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 9 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 8 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 2 hours ago by LordFall

[Joshe]

It’s as if you want to collapse all of psychology into 6 boxes and then try to refine those 6 boxes, as opposed to not boxing yourself in and looking at the more granular psychological aspects that can actually describe it in high definition, which is far more explanatory and predictive than SD ever could be. 

Obviously, SD can’t explain psychology better than the actual domain of psychology. So when you see something interesting in people, if you ask “how does this couch into SD” (which is what you’re asking here), that’s an inferior question to “what psychological configuration best explains this”. 

IMO, SD is limiting your model of other minds. For example, you’ve suggested I’m green, but usually, the only way I can actually have sympathy is via cognitive empathy, which requires me to model the mind experiencing the plight. So, either your assumption about me was wrong, or your explanation above is, or both.

The truth is, the model has no slot for people like me, which is what led me to seeing how utterly flawed it is. Trying to cram every human into a handful of boxes doesn’t work. Hell, even MBTI has 16 boxes, and that’s not enough. You need like 500+ boxes, and here AO is trying to get by with 6. Lol 

The problem is trying to use SD to understand and label individuals. It takes like 10 seconds to intuit that’s not a good idea, if you’re actually objective and not biased towards it. 

Edited 1 hour ago by Joshe

[Leo Gura]

Green has more empathy than any lower stage. Green just does not extend empathy to those who demonize empathy.

Charlie Kirk demonized empathy, so Green does not want to give him any. Because when you give empathy to those who don't give you empathy, they end up abusing you.

Green does not have empathy for abusers and bullies. It is not easy to have empathy for corrupt elites who flaunt their abuse of power like Andrew Tate.

Edited 23 minutes ago by Leo Gura

[Xonas Pitfall]

I don't think Green's issue is fundamentally lacking empathy. If anything, Green has a lot of empathy. What Green lacks is what Yellow and the stages above it gradually begin to develop: the ability to understand people who themselves may not be operating from empathy or inclusivity, and to figure out how those people can still be integrated into a harmonious, holistic system.

The "meme" of Green, for example, is that it empathizes with LGBTQ+ people. It may also empathize with Muslims, or with conservative Christians, to some extent. But what it can fail to recognize is that these two communities cannot be able to coexist in the same social proximity without significant tension. As a result, Green can end up demonizing the "less open and accepting" perspective, typically the more orthodox, conservative, or traditional one, while being disproportionately accepting and empathetic toward the more progressive perspective.

It's like going to your church-going grandmother's house on Sunday dressed as a goth, then blaming the culture around you for not accepting you. You might pride yourself on being modern, open-minded, and unlike the "brainwashed Blue," while failing to recognize that you are also being invasive of the context you're entering.

Yellow slowly begins to understand this because it has a broader perspective on all the previous stages. As it develops, it starts to see not only the value and internal logic of each stage, but also how different value systems can interact with one another and where they can or cannot coexist.

"Which side is more progressive and accepting? That one is mine, that one is the one I will support!"

vs.  "How can these different perspectives function together, where can they coexist, and where do they fundamentally conflict?"

Note *** Obviously, this is a very constrained characterization of Green. Green can be much more advanced, intelligent, and nuanced than this example suggests. But I think the fundamental limitation of Green isn't really a lack of empathy. It's more a difficulty with integrating perspectives and understanding how fundamentally different value systems can be harmonized, accommodated, or appropriately separated within a functional system.

Green wants to identify with being all-loving and accepting, which is a good direction, but can struggle to integrate the fact that sometimes you need to be aggressive, strategic, confrontational, or exclusionary. It may also underestimate how backwards or low-consciousness some people are, making it harder to figure out how to deal with them and still build a community that functions.

Edited 31 minutes ago by Xonas Pitfall