Review

Humanity's Expectations of You

The Primal Injunctions are fundamental to our better Self. If you choose to use your better Self within a social milieu, as you naturally will, then Primal Precepts emerge as the Injunctions interact and combine. Taken together the Injunctions and Precepts are guides for a worthwhile communal existence, whatever the state of your society.

It is noticeable that there is no self-disparagement, much less self-neglect, expected or implied in this framework. Naturally, a strong community depends on its members thriving. Its members can only thrive if they respond to themselves and care for themselves, as well as others.

So these Precepts seem to be part of the 20^th century discovery of our dynamic inner life and the importance of interpersonal relationships, rather than sourced from any religious or spiritual tradition.

Adherence calls for positive motivation and self-discipline. The initial requirement to unite with others seems to be the most difficult as might be expected. By contrast, ensuring your own stability is relatively undemanding when you are at home in your social milieu. To thrive with others may be more difficult insofar as these Precepts seem to invite neglect; and their violation may not generate overt opprobrium.

The most challenging moment comes when you rise to the occasion and assert your individual will in constructive defiance of the social milieu. At those moments, however it may appear to others and whatever the consequences, you are doing your utmost possible to make a meaningful difference to the status quo.

Summary of the Inquiry

• Identification of the dynamic duality: The tension in obeying the Primal Injunctions is generated by the psychosocial milieu. As a result, the Injunction may be exclusively under the control of the personal or the social milieu, or influenced by both simultaneously.
• Applying this tension reveals that four of the Primal Injunctions fuse these two opposite pressures within a single Centre, while the other three are split into two distinct Centres.
• Use of your better Self depends on uniting with others via the L"7 ↔ L"4Precept widely known as «the golden rule». Be willing to see yourself in another, no matter how different from you, and then treat both yourself and the other in a similar concerned fashion.
• Personal stability in a social milieu is determined by adherence to those Precepts that enable work and private life and handle the communal and moral arenas. These all derive from Centre combinations that bypass just one Level.
• In order to thrive with others, Precepts are formed by combinations of Centres in adjacent Levels.
• When an Injunction is split into two Centres, there is a mutual interaction which presents in practice as an existential demand to rise to the occasion and assert yourself.
• No additional bypassing of Levels is permissible, because attempts to do so release evil. See details with examples in this review.

Contents of this Review

• See the full picture of the Tree and a diagram of development of the framework.
• If you missed the early warning, note that bettering communal existence is about applying personal and social values, and not about social change programs.
• Check the inner structure of the Tree revealing how the framework builds existence on goodness.
• Note some harmful channels that have not been previously mentioned.
• Compare this framework with the widely used group development model proposed by Bruce Tuckman in 1965.
• Check why the Precepts are easier than the Injunctions.
• Recognize some patterns within the Tree.
• Consider how things go wrong:

• getting depressed about the power of society;
• focusing on interacting with others for benefit (aka Spiral Dynamics);
• succumbing to the herd instinct.

Originally posted: 15-Feb-2013