"empowerment" is a disempowering concept

[Paul Roberts]

I wonder how many here are familiar with the book "Spiral Dynamics", by Don
Beck and Chris Cowan, both students of the late Clare W. Graves.  It's
become an important idea for Wilber, and there is currently a lot of cross
pollination between SD which has (currently) 8 Levels of psychosocial
development and Wilber's 4 quadrants:  thus the Wilbeckian's (as some wags
call them) use the term 4Q/8L as shorthand for their conceptualizations.

The reason I mention that here is that a key premise of Graves is quite
divergent from some of what I am hearing here...ideas that there is (for
example) something wrong with command and control environments, or
conceptualizing about a relationship where one entity empowers another.

>From the SD framework, that idea itself is actually very disempowering
because it de-legitimizes the developmental diversity that undergirds the
global spiral of development which we all take part in.  In that sense, SD
provides a lens for a much more ethnographic and anthropological
examination.

SD recognizes that social structures, like individuals, pass through,
various stages in a spiraling towards whatever maturity is, and that their
place on the Spiral is not static...there might be some kind of centering
around one level, but there is a flowing quality, just as there is in our
own lives.  It looks at what works for what social groups, when and
why...and when does the group get stuck in its level, and/or move up or
down on the spiral.

There is also a process that the social structure goes through to move
through the levels:  entering, consolidating and exiting.

A key point of the whole approach involves respecting that the social
structure's place in the spiral and its process of moving through the
spiral is entirely appropriate.  It is epochal in scope, recognizing that a
social structure NEEDS time to complete it's integration at one level
(which may include periods of being arrested) before moving onto another.

According to Beck and Cowan, this kind of vision is a critical kind of
awareness if one wishes to be a SPIRAL WIZARD rather than just a CHANGE
WIZARD.  Beck and Cowan elaborate on the differences between the two early
in the book...and when I first read it I realized that part of my own
stuckness was in seeing life out of the eyes of a change wizard rather than
the eyes of a spiral wizard.

Here's a bit of spiral wizard talk from what I believe is the world's
oldest extant books of spirit:

When people see some things as beautiful,
other things become ugly.
When people see some things as good,
other things become bad.

Being and non-being create each other.
Difficult and easy support each other.
Long and short define each other.
High and low depend on each other.
Before and after follow each other.

Therefore the Master
acts without doing anything
and teaches without saying anything.

Things arise and she lets them come;
things disappear and she lets them go.
She has but doesn't possess,
acts but doesn't expect.

When her work is done, she forgets it.
That is why it lasts forever.

Releasing those kinds of labels (beautiful, ugly, good, bad, etc) has been
one of SD's gifts to me.  It's created a real shift in my own head, and a
deeper willingness than I had before to accept without judgement (or
anywhere near as much judgement, anyway) the current state of affairs as I
look (for example) at the vast majority of first world government, ngo and
for-profit institutions, or (another example) at the way life works inside
a country that is set up as a fundamentalist theocracy.

Instead of seeing them in such negative terms (the Emperor's new clothes
metaphor sums up my prior view), I've come to see them in terms of where
they are on the Gravesian SD model.  And it's not that I don't take account
of how soul-deadening life can be in an organization that is stuck in a
command-control paradigm (I lived in a Dilbert world for 15 years!), or how
terrible it can be for women (I have two daughters!) to live in a society
that institutionally deprives them.

The shift in my perspective SD provided has opened me up in new ways to
contemplating and conceptualizing how I might creatively play with these
structures right there where they are NOW, rather than trying to overtly
impose my own kind of change agenda upon them...or (even less useful)
getting caught up in some of the other emotional reactions I had had
previously:  inward rejection, even disgust at the current stuckness of
many organizations; a sense of having either to "fight the power", or
retreat entirely from the front lines where much of life is lived.  Those
of you who have read Dee Hock's saga, Birth of the Chaordic Age, will
remember his own struggle at this very juncture:  how reluctant he was to
get involved in the world again, for just those kinds of reason, after
leaving VISA.

If you haven't yet read Spiral Dynamics, I can't recommend it too highly.
My very brief explanation here is entirely inadequate to the richness it
has not just as metaphor, but as meta-metaphor...a paradigm shifter for us
paradigm shifters.

Best,
Paul Roberts

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