Decision Making Time

I want to point to two recent events to add a ‘glass half full’ element to the following somewhat harrowing account of how power comes to be abused. ‘Law enforcement’ type people are sometimes at least drawn to the profession because they respect the value of law and limits. So that, despite how corrupt a system may be, at some point, the rank and file of this enforcement system might get tired of the liberties taken by their superiors. In Italy right now the police seem to be collecting evidence for crimes of their head of state. Also, if reports are correct, in Tunisia the military seems to be protecting the population from roving internal security squads. If the legitimacy of power were to be undermined, possibly the enforcers of law could direct more attention toward justice and general social good, rather than the corrupting demands of authoritarian sociopathic bosses.

“All experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”

Thomas Jefferson

People grasp to the old forms as long as the vision that creates the new form remains quiescent or ill focused. Because new forms inevitably displace entrenched power interests, its backing will come from the zeitgeist rather than from more derivative intellectual constructs. Ideas presented out of context seldom go far, but ideas whose time has come will not be stopped by all the armies of the world. Our aim then should be to find ideas that better match our time.

As more people realize that their suffering seems to be advancing beyond bearable, we need all the more, a framework that will encourage productive decision making among all sectors of society. The other option is chaos and death, and who really wants to deal with that. I mean its one thing when C&D can be compartmentalized and localized upon some distant shore, but it’s not so fun when the shit goes global.

The following is from a four part series of articles that deal with issues of power and subjugation. The author, Davi Barker builds his arguments around the Milgram and other guard/prisoner role playing experiments.

Thanks also to 23 for posting this article at RI.

http://www.examiner.com/muslim-in-san-francisco/authoritarian-sociopathy-part-4-power-and-hypocrisy

"The fifth and final experiment yielded, by far, the most interesting results of all the experiments we’ve discussed, and it is my hope that this is the direction that this type or research takes in the future. The feeling of power was induced the same as the first and third experiment, where participants were asked to describe their own experience of power in their own life, with one important distinction. In this experiment the “high-power” class was divided into two, one group which was asked to describe an experience where they felt their power was legitimate and deserved, and one group which was asked to describe an experience where they felt their power was illegitimate and undeserved.

The hypocrisy results found in the previous four experiments emerged only when high-power subjects viewed their power as legitimate. Those who viewed their power as illegitimate actually gave the opposite results, a sort of anti-hypocrisy, which researches dubbed, “hypercrisy.” They were harsher about their own transgressions, and more lenient toward others.

This discovery could be the silver bullet that society has been searching for to put down the werewolf of political corruption. The researches speculate that the vicious cycle of power and hypocrisy could be broken by attacking the legitimacy of power, rather than the power itself. As they write in their conclusion:

A question that lies at the heart of the social sciences is how this status-quo (power inequality) is defended and how the powerless come to accept their disadvantaged position. The typical answer is that the state and its rules, regulations, and monopoly on violence coerce the powerless to do so. But this cannot be the whole answer...

Our last experiment found that the spiral of inequality can be broken, if the illegitimacy of the power-distribution is revealed. One way to undermine the legitimacy of authority is open revolt, but a more subtle way in which the powerless might curb selfenrichment by the powerful is by tainting their reputation, for example by gossiping. If the powerful sense that their unrestrained selfenrichment leads to gossiping, derision, and the undermining of their reputation as conscientious leaders, then they may be inspired to bring their behavior back to their espoused standards. If they fail to do so, they may quickly lose their authority, reputation, and— eventually—their power.

In this series we have seen that those given power are more likely to lie, cheat and steal with impunity while also being harsher in their judgements of others for doing these things. We have seen that those given power feel less compassion for the suffering of others, and are even capable of the torture and murder of innocent people. What’s perhaps most disturbing is that we have seen that these sociopathic tendencies have been fostered in otherwise psychologically healthy people. In other words, the problem is not only that sociopaths are drawn to positions of authority, but that positions of authority draw out the sociopath in everyone. But this final experiment offers some hope that authoritarian sociopathy can not only be stopped, but driven into reverse, not by violence or revolution, but simply by undermining their sense of legitimacy".

This is good material although (I really must say) gossip would seem to provide poor leverage when pitted against the machinations of power.

I wrote a paper back in the day called Voice of the Ineffable. It represented some conclusions derived from or responding to a ten year study of a wide variety of thinking. The product is a methodology that aids in decision making by identifying the source of corruption within the thought process. It points to a mechanism whereby, through resonance, the pre-manifest is tied to and engages dynamically with the manifest.

Voice of the Ineffable was re-written as Creativity Unleashed (posted on this site), and while I use different terminology now, I still like the content and structure of the paper.

The criteria for understanding that is proposed in that essay tends to cultivate fellowship and to undermine extremism as the hidden basis for asserting a sense of legitimacy to power. The ideas are not put forward as being ‘truth’, instead they are presented as a spur to imagination so that together we may build new systems for understanding where the information content of our perceptions become enabled to provide new levels and layers of meaning.