A Sociology of Big Pictures (IAM white paper): discussion thread

Research and Sense-Making
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Still gathering my thoughts on this, but creating this as a thread for discussion of this paper by Robb Smith, founder of the Institute for Applied Metatheory (IAM).

A lot of resonances with the 2R white papers. I’ll highlight especially the 6 elements of grand strategy Robb outlines:

  1. Crystallize a Minimal Integrative Worldview. The Teal+ movements will disagree on a lot, but there is likely also a parsimonious core of what brings them together. This might make all the difference to convivially cohering the network. Philosophical commitments that are candidates for this worldview include, but are not limited to, elements that sum to a visionary, valuable realism: stratified ontology (i.e., reality is emergent and layered); developmental perspectivalism (i.e, knowledge is reconstructively relative); cosmo-normativity (i.e., reality is valuable) ; emancipatory axiology (i.e., commitment to freedom); judgmental rationality (i.e., judgment is possible).
  2. Compete for attention. Name, and fill, one of the four major worldview slots in the global attention space by mid-century of the Transformation Age (i.e., 2025-2060). Seek to attract 10 million followers and $50 million in committed support to the network by 2030.
  3. Tell a true, more deeply meaningful story. Coalesce a compelling, credible and comprehensive story of wholeness—a transcendent pathway to real meaning—around the intrinsic sacrality of being, and being human, through the panentheistic, nondual, complex integral realism that is
    emerging.
  4. Build an autopoeitic network. Beyond story and interaction rituals, relationships are the spiritual connective tissue of a network; they are what makes a network meaningful. Convene the emerging “Teal+” movements into a broader network that can a) develop more robust in-person interaction rituals across the network, b) develop the sacred symbols that amplify the emotional energy of network participants and missionaries, and c) create auto-generative effects of social reproduction in, across, and via the network.
  5. Embrace huge problems. Make big promises and generate big problems to energize the solution landscape across the network, while also attracting the resources needed to support network
    members’ efforts.
  6. Develop proprietary tools. Develop new tools that embody and advance the network’s knowledge.
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Here’s a repost of how I responded to the paper on FB:

I appreciated the paper. A couple observations to extend and consolidate the network, so to speak.

  • Robb’s ideas about the"great release" find echoes in the work of Peter Pogany on the “chaotic transition” between world systems. (Rethinking the World, 2006).

  • Yuval Noah Harari’s Nexus, 2024 is an accessible long-historical meditation on societies as information networks.

  • On Baudrillard’s sequence from Real to Hyperreal, a lot of metamodern practice (like Vervaeke, cited in Robb’s paper) is about the recovery of the real through lived experience.

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A lot to be clarified content-wise, but that’s not the point at this stage and I think this is a great initiative. Does anyone know whether there are any concrete actions ongoing to advance the formation of the network?

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Having shopped around quite a bit for the most dynamic action hub in liminal space - the hub that connects all the other ideas - 2R looks best in show to me right now. So I’d say, if there is to be concrete action to be organized around Robb’s paper, this is a good place to organize it. What is being done in parallel somewhere else can always be connected to,

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That’s great to hear, and agreed! Lots of thinking going on behind the scenes about how to do this at the moment, along with the current focus on Limicon.

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I started reading the paper and this line jumped out at me

an opportunity to prefigure the first global, unity-in-diversity
society in human history.

To me, this already sounds like an anachronism. It sounds like idealistic dreaming which fails to take into account the realities of collapse, and the political realities surrounding the ongoing implosion of what became known as “woke politics”.

The problem, rather obviously, is that for all the good intentions of the idea of “unity in diversity”, the real world outcome has been absolutely disastrous. Rather than creating unity, it has shattered the opposition to the status quo into a chaotic brawl of all-against-all. It has engendered the normalisation of hatred towards normality. It has destroyed all hope of unity. The moment I read the words “unity in diversity”, I’m thinking “Oh dear, here we go again.” How to fix the world…from the people who brought us gender ideology.

It then immediately says:

Yet the very movements in which the integrative worldviews
consciousness is housed are tiny, fragmented and fringe

So the question is how to grow them. How to make them larger, unified and mainstream. I don’t think this can be done by repeating the ideological mistakes of postmodernism. Maybe this time the focus needs to be on getting the core right – on getting the bulk of society moving in the right direction rather than focusing entirely on the fragmented fringe.

For all the fruits of modernity’s
Enlightenment, Age of Reason, Industrial Revolution,
Romanticism, Information Age, globalization-based
material abundance, etc., the 400 year arc of modernity
ended with a postmodern exhaustion of no meaningful
story at all.

But this is postmodernism itself talking!! I believe it was Lyotard who described scientists as being “exhausted”, yes? It wasn’t the scientists themselves. This story is being told from the perspective of postmodernism, and it is misleading. It suggests modernism necessarily ended without a coherent story. It does not leave open the option of going back to ask what went wrong, and finding out whether a coherent story which does not end in postmodernism was possible. But that is exactly what we need to do.

Humanity is desperately in need of a new, credible and
ultimately soteriological story of wholeness.

Yes! In which case we need to start looking in the right place. Postmodernism is the wrong place.

When the boundaries between the categories that constitute our sensemaking collapse what is subject and object?, what is real or constructed?, what is cause and effect? We are left adrift in the hyperreal.

Yes. And once you are in the hyperreal, there is no way out. The only way to avoid it is to reverse out the way you went in. That means going backwards to modernism and asking what went wrong.

Maybe I don’t know enough about Integral Theory – in fact I’m sure I don’t – but it looks to me like this search for a big picture isn’t big enough. It needs to encompass much more than just the sort of thinking that integralists do. It needs to be capable of bringing together a bigger selection of worldviews under an even bigger umbrella. That includes people for whom “self development” will never reach the mystical stage. It must also include at least some people who are currently on the social right of pre-collapse politics.