The Daily Evolver

Our left hemisphere learns new routines, but it is our right hemisphere where the habits are hardwired — and it changes slowly. The brain evolved to not give up habits that it has associated with a satisfactory life. We are what we repeatedly do. —Aristotle I learn the coolest stuff listening to The Shrink & The Pundit sessions. For example, as you repeat a certain action it activates a specific neuronal network in the brain. Cells go there and wrap the neurons in a myelin sheath (myelin is a white, fatty, electrically insulating substance). The myelinated nerve is up to one hundred times faster! If you practice enough those circuits become heavily myelinnated and then that action becomes habitual, like the way my fingers are hitting these keys — you don’t even need to think about it. Which is great! Until it isn’t. Habits are hard to change. We can use pain and pleasure (the proverbial vinegar and honey) but mostly it just takes time. A habit is a pattern of self-reinforcing processes. A Princeton study suggests that about forty percent of what we do during the course of each day is purely habitual. Dr. Keith thinks that’s a conservative number. In his forthcoming book, Integral Mindfulness: From Clueless to Dialed In, he explains that to change something is to first be aware of it. Observation plus compassion equals mindfulness, and that’s your primary tool for regulating existing habits and creating new ones. Keith learned from Ken Wilber that the universe is composed of habits that are including and transcending each other through the mechanism of chaos. The nature of chaos is that it seeks coherence (involution). That’s a force as powerful as gravity. Systems naturally want coherence so they create habitual ways of being. It’s life’s general shape or mode of growth. Every once in a while a stable state is disturbed, there’s a disintegration and then a re-integration into something different. The universe has reorganized and created a habit that is more complex. Those more complex habits appear simpler but they’re not. “You could say humans have a habit of self transcendence,” Dr. Keith Witt A hundred years ago, William James famously declared that it took twenty-one days to create a habit. Modern neuroscience would say he wasn’t too far off. Integrative neurons start creating hard wired circuits back to your amygdala after about thirty days of doing something different. A spiritual teacher of mine named Sylvia used to say the most powerful thing we have is our attention, and in that moment when you realize you have the power to switch the energy from point A (your habit) to point B (your new intention) it is the most powerful moment in your life. Sometimes you have to apply that attention over and over and over until it begins choosing itself. Saying no to one thing by saying yes to another is called a reciprocal inhibitor. Studies have shown that people are twenty-five times more successful if they try to cultivate a new habit rather than just resist the bad one. So instead of smoking a cigarette, do a breathing exercise. Instead of eating a bag of chips, take a walk. It’s hard work, so it helps to get excited, and have someone that inspires you and embodies where you want to go. Even better yet, get that person to coach you. If you can engage repeatedly in the process where you go to the edge of where you’re competent and you make a mistake, correct it, make a mistake, correct it…that is a growth mindset. You have to be willing to be intimate with your weakness. An integrally informed mindfulness can give you a higher quality of self-awareness. Jeff often likens it to Google Earth, where you can view the whole picture and also zoom in to a precise address. There’s just more information in that kind of granularity — lines of development, what quadrant you’re operating in, your state of consciousness. Even your typology can be likened to a bundle of habits that you’re predisposed to perform, and knowing what those are can be immensely helpful. Integral is a developmental system in four quadrants. This is where it really trumps 20th century developmental psychology. 20th century developmental psychology shifts quadrants unconsciously and it’s frankly quite confusing, but integral doesn’t do that. So you can see the healthy expression of your current developmental level and what your next developmental level is. You can adjust yourself in terms of observing your good and bad habits and start cultivating good habits that involve horizontal health, which is more healthy with your current worldview, and vertical health which encourages you to move forward.   – Dr. Keith Witt That self observation, even if it has compassion in it, is still coming from a worldview, a specific perspective. But you’re aware of it and you’re aware of others that are available to you. You know what’s more healthy and less healthy and more or less what serves development. That’s a superior form of mindfulness. But then it gets really interesting. Earlier in life, when you’re in a Socialized Mind stage, the culture around you largely determines what your habits will be. As you evolve — if you evolve — you move into a Self-Authoring stage of development, where you are cultivating the ability to expand your choices and shape your own habits. People moving into second tier consciousness, or what can loosely be correlated with Kegan’s Self-Transforming stage, begin to find something very different. It feels like they start losing choice. Why? Because development goes in a particular direction and the lines converge towards service to God and service to the world. And so after a while your life starts informing you on the habits that you’re going to have to change and the habits that you’re going to have to cultivate, and that’s self-transforming mind.  – Dr. Keith Witt It feels like you begin to lose choice because in a way, you do. The deeper currents become more available and conscious to us as we develop and in general they lead us to habits that are more beautiful, good and true. You’re also unlikely to be rigid about them. Jeff says that cultivating second tier consciousness often feels to him like he’s “being lived.” I can relate to that. “At this stage in the game it feels like a lot of it is just unfurling the sails, and allowing the moment to inform where I’m going and what I’m doing and what’s appropriate. What’s the best use of Jeff in this moment, in this day?”  Losing choice turns out to be a higher form of liberation. So enjoy this latest installment of The Shrink & The Pundit and let us know what you think on Facebook or Twitter.

A GREEN ECONOMIST ADVANCES, A GREEN ENVIRONMENTALIST SURRENDERS EPISODE 91 April 22, 1970 was the first Earth Day Using mountains of data to make the case that capitalism, left to its own devices, concentrates money in the hands of the few at the top, French economist Thomas Piketty is making a splash among the economic intelligentsia in the U.S. with the publication of his new book, Capital in the 21st Century. Debuting at number one in Amazon book sales, and receiving rave reviews from mainstream media and economists, Piketty has made the rounds of policy makers in Washington DC and New York, challenging the conventional economic orthodoxy that modern capitalism is a great generator of equality. He makes the case that the flatter economic distribution enjoyed by the West after the two world wars was less a feature of laissez faire economics and more a result of the wartime deconstruction of the previous trusts and multi-generational family fortunes. This looks like a significant shift in elite thinking that may help usher in more egalitarian economic policies over time. It supports Said Dawlabani’s thesis in his book Memenomics: The Next Generation Economic System, which I have examined at length in an earlier Daily Evolver episode, that the Orange altitude economy launched by Ronald Reagan in the 80’s may be re-orienting itself to more Green altitude egalitarian impulses. Along those lines, Piketty advocates raising progressive tax rates up to 80% for the highest earners as well as a worldwide tax on wealth. These are radical ideas to be sure, and are receiving the expected jeers from the political right, but if his thesis is borne out it will begin to change the conversation. Evolutionarily it’s right on schedule; as Piketty said in an interview with the Huffington Post Live last week, “income inequality is only getting started, and this century could look a lot more like the deeply unequal 18th and 19th centuries than the more-egalitarian 20th.” More charts about Piketty’s inequality story here. EARTH DAY 2014 In the second half of the call I honor Earth Day with an update on global climate change, and a look some of the reactions to the recent series of I.P.C.C. (International Panel on Climate Change) reports from the United Nations. The issue is, of course, vastly polarized at the moment with predictable responses from both the climate deniers and alarmists (as the political right and left are known to each other). One reaction to the climate controversy that is a bit outside the box is that of Paul Kingsnorth, a lifelong environmentalist from Britain, who is leading the way into a new relationship with global climate change: surrender. In a major profile in last week’s New York Times Sunday Magazine he shared his views on the “human machine and the age of ecocide.” I had a lot of friends who were writing about climate change and doing a lot of good work on it. I was just listening and looking at the facts and thinking: Wow, we are really screwed here. We are not going to stop this from happening. Everything had gotten worse. You look at every trend that environmentalists like me have been trying to stop for fifty years, and every single thing had gotten worse. And I thought: I can’t do this anymore. I can’t sit here saying: “Yes, comrades, we must act! We only need one more push, and we’ll save the world!” I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it! So what do I do? The first thing that Kingsnorth did was draft a manifesto…called “Uncivilization,” it was an intense, brooding document that vilified progress. “There is a fall coming,” it announced. “After a quarter-century of complacency, in which we were invited to believe in bubbles that would never burst, prices that would never fall…Hubris has been introduced to Nemesis.” Five years ago Kingsnorth founded The Dark Mountain Project, a loose organization with a difficult-to-pin-down mission: “When you ask Kingsnorth about Dark Mountain, he speaks of mourning, grief and despair.” Kingsnorth explains: “Whenever I hear the word ‘hope’ these days, I reach for my whiskey bottle. “It seems to me to be such a futile thing. What does it mean? What are we hoping for? And why are we reduced to something so desperate? Surely we only hope when we are powerless?” The NYT article also features Dougald Hine, Dark Mountain’s co-founder, who compares coming to terms with the scope of ecological loss to coming to terms with a terminal illness: “The feeling is a feeling of despair to begin with, but within that space other things begin to come through.” Yet arriving at this acute state of “awareness of what’s worth doing with the time you’ve got left” isn’t always easy for Dark Mountain’s followers. “Some people come here, and they get very excited by the fact that people are inspired, and they go: ‘Right! Great! So what’s the plan?’  Hind and Kingsnorth have worked hard to check this impulse, seeing Dark Mountain as a space to set aside what Kingsnorth refers to as “activist-y” urges. “People think that abandoning belief in progress, abandoning the belief that if we try hard enough we can fix this mess, is a nihilistic position,” Hine said. “They think we’re saying: ‘Screw it. Nothing matters.’ But in fact all we’re saying is: ‘Let’s not pretend we’re not feeling despair. Let’s sit with it for a while. Let’s be honest with ourselves and with each other. And then as our eyes adjust to the darkness, what do we start to notice?” Kingsnorth, Hine and the Dark Mountain movement perfectly distill the dystopian view of many anti-modernists within the Green altitude in general and the environmental movement in particular. They see “the human machine” as sometime other than natural, a cancer on the planet that is at odds with right living. The idea that humans would invent technological solutions to climate change, such as carbon sequestration or geoengineering, are not only futile but immoral. “For Kingsnorth, the notion that technology will stave off the most catastrophic effects of global warming is not just wrong, it’s repellent — a distortion of the proper relationship between humans and the natural world.” I disagree, of course, and think an evolutionary view embraces the idea that, as Devin Wilson of Integral Life puts it, “technology is a force of nature.”  History — including the history of environmental movement — is replete with examples of how technology has fixed the very problems it originally caused. Indeed, this is one of the great themes of the evolution of humanity. Nevertheless, I am touched by the courage and bracing honesty of Paul Kingsnorth and the Dark Mountain folks. I do think they have identified an important step in the evolution out of the confusion, hopelessness and malaise that infects so many people at the Green altitude: acceptance leading to the realization that the only way out is through. From the New York Times profile: “The author and activist Naomi Klein , who has known Kingsnorth for many years, says Dark Mountain has given people a forum in which to be honest about their sense of dread and loss. ‘Faced with ecological collapse, which is not a foregone result, but obviously a possible one, there has to be a space in which we can grieve…And then we can actually change.’” Let’s hope so — and chase it with a nice shot of whiskey. Listen on the player or download below. Need some help to listen on your mobile device? Click here. You can also find The Daily Evolver on Integral Life or iTunes. Want to comment on this post? Click here and scroll down.

DAILY EVOLVER EPISODE 90               We started this week with a couple of quick items: first a comment on Brendan Eich, who was pushed out as the CEO of Mozilla (makers of the Firefox browser) because in 2008 he supported Proposition 8, the California voter initiative that banned the state from granting gay marriage. A quick poll on Tuesday evening’s call showed that the vast majority of the callers thought Mozilla’s actions were wrong.  I’m not so sure I agree. I guess I’m for a world without shaming, but till then I’m happy that instead of being shamed for being gay, people are now (in some circles at least) being shamed for being anti-gay. Once again, evolution is beautiful but not always pretty. The second quick item regards economic corruption. I often make the point that what we see in developed countries as “corruption” — powerful people colluding for mutual profit — describes 100% of the economy at pre-modern altitudes. Yet by the time we get to modernity this kind of corruption is criminalized (though, of course, far from eradicated). But what about post-modern corruption; is there anything new and different emerging?  I think we can see a perfect example in Flash Boys, a new book by Michael Lewis that exposes the practice of high speed stock trading, where savvy traders set up shop right next to a stock exchange in order get the millisecond advantage gained by proximity in electronic transactions. I think Time Magazine sums it up well: “More than ever, the economic injustices of the world are made possible by the unequal distribution of information.” DOES POLITICS MAKE US STUPID? In our first major story, we look at an essay published by Ezra Klein, How politics makes us stupid, in which he reported on a study done at Yale University by Law professor Dan Kahan who set out to answer a question that I think most of us have asked, particularly when we’re in a heated political disagreement: “Why don’t facts win arguments?” The researchers started by creating a neutral control experiment: first, they asked people to interpret a data set of four numbers that revealed the efficacy of a skin cream in relieving a rash. The data, presented in quadrant grid, showed the number of people whose rash got better and worse while using the cream, and the number of those whose rash got better and worse while not using the cream. So was the cream effective? As might be expected, the better peoples’ math skills were the better they did at the problem. Next the researchers presented a highly politicized problem: does a ban on concealed handguns increase or reduce crime? Using data sets similar to the skin rash question, (some showing a gun ban cutting crime and some showing a ban increasing it) peoples’ math skills no longer determined how well they did at solving the problem. Ideology did. Liberals and conservatives were both able to solve the problem — but only when it fit their ideology. In fact the better they were at math the better they were able to use the data to support their pre-established political positions. Those with strong math skills were almost twice as likely than those with weak skills to get the problem right when it fit their worldview. As Klein points out: “People weren’t reasoning to get the right answer; they were reasoning to get the answer that they wanted to be right.” This partisan filter is at work throughout all political discourse and flies in the face of the conventional understanding of why we have political disagreements, which Klein calls the More Information Hypothesis, “the belief that many of our most bitter political battles are mere misunderstandings.” He writes: The cause of these misunderstandings? Too little information — be it about climate change, or taxes, or Iraq, or the budget deficit. If only the citizenry were more informed, the thinking goes, then there wouldn’t be all this fighting. It’s a seductive model. It suggests our fellow countrymen aren’t wrong so much as they’re misguided, or ignorant, or — most appealingly — misled by scoundrels from the other party. But the More Information Hypothesis isn’t just wrong. It’s backwards. Cutting-edge research shows that the more information partisans get, the deeper their disagreements become. So what causes this counterfactualism? Dan Kahan, the Yale researcher, calls it Identity Protection Cognition, “a way of avoiding dissonance and estrangement from valued groups.” In other words, we don’t want to risk the disapproval of other people in our political tribe (the lower left quadrant) by challenging the group’s base beliefs and orthodoxies. This makes sense but it doesn’t explain how the individuals in the group get their beliefs in the first place  — and hold them in the face of contrary evidence. I think integral theory offers a better explanation: beliefs flow from the altitude of consciousness development (the upper left quadrant) of the believer. Here’s why consciousness development is a much better predictor of why we hold political beliefs independent of evidence: Amber traditionalists (home of hard-core conservatives) and green postmodernists (home of hard-core liberals), for instance, not only think different things…they think different-LY. They have different receptors and filters for facts. They use different kinds of logic to process the facts, drawing different conclusions and making different meaning. Kahan’s experiments at Yale show this explicitly and it is one of the reasons that political dispositions are so uniform and predictable (for instance people who are pro-gun are also usually anti-abortion and vice versa). This phenomenon pervades our political discourse right up to its apogee: the United States Supreme Court. I’ve always been amazed that professional judges, who are presumed free of prejudice and for whom justice is blind of all but the facts of the case, can so consistently come up with such predictably differing conclusions. But it is indeed the way of things, and more frequently with the current John Roberts court where 22% of all cases are decided by a 5 to 4 majority, broken down by party loyalty (the average of 5 to 4 decisions from 1800 – 1940 was 2%). William Faulk, writing in the last issue of the magazine The Week, says “the Roberts court has issued bitterly polarized, 5-4 rulings on its most controversial cases – including gun control, voting rights, affirmative action, campaign finance law, Obamacare, and gay marriage.” Describing the justices arguing about the recent case where the retail chain Hobby Lobby challenged the contraception mandate in Obamacare, he writes: “The conservative, Catholic male justices recently expressed open sympathy for the Christian-owned company, while the female liberal justices focused on women employees who might be denied contraceptive coverage. It sounded more like a debate on MSNBC or FOX News than a judicial proceeding. “We humble citizens are thus left to wonder: are the good justices dispassionately weighing each case on its constitutional merits, or are they mere ideologues who start off with the desired result and work backward?” It’s enough to give you a rash. DOES THE PAST EVER DIE? In an essay in last week’s Time magazine about the Russia/Ukraine situation, conservative political thinker Robert D. Kaplan makes the case that “in geopolitics there is no modern world and the past never dies.” I could feel another rash coming on until I read his argument. Although I disagree with some of his broader conclusion (details on the call) I also see that, as is often the case, conservative thinking reveals an important piece of the truth that is often missed by liberals. Under the title Geopolitics and the New World Order, Kaplan writes: This isn’t what the 21st century was supposed to look like. The visceral reaction of many pundits, academics and Obama administration officials to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s virtual annexation of Crimea has been disbelief bordering on disorientation. As Secretary of State John Kerry said, ‘it’s really 19th century behavior in the 21st century.”  Well, the “19th century,” as Kerry calls it, lives on and always will. Forget about the world being flat. Forget technology as the great democratizer. Forget the niceties of international law. Territory and the bonds of blood that go with it are central to what makes us human. Well, yes and no. Territory and bonds of blood are more central to what makes us human the lower we are on the altitudes of development. As we evolve in consciousness and culture they matter less and less, till at post-modernity things like bonds of blood are almost irrelevant. I remember what a college classmate of mine from Bosnia said about what surprised her most about America: “here nobody cares what my grandfather did to your grandfather.” Where Kaplan is right, of course, is that most of the people of the world — Ken Wilber often cites 70% or so — are living and thinking at pre-modern altitudes of development. And for them their grandfathers’ behaviors are still alive and online. This is a fact that is sometimes lost on those of us who, raised in the comfort and security of liberal democracies, fail to grasp the motivations of people living at traditional and warrior (red altitude) stages of development.  As Kaplan points out, “a large number of people on this planet, to whom the comfort and stability of a middle-class life is utterly unknown, find war and a barracks existence a step up rather than a step down.” He quotes Martin van Creveld, author of the book The Transformation of War and a military historian at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem: “Fighting in many ways is not a means but an end. Throughout history, for every person who has expressed his horror of war there is another who found in it the most marvelous of all the experiences that are vouchsafed to man, even to the point that he later spent a lifetime boring his descendants by recounting his exploits.” Kaplan goes on to write: “The post-Cold War era was supposed to be about economics, interdependence and universal values trumping the instincts of nationalism and nationalism’s related obsession with the domination of geographic space. But Putin’s actions betray a singular truth, one that the U.S. should remember as it looks outward and around the globe: international relations are still about who can do what to whom.” Conservatives are usually better than liberals at understanding the minds of pre-modern people (they’re evolutionarily closer, after all), so even when they get the big picture wrong, they bring a perspective that integral thinkers are wise to consider. Till next week, keep it intergral! Listen on the player or download below. Need some help to listen on your mobile device? Click here. You can also find The Daily Evolver on Integral Life or iTunes. Want to comment on this post? Click here and scroll down. 

If it was just the genes talking we’d have serial marriages lasting on average four or five years, and we’d cheat on each other every chance we got.  ~Dr. Keith Witt Apparently we’re kind of clueless about intimate attachment in general. According to Dr. Keith we aggrandize romantic love, we’re afraid of sexual lust and we have no idea about long-term attachment. We mix them all up, basically. Ninety percent of the people and couples that come to Keith for help present with a problem in their marriage or primary partnership. That tells us a couple things. One, like many other mammals we’re drawn to pair bond. Most people who are allowed to get married, do. And two, it tells us that marriage is challenging and most of us need some help to learn how to do it well. So why aren’t we taught how to do it? Probably because your marriage is not your parent’s marriage. It’s not even the marriage that you had yesterday. As cultures change marriages must change with them, so a successful marriage fifty years ago is not the same as a successful marriage today. I’ve noticed that the marriages of my parents, my friends, and my friend’s children are all very different. Keith says when you get married you’re not just signing up for one marriage, you’re signing up for many marriages. It’s going to change from romantic infatuation to intimate bonding, to living together, to having children. It’ll change through family, through aging bodies and changing endocrine systems. Each one of those changes is associated with new structures of consciousness around how you hold yourself in the marriage, and how you hold your partner. What makes marriage so challenging is that the relationship needs to be successfully reorganized, consistently, by both people in order to keep working. Despite the constant change, studies have shown us there are specific characteristics present in successful, happy relationships. Author and researcher Nate Bagley found the following things in common: The individuals were dedicated to self care They were committed to helping each other get through anything They trusted each other They had intentionality. They didn’t take their love for granted. They did something everyday to show love for each other There is always going to be conflict though, and couples that want to be together for the long term have to know how to navigate it. Keith says there are a lot of factors, but Bagley discovered a few very important ones: Couples that stay together don’t fight to win, they fight to resolve the conflict. They focus on trying to understand each other and lastly, they really try to be nice to each other. Imagine that! Being nice… There is a way to love. If two people want to get there and they’re willing to take care of themselves and change, they can find a way through to love again and again and again. That’s really the bottom line. If you want to take it down to just one thing, the evolution of consciousness is just getting better and better at finding our way through to love.  ~Dr. Keith Witt When it comes down to brass tacks, couples that can down-regulate anger and up-regulate the positive emotions are ones that are destined for the long term. Easier said than done. Of course, if you have stable access to 2nd tier consciousness then you’re really ahead of the game. People operating at the teal altitude can observe structures of consciousness in themselves and their partners, and as we know from studying development, mindful self-observation accelerates development which gives us response flexibility. In relationship, when you are responding to your partner, to their happiness and suffering, you are definitely accelerating your development. Keith says he’s never seen this researched the way that meditation and other practices have been researched (yet!) but he’s found it to be true in his own life. The relationship itself becomes a container for the updraft of development in both the partners. How inspiring!

THE DAILY EVOLVER LIVE EPISODE 88 This week I focused on a topic that is always front and center in the culture wars: the role of the public sector and the private sector in our lives, and the tension between the two. One story that captures this tension in the U.S. is the Supreme Court hearing of the complaint by Hobby Lobby, a chain of retail stores, seeking an exemption from having to provide “morning after” contraceptives in its employee health care plan under the new terms of Obamacare. The founder of Hobby Lobby, David Green, is a devout Christian who donates half the company’s pre-tax earnings — $500 million so far — to evangelical ministry.  An amber traditionalist at heart (though clearly an orange modernist in his ability to build a very successful business), Green specifically objects to birth-control medications such as “Plan B” that would destroy a fertilized egg. This detail is often missed in media reports which represent the company as objecting to providing any contraception whatsoever. In fact, they are objecting only to the class of “morning after” contraceptives, which they consider to be a form of abortion. As integral practitioners, let’s pause for a moment and enter the worldview of conservative Christians (amber altitude) which is radically different than the worldview of those of us who have become secular at heart. For them the world is an enchanted creation of Almighty God. Likewise, life itself is a gift from God and only God can create it. Being faithful means that we are grateful when God sparks a new life into being, and we joyfully make room. To do otherwise would be to disobey God. At the amber altitude the battle cry is “God and Country,” with God coming in first and country second. Humanity is corrupted, fallen, and although we have to “give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s,” the ultimate purpose of life is to be righteous and holy under a Law that supersedes the puny laws of man. It makes perfect sense: to whom are you going to owe your primary allegiance, the crowd in Washington or the Creator of the universe? If you are a child of God living in His enchanted creation, that decision is easy. A similar issue surfaced in a recent controversy out of Arizona, where the legislature passed a law defending the “religious freedom” of private businesses to, for instance, deny to bake a cake for a gay wedding. In this case the Republican governor vetoed the legislation. The reason? There was too much blowback from the secular business community, who feared an economic boycott of the state, particularly the upcoming Super Bowl scheduled in Phoenix next year. So it turns out that the dollar is almighty too! In fact one of the most potent evolutionary forces in modern culture is the trumping of money over traditional ideology (orange altitude over amber altitude). As a result of the Arizona outcome, similar initiatives promoting this conservative brand of religious freedom in other states have been seriously undermined. This question of corporate personhood shows up in other cases as well, most notably the Supreme Court case Citizens United, which lifted the limit corporations and labor unions can donate to independent political groups. HOW THE PRIVATE SECTOR EMERGED For most of human history, of course, there was no such thing as a private sector. The tribal elders (in the magenta altitude), the warlord (in red altitude) or the king (in the amber altitude) could control your life in whatever way they saw fit. In the middle ages, we saw the gradual emergence of charters given to various guilds who could exert some independent control over their trade: blacksmiths, farmers, weavers, barrel makers – even executioners! In the 1500s we saw the emergence of mercantilism, the creation of the first great companies including the Dutch East India Company and the British East India Company. These were important emergents in that they incorporated multiple shareholders who enjoyed a limited liability into a larger whole. It wasn’t until the late 1700s, with the emergence of mature modernist thinking (orange altitude), that Adam Smith, and other economists began laying out the theoretical justification for a completely new emergent in cultural ecology: the private sector. Fundamental to the modern private sector is the principle of the “legal person”: incorporations of people that have the right to operate in the public sphere as if they were an individual person. They have the right to own things, to buy and sell, and to enter into contracts with each other under the safeguards of a legal system that recognizes the fundamental sovereignty of the people, not the government. It’s an amazing evolutionary achievement of humanity! The history of corporations is an evolutionary tale of increasing consciousness and care. Corporations stopped selling slaves in the 1860’s, stopped working children in the 1940’s and stopped racial discrimination in the 1960’s. They have drastically increased workplace safety and reduced pollution. And in each of these cases they were forced to by the public sector. Today’s corporations are well civilized, by any historical standard. But not nearly civilized enough, according to the green, postmodern left, for whom the very idea of corporate personhood is repulsive. The green altitude’s antipathy towards big business is evolutionarily right on schedule as green is emerging out of the orange altitude, which is the home of corporate thinking. Green sees the downsides of the corporate mindset that puts money above all else. The project of green is to put the brakes on the rampant growth ethic of business, which is a threat to a finite global ecosystem, and to redistribute the wealth capitalist system to those who have been left out. In contrast, Amber traditionalists have antipathy towards big government, a position that also makes perfect sense when viewed evolutionarily. Amber traditionalism is emerging out of the brutalities of Red, where the King’s men could come and take anything they wanted, including your daughter. The project of Amber is to create order in the culture at large and in peoples’ individual psyches, a project that is articulated in documents such as the Ten Commandments and the Buddhist Eightfold Path. As integralists we want to bring forth the best of all of these worldviews, and to realize that the contention between the systems is the source of their evolutionary power.  The public sector and private sector provide the two poles out of which a new synthesis emerges, a synthesis that is not a compromise or murky middle, but a new emergent that takes on the best qualities of both. We are seeing this happen as corporations begin to civilize themselves. The classic Milton Friedman definition of corporate mission being to create profits for their shareholders is becoming passé among leading edge business thinkers. Prominent among these is John Mackey, CEO and founder of Whole Foods Markets, an 11 billion-dollar company, and who with Raj Sisodia has founded Conscious Capitalism, an organization promoting evolutionary business management based on four key principles: Higher Purpose: what the company is dedicated to doing beyond just making a profit. Conscious Leadership: the leader functions as a servant of the purpose of the organization and of the people she or he is leading. Stakeholder Orientation: the organization exists not just to serve the stockholders, but all the shareholders who are essential for the company to succeed: employees, customers, suppliers, funders, supportive communities and a life-sustaining ecosystem. Conscious Culture: a focus on “we” not “I”, which builds trust between a company’s team members and its other stakeholders. In an essay in the Harvard Business Review, Mackey explains Conscious Capitalism further: The word “conscious” has many connotations for people. We define it as being mindful and awake, seeing reality as it is rather than as we wish it to be, recognizing and being accountable for all the consequences of our actions, having a better sense of what is right and what is wrong, rejecting violence as a way to solve problems and being in harmony with nature. We [therefore] hold these truths to be self-evident: business is good because it creates value, it is ethical because it is based on voluntary exchange, it is noble because it can elevate our existence and it is heroic because it lifts people out of poverty and creates prosperity. Free enterprise capitalism is the most powerful system for social cooperation and human progress ever conceived. It is one of the most compelling ideas we humans have ever had. But we can aspire to even more. On the public sector side of the street we also see a new synthesis made up of ideas and practices that have been taken from the private sector: entrepreneurship. For instance, charter schools inject a spirit of creativity, entrepreneurship and customization to an public education system that has become hidebound. We’ve discussed this in previous Daily Evolver episodes, particularly #85. So relax: the contention between the public and private sectors is supposed to be happening. Neither side is going to win or lose. Their natural struggle has brought us a long way and promises to take us further as new, more integral structures emerge. Listen or download here. Need some help to listen on your mobile device? Click here.

I started the call this week by responding to a couple listeners who think I’ve gone a little soft on modernity (Orange altitude). The first, David O’Conner from Australia, critiqued me by saying, “you believe a little too much in the evolutionary goodness of Orange without sufficiently taking into account what is not so good about Orange.” Good point. So let me self-correct a bit. Every stage of development comes online bearing a dignity and a disaster. For instance, on the upside Red brings on the juice of individual power; on the downside it gives rise to plunder and patriarchy. Amber civilizes us, but into a conformity that ultimately becomes stultifying. Each stage experiences radical new powers that are used for both good and ill. The powers that emerge in Orange are jaw-dropping in all four quadrants: in the exterior quadrants, science and technology turn dirt into Chevys, create “the indoors” and triple life-spans. Orange becomes world-centric and modern people are able to mobilize resources from all corners of the planet. Money flows, as well as communication and travel. In the interior quadrants, humanity abandons millennia of dogma and superstition in favor of observation and reason.  We wake up to our own individual sovereignty and ascribe equality of status to every citizen under the rule of law (not men). Astonishing! But the interiors and the exteriors do not always come online at the same time. People with modern exteriors often harbor pre-modern interiors that are quite provincial and even ethnocentric. This is a dangerous stage of the game: modern technology in the hands of a pre-modern mentality (think of a 12 year old with a chainsaw), and it is the source of much of the downside of Orange, particularly in its early stages: On the war front, we are able to fight at exponentially higher levels of lethality. Although genocide is old hat to us humans, modernity introduces the ability to industrialize it with gas chambers and atomic bombs. Modern economies do away with the age-old hunt for calories, but deliver this gift by means of industrial mono-farms that create disease and obesity, and meat factories where living beings are treated as units of production. Modernity does away with state-sanctioned slavery, but creates corporate fiefdoms in developing countries with little regard to the culture it is uprooting. Indeed modernity creates a new philosophy to support its new power: social darwinism, an application of the law of “survival of the fittest” to human affairs in which the exploitation (they see it as the “civilization” or “modernization”) of weaker people and cultures is justified as the march of progress. Currently, one of the most threatening downsides of our modernizing world is its global environmental impact. People have always exploited their environments to the degree that they were able. But you can only do so much damage with a digging stick or a team of horses. Bring on technology and you suddenly have hundreds and thousands of horsepower at your disposal stripping down forests, dragging mile-long fishing nets, pumping rivers dry and belching poison into the air. Modernists are able to see and rectify environmental degradation in their local environments, but they don’t see or have the will to rectify it on the global scale … until they do. Feeling into the larger global commons defines movement into the next stage: post-modernity (Green altitude). At this stage of consciousness we see that although any environmental violation may be local the larger effect is global: ocean acidification and climate change as examples.  Because Green sees the finiteness of the planet system its orienting principle becomes sustainability, not growth (which is Orange’s orienting principle) and post-modernism sets out to right the wrongs of modernity. And the culture wars ensue in all their gory glory. One of the leading warriors against pernicious modernity is Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. She was recommended to me by listener Scott Bogart of Alberta, Canada as a tonic against over-valorizing modernity. Klein’s thesis is that capitalism grows by finding (or creating) social disaster then rebuilding things in an image more to their liking. In her introduction she writes, “I am writing a book about shock. About how countries are shocked—by wars, terror attacks, coups d’état and natural disasters. And then how they are shocked again—by corporations and politicians who exploit the fear and disorientation of this first shock to push through economic shock therapy. And then how people who dare to resist these shock politics are, if necessary, shocked for a third time—by police, soldiers and prison interrogators.” So far so good, and indeed all of this has happened in different proportions throughout the world as modernity has come online. But while I don’t disagree with most of her facts, I want to point out a couple things I think she misses: The modern world that is created by “disaster capitalism” is usually better than the one that was washed away. I’ll address Klein’s signature Shock Doctrine example, the one she starts with and uses to lay out her case against disaster capitalism. It is the story of the New Orleans school system after Hurricane Katrina ten years ago. The public schools were in ruins and thus education privateers, led by economist Milton Friedman, saw it as a chance to come in and install charter schools, a public/private hybrid. She writes: Milton Friedman, grand guru of the movement for unfettered capitalism and the man credited with writing the rulebook for the contemporary, hypermobile global economy. Ninety-three years old and in failing health, “Uncle Miltie,” as he was known to his followers, nonetheless found the strength to write an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal three months after the levees broke. “Most New Orleans schools are in ruins,” Friedman observed, “as are the homes of the children who have attended them. The children are now scattered all over the country. This is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity to radically reform the education system. Friedman’s radical idea was that instead of spending a portion of the billions of dollars in reconstruction money on rebuilding and improving New Orleans’ existing public school system, the government should provide families with vouchers, which they could spend at private institutions, many run at a profit, that would be subsidized by the state. It was crucial, Friedman wrote, that this fundamental change not be a stopgap but rather “a permanent reform. And that’s what happened. She goes on, apparently unaware of the positive case she is making for the privateers: In sharp contrast to the glacial pace with which the levees were repaired and the electricity grid was brought back online, the auctioning off of New Orleans’ school system took place with military speed and precision. Within nineteen months, with most of the city’s poor residents still in exile, New Orleans’ public school system had been almost completely replaced by privately run charter schools. Nobody ever said capitalism wasn’t efficient! Klein wrote her account of the New Orleans school overhaul shortly after it begun.  Seven years later we have more understanding of how New Orleans is handling the shock. Last week the fair-minded Christian Science Monitor published a major article on the New Orleans school system. They report that indeed nine in ten students today attend charter schools in New Orleans, the highest percentage in the country: Gone is a traditional central district office that assigns students to schools, hires and promotes teachers in negotiation with a union, and controls everything from budgets to textbooks. Instead, families here choose among charter schools citywide that – in exchange for their autonomy – have to meet certain benchmarks in order to have their charters renewed. The results? Test scores and graduation rates have climbed steadily. And while there are fewer public school students than before the storm – 43,000, down from 65,000 – the demographics are similar: 90 percent African-American (compared with 94 percent pre-Katrina) and 82 percent low-income (up from 77 percent). A surge of extra resources has helped: In 2010-11, for instance, per-pupil spending in New Orleans was about $13,000, compared with just under $11,000 statewide. So it’s pretty promising so far, and the article goes on to point out how other communities, especially urban districts with chronically under-performing schools, are using New Orleans as an example to emulate. Obama’s education department is supporting the movement with large, high-profile grants in several test cities. I wonder how many New Orleaners, including the most disadvantaged, would choose to go back to the pre-Katrina system that existed before their exploitation by Milton Friedman and his ilk. Which brings me to another aspect of “disaster capitalism” that is surprising and certainly missed by Naomi Klein: in most cases, the majority of people affected by it support it.   Let’s take another key example Klein uses to illuminate The Shock Doctrine, the rise of the oligarchs in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. Klein tells of how these feudal strong men exploited the chaos of the disintegration of the state to build vast business empires and fortunes. This is undoubtedly true, and the alpha oligarch is Vladimir Putin himself, who has wealth estimated at 40 billion dollars stashed around the world. So how do the Russians feel about that?  An American president would love to be so popular with his people. Putin’s approval ratings hover around 65 – 70% (Obama is at 42%). 69% back his incursion into Ukraine. Economic optimism in Russia is over 50%; in America it’s currently at 29%. How does this happen? Ken Wilber’s AQAL altitudes of development help us understand.  Most Russians, although well educated and cultured, are still largely traditional (Amber altitudes) in their view of state power. They are used to autocrats running things; that’s how it always is in Amber. They are willing to tolerate leaders skimming some cream off the top as long as the economy is growing. In Russia it is, and under Putin economic growth has been reasonably strong and steady. People at these altitudes will also tolerate some diminishment of personal freedom as long as the streets are safe, and in today’s Russia they are. So Putin has the peoples’ support, and as Moscow integralist Victor Shiryaev pointed out in my interview with him a couple weeks ago, many Russians refer to the pre-Putin 1990’s, under the regime of Boris Yeltsin, as “the dark age.” In the West, particularly the US, we have our own strata of population with Amber interiors, the social conservatives and nationalistic hawks, and they too love tough-guy leaders. A circumspect and nuanced leader like Obama actually leaves them feeling insecure and is the source of much of their reflexive antipathy towards him. Now of course, from a more developed Green perspective — where Naomi Klein is living — it is the authoritarian leader who becomes scary and repulsive. Welcome to evolutionary progress! It is this evolution that will bring on the end of Putinism, if not Putin himself, over the long run. We just don’t know how long the run is. Evolution, while beautiful, is not pretty and we have to remember that we too have had our history with crony capitalism and we’re not done yet.  Evolving Russia will find its way too. All in all, what limits the value of The Shock Doctrine to me is that it is a Green critique of Orange. In Klein’s view disaster capitalists are the bad guys who exploit the innocent victims who just want to get back to their old way of life. I see it differently: that disasters are always an opportunity for radically better structures to be built, and this is true for life at any scale. At a macro scale, for instance, the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs also made room for great arising of mammals. When our house burns down we strive to build a better one. At the personal level, a divorce or job loss may be a catalyst for a much better life. The struggle between Orange and Green is a fruitful one, and we Integral practitioners want to appreciate both views of the world, as we find them in other people and as we find them struggling in our own minds. In so doing we have a better chance of bringing the gifts of each worldview to the project of building a better world. WHAT TO MAKE OF YOU, MILLENNIALS? I ended the call with a look at a major Pew study this week that seeks to reveal the soul of American Millennials, our youngest adult generation, ages 18 – 33. The upshot of the research? It turns out the youngsters are less supportive of institutions like religions, political parties, even marriage and career — and more tuned into their own networks of people and organizations, networks which are much larger than those of previous generations. They are more multicultural and less patriotic than any generation in history. These changes represent welcome evolutionary movement into world-centrism, which is less dangerous and more fertile than nation-centrism. One striking irony: Millennials are at the same time the first generation to be economically less well off than the previous generation at the same age … and the most optimistic! So human race, welcome to your future! As an evolutionary I am hooked on studying what is emergent, and am so happy to encounter this new generation, both through the Pew study and directly through my friendships with the the Millennials I know. A couple smart millennial listeners spoke up on the call, and I will be interviewing more as the world turns. Which bring me to one final quality of the Millennials that impresses me: they are actually willing to talk with the old folks. That’s more than I can say for us don’t-trust-anyone-over-thirty boomers at their age. Ah well, we’re all just right on schedule!

A CONVERSATION WITH DR. KEITH WITT (AUDIO) The “shadow” is a Jungian term that means the hidden aspects of our psyche that motivate us but that we are unaware of. For instance, we may experience an anger that comes out of nowhere, an inexplicable attraction or aversion to other people, a depression that descends in times of stress. Photo by Taylor Marie McCormick In this month’s installment of The Shrink and the Pundit, Dr. Keith Witt, integral psychotherapist extraordinaire, approaches the subject of psychological shadow from an unusual angle: neurobiology. As good integralists we’re aware that for every interior state of mind (upper left quadrant) there is an exterior neurological corollary in the brain (upper right quadrant). Whatever you’ve repressed or negated, projected or idolized, it’s likely the function of a neural network that served you at one time, but is not necessarily serving you now. This explains why psychological problems can usually be dealt with more effectively when a body-based therapy is included. “When people talk about somatic psychotherapy, to me that’s a redundancy,” says Dr. Keith. “All psychotherapy is somatic.” We’re always working with a set of values (upper left quadrant) that are neurologically programmed (upper right quadrant). “I don’t decide to get excited or angry … I discover myself in the midst of that and then have to decide what to do with it.” Keith explains. Your autonomic nervous system can be rewired by a traumatic event and stay that way until you do the necessary healing work of reintegrating that memory so it has less and less trauma associated with it. For instance, let’s say somebody insults or threatens you. Your nervous system may constellate a defensive reaction instantaneously. If your pulse goes above 100 you’re in a diffuse physiological arousal and have passed a threshold where you may lose the capacity for self-reflection and empathy. A therapist who is aware of this will help you decide how best to respond: when it’s important to stay in relation to the conflict and when it’s best to take a walk. The coping mechanisms you learn in a relaxed state are not necessarily accessible in a defensive state. All shadow work requires taking parts of yourself that have become dissociated and re-connecting to them in a safe environment with positive intent. This is the basis of many of the new and very effective therapies for trauma recovery, including PTSD. “Add compassion and let it happen,” Keith says. As always, Dr. Keith is a fascinating conversation partner. Have a listen. Listen or download below. Need some help to listen on your mobile device? Click here.

Dr. Keith Witt joined me and about 100 integralists from all over the world at The Integral Living Room gathering here in Boulder a few weeks ago, where we explored approaches to creating a higher-level interpersonal space among us. Because Keith’s ideas were so influential to the design of this event, I was interested in hearing about his experience and sharing my own. Street art by Borondo from Spain The Living Room was a sophisticated flex-flow workshop where we tried to hold a framework that was tight enough to give the gathering a structure, but loose enough that it could change as needed. We wanted information and influence to flow both ways, and for the we-space to tell us what it wanted to become. The entity created by the “we” seems to have it’s own destiny. It’s a tricky thing to pull off but we had an amazing group of people present and they were up to the task! In this episode of The Shrink & The Pundit Keith and I talk a little bit about how we felt during and after the event. We talk about the difference between trans-rhetorical practice and integral trans-rhetorical practice, how to engage with other people in looking for a deeper truth that neither side knows yet, and letting yourself be influenced and led by the power of the we-space itself. We also talked about the things that didn’t work quite as well, and what we would like to see more of in future gatherings. We both agree that one of the greatest gifts of community is its ability to reflect back to individuals the truth of who they are, and especially to help people see where they are spiking into higher levels of genius in one or more lines of development. Finding ways to evoke more of this is high on the list for future events. Keith and I were both especially inspired by the young people who attended the gathering. We both see wisdom and awareness in these young twenty-somethings that we would normally associate with elders (and which was conspicuously absent in our boomer generation when we were in our youth). Integral consciousness is indeed arising earlier in individuals than ever before. Keith and I concur that these folks provide the best evidence of all that our future is in good hands. Hear the full dialog here… You can listen to the podcast right from this page by pressing play on the audio player below. Or you can download the podcast to your computer and put it on a mobile device, such as an iPod. If you’re not sure how to do that, click here.

A dialog on Joseph Campbell and the hero’s journey with Dr. Keith Witt Before I encountered the work of Ken Wilber, Joseph Campbell was lighting me up with his synthesis of the myths of all cultures.  Like Ken, Campbell had a gift for the meta-narrative, for seeing patterns in seemingly disparate times and systems of thought. In this dialog with Dr. Keith Witt (who is also a huge Campbell fan), we discuss the gift of Campbell’s formulation of The Hero’s Journey, which is his name for the basic pattern of the great myths, and which turns out to be a guide for our own lives. Although told in wildly different ways throughout the world, the basic story is the same. It begins with the “call”, which is often a big blunder or a disaster that leads you to what Campbell called the belly of the whale. If you say yes to the calling you find yourself on the threshold where you have to leave the old ways behind and venture into the unknown. Guides will appear to help you on your journey, and though some may betray you, if you make it through you will be the master of two worlds. Most of all, you’ll have a gift to bring back and share with your people. When I first read about the hero’s journey in Campbell’s classic book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, I remember feeling a tremendous amount of relief. I stopped blaming myself so much for my problems. Life is supposed to be like this. It is difficult but those difficulties have meaning. Like most of us in the modern world, I was taught the opposite: that hardship and travails are to be avoided. If things are too challenging then you are doing something wrong. The hero’s journey is dangerous, but remaining where you are is no picnic either. Sometimes people just plain decline their “hero’s call”, which leads to a stunted life or even death. Even if you say yes there’s no guarantee that you’ll make it through. People get dismembered or find themselves in the land of the lotus eaters and decide they will never leave. But usually the transformation causes us to want to bring the gift back to our people, to share what we’ve learned. What a wonderful thing: your travails have meaning. I was also deeply inspired to realize that I myself am the hero of my own story, and that I am daily encountering magic and guides, if only I pay attention. I also realized that I can sprinkle a little fairy dust on other people, and be a guide for them. One of the characteristics of Integral consciousness is that magic comes back online. Not the gripped, “domination magic” of the magenta stage of development, but a recognition, scientifically vetted, that we are riding the updraft of 13.8 billion years of emergence toward ever-unfolding goodness, truth and beauty. And that as we realize this we are able to consciously influence our story, our evolution, and co-create our own heroic journeys with a loving and intelligent kosmos. Listen or download here:

In this installment of  The Shrink & the Pundit, Dr. Keith Witt  and I discuss the emotional constellations of shame. As a therapist who has worked with thousands of clients, Keith has seen the devastating effect shame can have on psychological health. “It can literally kill us,” he explains. It can also save us. Because shame is so powerful and central to our psyches, it is a great leverage point for metabolizing our dysfunctions. Shame is a social emotion and first comes on line in small children as a response to the inevitable disapproval from authority figures. It is the prime engine behind the development of the defensive states and patterns that create amplified or numbed emotions, distorted perspectives, destructive impulses, reduced empathy and inability to self-reflect. As we let ourselves see and feel into the textures of our own shame we can begin to witness the admonitions of our “inner critic,” as well as the subtle energy and somatic patterning that keep it anchored in our psyche. This awareness itself is curative (to paraphrase Fritz Perls) and is a key to the psychotherapeutic process. It is also a worthy form of integral practice. As usual, Brother Keith has thought it through beautifully, and you can listen to him explain (below)… Dr. Keith Witt is an integral psychotherapist extraordinaire, and my conversation partner for The Shrink & the Pundit dialog series. Having practiced in Santa Barbara for nearly forty years, conducting over 50,000 therapeutic sessions, Keith knows the human animal up close and personal. Keith has written several integrally-informed books, including Waking Up: Psychotherapy as Art, Spirituality and Science, The Gift of Shame, and his latest: 100 Reasons Not to Have a Secret Affair. Listen or download here: