At Kegan 3 the ground truth is taken for granted, and is heavily constructed via social reality. You can have a traditional society that isn’t trying to do anything other than maintain the existing reality that works for people at this stage of development.
On the other hand, modern civilization (as in, modern industrial civilization with loose family ties and trusting strangers and impersonal organizations that function like machinery) basically demands people at least come up to Kegan 4 to really succeed, and historically put lots of systems in place to help people get there. It does end up asking people to try their best and fake it until they actually develop, with people playing at Kegan 4 without actually being there.
A classic example I can think of is the way modern society, and especially modern organizations, expect people to function in compartmentalized ways. Like, say you work at a company, and you, Alice, have beef with your coworker, Bob. The expectation is that you’ll act “professionally”, which is essentially the LARPing thing you’re getting at, where there are rules around how you are supposed to behave in the workplace, and one of those is engaging with people in the workplace only on limited terms. The whole person doesn’t come to work, only their work “mask”. So your beef with Bob must be kept out of the workplace, lest you be fired yourself, and Bob can readily get himself out of trouble if you break the rules and bring the beef to work by saying “hey, Alice isn’t acting professionally!”.
I feel like I only wrote half that comment. Here’s the rest.
That kind of compartmentalization is not something that comes naturally to people without systems in place to push them to it. In a traditional society, there’s just sort of one social sphere (attempts at secret groups for ritual purposes notwithstanding) that overlaps with everything and you can bring your whole self all the time everywhere and people will expect you to do that. It’s only that we ask more of people in our modern world because compartmentalization works well as a bridge to help people at stage 3 get by in a world that expects them to be at stage 4 or higher: it keeps complex social interactions functioning when the people involved would otherwise interact in ways that would eventually, compounded over many interactions, tear modern society apart.
I think much of the difficulty and dissatisfaction people find in the modern world comes from some critical mass of people developing to Kegan 5, reshaping society, and then tearing apart some of the things that helped people bridge into the Kegan 4 level and modern society. To go back to professionalism, lots of aspects of traditional professionalism have broken down. For the people this works for they really enjoy the more casual atmosphere, but it makes it harder for people who are at Kegan 3 to fully join the party because it requires stepping out into a groundless space that’s difficult to navigate without solid frames provided to them. For all the stifling of traditional notions of professionalism, it at least created an equal ground with known rules that made it easier for people to come up into. I think we underappreciate how difficult the erosion of these norms makes it for people who are at Kegan 3.
And I want to importantly emphasize that we need to make a world that’s accessible to folks at Kegan 3, because this is the natural developmental level for most adult humans. So, in fact, I’d say, to use your metaphor, we’re asking people to LARP in a situation where the rules are vague and you don’t necessarily understand why the DM (or whatever this is called in LARPing) punished you, or even necessarily the genre of LARP you’re doing. We used to have clearer rules, we cleared them away because the people who stopped LARPing and starting living in game (out of game?) full time thought it would be more fun that way, and it is for them, but not for everyone else.
Is society just a tool to get Kegan 3 frames to want to LARP Kegan 4 and Kegan 5 frames?
I mean, this is a weird way to put it, but kinda.
At Kegan 3 the ground truth is taken for granted, and is heavily constructed via social reality. You can have a traditional society that isn’t trying to do anything other than maintain the existing reality that works for people at this stage of development.
On the other hand, modern civilization (as in, modern industrial civilization with loose family ties and trusting strangers and impersonal organizations that function like machinery) basically demands people at least come up to Kegan 4 to really succeed, and historically put lots of systems in place to help people get there. It does end up asking people to try their best and fake it until they actually develop, with people playing at Kegan 4 without actually being there.
A classic example I can think of is the way modern society, and especially modern organizations, expect people to function in compartmentalized ways. Like, say you work at a company, and you, Alice, have beef with your coworker, Bob. The expectation is that you’ll act “professionally”, which is essentially the LARPing thing you’re getting at, where there are rules around how you are supposed to behave in the workplace, and one of those is engaging with people in the workplace only on limited terms. The whole person doesn’t come to work, only their work “mask”. So your beef with Bob must be kept out of the workplace, lest you be fired yourself, and Bob can readily get himself out of trouble if you break the rules and bring the beef to work by saying “hey, Alice isn’t acting professionally!”.
I feel like I only wrote half that comment. Here’s the rest.
That kind of compartmentalization is not something that comes naturally to people without systems in place to push them to it. In a traditional society, there’s just sort of one social sphere (attempts at secret groups for ritual purposes notwithstanding) that overlaps with everything and you can bring your whole self all the time everywhere and people will expect you to do that. It’s only that we ask more of people in our modern world because compartmentalization works well as a bridge to help people at stage 3 get by in a world that expects them to be at stage 4 or higher: it keeps complex social interactions functioning when the people involved would otherwise interact in ways that would eventually, compounded over many interactions, tear modern society apart.
I think much of the difficulty and dissatisfaction people find in the modern world comes from some critical mass of people developing to Kegan 5, reshaping society, and then tearing apart some of the things that helped people bridge into the Kegan 4 level and modern society. To go back to professionalism, lots of aspects of traditional professionalism have broken down. For the people this works for they really enjoy the more casual atmosphere, but it makes it harder for people who are at Kegan 3 to fully join the party because it requires stepping out into a groundless space that’s difficult to navigate without solid frames provided to them. For all the stifling of traditional notions of professionalism, it at least created an equal ground with known rules that made it easier for people to come up into. I think we underappreciate how difficult the erosion of these norms makes it for people who are at Kegan 3.
And I want to importantly emphasize that we need to make a world that’s accessible to folks at Kegan 3, because this is the natural developmental level for most adult humans. So, in fact, I’d say, to use your metaphor, we’re asking people to LARP in a situation where the rules are vague and you don’t necessarily understand why the DM (or whatever this is called in LARPing) punished you, or even necessarily the genre of LARP you’re doing. We used to have clearer rules, we cleared them away because the people who stopped LARPing and starting living in game (out of game?) full time thought it would be more fun that way, and it is for them, but not for everyone else.