Spiral Dynamics Stage Yellow Examples Mega-Thread

[Taylor04]

This is my latest theory on spiral dynamics. It might be right or wrong, but I will share. So I think while societies as a whole move through every stage, we overestimate how much individual people move up. Except for fairly exceptional instances, these stage changes are a multi-generational effort thattakes centuries. People tend to stay what they got born into, and maybe move a quarter vMeme up or so at best. Stage changes mostly happen when people got born into a very late stage.

Individual humans seem to be selected to be either on the warm or the cold side of the spiral, and depending on our level of consciousness we will flock to one of the memes the society we live in offers us. Not sure how this works, but humans seem to be either warm colored (K-selected) or cold colored (r-selected). There is an interesting presentation on youtube called Gene Wars for further explanation. I think it is either genetic or we rate our relative status some time during childhood, and then pick which mating environment would be most beneficial for us, and spend the rest of our lives trying to create that mating environment. The relatively strong/smart want a "selfish" meritocracy where they have all the reproductive advantages, and the weaker r-selected want to stifle meritocracy, so that the strong and smart dont have all the mating advantages. Society seems to go fourth and back between domination by either. Some examples: Red antiquity was bad for the genes of slaves, but good for the one of chieftains. Blue medieval ages brought slave religion and palace economies where mating opportunity was more random and based on status. Anything that stifles meritocracy is good from an r-selected perspective. Then came the orange laissez faire age, which made everyone rich, but genes care about relative status, and capitalism was relatively good for the smart and diligent and relatively bad for the less so. Then we get green with a return of palace economies in the form of welfare-warfare statism. One of the first measures the progressives implemented when they became agenda setting in the 1900's was to implement unequal income taxation and monetary communism, in effect a transfer of wealth from K-selected individuals to r-selected individuals that stifles meritocracy. So this desire for "equality" isnt as noble as they present it, they simply wish to create the mating environment that benefits them at the expense of others.

A contemporary first world K-selected person can be orange or yellow, but cant be green, and a r-selected person can be blue or green, but not orange or yellow. Moving up the spiral only happens on average and "with each burial"; i.e. in the next generation. The children of orange parents may become green, and the children of greens may become yellow.

Society as a whole moves through the stages as an average of where the individuals are. So lets start with a blue-dominated society. Here most r-selected people will be blue, but the K-selected people will be split between red and orange. Since the cold colored side is unified and the warm colored side is split, the cold colored meme will dominate society. The blues usually dont move up, because their society confirms their views and they are in an echo chamber. Now, as the average level of consciousness improves, there will be a net change of warm colored people from red to orange. (That doesnt have to mean that they are the same people moving up, but that new oranges replace old reds.) And at a certain point most of the warm colored individuals are orange, and society tips to being blue-orange. But blue is the low end of the spiral now, so as the level of consciousness improves the r-selected people will start resonating more with green. Now the cold colored side is split and the warm side is unified and society will be orange dominated. As enough cold colored people appreciate green, we again get a tip to first orange-green and then green domination. This leaves us with the current situation in the first world: a green-dominated society where the K-selected slowly trickle up from orange to yellow. Greens stay where they are, because moving up would not only require moving against a groupthink they find plausible, but also to steer in the right direction from within a perspective that leads them astray. They cant go towards yellow, because they dont even know what yellow is. The best they can do is to improve within their meme and be good people, which is difficult enough, so their kids have a chance to be yellow. Turquoise wont really happen until society is sufficiently yellow for new r-selected children to start rebelling against their yellow parents, which wont be for another 30 years or more.

Now, this is of course a massive generalization and not always as clear cut. One reason it might apper that people move from cold to warm or vice versa is that we might have become culturally indoctrinated by a meme that does not fit our selected mentality. For instance, a cold colored individual might have been born in an orange pocket and then move to green as he individuates away that conditioning. This should not be seen as a move up the spiral but a shedding of the wrong conditioning. And since the dominant meme runs the means of predation, and therefore gets first dips on indoctrinating all new individuals, many people are conditioned into the dominant meme for the first decades of their lives and then individuate away from it. So someone born in todays society would usually receive a green conditioning and if that person is r-selected, it will feel all is proper and the green shades fit. But if the person is K-selected, it will move to a warm-colored meme after childhood. Some people never quite escape this, due to lack of access to information or courage to go against the mainstream.

What sometimes seems to happen that the split side will form an amalgamation. So for instance the green and blue may find enough common ground to partner up to overpower orange for a while. I think naziism in the 30's was such a blue-green amalgamation. (Hardcore green environmentalism and socialist "egalitarianism", but with deep blue elements such as loyalty.) Communism, too, seems like green intellectuals taking charge of a blue society and forming a blue-green amalgamation. The reason they fought each others was not due to ideological differences, but because cold colored dominance tends to be violent and because they competed for the same ideological territory. It was a fight of Coke vs. Pepsi.

Another example: neoliberalism in the 70's might have been the orange-yellow amalgamation that overpowered green dominance for long enough to avoid economic collapse in the west. (Early yellow thinkers formulated the economic theories, and orange went along with them because they could see empirically that it worked.) This recent mixing might be a reason why so many greens have a hard time keeping orange and yellow apart. In their lifetimes they have mostly experienced it as a mixture, and orange has taken on a lot of yellow rhetoric. But the distinction is that yellow understands proper systems thinking aka. emergent properties (for instance free market economics) and orange only applies them empirically.

Edited November 3, 2018 by Taylor04

[Taylor04]

I was asked to provide some contemporary yellow thinkers, and since this is the yellow examples thread, here's what I replied:

Most people in the first world are somewhat yellow, because they grew up being subjected to multiple perspectives. Matt Ridley is in the best yellow thinker I can think of. His latest book The Evolution of Everything is a great introduction into proper systems thinking. James Damore, the writer of the google memo, is an example of the kind of yellow meta perspective that sees how the political sides are both necessary and a balance to each other. The youtube channel Rebel Wisdom seems very yellow and has some videos about spiral dynamics. And the blog libertyblitzkrieg has a series on spiral dynamics that influenced my writings here. I think The Rubin Report is a good place to hear yellow ideas, although its not as pure. And I think Douglas Carswell, Stefan Molyneux and Alex Epstein deserve honorary mentions as well, even though they have some tier one aspects to them. And lets not forget F. A. Hayek (and other supply-side economists) who might have been one of the earliest yellow thinkers of humanity.

I like to add Nassim Taleb, Jeffrey Tucker, Tom Woods, and especially the blog Brodoland, which explains the true yellow concept very well, and mentions some "further reading" sources, but gets some details wrong. For instance, I dont think red and blue exist much any more in the first world. They were pre-industrial phenomena, with a completely different outlook on life than anyone in the first world has today. A real blue would be some medieval peasant, who's bordering starvation, mired in superstition and cruely traumatized. The first worlders we call "blue" are not really blue but have an orange/green perspective on life, and may have a slight blue tint to it, thats it. They are often orange with plenty of green beliefs (thats unavoidable because of green media and schooling monopolies), who have maintained traditional religion in place of green religion (environmentalism), which are functionally the same; belief in an invisible threat in the sky that requires moralizing our actions to avert divine retribution (warmism). Blue and green religion run on the same cognitive hardware, and it is easy to see how someone indoctrinated into one can easily flip to the other.

If people respond to any of my posts with serious arguments, I will be around to respond to them for at least a while. (They start on page 14 of this thread.) Also, I'd like to mention an error in an above post that I cant change any more: the term "systemic order" should say "spontaneous order". Look the latter term up if you want to know what I mean by proper yellow "systems thinking", a term which is thrown around a lot here, but usually just seems to refers to peoples (tier one) belief in central planning.

Edited November 3, 2018 by Taylor04

[remussirca]

I've found this channel to be a great YELLOW source for me. It explains all the basic topics of Yellow plus all the connections between them.
@Leo Gura
I would like to hear your opinion.

I post here one of my favorite videos from the Systems thinking play list, but feel free to dig more into the channel, it really has great content.

 

[MsNobody]

Ifound Jonathan Haidt to be very yellow, he points out two POV and stays neutral, talking about the importance of both in society, in the end he talks about moral humility, which is respecting everyone’s opinion and not having the black/ white, right/ wrong, good/bad way of thinking 

what do you guys think? 

[Himanshu]

 

[MsNobody]

Yellow poetry from Khalil Gibran 

“Let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together, yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow.”

Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

[StardewValley]

I'm surprised that no one has mentioned Elliot Hulse:

 

[Taylor04]

On 11/12/2018 at 6:51 AM, MsNobody said:

 

On 11/12/2018 at 6:51 AM, MsNobody said:

Ifound Jonathan Haidt to be very yellow, he points out two POV and stays neutral, talking about the importance of both in society, in the end he talks about moral humility, which is respecting everyone’s opinion and not having the black/ white, right/ wrong, good/bad way of thinking 

what do you guys think? 

I agree. He seems like a green-friendly yellow.

Edited November 15, 2018 by Taylor04

[Roch]

Excess of yellow?

 

[Key Elements]

 

[Brittany]

Advanced viewpoint on desire

[Samra]

 

[Taylor04]

@Samra Yes, I sense a little yellowness in Bill Gates. He has for instance said that green energy is unwise and his solutions are not the typical "more social engineering". As such his solutions are "integrative", because they take their real world consequences into account, unlike green "solutions" which only measure intentions and ignore consequences. Gates seems to look at the world empirically and rationally, and decides on solutions based on what works. This empirical approach has led him to disagree with the typical green solutions. He still comes at it from green assumtions though, which makes him less yellow. Keep in mind that yellow is the rebellion against green, like green was a rebellion against orange. These rebellions tend to oversteer a bit. Yellow is the rebellious teenager who storms out of his green parents house shouting that he hates everything they stand for. So real yellow can be expected to be aggressively anti-green. At times axiomatically anti-green: "if its what the greens say then it must be wrong". So yes, yellow is agentic and anti-collectivist. It is anti-environmentalist and does not believe in global warming. Yellow wants to tare down the wind turbines and smash the welfare state.

Bill Gates is not like that. He is a bit yellow through valuing rationality over groupthink. But he is not very deeply yellow. For instance, his conclusions are in effect very pro-market and agentic, but he is unwilling to say this directly. He does not say that is was agentic market liberalizations that created these waves of poverty reduction. He only mentions unspecified " progress". Mass poverty goes away when a society moves from blue to orange. Orange reduced birth rates and closes the malthusian trap. This is death to the low-K gene set that exists as an adaptation to the blue world. The reason humanity has such a hard time getting out of poverty is that the low-K gene set needs it to survive. To remove poverty, the resistance of the low-K gene set needs to be overcome, that wishes to keep the birth rate gravy train rolling. Gates favors reduction in poverty through markets and agency, as such he is in favor of making the world more warm-colored. Thats not what greens want. Low-K vMemes do not favor changes towards high-K vMemes, ever. The low-K gene set wants low-K vMemes, even at the expense of fighting to keep poverty alive.

And then Gates mentions his belief in warmism, which is green. Its funny how they blame every crop failure on global warming these days, like there were no storms or crop failures before. 100 years ago these things were explained by God, now they are caused by global warming. Gates apparently isnt yellow enough to have outgrown that.

[Key Elements]

What does the Mirror of Erised symbolizes for you in "real" life? 

 

[Forestluv]

@Brittany Thank you. I've been looking for examples of Yellow stage women. She is great.

4 hours ago, Taylor04 said:

@Samra Keep in mind that yellow is the rebellion against green, like green was a rebellion against orange. These rebellions tend to oversteer a bit. Yellow is the rebellious teenager who storms out of his green parents house shouting that he hates everything they stand for. So real yellow can be expected to be aggressively anti-green. At times axiomatically anti-green: "if its what the greens say then it must be wrong". So yes, yellow is agentic and anti-collectivist. It is anti-environmentalist and does not believe in global warming. Yellow wants to tare down the wind turbines and smash the welfare state.

That seems like an Orange perspective of what it imagines Yellow to be like.

Tier1 is "anti" other Tier1 stages. Tier1 stages demonize each other. Tier2 has transcended and embodied Tier1. Tier2 is not "anti" any stage in Tier1, they no longer demonize other stages. 

What you are saying is like saying: "College is the rebellion against the 4th grade, like how 4th graders rebelled against 3rd graders. A college student is like a 6th grade brat that throws a temper tantrum because they can't have a piece of candy. So, real college students can be aggressively ant-4th grade. If it's what a 4th grader says, then it must be wrong".

This is the perspective of what a 3rd grader imagines 5th grade will be like. College students are soooo much more mature and developed than this. Similarly, Yellow is much more mature and advanced than you are imagining.

[Taylor04]

@Serotoninluv

No, it is a green-YELLOW perspective that Green perceives as Orange.

I think this forum and the spiral dynamics video series portray a green narrative of what whatthey wish the spiral would continue like: green beliefs and green opinions and green politics, but with lots of equanimity. Why the luxury to no longer demonize other stages? Because green eliminated them all and there are no other stages left to fight. This is still an expression of monoperspectivalness, just in the form of wanting green to become so dominant that is gains the luxury of quitting the fight and turning spiritual. It is easy enough to think one will not demonize anyone in a future where there are no enemies left to demonize. Sort of what the 1000 year Reich wished it could have been for the last 990 years, if things had gone their way. This still indirectly illustrates a desire to abolish other vMemes and make green dominant, just in the form of inventing a future where they already killed them. It's still demonization in the form of deeming the other stages inferior enough to be worthy of eradication. That is quite different from the "both perspectives have upsides" view of real yellow.
I can see why this view appeals to greens who stumbled onto spiral dynamics. They don't like the notion that real yellow is the growing challenge from the neoliberal agentic side, that emerged out of the internet circumventing the green monopoly on ideas. (Agentic vMemes seem to spead due to new communication technology; orange emerged out of the invention of printing press.) So they invented a spiral that accommodates their beliefs. Unfortunately it does not work that way. Spiral Dynamics does not support the view that the spiral stops oscillating after green, nor that agentic vMemes die out after orange. And the book specifically mentions that green does not like tier 2, so we know that whatever greens would prefer yellow to be, that is not it.
Tier 2 is supposed to have equanimity, but that does not mean that yellow couldn't be in disagreement with some green beliefs. It still integrates some of them. Also, one has to distinguish yellow from tier 2 as a whole. While tier 2 as a whole might not be agentic per se, yellow is an agentic stage. Yellow does not have to be all cozy with green politics, nor or is anyone who disagrees with collectivist beliefs by necessity orange. That would imply that history ends with the latest low consciousness stage belief system, because tier 2 is just too zen to get any wiser. Tier 2 vMemes do disagree with stuff they don't like, and will try to participate in the battle of ideas. They just do so from a lighter, less hateful place. But it is perfectly reasonable to rebel against something, if it is deemed destructive.

[Key Elements]

 

[kieranperez]

Mark Hyman is a GREAT example of Yellow. What he’s doing in the medical field and all the work he’s doing in nutrition is fabulous. 

[petar8p]

@Taylor04
Would you say this is yellow? 

 

[PetarKa]