Integral Planetary Politics

By Jon Eden Khan

Today the collective human soul is at war with itself along the lines of the fundamental ideological differences between the world’s major approaches to governance, politics, religion, and culture.

That war spans battles between nations holding the ideals of democracy (albeit with major shadows underneath) and nations governed through the tight fist of authoritarianism; between traditional religious and secular liberal values; between those on the political right and left; between nationalists and globalists, colonisers and the oppressed.

Each of these groups believes itself to be right with righteous certainty, the others wrong, and seeks to win a final victory — a zero-sum game that is leading the world into ever greater violence, trauma, and disconnection.

The intensity of polarisation that has come to dominate the field of politics and political parties has drained the public’s trust and confidence to such a low level that on one hand political apathy, disengagement, and cynicism are endemic, and on the other people celebrate the emergence of politicians whose brazen expressions of the worst aspects of human nature give some sense of liberation from the bubble of PC politics that has come to reek of inauthenticity.

There is no constructive pathway forward in humanity’s collective life as long as this kind of bitter polarisation governs political process. Instead, the best we can hope for is a weary oscillation between warring factions, with rare moments of progress emerging from their clash — a dialectic that drains more than it builds.

We desperately need a breakthrough into a new kind of politics — an integral politics that can make sense of and empower constructive action in the battlefield of polarisation. 

To understand why we are so stuck in polarisation, we need to look deeper into the pervasive worldviews and values shaping our collective psychology and politics.

Over the last decades, a number of approaches have emerged out of a growing transdisciplinary synthesis of research and theory from fields such as developmental psychology, anthropology, philosophy, and sociology, which offer significant contributions to our sensemaking. These include models such as Integral Theory from Ken Wilber, Critical Realism from Roy Bashkar, Spiral Dynamics from Don Beck and Christopher Cowen, and the Meta-Modernism of Hanzi Freinacht. 

These approaches are based on each side of every conflict containing some critical piece of the truth relevant to us all, and invite us to view their various positions through a nuanced developmental lens, grounded in critical research on both individual and collective growth.

That lens isn’t about creating more hierarchies of dominance, but rather being able to see and honour the particular states and stages of development that an individual or collective is operating from; the healthy and unhealthy expressions of those states and stages; and how to support their healthiest and most life-giving expressions through the spiral of development that we’re all participating in.

Today, for instance, the major conflicts on the planet are happening between nations and groups operating through what we could call the traditional ethnocentric, modernist worldcentric, and postmodern pluralistic stages of development.

Each of these stages has emerged over time through the arc of human history.

Integral theorists describe the traditional stage as one shaped by clear rules and roles, moral absolutism, and strong ideas of reward and punishment. This emerged around 10,000 years ago with the agrarian revolution.

The modernist worldcentric stage, which values rationality, logic, empiricism, evidence, individual achievement, and worldcentric opportunity emerged collectively around the time of the Western Enlightenment.

And the postmodern pluralistic stage, which is characterised by a critical awareness of the contexts that all perspectives arise within (e.g. historical, racial, cultural, and privilege-based) brings in strong values around diversity and inclusion, emerged around the 60’s.

Each stage of development tends to share a particular worldview and set of values, and the major conflicts on the planet are often deeply informed by clashes between them, without those involved having enough of an integrative lens to be able to see this. When we add collective trauma and the legacies of colonialism, racism, and empire into the mix, things get extremely intense, as we can see in the world around us.

And politically, each political stance tends to be an expression of a deeper worldview — one rooted in distinct stages of psychological and cultural development. These are not just opinions, but expressions of where individuals and societies are in their growth.

For example, many conflicts inflaming in the USA currently are unfolding between those on the political right who tend to have worldviews and value structures that span the traditional ethnocentric (‘traditional America’) and modernist worldcentric (tech innovators and business leaders) stages, and those on the left that span from modernist worldcentric (tech innovators and business leaders) to postmodern pluralistic (social justice and LGBTQ rights activists) stages.

Those on the right operating from traditional ethnocentric and modernist worldcentric stages have not yet integrated the systemic awareness that comes with the postmodern pluralistic stage. As such, they don’t see the world the same way people on the progressive left do, and don’t understand or like the psychological pressure they experience to see so much of the world through the lens of race, collective injustice, diversity, and implicit white guilt. As a result, one thing we see happening right now is mass deportations, a massive pushback against DEI programs, and the policies introduced during the Trump administration’s restriction of immigration from several nations, alongside its welcoming of white South African farmers citing discrimination under majority rule.

Or in the Middle East, where we see continual clashes between those holding aggressive ethnocentric worldviews and value structures (e.g. many Israelis, Palestinians, and Iranians) that are fuelled historically by collective trauma related to the persecution the Jewish people have experienced through history on one side, and the impact on Arab nations of Western colonialism, driven by the modernist worldcentric stage (e.g. British and USA colonialism and regime change operations). These issues have also become a battleground of public debate, as many with postmodern pluralistic worldviews have stepped in to call out systemic imbalances in power, racism, and oppression.

We also see similar tensions playing out in India, where modernist economic ambitions coexist with a resurgent traditionalism; or in China, where authoritarian governance integrates elements of modernist planning but resists postmodern pluralism.

When seen through an integral developmental lens, we can start to tease apart the intricacies of each of these conflicts with much more nuance than they often receive in mainstream analysis.

And we do so on the recognition that each has crucial contributions to make to the overall health of society, nationally and globally, and they all have certain significant shadows too.

One limitation they all share is that each is certain their worldview and value structure is the ‘right’ one, whereas developmentally we know that it is only with the emergence of integral or ‘second-tier’ stages of consciousness that a synthesis begins to form — one that honours each prior worldview as necessary and simultaneously partial, and seeks to coordinate them into a greater whole.

With the fires of polarisation burning so intensely on the planet today, integral political leaders are needed as never before — not to take sides, but to steward the emergence of a new kind of planetary politics: one that honours and supports the healthy expression of each stage of consciousness, while transmitting into the world the deeper states of soul, spirit, and non-dual Source.

This planetary political movement can offer humanity a fundamentally different path — one that can liberate us from the endless battles of polarisation and conflict — and guide us into a non-polarised politics of the heart. A global politics capable of facing our greatest global challenges with clarity, compassion, and a commitment to wholeness.

Cultivating such leaders — and a culture of integral planetary politics — is a central mission of Singularity.