Everyone has blind spots. Except me. I don’t have any. This is amusing because it is so obviously false, and yet there is a part of me that really believes it. After all I can’t see my own blind spots so obviously I don’t have any, right? In other words, I don’t know what I don’t know. But this is true for everyone. We all can not see our own blind spots by definition! Other people can know things, can be so more advanced than us on something that we don’t recognize how much further ahead they are. So when we reach an impasse with someone, it is important to stop and hold open the possibility that maybe, just maybe this might be our blindspot not theirs. Maybe they can see something that we don’t even know we don’t know.
There are many different kinds of blindspots, but let’s focus on where one stage sees something that another stage just misses.
On January 28, 1986 millions of children sitting in their classrooms watched the launch of the Challenger shuttle. For the first time in history there was a school teacher onboard, Christa McAuliffe. The networks were televising a special classroom set up for her students watching the launch. 73 seconds after launch the shuttle blew up and her students watched her die on national TV. It was a horrible, painful death. It did not have to happen. NASA engineers the day before the launch literally begged for the launch to be cancelled. But the launch had already been postponed numerous times, and if it were postponed yet again it could not be included in Reagan’s state of the union address. So the engineers were overruled. But they knew. One of the engineers, Bob Ebeling, told his wife the night before, “It is going to blow up”
What happened here? Bob Ebeling was working at the Orange stage, but the NASA administration was operating at most likely Red or at best Blue. Either way the administrators clearly did not have a science/engineering mindset. There was a stage mismatch. Sometimes one stage sees things much clearer than another stage and we ignore it at our dire peril. It is an act of moral cowardice to not call it out. Bob, spent his life regretting not finding a way to convince the administrators to cancel the launch. His problem was that he tried to talk to them in the language of science/math, but that kind of thinking was not really available to those decision maker. At that time it was pretty common for Republicans to not even believe in evolution. The Green stage has done such a good job of deconstructing rationality that we sometimes forget that in certain cases one point of view is clearly superior to another. We have to be incredibly careful here of course because it is so easy to mislead ourselves that we are correct when in fact we are not. In this case, however, we are on fairly safe ground. Spaceships are very much an Orange stage construct, and disaster awaits anyone who tries to launch one without being at least at that stage. Global warming is a similar problem. Politicians who are not at least at the Orange stage are deciding to not respond to the challenge. Disaster awaits us.
Hopefully you agree with this? Good. Let’s go on to something harder.
I grew up in Waukegan Illinois. It was a gritty, dirty factory town north of Chicago. Unions were strong there. Everyone knew how much everyone else earned because we were all in this together. Only a factory owner would want to keep wages secret. Waukegan is in a region that used to be called the Steel Belt because of all the manufacturing, but in the late 70’s that all started to decline and the area is now known as the Rust Belt. Dead factories were all around us. I would sneak into an abandoned factory with a friend and it was spooky. The calendars on the wall were marked off until one day they weren’t. Desks were just left as they were. This was already happening, but the move to fully open trade was the last nail in the coffin. And the most vigorous supporter of open trade was Bill Clinton, a Democrat. He almost didn’t get elected in 92 because of this. He benefited from Ross Perot’s independent campaign that got an astonishing 19% of the vote. No other third party candidate has gotten close to that in living memory. And if Perot had run a better campaign he probably would have done much better. Maybe even won. Perot is famous for talking about the “giant sucking sound” people would hear as union jobs were outsourced. He turned out to be exactly correct. We first set up a free trade agreement with Mexico (NAFTA) and then moved on to China. Factories were already in decline at that point, but that was the death knell. Factories shut down all over the Rust belt and most importantly the unions were thoroughly busted.
Economists kept on insisting that the net effect of all this “creative destruction” was increased wealth for the country. But they didn’t say increased wealth for who. Some people definitely benefitted from this, but it wasn’t the factory workers. And the workers noticed. Hilary Clinton lost in 2016 because formerly solid Democratic Rust Belt states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan went (narrowly) for Trump. These states were crushed by Bill Clinton’s trade policies. I suspect the insult of nominating his wife was just too much for some former Democrats there. I sympathize. We (the coastal elites) betrayed them, and the most damning thing of all is that we don’t even acknowledge it. Trump knew all about this though. He talked a lot about NAFTA at the debates. Most Greens did not even notice his talk about NAFTA. Once elected he acted tough against China. Again most people at the Green stage had no clue why he was doing that, but the Rust Belt did. The U.S. did not have to abandon their workers. Germany and Japan did not abandon their workers. We chose to.
When I say “we” I am talking about people like me who have benefitted enormously from the free trade agreements. I was always very good at school so as soon as I graduated from Waukegan East HS I went straight to a fancy college and never looked back. I was set, but all the kids not so good at school were kind of screwed. I never thought much about them. Should have gone to college, losers, seems to be my classes attitude. Chris Arnade has does some really good work on this. He was a Wall street broker who found himself wandering away from work to photograph people, until he found himself doing it full time. He took the time to really look at America, and he realized that “we” are part of the front row. We are more educated and we moved to pursue high paying jobs. We left behind the back row, the people that maybe didn’t do so well at school, and stayed where they were at because of family. Please read Divided By Meaning for a quick synopsis of his argument. It is well worth reading. We have a long history of class conflict, but we keep on forgetting this. For example we forget that Martin Luther King was assassinated right when he truly (in my opinion) started to get dangerous. He was just starting to organize a multiracial army of the poor. A campaign to bring all poor people together not just Blacks.
At the diversity trainings I have been to, that class solidarity MLK advocated for is almost never talked about. Why is that? It is a blindspot. People at Green are almost always well educated. Which means they not only went to college but they got a really good education, and that education changed how they view the world. They see things differently. But college is also the gateway for most of the better paying, prestigious jobs. And even if you are not making a lot of money, you are still part of the cultural elite. Green is mostly blind to all of this. Does not recognize that their class has been winning. The people at Red who voted for Trump, though, are very aware. This is not the only reason why Trump is popular, racism is of course a huge part of the reason, but still Orange and Green have a big blindspot here.
Still skeptical? Nikolas Kristoff wrote an amazing article about all of this. I strongly recommend it — he captures the tragedy of our workers. “We” really have a blindspot here.
It was not just factories that were starting to collapse in the 70’s. Trust in institutions also crashed. People stopped going to church. Kids no longer went to Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. People used to bowl together in leagues, now they were bowling alone. And Green cheered. Celebrated the demise of the myth based superstition of Blue religion. Celebrated the demise of (at the time) homophobic institutions like the Boys Scouts. And of course Green has a point. And yet nothing came to replace these institutions. Blue is necessary. Without a strong healthy Blue, people suffer. Polarization rose, inequality rose, and deaths of despair rose. For the first time in a very long time the average lifespan started to go down in the U.S. And Green did not care. Most Green people are not really aware of the deaths of despair. Or if they do know anything about it they simply blame it on big pharmaceutical’s greed without really understanding the full tragedy of it. People need meaning. People need community. Red needs a way to find Blue. Religion used to supply that, but no longer. At least no longer at the Blue stage. When I first started on my spiritual awakening I noticed my favorite conversations were with evangelicals. Despite our many other differences we shared a passionate love for Spirit. Tepid, cautious, dying Blue churches could not bring themselves to make a full throated commitment to Spirit, but Red churches could. And so for a time at least, Red evangelical churches thrived.
When I tell people what the world needs is a new religion, they usually recoil. To the Green mindset this is the very last thing the world needs. I think they assume that any new religion would inevitably repeat the horrible mistakes of the past. But what they are missing is the desperate need for meaning and community. People need to come back to together. We have gone way, way too far on our separate paths. There has to be a balance.
The other part of this blindspot is that people standing firmly in Orange only believe that pure reason is the source of Truth. That only rational science should be trusted. And of course for questions like “Is it safe to launch the space shuttle?” they are absolutely right. But science doesn’t have satisfying answers for questions like “Why am I here?” and “How do I lead a deep, rich fulfilling life?”. For those questions we need to reach into ourselves for other faculties, other sources of Truth. Discovering the math/scientific mindset was huge, and we should absolutely celebrate it. It is such an important source of Truth. But it is mainly useful for the exterior questions. It is not nearly as useful for the interior questions. It still has a role to play there too, but for the interior work we have to use other parts of ourself. These other parts can work together with rationality. They do not have to be in conflict. But unfortunately many people don’t know that. They think that because spirituality is inherently non-rational that means it can not be true. So they make the huge mistake of simply dismissing spirituality. That is just as big a mistake as dismissing science. It is true that Blue stage religion is typically full of myths, but that doesn’t have to limit us. What we need is a religion that brings in the higher stages as well. The book, Integral Christianity does a good job of explaining all of this if you are curious or need more explanation.