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A Post-Truth World: Trump and Ken Wilber
“A Post-Truth World, Politics, Polarization, and A Vision for Transcending the Chaos” is Ken Wilber’s latest book published in July. Here is a summary.
The book is a re-release of the book “Trump and a Post-Truth World” published in 2017. A book I deliberately chose not to read, because… Trump! Obviously, many other people felt the same way because the publisher changed the title and re-released the book. To be fair there is very little Trump in this book. It is about the politics of Postmodernism - Wilber’s most comprehensive to date.
His thesis is Postmodernism has lost its way by deconstructing Modernity. It lost all ‘Truth’ degenerating into “Post-Truth”, “aperspectival madness”. Trump is part of a self-correcting reorganization of society leading to higher stages of development. Developmental consciousness is a core concept in Wilber’s structuralism he calls “Integral Theory”.
Wilber’s idea is society and morality evolve through stages of development, and many social ills such as oppression exist because higher stages of development are absent. The problem isn’t power and oppression, but rather a lack of development. In this way Postmodernism has gone astray. In focusing on power and oppression instead of development it is going crazy. Trump is a self-correcting phenomena of Postmodernity.
