Think Integral

Kevin Rollins talks to Michael Ostrolenk about the Integral concept. Ostrolenk is the president of Global Integral Research Corporation and sits on the board of the Integral Foundation.

What is Integral Thinking?
In any system in which people participate, whether it is education, health care, business or government, the response to any particular problem or challenge is usually piecemeal and limited. People usually focus their attention, understanding and interventions in a very narrowly focused domain of human experience. Some focus on the psychological dimensions of the challenge, while others focus on behavoiral factors or cultural issues or social systems.
In this case, social is not just human social systems i.e. human institutions such as the family, church, business structures, or governmental systems. Social means all ecological systems. Since man is part of the natural world, than man’s social systems are ecological systems.
What we do as integral thinkers, when we work with clients and start thinking about the challenges facing them is to be comprehensive in our approach and look toward all 4 domains of human experience. The four domains are the psychological, cultural, behavoiral and the social. By recognizing all four domains and integrating them into a cohesive system, we create a much broader and inclusive perspective which is more functional when you’re thinking about problem solving and solution generation. That is what is referred to as integral thinking. It is a meta-philosophy that takes into account all the domains of human experience and ways of knowing and integrates them into a formal system. This integral system also recognizing the knowledge problem -- that you never can know it all. You have to make sure that any intervention you use is flexible and adaptable.
So you’ve got the x variable at the end there.
If you’re teaching an individual, an organization, a government -- whomever your client happens to be -- that whatever system or structure they set up needs to be adaptable to ever-changing environmental situations. In this case, the ever-changing situations can and do include changes in culture, human social organization, technology, natural (non-human) ecologies, individual psychology and organic structures.
That’s the Integral approach?
That’s the Integral approach. Basically.
A part of the Integral Philosophy that might be of interest to readers of your paper is that in each of the four domains of human experience development occurs. Psychologically speaking, you can track development. If you hang around children, you can see that their thinking levels are less complex -- from a moral level they are less complex. Their emotional capacities are less developed than most adults. You can even see distinct differences in adults in various lines of development. Some adults are more compassionate than others; some are more complex in their thinking; some are more emotionally developed, etc. So, it is easy to see that development can and does occur psychologically in human being. It occurs in multiple different lines from simple to more complex expressions. The basic stages for purposes of this discussion are from pre-personal, to personal to post-personal or another way to characterize them is that development moves from pre-conventional to conventional to post-conventional. An example is moral development. It goes from ego-centric to socio-centric to world-centric. Babies do not have a self-sense and therefore cannot act morally in the world. They are pre-personal in their moral development because they do not have a personal self-sense. They act on immediate gratification of their physiological needs. Moral development really begins with young children who have the appropriate socio-cultural and organic brain structures that will allow them to develop an egoic-centered moral sense. However, that moral sense is very limited. At first to their own immediate needs but with the ability to articulate those needs through language. Those needs will also start to include basic emotional needs not just physiological ones. They are the ultimate libertines. What is right is what is right for them now. Their level of development is personal at that point. They are ego-centered and can only really think (very simple) about themselves. A little later in development, the child can begin to think about others in their social group. What is right action here at this wave of development are the conventional standards of conduct for the group. This is referred to as socio-centric morality. It is called socio-centric because their moral stance is limited to their immediate social group i.e. family and peer group. In adults, this level of development could be seen in the phrase “for God, Queen and Country.” This level of development in adults is more inclusive than just one’s peers and family but still limited to one’s social group in this case a national group. A later possible wave of development is what is called world-centric morality. This wave allows the individual to recognize people outside of their own particular social group, to think about them as individuals and begin to apply a more universal moral code of conduct. It is not about what is right for me now, or for my group but how should one act toward all human beings. This moral stage is not limited to race, creed, country, ethnic background, etc but includes all human beings and therefore this moral stage is universal in its application. This individual level of moral development can first be seen culturally in the world during the Western Enlightenment, where the classical liberal values where seen to be human values not specific group values. The way this works is that each new wave of development transcends but includes it previous wave or stage of development. Each new structure takes time to develop fully. Development can be and often is quite messy. This is obvious when one realizes that each domain interacts with, informs, and effects the others. So, psychological development is effected by and effects socio-cultural and organic brain development and vice-versa.
You can track development in cultures; you can track development in ecological (non-human) systems, human social systems, and techno-economic systems. An example of techno-economic development is from horticulture to agriculture, to industrial, to post-industrial. Some countries in the world are still industrial, some are post-industrial, and some are agrarian. Each one is supported by a particular wave of cultural and individual development.
The ability to think, very abstractly, and recognize spontaneous orders -- like Hayek’s work -- is actually a very high level of complex thinking. The average agrarian was not able to think systemically like the average post-industrial/information age person.
It’s not common sense?
It’s not common sense. It actually has very little to do with one’s senses. For instance, let’s look at math. Basic math like addition and subtraction are very much related to the sensory field i.e. you see something in the concrete world and you add to it or subtract from it. As one’s thinking becomes more complex, still using math as an example, the world one plays in is not the concrete world but the mental world. You do not see algebraic equations with one’s physical eyes in the empirical world but with the eye of mind in the mental world. Moving from the concrete to the abstract to even greater degrees of abstraction is about the development of one’s cognitive capacities.
Individual cognitive capacities need to be highly developed to be able to recognize and understand a libertarian political and economic system. The cultural system actually has to be quite complex in order to support the appropriate average level of cognitive, moral and emotional development that are necessary to create and support a libertarian system.
And you have to have social institutions which are objective manifestations of these cultural systems that are necessary to support a libertarian society. So from an integral point of view, it is more complex and difficult to develop a libertarian society than just some notion that if we remove the government everything will be alright.
Absolutely!
That’s what we do. We use integral thinking in all these different areas and say, “here we are today and the average level of development is this, the average cultural level is this, the social systems are arranged this way.” We have a vision of how things could be different -- in this case, political and economically speaking pretty libertarian, but I don’t want to be limited by that word because it has different meanings for different people. I want to make that distinction because at different waves of development, the word libertarian will have different meanings just as the words freedom, justice, responsibility etc, will have different meanings. An authoritarian, objectivist, post-modern or an integrally informed person will experience and define freedom differently. The real difference between an integrally informed person and the others is that the integrally informed person will see the partial truths in the others worldviews, where the others will only see their own visions/versions of reality as truthful.
One skill that is very important for someone to have developed to function at an integral level of consciousness is to have a highly developed ability for self-self-reflection. Yes, I said self twice. One needs to be able to see into oneself and be able to cascade up and down one’s own levels of being and thinking. This is a very complex notion that will need to be unpacked later.
What is the change to get there...?
Not just what is the change, but what are the transition costs. And what interventions can we make that actually reduce the transition costs. And then support the movement there. So it’s not that all of a sudden you are there because that’s never going to happen. All human beings start at stage 1 of development in all lines of development. Even if we had a ‘perfect’ libertarian world, we would still have an awful lot of people who are not developed enough in various lines to support that world. And, without the cultural and social support systems—it would collapse.
When you use the word Integral where does that come from? Like in the mathematical sense?
No.... The word was originally used by Gebser in the first part of the last century. It has been popularized by an associate of mine, Ken Wilber. He is an associate in my company Global Integral Research and I am an associate of his think tank, The Integral Institute. He is the one who has spent the last 30 plus years thinking and writing on Integral Philosophy. I think he has written over 18 books and I believe he is the most translated living author. Those theorists, practitioners and researchers connected to the Integral Institute are continually refining the ‘Integral Philosophy’ and applying it to specific fields including: conflict resolution, business, education, healthcare, ecology, art, politics and psychology.

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