Avatar is sci-fi about a Teal society!

this is really useful .. it reminds me how foggy i am (we are?) as to the real nature of 'tribal'. 

looking more closely i think shows up a lot of contradictions - eg.

animalistic means (looked it up)

would u seriously apply this to the Na'vi?  apart from 1, perhaps.  i wouldn't. they are portrayed as very evolved both spiritually and scientificall, and mentally they actually show at the beginning of the film that they despise humans for having 'minds like children' .. not being emotionally mature (which the film portrays as true)

magical and spiritistic .. to my reading of this in a purple context it's when you haven't developed science yet and infuse made-up meanings into circumstances in order to explain the world to yourself..  

but this is not my reading of where the Na'vi are at, at all.   They are portrayed as having mastered a very sophisticated, advanced bio-science and even the top earth scientist during the film says "Eywa is real", towards the end, when she is dying i think .. so showing how hard it is for us to change our prejudices - even she doubted about theirs being 'mystical' stuff (cynicism portrayed very well in its extreme form by the business man character)

same with 'supersticious' - did you see the Na'vi as that?  i didn't.  and the same with ancestor 'apeasement' - honouring the ancestors is very different from appeasing (fear) and normally considered quite mature i think. 

green (probably orange too) disconnects with the ancestors, even despise them in some way - at least i see that around me: not many greens that i know have any real appreciation of what our parents or grandparents generations tried to do or gave us, quite the contrary), and this disassociation with our past is something i think gets to heal in level2.  you can't integrate without also integrating all generations..

same with respect for authority - it's not necessarily fear, and respecting that a master knows more than you is mature, not regressive (but try telling the baby boomers that!).   this is shown well in Avatar by the mother (priestess) saying to her daughter that she will teach Jake - the daughter is angry and openly shows her disapproval - with no punishment whatever - but does it, out of respect not fear, i think.    these are significant details!

and her mother's intuition turns out to be right - the journey both teaches her daughter and Jake, and gives the tribe a big new resource.   this is just what wisdom does: with lots of experience you get to 'just know', things it would take too long to explain to others, and so can lead others, quickly and decisively for everyone's good - if they let you.  and a mature society will respect leaders a lot more than ours does, i think. 

ours is still based on chronic individualism - so it ignores or attacks good leadership whilst worshipping charismatic 'star' personalities (sometimes good, but often crap leaders) that make them feel good.  it's way behind tribal in some ways, in this respect (in terms of effectiveness, in evolving us) - yet an important step towards accepting authority in a more mature way ... which I think it's what the Na'vi do. 

eg. what is interesting is that the leaders of the tribe totally keep out of their daughter's business when it comes to which man she chooses, even though it's totally controversial and not necessarily approved of by them.   this, i feel, would be very different in a purple tribe (where tradition has to be followed at all costs), but here people are shown to have a lot of autonomy and personal freedom, whilst being much more cooperative than we can farthom people being.. (so we can only understand it in terms of subjugation of individual will!)

my main question here still is, how do you envisage a teal society?  and you say " Teal on the other hand involves integration of many different and mostly antagonistic cultures, worldviews, beliefs,"

ok, and what does that look like, on the ground, to you??

because to me it could well look like the patchwork of 'tribes' (i would say cities) that we get to see they have, later in the film.   that is how i read the fact that they have lots of scattered tribes, each with their own culture, landscape and tradition ... as i got the impression that they one people (one nation), and that you get to choose with which neighbourhood (which settlement or 'city') you get to live in, based on what type of experience you wanto get.   of course am assuming things, but they're assumptions based on what they tells us, and this makes a lot more sense than the idea that they are just tribes limited by blood-ties and protecting themselves by warfare - i saw them a lot more sophisticated than that.

again thanks for the reflexion - interesting what you say about 'englightened purple societies, will look out for that - i wonder what that means in practice..

I do think we need to sort out what this 'tribal' really means and perhaps consider it's not the best name for that pattern.. as it confuses a physical social structure with a way of thinking, and it might limit our imaginations more than liberate them.

another thing i've seriously considered, is that spiral dynamics can only  really be applied to the Takers (and the Leavers have some other developmental scale or pattern they follow), yet this kind of 'elogy to the tribe' is offensive to all memes except 2nd tier (yes, including green my opinion, because they will not accept the hierarchy that makes a tribe a good survival option)

hey .. maybe the Leavers and Takers split off exactly there, at purple - the Leavers branch rejects violence and power-over nature (they accept the Gods will look after them, as they do all other species, don't go in for agriculture, etc.) and so .. it is possible - but not inevitable - that they eventually get to Teal, without having to go through all that civilization stuff.   The "enlightened Purple societies" way you mention.

and the Takers just have to get there the long way..

thanks!

this was my first post and yes i was a little confused about how the forums and blogs work.

i did see that post and infact answered firstly under that, then deleted it and put into my blog for two reasons:

1.  i realize am writing this mostly for me and my learning, to think things out, and i didn't get into most of that thread anyway - too much to read and i didn't see anyone saying this might be a peep into a teal society meeting an orange one (did i miss something?), and i am mostly interested in that aspect - visioning our possible futures is i think a critical skill and necessity now

2. i figured as they advised a blog that infact that made more sense - also i can find it a hell of a lot easier - and link to - than all those other threads, just more practical

also the title said Ken doesn't understand SF and I totally disagree with that, doesn't seem relevant to me.

thanks very much for helping to orient me, i see you know your way around here, will probably ask you next time i get confused with the geography here..

saludos!

interesting questions!

"I'm wondering about the notion of tribes living in global harmony. If that was possible to do, why didn't we do it already?"

We have already done it ... just shift your scales a little.   Within nations, cities, neighbourhoods, extended families... etc. we do live in harmony - more less... meaning ok there is crime and competitiveness, as well as peace and cooperation, but overwhelmingly the latter.   You just don't call those 'tribes' - but why not?

you also say...

"What happened 12,000 years ago that made humans, as living conscious beings, choose agriculture as a way of life?"

Ismael by Daniel Quinn answers this question beautifully, whilst answering a lot of others - highly recommended.   

But to give one of interesting perspectives that Quinn gives is .. that we 'forget' or don't care to notice (I wonder why) that infact it's not true that humans chose agriculture as a way of life.  Only some did.  These he calls Takers, and the others Leavers. .. and the Leavers are those humans we are now busy exterminating because our Taker way of life demands that we eat up the world.

The Leavers discovered early on (where they tried it) that agriculture came with some inherent problems.. that it did not make for an easier life, necessarily.   They are just as evolved as we are (they've been perfecting their way of life for millenia, just like us), only we call them "primitive".

Our blindness about this simple fact is outstanding, even though most of us have heard of stories of 'primitive tribes' today resisting 'development' with all their might, and despite lots of puzzling archeological evidence..

For eg. here where I live, in the Canaries, the native Guanches were wiped out by the Spaniards ago, and there is a conundrum the archeologists can't resolve - they can't figure out why they find traces of agriculture in one era and then a 'reversal' to hunter-gatherer in a much later era.  There's all sorts of speculation but none even consider they simply thought it a bad experiment.

interesting, no?

I wrote days ago in reply to your lovely post but then lost it all ... sorry

love what u say, yes agree!   that it's great the dialogue is out there and the vision in the realms of the mass public.. amazing.  (the only other Teal sci-fi visions I know of were a lot less successful in terms of mass distribution, all from female authors, see my latest blog for details).

and also that if we can imagine it, then it's already in the realms of possibility.. wow :)

myself, i quite like the colours, i just think the names might be a little off...precisely because of this kind of semantics complication over what the actual patterns might b  (i suspect that in general in level 1 we tend to be more concrete-literal than in level 2, and given that geniouses are often level 2, it makes it hard to translate sometime..)

and hey, i went to look up Cameron on wikipedia.. and he's definately Teal (as far as I can tell.. am not claiming to b any expert on this ok), judging by his amazing life and interests, his massive success and the kinds of movies he made.   very emergent plots, often powerful female characters, always playing with spirit, time ... amazing.

great to hear from you!