Question:
I’d like to go over something that I’m not clear on that
you talked about earlier. When
a person goes from system to system a totally new psychology emerges
and you talked about the brain. As I understand it, there hasn’t
been any evolutionary change in the brain for the last, say, hundred
thousand years.
Dr.
Graves:
I think the thing you are having trouble with here is that I
am saying, and very definitely Jack Calhoun is saying this, and a
number of others, that evolution is still going on but not evolution
itself. Evolutions end conception and so there’s not much emphasis
because you simply cannot account for history. Forty thousand years
ago and beyond all the evidence we have indicates that man operated
at this A-N stage. Forty thousand years ago something happened and
lo and behold for the next thirty thousand years he operated in what
we call the B-O system. Ten thousand years ago something happened
and lo and behold he began to operate at the C-P level. And along
about twenty-five hundred years BC something started to happened and
lo and behold he started to operate at the D-Q level, in what we
call the Great Religions. About six hundred years ago something
started to happen called the Renaissance and man began to think and
behave and operate at a different level. Two hundred years ago man
started to change in what we call the scientific revolution.
Question:
According to history there were some great heights reached in
the Greek civilization. How are these historical facts accounted for
in your theory?
Dr.
Graves:
Now . . . this is one of the gosh-darnedest fallacies that
exists that somehow the Greek civilization was a high level
civilization. The Greek civilization contained a great deal of very
low thinking. Even those people at the top of the society thought in
a very low level way. They believed in magic, believed in a
geocentric concept of the universe. They didn’t know very much.
They were very low level thinkers . . .
awfully good low level thinkers.
Question:
Isn’t there some kind of a normal or skewed curve to the
distribution of these so called “more highly developed
civilizations”?
Dr.
Graves:
There was no normal distribution curve, nor a skewed curve.
Man had not at the time that those people lived - solved the
existential problems they had to solve to get here. Man had not
created mathematics. Man was just developing the clock. Man was just
producing an alphabet. These are existential problems that man had
to solve before he could apply them toward the solution of higher
level problems and they hadn’t been solved at that time in
history. After all, who
was Aristotle? Aristotle could be B.F. Skinner’s father.
Question:
Aren’t some of the eastern religions or philosophies
somewhat in line with your systems theory?
Dr.
Graves:
I’ve had a number of oriental students – Pakistanis,
various sects of Hindus, from
Iran
, from
Taiwan
and the like
and
Japan
.
We’ve spent many hours talking about some of the
philosophies, for example, some of the Indian philosophers. What did
Indian philosophers really mean by the concept of reincarnation?
Actually we went over one philosophy which is extremely close to one
what I had in that paper {1969-A Systems View of Value Problems}. .
.a philosophy of six steps – three ladders with six steps each.
And, oh, my gosh, the language of this – in so many respects that
sort of thing is there in far eastern philosophies.
Now,
it is possible. . . don’t misunderstand me . . .that in the time
of the Hellenic Age you
could
have had a human being here or there operating at a high level. But
I don’t know any perceptions that I have studied that represent
high level thinking out of the so-called great Greek minds. I see a
lot of lower-level thinking but I do not see higher-level
thinking.
Question:
How can you observe someone and know their dominant
operational system?
Dr.
Graves:
Let me say this. First of all, there are people here who will
back me up on this. You don’t see the phenomenon operate here
nearly as much as you do if we had a non-professional group. If we
were sitting here this afternoon discussing this with a
non-professional group and you just sat in the back, you’d know -
who was what - pretty damn soon - simply by the questions that they asked and the way that they
operate. We’ve seen this operate many, many times. It’s almost
unbelievable.