Episode 147 - How I Make Sense of the Absolute Bullshit Going on Right Now
We are living through an incredibly intense political, social, and cultural moment, and it’s easy to fall into the despair and overwhelm of it all. In this episode, I’m sharing a framework that helps me make sense of what's happening and hold onto hope. Spiral dynamics explains how humans organize around shared value systems, and what happens when those systems collide and begin to collapse. While these transitions are often destabilizing and painful, what we’re living through is not random–and understanding the pattern offers the reminder that how we choose to show up, care for ourselves, and embody the values we want to see matters. Here’s what I cover:
The origin of spiral dynamics and how the framework can show up in everyday life
Why systems resist evolution with the same fear and violence they were established with
How the framework of spiral dynamics relates to good girl rules and people-pleasing tendencies
Why nervous system safety and connection matter alongside protest, organizing, and action during times of change
How rest, pleasure, joy, and community are not distractions, but essential tools for surviving times of massive transition
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Transcript
00:59
I want to explain something that helps me make sense of the intense political and social things that we are seeing play out in the United States, if you live here or around the world.
01:13
I explained this very poorly in a group coaching session last week with some of the graduates of my Stop People Pleasing program. And so if nothing else, this podcast is for you because it really helps me when I look at this framework called spiral dynamics to see what is happening.
01:36
And I hope it helps you too, because in a time when there is not a lot of hopeful things in the broader political and social and cultural landscape, this actually does give me some hope in the midst of everything that is so hard and so sad.
01:57
Spiral dynamics was developed by a psychologist, Claire Graves, and later expanded on by a guy named Don Beck. And I learned it by listening to and working with Richard Rohr. So let's dive in. Spiral dynamics teaches that human beings organize themselves around shared value systems.
02:19
They are deep, they're often unconscious beliefs about things like what keeps us safe, how power should work, what success looks like, and whose lives matter and matter the most. And these value systems don't emerge randomly.
02:34
They emerge in response to life's conditions. They change when life's conditions change. When the world becomes more complex, more interconnected or more aware, the old system eventually stops working.
02:52
And that might sound like a good thing, but it's actually where things get very, very intense. Let me give you a couple of examples. We can see this when we look just at parenting. When we think about how a lot of us were raised, I'm 52.
03:07
If you're younger, it might not apply. But for generations, parenting was organized around obedience. Because I said so, don't talk back. If you didn't comply, it meant you disrespected your parents.
03:22
And that kind of made sense, although it wasn't very kind, in a world that valued order, hierarchy, and control. Think about how many systems and how many organizations and communities were organized around order.
03:40
Who's in charge? Who's not in charge? Who has power? Who doesn't have power? And controlling the people in that system, right? It begins to make some sense. But then, as psychology and neuroscience and emotional awareness expand, that system started to break down.
03:59
I didn't raise my children that way. I wanted some emotional attunement and connection and consent. And I looked at the way that I, even in the beginning years of my parenting, used punishment to control.
04:16
And I didn't want to do that anymore. It didn't feel good. But there was also a backlash. You can hear in a lot of circles, you know, kids are too soft. No one respects authority anymore. We've gone too far.
04:30
And this isn't like random. It's two value systems colliding. You can see it in work culture. I mean, if you want to go back, one of the clearest examples of spiral dynamics in action throughout history is the Industrial Revolution.
04:46
As societies industrialized, a new value system took over, right? One that was focused on efficiency and profit and growth above everything else, even above humans, because humans became labor units.
05:03
Time became money and rest became laziness. And this system solved some issues, right? Mass production, economic expansion, and technological progress. But it came at an enormous human cost. People were working like 12 to 16 hours a day.
05:23
Children labored in factories. Injury and death were routine. There were no protections. There were no weekends. There were no safety nets. And eventually, the conditions became so extreme that that system could no longer sustain itself.
05:38
And that's when resistance emerged. Workers organized. They protested. They demanded limits and safety and dignity. And the system did not respond gently. It responded violently. Police and military were used to break strikes, people who were organizing.
05:58
People were jailed, injured, and killed in the name of keeping that system in place. But here is where spiral dynamics teaches us something that I think is important. Systems resist evolution with the same fear and violence that they used to establish themselves.
06:21
And yet, because life conditions demanded it, those systems did change. I mean, that's how we got the eight-hour workday and weekends and child labor laws and workplace safety standards. The system didn't collapse, it developed, but at a very big cost to the people who lived during the collision of those two value systems.
06:48
You can see it inside relationships too. Many women were raised inside a relational value system that tells us to be a good girl, be agreeable, don't rock the boat. Your job is to maintain harmony. And for a lot of years, that system, because women didn't have equal access to power and resources, kept relationships stable.
07:16
But we're not putting up with that anymore. Now women want to be seen. They want to have equal access to all the places where decisions are made. And so they're labeled difficult and rights are given and then taken away by people who don't want us to move to the next level of equality.
07:38
So again, you can see the collision of those two value systems there. And this moment feels so intense because transitions between those value systems are always destabilizing. The old way no longer works.
07:57
The new one isn't fully formed yet. Those people who are in power cling to that power. People feel afraid. They cling to certainty. They want authority. They look backward to the good old days and how things used to be so much better.
08:16
And while it makes sense, it is not easy. We are living in the middle of a global transition, and the middle is always the hardest part. One of the important, and I think this is kind of the most important teaching of spiral dynamics, is this.
08:35
You cannot shame or dominate or punish people into a new value system. That just recreates and perpetuates the old one. Evolution happens as people feel safer, when connection replaces isolation, when nervous systems can regulate, and when meaning and joy are allowed alongside marching and protesting and calling centers and doing the things that create the conditions for the new system to come into being.
09:11
If you feel crushed by the middle that we are in right now, I am with you. I feel the heaviness and the grief of this moment. And I have so much privilege and I have so such distance from this. There are people who are suffering every single day.
09:34
And we have humans who are being kept in camps. And so I want to keep in mind that my suffering is nothing like theirs. And I still suffer. Two things can be true at the same time. You are feeling the heaviness and the weight and the sadness and the grief.
09:54
I want to name something explicitly here because it matters to me. If you decide to look into spiral dynamics, you'll find that a lot of people use it in a lot of different ways. There's a wide range of interpretations and applications, and there are critiques of it that I think are not only valid, but are important to name, especially from a feminist or a racial justice perspective.
10:18
Spiral dynamics comes out of Western psychology, which carries kind of its own inherent set of values and assumptions. And one of those assumptions is the tendency to rank development as good development or bad development, better development, right?
10:35
Higher or lower. And I don't believe that that holds true across the board, especially just looking through a Western lens. One of the clearest examples of this is that Indigenous ways of knowing, deep relationship to the earth, embodiment, community, and interdependence, those ways of living and organizing have existed for centuries.
10:57
They're not new and they are not underdeveloped, right? In many ways, they hold wisdom that our kind of dominant Western way of thinking about it are only now realizing we desperately need and are so valuable.
11:13
So spiral dynamics through a Western lens can be used to dismiss or minimize less developed values as it gets defined there because they don't fit that really kind of narrow definition of what progress should look like.
11:31
That is not how I'm using spiral dynamics or how I find it to be helpful. I find it helpful as a pattern recognition tool, a way to understand that we are living in an intense moment of collision of value systems.
11:48
I don't use it to rank people or cultures. I don't use it to claim moral superiority. And I absolutely am not going to use it to bypass or to excuse harm. Because this transition time that we're living in is not abstract.
12:06
It's the death of violent systems of extraction and power, racist, misogynist, deeply entrenched systems that are trying to hang on and survive and to keep us under control. And real people are paying the price for our resistance to those systems.
12:28
Black and brown people around the world have and are bearing the brunt of this violence as they have for generations. And many white allies, people are putting their bodies, their safety, and their privilege on the line as well.
12:44
I don't want any framework, spiral dynamics or otherwise, to tidy this up or to make it sound spiritually neat. What we are living through is not clean or gentle. There is real hurt, real terror, real grief, and real loss happening right now.
13:04
So the way that I hold spiral dynamics is this. It's not an excuse. It's not a bypass. It's not a way to downplay suffering. It's a way to see a pattern clearly. And to describe that clash of values also helps me decide how I want to position myself inside of it.
13:24
Because as I embody the values that I want to see take root in the world, care, connection, dignity, mutuality. I help that transition. I'm a part of bringing that transition about. As I take care of myself and my community, I embody what I want to see in the world.
13:49
And as I stay human in the face of these dehumanizing systems, I help the transition. And what I feel like it does is it helps me be very clear-eyed about what I want to be doing and how important it is that even in the midst of all of this chaotic terror, that I hold on to the values of rest and pleasure and play and joy, because that is what I want to see more of in the world.
14:22
This framework and no framework should be used in a way that erases the pain of the moment. But I hope it offers some context and a way to understand what's happening and to ask ourselves, if we want to, the important question of, you know, given what we are living through, what role do I want to play?
14:43
What values do I want to use my life to embody and to bring more of into the world? Because it's what I want everyone to have. So while I hope that this explanation of spiral dynamics is helpful, it's very brief.
15:00
I didn't mean to go into a lot of description. You can look it up and read more if you're interested. My hope is that you can take from this episode two things. Number one, systems of values are colliding and the old one is collapsing and they collapse in the same violent manner in which they lived.
15:22
And number two, this is why rest and pleasure and laughter and community and care and dancing and joyful existence and finding beauty. They're not distractions. They are essential because this is how humans survive these kinds of transitions.
15:45
So hug someone, care for someone, care for yourself. There aren't going to be like a bunch of breathing exercises that are going to make this go away. It is going to help, like for sure, breathe and drink water and touch some grass and hug your pet.
16:06
But I hope that being clear-eyed about what is happening gives us some stamina, gives us some sturdiness, and a little bit more resilience because each of us has the opportunity to act within our sphere, to act within our privilege, to act within our limitations, and those are different for everyone, to help each other through this moment.
16:34
And that's what I hope this podcast episode offers you. A little bit of explanation, my love and my respect, and a reminder. Rest, laugh, get together with people that you love because that's how we're going to get through this.
16:54
I'll see you next week.
