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 December 31, 2025 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.

[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.

[Carl-Richard]

This topic essentially claims Stage Turquoise is a product of a culturally-dependent sampling bias (i.e. had the sample included other cultures, the stage would not exist):

This post in particular says there is also a problem with the sample size (it cannot be expected to capture Turquoise to the claimed extent):

And this post says Susanne Cook-Greuter's 9SEDT does not fix these flaws:

And here is an earlier topic going more into the problems with sampling bias as well as cultural theoretical assumptions:

And here is a long debate on 9SEDT that puts the above observations to the test and elaborates on some of them:

 

Edited 2 hours ago by Carl-Richard

[UnbornTao]

No model is true; it might be useful, but it is invented, made up.

[CARDOZZO]

The map is not the territory. It is a useful invention/framework.

[Entrepreneur]

On 12/31/2025 at 4:05 PM, Oppositionless said:

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

Thanks,  I briefly checked them out with Google Gemini.  I will study them deeper later.

On 12/31/2025 at 1:23 PM, Vali2003 said:

I agree, it’s sometimes used in a way that implies superiority.

I don’t think being on a ‘higher’ developmental stage says one is superior to another. It depends, though, what you mean by that exactly. Could someone on a higher stage be ‘superior’ in terms of moral development for example? Sure. Just like a high-school-kid has superior maths than a primary-school-kid. But is a primary-school-kid by itself inferior to the high-school-kid?

Do you see a baby as inferior to a ten-year old?

You can go into specific skills, sure, but do you get what I mean?

You have to learn basic math before you can learn algebra.  You have to learn algebra before geometry and trigonometry.  You have to learn those before calculus.   Yes.   That is because you must fully understand the laws of the previous one before you can understand the laws of the next one.   Learning math that way is a linear time process.   

I am suggesting that is nothing like Spiral Dynamics at all.   Yet, that is how SD is explained, which is why I call it false.

Believing that is how people or societies evolve is as wrong as believing the Pythagorean Theorem is anything other than A squared plus B squared equals C squared.    Spiral Dynamics is a formula that does not accurately describe how the world works.  In fact, it teaches untruths.  So anyone buying into it is making decisions about how life works based on fundamental untruths.

A person does not need to learn any other stages before deciding they value the well-being of the entire globe on an equal level as their own well-being (Turquoise or whatever).   They simply need to be taught that belief when they are young.   You could have a teenager, in fact you do have many teenagers, believing such things as they are taught that they should believe that by their parents.    They have not experienced nor learned any other stages at all as their parents have satisfied every fundamental human need in their life up to that point.   If SD were true, the kids would have to progress from one to the next.   But they don't.  They can start at Green, Yellow, Turquoise or Orange, Red, Blue, or whatever.   It depends on the circumstances they are brought up under and who is teaching them what.   This is why I say it is a human choice and nothing more.  It is a choice, a belief, that anyone can choose at any time in their life and doesn't require evolving through any other stages to get there.

I fail to see how any of these stages is evolutionary or progressive when any "stage" can be adopted by any person (adolescent or older) based on their experiences in life and whoever molded their beliefs when they were young.

The things that these humans do share in common are those fundamental human needs that Maslow and others explained decades ago.  Those human needs are what I would call fundamentally true.  We all experience them.   And as humans, beyond our basic survival needs, because of our varying personalities and life experiences, we get to prioritize our other needs, desires, goals, etc. however we are taught to or however we decide to on our own.   That is how humans tick.  That is how Societies tick based on the culmination of decisions that humans are making within that community.   This is why Native Americans chose to live like nature-loving communists.   This is why the Amish choose to live like religious conservatives, highly dependent and benevolent with each other.  These same fundamentals apply to every community of people and every country across the globe.  They are direct results of decisions made as those people all attempted to survive and improve their lives.   That is the fundamental truth as far as I can tell.

These so-called stages of SD are false.  The formula suggesting Red precedes Blue, which precedes Orange, and so on, is a complete and utter lie.   It seems ridiculously easy to disprove it.   As a theory of psychosocial evolution for individuals, organizations, or cultures, Spiral Dynamics fails miserably.

I would assume any truth seeker who thinks deeply about whether it is even remotely accurate would be appalled by it and reject it entirely as false dogma.   But that is just my opinion.  Perhaps I am wrong.

[Entrepreneur]

On 12/31/2025 at 4:11 PM, Oeaohoo said:

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.

Wow!  That was an entertaining read.   Thanks for linking that!