The sad, sad other side of the story is perhaps that part of the result of colonialism is the brain drain that has already happened across much of the world that took the people with many of the most resources and skin in the game and education, who could’ve made incredible investments in their countries of origin, however, they’ve probably already assimilated and seen that their human and financial capital can grow much more as can their children’s in the post colonial industrialized west. And thus the satellite and sub development situation as well as the return on Investment on more complex infrastructure development Across what people used to call the Third World, remains extremely fraught, to put it simplistically…..
Geo politics of pretty much all of the major nations of the last hundred years as resulted in this tragedy so we can’t just point one or two fingers conveniently across the aisle,
Great article - insta-subscribed! This exact application of spiral dynamics to the current moment is something I have been pondering a lot recently - so many of the West’s current problems strike me as rooted in the Green mainstream’s inability or unwillingness to accept that consciousness/developmental hierarchies are a thing, and that new migrants from strong (and more importantly self-confident) red/blue cultures won’t jettison their deeply held values, beliefs and behaviours overnight just because they move here. Once you have decided that any consideration of the relative merits and maturity of different cultures and how they can or can’t mix is “hate”, you’ve put yourself in a cognitive box by taking that whole line of thinking off the table and – as far as I can see – denied yourself any ability to either diagnose or fix some of the problems facing us, particularly if you also see everything through a victim/oppressor lens with the red/blues as the victims.
I do think there is a slow dawning here in the UK that there are potentially unbridgeable gaps between red/blue Islamic values and green “tolerance” and relativism, but ironically that recognition is much more clearly articulated by Islamic commentators (including some very eminent native British ones) than by anyone I’ve read on the Green side. Working class native blue/oranges see it quite clearly I think, but they have no power and are largely voiceless and despised by their Green "betters". It’s far from clear to me how this shakes out in the decades to come – perhaps we need to get as many people as we can to yellow asap, but yellow still feels quite a lonely place to be here.
I am so happy to see this, James! You have your work cut out for you in the UK to share the SD framework among more of your peers, but you clearly get it. Well said. And, indeed, our mission is to bring as many as possible to (healthy) Yellow.
Thank you! I'm annoyed to see I missed your London symposium by a week, I would definitely have come along, at the risk of getting myself on a list somewhere....
Look for commonalities, exchange ideas across cultures. Two starting points: "Islam and the Discovery of Freedom" by Rose Wilder Lane (of Little House fame), edited with commentary by Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad, Director of The Minaret of Freedom (Hayek, Mises, understood); and second: "Charlemagne, Muhammad, and the Arab Roots of Capitalism" by Gene W. Heck. Be part of a waves of conversation that work from congenial edges inward. One important thing we share with the Saracen world is that their worst ideas and ours both lead to the destruction of civilization. Let's make personal connections that understand that and work to avoid it. Meanwhile, the predators and fanatics of both cultures must be dealt with harshly.
Not an easy subject to write about, I think you’ve done a very nice job.
Many people point to Paris and France and say that London has done a supremely better job than the French and managing cultural immigration.
Nonetheless, for industrialized donations that also are frequently post Colonial nations, …..
until policies at home allow for a gray market of semi legal immigrant workers that accept reduced privileges For the opportunity for employment and possibly future citizenship, …
and until current citizens are more incentivized for both education, but also supported to have happy and healthy families (child, friendly policies for daycare and public parks and transportation, etc. ) that maintain the replacement value, …..
the entire paradigm of literate and educated world and society is in big trouble….
No, I mean women wearing burkas, honor killings, female genital mutilation, theocratic governments (post reformation) to name a few ideologies that are completely alien to western civilization.
If you phrased those as “culturally/religious neutral” questions….. and were able to take a global cross class /Cross age , multi nation/multi cultural survey, it would be absolutely fascinating to see what patterns May be visible, if any. History and brutality and culture are nuanced. Yet riots and tabloids make lusty apes of us all/or most anyway…. The things that you mentioned her certainly out of fashion, but they are not completely unpopular amongst many swaths of Caucasian Christians. The behavior of the New England Puritans, who were supposedly looking for religious freedom, was sometimes as brutal, if we are to believe the accounts. … as deplorable as the behavior of the Taliban appears to be, it’s hard to say that people who have been “a dry and hot Panini sandwich between the USSR and Russia and the United States” for the last 50 years, not to mention previous global empires, is exactly a nation full of choices
Good on this topic is Douglas Murray's 2017 book, "The Strange Death of Europe". Also worth reading: "Radical: My Journey out of Islamist Extremism" by Maajed Nawaz.
Excellent article... though I have a bone to pick regarding the words "integrate" and "assimilate". When an incoming culture integrates with the host country, it still retains its birth culture which, I believe, enriches both cultures; however, when a culture is assimilated by another, it loses its attributes... the two words are not interchangeable.
Ireland, which was colonised, now has an open immigration policy, resulting in our non-Irish born population going from 7% to 23% in two years. In my view, this is a deliberate EU+ policy to destabilise national cohesion, in order to make way for totalitarianism.
Dear Rachel -- please see the comment from James. This is not euphemistic language but rather an analysis tool called Spiral Dynamics. https://www.thenextevolution.com/spiral-dynamics/ It's designed to show the universality of the problem of incommensurable worldviews.
It may be a named analysis tool and perhaps some find it useful. For me it simply renders the text unreadable. I am unlikely to be unique. We have more than adequate language to analyse and discuss this already, if we are allowed to use it.
"Can it be an accident that Western countries such as the US, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK all have open borders simultaneously?"
I was thinking more of the US. While it is required by the "supreme law of the land" (Article I, Section 9; Article V; Amendment 10) to have "open borders," and while as a practical matter 95,500 miles of border and coastline could never be "secured," Republicans and Democrats alike have poured billions of dollars and thousands of roving gangs of thugs into supposedly doing so. Both parties seem very intent on Making America East Germany Again.
There's a difference between that which is designed to vet those coming in and that which keeps citizens from escaping. I suppose the powerful could flip a switch and make that transformation happen, but migration is not a simple theoretical matter. It requires considerations of context and pragmatism.
The sad, sad other side of the story is perhaps that part of the result of colonialism is the brain drain that has already happened across much of the world that took the people with many of the most resources and skin in the game and education, who could’ve made incredible investments in their countries of origin, however, they’ve probably already assimilated and seen that their human and financial capital can grow much more as can their children’s in the post colonial industrialized west. And thus the satellite and sub development situation as well as the return on Investment on more complex infrastructure development Across what people used to call the Third World, remains extremely fraught, to put it simplistically…..
Geo politics of pretty much all of the major nations of the last hundred years as resulted in this tragedy so we can’t just point one or two fingers conveniently across the aisle,
Great article - insta-subscribed! This exact application of spiral dynamics to the current moment is something I have been pondering a lot recently - so many of the West’s current problems strike me as rooted in the Green mainstream’s inability or unwillingness to accept that consciousness/developmental hierarchies are a thing, and that new migrants from strong (and more importantly self-confident) red/blue cultures won’t jettison their deeply held values, beliefs and behaviours overnight just because they move here. Once you have decided that any consideration of the relative merits and maturity of different cultures and how they can or can’t mix is “hate”, you’ve put yourself in a cognitive box by taking that whole line of thinking off the table and – as far as I can see – denied yourself any ability to either diagnose or fix some of the problems facing us, particularly if you also see everything through a victim/oppressor lens with the red/blues as the victims.
I do think there is a slow dawning here in the UK that there are potentially unbridgeable gaps between red/blue Islamic values and green “tolerance” and relativism, but ironically that recognition is much more clearly articulated by Islamic commentators (including some very eminent native British ones) than by anyone I’ve read on the Green side. Working class native blue/oranges see it quite clearly I think, but they have no power and are largely voiceless and despised by their Green "betters". It’s far from clear to me how this shakes out in the decades to come – perhaps we need to get as many people as we can to yellow asap, but yellow still feels quite a lonely place to be here.
I am so happy to see this, James! You have your work cut out for you in the UK to share the SD framework among more of your peers, but you clearly get it. Well said. And, indeed, our mission is to bring as many as possible to (healthy) Yellow.
Thank you! I'm annoyed to see I missed your London symposium by a week, I would definitely have come along, at the risk of getting myself on a list somewhere....
Look for commonalities, exchange ideas across cultures. Two starting points: "Islam and the Discovery of Freedom" by Rose Wilder Lane (of Little House fame), edited with commentary by Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad, Director of The Minaret of Freedom (Hayek, Mises, understood); and second: "Charlemagne, Muhammad, and the Arab Roots of Capitalism" by Gene W. Heck. Be part of a waves of conversation that work from congenial edges inward. One important thing we share with the Saracen world is that their worst ideas and ours both lead to the destruction of civilization. Let's make personal connections that understand that and work to avoid it. Meanwhile, the predators and fanatics of both cultures must be dealt with harshly.
Not an easy subject to write about, I think you’ve done a very nice job.
Many people point to Paris and France and say that London has done a supremely better job than the French and managing cultural immigration.
Nonetheless, for industrialized donations that also are frequently post Colonial nations, …..
until policies at home allow for a gray market of semi legal immigrant workers that accept reduced privileges For the opportunity for employment and possibly future citizenship, …
and until current citizens are more incentivized for both education, but also supported to have happy and healthy families (child, friendly policies for daycare and public parks and transportation, etc. ) that maintain the replacement value, …..
the entire paradigm of literate and educated world and society is in big trouble….
Agreed. And illegal immigration + lack of assimilation by cultures completely alien to western civilization may be the final nail in America’s coffin.
https://lizlasorte.substack.com/p/borders-and-boundaries-and-freedom?r=76q58
“Completely alien”? Or maybe just experiments gone wrong and fueled by cocaine (“metaphorically”) by the world’s intelligence agencies ….
No, I mean women wearing burkas, honor killings, female genital mutilation, theocratic governments (post reformation) to name a few ideologies that are completely alien to western civilization.
If you phrased those as “culturally/religious neutral” questions….. and were able to take a global cross class /Cross age , multi nation/multi cultural survey, it would be absolutely fascinating to see what patterns May be visible, if any. History and brutality and culture are nuanced. Yet riots and tabloids make lusty apes of us all/or most anyway…. The things that you mentioned her certainly out of fashion, but they are not completely unpopular amongst many swaths of Caucasian Christians. The behavior of the New England Puritans, who were supposedly looking for religious freedom, was sometimes as brutal, if we are to believe the accounts. … as deplorable as the behavior of the Taliban appears to be, it’s hard to say that people who have been “a dry and hot Panini sandwich between the USSR and Russia and the United States” for the last 50 years, not to mention previous global empires, is exactly a nation full of choices
Apologies, couple of typos. I don’t see how to edit the post after pressing the blue arrow. 🤦🏼♂️
Good on this topic is Douglas Murray's 2017 book, "The Strange Death of Europe". Also worth reading: "Radical: My Journey out of Islamist Extremism" by Maajed Nawaz.
Hence... I do what I do. ;)
Let the accusers come forth.
Excellent article... though I have a bone to pick regarding the words "integrate" and "assimilate". When an incoming culture integrates with the host country, it still retains its birth culture which, I believe, enriches both cultures; however, when a culture is assimilated by another, it loses its attributes... the two words are not interchangeable.
Ireland, which was colonised, now has an open immigration policy, resulting in our non-Irish born population going from 7% to 23% in two years. In my view, this is a deliberate EU+ policy to destabilise national cohesion, in order to make way for totalitarianism.
This is probably a good, meaningful distinction, Eleanor.
Gosh please rewrite this without the euphemistic colour-coding. Just reading it makes me feel a queasy 1984 unease. Be brave, speak plainly.
Dear Rachel -- please see the comment from James. This is not euphemistic language but rather an analysis tool called Spiral Dynamics. https://www.thenextevolution.com/spiral-dynamics/ It's designed to show the universality of the problem of incommensurable worldviews.
It may be a named analysis tool and perhaps some find it useful. For me it simply renders the text unreadable. I am unlikely to be unique. We have more than adequate language to analyse and discuss this already, if we are allowed to use it.
"Can it be an accident that Western countries such as the US, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK all have open borders simultaneously?"
It's neither an accident nor a fact.
I think this is a fair point, especially as Germany and the Netherlands have tightened up relatively recently.
I was thinking more of the US. While it is required by the "supreme law of the land" (Article I, Section 9; Article V; Amendment 10) to have "open borders," and while as a practical matter 95,500 miles of border and coastline could never be "secured," Republicans and Democrats alike have poured billions of dollars and thousands of roving gangs of thugs into supposedly doing so. Both parties seem very intent on Making America East Germany Again.
There's a difference between that which is designed to vet those coming in and that which keeps citizens from escaping. I suppose the powerful could flip a switch and make that transformation happen, but migration is not a simple theoretical matter. It requires considerations of context and pragmatism.
The actual name of the Berlin Wall was the Antifaschistischer Schutzwall "Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart ."
All that immigration requires consideration of is whether other people should be allowed to move and travel without your permission.
That latter statement sounds like Anarchist Platonism, which is why I mentioned context and pragmatism.
Certainly anarchist, but I'm not sure I see a Platonism connection.
Context and pragmatism require living in the real world rather than in a world where other people require your consent to live their lives.