Color-coded confusion

One little pet peeve I have with the Integral community is the misuse of spiral dynamics stages based on the color scheme.  The problem is that certain colors already have a cultural significance for us, and I've seen several people, including even Ken himself, confuse the cultural meaning of a color with its meaning in SD.

I think the most common source of confusion is Red.  When we think of red, we think of blood and violence.  It's deeply ingrained when our psyche.  So when you have a mass murderer like Anders Breivik or some Al Qaeda operative, inevitably someone will say that they are coming out of a Red value structure.  But this is nonsense.  Any level of consciousness can perform and justify violence.  Organized terrorists, from Breivik to Bin Laden, are overwhelmingly Amber.  They have a rigid ideological worldview, and their absolute certainty in that view justifies violence against those who would oppose it.  Red, in Spiral Dynamics, does not mean violent.  It means impulsive and egocentric.  A good example of Red violence would be Jared Loughner when he committed that spree killing in Tucson.  Another would be the guy who committed the Virginia Tech massacre.  These are people who are not fighting for some ideological cause, but are simply mad and frustrated, and are taking it out on the world.  When trying to figure out if a killer is coming from Red or Amber, ask yourself this:  Are they trying to accomplish a specific goal, or are they simply having a temper tantrum?  This is actually why Al Qaeda has a strong incentive not to recruit people who are Red.  Such people cannot be trusted to carry out coordinated attacks.  They could lose their cool and blow the whole operation.  What they want instead are militant ideologues who will follow marching orders and believe in their cause.

Another source of confusion is Green.  This is easily understandable, as the environmental movement has embraced the term for everything that they believe in, and there is indeed a large overlap between "Green" as an environmentally conscious social movement, and "Green" as a stage in spiral dynamics, but they are far from identical.  For one thing, any responsible person at second-tier should also be "Green" in the sense of supporting environmental sustainability.  But also, one doesn't have to be at the stage of Green in order to be aware of environmental issues.  So often, I see the claim thrown out there that climate change is an issue that only someone at Green cares about.  Nonsense.  Someone at Green might have an environmental ethic in which the Earth is intrinsically valuable, but in cases like climate change, one doesn't have to be a tree-hugger to recognize the dangers to human civilization.  Personally, I would wager that the majority of climate scientists are at Orange, not Green.  Furthermore, one can be at Green and have a decidedly anti-environmental bias.  Much of the discourse on climate change on this site which I've criticized strikes me as much more Green than Integral, in that it acts as if both sides of the argument are equally valid.  In other words, it falls into Green fallacy of saying that because truth is never final, therefore one person's truth is just as valid as another's.  But I'll try to keep that can of worms as closed as possible here.

Another confusion which isn't necessarily related to its color is Orange.  I see a common tendency to conflate Orange with any kind of intelligence, simply because Orange is called "rational."  But Amber has its own kind of reason as well.  Allan Combs points out in his book Consciousness Explained Better how fourth and fifth graders can be incredibly bright spelling bee champions and even be advanced in math, but when attempts are made to introduce a debate club to such children, it ends up being chaotic.  This is because Amber is very good at the kind of thinking that involves following rules and formulas, but what they lack is the kind of imagination that allows them to put themselves in the shoes of the other person enough to follow their argument and put up a counter-argument.

Anyway, that's all I have for now.  I just would like people to be a little bit more careful about how we use these terms, and be more attentive to the nuances involved in such classification schemes.