You can also listen to this episode on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In this month’s solo episode, I’m sharing more about the model of developmental psychology that I’m finding incredibly useful right now: Spiral Dynamics. As a framework, I think it can help us understand our world and culture better—and it can guide us in the best, and most effective ways to respond to it.
MORE FROM THIS EPISODE:
Nicole Churchill on Pulling the Thread: “The Basics of Spiral Dynamics”
Ken Wilber on Pulling the Thread: “To Transcend and Include”
Solo Episode on Pulling the Thread: “Is this Our Push Up the Spiral?”
Ken Wilber’s A Post-Truth World
Don Beck’s Spiral Dynamics Integral (Audiobook)
Don Beck & Chris Cowan’s Spiral Dynamics
Loretta Ross on Pulling the Thread: “Calling In the Call Out Culture”
Loretta Ross on Pulling the Thread: “How to Talk to People You’d Rather Hate”
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
ELISE:
So I think like many of you, all of you, I’m guessing if you like this show, I’m experiencing whiplash and already a fair amount of fatigue from mayhem, chaos, violence, pain, suffering. It has been a pretty inauspicious start to the year I would say for humanity. And I’d be lying if I said that I had any certain or fixed ideas about what all is unfolding. Just that I know that the disorder will continue and also that I have faith that we are going to pull through and that this is a bit like an chemical turn where the coal is becoming gold and I think we have to have faith somehow that this is growing a lot of us up really quickly and that there is hopefully as much as we’re seeing a lot of regression, that we’re going to see a lot of maturity, spiritual maturity, emotional maturity.
I don’t know why maturity is so hard for me to say that in so many other words. My kids love to make me say ranch. I don’t know. I can’t. I have a lot of trouble with my Rs. I guess that’s my Montana accent if there is such a thing, but apparently there’s such a thing. That’s what I’m told. So I’m also certain, many of you holding the polarity together of having everything being on one hand sort of personally great and feeling really good. And then also switching on my Instagram and just seeing a feed full of suffering in Iran and the unfolding protests in Minneapolis. I’m recording this on January 15th just for context. So you’re hearing this a week and a half later, and I’m assuming it’s still going to stand and hopefully there are no other devastating events that happen in the interim, but then maybe we just need this even more today.
I wanted to talk about a newsletter that I wrote this week using spiral Dynamics to analyze this moment and trying to parse and figure out what we can learn and go a bit deeper with you all. It’s one of those models of developmental psychology that I feel like every time I turn back to it, I understand it ever more. And so hopefully, I know we’ve covered it a few times, but I intend to keep coming back to it. I was just thinking I needed to email Nicole Churchill and see if she’ll join me again, and I wish Claire Graves were alive to help propagate this more fully. And same with Don Beck and Don Beck wrote several books that are almost like textbooks. They often have a business application, which is really interesting and I’m going to share some of that with you guys today.
And obviously Ken Wilber folds spiral dynamics into his work. He likes to build sort of these meta models of all the models, which is fascinating. And so Enneagram type five. But I think what’s really helpful now is understanding what it looks like when it’s applied. And what I think is also really beautiful about the model and something that maybe makes us more in the passing of Graves or back is that Graves described spiral dynamics. Let me tell you what he called it. It’s actually really funny. I mean not a great marketer, but he was really wanting to understand what a psychologically mature and stable adult human looked like. That was the goal of his research and his work. And he wrote about spiral dynamics as in the way that Michelangelo described carving sculptures, which is that the sculpture was already in the stone waiting to be revealed.
And Graves felt like through thousands and thousands of interviews where people would write out sort of their worldviews for him according to specific prompts that he then synthesized and aggregated and that spiral dynamics revealed itself to him. So as much as we can mourn that we don’t have more sort of teachers, I know there are a number of people who work in spiral dynamics, but I think it’s a system that is available to all of us. It’s not dependent on the person who authored it, which is actually quite cool. I think it becomes even more clear as time passes how prophetic and accurate it really is. So this is what Graves called it, which makes me laugh. This is from 1984. I call my point of view the emergent cyclical double helix model of adult bio systems development. So not a marketer, not a marketer, but Don Becken particularly really repackaged it for us in a way that makes it more useful.
Spiral dynamics is easier to say, I think. And I wanted to, I’m going to give you a brief overview of they’re called memes, which I hate that word. I still just will never understand it, but I’m going to try and define it for you. You can also just think of them as levels. That’s often how I write about them. But the memes, which comes from Richard Dawkins book, I think it was in 1967, The Selfish Gene. A meme is a packet of cultural or social information that we pass on to each other. It’s almost contagious. It’s how we pass culture, patterns of behavior, et cetera. And so these are memes and the idea being that once there’s a certain amount of a meme level being reflected in the culture, people, not all people, but people might start to shift or evolve. And each meme emerged in time when the meme in question sort of outgrew the problems increased in complexity to the point that the current worldview wasn’t enough.
And so they emerge over time. It’s also why, and I think this is so important, we can look back at people in the not so distant future and judge them harshly and say, I would never have enslaved people. I would never have participated in colonizing America, whatever it is. And yeah, you wouldn’t have with your consciousness today, we hope, but we’re seeing right now sort of what mob, contagious ages, collective psychology looks like. That’s a whole ‘nother topic, but yet you could probably say you wouldn’t have that worldview today. But if you were alive in that time and a meme of freedom and enlightenment and science and rationalism hadn’t emerged on the planet yet, it would never occur to you that enslaving people was bad. It’s something that one in three people in Athens were enslaved. It’s something that we’ve unfortunately had always done to people until we were like, why would we do this?
This is horrific. But spiral dynamics is a way of understanding the emergence of different levels of consciousness at different times across the planet. We’re all in somewhat different time zones. I think that’s also really important because we want to judge different parts of the world for not sharing our worldview, and it’s just not there. It’s not the center of gravity of that culture. And that’s what also makes spiral dynamics so cool because it mirrors personal psychological development. It lines up with the work of Carol Gilligan, and I’ll include her episode in the show notes, Lawrence Kohlberg, et cetera. But it also works on a cultural level and we’re really going to talk about the culture right now, but also what that means for each of us and each meme. And Nicole Churchill, who came on the podcast, did a really beautiful job of describing this.
Each meme, each level of the spiral has its shadows and its light. So there are beautiful gifts that come with each meme, and there are also some really problematic or troublesome aspects, particularly when that meme is really activated or unbalanced, and we’ll talk about those quickly today as well. The thing about the first six levels, which is where, I don’t know, 90, 95% to quote Ken Wilbur of the world population is in this first tier. The other thing that’s really important to know is that when you’re in a first tier meme predominantly, and you’ll theoretically move between memes, as you grow up both in terms of age and also spiritual and psychologically mature in your life, you’ll grow up, your worldview will expand, you’ll hit these points of complexity, feel a lot of dissonance, be like, I don’t understand this, and it will push you.
It hurts, but it will push you to grow and climb higher up this spiral and to expand your worldview even more. But for first tier thinkers, which again is a majority of us, the other really important thing to know is that all the memes in the first tier kind of hate each other and dismiss each other, deprecate each other, don’t really understand each other, and causes a lot of conflict. As you can imagine, when you punch up to the second tier to yellow and turquoise, Ken Weber refers to yellow as teal just to make things extra confusing. That’s when you start to actually become a spiral wizard. That’s when you can see the whole spiral and can see your own participation in it. And the beauty of that is that you also see its manifold gifts and you understand where people are and you understand how to speak to them and how to reach them at the level at which they are most comfortable or are operating.
You know how to speak to green. You know how to speak to orange. You know how to speak to blue. You know how to speak to red and purple without alienating them. It’s not perfect. It’s hard. I cannot say I would like to believe. I think if you’re interested in this in general, chances are you’re probably yellow. I’ve come to recognize I have a lot of yellow attributes like being a lone wolf, and I can tell you some those later. But really being devoted to practical, pragmatic solutions systems, just wanting, I definitely, when I read Beck and Cohen’s descriptions of a yellow leader, this to me feels like, oh yeah, that’s how I am, which is really get people what they need and get out of their way. I don’t really care how people do their work so long as they do the work. And I see my job as empowering them.
I’m not really interested in pedigree. I’m more interested in hierarchies of knowledge, wisdom, really more than I am in status. I don’t care about status at all. Let me tell you some of these. I’m jumping around. I know, but hey, stick with me. Okay, this is characteristics of the second tier leadership package, and I think this is, see if this feels like it fits you regardless of whether you work in a business or not, you put yourself there. Each person is free to choose whether to put up with, try to change or even to walk away, but he or she will take individual responsibility for the consequences. Managers act as gophers, not supervisors or overseers for the worker getting necessary information and materials to the right place as needed. They may also empower, enable, facilitate, and inspire when required to do so. Contracts are made with employees such that a very specific what should be done and by when.
However, there are great degrees of freedom regarding how and no pretense that the job can only be done in one way. People are focused on an agreed joint purpose that supersedes the person or group itself, yet serves to make each life healthier and enhances the overall life of the spiral. At first, less is more. Since the most effective use of resources makes possible the pursuit of other equally valuable and simultaneous projects, then more can be more. Second tier thinking uses human diversity constructively by neither worshiping it nor advocating sameness. In this view, people have unequal competencies and unequal needs since differentiated intelligences are spread among us all but not in accordance with economic, class, gender, or race-based distinctions. People are naturally productive if the organization is designed and aligned to match individuals with functions they find stimulating. The spiral wizard helps diverse mindsets, target specific outputs in a functional flow and move around as needed people.
Technology, nature and procedures are interwoven and integrated into the stream of work. Conflict is inevitable in any living system, but the Spiral Wizard actively manages it to promote the health of the interactive spiral, not to favor any isolated faction or personal agenda. So I mean, I just want to believe that that’s how it is, but it feels like me. Yellows can be cold and aloof and odd, and they’re really just interested in synthesizing information, using the best of what’s available to make for the best outcome, so on and so forth. And that’s second tier turquoise, which is the next level, which is the communal level. It goes selfish, individual, communal, selfish, individual, communal. But I’m trying not to confuse you all too much, but turquoise is where you see the emergence of sort of oneness and really integrated spiritual thinking, almost a mystical level, but it’s also embodied by people we know and love.
Like Jane Goodall is very turquoise. Yvonne and Patagonia are very turquoise. These are people who are working for the collective good and are more heart led, whereas yellow might be more head led. Okay, so let’s talk about this current moment in time. I’m just going to do a really quick rundown of the memes, and these are the first tier memes. And I’m going to use this to talk a little bit about what’s happening in Iran, not to conflate it with what’s happening here, but as I write in this newsletter, which I’ll include a link to, it’s like we’re watching the beginning and the end of the same movie. Iranians have been in an oppressive authoritarian theocracy under the Islamic regime for 47 years where women have very few rights, they’re mowing down protestors, they hang people from cranes. There’s just tons of state-sponsored violence and it’s devastating.
And so I don’t want for anyone to think that I’m conflating the two. And you can just imagine, I mean, it’s so shocking in America to see rights violated, whereas Iran is in their fifth decade of rights violations. And Iran, I’m sure many of you, if not all of you know this, but historically is just the most gorgeous culture that frequently has been way ahead of its time, including in the context of women. They invented algebra, they invented water management systems, the post office, the first charter for human rights, the Sarah cylinder from 5 39 BC and so much more. And so I think what’s so heartbreaking is just how this beauty was subsumed by this regressive and suppressive force, and I know America is complicit, et cetera. That’s not what this particular podcast is about.
So here’s a brief reminder and just to again, go back to it every time you sort of transcend to the next level, and a lot of these subsistence memes that I’m going to describe, you move through them in your early childhood, right? Some of them describe the states of being a newborn or in your terrible twos or in your magical age where you thought that your stuffed animals can talk. But those memes continue to be alive in us, and so we can revisit them either in times of extreme stress or as sort of celebratory moments. So beige is the beginning of humanity. It’s focused on basic survival. This is the stage of newborns, those with dementia or who are incredibly close to the ends of their life. Also, people in disaster and war zones can retreat to beige. It’s shellshocked, it’s the color beige because these are coated according to their energetic qualities, not for any other reason they don’t align with the chakras, but beige is for the Savannah grasslands.
It’s this idea of first humans just trying to survive. And then theoretically, maybe 50,000 years ago, you see the emergence of purple, which was tribal, the first tribal. It goes to that communal level with cause and effect magical beliefs that God or the spirits are unhappy. And so it is a drought. It’s that type of thinking and all for one, for all a tribal mentality. We survive together. The shean is sort of recognized as the closest to the ancestors, however it shows up. But for many of us, particularly in the West, it’s this magical mystical relationship with a world that’s much bigger than we are. And I spend a lot of time in purple. I’m sure many of you do too. If you wear lucky underwear, if you’re superstitious, if you consult tarot, that’s all very purple. Purple’s beautiful. And generally you don’t hear a lot about regressive purple actions in this world.
It’s again, communal. It’s not a devastating meme. Doesn’t have such a deep, deep shadow, but it gives way to red, which started about 10,000 years ago. This is the meme. We’re going to talk a lot about it today. This is the level of conquering pillaging strong men, futile lords. It’s risk-taking behavior. It’s race car drivers. It’s people with zero guilt in healthy developing children. It’s the terrible twos. It’s also prevalent in teenagers, particularly right before they’re ready to conform. It’s that punk. Sometimes it manifests as gangs. It’s king of the jungle, take no prisoners vibes. It can be really fun on the light side, but it’s a tough meme. I think a lot of women in particular, this was Nicole Churchill’s point, breeze through it. We don’t spend enough time. It’s another one of the selfish individual stages. And her point is that red really teaches personal power and boundary protection, and it’s important for all of us to develop that.
But red is incredibly destructive when it is not tempered by blue, which merged about 5,000 years ago. So Wilbur refers to blue as the conformist age, and it was sparked when one, we got tired of all that raping and pillaging. And two, it sparked because there was a search for larger meaning purpose, wanting to belong to something bigger than ourselves. This is the emergence of orthodox religious beliefs that there’s someone above us on high. All of the Orthodox religious beliefs are blue to a one, although you’ll see variations of them expressed at different memes. But evangelical Christians are very blue fundamentalist Islam, blue orthodox Judaism blue. Some of the reform movements of Judaism are more green, so you’ll start to recognize, but yeah, religion is blue, but there’s also a lot of secular emergence of blue as well. So it’s really all the infrastructure for being a responsible citizen and being part of something that’s larger than your own wants.
It’s law and order government rules, responsibilities, discipline, communities, and cultures really can’t effectively function without strong blue. You could say kids can’t function without strong blue. This is the disciplinarian in all of us that shows up to teach right and wrong. Blue can just get very rigid about one right way of thinking, one right way of acting, so on and so forth. And so blue of course births the next meme, which is a selfish individual meme. And this was they say 300 years ago with the enlightenment and it ushered in freedom. This is when we finally realized that we should not be enslaving each other. And it’s this idea of meritocracy. Everyone should have the right to pursue their own life and liberty and to make something out of themselves. That is the core orange belief. It also was the emergence of science rationality. Again, purple would say, oh, it’s the witches.
Blue might say that too. Who caused the plague? Orange is like, maybe it’s the fleas, right? So we owe a debt of gratitude to orange, so rationality, medicine, capitalism, all these other systems that advanced us incredibly and lifted so many people out of poverty. All this abundance and growth is at the mercy of orange, but its shadow is runaway consumption, materialism, and sometimes scientism. There’s not really anything sacred about orange. It’s much more interested in the present moment, material, reality, status, symbols and so on. And it doesn’t really concern itself with the price of all this growth. So this is eighties, right? That’s a flaming decade for orange, but you still see so much orange today amongst the technocrats really. And the Peter Thiels, the Elon Musk are very orange. It’s probably the most common meme level in America, I would guess. Alright, then we get green, which started 150 years ago, but really is, you can think about the civil rights movement, you can think about the sixties and everything that came after is the height of green. And this moment today, it’s egalitarian, it’s pluralistic, it’s inclusive.
Green is the mean level of human rights and social justice and equity and equity is very different than freedom, which they kind of actually lock horns. That’s another sidebar that I’ll do with you guys at some point, but it’s an interesting conversation. Green envisions a utopia. It just doesn’t actually have the means to pay for it. And that’s where there’s a lot of conflict. Green hates orange. It thinks orange is greedy and wasteful and responsible for so many ills, but green is paid for by the fruits of orange’s. Achievements. We wouldn’t really, you can’t have green if you don’t have otherwise thriving public. It just doesn’t emerge when you’re really in subsistence survival levels. Green is wonderful. I have a lot of green in me, but it has a deep shadow, which is that it is overwhelmed by guilt and sees everything including history through the lens of oppressors and oppressed.
Green also falls apart when it begins to exclude people who don’t share its values despite its primary value of inclusivity. And when it promotes diversity but not diversity of thought. Wilbur calls this behavior the mean green meme or regressive green. So we have seen a lot of mean green meme in the last few years and a lot of beautiful green. So before I get to the us, here is just a very brief primer just on Iran through the lens of spiral dynamics. And this is again a very brief overview. So in the seventies under s Shah Muhammad Pavi Teran was moving orange. So they were really pushing modernization and industrialization. There was a push towards science industry and materialism and even some early green human rights movement, women’s suffrage, drive for equality, et cetera. So they were sort of on par in that sense with other parts of the world.
But this clashed very deeply with the country’s deep blue meme, which was fundamentalist divine order via Shia Islam. And this fueled the red green alliance, which are not part of spiral dynamics, but they fit, which was this communion between the Islamists and the Marxist against Westernization, which was led by the Ayatollah. And this red became a red revolutionary movement, which is now referred to as the great lie over through the Shah. And the Ayatollah ascended to power and immediately put the country in an oppressive headlock ruling via red blue. So the blue asserts that there is one single absolute truth and right way for the glory of Islam. In many ways, Iran is deep, deep blue, which I know is confusing. I’m going to tell you to shore up the blue in the middle, but it’s the red enforces with terror and violence through the IRGC, the revolutionary guard.
So that’s what we’re seeing right now. But it is not a rare event and these things happen. There are these pulses throughout time and I really hope that the Iranians see freedom and there’s a move. There are a lot of people who do not like pbi, it’s so complicated, but there are many in the country calling for his return. This would be the Shaan, the C crown prince, which is really like a call to restore a different blue and in a transitional government so that it can restabilize and then move towards orange green and eventually to yellow turquoise. So that’s briefly what’s happening through spiral dynamics. So I understand that this will not be satisfying to some of you who are listening, but now let’s talk about what’s happening in the US because woo, spiral dynamics I think is really helpful. So we all can see that Trump has really regressed and there are a lot of theories as to why including cognitive or we’re seeing a further revelation of his personality and he’s less hamstrung by people in his administration who are now aiding and abetting his agenda.
But in Trump one, we’re potentially working against him. We’re also seeing evidence that his revenge addiction is just even more out of control. If you miss my episode with James Kimmel, I highly recommend listening to that. It’s about that phenomenon, but this is very different even than Trump won. So Trump is red now. He is exhibiting all the traits of a conquering feudalistic warlord gang leader. He exhibits no evidence of guilt, which is important to say. The lower memes do not feel guilt. It’s just not part of the psychological value of those memes at that point. That’s really something that happens with blue and it’s handicapping for green, but he doesn’t feel any guilt. He is exhibiting no contrition or concern, no empathy, and he is really pushing. He and his administration are pushing against the bulwark of blue to see if the fence is electrified and whether they can take it down.
That’s what they’re doing again and again. And they obviously know that there is a reckoning coming for them with the midterms. So I think we can expect this to get even worse. He does not want the midterms to happen. Do I think they will happen? Yes. Do I think America is possible to control? No, we’re massive. We’re secular. We have state governments. I think that there will be more fear and more of this, and unfortunately people are going to suffer and get hurt, but I do not think that we are going to fall. I just don’t. But he will try. So he’s going to try and co-opt blue entirely or bully it to get in line. And you obviously see this with Congress, right? They are not acting as the third arm of government. They are acting as his whipping boys. So Trump won his first term in 2016 by being orange.
I still remember friends saying, oh, you shouldn’t be worried. He’s really a Democrat. I mean, remember that he was supposed to be a businessman after all, and he played up to the blue, the evangelical Christians specifically, and the red, those who vibrate with the idea of a strong man. So Trump is incredibly good. His brilliance really is incredibly good at connecting with and mirroring the values of whatever crowd he meets. And I think this is why when people who we would expect to meet him and walk away concerned. Yeah, I remember that Bill Gates meeting where Bill Gates was like, here’s some good ideas. I can’t remember exactly what he said, but I just remember being shocked. I think Trump knows how to play to an audience and he knows how to mirror values. And he ran a campaign in 2016 that was essentially anti-green.
So he mocked and criticized the country’s more progressive streaks. You can call this anti woke. And he very effectively, and this is what I mean about all those first tier memes hating each other. He very effectively communicated why green’s vision and intention was an assault on each level’s value system. So he made it very clear to the red people that green found them barbaric, hashtag basketful of deplorables. You can say that Hillary is green orange, I would say he made a point to blue that green found blue privileged and oppressive and racist and so on and so forth. So he really hammered that in which for blue is that’s a very difficult pill to swallow. And for orange, he made it clear that green thinks that orange is greedy and responsible for ruining the world and highly, highly irrational I would add compared to orange’s, rationality.
So he just really knows how to hit those wounds. And so he really rallied people around this idea that he was this sort of anti-green candidate and he did it by speaking to the different memes in different ways. It’s really easy as we know, to stoke defensive feelings of anger and resentment. So I don’t really need to remind you all, but in the course of these two terms, he’s stacked the supreme Court, which should be is a blue institution with justices who will be loyal to him and he delivered for his evangelical Christian constituents in the process. And he’s hobbled and co-opted an institution that should be an essential check on his power. He has kept orange satisfied by being pro-business, pro-industry in every way. And he, I think really satisfied them in some ways by bringing in the ultimate orange boy, Elon Musk, right?
Peter Thiel is very orange. So I think that orange looks and says, well, he has some David Sachs whatever. These guys are like orange, orange, orange. And so he has that part of his administration covered. And as Charlottesville and January 6th illustrated, he not only allowed violence and terror from the country still read contingent, but he honored it and really gave them a seat at the table and offered them protection and immunity and accolades. And I think, and I’ve heard this from other people in the government that congressional Republicans, and I know some of them have been public about it, but the congressional Republicans, some are sort of maga red blue with a little bit of purple. That’s a whole nother thing. But congressional Republicans, let’s say the blue orange ones, the ones that are totally reasonable, are really terrified of becoming targets of red. So this is how Trump now demands their allegiance, their submission, and their obs.
It’s obviously quite clear to all of us that ice mass vigilantes to a one are red Trump army. He is recruiting proud boys people, these people are read through and through and then they’re joining a red institution and it’s clear that the sole intent is to terrorize the American public and incite violence so that he can do the insurrectionist act and send troops after us. It’s nuts. So I think if anyone had any doubts about their legitimacy, let this past week show and the point blank murder Renee Goode and the fact that they are now protecting her murderer and we’re trying to get the DOJ to investigate good’s widow instead illustrate where their allegiance is. So Trump is really working hard and his compatriots, because I think Steven Miller is essentially the shadow president at this point. He is working hard to get blue on its knees in order to come under his feudal dominion and service his agenda. And obviously he has already dismantled huge amounts of our government. He is really doing his best to bring the entire thing under his control. And he’s also, this is one of the scariest thing about, you could say this about North Korea, you can say this about Putin. Netanyahu is quite red is when they have access to orange technology. It’s quite scary. So orange technology, Palantir, grok, et all these are all part of his agenda now.
All right, so what do we do? And this is where we need to be spiral wizards. We need to shore up blue. This is really the only agenda that matters. This means that we abandon progressive green agendas for the moment. This means we’re not talking about defunding the police, we’re supporting the police. And we just really need to practically stand behind our legitimate and honorable police forces. And we need to support our military, including all of our military heroes like Senator Mark Kelly and Senator Alyssa Lockin when they reminded our troops that it’s their duty to not follow unlawful orders. We need to get behind our elected officials and justices, particularly when they stand for the constitution. We just have to buttress everything in America that fortifies our rights as Americans. We need to channel our own blue and to think blue. So again, we all have this meme in us, even if it’s not our predominant center of gravity and we need to think blue speak blue.
Blue represents a call to belong to something larger than any one of us. And this doesn’t have to be religious. Blue frequently had religious component, yes, but it also is secular. So Confucianism in China was blue. So I know we like to take things apart, we like to criticize, we want things to be better. I get it not the time. It’s all about fortifying blue right now and we speak blue again, we can do this. We know how to do this. Blue is the language of honor and obligation of service to a larger project than our own lives or ambition. It’s the birthplace and our psyches of charity concern and care through our words and actions. We can remind those of us who are regressing into red behavior or confused of their better blue natures, not through attack, but by sparking enough cognitive dissonance that they realize they’re out of step with their own values. So I was thinking the other day about my first conversation with Loretta Ross. I’m pulling the thread. She was the second guest ever where she referenced what she calls her Uncle Frank strategy, which she uses with her own family. So let’s listen to her now,
Loretta Ross:
The Uncle Frank that blows up the Thanksgiving dinner table by saying something racist because the niece is saying we shouldn’t be celebrating Thanksgiving, Columbus day and all this other stuff. And my Uncle Frank’s strategy is to first remind the person who says these hateful racist things or whatever out of their mouths of who they are. And so with my Uncle Frank, I used the tactic of saying, uncle Frank, I know you would run into a burning building to save somebody if you could. And I know you wouldn’t care about what race they were, whether they were gay, whether they were an immigrant. I know that’s who you are, uncle Frank, you’re a good man. So Uncle Frank, help me understand how I can reconcile the good man that I know you are with the words that just came out of your mind, which uncle do I actually have?
The good Uncle Frank or the Uncle Frank that says those bad things about other people. You’re not calling them in or you’re not calling them out. You’re calling on Uncle Frank to determine how he wants to walk through the world in his niece’s eyes. So you’re lessening the feeling that he’s going to feel attacked or put on the defensive because you’re asking him to self interrogate, assess, is this how I want to be seen by people or do I want to be seen in a way that’s aligns with my good opinion of myself that I have on the inside? Those are the tactics that are teachable, that are learnable through calling in practices that we can use in every conversation. Again, you go underneath the words and you see the humanity of the person who’s expressing those words and that I think neither the right nor the left does very well because we tend to pounce on what we believe a person is represented by what they said on any given time or even in the past.
ELISE:
And let me remind you that Loretta Ross rehabilitated rapists and she rehabilitated ex clans as a black woman who had been raped in her own life. She could do it. She has done this so we can learn from her. And what Loretta is doing here is she’s creating cognitive dissonance. Here’s who I think you are, honorable, brave, caring, and it is not aligning with your behavior. I think you’re the former no. So this is what we all need to be doing everywhere. Cognitive dissonance is the result of our self-perception, budding against reality and how we will do anything we can to make it go away and restore consonance with who we feel ourselves to be. If you miss my conversation with Carol TAVRs, it’s all about cognitive dissonance and self-justification. I will include it in the show notes. So I think it’s our best weapon here.
Hey Senator, I’ve known you to be the sort of person who puts country before party and stands for the rights of Americans. I’m confused by fill in the blanks. Is my perception of you wrong? Can you clarify? Can I expect to see something different from you going forward? I want to believe in who I’ve previously known you to be or Hey dad, for my whole life I’ve thought of you as my hero, someone who sticks up for the little guy and makes sure that life is fair. When I hear you saying or doing, it makes me feel like you’ve changed. I want to believe in the dad I grew up with. Can you explain how you’ve come to hold some of these beliefs, so on and so forth. It’s asking the ice officer, Hey, do your kids know that this is what you’re doing all day?
I have a feeling that you have different values for how you live your life, otherwise you wouldn’t be wearing a mask or feel like you need to hide your identity. Are you sure that what you’re doing right now is who you actually feel yourself to be? I promise this type of thing works. I recently read getting to Yes, negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, which is a classic business tax, which was first published in the eighties written by William Yuri and Robert Fisher. They created the Harvard Negotiation Project. Fisher passed in 2012, but they were both involved in Middle East Peace talks. Yuri continues to be for decades. They know how to work closely with red factions and negotiate with red. One of the things that they reiterate again and again and again in the book is to separate the people and the problem. Be hard on the problem, soft on the people.
Reminds me of my favorite John Powell quote, hard on systems, soft on people. Same thing they expound. This is from the book quote. If they feel personally threatened by an attack on the problem, they may grow defensive and may cease to listen. This is why it is important to separate the people from the problem, attack the problem without blaming the people. Go even further and be personally supportive. Listen to them with respect. Show them courtesy. Express your appreciation for their time and effort. Emphasize your concern with meeting their basic needs and so on. Show them that you are attacking the problem, not them. One useful rule of thumb is to give positive support to the human beings on the other side, equal and strength to the vigor with which you emphasize the problem. This combination of support and attack may seem inconsistent psychologically. It is. The inconsistency helps make it work a well-known theory of psychology.
The theory of cognitive dissonance holds that people dislike, inconsistency and will act to eliminate it. By attacking a problem such as speeding trucks on a neighborhood street and at the time giving the company representative Mr. Jenkins positive support, you create cognitive dissonance for him to overcome this dissonance. He will be tempted to dissociate himself from the problem in order to join you in doing something about it. I hope this helps. Before I go, this is also from Don Beck and Chris Cowan’s book, Spiral Dynamics, and I think it’s just helpful and they write, it seems so obvious, but they write this section again, this is about leadership traits of yellow and turquoise, which is what I think we all need to be right now. And they write this section about politeness in leaders and we’re just missing politeness. This book is from the nineties. I think Politeness in leaders shows genuine interest in persons.
The spiral leader respects them as human beings with the potential to develop beyond where they are. But grants some the right to be who they are adheres to the established social norms and niceties in doing what is proper in terms of honors, condolences and other personal or professional recognitions. While these may irrelevant to the leader, they matter to the other person. Politeness is a response to others’ needs on their terms, not one’s own. The polite leader respects cultural differences, strikes a good balance between interests and the lives of others and their right to personal autonomy, privacy, and freedom. The leader is concerned without being nosy or intrusive. Involvement is appropriate in degree, authentic and genuine. Not phony or contrived. Listens without becoming distracted or ego speaking yet can express personal time constraints honestly and directly such that the other person does not feel high handedly dismissed.
Alright, I hope this helps. I’ll be back with more about spiral dynamics, I promise. Alright, I’ll see you next time. If you got something out of today’s episode, I would so appreciate your help spreading the word. Please rate and review the episode, follow pulling the thread on your preferred podcast platform and share this episode with a friend who would also enjoy it. That’s how we grow this thing. It’s so helpful. Thank you.