Wellbeing and Royal Commission Outcomes
Torrey Orton
April 30, 2009
What’s it all about, this Commission? It’s all about human well-being in Victorian bushfire prone areas. We are concerned with our areas but extend this concern to the experience of others in similar ones (across Australia, and in California and Greece for instance). The underlying question of the Commission’s inquiries is, ‘What is a viable context for human well-being in such areas?’ For many this will include the well-being of indigenous plants and animals, too.
The Black Saturday Royal Commission has the responsibility to recommend on:
1) The preparation and planning for future bushfire threats and risks, particularly the prevention of loss of life.
2) Land use planning and management, including urban and regional planning
3) Fireproofing of housing and other buildings, including materials used in construction
4) The emergency response to the fires
5) Public communication and community advice systems and strategies
6) Training, infrastructure, and overall resourcing needs.
The last is the outcome delivery system, the means through which the first 5 are implemented. So, how it is shaped matters more than the others, since without good implementation the Commission will have been just another Government ‘talkfest’. At least three pre-conditions are important to success. One, that the implementation of new ways of doing anything is understood to be iterative, not a one-shot stamping of a new impression on old materials. Two, that the processes are open and transparent (including no places to hide like ‘commercial in confidence’). And, three, that implementation is well-rounded: its parts and processes are interconnected and interdependent. The last is the focus of the following discussion.
All of these recommendations will touch directly or indirectly on aspects of human well-being. There are models of well-being around. One I like is used by Australian criminologists to drive a new approach to sex offender rehabilitation – where re-offending is an all too usual result. Their model looks like this:
1) Life (including healthy living and functioning) 2) Knowledge 3) Excellence in play and work (including mastery experiences) 4) Excellence in agency (i.e., autonomy and self-directedness) 5) Inner peace (i.e., freedom from emotional turmoil and stress) 6) Friendship (including intimate, romantic and family relationships) 7) Community 8) Spirituality (in the broad sense of finding meaning & purpose in life) 9) Happiness 10) Creativity
*From: The Treatment of Sex Offenders: Risk Management and Good Lives.
Tony Ward, Claire A Stewart,
I am not too excited about happiness and inner peace as core human needs (I think ‘interest’ does better because it isn’t turned in one direction – a ‘positive’ one - about outcomes). While we can dispute the specifics of models, we have a sense of what it means to be human. That is, we won’t dispute well-being as a human need, just its components and configurations. All societies have well-being assumptions. Our models are also implicit most of the time, until decision demand times arrive with high life/death outcomes.
Let’s apply part of our model to the sixth outcome - Training, infrastructure, and overall resourcing needs. The relevant parts may be life (1), knowledge (2), excellence in play and work (3) and community (7). For example’s sake I’ll take the resourcing element as one focus for application of well-being criteria. What would it mean to do this? A series of questions which can be used to establish the parameters of resource decisions and for tracking their implementation:
Life
Will these resources in this configuration best provide for added safety within the technical constraints and not detract from other life sustaining matters?
Knowledge
Will these resources provide the best chance(s) of increasing our understanding (knowledge) of fire related factors as they change across their total spectrum? Eg – is it clear where across various provisions, systematic data gathering and interpretation is necessary and how will it occur? This understanding must be increased at three levels at least: state, locality and family / individual.
Excellence in play and work
Are the programs associated with fire danger amelioration providing best opportunities for local stakeholders (business, residents, etc.) to improve / increase their work and play?
Community
What affects on the whole populations of various localities will the total set of programs have, how will this be monitored, what feedback systems are built in…?
A similar application of selected well-being parameters should be made to the other two parts of item 6 (training and infrastructure) , and each of the other 5 outcome areas, and then across the set as a whole. Attention should be paid to which well-being parameters must apply to assessment of all outcomes.
Underlying all efforts may be this mantra: “It’s just not affordable”.
Access Economics CEO Chris Richardson on ABC 7:30 Report, 280409, talking about the coming financial constraints of the GFC.
This will be at play in the Commission’s decision-making, too. A rounded, well-being based approach will enhance the value achieved from their work. Lack of it will lead to an assumption ruling the proceedings – the neolib assumption about public debt and private provision before which all still kowtow since there is no other accessible language for public discourse!! This one is employable almost with impunity because we cannot know what the future will bring to the ‘economy’. This fact, and its attendant diversely reported feelings of fear, anxiety and anger, will tend to drive everyone and every public process (where those feelings are constantly intentionally exaggerated) to lowest common denominator thinking.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Rectifications (7) – ‘Make a difference…’ ….‘Give back…’
Rectifications (7) – ‘Make a difference…’ ….‘Give back…’
Torrey Orton
April 22, 2009
Following the suggestion of Confucius, I continue some rectification of names for our times. Elsewhere I offer some ‘solutions’ to some problems of linguistic degradation. Relevant observations appear towards the end of my most recent Dances with Difference (4) post.
‘Make a difference…’ is what we say when we mean that whatever we’ve been doing until the moment of speaking has not been making a difference; that we’ve been contributing negatively to the human condition? Is this what all the job adverts mean if they don’t involve ’making a difference..’, if they don’t promise that you can ‘make a difference..’ by working with us, our clients / customers??
I got about 75, 000,000 Google hits for the expression, with involvements in every domain of human life and specialties like the Make a Difference movie. I just can’t help thinking about all the lives which, presumably, are not making a difference. They’re just getting on with living in various forms, which makes humanity continue. I guess they are not making progress or making things better or something. Being one who has always struggled to find what difference was worth making, I find it hard to join this parade. And I can’t also help thinking of the gratuitous exclusion from virtue of those who have no access to such opportunities!!
In fact, I’m inclined to sneer a bit about making a difference. This inclination is strengthened when I remember that ‘Make a difference..’ reminds me of its cousin ‘Give back…’ (146 million hits, amongst which some organisations I support like Environment Victoria with Gifts that Give Back). From its viewpoint I’ve been robbing you quietly all these years. Am I now going to make amends for damages which you never noticed I was doing, either directly or indirectly, by being associated with destructive products, process and payments???
Does the return of unprincipled and unearned bonuses constitute an example of giving back? How would we know when a claimed example of giving back actually amounted to enough of whatever it is that was withheld or stolen in the first place to recompense the victims? For example, Bill Gates is lionised for giving back immensely – his whole fortune, more or less – by doing which he gets to play god with the lives of masses he chooses to help on topics he decides are most important. And have the consumers gotten back the outsized results of his de facto monopoly?
Similarly, but from the product side of the make a difference equation, there are products which make or sustain their appeals to buyers on the back of making differences of highly ambiguous sorts. The alcohols which support sports events / organisations come to mind. I suspect there’s a pile of cultural studies books on variations of this theme among certain clothing manufacturers and styles, cars, and on and on. Probably someone’s done the work. Let me know if you know who and where.
These may be also more or less making a difference by giving back?? Two-faced contributors to NGO’s now come to mind. ,,, and how about the energy companies spruiking new energy orientations while sustaining old energy profits (an unavoidable conflict of interest for an existing industry seeking to respond to market or other changes??).
I think all this (my anger / irritation) has to do with the stripping of the moral fibre of late capitalism to its thinnest. What’s left are pretensions to it – a moral fibre – which keep us aware of our awareness that there’s little left to aspire to in our world but things. Other reminders include CSR, the new one – ESG (environmental, social and governance) issues, pleas for greedless leading, disparaging of excesses and denials that there’s any role for anyone in anyone else’s use of their choices as long as they do no harm to others (harm calculated as something like shooting rather than spiritual dismemberment). I rave on without making a difference.…
Thanks to Brassie and Hamid’s complaints about my lack of channels for anger a few weeks back, I’m going to provide some channels for making a difference here. What you can do to make a difference wherever you are now is:
1- Do your job right and well – whatever you have to do to live
2- Do the right job well – something you care about and make a living
3- See to it your organisation does its job well and right
4- Discourage yourself and others from consuming the results of wrong and badly done jobs – scams, frauds, discretionary misrepresentations ( the most widely spread chicanery in human worlds) in ‘normal’ commercial endeavours – that is, omission of important consumer information which is not required by law. Complain where you find these hidden, preferably by naming and shaming.
5- Encourage others to join the difference you are making.
That’s for starters. You may notice that this is merely a recommendation to bring basic virtues back into the everyday.
Torrey Orton
April 22, 2009
Following the suggestion of Confucius, I continue some rectification of names for our times. Elsewhere I offer some ‘solutions’ to some problems of linguistic degradation. Relevant observations appear towards the end of my most recent Dances with Difference (4) post.
‘Make a difference…’ is what we say when we mean that whatever we’ve been doing until the moment of speaking has not been making a difference; that we’ve been contributing negatively to the human condition? Is this what all the job adverts mean if they don’t involve ’making a difference..’, if they don’t promise that you can ‘make a difference..’ by working with us, our clients / customers??
I got about 75, 000,000 Google hits for the expression, with involvements in every domain of human life and specialties like the Make a Difference movie. I just can’t help thinking about all the lives which, presumably, are not making a difference. They’re just getting on with living in various forms, which makes humanity continue. I guess they are not making progress or making things better or something. Being one who has always struggled to find what difference was worth making, I find it hard to join this parade. And I can’t also help thinking of the gratuitous exclusion from virtue of those who have no access to such opportunities!!
In fact, I’m inclined to sneer a bit about making a difference. This inclination is strengthened when I remember that ‘Make a difference..’ reminds me of its cousin ‘Give back…’ (146 million hits, amongst which some organisations I support like Environment Victoria with Gifts that Give Back). From its viewpoint I’ve been robbing you quietly all these years. Am I now going to make amends for damages which you never noticed I was doing, either directly or indirectly, by being associated with destructive products, process and payments???
Does the return of unprincipled and unearned bonuses constitute an example of giving back? How would we know when a claimed example of giving back actually amounted to enough of whatever it is that was withheld or stolen in the first place to recompense the victims? For example, Bill Gates is lionised for giving back immensely – his whole fortune, more or less – by doing which he gets to play god with the lives of masses he chooses to help on topics he decides are most important. And have the consumers gotten back the outsized results of his de facto monopoly?
Similarly, but from the product side of the make a difference equation, there are products which make or sustain their appeals to buyers on the back of making differences of highly ambiguous sorts. The alcohols which support sports events / organisations come to mind. I suspect there’s a pile of cultural studies books on variations of this theme among certain clothing manufacturers and styles, cars, and on and on. Probably someone’s done the work. Let me know if you know who and where.
These may be also more or less making a difference by giving back?? Two-faced contributors to NGO’s now come to mind. ,,, and how about the energy companies spruiking new energy orientations while sustaining old energy profits (an unavoidable conflict of interest for an existing industry seeking to respond to market or other changes??).
I think all this (my anger / irritation) has to do with the stripping of the moral fibre of late capitalism to its thinnest. What’s left are pretensions to it – a moral fibre – which keep us aware of our awareness that there’s little left to aspire to in our world but things. Other reminders include CSR, the new one – ESG (environmental, social and governance) issues, pleas for greedless leading, disparaging of excesses and denials that there’s any role for anyone in anyone else’s use of their choices as long as they do no harm to others (harm calculated as something like shooting rather than spiritual dismemberment). I rave on without making a difference.…
Thanks to Brassie and Hamid’s complaints about my lack of channels for anger a few weeks back, I’m going to provide some channels for making a difference here. What you can do to make a difference wherever you are now is:
1- Do your job right and well – whatever you have to do to live
2- Do the right job well – something you care about and make a living
3- See to it your organisation does its job well and right
4- Discourage yourself and others from consuming the results of wrong and badly done jobs – scams, frauds, discretionary misrepresentations ( the most widely spread chicanery in human worlds) in ‘normal’ commercial endeavours – that is, omission of important consumer information which is not required by law. Complain where you find these hidden, preferably by naming and shaming.
5- Encourage others to join the difference you are making.
That’s for starters. You may notice that this is merely a recommendation to bring basic virtues back into the everyday.
Monday, April 13, 2009
Who’s to blame?
Who’s to blame?
The role of blame and victimhood in responsibility and accountability assessment by the Black Saturday Royal Commission
Torrey Orton April 13, 2009
Here I want to look at one facet of the Fire Commission which should become a lens through which the review is conducted and received by its publics. This is blame. The use of blame (hand in glove with guilt and shame) is essential to effective accountability and responsibility. It reminds us there are others depending on us, and we on others. Like most things human, blame can be politicised. It already is in the direct and indirect processes of the Commission; parties and interests are at work stigmatising their notional competitors or contestants for various outcomes, or building on existing stigmata in our local discourse – greenies, foresters, etc. The Commission also stands between the Government of the day and its citizens.
Unfortunately, this normal process of interest group struggle distributes resources to social projects, but seldom the truths needed for more resilient responses to the unpredictable. In our very uncertain times, truths are the more needed and the less likely. Maybe a new approach to blame would be useful in sustaining truths.
“We are responsible, in the end, for what is done in our name.” – Viggo Mortenson (THEAGE A2 040409; pg. 18-19). The cries for exemplary blood around the economic miniverse (CEO remuneration rage, AIG et al. bonus envy, Wagoner’s head at GM, Sir Fred’s departure dough at RBS… ) express popular blame of these elites and their support teams for their greed and grandiosity without restraint or regret. These are the cries of the victims of their excesses. Others have long pointed out that some of the victims contributed to their own losses in various ways – mostly through avoidable ignorance. This is most reasonable when the victims are also the greedy with flavours of the grandiose like Bernard Madoff’s “clients”. It is a less reasonable accusation to make of the subprime mortgagees reaching for the American dream which their commercial leaders told them was their right (to dream, that is) and the subprime offer a viable commitment to make.
What powers blame, and the sense of being a victim, is when people feel they have been intentionally harmed by others. Spontaneous acts of natural destruction – tornadoes, floods, volcanoes, droughts – attract great sorrow, depression and despair. But not enduring anger. Anger doesn’t do much to nature because it is largely beyond our powers. What does generate anger is when agreed defences against the possibility or effects of such events fail to protect. Katrina comes to mind. Our Black Saturday fires are another such event. Apparent failures of these defences are the objects of blame attacks.
But, these defences include actions by the eventual victims*. They took a chance in the face of a probable but unpredictable risk – a 1 in a 100 bushfire – to live in a fire prone place, deciding to comply or not with local clearing regulations, etc. These are blameable as much as excesses or shortages of various public provisions for fire safety in fire prone places. The claim that they had and have a right to live where they like amplifies the right to being blamed along with the public safety providers. Children and invalids are excused from this status.
So let’s start with the assumption that everyone involved in the fires is to blame in some degrees and dimensions as appropriate to their roles, situations and capabilities. This would then lead to a Commission focused on who holds what responsibility for what over the course of the fires. The time frame for responsibility extends backwards to include the precursor or preparation periods. From this might come recommendations which relate more appropriately to future responsibilities and their supporting accountabilities. The gray regions between individuals / families and local governments, and those between local governments and state or national ones will be the major focus of blame strategy and dispute.
The accountabilities are another thing. But with responsibilities more thoroughly established (or at least explored), some more balanced appreciations might extend to the main accountable organisations. For example, they might accept less of the responsibility and direct more attention to helping those actually responsible to fulfil them. Most important among these may be individual land and business owners / occupiers, and local government entities. It is they who can most immediately respond to changing conditions (long term drought, land clearing, increased housing intensity…). What higher level entities and agencies could contribute to building such capabilities will be useful to identify.
* NB - the status of ‘victim’ is confused in our times. We have people who knowingly swim into the jaws of death in the Daly River, NT (April 10, 2009) to be retrieved in segments days later; we have a conventional litigiousness which makes every accident an opportunity for a no win/ no fee legal firm (where market growth comes from extending the range of items deemed rewardable – that is blameable on some public entity); we have parents so anxious about the safety and self-esteem of their children that no challenge not previously vetted for insipidity should cross their tiny paths; we have councils which post inane notices like “limbs may fall” (or rocks) along country roads (undoubtedly in fear of those voracious defenders of personal loss, the litigation mavens of Australian legaldom now reaching for the pecuniary heights of their pathetic American counterparts. Look where that got those folks! I’m waiting for Albrechtson to write about the well-in-train depradations of legal cupidity which works to turn every relationship in the country into items for dispute – note: they don’t make the big money from mediation!).
Declaration of interest: I’m a bi-national of American origin who’s been pleased to be here rather than there for 35+ years partly because some that culture’s least attractive features have long been visible to my eyes.
The role of blame and victimhood in responsibility and accountability assessment by the Black Saturday Royal Commission
Torrey Orton April 13, 2009
Here I want to look at one facet of the Fire Commission which should become a lens through which the review is conducted and received by its publics. This is blame. The use of blame (hand in glove with guilt and shame) is essential to effective accountability and responsibility. It reminds us there are others depending on us, and we on others. Like most things human, blame can be politicised. It already is in the direct and indirect processes of the Commission; parties and interests are at work stigmatising their notional competitors or contestants for various outcomes, or building on existing stigmata in our local discourse – greenies, foresters, etc. The Commission also stands between the Government of the day and its citizens.
Unfortunately, this normal process of interest group struggle distributes resources to social projects, but seldom the truths needed for more resilient responses to the unpredictable. In our very uncertain times, truths are the more needed and the less likely. Maybe a new approach to blame would be useful in sustaining truths.
“We are responsible, in the end, for what is done in our name.” – Viggo Mortenson (THEAGE A2 040409; pg. 18-19). The cries for exemplary blood around the economic miniverse (CEO remuneration rage, AIG et al. bonus envy, Wagoner’s head at GM, Sir Fred’s departure dough at RBS… ) express popular blame of these elites and their support teams for their greed and grandiosity without restraint or regret. These are the cries of the victims of their excesses. Others have long pointed out that some of the victims contributed to their own losses in various ways – mostly through avoidable ignorance. This is most reasonable when the victims are also the greedy with flavours of the grandiose like Bernard Madoff’s “clients”. It is a less reasonable accusation to make of the subprime mortgagees reaching for the American dream which their commercial leaders told them was their right (to dream, that is) and the subprime offer a viable commitment to make.
What powers blame, and the sense of being a victim, is when people feel they have been intentionally harmed by others. Spontaneous acts of natural destruction – tornadoes, floods, volcanoes, droughts – attract great sorrow, depression and despair. But not enduring anger. Anger doesn’t do much to nature because it is largely beyond our powers. What does generate anger is when agreed defences against the possibility or effects of such events fail to protect. Katrina comes to mind. Our Black Saturday fires are another such event. Apparent failures of these defences are the objects of blame attacks.
But, these defences include actions by the eventual victims*. They took a chance in the face of a probable but unpredictable risk – a 1 in a 100 bushfire – to live in a fire prone place, deciding to comply or not with local clearing regulations, etc. These are blameable as much as excesses or shortages of various public provisions for fire safety in fire prone places. The claim that they had and have a right to live where they like amplifies the right to being blamed along with the public safety providers. Children and invalids are excused from this status.
So let’s start with the assumption that everyone involved in the fires is to blame in some degrees and dimensions as appropriate to their roles, situations and capabilities. This would then lead to a Commission focused on who holds what responsibility for what over the course of the fires. The time frame for responsibility extends backwards to include the precursor or preparation periods. From this might come recommendations which relate more appropriately to future responsibilities and their supporting accountabilities. The gray regions between individuals / families and local governments, and those between local governments and state or national ones will be the major focus of blame strategy and dispute.
The accountabilities are another thing. But with responsibilities more thoroughly established (or at least explored), some more balanced appreciations might extend to the main accountable organisations. For example, they might accept less of the responsibility and direct more attention to helping those actually responsible to fulfil them. Most important among these may be individual land and business owners / occupiers, and local government entities. It is they who can most immediately respond to changing conditions (long term drought, land clearing, increased housing intensity…). What higher level entities and agencies could contribute to building such capabilities will be useful to identify.
* NB - the status of ‘victim’ is confused in our times. We have people who knowingly swim into the jaws of death in the Daly River, NT (April 10, 2009) to be retrieved in segments days later; we have a conventional litigiousness which makes every accident an opportunity for a no win/ no fee legal firm (where market growth comes from extending the range of items deemed rewardable – that is blameable on some public entity); we have parents so anxious about the safety and self-esteem of their children that no challenge not previously vetted for insipidity should cross their tiny paths; we have councils which post inane notices like “limbs may fall” (or rocks) along country roads (undoubtedly in fear of those voracious defenders of personal loss, the litigation mavens of Australian legaldom now reaching for the pecuniary heights of their pathetic American counterparts. Look where that got those folks! I’m waiting for Albrechtson to write about the well-in-train depradations of legal cupidity which works to turn every relationship in the country into items for dispute – note: they don’t make the big money from mediation!).
Declaration of interest: I’m a bi-national of American origin who’s been pleased to be here rather than there for 35+ years partly because some that culture’s least attractive features have long been visible to my eyes.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Rectifications (6) – ‘Don’t take this personally, but…’
Rectifications (6) – ‘Don’t take this personally, but…’
Torrey Orton
April 8, 2009
Following the suggestion of Confucius, I continue some rectification of names for our times. Elsewhere I offer some ‘solutions’ to some problems of linguistic degradation. Relevant observations appear towards the end of my most recent Dances with Difference (4) post.
‘Don’t take this personally, but…’ is what we say when we mean the opposite. Anyway, how could I not take personally anything except if it really had nothing to do with me nor with any world that I recognize, embrace, inhabit?? Of course, I might be preoccupied with something which took my whole attention. But even then I could recognise something as affecting me which I postponed to a moment of internal space. ‘Don’t take this personally, but…’ is often avoiding perceived violences. It is a member of the ‘easing in’ family of expressions for giving no offence when an offence is required, felt or expected to be perceived by another.
It’s mirror image is ‘I won’t apologize for..’ - an apology for something we do not apologize for. Typically this is from a politician (no colour, shape or size seems to matter) when such is clearly what is called for ... except if there is someone you can get away with not apologising to, in which case the explicit denial of just treatment is unattributably in their face. These are usually stigmatised groups or individuals.
A common experience in therapy is the rather quiet, introverted client who says their noisy extraverted partner doesn’t listen to them. It turns out that they are often unheard because their own voice is small and their needs veiled. Between cultures similar things happen. Noisy, informal explicit cultures don’t hear quiet, formal, implicit ones, and vice-versa. The personal and inter-cultural development task is the same: to become more varied in assertion styles. For some this will feel like doing violence to the other, or being violated by the other. A nice case of the latter appears in my latest Dances with Difference (4) post above.
The workplace version of this is performance management problems. I have often dealt with either a boss or a report who says something to the effect: ‘He/she just doesn’t do it right.’ And there follows a litany of perceived avoidances, derelections and disrespects, with months of history piled onto them. Almost irremediably split. These are often reparable by one of two moves (depending in position) – (1) give clear statements of expectations, checking that they are understood and within the person’s capacities and perceived responsibilities; or, (2) confirm clarity of directions and limits of personal capability to perform, especially where cooperation from other organisational units is required to do the tasks successfully. The desire to avoid being personal blocks these simple moves.
The three examples – therapeutic, intercultural and workplace - share the feature of a shock likely being necessary to create or sustain a clear understanding of something previously veiled or invisible. We know that our work and relationship habits are resistant to change, and selectively interpret the world to sustain their utility for us. When the world has changed so that our habits are no longer adequately functional, a shock may be necessary to loosen them. That’s personal.
So ‘don’t take this personally’ is an invitation to a separation or a snooze in the conversational gap between personally interesting stuff. However, I can think of one situation where I might say this: when I’m about to tell a story or share a fact which I believe could be interpreted as a veiled ‘take this personally’ and it is really important to the relationship at that moment that such does not occur. Good judgment on such fine points saves recurrent recriminations be preventing unnecessary shocks. Since we inhabit shocking times, care about creating gratuitous shocks is highly desirable.
Torrey Orton
April 8, 2009
Following the suggestion of Confucius, I continue some rectification of names for our times. Elsewhere I offer some ‘solutions’ to some problems of linguistic degradation. Relevant observations appear towards the end of my most recent Dances with Difference (4) post.
‘Don’t take this personally, but…’ is what we say when we mean the opposite. Anyway, how could I not take personally anything except if it really had nothing to do with me nor with any world that I recognize, embrace, inhabit?? Of course, I might be preoccupied with something which took my whole attention. But even then I could recognise something as affecting me which I postponed to a moment of internal space. ‘Don’t take this personally, but…’ is often avoiding perceived violences. It is a member of the ‘easing in’ family of expressions for giving no offence when an offence is required, felt or expected to be perceived by another.
It’s mirror image is ‘I won’t apologize for..’ - an apology for something we do not apologize for. Typically this is from a politician (no colour, shape or size seems to matter) when such is clearly what is called for ... except if there is someone you can get away with not apologising to, in which case the explicit denial of just treatment is unattributably in their face. These are usually stigmatised groups or individuals.
A common experience in therapy is the rather quiet, introverted client who says their noisy extraverted partner doesn’t listen to them. It turns out that they are often unheard because their own voice is small and their needs veiled. Between cultures similar things happen. Noisy, informal explicit cultures don’t hear quiet, formal, implicit ones, and vice-versa. The personal and inter-cultural development task is the same: to become more varied in assertion styles. For some this will feel like doing violence to the other, or being violated by the other. A nice case of the latter appears in my latest Dances with Difference (4) post above.
The workplace version of this is performance management problems. I have often dealt with either a boss or a report who says something to the effect: ‘He/she just doesn’t do it right.’ And there follows a litany of perceived avoidances, derelections and disrespects, with months of history piled onto them. Almost irremediably split. These are often reparable by one of two moves (depending in position) – (1) give clear statements of expectations, checking that they are understood and within the person’s capacities and perceived responsibilities; or, (2) confirm clarity of directions and limits of personal capability to perform, especially where cooperation from other organisational units is required to do the tasks successfully. The desire to avoid being personal blocks these simple moves.
The three examples – therapeutic, intercultural and workplace - share the feature of a shock likely being necessary to create or sustain a clear understanding of something previously veiled or invisible. We know that our work and relationship habits are resistant to change, and selectively interpret the world to sustain their utility for us. When the world has changed so that our habits are no longer adequately functional, a shock may be necessary to loosen them. That’s personal.
So ‘don’t take this personally’ is an invitation to a separation or a snooze in the conversational gap between personally interesting stuff. However, I can think of one situation where I might say this: when I’m about to tell a story or share a fact which I believe could be interpreted as a veiled ‘take this personally’ and it is really important to the relationship at that moment that such does not occur. Good judgment on such fine points saves recurrent recriminations be preventing unnecessary shocks. Since we inhabit shocking times, care about creating gratuitous shocks is highly desirable.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Popular anger denied makes way for populists
Torrey Orton
April 1, 2009
So here I am teetering on a fence, pulled unpredictably but certainly by the interdependent forces of rage and terror. The opportunity in the challenge of these times is to stretch my understanding, and maybe that of others, particularly in the ‘elites’ of socio-political practice, of how public anger works.
It’s not populist anger, it’s popular!!
One thing the anger is not is “populist’. It is popular in both original senses of the term. It arises from popular experience and it has achieved a certain popularity. The two together give it a new power. The popularity authorises, to an extent the experience of its popular roots. The apparent linguistic mistake in the US and UK of tagging bonus anger and remuneration rage as “populist” is interesting. There may be populist uses of broadly shared outrage sustained by recurrent anger roots. To call it “populist anger” from the start pre-empts possible outcomes by demeaning their shared sources – demeaning the popular experience of the world.
For example, let’s say I’m angry about the increasingly unfair results of our economy. This has been developing for decades, only now being demonstrable with some clarity (though, like climate, still disputed from certain established positions). On top of this falls the GFC emerging from the background of various other collapsing systems – food, fuels, climates, etc. – which enhances the emotional terrain of my existing anger. Creaming the cake of my multi-dimensional distresses is the news that those who created the increasing unfairness – the sometime Masters of the Universe celebrated by Tom Wolfe‘s Bonfire of the Vanities – see their remuneration for their collective failure as the first take from the bailouts which they have been forced to accept because they are too big to fail!! What?! This course of anger development is not the only pathway, I’m sure. Just mine.
However, many commentators I respect around the anglosphere take the path of populisting the popular anger. I see their ‘tell’, their pre-emption, confirmed when they argue that the object, the coalescing event, of the anger is a small number (minimal percentage of X zillions of bucks poured into the very organisations which are the source of the outrage) and therefore unworthy of strategic attention in the battle of / for the banks, and more recently the autocrats. It’s certainly possible, and fairly likely, that the anger will blow over as some have suggested recently. Disregard makes investment in emotions unrewarding to their owners, but it doesn’t reduce their energising sources. Often it intensifies them, or the owners’ perception of them, which does just as well for outrage production.
How anger works – the immediate and the referred / displaced anger (of rages and the like!!)
This popular anger is the visible, repeatedly reinvigorated, anger of public discourse driven by rage, which coalesces around particular acts (CEO pay, Madoffs, etc.). To the extent it takes violent forms – actual or virtual – it is bretheren to the small ’r’ rages which populate our daily lives as pungent but obscure and untraceable (in their origins) outbreaks of displaced feelings by individuals. Popular anger is a group phenomenon expressed in group events - demos, mass email attacks, etc. – and individual acts.
A small example of dis-placed anger: in our house we intensely dislike phone solicitations for charity or sales, with slightly less animus for the charity than the sale, and greatly more for those who just want to ask a few question as a cover for a sale by marketing slime!! I’ve placed us on the national not-to-be-called register and things keep coming, especially around dinner time. One of these happened yesterday from a charity. I called back today to ask them to take us off the call list (we give regularly by mail). I was rougher in tone and barely withheld anger than she deserved, except that they are the latest in a running series of these things which seem unstoppable. I did not know when I picked up the phone to call that I was actively angry. I was and she got a bit of it (I do the same to males – gender free aggressiveness).
You may have your own version. They are how rages sneak up and burst out. This one was cheap for all. For anger to characterise a group, a coalescent public event must be strong enough to attract some of the free floating anger otherwise expressed in little rages. A ‘strong enough’ public event must be a gross violation of collective sensibilities – moral, political, spiritual, or their surrogates. We are back to the likes of Madoff who was put away, Wagoner (GM) who got sent away, and Sir Fred Goodwin (RBS) who renounced his takeaway some weeks too late (April Fools to you…). Otherwise, there are acts of nature which we confuse with human agency – Katrina in New Orleans, wildfires in the hills around Melbourne – evidenced by the search for the blameworthy for unpredictable events, while disregarding the performance of the forces of saving those who remain! The appreciation they deserve.
Can we “channel” our anger, as Obama proposes ?
In principle and fact, yes….but, channeling requires the existence of viable channels, both within us and about us, pathways for practices whose meaning and functionality are understood by those concerned. In matters of public channelling, the pathways are seriously in doubt these days. Existing political means are debased and disregarded by such numbers as to be barely technically legitimate. Fulfilment of policy implementations is too often compromised by various alphabetical failures: PPP’s, ICT’s, MBA’s. This of course doesn’t prevent the exploiters of those pathways pretending, by disregarding, that they are legitimately where they are – Senator Fielding comes to mind as the grossest violation in Australia.
The fear generated by the possibility that basic systems are dysfunctional is so intense that almost no one will entertain it. The most convincing evidence that these channels are in doubt are the various new violences which assail us daily, but then the stats on such are not good, any more than they are on normal crime or a range of the other marginalia of modernity. Too hard to look for; too painful to see. On the 17th of January this year I saw two separate references to shooting bankers in the CIF section of The Guardian. (UK) And Sir Fred gave his separation pile back today….to who I wonder. Who’s fool day?
Torrey Orton
April 1, 2009
So here I am teetering on a fence, pulled unpredictably but certainly by the interdependent forces of rage and terror. The opportunity in the challenge of these times is to stretch my understanding, and maybe that of others, particularly in the ‘elites’ of socio-political practice, of how public anger works.
It’s not populist anger, it’s popular!!
One thing the anger is not is “populist’. It is popular in both original senses of the term. It arises from popular experience and it has achieved a certain popularity. The two together give it a new power. The popularity authorises, to an extent the experience of its popular roots. The apparent linguistic mistake in the US and UK of tagging bonus anger and remuneration rage as “populist” is interesting. There may be populist uses of broadly shared outrage sustained by recurrent anger roots. To call it “populist anger” from the start pre-empts possible outcomes by demeaning their shared sources – demeaning the popular experience of the world.
For example, let’s say I’m angry about the increasingly unfair results of our economy. This has been developing for decades, only now being demonstrable with some clarity (though, like climate, still disputed from certain established positions). On top of this falls the GFC emerging from the background of various other collapsing systems – food, fuels, climates, etc. – which enhances the emotional terrain of my existing anger. Creaming the cake of my multi-dimensional distresses is the news that those who created the increasing unfairness – the sometime Masters of the Universe celebrated by Tom Wolfe‘s Bonfire of the Vanities – see their remuneration for their collective failure as the first take from the bailouts which they have been forced to accept because they are too big to fail!! What?! This course of anger development is not the only pathway, I’m sure. Just mine.
However, many commentators I respect around the anglosphere take the path of populisting the popular anger. I see their ‘tell’, their pre-emption, confirmed when they argue that the object, the coalescing event, of the anger is a small number (minimal percentage of X zillions of bucks poured into the very organisations which are the source of the outrage) and therefore unworthy of strategic attention in the battle of / for the banks, and more recently the autocrats. It’s certainly possible, and fairly likely, that the anger will blow over as some have suggested recently. Disregard makes investment in emotions unrewarding to their owners, but it doesn’t reduce their energising sources. Often it intensifies them, or the owners’ perception of them, which does just as well for outrage production.
How anger works – the immediate and the referred / displaced anger (of rages and the like!!)
This popular anger is the visible, repeatedly reinvigorated, anger of public discourse driven by rage, which coalesces around particular acts (CEO pay, Madoffs, etc.). To the extent it takes violent forms – actual or virtual – it is bretheren to the small ’r’ rages which populate our daily lives as pungent but obscure and untraceable (in their origins) outbreaks of displaced feelings by individuals. Popular anger is a group phenomenon expressed in group events - demos, mass email attacks, etc. – and individual acts.
A small example of dis-placed anger: in our house we intensely dislike phone solicitations for charity or sales, with slightly less animus for the charity than the sale, and greatly more for those who just want to ask a few question as a cover for a sale by marketing slime!! I’ve placed us on the national not-to-be-called register and things keep coming, especially around dinner time. One of these happened yesterday from a charity. I called back today to ask them to take us off the call list (we give regularly by mail). I was rougher in tone and barely withheld anger than she deserved, except that they are the latest in a running series of these things which seem unstoppable. I did not know when I picked up the phone to call that I was actively angry. I was and she got a bit of it (I do the same to males – gender free aggressiveness).
You may have your own version. They are how rages sneak up and burst out. This one was cheap for all. For anger to characterise a group, a coalescent public event must be strong enough to attract some of the free floating anger otherwise expressed in little rages. A ‘strong enough’ public event must be a gross violation of collective sensibilities – moral, political, spiritual, or their surrogates. We are back to the likes of Madoff who was put away, Wagoner (GM) who got sent away, and Sir Fred Goodwin (RBS) who renounced his takeaway some weeks too late (April Fools to you…). Otherwise, there are acts of nature which we confuse with human agency – Katrina in New Orleans, wildfires in the hills around Melbourne – evidenced by the search for the blameworthy for unpredictable events, while disregarding the performance of the forces of saving those who remain! The appreciation they deserve.
Can we “channel” our anger, as Obama proposes ?
In principle and fact, yes….but, channeling requires the existence of viable channels, both within us and about us, pathways for practices whose meaning and functionality are understood by those concerned. In matters of public channelling, the pathways are seriously in doubt these days. Existing political means are debased and disregarded by such numbers as to be barely technically legitimate. Fulfilment of policy implementations is too often compromised by various alphabetical failures: PPP’s, ICT’s, MBA’s. This of course doesn’t prevent the exploiters of those pathways pretending, by disregarding, that they are legitimately where they are – Senator Fielding comes to mind as the grossest violation in Australia.
The fear generated by the possibility that basic systems are dysfunctional is so intense that almost no one will entertain it. The most convincing evidence that these channels are in doubt are the various new violences which assail us daily, but then the stats on such are not good, any more than they are on normal crime or a range of the other marginalia of modernity. Too hard to look for; too painful to see. On the 17th of January this year I saw two separate references to shooting bankers in the CIF section of The Guardian. (UK) And Sir Fred gave his separation pile back today….to who I wonder. Who’s fool day?
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