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Response to Reply by Arjen

to Peter Merry's Dutch "no" vote on European Constitution

Anders Erkeus

Oh, dear, oh dear

The esssential thing the two writers agree on seems to be this:

I feel very frustrated with the current obsession with representative and participative democracy.

Unfortunately, this view has been hinted at by Ken himself, which makes it the more lamentable. When it comes to politics, a consistant integral perspective is still far away, just remember how Ken started off writing about politics as if the American two party twins were the only options. After the introduction of the colors from SD, shallow politics sneeks into integral theory and small talk. This an earlier text I made on that matter:

Many years after creating the metaphor of ”spectrum of consciousness”, Wilber adopts another theory, that uses color metaphor, Spiral Dynamics. This theory uses colors to refer to different levels of value systems, or maybe levels of individual motivation. The colors used here are beige, red, blue, orange, green, yellow, turquoise . That is, an order that is totally off the natural spectrum. So where does this sequence come from?

Well let,s look at some of the words associated with the different colors. Red = agressive, apt to overthrow order in own interest, Blue= conservative, stressing values and order, Orange= rational, pursuer of enterprise, Green= speaking of equality, and peace, ignoring necessary hierarchy, Yellow= ability to overlook and understand the whole scene.

Well, what do we think about? To me it looks as the in USA prevailing view on political ideologies, and the colors usually attached to them. Red= the agressive communists, Blue=the law and order conservatives Orange= a ”free color” for the industrial main stream enterprise liberalism, Green= the unrealistic idealistic outsiders, Yellow= also ”free” color, reserved here for the ambition to come up with something new, that shines its truth like the Sun on all the rest.

I can’t think of another reason to choose these colors. Can anyone??

So what we see here is an involving of the heavily value-laden political concepts with a supposedly neutral scientific analyses of human development. Dangerous indeed!

No wonder the debate seems to have gotten political, with all that comes with it. Narrowing of the very complex AQAL picture, a game of stamping people , and whole nations, with new fixed color identities, just when we started to get rid of skin color stamps.

So Karl Marx was red, wasn’t he? And of course it is only the blue Bush fans that fall for authority? And among the orange entrepreneurs, we never see red emotional reactions and power fixations, do we? And we all know the mean green enviromentalists and antiglobalists by now. Etc. See what I mean?

For some reason, the neo-liberal establishments of USA and the EU get away rather easy in the alleged integral analyses.

I send a couple of text on the European Union Constitution, that are written without integral ambitions. Maybe they can be objects for SD color stamping analyses? :-) They represent some of the concrete oppositional views in the EU debate.

The best I get out of reading the two pieces on the "No":s is that my identification with Integral theory as something "I stand for" (an individual-rational fixation) gets another blow. Good enough, maybe.

For a truly integral Europe, where the integrity of the parts is kept in a cooperative system, that is more than and INCLUDING its parts, not repressing them.

Anders Erkéus
Stockholm, Sweden

Read more:
Another possible Europe, Anders Erkéus
Drop the EU Constitution, Anders Erkéus