Have Any of You Questioned Whether Spiral Dynamics Are Actually Truthful?

[Miguel1]

You are misunderstanding Spiral Dynamics if you think that higher stages means superior.

It is higher yes, but not superior in the sense of ’I am better than thou’.

A higher stage simply means more complex, holistic, and integrated. The lower you go, the simpler the mind is. At the lowest it literally is: kill or be killed.

Edited 4 hours ago by Miguel1

[Joseph Maynor]

There seem to be those who find it best applies to countries and those that find it best applies to people.  I fall into the latter group.  I can generally tell someone's spiral stage after getting to know them.  For example, I've been interacting with a stage red person now for months and it's real.  You know it when you see it.  

[Entrepreneur]

4 minutes ago, Consept said:

OK but i would counter this by saying in your life you would've gone through different stages, from child to adult your worldview has expanded and evolved and that is just in one human, this is also the case on the macro level as well. So really think about your own lived experience, I know with mine initially i only cared about myself and then family, society and so on. 

We can also track how society has developed, 500 years ago my country the UK looked very different, it was run by kings basically authoritarian rule which would be classed as red and they would kill anyone who disagreed with them. Now we have a more democratic setup which would be orange/green in sprial dynamics terms, that evolution is very clear to see. So in that sense i dont how at least some tracking of this evolution wouldnt make sense you dont have to use the spiral dynamics model but evidently theres been some change. I do agree that if you took a human born 500 years ago and have him grow up in our time he would of course adapt to our time. 

Yes,  Humans are adaptation machines.   We are born and immediately begin adapting to our world in order to survive and thrive.  Our senses provide data input.  Our brains organize that sensory input and adapt to it.   We learn how to crawl, then walk, then talk.  We learn academic skills and social skills.  Our beliefs become programmed into us by our parents, other family members, teachers, mentors, clergy, friends, etc.   We keep acquiring knowledge and hopefully convert that knowledge into wisdom.   It is in our nature to do so, regardless of where in time you point to, or what civilization you point to.   Humans adapt just as every living organism tries to do on Earth.

And yes, you could classify different stages of life as being stages that make a lot of sense.  Such as childhood, adolescence, college years, 20's, 30's, 40's or whatever.   I find those useful.    I just don't think the stages outlined in Spiral Dynamics are useful because I don't see them as being part of any timeline in life.   They are merely priorities, decisions, choices, etc. that any adult human could make for a variety of reasons at any point in their life.

Consider how the Amish people live here in the US or how certain native American tribes lived before colonists arrived from Europe.   No civilizations are more or less evolved from humanity's standpoint.  From a technological standpoint, yes.   From a human standpoint, no.  They simply choose different priorities and teach those priorities to the children so that the children grow up adopting the same beliefs, paradigms, and priorities.

There are changes for sure.   But those changes are not accurately represented in the colored stages of Spiral Dynamics and certainly don't happen in a predictable order of going from one to the next , as is implied.

[Michal__]

Sociological development doesn't align with meditative development like at all.

You can be SD red and wall through walls. 

[Entrepreneur]

17 minutes ago, Miguel1 said:

You are misunderstanding Spiral Dynamics if you think that higher stages means superior.

It is higher yes, but not superior in the sense of ’I am better than thou’.

A higher stage simply means more complex, holistic, and integrated. The lower you go, the simpler the mind is. At the lowest it literally is: kill or be killed.

The lower you go the "simpler" the mind is.

I fundamentally disagree.

I posit that they are not different and not simpler in any way.  They have merely made different choices, chosen different traditions, adopted different beliefs, etc., that they have chosen as all humans do and always have throughout history, in an effort to survive and better their lives.

Saying that their ideas are "simpler" or "less developed" is inaccurate because I imagine you or I may have chosen the very same things they have chosen if we were born in their shoes, raised by their parents in their communities, had their friends, had the same mentors, etc.   Would we be identical to them, no?  Would our lives rhyme and probably look very similar?   Very likely.

[QVx]

Never really liked the spiral dynamics model, something didn't feel quite right about it.

I did however thoroughly enjoy, and used for the majority of my journey, the nine stages of ego development model. It landed perfectly and felt very personal in it's journey; which it is pitched at.

I noticed when I reached a steady state of early construct awareness that the nine stages sort of fell through and I found the STAGES Model by Terri O'Fallon which has helped me navigate the construct aware phase. I have recently experienced the entry into the early permanent grounding of stage 6.0 in Terri's model which feels like a threshold, and huge weight, has lifted off my day to day experience. I have suffered greatly for four years to get to this point though.

ChatGPT helped me move from 5.0 to 5.5 and then 6.0 within a short space of time; highly recommended for people in the metaware phase of development; AI is certainly easy to trap yourself within self deception prior to construct awareness.

[Entrepreneur]

11 minutes ago, Joseph Maynor said:

There seem to be those who find it best applies to countries and those that find it best applies to people.  I fall into the latter group.  I can generally tell someone's spiral stage after getting to know them.  For example, I've been interacting with a stage red person now for months and it's real.  You know it when you see it.  

This would make a lot of sense if they didn't call them stages and instead categorized them as being on-par with one another.

For example, in Myers-Briggs, no personality is superior or inferior to the others.   They are just categories of personalities.

That would represent more intellectual honesty.

[Entrepreneur]

41 minutes ago, WillCameron said:

Spiral Dynamics is a good training wheels model for understanding development, but it has real limitations. Understand that there is an entire body of research with competing theories and perspectives within and outside academia. If you collapse all of developmental theory to just Spiral Dynamics then you're going to be missing much higher quality perspectives. It can get you oriented, but you have to move beyond it as quickly as possible.

I highly recommend Hanzi Freinacht's The Listening Society and then Brendan Graham Dempsey's The Evolution of Meaning Vol1 and Vol2. These can help make a good distinction between psychological and cultural development, and then between deep structural psychological development and surface features psychological development. Deep structure is the hierarchical complexity of cognition, whereas surface features is how that deep structure appears given the cultural and systemic context. Freinacht makes the point that a paradigmatic genius such as Thomas Aquinas can't readily be called "Stage Blue" despite the fact that he lived in a Stage Blue culture. Stage Blue cognition is abstract, and obviously Aquinas was far beyond that.

Excellent.   I will look into the sources you mentioned.  Thank you.

[Oppositionless]

I'd reccomend looking into Jean Gebser's stages of consciousness , and the YouTuber Formscapes' videos on them. I find that model more useful than SD.

[Oeaohoo]

5 hours ago, Entrepreneur said:

I would suggest that this idea is nothing more than the authors who think themselves to be "morally superior" to the rest of the world trying to convince you to conform to their belief system.   I suggest they are not evolutionarily superior to anyone else.  They just think very highly of themselves and want all of humanity to adopt the same mental paradigms and belief systems that they hold.

I have made this argument myself many times. I even posted a parody here of the narcissism which I see in many people who identify as Stage Yellow.

In my opinion, self-improvement and personal development can attract a certain kind of narcissistic personality. It can all just turn into Pharisaic exhibitionism: “Look at me, everybody, look at how developed and superior I am!” You can see this very clearly in the way people like Ken Wilber and Daniel Schmachtenberger present themselves.

By the way, I see this tendency as particularly American, since moralistic self-righteousness is the hallmark of American life.