Ken Wilber puts up his follow-up to his two earlier Earp-Test posts [1] & [2] that features a kiss-ass email that he considers to be kick-butt. The mad Wilber titles this new post “The Unbearable Lightness of Wyatt Earpy.” He seems to be pursuing a movie theme.
Wilber doesn’t talk about it, but “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” is a romance, of sorts, that takes place mostly in the Czechoslovakia capital during Prague Spring, in 1968, and includes the Soviet invasion that put an end to a short bout of freedom. To my mind, the tight control that Wilber wields over Integral, the cult of personality that sweeps through his online presence, his unwillingness to engage in non-conforming dialogue at iN, and his elitism overlay that must certainly be a contortion of the true 2nd Tier, makes him an ugly taskmaster in that story of liberation. By making himself central instead of his insights; by controlling the levers and making his iterations of changes to Integral the line of acceptable dogma, he and his soldiers are a tank squadron presence in the Streets of the Spiritual. Perhaps we all should be so light in our being in the world that the tanks don't matter. But that wouldn’t excuse an effort to dampen down dissent.
In his new post, Wilber presents an email he received from Geert Drieghe that is gushing in praise of Wilber and that insult act in his first post. Here is part of that email:
I think it's a great example of a multilayered post that really addresses several meme levels at once, a feat which is not lightly done. When I read it I feel like Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind where he is taken into a FBI facility to read encrypted texts and where all the relevant words show up. For somebody at green all the cuss words and the rants show up, but for somebody at turquoise the lightness shines out, different words and strings of words light up. It would be really interesting to analyze how you did that.Here is part of Wilber’s response:
[It was] meant to convey what I believe are extremely important ideas, and thus indeed it was written with multilevel meanings, and that multilayered writing was something I worked at quite hard, especially as it went through several drafts, and thus it is what you call “a piece of art” …“A Beautiful Mind,” the movie, was for the most part a bad adaptation of an excellent biography of the same name about mathematics genius John Nash. But the film does do a good job focusing on Nash’s descent into madness, an important theme in the book. Quickly, Nash is of no aid to the government as he begins to read false messages everywhere. It is, perhaps, too much to hope that Geert is sending Wilber a message that he should be able to find among the email's lines: “Hey, Wilber, you're losing it.”
In David Berreby’s book Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind, there’s a chapter “Them, We Burn.” It talks about how we learn the standards and rituals of our culture and how we need a network of unwritten regulations and performance cues to act in a society and to understand one another. We all have “an innate knack for learning ‘our’ [the tribe’s] rules.” These things teach us what to eat, when to eat it, when to be emotional and when to be blasé. We understand others better if they are using cues similar to our own. One reason we can enjoy a foreign country and find it particularly exotic is if the culture is undergirded by a set of cues curiously different from our own. Part of what we learn is how to react to cuss words.
I would contend that Wilber isn’t having any insight about grand spiritual advancement relating to ego loss and oceanic acceptance; he is, instead, rather pitifully, creating new societal/tribe rules – rules that are only rather arbitrary and only conveniently contrary to the great society in which he functions. By doing this, he manufactures a loyal, willing tribe of folks that are all too obsequious. They have to be obsequious because one of the rules of the crawlspace, fake 2nd Tier that he writes the rules for is that Wilber is never wrong and that questioning him or failing to praise his every burp is likely to get you remanded to the dreaded 1st Tier.
In some societies you find people who are 'set off' by disrespect or by utterances of cuss words. This is learned behavior that lingers. Certainly, degrees of tolerance which becomes acceptance which becomes radical acceptance is involved in spiritual advancement. And these more-liberal cultural cues begin to replace what might be the conservative cues of one's culture and upbringing. But these "group bonding" cues are not the story of spiritual climb. Indeed, group bonding is tribal [purple meme] and causal for friction between people. [As I wrote in an earlier post, "kind" scientists have shown that it isn't friction that causes people to form groups; it is grouping that causes friction.]
So, Wilber's hot inauthentic posts about feather ruffling are really acts of tribe creation. Wilber is creating a tribe in his own likeness. And looking at Him, we are all supposed to see the Face of God.
Madness! … Madness! …
