Audre Lorde wrote: "What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow perimeters of change are possible and allowable."
Reform movements consistently adopt the same hierarchical, top-down approaches that created exclusion in the first place. They use quantitative metrics and business case arguments that treat subordinated people as instruments for institutional goals rather than agents of their own liberation. The language of efficiency, productivity, and competitive advantage - the master's conceptual tools - shapes how problems are defined and solutions imagined.
But Girard reveals something deeper: it's not just that we use the wrong tools, but that our very desire for reform is mimetically structured by what we oppose. Revolutionary movements define themselves against existing power structures, but this oppositional stance creates a mimetic relationship with power itself. The powerful become both models (of what revolutionaries want to possess) and obstacles (to revolutionary goals), intensifying mimetic desire in a double bind that ensures the reproduction of domination under new forms.
bell hooks and Paulo Freire understood this dynamic. Traditional reform approaches mirror oppressive education where students need only consume information fed to them by a professor." Similarly, reform movements often ask oppressed groups to passively accept incremental changes designed by those in power. This maintains the fundamental teacher-student, powerful-powerless dyad even while claiming to address it.
This constraint manifests in what philosopher Michel Foucault called "discursive formation"—systems where even critique must use the Master's language, thereby reinforcing what it opposes. Movements that demand "recognition," "rights," or "equality" find themselves speaking within frameworks that preserve fundamental assumptions about humanity, society, and value. The very language of liberation becomes what Audre Lorde called the Master's Tools—instruments incapable of dismantling the structures that produced them.
Liberation movements operating within existing frameworks find their critiques formulated in terms that reinforce what they oppose, creating what mathematician Kurt Gödel might recognize as a self-referential paradox—the impossibility of systemic critique using conceptual tools generated by the Master's House itself.
The evidence reveals four interlocking mechanisms: competitive frameworks create self-reinforcing mathematical loops that trap advantage and disadvantage; violence collapses multidimensional human potential into binary hierarchies; reform efforts within these systems cannot achieve dimensional transcendence; and genuine transformation requires adopting fundamentally different geometric organizing principles (such as those found in gift economies, Indigenous systems, and regenerative models).
In social change work, powerful institutions often co-opt the very frameworks meant to challenge them. As Audre Lorde famously warned, “the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." When dominant systems adopt transformation frameworks, they usually allow only “the most narrow parameters of change." In other words, the established order repurposes the rhetoric of evolution and futurism to preserve itself. The result is a beguiling illusion: systems of oppression don the costume of progressive change, wielding “horizon planning” and “visioning” as tools to forestall genuine emergence. We witness this in the popularity of models like Spiral Dynamics, Three Horizons, and Presencing / Theory U – frameworks that promise transcendence and deep change, yet subtly reinforce the core assumptions of the current power structure. This essay offers an analytical critique of how “the Master's House” weaponizes these frameworks, yielding a flat choreography of managed “change” that keeps existing structures intact. Through case studies of Spiral Dynamics, Three Horizons, and Theory U, we will see how these models – often touted as evolutionary roadmaps – actually perpetuate dimensional compression (flattening complex realities into legible, controllable schemas) and exhibit an allergy to mystery, conflict, and power analysis. In doing so, they repackage dominator logic in new clothes, turning legitimate dissent into pathology and creating a form of soft authoritarianism dressed in evolutionary language.
The Allure of Transformation – and Its Co-optation
Modern organizations and futurists are understandably drawn to frameworks of transformation. Spiral Dynamics advertises a rainbow spiral of human consciousness evolution; Three Horizons offers a structured journey from the problematic present to an ideal future; Theory U invites us to dive into the “U” of presencing an emerging future. Each framework carries the allure of transcendence: the promise that by following its map, we can leap to a higher level of being or society. However, these promises come wrapped in hidden biases. They demand legibility – every person or idea must fit into predefined categories or stages. They enforce binary classifications (e.g. “evolved vs. unevolved”, “Horizon 1 vs. Horizon 3”, “open-hearted presencing vs. closed-minded downloading”). They present themselves as neutral and universal, all while encoding the worldview of those in power. And perhaps most critically, they are allergic to the untamed forces of real change: the unknown, the “chaos of knowledge”, genuine conflict, and direct confrontations of power. In sanitizing and structuring change, these tools make it “safe” – and thereby strip it of its radical potency. As one scholar notes, “radical dissent in its primal, cacophonous form is in danger of being co-opted into a standardized and legible form… in the ‘universal' language of the Enlightenment”, such that alternatives “end up as products of the same worldview which has produced the mainstream concept of…development.' In short, dominant systems translate dissent into their own managerial language, defusing its threat.
This co-optation is a form of predatory mimicry: like a predator imitating a benign creature to lure prey, the dominant system imitates the appearance of progressive change to absorb or neutralize challenges. The very frameworks that seem to oppose the Master's House become its tools, ensuring that any “new” development occurs on terms the house can recognize and control. The result is change without change – a choreography of evolution that dances around fundamental questions of justice, power, and historical accountability.
dominant frameworks take rich, multi-dimensional realities and compress them into flat geometries. The circle of communal being is stretched into a spiral ladder of progress; the turbulent river of time is straightened into a three-lane highway to the future; the wild topology of human conflict and aspiration is flattened into a U-shaped journey that always ends happily. These are the two-dimensional tools of the Master's mapping – the graph, the chart, the pyramid, the timeline. They carry the imprimatur of rationality and inevitability. They are tremendously legible (easy to grasp and thus to administer) but woefully incomplete. In compressing dimensions, they eliminate the mystery and paradox that true emergence demands.
Consider the contrast between a spiral and a circle. The spiral, as used in Spiral Dynamics, implies an open-ended ascent – but also a departure from origin, a leaving-behind of earlier coils. It privileges difference in level over wholeness. A circle, on the other hand, is often a symbol of inclusion, returning, and equality. In many indigenous cosmologies, time is circular or spiral in a cyclical sense (seasons, life-death-rebirth), which honors the idea that what's past is never completely left behind – it will come back around. The dominator logic fears this circular return because it means yesterday's suppressed truths (the buried histories, the excluded people) will rise again. The Master's tools prefer a spiral that never truly closes – an infinite progress that leaves ghosts in the past, never to trouble the present. Yet those ghosts have a way of reappearing, no matter what the linear models predict. The circle of history is not so easily broken. In fact, Lorde's message was to embrace difference and those on the margins, rather than pretend a universal (circular) sisterhood without acknowledging difference. Real change may look less like climbing a spiral and more like enlarging the circle to include what was once outside it.
Now consider torus vs. timeline. A torus (doughnut-shaped form) is a circle looped around forming a continuous surface – it's a shape often invoked in systems thinking to represent self-replenishing, dynamic balance. It has an inside and outside that flow into each other. A timeline is a one-way arrow. Much of modern planning assumes time is an arrow – and in Three Horizons that arrow leads to improvement. But a torus model of time might allow that the future is also folding back into the past, that growth and collapse circulate. Our current system's allergy to mystery makes it shun toroidal thinking. It wants crisp beginnings and ends, not continuous feedback loops. Yet genuine emergence might be more toroidal – an interplay of forces that can't be frozen on a chart. For example, ecosystems often exhibit torus-like cycles (water cycle, nutrient cycles). However, a high-modernist plan abstracts a single factor (say carbon ppm over time) as a line, ignoring the complex loops that might surprise us. The torus is 3D, the timeline essentially 1D. What gets lost in that dimensional drop? Perhaps the soul of change – the Ungrund.
Ungrund is a term from German mysticism (notably Jakob Böhme) referring to the “groundless ground,” the abyss of pure potential beyond all form. It is the mystery at the heart of being, the wellspring of creation that has no pre-existing rationale. Böhme and others described it as “pure potentiality”, an “abyss” out of which God or reality creates itself. Why invoke Ungrund here? Because all these dominator frameworks exhibit a deep fear of the Ungrund – they cannot handle the truly groundless, the unprogrammable. They always install a pseudo-ground: the stages of Spiral Dynamics, the trendlines of Three Horizons, the field of presencing in Theory U. These give the comfort that creation and evolution are knowable, mappable, controllable. But real novelty comes from the ungrund – the place that cannot be seen or legitimized by existing paradigms. It might emerge from the margins (the voices silenced, the experiences erased) or from nature's chaos or from spiritual epiphany. Wherever it comes, it does not fit neatly into the Master's spreadsheet.
To allow genuine emergence, then, requires humility before the Ungrund – an acceptance that not everything can be made legible or managed. It means embracing paradox (for instance, that conflict can be creative, that destruction can precede rebirth) rather than insisting on constant harmony and positivity. It means acknowledging power and suffering – the darkness – as integral, not as mistakes to be wished away. As the theologian Philip Hefner put it, interpreting myth: “The true and the real are comprised of the whole struggle, not by a shaking free or separation from it.” In the Babylonian creation myth, chaos (Tiamat) is not annihilated but struggled with, and that struggle is ongoing, part of order. Similarly, Ungrund logic would say that the void, the unknown, even evil or conflict, are part of the fertile ground of evolution – not aberrations to be ignored.
Yet our modern transformation frameworks behave as if the problem of evil is solved or irrelevant in their schema; everything is oriented towards light. In Theory U's happy ending, in Spiral's second-tier synergy, in Horizon 3's sustainable society, the messy struggle is notably absent. This absence is precisely what tips us off that we are dealing with a Master's tool. The Master, after all, dreams of a world where his dominance is uncontested – a world without struggle (except maybe a simulated one that he already wins). So the Master happily funds “change” programs that channel discontent into orderly processes promising a “natural state of peace”. It's peace on the Master's terms: soft authoritarianism wearing the robes of love-and-light evolution.
We have traveled through the brightly colored stages of Spiral Dynamics, across the sleek graph of Three Horizons, and into the meditative circle of Theory U's presencing. In each case, what appears as a path to liberation or innovation doubles as a sophisticated containment system. These frameworks offer a Map of the Future – but as the saying goes, the map is not the territory. The map, in fact, often reproduces the territory of the present power relations, just with new labels. Colonial attitudes re-emerge as “conscious leadership stages.” Neoliberal market logic resurfaces as “innovation horizons.” Corporate managerialism hides in plain sight as “facilitating emergent stakeholders.” It's the same play with a new script, keeping the audience enthralled while behind the scenes the directors (dominant interests) remain firmly in control of the theater.
Audre Lorde's exhortation resonates as a guiding principle: using the master's tools – tools that demand we fit into his logic – will “never enable us to bring about genuine change.”They “may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game” – indeed one can win some concessions playing along with these models – “but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” The master's house stands not by brute force alone, but by dimensional reduction: it keeps reality two-dimensional so that it can surveil and engineer it. To dismantle that house, we need tools that restore depth and dimension – tools that invite the chaos Lorde spoke of: “the interdependence of mutual (nondominant) differences… [the] descent into the chaos of knowledge” from which “true visions of our future” can emerge.
Such tools might look less like tidy models and more like processes of listening to those historically silenced, engaging in uncomfortable conflict with love and accountability, and cultivating spaces where mystery is allowed. Imagine a gathering not to agree on one Horizon 3, but to hold a plurality of futures including those that unsettle us. Imagine a development model not of a single spiral, but of many spirals weaving into a circle, acknowledging different cultures' evolutions as incommensurate yet coequal. Imagine a U-process that at its nadir of presencing does not seek only light, but also lets the shadows speak and transform – a Theory Ungrund, if you will, where we don't preempt the emergence with our need for happy endings.
The Master's choreography of change is flat – predictable steps on a stage he owns. To break this spell, we must step off the stage and into the wild terrain of unscripted reality. There, emergence is not a buzzword but a frightening, beautiful possibility, and transformation is not a management exercise but a lived surrender to the unknown. It is in that space of not knowing – the very space these frameworks try to eliminate – that truly new worlds can be born. As long as we remain confined to the master's diagrams, tracing lines he drew for us, we will continue to march in place, mistaking movement on paper for freedom. It's time to put down the fake maps, respect the mystery of the ungrounded potential beneath us, and listen to the rhythms of change that have been playing far longer than any of these models have existed. In those deeper, dimensional rhythms – in the circle, the torus, the Ungrund – lies the genuine emergence that no master can foresee or forestall.
The Legibility Trap: When “Transformation” Becomes Dimensional Erasure
Not all agents of dimensional collapse wear jackboots. Some wear facilitator badges and speak the language of systems thinking and social innovation. In board rooms, retreat centers, and Zoom webinars across the world, well-meaning experts peddle frameworks that promise to simplify change. Their intentions may be good, but many of these legacy paradigms insist on an almost authoritarian legibility and coherence – and thereby become unwitting weapons of simplification. Under banners like “Emergence” and “Transformation,” they often smuggle in the very binaries and enclosures that keep the Master's House intact.
Take popular models like Spiral Dynamics, Theory U, or Three Horizons – beloved in some progressive and corporate change circles. They speak of evolution and higher consciousness, but look closely and you'll find a rigid scaffold of categories and stages. Everything must be made legible in these models: “every person or idea must fit into predefined categories or stages,” as one critique notes. The world's rich cultural mosaic is reduced to color-coded tiers of development; individuals are labeled “evolved” or “unevolved”; ideas are sorted as Horizon 1, 2, or 3; voices are either “open and presencing” or “closed and egoic." This is dimensionality sliced and sorted – complexity masquerading as a rainbow but delivering a flat circle. Indeed, the spiral of Spiral Dynamics, for all its colorful coils, is essentially a flattened loop of the Master's logic returning to validate itself. Such frameworks come with built-in biases towards coherence: conflict and contradiction are pathologized as signs of “lower vibration” or resistance, rather than acknowledged as sources of insight. In Theory U, for example, if someone raises a messy practical concern (say, pay inequity in an organization), they might be gently sidelined as being “stuck in the past” or “downloading old trauma,” while the group is urged to focus on dreamy future possibilities. The result is that real tensions get papered over. As one analysis wryly observes, “everyone is invited to the circle of trust, but those who don't sing Kumbaya are quietly shown the door (or at least not given the mic).”
This is how reasonable, smiley-faced approaches can collude with oppression: by enforcing an artificial harmony that leaves injustice unaddressed. When a system-thinking facilitator tells us to “trust the process” and avoid negativity, there's a risk that they are, in effect, preserving the Master's House under the banner of “positive vision.” The irony is brutal: In trying to transcend conflict, they invalidate legitimate grievances (which often come from less powerful voices) and thereby uphold the very power structures they claim to transform. We see this in practice: “Nuance, trauma, and non-linear causality are lopped off; what doesn't fit the model is rendered irrelevant noise — perfect cover for hidden violence. Psychological growth substitutes for material redress.” In other words, these frameworks may encourage personal healing or collective dialogue, but if they dismiss systemic injustice as just a “lower vibration” issue to be transcended, they effectively tell the oppressed to meditate their way out of oppression while the status quo continues unchallenged. It's a genteel form of gaslighting: the system isn't the problem, your attitude is.
Furthermore, many transformation tools exhibit what feminist scholar Audre Lorde warned about: the Master's tools will never dismantle the Master's house. If a change model uses the same geometry of control – binaries, hierarchies, forced coherence – then no matter how “evolutionary” its lingo, it ends up reinforcing the existing enclosure. We might note that the Master's House has many rooms: academia, media, finance, tech, spirituality – all can operate with the “same underlying blueprint of extraction and hierarchy, masking domination with the language of…progress.” A framework like Theory U can easily become the Master's tool of transformation: it convinces would-be change agents that they are doing something radically new, while subtly “reinforcing the core assumptions of the current power structure.”For instance, it might treat conflict as a breakdown to be mediated away, rather than as evidence of real power imbalances that need reckoning. By drawing a smooth U-shaped journey where the group drops into a quiet reflection and emerges with a unified vision, it defangs the disruptive potential of dissent. After the workshop, everyone feels enlightened and aligned – but the unjust policies, the “Master's architecture,” remain unscathed. This is simplification weaponized under the banner of emergence. It creates a false coherence – a legible, happy story that ignores the dimension of struggle. In the end, such approaches produce only “false resilience or superficial change… yielding only a loop back to the starting point.” They may tout emergence, but they deliver recursion: we find ourselves back where we began, only more complacent.