Integral and me

It's been about a year now since Marco Morelli wrote this piece. It came up again today on my FB feed with this quote:

"I’ve come to believe that the problem with integral culture is not the marketing of it per se—but the bad marketing. Marketing that insults one’s intelligence. One of the features of integral discourse that unfortunately emerged with I-I and has continued for the last ten years (some of which I even helped write) involves a subtle flattery of the self in the attempt to define a psychographic market segment and attract it to one’s cause. A typical message goes something like this: 'You’re Integral. Here are five things about you that are different and amazing…but you also feel pain: you feel alone in this incredibly fragmented world, and need to be connected to, and supported by, other integral people like you who long for greater wholeness, etc.' All of which might be true, of course; but the question I have is: So what? Who really cares? If I really care about you as a person, and am not merely interested in enrolling you in my integral community, then identifying you as 'integral' is not going to be my priority. Rather, I want to know what you’re actually doing in the world—what you stand for, how you struggle—what your real experience is, how your mind works, and how you feel life. I shouldn’t just be trying to get you on my email list. I should want to know your story, the quality of your presence, your energetic flux. And, most importantly, I should want to know if we can work together, be friends and allies, peers and equals—learn from each other’s example. Not merely aggregate you to my larger project that remains, at some level, a capitalistic game."