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Too much simplification

Posted November 3rd, 2011 by Christian Lamontagne in Politics
In Reference to:
The Spectrum of Political Thought (or: Why Buddha Was a Republican)

Ken's presentation of right and left in terms of "freedom" and "totalitarism" is not appropriate. I think that this has never occurred in history, even if we got savage capitalism and savage totalitarian states. I would say that right insists on individual responsibility and left on the context determining what is really possible to individuals, but neither is absolutely reductionnist.

But I agree with him on the necessity of an integral political discourse to start presenting "integrative" solutions to our global problems. As he points out, "national" problems are no longer simply local, many of the most difficult of them are transnational. So the type of possible solutions must also be global in perspective.

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5 out of 5 members found this useful.

Different axes

Posted November 3rd, 2011 by Corey deVos

Hi Christian,

Just to be clear, Ken wasn't correlating "freedom vs. totalitarianism" with "Left vs. Right".  He actually holds it as a completely different axis than Left/Right, which is better correlated with "interiorist vs. exteriorist" (or the left and right sides of Wilber's Four Quadrant model).  

Personally, I think the terms "freedom vs. totalitarianism" are unfortunate--as we have some very positive and negative connotations associated with those words--and is better described as "individualism vs. collectivism" (or the upper and lower quadrants).  In this scheme, we can see that "totalitarianism" is actually what collectivism looks like from a red or amber altitude.  In today's parlance, I think we can best see this individual/collective dynamic in U.S. politics as the tension between libertarianism and socialism, or in the ongoing argument about whether the world would be best served by more economic regulation, or less.

So, here are the four major axes of integral politics, which taken together create a sophisticated 4-dimensional matrix of political thought, within which we can "locate" every major political ideology in history and see how they all "fit together" into a much more comprehensive vision of civics, politics, and governance:

- Interiorist vs. Exteriorist (e.g. Left vs. Right)

- Individualism vs. Collectivism (e.g. Libertarianism vs. Socialism)

- Translation vs. Transformation (e.g. Conservative vs. Progressive)

- Levels of Development (e.g. ethnocentric vs. worldcentric; or Mythic vs. Rational vs. Pluralistic)

Here are a couple images that may help us better visualize these different dynamics:

 

 

 

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Corey W. deVos

Editor, Writer, Producer
Integral Life
Managing Editor
KenWilber.com