For all the criticizing of religious people in yesterday's video, I honestly don't know what's more manipulative: modern forms of religion or the Clare Graves model. Religion is very manipulative to children to the point of even being abusive in its indoctrination. But try talking about heaven and hell to a non-religious adult and see how much they care. At least hell is not something people are biologically programmed to be afraid of, social disapproval is. Even with only Leo teaching this model, he's a very strong authority figure for many of his followers. I used to give Leo a lot more credence before, and I found it almost impossible to disbelieve anything he said. And if knowledge of this model spread and more public figures began to talk about it, they could essentially bully millions of people into adopting whatever worldview they decided corresponded to the color at top of the hierarchy.
My biggest problem with this is Leo didn't even provide any evidence to back up his claim that this hierarchy is based on a one-way natural psychological progression (that people don't go backwards). I guess Leo's big argument for why this model should be followed is that you would go through it anyway if you lived long enough, and only some people progress fast enough naturally to reach the higher levels in their lifetime. However, the fact people never regress on the hierarchy presented in this model seem like a very questionable claim to me that contradicts personal experience. In my opinion, Leo shouldn't even begin talking about how to use the model until he has presented strong scientific evidence to back up his claim.
The internet shows us the wide variety of different worldviews and life paths people take. If you give me any two worldviews I can guarantee you I'll be able to find a blog or an article written by someone who converted between them, in either direction. I've read some really surprising religious conversion stories. And if we take politics it only gets easier as people are generally more flexible in their political views than in their religious ones. Buddhists converting to Christianity, Christians converting to Islam, staunch conservatives becoming communists, it's all there. I have close family members who according to this model, have "regressed" over time. I have personally taken both small steps forward and small steps back in different areas of my worldview. I changed my mind on certain things, then changed back years later. And lo and behold, I checked the wikipedia (people will say it's unreliable but imo it's going to be more reliable than biased new age sources) article for Clare Graves and found this:
"Graves' work observes that the emergence within humans of new bio-psycho-social systems in response to the interplay of external conditions with neurology follows a hierarchy in several dimensions, though without guarantees as to time lines or even direction: both progression and regression are possibilities in his model. Furthermore, each level in the hierarchy alternates as the human is either trying to make the environment adapt to the self, or the human is adapting the self to the existential conditions. He called these 'express self' and 'deny self' systems, and the swing between them is the cyclic aspect of his theory. Graves saw this process of stable plateaus interspersed with change intervals as never ending, up to the limits of the brain of Homo sapiens, something he viewed as far greater than we have yet imagined."
The part about not being able to guarantee direction confirmed my hunch of course. But the entire paragraph gives a different perspective on the model than Leo has presented. Without this one fact, what other reason is there to following the Clare Graves model than feeling like you're a good "personal development", "spiritual" or "progressive" person? And whenever you're doing something to be an X person, you're really doing it to fit in and gain the social approval of a certain group. This ties in to my first paragraph.
I feel like mindset and worldview should evolve organically and authentically. They should change as a result of finding new information or new perspectives, and changing your current worldview to account for them. Changing your worldview or life mindset according to some model requires a leap of faith strangely similar to what's seen in religion actually, someone else knows what's best for you.
For all the criticizing of religious people in yesterday's video, I honestly don't know what's more manipulative: modern forms of religion or the Clare Graves model. Religion is very manipulative to children to the point of even being abusive in its indoctrination. But try talking about heaven and hell to a non-religious adult and see how much they care. At least hell is not something people are biologically programmed to be afraid of, social disapproval is. Even with only Leo teaching this model, he's a very strong authority figure for many of his followers. I used to give Leo a lot more credence before, and I found it almost impossible to disbelieve anything he said. And if knowledge of this model spread and more public figures began to talk about it, they could essentially bully millions of people into adopting whatever worldview they decided corresponded to the color at top of the hierarchy. My biggest problem with this is Leo didn't even provide any evidence to back up his claim that this hierarchy is based on a one-way natural psychological progression (that people don't go backwards). I guess Leo's big argument for why this model should be followed is that you would go through it anyway if you lived long enough, and only some people progress fast enough naturally to reach the higher levels in their lifetime. However, the fact people never regress on the hierarchy presented in this model seem like a very questionable claim to me that contradicts personal experience. In my opinion, Leo shouldn't even begin talking about how to use the model until he has presented strong scientific evidence to back up his claim. The internet shows us the wide variety of different worldviews and life paths people take. If you give me any two worldviews I can guarantee you I'll be able to find a blog or an article written by someone who converted between them, in either direction. I've read some really surprising religious conversion stories. And if we take politics it only gets easier as people are generally more flexible in their political views than in their religious ones. Buddhists converting to Christianity, Christians converting to Islam, staunch conservatives becoming communists, it's all there. I have close family members who according to this model, have "regressed" over time. I have personally taken both small steps forward and small steps back in different areas of my worldview. I changed my mind on certain things, then changed back years later. And lo and behold, I checked the wikipedia (people will say it's unreliable but imo it's going to be more reliable than biased new age sources) article for Clare Graves and found this: "Graves' work observes that the emergence within humans of new bio-psycho-social systems in response to the interplay of external conditions with neurology follows a hierarchy in several dimensions, though without guarantees as to time lines or even direction: both progression and regression are possibilities in his model. Furthermore, each level in the hierarchy alternates as the human is either trying to make the environment adapt to the self, or the human is adapting the self to the existential conditions. He called these 'express self' and 'deny self' systems, and the swing between them is the cyclic aspect of his theory. Graves saw this process of stable plateaus interspersed with change intervals as never ending, up to the limits of the brain of Homo sapiens, something he viewed as far greater than we have yet imagined." The part about not being able to guarantee direction confirmed my hunch of course. But the entire paragraph gives a different perspective on the model than Leo has presented. Without this one fact, what other reason is there to following the Clare Graves model than feeling like you're a good "personal development", "spiritual" or "progressive" person? And whenever you're doing something to be an X person, you're really doing it to fit in and gain the social approval of a certain group. This ties in to my first paragraph. I feel like mindset and worldview should evolve organically and authentically. They should change as a result of finding new information or new perspectives, and changing your current worldview to account for them. Changing your worldview or life mindset according to some model requires a leap of faith strangely similar to what's seen in religion actually, someone else knows what's best for you.