The Spiral of Human Development (Stage Six)
Order of the Leaf: Environment, Consensus, and Equality (Green)
I want to comment briefly on this stage because some readers will recognize it as pervasive and pathological. In an era marked by millenarian cults around climate change, simulacra of identities devised in transgenderism, and obsession with oppressor/oppressed dynamics of race and sex, stage Green can be a psychosocial swamp.
Remember, though, Green has healthy values that practitioners should be able to identify and deploy in certain contexts. For example, Green’s emphasis on community can have a positive expression. So also can its desire for consensus. Indeed, if there is anything to Spiral Dynamics, one can’t make the quantum leap to the Second Tier without coming to appreciate the healthier aspects of all prior stages. Let’s not let today’s Green-stage pathologies keep us from growth and development as we “transcend and include.”
(BEIGE) Order of the Naked: Survival, Sensation, and Self-Concept
(GREEN) Order of the Leaf: Environment, Consensus, and Equality <
(YELLOW) Order of the Nautilus: Integration, Emergence, and Complexity
(TURQUOISE) Order of the Lotus: Holism, Paradox, and Ineffability
Spaceship earth is our home. The only feasible alternative is a rusty planet with no atmosphere, bathed in every moment by radiation. Yet greedy industrialists are racing to colonize this inhospitable place instead of righting the wrongs against our planet. Rather than restoring the earth’s natural ecology, some industrialists seek to terraform planets that are not fit for human habitation. We should weep for Mother Earth and cry out against the inequality that exists in the name of science and commerce.
It’s not just our environment that needs repair. We are also spiritually deprived due to rampant materialism which creates radical inequality. To rectify this, we need to restore balance to our economic systems by sharing the surpluses of human progress with the least advantaged. The existence of billionaires should be viewed as a failure by the greedy and dogmatic to unite in the people’s demands for social justice, which require a higher degree of wealth equality.
In the age of hypercapitalism, too many people focus on acquisition. This creates a kind of spiritual anemia that can only be cured by people coming together to connect more deeply as a community. Eventually, that community can extend to everyone as we become a global village. We will learn how to manage our precious commons in such a state. To avoid the frictions associated with returning to a more communal lifestyle, we must adopt means of finding consensus and creating harmony. Let every voice be heard. To the extent that there is social unrest, we must include those at the margins of society. We must struggle alongside them, for they were put there by a lower order’s powerful oppressors.
While we are comfortable dispensing with the idea of truth as something to be discovered in the world instead of experienced by the subject, we are not giving up on ideal justice. We can abandon Truth for cultural relativism while remembering that a story told enough times becomes our truth. That’s how we march through the institutions. That’s how we install ourselves in hierarchies once reserved for the privileged. And that’s how we assume control for the oppressed and marginalized yearning for equity.
Yet, in such zealous commitments, will we start to channel some of the former Stages’ unhealthier aspects while forgetting the healthier insights? If we do, we will come to feel hopeless, even nihilistic. Are we, in our sanctimony, seeking to create another moral hierarchy within a dangerous administrative state? Have we forgotten that the forces that generate abundance can be employed to help the natural world and lift up the poor?
Next: Order of the Nautilus: Integration, Emergence, and Complexity (Yellow)