Development Matters

The lesson from Spiral Dynamics is clear— there’s a massive difference between First and Second-tier.

Most people — roughly 80% — have a Blue, Orange or Green center of gravity, identifying with those core values above all others. If you’re at Orange, you’ll identify as an achiever, thinking rationality, individualism, and materialism, are the best values. You’ll think it’s self-evident that everyone else should value these things as much as you.

First-tier tries to convert others to their value set. Unfortunately, forcing Orange technology and Green human rights on Purple, Red, and Blue societies often causes Blue jihads and Red revolts. Memetic mediation is a delicate process of affirming different value sets to build bridges between warring meme complexes.

How To Level Up

Leveling up into second tier is helped along by meditation and deep existential conflict that’s unreconcilable within a First-tier worldview.

Meditation helps loosen your grip on adolescent stages and develop appreciation for the bigger picture. Boredom and dissatisfaction offer opportunities for re-framing your perspective in a more effective way.

Existential conflict usually stems from a paradox between first-tier stages. For example, in growing from Orange to Green, you struggle reconciling personal ambitions with sensitivity towards disadvantaged people. From a first-tier perspective these values are zero-sum, but from an integral perspective, its easy to combine altruism with ambition.

In addition to reaching second-tier, one can level-up different lines, or skills: such as kinesthetic, cognitive, emotional, relational, moral, aesthetic, and spiritual. These can be improved through yoga, writing, deep dialogue, group work, appreciating art and nature, etc.

To level-up is to recognize each wave of development as a necessary and useful stage in the spiral of consciousness.

Development reduces Egocentrism

Young children believe others share their pain and pleasure, understand their mumbles, and share their perspective. They “hide” in broad view of adults because their ego-centrism blocks theory of mind. Human development is a systematic reduction of our ego-centrism.

Carol Gilligan broke female moral development into three main stages: selfish, care, and universal care. Like Spiral Dynamics, stages are obtained by transcending and including. As compassion expands, ego-centrism declines.

First, the young girl cares for herself, followed by an inclusion of family and friends. Eventually, she extends well-wishes to all of humanity. Achieving higher stages does not imply halting self-care, only that the circle of compassion widens.

Just as girls develop their care, so do men develop their sense of justice, from self, to other, to universal. Once men and women reach higher stages, they integrate the contra sexual attitudes, enabling universal justice and compassion in every adult.

Conformist teenagers

Approaching adolescence, children step out of their perspectives and begin to share the views of others, to the point of getting trapped in their views. This preoccupation is the conformist stage of development. Though teens escape their perspective, they can’t escape the group’s. Moving from “me” to “us” is a solid decline in egocentrism, nonetheless.

The conformist teen is at the Blue stage of development, believing their group to be beyond reproach. Once teens develop Orange values, they question the conformity and biases of their group.

Post-conventional attitudes — questioning societal norms — are only achieved by passing through conventional stages. Norm competence is required for post-conventional views.

The Pre-Trans Fallacy

The Pre-Trans fallacy helps us distinguish pre-conventional motives from post-conventional motives. While both are “non-conventional,” they are separated by a vast gap of cognitive development.

You can be against formal schooling because you want to play video games, or because you believe factory schooling hampers development.

Just being anti-convention doesn’t automatically tell me why you’re rebelling.

Quitting school to play video games is pre-rational, but swapping factory education for homeschooling is post-rational, but both are non-conventional.

Pre- and post- use the same “unconventional” rhetoric to get what they want. During the Vietnam War protests, activists used post-rational language to define their movement. But when given psychological tests, the majority scored at pre-conventional levels, despite using fancy language to fight convention.

Pre-conventional people using post-rational language is a perennial problem, but learning this fallacy helps us flag the shenanigan before getting taken in by it. Keeping the fallacy in mind prevents the covert use of fancy language to support archaic impulses.

The Green Paradox?

Green commits the Pre-Trans fallacy when criticizing all hierarchies without distinguishing between domination and growth.

Pre-rational domination hierarchies are cruel and oppressive, devastating the lives of everyone involved. Growth hierarchies, like Spiral Dynamics, are not oppressive. In fact, they provide a path of development that frees us from narrow-mindedness and pointless rivalry.

When Green shuns growth hierarchies, it denies the path that produced its philosophy in the first place. This puts Green in a tough spot — hasty attempts to surpass convention leave gaps filled by regressive and narcissistic motives.

Sloppiness threatens Green’s integrity, creating logical fractures at the top of first-tier. This breach creates opportunity for ascension as Green nears the end of its cultural dominance.

Political implications of First Tier Memes

Left and Right have different aims when explaining human suffering: Liberals lean towards exterior causes, and conservatives focus on interior causes.

The Left looks outward, redistributing wealth, changing institutions, and flattening the economic pie to achieve equality for all. The right looks inward, insisting on family values, individual responsibility, strong moral standards, and work ethic. Bootstraps!

Liberalism arose from early scientific materialism, when the mind was viewed as a blank slate.

Since our interiors are all the same, we should change the exterior!

The outdated emphasis on exterior solutions continues today. Interior development is left to amateurish conservatives, leaving culture in a basic level of interior development. Nothing special…

The War on Development

We’re left with a battle of exterior VS interior, environment VS individual.

Integral politics requires interior and exterior development with parties focusing on optimization VS innovation.

Back to Ecology: Conclusion

Our Human Value Toolkit includes — but isn’t limited to — the following: Survival, Habit, Instinct, Kinship, Power, Meaning, Purpose, Hierarchy, Morality, Law, Order, Scientific Achievement, Rationality, Sensitivity, Universal Human Rights, Environmentalism, Multiculturalism, Racial Equality, Responsibility, Harmony, and Compassion. We need to use them all to charter the choppy seas ahead.

Just as all people start at Beige, so must our new global village begin from first principles. Our global brain is an infant, and has yet to master this toolkit — evidenced by memetic warfare online.

Our toys are too powerful for first-tier shenanigans. Though rational Orange invented the Nuclear bomb, it can be used by Red, a wave unable to build it. Technological feats outpace our ability to use them wisely, a perennial mismatch of human development.

An integral synthesis holds all worldviews to be true but partial aspects of the great chain of being. Every wave looks primitive to the ones that follow it. Even turquoise will seem hopelessly archaic to future civilizations, yet another nested truth in an ever larger whole.

We build integral practices by achieving physical, cognitive, and spiritual waves in ourselves, our culture, and nature. Integral thinkers promote every value in the spiral without special privileges. We’re all in this game together, and we must bring our full value ecology to bear on the obstacles before us.

THE END