Democracy is good. Churchill in the House of Commons, 11 November 1947: It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government — except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
And before that on 8 December 1944: The ordinary man who keeps a wife and family, who goes off to fight for his country when it is in trouble, goes to the poll at the appropriate time, and puts his cross on the ballot paper showing the candidate he wishes to be elected to Parliament— he is the foundation of democracy. This man or woman should do this without fear and without any intimidation or victimization.
Democracy is good. The ultimate in democracy are referendums. So referendums are the ultimate good.
Are they?
In theory yes, in practice no. Everything under the sun has its conditions. Conditions to exist, and conditions to exist well. If I look at the Brexit-referendum and before that the Ukraine-referendum in the Netherlands, I see a fundamental weakness and a fundamental error.
The fundamental weakness was the lack of a sturdy, disciplined public debate. When that is not in parliament, where is it? In the newspapers, on radio and television, on the internet. The problem is that very few media are geared to non-partisan debate. Most media are either partisan or commercial and so geared to sales and not to debate. And how to make a debate so lively and so interesting that it is followed and echoed in homes and public places?
Somehow, politicians consider referendums not sexy, like elections or parliamentary debate. Also interesting how abstract and far were the arguments for against how lively and near were the arguments against.
The only solution I know that directly addresses this problem is the 'deliberative polling' (google that!), in a sense the return of ancient Athenian democracy. Representatives are drawn by lot, like in a jury. They get full access to interest groups and to expert opinion. And the deliberations are public. Anyway, talk shows are not enough, especially when politicians are lukewarm for a fight outside parliament.
The fundamental error is to submit foreign policy issues to a referendum. Imagine asking the workers in a factory to vote on sales strategy. They should vote on production matters, if anything. In referendums, people shouldn't vote on foreign issues but on domestic issues.
No one in his right mind would ever suggest to have the Home Office absorb the Foreign Office. Though once I heard a human resources manger advocate that sales should be under human resources, because both were about people.
Don't treat external matters as internal matters.
Referendums try to involve citizens in politics, as citizens have distanced themselves form politics in recent years - or rather: recent decades. Confidence in politics, politicians and political parties has diminished. But going to the ballot box on referendum day is attracting smaller crowds, not larger crowds. We can't blame people for that. We let them vote on complex issues, without committed champions with a compelling story on both sides of the issues.
When we want more direct democracy, we need not less, but better populism, as the Belgian David Van Reybrouck argues convincingly in, among others, Tegen Verkiezingen (against elections). It starts with preparing referendums better: stronger debate, about domestic issues.
Referendums are no escape for lazy politicians. They heat up politics. They should.
Tuesday, December 13, 2016
Friday, November 25, 2016
Prudence
Machiavelli, wondering about the difference between successful and failing republics, tried to find out what were the key success factors. He found two: Virtú and Fortuna, virtue and fortune. Virtue we might call today merits and fortune we would call luck or good-luck.
Whatever our qualities, our merits, our competence, we also need good-luck to be successful. At the very least we need not to have bad-luck. Some people maintain that good-luck can be fostered, even managed. I agree, up to a point. Robert Heinlein said: One man’s magic is another man’s engineering. So what others call luck, may be the result of effort.
We never have everything in hand, though our mental attitude and mental capacity may diminish the influence of randomness and improve our chances to get lucky. All this means that the more qualities we have, the less the role of luck. What qualities do we need?
In his Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius, Machiavelli analyses virtue. The main ingredient is prudence, also called practical wisdom, the power of common sense, practical and sound judgment.The second is discipline and the third is justice. Prudence, discipline and justice explain the phenomenal rise of Rome during several centuries. And growing imprudence, indulgence and injustice have brought its slow downfall. Interestingly, Machiavelli considers religion to be the most important determinant of discipline.
Discipline is out of fashion, self-indulgence is the fashion and so indignation with the indulgence of others: undisciplined indignation. Justice is still a powerful concept, though difficult to implement when discipline is weak and self-discipline seems almost a lost art. My guess is that indulgence is directly proportional to drug and alcohol consumption. This is not to mean that discipline and self-discipline can be increased by forcing down drugs and alcohol consumption. It is rather the other way round: more discipline and self-discipline will lead to less consumption.
But what about that key concept of Machiavelli - and for that matter Aristotle: prudence? According to the thesaurus, prudence is a quality that allows people to choose the sensible course. Prudent belongs to the same family as careful, meticulous, scrupulous, circumspect, cautious, discreet, and wary. Prudent implies the exercise of both caution and circumspection, suggesting careful management in economic and practical matters. We may subsume economic matters under practical matters. Therefore, prudence is also called practical wisdom.
Chaim Herzog, one of the pioneers of Israel, wrote about the wisdom of his father, the chief rabbi of Israel. Everybody sought him for his advice. Elsewhere he tells that his mother had to run the house and the family, because his father was no good in practical matters. What other matters are there?
A practical orientation does not conflict with an interest in the world of the mind. William James, who was more open-minded than any modern psychologist about religious, spiritual and parapsychological matters, was also the father of pragmatism. Nothing is as practical as a good theory, said Kurt Lewin, also one of my favorite authors. Which means, by the way, that impractical theories are bad theories.
Even in a supposedly practical field like management impracticality abounds. I remember reading the report of a well-known management consultancy firm. They found that the communication between the directors and between the directors and their underlings was unsatisfactory. So they proposed a 'communication development program,' that - surprise, surprise - they could offer. It seems practical, but it isn't. Communication is unsatisfactory for a reason. Or for many reasons. Maybe people were afraid of a coming merger; maybe people were afraid of each other; maybe the market or the technology had changed and they were lagging behind; maybe one of the directors was sleeping with the secretary of one of the other directors; maybe the directors were too old, too inexperienced, too stubborn or not smart enough. Maybe people belonged too different lodges or service clubs. Whatever the case, improving bad communication without finding out the reasons is as sensible as widening the doors of a shop that attracts not enough customers from the passers-by.
I think prudence always start with facing the facts, checking if these are the facts that need to be faced, if they are all the relevant facts. What are the practicalities? What is desirable, what is possible? What is the objective, what are the criteria, what are the options?
Can we teach prudence? Probably, but it won't be easy. Because imprudence is rooted in personal characteristics and limitations. People are surprisingly fact-resistant and not always solution-oriented. They even may prefer awful conditions they are used too; disasters that may strike others more than themselves; they may indulge in apocalyptic perspectives, they may be set on self-destruct.
The main condition is reality-orientation: seeing fantasies for what they are. A second condition is the ability to face uncertainty. A third condition is simply pride in good work, in right decisions, in solving problems - or better: avoid problems.
Politically, imprudence seems on the rise. It is often called populism. Poor people, they don't know what is in stock for them.
Whatever our qualities, our merits, our competence, we also need good-luck to be successful. At the very least we need not to have bad-luck. Some people maintain that good-luck can be fostered, even managed. I agree, up to a point. Robert Heinlein said: One man’s magic is another man’s engineering. So what others call luck, may be the result of effort.
We never have everything in hand, though our mental attitude and mental capacity may diminish the influence of randomness and improve our chances to get lucky. All this means that the more qualities we have, the less the role of luck. What qualities do we need?
In his Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius, Machiavelli analyses virtue. The main ingredient is prudence, also called practical wisdom, the power of common sense, practical and sound judgment.The second is discipline and the third is justice. Prudence, discipline and justice explain the phenomenal rise of Rome during several centuries. And growing imprudence, indulgence and injustice have brought its slow downfall. Interestingly, Machiavelli considers religion to be the most important determinant of discipline.
Discipline is out of fashion, self-indulgence is the fashion and so indignation with the indulgence of others: undisciplined indignation. Justice is still a powerful concept, though difficult to implement when discipline is weak and self-discipline seems almost a lost art. My guess is that indulgence is directly proportional to drug and alcohol consumption. This is not to mean that discipline and self-discipline can be increased by forcing down drugs and alcohol consumption. It is rather the other way round: more discipline and self-discipline will lead to less consumption.
But what about that key concept of Machiavelli - and for that matter Aristotle: prudence? According to the thesaurus, prudence is a quality that allows people to choose the sensible course. Prudent belongs to the same family as careful, meticulous, scrupulous, circumspect, cautious, discreet, and wary. Prudent implies the exercise of both caution and circumspection, suggesting careful management in economic and practical matters. We may subsume economic matters under practical matters. Therefore, prudence is also called practical wisdom.
Chaim Herzog, one of the pioneers of Israel, wrote about the wisdom of his father, the chief rabbi of Israel. Everybody sought him for his advice. Elsewhere he tells that his mother had to run the house and the family, because his father was no good in practical matters. What other matters are there?
A practical orientation does not conflict with an interest in the world of the mind. William James, who was more open-minded than any modern psychologist about religious, spiritual and parapsychological matters, was also the father of pragmatism. Nothing is as practical as a good theory, said Kurt Lewin, also one of my favorite authors. Which means, by the way, that impractical theories are bad theories.
Even in a supposedly practical field like management impracticality abounds. I remember reading the report of a well-known management consultancy firm. They found that the communication between the directors and between the directors and their underlings was unsatisfactory. So they proposed a 'communication development program,' that - surprise, surprise - they could offer. It seems practical, but it isn't. Communication is unsatisfactory for a reason. Or for many reasons. Maybe people were afraid of a coming merger; maybe people were afraid of each other; maybe the market or the technology had changed and they were lagging behind; maybe one of the directors was sleeping with the secretary of one of the other directors; maybe the directors were too old, too inexperienced, too stubborn or not smart enough. Maybe people belonged too different lodges or service clubs. Whatever the case, improving bad communication without finding out the reasons is as sensible as widening the doors of a shop that attracts not enough customers from the passers-by.
I think prudence always start with facing the facts, checking if these are the facts that need to be faced, if they are all the relevant facts. What are the practicalities? What is desirable, what is possible? What is the objective, what are the criteria, what are the options?
Can we teach prudence? Probably, but it won't be easy. Because imprudence is rooted in personal characteristics and limitations. People are surprisingly fact-resistant and not always solution-oriented. They even may prefer awful conditions they are used too; disasters that may strike others more than themselves; they may indulge in apocalyptic perspectives, they may be set on self-destruct.
The main condition is reality-orientation: seeing fantasies for what they are. A second condition is the ability to face uncertainty. A third condition is simply pride in good work, in right decisions, in solving problems - or better: avoid problems.
Politically, imprudence seems on the rise. It is often called populism. Poor people, they don't know what is in stock for them.
Wednesday, November 2, 2016
Self-defeating processes and sentimentality
About ten years ago I was in Porto, an old, historic city at the Douro, in the North of Portugal. It was evening and I was enjoying an excellent port at the riverside, with excellent bread and excellent cheese. Everything was calm and I enjoyed the evening.
A month ago I was back for a congress. Again I was at the riverside, now at lunchtime, before an open window on the first floor.
I hardly recognized the place. Between huge masts tourist passed in funiculars, about twice a minute. Each five or ten minutes a helicopter passed over the river, first East and a few minutes later West. This is going on from earling morning to evening. At the quay an endless stream of visitors strolled between restaurants offering Indian food, American food, Italian food. And yes, also Portuguese food. Street vendors everywhere and small shops selling the same souvenirs in gaudy colors.
Tourism had come to Porto.
So we take a plane to an other country to walk between other tourists in a place that has become a backdrop to tourists. At a beautiful coast so many hotels are built that the coast becomes a backdrop to high-rise hotels and the silence is ripped by motor yachts and other tourist pleasures.
in Porto, a local doctor told me that all European funds for regional development in Portugal were to stimulate tourism. Portugal has been earmarked a tourist destination for North-Europeans.
I had seen the results also almost ten years ago already at the Algarve, where the beach was parceled out to huge restaurants with large terraces, so you could enjoy the beach without touching the sand. Local people were waiters and waitresses and everybody spoke English and German.
Is that bad? There is certainly a good side to it. Porto is certainly more wealthy than ten years ago. Many Mercedeses, many good restaurants, more people living the good life, enjoying the new dynamism. Life has become so good than they can make tourist trips themselves.
Amsterdam is groaning under the ever-increasing loads of tourists. The almost proverbial Japanese tourists of thirty years ago are today swamped by the Chinese. And a reputation for freely available soft drugs has attracted hordes of youngsters. It is going the way of Venice where locals are leaving, children can play on the streets only after night fall and the Italian restaurants are run by Chinese owners. One Venetian lady told that a tourist asked her at what hour the city closed. Venice as Disneyland. Paris as Disneyland. Amsterdam as Disneyland. And now Porto as Disneyland.
I can’t see this is going to stop. Unless for awful reasons like a pandemic or slightly less awful: a serious and persistent global economic crisis.
In all of history, almost all people have subsisted, pretty much tied to the place where they lived. No wonder that such an experience in the collective unconsciousness of mankind leads to over-eating and over-traveling today.
The only solution on the short term may be to make attractive destinations less attractive by making them more expensive: fewer cheap hotels, fewer cheap eateries. The owners of such establishments, and the owners of mass tourism services will cry wolf. And mass tourism will simply change its destinations. There are places enough in the world that will welcome them.
Today, plans are underway to deregulate the Dutch coast so that hotels and apartment flats can be built at nice spots - making them much less nice.
All these process have been described and analyzed at a global level. The article that started it all, The Tragedy of the Commons by Garrett Hardin is already 50 years old. Limits to Growth has become a household word. Still, system dynamics is a largely underrated and underfunded discipline.
By the way, the food and the drink and the company in that restaurant in Porto last month were excellent. For the locals all the buzz was a sign of social and economic progress. But I miss that simple food and drink of a decade ago. Lost worlds live only on in sentiment.
A month ago I was back for a congress. Again I was at the riverside, now at lunchtime, before an open window on the first floor.
I hardly recognized the place. Between huge masts tourist passed in funiculars, about twice a minute. Each five or ten minutes a helicopter passed over the river, first East and a few minutes later West. This is going on from earling morning to evening. At the quay an endless stream of visitors strolled between restaurants offering Indian food, American food, Italian food. And yes, also Portuguese food. Street vendors everywhere and small shops selling the same souvenirs in gaudy colors.
Tourism had come to Porto.
So we take a plane to an other country to walk between other tourists in a place that has become a backdrop to tourists. At a beautiful coast so many hotels are built that the coast becomes a backdrop to high-rise hotels and the silence is ripped by motor yachts and other tourist pleasures.
in Porto, a local doctor told me that all European funds for regional development in Portugal were to stimulate tourism. Portugal has been earmarked a tourist destination for North-Europeans.
I had seen the results also almost ten years ago already at the Algarve, where the beach was parceled out to huge restaurants with large terraces, so you could enjoy the beach without touching the sand. Local people were waiters and waitresses and everybody spoke English and German.
Is that bad? There is certainly a good side to it. Porto is certainly more wealthy than ten years ago. Many Mercedeses, many good restaurants, more people living the good life, enjoying the new dynamism. Life has become so good than they can make tourist trips themselves.
Amsterdam is groaning under the ever-increasing loads of tourists. The almost proverbial Japanese tourists of thirty years ago are today swamped by the Chinese. And a reputation for freely available soft drugs has attracted hordes of youngsters. It is going the way of Venice where locals are leaving, children can play on the streets only after night fall and the Italian restaurants are run by Chinese owners. One Venetian lady told that a tourist asked her at what hour the city closed. Venice as Disneyland. Paris as Disneyland. Amsterdam as Disneyland. And now Porto as Disneyland.
I can’t see this is going to stop. Unless for awful reasons like a pandemic or slightly less awful: a serious and persistent global economic crisis.
In all of history, almost all people have subsisted, pretty much tied to the place where they lived. No wonder that such an experience in the collective unconsciousness of mankind leads to over-eating and over-traveling today.
The only solution on the short term may be to make attractive destinations less attractive by making them more expensive: fewer cheap hotels, fewer cheap eateries. The owners of such establishments, and the owners of mass tourism services will cry wolf. And mass tourism will simply change its destinations. There are places enough in the world that will welcome them.
Today, plans are underway to deregulate the Dutch coast so that hotels and apartment flats can be built at nice spots - making them much less nice.
All these process have been described and analyzed at a global level. The article that started it all, The Tragedy of the Commons by Garrett Hardin is already 50 years old. Limits to Growth has become a household word. Still, system dynamics is a largely underrated and underfunded discipline.
By the way, the food and the drink and the company in that restaurant in Porto last month were excellent. For the locals all the buzz was a sign of social and economic progress. But I miss that simple food and drink of a decade ago. Lost worlds live only on in sentiment.
Tuesday, October 18, 2016
DON’T SWITCH OFF THE LOUDSPEAKER IN YOUR HOTEL ROOM!
A tourist in Myanmar has been sentenced to three months hard labor because he had switched off the loudspeaker in his room which prevented him from sleeping. It was a Buddhist prayer and he was sentenced because he had offended the Buddhist religion. How stupid and how outrageous can institutions be? Avoid Myanmar.
Fanaticism to the point of idiocy seems to be on the rise everywhere in the world, including religions that seemed broad-minded before, like Hinduism and Buddhism.
A few years ago, in India a very scholarly book on Hinduism has been taken out of the bookshops because it offended Hinduism. The writer, by he way, was more critical of other scholars than of Hinduism. My guess is that she didn’t take some Hindu scholars too seriously.
About Islamic sensitivities nobody needs to be reminded. Remember the cartoon where freshly-dead jihadists ate informed that heaven has run out of virgins. Till a few years ago the going rate was 40 virgins, meanwhile it has gone up till 72 virgins. What is the rate for girls who blew themselves up?
Scholars have argued that the original text most probably read: ‘plenty of green grapes.’ A transcription error of just one dot the wrong place, intentionally or not, could have shifted the meaning. The text about grapes would also fit, because grapes are mentioned just before too, while the virgins (‘green’ girls) fall out of the blue. Sorry for mixing up my color metaphors.
David Greer, writing about the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution once called fanatics the disease germs in the body politic. Religious fanatics are often worse than political fanatics, because common sense is even more repugnant to them.
What could explain this rising fanaticism?
Increasing exposure everywhere to an international world of finance, economics and technology diminishes local identities and local culture and that international world is clearly “Western”. Television does that, the internet and social media even more. If that is true, we are witnessing a backlash of threatened local cultures that cling to religion as an antidote to what might be an inferiority complex.
At the same time there is a backlash against liberalism, democracy, rationality and the acceptance of pluralism, even in Western countries. Part of this may be due to a cycle of about 55 years in which progressivism and conservatism, right-wing and left-wing ideas change places. But only a part, I guess.
Unbridled capitalism bred socialism in its different forms. Narrow-minded socialism bred a return to neoliberalism and neoconservatism that spawned a world-wide financial system that is leaving behind so many disaffected that we get Occupy movements and worldwide blackening of multinationals.
The heydays of neoliberalists (read: neocapitalists) are over, though they still may assume they have the run of things.
Alternating waves are healthy - if they grow less and less extreme. But they also may grow more and more extreme.
Meanwhile, be careful in you holiday planning. Especially if you look like a Westerner.
Fanaticism to the point of idiocy seems to be on the rise everywhere in the world, including religions that seemed broad-minded before, like Hinduism and Buddhism.
A few years ago, in India a very scholarly book on Hinduism has been taken out of the bookshops because it offended Hinduism. The writer, by he way, was more critical of other scholars than of Hinduism. My guess is that she didn’t take some Hindu scholars too seriously.
About Islamic sensitivities nobody needs to be reminded. Remember the cartoon where freshly-dead jihadists ate informed that heaven has run out of virgins. Till a few years ago the going rate was 40 virgins, meanwhile it has gone up till 72 virgins. What is the rate for girls who blew themselves up?
Scholars have argued that the original text most probably read: ‘plenty of green grapes.’ A transcription error of just one dot the wrong place, intentionally or not, could have shifted the meaning. The text about grapes would also fit, because grapes are mentioned just before too, while the virgins (‘green’ girls) fall out of the blue. Sorry for mixing up my color metaphors.
David Greer, writing about the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution once called fanatics the disease germs in the body politic. Religious fanatics are often worse than political fanatics, because common sense is even more repugnant to them.
What could explain this rising fanaticism?
Increasing exposure everywhere to an international world of finance, economics and technology diminishes local identities and local culture and that international world is clearly “Western”. Television does that, the internet and social media even more. If that is true, we are witnessing a backlash of threatened local cultures that cling to religion as an antidote to what might be an inferiority complex.
At the same time there is a backlash against liberalism, democracy, rationality and the acceptance of pluralism, even in Western countries. Part of this may be due to a cycle of about 55 years in which progressivism and conservatism, right-wing and left-wing ideas change places. But only a part, I guess.
Unbridled capitalism bred socialism in its different forms. Narrow-minded socialism bred a return to neoliberalism and neoconservatism that spawned a world-wide financial system that is leaving behind so many disaffected that we get Occupy movements and worldwide blackening of multinationals.
The heydays of neoliberalists (read: neocapitalists) are over, though they still may assume they have the run of things.
Alternating waves are healthy - if they grow less and less extreme. But they also may grow more and more extreme.
Meanwhile, be careful in you holiday planning. Especially if you look like a Westerner.
Thursday, September 22, 2016
Core issue analysis
We have many things to do and to think of. So we invented to-do lists. Most lists are too long and have the habit of growing at least as quickly as we shorten them. So we invented something else: priorities. The scary thing about setting priorities is setting posteriorities: postponing or rather deleting things from our to-do list. When we don’t dare to let go of anything, we get a firm grasp on nothing. We have to choose, to commit ourselves to one line of action instead of another, to deal with one problem and leave another alone. We know in our private lives people who are afraid to commit (usually men who are not yet ready for … eh … commitment). They all have something they do not wish or dare to let go, like freedom (e.g. to engage in noncommittal relationships and activities). Even if we have the courage to choose, we need the wisdom to choose well. And even good choices can turn out wrong. As Harry Truman said: “A schoolboy’s hindsight is better than a president’s foresight.” We need good-luck as well.
But how do we acquire the necessary wisdom? The biggest danger of many priority lists is that the most important items may have been forgotten or overlooked. We overestimate acute and urgent issues, and we underestimate gradual developments that may eventually be decisive.
Of course we want to find out which issues should get the highest priority. Let’s take this one step further. What is the most critical issue in your life and work right now? Imagine to focus on one issue and one issue only, rather than diluting your attention over multiple issues, however important each may be. The assumption that every organization, community, group, and perhaps every individual as well, faces at any time one single overriding challenge – the core issue - is attractive and probably also true.
Arnold Toynbee, the historian, has developed this proposition about the evolution of civilizations, following the ideas of Henri Bergson. Toynbee says that civilizations advance when they respond successfully to their dominant current challenge. Then a new, more or less stable situation comes about that will gradually present a new challenge. Civilizations stagnate when they have spent so much energy on solving their challenge, the tour de force, that they lack the stamina to deal with or even recognize new challenges arriving at its doorstep. Civilizations collapse when they fail to respond effectively to their greatest challenges.
Core issue analysis is the methodical identification of the prime actual challenge facing an organization, community or individual. Core issue transformation means to tackle and solve this problem and so to advance fundamentally as a person, a group or an organization. When we solve our key problem, we transform ourselves. The opposite occurs as well. When we leave the essential problem unattended because it is too difficult or we refuse to acknowledge it, we fill our days with matters of secondary or even tertiary importance. When we don’t solve our key problem, our energy level goes down. Sooner or later this leads to demoralization and lethargy of the organization – for example to rampant sick-leave that has nothing to do with the objective work conditions and everything to do with a bad work climate and lack of spirit. Even though it is not written down or formally admitted, everyone knows or feels that they are just fumbling around what is really relevant.
I suspect that each core issue involves a dilemma, a paradox that needs to be resolved. Whenever we pursue a simplistic, one-dimensional goal, we are either rambling on a path to nowhere or marching into a dead-end street. If we solely focus on one criterion, we lose sight of everything else. When analyzing management positions, I discovered that each time the primary responsibility of a position was to reconcile a conflicting set of demands and criteria. With the project leaders of an engineering firm, it was about resolving the tension between satisfying the customer and all what that meant, and controlling the costs and all what that entailed. Satisfying clients is easy at high cost. Saving costs is even easier. It just leads to dissatisfied customers – and discontented personnel. In such a position, core issue analysis is about finding a way to make customers happier while reducing costs.
Hypes arise from one-sided, ‘self-evident’ truths. They are proclaimed by the-sun-is-always-shining philosophers and like-minded managers: quality awareness, customer orientation, motivation, cost-effectiveness, shareholder value.
A core issue is probably always emotive. We tend to avoid it, we ridicule it, we passively worry about it, we are paralyzed by it, we suppress it. Many people have a gut feeling about what really matters. A gut feeling or an intuition often is an awareness displacement. Whatever is really important while we are not aware of it, seeps into our consciousness through feelings and hunches. That is all right, yet hunches are hard to communicate and go awry when we become entangled in emotional or energetic problems.
If you want to find out the core issue, start with looking in the dark - if you can. To what is the least attention given? About what people avoid speaking? If an organization is continually busy with internal matters, chances are that the core issue is an external one. If an organization solely occupies itself with the market and with clients, chances are that the core issue is an internal one. Where is your attention going? To your children, to money, to your next diploma, to your reputation, to your health? Chances are that’s not where your core issue is.
More roundabout ways to find the core issue are:
When your survival is at stake, the strategic core issue is the decisive factor for your survival – or demise. In a crisis, core issues are often dual: one on the short term and one on the long term. When your survival is not immediately threatened, when you stay outside the danger zone, the core issues are invariably linked to our raison d’être, to our mission in life, to our ability to be successful in that and to the external changes that affect both.
Is a core issue found or chosen? To what extent is it objective? The more the core issue is a matter of survival, the more objective it is. The farther we are from the danger zone, the more our perception of what your life means and where it is heading to, will determine the core issue. A core issue is essential as well as existential: what you are here for, what your mission is, where, how, for whom. Theoretically, the core issue is difficult to define, yet in practice, finding it, releases a particularly certainty. Finding the core-issue and dealing with it are not mere intellectual processes. They electrify.
Find your real priority and dare to concentrate on the most essential point of it. Success in that is much more than solving a problem, defusing a threat or grasping an opportunity. Solving a core issue transforms people and situations. You become more energetic, skilled, effective or efficient. Usually all of those. A popular idea is that personal transformation is the consequence of a shift in awareness. That is self-evident. However, not every increase in awareness will transform you. Transformation does not result from growing more conscious, perceptive in general, but rather from a growing awareness of your factual situation as you really stand in your actual environment. That includes real other people and their real motives.
The relief of ‘Eureka!’ doesn’t mean that everything is or will be easy. Crucial decisions have to surmount excruciating doubts. An action that intends to solve all your problems at the same time, meet all criteria, is a proposal by the incompetent to the weak. Solutions with only advantages do exist – in never-never land. "There is no such thing as a free lunch."
Hitting the nail on the head: it separates the men from the boys, the women from the girls. The deepest analysis leads to the most powerful conclusion. The deepest decision has the widest consequences. A pithy conclusion is no absolute, eternal truth, but the strongest answer to the most daunting challenge you can find right here and now. The core issue is in a classic sense the crux, the essence, the focus. In biblical terms: the narrow gate. Not the wide one that leads astray.
When we solve a problem we prepare the ground for the next problem. First you are poor. That create problems. Then you grow rich. That creates other problems. First you can’t give money to your children. Then you can. Different problems. First you are alone: problem. Then you are together: other problem. Every response to a challenge leads to a new challenge. To what does that ultimately lead: to the ultimate challenge: dying gloriously. The first personal challenge is to be born well. That is now water under the bridge.
By the way, when I introduced core issue analysis to a group of Dutch management consultants ten years ago we spent two evenings to find the political core issue of the Netherlands as a society. We found it: Immigrants and Immigration. Ten years later, it seems to have been a pretty powerful diagnosis.
But how do we acquire the necessary wisdom? The biggest danger of many priority lists is that the most important items may have been forgotten or overlooked. We overestimate acute and urgent issues, and we underestimate gradual developments that may eventually be decisive.
Of course we want to find out which issues should get the highest priority. Let’s take this one step further. What is the most critical issue in your life and work right now? Imagine to focus on one issue and one issue only, rather than diluting your attention over multiple issues, however important each may be. The assumption that every organization, community, group, and perhaps every individual as well, faces at any time one single overriding challenge – the core issue - is attractive and probably also true.
Arnold Toynbee, the historian, has developed this proposition about the evolution of civilizations, following the ideas of Henri Bergson. Toynbee says that civilizations advance when they respond successfully to their dominant current challenge. Then a new, more or less stable situation comes about that will gradually present a new challenge. Civilizations stagnate when they have spent so much energy on solving their challenge, the tour de force, that they lack the stamina to deal with or even recognize new challenges arriving at its doorstep. Civilizations collapse when they fail to respond effectively to their greatest challenges.
Core issue analysis is the methodical identification of the prime actual challenge facing an organization, community or individual. Core issue transformation means to tackle and solve this problem and so to advance fundamentally as a person, a group or an organization. When we solve our key problem, we transform ourselves. The opposite occurs as well. When we leave the essential problem unattended because it is too difficult or we refuse to acknowledge it, we fill our days with matters of secondary or even tertiary importance. When we don’t solve our key problem, our energy level goes down. Sooner or later this leads to demoralization and lethargy of the organization – for example to rampant sick-leave that has nothing to do with the objective work conditions and everything to do with a bad work climate and lack of spirit. Even though it is not written down or formally admitted, everyone knows or feels that they are just fumbling around what is really relevant.
I suspect that each core issue involves a dilemma, a paradox that needs to be resolved. Whenever we pursue a simplistic, one-dimensional goal, we are either rambling on a path to nowhere or marching into a dead-end street. If we solely focus on one criterion, we lose sight of everything else. When analyzing management positions, I discovered that each time the primary responsibility of a position was to reconcile a conflicting set of demands and criteria. With the project leaders of an engineering firm, it was about resolving the tension between satisfying the customer and all what that meant, and controlling the costs and all what that entailed. Satisfying clients is easy at high cost. Saving costs is even easier. It just leads to dissatisfied customers – and discontented personnel. In such a position, core issue analysis is about finding a way to make customers happier while reducing costs.
Hypes arise from one-sided, ‘self-evident’ truths. They are proclaimed by the-sun-is-always-shining philosophers and like-minded managers: quality awareness, customer orientation, motivation, cost-effectiveness, shareholder value.
- "It is about saving costs."
- "Our people must become more flexible."
- “Customer-friendliness, that’s what it all amounts to."
A core issue is probably always emotive. We tend to avoid it, we ridicule it, we passively worry about it, we are paralyzed by it, we suppress it. Many people have a gut feeling about what really matters. A gut feeling or an intuition often is an awareness displacement. Whatever is really important while we are not aware of it, seeps into our consciousness through feelings and hunches. That is all right, yet hunches are hard to communicate and go awry when we become entangled in emotional or energetic problems.
If you want to find out the core issue, start with looking in the dark - if you can. To what is the least attention given? About what people avoid speaking? If an organization is continually busy with internal matters, chances are that the core issue is an external one. If an organization solely occupies itself with the market and with clients, chances are that the core issue is an internal one. Where is your attention going? To your children, to money, to your next diploma, to your reputation, to your health? Chances are that’s not where your core issue is.
More roundabout ways to find the core issue are:
- Look for problems that are really persistent or recurrent.
- Look for flip-flops in your life, going from one extreme to another.
- Look for gradual developments that may be not too serious right now, but seem unstoppable.
When your survival is at stake, the strategic core issue is the decisive factor for your survival – or demise. In a crisis, core issues are often dual: one on the short term and one on the long term. When your survival is not immediately threatened, when you stay outside the danger zone, the core issues are invariably linked to our raison d’être, to our mission in life, to our ability to be successful in that and to the external changes that affect both.
Is a core issue found or chosen? To what extent is it objective? The more the core issue is a matter of survival, the more objective it is. The farther we are from the danger zone, the more our perception of what your life means and where it is heading to, will determine the core issue. A core issue is essential as well as existential: what you are here for, what your mission is, where, how, for whom. Theoretically, the core issue is difficult to define, yet in practice, finding it, releases a particularly certainty. Finding the core-issue and dealing with it are not mere intellectual processes. They electrify.
Find your real priority and dare to concentrate on the most essential point of it. Success in that is much more than solving a problem, defusing a threat or grasping an opportunity. Solving a core issue transforms people and situations. You become more energetic, skilled, effective or efficient. Usually all of those. A popular idea is that personal transformation is the consequence of a shift in awareness. That is self-evident. However, not every increase in awareness will transform you. Transformation does not result from growing more conscious, perceptive in general, but rather from a growing awareness of your factual situation as you really stand in your actual environment. That includes real other people and their real motives.
The relief of ‘Eureka!’ doesn’t mean that everything is or will be easy. Crucial decisions have to surmount excruciating doubts. An action that intends to solve all your problems at the same time, meet all criteria, is a proposal by the incompetent to the weak. Solutions with only advantages do exist – in never-never land. "There is no such thing as a free lunch."
Hitting the nail on the head: it separates the men from the boys, the women from the girls. The deepest analysis leads to the most powerful conclusion. The deepest decision has the widest consequences. A pithy conclusion is no absolute, eternal truth, but the strongest answer to the most daunting challenge you can find right here and now. The core issue is in a classic sense the crux, the essence, the focus. In biblical terms: the narrow gate. Not the wide one that leads astray.
When we solve a problem we prepare the ground for the next problem. First you are poor. That create problems. Then you grow rich. That creates other problems. First you can’t give money to your children. Then you can. Different problems. First you are alone: problem. Then you are together: other problem. Every response to a challenge leads to a new challenge. To what does that ultimately lead: to the ultimate challenge: dying gloriously. The first personal challenge is to be born well. That is now water under the bridge.
By the way, when I introduced core issue analysis to a group of Dutch management consultants ten years ago we spent two evenings to find the political core issue of the Netherlands as a society. We found it: Immigrants and Immigration. Ten years later, it seems to have been a pretty powerful diagnosis.
Monday, August 22, 2016
Religion, politics and psychopaths-2
Psychopaths, people without empathy and without conscience, gravitate towards positions of power: the military, the police, top management, top finance, top legal people. If they are smart enough, they go for careers. Of course not all CEOs or military are psychopaths, only a few. But more than among gardeners or shopkeepers.
At the lower end we find them among petty bureaucrats, among soldiers, among criminals. How many soldiers in wars act like psychopaths? Estimates vary between 2% and 5%. But the longer a war lasts, the higher the percentage becomes.
OK. As I wrote in my previous blog, the only fundamental approach is to discourage the making of new psychopaths. But how?
Psychopath parents are the surest way to produce new psychopaths. The golden rule is to consistently humiliate children. Quite openly, by being harsh and cruel, treating them like little monsters that have to be broken. Or more insidiously, by mocking them as an inferior breed. Or mechanically, like dumb robots that still have to be programmed.
In the second half of the 19th century, belief in the “survival of the fittest” saw rapidly diminishing standards in taking care of the mentally ill and the mentally handicapped. Discipline and harshness in education became almost the norm. It may be that the horrors of totalitarian regimes have been unleashed because some critical mass in psychopaths in positions of power was reached. In cultures already tending to hardness, the psychopaths took over: Russia, Japan, Germany. Small differences can produce large consequences.
In the biographies of many leading Nazis, we find a harsh education, especially a cruel or harsh and indifferent father. The Nazis emptied the prisons to recruit the guards for the concentration camps. SS-officers were trained very harshly. The trainees got each a dog to train. For many months that was their only companion and many got a sentimental bond with their dog. At the graduation ceremony, they got their officer’s pistol and the first thing they had to do was to shoot their dog. “To become hard.”
How can we prevent psychopaths from taking over powerful institutions? Grossman, in his book On Killing, says that the only protection sheep can find against wolves is from what he calls ‘sheep dogs.’ Those who can be firm, even hard and violent, but still remain humane and conscientious.
The main development of civilization is in eliminating humiliation. The antidote to humiliation is not love, but respect. Against psychopaths we can’t come with love or flowers or peace. We need to establish clear boundaries and containment procedures.
Even in love and tenderness there may be easily belittling. Overprotection is also disrespectful. Eliminating humiliation in education, in work organization, in public offices, even in police and justice. Even in war. Wherever possible.
Can humiliation be avoided in boot camps? Maybe it can’t, but maybe it can. Anyway, it is not just a tool for discipline. It may foster indiscipline in the end.
Society is people living together. Culture is how people live together. Civilization is how humanely people live together. Our society is full of rituals, though our behavior is less prescribed than in more traditional societies. Humanization rituals make people more decent, taking one another more into consideration, into account.
An example remaining dehumanization are the rituals in what Ervin Goffman called total institutions: hospitals, asylums, prisons. Many rituals practiced in these institutions are defacement rituals that strip people of their personality. The strongest examples of such defacement rituals have been in concentration camps, where all personal distinctions were removed and people were treated as animals or things. Inmates were regarded as useless or reprehensible, as objects of contempt, derision or experiment. The essence of many camp rituals lay in declaring inmates to be non-people, non-humans, reducing them to naked, frightened, trembling rabbits. As Goffman showed, benevolent institutions such as hospitals and mental wards also employ defacement rituals.
By contrast, rituals that stress people’s humanity and personal dignity enhance self-respect and self-confidence. All rituals that stress acceptance and inclusion of the participants and recipients in society are humanization rituals. Rituals that treat people as nonhumans, barbarians, animals, robots or things, or just not there, are dehumanization rituals, apart from the intention or awareness of the people who engage in such rituals.
Boss-subordinate relationships in a factory are prone to dehumanization. Production schedules have to be met. Breakdowns occur, waste problems and quality problems arise, as does friction between groups and within groups. Competition, irritation, jealousy, distrust, and disappointment are present in the work environment. Rituals may reinforce such problems, contain them or counteract them. Work rituals define the culture of a company. Companies with the most positive corporate culture are often the most successful.
Dehumanization rituals are common between organizations and their clients when organizations don’t depend directly on their clients for their survival, like most public agencies. The treatment given to clients at many counters is almost the prototypical defacement ritual. We all know how it feels to be treated as a number. And many of us know the bureaucratic crucifixion when someone happens to have a request or suffer circumstances that do not fit standard operating procedures and threatens the convenience of bureaucrats.
What is the easiest way to humiliate people? To make them wait. Many bureaucratic rituals are to keep people waiting. Clerks make civilians wait, bosses make subordinates wait and subordinates avenge themselves by making bosses wait. The anonymous sphinx of modern bureaucracies is indeed a dehumanizing machine.
It may console us to learn that firms that define their business as service are the most successful. Just as horses respond favorably to a treatment geared to horses, and car engines respond favorably to maintenance schemes that are geared to car engines, so also people respond favorably to treatment geared to people.
Morality is about treating people as human beings. Humanization rituals are the preventive maintenance of society.
Much of what goes under the name of alienation is a response to dehumanization.
The first step toward a more civilized world is to fight dehumanizing rituals and foster humanizing rituals. Thanking someone for a service rendered is a humanizing ritual, as is the custom of replying promptly to requests. Barring someone from expressing an opinion in a meeting is dehumanizing, as is withholding of information about the purpose of our work.
The most sensitive areas in society as to human and inhuman rituals are total institutions; the least sensitive areas are market institutions where people can always go somewhere else. Employment functions more as a total institution when unemployment is high, more as a market institution when employment is high.
The first defenses against the arrogance of powerful institutions are more freedom and more humane procedures: liberalization and humanization respectively. Under liberal conditions, humane policies pay off, when applied with some intelligence and some patience.
Unrestrained psychopaths like to make people suffer, to destroy their homes, their families, their lives. Why are people cruel? Why do they abuse, rape and kill and maim others?
Engaging in cruelty, torture and terror overcompensates feelings of worthlessness - a stronger form of the inferiority complex - by means of an all-powerful, sadistic manipulation of other people, by threat of prolonged suffering and ultimately destruction.
Brutes laugh when something comical happens with the body of a victim, when the head or neck snaps weirdly, or when a man stumbles over his own entrails. These marionettes are cute: they are droll and they squeak. Brutes make fun of them. They can do as they please. They are out of bounds. They are the boys with the boots and the whip. But an unconscious feeling of worthlessness remains and is drowned by a further descent into inhumanity.
Brutes see their descent into barbarism and sadism as courageous, hard, superior, only for the strong. Others are sleepers, dreamers, sentimental squeakers; they are timid, afraid, soft and vulnerable.
When Himmler visited an extermination camp, he told his SS-men how proud he was of them. This was a great moment in German history. People could say about them that they had become hard. They did not falter because of revulsion and abhorrence; they had hardened.
Such people view themselves as superhuman, and ordinary folks as subhuman, children of a lesser God. In the world of a brute, humanity is no more; only strong supermen and weak subhuman rabbits. This mind-set is evident in many butchers, but even more in their bosses: the Hitlers, the Himmlers and the Eichmanns.
Distant bosses may have the same dynamic as acting brutes, but more intellectual. They are more fanatical or more cynical, indulging in the cold and dry satisfaction of unleashing a man-destroying machine. Fanatics make themselves hard, unyielding servants of their higher purpose. Preaching fanatics are hot and acting fanatics are cold, but their henchmen are hot again.
Religious fanaticism is even more dangerous than political fanaticism.
What conditions turn people into brutes? Ultimately, none. Some people remain decent when everyone around them indulges in cruelty. The mind is its own place, and there is no condition that triggers inhuman behavior in the absence of a corrupted mind. Still, many influences may ease a corruption of the mind.
A brute is someone whose feelings of self-esteem and dignity, of being loved, accepted or respected, have been destroyed, and whose feelings of rage have been bottled up. Self-pity and aggression are universal responses to frustration. Deeply frustrated souls tend to become either aggressors or victims.
Usually, such frustrations begin to bottle up early in childhood. The main breeding ground for brutes is deep and constant humiliation and intimidation from an early day on. Continuous inhuman treatment sows the seeds of inhuman response. Whenever people in authority (parents, teachers, bosses or priests) treat people as small and insignificant or as despicable, they create losers. Or brutes.
(See for a more extensive analysis chapters 2 and 3 of my Humanity, Civilization, Politics; http://www.onlineoriginals.com/)
At the lower end we find them among petty bureaucrats, among soldiers, among criminals. How many soldiers in wars act like psychopaths? Estimates vary between 2% and 5%. But the longer a war lasts, the higher the percentage becomes.
OK. As I wrote in my previous blog, the only fundamental approach is to discourage the making of new psychopaths. But how?
Psychopath parents are the surest way to produce new psychopaths. The golden rule is to consistently humiliate children. Quite openly, by being harsh and cruel, treating them like little monsters that have to be broken. Or more insidiously, by mocking them as an inferior breed. Or mechanically, like dumb robots that still have to be programmed.
In the second half of the 19th century, belief in the “survival of the fittest” saw rapidly diminishing standards in taking care of the mentally ill and the mentally handicapped. Discipline and harshness in education became almost the norm. It may be that the horrors of totalitarian regimes have been unleashed because some critical mass in psychopaths in positions of power was reached. In cultures already tending to hardness, the psychopaths took over: Russia, Japan, Germany. Small differences can produce large consequences.
In the biographies of many leading Nazis, we find a harsh education, especially a cruel or harsh and indifferent father. The Nazis emptied the prisons to recruit the guards for the concentration camps. SS-officers were trained very harshly. The trainees got each a dog to train. For many months that was their only companion and many got a sentimental bond with their dog. At the graduation ceremony, they got their officer’s pistol and the first thing they had to do was to shoot their dog. “To become hard.”
How can we prevent psychopaths from taking over powerful institutions? Grossman, in his book On Killing, says that the only protection sheep can find against wolves is from what he calls ‘sheep dogs.’ Those who can be firm, even hard and violent, but still remain humane and conscientious.
The main development of civilization is in eliminating humiliation. The antidote to humiliation is not love, but respect. Against psychopaths we can’t come with love or flowers or peace. We need to establish clear boundaries and containment procedures.
Even in love and tenderness there may be easily belittling. Overprotection is also disrespectful. Eliminating humiliation in education, in work organization, in public offices, even in police and justice. Even in war. Wherever possible.
Can humiliation be avoided in boot camps? Maybe it can’t, but maybe it can. Anyway, it is not just a tool for discipline. It may foster indiscipline in the end.
Society is people living together. Culture is how people live together. Civilization is how humanely people live together. Our society is full of rituals, though our behavior is less prescribed than in more traditional societies. Humanization rituals make people more decent, taking one another more into consideration, into account.
An example remaining dehumanization are the rituals in what Ervin Goffman called total institutions: hospitals, asylums, prisons. Many rituals practiced in these institutions are defacement rituals that strip people of their personality. The strongest examples of such defacement rituals have been in concentration camps, where all personal distinctions were removed and people were treated as animals or things. Inmates were regarded as useless or reprehensible, as objects of contempt, derision or experiment. The essence of many camp rituals lay in declaring inmates to be non-people, non-humans, reducing them to naked, frightened, trembling rabbits. As Goffman showed, benevolent institutions such as hospitals and mental wards also employ defacement rituals.
By contrast, rituals that stress people’s humanity and personal dignity enhance self-respect and self-confidence. All rituals that stress acceptance and inclusion of the participants and recipients in society are humanization rituals. Rituals that treat people as nonhumans, barbarians, animals, robots or things, or just not there, are dehumanization rituals, apart from the intention or awareness of the people who engage in such rituals.
Boss-subordinate relationships in a factory are prone to dehumanization. Production schedules have to be met. Breakdowns occur, waste problems and quality problems arise, as does friction between groups and within groups. Competition, irritation, jealousy, distrust, and disappointment are present in the work environment. Rituals may reinforce such problems, contain them or counteract them. Work rituals define the culture of a company. Companies with the most positive corporate culture are often the most successful.
Dehumanization rituals are common between organizations and their clients when organizations don’t depend directly on their clients for their survival, like most public agencies. The treatment given to clients at many counters is almost the prototypical defacement ritual. We all know how it feels to be treated as a number. And many of us know the bureaucratic crucifixion when someone happens to have a request or suffer circumstances that do not fit standard operating procedures and threatens the convenience of bureaucrats.
What is the easiest way to humiliate people? To make them wait. Many bureaucratic rituals are to keep people waiting. Clerks make civilians wait, bosses make subordinates wait and subordinates avenge themselves by making bosses wait. The anonymous sphinx of modern bureaucracies is indeed a dehumanizing machine.
It may console us to learn that firms that define their business as service are the most successful. Just as horses respond favorably to a treatment geared to horses, and car engines respond favorably to maintenance schemes that are geared to car engines, so also people respond favorably to treatment geared to people.
Morality is about treating people as human beings. Humanization rituals are the preventive maintenance of society.
Much of what goes under the name of alienation is a response to dehumanization.
The first step toward a more civilized world is to fight dehumanizing rituals and foster humanizing rituals. Thanking someone for a service rendered is a humanizing ritual, as is the custom of replying promptly to requests. Barring someone from expressing an opinion in a meeting is dehumanizing, as is withholding of information about the purpose of our work.
The most sensitive areas in society as to human and inhuman rituals are total institutions; the least sensitive areas are market institutions where people can always go somewhere else. Employment functions more as a total institution when unemployment is high, more as a market institution when employment is high.
The first defenses against the arrogance of powerful institutions are more freedom and more humane procedures: liberalization and humanization respectively. Under liberal conditions, humane policies pay off, when applied with some intelligence and some patience.
Unrestrained psychopaths like to make people suffer, to destroy their homes, their families, their lives. Why are people cruel? Why do they abuse, rape and kill and maim others?
Engaging in cruelty, torture and terror overcompensates feelings of worthlessness - a stronger form of the inferiority complex - by means of an all-powerful, sadistic manipulation of other people, by threat of prolonged suffering and ultimately destruction.
Brutes laugh when something comical happens with the body of a victim, when the head or neck snaps weirdly, or when a man stumbles over his own entrails. These marionettes are cute: they are droll and they squeak. Brutes make fun of them. They can do as they please. They are out of bounds. They are the boys with the boots and the whip. But an unconscious feeling of worthlessness remains and is drowned by a further descent into inhumanity.
Brutes see their descent into barbarism and sadism as courageous, hard, superior, only for the strong. Others are sleepers, dreamers, sentimental squeakers; they are timid, afraid, soft and vulnerable.
When Himmler visited an extermination camp, he told his SS-men how proud he was of them. This was a great moment in German history. People could say about them that they had become hard. They did not falter because of revulsion and abhorrence; they had hardened.
Such people view themselves as superhuman, and ordinary folks as subhuman, children of a lesser God. In the world of a brute, humanity is no more; only strong supermen and weak subhuman rabbits. This mind-set is evident in many butchers, but even more in their bosses: the Hitlers, the Himmlers and the Eichmanns.
Distant bosses may have the same dynamic as acting brutes, but more intellectual. They are more fanatical or more cynical, indulging in the cold and dry satisfaction of unleashing a man-destroying machine. Fanatics make themselves hard, unyielding servants of their higher purpose. Preaching fanatics are hot and acting fanatics are cold, but their henchmen are hot again.
Religious fanaticism is even more dangerous than political fanaticism.
What conditions turn people into brutes? Ultimately, none. Some people remain decent when everyone around them indulges in cruelty. The mind is its own place, and there is no condition that triggers inhuman behavior in the absence of a corrupted mind. Still, many influences may ease a corruption of the mind.
A brute is someone whose feelings of self-esteem and dignity, of being loved, accepted or respected, have been destroyed, and whose feelings of rage have been bottled up. Self-pity and aggression are universal responses to frustration. Deeply frustrated souls tend to become either aggressors or victims.
Usually, such frustrations begin to bottle up early in childhood. The main breeding ground for brutes is deep and constant humiliation and intimidation from an early day on. Continuous inhuman treatment sows the seeds of inhuman response. Whenever people in authority (parents, teachers, bosses or priests) treat people as small and insignificant or as despicable, they create losers. Or brutes.
(See for a more extensive analysis chapters 2 and 3 of my Humanity, Civilization, Politics; http://www.onlineoriginals.com/)
Monday, July 25, 2016
Religion, Politics and Psychopaths - 1
Are suicide attacks to end in the foreseeable future?
More than a century ago, we also had decades of assassinations and bomb explosions. People doing that were not called terrorists, but anarchists. They were more politically inspired than religiously. How did this this spate of anarchist bombings and shootings end?
By the First World War. A new World War may do the same. Not a perspective to look forward to. A remedy far worse than the present ill - and nobody can guarantee that this remedy will work.
The Second World War had its own unimaginable terrorism in the wanton killing, enslaving and raping of civilians, in the industrial scale of forced prostitution, in large-scale torture and cannibalism - and in persecuting and eradicating whole categories of people and whole peoples like the Jews.
And now we have religious terrorism, largely Islamic. Pitirim Sorokin already pointed out that civil wars are more cruel than regular wars and that religious wars are the most cruel of all. Why?
Religion is about the more-than-human, transcending our ordinary day-to-day existence. Religion is a booster. It makes broad-minded people more broad-minded, it makes narrow-minded people more narrow-minded. It attracts people of good-will, noble, spiritual.
It also attracts psychopaths.
The inhuman finds a natural hiding place in the superhuman.
In Europe, Christianity was at its zenith when the only place for smart and decent people was the monastery. Because the crude people had taken over. When slowly cities started to develop and competent people could flourish in commerce and administration, the average level of entrants in the religious life diminished. Till slowly the petty-minded again became dominant there.
The Islamic culture at its heyday was much more civilized than the Christian culture. The Crusades were mainly an invasion of barbarians into a reasonably developed society. And those barbarians were incredibly cruel. One priest wrote home that God rejoiced in heaven, because the blood of men, women and children flowed till the ankles of the victorious knights.
When an enlightened society is religious, the religion is enlightened and adds to its enlightenment. When a dark, crude society is religious, the religion adds to its cruelty and darkness.
Should Islamic people and Islamic institutions distance themselves explicitly from Islamic terrorism? I think they should. Maybe they should do even more: seek the terrorists out. Because it is their religion that is poisoned. Also: Islamic terrorists kill more Muslims than non-Muslims.
It is like communists who had the deepest revulsion not for the capitalists, but for the socialists who got it wrong. False friends and supposedly false friends are more dangerous than enemies. especially when outsiders hardly see the difference. That is why Erdogan is more bent on destroying the Gülenists than the secularists. Or the Kurds. History is boringly repetitious, almost anywhere, almost anytime.
Blowing yourself up and kill as many people as possible is the ultimate manifestation of making a difference, of overpowering others. It is a reaction to impotence, deep frustration, personal insignificance. Religion gives an extra glow. And it over-shouts the fear of death even psychopaths still have lurking somewhere.
There is one thing unrelated to religion, that facilitates people to go on a killing spree: recent well-publicized killing sprees. Unfortunately, me-too and religion are not mutually exclusive.
Expect more of all this for quite some time to come. Unless some nuclear blasts destroy millions of lives. This time most probably in Asia.
The dark mind poison that manifests itself in suicide bomb attacks and other mass killings, and spread itself through them, won't go away because we desperately want it. And certainly it won't go away by sending good vibes of love and noble spirituality. Pumping up hope is just delaying despair. That may even grow in the meantime.
Cui bono? Who benefits? As always: the psychopaths. Fortunately, they all die. Unfortunately, few of them by suicide. We have to defuse them, starve them or kill them. without becoming psychopaths ourselves. There is no way to do that outside political and military machinery. Two worlds that contain their own psychopaths. So it takes a generous supply of prudence - and good-luck - to apply that machinery effectively. Machiavelli hs wrestled with this problem extensively. I will come back to that in a next blog.
The only fundamental approach is to discourage the making of new psychopaths. That long-time perspective may be food for one more blog.
More than a century ago, we also had decades of assassinations and bomb explosions. People doing that were not called terrorists, but anarchists. They were more politically inspired than religiously. How did this this spate of anarchist bombings and shootings end?
By the First World War. A new World War may do the same. Not a perspective to look forward to. A remedy far worse than the present ill - and nobody can guarantee that this remedy will work.
The Second World War had its own unimaginable terrorism in the wanton killing, enslaving and raping of civilians, in the industrial scale of forced prostitution, in large-scale torture and cannibalism - and in persecuting and eradicating whole categories of people and whole peoples like the Jews.
And now we have religious terrorism, largely Islamic. Pitirim Sorokin already pointed out that civil wars are more cruel than regular wars and that religious wars are the most cruel of all. Why?
Religion is about the more-than-human, transcending our ordinary day-to-day existence. Religion is a booster. It makes broad-minded people more broad-minded, it makes narrow-minded people more narrow-minded. It attracts people of good-will, noble, spiritual.
It also attracts psychopaths.
The inhuman finds a natural hiding place in the superhuman.
In Europe, Christianity was at its zenith when the only place for smart and decent people was the monastery. Because the crude people had taken over. When slowly cities started to develop and competent people could flourish in commerce and administration, the average level of entrants in the religious life diminished. Till slowly the petty-minded again became dominant there.
The Islamic culture at its heyday was much more civilized than the Christian culture. The Crusades were mainly an invasion of barbarians into a reasonably developed society. And those barbarians were incredibly cruel. One priest wrote home that God rejoiced in heaven, because the blood of men, women and children flowed till the ankles of the victorious knights.
When an enlightened society is religious, the religion is enlightened and adds to its enlightenment. When a dark, crude society is religious, the religion adds to its cruelty and darkness.
Should Islamic people and Islamic institutions distance themselves explicitly from Islamic terrorism? I think they should. Maybe they should do even more: seek the terrorists out. Because it is their religion that is poisoned. Also: Islamic terrorists kill more Muslims than non-Muslims.
It is like communists who had the deepest revulsion not for the capitalists, but for the socialists who got it wrong. False friends and supposedly false friends are more dangerous than enemies. especially when outsiders hardly see the difference. That is why Erdogan is more bent on destroying the Gülenists than the secularists. Or the Kurds. History is boringly repetitious, almost anywhere, almost anytime.
Blowing yourself up and kill as many people as possible is the ultimate manifestation of making a difference, of overpowering others. It is a reaction to impotence, deep frustration, personal insignificance. Religion gives an extra glow. And it over-shouts the fear of death even psychopaths still have lurking somewhere.
There is one thing unrelated to religion, that facilitates people to go on a killing spree: recent well-publicized killing sprees. Unfortunately, me-too and religion are not mutually exclusive.
Expect more of all this for quite some time to come. Unless some nuclear blasts destroy millions of lives. This time most probably in Asia.
The dark mind poison that manifests itself in suicide bomb attacks and other mass killings, and spread itself through them, won't go away because we desperately want it. And certainly it won't go away by sending good vibes of love and noble spirituality. Pumping up hope is just delaying despair. That may even grow in the meantime.
Cui bono? Who benefits? As always: the psychopaths. Fortunately, they all die. Unfortunately, few of them by suicide. We have to defuse them, starve them or kill them. without becoming psychopaths ourselves. There is no way to do that outside political and military machinery. Two worlds that contain their own psychopaths. So it takes a generous supply of prudence - and good-luck - to apply that machinery effectively. Machiavelli hs wrestled with this problem extensively. I will come back to that in a next blog.
The only fundamental approach is to discourage the making of new psychopaths. That long-time perspective may be food for one more blog.
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