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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 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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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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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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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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deletedAug 22, 2022Liked by Harrison Koehli
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