118 Initiatives.

Question Time debated Cameron’s connect between 20% of English/Muslim women speaking English and terrorism. Argh the usual tennis. I hate it when people only think as far as how best to justify their own position. I begin to wonder how many of the English Raj learnt Punjabi or lost one iota of their own English culture. Not many. The elephant in the studio was the depth of our cultural roots; how we will, even after several generations, justify our position in those terms. There remains a deep cultural fault line that if stressed will fracture. The error is to deny it. There is an English culture and there is Muslim culture, we cannot pretend otherwise, each with its own way of being. Cameron’s connect both expresses an English fear but also exacerbated tensions by laying the blame elsewhere. Neither side finds itself capable of saying, ‘we’re human and these are our fears’, so the rally continued. On this mornings news Muslim Councillors were being criticised for bringing their Islamic culture into our English system by, of all people, Muslim women not wanting to be treated as second-class citizens. From there I happened on a Danish psychotherapist’s comparison between his Muslim and European clients. Muslims ‘Inshallah’, if God decrees it to happen, puts the locus of control externally where our Christian roots place it internally in self-responsibility. In essence Islam leans towards a co-dependent relationship with God. It fosters victim-hood as in easily offended, persecutor as in aggression, and rescuer as in ‘holder of the faith.’ He finds that integration in the minds of Muslim immigrants is the initiative of the host community where as the host community sees integration, because of our internal locus of control, as to also be our initiative. Hence in Denmark’s  "Diversity, and Safety in the City" conference in 2008 out of 118 initiatives hardly any were about what immigrants could do for themselves, and probably why only 20% of Muslim women have learnt to speak English, and why when asked they point to lack of Government funding for language tuition. By contrast if I moved to Greece I would consider it totally my own responsibility to learn Greek and see it as a necessity in order to partake in the Greek way of life. The external locus of control is completely alien to me but somehow in that blind spot there is vulnerability. Maybe as the host community we need to make it clear that we expect an internal locus of control where ‘Inshallah’ just isn’t good enough. 

This is What You Want to Hear.

My great friend Smolemouse, a Dell Boy draughtsman in the East End left to manage a building site. After our many years on the bottom rung I wondered how he’d taken to his new managerial role. To my surprise he’d found it easy, “I just tell them what they want to hear.” Not bad, an MBA in nine words. Currently in the holy grail of free energy there is an Indian scientist named Keshe who has developed a Coke can sized plasma generator with which we can all wave goodbye to fossil fuels. His story began several years ago with hour-long YouTube lectures on the science behind his discoveries. Based on confident presentation and ultra esoteric ‘science’ his labs have built what we dream of and it is now on sale. It fascinates me how this combination of total confidence and esoteric ideas work so well especially as I have neither the confidence to be sure of anything nor the capacity for esoteric knowledge. I am pledged by inclination and choice to remain on the bottom rung of curious playful observation. So it seems Smolemouse was right; give people a dream they can’t quite grasp with total confidence that they’ll find it if they try had enough and, to quote the South Park underpant gnomes, “Stage three, profit.” Perhaps that’s why Stage Two was, if I remember it correctly, unspecified. So for $499 plus $300 mandatory donation to the Keshe Foundation you too can, in 90 days of placing your order, receive a brown cardboard box. In the process you may well find the meaning of Stage Two, ‘ever hopeful gullibility.’ It’s the natural response to hearing what you want to hear. 

Wiggly Glee.

A big black cat, a young puma maybe, runs full tilt across a paddock, off a wall up onto a roof into the arms of a young woman and mauls her with all the wiggly glee of …. That’s where my description falters. I don’t know that wiggly glee, the how of it. Maybe I’ve come close once or twice but not that full body totality of joy expressed without thought for the expression of it, convoluted without thought for gravity or the constraints of constraints. I imagine an electricity to pure delight that fires muscles in a symphony of movement, a wild jazz of tumbling notes, an unwritten sonata of strength and gentleness, a firework of chaos. Perhaps I should have learnt less in my gravity lessons. Perhaps in each and every one there was a hidden message of constraint. So much was I caught in the mirror of reality I lost sight. I mean of the un-reflected real. Perhaps in reflection I learnt restraint, in tools, manipulation in these virtual images. And with it perhaps I lost electricity. Imagine every moment of your life you responded clean of reflection; jiggled, snapped, growled or purred, or slept as reality required. No higher ideal than breath, that but for the addition of an ‘L’ perfection is just an idea. Such a simple grandeur. And this is why I watched the puma time and time again. It reminded me of electricity. 

Another Necessary Story.

The statistician began his evidence to Parliament. “I imagine you’re all aware of the natural or Gaussian distribution, a bell shaped curve like this”, he showed an example. They all nodded sagely. “In the present unrest where a relatively small proportion of the populous are demonstrating on the streets one might well assume, in the distribution between approval and disapproval, the disapprovers would appear on the left at the beginning of the curve,” he showed a small section of a curve filled in red, “a small proportion of those prone to extreme dissatisfaction.” The PM was heard to say,  “Exactly. I don’t know what all the fuss is about.” The statistician continued. “If say 2% of the population riot then 98% must support your policies. Vigorous nodding and vociferous approval. “I’m glad you see the power of statistical analysis. I have though here another distribution curve that compares one’s opinion with one’s decision to take action.” He held up a new diagram similar to the previous one. “On the left are the individuals who, on issues that concerns them, always take action and the right those who never take action. Let’s say 0% and 100%. Notice for this distribution the median occurs at around 2% on that scale.” “Exactly as one might expect” added one helpful member. The PM joined in, “It seems to me you’re rather stating the obvious.” “On the contrary Prime Minister. This distribution indicates that for every individual that takes action on some concern there are forty to fifty people who do not; one presumes through laziness, illness, fear, inconvenience etc. Perhaps you can begin to see the implications. The one million that took to the streets against the Iraq war in fact represented some forty million that didn’t but had the same concern, that’s over 70% of the population.” “That’s a totally unfounded assumption, it’s preposterous” retorted the PM. “Please consider this. One million took action against and exactly how many took action for? Records show as many as fifty thousand. On that same basis, that they each represented 40 to 50 people, they accounted for around 3 million. In total 53 million plus 7 million don’t knows.” “In other words over half the population have an opinion but don’t act on it. Am I right?” interjected the PM. “Exactly.” “Then what are we worrying about?” “Our third distribution (to general groans) was with regard to this. One might consider it the first differential of the previous one, the rate of change of opinion. Because the median, the mass of the people, was at 2% it’s clear that any small change in that median will affect a huge number of people. A 1% change for example would put 2 million on the streets, with many thousand prepared for violent action. It represents great volatility, the nearness of a tipping point; the very reason you called me here today. According to this statistical analysis gentlemen there will shortly be a revolution.”

The Impossibility.

The children were the first. Often on farms or in gardens playing with animals they would glimpse them as if in a daydream. Or at least they were dismissed as such. But such was the frequency of this same ‘daydream’ by so many children many miles from each other it became newsworthy. What was this phenomenon, children seeing people, a little strange but recognisably people, doing ordinary things often around animals. It was investigated. In brief, a researcher aware of the daydream element and practiced in Ericsonian hypnosis induced a trance state in one of the children in his practice room but the child did not see any people. He persisted and did the same where the child had been seeing them. This time the people were there and not just glimpses but for the whole period of the trance state. The child would smile and talk to them as if they were real though the researcher saw nothing. Intrigued he asked a colleague to put himself in a trance in that same place. He too saw the people moving amongst the conscious people and going about their business as if they weren’t there. He found he could ask them questions that they were more than willing to answer. There was a whole population of them mostly in unpopulated areas because there were less ordinary people to avoid. They saw these ordinary people as blind, uncommunicative and somehow absorbed in their own conscious thoughts. Of course he found it incredible that there was a host of other people in a sense existing exclusively in this unconscious realm. How could it be there were two types of humans sharing this planet, one not aware of the other and the other unable to communicate? But, they would say, you are communicating with us in your trance state, and we with you, and he would miss them when he was brought back from the trance. There was something about their simple honesty, their lack of need, their playfulness that attracted him. In fact in a trance when he looked back at his own ‘ordinary people’ he too saw them as uncommunicative, almost robotic. Were these the elves of folk lore? His experiment was repeated by others and they too became entranced by that same simple beautiful honesty. As time passed much was made of the disappearances. The experiments were stopped. They were considered dangerous. Virtually all the people that underwent the experiment disappeared, just up and vanished, at least to ordinary people. 

Sheffield Lives.

Sheffieldlives FM, our local radio station, often has local people chatting about this and that. On my way to the plumbers there was an in depth conversation about the jelly in pork pies. Was it there to fill it out, or maybe glue it together; indeed was it necessary at all because small pork pies don’t have any? This pork pie conversation inevitably lead to the intricacies of cooking a pork joint. One chap posed a rhetorical question. What might the reason be that his wife always cuts the top off a leg of pork, as it seemed a waste of good meat? His wife said her mother always did it, possibly because it didn’t taste nice or it was too gristly, but she didn’t really know. Intrigued they asked her mother, the chap’s grandmother-in-law, why she did it. She said her mother had shown her when she was young and it might be because it makes the rest of the joint cook better. Luckily as the great-grandmother was still alive they all went round to hers and asked her why she always cut the top of a pork joint. She explained, “Well just so I could get it in the tin.” There must be a moral there somewhere. 

The Brain Plague.

There are a thousand instances around the world that point to something happening in our brains. From the notorious, the political, to sport, economics and the wealthy we seem to be going through a phase quite opposite to the enlightenment. It seems so ubiquitous amongst our institutions that it might be termed a plague, a plague of un-enlightened self-interest amongst those in power. I’m not talking here about some covert conspiracy but what the CIA called ‘group think’ to explain their wrong intelligence over Iraq. ‘Sorry guys, honest mistake. Move on, nothing to see here.’ They called it groupthink as a sort of benign explanation of an everyday, common or garden human fallibility, a one-off aberration. It was accepted as such and a hundred thousand people died. In the past I’ve called it Psychotic Group Collusion, PGC on the basis it sounds more scientific than a Mark Twain throwaway comment. PGC has been ever present from Nero to The News of the World. A closed, self-protecting group will incrementally, day by day, invent their own psychotic view behind their closed doors. The problem is the mindset of the group changes so slowly they are unaware of it, and the longer the group is isolated the more they drift into psychosis as famous psychological experiments have proved. It’s why democracy was invented in the first place but with the advent of professional politicians our western democracies have circumvented its true value allowing the ‘political group’ to remain unchanged irrespective of elections. As a result the general public see government as strangely disconnected, in short, psychotic. The ‘political group’, seeing themselves as right-minded, conscientious public servants, feel unfairly attacked by subversive elements and ramp up their defences. National security is in fact political security as they fail to perceive the influence of their own Psychotic Group Collusion. No blame can be attached to this because throughout history no person or group has prevailed over its effects. These days though, due to various technological and social factors, PGC is becoming more rampant and its effects more destructive. As such our systems of governance must take account of PGC as a progressive psychological disorder and implement measures to counter it or suffer the same fate as history’s numerous examples. Sepp Blatter today and maybe Tony Blair tomorrow. They are not bad men, they have just done bad things under the influence of PGC. I suggest it is vital this condition is studied, conclusions drawn and measures implemented to take account of it.