We Are Still Beige: Survival Loops in a Hyper-Competitive World
The Biggest Spiral Dynamics Lie Ever
Originally, I recorded this as a voice memo to organize my thoughts on paper through transcription. But after listening back, I realized the raw recording itself carries something worth sharing—so here it is, unfiltered.
If you are not yet familiar with Spiral Dynamics, here is a 90 minute seminar on the topic:
The Hidden Foundation We Never Left Behind
Stage Beige is the first stage in traditional Spiral Dynamics. It is the stage that most people who are teaching Spiral Dynamics spend just a few minutes talking about. I used to do the same thing, and now I’m saying that this is a huge mistake. This is actually a reason why Spiral Dynamics has been left in the dirt.
We’re seeing it upside down. We have these stages, but we are approaching them from the wrong way.
What Stage Beige Actually Is
Let’s go back to Stage Beige. What is it actually known for? Survival. Stage Beige is survival.
If you search on YouTube for a video explaining Spiral Dynamics, they will sprint through this stage, and they will say something along the lines of: regular people are not found in this stage, babies are found in this stage, and if an adult is in this stage it means that something wrong happened with their development. They are almost parroting this. I don’t know where this came from.
But actually, it’s much more rich and nuanced than this. Survival is the name of this stage. So a baby is going to be screaming when they don’t get their food. Eventually, we’re meant to graduate from this into Purple, where now we’re not just surviving.
We can understand Beige further by understanding that there’s a negative feeling in this baby—hunger or fear or something—and then this feeling creates a reaction, and this reaction helps us jump into the world and satisfy these feelings.
To explain this negative bodily feeling that Beige is experiencing, we can just simply call it STRESS. Actually, Beige is the stress stage. That is what it is.
The Biggest Spiral Dynamics Lie
And when we see it from this way, we realize that most adults in today’s society have actually not left Beige behind. They are stuck in a loop of reacting in a stressful state.
Their bodies, their nervous systems, are running on full stress, running in circles. It is not actually the case that this is a stage that you just naturally transcend when you are two years old. I would say that this is the biggest Spiral Dynamics lie ever. This is actually a bigger lie than the higher stages going in the wrong direction into increasing complexity, because this is a lie that captures everyone.
If you think that you are not Stage Beige, but you are running around in circles, being activated, feeling stressed without knowing why, and you’re still trying to get to the higher stages—well, good luck.
The Repercussions of Our Beige Foundation
This creates huge repercussions for our world, because it means that the majority of people, even if they have gotten up to Orange or Green or Yellow or even Turquoise, have a fundamentally stretched-out and unhealthy Spiral Dynamics footprint. It means that our society, even though we have really high peaks, has a consistently low baseline of Beige, where most adults actually have about 50% of their Spiral Dynamics footprint in Beige.
This means that there will be huge repercussions in the Spiral Dynamics footprint of the average human:
Orange is going to be heavily influenced by Beige, which means that these competitive markets are going to be not just Orange markets, but Orange/Beige markets
The Blue systems will not be just Blue; they will be Blue/Beige
Green, the same there: the people who are fighting for change at a worldly level will also come in with this very reactive Beige
It’s going to be very hard for people of different stages to cooperate because they have a base of Beige.
And look at the horrible state of Yellow: people who have really advanced minds, capacity for Yellow, but are completely disconnected from their bodies. Lost nerds, reacting and building. This means you have people who are accumulating resources with horrible feelings in their body. The innovation from Yellow, but with a Beige base, creates a very dystopian environment.
I used to think that the bottleneck was that Yellow was too much in their head and we had to move into Turquoise, but actually the bottleneck is on our ground, in the basement. We are Beige. We are a smart species with enough resources, but we’re still stuck in Beige.
The Efficiency Trap
It is very efficient to be stuck at Beige, because it makes us run in circles thinking that, “Oh, just one more upgrade, one more thing, and I will feel differently.” No, this is not how it works, and the people who are legitimately ready and wanting to go into Tier Two can’t do it, because their body is in a reactive state. How can they meditate when they are stuck in a reactive cycle?
This is something that I have touched on before. If you are Yellow, the way to Turquoise is not to read spiritual texts or read about and consume and reach for the stage above. No, this is not how it goes. We actually must go down in order to go up. The very densest energies that we carry in our body—Beige—is going to make it very difficult to actually come into our body of Turquoise.
And when it doesn’t work, these people often turn towards drugs that can create these temporary states. So now they’re using tools to get to the higher stages, when in actuality they just need to go into the very lowest of stages, remove some of that gunk or material, create a healthier Spiral Dynamics footprint.
What Is a Healthy Spiral Dynamics Footprint?
And as you are listening to this, you begin to understand: what is a healthy Spiral Dynamics footprint? It is simply a Spiral Dynamics footprint that is not dragged out too much. A healthy Spiral Dynamics footprint spans across a few stages. But actually, this is very rare in today’s world, because most people have half of their Spiral Dynamics footprint in Beige.
So we can’t just skip Beige. The world is stuck in Beige: people reacting to the survival instincts, which are essentially feelings in the body that are meant to be the kickstart of our evolutionary process and push us into Purple. But actually, this pushes us into a system that runs on this.
Actually, the capitalist system of competition and scarcity, often artificial, is what is fueled by this Beige state. We are not incentivized to remove this Beige, because then we will not produce as much as we did before. However, we will be happier. We will create a healthier environment, and we will also be able to graduate from this environment of competitive markets that are actually a real black ball.
The Real Black Ball
Here I’m talking about the vulnerable world hypothesis, which paints the image of humanity pulling its hand down a bag, pulling out balls like vaccines or electricity or the internet or fire—great inventions that we are pulling out. But some of these balls that we pull out might be so-called black balls, hence the vulnerable world hypothesis: that humanity is pulling out ball after ball, and there might be a black ball like nuclear weapons or super-intelligent AI or hyper-advanced biotech weaponry.
And this environment of Yellow/Green/Beige people are discussing these black balls with the potential to kill our species. What do we do? I was recently in Patagonia for a month, and I was sponsored by this movement.
And something that disappointed me during these debates and discussions was that these were discussions about the technology. Like, “Oh, we need to invest in filters for the airplanes so that when the bio-weapons come, we have defensive technology to beat the technology that could kill us. We need to outcompete competition. We need to outcompete tech. We need to build even stronger technology.”
But they don’t see, like the fish can’t see the water, humanity or humans can’t see the competition in front of them. They can’t see the Beige that they are operating from mixed with Orange. They can’t see it. They don’t see that the actual black ball that humanity picked up hundreds, if not thousands of years ago, was competitive markets.
It is not super-intelligent AI. It is not nuclear weapons. It is the hyper-competitive markets. The markets that have given us so much over the years—we went from sticks and stones to nuclear weapons to soon perhaps even more powerful tools on the back of hyper-competitive markets—and Beige was really the fuel that pushed us to get there.
The Nature of Humanity
And now people say, “But how can we have markets without the hyper-competitiveness? What about the incentives?” And for people who say this, I believe they have very negative views on humanity. They think that humanity is a competitive species. But we are not. We are clearly a cooperative species running on competitive temporary software.
Do you see the repercussions of having billions of people with unhealthy Spiral Dynamics footprints? This has repercussions through the whole spiral—through Blue, through Orange, through Green, through Yellow. We can’t get into the body awareness of Turquoise when it is blocked by Beige. Of course, Yellow is the bottleneck, but the core reason for this bottleneck is Beige.
And the hyper-competitive markets are the mechanism that maintains this flaw, that confuses our temporary condition for our nature.
The true black ball for humanity to graduate from is transcending Beige. Then we will naturally ascend. The Oranges will become Green, and the Green will become Yellow, and the Yellow will become Turquoise, just from releasing this Spiral Dynamics debt that we have accumulated.
Do you see it?
The Next Generation of Debt
The next generation of debt after releasing this debt of Beige will be releasing the debt of Purple.
Massive release of anxiety will also happen, which will be the fall of the advertising empire that is currently being run on this—the money tree of Google advertising running on our Purple debt of anxiety, looking around, seeing what everyone else is doing.
This is Purple. This is the Purple debt. Do you see it? This is what will be the next huge step in human evolution. This will bring up another tier of development. The now Turquoise will become Coral. The now Yellow will become Turquoise. The now Green that used to be Orange will now be Yellow, and so on.
We are releasing from the bottom, not reaching for the top.
The Current Bottleneck
I’m getting ahead of myself. The current bottleneck is Beige. The current bottleneck is graduating from these hyper-competitive markets. We will soon have people who don’t have access to clean drinking water or reasonable healthcare—but they will have access to the world’s smartest LLMs for just $10 a month.
Eventually, these will be not just conversational friends, but actually biotech weaponry that any bum who wants to see our system burn, now they can do so. This Beige material that we have in our societal Spiral Dynamics footprint creates some large injustices. It makes it very appealing for somebody who is desperate to feel the warmth of its system, have it burned down to feel its warmth.
They say that our highest priority is to survive these black balls, but it is not so, actually. Their highest priority is to come through these challenges and still be in a competitive system. They have married the system. They want to ensure their own success in the current system while at the same time winning.
They are trying to outcompete competition with competition. This is the tangle. This is the Beige tangle. Do you see it? It is not our highest collective goal to graduate from this problem, first of all, because like fish in water, we don’t even see the problem.
“But what about incentives?” people say, blindly confusing our temporary software with our permanent nature of cooperation. This annoys me.
This annoys me.
Operating at 5%
We are currently operating at about 5% of our human capacity to do great things. This Beige/Orange system that we live in—it’s not to produce results anymore. It is to maintain itself through reactivity and artificial scarcity. This is not the same as human potential and flourishing. We are operating at what I would say is about 5% of human capacity.
Competition is the main thing that our system promotes. It is not even fun to be in the system. It goes against our nature of cooperation.
5% is where we are operating from, because in order to cooperate, first you must survive. You must compete against others. You must survive to collect money, survival tokens—that is what money is currently. We must fight and compete with others to even have bread on our table, and then we must compete to get an education against others.
Then we must compete to get a higher education against others. Then we must compete to get a job, which means that if it can’t make money, then how are we gonna compete anyway? We compete against others to get a job, but then our job needs to compete against other jobs, and this cycle continues. There’s competition in every step of the chain. You can’t just go and contribute. That wouldn’t be Beige enough. It doesn’t fit into our system.
5%.
Imagine all the geniuses that we lose, all the black swans that we kill.
The Solution
I don’t know.
Spiral Dynamics, if we follow the principles of it, we know that the answer is not to reach for Stage Green and try to brainwash us with Green propaganda. That’s not how it works. You can’t brainwash an Orange person with Green content and now have everyone hug and go for a world together. No, that is not how it works.
We must go down the spiral, remove the bottleneck, and it’s very clear: it’s Beige.
So this is not about throwing Green propaganda on how we must come together. Even though happiness scales really well—somebody’s third house does not give them much joy, but the person who is homeless, their first house is surely going to give maybe 100x happiness. The same with somebody’s fifth meal versus somebody’s first. This is how happiness scales. That is just a truth.
Currently we’re not at all taking advantage of our happiness laws. Most of our resources go into brands, into scarcity, into status. This is Orange/Beige.
Releasing the Stones We Carry
The good thing, though, is that the solution to this is very simple. We are living in survival loops when this is not necessary. It is much easier to remove the gunk of the lower stages than to reach for the higher ones. We can begin by doing it in ourselves: Am I stuck in a loop of reactivity? Am I stressed even when my life is actually not that bad?
This is when you have low-hanging fruits. This is why Vipassana meditation works splendidly—as long as we go there to remove our bottleneck by our feet and not to go in there grasping for the skies when we have this immense weight pulling us down. We must release the stones that we carry, and we will naturally ascend.
This is why Vipassana works. Vipassana simply means seeing clearly. Half of the liberation work is seeing the system for what it is, stopping identifying with it. This is Vipassana on the individual level. But what then is Vipassana meditation for the collective level? It is simply to see the system clearly on a large enough scale.
That is half of the work. I’m hoping that this, whatever this turns out to be, will be just that, or at least create the initial, or inspire even a ripple. What is the Vipassana meditation on a collective scale? Well, we know: seeing it as it is. Like the fish sees the water for the first time, a human can see the competition, the nature of the competition, and the energies that fuel the system—and that that is it.
I am very optimistic, actually. It is much easier to go back to basics than to try to outcompete competition itself.