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.
This post started as a response to someone on the Beck-Graves Facebook page as an inquiry into an earlier analysis I offered on the future of liberal democracy in light of the war in Ukraine. Her question to me was: “I wonder how we can bring our Integral second tier insights into the world. Because I think that only an Integral view and structure lies beyond liberal democracy.”
Here’s my answer and it addresses both the shortcoming of Wilber’s Integral model that seems to have hijacked everything that means integral, and our respective communities’ different understanding of “Integral Design” when it comes to figuring out what is happening today on the European continent.
Graves and Cowan used to say “people cannot be until they are” which meant that design must follow function that recognizes the presence of people and cultures in the lower systems and create governing structure that help them move up the spiral at their own pace. What’s happening today in Europe is one of the 3 scenarios that Graves predicted over 4 decades ago shown in the image below. To me it’s a dance between scenario #1 and scenario #2 on the European theater; one more toxic than the other.Â
Clare W. Graves in 1974 on the future of humanity
I follow Graves not Wilber. I hope that has become clear by now. When Graves says that Life Conditions (half of our model) is what makes development dynamic, the living proof to that is the work of the different Center for Human Emergence around the world set up by Beck, Beck’s own work in South Africa, our work with him in the Middle East and my work with economics.
The integral community has no clue what LCs mean and how to factor that huge variable into their model. Maybe they think the likes of Putin will automatically become enlightened the minute they’re placed on the Quadrants. To me when Life Conditions are ignored, a model becomes incomplete and inferior. Because of that, I believe that the Integral community has a very poor understanding of what the Yellow Seventh level system does when it comes to designing solutions that are informed by the existing reality in the first tier. Yes, we have to go slumming in the first tier where over 94% of the world lives.
Yellow must study that dysfunction and design in response to its indigenous findings (local content). In our experience in the Mideast, insolent Red feels no guilt and doesn’t care about the consequences of its actions. It only alters its behavior after its head is bashed in.
The Red system in raw form. Leave only a scorched earth behind
To Wilberian this is a savage solution that appears nowhere on their radar. By ignoring most of the LCs in the lower systems the integral model, in my opinion has effectively become a closed system itself. It attracts like thinkers who give each other high fives, engage in endless intellectual debate and think they’re addressing real issues on the ground. To me this is the height of arrogance and hypocrisy. They forget that in real life more than half of the world is struggling to climb into Blue. Or in the case of post-Cold War Europe, the struggle is to rip out the communistic Blue from its roots and replace it with democratic systems of governance.
Putin’s Red is the breaking of the shadow of Western Orange-Green. I spoke about this danger in Europe a few years ago when I warned that the pursuit of “no war” has a completely different memetic contour than the “pursuit of peace.” One is reactive and wants to avoid a certain outcome (which contributes to “us v them” division and resentment that builds in the collective shadow). The other requiring patient long term leadership that would have picked up of Putin’s Red and put in place certain “Red Wizardry” measures that would have moved him up the Spiral while stroking his Red ego and making him look like he’s the hero who made Russia into a new superpower in harmony with Western Blue-Orange.
Finally, what we’re forgetting in this entire calculus is the 3 legs of the model that must be present to make psychological advancement possible: 1: The Bio/neurology. 2. The psychology and 3. The sociology. It could very much be that Putin’s Bio-neurology (what Graves called the lottery of the brain), makes him incapable of moving up to a new stage. All his other intelligences are acquired through mimicry that expand his Red control. This reality is lost on the integral community and much of those in the humanistic psychology movement (Green) who wrongfully believe that everyone can develop higher capacities.
We have to start thinking is Stratified Capacities and design accordingly or we’re doomed. That is my Gravesian solution.
This is a story about China’s centrally planned Too-Big-To-Fail economy and the impact that has on our future
When I was in business school, there used to be a saying that pointed to the strength of the US economy that went something like this: When the US sneezes the world catches a cold. A lot has changed since and China has become the driver of much of what happens in the global economy today. This is all due to a very odd mix of a centrally planned economy (what we in Spiral Dynamic call the Blue-Absolutistic value system of governance) with a mix of strategic and highly manipulative objectives to take over the world (Orange in Spiral Dynamics), while using Red/Purple values and tactics (oppression and tribal manipulation) to employ slave labor and engage in other subversive practices. This rare form of governance has allowed China to bully the third world and control its resources and undermine intellectual copyrights and global trade covenants. It has condoned the abuse of human rights at home while enriching the few elite members of the Communist Party of China (the CCP). The Western world has overlooked all this as it continues to feed its insatiable appetite for endless consumption and focusing on cheap production costs while increasing the profit margins of big Western corporations on the back of cheap Chinese labor.
In order for any true free-market economy to succeed, Blue central planning must remain a transitory phase that builds the physical economic infrastructure (highways and ports as well as robust institutions) then it must be relegated to maintenance and support as Blue responsibilities become those of a government responding to Orange innovation and its effective regulation. This is not the case with China, as it continued building cities that have remained empty for years through its absolutistic Blue leadership. Click on this link to an interview I gave to Newsweek Magazine a while ago which warns against China’s sudden transition from Blue to Orange.
Blue/Red men in Orange suits
Well, like any other closed Blue system of governance run by closed system ideologues, China remains unaccepting of ideas on how to give up control without having to instate major reforms that threaten the very existence of its brave experiment. Cracks in the system are beginning to show as the transitory Blue economic policies have been exhausted beyond their useful function. These are signs of the deeper tectonic plates the plague the Chinese economy. The canary in the coalmine is its real estate sector with 100’s of development companies teetering on the edge of collapse as they owe 100s of Billions to Chinese banks. The first hint of the forthcoming collapse of this sector recently came from property development giant Evergrande, warning that it might not be able to meet its debt payments to its lenders. The news sent shockwaves through global financial markets as analysts began to speculate as to what this could mean. Evergrande in the largest real estate development firm in the world and holds a world record of $300 Billion in debt; a sum that is larger than most counties’ annual sovereign debt. As the Chinese Communist Party tries to grapple with these upcoming existential economic crises, there could only be one of two outcomes:
Stop the blind drive-at-any-cost to become #1 and transition to a free market economy. This will necessitate the long-awaited upward movement in governance and values to an entirely different set of metrics, which will bring the long awaited, market-driven price discoveryto a $16 Trillion a year economy that will now be based on market forces of supply and demand not the will of a few people in the National People’s Congress claiming to know what’s best for their people and the world while becoming Billionaires and rarely if ever being transparent.
Continue with the Blue-centrally planned economy that blindly seeks becoming #1 while hiding much of the corruption and abuse that remains hidden from the eyes of the world.
Once the West wakes up to China’s drive to create a global resource monopoly, they will be forced to reassess their ill-thought preception of global trade and begin to focus on resources as a national security matter. This is the new geopolitical divide the awaits the world: China and resource-rich third world counties on one side, the West and its allies on the other. In my work, I call this the New Global Axis of Values: Red/Blue v Orange/Green. Click here for a full explanation of what these values stand for. My long-term bet is on the West since it has long been established in the values of the Orange system which has the mandate to uncover the secrets of the universe through scientific discoveries, quantitative analysis and research and development.
We in the West must reinvent ourselves as the undisputed global leaders in research and development in energy and in new sustainable, carbon-neutral resources , especially when the alternative is China’s carbon-heavy pile of natural resources that will surely continue to destabalize life on our planet.
