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.

Mellow sea kayaking — outside Loreto, BCS, Mexico

One of the interesting things about Rat Park is the fact that doesn’t seem to be recognized explicitly is that the rats were in a plywood box in Dr. Alexander’s office.  They were happy rats, for lots of reasons — adequate food, fun places to play, and places to raise lots of little rat-babies.  All looked after from a benevolent rat-God, staring down from above.  Who would do cocaine in a circumstance like that?

Yet one of the key benefits of Rat Park, that had to contribute to domestic Rat Bliss was the fact that they didn’t have to worry about being eaten.  I’m not so much on the animals-are-super-intelligent-all-the-time spectrum that I would assume that rats have loads of consequentiality in their thinking.  But I do believe that rats are empathetic, connected creatures, sharing information in ways we probably don’t completely understand yet.  And one of the things that has to contribute to rat stress is the overhanging worry of a larger animal eating them.

Why does this matter?  Because rats are aware that they CAN get eaten.  I’ve never raised them, but I have raised chickens, and chickens are keenly aware after only one incident if you’re the axe-murderer.  The word is out in chicken-land when you come around.  I happen to believe that rats don’t have long-term memory, precisely because, as a food species, lots of rats and their brethren and sisters DO get eaten.  And it’s likely that their mourning period is extremely short — the colony reorganizes around the remaining rats, and gets on with business.  I read somewhere that you’re never more than 90 feet away from a rat at any given time.  So the strategy must be successful.

Yet rats are empathetic.  They likely have very well-developed mirroring behaviors, and they, as mammals, have some level of emotional empathy.  They have some plug in their brain where they need to be connected.  And when they’re not, they drink cocaine-laced water until they die.  If they didn’t have that, they’d likely get eaten, because, well, rats get eaten.  Yet evolution has geared them so that the rats that hang together and connect are the ones that survive.

What does this have to do with high-performance work environments?  If you want to have healthy, creative people, thinking about connecting with others, you have to boot everyone out of the Survival v-Meme.  Things like accessible day care, steady, calibrated salaries, good health care, and a meaningful, non-threatening performance review system that finds weaknesses in employees with the intent to improve that characteristic are overall likely to be more effective than ones that seek to find weakness to aid in a campaign of dismissal.

To the evolutionary manager, this all seems to be pro-forma.  Yet company after company has implemented Jack Welch-like strategies, where after every performance review, some bottom 10% of the employment cohort is whacked.  The hawk is constantly circling overhead, and the rats run for cover.  You might end up with a couple of wickedly fast rats with these kinds of strategies.  But no one’s going to talk to anyone else.  For those that want a detailed exposition on this, Vanity Fair’s expose’ on Steve Ballmer’s stack ranking system is stunning.  Highly recommended on how to kill creativity.  And just a little anecdote — before Jack Welch and his ‘whack the bottom’ every year strategy, I was of the engineering cohort (Class of ’82)  that wanted to work for GE.  It is absolutely not aspirational for the kids I teach now.

Daniel Pink makes this point very eloquently on a slightly higher v-Meme basis with the following video — well worth the watch.  Spoiler Alert — Daniel is very much a Communitarian, and so the punchline at the end isn’t very surprising — don’t do the carrot and stick thing with people, like you would with a donkey.  What he doesn’t quite understand is that with any empathetic connection — and you can have those with donkeys, too — don’t do the carrot and stick thing.  Unless they’re a teenager wanting a car.  THEN do the carrot-and-stick thing!

One thing I would say before moving on is that there are always people that you can’t reach, that are going to have to be fired.  Very Authoritarian v-Meme.  That’s life.  But you simply can’t manage your entire workforce like that.  Unless you want the rats to run for cover every time you walk in the door.

Takeaways:  Examine what you’re doing to your workforce, and if there’s anything that involves making people constantly fear for their survival, cut that shit out!  Possess enough of your own personal agency and responsibility to whack the bad actors.  Remember that an evolved manager has all the lower v-Memes to work with — but if you want creativity and innovation, you’ve got to cover your bases at the bottom as a matter of course.

Further reading:  The Wall Street Journal article I linked to above is a great one for understanding why we have far too many psychopaths — with the incumbent fallout– in the executive suite nowadays.  Here’s another one — ‘the near-perfect CEO’.  To be fair, Jack also preaches some enlightened stuff as far as employee development.  And if you look at GE’s primary businesses, they were hierarchies where refinement was more important than innovation.  So some of it makes sense.  But as the power business rolls over to more distributed modes, dark clouds are on the horizon — and GE could be dramatically reduced, just like other hierarchical powerhouses of the past, like IBM.  Live by (and optimize the performance of) the power structure, die by the power structure.  Because, well, you’re still a power structure.

Another version of Rat Park — Toad Beach on the Lower Salmon, Gary MacFarlane, Photo (with my camera!)

After reading the last post, you’re likely wondering what intellectual rabbit I’m planning on pulling out of my hat to explain how Rat Park informs us of how we should structure work environments for optimal productivity and creativity.  Here’s the simple version, for those that are waiting with bated breath.  Keep everyone safe, well-fed and happy, and in plain view, and you really cut down on the opportunity for relational disruptors to terrorize people.  Optimize connection, as well as appropriate alone time, and let the experiment run.  For more than that, you’ll have to wait until the next post.

One of the things I’ve mentioned before about v-Meme analysis is that while Spiral Dynamics as a whole can give us an overview of how we perceive our larger problems, it does not mean that individual v-Meme levels can’t inform critical understandings of essential parts.  Everyone — literally everyone, even your gaslighting psychopaths — possess an element of the truth.  The challenge of the manager is in the integration of both data and patterns, while being aware of their own perspective.  Rat Park may indeed give us a larger, say 10,000′ view of how addiction functions. At the same time, once we understand the system boundaries of the lower-level v-Memes, we can figure out the truth that those researchers that may even be anti-Rat Park are telling us, and strategize across the different temporal and spatial scales.

At the same time you’re appreciating your more detail-minded friends, you have to guess a functional, system-level description of how things actually work.  And here’s the rub — that guess may be all that we start with, or live with for a while.  Because setting up a fine-scale experiment to determine absolute truth may be impossible.

When researching the Rat Park phenomenon, one of the things I found on Wikipedia was the general agreement that the mesolimbic pathway is the nerve pathway primarily affected by opiate addiction.  (In case you wonder what intrigues me on a Sunday afternoon… 🙂  What the heck is the mesolimbic pathway anyway?  It’s one of the dopaminergic pathways in the brain, that move dopamine around in the system — the stuff that regulates our mood and modulates our reward behavior and emotional response to others.  In other words, a key element of empathy.  The mesolimbic pathway is also, interestingly, very short.  It starts out touching the spinal cord, cuts across the limbic center, and then branches out in the very bottom of the prefrontal cortex.  See the figure from Wikipedia if you’re curious.  I can’t figure out how to insert it in the blog!

Here’s the key thing.  It’s short.  It goes from the top of the Spinal cord, across a little real estate in the limbic system, and then touching the prefrontal cortex — the shortest way to connect all three systems of the triune brain.  Evolutionarily, it’s a core function, and likely one of the first to evolve.  Now if it just connected to the vagus nerve — that empathy backbone connecting the lower body systems up to the face muscles.  And, not surprisingly, it very well may.  This is recent research by a team in Poland.

So one of the things we know functionally is that heroin and its cohort are drugs that head straight for the empathy circuit.  Or humans take heroin BECAUSE that circuit isn’t working right, or isn’t getting what it needs.  The neuroscientific, small scale analysis tells us that heroin addiction is actually something that occurs because of a lack of connection!

Now, why that lack of connection is happening is not so simple.  Perhaps, there’s a genetic abnormality that prevents connection.  Perhaps trauma has so flooded those neural circuits with cortisol, the hormone released during stress and trauma, that the circuit is busted.  Perhaps the individual is isolated for reasons beyond their control, by either a larger societal mechanism –they’re in jail, or at war, or something.  Or perhaps this person is being abused and isolated by an HCP/empathy-disordered individual.

As we start peeling off the layer, it’s actually the core insight by the Authoritarian Legalists that gives us the starting point for exploring the effect of higher-level v-Memes.  The main thing that shows the Authoritarians’ bias, though, because of their perspective generated by their social structure, is the idea that the majority of people are self-pleasuring.  It is far more likely that they are taking opiates because they are in pain.

I’ve used the metaphor of understanding sentient evolution by borrowing from the old story of the five old blind men and the elephant.  The reality is that once you get far enough away from the elephant, you will likely recognize that you’re looking at an elephant — if you’re not blind.  What does Spiral Dynamics also tell you?  You also then realize that the elephant is wrapped in spaghetti.  Everything is connected to everything else.

A multi-scale analysis of addiction leads to similar problems of causation.  Dopaminergic pathways are disrupted in addicts.  They may have gotten there through a defect of moral character.  But they likely had a genetic predisposition for addiction, and couldn’t quickly recover.  They may have been cut off from their community for their behavior, but certainly possible, some traumatic experience happened that started the downward cycle of isolation, and severely short-circuited their chances for personal evolution out of the crisis.

How to understand what to do next?  We can go back to the Principle of Reinforcement, that says there is a self-similar loop of causation — a coupled system — between individual and social structure.  If someone is addicted, we can both help the individual’s biology (maybe with methadone or buproprione) and at the same time create supportive community that allows the addict to process their past trauma, and restore an empathetic ability to reconnect with others.

But if you really want to fix your larger addiction problem from a population perspective, the whole society’s going to have to be on board.  Addicts make up a percentage of a given population, and that population functions in the way that it does because of the whole elephant.  In U.S. society, we’ve accepted social dislocation, stress, and economic wealth redistribution toward the top.  Though my personal opinion is that this is an absolutely crazy way to run a larger society, the society makes the consensus, with all the various dynamics and factors that come into play.  That means we also have to accept that there is going to be a transient population moving in and out of addictive behaviors as their circumstances change in the stressful world we live in. We can, and should do better.

But until we figure out our larger evolutionary goals, the last thing society as a whole should do is wage war on the more helpless victims involved with the system.  The trauma and isolation from those actions aren’t going to get us anywhere — except in the creation of more patients.

Takeaways:  If we want to stop individual phenomena like addiction, it would behoove us to consider the social aspects of how individual biological phenomena manifest.  

Further reading:  Forget the New York Times crossword puzzle!  Read the Wikipedia article on dopamine!  So much cross-functional and synthetic thinking possible!  The secrets to why nicotine is so bad, and heroin not-so-much from an individual perspective are buried within.  Plus a ton of other stuff.  

Homecoming Parade, University of Idaho — accompanies one of the big football games of the year.  2011 (I think!)

One of my best buddies when it comes to scheming stuff up, and out, is Jake Leachman, Assistant Professor in the School of MME, where I work.  Jake’s a thermodynamicist, specializing in the development of the Hydrogen Economy.  His blog, hydrogen.wsu.edu, is somewhere in between a public consumption blog, and one where he communicates with his students taking his various classes, which are often applications of design methodology.  I love teaching with Jake, for multiple reasons.  First off, he’s creative.  And second off, he understands all my babble.  Which is saying something!  He’s also been critical in my evolution of the direction and purpose of empathetic connection.  As he’s fond of saying, you don’t have much choice but to obey the laws of Thermodynamics — even if you’re talking about social structures.  Because they’re the Law!!

Jake is also an ex-football player for the University of Idaho, the campus next door.  He recently started applying Spiral Dynamics to football organizational structures.  That’s American football.  I wish I knew enough about football to understand everything in this piece, but for those that love the game, this may be a pathway for understanding the rest of what I write about.  There’s some questions I have for my good friend, though, and I’m going to lean on him to write about how Legalistic v-Meme rules can prevent Communitarian v-Meme development.  But for now, you can read his analysis here.  Good fun!

One version of Rat Park, Snake River above Lewiston, ID, 2007

One of the more interesting and profound experiments done on the power of connection was in the Rat Park addiction studies by Bruce Alexander, a professor of psychology at Simon Fraser University, in British Columbia.  Alexander set out to show that our view of addiction, framed as either a.) a moral failing, where the individual doesn’t have the ‘moral fiber’ (whatever that means) or personal character to face the world, and so self-pleasures themselves in a destructive spiral using harmful drugs, or b.) a genetic condition or disease that predisposes them to using drugs in an abusive fashion, causing a downward spiral of self-destruction, was fundamentally incorrect — and actually neither of those things.  To prove these were not major factors, Alexander created Rat Park — a social system of rats subject to addictive potentials, and watched the results.

Readers of this blog will recognize a mix of v-Memes inherent in a.) and b.).  Moral fiber sounds kind of legalistic, but it’s really magical thinking — no one can really define it, though, at some levels it may be associated with following some tenets of society.  “You know it when you see it” — when I hear this, I immediately start wondering about egocentric projection.  One person’s moral fiber might be someone else’s mush.

As for b.), an individual with some genetic condition or disease?  That’s definitely more able to be diagnosed.  There are benchmarks that can be measured, and an algorithm that can be followed in determining if someone is an addict.  Meet conditions 1,2,3.  You’re an addict.  And likely, if you believe the Legalistic Authoritarians, you got there through your own doing — by following another algorithm.  Drill 20 holes in your arm, shoot up heroin, and voila!  By the 21st, you’re baked — both literally and figuratively.

What’s the way out?  Well, we have another algorithm — a 12 Step Program.  Follow these rules, which start with admitting you have no personal agency (every 12 Step Program starts by the individual admitting they are powerless over the substance they are addicted to) and hand off your responsibility to a Higher Power.  All 12 Step Programs are fascinating — and they’re not all bad, though their efficacy is highly overrated for the reasons that they give.  But we’ll unpack those at a later time.

Where does this socially fragmented view of addiction come from?  Remember Conway’s Law, that says the designed product, and through the Intermediate Corollary, the knowledge structure, will map to the social/relational structure of the designers.  Add in that broader cultural understandings are almost always limited by the dominant v-Memes of a given society.  Way back before we had anything resembling scientific reasoning, we had any kind of disease viewed as a moral failing or Divine Punishment, mapping back to the extremely old Magical v-Meme of Original Sin.  Pretty powerful stuff.

The idea of a medical condition involving addiction evolved more recently, predicated on experiments involving  isolated rats in a cage.  The fundamental idea behind those experiments was a rat was placed alone in a cage, and given two choices — a bottle of regular water, and a bottle of water laced with cocaine and opium.  In only a short while, the rat would drink only from the opium-laced bottle, and basically drink itself to death.  Needless to say, there was pretty limited empathetic connection between the rat and the researcher — and not only for the fact that the researcher wasn’t patting the rat.

But the experiment had all the things that good science likes — repeatability and reliability, as well as the consequent status elevation — being able to be published in a prestigious journal.  Any effect of the social isolation of the rat was discounted — it’s only a rat, after all.  And the rats all lined up in their cages weren’t too far off from the social structure of a standard university faculty office suite.

Entering Stage Left was Bruce Alexander, the aforementioned psychology professor.  Alexander questioned the very basis of the study.  Rats don’t live like that, he said, and besides, we line up people in hospitals every day, and give all sorts of patients powerful opiates.  After they exit the hospital and go back to their families, they don’t become addicts.  If we really want to study addiction with rats, Alexander said, we have to create something more normative for rats — Rat Park.

Rat Park was set up by Alexander and his researchers to represent kind of a rat paradise.  There were other rats, plenty of food, some places to play and raise litters of baby rats — and no one to eat them.  In this environment, the rats thrived.  And when offered opiate-laced concoctions, the rats, for the most part, turned them down — even rats that had been formerly addicted and dumped into Rat Park.  The video below is a great description of both current theories of addiction, as well as Alexander’s alternate theory.  Highly recommended!

Alexander attempted to get his article published in the famous journal Nature, but in the end was rejected.  His original article was published in a smaller journal, Psychopharmacology .  You can read all about it on Wikipedia, as well as Dr. Alexander’s own website.  There’s a lot more to the story, with Alexander’s research on cocaine addiction, that basically backed up the Rat Park results, being suppressed by the World Health Organization after being pressured by the US representatives.

Alexander’s own statement on addiction is below, from his web page, and fascinating in its own right.

Global society is drowning in addiction to drug use and a thousand other habits. This is because people around the world, rich and poor alike, are being torn from the close ties to family, culture, and traditional spirituality that constituted the normal fabric of life in pre-modern times. This kind of global society subjects people to unrelenting pressures towards individualism and competition, dislocating them from social life.

He backs up his thesis that addiction is flourishing from separation in society — of a collapse of what this blog calls Externally Defined Relationships.  Yet at the same time, in this article, testimony to the Canadian Senate, he states that addiction has been in decline since the end of the 19th Century.  It’s plainly obvious that tribal societies have made no great gains in the last century. How can one both appreciate Alexander’s contribution, while at the same time understand why Alexander would make statements that so directly contradict his position?  What makes such obviously erudite individuals make claims that they then contradict?

A Classic Evolution of Understanding

Let’s stop and sum up a little.  Understanding our understanding (meta-understanding!) of addiction requires us to both understand the methods we use for gathering information, the information itself, and the social/relational empathetic structure of the researcher/observer.  We can use the tools in this blog to understand exactly the progression of knowledge — if we can accept that, first, that it IS a progression.  And as with all progressions, there are two v-Meme directions that this progressive understanding can follow.

The first is more familiar to us — horizontal progression.  In the case of most of our ways of understanding, this is a process of refinement of both time and spatial scale, across a given social/relational structure, coupled with the energetics of the measurement.  Nothing exemplifies this more than our understanding of something like the strength of steel.  We start by looking at a hunk of steel, and quantifying its various strengths, elasticities, fracture toughness and such.  Over time, we develop finer and finer tools that enable examination of steel on finer and finer scales.  With electron microscopes, we finally get down to the nano-scale and beyond.  No conflict of social/relational values is immediately present — we mostly stay within the same social/relational, as well as knowledge structures, and we’re more than happy to let scientists in the same v-Meme argue about this at metallurgy meetings.  As long as the steel bridge doesn’t break, then we’re all happy.

Not so much with vertical v-Meme progression.  Now, as our understanding changes, we start having v-Meme conflicts — fundamental, different ways our social/relational structures perceive the same object or issue.  Yet at the same time when these conflicts are generated, if we cannot understand empathetic evolution, our solutions are prone to go memetically backward, to a time when we perceived those problems didn’t exist.  The reality is that it’s hard to know — especially in the case of drug addiction.  But we project away if we have no sense of that evolutionary process.

With drug addiction, as a larger culture, we started out down at the Magical v-Meme.  Flawed individuals use drugs, and deserved whatever they get.  When viewed as a moral failing, after all, and with the incumbent low-empathy level v-Memes, its easy to cast addicts into the Out-group.  They were disconnected from society, anyway.  God tells us what happens to sinners.

Then we evolved — a little.  The Legalistic Authoritarians — famous ones, from Harvard! — got a hold of the problem.  Fragmented Authoritarian social structures are still going to view drug addiction as a flaw of an individual — not the system, because there is little awareness that there is a system.  Authoritarians simply don’t have that level of connectivity in their thinking.  So they set up experiments that modeled how they viewed the problem — largely to confirm their hypotheses.  Low on metacognition, they drew hard boundaries around those individual rats.  They’re rats, after all — no one has proven they have feelings, or are sophisticated social animals.  Then they gave them a choice — morphine, or water.  I personally find it fascinating that the only way the rats’ response is described by these folks is ‘pleasure’ from the morphine — not an attempt to ease their pain, which is, of course, what almost all mammals feel when isolated.  It’s not obvious that they thought of this potential effect– or the larger implications of NOT thinking about this — at all.

And why would they?  We can see the Principle of Reinforcement come into play, with the social structure of the researchers, along with the dispensation of metacognition.  Not only do they still not admit what they don’t know — they burnished their status by supporting large-scale government policy initiatives that have turned entire countries in our world into war zones over this.  Does anyone need reminding about the War on Drugs?

Yet, as odd as it sounds, this was an empathetic progression — an expansion of In-group status to addicts.  Addicts now were declared “not responsible” for their addiction at some level.  Instead of being on the Outside of the social structure, they were allowed provisional acceptance. Treatment was in the hands of professionals, and moral blessing would be applied if the addict would surrender all agency to a 12-Step Program.  This was better than being cast to the curb — though the lack of consequential thinking, and limitations of spatial and temporal scale failed to impress on decision makers.  The people supplying the drugs were now the subject of moral approbation — as long as they were illegal.  They, not the addicts, were sentenced to a lower position on the evolutionary chart — evil men — by the power of the Legalistic Authoritarians.  A new Out Group was formed — and an expanded War was started.

Along comes Dr. Alexander.  It’s hard to know what he originally thought — perhaps he was bothered by the larger status of addicts in society.  But it’s possible that he felt emotional empathy toward the rats in the cages.  Maybe he observed their social order and felt that the whole scenario just wasn’t right — more of a pure legalistic/absolutistic thought.  I’ve actually written to him, and will be interested in his response!  He created his experiment, and attempted to publish his results.

Not surprisingly, the Authoritarians pushed back.  Reliability is the stock in trade in science — the entire university system is constructed around supporting this aspect of the Authoritarian v-Meme.  And Alexander had not just constructed a Rat Park.  He had constructed an empathetic Rat System — an aggregated Collective Rat Intelligence.  Not only had Alexander violated one taboo — saying that a system of actors would influence the agency of an individual.  He also told a non-empathetic community that empathetic connection  was likely the factor that would prevent the problem they had already prescribed with an Authoritarian solution.  He told them that their proposed solution — jails for the Out-Group — all those people selling drugs, wouldn’t make a difference.  And the proposed treatment for the sympathetic In-Group likely wasn’t effective.  The idea that empathetic connection is the critical factor in solving addiction is still unfathomable to most people — and certainly never occurred to the original addiction researchers.

Alexander didn’t give up.  As a progressive change agent, his persistence was in his favor.  By continuing with his work, he gave it more reliability. Alexander went on to write a book on his attempt at not just coming up with a reliable answer — but a valid one as well.

Yet in his book, The Globalization of Addiction, he, too, rails on the v-Memes above his level of processing.  In the passage quoted above, he too downgrades the Performance/Achievement v-Meme.  Without an empathetic evolutionary understanding that there might be a higher level of connectedness possible (a more comprehensive Communitarianism, but not achieved yet!) he falls into the same v-Meme conflict trap.  And at the same time, he ignores his own data regarding population levels of addiction.  Alexander identifies empathetic connection as the key to providing the connection that prevents members of a community from becoming addicts.  But at the same time, he fails to see how that connection manifests outside of already societally and culturally defined relationships that, like it or not, are in decline.  And as anyone from a dysfunctional family can tell you, they have their own set of problems.

Make no mistake — Bruce Alexander should be lauded for his heroic work in exposing so much of current understanding as a myth.  But there are also critical factors that Alexander misses.  One of the major ones is this.  If it is true that empathetic relational formation in systems drives recovery from addiction, or prevents it altogether, we must appreciate that relational disruption, and those anti-empathetic individuals that drive it in relational systems also are a major cause of addiction.  And if we’re serious about controlling addiction and other pathological behaviors, we have to also be serious about understanding how relational disruption works in our families, homes and workplaces.  In the end, it all comes back to empathy.

Mike and Me — Bahia Concepcion, Baja California Sur, Mexico — 1997

Before we move on with our posts on anti-empathetic people, though, let’s talk a little bit about why the Joker is in Gotham City, and how we can learn from the Batman’s example on what to do (or really, not do!) with people that have empathy disorders.  It really boils down to one principle:  Don’t be the Batman.

What is the Batman?  Is the Batman another High Conflict Personality, or empathy-disordered?  No.  At some level, the Batman is the opposite.  The Batman arose as a response to regular crime in Gotham City.  He was working on breaking up the criminal syndicates that had permeated the fabric of Gotham, and at some level, was a Legalistic/Absolutistic v-Meme evolutionary response to the problems Gotham was having.  The fact that at some level, he is a vigilante on a vendetta, and his alter-ego is millionaire playboy Bruce Wayne is more a reflection of the v-Memes inside the creator’s head.  It may be meaningful, as at some level, since it places Bruce Wayne on a similar, more palatable v-Meme level as the Mob in Gotham, and therefore Batman is extension of both sides’ issues in rising above.  Tough to tell!

But one thing for sure.  The reasons the Joker showed up in Batman’s backyard have little to do with money.  The Joker showed up because Batman was interesting.  He said as much in the famous interrogation scene:

The Joker: [giggling] I don’t, I don’t want to kill you! What would I do without you? Go back to ripping off mob dealers? No, no, NO! No. You… you… complete me.

The Batman serves as a complementary replacement for part of the Joker’s distorted identity.  And when the Joker ups the heat, the Batman swoops in to escalate the conflict.  Who else can save Gotham City?  But while all the fireworks are going on, no one is asking the longer-time, consequential question:  is Gotham City safer with, or without the Batman?

Understanding how relational disruptors work in systems has been the subject of the last couple of posts.  If you’re the boss, and you have the ability, the best answer with such personality types is just to get rid of them. High Conflict Personalities (HCP)/empathy-disordered people will use resources to process them that would be better off spent toward reaching actual goals.  And the research has shown that there is little that can be done to fix them.

But what if you’re not the boss?  What does “Don’t Be the Batman” look like?  Here are some thoughts.

Don’t be an Absolutistic Personality

There’s no question that absolutistic behavior from people who are targets fuels High Conflict Personalities.  HCP/empathy-disordered people often possess a behavior called ‘splitting’, or black-and-white thinking.  Applied to a target persona with absolutistic behavior, splitting allows the HCP/empathy-disordered to either paint themselves as hero or victim, and allows them a license for split-second impulsive decision making that can create further chaos, while solidifying the HCP/empathy-disordered image of themselves.

Batman’s ostensibly absolute morality (especially when applied to not killing the Joker) fuels the Joker to devise increasingly extreme tests to see if the Batman is serious.  What does this mean?  Rule #1 — keep multiple solutions on the table for any situation.  Don’t provide an absolutistic mirror for the Joker.

EAR — Empathy, Attention and Respect

As we’ve discussed before, the HCP/empathy-disordered do not have any well-structured mode of emotional or higher empathy.  But what they do have is a profound connection with mirroring behavior.  The more excited you become in a situation, you can be sure the more excited they become.  What this means is that you need to be the source of the behavioral mode you want your HCP/empathy-disordered to emulate.  Bill Eddy has a term he emphasizes — EAR. EAR stands for Empathy, Attention and Respect.  When dealing with the HCP, you want to emphasize this mode.  I’ve read most of Bill’s stuff, and he isn’t a structuralist — he mostly emphasizes techniques that work, from his experience.  And the concept of EAR is deeply embedded in almost every religious doctrine — from Buddhism to Christianity.  It’s the sign of yourself being a ‘good person’.  My argument is, though, that this works on a far deeper, organic level.  If you project EAR, the HCP/empathy-disordered individual, not possessing their own EAR modes, are forced to mimic yours.  This absolutely drives them nuts, as they just don’t have the circuits.  So by you using EAR, you’re forcing them to use EAR.  And that’s the most painful thing you can do to them!

Understand Fundamental Attachment Issues

Remember that the HCP/empathy-disordered individual also likely has attachment issues.  For whatever reason, that person can’t form healthy, empathetic relationships with anyone, making them feel alone and isolated, and as discussed before, likely to develop disordered behaviors that help them control their chaotic worldview.  What brings the Joker to Gotham City is to form an attachment to the Batman.  But in order for that to happen, the Joker has to make himself interesting enough to the Batman to get close enough to attach to him.  That involves many of the pre-posted scenes, including sucking himself into the Batman’s former girlfriend’s life, Rachel, to fire up the Batman’s primal desire to protect her.  Needless to say, the only hook that the Joker really has is continuous mayhem.  Not good for Gotham City.

Out of this flows two fundamental principles:  Don’t be a Shiny Thing, and Back Away Slowly!  The Joker is drawn to the Batman in the first place because he offers the Joker a way to get the level of impulsive stimulation the Joker obviously craves.  But the second principle is as important as the first:  in The Dark Knight, the Batman doesn’t become more boring, once the Joker is attached.  Instead, the Batman beats the hell out of the Joker in the jail cell.  That’s a little disruptive attachment for you!  Psychologists call this an attachment injury.  The Joker just got done making his case on how the Batman and him were virtually the same!  And this fuels the Joker even more, to pull his next stunt with the ferry boats!

Community unification and refusal to play

HCPs/empathy-disordered actors are very difficult to beat single-handedly.  Part of the reason is that so many of them are so adept at distorting the truth in a way that is patently believable, yet completely false.  We talked about this a few posts back with the topic of gaslighting.  But over time, this type of behavior gets exposed.  Billy Eddy also discusses this, and recommends documenting behavior over time as a way of outing the HCP.

But the only real way that an HCP/empathy-disordered individual is really shut down is when the entire community refuses to play.  Nothing illustrates this better than the final act of The Dark Knight, when the Joker sets up a boatload of convicts, and a boatload of ordinary citizens on opposite ferry boats, each loaded with explosives, and each with the detonators for the explosives on the others’ boats.  The Joker issues an ultimatum — make a decision about blowing up the other boat before midnight, or the Joker blows both boats up.

It’s the convicts that call a halt to the game, when one elderly black convict, an obvious leader in the group, takes the detonator and throws it into the water.  The boat with the ordinary citizens also picks a leader who refuses to execute the command, though with a little less forceful moral presence.  The viewer is left with a statement about the potential morality of the prison boat that the director, Christopher Nolan, leaves unclear.  Are the convicts really of higher moral order than the regular people on the other boat?  Or do they just understand the psychopath’s mind more completely?  The movie’s penultimate scene ends with the Batman fighting hand-in-hand with the Joker, and saving his life while capturing him.  Batman walks away from a Joker, suspended in mid-air and tied up.  Virtually a guarantee of a sequel — but for reasons you now understand.

What’s the point?  An HCP/empathy-disordered individual can only really be mastered if the whole community refuses to play.  This is extremely difficult to convince a community to do.  Most of Western society has a little communitarian v-Meme in them, and that leads to a belief in change of both parties and an aversion to conflict.  Strong Legalistic v-Memes drive outside observers to a 50/50 split in blame, and an inability to understand the more complex dynamics inherent to an HCP situation.  The Joker himself lays the foundation for others’ thinking by demonizing the Batman, which is aided and abetted by society in general.  The Batman should surrender himself if he doesn’t want other people to die — even though he’s not the one doing the killing.  The Joker pulls others into his orbit where he is low-responsibility.

And so on.  The hard truth is that the community has to look at the facts.  And for whatever reason, decide not to play.

Takeaways:  There’s one basic rule for dealing with HCPs/empathy-disordered individuals.  Don’t be the Batman!!  No absolutistic behavior, don’t be a shiny thing, back away slowly, and get the community behind you.  Face-to-face, it’s gotta be EAR.   Not only will you be a better person, for those stuck in mirroring behavior with an empathy deficit, it’s a brain-scrambler.

Further Reading/Watching:  My favorite TV series of all time is 30 Rock, with Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin.  Most of television consists of emotional manipulation and gaslighting, as well as glorification of actual narcissists (think Scrubs).  30 Rock flips all of this on its head, with the cast of ‘normals’ all being narcissists, and the one tagged narcissist, Alec Baldwin, being the most normal.  What’s also refreshing is that instead of wrapping up the end of every episode with some renormalization of the various personality disorders, the show usually ends with them back in isolation, getting some level of just desserts.

There are classic episodes — but the one that relates the most to this post is Verna (Season 4, Episode 12).  Jack’s advice to narcissistic actress Jenna Maroney on how to deal with her mother — “Say ‘No’.  Talk low.  Let her go.” matches the advice above to a ‘T’.  

On a more serious note, as mentioned earlier, Bill Eddy has a series of books dealing with HCPs.  The books get a little repetitive, but if you pick the one for your situation, they work well.  From an experienced practitioner, Bill’s advice is spot-on.  Highly recommended.

A Moving Sound — Taiwanese Modern Ensemble with Traditional Instruments

One of the things I’ve always maintained is that because of the inherent issues with managing reliability and complexity, China is likely 15-20 years away from selling a world-class commercial airliner.  I’m still standing by that estimate — but this news might make some wonder.  In Al Jazeera today, this was posted:  First China-made passenger jet leaves production line.

The plane, built by COMAC — The Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China — is a state-owned enterprise, and the plane is a competitor to the Airbus A320/Boeing 737 lines.  Pre-orders total over 500, but only 10 of these are outside China.  No FAA certification of the aircraft has occurred, so it’s not showing up in the U.S. any time soon.

It’s an interesting coincidence, because I’ve always maintained that the Chinese culture, which is a modified, empathetic form of narcissistic authoritarianism, built on powerful in-group/out-group dynamics (Chinese culture maintains the Han as the master race, and everyone else is not-so-much) would be rocked by the One-Child Policy, which also has recently been modified to a Two-Child Policy.  I always figured that the One-Child Policy would force the products of that policy to then form independent relationships, and drive greater empathetic development, which would then make more complex products possible.  Yet it’s hard to predict exactly what will happen in China — because even though the Chinese government is very much about control, the Internet is the great control leveler.  Even when it’s throttled around, and folks can’t use Facebook.  How much of any of this is China, and how much of it is the new, ascendant global culture?

The plane, the C919, has been delayed from first flight, for reasons no one knows.  That’s not in and of itself surprising — new commercial aircraft are often delayed for a variety of reasons.  What will be interesting to watch is how long the delays last, and where they show up.  China already smartly partnered with GE and France’s Safran for the engines — definitely the hardest part of the game.  That was smart.

But for the remaining parts, it will be interesting for us aerospace watchers to understand what part of the plane game causes the greatest delays — whether it’s airframe or manufacturing.  That’s going to tell us loads about where synergy really matters — in design, or making the thing.  Or perhaps communication and exchange between the two parts.  I’m sure my friends at Boeing are also watching — because it’s going to tell us where we need to double down on understanding and managing complexity.

In the end, the thing to remember is this — it’s complexity management and ease of duplex information flow that creates commercial aircraft.  China’s running an enormous controlled experiment that behooves us all to watch with a true, critical eye.  Running around screaming the sky is falling, or alternately, dismissing their attempts won’t get us very far.  I know I’ll be watching from the sidelines with bated breath!

Wildfire outside Kamiah, Idaho — Braden Pezeshki, Photo

(Just in case you’re new to this blog, I post pictures intended as scenic relief — don’t read too much into it.)

In the last post, we explored some of the manipulation techniques of the Joker, performed unforgettably by Heath Ledger, in the movie The Dark Knight.  The Joker, in this movie, is portrayed as the ultimate psychopath — which in our world of high-performance team formation means that he is THE iconic relational disruptor.  In the last post, we explored how the Joker, instead of wanting to kill the Batman, actually needs the Batman.  The Joker is actually ATTACHED to the Batman, though in a disordered way.  Interaction with the Batman actually helps the Joker construct his own self-image, as well as gets him off.

The Joker also cleverly uses our mental models against us — creating conditions that turn on OUR empathy, which then allows him to create chaos.  I highlighted how the psychopathic mind has a disordered sense of time, which the most clever will use to their advantage.  And how we can’t think like a psychopath (unless we are one).  We can only attempt to predict what they’ll do.

So how can we predict the unpredictable?  The Joker always seems to be one step ahead of the Batman, especially when it comes to initiating events.  So, in many ways, when it comes to superficial, or surface-level actions, you can’t out-guess them. You have to focus on underlying dynamics.

Though there’s got to be a ton more — no claim of exhaustive search or knowledge here — I’m going to talk about three dominant ones today.  These are, in no relevant order:

1.  Social Isolation/Depriving of Agency of a Target.
2. Triangulation of Authority/Target Intersection.
3. Defining the Landscape of Irresponsibility

Let’s go through these, one by one.

Social Isolation

How does an High Conflict Personality (HCP)/empathy-disordered person isolate a target person in a relational system?  There are many ways, but one of the key techniques is using what is called gaslighting.  The standard definition of gaslighting is when the HCP/psychopath makes an individual doubt their own perceptions of a given event in their life.  The Wikipedia definition is actually pretty good.  But it leaves out the relational dynamics which are so important about understanding how relationships are disrupted.

Let’s say you and I have a cup of coffee on Tuesday.  We have a great conversation about a new project, and the event seems relatively agreeable to both parties.  I see you the following day on Wednesday.  “That was a nice cup of coffee we had on Monday, Sue,” I say.  “But Chuck — it was Tuesday.  Remember?”

Now the gaslighting occurs — “Sue — why are you being so difficult? I’m sorry you can’t remember.”  Still feeling the positive experience, you might reach into your purse and pull out your phone.  “See — right here, on Tuesday, Chuck!”  I don’t relent.  “Sue, your phone is all messed up.  Let’s go down to the AT&T store and get that fixed.  I’ll drive you!”  You walk away, disturbed.

Let’s say you’re married.  You go to your husband.  “That guy Chuck,” you say.  “The strangest thing happened at work with him.  We went out for coffee on Tuesday, and had a great exchange on getting this big project going. But when I saw him again today (Wednesday), he said we actually met on Monday.”

What your partner is likely to say is this:  “Are you sure you just didn’t mishear him?”  You resist and protest.  “No, I’m sure…”  — but are you really?

The most pernicious gaslighters don’t do anti-social things, like inappropriate behavior that could readily be called out.  They do ordinary things that distort reality — and here’s the relational system edge.  They use things that deprive you of the fundamental empathetic grounding that occurs when we coordinate our activities with other people.  It’s not surprising, for example, that I use the time for a coffee conversation.  Who would expect that as an avenue for control?

Let’s say I see you again, and a similar situation occurs.  How likely are you to go talk to your partner about it?  I’d argue, unless you have a way to explain it (and now you do!) you’re very unlikely to even bring up problems with me with your partner.  Because it makes you look crazy.  And that starts the process of social isolation that will enable me — the HCP/psychopath/gaslighter — to grab control of your grounding circuits.  Which means that I’ll soon be able to assert abusive control.

Narcissistic leaders do this too — by gaslighting their own performance, or more typically, by praising one employee or a group uber alles.  HCPs/psychopaths often do this cleverly in groups by working with various ratios of teams, by coddling, say, 1/3 of a team, while punishing the other 2/3s. Often, the HCP/psychopath will pick the people out who are either most susceptible to control, or other HCPs like themselves and reward them, keeping their allegiance tight (remember what Machiavelli said about holding your friends close, and your enemies closer!) and punishing the rest, because they know that their histrionic friends will be quick to defend them, while the other, more healthy people will become depressed, and are much less likely to protest the dominant order.

Triangulation of Authority

There are literally hundreds of permutations of this standard conflict scheme, but it is much more commonly used by HCPs/psychopaths where large institutions are in play.  Anonymous complaint processes are rife for this kind of abuse as well.  Here, the HCP/psychopath makes an accusation against the target to an authority about an indeterminate act — one that there is no clear evidence for, but obviously transgresses social mores.  The authority is compelled to act against the accused. The end result is that the HCP steps out of the triangle after the accusation, and then lets the accused deal solely with the authority.  The accused is usually faced with an either/or situation — accept the false accusation as true, and negotiate with the authority, or fight with the authority, which usually has much greater resources than the accused.

Another Triangulation technique often used by HCPs is an innocent bystander is triangulated into the system, taken hostage as it were, and then an untenable situation is created for the HCP’s real target.  The target is then placed in a position of judgment whether the innocent is going to be hurt or spared, with blame and responsibility centered on the target.  The HCP doesn’t necessarily have to limit themselves to one target — in the following scene, the Joker sets up two ferry boats full of people as his ‘social experiment’, one of ordinary citizens, and one filled with convicts, each rigged with explosives, and with each holding the detonator.  The Joker gives both a deadline of midnight to figure out if they’re going to blow up the other boat, with the threat that he’ll do it if they don’t.  Classic triangulation/relational disruption!

The Landscape of Irresponsibility

One of the arguments made for making sure everyone has a title in a team is that responsibilities are clear-cut, and that ought to improve efficiency.  But there is also no more fertile ground for irresponsibility than the creation of titles.  And particularly when there are HCPs/psychopaths in play.  When one wants to manipulate the people on your team, one of the primary tools is the Landscape of Irresponsibility.

What does that landscape look like?  A given project or situation is mapped out so that the HCP has no responsibility other than pointing out that he/she is not responsible.  And they do this in compelling ways — in the above scene from the Joker’s Social Experiment, either boat is set up to be responsible for blowing up the other boat.  In the execution of both Harvey Dent and his fiancée, the Joker is once again not responsible.  And on it goes.  Creation of fragmented effort offers tons of opportunities for finger-pointing, as well as relational disruption in teams.  And a good leader can spot a victim/blamer, creating the seeds for this kind of chaos, a mile away.

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If there is any scene that sums all of these up, it’s the following scene of Batman interrogating the Joker in the jail cell.  So here’s your pop quiz — can you identify the three disruption strategies at work in this final clip?

Further Reading:  One of the great canards is that the Joker is psychotic, as opposed to being a psychopath.  It’s the ultimate piece of gaslighting, but one that unfortunately probably informs too many people’s ideas on mental health in this country.  This article, written about a psychiatrist, Vasilis K. Pozios, M.D, who analyzes comic book criminals for fun and speaks at Comic-cons, is well worth the read on both the Joker and this phenomenon.