| Color | Nickname | Social construct | Cause worth dying for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Beige | FirstAwakening | Family and Kin | My family |
| Purple | KinSpirits | Tribe | The sacred ground |
| Red | PowerGods | Kingdoms, Empire | My king. Honor |
| Blue | TrueBlue | Church, Schools | The Truth |
| Orange | StriveDrive | Capitalism, Democracy, and Science | Give me liberty or give me death |
| Green | HumanBond | unions, environmentalism, feminism, racial justice, LGBTQ, et. al | For my brothers and sisters |
| Yellow | SecondAwakening | Integral Theory, personal growth movement, medicine movement | A life worth living |
| Turqoise | PromisedLand | Just starting to emerge | Save the world |
Spiral Dynamics is based on the research of the psychologist Clare Graves who was a contemporary of Abraham Maslov. Both were exploring all the stages of human development from the highest and lowest. Clare Graves’s health started to fail before he could fully develop his theory but his work was carried on by his younger colleagues Don Beck and Chris Cowan. They took Grave’s original theory and made it more accessible by adding things like color mnemonics. Ken Wilber took the theory and added it to his Integral Theory. He later on modified it to reflect his focus on individual, spiritual growth which is a different focus. I don’t cover his variations because my focus is more on the group than the individual. That was Don Beck’s focus as well. He made many trips to South Africa to try and put Spiral Dynamics to practical use during the transition from Apartheid. Later on he tried the same thing with Israel and Palestine. He saw how this theory could transform the world. It is that focus that I am most interested in here.
This is what I love about Spiral Dynamics:
It is a practical tool. It is meant to be of use. Please judge it by its practical benefits. It suggests concrete actions to deal with the world.
It helps us understand why “those” people act as they do. Depending on what stage you are at, the world looks very different. To “those” people’s point of view they are not doing anything wrong. In fact to them it is clear that it is “us” people who are the problem! When we better understand people it is easier to open our hearts to them. And that is when real change is possible. You learn to stop judging people as hopelessly crazy and evil, and instead meet them from within their world view.
It teaches us to welcome all parts of ourselves. Even the parts that we resist. Especially those.
It sets a concrete goal for where we need to go. If everyone was at the highest stage, the world would be transformed in an instant.
It is circular (in a spiral way). The later stages circle right back to where we started. To where we need to go again.
The original idea was that we all go through developmental stages. As infants slowly mature into adults they go through many developmental stages. The same can be said of human history. We started as animals and then have gone through and are still going through many societal developmental stages. Not every society has gone through all the stages yet. The beauty of Spiral Dynamics is that it recognizes that this transformation is not in a straight line, but a circular spiral. We keep on coming back to where we were before but from a higher vantage point. Note that no stage is “better” than any other. Each is a complete, vast world unto itself that could easily (and does!) consume many lifetimes to explore. When we go on to the next stage it does not make us a “better” person. And we don’t throw away all the learnings of the previous stage; we bring those learnings with us. Going to a new stage gives us access to a new way of viewing the world. The more stages we go through the more views are available to us. Historically these transitions have been rough. We lost some important things. Our ultimate goal is to circle back to where we started.
I’m going to take you through each of these historical stages. Lets start way back at the beginning.