Leo Gura

Spiral Dynamics Stage Yellow Examples Mega-Thread

1,196 posts in this topic

 

Peter is definitely a great systems thinker. Not even close to a libertarian. 

If he sounds green for you, you're orange. 

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edit- posting when very tired, will be back later

Edited by In Sterquiliniis

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On 10/17/2018 at 0:48 AM, In Sterquiliniis said:

'I suggest that all tier two memes are anti-authoritarian, which is the future of humanity.'

It may be worth noting that with voluntarism (the idea that all human interactions should be voluntary/free of coercion) and free market anarchism (the consistent application of the non aggression principle) you are welcome to have any social, religious and economic structure you desire as long as you don't initiate force on other people to get them to do it.

This would include green style feminist communes, cooperatives, voluntary socialism, eco communes, religious based communities, ranches, cults, tribes whatever, the whole philosophy is 'we don't know which perspective is best so do whatever you like: just don't initiate force on anyone else, if you do the individuals involved may find non coercive and innovative means of dispute resolution, gaining restitution, negotiation, communication or ostracism'.

I see many voluntarists who promote eco conscious and innovative ways of living such as seasteading or permaculture homesteading too.

Yes. It would even imply that property rights are not enforced by initiation of violence. So there would not be a "capitalist system" as such. The rich would have to buy their own security guards / insurance policies instead of making the middle class pay for it. This is very un-orange. Many stage orange "capitalists" tend to insist that the state needs to impose property rights for the economy to work.

I have no problem with green communes etc., as long as they are not mandatory. (Most greens seem to want to erect a mandatory global green commune.) I would even suggest that in an anarchist world entire cities might agree to engage in some lifestyle that in some sense is imposed on everyone in that area. That means some people who dont like it will have to move away. Initiation of violence? Yes. But it is important to note that in anarchism nobody would enforce the anarchism. It is not a system, but the absence of one. We have trouble comprehending that, because we were only schooled in thinking in terms of competing systems. Anarchism doesnt require that every last person on earth decides to abide by the non-aggression principle. It just means enough people abstain from supporting a centralized system for the initiation of violence for there to not be one. That there is no central system for doing evil does not mean that no human can do evil any more. People could for i stance still form a military club, collect money to buy bombs, and then invade stuff. I imagine they will be a lot more revenue-restrained.

In many ways, such a world would be a lot more socialistic than many contemporary greens assume. True the-workers-own-the-factories socialism can only come about as a consequence of a libertarian world, not by imposing it via fiat. The state-socialists are holding that progress back, because they are unwilling to go through the transition stage.

I also like to point out that I am not against eco-consciousness per se. I very much like nature, and probably spend more time in it than most greens. I want the planet to be more green and be nice to animals. I just dont think statist engineering is a very good means of doing that. Social engineering failed at everything else, so why do we still think it is the best means of providing a clean planet? The empirical evidence agrees with me. The world gets cleaner and greener where people get rich, not where they are the most environmentally activist. Parks, clean power plants and plastics removal efforts are capital consumption, that we can afford more of as we get rich. The theory that poverty is good for the planet is about the wrongest idea that everyone believes. It slows down the decline in birth rates and prolonges dependence of old, dirty technologies.

Edited by Taylor04

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On 10/21/2018 at 0:49 AM, Cudin said:

Peter is definitely a great systems thinker. Not even close to a libertarian.

If he sounds green for you, you're orange.

I think some definitions are in order, because you seem to use the term "systems thinker" in some narrowly specific way. It sounds like you are suggesting that it means "thinking of the entire system", i.e. rationally planning all of society, i.e. not taking any systemically created order into account. This would practically be an opposite meaning to the dictionary definition of "systemic order" aka. having a comprehension of emergent properties aka. appreciating when humans can't rationally plan society. It is the view that society is like a plant that we can put in the right conditions for growth, but not make it grow ourselves. Peter Joseph suggests that anything that isnt centrally planned - such as markets - is just narrow and short-sighted gratification of impulses without order. This is an extremely strong statement of not believing in any systemic order at all. Of being so blind to systems thinking that one inserts its opposite in its place. Actual systems thinking (if my definitions are right) would be an approach diametrically opposed to his "humans should plan everything, and everything that isnt planned is just random disorder" view of things. This kind of hyper-anti-systemic thinking isnt just not tier two, it is specifically anti tier two. It is the complete rejection of tier two.

Please tell me the people in this community didnt just find an elaborate way to re-define "systems thinking" to mean good old communism in order to declare it tier two. That would be really silly.

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Wow, this thread is very messy. But very entertaining to read through most of it today :D

Mainly because basically anyone can post anything that's orange or green and call it yellow. So as it's been pointed out several times before; many examples aren't yellow and so this thread is more confusion than clarification about what yellow looks like. 

Now, after thinking about this spiral dynamics stuff for the last few weeks what I came up with was the following:
Orange mistakes yellows for intelligent orange thinkers. They do this to avoid facing the fact that green values are higher up in the spiral than orange values.
Green mistakes yellow for green/yellow; mainly green people who tapped into some yellow aspects like systems thinking and add this to their green worldview. Taylor04 described this in detail in his posts and it makes a lot of sense to me.

I believe that yellow is just way too complex to grasp it as easily as tier 1 stages. So what yellow looks like is very speculative on a tier 1 stage and very hard to explain even if you understand it. 
While we can more or less assess earlier stages to examples like political believes or lifestyles; blue people are often conservatives, orange people like material wealth and green people want equality, I see a yellow person as too complex of a mind to reduce it to a simple observable variable. What I mean is this; this is my hypothesis: you put all the yellow people who exist in the same room and tell them to design a better structure for the world's society; you hand them all the political power in the world. I don't think they would agree with one another. They probably wouldn't yell and be name calling, but they would have very differing views. Because why wouldn't they? Look at yellow's typical values; those aren't goals, but rathers ways of perceiving / ways of thinking.
I think at yellow you can't assume the conclusions of someones thought process. I don't find it hard to believe that a yellow person sympathizes with anarchy or libertarianism. I also don't find it hard to believe that someone on yellow would prefer left-wing politics. Yellow values go way deeper than this level; yellow's values are about its new attitude towards the other stages, its own beliefs and the thought process and consideration that go into everything. (Obviously me simplifiying yellow here as well)

Yellow means understanding and seeing the previous stages; it doesn't mean liking or disliking a particular stage. In fact; that's the exact difference between it and tier 1. Yellow forms its own believes and values independently. That's what happens when green moves up; he starts to question everything and uses all the tools and knowledge he has aquired from beige to green. He doesn't limit himself to "ah I'm yellow, therefore I have to value this and stay away from that. (that's a very blue or green way of looking at things) This means yellow can form opinions about previous stages, - yellow does not mean liking every stage - yellow can pick sides, deem certain stages as more useful than others and - especially lower yellow - still judge or get triggered by other stages. What makes yellow yellow is HOW it reaches conclusions; not based on simple premises about the world, but by understanding the world and perspectives on a deeper and way more complex level. It sounds very simplistic and tier-1ish to believe that everyone who uses systems thinking and nuanced thinking reaches the same conclusion. Actually the more complex the process, the more unlikely it seems that two minds share the same opinions.

Sooooo,,, maybe I'm completely wrong with what I just wrote. The problem is everyone can say they're yellow and believe it themselves, but how do we know? Most of us are not yet yellow, it is also more complex and rarer than blue/orange/green and therefore more difficult to portray in examples. My thesis is - as stated - that yellow individuals differ a lot from one another.

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Am I correct that this is a stage yellow man who tries to explain more advanced turquoise topics?

 

Download video

 

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@Zizzero Yes, I would say that is a good way of putting it.

This kind of meta-perspective thats not "for" either "side", but hovers above them is, ironically, kind of yellow.

I might make some arguments at a later time for why my view of yellow as "a more intelligent orange" is correct. Namely, that it is on that side of the spiral. Much like orange is a more intelligent red, green is a more intelligent blue (real historical blue, as in medieval catholicism or fundamentalist islam, not contemporary american "blue" which isnt really that blue), and blue is a more intelligent purple.

These "orange values" are not orange values, but warm-colored values. Red shares these "orange selfishness" (think a viking chieftain). I think the unifying factor is K-selection bias for the warm colored memes (look that up of you dont know what it means) and r-selection bias for the cold colored ones. Thats also where greens desire for equality comes from. They dont like meritocracy.

Edited by Taylor04

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This is my latest theory on spiral dynamics. It might be right or wrong, but I will share. So I think while societies as a whole move through every stage, we overestimate how much individual people move up. Except for fairly exceptional instances, these stage changes are a multi-generational effort thattakes centuries. People tend to stay what they got born into, and maybe move a quarter vMeme up or so at best. Stage changes mostly happen when people got born into a very late stage.

Individual humans seem to be selected to be either on the warm or the cold side of the spiral, and depending on our level of consciousness we will flock to one of the memes the society we live in offers us. Not sure how this works, but humans seem to be either warm colored (K-selected) or cold colored (r-selected). There is an interesting presentation on youtube called Gene Wars for further explanation. I think it is either genetic or we rate our relative status some time during childhood, and then pick which mating environment would be most beneficial for us, and spend the rest of our lives trying to create that mating environment. The relatively strong/smart want a "selfish" meritocracy where they have all the reproductive advantages, and the weaker r-selected want to stifle meritocracy, so that the strong and smart dont have all the mating advantages. Society seems to go fourth and back between domination by either. Some examples: Red antiquity was bad for the genes of slaves, but good for the one of chieftains. Blue medieval ages brought slave religion and palace economies where mating opportunity was more random and based on status. Anything that stifles meritocracy is good from an r-selected perspective. Then came the orange laissez faire age, which made everyone rich, but genes care about relative status, and capitalism was relatively good for the smart and diligent and relatively bad for the less so. Then we get green with a return of palace economies in the form of welfare-warfare statism. One of the first measures the progressives implemented when they became agenda setting in the 1900's was to implement unequal income taxation and monetary communism, in effect a transfer of wealth from K-selected individuals to r-selected individuals that stifles meritocracy. So this desire for "equality" isnt as noble as they present it, they simply wish to create the mating environment that benefits them at the expense of others.

A contemporary first world K-selected person can be orange or yellow, but cant be green, and a r-selected person can be blue or green, but not orange or yellow. Moving up the spiral only happens on average and "with each burial"; i.e. in the next generation. The children of orange parents may become green, and the children of greens may become yellow.

Society as a whole moves through the stages as an average of where the individuals are. So lets start with a blue-dominated society. Here most r-selected people will be blue, but the K-selected people will be split between red and orange. Since the cold colored side is unified and the warm colored side is split, the cold colored meme will dominate society. The blues usually dont move up, because their society confirms their views and they are in an echo chamber. Now, as the average level of consciousness improves, there will be a net change of warm colored people from red to orange. (That doesnt have to mean that they are the same people moving up, but that new oranges replace old reds.) And at a certain point most of the warm colored individuals are orange, and society tips to being blue-orange. But blue is the low end of the spiral now, so as the level of consciousness improves the r-selected people will start resonating more with green. Now the cold colored side is split and the warm side is unified and society will be orange dominated. As enough cold colored people appreciate green, we again get a tip to first orange-green and then green domination. This leaves us with the current situation in the first world: a green-dominated society where the K-selected slowly trickle up from orange to yellow. Greens stay where they are, because moving up would not only require moving against a groupthink they find plausible, but also to steer in the right direction from within a perspective that leads them astray. They cant go towards yellow, because they dont even know what yellow is. The best they can do is to improve within their meme and be good people, which is difficult enough, so their kids have a chance to be yellow. Turquoise wont really happen until society is sufficiently yellow for new r-selected children to start rebelling against their yellow parents, which wont be for another 30 years or more.

Now, this is of course a massive generalization and not always as clear cut. One reason it might apper that people move from cold to warm or vice versa is that we might have become culturally indoctrinated by a meme that does not fit our selected mentality. For instance, a cold colored individual might have been born in an orange pocket and then move to green as he individuates away that conditioning. This should not be seen as a move up the spiral but a shedding of the wrong conditioning. And since the dominant meme runs the means of predation, and therefore gets first dips on indoctrinating all new individuals, many people are conditioned into the dominant meme for the first decades of their lives and then individuate away from it. So someone born in todays society would usually receive a green conditioning and if that person is r-selected, it will feel all is proper and the green shades fit. But if the person is K-selected, it will move to a warm-colored meme after childhood. Some people never quite escape this, due to lack of access to information or courage to go against the mainstream.

What sometimes seems to happen that the split side will form an amalgamation. So for instance the green and blue may find enough common ground to partner up to overpower orange for a while. I think naziism in the 30's was such a blue-green amalgamation. (Hardcore green environmentalism and socialist "egalitarianism", but with deep blue elements such as loyalty.) Communism, too, seems like green intellectuals taking charge of a blue society and forming a blue-green amalgamation. The reason they fought each others was not due to ideological differences, but because cold colored dominance tends to be violent and because they competed for the same ideological territory. It was a fight of Coke vs. Pepsi.

Another example: neoliberalism in the 70's might have been the orange-yellow amalgamation that overpowered green dominance for long enough to avoid economic collapse in the west. (Early yellow thinkers formulated the economic theories, and orange went along with them because they could see empirically that it worked.) This recent mixing might be a reason why so many greens have a hard time keeping orange and yellow apart. In their lifetimes they have mostly experienced it as a mixture, and orange has taken on a lot of yellow rhetoric. But the distinction is that yellow understands proper systems thinking aka. emergent properties (for instance free market economics) and orange only applies them empirically.

Edited by Taylor04

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I was asked to provide some contemporary yellow thinkers, and since this is the yellow examples thread, here's what I replied:

Most people in the first world are somewhat yellow, because they grew up being subjected to multiple perspectives. Matt Ridley is in the best yellow thinker I can think of. His latest book The Evolution of Everything is a great introduction into proper systems thinking. James Damore, the writer of the google memo, is an example of the kind of yellow meta perspective that sees how the political sides are both necessary and a balance to each other. The youtube channel Rebel Wisdom seems very yellow and has some videos about spiral dynamics. And the blog libertyblitzkrieg has a series on spiral dynamics that influenced my writings here. I think The Rubin Report is a good place to hear yellow ideas, although its not as pure. And I think Douglas Carswell, Stefan Molyneux and Alex Epstein deserve honorary mentions as well, even though they have some tier one aspects to them. And lets not forget F. A. Hayek (and other supply-side economists) who might have been one of the earliest yellow thinkers of humanity.

I like to add Nassim Taleb, Jeffrey Tucker, Tom Woods, and especially the blog Brodoland, which explains the true yellow concept very well, and mentions some "further reading" sources, but gets some details wrong. For instance, I dont think red and blue exist much any more in the first world. They were pre-industrial phenomena, with a completely different outlook on life than anyone in the first world has today. A real blue would be some medieval peasant, who's bordering starvation, mired in superstition and cruely traumatized. The first worlders we call "blue" are not really blue but have an orange/green perspective on life, and may have a slight blue tint to it, thats it. They are often orange with plenty of green beliefs (thats unavoidable because of green media and schooling monopolies), who have maintained traditional religion in place of green religion (environmentalism), which are functionally the same; belief in an invisible threat in the sky that requires moralizing our actions to avert divine retribution (warmism). Blue and green religion run on the same cognitive hardware, and it is easy to see how someone indoctrinated into one can easily flip to the other.

If people respond to any of my posts with serious arguments, I will be around to respond to them for at least a while. (They start on page 14 of this thread.) Also, I'd like to mention an error in an above post that I cant change any more: the term "systemic order" should say "spontaneous order". Look the latter term up if you want to know what I mean by proper yellow "systems thinking", a term which is thrown around a lot here, but usually just seems to refers to peoples (tier one) belief in central planning.

Edited by Taylor04

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I've found this channel to be a great YELLOW source for me. It explains all the basic topics of Yellow plus all the connections between them.
@Leo Gura
I would like to hear your opinion.

I post here one of my favorite videos from the Systems thinking play list, but feel free to dig more into the channel, it really has great content.

 

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Ifound Jonathan Haidt to be very yellow, he points out two POV and stays neutral, talking about the importance of both in society, in the end he talks about moral humility, which is respecting everyone’s opinion and not having the black/ white, right/ wrong, good/bad way of thinking 

what do you guys think? 


"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." Shakespeare

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCqtX3EPGsnmWjK76m5Vpbw

 

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Yellow poetry from Khalil Gibran :x

“Let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together, yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow.”

Khalil Gibran, The Prophet


"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." Shakespeare

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCqtX3EPGsnmWjK76m5Vpbw

 

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I'm surprised that no one has mentioned Elliot Hulse:

 


I have permanently locked myself out of my account to force myself to focus on my work. Goodbye.

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On 11/12/2018 at 6:51 AM, MsNobody said:

 

On 11/12/2018 at 6:51 AM, MsNobody said:

Ifound Jonathan Haidt to be very yellow, he points out two POV and stays neutral, talking about the importance of both in society, in the end he talks about moral humility, which is respecting everyone’s opinion and not having the black/ white, right/ wrong, good/bad way of thinking 

what do you guys think? 

I agree. He seems like a green-friendly yellow.

Edited by Taylor04

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