I’ve been wrestling with a fundamental question about human development, and at the same time I think you’ll find this approach quite interesting.
In the 1960s, the great developmentalist Clare Graves (1914-1986) came up his approach, which later became Spiral Dynamics, founded by Don Beck and Christopher Cowan. Beck came up with the colors, which Graves agreed to. (Spiral Dynamics changed the eighth Turquoise stage a bit, but I went more with Graves’s original description here.)
This was later picked up as a foundational model by Ken Wilber and the Integral movement.
What do you think?
The challenge for me right now is deciding whether Green is superior to Orange or whether Green and Orange are equal — two divergent paths, perhaps at least somewhat on the masculine and feminine continuum? Would appreciate your input on this.
Mike
THE EIGHT STAGES IN HUMAN DEVELOPMENT
CLARE GRAVES’S PARADIGM
At the BEIGE stage, survival is the main value. Doing what you must to stay alive. Satisfying your basic, imperative physiological needs. Food, water, a warm or cool temperature, sleep. The sensory, nonverbal, instinctual level.
The RED stage is about satisfying yourself. You impulsively act for your own direct personal benefit – regardless, at any cost, and without shame. You see the world as a jungle full of predators and threats. Dominate or be dominated, you think – exploit or be exploited. So you exert your strength and power and you use aggression, conquest, coercion, force, and even violence to get what you want.
The PURPLE stage is about magical powers to help you and your clan. You are dependent on and show allegiance to one leader, who is never questioned. You strongly defend your ancestral way of life, including your rituals and customs.
In the BLUE stage, order and stability are the main values. Structure, rules, laws, hierarchy, authority. BLUE is all about compliance, conformity, obedience, duty, and sacrifice to your group. You’re embedded in that group, you draw your identity and sense of belonging and purpose from that group, and that group has found the one and only right way to think and behave. You do what is proper according to proper authority, which you never question, you consider all views outside your group to be wrong, and you are kind only to people in your group. Anyone outside your group you treat with narrow-minded intolerance or worse.
ORANGE is all about personal achievement, performance, and excellence. You’re proud of your individual skills and strengths, you prove your worth by competing and winning and career success, and you play the game to get ahead and make things better for yourself. You think positively, stay motivated, strive to be your best, take on challenges, generate value, and get results. But your pursuit of your self-interest, material security, money, advancement, and status can lead you to be greedy and even inhumane.
GREEN is all about warm and tender feelings as we interact with our fellow human beings. It’s about human bonds, harmony, unity, empathy, sensitivity, open-mindedness, tolerance, fairness, consensus-building, cooperation, teamwork, and mutually beneficial relationships and solutions. We are aware that we are traveling through this life together, that there is richness within each person, and that each person is important and equal. Freeing ourselves of absolutes, we are free of divisive differences – so we can be one with others – and we can join in as people come together in the caring dimensions of community. But we are relativistic about our values and, while we are always willing to talk – and listen – we’re willing to talk and listen endlessly, without ever reaching a conclusion, making a decision, or taking action.
In the YELLOW stage, we value the flexible flow of systems. We strive to integrate the strengths and benefits of the previous stages – which we see with clarity – and to integrate knowledge, views, and systems. We move the team toward each project’s next goal in whatever way works. We appreciate each person’s unique individuality. While remaining our own authentic self, we adjust as we’re communicating in the moment to anyone from any other stage. We accept forms as they are, and we aim to integrate them into functional interconnected flows. We are comfortable with multiple perspectives, differing opinions, ambiguous statements and situations, paradoxes, inconsistencies, contradictions, and uncertainties. We stay curious, keep developing our knowledge and capacities, adapt to change, and experiment and innovate. We are a self-respecting individual – accepting human nature as it is while valuing our dignity and all people’s dignity, with ethics rooted in the best that is possible. Each of us is our own person, accountable to our self and continuing to develop on our own pathway – and yet part of a living system. We exercise our personal freedom without excessive self-interest or harm to other people and we care about others as much as is realistic.
And then there’s TURQUOISE. The primary values of TURQUOISE are humility, acceptance, and trust. We are humble enough to know that we are not omniscient about the world or about our self – that we’ll never grasp all of life’s interlinked causes and effects. We value all the stages of being human, and we fashion a life with our intuition while drawing from all our experience. We are neither dominant nor dominated, although we offer firm direction to each other as it’s needed; we resist coercion and restrictions in a quiet, personal way. Beyond mechanical thinking, beyond limiting ideas, we think holistically about the well-being of humanity. We live our life from the marvelous richness of a deeper realm of consciousness: from receptive and poetic perception of reality, from sheer fluid beauty, and from ineffable experiences of wonder and awe and reverence. Aware of our distinct self (and each distinct self), aware of the way we are blended into a larger and conscious whole, and knowing that everything we do has consequences, we engage in cooperative and selfless actions intended for the good of all living beings.
What do you think of this paradigm of human development?
And what do you think, are Orange and Green equal or is Green the stage beyond Orange?
Thanks,
Mike
I like this analysis and think I'll probably save it; reminds me a lot of Hawkin's scale of consciousness. At first I thought, of course, Green is superior because it is more expansive and moves beyond self—exactly what humanity needs to embody at this time. But, I've recognized in myself that even as my focus on the outer increases, so too do I find myself more and more focusing on MY development in contribution to the whole. I seem to be equally Orange and Green at least in my general set point (with occasional breakthroughs into the upper colors—only briefly though). In this moment at least, I'm thinking there really is no stigma to Orange—unless it is not paired at the same time with Green??? You may have noticed that I tend to have a coincident-theory, where the most powerful things actually involve two seemingly contradictory elements working together to create some kind of unique synergy. It might be the same with this. My humble offering and just thinking out loud. This was a good one, liked it very much. :)
I think that if Orange does lead to being greedy and inhumane that nullifies any possible positive outcomes, because those are corrosive states of being. On that basis I would say that Green is superior, even though it might potentially generate very little practical benefit!