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Moving up a nice set of thoughts from my comments. Dave said:

Dave…feel free to contribute observations like that anytime. I’ve been really taken by the notion of truth, and how we generate it and how we agree upon it. Springing out of Ken Wilber’s map of the world, the ideas Dave is throwing out live within the subjective and inter-subjective realms. In other words we’re talking about truths that arise from our lives as individuals, driven by intention, and our lives as subject negotiating a set of relationships with others.

In the realm of the individual, our truth emerges as integrity, sincerity and trustworthiness. This is the subjective truth that underlies our individual acts of intention that make up the basis of “living in truth” I think. These are the things that cause us to be “good.” In the realm of the collective, this truth, in intersubjective space emerges as cultural fit, mutual understanding and rightness…a shared sense of justice, a story codified in things like constitutions, laws and cultural norms.

These are both stories; stories we tell ourselves about what is true and what is good. Notably this kind of truth completely excludes the notion of “objective truth,” in other words, that which can be measured without participating in its execution. How do I know I have four apples? I count them.

This is notable because the subjective truths, the good and the true (in Wilber’s terms) are truths that only exist if you participate in them. You must generate that intentional truth that refuses to participate in a totalitarian regime. You must get into conversation with people to understand how things fit culturally, what the law should say and so on. The very nature of these truths is active, participatory and dynamic.

To simply sit back and accept the measured approach (pun intended) is to give up responsibility for the truth, and to become complicit in the system that generates that truth from outside of its subjects. In other words, a totalitarian regime, to whatever degree, rests its truth and power in the objective and in objective sides of things: it determins the social order and it regulate behaviour. It has no interest in the lively world of personal intention and shared and living culture. Giving in to this is suicide for the soul. The way out, as Jefferson, Gandhi, Havel and others have pointed out, is to activate the subjective and intersubjective truths.

In other words, freedom and power works on a use it or lose it basis. One cannot have freedom simply by buying the message that one has it. The system that tells you you have power is exactly the system that has disempowered you. One must do more than simply accept the fact that one lives in a democracy. One must activate the truth.

And activating it, in whatever social structure, be it society, community or organization, animates power with the truth of subjects, and leads to a world that is open to the fresh and liberating breath of living in truth. It brings creativity and individuality to collective activity and illuminates dark monochrome structures and ideas, which, in totalitarian regimes, blanket the spirit and cloud out the light.

Too airy? Perhaps, but I am more and more convinced of that fact that colonization is actually the gobbling up of subjective and intersubjective reality by those that wield the tools of measurement, observation and metrics. The deep effect of losing the richness and life of the subjective world, is an oppression that runs so far down that people may not even be aware of its effects. The fact that liberation has come to mean control over the ways in which societies are governed and measured proves this to a point. If we simply take over the objective world, without activating the subjective, we are only prolonging the struggle, instead of winning the war.