Creating Social Change

[Parththakkar12]

What different spiral stages value understanding about:

Blue: Does not value understanding anything. Thinks that it has it all figured out, their ancestors/religious prophets/leaders figured it all out and there is nothing for me to figure out. We have no reason to reinvent the wheel when they have created it for us.

Orange: Values understanding only about its own personal goals and how to achieve them. They will value learning useful skills, logical thinking, rational thinking, conceptualization, valuable information, goal-oriented thinking/self-help as long as it is pragmatic and helps them achieve their goals.

Green: Values understanding about the wider world in general. Values understanding other people and their struggles.

Yellow: Values understanding anything and everything. Yellow people are the ones who will want to grind down the details of everything and really question stuff for the sake of it. They will have completely self-constructed revamped mental models/worldviews based on their own best research. They will value having a map that resembles the territory as much as possible.

This is very important to understand when communicating with different stages.

• For example, sometimes I make the mistake of telling Stage Blue people something that's nuanced and detailed. What happens is that their mind cherry-picks the details that fit their worldview, and leave out the rest of the message! They are picking out what they value out of it, and the way they do it suggests that they value keeping their mind closed.
• How much they value clear communication, whether or not they will make an effort to close the semantic gaps in communication entirely depends on their spiral stage. The higher up on the spiral the individual is, the more they will value clarity in communication.
• Tier 1 generally only understands stuff that go through their filters and nothing more. Their mind will literally ignore stuff that isn't a part of their worldview. This is often why you see them hanging out with their set ideological tribe. It is only at Tier 2 do we really get people seeking out different perspectives and really communicating properly!

[Parththakkar12]

The way egos work is they have existential suffering, so they conceptualize of the opposite experience of that suffering. That becomes your desire. You pursue it, get it, then realize that it didn't fulfill you 100%, i.e. it didn't end your suffering. You now feel existential suffering and you are unable to escape it. You previously equated forward movement to life and surrendering to the suffering to death. The suffering is because of your resistance to death, because what the ego fears the most is death. A spiritual teacher would tell you to surrender to your suffering and just be unconditionally present with it, i.e. face death head on. Maybe practice self-enquiry too along with it. Just so you know, this is the difficulty level for an individual when it comes to facing your death.

Now lets say an individual has a survival strategy they want to change, because their current one is causing them suffering, or is outdated and is creating problems. Say you have survival strategy A, and you want to switch to survival strategy B. If you let go of survival strategy A, and try survival strategy B and it doesn't work, you die! So, the way this typically works is that the suffering caused to you by survival strategy A keeps increasing up until a point where you have to choose between survival strategy A and death. The only reason you will wilfully risk your life in trying a new survival strategy is if your ego would prefer to surrender to death than live with that suffering. This would require you to really face your death and go through the process mentioned in the previous point.

This is also why it can be difficult for an individual to leave their comfort zone and try something new for the first time. Staying in your comfort zone is a survival strategy and leaving it could be equivalent to risking your life, and a typical Stage Blue person wouldn't want to do that because their survival strategy is to cling to the status quo.

You can see the aforementioned dynamic on a collective level in multiple situations. When we're talking about creating social change, what we're really talking about is changing survival strategies of collective egos. One of the features of Stage Blue Collective egos are that they tend to cling very hard to the status quo. They see the status-quo as survival and letting go of the status-quo as risking death. If you are a Stage Green person who is asking for social change, understand what you're really asking for and what you're expecting from your society.

[Parththakkar12]

If you are a leader, you are in a position where the decisions you take are very important to the overall system. Who you are and what your role is in the system is actually a massive leverage point in the system. Your position is the one with the most power in the system, i.e. the system will do what you want it to do. A lot of lives could be affected by the decisions you take.

If I could create my own society, here's what I'd do relative to leadership positions : I feel that it is very important that we put the most evolved and competent people in leadership positions. Specifically someone who is able to jump between different perspectives and understand how systems work, how ideologies spread, how to create change.

This is tremendously important for the following reason : The post I've linked goes into detail about why collective egos defend certain ideologies. Now, say you are a Stage Yellow leader who understands this about ideologies, that they are created/spread according to the goals of the specific system and thus they define good vs bad, right vs wrong. If you aren't attached to the contents of the ideology, the following options open up:

• What you can do is that you can now use ideology as a tool without getting attached to any specific ideology yourself!
• You can define a certain system goal, powerfully and consciously create and spread an ideology in that system accordingly (cuz most people are simple-minded black-and-white thinkers).
• You can analyze what happens when you spread a specific ideology. You can understand whether the ideology was a success or failure, its pros and cons, potential details and improvements, potential rules and conditions, potential complications in it, etc. You can get really good at creating the right ideology according to the specific group you are working with and the goal of the system you're heading.
• Say you spread an ideology. But, because you didn't quite know the people you were working with, you made an ideological mistake and it starts to backfire. This can happen if you don't know the system well enough. You will be able to switch course whenever you see it backfiring! When you are attached to the ideology yourself, you will be too busy defending your ego when it is made clear to you that the ideology is backfiring. You will be able to catch yourself falling into this trap if you are a Tier-2 thinker.

My reference is 'Thinking in Systems' by Donella Meadows. In the chapter on Leverage Points, the most powerful leverage point she gives is Paradigms!

Say this society collapses under its own weight and it's up to you what kind of a society you'd want to create from scratch. What would you create?

Edited May 8, 2020 by Parththakkar12