Psychosociological Development: The 4th Person
The Post-Modern Shadow — Part 2: Spiral Dynamics
What is the Fourth Person Perspective?
All natural languages incorporate first, second and third person perspectives.
I shall elucidate later the worldviews and reasoning typologies associated with each of these perspectives.
Cellestial Studios has good article on 4th Person perspective:
Stages of Psychological Development
In Spiral Dynamics (Beck and Cohen) which is based on the work of Graves, certain memes, or worldviews, of development are identified. This progression is followed by individuals — everyone starts at stage zero— and by societies and humanity in general.
This is a primitive emergence of consciousness where personal identity and individuation is almost completely absent. The world is viewed as magical with vague and far reaching archetypes, e.g. predator, nourishment, etc.
This emergence of the individual, normally referred to as the terrible twos nowadays, started about five to four thousand years ago and culminated in the Roman Empire.
Reason and process is still absent from human thought at this stage and is pretty much “might is right”. Red is egocentric.
This stage emerges nowadays at the age of six or seven years, where the child gains the ability to distinguish between right and wrong in the sense of a moral code. Blue is process driven and maintains that there is only one right way to do anything. Blue is ethnocentric and considers, “Our values are the only values”.
Blue is prominent during the Christian/Islamic era (0–1500).
The emergence of the rational mind had it’s first murmurs in the Renaissance and came to maturity with the Industrial Revolution. This advanced form of thinking involves a system that boundaries against the environment, with inputs to the system, processing within the sub-systems and output back to the environment.
Orange (hopefully) emerges during one’s mid-teens with the adoption of a scientific worldview.
Hints of Green’s pluralistic worldview started appearing circa 1900 in the writings of such authors as Marx, Nietzsche, Jung, and Dostoevsky. Postmodern authors would include Foucault, Derride and Baudrillard.
Green’s reasoning, which may emerge in one’s early twenties, is a relativistic web of data-points — exactly like a relativistic database. The positive is social groups are recognized in this world-centric world view (as opposed to ethnocentric), the negative is that all data is of the same value — Wilber’s Flatland.
In extreme postmodernism, people are seen as only members of a group and are homogeneous, all socialization is constructed (blank slate theory) and there is Marxist tendency to divide the world into oppressor and oppressed.
Yellow, which is currently pre-emergent, is the first second tier meme or worldview. The tier distinction is that Yellow can cognize the perspectives of all the other memes (simultaneously); whereas the first tier memes, listed above, are in conflict with each other.
Vision logic reasoning is characterized pattern recognition, abstraction and polymorphism. (Just like Object Orientated Programming.) A pattern is like an archetype in human consciousness, abstraction is recognizing or creating that pattern, and polymorphism is mapping it onto the real world. So one has nodes with attributes, actions, and perceptions; and relationships between these nodes (objects).
Summation of and Commentary on Spiral Dynamics
Here’s a pretty good explanation from actualized.org:
It is important to note that these developmental stages are not smooth and linear, different developmental lines (e.g. cognitive, social, etc.) can be at different stages. There is also a mechanism for progression between stages, more about this in a later article.
Fourth Person in the Christian Mythos
Considering that the Holy Trinity has God the Farther representing (structuralism) first person, The Holy Spirit representing (relational) second person perspective, and Jesus Christ representing (physics) third person; it follows Lucifer represents the (sociological, materialist) fourth person.
Although one can find traces of this in Orthodox Christianity, it is absent from Catholicism, for, I submit, two reasons: firstly, there was no fourth person perspective at the time of the formation of the Church’s theology; and secondly, the privation theory of evil (privatio boni) doctrine in which evil is explained as merely the absence of good, thus denying Satan his existence.
(And now, writing in 2020 as America burns, it appears that this denial of individuality has reached it’s full measure and force.)
The point I’m driving at here is that the 2nd person interpretation of good and evil needs to be updated and inclusion of the psychological shadow needs to happen on both individual and social arenas.
