June / July 2005

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The Spiral Dynamics Integral: A Developmental
Model of Worldviews

— Don Beck

THE CONTINUUM OF
DEVELOPMENT

Spiral Dynamics is based on the original work of Clare W. Graves, who taught psychology at Union College. He taught theories from Freud to Watson/Skinner behaviorism to the humanistic approach of Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, and at the end of the course his students would say: “Fine, Dr. Graves, which theory is right?” He didn’t have an answer to that question. So he began longitudinal research designed to figure out why people think in different ways about the different fields of politics, religion, sports, architecture, economics, sex, love, marriage, and psychology. What he discovered was that the different theories (or perspectives or worldviews), rather than being contradictory to each other, simply reflect different stages of psychological development.

From that original research, which lasted more than 30 years, he described what we call today Spiral Dynamics. The basic concept of the model of the development of human thinking or intelligence is based on a spiral, which as it unfolds moves to greater complexity. While it is, in a sense, a single line because if you lay out a spiral it will be a line, yet each of the turns of the spiral represents a different worldview, a weltanschauung, a way of understanding reality, a bottom line, and what today we’re also calling a meme, a value system meme. We’re able now to demonstrate that what lies beneath the surface in relationships, in issues, in controversy, even in warfare, are these different core, adaptive, contextual, complex, intelligences. Let’s look quickly at the nature of these intelligences. Basically, there are three components that we need to understand: Life conditions, behaviors (memetic code or awakened systems), and particular social meaning.

LIFE CONDITIONS

Life conditions are the problems of existence that we encounter. They vary across time and cultures. They can be complex, or in times of crisis regress to simpler forms. The systems that people use to cope with life conditions and that we’re trying to describe are not innate in people, not like IQ intelligence or EQ emotional intelligence. Rather, they are adaptive intelligences to these life conditions.

BEHAVIORS/CODES

The memetic code is the way we deal with life conditions. There is no single, one-to-one relationship between life conditions and code. A person might be overwhelmed by certain life conditions, such as when a deep-sea diver gets the bends and the coping mechanism designed to deal with that life condition may not be awakened. Further, a person experiencing an altered state may contemplate different memetic codes previously unconsidered. From their current less complex system, they are beginning to contemplate more complex ways of thinking. That new way of thinking may reach a threshold where it becomes part of their everyday life when the life conditions in which they’re functioning change in a way that makes it more likely to support those new ways of thinking. If not, then the new ways won’t be sustained.

SOCIAL MEANING

Then we have the way the codes are expressed in social life, in areas such as religion, politics, lifestyles, and so forth. Once again, there is no necessary direct connection system between the awakened code and its surface-level manifestation. For instance, achievement and modern level code (orange) doesn’t always produce capitalism. Capitalism is simply the typical historic manifestation of that code. Each new code is designed to deal with certain conditions in the environment, and when a new one is expressed, the older codes don’t disappear. Rather, they continue to exist because those life conditions that gave them birth are still two paychecks away from a particular person who has moved on, and because they continue to apply to people still in those life conditions.

SURVIVAL CODE

The first code, the basic instinctive survivalist system (beige), is about making it through the day, making it through the night. You see it in newborn infants, you see it in the elderly, you see it in times of great crisis like on 9/11 when there’s a temporary regression into beige. The only important thing there is survival.

MAGIC, ANIMISM CODE

During the Ice Age, when clans began to bump into other clans, there grew a need to form a more complex system, and what happened in the brain was the awakening of the cause and effect linkages and thus the emergence of the magical and animistic (purple code). And you can even watch these in young children as they suddenly have animistic beliefs about their dog or their dolly or in bonding to their blankets or in current movies where you see this code developing itself in response to crisis.

EGOISM/POWER CODE

Out of that code comes the first of the strong, egocentric, self-centered, “I am me,” “I am the greatest,” “I am all there is,” assertion of power and egoism (red code). You see it in the “terrible twos” of toddlers. You see it in adults in various expressions of machismo, and you see it in entire nations where the bottom line is to assert power. It becomes a predatory system, yet also a positive stage in human emergence in which the first raw self-concept becomes apparent.

TRADITION, CONFORMIST CODE

Obviously out of the chaos and anomie of egoism, each one doing what’s right in their own eyes, comes a stage where there is a need for order and a shift out of looking out only for the self today into a recognition that “thou, too, are mortal,” and there will come some time in the future the reality of death. These thoughts and feelings often trigger the search for meaning and purpose, which are the key elements in the traditional/conformist (blue) code. It’s a system that’s designed to enable people to find deeper meaning and purpose in their particular life, and when this particular means begins to express itself, one is quite willing to conform to rules, regulations, to some kind of plan for your life because there is a guarantee of something in the future. There may be sacrifi ce of the self now to obtain something later.

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AUTONOMOUS MODERN ACHIEVEMENT CODE

Historically, the autonomous self develops next. If the traditional conformist is a kind of fatalistic, “I’m simply along for the ride and whatever will be, will be,” out of that can come, “Well, maybe I can change things. Maybe I can influence my own course. Maybe we need not accept the inevitability of whatever “ism” we have embraced. Maybe we can make a difference.” With the Enlightenment came the whole notion of individual freedom and independence, and when Martin Luther was able to nail his 95 Theses on the church door in Wittenberg, Germany, that in itself was an assertion that each individual could interpret the Bible on their own. His friend Gutenberg put a Bible in the hands of everyone with his new technology of the printing press. Thus, we had a surge of autonomy to create the good life here and now and not wait for death. This self-directed autonomy value system meme is the dominant force today in our society, aided by our amazing technological successes and by our capability as humans to go anywhere on the world, down beneath the oceans, and even to other celestial bodies. This is an expansive value system (and warm in color, orange) where the focus on self versus focus on the collective.

ALTRUISTIC HUMANISTIC CODE

As you might expect, out of autonomy came a shift again from the I/me/mine to the we/us/our of the more subtle humanistic (green) concerns that happen only in societies with enough money in the bank. That’s why you don’t find green in Afghanistan and why toplevel government offi cials in Mexico recently said there’s little humanism in Mexico other than among the expatriates living there. So what triggers the humanistic code is the awareness that maybe in the search for success and material pleasure we’ve lost our soul, we’ve lost what it means to be human. We’ve become so automated by our technology and, in one sense, enticed by our material gain and our affluence that we ask, “What’s it all worth?”

In some cases, that turn toward experiences of altruism/humanism will be more conceptual than realistic, manifested by an array of sensitive emotions that often capture a person in this stage. It may lead to social concern about business organizations or into a heavier emotive experience.

It looks down the spiral at autonomy/ modern achievement and traditional conformity and sees in them elements that divide people, that bring harm to people, that separate people. And so one of its first obligations, it thinks, is to deconstruct what they have produced: winners and losers (in the autonomy, modern, achievement code) and saints and sinners (in the traditional, conformity code).

The Humanist’s goal is to try to clean up the spiral in terms of what the other systems have done, which it views to be dangerous and detrimental to humans themselves. So it has that cleansing kind of effect on people. By its nature, it is short-term and expensive, because in spite of all of its good intentions, in spite of its egalitarian motives to see to it that everybody has an equal share of our bounty, it lacks in itself the codes to actually make those things happen. Consequently, it is a kind of dead end, and what comes next is what we call the second-tier systems.

SECOND-TIER LEVEL OF CODES

In Clare Graves’ research, he found a momentous leap occurring in the spiral dynamic. He found among the people that he was studying a capacity for the holistic/systemic (yellow). He found the ability to make decisions far beyond what any of the other subjects whom he had been studying for years were able to accomplish. It seemed to him that that this next system was more than the next code level in the series of ratchets of systems.

That’s why he said that the first six systems represent our attempt to leave our more animalistic nature, and the humanistic is the capstone of that search. The second-tier system occurs when most human needs are met—no predators, we can find food at the local grocery store, we have access to what happens around the world instantly. So Homo Sapiens again says: “What in the world are we and where are we going?” but asking these questions with a full array of skills that have been added to us by these different meme codes along the way. And so the crossing over of this great Rubicon from humanistic (green) to holistic (yellow) or from first tier to second tier describes the cutting edge of society today.

In the holistic (a warm color yellow, which means it’s an I/me/mine focused on self), we’re going to define a whole different kind of human, one who is not driven as much by obsessions, one who has a good internalized compass, one who is more comfortable inside his or her skin, one who understands reality in terms of natural flows, one who is able to focus on human nature, not as a fixed type as the first-tier meme codes tend to do, or as a final answer, but recognizing the inevitability of the flow through codes.

Consequently, one of the first things systemic/holistic yellow has to do is to look back at the firsttier systems and see where there’s serious trouble. Now it does this on its own behalf. It wants to live in a world where it can pursue its own interests, but when it’s threatened by drive-by shootings from the red level and when insidious, malignant “isms” in the blue traditionals endanger its survival, when modern achievement orange has so contaminated the environment one can hardly breathe, and when altruistic/ humanistic green’s naivete is such that it refuses to put in the kind of disciplines necessary for others to climb this existential ladder, that impairs the capacity of holistic yellow to be free and to live the kind of lifestyle that it chooses for itself.

And so its first task, in a sense, is to put on a toolkit and surf up and down the spiral to repair damage done by each of the other systems to enable life to continue. And when it is joined with its compatriot, turquoise (holarchical), the next level of the second-tier (that is right brain with data), it is brains with feelings. Then we have both an I/me/mine system in yellow joined with a we/us/our system in turquoise. And just as holistic yellow’s task is to repair the first-tier systems and to stitch together the wounded world, turquoise, because it is a collective we/us/our system tuning in to energy fields and to life itself—not just human life but all life—engulfs the spiral in the warm, healing bond that makes it possible for humans, for the first time, to free themselves from the gravitational tug of the more primitive systems and to move ahead.

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EMERGING SYSTEMS

So those are the first eight of the memetic codes that have emerged to date, and because the whole Clare Graves Spiral Dynamics concept is not yet complete, it means there will be a coral stage. Then there will be teal, and as each of these life conditions warrant, we’ll see more complex systems emerge, many of which have already been experienced in transient altered states. But until they reach that threshold where they replicate and begin to solve human problems, they have yet to reach the stage of being a value system meme.

Well, to conclude this quick trip, we want you to see that these are systems inside people rather than types of people. We want you to understand that each of us may, at certain times in our life, even though we have advanced to more complex views of the world, regress to essential coping systems to deal with current life conditions. And what exists inside the individual, likewise, exists within the core of a company, within its sacred Ark of the Covenant that determines how that company does business. And, likewise, these same codes exist within the core of cultures and entire societies.

One of the most important aspects of what we call the second tier is that Spiral Dynamics is now integral. This is a major development in the whole Graves paradigm. The last time I talked to him before his death in 1986, he said: “My whole theory says it itself has to emerge.” Certainly the influence of Ken Wilber here is such that it began to open a whole new horizon to those of us who have been working with the Graves concept for a number of years.

We’ve added the term integral to suggest that even the whole Spiral Dynamics concept is emerging, it’s evolving. And what this means practically in what we call the second tier will be both a vertical integration and a horizontal integration.

VERTICAL INTEGRATION

So by integral vertical, I mean that what happens in the second tier is a recognition that all of the meme codes and first-tier systems need to be healthy. And so the task of the integral approach is to show people how they can integrate and awaken and refresh and certainly empower each of these systems inside themselves.

And so rather than debate among the various meme code adherents, our approach in integral psychology is that each of these represent ways to be human, and because the spiral is inside the person, then it is critical that each of these systems resonate, be exercised in such a way for them to contribute to the further evolution of the spiral itself. And so holistic and holarchical level codes (yellow and turquoise) both attend to the question: “How can we keep the whole first tier set of systems in their healthy version and how can we keep the entire spiral open for movement if and when life conditions trigger that movement?”

Each of us has a center of gravity code, and we have memes in our basement, those systems once used but today not as congruent or relevant, and memes in our attic, those systems appearing on the horizon for us as individuals. We live in a tension zone between those memes used before and those yet to emerge. The basic concept, rather than to discredit any of these meme codes, is to show their importance in the overall emergence of the spiral. So that’s what makes the spiral integral different, even from other people who are using Graves’ concept.

HORIZONTAL INTEGRATION

But second, it becomes integral horizontally in that we’re able to show in the second tier how each of these codes operate in the full dimension of being human. And here, once again, using the Wilber all-quadrants, all-levels, all-lines concept, we’re able to actually graph and demonstrate how these codes express themselves.

And if you’re aware of the allquadrants, all-levels approach, you have the two versions of the self that is the person—those concepts about the person that are visible, external, such as the brain and the organism and what Graves would call “degrees of activation” of the central nervous system, the visible, biological features, and you have those aspects of the individual you can’t see, those intangible, invisible states of mind. And here we find the levels of psychological existence. If the approach to human development focuses only on one and not the other, then that approach is fragmented, and this is a topic of concern to the field of psychiatry that now must be of two minds, one using Prozac in terms of an intervention into the physicality or what we call the upper right, individualistic exterior system quadrant, or the use of talk therapy or other tools of emergence in the so-called upper left, individual interior quadrant. And it becomes important to recognize the synergy between those two.

Furthermore, there is the synergy between the two lower systems (quadrants), which are both collective, that is to say the collective, interior system, which is invisible— and these are the webs of culture, relationships, norms, boundaries and customs—and the lower right system that includes the visible societal structures—economic, political, laws, habitat—things that you can see about our collective sense.

And what is really powerful about this model is that one can diagnose a particular situation and see what kind of intervention is necessary and fl esh out that intervention in all four quadrants. Otherwise, we have efforts that appeal to only one quadrant and deny the importance of the other—for instance when we give economic aid to a country and do not pay attention to its interior capacity to handle that money in a responsible sense. Or we expose children to pretty nifty training programs to keep them out of gangs and then what do we do? We send them back to the same gang-infested, lower-left quadrant culture that produced the original dysfunctionality.

And so what is extremely powerful about this integral approach is that we can hone in on any particular situation, diagnose what’s happening in all four quadrants, read the codes to see at what level these interventions are now being pitched, and then do what we call “major alignment” to see to it that all the efforts in all four quadrants and, ultimately, in all the lines of development—social, emotive, physical, ethical—are, likewise, accommodated. So we come up with a full-spectrum approach, one that has the capability to make a major shift in the whole critical mass using the spiral dynamic model

Now while this sounds pretty complicated, it’s actually quite simple. We even use the metaphor, “Humpty-Dumpty sat on a wall,” to illustrate it. You know, he had a great fall and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty back together again. Well, the reason is, so many efforts are fragmented, ad hoc, piecemeal. They all mean well, but the various stakeholders—home, church, school, law enforcement, business, government—all of these things are doing the best they know how to do, but things get worse because they lack the ability to integrate their efforts and align them like laser beams on these meme codes.

We’ve been able to demonstrate how to practically use this information in this integral fashion, for instance with what we developed in South Africa. It is exciting work because we know exactly what we’re trying to do mimetically, and we can show how the various entities’ and stakeholders’ efforts may, unhappily, be contradictory, piecemeal, ad hoc, and fragmented. Therefore, we can introduce at community levels, in companies, in communities, and in entire societies, ways to shift the focus and the efforts in such a way to impact the emergence of people. Because we’re integral, we can look at other entities that are traveling the same territory with us and begin to do some alignment. And we gain from them as they gain from us.

So I’ve become a Spirocrat; I believe in the Spiralocracy. I think we can identify what I call the power of the third win, using spiral dynamics. And if we can keep the Spiral itself healthy, if we focus on the undercurrents of the memetics (meaning and worldviews), this is how we can enable emergence of people up the Spiral as changing life conditions warrant and make this development possible.

DON EDWARD BECK, Ph.D., is the founder of Spiral Dynamics Integral (spiraldyanmics.net), founder of the International Institute of Values, cofounder of the National Values Center, and founding associate of Ken Wilber’s Integral Institute. Dr. Beck is coauthor of The Crucible: Forging South Africa’s Future (1991) and Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership & Change (1996).

First Cover Story

CONTEXTS FOR AN INTEGRATIVE PSYCHOLOGY— Don Eulert