DAILY EVOLVER LIVE PODCAST TRANSCRIPT | 1.20.

2015 | Boulder Colorado | Jeff

Salzman
OBAMA LEADS FROM THE FRONT
An Integral President Promotes Post-Modern Values to a Modern Nation
Jeff Salzman: Hey folks, welcome to the Daily Evolver Live. I'm Jeff Salzman and I am
coming to you from my office here in beautiful Boulder Colorado.
We had some technical trouble at the beginning of our live podcast on Tuesday, so I am rerecording the first part of it again here, for the podcast.
I want to thank you for listening in, wherever you are I hope you're well.
Tonight I want to look at the State of the Union address by President Obama. To our
international friends please forgive my American centric focus, but I think were witnessing an
epochal shift to the next stage of economic development for the US, from the Orange Modern
Altitude to the Green Postmodern Altitude, and its worth noting.
Before we get into it, I want to give a shout out to IntegralLife.com which is where the
worlds leading integral philosopher, Ken Wilber publishes his latest work. They just released a
wonderful excerpt of Ken talking about the qualities of higher levels of consciousness. It's called
Supermind and the Primordial Avoidance, and like the Daily Evolver now, it is available on both
a recording as well as a full written transcript. It is behind the pay-wall at integral life.com, and
let me say it's well worth it. $100 bucks for one year subscription. I just asked Siri and she
figures it out to be 8.33333 dollars per month. IntegralLife.com is how Ken and some very good
people make a living, so it deserves your support, and earns it.
Ok, so President Barack Obamas sixth State of the Union address. The State of the Union, of
course, is just that: an annual overview of where the President sees the nation and where he
wants to lead it. Obama used this years address to lay out his economic message, which he
presented in its most unvarnished form tonight. As he said at the end, with no more elections to
run he is free to tell us what he really thinks. And he does, mostly at least.
Again, Id say that from an integral point of viewpoint Obama is charting the course for the
developmental leap from a modern orange altitude economy, which is where we are now, to a
postmodern green altitude economy. He argued for policies such as:
Free higher education for everyone who wants it
Maternity leave and increased child care

 Paid sick leave

Extending health insurance to more people
Higher minimum wage, so that everybody who makes an effort can make a living. I love
how he said it: To everyone in this Congress who still refuses to raise the minimum wage,
I say this: If you truly believe you could work full-time and support a family on less than
$15,000 a year, go try it. If not, vote to give millions of the hardest-working people in
America a raise.
Higher taxes on the rich
Now I know what many of you international listeners are thinking, Really, this is what you
Americans are still working on? Its true, America is a good developmental half a stage or
more behind other developed countries in regards to family care and even safety net issues.
Fundamentally Obamas economic vision is to catch up to what is already happening in other
rich countries of the world, particularly Western Europe.
I saw elegant evidence of this difference between American and European thinking in a
Pew Poll this week which asked people from the United States, as well as people from Germany,
France, Britain and Spain, which is more important to them: 1) The freedom to live your life
without state interference? or 2) The security of having the state guarantee that everyones basic
needs are met? It turns out that the views of Americans and European were perfect mirror images
of each other on this basic security vs freedom polarity. Europeans choose security over
freedom by 60% to 40%. Americans chose freedom over security by 60% to 40%, and thereby
choose the modern Orange system, which is oriented to the individual, over the Green postModern system, which focuses on the community at large. The latter is the choice of the
Europeans.
Paradoxically, Americas relative Orangeness may be one reason for its economic
success, which outpace Europes in two important ways. The first is our long-term success: over
70 years America has had the richest middle class in the world. The rest of the developed world
is gaining on us, but were still out in front. Also I point out our success in the short run as well,
with America leading the developed world out of the Great Recession in terms of growth and
employment.
But the inequitable distribution of Americas wealth is too high. It just doesnt feel right
when 90% of new wealth created by the economy is flowing to the top 2% of the citizens. That
offends the moral sensibilities of modern and postmodern people.
So how do we solve this problem? We integrate! The way forward is to harmonize the
polarities and freedom and security are two of the primary polarities of life. As we mature we
realize that its not that we are to choose one or the other. Its that we are to see the wisdom in

both poles, and be ever-more able to tease apart what is best about each. Using this thinking we
create a less ruthless meritocracy and a less stagnant collective. We develop a more
entrepreneurial flavor to government services ... and an ever more humane and flexible
workspace, provided by private companies.
The goal of this integration is a system where people are free to move through their lives
and make decisions for themselves and their families unencumbered by unnecessary rules and
rulers. Yet at the same time they are connected to and supported by a mesh-work of intelligent
and responsive systems that catch them when they fall. At this point were talking about an
integral economy, the exploration of which is an ongoing topic on the Daily Evolver.
I think an economy like this is evolutionarily inevitable, the natural consequence of
smarter people and systems. And leaders. This is where Barack Obama comes in. One of the best
ways to hear how a President thinks is to read their big speeches, and to read Obamas speeches
is to feel the multi-perspectival flow of an integral mind.
From Tuesdays speech:
If were going to have arguments, lets have argumentsbut lets make them debates
worthy of this body and worthy of this country.
We still may not agree on a womans right to choose, but surely we can agree its a good
thing that teen pregnancies and abortions are nearing all-time lows, and that every
woman should have access to the health care she needs.
Yes, passions still fly on immigration, but surely we can all see something of ourselves in
the striving young student, and agree that no one benefits when a hardworking mom is
taken from her child, and that its possible to shape a law that upholds our tradition as a
nation of laws and a nation of immigrants.
We may have different takes on the events of Ferguson and New York. But surely we can
understand a father who fears his son cant walk home without being harassed. Surely we
can understand the wife who wont rest until the police officer she married walks through
the front door at the end of his shift.
The man is a perspective-taking machine. I was reminded of why I am so happy that
Barack Obama is president by a Voice message I received a couple hours ago from one of our
young, integral writers and poets, Zachary Feder. He sum up in his own beautiful way what I and
so many integral lists feel about Obama.

Zachary Feder excerpt

Obama has been criticized because most of what he is recommending in this State of the
Union has no chance of actually passing Congress. The pundit Jeffrey Goldberg accused him of
trolling the Republicans, that is poking at them trying to provoking a response from them.
Well, yeah. Its what a leader does, he set the topic for debate. Obama has done that, and really
put the pedal to the metal in this speech.
But not to worry, the Republicans have already gotten the message, at least those of them
who are serious about winning elections. The 2016 Republican Presidential hopefuls are all
presenting plans to fight inequality in their platforms.They are more given to private enterprise
solutions, to be sure, but so be it. The oscillation between what is private and public is one of the
engines of evolution. May we fight our way forward ever faster!
Ok, I think we can patch in to the recording from Tuesday night. As we enter the
program, Im about to explore the historical development of Americas economic systems,
starting with the fateful encounter of the Tribal Altitude native people with the Warrior Altitude
Europeans... and leading to what we have today: An integral President bringing post-modern
thinking to a modern country.
AN OSCILLATING HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN ECONOMY
We can see that every developmental altitude has its own economic system, and it is a
reflection of the natural forces of human development that come online at that stage. It all starts,
of course, with the dawn of humanity, about 250 thousand years ago. It's what we call the
infrared altitude, or the beige meme in spiral dynamics. The economy at this stage was basically
get through the day. We're looking for food, warmth, sex and babies, k some of whom live
long enough to continue to do it all over again. This really basically is as complex as the
economy gets at this stage of the game.
Then we move into the second stage of human development, or the tribal stage, the magenta
altitude and purple meme. Here we continue to emphasize survival, but it's more complex, with
longer timelines people can see a season instead of a day or a week. We have differentiated
functions among the members of a tribe, hunters and gatherers. We have the emergence of trade
and bartering with other tribes. But it's still very communal. With the ego not yet fully
differentiated, there's a self-sacrificing allegiance of the individual to the tribe.
And then we move and again we're moving quickly to about forty or fifty thousand years
ago, where we enter the red altitude, or what we call the warrior or the empire stage of
development. And this is a reassertion of the individualistic. If the tribal stage says something

like we are one, we are a group, we are the tribe, the red or the warrior stage of development
says, I am powerful, I have agency within myself. And so, this is the stage where the young
warrior goes up against the chiefs or the tribal elders and customs and basically moves into the
plunder and stage of development, where bands of warriors roam the countryside or planet
taking whatever they can get. This is really the beginning of America, where we have the first,
the economy in the first hundred years of America was basically full on red, with the subjugation
of the indigenous American people and the enslavement of Africans.
Red eventually moves from gang plunder to its more organized form: the warlord. This
lasted in American even through the Civil War, when slavery ended and the Wild West began to
be tamed. The end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th Century, is the era of John D
Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, JP Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt and a whole roster of robber
barons who built huge enterprises in steel, oil, railroads, publishing, retailing with very little
constraint or countervailing force. There were very few government or labor power structures
that kept them in check.
The good news? We had the beginnings of modern industry. The bad news is that by the
late 1920s we had a situation where the bottom ninety percent of America held just sixteen
percent of the wealth, and fewer than .01 percent, the one tenth of a percent, of the population
held a quarter of the total wealth, just between the crash, right before the crash of 1929. This was
the end of the Red economy. And it ended, as these stages tend to do, in a bang, not a whimper.
So, at this point, with the Great Depression and the beginning of World War II, we saw
the rise of the next great economic system, the traditionalist economy Amber altitude, Blue
meme built on the values of the that stage of development. And this is where we have a
renewed focus on the common good. And this is in a certain way a recapitulation, in a new time
and place, of the collective, tribal stage of development.
This economic system seeks basically to rein in the excesses of the red exploitation, using
government regulation, taxation and labor movements, all of which grew enormously over the
subsequent decades. This is the era World War II, of great social goals such as building
infrastructure, highways, airports, seaports, heck, even going to the moon. It supported an
educated middle class that exhibited good bourgeois values, such as thrift, hard work, and the
ability to delay gratification. It's also the beginning of the safety net, of Social Security, child
labor laws, a five-day workweek, occupational safety. This traditionalist economy, this blue
meme or Amber altitude economy, was ascendant during the postwar era, until it too eventually
played itself out with the economic malaise if you remember Jimmy Carter's famous phrase
in the mid-1970s.

And this is when taxes had spiked to seventy or eighty percent of income, growth was
stagnant yet inflation hit twenty percent, and labor unions were proving to be as ruthless as the
big bosses had been in the previous stages. And so, just as the Great Depression ended the red
economy, the Great Stagflation of the 1970s ended the amber traditionalist economy.
Americans had had enough of the collective orientation and felt the need to release the
power of the individual again. And so we elected Ronald Reagan, who instituted Reaganomics,
and began a new stage of economic development that we would identify as being Orange, or
based the values of modernity. At Orange this freedom is formulated as, above all, a freedom
from government coercion. . And so, tax rates were cut under thirty percent. Labor unions were
busted, or they certainly lost a lot of power in the Reagan era. There was a new kind of laissezfaire government. Deregulation, globalization, free trade. The ideology of Orange modernity is
meritocracy.
It's the idea that anybody can get anywhere on the strength of his skills. And the wording
his skills gives you a little bit of a sense of what's still wrong with this view, because it doesn't
include minorities, it privileges men over women, it doesn't include all of the people who are left
out by this meritocratic system, but we'll get to that in a second.
All of which is not to say it doesnt work. There was a huge upside. The economy grew,
inflation was tamed, and a new economy arose, based on service, technology, and knowledge.
And this was really the booster rocket of globalization. As trade barriers fell, and we are still
talking about this modern age kicked off by Reagan, it was the beginning of the end, really of
traditional manufacturing in America, at least as we knew it. During Reagan's first term America
permanently lost over two and a half million manufacturing jobs, and wealth was redistributed
from the workers to the owners and investors. Redistributing wealth is something that's going on
all the time. It's only pejorative when it's being redistributed away from your own interests. And
wealth was, indeed at this time, being distributed away from the working class and the middle
class, who were now competing with lower wage workers around the world.
First globalization hit manufacturing jobs factory workers, assembly line workers. It
turns out that relatively uneducated people in China can do those jobs. And then it gets into even
white-collar jobs, traditionally white-collar job like customer service well, as long as people
speak good English, as they do in India, and they're happy to work for three to five dollars a day,
then, they our airline reservations. And now there's even accounting and legal.
The good news is there is a global consciousness arising in terms of dealing with people
all over the globe. We have build a modern world, with its problems to be sure, but with
spectacular results for the good as well. The problem is, there is a blindness, and this is true of

orange, a blindness of the interiors costs. Orange is focused on the economic benefits, so there's
not really a valuing of the problems and suffering that's caused by these kinds of relocations.
Inequality inevitably grows in an individualist economic structure as well. Orange has
produced a global super-sorting system for talent, creating what I call a Michael Jordan kind of
playing field, where more talented or productive people are rewarded exponentially better than
less talented or productive people. If you can find somebody to run a company or a department
the way a Michael Jordan can play basketball or a Tom Brady can play football, then, in a way
the high payoff is justified. But as I said earlier, when it creates an inequality of wealth that rivals
that of the Gilded Age of the Robber Barons it feels like a moral hazard to the rest of us. The
moral hazard is magnified as richer and richer people opt out of the commons and live in a
bubble of plenty. I saw a passage in Vanity Fair magazine that I think captures the problem.
They write: The more divided a society becomes in terms of wealth, the more reluctant
the wealthy become to spend money on common needs. The rich dont need to rely on
government for parks or education or medical care or personal securitythey can buy all these
things for themselves. In the process, they become more distant from ordinary people, losing
whatever empathy they may once have had.
And so, we can see that happening, and again, the developmental structure ends with a
bang. Just as the red economy ended with the Great Depression, the Amber traditionalist
economy ended with the Great Stagflation of the 1970s, so the Orange modernist economy has
begun its end with the financial meltdown and Great Recession that started in 2008. Obama
pushed it along with his speech this week, where he brought home to people the excesses of a
modern economy that are built into the system and need deeper structural reform.
And thats what Obama talked about in this, his sixth State of the Union address. Not just
the family-supporting policies around childcare and sick leave. Not just the equalizing
correctives that come from raising wages and taxing wealth. But also through programs that are
explicitly world centric, such as internet security, global climate change and closing Guantanamo
Bay.
I'll just close by saying that the way we move into more integrated economic territory, as
I described a few minutes ago, is that progressives do what Obama did tonight. Which is to
articulate a strong progressive agenda, an optimistic progressive agenda, that is ... as the
president, that gets laid on the table. And the Republicans now have to respond to that. And as I
said, it's not like they have been sitting on their hands when it comes to this issue of inequality.
The leading Republican candidates, certainly the candidates for president, have all come out in
one way or the other for an equality agenda. I mean, I just want to pause there and note that that's
true. Everybody's basically in agreement that this trend that we've been seeing, where the lions

share of the gains in the economy go to the top one or two percent of the people, is not tenable.
It's not fair, it's not good, it's not healthy in terms of the civic society. So Orange is dying and
long live Green!
At this point we Jeff takes a couple questions and comments from our listeners.