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As a (loose) philosophical anarchist, I recognize the origins of anarchy as a political theory to be born out of socialism and the commune. But as an American and a spiritual being, I find that I love listening to Jordan Peterson, while I get sick to my stomach listening to woke talk. Socialism is good at destroying society but incapable of rebuilding society to be a happy, egalitarian place, insofar as socialism requires coercion all the time and empowers and corrupts those who do the coercing.

As you say too, all the search for meaning, the desire to know thyself, building character and become whole unto thyself, well, those are the people who get shot or sent to the gulag in the making of the socialist utopia that will never come.

I would much rather live in a society that is like the "kingdom of God" as you imply.

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I can relate! The thing about socialist and anarchist ideals is that they seem best implemented on a very small scale. I'll get into this a bit more in my next post.

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I feel about most self-described anarchists like I feel about socialists. But then I have often argued a real anarchist is just a libertarian who has a conscience and cares about the health of the earth. So that maybe makes me the only real anarchist?

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I wonder if this distinction in developmental levels is part of the instinctive wisdom that leads to franchise restriction in limited republics. Individuals who have made it to levels IV and V are more likely to have established themselves as successful professionals. They're also more likely to be older. Thus, restricting the franchise to e.g. land-owners of at least 25 years of age (as was the case in the early American republic) would tend to increase the proportion of highly and fully realized personalities with a direct say in the political process, and therefore to make the maintenance of a virtuous republic more likely.

I'm not arguing that such a restriction is ideal; certainly, it is possible to be wealthy, e.g. via inheritance or crime, while being at a low level of development. However, a universal franchise seems to guarantee that the electorate is dominated by low developmental levels - thereby making the political catastrophes of democracy inevitable, as has been observed repeatedly throughout history.

One could also look to the warrior republics of the Indo-Europeans, in which the chieftain was primus inter pares and chosen by his men, who in turn held their own positions in the tribe by virtue of their demonstrated battlefield virtue. Again we see an egalitarian hierarchy that establishes a virtue test for political participation, rather than simply throwing the doors open to every warm body.

It seems to me that even Plato's Republic, with its rule by philosopher-kings, was groping after this insight.

The question is, what is the most secure means of identifying such individuals, and of filtering out those at lower stages? Answer this and we have the beginnings of a political mechanism that places power into the hands of those most suited for its responsible use, as well as a social order that will organize itself around maximizing the ability for human beings to grow into this fully mature stage. As you state, that would likely be the closest thing we can achieve to the Kingdom of God.

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I think you nailed it. And this is precisely the thing that Lobaczewski writes about in his untranslated book, Logocracy. Here's some machine translation:

"With some surprise, however, we must observe that none of these authors of elite concepts provides a psychologically sufficient conception of *how the members of these elites were to be selected from society.* Biological inheritance of certain traits, as recognized by the Middle Ages, has never worked completely, as is obvious in light of modern knowledge of human genetics. Democratic selection by a broad mass of citizens reveals the flaws already described. How, then, would this elite capable of governing the country responsibly be formed? Without an answer to this question, any aristocratic system must degenerate because there are too many advantages to belonging to a ruling elite."

He thinks the franchise SHOULD be limited, but the requirements should be pretty basic. He thinks that in such a situation, voter turnouts would actually be higher than in western democracies.

Yeah, I also think Plato saw the outlines of this. As for selection criteria, once I finish reading Logocracy (and rereading it), I'll share Lob.'s thoughts. He thinks IQ should definitely be one of the criteria. But you can have smart assholes, so it can't be the only one.

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The key selection problem, when it comes to test administration as per e.g. IQ, or psychological tests, is the old qui custodiet issue. Those who administer the test end up with a strong incentive to allow themselves to be corrupted by those who desire admission to the halls of power.

Demonstrated performance in the real world seems like good criterion. The Starship Troopers military republic, with the franchise limited to veterans who completed their terms of service, is a good example of this - one gets in not because one is smart or rich, but because one has shown the willingness to put the needs of the many ahead of the needs of the self, by risking the ultimate sacrifice if necessary; further, in war-time, surviving military service tends to select for intelligence and wisdom all on its own. The other very practical advantage Heinlein points to is that the system ensures that violence-capable males are all inside the tent pissing out, as it were (which is more or less the polar opposite of the system we have now....)

But, again that can't be the whole story - there are plenty of sociopaths in the military, and if the military became the foundational stage of the cursus honorum it would attract characteropaths like flies to faeces. So, there needs to be a system that:

a) selects for virtue

b) cultivates virtue

c) weeds out characteropathy

And also, crucially

d) resists the inevitable entropic assaults that will attempt to water down a, b, and c

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Sometimes I wonder if it isn't simpler than we think. Like with the Canadian military guy I quoted several posts ago (Redman). He could easily see which 5% needed to be axed from the battalion. Left to their own devices, the 95% (with leadership from a man like Redman) would fairly easily self-organize: leaders would emerge, people would cooperate based on their own individual talents. But the problem is still: how to find the Redman's and assure they're the ones training the battalions. That's d) I think. How to ensure that system maintains itself.

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Exactly so. If you have someone like Redman in charge, everything more or less takes care of itself. But men like that are rare. Most senior military officers lack his level of psychological insight.

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On the levels of development aspect, have you looked into Spiral Dynamics or Integral Theory - these might inform things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_Dynamics ? It would be interesting to contrast these with the aims of socialism... Also, there sure is a lot of doubling down happening!

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Haven't looked into it, but I've seen it referenced. Just searched and found this comparison with Dabrowski's theory: https://app.soar.com/blog/view/31

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Aug 24, 2022Liked by Harrison Koehli

💬 The “rules” followed to achieve the hidden order are determined by the developmental level of the individuals coordinating their actions, the endpoints of their action implicit in the emotions and instincts operative in their psyches.

That’s nothing less than amazing: reminds instantly of empathy.guru’s canonical value-Meme stacks, an empathetic evolution framework with great explanatory power. Which itself draws heavily on Spiral Dynamics model. As the site’s byline goes, ‘As we relate, so we think.’ And then act.

🗨 It’s all interconnected, so if you’re expecting an easy answer, you’re going to be disappointed. But once you figure it out — well, it’s the story of all of us. Including your dog. And that monkey in Papua New Guinea. Which is the point.

Consilience is how we arrive at comprehensive truth. 42? 😆

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Aug 23, 2022Liked by Harrison Koehli

We should remember a period of human thought and writing that seemed to peak at the end of the 1800s. It included several thinkers and writers who might loosely be called "spiritual pragmatists."

My father had a copy of the book "Looking Backward" which was written by Edward Bellamy, who had close ties to Christian Socialism, and was very popular at the time. Later in life I was introduced to another book "Progress and Poverty" written by Henry George, who was also a deist. George ran for mayor of New York City in 1896, but died before the campaign concluded.

Both these books give government an important role in human life, but Bellamy in particular did not ignore the importance of the religious side of life. In fact he included an entire fictional sermon in his book. Both men supported the ideas of Humanism, which valued the contributions of every individual in a society, and thus were alarmed by the wealth gap that was very wide in their times. But they were also fascinated by the industrial idea of efficiency, and so their visions might be seen as somewhat Technocratic.

I have not delved deeply into the arc of these ideas as we entered the 20th century. But it seems that various power groups, annoyed by the religious and "kind" approach of earlier thinkers, redesigned or buried the older ideas and replaced them with Capitalism and Socialism. Squeezed in between these two was classical liberalism, which had long sought to give each person a certain basic level of respect while at the same time leaving economic and social outcomes largely in the hands of individuals and their abilities to successfully navigate the various games of life.

What was almost totally buried by the middle of the last century was any sense of spiritual experience. However, as the truth can never remain totally hidden, by the 1950s that sense was reemerging. By that time, a new factor had entered the picture. Many know it as "UFOs." I prefer to think of it as ET.

What this reemerging focus on spiritual experience explains better than any other ideology I know of is why people are born different. That means that no matter how stridently we seek equality of opportunity and treatment under the law and in the economic system, you WILL NOT get equal results.

These newer findings also relieve us of having to explain the various human urges and weaknesses on the basis of biological evolution. The development of the human personality DOES NOT follow the development of human bodies on Earth and involves so much off-Earth experience it's not even funny.

With these superficial restrictions on our thinking cast aside, we can begin to dispense with a lot of the philosophizing which goes into defending almost any political or economic ideology on Earth today and start to focus on what we could do to get ourselves out of this mess.

There are one whole set of answers that are relevant within the context of the human game on Earth (as well as other places). And there are another whole set of answers that only apply well to spiritual beings who are free of human bodies. These two sets of answers often get confused among those willing to discuss such things, and lead to outrageous and unworkable proposals such as Nirvana and so forth.

I offer the above as some small and imperfect idea of how far we are from understanding what needs to be done, whether we support the ideas of Socialism, Liberalism, Capitalism, Christianity or most other modern ideologies. And in this context, why we are so far from understanding human psychology, The phenomenon of psychopathy is, however, very real, and is a top priority for us to address.

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Thanks for the comment, Larry. I'll just comment on this bit: "But it seems that various power groups, annoyed by the religious and "kind" approach of earlier thinkers, redesigned or buried the older ideas and replaced them with Capitalism and Socialism."

A big part of this, for me, was the rise of revolutionary terrorism in Russia in the mid 1800s. By the time of the 1917 revolution/coup, the Germans had picked the Bolsheviks as the best bet for getting what they wanted in Russia. And once they took power, Marxism-Leninism became the only socialist game in town, so to speak. So I think the biggest factors behind the phenomenon were practical/cynical realpolitik and the "regression to the mean" I mentioned in the article.

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What I have been told is that there were pressures from various groups who wanted to create "armies" of obedient workers for industry, war, or... This pressure manifested in the academic world as the development of "modern" psychology, which studied man as just a sophisticated animal, or a stimulus-response mechanism. It resulted in the blossoming of modern techniques of both marketing and propaganda, delivering to those power groups many willing followers, workers, soldiers, and consumers.

This focus on the evolution of human psychology as a subject serving the interests of those seeking power has been meaningful to me (as I was working with a group seeking to improve the mental health of individuals), but I have not seen it rigorously presented or supported by more than just a very few scholars. So I am not sure whether it clarifies the situation or not.

Wundt, usually named as the "father" of modern psychology, founded his laboratory in Leipzig in 1879. If you trace the flow of American academics who studied under Wundt and then returned to the States to establish the subject here, you get a sense of how the older spiritual ideas were beaten down and replaced starting roughly 1900.

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The author makes the simplistic Protestant assumption that Christianity grew out of judaism, and most likely believes - as the jews alone claim and Protestants accept - that Christ was a jew. This leads him into numerous fallacies, as was intended by the perpetrators of this lie.

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The commenter makes the simplistic assumption that the author thinks Christ--as presented in the gospels and epistles--even existed as a real person. This leads her into numerous fallacies. And yes, Christianity did grow out of Judaism--but not ONLY Judaism.

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The author also believes that European philosophic tradition proceeds from Plato. He does not understand the vast difference between the Athenian Socratic tradition vs Plato. He does not see that Platonism is pursued by the northern Protestant countries of Europe but not the south or east, which - given his bias - he perhaps views as "inferior" - as the Protestant nations have too long claimed. Yet we witness today the break point between the self appointed Elite Protestant world and the "inferior" Rest of World. The limitations - no, blind lack of self awareness - of his POV renders his observations trivial and uninteresting to those outside the Protestant world.

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Keep on guessing what I believe, eventually you might get one or two things right.

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deletedAug 22, 2022Liked by Harrison Koehli
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Thanks, Heidi!

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