Tag Archives: Memenomic Cycles

Spiral Swan Theory

Leave a comment

An earlier version of this work appeared in January and February 2022 on Medium. Below is the link to the fully developed concept of Spiral Swan Theory with endnotes.

Here’s the Abstract from the paper. Please feel free to download and give proper citation to my work should you decide to use it.

ABSTRACT

In today’s global complexity the intelligence that classifies risk into different categories comes from a very thin layer of human values that leaves out much of the psychosocial structures that have defined the evolution of the mind. This paper focuses on the most popular classifications of risk as described by the popular Black Swan theory and offers a wider view on the values the incase today’s risk models and their limitations. It takes statistical modeling out of its sterile and often reductionist nature and places it into the totality of value systems that define our human journey. Using the Spiral Dynamics and MEMEnomics models, this paper demonstrates how systemic risk becomes less systemic and a lot more predictable when there is a functional balance between all the known stages of human development. Using the totality of value systems from both models this paper reclassifies the rare Black Swan into the knowable Orange Swan once the Black Swan is observed from a higher level of psychosocial development. It also sets forth the narrative on how the appearance of Orange Swans in perpetuity contributes to the Dead Swan phenomenon, a rare event that rewards systemic risk that has historically ended in catastrophe. This paper puts forth the hypothesis that we’ve been on the road to a Dead Swan for over a decade. Click here to view or download the full paper.

*****

Like!
1

The Orange in the White House

Leave a comment
This post is in response to the attention  the book The Chickenshit Club is receiving after becoming the #1 Best Seller with its release this week. The book is by Wall Street veteran reporter  and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Jessie Eisinger.  In my opinion, (based on the authors interviews, I haven’t read the book yet) this author is among the first writers to articulate our economic system from a long cycle systems perspective, and the importance of a robust regulatory structure, much like what I describe in my work in MEMEnomic Cycles.
For 9 years I have spoken about how the regulatory value system, the  Blue level of development was made impotent by design over the last 40-year. I call this cycle The Only Money Matters Cycle which began with the election of Ronald Reagan.  When I talk about the decline of the regulatory system during these years, the primary subject of this book, people take pictures of the graphics that show those historic changes in the values memestack.  Finally, someone from the mainstream is able to see clearly the necessity of Blue  that people familiar with macromemetics and the value systems framework have known for years.
When the dominant economic meme says only money matters, the battle to proof otherwise becomes extremely difficult. That system knows no consciousness other than it’s own self interest. Its primary obsession has remained the repeal of laws to allow the free market to determine the destiny of humanity. To argue its toxic outcomes like income disparities and extreme poverty only reinforces its tenets about self-reliance and individualism while becoming more and more oblivious to its own toxicity.
When a problem is created by a system, only a systems approach can solve it.  A system’s perspective, provides for a shift in focus from “what an individual can or failed to do”, to  “how the system can be nudged forward in the right direction”.  Sometimes if that system’s values have become toxic to the overall health of the culture, it becomes necessary to know when it should be nudged  over the cliff to hastened its end and allow for a new system to rise from its ashes. 
While the author argues that Obama missed the opportunity to do just that during the financial crisis, I argue that the system  chose Obama precisely to fool people into thinking he’s a change agent. Yes Obama exhibited the highest expression  of progressive values with climate change and a renaissance of civil rights, but any effort to resurrect the Blue system in an environment that has developed a repulsive resistance to regulation, was doomed to fail. 
I agree with Eisinger that we have Trump today because of Obama’s failure to regulate Wall Street and to a greater extend his failure to rein in the excesses  of the Orange system.  Everyone who was effected by the financial crisis wanted Obama to act on this  unprecedented opportunity to cut toxic Orange at its knees.  His failure to do so was not because of his personal lack of will or intelligence, but because of the absence -by design- of intelligence in our government institutions that know how today’s Orange operates. It is this systems failure that extended the life of this declining system of values and gave it new life and gave us the executive leadership we have today.
 
So the Orange in the White House today is not limited to the President’s tan, or hair color. Those are just some of the ironic manifestations of the Orange value system during its decline and entropy  phase. Treachery, contempt for the law and collusion with known enemies to get what you want are just examples-made-visible of how this system in its unhealthy manifestation normally operates. Today, the Orange that sneaked into the White House is  on its death bed confessing the ugliness of all its sins to a world that is divided on how to deal with  its misery. 
Until new leadership rises that can articulate the need for the current system’s early death and what needs to be done to transition us to the next system we will be stuck  with Trump and the next  leader that the system picks.
Sadly,  things point to a noticeable vacuum in new leadership that can transition us without considerable pain.  The obsession we have with admiring Orange values  and dismissing Blue values is pervasive. The blind allegiance to one of the two current political parties is prolonging the life of the Only Money matters system.  We naively continue to believe that a solution to this problem will come from within the confines of the two-party system. As long as this remains the debate there will be  complete dominance of the current system (the Only Money Matters, not Republican v. Democrat). 
This system will eventually collapse as transparency cuts across both political parties, leading either to a revolution or a higher level of consciousness that can contain the arrogance of everything Orange. Once we detach from our current and outdated paradigm and  begin to articulate the characteristics of the  new stage, things like multi-party democracy and  corporations not being granted the same rights as people, all become parts of the vibrant dynamics that define the possible future of our human journey.
 
Like!
12

The Obama Presidency and Complex Systems

Leave a comment

This post is in response to emails and comments I received about a statement I made on a recent radio show about President Obama’s leadership. If you’re wondering why every president ends up with white hair when he leaves office, please read on.

 What was taken out of context was my statement that President Obama was at least a decade ahead of time.  This wasn’t intended as a statement of blind liberal praise for the President as much as it was an attempt to explain alignments in complex systems and how they work.

cover 3rd mmnc cycle

 Here are some of the nuances behind the thinking:

 In the framework we use, we distinguish between the value systems profile of the individual and the value systems dynamics of a culture. The person who captures the hearts and minds of the voter still has to apply his leadership skills to the much bigger system he is elected to lead. If polarization and dysfunction in a society cannot be resolved as quickly as the voter wants them to, the blame automatically goes to the most visible individual without regard to the dysfunctional structures that are in place. When it comes to large scale political systems, under this framework, there’s a direct relationship between effective leadership and the phase of a value system life cycle that a culture is going through during the time that person is in charge.

phases life cycles

To make this concept simpler, think of the system as a train on a journey that lasts a few decades, and the Presidents are its conductors taking turns in 4-year shifts. During the Clinton presidency the current system was in the Growth and Maturity phase of its cycle. Clear track ahead and on automatic pilot most of the time with occasional but minor tweaks. All president Clinton had to do was some fine-tuning and the system moved along nicely providing him with a great legacy. This is what we call Aesthetic Change. President Obama, on the other hand, is presiding over the end phase of that same system. But, instead of the journey coming to a natural end, the system is dying a premature death as a result of decades of misguided monetary and tax policies the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the Great Depression. I call this in my book abnormal collapse and entropy. This phase of a cycle needs structural , or systemic change.

Now, here’s the dynamic that very few have observed. To President Obama, the current system couldn’t die fast enough for him to usher in simple aesthetic change of a future system. The republicans, on the other want to revive the current comatose and toxic system at any cost. Neither side realizes that relative to the speed at which complex systems move, the old system will take another decade to die, and for its DNA to go through entropy and become informational units that are parts of the next system. As to the coming system, it is still going through its gestation phase still needing a decade or more to differentiate itself while President Obama tried to give it premature birth. Institutions in our culture weren’t ready for it for another decade.

No one should be under the illusion that change could be reversed or accelerated during a system’s premature death. This is not the train pulling slowly into its final destination where the old journey comes to an orderly end and a new journey towards higher values begins. This is a train violently and prematurely derailing off its course leaving a trail of destruction in its path. The best anyone could have done is soften the current collapse while a new paradigm for a new system continues to be formed. There was no track in place for President Obama to launch the new journey. He had little capacities to deal with the current dying system and as a result his legacy will be forever tarnished.

Still, a leader at the helm of a system experiencing a toxic premature death has very few choices. Other than cleaning the carnage over a long period of time, a leader can leave it all behind and immediately start work on a new track and a new train.  We call this Second Order Structural Change (The kind of change that got JFK killed, in my opinion). Today in western culture, change comes very slowly as the existing system (with its toxicity) has to cater to so many diverse and often arrested voices on both sides even as it dies.

 President Obama’s vision, once applied to the collapsing system, was sucked into its energy and became nothing more than a lightening rod for imbedded interest of the dying system. We are simply not ready for the new system, nor can second order structural change be implemented in a divided culture that is openly democratic. Today there are only two ways for Second Order change to happen as quickly as the voter wishes for it to happen:

  1. Through a command and control leadership structure like the military where the President’s goals were simply a matter of delegating responsibility without any of it being questioned. If such leadership were possible, the US would have entered an infancy stage of some form of social democracy. But, since it wouldn’t have emerged naturally, it wouldn’t have any staying power past his presidency.
  2. After the complete and utter collapse of current institutions. For details on how this would have played out, see point one  and add a  Marshall Plan.

Systems move very slowly and there’s too much complexity for complete and systemic collapse to take place. The best the system would allow the President to do is manage an orderly collapse. Or, if the republican were at the helm, continue the toxicity of the current system that would have made for a far worse collapse than the one we saw in 2008.

President Obama is not the first president to have a system die on his watch. Similar value system life cycles also crippled the Carter Administration. President Obama’s legacy unfortunately will be slightly better than that of Jimmy Carter. Both administrations had the previous system die on their watch, but the “next cycle” was much closer in time to Obama than they were to Carter.

life cycles

I suppose the moral is, don’t build a track for a new train when half of the culture is still grieving the death of the old no matter how that death came about. A good lesson in how value systems rise and fall.

Like!
17