Spiral Dynamics Debunked

[gengar]

Spiral Dynamics is a model ignorant of so many dimensions of psychology and society.

It's typical "game 2" / Schmachtenberger slop - stuck in a liberal/materialist paradigm with an "integral" sauce plastered on top.

An example that debunks most of it is:

Why do people who regress from green, mostly regress to blue? like new-age hippies who suddenly become christian. Why wouldn't they regress to orange first?

There are countless examples of new age people who went christian. The link is that it was mostly because of their spiritual beliefs changing. Spiral dynamics has value, but is highly overvalued, especially in this forum.

[Leo Gura]

SD is limited. Use it loosely when it helps to make sense of things. If it fails, use other ideas.

Don't get hung up about it.

Yes, it is not a perfect model of human behavior because humans are wild motherfuckers that follow no logic.

[aurum]

48 minutes ago, gengar said:

Why do people who regress from green, mostly regress to blue? like new-age hippies who suddenly become christian. Why wouldn't they regress to orange first?

The spiral is not as simple as new age = Green and Christian = Blue.

You could have Green Christianity or new age done in a Blue fashion.

What matters is not content of beliefs, but things like core values, ontology, circle of concern, capacity for perspectival thinking, relationship to rationality, metacognition and construct-awareness.

[Cubbage]

Regression and progression of one's mind is not always linear.  The model is framed as a spiral for a very good reason. 

[Leo Gura]

To be fair, a Spiral is a line.

[Cubbage]

6 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

To be fair, a Spiral is a line.

You learn something new everyday. Now I know why I failed maths 🥸.

[Leo Gura]

SD does imply that people move up the Spiral in a linear sequence.

It is not like people are born Yellow and become Red with old age. That's not a thing. So in this sense SD is linear. But it is not 100% linear. Maybe like 80%.

The complicating factor is that people are born into cultures which are at a different level of development than the born person.

You can be born into a Green culture but be Red as an individual for personal reasons.

Also, cultures are not homogenous. There is no geography that has a 100% Green culture.

This makes SD very messy.

Edited 57 minutes ago by Leo Gura

[Recursoinominado]

Makes sense to me that advancing stages is linear and regressing may not be. It depends heavily on the situation. Maybe you are a green hippie but you are enlisted to a war and you become a stage red psycho in order to survive. Also, it is my understanding that no one  is "pure green" or "pure blue", we stretch across a few stages, specially when you reach second tier, you may go "back" to previous stages to polish some aspects in order to become balanced. Imagine a stage yellow thinker who lacks stage blue discipline or stage orange ambition or stage red aggressive grit. 

I myself am going through this process.

I a somewhat yellow but I have many aspects to work on that I didn't from the previous stages. Right now, my country is in the middle of an important election and I am getting triggered as a classic stage green. 

It's an amazing model to make sense of the world.