Quo Vadis, Humanity? Today we face serious questions around rigid ideologies, national boundaries, proprietary interests, technological utopias and naive, egalitarian demands. Global debates center on competing economic models, open political access, mandated equality of opportunity and results, and a host of other external, top-down solutions. Arguments grow in emotional intensity around the size and distribution of budgets. Money becomes the magic elixir that will cure all ills. New rules and regulations will transform hearts and minds. Everybody will benefit from the rising tides of prosperity as the freemarket makes global waves. Everybody will benefit from the largess of big government, using taxes to fund social work schemes. And, of course, brilliant technological innovations will bring the Internet into each and every home, with or without electricity. Right.

Why haven't such solutions worked in the past? In spite of all the money spent, expectations raised, programs imposed, good deeds celebrated and good works performed, why do our problems persist?

External approaches designed to improve the human condition are faulted unless they also include, as parallel and simultaneous tracks, the essential steps and stages in interior social development. In short, economic, political, and technological efforts must correlate with the levels of complexity of thinking within individuals and entire cultures. Unless the external efforts match in their respective operating codes the existing capacities within leadership cadres and the general population in specific countries, they will make things worse, not better.

Eight Stages of Social Development: How Cultures Emerge

A social stage is more like an emerging wave than a rigid step. Each stage is simply a temporary, transitional plateau that forms in individual and collective minds. Some call them paradigms or levels of psychological existence. Elsewhere I refer to them as valueMEMES or bio/psycho/social/spiritual DNA-type scripts that inculcate their codes throughout a culture and even migrate around the planet. These are fluid, living systems rather than rigid hierarchical steps. They form into spirals of complexity and exist within people,organizations, and entire societies. The terms social stage, cultural wave, value system, and vMEME code are synonymous.

Cultures as well as countries are formed by the emergence of value systems (social stages) in response to life conditions. Such complex adaptive intelligences form the glue that bonds a group together, defines who they are as a people, and reflects the place on the planet they inhabit. These cultural waves, much like nested Russian dolls, have formed over time into unique mixtures and blends of instructional and survival codes, myths of origin, artistic forms, life styles, and senses of community. While all are legitimate expressions of the human experience, they are not equal in their capacities to deal with complex problems in society.

Yet the detectable social stages within cultures are not given scripts that lock us into choices against our will. Nor are they inevitable steps on a predetermined staircase, or structures that magically appear in our collective psyche. Cultures are not rigid types with permanent traits; they are core adaptive intelligences that ebb and flow, progress and regress, with the capacity to lay on new levels of complexity (value systems) when conditions warrant. There is no final state, no ultimate destination, no utopian paradise. Each emerging social stage or cultural wave stage is always only a prelude to the next which contains a more expansive horizon, a more complex organizing principle, with newly calibrated priorities, mindsets, and specific bottom lines. All the previously acquired social stages remain in the composite value system to determine the unique texture of a given society, culture, country. In Ken Wilber's language, each new social stage transcends but includes all those which have come before. Societies with the capacity to change swing between I:Me:Mine and We:Us:Our poles. Tilts in one direction create the need to self-correct, thus causing a shift toward the opposite pole. Me decades become Us eras as we constantly spiral up or spiral down in response to life conditions. Some social stages stress diversity generators that reward individual initiatives and value human rights. Other social stages impose conformity regulators and reward cooperative, collective actions. Societies will zigzag between these two poles, thus embracing different models at each tilt.

Once a new social stage appears in a culture, it will spread its instructional codes and life priority messages throughout that culture's surface-level expressions: religious, economic and political arrangements, psychological and anthropological theories, including views of human nature, our future destiny, globalization, and even of architectural patterns and sports preferences. We all live in flow states; we find ourselves pursuing a never-ending quest.

Different societies, cultures and subcultures, as well as entire nations are always at different levels of psycho-cultural emergence as displayed within these evolutionary levels of complexity. Yet the previously awakened levels do not disappear. They stay active within the value system stacks, impacting the nature of the more complex systems. Therefore many of the same issues we confront on the West Bank (Red to Blue), for example, can be found in South Central Los Angeles. Likewise, one can experience the animistic (Purple) worldview in New Orleans as well as in, say, Zaire. Matters brought before the city council in Minneapolis (Orange to Green to Yellow) are in essence not unlike the debates of governing bodies in the Netherlands.

So-called Third World societies are dealing, for the most part, with issues within the Beige to Purple to Red to Blue zones, therefore the higher rates of violence and poverty. Staying alive, finding safety, and dealing with feudal age conditions matter most. Second World societies are characterized by authoritarian (Blue) one-party states - whether from the right or the left; it makes no difference. So-called First World nations and groupings have achieved high levels of affluence, with lower birth rates, and more expansive use of technology. While centered in the strategic freemarket-driven perspective which focuses on individual liberty - traits of the Stage 5 (Orange) worldview - new value systems (Green, Yellow, and Turquoise) are emerging in this postmodern age. Yet we have no language for anything beyond First World, believing that is the final state, the end of history. Further, there is a serious question as to whether the billions of people who are now exiting Second and Third World life styles can anticipate the same level of affluence as they see on First World television screens.

The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade organization, and most multinational corporations reflect the Blue-Orange worldview codes of cultural discipline, financial accountability, and individual responsibility. Attacks are launched from three directions:

1. Red zone activists, anarchists, and spoilers who love a good fight, and believe the Big (Orange) Money Machines are easy targets from which to exact tributes in various forms;
2. Blue zone ideologies who defend the sacred against the secular, resent intrusive technology and destruction of holy orders, and extol the purity of the faith, noble cause, and divine calling; and
3. Green zone humanists and environmentalists who level charges of exploitation, greed, and selfishness, noting the eradication of indigenous cultures and the poisoning of the environment by Big Mac golden arches.

The WTO demonstrations, for example, were so confounding to so many because they combined these Red, Blue and Green critiques into single anti-Orange crusades. Capitalism and materialism were the twin villains; spirituality, sharing, and social equality, along with sustainability, were the noble virtues. There appeared to be no middle ground, no zone of rapprochement, no win:win alternative. Herein lies the global knot: the seemingly irreconcilable conflict between and among the haves, the have-nots, the have-a-little-but-want-more, and the have-a-lot-but-are-never-content. There must be a better way.

Stratified Democracy: Managing the Global Mesh

The bulge of global thinking is in the Purple/Red zones, with a somewhat smaller peak in Orange. Many are locked in Blue authoritarian flatland and are just now waking up to Orange good life possibilities. At the same time, the postmodern mindset is attacking Orange materialism, living more lightly on the land and searching for meaning on a variety of spiritual paths. In his book titled The Cultural Creatives, author Paul Ray describes Heartland (Blue), Modernity (Orange), and Cultural Creatives (Green). We add Integral (Yellow) as the next developmental stage. The future of the Third World will be Second World authority before either First World autonomy or postmodern sensitivity becomes an option. There are different futures for different folks along the evolutionary trajectory.

Democracy, then, comes in many different variations, hues, and levels of complexity. Imposing the form that fits a specific Spiral stage or zone onto other strata is an invitation to cultural disaster. There are good reasons why humans have created survival clans, ethnic tribes, feudal empires, ancient nations, corporate states and value communities in our long bio-psycho-social-spiritual ascent.

The evolutionary spirals are dancing all over the planet. In some dances each expresses self, oblivious to others. In others, we dance in concert, in a multitude of interlocking arrangements and movements. This is the global diversity. New political and economic models are beginning to appear, based on the assumptions and codes within integral commons and holistic meshworks. Welcome to the global dance.

[Abridged from the 2001 article Stages of Social Development: The Cultural Dynamics that Spark Violence, Spread Prosperity, and Shape Globalization, by Don Edward Beck, Ph.D.]

One cannot merely follow the timetable we have set for our influence on the world; we must also honour and respect the infinitely more complex timetable the world has set for itself. That timetable is the sum of the thousands of independent timetables of an infinite number of natural, historical and human actions.

-- Vaclav Havel