Spiral Dynamics » Keith E Rice's Integrated SocioPsychology Blog

Margaret Thatcher: Saviour or Devil?

civil unrest, community, Europe, finance, government, politics, Psychology, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics 3 Responses »

Apr 212013

The responses to Margaret Thatcher’s death a fortnight ago (8 April), both at home and abroad, serve to remind us only too well what a divisive figure she was.

A 'Maggie' fan getting ready for the funeral - copyright © 2013 Wenn

As several tributes have been titled – eg: Ian Dunt at politics.co.uk – she was indeed ‘The Woman who changed Britain’.If you were one of those who saw the need unequivocally for those changes or indeed benefitted from them, then she may be a hero to you. My late father, Ted Rice, thought no less than that she had saved Britain. I once said to him: “You think the sun shines out of her arse!” – and he agreed totally.

If you were one of those who lost out badly or were just deeply offended at the wholesale destruction of traditional working class communities as the result of her policies, then you may well view her as, to all intents and purposes, some spawn of the devil. My distant friend Chris Maguire would sometimes wear a t-shirt emblazoned with “I still hate Thatcher!” It wouldn’t surprise me entirely if Chris didn’t end up at one of those parties celebrating her death.

As for the reports – eg: BBC News – of Tony Blair condemning such parties and Ed Milliband telling hard left Labour supporters to show respect for Thatcher, that would have had about as much effect as if David Cameron had told the right-wing arch-Tories not to regale each other with victory stories of Thatcher ‘handbagging’ other leaders to gain concessions at European Union conferences. (Note: notorious hardliner Dennis Skinner’s refusal to participate in the recall of Parliament to pay tribute on the following Monday (15th) and his co-sponsorship of a (defeated) motion to refuse the postponement of Prime Minister’s Questions on the day of the funeral so leading politicians could attend.)

As someone who has lived in the North of England all my life, was raised in the manufacturing town of St Helens and been engaged in projects concerned with ‘disappeared industries’, such as HemsMESH (coal mining in South-East Wakefield) and Humber MeshWORKS (docks and fishing in Hull), I understand (to some degree at least) the bitter resentment and simmering hatreds of people from areas which suffered under Thatcher.

It took a conversation a few years ago with Jon Freeman of the Centre for Human Emergence UK, a man I much respect, to really show me that people who were not particularly political and of my own generation (rather than my father’s) thought highly of

Thatcher’s legacy. But then Jon does come from the South-East which, generally speaking, did rather well out of Thatcherism!

Lefties celebrating at the news of Thatcher's death - copyright © 2013 The Windsor Star

The extremes of hatred for Thatcher and the extremes of unwavering support for her policies reflect an inability to appreciate viewpoints beyond your own perspective and show the workings of the Assimilation-Contrast Effect. In essence, the more the RED vMEME has invested your self-esteem in a viewpoint, the harder it is to see any merit in your opponent’s arguments. Even your less extreme friend may seem like a turncoat because they don’t support your extremes.

Thus, Blair and even the once-supposedly-‘Red Ed’ Milliband can appear to be closet capitalists supporting the Establishment to the hard left while Cameron can be portrayed by the hard right as just the sort of ‘Wet’ Thatcher appeared to despise.

The problem with being fixed by RED in the extremes of a political spectrum is that it leaves you unable to appreciate all other viewpoints and, thus, effectively deluded and incapable of getting a balanced perspective.

Did Thatcher save Britain? If so, what was the cost?
The argument that ‘something needed to be done’ in 1979 is unassailable. As Andrew Crisell (2002, p194) so poignantly reminds us, in the 1970s the country was plagued by “strikes, sit-ins, lock-outs, occupations, demonstrations, pressure and splinter groups…industrial stoppages were so common and inflation so rampant that Britain became known as ‘the sick man of Europe’.” This culminated in the ‘Winter of Discontent’ of 1978-79 when, as a result of various strike actions and union blockades, rubbish remained uncollected in the streets, many hospitals were forced to take in emergency patients only and , in Liverpool and Tameside, the dead remained unburied.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, Margaret Thatcher swept to power in the 1979 general election on promises to curb trade union power and to reign in public spending. By 1985, following the collapse of the national miner’s strike, Thatcher had pretty much achieved these objectives.

Thatcher’s policies in these respects can be characterised as coming from BLUE thinking. Unfortunately the BLUE vMEME, in its nodal state, is so focussed on doing ‘what’s right’ that the human cost of such policies is all but irrelevant.

Thus, the Thatcher Government’s withdrawal of subsidies for increasingly-unviable state-owned monoliths such as British Coal and British Steel led indirectly to the wholesale devastation of working class communities in the Midlands, the North of England, South Wales and the Central Scottish Lowlands as their big industrial monoliths were wound down and/or broken up and scores of smaller support industries went to the wall without them.

These communities were largely dominated by PURPLE and RED thinking. PURPLE tends to assign rigid gender roles, such as male breadwinner and female mother/housekeeper. The truncation of hundreds of thousands of jobs for unskilled and semi-skilled male labour in a relatively short space of time turned households inside out. Women tended to take 2 or even 3 part-time menial jobs (such as cleaning) while the men dossed at home, trapped in their ‘ex-miner’ or ‘ex-steelworker’ or ‘ex-docker’ identities, claiming benefits (where they could) and doing black market work (where they could). With this collapse of traditional PURPLE certainties – such as young adult males in the family having gone down the mines for the past 200 years – and the economic pressures put on households, family breakdowns multiplied, divorce rates spiralled and drugs and gangs stole in to further ravage the remnants of these communities. (The former mining town of Grimethorpe in South Yorkshire had the dubious distinction of being the first place in Britain where a bag of heroin could be obtained for just £5.) When PURPLE becomes destabilised, a very unhealthy manifestation of RED emerges to take over, seeing the world as a jungle in which the strongest and/or the most devious survive.

The huge expansion of what Charles Murray (1989) labels the ‘Underclass’ – has its origins in Thatcher’s economic policies – see: Underclass: the Excreta of Capitalism. In a very real sense, the ‘Shameless’ culture which permeates so many of Britain’s sink estates is a by-product of Thatcherism.

It’s not clear whether Thatcher didn’t anticipate the effect of working class communities – or she did but perceived it as worthwhile cost to pay. Either way, she had few effective social policies to counter the effects.

So, yes, it can be argued that Thatcher did save Britain from union power and cut down a bloated and profligate public sector…but the cost was horrific and we are still paying the price 30 years later.

No wonder, on the day of her funeral, in the South Yorkshire former mining village of Goldthorpe, they burnt an effigy of the ‘Iron Lady’!

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Thatcher understood the need for growth!
Margaret Thatcher knew that you can’t just cut back but you also have to stimulate growth of the economy – a basic fact that seems to completely elude her successors David Cameron and George Osborne! See: Have David Cameron and George Osborne ruined Britain?

Margaret Thatcher at the Conservative Party Conference 1980 - copyright © 1980 The Sun

Thus, powered by ORANGE, she supported inward investment, hi-tech industries and specialist manufacturing, in which Britain could develop a competitive advantage – strongly encouraged by Michael Heseltine. She also liberated capital so that Britain – and London especially – grew to become one of the 2 or 3 major financial centres in the world. On the back of these innovations, Britain went from being ‘the sick man of Europe’ to the seventh richest country in the world (as measured in gross national income) by 1997. (With Tony Blair more or less following Thatcher’s economic policies – at least during his first term – Britain became the second richest country, according to the World Bank in 2007.)

The downside, of course, is that the wealth was very unevenly spread, being mostly concentrated in the South-East of England, home of the financial services sector. Real deprivation and poverty afflicted parts of the country, with Cornwall, Glasgow, Liverpool and South Yorkshire meeting the criteria to receive EU Objective One structural funds – meaning they were among the poorest places in the entire EU. (South Leeds would have met the criteria too but affluent north Leeds pulled Leeds as a whole beyond even Objective Two.)

So, it can be argued Thatcher not only saved Britain but launched the country on a new path to prosperity. The problem is that Thatcher’s policies failed to bring a great deal of Britain into that new prosperity. In essence, a few got very rich indeed but an awful lot of people got much poorer. The global financial collapse of 2008-2009 also exposed the over-dependence on the financial services sector of Thatcher and successive governments for growth.

Evaluating Thatcher’s legacy
From a 2nd Tier viewpoint, away from the extremes of the Assimilation-Contrast Effect, Thatcher’s legacy is far from all bad. If the Government in 1979, of whatever party, had had a less strong and determined leader – another muddler like Edward Heath or James Callaghan, say – the economic decline might have continued over decades with the consequence that Britain might have ended up a Greece-like drain on the EU. Instead Thatcher’s hard right and ruthless tactics stopped the rot quite forcibly – and violently on the miners vs police battlefields of West and South Yorkshire.

The likelihood, if Thatcher hadn’t come to power, is that everybody would have suffered a deterioration in living standards as Britain slowly ground to a halt, ever more dependent on begrudgingly-given International Monetary Fund and EU handouts. How that economic decline would have played out in terms of further social unrest is hard to imagine from a perspective of 30 years later.

That being so, it has to be conceded that Thatcher undoubtedly changed Britain and she saved the country for the benefit of those ORANGE-driven wealth creators and those who made a reasonable living as a by-product of that wealth creation. Left behind, more or less to rot, were those – for the most part the traditional working class communities – whose thinking was dependent on there being steady jobs with steady incomes that required little more than low skill labour.

Thatcher, then, saved us all to an extent. To ORANGE thinkers, she was a godsend who facilitated the generation of wealth by individuals. To those PURPLE-dominated working class communities, she was a devil who tore apart the lifestyles they had unthinkingly taken for granted for decades (and longer!) and offered nothing to compensate them for what was lost.

The question to consider, then, in evaluating Thatcher’s legacy is not whether she had to do what she had to do. But could she have done it differently? Or, could she have done more for those who were displaced and dispossessed by the changes her economic policies brought about? Zygmunt Bauman’s (1988) concept of the ‘seduced’ and the ‘repressed’ is relevant here. The ORANGE culture of the endless pursuit of wealth Thatcher inaugurated led to a 25-year firestorm of wealth creation in this country, seducing many of us into the consumer society it spawned. But what about the repressed – those thousands upon thousands cast upon the human scrap heap and lacking the psychological wherewithal to get off it? Did there have to be so many of them?

And now we’ve got them and the country is buckling on the verge of a triple-dip recession, what do we – what can we do – for them? The repressed are as much Thatcher’s children as the seduced.

Topless FEMEN: who’s exploiting who?

civil unrest, Feminism, gender, morality, Psychology, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism 2 Responses »

Apr 112013

You might have missed it in all the intense media coverage of Margaret Thatcher’s death this Monday but 5 FEMEN activists sure upset Vladimir Putin on his visit with Angela Merkel to an industrial fair in Hanover. With ‘Fuck you, dictator!’ scrawled across their bare breasts, they chanted the same slogan as they rushed at him – only to be bundled away by the security men. Although he claimed afterwards to have been amused by the protest, according to the leader of the protest, Inna Shevchenko, writing in The Guardian 2 days later, the Russian president was furious and demanded the Germans prosecute the protestors.

What a great excuse FEMEN provide to feature a picture of an attractive woman with bare breasts on my Blog – all in the name of serious sociopsychological commentary! What a great excuse for the tabloids – including those who have supposedly turned their back on Page 3 girls – to include pictures of pretty topless women in their news pages!

FEMEN demonstrators at Euro 2012 - copyright © Joseph Paris

FEMEN, the radical Feminist group who have staged topless protests at key events, including a mass by Pope Benedict in November 2011, Euro 2012 and the London Olympics, have certainly gained considerable coverage in the media through their stripping-off antics – and that has resulted in a significant expansion of their movement. From their founding in Kiev in 2008 to protest against sex tourism in the Ukraine, they now have ‘representatives’ in virtually all European countries and, interestingly, a sizeable presence in South America. On the face of it, FEMEN are a tit man’s dream: a bunch of attractive women who believe the best way to make political protest is to go topless in front of the cameras. FEMEN activist Galina Sozanskaya told Russia Today (2009): “But we understand that this is the only way to be heard in this country. If we staged simple protests with banners, then our claims would not have been noticed.”

Sozanskaya is almost certainly right. A mixed age-and-mixed shape range of female protestors dressed in regular clothing is nothing like a s newsworthy as a bunch of young hotties baring their breasts. In terms of Richard Petty & John Cacioppo’s Elaboration Likelihood Model (1981), if the audience aren’t going to be persuaded by the message itself (the central route), then dress the delivery of the message up in the most attractive way possible (the peripheral route).

In Spiral Dynamics terms, FEMEN’s vMEME harmonic of RED/GREEN is exploiting the media’s ORANGE-driven obsession with sales – and attractive girls in a relative state of undress help sell newspapers, cars, chocolate bars, shampoos and any number of consumer items. Male fascination with ‘tits-and-ass’, it can be argued, is an adaptive response, with these aspects of the female shape providing visual cues to a woman’s fertility – see Human Reproductive Behaviour. So men exploit other men – the majority of senior decision-makers in the commercial media are still men – to make money by using naked and semi-naked women. The ORANGE vMEME exploiting the BEIGE vMEME. Only now FEMEN women are, in their own eyes at least, hijacking and exploiting that exploitation to advance Feminist causes.

We exploit you exploiting us.

The Women’s Libbers forerunners
In many ways the braless ‘women’s libbers’ of the late 1960s and early 1970s were the forerunners of FEMEN. In an effort to undermine male determination of what the female shape should look like, many young women took off the corsets and disposed of their bras. What this gave the ORANGE-driven media, of course, was lots of photo opportunities of bouncing boobs and erect nipples to help sell newspapers and magazines.

Braless Jane Fonda speaking at a rally

But did some of the protestors use their bouncing boobs to advance their own cause in a similar RED/GREEN way to FEMEN and their bare breasts? Certainly renowned actress Jane Fonda, then in her radical phase, has claimed that she and other female protestors often went braless at demonstrations to distract police and soldiers (Patrica Bosworth, 2011).

Did such tactics work? Well, certainly Jane’s nipples got her and her views a lot of press coverage…but much of it uncomplimentary; women’s corsets were consigned to the trash can of history but the bras never really stayed off for very long; the American military got out of Vietnam as soon as they decently could and women in the Western world began to make careers in the workplace – though the pace was slow and arduous. Graham Snowdon (2011) reports that 73% of women surveyed in the UK feel there are still ‘glass ceiling’ barriers to their progress up the corporate ladder. And, according to Rosemary Crompton & Clare Lyonette in 2008, women still do far more housework than men in the UK.

How much the protests of the braless women’s libbers really contributed to the changes in the economic and social status of women in the late 20th Century is impossible to assess with any degree of accuracy. Certainly, they were a contributing factor within the wider Feminist movement…but it was probably relatively minor in the overall scheme of things. As for the media of the time, most of it treated the braless women’s libbers as a welcome novelty at best.

FEMEN and the novelty burden
FEMEN have got the same level of challenge as their women’s lib forerunners. In a world where many men just love ogling boobs, baring your breasts as a form of protests risks being no more than a ‘welcome novelty’. Certainly, the tactic at least gets you media coverage, to go back to Sozanskaya’s statement; but will the tactic ever amount to more than a ‘welcome novelty’?

After the Putin protest, Shevchenko told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “You can see the reaction of security and police. It’s just a naked breast. It’s just something you can see in advertisements, but it’s really scared them.” The officials might have deemed Shevchenko’s boobs highly inappropriate for the Hanover trade fair but that didn’t stop them being posted on the internet and appearing in newspapers…being sold and resold for novelty value and possibly even arousal.

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Is Shevchenko deluding herself with this ‘threat of the breast’ talk? Looking at the video, it may be the way she and her colleagues ran at the Putin-Merkel entourage, screaming like demented harpies and fighting with the security men, that caused the scare rather than some bouncing boobs!

This near assault may represent an increase in extreme behaviour as a result of frustration in trying to get beyond the ‘welcome novelty’ factor. After all, the original FEMEN protestors on Kiev’s Independence Square in 2008 wore bikinis and got a little attention; then one of them went topless….

Aliaa Elmahdy bares all with FEMEN in Paris

In December last year Aliaa Elmahdy led a FEMEN demonstration outside the Egyptian Embassy in Paris in which she went completely naked, a portent perhaps of what is to come in term of nudity at FEMEN events…? Bare breasts are common enough – on TV and Spanish beaches – to have little threat value for most people but vaginas on view in the high street may be a completely different level of visual challenge.

Yana Zhdanova attacking the head of the Russian Orthodox Church

Perhaps more worryingly, there are indicators that the low-level violence at the Putin protest may not be an isolated exception but part of a campaign. In July last year FEMEN’s Yana Zhdanova attacked Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, with ‘Kill Kirill’ daubed on her back. In August Shevencko herself used a chainsaw to bring down a wooden cross in Kiev which had been erected in memorial of 700 people killed there in November 1941 by the regime of Josef Stalin.

Inna Shevchenko destroying the Kiev memorial

It’s a common enough theme in Sociology and Psychology that, when people can’t get what they want through approved means, their RED leads them to use non-approved means – Robert K Merton’s (1938) version of anomie. Thus, there is a real risk of FEMEN resorting to ever-more extreme means to pursue their goals, the more they are treated as a ‘welcome novelty’.

Part of the problem in developing strategies to deal with FEMEN is that their goals are so wide. Like al-Qaeda’s anti-everything western stance, their aims are more broad than specific; and, like al-Qaeda, they are a distributed rather than a centralised organisation. A many-headed Hydra. Of course, there’s no indication FEMEN have killed anyone yet nor that they intend to…but these extracts from Shevencko’s rant in The Guardian are as chilling as they are unfocussed:-

“Make no mistake about it: we are at war. This is an ideological war, a war of traditionalism against modernity, oppression against freedom, dictatorship against the right to free expression. We are targeting the three principle manifestations of patriarchy: religion, the sex industry, and dictatorship….Femen is a huge experiment. Every day we find new ways to destroy the patriarchy, new words with which to answer our opponents. We are calling for a global sexual revolt against the system. We cannot tell you of our upcoming plans, or what the final result of our struggle will be, but we’re working on them around the clock. The only thing I can say for sure to all those against whom we are fighting is that we are not about to let you enshrine such shit as yourselves in a cult.”

For the time being, like many men, I’ll continue to enjoy the periodic displays of bare boobs. I won’t be surprised if FEMEN eventually just wither away, another half-baked novelty tactic for getting attention overtaken by the need to earn money and raise kids. Equally I won’t be surprised either if FEMEN don’t come up with some genuinely nasty – and perhaps even bloody – surprises in the not-too-distant future.

Have David Cameron and George Osborne ruined Britain?

business, community, finance, government, politics, prejudice & discrimination, regeneration, schemas & memes, society, Spiral Dynamics No Responses »

Mar 242013

Of course, the rot set in well before David Cameron and Nick Clegg formed the Coalition Government in May 2010. As the Public Sector Net Borrowing chart shows, it was during Gordon Brown’s ill-fated premiership that the deficit increased massively. (The Public Sector Deficit is the difference between what the Government spends and what it takes in via taxes to fund that spending - that difference being borrowed.) To give them some credit, as the chart shows, the Coalition did bring the deficit down quite markedly in their first couple of years primarily via swingeing cuts in the public sector.

However, there are significant signs that the rate of decrease in borrowing may be slowing down. In December’s Autumn statement Chancellor George Osborne predicted that borrowing would be £108B this year, and £99B next year and just £31B in 2017-18. In his Budget last week, just 3 months later, Osborne revised those figures to £114B this year, £108B next year and £61B in 2017-18.

Hand in hand with this, Osborne was forced to revise December’s estimate of growth this year from 1.2% to O.6%. While it looks like the UK may just about avoid a triple-dip recession, the outlook for growth in the British economy is poor, with 2014 revised down from 2% to 1.8%. With the ‘Age of Austerity’ now officially extended from 2015 to at least 2018, it’s no wonder Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls shouts repeatedly that austerity isn’t working and that his Labour leader, Ed Milliband yesterday, in a speech in Birmingham, spoke of the Government having resigned itself to a ‘lost decade’ over the economy.

Of course, it isn’t Cameron and Osborne’s fault that the UK’s borrowing requirement spiked so highly in 2008-09 and 2009-2010. Nor, strictly speaking, is it Gordon Brown’s - other than that he and Tony Blair, in their spending review of 2000, moved away from the tight fiscal policy they had adopted from the previous Conservative Government and allowed public spending to increase. The result was that the mild surplus they had created was quickly reversed. Thus, when the world went into financial meltdown in 2008-09, Brown had no recourse other than to go to the markets and borrow heavily to keep the country in the style it had been accustomed to…and more than double the Public Sector Deficit in the process.

By 2010 no leading UK politician, other than Balls, was in any doubt that public sector borrowing had to be reduced. Even outgoing Labour Chancellor Alistair Darling championed cuts. The debate was not about whether to cut but how far and how fast. Labour, with their concern for the impact on the less well-off, advocated a slower reduction than Cameron and Osborne who opted for as fast and as deep as possible. Their concern was Britain’s reputation in the financial markets. Last month the UK lost its Triple A rating with leading credit agency Moody’s Investors Services. Balls was right: austerity isn’t working.

Austerity or growth?
Moody’s cited ‘subdued growth’ as one of the reasons for the downgrading.

A major problem with austerity – and something Cameron and Osborne don’t seem to get - is that you can only cut so far. What happens when there is little or nothing left to cut? This is part of the problem faced by Ireland, Greece, Spain and, to some extent, Italy as they struggle to meet the stringent reductions in debt reduction demanded as a condition of bailout by the German-dominated European Union. Since a large part of the bailouts come from the German taxpayers, it’s not entirely unreasonable that they should attach conditions to them. But how far does it go? Will a number of European governments end up stealing their citizens’ private savings to finance debt, as the Cypriot government proposed doing until its parliament was ringed with angry savers ready to commit violence upon their MPs if they had approved the proposal…?

Some see the Cypriot government proposal as a test for how such a strategy might be received elsewhere in Europe!

Last year new French president François Hollande proved a keen advocate of economic growth, daring to challenge the German mantra of austerity. (Since the Germans tend to prudent spenders anyway and their juggernaut economy is said to be pulling back from a relatively minor slip in growth of 0.6% in the last quarter, the impact of an austerity programme on others is something they might find difficulty in appreciating.)

The problem is Hollande, the socialist, doesn’t really know how to stimulate growth. The French economy remains stalled.

Neither, it seems, does Ed Balls. Since 2010 he has championed such strategies as investment in infrastructure and housebuilding as stimuli for growth. Lately - and perhaps surprisingly! - Confederation of British Industries director John Cridland (2013a) has come to agree with him, calling for an investment of £1.25B to build 50,000 new affordable homes. After the Budget Cridland (2013b) castigated the Government for not doing enough on infrastructure.

The problem is that neither strategy in itself is a wealth generator - and it’s surprising, given his position, that Cridland doesn’t champion wealth-generating measures more vociferously. As he points out, investment in housing is a surefire way to kickstart the economy. It creates jobs, workers and their families are more likely to spend in the consumer society and affordable housing meets a huge social need. And certainly investment infrastructure is necessary if the economy is to grow, enabling people and goods to move around more easily. But neither strategy in itself will create sustainable growth.

The graphic above is adapted from the Henley Centre Model for Regional Competitiveness (2001). It shows clearly the relationship between the institutions of society and wealth generation through an export-driven economy. For sure, it’s a neat and overly-simplistic Functionalist model that addresses none of the social, moral and philosophical issues that a society faces such as distribution of wealth amongst its citizens. But, if a society in a late-Modern Capitalist world, doesn’t create wealth, then it is effectively dysfunctional. Road-building and house-building may create a trickle-down effect of people feeling more confident about spending which can have powerful short-term effect…but, in the long-term, like hairdressers, it is recirculating the same money within a closed economy.

For the institutions of society to be sustainable in the long-term, that society must earn as much as it spends. For it to grow wealthier in a sustainable manner, it must consistently earn more than it spends. In a chain of such economies - as shown in Marxist Critiques of Development - inevitably there are winners and there are losers - the poor and the exploited. But the morality of that is for a discussion on the nature of Capitalism. Until Capitalism is superseded as the dominant economic system in the world, the UK needs to ‘play the game’ which means generating wealth to support its people.

A deficit in thinking
The big problem for the UK in playing that game is the poor quality of its leadership. Cameron and Osborne seem to be dominated by the BLUE vMEME in thinking in that efficiency is the only way to manage the deficit. Growth, for the most part it seems, can be sacrificed on the ‘Altar of Austerity’.

That Moody’s disagree with Cameron and Osborne on the importance of growth clearly hasn’t undermined their determination to stick to Plan A: austerity. Perhaps the reports of a second agency, Fitch Ratings, being about to take away Britain’s AAA on their scoring might give them pause for thought. Though probably not!

The unfortunate thing is that their much-vaunted Tory predecessors understood the importance of growth. While Margaret Thatcher reined in public spending viciously - in the 1979 election campaign she famously said: “You cannot spend what you do not have!” - she also liberated and encouraged business to make money. Indeed, wealth creation might be said to have been her mantra! Thatcher, at least in her public persona, was dominated by ORANGE (with a dash of RED ruthlessness and power-lust). There was, of course, a truly-terrible social cost outside of the South-East to her policies and it may be that she made the UK over-dependent on the financial services sector - and that in itself was a factor in the internal crash of 2008-2009. However, in overall terms, Britain recovered from the near-bankruptcy of 1976 and was on its way to becoming a wealthy country again - policies Tony Blair clearly saw fit to continue initially after being elected in 1997.

Perhaps a better model for Cameron and Osborne would be Thatcher’s sometime-nemesis Michael Heseltine. He clearly agreed with Thatcher that Britain’s old industries were unsustainable in a changing world increasingly influenced by transnational corporations who would site their manufacturing operations in the cheapest labour source – see The New International Division of Labour. But he understood the crux of the Henley Model – that export is king in the world of buying and selling and so championed niche and specialist manufacturing, arguing that British design was amongst the best in the world. While doubt has been since been cast on just how effective some of his strategies (such as the DTI Enterprise Initiative) really were, there can be little doubt that Heseltine’s championing of industry and exporting enabled an element of British manufacturing to change, survive and prosper. If Cameron these days sometimes talk up manufacturing as playing a role in any growth that might occur, he has Heseltine to thank for that. While he may have had some very different beliefs to Thatcher about strategy, Helsetine clearly was driven by ORANGE, innovating against the odds to further British industry.

The paucity of quality thinking amongst the Tory strategists these days is shown clearly in Cameron’s delusion that the private sector would grow so fast it would give jobs to all the public sector employees made redundant in the cuts. According to David Blanchflower in March 2012, in the previous year 44,000 more public sector jobs have been lost than private sector jobs created. In the 3 years of the Coalition Government, little has been done either to increase inward investment (from abroad) or to boost exports.

Cameron and Osborne’s BLUE strategies to cut public spending may be successful to a notable degree so far in cutting the requirement for public borrowing; but, in addition to doubts about how much further it is possible to cut, there is the ‘elephant in the room’ that hardly anybody is talking about and which the Cameron-Osborne tactics are not going to even scratch: the size of the National Debt. Both Moody’s and Fitch have expressed concern about UK debt.

As seen from the chart left, this was stable but not decreasing under Blair. However, it has grown considerably since Brown’s spike in public sector borrowing 2008-2009 and has continued to increase under Cameron. This, put simply, is because each year of deficit and the interest that goes with it increase the overall size of the debt - estimated in December 2012 to be around 89% of gross domestic product (GDP). Some commentators, such as MoneyWeek magazine, believe the size of the National Debt is simply unsustainable and that Britain going bust sometime in the next decade is inevitable. This is probably unlikely, given that other Western or ‘westernised’ are carrying far higher debt-to-GDP ratios. For example, Japan has a national debt of around 194% of GDP whilst that of Italy is more than 100%. The US national debt reached 100% of GDP in November 2011. In the aftermath of World War II, the British National Debt reached 180% of GDP.

What is clear, though is that, if the National Debt can’t be reduced in the short term, then British GDP has to increase.

The social cost of debt reduction
BLUE cut-back thinking on its own is simply not enough for the economic problems Britain faces. It requires at least ORANGE thinking. So, if Cameron and Osborne can’t manage that, they have to go.

There are certainly signs that a number of Tory MPS are profoundly dissatisfied with Cameron’s leadership. There is even talk of a leadership challenge prior to 2015. There will certainly be one if the Tories are unable to form a majority government the day after the election. While Cameron and Nick Clegg appear to have formed a reasonable working partnership, many Tory backbenchers hate the alliance with the Liberal Democrats. Their natural preference under pressure is to lurch to the right and try to appeal to voters on xenophobic issues such as immigration and the testy relationship with the EU – appeals that hit on PURPLE’s susceptibility to prejudice & discrimination against those not-of-our-tribe.

A slide down the Spiral is not, however, what the UK needs. Such slides on a macro-cultural level tend to lead to extremist groups gaining ground - eg: the rise of the Golden Dawn neo-fascists in Greece. In a country like the UK, where there are large Muslim populations, a slide down the Spiral may also lead to increased fundamentalism amongst such communities.

What the UK needs is at-least ORANGE thinking in economic issues. However, there needs to be thinking more complex than that if a real economic recovery, along the lines, Margaret Thatcher piloted, is not to produce the kind of huge social costs British society is still paying for more than some 30 years after Thatcher first started implementing her policies.

While ORANGE is well-suited to driving economic performance in a Capitalist global system, its workings need to be managed from a 2^nd Tier perspective. This meta-thinking can anticipate the effects of economic and fiscal actions on communities and modify them and/or compensate for the unavoidable side effects. 2^nd Tier overviewing is also necessary to keep ORANGE on the right tracks and prevent it deviating into the kind of loans and investments which led to the burst bubbles of 2008-2009.

Unfortunately there seems to be little sign of 2^nd Tier thinking amongst our political leaders. Without it, regardless of which party is in power, the mess is likely to get worse, not better.

Moral Panic and the Great Horsemeat Scandal

civil unrest, community, crime, government, Health, morality, politics, schemas & memes, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics 1 Response »

Feb 212013

The current furore over horsemeat being found in some processed foods shows the media still likes to create what Stan Cohen (1973) termed a ‘moral panic’. The ‘folk devils’ this time around initially were food processor Farmbox of Aberystwyth and the Peter Boddy Slaughterhouse in Todmorden who, it is alleged, knowingly introduced (unregulated) horsemeat into the British human food chain. Increasingly there is talk of an ‘international criminal conspiracy’ – led by no less than Environment Secretary Owen Paterson who was reported by the Daily Mail’s Tom Kelly (among others) to have said (12 February): “’I'm concerned that this is an international criminal conspiracy here and we’ve really got to get to the bottom of it…. This is a conspiracy against the public. Selling a product as beef, and including a lot of horse in it is fraud.” Kelly goes on to speculate that the Italian and Polish Mafias are behind the operation.

Rightly there are concerns about food hygiene standards not having been adhered to and that there is a risk of dangerous substances entering the human food chain through unregulated meat. The only substance to be identified so far, however, is the veterinary drug phenylbutazone (‘bute’) which was found in less than 4% of horsemeat-contaminated samples taken in the 9 days of 30 January-7 February. As the BBC’s Medical Correspondent Fergus Walsh has written, based on information Chief Medical Officer Sally Davies provided: “In order to get a single therapeutic dose of bute from horsemeat you’d need to eat 500-600 250g horse burgers. That’s an awful lot of meat.”

Walsh goes on to write: “you assume that there is a strong health angle to the horsemeat contamination scandal. The evidence so far would suggest otherwise. This is a food fraud rather than a food safety issue.” Clearly the labelling of some of the foods under scrutiny may have little correlation with what is actually inside the packaging and that substances potentially harmful to humans are entering the food chain – albeit in almost microscopic amounts.

So the ‘Great Horsemeat Scandal’ appears to throw up 2 issues:-

(i) Does the poor regulation of food processing pose a genuine threat to human health?

(ii) Is consumer confidence in meat processing and the labelling of food undermined…and, if so, how can it be restored?

The answer to (i) has to be Not so far but potentially Yes. If – and, to some extent, it is still ‘if’ – regulation of food in and into the UK has been circumvented as easily as it appears to have been by entrepreneurial but relatively low-level criminals, what would happen if an intelligent and well-funded terrorist organisation wanted to infect the human food chain in this country with a deadly bacterial and/or chemical agent…? The results would most likely be catastrophic and scarcely bear thinking about. Thinking about them – and hopefully preventing them – is the job of the Government’s ‘COBRA Committee’, MI6, the police anti-terrorist squads and other pertinent agencies. Preventing such an attack is a considerable task one can only hope the COBRA planners are wised up to.

Point (ii) is a strange one. A number of polls were reported on 18 February – most notably The Herald (Michael Settle, 2013) and The London Evening Standard (Press Association, 2013) – which were remarkably consistent in reporting that around 25% of the sample groups questioned will now buy less processed meat, with a further 15%+ saying they would do so if they could afford to. Around 20% have already started buying less meat per se. Just short of 70% trust food labelling less and a little over 60% will buy more unprocessed meat from local butchers. Of course, these are self-reporting surveys and subject to all the usual caveats about results from this research method. In terms of whether we have a full-scale ‘moral panic’ on our hands in the way Cohen meant when describing media reaction to and manipulation of the ‘Mods vs Rockers’ conflicts that blew up in several English seaside towns in the early 1960s, it’s difficult to conclude from the polls reported. A 25% change in meat shopping habits – assuming it’s both enacted and sustained – is certainly significant and would seem to give the lie to Angela McRobbie & Sarah Thornton’s (1995) contention that the very concept of a ‘moral panic’ is now outdated. Nonetheless, the fact that 75% of people seem to be willing to carry on buying meat as they did before…while being very suspicious of what the label actually specifies…could be said to lend some support to McRobbie &Thornton’s view that the public are just a little too sophisticated nowadays to be taken in in quite the way they used to back in the 1960s and 1970s.

It’s also worth noting that investment in the food retail sector has actually risen since the start of the year, with shares rising 6.2% in total and 1.2% in the week ending 16 February, the worst week of the scandal. (James Davey & Neil Maidment, 2013) Clearly such people are not panicking!

Why don’t we kill folk devils in Britain?
As a sociopsychological commentator, I’m fascinated by the ‘monster story’ the media has created, the public uproar that results and the pressure this puts on politicians to ‘do something about it’ – all classic features of Cohen’s moral panic concept. TV, radio and the internet all attract greater numbers of viewers wanting to learn more – especially if there is a possibility they and their loved ones may be at risk. As for the printed media, they can bask in a boost in newspaper sales – short-lived though the boost may be. Meanwhile pertinent politicians, civil servants and local government officers desperately look for someone else to blame and to be seen to be either doing something about it (if you’re part of the government machine) or harassing Government to do something about it (if part of the opposition).

Moral panics, of course, illustrate the power of certain memes to spread virally, through the media, and infect our schemas. So the issue becomes personal to us: it matters. To borrow from Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs concepts, the lower down the Spiral the vMEME which is engaged by the issue, the more powerful and emotive the response and the more people are likely to be activated to respond. Thus, a scandal about food products consumed by millions touches a BEIGE nerve – it can comprise the evolutionary driver to survive – possible even the evolutionary driver to reproduce.

A BEIGE/PURPLE vMEME harmonic comes into play if we have children of our own or just generally value children. Now, it is not just our own survival which may be compromised but perhaps that of the next generation. There is a risk to the replication and carrying forward of our genes.

Thus, even though the real risk to public health seems very small in the ‘Great Horsemeat Scandal’, it touches upon fundamental (evolutionary) values shared by most people at a very deep emotional level.

In 4Q/8L terms, the BLUE structure and processes of the Lower Right Quadrant that consumers trust in have failed. In Functionalist terms, a vital ‘organ’ of society (the food supply) has been compromised. Thankfully, the failure is small but the hullabaloo is huge, with the media running it as a headline story for over a month now. The ORANGE vMEME of the newspaper and the news programme editors has jumped at the opportunity to sell more newspapers and attract more viewers. However, as noted earlier, while the headlines have got the politicians performing on every news bulletin, either condemning the latest revelation or promising some new action, the response from the general public has been relatively muted. There have been no abattoir owners lynched for putting children at risk; not even a boycott of Tesco or Asda for retailing contaminated food!

But then, apart from a potshot through the window of one of the homes of disgraced ex-NatWest boss Fred Goodwin, no bankers were killed or even assaulted in 2008-2009 – and they were the catalyst for the financial meltdown which did real and lasting damage to the economy of this country which the people will pay for over perhaps the complete decade to come. And this despite the media pillorying bankers on and off for several years!

In some parts of the world, mobs would have formed to kill the folk devils – eg: in Jamaica last year a spate of mob killings of men suspected of child abuse and other sex crimes was reported (Michael Aitken, 2012). But this kind of mob violence against people is a rarity in the modern UK. (Riots damaging property and challenging the police are more common – from the Toxteth and Brixton riots in 1981 through to last Summer’s riots across England.) Perhaps it’s something to do with being ‘British’ – eg: it’s just not ‘cricket’ for a mob to hack a man to death or torch him with a ‘flaming necklace’.

Certainly there seems to be something in the collective psyche that by and large inhibits people from forming vigilante mobs.

And this presents an interesting conundrum in analysing responses to the ‘Great Horsemeat Scandal’. Spiral Dynamics orthodoxy has it that, as Life Conditions in the Environment change (Lower Right Quadrant), so there should be a vMEMETIC adjustment in the collective cultural (Lower Left) and individual psychological (Upper Left). Yet, despite a clear failure of BLUE systems in the Lower Right, there has been little change in the Lower Left or Upper Left. Usually, when BLUE fails, there is a regression to the RED vMEME. Certainly this can be read as a factor in numerous civil conflict situations in the UK, from the Catholic communities in Northern Ireland in 1969 calling for the IRA to protect them when police failed to prevent Protestant gangs burning them out of their houses to the spread of looting riots last Summer when the police were widely perceived as unable to protect property. But, when it comes to mob attacks on individual folk devils, it seems the Brits just don’t do that sort of thing.

It will be interesting to see how the growing ethnic diversity in Britain affects such behaviours in the coming decades.

Resolving the Great Horsemeat Sandal
“The consumer cannot be left to face a Catch-22 where they can either pay for food that complies with the highest standards of traceability, labelling and testing or accept that they cannot trust the provenance and composition of the foods they eat,” Anne McIntosh, cross-party chair of the Commons Food & Rural Affairs Committee, said last week. (Davey & Maidment)

However, the British Government is locked into the European Union Food Information Regulations (2011) which means food and labelling standards could not be lowered legally even if the Government was inclined to do so.

To comply, therefore, there will have to be more tightly-controlled processes carried out, audited and enforced by highly-trained specialists. The BLUE vMEME will naturally drive these processes but getting it right to the perfectionist standards BLUE will aspire to will not be cheap. DNA testing can cost up to £500 per sample. As Peter Garbutt, chief livestock adviser for the National Farmers Union, puts it: “Producing high quality, fully traceable, high welfare standard livestock costs money to put on peoples’ tables.”

According to Davey & Maidment, analysts believe value lines, such as frozen beefburgers or spaghetti bolognese ready-meals, are currently so cheap and profit margins so thin that supermarkets have little room for manoeuvre. That means increased margin pressure for already squeezed suppliers and price rises for consumers.

Neil Saunders of the retail research agency, Conlumino, comments: “I don’t think there’s any way that we can escape the viewpoint that the price of having guaranteed food in terms of it contains what it says it contains is ultimately higher prices. We might be speaking about a couple of pence on an item, because this is a game about volume.”

Davey & Maidment cite market research agency Kantar as stating this will accelerate food price inflation, already running at 4.9% in the 12 weeks to January 20 as a result of high commodity prices.

So the moral panic the media have attempted to create will cost us all dearly. The likelihood is that, as living standards in general have declined since 2008-2009 and, in particular, since the Coalition Government introduced its austerity programme in 2010, paying more for food will come to be accepted by most people as just another element in that decline.

The irony, as Fergus Walsh points out, is in the question: “How many of us have unwittingly eaten horsemeat and how long has the mislabelling of products been going on?” Walsh goes to note: “Horsemeat is popular in mainland Europe, in countries like Italy, France and Belgium. It is a lean meat…widely used overseas to build the strength of patients who were convalescing.”

So, while the labelling should reflect accurately what’s in the packet – and something does need to be done about that – we’re now going to pay higher prices to avoid mistakingly eating a perfectly healthy meat product.

Oh, the power of memes and moral panics!

Nadine Dorries: People’s Champion or Drama Queen?

celebrity, government, heroes and inspirational figures, politics, Psychology, religion, Spiral Dynamics, spirituality No Responses »

Dec 132012

Earlier this year Nadine Dorries, Tory MP for Mid-Bedfordshire, told BBC 1’s Daily Politics show that David Cameron and George Osborne were “…two arrogant posh boys who don’t know the price of milk – who show no remorse, no contrition and no passion to want to understand the lives of others.” (James Orr, 2012) It was a stunning, biting barb that left Cameron and Osborne flummoxed, with the former desperately stating that he paid just under 50p for a pint of milk.Just a few weeks earlier Dorries had gunned down Cameron and his Liberal Democrat deputy prime minister Nick Clegg in a Financial Times interview with a similar cutting comment: “The problem is that policy is being run by two public school boys who don’t know what it’s like to go to the supermarket and have to put things back on the shelves because they can’t afford it for their children’s lunchboxes. What’s worse, they don’t care either.” (George Parker, Elizabeth Rigby & Kiran Stacey, 2012)

Nadine Dorries in her more usual role in the House of Commons - Copyright © 2012 Press Association

In those remarks, Dorries summed up so perfectly the frustration and anger of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people who have been disenfranchised by the Coalition Government’s austerity programme. For everyone who’s lost their job and/or their house (and possibly their relationship and possibly their children and their self-respect) as a result (direct or indirect) of government policy, for a few weeks at least Dorries was their champion. She expertly exposed the hypocrisy in Cameron’s oft-repeated mantra that “We’re all in this together”. By the ‘we’ in “we’re all in this together”, Cameron seems to mean everyone who’s not part of the 1% wealth-owning elite – who have become so prominently the targets of the ‘Occupy’ movement – and their sycophantic puppets like Cameron and Osborne. (Though there is an argument for it as a strategy, Osborne has actually made the British elite wealthier this Autumn by cutting the very top of rate of tax, for those earning more than £150,000 per annum, from 50p to 45p.)To bring out the bitter irony in this, Osborne admitted formally in his Autumn Statement on Wednesday 5 December that the Government will not make its deficit reduction target and that the so-called ‘Age of Austerity’ will have to be extended from 2015 to 2018. In other words, how ever much Cameron and Osborne want to blame the 2008 global crash and the ensuing worldwide recession, the inescapable fact is that their policies are not successful in dealing with the problems. (Governments are supposed to develop policies that deal successfully with what ever problems their country faces. When they fail to deal with the problems, they effectively declare themselves to be incompetent.) So, while they make the poor poorer and the rich richer, the Government has to admit its policies aren’t working.

For their part in blithely acquiescing to both the incompetence and the greed of the Tories, the Lib Dems can expect to lose so many deposits in 2015 that they will be in danger of being wiped out of Parliament. (On the assumption that they somehow keep their seats, it will be interesting to see whether Clegg and Danny Alexander, Osborne’s number 2, abandon the what’s left of the parliamentary Lib Dems and formally join the Tories….)

Since the days of Margaret Thatcher, influential elements of the Conservative Party have been driven by the ORANGE vMEME. (While there were totally-unforgiveable costs to Thatcherite policies in terms of damage done to the social fabric of our communities, especially in Wales, the Midlands and North of England, and the Scottish Lowlands – see The Thatcherite Project is ended. Whither Britain? – they nonetheless restored Britain as an economic giant. Ironically it was Labour prime minister Tony Blair who, by essentially continuing Thatcher’s policies, took Britain to the position of second richest country in the world in terms of gross national product. (World Bank, 2007) Tragically, there seems little ORANGE in the current top Tory mindset. Rather, it seems to be driven by the RED/BLUE vMEME harmonic of zealotry. BLUE in that there is only one way – austerity – and it must be taken, no matter the cost to human beings. RED in that it is short-sighted and concerned only with increasing personal wealth and power and the wealth and power of its in-group, the 1%.

So, when Cameron and Osborne and their hapless lapdogs Clegg and Alexander are revealed so clearly in their incompetence and greed, where’s Nadine Dorries to put the knife in, puncture some over-inflated selfplexes and talk some much-needed home truths?

I’m a celebrity…
Unfortunately, when Dorries should have been skewering Cameron and Osborne (in the Autumn Statement) for the increased tax load they expect the middle class ‘strivers’ to shoulder, her own RED vMEME had led her away from Westminster in an all-too short-sighted pursuit of wealth and power as a contestant in I’m a Celebrity…get me out of here!

With her (partly-plastic) sculptured good looks and a genuine talent for quick-fire put-downs, it must have seemed to both the show’s producers and Dorries herself that she was a natural for I’m a Celebrity. So the antagonism her participation has produced in the Conservative Party ranks, in the media and amongst her constituents appears to have been largely unanticipated. According to a poll conducted by ex-Tory Party Deputy Chair Lord Ashcroft amongst 1500 of the Mid-Bedfordshire constituents, 58% disapproved of her being on I’m a Celebrity, with 42% disapproving strongly. As for the programme’s viewers, they voted her to undergo the most gruesome tasks (such as eating an ostrich anus) and voted her off at the first opportunity.

Dorries relaxing in the celebrity jungle - Copyuright © 2012 ITV/Rex Features

As partial justification for appearing on the show, Dorries claimed that, in conversation with other participants, she would be able to get across to 16 million viewers her controversial views proposing lowering the time limit for abortion and school sex education lessons explicitly teaching teenage girls to abstain. This proved to be hopelessly naïve. Those conversations were simply never included in the broadcasts. The RED vMEME, of course, has no sense of future or of consequences. So it seems Dorries had little notion that her foray into the jungle would enable David Cameron’s RED to have its revenge. Inevitably she was suspended from the party by Conservative Party Chief Whip Sir George Young as soon as it was learned she was heading for Australia. On 27 November, the day after returning from Australia, Dorries met with Young to discuss the situation. A spokesman for Young was quoted after the meeting as saying: “The whip has not been restored and nor will it be until she proves she can rebuild bridges with her constituents, her association and her parliamentary colleagues.” Dorries, it was said, had a fortnight to mend fences with her constituency association. On 10 December BBC News reported that she had indeed secured the unanimous backing of local members. As legally Dorries is the sitting MP until the next election, whether as a Tory or not, the local party felt it was better the constituency had a Conservative MP representing it. However, Paul Duckett, Chair of the Mid-Bedfordshire Conservative Association, added the rider that there was no guarantee Dorries would be selected to stand in 2015. The same BBC News story also carried Cameron’s latest comments: “I believe MPs should either be in their constituencies fighting for their constituents or at Westminster standing up for their area. A lot of MPs were angry that she just waltzed off to the jungle….She has got to earn her way back into the affections of her colleagues.” On 24 November, just before setting back from Australia, Dorries repeated her earlier support for Boris Johnson replacing Cameron, telling The Sun’s Laura Armstrong: “I long for the day Boris Johnson is Prime Minister. Boris is my King of the Jungle.” She also attacked the degree of control exercised by the whips: “There is a real control mechanism under Cameron in Number Ten now. MPs and how they vote are tampered with.” Since the meeting with Young, Dorries has refrained from such inflammatory comments…but no wonder Cameron says she has to win his affections!Whether Conservative Central Office would actually continue to deny Dorries the whip in face of the constituency association’s request for it to be reinstated is a moot point but Central Office does have a history of imposing its will on local party organisations. Such a course could have some justification in a report in The Times on 10 December that a petition calling for a by-election in Mid-Bedfordshire had already collected 700 signatures. (Michael Savage, 2012)

If Dorries continues to be denied the whip, there is speculation she could defect to UKIP, giving them a high profile, glamorous MP with a penchant for publicity for a honeymoon couple of years – after which she would almost certainly lose Mid-Bedfordshire and could be sidelined from frontline politics before she turned on their leadership. If she is reinstated to the Tory whip, what price would Cameron extract and what measures could the whips take to control her?

Dorries’ sheer impulsiveness is reflected in her attacking Labour MP Stephen McCabe on Twitter for reporting her to the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner, pointing out his own attendance rate was just 63%. McCabe responded by pointing out that he had taken time off to recover from having open heart surgery.

People’s champion…or drama queen?
Nadine Dorries would make a great people’s champion, being very much a working class Tory – unlike the public school boys currently running the Government. She was raised on a council estate on Merseyside, with her parents among the first tenants who bought their council house under Thatcher’s 1980 ‘Right to Buy’ scheme. She worked as a nurse in the days when nurses were not considered the elite professionals they are now but changed dirty sheets and cleaned up vomit amongst their more ‘medical’ duties.

So Dorries understands the ordinary person in a way Cameron, Clegg and Osborne, with their moneyed upbringings, almost certainly don’t.

However, she is also a very astute woman who ran her own childcare business for 11 years and then sold it to BUPA, with part of the deal being that she became one of that company’s directors. It’s unlikely anyone could do that without a well-developed ORANGE vMEME governing their thinking.

As a self-made woman with working class roots, Dorries has the potential to become a centre of gravity for those on the Conservative benches who are unhappy with the make-the-rich-richer-and-the-rest-poorer policies pursued by Cameron and Osborne. An internal opposition that could exert pressure to ameliorate some of the Government’s more extreme policies.

Unfortunately, Dorries often seems to put her immediate self-interest before duty and then justifies her choices in a manner that seems almost deluded. As with the delusion that the producers of I’m a Celebrity were going to air hours of technical debate about whether the time limit for abortions should come down from 24 weeks to 20.

Dorries also has a history of altering her history to make it seem more dramatic and glamorous. For example, she reduced her age by 10 years when contesting (unsuccessfully) Greater Manchester’s Hazel Grove constituency in 2001. Her 2009 autobiographical account of her 2005 selection in Mid-Bedfordshire reads: “That pride, that sense of achievement, the knowledge that I was selected on the basis of my performance and merit above all other candidates on that day is what enables me to hold my head up high …” However, The Times account paints the selection process as much less of an achievement: “Mrs Dorries…easily beat her 11 rivals and won the plum safe seat on the first ballot at the selection this weekend…. Senior party figures had made clear to local dignitaries that they would like the seat to go to a woman and presented the constituency with a shortlist of seven women and five men to underline the point.” (Rosemary Bennett & Helen Rumbelow, 2005)

Even the degree to which Dorries presents herself as a Christian varies significantly. She told the Salvation Army’s The War Cry: “I am not an MP for any reason other than because God wants me to be. There is nothing I did that got me here; it is what God did. There is nothing amazing or special about me, I am just a conduit for God to use.” (Nigel Bovey, 2007) Yet a few years later, when asked if it was her Christian faith driving her campaign to lower the abortion time limit, she responded: “Not at all. Not even a shred.” When asked about her faith, she said: “I believe in other people’s Gods as well.” (Mehdi Hasan, 2012) To be fair to Dorries, people do change their minds and just a few days before that interview, she told Charles Maggs that she was struggling to keep to her Christian faith in the culture of Westminster.

Nonetheless, such inconsistencies indicate a lack of strong BLUE in her selfplex - and that may help explain why she apparently failed to anticipate such a strong antipathy to her participation in I’m a Celebrity.

What now?
There’s one sense in which Dorries clearly has the upper hand. She’s the sitting MP for Mid-Bedfordshire - and that simply cannot be taken away from her until 2015. How she plays that hand could influence politics in the UK for years to come. She could choose to become a key figure in a constructive opposition within the Conservative Party or she could defect to UKIP and play a prominent, if possibly short-lived, role in their growth strategy. Dorries’ ORANGE can certainly weigh up the strategic options but she will need to develop her BLUE much more to give her the discipline to tow the line when necessary and restrain her impulsiveness. (She’s so impulsive that, if she were a male, she would easily fit many of the criteria for the temperamental dimension of Psychoticism. Unfortunately neither Dorries nor anyone who knows her well is on record as commenting on her sex drive!)

Or she could simply exploit her celebrity. But what a waste of a potential people’s champion that would be!

Do Arabs need a New Awakening to win True Democracy?

civil unrest, community, cross-cultural, government, Middle East, politics, prejudice & discrimination, Psychology, religion, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics 3 Responses »

Aug 292012

Written by GERALD BUTT

Annotated by KEITH E RICE

Gerald Butt wrote ‘Do Arabs need a New Awakening to win True Democracy?’ as the BBC’s Middle East correspondent. It was published on the BBC News web site on 16 August 2012.

Reading it, I was mightily impressed that Gerald’s understanding of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ effectively provided a Spiral Dynamics analysis of the phenomenon - though without the jargon and the concepts. Accordingly I contacted both Gerald and the BBC who gave me permission to republish his piece here, annotated with a Spiral Dynamics/Integrated SocioPsychology commentary. (The text of my commentary is in red.)

Gerald’s piece is timeless in its analysis of conflict between different value systems and the sheer lack of other value systems - vMEMES - hindering the progress of peoples – in this case, the Arabs – in achieving Democracy as we in the Modern West understand the term.

I am deeply indebted to Gerald and the BBC for their permissions.

________________________________________________________________________

Arabs in several countries around the Middle East are relishing the prospect of a new era built on political reform and democratic rule.

This craving for democracy was motivated by a desire to throw off the shackles of the past and finally achieve independence in every sense of the word.

As Gerald, to all intents and purposes, reveals later in the piece, it has to be queried just how much many of those thronging Tahrir Square in Cairo or skittering about in the Libyan desert on the back of machine-gun mounted rebel pick-ups really understood the spirit of Democracy beyond the trite motif of one man/one vote. (Then again, clearly not all Westerners truly understand the concept either!)

This is hardly surprising. For decades, Arabs’ self-esteem had been smothered by the totalitarian rule that followed colonial occupation. Colonialism itself had been preceded by centuries of Ottoman domination.

This long legacy is enduring and invidious. For all the euphoria and the undoubted bravery seen on the streets of Cairo and elsewhere, there remains a fundamental and persistent doubt amongst Arabs that democracy can work for them as free-thinking individuals.

And these doubts are prompting voters to seek the reassurance of religious or ethnic affiliation. This trend, by definition, limits freedom of choice, which is a pillar of independent, democratic life.

Don Beck & Chris Cowan (1996) hold that, often, the first response to the challenges, pressures and opportunities of change, is to slip down the Spiral. Thus, when confronted with the what next? of revolution, the BLUE/ORANGE thinking required for Western-style Democracy is too complex – and, because of that, too scary – for many whose thinking has been driven by the vMEME harmonic of PURPLE/RED. Grinding poverty (BEIGE), ethnic and/or regional tensions (PURPLE) and a stubborn refusal to obey and conform anymore (RED) have played their part in all the Arab uprisings. But, for many such people, used to being governed by ruthless RED/BLUE dictatorships, the jump up the Spiral to BLUE/ORANGE thinking simply cannot develop quickly enough to fill the void left by the collapse of the dictatorship. Therefore, a sideways retreat to the PURPLE/BLUE of safe and orderly institutionalised religion is attractive.

‘Not fair’
In Tunisia and Egypt, for example, post-revolution politics has been dominated by Islamist groups.

The electoral success of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists has set a pattern that will not be easy to break. President Mohammed Mursi’s promise to create an inclusive society will be hard to keep.

Prime Minister Hisham Qandil, on forming a new government, said it was time for Egyptians “…to stop asking who is a Copt, a Muslim or a Salafi. I don’t see that. All I see is that we are all Egyptians and this should be the main principle.”

This might be the ideal. But the overwhelming desire thus far in democracies in Arab countries has been for representation, first and foremost, on a sectarian or ethnic basis. This has been the case most obviously in Lebanon and Iraq.

Egypt looks like following suit, as the reaction to the formation of a technocrat-dominated cabinet has illustrated.

Egypt’s Salafists complained that their strong showing in the parliamentary elections was not reflected in the apportioning of cabinet posts – they received none.

Muslim Brotherhood supporters felt aggrieved that only two of their members had become ministers; and the Copts were unhappy at the appearance of only one Christian in the cabinet.

“It is not right that Copts get treated in this way,” Bishop Bakhomious, the acting head of the Coptic Church, told a Cairo newspaper. “We had expected an increase in the representation of Copts. The way the cabinet has been formed is not fair on us.”

Egyptian Christians’ unhappiness at the cabinet composition is an indicator of their lack of confidence in the new democratic system.

They feel that only their own strong representation in government would safeguard their interests. As a result, Copts are seeking to form political parties, thus strengthening further the grip of religion on democratic life.

What Gerald is identifying, to all intents and purposes, is the effects of the PURPLE vMEME seeking safety-in-belonging - and belonging requires you to know who you don’t belong to as well as who you do know. Thus, PURPLE emphasises and drives differences. Copts, for example, identify with each other as the in-group and make Muslims and Salafis the out-groups. The other tribalist groupings do exactly the same. In Iraq, Sunni vs Shia conflict has severely restricted post-war reconstruction and destabilised attempts to form a government representing all communities.

As I point out in the Global feature, Stratified Democracy vs Modernisation Theory, attempts to imposed Western-style Democracy on tribal societies are doomed largely to failure unless PURPLE, RED and BLUE needs are tackled in sequence, thus enabling people’s capacity for ideas to move up the hierarchy of the Spiral.

Political Paralysis?
The problem that President Mursi and other newcomers to Arab leadership will find is that democracies are being created in countries lacking political institutions and political parties that cut across sectarian and ethnic lines.

Secular parties, such as they are, were emasculated and discredited during the era of totalitarian rule and offer few attractions to first-time voters.

Give it time, one might say. Europe needed centuries to fine-tune its democratic traditions.

Perhaps new political parties might be established, rooted in Islamic traditions but espousing modern economic and social policies that could appeal to voters from all backgrounds.

Is Gerald asking for a kind of Islamic equivalent of the Church of England where the fundamentalist approach (RED/BLUE) to the religion is largely washed away by scientific rationalism (BLUE/ORANGE) and an increasing valuing of the human spirit freed of restrictions (GREEN)?

Looking at these ideas in terms of vMEMES shows vast gulfs in values and understanding between the different ways of thinking.

But can this process be fast-tracked? The evidence in Lebanon and Iraq points unequivocally to the fact that turning the political machine around, once it has headed off down the sectarian and ethnic route, is well nigh impossible.

Sectarian conflicts can burn themselves out if more complex vMEMES gain influence. An example of this was the withering of the PURPLE/BLUE passion in Eire to recover the ‘6 Counties’ – as the Irish Republic’s economy boomed in the early-mid 1990s and ORANGE’s focus on wealth creation and personal advancement became stronger. But, almost always, the ending of sectarian conflict requires a combination of war weariness and the emergence of more complex vMEMES to change thinking.

As many as 80 parties were formed after the ousting of Tunisia’s President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali

The Taif Agreement of 1989 was supposed to bring an end to political sectarianism in Lebanon. But cross-community politics is as elusive as ever.

Iraq, for its part, has slipped into a political system where Shia, Sunni and Kurdish loyalties are paramount. Iraqi national politics, as a result, is paralysed, while the major sectarian and ethnic groups vie for ascendancy.

Iraqis today face the unwelcome realisation that the removal of Saddam Hussein and the subsequent departure of the US military have failed to bring them true independence as free citizens of Iraq facing a range of political choices that are free of religious association.

Against this background, liberal and secular Arabs are bound to feel uneasy. For them, the euphoria experienced during those early days of protest has passed.

Al-Hayat columnist Raghida Dergham, writing in November 2011, observed: “We are on a swing of uncertainty, going up in celebration of the ouster of regimes that monopolised power for 30 or 40 odd years, then down in frustration over the alternative that is now coming to monopolise power with theocratic authoritarianism.”

The Arabs, therefore, may have to wait for the next awakening before they can achieve true independence.

Such an awakening will need to have more complex vMEMES in the mix if a sustainable path to Democracy is to be achieved.

To Understand the Value Systems of Syria, Look to Lebanon

civil unrest, Middle East, Psychology, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics 6 Responses »

Jul 102012

Written by SAID E DAWLABANI

Said E Dawlabani

I am honoured to publish this ‘guest blog’ by the remarkable Said E Dawlabani. Following a prominent 3-decade long career in the real estate industry, he has become one of the leading experts in the value-systems approach to macroeconomics and is the founder of The Memenomics Group. He has lectured widely on the subject of ‘Where Economics meet Memetics’, has a blog with that title and has authored several papers on economic policy and global value systems. His upcoming book, ‘Memenomics: The Quest for Value-based Economic Policies’, will further develop these ideas

Said’s other overriding interest is the development of the Middle East and North Africa. He is Chief Operating Officer of the Centre for Human Emergence Middle East and serves on its Board of Directors, alongside pioneering thinkers like Elza S Maalouf, Jean Houston and Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck. As a Lebanese-American, he writes with experience, insight and passion of the way its meddling in Lebanon has contributed to the neo-civil war increasingly engulfing Syria.

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The gruesome images of dead children and the systemic slaughter of innocent people in Syria continue to shock the world day after day. Just recently a human rights group uncovered over 2-dozen torture chambers spread throughout the country which are run by the notorious Syrian Mukhabarat (intelligence). As the regime continues to invent stories about who is responsible for the violence, their credibility seems to diminish by the hour and the spectre of a full-blown civil war hangs over every square inch of the land. For me personally and for millions of Lebanese who grew up during the Syrian occupation of Lebanon, the horror of the Syrian Army and its intelligence unit is something that is forever etched in our minds.

Lebanon has been a place for regional proxy wars since its independence from France in 1948. The place is a paradox and a cross roads between East and West. Before this oldest Arab democracy could ever get a chance to function, much bigger political forces sealed its fate. It was in the best interest of the West and regional Arab powers to keep Lebanon’s central government weak. For the West, it was a place to relieve pressure on Israel by housing hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees, while the United Nations paid Lebanese and Palestinian officials to administer care but did very little to improve lives in refugee camps. By the 1970s these deplorable conditions exploded in what became known as Lebanon’s civil war. In 1974 the Syrian Army entered Lebanon under the guise of peacekeeper to separate Palestinians and Sunnis on one side and the Christians on the other. The Syrians found life in Lebanon to be too good to leave and justified their occupation by being the perpetrators of instability - siding first with one side and then the other. The country has since been set back in its cultural emergence by several decades. For 30 years the world powers looked the other way while the Syrian Army was inflicting the same horrors on its much smaller, much richer and helpless neighbour it is inflicting on its own people today. Much like a bully who is not confronted in time, the pathology of bullying helpless people has taken on a far more dangerous form, emboldening it to become the disturbed, cold blooded killing machine it is today.

Although Lebanon has its longest common border with Syria, the value systems of the 2 countries could not be any further apart. In general, the elements of culture that are considered essential for human emergence in Lebanon amounted to what is called an open system that, for centuries, allowed its inhabitants to seek higher levels of human existence. As a child growing up there, the presence of any form of governmental authority was barely noticeable. Laissez-faire policies (due more to the absence of government than to deliberate design) enabled commerce and the media to thrive with freedoms rarely seen in any of the Arab dictatorships. Before the start of the civil war, Beirut was known as ‘the Paris of the Middle East’ where it would be a common occurrence to see The Beatles perform in one venue while across town an Indian Guru lead a meditation group. In short, Lebanon’s culture had far more memetic complexity and density that made its values more comparable to the West than any other Arab nation. The Syrian value systems, on the other hand were anything but open. It was in the best interest of Syria’s Baath Party and the Assad family to keep the majority of their citizens, including their soldiers, illiterate on purpose. At one point, before the winds of the ‘Arab Spring’ blew through the streets of Damascus, one out of every 4 men worked for the Syrian Mukhabarat. These men dressed in plain clothes, pretending to read a newspaper - although everyone knew they couldn’t read – but they made sure no one spoke ill of the leadership. Lebanese culture, on the other hand, frowned upon its citizens if they didn’t attain a minimum of a high school degree and learned to speak a minimum of 3 languages. When the Syrian brutal RED system entered a Western-oriented-but-weak ORANGE system, a clash of civilizations was inevitable. Following are just a few examples of the torture the Lebanese people suffered under a 3-decade long Syrian occupation…

While the Lebanese believed in hard work to get the creature comforts of life, the Syrian Army believed in stealing it. If a Syrian security officer in Lebanon liked a nice car, within 24 hours it was on the streets of Damascus driven by an army officer. If the owner of that car ever confronted the soldiers stealing it, he would be either killed on the spot or taken away to one of the most notorious torture chambers, the Mazzi prison, never to be heard from again. Over the years this type of civil society bullying on the hands of a brutal military (with a much lower level of complexity) grew to become the biggest kleptocracy in the region. It formed organized crime gangs and spread systemically to Lebanese institutions from government ministries to private banks. The Assad family continued engaging in political meddling in Lebanon to justify the presence of their soldiers as peacekeepers in order to keep money coming in from the oil rich Gulf States and the UN. The Saudis and the Kuwaitis favored the status quo so they could enjoy their summer vacations in the mountains of Lebanon in peace and tranquility. In typical RED vMEME fashion, the Assads and the Baath party elites kept all the money that poured into the Syrian coffers for themselves and ignored the most basic needs of their soldiers, such as winter blankets and proper shoes. This turned some the soldiers into petty thieves who would steal firewood from homes near their garrisons – just to keep warm in the harsh, snowy winters.

To the Syrians, Lebanon was a goldmine. Not only did the Syrian intelligence apparatus pillage its intuitions, its economic system provided employment for as many as 600,000 Syrians who supported their extended families. Although most of the work was in farming and construction, wages were much higher in Lebanon than in Syria (which offered meager employment opportunities). But, as is often the case with a closed diabolical RED system, the regime couldn’t see the benefits of its presence in Lebanon and wanted a much bigger peace of ‘the pie’. It thought nothing of cutting down anyone that came in the way of what it wished for. In a stark display of poor judgement, typical of the RED vMEME, the Syrians killed the ‘goose’ that laid the ‘golden egg’. In 2005 Syria’s ally in Lebanon, Hezbollah, was implicated in assassinating Rafik Hariri, a self-made billionaire and a very popular (ORANGE-driven) Lebanese Prime Minister. This heinous act exposed the true face of the Syrians and unleashed the fury of the Lebanese public, forcing the ouster of the Syrian security apparatus. All the Arab leaders loved Hariri and the pretense of a Syrian army keeping the peace quickly disappeared along, with millions in Arab aid. Suddenly the 30-year kleptocracy came to an end. In a matter of weeks, Syrian labourers were no longer welcomed in Lebanon. Over half a million Syrians with Purple/RED values suddenly had nothing to do – and there were millions of mouths to feed.

Not having Lebanon to bankroll Syria’s RED compulsive habits and to feed its growing population, in my opinion, was the primary reason for the Syrian uprising. Although the young Assad had embarked on economic reforms, they weren’t moving fast enough to keep millions of mouths fed and transform a leadership that had gotten used to stealing everything it had ever desired. Reforms that target real economic change take a long time to bear fruit and very few in Syria have that kind of patience. The economic reforms that have been implemented so far became the Baath party’s substitute kleptocracy for Lebanon. Meanwhile the killing machines of the dreaded Shabiha militias have turned their weapons on their own people because their diabolical RED training doesn’t allow them to think of what else to do. All this combined to create the perfect storm for emergence out of the most closed and toxic RED systems imaginable…and the gruesome results are horrifying to see.

The ‘Gay Cure’: was Spitzer right to recant?

cross-cultural, human rights, mental health, morality, prejudice & discrimination, Psychology, schemas & memes, sex & romance, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics No Responses »

May 232012

: Robert Spitzer, May 2012. Copyright © 2012 Alex di Suvero/The New York Times

Robert L Spitzer is one of the giants of modern Psychiatry, a scientific philosopher as much as a hands-on medical man. He’s been a fearless opponent of too-easily-accepted givens, notably challenging some of David Rosenhan’s conclusions in his 1973 study, On Being Sane in Insane Places. However, Spitzer really made his mark by leading the campaign to have homosexuality removed from the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual (DSM) as a psychiatric disorder – which it was in 1973.

So the news last week that Spitzer had ‘recanted’ a study he had carried out in 2000-2001 and had published in 2003 caught my eye – especially as I had referenced that same study in a lengthy letter I had published in Therapy Today, the journal of the British Association of Counselling & Psychotherapy, in 2009. My letter, titled ‘An Imposed Etic’, was published as ‘An Imposed Ethic’ – presumably the editor thought ‘etic’ was a spelling mistake and didn’t get the sense I was trying to convey through the use of the term ‘imposed etic’. My point was that particular, localised values and norms were being applied as though they were universals, without empirical justification.

I had been somewhat concerned by John Daniels’ article, ‘The Gay Cure?’, in the previous issue of Therapy Today, and had written ‘An Imposed Etic’ in response. Daniels’ article was based almost entirely on an interview with Michael King of University College London. On the back of a research project he had been involved with – Annie Bartlett, Glenn Smith & Michael King (2009) – King was expressing concern and dismay at the number of therapists in the UK – 17% of the sample surveyed – who had been involved in helping at least one gay man or lesbian reduce their homosexual feelings. 4% of the respondees had said they would try to cure homosexuals of their homosexuality if asked.

As a therapist, I fell into the 17%. At the time I was supporting a bisexual man on the verge of returning to his native country where homosexual practices were not only not accepted by the majority of the population but could potentially carry the death penalty. He had begged me to help him – though I had stressed there was no known ‘cure’ for homosexuality and that all I could do – perhaps? - was help him reduce his homosexual tendencies and increase his heterosexual ones…if he wanted that badly enough.

The Spitzer Study
Unsurprisingly, then, I took a keen interest in Daniels’ article. What really concerned me was King’s dismissal of the claims of NARTH (National Association for Research & Treatment of Homosexuality) to help around 66% of gay men and 44% of lesbians achieve ‘good heterosexual functioning’ (Spitzer, 2003).

NARTH had actually been founded by Charles Socarides, one of Spitzer’s leading opponents in the 1973 debate on whether homosexuality should still be classified as a mental illness. 25 years later Spitzer’s penchant for controversial positioning led him to investigate whether gay men and lesbians could be ‘cured’ of their homosexuality through ‘reparative therapy’. This was a time when the trend in the Western psychological research communities increasingly was to state that, not only was there no validated cure for homosexuality but also that there was no need for a cure as homosexuality was perfectly natural and normal for those who were homosexual. (The spread of the ‘homosexuality is OK’ meme throughout the West in the second half of the 20th Century is a remarkable example of memetic viral infection.)

Spitzer recruited 200 men and women from centres involved in reparative therapy, including NARTH and Florida-based Exodus International. He interviewed each in depth over the phone, asking about their sexual urges, feelings and behaviours before and after having the therapy, rating the answers on a scale. He then compared the scores on this questionnaire, before and after therapy. “The majority of participants gave reports of change from a predominantly or exclusively homosexual orientation before therapy to a predominantly or exclusively heterosexual orientation in the past year,” Spitzer concluded.

Spitzer’s study was certainly vulnerable to a number of methodological criticisms. Firstly, his sample was not a random sampling of gay and lesbian individuals or even a random sampling of gay and lesbian individuals who had experienced reparative therapy. The ‘volunteers’ were put forward by Exodus International and NARTH and included some ‘ex-gay’ advocates who were politically active. Secondly, some of the answers to Spitzer’s questions were based on what people remembered feeling years before – a notoriously unreliable method of investigation. Finally, Spitzer’s investigation did not test any particular therapy; only half of the participants engaged with a therapist at all, while the others worked with pastoral counsellors or in independent Bible study.

Such were the problems with the study that it took Spitzer 2 years to find a journal which would publish it: Archives of Sexual Behaviour. Even then, at the editor’s insistence, criticisms were published alongside the study as a commentary on it.

Around the same time and with a similar sample size (202), Michael Schroeder & Ariel Shidlo (2002) found 14% of their participants did manage long-term to either greatly reduce or completely stop homosexual practices. Of these, 5% were ‘struggling’. Another 5% reported being reasonably happy (almost all of this group were celibate). Only 4% (ie: 8 participants) reported a shift in sexual orientation from 5 or more to 3 or less on a 1-7 scale of hetero/homosexual balance. Of these, the only ones who could perhaps be classified as ‘ex-gays’, 7 out of 8 put down as occupation that they were ‘ex-gay’ counsellors and so could be accused of having a vested interest in the ‘success’ of reparative therapy.

In spite of the heated controversy around Spitzer’s study and the quite different findings reported by Schroeder & Shidlo, Spitzer’s findings were seized on by the ‘religious right’ as ‘proof’ that homosexuality could be cured and, therefore, it could not be defended as ‘natural’ or ‘God’s will’. Since the publication of the study, critics (some professional researchers but mostly gay political activists) have consistently and loudly scorned it. Spitzer himself has repeatedly bemoaned his findings being taken out of context and/or wilfully misinterpreted. Thousands – perhaps, tens of thousands – of people have been ‘treated’. Many indeed claim to have been cured; but others have spoken of the treatment failing, some of having their lives ruined and some that it had driven them to a suicide attempt.

So Spitzer’s ‘recanting’ and apologising for the misery his 2003 study had contributed to is news indeed. Now 80, retired and suffering from Parkinsons’ Disease, Spitzer was struck by guilt one night lying in bed recently and got up to write his letter of recantation. (Spitzer’s disquiet with his study had been building for several years; and thing finally came to a head following a meeing with Gabriel Arana, a gay journalist who had suffered significantly as a result of failed reparative therapy.) His letter, to be published in Archives of Sexual Behaviour where the study had been published 9 years earlier, is one of the most sincere and heartfelt apologies ever offered by a major figure in the world of Psychiatry or Psychology.

Unfortunately, while Spitzer’s apology might help assuage whatever sense of guilt is being produced by his BLUE and GREEN vMEMES working as a vMEME harmonic, it does nothing to help us resolve the issue of whether reparative therapy might work for some.

Is Spitzer’s Study really that bad?
For sure, Spitzer’s 2003 study has serious weaknesses. For one thing, it’s a relatively small sample size which makes it dangerous to generalise from. Schroeder & Shidlo’s sample group was no bigger yet gay political activists use it with abandon to bash Spitzer.

Secondly, Spitzer’s findings were based on self-reporting. King dismisses them, saying: “There’s no collateral evidence that they’ve changed.” So, is he calling the volunteers who talked with Spitzer liars? Anyone who’s been involved in analysing self-report work will know just how untrustworthy it can be. But how do King and similar critics know Spitzer’s volunteers were lying? Are they now the arbiters of people’s private experience – ie: they can tell people what they think and feel?

Unfortunately, Spitzer seems to have been infected with a similar meme to King. A key point in his letter of apology is that he believed the self-reporting of people who may have been motivated to deceive him. They indeed may have had such motivations; but how does Spitzer know they actually did lie to him?

Thousands of psychological studies have used self-reporting - the famous and much-cited Love Quiz is just one – and most researchers regard self-reporting as especially dubious when people are asked to recall things from the past. But, while it’s highly advisable to be cautious about the findings from self-reporting, if that’s the only data collection method employed, then that’s all the researcher can go on. It’s a serious design flaw in Spitzer’s study that he only had the one method and it’s another serious flaw that he didn’t control for sample bias – but neither of those criticisms automatically invalidates Spitzer’s findings. They do mean that his findings need to be treated with caution.

As for the much-vaunted Schroeder & Shidlo invesitagation…er, hang on: didn’t they use self-reporting?!?

A good many key pieces of research in the history of Psychology have contained similar flaws to those of Spitzer. Indeed, if we take the view of Karl Popper (1969), then it is impossible to be free of bias as soon as you decide what the issue is, theorise or choose the variables to study.

It can’t be anything other than highly creditable that Spitzer is finally and openly acknowledging the weaknesses in his study; but perhaps he’s going further than he really needs to in recanting it…?

Religion, Homosexuality and Bias
Religion and homosexuality are two topics that, when put together, seem to predicate bias. As most of the major religions – at least in their fundamentalist versions – declare homosexuality to be a ‘sin’, it’s hardly surprising that gay political activists and liberal sympathisers campaign against religious organisations that take such a view. Nor is it surprising that some of that campaigning is vociferous and sometimes even violent. Homosexual activity in some countries can lead to imprisonment and even the death penalty, so it’s no wonder that gay men and lesbians (and their heterosexual sympathisers) feel strongly about these things. Wellbeing, the freedom to be who you are and sometimes even your life are at stake.

In the 2009 Therapy Today article, King, a homosexual, articulates his personal biases very clearly indeed: “My hope is that homosexuals and heterosexuals will become indistinguishable.”

Such a strong bias may well have coloured King’s ability to approach Spitzer’s study impartially. He makes a somewhat convenient distinction between sexual behaviour and sexual orientation. So a Spitzer volunteer could be enjoying heterosexual relations in terms of behaviour but inside they’re still a homosexual? If so, then that is a level of self-deception that could be described in terms of Sigmund Freud’s defence mechanism of reaction formation (Anna Freud, 1936). In other words, you act out the opposite of what you unconsciously are. There are documented examples of repressed homosexuals acting out as heterosexuals – famously in the study by Henry Adams, Lester Wright & Bethany Lohr (1996) in which homophobics were found to be turned on by homosexual pornography. But how does King know for fact such self-deception applies in the case of those of Spitzer’s volunteers who were having heterosexual relationships?

The general consensus among research professionals is that reparative therapies don’t work and, according to a new Pan American Health Organisation report, may even be dangerous. Some American state legislatures, such as California, are proposong banning reparative therapy. It is now illegal in the UK to use certain types of therapy, such as Aversion Therapy, for the purposes of ‘curing’ homosexuals.

Personally I’ve no idea how effective or dangerous reparative therapies are. However, there is a variable that King and other researchers like him seem to miss: the power of faith. (It’s not clear if Spitzer missed that one as well.)

To declare my own bias: in my youth, I was a Bible-bashing fundamentalist Christian who believed I had personal dialogue with Jesus, that miracles really did happen, and that I would be one of the righteous who would be saved at the Second Coming. I’ve long since lost that faith – but the memory of it has stayed with me: the sheer sense that God is with you and you are doing his will can create the most incredible determination.

It’s a personal anecdote, of course; but, if we’re to value Carl Rogers’ (1959) phenomenological approach, it counts. I have no problem understanding why radicalised young Muslims become suicide bombers: they know they are doing God’s will – and that gets them through all the barriers that would stop someone without that determined faith. ‘Altruistic suicide’, in terms of Émile Durkeim’s (1897) classic study of suicide. When you believe to that degree, nothing is more important than doing God’s will.

For the believer, it may work something like this: if, for today I am doing God’s will by using reparative therapy to keep me from a gay lifestyle, well, the most important part of my identity is that I am a faithful person to my God. If I’m actually able to have a heterosexual relationship of some kind, well, how much the better! Of course, there may be inner turmoil and repressed homosexual desires; but, in countries where homosexuality is despised culturally and subject to severe legal punishment, a ‘forced’ heterosexuality, in which I can at least take pride that I am fulfilling my duty to my God, may well be the better option.

Even in this country there are considerable pockets of resistance to the idea that homosexuality is not abnormal. Life for those who find themselves to be gay and lesbian is often very, very difficult. They do need our support and, preferably, our encouragement to accept themselves for who they are – but not all will be able to do so. For a variety of reasons including social and family pressures, some will become desperate to be ‘not gay’. And, in other parts of the world, it is socially (and legally) impossible for them to accept themselves as gay – their culture tells them it’s wrong and their legal system persecutes them for it.

If organisations like Exodus International and NARTH say they can make a difference, then researchers need to investigate but considering it as an emic – a possible phenomenon specific to those people in those contexts – without imposing their own values on what they find. ‘Making a difference’ needs to be seen in terms of what it means for the highly-religious and supposedly-converted homosexual in their society – their take on it – not what ‘difference’ means to openly gay men and lesbians clearly pushing a ‘gay agenda’ in cosmopolitan London or multi-cultural Leeds. If we take the phenomenon outside of its own context and judge it against what is found in different contexts, then it may well be found to lack the magic it has in its own context. By judging it against our own emics, we risk that old cross-cultural demon: the imposed etic.

Before reparative therapy is banned and legislated against, research needs to establish whether it may work for a small number of ‘natural’ homosexuals who develop a areally strong religious faith. If it does, as Spitzer declared in 2003, then maybe some degree of rethink about reparative therapies may be needed. If we ban reparative therapies without knowing whether they may be successful in a small number of extreme circumstances, then we deny some people the possibility of a choice that could make the difference between some kind of acceptable life and no life worth living at all – or even no life (literally!) at all.

Austerity and the Euro – an Appalling Lack of Quality Leadership

business, civil unrest, cross-cultural, Europe, government, politics, schemas & memes, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics 1 Response »

May 202012

Well, the Eurozone crisis has certainly dominated the news this past week or so – and the Greeks are once again at the centre of it. But this time it’s different. This time it’s not so much the ORANGE vMEME of the ultra-rich financial speculators effortlessly wrongfooting the BLUE-dominated fiscal technocrats in Brussels and Berlin which is causing the problem - though the speculators are still making plenty of money! Rather, it’s the people - the newly-poor, crushed and deprived by the austerity measures wreaking havoc with lives right across Europe - who are democratically electing populist politicians and extremist politicians promising them relief from the austerity. (21 of the Golden Dawn’s neo-Nazi candidates made it into the Greek parliament in the 6 May election.)

New Greek elections in mid-June are tipped to give an outright victory to the leftist Syriza bloc which, if Syriza’s leaders stick to their guns, means forcing the European Union to renegotiate the second bailout deal agreed in March, so the austerity measures the Greek are forced to endure are that much less severe. That or Greece tears up the agreement and effectively leaves the euro.

In trying to predict what will happen – or what should happen – the pundits are all over the place. And so are the politicians! German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble hinted as far back as early March – before the second bailout deal was finally agreed – that Germany might be prepared to see Greece leave the euro. In their first somewhat-underwhelming summit on Tuesday (15 May), German Chancellor Angela Merkel and new French President François Hollande made it unequivocal that they wanted Greece to stay in the Eurozone…yet only days before Merkel had been backing Schäuble’s position. The 2 positions are not, of course, mutually exclusive: it’s quite possible to want Greece in the euro ideally but be prepared to see the country leave if it doesn’t fulfil the criteria to continue to be a member.

The Foolishness of the Austerity-Alone Agenda
Hollande is being portrayed in some quarters of the media as a naïve simpleton who thinks, in Ed Balls fashion, that you can spend your way out of the kind of massive debt crises befuddling much of Europe. If Hollande does think that way, it’s not clear from his public policies that is what he believes. In public at least Hollande isn’t saying No to austerity; he’s saying let’s have less austerity on one hand and develop growth strategies on the other. We’ve yet to have any evidence Hollande knows how to grow an economy…but at least he understands the importance of growth. For all my initial enthusiasm for the Coalition in the UK – see: ‘”Liberal Conservatives”: new politics?’ (May 2010) - it quickly became apparent that the new British government had little vision beyond its dogma of introducing swingeing public sector cuts - see: ‘Cameron & Clegg: where’s the vision?’ (July 2010).

In retrospect it’s astonishing - and can only be attributed to BLUE’s myopic determination to do ‘the right thing’ - that the likes of Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron really believed their national populations would passively accept having their living standards decimated.

People have lost their jobs, their homes and sometimes their marriages and families as an indirect – and sometimes direct - consequence of the austerity programmes introduced by these leaders. Imagine: your BLUE has done ‘the right thing’ your country expects of you (obeyed the laws, done your job to the best of your ability, paid your taxes, got married and produced children, bought a house with the biggest mortgage your salary can justify and consistently maxed out your credit cards in the name of consumerism and supporting the retail economy)…and then you lose everything because the government or a government-funded agency has taken your job away. Meanwhile, you see that ‘1%’ allowing servile politicians - hey, George Osborne! - onto their yachts and into their mansions and those same servile politicians then increasing tax allowances for the mega-rich – hey, George Osborne! - so they get even richer! No wonder BLUE subsides, betrayed, and RED takes to the streets and the barricades. Syriza saying No to the second bailout deal - and all the trauma that will produce – may yet be a preferable alternative to a people’s revolution and/or an Army takeover. (Greece is no stranger to either!)

Sarkozy is, of course, now consigned to the dustbin of history by an electorate not prepared to accept more and more years of austerity. (If he is remembered at all, beyond having a wife distinctly more glamorous than him, it will be for leading the West into the dubious but nominally noble role of being the Libyan rebels’ airforce in their 2011 struggle to oust Mouammar Gadhafi.) As for Cameron, the violence of last Summer’s riots - see: ‘The Riots – who’s right: Cameron or Blair?’ - may just have given him the ‘reason’ to turn the police loose Gadhafi-style on the next lot of anti-Government protestors rampaging through the streets of London, judging from the astounding amounts of rubber bullets the Metropolitan Police are reported to be stockpiling. Even Merkel is no longer looking so invincible, with her Christian Democrats suffering heavy defeats to anti-austerity parties a week ago in the their once-safe region of North-Rhine Westphalia.

It’s a 2-dimensional view, worthy of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, to think that a single strategy can solve what, in reality, are multi-faceted problems. Thatcher thought that freeing up the financial services to generate wealth while doing away with the old ‘heavy industries’ and the trades unions that went with them would solve the UK’s lack of competitiveness. What those policies resulted in was a fabulously wealthy south-east of England - so rich it pulled Britain into the Top 4 richest nations on earth (as measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP)). Yet much of the Midlands, the North of England, South Wales and the lowlands of Scotland were turned into industrial wastelands characterised by high unemployment, broken communities and broken marriages, failing schools and sky-high truancy rates, widespread alcoholism and substance abuse, and rocketing crime rates.

As Britain is now statistically in a ‘double dip recession’, I can’t help having some sympathy with Ed Milliband’s repetitive chanting that this is a recession “made in Downing Street”. While just about everyone on the Labour front benches, from Alistair Darling, Labour’s outgoing Chancellor of the Exchequer in 2010, through to Milliband - with the exception of Balls - recognised the need to take radical action to cut the deficit, they also warned continually against cutting too fast and too deep. They recognised the dangers both to the economy and to the social fabric of the UK. Cameron and Osborne took no notice of such warnings - even when this February 2 credit rating agencies, Moodys and Fitch, warned that the UK’s austerity programmes were so severe that they risked strangling any putative growth. Even this Friday, in a speech to business leaders in Manchester, Cameron was defending the government’s economic and fiscal policies, without accepting any criticism of them. In the same speech he paid only a fleeting, cursory recognition that a second policy of stimulating growth might also be necessary.

So, for the time being at least, Britain is stuck in austerity, thanks to Cameron; while Greece and other parts of Europe are stuck in austerity, thanks to Merkel and Sarkozy. If growth policies do emerge to balance out the austerity programmes, they are unlikely to come from such leaders - their BLUE thinking is too limited to the single strategy of public sector cuts: the ‘one true way’. Osborne epitmoises this BLUE-derived cut-and-do-nothing-else railroad thinking. From his first financial statement in 2010, he has done almost nothing to encourage business growth.

It seems it may need new leaders to bring in new multiple strategies which can combine reducing public sector profligacy with fostering private sector growth. So far at least, the Greek Syrizans are vehemently anti-austerity but have not voiced any viable alternative. Hollande was elected on an anti-austerity/pro-growth manifesto. The realities of being in power and having to negotiate with Merkel (who openly championed Sarkozy’s re-election bid) seem to have tempered Hollande’s rhetoric in the short time since his victory. While he wants a new focus on growth - but doesn’t say how he will stimulate French private sector growth - he is now giving more credence to the idea of some degree of austerity in Europe as a whole, at least.

With the BLUE conformity to society’s expectations failing to maintain stability and security, people’s PURPLE gets frustrated and bewildered, leading to a partial breakdown in social norms - what Émile Durkheim (1895) termed ‘anomie’ – which allows RED to self-express in what can often be a quite dangerous way. Beliefs about what is appropriate behaviour start to morph and change. As Susan Blackmore (1999) has shown, when old memes start to become dysfunctional, new ones rapidly take their place.

The riots and looting in Britain in August 2011 illustrate only too well the dangers of austerity programmes leading to widespread anomie in the specific sense that Robert K Merton (1938) used the term. When ORANGE-driven consumerism continues to promote high-value goods as socially desirable and indicative of status but there are fewer and fewer legitimate BLUE/PURPLE routes to obtaining those goods due to austerity measures, then it is predictable that RED self-expressive and self-indulgent thinking will dominate in the minds of some and they will then ‘acquire’ those goods by whatever means available to them.

By its very nature Capitalism cannot stop producing/providing and selling what it produces/provides. Otherwise there is no revenue from which to pay wages and overheads and derive profit. Austerity is, in a sense, anti-capitalist because it limits the legitimate ability of the market to buy what the Capitalists produce/provide. The only way to then get what the Capitalists tell you should have is through anomic means. Just one small example of what Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels (1848) were getting at when they talked about Capitalism having sown within itself the seeds of its own destruction.

Beneath the Surface of the European Union
On the surface, the Eurozone crisis and the controversies about austerity are about European countries racking up unsustainable amounts of debt - hence the austerity programmes to reduce the debt. Additionally, certain countries - most notably Greece but Eire, Portugal, Italy and Spain are also in similar messes - allowed their debts to build up to the point where they no longer could generate the revenues to service those debts as the markets lost confidence in those countries and interest rates rose. (Friday’s downgrading of Spanish banks by Moodys illustrates this perfectly.) Hence, the need for bailouts from the EU and the International Monetary Fund for these countries just to keep going.

But why are there such discrepancies amongst the countries in the EU? How come Germany is the only nation in the EU with really solid growth (in terms of GDP), the Italian economy hasn’t grown in 10 years and Greece is effectively bankrupt?

It’s about far more than differences in geographical location and natural resources, as some commentators would have it. It’s deeper and more fundamental than that. It’s about values. Alan Tonkin (2010), in his Global piece, The EU: an Organisation divided by Values, presents a basic overview of the values mix in the different member states and shows that there are clear values faultlines in the composition of the EU. Germany, Britain and, arguably to a lesser extent, France are driven by what Alan terms ‘BLUE Order and ORANGE Enterprise’. In contrast, he sees the Mediterranean nations of Italy, Spain and Greece as rather more relaxed, with PURPLE and RED more to the fore.

Of course, such ‘broad brush’ analyses are vulnerable to criticisms of playing to stereotypes. Yet there may well be some accuracies in such national stereotyping - how ever ‘politically incorrect’ the GREEN vMEME may make that seem.

A personal anecdote…Krissy is a young German woman working as a nanny in the Harrogate area of the UK and currently a participant in my latest ‘Introduction to Psychology’ adult education class at Rossett School. One ‘homeplay’ I set the class was to observe over the following week instances of each of the vMEMES as they went about their daily business. When they fed back at the next session, Krissy spoke at length about how much BLUE she saw in herself and in her friends and relations back home - indeed, in German culture as a whole. In effect, Krissy was confirming the stereoptypes of Germans as being:-

Ordered, disciplined and hard working
Highly procedural and efficient
Intolerant and punitive of people who are not like them or their values

- all characteristics produced in the selfplex by the BLUE vMEME.

Of course, one case study proves nothing. Nevertheless, Krissy’s thoughts do appear to support the basic stereotype of Germans. In which case, there may be some degree of accuracy in stereoptying of national groups. However, as Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck demonstrated in South Africa in the early 1990s - see: Don Beck & South Africa - it’s not being in a certain racial or ethnic group per se which produces attitudes but it is the vMEMES which dominate in the culture of a group.

Accept the broad brush stereotypes Alan Tonkin points to and accept that these come from vMEMETIC cultural domination as a ‘working hypothesis’…and it becomes possible to use 4Q/8L as an instrument to identify key factors contributing to the malaise afflicting the EU.

The rules and structures of the EU are located in the lower right quadrant and are largely derived from over-mature BLUE with some strong mixes of ORANGE and some fewer but nonetheless influential splashes of GREEN. The overall culture of Germany is in the BLUE-ORANGE zone - lower left quadrant – and, thus, is well-equipped to take maximum benefit from the EU structure. Greece, on the other hand, if dominated in its culture by the less-complex vMEMES of PURPLE and RED, is very ill-equipped to cope with the structures, procedures and demands of the EU.

Evidence of the weakness of BLUE and the strength of RED comes from the problems the Greek government has with tax collection. Greek culture is not heavily imbued with memes about ‘doing the right thing’. Evidence that ORANGE in Greece is in short supply comes from the fact there are such low levels of enterprise and business growth activity.

As Alan Tonkin hints, a key threat to the EU is that fact that more member countries are centred lower down the Spiral than are centred in the BLUE-ORANGE zone. In part, this explains why so much responsibility for the success and sustainability of the EU falls upon those countries centred higher up the Spiral – especially Germany.

Memetic and vMEMETIC changes can also be seen in attitudes amongst German electors. Once the staunchest advocates of European integration, resentment is growing at German wealth being risked to bail out a country with little or no short-to-medium term prospects of economic growth. At a cultural level, there is a longer-term danger of Germany becoming exhausted with supporting the European project and sliding into BLUE/PURPLE protectionism.

Whither Europe?
Yesterday the leaders of the G8 met at Barrack Obama’s Camp David retreat in Maryland.

Briefing the press afterwards, Obama said there is an “emerging consensus” that European countries must now focus on jobs and growth. That isn’t quite the tone of the official communique which stated that the G8 leaders had committed themselves to promoting growth alongside fiscal responsibility. The communique also added that, with regard to what strategies might put be put in place, “the right measures are not the same for each of us”.

In other words, despite Obama’s disengenous optimism, there is no real concensus among the leaders. Cameron appears to have come around a little bit to the view of Obama and Hollande that there must be a new focus in the Eurozone on growth. However, reducing the deficit remains his overrriding concern at home. Merkel is still wedded to austerity and is said to be concerned that the German viewpoint wasn’t given adequate consideration at the summit.

When the world is said to be on the brink of financial meltdown, this is a demonstration of an appalling lack of qaulity leadership. And it shows all too clearly that most of them don’t ‘get it’.

The botched manner in which the EU has allowed the Eurozone crisis to rumble on for over 2 years, with austerity put forward for most of that time as the only possible solution is an appalling indictment of the lack of higher level thinking of the leaders.

Even more telling is that they treat the Eurozone crisis as the issue: if they could only stabilise the euro, things would be OK! Unfortunately, that is a ‘sticking plaster’ solution to a gaping wound which the crisis has exposed. It is a failure to recognise that the problems with the euro and the ‘debt mountains’ accrued by many member states are symptomatic of more fundamental problems. As we considered earlier, it is the values differences created by different vMEMES in the 4Q/8L lower left quadrant which is the real source of many of the EU’s problems - as Alan Tonkin identified 2 years ago.

Acknowledging this, of course, means facing up to the stark reality that not all member states are equal and, therefore, cannot all be treated the same. This is anathema to the GREEN vMEME which has influenced certain elements of the German political intelligentsia for many years - a factor which may help explain why Germany has allowed itself to get sucked into some very unnatural and unequal partnerships.

In understanding how this mess has come about, it is necessary to keep in mind the original aim of the EU: to contain West Germany (as it then was), increasingly resurgent economically (after the country was devastated at the end of World War II) and to minimise the likelihood of Germany and France ever going to war again. On the basis that countries which are economically interdependent rarely end up going to war with each other, the original European Coal & Steel Community was launched in 1951. The economic aim was to serve the political aim.

Again, when many of the former Soviet bloc countries joined the EU in 2004, it was politics driving the agenda - with economics having to meet the political needs. The political aim was to safeguard these countries from either disintegration and social chaos and/or to minimise lingering Russian or Communist influence. But, of those countries, only Poland so far has shown the potential to be a significant European economic power on the same level as Germany, France and the UK.

Yet, although the EU is driven by political agendas, the politicians, if indeed, they have the will, are unable to persuade their electorates that direct political controls - ie: some form of federalism - are necessary to manage some level of EU-wide fiscal and economic policies. Without that, we get exactly what we’ve got: Greece ‘cooking its books’ and running up vast quantities of debt, dependent on German hard-won wealth to bail it out.

Once you consider it from a 4Q/8L perspective. a straightforward union of nations containing Germany at one extreme, dominated culturally by BLUE and ORANGE with some GREEN, and Greece at the other, dominated by PURPLE and RED with some BLUE, was never going to be an easy match-up. Even with federal controls!

It may indeed be that some form of federal Europe is not acceptable to the peoples of Europe - but that has yet to be tested electorally, so we don’t know for sure it isn’t. However, if centralised control isn’t acceptable, then Europe has to find another means of managing the divergent cultural values of its member states. On Friday David Cameron said: “Decisive action is needed by the Eurozone. They cannot go on kicking the can down the road.” While Cameron’s superficial analysis appeared to go no deeper than the woes of the euro, his criticism of the inertia of the EU leaders was spot on. They cannot go on kicking the can down the road – but the can is more than the problems of debt and the common currency: the can is the fundamentally-flawed structure of the EU which gives equal status to countries with wildly-divergent values and, therefore, wildly-divergent aims.

It may be that the EU, instead of treating its members as if they are all the same, has to apply differentiated strategies to them. It may even be that there needs to be differentiated tiers of membership whereby Germany, France, the Benelux countries, the Baltic states and perhaps Poland form one tier; and perhaps the others are split between 2 other tiers, based on a banding of GDP:debt ratio? Each tier would have a different set of obligations and a different set of benefits? EU members which don’t use the euro would form a totally different category of membership?

What ever steps are taken- undoubtedly, tentatively! - to do something about the present crisis – and it’s hoped it is at least a sticking plaster job! - the EU needs fundamental reform. Cameron has talked about ‘bold initiatives’ being required with regard to the Eurozone. In that respect at least, he is right. But any intiative – no matter how ‘bold’ – will only work to a degree unless the EU tackles the values divergences within its membership.

24 Iraqi lives are not even worth 3 months in prison

American Foreign Policy, international conflict, Middle East, prejudice & discrimination, Psychology, racism, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism 1 Response »

Jan 272012

This Tuesday past (24 January), Lieutenant Colonel David Jones passed judgement on Staff Sergeant Frank Wuterich for ‘dereliction of duty’. Normally, the maximum penalty open to an American military judge for this conviction would be a 3-month jail sentence, 2/3 forfeiture of pay and a demotion to the rank of private. Jones did not sentence Wuterich to jail. He did dock his pay but did not cut it by the maximum permitted 2/3 as the divorced father is solely responsible for the upkeep of his 3 daughters. He did demote Wuterich to the rank of private.

Jones’ sentencing of Wuterich would appear to have finally brought the long-running ‘Haditha Massacre’ case to an end in the military legal system. However, in the way he and the American military prosecutors have done this, they may well have sentenced to death hundreds of American soldiers and many more civilians of various nationalities.

From the evidence presented by prosecutors, Wuterich is directly responsible for the deaths of 9 innocent Iraqi civilians and indirectly responsible for the deaths of 15 others killed by the men in his command.

There is no doubt Wuterich is responsible for the 24 deaths. According to Al Jazeeera TV (2012), military spokesperson Joe Koppell said: “Staff Sergeant Wuterich accepted responsibility … and agreed and admits that he gave a verbal order to shoot first, ask questions later, or don’t hesitate to shoot, and words to that effect.” The victims of Wuterich’s orders included 10 women and children killed at point-blank range. 6 people were killed in one house, most shot in the head, including women and children huddled in a bedroom. An elderly man in a wheelchair was another fatality.

The original charge against Wuterich was murder which was then reduced to 9 counts of involuntary manslaughter and aggravated assault. The American military prosecutors this week allowed Wuterich to enter a plea of guilty to the lesser charge of dereliction of duty. As Jones found out, when passing sentence, under the terms of the plea bargain authorised by Lieutenant General Thomas Waldhauser, he was not able to jail Wuterich.

Of the men under Wuterich’s command at Haditha, one was acquitted and the cases against the others were dropped on legal technicalities.

The relatively small amount of attention paid in the Western media to the Wuterich verdict and sentencing indicates a lack of appreciation of how it will be perceived in non-western cultures. The headline playing out across the Muslim world will be something like: ’24 Iraqi lives are not even worth 3 months in prison’.

Ali Badr, a Haditha resident and relative of one of the victims, called Wuterich’s sentence “an insult to all Iraqis” and “solid proof that the Americans don’t respect human rights” (Al Jazeera, 2012). Awis Fahmi Hussein, who survived Haditha after being shot in the back, told the Associated Press’ Julie Watson (2012): “I was expecting that the American judiciary would sentence this person to life in prison and that he would appear and confess in front of the whole world that he committed this crime, so that America could show itself as democratic and fair.”

According the Los Angeles Times Tony Perry (2012), Waldhauser will offer no public explanation of his decision to accept the plea bargain and stipulate that Wuterich receive no jail time.

To add insult to injury, the convicted criminal keeps his job and, at some time in the future, may again be in a position where he has innocent civilians in the sights of his automatic rifle.

For the likes of al-Qaeda and other fundamentalist Islamist groups, the farce of Wuterich’s trial is yet more proof that Muslim lives are nothing like as important as American lives. It’s more justification for the view that Muslims are oppressed by the Americans and their infidel allies – which makes it another rallying point for previously-uninvolved Muslims to come to the defence of their brothers, as indeed the Qur’an (Sura 2:191, 193) instructs them to. Those who are deeply religious and with the BLUE vMEME dominating in their selfplexes may feel compelled to do their duty if fed the appropriate provocative material from radical imams.

Lieutenant Colonel Jones and the Lieutenant General Waldhauser have given al-Qaeda a wonderful cause for a recruitment drive. Which is why Jones may well have sentenced more American soldiers and innocent civilians to death.

The ‘Fog of War’ and the ‘Animal in Man’
The prosecutors argued that, on the day of the killings in November 2005, Wuterich lost control after seeing a friend blown apart by a bomb, before leading the soldiers under his command on a murderous rampage. His defence said he did the best he could in the ‘fog of war’ and that his squad truly believed they were on a search for insurgents. However, Wuterich’s former squad members testified during the hearings that they did not receive any incoming gunfire nor find any weapons at the scene of the killings.

A marine with dead bodies at Haditha - thought to have been taken with another marine's phone.

Wuterich told the court: “When my marines and I cleared those houses that day, I responded to what I perceived as a threat, and my intention was to eliminate that threat in order to keep the rest of my marines alive. So when I told my team to shoot first and ask questions later, the intent wasn’t that they would shoot civilians, it was that they would not hesitate in the face of the enemy.”

His assertion that “…I never fired my weapon at any women or children that day” was contradicted by a former squad mate who said he joined Wuterich in firing in a dark back bedroom where a woman and children were killed.

It appears, essentially, that Wuterich led his men on a brutal murderous rampage against innocent civilians because one of their own had been killed in front of their eyes.

Hot-blooded revenge in a state of, fright shock and high physical arousal…?

It would be far from the first time in recent history that atrocities and massacres have been committed by soldiers in a war context. And while Iraq in 2005 was far from being a full-scale war, American troops were fighting a ruthless and brutal insurgency that was killing and wounding men from their ranks on an unpredictable but scarily frequent basis.

I’ve talked before about contexts such as war which release the ‘animal in man’ – most notably in ‘Prisoner Abuse and the Mess in Iraq’. In terms of Spiral Dynamics (Don Beck & Chris Cowan, 1996) this is the RED vMEME doing what it wants in that moment of time without constraint or thought of consequences. In his Psychoanalytic Theory Sigmund Freud (1920) would see Haditha as the Thanatos element of the Id unleashed to fulfil its death instinct. Don Beck (2002) has cautioned that countries going to war should prepare their populations back home for stories of their troops committing atrocities.

What about the aftermath?
If, then, atrocities such as Haditha are inevitable from time to time – no matter how much we try to minimise their likelihood – questions then come as to how we deal with survivors, relatives and perpetrators in the aftermath.

If we accept that atrocities will happen in contexts such as war, when traumatised soldiers get carried away temporarily in their bloodlust, then it can be argued that reducing the charges against Wuterich from murder to involuntary manslaughter is appropriate.

After the shootings, Wuterich clearly knew he and his men had done wrong. (The BLUE vMEME – Freud’s Superego – kicking back in.) The sergeant lied to his commanding officers by stating that 15 of the dead Iraqi civilians were killed in the same explosion that led to the incident. Few outside of the immediate scene knew about the killings and the American military first attempted to downplay the killings until a local human rights activist went public with video footage of the aftermath. A subsequent investigation by Time suggested that most of the dead were shot by Marines – and in March 2006 a criminal investigation was begun.

With regards to the survivors and the relatives, should the American military pay compensation? As yet, there is no indication that this will happen. The American military does not routinely pay compensation for foreign nationals innocently killed or injured in its operations in their country. However, it is possible for survivors and relatives to pursue compensation claims through the American courts – assuming, of course, that they could muster the considerable financial resources required to do this!

This,and the fact that Wuterich will not serve even a day in prison following his sentencing, really does appear to show that the Americans do attribute lesser value to Iraqi lives than American lives. (No one who has been convicted of killing Americans walks free from an American court.

Henri Tajfel & John Turner’s (197 ) Social Identity Theory – see Prejudice & Discrimination – offers a powerful explanation for this discrimination (which is racism in all but name). Simply by categorising ourselves into ‘us’ (American liberators) and ‘them’ (Iraqi Muslims) – we end up absorbing the norms and values of our in-group and stereotyping and demeaning their out-group in the worst possible way. Thus, out-group Iraqi lives are worth nothing like as much as American lives.

It is, of course, the PURPLE vMEME’s tribalism which is behind this not-of-our-tribe discrimination. It’s also how, in part at least, the Nazis were able to manipulate the German people (‘us’) into nationwide complicity in the persecution of the Jews (‘them’).

If the Americans want to avoid being seen as hypocritical, partial, tribalist and racist, then they need to rethink substantially the way they deal with the aftermath of atrocities like Haditha.

The difference between war and counter-insurgency
Before we leave this brief study of the tragedy of Haditha, it’s worth considering the kind of situation those American troops found themselves in.

They were combat troops trained for straight forward battle but tasked to take on insurgents using guerrilla and terrorist tactics in a crowded, residential areas. From the British Army in Malaya in the 1950s, through American troops in the South Vietnamese cities in the 1970s and Russian troops in Afghan villages in the 1980s, the use of regular battle troops in such neo-policing operations has a bad history. Atrocity, murder, torture, rape and the widescale alienation of civilian populations have tended to characterise such operations. Again, it’s the PURPLE vMEME’s tribalist discrimination at work; but the more different ethnically and racially the civilian population have been from the soldiers, the more the soldiers have tended to abuse them.

From an Integrated SocioPsychology perspective, I would argue that a different time of man is needed for urban counter-terrorist operations than for an outright battle. If we use Hans Eysenck’s Dimensions of Temperament construct, then someone high in Psychoticism is more likely to make the kind of soldier needed for a battle. So compulsive and impulsive they are effectively fearless is very much what’s desirable. Ruthless brutality towards the enemy is also quite welcome.

Hunting out insurgents hiding amongst a civilian population is a very different game to slaughtering your enemy on the battlefield and requires a different sort of mindset. Yes, the soldier still needs to be lightning quick in their reflexes but the ability to slow yourself for that vital second or two under extreme provocation, such as the bomb blast at Haditha, is essential for successful interactions with the often equally-terrified civilians. Self-restraint is not a trait of Psychoticism; so men high on that temperamental dimension are not the right kind of people for neo-policing operations. When RED wants revenge, as it did in Wuterich, then it’s much more difficult, if not impossible, for BLUE to restrain it if the person is high in Psychoticism.

Of course, there are other factors which predicate the inhibiting or disinhibiting of behaviour. But, if we can at least get the right kind of soldier temperamentally suited to the task at hand, then we are more likely to minimise the risk of massacring of civilians in counter-terrorism operations.

While, unfortunately, there will still undoubtedly be outright battles in wars between countries in the decades and centuries to come, the guerrilla/insurgent/terrorist element of warfare has increased substantially since the end of World War II. Military planners, in who they recruit and how they train those recruits, need to have more diverse resources to deploy to different situations.

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