Robert Kegan on development and Venkatesh Rao on where it stops
A number of psychologists have advanced theories of developmental psychology. Freud’s is strange and probably wrong, but he had one. Piaget’s is fairly famous, but we’re interested in adult development here. I’m going to take a little detour to explain Kegan’s stages of development as I understand them, because the first several search results I found were really bad. In each stage, you’re capable of reasoning about some things (meaning that you have “free will” in these areas - you generally have the ability to think out problems and respond in a non-mechanical way), and you’re subject to other things (you can’t or don’t have a habit of reasoning about them). In Kegan’s theory, development is about gaining the ability to reason about more and more domains.
Stage 1. You’re a baby. I don’t really remember this one or care very much about it. You’re a baby, you do baby things. To maintain the pattern, I guess you’re subject to impulses and perceptions?
Stage 2. Subject to needs & desires, reasons about impulses and perceptions
Stage 3. Subject to relationships, reasons about needs and desires
Stage 4. Subject to identity and ideology, reasons about relationships
Stage 5. Subject to dialogue between ideologies/metasystematicity, reasons about identity and ideology
You can use surveys to figure out which stage someone is at; only like 1% of adults are at stage 5.
Adult development makes an unexpected appearance in The Gervais Principle by Venkatesh Rao, which was supposed to be about organizational behavior. The whole book is worth reading - Rao’s cynicism is, if nothing else, extremely entertaining, and it works well to make sure you don’t romanticize the workplace. But in the middle of the book, it shifts from being about organizational dynamics and starts talking about developmental psychology. As Rao points out, he is not a psychologist and isn’t advancing a clinical theory - and I’d add that Rao is in the business of advancing deliberately contraversial ideas that are at best directionally correct. In other words, how seriously you take any of this is up to you.
Rao splits people into three categories (noting that in reality, people don’t fall into them neatly but probably have elements of all three): Clueless, Losers, and Sociopaths. These names are deliberately insulting (to get you to read more) and don’t actually describe the groups they’re attached to very well. Rao says that he uses them because his book was inspired by a comic and he likes the joke too much to give it up; I’m now using them because I can’t talk about the book otherwise.
- The Clueless are the least developed group. They crave approval, so they’re genuinely motivated by inherently worthless awards from authority figures (eg: employee of the month, getting a sticker from the teacher). They approximately map to Kegan stages 2 and 3 depending on where they are in their development. Their reliance on legible “status red herrings” is exacerbated by the fact that they don’t reason about relationships (which would be stage 4)
- The Losers, according to Rao, comprise the vast majority of people, and approximately map to Kegan stages 3 and 4. All Losers want their self-image validated by others, and they form groups for the purpose of mutual appreciation. Losers deliberately create illegibility around social status within their groups so that no one’s self-image is threatened; being a good artist isn’t comparable with being a good writer.
- The Sociopaths are a subset of Kegan stage 5. Specifically, Sociopaths are stage 5 people who take on the role of managing other people’s realities for them. The Clueless and the Losers rely on self-deception (for Losers, it’s more like mutual deception that everyone agrees not to squint too hard at), and Sociopaths accept power from them in exchange for smoothing over irregularities in their illusions.
Here’s the important thing about Rao’s theory: he thinks you get stuck in one of these categories due to your strengths. The basics of this, from the book:
- Your development is arrested by your strengths, not your weaknesses
- Arrested-development behavior is caused by a strength-based addiction
- The mediocre develop faster than either the talented or the untalented
In other words, if you’re good at school and don’t have some pressure to be good at social stuff, you’ll just keep being good at school. Yes, you eventually run out of school, but it takes a long time to do that, especially if you go all the way to a PhD, and by then it’s way harder to learn Loser skills than it ever would have been in high school. It’s much easier to squint at everything until it looks vaguely schoolish - and that’s how you end up vying for employee of the month. PhDs can be Clueless.
On the other hand, maybe you’re not quite good enough at school to consistently use it to make yourself feel good. In fact, maybe you’re not good enough at anything to consistently win at that thing, or you’re in an environment where winning too much makes people dislike you. If you want to feel good, you’re forced to learn Loser skills.
I’m not really sure what the typical pathway is from Kegan stage 4 to 5, but Rao’s theory suggests that it has something to do with mediocrity - maybe you find that you’re not good enough at being a Loser (you keep wanting things to be legible or discover that staying in your lane doesn’t make you feel good or something). I think this is probably wrong - most of the stage 5 people I’ve met are smart enough to do really well in school and socially skilled enough to have plenty of friends. I think the transition today has a lot to do with ambition and agency. There aren’t any systems or institutions that seem to be designed to get people to stage 5, so only the ones who keep pushing on their own make it. If we want to twist this a little so Rao is still sort of right: the sort of person who ends up at stage 5 might have been good at the object-level games of stages 3 and 4, but was bad at extracting contentment from them.
The useful takeaway from this part of the book is that it’s important to be a little bit suspicious of the things you’re good at. Even if you’re already at Kegan stage 5, I think this keeps going: are you using your ability to be right more often than other people to feed your ego instead of deconstructing yourself or making other spritual/emotional progress? If you’ve made some good spiritual progress, are you sure you’re not doing any spiritual bypassing (cf: Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism)? And I suspect the list goes on. You could say that all of this is still just stage 5 and you’re just getting asymptotically better at being metasystematic, that’s fine too - it’s just important to observe the difference between an asymptote and a hard stop.
As I’m done with this essay and don’t know how to finish it, I’ll offer this sentence as an example of a hard stop.