Stage green people have a lot of sympathy but tend to lack empathy

[LordFall]

This phenomenon has become increasingly obvious to me over the years as I deal with more and more people that seem to fall under the stage green umbrella but have a weird shadow and seem to lack the ability to empathize in a lot of ways.

First let's define our terms so we know what we're talking about here

The main phenomenon I see is that these people tend to identify really strongly with their own pain and thus they gain a lot of sympathy for the pain of others experiencing SIMILAR CIRCUMSTANCES that often revolve around powerlessness and you vs the system. 

This gives them a disdain for the system and all things related to it like meritocracy, business, competence, quantification, science, skillset, etc. This leads them to fundamentally not understand society and reality and not being able to make the jump to yellow. Other people that aren't in a similar situation as them they don't feel relatability towards and thus their sympathy is cut off and their empathy skills were limited from the start so they turn weirdly bitter, resentful and sometimes openly violently antagonistic. 

This is where cognitive empathy comes in and the ability to understand another even if they live different lives than you. You should be able to empathize with someone from another nation or someone that's richer than you or someone that has different a ideology than you. 

Edited 7 hours ago by LordFall

[yetineti]

Thesis: Your point about cognitive empathy is reasonable, but you overextend it by using Spiral Dynamics to explain disagreement as a defect in the person rather than examining the disagreement itself.

I agree that empathy means understanding people whose circumstances, wealth, or ideology differ from yours. But someone can understand meritocracy, business, and power while still deciding they dislike what those things produce. That is not necessarily a failure of empathy.

The problem is that you label people Green, then treat their disagreement as proof of a “Green shadow”: they supposedly fail to understand reality, cannot make the jump to Yellow, and become bitter, resentful, or antagonistic. That makes the model circular.

Yellow is supposed to be second-tier and capable of integrating perspectives rather than reducing disagreement to a lower stage. So the issue is not that Green has no blind spots. It is that the model is being used to make objections self-invalidating.

That is the same problem I was pointing to in the other thread.

Edited 6 hours ago by yetineti

[LordFall]

5 hours ago, yetineti said:

I agree that empathy means understanding people whose circumstances, wealth, or ideology differ from yours. But someone can understand meritocracy, business, and power while still deciding they dislike what those things produce. That is not necessarily a failure of empathy.

In that case it would be more a lack of cohesive of systems thinking as opposed to a failure of empathy. The things that you've named don't necessarily lead to negative outcomes, you'd have to be more precise in the exact cause and effect that you're pointing to. Lumping capitalism as all bad for example is a classic argument of stage green people. 

5 hours ago, yetineti said:

The problem is that you label people Green, then treat their disagreement as proof of a “Green shadow”: they supposedly fail to understand reality, cannot make the jump to Yellow, and become bitter, resentful, or antagonistic. That makes the model circular.

A lot of people on this forum have a stage green shadow, it's something I encounter a lot. It doesn't mean that I invalidate all their points and use it to refuse the feedback it offers. I simply find that pointing out that fact gives both a compliment to the user that they have an elevated level of development but also seem to fall into pitfalls that seem common for people that generally seem to operate with that set of values. 

I also point to ways for people to integrate new paradigms and models that I personally have found instrumental in both increasing my understanding of the world but also my effectiveness in it. This one insight on the difference between sympathy and empathy I find massive. A lot of times, if you have too much sympathy for someone you will not be able to actually understand the world from their point of view and be able to help them if you're in a coaching position, for example.

Same with developing a political understanding. In that niche a lot of people seem to sympathize first when looking at an unfortunate issue instead of being able to deconstruct the problem to find actually viable solutions. 

Edited 1 hour ago by LordFall