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Viewing Humanity from Jupiter

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This post was prompted by a recent online conversation about the nature of Yellow leadership. This stage of development represents less than 3 percent of the world’s intelligence today.  Yellow is one of two stages in the Gravesian Bio-psycho-social conception that represent the highest stages of human development. The other being Turquoise, representing less than 1% of human intelligence and is the highest stage uncovered by Clare Graves’ research. Together they represent the values of the second tier, what is commonly referred to in the Gravesian community as the emerging values of humanity. (See model details here).

The Gravesian pre-Anthropocene Model of Human Development

Much of the conversation in our community today points to the failure of the Yellow 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 Yellow 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, 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 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 September 2024.

Graves was calling attention to all issues existential in the 1970s. 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 – Beige – first emerged 200,000 years ago. Graves’ trepidations about our ability to ascend to these existential values was captured in a conversation he had with 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 the 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 Turquoise 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 the 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 that 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

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Why the Western Narrative on the Mideast has Been Disrupted Forever

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I can’t help but notice the millions of people around the world taking to the streets to support Palestinian rights in the middle of a tragedy that repeats once every decade or so. The only difference this time is the number of demonstrators is exponentially higher. If we exclude the Arab world, most of these protests are in advanced Western countries. In Los Angeles a large group of the protestors were American Jews who can longer reconcile Israel’s right to exist with its continued brutality towards Palestinians.  

Without revisiting the old tired narrative that always ends inconclusively, here’s what I think is happening that will eventually force the West and Israel to approach this issue differently: The old Western narrative no longer works, plain and simple. Those who still believe in it are going crazy trying to keep the world from looking anywhere else for answers. The arguments made in reaction to the current conflict could have been made 50 years ago without changing a word. They are frozen in time and mercilessly default the debate to “us v them” narratives that kill any new ideas for a permanent solution while invoking arbitrary or historic facts that each side expects the other to accept as a rationalization for their actions. 

The primary disruptor of the carefully crafted Israeli narrative is the same one that is disrupting and weakening democracies all over the world and empowering autocracies in their place. It is the ubiquitous and unstoppable rise of the Digital Age that has forever disrupted the way we gain knowledge and information. This is at the heart of how our cognitive abilities and worldviews change for better or for worse. The Digital Age gave the world millions of media outlets with millions of alternative and diverse narratives. This platform is just one of those alternatives. It made citizen journalists out of anyone who has a smart phone, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg  

The Digital Age is disrupting everything we have taken for granted, including Geopolitics & global justice

From politics, to economics, education, and everything in between, the Digital Age is leveling what remains of the silos of the Industrial Age and hierarchical structures that contain the ethos of this now bygone era. Post WWII narratives and governing structures and the ideas behind democracy are not immune from this disruption. It includes the carefully guarded and uniquely crafted Western narrative about the creation of the state of Israel. Regardless of how the most genius arguments about its right to exist continue to be made today, they will automatically be filtered through a digital landscape that levels the global playing field, making Palestinians into victims and Israelis into oppressors.  

One of the consequences of the Digital Age the remains greatly unappreciated is its mandate to destroy hierarchal non digital structures. It is doing it very fast, and at a deep and pervasive level and won’t stop till everything in its wake is disrupted. The primary purpose of that disruption is “democratization” and it’s happening everywhere.  It is that democratization and the transparency that comes with that disruption that has led to the weaponization of media and other modern institutions we have taken for granted. It will keep chiseling away at the foundations of modern democracy. It is behind much of the chaos we see around the world today. It is responsible for the rise of the Israeli extreme right and its alliance with Benjamin Netanyahu that wants to silence the independent voice of the Israeli judiciary. It is also behind the rise of the Trump/MAGA phenomenon that wants to silence liberal progressives and destroy democracy in the process. 

The Digital Age is also behind the bypassing of traditional Industrial Age channels that branded the Palestinian as terrorists and allowed them to bring their case directly to the world in its raw unfiltered form. It made sure the world knew that 90% of Gazans have no access to drinking water and that over 50% of the population went to bed hungry every night for two decades all due to a blockade by Israel. It matters not what led Israel to impose the blockade. It shows that collective punishment modeled after the Western idea of sanctions, punishes the people, millions of them, not the leadership. Yet, that antiquated ethos, still defines the Israeli and Western approach to dealing with the problem. 

Whether good or bad, the Digital Age is bringing transparency to everything we do. It will not restore worn out narratives or ideologies that worked just a few decades go.  It will not support whatever appears to be oppressive or discriminatory in nature, nor would it empower the left or the right of the political spectrum to rule in a democracy. The only way to stop it is to stop the flow of information and only dictators and autocrats can do that. Short of having these repressive forms of governance, the world will continue to go through chaos that empowers those who were disempowered, expose those who are unfairly empowered and continue leveling the playing field until the world reaches some state of egalitarianism. That will be the time when and a new post-modern generation of leaders informed by humanity’s collective reality begins to design a more inclusive and equitable form of governance for the future.   

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Oppenheimer; The American Prometheus, Son of the Enlightenment and a Symptom of What has Gone Wrong

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For the first time since the start of the COVID pandemic, I went to the movies and saw Oppenheimer on the wide screen, the way an epic film of this magnitude is meant to be seen. It’s based on the 2005 book The American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. For a biographical picture that’s about the man behind the hydrogen bomb, most of us know how the story ends from history books.

I’ve been fascinated by the Promethean myth since my college years, and it features prominently in my upcoming book to be published in early 2024. It differentiates between human intelligence (Promethean), and natural intelligence (Gaian). It is the former that must be nested in the latter if we are to overcome our developmental barriers and have a chance at addressing planetary challenges and be able to mitigate societal and ecological collapse.

As the myth goes, Prometheus was a Titan god who created man out of clay. He stole fire from Mount Olympus and gave it to humanity in the form of art, science, technology and innovation. This act of defiance angered Zeus, the king of the Olympian gods who punished Prometheus by chaining him to a rock where an eagle would eat his liver every day, but due to his immortal nature, the liver would regenerate overnight. The regeneration symbolizes human resilience.

This mythical narrative is intended to show the dual nature of the binary world, the pair of opposites that came into existence when the universe was born. It is memorialized in the Promethean act of bestowing genius on humanity and the punishment he suffered for that bestowal. It is the yin and yang, the darkness and light that keep the cosmos in balance.

Prometheus creating man from clay

To me, Prometheus represents a pre-Anthropogenic form of arrogance of the modern mind that greatly ignores the delicate balance inherent in the pair of opposites. It still associates itself with the one-sided Western view of human exceptionalism, a fallacy that began when Enlightenment was handed down to those with less awareness of the binary nature of the universe; the politicians and the plutocrats who run the world. That one- sidedness has continued unabated with layers of complexity that have only contributed to our further departure from the original form of exceptionalism, that of nature. The scientific revolution and our modern mind sought to separate us from the natural order and make us superior to it. We saw the light and we saw that it was good and we dismissed the darkness. We also saw the good side of our genius, but dismissed its evil opposite. We built a modern civilization and a global economy based on those assumptions ignoring the fact that the unexamined opposite side of the binary universe does not go away, it becomes part of our collective unconscious that sooner or later will appear in our lives as fate.

The Enlightenment and Promethean intelligence represent the Orange level in the Spiral Dynamics model and stage five in Clare W. Graves’ ECLET model. Both models have eight, hierarchically ordered developmental stages which, along with Ken Wilber’s integral model are – in my opinion – quickly becoming obsolete. This is happening due to a general absence of Anthropogenic awareness within the models’ respective communities of practitioners. Our planet is going through epochal change that will render most of what we’ve known obsolete, yet like a frog in a slowly boiling pot we are not aware of the danger. In my new book, I make an effort to trigger that awareness and keep the original Gravesian model current by reinterpreting its content in ways that distinguish between the Holocene Life Conditions during which Beck and Wilber created their models, and the Anthropocene Life Conditions, for which my book will make the first attempt at keeping the model relevant. In my new work, I associate the model’s pre Anthropogenic intelligence with Promethean intelligence, and the Anthropocene with Gaian intelligence; the former acting as a trim tab for the latter. In other words, if we are to survive climate change and ecological collapse, we must subordinate human/Promethean intelligence to natural/Gaian intelligence.

If this shocks you, let me explain:

Many individuals who identify with Promethean intelligence see the dual nature of things, but others, especially those who are motivated by profit, or driven by Newtonian reductionism, don’t. Even the few who are conscious of the dark side are often prevented from speaking about it, especially after the symbolic fire in the Promethean myth gives birth to their genius inventions and the creation is handed over to those in power. More likely than not, those in power have no awareness of the dark side of genius, or don’t fully understand the power of the dark side. In the movie, Oppenheimer’s struggles with the dark side of the atomic bomb are on full display as he grapples with existential psychological and ethical issues while working on building it. In the aftermath of the bombing of Japan, he became an advocate for the peaceful use of the technology (attempts to mitigate the dark side), for which he was humiliated and discredited by those who held power over him.

The repression of the dark side of genius is at the heart of how Promethean intelligence in the hands of those who hold power became the primary cause of much of the existential problems we’re faced with today, not the least of which is climate change. Today, we are dealing with the largest collective shadow in human history. It is the accumulation of the dark side of our binary world that we have ignored and externalized to our environment over the last five centuries. This darkness is so enormous, it has pushed several earth systems passed their carrying capacity making ecological collapse inevitable, and climate-driven events increasingly unpredictable and more devastating in scale.

Oppenheimer was dubbed the “American Prometheus” in the book that inspired the hit movie written and directed by Christopher Nolan. Credit: Heinrich Füger / Public domain / Wikimedia Commons / Ed Westcott

What the modern-day Prometheus has forgotten is that billions of years before he was enlightened, intelligence existed in nature that was embodied in another Greek deity named Gaia, the mother of all things. She is the primordial Goddess who emerged from Chaos and gave form to the air the sea and the land. She has evolved her earthly systems for billions of years and given life to billions of species, while balancing the pair of opposites through her autopoietic intelligence, and feedback loops accounting for the darkness and the light at every fractal level without exception and without ever having to repress one side in favor of the other.

Awareness of the dark side of Promethean genius permeates the entire movie. One of the highlights came half way through it when Oppenheimer showed the hydrogen bomb calculations to Albert Einstein, who simply asks: “what can it do?” Oppenheimer responded with: “It can destroy the world.” In the final scene they meet again and Oppenheimer says: “When I came to you with those calculations, we thought we might start a chain reaction that might destroy the entire world.” Einstein asks: “What of it?” Oppenheimer responds with: “I believe we did.”

Climate change may not destroy the world as quickly as a hydrogen bomb, but it is just as deadly if we continue to ignore the dark side of existence. Addressing earth systems issues is a task that requires an end to our separation from and superiority over nature. Without returning to the fold of Gaian intelligence, human intelligence is doomed and it will be the primary cause that places the planet on the path toward a Sixth Extinction.

Millions of years from now, if there is an intelligence capable of reading the geologic record, it will likely find an anomaly that is unlike any other in our planet’s history; a creature with a big brain who walked on two legs and in a blink of an eye destroyed what took Mother Nature billions of years to build.

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Speaking Gaian Truth to Economic Power