Foreign Policy, Evolutionary Thinking, and the Next Five Years

Duration: 20 minutes

For your convenience, this video is available as an audio download:

Right-click to download audio version.
 

Here Don shares his own views about the current state of geopolitical affairs, paying particular attention to some of the more difficult regions of the planet including Afghanistan, Iraq, Cuba, and Darfur.  He describes what he sees as the "abject failure" of countries' ability to read the many topographies of culture all around the world—that is, we have largely lacked the maps we need to properly gauge and nurture the interior needs and dynamics of civilization, and this lack of developmental nuance has been a primary source of conflict and bloodshed in the 20th and 21st centuries.  He then goes on to share his vision for the next five years of his work, which only goes to show that, 72 years into his remarkable life, Don is showing absolutely no sign of slowing down any time soon....
 

"My mind is always searching for the logarithms, for the patterns, for the codes to the equations.... A metaphor that I've been using is from air traffic control, where controllers have to control airplanes at different altitudes, different directions, different speeds, and different equipment, and hold them in three dimensional space, realizing that each is on a different trajectory.  So the kind of intelligence that we are talking about globally is that kind of intelligence—not in a building, not in an -ism, but rather in a distributed intelligence that can be used with leadership in order to understand what is going on here...." -Don Beck

Don Edward Beck, Ph.D., is Co-founder of The National Values Center in Denton, Texas, and President and CEO of The Spiral Dynamics Group, Inc.  Beck co-authored The Crucible: Forging South Africa's Future (with Graham Linscott, l991) and Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership & Change (with Christopher Cowan, l996). He also writes a "Sports Values" column for the Dallas Morning News and appears often in the media regarding issues related to values, sports, and racial divides.
 

Jeff Salzman is cofounder and lead teacher at Boulder Integral, a conference center dedicated to integral development. He worked with Ken Wilber for three years in building Integral Institute. Jeff is cofounder of CareerTrack, one the world's leading professional-development companies. A long-time spiritual practioner in many traditions, he has a Masters Degree in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism from Naropa University.