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

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

Dorries relaxing in the celebrity jungle – Copyright © 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!

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
 

Frank Wuterich arriving at court. Copyright © 2012 Associated Press

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.

Lose a cat, lose a father….

 heroes and inspirational figures, human rights, NLP, politics, prejudice & discrimination, Psychology, racism, schemas & memes, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  No Responses »
Aug 082011
 

Yesterday we – my wife, Caroline, and I – attended a service for the interment of my father’s ashes. A few hours later we picked up a new cat, a 6-week old male kitten we’re calling Basmati - ‘Basmati Rice’, geddit?! Baz, as we tend to call him, is settling in remarkably well and is a real delight after what seems to have been 6 months of loss.

Personally I would never admit to being religious or, in any sense, ‘spiritual’ beyond having a strong but rather vague conviction that there is something bigger than me ‘out there’.  On the odd occasion I do think about it, I tend to think of this ‘something’ in God-the-Father/Allah-the-Compassionate terms – which I attribute to cultural memes rather than any spiritual intuition. And I certainly consider myself far too rational to entertain anything superstitious!

Yet, for several years now, I’ve had the thought that I would lose Artemis, my cat, and Ted Rice, my father, within a very short time of each other. Of course, I could rationalise this by arguing that both were approaching the end of their natural life and had already lived significantly beyond the average age of their sex and species. (Artemis was 19 years old and my father 83.) Or maybe the PURPLE vMEME’s tendency to believe in signs, omens and superstitions was simply tuning into something that rational science can’t comprehend…? Certainly, it would appear from studies of primitive peoples such as the Kalahari bushmen (eg: Richard Katz, 1982) and Australian Aborigine tribes (eg: James Cowan, 1993) that at least some of their number can ‘tune into’ and be informed by something way beyond the ken of conventional modern science.

PURPLE was certainly the dominant vMEME in terms of giving meaning to both relationships…so maybe, just maybe, there was something intuitive in that thought that I would lose them pretty much at the same time…?

Artemis
I acquired Artemis on 5 October 1991. I already had a 7-week-old black male, Merlin, I wanted company for since (just like today!) I worked long hours. My girlfriend of the time knew I was looking for another kitten and alerted me to a kitten some friends of hers had found in a barn on their farm in the hills above Keighley. When I saw this (approximately) 4-week-old kitten, apparently abandoned by her mother, I thought she was the ugliest kitten I had ever seen: a blobby belly on short stumpy legs, ears bigger than her head, bulging eyes, a coat that looked like someone had thrown a range of creams and browns over her in totally random fashion and one half of her face a totally different colour than the other. (Split straight down the middle, like the villain, Two-Face, in the Batman comics!) But, as long-time friend Linda Scurrah commented many years later: “Artemis has grown into her looks. She’s quite beautiful now she’s older.”

Merlin, sadly, didn’t last that long – getting knocked down when he was just over 6 months old. But Artemis survived illnesses, sequential girlfriends and multiple moves, to become a true companion. I talked to her and, to some degree at least, I thought she understood my mood, if not the content of my words.

Pure Behaviourists take the view that animals don’t have cognitions but I am in no doubt that Artemis had certain basic expectations – schemas. She expected stroking if she made certain noises or approached us in a certain way. If she went and sat by her bowl around about evening meal time, she was indicating clearly that she expected feeding.

Some would say I am anthropomorphsing but I am convinced something akin to the PURPLE vMEME functioned in her brain. Throughout all the moves and all the girlfriends, Artemis coped with it all as long as I was there; but, if I had to stay away overnight, I’m told she would prowl the house looking for me and acting distressed. Sometimes, if I just looked at her when I had been ignoring her for a while, she would purr – apparently pleased that I was giving her attention. It appears I mattered to her – that, from her side as well as mine, there was some kind of desire for mutual affiliation. Indeed, I would be prepared to stick my kneck out and say Artemis craved affection. Eg: as she got older, I could still tempt her to a bit of play occasionally…but then she would lick the hand she’d just pawed, look at me in what I meta-stated to be a pleading way and start purring.

Artemis, 2006

I’d also speculate that there was some degree of RED operating in her very basic selfplex. Eg: if I was eating chicken, she would howl at me until either I gave her some or she would get frustrated and try to snatch it from my plate – even though she had her own food down that she was usually quite content with. She knew what she preferred and she would try to intimidate me in to giving her what she wanted.

Artemis was also choosy as to which of my girlfriends she was prepared to associate with…or not. Around 7 years ago Caroline and I were decidedly relieved when Artemis did take to her.

Other prominent temperament traits Artemis displayed included great caution and  nervousness – which may have contributed.to her longevity. Tied in with that,  she was a coward and would never defend her territory. That is, until she  started displaying mild signs of feline dementia and seemed to forget she was a coward, charging at much larger cats and succeeding in driving them out of the garden!

Like most higher mammal pets with their owners, Artemis would not hold  my gaze for more than a second or two – indicating that she accepted I had greater power. However, in the last 6 months or so of her life, Artemis did  take to holding both mine and Caroline’s gaze from time to time. But we  meta-stated it was not in an aggressive way but more as though she was  searching us for something.

Ted Rice
My father was proud of being a right-wing racist who thought the sun shone out of Margaret Thatcher’s backside. He considered the trade unions to be the single biggest threat to the wealth and prosperity of the British people and wanted them tamed again – like Maggie had done 25 years previously! Being a classical music man, he despised The Beatles and the long hair hippie culture of the 1960s. He thought young women should still be virgins when they married and that young men should have short back & sides and wear suits. So when my teenager self grew my hair long, wore jeans, listened to Jefferson Airplane and espoused many of the more idealistic tenets of the hippie culture….!

BLUE was so strong in his selfplex that he considered everyone should listen to the TV news every night because everyone should be informed – it was ‘the right thing to do’. My  mother’s PURPLE village gossip mentality seriously irked him and they had  numerous rows about her finding the housewives’ gossip on the street more  interesting than the state of the British economy or the progress of the latest war in Africa.

There was some partial emergence of ORANGE in that he had ambitions to be a director of the company he worked for and was then able to reinvent himself very succesfully as a health & safety consultant after he was made redundant.

But of GREEN there appeared to be no trace. As said, he was a racist…of the England-for-the-English variety. He was a sexist in that it was understandable if men were unfaithful to their partners but women had to be totally faithful. He had no truck with the idea of human rights, believing criminals deserved to be beaten up by the police and that prisons should be such harsh places that offenders would be terrified of going back to jail. Unsurprisingly he was a staunch advocate of capital punishment and believed corporal punishment should be reintroduced to schools. His limited view of social mobility was that only those who, by virtue of intelligence and/or sheer hard work, could rise above their birth class status should be allowed to get on with it; the state should certainly not award benefits to create positive discrimination for the socially disadvantaged.

For all our cultural and political differences, I was close to my Dad…arguably closer to him than I was to my Mum. Though many of our discussions ended in rows – because of the cultural and political factors! – I could talk to my Dad about the world and what was going on. (Any time I raised anything like a problem with a girlfriend, though, it was immediately passed on to Mum – it was her job to do the emotion work!) But problems at work, too, he would listen and offer his advice. He was immensely skilled in management techniques and provided a very useful sounding board as I tried to fathom my way through various issues. My career and the social, economic and political implications of the news formed the basis of most of our conversations – though increasingly his health problems became a pressing topic of conversation after my Mum died.

Ted, celebrating his 80th birthday

My mother, Betty, died in 2000 (from cancer). For a year afterwards, my Dad was depressed, becoming a virtual hermit and dropping almost all social contacts. Then he developed Myasthenia Gravis, a neurological illness which inhibits the neurotransmitter acetylcholine from working in the  synapses at the muscle platelets, effectively preventing the efferent neurons from sending messages from the motor cortex and the cerebellum to the muscles. A Bell’s Palsy-type face droop in 2001 was followed by a collapse of his lungs the following year, necessitating a 5-month stay in hospital – 3 of them in intensive care. After getting the Myasthenia under control with stupendous amounts of medication, mobility problems and excruciating arthritic pain led to 2 hip transplants. Dad then had a couple of reasonable years before gallbladder problems led to a series of collapses and stays in hospital. By January this year it was clear he was deteriorating, with kidney and liver problems eventually triggering the long, slow, downward spiral to the end. I doubt I’ll ever forget seeing him 2 days before he died, screaming in pain and the hospital staff not able to get the morphine into him fast enough.

For all my ‘psychology tricks’, as I call them, that experience has left a deep wound in me. If it was bad for me, what must it have been like for him?

The downward slope and the aftermath
Already on major medication due to her Arthritis, Artemis began fitting late last year. The fitting may have been a by-product of a botched operation to remove bad teeth that left her temporarily blind and paralysed…but it would have been very difficult to prove. With even more medication, we thought we had got the fitting under control. However, a really severe and distressing fit at Easter, with medication at maximum levels, left us with no other real choice. As Caroline said: “What would happen if she had a fit outside? She’d be at the  mercy of any predator that was nearby – foxes and so on.”

Artemis hated going to the vet’s in a cat carrier. For all the steep extra cost, I got the vet out to our house. It was important to me that Artemis died in her own home, with as  little pre-procedure distress as possible. As she went under, in the conservatory in which she spent so much time, with me stroking her…did it actually make the experience of her passing any less traumatic for her? If I’m honest, I have no idea…but she seemed peaceful. And it helps me…whether or not it helped her.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t give the same consideration - euthanasia – to my Dad. He took another 2 days to die. By the last few hours, they had finally gotten the morphine levels right and he did appear to die in peace…but the 48 hours before must have been a horrendous experience for him.

I was at my Mum’s death bed in 2000. I saw and heard the final intake of breath. (The first time I had seen somebody die in front of me!) Strangely I cried only once for my mother – on a misty November night in the garden 2 months later. I think my focus was so strongly on trying to hold my Dad together in the following months and years that my BLUE never really allowed my PURPLE the privilege of grieving for a loved one. When Artemis’ executioners left - because, being blunt, that’s what we did to her: execution – I sobbed inconsolably for days. My little companion – who at times had seemed unnervingly human and who I sometimes referred to as “my little furry daughter’  – was gone. Even now Caroline and/or I will break into tears, if something triggers certain memories of Artemis. She was such a huge personality and such a part of our lives….

By contrast, my Dad was much less a part of our lives. We  spoke on the phone at least once a week, I travelled to see him approximately once a month – and Caroline would come with me every 2nd or 3rd visit. Christmas dinner with him was an annual ritual.

So far at least, I’ve cried less for my Dad than I have done for Artemis. Again, as with my mother’s death, it’s been all action. As my father’s only child (and the executor of his will), it’s been my responsibility to arrange the funeral, deal with Dad’s financial affairs and apply for probate, and clear out his house, ready for sale. In and amongst these processes, there have been tears but the focus has been mainly on doing rather than thinking. Certainly finding photos of Artemis amongst Dad’s possessions was a trigger for both Caroline and I to shed some tears!

Mum & Dad, 40th Wedding Anniversary

One photo that certainly brought me to tears was the one of my Mum & Dad’s 40th Anniversary in September 1991. Dad was 5 years older than I am now and Mum just 2. They look to be still in their prime, before the cruelties of old age could tarnish and diminish them. My PURPLE feels a great ache looking at that photo. The end of Summer in 1991 was a good time for my PURPLE. Just a few weeks later I would acquire Artemis.

Maybe I‘ll do more crying for Dad – and for Mum? – once everything is done and there is more time for reflection…?

A change in life
I miss my Dad in some different ways to Artemis.

Artemis was in my life every day, working through a variety of situations, ranging from her being a demanding pain to a purring pleasure. Her suddenly not being there any more left a huge emptiness in our lives. One or both of us still think we see her out of the corner of our eyes from time to time. The schematic expectation is still, to some extent, that she is there – or should be there. Caroline and I still hold each other and say we wish we could have her back, we miss her so much.

But somehow the scope of the relationship with my Dad, while lacking everyday impact, was more. Perhaps because of the greater history…? Perhaps because, according to Dale Hay & Jo Ellen Vespo (1988), parents teach us to love them from a very early age…?

Maybe it was simply the cognitive level of the relationship which made it more…? Bizarrely, at the post-funeral bash, I found myself thinking I would have to tell my Dad how pleased I was that my Mum’s relatives were mingling so well with his…when I suddenly realised he wasn’t there to tell anymore! I will miss talking to him.

Then, of course, you can sort-of replace a cat. Not that we feel we could or would want ever to replace Artemis. She will always have a unique place in our memories. But we can get a new cat. We had talked about this possibility and, after my Dad died, Caroline sourced the little kitten who is now Baz. We deliberately went for a male and one who looks nothing like Artemis because we don’t want to find ourselves drawing comparisons. We want to preserve her importance in our selfplexes.

But you can’t even begin to replace a father. (Or a mother, for that matter….)

UPDATE: 14 July 2012.
2 days ago, on the anniversary of his death, after a days’ teaching, I drove from Harrogate to Garstang, to stand by the marker which is all that remains that is tangible of my Dad (and my Mum). It was a near 5 hours round trip to spend 40 minutes with them…but I’m glad I went. On a rare (for this year!) warm and sunny evening, in the tranquil, almost idyllic graveyard of St Thomas, alone amongst the gravestones and the markers, I found that, for the first time I could remember my Dad, without being disturbed by horrendous memories of those last 3 days of his life.

I found that, for the first time, memories came easily to me of when he was younger and healthier…of things we did as a family as well as when I visited them as an adult. For the first time too, I found I could laugh again at some of the memories – at some of the more outlandish and ridiculous things he had said and done. The horrendous final days were still there if I looked for them but they were fuzzy and indistinct – as if partially repressed - so I left them alone and enjoyed my little graveyard reverie of better times.

Over the past year I’ve often moved away from thoughts of my Dad and tried not to engage with them by distracting myself with something else. Interestingly I found remembering my Mum a more easy and pleasant experience. So I’m pleased and hopeful now that I’ll be able to enjoy my memories of Dad.

My intention is to go back to Garstang every year on or around the anniversary of his death and use that trip as a way of honouring him and Mum.

I guess I’ve found for myself some truth in the old adage that pain eases with the passing of time. (For many months, it seemed like it would never ease!)

As for Artemis, we buried her ashes in a little copse on the cliffs above Robin Hood’s Bay and carved her name into the branch of an overhanging tree. As we love the Bay and usually spend a week in a cottage there most years, as long as we can still climb the cliffs, we can visit that copse.

In a strange way, there’s also a connection to my Dad in her burial place. He had always loved Artemis and often asked after her. When he was no longer well enough to visit us, we bought him a little wooden cat, which had something of her ‘look’, to symbolise her to him. As the carving was of a cat all curled up and seemingly very much at peace with itself, after Dad’s death, we took the carving and half-buried it on top of Artemis’ ashes to serve as her marker.

Of course, the world is a busy place and so often we’re too busy to  give much time to remembering those we’ve lost. But it’s good for our PURPLE to remember those in our personal history who have meant so much and to honour our past.

Wanted: Suitable Latvian Men for Latvian Women

 community, education, gender, mental health, Psychology, schemas & memes, sex & romance, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  1 Response »
Oct 162010
 

This article on the BBC News the other day (13 October) really caught my eye…about there being a shortage of suitable men for the women of Latvia.

Of course, there have been many shortages of men before. Usually after wars there are shortages of men since men do most of the fighting. Even in the one and only truly ‘total war’ of World War II, far more men were killed than women. Eg: the Germans lost over 5 million men and the Soviet Union an estimate of upto 10 million.

(If just some of the anecdotes I’ve heard are true, British and American soldiers in the ruins of Berlin in 1945 could have almost any German woman they wanted, especially if they had chocolate, cigarettes, nylons, etc, to give away.)

However, a significant shortage in peace time is unusual. Paradoxically statistics show that more male babies are born in Latvia than girls. However, a high early male mortality rate means there are 8% more women than men in the country. Among the under-30s, there are almost 9,000 more men than women. However, this is inverted between the ages of 30-39 so that there are almost 3,000 more women than men. This equates to men being 3 x as likely to die between the ages of 30 and 39. Overall women live 11 years longer than men, the highest disparity of life expectancy between the sexes in the EU.

Sociologist Baiba Bela explains the high male mortality rate: “Car driving, alcoholism and accidents in the workplace are mainly riskier for men than for women.” Statistics show that many Latvian men are also heavy smokers – so add that to the list of high risk behaviours.

This ‘express-self-now-and-to-hell-with-the-consequences’ nihilistic behaviour is clearly the output of the RED vMEME. The nihilistic element of these behaviours also illustrate what Sigmund Freud (1920) meant by Thanatos, the death instinct of the Id (peak RED) driving the individual to self-destruction. The gender difference in the numbers of people engaging in such risky behaviour can be explained by high levels of testosterone, the male sex hormone, which Hans J Eysenck attributed as the key factor in producing a Psychoticist temperament in many males. RED motivation and Psychoticism together make for a highly dangerous combination in males, leading to frequent behaviours dangerous both to themselves and others.

It would appear a substantial number of Latvian men have a RED/Psychoticist ‘lock’ or centre of gravity.

How did Latvian men get into this state?
Psychoanalyst Ansis Stabingis attributes high rates of Depression and suicide amongst Latvia men to the country’s rapid transition from Communism to Capitalism 20 years ago which suddenly put massive pressures on men to succeed financially. “There are demands about how [men] should live. And if they cannot meet those standards, they… fall into Depression…. And then they start to use some alcohol or some gambling because they cannot solve that problem.”

Capitalism and consumerism are driven by the ORANGE vMEME’s drive to create a better future for itself. As Zygmunt Bauman (1988) has noted, consumerism tends to divide people into those he calls the ‘seduced’ – those who have taken in the memes that life is about having designer goods and a luxury lifestyle and have the means to buy into it – and the ‘repressed’ – those who have taken in the same memes but do not have the means to buy into it.

When the world-wide economic crisis broke in 2008, unemployment in Latvia was pushed up by around 20%. Male suicide levels, already amongst the highest in the EU, rose correspondingly by 16%. Many of those who taken in consumerist memes and were only too willing to be seduced into the Western luxury life style now found they were actually slipping into the lifestyle of the repressed – wanting but no longer with the means to buy.

In Integrated SocioPsychology terms, the RED vMEME is motivated to establish self-esteem and esteem from others. When RED is confronted with failure – loss of job, drastic reduction in income, failure to achieve the lifestyle standards of the seduced – then RED simply cannot be shamed. It must either find someone else to blame for its misfortune or it will start to break the selfplex (an individual’s sense of self) down and/or become self-destructive (Freud’s death instinct). With a loss of self-esteem, RED is much more likely to engage in risky behaviour dangerous to itself. After all, if I’m no longer worth much, who cares if I risk everything for the little pleasure I might be able to get?

Latvia, like the other Baltic states and Russia, has long had a hard drinking culture. As software engineer Agris Rieksts told the BBC: “It is kind of perceived that it is manly, that the more alcohol you can handle, the more of a man you are. Everybody understands that it is kind of absurd. But it is still there.”

So there was a readymade alcohol culture for the newly repressed and depressed to drown their miseries in.

The undesirable male mate
In such circumstances, you might think that Latvian men between 30 and 39 could have their pick from so many available women. And the fact that Latvia has the highest rate of single mothers in the EU might well indicate that the men have indeed been ‘busy’. However, the fact that Latvia has the highest rate of single mothers in the EU can also be meta-stated to tell another story: that the Latvian women want babies but they don’t want serious ongoing relationships with the available men.

As Dace Ruskane. editor of women’s magazine Lilit, says: “The smartest girls are alone. The really beautiful girls are alone – if they are smart.”

There is an increasing stereotype of the Latvian male as a depressed drunk with little or no ambition. In his non-work time he either hangs out at sports bars or slobs out in front of the TV. Ruskane comments: “He just sits in front of the TV and knows he can get a woman. And if she doesn’t suit him, he will get another. Smart women simply don’t want to have such men as their partners.”  That, according to one woman who spoke to the BBC, is “why all my friends have gone abroad and found boyfriends there.”

The lack of male desire to better oneself is, according to Baiba Bela, encapsulated in the single statistic that there are 50% more women enrolled at the University of Latvia than men.

The existence of the ‘undesirable male mate’, while perhaps of particular concern to the men-starved women of Latvia, is by no means a Latvian-only phenomenon. 2 years ago then-Shadow Secretary for Innovation, Universities & Skills David Willetts drew attention in the UK to young women preferring to raise their children as single mothers rather than be partnered long-term with a man who had no means of support and no apparent prospects. Willetts was much influenced by the American sociologist William Julius Wilson (1987) who almost certainly was the first to identify the ‘unmarriageable male’, amongst the black underclass in inner city Chicago. (See ‘NEETS – are the Tories on the Right Path?’)

Wilson’s view is that the restructuring of the American economy (and the Western European economies) towards more knowledge-based industries (with much traditional heavy industry going to low wage economies, first Eastern Europe and then Asia) has led an underclass to develop of unskilled and unemployed American males (both black and white). The economic prospects of these males are so grim that effectively they are unmarriageable.

Norman Dennis & George Erdos (1992) confirmed the presence of the unmarriageable male in the UK, describing him as weakly socialised and lacking a sense of responsibility to be a functioning adult in the community, taking on the roles of husband and father.

Though their route to this state is a little different – Latvia was one of those Eastern European nations which most benefitted from being a low wage economy in the 1990s and early 2000s – Latvian men are now similarly undesirable as economic propositions…and drunk and depressed into the bargain!

Whither the Latvian man?
It will be interesting to find out just what kind of impact the BBC News article has on the collective psyche of Latvia. Certainly the article has been picked up a smattering of international news outlets, including the Herald de Paris, and several blogs; but, in the week of the Chilean miners, more Israeli rumblings about a possible strike on Iran and many in the Western world obsessing with just how savagely George Osborne is going to shred Britain’s public sector next week, it never did have much chance of making major news.

Since RED won’t be shamed, it’s more than likely that many Latvian males will simply shrug off the article – if they even register it! – with the selfplex defence mechanism of denial and reach for the next drink. It’s not hard to understand why so many Latvian women do turn to international dating agencies and web sites, with a few sadly ending up in the hands of the pornographers and human traffickers.

As for the Latvian Government and its policymakers…welcome to the late 20th/early 21st Century phenomenon of the undesirable male mate. He’s becoming a significant social problem throughout much of the Western world; but, in a country where there is a relative scarcity of men, he has the potential to become that much more a problem.

There again, as the Western countries struggle to reshape their economies in the wake of the global financial crisis and the unskilled and semi-skilled work continues to drift East, will the unmarriageable male, with his self-destructive behaviours, grow in numbers until he is a major problem throughout the Western world?

‘Lost’ in Purgatory?

 gender, Psychology, religion, schemas & memes, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics, supernatural  1 Response »
Jun 072010
 

Over 2 weeks later it’s still being remarked upon in the internet fan forums about just how similar in theme were the final episodes of 2 of the biggest TV dramas of the past few years, Ashes to Ashes (21 May) and Lost (24 May).

The Life On Mars/Ashes to Ashes story arcs ended with ‘rough diamond’/’Neanderthal throwback’ [take your pick!] DCI Gene Hunt revealed to be a Christ-like figure living in purgatory to work with the souls of dead coppers to help them accept their untimely demise and move on to the afterlife proper. Hunt even got to fend off the devil-like Discipline & Complaints investigator Jim Keats’ attempts to steal the dead coppers’ souls.

Truth to tell, I wasn’t much impressed with the ‘Ashes to Ashes’ finale, ruminating that the purgatory explanation was something of a cop-out, saving the writers from having to come up with some kind of science fiction story of alternate realities/dimension shifts/etc, etc.

But - blow me! - just a few days later a near-identical theme was acted out in ‘Lost’s’ 2.5-hour grand finale. This time around it was Jack Shephard being Christ-like to save the island from the darkness brought on by the devil-like ‘Man in Black’ (possessing the body of the deceased John Locke); and it was Jack’s dad, Christian Shephard, who, in a rather God-the-Father way, explained to his bemused son why their purgatory was necessary. After this they and the other main characters in the story opened their funeral home doors to walk into the light.

The supernatural/religious imagery particularly struck a chord with me because I’ve been supporting a (very sceptical!) A-Level Psychology tutee studying Anomalistic Psychology.

Who would have thought, in this supposedly late Modernist age grasping for the Post-Modern, a very traditional religious concept would have been used twice in the same month as a denouement for a major drama series?!?

Certainly we’ve seen some pretty ‘magick’ type stuff delivered in programmes like Doctor Who but it’s always been presented as aliens at work with technology advanced way beyond our ken. In the past 2-3 years that programme’s makers have even used the ‘timey-wimey’ shorthand to tell us it’s science beyond our understanding and, therefore, not to even bother trying to understand. But at least it’s always been given the sheen of ‘science’. With Ashes to Ashes and Lost, we seem to have encountered some variant form of very traditional religion. (Purgatory is a concept largely limited to Roman Catholics, the Orthodox Church and High Anglicans in Christianity; but Judaism and Islam also make use of the idea.)

Certainly both finales have caused major controversies amongst the 2 sets of fans. Many seem confused and/or angry; but just as many seem to be quite comfortable with this use of the purgatory concept.

So how come purgatory’s got a place in our late Modernist age…and how can programme makers get away with using it in the way discussed above?

Belief in the Paranormal
Well, for starters a Fox News poll in 2004 found that 92% of Americans believed in God, 85% in Heaven and 82% in miracles. Belief in the devil had gone up from 63% (1997) to 71%. 34% of Americans both believed in ghosts and UFOS, 29% took Astrology very seriously, 25% believed in reincarnation and 24% in witches  (Blanton, 2004). Only a year later David Moore got some rather similar results: 41% of Americans believed in extra-sensory perception, 37% in ghosts, 25% in telepathy and Astrology, 21% in communication with the dead and 20% in reincarnation. Back in 1997 Susan Blackmore found 59% of 6238 Britons surveyed believed in the paranormal. You can usually knock some pretty large holes in such surveys - methodological flaws, personality biases in the participants, etc - but cumulatively they build up a picture: an overwhelming number of citizens in the most technologically-advanced country on the planet believe in the supernatural - and a very sizeable minority believe in the ‘wookie stuff’.

So maybe we in the West don’t live in such a science-dominated world as we might like to delude ourselves? Maybe most of our fellow-citizens are Pre-Modernist thinkers? Or maybe it’s nothing like that simple.

How is it we rely upon and use science for everything from water purification to putting probes into deep space yet we believe in God, for which - whom? – there may be logical argument but no validated scientific evidence and, at least some of us, ghosts, for which there is not even much of a logical argument?!?

The answer, I posit, is on the Spiral. In historical terms, the development of the PURPLE vMEME predates the development of rational thought. Interviewed by Jessica Roemischer (2002), Don Beck describes PURPLE thinking as “animistic…and mystical”. As an example, Beck says: “…if the moon is full and the cow dies, the PURPLE mind connects the two events, one causing the other.” He dates the first beginnings of PURPLE to the Ice Age.

So the system which drives us to attain security by belonging is very primitive, indeed. The PURPLE mind in Beck’s analogy cannot achieve security if it cannot understand why the cow died. By attributing the cause of death to the full moon, Beck’s ‘PURPLE mind’ can now take steps – such as worship and/or sacrifice – to appease the moon and hopefully save other cows from a similar fate.

Modern people are, of course, little like such primitive ancestors but the PURPLE mind is still with us. It’s strong in little children and their attachments to their parents - and do little children like magic and fairly tales? Do they??? PURPLE is there in romantic attachment – and do lovers use mystical terminology like ‘soulmate’ and talk of ‘unending love’? Do they??? It’s there when we anthropomorphise our pets – and do we ascribe human-like personalities to our cats and dogs and rabbits as though they have somehow crossed the species barrier and magically become like us? Do we??? Well, a lot of us do, anyway. (I certainly do - “Hello, Artemis Rice-Cat!”)

Hasn’t belief in the supernatural waned in the Modernist era?
Usually PURPLE doesn’t dominate in our selfplexes quite the way it did with our primitive ancestors for a number of reasons. One of these is that other vMEMES have emerged in a hierarchy of complexity.

The so-called ‘Spiral balloon’ graphic – designed by Don Beck and a registered trademark of NVC Inc - brilliantly captures the idea that, as a more complex vMEME emerges to dominate in our selfplex, the less complex ones do not disappear. They remain there in the background, unlikely to cause much trouble until their needs aren’t being met or the circumstances (‘Life Conditions’) predicate a different way of thinking, thus requiring a different vMEME to dominate in our selfplex. It was Abraham Maslow (1943), with his Hierarchy of Needs, who established the principle that, when a lower level of need isn’t being met, then focus has to shift downwards to that less complex level to sort out the problem.

So PURPLE and its relationship to the mystical has never gone away in the ‘Developed World’ - it’s just not always been that obvious as other vMEMES have dominated in the cultural milieu.

Looking at things historically again, as BLUE has emerged so there has been a codifying and documentation of PURPLE’s mystical experiences and traditions, leading eventually to the structures of organised religions. Gradually from the time of Galileo Galilei in the West and accelerated dramatically by the advent of Evolutionary Theory, science has eaten into the credibility of PURPLE’s supernatural experiences and the PURPLE-BLUE memeplex of organised religion. However, fervent adherence to religion has never gone away – just ask the fundamentalist Christians in the ‘Deep South’ of the United States or those in South America or sub-Saharan Africa. And we all know about the world-wide raft of problems resulting from the rise of Islamic fundamentalism!

Nonetheless, for a while at least, the BLUE-ORANGE vMEME harmonic of ‘scientific rationalism’ seemed to have religion on the run in the Western world.

More recently that ‘progress’ seems to have been set back by the rise of Post-Modernism and the increasing influence of GREEN. This vMEME, of course, treats all ideas as being of equal worth - providing ideas don’t undermine the equality and worth of others. Thus, racism is out but pluralism is in. GREEN doesn’t get on too well with the traditional PURPLE-BLUE religions since their prescriptiveness ‘limits the human spirit’, tends to discriminate on grounds of such factors as gender and sexuality and often promotes status hierarchies. However, GREEN is quite happy to pull ideas from the traditional religions and incorporate them into the wooliness of some PURPLE-GREEN ‘New Age’ ‘spirituality’.

GREEN has effectively started to rehabilitate the concept of the supernatural in the Western world. You’re no longer automatically brain dead if you believe in some kind of divine being and/or would like to go to Heaven in the ‘afterlife’.

Given the RED and ORANGE drivers behind commercialism, it should be no surprise that corporations have started putting spiritual concepts into whatever it is they could sell. Ashes to Ashes helps to sell the TV licence fee to an increasingly-truculent viewing audience in the UK. Lost sells advertising - reputedly $900,000 for 30 seconds during its finale.

So, RED and ORANGE, in the space created by GREEN’s egalitarianism, are plundering traditional religious ideas, to manipulate PURPLE’s need for mysticism-as-explanation. Because Ashes to Ashes and Lost have been such hugely successful TV shows and continually stretched the science fiction element so that it eventually mutated into outright fantasy, they became near-perfect vehicles in the 21st Century for promoting GREEN’s take on PURPLE-BLUE traditions to millions.

It would have been interesting to have done a Fox News poll a week prior to the 2 finales and then followed it up a week later to see if there had been a general increase in ‘belief’.

What’s happened to science?
So where is science in all this?

The contemporary version of science (at least, in the West) is largely derived from the application of a strictly BLUE methodology by ORANGE’s meme of progress/technological advancement. Science claims to be objective, to be founded on empiricism. In other words, where’s the evidence? If a claim can’t be supported by the weight of empirical evidence, then it can’t be considered ‘scientific’. Let’s face it: it’s much easier for a rational thinker to trust a claim if the weight of evidence supports it, rather than simply believe something because a logical argument leads to such a conclusion - the philosophical approach. History is littered with logical conclusions which have been overturned by empirical evidence. Perhaps the most famous overturned piece of logic was the belief that the earth was flat which only started to be effectively undermined around 330 BC when Aristotle provided observational evidence for the earth being spherical.

But, of course, science is limited by its own paradigms. If it doesn’t have the means to investigate something - such as whether there is something called ‘God’ - then it has nothing to say about the subject other than claims that God exists are not ‘scientific’.

How then are we to make sense of those things such as religious/supernatural/paranormal experiences if science can’t explain them? In the vacuum of a scientific explanation, BLUE thinking will attempt the rational, logical  route. PURPLE is more likely to accept a religious/spiritual/paranormal explanation. (It really requires 2nd Tier thinking to accept paradoxes and to live with the uncertainty of not knowing.)

So, in its quest for the equality of all non-toxic ideas, GREEN has made PURPLE’s love of mysticism equal to the PURPLE-BLUE structures of organised religion and the BLUE-ORANGE rational-materialism of science…while GREEN itself has fostered new forms of PURPLE-GREEN (New Age) mysticism. RED and ORANGE have then used such ideas - eg: purgatory, but not quite as a Roman Catholic theologian would know it - to make money via the likes of Ashes to Ashes and Lost.

To some extent the scientific establishment limit the credibility of scientific endeavour in the eyes of a multi-vMEME public by demonstrating bias in terms of what is accepted within ‘scientific circles’. Thus, Maslow’s Hierarchy, the most widely-used psychological model outside of academia – in business, social work, education, etc – is increasingly junked in revised academic curriculums because Maslow didn’t use the ‘scientific method’ in the approved manner. Numerous attempts to dump Sigmund Freud’s grand Psychoanalytic Theory have only been prevented by the sheer ongoing importance of Freud’s work and the advocacy of neuroscientists like Mark Solms (2000) that, based on empirical evidence, there does seem to be a biological basis for at least some core elements of Freudian theory.

Paul Feyeraband (1975) was an early commentator on the bias in the acceptance of work in scientific circles, stating that who-shouts-loudest was often more important than the quality of their research.

Jon & Juliana Freeman’s 2008 book, ‘God’s Ecology & The Dawkins Challenge’,  does a great job of debunking objectivity in so-called scientism. As an example of bias, they cite the work of Cleve  Backster. By using a polygraph measuring galvanic skin resistance in their leaves, Backster  demonstrated repeatedly that plants seemed to  be sentient in response to various environmental stimuli. In spite of Peter Tompkins & Christopher Bird (1973) drawing attention to Backster’s  work, it has been resolutely ignored by the scientific establishment at large.

So there are deep and serious issues in what it is claimed science actually is and how it works. While the disservice done to Backster’s work is relatively unknown, more public controversies over scientific claims (such as the exposure earlier this year that Phil Jones at the University of East Anglia covered up flaws in data on climate change) do huge damage to science’s claim to be based only on empirical evidence.

If the credibility of science is undermined by the scientists themselves, then this only serves to support GREEN’s position that science is no more important than mysticism.

Interestingly, Jon Freeman is positioning himself to propose a 2nd Tier view of what science is, with ‘God’s Ecology’ being the first step in that process. It will be more than a little interesting to see how this approach develops because he, like Ken Wilber (2000), sees no dichotomy between science and spirituality,

Gender differences in belief in the paranormal.
Before concluding this Blog, it’s perhaps important to note that, when you break down some of the figures I quoted earlier, some interesting gender differences can be noted.

Eg: the Fox News survey found that  women are more likely than men to believe in almost all topics asked about in the poll, including 12% more likely to believe in miracles and 8%  more likely to believe in heaven. The one significant exception is 39% of men accepting the existence of UFOs, compared to only 30% of women.  The notion of a significant gender difference on these issues is supported by the Blackmore study I referenced which found that 70% of her female respondents believed in the paranormal but only 48% of males.

I’ve often heard it said by believers that women are more ‘sensitive’. Could there be a more scientific/psychological explanation for this?

Stuart Vyse (1997) attributes such gender differences to locus of control. People with a high internal locus of control believe that events result primarily from their own behaviour and actions. Those with a high external locus of control believe that powerful others, fate or chance primarily determine events.

Vyse states that in childhood and early adolescence boys and girls do not differ much in locus of control; but in college and late adolescence onwards women begin to display a greater external locus of control than men and, thus, are more susceptible to superstitious and paranormal belief.

Jullian B Rotter (1966), who developed the locus of control concept, had some evidence that the tendency to display more or less of an internal or external locus was innate. If such a tendency can be categorised as a personality trait, then it can be linked to one of Hans Eysenck’s Dimensions of Temperament (1967, 1976). The dimension which most reflects gender differences is Psychoticism - attributed in great part to the male sex hormone, testosterone. At the high (male) end, someone high in Psychotocism would be impulsive, compulsive and assertive of their own needs and desires. At the low (female) end, sometimes referred to as Impulse Control, people can be indecisive and servile to the point of abasement. Thus, we can say someone high in Psychoticism (male) is likely to display a strong internal locus of control while someone low in Psychocticism (female) is likely to display a strong external locus.

Such an explanation may go a long way towards explaining gender differences in belief in the paranormal; but it’s important to note that not all men are loaded to the gills with testosterone and are, therefore, highly psychoticist; nor are all women very low in testosterone. So there may be many variations in biological predications to an internal or external locus - but then not all women are believers in the paranormal and not all men are skeptics.

Then there is the role of socialisation which undoubtedly contributes to the development of an individual’s tendency to locus of control but has been used also to explain gender differences concerning the extent of paranormal beliefs.  Angela Phillips (1995) has drawn attention to the way boys are raised to find and express themselves by standing alone, appearing strong, being independent and proving themselves through competition (supporting an internal locus). By contrast, girls are encouraged to develop relationships and gain affiliative skills (external locus). According to Phillips, girls spend hours practising emotional skills while boys expend their energies on mastering physical ‘doing’ skills. Lynn Schofield Clark (2005) is just one researcher who has noted the degree of effect of popular culture on teenagers. She particularly correlates New Age beliefs and being a female teenager.

Here we may also have to consider a vMEMETIC influence. Jenny Wade  (1996) has put forward the view that there is a masculine (hot colours preference) and feminine (cool colours preference) in the way people ascend the Spiral, peaking with males mostly missing out GREEN on their way to 2nd Tier and females mostly missing out ORANGE. This might tie in with the locus of control/Psychoticism approach to how males and females view the world and it would fit with Vyse’s observation that females show much more of an external locus than men from the late teens on - as you would not normally expect ORANGE and GREEN to be strong in the selfplex, if present at all, until at least mid-teens.

(However, it does need to be said that Wade has yet to put forward substantive evidence for her assertions while Don Beck has expressed some strong reservations about the idea some men don’t really have GREEN and some women don’t really experience ORANGE.)

To return to the original premise of this Blog, maybe, when I wrote earlier that “it would have been interesting to have done a Fox News poll a week prior to the 2 finales and then followed it up a week later to see if there had been a general increase in ‘belief’,” such a poll should have also looked for gender differences…?

‘Liberal Conservatives’: new politics?

 Afghanistan, community, government, heroes and inspirational figures, Psychology, schemas & memes, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  2 Responses »
May 142010
 

The first day of the Tory/Lib Dem coalition we had Nick & Dave: the Love-In in the Rose Garden which more than a few commentators likened to a wedding, such was the bonhomie and adoring gazes between the principals. Yesterday we had Vince Cable, the Lib Dems’ voice of sensible moderation, and William Hague, the conservative of the Conservatives, sharing the walk along Downing Street to David Cameron’s first cabinet meeting. Not to mention the bizarre spectacle of Lib Dem anti-nuclear spokesperson Chris Huhne taking charge of implementing the Tories’ plans to build more nuclear power stations! Today, of course, Cameron’s at war with a number of his own backbenchers over the intention to fix the level at which Parliament can be dissolved prematurely at a vote of 55% of the House of Commons (up from a simple majority of 51% and making it that much more to get rid of them). At least the Lib Dems are only being berated for this ‘stitch up’ by members of another party (Labour)!

Undoubtedly the week since the general election results were declared has been one of the most interesting in modern British politics!

The 55% no-confidence level stitch-up is, in fact, a key plank in the Tory/Lib-Dem agreement which, theoretically, ties the 2 parties to each other for the to-be-fixed 5-year life of this Parliament. This straightjacket, it is claimed, will give us the stable government we clearly need to steady the markets and to start to tackle the huge problems Britain faces.

But the story of this historic coalition – the first since the Second World War and the first time Liberals have had seats in a non-wartime cabinet since 1922 – may be in trouble even before it has begun. Not only are there very noisy grumblings about the ‘unconstitutional’ 55% but grassroots Lib-Dem activists are mounting a campaign to force Nick Clegg to put the coalition agreement to a full vote of the party membership. Meanwhile a number of Tory MPs have said they will campaign outrightly against the Lib-Dem-driven proposal for electoral reform once the legislation for the referendum is pushed through.

A number of seasoned political commentators are also far from convinced. Eg: the venerable Max Hastings, writing in the Daily Mail (12 May), says: “Nick Clegg has climbed into bed with the Tories, whom most of his supporters hate, for a political price that is more than a pittance, but scarcely worth the price of their souls. More than a few Tories, in their turn, are dismayed that David Cameron has made a deal with a party of hookers.” He goes on to describe the coalition as: “…a pantomime horse doomed to fail”.

Of course, putting together a government from parties, which have been staunch rivals since the Victorian times when William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli used to square up to each other across the dispatch box, is going to be problematic. Not least because these 2 historical political giants still infect their respective parties with their memes.

While economically Cameron might be Margaret Thatcher’s grandchild, his emphasis on social responsibility and talk of society’s obligations to the underprivileged and disadvantaged show clear strands of Disraeli’s political DNA surviving and replicating through generations of Tories to infect his thinking. As for the Lib-Dems, while they might in title be Liberal Democrats and have a touch of the centre-left about them, at heart the likes of Simon Hughes embody old Gladstonian Liberalism.

But some would declare us now to be in a post-ideological age where stolid pragmatism is more important than unthinking devotion to principle. Perhaps it was that kind of thinking that led the Lib Dems to leak that Monday’s (doomed) flirtation with Gordon Brown and Labour (far more, it was previously thought, their natural allies) was just going through the motions, to appease the party activists, and that the object of desire all along had really been the Tories?!?!? Maybe it was similar values that led David in the Rose Garden to declare that a minority Tory government, negotiating policy by policy support with the Lib Dems, just wasn’t inspiring; he just had to have a full-on relationship with the man he had only a couple of weeks before, as one reporter reminisced, referred to as a ‘joke’?!?!?

If pragmatism does have the upper hand over principle, then maybe…just maybe…the coalition does have a chance of succeeding. In which case, Clegg’s fine words about a “new kind of politics” might not turn out to be just so much hot air.

As for Cameron, he is reputedly talking about the ‘Liberal Conservatives’?!?!?

Some overlap of values?
On the face of it David Cameron appears to be dominated in his thinking by the ORANGE vMEME. He is concerned with progress, achievement and wealth. In these respects, he is very much Thatcher’s grandchild. Beneath this is a solid BLUE desire for order, stability, duty and conservatism (small ‘c’). Thus, his natural approach to the fiscal deficit is to cut, cut and cut public spending while looking for opportunities to liberate wealth-generating entrepreneurism.

Yet there is also a touch of GREEN liberalism in Cameron’s thinking. (Goodness, he’s even on record as supporting civil partnerships for gay and lesbian couples!) And it’s the work of the GREEN in his selfplex which enables Cameron to at least understand where the Liberals are coming from.

As for Nick Clegg, his near-naked ambition shows strong ORANGE at work beneath the publicly-voiced GREEN-derived mantras of the Lib Dems. Ostensibly, Clegg’s ORANGE ambition pulls him down from GREEN ideals to do the ‘dirty deal’ with Cameron which has so unnerved many Lib-Dem activists.

It’s interesting, looking at the footage of him and Cameron on the steps of 10 Downing Street and in the Rose Garden, how alike they seem. The same age, similar youthful good looks, slim, modern haircuts, sharp suits…they could almost be peas from the same proverbial pod.

If they can get on on a personal level and they can use each other for mutual progress, there is every possibility the core of the coalition will work – and the ruthlessness and cunning of ORANGE will enable Cameron to outwit the rigid BLUE of the Tory naysayers while Clegg undermines the lofty principles of GREEN-led Lib Dems simply by being in government, having a highly-visible profile and gaining credibility with the electorate.

Of course, there is a real risk of divisions in the ranks being driven and/or manipulated into real splits, with one or both parties splintering in the stress of being in a coalition with those they had previously despised – and that’s probably a higher risk for the Lib Dems. However, a real partnership between Cameron and Clegg, even if one of mutual use, should, theoretically, work. And, if the partnership works, without the parties splintering under the pressures of coalition, then maybe we really are into “a new kind of politics”.

2nd Tier thinking
After the Regent’s College summit last June, when we started putting together the Centre for Human Emergence UK, there was some considerable debate amongst the core team, as to how we might engage with politicians in developing ideas for the regeneration of British identity and culture. By and large the consensus was that the Lib Dems – at least, as a party – were most likely to be receptive to the kinds of ideas we were beginning to formulate.

The reason for this perception, partly drawn from portrayal in the media and partly from the direct experience of some of us in meetings with Lib Dem politicians, was that GREEN was so strongly dominant in much of the party’s collective selfplex, compared to the BLUE and ORANGE vMEMES driving the Tories and BLUE and GREEN motivating Labour. (These vMEMETIC ascriptions are, of course, huge generalisations about the 3 parties.)

If we were to find 2nd Tier thinking – or at least a readiness to move to 2nd Tier thinking – we thought we would be much more likely to find it amongst the Lib Dems.

So, a year later, with the Lib Dems forming a minority element in the new government, how does that perception stand?

Well, there was little in the Lib Dem election manifesto to indicate that the primary vMEME driving their thinking was anything other than GREEN. (Which doesn’t mean other vMEMES didn’t exert their influence – just that the overriding impression is one of it being a GREEN-led agenda.)

Since GREEN, in its desire to bring about fairness and equality, can actually become unrealistic in its expecations, the Tories’ BLUE and ORANGE demands on their policies being adopted by the coalition in areas such as immigration, defence and fiscal management is probably no bad thing. The Tories’ insistence on no joining the euro for the life of this Parliament is also no bad thing, given the mess the Eurozone is in – but longer term that may need to be reviewed, both from a pragmatic as well as an ideological angle.

The coalition programme, from what we know of it so far, can almost certainly be described as coming primarily from BLUE and ORANGE, with some GREEN initiatives. So it’s not the strong GREEN-derived  programme a pure Lib Dem government might have attempted to implement – but then it’s also without the worst excesses a strongly GREEN agenda might have contained.

So far, at least, there seems little on offer for people whose values come primarily from the PURPLE and RED vMEMES lower down the Spiral. As all too often in modern British politics, their needs get ignored by the political cognoscenti, making them easy prey for the likes of the British National Party. Hopefully, the Tories proposed cap on non-EU immigration might help those people feel they are not totally ignored by the political mainstream.

This disconnection with communities dominated by PURPLE and RED thinking – particularly the traditional white working class – is just one reason why programmes produced by BLUE and ORANGE and even GREEN are not enough in themselves. It requires full 2nd Tier thinking to perceive the full range of needs and desires on the Spiral.

So we’re back to the question: where is the 2nd Tier thinking in our leadership?

The effects of dissonance
Between 9/11 and the build-up to Iraq, I thought I detected an amount of 2nd Tier thinking in Tony Blair. The way he courted Muslim leaders in the wake of 9/11, using Qur’anic text and Islamic concepts to persuade them to at least not oppose the American invasion of Afghanistan seemed to me to display the remarkable ability to work with people in terms of their own values. Then came the blind alliance with George W Bush and the blunders people are still paying for with their lives in both Afghanistan and Iraq. After that, Blair was always ‘damaged goods’.

Yet no other 21st Century Western leader has impressed me with that quality of thinking. Even Barrack Obama, for all his initial promise, now seems bogged down and uninspired.

David Cameron certainly doesn’t impress me he’s got that kind of vision. At least not yet. Nor does Nick Clegg. Vince Cable maybe. Certainly the man is a treasure for his erudite wisdom and seemingly-unflappable composure – but he’s yet to master projecting himself as a charismatic figure in the mass media. William Hague is even worse at handling the media; though, years after fluffing his go at leading the Tories, he is at last starting to be recognised for his incisive judgements.

So what hope of 2nd Tier thinking in our new government?

Ironically it may actually be the stresses and strains of coalition – the very same pressures that lead commentators like Max Hastings to declare the coalition doomed – that make the difference.

Don Beck & Chris Cowan (1996) identified dissonance as being a critical component in any process of change. And dissonance there will certainly be as the 2 coalition partners try to come to terms with people and policies they have publicly despised until now. So this key to change will certainly be in abundance.

The actual triggers for neural change, which would enable Cameron, Clegg and their colleagues to self-actualise into 2nd Tier thinking may actually come about via the incredible surfeit of ideas – memes – involved in the huge internal and external dissonance which will beset the coalition. Susan Blackmore (1999) hypothesised that it is was memes – the sheer scale of ideas – early hominoids were dealing with which led to the development of the human ‘big brain’. So could it be that it is the sheer scale of the problems they face which will force the thinking of Cameron, Clegg, etc, up the Spiral…?

If so, are there any signs of the potential Beck & Cowan state is also necessary for progress up the Spiral?

Well, consider this from Clegg: “I hope this is the start of the new politics I have always believed in – diverse, plural, where politicians of different persuasions come together, overcome their differences in order to deliver good government for the sake of the whole country.”

It’s a good talk, isn’t? Let’s now hope they walk the walk!

Munir Hussain and the wrong messages of Judge John Reddihough

 community, crime, heroes and inspirational figures, mental health, morality, Psychology, schemas & memes, society, Spiral Dynamics  6 Responses »
Dec 162009
 

What has our Kingdom come to when a man and members of his family are tied up by knife-wielding masked intruders and threatened with death, some of the victims escape, get help, chase the perpetrators and beat up badly one of them, only to be jailed for excessive use of force…?!?!?

This is effectively what has happened to Munir Hussain and his brother Toker who were jailed this week for 30 months and 39 months respectively. Walid Salem, the intruder they caught, suffered such injuries (including, it is claimed, a permanent brain injury) in what  was clearly a sustained attack by the Hussains that he was considered unfit to be tried on a charge of unlawful imprisonment and was merely put on a supervision order. In sentencing the Hussain brothers, Judge John Reddihough described the assault on Salem by the Hussain brothers as “a dreadful, violent attack”.

It undoubtedly was. Among the implements the Hussains and 2 other neighbours used to beat Salem were a cricket bat and a metal pole, (Reportedly the cricket bat was used to strike Salem with such force that it broke in 3!)

“This case is a tragedy for you and your families,” the judge told Munir Hussain. “Sadly, I have no doubt that my public duty requires me to impose immediate prison sentences of some length upon you. This is in order to reflect the serious consequences of your violent acts and intent and to make it absolutely clear that, whatever the circumstances, persons cannot take the law into their own hands, or carry out revenge attacks upon a person who has offended them.”

If the judge feels required by the law to pass such sentences, then the law is the proverbial ass!

Reddihough may know his law books but I suspect he’s not that familiar with human psychology.

The psychological scenario
Munir Hussain and his family returned from worship at their mosque during Ramadan. Devout Muslims, they will have been part-fasting for several days so the chemical balances – blood sugars, hormones, neurotransmitters, etc, will have been at different levels than is their norm – thus making it more likely that the Hussains would respond to trauma in an abnormal or exaggerated way.

Whether a court of law should be able to take into account the psycho-physiological effects of religious observance is a moot point. But undoubtedly the abrupt withdrawal of food over a short period of time will have affected the Hussains’ state of mind.

In their house, the Hussains found 3 masked intruders waiting for them. They were tied up, with their hands behind their backs, and forced to crawl from room to room. They were threatened with death. Shaheen Begum, Mr Husssain’s wife, told the court she feared the intruders had killed her youngest son. She said: “They were hitting my husband. When I asked them to stop or looked up they started hitting him again. They told us to lie face down and not speak, or they would kill us. It was very terrifying.”

It is rare for people in such terrifying circumstances to think coolly and rationally as Judge John Reddihough and his ‘law’ seem to expect. In most people the amygdala, the emotional centre of the brain, will become highly aroused, causing the hypothalamus to trigger the mechanisms which flood the body with the ‘fight or flight’ hormones adrenaline and noradrenaline. Munir Hussain was geared to action and reaction, not logical thought. Psychiatrist Dr Philip Joseph told the court Munir was normally a calm man who kept himself under control; but, on this occasion, in what defending QC Michael Wolkind called “the extreme moment of stress”, his body took the ‘fight rather than flight’ option.

This intense physiological arousal led in part to Munir Hussain freeing himself and, with the help of his brother, turning the tables on the intruders. That they then gave chase to intruder Walid Salem and assaulted him viciously is hardly surprising. It’s why soliders will carry on slaughtering the enemy when the enemy are helpless or desperately trying to surrender. They are far too caught up in the moment – amygdalas aroused – to think rationally. Many commentators – eg: Peter Foote & David Wilson (1970) have commentated on this ‘beserker rage’, originally lionised in Viking lore but still featuring in frequent accounts of battle, including those of recent US Congressional Medal of Honour winners.

Of course, what the Hussain brothers did in the end to Salem cannot be condoned. But it should be understood.

There is another factor in this tragedy; and that is the role of the RED vMEME. Doubtless, RED was behind much of the no-consequences actions of Salem and his confederates. However, there is also strong evidence this vMEME contributed to a strong and possibly overwhelming psychological impetus on Munir Hussain’s emotions and actions. According to The Times (15/12/09), Munir is reported to have felt that he was letting down his wife and children in not being able to defend them from the criminal attack of Salem and his accomplices. RED will not take such shame lying down; rather it will seek to put right the wrong of his shame in not being able to protect his family. Not only does the dominance of the RED vMEME in Munir’s selfplex at that moment in time need to  be recognised but so do the cultural memes which will have been influencing him. In Munir’s Asian/Islamic tradition – just as it was not that long ago in the European/Christian traditions – men are supposed to look after and protect their women and children. By not protecting them or being unable to protect them, they lose both self-respect and status in their community.

Walid Salem, also a Muslim and presumably familiar with the effects of Ramadan, chose to invade Munir Hussain’s house, tie up Munir and his family and subject them to death threats and other abuses. It can be argued that actions of Salem and his confederates precipitated the extreme arousal of Munir Hussain’s amygdala and the stimulation of his RED vMEME. As he was in a period of religious observance, it would be reasonable to expect Munir Hussain’s selfplex to be dominated by the decidedly more deliberate BLUE vMEME. Due to the actions of Salem and his cronies, different vMEMES were at play.

Thus, while Munir Hussain’s assault on Salem cannot be condoned, it is understandable and to some degree predictable. Thus, it can be argued Walid Salem chose knowingly to put himself in harm’s way.

A different story
Many commentators are comparing the case to that of Tony Martin, the Norfolk farmer who, in 1999, shot dead a teenage hoodlum who had been breaking into his property and terrorising him repeatedly.

This comparison would seem to be not entirely fair. Martin’s ‘manslaughter’ of his tormentor, lying in wait with a pump action shotgun, was clearly premeditated whereas Munir Hussain’s assault on Walid Salem could be considered ‘hot pursuit’. According to early reporting of the trial in This is London (25/08/09), Salem was punched repeatedly in the face while one of his assailants demanded “Who sent you?”

It would seem that the attack on Munir and his family was not in any way random but was directed at them in a very personal way. Prosecuting QC John Prine told the court: “Whatever the motivation of the attack, it was something of a personal kind. It didn’t seem to have been done out of a desire to steal anything, rather that it was directed at the people who lived there.”

How additionally terrifying must that have been, knowing that it was you and your family specifically under attack and not knowing who was behind it! (It would appear Munir Hussain has made a powerful enemy somewhere but no evidence has come to light of him being involved in any shady dealings – business or personal. Indeed, he is regarded as a proverbial pillar of the local community and has been offered the personal support of Chief Inspector Colin Seaton of the Thames Valley Police.)

Returning to Tony Martin, it’s worth noting that his original conviction for murder was reduced to manslaughter on the grounds of suffering from Paranoid Personality Disorder – hardly surprising given the persistent abuse he had suffered! As Battered Wives Syndrome is a permissible defence for women who cold-bloodedly kill their husbands perhaps years after abusive crimes against their person, Martin’s appeal on the grounds of being in an abnormal mental state could hardly be refused.

But how can Munir Hussain’s case be compared when his assault was immediate upon a ‘very terrifying’ ordeal whereas Martin’s was cold-blooded after months of abuse? While a psychiatrist would need to confirm this, I would hazard that Munir Hussain’s assault on Salem was driven by the RED vMEME’s desire to eradicate his shame while in a state of high physiological arousal due to the life-threatening ordeal he and his family had been subjected to and the fear that they were being targeted deliberately and personally to be harmed.

The failure of the criminal justice system
Judge John Reddihough’s words appear rather mealy-mouthed when he says: “…if persons were permitted to … inflict their own instant and violent punishment on an apprehended offender rather than letting justice take its course, then the rule of law and our system of criminal justice, which are the hallmarks of a civilised society, would collapse.”

…er, excuse me: Salem gets 2 years of supervision in the community while Munir is sentenced to serve 30 months behind bars…?!?!? 

It’s fine to outlaw taking the law into your own hands if the police could be guaranteed to arrive within less than 5 minutes of an alarm being raised (thus eradicating the need for ‘hot pursuit’ by the victims) – they can’t! – and if the criminal justice system were seen to punish the criminals and compensate the victims. Unfortunately too many victims of crime are aware of police indifference to all but the most serious of crimes while the criminal justice system is in a state of near-continual reform because the last set of reforms didn’t work either!

What would today’s criminal justice system have to say if Salem and his accomplices had gone ahead with their threats and murdered Munir Hussain and his family? I doubt their shades would have been much impressed with 20 years less 10 for good behaviour. (That’s assuming, of course, that the police could have caught the murderers…!)

The kind of inverse logic of Reddihough’s court is one of the problems with cultural dominance by the GREEN vMEME which, in its drive for egalitarianism, would put the rights of the criminals on a par with the rights of the victims.

Not only is this anathema to PURPLE’s need for safety in the community and BLUE’s desire for simple black & white justice – Salem chose to commit a crime, Salem should be punished – but it goes against the 2nd Tier ‘big picture’ of what is beneficial to society.

Salem is a habitual crook, with 50 previous convictions against him, currently awaiting trial on a charge of credit card fraud. According to Razi Shah, one of Munir’s lawyers, this last crime was committed after Salem had received such supposedly debilitating injuries –  “On the one hand he was claiming that he was suffering from memory loss and brain damage and is not fit to stand trial, and on the other hand he was out committing more criminal offences — and obviously complex ones such as credit card fraud.” (Interview with National Post, 15/12/09.)

Munir Hussain is a former chairman of the Wycombe Race Equality Council; his company employs 9 other people in worthwhile esteem-enhancing occupations and generates around £2.4M taxable revenue. Now, because of Reddihough’s decision, 9 (presumably-)respectable citizens lose their jobs and may be reduced to claiming benefit while the Treasury loses the taxes to be collected from £2.4M…?!?!?

Just what kind of insane society are we living in where the just are convicted on a technicality of law and the lawbreakers get off with unmanageable supervision orders..? (How many probation officers and social workers do we have spare to follow up on this kind of nonsense…? Clearly not enough since Salem went on to commit further crime!)

Of course, Munir Hussain can’t be allowed to walk free with his head held high. But the degree of his crime should be assessed in proportion to the provocation to which he was subjected, the degree of fear he was experiencing and the consequent state of mind he was in.

As for Reddihough’s awarding of criminal convictions, let’s just hope that Salem and the legal leeches who support him don’t decide to bankrupt the Hussain brothers with claims for compensation!

Insanity mustn’t rule!
For the benefit of law-abiding citizens, the law of self-defence needs broadening. If someone chooses to put themselves in harm’s way by breaking into your house and threatening you with death, then they clearly are the stimulus for the consequences that follow.

Of course, the Hussain brothers went too far; but it was Salem’s choice to put himself in harm’s way. Of course, the Hussain brothers need to be told they did wrong; but, if Munir’s amygdala hadn’t got so aroused that he fought his way free and, with his brother’s help, turned the tables on the intruders, he and his family might now be dead.

It’s absurd for people to be refrained in defending themselves in clear and obvious life-threatening situations because they’re worried they’ll go too far. They need that amygdallic panic energy to get themselves out of the situation…and, if the criminals come off badly out of that situation, well, the criminals shouldn’t have created the situation in the first place!

Of course, householders can’t be given a charter to do whatever they like to intruders – otherwise we really would end up with the occasional burglar being maimed, tortured and/or murdered in a quite callous and cold-blooded way.

But it’s not unreasonable to allow someone to defend their family and their home…and, if your amgydala is so aroused, you go too far…. Well, the French have long recognised the concept of ‘crime passionnel’ and many American courts have waived judgment on the grounds of ‘temporary insanity’.

That, to me, would be a fair judgment on the Hussain brothers: they were in a temporarily insane state due to extreme, life-threatening provocation, terrifying abuse and fear of an unknown enemy. And, as their victim deliberately caused that provocation and was party to that abuse, he should have no recourse in either criminal or civil law.

It’s in the public interest that the Hussain brothers should have a conviction for criminal assault. It sends out a clear message: push these guys way, way too far and you might get a beserker response. (Probably some 80% of the male population would respond similarly and, if their immediate family was threatened, around 50% of females.) Who but the stupid and the criminal would want to push them that far, anyway? Treat them with respect and dignity in a fair and equitable way and you will most likely find them fine citizens and good people to do business with.

What’s not in the public interest is to send to prison a wealth-generating pillar of local society for gross but single overreaction to extreme provocation and ongoing fear – that sentence destroying his business and the livelihoods of his workers. What’s not in the public interest is to set free a habitual criminal who then goes on to commit other crimes. What’s not in the public interest is to send a message to householders throughout our Kingdom that they must pause and think coolly when confronted with extreme danger to themselves and their families.

It’s to be hoped that the court of appeal has a bigger picture view of the law that Judge John Reddihough who appears to have been dominated by his BLUE vMEME’s absolutist views on rigid application of the law. The Hussain brothers should have their sentences suspended on condition of good behaviour. As for Walid Salem, perhaps the court will subject his claims to brain injury to a much more rigid scrutiny when considering his prosecution for credit card fraud. The police should also seek medical authority to haul Salem in and carry out a proper investigation into the attack on Munir Hussain’s home.

Should the BNP appear on the Beeb?

 community, cross-cultural, Neurological Levels, Psychology, racism, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  13 Responses »
Sep 062009
 

There are few things guaranteed to get the knickers of the British ‘chattering classes’ in a twist more than the British National Party (BNP). It’s bad enough that they exist at all – that they are gaining significantly in electoral support in 21st Century Britain is simply unbelievable!

And now the BBC are considering having them on ‘Question Time’…how utterly disgraceful!!

People who vote BNP are clearly small-minded, uneducated, unthinking and immoral racists.

It’s a harmonic of the BLUE and GREEN vMEMES which condemns the BNP and which condemns those who vote for them. It’s a variant harmonic of these vMEMES which has led the Equality & Human Rights Commission (EHRC) to take the BNP to court on the charge that the latter’s constitution is discriminatory as it does not allow membership to those of a non-white ethnicity. And it’s another variant harmonic of these vMEMES which has drawn up the forthcoming Equality Bill 2009.

The problem with these approaches is that, rather than understand what it is about the BNP that gains support from substantial numbers of people, they attempt to suppress the BNP. However, Nick Griffin and the top echelon of the BNP are smart characters. They have got a 7-week adjournment on the EHRC case; and Griffin is making it clear the BNP has to adapt, to find ways of complying with the inevitable tighter legal restrictions. In how ever the BNP changes, though, Griffin has made it clear they are not going to compromise their “core principles”.

We can legislate to make it more difficult for the BNP to do what they do; but that is not going to undermine their support. It may even increase it, as what they portray as ‘persecution of true Britons’ may well strengthen their sense of solidarity as a persecuted minority. By making out that they are being persecuted unjustly, the BNP are likely to draw in those who may be only slightly sympathetic to their stance on race and repatriation but will rally to their cause because of the perceived injustices. (From Griffin’s statement on the EHRC case, it would appear this is at least one route the BNP are going to go down.)

The problem is you can legislate against discrimination – speech and behaviour based on prejudice – but you can’t legislate against prejudice (biases) because people’s thoughts are their own private experience.

Is racism natural?
That’s the question one of my A-Level Psychology students asked me when the class was discussing Henri Tajfel & John Turner’s Social Identity Theory (1979) in relation to Prejudice & Discrimination. (See also: Is Racism Natural…?)

Tajfel (1970) showed that, as soon as you categorise people, they invest themselves in the identity and well-being of the group of people with whom they have been categorised, aborbing its values and norms. Because their selfplex – their sense of who they are – is tied up with that group, they need their in-group to be at least safe from and preferably superior to the out-group(s). What drives this investment in the in-group is the PURPLE vMEME’s need to find safety in belonging.

PURPLE needs to know how to identify which tribe it belongs to and who “is not of our tribe” – using markers such as nationality (English vs Scots), names (Singh vs Kahn), football scarves (Millwall vs West Ham), religion (Protestant vs Catholic) and, of course, colour of skin (black vs white).

So it’s not racism per se which is the problem, it’s PURPLE’s need to discriminate between members of the tribe and those who are not members of its tribe. And this is why ‘education’ is only partly successful in persuading people to turn away from the BNP. It’s not so much a ‘skills & knowledge thing’; it’s a ‘values & beliefs thing’. As Robert Dilts (1990) showed with his Neurological Levels model, Identity and Values & Beliefs influence Behaviour far more than Skills & Knowledge. You can tell me all you want about how unfair and evil racism is [knowledge]; but, when I hear about the ‘other tribe’ getting the few jobs going or getting better handouts, then what’s important to me is the survival of my tribe [values].

As Marilynn Brewer & Donald Campbell (1976) demonstrated, competition for essential resources will significantly increase hostility towards out-groups – effectively the formation of a BEIGE/PURPLE survival-of-the-tribe harmonic. Last year the more forward-thinking commentators did predict a rise in racial tension and support for the BNP as the recession bit. Where are the BNP at their strongest? In the towns and cities of the Midlands and the North of England where there are large immigrant communities and the decline of the traditional manufacturing industries has already resulted in high unemployment amongst unskilled and semi-skilled young males all full of testosterone and only too ready to defend their ‘turf’ against the out-group. All it needs is a RED-driven leader (Griffin) with a slight sheen of BLUE patriotism, telling people they are doing the right thing in defending ‘our turf’ to exploit that frustrated in-group angst and we have the kind of problem the BNP are facilitating.

A superordinate identity and common values are needed
Way back in 1954, in their famous Robbers Cave study, Muzafer Sherif et al(1961) showed that groups conflicted by identity and competition could be brought together if they needed each other to address common goals. Andrew Tyerman & Christopher Spencer (1983) found that shared goals and values actually made inter-group conflict more difficult to create in the first place.

Samuel Gaertner et al propose, in their Common In-Group Identity Model (1993), that it is possible to bring together conflicted groups by creating a common identity to fight a common out-group. Eg: English and Scots become Britons to fight Germans. Eg: Sunnis and Shi’ites become Muslims to defend Islam against Christians. PURPLE can expand to include all within a ‘super tribe’ to defend shared values. However, learning from Sherif et al and Tyerman & Spencer, it needn’t always be explicit threats that lead us to unite; but aspirations and opportunities can also lead us to a sense of common identity in a super tribe. Eg: Britons and Germans become Europeans in the pursuit of greater wealth for all their peoples.

GREEN’s fallacy is to assume that we can all be the same. We can’t. We have different traditions, norms and values. And even within each tribe, there are vastly different temperaments and intelligences.

What’s needed is not a top-down BLUE/GREEN suppression of organisations like the BNP and their riotous close cousins, the English Defence League – though carefully-considered legislation can place useful restrictions on the out-and-out extremists and education has a role too – eg: unrestrained Fascism led to the Holocaust.

What’s really needed is a bottom-up building of confidence and respect between the tribes, based on common needs, goals and aspirations, whilst acknowledging difference.

If it serves my purpose, I may even come to gain value from the difference. 50 years on from the first waves of immigration, millions of Britons, whose grandparents would have considered Asians and West Indians inferior species, eat in Indian and Jamaican restaurants because they enjoy the food so much. Racism died in part at least on the football terraces because so many good black footballers came through from the 80s on – after all, what white football fan is going to throw racial abuse at the black footballer who scores goals for his team? (Of course, as Spiral Dynamics clearly demonstrates, values are all too often contextual. The white football fan who praises his team’s black goal scorer, may still vote BNP when he’s made redundant and the BNP tell him the government is forcing employers to take on more black workers.)

When it comes down to it, most members of most tribes want decent jobs with reasonable wages, good schooling for their children, freedom from the fear of crime, effective healthcare, etc, etc. So there are a large number of self-evident shared needs, goals and aspirations. What is needed is the belief that it is by working together, rather than fighting each other, that those needs, goals and aspirations can be achieved. Eg: unite to put pressure on the local health authority to improve maternity facilities. Eg: unite to set up neighbourhood watch schemes. Etc.

Ideally, this bringing together of the tribes should be structured as a MeshWORK, using 4Q/8L, to ensure that all the issues relevant to a locality are tackled together in a concerted way. This should enable all relevant points to be covered in a transparent manner, thus catching those half-hidden things that are often overlooked but emerge later to cause immense amounts of trouble.

Of course, there may not be enough dissonance in such a process to bring the out-and-out extremists to the point of change – especially if they are high in Psychoticism (as some of them do indeed appear to be); but, if the more moderately-minded come to trust the process, then it leaves only the true hardcore, still dangerous possibly but isolated and without any real powerbase any longer.

So should be BNP appear on ‘Question Time’?
The arguments will run from Margaret Thatcher’s ‘starve them of the oxygen of publicity’ stance – which led, in the 1980s, to the ridiculous situation of silhouetted actors reading out paraphrases of IRA statements – to the let-them-appear-in-all-their-full-nastiness-so-people-will-realise position.

In fact, it’s a tough one to call. When even China and Iran can’t keep news they would rather suppress from appearing all over the Internet, the ‘starve them of the oxygen of publicity’ stance clearly isn’t going to work. On the other hand, some people watching Nick Griffin on ‘Question Time’ will say to themselves: That guy makes a lot of sense – I’m going to vote BNP – because he’s appealed to their values.

In fact, it’s also a red herring. Think of when Tony Blair (1998) said: “Labour will be tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime.” We can be tough on the BNP but we also need to be tough on the causes of BNP – and that means understanding the very real needs, goals and aspirations that BNP voters have and finding ways of meeting those legitimately through cross-cultural, common identity means.

The Thatcherite Project is ended. Whither Britain?

 community, government, regeneration, society, Spiral Dynamics  11 Responses »
Jun 062009
 

As Gordon Brown sits in 10 Downing Street and contemplates the terrible drubbing the small turn-out of disillusioned voters inflicted on Labour in Thursday’s local elections – 273 Labour seats lost – while hoping desperately that yesterday’s emergency reshuffle of his Cabinet will at least temporarily stall the intra-Labour campaign to oust him and that Sunday’s European election results will not be as bad as predicted, there is one crumb of comfort for him in all this….

The Thatcherite project, which, with his roots in traditional Socialism, he must have hated, is at an end.

Margaret Thatcher’s philosophy of the pursuit of individual wealth in an unregulated market, with few or no social responsibilities, was an ethos driven by the ORANGE vMEME. And, for quite a time, that philosophy seemed vindicated. After being the ‘sick man of Europe’ in the 1970s, Britain once again become an economic powerhouse and a country of standing on the world stage, with Thatcher seen clearly to exert influence on those ‘leaders of the free world’, Ronald Reagan and the first George Bush. Thatcherism reached its Capitalist zenith in 1989 with the collapse of European Communism and even China starting to crawl towards a sort of market economy in the aftermath of Tiananmen.

But, behind this apparent ‘miracle’ lay a country torn asunder geographically, socially and economically. The new wealth, built on technology and financial services, was concentrated primarily in London and south-eastern England. Most of the traditional ‘heavy’ manufacturing industries in the Midlands, northern England, the Scottish Lowlands and South Wales were allowed to die in the face of competition in the emerging global market. Some, such as mining, were deliberately dismantled as a means to break the power of the trades unions which had so undermined the economic viability of much of British industry in the 1970s.

Many still argue that Thatcher had little choice if she was to enable Britain to be competitive in the embryonic globalisation. I’m not much of an economist to argue that point and I can see the rationale behind much of what she did. (Hey, she made so much sense to me in Spring 1979, I voted for her!) But the social costs of her policies were horrific. The traditional working class, as emerged in this country since the Industrial Revolution, was largely disoriented and, to some extent, disenfranchised by the results of her policies.

The dissolution of a social class
In Spiral Dynamics terms, the traditional working class in Britain was mostly dominated by the PURPLE vMEME. Some of the attributes of PURPLE are its attachment to the land and its demarcation of kinship roles by age and gender. Thus, the male ‘breadwinner’ of the house with his wife in the mother/housekeeper role, with parents (usually hers) in the next street who were there for support (from advice to babysitting). The work done by the males was largely unskilled and manual in nature – so not much need for formal education beyond the basics. (Though schools, as the place where the young of the community learned these basics, were often treated very respectfully.) These working class communities were often centred socially around the pub or the working men’s club which many of the males would visit most nights and take the wife to (as a treat) on either a Friday or Saturday night.)

The RED vMEME, as a cultural entity, was relatively low profile except clearly manifest in the corner shopkeepers, the union radicals, the ward councillors and political activists and other community leaders. However, the RED of most men took pride in being the breadwinner for their families.

For sure, this is an incomplete picture and a stereotype – but it’s a stereotype that largely held true for millions of working class families from the end of World War II through into the early 1980s.

Margaret Thatcher’s policies allowed such communities to be devastated. With the traditional heavy industries in terminal decline and mass unemployment of unskilled males by the late 1980s, the very notion of the working class as it had been was in question. The RED self-esteem of those former male breadwinners was trashed, leaving many of them with nothing but nihilistic self-destruction in booze, cheap drugs and gambling their redundancy money and benefits to obliterate their misery, hopelessness and sense of uselessness.  Small wonder that the small former mining town of Grimethorpe was the first place in Britain you could buy a bag of heroin for £5! Small wonder that male small-time crime and the black market for short-fix cash-in-hand jobs have mushroomed!

What was left of British industry – the new light techonology-driven businesses – by the end of the 1980s tended to prefer low-waged part-time female workers. This resulted in many women holding down 2 or 3 such jobs. Paradoxically such determined enterprise was the making of a number of their daughters who saw hard work and initiative at school as a potential way out of their dire circumstances. With the sons modelling their fathers’ sense of ‘no future’, it’s perhaps one partial explanation of why the daughters of such communities have tended to do better at school than their sons over the past 15-20 years.

The ‘Shameless’ TV programme gives us an exaggerated version of such dysfunctional communities and the way they survive in spite of what society has done to them. What many in the affluent middle classes in the South East may not have realised is how true much of ‘Shameless’ was – and in how much of the rest of the country there were/are Shameless-style estates

As a member of the HemsMESH team working in the former mining villages in South East Wakefield in 1999-2000, I still remember the palpable sense of hopelessness on the streets. Working on projects on Hull’s mammoth Bransholme estate in the early 2000s, I was amazed initially at the poor take-up of train-to-work schemes available in other parts of the city or the surrounding parts of East Yorkshire. Then I realised that, in their heads they were still fishermen or factory workers or manual labourers, their PURPLE keeping them trapped in their traditional identities stuck on home turf. There might have been low-paid government training schemes galore; but nobody was working with the identities and values of these people imprisoned in their own minds.

In the early years of Tony Blair’s government especially, when it seemed the opportunities for more wealth for the middle classes might actually be endless, this underbelly of the dysfunctional remains of the traditional working class was largely ignored. Yet these communities were often in real poverty. The former steel towns and mining villages of South Yorkshire and the deserted docklands of Liverpool actually met European Union Objective 1 criteria – which meant they were amongst the poorest places in the EU which was then obligated to help them financially. Hull would have met Objective 1 criteria but for the affluent East Yorkshire towns surrounding it; ditto poverty-stricken south Leeds but for the wealthy financiers in north Leeds.

I’m not sure I can argue with Thatcher’s policies economically; but she either didn’t anticipate the huge social misery her government’s actions would lead to…that or she simply didn’t care.

And now the middle classes are fallen
While the increasingly large middle classes grew ever more affluent, the successive governments of Thatcher, John Major and Blair could get away with making token gestures to help the remains of the working class communities devastated by the loss of the traditional heavy industries.

But the bankers and financiers who took what, in retrospect, were clearly ridiculous risks in the interests of personal gain – those incredible 6 and 7 figure salaries and even bigger bonuses! – were even more Thatcher’s children than the ‘Shameless generation’ trapped on sink council estates.

ORANGE, shorn of BLUE regulation and understanding little of GREEN’s concerns beyond making the odd token gesture towards environmental issues, pursued personal wealth ever more relentlessly, recklessly and ruthlessly. And they have brought Capitalism to its knees. Banks bust or sitting on huge amounts of public funds to prevent them going bust but not daring to lend. Businesses going into liquidation in truckloads. House prices collapsed. And fortunes wiped out in repeated stock market crashes – all those ‘little people’ Thatcher talked into buying shares now without their retirement ‘nest eggs’ or nothing to fall back on to pay the mortgage now the jobs are gone.

In terms of the amount of money involved, the MPs’ expenses scandal is relative peanuts – but, for so many, it symbolises the personal-wealth-regardless-of-cost ethos of the Thatcher legacy. And it provides a focus for the anger of the middle classes either becoming economically disenfranchised like their working class brethren or potentially faced with it.

Now, it’s too big for the government to gloss over with train-to-work or back-to-work schemes. It’s now no longer a small  but significant disoriented minority in poverty. Now the entire country faces poverty!

Gordon Brown’s government has cushioned the country from the worst so far by a phenomenal level of borrowing. When it seems no one has any real idea how to resolve the global financial crisis, clearly no one has any idea how this country will pay back what it now owes. Even with a relatively buoyant economy, it would take several generations to get the National Debt back to where it was when Blair stepped down from government.

It’s a principle long ago established by Abraham Maslow (1943) that, under pressure, thinking reduces in complexity to tackle lower-level needs.

Thus, under pressure, with the survival of the little you’ve got threatened, dysfunctional PURPLE forms a survival harmonic with BEIGE – and PURPLE’s dislike of those who are ‘not of our tribe’ turns ugly. It goes from a latent fear to active hatred. Thus, the increase in electoral support for the British National Party, with its near-explicit racism. But xenophobia is not exclusive to the working classes. As ORANGE’s personal wealth programme stalls or fails completely, BLUE springs up to form a harmonic with PURPLE against ‘Johnny Foreigner’. Thus, the United Kingdom Independence Party have been able to steal what should have been guaranteed votes for the Conservatives.

Expect more and more RED-led demagogues who will exploit PURPLE fears, feeding racism under the guise of nationalism. It’s in contexts like this that the extremes of politics – Fascism or Communism  - do well, as indeed do fundamentalist religions.

Whither Britain? – a call to intellectual arms
So Capitalism – or, at least, the unrestrained Thatcherite version of it – is finished. Bankers are now rated even more lowly than politicians, journalists and estate agents. The attack on Sir Fred Goodwin’s house earlier in the Spring was applauded by many. Don’t be too surprised if eventually a leading financier gets assassinated. An awfully lot of ‘little people’ have lost an awful lot of money due to the likes of Goodwin. Those with RED strong in their selfplex, particularly if they are of a Psychoticist temperament, will need someone to be avenged upon. (Of course, with the current media frenzy over expenses, it might well be a politician who cops for it!)

But what’s to replace Thatcherite Capitalism – and how will it work? No one seems to know. It appears we’re in uncharted waters.

And what happens to a debt-saddled Britain, with its disenfranchised poverty underbelly being added to every day, its economic rationale no longer viable and its leaders openly despised by a public increasingly ready to listen to the extremists? The bulk of our manufacturing industry was disappeared long ago and the replacement economic ‘fool’s gold’ of financial services has been shown to be just that.

Of course, the picture I have painted of our kingdom’s malaise is somewhat simplistic – what else could it be in such a short space? – but it does sum up a great deal of what we are faced with and how we were got into this awful mess.

So, what do we do? Whither Britain?

When the old ideas clearly aren’t going to work or are just going to make things worse, then it’s time for some, new fresh thinking.

Thankfully we have in London town 27-28 June 2009 Don Beck, one of the foremost experts in the world on large-scale societal change. A veteran and partial architect of the early 1990s changes in South Africa which led to the dismantling of Apartheid, Beck is currently working on a number of key  initiatives, not least the development of a Palestinian state sufficiently mature to  be a viable partner to Israel in the Middle East Peace Process. Along with a team of UK-based seasoned Spiral Dynamics practitioners (including myself), Don will seek to establish new opportunities for the UK at this critical juncture in our modern history, using some of the most advanced sociopsychological tools in the world.

Effectively this is a summit to find a way forward for our kingdom.

The 2-day sessions are open to anyone, regardless of their prior knowledge of Spiral Dynamics and sociopsychology tools. What matters most is that you care about our planet and about our country, for the future of our children and developing a viable culture in which wealth and responsibility are balanced in the interests of all.

I truly hope you will be motivated to be there. The more voices we have and the more commitment, the more likely we are going to be able to make a telling difference.

To find out more about this critical workshop programme, click www.spiralworld.net/html/don_beck_event.html

Don Beck’s got who at his workshop this weekend…?!?!?!

 American Foreign Policy, cross-cultural, NLP, Psychology, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  3 Responses »
Mar 062009
 

This weekend Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck has got Lt Colonel Fred Krawchuk attending and presenting at his workshop programme at the Integral Centre in Boulder, Colorado. WHAT?!?!?

This man is a killer! He’s been heavily involved in the ‘surge’ in Baghdad. There will be more than a few innocent men, women and children killed by his troops. And suspected insurgents summarily executed without a shred of evidence.

What the fuck is Don doing having this man presenting at his workshop?!?!? And, fercrisakes, what were all those supposedly-TURQUOISE Buddhist types at the Integral Center doing letting this mass murderer through their doors?!?!?!? Have they all gone mad? We’re supposed to be about building a better world, not endorsing the work of ruthless killers!

I tell you, my GREEN vMEME really went off on one!!

I was going to e-mail Don and tell him he was a disgrace! I was going to cancel my ticket to Don’s London workshop on 14 March. I was gonna…! I was gonna…!

 

And then, while seething, I caught sight of the Key Update notification on my home page of the Global feature, ‘Killing the Terrorists’. In that article I had advocated the ruthless extermination of terrorists whose peak BLUE made them closed to other, more reasonable points of view.

 

…er, hang on. I wrote an article advocating pretty much what Krawchuk had been trying to do??? Was that the same me having histrionics about this mass murderer presenting at Boulder?

 

Different vMEMES value different things

Well, yes, it was. And, when, I read it again, there isn’t anything I feel the need to change.

 

The me who advocated killing unreasonable and unmovable terrorists was the same me who got so offended by Beck having Krawchuk present at his workshop. Well, it sort of was the same me. But not quite the same me….

 

Put simply, the selfplex – your concept(s) of who you are – bends, twists and morphs according to which vMEMES dominate in your vMEME Stack in any one context. Thus, it was my GREEN which was indulging in histrionics over Krawchuk. However, I’d claim it was 2nd Tier thinking which was behind ‘Killing the Terrorists’. Research to date shows that 2nd Tier thinking will sacrifice a few for the good of all. Thus, I was in a state of outrage over Krawchuk; but, when authoring ‘Kill the Terrorists’, I was coolly aware of both the need to say that and the huge responsibility I was taking upon myself by saying it.

 

Having worked practically with Spiral Dynamics for over 10 years and researched intensely into how it fits into the broader world of the behavioural sciences for over 5, being an NLP Master Practitioner and having undergone all the self-examination that goes with that training, I thought I pretty much understood how human beings work – how I work! Getting to understand just how and why I had reacted so strongly to the news of Krawchuk’s involvement at Boulder has been an important learning for me. And once again it brings home to me to just how much vMEMES shape our current state.

 

Now I look at Don Beck’s blurb about Krawchuk with interest – that he “has been in our SDi series before. He played a major role in revealing the underlying  tribal structures and demonstrated how to relate to Shia and Sunni factions, as well as integrate the military with the civilian elements.” Krawchuk used Spiral Dynamics-rooted strategies in Baghdad…? Wow! I almost wish Krawchuk could be at London next weekend – and I’m certainly pleased Don intends including Krawchuk’s work in his briefings.

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