Learning to act right (31)… When is a counter-attack ethical

Learning to act right (31)… When is a counter-attack ethical
Torrey Orton
Jan. 9, 2012

I look forward to the views of St James Ethics Centre on the ethics of our proposed action described below. At least, some generic guidelines for our thinking so far would be useful. I will be approaching Ethi-Call, the Centre's telephone ethics consulting service for an opinion of the following strategy when they re-open in a week. This article is still in draft at this posting.

I write on behalf of a loose assemblage called Friends of the Fertility Control Clinic (FCC), numbering around 6-8 volunteers who appear solo or in pairs at least 4 of the 6 mornings a week the clinic is open. We support patients arriving between 7:30 and 9AM who are being challenged by Helpers of God's Precious Infants (HoGPIs). The HoGPIs' view is that they are offering help to pregnant women who are, in their own views, being harassed by the HoGPIs.


Proof of the patient perception lies in two facts: almost no patients ever take up the help offer (as reported by the HoGPIs themselves) and, two, once the patients pass by the first offer they are subjected to various degrees of continuing verbal harassment (as defined technically by the Melbourne City Council by-laws, which is also harassment by our standards and, we believe, the standards of most of society). The HoGPIs have on passive display materials which can only be called provocative for patients and partners. Their view is that they make no contribution to patient distress because patients are already distressed – a simple, but self-serving ignorance of the psychology of stress (it is cumulative!).


We have been supporting patients for 18 months now. The HoGPIs in some cases have been protesting for 20 years at this site, or another. We are on a first name basis with the principal actors of the HoGPIs, though none will take responsibility for leadership on the site. The regular HoGPI participants number about 10, with daily numbers varying from 4 to12. The most persistently aggressive of their number are women. Patients do not know they are usually being covertly filmed by one HoGPI and their daily numbers recorded manually, all assumed to be seeking abortions. The HoGPIs do not know which patients are coming for abortions and which for other fertility control help.


Apart from our presence, which patients spontaneously thank us for, we support by actively pointing out when HoGPIs have stepped over the technical harassment line, usually saying to the offending HoGPI, "they said 'no'". Sometimes some of us step between patients and protestors after that line has been crossed and accompany them to the clinic entrance. The pattern of events under discussion occur on a public footpath bounded on one side by the property line of the clinic and overseen by a security guard each day (one of whom was shot to death 10 years ago by a protest-associated gunman; no one in the clinic has forgotten that this is a possible end game of their professional commitment).


Our commitment to patient support is based mainly on the need to reduce patient stress. I am professionally committed to this as a psychologist and psychotherapist. Others of the Friends have their own reasons, but reducing patient stress is always the starting place for our actions. Therefore, any actions we undertake to inhibit, moderate, or deflect HoGPI impacts are judged from a patient stress reduction perspective.


Our actions are largely seen by HoGPIs to be an inhibition of their freedom of expression. They seek legal redress for our perceived indiscretions, e.g. being supposedly "provocative" by pointing out the connection between their anti-abortion line and the Church's clear anti-contraception and anti-gay positions, plus its present difficulties with systemic paedophilia. We are prompted to remind them about the latter difficulty when a regularly appearing priest adds his contribution to the patient experience as he surveys the clinic entrance from 6 feet away: "protect your child." They call the police when offended. This results in no reportable offenses being found.


We have made efforts to assist the HoGPIs to increase the effectiveness of their first offer to patients so that there would be greater uptake potential and less added stress for patients. These efforts have been documented, discussed and refused consistently. Two of their number attempt to discourage the more flagrant misbehaviours of their colleagues.


The HoGPIs are absolutely certain about when life starts and finishes. From that position they judge others' positions as right or wrong. The source, and authority, of their position is the Catholic Church's published positions on said issues, available for all to see on their website. From their point of view, no one has the right to any other position. Hence they label as "murderers", including by implication patients, those differing with them at the FCC. They do not extend to non-believers the democratic consideration we extend to them as our starting point in opposing them – that they have a right to say what they want. We do not oppose their offering help, but we are "going to hell" for opposing their excesses.


Liberal democracies judge that everyone has a right to their claims, but not to ones which endanger the dominance of liberal democratic values – i.e. freedom of thought and its assistant, speech. At the gates of the FCC these two values clash quietly for the four groups of participants: patients and families, Friends of the FCC, security guards and HoGPIs. And so, we have the central challenge for Friends and HoGPIs – the challenge of enforcement of regulations which establish and manage the borders of free speech and offence. No one in enforcement wants to be involved with this highly irregular terrain. The last place the police and council officers want to hear from is the FCC footpath.



We know that the HoGPIs will vigorously defend their perception that they are not harassing the patients, just trying to help them…to the point of claiming, as one did recently when she was haranguing a couple who had turned away from the offer of help, that she was just "speaking to herself" in mouthing the standard accusative mantras at users of the clinic's services.


Now it's time for a new step. Remember the context, in brief, is this: 6 days a week the already emotionally charged patients of the fertility control clinic are confronted by anti-abortion protestors whose behaviour clearly offends them to the point of tears in many cases and outbursts of rage in a few. These patients are entirely within their legal and moral rights to use the services of the clinic.


This will be a more confronting step, at least from our viewpoint. Confronting for us is the fact that we have to become much more systematically attentive to HoGPI misbehaviour in order to push the Melbourne City Council / police authorities to enforce their own rules of public behaviour – notably the rules against public harassment.


So we are committing to a persistent data gathering campaign by live video to clearly document HoGPI transgressions against the law of harassment, and three other recurrent invasions of patient privacy. These three are:

(1) 'gang tackling' approaching patients in pairs or trios with the effect of partially blocking their normal progress along the footpath;

(2) chasing patients from many meters down the footpath, sometimes as far as 100 meters from the clinic so that their approach to the clinic is punctuated by the continuing presence of protestor(s); and,

(3) corralling patients in their cars on arrival so they cannot easily get out.

Harassment data is the most difficult to collect because it requires close video with audio which is highly likely to be more confronting for patients than HoGPIs.


This project, once agreed by all stakeholders on the FCC side, will be clearly advertised to the HoGPIs, as have been all our other initiatives. That is, we are trying to work with democratic values of openness and transparency in a context where they are not shared by the 'opposition' in the name of their right to free expression.


Torrey Orton
AHPRA Reg. No. PSY0001120138
11 Wertheim St
Richmond, Vic., 3121
Australia
Mob. +61 (0) 419 362 349
Skype - torreyo

Anger channelling – effective or expressive

Anger channelling – effective or expressive

Torrey Orton

October 30, 2009

Months ago Hamid and Charles wondered what effective anger channelling would look like. They were picking up a line in my post on popular anger. The six months since then has seen an increase in popular public angers, notably to the level of scaring people like Thomas Friedman a few days ago – a guy who has seen a few things while wandering across flatter and hillier parts of the planet.

In the intervening months little has emerged to increase my awareness of channels I would likely choose for my angers, though I find myself continually looking at Comment and Letters pages for examples and models. Someone else's initiative I could join would be nice. Finding Don Watson interviewed recently and visiting the website spawned by his earlier writing (www.weaselwords.com.au) gave no solace to my shared anger at the linguistic (evidence of the) corrosion of basic social functions. Maybe we don't do popular anger and I'm unAustralian in my aspirations for more of it.

Sources – public and private
My most constant acquaintance with unresolved anger, aside from my own, is in therapy. With great regularity my patient clients with anxiety/depression related difficulties have substantive early abuses in their personal histories, often multi-generationally. This pattern has most recently been re-aired in the backwash of the arrest of Roman Polanski a while ago. Lurking in the interior of the veiled awareness of their abused childhoods, often extending well into early adulthood, are family systemic and peer group systemic threats to self. Coping with them at the time they are occurring involves a fine dance of conscious self-protection from these dangers and avoiding offense to their powerful authors. Especially critical is not allowing anger to surface, since that may be seen as a threat inviting even more vigorous abuse.

One can find this, too, in abused populations who are victims of racial, ethnic or other stereotypically driven abuses. Whole countries like Greece, China and Korea still show effects of longterm foreign domination. Individuals and groups learn to repress and deny their anger at felt injustice(s). The aversion to confrontation is so great people literally cannot speak their hurt directly. Equally, once freed of their oppression(s), the injured groups often cannot stop talking about the past that is so much with them. Their talk, organised as a group action, is one way to channel anger. The objective is to shame the oppressors, and maybe gain retribution or recompense. The enduring effort of surviving "comfort women" to win Japanese acknowledgement of their victimisation is a well known example. Reconciliations are another objective, seldom (?) successful, even if the once victimised are now the powerful as in South Africa. On the other hand, face-the-victim processes for personal injury criminals have some positive results, particularly if the criminal is early in their possible career.

Mixed feelings, often conflicted (an anger source itself)

One of the discoveries which open the door to moral complexity is that of conflicted feelings about acts of perceived goodness or badness. Even minor ones often suffice to elicit an emotional array about people well-known to us that leaves confusion in its wake. Where the origin of abusive treatment is within family, it is usually undiscussible. Failure to abide by the rule is punished by indirect or direct threat of emotional exile.

We could say that the existence of real moral simplification (black and white thinking) is among the leading indicators of social cohesion within groups. How better to identify a robust group than by its resistance to acknowledging, or, better, pursuing the ethical shortcomings of its members?

The latter is, however, an accepted indicator of under-development of personal ethics. Its organisational version is on show daily: the Catholic Church's repeatedly reported knee-jerk denial / obscuring of sexual predation; NFP organisations' abandoned children hostel's multidimensional predations; corporate boards unable to restrain greed in management or even apply preset performance indicators to executive remuneration; footy players distressing women or each other ….

In therapy, the mixed feelings of traumatised children are expressed in adult squeamishness about tagging their parents with any accountability for the agreed traumas. Often initially the traumas cannot be recalled, being locked in memory out of direct access. Sorting them out is essential to righting the wrongs (setting responsibility where it belongs: with those in power at the time). Once sorted, the anger can be addressed to managing the present state of the abusive relationships. This is not sortable by changing the way we think about abuses – i.e. changing the way we value them by portioning the experienced violences into non-catastrophic mind-bites. It requires action - actual or virtual – to hold the continuing forces of abuse at bay even in their weakened forms of the family social system: aged parents, the variously affected and denying siblings, etc.

Different angers – levels
Anger can loosely be thought of as having two experiential sources: (1) undesired violations by others and (2) frustration of our appropriate aspirations through our own or others incompetence to support them. Some helping fraternity folks divide angry feelings from angry behaviours. This, and its sibling – the division of thought from feeling in CBT – are on the verge of relegation to a subservient role therapeutically as the indivisibility of thought, feeling and action are demonstrated by multi-modal research in these areas. Recent work on thought/feeling integration makes this distinction functionally meaningless, since there is no thought which does not have a feeling component, nor a feeling which does not have a behavioural component. This is the practical meaning of 'non-verbal' and 'habitual'.

Channels – pathways and platforms for action

There are a number of action channels, spread over two basic levels: actual (real, authentic) and virtual (technically mediated). These two flow into each other of course when the interaction becomes live (therefore real and authentic) while still being technically mediated (phone, etc.) Means of expressing anger (and most other feelings) are many and employable at either level. Here's a start at the micro level: two people. (Plug in your own two party scenario at this point.)

For example, I want to deal with a difficult issue with a person who matters to me. The issue is so volatile, and we have handled it so badly in the past, that there is justifiable anger arising from objective disrespects on both sides. How I start to re-engage will make all the difference to the possibility of a different result from the repeat failures we have achieved so far. The start has to flag that something new is intended without getting into the substance of things too early. A new shared ground has to be prepared.

This will partly be old ground recovered from joint history, and partly new ground created for this event. The old might include shared history, experience and values; the new, opportunities for growth or development that did not exist before now and the mutual interdependence(s) which can bring them to life. It ensures actual continuity and engages the shared history as a context for future activity.

I might send these thoughts in an email, written in a spare, agenda-offering style - for discussion, a precursor to a talk. If I wondered about his accessibility to email – some folks don't turn it on every day or more than once a day – an SMS noting that it is on the way would be appropriate. It's all virtual to this point. The rest unfolds in conversational steps like those mentioned here where a delicate entrance to a potentially indelicate subject is sketched out as a face-to-face event.

Join 'em
More recently, in trying to find a way to channel my anger more concretely I sought out an appropriate NGO as the prospective beneficiary of ½ day per week of my time pro bono. I overcame previous doubts about my ability to stick with anything too narrowly focussed by choosing one in the environmental domain. I realised (again) that such groups have to take a whole of system and systems viewpoint on their efforts – therefore allowing my broader unresolved interests some room to play, too. So, it looks like I've found something to join. I expect it will become a source of new bloggables.

Requisite violence – an ethic of personal and organisational change

Requisite violence – an ethic of personal and organisational change

Torrey Orton

August 19, 2009

Following on from Violence and violations – making sense of extremes, I'm going to grasp the violence nettle from another direction, which assumes it is not a plant we should (or could) completely uproot. That we can never do so, as well, is an assumption of the next steps. The complexity of talking outside a good/bad frame about violence is briefly but sharply explored in a recent discussion of terrorism in The Guardian. I commend it to you.

Pain we have to have?

The "Pain we have to have" is extolled in The Australian recently as the price of health care reform. This is emblematic of an array of pains we have to bear to live. For example, there is

the pain of training to a high level of physical or mental competence (10,000 hours of strenuous application for mastery in advanced disciplines). This is a key pain for development and competence. Not everyone wants to go to the Olympics (a modal 10K hours aspiration), but everyone needs to be competent at quite a range of things and we aren't born with most of those competences, just the potential to acquire them.

These are the self-imposed pains of stumbling along life's way, which can only be avoided at the cost of another pain: the senses of sadness, incompetence, hopelessness which come from not developing oneself! It is Catch 22's original symptom. Alongside these pains are the experiences of being not good enough for a certain performance hurdle. Amass enough of these and a recurrent pain of expecting to be 'not-good-enough' grows to make work for people like me.

Then there are the pains of helping people to learn or recover from injury – teachers, psychotherapists and coaches all know that important developmental stages are seldom reached without uncomfortable, sometimes shocking, inputs from helpers to learners.

In such cases there is often some pain for the helper in knowing they will give pain to another. Those who experience the other's pain too much become limited helpers. Medical staff similarly must often inflict pain to achieve health, starting with children's first needles (I remember one of mine on a kitchen table in Washington DC in 1946, approximately).

Few of these steps are painful all the way (though some accident recoveries are almost totally pain for months), but few can be successfully travelled without some pain. The same point can be made for groups and organisations and societies… our own seem on the verge of some great new pains now. In this case, as for individuals, avoidance is the harbour of failure.

Good pain, bad pain

We do not usually think of these pains as violences, nor the perpetrators as violaters, as criminals and abusers. Yet they are experientially the same. The pained feel injured and retain the memory with the special clarity which dangers give. The defining difference is not the pain but the intent. These pains above are all good for us in some sense. From this point there grow arguments for just wars, justice in a daily sense (the restraint of others who are damaging us, or likely to do so if given a chance) and so on. Where good pain is involved the pain remains but the burden of assault is retired. Of course, just which is which is often unclear since the 'value' of a pain is proportional to various contextual factors. Those who struggle on our behalf to manage failed families – the child protection workers – deserve special medals just for trying to decide in the child's interest.

My point is this: some violence is necessary in life, and when we hide those violences from others (often in the name of not disturbing them, or not being 'negative', or not discomforting them, or protecting ourselves from their fear, anger, sadness….) we are often doing a wrong by them. In some cases I believe this should be treated as culpable and punishable for ethical and moral breaches of a high order. Those cases are ones where some preparation could have substantively ameliorated the large numbers of people and the size of the negative effect(s) which resulted. Corporate downsizings and failures, mergers and acquisitions and some public disasters are among these. Here in Melbourne we are seeing one such process play out in trying to make sense of the February bushfires.

Doing the right thing

Providing information about possible dangers (usually the most important form of assistance) to people who otherwise could not access it until a probable sky has fallen is what I call requisite violence. It is a core competence for organisational risk management, change management and project management. It is also, in these times of multiple local and global threats to core well-being, a core life management competence, perhaps.

This responsibility (obligation would be a better word) ranges across the full spectrum of management / governance roles in life. These are functions which have privileged access to information affecting the viability of organisations and their members.

But, private business structures protect executives from accountability for withheld information which seriously compromises workers. The published Australian history on these matters is persistent and recurrent. On a monthly basis, large organisations go under with workers losing entitlements and opportunities to prepare themselves for the demise of their work. It would be nice if their wellpaid bosses were more publically accountable - outed perhaps – for their contribution to a worker's fate they will not experience themselves. Out of such ground grow rages against the machine. How many failed executives reappear rebranded in a related industry under the mantle of board positions?

Yet the first argument against my position will descend from the heights of private property theory amplified by commercial-in-confidence practices. It will be said that competitive positions would be compromised by transparency of the sort I am recommending. Counter -examples of businesses which share the brunt of bad business weather across the whole organisation are not abundant, but are occasionally publically noted. I have yet to see this acknowledged by the rest. When it is embedded systematically in business practice, the need for powerful employee associations will decline precipitously. I don't expect that slide to occur in my lifetime or yours.

What are requisite violences?

I did not expect to find what I recently did in a Harvard Business School newsletter – an item called Conducting Layoffs: 'Necessary Evils' at Work
* in which the authors Margolis and Molinsky say:

"We define a necessary evil as a work-related task that requires a person to cause physical, emotional, or material harm to another human being in order to advance a perceived greater good,"

This definition could apply to non-work as well, of course. The DIY relationship industry produces tons of material but only a little of great use unless you are in very low conflict situations. There are a couple of management / self-help market books where this is handled explicitly. See Difficult Conversations (Stone, Patten and Heen, 1999) and Crucial Confrontations (Patterson, Grenny, McMillan, Switzler, 2005). Jim Camp engages the same ground from a negotiation viewpoint in Start with No (2002). These books are uncommon in the communication and negotiation literatures. Mainstream communications texts have varieties of conflict management by conflict avoidance, easing-in strategies and keep everyone comfortable ethics – ones where words like power and anger are hard to find in the indexes.

Arguments about the character of possible requisite violences must cover at least three things:

• Is the act in question really necessary? e.g.- is the precipitating threat big and real enough that not to mention it would constitute a significant risk to others? If there's a doubt, their right to consider the risk is bigger than your right to decide for them.
  
• Is it just? (arrived at by influenceable processes as above and with reasonably balanced outcomes)? That is, will the action bear roughly equally on all affected by it, or will the reasons for unbalanced outcomes be convincing and available to all?
  
• Are the means and level of the act appropriate to the circumstances? Will the act achieve the appropriate end (informing people, providing pathways of response) and at the right level of intensity?
  

* The Harvard mob's use of 'necessary evils' in the title signals to me a borderline moral unease with their material. The ' ' casts a pall over their engagement with violence, a pall which suggests it is unethical, bad, etc. The presumptive counterpoint of the ' evils' by "greater good" intensifies the pall. This good /bad split is characteristic of simplistic moral thinking. That simplicity, however is exactly appropriate as a first response to serious threats – necessary but unrequisite violences. This is the response of our core defence systems. When we are also constantly under pressure from various kinds and sizes of violences, simplistic response is likely to be sustained, tending towards continuous presence in our appreciation of the world.

Violence and violations – making sense of extremes

Violence and violations – making sense of extremes
Torrey Orton
August 5, 2009

What seems consistently missing from every outburst about our violent days and ways – in and at the footy, around the fastfood parlour, on the roads, down the laneways of our nights – is any integrated understanding of what breeds it and feeds it. Just how much violences of various kinds are with us I assayed by a quick count of today’s TheAGE: I totalled 43 mentions of items people might find violent, or encouraging them to do so by choice of header language. I didn’t bother with the BusinessDay. I guessed it would be around 50% violences. 43 items out of a possible 73 (total of non-advertising contents) in the front is enough.

For lack of perspective, we look to numbers of incidents of perilously violent events (street bashings, glassings…) to help adjust our fear responses. These divide roughly into two camps: the directly dangerous and the distantly dangerous. This is a continuum of course! Then there’s the collection of almost invisible and imperceptible violences which make the rest.

Domains of violence
I will try to sketch here the variety and coverage of the actions which compose the domain of violence in everyday life. It cannot be exhaustive. It cannot itemize the damages which different violations deliver for calculating the comparative villainy of perps near (thugs, etc.) and far (terrorists, plane accidents…). But, it can suggest a range of types which casts different light on the most feared violations – the personal assaults, distant or direct.

My intent is not to diminish the latter but to portray something of the encouragements to violence which abound in our culture. Without such a picture, we are left to interpret the most violent as acts of the deranged, the drunken and/or the criminal – personal failings to be stamped out. We have some inkling of the broader social support for violence in the repeated incidence of footy flair-ups and the prominence of alcohol in local incidents or gang-like forays.

Our violent times
So, perspective one: these are seriously violent times for many of us (just how many are not touched at all or very little by the fears and pressures which drive our angers?). The angers arising are expressed in a variety of recognised ways: the road, shopping, telemarketing and similar rages, rising violence to persons – numbers and intensities, public fractiousness (rudeness)…. The bio-psycho-social context is well covered. What’s not so clear is why the extremes seem to be growing, even allowing for the inflation of our perceptions of what’s happening by news media beatups (the daily front page assault above).

Here’s a take on why. Try the cumulative effects over 15-20 years of increased time ‘at work’ in a 24/7 kind of way. Try a world in peril on more dimensions than most of humanity, or any computer, can hold in mind at once. Try a world where all achievement is measured in capacity to consume, or amassing excessive consumptive capacity. And all of this is happening faster and faster…deeper and deeper, ever more extremely it seems.

Invisible stressors and the epidemic of mental illness
This is a world of high grade, largely invisible stressors. They appear in the form of media light ups, many of which are falsely inflated issues for present power scrabbling purposes by equally incompetent politicians; that they all speak with the same wedging tongues and spun language makes this outrageously clear! (Notice that nearly every public query under pressure is responded to with this spinning intro: “Look, I just want to say…”; pollies or priests do this, CEOs or cabbies do it, too.) The symptoms of long term stress can be found in AFR’s BOSS (July 09 issue, pg. 32 ff).

The one they leave out is anger, probably because their audience is commercial and that’s a world in which only the most powerful can be openly angry. Stressed workers do well to contain that part of the stress overwhelm experience, which adds to the stress of course. In the BOSS article Professor J. Toohey of RMIT is reported to say: “…we commonly medicalise issues around work stress and anxiety…psychological injury often has much more to do with the way work is organised and the way people are managed than it has to do with illness.”

Society of fear
Some have noticed that we live in a fear society – dominated by pre-emptive defences against unseen and unsubstantiated threats expressed in defensive behaviours like door-to-door school transport. Locally, Shaun Carney started from this point on the way to his interpretation of public violence phenomena. He ends up with the view that increased violence results in part from increased opportunity arising from increased public service hours and activities (“the 24/7 lifestyle”).

..and society of shame
Then there’s the approach of Dr. James Gilligan, cited in Simon Castles’ TheAGE article excoriating the Victorian Government for the advertising-led effort to restrain boffo and biffo. Having soundly trounced the media fools, fed by governing fools anyway, Castles quoted Gilligan saying: “..the purpose of violence is to diminish the intensity of shame and replace it as far as possible with its opposite, pride.” Castles summarised further: “The major causes of shame were relative poverty, downward social mobility and unemployment..” and concludes that more egalitarian policies are more likely to be useful than adverts.

While for significant numbers and segments of our most wealthy human societies ever life is good materially, an apparently irreversible divide grows between those with repeatedly too little and those with undoubtedly and unaccountably too much. There’s a middling to long argument to sustain this point, but I’ll take it as made for the moment.

A similar insight came from Guy Rundle’s second Crikey piece on local violence in late July:

"The “respect” culture, the exhausting aggressiveness is an assertion of atomised individualism, a getting the first punch in against an indifferent world. The same thing underlies opportunistic violence in the West. What’s noticeable about the kids hanging round these stations is that they’re not in gangs, so much as small packs of individuals, whose personal style — bad gangsta rapper gestures, the hoodie all the way over — is not an expression of confidence, but a perpetually threatened and hostile resentment, a desperate desire for impact."


Hard wired for fighting?
For an evolutionary take, of the sand box battlers variety, TheAGE’s Michael Coulter (Sunday AGE July 19, 2009; pg. 15) reviewed the “human animal” research showing violence for good (by goodies) is seen to be better than violence for bad (by baddies). And he concluded that“..violence still provokes an extreme emotional reaction that a lot of people experience as pleasure.” This is OK in his view if it’s addressed to or roused by make-believe (films, etc.). Unfortunately he closes, many folks, men in particular, cannot tell the difference.

Necessary violence with disregard for accountability
Here’s another brand of violence, from the top as it were. A few weeks back Lihir Gold’s Ballarat mine was consumed in a debt collapse leaving 200 jobs on the way through. TheAGE’s Matthew Murphy reported:
"Despite leading the $400 million acquisition of the project from Ballarat Goldfields in 2006, Lihir chief executive Arthur Hood chose not to tell the workers about the job cuts in person, instead leaving it to site general manager Craig Thomas.
Peter Smith, Lihir's executive general manager for Australia and Africa, said delivering the news was not a priority for Mr Hood, who yesterday was flying back from the company's more successful operations in Papua New Guinea.
"Arthur's had other priorities right now but the mine management team has taken great ownership of the people at site and I think they actually felt a responsibility to do it themselves," he said. "

This is classic accountability violence, which disrespects both the people in charge (“the management team”) and the workers. The executive general manager Australia and Africa above attributes to the management team a responsibility which wasn’t theirs by way of excusing the accountable and responsible person – Arthur Hood. This is multi-level commercial violence not often on show so clearly. For once the workers don’t get smirched with the others.

This violence was necessary in the sense that the business went under (maybe financially disputable, but within understandable limits for such things). The gratuitous violence, the unnecessary part, lies in the ethical gutlessness of the senior accountable – in this case, “Arthur”.

And this kind of violence is not thought of in the morning paper’s treatment of assault. It’s reported as fateful acts befalling the powerless with an implicit suggestion it’s their fault for being powerless. Only in the last 12 months have we seen so clearly that the powerful fail with feather landing fields and get up to play and earn as if they had never strayed from the fold of commercial productivity. Executive bonuses anyone? How many billion US$’s in New York or Sterling in London last month based on public guarantees and subventions?

Precursor spin – the Meno message?
I remember my surprise 35 years ago at discovering that Socrates was leading Meno by subtle questioning to mathematical insights which he was pretending were to be found in Meno’s natural capabilities. By chance (reading the translation with a Greek interlinear), I found that the words used to name the objects being explored were shaping the progress of the dialogue to imply / suggest the insights which were being sought. It was as if the master midwife to thinking had been caught with virtual hands in the pie.

There in the heart of the origin of dialogue was a slippery practice hidden in the authority and competence of the master. Elsewhere, we have Socrates as master of violating the pretences of public figures of his time. In both guises we have dominance of others, in both instances for their best interests (and those of society, Socrates would have us think).

The violence of Socrates demolition of various public figures is clear. He paid violently for it, hemlocked by his own hand. What of his instruction of the boy Meno? This is our task. To understand, distinguish and deploy judiciously violations of existing habits which impede growth at the personal, group and organisation levels. Growth here is change allowing better adaptation to environmental changes than would be the case if no growth occurred. This task is that of helpers of many persuasions and leaders of all organisations.

Violence - a flower of many colours
You may be wondering at some of my inclusions in the violence bestiary above. Most providers of support services to victims of family abuses recognise that the larger part of abuses and their instances are not physically violent – harassment, belittling, demeaning, withholding of resources and social connections, threats, etc. On a slightly closer look these behaviours can be found in discriminatory organisational processes, bullying in all settings and similar occurrences on the borders of reportable offenses.

The degree of actual reporting may be proportional to the power of the offenders, especially in organisational settings. This is why whistle-blowing is never met with organisational approval (when was the last time you saw it celebrated by those within the organisation whose hides were being exposed to public scrutiny by the whistler’s tune?).

So I take the position that there are many violences in our worlds, some of which are unavoidable and many of which seem endemic, even among ‘nice’ people, or our leaders, both personally and institutionally. To understand the unveiled or unavoidably visible ones we must understand the veiled and collusive ones. That’s the starting place for a deeper grip.

Again, what to do?
So what to do in thinking and talking about violences? This is really hard because so much reporting and discussing of violences occurs in seriously sub-optimal perceptual conditions. That is, we are assaulted by the assault (direct or indirect) in an assaulting (language inflation) way while reeling from an undercurrent of little violences which keep us often in a clinically stressed state. Hence, the leap in responses to the black and white; the fundamentalist reaction is automatic and intensely propelled by fear rising as anger and rage.

At least that’s what happens to me and a few other old farts I know. Judging from the personal commentariat in the virtual and hard copy letters pages, I / we are not alone in this volatility. So, again, what to do to understand And act on violence better, something that doesn’t take a book (I found 4 on my shelves with ‘fear’ in the title, none of them a work of fiction)? I propose this: That we…

• …assume it is a whole of society problem, whatever it is;
• …assume it’s a local systems problem, at whatever level of scale and diversity is appropriate to good coverage of the influencing (original sources) sustaining (currently continuing enablers, enhancers) and ameliorating (motivation reducing) factors bearing on the violence in question;
• …assume that it is multi-generational;
• …assume that the violence is multi-modal and multi-dimensional;
• …assume that it is meeting some real needs of some of the participants some of the time.
• …assume that we, too, do violences to others, and the previous assumptions apply to us.
• …and???

Over to you…