When the LambdaConf decision first came to light, I followed a number of very lively, vitriolic, passionate responses on twitter denouncing the decision to permit Curtis Yarvin (a.k.a. Mencius Moldbug) to speak at the conference. The conference took the viewpoint that his contribution outweighed his beliefs, and furthermore, that his beliefs were irrelevant to the conference. Many people who are opposed to his attendance and speaking argued that you cannot separate a person’s contributions from his political beliefs, just because he is only talking about one at a specific time.
Yarvin wrote a rebuttal to people’s objections saying that what he believes, and what he will be presenting are different things, which is very similar to the conference’s own stated position.
I continue to follow it as it is currently developing right now.
This strikes me as a very contemporary struggle between the orange rational level and the green postmodern level. Orange (from which Yarvin and the LambdaConf organizers are arguing), is the first stage where concern for other humans manifests at all, coming out of the ethnocentric amber state which would be more willing to burn someone at the stake than to engage in any sort of discourse, even if that discourse were dehumanizing. To people at orange, there is some awareness of the height of this particular unfolding, and so they justly (for their level) argue that the achievement of a human should overshadow his particular beliefs. This is the very unifying force that drove orange out of amber to begin with, so of course it is going to seem extremely prominent as the foundation of any argument.
The opposition is largely coming from a green altitude, where there is a rejection of the fundamentally dehumanizing aspect of orange. At orange, if I make more money than you, it’s because I am just better than you. Not morally superior, but economically. If I am more beautiful than you, it’s because I was born with better genes. Orange is the level where rationalism reigns supreme to the point where the subject is nearly completely suppressed in an attempt to actualize through achievement, whether that achievement is “the way things are” (biological determinism) or “the way things came to be” (individual exceptionalism).
At green, there emerges a truth that while no human is better than any other, some humans are suffering more than others, and it is our duty as agents of inclusion to make sure that no human is left behind just because some other human succeeded. This is the positive aspect of green. At the extreme, green is still a tier one consciousness, and because tier one relies on setting extrinsic security boundaries in order to stabilize its emergence, green will roundly reject orange contributions. “You are unwelcome to speak about virtual machines because you think that slavery is ok.” However, this is categorically throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Green generally accepts this, and assumes that the baby was not worth saving any way if the bath water was too dirty.
This rejection, that all tier one consciousnesses harbor, first finds its intrinsic contradiction in green who is so obsessed with inclusion. But the exception to the inclusion is if you do not share the mindset of inclusion. So it intrinsically has an exclusive quality. As I stated before, this is part of the extrinsic insecurity of tier 1 stages, it is required for the stage to fully actualize. And at this point therein lies the issue.
At an integral level, and starting at tier two, the consciousness first begins to understand that these tier one parts of itself are intrinsically valuable. It understands that without orange, there is mental stagnation; without green, there is too much division. But tier two comes from a level of understanding that extrinsic security is not longer necessary. Instead, intrinsic security takes over (I, as a universal, am not threatened by the machinations of levels preceding me), and a drive toward actualization of all that has come before begins. Teal begins the process of weaving the carpet that eventually becomes the tapestry of the Kosmos to Turquoise.
And that’s where I spend a lot of my waking life, is at teal bordering on turquoise. I have access to turquoise consciousness, but I am not stably there yet. So I thought, in what I think is traditional teal fashion, how could we prescribe an integral solution to this problem. I used my intuition into turquoise (i.e. how would a group of turquoise people handle an orange speaker), and came to the conclusion that there really is no way unfortunately. If the conference is predominantly orange, it will push away a lot of green contributors. If the conference is green, it will outlaw people it sees as “too” orange. There is no reconciliation because both viewpoints believe themselves to be absolute. These viewpoints can be reconciled internally (as in, I can operate at green and orange in order to inform teal and turquoise), but they cannot be reconciled into a group.
And so that leaves us with both sides being true, but partial. Orange conferences will focus more on individual achievement, to the potential (not guaranteed) detriment of some class of people, in this case anyone who has been a present day target of the philosophy that Yarvin perpetuates. Green conferences will focus more on community, choosing only the people who are a part of that inclusion community to speak, at the risk (but not guarantee) of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There is no reconciliation or solution to this problem is what my turquoise intuition tells me, because this is exactly how these levels are supposed to act. Yarvin is on the unhealthy side of orange, and I have seen some unhealthy green responses, but the gravity of both the orange and the green communities that are arguing seem to be doing exactly what they have learned to do thus far.
So therefore this controversy, this discussion, as passionate and lively as it is, is completely necessary and appropriate between these two levels. There is no “reconciliation” because this is how these levels relate, and it is the ties that bind, whether conflict or accord, that tie together the world in which we live.
