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 the 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 Saturday at 02:30 AM 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!

[enchanted]

@Oeaohoo Surely you aren't denying that individuals and groups develop right? There might be debate about how exactly they develop but you do admit there are distinct hierarchies within individuals and groups. Surely you don't think a hunter gatherer tribe is as sofisticated as modern society? Or that a someone in grade 3 is equally developed as a university student?

Regardless of what you believe I don't think anyone actually answered your question so I will try:

The evidence used for believing in SD is the scientific study it was based on. Leo's video series and the SD book on his booklist also help understand the origins of SD. 

The other thing that validates SD is that other models like Susan Cook Greuters EDT have come to similar conclusions. 

An important point is that all psychological theories are a "soft science" which means there will never be hard evidence for anything in the psychology field. So every mental frame work and theory of the mind will forever be just educated guesses based on limited and subjective data. This is also due to the mind being infinite and nebulous. 

Hope that helps. 

Edited Friday at 07:02 PM by enchanted

[Carl-Richard]

7 hours ago, enchanted said:

The evidence used for believing in SD is the scientific study it was based on. Leo's video series and the SD book on his booklist also help understand the origins of SD. 

The other thing that validates SD is that other models like Susan Cook Greuters EDT have come to similar conclusions. 

As long as you acknowledge that the evidence is exclusively based on Western cultures (and 9SEDT, Piaget, etc., are not exempt from this), then you're alright.

Edited Saturday at 02:11 AM by Carl-Richard

[Daniel Balan]

On 31/12/2025 at 6:08 PM, Entrepreneur said:

All over this site, I see numerous members referring to the Spiral Dynamics model of human and societal development as being taken for granted truth about how humans and societies work.

What if the model you are basing your thinking around isn't even accurate?

What if you have your ladder leaning against the wrong wall and you keep climbing it anyway?

Have you ever carefully thought about it, scrutinized it, and questioned whether or not the theory is even based in truth?   Or did you just accept it and run with it because other people have done so, and it is easier to just agree with them?

Here are some things to ponder:

1 - Humans are 99.9% identical in DNA, whether they live in a first-world country with all the technological advances it has, or if they live in some tribe in a jungle or desert halfway across the world.

2 - Fundamentally, humans, regardless of where they are located in the globe, are driven in life by the exact same underlying forces of human nature.   You and the Pygmy are no different in this regard.   Compare yourself to any of the many evil dictators the world has seen throughout history.   You and he are no different in terms of your human nature.  Your personalities might be different.  Your priorities in life might be different.  Your beliefs might be different.   But, at your core, your human nature is no different.   They were also driven to acquire safety, basic resources, love, belonging, self-esteem, etc.

3 - Whether a group of people (call it a country, community, or whatever) decides it wants to exist as economic equals or not has nothing to do with whether that community is "more evolved" than any other community anywhere in the globe.    The same is true whether a group of people is more concerned about the well-being of every single member of the community or less concerned.  That decision that each of us makes on our own has more to do with individual personality traits and the programmed belief system that we get programmed with starting in our youth.  It has nothing to do with being "more evolved."

The reason I mention this is because I see so many decisions and opinions on this forum shaped and based under the assumption that their model of how the world works is accurate.   I suggest that this Spiral Dynamics model isn't accurate in the sense that it claims one color as being more "evolved" than another.   Using the word "evolved" suggests that communities, states, countries, whatever, will eventually reach Green, Yellow, or Turquoise as they evolve.   It also makes the "unstated assumption" that a community based on principles that would make it Green, Yellow, or Turquoise is superior in some way to all the so-called "lesser evolved" societies.   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.

Is the Spiral Dynamics model truly accurate?

 

1. Spiral dynamics litteraly saved my life. When I was a teen I had a lot of friends that were doing illegal stuff, sold drugs and did a lot of illegal hustling! I never engaged with them in these illegal activities but I did hang out a lot with them because these were the only people that were of my age and I had no one else to hang out with. 

Then Leo published his series on spiral dynamics and after listening to it all I realized that my friends were all at stage red. Consequently I dropped all the friendship and I never hung out with them ever again. 2 years ago 2 of my former friends died in a car crash because they drove while being drunk and under the influence of heavy drugs like heroin or cocaine. Had I not cut ties with all of them I would have been dead too since I always was on board of that car with them when we were friends, they drove the car while being drunk or high even when I was friends with them and I was in that vehicle with them. Had I not realized thanks of spiral dynamics of their dangerous level of development I would have shared their fate.

2. Spiral dynamics is the most truthful model there is. Red is worse than blue because red will kill you for an unpaid debt, blue will torture you if you are gay or atheist, orange will steal all your money via a crypto scheme, green will cancel you for being mysoginistic, yellow will ignore you all together instead yellow will spend time contemplating the nature of the universe, and turquoise will accept everything as it is.

If you can't understand why blue is worse than orange or why red is worse than blue, then have fun creating your own system. 

Your post is pissing me on so many levels. For the first time in like forever we as a species have a model that accurately maps out different stages of development yet you think that this is some kind of jewish plot that the globalist cabals have created to paint the one true saviour "donald trump" as evil and underdeveloped. 

May aswell be skeptical about the invention of the flashlight, maybe the globalists have invented the flashlight in order to fool us that we can see in the dark, when in fact the flash light is the work of the "jews". 

[Entrepreneur]

2 minutes ago, Daniel Balan said:

1. Spiral dynamics litteraly saved my life. When I was a teen I had a lot of friends that were doing illegal stuff, sold drugs and did a lot of illegal hustling! I never engaged with them in these illegal activities but I did hang out a lot with them because these were the only people that were of my age and I had no one else to hang out with. 

Then Leo published his series on spiral dynamics and after listening to it all I realized that my friends were all at stage red. Consequently I dropped all the friendship and I never hung out with them ever again. 2 years ago 2 of my former friends died in a car crash because they drove while being drunk and under the influence of heavy drugs like heroin or cocaine. Had I not cut ties with all of them I would have been dead too since I always was on board of that car with them when we were friends, they drove the car while being drunk or high even when I was friends with them and I was in that vehicle with them. Had I not realized thanks of spiral dynamics of their dangerous level of development I would have shared their fate.

2. Spiral dynamics is the most truthful model there is. Red is worse than blue because red will kill you for an unpaid debt, blue will torture you if you are gay or atheist, orange will steal all your money via a crypto scheme, green will cancel you for being mysoginistic, yellow will ignore you all together instead yellow will spend time contemplating the nature of the universe, and turquoise will accept everything as it is.

If you can't understand why blue is worse than orange or why red is worse than blue, then have fun creating your own system. 

Your post is pissing me on so many levels. For the first time in like forever we as a species have a model that accurately maps out different stages of development yet you think that this is some kind of jewish plot that the globalist cabals have created to paint the one true saviour "donald trump" as evil and underdeveloped. 

May aswell be skeptical about the invention of the flashlight, maybe the globalists have invented the flashlight in order to fool us that we can see in the dark, when in fact the flash light is the work of the "jews". 

Thanks for your viewpoint.  If you re-read what I posted, I don't think I ever mentioned or alluded to Jews or Donald Trump.  I must really be a terrible communicator if that is what you got from this.

I don't wish to attempt to logically debate your emotions.   You are free to believe as you wish. 

[Daniel Balan]

1 hour ago, Entrepreneur said:

Thanks for your viewpoint.  If you re-read what I posted, I don't think I ever mentioned or alluded to Jews or Donald Trump.  I must really be a terrible communicator if that is what you got from this.

I don't wish to attempt to logically debate your emotions.   You are free to believe as you wish. 

The reason I alluded to conspiracies about jews is because only republican conservatives are the ones that always attack intellectuals and "progressive globalist" ideas, plus your Musk profile pic, Musk that is the n.o 1 warrior against "wokeness". I assumed that you operate under the "skeptical debunker" conservative paradigm that seeks to challange and push back against liberal intellectualism that is represented by models such as spiral dynamics.

Questioning everything is good and a core tenet of development, that is something very good, I was just very pissed personally when I saw this post because I smelled in it right wing conservative rhetoric, which I deeply abhor. It is an issue with me getting triggered. I can't stand anything that even remotely smells republican. It is a problem with me, not with you. I project my biases when I write. 

[Carl-Richard]

6 hours ago, Daniel Balan said:

1. Spiral dynamics litteraly saved my life. When I was a teen I had a lot of friends that were doing illegal stuff, sold drugs and did a lot of illegal hustling! I never engaged with them in these illegal activities but I did hang out a lot with them because these were the only people that were of my age and I had no one else to hang out with. 

Then Leo published his series on spiral dynamics and after listening to it all I realized that my friends were all at stage red. Consequently I dropped all the friendship and I never hung out with them ever again. 2 years ago 2 of my former friends died in a car crash because they drove while being drunk and under the influence of heavy drugs like heroin or cocaine. Had I not cut ties with all of them I would have been dead too since I always was on board of that car with them when we were friends, they drove the car while being drunk or high even when I was friends with them and I was in that vehicle with them. Had I not realized thanks of spiral dynamics of their dangerous level of development I would have shared their fate.

You could've also learned about Jesus and had a similar conversion. Any framework that puts degenerate behavior lower than an alternative could suffice.

Edited Saturday at 06:01 AM by Carl-Richard