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Social Evolution?
Posted by Joseph Riggio on Thursday, November 06, 2008Noticing what’s going on around you is important ... knowing what’s going on that determines what you notice about what’s going on around you is even more important. With the election of Barrack Hussein Obama this past Tuesday the whole game is about to change. Not like you’re used to ... not like it did during the transition in any American Presidency in the entire twentieth century or even in the first transition leading into the twenty-first century ... this transition will rock the foundations of society as America has defined it since it’s inception in the late part of the eighteenth century!
And ... only those who are ready ... those who know precisely what they are looking for ... are likely to prosper in this brave, new world.
More than you could have ever believed it we are about to enter the Age of Aquarius ... and I’m not just singing “Dixie.”
Good day,
I was somewhere over the eastern Atlantic Ocean when the networks proclaimed Barrack Hussein Obama, "King Elect" ... er, excuse me, "President (Elect)" ... or at least that how it sounded when I finally heard the news upon landing.
I think it's a good day for America (for some of you that's the United States of America, but for all of us who live there and many others who are "old school" just America is enough to make my point clear), and also for the world-at-large. All in all I think Barrack Obama's a good man for the job, and the best man for the job today (given the choices both leading up to the election and for the final election itself). Not that I thought that John McCain wouldn't have been a good President as well, I think he would have ... but it's a question of "fit and match" for me as some of you who read me regularly might already know.
One perspective about how to make a choice like who should be the next President would be, "What can I get from his/her presidency (for myself)." In other words, "What's in the goodie bag they're holding out for me personally." This seems to be a function of what some are calling, "The Shallowest Generation" referring to the boomers and post-boomers.
"I hate to tell you Boomers, but putting a yellow ribbon on the back of your $50,000 SUV is not sacrifice. Our claim to fame is living way beyond our means for the last three decades, to the point where we have virtually bankrupted our capitalist system. Baby Boomers have been occupying the White House for the last sixteen years. The majority of Congress is Baby Boomers. The CEOs and top executives of Wall Street firms are Baby Boomers. The media is dominated by Baby Boom executives and on-air stars. We have no one to blame but ourselves for the current predicament. Blaming Franklin Roosevelt or Lyndon Johnson for our dire situation is a cop out. Baby Boomers had the time, power, and ability to change our course. We have chosen to leave the heavy lifting to future generations in order to live the good life today."
from: THE SHALLOWEST GENERATION by James Quinn, November 3, 2008
Looking at it from the outside it would appear that this disease of "Boomeritis" has infected most of the industrialized world as we know it. For years the high-end luxury retail market has soared. In fact it was presumed by most "savvy" investors that the luxury retail market was on an unending roll of every increasing growth. There's even a Luxury Marketing Council who's founder and chair Greg Furman has been touting as recently as the beginning of this year the immunity and selectivity of the luxury market ... a market flooded by boomers who want to have a part of the "good life" that's on offer there.
Yet, now we are hearing about another possibility, that in the wake of the most recent economic crisis even the luxury market may be showing signs of failing alongside other retail sectors. The idea that luxury buyers may be price conscious after all is almost heresy in that market space. However, at the very same time the ultra-luxury market continues to grow and maintain it's strength despite the crashing portfolios of so many boomers who thought they were impervious to the economic realities of the ordinary blue collar workers out there.
The references in politics will always be the social/culture form as it has been experienced and as it is intended to become. In other words what I'm suggesting is that politics is an expression of both the perceptual experience and desire of those with political power. When we're talking about a democracy then the power is held by the voters, especially before the election whereas afterwards they apparently lose a significant amount of their ability to impose their power without relatively extreme measures being taken to do so.
It seems that in the latest U.S. presidential election that has just occurred we witnessed the intersection of the late bloom of boomeritis with the political process. Essentially, what the boomers have wrought is not what they find they want now that they have it. The desire to have an ever growing economy left unchecked has produced effects like:
All told the current election process and the result against the current social/cultural backdrop are not surprising to an astute observer. Not that there were any guarantees that it had to go the way that it has, but surely in hindsight the results make perfect sense all around, i.e.: systemically. One of the filters I use most often when I am observing social/cultural forms has become the Graves Model as developed by Dr. Clare W. Graves. Essentially a model of human bio-social evolution that I have written and spoken about extensively elsewhere, including on this blog (E.g.: Burning Desire to Change the World - Part I and Burning Desire to Change the World - Part II).
To get the backdrop of the Graves Model I recommend you go back and read the two postings I referred to above. However the basic idea is that as we have advanced our social/cultural forms we have done so in alignment with our biology as humans. This is what Dr. Graves referred as a "The Emergent, Cyclical, Double-Helix Model Of The Adult Human Biopsychosocial Systems" you gotta love that name!!! What he actually said was that as people continue to interact socially they advance the social model they are using which gives them greater access to their full biological neuro-potential. Literally that we can use more of the potential of our brains as we advance socially. Another way of saying this is that more sophisticated social models demand greater brain resources to be used to operate them and this loop between demand and opportunity gives us access to the potential that is present but had been previously unrealized.
Essentially, what Dr. Graves is offering us is a way to consider a different way of thinking about evolution:
Humans with our sophisticated and complex social systems demand us to access more of our latent neuro-potential ... such that the extremely sophisticated and complex socio-cultural systems we have evolved have allowed us to continue to advance to our biological evolution alongside our socio-cultural systems in tandem step-by-step .... not by altering the our gross physical anatomy but by allowing us to gain access to the resources contained in our existing gross physical anatomy, and that process continues in an ongoing way even today.
So rather than human evolution being something that ceased in any significant way 100,000 years ago or more human evolution has continued in an externalized way through the advancement of our socio-cultural systems. Literally, the suggestion is that purely biological evolution allows the species that are physically evolving to better cope with the demands placed on them by the environments they occupy. In the same way:
Graves biopsychosocial, emergent cyclical double-helix, systems are an external form of evolution that humans have adopted allowing us, by virtue of evolving our socio-cultural systems, to better cope with the environments we occupy ... including those we are creating, e.g.: the global economy.
Dr. Graves designed his model delineating significant shifts in the values that people occupying various levels of socio-cultural systems utilize. These values determine both what information in the environment a person utilizing them will tend to notice as well as how they will construct and assign meaning to that information. The meaning assigned to information in the environment determines the behavioral responses that emerge and the outcomes that people will produce as a result. Simplified what Dr. Graves has organized is a model that delineates how people produce the specific outcomes in the environments they occupy, and why different groups of people create different kinds of outcomes in different environments based on the value set they are operating from at any given moment.
IMO what we are now witnessing is a shift in the United States of America from utilizing Graves Level Five values as the default socio-cultural system to a Graves Level Six value set as the default operating system. Using the outline of the Graves Model to describe this shift it could be said that the United States of America has been operating from a system that seeks and rewards opportunity, while simultaneously allowing the rewards to accumulate to the most efficient operator in the system in terms of exploiting the opportunities present, what Dr. Graves referred to as Level Five. I'm referring to a new shift to where 1) the total resources in the system are distributed as broadly as possible, 2) access to the system's resources is created for as many people as possible and 3) the total resources available in the system are expanded by exploiting technology to increase the leverage of the resources throughout the system-at-large ... what Dr. Graves refers to in his model as Level Six.
It seems that the most recent election in the United States of Barrack Obama as President-Elect is a Graves Six response (especially when you compare what would have had to have been true to elect John McCain based on his campaign messages). This is a monumental socio-cultural shift for the United States of America ... and the entire world given the social, economic and military prominence of the United States of America on the global scene. From where I'm sitting the election of President-Elect Obama has changed the entire playing field and only those who are ready to play at the next level up in the game will prosper when the impact of the shifts that are coming begin to emerge.
Fundamentally, I say all of this coming out of a position where I've been putting the greatest force of my attention on the nature of these socio-cultural forms for the better part of a decade now. Using the models I was introduced to by Roye in my years of apprenticing with him, including hundreds of hours discussing the impact of his work in terms the effect of that work within socio-cultural systems, as well as the material I've been studying and using since I've build an enormous base from which to pursue this particular fascination of mine ... as well as to bring my expertise to my clients worldwide. All in all I'd say these are indeed most interesting times!!!
Best regards,
Dr. Joseph Riggio, Social Ontologist
Holte, Denmark
THERE'S STILL TIME TO REGISTER!
Jump Into 2009 With A Running Start ... join Joseph at either of both of the PERSONAL ENHANCEMENT workshops he's presenting this December
I’ll be presenting the last Personal Enhancement programs this year in England on December 8th, and then again in Barcelona on December 10th. Both programs are limited to only ten people each, and are almost always in high demand. This is the only public program I run where I work privately with people in a group format. For a full day I work on issues that the participants want me to work with them on, deliver a ton of material of creating exquisite performances in relation to the issues that come up, and have no agenda whatsoever except delivering on the requests participants bring into the room.
Essentially what I’m doing is hours of private work that I normally charge ten times the amount of what this program fee is for the entire day! If you’re interested give Nancy a call at +1/609-275-1845 or email her at nsriggio@josephriggio.com for full program details and to register.
As always I take participants into these programs on a first come, first serve basis and when I have ten in each program the doors will close for 2008! If you know that you want to kick off 2009 running you can even come to both programs, in England and in Spain, and pay half the normal program fee for the second program ... but please act now ... call or email Nancy today ... I hate having to turn people down because we’ve overrun the room and you’ve asked me too late.
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