When People – and Cultures – Grow Too Fast

It is an ironclad principle of human development: you can’t skip stages. Each stage of development builds upon the gains of the previous stages, and if the previous stages are not well installed things don’t work right.

Unstable and uneven growth is a feature of today’s world, where four or five stages of development are online competing for dominance. In some places we see people with traditional identities trying to function in modern economies while watching their children be enticed by a globalized, postmodern culture.

We may see in ourselves that we do not have some traditional qualities, such as self-discipline, well installed. Or maybe we are weak on modern qualities such as ambition. Environmental factors may be that we were raised in a chaotic, pre-traditional environment, or by postmodern parents who were themselves polarized against earlier value sets.

Many forms of bypassing can occur in individuals and cultures today. That’s why integral practice includes a form of reclamation, where we identify and rehabilitate skills from previous stages that are absent or unstable in ourselves, our families and our communities. In this podcast Jeff explains with examples.