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you all right welcome to conscious politics part two let's jump right in we have an enormous amount of material to cover and I am super excited about this I can't tell you how excited I am I've been planning this all week in fact there's so much material to cover that we're gonna need an extra episode we're still gonna be busy laying the foundation here in part to the practical stuff will come towards the end I promise it's gonna be worthwhile to really lay a deep foundation here which is what is necessary otherwise I'm just gonna give you a list of principles and policies and you're not gonna understand like why why the policies are what they are anyhow also I should I should point out for you here that understanding politics and government is not a tangent from self-actualization this will help you to understand yourself and people in fact what we're talking about when we're talking about government is we're talking about how to be in communion with other living beings at a sort of super organism level that's really what we're talking about we're not just talking about abortion rights or racism or tax policy I mean this is this is all nitty-gritty stuff we'll get to that but you need to learn how to commune with other living beings on a massive scale nobody has taught you this you see and so as you learn the principles of proper communion then that's going to help you within your local community it's gonna help you within your business and corporation because you have team members there it's gonna help you even in your family because really the problems you face in your family you have political problems in your family don't you of course you do those same problems exist on higher orders of organizations it's just that scaled up by hundreds of millions and then you see how difficult it is so don't think of this as some sort of tangential topic this is self actualization human beings we are social ape creatures we are social we are self actualizing in a social matrix you see and culture and collective ego these are huge forces that shape our lives very much they shape our egos they shape our identities so as you study the principles of conscious politics and government in the world after you're done with this series you're gonna see that's gonna help you to deeper understand yourself and as you understand yourself deeper and your own devilish ways all your egotism and all the stuff that you're gonna be self actualizing and purifying out of you through the spiritual path as you do that you will gain insights into what makes other people so bad at politics and government and then everything will come together and you'll understand so here's the key perhaps the most important thing I want you to take away from this episode your level of consciousness and development dictates your values your morals and therefore your politics that's really the thing that's running the show so at this point my political or rather my my understanding of consciousness and human development has become so deep that I can just look at someone on television on CNN or Fox News or whatever and just look at the politics that they're spewing or the morality that they have and I can quickly identify what value system they're coming from and I can quickly see that all they are is just a zombie or a robot parroting away running off a script with their ideology whether left or right or whatever people vote simplistically for whoever they resonate with a lot of times you see people on TV pundits and analysts debating endlessly about all well why how could how could this person have voted for that person and how could this policy have passed and the others they're surprised by these things there's nothing surprising about it at all and there's nothing very sophisticated about at all it's actually very simple whatever your level of consciousness and your level of development that dictates your values and then therefore you vote for that level of person it's as simple as that nothing else matters gun rights abortion rides this that it's all that's all nonsense what determines who you vote for is your set of values and your set of values changes depending on what stage of development and consciousness you're at we'll talk about the stages here in a moment everything else is just a retroactive rationalization that your ego mind comes up with pretty stories that you tell yourself and reasons and and logic and facts and all this these are just arbitrary justifications that you create after the fact to justify why you voted for some or why you like some politician so what I'm telling you here is that person who is at a certain level of consciousness or development and value certain things like nationalism for example they're gonna vote for a nationalistic person they're gonna look at all the candidates out in the field whether they're Democrats or Republicans and they're gonna this is all gonna happen unconsciously but they're gonna look and they're gonna see who do I resonate with it's sort of like a feeling thing who do i resonate with and the one you're gonna resonate with is the exact guy or woman who has the same level of consciousness and values that you have so if you're a nationalist you're gonna resonate with a nationalist if you're a hippie you're gonna resonate with a hippie if you're a a corporate CEO you're gonna resonate with a corporate CEO minded type of person who shares your set of values it's literally this simple it's like the simplest thing there's no mystery to it see and then what you tell yourself about why you chose somebody that you have to be very very suspicious of that doesn't matter because your entire life is lived from your state of consciousness and your level of development this isn't just politics this is also how you show up in your relationships how you show up at work how you think about money how you think about sex all of this is governed by these more fundamental structures of your own psyche see but of course nobody is really conscious of these structures so to them it's just a mystery of you know who to vote for and why people vote and all the sort of stuff actually it's extremely simple also I want you to notice that your political ideology whatever it happens to be left or right or Center is a survival strategy of yours I want you to notice that it has nothing to do with the truth you tell yourself that your politics is based in truth but actually it isn't that's sort of a little bit of a rude awakening that I want you to experience here remember we're going meta beyond ideologies you were indoctrinated into your political positions if you just go and you you analyze how you arrived at your political ideology where to come from whether you're conservative or liberal it came from a from early childhood and teenage upbringing within your family and your culture and your colleagues and co-workers and they just a doctrine aid you with various ideas of course this happened and you were you were willing to go along with it and that's where your political ideology comes from you didn't do anything intelligent you didn't actually bother to sit down and think for yourself and arrive at some positions on abortion and gun rights and this and that you didn't do any of this you just absorbed it from your culture and whatever the status quo of your culture is that's what you picked up and if you grew up in a conservative family chances are you hold conservative ideologies and if you drew up in a liberal family you hold liberal ideologies notice this notice it remember when I talked about what survival is in my two-part series understanding survival I said that survival is not just about surviving your physical body first and foremost survival is about maintaining your identity and that ideology remember I said your worldview is like an operating system which governs everything you do and all of your motivations and all of your actions and behaviors in all the various contexts of life right so that's what we're talking about here the reason people get so attached to their Nicoll ideologies and they don't want to give it up and they get so emotional about it and so defensive about it is precisely because when we're talking about changing or questioning one's political ideology we're talking about changing fundamental features of one's worldview which is something the ego mind does not want to give up because to it to admit that parts of its worldview are wrong is very very threatening that's a slippery slope that it doesn't want to go down because that opens Pandora's Box to to much greater existential crises and problems that we don't want to even get into here see so people of course get very defensive about their their worldview which is why religion politics sexuality these are some of the most controversial topics that exist and it's very difficult to have serious substantive conversations about these precisely because people dig in their heels and the trick is they don't want to explore different worldviews so what I'm inviting you to do here is to drop all of your ideologies whatever they are and to sort of start to think from scratch rethink everything be very mindful of how you're just executing a script you're just being a zombie here a selfish zombie you're not being intelligent culture plays a huge role in maintaining the status quo of government and society 99% of people never think for themselves their ideas are absorbed from culture this is true even of serious intellectuals and scientists it's extremely difficult to break out of the cultural matrix that you grew up in and politics and government cannot evolve until culture evolves so it's a tricky catch-22 because of course the powerful and the most selfish people who have the most power in the culture and in society precisely put up obstacles to changing the culture they don't want the culture to evolve because to them that is tantamount to death if the culture evolves the political structure will evolve if the political structure evolves they risk losing their power and since they're just blindly selfish all they care about is maintaining their power because maintaining their powers how they survive how they reproduce how they pass off their resources to their offspring and ensure that their offspring do the same that's really what this is about and who gets to decide in which direction culture should evolve which is the right direction you see the problem here everyone has their own opinions and hence we get to the culture wars and the force of the status quo that is preserving existing culture is extremely strong extremely strong most people in countries around the world are attached to their culture and to their way of life and they don't want change they don't like change and so this is what we're dealing with here so the majority of people are gonna resist any kind of change or even any kind of discussion about change necessarily so because they're afraid of what that leads to what does the change mean for me and for my family they're worried they're scared I also want you to understand that logic reason and facts have been co-opted by the ego logic and reason our survival and selfishness not truth so whatever logic or science that you use to rationalize your political ideology understand that this is backwards rationalization you're not actually believing the things you believe because they're logical or reasonable or because of the facts or the statistics or because of science you use all of those to entrench your existing positions which were adopted blindly on blind faith not based on any kind of reason logic or facts be very mindful of that trick that the mind plays now here's an important distinction that I want you to make that'll help you out there's a difference between content versus structure content versus structure content is the specific content of your beliefs people get hung up on this stuff like content would be for example are you a Muslim or you're Christian or are you a Jew or are you an atheist or do you believe we should ban assault weapons in the United States or do you believe that we shouldn't these are content based disagreements people get caught up on these this is not what's important what's important is the structure the structure is the underlying cognition that you're using to think about the content it's how your mind works behind the scenes that you're not aware of it's the very fact that you're holding these beliefs without recognizing that their beliefs or ideologies or where they came from or the fact that you're just executing the script that is the deeper structure and the most important piece of structure that we're to be talking about at length here right now that determines all political actions and motivations and opinions is the sense of self and other that you have what is your sense of self and what is your sense of other that's the key that is so key most people just assume that well my sense of self is just me my body and then the other is just everything else it's not so simple sense of self is a is an elastic notion as is the sense of other so we're going to explore this in a moment here this is a this is a matter of how big is your circle of concern and here we need to talk about developmental psychology and specifically stages of moral development researchers and psychologists over the last 50 years have done some good serious research into how morality develops within human beings and what they found is that there's a consistent ladder of steps that people go up as they grow and they mature so here are some of these steps this is we're gonna be talking about now from going from the smallest circle of concern smallest most condensed sense of self to an expanding ultimately Universal sense of self and circle of concern so first we start off with the way that a baby is born into the world it's just my physical survival it's the smallest circle of concern you could have at this point you don't even care about your family you don't care about your parents you don't care about your friends because you basically don't have any friends and your family you don't even recognize them as your family it's just like a little toddler who needs his milk otherwise he cries dad that's that's it that's all he cares about he doesn't even care about what happens to his mother he just needs what he needs to live it's a very primitive form of existence and this is how animals live as well animals mostly just care about their own physical survival many animals for example will actually cannibalize their own kind they will even cannibalize their young in order to personally physically survive and that's just a very crude form of survival you know that we had to go through as as life-forms to to get to where we are today then your circle of concern expands some more as you grow up and now it's not just me personally but of course you have to include your family as well and usually also you have to start to include your tribe as well because you don't just grow up in a family outside of a tribe this has never been the case in human civilization until maybe yeah just now in the 21st century well we always had a tribe so now I care about myself my family and my tribe and I care like I really care like if someone in my family gets hurt or injured I actually empathize with them and I want to help them and if they need help I will gladly lend a hand but not to some other family only to my own family because my own family is mine and that other family is some other family animal what do I have to do with them likewise I will chip in for my tribe but I won't chip in for the neighboring tribe because they're not my tribe and that's my sense of self and my sense of circle of concern then that grows to include me my family but also now my civilization because we're going beyond tribes we've evolved to civilization so my civilization my ethnic group my culture my religion my morality and my country all of that this is the level of moral development that many conservatives are at right here this is how they form their entire identity around their family their civilization their ethnic group their their moral system passed down from their religion and their culture and their country and this is held to be the best and everything else is expendable it's not mine that other country that other culture that other civilization it has nothing to do with me that's how they think then you grow a little bit more and your circle concern expands to all decent human beings on the planet all races all cultures but not the bad guys not the evil people not the criminals not the ones who would oppress the innocent your circle of concern does not expand to those those you hold as expendable because they're bad in your mind what all decent people regardless of what country they live in you have empathy for then your circle concern expands even more as you become more conscious and more developed and now you start to care about all human beings on the entire planet good or bad including the evil ones the criminal ones and even the ones who would oppress the innocent you even have empathy for them because you recognize that they too are human and many of the most monstrous people on the planet actually there's a really good reason for why they are that way because they were abused as children or they grew up in a very impoverished environment or they had terrible tragedies like their family died when they were young or they were indoctrinated into some kind of cult or some sort of terrorist organization so you start to see that oh it's not really their fault I can see why they went down that road and if if not for me being a little bit lucky being born in the right circumstances and the right family and being raised I too could have gone down that road and so oh I see I I have empathy for them now - then your circle of concern expands even more to include now not just humans but animals and the environment you care about the entire planet as an ecosystem this is called Gaia planet Earth as a super organism you care about the future of the entire planet not just for your selfish needs it's not like oh well I care about the planet because I don't want my children to you know to live in it in a burning hell but I actually care about just the well-being of the planet itself and all the animals that live on it then your circle of concern expands even further to include all conscious beings in the entire universe not just this planet and then lastly your circle of concern becomes infinite your sense of self becomes infinite and you care about all of creation whether it's living or nonliving in this dimension in some other dimension in the past in the future at all times all of it is something you identify with and all of it is something you empathize with and care for and want the best for so try to peg yourself where are you honestly where are you on this scale of moral development understand though that if you're at a lower level this doesn't mean you're an evil person it just means you're at that level so I'm not judging you for being whatever level you're at just be honest with yourself and don't judge yourself either also understand that there's gonna be a problem here is that if your level is too low you're not gonna even want to accept that there are these levels you see because some people listening to me here if they're on a low level they'll say leo but why should I care about the animals in the environment this is some hippy [ __ ] some new-age nonsense all conscious beings and you know what are you talking about this is this is fairy tales and wishful thinking I mean I can understand maybe caring for all human beings but are you serious caring about animals and environment this is this is silly yeah that you're speaking from notice that you're speaking from your current stage of consciousness and moral development that's how you feel and you honestly feel that way and you can't understand why someone would care about living beings on another planet to you it makes no sense because you haven't evolved to that level yet you see so that the trick here is that it's hard to take seriously any level which is several stages above your current level because if you could understand it and you would accept it seriously then you would already be there you see so keep that mind so the reason we get such bad politics is because most of the citizens who vote have a very small narrow circle of concern and most of mankind is at a very primitive level of moral development over 50% of the planet are at the level where they have uh the circle concern includes them their family and their civilization their ethnic group and they are personal religion and country and nothing else that's where 50% of the globe is at right now see so it's it's it's not very sophisticated also I should tell you about Lawrence Kohlberg stages of moral development Lawrence Kohlberg is the developmental psychologist from the University of Chicago if I recall correctly and he did some some groundbreaking research by analyzing people and how they evolved as they mature and he found the following six stages of moral development really he broke it up into three into three parts so first you have the preconventional then the conventional and then the post conventional so each of these three parts has two stages in it so stage one pre conventional is as follows morality is based upon obedience and a punishment orientation which basically means extremely selfish how can I avoid punishment that's what the person cares about so the reason that they're moral is because they want to avoid personal punishment and suffering you know it's very selfish a selfish way to be moral then you evolve beyond that two stage two which is now a self-interested orientation where now instead of avoiding punishment it's a question of what's in it for me so all be good as long as there's something in it for me like I'll be good if you pay me some money that's sort of thinking then you evolve beyond that and you get into the conventional stage conventional stage three is interpersonal Accord and conformity now the person is motivated to be a good boy or a good girl and to have some authority figure think of them as a good boy or as a good girl and they get a sense of achievement out of being that good boy or that good girl and that is what motivates them to be moral so they're not really doing it because they believe it's right per se they're doing it because some authority figure told them to and they want to conform to what the authority of your told them and they want the approval and love of the authority figure then you evolve beyond that to Stage four which is now Authority and social order maintenance this is a law and order morality you conform to the laws of your culture and your civilization and you accept them unquestioningly as the one true right way and you believe that they are absolute because they're passed down by God or some other authority figure and it never really even occurs to you to question law and order it just is what it is and it's always been this way that's how you think and so you just follow and you conform and you you don't skirt the rules and then finally you get to the post conventional stage Stage five which is the social contract orientation here use to see that there's like a social contract that we all sort of sign up for when we're born and we want to participate in that and that morality is not based in in religion or in God but rather in social contract theory and it's really about maximizing the greatest good for the greatest number of people sort of a utilitarian philosophy then the next stage after that is stage six this is called Universal ethical principles here now you start to think critically for yourself this is like the morality of Immanuel Kant you think critically for yourself and you try to behave in such a way that you're a good citizen within your society and you try to follow your own principles you set your own principles and here at this level of morality you can actually question government laws because you don't take them as absolutes here you can look at some government law and you can say well you know what that part in the Constitution where it says that black people aren't even people but just like three-fifths of a person or whatever that number was the ratio that used to be there you know we can question that that doesn't seem right to me because I have my own internally grounded ethical principles and doesn't seem right to me that black people should not count as a full person so I'm gonna question that and I'm gonna stand up for what should be right I have my own internal sense of justice and and propriety and so I can now question and change those laws based on what my heart tells me rather than what the the book says it doesn't matter what the book says it matter what the Constitution says we can rewrite the Constitution because the Constitution was written by men and how did they come up with it well they followed their hearts or that their own reasoning supposedly right that's how this type of person thinks and then lastly there's a there's a final stage which Kohlberg didn't even get to because he himself wasn't developed enough and it was hard for him to to gather the empirical evidence for it but I'm telling you right now it's there because I'm there it's transcendent morality we could call this stage 7 Universal self love this is when your sense of self through mystical experience and enlightenment becomes so great that it literally becomes infinite and you become conscious of the substance of the entire universe as consciousness and love and therefore you love the entire universe because you realize that it's all a product of your own mind this is a very radical very advanced level of morality that less than 1% of the population has ever tapped into or even understands exists so so there you go so this explains a lot about how people act with politics and with government is because most of them are at a at a conventional not even a post conventional but at a conventional level of morality where they're mostly just conforming to various kinds of authority figures that came in the past they're not thinking critically about these things at all so their ideology is based on that and their politics is based on that now let me give you an example with abortion here about how this morality stuff works so my claim is the reason that we put these as numbered stages each stage builds on top of the previous stage is because what happens is that it's not just that these are different random categories and a person just either accepts stage 1 or stage 5 or stage 7 just willy-nilly it's not how it works you evolve through it by developing your sense of self by expanding it by becoming more conscious so the claim is that you start off at the bottom and you move towards the top now most people don't make it very far towards the top they start so they stop somewhere in the middle they usually stop roughly at the center of gravity of their culture or their family that they grew up in but the reason we can say that the higher stages are more advanced and more developed and more conscious is precisely because once you evolve to them you will never evolve backwards and they go in a consistent order so for example with abortion and this is just one example the first stage of morality of abortion is something like this you ask a person at this stage is abortion right or wrong and they'll just tell you [ __ ] you I'll do whatever the [ __ ] I want you don't get to tell me what to do stage 2 you ask a person is abortion right or wrong and they say abortion is definitely evil because God says so my Bible says so and you can't question the Bible because it's the absolute truth then that person evolves further if they keep growing and expanding their consciousness if they keep doing self actualization work they will evolve to the next stage where you ask them as abortion right or wrong and they will say well it's complicated we need to balance the suffering of the fetus versus the suffering of the mother because clearly there are instances where abortion can be abused so we don't want to just give everybody free rein of abortion you know all the way up until the final day of the abortion willy-nilly aborting you know nine month-old fetuses you know this this would this would be cruel and it would create unnecessary suffering but on the other hand we also have to take the the serious complications that mothers have during during labor and during childbirth all of this needs to be taken into account during pregnancy it's complicated got to take rape into account we got to take incest into account all of these complexities and you know we have to we have to weigh the pros and cons and the relative suffering of the mother versus the fetus because you know if if the fetus is only like a clump of cells not even a fetus yet and it's only a month old it doesn't even have a heart does it have a brain does it really suffer doesn't seem like it suffers that much so in this case the suffering of the mother if the Milly of the mother's life is in danger something to happen then sure we allow the mother to do what she used to do but but you know once you get to a certain point where it develops a heart and a brain and you can you can tell that it's capable of suffering now the situation starts to tip favor of of the fetus rather than mothers than the mother's wishes and desires and so see it's a it's a very nuanced position about abortion so my claim is that once you evolve to this nuanced position you will never go backwards to believing that abortion is evil because God says so nor will you ever go backwards to the point where you say well [ __ ] it I'll just do whatever I want see in this way we say that certain stages are more evolved and developed than others because the thing with expanding your consciousness is that once it expands to a certain level it never contracts all the way back now of course you can have temporary contractions and when you're just pushing to expand it it can contract back but once you kind of really expand it permanently it never fully ever contracts back so the key to understanding all politics is these stages of morale and also ego development it's not just that morality develops through stages but the ego develops through stages and here I'll point you to a researcher a harvard-educated developmental psychologist by the name of Susan Cooke Gruyter Cooke - Gruyter so weird last name but she did some amazing research and she she has nine stages of ego development that egos go through I'm not gonna go to the details of that it's it's too complicated and technical but just be aware of that and I posted on my blog actually one of her research papers it's like a hundred page research paper which talks about the various stages of ego development so the reason I'm giving you this is because I want you to see that what I'm talking about here is not just my own personal preferences and biases I am I'm talking about serious scientific research that's been done in fact in the future I will do a whole episode called developmental psychology which will list about eight different developmental psychologists reputable ones from top universities that have been doing research for the last 50 years on this and you'll see a lot of convergence and it'll really build on top of the stuff we've talked about with spiral dynamics so the key here about ego development is that it's all about how selfish you are the more developed your ego is the less selfish you are the less develop your ego is the more selfish you are the more selfish you are the more you are motivated by greed fear ignorance hatred bias the more closed-minded you are the more prone you are to denial projection blaming and division and the more dogmatic and the more ideological you are and when you are that way you vote for those types of leaders you vote for the leader who most reflects who you are you see so if you're a racist you're gonna vote for racist leaders if you're a hippie you're gonna vote for hippie leaders and so forth the trick to conscious politics is stepping outside of one's identity there cannot be conscious politics without expanding your sense of identity that's what it all boils down to because the more expanded your identity the more capable you are of universal love and that is the thing that we will need to resolve all of the tricky problems of self dealing that make politics so dirty and problematic see when selfish people do politics it becomes very ugly it becomes name-calling factions and rivalries and ultimately violence and genocide when selfless people engage in politics they can resolve all sorts of problems without violence without name-calling they can be adults rather than children so that's what we're working towards here so how do we fix all the problems with government firstly by taking personal responsibility for them secondly by educating yourself about the problems many of these problems are complicated and require study thirdly by expanding your sense of self-consciousness in your capacity to love which something you do through personal development work through consciousness work through spiritual work by purifying yourself of your devilry that's how you stop being a devil it's really simple you want good politics stop being a devil be an example for others of how not to be a devil and then they will also not want to be Devils around you because they'll see your example and so as you do all this you become a better citizen and a better leader within your community and then this creates an upward spiral where everyone starts doing the same thing and then we have a beautiful Society and to the extent that we don't do this is the to the extent that we have a evil society where it's selfish and vicious and oppressive and unfair and violent and it's nasty to the point where nobody wants to live in such a society you want to run away and see suddenly now you see why why government is so screwed up because nobody wants to do the hard work of actually expanding their sense of self and their capacity to love this is hard to do all the self actualization stuff that you've been doing over the years while following me you guys who've been doing it and you girls you know how difficult it is see it's filled with pain and suffering and you know overcoming your own ego and you know rude awakenings and ego backlashes all this most people aren't interested in any of that instead what they're interested in is just ideological debates because when they're engaging in ideological debates this allows them to blame everybody else except themselves therefore they never have to turn inwards they never have to do any inner work they don't have to grow they don't have to change they don't have to improve as a human being they don't have to raise their capacity to love they don't have to question their culture or their religion or their family they can just comfortably fit in and execute a script this is it it's this simple it really is this simple but notice this is not talked about anywhere else on television or in the political analysis nowhere is this talked about as simple and as obvious as it is you know once you understand what I'm talking about here it's gonna be so obvious you know like of course of course this is the answer of course this is the root problem of why government is so so corrupt see one of the hallmarks of conscious people is that they take responsibility for everything they don't blame they don't deny they don't project it they don't ignore and they don't divide they don't sweep problems under the rug they take responsibility for them and they become proactive about it notice that all of low consciousness politics often that you see on TV and YouTube tries to blame somebody else it really is this simple you can identify what political ideology someone has simply by asking them who's responsible for all the problems in the world and they will have a scapegoat for you so who's being blamed either immigrants or my or minorities women or feminists terrorists or muslims globalists are jews reptilians Russia North Korea Iran various dictators around the world or who are blame or just the politicians the President Congress Republicans or Democrats are blamed the gays are blamed atheists are blamed theists are blame religious nut cases are blamed communists and cultural Marxists are blamed corporations are blamed the media is blamed racists are blamed who do you like to blame if you're blaming somebody and you honestly believe that the world's problems would be resolved if we simply got rid of the racists or the gays or the communists or the Republicans or the Democrats or the globalists you're kidding yourself you're not operating for a place of high consciousness because if you were truly conscious your sense of self would be so expanded that you would understand that all of this all of these various groups and factions that are that are fighting for power and control that are acting selfishly and I'm by the way I'm not excusing any of these people from not contribute to the problem they certainly all of them contribute to the problem in their own respective ways but um and and also to various degrees so I'm not creating false equivalencies here I'm not saying that gays are the same as racists no don't get me wrong I'm just saying that if you were conscious your sense of self would be so expanded that you would realize that this is just the cards that humanity has been dealt we are collectively evolving through some complex stuff trying to survive on this rock which is spinning around around the Sun at thousands of miles a minute you see in the larger scheme of things that's what's happening here and you know building a society is a very difficult thing and people have different agendas and people are different levels of development and so you can't really blame anybody here and so a conscious person would take responsibility for the devilry of his or her government and that's exactly what's missing today in our political discussions nobody wants to take responsibility for the devilry that their government commits sure everybody loves to to blame government and the politicians for being corrupt and evil in all this but the truth is they're only as corrupt and evil as the people who elected them and you are directly responsible for what they are doing that's how democracy works human rights abuses oppression and war is your responsibility if your government is waging war you are responsible for that war whatever human rights abuses and torture that your government is doing you're responsible for it and if you say no I'm not leo I didn't vote at all there you go you're responsible by not voting you're responsible by not making a choice by being lazy by being ignorant you create the status quo you maintain the status quo which is generally oppressive abusive and more like see now I'm not blaming you per se responsibility is a much broader notion than blame see my episode blame versus responsibility you know I'm not I'm not saying you're a bad or evil person by saying that you need to be responsible for the devilry of your government I'm just saying be responsible realize that you have you have some say in what your government does even if you live in a country you might say well Leo but I live in a country where I don't even get to vote so how am I responsible the government just decides without my even able to to do anything about it you can do something about it how do you think countries that have the right to vote got the right to vote because they didn't have it originally no country was started with the right to vote and certainly not a universal right to vote for women and lower class people and for black people and minorities too no it didn't work that way even in America this wasn't the case in America the right to vote was reserved for the most elite land owning rich people who were also white and men so how do you think the rest of them got the right to vote by by standing up by taking responsibility for it and the way that America was founded our founding fathers the way that they got the right to vote even for the for the for the rich white men of this country is by waging a revolutionary war against some king in England see so so only when you take responsibility are you able to really challenge and change government what I'm telling you here is something that you don't want to hear I'm telling you that you are responsible for the Iraq war you are responsible for nuclear weapons you are responsible for immigration problems you are responsible for the corruption of government you are responsible for corporate lobbying and Wall Street shenanigans you are responsible for Donald Trump even if you didn't vote for him you are responsible for terrorism you are responsible for overfishing you are responsible for pollution you are responsible for partisanship you are responsible for racism even if you don't consider yourself to be a racist this would be a position that a conscious person acknowledges if you're not a conscious person you're gonna deny your responsibility for these things you're gonna come up with excuses such as like well Leo I'm not a racist so how am I responsible for racism but you're part of a larger society racists aren't some evil people that are living somewhere else racists are your neighbors part of your society your friends and if we look at it from an even bigger picture perspective they are part of your consciousness they are part of the entire universe which is identical with yourself but now we're kind of getting getting ahead of ourselves here okay so you're responsible for all this stuff when you start to see it that way your whole attitude changes you stop blaming and you start looking for solutions you start being understanding towards those people who you thought were evil who you spent time blaming and you see that that blaming didn't solve anything and only contributed to the problems because you blame them they blame you and and then nothing happens nothing changes when you take responsibility for these things then you can become a great leader for example if you took responsibility for leadership you might say if I mean for racism you might say well I'm not a racist but what am i doing to help change people who are race how do I reach out to them how do I convince them maybe I can start a school maybe I can start a YouTube channel maybe I can write a book maybe I can go talk to politicians maybe I can become a politician maybe I can give an inspiring speech and then through this you can change the situation you can't change the situation by sitting around and blaming others here are a few low consciousness political behaviors that I want you to be very cognizant of because you might be engaging in these number one trying to own or ridicule your opponent's high consciousness people do not do this number two taking Glee in the suffering of your opponents so if you see a Democrat suffer and your Republican and that makes you happy that that's happening or vice versa if you're a Democrat and you see a Republican suffering that makes you happy just know that that's the low consciousness behavior you see the reason that you're happy at the suffering of your opponents is because you've separated yourself from your opponents and your sense of self is so contracted that doesn't include your opponents if your sense of self expanded further it would include your opponents and therefore even though they're your opponents you might disagree with them you're not happy that they suffer you feel compassion for them you understand that they suffer out of their own ignorance and you would like to help them but of course not everybody will allow themselves to be helped and you understand that but you don't take joy in seeing them suffer even if they're deeply ignorant and unconscious because you understand that at one point in your life you two were deeply ignorant and unconscious see number three holding an intellectual position as an absolute conscious people don't do that not acknowledging that your perspective or point of view is a point of view conscious people don't do that unconscious people do that unconscious people deny that their point of view is a point of view they tend to hold it as an absolute next scheming and manipulating to defeat your opponents if you scheme and manipulate a lot to undermine your opponent's you're not a conscious person if you demonize your opponents you're not a conscious person if you call your opponent's crazy or insane you're not a conscious person because when you call somebody crazy or insane that means you're not interested in understanding their point of view that's a defense mechanism you see and lastly acting righteous beware of acting morally righteous conscious people do not act morally righteous and with all these low consciousness political behaviors that I pointed out here I'm not just saying this for the sake of civility I'm talking about something substantive and something much deeper I'm not just saying at all we should all just get along and be nice to one another that's not what I'm saying it's not about and being nice or being pleasant sometimes you do have to fight with in politics sometimes you'd have to stand up against people who are truly devils and want to do unconscious things you do have to stand up you don't just lay down and be a doormat and you don't just be civil with them you know you don't you don't you don't just take Hitler out for dinner to a tea party you know you don't you don't need to do that that's not what I'm talking about but you do have to be careful not to fall into the very same traps that make your opponents your opponents and not to to feed the downward spiral into unconsciousness you see this is very important a lot of liberals make this mistake they they fall into the trap of thinking that well we're above the Conservatives were more evolved to the Conservatives and so therefore now we can we can act morally righteous and we can demonize them and can call them Nazis and racists and these sorts of things and we can even we can even be glad when they suffer and those sorts of stuff this is not conscious behavior be careful with that even though you might be correct on individual policy positions that doesn't mean you're acting conscious human being you see separate the structure of how you act and how you think from your individual policy positions whatever you believe in as a liberal maybe you believe in medicare-for-all maybe you believe in socialism maybe you believe in in free health care or free college or whatever these are fine you know believe what our policies you want but separate that from the structure of your psyche and your ego ideology cannot prevent devilry no ideology can in fact ideology is the primary tool of devilry so changing your ideology from a conservative one to a liberal one is not going to do it morality cannot prevent devilry no system of codified moral codes can prevent devilry technology cannot prevent devilry some people have this fantasy it's the sort of the techno bro fantasy that if only we have enough technological innovation we have robots and machines we have the the the digital singularity and we have Elan musk who becomes our Overlord and solves all our problems through technology that this way we will solve the problems of government and unconsciousness and devilry no it's not gonna happen technology is co-opted by the devil notice this every new technology presents new problems we invent nuclear weapons and then devils get a hold of them and then we have disaster so technology's not going to do it and in fact some of the newest developments that are happening with you know brain computer interfaces and genetic engineering cloning this sorts of stuff this is this is extremely dangerous stuff and it's not gonna solve our problems gonna make the problems even worse first we have to solve the devilry then that will create space for more technology regulation also can't prevent delery a devil is going to be the devil no matter what the regulations are although of course regulations are necessary the only thing that prevents devilry is expanding your sense of self in other words stop being a [ __ ] devil that's how you stop devil ray spiritual development is necessary spiritual work to prevent devilry and here we run into one of the key problems right now in our stage Orange by the Nemec stage where society is the very notion of bringing spiritual development into politics or government and to suggest that we cannot solve our government and politics problems unless everybody spiritually evolved and do spiritual work that is a non-starter already because you have you're gonna have the scientists and atheists and and agnostics and so forth you know whining and bitching and moaning about the fact that no leo you're creating a theocracy and you're you're you're forgetting about the separation of church and state and what are you talking about this spirituality just a bunch of New Age hippie [ __ ] and it doesn't really solve anything it's impractical see yeah with that kind of attitude because people are so ignorant about what spirituality is we're stuck we're stuck with devilry then stage orange devilry capitalist devilry that's what we have right now I want you to really understand that political discourse in our culture and media is happening at it at just a barbaric childish level childishness that's what it is it's children throwing food at each other that's what our politics is right now none of the real issues are being talked about that's the real tragedy of all this really what I'm talking about here should be talked about on CNN and Fox News and MSNBC every single day that's all they should be talking about this is the shitty Anderson Cooper should be talking about what the [ __ ] is he doing sorry Henderson but this is what you should be talking about dude not like back and forth having Republicans and Democrats bicker with each other about some nonsense tweet that Donald Trump made last night that's not that's not gonna move us forward but on the other hand I understand why he does what he does because he's in a certain corporate system and the stuff that I'm talking about here it takes hours to talk about you can't have a three-minute soundbite about these these things you know this is a serious this is serious work but then again how else do you expect serious problems would get solved other than through serious work serious careful critical thinking study self analysis self reflection people in our culture are deeply ignorant about government and politics this right here contributes to at least 50% of all of our problems simply this a lack of education study and contemplation and I'm not even talking about advanced ideas about non-duality or about even conscious politics as I'm talking about here I'm not even playing for less than 1% of our population will even reach this stage to be able to understand what I'm saying in this set of episodes I'm just talking about extremely basic education most people have no sense of political history about Nazism about McCarthyism about slavery about racism about other nations about what government is like in Scandinavia about what government is like in Africa about how government evolved about the Roman Empire about the Egyptian Empire about the Chinese Empire just these basic things to be able to understand government and politics you need a historical foundation this is absolutely critical because history is filled with over 5000 years of politics done in various wish vicious ways and we can see the stuff that's worked in the stuff that hasn't worked and by studying history you start to appreciate where we are at today puts everything into context see but how many books have you read about political history since high school or the end of university whichever that was for you if you didn't go to university how many books of political history have you read since high school zero probably for most people the answer is zero so of course you're ignorant about politics and government and of course you didn't vote for the wrong people of course you're gonna be easily seduced and misled by various kinds of fear-based ideologies which are peddled as a business by various kinds of outlets on YouTube and on the on the TV on cable see you got to read books you can't you can't understand this stuff without reading books without studying these complex problems you know our founding fathers were great students of Athens and ancient Greece and Rome and various kinds of political philosophies cutting-edge political philosophies coming from Europe after the French Revolution they studied all this stuff carefully and they came up with principles and and various kinds of rules of thumb about how to architect a better government which will have safeguards against these various kinds of corruptions and problems that existed in other states for all of human history they studied all that stuff and then they came up with the Constitution and that was a that was a pretty epic achieve but today you know and of course they were elites and in their time they were the cream of the crop they were the top 1% you know in their time most people were illiterate so they had no idea what was really going on but today we have democracy today everyone gets to vote but people are so ignorant that what they vote for is ignorant stuff thinking that what they're doing is being smart and intelligent so this point about lack of proper education is central and one of the one of the key policy proposals I will have for you in the future episodes for fixing our politics and government is a much higher quality education across the board which is free to everybody in the country this is absolutely crucial this is one of the highest leverage points that we have to transform the world is to transform our education system and there's so much we can do to improve our education system but of course it's never gonna be that easy because education therefore becomes a political powder keg changing education is one of the most difficult things precisely because the devils who are in power the most selfish and unconscious people who don't want culture to change first and foremost they don't want education to change in fact what they want to do is they want to roll back the clock on education they want to take education backwards to teach their ideology that's what the devil tries to do with education because education is one of the key tools that mankind can use to awaken so the devil needs to co-opt education and turn it into a source of a spreading of devilry indoctrination and you see that with the Trump administration look who he put in charge of the Education Department um Betsy DeVos she is trying to turn education backwards that's what she's doing this is not an accidents is all by design but of course the people who are doing this they're not conscious enough to understand what they're really doing they think that what they're doing is actually gonna be good for the country but really what it is it's good for the maintain maintaining of the status quo it's good for maintaining their ideology they've confused what's good for their ideology with what's good for the country these are two very different things let's move on here and I want to point out another important thing for you make the following distinction any political policy or position can be criticized or analysed from above or from below not just the left and the right but from the above and from below so for example religion what's a criticism of religion from below it's something like this religion these days is so degraded young people are not going to church we're not even allowed to teach religion in the schools anymore we're not allowed to to bring Bibles to school anymore you can't pray in schools anymore this is all wrong we need to bring Christianity back into the classroom we need Bibles we need we need to make Christianity official state religion this would be a criticism of religion from below a criticism of religion from above would be something along the lines of religion is problematic in that it presents important truths about life and about human nature and about consciousness in a dogmatic and ideological way it actually prevents its own ultimate purpose which is to help to awaken people and to help them to expand their sense of self so the way religion is practiced today often times is that actually it contracts a person's sense of self rather than helping them to do the practices that are necessary like meditation contemplation to grow themselves spiritually see see the difference in criticism there so this is this is almost the case with any position you can criticize it from below or from above and oftentimes people make this sort of conflation where they hear a criticism from above and they misinterpret as a criticism from below let's look at example at the example of science a criticism of science from below is something like well science is problematic because you know those scientists are godless atheists and they just have their materialist agenda and the problem is is that they don't understand God and they don't understand the importance of Christianity and so they are missing something important and so really what we need is we need we need to teach creationism alongside with evolution in the biology class that's what we need and you know science is overstepping its bounds and science is making people doubt God and doubt religion and doubt the Bible this is all very bad that's the criticism from below of criticism of science from above which is often how I criticize science is that science is locked into the materialist paradigm and as important as science is there are serious limits to science as an epistemic method science is overlooking important aspects of spirituality and mysticism because it's locked into the materialist paradigm and it's trying to quantify everything and explain everything through formulas and through mathematics which simply can't be done if you're trying to understand the deepest levels of reality can't do it that way and science is blind to some of those limitations and also science is stuck in groupthink and science is not questioning various metaphysical assumptions that it holds as dogmas which it doesn't recognize are dogmas and if we could help science to overcome these limitations science would become much better but also it would free people up to pursue spirituality more and therefore actually be a net benefit for all of civilization and science itself as well because the best scientists are actually reaching right up to the point of being mystics so you see that a very different kind of criticism likewise you can criticize socialism from above or from below a criticism of socialism from below is very common when you hear for example on Fox News it's something like all those Socialists they're really just communists they just want to seize all of the money and they just want to redistribute it and turn us into Venezuela that's what they want to do and they want to take away all our all our rights they want to oppress us and they just want a big government rule that's all they want to do and they're evil and they're anti-american a criticism of socialism from above would be something along the lines of if we give workers in a corporation the power to vote and to actually have ownership of that corporation in the sort of Marxian ideal there's a sort of problem which Marx and many socialists don't take seriously which is that if a corporation is truly run by committee by the average of all the workers rather than by some really ambitious passionate founder or CEO who has a vision for this corporation then there there's a serious risk that the operation will be run into the ground through a sort of rule by committee and you know rule by committee doesn't have a sense of direction or sense of vision and therefore a lot of businesses will actually become less productive and will ultimately fail which was sort of backfire on the workers of that corporation so many of the workers in the corporation and many socials and marches don't understand the importance of the vision that the founder of the corporation presents and the direction he sets for the corporation which makes that corporation successful so for example if you remove Elaan Musk from SpaceX or from Tesla or or if you Moves remove Steve Jobs of course he's he's he's past now but you know the loss of Steve Jobs you know that that was a significant to the significant detriment of Apple because it was his vision that ultimately led Apple to become the the powerhouse corporation that it is today without his vision it probably wouldn't have happened see so if Apple is just run by committee if every Apple Genius Bar employee just gets a vote in how to run Apple is that really going to produce the best products or is it gonna produce kind of middling products with no vision that's a very different quality of criticism of socialism so it's not the socialism is bad or evil it's a question of nuance see your criticisms of these issues almost anything can be criticized but it has to be criticized with the proper nuance from above not from below and what we mean by the difference being below and above is simply how conscious is your criticism that's what distinguishes whether it's below or above it's not about left and right you might say all leo but you're just being a leftist here because it seems like you're in favor of socialism you're more gentle on socialism than the then the criticism from below from Fox News that's because you're trying to analyze this situation from a left-right perspective and I'm telling you that's the wrong way to to think about the situation in fact this brings us to the more general point that I want to make here which is that to do politics properly you have to throw away these simplistic dichotomies of left versus right individual which is collective capitalist or socialist religion versus science small government versus large government freedom versus regulation majority rule versus minority rule masculine versus feminine to select one of these at the cost of the other is a trap and a mistake rather what you should be asking in all these situations is is it low or is it high not whether it's left or right or capitalist or socialist is it low consciousness or high consciousness is it something that's coming from fear and selfishness and a small circle of concern or is it a position that's coming from an expanded sense of self which includes everybody a universal sense of self and love that's what matters and then let the chips fall away they where they may if a universal sense of expanded identity and love lead you to concluding that we should be socialists then we'll be socialists I'm not I'm not saying that that's necessarily the case I'm just saying if if right if and if if an expanded sense of self and universal love leads to you to conclude that we need more femininity in our culture and that we need more females and government than that's what you go with femininity not because you're Pro femininity or you're anti masculinity or you're Pro black people but your ante why feel not because of these things but because you're expanded sense of self and love has shown you the proper way that's how you adjudicate all of these policy issues and debates now let's talk some more about developmental psychology and let's return to spiral dynamics I hope you've watched my multi-part series on spiral dynamics I'm not gonna of course you recap all of it here I want to specifically focus on the political evolution that we see within spiral dynamics so just like with moral development than we're stages there are also stages of government development or social development that we see throughout history and this has been well documented through various research that you can go read about read the book spiral dynamics you don't know more but here I'll give you the political essence of it so basically human government thousands of years ago started out before there were major civilizations at stage purple which was the tribal stage at this stage these are tribes of hundreds of people maybe thousands of people at most there is no serious government there is no formal law system there's no legal system there's no court system there might be a leader of the tribe but he's not a dictator per se the tribe is actually very communist ik examples of this these sorts of tribal governments and they still exist are tribes in the Amazon deep in the Amazon rainforest there are tribes within Africa tribes in Papua New Guinea aboriginals in Australia and certain very backwards kind of underdeveloped nations like Afghanistan a lot of their government and politics is staged purple tribalistic and in this level of government there is no real sense of individuality you're working for your tribe your identity is enmeshed with your tribe and there's a lot of tribal warfare so it's not like these tribes live peacefully with one another in some sort of romantic ideal where it's like you have tribal people living in the Amazon and it's just like the Garden of Eden and everyone is happy and there's no government and so everything is great no no these tribes are vicious there's tribal warfare they slaughter each other they will wipe out neighboring tribes so their genocide --all they will also enslave neighboring tribes so there is slavery at this level this is not some libertarian ideal or an anarchist ideal here then from that there's an evolution as the society becomes larger into the thousands and tens of thousands tribes no longer become sustainable and so what happens is that because these tribes they become large and they start to fight with one another too much tribal warfare becomes so problematic that an authoritarian Rises some big boss this is staged red government and he creates an empire by rallying and unifying all the tribes together not through love and peace but through conquest and enslavement and vicious brutality rape and pillage raising entire cities to the ground waging military campaigns this form of government is authoritarian totalitarian and monarchic a monarchy is built through conquest and raw power raw physical power masculine brutality women are oppressed in these societies because they're not strong examples of this include the Roman Empire the Mongol Empire North Korea Russia some elements of Russia right now Saudi Arabia some aspects of Mexico are still like this the cartels and the mafias and all the corruption in Mexico those aspects are like this of course Mexico still has some democracy so it's a little bit more evolved than just pure red but you can see aspects of it there for the most part governments today the 21st century they cannot be purely red they have to make some at least some pretense of democracy otherwise they're just unsustainable we've we've outgrown pure monarchy and authoritarianism it just it doesn't it doesn't work because people have evolved culturally and morally to the point where they won't stand for a monarchy after the monarchy plays itself out then we move into the next level which is stage blue stage blue is theocratic ethno state isolationist and nationalist this is Nazi Germany this is Iran India China Brazil Israel Poland and the rural South and rural aspects of the US that's what I mean by rule south this is a very kind of conformist stage where people are just interested in upholding their own civilization they think their own civilization is best and what they want to do is ideally create an ethnos State that's what Nazism was about creating an ethnos state all the other the ones who are not like us we throw them out but we build this massive civilization for ourselves so it's sort of like tribalism but on a grand civilizational scale now my tribe is my entire nation and my whole ethnicity and so we will unify you know Hitler was obsessed with unifying the German race as the tribe so the tribe became the German peoples but of course you know at the cost of killing the Jews and the gypsies and a bunch of other folks to develop a sense of purity this is nationalism of course there's various degrees of it not not all nationalists become Nazis it doesn't get as bad as Nazi Germany all the time I'm not saying that for example India or China or Brazil is as bad as Nazi Germany I'm just saying that there's there's degrees of it and there's definitely aspects of this in these various countries that I've talked about and also in the rural American politics then you evolve beyond that because you that's a very limited way of thinking and now you realize that the nationalist position isn't sustainable because actually there's a lot of nations on the planet and we can't just be viciously national to the expense of all our nations because then we get into fights with our neighbors so we get world war two you know millions of people die and eventually Nazism collapses nationalism collapses under its own weight because in the end people evolve beyond that two-stage orange stage orange is like the founding of the US Constitution basically it is democracy it is capitalist is this free market often it's laissez-faire capitalism it's often neoliberal and often libertarian here examples include metropolitan USA major cities Japan South Korea Australia France the United Kingdom this is sort of the standard kind of government that you expect this is mostly what American government has been up until now you know Trump is trying to pull it back towards nationalism but before before it was being pulled towards nationalism whether it was conservative or liberal mostly it was staged orange government you know whether it's George Bush or Bill Clinton mostly a kind of an orangish level at this level there's just a belief that the market will solve everything and that just growing the economy is all that we really need to do everyone is kind of for themselves we don't need to have any sort of sort of collective identity we don't really need to worry about spirituality we just need more science we need more money we need more economy we need more technology sort of this technological scientific fantasy thinking that that will solve all the problems but of course it doesn't and then you reach the next level so what's recognized the next level stage green is the limitations of just unfettered capitalism the limitations of unfettered capitalism becomes so obvious that we realize that the free market is really a myth there's no such thing as the free market because corporations manipulate the market all the time to their advantage and if these corporations become very powerful they start to corrupt government and that capitalism this sort of idea of trickle-down economics doesn't really work because what happens is that there's a growing and growing disparity between the lower class and the upper class to the point where the middle class gets squeezed out and it becomes easier and easier for the top capitalists in the country to own the entire country basically and then to use that wealth and money to do whatever they want and that is a unhealthy for the society as a whole it becomes a cancer money becomes a cancer also we realize that technology and science isn't enough to the resolve these problems so we go to stage green stage green is more social democratic more socialistic that necessarily this that doesn't necessarily mean it's purely socialist or communist but more sleeting towards socialism anarchism can arise here at stage green as well anarchism can be both orange or green depending on which version of anarchism we're talking about but generally this is liberal is progressive there's some elements of new ageism and pacifism and hippie ism that come with stage green of course some of the ideals here a little bit idealistic and impractical but nevertheless examples include Canada Germany the Netherlands Scandinavia Switzerland Iceland and parts of the United States the most progressive parts of the United States like maybe San Francisco the state of Washington New York City you know these are the most progressive parts of America California entire state of California to some extent is stage green or moving in that direction and then beyond that you have stage yellow and then finally stage turquoise the problem with talking about stage yellow and turquoise when it comes to government politics is that there are basically no solid stage yellow or turquoise governments in the world we're starting to see a little bit of emergence in Northern Europe in Switzerland in the Netherlands and Scandinavia we're starting to see little glimpses of it but it's still very early so it's hard to say exactly what stage yellow let alone stage turquoise government will look like that's something we're gonna have to invent going forward and it's challenging I want you to see that it's challenging to invent this stuff it's not written in a book somewhere you know what the next level of government will be we have to figure it out that's difficult and it's doubly difficult when you have a bunch of stage blue or orange people who are trying to you know do their damnedest to make sure that nothing changes and that we stay stage blue and stage orange and that we just double down on that because that serves their agenda generally what I think stage yellow government looks like is that it's a it's a hybrid between socialism and capitalism delicately balancing the pros and cons of both it is moving towards a world government stuff like the UN but even more so it is very systemic so it thinks of social problems in a very systemic manner and it is conscious of the entire spiral in its conscious of human developmental stages and therefore what it tries to do is it tries to respect each stage without trying to oppress each stage or demonize each age and tries to create systems which help to move people up the spiral at their own pace that's what yellow looks like and then turquoise this is hard to say I don't know turquoise is based on mystical insights a sense of Gaia I think at turquoise you're gonna have even a larger sense of world government not an oppressive way people can still vote and individual nations can still retain autonomy because their whole ons but basically all nations realize that they're part of the entire ecosystem of the planet of Gaia and and spirituality now plays a much more prom role in the culture and it becomes an aspect of governance and of politics in a totally different way than the way that evangelicals or fundamentalist Muslims try to unify church and state that's not what I'm talking about stage turquoises is a is it as a mystical type of spirituality so what's important to understand about these various stages of political development is that each stage sees the world in a different way not just sees the world in a different way but literally the world is a different way for those types of people people at stage blue or orange or green they're living in different worlds there isn't one world there's a blue world there's an orange world there's a green world and so on but the tragedy of all this is that the lower stages anything below stage yellow doesn't understand that there are different worlds so the reason we have so much conflict is because the predominant stages and most people in the world right now are at stage blue orange or green none of those stages understands that there are stages none of this these stages understands that there are these these different worlds and so they try to argue with each other and fight each other and they never are able to understand each other for example liberals are not able to understand stage blue conservatives because the Liberals are stage green and they think that blue the blue people are crazy the Trump supporters they seem crazy to stage green liberals and vice versa to stage blue Trump supporters stage green liberal hippies social justice whereas they seem crazy but what's being missed here is the fact that your mind is constructing the world you're not just thinking about the world and interpreting the world you're actually part dissipating in constructing the world and this is lost on everybody sage green or below there's really two tiers of politics there's tier 1 and tier 2 tier 1 is green orange blue and everything below tier 2 is yellow and above the difference between tier 1 and tier 2 is as follows tier 1 gets hung up on the content and is ignorant of the deeper structures like we talked about earlier it's hung up on positions in ideology it's hung up on specific policy proposals like pro or anti abortion or pro or anti gun rights it's based in survival it doesn't know anything but survival it's using politics as a survival strategy without knowing that it's doing so tier 2 goes meta beyond ideologies and content and looks at the deeper structure looks at systemic issues and it now recognizes something beyond survival which is being in consciousness and its sense of self is significantly expanded and not just limited to the physical material body I would say less than 2% of the world population is at tier 2 probably even less than 1% if we really want to be brutally honest that's the situation we find ourselves in we desperately need more people to move from tier 1 to tier 2 if we are to fix our politics and that is the intention of this series of episodes about conscious politics conscious politics only begins at tier 2 anything in tier one is what I call unconscious politics survival based politics politics based on fish needs at tier two you're now thinking beyond selfish needs now be careful here liberals because some of you liberals will say leo but I am at tier two because I'm a liberal and I am progressive and I'm thinking beyond my selfish needs you know I care about the poor I care about minorities I care about ll the lesbian gay and trans community and all this so solely oh I'm in tier two no you're not no you're not be careful real tier two is when you move beyond some of those ideological positions you're still coming at it from a place of survival for example the reason you care about minorities often as times because you are a minority in a surger survival to care about minorities of course that's pretty obvious you know also a lot of times the reason you care about poor people or about equality and justice is because you've actually internalized this as an identity aspect of your own ego and identity is that you care about others that's still not quite there that's still not quite tier two of course that's good that you've done that it's better that you care about others than that you don't care about others but still you're looking at it from a survival perspective you're not ready neither there's something deeper at play here than just survival being and consciousness is running the show and that's something that you still need to evolve up towards go check out my episode spiral dynamics stage yellow if you want to learn about that and also intro to systems thinking that's a good episode for you to start to move beyond traditional Orthodox stage green liberalism alright now let me make some more fundamental points of how the nature of government first you are part of a society whether you like it or not there is no escaping society this is very important that you admit because some people have a fantasy that they can escape Society they say well Leo I can just like earn a million dollars or become a billionaire and then I can go buy my own private island just live on my private island and I have escaped Society so what are you talking about Leo I can certainly be off on my own no you can't because the only meaning that your billion dollars has is thanks to society there's no such thing as money without society see you can't be a billionaire and live in luxury and have a private jet and have a private island and have a fancy mansion with a fast sports car and fine food and Rolex watches and all this you can't have this without society somebody's got to manufacture your private jet someone's got to fly your private jet for you because you can't fly it yourself or if you can fly it someone has to teach you how to fly it someone has to create the gasoline or the jet fuel to fuel your private plane someone has to go fish the caviar that you're gonna have in your private plane someone has to build your mansion someone has to quarry and mine the granite the fine Italian marble that you put on your kitchen countertops in your fancy mansion someone has to defend your private island against pirates and and invaders and if you say well Leo I'll just you know I won't I don't care about money I'm just gonna be like a hermit I'm gonna give away all my money I'm just gonna go live off by myself in the woods in the middle of Alaska deep in the woods there outside of town outside of civilization and I have escaped society and I'm independent of society no you're not you're not you're still part of Alaska you're still part of the United States you're a United States citizen you aren't protected by the United States Army and military otherwise Alaska could be conquered and taken over by Russia you still have access to the fire department the police they can help various wildlife services can help you if you are getting attacked by a bear then they can come and they can handle that bear for you they provide you with food and resources you can't live in the wilderness in Alaska without a gun without matches without lighters without rope without shovels without axes all of these things are manufactured by society I want you to understand that you cannot survive outside of society you will die that's - you anarchists and libertarians out there some of you who have this really entitled sense of individualism and you think that you can just do it all on your own you can't you can't it's never worked this way survival is vicious you don't know how tough it is to survive all by yourself even if you go to youtube and you type in some survival videos some sort of Bear Grylls type of [ __ ] or you know he's running around in the wilderness eating bugs and all this and surviving on basically nothing with his pocket knife even in those situations he has a pocket knife he can't manufacture his own pocket knife he can't manufacture his own axe he can't manufacture his own tent and he's only out there for a few days how are you gonna live out there by yourself for decades not to mention which you're gonna be bored as hell it's gonna be a miserable existence for you you're gonna be totally lonely you're gonna be horny you're gonna be desperate you're gonna be craving to get back to society to all the luxuries that society offers you and these luxuries can only exist thanks to government and thanks to the complexity of the organizational systems and infrastructure that government has built up over the last five to ten thousand years so understand the depth of this problem acknowledge that you are part of a superorganism the superorganism doesn't just include your country this superorganism is a superorganism of superorganisms so your country is a superorganism which includes you but then beyond that the entire world is a superorganism that includes all countries this is the case whether you like it or not whether you agree with the United Nations or not this is the case that's the reality you need to start acknowledging that you are part of the superorganism it's very easy to be arrogant and to act like you're not part of it in fact that's one of the luxuries of this superorganism is that it allows you so much autonomy and independence that you can forget that you're a part of a tribe a part of a tribe which is part of a larger try part of a larger tribe of a larger tribe of a larger tribe which is ultimately the whole globe this is how reality works it's got many layers of structure and you are not at the top the other important point we've got to talk about is bureaucracy bureaucracy is vital to the functioning of this super organism and specifically I want to talk about the court system because people do not understand the significance of the court system in our culture colloquially we like to make fun of the court system various kinds of celebrity trials that are silly and we we talk about all the various bad verdicts that the court system rules and all the wrong Supreme Court decisions that happen and we talked about how lawyers are just money hungry and they're unscrupulous and untrustworthy and all this sort of stuff but really the court system the legal system is the very heart that maintains the structure of government here's how it really works let's say we're living in a tribal society 10,000 years ago where there was no government this is a stage purple society there's no court systems here and usually these tribes there's multiple tribes living in the same area competing over similar resources so we have two neighboring tribes we have tribe a and try B I am from tribe a you are from tribe B now I'm in tribe a and in my tribal culture you know I'm a farmer I'm raising livestock I have pigs whatever that I'm that I'm raising one of my pigs runs away from me one day and goes towards the border between your tribe and my tribe now remember there's no firm legal system here so there's no clearly demarcated border where my tribe ends and yours begins we have lose territories and we roughly know where we are but you know no one's ever bothered to draw a firm clear line so this pig it doesn't even wander into your territory but it wanders kind of close it's still in my territory and I go looking for the pig but before I find the pig you find the pig and you steal it for yourself you say oh look a pig you don't even know that it's my Pig you just say there's a ball Pig oh this is a nice fat pig I'll take it for myself you know one of these pigs will feed my family for a whole week or for a whole month this is nice so you grab it then I discover that you stole my pig and I go to you and I and I knock on your door and I start yelling at you give me back my Pig that's my Pig and you tell me to go [ __ ] myself now me see in my culture I've been raising this pig for four years because I have a daughter she needs to get married or rather I have a son I have a son who needs to marry one of my neighbor's daughters right and you know to marry to marry this beautiful woman we need to provide a big dowry you don't just marry who you love in a tribal culture you got to pay for this [ __ ] years of work off and go for a down payment on a bride in one of these cultures so I've been growing this pig this is a giant pig that I've been raising for years specifically to provide as part of the dowry this down payment to get this beautiful bride to my son so that he can procreate and you know have children I have I can have grandchildren and then my genes will survive right so I need this pig this is this is a serious matters it's not just about food this is something bigger but because there's no court system to adjudicate this this dispute that you and I have you know used you steal my pig and this threatens my very survival and my son's survival my future lineages survival so I need that pig back but you have already butchered the pig and already eaten it so you can't give it back to me so you send me packing you telling me to go [ __ ] myself so of course I go away because you know your tribe is full of warriors and stuff like that I can't just I can't just take you on by myself so I go back to my tribe and then I hash my plan I start talking bad about your tribe how you stole my pig to my neighbors and I rally my warriors we build weapons we sharpen our knives and we come in the middle of the night and we slaughter a few of your children because we think that's only fair because you killed my Pig you slaughtered my Pig that pig has cost me my beautiful grandchildren now I've lost this this beautiful bride that my son could have had now he had to set has to settle for some lesser woman who has a lesser dowry so so I slaughter a few of your kids and then and then what do we have we have tribal warfare see of course you get outraged that I have slaughtered your children just for you slaughtering my Pig and then you you go and you sneak in the middle of the night and you slaughter some of my children you kill my son and then I get outraged by that and then I go kill your wife and on and on it goes and this can go on for hundreds of years literally hundreds of years can pass and these tribes from that one Pig incident will become vicious enemies they they go to sleep at night cursing their neighboring tribe hoping to ethnically cleanse them out of existence to the point where generations pass and this clan tribal warfare still rages on to the and the the the generations that came later they don't even understand anymore they don't even know how this whole rivalry began in the first place they forget about the pig and the the son and the bride if they don't even know any of this stuff all that they know is that those are our evil enemies that neighboring tribe and we must kill them because they're evil that's all they know this is what the court system was designed to handle this problem if there's a court system in place now there is an objective impartial third party to whom you and I can both go to and I could plead my case that hey your honor he stole my Pig and butchered it and this has caused me grave harm because I can't now pay for for this bride that my son needs and that other person will say well your honor but uh I was entitled to take that pig because the pig was on my land and we have a clear boundary we can we could say okay let's let's go to the government and ask the government where exactly was the boundary was the pig really in his land because if it was then he he gets to keep the pig but if it wasn't then he stole it and we have a system of what constitutes theft and stealing these various kinds of technical rules were established so that there could be clear lines drawn within our society so that people could know what's right and what's wrong relatively speaking we both agree to a certain set of laws that we're gonna abide to and then we adhere to those laws and if one of us breaks it then we can go to court and we can adjudicate this and then the judge will decide the judge is impartial ideally and then the judge will we'll give a sentence to one of us and then through this process we can resolve this dispute so in the end the judge might say you stole my Pig the order you stole that leo's Pig and and therefore you owe him $5,000 for that pig and then you pay that and then I get my restitution we're happy I don't need to grab my knives you don't need to grab your knives we don't need to kill each other that's what the court system allows this is a brilliant invention somebody had to invent this and it could only be invented within a government where the government has a monopoly of force individual citizens are not allowed to execute each other precisely because if individual citizens are allowed to execute each other and render their own justice how can you ensure that the justice that is rendered is fair and objective because of course I'm gonna think that I'm right and you're gonna think that you're right and that's not gonna be enough that leads to clan warfare we need a third party someone who's impartial to take care of this for us and this is to the benefit of both of us because it means that my son and your children don't get slaughtered that's how this works fair uncorrupt court systems are vital to maintaining peace amongst human beings because what they are really is an orderly process for adjudicating disputes and if there is not such a process then there will be blood there will be blood this is how things actually work not the libertarian free-market fantasy but this is how things actually work when you don't have government and you can actually go and read books and study about of tribal cultures live this is not speculation you can go and find these tribal cultures today and Papua New Guinea in the Amazon in Africa and you can study them and in fact I have some books on my book list go check that out some important books which talk about these sorts of examples in my politics section I have a politics category within the book list the reality is is that you cannot stop people from organizing at higher levels because that's what life wants to do that's what makes governments so difficult you see it's not just that people come together and are organized into one group called the government no no no no it's way more complicated than that if you have a free market people form all sorts of groups and subgroups groups within groups within groups within groups people form cabal's gangs syndicates mafias cliques masterminds think tanks lobbies parties factions cults subcultures religions clubs militias all of this naturally gets formed if you give people the freedom to form groups which of course exists in your libertarian fantasy you libertarians how do you stop people from forming these groups when people have freedom the freedom that you love so much you can't you can't stop them and now you say well well so what yeah they'll form these groups that's good no problem big problem because the whole point of forming these groups is to gain survival advantage people are not just forming these groups because it's fun people are forming these groups because this is how they [ __ ] survive this is how they feed themselves this is how they reproduce so what happens when I form my religion and you form your religion and your religion contradicts my religion because my religion says that I am the best religion and your religion says that it's the best religion what do we do then when we don't have a court to adjudicate our issues we don't have a constitution we don't have a monopoly of force by some external third-party what happens is that I saw my religious followers that your religion is evil and that they need to sharpen their knives and you do the same and then we have a war and millions of people die that's what happens in a free market these various cabal's and syndicates that are formed are formed precisely so that if i form a group that can accumulate power can help ourselves to get some advantage either some technological advantage some strategic advantage some political advantage some ideological advantage we can form a group we can become more powerful we can dominate their other groups we can grow our group to oppress all the other groups unless something stops it what would that be in a free-market scenario nothing would stop it and therefore you get slavery in the current system that we have a government has been developed to prevent that so the beauty of our government is that it allows the peaceful coexistence of all sorts of interesting subgroups there are all sorts of corporations and lobbies and think tanks and factions and parties and cults and subcultures and religions and clubs and militias which exist within just American government alone and they can all coexist and not slaughter each other or enslave each other or dominate each other because we have a court system because we have a constitution which says that there's freedom of religion and that one religion can't oppress everybody else one religion for example can't take over the schools and substitute all the textbooks with its Bible but if there was no such constitutional mandate and there was no court system and there was no police force to enforce this you better [ __ ] believe that the most powerful religion in our society would do just that the religion with the most money would hire the most mercenaries and would print the most Bibles and would take over the schools and replace the textbooks with Bibles their Bibles that's what they would do because this is how selfishness operates this is survival not only do you need to appreciate like I said in part 1 of this series that humans are extremely vicious but they're extremely sneaky and manipulative on top of that people organized to rig the rules of society in their favor precisely because that helps them to survive you would be stupid not to do it what libertarians and anarchists don't understand is that this this force to organize at higher levels is irrepressible you cannot stop it even government cannot stop it and what they misunderstand is how sneaky and manipulative human psyches are to to accomplish survival they will find every every loophole within a free-market to oppress and dominate and gain favor for themselves that is what's going to happen and they are not gonna have any moral qualms about it because the majority of people are not at a universal stage of moral development where they care and love about Everett and they don't care and love everybody equally this is less than 1% of the population to get to a point where morality is widespread throughout culture already requires thousands of years of government and education on a massive scale that's the reality next point society is grossly unfair selfish exploitative and barbaric I'm not just talking of societies of the past I'm talking about today I'm talking about America I'm talking even about the most developed countries in the world grossly barbaric people are in denial about how unjust society is because they are selfish when you're selfish you don't care about truth or equality or fairness all you care about is that which serves you and whatever you identify with so if you identify with you yourself your tribe that's all you care about if some other tribe is oppressed or murdered or extinguished you don't care that's what selfishness means and most people are at that level of development most people are too busy following their survival agenda to care about how others are being exploited it's not in their benefit to even be aware of exploitation if they are on the receiving end of the exploitation routes and what's worse the way that oppression works it becomes so internalized this oppression in one's own worldview from birth and from indoctrination that those who are oppressed do not even recognize that they are being oppressed for example the women in Saudi Arabia who are oppressed do not fully recognize that they are oppressed because their culture teaches them that the suppression is just normal and how it should be women are not supposed to dress in skirts or wear makeup or you know expose their hair and many women in Saudi Arabia have internalized this so deeply from birth through indoctrination that they actually if you ask them they honestly will tell you that Oh Leo I'm not being oppressed this is just all part of my culture this is part of Islam I'm just being a good Islamic woman this is how you be a good Saudi now of course of course there are women in Saudi Arabia who can see through that there are even women's rights movements and all this they recently got the right to drive that was a big big deal for them so of course many of them do understand the oppression but many don't many are just so deeply indoctrinated they don't see it that's the that's the tragedy of oppression you don't always know that you're oppressed same thing for example with with many slaves house slaves you know it's easy if you're house slave to rationalize yourself at all I'm not even that oppressed because you know those slaves that are working in the fields they're the ones who have it terrible and bad I'm actually lucky to be a house slave a lot of house slaves thought that way and today we have many wage slaves we have millions of wage slaves under the capitalist system which are brutally oppressed economically but they don't even know that they're economically oppressed they have no idea and those who are doing the oppressing are in denial about it because it serves them their employers are of course in denial about the wage slavery they think it's totally normal because their culture has normalized it hey this is just part of capitalism you know you if you don't like it go get a better job that's see the oppression is not happening because there's some evil genius individual sitting there thinking of how to oppress people that's not how oppression works oppression is just brute survival happening blindly and then the denial that anything is wrong it's just selfishness that's all it is the oppression is systemic the oppression is cultural not individual I'm not just saying that there's some evil CEO who is you know running some sort of minimum-wage sweatshop somewhere in America of course there is that you're plenty of that that's problem but there's if there's there's a deeper problem the oppression is cultural because it's the culture it's American culture business culture which allows employers to suck dry all of the wages of their employees without compensating them as well as they otherwise would have if they had some compassion and a larger sense of self you know not fairly compensating these employees and kind of sucking them dry using them as wage slaves this is considered totally normal and in fact necessary within Wall Street business culture and in fact if a CEO isn't doing this he will get angry calls from his stockholders who will demand that he pushed down wages as much as possible and break unions and deny people bonuses for their overtime work because the stockholders they want those dividends and the stockholders don't care about the employees because the stockholder has a very contracted sense of self just about his stock portfolio that's all he cares about he doesn't care about the employees working at the companies that he owns stock in does it matter to him that's our system right now and everybody just thinks it's normal and this is cool and of course when you benefit from it it is cool it's great to be the CEO of a giant company where all of the wage slaves are working for you and therefore you can have an income which is 5000 times greater than the average wage that your employees make it was great for Jeff Bezos it's great for Bill Gates it's great for Steve Jobs it's great and they don't even know that there's a problem why not because this is the system they grew up in this is the culture this is staged orange is totally normal and their sense of self is roughly what it was for most of their adult life they're not really working on growing themselves spiritually and so that's the system and in fact they might argue well you know even if I wanted to change the system it's too hard to change the system that's right even if Steve Jobs or Elaan musk decided that he okay I want to be very generous with my employees he'll he'll get kicked out of the corporation the stockholders and the the the board room will kick him out that's what will happen in fact Steve Jobs was kicked out of Apple now of course not for those same reasons early in Apple's history Steve Jobs actually got kicked out of the the company that he himself has started that's how it works the system is so out of control that even the CEOs don't control it it's a cultural problem it's a lack of cultural development and a lack of collective consciousness not just individual consciousness responsibility needs to be taken not just at an individual level but at a collective level this is something that the right-wingers don't fully understand they love to talk about taking personal responsibility but they never take collective responsibility part of what it means to take personal responsibility is that you recognize that you're part of a collective and that you have collective responsibility to you see it's not enough to just say to a poor person all pull yourself by your bootstraps man go get a second job work harder no there are systemic cultural problems that need to be changed that you must first take responsibility for otherwise we can't change it for example racism is not just an individual problem it's not just that I'm telling you that you shouldn't be a racist of course I am telling you that but hopefully you knew they're not ready as an individual hopefully you're not a racist but that's not the issue the deeper issue is that you need to recognize that there's racism at a systemic level and that that can't be fixed until you take responsibility for it even though you yourself as an individual might not be a racist at all but your culture in your society is racist or has remnants of racism in it so the Conservatives are correct it is important to take personal responsibility but that's a very narrow definition of responsibility personal responsibility has to go full circle and to include collective responsibility as well right now in stage orange societies one of the biggest ways that people are oppressed is not so much racially or sexually even though that still exists but it's economically this is one of our greatest struggles is the economic barbarism that exists in some of those developed countries right now what I mean by that is that we have people in our society who have billions of dollars and millions of dollars way more than they can ever possibly use they squander this money on stupid things like golden toilets and private islands and yachts and jets and all sorts of ridiculousness well at the same time we have people in society who are actually working two jobs mothers who are working two jobs can barely sustain their children can't put their children to proper daycare or send them to a good school so that they can grow up and have a decent shot at life and raise their own consciousness these poor people who are not poor because they don't work hard they're poor because of how the whole system is structured you see they were born it's right into the right family under the right circumstances mmm they weren't able to get the best private education at Harvard and so forth therefore they can't have jobs that pay that awesome money that you need to to really thrive in life and and so these people are so busy working every single day as wage slaves just to meet their basic needs that they are unable to self actualize they don't have time or energy at the end of the day to self actualize they don't have money to buy self-actualization resources like books or courses let alone to go beyond self-actualization to self transcendence because they are so low at the lowest stages of Maslow's hierarchy of needs and this ends up regressing all of society this is one of our greatest challenges that needs to be resolved because of this tens of millions of people are not actual izing their full potential as human beings they're not becoming great teachers and professors and scientists and artists and educators and speakers and spiritual teachers and entrepreneurs the way that they could because their family is barely able to scrape by see and this ends up costing all of society enormous lis because all of those people tens of millions of people are not contributing to society at their maximum think about all the amazing scientists and inventors and engineers and artists and entrepreneurs and leaders that we could have had if our resources were better distributed this would not just benefit the poor this would benefit everybody because those amazing scientists would make breakthroughs in cancer research and those amazing entrepreneurs would cope with new businesses new websites new apps new technology and then you know those amazing teachers and educators they would they would educate our children better it would improve everything for everybody including the lives of the CEO and the the billionaire's their lives too would be improved because you know what when a billionaire gets cancer if it's a rare type of cancer that has no cure he's dead but if he wasn't so adamant in sucking up the wage the wages of all his employees maybe some of his employees could actually fund their children to go to a nice school a nice university become actually like a cancer scientist and come up with a new cure or a solution to that cancer that the billionaire had so the billionaire is gonna die with billions of excess dollars because that money wasn't properly distributed in our society in order to allow for the majority of its citizens to flourish to their full potential you see it all interconnects it all comes back around it's Karma this is why it matters this is why it matters to you even if you are comfortable right now even if you're in the upper class and you know what I'm in the upper class I'm rich this doesn't affect me I'm rich I've escaped wage slavery I can live for the rest of my life comfortably never having to worry about money again so I'm saying all of this not because I'm poor and I need to change the system in order to benefit myself no actually the things that I'm saying are actually gonna actually be in a sense to my detriment at least in the short term because what I'm talking about is actually making it harder for me like I could right now go and hire a bunch of employees and exploit them to make a lot of money that would become harder for me under a new system a more evolved system but see I'm not thinking about this selfishly in like what is most best for Leo that's Tier one I'm thinking about this from tier two not what's best for Leo but what's best for mankind what's best for the universe what's best for consciousness and if that happens to encroach on Leo a little bit if that makes a little bit harder for me I'm okay with that that's selflessness that's conscious politics correcting oppression and inequality very ironically makes the oppressors feel oppressed because that's how selfishness works so if I'm a slave owner and I have a hundred slaves who work my plantation if a movement arises that starts to say that all slavery is immoral and evil first of all how am I gonna react am I gonna be sympathetic to that of course not because it directly threatens my survival I'm the one who has to give up his slaves I don't want to do that those slaves give me a cushy life of course I'm not gonna give it up in fact I'm gonna go one step further I am going to act like the victim now cuz this is what the ego does it's sneaky it's selfish I am gonna act like the victim and I'm gonna say that you are oppressing me how dare you take away my slaves that's immoral and evil look at how unfair you're being it's totally normal that I have a hundred slaves it's fair it has to be this way they're not real humans they're like animals they just work for me this is how I think this is how the ego has to rationalize to itself its own selfishness you see it's not about truth it's not about science or fairness or logic the logic serves whatever serves me this is devilry this is how it works the people who are gaining from the oppressive system manufacture ideologies and narratives which justify first and foremost not to others but to themselves that what they're doing is actually good and proper because I cannot be a slave owner while at the same time I think that slavery is evil and wrong because that's a cognitive dissonance in my mind I have to wake up every morning and feel good about myself that's what the ego has to do the ego has to feel right all the time so if the ego is right that means that owning slaves is right cuz that's what I have right now if that's scenario we're considering you see so I'm gonna spin various kinds of narratives I'm gonna bring in science as well I'm gonna I'm gonna use science to tell you why those slaves deserve to be my slaves that's how this works that's what we're dealing with and of course I'm gonna vehemently resist the changing of my culture the changing of the norms of my culture to say that slavery is evil I can't have that I can't have that written in the books you can't teach that to children because this conflicts so I'm gonna I'm gonna start my own lobbying group which is actually going to gonna print textbooks for children which is gonna use science and religion to justify why actually slavery is good and you know why I'm doing all this because I have children that I need to feed and those slaves feed my children and what I really care about is the survival of my children that's selfishness that's how this works replace slaves or slave owners with CEOs and Wall Street hedge fund managers it's the same thing just various degrees of it so of course they're in denial about it you must be selfishness only works when you're not conscious of how selfish you're being and how much it hurts others it only works when you don't care about others when your circle of concern is limited then what you can do is you can externalize the suffering and oppression outside of the circle of concern and then you can create this little comfortable bubble for yourself to live in that's the name of the game those in power do not want to give up power and they perceive anything that takes away their power as unfair by definition that's the trick but all oppression and selfishness is unsustainable in the long run and it ends up backfiring if a government becomes too unfair the people will take matters into their own hands there will be protests civil disobedience and ultimately violence where the solution and coos until the situation is equalized and that's what many political revolutions are about equalization of gross and justices that cannot be resolved in any other way but through violence because the people who aren't doing the oppressing are so stuck in their own rationalizations and justifications for their oppression saying that their oppression is is actually normal and good and just that you can't convince them otherwise but through violence through physical force and government ideally is put in place to reduce that reduce that to reduce these sorts of gross inequalities and oppressions if it's not doing that then it's not a good government and therefore the government itself is corrupt and it needs reform and of course definitely government can be corrupt all of these forces can corrupt government as well you know if I'm a slave owner I'm gonna go pay millions of dollars to Lobby the government to make sure that slavery is not abolished of course it makes perfect sense for me to do that another point that people overlook is that you shouldn't assume that what's good for you is good for everyone else this is just not the case the key point here is that many people profit and survive off the suffering of others there are entire professions that are designed off the suffering of others millions of people in our society feed their children because their job is to pull resources away from those who need it make them suffer to give to your children what's good for the nation as a whole is bad for many companies elites politicians and exploiters for example peace is bad for the military-industrial complex even though peace is the ultimate ideal any conscious person understands this but for those millions of people who work for the military-industrial complex for them what matters first and foremost is not peace as some abstraction for some other people that they don't know like for for the Middle East it don't care about peace for the Middle East because they're more concerned about feeding their children and sending their children to Harvard so these people work in the military-industrial complex they deny to themselves that there's a problem with working in the military-industrial complex in fact they create all sorts of stories and narratives to excuse and to justify why working in the military-industrial complex is actually good and they tell them so it's all pieces piece is not really possible Leigha we have so many enemies abroad what are you talking about peace this is just some hippy ideal the fact is we need bombers we need missiles and weapons and someone's got to do it and so I'm doing it and I'm protecting the country you're being selfish first and foremost realize that and the rest is all sorts of narratives that you spin free healthcare for example is bad for insurance companies and for many wealthy doctors and hospitals in America this is especially the case this is the problem we have right now we have a we have a healthcare mafia which has a stranglehold on the entire American healthcare system thousands of people die unnecessarily every single year why because these hospitals these doctors and these insurance companies want to rake in as much money as possible pharmaceutical companies as well does any of this matter to them how do they justify to themselves Society has a pre-made set of narratives which make all of this normal so they go to sleep just fine at night because you know what what is the big pharma CEO tell him oh well you know I got shareholders that I got to work for and this is a free-market economy it is if some sick kid can't afford health care you know well he should have worked harder she should get a she should get a job his parents should have provided for him you know he needs to take personal responsibility that's the problem and this entire health care industry is gonna lobby to the tune of tens of millions of dollars maybe even hundreds of millions of dollars to make sure that free health care free quality health care for all Americans is not offered by the government because that would put them out of business how are they gonna feed their children how are they gonna pay for their golf course and their private jet how are they gonna buy their Rolex watch see so in their mind it's not that they're just resisting free health care it's that they actually think that free health care is bad it's unamerican it's anti-capitalist it's socialist it's marxist it's it's it's going too far it's big government but if your circle of concern actually was truly universal if you expanded what you considered your sense of self if you identified with all Americans would you really be okay with tens of thousands of Americans dying unnecessarily every year simply because they can't afford some ridiculously overpriced medication or some ridiculously overpriced surgery what a humane conscious loving society treat all of its citizens in such a fashion such a barbaric fashion or they just have to survive on their own if they get cancer or if they get you know some heart condition or whatever no of course not if someone in your family like your mother got sick and you had the money and the resources to help her but you didn't because you said oh well it's her responsibility you know she should have thought of that before she got sick she should just pull her up by herself up by the bootstraps not my problem see you would immediately recognize how barbaric you're being if you thought that way why is that because most people most people's sense of self includes their family their immediate family to the point where they won't allow an immediate family member to you know go hungry or to starve to death or to die if they can help it reasonably you know of course there's limits to what you can do but the only problem is that your circle of concern is not wide enough to go beyond your family and beyond your tribe of people to everybody universally and that's because you haven't developed yourself to that level yet free education free high quality education is very bad for private schools and universities threatens them enormous lis so of course you're going to lobby against it another very important point that people overlook is that normativity does not exist normativity a nerdy philosophical concept what it means is is that all norms are arbitrary and relative there are no shoulds in reality there's nothing you should do nor can you make someone else do what you think they should do because you made it up therefore morality is relative government is necessary precisely because normativity doesn't exist if normativity existed if there was objective morality then it would be very easy to get people to agree on it in the same way that for example it's very easy to get everyone on the planet Earth to agree about the existence of the Sun you don't need to debate very hard you don't need to present scientific data you don't need to you know create elaborate courses and textbooks to get people to understand that there's a Sun because it shines every morning when they get up it's obvious that's what we call objective this is not the case for morality this is not the case for thou shalt not kill or thou shalt not steal people disagree on all these things people have different moralities based on their sense of self self is relative as well how you define yourself is all relative which makes normativity impossible which means that we need to come together and create a sort of a consensus about what the rules are of the game we get to make up the rules there are no rules handed down to us by God on some stone tablet we got to make up the rules and that becomes very tricky because who gets to say what the rules are if everybody knows that the rules of the game are made up whoa well that's a very different situation than when most of the people think that the rules are etched in a stone tablet most people in society think that the rules of society and morality are etched on a stone tablet by God or whatever you justified or ground your morality in it might be universal principle or whatever and so people become ideological about what should and shouldn't be done by humans precisely because it's made up and then they have to be in denial about the fact that it's made up because if they admit that it's all made up then they can't ground an anchor their sense of self and reality into that you see so what the ego wants to do is the ego wants to make up the rules of the game but then to deny that it made them up it wants to objective eyes them to reify them the ego wants to objective eyes its own personal selfishness bias and preferences so if your preference is that gay sex is dirty then you want to not just have that as a preference your ego wants to just wants to say that sex gay sex isn't just dirty in my opinion from my perspective gay sex is wrong because it's a abomination in the eyes of God absolutely so likewise your ego doesn't want to admit that murder isn't actually objectively wrong why not because otherwise then you could be murdered and then someone could say well yeah I murdered your family but it wasn't wrong and to you that's extremely threatening and so you do not want to open yourself to that possibility so you actually want a culture and a society and a government that objective eise's that murder is wrong because that gives you comfort and security it also makes you feel good for not murdering people makes you feel like a good little boy and a good little girl see that's the game here very very sneaky this is all the mechanics of devilry at work at a collective level I also want you to understand that the entire political spectrum of left versus right and all the gradations that exist in between is completely relative what counts as the left or the right is totally relative relative to the era and the culture in which you're living right now so what is considered the left today was not the left a hundred years ago and vice-versa this relativity is precisely what allows for the thing called the Overton Window maybe our heard of it in political discussions the Overton Window can shift this is sort of like the average or the the center of gravity of the of the conversation can shift between left and right depending on era and culture you know the Overton Window can shift and the reason that this over would tune window exists at all is precisely because all political positions are totally relative you make them up you imagine them there is no true left and true right slavery for example is considered evil today but it wasn't 300 years ago and what I'm telling you is that it's not that the people through years ago were wrong and that today we're right what I'm telling you is that there is no right and wrong we make it up so if we say that slavery is not evil it's not evil if we say that slavery is evil it becomes evil and the reason people get upset by admitting this is precisely because they really want slavery to be objectively evil in some sort of concrete sense and that's just not the case which is precisely why slavery existed see if slavery was truly objectively evil in a concrete sense slavery would have never existed by the way you know an interesting point about slavery the only stage of political development at which slavery guess abolished is stage orange and above Spile dynamics we're talking about here so at stage purple red and blue slavery exists and it's not considered evil only a stage orange and above so what you consider good and bad right and wrong are relative to how developed you are and relative to what your ego is identified with you have to be very careful about applying today's moral standards and our own consciousness from today to standards of centuries ago this is a mistake that many liberals make that I see is that they they tried to like demonize or judge people in the past like for example Thomas Jefferson or some of the founding fathers who many of them were slave owners you know liberals will often say something like well the you know they were actually they weren't really they weren't decent men they were actually evil slave owners and they were vicious racists and all this and I mean of course that's true from our perspective today but we have to acknowledge that that's only true from our perspective today thanks to all the evolution we've done over the last 300 years to get to today it wasn't true back then and so it's improper to apply standards of today to 300 years ago because when you do that what you're not being conscious of and what you're not appreciating what you're taking for granted is that we we build on the shoulders of giants this is how evolution works nothing is a given it all has to be built from scratch it has to be invented the idea that slavery has evil had to be invented and spread throughout mainstream culture until the point where it became so obvious that we don't even question it anymore today this was not obvious 300 years ago and in fact many people opposed it we had an entire civil war over that you see so the the poles of what is left and what is right is changing and evolving all the time such that actually what's happening is that as evolution happens we become more progressive and more liberal and more liberal and more liberal so the stuff that many conservatives oppose actually is the stuff that will become the future after they die in the next generation and so on and so on and so on and so on people are always clinging to the status quo whatever it is doesn't matter what it is whether it's slavery or racism or sexism or capitalism at it they cling to it because that's just what they've been indoctrinated with and they're just conforming it's just conformist consciousness and then they have to die for the next generation and slowly you know culture evolves in this fashion this is what happens and in this way the Overton Window shifts and shift and sips to the point where today even the most rabid right-wing conservative today would not argue that slavery is proper it's unthinkable to argue that today you would be booed and probably physically attacked in any public setting where you a serious intellectual person stood up and say well you know what slavery is actually okay and proper even the KKK won't say this today that's how much the Overton Window has shifted to the left relative to where it was just 150 years ago you know during the Civil War during the Civil War many people probably significant chunk of the country would have actually argued that slavery is proper the reason that the ship could happen is not because people were wrong and now they're right it's because there is no right and wrong we make it up and what I'm telling you is at this Overton Window in the next 500 years will shift so radically to the left that the people who are alive today even the most liberal people who are alive today if they were just plopped into 500 years in the future like they took a time machine they would they would have a conniption when they saw how progressive society is 500 years from now because they are so used to the barbarism of today today's barbarism is so normalized it ain't considered barbarism it will only look like barbarism from the future all progress is relative to one's past position you can't compare countries to each other simplistically the way that people like to do you can't just take America and Saudi Arabia and just compare them and so like well Saudi Arabia's left less developed that means they must be stupid or less intelligent or it must be the Muslims you know the Muslims are clearly in an inferior religion because they're not as developed as America you can't do this you have to appreciate that some regions of the world are much harder to survive in and others there were different historical starting points so of course different countries will be at different levels of development because they had different strengths and weaknesses and different obstacles to deal with you know how much harder it is to create a stable government in certain parts of the world for example in the Middle East where there was enormous trial of warfare due to limited resource and very hard geographic conditions and also for example in Africa some some some European folks who like to fancy themselves as superior to Africans you know they will they would like to create this narrative at all well the Africans are so backwards Leo if the Africans have the same IQ as whites and Europeans that how come they don't have good governments over there well a lot of it has to do with the geography Africa is a very difficult continent to survive in the jungles they have the vicious wild animals mm-hmm you know it's hard to even build a city in a jungle because the jungle just overruns it breaks through your cement and concrete rows and everything breaks your pipes and your plumbing the insects the the diseases that exist there because it's a swampy sort of a rainforest a wet moist environment makes building a government there have much much more hard so yeah they take all that into account you're comparing apples and oranges also watch out for romanticizing to pass this is a common mistake that I see people make especially conservatives somehow they they say well if we just go back we roll the clock back to to the 1950s or to the founding of America the Wild West you know those were the days where people were free and everything was nice or if we roll we just roll the clock back before the the the rise of civilizations where people just live in little agrarian tribal communities everything was nice back then you know you live in nature Leos it was it was beautiful people just live in a Garden of Eden and they just you know they just foraged for whatever they wanted to there was ample food and there was no oppressive governments and everything was nice pail it wasn't genocide was rampant slavery was rampant famine and disease were rampant poverty was rampant illiteracy was rampant you have no idea how terrible it was never forget that 40% of the Roman population we're slaves and even if they weren't society cannot go backwards to a simpler time society is part of evolution evolution is moving everything forward society must evolve because technology evolves as technology evolves power dynamics change structures change things that were possible no longer become possible and sustainable you cannot roll the clock back to some pre or agrarian society while maintaining airplanes global travel space satellites global communications telephones smartphones the Internet what are you what fantasy world are you living in nuclear weapons and you want to live in some agrarian society you can't put the genie back in the bottle technology can't just be forgotten it's here we have to deal with it advanced complex technologies requires complex logistics chains complex manufacturing industry universities government subsidies government regulations to make sure all that stuff works advanced education systems universities schools everything is interconnected as we develop new advanced technologies this requires radical cultural change for these technologies to be sustainable and workable and not to destroy society you know the printing press the invention of the printing press revolutionized religion you can't do religion the same way that you used to once the printing press is invented the power dynamics change with the printing press all of a sudden it's easy to print books everyone have their own personal Bible you don't need priests who preach down to you in Latin because the Bible is only written in Latin and only of a to them because every book costs thousands of dollars and nobody can afford it now everybody can afford it now the books are translated into common languages that anybody can read and now all the sudden the the priesthood loses its power this is what the Protestant Reformation was was about to some extent you know the democratization of Christianity the decentralization of the Catholic Church and its hegemony on religion in Europe see nothing can stay the same with evolution constant change otherwise you're gonna die and that's the whole game here is that egos are trying to play this game so that they can survive long enough not to go extinct and for their children to go extinct and so they're trying to manipulate this whole system they're trying to create an environment for themselves which is most ideal to their genes of being passed on another very important point is that society is incredibly complex and counterintuitive solutions which you think will solve everything and will help everybody end up actually backfiring and making things worse this is one of the problems with tier 1 consciousness and tier 1 cognition is that it thinks that it has all the easy solutions to society's problems because it thinks the society is very simple and and it basically only looks at the status quo it's not looking towards the future towards new technologies disruptive technologies which are arising which requires social change it's not thinking about that at all it's denying that so new technology requires systemic thinking systemic thinking deals with the counterintuitive nature of complex systems really go watch my episode intro to systems thinking to understand this deeper one of the keys to systems thinking is that you understand that any change you make to the system in a local area will affect the whole thing because it's an interconnected system and there are likes feedback loops and so you study these systems very carefully before you change or tinker with them because you understand how dangerous it can be to tinker with the system also it can be dangerous to maintain the status quo of the system without anticipating the new environmental changes that are happening this kind of systemic complex thinking only happens at tier two because people are too selfish and too worried about satisfying their own short-term needs at Tier one stages blue orange and green in order to really be good systems thinkers systems thinking requires objectivity and this is what we need badly from our politicians and from our leaders and from our scientists and from our citizens to because you can't elect a systems thinker into office unless the person who's doing the electing is advanced enough to appreciate the value of systems thinking see you can only vote as high as you yourself are in your consciousness and development now some people here will say ah leo but but but we do have like trump is a good systems thinker he's really good at manipulating systems he's so good at he's look he's actually he's a secret genius because he's so good at manipulating systems this is not a systems thinking selfish manipulation of a system is not the same thing as systems thinking a key quality of systems thinking is that you're not thinking about the system in ways in which to manipulate it for your own personal benefit you're thinking about how to make this system function in a healthy way for the greater good and of course Trump is the opposite of a systems thinker Trump is a selfish opportunistic manipulator not a systems thinker can he exploit a system to satisfy his ego yeah he's pretty good at that but he ain't no systems thinker systems-thinking understands the importance of balance delicate balance between various kinds of dichotomies and dualities such as freedom versus regulation or capitalism versus socialism or individuals and force collectivism or masculine versus feminine it understands that taking one side in any of these debates is gonna lead to disastrous pathological consequences and you could only start to appreciate the delicate balance of nature when you get to tier 2 and above really mysticism teaches you the importance of balance the whole yin-yang thing go study some Taoism so this is what is missing and remember balance does not mean that you just split everything down the middle I am NOT saying that we need to take pro-slavery positions and anti-slavery positions and just take the middle point between the two and call that balance that's not balanced that's devilry true balance is you you look at every situation carefully and sometimes you make a clear decision like slavery is clearly not something that our society should tolerate and that's balance that's proper balance now of course to a slave owner that doesn't look like balance to a slave owner his bias projected on to what I just said makes it look like I am being biased so now we're wrapping up part 2 there's still so much more to say so much more foundation to lay believe it or not we're really going deep here I hope you can tell now you might wonder believe how do I know the things that you say here are true and that they're not just your ideology as always with my work you need to observe this for your self happening in life so the solution is observe observe observe study history study politics observe how political actors behave in the media in the news on YouTube and elsewhere be open-minded as you do this be objective be unbiased be selfless otherwise you're gonna have a totally warped perspective see your ego is warping how you do your observation so if you want to do your observation properly to understand the things that I say you got to really step outside of any preconceived ideas that you have about politics and government and also very importantly have mystical experiences mystical experiences open your heart and open your sense of self to the most widest levels to the universal levels only really once you're at a universal level of consciousness and self can you truly understand what a conscious society looks like where we care about each other and help each other and not working against each other where the entire world becomes your family where your compassion expands to everybody to your friends and your enemies alike no matter what race they are what color they are what country they live in what their political positions are you become conscious that all of them are an aspect of your own self and that all of it is deeply interconnected and we're all in this boat together and that we need to work together so for that you need to do the spiritual work be careful not to turn conscious politics into an ideology who certainly could turn everything I'm saying here into an ideology that is not what I want you to do that would be a mistake but anyways that's enough for today next time I'm going to talk about more foundational ideas new stuff that I haven't said yet and we're also going to get into the principles of conscious politics we're really going to get to define it I'm gonna give you a list of principles and then there's going to be a part for as well and in part four I'm gonna give you specific policy ideas for how to turn our society into a conscious one that's it I'm done here please click that like button and come check out actualize that organ really go find my blog you'll find amazing stuff on my blog I'm posting everyday now videos and examples especially about politics and you'll find resources there that I link to and check out my book list which has a bunch of books about politics on it that will help you to understand these things deeper and spiral dynamics and development psychology and all this is there and my life purpose course and in the forum where you can come and chat about this stuff we're having interesting discussions on the forum these days about conscious politics so come join and I'll see you in part 3 you