The Water We Swim In: a Developmental View of Our Politics

Psychological development shapes our culture and politics

Most people think they disagree about facts. They don't: they disagree from entirely different worlds. We are not divided by what we think as much as by how we think.

This is the core insight of developmental psychology — and specifically of a framework called Integral Theory, which builds on decades of research into how human consciousness grows. The basic finding is this: we don't just accumulate knowledge as we mature. We shift, sometimes radically, in the entire structure through which we perceive reality. Different structures. Different worlds.

These structures have names. Traditional consciousness organizes life around religion, tribe, authority, and duty. Modern consciousness replaces that with reason, science, individual achievement, and market logic. And then, in reaction to the failures of modernity — its coldness, its exploitation, its indifference to the marginalized — something new emerged. Developmental theorists call it postmodern, or Green. You know it as the dominant sensibility of progressive culture: empathy over hierarchy, inclusion over merit, emotional truth over abstract reason, and an almost spiritual commitment to the idea that connection is what saves us.

None of these stages is simply right or wrong. Each one sees something real. Each one also has a shadow — a blind spot so deep it's invisible from inside the stage itself. The problem isn't being in a stage. The problem is being in a stage without knowing it. Mistaking your worldview for reality. Being the fish who doesn't know what water is.

I want to use a television series to show you exactly what this looks like — because sometimes a piece of art reveals a worldview more clearly than any argument can. The Netflix series Sense8 is one of the most perfect illustrations of Green consciousness ever committed to screen — in all its beauty, and all its blindness.

For the uninitiated: Sense8 follows eight strangers scattered across the globe — Nairobi, Seoul, Mumbai, Chicago, Berlin, Mexico City, London, Reykjavik — who discover they are psychically linked. They can feel each other's emotions, access each other's skills, step into each other's bodies during moments of crisis. Over time they become something like one distributed mind. The series was created by the Wachowskis and ran from 2015 to 2018. It is lush, sensory, emotionally generous, and genuinely moving in places. It celebrates queer identity, trans experience, fluid sexuality, chosen family, and the radical idea that underneath our apparent separateness, we belong to each other.

This is Green at its highest expression. The premise itself — eight humans becoming one — is practically a myth about what postmodern consciousness wants most: the dissolution of separateness into pure empathic union.

And then you notice what's underneath.

The villains of Sense8 form a composite portrait of everything Green fears and despises about the modern world. The organization hunting the sensates — BPO — is technocratic, hierarchical, emotionally dead, richly funded, mostly White, and ruthlessly rational. It represents surveillance capitalism, militarized science, and patriarchal control. This is no accident. Anti-capitalism runs through the entire Wachowski filmography like a spine — from The Matrix's humans-as-batteries to Sense8's explicit equation of ownership with moral corruption. One character states it plainly: art is "enriched when shared and impoverished by ownership and commodification." In the world of Sense8, the market doesn't just exploit people. It is the mechanism of dehumanization itself. To be capitalist is to be on the wrong side of history, of empathy, of life. 

The heroes, meanwhile, embody every value Green holds sacred. They are queer, global, diverse, anti-nationalist, emotionally open, sexually liberated, and bound by love rather than law. 

The show's moral architecture is a perfect circle: power is evil, connection is salvation, and the system is the enemy.

This isn't storytelling. It's theology.

And like all theology, it starts to reveal itself in the details — especially the unguarded moments.

At one point, the series makes a point of criticizing collective blame. You can't ascribe violence to a race, a religion, a culture. That kind of thinking is the enemy. Fair enough — this is quintessential Green consciousness: genuinely trying to resist tribalism, even at the expense of nuanced pattern recognition. And then, in nearly the same breath, a character announces that “violence has a gender”. Men are the problem. Not some men. Men.

This is not a minor inconsistency. It is the signature failure mode of Green consciousness: the inability to perceive its own essentialism. The same logic it condemns when applied to race or religion — collective attribution, group blame, identity as destiny — it applies freely to the dominant gender. The tribal reflex didn't disappear. It just found a sanctioned target.

A more integrative way of thinking would ask different questions. Which men? Under what conditions? And in what ways do we who criticise men actually embody the very qualities we condemn?

Unhealthy expressions of Green can't go there, because their supreme value remains fighting power structures by bashing those at the top. If complexity and nuance threaten one’s identity, they are rejected. And so the analysis stays flat.

Nowhere is this flatter — and more revealing — than in how the show handles its two Jewish characters.

Dr. Metzger — coded as recognizably Jewish through his name, casting, and familiar Hollywood semiotics — is a doctor working with BPO. He is complicit in the machinery of control, his intelligence in service of an evil institution. He is the figure North American progressive culture finds most legible and most damning: the Jew who chose power over conscience, intellect severed from humanity, capability weaponized for oppression.

Then there's the Berlin fence — a fixer, a man who operates in the shadows of the law. His identity is defined almost entirely by the Holocaust — by the inheritance of catastrophe, the psychology of survival at any cost, the sense that history has placed him permanently outside ordinary moral frameworks. He is cunning, loyal to his own, shaped by trauma into someone for whom the rules were never really meant anyway.

Neither portrait is antisemitic in ways that the writers would recognize. But taken together, the two Jewish figures reveal the essentialized role of the Jew within Green cosmology itself as both the victim who lost its sacred status and as a contaminated beneficiary of modernity. They are less people than symbols — positioned at the intersection of trauma, power, guilt, and historical memory. The Jew complicit in the system. The Jew defined by what the system once did to him but learns the wrong lessons from it. Both function as figures in a moral drama about modernity itself and receptacles for Green’s collective shadow projections. Neither is simply allowed to be fully human.

This is what it looks like when a worldview uses a group to prove a point rather than actually relating to their experience.

What would a Teal version of Sense8 look like? Teal — or Yellow, in some developmental frameworks — is the stage that comes after Green and can see the previous ones. It still values what Green values: empathy, connection, care for the marginalized, suspicion of unchecked power. But it can also hold what Green can't quite tolerate. That power isn't inherently corrupt, only unaccountable power. That hierarchy can be either pathological or functional, it can be about domination or growth. That capitalism generates both exploitation and genuine human flourishing, often simultaneously. That you cannot dissolve tribal identity through empathy alone.

A Teal Sense8 would still want the sensates to find each other. But it would let the antagonists be complicated. It would show the full humanity of the people at BPO. It would let the heroes carry contradictions that aren't resolved by love. It would understand that love without structure collapses into chaos, just as structure without love collapses into domination.

Sense8 never gets there. It is too in love with its own vision to question it.

But the show is not the real subject of this essay. It's just one of the clearest mirrors I've found.

The real subject is the culture that made it and celebrated it. The academics, the journalists, the cultural institutions. The entire ecosystem that has adopted Green consciousness not as one valuable stage in human development, but as the final word on reality.

And here is what happens when a worldview mistakes itself for the destination: it stops growing. Worse, it starts regressing. The movement built on rejecting tribal thinking has become one of the most aggressively tribal forces in contemporary life — sorting people by identity category, assigning moral status accordingly, and calling this justice. Preaching empathy but producing excommunication.

We are not going to think our way out of this with better arguments. People don't shift between developmental stages through debate. They shift through experience, through genuine encounter with complexity they cannot explain away, through contact with people whose humanity doesn't fit the categories. That's slow work. But it starts with something simple.

Seeing the water.

#Memra