Part 3, Evolution and Spiral Dynamics: How Principles Derived from "Tragedy of the Commons" Support Stage Development
In Part 2, we walked through Ostrom’s eight Core Design Principles as a framework for cooperative groups at any scale. Beck and Wilson established them as both a blueprint and a diagnostic tool. Now Don picks up the thread and shows how somebody can use those principles to think about any stage transition through the Spiral, and what it looks like when someone begins the difficult, often lonely journey out of Blue.
Beck: There is a natural progression through the Spiral. You don’t blow up Blue to get to Orange. People realize that Blue’s orderly structure no longer supports their desire to break out on their own. Leaving Blue in an unhealthy way would be to abandon and even condemn their Blue brethren. But healthy development transcends and includes. Blue doesn’t disappear. It becomes a foundation. The person or group still has their identity, their roots, their sense of “my people.” But they also develop the capacity to operate in larger contexts. They learn to think in terms of “as well as,” and not just “instead of.”
Wilson: Let’s translate that into concrete terms. I think you start with working groups focused on projects where people at different stages have to solve a shared problem together. The task is the unifier.
My strong recommendation: don’t start with dialogue groups where you sit around discussing your differences. That talk lays the foundation for division. So start with real work because cooperative behavior in pursuit of a shared goal is precisely the context in which our evolved psychology builds trust. You don’t talk your way into a new in-group. You work your way into one. This is the same advice for a person joining an established group.
Gary: But so many of the people I know think it is vital to become aware of how we have intentionally or unintentionally hurt others because of bias or prejudice. They think it is necessary to clean our own house before we can work together.
Beck: Well, that’s a little like making a person go to therapy before they see a need to go to therapy. Because these discussions have a therapeutic feel, you bring together people from different backgrounds, races, education, and, from my Spiral Dynamics perspective, different stages. If you sit them in a circle and say, “let’s talk about how different we are and how that causes problems.” You’ve just planted a negative message in their consciousness. Never mind finding what you might hold in common. For someone coming from a Blue orientation, you’ve sent the message that, before they have even started working, they come from a wrong orientation.
Wilson: The training we are seeing that exposes these fault lines is asking them to perform a cognitive and emotional task: perspective-taking across deep differences. And then not know what to do when the deep differences, especially development differences, show up and get labeled as bias or worse, some ism. When we have to share feelings and values, especially when we’ve put two minutes of thought into them before sharing, we can easily violate unseen norms and say things we regret.
If our values are based in Traditional Blue, Modern Orange, or Postmodern Green, our reactions may sound offensive to those at other stages. Perspective-taking that takes this information into account are not universal skills you can activate on demand. But here’s the genius of the 8 CDPs: if they are introduced and employed in your work, they will frequently be referenced when working together on cooperative projects. People with different backgrounds will begin to learn each other’s perspectives. I’m adamant that this ability develops organically through the relationships that form in functional groups, not prior to them.
Think about it from the ancestral environment. You hunted together. And through the hunting, through the shared risk and shared reward, you developed the trust and mutual understanding that made a deeper relationship possible.
Beck: So the shared problem has to be real. Not manufactured. Not a sensitivity exercise. Something that actually matters to everyone involved. When I was working in South Africa, we didn’t start with “let’s all appreciate each other’s cultures.” We started with “this township doesn’t have clean water, and everybody here needs it.” And suddenly you’ve got Zulus, Afrikaners, and English-speaking South Africans working shoulder to shoulder, and belonging starts to grow naturally out of shared effort.
Wilson: Remember, we said the Core Design Principles are necessary but not sufficient? Let’s spell out the rest. First, the design principles set up the framework so that it is fair and it functions. Second, you need a real shared challenge that creates the evolutionary pressure for cooperation. Third, you need explicit protection of existing group identities within the new structure. You are not eliminating differences. You’re building a coalition, not a melting pot. People do not have to give up their values to be a part of the team.
Beck: I’d add a fourth from the developmental perspective. You need patient, stage-aware leadership. In Spiral Dynamics, this is the next stage after Green, in which one understands where people actually are and can skillfully translate between their worldviews. Not someone who stands at Green or Orange, beckoning. Certainly not someone who chides or labels those at earlier levels. This kind of leader[1] walks alongside people and honors the contribution they make while also helping those who see that expanding their circle serves their own deepest values.
Wilson: I’d accept that, because from an evolutionary perspective, leadership of that kind functions as a cultural catalyst — it accelerates a process that might otherwise take generations.
Beck: Gary, even with all four of those elements in place, this is slow work. David’s pointing at genetic predispositions that took hundreds of thousands of years to evolve. We’re naïve to think we can override them with a workshop series. We can create conditions that make expansion more likely, more natural, and less threatening. But anyone who promises a quick transformation is selling something.
Wilson: Don, I agree, but let’s not downplay our opportunities. Cultural evolution can move much faster than genetic evolution. We don’t need to change the biological genome. We need to build cultural institutions that channel our existing psychology in more expansive directions. That’s been happening throughout human history. It’s how we got from bands of 50 to nations of millions. The question is how to experiment intentionally, rather than waiting for it to happen through the slow grind of trial and error.
Gary: I think you’ve laid out a good model that could be incorporated in groups and institutions, with the aim of it being an iterative process. You win a little development here and there, experience a regression in a crisis, but stay steady with the process to work on the next project. That's how you can intentionally keep cultural evolution moving. That’s how you end the “we didn’t try it and it didn't work” syndrome.
Now I’m curious about a case where a person is leaving an unhealthy Blue Group. The writer of the Leaving MAGA Substack writes about his difficulty with leaving the group because he made friends with people he cared about, and he had to leave because MAGA’s agenda was hurting people. In other words, such a person has to process a complex situation: an organization whose values are no longer supportable, but where they have developed friends they value. If the Orange and Greens they encounter are unfriendly or judgmental about his former values or relationships, it can get lonely for him.
Beck: Gary, you’ve just shifted the lens from the group level to the deeply personal, and I think that’s important because this is where so much of the real pain lives. The macro frameworks are useful, but development happens one person at a time, and it often feels like a kind of death.
You’re describing someone who can see that the group’s values have become harmful but who genuinely loves people within that group. We should not treat that as a trivial matter. That’s a person being torn apart by competing loyalties that are real. The friendships aren’t false. The belonging wasn’t fake.
Wilson: And evolutionarily, this is exactly what we’d predict would make leaving so agonizing. The neural circuitry for belonging doesn’t discriminate abstract values from concrete relationships. When you leave a group, your body perceives it as a survival threat because, for most of human evolutionary history, it was one. Exile from the band was effectively a death sentence. So even when the conscious mind has worked out that leaving is the right thing to do, the deeper systems are screaming that something is terribly wrong.
Gary: I know from individual conversations that my liberal peers can see that people leaving MAGA are growing. We know that is the kind of growth we are hoping for. Still they do not seem committed to welcoming them with open, non-judgmental arms.
Beck: Yeah, from the outside, the calculation looks simple: “The group is toxic, you should leave, welcome to our side... But act just like us. Use our language. And please don’t share your grief about leaving MAGA.” They haven’t yet shown that they see a person who is grieving, and they’re treating his experience as if it should be a celebration.
Wilson: You’re setting up a loyalty test as a condition of entry. That’s not inclusive decision-making.
Beck: The person writing that Substack is describing a pattern I’ve seen hundreds of times. The person has grown. Their consciousness has expanded to the point where they can see harm that others in the group can’t see or won’t acknowledge. But growth doesn’t sever attachment. You don’t stop loving people because you’ve outgrown a shared worldview. And anyone who thinks you should does not yet accept the guidance to transcend and include. They don’t even realize that this person is a bridge to others who may someday also achieve this transition
Wilson: I want to add something from the evolutionary perspective that I think is underappreciated. When someone leaves a group like this, they’re not just losing friends. They’re losing an entire cooperative infrastructure. Who do I call when my car breaks down? Who watches my kids? Who brings food when I’m sick? Who do I sit with on Sunday? These are not trivial things. These are the actual, material manifestations of small-group cooperation that our psychology evolved to depend on. And when Orange and Green don’t offer a functional replacement for that infrastructure — when they offer ideology without community — they’re violating one of the core functions of the primary group we belong to, people who have our back.
Beck: That is why the transition of people who start to drift away from unhealthy Blue groups end up drifting back. Not because they were reconvinced. It’s because they were cold and lonely, and nobody on the other side cared. In fact, they were rejected because they were coming from that group of outsiders.
[1] In Spiral Dynamics terms, this next level is Yellow.