Elon Musk has warned us time and again about the so-called “woke mind virus”, as if you catch wokeness when a progressive activist sneezes on you.

Let’s be real – wokeness isn’t a virus. You don’t come down with “pronouns” and break out in climate anxiety.

What’s being labelled a virus and a cultural disease is, in fact, something far more ordinary. It’s basic human development in action. 

Developmental psychologists have long studied how individuals and societies grow through predictable stages.

The term “wokeness,” for all its baggage, is best understood as a symptom of what developmental psychologists tend to call the postmodern stage of development.  

Developmental stages are a way of understanding how human thinking, morality, identity and worldviews evolve over time. This process lasts our whole life and doesn’t stop after childhood.

Just as children grow through predictable stages of cognitive development, so too do adults progress through increasingly complex ways of making sense of the world.

Our worldview at age 55 tends to be more complex than it was at age 25. 

If you ever studied psychology at an undergraduate level, you will be familiar with Jean Piaget. He famously mapped out how children’s thinking matures.

Lawrence Kohlberg explored stages of moral reasoning in people of all ages. Jane Loevinger and Susanne Cook-Greuter extended this thinking into adult ego development, showing how our sense of self evolves.

Robert Kegan built on these ideas with his theory of subject-object shifts, explaining how we gradually become aware of (and take responsibility for) more aspects of our inner and outer worlds.

And Clare Graves, whose work inspired the rather popular Spiral Dynamics model, showed that societies evolve through similar stages.

Each stage has its own values, blind spots, and challenges. 

Every stage has its light and its shadow. Ken Wilber describes the shadow side of postmodernism as the “mean green meme” (green here refers to the name of the postmodern stage of development rather than the political ideology). That’s a tendency toward........

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