Engage & Participate
Online Exercises
Are You A Developmentalist?
Take the Test
Take a 2-minute test of your political developmentalism, and see your “transcendence and inclusion score.”
This simple test asks you to select your level of agreement or disagreement with twelve political statements. The test results will indicate your inclusivity score, your transcendence score, and the overall extent of your developmental perspective.
Worldview Questionnaire
What is your worldview? Take this 7-minute test and find out which “values frame” describes you best.
By answering these 17 questions you may learn more about your own worldview, as well as about the worldviews of others.
Character Development Exercise
Become a better person through this brief exercise in character development—create your personal portrait of the good.
Answer 10 questions to create a personalized chart of what matters most to you. This chart—your Portrait of the Good—will be sent to your email address as a pdf file.
Community Comment
“I am grateful for the post-progressive way of thinking. It was totally new to me, and now that I have been exposed to it, I think it is the way forward. It is the future. If there is a way out of this terrible culture war, I think it will be something along these lines. I love the idea of taking the best of the different worldviews and bringing them together into a more inclusive post-progressive worldview. This is a brilliant approach, and I am going to try to share it with as many people who are willing to listen to me as possible.”
– Lucas Chasin
Community Comment
“Progressivism doesn’t work without a foundation of modernism and traditionalism. Post-Progressivism allows modernists and traditionalists to feel significant, to feel needed, and to have a foundational seat at the table. The reason I don’t identify as a progressive, even though I am a vegan, spiritual, conscious, burning man guy, is because I feel its rejection of these previous worldviews …”
– Thomas Waterman
This data on the future of world religions suggests the gradual decline of the Traditional worldview is being overpowered in the next few decades by larger population trends. In other words, the non-religious or "unaffiliated" category is growing (due partly to "religious switching") but because the unaffiliated tend to be older and/or have lower fertility rates, the share of the world population is shrinking. However, the unaffiliated share is growing in developed countries, which probably forecasts the long term trend worldwide.
The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010-2050
www.pewresearch.org
As of 2010, nearly a third of the world's population identified as Christian. But if demographic trends persist, Islam will close the gap by the middle of the 21st century.the study is valuable. Thank you for sharing.
# New Presentation by Steve McIntosh
Hey, Developmentalists! Let's continue the conversation from Steve's talk that he gave to our group this month.
He discusses his paper titled: “Cultivating Noosphere Evolution in the Spirit of Teilhard and Whitehead," which he presented to the Whitehead and Teilhard conference at Villanova University last week.
Steve's paper will be published with the other conference papers in an academic book next year.
www.academia.edu/38978074/The_noosphere_concepts_of_Pierre_Teilhard_de_Chardin_and_Vladimir_Verna...
Isn’t Intuition the noosphere?
I really enjoyed this. Thanks for sharing it.
Thank you for posting this presentation. I always appreciate the depth Steve brings to any conversation/presentation. I especially liked Steve's explication of world view - how it is more than a cognitive point of view. I look forward to the release of Steve's paper when the conference presentations are published. Congrats Steve! I hope you were well received.
There aren’t many giants like Sy Hersh (or Greg Palast) who expose the nightmares we continue to conjure up…Can we turn the comment section here into a Sy Hersh think tank?
suzannetaylor.substack.com/p/its-worse-than-you-think?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
I’m not sure if “identity synthesis” will catch on, but I’m really glad to see this in the New York Times.
Opinion | How to Argue Against Identity Politics Without Turning Into a Reactionary (Gift Article)
www.nytimes.com
State your position loudly and clearly, and don’t lose sight of the values that guide you.I find the New York Times an interestingly mixed bag. This article, though exploring an important dynamic well and correctly pointing out some truly useful insights is nonetheless internally hypocritical. Mounk acknowledges the counterproductive style of right wingers who criticize “wokeness” but insinuates counterproductively and dismissively that Bret Weinstein is a crank for suggesting 9-11 was an inside job or that the COVID vaccine might not be wise for children. I have listened to many YouTube videos by Weinstein and can honestly say I am not a fan. And I agree with Mounk that Weinstein was attacked by uncritical progressives. But the man is not lacking in having meaningful points worth exploring. Regardless of one’s views on 9-11 and in spite of the various unjustified theories, it is not entirely unfounded to ask serious questions, and even though alternative explanations have unfounded conclusions, it is not as if the official report on 9-11 is without serious problems. Furthermore, not all people who question certain vaccines as applied to certain persons for whom it might be contraindicated are anti vaxer science deniers. Having said that, the article does correctly admit to extreme nonsense from both sides. Some “woke” ideas are absurd while others are important to pay attention to. And yes, the right does have pundits who accuse anything remotely related to the history of racism as if it is an example of CRT. The way we chat and argue between the political extremes is dysfunctional. People believe what they believe not because they are smart and not because they are irrational. Most beliefs are founded in one’s group identity with just enough individual differences to plausibly deny the group think. What someone’s views on abortion might be could very well be based on what in-group they identify with. To listen to reason could endanger one’s standing with their in-group. And could even cause someone to feel that they do not know who they are anymore. Political positions are not as rooted in the positions themselves as we pretend. Yes we use our intellect and rational argument, but it is more to preserve our connections than to deal honestly with the issues. It seems to me that our great divide these days is sustained mostly by the impact of those on both sides of the aisle attacking their own side for failing to walk strictly within the narrative. To lean left but then disagree with something on the left can get you cancelled. To lean right but criticize Trump gets one labeled a RINO. It is as if the left and the right both want our differences to be clear unified singular positions. Diversity within the sides is not tolerated. The way to win a political argument and change someone’s mind is to love them, respect them, empathize with their concerns, and to behave like a true friend. Once they see that changing their mind is socially safe, they are more open. As a young man I was so isolated on the right that I honestly thought everyone on the left was an immoral nut-job. I had no idea they loved their children, were educated, or cared about America. It was the love and friendship of people on the left that opened my eyes and gave me the safe space to leave my radical right thinking and to even begin to champion a number of left leaning concerns.
I'm going to get to see Yascha speak on Tuesday night. Looking forward to hearing from him further in this.
Are there any brighter minds that can comment on Musk's assertions, and perhaps my misunderstandings. I often intuit that remarks like this are an integral unfolding or enactment. He has said he's a classic Democrat but the party left him. He was invited into Trumps circle and quickly distanced himself from him. If society and civilization is evolving can he be the wizardly messenger and a change agent? What if the Western Liberal Order is in it's final stage, and we are to rethink and realign?Elon Musk, the wealthiest man in the world, compared modern civilization to the Roman Empire on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, early Monday. trib.al/VODILSs
Musk is certainly far from alone for saying as much. But I get the idea Musk is motivated to say it out of frustration rather than from historical analysis. Empires fall apart but the time table by which it happens is probably impossible to predict. Usually the end comes unexpectedly. They lean precariously until some random event not expected to amount to much suddenly achieves a critical point and then inertia pulls it all down.
Musk hasn t enough geopoltical intelligence and imagination. He is fishing for public attention more and more. His fake announcement of a MMA fight with ZUckerberg and some rdiculous posing in the Russian invasion of Ukraine have shrinked him for me rapidly.
It depends on how you define empire or civilisation. The Roman Empire did not collapse as much as it evolved. If there is any lesson for the US it is the decline of the British empire. Although it has lost wealth and power, British culture is still very influential. As for Musk - to use the Roman analogy - he is a wealthy patrician who, through their decadence and neglect, allowed Rome to decline. What is his solution other than to profit from new tech?
People can say the right things from a variety of worldviews, it does not make them integral nor does it imply he knows what he is talking about. He is just a rich entrepreneur with a huge ego and who uses the power his money gives him to act out more and more radical and in support of autocracy and right wing extremism.
I’d also add that this is a popular meme among the technorati—that civilization is collapsing—and that it performs an ideological function—only the John Galts of the world can save us with their technology. It centers the entrepreneur as a mythic hero saving the world.
Successful businesspeople are often extremely smart and good at what they do, but they generally lack a deep understanding of history and politics (and, I would add, economics, in a more integral sense of the term). And the converse is true, too—historians and political scientists generally don’t understand how business really works. The difference is that historians and company generally don’t have a public platform and influence.
Let's welcome our new members!
Melina Curi,
SUE Speaks
Welcome!!!
Welcome, Melina and Sue!
Let's welcome our new members!
Sheharyar Jillani,
Linda Ho-oh
Welcome, Sheharyar and Linda!
Is anyone going to the Integral Leadership in Action Embodied Integral event in October?
www.ilianow.org
ILiA Embodied Integral Facilitator Spotlight:Diane Musho Hamilton (Diane Musho Hamilton is in our latest facilitator Spotlight)Diane has submitted a video to share more details about her session.Read ...I believe I shall!
I wrote a long essay that some people in this group may appreciate. If you read it, please do so with an intention to understand, and please try not to jump to conclusions if you haven't read the whole thing. Read with grace, share with care.
Two excerpts:
"In the absence of universal human rights, and without a shared understanding that every person has inalienable rights as an individual simply by virtue of human birth, the violence of the past was not nearly as problematized as it has become in the modern world. It is very easy to project our widely shared assumptions about human rights and equality into the distant past, but this is a very significant and common mistake. To judge the past by the standards of the present is a form of presentism. It is anachronistic, and misguided, precisely because of our shared context of evolution. Values change and evolve, along with everything else. This is a key point that is hard to overstate or fully appreciate. So much of our contemporary discourse and collective understanding depends on the foundation of our relationship to the past, and on our presuppositions about human nature, cultural change, and evolution (cosmic, planetary, and human). *And the prevalence and constitution of those presuppositions all change over time*, as do the explanatory frameworks of each individual as they grow, learn, and mature. So there is a relationship between our personal maturation process and the way we situate ourselves in a historical context—our relationship to history can deepen and mature over the course of our lives. And this is what we need collectively: a deepening of our relation to history, so that we understand better the salient differences between our postmodern world and the social and cultural worlds of our distant ancestors."
"...our children are becoming increasingly confused and distressed in part because we are not providing adequate clarity and reassurance regarding what it means to be human. They are getting mixed messages, to say the least, and are developing their identity within media ecologies that are predatory, materialistic, partisan, and disorienting in ways that are completely unprecedented in the scope of human history. *TikTok is not a campfire or a dinner table. Instagram isn’t grandma. *The fact that the former now has more of an influence than the latter on most children represents an almost unimaginable degradation of human culture which has taken place in just the past few decades. The stakes are high and the environment is toxic. It is our responsibility to protect our children and to nurture their development, and this means enabling their construction-of-self-in-relation-to-the-world to be as healthy and reality-based as possible—and this means not mediated by screens or influenced by advertisers and influencers."
integrallife.com
Brad Kershner offers a deep and detailed criticism of standard DEI approaches (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion), highlighting the complexities of ethnicity, race, and cultural evolution. He challenges pr...A little late to the game here - I appreciate the care that seems to have gone into this article and look forward to diving in further!
Much appreciation for the hard work that surely went into writing this very helpful article!
Brad Kershner, this is one of the most brilliant articles on the topic I had ever read. It's fantastic, truly! Thanks for posting it to the group--and thanks for writing it!
Thanks for sharing your thoughts and insightful essay. Technology I see as an extended humanity, however humans must use it with good will in mind and reject malicious influences & egotistical manipulation.
I've been meaning to write something like this, so thanks for doing the work for me!
Hi Brad, I read your essay in its entirety and was impressed with the breadth of cultural perspective. I agree with many points as I could quote about 45% of the content of your argument. I was happy that you grasp the incredible force of bureaucracy in America. About the second definition of culture I am not sure. There is civilization and culture at the level of our species on a diachronic dimension. Civilizations and cultures on a synchronic dimension. Being an educator in America mostly in times of DEI is a truly confusing experience and I empathize totally with educators of today. Thank you for this moving intellectually well balanced SOS.
This meme that Steve McIntoshSteve and I created this meme and is getting a little attention over on X (formerly Twitter). If you want to be part of the sharp end of the spear, follow us @PoliticsDevelop: twitter.com/PoliticsDevelop
Sooo good!! Thanks!
Great meme! And… depending on how we define “vilify”, there are times and places when villains have to be called out.
Love it!!!! Yes!
Hmm, it says left exit ... 😆
Community Comment
“I really appreciated the use of gay marriage as an example of win-win-win policy solutions because it shows how people with different approaches to political issues can still align on values. In speaking to my friends about using this value integration technique I realized that it can be helpful to use value as a verb, rather than a noun. When you look at value as a verb, as in ‘what do we all value?’, it really does become possible for traditionalists, modernists, and progressives to value a lot of the same things.”
– Scott Kirby