Index to the most important knowledge in the world

Adult developmental stage theory holds that there are three fundamental ways of thinking, feeling, and acting. They are the communal or pre-systematic mode; the rational or systematic one, and the fluid or meta-systematic one. These are distinctive ways of being that can manifest in any domain.

Each is more powerful and accurate than the previous. As individuals, we can develop into them only in sequence, so they are called “stages”—numbered 3, 4, and 5 for historical reasons.

The title of this page is humorously hyperbolic. However, I do believe stage theory may be the most significant idea we have, if it is true and if it implies what I hope it may. It may be the key to escaping our current stagnation and malaise, and moving as individuals and whole societies into more effective and enjoyable ways of being.

This page collects, links, and summarizes my writing on the theory and its implications. Currently that’s scattered over several web sites, so this is a hub for all of them.

I also include planned but unwritten essays, with summaries, to give a sense of the scope of the material and why I think it’s important.

The theory

This is a summary of the theory, particularly as it applies to personal growth, with some emphasis on ethical development.

Start here!

This essay aims to dispel a dozen common misunderstandings that hinder effective use of the theory by people who might benefit from it.

[Titles that aren’t linked are for essays that I haven’t written yet.]

This will be a summary of applications: fundamental epistemology; your personal development; professional work; understanding and communicating with people; learning relationships; therapy; romantic and family relationships; organizational leadership; culture, society, policy, and politics.

Historically, adult stage theory grew out of Jean Piaget’s theory of children’s cognitive development. He described stages 1–4, with stages 1–3 being pre-rational, and stage 4 being formal rationality. Researchers in his tradition discovered that there is a mode of reasoning that goes beyond rationality, which they called “postformal thought,” “stage 5,” or “meta-rationality.”

I am writing a practical book-length explanation, linked after the bullet above.

The past, present, and future of stage theory as science.

The field began as academic empirical psychology, but university research in the area stopped abruptly in the late 1980s. That means we can’t be confident about whether the theory is true, or a version of it is true, or what parts of it are true, or even what it would mean for it to be true or not.

If it is true, it may be enormously important. We ought to find out.

The original version of stage theory supposed that you are “at” one of the stages, and you think, feel, and act in that mode everywhere in your life. This is an oversimplification.

You may operate “at” one stage in one part of your life and “at” another stage in a different one. For example, it’s a common for technical people to lag in the emotional and relational domains. Many of us operate in the stage 3 communal mode in those aspects of life, while operating in the stage 4 rational mode in our cognitive and practical work.

You may also be “between” stages. Empirical data show that much of the population in developed countries is somewhere between stages 3 and 4.

These observations call into question the “stage” concept altogether. What does it even mean for something to be a stage if you can be “at” two at once, or part way in between? The academic literature has not faced this question squarely.

This essay will clarify the conceptual confusions here.

Society, culture, and policy

The most influential people in a society may group around a particular developmental stage. That stage shapes its culture overall, even if the majority of the population lags somewhat developmentally. From about 1700 to the 1970s, stage 4 systematicity shaped the culture of rich countries. This was “modernity.”

Starting in the early 1900s, modernity started to crack, and in the 1970s we entered “postmodernity.” In postmodernity, culture is shaped by the nihilistic confusions of stage 4.5. In some ways, this has been an advance, but it’s mostly been destructive, and may prove catastrophic.

“How meaning fell apart” is an unfinished many-web-page explanation of how and why this happened.

This sketches a possible future in which culture centers on the stage 5 fluid mode of thinking, feeling, and acting.

So how do we get from postmodernity to the social and cultural fluid mode? We have to build a bridge.

This essay, more than any of the others I’ve written so far, explains why I think adult stage theory may be “the most important knowledge in the world.”

“Circumrational” work interfaces a rational system with the real world. Most of the work in most white-collar jobs is circumrational. It requires some understanding of formal rationality, but not complete personal systematicity. In stage theory terms, circumrationality demands that you be somewhere between stages 3 and 4.

This “3.5” is a confusing non-stage. You don’t get most of the benefits of the systematic mode, but understand the limitations of the communal mode well enough that you can’t fall back on it either. This tends to produce personal, emotional, relational, and cognitive incoherence, often leading to nihilistic anxiety, depression, or futile rage.

The majority of the population is now stranded in this no-man’s-land, and the center of gravity of our culture and politics and social relations are stranded with them. It’s a bad place to be.

I consider possible ways forward.

Modernity was built and run by an elite class who got educated into the stage 4 systematic mode. That system of education has mainly ceased to operate, other than in STEM disciplines (and is eroding rapidly there too).

Software engineers are the main remaining group trained in formal rationality. Increasingly it has fallen to us, by default, to keep the machinery of society running. This is unfortunate, because we lack critical parts of the know-how that used to be taught to the ruling class.

This is about the American ruling class, and what they used to know and be.

It is about the battle at Maldon against Viking marauders in the year 991. It’s about postmodernism and about Gandalf’s showdown with the Balrog at Khazad-Dûm. It is about the dysfunction of Harvard University and about adult developmental psychology and about the Great Stagnation.

In the end, though, it’s about the American ruling class. Or, more precisely, about its absence.

Stage 5 in relationships and organizations

This “business fiction” explains the path from stage 4 to stage 5 in the context of the relationship between the two cofounders of a software technology company. It goes into considerable detail on seven substages along the way, in order to make the developmental arc clear and explicit.

You may find it useful as a personal diagnostic tool, to locate your own relational substage and see what’s next for you.

What would working in a stage 5 organization be like?

This is about the nostalgia one feels for stage 2 when at stage 3: the sense of freedom from others’ needs. It’s about how you can use that nostalgia to move on to stage 4, which puts limits on your responsibility to others.

Analogously, it is about the nostalgia one feels for stage 3 when at stage 4: the sense of emotional connection, which stage 4 constricts excessively. It’s about how you can use that nostalgia to move on to stage 5, which offers intimacy beyond that available at any other stage.

The path from stage 3 to stage 4 is well-understood; the main obstacle is willingness. Very little has been written about the path from stage 4 to stage 5 as it manifests in emotions and self-understanding; that has been a matter for mentorship. I will provide some explicit guidance.

How falling in love with someone you can’t get may blow up your whole carefully-shielded system of life, forcing you out of developmental stage 4 and into the storm-tossed ocean between it and stage 5.

How a cannibal witch or barbarian warrior prince can guide you across that ocean.

Stage 5 ethics

Several major adult stage theorists have researched ethical reasoning in particular. I too have written about meta-systematic (stage 5) ethics:

A draft of an introduction to an unwritten chapter of Meaningness.

Explaining similarities between ethics in adult stage theory and in Dzogchen, a branch of Buddhism. It intends to illuminate both, although in retrospect the writing may be unnecessarily difficult.

This will tie together several threads begun elsewhere: adult developmental stage theory, Buddhist ethics, Robert Bly’s interpretation of Jungian psychology, Meaningness’s exploration of nihilism, and spontaneous activity in Dzogchen.