The "Memes"


BEIGE

WIE: The Spiral Dynamics model charts our evolutionary development beginning 100,000 years ago with the appearance of the first "level of existence," the BEIGE meme. What defines this first stage of human development?

DB: BEIGE is a virtually automatic state of existence, driven by the imperative physiological needs that trigger the very basic survival equipment with which we are born. In its original form, starting 100,000 years ago, the BEIGE level of existence was the first step that made us human. It is humans simply struggling to survive in environments where there are other animals. Yet we are more sophisticated and seem to have more conceptual skills for bonding into protective clans to preserve what we have and fend off predators. The father in the survival clan eats first because if the strongest dies, the family has no hope. So, the key to BEIGE is survival using instinctive intelligences, with a more heightened sensory system with which we can see better, hear better—we can sense things with the hair standing on the back of our neck. Simply staying alive is more highly valued than anything else.

WIE: Are there any remaining examples of BEIGE in the world today?

DB: The only real BEIGE that exists today in its pristine condition is hidden away in Indonesia and parts of Africa. We've studied bushmen for some time, and it's quite clear that they have an uncanny ability to recall where the water is buried, and the ostrich eggs, and can sense weather changes. So we don't equate primitive with being primitive and "dumb" because there are possibly sixteen different senses, including a remote viewing capacity, that are activated at this level. But today, most of these senses have atrophied and have been overwhelmed by our more complex conceptual systems.

WIE: Do Life Conditions sometimes force people to exist at the BEIGE level, even though they may not actually be primitive or represent the "pristine" form of this meme?

DB: Oh, one can find pieces of BEIGE in street people who are basically hunter-gatherers, who get what they eat where they find it. You can certainly see it in the horrible conditions of extreme poverty in Somalia or Ethiopia, where it's a hand-to-mouth existence. And also, it's evident in newborn infants, who eat when they're hungry. And some people, when exposed to a catastrophe, may regress to BEIGE. Higher-order priorities suddenly vanish in the midst of personal tragedy, extreme suffering, or deprivation. There's a kind of emptiness, which is certainly fear-driven, because boundaries and expectations have suddenly dissolved and one is on one's own footing, living by one's own wiles. It's that feeling that we have when we have to do something entirely different, something that we've never done before and are not sure that we even can do. I think that after September 11, we saw some people temporarily go into BEIGE because the crisis put them in a very different psychological condition.


PURPLE

WIE: The second level up the spiral is PURPLE. What evolutionary developments characterize the shift from the primitive existence of BEIGE to this next level of existence, the PURPLE meme?

DB: PURPLE is animistic, tribalistic, and mystical. In this world of PURPLE, we tend to have the first evidence of human bonding—the sense of a kindred spirit, that "I'm someone because I belong to a certain clan or certain tribe." During the Ice Age, the world became overpopulated. There were more humans per acre than there had ever been before. We had clans in the BEIGE system beginning to bump into other clans, with a sense of competition for niches starting to appear. Suddenly a clan, which is loosely structured, solidifies into a tribe of, say, four to five hundred people, so that the previous clan can now survive in the midst of competition with other clans. So one of the Life Conditions changes that led to the shift from BEIGE to PURPLE had to do with territoriality and access to resources.

Now, at the same time, a mutation occurred to awaken in the brain the first real ability to assign cause and effect. This was the first sense of the metaphysical. In the BEIGE mind, events seem to be scattered, each one unto itself, without much predictability. But, for example, in Africa, if the moon is full and the cow dies, the PURPLE mind connects the two events, one causing the other. So the awakening of the metaphysical system, together with the capacity to work more firmly in a team arrangement, occurred in the transition from the Dawn People (BEIGE) to the Mystical People (PURPLE), precipitated by the changing Life Conditions that occurred during the Ice Age, about fifty thousand years ago.

WIE: It seems that the emergence of the capacity for bonding and working together, would literally improve one's chances for survival.

DB: You're absolutely right. Literally. And because these stages of existence, or meme levels, represent bio-psycho-social systems, they indicate the evolutionary emergence of biological and physical capacities and abilities. For example, we know that the level of the brain chemical oxytocin, which has various health-giving benefits, is higher when humans eat in a group. And so eating together, breaking bread together, feasts of various kinds, all raise the oxytocin level in the brain and improve survival. Another thing that developed at this time was whatever it is in the brain that chemically enables the person to hear inner voices, the voices of spirits. The PURPLE meme is heavily laden with such so-called right brain tendencies as heightened intuition, emotional attachments to places and things, and a mystical sense of cause and effect. I have a well-developed PURPLE sense myself, having spent so much time with the Zulus in sacred places.


RED

WIE: With its tribes and rituals, PURPLE seems to have been quite a leap from the primitive existence of BEIGE. How did the next meme level of the spiral—RED—arise out of PURPLE, and what are its defining characteristics?

DB: In the RED zone, we have the first raw, egocentric self. I am somebody. Beginning approximately ten thousand years ago, what began to cause the change in Life Conditions that led to RED were not failures, but rather successes. In PURPLE we had become very successful. We had found food, we had stabilized our lifestyle, we had conquered what we thought were the dragons in our life. Everything was smooth, boring. So many of the youth became discontented. They saw that there was something about their essence that, rather than being protected, was being contained, limited. Then RED strides forth. Now we have an elite individual beginning to move away from the bonding element in PURPLE, which had become overplayed. So what PURPLE produced, through its success, was the need for strong individuals who ascend to power, who dominate, for example, in a military environment where we don't have the time to vote whether or not to "take yon hill." What begins to spring free is the assertion of raw self—the renegade, the heretic, the barbarian, the go-it-alone, the power-self, the hedonist.

WIE: It's more difficult to see the positive attributes of the RED meme. PURPLE definitely seems more appealing to me, with its emphasis on human bonding and the sense of the metaphysical.

DB: There are both positive and negative expressions to all the memes, including RED. In RED, we see high crime rates, we see all kinds of rage and rebellion, but we may also see wonderful spurts of creativity, heroic acts, and the ability to break from tradition and chart a whole new pathway. And RED rebellion and impulsiveness could only happen because PURPLE, through bonding, stabilized things. And also, RED was a rebellion against the rituals and sacrifices forced on the youth by the PURPLE system, in painful rites of passage, for example. So that's why RED follows PURPLE, and why PURPLE set the stage for RED.

This is very important—I want you to see the interconnection. Memes are not free-floating entities. RED is not better than PURPLE. It's different. So you have to ask, first and foremost, what are the Life Conditions? If the Life Conditions require you to be strong and self-assertive, or to fight your way out of a horrible situation, then the RED meme is the way to be. RED is not an aberration, but a normal part of the human meme repertoire. This perspective is fundamental to Spiral Dynamics: you accept that the memes do not represent a hierarchy of "better," but rather that each can be expressed in a positive and negative way, and that the whole spiral with its assortment of meme codes is inside the person and may be called upon in response to the demands of their changing Life Conditions.


BLUE

WIE: And now to the fourth meme level of the spiral. Could you begin by speaking about the Life Conditions problems produced by RED individualism and egocentrism, which ultimately required a shift up to the next level, BLUE?

DB: In BLUE there is a search for a transcendent purpose, a recognition of the importance of order and meaning, a universe controlled by a single higher power. Society could no longer function with the constant presence of RED, with its war-like, gang-like, warlord-like entities, so we have to grow up, to solve the problems created by RED success. Here for the first time is the capacity to feel guilt (RED feels shame, but not guilt). In the BLUE system, people gladly accept authoritarianism and self-sacrifice for the common good.

When BLUE first develops, it has to handle RED. And that's why in the Old Testament you have such punitive measures as "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." If there is a heavy RED component, then you have, in religious systems and legal systems, the very heavy punitive form of BLUE. It's designed to address the threat of RED, so as long as the RED threat is there, the punitive expression of BLUE will continue to exist. But as BLUE moves away from having to contain the violence in RED, it goes on its life cycle toward its own healthier version, taking the form of more institutionalized systems, in which righteousness, discipline, accountability, stability, perseverance, and order prevail.

What also seems to occur in the brain is a heightened capacity for abstraction, and that abstraction ability attaches itself to a cause, a cause célèbre, an "ism"—for example, the Buddhist's Eightfold Path, or the idea of Islam, which are both abstractions. So once again, we're into a metaphysical zone, but this time the PURPLE spirits are organized into "a mighty fortress is our God ..." And thus we have the birth of monotheism and Zoroastrianism and all the "isms" that suddenly started emerging about five thousand years ago. And while they had different content, the mode of thinking for all of them was identical.

WIE: I had never considered the world's religions from that point of view, that despite differences in "content," they are expressions of the same evolutionary stage of development.

DB: Yes, because these meme codes are like a blueprint, or like magnets. The meme code we designate "BLUE" finds a transcendent purpose. What is that transcendent purpose? It could be Buddhism, or Judaism, or Islam. These religious expressions are what that meme code has attached to as a way to express itself. Therefore we can have holy wars between "isms," both of which are in the BLUE code. Because there's a difference between the surface-level manifestations of a core value system, or meme, and the core system, or meme code, itself.


ORANGE

WIE: How does institutional, disciplined, absolutist BLUE give rise to the ORANGE meme, the fifth level of the spiral model?

DB: ORANGE is about advancement, improvement, and progress. Once again, you play out the BLUE theme to its ultimate. You make it very, very successful. And then what happens? The individual gets restless. "But I'm an individual. I want to assert my personal autonomy." "No," BLUE says. "You must stay in line and conform to the dictates of the system. Don't you want to go to heaven? Don't you want to have a retirement?" And ORANGE says, "Yes, but I think I can produce a heaven on earth. I think I can increase the size of the cake." Thus we had the great Enlightenment, which is simply the individual spirit breaking free from what had become very restrictive forces.

Now the BLUE system, when it first appeared, was relevant, was necessary. But ORANGE individualization began to appear about three hundred years ago, when the sacred leaders became too punitive and also became discredited because they could not protect people from the plagues. And thus we had the birth, thank goodness, of the scientific method. We also had a growing belief in optimism, in changeability—a belief that we can indeed shape our future, that we are the stewards of the universe and therefore have dominion over it. We can carve out a good life for ourselves. And again, some fascinating things happened in the European brain that seemed to occur for the first time in the 1700s—the mathematical sense, the sense of cadence, the linear sense that made possible written music, that made possible quantification and measurement. These classical left brain capacities uniquely developed in the Western brain in the ORANGE system. That entire wonderful movement is begrudgingly classified as "Western," but that's really what it is.

WIE: It's refreshing to hear you speak about ORANGE in these terms, because I was reflecting on the many negative effects of this particular meme, for example, the ecological devastation that ORANGE industrialization has given rise to.

DB: That is why we have to look at three things: the Life Conditions, the meme code itself, and the way that meme code is being expressed in a certain context. If we don't like capitalism or consumerism, which are expressions of the ORANGE meme code, it's not the same thing as the meme code itself, which is the capacity to engineer things, to make things better. The creativity and ability to engineer that are inherent in that same ORANGE meme code can now be used to clean up the environment. That's why we can't afford to bash any of these memetic systems. We can challenge a manifestation of it, but without the ORANGE thinking system, we couldn't solve medical problems, we couldn't figure out how to clean up the water or the air, and we would sink back to the myth and mysticism of BLUE. I don't think anybody wants that to happen.