Trump and a Post-Truth World Quotes

“The culture was constantly telling us one thing, and the realities of society were consistently failing to deliver it—the culture was lying. This was a deep and serious legitimation crisis: a culture that is consistently lying to its members simply cannot move forward for long.”
― Ken Wilber, Trump and a Post-Truth World

“Nihilism and narcissism are not traits that any leading-edge can actually operate with.”
― Ken Wilber, Trump and a Post-Truth World

“...the capacity to identify with others is definitely not gained all at once or from the start. The mind has to increase its capacity for inclusiveness through a slow and arduous growth process, and thus this capacity gets a little bigger (moving from egocentric to ethnocentric—from "me" to "us"), then a little bigger (from ethnocentric to worldcentric—from "us" to "all of us"), and a little bigger still (from worldcentric to integral, which starts to include even other species, resulting eventually in a "cosmic consciousness"—from "all of us" to "all of reality).”
― Ken Wilber, Trump and a Post-Truth World: An Evolutionary Self-Correction

“If you think this ethnocentric stage—with its tendencies toward racism, sexism/patriarchy, misogyny, mega-tribal dominance, oppression, and fundamentalist religion—sounds a bit like hardcore far-Right Republicans, and that it starts to push into recognized Trump territory, you’d be right.”
― Ken Wilber, Trump and a Post-Truth World

“Even science itself was held to be no more true than poetry. (Seriously.) There simply was no difference between fact and fiction, news and novels, data and fantasies. In short, there was “no truth” anywhere.”
― Ken Wilber, Trump and a Post-Truth World

“the result of an extensive “pre/ post fallacy.” This fallacy occurs because both PRE-conventional realities (such as egocentrism) and POST-conventional realities (such as autonomy and individualism) are both fully NON-conventional, and thus they are easily and often confused and equated. Either pre-conventional realities are elevated to post-conventional truths (so that narcissistic and egocentric stances are taken to be very high expressions of fully autonomous individuality), or else post-conventional realities are reduced to pre-conventional childish modes (so that nonconformist postconventional individuals are charged with being narcissistic and self-promoting).”
― Ken Wilber, Trump and a Post-Truth World

“we’re using a simplified half dozen major stages: crimson archaic (the earliest transition stage from the great apes), magenta magic (or impulsive), red magic-mythic (or power), amber mythic (or ethnocentric traditional values), orange rational (or modern values), green pluralistic (or postmodern values), and turquoise integral (or the first truly synthesizing and integrating level). I have further simplified and summarized these as egocentric (archaic and magic), ethnocentric (mythic), worldcentric (orange modern and green postmodern), and kosmocentric (or truly integral).”
― Ken Wilber, Trump and a Post-Truth World

“in a sea of nihilism, passionate narcissism is the key determinant.”
― Ken Wilber, Trump and a Post-Truth World

“They most definitely and strongly believed that it is universally true that there is no universal truth.”
― Ken Wilber, Trump and a Post-Truth World

“Put differently, oppressive actions and drives are inherent in the lower stages of development. […] A lower, pre-worldcentric stage of development will step all over worldcentric values if it can, not because it is trying to specifically oppress those values, but because it does not yet possess those values itself and has no understanding of their value, goodness, or desirability. The cure for this is to move development forward, not to criminalize earlier stages (which is like calling age 5 a disease and outlawing it).”
― Ken Wilber, Trump and a Post-Truth World: An Evolutionary Self-Correction

“Green will typically look at history, for example, and whenever it finds a society in which there is a widespread lack of green values, it assumes that these green values would normally and naturally be present were it not for the fact that they have been maliciously oppressed by the dominator hierarchies found in that society. All individuals would possess worldcentric green values of pluralism, radical egalitarianism, and total equality, except for the oppressive controlling powers that crushed those values wherever they appeared. […] The existence of strong and widespread oppressive forces cannot be doubted. The problem comes in the claim to know what their source and cause is. For green postmodernism, the cause of the lack of worldcentric green values in any culture is due to an aggressive and intensively active repressive and oppressive force (usually the male sex; or a particular race— white in most parts of the world, coupled with a rampant colonialism— and/or due to a particular creed—usually religious fundamentalism of one sort or another; or various prejudices—against gays, against women, against whatever minority that is oppressed). In short, lack of green values (egalitarian, group freedom, gender equality, human care and sensitivity) is due to a presence of oppression. […] The major problem with that view taken by itself is that it completely overlooks the central role of growth, development, and evolution. We’ve already seen that human moral identity grows and develops from egocentric (red) to ethnocentric (amber) to worldcentric (orange then green) to integral (turquoise; and this is true individually as well as collectively/historically). Thus, the main reason that slavery was present, say, 2000 years ago, is not because there was an oppressive force preventing worldcentric freedom, but that a worldcentric notion of freedom had not even emerged yet anywhere on the planet. It wasn’t present and then oppressed, as green imagines, it simply had not yet emerged in the first place—there was nothing to oppress. This is why, as only one example, all of the world’s great religions, who otherwise teach love and compassion and treating all beings kindly, nonetheless—precisely because they were created during the great ethnocentric Mythic Age of traditional civilization —had no extensive and widespread conception of the fundamental worldcentric freedom of human beings—or the belief that all humans, regardless of race, sex, color, or creed, were born equal—and thus not one of them strenuously objected to the fact that a very large portion of their own population were slaves. Athens and Greek society, vaunted home of democracy, had 1 out of 3 of their people who were slaves—and no major complaint on a culture-wide scale. Nor was there a widespread culturally effective complaint from Christianity or Buddhism or Hinduism et al. It wasn’t until the emergence of the worldcentric Age of Reason that “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” actually came into existence—emerged evolutionarily—and thus started to be believed by the average and typical member of that culture.”
― Ken Wilber, Trump and a Post-Truth World: An Evolutionary Self-Correction