As the sparks fly upward, we complexify

At this point in the thinkboi Substackosphere, most people have encountered Kegan’s theory of adult development. The core of this idea is: adults don’t stop mentally developing at puberty. Instead, throughout our lives, we advance through stages of mental complexity, as our environment demands it. Each stage of development is a shift in how we compose reality—where we get our notion of truth, and how we construct our identity.

These stages are:

1, the impulsive mode (young children)—very little split between subject and object, you are totally merged with your wants and feelings, you act when there’s an impulse to act.

2, the imperial mode (adolescents, maybe 10% of adults)—life is about meeting your own needs, other people are experienced as antagonists or allies in this effort.

3, the socialized mode (over 50% of adults)—what is good and true is judged by the feelings of others. Emphasis on relationships, fitting in, inhibiting desires.

4, the self-authored mode (less than 50% of adults)—where what is good and true is judged by an inner compass. Emphasis on authenticity, consistency, reconnecting with fully owned desires.

5, the self-transforming mode (a few %)—where the inner compass has been seen as only one of infinite potential systems, each with upsides and limitations. Emphasis on fluidity, paradox, meaning-making as an ongoing activity.

People can be at different stages in different areas—like, self-authored in work, but socialized in relationships. Also, you can temporarily revert in stressful circumstances.

This idea can easily become a wank. Ooh, look at me, I’m so fluid! The shallow way to absorb this developmental framework is to wield it as an instrument of judgement. But there’s also another way. If you use Kegan as a lens, you can look out at the whole human world, and see a complex ecology with a profound unifying logic. Where once you might have asked questions like, “why can’t people just think for themselves more,” or, “why can’t people see the flaws in their system of reasoning,” you will instead see necessary phases in the development of others—and, if you’re being honest, yourself.

I’m not here to do the tedious work of recapitulating basic Kegan, which has been generously provided by others. Check out this great website by Anne Pierce, perhaps with a side of David Chapman’s exceptional commentary. Instead, I want to give you a sense of how profound Kegan is for me by reviewing some of the non-obvious consequences of his ideas.

Around every idea, a groupish fad will exist

Have you ever wondered why, in Buddhist meditation circles, the stated idea is to deconstruct self-identity, but everyone talks the same, as if the real point is becoming the dullest vegetarian possible? Or why “contrarian first-principle thinkers” in the Bay, 6 years ago, all had the same ideas about what kinds of business to start? Or why there’s such a thing as “therapy culture,” which has little to do with what typically goes on in analyst’s offices, but is rather a watered-down collection of speech norms developed on social networks, used to torture hapless single men?

Kegan ends our confusion. There is an elegant reading of the above phenomena: for people in a socialized mode, ideas exist as components of group identities. When the Zen teacher says to people in the socialized mode, “when you meet the Buddha on the road, kill the Buddha,” what the socialized mode pupils hear is, “got it, we should act like our Buddha-killing teacher.”

In other words, every philosophy that advocates individual self-development will get codified, by its Stage 3 adherents, into an aesthetic, a set of collectively enforced priorities.

A huge amount of therapy/coaching/personal development is facilitating 3->4 transitions

A frequent task in psychodynamic therapy is: get people to see and relax their vicious internalized parent, which constrains their individuality. Thus freed, patients can devote themselves to wholehearted love and work based on personal integrity, not obeying an invisible crowd of others. This is a facilitated Kegan 3–>4 transition, or, to be more precise, the facilitated removal of one blocker to authenticity.

Psychotherapy is not alone in this. It’s fascinating: look at self-help or psychology sections in a bookstore, and you’ll see dozens of books about this shift, all referring to it with different vocabularies. In the world of Spiritual Girl, you hear about “owning your power” and “speaking your Truth,” perhaps in response to a Saturn return. In the Oprah-recommended-book crowd, we hear about The Way of Integrity. Jungian psychotherapists will talk about individuation, and the Adlerian angle is the courage to be disliked. If you’re a business or startup type, you might dog-ear your copy of Principles. I co-authored a book about this shift, using the term “agency.” Passionate Marriage will teach you the 3–>4 shift in the context of relationships, and you will have better sex as a result.

None of these vocabularies, though they are useful within their specific cultures, get at the essential property of the shift. But they don’t have to, any more than gaining muscle at the gym requires an understanding of what ATP is. (To be clear, I don’t know what ATP is.)

People aren’t supposed to know how they feel

If your identity is organized on smoothing social relationships, the simple question, “what do you really want” is fraught with peril. It would be dangerous for you to notice the ways you privately dissent with your company’s mission. Or the ways you chafe against the contortions you endure to please your spouse. I notice that many people in stage 3 are confused about directions like, “date people who make you feel good inside,” because, often, the person who makes you feel good inside will not be who you’re supposed to date, according to some internalized social narrative. And, before the self-authored mode, the internalized social narrative is supposed to win.

Eventually, frictions like this can provide the opportunity for a break into authenticity. But before authenticity, your heart has to remain semi-secret to its owner.

Similarly, “thinking for yourself” is not a standard human ability

A few years ago, a founder client of mine spoke ruefully about their co-founder. The co-founder, instructed to “think for himself” about some decision, would call up some mentors, read some blogs, and then provide an opinion about next steps based on an average of sampled options. My client would then explain, frustratedly, that he wanted the co-founder to come up with the criteria to make a good decision with. The co-founder would agree, then… crowd-source some criteria. For the co-founder, “think for yourself” meant “gather outside opinions until the anxiety of uncertainty has been soothed.”

This is Kegan’s famous “chairman of the board” metaphor. In the socialized mode, when you seek input from others, you hope that your influences can arrive at a consensus, and if not, you will manufacture a close-enough room-temperature opinion. In a mode of self-authorship, like a chairman of the board, you may be desirous of input, but you can make the decision based on your independent judgement.

Note that this is not about intelligence. The consensus-seeking cofounder was brilliant. This is about what the socialized mind does with the anxiety of disagreement. Self-authorship is about seeing the anxiety of disagreement and taking it as a cue to make a personal decision.

Sometimes, adults don’t hit stage 3 immediately

Speaking of intelligence, a core principle of Kegan is: you can’t skip the steps, no matter how smart you are. You can’t skip the social consensus mode, and go right to self-authorship. I have personally experienced this.

In my early 20s, in school, I was pretty smart, in terms of processing speed and memory. I could easily recite longish poems after a few readings, and, before a seminar, I’d hastily skim a few random pages from the long text I’d been assigned, then convincingly riff such that it seemed like I’d memorized the whole text. I begged professors to get into advanced or graduate classes, and routinely excelled in them.

But, as I’ve written about before, people didn’t like me. Without realizing it, I thought of relationships as the place where I would be clever, such that people would validate me. And then, once I had earned their trust, we could have conversations about what I wanted to talk about. This is the imperial mode, where the world is seen as a zero-sum competition to meet your needs. Well-adjusted people depart this stage in adolescence. I took longer.

When I mingle in the Bay Area, I notice many precocious young people—mainly young men, but not all—who can hold out intelligently about economic principles, AI, and other worthy topics. But they are intensely socially abrasive, missing obvious cues from others, and exhibiting basic failures in empathy. They have tried to skip from Stage 2 to 4, and failed. It is all about them; the inner lives of others aren’t fully real.

And, according to the theory, and my experience, there is no helping them, until they do something like get a restaurant job, or try to run an organization, or do something else that will completely explode without the capacity for socialized being. (I did the restaurant job route.)

Someone can say “I don’t care what people think” as an imperial person who hasn’t learned to care about anything outside their goals. Or as a self-authored person, who has learned to empathize, but is purposefully choosing to be disagreeable.

Dogmatism is a feature of humanity, not something that can be debugged

People’s realities are constituted by dogmatism, of differing levels of sophistication. In the socialized mode, the dogmatism is tribal. In the self-authored mode, the dogmatism is a system of truth, which organizes perception well enough, but makes certain thoughts unthinkable. Relatively few people abandon the prospect of a rigid system of values—and, when they do, it’s mostly as they approach middle age, in response to life’s increasing complexity, not an education about critical thinking.

And, this is Good, Actually. Do you think you’d be able to teach a band of rowdy teenagers why group cohesion is a good idea, via philosophical reasoning?

Recently, while I was commuting in New York, I marveled at the harmony of civilization, how so many with disparate priorities can peacefully coexist in public. On a given subway car, you have young Marxists who feel that society is being torn apart by capitalists, and corporate lawyers working out the multinational wranglings of giant enterprises. Both maintain this truce without thinking, keeping conflict mostly in the realm of Twitter or the voting booth. As anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy pointed out, if you put a bunch of rival chimpanzees on a cross-country flight, you’d have a massacre on landing. But a cross-country flight of rival humans is, like, every flight. If people didn’t have a baked-in tendency towards groupthink we would tear each other to shreds. As it is, our default tendency is to say “bless you” when our enemy sneezes.

Thanks to Erin Shetron for editorial help. Photo credit goes to Daido Moriyama.