Integral Politics - A SPIRITUAL THIRD WAY

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http://holons-news.com/free/Integral_Po ... ilpert.pdf

In this time of ideological upheaval, when the old ideologies of left and right, of socialism, liberalism, and conservatism, no longer capture the political imagination as they once did, new political visions are required. Some have tried to formulate a “third way” between social democracy and conservatism. Others have proposed a more spiritually-oriented approach to
transcend left and right. In what follows, I will present another vision, Integral Politics, based on Integral Theory.




Ken Wilber, particularly in his recent writings, has presented a comprehensive map of the Kosmos and its evolution that lends itself to the mapping of political belief systems.3 To summarize briefly, Wilber argues that our ways of making sense of the world are merely the perspectives we take on the world. These perspectives can be organized in a way that helps us develop a more comprehensive or encompassing view. According to Wilber, there are at least
two dimensions according to which we can organize perspectives. First, we can either look at the world from an interior perspective or from an exterior perspective. Second, we can either look at the world from an individual point of view or from a collective point of view. Put together, we
end up with a two-by-two matrix of four main perspectives: subjective, objective, intersubjective, and interobjective. These four perspectives can also be summarized as “I,” “It,”
“We,” and “Its” respectively.
In a third dimension, the phenomena seen from each of these perspectives evolves, in a stage-like fashion, where each later stage includes and transcends the previous stage, so that (from the “It” perspective), atoms evolve into molecules, which evolve into cells, which evolve into multicellular beings, and so on.