"empowerment" is a disempowering concept

[Winston Kinch]

Or, for a short SD intro, go here...
http://www.spiraldynamics.com/reviews/SD/SDreview_Dinan.htm
Winston

----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Roberts" <proberts at SPIRALPARTNERS.COM>
To: <OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU>
Sent: Saturday, May 18, 2002 3:51 PM
Subject: Re: "empowerment" is a disempowering concept


> 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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