A scholarly friend of mine who does cognitive counseling was telling me about spiral dynamics a few days back. Spiral dynamics is a theory about personal and social development that characterizes developmental stages into discrete categories and provides a convenient color label to each of those stages. I want to briefly discuss those stages and then demonstrate how this is relevant to the ZM.
Reflecting upon our current society, the main colors we find today are red, blue, orange, and green.
RED is a stage that is based purely on power. If I don't like you, I want you dead or somehow to be rid of you. Many members of the current Tea Party group exhibit this mental stage. They want liberals gone and anyone else who disagrees with them. The Wild West and days of the Pharaohs were very Red.
BLUE is a stage where people grow weary of this "kill or be killed" mentality so they come to a place of rigid conformity. In other words, they sacrifice some freedoms for safety. We can be groped, x-rayed, and suspiciously watched as we pass through airport security because that makes us feel much safer about flying. (By the way, a couple of years ago, I found out I had carried two box cutters on board with me by accident!) Everyone has a specific place in this organized society and deviants need to just come in line with the group. Authority is important and the laws put in place are for our own good; that's why they're laws, after all! Getting into the reasons behind the formation of laws is unimportant. Many democrats fall into this category. We accept the laws because they are good for all of us so we just need to obey them. Rebellion against the rules is seen as a sign of REDness, which no one wants to go back to.
ORANGE people tire of the constraints of BLUE conformity, so they seek to break away and be special. Laws should apply to everyone else, not them. They want to manipulate others for their purposes because they know better. Neo-conservatives fall into this group. They don't want to actually send their own families into war to die, but they will pull the strings behind the scenes to get what they want through political tactics. They exploit the current rules to feed their self-interests. America's obsession with celebrity is a sign that as a whole, we are moving toward Orange.
GREEN people realize the limitation of the ego-centric Orange. The irresponsibility of everyone greedily grasping for what they want in a world of natural limits becomes apparent. The idea that some people are just "special" and deserve more than others becomes unpleasant. Greens rebel in an opposite pattern and want to believe that all perspectives are valid. Everyone should have a say at the table, and all points of view are equal. This stage leads to a quality of impotence because deciding which action to take if all points of view are equal is a challenge. If morality is culturally relative, then another culture has no right to even criticize the merits of our culture.
GRAY is a place of devastating disillusionment. It seems that no one knows what they are talking about and so the whole of life is a big disappointment. Suicide and "humanicide" ideation are frequent. Just blow up the planet and oneself to stop this mess. It's the only way. In a more psycho-spiritual sense, this is the stage when a person lets go of all gurus, ministers, religions, and self-created beliefs.
YELLOW comes about through a major transformation in which the prior colors are appreciated and understood for what they are, but there are no illusions about their limitations. We all must have some cooperation (blue) to coexist, and we must celebrate our special characteristics (orange), but there needs to be a broader awareness about the effect each one of us has on the whole of global society (green). You have the power to act decisively (red) but you don't become identified with any particular action/system (gray). The resource based economy may be the next step in human society, but it most likely won't be the last. When the time comes to let the RBE go, people above gray will not rebel against that because they are not committed to RBE-identification, only to the well being of people.
Spiral Dynamics is a useful shorthand to describe different interactions as they relate to discussion that the Zeitgeist Movement elicits. The first point is that a person in orange will be misunderstood by a person in red. The Neo-cons exploit the Tea Party by speaking down to them in the way they understand to use them for their purposes. It's not always successful because the Reds have an undisciplined streak about them. Peter Joseph is clearly in Yellow (or above) and as such some of his points about the unequal validity of each viewpoint will be off-putting to people in Green (which this group tends to attract). It reminds Greens of the tactics of Orange and they want nothing to do with that!
Generally, the movement from one stage to the next is prompted by a crisis or awareness about some conflict and suffering, personal or global. This means that the person becomes disillusion with the current system. The cracks are appearing and it leads to skepticism. The stated present goal of the ZM is to promote awareness. The "awareness" is about the inadequacies of the current monetary system. If you are in Blue, you do not want to hear about changing "the system," you just need to make minor modifications. The ZM states clearly that the system itself is to blame for the suffering. It doesn't just allow for it, it engenders suffering on a massive scale, which is why it becomes obvious that the system must change.
When discussing the ZM with people, there is often a reaction against it because it entails such a major transformation that simple actions to change things are no longer meaningful. The result is an effort to undermine the ZM through whatever means so that the ZM as a whole can be dismissed. For people involved in the ZM, I think it's important to keep the focus on the awareness of the damage of the current system. A mind that is identified with the current system has not experienced the disillusionment to allow for something new. Sometimes, when deciding what to do, it is important to sweep away the old clutter. You cannot redesign your room if you haven't cleaned it out first. The majority of the "audience" will be in colors that are Green or below. To try to paint a pretty picture of a RBE is like trying to lure someone out to play when they are comfy on the couch in front of the their TV with a bag of chips. They must have some compulsion to get up off their duff.
For people involved in the ZM, it is appropriate to identify it as a significant change from the current system, and then to bring back the discussion about the problems of our current economic paradigm. After all, when 2+ billion people are starving, how successful is the current model which they want to keep defending? Or what about people who are nutritionally starving but overfed with empty calories because they can't afford fresh foods? At what point does the current system become just too uncomfortable? To put it bluntly, is it only when you are starving that you care to do anything about it? Isn't it then too late?
For those that are certain the kind of change the Zeitgeist Movement advocates (Resource Based Economy) is impossible, or will never happen, etc.. Have failed to see the progression of social structures in history that has got us to the point we're at today.
ReplyDeleteMassive changes have taken place (woman's suffrage movement, Ghandi in India, America's split from England, worker's rights, Civil Rights Movement) and if you look farther back, the evolution out of the Dark Ages and the discovery of the methods of science.
From this view the progression over time is clear, showing that there's no 'fixed' social system. Once someone can see this, it takes the possibility of the Venus Project from the impossible to the possible.