Life Conditions

WIE: You said earlier that new intelligences—new meme levels—are formed in response to our Life Conditions. No one can deny that the Life Conditions that now confront us as a global human community are more challenging and dangerous than those of any previous moment in history. Could you speak about these Life Conditions and the role they play in our next evolutionary transition?

DB: What seems to have happened in our lifetime, for good or ill, is that we have learned the basic codes and principles of life itself. We are confronted with mind-blowing choices—everything from shaping natural habitats to gene splicing to using science in various ways to alter the human experience. I don't think any of us realize yet what that's going to mean. So we're now in this position: we act like gods. We can change the future, and we have never before had this capacity as a species. So once again, we find that, not through our failure but through our success, we are confronted with extremely dangerous conditions.

And furthermore, power in the form of nuclear weaponry developed in the more complex ORANGE meme, which has the stabilizing influence of the previous BLUE code in it, is now under the control of a RED meme that has no BLUE influence, no discipline and accountability, no sense of the potential for mutual destruction that emerged in ORANGE along with that particular technological development. RED has a short time-frame about power and that's one hell of a problem. That is, is it not, one of the primary risks that we face as a species.

WIE: Adding to this pressure is the fact that life is changing at an ever-increasing rate. The quote I'm about to read you, by inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, conveys the enormous change that we, as humans, are both precipitating and simultaneously trying to adapt to:

DB: Oh, that's an awesome quotation. But it assumes that our biological genetic systems have the complexity of codes in them to support that amount of change that quickly. There is already beginning to be some doubt in the minds of those who study our immune system as to whether or not we actually have a capacity to handle the complexity that's being demanded of us, even physically. So that quote presumes an organism that is able to assimilate that amount of change. I don't know if that's the case. I do know that today we are subjected to unbelievable change because there are billions of people who, from my perspective, are passing through different layers and levels of the spiral simultaneously. So rather than our species moving in a singular advance along a horizontal line, it turns out that multiple changes are happening up and down the spiral. Many are now moving into zones that we vacated three hundred years ago.

Then you add in other things, like the impact of the microchip. Furthermore, as we learn more about ourselves in studies of molecular biology, we are uncovering the so-called mystery of our genetics. We can do cloning; we can do gene splicing—but what if we mess it up? What if we release biogenic agents, or bugs, that attack all carbon life? When we begin to play around with the deepest codes in our biology, no one can foresee what the flutters of little butterfly wings* in Chaos Theory will produce down the line. That's why there's so much stress on us, which also means we might be looking for new organizational forms—more ensembles of people—because no single person is going to be able to keep all these things in mind.

WIE: Evolutionary biologist Elisabet Sahtouris has said that "stress is the only thing that causes evolution." Is there a relationship between the increasingly greater levels of stress we are experiencing in our current Life Conditions and the potential for a significant percentage of us to evolve up the spiral?

DB: Well, evolution does take crisis. It does take wake-up calls. But that, in and of itself, does not guarantee there will be upward movement. If the Huns are at the gate, literally, for people, or if they're suddenly under threat of losing their job because of downsizing or economic collapse, the energy and the capacity for more complex thinking actually begin to erode, and an earlier, or lower, priority suddenly dominates.

So in addition to the crisis, there has to be some stability in the basic memetic systems. And there has to be the capacity to create new conceptual systems, because just being exposed to problems may regress the whole society. This is exactly what happened in Zimbabwe, which was a very richly endowed place. Now there is the virtual starvation of millions there. That's why stress in itself is not the key. As Nobel prize winner Ilya Prigogine would say, when previous systems start to dissipate, we reach that zone where there will either be an upsurge to a more complex system or a downshift to a less complex one. It happens in that critical zone, that tipping point. Though stress crises are certainly necessary to break out of a memetic paradigm, that in and of itself is no guarantee that we'll make the kind of emergence that is necessary. So far, we have.



the MEMES: worldviews and realities

TURQUOISE MEME
An elegantly balanced system of interlocking forces

YELLOW MEME
A chaotic organism forged by differences and change

GREEN MEME
A human habitat in which we share life's experiences

ORANGE MEME
A marketplace full of possibilities and opportunities

BLUE MEME
An ordered existence under the control of the ultimate truth

RED MEME
A jungle where the strongest and most cunning survive

PURPLE MEME
A magical place alive with spirit beings and mystical signs

BEIGE MEME
A natural milieu where humans rely on instincts to stay alive


A Spiral Wizard at Work

I MADE OVER SIXTY-THREE TRIPS to South Africa between 1981 and 1999, launching the South African initiative first called "Strategic Evolution." During that period, my basic role was to reshape the definitions the various sectors of society were using to stereotype each other, replacing the usual racial/ethnic categories with an understanding of these value system or memetic differences, all of which were alive in that global microcosm. The complexity of the South African situation had been simplified down to what is morally right or wrong along race lines, and that was a grave mistake. Much sympathy was lavished on the black "struggle," and rightfully so. But getting rid of what they didn't want—apartheid—was not the same thing as getting what they did want—a just and prosperous society. In the final analysis, a black, one-party-state doctrinaire nationalism (as in Zimbabwe today) would be no better than an Afrikaner version of the same.

So, rather than attack the Afrikanervölk and their rather rigid, exclusive belief system around race, I simply challenged them to develop technology and agriculture in Africa—as their highest calling. As Franklin Sonn, the South African ambassador to the United States, said, my work "helped educate white people that there was a life, and even a life abundant, beyond apartheid." To get this message out, I appeared on television, on radio, at academic institutions, and in open sessions all over the country. A series of six articles of mine, which appeared in all the South African newspapers in April of l989, was influential in convincing Afrikaner political leaders in Pretoria to release Nelson Mandela and start the peace process.

But I paid a heavy price and was severely criticized for my work in South Africa. Clare Graves had warned me to plan for a personal attack from the GREEN egalitarian system for even being in South Africa in the first place, "selling out to the white, racist, apartheid regime." I was advocating a different solution than what GREEN demanded, which was the instant redistribution of power because, according to GREEN, the only reason for the gap in development between European and African was blatant racism. The unhealthy expression of GREEN egalitarianism is to "deconstruct" the BLUE and ORANGE social, economic, and political architecture since that alone is supposedly the cause of human suffering. But those in the "struggle industry" had little idea of the scorched earth they were to inherit if their tactics for disinvestment, sanctions, and Western isolation were to succeed. In fact, sanctions cut both ways. Jobs were lost, never to return. The medical establishment was severely crippled. Much of the essential infrastructure disintegrated. Many good people with high skill levels have left the country and, alas, the AIDS pandemic is sweeping the veldt. I think there was a much better way to transform that whole society in a healthy fashion, and many who backed sanctions in South Africa have told me they now realize what deep and permanent damage was done to the country.

I believe that if they started over again, South Africans would do a number of things differently. And yet, the fact that the society emerged without a civil war is simply remarkable. But to me, apartheid was not the problem; it was a symptom of the inability to figure out the meshing of European and African modes of thought, to stitch together a new South African fabric. I went to South Africa because I believed that something entirely different, yet just and democratic, was waiting to be discovered, managed by new, more complex levels of thinking that would appear, driven by the Life Conditions they all faced together. If the social mosaics could successfully work together for the common good, I believed that South Africans could point the way for the true integration of the entire planet. I felt that if I could discover the nature of the deep conflict, perhaps I could work behind the scenes in empowering them to bridge their own great divides. There were many, many South African heroes who were involved; I was simply a pathfinder, a map-maker, and a cheerleader. The Zulus named me "Amizimuthi," which means "One with Strong Medicine."

*The "butterfly effect" illustrates the essence of Chaos Theory. It is the notion that the flapping of a butterfly's wing will create a disturbance that, amplified by the chaotic motion of the atmosphere, will eventually change large-scale weather patterns, so that long-term behavior becomes impossible to forecast.