interview

Spiral Dynamics

WIE: Dr. Beck, can you begin by explaining the basic concept of Spiral Dynamics?

DON BECK: The concept of Spiral Dynamics is that human nature is not fixed; we're not set at birth. Rather, we have the capacities, in the nature of the mind/brain itself, to construct new conceptual worlds. So what we're trying to describe is simply how humans are able, when things get bad enough, to adapt to their situation by creating greater complexities of thinking to handle new problems.

WIE: Can you elaborate on what seems to be our unique capacity to develop higher levels of thinking and cognition?

DB: Spiral Dynamics is based on the assumption that we have adaptive intelligences, "complex, adaptive, contextual intelligences," which develop in response to our life circumstances and challenges—what Spiral Dynamics calls Life Conditions. What we're always focusing on are the causative dynamics created by the Life Conditions and then the kinds of coping mechanisms and collective intelligences that are forged in response to those conditions. These collective intelligences are what we call memes.*
WIE: You seem to be pointing to the evolutionary nature of human intelligence, which makes it possible for us to adapt to and survive our existential challenges, or "Life Conditions." Can you speak further about the evolutionary significance of "memes"?

DB: Like genes, viruses, and bacteria, memes respond to the same basic principle in the universe, which is this concept of renewal, this regenerating capacity. Each successive meme contains a more expansive horizon, a more complex organizing principle, with newly calibrated priorities, mindsets, and specific bottom lines. It's a way of solving problems. It's a way of assigning priorities to what's most important and why, formed in response to the Life Conditions. And just like a biological DNA code, which is a code that replicates itself throughout the body, a meme code is a bio-psycho-social-spiritual DNA-type script, a blueprint that spreads throughout a culture, and plays out in all areas of cultural expression, forming survival codes, myths of origin, artistic forms, lifestyles, and senses of community.

WIE: So, you are saying that as humans adapt to their Life Conditions, this awakens new intelligences, or meme codes, which in turn shape the evolution of culture.

DB: Yes. And cultures, as well as countries, are formed by the emergence of these memes, or value systems, which are the glue that bonds a group together, defining who they are as a people and reflecting the place they inhabit on the planet.

My longtime friend and colleague, the late Professor Clare Graves, sensed that there were deeper patterns in the evolution of human consciousness and identified eight levels of psychological and cultural existence, or value systems, which became the basis for the spiral model. The same principles or levels of existence apply as much to a single person as to an entire society. Graves involved thousands of people in his research and was constantly on the lookout for these deeper patterns, which, he argued, reflect different activation levels of our dynamic neurological equipment.

WIE: Could you outline the spiral model with its hierarchy of eight memes, or levels of existence?

DB: In the language of Graves, the spiral's "First Tier" is a set of six memes characterized by existence or subsistence. What that means is that we're more like animals than like gods and we have to deal with what are essentially earthbound existence problems. So the First Tier (BEIGE, PURPLE, RED, BLUE, ORANGE, GREEN) clusters together our "subsistence" or survival-level concerns, while the Second Tier (YELLOW, TURQUOISE) works to create healthy forms of all the First Tier systems in the context of an information-rich, highly mobile global community. While Graves identified eight levels of existence, with a ninth on the horizon, the Spiral is expansive, open-ended, continuous, and dynamic. There is no final state, no ultimate destination, no utopian paradise. It's a never-ending upward quest, with each stage but a prelude to the next, and the next, and the next.

WIE: And what drives the evolutionary emergence of these stages, or memes, up the spiral?

DB: Our crises, because they provide the inflection points and the benchmarks that trigger the shift up to the next level of human development. And each level of existence, or meme, is more like an emerging wave, a fluid living system, than a rigid hierarchical step. Once a new level appears in a culture, all of the previously acquired developmental stages remain in the composite value system. In Ken Wilber's language, each new social stage "transcends but includes" all of those that have come before. For this reason, the more complex thinking systems have greater degrees of freedom.

WIE: Why do you use a spiral model to chart the emergence of these evolutionary stages of psychological and cultural development?

DB: A spiral vortex best depicts the emergence of human systems, or memes, as they evolve through levels of increasing complexity. Each upward turn of the spiral marks the awakening of a more elaborate version on top of what already exists, with each meme a product of its times and conditions. And these memes form spirals of increasing complexity that exist within a person, a family, an organization, a culture, or a society. We all live in flow states; there is always new wine, always old wineskins. And you can see that this whole evolutionary process is working because we're still here, because we've been able to survive thousands and thousands of years of coping with what has been quite a hostile environment. So we have a wonderful species that has an innate capacity to renew itself. That's what makes us human.



*The concept of "meme" was first proposed in the mid-1970s by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, who believed that the evolution of culture should be considered as independent from genetic or biological evolution. Dawkins' "memes" refer to specific "units of cultural transmission," examples of which could be songs, ideas, clothes fashions, to name just a few. However, in Spiral Dynamics, these are called "little memes." When Beck uses the word "meme," he is speaking about a "core value system," or "value meme." These act as "organizing principles" that express themselves through little memes and that are so central to the way we think that they can "reach across whole groups of people and entire cultures, and begin to structure mindsets on their own."