Some people think postmodernism is just a deficient form of the integral structure of consciousness. This is the opinion of a few people who prefer Jean Gebser’s version of integral.
From that perspective, there is no “skipping Green”…
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Yesterday I got to participate in an interesting Zoom call on the theme of who or what is really part of the Integral Community? It’s not like we took a vote or that someone handed down a ruling - just a lot of different perspectives shared. My opinion was pretty “big tent” - if a conversation is at least using Ken Wilber’s work as a jumping off point, good enough reason to include it here. This conversation is a case in point. Ken Wilber said a lot of things at one time or another, and I’m not sure they all are consistent with each other. So different people coming at the question of what green really is from different angles is a worthy discussion, one I find very intriguing.
My own instinct when addressing a very synthetic concept like “green” or “postmodern” is to unpack it with respect to its historical origins, underlying experiences, causal connections to other things, systemic foundations and so on. A couple things need straightening out in my view. One is - what is the relationship between psychological development (UL quadrant) and cultural evolution (LL quadrant)? Is “green” a developmental stage for persons, for societies, or both? And if both, do persons and societies somehow synch up with one another in fixed sequential ways?
Without proposing a complete solution here (it would take a book or two or many more …) It seems likely to me from quick and dirty observation that postmodern attitudes develop most readily in a modern social context. The modern creates the framing for the postmodern. But historical research convinces me that the modern played out differently in different parts of the world.
So for example, looking at Integral applied to Afghanistan (home country of some of my students), do they need to go through specific developmental sequences involving losing their religion (magenta to orange), becoming raging capitalists and scientific rationalists (full orange), deconstructing all those orange attitudes to become eco-friendly, SJW, cultural relativists, and only then maybe leveling up to second tier? Or can we just skip a bunch of that and jump in at the part where we are all very high-tech, culturally diverse together, and self-reflective enough to navigate both personal and cultural development levels? As a practical matter, I absolutely need to work from the second hypothesis - that step skipping is not only OK, but that it’s a current vital necessity. My students come from all over the world, many from places that never really went through the modern or the postmodern in any obvious way. And yet, together we are studying topics like AI and cloud services, which are supposedly the information underpinnings of teal and higher. How to square that circle?
My working hypothesis is that second tier has access to all prior vMemes because second tier has access to all the world’s knowledge (once through great libraries, more recently through internet) and because second tier has access to the cognitive skills and emotional maturity to process all that knowledge. My historical take on Western experience over the past 600 years or so is that the Western modern and postmodern involved a lot trial and error blundering that need not and should not be literally repeated by everyone else. Better we just harvest the better fruits of this Western experience (like critical thinking, experimental science, or linguistic sophistication) and teach them directly in current contexts. In summary, let’s just be second tier right now and arrange our education programs accordingly. Because honestly, what’s the real alternative?
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I’ll make a few comments that may or may not be helpful to you.
According to Wilber’s theory, for both. In the West, if you as an individual are at the amber stage and below (50-60% of the population) then you might “synch up” with the culture as a whole a little better than people at the orange stage and above (40-50% of the population).
From this statement, you see/believe your Afghanistan students to be at the amber (or below) stage?
The thing I would point to is that capitalism and (more sophisticated) science and rationalism emerged during the orange stage, but are not the only markers of that stage (world-centrism, equal rights are others), and there have been and are people at the orange stage who are religious–giving up religion is not a requirement, although in the big picture view of things, this stage did in general put religion far away on the back burner. If you look at individual developmental theories within the Integral metatheory model, you find things like Piaget’s formal operations stage (in cognitive development) and conscientiousness in Cook-Greuter’s self-identity development theory, both of which are deeper structures underlying the orange stage, and these are in some respects better markers for that stage of development in individuals than any embrace of “raging capitalism” or such. So maybe some of your students have some orange qualities already? (and perhaps some green as well?) Just wondering.
I think the Integral stages are marked by an exponential perspective-taking, i.e. an Integralist can see, understand, take and embody the perspectives of 1st tier stages, as well as their own perspective (a meta-perspective so to speak). AI and cloud storage can be used by anyone regardless of stage. Cloud storage is basically a bunch of metal file cabinets in cyberspace, isn’t it, and filing seems very much an orange/rational stage creation to me as does cyber technology in general, and while AI can present different perspectives of different stages and synthesize them (and does a fairly good job of this, it seems), it does this based upon data it was trained on provided by actual people at those stages, and does not itself have a personal perspective. So I do not see AI as truly Integral, at least not at this point.
We associate the internet with the green stage, and yet the green stage in the West dates to the late 50’s and early 60’s at least, and the internet came much later: you undoubtedly know this, but only 1% of two-way communication through information networks was through the internet in 1993, 51% in 2000, and 97% in 2007. So I suspect we haven’t yet seen the technology that will be the true information underpinnings of the Integral stage, and I suspect it might be more centered in innate human abilities than technology. Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking.
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Is it possible that it is because the stage is not completely embodied? At least for myself i see that becauseof ADHD im intellectually reaching for higher levels, but the rush to it in an anxiety shadow of “the race” wasnt helping. Im slowing down to anchor…
Here is where I got the tech stuff from. Not making it up personally. Someone shared a chart on a recent Zoom call that was mapping things like AI to teal and turquoise.
https://app.contextdriven.ai/register
On an information level, I’d say postmodern needed at least decent libraries back in the books and print era. This was one reason postmodern tends to sprout best in university towns. In the age of the internet, of course, postmodern can spread more quickly, and it has.
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There have already been a lot of answers already, but I’m not sure anyone answered the part above. And from my own experience, I believe Empathy is the focus in green, even though I understand the use of the word compassion.
Postmodernism is the “mind” of Green, whereas Empathy is the “heart”. Where Orange focuses on Action, Growth and Change, personal and external - Green focuses on increasing the time before taking an Action, choosing how to Grow and what to Change.
Empathy/self-empathy is a useful tool in increasing the capabilities of the parasympathetic nervous-system, and the ability of the prefrontal cortex to relax the Fight, Flight or Freeze system, allowing for new options to emerge where before there was possibly only one/two.
Nonviolent-communication is a good example. And it isn’t really about giving up rationality, but more a post-hoc realization that all the guilt, shame, conflict and relativism you encounter on your way to a more complex (self-) understanding, is going to be much more doable if you have a way to soothe yourself and others.
I found this an important point. Even though I would prefer to say that this is what green Intends to do. Or do you see this differently?
There are many parts of me where I would say I would benefit more from integrating the green perspective, than trying to build the structures “above it”.
I am wondering if a reason why there is a dislike for green isn’t necessarily because of people that gravitate mainly towards green, but from the trickling down effect (not sure if this is a thing, but it seems to be so). Saving the planet done blue for example; you are either for or against climate-change. Or LGBQT - Either you give full, unquestionable support or you are anti-LGBQT in general.
I would love for this to be more of a focus in Integral. I do still believe that both the INTJ and INFP in this example would have a positive impression of each other in general, even when they would disagree on certain specifics or approaches.
What I find important about this is that when we talk about Skipping Green, I believe it would be helpful to understand that we are integrating Cognitive Functions of a Stage, not the Stage itself. I mean, personalities, enneagrams etc. all point towards differences, and as such green is still in development.
In my experience this opens up to the possibility of “going back to basics” and focusing on building a more firm basis, than trying to build a higher tower. Instead of skipping green, it makes more sense to see if one can develop more of oneself close to the altitude.
This is something I came across a while back, and I’m not familiar with the work they do, but I liked this whiteboard that showed the different areas and their respective “colours”. (See minute 9:41). This kind of “balanced” growth is something that I find inspiring, even as it is quite hard to do.
Took a look at Daniel Scmachtenberger, and even though I’m not that familiar with the Integral movement per se, I do like the angle. And also wondering if you know any women in the same category as well?
I believe the same, as I’m more prone to imagine there is some sort of trickle-down effect going on from the more complex vMemes to the other ones, giving rise to all manners of Signalling. And I’m not sure to which degree this facillitates that people reach a more complex level - as I sometimes wonder how much actual Growth there is with regard to the stages - or if simply it is now easier to find others on a similar level, not only because of the internet, materialistic gains, transportation and easier access to a language - but also because there are a lot more people - and therefore statistically so many more people on one’s respective Stage.
So yes, this is very relevant.
But first, my verdict is still out if Western Civilization has “achieved” Green, or if we moved past Green and directly into “Shadow Green”. So I’m not pointing fingers.
Is it possible to achieve Teal without a deeply rooted respect for the rights of other groups to live in direct contradictions to one’s beliefs?
I don’t think it is.
Yes, an individual and a group can intellectually understand very complex ideas. They may “Grow Up” along several lines of development. My point would be, though that if they don’t also “Clean Up”, they are living in shadow and the result is a corrupted existence.
In the USA, can a man who has a gut instinct to physically harm homosexuals be said to be at Teal? Maybe he is a Nobel Prize winner in some groundbreaking esoteric Integral Science field. But if this hypothetical person also freaks out at a Pride parade and guns the engine or joins an insurrection to overthrow a Democracy - at that point I’d say he was never Integral in the first place but just thought and pretended he was.
From there we can easily transplant that to Afghanistan. Is the respect for others to live their lives according to their wishes and their own beliefs genuine, or will it crack under pressure?
Its a very difficult thing to separate one’s self from one’s surrounding culture. What I see is that people are only able to shift slightly into a sub culture from the main culture. I’ve only known a handful of “individuals” in my life whose subconscious was not dominated by their culture. The result is that I think 9 out of 10 people who believe they might be Integral are only so on the tip of the iceberg while the bulk of their subconscious drags this down without them even knowing it.
I’d give that one a hard “no” for a variety of reasons. In the book Developmental Politics, Steve McIntosh does a good job pointing out that personal development is one thing and cultural evolution is something else. So the idea of entire civilizations manifesting one developmental level or another just seems like a category confusion. Beyond that, in any given civilization, people are going to be at different developmental stages. I would even go beyond that and say that any given person has access to different skills, attitudes, and behaviors that are acquired in different stages of life. The things we all learned in kindergarten still matter, even if we have layered a few advanced degrees on top of those kindergarten skill sets. So nothing really goes away, and nothing new is immediately propagated all over a particular culture region. Education and cultural diffusion matter.
That said, the rooms in which I teach are full of many Africans, Middle Easterners, Latin Americans, Asians, and Westerners. The basic “play nice” rules we all learned in kindergarten seem to be enough. Last night, for example, we looked at the global distribution of AWS data centers, and discussed why there were more of those in the West and Asia than in South America and Africa. Also why data governance works differently in the US, Europe and China. No one was especially triggered by any of this. It’s a sort of casual, obvious, globalized milieu that no one really questions.
That said, there is a diversity office on campus, plenty of affinity groups for different identities, social justice projects aplenty, and all the usual green trappings. I’m just saying that when I see women of color from the global south or the global east in my classes, I don’t feel the need to send them off to post-modern training so they can check some sort of “green” box before getting on to whatever they actually want to do.
Classic postmodernism in the West involved a lot of middle class white kids discovering there was a big wide world out there and playing dress up with everybody else’s culture in a veritable orgy of exoticism. It was a phase we needed to go through. (I say “we”, because yeah, I was part of that). In today’s world, however, that all seems pretty retro and ridiculous. My students of color from around the world are not preciosities. They are just people. Why not just have constructive personal relationships and let the cultural chips fall where they may?
Well, that’s my point - that the post-modern training I infer you are talking about isn’t healthy Green. It’s some weird bypass of Green. Yet this does not mean these women in your example necessarily get a pass.
My experience isn’t in Africa or South or West Asia, but in East Asia. I can for sure say that East Asia is by and large pre-Green and has tremendous cultural barriers to Green that are difficult for individuals to go against.
Most of these countries are real horror show when you peek into alleys or stumble into the wrong part of town. It’s literally the conventional wisdom of many of these cultures that parts of their own society are sub-human and undeserving of basic human dignity. Is it possible for individuals to achieve Teal without questioning this conventional mindset of the society they are living in? That’s even before we get into the fear of diversity.
While no one needs “post modern training”, they do need to recognize basic Green tenets in order to pass on to 2nd Tier - check boxes if you want to call them that. Don’t treat handicapped and the poor worse than pigs and dogs, for example. Then don’t treat dogs the way they treat dogs, and so on.
That’s a very interesting point. Our local efforts in these areas are staffed by people of various colors, gender-diverse people, and straight white people who are very sympathetic to inclusion in all its dimensions. I would not say any of this is “unhealthy”. I would say, however, that the social theory behind all this is less comprehensive than something like Integral, and when something like CRT is overgeneralized to become a one-size-fits-all answer to social analysis and social action, that leads to some unhealthy results. (Not picking on CRT or “green” in general about that overgeneralization point. Traditional religions or modern science or economics also get overgeneralized and misapplied with similarly unhealthy outcomes.)
Also fascinating. Leads me in a couple directions. The local framing of “Asian” is one of the many minorities generally oppressed by white privilege. Of course, in Asia itself, Asians are not exactly an oppressed minority. Against the grand sweep of world history, the Western colonial era in Asia was the exception rather than the rule. Most of the historical empire building, colonizing, repression, discrimination, enslavement, and exploitation of Asians was conducted largely by Asians themselves against other Asians. This leads me back again to the “overgeneralization” point in my other response above. A model of history in which “white privilege” is the prime mover is going to hit the rocks against many stubborn facts and will lead social justice activists astray, because, among other things, of their blindness to history and human nature outside of their own immediate experiences.
Speaking of immediate experiences, it occurs that all my immediate experiences with East Asians (native or 1st or 2nd generation immigrants) is in elite academic and professional settings. As far as I know, some of these people may have servants at home who they abuse in the most racist or classist way possible. But in public, professional settings, a sort of practical multiculturalism necessarily prevails. It turns out money and power don’t correlate all that directly with ethnic tribalism. Global capitalists who seek above all to maximize need to adopt a sort of functional multiculturalism, lest they leave key customers or talent pools to their global competition. For this reason, I imagine the future of “green” or “teal” in Asia has a lot do with how Asia navigates global networks of trade, production, power, and influence. This may well be a purely elite project for a quite a good long time into the future.
The term “white privilege” is such a bizarre term when applied globally. I “get it” in the countries where whites have conquered and continue to occupy, such as Israel or South Africa or the United States.
Where Whites do not actually occupy the country nor hold power in government, I just don’t see white privilege. Modern White Liberals may feel self shame and flog themselves and say there is white privilege everywhere, but this is more a psychological ailment than reality. This is why I refer to it as “shadow green”. It’s White Fragility that they convert to White Guilt and then try to project onto all white people everywhere on the planet.
This doesn’t mean I deny the holocaust or other genocides or anything. It’s more that I accept that the Genocides of Colonialism and Industrialization were only the most recent that my ancestors participated in as both perpetrators and victims. I have no guilt for my Norse ancestors who raped an pillaged across Britain, nor for my family name that was a reward from the Romans for slaughtering my Celtic relatives, nor for my ancestors who assisted in the slave trade and gave my family name to children of slaves they raped.
I understand all these things happened, but I don’t jump on the white guilt bandwagon and say things that are just not true. Is there white privilege in the United States? Oh yes, for sure. Is white privilege a thing abroad? Not so much, or “it depends”.
On the global level, financial privilege trumps white privilege in the vast majority of my experiences. To say that White people have the most wealth and therefore the most privilege would also have to be qualified with “it depends”.
The only white privilege that exists in most countries such as China, Korea, Japan and many others is to be a white monkey with a slightly higher standing than the other foreigner monkeys. White privilege doesn’t trump Asian privilege in Asian countries.
I believe a similar circumstance exists in many Arabic and / or Muslim countries. Whites hold status slightly above other financial slaves but there is no question of even being equal much less privileged. Money and sometimes Religion tend to even the playing field far more than whiteness.
Ethnic tribalism is alive an well throughout Asia. I don’t know any person with a sense of perception who could live in most countries and not see it. There are barriers in place that prevent one sub race from gaining financial or political standing. Imagine if there were never any black people in the USA and instead Jim Crow laws were against Irish and Scotts, for example. The same “race”, but nevertheless still a kind of apartheid to prevent one racial subgroup from rising to equal status. Because the apartheid in these countries it is not White people doing the exploitation or killing, there is no story because it does not feed the desire to self-flagellate and consume white liberal shame.
I don’t think global trade will magically change this, because all the prosperity of the past 40 years up to this point hasn’t done so yet and that part of the cycle is ending. Migrant workers are still a hated subculture and there are still untouchable cultures and “non-people” in many countries. Just ask any local when you are visiting these countries “Why does everything look so nice but those people are living houses that look like heaps of garbage?” Expect a bold reply that would make any white nationalist glance around before saying in the USA.
What we see today is that China is in for a rough road ahead as their form of Communism/Capitalism starts to crumble and as this has a knock on effect across the region.
What we are seeing is a system is crumbling due to this very thing we are talking about. Those who had control over trade, production, power and influence did not even have Orange values, forget about Green. Corruption, graft, waste, nepotism and worse have been the norm and we are now seeing the results.
Symbolic of this is the Three Gorges Dam. Seen as a pinnacle of Chinese achievement, it has started to deform. The first reply to this accusation is “LIES, it isn’t deforming”, and attacking the people who presented the satellite photos showing a clear deformation. Then later when it was impossible to refute the photographic evidence, the new line was “The deformation is safe. Nothing to worry about”. Several sectors of China are similarly “warping” with denial followed by “well, it doesn’t matter anyway”.
A country is a collection of individuals and while it is possible for individuals to not conform to their society. it is very difficult. I would say that it’s not possible for a culture or nation to “skip levels”, and it will hinder individuals being able to even slowly take baby steps to “grow up” beyond where that culture is. In the China example again, you simply cannot form a group with motives at Green or Teal. Those who have tried are either dead or in concentration camps.
From Wikipedia:
Hundreds of thousands of Falun Gong practitioners are estimated to have been extrajudicially imprisoned, and practitioners who are currently in detention are reportedly subjected to forced labor, psychiatric abuse, torture, and other coercive methods of thought reform at the hands of Chinese authorities.
The stress I’d like to put on is “hundreds of thousands” of people, who were trying to achieve some kind of spiritual advancement.
First, thanks for the very detailed, world-spanning picture. That’s the level of social analysis that is needed. I picked the quote from your reply above because I want to relate it to the Ken Wilber essay posted yesterday on revolutionary social change. Ken is quite clear that nations are never on one level. He acknowledges the basic Marxian insight that “base” has a large influence on “superstructure”. Large nations like China, for example, have a spectrum of cultures ranging from primitive to traditional to various shades of modern, because there are many different types of production going on. So I would not expect nations as a whole to manifest some level or another. Never has happened yet. Likely never will happen.
Sorting out China is a very interesting and vital question, but I want to circle back to my own locality where the ground feels firmer. My ideas about skipping stages (personally - not entire nations as a whole) relates to the basic Marxian “means of production” idea, which anyone here is more than welcome to interpret through Ken’s AQAL version. Namely, for the topics I teach - AI, cloud, web applications - globalized human brains ARE the means for production. Students who on a cognitive level aren’t at least at what Integral calls teal can’t even do the job. But part of the cognitive teal package is the ability to access cultural codes at prior levels. Because when your native skill set is data filtering, data visualization, and linguistic transformations (human language, machine language, whatever) all prior culture is just another data set. More embodied, practical understandings of the tribal, the traditional, the conventionally modern, the pluralistic postmodern need more than internet search or AI manipulation, but my point is global information orchestration is now tending to come first, and figuring out what it all means and what to do with it comes later.
In China, the Falun Gong may be repressed, but what about ByteDance? Xi - a Leninist through and through - is not letting anyone pop their head up, lest someone, somehow might rival his power. But Xi’s power will wither just as surely if he does not give the Chinese tech sector some room to run. Which brings us back to that means of production thing.
Well, yes - I agree it’s not that difficult for any Master Degree student in about a hundred different disciplines to grasp the concepts of Tier 2 on an intellectual level. It’s even possible to intellectually grasp higher levels.
The problem I see is that in the information age people are coming to incorrect conclusions about what reality is. As an example:
This is where people get mixed up. Often people believe that what they see is reality, and ignore that it isn’t, actually - what they see is only what they see, nothing more. The internet doesn’t make your shoes, nor grow the wheat that is in your bread, nor transport those things to you. The web / cloud / whatever - is actually no more than just a glorified global “personal organizer”. It tells the driver to pick something up and deliver it at this place and that time - it does not actually do the picking up, driving, delivering, etc.
Now back to integral theory - the theory is similar to the web. Yes, it’s possible to conceptualize things. It’s another thing entirely to get those things done and live that kind of lifestyle in the real world.
One short description of Teal is: “deep understanding that all levels on the pathway to Teal are present and right”. This is simplicity itself to do on the internet. If someone says something you really do not like or becomes aggressive online, you smile and say “blessed be you” or something and then block them, lol.
In physical reality it’s much more difficult to be faced with violence and all the other things that go along with all the other levels and also at the same time have the “deep down feeling” that this is “right”. I really doubt that is what your students feel deep down when they discuss world events.
When we project this globally, the internet is far, far from being a place that nourishes the idea that all quadrants and all levels are “right and present”. I would say the opposite. You have to unplug from the absurdities of the internet or risk living a fake reality.
I find that in the real physical world is where the whole “wake up” and “clean up” get tested.
This is why I brought up Asia. East Asia is one thing from a distance and quite another thing close up. I imagine everywhere is, but since we are living in the West it’s easier to have idealized images of more exotic and less known cultures and peoples. It’s easy to present a fake image on the web, particularly with censorship and constant threat of litigation. It’s easy to boost production numbers and quality control figures when they are, well, just numbers. But actually use that product for a year and it’s impossible to ignore batteries exploding on airplanes and buildings collapsing or remaining unfinished. For people who invested their life savings on housing projects that will never be finished it’s impossible for them pretend the government figures are correct and that they are not in fact living under a sheet of plastic on the street and they are now an outcast from society.
Remember the Tech sector is only a supplement to reality. If reality gets knocked out from under it, the entire tech sector will cease to exist. ByteDance seems to me to be a conglomeration of tech stuff like what Elon Musk fantasizes X should be. A one stop shopping for Artificial Reality. The problem being that there are serious questions how the physically real China will be in the future.
Closer to home in the USA - I’m curious how long it will be before the masses realize they don’t actually like social media and how pointless it all is and how little it has to do with actual reality, lol. The entire IT sector is based on the belief that people will continue to be invested in digital products that are essentially pointless and decreasing in entertainment value as time goes by. How long will the scam last to “make your own online business” vs people realizing that garbage men get paid six figures with a GED or two years learning a basic trade grounded in the real world like plumbing or electrician lets you demand $500 and up per hour. Heck, they can become an elevator repairman and find out people will pay whatever you ask to get out of a stalled elevator after business hours, lol.
All it takes to give a Wilberesque opinion nowadays is to ask Holo. So deep understanding - embodied learning is my preferred phrasing - is going to need a lot of experiential projects and practices, preferably outside the classroom and engaged with the world. Current educational systems will need flipped inside out and upside down.
Recently I got involved with a couple conferences that were basically teal-level, drawing participants from around the world. They involved AI and digital upskilling. Many nations with majority traditional cultures were represented. The question at issue is if those majority traditional people are going to need to industrialize and then go through some sort of late-capitalist critical phase to embrace the globally diverse digital, or if the globally diverse digital is going be the catalyst for change processes in such places that embody a spectrum of cultural levels including ethnocentric traditional. My recent experiences with events on global digital topics suggest that going forward, the globally diverse digital is on the lead.
I think these two are related. By the narrow meaning of the term “industrialize”, I don’t think so. I don’t think it’s necessary to build coal factories, for example.
But remember also the broader and older meaning of “industry”. Can the globally diverse digital get away with not being “industrious”. I don’t think it can or it will risk what we have now of a generation not even bothering or caring if they fulfill a core human drive - to reproduce.
As a member of Gen X, I see both the diverse side and also the industrious side. I can be Industrious in ways that some Millennials and most GenZ’s can’t imagine. Then at the other end I got into the digital early so it isn’t completely alien like it is with most Boomers.
The “globally diverse digital” can only exist so long as it has a firm foundation to stand on. We are seeing this in China where basic “industrious” was skipped and “tofu dreg” infrastructure is falling apart while an apathetic young generation move back in with their parents and become “professional children”. I don’t think the “globally diverse digital” is able to thrive unless it also has construction workers with professional ethics and pride in a job well done, combined with a legal system to back it up.
Of course we are getting again into a Nation or culture “skipping” Orange and so again I come back to the point that Nation and Culture are incredibly important in aiding or hindering an individual’s development.
I understand Ken said some things and also I understand that most of his writings and speeches are from a period when everyone believed society was developing linearly and would just continue to go up and up and up, choosing to ignore the many retrogrades in human development over the centuries and Millenia. It’s easy for Boomers, who will die before the next downward trend or crisis, to ignore it.
One thing that is interesting is that there are serious cracks developing in the whole global system that are required by the “digital” but few people want to recognize these cracks are serious. The global society is moving towards “Red” and open warfare is popping up around the globe like whack a moles. All these fires igniting are because we as a planet did not “solve” Orange before moving to Green. As a result, a young man in Russia, Israel, Palestine, and many other places are “stuck” in Amber and Red, and increasingly agitate their neighbors and knock them out of development and down into conflict.
This again is why I also say you can’t skip Green as an individual or as group of individuals because Green requires addressing all this global inequity and not just sweeping it under the rug. The “Integral Community” by and large just ignores the fetid stench of rotting corpses around the globe while they continue on with their “Integral” discussions about high level topics only.
This is where I see a false Green as being so common in our digital age and being mistaken for Teal. The Burning Man experience is perfectly representational of this. Tech bros and celebrities fly in and participate in the desert event, but completely segregated from normal people. After decades of hypocrisy and fake spiritual seeking, its finally being called out for what it is: a spiritually shallow orgy where sex and drugs are bought by the “haves” and sold by the “have nots”. It’s an illustrative example of why the “digital” cannot “skip green”, or call something green when it is not. It’s just another form of prostitution and exploitation so the “digital” crowd can believe that achieving orgasm while high on various substances has something to do with spiritual growth when it doesn’t.
This then feed into why Elon Musk as global champion of these bros will cause far more damage and bring the world farther away from Teal. Elon is representative of this “globally diverse digital” lacking personal Orange. As a group they lack “substance” and core values necessary for a healthy culture.
Yes, and all the other darker details you had to offer …
Along those lines, my main conceptual problem with “green” is a lot of people seem to interpret that as some sort of comprehensive reenactment of the US hippie era with respect to all the values and practices the emerged at that time. It’s really, really unlikely all that will happen anywhere in a similar way ever again. For that reason, I like your interpretation of “orange” as “industrious”, rather than literal coal mines, railroads, factories, etc. It’s more about skills, behaviors, and cognitive style. In similar fashion, I’ve been searching for the skills and behavioral essence of the green. My feeling is the core of green has to do with multiculturalism and learning there is more than one language, culture, lifestyle, value system and taking a moment to consider that one’s native language, culture, lifestyle, value system may not be as central as they once appeared. That realization can be transported to a variety of settings - it does not depend on all the passions US Boomers manifested when they broke their parents’ mold in the 60s and the 70s.
That being said, the green skill set - diversity - and the orange skill set - industry - are now often being fleshed out in a teal framework - adaptive complexity. The classes I teach involve a very complex global framework, and students are chasing prerequisite skills both in orange-style production and green-style global diversity (lots of second language learning) just to catch up to the framework. Education it seems is going to be remedial everything from now until forever.
As you rightly note, red and amber are also far from out of style. Indeed, again as you rightly note, those skills and behaviors are the base of the pyramid upon which everything else rests. Were it not for my preferred red warriors (the cops) keeping other red warriors (the street gangs) at bay, I’d have to ammo up and go red myself. We’re seeing quite a bit of that nowadays … Again, though, for me, that would be “remedial red”. I think my developmental stage of pure redness ended sometime around the age of 3.
One very old acronym you might recognize is KSA - what Knowledge, Skills and Abilities could be tested to see if a person is at Green? Here are some I would propose. These have nothing to do with any political or social movement. Instead, ignoring current political and social divisions, these are what I understand “Green” to be:
- Ability to “listen to, see and respect the other side”. Can the person look through the lens of the other person or culture and understand and empathize with why they are that way and why they made decisions that they did.
- Accepting emotions of others without judgement. People have emotions. Understanding that another’s emotions are about them and not about the target of the emotion. The target of the emotion is irrelevant and usually a scapegoat. Regardless, everyone has the right to feel an emotion without being judged for having that emotion.
- Understanding and expressing one’s emotions constructively. Is the person able to recognize all their emotions, even unpleasant ones rather than stuffing them down into the subconscious? Does the individual understand the concept of spiritual bypassing, projection and other scapegoat defense mechanisms of their psychology and recognize when they themselves are doing it?
- Acceptance of oneself unconditionally. Does the person have some hidden shame of themselves or other negative core belief about themselves?
- Leadership - is the person able to nurture and lead others so they feel comfortable being their true selves? Do others feel “safe” in their presence, even to the point of being vulnerable?
There are more but these are some of the key KSA’s that I would say belong to Green, and obviously a lot of Postmodernism and Progressivism does not get a “passing grade”. This doesn’t mean conservativism does, though, lol.
With this rubric, I would say that less than 1% of the population of the Developed world is even at Green. Teal is a far higher bar, in my opinion.
The trap is to try and use examples. Of course “Hippies”, former Hippies and Hippy wannabes will say “We represent Green”, just as Various Christian Churches will say “We Represent the Teachings of Christ”.
Well, kind of but not really. Just as there are millions of Christians who are hypocrites, there are millions of Hippies and Earth Mother worshippers who are also hypocrites. So a political or social group is used to represent a dynamic at risk that labelling that dynamic will change as those groups change.
For example, if we use Russia and China to describe “Communism”, that worked for a while but now Russia and China are far from Communism. Russia today is more Fascist while China is some kind of weird hybrid of Totalitarian Communal Capitalism.
I’m sure I’m describing a logical fallacy with a Latin term and Integral Theory seems to get stuck in that fallacy sometimes.