Wheeler Peak, Great Basin National Park, Nevada — about the same level of isolation as the current protest occurring in Burns, OR.

Posts were coming in last night that a group of militia movement protestors, led by Ammon Bundy, had broken into the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters in Burns, OR, ostensibly to make a statement about their assumed rights as ranchers and their right to graze cattle wherever they want in the West.  The details are laborious, as well as their argument — mostly because it’s so convoluted and layered with half-truths and lies.  This is, at some level, a continued manifestation of the Sagebrush Rebellion — a movement that was started back in the 1970s designed to return jurisdiction over federal lands in the western United States to the states in the region.

The short history is as follows:  The United States, since its inception, has had various manifestations of programs either involving encouraging settlement of its domain, or reserving parts of it for various reasons.  It’s the advantage of white folks coming into a new place, and embracing enough profound In Group/Out Group dynamics to exterminate off a huge hunk of the locals (known as Indians or Native Americans) or place them on remote ‘reservations’.  Most Americans are aware of places like National Parks as being carved out of that federal reserve.  Less know that over 10% of the public estate was given to a handful of men for construction of the railroads, which turned into a series of the largest land swindles in the history of the nation.  But I digress…

The land available to be settled has always been called ‘the frontier’ in some form or another.  And the frontier was essentially closed with the passage of the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934, that placed all unsettled lands into various grazing districts.  At that time, the Bureau of Land Management was established (and funded) by the federal government to manage these lands, and coordinate use.  What’s fascinating is that only two years earlier, President Herbert Hoover had offered the remaining unreserved federal lands to the states.  And the states had turned him down, largely because most of the land was so damaged by overgrazing they wanted no part of the financial responsibility of fixing the mess that was out there on the range.

The lands in current contention, usually in the high desert of Nevada and eastern Oregon and southern Idaho, are remote.  To utilize them, they were subject to considerable consolidation, both formal and informal, with old-fashioned land barons piecing together multi-hundred-thousand acre spreads patrolled by ranchers in airplanes.

It’s hard to wrap one’s head around the condition of the landscape, as well as the scale. To someone from the outside, these landscapes appear wild and desolate.  But the ecological reality is that too many of them are often heavily impacted by sheep and cattle — those ubiquitous, non-native species.  And the ranchers out there have bent much of the landscape to their will.  Sometimes deliberately, by rooting up the sagebrush by a practice called ‘chaining’, where a chain is drug between two bulldozers to annihilate vegetation so that some non-native grass species can be planted;  and sometimes accidentally, through the spread of species like cheatgrass across the bunchgrass ecosystems of the high mountain West.

If you think lots of cattle and beef are produced there, you’d be wrong as well.  It’s a marginal fraction (I remember something less than 5% of all cattle production comes from the Intermountain West, and it’s probably less.)  But the cowboy ethos in the U.S. looms large culturally, and even though no one in their right mind wants to actually work as a cowboy, as a nation, we are a sucker for iconic chiseled dudes in Stetson hats.  Even if most ranch workers are migrant labor from Mexico and points south.  When the ranch owners start talking, dressed in that Western drag, we perk up our ears, whether we should or not.

There’s more story behind the takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters (which incidentally, though it is a wildlife refuge, still has cows grazing on it.)  But here’s a description of the current situation:  Ammon Bundy, son of rancher Cliven Bundy, is leading a protest, supposedly with armed men inside the building, involving occupying this piece of property in protest of a re-sentencing of local ranchers Dwight and Steven Hammond, who burned 139 acres of rangeland, supposedly for rangeland management, but more likely to cover up a poaching violation.  If the situation is anything like the last Bundy dust-up, it’s going to have lots of confused, isolated dogma, as well as more than a few non-native psychopaths laboring under impulsively driven, black-and-white thinking.  In the vernacular, we  might say they were “itchin’ fer a fight!”  And they’re famous for having lots of automatic weapons.

The battle cry across lots of my enviro friends’ pages has been “lock ’em up!”  and “storm the compound!”  Obviously, this is very triggering for them, and many progressives.  Here are a group of white males, who committed a crime — arson — who are now occupying a federal building and demand special privilege.  What’s not to activate in those lower v-Memes?  Those obsessed with power and control have long terrorized the environmental movement.  Now it’s time for them to get their turn under the government boot.

Yet, if we want a better, or rather, a more evolved world, thinking along these lines on such a short timeline is likely a very poor solution.  There are no hostages taken in the situation, and no one’s life is at risk.  The locals in Burns, OR, where the Malheur NWR headquarters building is located, are pretty unhappy with the state of affairs. Everyone just got off Christmas holiday, after all.

And we can also see the effects of our hyper-connected, empathetic modern society, relaying information from one of the more remote corners of our world, into everyone’s living room.  In many ways, this is no different than the situation with Boko Haram’s kidnapping of the 276 school girls in Nigeria to be distributed as wives and slaves to its fighters.  100 years ago, it would have been impossible for us to even know about such an event, and if we did know, there likely would have been an anthropologist there to tell us that such events were modestly common, and culturally appropriate.  If we look at this event from a social/relational developmental framework, well, not much has changed regarding the Magical/Authoritarian v-Memes of the respective players.  There is lots of higher-level Legalistic v-Meme borrowing, which is a fancy way of saying these guys are spouting the Constitution and using it for the justification of their actions.  It’s also a sign of ignorance, a lack of personal evolution, and more than a little potential empathy disordered behavior.

Many of the rank-and-file involved with the protest look like Range War precedents from days past — namely lots of Authoritarians, with vested economic interests, and more than a little High Conflict personality in their blood.  Yet it’s important to remember that the world, even in isolated Burns, Oregon, has moved past them.  “It’s sort of frightening when there are people making threats and people toting guns,” Burns resident Kainan Jordan told KTVZ. “We’re not used to this kind of thing here.”

The solution is to not let the protestor cowboys bring the power of cultural imagery into play.  Nothing is proved if someone goes home dead, other than the fact that the government really was only interested in power and control, or the wanna-be martyrs really turned out to be martyrs.

Maybe it’s really this:  an opportunity for the Progressive Left and the environmental movement to confront their own past trauma, and grow and heal through it.  And practice the long view that the folks in the movement purport to have across-the-board.  We can turn off the power, and let the inevitable happen as more and more get cold and surrender.  If we’re really evolved, we won’t even try to starve them out.  That will take longer, but would be even more of a profound statement.  We’ll accept this as the isolated incident that it is, and realize there is no way, in a country of 300 million, with behavior and structure across the Spiral, that things can be neat and clean.  The statistics won’t permit it.  Does anyone out there remember Wayne Hage and his 1991 range war?  That guy even went so far as to marry Helen Chenoweth, famous Idaho congresswoman and radical right pioneer.

No one said it’s easy — and maybe this is one of the hardest moments.  But counting on the Ammon Bundys of the other side to lead the way toward higher social evolution is not the way to bet.  Let’s let them represent the barbaric edge of anachronism that they’re playing.  And take our opportunity to give real credence to the anti-war slogan from the Vietnam era:  “What if they had a war and nobody came?”

White Sand Lake, Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, Clearwater NF, Idaho

A friend posted a blurb on the Dunning-Kruger effect a day or so ago on Facebook.  It’s political, and not very insightful, so I won’t re-post.  But it made me revisit my own writings on the subject, and realize that I hadn’t done a very good job of discussing the concept, which is very important for understanding information dynamics inside organizations.  Dunning-Kruger can be a powerful tool for ridicule of audiences you don’t like, as you’ll see when I get done explaining it.  But the work that David Dunning and Justin Kruger, both professors at Cornell University, completed in 1999, has tremendous ramifications for understanding knowledge transfer inside business organizations, as well as current societal trajectories.

What’s the basic idea behind Dunning-Kruger?  It’s this: people who are relatively unskilled in a particular area will rank their abilities much higher in that area than those with more skill and talent.  In the language of this blog, it means that their metacognition is low — the things that they know they don’t know, or the things that they don’t know they don’t know (or aren’t remotely aware of) are few.  They’re basically not aware that they’re dumb.

But there are flip-side corollaries to Dunning-Kruger involving people with demonstrated expertise.  Experts, when asked how their knowledge stacks up relative to others, will often assume that other people know a lot that the experts know, and will project their comprehension of specific expertise onto others — a direct manifestation of the Authoritarian/Egocentric v-Meme, no matter how ostensibly humble or well-meaning.

As a teacher, I can personally vouch that this is an enormous problem for me as I’ve aged.  You teach the students in one class something, and then the next class comes along — fresh, brightly scrubbed faces that look very much like the last bunch — and you assume that surely they must know what you just taught the previous class!  For me, each semester, I sit down and work out hitting the reset button in my own head so I minimize this effect.

Here’s the point — that’s also Dunning-Kruger.  It’s not just about other people whom you think are dumb.  It’s also about all of us, at some level.  At times, we’re so dumb, we’re unaware how dumb we are.  And at other times, we’re so smart (or learned) we don’t know how smart we are.  This lack of metacognitive perception is a two-edged sword.

There’s a famous funny story in the academy, where a math professor is doing an elaborate proof of a particular theorem on the board.  He comes up to a spot, where he turns to the class after writing down a particularly complex part of the proof, and says ‘Of course, it’s obvious…’  He then looks at it, exits the room for 10 minutes, then comes back and says, ‘Of course, it’s obvious’ and continues writing!  That’s classic Dunning-Kruger.

(As a side note, I committed Dunning-Kruger on my original mention of Dunning-Kruger in my blog, back in July.   I said something to the effect of ‘I wrote about Dunning-Kruger and surely you all are familiar with it! 🙂

For those that remember the posts about metacognition, the magnitude of the Dunning-Kruger effect on an organization is powerfully affected by the social/relational structure.  If you’re in a status-based, Authoritarian organization, where discussing the organization’s problems is strictly verboten, and pointing out areas where the organization (or leadership) lack knowledge results in punishment, it doesn’t take long for metacognition to collapse.  The organization becomes, a la Rogers’ Theory of Diffusion of Innovations, a  home for employees full of Late Majority and Laggards — an anathema in the rapidly evolving, hi-tech information-sharing landscape of today.

And it can happen to organizations full of very smart people.  Anyone failing to believe this needs to examine the rapid collapse of certain companies in the tech industry, like DEC or IBM.  Microcomputers were the disruptive technology, of course.  And while super-large, mainframe-esque computers still occupy a small part of the computing landscape, the organizations/customer base they service (consider the fact that IBM is still in the mega-supercomputer business), not surprisingly, match the social structures and frontier tech aspirations of those with the same design limitations.

A great example of this would be the Lawrence Livermore National Labs, the mission there for advanced understanding of exploding nuclear weapons — truly a relic technology (as well as the nuclear fusion program,) and the IBM Sequoia supercomputer that was built especially for them.  It’s no surprise that  these two partners (IBM and LLNL) are in the nuclear simulations game.  And it’s also important NOT to discount the relative sophistication of the games these people play.  But to what end?  Does the world really need smaller nuclear weapons?  What about the core validity of these programs?  And at the same time, how else could the Legalistic/Absolutistic v-Memes allow the system behavior to emerge?

Confirmation bias also comes into play. The phenomenon, which has a history going back to Thucidydes, has been more recently defined and researched by Peter Wason, as the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one’s beliefs or hypotheses, while giving disproportionately less consideration to alternative possibilities, is also a major factor in destruction of metacognition..

What confirmation bias means in simple English is that if you believe something, a natural tendency is to go out and find more evidence that proves the thought in your head, as opposed to confronts what you believe.  And it’s everywhere (warning — potential confirmation bias of confirmation bias!)  The simple child’s game of spotting a Volkswagen and then punching your brother in your arm, known by my own kids as Slug-Bug, is prone to confirmation bias.  They start by only punching their brother when they see a Beetle.  But the game rapidly degenerates to any small car becoming a reason to beat the living daylights out of each other.

Organizations with particularly rigid belief structures (like universities!) can be extremely prone to confirmation bias destroying metacognition (and promoting Dunning-Kruger effects) as well as destroying meaningful examination of belief structures.  An example of one of the biggest areas that vex me is the perspective that students are lazy and prone to cheat.  I’ve found from my own experience (also prone to confirmation bias!) that a certain, measurable subset of kids cheat, and that this number doesn’t substantially change year-to-year.  The ways they do it are relatively predictable as well, and if you design curriculum and evaluation around these techniques, you don’t have a problem with cheating.  Yet, inevitably, there are routine outbreaks of professorial concern (and the incumbent task force!) regarding cheating, where if you stand up and voice a view similar to the one I just stated, you’re branded as a heretic.  Not surprising in an institution dominated by Authoritarian and Legalistic/Absolutistic thinking that spends an inordinate amount of time on focusing on control.

Confirmation bias weighs heavily in Dunning-Kruger scenarios of self- and organizational competency assessment.  People inside an insulated organization where underlings consistently confirm their boss’ approach as the correct one feed into leadership’s perception that they are on the right track.  And as the worm turns, such organizations also grind out other employees that could fix the problem.  Those people leave because either a.) they don’t believe the superficial beliefs,  b.) don’t appreciate the workplace dynamic of working in fear for their careers, or c.) they’re fired.

One of my mentors, Al Espinosa, who worked as a fish biologist for the US Forest Service, and is one of the pioneers of using data-driven analyses for watershed health, had a term for this — the Synergistic Stooge Effect.  (Al also ended up being driven out of the Forest Service.) People with the same belief structures would sit in the same room and tell themselves the same thing over and over, in denial of outside data, until the whole enterprise (and all the watersheds they were responsible for) started literally falling apart, with landslides and road collapses.  Citizen lawsuits became a primary driver of reform — because the USFS’ own data showed decline, and problems became so obvious that citizens could pursue enforcement through an outside agency — the Federal Courts.  Even under the reality of legal jurisprudence inside the Federal Courts that the ‘King’ (in this case, the US Government) can do no wrong.  At least not until you get to Federal Appeals Court.

Al even developed a lexicon for the professionals inside the agency that facilitated the group’s Dunning Kruger behavior — lap dogs (underling authoritarians) and displacement behavior specialists (biologists inside the agency who would run away from problems and hike in the wilderness to avoid conflict) were two types.  Needless to say, there are many pathologies that organizations enshrine when denial and metacognitive collapse become part of organizational culture.

It might be easy to see how people we’d consider stupid would consider themselves smarter than other people when asked to evaluate their competence.  But how does the other end of Dunning-Kruger work?  How do smart people consider themselves only marginally more competent than others in the general population pool?

One of the interesting areas I’ve explored is how expert thinking actually works.  Often you will have high experts who reach answers that might require other, less-developed individuals extensive time to come to the same conclusion.  Understanding this can be traced back to Roger Martin’s mystery => heuristic => algorithm paradigm.  As we’ve discussed earlier, Martin’s paradigm maps well to the Spiral, with Mystery/Guiding Principles thought being referenced to the upper, more unknown parts, Heuristic mapping to Performance/Goal-Based behavior, and algorithmic thought mapping to Legalistic/Absolutistic social structures.

In real experts’ heads, there is what I call a v-Meme compaction of information from higher levels into lower, more impulsive parts of the brain.  This turns more complex information structures from slow, reasoned thought to quick thought.  The brain is an amazing thing, always looking to free up space.  So if the brain can take more complex processes buttressed by hundreds of examples and create an established behavior, it will if we let it. Confirmation bias will help your brain make the decision that it ought to speed up with certain kinds of decisions — after all, the situation is the same, isn’t it?  And certainly, it’s not, all in all, such a bad thing.  As one rises in an organization, the expansiveness of the decision landscape keeps growing. You’ve got to figure out somewhere to put all the detritus.

It’s certainly true in hi-tech. Up to a certain point of time in the early ’80s, experts likely would recommend the next largest mainframe computer to come along as a solution to business problems.  (My first microcomputer that I used when I worked in the steel mill in 1982 was a hobby-based Heath-Tecna.)  And for the longest time, in all tech heads, the idea that real computing could be done by a smaller box was something that did not play well inside our own noggins, filled with our own version of confirmation bias.

Yet we all know the end to the story.  Our current expectation is that computers will now get smaller, and ‘bigger is better’ has now been replaced with another belief framed by confirmation bias – ‘if it’s not shrinking, it’s lower tech.’

We all do this, at some place in our lives.  We process enough similar experiences, we down-compact.  When I go kayaking, when I’m getting my gear together, I always count out the Big Five — paddle, lifejacket, sprayskirt, helmet and boat.  Eventually even this process down-compacts even more and I have a bag where I count all the gear going in, and going out, so I condense getting ready to boat in grabbing that one bag.  It’s all there, and I can think about what kind of beer I’d like to drink.

Where it becomes a threat is when we’re not aware that we’re doing this — that this is a natural part of brain function. V-Meme Down-compaction loads information into non-empathetic, belief-based knowledge structures that are fundamentally ungrounded or self-referential, like rules or knowledge fragments.  That doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily invalid — I’ll always need my five pieces of gear to go boating.

And this is where self-awareness, and empathetic connection comes in.  If there isn’t an individual inspection/feedback component when I put the gear into the bag, if I rip my sprayskirt on a rock, and it goes into the bag automatically, or if a friend doesn’t remind me to check my gear when I’m leaving the house, I end up sitting on the bank the next time I want to go paddling.

Organizationally, how does empathetic connection and higher organizational modes come into play?  Empathy drives coherence with others, and provides a grounding feedback loop that forces reconsideration of decisions made by experts inside your organization.  Organizations with Performance/Goal-Based v-Meme structures or higher are much less likely to fall into either version of the Dunning-Kruger trap.  Outside grounding — and more importantly, the receptivity to outside grounding, established by things like neutral focus groups, or regular customer visits and listening programs (this is why kaizen events with customers can be such great ideas) — can do much to cause appropriate reconsideration of this constant problem of institutional atherosclerosis.

A little empathy works even in the most dire of circumstances.  There was a period where members of the Senate Democratic and Republican programs starting having a ‘lunch contact’ program.  Amazingly enough, even that little bit of Tribal v-Meme empathetic connection reduced conflict.

And now we can see how this ties back to Servant Leadership 2.0 — the mindful Servant Leader.  It is only with that process of empathetic connection and self-examination that we can hold those Dunning-Kruger beasts at bay.  Having a leader at the top that exhibits that kind of mindfulness and need for connection is definitely going to see mirroring behavior benefits further down the chain-of-command — all anathema to Dunning-Kruger manifestation.

There’s a curve that shows the progression of Dunning-Kruger I’ve posted from this website below:

(Contrary to the figure’s announcement, Dunning and Kruger were not awarded the Nobel Prize in psychology (of which there is none.)  Rather, they were awarded the Ig Nobel Prize, which is a parody.)

Organizational managers might like to operate in the valley — the position of maximum metacognition — but we all enjoy the benefits of colleagues who give quick, right-thinking answers as well.  The real answer is that combination of self-reflection, personal mindfulness, and empathetic connection to outside audiences to ground ourselves to reality.  As well as being humble when asked the question “Are you sure you know what you’re talking about?”

Takeaways:  The Dunning-Kruger effect shows up on both ends of the competence spectrum, and afflicts both superbly competent and incompetent alike.  Confirmation bias complicates things, because we reinforce what we know with our own observations.  The two solutions are, not surprisingly, mindfulness of our own thought process, and empathetic connection with others.  And it doesn’t hurt to have someone at the top beaming out these values to their employees.

Further Reading:  This piece on Normalizing Deviance, about pilots who don’t follow appropriate pre-flight behavior and checklists is a great example of how v-Meme Down-compaction, as well as confirmation bias, can create a real hazard, even among expert pilots.  Gotta go through that pre-flight checklist, guys — or that plane may crash.  As good an example of discarding necessary Legalistic/Absolutistic algorithms to Authoritarian expert judgments as you can get.  As we all know, there are often reasons behind those rules.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ryan Woods and our African Painted Dog-Chasing UAV, Summer 2015

One of the big challenges that confront managers attempting to transform their organizations to more synergistic, creative enterprises is understanding the role of rules.  How do you manage some modest level of hierarchy in a more empathetic, free-thinking organization?  It’s not easy.  And as friend Jake Leachman pointed out, it’s important to differentiate rules from values (regardless how much some folks will scream.)  Values are more fuzzy, definitionally, where as rules — well, they’re the rules.

I’ll tell you from personal experience, though — you need rules.  Rules serve as constraints from total creativity, and while that might sound restrictive, it will actually encourage creativity and synergy if done right.

Let’s consider how that works, from a historical perspective.  Back when I was in college (dinosaurs were still ambling the streets, and leopard skin tunics were the hot number) friends of mine were working on developing some of the first consumer/commercial Ethernet products.  There were a plethora of algorithms for networking — I can remember, as a young boy, dreaming of Apollo token ring workstations strung together in a row — but what it really meant was that nothing could work together unless it was built under the same roof.

Along came the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) movement, started in 1977, where the International Organization for Standardization laid out a general plan for various network layers, drafted by Hubert Zimmerman.  Though the TCP/IP Internet protocol ended up being the one primarily implemented for construction, the OSI turned into more of a semantic model that still guides networking today.  It pointed the creativity of an entire cutting-edge community toward developing the Internet we have today.  Appropriate standardization — one of the key aspects of the Legalistic v-Meme — is one of the primary drivers in creating a nervous system for our planet.

How do we decide what to standardize and what not to standardize?  Certainly there is some level of application dependence on the answer.  Framing the question appropriately is, however, important.  One of the ways I like to approach the problem is by considering a language analogy, originally introduced to my thinking through the Computer Graphics text by Foley and Van Dam.  The authors split up processing for computer graphics along a four part hierarchy:

1.  Lexical — fundamental elements used to build phrases (words, phonemes, letters, etc.)
2. Syntactic — rules used to string lexical elements together, but not responsible for larger meaning.
3. Semantic — Rules for constructing paragraphs out of sentences, learned methods of expressing thoughts, etc.
4. Conceptual — High level heuristics that deliver large, sweeping points that characterize a general argument.

Product variability, as well as reliability is going to dictate how many rules you’re going to have in how many places.  Naturally, more rules means more constrained designs.  If you want breakthrough thinking, you’re obviously not going to constrain concepts, or larger paradigms.  Think electricity — hydropower, natural gas combustion turbines, wind, solar, batteries and fuel cells are all valid conceptual level approaches.  But if you need a certain compactness, or a particular energy density, or you need to build on technology already generated by your experts, then some rules are going to be in order.

How can we perceive rules, and have a meaningful discussion about their place, and generation?  Here are some thoughts that require a little 2nd Tier reflection:

1.  Consider rules from the v-Memes above and below.  What’s the percentage of effect of a rule on improving performance (the v-Meme above) vs. the % of effect on increasing/decreasing control?  Have the discussion in a grounded group.
2. What’s the process for creation or changing of rules?  Rules only enfranchise your employees if there are meaningful ways to change them if they no longer apply.
3. Recognize that rules are, fundamentally, belief structures.  They are the result of data and circumstances integrated over a number of instances.  Historical records of why rules came into being can be very helpful in managing, expanding, or deleting them.
4. Avoid making rules for the first exception in behavior that comes along.  The rule is likely to be a weak rule, and have unintended consequences.
5. Once you get a certain body of rules, practice timely deletion.  Don’t just leave archaic rules on the books.  Historical reflection helps here.
6. Rules cost money.  Cost/benefit analyses of rules is always a good idea.  This concept goes along well with #4.
7. Remember that rules have their fundamental limitation –Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem.  The short version of understanding this famous proof is that there will always be spaces outside of rules, no matter how hard you try.

Finally, remember that rules, for good or bad, decrease agency and responsibility.  That’s what rules do!  Consider the impact on the creative direction of your workforce.  And remember — psychopaths, often the people for whom rules are intended to control, are the best ones in using rules to game the system.  There’s no substitute for real guiding principles in any operation.

Takeaway:  Just like the Performance v-Meme post, I’ve created a slide with tons o’ behavior to help you identify your own (and others) legalistic predilections.  Enjoy!

Mirroring behavior — Botero Museum, Bogota, Colombia

A post in Slate caught my eye today, about the care delivered by residents and interns in hospitals.  Basically, the piece was documenting reforms made on medical intern work hours, which had been diminished from single shifts running 36 hours, to 24 hours with some mandated breaks.  From the article, “The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, the nonprofit that oversees residency programs, followed New York’s lead and barred residents from working more than 80 hours a week or spending more than 24 straight hours on duty caring for patients.”

When the results of this action were studied, though, the effect on patient morbidity was unchanged.  In fact, the situation may have gotten worse.  Why?  The obvious reason is that individual interns that stay constantly by the patient’s side are more likely to have up-to-date and continual information on the patient they’re monitoring, and as such, symptoms that may have large consequences don’t fall through the cracks.  When interns are forced to transfer information as part of continual patient care, the system breaks down.  By the time anyone has been up for 36 hours, their cognitive impairment is such that they’re equivalent to being drunk.  So what this is saying is that you’re better being looked after by a chronic alcoholic than two tired people forced to bridge a shift in patient care.

What it really exposes, however, is the deeply authoritarian and hierarchical nature of Western medicine, and the non-empathetic social structures that govern its delivery.  Everyone, in modern medicine, is viewed as a fragmented piece of the puzzle.  There’s some nod to the fact that interns may be connected to their patients (hence the benefits of constant monitoring) — but there’s little concern about the actual cognitive processing (or well-being) of the individual interns.  Add to that the fact that the non-empathetic social structure applies to what would be considered abuse in other professions (and is grossly illegal in many — such as airline pilots, etc.) because doctors are high-status in our society.  They OUGHT to know better.  But of course, we can only know, especially experientially, what our empathetic development allows us to know.  My dad was a doctor, and there’s a ton of mythical reasoning in the profession (this is the way we’ve always done it!)

What needs to happen is that interns need to be considered people — and have a regimen that boots them out of the Survival v-Meme, so they can focus on others.  Add to that a serious inventory of how information is actually transferred in hospitals, and we’re on to something.  Focus on information coherence and patient representation, as well as consider transients in care — as when supervising doctors come on to a shift, and when they leave.  Ideas wouldn’t be that hard to generate (what about shift overlap, for example?)  Then we would see care improve.

Takeaway:  Information transfer between people is critical for success for continuous running operations.  Lots of solutions appear when we realize that what we have to do is manage for information flow continuity, as opposed to ‘one person, one shift.’  The medical community has one thing right — nothing can replace experience.  But without considering a broadened systemic perspective, we can’t create the integrative environment that patient care actually needs.

Inside the Duomo, Florence/Firenze, Italy

It’s Thanksgiving Day in America, and I’ll keep it short, while posting a more pedestrian op-ed on the crisis over both racism and control at the University of Missouri.  These events unspooled over the last few weeks, only to be eclipsed by the mass murder in Paris by ISIS.  The fact that both thrive on tragedy should be a wake-up call to all sentient actors.  Is this how we want to run our civilization?  Can we move to that higher plane of understanding that it’s not just individuals, but systems that produce certain outcomes?

I’m happy this Thanksgiving, as I usually am on a daily basis, for my loved ones and myself being able to get up and breathe.  That’s how simple I am.  But if I had a wish, it would be this:  that everyone in the world spent a little more time stretching their timeline, and spatial scale of consequence, and think just a little longer about how our actions affect other living things and the planet.  Everything we do is a ripple, and reaches out and interacts with all other things around it.  And we, in turn, are reached by others’ ripples.  And though we all must surrender, in some fashion, to the larger currents moving our time, we all have some level of choice where we seek to send out our energy.  Like moving our hands in the water, while standing in a cool lake on a summer day, we have some agency to send our ripples where we want.  I’m hoping in the coming months, we’ll all think about that just a little more profoundly, and think about where, and how far, our waves will carry. Because like it or not, connection is real.  And our ability to understand is all about empathy.

Happy Thanksgiving — here’s the op-ed.  This first ran in the Moscow-Pullman Daily News Nov. 14, 2015.

Time for Systemic Change at Missou

For those of us with a fascination for land-grant institution governance, this week’s events at the University of Missouri – Columbia are proving to be a fascinating spectacle for what happens to both upper administrations and student bodies when incidents provoke a breaking point response. Here’s the short version.

The University of Missouri has had problems with racial incidents for a long time. I dug through past press, and while the press is focusing on a couple of key provocative incidents, including a feces-smeared swastika in a bathroom, and cotton balls scattered in front of the Black Culture Center, there are more disturbing things. For example, one African-American faculty member reported being called the N-word to her face by other faculty – and without the fanfare of someone distorting events to get attention.

One African-American student went on a hunger strike, and demanded the resignation of Mizzou President Tim Wolfe for inattention to racial climate issues on campus. This was followed by the threat of a boycott by African-American athletes on the Mizzou football team. The same day after Wolfe’s resignation, nine deans of a variety of Mizzou colleges demanded the resignation of the system Chancellor, R. Bowen Loftin. Chancellors are one step down from presidents, and in charge of the Columbia campus. The deans stated that Loftin was responsible for a “toxic environment through threat, fear and intimidation.”

As I write this, the Mizzou campus has not quite returned to normal. Protests continue, and now Mizzou must come to terms with finding a new set of leaders to fix this mess.

But this mess will not be so easy to fix. The Board of Curators, those responsible for the system, similar to WSU’s Board of Regents, conceded to a number of demands for diversity training for administration, faculty and staff, a doubling in the number of African-American faculty, and increased support for mental health facilities on campus. I’m sure the Curators had no problem with the first and third, but increased diversity faculty is something that many administrators promise, but none can really deliver – because they’re constrained by employment law. Part of it depends on convincing more African-American faculty to live in Columbia. And after all this, as well as Ferguson, why would a talented person want to move there? Having been involved in similar searches myself in our own rural campus, these things are just tough. It’s nuts to think that smart diversity faculty don’t have other options.

What is as telling is what the Curators didn’t accept. They didn’t agree with fixing the broken health care insurance system for graduate students, or real concerns about grad students working at the university living in poverty. Interestingly enough, they also refused to cede a larger role to the diversity community in the next search for Wolfe’s and Bowin’s replacements.

What to make of this? Fundamentally, Mizzou is going to remain a system with a very authoritarian social structure. And the only way such social structures handle large-scale change is with some level of violence and chaos. Forget the various actors, as well as the endless academic fascination, on both sides of the political spectrum, with finding ubermenschen to run these increasingly complex systems. Not enough information can flow in this multiple stacked hierarchical systems.

And the powerless are going to remain functionally powerless. When the institutions’ governing board fails on act on employees’ fundamental right to eat and be healthy, nothing good is coming downstream. Though it may be a modestly popular current view that penury is permissible in the cause of one’s education, leadership shouldn’t expect to sleep well at night as long as this is the case.

Social justice needs to consist not just of non-discriminatory environments. It has to consist of modified governance structures, and baseline support for living. Otherwise, we shouldn’t be surprised when the mob comes once more with pitchforks.

 

From the Uffizi museum, Firenze, Italy — one of the fascinating aspects of many of the religious paintings involving Jesus was seen in the backdrops– all scenes from Italy, not the Holy Land

For those that have been paying attention to the higher education landscape lately, there has been a fair amount of upheaval around the issue of race — namely the lack of progress on a variety of diversity issues.  These complaints are broad-based, and often touched off by an incident, which may or may not be small.  There are typically also other concerns mixed in with the crisis, often involving social justice, like poverty or insurance issues for academia’s permanent underclass– temporary faculty and grad students.

Two separate situations made it to the top of the fold.  The first, a racially instigated crisis at the University of Missouri, led to the resignations of Chancellor R. Bowen Lofting, the nominal head of the Missouri-Columbia campus, and the President of the entire system, Tim Wolfe.  The second, involved, curiously enough, Yale University, and an individual whose work on social networks I had blogged about earlier — Nicholas Christakis, a professor, and his wife and fellow professor, Erika, about an e-mail concerning Halloween costumes, cultural and racial appropriation, and students’ ability to choose what they wear for holiday parties.

The University of Missouri’s situation is large and complex.  I’ve written an op-ed about it for the local paper, and I’ll post it after this post.  It is a cautionary tale about how Authoritarian v-Meme systems change, which means they fight until they collapse.

It’s more interesting to look at the situation at Yale, which blew up because of a seemingly innocuous issue — students’ ability to choose what they wear at Halloween.

Here’s the backstory:  in the run-up to Halloween, members of the Yale Intercultural Affairs Committee sent this e-mail to all members of the Yale community regarding dress for the holiday.  For those that don’t bother to click through, it pretty much says dressing like any other culture than your own (whatever that means in this polyglot world!) is off-limits.  It’s reinforced by a Pinterest board that’s even more prescriptive — no Steve Jobs costumes, or Amy Winehouse for that matter.  The tone of the e-mail isn’t bad, but there’s not much left over, costume-wise, if you carefully parse the contents.

Some students apparently complained about the first e-mail to the Christakises, who are live-in ‘masters’ of a residential community at Yale, known as Silliman House.  Such living groups are common at residential campuses like Yale, and the various titles, like ‘master’, are historic.  If you want to get upset by this kind of thing, well, that’s another post!  I’m sentencing you to read the rest of my blog!

In response, Erika Christakis, who is a child development specialist and professor herself, wrote this e-mail, basically arguing that the Halloween costume e-mail sent by the Yale Intercultural Affairs Committee, though typical — lots of universities send out these kinds of things — was overstepping sensible bounds of restriction on student choice.  The level of control being implied, that students wouldn’t be able to figure things out Halloween-costume-wise, was inappropriate, she maintained. Experimentation and exploration was supposed to be part of the college experience, and as long as things didn’t get too far out of hand, then it was just fine.  She explicitly stated that she didn’t want to tell anyone how to act. So it was not a case of an authority attempting to impose her will or taste on others.  Quite the opposite.  She was making a case for independent agency — the ability for students to choose their costumes on their own.

This e-mail led to a crisis among the students, with demands by a group called Next Yale for the Christakises to be booted out of their role as house parents.  The culmination of public exposure for this incident were the following three videos, which shows students in Silliman House demanding apologies from Nick for his wife’s e-mail (talk about reinforcing traditional patriarchal gender roles!) and culminating with one student having a mental screaming breakdown.  See the following three videos for a complete review of the incident.

This incident is a classic example of how a High Conflict Personality (HCP) (in this case, there is more than one!) using well-traversed mental models (in this case, the relatively rigid perspective on diversity on today’s university campuses) to demand obedience from an authority figure that they may, or may not like.  The worst offender was student Jerelyn Luther, who is the one in the final video apparently melting down in a preconscious rage, while earlier in the second video, mugging for the camera.

The Halloween costume issue itself lends itself well to v-Meme unpacking, mostly along the lines of how different social structures have different levels of In-group/Out-group sensitivities dependent on empathetic development and cultural/religious sidebars.  Once one moves out of the grossly inappropriate racist parodies (such as blackface), Native Americans are well-known for resenting costume appropriations by Out-group members — especially those that use religious symbols as part of costume play.

Yet generalizing this exclusion to all folks — saying you must stay in your ethnically or racially designated In-group to play dress-up — starts running into larger problems with reality.  People protesting someone wearing Chinese garb, such as a Qipao, or one of the myriad head adornments, have obviously never visited mainland China. There, it is popular for any tourist, or person out for a Sunday afternoon in the park, with a few extra dollars, and hours, to dress up as a Qing-dynasty emperor and have their picture taken.  Such photo studios exist at many of the major tourist attractions, and are rooted in a deeper history going back to a desire for play with limited resources during the Maoist era.

But that’s not what’s really interesting to me.  What the HCPs in this video are doing is, on the surface, objectionable, and likely to trigger readers of this blog.  The screaming, dismissal of Dr. Christakis’ argument, and what many would call a lack of respect for him is all interesting enough.

What’s more curious is the demand from the younger generation for less agency — not more.  And the sidebars in the press around how they treat the students is equally fascinating.  The Christakises, in every news release, are named, and their relationship to both Yale and each other is well-publicized.  Yet the students attacking Nicholas Christakis in the video, though over 18, are almost never named.  Students in a public space are as accountable as anyone in a public space.  Yet the press itself does not recognize newsmakers if they are undeclared and under the age of 30.

What we see here is classic evolutionary/devolutionary v-Meme conflict, being manipulated by HCPs, for the end of power and control.  Students are demanding an apology from a husband, Nicholas Christakis, for his wife’s behavior.  The students doing the screaming are pure, collapsed Authoritarians, borrowing from higher Communitarian, as well as bottom-level Survival/Safety themes, to demand a homogenized environment that they get to control. Because the e-mail that Erika Christakis wrote was so innocuous — all it argued for was to trust students a little — that makes it an even more powerful tool, if they win.  Every appointed figure will have to walk on eggshells around the student groups, lest they be called out.  That’s a pretty rough situation to place someone in if they expect to finish the job of raising the young adults in the video.  I’ve been working with this age cohort my entire career.  And while none of my students would ever accuse me of being an Authoritarian, sometimes you need to have the last word.

Nicholas Christakis does a pretty good job of evolutionarily holding his ground with the various questioners/attackers — talking about personal agency, choice, freedom of speech, and some reserved personal boundaries on whether to apologize or not.  Though his voice raises a couple of times, he gets points from this author for not being the Batman. Both he and his wife are obviously very Communitarian v-Meme, with a fair amount of self-awareness, and that’s to be commended. Yet the fundamental elements of a three v-Meme separation, the Insanity/Barbarism Conflict, is clearly evident.  In the second video, to the students surrounding Dr. Christakis, they think he’s nuts for not giving in and apologizing to his primary accuser, who is busy demanding an exaggerated emotional empathetic response.  She declares herself ostensibly in pain (though there are no facial cues that she actually is) and is demanding reparations for her perceived hurt.  And while Dr. Christakis’ thoughts are reserved to himself, my own empathetic sense is that he’s wondering if these kids can be saved from their darker impulses.

At the same time, you can see how the students surrounding him are, whether HCPs or not, mired in external definition.  Some clap as the student leaders attempt to score Survival v-Meme points, as well as demonstrating what Foucault talked about with power not always being vested in a title.  But even the ones that aren’t clapping aren’t stepping up to actually argue the points Dr. Christakis is making.  Not a single young person will go against the Groupthink.  It’s all about power and control.

Current trends in the university aren’t helping them realize that they need to have responsibility and rational empathy toward others.  In the videos, Dr. Christakis urges them in that direction.  But the Principle of Reinforcement in this case, of the v-Memes of Authoritarianism and Legalism, too common on university campuses,  being applied, is pulling down the empathetic ladder he’s attempting to give them.  Anything declared racist by someone of that race must be, de-facto racist.  No one outside the In-group has any ability to speak or argue, rationality be damned. Rightness is determined by grossest measure possible — phenotype.

In other videos, and other pieces of news on this case, it’s pretty apparent that the social structure extant on university campuses is not dealing with change well at all.  In the piece tagged above, the Dean, instead of processing the students through their concerns — some legitimate, some not — spends time kowtowing to them.  I’m sure that Yale is not the perfectly evolved, racially diverse environment — and things need to continue to evolve. At the same time, such dichotomous thinking does not promote the kind of multiple solution thinking the future needs so badly.  The Ivy League is where, for meritocratic reasons or not, future leaders are expected to emerge.  And diversity, as I’ve argued, is absolutely fundamental in that.   Yet at the same time, giving in to the moment of the mob is also not a very evolutionary path.

How to understand what Yale can do?  Yale’s social structure is virtually identical to every other university in the US, which means not much real or declared authority or responsibility for diversity, or anything else, is in the hands of the students.  It’s a legalistic authoritarian environment.  And there is the expectation that change, order and security is supposed to rest in the hands of the administration.  By the fundamental definition of the social structure of the campus, the students are placed in a role of low responsibility.  And unfortunately, they are responding by arbitrarily lowering the bar.

Yet that very fact makes the whole system unstable, and prone to manipulation.  And the externally defined, title-based thinking is absolutely ubiquitous in how people are perceived.  Jonathan Holloway, noted in the article above, is described first not by his name, but by the fact that he is the first black Dean.  He’s not a person first — he’s a category.  And he knows full well that his continuation in that authority rests not on him speaking truth to the real power in the room — in this case, the HCPs — but instead on mollifying them about concerns that are truly trivial.  Most of the students at Yale ARE well-off.  Inside the Silliman House sit two magnificent Steinway pianos.  And the ones that are not well-off have won the equivalent of Willy Wonka’s Golden Ticket, with heavily subsidized tuition, or likely a free ride.  The student most noted for screaming (though there are others) was Jerelyn Luther, whose mother, at least we know, owns an ad agency.  It is unlikely she has known much deprivation or discrimination, especially due to her racial profile.

What’s happening here many would like to blame on spoiling, or infantilizing youth.  Some might say narcissism is the problem — and it may well be the problem for the disruptors.  But the bigger problem is that young people in this society are being raised in more fragmented, control-based social systems, with less and less agency — less ability to make choices, enjoy freedoms of association, and face scaled consequences — than the generation I was raised in. My own sons, ages of 17 and 15, spend far less time in any independent social milieu with other age groups than I did.  No one hangs out or cruises.  They have far more homework, and even in school, there is not even the sociableness of gym class.  Lunch is short, and breaks between classes are only 5 minutes. Even the homogeneous age mixing necessary for teenage development is truncated.

This lack of social and empathetic diversification is having, and will continue to have profound effects.  Students are taught to be passive in the face of authority — and they are.  But what happens, when authority fails to deliver on some of the promises, the HCPs, sensing an ‘in’ to get the party started, uses marginal complaints to provoke an episode of group Borderline Personality Disorder.  The student mentioned above, was on the committee that picked the Drs. Christakis as masters.  Now she wants him to quit.  Splitting much?  And an unspoken truth that could come back to haunt all of us in the future?  Students broken into an authoritarian system are very likely to be comfortable with a future, larger authoritarian leader.  How does democracy play into that set of biases?

At last report, it looked like the Christakises were being taken down off the cross before death by Yale President Peter Salovey and Yale College Dean Jonathan Holloway.  They will remain as masters of Silliman House, and lead an effort to ‘move forward’ their respective constituencies — whatever that means.  What it needs to mean is more empathetic development and exercises in connection for all the students, especially with real Out-Groups.  I honestly recommend some time spent in Papua New Guinea, or maybe next door, in the slums of New Haven.  Combine that with situations with real accountability, and responsibility — if things don’t get done, then other people get mad at them — and these young people might begin the transformation into real Independent Relational Generation.

But it’s not going to be easy. Real change is going to involve doing things differently, and organizing differently.  The HCPs have persistent mental models on their side, and aren’t likely to respond well to demands that they actually step up and do something, other than terrorize and manipulate. They’re not afraid to use crisis for their own needs for excitement, power and control. But change has to start somewhere.  Like it or not, at least some of these students will end up in the next leadership cohort of governance or corporations.  It would be far better to start them on a path toward data-driven, critical thinking now.  And the best way to do that is with empathetic development.

 

 

 

Ice skating, Copenhagen — January, 2008

We’re going to get back on track with some design thinking analysis of modes, and off the disruptive organization track.  But this article shows that various operators have been aware of exactly how one disrupts social organizations for a long time.  Pulling a couple of quotes, from the CIA’s predecessor in WW2, the Office of Strategic Services'(OSS) Simple Sabotage Handbook.  These are under ‘General Interference with Organizations and Production’:

“Insist on doing everything through ‘channels’.  Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.”

“When possible, refer all matters to committees, for ‘further study and consideration.’  Attempt to make the committees as large as possible — never less than five.”

“Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.”

“Advocate ‘caution.’  Be ‘reasonable’ and urge your fellow-conferees to be ‘reasonable’ and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.”

“Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.”

It makes me groan to read through this.  Ugghhhh…

Further Reading:  You can find the original here.  Don’t blame me for triggering your PTSD!

The only camel I ever liked, Arabian Desert, 2011, UAE

Just so you know, I don’t like writing about religion.  The short version of why I don’t like writing about religion is that it makes people really angry — more angry than usual.  But in the wake of the attacks on Paris that killed 150+ people, and Beirut only a few days earlier that killed 40-some, I thought it might be a useful meditation to understand how these things come into existence from the collective mind.  The dominant narratives are simply not working, and it would behoove all of us to pause before the brink — regardless of what those next steps became.

For most people, their choice of religion is inscribed in their deep limbic circuits — virtually every religion has an entry ceremony for youth at the earliest possible age (think baptism, circumcision, etc.) and even people who have continued to a point of rational evolution don’t like their beliefs picked apart.  For those that come into a new religion later in life — it’s likely a profound epiphany, (like being Born Again) which has some element of trauma involved.  And that hits a reset button in the limbic system as well.

On top of that, people a whole lot more thoughtful and smarter than I have picked religion apart pretty thoroughly on an individual basis.  Here’s a great piece by the Integral Philosopher Ken Wilber, that splits things up in a dichotomy I’d never have thought of, myself being far more of a collective thinker.

But when it comes to the components of religion, those are like any other knowledge structure — largely arrived at by collective agency among a group of people.  And the same principles of knowledge formation and mapping of social structure, as well as importantly, the fundamentals of metacognition — knowing what we don’t know — come into play.  Those in belief-based social structures are likely to have angry Gods and short timescales.  Those with more rational associations are likely to be a little more accepting of the unknown, as well as embracing metacognition and agency of the Believers in deciding what they want to believe.

Religion, as a knowledge structure, evolves over time.  No better illustration of this can be found than one of my favorite versions of the Bible — The Brick Bible — where all the stories are re-enacted with Lego characters.  If you read through this version (and yes — I have studied the ‘Real Bible’ as well) you can track the the v-Meme evolution of the Jews, and Christianity through the stories.  I was raised a Catholic, so I’m pretty familiar with all the various parts.  The Brick Bible does a great job of showing how we started out in the Survival v-Meme (Adam and Eve,) progressed through the Tribal/Magical (the story of Lot and his daughters is really about the need for an evolving Legalistic v-Meme) and through to Jesus’ Communitarianism and beyond.

All religions were (and are) artifacts of their time. If you believe in Islam now, you may want to believe in the magical stuff, like Muhammed springing to Heaven on a Winged Steed.  But regardless of the level of the Touch of God, all the various prophets were v-Meme limited, just like all of us now.  Muhammed inhabited a world devastated by two empires — the Byzantine and Sassanian (Persian) — and came into a world of loose tribal confederations in a hostile land with few resources. (Sound familiar?)  His construction of the Qu’ran was designed around consolidating those warring tribes into an Authoritarian v-Meme empire, where future rulers would be constrained by some level of Legalism as well as some element of meritocracy.  Station at birth was important, but you also had to know something.  Considering the world that Muhammed was born into, these were radical, progressive social innovations.

The Qu’ran is also prescriptive, as most religious texts as this were earlier.  The Sharia, Islamic Law derived from both the Qu’ran and the Hadith, as well as a deliberative process from various Imams, mullahs, and scholars, was designed for governance.

This is very different from the Christian Bible — especially the New Testament, where Jesus only staked his claim in prophecy and guiding principles.  Muhammad was a military leader and someone who tried to keep some very fractious desert tribes from killing each other.  As a consummate Authoritarian, however enlightened he may have been, it is not surprising that he would use some elements of societal terror to keep everyone in line.  Add to that the fundamental fatalism embedded in Islam — every action is concluded with Insha’Allah — doesn’t, for those with short time scales, imply much independent agency.  In conservative Islam, the governing authority is fully invested with the power to tell you how to behave and think.

The problems with these belief systems is that humanity and sentience moves on.  As an aggregate, we are simply not the same people, with the same levels of empathetic evolution, as we were 1400 some odd years ago.  For better or for worse, we have evolved radically different social structures than what dominated the ancient world, that have allowed more complex knowledge structures.  These have led to a different built architecture, and machines, that the world had never seen, or barely conceived of.

So, are those with more modern v-Meme sets, superior to those in the past?  The tendency when looking around is to then take the pattern of the Spiral, and the Intermediate Corollary, and pronounce modern humanity as smarter.  That’s a dangerous leap to take.  That implies that lower v-Meme systems cannot embody more complex and nuanced knowledge structures, and we must necessarily, always be ‘smarter’ than tribal people.

The best way to explain that this is not necessarily the case is metaphorical.  See the picture below:

Girl with the Pearl Earring (Enrique Cornejo-Sanchez by way of Vermeer)

Above is a mosaic by Enrique Cornejo-Sanchez of a well-known Western painting — Girl with a Pearl Earring, by the Dutch Master Johannes Vermeer.  Upon closer inspection, the painting is composed of a series of fantasy art ’tiles’ from the ’70s and ’80s (think Frank Frazetta!) assembled by Cornejo-Sanchez.  When viewed from a distance, the picture looks like the famous painting.  Viewed close-up, though, one can see that it is constructed from a multitude of stories.  Cornejo-Sanchez is very talented — check out his other art!  In a similar fashion, Tribal/Magical v-Meme stories can be used to construct extremely complex knowledge structures, that can mimic the disruptive jumps in knowledge that are much more naturally emergent and inherent in more complex, synergistic social structures.

But two things are also obvious, and inherent in the faux-Vermeer: the primary image is much more vulnerable to corruption of knowledge and intent than the knowledge produced through higher v-Memes;  and the facsimile took much longer to construct than if someone had used a paintbrush.  In a nutshell, this is why higher v-Meme social structures have such tremendous advantage over lower v-Meme social structures.  They can assemble data and get at a predictive truth much faster than the lower v-Memes, making them much more adaptive to change.

In this manner, we can also understand the challenges faced by various faiths in adapting to more modern, empathetically connected times.  Ancient shamanism can come up with great truths — but when the oil company is knocking on the forest’s door, it is communitarian organizing and suing them in the Hague that matters.

The easiest to adapt — the Taoists and Buddhists, who at their most developed, demand an individual agency and metacognitive reflection, excluding some of their magical rituals, transfer to the post-modern age with little cognitive dissonance and relative ease.  Faiths like Islam, that in their real form are prescriptive governance arising from the 7th Century, are going to have a harder time.  Evangelical Christians who are Full Bible adherents are going to have similar difficulties.

Further, faiths with tremendous In-group/Out-group differences are not going to deal well with a transcultural, or probably better said, a transcategorizational/individuational (gender, race, class, etc.) world.  Islam is one of the last, great bastions of ingrained In-group/Out-group differences.  If you’re a Christian living under Sharia law, or a woman, your world is fundamentally decreed by the divine to be less valued.  That obstructs the kind of rational empathetic development and information exchange advanced societies need to function — and if your viewpoint is also extreme or fundamentalist, the modern world holds even further challenges.

One of the biggest that is almost never discussed is the ability of the modern state to enforce laws in a much more rigorous and vigorous way than was possible in the past.  Take, for example, speed limits.  Back in the ’50s, if you were going to get busted for speeding, it took two cops with a radio and a timing device to nail you.  Then came radar guns, then laser guns, and now in many countries, automatic cameras that automatically maintain speed on roadways.  And any record you now get is known nationally, or even internationally.  Police forces in Western nations increasingly have no discretion on whether to enforce the law.  In the United States, there’s even an increasing dispensation with courts and the idea of ‘innocent until proven guilty’.  Prosecutorial justice takes the evidence, however generated, and used to force the accused to plea bargain.  Something like 95% of all crimes in the U.S. are adjudicated in this fashion.  Add to that the fact that in the U.S., your picture is taken some 200 times/day.  There is no private space any more, physically, as well as informationally.  We are all subject to instantaneous background checks.

Now put yourself in the position of a modern Islamic State.  Before, where ambiguity for the prescribed harsh punishments of Sharia Law, such as amputation, crucifixion and beheading were subject to the vagaries of a background tribal culture, leeway could be offered to various communities for the different violations.  Now, a dichotomous archaic/ modern state like ISIS has made possible an atmosphere of terror that even the most devout can hardly comprehend.  Sharia law is absolutistic in nature.  What that means is that if the authorities know, then they must act, or face divine retribution.

No one of less stature than Osama bin Laden recognized this.  In his management and direction of Al Qaeda, before his death, he and his cohort were in constant conflict with ISIS over enforcement of hudud (fixed punishments in Islamic Scripture).  Osama, believe it or not, said ‘go easy on the tribes’, and focus on development of what might look like a modern welfare state.  The ISIS leadership would have none of this, and have shown an increasing penchant for the most  drastic of punishments.  ISIS leans heavily on the whole concept of terror as decreed in the Qu’ran as being more merciful than not, because it brings communities into line quicker, thus saving more souls (though liberating more in the process!)  And they have the tools of the modern informational state with which to apply Allah’s Will.

If we were back in the 7th Century, all of this would likely have been viewed as evolutionary.  Instead of treating all women as chattel, women who were kidnapped during raids now had an opportunity for some type of citizenship after being forcibly raped.  That doesn’t sound like much of an improvement — but you have to not think with modern sensibilities.  The rape was inevitable.  Some kind of security for children who were products of that rape were not.  As such, though please note!! at a very low level, such standards and rules were relationally progressive.

But in today’s times, they are quite obviously not.  Humanity as a whole has advanced, and now such behavior is considered wildly regressive and relationally disruptive.  The tragedy of the Yazidi people, running up the mountainside to escape from ISIS troops, who have received religious blessing to rape and enslave them, is viewed by modern society to be monstrous — because, of course, it is.  Believe it or not, that is only a higher truth from an evolutionary empathetic perspective.

What this means that Muhammed, when he founded Islam, may have been an enlightened being.  His trajectory for him and his subjects was upward, and aimed toward righting many of the wrongs that he saw in the world.  Because Islam was fundamentally an instrument of governance as he developed it, it was necessarily v-Meme limited to a Legalistic Authoritarianism, which was a progressive concept at the time in human history.

But the world has moved on from Legalistic Authoritarianism being the most enlightened state a human on this Earth can expect.  Buddhism grew in prominence.  Zen Buddhism happened. The Protestant Reformation happened.  The Western Enlightenment happened.  And ISIS is headed in exactly the opposite direction.  By contemporary standards, ISIS is tremendously regressive, even by others in the Islamist movement — Osama bin Laden and his lieutenant, Ayman Zawahiri, included!  That implies it is also anti-empathetic and devolutionary, which means that it must be run, in this place and time in humanity’s evolution, by psychopaths.  There is no rationale in this current media-saturated world for accepting slavery and mass murder.  The fact that ISIS is cleverly using ur-v-Memes out of the Qu’ran for manipulation is yet another piece of evidence for empathy-disordered behavior.  Such calls out of the distant past as routes for stability in a war-torn, devastated part of the world may have short-term value.  But long-term, ISIS cannot expand outside a certain geographic area of ignorance.  The v-Memes of the rest of the world are against them.

Additionally, when an organization like ISIS becomes known for ruling with dominant 7th Century behaviors and v-Memes, it is necessarily forced, by its absolutistic position, to swallowing the whole enchilada.  This, from a knowledge structure and coherence position, is absolutely devastating.  7th Century Arabia was filled with lots of magical thinking, and arbitrary beliefs.  In fact, Muhammad himself struggled against the various tribes in Mecca, who were polytheistic, in attempting to incorporate them into his monotheistic system.  Along the way, he had to invent his own set of magical stories — winged steeds included — in order to establish the hegemony of an empire that he would rule.  This is not the way toward modern battle planning.

Nothing could be more demonstrative of this kind of nonsense than ISIS’ obsession with a small agrarian village called Dabiq.  Dabiq, in Syria, is the place where the decisive battle will be fought with the Christian Crusaders and mark the end of the world.  Dabiq WAS the site of a major battle fought in 1516 between the Mamluks and the Ottoman Empire, so it may have some strategic significance.  But it is hard to believe that modern Western war planners are going to be constrained in any campaign to roll battle tanks up to Dabiq, stop, and wait for ISIS to show up.  Such swallowing of magical thinking creates unreality in any larger war strategy that ISIS may have.

And magical, apocalyptic thinking creates other cognitive dissonances.  In his book, The ISIS Apocalypse (where I’ve gotten most of my understanding of the recent ISIS timeline) William McCants discusses ISIS’ misfires in planning events around the return of the Mahdi — the Islamic savior who comes back at the End Times, along with Jesus, and leads the Righteous to victory.  Needless to say, the Mahdi hasn’t shown up.  And this incessant debate confuses and obstructs any real advances for ISIS on the contemporary battlefield.  The moral to the story is that ISIS is headed for collapse.  It is only a matter of time.  Tribal/Authoritarian v-Memes, with some Legal scaffolding, just can’t cut it in a global society.

But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t some inherent stability in the system.  Reports from a variety of sectors indicate that ISIS has at least part of its leadership from the old Baathist Iraqis, and it’s been said multiple times that the worst thing we did when we conquered Iraq was disband the Iraqi Army.  Terror is an effective weapon, and no one’s going to gainsay that Saddam’s old buddies didn’t know how to terrorize a local population — in fact, many of the tribes that are incorporated into ISIS caliphate are ones formerly terrorized by Saddam.  Meet the new boss — same as the old boss.

The region also has historic precedent for this kind of behavior.  The 11th Century Nizari Ismailis, otherwise known as the Assassins, or Hashashin, led by Hassan-I-Sabbah, practiced a devoted, limited fanaticism that sprung from mountain fortresses across much of the same geographic area as ISIS.  Spanning the landscape from Northern Syria to their key fortress at Alamut in Iran, the Order of the Assassins, with the same type of fatalistic fervor as seen by today’s suicide bombers, kept Saladin, his successors, and the Ottoman Empire at bay for over 200 years.  It is instructive as to how they were defeated.  Only through utter devastation by the invading Mongol armies of Genghis Khan were they wiped off the map.

Fast-forward to the present.  Though I have been reading and studying ISIS for the last three months, events in Paris, and Beirut show a new internationalist bent to the terror.  Similar to the Assassins, ISIS is projecting its activities outward.  There are several possible reasons for this.  All spring from the strategies documented in the last couple of blog posts on the workings of the psychopathic mind.

First is that ISIS is projecting power and strength by attacking targets away from the Caliphate — the Islamic State declared by ISIS, whose only legitimate ruler is blessed by Allah, and wields the authority of Sharia.  Public attacks have the potential to draw recruits to the homeland to fight in the ongoing wars against Bashir Al-Assad, the current dictator running Syria, as well as the Kurds and Iraqis in Erbil and Baghdad respectively.  But this is, in my opinion, likely not the real reason.  There are likely more psychopathic plans behind the current efforts.

Another effect of the attacks, especially in the West, is to create a powerfully constrained and tenuous environment for the Syrian refugee community.  Over 9 million Syrians have fled their homes, and are residing outside the country, or in other displaced locations inside contemporary Syria.  Regimes that practice radical control inevitably cause people in their countries to stop reproducing, as well as leave, and ISIS is no different.   By triangulation of the Western powers against escape routes into other countries, ISIS in effect ‘backs up’ the escape route pipeline.  Further, those refugees who now are backed up in home territories, if they are apostate, can now be enslaved.

Thirdly, the attacks are part and parcel of the core of the delusional apocalyptic fight that ISIS believes is in their favor.  The current morass of confusion that exists with the U.S., Russia, Turkey and the Kurds all fighting either an air war, or land conflicts, is not enough to bring on the End Times.  For that, there has to be a Roman (read Western) invasion ending up on the plains outside of Dabiq.  Forget that prophecy couldn’t predict the existence of fuel-air explosives or A-10 Warthogs.  It’s not a party if you don’t send out invitations, and if no one RSVPs.  And nothing gets the TV/Internet pundits going like assassinations of civilians.

I am not trivializing the deaths of the hundreds that have died in Paris or Beirut.  But the histrionic nature of the coverage is fascinating.  The constant drumbeat of the coverage is that “ISIS must be all-powerful” because a handful of people pulled off a handful of attacks at the same time using relatively available weaponry.  How many AK-47s are there in the world now, anyway?  More than anything, these stories are created to fuel our own Authoritarian/Survival v-Meme narrative.  If anyone can hurt us, they must be at least as powerful as we are — instead of viewing things through a more Performance-based v-Meme lens.  I’ve always thought that the number of people that pulled off the 9/11 hijackings was far closer to 20 than the 100s, or even 1000s, the media alluded to — namely because it would be much harder to keep a lid on the whole plot with hundreds involved.  Performance-based productivity, unfortunately, also applies to goal-driven suicidal hijackers.  It would behoove the West to be mindful of this kind of talk, especially if we intend to subscribe to former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s Pottery Barn principle of failed states — you break it, you own it.  We have done a miserable job with Iraq in that regard.

What to do about ISIS?  I’ve laid down the case that ISIS will expire.  The quicker we cut off their energetics, which is, in the modern world, directly related to money, the quicker that will be.  There’s no question that ISIS receives broad financial support from similar issue-oriented (those that hate Bashir Assad) and v-Meme backers, like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar.  But the problem with so much of what goes on in the Arab world is that the legitimate regimes are corrupt — either Authoritarian v-Meme, or mixed Tribal/Authoritarians, like Saudi Arabia — using Sharia when convenient to keep the population in check with beheadings at Chop-Chop Square, while at the same time, gambling and living the high life in Monaco.  Cutting off the money is an absolute requirement.

Another invasion may well be in the cards.  France is very unlikely to let the current incident go without something greater than aerial bombing.  The destruction of a Russian jetliner over the Sinai brings another potential set of ground troops into play.  And Obama has already committed Special Forces in very limited numbers for reinforcing the Kurds.  All these players, provided that they coordinate actions together, may result in a larger global strategy that may combine efforts in a way that will actually help in rebuilding the Middle East.

But we also have to understand that the current U.S. position of hitting the reset button when we are unhappy with a regime that doesn’t exactly represent our interests has to go.  Empathetic evolution is a long game to play.  And it’s much better to start from Authoritarian, as opposed to Survival v-Meme, if you want to get to some state of Performance-based Legalism.  No passing through the magical stage we’re seeing right here with the End-of-the-World types. Because, in the end, empathetic evolution is the only game in town.  And Social Physics are, like it or not, the Law.

Further Reading:  I’m not as confident as some that there won’t need to be military action to take out ISIS.  But I like this piece a lot — it gets at a big hunk of the problem with sophisticated, diversionary politics in the Gulf States.