TheAlchemist

Spiral Dynamics Non-linear development

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One thing that confuses me about spiral dynamics is that it implies that development at the collective level is non-linear, as in the scale of time it takes for a new level to appear is shorter and shorter. For example:

Stage purple: 50,000 years old

Stage red: 15,000 years old

Stage blue: 5000 years old

Stage orange: 300 years old

Stage green: 50 years old

Stage yellow: >50 years old

Stage turqoise: >50 years old

Why do we all of a sudden have new stages popping up within a few hundred years (or less) from each other, when before it took thousands of years? Are we just being modernity centric here, overly focusing on modern times as being somehow special, or does the emergence of new levels facilitate faster emergence of yet new levels, making it non-linear?

These new stages emerging faster and faster  would imply that collectively humanity is developing in a non-linear, almost exponential way. But yet the general consensus is that it will take at least hundreds, maybe thousands of years for humans to shift significantly as a collective to tier-2 for example. But doesn't that imply a linear growth pattern? What if there are certain thresholds we break through collectively, which allow faster and faster development? That would change our assumptions quite a bit. 


"Only that which can change can continue."

-James P. Carse

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2 hours ago, Zeitgeist said:

This rapid development is not happening everywhere at the same pace. Where it's happening, technology and innovation, and the consequential creation of wealth are huge enablers of this trend. Today we have internet and can watch Actualized.org, for example. And we understand the content and are able to act upon it because we have leisure time. It sounds simple, but these things are not to be taken for granted.

Yes that makes sense. And in the same way that we couldn't have predicted how these new enablers (like the internet) will change opportunities for development, we probably can't really know what the future enablers will be. What will be the next enabler at the same magnitude or more than the internet? Who knows, some personalized AI algorithm optimizating for nutrition, spiritual practices, psychedelic use and teaching epistemology based on environment, genetics etc. could quite quickly result in massive breakthroughs where vast amounts of people start developing much faster than ever before. 

I'm just not so convinced we can predict at the collective level how these developmental stages will unfold, and especially when they will unfold. Since it seems like a non-linear process, there could be rapid breakthroughs so that it won't take hundreds or thousands of years. Maybe it's like solving/filling in a puzzle, the beginning is the most difficult, but it gets easier the more we fill in the pieces, until at the end, progress is extremely rapid. 

Edited by TheAlchemist

"Only that which can change can continue."

-James P. Carse

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1 minute ago, Husseinisdoingfine said:

Actually, according to spiraldynamicsintegral.nl/en/ :

Beige: 150,000 years ago

Purple: 40,000 years ago

Red: 10,000 years ago

Blue: Also 10,000 years ago

Orange: 2,500 years ago

Green: 200 years ago

Yellow: 50 years ago

Turquoise: 30 years ago

 

That seems way the fuck off... Anyway. There was definitely no Orange 500 BC lmao.


Dont look at me! Look inside!

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20 minutes ago, Husseinisdoingfine said:

Actually, according to spiraldynamicsintegral.nl/en/ :

Beige: 150,000 years ago

Purple: 40,000 years ago

Red: 10,000 years ago

Blue: Also 10,000 years ago

Orange: 2,500 years ago

Green: 200 years ago

Yellow: 50 years ago

Turquoise: 30 years ago

 

My point is the same regardless. Why did it take 110,000 years for the next stage to emerge from beige to purple, but only 20 years from yellow to turqoise?


"Only that which can change can continue."

-James P. Carse

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39 minutes ago, TheAlchemist said:

My point is the same regardless. Why did it take 110,000 years for the next stage to emerge from beige to purple, but only 20 years from yellow to turqoise?

I think its because at each stage we expand our society. For example, in a small Purple tribe there is not much input, no new ideas from outside. Few people. 

In purple you are a small tribe or village.

In red/Blue your society expands to a state.

In Orange your society expands to a country.

In Green weve gone global.

Why is this important? Because more people means more idea-sharing, more idea-sharing means faster development of society, techology, etc. Think about the fact that the planet has gone from 1 billion to 7 billion people from 1900 to now.

Edited by Rilles

Dont look at me! Look inside!

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Why is population growth non-linear? Why is advances in data processing non-linear? All intelligent self-improving systems work this way. Once growth entails you becoming better at growth, growth becomes exponential.


Intrinsic joy is revealed in the marriage of meaning and being.

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Great points, thanks. Population growth surely is part of a positive feedback loop. It keeps going until a "competing" stabilizing or negative feedback loop gains more momentum and slows it down. This is the case with all positive feedback loops if space or resources are limited. Once they gain momentum, they usually grow non-linearly until they reach saturation, or are overtaken by another loop. So assuming that the same would apply to collective human development, we will eventually see rapid growth and some kind of saturation point. Will this point be a collapse or a transcendence? 

It's just very interesting to think about.

Edited by TheAlchemist

"Only that which can change can continue."

-James P. Carse

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Any given society is basically forced to level up into the next stage whenever its functioning at a given stage is insufficient to meet the challenges of its environment. So a Purple society faced with the threat of a neighboring Red warlord must put forward its own Red warlords to meet the challenge. But a society packed with warring Red warlords (say the Arabian peninsula during the time of Muhammed) must consolidate its warring factions in order to become a more orderly Blue society (which in the case of Islam then became a very powerful caliphate). One thing we know from history is that the age of empires (i.e. competing societies centered at Blue) lasted for thousands of years.

The transition to Orange coincided (roughly speaking) with the stabilization of the various Blue spheres of influence, and the transition to Green and above corresponded with both WW2 and the development of the atomic bomb. Now that the threat of nuclear annhilation is in many ways "hanging over" the head of humanity, we can no longer afford to fuck around with warfare and violent means for settling disputes. So Green, Yellow, and Turquoise as necessary developments in preventing Armageddon. If it were not for all of the technological developments of the 19th and 20th centuries, there's a good chance we'd all still be centered at Blue/orange.

So it's not that we humans have all of a sudden gotten much smarter than we had been before, so much as we've been forced to get more serious about handling conflict productively and engaging in complex systems thinking. One last point I would like to make is that every human being carries the entire spiral around with them. That is, each person advances in their own personal life from beige (infant) to purple (baby) to red (toddler) to blue (child) to orange (teen) to green (young adult) to yellow (adult) to turquoise (mature adult or elder). When society was centered at blue there wasn't any pressure or incentive for a person to develop to higher stages (or to activate the energies of the higher stages, depending on how you want to look at it). And in fact lots of people in our current society at "stuck at" lower stages like blue or orange. In any case, there is probably some natural limit around how quickly any given person can develop -- you can't expect a 15 year old to be centered at Turquoise, for example, and if they were it would make for a rather maldeveloped person. So at some point probably this century, absent genetic engineering or the aid of artifical intelligence, we're probably going to have access to the full spiral of human development. In fact, a country like the Netherlands might already be there. So really the exponential growth of the Spiral can be thought of as producing fully developed human beings, and it's going to be super interesting seeing what sorts of challenges the species faces once our people have reached the practical limits of human development.

Edited by Boethius

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@TheAlchemist

Good question.

My thinking is that humanity is on a non-linear growth path at the moment.

If you look at statistics around population growth, resource use, technological innovation etc, you’ll see these things have all been expanding exponentially.

Spiral dynamics seems to match that exponential curve.

Of course, such an exponential curve is unlikely to last. You’re not going to have exponential population growth forever. This is a temporary phenomena, like the “grow spurt” of an adolescence. Thus, if there are stages after turquoise, I’d doubt they will continue to unfold in an exponential way. Although I’m purely speculating.


 

 

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2 hours ago, Husseinisdoingfine said:

Why not? They DID have computers after all.

As I've been reading a little history of philosophy this year, I've concluded that I don't find it particularily helpful to apply Orange to pre-enlightenment societies.

The time from classical antiquity throughout the middle ages was a messy mixture of theology and philosophy, mythic and rational thinking, concrete and formal operational cognition etc.

There is a point in calling it the Dark Ages. I would say those 2000 years were a rough, complicated and slow transitionatory stage. If there really was any true Orange anywhere, it was very exclusive and not truly significant in the bigger picture. 

It's not this simple, but for instance, Stage Blue surely didn't reach its peak before the great empires fell and the nation states were established. That is just one example, but the point is that the seeds of Orange needed a vast selection of ideal conditions in order to bear fruit (as did any stage).

Edited by Carl-Richard

Intrinsic joy is revealed in the marriage of meaning and being.

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