Marc Gafni & Zak Stein Releasing Seminal New Book: A New Politics of Outrageous Love

The following is from a blog-post by Zak Stein, co-author of the forthcoming book by the tentative title A New Politics of Outrageous Love by Marc Gafni & Zak Stein (Foreword by Ken Wilber). The blog-post is constructed exclusively from footnotes from Zak’s and Marc’s forthcoming book. The book moves significantly past the post-modern assumptions of so much of the futuruist and liberal social discourse and points towards a higher Integral Politics of Outrageous Love.

Read Zak’s introduction:

Footnotes on Post-modernism & etc…

Below are some footnotes just drafted for a book I’m working on with the support of the Center for Integral Wisdom. I wanted to share the exciting ideas unfolding in this book, and what better way to foreshadow a book, than by showing off the footnotes. You gotta figure, if the notes are this good, the main text must be awesome…. And, of course, I’ll just point out how very appropriate it is to publish a blog post on post-modernism consisting entirely of footnotes from an absent text.

Read this fantastic post on his blog>>>

In response to a comment on his blog Zak wrote the following synopsis of the book:

The argument in a nut shell is this:

Humanity is on the verge of a self-inflicted extinction. Awareness of this fact has been reverberating through culture for about 30 years (maybe as much as 60). What is to be done? Most are looking for techno-scientific and economic solutions; we argue that these are important, but that the problem is more fundamentally educational—we are in the midsts of a species-wide identify crisis, requiring a revolution of consciousness, not just of techno-economic arrangements.

On the one hand there are the techno-economic optimists who see a future in which our current techno-economic systems are salvaged, re-designed, and made increasingly scientific, efficient, and profitable; we will avert disaster by creating a hyper-scientific, human controlled Heaven on Earth.

Then there are the techno-economic pessimists who see these very attempts at continued scientific control and economic growth as the problem, sensing that the technologically wrought future they yield will give us more of what we’ve already had for nearly a century: a system that decimates communities and ecosystems, and that will eventually degrade the Earth until the biosphere is simply unable to sustain life.

Importantly, both pessimists and optimists focus on external systems, processes, resources, technologies, and economies. When they speak of crises they refer to broken or scarce things (broken ecosystems, unhealthy food, toxic air, failing schools, etc.). When they speak of innovation, they mean the creation of new and better things (healthy forests, organic food, new energy technologies, fresh air, good schools, etc). The future is in the balance for both camps, no doubt, but they both set their focus mainly on the impacts of science, with a focus on sustainability and the physical continuity of life as we know it.

The book argues we need to take a fundamentally different approach when thinking about the current global situation. We need to focus on interiors, on consciousness, on moral crises and crises of self-understanding, crises in which hope and faith are the scarce resources; with mindsets, capacities, and worldviews in need of reform and redesign. The book clarifies the need for innovations toward new and better action-orienting worldviews, conceptual frameworks, and especially, a re-invention of the human sense of self. Humans need a new sense of what it means to be human. Integral Meta-theory provides an orientation, culminating in a theory of self—Unique Self Theory—that integrates Enlightenment as defined by the great wisdom traditions, with modern ideals of autonomy, democracy, and inviolable individual dignity… this new sense of self lays the ground work for “a new politics of outrageous love.”

Read an excerpt of Zak Stein’s paper On the use of the term Integral: Human Development 1: Higher levels are not always better>>>

Read an excerpt on Justice and Justice from Zak Stein’s dissertation on Tipping the scales: social justice and educational measurement on his blog>>>

Listen to a dialogue with Zak Stein, Richard Barrett and Marc Gafni and more>>>

Read Zak Stein: Integral Meta-Theory – The What and Why>>>

Read Marc Gafni’s Essay on Evolutionary Love: One Love–Kosmic and Impersonal, Intimate and Personal>>>

Read this unedited first draft essay on Evolutionary Love by Marc Gafni from forthcoming book The Path and Practice of Outrageous Love by Marc Gafni and Kristina Kincaid>>>