Someone recently posted a blog in the Integral Life community titled “Perhaps There is a Big Elephant in the Integral Room,” in which Brent Simpson asks:

“Over the last few months I have come across Alex Jones. His views to say the least are radical. He is positing that the government (at the highest levels)… is already non-left/right (Something Wilber pushes for & I believe could be wonderfully powerful if just people run the show). Jones’ view is that however, the left/right paradigm is a hoax it is used as a means to rile people into partisan thought. Where in reality the control is really coming from banking elite. Wacky right? I agree… it sounds/is far out. But, the far out-ness of it does not on its own negate its possibility of truth. As truth claims must be empirically looked into right?

Here’s the scary thing… he in my view provides some real suggestive evidence that there may well be some real truths to what he has to say. The stuff is far out no doubt… but it requires personal inquiry to ascertain if such important info is or isn’t true.

Look for yourself: www.infowars.com & www.prisonplanet.com”

Brian Oconnell responded by saying:

“Too much reality might make Integral’s and Ken’s Vision have to be revised. The LR would look much different with the truths your pointing to…. Integral thinks it has a grasp of the LR. But does not understanding banking 101. Integral needs a LR awakening and quick before the Elite blob takes over Integral hopes.”

Here was my response.

As a life-long enthusiast of conspiracy theory, i’ve kept an eye on everything from Alex Jones to the Masons, to the Bilderbergers, and all the way to glass domes on the moon, structures on Mars, ancient astronauts, and various forms of (occasionally illicit) extraterrestrial liaison.  Not only is it wildly entertaining to wrap interesting mythologies around the complexity of modern life, it’s also a great way to remind myself of everything i don’t know—and i personally think that it is extremely important for even our best maps of reality to acknowledge the mind boggling mystery at the periphery of understanding, dark seas of incomprehension scribed with warnings that plainly read: “Here Be Dragons.”

The problem with most conspiracy theory is that, when followed through to the end with a critical eye, any particular theory ends up appearing hopelessly naive.  However, it is equally naive to think that, in a world with as dramatically imbalanced a distribution of wealth as ours, there are no conspiracy theories at all.  American and European history has been decidedly influenced by a plethora of secret societies, each with its own sphere of influence, control, and power.  Let’s be clear—those with the most wealth and power will almost always manipulate the system so they can maintain that power.  And they use tactics that have been in play since at least the Roman Empire—even the Babylonian, if you listen to Alex Jones.  But, outside the world of comic books and caped crusaders (the Guild of Calamitous Intent notwithstanding), it is hard to imagine any single room of people powerful enough (or competent enough with their power) to successfully manipulate and control the thoughts and values of over six billion individual agents around the world.

Conspiracies certainly exist, but no prison is strong enough to confine Eros.

Much of the confusion, i believe, is due to an unnecessary personification of the “nexus-agency” of the lower right quadrant—e.g. Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand”—there is a very real “intelligence” to the LR quadrant, a self-organizing force that we have begun to intuit, but have found difficult to account for (at least before Ken Wilber’s four-quadrant map made it explicit)—and while looking for some way to “ground” this LR intelligence in the real world, we naturally project it onto the power elite.  After all, if there anyone who could influence the political, industrial, military, and entertainment worlds, it would certainly be the top .0001% of the wealthiest people in the world.  But to think that any of them would be capable of subverting more than 500 years of individual liberty, enslaving the free-thinkers of the world under some sort of monolithic New World Order aegis of global totalitarianism (as Alex Jones suggests) is hopelessly naive, and radically overestimates our own sway on the forces of evolution in this lonely pocket of the galaxy.

It reminds me of my favorite argument against those who believe the Bush administration was responsible for 9/11*—do you really think that those responsible for the FEMA, Guantanamo Bay, and Iraqi WMD fiascos could really carry out an operation as incomprehensibly complex as a 9/11 coverup?**

As to Brian’s comment that “the LR would look much different with the truths you’re pointing to”—would it really?  Isn’t this thirst for wealth and power pretty much covered by the “Red” stage of development?  And isn’t it made pretty explicit that any level of cognition can be hijacked by ego-centric values, and that these power-hungry values can even be dressed up (double-speak style) with the language of pretty much any other stage of values?  While i agree that the integral treatment of political science has remained highly abstract and conceptual, and its real-world implementation needs to take into account the fact that the power elite and the developmental elite seem to share almost no overlap whatsoever, i don’t think our distribution of wealth and power does anything to “break” the integral model.  I also think it can accommodate the concept of “esoteric” and “exoteric” power dynamics as they exist today and throughout history, which is what most political conspiracy theory concerns itself with.

Again, i think it is foolish to believe any given conspiracy theory, on it’s own merit.  The truth is too big, too complex, and most likely too compartmentalized for even the conspirators themselves to fully understand.  And it is easy to become seduced by the sorts of generalizations people like Alex Jones throw around so easily, such as the idea that distinctions between the American Right and Left are mere Illuminati illusions—one only needs to look at the deeply-embedded culture wars of America to see that, on an ideological level, the Left and the Right represent some very real distinctions of modern political thought.  That is, even if the American political system has been manipulated on a structural level by the power elite, it is still inhabited by a plurality of different perspectives—some red, some amber, some orange, some green, some teal, and some turquoise.  Some valuing individualist libertarianism, some collectivist socialism.  Some emphasizing interior values, some emphasizing exterior conditions.  Some socially liberal, some socially conservative; some fiscally liberal, some fiscally conservative.  Again, although i agree that the integral community still needs to find more pragmatic interpretations of real-world power dynamics, we already have all the conceptual tools we need to do so—we just need to continue unfolding the map and unpacking some of these insights.

Personally, i have noticed that i have grown far less interested in conspiracies of imprisonment, and more interested in conspiracies of jailbreak—that is, if any one of the thousands of possible conspiracies was actually true, it would be extraterrestrial contact that would have the potential of radically reconfiguring our integral maps.  Nothing would stretch our definitions of the word “integral” more than interplanetary contact.  Just a couple weeks ago at Ken’s loft, he said something along the lines of “right now in history, we have the biggest opportunity we will ever have to integrate all the world’s knowledge and to get a real sense of the universal—until we make extraterrestrial contact, when we will have to compare our integrated world-truth with all the other integrated world-truths that are out there.”  But we don’t even need to be so visionary—i think that even finding a single microorganism in the seas of Europa would be enough to galvanize a massive upswell of human consciousness, as we would have a new symbolic “other” by which to contrast a new global sense of “us.”

You can almost smell the pot fumes with this sort of dorm-room philosophizing ^_^

* Which is an entirely different group of people than those who believe the Bush administration wasn’t directly responsible for executing the 9/11 attacks, but knew it was going to happen and allowed it to, precipitated by Cheney’s confession that we “need” a “new Pearl Harbor”—which i find to be a far more believable accusation.

** Just so i don’t come off as a typical liberal Bush-basher (though it can sometimes seem like shooting whales in a barrel) i will say in self-defense that i am horribly disappointed that the media has been ignoring the admirable success of his AIDS work in Africa, as it’s been recently estimated that his actions are responsible for saving the lives of over one million people.  It was a shining diamond in the eight-year rough that should receive far more acknowledgment than it does.  For some reason i doubt very much that Dick Cheney was closely involved in that one.  (Yes, i am a typical liberal Cheney basher.)

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