How Human Development Impacts Our Omnipartiality Journey
Discover "peek experiences" and their profound influence
Welcome back to this long series about living in complexity. Last time, I talked about Simone de Beauvoir’s hierarchy of freedom in The Ethics of Ambiguity. In this book, she explored ethical frameworks for living in an ambiguous world with unclear meaning.
Looking at the bigger picture, we need to think about how we can grow into omnipartiality and want the best for everyone. We also need to be able to deal with our complex, uncertain world that’s full of unsolvable, wicked problems that we must manage through collaboration. That means working with a diverse group of people who we don’t like or trust but who are still on our team.
Today, we’re looking at the stages of human development and how they affect our journey towards omnipartiality. Let’s jump in.
What are the stages of human development?
There are a bunch of theories about human development, with common threads among them. Firstly, we develop as individuals during our lifetimes, and the stages go in a consistent order, so we can’t skip ahead. We have to be a baby first, obviously.
Each stage represents a new way of perceiving and relating to ourselves, others, and society. This helps us navigate the complexity of our world. To move on from our current phase, we need to master it first. If we don’t, we’ll leave scraps behind that need picking up eventually.
While each stage goes beyond the previous one, it still includes the knowledge we’ve learned and integrated. We don’t forget what we discovered before; rather, we step beyond it. I see this as realizing things are inadequate and wanting to learn something new, a different way of being in the world.
Because each stage pushes off the previous one through a lot of this process, there’s a flavor of rejecting that last stage and not liking it anymore. That leads to one of the important critiques of this theory:
Elitism
There’s a concern that this way of thinking is elitist, and some people think they’re better than others. Yes, some people go through this process thinking that, but that’s their experience and worldview. Nothing about this model says that anyone is better because they’ve gone through this.
All that it means is they’ve developed a more complex meaning-making system in their reality. In a sense, this model is hierarchical because each stage builds upon the last, growing our skill set for understanding the world around us. Still, there’s this tension between us growing as individuals and as a culture.
Magnet of culture
Since each stage is the same for everyone, there’s always a big chunk of the population in that stage of development. Whatever the prevailing stage of development is in any culture, big or small, that becomes the cultural value, creating something called the “magnet of culture.” That magnet helps us grow until we get to that level, but it pulls us back if we try to develop beyond it.
People comprise culture; it’s simply a collective set of ways of seeing the world. Culture has a way of getting everyone to orient around it, so the dominant culture influences everyone. But as we are culture, we can grow if we want to. If enough people grow, the whole culture grows along with us.
Change is a choice
It’s worthwhile to note that you can’t change other people. You can improve, and maybe that’ll inspire other people to change. Unfortunately, if you want someone else to change, the best way to do that is to let them know that you accept them exactly as they are. Let them choose their own path.
That means you don’t have to change. I can’t make you change. You don’t need to do this.
In fact, you only really need to operate at the level that matches the complexity of your circumstances. If you have a worldview that works for you, that’s fine. There isn’t necessarily any evidence that change will make your life happier or make you feel more fulfilled. Still, by opening up to development, you may learn new, exciting things and positively influence others.
Peek experiences
Throughout life, we experience things where we feel like we should have learned those lessons already. We probably did, but we didn’t integrate them into our lives. This is because there’s something that people call “peek experiences,” where we peek into a higher level of understanding.
While that’s really cool and profound, if we’re not ready in our development, these experiences won’t make a difference. We might have to experience the same lesson over and over again until we learn it. But we’ll get there eventually.
Growth = Tolerance
With every new growth stage, we develop a higher tolerance for living in ambiguity, dealing with nuance, and handling complex situations. We become more capable of functioning in a rapidly changing and ever more complicated world.
Our sense of self evolves, and we grow to have a more meaningful sense of who we are and who we care for. Eventually, we determine who is relevant and vital to us and who is on our team.
How does our thinking change?
As a baby, we only care about ourselves. We eventually grow to care about our family and see them as ourselves. Then our community or the people who think or look like us become our crew. Our society and our nation eventually become our sense of self.
Humanity is the next way of thinking. From here, we can expand our sense of understanding and care to include the entire biosphere, all the living things on the planet, as part of our family. Eventually, we can grow to understand that the whole universe itself is who we are, and maybe even beyond that.
As we grow, our sense of self grows with it, and we separate from our traits, beliefs, thoughts, and feelings. On realizing we are not our traits, we become more liberated and less entangled with our identities.
At this point, we’ve developed the capacity to hold many different models for understanding the world around us. We accept other ideas of reality because there isn’t just one version of the truth. Accepting that our traits and beliefs aren’t tied to who we are makes it easier to take in different opinions and ideas.
Even as we expand in all these different ways of seeing the world, we become more integrated. Here, we can be in touch with our authentic selves. That offers us the opportunity to act with integrity and follow our values, giving us agency to operate in the world as an individual with a lot more freedom.
Stay tuned for the following essay where I share some awesome adult development theories and how we can take responsibility for our evolution.
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