Beyond the Master Signifier

Toward a Developmental Account of Psychological Flexibility & Virtue Ethics

Feb 08, 2026

Abstract

Language colonizes us before we can speak. It names us before we can name ourselves. The suffering this generates — through diagnostic labels that become identities, political ideologies that become prisons, and moral certainties that foreclose growth — is not a bug in the system but its fundamental operation.

Jacques Lacan and Steven Hayes, working from opposite sides of the same mountain, both identified this mechanism. Slavoj Žižek built a generation of critical theory on the diagnosis — but his tradition offers no pathway from critique to construction. He functions, ironically, as the Master Signifier of the very tradition that claims to diagnose Master Signifiers.

This essay proposes a way through: from structural critique to integral political praxis, from the therapy room to the public sphere, from the Left’s allergy to religion to the reclamation of the great conveyor belt of human development. It bridges Jonathan Haidt’s moral psychology with Jürgen Habermas’s communicative theory through the ACT Hexaflex — and finds in the late Michael Brooks a case study of what that praxis looks like when someone actually lives it. Brooks built a counterpublic that operated across all six Moral Foundations through structures that welcomed correction rather than forbade it. This essay argues that what he practiced can be mobilized — not as doctrine, but as shared practice.

Tags: #ACT #IntegralTheory #MoralPsychology #PoliticalPhilosophy #Habermas #Haidt #Wilber #Hayes #Lacan #Zizek #PostmodernConservatism #Religion #Recovery #RecoveryPathways #IACT #EnactiveFallibilism #Prosocial #MichaelBrooks

“The subject is nothing other than what slides in a chain of signifiers.” — Jacques Lacan

“The mind makes a wonderful servant but a terrible master.” — Steven C. Hayes

“Each successive stage transcends and includes its predecessor.” — Ken Wilber

I. The Naming Problem

Before you could say your own name, the world said it for you.

This is not a metaphor. It is a description of what language does to biological organisms. The infant enters a world already saturated with verbal categories — boy, girl, healthy, sick, wanted, unwanted — that constitute the subject before any act of self-constitution is possible. By the time the child can say “I,” that “I” has already been shaped by a symbolic system it did not choose, does not control, and cannot fully escape. The philosopher is always already philosophized. The speaker is always already spoken.

In my previous essay, “The Language Parasite and the Symbolic Order,” I traced how two radically different intellectual traditions — Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis and Steven Hayes’s Relational Frame Theory — converge on this insight, and I proposed that their convergence opens a path toward what I called a post-metaphysical virtue ethics. For readers encountering this argument for the first time, the core claim is this: Lacan describes a Symbolic Order — the totalizing structure of language, law, and social convention — that constitutes the subject by inserting it into a chain of signifiers. You become a speaking, desiring, socially legible being only by submitting to a system of meaning that precedes you and will outlast you. Hayes’s Relational Frame Theory, developed within a completely different scientific tradition, arrives at a functionally identical conclusion: language is a “parasitic” process that, once acquired, colonizes all other forms of behavioral regulation. The word “failure” does not merely describe an event — it transforms the organism’s relationship to the event, generating derived relations that propagate suffering through verbal networks the organism never consciously constructed.

Both traditions identify the same structural mechanism: a system of arbitrary symbolic relations that colonizes the biological organism, constitutes its identity, generates suffering through the very processes that make meaning possible, and operates with a logic that cannot be fully mastered by the subject it produces. Lacan and Hayes, despite their radically different vocabularies, institutional homes, and epistemological commitments, are describing the same phenomenon from opposite sides of the same mountain.

That essay proposed Acceptance and Commitment Therapy as a practical bridge between these traditions — one that could move from diagnosis to praxis. This essay builds on that foundation. The bridge is wider than I initially described, and it connects more territory than clinical practice alone. What follows extends the argument into moral psychology, political philosophy, and the question of religion — because the structural problem that the Language Parasite names does not stop at the therapy room door.

II. Two Responses to the Parasite

For the Lacanian-Marxist tradition — and here I am thinking primarily of Slavoj Žižek, whose work has defined the horizon of this discourse for a generation — the Symbolic Order functions as a structure of domination. The Master Signifier quilts the subject’s identity into a fixed position. “You are a worker.” “You are mentally ill.” “You are your diagnosis.” These are not neutral descriptions; they are acts of power that constitute the subject by naming it from above. The Lacanian-Marxist response is traversal: cross the fundamental fantasy, confront the Real that the Symbolic cannot capture, refuse the Master Signifier’s authority. This is revolutionary in the deepest sense — it aims to break the hold of the naming structure itself.

For Hayes and ACT, the Language Parasite operates through fusion — the process by which verbal content becomes functionally equivalent to the events it describes. The word “failure” becomes the experience of failing. The diagnostic label becomes an identity one inhabits rather than a verbal construction one relates to. The ACT response is defusion: the capacity to notice verbal processes as verbal processes, to hold language lightly, to create distance between the observing self and the content of thought.

Both responses are partially correct. And both are partially dangerous.

Žižek’s traversal, taken alone, offers no pathway from insight to practice. You either break through or you don’t. There is no gradual cultivation of increasing flexibility. The revolutionary moment is binary — before and after. This makes for powerful theory and terrible therapy. It also leaves the subject with no framework for what comes after the traversal. If you successfully refuse the Master Signifier, what do you do next? Žižek’s own career suggests the answer: you produce more brilliant critique, endlessly, without ever arriving at the constructive moment that the critique demands. The diagnosis is perpetual. The prescription never comes.

And this is not merely Žižek’s personal limitation. It has become the structural limitation of the communities that have formed around his work. Thinkers like Daniel Tutt and Cadell Last — whose engagement with the Lacanian-Marxist tradition is serious and whose communities are intellectually vibrant — nevertheless cannot seem to get beyond Žižek. He functions, ironically, as the Master Signifier of the very tradition that claims to diagnose Master Signifiers. His authority is not earned through the kind of fallibilistic correction his own theoretical framework demands — it is conferred through the same dynamics of intellectual fusion that operate in any community organized around an unfalsifiable authority figure. The Lacanian-Marxist Left, in other words, suffers from the same structural problem it diagnoses in everyone else.

The ACT response, taken alone, can become apolitical. Defusion as a clinical technique risks treating the Language Parasite as a purely individual problem — a matter of cognitive skill — while leaving the social structures that impose Master Signifiers entirely unexamined. You can defuse from any given label, but if the institution still requires you to wear it, the Symbolic Order remains intact. Psychological flexibility without structural critique is accommodation dressed as liberation.

What is needed is a framework that integrates both moves — the structural critique and the practical tools — without collapsing into either revolutionary fantasy or therapeutic quietism.

III. The Hierarchy Problem

Ken Wilber makes a distinction that neither Lacan nor Hayes adequately addresses: the difference between hierarchies that liberate and hierarchies that dominate.

A holarchy is the natural structure of complex systems. Each level transcends and includes the prior. Atoms are included in molecules, which are included in cells, which are included in organisms. No level is skipped. No level is eliminated. Each new level brings greater complexity, greater flexibility, greater capacity to include what was previously excluded. Crucially, a holarchy welcomes correction — it is structurally open to revision, because each level recognizes it may be transcended.

A Dominator Hierarchy is the imposition of power from above. It does not transcend and include — it suppresses and exploits. The landlord over the tenant. The institution over the individual. The Master Signifier over the subject. And its epistemological signature is unfalsifiability: it does not welcome correction. It forbids it.

The Lacanian-Marxist tradition — and this is its great strength and its great limitation — treats all hierarchy as dominator hierarchy. The Name-of-the-Father is always a structure of domination. The Symbolic Order is always the Law imposed from outside. From this perspective, any talk of structure, stages, or levels is immediately suspicious — it sounds like the Master’s discourse in humanistic clothing.

But this collapses a distinction that matters enormously in practice. If you cannot tell the difference between a structure that supports growth and a structure that enforces control, you will either reject all structure (and have no tools for building alternatives) or accept all structure (and submit to domination). This is what Wilber calls the Pre/Trans Fallacy — the confusion of pre-structural and trans-structural, pre-conventional and post-conventional. And it is not merely a theoretical error. It is the error that has left the Left without the capacity to build the institutions its own critique demands.

IV. The Moral Foundations of the Structural Confusion

This is not merely a theoretical problem. It is an epistemological one — a problem of how we know, how we sort, how we distinguish liberation from domination in practice — and Jon Haidt’s moral psychology gives it a precise shape.

Haidt identifies six Moral Foundations that structure human moral intuition: Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, Sanctity/Degradation, and Liberty/Oppression. His central empirical finding is that political liberals operate primarily from Care and Fairness, while conservatives engage all six foundations. The Left, in other words, has a narrower moral palate — and this narrowness has consequences that extend far beyond electoral politics.

Consider the Authority/Subversion foundation. This is precisely where the structural confusion lives at the level of embodied moral intuition. The Left rejects authority wholesale because it cannot distinguish authority that supports (the teacher, the mentor, the scaffold) from authority that controls (the boss, the warden, the Master Signifier). The Right sacralizes authority wholesale because it cannot make the same distinction in reverse. Neither side possesses the tools to sort liberating structures from dominating ones — and those tools are exactly what needs to be built.

The same applies to Loyalty and Sanctity. The Left is suspicious of group loyalty because loyalty has historically been weaponized by nationalist, fascist, and fundamentalist movements. But any serious collective project requires loyalty: shared identity, mutual commitment, the willingness to sacrifice individual preference for collective flourishing. The question is not whether loyalty is good or bad, but whether it operates within structures that welcome correction or structures that forbid it. Similarly, the Left dismisses sanctity as superstition or repression. But the recognition that some projects carry ultimate significance — that the struggle for justice, for genuine human flourishing, is not merely a policy preference but a matter of profound moral weight — is itself an engagement with sanctity.

By rejecting Authority, Loyalty, and Sanctity as Moral Foundations, the Left rejects the very moral infrastructure it needs to build alternatives to the structures it critiques. And then it wonders why its communities lack depth, cohesion, and meaning. This goes deeper than what Robert Bellah called “lifestyle enclaves.” The Left is ceding religion itself to the Right — surrendering the one institution that has historically operated across all six Moral Foundations simultaneously, the institution that Wilber rightly identifies as the great conveyor belt of human development and transformation. Every major religious tradition, at its best, has engaged Authority (earned spiritual mentorship), Loyalty (sangha, ummah, ecclesia), Sanctity (the sacred as a lived reality), Care (compassion as practice), Fairness (justice as divine mandate), and Liberty (liberation as the ultimate aim). By treating all religion as pre-rational superstition — confusing mythic literalism with contemplative depth — the Left commits the Pre/Trans Fallacy at civilizational scale and abandons the very conveyor belt it needs.

Haidt’s framework, I want to suggest, also offers a more refined empirical account of what Wilber calls “types” in his integral model. Types — moral-intuitive orientations, personality structures, foundational ways of engaging the world — are not static. They grow and evolve through developmental stages. Someone operating primarily from the Authority/Loyalty foundations is not at a lower stage than someone operating from Care/Fairness — they are a different type moving through the same developmental sequence. The progressive who has developed a post-conventional relationship to Care is operating at a different stage than the progressive who fuses with Care as an identity — but both are operating from the same foundational type. This means that the work of development is not to replace one set of Moral Foundations with another, but to develop an increasingly flexible relationship to all six — holding each as a genuine moral intuition while being captured by none.

V. The Elephant, the Rider, and the Language Parasite

Haidt’s work does more than map the moral landscape. It delivers a direct challenge to the foundational assumptions of communicative rationality — a challenge that is epistemological before it is empirical.

Haidt’s “elephant and rider” metaphor — where moral intuitions are pre-verbal, embodied responses and the conscious verbal mind constructs post-hoc rationalizations — maps directly onto the Language Parasite. The rider is the parasite. Moral intuitions (the elephant) are pre-reflective, somatic, fast. The verbal mind narrates them after the fact, generating reasons that feel like causes but function as justifications. This is fusion in ACT terms: the narrative about why you believe what you believe is the Language Parasite generating explanations for the elephant’s movements. People do not reason their way to moral conclusions; they feel their way and then construct verbal accounts that feel like reasoning.

This presents a serious problem for Jürgen Habermas.

Habermas’s entire project — from Communication and the Evolution of Society through The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere to The Theory of Communicative Action — assumes that communicative rationality can produce normative consensus. If we create the right conditions for discourse — the ideal speech situation, free from coercion, open to all perspectives — rational agents can reach understanding across difference. This is the foundation of deliberative democracy, the structural transformation of the public sphere, the reconstruction of historical materialism through normative structures as the “pacemaker of social evolution.”

Haidt’s findings appear to demolish this assumption. If moral reasoning is post-hoc rationalization — if the elephant moves first and the rider merely narrates — then the ideal speech situation is an illusion. Participants in discourse are not exchanging reasons; they are exchanging rationalizations generated by incommensurable embodied moral intuitions. People with different Moral Foundations are not failing to communicate. They are operating from fundamentally different elephants, and no amount of rational discourse can bridge that gap on its own.

This looks like a fatal blow to the Habermasian project. But it is not — if you know where to look for the bridge.

VI. The Six Capacities: ACT’s Hexaflex as Psychological Infrastructure

Before building that bridge, we need to understand the tools.

Steven Hayes developed Acceptance and Commitment Therapy over several decades within contextual behavioral science — a tradition rooted in pragmatic philosophy and behavioral psychology that shares more with Habermas’s pragmatic orientation than either tradition typically recognizes. Where Lacan offers a theory of the subject’s capture by language, Hayes offers something the Lacanian tradition does not: a systematic, empirically validated set of practices for cultivating a different relationship to that capture.

The core of ACT is the Hexaflex — six interconnected psychological processes that together constitute what Hayes calls psychological flexibility: the ability to contact the present moment fully, as a conscious human being, and to change or persist in behavior in the service of chosen values. These are not abstract virtues or theoretical ideals. They are cultivable capacities — practices that can be trained, refined, and extended from individual psychology to collective life. Understanding each is essential before we can see how they address the Haidt-Habermas problem.

Defusion is the capacity to observe verbal processes without being captured by them. When you think “I am a failure,” defusion is the ability to notice that thought as a thought — a verbal event occurring in awareness — rather than as a description of reality that demands response. This is not positive thinking or cognitive restructuring. It is not replacing “I am a failure” with “I am a success.” It is recognizing that the sentence “I am a failure” is a string of words produced by the Language Parasite, and that you — the awareness in which the words appear — are not identical to the content they describe. In relation to moral intuitions, defusion is the capacity to notice your elephant’s movement as an embodied response rather than mistaking the rider’s post-hoc narrative for truth.

Acceptance is the willingness to have what is already present — including difficult emotions, uncomfortable sensations, and unwanted thoughts — without attempting to change, avoid, or control them. This is not resignation or passivity. It is the active embrace of the full range of human experience, including the parts that the Language Parasite labels as intolerable. In moral terms, acceptance is the capacity to include all six of Haidt’s Moral Foundations within awareness — not just the ones your political tribe endorses — without being overwhelmed by or fused with any of them.

Self-as-Context is the perspective from which all experience is observed. ACT distinguishes between the self-as-content (”I am a progressive,” “I am my diagnosis,” “I am an addict”) and the self-as-context — the observing awareness that remains constant while the content of experience changes. This is not a metaphysical soul. It is the functional experience of perspective-taking: the capacity to hold identity lightly, recognizing that “I am a progressive” or “I am a conservative” are verbal constructions that can be inhabited flexibly rather than fixed essences that must be defended. This is the psychological precondition for genuine discourse across moral divides.

Present Moment contact is the capacity to attend to what is actually happening — here, now, in this body, in this situation — rather than to the verbal overlay that the Language Parasite imposes on experience. This is where moral intuition lives before the rider narrates it into ideology. In practice, it is the capacity to respond to the actual situation rather than to the ideological narrative about the situation.

Values are freely chosen life directions — not goals to be achieved, not rules imposed from outside, but intrinsic orientations that give life meaning and direction. Values in ACT are not the verbal descriptions of what you should care about; they are the lived sense of what matters, contacted through present-moment awareness and held through defusion from the narratives that would reduce them to slogans. Political solidarity grounded in chosen values rather than imposed identity is solidarity that can withstand challenge and correction.

Committed Action is the enactment of values in the world — the building of patterns of behavior that embody what matters, including the willingness to experience discomfort in service of those values. Committed action is where psychological flexibility meets the world. It is praxis in the fullest sense: theory-informed action that submits itself to revision through practice.

These six processes are deeply interdependent. Defusion without values is nihilism. Values without committed action are fantasy. Acceptance without present-moment contact is dissociation. Together, they constitute a technology of the self — not in Foucault’s sense of disciplinary power, but in the sense of cultivable capacities that enable a fundamentally different relationship to language, identity, and moral life.

VII. Defusion as the Precondition for Communicative Action

With the Hexaflex in hand, the bridge between Haidt and Habermas becomes visible.

Consider what defusion actually accomplishes at the level of moral cognition. Defusion is the capacity to notice your elephant’s movement as an embodied moral intuition rather than mistaking the rider’s post-hoc narrative for truth. It does not silence the elephant — that is neither possible nor desirable. The elephant carries genuine moral wisdom, encoded through millennia of evolutionary and cultural selection. What defusion does is create space between the intuition and the response — space in which the rider can observe the elephant’s direction without being fused with it, without mistaking the intuition for the final word on the matter.

This is precisely the psychological precondition that Habermas’s ideal speech situation requires but cannot, on its own, produce.

Self-as-Context — perspective-taking — extends this further. It is the capacity to hold your Moral Foundation as a perspective rather than as the way the world is. Someone operating primarily from the Care/Harm foundation can, through perspective-taking, understand that someone operating from Authority/Subversion is not merely confused or evil — they are responding to a genuine moral intuition that indexes a real feature of social life. This does not require agreeing with them. It requires the capacity to hold multiple moral perspectives simultaneously without being captured by any single one.

The full architecture thus becomes clear:

Haidt tells us why communicative action fails across moral divides — moral intuitions are pre-verbal, embodied, and incommensurable across foundations. The elephants walk in different directions before the riders open their mouths.

Hayes tells us how to create the psychological conditions under which communicative action can succeed — defusion from moral certainty, perspective-taking across foundations, acceptance of the full moral spectrum, present-moment contact with actual situations rather than ideological narratives, values-based committed action rather than fusion-driven reactivity.

Habermas tells us what we are building toward — normative structures as the pacemaker of social evolution, communicative rationality as the basis for democratic life, the structural transformation of the public sphere into a space where liberating structure replaces dominating structure.

Wilber tells us how to sort the structures — which hierarchies transcend and include, which suppress and exploit, and why confusing the two has paralyzed the Left’s capacity to build.

No one has brought Haidt and Habermas into dialogue through Hayes. The Haidt-Habermas problem — that moral intuitions undermine rational discourse — has been identified but never resolved. The resolution lies in recognizing that the ACT Hexaflex provides the psychological preconditions for communicative action across incommensurable Moral Foundations. And these are not merely individual capacities. They are the foundation for group-level cooperation — which is where the Prosocial framework enters.

VIII. The Naming Problem in Clinical Practice

Before extending these tools to political life, it is worth seeing how the structural confusion operates within the institutions that claim to help people — because the clinical domain makes the abstract architecture concrete.

The medical establishment cannot agree on what its own diagnostic labels mean. The DSM-5’s replacement of “substance dependence” and “substance abuse” with the single category “substance use disorder” was meant to reduce confusion — but the conflation of physiological dependence with the complex behavioral syndrome of addiction continues to cause harm. Clinicians misdiagnose. Patients receive inappropriate treatment. The label, once applied, becomes functionally equivalent to the condition itself — a textbook case of fusion operating at the institutional level. Dr. Jonathan N. Stea’s clinical research has documented this with precision, demonstrating that even within the medical establishment, diagnostic terminology functions as a Master Signifier rather than a working hypothesis.

Stea’s research on natural recovery is equally illuminating. His studies document individuals who recovered through both abstinence and moderation pathways, through both treatment-assisted and natural recovery processes — empirical evidence that the rigid binary of “diseased/not diseased” fails to capture the actual diversity of human experience with substances. The syndrome model of addiction — viewing addiction not as a single disease entity but as a syndrome with multiple, interacting dimensions — is precisely the kind of nuanced, contextual understanding that the Master Signifier forecloses.

William White’s historical research tells the same story at a larger scale. The diversity of recovery pathways — mutual aid, professional treatment, religious conversion, natural recovery, medication-assisted approaches, secular programs, and countless indigenous and culturally specific traditions — is a documented empirical reality that institutional orthodoxies have consistently suppressed in favor of singular narratives. Guy Du Plessis’s Integral Recovery represents one of the few frameworks that has attempted to hold this diversity within an integral container, recognizing that recovery itself must be reconceived beyond the pathology-and-treatment model.

This clinical and historical evidence connects directly to the structural problem. When a recovery framework operates as a liberating structure, it offers a provisional scaffold — useful for guiding intervention, subject to correction as new evidence emerges, held lightly by both clinician and client. Diagnostic language functions as a working hypothesis.

When a recovery framework operates as a dominating structure, the diagnostic label — or the identity label imposed by the community — becomes a Master Signifier. It is not provisional. It is not subject to revision. It captures the subject’s identity and holds it fixed. The framework leverages genuine Moral Foundations — Authority (the sponsor, the group conscience, the clinical protocol), Loyalty (belonging, community, “keep coming back”), Sanctity (the sacred narrative of disease and recovery) — but in service of a structure that forecloses the very moves that genuine growth requires: defusion from the label, perspective-taking on one’s own experience, fallibilistic correction when the framework no longer fits.

For many people, a strong identity framework provides essential structure — community, meaning, a coherent narrative that organizes otherwise chaotic experience. This is real and should not be dismissed. But the question is always: does the framework welcome the kind of fallibilistic correction that the clinical and recovery research demonstrates is necessary — moderation as well as abstinence, natural recovery as well as treatment-assisted, syndrome complexity as well as categorical clarity, multiple pathways as well as singular orthodoxy — or does it immunize itself against such correction?

When the framework causes suffering that exceeds the suffering it was meant to address — when the label itself becomes a source of rigidity rather than liberation — the framework has been falsified. Not discarded. Not rejected in anger. Falsified. Which means: revised, corrected, grown beyond.

This is what “maturing out” looks like — the well-documented phenomenon whereby many people simply move past problematic substance use not through treatment intervention but through the natural process of living. The disease model cannot account for this. A framework grounded in Enactive Fallibilism can: we enact, we test, we revise. The body knows before the rider narrates.

IX. Postmodern Conservatism, the Master Signifier, and the Structural Vacuum

This is where the political stakes become urgent.

Matthew McManus traces a genealogy that runs from Burke’s pragmatic skepticism about objective moral truth through neoliberalism’s hollowing out of meaningful political life to the present crisis: a Right that has absorbed the epistemological relativism and identity politics it claims to despise. Postmodern Conservatism is characterized by indifference to the traditional distinction between truth and falsehood, the legitimation of political claims through identity rather than argument, and the weaponization of victimhood narratives by historically dominant groups. It rejects the epistemic standards that would allow its claims to be evaluated — and therein lies its most dangerous feature.

Mapped onto the framework developed here, Postmodern Conservatism is a Dominator Hierarchy that presents itself as resistance to domination. It mobilizes all six of Haidt’s Moral Foundations — Authority (strong leaders), Loyalty (national identity), Sanctity (civilization under threat), Care (for “our people”), Fairness (against elite corruption), Liberty (against institutional overreach) — but in service of a structure that forecloses precisely the moves that genuine political life requires: defusion from certainty, perspective-taking across difference, willingness to revise. It is fusion masquerading as freedom: the elephant’s moral intuitions narrated by the rider into an unfalsifiable identity narrative, immunized against correction by dismissing all external standards as manipulation or elite overreach.

And here the mirror becomes uncomfortable. Jordan Peterson functions for the postmodern conservative Right exactly as Žižek functions for the Lacanian-Marxist Left: as a Master Signifier around whom communities organize, whose authority is conferred through intellectual fusion rather than earned through fallibilistic correction. The structural dynamic is identical. Both figures produce brilliant, partial insights. Both attract communities that cannot get beyond them. Both foreclose the developmental moves their followers most need to make — because to question the authority figure is to be expelled from the community rather than welcomed as practicing the very critical thinking the community claims to value.

The Left’s failure to counter Postmodern Conservatism is not merely strategic. A Left operating from only two Moral Foundations — Care and Fairness — cannot build the kind of moral community capable of competing with a movement that, however distortedly, engages all six. The progressive response to Postmodern Conservatism has largely been to double down on what it already does: more Care, more Fairness, more denunciation of the other four foundations as pathological. This guarantees continued failure, because it offers no alternative structure of meaning, no earned authority, no sacred project, no loyalty that transcends individual preference.

But the problem goes deeper than political strategy. The Left has ceded religion — the single most powerful institution for engaging all six Moral Foundations through structures designed to support human development — entirely to the Right. And in doing so, it has abandoned the great conveyor belt.

X. Religion as the Conveyor Belt

Wilber’s argument in The Religion of Tomorrow is essential here, and it has not been adequately engaged by either the secular Left or the Lacanian-Marxist tradition.

Every major religious tradition, at its most developed, functions as a conveyor belt — a structure that moves people through successive stages of development. The novice enters with pre-conventional understanding: mythic literalism, rule-following, tribal loyalty. The tradition, when it functions as a liberating structure, does not leave them there. Through practice, through community, through earned mentorship, through the cultivation of increasingly subtle capacities of attention and discernment, the tradition moves people toward post-conventional understanding: contemplative depth, nondual awareness, universal compassion held within particular commitment. This is what Wilber means by “Waking Up, Growing Up, Cleaning Up, and Showing Up” — and it is what the great traditions have been doing, imperfectly and unevenly, for millennia.

The Left’s allergy to religion is the Pre/Trans Fallacy operating at civilizational scale. It confuses pre-rational religion — mythic literalism, fundamentalist dogma, theocratic politics — with trans-rational spirituality — post-metaphysical theology, contemplative practice, integral development. Because both pre-rational and trans-rational forms are non-rational, the Left collapses them into a single category (irrational/superstitious) and rejects the whole thing. In doing so, it loses access to the only institutional tradition that has ever successfully engaged Authority, Loyalty, Sanctity, Care, Fairness, and Liberty simultaneously through structures designed to support developmental growth.

Wilber’s post-metaphysical position, developed in Integral Spirituality and extended in The Religion of Tomorrow, offers a way to reclaim religion without regressing to its pre-rational forms. Post-metaphysical religion does not require belief in mythic narratives, supernatural entities, or dogmatic truth claims. It requires practices — contemplative, ethical, communal — that cultivate the very capacities the Hexaflex describes: the ability to hold experience lightly (defusion), to embrace what is present (acceptance), to observe from a stable witnessing perspective (self-as-context), to contact experience directly (present moment), to orient from freely chosen depth (values), and to enact that orientation in the world (committed action). These are not merely psychological techniques. They are, at their root, spiritual practices — practices that the great traditions have been refining for thousands of years.

This is also where Wilber’s analysis of what he calls “addictions and allergies” becomes relevant. In his developmental framework, each stage of development carries the risk of two pathological responses to the stages it must transcend: addiction (the refusal to let go of the previous stage) and allergy (the refusal to include the previous stage). The fundamentalist is addicted to mythic religion — clinging to literalism because the transition to rational or post-rational faith is terrifying. The secular progressive is allergic to mythic religion — so repelled by literalism that they reject the entire religious impulse, including its trans-rational forms. Both responses are developmental failures. Both foreclose growth. And both are amenable to the work that IACT proposes: defusion from the reactive stance, acceptance of the full developmental spectrum, perspective-taking that can distinguish pre-rational from trans-rational, and committed action that reclaims religion as a vehicle for integral development rather than a relic to be discarded or a weapon to be wielded.

Du Plessis’s Integral Recovery applies this framework directly to addiction and recovery, demonstrating that the same developmental logic operates at the individual level: the person in recovery must neither cling addictively to a rigid framework nor reject all framework allergically. Growth requires the capacity to hold structure lightly — to use it as scaffold rather than cage — and this is precisely what the Hexaflex cultivates.

XI. The Brooks Case: Integral Political Praxis

Has anyone actually practiced what this essay describes?

Michael Brooks, who died in 2020 at the age of 37, is the most compelling case study I have found.

As I argued in “Towards a New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere,” Brooks built what he called a “worker’s counterpublic” through The Michael Brooks Show, his book Against the Web, and his role on The Majority Report — a Left political space that, mapped against the framework developed in the preceding sections, operated across all six of Haidt’s Moral Foundations through structures that welcomed correction rather than immunizing themselves against it.

What follows is an interpretive mapping of Brooks’s practice against the ACT Hexaflex — not a claim that Brooks consciously employed these processes, but an analysis of the functional structure his practice exhibited. He never used this theoretical language. He did not need to. The significance lies in what the mapping reveals about the practicability of the tools this essay describes.

Defusion. Brooks held ideological commitments — democratic socialism, anti-imperialism, materialist analysis — with a humor and lightness that distinguished his practice from the fusion-driven certainty that characterizes most political media on both Left and Right. He could advocate passionately for a position in one segment and satirize the rigidity of that same position’s adherents in the next. This is not inconsistency. It is defusion: the capacity to hold verbal content — including one’s own political convictions — as verbal content rather than as the final word on reality.

Acceptance. Brooks engaged conservative moral intuitions — Authority, Loyalty, Sanctity — with curiosity rather than contempt. His analyses of right-wing movements demonstrated a willingness to take seriously the full moral spectrum rather than dismissing four of six foundations as pathological. He accepted that these foundations index real features of human social life, even when they were being mobilized by dominating structures.

Self-as-Context. Brooks inhabited his identity as a democratic socialist without being captured by it. He could take the perspective of a Brazilian worker, an Indian farmer, a conservative American voter, or a Marxist intellectual — holding each as a perspective rather than as the way the world is. This is perspective-taking in action: the capacity to see systems of perspectives rather than being embedded within a single one.

Present Moment. Brooks’s practice was characterized by a responsiveness to what was actually happening — in the news cycle, in the interview, in the political moment — rather than to ideological narratives about what was happening. His improvisational style, his capacity to shift register mid-conversation, his willingness to be surprised — these are markers of present-moment contact.

Values. Brooks’s direction came from within — from a commitment to human solidarity and internationalism that was chosen rather than imposed by any institutional Master Signifier. He was not performing a party line. He was not fused with an identity that required defense. His values were held as values — freely chosen directions that organized action without calcifying into dogma.

Committed Action. He built. The Michael Brooks Show, the Majority Report contributions, the international solidarity work, the educational practice — these were values-enacted-in-the-world, the construction of a counterpublic that embodied the very capacities the other five processes describe. And crucially, this construction was fallibilistic: Brooks revised, adjusted, grew.

Brooks’s counterpublic was not merely a Care/Fairness space. It operated across all six Moral Foundations: loyalty as solidarity, authority as education and mentorship, sanctity as the recognition that the project of human flourishing within facticity carries ultimate significance. He engaged all six foundations without submitting to conservative Dominator Hierarchies — not rejecting authority but earning it, not abandoning sanctity but grounding it in facticity. In ACT terms, what Brooks practiced was the Hexaflex as integral political praxis, enacted before the framework existed to name it.

The question his death leaves open is whether what he practiced can be made teachable — and whether it can be grounded in the kind of institutional structures that the great religious traditions have historically provided.

XII. Integral Facticity and Enactive Fallibilism

The two philosophical foundations of IACT address different dimensions of the same problem.

Integral Facticity — the synthesis of Habermas’s communicative theory with Wilber’s AQAL (All Quadrants, All Levels) framework — provides the normative architecture. Habermas established that legitimate norms arise through communicative action governed by validity claims: truth, rightness, and sincerity. Wilber established that these validity claims operate differently across the four quadrants of human experience (individual-interior, individual-exterior, collective-interior, collective-exterior) and that confusing these quadrants produces category errors that paralyze both theory and practice. Integral Facticity integrates these insights: normative discourse must be grounded in structural awareness of which quadrant a claim belongs to, and structural analysis must be accountable to normative discourse. The Left’s collapse of all hierarchy into domination is a category error — it mistakes a structural claim (some hierarchies liberate) for a normative endorsement of all hierarchy. Integral Facticity provides the tools to make the distinction. The same category error operates in clinical settings when a syndrome claim (addiction involves multiple interacting dimensions) is collapsed into an ontological claim (you are an addict) — Integral Facticity gives us the framework to see why this collapse produces suffering.

Enactive Fallibilism — the synthesis of Peirce’s pragmatic fallibilism with Varela’s enactivism — provides the epistemological ground.

The sequence is simple and it is universal: You learn. You learn by doing. You get it wrong. You correct.

This is not just Peirce’s fallibilism applied to abstract inquiry. It is the structure of every practice that has ever produced genuine knowledge — scientific, moral, political, clinical, personal. We enact a framework, test it against experience, and revise when the framework fails to include what lived experience demands. The community builds an institution, discovers its failure modes, and either rigidifies or reforms. The person in recovery adopts a framework, tests it against embodied experience, and either grows within it or discovers that the framework has been falsified — that the label does not fit, that the institution has become a Dominator Hierarchy, that the Master Signifier has foreclosed the very growth it claims to support.

This is the fundamental epistemological difference between a liberating structure and a dominating one. A liberating structure welcomes correction. Fallibilism is built into its operation. It says: this framework is a hypothesis — test it against your experience, and revise when necessary. A dominating structure forbids correction. The Master Signifier does not invite revision. The unfalsifiable identity narrative of Postmodern Conservatism does not submit to empirical correction. Neither does a diagnostic label that claims permanent ontological status regardless of lived experience. Žižek’s authority within the Lacanian-Marxist tradition does not submit to fallibilistic correction. Neither does Peterson’s within the postmodern conservative sphere. To question these claims within their respective communities is not to engage in inquiry; it is to commit heresy. Each has immunized itself against falsification — and that immunization is the epistemological signature of domination.

Any framework that cannot be falsified by lived experience is operating as a dominating structure at the epistemological level. It does not include the subject’s experience; it overrides it. This holds for clinical frameworks, political ideologies, recovery orthodoxies, religious institutions, and the Integral Left itself — which must submit its own claims to the same fallibilistic correction it demands of others, or become the very thing it critiques.

XIII. The Path

Integral Awareness and Commitment Training proposes to be the framework that connects these insights into a teachable practice. Not a recovery program that assumes pathology, but a practice that assumes capacity. Not a clinical technique applied to individuals in isolation, but a training in psychological flexibility that operates at both individual and collective levels — grounded in the epistemological architecture of Integral Facticity and Enactive Fallibilism, operationalized through the ACT Hexaflex, and extended to group-level cooperation through the Prosocial framework that David Sloan Wilson, Paul Atkins, and Steven Hayes have developed using Elinor Ostrom’s Core Design Principles.

IACT addresses the Lacanian-Marxist critique — Žižek’s, Tutt’s, Cadell Last’s — not by rejecting it but by offering what it lacks: a coherent praxis that moves from structural critique to institutional construction. It addresses the Left’s loss of religion not by returning to pre-rational forms but by reclaiming the conveyor belt function through post-metaphysical practices that cultivate the same capacities the great traditions have always cultivated — defusion, acceptance, perspective-taking, presence, values clarity, and committed action — within structures governed by Ostrom’s principles of shared identity, proportional equivalence, fair conflict resolution, inclusive decision-making, and nested governance.

And it addresses the closing illusion that this essay must finally refuse: the illusion that recovery, revolution, surrender, and reaction are alternatives to one another. They are not. Committed action, grounded in values and informed by the full Hexaflex, transcends and includes all of these dimensions. Recovery is part of the path — the ongoing work of cleaning up, of revising what no longer serves. Revolution is part of the path — the refusal to accept dominating structures, the insistence on building liberating ones. Surrender is part of the path — acceptance, the willingness to include what cannot be changed, the humility to let the body teach the rider. Even reaction is part of the path — the elephant’s moral intuitions are data, not noise, and allergy to them is as much a developmental failure as addiction to them.

This is what it means to act within facticity. Not to escape the Language Parasite — that is impossible. Not to overthrow the Symbolic Order — that is revolutionary fantasy. Not to merely defuse from moral intuitions — that is clinical technique without political vision. Not to construct an ideal speech situation populated by disembodied rational agents — that is Habermasian aspiration without psychological realism. And not to retreat into the unfalsifiable identity narratives of Postmodern Conservatism — that is structural domination dignified as political movement.

The task is to Wake Up, Grow Up, Clean Up, and Show Up — within facticity, not in escape from it. To build, through practice, within communities, using tools that already exist, the capacity to hold language lightly, to resist dominating structures, to welcome correction, to include all six Moral Foundations within an increasingly flexible perspective, and to enact one’s values in institutions that support flourishing rather than enforce conformity.

The people capable of this work are already here. The moral seriousness is already present. The conveyor belt does not need to be invented. It needs to be reclaimed — and everyone is invited to step onto it.

Integral [+] Facticity

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