Steve McIntosh 
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Institute for Cultural Evolution
Focusing on the Cultural Roots of America's Challenges
ICE Blog Post
July 05, 2020
Value Energy Podcast, Including Commentary on the Protests
Here’s my latest podcast with Layman Pascal wherein we discuss the idea that value itself can be understood as a form of interior energy that influences consciousness and culture. As described in chapters 5, 6 and 7 of Developmental Politics, value serves as the motivating power that attracts human interest and generates political will.
Also in the podcast, at 19:50, I comment on the recent unrest surrounding the murder of George Floyd:
“I think in general that progressivism is the most evolved large-scale form of culture that has yet to appear in the timeline of human history. But like all of these worldviews, it has positives and negatives. And as it accelerates, as it gains ground culturally, and hopefully eventually politically to some degree, the pathologies of progressivism are exposed. We can begin to see the pathologies of it—the destructive nature of it, the craziness, the totalitarianism of it—more clearly than ever before. … In this mode of the dialectic, [progressivism] is very much an antithesis, you know, it’s gaining traction by its own character of protest and rejection, which is a necessary step to hopefully a larger synthesis that can better include and make peace between these major worldviews.”
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ICE is on the right path for approaching deliberate evolution, and in seeing that values hold psy (not psi) energy. In fact it is such energy which accounts for the cardinal, archetypal cores of our egos, as compared to our infinitely differentiated social indentities. However, in post-Jungian terms, more research and theory is needed for better discrimination between the energy of consensual values (eternal verities?) and the dark, dysfunctional and Self=defeating energies of their opposite dialectical aspect. That is the woefull undeveloped, often injured, undifferentiated and unsubtle energies of each ego’s shadow or each groups’group shadow. And it is exactly that aspect of Progressivism psy-dialectic, which in it’s alternately childish and tyrannical modes of expression and behavior, lead to the inefficacy of its moralistic posturing on the one hand and the far scarier and more destructive totalitarian insistence on having its way with non-progressives. It is exclusiveist, morally elitist isms of “one true belief” (E. Hoffer) that is the unhealed or undeveloped deficiency in Progressivism’s psy-makeup which needs an Rx for it to get legs with differing folks, especially true believers of more traditional faiths. (BTW, Progressivism and its excess have been around for at least 150 years here in good ole USA.) DT, 7/21/20.