This post was prompted by a recent debate in our developmental community about the nature of leadership needed in the Anthropocene. This is the human development stage that possesses full ecological awareness of Earth’s systems, but represents less than 3 percent of the world’s intelligence today.  It is one of two stages in the Gravesian bio-psycho-social conception that represent the second highest stage of human development, stage seven. The other, stage eight, represents less than 1% of human intelligence and is the highest stage uncovered by Clare Graves’ research. Together the two represent the values of the second tier, what is commonly referred to in the Gravesian – Spiral Dynamics community as the emerging values of humanity. (See model details here).

Much of the conversation in our community today points to the failure of the 7th level system to address existential problems, from political instability and war to environmental issues and everything in between. While that might be true to the way we understand the system’s leadership today, I don’t believe our problems are beyond Graves’ conception the way he envisioned it five decades ago. To me, what we’re witnessing today is part and parcel of the chaos and entropy of the entire First Tier that contains the lower six stages of human and cultural development we have gone through, what Graves called the values of a deficient humanity. Because of our failure to address higher order challenges such as climate change, ecological collapse, and loss of biodiversity at the right time, this stage has become a necessary sequence in the development process, a collective dark night of the soul, so to speak before we can move to second tier intelligence. It will be planetary in nature the way Graves envisioned it, an important theoretical aspect that was sidelined by the subsequent interpretations of Graves’ work, primarily Spiral Dynamics and Integral Theory.

Graves had labeled these two most advanced stages of our development as existential in nature, charged with dealing with macro systems such as world population, environmental degradation and matters of scarce resources. Beck and Wilber watered down Graves’ second tier intelligence by limiting it to human-built systems, or in the case of Wilber, falsely using the model to create a third tier in order to transcend physical existence. It is the human-built systems that are in collapse, which are in turn causing the collapse of natural systems. This mega state of chaos and entropy is part of what I call the Great Obsolescence that takes up 3 chapters in my upcoming book expected to be released in early 2025.

Graves was calling attention to all issues existential in the 1970s. This was the time when systems thinking was born. His concerns were similar to those of Donella and Dennis Meadows, two of the authors of the landmark book Limits to Growth and to James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis the authors of the Gaia Hypothesis and many other systems thinkers like him at the time. Bringing back Graves original conception of these two stages is at the heart of my new work. It accounts for the changes in Life Conditions, which is half of the entire model that makes it dynamic and infuses it with advancements in systems thinking that have taken place over the last five decades. Over that period of time, his life long work has moved from what academics called works of prophecy, to where it is today; a confirmation of an undeniable reality.

Graves’ Second Tier is Existential because First Tier has destroyed our ecology, and in the process triggered the collapse of an exponentially higher order, non-human system; Nature.

My research into Graves’ archives has uncovered that the “Existential” label was driven by the urgency for us to understand the exponentially higher order dynamics driven by what I call “Natural Intelligence.” In essence, we have to mimic Nature in every fractal of existence, from politics, governance, commerce, and everything in between in order for us to have a chance at survival. This is the “reversal” that Graves spoke of; the reversal of much of what we have taken for granted since the first stage emerged 100,000-200,000 years ago. Graves’ trepidations about our ability to ascend to these existential values was captured in a conversation he had with his successor Don Beck in 1980 when he told him that he feared half of the world population will disappear before the world can be stabilized at second tier. Beck shared that prediction with me two decades ago, but only made it public in the 2018 book Spiral Dynamic in Action. According to the latest research, and in spite of all the technological advancements we made, it is believed that number is closer to 70% of today’s world’s population, which is almost double what it was in 1980.

It took me a while and much research into Graves’ archives to figure out why he labeled stage eight, the last known stage in his model as a restrictive existential system as well. If you can imagine what life would be like in a post-collapse scenario, or in what we have to do to successfully mitigate the effects of climate change, the survival of what remains of civilization has to follow an ecological alignment that way Mother Nature conceived it billions of years ago. The restriction is to that and not to some arbitrary ruler claiming the best interest of his/her constituents. It’s a conformity to the dictates of the exponentially higher intelligence of the natural world into which human nature must be subsumed. This scenario must be followed if we’re to ensure the survival of what species remain. In my new book, I call these new conformist values the Gaiametry Protocols and I spend another 3 chapters detailing them. 

In 2016, I had a conversation with Beck about the Marco and Mega systems problems we’re facing. At the time, I wanted to understand them as part of the VUCA craze, an aspect of the human intelligence that thrives on its own sense of exceptionalism and superiority. The issues fell into three distinct categories that have only grown in magnitude since. They were:

1. The entropy of the post WWII world order driven by what is now becoming a universal fallacy of peace through commerce and the era’s now-outdated geopolitical and financial architecture. 
2. The pervasive and systemic disruption brought on by the digital age and the rise of artificial intelligence. 
3. Our utter failure to address climate change effectively. 

Beck’s response to my concerns was that I wasn’t zooming out far enough. “You need to see these existential issues from Jupiter” he told me.  It is by seeing these issues from Jupiter that I was able to articulate The Great Obsolescence.

As cruel as it seems to remain emotionally detached from the ravages of wars and environmental degradation, seeing these issues from Jupiter reminds me of my guru’s response to the death of 250,000 people in 2004 in the aftermath of the Indian ocean tsunami. When prompted for a spiritual meaning of what happened, he responded saying: “It’s Shiva and Shakti playing soccer on higher planes.”  While that death toll is far less than the 5.6 billion people projected to die because of our failure to address climate change and ecological collapse, we have to remind ourselves that this is Mother Nature’s way of restoring ecological balance and reaching homeostasis in the largest system we’ll ever be tasked to understand. It is that understanding of natural intelligence that operates outside human intelligence and is exponentially superior to it. This is what we must embrace. These are the Second Tier values that transcend human-built systems and preserve humanity and what remains of life on the planet.  

Credit for featured image “punic wars.” English Plus Podcast. https://englishpluspodcast.com