More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
September 17, 2021 - January 23, 2022
Naturally, Sue out-states Betty. But she is fundamentally blind to the tragedies of reality that Betty knows first-hand.
She will speak of universal love and sisterhood, but her eyes will glaze over into a blank stare when confronted with any of the real, meaningless terror that is also part of reality: full stop—denial.
When someone out-depths us, it means that they see either a seriousness that we fail to recognize, that our personality and expressions in life-goals, taste and arts are all superficial and frivolous—or that we have entirely missed out on some greater meaning in life and are in effect experiencing a quite reduced and impoverished existence.
When you are out-depthed, you are suddenly faced with the limits of your own reality; you are dropped into an abyss of terrifying nothingness.
Under these circumstances it becomes difficult not to feel very alone and alienated—and not to harbor a subtle anger towards our all-too-shallow social surroundings. And we are likely to eagerly, sometimes hysterically, seek to have our depths met, recognized and included.
It is much easier to create and maintain social settings and institutions that revolve around lower depth: It takes considerably less sensitivity and skill to set up a manual labor team, a movie night or a game of golf, than it does to set up an a successful psychotherapeutic treatment, a genuine talk about the meaning of life or a truly sublime shared spiritual experience.
In a way, we are talking about the opposite problem from the one that shows up in spiritual communities, where everyone pretends to be of higher state than they really are: In mainstream society, we generally pretend to have less depth than we really do.
As I see it, what the wisdom people are sensing is the importance of seeing inner dimensions of people and society and the possibility of an active and deliberate development of these.
Wisdom, after all, is most often just taken to mean: “you folks should be more like me”. This way, wisdom is simply the speaker’s received wisdom.
Wisdom is great depth, plain and simple. Nothing more, nothing less. So, the way I use the term, wisdom has to do with things like spirituality and transcendence but not really with being smart or “proficient at living a good life”.
These vMemes seem to develop as people become more well-off, not just materially, but socially as well.
the eco-feminists and critical sociologists don’t see why mainstream society is so blindly capitalist, anthropocentric and materialist (because they’re ORANGE; it’s not capitalism or its ideology—it’s the development, stupid!),
critics of immigration in Europe tell us that Arab culture is not compatible with Western culture (even if culture matters, the crux is not differences in culture, the modernized Arabs are doing very well—it’s the development, stupid!).
We live, essentially, in a retarded world. Our value systems do not correspond to the society we live in. Our ways of seeing, sensing, feeling, acting and understanding do not correspond to the very society that we ourselves have created.
Your effective value meme is a kind of average between your complexity, code, state and depth.
You can out-complex someone else, or be out-complexed by someone of higher cognitive stage. You can out-code someone else, or be out-coded by someone who has installed a more advanced symbol-stage. You can out-state someone else, or be out-stated by someone who has greater wellness and/or more spiritual experiences. You can out-depth someone else, or be out-depthed by someone who has successfully internalized a wider range of subjective states than you have.
both state and depth offer hefty premiums or penalties to our effective value meme.
Profound experiences of higher states and the development of great inner depth (of the “light” or “dark” kind), tend to let you see beyond the confines of your own society, pointing you towards more universal issues, which can in effect help you manifest higher value memes than the people around you.
Up until this point, the interests of the group or tribe have been the basis of morality. But in postfaustianism all people who serve the true faith will have their souls salvaged.
The modern value meme encapsulates what mainstream Westerners are like: They believe in human rights, progress, science, democracy, civil liberties, fair competition, rule of law. They may or may not be religious, but their faith is kept as a more private concern and generally not relied upon as a source of authority in politics and debates.
everything in reality is more or less about people and their needs. So you have no problem with mass-killing and torturing animals for the most trivial of human concerns, such as sausage or profit.
The Postmodern value meme generally doesn’t believe in “progress”, but rather that societies change over time. After all, can you say that today’s society is really “better” than medieval times, given all the environmental degradation, materialist over-consumption, loneliness and anxiety?
The need for a sense of uniqueness grows from alienation. Alienation makes you miserable so you have a pervasive sense that there must be something wrong: Is it the world, or me? Because
Even natural science is just another perspective and is based upon scientific communities, cultures, practices. We cannot access an ultimate reality.
Because they have a more developmental perspective, they also accept, learn from and try to include all of the former value memes. This is quite unlike any of the other value memes, all of whom believe that they alone have the right path.
People of other value memes, like the exploitative boards of major corporations, even folks like the fundamentalist terrorists, are not seen as evil. They are, to put it bluntly, developmentally challenged. Retarded.
if you are seen as condescending, it simply means that you have failed to successfully take the perspective of others and adjust your communication accordingly.
you create me as I create you, we are not sealed containers, we are often more transparent to one another and controlled by one another than we are to/by ourselves.
You strive for solidarity with all beings and their perspectives. This means that you don’t judge people because of their opinions.
All creatures have the right to be who they are. But for the sake of all sentient beings, long-term transformation towards higher stages should be supported in nicest and least painful manner possible.
What we usually call reality is only “actuality”, one slice of an infinitely larger, hypercomplex pie.
By and large, you can spot the Metamodern value meme in people who have successfully internalized all of the postmodern values and thinking, but also add a developmental perspective and begin to value inner growth and authenticity to a much higher degree.
The Metamodern value meme also accepts the importance of elites and hierarchies—something to which the postmoderns are deeply allergic—and it accepts the fact that not all people can be included in all settings: for instance, that not all people can become metamodernists.
solidarity with all sentient beings also requires solidarity with their perspectives.
But in reality, all these purportedly TURQUOISE people are seldom even complex enough thinkers to stably operate at the Metamodern value meme.
imbalances. To develop a spiritual depth and very high states, but lacking the code and complexity to match it, very often makes for some pretty sick stuff, which often leads to some deeply regressive and harmful behavioral outcomes
Just because you have high state and great depth, it doesn’t mean that you are also a complex thinker and that you have access to advanced symbolic code; i.e. that you are of high effective value meme.
By and large, the Modern value meme explains problems in society as result of people acting irrationally or of their failures to take responsibility.
The postmodern mind doesn’t believe in the purported rationality of modern society and “modern man”—there are just too many cracks in the wall.
you see the huge social machinery behind the curtains, which determines what people do—including, to a large extent, the thing called science. Secularism.
The postmodern mind thinks that there is some kind of metaphysical evil called “power structures” and that you can remove this evil by invoking its opposite: emancipating critique, deconstruction, inclusion, more soft and relativist values and so forth.
But that means you still believe in there being some evil “out there” and you being the “good guy”: No longer the bad intentions of others, but certainly a collective and sociological evil that must be destroyed. The Metamodern value meme doesn’t believe in anything like that. It sees that all of these things only emerge by necessity, as emergent properties of complex systems. It sees the world as more mechanical, and less good or evil—all things are explainable, and there are no evil patriarchy spirits or ghosts of colonialism past. These are illusions, just interpretations of effects of
...more
Secularism isn’t really about religion vs. non-religion, or spirituality vs. non-spirituality; it is about expanding the ability to question and recreate reality.
Not only that; the technological, economic and social structures of our time automatically foster more metamodern ideas and values. The younger you are, and the better you are doing in life, and the more central your position in the new global society, the more likely you are to pick up metamodern values.
So, for a society to begin to manifest some metamodern characteristics, it is enough that there are some people around with the code, some with the cognitive complexity, some expressing metamodern aesthetics, some with extra existential depth, some in high states, some creating more metamodern organizations, some doing research on complexity economics, and some creating metamodern economic structures
Most people only grasped the developmental stages as a kind of stereotypes.[162] Indeed, such “flattened” theory does more to feed prejudice than to elucidate the social world and our place in it.
Point being: You need to understand the pattern and logic of the value memes; simple clichés will do more harm than good.
The light pomos build those dome green houses and do lots of yoga and eat fruit-only diets. And the dark pomos smoke and drink and discuss, often with great intellectual talent, the predicament of modern life.
Yet, these two groups of people will have a whole lot in common: they are very liberal, they are anti-racist, they are pro-environment, they prefer soft values over toughness, they don’t like commercialism, they tend towards multiculturalism and relativism—the list goes on! In
The people who have lower complexity, who haven’t had the opportunity to install the more complex code, and who are disadvantaged (thereby getting lower well-being, lower states) will of course not like where society is going. They have every right in the world to defend their own earlier value meme. But in the long run, the battle is always lost.
