Lawrence Kohlberg

It's a brain thing.

If people think about it, if people think about the stages, Kohlberg stages of moral growth, okay, which are an external record of an interior phenomenon.

In other words, someone like Kohlberg comes around and says, I'm going to study and I'm going to show you the stages.

of moral growth in the brain, okay? Piaget, people are familiar with Piaget, similar.

Any of us who are involved in this staging, what we're doing is we're showing people, making exterior what's interior.

There it is.

And, you know, statistically, I mean, you look at these psychological adult development models, so Erickson and Maslow and Keegan and Kohlberg, et cetera, and they say, well, geez, unfortunately, only 1% get there to the sort of the...

the stage of generativity and wisdom and so forth.

But they don't really go into why so many people bomb out along the path.

And so she talked about how there effectively, when we thought about our care, justice system.

It was based on this very simple ethic of justice based on Lawrence Kohlberg's six stages.

And effectively what these six stages, I'll link the website below so you guys can check it out, but I don't want to go too far into it.

Effectively, what it means is that everyone is equal under the law.

And so let me run that out for a quite trained in psychology and developmental psychology.

So I know the work of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg and Eric Erickson about stages of development.

And I absolutely know that the early stages, children and many adults need to see the world in black and whites because they don't have the comparative capacity and they don't have reflexivity.

Now, one perspective one can take is, you know, which I think is yours, is, look, I'm into the evolutionary esotericism of the pursuit of real truth, and I know it's not for everybody.

It is.

If we look at developmental psychology, specifically Kohlberg's stages of moral development, the very first stage is obedience driven solely by the fear of punishment.

Okay, that makes sense.

Yeah, Luton's mother knows she cannot explain abstract concepts of empathy to a hundred mission.

Inspiring.

It's kind of like Kohlberg's levels of moral development.

This teacher clearly acted on level six.

I believe that is the level which says you do it because it is the right thing to do.

There's a psychological reason for that.

In nineteen fifty-eight, psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg identified the most primitive stage of human moral development.

He called it obedience and punishment orientation, the belief that your actions are only wrong if they result in punishment.

No punishment means no crime.

Okay, now if you have taken an intro psych class, you probably got that one.

Has many levels because, I mean, I like it because so many psychologists have stage theories, right? Piaget, Erikson, Kohlberg stage theories.

And we also commonly say that it's just a stage that the usually adolescent is going through.

Anyway, that's my kind of joke.

I guarantee you, if you think back in the rear view mirror of your life, [laughs] that you can think of so many examples where thank God you didn't know the full story before it happened, or be- you know, in, in loving timing, right? This is-- this takes us back to this concept of love governing well-timed truth that we talked about in the previous episode.

So what if concealment isn't inherently sinful? How could it be if God sometimes conceals? What if it can actually be sacred? And there's a developmental framework in psychology as well that I shared with my client called Kohlberg's Stages of Moral Development.

This is something that I learned in my child development class that I took as part of my undergrad psychology degree, but it's basically how all humans naturally grow up emotionally and ethically.

As children, we understand the world in binaries, right and wrong, good and bad.

This is usually called actually, y- you know, it's conventional morality.

But then there's this turn, and Kohlberg studied this a lot, to the post-conventional, right? Which is now you're interrogating everything.

You, you don't believe your parents precisely.

You need to see for yourself.

Sure

...

so we're a little bit stuck in that as a culture [laughs] and have been for a long time, uh, which is in Kohlberg's terms, you know, you can't resolve your a- adolescent identity crisis, which means you can't really answer the question of who you are if you can't answer the question of what do I value, which is what is good.

So there's a, there's this prolonged identity diffusion disorder which makes us unable to stand and protect the things that actually matter.