Become a Spiral Wizard! Muggles accepted.

"Spiral Dynamics" is unabashedly modern day Alchemy. It speaks of certain "Spiral Wizards" who have secretly roamed the world with intuitive skillz at reorganizing human systems and bringing about "paradigm shifts." Mostly the theory is marketed for business executives with soul patches who self-identify as: "Spiritual, but not religious."

 

Try to spot the Spiral Wizard

Anyway, the empowering and impressive thing, to me at least, about this Integral Theory and Spiral Dynamics stuff is that they do not claim to contain within themselves any unique or esoteric knowledge. Everything they talk about is intuitively accessible to every human being. All powerful people are to some degree "Wizards" already. So Spiral Dynamics is not, supposedly at least, trying to get you to become a "member" of their club. You are already a bit of a "Spiral Wizard." They are merely offering to help you level-up. Since there are no built in secrets for which you need to tithe or pay only $9.99 a month for, it kinda saps Spiral Dynamics of its exclusivity. It probably won't get very popular.

Fact: All Wizards are actually friends.

Other enlightenment systems have similar self-destruct mechanisms built in. 

Zen-Buddhism "Step 8" (out of 10).

 There's a level in Zen-Buddhism's progression (as depicted in the Ox-herding paintings) where you forget all about Zen and other "paths" and realize that the path you were shown was a "necessary illusion." Makes you wonder who the fuck writes about the next stages of Zen if Step 8 is that you stop giving a shit about Zen? 

I wanna find some good personality tests for the kids I work with. The idea is to place them somewhere on that colorful spiral and see what Non-cognitive skills they are most deficient in. These Non-cognitive skills add up to a "mode of consciousness" within the frame work of Spiral Dynamics.

The dialectal progression of consciousness through societal stages as a cartoon!

Once you place someone on the spiral you can see how they are interacting with other modes of consciousness in helpful or counter-productive ways. From a rather naive perspective, one might say that these young men are operating on the "Tribal" and "Warrior" modes of consciousness when that is not "warranted" by the broader societal system they are in.

If only "The Warriors" knew about paradigm shifts!

Their "mode of consciousness" is what causes them to join gangs and dismiss the moral structures of larger society. But is it really unwarranted for them to do that? 

How would you engage with the majority culture you lived in if the police did not "serve and protect you"? Would you strive for the common external ideal of society if the media demonized your race as sociopathic?

Rockwell came back from the dead and managed to make
some decent social commentary.

"Spiral Dynamics" talks about how different planes of societal consciousness can rub up against each other like tectonic plates. Mainstream consciousness in America, it is claimed, is operating on the "Rational Plane," which uses external ideals to release the motive force of society. 

Does the Oreo help or hurt the analogy?

"You're born a nobody, but you can try to become somebody in America," is the latent message of "Rational Consciousness" when applied on a societal level. I'll have to go into this more another time. But anyway, this produces a striving for greatness, the illusion of material transcendence. We're always looking to get that new thing, and to become a better, more admirable person. I'm saying nothing new. But I will say that this model of societal motivation is better than having a society with no group motivation (Jamaica?). 

 Besides making us never fulfilled, it has unexpected and usually unconscious societal ramifications. I wont go into the positive (Non-external) alternative right now, but I will state the obvious problems with the external ideal paradigm. One problem with this it is that it puts true contentedness out of reach, by design -- the ideal is external. "Andrew Carnegie, Jay-Z, they're special, they're got something you don't, try and get it though!" Holding up Jesus as essentially super-human is problematic in this way too. 

Another problem with external ideals is that they inherently imply an external "negative-ideal," a devil figure to be held down while the "positive-ideal" is striven for and held up.

Maybe its not about shifting their culture out of the tribal state, but evolving ours beyond needing someone to oppress, for the oppression of others in order to attain greatness is rational.