September 30, 2009
When someone lies to you, and you, knowing full well it is a lie, go along with it, you are as culpable as the liar! You support & validate the mis-truth.
If the emperor has no clothes;
And you see he has no clothes;
While others proclaim his fine clothes;
Is not your silence reprehensible?
Silence is never neutral, it sometimes speaks louder than words.
Example:
During the President’s health care infomercial to both houses of congress, on Wed Sept. 9, 2009, he presented many, many deliberate errors (lies).
Yet 534 members of congress (435 + 100 – Joe Wilson) by their silence went along with those lies, supporting & validating them, even at times applauding, & standing & cheering him, hence becoming as culpable as the president for those lies.
Both as members of congress and as simple decent human beings… They, like Joe Wilson, should have objected to, rather than agreeing with those mis-truths.
August 1, 2008
All bullies are, or believe themselves to be weak. Believing they could never win in a fair fight, they need to FORCE others to do their will.
There are 2 ways to do this.
The traditional ‘Bully’ uses a false sense of power. “Do what I say or I’ll beat you up, or humiliate you, or those you love”. These have been popular especially in school settings. And outrage mounts as those who are unwilling to confront them want laws passed so somebody else will confront them.
Some are well dressed and highly paid, but still, at heart, they are bullies.
But there is a second type, that hasn’t received as much press, that I’d like to address, or rather confront. It is what I chose to call the Weak Bullies, the Whiners. They lead with supposed weakness. “I’m so weak you MUST help me.”
No, I don’t!
The ultimate, and I’ve experienced it first hand, is the threat of suicide – “Do what I say or I’ll commit suicide”. Implied is that you will feel guilty for the rest of your life if you don’t acquiesce to their demands. Well let me respond clearly and forcefully: “It would be a loss for everyone if you chose to commit suicide, but that is your choice, and I for one will never feel the slightest bit of guilt for your decision”.
The primary defense against bullies is to ignore them when you can. When you can’t and sometimes they can be rather intrusive – confront their message and remove their pseudo-power.
PETA – The animals are so weak you must defend them…
No, let them fend for themselves.
These people don’t so much love animals as they HATE people!
Endangered species!
Species come and go. They have for millions of years. That’s nature. Sure I’m as sentimental as the next person and would hate to lose tigers, especially white tigers, because they’re so beautiful, but not because they’re in danger of becoming extinct.
I find it somewhat fascinating that the endangered species crowd are very selective protecting tigers and many birds. But in all fairness the measles virus is almost extinct. Not only is it naturally going away, but people in large numbers are actively trying to kill it! The same is true for many other species. Perhaps we can get some people together for the following causes:
Save the ebola virus.
Save the black plague.
Save Lou Gerick’s disease…
Save Sickle Cell anemia…
Save smallpox.
And if we remember to – Save Altzheimers…
They aren’t as cute & cudly as a tiger cub,
but fair is fair – or is it?
This entry is a continuation of my series on how negative models keep us from thinking clearly about issues. Earlier entries are: “On the Use of Negative Models” & “The Myth of Lift”
Let’s look at the current paradigm or explanation for how people behave, examine why it doesn’t & indeed can’t work, and then explore a new paradigm.
Current Paradigm: People respond to various Stimuli. So if you find, predict or control the stimuli they are exposed to – you can understand, control, and/or predict their behaviors.
Assumptions:
We are passive responders, not active participants in life.
These various ‘stimuli’ have certain mysterious powers,
which in fact they do not, and never could have.
Examples: Alcohol, certain foods, pornography, firearms, PTSD memories, etc.
Closer look:
Gun Violence:
I and countless others have been around firearms for many years and have never seen one, by itself, jump off the table, turn & point itself, and then pull it’s own trigger. Knives are the same way.
Alcohol: Imagine a quart of Scotch sitting on your kitchen table. It could sit there for a hundred years and not cause a problem unless 2 specific conditions are met:
1. Someone has to drink it, a behavior. Yet even this is not enough. If you were to drink that quart of scotch over the course of a year, it would not have much effect other than some mild relaxation. So, for it to be harmful, we need a 2nd condition:
2. It must be ‘consumed’ in a very brief period of time. Again, a behavior. So the substance has no magical power, it is the behaviors that cause the problems.
PTSD memories:
Let’s imagine, for those of us fortunate enough not to have experienced this: During one of the many wars, a gun shot killed your best friend who was standing right next to you. Years later, you’re walking down the street of some small town, like New York City, and a car backfires. You dive for cover. Some would claim that the ‘noise’ triggered you. But that same noise did NOT trigger the many other people around you. So it’s not the noise but the painful, and un-processed, memory you brought to it, that creates your behavior.
I could go on and on, about chocolate, drugs, pornography & other ‘things’ that do not have the magical powers we attribute to them, but life is too short to be boring…
Also, some activities, or habits, are labeled and then treated as if they were real things, like workaholism, sex addiction, etc. These are activities, or habits, that are done by people not to people.
Thus the so-called all powerful stimulus is no more than a passive reminder.
Unless we have a personal, un-processed memory, it can’t Stimulate us!
Thus the so-called Stimulus has NO magic power in itself, only a passive reminder of powers which come from within us!
How did this wide-spread notion of Stimulus-Response come to be, and then come to be popular? This could get boring…
As near as I can construct, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (September 14, 1849 – February 27, 1936) a Russian scientist, performed and directed experiments on digestion in dogs which earned him the 1904 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine.
Pavlov’s term “conditional reflex” was mis-translated from the Russian as “conditioned reflex”, and other scientists reading his work concluded that since such reflexes were conditioned, they must be produced by a process called conditioning. (Another mysterious force conjured up to explain something which was not yet understood, like the entity ‘Random’, but that’s another days topic.)
Personal experiment:
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Imagine you’re leaving your home tomorrow morning.
As you step outside, you declare:
Ah, let me go forth and experience some random stimuli!
Duh! That would never happen.
Why? Because you, being a purpose & meaning driven creature always go forth to accomplish some Purpose or Intention. Even if that purpose is simply to relax and enjoy life. Then as you poke & prod the world, you being the Stimulus, the world Responds to your energy. It may yield to you, it may resist you, and most often, it will simply ignore you.
Try it yourself.
Certified RFR – Rat Free Research
All studies have been conducted by humans, on humans, and for humans.
No rats have ever been harmed or even inconvenienced.
Bob Gorman
January 19, 2008
Over the last year I have been following Cesar Mellan ‘The Dog Whisperer’, reading both of his 2 books and watching his show on the National Geographic channel.
Then something struck me, oh how the obvious is so hard to see. When Cesar has what he calls an ‘unbalalnced’ dog, a much better label than ‘sick’ or ‘neurotic’ or ‘psychotic’ or any of the many pejorative labels we put on people, he puts them in a pack of about 40 ‘balanaced’ dogs so the ‘unbalanced’ one can learn the social and other skills it needs.
However, with people, what’s called Group Therapy, we put 1 ‘unbalanced’ person in with a dozen or so other ‘unbalanced’ people*.
How then could they possibly learn the skills they need?
* Oh, and also 1 so-called ‘balanced’ leader!
October 17, 2007
IF, we are all the same,
THEN it is fair to treat everyone the same,
and unfair to treat different people differently.
However,
IF, we are all the different,
THEN it is fair to treat everyone differently,
and unfair to treat different people the same.
In a world of different people, sometimes very different people, there are many things we all have in common.
1. We all need to have a personally meaningful dream or goal to organize our efforts, and our energies, and help us to set priorities when the natural limitations of time, space, resources, etc. force decisions. I call this part of each of us a ‘unique spirit’.
2. We all have a ‘thinking mind’, a place where we reflect on our experiences and try to build better rules for our futures. But each individual thinking mind can be very different from the people right around us as well as those far away. This ‘thinking mind’ which requires the notions of past and future, seems to be one of the differences between us and other animals, even mammals. Like a double edged sword, it is both our finest gift, and the source of our greatest miseries.
3. We all have an ‘emotional mind’, a place that protects and nourishes all of the rest of us, our ‘thinking minds’, our unique spirits, our physical bodies, and the various communities we live in and depend upon.
4. We all have a physical body. A simple way of defining it, is it’s what gets buried or burned after we die. But while alive it is a great source of both pleasure and pain. While each of us has a human body, the differences in those bodies varies quite widely. Ignoring those individual differences causes our bodies much pain, and our emotional minds much distress.
5. Finally, since like horses and dogs we are very much pack animals, we need even more than most animals a sustenance community, which will both defend and nurture us, and that in turn needs our unique contributions to sustain the rest of the human community. For many other species, days, weeks, and months are necessary for a youngster to live an independent life. For us it takes at least a decade sometimes two.
Bob
July 22, 2007
This is both a way of thinking and a tool.
Example:
A central question, or struggle, for many people is: Should I look out for and serve my Self or Others? This has generated many very heated debates. Graphically, let’s look at this conflict.
Who to help:
However, if we change this from a 1 to a 2 dimentional space, here’s what happens:
Since this is both a way of thinking and a tool:
As a way of thinking, it helps when you want to resolve often contentious issues. This presumes your true intention is to unite not split. Those whose intentions are to create and maintain divisions, such as some politicians, many so-called news-reporters, and those who want to destroy our way of life, will have no use for it.
The tool part is simply a graphic way to help us ‘think out loud’. Graphs are sometimes more useful than words, since words allow us to both reveal or hide our thoughts, and focus on things and people and events as if they were totally isolated experiences. Graphs tend to encourage us to make more relationship type decisions. Where do I place the first item on a blank page? And the second item, should it be lower or higher, to the left or right, in bigger or smaller letters etc. Perhaps a different color…
Expanding this a bit further and, hopefully, shedding some light on it, and making it even more useful, we need to look at several things. Not everything we do helps ourselves or others. Sometimes it does nothing, and I’ll address that situation later, but sometimes, in spite of the best of intentions, we actually do harm. To see that graphically, lets extend both of these arrows in the opposite direction.
By pushing each dimension into the negative range we have a more complete picture to think about. To save space I’ll label the 4 quadrents, QI, QII, QIII, QIV. (Remember the Roman Numerals). The numbering is completely arbitrary.
Here we can place many groups of individuals, some of whom seem hard to understand, especially if we only have 2 places like Good & Bad.
To print this out for taking notes, right click on the graphic, select “View Image”, and when the image comes up in a separate page, Print it.
This is my view only, others may well disagree…
Quad I – Win-Win or Both Win
Diplomats are typically here. Win-win solutions is what their whole life is all about.
Internationally – Tony Blair – creating peace between England and Ireland.
SalesPeople are also here. While we sometimes think of them as self only oriented, the best of salespeople realize that no deal is concluded until BOTH parties are satisfied.
Quad II – Self Wins – Others Lose
There are quite a few folk here.
Bullies, being insecure, need to put others down, in order to feel OK about themselves.
Criminals of most all types, believe, and live, I win, others lose.
These next 3, Narcissists, Sociopaths, and Perverse Abusers or Soul Killers, I’ve known about for a while, but couldn’t figure out just where they differed or overlapped. Doing some reading and using my KnCells tools to reduce the confusion, here’s what I currently think:
Narcissists – The narcissist, is not just the center of the universe, he/she IS the universe. So the rest of us simply don’t exist.
Sociopaths – see: “The Sociopath Next Door” by Martha Stout
The Sociopath, also a narcissist, acknowledges we exist, indeed he/she needs us to play the games where he/she will ‘win’ over us. But after winning we no longer count. A recent example is Mike DeFong a now former prosecutor in North Carolina, who cares absolutely nothing about the damage he creates to others, only his own, sometimes imaginary, advancement.
Perverse Abusers – see: “Stalking the Soul” by Marie-France Hirigoyen. The ‘Perverse Abuser’, I call them Soul Killers, also a Sociopath, not only acknowledges that we exist, but is dedicated to make sure we cease to exist. They will not rest until we are destroyed. We see these on the international stage. They are also in our personal lives, but are much harder to see or accept there.
Yet another group, with deadly effect:
Homicide bombers – I win others lose.
Quad III - Self Loses – Others Win
Martyrs – Others win, I lose
Burnout - Others win, I lose
Quad IV – Both Lose
Suicides – I lose, others lose what I might have contributed.
Idea Killers – These people will attempt to kill any idea that moves us all forward. They seem to believe that somewhere in this world, somehow, there exists a person who wants to have fun; and it their mission in life is to prevent that from ever happening. They are the sadest of the sad, and it would be only their problem, but most of them are devoted body and soul to making the rest of the world as miserable as themselves.
Suicide bombers – I lose life, others lose life.
Here’s a graphic which shows where I believe these various groups fit; your values may well differ.
July 17, 2007
Left Brain Creativity and/or Right Brain Editing
This topic is very, very personal. I hope it will be a comfort to others who have the same dynamics.
This is a topic that is rarely, if ever discussed. I always knew, based on what everyone around me said, that I was ‘creative’ in some way, perhaps even hyper-creative, if there is such a thing. My need to create is so pervasive in my life, and I attribute it at least partially to being an appropriate response to severe and inappropriate abuse/neglect.
It shows up in so many ways in my life. When most people run out of money, they think “I need to go get a job”. When I run out of money, I think “I need to go create a business”.
Once when I was living in the Chicago area I saw an ad in the paper, for a collection of books on creativity. The person wanted, I think, $150. for about 35 books on every possible aspect of creativity. Naturally I bought them, and over several years, read them all.
But what I am about to write about was NOT in that collection. It was a small book, and I don’t remember the title or the authors’ name, it was a woman. It was set very strongly in a business setting. If anyone knows the title or author, please contact me. She had a huge impact, in a very positive way on my life, and I’d like to say Thanks…
Even tho I had been accused of being creative by everybody around be, I didn’t fit the typical definition, and so for many years, I felt like a fraud of some kind, till I read her book.
Most of us when we hear the term creativity, think of what I now call right-brain creativity. The painter starts with a blank canvas and draws a picture. The writer starts with a blank piece of paper and creates a novel. The musician, and I’m guessing here, starts with blank music paper. But while I wanted to do that, at least the writer part, I couldn’t!
She introduced the notion of Re-Arrangement as a form of creativity. Moving the existing parts around to create a new pattern! Wow! It clicked with me immediately. In business, several times I had been hired to take over a failing department, turn it around, and make it successful. A ground rule was always, I could NOT fire everyone and hire a whole new staff, I had to do it with the existing staff! I did it, I did it very well, and more importantly, I loved it! Reflecting back, I was Re-Arranging!
Looking more broadly at my whole life, I wanted since my youth to create, there’s that word again, a better system of psychology. A better way of thinking about people that would help eliminate, or significantly reduce, personal violence. I wanted both to provide recovery for those who had already been severely broken and a way to prevent future generations of individuals from becoming broken.
Over the last 45+ years I have studied over 140 ‘systems’ of psychology. Some, I read a few articles or books, many I took direct trainings, workshops, seminars etc. Each of them had some good ‘nuggets’ of truth or help. Where, in my opinion, they mostly went astray is that they tried to generalize their excellent solution of a specific problem into a generic solution for all human problems.
So now at 65+ I am left with a few hundred jigsaw puzzle pieces, to assemble into a picture, but I don’t have that picture! I must create it. And how I do that is a massive Re-arrangement of all those nuggets!
Right Brain Editing
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Another thing I haven’t read much about, even tho I’ve been reading “The Writer” magazine for over 50 years, is what I call “Right Brain Editing”.
When I start creating an article, book, workshop etc., I start with a lot of small pieces, very often not organized well at all. Then occasionally, more often now that I recognize it as a solid process, I get into a mode, a frame of mind, where I don’t touch any of the pieces or chunks, but simply re-arrange the big chunks. This chunk needs to come before that chunk… This has worked well for me, and I hope it will be helpful to others as well.
Recently, I was totally stymied with a whole bucket full of my ideas and no clear way forward. What finally worked was this: I made, totally for myself, a PowerPoint presentation of all my ideas. This forced me to concentrate on my main ideas, keeping the What’s, but dropping How’s, and it forced me to create some organization or sequence! In other words, I had to Re-Arrange the chunks!
June 24, 2007
Continuing with negative models…
Some myths persist for centuries, like the earth being the center of the universe. Some for only a century, like ‘lift’, which supposedly keeps airplanes in the air. Let us look at this carefully, and also trust both our senses, and our minds.
Some theoreticians have created an abstract notion called ‘lift’. I consider it bogus, and here’s why. By the way, I’ll also show why it’s safe to fly.
Let’s look at a few of their definitions:
Lift: The lift force, lifting force or simply lift is a mechanical force generated by a solid object moving through a fluid.
The first red flag: It seems to me that a moving object doesn’t generate force; rather a force is need to make the object move.
The second red flag, air is a gas not a fluid!
Gases compress rather easily, and when compressed try to decompress, liquids or fluids, except under some extreme conditions do not.
Do try this at home:
Blow up a balloon. The tension of the balloon skin, compresses the air, keeping it from decompressing. Stick a pin in the balloon. The compressed air, given an opportunity decompresses very rapidly!
Here’s some help, I found. which is as clear as mud:
Sometimes the term dynamic lift or dynamic lifting force is used for the perpendicular force resulting from motion of the body in the fluid, as in an aerodyne, in contrast to the static lifting force resulting from buoyancy, as in an aerostat.
Again, air is a gas not a fluid!
Much of the supposed ‘lift’ of an aerodynamically shaped wing is attributed to Bernoulli’s principle which states: that in fluid flow, an increase
in velocity occurs simultaneously with decrease in pressure.
Yet again, air is a gas not a fluid!
They’ve even created wind tunnels where they blow air, with big fans past a stationary wing to determine its aerodynamic behavior. But that’s not what happens when you fly a plane. The air is sitting there rather happy, and undisturbed, and all of a sudden, you come along with your plane’s wing and try to penetrate the air. If you’re going slowly, say less than 60 mph, the air simply gets out of your way since it’s a rather flexible gas, almost fluid. But when you go faster than say 70+ mph, the air can’t get out of the way quick enough, so it compresses! Now it doesn’t take much compression for the air to get very firm, perhaps spongy is a better word. A mere 30 lbs. of pressure, can keep a 3000 lb. car off the ground.
So as a pilot, you look for air that you can ‘push against’. You compress it with your wing using speed, and as it tries to de-compress it pushes you up. Just like the dense cold air pushing the lighter hot air upwards. There is no mysterious force called ‘lift’, with a motor or batteries of it’s own that ’sucks’ you upward.
Regardless of the ‘aerodynamic shape’ of a wing, you can flip a plane upside down and continue to fly quite normally! acrobatic planes do it all the time. Indeed the shape of their wings is symmetric (same on top and bottom), not the popular ‘aerodynamic’ wing.
To see a diagram of an aerodynamic wing see:
Diagram of an aerodynamic wing
If you like this topic, here are some excellent pictures, see:
Blaniks-1
Blaniks-2
Supporting articles:
Newton on hot air
Another explanation, with fantastic pictures is at:
Air-balloons
Gravity pushes flames and hot air up:
Gravity
Naturally, if I ever have to take an FAA exam to get some sort of flying certificate, I’ll swear allegiance to the lie of lift, to get my license. But when caught in a micro burst, or spiraling to where my plane does not behave like a plane, but more like a rock, I’ll look for some air to ‘push against’!
No worries…
As I promised…
Flying is safe, or at least far safer than driving. The most dangerous part of any flight is driving to the airport, you can get yourself killed on the highway. But if lift is a myth, and the aircraft industry relies on it, why is it safe to fly? Mathematically, the same forces exist in the real world, regardless of how you describe them. Just as with hot air rising, whether the ‘lift’ sucks the plane upward or pushes it upwards, the same forces are at play, just the explanations are different, one easy and natural, one abstract and difficult.
Please DO try this at home:
When you’re driving in a car down a highway, put your hand out of the window. First, put it out flat, with your thumb facing the wind. Then turn it slightly, raising your thumb, and feel what you experience. I feel a compression of air on the underside, which tries to push my hand upwards. I do not feel any suction from above pulling the skin on the back of my hand upwards. But that is only my experience, you try it, and decide for yourself.
Further thoughts:
Does the same or a similar principle apply for water when skipping a stone across it! Why for the first 2-3 skips does the water not allow the stone to penetrate it, but by the 4-5 skip it does allow it to penetrate the surface of the water and sink to the bottom?
June 19, 2007
We have so many negative models around that it is hard to think accurately sometimes. What I mean by negative forces, is explanations that propose a mysterious force, which can’t be measured, pushing, or more often pulling things around.
Case 1: Hot Air
Some people claim that ‘hot air rises’.
It’s as if the hot air has a little motor in it, or perhaps a battery that enables it to propel itself upwards. I doubt that.
A more useful model, for the real world, is that cold air, being more compressed, hence heavier, falls to the ground. We see this when we open a freezer and see the heavy cold air tumble out.
Now when that heavy, cold, compressed air pushes downward, due to gravity, it squeezes the lighter less compressed hot air out of it’s way, thus giving the illusion that hot air rises, when in fact, the cold air, as a side effect of its falling, due to gravity, pushes the hot air upward.
Try it yourself.
June 16, 2007
We all live in multiple worlds. There is the one shared world of everyday experience, where we bump into trees and get a lump on our heads. There is also the worlds we create in our heads, our own personal map of that shared world. To capture the entire experiential would overwhelm us, so we only capture those parts that we are interested in. We construct our personal worlds, or maps, based on our values, priorites, and expectations. This serves us well by reducing the ‘noise’ of the the full ‘real’ experiential world.
Then, since we all want to make things better in some way, we manipulate our private worlds, and refine them, and generate hypothesis, and test them, all with the single goal of making things better, in some way, for our selves and others, those we care about.
To understand others, who have created different maps of our common experiential world, we need to understand that they, like us, act based on their maps, not on the experiential territory.
This distinction, first made by Alfred Korzybski in 1933, is so fundamental to many of my ideas that I want to remove it from long fancy, technical words and make it very real for us ordinary folk. Since we have different individual preferences, here are 3 examples.
Visual example:
To make this clear, visually, here is a picture of a local airport both as the world is,
(Google Satellite photograph) and as we see it (Google Map View):
 
Clearly there is a difference, and when we think about things we must be clear about which world we are talking about. Confusing one with the other has caused countless mis-understandings.The really important rule is that:
We, and others, ACT based on our private maps of the world, NOT on the shared territory!
Audio example: The difference between a bird singing, and a recording of that bird singing.
Kinesthetic example: The difference between flying an airplane, and reading about how to fly a plane.
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