Corbett on integral capitalism

The following is from Corbett's Integral World article "The rise of integral conservatism":


He discusses Habermas' instrumental rationality and how it manipulated people and the environment for profit. And that Kennilingam supported this critique in favor of a more integral or postformal rationality. And yet the old adage "what what I do, not what I say" seems apparent. He said:

"That the integral leadership beginning with KW chooses to remain silent and even takes sides favorable to the right-wing austerity bastards (which includes the so-called center-left these days) on this most timely and urgent issue, I think speaks volumes not just about their intellectual bankruptcy but about their own aspirations to power and wealth, the same kind of petty bourgeois opportunism that gets minorities and women into positions of power without really changing anything, those very things that strategic-instrumental rationality can be employed to acquire and accumulate, at whatever the cost. Indeed, there are those including myself who have experienced first hand the interpersonal and institutional manipulations of KW and his inner circle of loyalists who will go to great lengths to avoid and otherwise exclude anyone who questions or challenges the 'party line' of integral ideology and its practices. Of course, the solution to this political corruption within the inner integral circle is to splinter off into a more progressive and open network of integral scholars and practitioners who don't deploy strategic-instrumental manipulations for their own personal systemic benefit within the integral echelon."

And from his article "Ken Wilber, philosopher-king":


"What concerns me most is not so much the apparent cult-like tendencies of the inner circle of KW-integral, but the almost banal stride with which a social Darwinian perspective makes its way into integral theory through none other than the king himself, KW. Individual survival strategies in response to collective crisis seems to be all the fashion-rage among new age self-help gurus these days, indeed, as it always has been in America. Personal responsibility for ones fate in life beyond external determining forces of oppression is also a well known tenet of integral politics, and of a Buddhism that has historically been used to justify the caste system in traditional Eastern societies. In fact, Wilber has gone so far as to claim that Buddha was a Republican, thus recruiting Buddhism to the cause of joining the chorus of those right-wing conservatives who blame the victims of social injustice for being lazy, irresponsible, not of right mind, and generally deserving of what they get. The war of all against all in a neoliberal world of the global race to the bottom thus seems to find a champion in the KW-integral call for individual responsibility, mental discipline, and physical austerity, aka, blaming and punishing the victims of the unregulated excesses of financial and political elites."