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benlevi
benlevi
A Model of Values and Change
May 26 2008, 9:00 PM EDT | Post edited: May 26 2008, 9:00 PM EDT
Greetings,
My name is Ben Levi, and I currently live my life globally between Boulder, Colorado, where I've built a self-sufficient house (see http://www.dialogue.org/sustainability.html) and New Zealand, where I have residency. I have read the exec summary and started the report, and would like to offer a compelling model for understanding values that I believe will shed a slightly different light on the issue as you have framed it. That model is Spiral Dynamics Integral, and it combines Ken Wilber's All-Quadrant-All Level model with Spiral Dynamics, a model for understanding values and change that came out of the work of Clare W. Graves. You can download a summary of Spiral Dynamics Integral from my website (http://dialogue.org/Documents/SD_Integral.pdf), but the jist of it can be summarized this way:

-- People have different values, depending on their perception of their life conditions. As those life conditions change, so do our values, in order to cope with or respond to those life conditions.

-- There is a hierarchy of values that have been identified by many psychologists, and generally described the same way by all of them. Spiral Dynamics presents such a hierarchy in relationship to the complexity of thinking and ability to manage the complexity of the life conditions. Clare Graves wrote about it this way:
"Briefly, what I am proposing is that the psychology of the mature human being is an unfolding, emergent, oscillating, spiraling process, marked by progressive subordination of older, lower-order behavior systems to newer, higher-order systems, as man’s existential problems change."

-- SD proposes that a person's values oscillate between "express self" (i.e. it's all about me) and "sacrifice self" (i.e. it's all about the group), repeatedly up a never-ending spiral of evolution.

There is much more, but I believe the SD model would be useful for you to know about. Do you find this valuable?    

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