About

For the fifth episode of MUTATIONS, I am pleased to bring you Michael Brooks. Michael is a political journalist, integral thinker, and host of The Michael Brooks show. Together we explore the Intellectual Dark Web (the subject of his upcoming book from Zero Books) and Jordan Peterson. We also consider the alternative depth psychologist, James Hillman (who arguably speaks more from the left), the applicability of Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory to politics, a need in the consciousness culture for a historic grounding in economic theory, and building towards authentic, bottom-up planetary meshworks. SHOW NOTES / FLORILEGIUM The Michael Brooks Show on Patreon Michael’s Twitter The Michael Brooks Show on YouTube Michael Brooks on Zero Books James Hillman, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy—And the World’s Getting Worse James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology (Recommended) Rebel Wisdom with Doshin Nelson Roshi (apologies for the brain fog during the recording), “A Zen Master Talks About Jordan Peterson and the Shadow” Notes: This conversation and the heated, bifurcated response to it (200k+ views) is very interesting. So much so that there was a follow-up episode with Rebel Wisdom to reflect on why it hit such a nerve. Ken Wilber, in the late 90s and early 2000s, critiqued much of postmodern academia and the progressive left as “flatland reductionism,” “mean green meme” (via Don Beck’s Spiral Dynamics), and “aperspectival madness” (an unfortunate hijacking of Jean Gebser’s term, ‘aperspectival,’ which means something completely different) many years before the Peterson phenomenon in popular culture. There is some substance in these criticisms, (i.e. “true-but-partial”). As we noted in this episode by way of Mark Fisher’s essay, or Angela Nagel’s Kill All Normies, a critique from within the left is needed, and as Rebel Wisdom says often, “the left needs to get its house in order.” I’m in support of this. However, a knowledge and literacy of leftist“theory” is something I often sense is sorely lacking in the integral movement. This is something that Wilber shares with Peterson: a postmodern “allergy,” a lack of progressive metabolism. Integral oriented thinkers from the progressive left desperately need to step forward and bridge that gap. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/mutations/message