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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

The Divided States of America

And How to Heal Them

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

Me to ChatGPT:

• Write a letter to the editor of the New York Times on the Divided States of America and how it can be healed, written by integral philosopher Ken Wilber.
• Write a more polemical version of the same letter, written in the sharper, more confrontational tone that Ken Wilber sometimes adopts when critiquing cultural decay or ideological excess.
• Write an even sharper, no-holds-barred version of the letter, in full polemical Wilber mode, channeling his biting critique of cultural dysfunction and spiritual ignorance.
• Write another satirical version of Wilber's letter to the NYT editor which is so full of integral jargon nobody will understand it.
• Write another version of Wilber's letter to the NYT, this time from an enlightened perspective.
• Now write this letter as if Wilber is drunk.

Write a letter to the editor of the New York Times on the Divided States of America and how it can be healed, written by integral philosopher Ken Wilber.

Certainly. Here's a fictional "Letter to the Editor" written in the voice and style of Ken Wilber, addressing the divisions in American society and offering an Integral perspective on healing them:

To the Editor:

The Divided States of America—And How to Heal Them

America today is not merely politically polarized—it is epistemologically fractured. Red and blue no longer represent differing opinions within a shared worldview; they now signify alternate realities, fueled by mutually exclusive value systems and levels of consciousness. What we are witnessing is not just a battle of ideologies, but a developmental clash of worldviews.

From an Integral perspective, this fragmentation is the result of a nation caught in the throes of multiple stages of human development, all clamoring for recognition. Traditionalists uphold order, religion, and family. Modernists trust science, progress, and individual rights. Postmodernists critique power structures and elevate diversity, often rejecting the metanarratives that held society together. And now, emerging integral thinkers seek to include and transcend all these perspectives—honoring their truths while recognizing their limitations.

The culture wars are not merely about policy; they are about identity, meaning, and the very structure of consciousness. The tragedy is that each worldview sees only the pathologies of the others, not their partial truths. The traditionalist sees the postmodernist as nihilistic; the modernist sees the traditionalist as regressive; the postmodernist sees the modernist as exploitative. And all miss the potential of an integral embrace.

Healing America requires not a retreat into centrism, but an ascent into integration. We must foster a national dialogue that moves beyond shouting matches and into genuine developmental empathy. This means recognizing that no single worldview holds the whole truth, but each contains a vital piece of it.

Our educational, media, and political institutions must evolve to reflect this complexity. Integral literacy—understanding the stages of human growth, the spectrum of values, and the deep patterns of individual and cultural development—should become a civic priority. Only then can we bridge the divides, not by flattening them, but by weaving them into a coherent, inclusive tapestry.

The United States will only become united again when we realize that unity does not mean uniformity—it means wholeness. And wholeness begins with the willingness to see, hear, and include the Other—not as an enemy, but as a necessary part of ourselves.

Sincerely,

Ken Wilber

Boulder, Denver

Write a more polemical version of the same letter, written in the sharper, more confrontational tone that Ken Wilber sometimes adopts when critiquing cultural decay or ideological excess.

To the Editor:

The Divided States of America: A Nation Stuck in Culture War Kindergarten

Let's not sugarcoat it: America is tearing itself apart, not because of its diversity, but because of its arrested development. We are no longer a country disagreeing on policy—we are a country disagreeing on reality itself. And this collective psychosis is being driven by the loudest, most regressive voices from every corner of the culture war.

On one side, we have the regressive traditionalists, desperately clinging to a mythic past that never existed—God, guns, and a fantasy of national purity. On the other, a postmodern Left that has replaced rational discourse with a grievance Olympics, where victimhood is virtue and truth is just a social construct. And somewhere in the middle, the modernist mainstream is being eaten alive, caught in the crossfire with nothing but technocratic pragmatism and a dwindling faith in liberal democracy.

But here's the kicker: they're all right, and they're all wrong. Each worldview—traditional, modern, postmodern—contains essential insights. But when they ossify into absolutisms, they become cultural cancers. Traditionalism without compassion becomes fascism. Modernism without soul becomes soulless materialism. Postmodernism without structure becomes nihilism in drag.

What's missing is a higher integration. An Integral view that can hold these truths without collapsing into relativism or absolutism. A view that recognizes development—that some perspectives are not just different, they are more inclusive, more capable of embracing complexity without dissolving into chaos.

The only way out of this mess is not some shallow “can't we all get along” centrism, but a developmental leap. America must grow up. We need leaders and institutions that can see the full spectrum of human values, not just pander to their tribal bases. We need education systems that teach systems thinking, developmental psychology, and epistemological humility—not just STEM skills and identity politics.

The Left needs to stop eating itself with purity tests and start building again. The Right needs to stop fantasizing about a theocratic golden age and join the 21st century. And the rest of us need to stop pretending that polarization is the problem. The real problem is flatland thinking—the refusal to acknowledge that consciousness evolves, and that worldviews can mature.

Until we make that shift, we're not a United States—we're a civil war in slow motion.

Sincerely,

Ken Wilber

Boulder, Denver

Write an even sharper, no-holds-barred version of the letter, in full polemical Wilber mode, channeling his biting critique of cultural dysfunction and spiritual ignorance.

To the Editor:

The Divided States of America: A Suicide by Worldview

Let's be brutally honest: America is no longer a functioning nation—it's a balkanized battlefield of mutually exclusive realities, each convinced of its moral supremacy and epistemic infallibility. We are not witnessing political disagreement. We are witnessing a slow-motion national suicide, driven by worldview tribalism so deep it no longer even recognizes itself as such.

The MAGA Right is lost in a pre-rational fever dream—Christian nationalism dressed up as patriotism, nostalgic for a mythic past that never existed and openly hostile to modernity, science, and basic decency. Meanwhile, the postmodern Left is busy devouring its own, performing ideological purges with the fervor of medieval inquisitors. Their new religion is Wokeism: a dogma so allergic to nuance that it sees oppression in everything except its own authoritarian tactics.

And the so-called moderates? They're sleepwalking through the collapse, too cowardly or confused to name the deeper problem: we're not just culturally divided—we're developmentally stuck. America is trapped in a civilizational adolescence, where different levels of consciousness—traditional, modern, postmodern—are locked in a death spiral, each pathologizing the others instead of transcending and including.

The tragedy is that each worldview has partial truths. But when those truths are weaponized into absolutisms, they become toxic. The Right offers order but kills freedom. The Left offers inclusion but kills reason. The Center offers compromise but kills vision.

What we need is not unity through sameness or compromise through appeasement. We need evolution. We need a level of consciousness that can hold multiple perspectives without collapsing into relativism or retreating into absolutism. That level exists—it's called the Integral stage. But it requires effort, education, inner work, and a willingness to see that not all perspectives are equally whole.

This is the hard truth: America will not be saved by elections, policies, or platitudes. It will be saved—if at all—by a radical transformation in how we see. We need a culture that honors development, complexity, interiority, and wholeness. Without it, we remain what we are now: the Divided States of America, lurching toward decline while arguing about who's more righteous.

Grow up, America. Or go down.

Sincerely,

Ken Wilber

Boulder, Denver

Let me know if you want this trimmed to fit typical word limits for op-eds or adjusted to better match Wilber's published tone in specific works.

Write another satirical version of Wilber's letter to the NYT editor which is so full of integral jargon nobody will understand it?

Here's a satirical letter to the editor of The New York Times that is so dense with integral jargon, AQAL-speak, and Wilberian idiosyncrasies, it practically folds in on itself like a fourth-tier holon encountering its own causal body. Buckle up:

To the Editor:

It is with an abiding concern for the ontological destabilization of the lower-left quadrant in contemporary political semiotics that I submit the following brief but (I hope) meta-theoretically adequate reflection.

The Divided States of America are not merely a sociopolitical phenomenon but a meta-systemic fragmentation across the epistemic bandwidth of the noosphere. What we are witnessing is not just culture war, but an all-quadrant, all-level breakdown in inter-holonic resonance between competing morphogenetic fields. The culture has ceased to “tetra-mesh.”

The regressive gravitational pull of mythic-membership worldviews, amplified by ethnocentric attractor basins and the neurotic fixation of first-tier value memes (especially blue/orange bipolarities), has catalyzed a devolutionary spiral—what I elsewhere call “Boomeritis”—at scale. Meanwhile, the green vMEME, in its aperspectival madness, continues its allergic reaction to hierarchy, thus sabotaging the emergence of a truly integrative, post-Postmodern meta-context.

To heal this fragmentation, we must enact a second-tier epistemology grounded in AQAL meta-theory, shadow-integrated, kosmocentric, and at least casually fluent in quadrivium and hexadic hermeneutics. Without the vertical depth of vision-logic and a commitment to waking up, growing up, cleaning up, and showing up (in all quadrants, all lines, all states, all types), we will remain locked in a self-perpetuating samsaric feedback loop.

What's required now is not more political discourse per se, but an ontological upshift to a meta-paradigmatic holding space that can integrate the dialectics of agency and communion, eros and agape, autonomy and heteronomy, Wilber-4 and Wilber-5. Only then can the American holon heal its interior fractures and re-establish a healthy morphic resonance with its Kosmic address.

Yours integrally,

Ken Wilber

The Center for Worldspace Kosmic Integration and Transpersonal Yoga of the Lower Left

Write another version of Wilber's letter to the NYT, this time from an enlightened perspective.

Here is a version of Ken Wilber's letter to the New York Times, written in a serene, grounded, and lucid tone, as if emanating from an “enlightened” or “nondual” perspective—still distinctly Wilberian, but stripped of jargon and spoken from the still point at the heart of complexity:

To the Editor,

There is a stillness beneath the storm of our divided nation.

The United States today appears fractured—split across ideologies, identities, worldviews. Each tribe proclaims its truths as ultimate, while dismissing others as deluded or dangerous. But this fragmentation is not merely political; it is spiritual. It arises from a forgotten wholeness.

In truth, there are no enemies—only aspects of ourselves we have not yet learned to include. Red and blue, rural and urban, progressive and conservative: these are not opposites to be eradicated, but partial truths to be embraced and transcended. Each is a necessary voice in the chorus of the human soul.

An integral perspective begins with the recognition that every person, every culture, every system is a part of a greater unfolding. It sees that the same evolutionary current which birthed galaxies now moves through our conversations, our disagreements, our longing to belong. This is not idealism—it is realism, deepened by humility.

The healing of America will not come from silencing one side or celebrating another. It will come from growing up—not just waking up to our deeper nature, but maturing through the many stages of human development, individually and collectively. We must learn to listen across divides, to make room for multiple truths, and to hold conflict as part of a deeper harmony.

Integral thinking does not seek easy unity; it seeks true inclusion. It honors depth and complexity. It invites us to see our disagreements not as threats, but as invitations to evolve.

The first step is simply this: recognize the partial truth in the view you most oppose. In doing so, you begin to transcend the very polarization that seems so intractable. This is the practice of love, in its highest form.

We are not enemies. We are one being, waking up to itself—slowly, painfully, and gloriously.

Yours in clarity and compassion,

Ken Wilber

Denver, Denver

Now write this letter as if Wilber is drunk.

[Note: This is a satirical piece written in the voice of a fictional, tipsy Ken Wilber. It's not intended to offend, just to entertain those familiar with Wilberian prose and its… kosmic ambitions.]

To the Editor of the New York Times (or maybe The Atlantic? Doesn't matter):

Look… look… I wasn't gonna write this, okay? I was just sipping a nice biodynamic pinot and re-reading Plotinus' Enneads when I turned on CNN and saw Marjorie Taylor Greene yelling at a microphone like it owed her money. And I thought: that's it. America has officially lost its lower-left quadrant.

We are, as a nation, suffering from a full-spectrum fragmentation of the tetra-everything. It's not just political, it's ontological, and possibly gastronomical. (Why are there fifteen kinds of milk now?) The noosphere—remember the noosphere?—it's buffering. Emotionally.

What we need, and I say this with great integral sincerity, is a radical AQAL-informed meta-vision that integrates everything, including—but not limited to—your childhood trauma, postmodern irony, QAnon, Burning Man, and the fact that no one knows what “epistemology” means at brunch anymore.

I tried to warn you people with Boomeritis. Nobody listened. You were all too busy downloading Tinder and deconstructing Western civilization. Well guess what? Now you're in the amber-orange spiral abyss, and the only ladder out is made of Wilber-5 footnotes and Jungian archetypes in skinny jeans.

Listen. If we don't start growing up, waking up, cleaning up, and—I don't know—getting real, we're going to end up in a first-tier value meme traffic jam where even Spiral Dynamics can't find parking.

I'm serious. I'm integrally serious. We need a second-tier renaissance. Like… a really groovy one. With metrics. And transcendental compassion. And dancing.

Anyway. I gotta go. My Uber just arrived and it's a turquoise Tesla driven by Teilhard de Chardin. He says we're heading to the Omega Point. Or maybe a jazz bar. Same thing.

Yours in Eros, Agape, and Slightly Wobbly Kosmic Consciousness,

Ken (or… Ken-ness?) Wilber

Founder, The Integral Institute for Unrequested Emails and Causal Karaoke