Sunday 15 July 2007

Pic of the day: In the future, our world is likely to be even more complex than today. How do we prepare our society, and children if any, for that?

Yellow vMeme again

I still like Spiral Dynamics, despite the dislike among my new friends in the Church of the Cosmic Raccoon. Obviously it is easy to just latch on to SD and start going wild with the paintbrush: You are Blue, you are Green, and you must be Red! You are not worthy of the Second Tier! But despite this temptation, I've found SD a very useful tool, a shorthand for the thought. Just don't get too religious about it. It is just a simple and "colorful" way to talk about things that otherwise require even longer sentences than this.

So how does life in the Yellow vMeme treat me? Thank you, I remain curious, always a good sign. I seem to slowly pull another remaining pseudopod or two up from the lower levels where they have lingered, but it is as usual a glacially slow process. "Snail's pace" sounds positively sprinting in comparison.

***

But the world isn't all about me, and I have spent some thoughts on this as well. As I may have mentioned, there is a tendency for people to not stop at Yellow, at least in theory. A keen interest in further development seems to be a common symptom of Yellow. After all, Yellow is the first time where you realize that further development is possible. Before that, each level considers itself the highest.

If you are steeped in Blue, you are bound to frown on the rational and opportunistic Orange: How can they talk about science and progress, when the unchanging God has given His unchanging laws for all times, and told us all we need to know? It is almost as bad as those godless New Age hippies! (For communists, replace God with Marx.)

Likewise the Orange modern man will shudder at the medieval Blue, a cold blast from the past. Those dusty old pew polishers are almost as superstitious as the Greens with their Earth worship and touchy-feely new ways.

The Greens, of course, of all too aware that they are on a higher plane than the rest. After all, they have been there, if only briefly, and are embarrassed to think back on it. But now they have seen the light: Peace, love, tolerance, and respect for all life. Well, except for the fossilized churchgoers and moneygrubbing capitalists, who deserve nothing but scorn.

At Yellow, you start seeing the world as systems and processes. You see the earlier vMemes as reasonable adaptations to the conditions of their times, each of them trying to fix what was broken in the previous. And each of them is still useful under certain circumstances. But generally, all other things being not too different, higher is better. And Yellow is not the highest. It is however the highest that is even vaguely defined. The Turquoise vMeme is probably represented by a few scattered persons, but no known communities.

In truth, even the Yellow vMeme is still just scattered individuals, but at least there are hundreds of thousands of us, perhaps more now. At the moment, you pretty much have to be a genius to be here, but that ought to change. I don't just mean that it will probably change, I mean "ought" a moral sense. It is the first thing we should do, before forging ahead toward the ultraviolet end of the spectrum and the Great White Light. We need to make it simpler to be Yellow. Simpler and easier. There need to be symbols, rituals and institutions. True, these things diminish as we advance up the spiral, but I don't think we should discard them entirely. If there is no beaten path, people will only find the way by happenstance or searching, and probably arrive later in their lives than necessary.

Do Yellow parents raise Yellow kids? I still mean the vMeme, of course, ethnic jokes aside. (Not to mention ancient comics...) Really, how would you raise your children to think in such a way? To see the world as systems made of systems, wheels within wheels, not only the hardware of the world and body but the software of culture and mind. To see the flow of history unfolding on different time scales. To naturally take an interest in not only how things work but also why. Would growing up with parents like that be enough to begin thinking the same way, if you had an average or better IQ? Or would you need Yellow teachers, Yellow friends, clubs, games, or whatever kids today are interested in?

Well, I won't have to put that to the test. But I hope that to some small degree, I am helping to bring the Yellow society closer. It may not be urgent, given that even Green is a minority. But I think perhaps Green ought to remain a minority. It has displayed a tendency to be parasitic on the two previous vMemes, especially on Orange. A lot of the (post) modern criticism of capitalism does not offer an improved alternative. If anything, all it can recommend is a return to the essentially Blue dogmatism of socialism, which has already been proved inferior when it comes to creating not only wealth but liberty.

This is not to say that there is no better alternative. Capitalism itself is evolving, becoming more personal, more individual, more oriented toward individual needs. And our higher needs are rarely fulfilled by mass production, whether of goods or ideas. The individualized society is the most reasonable path I can see forward from classic Orange capitalism through Green to Yellow. We need to understand that people are different and have different needs -- actually, even each individual has different needs at different times -- and adapt our economic model to the individual, not the other way around. (Traditional advertising, my ancient enemy, tries to manipulate the individual so it fits the product. This is the exact opposite of what we need, and I wish to remind you how much I hate and scorn this.)

It may seem premature to plan for a Yellow society: In the USA, for instance, most people are still in the Blue or Orange stage, or in between them, although there is a growing Green faction. Here in northern Europe we tend to be Green officially but Orange in private. But we could already have Yellow leaders. I suspect that the Norwegian prime minister, Jens Stoltenberg, is such a person. In America, Hillary Clinton sure acts like one. (Please note that being Yellow does not make you a good person -- it only describes your mental toolbox being able to deal with more complex problems in a rational way. If you want to do a good job, this should help you screw up less. If you want to swindle people, you will also find this somewhat easier.)

I am not sure it is a good thing if the leaders of the nation understand the people, but people don't understand the leaders. Even so, it sure beats the opposite situation. Not naming any examples, just saying. But ideally, we should have a reasonably large part of the population that actually understands what's going on. And in a modern society, with all its complexities, Yellow would come in handy for that.