It’s useful to broadly categorize current Western culture into A) Green stage consciousness and B) Orange stage consciousness (from Spiral Dynamics/Integral Theory).
Green emphasizes values of inclusions, sensitivity, community, equality, and honoring diverse voices. There’s an intention towards empathy, emotional connection, and collaboration. Socio-politically this generally manifests as a left-liberal perspective.
Orange emphasize values of achievement, rationality, personal responsibility, meritocracy, and individualism. There’s an intention towards scientific thinking, competition, and innovation. Socio-politically this generally manifests as a right-conservative perspective.
The needs each consciousness is seeking to get met are valid.
Green needs: compassion, community, support, consideration, care, community, inclusion, trust, love
Orange needs: clarity, honesty, respect, order, choice, freedom, consistency, integrity, trust, love
The issue is that in the current paradigm each is in a broken form (broken green and broken orange). They each fall into major pitfalls:
Green pitfalls: groupthink, relativism, and denial of consistent, clear thinking
Orange pitfalls: focus on hierarchy, cut off from emotions, and materialism/profit over wholesome ways of being
In modern form, both green and orange fall into collectivist thinking by maintaining a belief in the coercive authority (government) to implement the structures/laws (e.g. green = redistribution of wealth, coercive “public” schooling and orange = corporatism, militarism).
So what’s needed is to see the integration of the healthy versions of both Orange and Green, to ascend to a Teal consciousness which integrates towards a healthy win-win paradigm, in which all needs are nurtured.
Teal synthesizes the strengths of Orange (rationality, innovation) and Green (empathy, inclusivity), and yet moves from conflict to cooperation. It emphasizes “both-and” thinking.
Teal chisels the mind with clear thinking, respect for choice, freedom, and personal responsibility while allowing awareness and emphasis on the heart-centered needs for openness, empathy, and warmth.
Without denying self-responsibility, Teal radically values community.
Without vilifying freedom, Teal creates security and safety for all.
Without sacrificing choice, Teal retains consideration for the affect of one’s choices on others.
Socio-politically, this manifests in a voluntary-ist, creative paradigm (spontaneous order through consensual trade and trust-based, decentralized systems (no centralized government). Free markets, while incorporating profit motives as desired, are cultivated in non-hierarchical, self-managing organizations based on wholeness, self-management, trust, and shared purpose. The full human is nurtured in the organization, as is any customer. Gift economies (non-monetary) also expand in a world of increasing prosperity and abundance.
Children flourish as parents focus on the quality of their relationship with their child, not parenting “techniques” to control and coerce. The natural creativity and curiosity of the child organically blossoms and skyrockets as healthy education paradigms draw out the maximal human flourishing of each budding human.
The path to ascend to Teal is the de-conditioned and integrated Self, in which the inner child is liberated from early experiences in which — depending on whether his environment was more broken Orange or broke Green — either his rational mind was suppressed or his caring heart was walled off. (Or more likely, a combination of each. I dichotomize merely for the interest of simplicity).
Everyone wants this world, deep down.
It’s possible, but perhaps only if we give ourselves permission to even dream of it.
