This week Jeff takes a look at the movie American Sniper and Fox News’ rising star Megyn Kelly, to make the case that conservative culture is evolving by taking on the best of green altitude values. And it’s not just a one-way street. The left also evolves by taking on the best values of amber altitude traditionalism, such as the gay rights movement’s argument for marriage and military service. This year’s Super Bowl commercials also moved the ball…
You can listen to the entire podcast at the bottom of this post. Or if you prefer to read, the full written transcript is there as well. For a quick listen check out the excerpt below which focuses on the controversial new movie, American Sniper.
Excerpt | “Chris Kyle is no John Wayne”
American Sniper tells the story of Chris Kyle, “America’s deadliest sniper in the Iraq War”. Kyle is credited with a record number of kills: 165 “confirmed kills” and another 95 “claimed kills” (which is where the bullet hits the target but death cannot be confirmed).
Let me stop here and let our liberal blood curdle over the fact that there’s such a thing as a count of “kills” … that such distinctions are even made, and that racking up a high number makes you a hero and a legend. This is just naturally repulsive to liberals.
Moving into the green altitude of development requires that we at least try to take on the perspective of other people, especially victims. This realization forms the essence of the liberal critique of American Sniper: the movie doesn’t consider the humanity of the people it’s fighting and killing, the Iraqis. It doesn’t consider their motivations, their context, or the fact that they love their families and value their lives as much as we do.
But like it or not, conservatives (amber altitude traditionalists) do indeed see killing enemies in war as something to enjoy and take pride in. It makes perfect sense because at the traditional level of development life in general is seen as a universal battle between the forces of good and evil. We are the people who are on the right side of things, thank goodness. We are the chosen people of God. We have a blessed way of life, and we are — and this is always the case in the traditional stage of development — we are under attack by the forces of darkness.
This is why for the vast majority of human history people have found killing to be deeply fulfilling. Every dead enemy just makes the world that much safer for us, our people and for the Kingdom of God we are building. There are few things so sweet. This is the essence of the traditionalist view presented in American Sniper.
Yet, in American Sniper the traditional “god and country” view is leavened with a sensitivity that recognizes the collateral damage of war, not just for the Iraqis, but for the military families and the soldiers themselves. This is evidence of the evolution of the conservative view. John Wayne never worried about PTSD (and “shell-shocked” veterans of earlier wars were seen as weak and pitiful), but now it’s unpatriotic not to.
The integral view is that every perspective is both true and partial, so even though integralists are steeped in green sensitivity, we also seek out the piece of the truth that the traditionalists bring in. And so the question becomes: what in this world is actually worth fighting for, and dying for, and yes, even killing for?
Full podcast below includes the excerpt plus further commentary
In the rest of the podcast Jeff examines this year’s Super Bowl ads, finding more evidence of cultural evolution, this time as an integration of the polarities of masculine and feminine.
He ends by making the case that Fox News’ breakthrough anchor, Megyn Kelly, is likewise widening conservative values to include territory that had been previously held by liberals. Why? Because it works — her ratings are stratospheric and leading the way in Fox’s goal to appeal to independants. Orange cash trumps amber ideology. Ain’t evolution beautiful?
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Hi Jeff,
I just listened to the recording of last week’s show, and I’d like to comment on vaccinations. I have two sons who did not receive all of their vaccinations when they were young. The older one was diagnosed with a severe neurological condition, unrelated to the vaccines; but we stopped giving any more because he was considered at risk for further impairment. Because of his condition, I simply decided to stop giving his younger brother any more vaccines as well. This was several years ago. Last year, my younger son moved from Colorado to another state where he was entered into public school. We were faced with the issue of updating one of his vaccinations or stating that we had a religious belief that would exempt him from having the missing vaccine.
I am fully aware of all the green and orange considerations that were discussed in the broadcast. On one hand, for the past 20 years, I have been giving my older son pharmaceuticals to try to control his seizure condition. I have witnessed both their effectiveness and ineffectiveness and their sometimes horrible side-effects. On the other hand, I have opted for natural remedies to heal nearly everything else for my kids and myself. (We also tried natural remedies for the seizures, including cannabis, but nothing has helped as much as pharmaceuticals.) When I needed surgery, I didn’t hesitate to take advantage of “orange’s” modern medicine and procedures. I also took advantage of “green’s” healing sensibility through energy healing and rejecting my dr.’s post-surgery prescriptions, opting instead for natural herbs and foods. I take the best of both memes.
As for the vaccine question, I decided to go ahead and give my son the vaccine the school wanted him to have, in the CDC’s quest for herd immunity. Initially, I had a very hard time coming to that decision. I have seen the positives and the negatives of what chemicals can do to a growing brain and nervous system. I see both the politics and the personal. Having all this information and experience, my mind could not make the decision. So I went inside. I felt for the answer. I tapped into that dimension where information is in the form of feeling, and I felt that it would be ok for my son to have the vaccine.
I don’t hear a lot in terms of definitions, when we talk about second tier, and I guess that’s because it’s still emerging. Surely though, we must be talking about expanding our decision making ability and our sources of information from those of facts and physical/emotional experience to that which we can learn from our experience of states that are non physical, non emotional, and non intellectual. This is where I find myself going more and more to understand the world and to make decisions when things are complicated- when I see validity in all points of view. Might this be a route to the synthesis second tier is striving for?
Lori
# Lori
Lori wrote: ** I don’t hear a lot in terms of definitions, when we talk about second tier **
Which has me wonder what kind of definitions were you hoping to find? Are you talking about definitions of what 2nd is?
Lori wrote: ** I didn’t hesitate to take advantage of “orange’s” modern medicine and procedures. **
Good that you put “orange” in quotes there. In integral modern medicine is also green, and teal and every Spiral Dynamics color of 2nd tier.
I think 2nd tier is, or can be, pretty hard nosed about choosing good medical science backed up by experiment, intellectual integrity, critical thinking and so on. That is, for some questions the answers may be more likely to come more some some quadrants than others. The rationality of orange gets embraced and included in the higher levels. At the same time, and as a mother you may sense every day, there is more to health than taking the appropriate medications or even eating nutritious foods.
On vaccines: I have not deeply studied this whole question, but I occasionally hear stories about mercury (preservative) in vaccines causing problems — maybe contributing to autism?? So maybe vaccines in some broad sense are OK and “natural” and socially beneficial. etc., but maybe the mercury “contamination” is an aspect of “orange greed” (like the recent scandal about bad herbal stuff sold by Walmart, etc.) The “mercury danger”, if true, would make me pretty reluctant to be vaccinated. That sort of unfounded(?) fear is what has prevented me from getting, for example, flu and shingles vaccines that are pushed at me.
I just googled “shingles vaccines”. One of the responses says “Stay Healthy At Walgreens. Walk In Or Schedule An Appointment Online!”
The larger issue here is “side-effects”. Pharmaceutical medicines seem to have a much wider range of bad side-effects than most “natural” medications. These side-effects seem to be under-studied and reported, or even of much concern to the medics. They appear to run on statistics: “there is only 1 chance in 1000 that this treatment will kill you”.
My wife and I have both been very ill for the last 1.5 years, and the side-effects from various treatments have often been a worse problem than the original illness. The doctors/hospitals just plow ahead with treatments without any pre-testing for reactivity to the treatment (other than to ask if you are allergic to this or that). The reaction (side-effect) became the next “illness” to be treated. This continued into an ongoing chain of reactivities/new treatments.
I consider it as something of a miracle that we are still both alive!!
Indeed , Chris Kyle is ‘No John Wayne’ and he isn’t Audie Murphy either . After hearing many debates from conservatives and liberals about the American Sniper movie, I wanted to watch Audie Murphy’s movie version of his memoir , “To Hell And Back”. Audie Murphy was our most highly decorated serviceman of WW II and he was trained as a sniper too. His army life posits all of the aspects of the traditional ‘god and country’ view. But, something else is there too. Audie Murphy was raised in the extreme poverty of a sharecropper’s life and from a broken home with only a very troubled mother to care for him and his siblings. Audie Murphy suffered from PTSD, like Chris Kyle , and like Kyle had an urge to help his fellow soldiers when he got back home . Audie Murphy’s other movies , like ‘Destry Rides Again ‘ emphasize the civic , relations building benefits of adopting non-violent, peaceful conflict resolution alternatives . Perhaps, conservatives and liberals can more positively evolve by looking backwards and looking forward.