Robb Smith Profile picture
Founder, https://t.co/dyqXUmyjMs, Institute of Applied Metatheory (@iametatheory) & Integral Life (@integrallife). Tweeting decade+ on rise of Transformation Age.
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Mar 6 20 tweets 8 min read
How American Got Here... Thinking of new Complex Systems lens for , here's a graphic explainer I created for how the shape of the national socioculture changed to give rise to a totally new system "regime" between 1970 and 2020.

TLDR: specific decisions & policies each contributed in specific ways to polarized fracture of social contract between educated, liberal (small-l) winners of globalization and traditional white working class

(Did this quickly so I'm sure I left some things out. And my drawing kinda sucks.)ContextDriven.aiImage P.S. In case anyone is wondering, I struggled in that small space with how to demonstrate the seeming paradox between the social discord and protest riots of 1968 with the "stable, civil society" I start with in 1970. The basic idea is that even though the values of the nation were highly-contested, and in a liminal space between FDR's progressivism and Reagan's neoliberalism, there was still a more-or-less unified normative space that allowed for the contest to be assimilated through mostly-normal political processes—hence the system regime is stable even if the surface conditions were volatile. This has changed and we no longer have a shared concurrence on the legitimacy or commitment to our underlying democratic governance model, and so we are/have entered a new system regime.
Dec 20, 2022 16 tweets 5 min read
1/ In case you missed it, we announced results for The Maturing Test of GPT-3 on Saturday. A thread on what we found. 2/ First, what is an ego assessment?
Oct 1, 2022 6 tweets 2 min read
1/ This becomes more likely by the day, & obviously it puts the US in a bind. NATO wiping out Russian military in reply is doable, but then it likely escalates to strategic nuclear war. Which is why from day one I said this thing ends in a cloud or a coup. 2/ If RU does so, the global opprobrium would be severe, & they’d lose China & anyone else who otherwise wanted to stay in RU’s ideological camp. It would instantly turn Russia into N Korea, which is the most apt model of where Putin is taking Russia anyway.
Sep 29, 2022 5 tweets 1 min read
Perspectives, by ontological necessity, discriminate. From discriminatio, Latin, to divide or separate, and in archaic use “to make distinctions”. Given that there are no non-discriminatory perspectives in the universe, of course their participation is discriminatory. So Q moves to ethical, aesthetic, & functional discernments: what are the formal purposes of sport, the proper boundaries & ethics of competition, & the biological or other preconditions that enable those purposes and boundaries at all? And if the universe is becoming more…
Sep 28, 2022 5 tweets 2 min read
FML. Does no one learn nothing from anything anywhere ever? Brilliant to let the UK pension system leverage their pension assets in the midst of the greatest global volatility regime since 2008.

Nov 16, 2021 7 tweets 2 min read
A masterful hosting by @DouthatNYT of @SohrabAhmari that begs for a clearer distinction bw pre-liberal and post-liberal instincts by the radical right, and which turn on whether indeed “the law should be used to teach.”

Integralists should devour this.

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the… There’s no doubt that liberalism is nearing a cyclical end, and its contradictions eat it from the inside, but where someone like @PatrickDeneen sees liberalism failing, integralists see its structure giving rise to its own next stage of integration, a transcend, not regress.
Aug 31, 2021 6 tweets 2 min read
“a failure so broad that it should demand purges in the Pentagon, the shamed retirement of innumerable hawkish talking heads, razing of various NGOs and international-studies programs & the dissolution of countless consultancies & military contractors.” nytimes.com/2021/08/31/opi… And this doesn’t go far enough.

America should wallow deeply enough in this loss to learn the important lesson that its national wisdom, fragile in the best of times, is corrupted by a broken political process of narrow, gerrymandered primaries,
Aug 11, 2021 9 tweets 2 min read
Speaking w another integral org leader today, I suggested that the main problem w the Teal org community today is inadequate knowledge transparency & coordination of interventions mechanism. This is a software problem, and is at the heart of what I’d like to solve. This problem is also emblematic of a movement that has immense identity cohesion—indeed, its primary differentiable asset in a post-Amber world—but, due to the complexity of the worldspace, minimal social cohesion, little to no task cohesion, nor congruent incentives.
Jul 17, 2021 5 tweets 1 min read
I agree. “Philosophy is not a science, and the latest journal articles are not expressions of the most advanced thought. One is not going to find anyone writing in the current journals who is remotely as deep and thoughtful as Plato and Aristotle or Kant and Wittgenstein.” “science cannot answer any philosophical questions. The sciences are (very roughly) intellectual disciplines that pursue the discovery of empirical truths and, where possible, laws of nature in their several domains, and the construction of empirical theories that explain them.”
Jul 15, 2021 7 tweets 1 min read
We've taken a healthy ideal — “I am responsible for not offending other people” — and twisted it into “you are responsible for not offending me”. This has resulted in a collective regression away from a healthy pluralism and toward “grievance culture”...

integrallife.com/the-art-of-pra… But without an underlying “forgiveness culture” to support it, “grievance culture” can only end in more fragility, more tribalism, and an endless cycle of resentment.
Jun 26, 2021 8 tweets 2 min read
1/ Everything that is wrong with the world today in one image: Intelligence & education has to wade through endless ignorance & vitriol.

A society can’t survive this kind of perspectives flatland, as ecologies need power to flow to competence to optimize information processing. 2/ I think about this problem a lot, & I think it’s probably the Root Bug in the global operating system today, a system that needs to harness & unleash maximal system IQ to address 21st c challenges, but is confronted by Flatland at every step.
Apr 21, 2021 12 tweets 2 min read
1/ This nation desperately needs an integral approach to police reform. Briefly, here’s just a little of what it would entail.

washingtonpost.com/national-secur… 2/ Starts w lower-left quadrant/cultural revitalization to the SACRED responsibility of policing one of the world’s most precious democratic experiments. Police Academies & Departments should be downright cults... of goodness, service, love & care for their communities.
Jan 11, 2021 4 tweets 1 min read
1/ Integralists will always watch both the flows & margins of social dynamics. We're seeing the flow move back up towards Orange, and away from the Rights-only pole (towards Responsibilities). It will take time for these to re-cohere. Once they have, we'll watch for our shadow. 2/ What's happening now is the social body is building its immune system against the way Green can be abused to radicalize Red & Amber citizens into terrorists. This is necessary development. But it will become repressive & shadow if we don't create glide paths out for them.
Jan 11, 2021 10 tweets 4 min read
1/ What is Right Privilege? Walking around so embedded in your own delusion that you know:

- If you shout "law & order" loud enough, the law is what you say it is
- Cops are on your side, before they're enemies
- The hotel bar is relaxing after the insurrection

#rightprivilege 2/ You know:

- Society blowback for your terrorism is just more repression
- Socialism is hell, but tech platforms should be socialized
- Supporting others' needs is just socialism
- But California subsidizing Oklahoma is federalism

#rightprivilege
Dec 18, 2020 8 tweets 2 min read
1/ Quick thread on why integral people often suffer to clarify how to contribute economically, probably 1 of 2 top topics I coach friends about.

TLDR: Integral people live in a gap between evolutionary dilemmas & economic problems.

@IntegralLife 2/ Money follows problem-solution fit, which in turn requires an understanding of problems. Many problems exist but are not valued as such in a monetary way.
Sep 21, 2020 8 tweets 2 min read
The Integral corollary to this, a thread:

1/ An argument with the Red/Opportunist mind is over when one of us is knocked unconscious. 2/ It’s impossible to win an argument with the Amber/Conforming mind because cults have beliefs, not arguments.
Sep 18, 2020 5 tweets 1 min read
I believe that the US faces an existential threat to our democracy in the next 4 months. It is real and emergent.

Do not be surprised if you are asked in the coming months the following questions:

Should we temporarily suspend due process and posse comitatus? Should the military be called in to maintain domestic order?
Jul 22, 2020 6 tweets 2 min read
1) Brian, here’s the story of today’s inequality in 4 acts. Gotta see the whole picture. Hope this helps. 2) Act 1: 1945-1970: Contain the USSR

Do so by making USD GRC and building Germany & Japan postwar to act as bulwarks. In return they buy US goods & reinforce $ hegemony, establishing US core/periphery monetary empire.
Jul 5, 2020 20 tweets 4 min read
1/ To see why the Fed is the most racist organization in the world is not difficult. You first have to see what systemic racism is: systemic structures of oppression, or conversely, supremacy, that by their very action perpetuate massively unequal social power relations. 2/ The Fed is not, qua institution, subjectively racist. That would be absurd (in a way that it is not, for example, with an institution like the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan). The Fed mandate, strictly speaking, is not racist.
May 31, 2020 4 tweets 1 min read
1/ Complex thinking—being able to hold multiple causes & effects simultaneously all as real & important—is still in minority, developmentally speaking. Making matters worse, our system 1 brain is always simple (bc fast), & we have to slow down to engage system 2 for complexity. 2/ Now, this is important: Twitter relishes, & is built upon, a system 1 cognitive syntax... snappy and instinctual, identity-reinforcing feedbacks.

*This is why social media distorts our lifeworld* through accelerated feedbacks of noisy, non-real signals.
May 31, 2020 7 tweets 2 min read
1/ Probably a good night for a practice to turn fear and darkness into love and compassion. My version of Tonglen.

Close your eyes and take several deep breaths. Allow the stillness of a clear mind and open heart to overtake you; this is who you really are. 2/ Start to picture, and feel, your heart inside your chest as a burning, bright-as-the-sun light inside you. Raging love and compassion, this power inside you is able to transmute anything in this universe into light.