Tag Archives: Anthropocene

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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Take My Job Please; AI and the Anthropocene

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Published on Medium July 10, 2023.

If the Anthropocene Epoch that we have entered is about creating policies that keep us within the bounds of planetary systems, then a global unifying goal that seeks the systemic reduction of growth has to be our new North Star. The debate about the future of AI is part and parcel of that monumental shift in thinking. This long-awaited discussion about the role AI should play in our future has just begun, but unlike any other debate in the past, the voices that want to regulate it are much louder that those who want to advance it. Aside from the potential danger it presents to our mental health, democracy and global security, the biggest fear we have is that AI will render obsolete what remains of our professions. In other words, it has the potential to take away the endless number of jobs the capitalist system justifies and continues to create as an automatic extension of its ethos. The obsolescence of most of these jobs should be considered a good thing if we are to take seriously our new strategies of degrowth aimed at reducing our carbon footprint and the exploitation of the planet’s natural resources.

Having AI do everything for us — in the words of historian and anthropologist Yuval Harari — will bring an end to human history as we known it. While this may sound apocalyptic to many, it is a needed catalyst for the change we need. The end of history is the beginning of a future unbiased by it. It is one of the ways to bypass the inherently toxic aspects of our past that have defined the evolution of our mind and brought us into the climate predicament we’re in today. By transforming past quantifiable human endeavors into what will become the largest algorithmic utility, AI will play a crucial role in helping us survive our immediate future. This is a perspective that is currently missing from our conscious awareness that will free us from the biases of the past and focus us on a future based in Anthropogenic awareness.

The next phase of our human journey will be an extremely difficult one to navigate. As climate catastrophes increase in size and frequency, we will come to realize that we are helplessly at the mercy of Mother Nature that has become less merciful towards our species due to our actions that have forced the collapse of her different systems. What we’re coming into is a crucible of unbelievable meaning that we must cross if our species is to survive. Our future will barely resemble our past and we will go through decades of adjustemnts that are existential in nature. It is our collective passage through the dark night of the soul, a necessary metamorphosis that will bring us face to face with our past actions. It is our entire species being swallowed into the belly of the whale that brings us to our inner temple where we must die to our old selves before we can be born again. Without this painful transformation we won’t be empowered to jump into the next part of our human journey where we learn to live within our planetary limits.

It is on the other side of that transformational journey that we begin to replace the mandates of growth with the virtues of de-growth. It is on that other side that we begin to place human exceptionalism in the proper perspective that nests it in natural exceptionalism that strips way its frivolous reductionist nature. It is on the other side that we return to being one with nature and end the madness that made us think we’re superior to her or separate from her. It is on that other side where we replace monotheism with deep ecology and where planetary survival will not be subject to the naiveté of the democratic process. And yes, it is on the other side of the darkness that we will come to realize the capitalist system unconsciously spawns the seeds of its own destruction while its newly anointed captains of industry, the AI engineers continue to falsely believe that their narrow focus on power and wealth is as an ecosystem onto to itself.

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Would Our Developmental Models Withstand the Anthropocene?

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This post began as a response to comments made on the above image I posted which depicts the Spiral Dynamics model with the words: Burn your old ways of thinking. I had initially posted the image many years ago to my social media profile and decided to bring it back again today. In my opinion the tagline has become more relevant now in light of the planetary and societal collapse that only seems to accelerate with every passing day.

Meanwhile our community of practitioners continues to busy itself with the philosophical and intellectual underpinning of what our gurus taught us from the comfort of their air-conditioned, flood-and-fire-resistant bygone era called the Holocene ignoring any and all sense of urgency that defines our new reality. Most of the comments ask what happened to “transcend and include”? My question back to our community is “What if our sense of transcendence is way off?” Most of us, beginning with Wilber practice what I call “Transcend and ignore.” We have become an intolerant, elitist bunch with exclusionary behavior that can’t give a damn about inclusion unless those seeking it buy our seminars, come to our conferences, or speak our cultist language. 99.99% of the world has no clue as to what we do or how to use what we teach to affect real change.

Nowhere is this behavior of exclusion and ignorance more apparent than at the very top when Wilber in a reluctant way eulogized Beck a few months ago in a four-line statement, where he twice repeated “let’s not forget that his contribution was only to a values line”. The bruised and fragile ego of a far smaller man who couldn’t transcend the Red stage of being the Wyatt Earp of consciousness going all the way back to 2006. Where’s the transcendence, where’s the inclusion? Beck wasn’t much better in transcending and including much of what fell outside his worldview as well. This might sound like a harsh criticism for those who we admire, but their pre-occupation with their models that “explained everything”, left out that which requires a far greater degree of explaining; how to train our minds and our species to become an immutable part of nature again, and be in awe of her superior intelligence.

Our challenge TODAY is this: Can we transcend our teachers, add our own take on what they taught us, learn new existential models that factor in our new reality in order to help humanity NOW. Neither Wilber nor Beck spoke about how our models behave in the Anthropocene. Hint: We’re at the mercy of Mother Nature and her evolutionary process happens unconsciously and with utter moral indifference towards all species including the one that has been the most destructive, us. This reality will never fit on the Spiral or the AQAL models. Homo sapiens will become extinct as a function of Mother Nature adapting to a far greater system in collapse and as an automatic, unconscious way for her to reach balance. No Transcendence. No Inclusion. Sorry.

The idea for the word “burn” first came to me from Eastern philosophy. Rumi’s poem “I want burning” has more wisdom in it than anything Beck and Wilber ever wrote. It has everything to do with learning to die in order to live, an Eastern concept that is the polar opposite of what Western Civilization stands for. Are we ever going to start thinking for ourselves, or be in awe of the greater forces of existence, the mystery of life itself beyond any model the brightest human minds can create? Or will we always reduce existential challenges to whether we can fit them into our own unique understanding of our elitist models?

We are in an existential crisis and if we had “transcended and included” we wouldn’t be here in the middle of the Sixth Extinction. The dominant narrative that has defined who we are for the last 500 years is in collapse Will we ever create our own narrative that gives humanity a chance at surviving that collapse or will we remain wanna be armchair philosophers wondering if the next flood or fire will spare us because we’re special. Like Mother Nature I have an utter moral indifference about how special we are.

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