Shambhala:  [Laughing]  Actually, the most common ad hominen criticism as of late is that you are a very controlling person.  You have tried to build a huge and encompassing system because psychologically you want to control everything and everybody.

KW:  Yes, I've heard that, but only from critics who have never met me, which suggests to me that these critics are simply projecting their own shadow onto me.  Because the people who know me don't say that I am competitive or controlling.

Shambhala:  What do they say that you are?

KW:  Borderline psychotic.

KW:  Fred's first criticism had to do with the four drives of any holon.  In SES, I listed these as agency (horizontal individuation) and communion (horizontal linking), and self-transcendence (vertically moving up) and self-dissolution (vertically moving down).  Fred pointed out that the first three drives were, correctly, the healthy version of those drives; but for the fourth drive, I had incorrectly given the pathological version of the descending drive.  The healthy downward drive -- the drive of the higher to embrace and enfold the lower, which I call agape or compassion, or what might be called self-immanence (the dialectical opposite of self-transcendence) -- I actually gave as thanatos, which is not the embrace of the lower by the higher but the dissolution or regression of the higher to the lower.  When it came to vertically moving upward, I had correctly given that as Eros or self-transcendence, seeking out higher and wider wholeness.  The pathological version of Eros is phobos, which is not the transcendence of the lower but the repression of the lower.  But when it came to vertically moving downward, instead of giving the healthy agape -- where the higher embraces, enfolds, and "loves" the lower, as a molecule embraces its atoms -- I inadvertantly gave the pathological thanatos, where the higher merely dissolves into the lower, dies or decomposes (e.g., the molecules dissipate into their constitutive atoms).  So the four drives should be agency and communion, and self-transcendence and self-immanence (not self-dissolution).

This is a brilliant criticism, and of the hundreds of thousands of people who went over those ideas, only Fred spotted it.  (Incidentally, I still sometimes list the fourth drive as self-dissolution, simply because that is so much easier to understand in an introductory statement.  But my actual position should now be clear, thanks to Fred...

    "Edwin Firmage, a recognized authority on constitutional and international law, who has worked for several decades on the control of nuclear weapons, has written that 'Law [exterior legal control] can help, but it leaves you hopelessly short of where we must be. Even if by law you could eliminate all nuclear weapons from the earth by fiat, you don't lobotomize a generation of physicists. You could begin the whole process of arms racing again. How do you change the souls of human beings? You have to go where law can't get you....'22 You have to go, that is, to the interior quadrants and the growth of the soul, the growth of wisdom, the growth of consciousness, an interior growth in the Left-Hand quadrants that will keep pace with the growth in Right-Hand technologies. 23 And it simply does not matter that this is an impossibly difficult task; the alternative is painfully clear.

    Whatever the solutions to these problems, the discussion must surely shift to an integral platform, because anything less than that leaves out fundamental dimensions of the crisis, which will then more likely speed out of control on its merry way to a destiny with death."