Beige/Grey: When your society is primitive and vulnerable, there might be a bias to view the foreigner/stranger/“other” as dangerous. This is a xenophobic bias that leads to a blind spot of being less able to identify when a stranger might be beneficial to your group.
Purple: When your culture evolves some superstition, the stranger becomes mysterious – perhaps his arrival is a sign from the gods, for good or ill – approaching more nuance. This bias has a blind spot in romanticizing the stranger. For example, when the conquistadors arrived from Spain in central America, they had a superstitions bias to view these white men as the return of their white skinned God. Their bias failed to properly alert them to the dangers of the stranger.
Red: When shamanistic tribes evolve into militaristic states, honor becomes connected to strength, despicableness becomes connected to weakness. The fact that neighboring states are vulnerable to invasion is evidence that they are weaker and therefore morally inferior, hence deserving of masters to conquer them. This is reminiscent of the “master morality” proclaimed by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. So, under this zeitgeist there is a bias to view the foreigner as weak. One blind spot of this ideology is the be unable to see the value of humanity despite weakness. They might have views that the weak don’t deserve to live, and so they are against social safety net policies. Another blind spot might be due to the elevation of honor as being more important than life itself, leading to reduction in wellbeing. This leads to honor killings and honor suicides.
Blue: When your militaristic state begins to grow into a vast empire, the stability of the nation becomes dependent on a religious ethos to unite the states under one moral code. This religious superstructure becomes a symbol of authority that all the states must look to with reverence and obedience. Any who defy the authority of the religious superstructure must be inherently evil, since goodness is now defined in connection with allegiance to (or faith in) this moral authority. This then creates the bias to view the foreigner as evil. The blind spots of this ideology are to be unable to see when their moral authority makes the wrong decision. They are also less able to see the good within a foreign culture, since goodness is necessarily defined in relation to consistency with their religious culture.
Orange: During the Enlightenment, philosophy and science were growing as the Gutenberg revolution was starting to have a exponential impact on the growth of knowledge. A new worldview began to immerge – a worldview that empowered the individual with rights, freedoms, dignity, equality, and participation in government. The individual should no longer be subject to the authority of a theocracy, but he should be his own center of moral authority. Out of this philosophy grew a type of economic freedom that empowered individuals to own property, procure labor, and grow their industry without a king or a church getting in the way. Unfortunately, this worldview wasn’t enlightened enough to apply their vision of equality to all races, sexes, or nations equally. Under this paradigm, foreigners could be viewed as economic opportunities. Whether it was colonialism, searching for resources, slavery, trade, or finding cheap labor abroad, the stranger now, more than ever, had economic value. So, the fundamental bias of this zeitgeist was to view the stranger as an opportunity. The blind spots for this worldview might be the inability to see strangers as more than just an opportunity.
Green: In the 20th century a new zeitgeist began to emerge – a belief in the importance of applying our philosophy of human rights, dignity, and equality more equally. This produced a civil rights era in America. It led to discussions on sexuality and LGBT rights. While this zeitgeist produced a lot of good, it led to an unfortunate side effect – a philosophy of moral relativism – where all cultures and all moralities are equally respectable. By elevating the value of equality as high as it could go, they sacrificed the ability to judge the moral quality of different systems. So, the fundamental bias of this worldview was to view everything as equal, and anyone who disputes this principle is classified as evil. If this wasn’t enough, this zeitgeist also formulated another epistemology – any statistic to be found within society that doesn’t spread equally among the groups is a sign of oppressive groups leveraging their power to statistically favor their group over others. This reductionistic view led to the vilification of “oppressor” groups, and the veneration of “oppressed” groups. The blind spots of this ideology are to be unable to acknowledge the weaknesses or problems in certain cultures or religions, and the inability to see factors other than oppression that might influence statistics.
Yellow: Only recently has a new zeitgeist been emerging: the integral perspective – the idea that each phase of development has its purpose, its strengths and its weaknesses. The integral perspective tries to have empathy with all the stages of development and tries to find ways to aggregate the strengths of each phase while minimizing the weaknesses. It is an ethos of synthesis and dialectic. It looks to transcend via inclusion, not exclusion. It is on the forefront of the consciousness of many public intellectuals. Integral thinkers embrace the empathy of green while rejecting its relativism. Integralists understand the importance of making judgements and therefore hierarchies can and should be established by measuring attributes. This inspires integralists to think in systemic ways – how to make the world better by fixing the ways systems work. So, under this paradigm, the stranger is a partner in the effort to fix global systems. The basic bias of this zeitgeist might be to believe that everything is systemic, overestimating the importance of systems. In fact, they might evolve a moral ethic of systemic guilt – taking the slippery slope in believing that knowingly committing actions that might produce negative systemic consequences is inherently evil. They might also have a bias to believing that everything has an element of goodness that needs to be synthesized. And when it comes to the stranger – they may think that treating the “other” as a partner is good enough.
Cyan/Turquoise: The highest level of perspective shown in this Spiral Dynamics chart is the holistic worldview. It brings a balanced perspective between natural systems and human systems. It brings in the importance of all the stakeholders involved in different issues, even the non-human stakeholders. It aims for sustainable healthy systems for all, from a place of love. Under this worldview, humans are more than partners with each other – we are brothers and sisters. This is often the highest standard of love that religions have been trying to inspire us towards for millennia. The biases of this system might be to fail to know how to manage a “brother” that is morally out of line – love becoming a weakness. When this holistic perspective healthily integrates all of the perspectives before it, they can draw upon wisdom from the lower levels in order to correct for their weaknesses.