This lesson will be split into two parts. We will be exploring the book In Over Our Heads by Robert Kegan. The next part’s tentative publishing date will be October 15th, 2021. This part will likely receive some revision for clarity, editing, and flow purposes at a later date, as well.
So far we’ve been investigating the biological aspects of being human, illuminating the mechanisms of emotion through ligands and receptors. We must now begin to advance our understanding of how we arrive at our ethics, and what we prioritize as our responsibilities as individuals. Are one’s ethics and values intransigent, unchanging from youth to old age? If not, how do our priorities shift as we get older and more experienced? Is it not possible that our intellectual foundations compromise as we get older? Today’s lesson will be focused on the “evolution of consciousness” and how we as individuals organize experience as we grow older into more complex systems of thought.
How you perceive the world today should hopefully be drastically different than how you perceived it at eight years old. The combination of life experiences along with the given biological truth of age maturing your brain makes for a recipe of how you think now. It truly is a simple concept, you would never allow your eight year old self to control the finances of your household, or you’d end up living in a bankrupt micro amusement park within months. We gradually learn responsibility, and yet it is vital to admit that in some stages we simply aren’t capable of comprehending the complex realities of life, especially living in the labyrinthian society we have created for ourselves. Today’s lesson will be an introduction to the different “modes of thinking” that we have and develop throughout our lives, as well as how we may involuntarily bring out our eight year old, or our adolescent in times when more maturity is required. Robert Kegan has laid out a very compelling theory of the evolution of consciousness that I feel can be applied directly to oneself with excellent results if done properly.
We can consider our journey through the development of our orders of consciousness to occur in “stages.” For our purposes in this project, we will be investigating Stage Two, Three, Four and Five. It should be noted that these stages are transitional, existing on a gradient, meaning that one grows out of them gradually, rather than jumping from one level to the next. Another issue I’ve personally experienced is that some of these immature thought processes can and will stick with us deeply into adulthood. Recognizing these outdated thought processes is crucial to being able to assert control over your own life. Stage One is purely the impulsive mind of very early childhood, which a vast majority of people tend to grow out of therefore I won’t be going into it.
Stage Two: Self Interest
The Stage Two mode of thinking revolves around a moment-to-moment relationship with their desires, preferences and abilities. Example: A five year old child very nearly defines their existence by how much they dislike broccoli in a given moment. This five year old wants pizza now. These feelings are defining. Interactions are generally transactional, or tit-for-tat, built upon whether or not the child gets what is perceived to be the “fair” end of a deal. An example from my own childhood is how I was willing to throw every fiber of my being into going to the places I wanted to go, willing to embarrass my parents into yielding to my will. It is generally during the ages between five and ten that mental development advances to the point where the child is not defined by their desires and preferences, but are what they have. It is interesting (and terrifying) to note that approximately 3-5% of adults are stuck in Stage Two thinking. The transition into Stage Three begins during those early years, but really takes off with puberty and adolescence.
Stage Three: The Communal and Socialized Mind
Stage Three analysis will be the bulk of this lesson, as it is unfortunately where approximately a third of the adult population still resides mentally. Can you fathom that? At least 33% of the adult population still think like teenagers. A quick example of how that demonstrates in an adult: political affiliations. When someone votes for a particular party without any complex consideration for the actions or viewpoints of said party, they demonstrate an inability to think outside of their “established community.” These people have a tendency to align their views with their chosen party because they wish to fit the orthodoxy that is accepted of that political group. Many adults tend to inherit their political views from their own younger selves, which never gives cause to actually question them despite those views having been chosen during a period in their lives in which the complexities of public policy doesn’t necessarily effect them. This mode of thinking insidiously can convince individuals of beliefs that could even potentially harm them, yet the compulsion to fit into this fixed category remains steadfast.
Can you remember what it was like to be a teenager? Were you someone who was so profoundly concerned with how others felt about you, that others effectively controlled your life? Did you do certain things because others were doing them, with little to no care about the real consequences? We are all aware of the stereotypes of teenage life: peer pressure, social outcast, cliques, fashion trends, or simply just wanting to be accepted. These issues are all built in to the third stage of development. This is because at this point in one’s life, you feel defined by your relationships. Recall: Second Stage revolved around the self and the self’s desires were defining, wherein one’s relationships were simply means to a self-serving end. Third Stage is when that excess “selfishness” begins to evolve into excessive “selflessness.” What was once self now bleeds and blends with the desires of others, one begins to involuntarily subsume the emotions, experiences and values of others without clearly dividing where one’s individuality ends and others’ begin. This way of thinking is inadequate for an adult in our modern society.
Kegan provides a hypothetical scenario that helps us see the flaws with this mode of thinking in an adult, I’ll be paraphrasing it and making a few minor adjustments. Envision a couple, married for fifteen years, with two children. It has been at least ten years since the couple spent any significant romantic time alone together, and their marriage begins to show signs of wear and neglect. An opportunity arises to go on a romantic vacation alone, with a plan to leave the children with the father’s parents for a week. Of course, one cannot simply drop the children off and fly out to Bermuda without first informing the grandparents, so the father reaches out to them during the planning phase of this mid-marriage honeymoon. The husband notes a hint of melancholy from his parents while telling them about the wonderful hotel they plan to stay in, and not wanting to see his parents envious and sad, chooses to take this opportunity to invite them along on this romantic trip. The grandparents then suggest bringing the children along too, as they don’t trust any babysitters with their precious grandchildren for a week. The wife is furious and the husband is unable to understand why.
This example demonstrates the husband’s inability to properly divide his relationships and his own desires as objects of differing priority. Indeed, which grandparents wouldn’t mind a trip to some tropical islands? Yet it was not the husband’s responsibility to please them in such a way in this situation. From his wife’s perspective, his responsibility lay with mending their marriage and transitively to the stability of their family. Not only did he not consult her before making this decision, but it was an action that lay counterproductive to what was initially intended. Kegan’s hypothetical and torn husband has given a name to this phenomenon: “The Bad Feeling, that impossible feeling of having to ‘be’ in several places all at the same time, that feeling of begin ripped apart, or being pulled in different directions, the feeling of wanting everyone you love to be happy, of even feeling you could make them all happy – if only they would cooperate and somehow didn’t need it all at once.” [Kegan, 117] He isn’t a bad person because he has such an overwhelmingly big heart, but his order of consciousness is underdeveloped for not being able to comprehend the potential problems with the way he operates.
Kegan offers us a list of responsibilities a parent and partner may have at any given time [Kegan page 86]:
Take charge of the family; establish rules and roles; institute a vision of family purpose.
Support the ongoing growth of the young, including their growth within and away from the family.
Manage boundaries (inside and outside the family)
Set limits on children and on oneself to preserve and protect childhood.
Be psychologically independent from, but closely connected to, our spouses.
Replace an idealized, romanticized approach to love and closeness with a new conception of love and closeness.
Set limits on children, in-laws, oneself, and extra-family involvement to preserve the couple.
Support our partner’s development.
Communicate well, directly and fairly.
Have an awareness of the way our personal history inclines or directs us.
A daunting list of responsibilities indeed. Can you imagine imposing these variegated demands on a teenager? What of an adult trapped with a teenager’s mindset? Where in our modern society do we even begin to learn how to expertly navigate these demands? Recall what you’ve learned about being in the Third Stage in the order of consciousness: one’s ability to set limits is severely lacking between different relationships because one feels defined by their relationships, and are not separate from them. This mismatch in one’s order of consciousness versus the realities of what is expected of them can lead to devastating consequences.
We can use an even simpler and potentially more relatable example that would be the adolescent son returning home after midnight without informing his parents that he would be late. The parents are simultaneously concerned, furious and ashamed. They don’t understand how their son could be so irresponsible. Yet, we’ve all possibly been that boy, can you remember what it was like? “What do they even want from me?” Our priorities were with our immediate surroundings, our community of friends that were all out late. Unfortunately, adolescent or adult social groups that operate in this order of thinking tend to orbit around individuals with personality disorders, as they generally tend to emote melodramatically and create cause for strong empathy from their peers. I intend to create an entire standalone lesson devoted to those personality disorders and their dangers at a later date.
Those that remain in the Third order of consciousness into adulthood develop various coping mechanisms in order to survive the series of systems that feel cold and alien to someone communally minded. Employment responsibilities are equal to friendship or familial responsibilities. Despite making prior commitments to an employer to be on time, a communally minded person has little issue disregarding their employer in order to deal with the dreaded “something that came up”, however minor or major. To the employer, this late employee appears to be irresponsible and selfish. In comparison, the employee perceives their employer to be the selfish one that was simply made unhappy by the lateness. Ergo, a third order mind will develop coping mechanism such as “I don’t want my employer, coworkers or family to be unhappy with me if I lose my job, so I will try to be at work in time.” If this person fails to mature, they will inevitably disregard their responsibilities again as other things come up.
This order of consciousness was extremely valuable in more traditional settings, societies that tended towards small villages wherein the whole community lived side-by-side. Those that would make the rules, impose them and be beholden to them lived as immediate neighbors. Therefore, almost selfless consideration for those around you was greatly beneficial to the community as a whole. However, for better or worse we live very far from those simpler times. What is required of us in these modern times is a much greater order of consciousness. We live in a web of systems, entangled with people of wildly differing priorities, employed by bosses we may never meet, beholden by rules written by lawmakers hundreds or even thousands of miles away. With such a complex system requires a more complex, systemic order of consciousness.
Summary of the Third Order of Consciousness:
“The others’ viewpoint matters to us intrinsically not just extrinsically as a means of satisfying one’s ego.”
Personal interests are relativized.
Fails to properly set limits between relationships.
Defined by transient emotional experiences as the subject. “They are unhappy, therefore I am unhappy. My happiness is dependent on theirs.”
How do we begin to evolve from this state that we may be stuck in? The next post will delve deeply into the next stage of consciousness, the systemic mode. For now, let us consider these four insights Kegan offers in order to help us begin evolving [p. 128]:
We are not made up by the other’s experience.
The other is not made up by his or her experience.
We are not made up by our experience.
The other is not made up by our experience.
We can begin to take control of our lives when we stop allowing our feelings and others feelings from defining how we behave at any given moment. Just like feelings and emotions, we are not in relationships, we have them. Part two of this lesson will go into depth of the Fourth order of consciousness, and we will delve into what is necessary for a person to mentally operate systemically while growing out of their excessive selflessness.
Please look forward to the next half of this lesson on October 15th, 2021. Thanks for your support!