This book provided me with insights about human nature like never before! This explains why people in different memes really can't communicate with each other at a deep level (especially while we are in the first tier memes). It has always been a mystery why people can't understand some things that seem so simple to me. But then again, I am sure that other people feel the same way about me. I feel I understand the yellow meme in my head but emotionally, I'm not really there yet. I've read another terrific book on this type of topic called "The Ever-Transcending Sprit" by Toru Sato that is helping me move in that direction. It looks at this from more of an interpersonal and intergroup perspective and the theory is slightly different but it helps you understand things better from a green-yellow and maybe even turqoise perspective. I guess these books are for people in the green-yellow-turqoise area. Clare Graves and his students are thinkers well beyond our time. I wish that the general public catches up to them a little bit faster than they are doing (for the sake of humanity). But then again, it is a natural process, a natural spiral.
Spiral Dynamics possesses a childish charm that is typically absent in any study of such intellectual depth. At the core, Spiral Dynamics is a heirarchical (holarchical) evolution of values, motivations and drives. These are WIDELY applicable in business, sociology, anthropology, politics, and foreign policy.
The initial theorems were concocted by the late Clare Graves, and his two predecessors Beck and Cowan have not only adapted these profound analyses to a broader (non-academic) audience, but have added a unique flavor of their own.
Now I have friends who have been mildly exposed to Spiral Dynamics, and they're immediately put off by the color scheme, with a puritanical disgust for anything with such an "unintellectual" resemblance. On top of that, the kiddie analogies even make the reader feel quite... well, admittedly juvenile at times. But the beautiful thing is, these are SERIOUS and PROFOUND discoveries with WIDE implications (as been shown by Beck and Cowan's social and cultural work around the planet); these simplistic representations of such dynamic and deep material helps the student understand the points and quickly push to deeper and more pertinent questions. For instance, instead of saying "The membership-driven meme, desiring conformity and sociocentric awareness," it's much easier to say "The Blue Meme."
On top of that, the book leaves an open-end with the mathematical structure of the spiral which has interesting implications as far as patterns of evolution are concerned (in whatever medium they occur).
Enough of the mumbo-jumbo, highly recommended.
