With world markets dropping like a stone, crucial resources such as oil depleting and pollution in the form of global warming threatening our very habitat, I still have hope. Why?

Strangely, five years ago, when nearly everyone else was partying, I was afraid. I strongly suspected the credit crisis was coming, I was investigating peak oil and was raised to be concerned about our environment. I was a doomer.

Today I am optimistic. I do have concerns and things could certainly go down the pan, we have a long struggle ahead of us. Now that the problems are largely being recognised I feel a sense of relief and am able to focus on what needs doing more clearly.

Perhaps I just like to be contrary, but there is reason to my madness. As anyone who has followed this blog will notice I find Graves’ E-C theory fascinating. It is popularly known as Spiral Dynamics and deals with how humans value their lives and the world. Although his theory predicts some reasons to fear, my reading of the current situation is hopeful. Here is why.

Graves studied how people value the world and how that impacts on their behaviour, I have written about it elsewhere on the site, so will not go into a lot of detail here. It is complicated to sum up the whole theory in a sentence without oversimplifying, but essentially the way humans value the world is evolving.

For the last few hundred years a values system known as ER (orange) has been growing in strength as more people embrace its ideology. This system is characterised by an ‘express self’ attitude, where we put our selves and our own needs first. Yet it is a system that does so through planning rather than immediate gratification. It is a rational, thought out value system, but one that is reductionist and tends to have tunnel vision. For all ER’s ability to create an economy that can produce unparalleled wealth and freedom it is useless at seeing the side effects of its externalisations. It does not equate the waste or resource streams into its economic model because equating them is not in its foundational interests. As a result we have major economic crashes, depleting resources and an eco system that is becoming unfit for civilisation as we know it. This value system has brought us many great things from democracy through to the scientific method, it is not that the system is bad, just that it has had its day. It is time to develop a new way of valuing the world that takes on board the best that ER offers us, yet also has inherent appropriate responses to the problems it has caused.

For all its flaws the ER system has many benefits over the previous dominant value system, DQ (blue). DQ is an absolutist, dualistic, fundamentalist, dogmatic value system in which it is believed everyone has their place. This was a world of caste systems, an absolute belief in how life works that is handed down from superiors without question. DQ is still around today, it is still a strong value system that many embrace whole heartedly, there are even more primitive value systems around to a lesser effect. The world is a complex place.

It is important to stress that these are systems in people, not people in systems. A person is not in the DQ system. DQ is a system that is operating in a person, often at the same time as other value systems. People are complex.

If we have overshot our resources to such an extent that the ER system is no longer viable then it is very likely that the dominant system will descend back towards DQ. There is a very good historical example of this happening before. 1930s Germany. ER science with DQ values is not a pretty sight. As I said, I am not without my concerns.

However, I have hope, and it is with reason.

Over the last 100 years a new value system has been evolving in response to the shortcomings of ER. It is known as FS (Green). FS takes Newtonian physics and relativises it. FS takes a colonial anthropological perspective and pluralizes it. FS takes modern art and post-modernises it. FS takes the scientific method that ER created and runs with it, transforming it into a multiperspictival tool. Rather than looking for a single formula that explains all existence, it conceptualises a formula to its environment. Someone with FS values cares about the environment beyond their back yard, they care about peoples happiness and ability to live life to the full regardless of their cultural origins. FS inherently develops economies that care about the resource and waste streams and it is capable of doing so without abandoning all the benefits that the ER economy brought about.

FS is a ’sacrifice self’ value system as was DQ. However the sacrifice is not to an omnipotent dictator or creator, but to the equality of all. DQ develops a strong sense of community but where everyone outside of that community is an evil ‘other’. Everyone with FS values appreciates community, but that community is different for every person, it extends to everyone that touches that persons life, no matter how far away that person is or how culturally different they are. A purely FS system of government would be inherently anarchistic, but not in the sense of the barbaric CP value system, it is a peaceful, peer reviewed, consensual seeking anarchism. It is democracy as it truly could be, with everyone having a say.

FS brings its own problems, it can take a long time to find consensus, but solutions to these will be found, in fact they are already on the horizon. Lets not race ahead, ER loves to get to the top of the pile and when ER looks at the system after FS (GT) it sees something it wants to be, but it can