text/TheKenShow-TransformingSelfSocietyAndTheSpacesBetweenUs-Highlights.txt

So what I do here is talk about what I call zones, which are if you take the four major  quadrants and you look at each one from an inside subjective view, you'll get one particular type  of perspective. And if you look at them from an outside exterior viewpoint, you'll get another  type of perspective. What this looks at is zone seven, which is first, second, third, fourth,  fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth. So it's the seventh and eighth, the inside and the outside view from  the lower right quadrant. So as we'll see when we go through this, seventh person view is the view  of what all those...  material exterior things look like from within. So we actually see a third person plural view  because we take up a third person plural perspective. And that actually generates  the objects that we'll see. And then that's one major form of systems theory. It turns out that  there are actually two. And as we'll see from...  from authorities in the field, there are only two major forms of systems theory. And that perfectly  with the inside and the outside of the lower right quadrant. You'll be amazed at how much the actual  system sciences themselves describe themselves as this is the inside view of reality or this is the  outside view of reality.  Yeah.  So...  So we'll go through particularly this zone seven or the inside, interior view of multiple objective  realities.  I often talk about, you know, the upper left quadrant can be summarized with a single word, being. The  upper right, doing. Lower left, being together. The lower right, doing together. Right? And so when we're looking  at that, that sort of dimension of doing together, how we do together, we can take either that third-person view or that first-person view. And they're both gonna disclose, you know, complementary, I think, realities but quite different. They're different perspectives on a system. And you, you know, I think you made it a solid case for why we need both. Now tying that back to, you know, revolutionary social transformation, it sounds like what you're saying is, you know, the society is going to be one. I think it's going to be one. But if we're not, then we're not going to be one.  Right.  We're not going to be one.  Right.  We're not going to be one.  We're not going to be one.  Right.  Right.  Right.  social transformation it sounds like what you're saying is you know in the essay you talk about how  we have a base this is using karl marx's terms a base in the lower right quadrant and then a  superstructure in the lower left quadrant and marx used to stack one on top of the other and you make  the point today no no no these aren't these are you know uh the the super the culture the lower  left is not downstream from the lower right it emerges alongside the lower right quadrant but  it sounds like what you're saying is that a base if we want to understand the base in the lower  right quadrant we need to take nothing less than a zone seven and zone eight perspective in order  to clearly see that base so one thing i've been thinking a lot about is how each stage brings  different means of generating preserving and distributing knowledge and how those different  means have an enormous impact on our perceptions our behaviors and our sense of shared meaning  information  and knowledge move in very particular ways at each of these stages and the ways that this  information moves in a society will always determine how that stage self-organizes and  how individuals in a society go about identifying things like truth beauty and goodness so ken i've  created a map which i sent to you 12 pages colin printed them out for you i'll post it to uh  screen share when i edit this video it's a very good app  it's very oh yeah  you liked it yeah  awesome awesome um so yeah uh it's it's very large very robust and it tracks the evolution  of communications paradigms over human history so in this map i zone seven yeah exactly that's  that's exactly right that's what i was trying to do is really take a look at a developmental  look at zone seven as it's unfolded over time and there's some zone eight sort of pieces to it of  course when we talk about like the frequency and the duration of the communication and all that  but yeah it's really focused on on zone seven that self-organizing piece um because what again i want  to look at how each paradigm from each stage generates preserves and distributes knowledge  how that knowledge is curated and how each of these zone seven stages radically influences our  perceptions our behaviors and our meaning right so one thing that the first thing i noticed ken and  this was fascinating to me the first thing i noticed is that if i separate these stages into  what i call early the early stage and i look at what i call the early stage and i look at what i call the early stage.  and late stage, we see something absolutely fascinating. What I found is that the communications  technologies, paradigms, and bases that emerge in the early periods of each of these stages  are typically translative, right? They support the deep features of that stage that is coming  online. However, the technologies and paradigms that emerge in the late phase of that stage  don't just reinforce that current stage, but actually lead kind of directly to a transformation  to the next stage. They're transformative technologies. This was fascinating and  tremendously clarifying when I noticed this. So we see, for example, how the innovation  of spoken language, which first emerged in the crimson stage, actually allowed magenta  to emerge. And of course, magenta magic is very verbal based. It's very word magic. I  can't differentiate my representation of the thing from the thing itself. And that's the  source of information.  The innovation of written language during magenta and red stages allowed amber to emerge.  And amber fully depends on a codification of the written word, whether it's the Bible  or the Torah or the U.S. Constitution. It's some written code that can survive much longer  than data and information and knowledge can survive in an oral society, for example.  Then with amber, we got the innovation of libraries, manuscripts, universities, the  printing press.  All of this came out of the amber stage, and all of this became like the bedrock for  orange.  Out of orange, we got the innovation of electronic media, television, radio, and film, which  allowed the green stage to emerge.  And then finally, with the green stage, late stage green has given us things like not only  the internet, but now things like, you know, social media and, you know, virtual reality.  We might even argue artificial intelligence.  Though I kind of place that more as a teal emergent than a green emergent, but still  we're seeing how green's sort of informational technologies, communications technologies,  allowed, for example, integral to exist.  We wouldn't have been able to do something like integral naked or today integral life.  We wouldn't have been able to constellate this global community, you know, from that  0.5% to the maybe 5% of teal that are out there, we're actually able to kind of bring  them together into a single.  Sort of, you know, loose group because of the technologies that green gave us.  So all of this has led me to bring just a lot more focus to these kinds of zone seven  realities, each of which corresponds to the zone eight techno economic systems in the  paradigms that we see in your classic four quadrants.  So agrarian to horticultural, to industrial, to informational, et cetera.  Right.  I tend to make these zone seven information and communication patterns as part of the  primary as the techno economic stages themselves, because they directly show us exactly how  society self organizes the different information flows that reinforce that society and how  those information flows dramatically influence our interior perceptions, our cultural  narratives and our individual behaviors.  So the questions are, what do you think of this overall approach?  Would you agree that looking at the self organizing currents of zone seven interactions is  as revealing as looking at the zone eight?  Techno economic systems themselves, and is there anything else that we might want to  track, particularly when it comes to my map that I sent you of how these communication  paradigms have evolved over time?  Yeah, I think your map is fairly complete, by the way.  I mean, I suppose I could think of some other factors that could be addressed, but none  really jumped to mind because it's a very complete view.  Okay.  So what we're looking at with these is it's kind of hard to picture in a certain sense  because, well, if we look at the relation between mind and brain, that's the same as  the relation between the lower left or zone three and zone seven, the lower left being  the mind.  And zone seven being the brain.  Sort of distributed.  He means like distributed mind, distributed collective consciousness, and then distributed  brain.  Really?  I mean, that's that's what the Internet is.  That's what AI is.  It's a distributed.  That's right.  Consciousness, but in exterior form.  Intelligence, we might say.  Yeah.  And when we think of a zone seven and we're thinking of the relationship with the brain,  what we notice is that the brain is very much authentic.  First person reality.  And that's how we experience it as an experience of an eye, a me, a mind.  But we don't think of the brain that way.  Or if we think of the brain being the seat of linguistic awareness, for example, then  we imagine that there are linguistic symbols someplace.  Yeah.  Being transmitted by the brain.  But we don't experience it as, you know, I experience, oh, this the upper right parietal  portion of my brain.  It's a very similar to the relation between consciousness and a computer.  Let's say that the computer has all the information on it and it will seem to generate an actual  person.  Yeah.  If I let it.  Or I program it to.  But we never really experience the computer as a first person experience.  Although there's some clear relationship between first and third person and the brain is somehow  at the extreme of that experience.  And that's what zone seven is.  It's a bunch of computer programs.  Yeah.  Yeah.  It's a bunch of programming in a sense.  And that's why artificial intelligence is so easily realized as a zone seven phenomena.  It's very like a computer program.  So here we're going to look at a particular kind of techno-economic base that we are living  in today, that we're actually having this conversation within right now.  Right.  Which is, you know, integral in the social media age.  Right.  And it really has to do with how our perceptions and behaviors and shared meaning, again, is  being influenced at this very moment by these systems.  So as I mentioned earlier, with the social media age comes a number of deep meta-crises  facing humanity.  Some of these crises are being addressed from within these social media platforms and a  great many others are being created by these same platforms.  Right.  Such as the overall de-legitimization of many of our most foundational political, economic,  medical, educational, and media systems.  Now in many cases, these crises are appropriate.  Some of these systems have not been working very well for a little while now.  Right.  So some of the sort of skepticism that we're bringing to these systems is maybe a bit appropriate.  And they might even be overdue in a lot of ways.  However, they're also oftentimes profoundly exaggerated because lies, propaganda, and  misinformation ends up flooding through our minds.  This is a little bit of a ologie.  And one of the main reasons behind that is that we're going through these two different  stages of technical activity.  There's these things called either before the pandemic, where we're talking about social  media issues, or prior to the pandemic, where we're focused on something that we're not  really interested in.  Right.  It's a phenomenon that we're looking at these days.  It's a phenomenon where.  Right.  We need to be looking at, what are we doing?  What are we doing today to address these issues?  What we're doing today to address these issues?  As you mentioned, this is a global age.  Right.  Right.  Right.  where all of our anti-hierarchical, that's right. It's anti-hierarchical. And this is true of  Twitter, of Facebook, of, you know, of, of what have you. And it's really where our political  narratives and confirmation biases are being reinforced by an algorithm whose only purpose  is to drive user engagement for the sake of profit. So we have this combination of green  sort of surfaces, but also underlying maybe mean orange meme kind of motivations that are  actually contributing to this epistemic collapse. Now, the goal of maximizing user engagement  means that social media platforms are inherently resistant to the kinds of big picture views  that integral provides. And instead, they tend to reward the lowest common denominator views  that are typically fairly low depth, usually coming from  radicals.  So, for example, if you look at Facebook, for example, they have a much wider span,  right? Because just about every single one of us has these stages alive within us in  some way. And we often reconsolidate to some of these previous stages, which may be a little  bit more stable than the stage we're currently at. We can reconsolidate whenever we're in  times of high stress, high anxiety, high complexity. And the problem, Ken, is, of course, the vast  majority of people don't know what they're doing. And they don't know what they're doing.  They don't know when they're reconsolidating, because they don't have a map in their heads  saying, oh, this is an orange thought. This is a green thought. This is an amber thought.  To them, it's just a jumble of conflicting feelings or beliefs or views or values or  what have you. And this, I think, allows deeply regressive views and narratives to proliferate  across our society.  Right.  Now, I would personally make the argument, Ken, that social media, this era in general,  has not been altogether kind to integral, for all the reasons that I just stated. Social  media is a base in the lower right quadrant that is not altogether supportive of the integral  superstructures in the lower left quadrant. And yet, it's the primary technological base  that integral has been unfolding within for the last 15 years or so, for better and for  worse.  Yeah.  And as for whether we're actually talking about a Zone 7.  A Zone 7 reality. Notice that virtually all social media is digitalized. It's all computerized.  And I just said the relation of the mind to the brain, which is like Zone 7, is just like  a computer. And all of social media is computerized. So that's where we're getting this entire  Zone 7 morass created.  Yeah.  And all the problems that go with Zone 7, and all of its, particularly in the green  era with its anti-hierarchical emphasis, and all of that, it's alarming, but it also definitely  fits Zone 7. It is a computer-like brain. And that's part of the difficulty with the  whole Zone 7 reality.  Yeah.  It's just like this giant computer that's just programmed. And it is sort of automated  and goes on, this programs by itself. And we're just sort of along for the ride. And  like most computer actual things that you're watching on a computer, it's non-hierarchical  and anti-hierarchical.  And that's always been my main complaint with green. And as you pointed out, I would  write about that a lot in things from Boomeritis on down. And I would always point out the  anti-hierarchical nature of green. And that rules out its ability to enthusiastically  grasp developmental hierarchies.  Yeah.  Or any sort of growth hierarchies or evolutionary hierarchies, all of which unfold in a hierarchical  transcend and include fashion. And that's what makes them so fascinating and so interesting.  Yeah.  But not to green. It's just really amazing. And I've always noticed that and been really  disturbed by it.  Yeah.  So.  That's still the case now that we're talking about the Zone 7 social media. It's just a  big, big problem. So that's where we are. So as I mentioned earlier, with the social  media age comes a number of deep meta-crises facing humanity. And that's exactly right.  And we don't have growth models that we are willing to immediately applaud.  Yeah.  To any of these problems because we have this green bias, this Boomeritis anti-hierarchical  fervor. And it's just a nightmare when that happens. And it's the nature of our social  media world. People talk about the problem between the divorcing our mind from our body  and that's the human predicament. Well, computer is not.  It's not helping that at all.  Right.  Right now, we don't have any bodily contact. We're not actually talking to each other.  We're not actually seeing each other. We're seeing digital displays. And those are completely  non-sensory. So that's a real problem that humanity is facing. And AI is just going to  make it worse.  Yeah. Ken, I love that you brought that up.  Yeah.  When you and I did our talk about a year ago, we talked about AI and art.  Right.  And after I produced that episode, we'll talk about this in just a minute with  our last question. But one of the things I've been doing is creating these polarity maps  for all of our content. I'll do the same with this episode when I publish it. One of the  polarity maps that I came up with for that particular conversation was the difference  between, I called it embodied intelligence and distributed intelligence.  Right.  And that is a vital polarity. And we need to attend to both of those poles and not just  manage and harmonize those poles, but actually integrate those poles.  Right. Right.  And it's truly amazing how useful this lens is and how so many of these polarities  are fundamentally organized around the core polarities of integral theory itself.  Yeah.  In other words, we typically see polarities between quadrants, individual and collective,  or interior and exterior.  We also see them within quadrants. So polarities within the lower left quadrant, for example.  And we might see polarities that are sort of like part-whole polarities that exist between  the products of one stage and the products of the next stage. And when you're making  that transition, it's pretty easy to hold those two sets of products as its own kind  of polarity.  One of the things I often say about this kind of polarity thinking is it's the kind of thinking  that generates things like integral meta theories in the first place, and it's been an implicit  part of your own work ever since your very first book, Spectrum of Consciousness, and  particularly, No Boundary.  Now, when it comes to social transformation, there is all sorts of polarities that we want  to keep in mind, including the primary polarity of your essay, which we've been talking about  today between the lower left superstructure and the lower right quadrant base. But another  piece that I wanted to add to the puzzle is around the relationship between the polarities.  I'm not, again, exactly using the accumulation of polarities, but there are polarities that  are built around the prime polarity that comes from the lower right quadrant. And they're all  relationship between personal transformation and social transformation because of course  our cultural superstructure is really a nexus aggregate of all of our individual structures  of development and so when our personal transformation is neglected across the  population the overall cultural superstructure gets diminished so i sent you a polarity map  that i recently created around personal transformation and social transformation  which i think helps us understand how important it is to quote be the change that we want to see  in the world and how it helps us avoid the traps of complacency hypocrisy and something we've seen  a lot of these days performative virtue signaling particularly understanding the role that personal  transformation plays in social transformation and vice versa because what we're talking about  is again transforming both together and that's what's important and just when you understand  personal transformation what you're asked to understand is that there is no pre-given world  that you actually co-create the environment that you perceive and that gives you an enormous role  in the world you're in you're actually in the world you're in and that's what's important  you're actually co-creating that world and that gives you an enormous amount of power and control  over the world that you tend to think of yourself as just being plopped in and just impacting all  your senses and you're passively taking it all in that's not really true and so you want to learn  the relation between this personal and the actual world and the actual world and the actual world  and that's what's going to serve you and that's what's going to give you the impact and the解除  co-creation and bringing forth of the world around you and then of course there's the world's impact  on you and so you want to keep both of those in mind and it really is an effort of keeping both  of them in mind it takes a genuine force to hold both of those in your life the impact is going to  bring out a lot of the effect that you've had and I think that's what that is going to do is that you're  going to you're going to find yourself on that same level you're going to be able to be able to bring  your non-grapefruit-looking mind.  And the way that we co-create and enact our world  also gives us the key to our own self-transformation  because what we have to look at  in the ways we create our world  are the ways that we actually transform ourselves.  And that's something that is a learning process.  You can learn to self-transform.  And you'll find yourself doing that  when you're working on changing the world.  So you wanna keep both of those in mind  and you want to activate both of those processes.  And that will give you  a self and world-transforming agenda.  And that's good.  That's exactly what we want to do.  So that's sort of a brief summary  of what I would say about getting both of those together.  It's important.  That's great.  It's that easy.  I think so.  Yeah.  And that's pretty much it for this video.  It's a great way to wrap up the video.  And I hope you enjoyed what you were having  with me today.  I hope you had a great day.  All right, bye.  Bye.  Bye-bye.  Bye.  Bye-bye.  Bye-bye.  Bye-bye.  Bye.  Bye-bye.  Bye-bye.  Bye-bye.  Bye-bye.  Bye-bye.  Bye-bye.  Bye.