that headline is a result of macros clashing off the Tannhauser Gate, I meant to type: “Leave me alone” it’s world introvert day. Other ‘interesting days’ coming up soon include:
I’m not going to discuss that last one, instead I’m going to focus on World Introvert Day, which was yesterday. Yesterday was supposed to be World Procrastination day, but it was put off until the 31st, which is also UK File Your Taxes Day.
and here is somebody else’s lovely work on the topic of…
‘the joy of telling everyone to just fuck off and leave me alone’,
Ted Gioia has identified these and so has this other writer, Peter Turchin
I’ve long said that it takes 40 years [or 5] it’s an approximation] for a culture to forget – the children of the children of Thatcher have forgotten what she and her rabid dogs did to the body politic, culminating in the self-harm of Brexshit.
A new primitive – duogenerational human cycles
Below lifted from Ted, go read him!
50 YEAR CYCLES OF HOT AND COOL CULTURE
In a highly speculative two-part article (here and here), I claimed that we are living a culture that shifts from hot cycles to cool cycles—each one lasting around 50 years. We are currently in the middle of a hot cycle.
I know this sounds like poppycock. But I reached this conclusion while researching my book on the history of coolness. I can’t overstate how shocked I was to discover that the cool ethos permeating American culture during my formative years was just a passing phase.
I had assumed that everyone always wanted to be hip and cool. But at the very moment when I started researching and writing the book, something was shifting. Hipster even turned into a term of abuse. But in a hundred other ways, I saw the culture getting hotter and hotter—promoting aggression, not coolness.
Now I’ve encountered a social scientist with a very similar story to tell. Peter Turchin has spent decades creating an enormous database in order to determine the laws of history, drawing on advanced data analytics. In fact, he is so ambitious that he is studying ten thousand years of history, and forcing it to reveal underlying rules and patterns.
And guess what? Turchin also discovers 50 years cycles of hot and cool—but he draws on completely different evidence than mine. I was looking at music, movies, books, fashion, and cultural style. In contrast, Turchin was studying wars, politics, and historical conflicts.
But we reached identical conclusions.
Here Turchin tries to summarize what Big Data tells him about societies in crisis—explaining it in the simplest terms possible:
When we look closely at the disintegrative phases, we discover that they are not uniformly grim. Instead, the level of collective violence tends to follow a rhythm. One generation (“the sons”), scarred by violence, keeps uneasy peace. The following generation (“the grandsons”), who grew up not being directly exposed to violence, repeats the mistakes of the grandfathers. This dynamic sets up a recurrent cycle of violence of roughly fifty years in length (that is, two human generations), which persists until the structural conditions are somehow resolved, leading to the next integrative phase.
I find it curious that I’m studying Miles Davis, David Letterman, Lenny Bruce, hippies and flower power, etc. and intersect exactly with Turchin’s data anlytics of battlefields and political dissolution.
I continue to stand by my prediction that society is going to get hotter and angrier. But the trend must eventually reverse, maybe as soon as 2025. Coolness and conciliation will finally return—I just don’t see that happening in the coming election year.
“For nearly 150 years, state governments believed that society and physicians had a moral responsibility to provide care for all those afflicted with mental illness. But beginning in the late 1960s and 1970s, the welfare state came under increasing attack with the belief that individuals needed to take individual responsibility for themselves. State governments were primarily responsible for the smooth running of market economies and not for individual welfare. The elections of Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK underlined this shift in political culture.
“These changes shifted care priorities away from state hospitals and toward care in the community. But that has become increasingly fragmented, decentralized and subject to the logic of market forces rather than to the needs of those with serious mental illness.
“The political ideology that emphasizes individual responsibility fits neatly with a belief that disease is largely a problem of biology and/or psychology and that the solution is a treatment that focuses on the individual’s psychology or biology.”
“Once we acknowledge the reality of mental illness as a disease that robs its victims of meaning, social connections and the ability to function in contemporary society, we can start designing interventions that address this reality. We cannot simply wish away the complexity of psychiatric disease and the kinds of interventions that are necessary for humane, scientifically based care.”
“For nearly 150 years, state governments believed that society and physicians had a moral responsibility to provide care for all those afflicted with mental illness. But beginning in the late 1960s and 1970s, the welfare state came under increasing attack with the belief that individuals needed to take individual responsibility for themselves. State governments were primarily responsible for the smooth running of market economies and not for individual welfare. The elections of Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK underlined this shift in political culture.
“These changes shifted care priorities away from state hospitals and toward care in the community. But that has become increasingly fragmented, decentralized and subject to the logic of market forces rather than to the needs of those with serious mental illness.
“The political ideology that emphasizes individual responsibility fits neatly with a belief that disease is largely a problem of biology and/or psychology and that the solution is a treatment that focuses on the individual’s psychology or biology.”
“Once we acknowledge the reality of mental illness as a disease that robs its victims of meaning, social connections and the ability to function in contemporary society, we can start designing interventions that address this reality. We cannot simply wish away the complexity of psychiatric disease and the kinds of interventions that are necessary for humane, scientifically based care.”
Corecore, which has racked up hundreds of millions of views on TikTok, is a form of visual poetry that is meant to evoke certain emotions.
— Read on time.com/6248637/corecore-tiktok-aesthetic/
That’s some weird-ass fecked-up shit right there, blud
“That memo doesn’t shock a lot of us. Our bosses don’t care about us, no matter what they say. Even if you have sick leave, the idea of leisure has become so stigmatized in this country that most of us don’t take it.
“Call in sick, and you’re a liar.
“Ask for time off, and you’re lazy. Ask for a regular schedule, and you’re entitled. Get pregnant, and you’re a liability.
“It never ends.
“Americans talk a lot about family values, but our work culture shows the opposite. We don’t value family at all—not as a culture. We talk about mental health and wellness. We talk about sleep. We talk about self-care. Our bosses slip all these things into their memos and emails. They mention them in meetings. It matters so much until it threatens profits. Then it doesn’t matter.”
Brittle professional and CEOs share a characteristic, they are spiked upon a fitness peak/ stuck in an attractor basin. They don’t wanna budge from it. Gobbledegook? Read my book, or Googlit.
Q: is leadership necessarily lacking in empathy? I’m beginning to think so…
“The thing that people with power don’t know is what it’s like to have little or no power. Minute by minute, you are reminded of your place in the world: how it’s difficult to get out of bed if you have mental health conditions, impossible to laugh or charm if you are worried about what you will eat, and how not being seen can grind away at your sense of self.
I am often in rooms with people who do not understand this, people more educated than me, more privileged than me – people who are so accustomed to having power that they don’t even know it’s there. I am a black woman in my fifties, I am neurodiverse, and I have multiple mental health diagnoses. Part of my job as a researcher and cultural thinker involves working with leaders in the arts, business and politics, supporting them to see the one thing they can’t: the effects of the power that they wield.
But just pointing out this disparity can leave people feeling defensive. It can get you labelled an “angry black woman”. In the past, when I started to tell people about what it felt like to have no power, and how hard it was to understand, they didn’t listen. So I turned to science, to understand the effects of power in your body, in order to bring evidence to what I already knew, and make people listen.
I call this research the neurology of power. It involves looking at the sociological explanations of power as well as the neuroscientific underpinnings. Being in a state of powerlessness leads to perpetual stress. That stress trains our bodies to be on the alert for it, compromising our productivity and happiness in situations where others – those who have never experienced that sense of powerlessness – are left to thrive.
Anyone who’s ever taken a few deep breaths, forced themselves to lower their shoulders or closed their eyes to regain their composure is aware that the brain and the body are in a constant feedback loop. We feel our thoughts and we think our feelings.
Researching these ideas brought me into conversations with leading scientists around the world. Prof Lisa Feldman Barrett, at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts general hospital, told me about a process known as “body budgeting”, or allostasis. She argues that, like a financial budget, our brains keep track of when we spend resources (eg going for a run) and when resources are deposited (eg eating). It is a predictive process, by which the brain maintains energy regulation by anticipating the body’s needs and preparing to satisfy those needs before they arise.
Feldman argues that this process is so fundamental to the architecture of the brain that it extends to our mental states. Our emotions arise from our brain’s calculations of the physical, metabolic needs of our bodies. Predicting a dangerous situation requiring us to flee results in physical changes and discomfort we register as anxiety.
This body budgeting has social effects. For instance, our ability to empathise with another person is dependent on our body budgeting. When people are more familiar to us, our brain can more efficiently predict what their inner state and struggles may be and feel like. This process is harder for those less familiar to us, so our brains may be less inclined to use up precious resources in making difficult predictions.
Sukhvinder Obhi, a professor of social neuroscience at McMaster University in Canada, told me more about how people with power often struggle to empathise with others. Because the brain makes predictions based on past experiences, these patterns are self-reinforcing. Often, powerful people learn to behave as if they have power. Powerless people learn to behave as if they have none.
This research legitimised what I always knew. Power wires the powerful for power; but it can also wire them against people without power. You can lose your empathy. And power is critical for wellbeing.
This empathy deficit has historically been a celebrated attribute among leaders – ruthlessness that allows people to make hard decisions without fear of the consequences. You can see it in political leaders of every political persuasion, from time immemorial. Today it feels particularly stark. It has left society divided, trust in powerful institutions eroded and policymaking driven by ideology rather than human experience.
We need a new kind of policymaking that puts people at the heart of the process. Policymakers need to start by listening, by sharing power with the people who really understand the nature of powerlessness and the effect of the policies they are writing. We can’t stay in this perpetual loop of those with power deciding everything. They are handicapped by their own privilege.
Many find this evidence about power uncomfortable to confront. I’ve spoken on panels, presented my arguments and had them disputed in public by senior academics, who later apologised privately, once they’d checked my references in full.
I shouldn’t need to lean on science to be heard and justify what I already know: that power is a limiting factor for our leaders and we need to make policy differently to counterbalance the power gap. This is a call to action: we can do things differently. Let’s try.“
Suzanne Alleyne is a cultural thinker, founder at Alleyne&, and fellow of the thinktank Demos
“But for Bailey and the technocratic elites he represents, this is a terrifying prospect: even though workers aren’t yet strong enough or sufficiently well-organised to fight for better wages, a structurally tighter labour market is liable to make such struggles much more likely in the future, especially in a context of permanently higher prices. They fear this not because it might lead to a wage-price spiral, which is unlikely, but because it would signal a shift in the labour-capital balance for the first time in half a century.
” As Adam Tooze has written, what really worries technocrats like Bailey “is that inflation will emerge as a macroeconomic and, one might say, a macrosocial phenomenon. All of that is code for a world in which organised labour is stronger and in which workers receive not gratuitous handouts from socially minded employers to help with the grocery bills, but proper cost of living adjustments”. This is about more than just capitalists having to give workers a bigger share of the pie: a more emboldened labour force is also more likely to start demanding a greater voice in the management of their country’s economic and political affairs — a technocrat’s worst nightmare.”
Yes, there is a class war, it’s been going on for centuries, but we [the werkers] didn’t start the fire, despite what Billy Joel tells ya…
It would be fun to link to the video of his song, but I’m going to deny him the oxygen of publicity. Here’s Jeremy instead…
Bolx to CoPs, as they were Wengerised away from the elegant ethnography of Jean Lave, in service of McKlumsey or was it SpiteWatereddownShysters. CoPs were emasculated at birth by theMan. Bolx to System Convening, a Learical senescent early-retirement community.
How dare you desertify a floral community and replace it with a floral clock?
Those other ravens were Thought and Memory. No, they weren’t in the Marvel movies, they’d end up being Hekyll and Jekyll in Song O’ the South, shudder, racist bickering disney sidekicks…
Anyway, we’re all familiar with reification, it means making into a thing. It’s what they did to Murphy in Robocop, I do love my cheesy movie references, as a colleague once said, sourly.
Reification (linguistics), the transformation of a natural-language statement such that actions and events represented by it become quantifiable variables
Reification (Marxism), the consideration of an abstraction of an object as if it had living existence and abilities
Back then, though, I was revisiting all the marvellous 80s learning organisation malarkey. Having been handed its ass on a plate by the wily orientals of the co-opetioning clans (Co-opetition? ugh. Great idea, vile wordle curdle) gathered under the stern gaze of grandma MITI, American carmakers were licking their wounds when a nice young man in a periwinkle blue jumper wandered in from Harvard with a book wot he wrote… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_organization
I soon realised the learning organisation was a dumbass reification, a pellet of baby food regurgitated for the fluffy pinstriped baby birdies in the boardroom to swallow. The issue is how do organisations learn, ffs, not have they got a ‘stificate in PRINCE Charming sick Stigma. Possibly helped by the fact that I was picking up on the learning organisation fad as it fell out of the top twenty and had therefore been dropped as a work area by m’colleauges in the spanish Inquisition, sorry MPD, management practice and development, when I worked at LGMB, formerly LGTB, not to be confused with LGBT.
Shapiro, Eileen C., FadSurfingintheBoardroom: Managing inthe Age of Instant Answers, Basic Books (1996), ISBN 0-2014419-5-0
organisational learning isn’tmuch better becauseit is, wordsaladalert a neologism portmanteau of reificatio… fuqsayk, just say it man – because its a POS made up of 2 horrible reifications, because organisations don’texist as a thing and neither does learning. Iwill stab you if Ihear you say ‘learning point’s or key learning points, and swear to god I will shoot you dead if you pluralise the verb learning.
What were really getting at is this, punchline alert, thingification is a process for an individual or ideally a small group who care, to deploy when they try to bring forth a new, erm, thing. That’s why Icalled it thingification. It is the yin to the enormous yang of thingification. Loved by Etonians because it hides the pain of thinking and feeling.
So, our pinstriped Waitroseian strides forth into his Cotswoldian landscape to inspect his (his! Lol) tradition country garden, the wife is really into Beth Chatto you know [look, you can use google, ffs, I’m getting tired now] these are hollyhocks from John Clares [googlit] garden near Stamford, and, its been a cold winter, not that he noticed, and the daffodills aren’t out yet, they’re the original ones you know, the pale small native flower not the horrid Dutch cultivars, like swaggering drag queens in SF, ugh, and he is suddenly apoplectic with rage, the pure Etonian rage of cousin Eustace in Dawn Treader, (twas on telly yesterday,) the Bunter-roid rage of the thwarted ten year old nanny’s boy, becuase Charles, and Bex, and tommo and Katerina and Binky and Daisy are up from the smoke for the weekend and the fucking daffodills aren’tout, and Iknow m’wife Madelaine will be so dissapointed, because bloody women letting me down again, and suddenly— a boy wrenched from home aged 7, and therefore locked into a grief gestalt trauma beneath saville row body armour—- and he will beat Maddy after his not-friends from the Bank have failed to gaze upon his Ozymandelsonian fucking flowers that Ibuy every year from by the till in me Nisa.
And do you know what he shouts? This Proustian wail he bellows across the hollyhocks, they aren’t out either, bastards, across the pinstripy lawn, we have this marvellous little man, George, still uses an absolutely ancient Dennis mower, must be in his 80s, Idigress, so he stands, our brittle etonian, at the top of his fitness peak, his arse getting stabbed by the ointy peak of his fitness, his perfect adaptation as bastardi di tutti bastadi, bigdog, and he shouts at the flowers, or rather the vibrant pale acidy-green spears of life stabbing up through the dirt and John Innes, and he shouts:
GROW, DAMN YOU, GROW ! ITOLD YOU TO GROWW!!!
IT’S ok, I’m calm now, gather, gather, deep breath.
A leaning organisation is a garden in a shitty patch of suburbia. Choked with bramble and knotweed, rose-bay willowheb, old mans beard, n shopping trolleys, ford anglia gearboxes and Pampers and hedgepr0n, prone to flooding when the river, etcetera, overhung by senile sycamores and seedy silver birch and I need this bombsite to look like this…
We need a group quietly nods it head sentence gary.
Heres mine for learning organisation
“how, can we, (and by we I mean everybody, not just us, the staff and children of the small primary school in worcestershire, but the village and the cleaners and, and ,and, and and — where’s the boundary Gary, of the fishtank in the dentist waiting room, Gary)
“But there is a kicker to the story, and in it we see how the cynicism of self-preservation prevailed at the expense of doing something long-term and substantive about race relations. Shortly before Macpherson published his report, Straw proposed a follow-up – an ambitious strategy that would prioritise race equality considerations in policymaking across government bodies. Yet taking on racial justice in such a direct manner was just too risky, too destabilising to the government. “A regulation nightmare,” said Blair. Angus Lapsley, an official in Blair’s private office, decided not to back a proposal that racist police officers should be dismissed (government was “cool” towards this suggestion, he said), not because the policy would be wrong, but because of how rightwing papers would react to it. Here is where the decibel level rises. “This could easily become a ‘Telegraph cause celebre’ if taken too far,” said Lapsley. Blair agreed, saying: “We do not want to go OTT on this.” The proposal was killed. There is a sort of sickening relief in seeing those sentiments – expressed behind closed doors – spelled out so matter of factly; in knowing for certain that concerns about racial injustice aren’t taken seriously not because they’re not believed but because they rock the boat. Indeed, the smothering of a broad, progressive race policy 20 years ago tells us much about where we are today, with a government proudly hostile to interrogating the true state of race relations”
A friend of mine said, in a lovely,erudite presentation to some very smart folk:
“a weakness of my current thinking is a lack of explicitly encompassing the group, the social.”
Totally agree, we all lack this.
Re-examine page 49 of ‘Navigating Complexity: the essential guide to complexity theory in business and management’, written by myself.
Then think about that botanical nostrum – Early Years textbooks teach that there are three kinds of play in young humans and many mammals:
individual play
parallel play
social play
Know that this is botany – classifying plants by the shape of their leaves. We observe the spots of a leopard, but what is the mechanism that creates them?
What are the primitives, the atomic irreducible processes that underly the phenomena?
We do not have a language to describe phenomena in groups. I suspect they are incommensurable, like weather prediction after Lorenz.
We do not have a language to describe phenomena in groups.
This has hamstrung playwork, education, professional football, orchestral performance, NASA budgetary oversight inquiries, Air Accident Investigation, Corporate Fraud Investigation, etcetera etcetera.
There are clues in the Miles Davis approach to group play.
There are clues in Taoism, and Zen.
But as Sapir, Whof and Wittgenstein, and probably Gibson (JJ not W) would tell you, language shapes thought and we do not have the language.
Try explaining how to put oil into a car without using any car-related, or engine-related words. Go on, try it. Write it down, now go through it and strike out any car-related and engine-related words that crept in. We don’t have a big enough RAM, our short-term memory, to hold even one sentence of the resulting tedious arm-waving stuttering verbiage.
Why doesn’t the world move when I shake my head?
~~~~~~
M’learned friend also said:
“This has many implications, but that main one is that we should judge education by the value created for stakeholders (laudate Tom) – this is fittingly complex and circular.
NO NO NO, NO!
Very pleased that you rate teecha Tom.
Not stakeholders, feck stakeholders. Leave that to the Tory Goovey Gradgrindians.
I think you might mean participants? If so then I‘ll semi-agree.
How would you judge a Beth Chatto garden? Answer that and you’ll know how to judge education .
Greetings, loyal readers, and passers-by. Today’s topic is playwork (again).
“I know it’s wrong of me, but when I read the newspaper headline, Out-Of-Control Kids Driving Wichita Teachers Away, Union Says, I felt a little like cheering. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m against anyone hitting, biting, or engaging in property damage, which are among the things this article alleges. I am fully supportive of teacher’s unions that fight for both educators and students. And I have nothing but respect for public school teachers, whose already difficult jobs have been made even more difficult over the past couple decades as anti-child policies like No Child Left Behind (Bush), Race to the Top (Obama), and Common Core (Gates), are turning our schools into high-pressure, drill-and-kill, test-taking coal mines. Yet still, when I read that headline I could only think, “Damn straight, the kids are fighting back.” “I mean, public schools have never exactly been a bastions of freedom, and kids, like all humans, love freedom.”
“It’s shocking, frankly, that we didn’t rebel more than we did: it’s a testament to the capacity of children to thrive under any circumstances. But now consider that the pressure has been slowly increased over the past couple decades: high-stakes standardized testing and the millions of hours of test prep; the narrowing of the curriculum to focus almost exclusively on math and literacy at the expense of life-savers like the arts, wood shop, physical education, home economics; the slashing of budgets leaving schools poorly maintained and and supplied; and a drive toward longer school days and school years. “
“I assure you that I, a generally well-mannered kid who was good at school, would have rebelled a long time ago.”
Playwork starts where teaching stops.
Teachers have to leave when they become recalcitrant. Resign or be sacked or obey the system, your call, pal.
Google John Taylor Gatto. New York teacher of the year. Three times. On the day of the award ceremony, to be his 3rd time as T of the Y, he walked. He walked, but not before he told them what he thought of what they were doing to the kids.
Teaching is about educating children, supporting their learning, not doing the stuff that Tom describes being done to them in his blog.
Your job, as playworkers, is to work with the recalcitrance of the weasels, to hold a space in which they can be free to become, to do, to be. To doo be doo be do, if that’s what they wanna do.If you can’t do that, then what you are doing may be useful, or worthy, or positive…
arthur~battram… 