13 American colonies, prior to the Constitution, weekly church
attendance was mandatory in every single colony! Can you imagine what that was like? Not to
attend church was a criminal offense. When liberalism demanded that there be a separation of church and state, such practices were in essence eliminated. This is stated by liberalism as: Right
precedes Good—which means, it is your right to choose your own religion, or no religion at all.
It is your right, not the state’s, to choose your version of the good life. Hence, your right
precedes the good, and you can choose whatever good you want; whereas in traditional cultures,
Good precedes Right: the group’s spirituality is the one you must accept, or the tribe’s Goddess is
what you must embrace, or the state’s religion is the only good allowed, and you have no right to
publicly disagree with it without severe punishment, as we saw—or just ask Galileo, or ask al
Hallaj, or ask Giordano Bruno—not to mention perhaps 200,000 European pagans and witches
burned or stoned for not adopting the correct Good.” The separation of church and state put an end to that persecution. It is your right to
worship if, when, where, who, what, and how you wish. Liberalism therefore recommends what
is known as a procedural republic (where right precedes the good), not a substantive republic
(where the good precedes right); and it generally defends negative freedoms (the freedom from)
more coherently than positive freedoms (the freedom to). The liberal stance therefore advocates a
type of equality and even egalitarianism. But in all cases, the emphasis is on exterior and social
equality. Interior hierarchies are looked upon with suspicion, as are interiors in general. And, in
fact, in the classic liberalism of, say, John Locke, interiors are pretty much denied altogether—the
so-called tabula rasa—more about that later.”
“But there is a great
difficulty with such liberalism: the very capacity to protect and promote universal equality is the PRODUCT or the RESULT of several stages of interior hierarchical growth (egocentric to
ethnocentric to worldcentric—or magenta to red to amber to orange, which is why representative
democracies show up no place in history until the orange level begins to emerge). The liberal
stance that says all people are equal is itself an elite value reached only by a minority of the
population at most times. Liberalism is the product of several major hierarchical stages of growth
that then turns around and denies the importance or even the existence 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 not only was liberalism born in the higher
atmosphere of worldcentric awareness over ethnocentric awareness—a significant plus—it was
also born in the climate of the disenchantment of the world—the climate of flatland, of scientific
materialism, of economic reductionism, which maintained that all the truly important realities are
exterior/sensorimotor occasions—a significant minus.
“Even the psychological systems that grew up with liberalism—empiricism, behaviorism,
positivism—maintained that the interior world is nothing but a series of pictures or
representations of the exterior world, which is the only really real world (again: liberal science
maintains there are only facts, no interpretations: that is, there are only exteriors, no real
interiors). Tabula rasa interiors was the widespread belief, and this just further embedded the
prejudice that all real realities are exterior, and therefore all real social change must be exterior.
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 interior,
nested, hierarchical stages of growth—and liberal values are fairly late-emerging values
at that (beige to magenta to red to amber to orange, at which point liberal values begin to
emerge…). Therefore liberalism—because it was in fact a postconventional, worldcentric, universal wave of fairness, justice, and tolerance—immediately extended to
all the other stages the status of equal value, even when those lower stages, such as red
and amber, had no intention of returning the favor—and, in fact, were they in power,
would crush liberalism as soon as they possibly could. And every time those lower
stages do come into power today, the first thing they attack and attempt to eradicate is
liberal freedoms.
‘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 levels,
only the higher of which start producing liberalism. Whereupon liberalism begins
vigorously denying interior hierarchies and thus effectively dissolves the path to its own
genesis.
“Thus, liberalism works very hard to destroy the path that produced it. 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—
redistribute the material wealth, provide physical healthcare for everybody, provide physical
shelter for everybody, provide physical food for everybody, provide physical wellbeing for
everybody. All of which is wonderful, but in itself, this leaves all values, all interiors, all
meaning, all significance, all spirituality, and all depth to the conservatives, who often represent
a lower wave of development (traditional amber instead of modern orange) but who at least
haven’t forgotten the interiors!
“Interior talk—values talk, spirit talk, character talk, meaning talk—is thus left largely in
the hands of the conservatives. The liberal then looks at the typical traditional-amber
conservative values—which are ethnocentric, nationalistic, and jingoistic, but which are adaptive
and unavoidable at that stage, yet 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 stage in the nested hierarchy (or holarchy) of unfolding
values.
Liberalism thus attempts to escape ethnocentric values, not by transparently championing
its own higher worldcentric values (itself a Good), but by ‘claiming’ to be value-neutral and
egalitarian, whereas in fact it is championing the next stage of value structures, the next wave of
interiors, the leading edge and truly progressive edge of development. And this it calls being
‘value-free’ and ‘egalitarian,’ where it is nothing of the sort, not really. It is coming from a very
high level of values that then claims it is without values—and this misunderstanding of its own
stance would continue, and be amplified, by green postmodernism, which, trying to overcome
this contradiction, jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire. The modern and postmodern
world of whatever was born.” “The problem is that liberalism—championing equality—will not face the fact that it is
an elitism. It is a value structure held by a minority in most cultures, including ours—but it is an
elitism, the only elitism, that wishes to treat EVERYBODY fairly and equally, even if they
disagree with you. Even if they disagree with you and your values, you as a liberal will accord
them equal status before the law. But the number of people who can do that—the number of
people at worldcentric orange or higher—is less than 50% in this country and less than 30% in
the world at large. And the point in any event is that orange itself is a developmental
achievement reached only at higher stages, and if you don’t get to those higher stages, you simply
don’t produce liberalism.
“So if liberalism stated its own stance more accurately, it would say that liberalism is an
elite developmental stance, often reached by a relative minority of people, but whose values insist
on treating not just that elite but everybody equally—an unheard of fairness and generosity. It is
an egalitarianism held by an elite. But the typical liberal, not understanding both of those
clauses, often arrives at the disaster of a conclusion that it is an egalitarianism held by everybody, or easily could be. Whereas, at this time in history, very few people share that value, and it’s
losing ground, by the way—more about that later.
“So if I could drop out of my professor mode and into a more colloquial delivery, I guess
I’d summarize this by saying that liberalism is an elitism that is open to everybody, but to actually
get there and share liberal worldcentric values requires interior hierarchical development from
egocentric to ethnocentric to worldcentric. Failing that interior development, liberalism and its
worldcentric values are dead meat.
“It is such an intricately infuriating problem. But it’s true. Failing to grasp that simple
developmental reality, liberalism promptly succumbs to flatland floundering. The separation of
church and state—some form of which is absolutely necessary, to be sure—degenerates into an
extreme and rancid version that amounts to the oppression of all interiors, via a sin not of
commission but of a sin of omission, an oppression by silence and consequent ineptitude. Instead
of pioneering a new wave of interior talk—higher values talk, higher spiritual talk, higher
character talk, higher meaning talk—it talks only of tepid egalitarianism, a supposed plurality of
equal values, tractionless multiculturalism, and an endless yada yada yada of whateverland….
Whereupon every interior, no matter how vulgar and narcissistic and self-serving, is accorded not
just equal respect but equal value, period—and the regressive nightmare is about to begin.”
And there we are, with the generation of whateverism and pluralitis and boomeritis. The
vacuum of values that is our culture. And since nature abhors a vacuum, in rushed the idiots. But
an entire culture built on having no culture! Something is deeply fucked-up about this. No
wonder the conservatives—an important but ultimately anti-evolutionary pull if left to their own
devices—can have such a field day with how “liberals spoil all values.” It’s half true, and that’s
what liberalism and the Left end up giving us, if left to their own devices.
A culture of no culture. Ultimately leading to boomeritis and whateverism—boomeritis
if you’ve got an ego big enough to withstand this horrifying vacuum, and whateverism and irony if you don’t. Jesus this is depressing! But I will not let it get to me! Watch the Thinker, do a
Walk Through, then rest in my own true nature, the Great Perfection of primordial Goodness.
Yes!
“And so classical liberalism, and virtually every variety of the Left, saddled with a
flatland psychology, does indeed work very hard to undercut its own existence.
“But let me finish this section by repeating our original starting point, namely: one of the
scales we examine in Integral Politics is the level of consciousness that is a driving any political
movement. And what we have seen is that traditional Republican values mostly stem from
amber, and liberal Democratic values mostly stem from orange. These are simply two examples
of how important the levels component is. I’ll summarize all of these components in a moment—
the three axes at each level—but these examples particularly highlight the levels aspect of Integral
Politics.”
“What about the often commented on fact that liberals and conservatives have seemed to
switch positions since the Enlightenment?”
“Yes, and that brings us to the second of the three major axes we examine, the
transformation/translation axis. Those of you familiar with holonic theory will immediately
recognize this axis. It simply represents the direction you face in evolution or development: Eros
or Agape. Do you face the progressive side or the conservative side of development itself? Now
obviously liberals are usually progressive and conservatives are just that, conservative. And both
of those are important, aren’t they? As is well known, Edmund Burke, watching the horrors of
the French Revolution resulting in the Terror, gave what is still perhaps the best defense of
conservatism ever given: society is an incalculably complex system, which is therefore quite beyond the capacity of any human or group of humans to figure out and try to rationally engineer,
and so we must rely in a sense on cultural selection, or those institutions that have been
demonstrated and proven to work in the past. We must, in other words, conserve those
institutions that work. Hence, conservativism.
“(Here we run into a terminology problem, in that ‘conservative’ can refer to this second
axis and also to the general political movement of Conservatism itself, which may or may not be
conservative on this axis or scale. So from now on, I will capitalize the terms Conservative,
Liberal, and Progressive if they refer to specific political movements or parties, and use small
letters for those words if they refer mostly to one of our axes. I think this will be clear as we
proceed.)
“Thus, to continue the story, somebody who is conservative on this second axis 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, and reacting—
‘reactionary’—to anything new and possibly likely to cause social disintegration. According to
this conservative view, attempting to rationally engineer society is a prescription for disaster.
Engineered compassion ends up creating many more problems than it solves, says the
conservative. It mostly salves the conscience of the liberal but leaves the real world in a
shambles: witness the Terror.
“The Reign of Terror, incidentally, is where we actually get the word terrorism. The
progressive (or Left leaning) government of Robespierre systematically engaged in the murder of
citizens in order to ‘further the cause of compassion.’ This activity became known as terrorism.
The Reign of Terror is the first action of the first progressive or liberal government in European
history. Not a good start, eh?” “As important as conservative is, there are, of course, there are times in history where
embracing tomorrow and Eros—or our upward-moving and forward-looking impulse toward
higher wholes—is called for, and not just embracing yesterday and Agape—or our downwardmoving
and backward-looking impulse. In other words, times when we must be progressive and
not just conservative. The civil rights movement in America is an oft-sited example. And
‘liberal’ itself has often been associated with the progressive (or Eros) side of politics. Where
Agape reaches down and attempts to protect what has already come into being, Eros reaches up
and attempts to create new forms, higher spaces, emergent wholes, higher embraces: egocentric to
ethnocentric to worldcentric to Kosmocentric.
“And in order to make an omelette, a few eggs have to get broken. The progressives are
always the revolutionaries. Of course, not everybody who calls themselves ‘revolutionary’ is
necessarily a true progressive: many ‘revolutionaries’ are just lower levels parading as a newlyemergent
higher levels: which is exactly what happened with the Terror, as every egocentricpower
trip was mistaken for worldcentric compassion—thoroughly confusing pre-conventional and post-conventional—and to this day, ‘Off with their heads!’ unfortunately has been the calling
card of most revolutionaries pretending to be progressive but who actually embody the worst sort
of regression imaginable. Already we can see the pre/post fallacy that would come to mark so
much of the ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’ yearnings in humans—a confusion still with us today,
alas, in too much of anything called ‘liberal.’
“But the important point for now is that, indeed, any political party can be situated on this
axis of transformation/translation, progressive/conservative, or Eros/Agape—along with the
internalist/externalist and individualist/collectivist axes at each of the major levels. Does the
political party wish to progressively transform or conservatively translate? ”
Reporter: “And those sides switched? That is, the traditional liberal progressives and
traditional conservatives switched?”
“In a sense, yes. More specifically, here is what happened. The progressive/conservative
stance ends up changing its actual values, simply because evolution itself continues to unfold, and
what is new today is old tomorrow—and thus what is progressive today is conservative
tomorrow. So this axis itself is an independent variable—Eros/Agape, or
transformation/translation, or progressive/conservative, or (r)evolutionary/stationary. When we
call it ‘progressive/conservative,’ those terms mean only that axis, which is one variable in the
AQAL matrix, and, as I said, not the political parties by those names, which can be all over the
place. But this is indeed an independent axis, as when we speak of the progressive wing of the
Republican party or the conservative wing of the Democratic party. So Left and Right are not the
same as progressive and conservative, since you can have progressive Left and conservative Left,
as well as progressive Right and conservative Right.
“But here is how the progressive/conservative scale unfolded historically, up to today
(where we believe an Integral Politics might begin to kick in and change things by integrating or
balancing them)—and it’s actually quite fascinating. “Around the time right before the Enlightenment, the establishment level was amber.
Because the establishment level was amber, then to be conservative meant, of course, to conserve
amber, to conserve traditional amber values. That was the Agape side of the street. But
evolution was about to bring forth a new and higher level of consciousness: orange. And thus the
Eros or progressive side of the street would soon bring forth a new political orientation, one that
conscientiously referred to itself as siding with progress: namely, the progressive movement.
And the new and rising political orientation of Liberalism (or the Left in general) did indeed often
think of itself, and eventually sometimes refer to itself, as progressive (even though that actually
was only one factor—one axis—in its overall orientation).
“Thus the birth of the new and higher level of consciousness (orange), and the birth of the
Enlightenment, was the birth of a new political orientation—Liberalism—that was originally both
externalist (as all Left parties are) and progressive (for reasons we just discussed). At the new
and modern level of orange, this political orientation therefore believed in worldcentric,
postconventional morality (“all men are created equal”); the external cause of human suffering
(e.g., John Stuart Mill); was strongly individualistic (on the individual/collective scale); and
decidedly progressive and even revolutionary on the progressive/conservative or Eros/Agape
scale, as witness France and America. So there are the three axes and the level of original
Liberalism or the original Leftist parties.
“So we can see that to be conservative at that time was to be amber, and to be progressive
was to be orange. But evolution continues, doesn’t it? By the 1960s, a new level of
consciousness started emerging in the culture at large, and the Revolution of the ’60s began.
If you were young and progressive, you were no longer orange, you were green. Orange thus
became the new status quo, the new establishment, and ‘Down with the establishment!’ now
meant down with amber and orange. A new wave of revolutionaries swept through the streets of
Paris, France, in May, 1968, and they were carrying the banner of green, not the banner of orange. Orange was not the new hero, but the new enemy. To be modern was no longer to be
progressive but to be reactionary. The new hero was postmodern.
“And, as so often happens, that new progressive-revolutionary movement would get
caught in a new Reign of Terror, driven by a new pre/post confusion—the one referred to as
boomeritis. This Terror would not break bodies but minds; it would not take your life but your
career. (We have evolved, haven’t we?) So again we find that under a high postconventional
banner (this time, green), there was a wave of preconventional, egocentric, narcissistic, red
power. A new Reign of Terror would descend on society, this time in the universities, where ‘Off
with his head’ was the battlecry of The Shadow University—the Larry Sommers affair here at
Harvard being a very tame example—and where even Foucault would call Derrida a terroriste.
“Of course, the positive gains of healthy green must be remembered as well, which is
what the best of the civil rights movement was all about. But wherever you see the progressive
or revolutionary edge of politics, watch out for a new Reign of Terror (from Russia 1917 to
the Shining Path of today).”
“Don’t you find terrorism at the conservative end of the scale?”
“Oh yes, but for different reasons, different values, and different drives. This has to do
with Eros gone sour, which is Phobos (which drives liberal or revolutionary terrorism) versus
Agape gone sour, which is Thanatos (and which drives conservative or state terrorism). The
results often look the same, but the psychology is profoundly different. But yes, the conservativelooking
face brought us such fun amusements as the Spanish Inquisition. State-sponsored
terrorism is usually conservative, and the terrorism of those who identify themselves as rebels or
revolutionaries is progressive, or rather likes to think of itself as progressive, anyway. Whether it
actually is or is not is another story. Still, it sees itself as progressive and opposed to
conservatism in almost every way. “So there are two major types of physical terrorism—state-sponsored, which usually
thinks in conservative terms to justify itself; and the terrorism of revolutionaries, which usually
thinks in progressive terms to justify itself. Neither is a true freedom fighter—who is truly post,
and is not caught in pre/post confusions—but we will come back to that when we examine the
difference between being a terrorist and being a true freedom fighter or authentic revolutionary.
“Right now, we were at the point in the historical account where ‘progressive,’ which
meant ‘progress toward orange and away from amber,’ now means ‘progress toward green and
away from orange.’ So what do we find in the Democratic (or Leftist) Party today? Two major
wings: the conservative Democrats, who still adhere to the ‘old’ orange values of individualism,
free will, truth, and individual justice; and the progressive wing, the postmodern wing, the green
wing, which despises everything the old orange Democrats represent, and stands instead for green
values across the board: collective values, values that are anti-individualistic, anti-business, anticapitalism,
anti-modern-rationality, based instead on feelings, sensitivity, embodiment, sharing,
multiculturalism, pomo versions of Marxism, and so on.
“Thus, as the progressive or leading edge—the liberal edge—began to push into green,
the progressive wing of liberalism pushed away from orange and into green and became the
radical Left or pomo-green Left—violently condemning the modern West, condemning orange
and all its actions (from science to business), virulently condemning the Enlightenment (by
almost entirely misunderstanding it, but anything orange was guillotined), and demanding state or
government-intervention to correct these evils, whereas the old-time liberals remained with the
orange vales of the Enlightenment and its anti-government hyper-individualism. You all have
noticed that split into the orange-modern and green-postmodern wings of the Democrats, yes?
And how pomo green calls itself anti-liberal, meaning anti-orange?
“Well, this created a terrible strain and even split within the Left itself, with its
fundamental base still holding Enlightenment, orange, modern values, generally pro-West, and its more radical wing championing postmodern, green, collectivist values, angrily and starkly anti-
West. Both are still Leftist because both are stark externalists, which is the major defining axis of
anything called the Left. But these two Leftist wings rather thoroughly despise each other—it is a
serious, deep, and widespread split within the Left, and one we will return to often, because it
holds the fate of Western democracies, we believe. But this is why the Democratic Party itself in
America has rather completely fallen apart—green versus orange—and will remain so for the
foreseeable future. This is also where the levels component also plays such an important role in
identifying political orientations, because it is the only way to see and understand these two wings
within the Left.
“Meanwhile, just as the Democrats have progressive and conservative wings, so do the
Republicans or the Right. The ‘old’ conservative Republicans are firmly entrenched in amber
values: traditional, mythic-membership, fundamentalist, Biblical, ethnocentric, militaristic,
nationalistic, patriarchal, patriotic. The ‘new’ Republicans (or New Right or neo-cons) are not
traditional but modern, not amber but pushing into orange—the so-called Wall-Street
Republicans—in other words, modern-worldcentric conservatives with orange values—Ayn Rand
Republicans.
“And thus, today the two major wings in the Right are amber and orange: amber,
fundamentalist, traditional, religious (‘the religious Right’), ethnocentric, militaristic, patriarchal
(against abortion and gay rights, in favor of prayer in school and national security, all of which
are their hot buttons); and orange, modern, economically-driven, worldcentric, neo-con, Wall-
Street Republicans for whom not abortion but taxes, not ethnocentric but merit-centric, not homoreligious
but homo-economicus has become paramount.
“Thus, the very values that a few centuries ago were the leading-edge (and literally
revolutionary) liberal values have 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
amber values, which is why ‘the political Right’ today is a strange mixture of amber and orange,
just as ‘the political Left’ today is a strange mixture of orange and green. (What holds them
together? That’s correct: the Democrats are all externalists, and the Republicans are all
internalists.)
“But neither of them has been able to span the entire Spiral. And that, exactly, is the
problem. Both the Republican and the Democratic positions are partial, fragmented, alienated
and alienating—so far, they are both totally and entirely first-tier political parties and
movements.”
