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Ken Wilber – Folge 39 Part 4
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Yes, we were with the development stages. Sure, and I can wrap that up fairly quickly. What
happens is that one thing you get out of a great nest viewpoint is that there is this gradient to
reality, and that you do show higher dimensions of more inclusive, more complex, more
differentiated, integrated, and that seems to be a directionality that we find in our universe.
So starting all the way from the Big Bang, there was this drive to… Well, it presents it by saying,
according to the second law of thermodynamics, things are running down, but that’s true only if
you cut off a slice of just the physical universe, put it in a box all by itself, and then watch it, it’ll
run down.
But if you let it out of the box, let it interact with everything else that’s going on, say, on
something like planet Earth, it doesn’t wind down, it winds up. I mean, it goes from quarks to
atoms to molecules to cells to multi-cellular organisms to more and more complex organisms all
the way up into primates and humans, and then humans start this whole series of
developmental evolutionary stages themselves to get more and more complex, more conscious,
more inclusive, and wherever we want to get that drive, it does plug all the way back into the old
Great Chain theorists that have this gradient of the universe. But the point is that the universe is
tilted, and it’s tilted in a direction that’s just slightly going up.
And so, if you look at almost all the recent developments in physicists, let me take something
like Ilya Prigogine’s Nobel Prize-winning studies, what he found is that if you take just dead,
insentient matter, push it far from equilibrium, it’ll actually jump to a higher level of organization,
sometimes called order out of chaos.
Now, this is something that even dead matter does. It doesn’t have to be living biological order, I
mean it’s built all the way back into the lowest, most fundamental levels of the universe.
Systems theorists today often call that drive self-organization, and the point is it’s an inherent
drive to create more complex, more whole, more differentiated, integrated unities, or as we say,
holons.
And that’s just important because, again, however you want to get it, if you want to say, well, it’s
coming out of this ground of being, or if you want to say, well, no, it’s just a secular property
going back, it’s just one of the forces of the physical world.
Fine. The point is there’s an inherent eros in the universe. And so then when we start to look at
interiors of human beings, we also find that there isn’t just a flat given, this is my spectrum of
consciousness, that we actually have a whole band, and these appear to have evolved from the
earliest Homo sapiens, sapiens, skeletons have now been found around 300,000 years ago.
So from that whole period, we’ve been continuing this tilt in the universe. We’ve been following
that, and it just keeps kind of pushing up, pushing up, pushing up. And that’s what we have
happening.
In recent times, this became particularly problematic because in much of our previous history, if
we had a culture, it tended to come from sort of one major stage of development, and it tended
to express that stage.
So you had magic tribes, and those would move up into sort of more mythic, almost empires.
And then those moved into more rational nation states that also brought the rise of modern
sciences, the Enlightenment.
It brought a morality that freed the slaves for the first time in history. And then starting in the 60s,
we got the emergence of this new, green, pluralistic, relativistic stage. And so what we actually
had now were particularly the most recent three stages of development, amber, mythic, orange,
rational, and green, pluralistic, multicultural.
And all of these, because we had developed a culture that wanted to be inclusive, that all people
are created equal regardless of race, color, sex, or creed, and so on. So now, all of a sudden,
we had cultures that were allowing these different and almost hostile value structures to exist.
And our overarching belief was, okay, there’s room for everybody. We can’t say anybody’s right
or wrong. Everybody has to be included. And so now, we have, it’s called the culture wars. And
it’s amber traditional values versus orange modern values versus green postmodern values.
And the problem is they’re all what Clare Graves called first tier. And a stage in first tier, every
stage in first tier thinks that its truth and values are the only real truth and values in existence.
Everybody else might be good, they’re trying, their hearts are in the right place, but they’re
wrong, they’re confused, they’re goofy, or they’re just flat-out false. But my stage has the one
truth and values that work.
And so what we have, particularly with these higher, most recent three value systems, is they’re
at war. And that war is getting nastier and nastier and nastier. And as a kind of major cure for
that, but it still might take 10 or 15 or 20 or 30 years, is people moving into the next higher
stages of development that research shows are often called integral stages.
Because they can integrate all of the previous value structures. We’ve never had a stage like
that in history. We’ve never had a culture that was run by a stage like that. We have no idea
what that would actually look like, except theoretically, it’s going to be inclusive and balancing
and comprehensive.
And it’s not going to just pick sides and wish death on everybody else. So that could be a very,
very profound movement. In the meantime, we’re stuck with culture wars. And we saw an
enormous outbreak of that with the election of Donald Trump.
And Trump had, if you look at… Is this a kind of regression? Yes, in some ways. But keep in
mind that everybody’s born at square one, so people are always moving through it, and there
will always be people at a stage, even if it’s a lower stage.
And for them, at that time, that’s the best they can do. They have to stay there and understand
that stage, work it out, get all its desires fulfilled that it can, then increasingly run into things that
just don’t work, and questions they have that their present stage can’t answer, then they open
themselves to their next stage and eventually move up to that.
But one of the reasons that we still have amber and orange and green, even though the leading
edge right now is green, not all of culture is at green, only about 20% is there. There’s large
percentages at the other stages, and that’s always kind of going to be a problem because
people are always coming through the funnel, and they’re always going to start at the bottom
and come up.
So that’s part of the difficulty of it. But we’ve never had a culture that had three major value
systems all at war. Almost all the previous cultures, there was just one major stage, and maybe
two. And everybody was still born in square one.
So if you get up to, like, the Middle Ages and the major stage is mythic, fundamentalist
Christianity, then there were still people at the earlier magic stage, and they tended to have
beliefs in things like paganism and magical practices.
And the mythic church, of course, took them as being demonic. And during the Middle Ages, we
probably burned or hung somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 pagans, most of whom
were women. But that’s what these first-tier structures do.
They don’t like each other. And so you could see that was just a battle between magic and
mythic. So now toss in a culture, we have three of those going at each other. And that’s what
makes the culture war so insane.
And in part because of the worldwide technological factors that are occurring and the way a kind
of global economy is starting to occur, then a lot of the more middle class that many of them did
tend to still be amber.
In their orientation, they were really getting the slats knocked out economically. And the
Democrats, the left in America, used to represent that kind of working class. But now with the
emergence of green, many, many Democrats have become green.
And so they have a very, very different value structure than the old Democrats. So the distance
is too high between them? This way? The distance between them is too high to reach to have a
connection?
Well, that’s part of the problem. And it’s become extremely polarized in a way that we’ve just
almost never seen before in history. So a very smart moral psychologist named Jonathan Haidt
has, in America, measured the polarization between classically contentious groups.
So he’s looked at male versus female, black versus white, educated versus less educated, rich
versus poor, and then left versus right. And he found that all those other polarities, male, female,
rich, poor, black, white, on a relative scale from zero to 20, they all had polarized differences up
to around 10 or so.
And then there was a huge leap up to one that had a polarization of 18. And that was between
left and right. So the political polarizations were much worse than any other kinds of
polarizations. And one of the especially disturbing factors that he found is how people on the left
and the right thought about each other.
In around 1970, if you ask that question, both sides would say, well, I disagree with what the
other political party is saying, but I think that they’re trying, I think their heart’s in the right place,
but I think they are confused.
Today, if you ask them what they think about each other, both of them say flat out, the other side
is evil. They’re vicious. It takes about two steps and they’re Hitler. They don’t even understand
what that
means.
But that’s just how unbelievably zealous and absolutist they’re becoming in their ideas. And one
of the problems with that, since they’re all absolutely sure they’re right, many of the political
parties, the far left, for example, is so sure it’s right that it won’t even talk to conservatives.
It just doesn’t think it’s necessary. They’re all fascists, step one, step two, Hitler. So it’s just, it’s
crazy. But as you start thinking absolutistically, even for some of these higher stages, and also
you latch on to your view as if it’s absolutely correct, Clare Graves named those three stages of
amber, orange, and green.
Absolutistic, multiplistic, and relativistic. So you should be, if you’re absolutistic, amber, then it’s
like a fundamentalist religion. You know that you have the absolute truth, if you’re Christian, the
Bible is absolutely true, everything in it, God said, you can’t argue with it, it did that.
So that’s absolutistic. And then multiplistic at orange introduced a third-person perspective. It
realized it could take other viewpoints, that there might be some other kinds of truths out there
other than its own.
So that was called multiplistic. And then green just sort of pushed that into extremes and said
there were not only multiple viewpoints, they’re all absolutely relative. None is better than
anything else.
And so we find we could all these cultures out there, and all we can say is that they’re all
absolutely equal. Nobody’s better than anybody else, and the same with individuals. All
individuals are absolutely the same.
Nobody’s allowed to be better than anybody else. And so green doesn’t even like things like
excellence or competence or achievement, because if you’re achieving, it means you’re getting
something that those other people aren’t.
So you’re an oppressor, you’re a bad person. We don’t like you. And so that’s what we’re getting
in these culture wars. Part of the problem is that when you hold those viewpoints absolutistically,
so when the far left holds that, I know that we’ve got it right, I don’t even have to talk to
conservatives, they’re holding that absolutistically.
And whenever you hold anything absolutistically, you tend to regress to the absolutistic stage.
That’s where you feel better because you know you’re right. You can’t imagine somebody else
coming up with something that would be better than what you have.
You’re a fundamentalist. And so that’s what we’re getting. In other words, we’re retribalizing,
going back to this tribe is right, versus this tribe, versus this tribe. And they all have their
absolutistic views.
We’ve never seen something quite that bad happen. And college universities have a large hand
in this. Because that’s pretty much all they teach, is that they’re extreme green. And they got
that way because intellectually green was the leading level.
Smart people went into green. And we produced the whole sort of postmodern series of
philosophy, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Lyotard, and so on. All of them essentially taking a
relativistic stance.
And personally, that just doesn’t work. As a philosophy, it’s a self-contradiction. It maintains, for
example, that it’s absolutely universally true that there is no universal truth. So they get to have
their universal truth, and then nobody else gets to have a universal truth, though.
So it’s called a performative contradiction, and it’s a mess. But they’re busy regressing. And the
bad thing about amber is that both orange and green are world-centric. They want to treat
everybody fairly.
Amber is flat-out ethnocentric. It’s just my tribe, my race, whatever it is, is better. And so
unfortunately, what we’re getting with, let’s say, the extreme postmodernist notion of identity
politics, for example, means you have to identify with just your tribe.
And whenever you identify with just your tribe, whether it’s your race or your sex or your gender
or your ethnicity, you always talk about how your tribe is different from all those other tribes. And
that’s what you’re emphasizing.
My tribe’s different, and this is why it deserves special treatment or whatever it is. But you never
talk about what your tribe has in common with other tribes. That would be world-centric. What
you’re doing is just an ethnocentric my tribe.
I don’t like your tribe. I mean, God, that’s amber. That’s what we fought hundreds of years to
overcome. That was the nightmare that gave us slavery. With thousands and thousands of
years. Every major religion on the planet endorsed slavery because they were all at ethnocentric
stages of development.
No matter how well they were doing in waking up, in growing up, they were at these amber
ethnocentric stages. It took the modern, orange, world-centric stage to outlaw slavery. And it did
that in every rational, industrial country on the face of the planet in a 100-year period from
around 1770 to 1870, slavery was outlawed in every one of those countries.
First time in history, anything like that had happened because we had reached world-centric
stages of moral development. And what we find in the culture wars is people absolutizing their
particular view, therefore becoming tribal and therefore regressing to absolutistic stages, that’s
part of the Trump phenomena, that’s part of what got him into office.
And the only sad thing is to see many of these more developed stages become polarized and
absolute in their views and end up sliding right back to an absolutistic stage where they’re joined
with the original amber ethnocentric folks, the regressed green identity politics folks that are now
as tribal as you can get and then even some orange crashing down.
That’s the nightmare we’ve got. And it’s just looking extremely serious. Yeah, so would you say
that Barack Obama was too far ahead? Well, he was too far ahead, but one of the things that he
and both his fans and his critics can agree on is that he just a little bit too much played the race
card, and the suggestion was always if you disagree with me, it’s because you’re racist.
And so we actually saw in that eight-year period where Obama was here, along with all of his
terrific ideas, we saw a significant increase in racial polarization, and that was really
problematic. Now that wasn’t just his fault, but he was driving it from his end, and so then we got
the standard individuals who will drive that themselves.
Particularly from amber ethnocentricity, they were pushing back. But he wasn’t countering it as
strongly or as effectively as he could. And that was a real problem. Race relations got worse
under Obama than we’ve seen in any eight-year period for decades.
And it’s just an unfortunate problem. So terrific in so many other ways. So when I heard his first
speeches, I thought it sounds very integral. It sounds like he has got a kind of integral
perspective.
Well, there are a fair number of individuals in all sorts of different thought areas. And a whole,
there’s a large number of thought leaders. And they’re thinking integrally, they’re thinking teal or
turquoise, second tier.
But their center of gravity can be green or orange or even occasionally amber. And so they kind
of talk the talk, but they institute. We had about 500 people that came. And these are all people
that had just sort of been talking integral stuff.
So we just kind of invited them. And after a year of holding monthly meetings, about 10% of the
people that were attending tended to break off from the rest of the group. And I would
occasionally find them off in a corner by themselves and say, okay, what’s going on?
And they say, well, everybody else out there is talking integral, but they’re all green, you know,
or they’re all orange. And we just find we can’t get anything done. So we’re just starting a new
little section over here.
And I suspected something like that. And when I heard them say that, it dawned on me that that
was exactly right. That was what was happening. The standard psychograph of these individuals
was cognitive development at turquoise and then self-development, center of gravity at green or
amber or orange.
And that just turned out to be a real problem. So I just took that about 10% from each of the,
there were 10 branches and they all were about the same. So I took about 10% from each of the
10 branches, just took all of them, got up, went over here and started a new integral Institute.
And I just didn’t say anything to everybody else that they were just out there doing their thing.
But we had a group whose psychographs were cognitive development at second tier and center
of gravity at second tier.
So it was a much more effective organization. So, I mean, you speak about culture wars, and I
would say I can see this very clearly also in Germany right now. So what kind of advice do you
have to people who are watching this video and they’re saying, I want to take responsibility, I
don’t want to just watch?
Right. Well, my standard, my standard approach, a recommendation for these types of
situations right now is to think integrally. And the more you do that, the more you’ll start to
behave integrally. So the more you really can get the concepts down, get the notions down, and
then start to apply them.
And there’s no rule for where to apply them, except do it initially in just sort of small steps. You
can take just any particular area you find that is having a problem, and especially is having a
problem because it’s not being very comprehensive or inclusive.
And there are clearly other areas outside of its awareness that are having a very big impact on
what they’re doing, but they don’t know about it. And so some sort of general discussion about
that or let me tell you what I heard about this and how these things actually can be brought
together and just see what you think about that.
Most of the ones who are diehard identified with a particular stage at that point, they’re not going
to change their minds
. And you can’t reason them out of it. Somebody once said you can only reason somebody out
of a view that they were originally reasoned into.
So, but nobody was reasoned into this stage of development. It’s just part of an overall organic
flow of billions of elements acting and interacting that help people grow and develop up these
stages.
It’s not just irrational. You know, when you’re six months old, you don’t go, oh, I think it’s time for
me to move up a stage and make that decision. So, you can present facts and evidence and
data. That won’t change their stage of development.
Keep in mind, this is also a very complex issue that human beings have, perhaps, up to a dozen
multiple intelligences. And they can be at different levels in each of them, basically. So, you get
a real smorgasbord of possibilities.
And so, we have to keep that in mind. It’s not just, you know, a linear clunk-clunk-clunk-clunk
stage kind of thing. But these are probability waves of the likelihood that you will respond in a
particular area based on the value structure of this particular stage, or based on the motivation
structure, or based on the ego development, or based on a moral stage of development or
cognitive stage.
And so those turn out to be very, very important landmarks as we continue to grow and mature
and develop. And all of our cultures are arranged as interactions among individuals at different
stages of unfolding.
And that’s what always makes culture quite, quite a tricky thing to put together. And it’s also why
in our recent culture we’ve actually added, you know, these last three really strong stages of
development and they all really disagree with each other.
That we’ve started to find a type of social turmoil that is pretty unprecedented in history. This
isn’t really the way cultures in the past worked. They tended to be driven by a predominant
worldview, and particularly as they got stronger and stronger then they frequently felt the need
to attack others and spread their worldview.
They weren’t sitting around having an argument internally about which one of three or four levels
they should be accepting. They pretty much knew where they were at. That was considered the
one correct way.
So we had enormous battles over the long period of empires where individuals were trying to
expand and impose their particular stage of worldview. But now we’ve got it all occurring within
the boundary of one culture.
And so everybody’s kind of at each other’s throats there, and at least so far we haven’t settled
these battles the way they were always settled in the past, which is you kill the people that
disagree with you.
And so we have no idea how to handle these kinds of things, but it’s pretty clear it is involved in
a kind of regressive trend and that’s one of the real problems because it’s taking us right back
into those areas and those epochs where human beings treated each other with horrifying,
brutal ways of interacting.
And everything from the Crusades to slavery, to Spanish Inquisition, Tower of London. Just
nasty stuff. And so we finally got over that only to find that now we have this abundance of value
systems and now they’re all at each other’s throats.
Yeah, well, if you see what’s happening in the world, are you pessimistic? Am I pessimistic or
optimistic? Well, one of the most pessimistic areas also has to do with exterior environments.
And in this case, just with the ecological environment and global warming and the problems that
are occurring there.
That does appear to be a nightmare headed this way. And again, we’ve never really seen
anything like it, so we don’t know how serious it is. And so a large number of human beings are
finding it hard to become motivated to do something about it.
And some of them just don’t have the cognitive capacity to conceive global structures. And so
many of those people just don’t believe global warming is real. They just think it’s a hoax or a
joke or made up or something.
Most of the right, sophisticated climate scientists find it is real, and it’s really problematic. And
unfortunately, history sort of demonstrates that there hasn’t been really that I’m aware of a single
time that human beings saw a specific disaster coming at them.
And then they took measures to prevent it before it hit. Usually it has to hit, cause a disaster.
Then we pick up the pieces and say, okay, how can we do this so that doesn’t happen again? I
mean, maybe the only person that ever built something that would help them through the crisis
before it happened was Noah.
He went out and he built the ark before the flood. Most humans wait after the flood. Everybody
drowns, a few live, and then they try to rebuild it so that won’t happen again. So good for Noah.
It’d be nice if we had a little bit more of a Noah approach to global warming, but that doesn’t
appear to be happening, so that’s not looking good.
On the culture side, one of the things that does seem to be capable of helping contain this kind
of intense retribalization and polarization is the emergence of some second-tier stages of growth
and development.
Right now it looks like there’s about 5% of the population that are at second-tier, and it does
appear that things start to get better when that leading edge reaches about 10%. And there
seems to be a kind of tipping point, and the values of that leading edge tend to kind of permeate
the culture.
People don’t automatically then start accepting those values. I mean, if you accepted those
higher values fully, well, you’d actually be at that stage. But if you become open to them a little
more, accepting of them, a little bit more aware of them, and it does start to have a bit of an
impact on the culture.
So even with the rise of modernity and the Western Enlightenment, only about 10% of the
population hit that when it happened. And yet under those principles of universal freedom and
equality for all people, the United States fought a civil war and lost some 800,000 people fighting
to get rid of slavery.
And only about 10% of them were actually at that stage that felt that, but it was enough to help
energize the whole movement. Same thing in the 60s. In 1959, only about 3% of the population
in America was at green.
And then by 1972, the most frequently quoted academic writer in America was Jacques Derrida,
deconstruction of postmodernism. And we had about, at that point, about 12% to 14% of the
population was green.
But that caused the whole revolution of the 60s, and everything just started seeping down, even
though there were still people very much at red and very much at amber and very much at
orange. So if we could start to get that 10% tipping point in second-tier and have those inclusive
values start to seep down. That would at least start to take the intense edge off of these value
structures, wanting to kill the others.
And so in the long haul, that’s relatively optimistic. The question is going to be, are we even able
to make it to that? There are at least some social commentators with the degree of
retribalization that’s occurring.
And you can see these currents, of course, in Europe as well. I mean, it really is a sort of
Western in general kind of phenomenon that we’re dealing with. Right now, it looks like we’re
going to need some interim measures to get the intense polarization and the intense hatred
calmed down.
There are at least some social commentators that are saying, at least in America, okay, this
really is headed to an actual civil war. And I think that’s a bit overstated, but I see why they’re
saying that.
Because again, this polarization and hatred, that’s really new in terms of widespread, expected
forms of behavior. It’s really unheard of.
