How a Breakdown in Liberal Ideology Created Trump – Part 2

If you didn’t read yesterday’s post, today’s will read like a bunch of indecipherable nonsense (perhaps it will anyway!).

What follows is a continued analysis of the recent thoughts Ken Wilber outlined in his e-book, Trump and a Post-Truth World: An Evolutionary Self-Correction, which attempts to understand contemporary American politics through the lens of human consciousness development.

To summarize what we learned in recent posts, a new leading-edge consciousness started to emerge on the planet around the 1960’s, and it has been color coded “green” within the framework of Spiral Dynamics. The are many positive attributes of green consciousness, but almost as soon as it got started, it began a decades long decay into nihilism and narcissism. This divergence between “healthy green” and “unhealthy green” essentially led to a momentary halt in the evolution of human consciousness, a diseased condition that existed far before Trump was elected. Trump was merely a very visible manifestation of this, an evolutionary canary in the coal-mine, which was inevitable given the circumstances.

To understand more fully, let’s examine a few excerpts from the book:

So we’ve seen just a few of the ways that the green leading-edge of cultural evolution itself had become derailed, had become significantly dysfunctional and unhealthy, had been blindsided by a performative contradiction resulting in an epidemic aperspectival madness. And under such circumstances, evolution finds it’s necessary to take certain self- correcting moves. These moves will not obviously appear as necessary correctives—they might indeed appear alarming. But the only thing more alarming would be for evolution to try and move forward on the basis of an already badly broken leading-edge. The disasters would simply increase. Green, as a leading-edge, had collapsed; and evolution itself had no choice but to take up a broadly “anti-green” atmosphere as it tried to self-correct the damage.

And the one thing that was true of Donald Trump—more than any other single characteristic that defined him is that every word out of his mouth was anti-green.

What virtually all of the above voters had in common was ressentiment— they resented the cultural elite, whether in government or universities or “on the coasts,” and they wanted, if “revenge” is the wrong word, it’s not far off. But there was, I am suggesting, another and very strong, hidden current in all of this, and that was the antagonistic reaction and turning- away evidenced by a leading-edge that had gone deeply sour and dysfunctional, and wasn’t even serving the 25 percent of the population that were themselves at green. The deeply self-contradictory nature of “there-is-no-truth” green had collapsed the very leading-edge of evolution itself, had jammed it, had derailed it, and in a bruised, confused, but inherently wisdom-driven series of moves, evolution was backing up, regrouping, and looking for ways to move forward. is included activating an amber-ethnocentric wave that had always been present and very powerful, but that had, for the most part, been denied direct control of society starting around a century or so ago (as orange and then green stepped in). When a Republican had been placed in power, which was relatively often, it was usually an orange-leaning Republican (with mandatory amber ethnocentric sub-beliefs, but talking worldcentric language).

Trump’s anti-green impulse runs serious, far, and vast (though he consciously is aware of none of this). Whether his proposals are red or amber or orange, they are always also anti-green. And that is the one thing they all have in common, whether they are red, amber, or orange—they are all energized in part by this anti-green self-correcting drive of evolution in search of a functional and self-organizing way forward (and a way that allows each of these stages an actual participation in the overall national dialogue, and doesn’t aggressively deny and ridicule any of them as being merely deplorable). As we’ll explore in a moment, amber was activated because it needed to find a way to be integrated into a larger society in a way that has been denied it for a very long time. Any specifically amber moves themselves are not directly part of the overall self-correcting drive of evolution, but the activation of amber itself most definitely is—and its voice desperately needs to be heard. It needs to be “transcended,” most certainly, but it also—the lesson here—needs to be “included,” if evolution is to return to its general functional and self-organizing drive of “transcend and include.” That is the secret, hidden, but very real drive that Trump unconsciously rode to a victory that, because its primary driver was completely unseen, was a total shock to both camps and to every major pollster anywhere.

Thus, whether he was activating red egocentric, or amber ethnocentric, or orange worldcentric, he was always also anti-green. And the anti-green current (acting in a preconscious fashion in the dynamics of ongoing cultural evolution) would allow these stages to find their station energized by something Trump was doing. It’s an astonishing amalgamation— indeed, one that many analysts claim is unique in all of American politics. Never had an “anti” stance reached out and energized so many stages— because never before had the leading-edge so blatantly failed to lead. And the overall meta-drive in all of this is to find a way that all of these previous stages can actually be heard, and truly seen, and more effectively and compassionately integrated into the larger currents of a cultural evolution in a way that green (with its aggressively deconstructive aperspectival madness) has profoundly failed to do.

Donald Trump, more than any other single factor, has (unknown to himself, or virtually anybody else, for that matter) ridden these anti-green forces to a massively surprising Presidential victory. As previous stages became, in various ways and to various degrees, activated by Trump, whether orange, amber, or red, they all shared one thing, the anti-green dynamic (a dynamic that because it was not recognized in any significant way, made Trump’s victory a stunning and unbelievable surprise to virtually everybody).

Ken Wilber does an incredible job describing the collapse of green and how this created the vacuum Trump filled in the 2016 election. What he doesn’t do much of, at least in this book, is talk specifically about the Democratic Party and the various players in it within the framework of Spiral Dynamics. So I’m going to go ahead and do that to provide additional color on what I think happened.

To do this, we need to review some of the colors of first-tier thinking. Red to green should be sufficient.

     3. Red: Power Gods. First emergence of a self distinct from the tribe; powerful, impulsive, egocentric, heroic. Mythic spirits, dragons, beasts, and powerful people. Feudal lords protect underlings in exchange for obedience and labor. The basis of feudal empires—power and glory. The world is a jungle full of threats and predators. Conquers, out-foxes, and dominates; enjoys self to the fullest without regret or remorse. 

      Where seen: The “terrible twos,” rebellious youth, frontier mentalities, feudal kingdoms, epic heroes, James Bond villains, soldiers of fortune, wild rock stars, Atilla the Hun, Lord of the Flies. 20% of the population, 5% of the power. 

     4. Blue: Conformist Rule. Life has meaning, direction, and purpose, with outcomes determined by an all-powerful Other or Order. This righteous Order enforces a code of conduct based on absolutist and unvarying principles of “right” and “wrong.” Violating the code or rules has severe, perhaps everlasting repercussions. Following the code yields rewards for the faithful. Basis of ancient nations . Rigid social hierarchies; paternalistic; one right way and only one right way to think about everything. Law and order; impulsivity controlled through guilt; concrete-literal and fundamentalist belief; obedience to the rule of Order. Often “religious” [in the mythic-membership sense; Graves and Beck refer to it as the “saintly/absolutistic” level], but can be secular or atheistic Order or Mission. 

      Where seen: Puritan America, Confucian China, Dickensian England, Singapore discipline, codes of chivalry and honor, charitable good deeds, religious fundamentalism (e.g., Christian and Islamic), Boy and Girl Scouts, “moral majority,” patriotism. 40% of the population, 30% of the power. 

     5. Orange: Scientific Achievement. At this wave, the self “escapes” from the “herd mentality” of blue, and seeks truth and meaning in individualistic terms—hypothetico-deductive, experimental, objective, mechanistic, operational— “scientific” in the typical sense. The world is a rational and well-oiled machine with natural laws that can be learned, mastered, and manipulated for one’s own purposes. Highly achievement oriented, especially (in America) toward materialistic gains. The laws of science rule politics, the economy, and human events. The world is a chess-board on which games are played as winners gain pre-eminence and perks over losers. Marketplace alliances; manipulate earth’s resources for one’s strategic gains. Basis of corporate states . 

      Where seen: The Enlightenment, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, Wall Street, emerging middle classes around the world, cosmetics industry, trophy hunting, colonialism, the Cold War, fashion industry, materialism, liberal self-interest. 30% of the population, 50% of the power. 

     6. Green: The Sensitive Self. Communitarian, human bonding, ecological sensitivity, networking. The human spirit must be freed from greed, dogma, and divisiveness; feelings and caring supersede cold rationality; cherishing of the earth, Gaia, life. Against hierarchy; establishes lateral bonding and linking. Permeable self, relational self, group intermeshing. Emphasis on dialogue, relationships. Basis of values communes (i.e., freely chosen affiliations based on shared sentiments). Reaches decisions through reconciliation and consensus (downside: interminable “processing” and incapacity to reach decisions). Refresh spirituality, bring harmony, enrich human potential. Strongly egalitarian, anti-hierarchy, pluralistic values, social construction of reality, diversity, multiculturalism, relativistic value systems; this worldview is often called pluralistic relativism . Subjective, non-linear thinking; shows a greater degree of affective warmth, sensitivity, and caring, for earth and all its inhabitants. 

      Where seen: Deep ecology, postmodernism, Netherlands idealism, Rogerian counseling, Canadian health care, humanistic psychology, liberation theology, cooperative inquiry, World Council of Churches, Greenpeace, animal rights, ecofeminism, post-colonialism, Foucault/Derrida, politically correct, diversity movements, human rights issues, ecopsychology. 10% of the population, 15% of the power.

As Wilber so accurately described, Trump activated latent tendencies in red and especially blue (he now calls this amber) consciousness. Trump also got plenty of orange voters, but that wasn’t what propelled him to victory since Hillary Clinton was very orange by comparison. Which brings us to the bigger point. The U.S. political system has been only offering orange-dominated candidates for decades in Presidential elections despite leading edge green consciousness having emerged over 50 years ago. Why is that?

The primary reason is that, as Wilber noted, green went totally off the rails and therefore failed to inspire society to come along with it. The second reason is that orange holds by far the biggest percentage of global power. The orange point of view dominates corporations, politics, the media, pretty much all facets of our lives. As we know from history, power doesn’t simply roll over and die. Therefore, orange marshaled all its resources to defend and perpetuate the status quo, which is orange.

The most interesting aspect of the 2016 election, other than Trump of course, was Bernie Sanders. He was clearly green to the core, which is why he resonated with so many people. Whether or not you like his policy positions, Sanders was a good example of healthy green. He spoke in authentic terms, came across as honest as well as genuinely compassionate. This is why I really liked Sanders despite not agreeing with many of his policy positions. This is also why Sanders had to be destroyed. He represented the potential for real change in an orange dominated world, but the power structure, and especially the media, needed to protect it’s paradigm so they rallied around the very orange candidate in Hillary Clinton.

If you’re a voter longing for green after being fed up with eight years of orange Obama (who pretended to be green to get elected), you couldn’t possibly vote for Hillary even when faced with a Trump Presidency. I actually think Hillary possess a significant red streak, which the public was able to pick up on, and this is why many Democrats disliked her mightily compared to Obama. You could almost sense some green in Obama that he was too cowardly to express while President. On the other hand, no matter how much Hillary tried to talk in green terms, nobody other than cultists and celebrities believed a word of it.

To conclude, Hillary was an obvious orange with a significant red streak pretending to be green, while Trump could appeal to red, blue and orange. He won by activating blue, and keeping green at home.

Unfortunately, there aren’t any yellow politicians. You can’t win an election when only 5% of the population sees the world as you do. It’s also why yellow types don’t even bother to run. They know for certain they’d have to sacrifice too much in order to win, and it’s just not worth it.

Tomorrow’s post will focus on charting a conscious path forward in the midst of our current societal insanity.

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In Liberty,
Michael Krieger

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