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This post started as a response to someone on the Beck-Graves Facebook page as an inquiry into an earlier analysis I offered on the future of liberal democracy in light of the war in Ukraine. Her question to me was: “I wonder how we can bring our Integral second tier insights into the world. Because I think that only an Integral view and structure lies beyond liberal democracy.”

Here’s my answer and it addresses both the shortcoming of Wilber’s Integral model that seems to have hijacked everything that means integral, and our respective communities’ different understanding of “Integral Design” when it comes to figuring out what is happening today on the European continent.  

Graves and Cowan used to say “people cannot be until they are” which meant that design must follow function that recognizes the presence of people and cultures in the lower systems and create governing structure that help them move up the spiral at their own pace. What’s happening today in Europe is one of the 3 scenarios that Graves predicted over 4 decades ago shown in the image below. To me it’s a dance between scenario #1 and scenario #2 on the European theater; one more toxic than the other. 

I follow Graves not Wilber. I hope that has become clear by now. When Graves says that Life Conditions (half of our model) is what makes development dynamic, the living proof to that is the work of the different Center for Human Emergence around the world set up by Beck, Beck’s own work in South Africa, our work with him in the Middle East and my work with economics. 

The integral community has no clue what LCs mean and how to factor that huge variable into their model. Maybe they think the likes of Putin will automatically become enlightened the minute they’re placed on the Quadrants. To me when Life Conditions are ignored, a model becomes incomplete and inferior. Because of that, I believe that the Integral community has a very poor understanding of what the Yellow Seventh level system does when it comes to designing solutions that are informed by the existing reality in the first tier. Yes, we have to go slumming in the first tier where over 94% of the world lives.

Yellow must study that dysfunction and design in response to its indigenous findings (local content). In our experience in the Mideast, insolent Red feels no guilt and doesn’t care about the consequences of its actions.  It only alters its behavior after its head is bashed in.

To Wilberian this is a savage solution that appears nowhere on their radar. By ignoring most of the LCs in the lower systems the integral model, in my opinion has effectively become a closed system itself. It attracts like thinkers who give each other high fives, engage in endless intellectual debate and think they’re addressing real issues on the ground. To me this is the height of arrogance and hypocrisy. They forget that in real life more than half of the world is struggling to climb into Blue. Or in the case of post-Cold War Europe, the struggle is to rip out the communistic Blue from its roots and replace it with democratic systems of governance.  

Putin’s Red is the breaking of the shadow of Western Orange-Green. I spoke about this danger in Europe a few years ago when I warned that the pursuit of “no war” has a completely different memetic contour than the “pursuit of peace.” One is reactive and wants to avoid a certain outcome (which contributes to “us v them” division and resentment that builds in the collective shadow). The other requiring patient long term leadership that would have picked up of Putin’s Red and put in place certain “Red Wizardry” measures that would have moved him up the Spiral while stroking his Red ego and making him look like he’s the hero who made Russia into a new superpower in harmony with Western Blue-Orange. 

Finally, what we’re forgetting in this entire calculus is the 3 legs of the model that must be present to make psychological advancement possible: 1: The Bio/neurology. 2. The psychology and 3. The sociology. It could very much be that Putin’s Bio-neurology (what Graves called the lottery of the brain), makes him incapable of moving up to a new stage. All his other intelligences are acquired through mimicry that expand his Red control. This reality is lost on the integral community and much of those in the humanistic psychology movement (Green) who wrongfully believe that everyone can develop higher capacities. 

We have to start thinking is Stratified Capacities and design accordingly or we’re doomed. That is my Gravesian solution.