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[Music] welcome to spiral dynamics stage red this is a continuation of my multi-part series on the psychological developmental model known as spiral dynamics i'm not going to introduce that whole model here we're just going to jump right into stage red i've already covered stages blue orange green yellow and even turquoise and so we're sort of moving backwards here down the spiral and we have a lot of material to cover so let's get started i want to make sure i give credit here to some important people who develop spiral dynamics this model it's an amazing model and they did some amazing work here they really devoted their lives to to flushing out this model and making it popular so credits go to claire graves who was the original developer of the the value system underneath the model and then don beck and christopher cohen for popularizing it and fleshing it out and giving it the label spiral dynamics i also want to give credit to a website called spiral dynamics integral dot nl from which i pulled some information here that i'll be quoting directly and i also pulled a lot of material from the spiral dynamics book written by don beck and by christopher cohen sometimes i just rip out entire phrases or words or sentences from that book and i'll be uh quoting a lot of that stuff here so by no means that i make all of this up myself so the way that sproul dynamics works just to refresh your memory a little bit uh and i'm going to show you here uh a chart of of this broad dynamic basis model basically what it is is it's a series of stages that humans evolve through both individually and collectively as society our culture evolves through these stages it goes from beige to purple to red which we'll be talking about now then to blue orange green yellow and turquoise so now we're starting to talk about the the lower stages this episode is going to be on red i'm going to have a follow-up episode soon on purple i'm not going to talk about beige but red is an interesting it's an interesting stage because it's one of those stages which is active in many parts of the world in third world countries in developing countries that most of us in advanced western democracies and in the first world aren't too familiar with so we can easily get tricked by stage red because we don't see a lot of it in our everyday lives even though there's still plenty of it present in america in europe and other advanced developed countries so we have to be careful because we can get tricked by red and and red can be a very very dangerous and problematic stage as you'll start to see here so again just to give you the big picture of what is spirodynamics really modeling or explaining it's explaining the evolution of the human psyche it's explaining human value systems as they relate to the environment the social environment that we find ourselves in having to survive in as humans so what's unique about humans is that unlike other animals which just live in some static environment like you know a monkey is living in a rainforest somewhere or a zebra is living on the savannah or a bear is living in the woods their environment has stayed the same for hundreds of thousands and maybe millions of years and those animals haven't changed like crocodiles for example have existed for for tens of millions of years and even longer basically since the age of the dinosaurs and they haven't changed very much because their environments are basically the same and so it works for them but for humans what's unique about us as a as a social species that we have a symbolic system which we can use you know writing talking ideas philosophy culture uh education books entertainment media art all of this all of these cultural artifacts that we have so we are literally transforming our own environment because we're constructing cities and societies we're not only engineering the physical environment by building roads and bridges and you know clearing forests and things like this but more importantly we're building a sort of a culture a sort of a software environment not just the hardware of the enviro software in many respects the software is even more important than the hardware for us humans and so as it turns out societies evolve through these stages in a particular specific order you can't just jump over a stage every society basically evolves up the spiral stages in a particular order and that's very useful to know because you can then predict what the next stage is and help people to navigate the various traps and problems of each stage see so these are like cultural soft pieces of software that that are programmed into our minds as part of being civilized animals which is what we are now unfortunately red is not that civilized as we'll see here so uh you can see the spirodynamics chart you can see the different stages basically what's happening is that the higher you go up the spiral your circle of concern for others expands your sense of ego becomes more diffuse and it also expands the lower the stages the more contracted the ego the more selfish the person is and generally all of the problems that come with ego become more pronounced at the lower stages and at the lower stages you have lower levels of consciousness basically at the very lowest stages it's more like humans behaving like animals and then at the higher stages these are more civilized humans more developed humans uh who have more compassion and a larger sense of concern a deeper broader morality and they behave in more humane ways more like like saints than animals so what is the essence of stage red it's this we could call it egocentric and domini domineering it's power hungry it's a mode of survival which is very animalistic in the sense that in the animal kingdom might makes right if you can physically attack somebody or you can chase them down and eat them bite them scratch them trick them exploit them then you do it as an animal that's just survival of the animal kingdom and that's very much what survival looks like at stage red in stage red societies it's very exploitative this stage is individualistic if you remember spiral dynamic stages they oscillate and swing back and forth like a pendulum between individual stages and collectivist stages so stage red is individualist then it's going to swing to stage blue which is going to be collectivist then back to stage orange which is individuals to get in so it oscillates this way so uh what this means is that stage red is about taking charge without taking into account the suffering of others it's very very egocentric that's why we call it egocentric it's all about me and my ability to survive and reproduce and maybe my immediate circle of friends and family but even there at stage red you might be shocked to learn that stage red is so egocentric that it might even hurt and cause suffering to its uh to its family members and even to its closest friends because it's just so self-absorbed stage red views life as survival in the jungle the strong will win and the weak will lose they tend to see the world as a one divided between victims and predators and that there's no other alternative but to compete and stage red wants to be the predator not the victim of course it's pretty natural right i mean if you were forced to choose between being a victim and a predator wouldn't you choose to be a predator at least that's how stage red thinks about it stage red is impulsive and it looks for immediate gratification of its desires so if it's horny it's gonna immediately want to have sex damn the consequences if it's hungry it's gonna throw some lavish banquet and gorge itself full of you know delicacies and the the best food that it can without thinking of the long-term consequences and so on for the way that it generally approaches life stage red has neither guilt nor concern for others this can be a little bit difficult for some of us in developed democracies to appreciate those of us who have a higher sense of morality those of us like most of you who watch me are probably at around stage green maybe high orange low green somewhere around there maybe a little bit above green so if you're coming and looking at red from that vantage point the difficulty with this entire episode is for you to understand red is going to be difficult because to you this this seems like uh psychopathy it seems like craziness it seems like insanity it's gonna seem like red is uh is just brutal and criminal like how how is it possible that a a human could have no guilt or that a human could not care about causing suffering to its immediate family members or to its friends or to to others how is that possible well that's because society has inculcerated you so well because you had the luxury of standing on the shoulders of giants and growing up in an advanced society which has been evolving for hundreds and thousands of years that now you just take that for granted and you think well humans just always were compassionate and always were you know capable of guilt and they always you know treated each other nicely and so forth no no what you have to understand is that the software that runs the human mind and all of human society this software has been upgrading for hundreds and thousands of years and it's different in different parts of the world at different times in different eras and it transforms how you see the world completely it's almost like we're talking about living in different realities here right so the challenge for you here as you're listening to me is that it it might seem like what i'm talking about here is is exaggerated or that it's hyperbolic or that it's grotesque and that it's evil many people would consider stage red evil and yet it's not evil it's not even bad it just is what survival is like in certain parts and times in the world and so what you have to really appreciate about red is that red is an effective survival strategy given a specific type of environment so red usually exists in very brutal environments very underdeveloped parts of the world where there aren't effective court systems there is not effective and fair police there is not a democratic government at stage red there are not human rights there is not even a notion of morality there is not a notion of of the ten commandments there's not a notion or a value of compassion these sorts of things are luxuries when you're living in a certain type of environment certain parts of the world which are very underdeveloped which all of the world was 500 years ago or a thousand years ago or 2 000 years ago right so you have to appreciate that so one of the things that many stage green and above people fail to appreciate is that the only reason you're at stage green is because your society has developed the infrastructure and the kind of government and culture thousands of years of cultural evolution have happened to allow you to stand on the shoulders of giants so that you live in this nice comfortable society where you can have the luxury of compassion for others and where you don't have to worry about somebody stabbing you in the back as you're walking down the street you don't have to be worried about being robbed at gunpoint while you're driving down the highway by some high women you don't have to worry about pirates because there's police that protect you but in many parts of the world there isn't such a thing or if there is police these police themselves are stage red and they're part of some criminal mafia and they've been paid off and they're very corrupt and so unless you're able to pay them off or you're friends with somebody in the in the police then they're not going to help you and in fact they will they will abuse you themselves and exploit you themselves so we'll get into a lot more of that as we keep going stage red has this attitude of challenging death and coming out on top prevailing so it tends to be very risk tolerant because it has to be because the environment it grew up in to survive it had to take some bold and daring risks so when does stage red emerge on the spiral basically if we kind of situated historically in the evolution of of human societies stage purple is the stage that comes before red and so stage purple is very tribal think of it as the prototype is basically uh tribes of 100 or 200 people living deep in the amazon jungle which still exists today that's how humans lived five thousand years ago or so so there are these tribes and then we tend to have this kind of myth about these tribes that these tribes are very peaceful this is sort of the stage green romanticization of these tribes they're peaceful they live in harmony with nature and some of that is true uh but they also tend to be uh warlike amongst themselves there's a lot of tribal warfare and so what starts to happen is that as these stage purple tribes as they start to expand and grow there's more of them you know at first if we just you know roll the clock back a hundred thousand years then these tribes could live more or less peacefully because they were so isolated from each other and they were the the environment was so huge there were so few of these tribes the population of humans was generally so low there were so many abundant natural resources animals to hunt but you know buffaloes and and mammoths and all these sorts of things that you could hunt and eat and it was all plentiful you could fish and you could you know pick fruit and all this and so there wasn't a lot of need for tribal warfare but then as these tribes grow they start to encroach on one another and then of course naturally they have to fight over resources and they have different culture different languages different ethnicities and so forth and so that you start to get clashes and fighting now at stage purple this is a very collectivist stage and basically when you're living in this tribe there's no sense of individualism the way that we have today there's no sense of like this libertarian i'm an individual and i have personal freedoms and rights this is not how tribal life works in a tribal culture you're basically living as part of the tribal identity you're basically part of this tribal hive mind that is your identity as the tribe it's not about you because that's what's necessary for a tribe to survive they have to work together effectively but then with stage red what starts to happen is that once the tribe becomes successful and it it becomes stable and you've sort of mastered cooperating within the tribe that safety of the tribe the success of the tribe then sort of leads the next stage which is now the emergence of red now you start to develop a certain sense of individuality and personal ambition now you've sort of lived in the tribe then you realize well okay the tribal life is nice but then what do i get for myself and now i want something for me i want to control the tribe what if i become the chieftain of the tribe what if i overtake and overthrow the chieftain who's already there because i'm more powerful then i could get all the women i could get all the resources i can get all the money i can get all the weapons and i have all the power for myself and that would be great right that's the sort of attitude of red and uh and also it might not just be purely selfish like that but there might also be sort of an altruistic component to it indirectly in the sense that if i have a tribe here my tribe and the chieftain of my tribe is not very effective not very decisive not very strong and we have a neighboring tribe that's stronger than us who already has a stage red chieftain who's very powerful and bloodthirsty and domineering the problem is is that now my tribe is at a serious survival disadvantage if that tribe overtakes my tribe my entire tribe will be enslaved or wiped out so in a sense there's like an arms race where i am compelled for purposes of just survival i am compelled to rise and it's in a sense my duty to overthrow this weak feeble ineffective chieftain and to be strong and to fight for my people and to rally my tribe together maybe rally multiple tribes together unify them so that we can put up a strong front against this other stage red tribe that will conquer us see so there's this pressure to you unify squabbling tribes for the greater good for the survival of the tribe and that's really what stage red is all about it's just about pure survival if you're sort of shocked by some of the brutality and cruelty of red as we'll be talking about going forward don't be because if red wasn't this brutal given the environment it has to grow up in it would probably die or it would be severely victimized and its family would suffer deeply so in a sense you can start to empathize with red and start to see why red has this appeal you know if you're going to be put into a corner if someone's going to put a gun to your children's heads and threaten to pull the trigger you can see how that might spur you to stop being a victim stop uh being nice take off the kid gloves and uh and you know go get your baseball bat sort of thing and so red red's form of government is going to be a unification through ruthless domination and that's how red emerges from from purple here's a list of stage red values i give this list in every one of my episodes these values are the core of what defines the spiral dynamics stage any stage a stage is basically a collection of values so here's what stage red values personal power strength might and brute force displays of toughness brazen courage valor heroism and daring being the boss being number one winning at all costs conquering one's enemies domination and furthermore it's the thrill of conquest they actually get off on this there can be a sort of joy to being strong and powerful and being able to bully others stage red has a warrior mentality death is glorified it's not something that stage red fears very much one of the qualities of stage red is that it tends to be fearless it tends to be daring and bold it loves heroic deeds it loves to challenge death and win it loves competition it loves to crush its opponents it values resolving disputes through ruthless force or through intimidation rather than through diplomacy or any kind of soft means like that so if you want to think of stage green as the soft hippie stage stage red is sort of the polar opposite that is a very hard brutal physical force stage if you want to think of stage green as having a lot of compassion and being very centered stage red is very much sort of groin centered we might say it's chakra too in this sense uh it's it's very lusty it's uh it's very primal it's sort of brutal it's physical it's material stage red values winning victory conquest and triumph against difficult odds it values ambition and playing it big it values revenge respect receiving respect loyalty loyalty to me to the boss decisiveness assertiveness passion action it's a very action oriented stage it's pragmatic it's direct it's no nonsense it's about taking initiative and ownership and personal willpower getting things done and sort of just do it mentality so sage red is not going to sit around and think things through very deeply it's just going to say [ __ ] it let's just do it let's just do it and deal with the consequences whatever they are and sometimes the consequences are are very bloody and terrible and catastrophic and and then red adjust to that it's a very much sort of a fly by the seat of your pants uh shoot first ask questions later sort of mentality stage red values unilateral control and executive power it values glitz ostentation dis ostentatious displays of grandiosity it wants to be bigger than life so what i mean by glitz and oscitation displays of of grandiosity is uh think of a roman emperor who has conquered some some barbaric tribe and then they build you know the roman empire builds this giant uh elaborate very expensive monument that takes 10 years to build so you know some sort of obelisk or some sort of giant statue where it shows the emperor you know with his muscles and a spear and he's standing on top of the corpse you know a pile of corpses of his enemies that he's conquered that sort of display of ostentation and grandiosity and of course he's depicted as this larger than life hero with giant muscles the perfect physique and you know big weapons and it's all covered in gold made out of solid gold something like that and just imagine imagine the most grandiose uh sort of uh monument to to conquest and and you can see this all throughout the you know the roman empire for example or other ancient civilizations we see these sorts of sculptures and reliefs and monuments and of course this will come with myths and stories that glorify the conquest of of our enemies stage red values status and recognition of prowess it values machismo pride and bragging charisma and it tends to be a plain talker rather than being very intellectual like some of the higher stages this uh this this stage tends to be plain spoken and very blunt and direct and brutal tends to be quite vulgar in its speech it's not very refined or educated a stage red person probably doesn't have very much education it values intimidation manipulation and exploitation as survival and it actually gets off on this it sort of delights in being able to intimidate or manipulate or exploit somebody who's weaker than it it values sexual conquest and exploitation and it tends to use sex not just for sex or procreation but for for power and vanity it tends to value sadistic forms of sex sex that involves torture and domination and exploitation and inflicting suffering it's about enjoying life to the fullest damn the consequences it tends to value adventure thrill seeking and living boldly it values power contests like uh arm wrestling face slapping there's this interesting trend on youtube i heard about it on joe rogan um he showed some clips of of the these guys these russian guys who will do these uh slapping contests you can you can google it type in slapping contests something like that and you'll see it basically it's like usually two giant beefy dudes standing face to face across from each other in front of a little table and they just take they basically get one turn after another just to slap each other across the face as hard as possible sometimes they will slap each other so hard that they will knock the other guy out just from from the sheer force of that slap so that that's an example of a very sort of uh stage red sort of mentality and you can see the people who are there just you can look at their complexions like the tattoos they have and just the way they talk and everything you could just tell it's a very stage red vibe stage red values breaking rules and finding loopholes it's not very good at following rules or obeying or being orderly that's something that comes with stage blue which hasn't emerged yet and it values breaking with the pack and pushing the envelope so here are some more characteristics of stage red it strives for self-preservation and respect it feels very insulted when it doesn't get the respect that it deserves it enjoys itself to the fullest without regret or remorse it's free of guilt and shame it's indifferent to the collateral damage or suffering caused to others and this is one of those points where this is one of these points that will be difficult for for many of you to accept how is it possible that someone can just go through life and not think about the suffering that one's actions inflict upon others to a staged green person this seems like insanity this seems like a mental disorder but it's not necessarily a mental disorder in many parts of the world it's just not a luxury that you have you have to survive no matter what because in many parts of the world if you're living in a difficult environment like you're living somewhere in some very impoverished part of africa or in the middle east the reality is that if you do care about the suffering of others too much and you care about the collateral damage that your actions inflict you're simply not going to survive your family is not going to survive so in a sense you're forced into it you don't really you don't have very much options um another characteristic of stage reds it tends to be narcissistic and uh sometimes narcissism in our society is thought of as this mental disorder but not necessarily is it just a mental disorder it could just simply be a fact of a lack of development many people who for example might immigrate from a third world country into a first world country they might appear narcissistic because they simply come from an environment where they had to be extremely selfish and ego centered in order to survive in order to get to where they are so it's not necessarily a mental disorder don't think of stage red as a mental disorder the reason that is is because if you if there are societies where stage red is just prevalent and it makes no sense to say that these people have a mental disorder because they can evolve out of that if they do work and if you know society is given more time to develop and infrastructure is built they grow out of it so it's not just a mental disorder another characteristic of red is that it tends to be impulsive rather than strategic so there's no deep strategy behind stage reds actions it tends to go by its gut feel it tends to be intuitive and not so much analytical or academic it doesn't make very long long-term deep plans and of course that can get into trouble because its time horizon is very short it tends to be very myopic it tends to be very opportunistic and it tends to just try to do whatever it can do now in order to survive because that's do you see how when you're living in a very challenging survival situation it doesn't make sense to spend a lot of your energy thinking about what's gonna happen five years or ten years down the road because you just have to survive this week that's all you're concerned about in these kinds of environments now if you're living in a first world country then you have the luxury to think about what's going to happen in five years and 10 years you know to plan out your life because you can predict life is more stable and predictable in society is not all chaos and it's not war um but when you're like living in the mafia for example you don't have some five-year 10-year plan you're just living for tomorrow you're just trying to make sure you don't get caught by the cops tomorrow you're trying to make sure you don't get hit you know some hit isn't issued on you next week and as long as you can survive that then you'll deal with the next problem you know when it arises but of course the problem with this approach is that you can get yourself painted into a corner very easily you can sort of go down and down a downward negative spiral which then just completely spirals out of control and it's it's unsustainable and then you just get killed another characteristic is that red uses power for personal gratification and enrichment it uses force fear and intimidation to govern there's no democracy at stage red this is absolute totalitarianism tyranny authoritarianism strong-arming others there is a glorification of absolute rules and vengeful gods stage read can believe in god a lot of stage read dictators and so forth they actually do believe in god but the gods they believe in are the sort of gods that are convenient to their lifestyle so this is a god that actually encourages war this is a god that encourages celebration of conquest and things like this so their theirs is not some peaceful loving god theirs is a god who respects others who are strong and who conquer their enemies and then therefore they now they deserve the respect of god because to them that's what god is god is this vengeful authoritarian ruler of the universe and of course they're trying to emulate god in that sense there is a glorification of war rape genocide and enslavement these things are not considered to be bad and uh that's that's a very difficult one for many of us in developed parts of the world to wrap our minds around you know like how could someone consider rape to not be bad how could someone consider enslavement uh you know how to be a positive how can someone glorify war these things are horrible but these things are also extremely common at stage red they're just a way of life that's how you survive in a stage red society in many places life is cheap and people are expendable to stay dread survival is so difficult that people are dying all the time for example if you're part of the mob you know many people who your your friends and so forth and your bosses who have been killed put in jail and this is just a normal part of your life you're in a sense you're sort of jaded and desensitized to it because there's no other way stage societies are not peaceful societies and the people you hang out with stage red people you know they're generally violent uh narcissistic sort of people and so it's all about you know how do i use somebody else to get myself ahead relationships tend to be transactional and expendable so stage green you know puts a lot of effort into actually cultivating relationships and getting satisfaction value out of just the relationship itself a relationship for its own sake red doesn't think this way red doesn't have that luxury a relationship is something i'm using in order to advance my survival red tends to be oblivious to other sentient beings with rights and personal worth red basically treats other humans in the way that humans treat animals that they eat in the way that we treat factory farmed cows and pigs and chickens right how much time do you spend thinking about the rights and personal worth of a chicken not very much you just kill it and you eat it and that's generally the sort of approach that stage red takes to other humans now of course if you're a stage green you say no leo but i'm a vegan and i care so much about animal rights and the worth of animals and they're they are sentient beings well good good for you you've evolved to a certain level of consciousness but don't expect others to be at that same level and you have to understand that that what you're doing is not some you know it's not some absolute truth that that's that that's part of your value system that's part of something that you're constructing is you're constructing this sort of idea that that sentient beings have value and personal worth that we need to respect life this is a this is a relative value system there's no reason that you need to respect life it's just a i mean it's nice if you do it creates a nicer society it's easier to live that way but but but don't go thinking that there's there's some sort of absolute truth behind that there's not it's relative another characteristic of red tends to be that they're they're gutsy they're ballsy they're cocky and they have a very high risk tolerance so a lot of gamblers you know like degenerate chronic gamblers will be stage red because they don't they don't think about the consequences uh they don't think about the odds and they get a thrill out of at you know placing these high stakes bets and then winning even though they're probably going to lose but if they do win you know that that gives them that sort of adrenaline rush and gives them that sense of of power sort of beating the system beating the odds um a lot of red survival strategy is about winning through sheer audacity it's an interesting survival strategy have you ever maybe experienced this in your life sometimes you think like well i can sort of take the safe road in this situation like you could say it's a dangerous situation here so i could be conservative and take the safe road or i can you know do the very risky thing and you think about the risky thing and most of us think about it like nah it's just too dangerous because if it goes wrong it will really really go wrong um and so we generally go the conservative direction and we stay safe that way but stage red in a sense it's so bold it's so daring it's so shameless that a lot of times it can win simply through its sheer shamelessness have you known people like that um yeah it's definitely a survival strategy that sometimes works you know i've heard stories of people stage red people you know who describe some of their you know daring risk-taking audacious uh you know things that they've done and you know i think about like damn you're crazy that that's insane you could have killed yourself you could have gotten arrested you could have you know overdosed you could have um you could have killed yourself you know you whatever uh but uh but the reason that they didn't is precisely because they were so audacious a lot of times you can exploit people that way because a lot of times people don't expect you to be suicidally daring and yet when you are for example you could win on the battlefield if you're if you're fighting a battle against some opponent and you're completely outnumbered what do you got to do well you don't have much to lose because you know you're so outnumbered you know they're going to come and kill you so you might as well just go for the most bold and daring plan and sometimes it works out precisely because your enemy doesn't expect you to be so daring and so bold and that's exactly why red uses this strategy because it works in a certain type of environment you have to really appreciate that the environment that these strategies are played in is is is completely fundamental because if you have a mismatch between the environment and the strategy you're using then it's going to turn out terrible but if the environment and the strategy is the right fit then it'll work even if it's brutal or it seems insane to you another characteristic of red is that it tends to only trust itself because of course everybody is in this sort of dog-eat-dog world it's it's a jungle out there and so who can i really trust well nobody because anybody could stab me in the back and everybody's going to try and exploit me just the way that i exploit i expect them and so one of the ways in which red justifies its predatory and exploitative behavior is because hey everybody else is doing it so why should i be the only one who disarms when all of my enemies are arming themselves up well i have to as well it's an arms race another characteristic is that whatever i can take is fair it's this attitude of i am the law i set the law might makes right if i can do it then that means it's justified i don't have to hold myself back with guilt and morality and artificial rules of what's right and what's wrong if i can do it it's right red has a high sense of entitlement it feels like it owns the world it deserves women and sex and money and fame and respect all of this is deserved which makes red very confident it's decisive and energetic it's very direct and blunt it's quick to action red tends to be hot-blooded emotions such as rage anger mania red will fly off the handle if it's triggered enough red will throw objects at the wall you know those people who you know they're in a fight they get angry they take some vase or something and they they smash it against their partner's head or something like that where they will throw a glass in their face these sorts of things a lot of domestic violence comes from stage red men and even stage red women a straight a stage red woman and by the way stage red is not just exclusive to men women of course are also able to be at stage red i'll give you some examples of that as we get to the examples portion of this episode but you know there's examples of of crazy women who are alcoholic and do drugs and they they are abusive to their boyfriends and husbands and they will try to stab them or throw something at them or shoot them so there's there's there's plenty of these examples to go around stage red tends to be materialistic and hedonistic it it values tangible things gold diamonds drugs uh sex uh you know trophy women and wives and like this sort of stuff stuff that you can that you know that you can that you can use directly for your survival red likes to flex its muscles as a show of its strength it likes to puff itself up you know puff up its chest and it's just this sort of attitude it tends to be pragmatic action oriented and results oriented it's very opportunist opportunistic and expedient whatever is expedient whatever will work in this situation it tends to to do because it's forced to it expects personal loyalty and respect uh it uses shows of power and guts to gain respect from others it delights in cruelty torture revenge and violence so not only is it that red can be very violent and do all these sorts of criminal things but it actually takes delight in it not always but oftentimes it can it tends to be very vindictive and delights in the suffering especially of its enemies so if some enemy did me wrong uh stage red people will have very long-term memory they will hold a grudge for any insult that they received and they're easily insulted because they value respect so much you know they can be disrespected easily and then they will hold that grudge for years for decades until they can re exact their revenge on their enemies and make it as as painful for them as possible and they will gloat and delight in that and then they will they will glorify that and they will share that with their you know with their friends and their enemies so that it's like a threat you know if you mess with me i'm gonna cut off your head and put on a spike sort of idea there's no altruism at stage red there's no forgiveness there's no compromise there's no mercy it tends to be ruthless and bloodthirsty there's celebration of conquest rules and regulations are to be tested and ignored not to be followed red likes to bend nature to its will so not only is red about dominating humans but also dominating the environment physically you know raping the earth so to speak extracting resources dominating animals as well red doesn't have the capacity for self-reflection all problems in the world are perceived to be external so there's no inner work going on at stage right there's no consciousness work it's not like stage red will stop and will ask yourself well did i do the right thing in that situation when i killed that guy or when i robbed that bank or when i did those drugs it's like no the problem isn't me the problem is never me the problem is always that oh it's the police who are the problem it's the government who's the problem it's the woman who's the problem you know she made me slap her and rape her because of what she was wearing because she was disrespecting me so of course i raped her because she was disrespecting me she got what she deserved that's the sort of idea it's never like well what about me what about my is there anything in my psyche that i should change should i do some self-improvement like no not a stage right problems are always somebody else's fault and stage red doesn't learn through punishment so a lot of criminals will be repeat offenders and they will be sent in jail over and over again they get released they get caught again because they just go back to doing what they were doing because punishment doesn't deter them and they don't think that far ahead when they're thinking about holding up you know a liquor store at gunpoint for a thousand dollars or something all they want is that thousand dollars because they need a thousand dollars you know to buy some heroin to feed their drug addiction or whatever and they're not thinking about well what are the consequences what if cops come and then you know the the judge throws the book at me and i get 10 20 years in jail it's like they no they don't they don't make those connections so of course they're going to just um uh they're gonna seem very unintelligent to higher stages and in a sense they are and you know they're impulsive so it's like if i'm horny and i want to have sex and you know there's that that girl walking by well i'm just going to rape her and i'm not going to think about the consequence i'm going to think about will i get caught how many years am i going to go to jail for rape you know i'm not going to go google that and try to figure it out and see like well is it worth let me do a cost benefit analysis on you know well i could get five years for raping her but on the other hand i'm really horny like which one of those should i like no it's like oh i'm horny i'm just gonna rape her and then if the cops come i'm gonna i'm gonna you know i'm gonna i'm gonna find where those cops live and i'm gonna go and break the kneecaps of their uh of their children with a baseball bat teach them a lesson this kind of mentality because there's no self-reflection here there's an instant defensiveness when ideas are challenged because stage red is so brashly self-confident that it doesn't recognize the weakness of its own plans or ideas so when someone tells stage read like hey you know that's a bad idea maybe you shouldn't go through with that stage red is gonna is gonna tend to not introspect and say yeah you know maybe you're right maybe i shouldn't rob that bank maybe i should get out of the mafia it's like no it's like who are you to challenge me you're questioning my ideas you're disrespecting me you're telling me there's something wrong with me it's like no something's wrong with you because all problems are external nothing's wrong with me of course there's very high ego at this stage and because there's high ego stage red is not capable of looking at itself objectively objectively evaluating its own weaknesses and trying to improve itself and so that's a big problem how do you get people out of stage red how do you get them to to rehabilitate themselves like as criminals or as drug addicts for example how do you get them to change when they don't want to do any self-improvement work and everything at this stage is taken personally so if you tell a stage red person to do some self-improvement work they're going to take that personally like there's something wrong with them they're going to get angry and they're probably going to lash out at you and they're probably going to hit you over the head and they're going to be happy about it stage red is unable to exercise restraint there's a lack of self-control self-control and discipline is something that's developed at stage blue which comes next after stage red but we haven't gotten there yet so there's a lack of self-control a lot of the stupid stuff that stage red does tends to end up boomeranging on on it because it just acts impulsively on on some craving or some desire it has and then it gets itself into a bad uh dangerous situation which ends up harming its survival it's unable to plan well it's unable to save for a rainy day or do preventative maintenance work it tends to be very corrupt and it sees corruption and violence as the norm it doesn't see corruption as a bad thing that needs to be reformed it's just the way of life because some countries and societies are so corrupt that the idea of ever correcting that corruption is so far out into the future that it doesn't even make sense to think about it because it won't happen in your lifetime so why think about it join the corruption and try to win that game of corruption and come out on top be the most corrupt that's how red things you don't deal with corruption by by being nice you deal with corruption by becoming even more corrupt than everybody else red tends to be about controlling and expanding turf and territory that's what a lot of gang warfare is about you know different rival gangs in inner cities are fighting with each other for control of territory in order to sell drugs for example and if you disrespect a gang member you get killed by it through like a drive-by shooting or something stage red can get off on controlling people because it loves to be dominate domineering and so just its whole approach to life is to control others to make them do what red needs and wants for its survival aggression and violence are seen as legit tools to get what red wants red tends to be passionate it tends to have a a passionate sense of mission it tends to be a sort of alpha male mentality although that doesn't mean that red is exclusive to males females like i said are also capable of it it tends to be very confrontational it doesn't back down it creates enemies and it sees the world in terms of friends and enemies enemies are not seen as something that my mind is projecting or creating enemies are not relative or subjective things the way that you realize they are at higher stages enemies are real tangible and they must be destroyed red tends to be independent it tends to like a strict hierarchy where red is in charge or red is climbing the hierarchy to the top to become the boss now don't make a mistake think a mistake here of thinking that you must be the boss in order to be stage red for example in a gang or in a mafia everybody in in a sort of you know soprano style mafia situation everybody not just tony soprano but everybody in that structure is stage red you have the highest boss maybe tony soprano of course he's red but there's lower you know his lieutenants they're also red and and everybody underneath them is also red but then of course you know it's it's a vicious sort of hierarchy where one is trying to climb the ladder and trying to take out the guy above or if one respects the guy above you then you sort of respect his power and so you know red is not totally stupid red can understand that you know maybe i'm not the strongest one in this hierarchy maybe i have to bide my time a little bit i can't just go challenge the boss right away maybe right now i'm just sort of a newbie i'm sort of just a lieutenant i can i can respect the boss because the boss is powerful so don't think that red will never submit himself to some higher power he will he will submit himself to a boss but of course red respects the boss precisely because he wants to sort of be in that boss's shoes now that doesn't mean that he will ever get there he probably won't because there's not that many bosses there can only be so many bosses relative to everybody down lower on the pyramid but you can sort of maintain that structure and then the boss the way the boss enforces that structure is through an iron fist through you know brutal torture and domination such that that keeps others in line and red respects that another feature of red is that it tends to view conquest as equivalent to worth value truth goodness and beauty so for most of us if we're a little bit more developed than that we can have values like truth and goodness and beauty and we can value these and we don't equate these with conquest and domination of other people but stage red does and you can see how problematic that can be and lastly a characteristic of stage red is that it tends to exploit the superstitions of stage purple so stage purple which we'll talk about in the future not only is it deeply tribal but it tends to have a sort of a magical animistic mystical spiritual component to it a lot of sort of superstition witchcraft voodoo this sort of stuff which can be exploited by stage red for its own purposes because stage red is not going to be loyal to some you know mother earth spirit or some some [ __ ] like this but it could exploit that in order to to dominate and to control other people all right so now it's time to get to my giant list of examples of stage red a lot of examples here we're going to go through them quickly i'll pause on certain examples in order to elaborate because some of these examples are really illustrative of red so let's start with the first one which is donald trump so i've alluded to this in the past but it really bears to to double down on it here hopefully if you're conscious and you've been following sprawl dynamics and you've been following what's been happening in politics over the last four years you've been sort of psychoanalyzing trump uh and a lot of the stuff that i already mentioned all these values and qualities as i was mentioning them i hope in your mind you were seeing an image of trump because i was describing him almost word for word in many ways he loves to brag he loves displays of power military parades he is friends with other dictators and authoritarians around the world he's extremely impulsive he has no self-control he has no discipline he's very manipulative and exploitative opportunistic he doesn't have long-term plans he's not a strategic thinker he's not a systemic thinker he's just flying by the seat of his pants he's very intuitive he's driven by his gut he's simple-minded he's not very educated he will say the dumbest things he wants respect more than anything he gets easily offended he has a very fragile ego he's extremely narcissistic he doesn't care about anybody not even his own family members many of them he doesn't care about um not even his own sons uh if you've read you know stories inside stories of how the trump family operates it's a very stage red sort of mentality now of course trump is not exclusively stage red he's also got elements of some blue and he's got plenty of stage orange in him as well but he's got a lot of stage red and the problem with trump is that he got elected by people who are not very bright and are not able to make these distinctions they have no idea what sprout dynamics is and so they elected him including most of the republican party they started to support trump uh thinking that he's at stage orange i mean they don't understand what stage orange is but if they did they would think oh yeah he's just a stage orange like ceo successful business guy likes money you know has a has giant high rises with golden toilets and stuff like that yeah you're sort of like an excessively staged orange sort of guy we can deal with that you know because almost most republicans and most people who um you know neoliberals and capitalists they're stage orange but what they don't understand is that trump has a thin veneer of stage orange but deep down at his core in his psyche he's staged red which is two stages lower than oranges it's far more dangerous and so now four years into it republicans have sort of been shocked themselves to see how incompetent and reckless and dangerous trump is how uncontrollable he is how little discipline he has and to many republicans it's kind of like they've they've gone all in on trump because they want to maintain power but they're not quite able to reconcile like why does this guy act like such a monster sometimes why can't he just like be normal why can't he be a normal republican why can't he just be the sort of normal stage blue slash orange sort of republican the way that most of them are well because he's actually got a very deep red core and and see you can't you can't train him you can't teach him he doesn't learn lessons he just keeps acting impulsively from his narcissistic impulses and this offends some conservatives the good conservatives the sort of never trumpers they saw through it they had some morals and some integrity they saw that this guy is not a standard republican this guy is actually hijacking the conservative movement uh you know he's not truly religious he doesn't respect mur he doesn't have any morality he's a serial you know womanizer and philanderer and you know there's rape accusations against him and blah blah blah blah and so you know he you know he he he engages in in criminal business activity he's not really able to run a successful business so he's not he's not going to lead us to any kind of you know um sort of neo-liberal ideal that many conservatives have it's not going to happen so the narrow trumpers saw through that credit to them um but many conservatives and republicans haven't and in fact they've they've sort of been pulled by trump deeper into red themselves trump brings out the red in in many conservatives and i think many conservatives do have a tinge of red in them you know some more than others but the danger is is that trump stokes that up and because birds of a feather flock together other stage red people you know they get activated so we have more hate crime racism has now sort of started to to to come out from from the shadows into the open with trump because you know he's been kind of encouraging it and he's been so sort of brash and blunt about it um and you can tell i mean the biggest problem with trump is simply he has no compassion he has no concern for the collateral damage or suffering that his actions caused towards anybody not even his closest friends and and colleagues and family members right so that's the biggest problem with trump um you can't run an effective society and community at the sort of level of complexity that america is at now you know we're not some some banana republic uh we're not some some underdeveloped country in in africa you know we're a country with nuclear weapons and you know space travel and satellites and complex military systems and all the sorts of stuff so you know as americans we need a leader who's able to think strategically systemically trump is incapable of this he's utterly incompetent at this he doesn't understand how government works he doesn't care to understand how government works you can't even brief him on anything because you need to you need to you know whittle down a 20-page report to like a single one-page sheet and half of it has to be graphics and the other half has to be telling him how good he is how great he is you know praising his ego stoking his ego and because he has no compassion he doesn't understand what a leader needs in america is the leader needs to have compassion for the suffering of others trump doesn't doesn't give a [ __ ] about the suffering of the poor minorities the middle class like he doesn't care about any of this stuff it's all just pretend and he's a great con artist you know he he likes to talk about god and protecting um protecting religious freedoms and being anti-abortion and all this he doesn't this isn't this is just it's just a he's just running a con he's saying these things because he's done some a b split testing to figure out that that's what these suckers want that's what you conservatives want is him to talk about this stuff he doesn't actually care about these things but hey you know conservatives are in denial about it if you're a trump supporter you're gonna deny everything i said here uh you know but um it is what it is that's why spiraling was such a powerful model really one of the greatest disservices that the media mainstream media did during the election leading up to trump in 2015 and 16 is that they didn't properly make these distinctions for ordinary people really what should have happened is that cnn msnbc even fox news should have basically been running and saying look this guy he seems like he's a stage orange successful businessman ceo type of person he's not he's actually stage red so be very very careful not to confuse him with that see if this distinction was properly made to to mainstream people then trump wouldn't have gotten elected because people would have foreseen all the challenges that that came and all the problems you know and how reckless he would have been as a leader but the reason these distinctions weren't made is because the people at cnn fox news and msnbc and other places they themselves are just completely ignorant about spiral dynamics they themselves are incapable of making this distinction it still baffles me to this day four years into it i see people you know on cnn or so forth or even on youtube i see progressives even talking about trump but they're still not able to clearly differentiate trump from standard conservatives and republicans who are more stage blue orange than red and then they're shocked by some of the stuff that trump does it's not shocking when you understand he stayed red he's behaving exactly as you would expect him to behave and this is why a lot of times progressives will tend to call trump a fascist and trump call trump supporters fascists um it's because the reason they're calling him a fascist is because they're they're intuiting they're sort of seeing his stage read qualities but they don't know what red is they don't have that label in their mind so the only label they have is fascists so they call them fascist or they call them a nazi or something like this which is not strictly correct in a sense trump is is in a sense he's almost like below a fascist um in his development but also somewhere around there i mean he's too he's too uneducated to really be an effective fascist but he certainly has has the stage read authoritarian narcissistic tendencies which is basically where fascism stems from but also fascism incorporates a lot of stage blue elements into it as well so that's just trump as an example saddam hussein is another very good example i have a book on my book list about is a biography about saddam hussein and it clearly illustrates saddam hussein's rise from a stage purple tribal culture into stage red and how he took power it's an amazing book go read it and you will learn a lot about stage red and saddam was saying very very interesting i also shared recently on my blog an hbo slash bbc uh miniseries uh it's sort of a fictionalized but also sort of a true uh dramatic reenactment of saddam hussein's rise to power amazing one of the one of the best shows that hbo and the bbc has ever produced um that sort of flew under the radar not many people know about it go go check it out it's called house of sodom amazing show it shows you how how stage red works and in that show also you get to see saddam hussein's sons especially one of his sons i forget was it uday or kusey i don't know exactly which one of them but one of them was like just utterly brutal like he he ran saddam's torture to a torture division um and this guy was just like a a bloodthirsty psychopath there's this one scene in house of sodom where uh in the royal compound you know some of some of one of saddam's you know younger friends and and sort of collaborators and colleagues he's throwing this party it's like a wedding party or something and it's late at night and they're kind of rowdy and they're they're drinking and they're dancing and all this and then saddam's sons are like sitting upstairs in in the building in the palace just like talking i mean they get annoyed by this by this noise coming from this wedding party down below so they go down there and um and the guy is just drunk the guy is drunk and he's you know he's singing loudly um and uh and saddam's son you know the torture guy he says you know turn off the music this party is over uh shut it all down you know we want to sleep or something like that you guys are making too much noise but the drunk guy is like no we have permission from saddam to hold this party so we're going to enjoy ourselves you know blah blah and uh and so the son takes his cane and just beats the guy over the head to death and just like cracks his skull open just like it beats him his brains just are splattered all over like the uh the concrete there and the crowd you know the wedding party crowd is standing there just aghast at what's happening the guy just beats his brain into a pulp on the concrete floor there you go and and then and then he goes back upstairs uh you know saddam's son and he he's now he's terrified because this was this was saddam hussein's like top favorite advisers and now he knows saddam hussein is going to be pissed off that he killed this guy for such a stupid reason so this is an example of sort of stage red you know impulsive uh anger and and just you know hot temper that hot bloodness and so then he tries to saddam's sons you know he's trying to figure out a way now how am i gonna how am i going to deal with this because saddam hussein is going to be you know like coming here and kicking my ass for this he thought saddam would kill him for what he did so he took a bunch of sleeping pills and then he wound up in the hospital he survived but anyways you know he he himself was was terrified of what he did so he sort of recognized after the fact that what he did was was very dangerous and problematic so uh regions in the world that are stage red or have a lot of stage read in them is iraq syria uh liberia i posted a video about liberia on my blog a while a while ago uh vicious vicious vicious go go check out the liberia video it'll it'll shock you how how um wow very stage red uh somalia north korea myanmar turkmenistan haiti many parts of africa that are underdeveloped uh the middle east many parts of the middle east that are underdeveloped palestine leaders like hitler stalin basically any kind of warlords mafia of course i've talked about tony soprano al capone pirates marauders gangs of various kinds yakuza which is the japanese gang violent prisoners tend to be stage red people prison culture in general a stage read you know they tell you know when you go into prison there's that whole kind of i don't know if it's true or not i guess it's true when you go into prison you're supposed to like beat somebody up on the first day in order to gain the respect of everybody else otherwise they're going to make you your their [ __ ] it's probably true i don't know uh sounds true for stage red uh freedom fighters tend to be stage red revolutionaries criminals rapists con artists thieves terrorists juvenile delinquents ancient rome had a lot of stage red in it gladiatorial combat every stage red emperors like caligula nero and there are others other roman emperors who qualify stage red the spartans were very warlike militaristic as a people chinese emperors certain ones japanese emperors that sort of samurai code it was deeply staged blue as well samurais are sort of in between red and blue i would say alexander the great who is a great conqueror achilles who was a great fighter if you've seen the movie troy the depiction of achilles there is really good he's he's this amazing fighter and warrior but on the other hand he has a hot temper he's very sort of proud of his victories and conquests um so he sort of exemplifies sort of the noble image if you want sort of a noble archetype of stage red it might be achilles or alexander the great klingons the klingons from star trek i've mentioned this before but star trek the different races in star trek were actually created by the creator of star trek gene roddenberry he studied spiral dynamics the early version of it developed by claire graves he studied claire graves and he knew the different stages and he basically built these different alien races like the klingons and the romulans and so forth based on different spiral stages and so the klingons were the red ones they have this very warrior culture they love to be rowdy and rough and they drink and they sing and they um you know they're sort of these barbarians they're not very educated they they tend to act from the gut shoot first ask questions later online hackers who do all sorts of hacking scams and schemes or stage red toxic narcissists sociopaths psychopaths now i don't want to say that psychopaths and sociopaths are necessarily not necessarily automatically read but there's definitely overlap there i'm not quite sure how to distinguish those honestly my specialty is not pathological psychology so i don't really know and you could probably draw a lot of very fine distinctions between sociopaths psychopaths and stage red but that would be a topic for another day lone shooters and mass shooters these gunmen that we see on the news in america so often these days these are mostly stage red folks who get very angry and then they they take it out they take their anger out on others conan the barbarian that movie and that uh fictional character joe pesci from casino oh man if you want a rendition of stage red which is just perfect prototypical stage red joe pesci from casino i posted some uh some videos of this on my blog and also on the forum in the mega thread of sprawling dynamics examples we have some some clips of joe pesci viciously read the russian mob toxic masculinity some elements of the red pill philosophy is stage red vikings genghis khan mongol hordes drug addicts gamblers criminals uh the criminal underground war criminals massacres torch torture rape gangs wild rock stars tend to be red they do a lot of drugs stuff like that um i think uh russell brand in his early days when he was like doing heroin and stuff like that that was probably stage red and now he's evolved very beautifully so if you want a really good example of how you evolve out of stage red uh look at russell brand jules from pulp fiction samuel l jackson character from pulp fiction is a great example of red and he has a nice story arc basically jewels a story arc in pulp fiction is going from red from a red gangster to a stage blue finding god joffrey from game of thrones ramsey from game of thrones cersei from game of thrones the dothraki from game of thrones the joker cult leaders like jim jones and charles manson and david koresh aztec human sacrifice pimps hustlers prostitutes sex trafficking brothels strippers porn stars not all porn stars but porn stars are going to tend to gravitate in that direction so will strippers that's why strippers have a sort of reputation of being crazy and psychotic because you sort of have to be to be involved in in prostitution or stripping or pornography violent porn will appeal to stage red snuff films stage red king's harems stage red absolute monarchs feudalism heads on spikes vlad the impaler crucifixion cutting off body parts as legal punishment for violating crimes cruel and unusual punishment of various sorts um you know in in modern democracies we explicitly ban cruel and unusual punishment in the constitution and in certain bills of rights and so forth um just because it was so vicious most pre-democratic societies have cruel and unusual punishment like in saudi arabia by the way saudi arabia staged red as well saudi arabia what do they have they have like honor killings and they have uh beheadings for criminals in the public square you can see how that that's the sort of cruel and unusual punishment uh vil many villains and movies are stage read bullies colonial exploitation sweatshops slavery the wild west many wild west movies usually the villain and wildest movie will be stage red uh the terminator rambo throwing objects when you're angry cocaine heroin crack and meth users these are like the very hard drugs suicide bombers the lesser jihad from islam isis domestic violence mma and ufc tend to attract and appeal to a lot of stage red people they they appeal it's sort of like a modern day gladiatorial combat they appeal to that stage red within us now i'm not saying that just because you practice mma or just because you're interested in ufc that you're automatically full-on solid stage red i'm not saying that because like for example joe rogan loves mma he does jiu jitsu uh he he commentates on ufc uh and yet he's not red he's he's stage green i would put him at stage green but still there is you can tell there's a there's a little kernel at least a little kernel of stage red within him probably more so in his younger days which is why that sort of stuff appeals to him see um and a lot of guys who watch that they you know they love that that bloodlust that you get to see it appeals to that animal part of you which is locked away you know usually you're working at the office as a computer programmer you can't you can't tap into that stage red you know warrior blood thirsty conquest sort of thrill but when you're playing a video game or you're engaging in one of these extreme sports or something like ufc then you you get that that stage red nerve titillated uh boxing also has a lot of stage red in it many boxers are stage red for example like mike tyson um you could see some interviews i mean he's evolved now he's probably moving towards orange and green more he's done five meow dmt which is good to see that probably helped evolve him a bit um you know he's he's much older now but when he was in his early 20s uh he was just vicious he was a vicious animal in the ring don king his his boxing promoter also a very stage red sort of guy of course they have plenty of stage orange in them as well conor mcgregor stage red and orange um that's why you see conor mcgregor throwing stuff you know yelling at stuff yelling at people you know threatening to to rape their mothers and like all this nasty stuff that he says to promote his fights you know only a stage red person would behave that way bank robbers bully and tyrannical bosses if you have a boss who's just a complete dick to you and actually gets off on on dominating you that's a stage red boss bribery bling you know that pinky diamond ring uh gold teeth and chains which are popular in the hood the hood itself a lot of black culture like rap and so forth comes from a sort of stage red culture which is why you know a lot of conservatives like to say like oh well the biggest problem with racism is black on black crime you know black people are just shooting each other in the hood other black people so it's not white people who are hurting black people's other black people but that's a function of the systemic racism and the income inequality which is a legacy from slavery which of course has created these these parts in urban areas which have been redlined and then they don't have enough resources there to actually give opportunities to these young black people so they just join gangs and it becomes the hood culture and they're dealing drugs and they're shooting each other of course but that's not because that's black culture that black culture came from the fact that there was 200 years of slavery and then there was jim crow and then there was not any like any sort of reparation any sort of help to these black communities and their wealth is like five percent of what white wealth is overall because wealth is accumulated over generations they just don't have the generational wealth so of course they have a sort of stage red culture that that's not that's not a feature of being black that's a lack of spiral development which is again another common failure to make a distinction that many conservatives have when it comes to understanding racism they tend to think that all blacks have low iq and that's a genetic problem it's not a genetic problem it's a problem of spiral development which is actually a very optimistic thing because that means that if we equalize the income inequality and we help them out then they're going to be able to evolve their culture and then it's not going to be a genetic thing it's not going to be a function of iq their iq will actually increase as we create safety net programs for them and as there's more job opportunities for them and so forth the iq will equalize which is what these uh sort of uh race iq people don't really understand because they fail to see how culture how significant culture is and how it shapes our psyches and minds and how it evolves and changes drive-by shootings blood sport it's interesting i mentioned this example on the forum um there's a story online that i saw about trump which said that his favorite movie is bloodsport it's a old 80s fan damn movie a great movie by the way um i think it's probably van damme's best movie but but this is just so typical of stage red mentality so what trump did the movie is like two hours long uh and there's a story to it there's a lot of fighting you know van damme goes to asia to china i think and he does some underground martial arts competition so there's a lot of fighting and blood and so forth but there's also story he has like a love interest there's relationship stuff going on uh so trump told his son that he was sick of watching bloodsport in its entirety because there was like love scenes and other sorts of stuff that he didn't like he wanted to just fast forward through all that so he told his son to edit the movie such that it was just pure 60 minutes of just people punching each other in the face cutting out all the story and everything else and then to him that was like the best movies that just perfectly exemplifies stage red thinking other examples include [ __ ] fighting dog fighting animal cruelty sports fights when you see like in hockey you know two guys or a bunch of guys they start you know taking off the gloves and punching each other that's a very stage red sort of activity pro wrestling appeals a lot to stage red they sort of play it up with drama uh the movie lord of war actually one of my favorite movies oh my god it's an amazing movie with nick cage if you haven't seen lord of war go buy that [ __ ] movie and watch it it's amazing watch it twice think of just like man i can't say enough positive things about that movie it's so well done it's definitely nick cage's best movie and i think it's probably my favorite movie of all time uh in addition to ex machina and her i like the movie her as well like really well done movies but lord of war it shows nick cage as this weapons dealer he himself is more stage orange he's not so much red but he he goes to these war-torn parts of the world he's like a stage orange sort of vulture capitalist who goes and sells weapons uh like ak-47s and m16s to uh to like warlords in africa and in eastern europe and he does all this drug running and uh and sorry weapons running uh and it just shows all the intricacies of that and then he deals with these like african dictators who are just totally bloodthirsty and that's where you get to see the stage red it's it's amazing alex jones very stage red l ron hubbard the guy behind scientology he was sort of a con artist swindler he also had like rape charges against him and uh the government was after him for all sorts of weird reasons i don't even know the full story and then his uh his protege his successor was david miscavige who runs the scientology cult now he's also a very stage red guy there's there's stories you can read of him like beating uh beating people down that don't listen to him is very sort of he runs the scientology organization basically as a cult and as like a totalitarian organization he's the one in charge he took over after l ron hubbard died 911 was stage red the oklahoma semi city bombing with timothy mcveigh stage red some insole cult in cell culture not insult in cell culture is uh stage red there's like this deep deep deep misogyny there's a sort of glorification of rape within that culture uh also some aspects of the pickup community i was involved with the pickup community i'm very intimately familiar with it i've met many pickup artists some of the world's greatest i've interacted with a lot of folks from rsd and and others um personally i never i never indulged in the red aspects of it i was too conscious for that i was just basically doing pick up to learn the techniques the techniques are effective and they're great and i recommend you learn them but if you know if you're a guy and you want to learn to get good with girls but uh but i noticed some very very toxic stage read aspects to pick up a lot of pickup pic a lot of people who get drawn to pick up very heavily who tend to become coaches they get drawn to it from a sort of a stage red place they're they're very misogynistic uh they have this toxic masculinity to them uh they glorify rape um they don't take like rape as a serious problem they treat women just completely as objects it's about sexual conquest more than even the pleasure of sex or trying to find a girlfriend it's just about like sexual conquest usually these people were beaten or abused in their childhoods um you know i i've met a few and these are not all pickup artists so i don't want to smear them all some of them are good some of the some pickup artists are actually stage green um many of them are orange but a few of them are red like i've seen and i've i've interacted with some pickup artists who literally had rape charges like pending rape charges in court like they had a court date like they're going to court next week because they have a rape charge against them um and yeah that that's that's very like that breaks my heart to see that because it's important that we teach men how to be strong men and how to attract women these are important skills that need to be taught otherwise we get something even worse we get in-cell culture which is even worse than pick up culture uh but there is sort of a glorification of rape within the culture like uh i know a pickup coach who who has something called a rape van he drives a van he bought a van and if you're into pickup you know what i'm talking about here but i won't name his name but uh he actually bought a van this guy bought a van like a used van for five thousand dollars he drives around to the club to like a nightclub he will pull girls from the club into the van in the van he has set up like a bed of basically a mattress and he just [ __ ] girls in the van and um and then and then what he does is he has he actually paints a little picture of he like sort of puts a little picture of of a woman on the back of the van for every woman he [ __ ] he has like a hundred of these on the back of the van so this sort of and then he makes light of it like the whole thing is sort of done as a joke um so that sort of attitude is a very stage red attitude and on the other hand i have compassion for him because i've read his life story this guy comes from a from like a terrible situation where his his father when he was yet when he was a teenager his father actually raped and murdered his mother with a shotgun because he found out that she was cheating on him and so of course that that kind of situation will will definitely send you into sort of a stage red spiral uh kanye west kanye talks about that dragon energy and then kanye west you know kanye west uh resonates with trump why does he resonate with trump because they're both when he says dragon energy he's talking about stage red values and energy rap music heavy metal music punk music these tend to be stage red uh there can be higher forms of it i'm not saying it has to necessarily be stage red people like to debate me on heavy metal like oh leo heavy metal actually is green most of it is probably red maybe there's some green mexican drug cartels are very red el chapo if you watch some of his how he ran the sinaloa drug cartel he got arrested recently some some years ago but this guy was a vicious vicious stage red mobster the gran the game grand theft auto sort of glorifies stage red and in fact many video games are glorification of stage red in a sense many of these violent video games they let us play out these stage red fantasies in a safe way so that we don't have to do it in real life you know you can get a sort of a thrill from curb stomping somebody in one of these video games or you know shooting them in the face with a shotgun and blowing their head off yeah that stage red imagine what a stage green video game would look like a lot fewer of those graffiti is stage red no country for old men the villain in that movie stage red the old testament has a lot of elements of stage red where you have a vengeful god who punishes others see the old testament was written for a time and a culture in which most of it was stage read and so spirituality and religion at that time had to appeal to that you couldn't market a stage green version of religion or christianity back then because there was no stage green that's why there's such a sharp contrast between the old testament and the new testament in the bible people say they have a different feel you know the old testament is very vindictive god is sort of angry and judgmental and and and violent whereas in the new testament you sort of have a more softening of the approach it's more of the sort of effeminate approach of jesus you know having love and compassion and turning the other cheek very different the jesus example is more stage green whereas the old testament is more stage red the sith from star wars is very stage red fight club stage red a clockwork orange stage red uh dan pina he's sort of a motivational business leader coach teacher he's got a lot of stage red elements to him also state orange hunting homeless people for sport that cliche is stage red the black panthers had a bit of stage red in them the kkk lynchings and the sort of torture that they inflicted upon slaves and black people and the sort of terrorism that they they they did and i guess they still continue to do although less so these days machiavelli and treating women as chattel and literal physical personal property the way that they do like in saudi arabia or in certain islamic parts of the world where women are you know basically kept as prisoners they can't get a bank account they can't travel without a male companion they they can barely go to the store and do shopping without a male companion um they certainly are not they don't they don't have the freedom to divorce the husband and a lot of other freedoms that women enjoy in the developed world they don't have so that's my list of examples for you if you want even more examples or you want videos of these examples go to actualize.org forum go to our forum uh go to the self actualization sub section and there you will find a mega thread that we started called spiral dynamics stage red examples mega thread in there you will find dozens and dozens of pages and hundreds of examples of all this and you can post more of your examples if you want so for each one of the spiral stages we have a dedicated mega thread on the forum there these are very useful mega threads go check them out we put a lot of work into them hundreds of hours went into developing these mega threads to give you concrete examples videos links articles that show you you know photographs images memes and so forth that that show you and teach you how these stages actually look in the real world so don't miss that opportunity it's there for you it's free don't have to pay anything you don't even need to sign up to the forum you can go look at it it's public and open to everybody here are some common phrases and sayings that exemplify stage read might makes right desperate times require desperate measures no guts no glory you have to break some eggs to make an omelet an eye for an eye a tooth for a tooth it's a dog-eat-dog world survival of the fittest to the victor go the spoils the world is a jungle if you're not with us you're against us fight tooth and nail take no prisoners and offer he can't refuse what's in it for me off with his head and you scratch my back i scratch yours now let's talk about how to distinguish stage red from orange because for many newbies who are just learning about this model it can be confusing so here's the difference stage orange for example will manipulate an exploit on wall street to get money stage red will not just manipulate to get money he will get a baseball bat and break your kneecaps if you piss him off that's the key difference between orange and red because a lot of stage green people might look at it and say well leo what's the difference really i mean stage orange is very exploitative too you know the stage orange capitalist you know they're so money hungry and they're all sociopaths these guys like jeff bezos and bill gates and who else elon musk or whatever you know they're just these shameless sociopathic capitalists all they want is money they're just greedy so their stage red no they aren't they're stage orange and even a little bit of green as well you don't appreciate how more how much more vicious stage red is than stage orange stage orange is capable of guilt and shame stage orange might commit some white-collar crime stage or ensure they'll be very capitalistic they will be very competitive they can be exploitative in the sense that they might you know not pay their workers a fair living wage or something like that and they may not be socialists or communists or marxists or agree that we need high taxes stage orange will not agree with those things they're generally neoliberal okay but they are not joe pesci or tony soprano right they're um uh they generally follow the rules they're not violent criminals so you got to make a distinction here between sort of white-collar crime and violent crime red is more than violent crime red will actually enjoy hurting others enjoy the suffering of others the ceo like you know of amazon jeff bezos he doesn't take pleasure in the suffering of his employees he's just you know he's just a full-on capitalist okay but he's not stage red red cannot control its impulses and it cannot follow rules orange usually can orange is rational and strategic orange can make plants orange can be patient orange doesn't fly off the handle into some rage and beat someone with a cane orange is capable of remorse and shame orange is usually not physically violent and orange tends to be democratic at least in principle like if you ask elon musk or jeff bezos or bill gates should we have a democracy they'll tell you yes if you ask a stage red person no he wants a totalitarian regime he wants to be the boss stage orange is scientific and it tends to be fairly well educated and it values science and education so there's quite a significant difference what triggers stage red signs of weakness softness and emotional vulnerability stage red doesn't respect that and it's not open to exploring that within itself especially as a as a man a stage red man is not going to want to explore his feminine side or be emotionally vulnerable that's a liability he can't afford he thinks that's feminine he thinks that's emasculating he thinks that's not how a man should be he's also triggered by disrespect insult ridicule disloyalty and betrayal with donald trump you can clearly see how triggered how easily triggered he is by disrespecting by ridicule it gnaws adam you know it gnaws adam and disloyalty everybody around him is disloyal i mean there's a few maybe mike pence is loyal but but many around him are disloyal because they're vultures just like him and they betray him you know they come out with tell-all books and all sorts of and this you can tell this hurts him because it hurts his reputation it hurts his fake facade of being the uh the successful rich billionaire wealthy ceo you know competent ceo like that whole facade gets crumbled by all these people who come out and then you know betray him and tell the true stories of of how of how he behaves and how incompetent he is how narcissistic and selfish he is red is triggered by anyone threatening the boss's authority which you can see in trump for example the surest way to get fired by trump as we can tell from the stories is to try to outshine him anybody who works for him has to make sure that they don't outshine him because as soon as they do he's going to fire them because he's so insecure and he needs to be the boss his entire ego is built upon that that's what his whole life is about stage red is also triggered by losing the fight you can see that trump's whole identity for example is built upon being a winner so for him the greatest blow will come from losing an election that's going to piss him off the most that's going to make him the most vindictive and when trump loses the 2020 election as i predict he will it's not guaranteed but i predict he will lose it he is so narcissistic that he's gonna go down swinging and he's gonna try to take the entire ship down with him you see a more evolved person to trump he would lose the election he would be sad about it it would hurt his ego like a stage orange person and then he would just move on to other things maybe he would go on and start a business or you know whatever move on with his life if trump loses this election especially if he loses in a landslide which is looking like it's likely given the recent poll numbers uh he's going to take it extremely personally and he is going to devote the rest of his life to exacting vengeance upon stage green and the democrats and progressives and liberals for for costing him this election he's going to take very very in fact i think one of the reasons he ran in the first place in 2016 is because he was at the he was at some dinner where barack obama like insulted him in front of everybody and he took it so personally that then he made it like an agenda to just to to stick it to obama by by winning and then undoing everything obama did and that's that's what he's been doing he takes delight in undoing obama's work because for him it's about conquest and victory and vengeance he enjoys the vengeance and there are stories of trump where he enjoys destroying people who have stood in his way that's his style see a stage orange person wouldn't be into that so much what else triggers red is a lack of action indecisiveness and making excuses over analysis and an academic approach to life see we know this about trump as well he's easily triggered when he's asked to like read uh a report about some intelligence it's a 20-page report he's not going to read that he wants like a simple powerpoint presentation with pictures because he doesn't he doesn't take an academic approach to anything and you can see in his speeches all of his policy proposals they're all just coming purely from the gut there's no research about it there's no science to it there's no asking people's opinions or expert count getting expert counsel from advisors it's all just purely his own gut and whatever serves him at that moment it's pure opportunism and that's why he changes his policies all the time and he says one thing then one day then he tweets something the reverse of it the next day he changes his mind it's impossible to negotiate with him because he has no ideology he has no principles he's purely acting out of self-interest uh what else triggers red is a doubt about one's power and uh and basically stage green triggers red hippy values and you can see this in trump as well he's very triggered by feminism uh social justice warriors basically democracy homosexuality this this all this sort of stuff triggers stage red because it's seen as soft fundamentally red wants power and it respects only brute physical power not the softer aspects of life it doesn't value relationships and love and compassion and generosity and goodness and beauty and truth no it's just raw power truth is raw power and you can see that in trump as well he has no sense of truth for him truth is anything that serves him that's what truth is and it changes on a daily basis now let's talk about the unhealthy manifestations and excesses of red now of course we've been talking about it in a sense all along um but there are healthy aspects to red which we'll get to here in a minute but first let's cover the unhealthy ones remember red is not bad it might seem bad given all the examples i've given you but it's not bad but it is pretty brutal and that's its biggest problem is that it easily leads to violence war dictatorship abuse slavery genocide mafia gang warfare it leads to a sort of a downward cycle of abuse and violence where i'm violent to you and then you're violent to me and i'm even more violent to you and then you're even more violent to me and it's just this downward spiral it tears apart it tears apart families and communities uh now you might say well leo if it causes all these things then surely red must be purely bad but what you have to understand is that strictly speaking none of these things that i mentioned are bad again it's bad because you're judging it from your survival agenda given where you are at the spiral bad here is purely relative stage red is a step up from purple for example so you can't just say it's bad because if you say stage red is bad how is the stage purple society going to evolve to stage blue or orange or green if it can't get through stage red because it has to go through it see other unhealthy manifestations and excesses it it causes cruel and unusual punishment and torture a lot of sexual exploitation and rape it treats women very horribly oppression of women and minorities gross human rights abuses uh it's criminal it's barbaric it's harsh it's brutal terrorism comes from it corruption and theft especially corruption comes from it's very problematic many third world countries are crippled by the corruption of stage red it makes it impossible for that country to have a decent style of living or job opportunities so goddamn corrupt other excesses include irrational megalomaniacs irrational action lack of analysis and oversimplification lack of a bigger plan no systemic thinking trump is a perfect example of a zero systems thinking sometimes conservatives push back and say that no leo trump is a strategic genius he's playing the democrats he's playing the media he's playing dumb actually he's smart no he's not smart he's purely impulsive he's extremely good at exploiting systems do not confuse the exploitation of systems for purely selfish benefit out of uh irrational megalomania and narcissism do not confuse that for systems thinking systems thinking go check out my episode called intro to systems thinking systems thinking is about understanding and studying how systems works the careful mechanics of it and then nurturing that system for the benefit of all in a selfless way stage red is utterly incapable of this which you can see in trump other excessive aspects are narcissism sociopathy and psychopathy as we've talked about stage red tends to be like a bull in a china shop i once posted a video on my blog about trump it's a 30-second clip that shows a deer accidentally walking into uh a barber shop like a hair salon and this the deer just sort of stumbles in through the glass door it breaks through the glass with a door with its horns and then it just it just it literally it's a it's a deer in china shop sort of situation it just runs around you know everybody is screaming and going crazy because it's got his sharp horns and it's like it's hitting its horn against the couches and the tables it's just knocking everything around and then 30 seconds later it just runs out the other window and it's gone and so i said that this is the perfect illustration of the trump presidency he's just a bull in a china shop and what he's going to do ultimately the legacy of trump is going to be you know when you look back 20 30 years later uh in the history book literally it's just going to be the way it's going to look is that trump came into government as a bullet china shop he did a bunch of crazy irrational things in all sorts of different directions none of it really worked none of it was effective he broke a bunch of institutions and norms and things and then he exited he left and then we moved on and we had to pick up the pieces and rebuild that's that's basically he's a he's a chaos agent that's that's his that's his role that's going to be his role he's not capable of anything else because not only is he stage red but he's deeply incompetent stage red if he was competent stage red he would be sort of a hitler stalin type of figure he would be very brutal but at the same time you know he he could get some stuff done but but he's too incompetent for that so he's a unique mix of of red and stupid at the same time uh he's also just very lazy you know some stage red is like hard working you know you take a look at someone like putin in russia he has many elements of stage red in him i think uh but he's well put together you know he takes care of his body he exercises he um he's smart he's intelligent he's very strategic he's cold he's calculating he's he's he's he you know he's a brilliant sort of geopolitical chess player um and brutal as well bloodthirsty and ruthless at times as well corrupt as well but uh but he he also is getting stuff done for russia um trump unfortunately is not that and also trump uh i mean russia is at a much lower level of development than than america so putin for russia is a relatively okay fit but trump for america is is a no-go fit doesn't work uh stage red is also a blabber mouth engages in a lot of bragging as we see with trump uh only things about oneself can't build quality relationships uh and ultimately the problem with stage red is that you can't build a stable decent peaceful civilization with stage red it's too unstable and one of the problems with these dictators and tyrants is that of course there's a lot of nepotism at stage red which of course trump is very guilty of by appointing his sons and daughters to positions that they have no business being in because they're utterly unqualified and ignorant and competent about how government works but this nepotism ultimately it breaks down because it becomes a government of the ignorant and the incompetent and uh and then how do you transition even if trump became ruler for life he's pretty old he would probably die in 10 or 20 years anyways of natural causes and then and then what how do you transition this is the age-old problem of every authoritarian and dictator and monarch who's ever lived is that even if you have an amazing king who does great things and is very effective and very competent at the cost of being a little bit you know too ruthless and bloodthirsty that can still be tolerated but what happens when the king dies of old age you have to replace him but who do you replace him with you have to elect somebody but with a king there's no elections so he just picks some crony of his or a child of his some some relative but that relative is not going to be ever as good as the king himself and so it devolves into utter incompetence and then eventually they have to be kicked out there has to be a coup because for a stable society it needs to be competently run using reason strategy systems thinking and science one of the problems with stage red is that it's utterly unscientific which of course we also see with trump you know when you have a serious scientific problem like climate change or covid19 uh trump's response and a stage reg response is to try to like bully your way through this scientific problem but really it's a problem for scientists to solve and you've got to listen to the scientists and follow their suggestions here with these sorts of issues you can't just bluster your way out of climate change or a bad economy or uh or some sort of pandemic doesn't work so ultimately red ends up exhausting itself and undermining itself and that's what leads it to then try to evolve into blue because it's so chaotic that from red then we need to we need to we need to build a stable civilization which comes with discipline which comes with a sense of morality which is what is developed in stage blue and lastly the problem with red is uh the sort of toxic masculinity and patriarchy that uh that be that that ends up oppressing women so then you might wonder what are the healthy and good aspects of red here are some of them first of all it allows unification of squabbling tribes so as bad as you might think saddam hussein was as vicious as he was gassing his people and so forth as they say removing saddam hussein as we can see now has proven to be even worse led to the rise of isis and uh you know terrorists who run around beheading others what is that it's it's an even further it's basically a fragmentation iraq used to be a unified country under saddam hussein's rule he had to rule with an iron fist and torture people and murder people in order to maintain that cohesion there was a certain benefit that came from that most people don't don't appreciate the the value of that benefit but when it falls apart and it all just turns into a bunch of stage purple squabbling tribes who are trying to do genocide on other neighboring tribes you can't even have a state without a state that that country falls apart and it gets eaten up by other countries who are unified you know around the region like iran and um you know israel is unified in that region and and other you know turkeys unified there and so now they're picking apart the carcass of iraq and syria and so really what's going to have to happen in iraq and syria is somebody else like saddam is going to have to come together and unify them into a cohesive sort of nation otherwise they're going to stay at stage purple and that's not going to be good there's going to be a lot of violence and um they're not gonna be able to develop as a nation see a lot of people today they don't appreciate that nations countries this is a relatively new invention america is only like 250 years old as a country and other countries are even younger than that italy germany we talked about these countries as though they've existed forever for thousands of years no they haven't there was no germany there was no italy these were small city-states and regions that were always fighting with each other someone had to unify these into into solid countries and this was done only recently most modern countries have only existed for like two three four hundred years if even that some countries have only existed for 100 years try to really appreciate how innovative this idea of a country is it's amazing that conservatives today a lot of conservatives are so nationalists and they talk about like loving our country loving america or whatever country you're from uh but this in a sense this is the idea of a country is such a progressive modern liberal development if you were alive as a conservative 500 years ago you wouldn't glorify the idea of loving your country the idea of loving your country would be seen as a radical utterly leftist utterly progressive uh oppressive tyrannical thing because a country after all has to be unified by some sort of higher power so the paradox of some of these libertarian philosophies is that they they talk about how um we want america to be free and all this you know free from government oppression but the very notion of a united states is already in a sense the thing that the the the the libertarian would have opposed when it was being built in the first place i've talked about that in my lengthy video about why libertarianism and not is nonsense so go check that out if you want to know more uh other healthy aspects of red so so anyways getting back to the healthy aspects so why is that healthy unifying these tribes ultimately is healthy because it allows us then to develop to blue and to orange and to green into higher stages it's necessary we can't live as little tribes that are all fighting each other we need to unify so that's very valuable even though it has a high cost you have to appreciate that just because something has a high cost doesn't mean that it's bad because the cost of not doing anything might be even higher you see it's all relative a cost is only high compared to something else so sometimes you're forced to choose the lesser of two evils which is what stage red is other good aspects of red is that it's fast and decisive in its action it's not a victim it doesn't sit around and mope and and cry and talk about how it can't do anything in a sense being a victim is even worse than being a little bit hot blooded and angry uh because at least when you're a little bit angry and hot-blooded you're not in like the suicidal depression you're able to accomplish things in the world which is important you don't feel helpless the worst thing is when you're utterly utterly helpless you can't even get out of bed in the morning you're so helpless and then your only option is basically to kill yourself so at least red is not that also what's good about red is that it stands up against bullies it protects against bullies when you have a big bully you need another bully to protect you against that bully so that's a valid function of red appreciate that like if saddam hussein didn't defend his people his people would be conquered by neighboring countries like iran israel saudi arabia i don't know who else is in that region turkey they would they would pick that country apart so in a sense saddam hussein was doing a favor for his people by being strong even though of course it hurts them as well but you know what hurts even more when some foreign bully strong man comes in and then devours or exterminates your people completely that hurts even more red can have a sort of a noble warrior spirit at its best that's also a positive aspect that you might want to even deliberately cultivate so this list of positive stuff i'm telling you because a lot of you guys who fancy yourselves to be very advanced at stage yellow or green or or orange you might think oh i have nothing to learn from red red is just some evil bad stuff that i i shouldn't even study no there's there's probably aspects of red healthy aspects that you haven't fully realized and developed within yourself so start developing these these are good for example if you like to play victim a lot or you're very indecisive then you might benefit from from a bit more development of this stage red aspect of yourself develop that noble warrior spirit stand up to bullies be decisive rather than getting lost in analysis paralysis uh take action more think less act from the gut these can be positive things perhaps the most important function of red is simply to survive and to thrive in brutal environments when you find yourself for example in prison if you do you might need to rely on red to survive and to thrive in a prison environment there are certain parts of the world certain eras you might be born into maybe in a past life maybe in a future life where you're going to have to rely on red to survive and not just to survive but thrive red is not just survival it's thrival in brutal environments also what's nice about red is that it tends to be pragmatic rather than superstitious and deeply religious it doesn't tend to get stuck in religious fanaticism so much although it can you know in in the middle east for example uh with isis you know it's it's a very toxic combination of both stage red um viciousness but also sort of stage blue religious fanaticism is a very toxic mix uh oftentimes red and blue mixed together like with nazi germany that was a mixture of red and blue um but also red can be secular like in the mob uh it's not so much about religious fanaticism another healthy aspect is that red offers rapid expansion of civilization and conquest of territory this can be good it develops a stronger nation of course comes at great costs red can also be creative innovative and non-conformist so that's good it's independent it can take care of itself it doesn't mooch off of others it can find innovative solutions to to survival challenges because it tends to have a lot of ambition and it tends to just be very opportunistic and to find find new ways of doing things that a conformist society wouldn't be able to do the statistics on stage read are as follows these statistics are from the spy dynamics book it says there that roughly twenty percent of the adult global population is stage red and that this percentage holds five percent of the world influence twenty percent of people with five percent of world influence the style of government of stage red is clans led by warlords and dictatorships an exploitative empire absolute monarchy or tyranny totalitarian states it's very power driven conquest driven very much about enslaving others rule through intimidation and stage red tends to surge in times of uncertainty and crisis for example if a giant meteor hit the earth and wiped out half the population stage red would probably come into resurgence because things would be very uncertain we would be in a panic and in a crisis we would need rapid action there's no time to sit around and to deliberate and to be democratic and to care about people's feelings because there's a lot at stake people are dying it's an emergency situation there are loose nuclear weapons we need order restored quickly so in this case most likely what's going to happen is we're going to have a military dictatorship for some period of time maybe for a few decades in order to restore order it's going to be bloody but it will be better than having you know stage purple tribes running around with loose nuclear weapons trying to exterminate each other and now let's talk about how to transcend red what do you do if you're at stage red or you have stage red elements within you that you notice and you want to move beyond them because you find them limiting or problematic well like i mentioned in pulp fiction the character arc of jules samuel jackson's character is is is actually a very realistic example so the way it worked in pulp fiction is that at the very beginning it's samuel jackson and john travolta and they're basically uh bullying some some some guys who owe their boss money they shoot a couple of them um and then uh both of them almost get killed because there's some guy hiding in the closet he jumps out he fires his giant hand cannon as they call it and all his shots miss he he takes like six shots he surprises uh he surprises samuel jackson and john travolta uh but he's such a terrible shot that he misses all six shots from that revolver and then they end up killing him and uh and john both of these john travolta and champion jackson they're both sage red gangsters but samuel jackson he has sort of a religious you know he says that he says that religious uh passage before he shoots that guy you know um in that sort of flamboyant tarantino style but anyways samuel jackson sees that he's a bit religious he interprets this as a as a new lease on life and he interprets that as a miracle and at the end of the pulp fiction movie uh jules and john travolta they're sitting there in the cafe and they're just talking and then jules tells john travolta that you know what happened to us is a miracle and i'm getting out of the business and john travolta is sitting there and he's like really no well i mean what are you going to do we've always been gangsters how are you going to make a living and jules just sitting there he's like i don't know but i just i just feel called to walk the earth and i feel called to um you know to to raise myself to a more you know moral higher standard and so basically his arc was that he discovered that stage red is too limited god gave him an uh you know a second chance at life he was supposed to die this was a miracle and that now this pushes him into stage blue and then the movie ends there it's actually a quite beautiful arc uh i think actually for many people the way they get out of stage red is they suffer so much they almost kill themselves or they almost end up in jail or they almost maybe they even get sent to jail when they get released or they almost you know die of a drug overdose something terrible like this and but then you know it it shocks them awake and it awakens them to the next level where they realize that their life is too chaotic and that they need some discipline and order in their life and so they commit themselves to a more ordered existence they just say enough is enough and one way in which that might happen is that they they find god or religion i put god here in quotes because it's not the real god this is the fake the fake god the sort of judeo-christian god the anthropomorphic father figure god of the old testament of religion of organized religion so they find that maybe they join some church maybe they they they have a born-again experience uh and they sort of commit themselves to a more stable life maybe they have a they get married maybe they have a child and then that you know when they have their child they sort of realize like what am i doing all this violence and criminality and all this narcissism now i have a little child i have to take care of that and that might elevate them to stage blue basically to to rise out of stage red into blue uh you need to find some sort of higher power than you a higher purpose a higher set of principles or ideals a higher truth even if it's not real truth it's not the you know truth of enlightenment but some sort of truth whatever it is for you maybe it's a sense of life purpose maybe it's volunteer work maybe you wanna you wanna help addicts recover because you used to be an addict it might be that um maybe you used to work for the mafia and now you're gonna go work for the fbi in order to be an informant or to work with them you know to dismantle the mafia you reform yourself that way maybe you used to be an ex-convict and then or a thief now you go work for a security company helping to protect against other thieves like you maybe you used to be a soldier or whatever and now you reform yourself and now you start to advocate for peace things like that some higher purpose uh you need to open your mind to some kind of morality this is not going to be some super advanced spiritual morality this is going to be a morality that's very stage blue a very rigid uh set of right and wrong black and white morality it's not super advanced it's got its limits which i discussed in stage blue but is sure as hell better than than being this sort of reckless bull in a china shop that you've been at stage red if you want to evolve beyond stage red recognize the limits of an egocentric life start to see the collateral damage and suffering that you're causing to others start to see that if everybody lives life like you do if everybody acts like a bully the problem is that there's always a bigger bully sure it feels great to dominate others but what happens when somebody else becomes stronger than you has more guns than you has more soldiers than you has more power than you and then they dominate you and dominate your family how are you going to feel then not so good so after all this fighting and violence at some point we have to come to a truce and we have to realize you know what i've hurt you you've hurt me this lifestyle can't continue it's unsustainable otherwise we're going to annihilate each other so let's just calm down let's set some rules let's follow some moral principles so that we can create a stable civilization and when you start to see the power of that that's how you evolve beyond red recognize the limits of violence and force as solving problems recognize that really to create a quality society to have advanced things to have complexity we can't use the tool of violence and blunt force to deal with complex systems which an advanced society needs uh you can't just deal with everybody in a forceful way you can't deal with your children in a forceful way you can't maintain a quality marriage by using force and by controlling you know your wife and so forth and getting angry at her and throwing stuff at her and beating her it doesn't work you need a softer approach also start to develop a sense of guilt shame and remorse if you hit your wife and you don't feel guilty about it you're still stuck a stage red when you start to feel a little guilty about it the reason you feel guilty is because you actually use your awareness to realize like ah she's crying she's suffering my children are seeing this they're also suffering you know my friends are suffering this this sort of lifestyle that i'm living it's so self-centered that it's causing suffering then that causes me suffering to see other suffering that causes me guilt and shame and remorse and now that allows you to start to self-reflect and start to say like ah yeah maybe there's some maybe i am being a bit of a monster here uh maybe i need to start to discipline myself start to mellow myself out and a lot of times i think that that's what happens with stage red people is that stage stage red i think is very prevalent amongst teens you know angsty teens and people in their early 20s maybe 30s once you start to mature past your 30s into your 40s and 50s the testosterone comes out of your system if you're a young male you you just you calm down you become more pacified you've you've expended a lot of your energy uh you've seen that it's only led to misery and chaos and you just you're tired of it and you just want to like settle down and live a more peaceful life you you don't want to be on the streets doing drugs anymore you don't want to be involved in gangs anymore you're over that you don't want to be you know punching people in the face or getting into into bar fights anymore you just want to calm down you want a nice family a decent job a community church you can go to have fun with your friends at the park whatever that kind of stuff and this this comes a lot of it comes just with age i think a lot of people they grow up in abusive families and childhoods and they don't get good educations they don't get good parenting their parents are aren't there for them they're drug addicts or they're violent or they molest them or rape them and so forth and so coming out of this of course in your teens if you have that kind of childhood in your teens and 20s you're going to be so lost you're going to be looking so desperately for ways to survive or you're just living in a country which is so underdeveloped and so corrupt that you have no other way to survive so in your early you know teens and 20s you're going to be just finding a way to survive and you're going to be using red for that and once you achieve you you either exhaust that or you achieve a certain level basic level of success material success or maybe you move out of that environment that will allow you to to move into blue develop compassion of course see the limitations of authoritarianism start to see the importance of rules start to develop discipline and work ethic a lot of times for example parents will send their unruly children to a military academy or a boarding school which is very strict or like a strict religious institution why does that work of course it doesn't always work but it can work because it builds a sense of discipline work ethic and morality into an otherwise stage read person basically they're sending a stage red child or teen into a stage blue environment that can be problematic but also it can work you know it's better than having your child out on the streets prostituting herself and doing crack set her to a boarding school which is very strict teach her some you know good old-fashioned christian morals you know scare scare the [ __ ] out of her with with talk of of damnation and going to hell and and how the devil is gonna you know burn you with fire if you if you're a bad girl this sort of stuff it can work it's it's crude but it could work uh maybe study stoicism and stoicism might be sort of a philosophy you can get into marcus aurelius is a good example of a sort of stage blue stoic um stage blue can be quite healthy when it's about work ethic and discipline maybe join the military if you have no sense of direction if you're hanging around in a bad neighborhood where your only option is drugs and joining a gang if your option is between that and going into the military and the military you know sends you off to some some other country you get to explore the world you get camaraderie and friendship you're out of some you know terrible drug drug filled neighborhood you don't have access to drugs when you're in the military hopefully and so forth and so maybe that's how you get your way out and then of course also you can you can parlay that military um uh stint you know five years in the military whatever and then you can maybe they pay for your college and then you can use that to educate yourself so education is actually a very good way to move up from red into blue and orange start reading books consider going to a community college or to a four-year university if you can maybe use the military as a leverage to do that but of course you could also just educate yourself you don't need to go to college you can do it all yourself if you're really ambitious and you're dedicated change your environment that's a huge factor for many people stuck in red if you're living in a deeply stage red country like iraq or syria uh one simple fix is to find your find your way out of that environment do whatever you can to move to a high more highly developed country whether in europe or even just within the middle east maybe there's a more developed country in the middle east you know if you're living in syria maybe you can move to turkey i don't know i don't know the details of that i understand it's difficult to move and a lot of people don't have that option it's expensive you need passports and visas and so forth and permits um but you can also look for those opportunities and if you could find it change your environment or if you're stuck in the hood somewhere where there's gangs and drugs you got to move out of that if all your friends are heroin addicts you've got to change your friends move to a different city different state different country hang around with a different crowd that's huge huge huge huge especially if you're an addict or a criminal you know if you're if you're in the new york mafia you've got to move out of new york move to california where the mafia won't affect you where they won't find you or they won't even be interested in looking for you another thing you can do is you can soften and explore your emotions more and explore your feminine side more realistically this will be a difficult thing for you to do because probably you're going to have to go or you have to go to blue and then even to orange before you start to really start to explore your emotions and your femininity but if you're if you're bold you can try it even at red it would certainly help and try to find some community support groups to move into blue oftentimes what helps is support groups such as alcoholics anonymous or other kinds of support programs or maybe joining a local community church where you're able to interact with people in a more sort of peaceful less violent less brutal way and their stage blue values can rub off on you they can teach you some discipline they can teach you how to fit in and be a normal functioning member of society this is basically what you have to do if you're a criminal who's trying to reform himself and not get sucked back into that kind of criminal lifestyle so there we are that's stage read for you in conclusion remember that stage red is not good or bad it's all relative it has its pros and cons the reason it looks so bad to us is because we're living in a developed part of the world if you're watching my videos you're an exceptionally developed person already just statistically speaking otherwise you wouldn't be interested and you wouldn't stick around so yeah for us for you and for me stage red looks unconscionably evil but it's not evil at all it's just survival remember everything you call evil is just survival somebody else is using what you call evil to feed his children and send them to school so red has healthy and unhealthy manifestations of course in a highly developed complex society like in america or in western europe a stage red individual is not going to fit in most of the stuff that stage red does is going to look very unhealthy because it's so incongruous relative to the level of development of of this part of the world that we live in also remember that red is important to evolve through people and societies have to evolve through it you can't just skip it and also remember that there are probably aspects of you even if you consider yourself orange or green there are probably aspects of you which are not fully integrating red if you're judging red people and red actions if you are judging and demonizing and calling red societies evil that shows that you haven't really integrated understood red so there is more work for you to do and the next stage of course after red is going to be stage blue i already have that episode published online you can go look for it watch my entire series if this is the first one that you're seeing and the last warning i want to give you here before i sign off is this remember that red is not a function of race ethnicity or religion this is a common mistake that simple-minded people make who have not made these careful distinctions in spiral dynamics people will often blame black people or muslims or islam or whatever they will blame them for being inherently less developed inherently evil inherently barbaric inherently uncivilized this is the sort of myth of you know western culture is the greatest this conservative myth this is this is completely wrong completely wrong yes generally speaking western civilization is more advanced and more developed spirally than other regions and cultures in the world let's say compared to the middle east but this is not a moral superiority you have to be careful not to turn this into a moral superior and you have to be careful not to essentialize this and to link it to something like genetics or dna or you know the aryan race sort of myth um and you want to be careful like with this thing about you know black people just they don't have a high enough iq or whatever and that they're they they are just red because that's how they are black people all black people are red no black culture is not red parts of black culture is red because they've been very oppressed for hundreds of years so that's very natural but it can all evolve and change and remember cultures are growing at different rates so just because western culture right now is relatively advanced that doesn't mean that african culture and middle eastern culture and black culture can't evolve relatively quickly in the next 50 or 100 years to to match up or even to rise beyond see so that's very important otherwise you're going to be racist so don't don't be a racist and also don't link it to religion the way that sam harris does so sam harris makes this mistake is he he says that islam is a uniquely violent religion more so than christianity and all others this is not this is not i understand what he's saying and in a certain sense it's true but in a deeper sense it's deeply misleading the reason it's misleading because it tends to characterize all islam as being stage red without acknowledging that there even is different stages and it doesn't acknowledge that islam can rise above red to blue and orange and green and and even turquoise not only can it rise but it already exists at these various stages of course in lesser degrees uh lesser percentages um but but but this idea that islam is inherently red because there's a couple of passages in the quran which you know talk about violence this is this is this is just scientifically and historically incorrect and that's why people are pissed off at sam harris muslims are pissed off at samaras because muslims know that there's different gradations of islam and there's toxic versions of it and there's more healthy versions of it and when you say that all of islam uh or a large percentage of islam is toxic stage red and has to stay that way in a sense you're creating a self-fulfilling prophecy you're dooming them to that and then you're getting a backlash because of course there are many there are millions of muslims in the world who practice islam at a more advanced stage of blue or orange or even green and yet sam harris would deny really islam the possibility of rising to green which which is problematic because in practice you're not going to be able to wipe islam off the face of the earth in practice the only thing that's going to happen is that you can evolve islam out of red to blue to orange and to green and then beyond and you're not going to do that by demonizing islam you're going to do that by actually explaining this stuff imagine for example if everybody in the in the islamic community understood sprawl dynamics and understood the different levels of islam and then they could clearly make distinctions like oh those isis guys okay yeah they're stage red you know the wahhabis but then you know in iran most of them are stage blue and then in maybe even other parts of the world or whatever um other segments of islam are more like the sufis and they're more green or more even turquoise and that's a beautiful thing and there's you know there's value in that and and then they could see like oh yeah so what we have to do is we have to help people at stage red and stage blue start to interpret islam in a more stage green stage turquoise sort of way how do we create systems that help to evolve them and move them up because you're not going to be able to to convince them to drop islam entirely so that that's a more that's a more strategic sort of spiral wizardry approach to that sort of thing so you can you see how making these more nuanced distinctions how how it is the solution to all of our geopolitical problems we're not making nuance enough distinctions we're not employing the correct models we're misdiagnosing the problems and then people are fighting and blaming each other there's these culture wars that are happening because we're not really understanding what's going on at the psychological level in terms of developmental psychology and consciousness and spirituality so this this is what we're talking about here is the operating system which will allow us to develop a more peaceful world so that's that's the ultimate value of the spiral dynamics stuff all right that's it i'm done here please click that like button for me i put a lot of research and work into this episode um and you can support me on patreon with your donations patreon.com actualized you can come check out my website right here at actualize.org you will find um some useful resources you'll find my blog where i post examples i post many many examples of spy dynamics on my blog so check those out uh you can also find the forum where i also i have those mega threads go check those out with examples for dynamics and you can discuss that stuff there we discuss politics and other cool things there spirituality and so forth uh check out my life purpose course check out my my book list on my book list you will find many books about politics development psychology and spot dynamics which will take you deeper into understanding this material so that you can see that i'm not just making this stuff up i am pulling a lot of information from books and from high quality resources that book list has some of the most important books in the world that you can read it will completely transform your life it's it's totally worth the price go go check out my book list so that's it for this one i just want to remind you of a couple of final points about spider-dynamics spiral dynamics even though i talk about it a lot and i use it a lot i get the sense that people fall into the trap of thinking that i am just obsessed with spiral dynamics and everything is all about spiral dynamics no spiral dynamics is a single lens that i use to look at the world with it's limited like any other scientific model uh i'm certainly aware of its limitations maybe i'll shoot a whole episode in the future talking about its limitations but it's just one lens and ultimately you're gonna have to drop this lens to really get to the highest levels of understanding that i want to lead you to that i hope you get to you will have to ultimately drop spiral dynamics but still even though you transcend it remember it's that old ken wilbur um saw of like transcend and include you're transcending it but you're still gonna have it in the back pocket to use in certain situations especially when we're dealing with social and political situations and cultural situations spiral dynamics will be very useful for that going forward but also as you do your spiritual work and you have awakenings and so forth we're going to go beyond and i'm going to share other models with you in fact i have uh several more episodes that i want to shoot which i know you guys will love which are going to be about developmental psychology but not spiral dynamics so see spider-dynamics is one model within a larger field called developmental psychology which is again just one subfield of psychology as a whole so the developmental psychology subfield has some amazing academics and authors who have talked about other models not spot dynamics which in a sense mirror what spider dynamics is talking about but they talk about it from different perspectives like there's moral development we'll we'll have an episode on moral development we'll have various episodes about ego development so there's like six or ten authors and academics who i want to introduce you to and teach you about which will have different kinds of developmental models which will hit upon different facets that spiral dynamics either ignores or it will reinforce some aspects of soil dynamics it'll just give you more lenses that you can use to get an even more complex and more nuanced understanding with more distinctions about how developmental psychology works sometimes people criticize me and they say oh leo spiral dynamics it's not very well peer reviewed it's not very popular within academia it's not really truly scientific it's more like pseudoscience um and that's partially true after all it's a very complex model so it's it's difficult to quantify it and it's difficult to measure it with formulas you know the way that you can with physics or something like that or with chemistry or biology even you know the more the more abstract our models get the more powerful they get in a sense the the more difficult they are to prove in a strict you know laboratory study the way that you can with lab rats or something when you're testing a simplistic physical model so that's just the nature of the beast but but also there has been quite a bit of research done by other academics and researchers outside of spa dynamics which validate and mirror what spider dynamics basically is talking about and i will be introducing you to that research there's papers and books and and research that has been done on that so um so the field of developmental psychology itself this is a legitimate field this is a serious field with serious academics in serious reputable institutions sitting around doing work on it and this field is going to grow even more in the future and there's very important insights from developmental psychology because what we're talking about is personal development how do you develop the human psyche what are the different levels what are the different facets how does it actually work what is the progression that typically happens that's the value of developmental psychology that we can rely on it to give us sort of a road map and a preview of where we're going to go next and where we were before and how we take people who have not developed themselves and how do we help them to develop themselves to the highest levels so if you think about it this is like a new science which is based upon the question of how do human beings develop and what is the most optimum way to develop human beings both individually and collectively as societies there's a lot of science that can be done on that we can spend the next 500 years researching this science coming up with principles technologies ideas models and so forth all of which will be crucial to get us to the next level of human development and evolution also remember that no individual person is purely one color so if you're gonna go out there in the world looking for a purely red person you're probably not gonna find it although trump trump trump does a good job but uh but even trump he's not purely red nobody is purely red nobody is purely orange or anything it's a mixture it's a mixture of this model is a is a mixture of of nuanced layers so someone might have a red core but then with a like a you know an orange shell or aspects of blue mixed in there and so forth so everybody has a certain percentage but also people have a center of gravity so what you're really talking about when we call someone red like when we say trump is red what i really mean is that his center of gravity is red that doesn't mean he doesn't have orange aspects he does it doesn't mean he doesn't have blue aspects he does he probably even has a little bit of green aspects but mostly a massive green shadow all right so there you go um i'm still gonna do one more spiral dynamics episode which will be the stage purple i will not be doing beige because it's just so primitive that i don't think it's it's worth our time uh but after i do the purple one basically i'm gonna have all the stages um the stage turquoise episode what happened with that one is you can't find it on youtube because it actually got taken down um for trademark violation and that's simply because spiral dynamics that that term has actually been trademarked by this biodynamics people and so i think what happened was that they they disagreed with some of the ways in which i characterized stage turquoise so they they forced youtube to take it down uh it's a bit of a dick move on their part um but uh i still have the audio available on my website so if you go to my website and you sign up to the newsletter you will get a login to the actualize.org site where you can log in and there you can access all the audios and you can find spider-dynamic stage turquoise and also try to re-upload that video to vimeo and post it on my website so it'll be exclusively on my website that will that will come probably in the weeks to come so that stage records and then i'll probably have a few more episodes that talk about spiral dynamics not from an individual stage perspective but i will just talk about more of the nuances of how to apply spiral dynamics and how you can use it in different situations like politics relationships business so forth so stick around for all that and stick around for those developmental psychology episodes those will be very illuminating for you you