Blue, the creator of civilisation: a Spiral Dynamics picture book

First published: 4 February 2011

Welcome to this little Spiral Dynamics picture book.

I went round the British Museum in London last month and saw how Blue developed over thousands of years by looking at artefacts from Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome.

In summary, the thing that hit me was that I could see the growth of Blue. I could see the increasing focus on the Blue factor of sacrificing for the future. 

The more Blue developed sculptures clearly took more time to carve the more recent the culture they came from.


Like any other picture book there is text for each picture. You'll find the text as the capture for each picture.

Enjoy.

In Mesopotamia the carving of stone is very shallow. Even the largest statues are something like 15 feet long, 12 foot high and yet only 3 foot wide, and there are very shallow marks carved into the stone.


This work also involved much more work than what had be done before, stone takes longer to carve than wood. Elaborate wood carving occurs earlier in civilisation, though much less wood has survived from these times.

By the time civilisation had developed in Egypt, Blue had developed further and the carvings in statues was deeper, the statues were also more 3D rather than just 2D with depth.

By the time civilisation had developed in Greece, Blue had developed even further, the carving work was much more ornate. The statue is fully 3D again. Also the attention to detail and the amount of detail is vastly higher than in what had gone before. However, although there is much more detail, the sculpture is also close to a cylinder with lots of shallow detail.

By the time Rome had developed we have a near Da Vinci-esque life-like quality of marble carving work. The work is 3D and has a much more intricate shape that took much more work, there is much more depth and carving work going on here compared with a nearly cylindrical shape. There is also much more detailed work in the hair, the feet and the surface of the flesh, compared with just carved lines of fabric creases.

Are the next big battles in civilisation between Green and Orange?

Are the next big battles in civilisation between Green and Orange?

To explain.  A few years ago it was explained to me that the West's modern medical and food industries, as just that industries, interested in making as much money as possible for themselves and quarterly for their shareholders.  There is also a large growing movement of people finding other, and mostly traditional ancient ways the body can heal itself of just about anything, and a lot of this is through eating natural unmodified foods, which (apart from the last century) human beings have done since our evolvement a quarter of a million of years ago.

This morning this struck me as, at its best, a Green, all human beings are equal, movement, that is in conflict with Orange industries, and perhaps more importantly the Orange people driving them.

It occurred to me that as Green processing (thinking) continues to become more prevalent in people, there will be more and more of this type of conflict.  Quite how these Green vs Orange conflicts will be resolved isn't clear at the time of writing.

By brain also jumped to WW2, and perhaps this was an Orange defeating Blue conflict.  Namely Orange technology (aeroplanes, submarines, military hierarchy, finances, atomic weapons) eliminating Blue absolutism (Jews, Gypsies, Cripples and Homosexuals are non-human and must be destroyed).

If this is the case, there is obviously forms of conflict resolution for all positions on the spiral.  War seems to be the ultimate way to resolve conflicts between Blue and lower Tier-1 levels.  However, recently, fortunately Orange finds war very costly in many ways: money, lives, cities ("This would drink deep.  'Twould drink the cup and all."  Henry V, I;1) and so Orange governments seem to be avoiding war as much as possible.

So what other conflict resolution mechanics are we going to start seeing?

What are the best?

And how best can the levels above Tier-1 help resolve such conflicts?

These levels are of course already in the mix and are already influencing.

I look forward to Yellow becoming the leading dominant level just as Green is now.

For now...

How can we take care of all the people, those that are looking to be healthy, get healthy, and those that have jobs and mortgages, and those that depend on the largest corporations and industry to produce financial growth for retirement funds and other important reasons?

Why this blog. Why this title.

I fell in love with Spiral Dynamics as a way to understand human perceptions and resulting behaviour with great clarity as soon as I was first introduced to it in 2002.  Spiral Dynamics is not the only tool worth using, however it is a wonderful big picture tool that explains what has been unexplainable without it.

So, spiral covered.  Why spanking?  When first thinking of this blog (about five years ago) I wanted an alliteration, so the title rhymed.  Spanking has connotations of inappropriate, abusive, and (for some people) intense play.  These of all connotations seemed appropriate.  I didn't consider myself a formally trained expert in SD.  Thus, for what I intended to do in this blog, discuss human behaviour, the connotations of "perhaps inappropriate", "slightly abusive", "intense" and "fun play" seemed appropriate.  Now also looking at dictionary.com reveal some other hopefully appropriate formal definitions I wasn't aware of: "to move rapidly, smartly, or briskly" and "to go at a quick and lively pace".

Anyway, to business.

I find SD (and other aspects of psychology) a useful way to think about how people behaviour.

And having a blog is a better of communicating this than just Notes on Facebook, where typically only my "friends" are likely to read it.

Though it is also on Facebook where my first Spiral Dynamics book is.  It's a picture book, five photographs, taken in the British Museum, and a dozen paragraphs.  And entitled: Blue, the creator of civilisation.