The Further Reaches of Adult Development - Robert Kegan

anyone who believes in indefinite growth on a physically finite planet is either mad or an economist we don't want to focus Politics on a notion that involves the rejection of principles around which a large majority of our fellow citizens were organize their lives we are not as endlessly manipulable and as predictable as you would [Music] [Applause] think so all of this kind of begins with recognizing that we human beings are are makers of meaning that we that we shape our experience that our experience doesn't happen up to us preformed and the quickest way to kind

of demonstrate this is uh for a moment visually now could you raise your hand if you're actually familiar with this tricky picture which I've actually had something to do with making famous right so you're all you're all kind of aware that you can see here kind of an older woman or or a younger woman if you see an a younger woman then you think of this little blip here as a blip of her nose and and you see this kind of as a as a necklace and you see this as an ear uh but um

if you see it as an as an older woman then you see all of this kind of as her nose and and you see this as her mouth and and you see this as her eye so the picture kind of quickly demonstrates that the the picture isn't really on the page right all we have on the page is just smattering of dark and light and that we human beings do some this really fascinating thing of taking this raw material and shaping it into a meaning since you're also proud of yourself that you all are familiar

with this picture let me show you one let me show you one here that you may be uh less familiar with just keep looking it'll eventually Dawn on you that there's something more than a Russian helmeted soldier there and that there's also some pigtailed girl who's who's mooning you so this is just to quickly get at the idea that we actually are organizing meaning and it turns out that that meaning that we're organizing we are doing so according to a kind of a kind of a system that creates basically what we call Knowledge what what

you know the way we the way we know I mean it literally creates what we see Kant said that a percept without concept is blind and so basically this is the work of the way in which we're doing our conceiving and turning things into reality and the basic Frameworks that we're using for constructing reality can now be pretty well described you can even name them epistemologically that is to say what are we subject to what can we actually look at and then a next really interesting premise is that we're not stuck with any one framework

then for the rest of our lives but rather that these Frameworks can actually evolve they can evolve in a direction of increasing capacity to as I say see more deeply into ourselves and into our world and of course there are a number of these successive kind of meaning Frameworks we call them stages there's a stage zero and one and two that pertain more to childhood but I'm going to just quickly take you through give you a taste of and then we can talk more about any of them uh back back and forth just to quickly

take you through three of them and uh the first of them is this uh this notion this this framework that tends to begin uh sometime in adolescence which has to do with a time when we begin finally we hope that it happens sometime in adolescence to move beyond our short-term interests and needs I've always said that most sensitive parents recognize that their 10-year-old kids love them but would still sell them for a cold drink on a hot day you know they might later regret the deal but at the time it kind of made sense you

know because that's kind of how it is you know when you're 10 you're just kind of orienting to your own your own needs and interests sometime typically during adolescence we we come to a more complex way of constructing the world where we actually start taking in the expectations and values of those surrounding us and we Orient to them not just extrinsically to kind of f figure out how we can get our ends meet meet our own needs and kind of maneuver around them we start taking them in so that they intrinsically matter to us they

become a a new way that we kind of shape a coherent self a self that is now aligned with what with what mom or my dear friend or someone else kind of wants of me so we call this the socialized mind because you become more a part of society you know because Society has become more a part of you you've actually psychologically Ally kind of you breathe in your kind of psychological surround you align yourself with those values you are able to be faithful to and made up by that surround and of course when this

occurs you know in adolescence we all breathe a sigh of relief because we say that the you know you've become quote more responsible uh you've become more trustworthy you can hold up your end of a relationship and that is itself a great achievement however in a modern society we actually have a demand for something more than just meeting other people's expectations increasingly there is a kind of demand for us to be able to actually step back from others expectations because for example they may not always agree and to begin to form an internal seat of

judgment a kind of personal Authority a kind of framework of our own our own kind of personal ideology and uh that brings us to the the the second of these three that I'm taking you through the fourth order of Consciousness what we call the self-authoring mind we're now able we're not ignoring the expectations of other but we're no longer so completely made up by them we're able to step back from them we're able to evaluate them and this this stage of development has is in in many different theories there's a stage resonant to this and

it's usually taken as something like the fullest uh you know evolution of development you kind of become your own person but you know since we developed this Theory not by just sitting in a chair and thinking what we thought development should look like but rather following people every 2 3 years going back and reinie them you know letting people know that if their lives had no other consistency they could at least count on this that somebody would call them up every three years and make an appointment sit down and talk with them look at the

way in which they were making sense of things and what we found is that some people never before midlife but some people actually began to be able to step back even from their self-authoring minds we call it the self self authoring Mind by the way because you begin to sort of author your own identity you be able you begin to sort of instead of being written upon which is what happens in the socialized mind written upon by the society you kind of pick up the psychological pen you kind of create your own identity and thereby

you become more of a kind of personal Authority and that's why we call it the self-authoring mind but we found that some people as I say never before midlife could actually begin to step back a bit even from their own personal ideologies even from their own personal internal Frameworks which have a lot of power which organize a lot of experience but which some people came to see inevitably any one system of meaning is going to leave some things out it's going to privilege some things or some people and it's going to kind of you know

disadvantage others and uh as people come to this recognition they gradually move these stages don't happen overnight there's a long Peri period of transition between them I'm just trying to give you a quick a quick tour here of these three qualitatively different orders of Consciousness that people come to a place where they actually can hold on to uh more than one system at once I'm going to give you a moment though to just sort of ponder the question given that each of these pictures this one with which you're so familiar and this one as well

is both they're both dealing with this kind of idea that the the perceiver actually constructs the picture and yet there are differences in the way that this picture deals with that idea from the way this picture deals with that idea some of you would start saying things like well there's there's a kind of either or quality to this picture it's true that it's about how you shape reality I see some of you nodding pointing to each other way to go uh this picture kind of you either either see it one way or the other and

the picture kind of leaves you alone it doesn't bother you after you formed whatever meaning of it youve Formed whereas eer and all ofer's prints do this that's why some people say that eer prints make them nauseous this picture will not leave you alone it will not allow you to just uh kind of see the dark as the background and the white as the figure on the ground it it forces you as you just keep following you know uh its motion to reverse these and see that the white could just as easily be the background

and oh my goodness this is a figure you know this is a figure here so it forces you to take a both and perspective rather than an either or perspective another difference you might have noticed is that this one's kind of static whereas this one there's all this motion and not just the motion of the figures but the motion of your own meaning making a third kind of difference is that that there's just a there's a much it's all different way of talking about the same thing but this one doesn't put the Opposites kind of

there in front of you this one does and there's a much friendlier relationship to opposites in fact there's kind of a story here if you read the picture from the top to the bottom which I think is what's intended where at the end of the story the Opposites actually come out meet and shake hands you can't get much you know friendlier toward the Opposites than that all of this brings me to my big idea if you are willing to step back far enough and view US human beings as a as a as a species across

a big enough sweep of time the thousands of years that we've been walking the Earth then you have to conclude that something very unusual is happening in just this last little blip of time just the last 100 to 150 years which is just a a few minutes kind of the most recent minutes in our long history what is it that's happening number one we have dramatically increased our numbers in less than a 100 years we've tripled you know the numbers of us from 2 billion to about 7 billion but this is not just about size

the size how many of us there are the other thing is that we are living much longer each human being is living much longer in fact an entire generation longer than we used to 150 years ago the average age at which people died was the age that we today call midlife you know in our 50s of all the human beings throughout human history who have ever lived to the age of 65 or more 2third of them are alive today just think about that for a moment an entirely new phenomenon in the long history of being

a human being we are the only species with so many me members living so long after the years of fertility and reproduction no other species does this has members 10 20 30 40 years after the years of fertility and reproduction now this prompts the question why why is this happening now the fast glib answer is that advances in medical science fight disease and prolong life but that is a very thin answer that is an answer about the technical how of how it is happening the means by which it's happening it is not an answer about

the why why are we doing this as a species now in the Western World we take great pride in our individual autonomy and agency so if you want to believe or find compelling the explanation that this species-wide phenomenon is occurring just because of the accident of millions and millions of autonomous agents coincident G making the same choices so to converge on this single phenomenon I will leave you to that explanation but I want to suggest to you a different explanation and that is that our species is collectively at work trying to figure something out why

does any species do what it does except to survive to live to succeed biologically when you take this big view of our current reality you have to also conclude that we are a species in Peril we're a species that is in Peril and knows that it is in Peril we are in the midst of a simultaneous race to the top and to the bottom that you don't have to look hard to find instances of human generosity and sacrifice and creativity and insight and invention but it is also true that we're the only species to arrange

the means of its near instant destruction through nuclear weapons and others and uh and to spread instantly to anyone with access to the internet the means to create devastating bombs and more gradually we fatally degrading our own environment despoiling our planetary home it may be no coincidence that we're the only species arranging its own demise and conscious of it and the only species with hundreds of millions of members who are alive years beyond the period of fertility and reproduction given a whole additional generation to live what might we generate our adult developmental research shows that

the self-transforming Mind does not develop until midlife until recently that time when we ended life what if we are living longer so that we can create more of the order of Consciousness that may actually save us from the Peril in which we live what if we're living longer in order to increase the chances that our troubled species can find non murderous non-catastrophic non annihilative non-p poisoning ways of dealing with the extraordinary dangers of our third order tribal passions and our fourth order prideful sovereignties of thought and state what if we are living longer in response

to Einstein's challenge that we'll never solve the problems tomorrow with the same order of consciousness we are using to create the problems of today what if we are living longer to find in Gandhi's words a way out of hell if any of this big idea is true then I want to say to any of you who spend your lives in whatever way you do supporting the development of people that there may be no more important work to do thank you you know people have often asked me so you have spent 35 years thinking about this

phenomenon that people develop have you come to any ideas have you come to even a single idea that maybe hasn't occurred to me this is my candid this is what okay so this is the big okay we'll stay with the big idea for a second I mean and what would it look like if it works so let's just imagine for a second that everything you say is true yeah um and that this is some sort of adaptive immune system response from the planet to increase our longevity so that we have more opportunity for a different

order of Consciousness in greater numbers so that collectively we can solve the problems caused by the third and fourth order of mind yes that's all true can you give us an idea of what that would look like a kind of governmental economic kind of level well no I think what I can what I can what I can tell you is that when you look at the at our most dangerous most intractable most you know prolonged form forms of you know Wicked problems I think in RSA language um you see that while every developmental level can

be spoken about with respect to the way in which it's a triumph over the limitations and the distortions of a prior meaning system it is also itself a limitation with respect to developments to come so not to disparage the the less complex orders of Consciousness when people move into the socialized mind I mean they move from being kind of these you know completely uh unsocialized kind of instrumental fig figures that we know that every every one of us was when we were children and that's why people watched over us into a a state where you

can you can actually become a member of a tribe and you kind of follow its values that's a great development but it is not a development that is going to enable us to deal with the most dangerous problems that face us which always involve you know some kind of battle between tribes so we move to the self-authoring mind which itself is an enormous Advance it creates the whole notion of a of system for example it creates the idea for example of law that that that that gives you rights even if you're not related to me

by Blood and even if I don't like you particularly I still you know you're you're part of a common system and you're you're protected but the fourth order of mind the self-authoring mind is still not actually going to be enough to solve the intractable kinds of conflicts that are often a function of Waring ideologies Each of which have certain kinds of Merit and internal consistency within themselves so I what I'm suggesting is that as there are more and more of us and more and more of us living longer and longer there is almost a a

guarantee that there's going to be more and more of an order of Consciousness which was almost non-existent a couple hundred years ago and that order of Consciousness may be a means to help us you know resolve these kinds of problems