Just about everyone who commented on the riots got the answers right.  They all had a piece of the truth, and some of the discussions were blessedly lacking in the usual polarisations.   Of course we ended up with the retributive justice, but if you are used to a Spiral Dynamics perspective you know that Red excess requires containment from a strong Red-Blue.   The first response must be to prevent further damage.  Medically you need to sedate the patient and stop the bleeding before other remedies are possible.

Seemingly, these things have happened before.  We recall Toxteth and Brixton;  no doubt there are some people who think that the problem will now go away for another 25 years.   But this time was different.  These rampages were not politically driven, they were across racial divides and something besides anger was being expressed.   These were Orange events – strategised, organised and acquisitive.  They were not merely Red excess requiring Blue order.  If it is co-ordinated by Blackberry, it’s not exactly a riot.

There is something fascinating and even ironic about the echoing of Iran and Egypt in this technological orchestration – that the same means that have been used against corrupt regimes are also being deployed to serve these gang events.  Some participants viewed this as fun, and maybe it was the only way to make life outside the bedroom as exciting as Grand Theft Auto.  But perhaps the biggest shock came from the participation by people who were not poor and who were not mere youths.  What we saw was an expression of “grab what you can, when you can”.  It was cynical and opportunist, and in that sense fully echoed the behaviour of bankers and expenses-fiddlers.  Feral youth looked at the feral elite and said – “we’ll have a piece of that”. 

In one sense it is good that we have a Prime Minister who uses the label “Broken Society”.  You could see it as progress coming from a party whose earlier leaderette barely allowed that there is such a thing as Society.  To his credit, Cameron has previously showed his awareness that there are underlying problems and since he was ridiculed for doing so with the “hug a hoodie” tag, we may understand that there is now some hesitancy to go outside the territory defined by his “bring back hanging” colleagues and Daily Mail readers.   But the label is misleading and inadequate. 

What we are dealing with is a society in transition.  When you bang your shins on the coffee table the pain is a reminder that you were not sufficiently conscious.  When you do so in the dark it is a reminder to turn the light on next time.  The truth is that we have known that the societal issues, like the table, were there all along.  In addition, familiarity with SD told us that this transition was coming.  Clare W. Graves told us that it would be “the most difficult, but at the same time the most exciting transition that the human race has faced to date… the start of a new movement in the symphony in human history.”

I think that we tend to underestimate the degree of change that this calls for.  We know that the second tier of existence which is attempting to birth, demands that we integrate and balance all the preceding stages.   Among the reasons for the looting we can find breakdown of second-stage bonding in the family and “tribe”.  We witness inadequate parenting, failure to manage the third-stage emergence of a healthy will and to place fourth-stage boundaries and inculcate orderly understanding of the collective rules.  We can see the systemic changes which have contributed to these failures – the geographical separation of the extended family, the families that live separate lives watching separate screens and rarely eating together.  Then there is the loss of sports facilities and the risk-averse or anti-competition mentalities that have progressively deprived youth of healthy and structured sport-based challenges through which to grow.

We know the fifth-stage drivers too, the need for two-incomes to fuel the acquisition lifestyle and the growth of the “grab-it” culture.   We can see that our “fairness” systems – the socialised medicine, education and care  structures have tended to create dependency, fostered an attitude of entitlement without effort and supported the idea that caring is not our own task as individuals, but the responsibility of public service professionals.  The sixth stage is in our systems, but not fully in our Values.   Collectively we care about the NHS, but we care most when it fails to deliver what we think we should have.  Only a minority truly take responsibility for their own health.  The list of contributing factors is very long and we could see our task as merely to rebalance the stack, bringing it back to health through an extended series of adjustments.  For sure, we will need to do that and if we do not, the platform for our next stage will be too unstable.  As Graves pointed out, it is not certain that we will succeed in the transition and these many aspects will need to change.

This tends to be the picture we see in varying degrees of detail, and often only with fragmentary grasp of the full systemic view.  I feel that we haven’t seen the depth of what needs to happen or grasped the full extent of the cultural change.  All of the adjustments that we must make need to be designed and orchestrated from the seventh level, and built with a second-tier perspective. 

The parallel that I want to draw is from product development and I would like to use the example of Interface carpets.  When Ray Anderson set his company the challenge of creating a truly sustainable business, he found that this could not be accomplished by “bolting on” environmental thinking.  It demanded a complete redesign.  Materials have to be different, production processes change and the whole idea of “selling” carpets disappears.  Interface only lease carpets so that when they are at end of life, they are returned for their materials to be re-used.

I suggest that the equivalent for our societal health is the need to rebuild society from the ground up.   The riots tell us that the underlying tensions and imbalances are unsustainable.  These will get worse if financial pressures increase, which the loss of market confidence in August 2011 suggests is now unavoidable.  We know that the Values mix that UK 2011 operates from is not sustainable and doesn’t enable us to address our life conditions, which for clarity include climate change, overburdened public services, ecological pressures, energy costs, food miles, unemployment, an ageing population, struggling businesses, an endemic debt-based economy and the continuing undercurrent of social exclusion, racism, immigration issues and addiction-fuelled crime.  Not to mention looting.

To quote Graves again (and remember that he wrote this in 1974) “We appear to be headed for a higher-order reversal of those values and beliefs we have held most dear and in our institutional ways of living.”   We need to get to grips with what that reversal of values will look like.  More than anything, we will need them to become part of how we all think.  We don’t need everyone in the UK to hold second-tier Values but we will need for those Values to articulate the nature of our society.  It must be possible for people in first-tier life conditions and mindsets to find their place of comfort within the mix.

This is not an overnight job.  It is one which requires inspiration and leadership.  It is one that requires a vision that helps the collective to find “freedom from inner compulsiveness and rigidifying anxiety”.   It involves a fundamental re-orientation of our thinking that Graves also described, among which:-

• Quality, not quantity, will become the measure of worth
• Reduction of use will be valued, growth will be devalued
• Freedom to operate in one’s own self-interest will be replaced by the responsibility to operate in the interest of others
• The boss will be the expediter of subordinates’ desires rather than the director of their activities
• The measure of educational success will not be quantity of learning but whether the education leads to movement up the existential staircase
• Activities that promote interdependent existence will be valued more than those that promote the sanctity of the individual

The equivalent of Interface Carpets’ shift into sustainability will incorporate such values into our social functioning.  Ground-up redesign recognises that we have reached the point where social health can likewise no longer be accomplished through add-on fixes; it must be designed in to the system, and ill-health designed out.  The nation spends huge amounts of its wealth and human effort in fixing problems;  our social and health systems have burgeoned with cures.  When we genuinely understand the needs and complex balances of modern society, we have the opportunity to shift money and effort to prevention rather than cure.  This is not a utopian proposition and we do not imply perfection, but it is a practical path to more effective social function.

The trend towards some of Graves’ new directions has already become apparent.  The need for others is manifest.  The shift towards partnership economics, sustainability by design, social responsibility, individual accountability, servant leadership, mutual care above individual acquisition, quality of life above possessions is already taking place.  These are the areas which our social rebuilding must incorporate.  These are the elements that must find their ways into individual thinking and into the systems and structures that we live within.  The requirement is comprehensive, complete and systemic.  We have made the world in our own image.  It is time for a new image and for a new world.

Jon

Everywhere I look it seems our systems are busting under the current pressures that we, the human species have created: we are facing the collapse or limits of our economic system, our energy systems and our environment crises, all of which are combining into the ‘perfect storm’. Chris Martenson, author of ‘The Crash Course’ points out that whilst our global economy is driven by consumption based on an assumption of continual growth, all growth comes from energy, and we have not been able to grow energy on a net basis for 5-6 years.

Think about it: every economic whim or dream is built on energy. Money was useful to drive and control growth when there was sufficient energy in the story. The story has changed and so these same actions of ‘driving and controlling’ growth don’t work today. The story has changed, but there’s a time lag or a gap where it seems we need sufficient critical mass of us to recognise the full implications of the new story: we need to change our deeply ingrained and somewhat dysfunctional habits. As my colleague Jon Freeman has written elsewhere:

‘Hands up who can honestly say they are not addicted to a western consumer lifestyle.’

The story that’s been driving us which we’ve been living has been one of exponential growth; anything based on any % of growth per year is exponential (even 1%) over time. We only have to look to nature to realise constant exponential growth is not a sustainable model for living on a planet that has finite resources and is in fact a delicately balanced system of interlocking forces. Luckily science has made available to us in the last decade or so the ability to see into nature at both the micro and the interstellar levels.

Biomimicry is the study of nature for solutions to our problems: from the Greek ‘bios’-life and ‘mimesis’-imitation.

• Biomimicry takes inspiration from natures models for example a solar cell inspired by a leaf

• Biomimicry refers to nature as a ‘measure’ in the sense of using an ecological standard to judge the ‘rightness’ of human innovations.

• Biomimicry introduces an new era based on what we can learn from nature as opposed to what we can extract from Her

“After 3.8 billion years of evolution, nature has learned: what works; what is appropriate; what lasts.”

Janine Benyus

If we really take on board Clare Graves’ thesis that human kind is preparing for a momentous leap which he described in his 1974 article in the Futurist, then we recognise that in solving the problems of one level of existence we create the problems at the next until we are faced with many of the conditions we are witnessing and living through today: that is, in solving our problems of existence to the level that we have, we have created the existential problems that cause our ability to continue to survive on this planet to be in question. Graves was clear that the first six levels of existence manifested in a world of abundance, where as ‘second tier’ life conditions are characterised by a world of scarcity.

And so we witness several ‘disconnects in demographics’ as we approach the limits of our systems and experience turbulence on several fronts:

• We have more debt than the world has ever seen compared to our productive capacity

• We have an aging infrastructure that will need fixing to cope with the demands of growing and (in the West) aging populations

• We are unprepared for a world of ever increasing energy prices

• The US currently has a 1.6 trillion fiscal deficit

• In the UK one person goes bankrupt every 50 seconds

There are many more conditions I could list but the point i am illustrating is: all of these conditions require vast resources in a narrow window of time: the question becomes: what are we going to prioritise?

Everything we’ve been doing has been geared around the belief that we can grow exponentially forever. Biomimics ask the question:

What would nature do here?

Biomimicry teaches us to imitate life itself because life creates the conditions conducive to life.

Benyus reminds us that we’ve been travelling in the opposite direction from our ancient ancestors who lived in harmony with nature, driven to gain our ‘independence’ from nature since the Agricultural Revolution which gave us freedom from the necessity of hunting and gathering as we learned to grow and stock our own cupboards. This journey then accelerated with the Scientific Revolution as we learned to ‘Torture nature for her secrets’ (Francis Bacon) followed by the Industrial Revolution where the age of the machine replaced muscle. Finally we culminated our frenzy of breaking free from earthly limitation with the Petrochemical and Genetic Engineering Revolutions. And we now consider we are autonomous in our ability to ‘arrange the genetic alphabet to our liking’ and manufacture what we need.

However, like all life forms on this planet we are subject to the laws of nature:

“The most irrevocable of these laws says that a species cannot occupy a niche that appropriates all the resources – there has to be some sharing.”

The outcome or result of continuing to ignore this law means that the species ends up destroying it’s community in order to support it’s own expansion.

However there is hope if we look to nature as model and mentor. Chaos and Complexity are the new sciences of our times and they are telling us that an unstable system is ripe for change. This is the power of tapping our limits. But we have to recognise and act on the information that is being fed back to us by the system we are a part of. If we can admit these limits and let go of our own human cleverness, be still in the face of nature in order to witness her miracles and lessons; if we can allow nature to be our guide and mentor and develop our will to change our unsustainable habits, then hitting the limits of the various interrelated and interlocking systems could be the best thing that ever happened to us yet.

Here are some of Nature’s Laws, Strategies and Principles that we could benefit from, if we can find ways to adopt them or at least allow them to inform our approach to life and living:

• Nature runs on sunlight

• Nature uses only the energy it needs

• Nature fits form to function

• Nature recycles everything: somebody’s waste is someone else’s food

• Nature rewards cooperation

• Nature banks on diversity

• Nature demands local expertise

• Nature curbs excesses from within

• Nature taps the power of limits

• Life in Nature competes within a collaborative framework

• Nature builds from the bottom up

• Nature uses simple building blocks: 96% of life on this planet is made up of Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Sulphur atoms

• Nature optimises rather than maximises: it devises systems that can adapt to face unknown situations

• Optimum Resilience is created with the right mix of flexibility and efficiency

• Nature’s systems are informed by feedback loops

• Nature engages in lots of experimentation: life creates success models through making mistakes

By

Rachel Castagne

www.rachelcastagne.com

At the same time, I want to take Gary’s questions wider, and perhaps I am using the term “culture” in a different sense, but in my mind at least it all hangs together. Let’s see if I can describe my version of the map.
This week has seen an upheaval in the political culture – possibly the third major shift in the last three years. The power structures are imploding and there has been massive loss of face, first for the financial power-holders through the banking crisis, secondly for the political power-holders in the expenses scandal and now for the power elite of the Third Estate. Murdoch is still there, but a veil has been removed. Ultimately the problem at the News of the World, and indeed in the whole of News Corporation, was and remains a cultural problem. The paper is closed but the cover-up remains. All of these issues are cultural issues. So where does the culture come from?

I frequently write about Money. The bottom line of my “Future Money” book is that the change we are still seeking cannot come merely from alterations in the money systems. The systems we have built reflect our thinking. All of us live with our own bits of fear, greed and desire for power. We participated collectively in the desire for “stuff” that led to credit (debt) as a way of life. And collectively we bought the “free lunch” notion of “making money” through property value inflation. The system reflects those emotions and those first-tier Values. For sure there is a powerful elite which is doing very well at the expense of the whole, but they are not so different from the rest of us.

You could see this as a four-quadrant viewpoint. Out of our individual inner experience arise collective thought forms in the culture, creating functional processes and an entire socio-political fabric. Any change will need to happen in the whole. Thinking that we only need to fix the lower right entirely misses the integral point. Right now the fear is rising and announcing 18% rises in fuel bills won’t help. But although you wouldn’t want to be old, frail and poor next winter, most of the UK is not truly at risk of not surviving physically. The threat people are facing is to their expectations, vastly different than those of my youth. When I went camping in France at the age of 10, I was the first in my school to do so. Hardly any houses had central heating and there were two TV channels. There is so much that we now consider “normal”. A historian once said that it is an effort of imagination to realise that when Napoleon entered a room, he didn’t reach for the light switch. I feel that way about my own past. Ultimately though, it was just as possible to be happy in the 1960’s as it is now. The fear that is arising now is in relation to raised expectations. It is fear of loss, which may feel like survival, but isn’t.

So when I think about a cultural shift, and seek an integral view of the world, I see a multi-faceted picture. Those of us who might consider attending the Midsummer event are the explorers of the leading edge in inner development. Our wish to see an integral culture does indeed lead us to explore Yellow and Turquoise, and there is nothing wrong with that. If we believe in the holistic space where all thoughts are creative and where we individually and collectively affect the field of consciousness then we may be doing humankind a service. These constellations do have an impact, and having spent almost forty years exploring this territory I greatly value this pioneering work. I also note in passing that the map is definitely not the territory, since only since encountering SD and Integral have I even known that maps were possible.

Nevertheless, I don’t see this individual exploration of the 2nd tier world as all of the coming together that is needed. Gary rightly observes that the numbers of integral thinkers is very small. The tectonic plates of our UK Values systems are re-positioning themselves, but not in Yellow. This is not where the majority live. Green Values have been visibly present for a century or two. Politically the Marxists and Fabians were once our forebears at the leading edge. Even so, during these centuries the centre of gravity has been gradually moving through Blue into and through Orange. Now the life conditions of excess and toxic Orange are pushing a greater shift towards Green. This is not to contradict Wilber’s view that 1968 displays a tipping point. But while that Green wave has rippled through many aspects of our culture for the last 40 years it’s only a part of the colour stack, and just as well, because we need to hang on (for example) to some healthy Blue.

So I see two things happening at the same time. The Midsummer Renaissance is a coming together of explorers at the leading edge of a culture that is about ideas, art and inner experience. That leading edge contains some Green aspirations relating to our exploration of what it means to be human blending through an embracing of integral and complex worldviews (Yellow) and shading into exploration of our holistic spirituality (Turquoise). I see that description as a view of my own exploration, and since it is non-linear don’t mean to imply arrival anywhere. Broadly, we have been developing the understanding of Graves’ momentous leap to 2nd tier.

If that is the wave of our own culture and its inner reality, I see a second wave of culture which represents the mass of the UK population. Their journey is through the Orange collapse into Green. The earthquake-like cracks in the crust of power systems represent the waning phase of systematized Orange. So I think that what I am describing here is the idea that when we look at the AQAL, the leading edge of human change is visible first in the interior and then some time later in the exterior. Maybe that should have been obvious to me, but it wasn’t.

As a result, I am interested in a second level of coming together, and if the Midsummer leading edge is an additional step in the formation of our holistic tribe, and a further move from the individualistic Yellow exploration into the collective Turquoise dance then that’s great. But Yellow is also about our ability to take our inner integration and assist the lagging exterior with its journey. In my view there is a coming together that we have yet to achieve, which represents our ability to support the world through a difficult transition. For me that will be a sign of our maturity, and of our ability to take these wonderful maps and brilliant theories and apply them. Copernicus and Galileo changed the way that we saw the Earth’s relationship to the cosmos, but it was John Harrison’s clock which enabled that knowledge to be used fully in navigation and so reduced the huge losses of ships at sea.

In closing, Gary says “My biggest fear is that we spent so long on the map that when we pull it back and look at the territory it is too late to help”. Perhaps this is another way of saying the same thing that I am. The turbulence is there already. Even an incomplete map is better than none. Who is going to help navigate?

Or, as Don Beck would say, “no more prizes for forecasting the rain, only for building the Ark”.
Jon

I had supported this campaign, but I feel obliged to replace the standard MP e-mail that I was offered.  Why, because the e-mail contained lots of assumptions about motivation – that the government was selling our forests to those who would exploit them, destroy them and deprive the owners – we, the people – of their use.

Let there be no doubt of my view – this plan needed to be withdrawn.  It was poorly presented, had not been thought through and lacked (albeit that the consultation stage was still to come) any of the safeguards that were needed.  This is why I wrote to my MP.

At the same time it was apparent to me that the government was not completely misguided.   If you live near a forest – and I am a few hundred yards from one such – you may be aware that often maintenance and management are sporadic, that the provision of recreational facilities is highly variable and that there is no mechanism for accountability to local communities for the way that our resources are managed or used.   That is to say, the current system doesn’t work, and in my view the government were quite right to propose change.

Now, fresh on the heels of this campaign success, the organisation has canvassed its members for what the next priority should be and has proudly announced its intention to “save the NHS”.   So that’s all right then.  Everything will be rosy from now on. 

I am seeing some severe limitations to this e-democracy.  So what have these tens of thousands of people actually agreed to?   Do they all have the same view of what it means to “save the NHS”?  Is there a shared vision of what the outcome is intended to be?   I doubt it.

So – hands up who thinks that the NHS is perfectly alright as it is, and needs nothing done to improve it?  Well, this is all in my imagination, but I am not seeing any hands going up.  Most specifically I am not seeing them from anyone who works in the NHS.  (Feel free to challenge this in the comments facility).  Most of us can list the well-known concerns, among them:-

1. Those who work in it are under permanent high stress
2. Resources are poorly managed and procurement is uncoordinated
3. The system is over-bureaucratised, with too many managers
4. The system suffers from high internal conflict and poor working relationships between managers, consultants and multiple other functions
5. Governance processes (NHS Trusts) are inconsistent and not necessarily adequate
6. The system overall results in postcode lotteries and other inconsistencies of care
7. Societal expectations are continually growing, in the face of financial constraints and we are simply unable to afford what we are asking for.

In an earlier blog I wrote of my experience in an emergency unit dealing with people who were having heart-related scares, and was full of praise for both the quality of care and the way in which  it was delivered.  In writing as I do here, I am fully aware that there is a great deal at stake.  Nevertheless, the problems exist and must be dealt with.

Those who share a Spiral Dynamics lens will hopefully recognise the excess Blue structure build-up that has become arthritic and immobile.  You will see Orange system issues; externally the tensions around resources and expectations, internally the status and demands of consultants (possibly with Red thrown in.   You will know or be able to imagine the Values system conflicts between Green-oriented care impulses and Blue or Blue-Orange process.    And every time the National Institute for Clinical Excellence makes a decision about the cost-effectiveness of a new treatment you will see the orchestrated response from the Orange pharmaceutical lobby manipulating the media to exploit every individual case of perceived hardship.  Under all of this, you may also see a societal incapability to deal with the nature of life, that it includes pain, and death, and loss.  You might see that as a Purple failure, as well as a spiritual issue.   I do.

In the face of all this, a knee-jerk, Green-politics or left-wing knee-jerk response is emphatically not what we need.   Already there are calls for the Health Secretary to resign over the plan for GP commissioning.  No doubt there is good reason to be concerned about the preparedness for this shift.  But where is the balance?  There is legitimate concern around the need for really considered planning, the requirement for exceptionally good change management processes, and the need to address the practical concerns of such a huge change.    There is likewise an obvious risk that inertia and resistance will conspire to paralyse any forward movement.   Given the slightest glimpse of an escape route, self-interest and apathy will keep things just as the always have been.

So What Should Yellow DO?  What’s the second-tier response to this complexity?  In my view the first answer is that structures have to loosen and flexibility has to be introduced.  Command and control has to give ground to local accountability and responsiveness.  There must be a new blend of central vision and nationwide planning with devolved and accountable, customer-centred provision.   It may also be necessary for individuals in this society to recognise that we have to take more responsibility for our own well-being.   Green tends to see everyone who is obese, alcoholic, addicted to smoking, lacking in exercise as a victim, and there may be some issues around our processed food and advertised lifestyle choices which need addressing.  This is not just for governments to solve.   Society is us.  The lack of any relationship between our behaviour and our costs to society may also be part of the problem.

So when you are faced with a call to petition your MP with a call to “save the NHS” – please consider just what it is that we need to ask for.  There is a core ethic of “free to all at the point of delivery” that we abandon at our peril.   But let’s look more carefully at what that means, and at what is the best way to bring it about.

Jon

I sit here having planned for this blog to be about multiple intelligences.    I have a swollen black eye with two small cuts, having failed to control the release of a bungee chord that was tying up a bundle of timber in my car.  Blame it on cold fingers as I might, I am very aware that physical intelligence is foundational and feeling physically stupid, actually.

My IQ (Cognitive ability) managed the situation well, fortunately.  I went straight into the house, getting the icepack from the freezer, taking some homeopathic aconite and arnica, and even managing to sit down and give myself some Reiki until Juliana was available to administer more expert levels of energy healing.   The swelling has gone down.

As for Emotional  Intelligence, I guess I give myself half marks, maybe 60%.   I have maintained some perspective and have not made a drama out of the event.   I am at least partly aware of my internal state, breathing deeply, letting the aftershock of adrenaline rush work through.  On the minus side I am beating myself up a little (see para. 1).  Possibly I should still be resting.  I can tell that Juliana thinks so, but I am behind schedule.  So here I am, blogging.  Some habits die harder than others.

But what I really want to talk about is Spiritual Intelligence.    I didn’t even know there was such a thing until a couple of years ago, when I became aware of the work being done by Cindy Wigglesworth (www.deepchange.com).   At first the term seemed like a self-contradiction; surely spirituality is not about thinking, so did intelligence belong there, I wondered?  Now I am convinced.

One of the angles that Cindy starts from is to ask what it is that marks out those people who we would identify as great spiritual leaders?   You will have your own no doubt, and not all will be well known in the way typical first-picks like Gandhi, Nelson Mandela or the Dali Lama would be.  But on closer examination, most of us would have a clear intuitive sense of the characteristics such leaders possess.  Typically the list would include compassion, humility, integrity, calmness, courage, acceptance, wisdom.  And then she asks whether such qualities would be beneficial in more mundane areas of leadership.  Would they be valuable in managers and CEO’s?  It’s hard to say “no” to that.

Cindy’s definition of Spiritual Intelligence is “the ability to behave with wisdom and compassion, while maintaining inner and outer peace (equanimity) regardless of the situation”.   And since she also presents an image of love as being a bird with two wings these being wisdom and compassion – as above the definition of SQ boils down to the capacity to bring love and peace.  

Now by my way of thinking that is a pretty good start, and something to aspire to.   So I was much taken by Cindy’s perception that SQ is something that can we can be helped with and that she has developed an assessment methodology which allows us to evaluate 21 separate skills, mapped to the four quadrants of an Integral viewpoint, and that this assessment has academically validated.  The perspectives are faith-neutral, and identify competencies in the areas of self-awareness (Q1) universal awareness (Q2), self-mastery (Q3) and in Q4, social mastery and spiritual presence. 

When I discovered that as well as assessing these 21 skills, it is possible to coach people in their self-development along each of these paths, I signed up to train in the methodology.   That is over 18 months ago, during which my esteem for the work has only increased.  And the latest stage in this journey is that we are in the process of launching a UK “branch” of Deep Change, and supporting its outreach into Europe.

It is obvious that SQ is somewhat leading-edge when even emotional intelligence is not that well-known, and even less well-understood.  Howard Gardner’s work on multiple intelligences dates back almost three decades (1983) and Daniel Goleman’s book on emotional intelligence to 1995.  Goleman wasn’t the first in the field, but is the one who made it known.   But while SQ is newer, it blends very well with EQ – can even be thought of as an “advanced EQ” for those who prefer to steer clear of the S-word.  The deepchange.com website gives a lot more information on how all of this comes together.  Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee’s recent book “Resonant Leadership” also takes people across the threshold between IQ and SQ, even if they don’t call it that.   It’s a message whose time has come.

If any of this even slightly catches your interest, I encourage you to hear more listening to Cindy’s free teleseminar from March 16^th.     This talk is in preparation for her visit to Europe in May, when she will be talking in Amsterdam and Berlin, prior to a talk and the London Integral Circle on May 25^th and a full training for coaches over the bank holiday weekend, May 27-30^th.

And do sign up for the DeepChange newsletter so that we can keep you in touch with developments.

Jon

Here is the access information for the teleseminar recording

http://InstantTeleseminar.com/?eventid=17686083 

Join the Deep Change newsletter

Am I a good Man?  Am I honourable, possessed of integrity?  Can I be trusted?   By everyone?   What would I have to do to be trusted by everyone?  What would I have to do to be trusted by women?

There is a joke about a Scotsman who had been found to possess a still and was before the judge charged with illicit whisky production.  He pleaded innocence because it was not being used, so when the prosecutor said accusingly “but you have the apparatus”, asked for the second offence of rape to be taken into consideration.

All men are rapists.  We all have the apparatus.  We all have the mammalian biological program for indiscriminate procreation.   In varying degrees, all heterosexual men are armed and dangerous.  Most have unfulfilled needs for love and affection too, and all women have the potential to fulfil needs that were not met in infancy by their mothers.  And bearing in mind that rape is a crime principally about power not desire, all men may use sex for multiple motives, including anger and revenge.

And what of women?  What is the female program?  Here I rely on observation not inner knowledge and what I observe includes the corresponding desire to find missing childhood affection, the failed father figure, to express anger through offering and refusing, to gain power through seduction, to meet unconscious needs through manipulation of sexual desire, to gain power by proxy and association.   All women have the apparatus too.   When the tits are flashed or the knickers drop, a man’s intelligence heads due South at light-speed.  When she has them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow

Mankind has lived through all history in this tension; men abusing women and women using men.  And because none of us were to be trusted, Blue invented rules to govern our sexual impulses.  The apostle Paul got exercised over the sin of fornication and legitimized it only within marriage, and even then only as long as you promise not to enjoy it, and only to do it for procreation.  Red uses it for Power, Orange for Status, and Green for bonding.  (Just for completeness I speak throughout of the heterosexual realm, and while I have no other experience, believe all the principles here generalize, but are less clearly defined by cultural programs.)

On such foundations we have built relationships.   Over the top of our unconscious and primitive natures we have overlaid love, something which we experience, but rarely understand.  In face of the many kinds of love, we invest one of them with complete primacy.  I must have a soul-mate, someone who will meet all my needs, someone who will love me unconditionally forever, someone who will make sure that I am never insecure again.  Never. 

It only takes a miniscule amount of honesty to recognise that we invest a great deal of our security in our relationships.  Perhaps we can own up to the fact that our love is conditional.  “If you love me you will want to have sex with me whenever I want it.  You will be turned on by the same things I am.  You will want to spend all your time with me – to walk by the sea rather than watch rugby.  You will bring me flowers, cook my meals, iron my shirts.  But most of all, you will not feel sexual love for anyone else, will not even look at another man or woman, still less act upon your desire.  If you do I will feel threatened and will have the right to accuse you of betrayal.  My fear that you will leave me will have nothing to do with my own insecurities, my own inability to be whole unto myself.  I will expect you to feel guilt for what you have done.  I will expect society to see me as the victim.  I will not be required to examine my own failures to commit, to give of myself, to be tolerant, open, honest.   The third party will by definition be either a seducer or a victim of abuse.  There is no possibility of innocence, and the idea that you, or I or anyone else might deeply love more than one person, and that a sexual expression of that love might be legitimate.”

One characteristic of the transition to second tier existence is that we move away from motivation that is rooted in fear, that we release the desire for power and control, that we take out the conditionality which supports strategic manipulation, that we find an openness and honesty and human care that replaces and transcends these limited ways of being.  All of this includes greater awareness of the relationship between sex and spirituality.  The depictions of angels don’t show genitals.  We have the apparatus.

I have experienced betrayal – for the sake of my current partner I emphasise not by her.  There were two sides to that story.  Yes, there was abuse, but I also saw my own weaknesses in these areas – the ways in which I was not giving, was expecting someone else to fill the bucket with a hole in it.   I have been monogamous for twenty years and don’t know if that will ever change.  But I also know what I have felt, and that my choices are not fully free.  They are conditioned by first-tier circumstances and first-tier ways of being – both mine and others.

Even so, I believe that it is time that those of us who aspire to integral perspectives, to more enlightened ways of being and to dealing with our shadow selves should stop wallowing in the tacky stuff.  It is time to end the prurience which draws our interest towards the peccadilloes of others.  It is time for us to stop looking for perpetrators and victims.  It is time to question the judgements that we make about other’s behaviours.  It is time to look at ourselves, at our own fears of what might happen, to look at what it is about our own disempowerment that makes us believe that power is being abused by someone else.  We need to acknowledge our own unconscious tendencies to seduce, to manipulate, to use our sexuality in ways that are not wholesome.  And we should above all let go of the idea that there is some perfect state, that is occupied by a perfect man in whom we can invest our own expectations, and have the gratification of disappointment and judgementalism.

It’s time that we clean up our act around sex.   Our current safe boundaries are tomorrow’s frontiers.

Jon

Or don’t, this is a blog, not a meditation.

Take a deep breath in and notice how it feels.

Allow a deep breath out and notice how it feels.

Which did you prefer?  Breathing in or breathing out?  Whichever you prefer, do that one on its own.

And hold it.

While you are holding it, you can read today’s message which is about how our thinking tends towards polarisation.  What does this do for us?   How does it affect our ability to deal with complexity?

How’s your breath doing?

It is natural for the human mind to look at things in terms of distinctions.   Up-down, left right, hot-cold, we have an inbuilt tendency to view life through these many lenses. A rather under-rated psychologist called George Kelly built a significant theory of personality by looking at the constructs people use for these assessments.   It is a pity that he and Clare Graves didn’t work together:  They would have made a powerful pairing.   Values systems based on the constructs we hold, Safe /Unsafe, Powerful / Powerless and so on. 

Are you still holding your breath, or has your body taken over.   Your body has its own polarities.   Dead / Alive is one.  Enough / Not enough Oxygen or toxic / viable CO2 are others.  Your body knows a little about polarity management and has many mechanisms for water balance, salt balance, temperature regulation in order to preserve the homeostasis that sustainable life requires.  

So hopefully by now you are breathing according to your body’s normal preferences.  I take no responsibility for the consequences from now on.   The breathing cycle manages our oxygen / CO2 polarity balances.   It automatically registers when more is needed.    It preserves life.  Not that a polarity is not an issue.  It is not a problem to be solved. Like breathing, it is not avoidable.  Polarities are interdependent positive opposites that are both strengths or values needed over time.

Now contrast this with the way that humans often think about choices.  What happens very often is that we are drawn to one pole at the expense of the other.  When our life conditions indicate that we need to take additional personal power and direction in our lives, our Red responses are activated.  Our concern about tradition may drop away.  We may be intolerant of rules.  We need something and we need it now.  My friend who at the age of 66 dived into the Atlantic to rescue a father and child from drowning activated heroic Red, against common sense and almost at the cost of his own life.  He received a Presidential Commendation, but not a Health and Safety award!

At any particular time, we may need to operate at one pole or the other.  Over a span of time, our responses to life have to change.   The same friend didn’t accumulate driving penalties and had no car wrecks.  Healthy Blue is in place.  The Spiral is characterised by oscillations between poles and acts to create balances that sustain individual and social health.  The spiral illustrates a process by which multiple polarities are managed.  

As we engage with the transition to Second Tier existence, polarity management moves more and more to centre stage.  In first-tier existence we can take up a fixed position, say in our allegiance to a core Blue religious fundamentalism and find that to be an effective life strategy.   Orange can be similarly viable, and continues to be so for a large number of people.  Much of the discourse in politics (socialist vs libertarian) or in business management (stability vs entrepreneurial risk) takes place along such polarities.   Many business are no longer in existence because they clung too hard to the safe and stable pole.   Others have failed because they were unwilling to put the stable foundations in place. 

Whatever the arena, the speed of change and the requirement to balance a wide range of societal or business forces demands flexibility and responsiveness.  Thus the ability to see polarities not as an “either-or” to be decided upon, but as a “both-and” to be managed will be critical to our future success.  The image that the brilliant Cindy Wigglesworth uses for our positioning, is to see ourselves standing on the pivot of the see-saw, shifting our weight one side or the other in order to maintain equilibrium.  Suzanne Cook-Greuter is using this concept to help verticality in personal development and Cindy sees it equally as a tool for recognising and embracing complexity.

So in order to function in second tier we will need to get more and more skilled at holding multiple variables and dynamics in an operational tension within our viewpoints, and help others to develop the capacity to see multiple “truths” that are sensitive and dynamically responsive to the context and life conditions.  This skill will be a key signifier in the development of emotional and spiritual intelligences.  I will be talking more about Cindy Wigglesworth and Spiritual Intelligence (SQ) in the coming weeks.

By way of closing, I should acknowledge Cindy’s inspiration in the message of this blog, and give recognition to work of Barry Johnson, author of “Polarity Management” which provides the original basis for the concept.   

Still breathing?

Jon

We are all familiar with the material world, probably too familiar.  That is how our lives are on a day by day basis – eating sleeping, keeping warm in a world of cars and i-gadgets.  Through the appropriate practices, mind-bending substances, or even spontaneously it is possible for us to enter into a realm of awareness where we are less conscious of the material and more aware of the oneness and of our interconnectedness with all things. 

For a century now, our collective understanding has been informed by quantum physics.  This rose out of a background in the Orange vMeme and its scientific investigation of material reality.  That view had developed the understanding of matter – Newtonian mechanics, the motions of the planets, chemical reactions and organic biology.  

The idea that atoms were the smallest possible pieces of matter and that each element was unique had given way to the knowledge that whether hydrogen gas or heavy-metal mercury, all atoms were made from smaller component like electrons and neutrons.   The more physics investigated this realm the more confused it became.  Eventually it developed the understanding that matter and energy were ultimately interchangeable.  All fundamental particles could also be viewed as waves of energy, a relationship encapsulated in Einstein’s E=MC² equation.  There is a world of paradox and uncertainty where both the particle and the wave are descriptions of a single reality.  The difference between one “particle” and another resides in the properties which the energy / wave is exhibiting.  It is a matter of observation and description.

This realm is incomprehensible to most of us in any detail.  Even quantum genius Richard Feynmann said that they he couldn’t explain it, and you’ll probably be relieved if I don’t try.   But the quantum picture has a crucial feature that I want to explore.  The question of duality arises from our material world. That which is material has established its separateness.  It is in some sense distinct, and visibly separated from a cosmic one-ness. What we struggle with as humans is the fact that our consciousness – whatever that may be – has the capacity to be sometimes living in the awareness of our materiality, and at other times to transcend that awareness, operating in the “field”, the “oneness” the space between thoughts.

In my view, the conversation about matter and energy, about dual and non-dual states of awareness has missed the most important and fundamental aspect of all.   If the difference between one “thing” and another resides in its description, if the quantum probability wave only collapses into something “known” when it is observed, then that difference between things consists of the information that the universe holds about them.  Underneath matter and energy is consciousness.  That is what holds it together, and that is also what separates it into its components.

As humans, our big challenge with such a reality is that we are incarnated.  My survival in this form depends deeply on knowing that I am here and the bus is there, and on the intention to maintain separation when crossing the road.  It will hurt me to be fully non-dual with the bus.  So much of our biology and experience is geared to sustaining our materiality.  It sits beneath the Beige survival Vmeme, fundamental to our existence.

In the face of this it is very hard to grasp, and comes as a shock to consider that beyond the realm where all of creation is energy lies a deeper truth.  The only reason why existence consists of more than an undifferentiated energy “soup” is that both energy and matter are governed by information.   The difference between an electron and a proton is a piece of information that the universe holds about the nature of electrons and protons.  The difference between a Hydrogen atom and a Mercury atom is that the universe has established a pattern of information in which normal Hydrogen atoms “have” one proton and one electron, whereas a Mercury atom has 80 of each.  The difference between one Mercury atom and another is the information about where that object (or wave of energy) is at any time.

So the deeper truth is that we are neither dual nor non-dual.  Or that we are both, but generally not at the same time.  The difference between these perceptions rests in where we place our awareness.  Are we connected with the information about our physical sense-data and our view of our surroundings? Or are we connected with the information about the fundamental and mystical wholeness of that huge field of energy and the information which describes it, and describes us?  And in that big connection, are we recognising that some of the wholeness is in the information that the universe holds, and that some of it is in the information that we are examining in our personal, local information store – our individual consciousness?

Here you may begin to wonder about the boundaries.  What part of the information is “in me”?   And what part of it is not?   Or you may recognise that this question opens up the different definitions of God – the personal God, 2^nd-person God or the all-knowing all seeing, transcendent God-in everything.  And this is where it is essential to avoid the trap set by both our material nature, by the conventional scientific viewpoint or even by the integral distinctions.  We see ourselves as separate, and most people will stay that way unless they make an effort through spiritual practice to experience something else.   Out attempts to believe anything else are challenged by conventional science, which doesn’t see anything other than the material realm.  It cannot acknowledge any connection between you and the universe except that which it can measure – light from the stars, chemicals you breathe.  The information is not detectable.  Consciousness is unrecognised except as a psychological experience.

Twenty-five years ago I had an undeniable experience through visualisation of detecting a fact about another person miles away – a knowing  that could not have been anything other than intuitively received.  The science in which I had been trained said that this was not possible.  In effect I had shown in practice both that the information exists and that the boundaries are porous between what “I” know and what is known in the wider universe.  You may well be experienced in exploring these porous boundaries.  For me this was entirely new.  I needed a scientific explanation, one which meshed the already-known with the hitherto-excluded.  The search finally led after twenty years to writing a book which explains the world to my satisfaction (and I was not easily pleased). 

The view that it presents is justified from a number of scientific perspectives.  It understands biology as well as physics, and draws a new perspective on genetics and evolution.  It also rests in practical experience in alternative healing, explains why homeopathy works, draws from subjective commonalities in the descriptions of shamanistic (non-ordinary) reality and from some philosophical viewpoints on how we construct our individual and collective reality.   

What I have been laying out here is the view that everything which exists is governed by a vast amount of information. Every particle in the universe embodies a piece of what the universe “knows” about itself. Every part of creation operates in a way that is defined by the rules that the universe has constructed for its operation over a 14 billion year timespan. Those rules are part of the information field, that governs how amino acids form, or how genetic replication takes place.  The collective information includes the things that we know about ourselves, but also those things that we are intuitively aware of through our relationship with the field. The Values systems of SD are part of that field of information too, and subject to change according to the principles which have applied at every stage of creation, namely what works in what conditions so as to become stable. 

Widespread among human habits is the perception that we are human beings having a spiritual (consciousness) experience.  We need to turn that perception on its head.  We are beings of consciousness, living in a realm of information and having a material experience – not just a human one, but an experience of participating in the entirety of material creation.   The universe is continually generating fresh knowledge of itself, creating new structure and new relationships.  So too are we – embedded in it, and it embedded in us.   

I have a profound desire for the whole world to begin seeing itself differently.   I want us to end the habit of seeing ourselves through material eyes against the background of a material world so that we know ourselves afresh as beings of creative, world-forming  information.  This is way beyond the fluffy new-age notion of “we are all energy”.   For me, this is where Integral Consciousness truly lies, in recognising how the interior and the exterior realities connect, both individually and collectively.  All four quadrants are aspects of the universal “mind” – choices about our perspective, and which parts of the information we are engaging with.   Knowing that, we have more chance of aligning ourselves with the world and with each other.  It is the beginning of a new level of empowerment and responsibility for our existence.  

Jon

 God’s Ecology:  A science of the Spiritual Habitat is available from www.spiralworld.net.

Do I need to justify that last statement?   I suspect that within months that question will not apply.  At the risk of making myself a hostage to fortune, I believe that the stock market recovery reached its peak last April.  It dropped by 18% over the following two months.  The recovery since then of the majority of that drop may well be its last hurrah.   The only reason it sustains is because both US and UK governments promise to print more money (known as quantitative easing) if it does not.  

Should you care?   Only if you own a house, or might want to.  Only if you have a pension plan.   Oh yes, and only if you are concerned about human survival, about sustainability, about peace.   The way that we think about money, and the systems that we live are fundamentally influencing our lives and our prospects.

It should not surprise anyone who knows SDi or Integral thinking, that our attitudes to money have reflected our Values systems shifts over time.  For Purple, money (where it exists at all) typically facilitated dowry systems and other social relationships.  Red hoards money and shows it off in conspicuous displays power and wealth.   For Blue, prosperity may be a reward for personal diligence and industry, except for those who turn their backs on it and make poverty a part of their spiritual discipline.  Blue also introduces written accounts, contracts and commercial laws.

The last two centuries have witnessed the rise of Orange Values.  As we exploited our scientific inventiveness, first with productive machinery and railroads, then with telegraphy, mass road and air transport and domestic technology, finally with mass communications and the digital economies, we shared in a collective triumph over the material world.   The culture came to value possessions.  He who dies with the most toys wins.

For over a century there has been recognition that materialism could go too far, bringing more human-centred Green responses, including pensions systems, unemployment benefit and healthcare.  But only more recently have we fully recognised that our dominance over the material world was an illusion, that prices have been paid not only in human happiness but also in ecological damage and conflict, and finally in a systematic weakness that was self-destructive.  Orange strategy outsmarted Blue regulation and created paper investments whose roots were not in real physical assets but in mathematical fantasies.  

Most of us have been caught in the fantasy world and still are.   But growing money has not worked.   The world today has an annual Gross Product  of $50 trillion.   World debts are hard to pin down, since they fluctuate with currencies, national economies and property values, but a conservative estimate would be $500 trillion.  

So imagine that situation as a description of your own personal or domestic economy.  Imagine an annual income £50K alongside mortgage, loan and credit card debt of £500K.   When it will take all of your income for ten years just to pay your debts, the accurate description is “insolvent”, unable ever to pay creditors, and leads to bankruptcy.

The government is making a huge song and dance about the need to balance the UK budget and I am writing as the spending review is receiving its verdict in the papers.   Amidst the varying political perspectives – I defy anyone to get clear guidance on whether the middle-class or the poor will suffer most – sits one widely shared perception. This is a gamble.  Sticking my neck out again, I don’t believe that it is.   We are in trouble either way;   It is only the trajectory of our fall that varies.   The world has manufactured money and expanded debt, and we each have our share.   One way or another, the rebalancing has to come.  

The picture I am attempting to build describes the remapping of Values and priorities as the Western world gets to grips with the pressures which will either drive our “momentous leap” into second tier Values, or see us fall over that hurdle.  Clare Graves offered no guaranteed outcomes, describing three possible scenarios.  The first is failure and catastrophic regression, possibly as far as pre-industrial conditions.  The second is that we become stuck in the Red-Blue-Orange bands as society attempts to control the chaos using old thinking.  Only the third, in which we emerge into the Yellow sunshine was enticing.  Here said Graves, man “becomes truly a co-operative individual and ceases being a competitive one”.   Here mankind truly sees its interdependence and “uses the knowledge gained through his first-ladder trek in efforts to put his world together again, systematically”.

So that’s our challenge.   And in order to accomplish it, we will need to understand our money systems and our relationship with them in as much depth as we can.

If you listen to economic news you may recently have heard the Brazilian finance minster describe a global currency war, as countries devalue their currencies to drive export competitiveness.  Behind this, conscious or unconscious, is the recognition that the value of our money is not based on anything real.   The fight to survive is driving the value of money down.  When governments print money, they devalue the currency.   

Have you ever put something onto eBay that no-one wanted to buy?   I have.  That is when you discover something fundamental about the value of goods and the value of money.  If you own a house, your equity and your mortgage are based on a perceived value.   If the perception changes (i.e. no-one wants to buy your house) its financial value disappears.   As a shelter you may value it, but its money value has gone.   Likewise, if all the money in pockets and bank accounts vanishes tomorrow, the world will be left physically unchanged.   

In recent decades we have experienced material growth.  There is huge manufacturing capacity and we are supporting more people on the earth than we ever have.   That’s the good news.  But the bad news is that we grew paper money much faster, issuing massive debts based on a fantasy about the inevitability that growth would never stop.  The reason that a stock market slide is inevitable (see Part 1) is that our money is not worth what it was supposed to be worth and those debts cannot be repaid.  The perceptual bubble has burst.    Some people have their heads in the sand and refuse to recognise this.    But the evidence suggests that many major investors are pulling out their investments in the productive economy.   The amount of money lodged in the US Federal Reserve at very low interest returns has leapt in the past year from its historically steady $200 billion, to $1200 billion.   Others are trying to make money for as long as they can from a broken system, either cynically or out of the desperation that they don’t know what else they can do, and they will call for more money to be injected into the system by governments in order to postpone the inevitable.   We may all be addicts who will fight with the determination of the alcoholic whose gin bottle is being taken.    

We are dealing here with a very complex system.   It is globally interlocked, requires an ongoing balance between Blue Order, Orange material success and a Green social care which is deliverable in its current form only if there is Orange surplus to pay for it.   It also requires a balance between stakeholders including not only multiple countries and human beings, but encompassing the planet itself, where both resource availability and environmental considerations exert pressure.

You may be wondering by now if there is a way out of this gloomy scenario.   I believe there is, but it is not only systems that must change.   Humans will have to change their Values and their behaviours.   The slide may now be inevitable, but our survival and the speed of our recovery will depend on how quickly we can accomplish such a radical realignment. 

I am not an economist.  But in my recent journeys into economic life I have discovered that few economists truly understand the world of money and that there is little agreement to be found among them.  This is because they think that money is in some way real and not perceptual.  They think that by manipulating money you can change the underlying reality.  This thinking is what drove the massive “derivatives” fantasy and it has not ended with the crash.   Those of us aspiring to functional second-tier thinking will need to become literate about how money works, not just as a lower-right system but in our upper and lower-left personal and cultural thinking.  

Despite the apparent ability of the world economy to survive, bankruptcy is already here.   By way of reminder, global indebtedness exceeds ten years of global production.   If you need another statistic, the UK national debt is now £77,000 for every inhabitant of this country.  We have mortgaged our own future and that of our children.

There are those who would paint this as a national tragedy, which it would be if most other countries were not in the same position.    Bizarrely, in recent months, the stockmarket has risen because the US Federal reserve has pumped another $0.6 trillion into the punctured tyre.  The Bank of England speaks of following suit with Quantitative Easing 2.   Madness continues.  We are faced with a very big challenge, and this posting is about the big questions that are about to be asked of each of us.  The price of failure could be high.  It isn’t easy, and I hope that you will bear with its message through to the end.  

I was a teenager when Harold Wilson’s government devalued sterling and he made the infamous statement that “the pound in your pocket has not been devalued”.  Today, we do not explicitly devalue because currencies are all floating relative to one another.  There is no fixed point to devalue against.   Instead, when countries print more money (the reality of QE2) they simply reduce the worth of the money that previously existed.  The pound in your pocket is not being devalued – not as such.   It is simply worth less today than it was yesterday, and you can count on that trend continuing.   To some extent you may expect that to continue in all countries.

Even so, nerves are frayed out there in money-land.  Ireland is being baled out again.  US investors have not responded as the Fed hoped they would and are not buying the new Treasury bonds (and are being blamed for their irrational behaviour).   If (or rather when) sentiment turns down, the whole world is likely to slide together.   At this point, the pound in your pocket does start to lose value, but your debts do not.   Internally (and this is what Wilson meant) your mortgage will still take just as many pounds to pay.  But more of your money will be required to meet other needs as inflation takes hold again.   And house prices will drop, leaving many more in negative equity.   If you have the option, now is a very good time to pay off all debts and avoid new ones.   I wish that I could.

Meanwhile, the hard-line economists will sing their traditional song about how it is public expenditure that has caused this problem.  They will tell you that the public sector is now larger than the private sector, so that too much of our income is not “productive”.  Most of service sector output cannot be exported because it needs its customers present.  We cannot earn enough to pay for our imports.  Our taxes increase, so making less incentive for entrepreneurs.  They will tell you how we should be like Hong Kong with its 15% top income tax and its lack of government activity.  Then everything would be just perfect.

Of course, there is some truth inside all that they say, but it misses the real point.  The question for each citizen of the UK concerns what kind of world we want to create for ourselves and our children.  Are you ready for the end of state-funded elder care?   Are you willing to see the communities which educate severely autistic children closed down?  Are you willing to pay directly for services which your local council currently provides?

There is little doubt that the state has become rigid, over-regulated, tick-box driven and with so many standards and accountabilities that it is hugely inefficient.  But remember that it only did so because many private sector organisations could not be trusted to maintain adequate standards of service.  Only today, the news speaks of the Care Quality Commission  (CQC) closing down sub-standard care homes, only to see them re-open under new names with the same management, and all their inspection history wiped clean?

I am abbreviating some complex issues here, and hope that readers can follow the plot, which in summary is one about balances and choices.   Please bear with me, because the goal is worth reaching.  Many of the actions which national or local government takes exist because we believe that they need to be done.  We outrage over Victoria Climbie and baby Peter.  We are distressed by pensioners found in a state of decay because no-one even knew that they had died.  Most of us also have some belief in fairness, in the financial support of those who are out of work, or long-term sick, or mentally ill.

Economists will present these choices as if they are all about the money.  Don’t be fooled by this.  Money does not measure quality of life.   As Bobby Kennedy said in 1968, “Gross National Product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.” That may sound like a romantic presentation, and perhaps there is a tinge of sentiment there.  But GNP also does not account for our care of the elderly, prevention of abuse and support of the weakest.   Some of that now looks to us like basic civilized behaviour.

It’s not about money, it’s about Values.   What is important to you?  Do you want to put the Money first?   Do you want to put Care first?   Do you think that if the taxes were lower and the economy stronger Care would occur automatically?    What will be important to the people of this country as the value of our income and our assets slide inexorably during the years to come?   Will the Nation be willing to spend one hour less in front  of the TV, in order to do something for a neighbour?   Can we cope if the iphone becomes a luxury and not a necessity?

We have made many aspects of social care into an industry, outsourced the job that Terry Pratchett describes as “Grasp for them as can’t bend, reach for them as can’t stretch and wipe for them as can’t twist”.  It now requires professionals to do these things.   People with NVQ’s under the guidance of registered organisations under the CQC with “nominated individuals” who ensure that all the boxes are ticked.

In Spiral terms, it is not only the economy which has gone over the edge.  While the economy lost its way through weak Blue failing to contain rampant Orange materialism, our care systems have seen Blue order combine with an Orange belief that everything can be measured objectively.  Anything that cannot be measured either does not exist or is of no importance.   There is no room for quality, no possibility to include the intelligence of our public debate, the integrity of our public officials or the care that we give to our elders.  Industry is similarly afflicted with quality kitemarks based on processes rather than outcomes. 

Out social care systems were Green Value impulses, but they do not run from those Green values.  They are dominated by the Blue-Orange culture.  They are mechanized, institutionalized versions of the Green Value system.   For sure, many individuals within the professions concerned really do care, and live their Green values, but as a society we are not there yet because we are stuck in the Orange belief that money comes first.  That is about to be put to the test.

While I am comfortable to predict that the slide will come, I am not clever enough to think that I know what it will look like.   I find it interesting that Downton Abbey, with its depiction of a benevolent, caring class system, is to be followed onto the airwaves by the return of “Upstairs Downstairs”, another such portrayal of the old order, but set in the middle of the 1930’s depression.   We are exploring our relationship with the values of the past and hunkering down more deeply, going back yet further than the Cath Kidston fashion echoes of the 1950’s.  The collective intelligence is a wonderful and mysterious thing.

Unfortunately hunkering down will not be enough, and the 1930’s also witnessed the fascist blackshirts and anti-Semitism.   Aspirations were different, families, communities and neighbourhoods more cohesive and stable.   We were not dependent on global food distribution systems to feed our cities.  We were not addicted to technological fixes.   To survive global bankruptcy will require humanity to make the Gravesian leap to Yellow, to integrate its first-tier systems.  We will need to take personal ownership of our impulse to care.  We will need leadership that understands how to support that cultural shift.  Are the Sun and the Daily Mail ready to get behind that change?

And beneath all of this cultural shift is our upper-left quadrant personal relationship with money.  In my new book, I explore in depth the way that our first-tier engagement with fear of lack, desire for power, selfish control and systemic greed have built the world we live in.   The socio-economic challenges described here come together with global challenges of sustainability, ecological damage and political instability.  If we are to get out of these, we will have to make a big transition.  We will have to make our Green caring strong enough to balance our self-centred fear and greed.  We will have to use that lever to take us beyond the first-tier limits and into a second-tier relationship with money and with society.

This may well be the first practical test of our journey to enlightenment.  Do we, the integrally literate, spirally educated and spiritually intelligent people who are supposed to understand these things, have the willingness to deal with our money shadow.  Are we ready to show those around us some leadership and help them through the challenges?

My book “Future Money” is intended to help with this journey.  It gets inside both our personal relationship with money and the systemic changes which we need to bring about.   These things go hand in hand.  Our systems are reflections of our thinking and if we do not change, the systems cannot.   Money is the keystone holding up the arch of our systemic rigidity.  It is the reason that Copenhagen failed and that Cancun may do no better.   “Future Money presents a manifesto for surviving global bankruptcy.  It is intended as a support and a road-map for our journey.  I think that we need all the help we can get.

Jon

 What may be more of a novelty is the speed and energy of the new administration.   It has hit the ground running.  Having put together its heads of agreement in just a few days, it seems to be capable of delivering policy proposals and discussion documents at a rapid rate.   And despite the internal resistance from the fringes of both parties (Cameron’s right wing and Clegg’s more doctrinaire members) the centre-ground is holding up.

 Perhaps no-one is clear who the enemy is any more!   Both might consider the Labour party to be the enemy, but it is currently on the sidelines and even leadership candidate David Miliband is warning that Labour may be out of office for ten years.  That leadership contest itself has two brothers as leaders who, while they are not identical in viewpoints, hardly represent a struggle for the soul of the party.  The contest itself does not appear to be a fundamental review of Labour identity.

 There may be good reason for this.   The deeper history of the three parties would show some degree of divergence.   Conservative, as the name suggests, was about preserving the status quo and changing as little as possible.  Broadly speaking its founding Value system was core BLUE order, with a nod to Red aristocratic hierarchy – the fruits of earlier conquest.     The Liberal party, over the past 150 years was characterised by a more radical and reformist stance and by a strong social conscience.  Their position was economically laissez-faire ORANGE, plus a “BLUE with fairness” social conscience that may even have hinted at GREEN.  They introduced the first health insurance, unemployment assistance and old age pension schemes before WW1, but their economic freedom did nothing to change working conditions.

 The Labour party was born out of demands for improved working conditions and propelled by the trade unions.    With this background came the fear of a communist-inspired socialism that was central to the struggle between Labour and Conservative during the past 80 years.  That socialism is a mix of GREEN egalitarian human values and BLUE “right way” which was hostile to much of entrepreneurial ORANGE, resulting in ineffective nationalisation and progress through conflict.

 So where are we now?    Socialism is a remnant with decreasing amounts of traction, smashed by Thatcher and quietly buried by Blair with his “third way” politics and his flirtation with Ashdown’s Lib-Dems.   If you watched the TV election hustings you may have found it hard to see any difference in most policy arenas because the parties have converged on a centre ground.   This was evidenced by the belief that both Con-Lib and Lab-Lib alliances were possible last May, and liberal deputy leader Simon Hughes is still advocating the latter.   It was not policy differences which drove the decision but tactics over leadership and voting systems.   There is no sign of any fundamental shift underway within the Labour debate and their identity may well be defined now by attempts to find some distinction from the coalition.

 Where there was divergence in the party histories, now all three are fighting for the middle ground between the BLUE edge of entering strategic ORANGE and the GREEN edge of its exit.   There are some complex thinkers talking in YELLOW ways, but not many.    And there is now as much divergence within the parties as between them.  Some Labour looks like Liberal (or vice versa) and Cameron is closer to Clegg than to some of his own party backwoodsmen.

 The point of this posting is to say that this is not just accident.   I am suggesting that it is a natural outcome as we approach society’s transition into second tier.    Management of a complex society requires the ability to address the entire bandwidth of social groups and Values systems.  It demands that we end the oscillation between two poles of thinking.   The same polarity is built into US politics, and even more entrenched there, with Republicans deeply opposed to social programs and Democrats attempting a progressive agenda.  The swings from one to the other were always disruptive and expensive.  Now the scale of provision and the complexity of relationships between multiple agencies for service delivery impose longer timescales on any change and the pendulum is dysfunctional.

 In my view the party system cannot deliver the intelligence for a second-tier version of democracy.   Its existence is part of what inhibits the emergence of second-tier leaders since they must first navigate the constrictions of their first-tier party dogmas.   In the absence of a proportional voting system this effect is compounded; even the current coalition does not in its balance reflect the support for the Lib-Dems.   The whole mechanism is clumsy and inadequate to a responsive, culturally diverse and flex-flow future.   Replacing it may not be easy, but it is no longer fit for purpose and needs to go.  We might even have to start knowing who our candidates are, what they think and voting for people, not platforms.

Jon