Published on Medium June 12, 2022
On Tuesday May 24th 2022, my friend and colleague Dr. Don Edward Beck passed away at age 85. It is impossible to fully state the influence he has had on the world at large, and on my life and on that of my partner and soulmate Elza Maalouf. Dr. Beck was our pinultimate guide on a human journey of mythical proportions. He appeared in our lives twenty years ago at a time when Elza and I had emptied ourselves from our respective pasts and were waiting for whatever the Universe had in store for us. I had exited the Orange stage of development after a succesful career in real estate and a bitter divorce from my first wife. I was questioning everything about the so-called American Dream and all its superfluous extensions. Elza who had been on a spiritual path for years, was also quetioning the nature of her spiritual practices that left so many unanswered questions in her life.
Don and his Spiral Dynamics model were the wrecking ball that shook our peaceful lives, our linear understanding of purpose and the nature of existence. It thrusted us both into a transcedant cause, a never ending quest that continues to burn brightly till this day. There are two websites that chronicle our work with Don Beck, The MEMEnomics Group which is dedicated to understanding the evolutionary aspects of economics, and the Center for Human Emrgence Middle East which is dedicated to understanding the evolutionary aspects of geopolitics and its applications in the Middle East. Both websites are dedicated to Don’s memory for whithout him, none of this work would have been possible for us and for thousands like us around the world.
Our relationship with Don and his late wife Pat became a personal one when Pat told Elza in 2004 that the work we were doing together on the Israeli-Palestinian issue had given his life new purpose. The quote below is from the dedication page of my 2021 book The Light of Ishtar, which is a memoir about my extraordinary journey with Elza, which would not have been possible without Don’s presence in our lives.
“To those who dispel the darkness with their light, to my guru and teacher Kirpal Singh, who taught me to live the life of soul, and to my friend and mentor, Dr. Don Edward Beck, who taught me how to fight like hell for a better humanity”
It is this presence of spirit and an unwavering commitment passed down to Don from his predecessor, Clare Graves which Don, in turn passed down to us to “do the work the world needs done” that represent my truth which will remain long after the messeger had gone.
In his last two years of life, Don struggled with health challenges, both physically and mentally. During the early stage of the pandemic, I had a rare opprtunity to speak to him, moments that I captured in the Epilogue of my book that give the reader a rare look at his genius. According to his family, that conversation was one of the last profound discourses he had before his death.
Below is an edited version from that last conversation from the book:
During that time of confinement, I had a rare lucid conversation with Dr. Beck. I wanted to tap into his reservoir of knowledge to see if I had missed anything in my writings about the virus. We discussed its meaning and the limitations of our models. He reminded me of one of our graphics that I have long forgotten. It depicts a top view of the spiral, which had an undifferentiated black mass and a simple coil at its center.
He had labeled it “The Evolutionary Prime Directive” specifically to capture the unacknowledged complexity of the evolutionary process that existed before humans differentiated themselves from it and evolved into the beige stage, the first level of existence in our model.
At the beige stage, which is still characteristic of some third-world societies today, people are preoccupied with sheer survival and the immediate gratification of needs with only minimal control over their surroundings. Dr. Beck and I speculated about how quickly the virus can bring us back to this beige level if we continue to ignore the warnings coming to us from our environment as well as from manmade threats. Together, we revisited findings of the research of CHEs from around the world that indicate humanity is still struggling to emerge from every level in the first tier due to the pervasive effects of the values of the Industrial Age―whether it’s our preoccupation with economic prosperity at the cost of our planetary ecosystems, our ongoing issues with globalization and world security, or the absence of a coordinated and sustainable global response to climate change.
Revisiting the research put our vulnerabilities in greater perspective. It showed that even the most advanced cultures in our model―Northern European countries―are struggling to exit the Green humanitarian level due to the high cost of social programs. China is attempting to enter the Orange level out of normal evolutionary sequence as it ignores human-rights abuses that place its 1.4 billion citizens at the mercy of leadership that is at the Red level. The United States and the United Kingdom seem similar in their inability to extract themselves from the corrosive values of the Orange level of financial capitalism. Findings also pointed to the struggles on the lowest levels of the spiral, which are the most concerning since they affect the least developed parts of the world: issues such as the unaddressed droughts that are keeping much of Africa and parts of the Middle East and South America at the beige and purple levels.
After that sobering reacquaintance with reality, Dr. Beck reminded me of a simple metaphor we had used at training events that depicted the mechanics of evolutionary change. It was a demonstration done on staircases with trainees in which each step represented an evolutionary stage or level of existence on the spiral. The point was that when we want to climb to the next evolutionary stage with both feet, to do it successfully we must bend our knees. The climb is made more difficult if the person or culture making it has been in an arrested or closed psychosocial state of existence.
Dr. Beck and I speculated that if the coronavirus were the existential threat that would move humanity to a higher level of consciousness, then all six value systems that humanity had experienced to this point in its history were simultaneously bending their knees with a great degree of difficulty and against the collective will to accomplish this monumental task. The death toll, the economic devastation, and the global chaos ensuing from the coronavirus were nothing more than the byproduct of a subsistent humanity being forced to bend its knees out of the necessity to survive.
That conversation sent me on a search for some of Clare Graves’s original research. It reminded me of his “six-upon-six”hypothesis and of how each of the six levels of human development represent one tier of values, or one flight of stairs. Furthermore, the hypothesis says that as we move up the developmental staircase to the next tier―or the next six levels―we experience a monumental upshift in human behavior from the preceding tier.[i] The first tier, or the first flight of stairs, contains the first six value systems, and they all identify with the values of subsistence that still define most of human behavior today. The second tier, or the second flight of stairs, Graves often referred to as the values of magnificence, what Spiral Dynamics practitioners refer to as the emerging values of humanity. He had also uncovered that the theme of each value system repeats as we enter each new tier, but at an exponentially higher level of psychosocial development. So, while the beige theme, comprising the first value system in the first tier, deals with the survival of the individual, the same beige theme of the seventh value system, which is the first level in the second tier―or the first step on the second flight of stairs―remains that of survival, but now as the survival of all life on the planet. To understand fully what is needed to save our planet, our psychosocial capacities need to recalibrate at an exponentially higher level from where the leading edge of evolution is today―somewhere between the fifth and sixth levels of the first tier.
In theory, unless all six value systems in the first tier remain in an open psychosocial state―meaning that they openly assimilate higher-level values―then the transition into the second tier will be mired with difficulty and unpredictability, subject to many wildcards that could destabilize life on Earth. Dr. Beck and I speculated that, due to humanity’s arrested state in the first tier, wildcards seem to be appearing in increasing intensity, the virus being the most intense so far. The result is a humanity spread on an entire first flight of stairs painfully bending its knees.
Also, Dr. Beck reminded me of the danger that Dr. Graves saw on the horizon if we were to continue to ignore the damage we’re causing to our planetary ecosystems. Dr. Graves had speculated that if humanity fails consciously to take the necessary momentous leap into the second tier of values, Mother Nature will do it for us at the cost of the earth’s population being cut by as much as half. Dr. Beck and I theorized that, due to humanity’s failure to think and act from the more inclusive values of the second tier, where we, individually and collectively, uphold the wholeness of existence over material possessions, our ascendence to them will come to us as a painful and unexpected fate. Mother Nature will do it for us as a way for her to regenerate, evolve, and adapt to the damage we have caused.
That conversation was the last meaningful interaction I had with the man who has always given me a glimpse of the simplicity beyond complexity, which remains the rarified realm where exceptional genius dwells. Rest In Peace my friend knowing that the world is in a better place because of your time in it.
