Hi, I’m Jeff Salzman and I’m here to help bring forth the next stage of human history. You can find me on The Daily Evolver podcast and follow me on Twitter (@DailyEvolver), where I look at current events through the lens of developmental theory. This page explains the basics.

Currently, three major worldviews are online and competing:

 

And they all hate each other!

Integral, an emergent worldview, seeks to include what is good, true and beautiful about each of the previous worldviews. 

The practice of integral consciousness is to not hate anybody, and to appreciate other people and cultures without trying to fix them. That may feel unnatural – and even wrong – because each worldview could certainly use some fixing:

  • Traditional can be small-minded and ethnocentric
  • Modern can be materialistic and soulless
  • Postmodern can be hypersensitive and depressed
  • ALL can be self-righteous, hypocritical and utterly blind to the gifts of the others

The emerging integral culture seeks to make room for everybody. It is a space where nobody gets to win it all but everybody gets to be in the game.

It’s a much more friendly, fruitful and fun place! Let’s have a quick visit …

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The central insight: consciousness and culture evolve

Today’s competing worldviews came online in historical succession:

  • Traditional: ~5000 years ago
  • Modern: ~300 years ago
  • Postmodern: ~100 years ago
  • Integral is coming on now

Earlier stages can also be mapped, appreciated and integrated.

  • Warrior / Empire: ~10,000 years ago
  • Tribal: ~50,000 years ago
  • Archaic: ~250,000+ years ago

STAGES OF EVOLUTION IN CONSCIOUSNESS AND CULTURE

The chart below maps the journey of development for both individuals and cultures. We start at the archaic stage, poised for self-awareness, and grow our way forward. Every culture is on its own path, and individuals tend to grow to the center of gravity of the culture they are in.

Archaic

  • Dawning awareness of self in nature
  • Instinctual behavior with discursive thought
  • Basic survival and physical safety
  • Emerging language and tools
  • Uses fire, lives off the land
  • Vulnerable, on-guard, fight, flight, freeze responses
  • Represents the fall from paradise
  • Online ~250,000+ years

Tribal

  • Emerging indigenous culture and art
  • Deep communion with kin and ancestors
  • Venerates shamans, chiefs and elders
  • Invokes magic, charms, curses
  • Communes with nature spirits
  • Sacred objects, rituals and rites of passage
  • Nomadic with early agriculture
  • Online ~50,000 years

WARRIOR-EMPIRE

  • Egocentric, passionate, courageous
  • Driven to fight, plunder and conquer
  • Patriarchy and honor culture
  • Impulsive and chaotic
  • Image conscious
  • Warrior rulers and superpower gods
  • Agriculture with slavery and serfdom
  • Online ~10,000 years

Traditional

  • Ethnocentric, believes one’s own culture is superior
  • Obedient to a transcendent God or Order
  • Social conservatives
  • Conformity enforced or encouraged
  • Self-evaluation and guilt
  • Self-sacrifice for personal/community salvation
  • National identities begin to form, patriotic
  • Online ~5000 years

Modern

    • Rational, objective, liberated from dogma
    • Science and tech create material progress
    • Sovereignty located in the individual
    • Ends slavery, exploits nature and premodern peoples
    • Citizen rights and equality under the law
    • Global communication and supply chains
    • Ambitious and growth-oriented
    • Online ~300 years

Postmodern

  • Worldcentric and multicultural
  • Egalitarian, champion of the marginalized
  • Seeks liberation from racial-gender-class roles
  • Reduces truth claims and progress narratives to power dynamics
  • Subjective and sensitive
  • Reveres indigenous culture
  • Dedicated to protection and restoration of nature
  • Online ~100 years

Integral

  • Kosmocentric: sees that consciousness itself evolves
  • Perceives patterns and systems of systems
  • Harmonizes multiple, conflicting perspectives
  • Synthesizes what’s good, true and beautiful from each previous stage
  • Ideologically flexible
  • Less critical and more curious, less fearful and more creative
  • Demystifies and re-enchants the world
  • Emerging now

4 insights to help apply the map to the territory

Evolution arises in three perspectives, and they evolve somewhat independently:
1st-person: How you and your culture perceive reality
2nd-person: How you relate to other people and groups
3rd person: The environment and stuff of life

Stage development does not happen in lockstep. A culture or person with a modern center of gravity will have plenty of premodern and postmodern aspects. We want to understand them all and relate to them in a way that is as healthy as possible.

 

Ideally, evolution proceeds by transcending previous stages while including them. Practically, we often reject our previous selves as a way of differentiating from them. For instance, traditionalism rejects magic, modernity rejects religion, and postmodernity rejects objectivity. Integral seeks to include the best of all stages.

 

Evolution is ongoing. There is a “next stage” of every culture and person that wants to emerge in real-time. Sometimes it erupts and causes chaos. Sometimes we get stuck and even regress. But the procreant urge is built in. Considering development is crucial to engaging any issue thoroughly.

 

The Integral Human

Imagine a person where the emergent force of every stage is online and healthy. 

  • The sensitivity of postmodernity
  • The rationality of modernity
  • The faith of traditionalism
  • The passion and power of warriors
  • The enchantment of tribal
  • The intuition of archaic

Now imagine an Integral culture . . .

Creating integral culture is what we’re about at The Daily Evolver.

Check out some of my favorite episodes here!

To learn more, check out:

BOOKS

Ken Wilber:

Steve McIntosh: 

Don Edward Beck and Christopher Cowan:

Video series on the Basics of Integral Theory

Created with Nomali Perera and Lee Mason of Practical Integral