Transcendization

My

My college background is engineering. But this site will be more about subjects like philosophy, anthropology, sociology, etc.

That is one of the reasons I am immediately encouraging others to help me fill it with new posts. (Note the menu at the top.)

My thinking has always been guided by enthusiasm for distillation, lowest common denominators, and the concept of “grand unified theory”.

These are math and physical science ideas, but I have always tried to apply them to philosophy.

In 2002, I was delighted to discover a book by Ken Wilber called A Theory of Everything. I realized that Ken Wilber’s extensive body of writing is rooted in the same grand unified way of reasoning that I wanted to follow. Wilbur’s approach to philosophy and psychology and other disciplines is called Integral Theory.

Wilbur also popularized “spiral dynamics”, a wonderful human development frame originated in the late 20th century by Clare W. Graves.

After I discovered Ken Wilber’s work, I was disappointed that he seemed to keep too much behind paid firewalls, so I stopped following him. I guess he wanted to make sure he could profit from book sales, and did not want blog and internet writing to compete with that.

I moved on.

About ten years ago, even though I have not studied philosophy, I decided that most philosophy is a tempest in a teapot, and that so much of it that makes up college courses is of limited value. This is because it developed during all the rapid changes in civilization, especially in the nineteenth century. It seems to me that what philosophers 150 years ago claimed about reality is not very useful after all the science and wars and upheavals since. This is probably a very wrong attitude. I hope to be enlightened out of it in the coming years.

However, I think philosophers overlooked the obvious, because it seemed too simple to be true. So they built complex ideas about reality in place of the obvious.

What do I mean by the obvious?

I mean the mostly overlooked, misunderstood, and thus mostly ignored philosophy called “utilitarianism”. Wikipedia says, “Utilitarianism is a family of …theories that promotes actions that maximize happiness and well-being for the majority of a population.”

Since I believe, at least right now, that this utilitarianism is “the meaning of life”, at least for social beings like humans, it is not surprising that I devised Transcendization, because I think cooperation is consistent with utilitarianism, and selfishness is not. Thus I want civilization to be replaced with transcendization, which transcends selfishness but embraces cooperation.

Dayton, Ohio, USA, 2018, at perhaps the peak of pre-collapse civilization

Utopias, such as communes in the 1960s, were attempted during civilization, and remained surrounded by or adjacent to it, although most of them tried to isolate. So they were an alternative to civilization. Civilization had many benefits that utopias competed unsuccessfully against.

Transcendization, if it can be created, will be built in place of civilization, not as an alternative to it. Since civilization will collapse in this century, now is the time to think about the aftermath. That is why I created this blog.