Hardkill

Are stages Purple, Red, and Blue needed if you already live in a first world society?

17 posts in this topic

So, I've recently been studying a lot more in depth on each of the different stages of spiral dynamics, and know that experts on this concept like Leo have mentioned that each person needs to go through each stage sequentially in order to solidly embrace and integrate all of the healthy aspects of each stage into your life and evolved beautifully into the highest conscious being possible. I know that Leo has already mentioned a number of times before that you have to have the good traits of each and every stage, you can't skip any stage nor can you can't suppress any of the lower stages, and that you may even have to go back down to the lower stages and work on each of those sequentially for a while in order to both properly burn through your karma and learn how to survive and function. Furthermore, I totally get that all of the first four stages of SD (Beige, Purple, Red, and Blue) are needed if you live in either any first world or even any second world country in order to have the best chances of surviving and thriving in those societies given how brutal and primitive each of those nations are to varying degrees. Additionally, I understand that someone who is at stage Green cannot function or survive independently let alone succeed at anything, and tends to be hypocritical and too judgmental if they don't have any good stage Orange values in them. Conversely, I am aware that someone who is at stage Orange is not going to ever be a truly happy and highly enlightened person and can be so selfish to the point of becoming a great liability to others and perhaps to their entire society in the long-run if that person never learns to integrate any good aspects and values from Stage Green. So, of course Orange needs Green and Green needs Orange.

However, after contemplating much about each of the aspects and values of each stage, if you have all of the healthy values of both Orange and Green, and you live in a first world country then why do you need to have any values from either Stage Purple, Stage Red, or Stage Blue?

Secondly, wouldn't both stage Orange and stage Green together already have all of the traits that Purple, Red, and Blue have? Yes, stage Red has the positive essential traits including assertiveness, courage, pride, decisiveness, assertiveness, ambition, charisma, adventurousness, taking initiative & ownership, personal willpower, pragmatism, strength/power, status, breaking with the pack & pushing the envelope, etc. However, stage Orange seems to already have all of those traits in a much more evolved way. Stage Blue includes hard work, discipline, duty, law, order, enforcing borders, objective sense of right & wrong, hierarchy, social order, status quo, etc. Yet stage Orange has all of those traits too. Yes, stage Orange doesn't have other qualities that stage Blue has such as loyalty, patriotism, morality, good & evil exist, justice, stability, security, meaning & greater purpose, culture, tradition, heritage, crusading for a righteous cause, family values, charity, giving back to my community, etc. But stage Green seems to already have all of those traits in a much more evolved way. Yes, Stage Purple has the values of family & tribal bonds, blood relationships, living together, contribution to the tribe, honor, mystery, spirituality, respecting elders, ancestors, customs, reciprocity, sharing, cooperative-interdependence, out of body travel, intuition, use of psychedelics, etc. Yet again, stage Green seems to already have all of those traits in a much more evolved way.

 

Edited by Hardkill

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Take the extreme examples of 1. Orange and 2. Green: 

1. Hyper-libertarian autism: "I'm an isolated individual, nobody can tell me what to do, all people are rational, the poor are lazy."

2. Perma-fried hippie New Ager: "Let's come together. We don't need money, work or aspirations, just peace and love and fluffy worldviews... and fuck the rich."

It's the case that all the Tier 1 stages are reacting to the other Tier 1 stages in an exclusionary manner, not just the extreme versions of it. Integrating all the stages means discovering the optimal balance that cultivates resilience and vitality on both an individual and collective level. There are no clear cut methods to facilitate this process. It's a process of growth.


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

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Stage red says u need to be a warrior

Blue says u need order and rules etc.

Sp ofcourse it is need.how u can u live if u cannot protect yourself against violence which is the core of stage red

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You need red and blue everywhere.. They're basic. 


INFJ-T,ptsd,BPD, autism, anger issues

Cleared out ignore list today. 

..

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Kids sort of go through these stages when they grow up, it just so happens our society is good at accelerating people through the lower stages since we've transcended them

Like look how cruel kids can be with bullying, tribalism etc. that's all pretty much pure red and purple

School itself is the epitome of blue, too

There are remnants of these older stages in our society that give most people a baseline of beige,purple,red,blue that allows them to build a reasonable foundation for orange/green by the time they're in their mid/late teens

So yea you can kind of get by without explicitly looking into the parts of yourself associated with these earlier stages since your society has already given you a solid-ish base in them.

It could also have fucked up your sense of red if you were badly bullied for example, and that requires work to fix

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But what would happened if a first world country such as the US had very little to no Red, Blue, or Purple and only healthy Orange and healthy Green? Couldn't positive Orange and positive Green protect it's country from violence and enact sufficient law, order, and justice for its society?

Also, what is the difference between the hard work ethic and discipline of Stage Blue versus Stage Orange work ethic and discipline?

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28 minutes ago, Hardkill said:

But what would happened if a first world country such as the US had very little to no Red, Blue, or Purple and only healthy Orange and healthy Green? Couldn't positive Orange and positive Green protect it's country from violence and enact sufficient law, order, and justice for its society?

Also, what is the difference between the hard work ethic and discipline of Stage Blue versus Stage Orange work ethic and discipline?

There are no healthy Tier 1 value systems. There are specific "healthy" examples where Tier 2 grabs inspiration, but as self-contained value systems, they're incomplete. Tier 1 is not self-aware: it excludes, judges, fears, otherizes etc. It does not understand its own values, how they relate to other values, or how to differentiate between healthy or toxic expressions of these values.


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

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8 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

There are no healthy Tier 1 value systems. There are specific examples where where Tier 2 grabs inspiration, but as self-contained value systems, they're incomplete. Tier 1 is not self-aware: it excludes, judges, fears, otherizes etc. It does not understand its own values, how they relate to other values, or how to differentiate between healthy or toxic expressions of these values.

Okay? How does that answer the question I have which is what would happen if a person from a 1st world society who has stage both the essential aspects of Orange and Green which Leo talks about doesn't have any values from either Purple, Red, or Blue? What would happen to a 1st world society that only has Orange and Green, but has very little to no Red, Blue, or Purple?

Also, isn't there overlap with hard work ethic and discipline of Stage Blue and that from Stage Orange?

Edited by Hardkill

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YES, of course. 

BLUE is expressed through; Discipline, work ethic, integrity, proper dress, proper and polite language, sobriety and self control

RED is expressed through; Loyalty, passion, decisiveness, no-nonsense, the ability to stand up for oneself. 

PURPLE is expressed through; connection to nature, and deep intimate bonds with family and community

19 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

There are no healthy Tier 1 value systems. 

This is deeply false.

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2 minutes ago, AdroseAkise said:

YES, of course. 

BLUE is expressed through; Discipline, work ethic, integrity, proper dress, proper and polite language, sobriety and self control

RED is expressed through; Loyalty, passion, decisiveness, no-nonsense, the ability to stand up for oneself. 

PURPLE is expressed through; connection to nature, and deep intimate bonds with family and community

This is deeply false.

Let me trying asking my question(s) in another way:

Aren't the BLUE values which do include discipline, work ethic, integrity, proper dress, proper and polite language, sobriety and self control, etc. also in Stage ORANGE? 

Aren't the RED values which do include loyalty, passion, decisiveness, no-nonsense, the ability to stand up for oneself, etc. also in stage ORANGE? 

Aren't the PURPLE values which do include connection to nature, and deep intimate bonds with family and community also in both stage BLUE and stage GREEN?

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1 hour ago, Hardkill said:

Okay? How does that answer the question I have which is what would happen if a person from a 1st world society who has stage both the essential aspects of Orange and Green which Leo talks about doesn't have any values from either Purple, Red, or Blue? What would happen to a 1st world society that only has Orange and Green, but has very little to no Red, Blue, or Purple?

Also, isn't there overlap with hard work ethic and discipline of Stage Blue and that from Stage Orange?

It's true that the higher Tier 1 systems contain some aspects of the lower ones within them, but they also react heavily to them, which creates a skewed picture. I'll elaborate on the first example I gave:

Orange may react to Blue's social-order dogmatist-collectivist meme by going full ape-shit anti-establishment rationalist-individualist meme (libertarians/an-caps/nihilists) and want to abolish all laws and regulations, because they think that deep down, everybody actually thinks like them. Truth is that criminals don't act rationally. They don't care about the sanctity of personal property. They need somebody to beat them up if they misbehave, and that is why we have a monopoly of force; the cops, the justice system.

Orange isn't just Blue+. It's Orange. It often treads on a lot of "healthy" Blue. We do need some serious order in society to protect people from monsters, and we do need some transcendent purpose to keep people from going insane. Now, Green doesn't necessarily address this either in any comprehensive fashion just because it's a so-called collectivist stage. It can also go full ape-shit anti-establishment trans-rationalist-collectivist (hippies/libertarian socialists/post-modernists). It's not just anti-establishment, it's also anti-rationalist, anti-progress (technically speaking).

I used extreme examples to illustrate the differences, but the same dynamics apply to more moderate versions. For Tier 1, as well as there is an integration aspect for every stage, there is a just as significant reactionary aspect. The reactionary aspect comes from a lack of perspective: a lack of ability to see the entire spiral.


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

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Guys, get out of the conceptual space and get into reality.

When you get an experiential appreciation for what's being talked about at each stage, you'll understand you can't be effective at higher levels without development and integration in the lower levels. There is no higher level without the preceding level. Also learn about open and closed states in SD.

If you follow someone at a high level like Leo, you'll have the experience of moving back into lower stages for periods of time, which allows you to fill in and flesh out the lower part of your psyche.

If your parents or community already integrated the lower then you'll have the lower integrated. If not then you won't. This stuff isn't complicated, but you need to relate your learning to direct experience. If not, you make mistakes like our friend confusing Green for Purple.

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36 minutes ago, Hardkill said:

Aren't the BLUE values which do include discipline, work ethic, integrity, proper dress, proper and polite language, sobriety and self control, etc. also in Stage ORANGE? 

If integrated properly, than yes. There could always be an orange system that does not integrate these things, but that orange system will become dysfunctional.

36 minutes ago, Hardkill said:

Aren't the RED values which do include loyalty, passion, decisiveness, no-nonsense, the ability to stand up for oneself, etc. also in stage ORANGE? 

Ideally yes, but the worst aspects of red are regulated by the blue system.

36 minutes ago, Hardkill said:

Aren't the PURPLE values which do include connection to nature, and deep intimate bonds with family and community also in both stage BLUE and stage GREEN?

YES

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52 minutes ago, AdroseAkise said:

This is deeply false.

We're making value judgements like "healthy" based on Tier 2 principles (SD is a Tier 2 framework). Therefore, Tier 1 stages, as self-consistent frameworks of exclusion and contraction, are by definition not healthy. They can still contain specific values that, when expressed in a certain way, would be considered healthy by Tier 2, but then these values would be incorporated into a larger context of inclusion and expansion.


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

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Okay, I think it get it now. So, what makes Stage Blue different from stages Orange and Green, but always necessary even within 1st world countries is that Blue involves the official law and order of a society and the monopoly of force by the military, police, and justice system of that society's government. Green and Orange may have some degree of each of those elements, but not at the sufficient levels needed for a whole society, let alone a large nation in modern times, to function, survive, and deliver justice in a pragmatic cohesive way. Stage Blue also teaches individuals to respect the necessary rules and norms established by their civilization and carry out their responsibilities, civic duties, and obligations that a citizen has to his country.

So actually, Blue, Orange, and Green all need each other in order for a first world society to function, survive, deliver justice, prosper, allow creativity, allow freedom (within reason), allow equal rights, and make as much scientific and societal progress as possible. The same would apply for each individual person who lives within any of those societies.

So, then how necessary are red or purple values for first world societies or for any individuals living in any of those places?

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Alright, I'll probably get that book some day. 

Also, I am thinking that maybe healthy red values are still needed in a first world society.

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