The horror of the Gaza genocide and the debacle of the Ukraine War have placed humanity in the most unsafe condition since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The morons who are running US foreign policy are pushing Russia to the limits and inviting possible nuclear war—which will mean the end of humankind and civilization itself while the entire world watches in horror while Israel commits genocide in Gaza, a genocide enabled and defended by the United States and its moronic leaders. These disasters raise the question, what is wrong with us? How can humanity have brought itself to this horrific condition, threatening the very future of the human project while all around us climate change is disrupting the stable Holocene era that enabled human civilization to flourish for the past 12,000 years.

Since the mid-20th century thinkers have developed an understanding of human cognitive and moral growth that can shed light on our endangered human situation. It involves a combination of what is known as “Integral Theory” integrated with similar developments known as “Spiral Dynamics.” I present my own version of these theories in the following table, which is culled from my new book called Human Dignity and World Order (2024). The general meaning of this table is the demand placed on all of us for conscious evolution. We must do everything in our power to facilitate cognitive, moral, and spiritual growth on all levels. Our only hope as a planetary species to avoid a horrible death and extinction of all civilization is to grow as rapidly as possible to levels that are not self-defeating and inherently suicidal.

Joe Biden, Anthony Blinken, and Benjamin Netanyahu all reside at the lowest level of human growth and immaturity, represented at the very bottom of the table. (I mention only them because they are currently the most destructive of all who could be named.) They identify absolutely with some arbitrary abstract category (to be Jewish, to be American). These abstract categories have little or nothing to do with the spiritual, intellectual, or moral dimensions of being a mature Jew or mature American. For the latter realities require growth, cognitive, moral, and spiritual development. However, at the lowest level the need and the possibility of such growth is not even recognized. Such a person is totally encased in the identity, confusing this abstract category with the growth-capable culture or religious reality of being a Jew or an American. Blinken mumbles hypocritical contradictions like “the Israelis may have gone too far” while at the same time supplying unconditionally the weapons they need to execute their genocide. These people are not morons because they are intrinsically stupid, they are morons because of their knee-jerk identification with categories and ideologies that determine their brutal behavior.

In the case of the endless provocations of Russia in Ukraine by the US (and its NATO lackeys) bringing us ever closer to nuclear war, the fact that Joe Biden and Anthony Blinken are morons could mean the end of humanity and civilization itself. At their very low level of egoistic-ethnocentric orientation, they cannot empathically comprehend the meaning of nuclear holocaust. To them it is just a set of facts, statistics—the US might “prevail” in such a war since we would only lose 60% of our population while the Russians would lose 90%. They are empathically incapable of imagining the horror of this post-apocalyptic world. To be a supposedly grown adult living at the egocentric-ethnocentric childishness is a form of madness. Healthy young adults move beyond this stage at a very early age and begin a process of life-long growth in wisdom and maturity.

Netanyahu and his henchmen in the Knesset are mental and moral children stuck in adult bodies. The entire movement of Zionism is focused on institutionalizing and implementing human immaturity and defeating the growth of empathy. The MAGA phenomenon of Trumpism does much the same thing. These movements egotistically and ethnocentrically embrace their own immaturity and fanatically defend their status as robot-like human beings, incapable of growth. Consider the following table depicting human cognitive, moral, and spiritual growth, with the lowest level at the bottom.

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One should not think that articulation of these levels mitigates moral responsibility at the lower levels. Even rebellious teenagers are responsible to do what is right, regardless of the fact that it may be more difficult for them. There is a dimension of freedom within us all that makes us capable of discerning our immaturity and that demands growth toward maturity.

Thinkers like Ken Wilber distinguish between “states” and “stages” in the growth process. At any level in the table a person may have momentary “states” that appear as higher levels. This is because the capacity for growth to all these levels is already within us and can be tapped at any time. Brief regression to lower levels is, also, of course, possible. Nevertheless, the moral demands within us are valid at all times. The is no excuse for genocide, risking nuclear war, or the lies of Trumpism. Occasional higher momentary states (of doing the right thing) do not equal real attainment of higher stages of maturity and empathy. The latter often require time, and real effort directed through conscious evolution.

In the USA today there are many people at the individualistic-relativistic level. When one has grown beyond the dogmatic lower level, one often feels as if there is nothing that is true or firm or certain. One withdraws from the fake identity level to become lost in a sea of relativism and indecision. This split defines one aspect of the polarization in the USA, because the evangelical Christians and the pro-Trump dogmatists see the next higher stage as a moral failure. The individualistic level is wishy-washy about abortion or traditional (chauvinistic) cultural values. They tolerate fluid gender-identities, homosexuality, and other behaviors that dogmatic ethnocentrists absolutely repudiate. This leads the lower level to repudiate the concept of growth, since they believe that so-called growth leads to such an immoral relativism. This is why they are trying to capture the universities with their dogmatism and censorship, because they rightly sense that many universities have been traditionally constructed to facilitate growth.

Indeed, real education, as any genuine educator knows, stives to elicit in students at least the third level of growth—the ability to think for oneself. Immanuel Kant in the 18th century called this “enlightenment” and posited our ability to have good government with freedom, equality, and fraternity on the attainment of this level. You cannot have effective democracy when populations are dominated by the first two levels. You get, instead, genocides, endless wars, social chaos, and the threat of nuclear holocaust. The historic 18th century period that we call the “Enlightenment” was truly a step forward in human growth by recognizing human rights, fundamental equality, and the need to premise government on these foundations.

The world centric level is populated by many scientists because a good scientific education fosters growth. From this level, many of the excellent books describing the planetary climate crisis have emerged, some of which I reviewed in my last book, The Earth Constitution Solution: Design for a Living Planet (2021). At this level the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Crisis) has coordinated thousands of scientists from around the world to raise the alarm about the facts of climate destruction and a pending future uninhabitable Earth. Since these alarms were first raised in a significant way in the 1960s, the global business community, often populated by puerile egoistic or relativistic adult-children (many of them billionaires), has worked to defeat the world-system changes necessary to create a sustainable planet, with the result that much of the business class, like the dogmatic ethnocentric class, is working in ways that destroy the future of human civilization.

If we really want a decent future for humanity and our beautiful planet, we need to have a significant portion of humanity at the highest three levels of growth. These three all understand the dynamics of cognitive, moral, and spiritual growth and therefore conscious evolution becomes natural and self-evident for them. Such levels that understand the growth-process intrinsic to human life are sometimes called “second tier” levels of growth. At the second tier, one sees all the levels as part of an integral dimension of our humanity and one understands that we cannot become ever more fully human without perpetual conscious evolution.

This is why we need the Constitution for the Federation of Earth as both an ideal and a blueprint for the way we organize our life on planet Earth. The very act of working for its ratification enables conscious evolution in people, and the actualization of the constitution itself would bring humanity to the point where our entire human project would be deeply informed by conscious evolution. This means that we would have created an empathic civilization in which people were able to feel and deeply identify with all other human beings and, indeed, with all forms of life.

If we are going to survive on this planet, stopping not only genocides, endless wars, and the threat of nuclear holocaust, but preserving what is left of our precious planetary ecosystem, then we need to ratify and implement the Earth Constitution. We need to end forever a world governed by adult infants like Joe Biden, Donald Trump, or Benjamin Netanyahu.