Time to revisit this Growing Down podcast

Selling the integral model to businesses isn't going to have much, if any, effect on changing the political system. Rather it sees to just be reinforcing it. The working class perceive that as just more elitism disconnected from their daily reality. We need to communicate with them in their own terms. That's why I like Bernie's approach, pocket-book issues, issues of making the neoliberals paying their fair share of taxes and so on.

We also have to realize that we're fighting fascism in the form of the current Republican Party. They fight dirty and we need to learn to do it too. The stakes are far too high to assume this is an intellectual debate for academia. This is a fight for democracy and we could very well lose it permanently. It this sort of trench warfare, down and dirty rhetoric must be used effectively to reach the working class where they live in terms that motivate them to win elections. Bernie and The Squad are framing messages on the positive side but we also need the attack dogs to do it on the negative side. It's one reason I appreciate The Lincoln Project: They know how to fight dirty and they are effective.

 

So to get to a point where people can even approach self-actualization they need to have all of the prerequisite needs met. We need to eat, to pay the bills with some surplus left over for socializing, for entertainment, for education. We need political policies that pay a living wage, that provide benefits like healthcare, savings, time off, a work schedule that has reduced hours. Then and only then can we talk about the working class having the time and interest to take up self actualization, to feel secure enough to participate in working together to build a better life for all.

 

Hanzi Freinacht noted that to achieve social liberalism 2.0 it needs a prerequisite base of social liberalism 1.0, for example in the Nordic countries. They have achieved providing for some of the aforementioned foundational needs. It's why they always score at the top of the Happiness Report and Democracy Index. It's why my focus is on trying to get the US back up to 1.0, where it used to be in times past with a robust working class. A key ingredient in achieving that is using effective framing to motivate voters to elect the sort of politicians who will provide that stable socio-economic base.

 

It is also important to imagine where we're going. As noted, Hanzi has social liberalism 2.0. I've written about the collaborative commons as another example. There is the recent book on metamodernism and a time between worlds. We are in this transition between the old and new way, the dying of one and the birth of another. But perhaps part of the burgeoning way is itself learning to live in transition, in the process, and not focus so much anymore on a result, a definitive level or resting place. Perhaps this thing we call the liminal is learning to live in that space between, which opens us to what's before us in a way that also allows for something new and creative to happen. Holding to rigidly to a structure tends to stifle that sort of open spontaneity. It seems we need more of the latter if we're going to address our ongoing crises like climate change and income inequality. Our liberation might very well be in the liminal space of the transition between worlds.