Zizzero

I think political ideologies in general are not so simple in spiral dynamics; while green definitely has a pull towards the political left and blue towards whatever their parents told them was right , I currently believe that we cannot reduce ideology to spiral stages. Meaning; you can be green and a trump supporter, and you can be orange and a feminist. I just see too many examples that suggest that besides spiral dynamics factors like personality, gender, culture, your personal experiences and knowledge all shape your values. In fact, the idea that people makes those crazy swings as they move up where they turn from christian conservative to libertarian businessman to feminist hippie is rare; most people stay roughly the same as they move up. I just wanted to clarify my position on that. I haven't really thought deeply about what you're asking, so I'm not too confident with my answer, but here's my take: Blue seems to like authoritarianism; left or right doesn't matter. Blue is convinced of the truth of his values, so far that he puts opinions in the categories of right or wrong; no third option which is the opposite of the kind of tolerance and open-mindedness to different lifestyle designs libertarians generally have. However, if a child grows up in a household with very libertarian parents, teaching him libertarian values, I believe when this child reaches stage blue, it is most likely going to be a libertarian as well. I believe there is a general movement towards libertarianism (left and right) as one moves up. Orange people often are attracted to free marked libertarian ideas, and most green people would be somewhere in the libertarian left quarter. And I also cannot see how yellow would be authoritarian; a very central epiphany that yellow had contrary to tier 1 is yellow realizes that there is no objective answer to the question what is good and what is wrong. Yellow is too open-minded to be very authoritarian, I think. However, since yellow values helping people move up the spiral, I could imagine yellow thinkers being somewhere in the authoritarian half when he thinks this accomplishes that goal; yellow isn't as idealistic about politics as his predecessor. Also, as people move up the spiral, rules become less and less necessary. While there is a legitimate threat that a red person murders you, I typically feel very safe when I'm surrounded by a green people. So, strict laws to prevent you from doing bad stuff will just be less and less necessary as the people under those laws move up.

Yes, but green is a more interesting case because green kind of is aware that there is something like a spiral. Green realizes how advanced he is. This leaves green in a tricky situation; he doesn't perceive orange or blue as evil (what blue tends to do with other stages), but rather as individuals who don't quite get it. Green's intentions are very kind. This makes green very comfortable with being loud and politically active stage, but he can also tend to push things a bit too far. I agree that the average collective level is orange, and that's especially true when it comes to lifestyle decisions people make; what stage they actually embody, but green seems to be the dominant meme in the public debates of the west. Cognitively, a lot of people are at green and the media is full of green values. The reason I am more hesitant towards a strong left than a strong right is that I don't see the right wing nearly as strong as his counterpart in today's politics. There's Trump and his supporters, but those are mostly conservatives who support rather moderate values and typically conservative values. The right of today is actually very boring; they just want things to stay the same. Most attempts to limit free speech and expand political correctness in the last years came from the left. The conservative in the US, while having a lot of regressive beliefs, does generally support free speech and pluralism which I see as crucial requirements to effectively move up the spiral; by questioning everything is how you get to yellow. I agree that orange or blue presidents don't care about raising the collective consciousness. But neither does green. The goals of blue, orange and green are not to move towards yellow/turquoise. But as written above, I see a free society ("free" as how a libertarian would define it) as a more effective foundation to enable his citizens to move up the spiral since there is no demonization of any stage from the elites. I don't think the government telling you to be green is going to motivate you to be green, but the government letting you live how you want to live will remove a lot of resistance. So, I believe a more balanced or moderate political landscape is better than a left domination to collectively move up the spiral. The very strong counterargument of course being: How long can the environment survive our orange way of life until people naturally moved up to embodying green. That is a legitimate question I don't know the answer to. Two genuine question: -What would a typical yellow perspective be on this political matter in your opinion? -What is generally yellow's attitude towards orange politics and green politics?

I don't see higher consciousness as intrinsically valuable. I agree that it would be more desirable to live in a society full of people high on the spiral than full of people low on the spiral. But, just because someone's higher doesn't mean this person is better suited to lead a country or solve societal issues. But generally yes, a green person has a way broader perspective than a blue/orange one which is a factor in favor of the green candidate. However, I don't know whether a green president really raises the overall level of consciousness more than a low level consciousness president. The way I see it with stage green in particular is this: I love to surround myself with green people and I'd love to live in a society where people treat one another based on green ideals. But, if you want people act green-ish you have two choices which @Shadowraix described: Either everyone buys in; green people will follow green ideals voluntarily or you have to force them through laws. I generally don't like laws that tell people what's right and what's wrong because you are not going to make a blue person any more green if you make him pay higher taxes to save the environment; he does not yet care too much about these issues and will just demonize green further. Basically, I strongly disagree with many stage green people on most political issues even though I generally love many core values of this stage. The reason is what I wrote in my earlier posts: because green thinks it's the highest stage, green feels like they have the responsibility to teach blue and orange people and to make laws which ensure green behavior. That just creates further polarization and it neglects the worries of blue and orange people. And the concerns that blue and orange people have are just as real to them as climate change is to green. I think who the best candidate is depends a lot on who the people are that he's supposed to govern.

Why do you assume I'm blue or orange? What if I told you I was yellow, turquoise or coral? See, green is so convinced that it is the spiral's highest stage that it perceives every dislike of green as below it. Green is convinced that the issues he sees are the ones that matter. What you named here is just values - your values. There's nothing noble about them; they are in no shape or form superior to values like preserving traditional marriage, having a strong economy or having a strong military Greens cannot believe for one second that his values could be wrong. Green likes to claim that he supports ideas like and then green goes on to say how one opinion is superior to another. That was my entire point.

Stage green believes it's the highest stage on the spiral and it believes that everyone should be stage green as well. I, for one, hope that Sanders will not become president; I don't share his values and beliefs.

I would personally advise carefulness. Moving up a stage usually comes naturally because you feel an urge to expand your worldview. If you're not open to learn a higher perspective, you wont move up. This doesn't mean that you can't try not help them move up. Show them cool orange things they might resonate with; talk with them about science and philosophy, show them different kinds of entertainment or any other things that are fun and hedonistic. If they take the bait, then you expose them to more of it and feed their desire to embody more orange. But, if they don't show any signs of being open to move up and feel comfortable in stage blue, then please don't. In the best case, you would just waste your own time. Leaving a stage behind can come with a lot of inner conflicts, let's assume the following example: A 80yo person has believed in God all his life and based all his major decisions on this believe. He hasn't followed his passion, but instead done what he believed to be right based on one fundamental belief this person had. If you would proof to this person one month before their death that God doesn't exist and that they were always free to do anything they wanted, this epiphany would be nothing but an unbearable amount of suffering to them. I personally hold the opinion that in cases like this, it would be better to let a person blindly believe what they want to believe. What I mean by that: the last thing you want is a stage blue person who realizes the limitations of his/her stage, but isn't open to let go and move up. They would just be stuck knowing deep inside that some things they believed are false, while also being too attached to let go of them.

Oh, this sounds like fun. If there's two things I like, it's talking about Spiral Dynamics and sharing music Blue: Theocracy - I AM (Song about Jesus by a christian band) Orange: Edguy - Superheroes (Always interpreted this song to be about heartbroken men who go out and pick up girls to cope with how they feel and them rationalizing they're numbness as being an invincible Superhero) Green: Saltatio Mortis - Todesengel (German song. Very political band which openly supports green values. The song is about a women who was a victim of Josef Mengele in Auschwitz and who decides to forgive him for what he did to her and her sister. The song promotes the idea of forgiveness and love instead of revenge and hate. Yellow: Dream Theater - Only A Matter Of Time (Lyrics are pure poetry. Basically a song about following your dream and that life is about the journey, not the destination. Turquoise: Devin Townsend - Life (Devin Townsend is easily my best guess for a turquoise musician; every interview or song I hear from him makes me believe this more and more. No idea what song illustrates this best though, so I decided to pick my favorite one )

But I do strongly believe that the consumption of meat will decline and animal rights will improve

Probably not. Many places on the planet are already green-dominated and nowhere are we even close to policies as radical as making meat illegal. (At least as far as I'm aware.) And moving up the spiral becomes easier and easier - especially because of the Internet. Given the high amount of yellow people that already exist, it seems unlikely that we'll ever live in a society that is almost entirely green - or yellow, or turquoise etc. - like we did in the past with blue or orange. So, I just don't see any period of time in which green actually is dominant enough to enforce a law like that because too much orange, yellow or turquoise will live alongside green. And certainly orange or yellow would oppose such policies.

Today I made an interesting observation about my own life which helped me understand Spiral Dynamics better, so I though I'd share with you. For this I first need to share a tiny bit about myself. Cognitively I assess myself to be at stage yellow; the way I think, the way I learn, my opinion on most questions is typical stage yellow. Which makes sense based on what type of person I am; I'm a very open person who always enjoyed learning new things and exchanging perspectives. Also, I am someone who likes to think and philosophize. Quite naturally I would rush up the spiral in these aspects and enter stage yellow at a very young age. However, other parts of me would develop in a more normal pace which means these parts of me are sometimes more stage orange or green. I was always confused how it could be that someone is scattered along the spiral and as a very thought-loving person I kind of only cared about my cognitive development. I, however, realized something when I thought about money and especially my current financial situation. I know quite a lot about how the economy works and what someone would have to do if they chose to become rich or at least increase their earnings and I possess the yellow thinking abilities to back this practical knowledge up with a systematic perspective on this practical matter. But it seems like I don't live accordingly; a realized how orange-green my beliefs about my own financial future are. Here a quick repetition of the stages: While stage blue exemplifies black and white thinking like no other stage, orange is guilty of that as well. Just slightly more complex than blue. Blue fundamentally beliefs that things are either or: a = a and b = b Orange beliefs that things follow a set of rules: a = b; therefore if "a" happens, then "b" happens as well. But yellow now realizes that a = b is rather a probability than I rigid rule. If you want "b", then "a" is your best bet, but there are too many factors in place to guarantee such a simple equation in the real world. A good example for how orange believes these matters work is mainstream self-help advice: "the top ten principles for success", "the step by step guide to become a millionaire". Orange cannot yet see the complexity of yellow's worldview and wants a simple step by step plan which unfortunately for orange often fails because it fails to go beyond the surface level. If we go back to my situation, we observe the following: I outgrew orange's obsession with money; so money doesn't really possess any intrinsic value to me and my goals don't revolve around the acquisition of money. And in the near future, there is no need for me to focus on my financial situation; I'm living a rather minimalist lifestyle, my expenses are so slim that even though I don't earn much, I am far from financial problems and my highest priority goals that I am currently working towards don't require additional financial resources. But long-term, based on where I'm heading, more financial resources will be required. Here's where my orangeness kicks in: My idea of how I will manage this is way too simplistic. I seem to have the belief that because I possess the general practical knowledge of what to do, I'll just earn some money when I need to. Basically; I just need to take step 1, then step 2, step 3, step 4 and then profit. So, instead of already beginning to build a system to create money, I used systems thinking as an orange method; I just need to apply the systems thinking and knowledge and these will equal success. Ironically, because I know that the matter is more complex and less predictable than they seem, I perceived it as overly simplistic and predictable because I knew that I was aware of the hidden complexity. So; I understood the matter on a yellow level, but wanted to use this understanding in a way that orange uses its knowledge. Orange fails to see the big picture, green only sees the big picture and yellow sees how each and every pixel constitutes the big picture. Even though I have the yellow perspective on the whole, that doesn't mean that my instinctive way of going about things isn't to just focus on a single pixel and its rules and forgetting the other pixels that interact with this one. Thinking in yellow means realizing how the big and the small pictures interact with one another. Living stage yellow means to instinctively and actively create systems to solve problems. I instinctively think in systems and look at the world from a yellow perspective. This means my views on topics like spirituality, politics, relationships, society, money etc. are yellow, but this does not mean that they way I behave in these fields, or rather how I use my yellow understanding in these fields, is yellow as well.

Thank you all for sharing your thoughts and knowledge, fully agree with what you all said. And @now is foreverI really liked that image with the atom

Not sure if I understand your posts correctly. Which one is it: a) You could connect with other people if you wanted to, but you don't want to connect with those people b) You want to connect with those people, but you can't If it's "b)": use the statement of intent as proposed by me in my previous post. But if I understand correctly, it's "a)". In that case: get off your high horse. Sorry to break it to you then, but you are a snowflake. You think you are so good and other people just can't live up. I believe your problem will be solved as soon as you stop looking down on people and you stop judging them for how boring and non-actualized they are.

This might not be a direct answer to what you wrote, but it made me remember what two pickup artists that I met once told me. So this post is more a practical answer than me stating my opinion on your claim that people are boring. Interestingly the two pickup artists don't know each other and couldn't be more different personality wise and therefore it is unsurprising that their advice was different. 1) The first one said that if you find someone uninteresting, then that is your fault. It is not their job to entertain you. Ultimately, you should be able to entertain yourself. When you have a problem with people being boring, then that is because you meet them with the completely wrong mindset; you are asking the question: "how can they entertain me?" which basically means: "what can they do for me?". People usually aren't interesting when they talk to someone who isn't interesting either. If you were having a good time yourself, you wouldn't care if the people around you had anything interesting to share. It is your job when talking to someone to draw them into your reality and if you create a conversation that isn't boring for them, they wont be boring. So, stop waiting for other people to entertain you and take responsibility; ask "how can I make this more interesting?" instead of "why aren't they making it more interesting?" 2) The second one told me this after he had met a lot of girls in a very short amount of time and I believe he came up with this after he had like seven dates within one week. He realized after date four or five that people (or in his case girls) are boring. They are boring because they are all the same; they talk the same, they all dress the same, they watch the same shows, listen to the same music, like the same things. If you date one girl, there's no need to get to know a different one because 90% of what she says or does is the same between seemingly all of them. So, he didn't really want to go to the next date that he scheduled just to meet another replica of girl number one. The thing he told me which made him enjoying dates again was a technique that the PUA community calls "statement of intent". The idea is: when you meet someone you make a statement why you like them. This thing you like should be something that sets them apart from other people and is something you could see yourself liking about them. For example; let's say I met a girl who at the first glance seemed very basic and boring; no idea why this would be a person worth getting to know, but when she laughs there's always some weird, but funny snorting sound she makes. The statement of intent would now be that I actively tell myself that I like this girl/am interested in this girl because I like the way she laughs. And really phrase this statement of intent in your head. Make a firm decision that you like this person because of something. Now, again; this something doesn't have to be something spectacular like "has won a nobel prize". It can be a small, objectivly insignificant thing that you might not even know whether you actually like it. It can be a physical feature, the way they carry themselves like "he wears socks that don't match which is odd", an interest like "she listens to similar music as I do", something they do/did like traveling (but instead of everyone else who travels to South America or Australia, they went to Antarctica) or if you can't find anything just the fact that they are open enough to talk to you. It just needs to fulfill two criteria: a) it sets them apart from other people and b) you could see yourself liking this about this person. The idea is that being interested is less something that just occurs, but rather an active decision someone makes. If you meet people with a mindset of "they need to prove to me that they aren't boring", they will appear boring. Hope I could help.

Fully agree. There's a polarization going on which a) prevents people from listening to one another and b) creates a vicious, warlike atmosphere where opinions are not anymore something one can simply agree or disagree with; there's a strong moral attachment; if you're against X, you're evil or if you're for Y, you're dumb etc. People are being reduced to nothing but their political beliefs. Here's where we share different views: You write: "claiming its too PC and blaming SJWs and feminism.", "very dangerous ideologies". How about: Those people have different personalities, had different experiences and have simply different value systems than you. Maybe they are right and Doctor Who is too PC, maybe feminism is a threat to be stopped, and maybe their ideologies are rather help- than hurtful to our society. My question to you is: Why aren't you becoming a blackpill-supporter? The reason why you wont become a blackpill-supporter or feminist or MGTOW is the same reason the supporters of those movements wont leave their ideology behind. They, same you and me, - I assume we share similar opinions about those movements - believe that they are right and that the others who they or we diagree with are dangerous or that they need to wake up to some sort and see how things actually are. My claim is; through our lenses some things are clearly better than others. BUT, only through our lenses. Only through those lenses should an incel stay away from blackpill-beliefs. A feminist is a feminist because based on her experiences, values, conditioning and character that is the ideology that is obviously correct in her eyes. And just as much as I cannot see myself become a feminist, she probably can't see herself stop being a feminist. To get back to my question: Why aren't you becoming a blackpill-supporter? How do you know that you are right and they are wrong?

Why? Please explain why it is important that we get to the root. Why is it bad if we ignore it? Because to me it sounds like your confronting ideologies with ideology; "those people believe in the wrong things, how can we get them on the right track?" Why not let them have their own opinions instead of them sharing yours?

Role models is a tricky one since your followers and fans don't have to be in the same stage as you. For example I know orange, green and yellow people who would call Owen Cook (RSD Tyler) a role model.

There still seems to be a correlation between level of awakening and Spiral Dynamics. The most famous current enlightened people are all stage turquoise. They are even listed as examples in the according thread for this stage on this forum. That enlightened people - or at least the ones in the spotlight - are all to be found at the same stage seems peculiar and raises some questions: What influence did their awakening have on their movement on the spiral? (Since I strongly assume that almost all of them weren't on tier 2 before their awakening) Did they sort of skip yellow/(green)/(orange)? Why exactly turquoise and not coral or higher? Does their awakening maybe hinder them on moving up even higher?

@theking00 Can you pay my rent?

Why does it matter what Leo thinks about Jordan Peterson? If you resonate with what JP says - listen to him. If you don't resonate with him - don't. Does Leo have the ultimate opinion? When Leo says something is good then it is good and if he says it's bad then it is bad? I personally believe that Jordan Peterson is very often unfairly portrayed on this forum and that he is being competely underestimated here. Don't fall into the trap of using SD to not having to make up your own mind; just because someone whose opinion you value - like Leo - says that JP is blue/orange does not mean that 1) What JP says is invalid or bad and 2) It does not even mean that JP is actually blue/orange. Whether someone praises or criticises Jordan Peterson or anyone else, take that as what it is - an opinion. No need to start a crusade to make everyone here agree with what you think of him - regardless of whether you like him or not - and no need to change someone's mind or behavior; let people rant, let people praise.

I find SD not a useful tool for practical use. I don't see how I could possibly assess myself accurately on the spiral. To understand someones values, SD alone seems too limited to tell the whole story. Also, there are too many uncertainties or simplifications with the entire model that I don't feel confident in using it too specifically. Don't get me wrong, I like SD a lot; as a model to understand societies on a macro-level; to predict and understand societal movements and changes. I feel like you can sense a general color that's surrounding a person or societal phenomenon; for that it is useful. But in general, as soon as you say something like "this person is blue/orange" or "this is something yellow people do", you're starting to get into territory that seems way too simplistic; in fact, it is so simplistic that you can easily use it as a tool to avoid having to listen to what this person or thing is arguing for by dismissing it as "orange bullshit that's just resisting green" or something of that sort. Honestly, that is what this forum often feels like; "can we agree that this thing that I don't like is low on the spiral?" or "this is something that I like. I believe that this is what yellow has to look like". What I got out of it for my pracitical use is that my worldview, like everybody elses, is not the final destination, but rather a result of where I'm at in my life. And that, instead of activly trying to move to the next stage, I'll just keep an open mind and look into things I don't resonate with from time to time. That way, I assume, I will quite naturally move up from whatever stage I'm in at that point to whatever stage comes next without having to do all the "am I green or yellow?"-stuff.

I had a similar thought. Mine is that if you want to become enlightened, there is a way more efficient way to make that happen than years of meditation. To be concrete: suicide. So, if someone wants to be enlightened to end suffering; you can end suffering right now by killing the ego. If someone wants to be enlightened to find truth; you can kill what's preventing you from finding truth by killing the ego. Leo often says that the point of life is to awake; to die before death. I never understood why he believes that. Seems inconsistent. If you want to awake to the absolute truth, there are way more efficient ways than meditation or psychedelics. I get why one would want to become enlightened, but claiming that survival of the body while absence of ego is the number one priority of life does not make sense to me. At least I haven't heard or experienced anything convincing to back up that claim. Long story short; if enlightenment is the most important thing for you, there is nothing preventing you from killing your ego permanently at any moment. And as you say; enlightenment will happen one day anyway. There seems no reason to awake before you die, other than that it is something you want to do. Me: Not an expert on nonduality and never had an experience I would count as such. Just someone who tries to make sense of what he hears.

Every stage can hurt others, not just the warm colors. Red: Simply because red doesn't care Blue: You don't think a muslim in a christian environment or a christian in a muslim environment will face some kind of bullying? Blue hurts others all the time and justifies it by refering to the fact that he did it to "them" and not to "us" Orange: If it helps him with his personal agenda, yes. But he's smarter about it and probably more subtle than red. Green: Go to a green event or social group and say that you support Trump; see how they react. Green can be very mean if he perceives this behavior to be just and will call it a "fight against the real bullies of red/blue/orange" Yellow: Also yellow can bully. A yellow person just would be more aware of what he's doing. But I don't see how yellow couldn't instrumentalize bullying to reach a bigger goal. To oversimplify things: warm colors hurt individuals to serve their agenda, and cold colors hurt individuals to serve the agenda of the community. So if you want to know what stage someone is in when the act without compassion, ask yourself what they attempt to get out of it. But I would definitely say that the tendency to hurt others lessens with every stage you move up.

Well Carrey is a bit of a dick here imo I mean I would much rather have a conversation with him and I resonate more with what he says than the superficial popculture she represents. But basically what he's doing here is just showing off what new thing he learned about the world that others don't know of. Seriously, he should be aware in what kind of difficult situation this puts the interviewer and that average people don't even understand what he means. No idea if he's turquoise, just because someone uses nondual rhetoric or had a nondual experience doens't mean this person is turquoise. I just think that there is no need to embarrass the interviewer just to express an opinion that flies above the heads of anyone who sees the interview.

Wow, this thread is very messy. But very entertaining to read through most of it today Mainly because basically anyone can post anything that's orange or green and call it yellow. So as it's been pointed out several times before; many examples aren't yellow and so this thread is more confusion than clarification about what yellow looks like. Now, after thinking about this spiral dynamics stuff for the last few weeks what I came up with was the following: Orange mistakes yellows for intelligent orange thinkers. They do this to avoid facing the fact that green values are higher up in the spiral than orange values. Green mistakes yellow for green/yellow; mainly green people who tapped into some yellow aspects like systems thinking and add this to their green worldview. Taylor04 described this in detail in his posts and it makes a lot of sense to me. I believe that yellow is just way too complex to grasp it as easily as tier 1 stages. So what yellow looks like is very speculative on a tier 1 stage and very hard to explain even if you understand it. While we can more or less assess earlier stages to examples like political believes or lifestyles; blue people are often conservatives, orange people like material wealth and green people want equality, I see a yellow person as too complex of a mind to reduce it to a simple observable variable. What I mean is this; this is my hypothesis: you put all the yellow people who exist in the same room and tell them to design a better structure for the world's society; you hand them all the political power in the world. I don't think they would agree with one another. They probably wouldn't yell and be name calling, but they would have very differing views. Because why wouldn't they? Look at yellow's typical values; those aren't goals, but rathers ways of perceiving / ways of thinking. I think at yellow you can't assume the conclusions of someones thought process. I don't find it hard to believe that a yellow person sympathizes with anarchy or libertarianism. I also don't find it hard to believe that someone on yellow would prefer left-wing politics. Yellow values go way deeper than this level; yellow's values are about its new attitude towards the other stages, its own beliefs and the thought process and consideration that go into everything. (Obviously me simplifiying yellow here as well) Yellow means understanding and seeing the previous stages; it doesn't mean liking or disliking a particular stage. In fact; that's the exact difference between it and tier 1. Yellow forms its own believes and values independently. That's what happens when green moves up; he starts to question everything and uses all the tools and knowledge he has aquired from beige to green. He doesn't limit himself to "ah I'm yellow, therefore I have to value this and stay away from that. (that's a very blue or green way of looking at things) This means yellow can form opinions about previous stages, - yellow does not mean liking every stage - yellow can pick sides, deem certain stages as more useful than others and - especially lower yellow - still judge or get triggered by other stages. What makes yellow yellow is HOW it reaches conclusions; not based on simple premises about the world, but by understanding the world and perspectives on a deeper and way more complex level. It sounds very simplistic and tier-1ish to believe that everyone who uses systems thinking and nuanced thinking reaches the same conclusion. Actually the more complex the process, the more unlikely it seems that two minds share the same opinions. Sooooo,,, maybe I'm completely wrong with what I just wrote. The problem is everyone can say they're yellow and believe it themselves, but how do we know? Most of us are not yet yellow, it is also more complex and rarer than blue/orange/green and therefore more difficult to portray in examples. My thesis is - as stated - that yellow individuals differ a lot from one another.