https://www.amazon.com/Over-Our-Heads-M ... 1529587720
Kegan's book is basically aimed at explaining the "Orders of Consciousness" (I will call it OOC). Kegan uses situational examples related to adolescence, partnering, parenting, working, healing, learning, leadership, and so forth to help explain how humans transistion between orders. Below is a link to a chart that displays some of the characterisics of each order (this is a slightly simplified version).
http://terminal.cyberpunked.net/post/88 ... complexity
Robert Kegan's wikipedia page also has a chart and some information about the book.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kegan
Below is a link to an article on OOC (which links to another article).
http://the-mouse-trap.com/2008/09/30/ro ... ciousness/
Jacob's comments on OOC:
(*) Kegan's arrangement of orders of consciousness can be used to conclude lots of interesting things about this. This also explains to which degree agency is possible in a person. Deliberate life choices like ERE, WSP, weight loss, ... which are different from the standard world-paradigm (consumerism, SAD diet, "good payin' jobs for hard-workin' people") requires a 4th order consciousness ("self-authoring") and works mainly in positive environments while failing in negative ones. It's also possible for 3rd order consciousness but not as a deliberate ("self-authoring") choice but rather as going along with the paradigm of one's friends, family, school, TV-ads, ... ("environment"). Unfortunately, climate change requires 5th order ("self-transforming") to resolve it. Going by the human adult population, 58% are 3rd order, 35% are 4th order, and 1% is 5th order. The remaining are 2nd order.
OOC is a constructive-developmental model of humans (or generally agents). The model captures the development of how agents construct existence conceptually. What is subjective in the previous order becomes objective in the next. This is possible by attending to the subjective until patterns can be abstracted from a collection of subjective perceptions.A rough schemata of Kegan orders presented in words that we can all understand/relate to here, along with the percentages of adult humans in the total population sample:
Lifestyle dependent (0%)
Lifestyle respondent (14%)
Lifestyle follower (58%)
Lifestyle chooser (35%)
Lifestyle innovator (1%)
I haven't quite debugged the suffixes yet---still converging on the "best terms"---but I suspect those are ultimately generic templates that fit after any prefix such as politics, religion, philosophy, ... not just lifestyle.
However, insofar that the majority of people are followers [of those who choose], and most other people are choosers [of those who invent], societal evolution from e.g. political changes et al. is very much curbed given the innate limitations of ordinary human beings. Most humans are born with a brain/lifespan to follow.
For instance, by paying attention to differences in how an agent can percieve actuality the agent starts to notice stable patterns. These stable patterns can then be stored in a category Kegan calls "Concrete". In this situation the agent is in trasition to order three where the agent will start to compare hypothetical concrete realities to find an ideal one.
Here are some transistion characteristics that I came up with.
Transistion from order 3 to order 4
- Growing use of abstraction.
- Growing awareness of the distinction between objective and subjective statements.
- Growing ability to formulate arguments derived from axioms.
- Decoupling from any single group ideology.
Transistion from order 4 to order 5
- Deattachment from ideals and identity.
- Beliefs and arguments become more like objects that are separate from self.
- Increasing focus on relations between systems.
I spectulate that a fully actuallized human is independent of past self. The self would be in constant flux with the environment based primarily on current relations (to other agents, institutions, objects, etc); the form/action would be secondary. What do you think of this?
Anyone know of any other sources? Any thoughts on the topic?