First Tier vMemes
Subsistence or Survival vMemes
Beige vMeme
SurvivalSense
Automatic state of existence driven by physiological needs, and based upon instinctive intelligences and heightened sensory systems. Staying alive through access to Food Water and Safety is the primary value.
Emerged: 100,000 years ago
Typical Governing Structures:
Survival bands, Clans
Examples in history: Early
humans
Current examples: Kalahari
Bushmen, Street people, Survival emergencies
In individuals: ~0-2 years
of age
Population: ~0.1%
Power: ~0%
Purple vMeme
Kin Spirits
Created through population pressures due to success of previous memetic, populations started to compete for resources and territory, and these new pressures facilitated the development of tribal affiliations and identities.
In the Purple vMeme, the world becomes a magical, mystical place, with new capacities for emotional attachment to places and objects a new capacity in the subject-object relationship allowing new connections to be drawn to events and natural phenomena. Spirituality is characterised by magical beliefs, superstitions and fear/worship of nature spirits. Sense of time is very different - and sense of timeless coexsistence with ancestors spirits who inhabit the world - good and evil. Ancient grudges are remembered for hundreds of years.
Emerged: 70,000 - 35,000 years ago
Typical Governing Structures: Tribal, Clan
Examples in history: Pagan tribes, Druids
Current examples: Australian Aboriginals, Astrology, Cargo Cults (Video) (Purple vMeme meets Orange vMeme)
In individuals: ~2-7 years of age
Population: ~5%
Power: ~1%
Red vMeme
PowerGods
Again combined with the success of the previous cultural wave and in response to the collective enclosure and eventually suffocating unindependant nature of tribal exsistence, a new individuated sense of self emerges - impulsive, heroic, and egocentric. Characterised by displays of power and prestige (e.g. now:Bling, historically:huge overindulgent feasts) Enjoys self to the fullest without guilt or remorse and will go to great lengths to avoid shame or embarrassment. Values power and might and rewards loyalty and ability.
Historically, the Red stage of development seemed to rise in conjunction with new military technologies and/or strategies like bronze age weaponry, horse and chariot warfare. Suddenly old tribal boundaries didn't need to be acknowledged. Powerful individuals could just step out and take control.
New kinds of Gods with individuated personalities (unlike nature gods) and a passion for war. - E.g. the Norse gods - are associated with this memetic.
Emerged: 10,000 years ago
Typical Governing Structures: Cheifdoms, Warlords, Feudal Empires, Ghengis Khan practiced Meritocracy
Examples in history: Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, The Vikings
Current examples: Hip-hop and Gangsta rap, African warlords
In individuals: ~8-15 years of age
Population: ~15%
Power: ~5%
Blue vMeme
TruthForce
A collectively oriented stage of values and thinking and the fruit of the axial age. Usually developed in reaction to the violence and havoc created by Red. Blue introduces a sense of absolutistic and transcendant meaning and purpose, introducing concepts of right and wrong, and capacity to feel guilt, which did not exist before this meme. Values order and stability through hierarchy and obedience. Introduces codes of conduct, sense of honour and chivalry. Introduced other capacities such as compassion for others - "Do to others as you would have them do to you"
New capacity for transcendant thought as monotheistic Gods become abstract all encompassing beings separate from the world - as took place in Judaism and Islam and other faiths.
Emerged: ~5000 years ago? I'm
using the SD version of events here, however as I understand it the
very first known version of this stage appeared in the mind of Zoroaster,
an Arayan priest around abouts 1200 B.C.
Typical Governing Structures: Nation
state, bureacracy
Examples in history: Zoroastorism,
Judaism, Roman Empire, Christianity, Confucian china
Current examples: Fundamentalist Christians, Totalitarianism, extreme patriotism and ethnocentrism
In individuals: Adults (Generally high school and onwards)
Population: ~40%
Power: ~30%
Orange vMeme
StriveDrive
Resulting from a desire to get away from the conformity and dictates of blue values. Orange is again individualistic, innovative, entrepreneurial. Concerned with achievement and trying to improve things through ingenuity and the belief that humans can create their own future and a better world by controlling and manipulating it.
Amazing developments like the invention of empirical science, capitalism, the industrial revolution and democracy came from this new stage of values. Orange tends to be materialistic and rationalistic and reductionist.
New found respect for individual freedom, as expressed in the American Constitution.
Emerged: ~450 years ago, though
it could seriously be argued that it first emerged with the Ancient
Greeks and was lost.
Typical Governing Structures: Corporate
state, Multinationals, NGO's, Meritocracy, Democracy
Examples in history: Colonialism, Copernicus,
Galileo, Christopher Columbus
Current examples: Bill Gates and Microsoft, Sir Richard Dawkins
In individuals: Adults (Generally college and onwards)
Population: ~30%
Power: ~50%
Green vMeme
HumanBond
Success in Orange creates a greater pool of wealth and standards of living. New individual freedoms allow a collective concern for community and multiculturalism to emerge. Green worldviews are marked by pluralism - the ability to see that there are multiple ways of seeing reality. Green is also strongly anti-hierarchical - a trait that tends to become quite a destructive factor from the point of view of Spiral Dynamics, (the mean Green meme - more on this in subsequent articles).
This stage of development has a heart and soul for humanity that tends to be missing in Orange, promoting a sense of community and unity. Green has given birth to civil rights, feminist, and gay rights movements, as well as environmentalism and a new ecological sensitivity.
Green meme refreshes spirituality, bringing harmony and aims to enrich the human potential. Green spirituality is about unity and is nondenominational.
Emerged: ~150 years ago
Typical Governing Structures: Consensus,
Reconciliation, Democracy, NGO's
Examples in history: Martin Luther King
Current examples: Postmoderism, animal rights, ecofeminism, political correctness, human rights issues
In individuals: Adults (Generally college and onwards)
Population: ~10%
Power: ~15%
Second Tier vMemes
Human "Being" vMemes
A very important thing to understand about the first tier vMemes, is they don't understand each other, and actively reject any other mode of values that is not their own. This has amounted to no less then the greatest Cold War that ever existed - 1st Tier Warfare. Most of us are unaware of it, as these distinctions about waves and stages of consciousness and values have been invisible until only recently. More on this later (Part III).
Towards the end of his research,
Clare Grave identified what seemed to be a new cohort of individuals
who were thinking in entirely new ways. The most marked difference was
a distinct absence of fear which marks all of the 1st Tier
memes. Graves described the leap to 2nd Tier as a "momentous
leap". In this new stage of consciousness, human beings are able to
perceive and cognise in completely new ways. There is an understanding
the essential role that all the different 1st tier memetics
play, whilst grounded in a new set of values for human "being" and
a cosmic context, rather than the animal and social needs of 1st Tier survival.
Yellow vMeme
FlexFow
The Yellow worldview develops the insights of the green worldview, pulling them into a larger context that perceives hierarchies, systems and paradoxes and is based around a concern for magnificence of existence. Values Flexibility and functionality, natural flows and natural orders.
Emerged: ~50 years ago
Typical Governing Structures: Chaordic, hotdesking (hotdesking?... er - Yes, Hotdesking - the cutting edge
of 21st century governance!)
Current examples: Chaos Theory, Complexity
Theory, Integral Philosophy, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela
Population: ~1%
Power: ~5%
Turquiose vMeme
GlobalView
Holistic, intuitive thinking in this stage sees everything as connected in a mesh of ecological relations, social and biological and spiritual. Unites feeling with knowledge with multiple levels woven into on conscious system of values. Self is distinct and also part of a larger whole.
Emerged: ~30 years ago
Typical Governing Structures: Holonic hierarchies in flexible collectives? Formal structures of global governance, distinct from any nation or group of nations?
Current examples: Integral practitioners?
Population: ~0.1%
Power: ~1%