I can feel you all out there bristling that I’d fill this space with ideas that are not “all mine,” that I would present this system as if it could be valid. Do devil’s advocacy for a dangerous idea that can’t hold together without tinges of hierarchical thinking, essentialism, determinism and necessity (dispositions it’s easy, these days, hate). It’s pretty irritating, I know.
But back to the idea of migrating concepts from one system to another, disrespecting them, taking them out for a night of slumming through the dreck of eclectic thinking. I guess that's a smirch on the integrity of any system.
Bring it! It’s 2008! Here, concepts are free-floating against the background of god-knows-what. They are not locked away inside isolated systems. Concepts are happy whores. Tools-at-hand. (When is somebody going to nail me on the Heidegger shit?) They are rafts to sail across whatever river, and to abandon once we reach the shore. They don’t belong to anyone. They’re loose women. I’m done trying to reign them in and judge them by the rules.
So I wonder:
What would spiral dynamics say about my reaction to spiral dynamics?
Is it more interesting to deconstruct a tool or use it to deconstruct yourself?
These are richer questions than What is wrong with this worldview? We already know how to locate the contradictions in a worldview and tear it down. Who cares? Who needs perfect worldviews?
I offer that it is worth suspending the meta-critique to look (from whatever point of view) at what is revolutionary about the proposition that consciousness evolves. The possibility that people are not all at the same place in their, well…, development of consciousness. (Insert quotation marks as needed.)
Come on. Think about where you have been in your lifetime. The ways you feel your awareness and your own ego changing. Just use your personal experience and nothing else, but subject that to some close, detailed examination. Before you turn on these questions one last time, turn them on yourself.
You are already acting on the assumption that consciousness evolves.
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