Will the real integral please stand up?

I've referenced and quoted from this paper before, “The Mean Green Meme Hypothesis: Fact or Fiction” by Natasha Todorovic (see link). She still adheres to the original Graves Spiral Dynamics (SD) system, not Beck SDi. I think it's time to refresh some of that paper, as I continually see some false kennilingus assumptions taken for granted in the most well-meaning integralists, often elevating lower levels into higher ones based on said assumptions.

The standard kennilingus is that integral yellow (now called teal to differentiate it from SD colors) strongly reject green, having just come out of it and thereby more clearly sees it weaknesses. But the studies Todorovic did do not bear this out. Yellow has a low green reject rate and accepts it more than any other system. Graves later on in fact saw green and yellow as closely related.


Whereas the strongest rejection of green comes from a “more sophisticated” orange. A number of these orange and blue/orange respondents were saavy enough to give yellow answers, as they figured out the proper response after being inculcated in kennilingus. However they did not display thought patterns overall consistent with yellow. She discovered that part of the problem lies with sentence completion tests per se and her group has since found ways to correct for this.

Hence the blue/orange characterisitics of ranking, combined with orange predilection toward classification, led these respondents to feel they had an inflated sense of the 'truth' which must be proseltyzed. These traits are rarely found in green, green/yellow or yellow. Plus the orange enter phase is the most aggressive and caustic of the blue/orange/green/yellow grouping, thereby adding to its vehement green rejection under the guise of yellow language (aka kennilingus).

I am thus more inclined to think that much of kennilingus is not itself yellow or teal but rather more of a “more sophisticated” orange. I've made that case extensively in various posts and threads throughout the forum (including this one), even noting that the model of hierarchical complexity's post-formal stages are more complicated extensions of orange's formal operations. And that yellow or teal is something else entirely, not at all my original idea but expressed in the various sources I've culled.