The Further Reaches of Adult Development - Robert Kegan MAN 1: Anyone who believes in indefinite growth on a physically finite planet is either mad or an economist. WOMAN: 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 organize their life. MAN 2: We are not as endlessly manipulable and as predictable as you would think. [APPLAUSE] Robert Kegan: So all of this kind of begins with recognizing that we human beings are makers of meaning, 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 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 and making famous, right. So you're all kind of aware that you can see here kind of an older woman or a younger woman. If you see a younger woman, then you think of this little blip here as a blip of her nose. And you see this kind of as a necklace. And you see this as an ear. But if you see it as an older woman, then you see all of this kind of as her nose. And you see this as her mouth. And you see this as her eye. So the picture kind of quickly demonstrates that the picture isn't really on the page. Right, all we have on the page is just smatterings of dark and light and that we human beings do some 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 here that you may be less familiar with. Just keep looking. It will eventually dawn on you that there's something more than a Prussian helmeted soldier there and that there is also some pigtail girl 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 system that creates basically what we call knowledge 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 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 that we call them stages. There's a stage 0 and 1 and 2 that pertain more to childhood. But I'm going to just quickly take you through, give you a taste. And then we can talk more about any of them back and forth just to quickly take you through three of them. And the first of them is this framework that tends to begin some time 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. [LAUGHS] They might later regret the deal. But at the time, it kind of made sense, because that's kind of how it is when your tenure just kind of orienting to your own needs and interests. Sometime typically during adolescence, 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 figure out how we can 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 new way that we kind of shape a coherent self-- a self that is now aligned 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, because society has become more a part of you. You've actually psychologically kind of [INHALES] You breathe in. You're 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, in adolescence, we all breathe a sigh of relief, because we say that you've become, quote, "more responsible." 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 other's 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 that brings us to 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 not ignoring the expectations of other [? bits. ?] 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 stage of development is in many different theories. There's a stage resonant to this. And it's usually taken as something like the fullest evolution of development. You kind of become your own person. But since we've developed this theory, not by just sitting in a chair and thinking what we thought development should look like, but rather, following people every two, three years, going back and re-interviewing them-- 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, 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-authoring mind, by the way, because you begin to sort of author your own identity. 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 disadvantage others. And as people come to this recognition, they gradually move. These stages don't happen overnight. There's a long period of transition between them. I'm just trying to give you a quick tour here of these three qualitatively different orders of consciousness that people come to a place where they actually can hold onto 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. They're both dealing with this kind of idea that 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 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. This picture kind of, you either see it one way or the other. And the picture kind of leaves you alone. It doesn't bother you after you've formed whatever meaning of it you've formed. Whereas, Escher-- and all of Escher's prints do this. That's why some people say that Escher prints make them nauseous. This picture will not leave you alone. It will not allow you to just kind of see the dark as the background and the white as the figure on the ground. It forces you, as you just keep following its motion to reverse these and see if the white could just as easily be the background. And oh, my goodness. This is a figure. This is a figure here. So it forces you to take a boat and a 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 differences that 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 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 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 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 100 years, we've tripled the numbers of us from 2 billion to about 7 billion. But this is not just about size-- the size of 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-- in our 50s. Of all the human beings throughout human history who have ever lived to the age of 65 or more, 2/3 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 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 coincidentally 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 or 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 to spread instantly to anyone with access to the internet the means to create devastating bombs. And more gradually, we're 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 mid-life 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 nonmurderous, noncatastrophic, nonannihilated, nonpoisoning ways of dealing with the extraordinary dangers of our third order tribal passions and our fourth order prideful sovereignty's 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. [APPLAUSE] People have often asked me, so you've 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 candidate. Interviewer: OK. So this is the big-- OK, we'll stay with the big idea for a second. I mean, what would it look like if it works? So let's just imagine for a second that everything you say is true and that this is some sort of adaptive immune system response on 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. And since that's all true, can you give us an idea of what that would look like at a kind of governmental, economic kind of level? [KEGAN LAUGHS] Robert Kegan: Well, no. I think what I can tell you is that when you look at our most dangerous, most intractable, most prolonged forms of wicked problems, I think, in our [? SA ?] language, 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 less complex orders of consciousness-- when people move into the socialized mind, I mean, they move from being kind of these completely unsocialized kind of instrumental figures that we know that every one of us was when we were children-- and that's why people watched over us-- into a state where 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 some kind of battle between tribes. So we moved to the self-authoring mind, which itself is an enormous advance. It creates the whole notion of system, for example. It creates the idea, for example, of law that gives you rights, even if you're not related to me by blood and even if I don't like you particularly, you're part of a common system, and 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 warring ideologies each of which have certain kinds of merit and internal consistency within themselves. So 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 guarantee that there's going to be more and more of an order of consciousness, which was almost nonexistent a couple hundred years ago. And that order of consciousness may be a means to help us resolve these kinds of problems.