Ken Wilber on First-Tier and Second-Tier Stages of Human Development
Look across the different maps of human growth and you keep running into the same basic architecture. Maslow charted six to eight levels along the line of needs. Spiral dynamics tracks a comparable set along the line of values. Study the way people relate to their own identity and you find those same levels appearing in the self-line. The pattern repeats across self-intelligence and other developmental lines too. These stages turn up in practically every domain of human activity, in every corner of the planet.
Take the culture wars as a fast illustration. In the far right-hand column of figure four, you can see the grouping into first-tier, second-tier, and third-tier. First-tier covers the overwhelming majority of stages humans have passed through in roughly the last 500,000 years. It begins with the archaic stage, which handled the crossing from the great apes into human beings. After that comes the magical, tribal era, then the mythic and religious stage with its agrarian, traditional values. Next is the rational, scientific, industrial era of modernity. And most recently, the pluralistic, multicultural, postmodern stage.
That postmodern pluralistic stage is the newest to arrive at any real scale. It spread widely beginning in the 1960s, carried by the civil rights movement, by personal and professional feminism, by the global environmental movement, by the push against hate crimes. Each of those was wrestling, in its own fashion, with oppression and with diversity. And diversity is one of the defining marks of pluralism.
Even so, about 95 percent of people worldwide still sit at one of these first-tier positions: archaic, magic, mythic, rational, or pluralistic. The reason they share the first-tier label comes down to a single shared conviction. Every one of them assumes its own truths and values are the only genuine truths and values there are. Whatever any other stage holds gets dismissed as childish, foolish, or simply mistaken.
Then, only a few decades back, something new appeared, and it was a different kind of stage altogether. It looked so unlike anything in the first-tier set, traditional and modern and postmodern alike, that researchers at first assumed they were dealing with bad data. But it kept resurfacing, over and over, until the field had no choice but to grant that it was real. It remains fairly uncommon. There seem to be about two sub-stages within it, named teal and turquoise, as the integral psychograph in figure four lays out. Together these account for under 5 percent of the global population.
What makes them worth the attention is the shift in attitude. A first-tier stage insists that it alone has the truth. The new stages, grouped together as second-tier precisely to set them apart, operate on a different premise: that every prior stage carries some genuine worth and plays some genuine role. Second-tier can see the value in all of them at once.
One thing to keep in mind about any of this: once a stage exists, it does not vanish. A culture may have a handful of people reaching second-tier, yet every person born into that culture still starts from scratch, down at infrared archaic, and begins developing from there in whatever line you care to name. From archaic in a given line they move up to magic, then to mythic, then to rational, and onward from there.