There is something clarifying about talking to someone who disagrees with your premise from the first minute. My conversation with philosopher Steve McIntosh was exactly that kind of exchange, and it turned out to be one of the more instructive of the thirty conversations I have now had about Co-Creating the Third Attractor.
Steve opened by taking issue with the term itself. As he sees it, “third attractor” as Schmachtenberger uses it implies a relatively direct path from our current modern-postmodern world to something better, without adequately accounting for the structural role that progressive postmodernism plays as a distinct stage of cultural evolution. This is not a minor terminological quibble. Steve’s entire framework rests on the insight, developed within integral and developmental philosophy over the past three decades, that cultural evolution follows a dialectical pattern: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Modernity is the thesis. Progressive postmodernism is the antithesis, and it performs a real and necessary function, even when it is militant and deconstructive. The synthesis that might follow cannot be reached by bypassing that antithesis. It has to pass through it and include it.
What struck me was how precise this criticism is when aimed at a certain tendency in the broader space of civilizational thinking: the desire to move directly from identifying the problem to imagining the solution, without sitting long enough inside the productive friction of the current conflict. Steve argues that the culture war we are living through is not simply a breakdown to be managed. It is the engine of what comes next. The conflict between modernism and progressive postmodernism, when understood properly, generates the values that a synthesis will need to carry forward. The synthesis does not dissolve that tension. It transforms it from a win-lose confrontation into a relationship of challenge and support.
This framing added real texture to something I have been sitting with across all thirty conversations. I have kept returning to the question of whether the change that is needed is primarily inner or outer, emergent or constructed, top-down or bottom-up. What Steve contributed was a third axis, one that cuts through all of these: the question of developmental sequence. You cannot synthesize what you have not genuinely passed through. And most of the people drawn to this kind of work, myself included, are still largely operating within a postmodern value frame, even when we believe we have moved beyond it. Steve is direct about this, and I found it honest rather than harsh.
He is also sober about timelines. The integral culture that seemed to be gaining real traction in the early 2000s largely failed to launch as a cultural force. The synthesis he describes is not imminent. It is a philosophical project still in early stages, carried forward by a relatively small number of people, and it will need institutions, thinkers, and public articulation to build any meaningful gravity. His own work through the Institute for Developmental Philosophy, and a forthcoming book on developmental philosophy and purpose, are part of that effort.
What I took away personally is this: the thirty conversations have made me less certain about what needs to happen, not more. Steve sharpened that uncertainty in a useful direction. If the synthesis he describes is real, then it requires not only inner development, not only systemic change, but a genuine philosophical maturation, the kind that can look at modernity and progressive postmodernism both with clear eyes, neither romanticizing nor rejecting either one, and begin to articulate what a larger circle of inclusion might actually look like. That is a harder and more patient project than most of the urgent discourse around civilizational transition tends to allow for.
It is also, probably, the right one.
here is the link to the youtube conversation: https://youtu.be/ITXedk_nEfE
