The Daily Evolver

In this episode of Post-Progressive Inquiries, Steve McIntosh and I visit with economist Pia Malaney to ponder economics through the lens of evolutionary theory. We look at what is arising concerning globalism and nationalism, wealth distribution, the future of work, model economies, the culture war between MAGAstan vs WOKEstan, and why Joe Biden gets us from the fire into the frying pan. Hope you enjoy the episode! – Jeff Salzman Pia Malaney is Co-Founder and Director of The Center for Innovation, Growth and Society and Senior Economist at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Her own professional research has focused on economic, biological, and sociological approaches to human welfare. She has held positions at the Harvard Institute for International Development and the Center for International Development at Harvard’s Kennedy School where she worked in collaboration with Asian and African governments on the development of health care and economic policies. She received a BA from Wellesley College and a PhD from Harvard University. Learn more about the Institute for Cultural Evolution and Steve McIntosh.

In this episode, recorded in the middle of the impeachment trial, I examine both the stunning House prosecution of the worst presidential betrayal in U.S. history (thank you Liz Cheney) as well as the apparent, dispiriting acquittal. It turns out that rationality and the evolution of “laws not men” are not built on solid ground, but are tethered to tectonic consciousness structures that are pre-rational, mythic and magic. I also look at last week’s Real Time show, where Bill Maher makes a good case about the religious qualities of Trumpism, but … if only he understood development. Finally, I highlight his guest, Charlotte Alter, who attempts an integral analysis of the cultural “cancellation” of actor Armie Hammer. It may fall flat with Bill — but you’ll get it! Enjoy the episode and let me know what you think. You can write at jeff@dailyevolver.com or leave a voicemail here.

Just when we thought it was safe to go back in the water, out of the depths arises Marjorie Taylor Greene, the QAnon Congresswoman from Georgia who trumps Trump in conspiracy nonsense. In this episode I attempt to bring some integral context to her and QAnon, the spaces they rent in our heads and suggest how we as evolutionary practitioners can relax into a more mature engagement with our ever-morphing culture.

Inspiring+++ Worth sharing! I shared to a Greta Thunberg Facebook group. – Pierre Hamel Very inspiring! Hopeful! Refreshing integral worldview in action. – Pat Veenema This is so inspiring and hopeful. I was imagining that Jeff and Steve may have felt like proud parents! These young people “get it.” – Mary Reese Folger In this episode, Steve McIntosh and I visit with two young leaders, Gary Sheng and Zoë Jenkins, who are activating higher consciousness in Generation Z through their organization Civics Unplugged.  Civics Unplugged is a community of Gen Z leaders committed to strengthening democracy through civic entrepreneurship in the U.S. and around the world. The organization has received significant attention with partners like Andrew Yang, the Smithsonian, Duane “The Rock” Johnson, and National Geographic. Wisdom is rarely married to youth, but meeting these two young people gave me greater confidence in our future, and I hope it will for you as well. – Jeff Salzman Gary Sheng, a former software engineer with Google, is on Forbes Magazine’s “30 Under 30” list of young innovators. Zoë Jenkins is a 17-year-old equity and justice advocate from Lexington Kentucky. __________________________________________________ Announcement Are there higher “stages” to friendship?  My friend, Terry Patten, will be offering a major address on one of our key leverage points in a fragmenting world: our capacity for generosity and friendship. You’re invited to register for Spiritual Friends Amidst Cultural Madness: The Power of Our Grateful Generosity. The free online event will be Wed, February 3rd 2021 @ 12 Noon PST, and you can watch or listen to the recording at any time.

Hey folks, here’s some commentary I did live today as the Inauguration for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris was unfolding. As always I looked for interesting integral angles, and think I found some. Also, I finally made peace with JLo! Enjoy and let me know what you think at jeff@dailyevolver.com. – Jeff                   Photo of National Mall: AP Photo/Alex Brandon

Epic interview. Brilliant and inspiring ideas (and strategies and tactics) around leadership development and how to work with “power” in the service of cultural transformation – Accelerating Leadership Rand Stagen is well known in the integral world as founder of the Stagen leadership academy. Stagen is the gold standard for leadership training, focused on long-term, disciplined, “leadership practice” which integrates psychological and even spiritual dimensions. I consider Rand to be one of most effective practitioners of applied integral thinking out there, and I enjoyed this conversation immensely. I hope you do too. “Post-Progressive Inquiries” is a co-production of the Daily Evolver and the Institute for Cultural Evolution. My co-host is the founder of the Institute, Steve McIntosh. You can find out more about Rand Stagen and the Stagen Leadership Academy here.

Thank you for this hopeful and inspiring conversation. – Donnell Allan Thanks fellas. I needed this chat. – Mary Evans Absolutely love you guys. Tons of sense-making along with optimism for the future. It feels good to smile again. – Cee Gee Last Wednesday we saw a mob assault the US Capitol Building in an attempt to stop the certification of November’s presidential election. Five people have died. This insurrection was incited by a sitting president of the United States – whose flags then waved from the broken windows beneath the Rotunda. As these astonishing events have sunk in over the past few days, there is a growing sentiment that Trump and rabid Trumpism must be condemned and contained. And that Trump’s political energies – “mean red” in developmental terms – are poisonous to the hard-won civility of a modern society. In this episode, integral psychotherapist Dr. Keith Witt and I try to add some integral perspective. Let me know what you think at jeff@dailyevolver.com. – Jeff Salzman

Excellent nuanced conversation. – Daniel Schulman Never heard anybody articulate so beautifully the differences between integral self and holistic self; although hearing explained so succinctly, it felt like home. Like many kensho moments when it opens us to a deeper understanding that we can never close again. Thank you. Yellow is still trying to understand and let go, teal accepts. – Steven Webb * Great conversation in the transition from one tier to the next. The clear appreciation of the seminal work of Clare Graves, Don Beck and Chris Cowan is wonderful. Thanks to Jeff Salzman and  Nomali Perera. 1:09: 26, well invested! – Albert Klamt * What a wonderful conversation, thanks for sharing! A must-listen for every integral person. – Johannes Schunter Enough people have been experimenting with integral consciousness for long enough that some of its contours are becoming apparent. As with all stages of human history, integral both sheds new light and casts new shadows on the human condition. In today’s episode, Nomali Perera, my dear friend and colleague in integral practice for nearly 20 years, and I share a few of our observations. * 13:13 – How integral includes, and get hijacked by, previous stages of consciousness * 39:14 – “Integral bypassing” – what the maps show us vs the territory we can actually inhabit * 52:10 – The qualities of the Yellow/Teal and Turquoise stages of Integral consciousness, and how we can embrace both I hope you enjoy the episode and, if moved, let me know what you think! Send emails to jeff@dailyevolver.com or leave me a voicemail here. Nomali Perera is a certified integral coach, facilitator and trainer, and can be found on Practical Integral.com. 

I start this week with some feisty and insightful letters from listeners and end with an idiosyncratic list of my products of the year, decade and millennium (so far). * (01:34) Who’s more mean, trads or pomos? Responses to my critique of the famous “toast scene” in the movie Five Easy Pieces.  * (18:39) How can the mythic impulse in religion be integrated? * (22:55) My ebullient resilience, and how to capture integral in four bullet points * (26:25) My products of the year, decade and millennium so far * (34:40) Gratitude to the Integral movement’s leading light Let me know what YOU think! Write to me at jeff@dailyevolver.com or leave me a voicemail. And farewell to a no-fun but probably quite fruitful year. Hope you all have a Happy Holiday! – Jeff Salzman        

In this episode, I look at the tensions arising among conservative Christians about how fervently to support Trump. * 01:23 – Clips and observations from the Jericho march on Washington DC earlier this month featuring evangelical leaders (and Alex Jones), and the backlash it has caused with others in the movement. * 21:25 – How mainstream punditry is seeking to explain the seeming paradox of Trump-loving Christians. * 35:50 – Bill Bryson and Jack Nicholson demonstrate why the hatred of the left still unites traditional conservatives – and why we deserve it. I hope you enjoy the episode! Announcement:  The Institute for Cultural Evolution think tank, where I serve on the Board, is recruiting an Executive Director to help run our operations. The job description for this new position can be found here. If the possibility of working with ICE sounds intriguing, I encourage you to check out this opportunity. – Jeff Salzman

In this episode, I welcome integral thinker Sue Brightman to talk about her new book, A Call to Further Becoming, The New Declaration From Women Over 50.  Sue describes the cutting edge of consciousness being pioneered by women who are now entering – and thriving – in elderhood. Based on 100 interviews with women age 50 – 70+, Sue shares 10 themes that capture the emerging essence of this creative, exciting and spiritually-rich stage of life. I hope you enjoy the episode! – Jeff Salzman  

In this episode I share some clips from Newsmax, the cable news network that is the new home for Trump people who have left Fox News for not being supportive enough of the President. Though inspired by the mendacity of his election fraud claims, the reporters hew closer to the truth than Trump does (The National Report), except when they opt for a good old-fashioned rant (Diamond and Silk). The result is a more differentiated mediaverse, required for the integration to come. I end on a happy note, with uplifting evidence of the evolution of consciousness in the person of five-year-old Tianna.

This is intellectual champagne!!! – Alexander Husum Welcome to Post-Progressive Inquiries, a new podcast series coproduced by the Daily Evolver and The Institute for Cultural Evolution (ICE). In each episode, ICE President Steve McIntosh and I explore new territories emerging in politics and culture. We are happy to have as our inaugural guest Tomas Bjorkman, an “applied philosopher and social entrepreneur” who has founded and funded many initiatives dedicated to the co-creation of a more conscious society. Steve and I talk with Tomas about his work, and particularly his association with the Metamodern movement that has emerged out of European developmental thought. Tomas Bjorkman is the founder of the Ekskäret Foundation and Retreat Center on Ekskäret Island in the Swedish Archipelago. He is the author of several books, most recently The World We Create, From God to Market. Integral philosopher Steve McIntosh is the author of several books on integral philosophy, including Developmental Politics, and Evolution’s Purpose.

Thank you Jeff. I love your show. Thank you for this talk. I struggle with these same feelings and it was good to find some humor in it. – John & Barbara Knoops Many thanks Jeff and Keith. Your episodes are always enjoyable and thought provoking. I immediately resonated with the concepts of empathy without demanding empathy in return, re-enchantment and ceremony. I have experienced these in my own life and look forward to more conversations that address their further development. – Barbara Senglaub Dr. Keith kicks off this episode with research showing that although virtually everybody lies, most people vastly prefer to tell the truth and believe other people are doing the same. But how do we as integralists make sense of competing truth claims, particularly from different sides in the culture war? How do the facts and logic of modernity stack up against the allure of premodern myth and story? And what are the effects to the body politic of the long-term diet of lies served up by our newly-certified Loser-in-Chief? “The Shrink and the Pundit” is my ongoing conversation with integral psychotherapist Dr. Keith Witt. 

As always, Jeff gives us an outstanding talk about the user of Integral Theory to understand and navigate our world. – Nils Montan On last week’s edition of CNN’s Global Public Square, host Fareed Zakaria ardently condemned Donald Trump’s attack on the election, drawing dark parallels to the rise of Hitler and Nazism after World War 1. His first guest, former National Security Advisor, General H. R. McMaster, chided Fareed for “misusing history”, arguing that the US has modern institutions specifically built to withstand the will of an autocrat. There is an essential truth in both of these perspectives. Fareed is right that pre-rational tiers of human consciousness can be dangerous and violent. They hunger for great myths, and thrill to the warrior leader who has come to set the world right. McMaster is correct that the US government is designed to check these non-rational impulses, and seems to be doing so effectively against the onslaught of Trump the Red. In this episode, I argue that integral thinking provides a next possibility beyond trusting leaders and trusting institutions. It is to trust in development itself, which in modernity and postmodernity has installed reliable new structures of rationality and sensitivity that dilute and contain (but do not eliminate) the premodern ones. Maybe the lesson of Germany in the ‘30’s is not that it could happen again in the US., but is found in the subsequent evolution of Germany into a world-leading nation less than a lifetime later. And that the odious Trump, if not Trumpism altogether, is headed to the ash heap of history.