Dear Editor -

It was with great interest that I sat down to read Carter Phipps' interview with Steve McIntosh regarding 'Integral Politics'. But this interest quickly turned to a deeper sense of alarm at the blatant cultural and intellectual elitism expressed in Mr. McIntosh's words (and, to a lesser extent, in Mr. Phipps' questioning). In his attempt to stuff complex and nuanced human behavior and development into some pre-existing, artificially fabricated 'model', Mr. McIntosh forces himself to ignore mountains of evidence and whole swaths of information that show again and again how ultimately futile is the attempt to lump and separate certain aspects of humanity into deconstructed groups and categories - of which some of us belong, and others do not.

For example, in their discussion of a potential 'federal world government', Mr. McIntosh laments the fact that this quasi-utopian dream of a 'supranational' state is unlikely to form just yet because 'other' nations and sectors of the global population are lagging behind the 'modernist' and 'post modernist' development of countries like the U.S., with its models of a Constitution and upstanding 'legal structure'. As an example of one of these more backward 'tribal' and 'traditional' sub-cultures dragging the human collective back into the past, Mr. Phipps and Mr. McIntosh turn their attention to 'Radical Islam', calling it 'one of the biggest problems today.'

Let us pause for a moment to look at the evidence regarding these two supposedly different sectors of human development. In the last six years, the thrust of U.S. foreign policy, with its highlighted Constitution and 'legal structure' well in tact, has been to fabricate now well-documented lies to start an illegal, immoral war in order to remove some two-bit dictator the United States helped rise and stay in power for 25 years. With the calls for war supported by a HUGE majority of the American people, the U.S. government took massive sums of public money, poured it into the private defense and 'reconstruction' industry which happily flew over to Iraq, blew a bunch of stuff up, then with gestures of grave seriousness from the boardrooms of the Pentagon, Bechtel and Halliburton began rebuilding that which they just blew up. All the while, hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi women, children, and men have been murdered by the insane vanity of these policies as we the people of this supposed model of 'modern' democracy numbly stand by and watch.

What, exactly, is the difference between this scenario and the supposedly unique problems that 'Radical Islam' presents? Humanity is not separate. Our actions feed, inform, and link into each other. Humanity cannot be corralled into this and that category of some fancy model or theory. Any attempt to separate and distinguish will only further separate us from the deeper truth of our collective reality. We are all involved in 'Radical Islam'. We are all involved in the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Our only duty is to look into the mirror of our actions and find out not how we are separate, but how we all participate in animating the same living pulse.