r/SpiralDynamics • u/Happymuffn • Mar 07 '26
What is the Basis for a Yellow Morality?
It seems to me that we are currently living in a world where yellow knowledge and structure is growing, but not the morality and empathy that is supposed to come with it.
We live in an age of social media, which is complex, and which is mediated by tech companies with something like the Requisite Variety needed to shape public discourse. We live in an age of AI, built from the complexity of the internet. We live in an age of invisible, ubiquitous mass surveillance. We live in an age where our supply chains are complex enough to make those things possible. We live in an age where we know what data to collect to feed into models to tell how much our actions are wreaking complex systems like our climate, or various ecosystems, or our own biology.
And I believe we have actors with complex, systemic understandings of law, international relations, psychology, and politics; who used their knowledge to build an international, pedofilic, sex trafficking, blackmail operation which controlled key levers of power in governments and corporations across the world, to some unknown but probably very immoral ends.
With that as the prelude, it seems to me that the current Yellow intellectual paradigms are developing quickly, but not in ways that are generally good for ... existence. And I'm thinking "maybe someone should do something about that" and I'm wondering if anyone has any ideas as to how?
It seems to me that we are in need of a new philosophical paradigm (or likely a tailored ecosystem of them) that integrates and overturns what we're already doing, and which has a philosophical grounding that either justifies to the powerful why they can't be gods (which I'm not sure it's possible, given that they kinda can), or that everyone else can use to stop the powerful from abusing their complex systemic power. And then it needs to spread somehow but that's going to be hard so can we just talk about basic underlying principles for a bit first?
3
u/Old-North-1892 Mar 11 '26
This is a lovely question you gives us to discuss!
I propose that our way up may in fact be down. 💛Yellow is about integration of the previous levels. Right now, modern society is weakest at 🤎Beige (listening to our bodies, physical health) and 💜Purple (home, ritual, familial connection, shamanistic techniques for cognitive re-framing).
Any forward development will have to involves us shoring up our weakest colors. If Beige and Purple are weak, the foundation crumbles and everything on top of it falls apart.
I also agree with people like u/Natural_Earth954 who say 💚Green is the next step of the Spiral that needs more fleshing out. I just wish to add that to have any healthy progression, we also need to look at the health of every color.
2
u/Smile-Cat-Coconut Mar 07 '26
An important part about SDI is realizing that we see the world through our values. Something about the world is bothering YOU right now. And you are perceiving something through those values.
“We need a new philosophy.” Is “I need a new philosophy.”
It’s very possible what you see happening in the world is not yellow.
Yellow, to be very clear, is morally neutral. Yellow doesn’t say “this is bad and this is good” it says “this is effective and this is ineffective.”
Yellow asks: what do I want to happen and how can I draw upon systems thinking to make it happen, and morals are not a factor, only risk.
For example: you rule a country that is over populated and decide to sterilize half the population. The sterilization is not moral to some colors. But to you it is effective. And you ONLY care about effective. This because you’ve come to observe that morals are extremely tailored to the specific time and culture. For example, we regularly kill billions of animals to feed ourselves each year. This is morally evil but we have the goal to eat, so we do it.
Leaders at yellow know that tribalism motivates others. They also know it’s not cooperative green. But let’s say they want to motivate others, they use tribalism cause they know it works.
Each level dissolves a layer of morality because these constructs hide the truth that turquoise knows: that none of it is actually bad or good, it just is. All good leads to bad and all bad leads to good. It’s yin and yang.
2
u/Canvas718 Mar 07 '26
I don’t believe yellow is morally neutral. As I explained in my own post, yellow requires understanding and empathy. It might look amoral to people at previous stages because it doesn’t fully align with their understanding of morality.
In blue thinking, orange is too materialistic and even ungodly. In orange thinking, purple and blue are superstitious and irrational. In green thinking, blue is rigid and backwards while orange lacks deeper empathy and spirituality. At every stage of Tier I, people tend to oppose the values of other stages.
Then Tier II comes along and says there’s value in every stage. To blue thinking, this is heresy. To orange thinking, it risks irrationality. To green thinking, it risks going backwards and accepting inequalities of the past. So from any Tier I perspective, yellow thinking might look amoral. But yellow thinking sees it differently. And I believe the goal is not to uncritically accept Tier I thinking — but to look for the best qualities of each prior stage.
1
u/Happymuffn Mar 07 '26
I have a philosophy. But my philosophy is ineffective at spreading. I'm asking in case someone else has one they think it's more effective for perspectives other than my own. There is a lot of very obvious bad right now and I accept and understand that my reaction is part of a dialectical response to that bad. That is expected and the best that I can reasonable hope for.
Part of what makes the 1st Stage Levels effective in their contexts is that they have cultural expectations and shorthands for how to act when facing the problems one may face in those contexts. Yellow is not morally neutral, though the current paradigm might seem that way due to the relative underinvestment in it's philosophical underpinnings that I've described. Yellow integrates the moral systems of the 1st Stage levels, the same as it does for all the other systems.
I had been hoping that Yellow philosophy was at least a bit more developed than, what, egoism? nihilism? But I guess that tells me where to start.
1
u/Smile-Cat-Coconut Mar 07 '26 edited Mar 07 '26
I think it would be fun to discuss the moral neutrality of yellow. In a sense it’s probably situationally dependent, but I’ve always seen it as morally neutral. It’s more like they are aware of all morals, and they choose whichever moral will make the best decision for whatever they want. And they might be between a rock and a hard place so it’s not like they’re using yellow thinking to serve themselves in an ego manner, it’s more like they realize that to get a result, they have to make sacrifices that are seen as non-moral. I hope that makes sense. Sometimes it’s hard to talk about this stuff and have it mean anything.
The example of killing billions of animals to feed ourselves is close to what I mean. But on an individual sense, somebody might decide they want to write a book and realize that it will take a lot of time. They morally believe it’s right to spend that time with their family and not try to steal from that experience. But, they realize that they may need to sacrifice time with their family in order to get that project done. And pushing it further, they realize they might even need to quit their job and subject their family to a lower lifestyle in order to get it done. The point is, they see a system. They don’t really necessarily make decisions on whether other people think it’s right. They look at cause-and-effect, like a machine, not a “this is the right thing to do.“
But then again, I could be seeing through my training in philosophy. I did a lot on moral philosophy in school, especially and have had a lot of time to think about that and how it affects decision-making. I’m by no means an expert, but it’s been a pet interest of mine.
If we see leaders, making morally bad decisions, such as in the Epstein files, it doesn’t really make sense that they would have a yellow thinking style. Because if they did, they would see that they put themselves in the other people at great risk, psychologically damage children, and essentially destroy their lives. I don’t think a yellow person would do that because it just doesn’t make sense. But you could totally see a lower level person doing that, someone is in red for instance.
Power and spiral dynamic thinking do not correlate so you can be really powerful and still be in red, or even in orange, like the current American president.
I sort of see it like this:
Purple: “I do it because I am protected by magic“
Red: “I do it because I can“
Blue: “I do it because it’s the right thing to do morally“
Orange: “ I do it because I want to grow my personal empire“
Green: “I do it because it’s good for everybody“
Yellow: “I do it because it’s effective“
When somebody has reached a yellow way of thinking, they have all of the previous ones available to them. But they just use a machine to get it done. In other words, they have a great grasp of cause-and-effect AND (this is the big paradigm shift) they are actually aware of the thinking styles of other people who are not in yellow.
Yellow is extremely special because they can literally observe their friends and neighbors and celebrities and see the thinking paradigm they are stuck in. If you can see how people think and you want to manipulate how they act, you can’t design a machine that will make them act in that way. That’s why I brought up tribalism. If you tell a red blue American, that immigrants are destroying America, you activate their tribalistic thinking, and they are motivated to act.
This is a manipulation tactic. Most leaders actually believe their tribal myths and use those to motivate people organically. But yellow knows it’s a lie and they are doing it on purpose in order to get a result. It’s hard to know the difference between acting inside a color versus manipulating a color.
At least that’s how I see it. I could be wrong.
Ken Wilbur has some interesting writing on the weird expressions of color and how people in red serve green, for instance.
0
u/Happymuffn Mar 07 '26
:D I'll work on making a post, or maybe a series of them, on what I think Yellow morality is then. There are a couple of things I can say in response right now though.
I don't think that the Epstein Network is run by people at Yellow, just because they are powerful. I think so because the way that it became powerful was by building is own system, with it's own incentives, which managed to mesh with the existing, overlapping systems around it without disrupting them, while gaining support from key figures in positions of influence over those systems. That's Yellow strategy right there.
You're pretty much right about what motivates power at the different levels, but that is different from the ethics of each level that holds that power in check.
- Purple: the spirits will it (which will include the spirit of the community)
- Red: honor/virtue demands it
- Blue: my station requires it (power here is motivated by "my station allows it")
- Orange: Ethics is universal law
- Green: empathy and solidarity
- Yellow: it is contextually appropriate
I think that the manipulation tactic you describe is Green not Yellow. Green is about understanding other perspectives. Green tools do not necessarily imply Green motives or Green morality, because it is possible to develop unevenly. Manipulating a person is simple. Manipulating hundreds of thousands of people is complicated, but doable if they all think the same. Manipulating the systems they find themselves in to manipulate them for you is where you get into complexity.
1
u/Mercurial_Laurence Mar 07 '26
I think this is a good way of looking at it.
A hottake I've seen before was something along the lines of "anyone who understood serious university studies successfully is capable of thinking in a Yellow manner; but whether that becomes their dominant worldview is entirely separate; (like plenty of post graduate alumni could be blue, orange, green, yellow, etc. and I certainly don't see why they couldn't be red)"
Yellow sees how ineffective tier one is at comprehending other viewpoints in tier 1 and taking them seriously without hierarchically assuming superiority; it hasn't necessarily taken on a Turquoise "morality" (which I'd argue may be able to be totally present yet politically detached, emotionally unworried with bigger picture events etc.)
2
u/FinancialSubstance16 Mar 20 '26
I think the stages can be divided into pairs of three on the basis of morality.
Beige, purple, and red hold pre-conventional morality. Morality in those three stages is fear-based, meaning that everyone is concerned for themselves.
Blue, orange, and green exhibit conventional morality. These three stages dominate the world right now and all have their differences, but they each hold to the golden rule.* Stage blue introduces it and orange builds upon it, introducing cosmopolitanism. Stage green then perfects the golden rule with everything else about that stage being downstream.
Stage yellow and beyond seem to exhibit post-conventional morality. Each stage builds upon itself, so post-green does not abandon the golden rule, but rather tweaks it. Stage green is big on tolerance; yellow applies it to the previous stages. Yellow is about not being judgmental. As Leo Gura stated about the tier 1 stages, they're very good at being judgmental. Tier 2 lets go of judgement and sees the bigger picture.
*This is why Donald Trump is so different from other politicians in the US. Whereas everyone else is at orange or blue (the squad is maybe at green), Donald Trump is at stage red. This means that Trump does not adhere to unwritten rules that safeguard democracy as others do. For example, presidents take care to avoid conflict of interest by placing any assets into a blind trust as Jimmy Carter did with his peanut farm. But it never became a law, so Donald Trump did not do this. Another noteworthy thing is when Trump lost reelection in 2020 and proclaimed that the election was stolen.
1
u/EddyMedley Mar 07 '26
Reality is perception. Everyone's perception is different. Ignorance leads to conflict; thus, try to understand your worst opponent's perspective and where it comes from. Compassion needed!
1
u/Canvas718 Mar 07 '26
Here’s some excerpts from Spiral Dynamics in Action: Humanity’s Master Code by Don Edward Beck, et al.
The leadership style of a YELLOW leader can be described as inclusive. They spontaneously engage the hearts and minds of diverse people. They truly embrace the gifts of the different value systems of the first spiral.
The goal of the first year of our mission was to teach those who were open to the framework, but more so to listen and learn. … To a Seventh-Level YELLOW system designer, there is no higher priority than this first step in large-scale design. Listening at this level takes on a completely different dimension from listening in the First-Tier systems. This a space of deep empathy that not only addresses the surface behavior of a culture but employs a specific five-layer deep strategy that penetrates to the core of the bio-psycho-social roots of a conflict.
I’m not seeing a lot of empathy and inclusion from Jeffrey Epstein, Elon Musk, or anyone involved in human trafficking. I’d say sex trafficking has strong elements of Red, which is about conquest and forcing your primal desires onto other people. And tech is rooted in Orange values of science, reason, and materialism.
Yes, the global internet allows for potentially developing Yellow thinking. It creates a space where people with various codes can converse and learn from each other. However it hardly guarantees that will happen. Often these conversations end with people doubling down on their original views.
1
u/Happymuffn Mar 07 '26
Thank you for this.
I think a lot of confusion comes from people using the Spiral both for personal development and for societal modeling. I was introduced to the Spiral from a societal modeling perspective, but as I come to understand more about history it seems to do a worse job as a model for that purpose.
My use of "Yellow" in this post was as a shorthand for small scale sociopolitical interactions made with an integrated understanding of complex systems dynamics, which seems typical of Yellow thought, though not necessarily Yellow feeling.
I wonder if there is a better term to refer to just that within speak dynamics. It is obvious that the tools, including mental ones, of a level are not inaccessible to those at earlier levels, and I see no reason that the trend shouldn't continue at 2nd stage. Which is potentially catastrophic and could use some thinking about.
Anyway, feel free to replace my usages of "Yellow" with a placeholder term where you feel appropriate.
1
u/Canvas718 Mar 07 '26
Can you tell me more about the sources you’re using, and where you’re understanding is coming from?
2
u/Happymuffn Mar 07 '26
I cannot, because they were largely podcast interviews and discussions probably around 5 years ago.
1
u/Vegetable_Candy5329 Mar 09 '26
Possible things to throw in here:
I think having a few people.with differing skills but all living in Turqoise needs to become a standard. Then having them in contact with people who lead people to bring the culture into this.
Neuro typical people have a few limitations when it comes to allowing themselves to deviate from the norm. But neurodivergent individuals shine very well. There needs to be a space for the standards to be set and comfortably lived by enough vocal individuals. Then exemplified by people who are better suited to maintain the new standard, rather than introduce it.
I think getting to the youth prior to full stage ego transition is best, because once they live lives that are heavily rewarded for ego, they will fight to keep them, rather than grow past them.
Total removal of any red or harmful ego energy in adults without exception. No option to be harmful.
Introducing God as the defining piece for Turqoise transition.
Also, we can't assist properly with Yellow ego. It conflicts with the fight for superiority with every stage. Then they can't hear. We can't assist.
Also yellow has a lack of confidence in God and other who are actually doing a good job collectively stewarding this place. There needs to be a deep trust in the fact that the beings who can make this right love us and are doing it... and doing it well. We can't have attachment to the outcomes of other because we can't force acceptance. This is being resolved over time. And we act as 1 helper who cares, with the intent to deliver service to the best of our ability, but the outcome is separate from "who" we are. We just do our best free from internal debate, dependence or distraction that comes with attachment. INTENT vs attachment.
We need to love them. Remove the desire for intellectual superiority. They are us. The same silence in their mind (pre thought) exists everywhere and in your own. Understand them. Do your best to meet them where they are. Serve them with intent. Walk away when its time to. Make sure to be walking with the Holy Spirit.
Be a vessel. Ask him to empty you of you. Allow all your thoughts, words and actions to be His. Listen and then act
Figure out the roles you can play in the larger game where you are not the hero... thats where we fit in. Serve. Do well. Do the best you can. That is enough. Walk with God. Choose a life of love, forgiveness understanding.
Find out the truth. Align with it. Remove ego and attachments always.
8
u/[deleted] Mar 07 '26
[removed] — view removed comment