Ken Wilber argues that a United Earth Federation requires world-centric thinking, but 60 to 70 percent of humanity remains stuck at ethnocentric stages. He says the answer is integration, not elimination: keep Christmas, Holi, and Ramadan while expanding to planetary identity.
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How far ahead do you think are we from? A world federation of nations, not talking about the United Nations, I'm talking about an Earth flag. I'm talking about human beings identifying themselves as citizens of spaceship Earth first and then citizen of their country. So that the flag that they're wearing on their backpack or the flag on the rockets going to the moon is an Earth flag. How far are we?
Well, right now the numbers are a little bit disturbing because what we find, and depending on which model you use, you get slightly different percentages. But it looks like around 60 to 70% of the world's population are ethnocentric or lower. So our problem right now is the particularly best and brightest do tend to move into world centric. So they're arguing for, oh, we have to include everything. Oh, we don't want boundaries. But you have to be very careful because then when you get into cosmocentric, then you also see the ways in which all of these earlier stages have to be carefully fit with one another. So we do need a stage of ethnocentric and then we need world centric institutions and in cosmo centric.
And that brings us to a very interesting concept over here, which is that when you move to integral, as the name suggests, you're integrating all the individual stages. For example, when you're going from egocentric to ethnocentric, you're not saying, oh, I'm just going to give myself to my religion or my tribe, I don't matter. You still matter. But you are also supporting your country or your religion or your tribe. When you move to world centric, you, you're not saying, let's destroy all human culture. And that's one global culture. You might still appreciate festivals from unique religions and cultures. You might celebrate Christmas and Holi and fast during Ramadan. But at the same time, you are world centric, but you are also appreciating the beauties of individual culture. So that is unfolding.
Yes. And it does look like we need all of these different elements, from egocentric to ethnocentric to world centric. There has to be some place that those are still located, not as rigid, you know. So if you're just at ethnocentric, then you want walls everywhere.
Yes.
And that's what we had in all of our ethnocentric periods. People were building, I mean, the Great Wall of China, people were building walls everywhere. We really do have to grow through these. And one of the important stages everybody goes through it is the ethnocentric stage. And so that's one of the real problems, is that we have to realize that and take that into account in our social policy.
