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Joe Corbett has been living in Shanghai and Beijing since 2001. He has taught at American and Chinese universities using the AQAL model as an analytical tool in Western Literature, Sociology and Anthropology, Environmental Science, and Communications. He has a BA in Philosophy and Religion as well as an MA in Interdisciplinary Social Science, and did his PhD work on modern and postmodern discourses of self-development, all at public universities in San Francisco and Los Angeles, California. He can be reached at [email protected].

SEE MORE ESSAYS WRITTEN BY JOE CORBETT

“I am just so over the
whole ‘justice’ thing”

An Open-Letter from Ken Wilber?

Joe Corbett

An unsubstantiated open-letter from Ken Wilber was reportedly distributed recently to a portion of his critics.

Dear Underlings,

I know that some of you have been unhappy about the absence of my presence on issues of Justice in the LR quadrant. But let me assure you that if you saw things from a higher perspective you wouldn't think this way. I am just so over the whole “justice” thing, I have completely transcended it; in fact, the LR quadrant doesn't even have an archetypal virtue in my AQAL, and now I only need to make token mentions of it in my remarks about the pathology of Green. You should try it sometime, it's as easy as counting 3-2-1, it really does make you feel better, like a burden has been lifted from your shoulders. And anyway, the Idea of Justice is really just a hang-over from the same old tired leftist days of “socialist revolution” and other fixations of the 60s. I mean, really, just grow up.

My own maturity on this issue is demonstrated by my ability to be subjectively detached from it, almost entirely silent on the whole issue, and to objectify those who are not. Anyone, in fact, who considers Justice of prime importance in our world today on an equal footing with Truth, Beauty, and the Good is clearly fixated on their allergy to the achievement and excellence of Orange. Maybe attendance at Social Progressives Anonymous meetings would do you good. In any case, I think you should go out and get a life and make something of yourself with material success before you start criticizing my very important and powerful corporate business-class friends and patrons.

On the other hand, I recognize that some of you may actually be repressing the emergence of your higher integral self when you blather-on about socio-economic and political justice, because the higher self in you couldn't give a damn about those losers who can't earn their merit on their own by proving their true grit. I mean, those who have earned their rightful place in the social hierarchy (like Hillary Clinton, for instance), by either used-car salesman cunning or by ivy league credential, to exploit and monopolize their privileges over others are the heirs to an evolutionary process that no one can or should deny. It is the will of Eros Itself. And to help the process along, we should probably do even more of what Bill Clinton did (Spirit bless his soul) in the 90s, which was to cut the social safety net so that all those single mothers wouldn't be held back from fulfilling their potential, to make even more profits for my powerful friends.

If this brief lesson in how to grow up and mature politically isn't enough, just let me say that any of you who try to use the concepts of quantum physics to shed light on psychological or biological reality (much less social reality) are committing the Deepak Chopra fallacy, using the latest and emerging scientific knowledge to try to understand and make sense of heretofore hidden processes and patterns of our universe! How reductionist and foolish is this! Whenever there are gaps in our understanding of how things work do not attempt to connect new scientific understandings to old problems we don't yet understand, just substitute the words Spirit and Eros in those gaps. Believe me. Just grow up.

Sincerely, KW

FURTHER READING

Joe Corbett, Social Transformation: Towards a More Just Kosmos, June 2011