Layer 511 . . . Taxing Wealth, Fear of Taxes, US Elections, Global Apocalypse, Carl Jung and Data Pool 3

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The thing is, politics is far too important to be left to politicians. That's why we need public intellectuals, capable analysts, and great writers & journalists. And we need the Guardian to give them a creative platform. Here's a selection of what was in the paper yesterday.

[It might seem like dull, dutiful, hard work sometimes to keep up with what's happening in the world, but in times of crisis and change we all have a public duty to pay attention, and to work hard if necessary at knowing what's going on. Otherwise we lose the right to complain when we don't like what's done to us.]

Mysteries of Data Pool 3 give Rupert Murdoch a whole new headache

The arrest of four Sun journalists threatens to open a fresh phase of the scandal surrounding News International

by Nick Davies

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/jan/29/data-pool-3-sun-arrests-murdoch

On Saturday morning, the police arrested four journalists who have worked for Rupert Murdoch. For a while, it looked as though these were yet more arrests of people related to the News of the World but then it became clear that this was something much more significant.

This may be the moment when the scandal that closed the NoW finally started to pose a potential threat to at least one of Murdoch's three other UK newspaper titles: the Sun, the Times and the Sunday Times.

The four men arrested on Saturday are not linked to the NoW. They come from the Sun, from the top of the tree – the current head of news and his crime editor, the former managing editor and deputy editor.

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Taxing wealth? The public mood still escapes the Tories

Ed Miliband's task is to point out where the blame really lies for unfairness in the system

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/30/tax-on-wealth-public-anger

by Polly Toynbee

The Hester bonus retreat marks a seismic political moment, a point of no return. How long it has taken, how slow Westminster has been to respond to public outrage since the crash – but Labour has seized the moment.

Labour's call for a tax on bank bonuses gains real traction as boardroom kleptocracy finally breaks through the political sound barrier. Despite poll after poll showing disgust at top pay, the issue has been ignored at Westminster and was invisible at the last election. Hester's failure to respond in time to public outrage has lit the blue touch-paper. Uncharacteristically, David Cameron missed the public mood, so he looks both weak and in hock to a City that bankrolls his party. Each new bonus announcement will skewer him again and again – one RBS trader gets £4m and on Friday, Barclays' Bob Diamond will swipe £10m: no Cameron nudging is likely to shift his sod-you-all attitude.

Hester has handed Labour the tin-opener to the whole can of worms over boardroom pay. Research from Professor Karel Williams at Manchester University's Cresc shows how far soaring executive pay is unrelated to performance, but how closely related it is to the tiny pool of people sitting on boards, similar earners rubber-stamping one another's ever-rising pay. There is, Williams says, "a very weak link between pay and performance". Most employees know that performance-related pay is largely a chimera: gamed by managers, resented by staff, it corrodes into custom and practice. Let this end the bonus and incentives fallacy in every sphere.

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Why are deficit-cutters so afraid to talk about tax?

Reducing public spending is not the only way of balancing the budget, but taxation seems to be taboo for politicians

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/29/deficit-cutters-tax

By Mehdi Hasan

 'I like paying taxes," the US supreme court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once remarked, "with them I buy civilisation." As hundreds of thousands of self-assessment taxpayers frantically file their returns to Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs, ahead of 31 January's looming deadline, the late judge's words are worth bearing in mind.

We need to talk about tax. I won't pretend I like paying taxes. I don't. But I agree with the argument that it is taxation that helps civilise our society. Tax revenues fund high-quality public services, the welfare state, our national defence and much-needed infrastructure projects. Progressive taxation of income keeps inequality in check, by redistributing from the rich to the rest.

But taxation also goes to the heart of the current debate over the deficit. In his new and aptly titled Compass pamphlet, White Flag Labour, economist Howard Reed points out that "there are two ways to close a fiscal deficit when the economy is operating at full potential – one is to cut spending, the other is to raise taxes" yet deficit hawks assume that "cutting spending is always and everywhere the preferred route to fiscal balance, rather than raising more revenue via the tax system".

Fiscal policy has been reduced to a sterile debate over public spending in recent years. Our political elites act almost as if taxation doesn't exist. Defending Labour's recent tilt towards cuts, Ed Miliband proclaimed in a speech on 10 January that "the next prime minister will still have a deficit to reduce, and will not have money to spend". Really? Why can't said deficit be reduced through additional tax revenues?

The phrase "deficit reduction" has become a convenient euphemism for cutting public expenditure. It shouldn't surprise us. The biggest myth in British politics is that government borrowing spiralled out of control because of overspending; our record budget deficit, say the Tories and their Lib Dem mini-mes, is the inevitable consequence of Labour profligacy.

It cannot be said often enough: the deficit was caused not by rises in public spending but by a collapse in tax revenues. For example, by 2009-10, the Treasury had received around £112bn less in tax revenues than it had expected to. As Channel 4's FactCheck website decisively concluded earlier this month, "the drop in tax receipts triggered by the economic crisis is what's behind the bulk of the £149bn deficit".

Poll after poll shows overwhelming public support for a tax on bankers' bonuses; a mansion tax on multimillion-pound properties; a windfall levy on the oil and utility companies; a Robin Hood tax on financial transactions; and a one-off wealth tax of 20% on the richest 10% of households (which would raise a whopping £800bn and, according to YouGov, is backed by three out of four voters).

Increasing taxes on the rich to help reduce the deficit isn't "class warfare", as President Obama belatedly argued in his state of the union address last week: it is "common sense". If our leaders want us to believe that they are serious about the deficit, then they have to lift their self-imposed taboo on discussing tax.

The time has come to say the politically unsayable: it is wrong to pretend that cutting spending is the only, best or main method of eliminating the deficit. It isn't. In the long run, once the economy is off its knees and growing again, we need to make much greater use of taxation to balance the budget. Perhaps we can update Justice Holmes's mantra for our age of austerity: I like paying taxes, with them I pay down the deficit.

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US elections: no matter who you vote for, money always wins
Dollars play a decisive role in US politics. And more so since the supreme court allowed unlimited campaign contributions

by Gary Younge

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/jan/29/us-politics-vote-money-wins

Republican presidential debates are not for the faint-hearted. 

Given the general state of the Republican party . . . truth and facts are but two options among many. The party's base, overrun by birthers, climate change deniers and creationists, floats its warped theories and every now and then one makes it to the top and bobs out into the airwaves.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/27/obama-no-credible-republican-challenger

 It is difficult to think of anywhere else in the western world where these debates would have any credibility outside of a fringe party (even if the fringes in Europe are now spreading). Far from indicating America's exceptionalism, it looks more like an awful parody of the stereotypes most outsiders already believed about American politics at its most bizarre. "Those who follow this race daily may have long since lost perspective on how absurd it is," said the German magazine Der Spiegel last week. "Each candidate loves Israel. They all love Ronald Reagan. Each loves his wife, a born first lady, for a number of reasons."

The good news is, with the exception of Perry's demise, the debates have not been pivotal. The bad news is that the truly decisive element has been something even more insidious: money. Lots of it.

The issue here is not class envy, hating rich people because they are rich, but class interests – cementing the advantages of the privileged over the rest. The problem is not personal, it's systemic. In the current climate, it means a group of wealthy people in business will decide which wealthy people in Congress they would like to tell poor people what they can't have because times are hard. And unless the ruling is overturned there is precious little that can be done about it.

Downplaying money's central role at this point merely buys into the illusion of participatory democracy, where ideas, character and strategy are paramount, while others are actually buying the candidates and access to power. The result is a charade. Fig leaf, G-string – name the scanty underwear of your choice. The emperor is butt naked. Whoever you vote for, the money gets in.

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SweetBirdOfTruth

"Truth and facts are but two options amonst many."

Great line, and one which is borne out every day here on Cif by the more mendacious right-wingers.

It's difficult to believe that, four years after a financial crisis created by widespread corruption and fraud by banks, not a single person has been jailed either in the US or the UK for perpetuating this fraud.

It's even more difficult to believe that this crisis has been exploited by right-wingers and free market zealots to make the case for a shrinking of the state and greater deregulation in the interests of those who clearly cannot be trusted to regulate themselves.

The neoliberal zealots, for whom truth and facts are simply options, shout down those who call for regulation and controls on irresponsible markets as socialists who will usher us all into the Gulag.

They will have missed the Newsweek report this week which found that there are 6 million people in the US either incarcerated or under some form of criminal supervision.

Newsweek helpfully pointed out that the figure of 6 million, in the Land of the Free, exceeded the total number of people imprisoned or under state supervision in the Soviet Union in the worst years of Stalinist repression.

Meanwhile, there are $18trillion sitting in offshore tax havens, a figure which exceeds the combined debt of the OECD economies.

The truth and the facts show that there is no justification for austerity.

Austerity is simply a policy choice for neoliberals who care more for their own selfish interests than they do for truth and facts.

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Davos policymakers are playing Global Apocalypse – and running out of lives
If the world economy was a video game, the central bankers and politicians have been struggling to master the controls – and remain stuck on the first level

By Larry Elliott

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/economics-blog/2012/jan/29/global-economic-crisis-policymakers-apocalypse

Policymakers have put the question of global rebalancing into a box labelled "too hard to deal with", and have been dilatory in sorting out the problems of their financial sectors. Instead, whether through a misguided belief in financial orthodoxy or a fear of the bond markets, they have concentrated on heavy-handed and blanket austerity, something that should have come at the very end of the game.

The result has been sluggish growth in the west because every element of growth – public expenditure, consumer spending and investment – has been choked off simultaneously. If government is to retrench without causing recession, private demand has to rise, but the squeeze on real incomes and a reluctance to invest means this is not happening. The result is an unbalanced global economy, drifting towards a double-dip recession (in the west at least), a dysfunctional financial system and – a new ingredient in the toxic mix – a deeply disaffected public.

Christine Lagarde, the International Monetary Fund's managing director, spent last week rattling the tin in the hope of getting contributions for a $2 trillion (£1.3tn) war chest. European policymakers were trying to put the finishing touches to a Greek debt deal. Draghi made it clear that providing liquidity to Europe's banks would not be enough on its own to bring an end to the crisis.

What does it mean? It means that blanket austerity is not working, and. It means that what was originally a global response to a global crisis has become a series of national responses to national crises. It means that Europe is treating a three-dimensional problem (growth, banks, public finances) with a one-dimensional fix of deficit reduction. It means that the global economy is still struggling to get beyond level one of Global Apocalypse. And if policymakers don't start showing a bit more skill, it will soon be Game Over and time to play Global Apocalypse 2.

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This could be Carl Jung's century

The psychoanalyst saw himself as a sort of therapist for western culture, and his diagnosis of its ills resonates today

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2012/jan/25/carl-jung-century

by Andrew Samuels

If the last century has been called "the Freudian century", there are reasons for thinking that this one could be Jung's. His time does seem to have come.

He had a much more positive view of the human psyche and unconscious than Freud. For Jung, the unconscious is not only full of wild and destructive drives; it is also the source of creativity, spirituality and the capacity for relationships.

What Jung saw in western culture is very familiar to what its contemporary critics perceive. He despaired of the over-rational one-sidedness of western culture, the way it has got cut off from nature (Jung is the pioneer of what is now called ecopsychology). He hit out at the materialism and loss of individuality in our world, focused on the mind-body split, on mechanical approaches to sex, and the west's loss of a sense of existential and spiritual purpose and meaning. 

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Layer 474 . . . Games, Pastimes, Winners and Losers, Berne, Reich and Maslow

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My father taught me how to play chess. He taught me the basic moves, but nothing about strategies, openings and endgames - of which I still know very little. I've never been a great one for playing games, or for pastimes. What the hell is a pastime?

My father taught me some basic things about life. He lived a very simple life - practically hermit-like and very monagamous, as far as I could see. If it turned out he'd had a secret lover I'd be completely shocked and amazed.

And yet dad was a great player of games. He had drawers and cupboards full of games. His own children were a huge disappointment to him in terms of their enthusiasm for games. It was his grandchildren who joined in with his games-playing to while away hours of companionship, having innocent fun on many a rainy weekend and school holidays. Dad would much rather play a game than have a conversation. What was the point of talking? Listening in to most people's conversations you might have to admit that he kind of had a point, even if he never expressed it as such. Inarticularcy was pretty much dad's speciality.

In terms of winners and losers - it's hard to say whether dad was one or other of these things. Having a leg blown off and almost losing your life in a war against fascists isn't exactly conducive to being a winner in the game of life. Yet having been brought back from the battlefield in Normandy and having survived horrendous injuries - you possibly learn certain things during a year or so of hospital convalescence about the preciousness of life itself, and an appreciation of its absolute value. You maybe learn that life is simply about being, and learn not to worry too much about doing or having.

Dad was a winner in that he had a beautiful and thoughtful wife who was his lifelong companion. She was feisty as hell and gave him endless brainache, but she was loyal and strong, and she took good care of him. She was full of enthusiasm, and she was brave and energetic. She gave him pride and dignity, and two children to enliven their lives and their modest household.

Dad was a winner in that he was able to retire to a beautiful part of the country and live in a part of the world he truly loved. He had enough money to live on, a decent car to get around in, and a decent home he could call his own. His lifelong work in a factory gave him dignity as well as a regular income. He also had a decent retirement pension that allowed him and mum to live out their lives well above the poverty line. He owned the home he lived in, and paid no rent to any landlord or local authority. This home that must now be sold - the last remaining contact with two good people and their decent and honourable lives.

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It's never been clear to me what's supposed to happen to people's possessions when they die. Obviously some of them are inherited and are gratefully owned by descendants - for their utility as well as their sentimental value. Some things are essentially useless but are wonderful reminders of their previous owners.

I was shocked by my sister's lack of interest in mum and dad's possessions. Her only interest was in their monetary value - and very few of their possessions had any monetary value. Therefore her attitude was - throw it all away, or sell bits if you're able. She was quite happy to give away all of mum's clothes to charity shops, keeping nothing at all for herself - not even a scarf or a cardigan. Thankfully my children, my nephews and their partners at least wanted to inherit some things as souvenirs. The bungalow had been a second home for my nephews as they were growing up, and living in various places around the county - as much as it had been for me. It was a place of stability, identity and continuity.

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During certain periods of her depression mum didn't really want me to go to stay with her at the bungalow. She'd come to rely on her meals on wheels, and she hated not being able to buy food for me or cook for me. It negated all she stood for as a mother and a provider. In the end she didn't even have the strength to clean properly or to change bed linen. Such is the indignity and loss of pride when you're old and feeble and reaching the end of your life.

I wonder now if she had any regrets - any unfulfilled ambitions, any thoughts about things she'd not done that she could have done, and maybe should have done, when she still had energy, drive and feistiness.

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Dad must have learned to play games to while away the hours as he was lying in a hospital bed, while the war in France and Germany continued, whilst hundreds and thousands more teenagers were losing their lives and their limbs in a war against fascists and their evil leadership.

Dad taught us how to play ludo and drafts and card games. He introduced us to the joys of Monopoly and Totopoly. (I get it now - it was about the Tote. Ha!) He was a great fan of dominoes and games involving picking up sticks and flicking counters into plastic cups. He was a good winner and a good loser. My sister was a habitual loser. Myself - I couldn't see the point of winning, or the taking part, and definitely not the losing. There were much better things to do - many of them involving friends and the vast amount of complete freedom available outside the house, away from parental control and the strict rules of the game; away from winning and losing.

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Aunt O was born during the First World War. The solicitor who came to the house yesterday was shocked when she told him she was born in 1915. 96 years of age and still sharp as a tack. "Oh well," she said, on learning how much it was going to cost to change her will and to set up powers of attourney. "I'll just have to get a job."

She would too, if only it were possible. Never afraid of hard work, my aunt - infirmity now afflicts her body, but not her mind. She can even cope with loss of hearing, as well as loss of mobility. She can still prop herself up on a walking frame and on her worktops well enough to cook a roast dinner for two. "Yes I know you can buy roast chicken in the supermarket - but I've already taken the lamb steaks out of the freezer!" Now be quiet.

She hadn't been allowed to get a paid job till she was 18 or 19. My Victorian grandfather had insisted that as the oldest girl in the family she had to stay at home and look after the rest of the children. No wonder she ran away from home to be with my uncle.

She manages quite well in her own home, and still does her own cleaning and washing. She has a stair lift and someone to take care of her gardens and her shopping. As she says herself, she wants for nothing.

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Eric Berne was a psychologist and the author of a seminal book called Games People Play. In it he describes the game-playing that goes on between both consenting and non-consenting adults. He also talks about people who take part in interpersonal 'pastimes'. Berne was the grandfather of what's now known as Transactional Analysis. It's worth reading about - especially if you've ever been involved in inappropriate game-playing or on the receiving end of an adult behaving like they're either a child or your parent.

To find out about what adults are supposed to be like when they become fully evolved human beings try taking a look at Layer 20 and the conclusions of another great psychologist - Abraham Maslow.

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Yet another great but little-known psychologist mentioned in the media recently - Wilhelm Reich. Channel 4's curious documentary series on human sexuality did a superficial review of his work on human sexuality with particular mention of the function of the orgasm. It's maybe time to write some more about Reich, and time to write something more about Zen, sexuality, enlightenment and well-being.

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Layer 458 . . . Empathy, Social Intelligence, Human Cruelty, and the World's Most Valuable Resource

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The obvious reason the rich don't give a shit about the poor is they're greedy bastards who can never get their hands on enough moola to satisfy their grasping, materialistic, status-seeking, pleasure-seeking desires.

Another reason is their total lack of caring, empathy, social intelligence - call it what you will.

The science of empathy

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/mar/27/the-science-of-empathy

Does it upset you when you see people arguing? Do you cry at the cinema? Empathy is one of our most powerful emotions yet society has all but ignored it. Autism expert Professor Simon Baron-Cohen reveals the science behind "the world's most valuable resource" – and how its lack is the root of human cruelty

This article was published in last week's Guardian magazine, and is a must-read for anyone who has any interest in human relationships - which ought to be everybody. If this doesn't appeal - then it means you're a sociopath or a psychopath.

It's interesting that the professor never uses the term "social intelligence", though he must be aware that Daniel Goleman, for one, has written whole books on this subject, and on emotional intelligence.

Bear in mind also that he's writing from the standpoint of a professional academic psychologist focusing on people with a deficit of empathy, people who have a serious lack of empathy for deep-seated personal reasons, and not just because their social intelligence hasn't been encouraged or allowed to develop by a school system that doesn't give a damn, on the whole, about consistently raising young people's levels of social intelligence. In fact, competitive education will always do the opposite - depress levels of social intelligence by setting people against one another through competition for grades and status.

As ever, I'll post here a few quotations from the article just to give a flavour, but I do urge readers to take time to read the entire piece.

How can humans treat other people as objects? How do humans come to switch off their natural feelings of sympathy for a fellow human being who is suffering?

As a scientist I want to understand the factors causing people to treat others as if they are mere objects. So let's substitute the term "evil" with the term "empathy erosion". Empathy erosion can arise because of corrosive emotions, such as bitter resentment, or desire for revenge, or blind hatred, or desire to protect.

The key idea is that we all lie somewhere on an empathy spectrum. People said to be "evil" or cruel are simply at one extreme of the empathy spectrum. We can all be lined up along this spectrum of individual differences, based on how much empathy we have. At one end of this spectrum we find "zero degrees of empathy".

Zero degrees of empathy means you have no awareness of how you come across to others, how to interact with others, or how to anticipate their feelings or reactions. It leaves you feeling mystified by why relationships don't work out, and it creates a deep-seated self-centredness. Other people's thoughts and feelings are just off your radar. It leaves you doomed to do your own thing, in your own little bubble, not just oblivious of other people's feelings and thoughts but oblivious to the idea that there might even be other points of view. The consequence is that you believe 100% in the rightness of your own ideas and beliefs, and judge anyone who does not hold your beliefs as wrong, or stupid.

Zero degrees of empathy does not strike at random in the population. There are at least three well-defined routes to getting to this end-point: borderline, psychopathic, and borderline personality disorders. I group these as zero-negative because they have nothing positive to recommend them. They are unequivocally bad for the sufferer and for those around them. Of course these are not all the sub-types that exist. Indeed, alcohol, fatigue and depression are just a few examples of states that can temporarily reduce one's empathy, and schizophrenia is another example of a medical condition that can reduce one's empathy.

Empathy itself is the most valuable resource in our world. Given this assertion, it is puzzling that in the school curriculum empathy figures hardly at all, and in politics, business, the courts or policing it is rarely if ever on the agenda. We can see examples among our political leaders of the value of empathy, as when Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk sought to understand and befriend each other, crossing the divide in Apartheid South Africa, but the same has not yet been achieved between Israel and Palestine, or between Washington and Iraq or Afghanistan. And, for every day that empathy is not employed in such corners of the world, more lives are lost.

I think we have taken empathy for granted, and thus to some extent overlooked it. Psychology as a science virtually ignored it for a century. Educators focusing on literacy and mathematics have also largely ignored it. We just assume empathy will develop in every child, come what may. We put little time, effort or money into nurturing it. Our politicians almost never mention it, despite the fact that they need it more than anyone. Until recently, neuroscientists hardly questioned what empathy is.

Empathy is like a universal solvent. Any problem immersed in empathy becomes soluble. It is effective as a way of anticipating and resolving interpersonal problems, whether this is a marital conflict, an international conflict, a problem at work, difficulties in a friendship, political deadlocks, a family dispute, or a problem with the neighbour. Unlike the arms industry that costs trillions of dollars to maintain, or the prison service and legal system that cost millions of dollars to keep oiled, empathy is free. And, unlike religion, empathy cannot, by definition, oppress anyone.

Zero Degrees of Empathy: a New Theory of Human Cruelty by Simon Baron-Cohen (Allen Lane, £20) is published on 7 April.

Simon Baron-Cohen is professor of psychology and psychiatry at Cambridge university

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Layer 74 Be Strong, Education and Affluenza

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The peace of the riverside café was broken by a sudden outburst over in the corner.

“Be strong”, is what she kept saying to her pathetic little scrap of a 5 year old, as he wept and moaned, needing her comfort and attention. Her friend and her friend’s little daughter looked on, somewhat bemused, somewhat embarrassed. The child was an obvious poser, an attention-seeker. His reaction to something quite minor was clearly borderline hysterical.

Most parents would have said either ‘calm down’ or ‘be quiet’, but this lispy blond mum in a pink sweater and blue jeans kept saying, as she put her arm around him and patted his little blond head, “Be strong”.

I have never, ever, heard a parent speak like this to a child. Strong? What’s that about? What strength? What kind of message is that? He's a pathetic, weak, small child!

Now in terms of Transactional Analysis, “Be Strong” is one of the 5 controlling “scripts” that bedevil and subvert people’s lives - people who then spend years acting according to the command of some distant voice they heard long ago, following an instruction that they continue to try to carry out for the rest of their lives. To their own considerable cost.

The others are:

Be Perfect
Hurry Up
Please Me
Try Hard

I’ve had many a chat with people - adults and children - whom I’ve worked with, trying to persuade them to slow down, please themselves, stop trying to be so bloody perfect, to work less hard and allow themselves to show some element of what they would see as weakness.

It’s important to recognise that we have these scripts located within ourselves, unconsciously driving and directing our lives, and to understand the harm we do to ourselves when we live according to their internalised dictats. We should also understand what we need to do in order to liberate ourselves from them, for our own sakes, as soon as we can.

It’s often helpful to assume we’ve adopted and internalised two or three of them, unbeknownst to ourselves, and try to assess which ones. We can then get to work on getting rid of them.

Which does NOT mean that we should NEVER try hard, hurry up, be strong, please others, or aspire to doing something perfectly, even if BEING perfect seems pretty unreasonable.

There’s nothing wrong with trying hard when we want to achieve something for ourselves, but there’s a lot wrong with forever aiming to show other people how incredibly industrious, tireless, determined and aspirational we think we should be.

Likewise, there’s nothing wrong with hurrying up when something’s important to YOU, but everything wrong with living life at a relentlessly frantic pace, and aiming to always keep pace with someone else’s expectations.

It’s good to want to please someone when the urge comes from within yourself, but very bad to be forever trying to impress and please others in order to gain their approval, receive rewards, etc. It’s also bad to expect other people to always be aiming to please YOU.

To be forever thinking you should be perfect (in your eyes and other people's), and always be ‘strong’ (i.e. not weak; completely self-sufficient), can only lead to a life of dissatisfaction and probably mental and emotional illness. Which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to improve ourselves in various ways, or that we shouldn’t do our best to overcome weaknesses of various sorts. It’s the absolutes that are the killers.

All of this is an argument for balance and integration, for inclusion of positive and negative, which we all contain - of yin and yang, as eastern philosophy would have it.

These are interesting fields for further study - Transactional Analysis and eastern philosophy. Useful starting points might be Zen, Taoism and Confucianism.

But why were these kids in the café not in school, anyway? The whole city was supposed to have started the Autumn term. Ah yes, of course - but not the private schools, which clearly these two kids would have attended. Be stwong darling - it’s almost time for school to begin. And what an awful lot he’s already learned from his sweet, devoted mother.

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Affluenza

In Oliver James’s excellent book he describes the phenomenon of Affluenza - its causes, symptoms and antidotes. For various reasons this isn't the right place to detail what these are, but halfway through the book he has a chapter called “Meet Your Children’s Needs [Not Those of Little Adults]”, and another called “Educate Your Children [Don’t Brainwash Them]”.

Surprisingly he doesn’t mention Transactional Analysis, but he does describe very well the millions of children who desperately strive to Be Perfect, and then become depressed, disillusioned and stressed when they don’t get 100% and straight A’s in exams.

They’ve adopted their parents’ values and scripts, but very often also the norms and values of over-aspirational and competitive peer groups, especially the girls.

“The scientific evidence shows that the methods employed for the transmission of values from parent to child . . . are a prescription for Affluenza. Parents do it in two main ways. A controlling pattern uses rewards, threats, deadlines and hectoring words, pressuring them to think, feel and behave in conformity with parental dictates. Love is conditional upon achievement of goals laid down by the parent - there is no love for the child who does not achieve them. By contrast, supportive care takes the child’s perspective, minimizing pressure and encouraging the child to find out for itself what it wants: self-determination by the child is valued.”

“The child does not realise the demand [i.e. the ‘script’] has been introjected because the process by which the parental dictate has become the child’s compulsion has been going on from before it had words with which to question or analyse it.”

“Supportive nurture has a completely different outcome. In place of pressure, there has been affection and encouragement for what the child wants, and into its own chosen mix the child has welcomed some of what the parent wants. For self-regulation, it has ‘identified’ with them, rather than introjected - made an active choice. . . If this child is a hard worker and high achiever, it has chosen to be so of its own accord; its self-esteem does not depend upon how it is ranked against other pupils, or on living up to parents’ or teachers’ standards.”

Or living according to Government or Local Authority ‘Standards Agendas’ for that matter.

“The inner compulsion driven by introjection is absent, as is the fluctuating and fragile self-esteem, because nothing is contingent on the performance of externally provided goals. The child may be upset if it does not live up to its own standards, but at least they are its own, not someone else’s.”

“Experience will have taught them that the price of love is success, starting with school performance, and usually involving an equation between money and exam success, as in ‘work hard to be able to get a good job and earn a good salary’. The kind of parents who are controlling are . . . likely to have Virus values themselves and to seek to pass them on to their children. If the family is living in a Virus-stricken society, those values will be even more likely to be inculcated in a people-pleasing child who strives to conform to them.”

To combat all of this, James suggests the following 'vaccines':

1. Disentangle your parents’ values from your own.
2. Identify introjected values.
3. Scrutinise how you were persuaded by your parents to accede to their wishes.
4. Colonise your inherited values.

Under this 4th heading he writes:

“ Having disentangled what you really care about from what you were forced to value, you are then in a position to choose. (e.g. Realising that it’s unimportant whether you replace your car with a brand new one, or keeping the house spotlessly clean.) The key is to start work on finding out what really matters to you, not your parents [or ‘society’], and colonise for yourself.”

Chapter 8, Educate Your Children (Don’t Brainwash Them), begins with this paragraph:

“In most of the developed world today, you learn in order to earn. Especially in English-speaking nations, education has been hijacked by business. The goal is to create good little producers and consumers, whereas it should be an enquiring mind, capable of both scholarship and a playful, self-determined and emotionally productive life. The result is Virus distress.”

“Wherever you look in the English-speaking world, a new obsession with exam performance is to be seen. Compared with previous generations, schoolchildren are menaced from ever-younger ages by assessment.”

“The yoking of the wagon of education to business and to money-making, once limited to America, is now found throughout the English-speaking world. . . . The legislation for the new city academies, personally promoted by Tony Blair, effectively permits wealthy individuals to run state schools, often with strongly Selfish Capitalist values and sometimes tied to strong religious convictions. The curriculum of the State system is being increasingly divested of subjects which will not contribute to the economy . . .”

“The key message is that the purpose of education is not to find out what has intrinsic interest for you, but to work hard at school for long-term financial reward. . . . [This] is a prescription for the absence of flow during work, for low self-esteem and a host of other problems. Ironically, on top of that it is death to the capacity to think imaginatively - the foundation of our economic future if the ‘skills economy’ is as important as politicians are always telling us it is.”

By contrast Danish children are "by far the most positive about going to school, and the least likely to be in a hurry to leave".

And the reason? They don’t regard school as something that gets in the way of their “real” lives, and they don’t have teachers who pressurise them to “work hard”.

“The official rhetoric is that education is for creating good citizens rather than economic performance, very different to that of other countries.”

Certainly very different to England, where measurable test performance is all, and almost nobody has cared very much whether children become “good citizens”, whether they have high degrees of social and emotional intelligence, whether they espouse decent values that enhance everyone’s wellbeing, including their own, and whether they have any proper spiritual development or intelligence. The prevalence of teenage gangs and knife crime is an indicator of how well our schools have been developing citizenship and emotional intelligence.

“This rhetoric is reflected in the [Danish] pupils’ emphasis on learning to function well as part of a group. The curriculum is crafted to encourage them to find subjects that interest them and to be pursued in ways that also achieve this. In terms of fostering intrinsic rather than Virus motivation, this ought to result in confident, creative and autonomous children.”

Isn’t it enough to make you want to weep that our children’s education isn’t being driven by the same set of values and assumptions? If not, just think how you and your family and friends would feel if it was your child who was the target and victim of teenage thugs and killers, who think that it's cool or even necessary to carry a knife, who think that it's essential to punch, kick and stab anyone who shows you 'disrespect' or dares to enter 'your' territory.

“The Danish system’s strength is in its emphasis on emotional literacy. Social skills are very valued, recognizing emotions as important.”

“The Danish approach offers an important vaccine which also serves them well economically. In this respect, like the other Scandinavian countries, they are imaginative and innovative. The grinding obsession of parents and government in [most other] developed nations with children’s exam performances is unjustified on economic grounds, and absolutely indefensible in terms of emotional wellbeing.”

“Modern education has been sold under a false prospectus containing three untruths. The first is that it will bring meritocracy, which it has not; and the pretence of it, requiring absurdly long hours devoted to passing mind-sapping, pathology-inducing exams, is hugely harmful to our children’s well-being. The second is that by enabling people to rise up the system, it will confer wellbeing, which it does not. The third is that exam results are crucial for our individual and national prosperity, and that is simply not true.”

“The truth is that in all the countries I visited, except Denmark, education is used mercilessly to put the needs of employers and economic growth ahead of those of children and emotional well-being.”

“The education systems of the English-speaking countries, which puport to be giving children opportunities to become richer than their parents, are actively hostile to the flourishing of creativity and emotional development.”

“Blair presented education as increasing ‘opportunity’ and encouraging ‘aspiration’. What is really meant by these words is ‘to make money, become as rich and famous as the folk on TV’, not to have the intrinsic satisfaction of identifying and pursuing one’s authentic interests, which is the goal of Danish education.”

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My recommendation is that everyone should read this important, stimulating, original and enlightening book - available in Vermillion paperback for a mere £8.99. It’s a key sociological, psychological and philosophical text, but is also clear, engaging, and jargon-free.

As Will Self said in his review, “Oliver James is our foremost chronicler of what ails us. Affluenza should be mandatory reading for everyone, but especially those in politics, business and the media who are intent on upping our society’s dosage of toxic affluence”.
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Layer 20 Fully Evolved Humans

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A Positive View of Human Potential

If we’re successful in helping children to develop personal, social, emotional and spiritual intelligences, where does it all lead? What do fully evolved human beings look like?

The humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow studied people whom he regarded as exceptional human beings, and described the characteristics of ‘self-actualised’ people. The actualisation process means the development or discovery of the true self and the development of existing or latent potential.

• They tend not to be overly religious in the orthodox sense of the word, but have a belief in a meaningful universe and a life which could be called spiritual. Their ideas of right and wrong are based on their own experience rather than blind acceptance of social conventions. Nevertheless, the characteristics of self-actualised HBs are very similar to the ideals and values taught by the great religions - “the transcendence of self, the fusion of the true, the good and the beautiful, contribution to others, wisdom, honesty and naturalness, the transcendence of selfish, greedy and personal motivations . . . the decrease of hostility, cruelty and destructiveness; the increase of friendliness, kindness, etc”
• Fully developed individuals have a kind of humility - the ability to listen carefully to others, to admit that they don’t know everything, and an understanding that other people can teach them something.
• The self-actualised perception is less distorted by desires, anxieties, fears, hopes and false optimism or pessimism.
• Self-actualizing people are dedicated to some work, task, duty or vocation which they consider to be important.
• Creativity is a universal characteristic of a self-actualised person. Creativeness is almost synonymous with health, self-actualization, and full humanness. Characteristics associated with this creativity are flexibility, spontaneity, courage, willingness to make mistakes, openness and humility. This creativity is similar to the creativity of children before they have learned to fear the ridicule of others, while they are able to see things clearly and freshly.
• Self-actualizing people are less inhibited, and therefore more expressive, natural and simple. They are self confident and have self respect. They lack the fear of making mistakes and their flexibility allows them to be able to change as situations change; they are able to break habits, to face indecision and changes without undue stress.
• A characteristic of the self-actualized person is the low degree of self conflict. The more they become unified as an individual the more they see the possibility for more unity in the world.
• These people find happiness in helping others. They enjoy their work, and they enjoy play; their work becomes play.
• They have respect for themselves based on the knowledge that they are competent and adequate. They rely fully on their own capacities. They are the most individualistic members of society and at the same time the most social, friendly and loving. They are governed far more by inner directives - their own nature - and natural needs than by those of their society or their environment. They are less needful of praise, honours, prestige or rewards.
• Self-actualizers have ‘psychological freedom’. They do not need or value unwarranted fame, celebrity or notoriety. They have a feeling of power in the sense that they have a feeling of self-control. They have control of themselves and their destinies; they are not afraid of themselves, ashamed of themselves, or discouraged by their mistakes. It is not that they are perfect; they make mistakes too, but they take them in their stride.
• They are able to make their own decisions - even in the face of contrary popular opinion. They resist their surrounding culture when it does not accord with their own point of view. They can become extremely independent and unconventional when they feel their basic principles are involved.
• For these individuals self-discipline is relatively easy because what they desire to do agrees with what they believe is right. They are responsible because they believe responsibility is rewarding.
• Whereas average humans are motivated by making good their perceived and actual deficiencies in their lives (coping behaviour) - seeking to fulfil basic needs for safety, love, respect and self-esteem - self-actualised individuals are focused mainly on their need to develop their higher potentialities, capacities and intelligences.
• Maslow believed that the term motivation did not really apply to the most mature individuals. They are spontaneous, they are doing what is natural; they are merely expressing themselves.
• They have a deep feeling of kinship with the whole human race. They are capable of friendship with people regardless of race, creed, class, education or political beliefs. “This acceptance of others cuts across political, economic and national boundaries.”
• On the other hand, their circle of friends is usually quite small, involving others who are similar in outlook and ability. They can be very tolerant of others’ shortcomings, and yet they are very intolerant about dishonesty, lying, cheating, cruelty, and hypocrisy. Healthy individuals tend to seek people with similar character traits, such as honesty, sincerity, kindliness and courage. They are less attracted by superficial characteristics and more attracted by someone’s emotional, intellectual and spiritual qualities.
• Healthy individuals are not without problems - they too suffer moments of guilt, anxiety, sadness and self-doubt. Neither are they universally calm and free of temper outbursts. However, they generally exhibit joie de vivre, enthusiasm for life, and a good sense of humour. They enjoy laughter, and enjoy bringing smiles to the faces of others.
• Their relationships are never exploitative. Because they have great respect for themselves they are able to be more respectful to others. “The love that is found in healthy people,” said Maslow, “is much better described in terms of spontaneous admiration and the kind of receptive and understanding awe and enjoyment that we experience when struck by a fine painting.” These people need less love from others and are able to remain alone for long periods, but at the same time they are able to give love - they are more loving people.
• They are attractive and attracted to others, and find it easy to enjoy friendship and intimate relationships without fear. At the same time they are not afraid to be constructively critical of others, to be exponents of ‘tough love’ even, because they consider it to be unloving to let someone go on making the same mistake again and again just because other people don’t have enough courage or caring to tell them.
• Healthy individuals enjoy life more: not that they don’t have pain, sorrow, and troubles, just that they get more out of life. They appreciate it more; they have more interests; they are more aware of beauty in the world.
• They have less fear and anxiety, and more confidence and relaxation. They are far less bothered by feelings of boredom, despair, shame, or lack of purpose. “They spontaneously tend to do right, because that is what they want to do, what they need to do, what they enjoy, what they approve of doing, and what they will continue to enjoy.” This network of positive intercorrelation falls apart into separateness and conflict if someone becomes psychologically sick.
• Putting it another way, “Self-actualising people enjoy life in general and in practically all its aspects, while most other people enjoy only stray moments of triumph, of achievement, or of peak experience.” They never tire of life. They have the capacity to appreciate the sunrise or sunset or relationships or nature again and again.
• The healthy individual shows far less fear than the average adult. Lesser individuals are less influenced by truth, logic, justice, reality and beauty. Healthy individuals do not often feel threatened by the world around them, as they have great confidence in their ability to handle whatever confronts them. They are also unthreatened by the unknown and the mysterious. This is in sharp contrast to the neurotic person’s fear of the unfamiliar and the mysterious. Maslow quotes Albert Einstein as being typical of this fearless attitude: “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all art and science.” Not only are mature self-actualising individuals less afraid of the external environment, they are also less afraid of themselves. They accept themselves and their natures philosophically, and give them far less consideration than neurotic people.
• People who are more mature and highly (self) developed have the ability to be objective, issue-centred or problem-centred, which involves a certain amount of personal detachment from the problem. Such an attitude, however, can be interpreted as coldness, aloofness, snobbishness, even hostility.
• They have an unusual ability to concentrate, which can cut them off from more mundane matters and lead to so-called absent-mindedness. Since they have fewer ‘problems’ of their own, they tend to be working to solve the problems of society; they have a mission in life. They are more concerned with ends rather than means.
• “They have for human beings in general a deep feeling of identification, sympathy and affection, in spite of the occasional anger, impatience and disgust . . . they have a genuine desire to help the human race.”
• According to Frank Goble, summarising Maslow’s work in his book The Third Force, the very best of humanity are sufficiently philosophical to be patient, and accept slow orderly change. They are apt to be both theoretical and practical.
• They want to see virtue rewarded and cruelty, exploitation and evil penalised. They take pleasure in rewarding, praising and recognising the talents of others.
• They have plenty of self-respect, they do not need love from everyone, and they are willing to make enemies if necessary.
• They also enjoy calm, peace, quiet and relaxation.
• They like to be efficient and effective, and dislike inefficiency. They manage to love the world as it is, while seeing its defects and working to improve them.
• Their excellent perception of reality enables them to see both the good and bad in each situation, and they enjoy solving problems and bringing order out of chaos.
• They are seldom mean or petty or inconsiderate of others, and are able to ignore their faults.
• They enjoy their work and strive to be more efficient, better, neater, simpler and faster.

Layer 13 More Thoughts On Buddhism

It now seems incredible to me that our education system does not insist that we all need a thorough understanding of Buddhism - its ideas, beliefs and practices. It seems self-evident that we should all be able to benefit from its philosophy, psychology and day to day practices, especially meditation.

As an educationalist I take a different approach to learning about Buddhism, and especially Zen, than that normally taken by religious ‘believers’. Young people in particular should not be subjected to any form of indoctrination by adherents to a particular faith. In any case they don’t in general have any inclination to sit for long hours of ‘instruction’, and they don’t have the time or inclination to read complicated textbooks on what appear to be esoteric matters beyond their own experience or interest.

What I see the need for is initially some sort of concise overview of the key ideas of Zen or Buddhism in general, which ought to stimulate the novice to undertake further enquiries and studies. If the summary or overview fails to do this, then clearly the reader is not ready for further exploration. But we do need to provide short, stimulating texts that will hopefully whet the appetite to find out more.

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To begin with, we need to understand the role of intuition, using processes of direct experience and meditation, in developing and expanding metaphysical or spiritual intelligence.

What Buddhists call Buddhi is a faculty - call it intuition - that has the power of direct dynamic spiritual awareness [or metaphysical intelligence], unfiltered by the intellect and its bewildering myriad of helpful and unhelpful words and concepts. Ultimately words, as human constructs, can mean whatever we want them to mean. Wisdom and enlightenment, which are eternal and immutable and lie beyond the intellect, are acquired from Buddhi.

Where is the opportunity to acquire wisdom and enlightenment in our schools and colleges?
To be a Buddha is to be Awakened, Enlightened, made Aware. Which of us wouldn’t aspire to this, or aspire to even a small degree of spiritual awareness, wisdom or intelligence? But how many are fortunate enough to have spiritual intelligence as part of their school or college curricula? Is learning ‘about’ morality and religion actually contributing to the development of “direct dynamic spiritual awareness”? Of course not.

Satori (the Zen word for spiritual experience), and Samadhi (the last step on the Noble Eightfold Path) are steps on the way to enlightenment and wisdom. Nirvana (or Nibbana) is its human goal.

“Yet beyond [Nirvana] lies Parinirvana, for Buddhism is a process of becoming, and admits no conceivable end.” (Humphries)

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More quotes from Christmas Humphries:

It is the criterion of all Buddhist teaching that it conduces to the achievement of Enlightenment.
Bodhi, supreme Wisdom (Maha Bodhi), is the purpose of all study, of all morality, of all attempts at self-development. It is for this that the false and separative self is slain and the true Self steadily developed; it is the sole end of all progress on the Eightfold Path; it is the Buddh in Buddhism.

In the end each living thing will achieve Enlightenment. This is the hope and the promise of Buddhism. All study and attempted practice that loses sight of this ultimate, supreme experience may be useful, but it is not Buddhism.

‘Our essence of mind is intrinsically pure’, according to the Patriarch Hui-neng. ‘All things are only its manifestations, and good deeds and evil deeds are only the result of good thoughts and evil thoughts respectively.’ Imagination, thought and willpower make deeds, and by our deeds we make ourselves. ‘All that we are is the result of our thoughts; it is founded on our thoughts, and is made up of them.’

To Buddhists, therefore, all weight and emphasis is on the mind, and none on circumstance. ‘Our mind should stand aloof from circumstances, and on no account should we allow circumstances to influence the function of our mind.’ All value lies in the mind.

To the Buddhist the moment alone is of supreme importance; all speculation and all conceptual belief are therefore valueless until made real.

[We should be valued by others and learn to value ourselves for our day to day actions and deeds. There is no point in dwelling upon or speculating about the past or the future. Only in the Now can we find joy and satori, and contribute to the joy and satori of others.]

Now is the moment of salvation, of the making an end of suffering. ‘Sufficient to the day is the evil thereof’, and its undoing.

Life is a bridge - build no house upon it; it is a river - cling not to its banks; a gymnasium - use it to develop the mind on the apparatus of circumstance; a journey - take it and walk on!

It is hard indeed to focus on infinity, and all men have at times preferred to focus on something just so much ahead of them, and not too far. Hence thoughts of Gods and gods, Saints and Saviours.

And yet, the Void is already full. It is filled with Tao or Zen or Life or Light. These names are man-made noises for the Infinite. ‘The Light is within thee’, said the Egyptian Hierophants; ‘Let the Light shine’.

The Mahayana stands upon the twin pillars of Wisdom and Compassion, of Law which manifests as justice, and Love which proves as mercy. Yet ‘Love is the fulfilling of the Law’, and like light and darkness, male and female, life and form, the two are ultimately and immediately One. [Yin & Yang. Justice is the dark side of love. Those who fail to love, those who hurt others, can expect to reap what they sow. Karma will return to them their lack of Loving-kindness, manifesting as some kind of self-punishment, as it were.]

Cause and effect are one, though we see the two sides of the coin in the relative illusion of time. For causation is only interrelation expanded into the ‘past’, ‘present’, and ‘future’ for convenience of our understanding.

Each must perfect himself, his own brief vortex in the flow of life; each is responsible for the changing complex of attributes called Self which grows only as the craving ‘ego’ dies.

‘Work out your own salvation with diligence’, said the Buddha. How? It is immaterial. The mountain peak is indifferent to the path by which men climb.

[As is the peak of Maslow’s pyramid!]

There is the soft way of Shin Buddhism. There is the harder road of the Theravada, with its Right Understanding and Right Action. Then there is the hardest (because the straightest) road of Zen - the direct road up the mountain-side. Meanwhile, for the vast majority of men, there is no road at all, only the drift of suffering minds.

The implications of the doctrine of Karma (Cause-Effect) are vast, and frightening to all but the strongest mind. If all that we are is the result of what we have thought [and done], then all that we shall be is the result of what we are thinking now [and what we do].

We are building now our tomorrow, creating hour by hour our heaven or hell. There is no such thing as luck or chance, and no such thing as fate. We are predestined now by the previous exercise of our own freewill. The world of time and space is seen as the workshop of an individual character.

[The so-called self] contains no single permanent factor, nor anything resembling a changeless and immortal ‘soul’. The evolving consciousness achieves successive states of spiritual development [or intelligence].

The Four Noble Truths concern the omnipresence of suffering; its cause (selfish desire); its cure (elimination of that separative desire); and the way to this removal. ‘Cease to do evil; learn to do good; cleanse your own heart’ - this is the teaching of the Buddhas.

There is no word of faith [in Buddhism], save that which a man has in a guide who tells him of a journey and a goal and a way to it; no word of a Saviour who will make that journey for him. Each must develop his own mind. There is no instrument yet invented that can do more than the mind of man can do when its powers are fully developed.

The purpose of Buddhism is to attain enlightenment, and in the lower stages of the climb all means and devices are legitimate, to be discarded when their use is ended. (Like a raft after crossing a river on it, to mix the metaphor.)

There comes a time, however, when all devices are seen as hindrances, and even the Scriptures are fetters about the awakening mind. Authority is a term which daily lessens in meaning, and the sole criterion of all value passes within. The faculty of Buddhi (intuition) slowly but steadily awakens, and the world of discrimination, which lives by the dreary comparison of opposites, is steadily left behind.

Tolerance widens, compassion deepens, serenity becomes a constant companion which neither the passions nor the problems of the human mind disturb. Certainty comes with intuitive awareness, and though sorrow still be the portion of the ever-returning night, joy as certainly comes with the morning.

The developed will begins to take the hill straight. The veils fall steadily and there comes an increasing awareness of that which lies beyond all veils. The ‘three fires’of greed, anger and illusion begin to die for want of fuelling. The stream is entered and all effort becomes increasingly ‘right’ effort.

In brief, the faculty of Buddhi [spiritual intelligence] is awakening, and the fact that it dwells in all [of us] and needs but awakening is cardinal to Buddhism. ‘So far as Buddha-nature is concerned, there is no difference between an enlightened man and an ignorant one. What makes the difference is that one realises it while the other is ignorant of it.’ (The Sutra of Wei Lang.)

In the words of The Voice of the Silence, ‘ Seek in the impersonal for the eternal man, and having sought him out, look inward - thou art Buddha!’

The process of becoming is a circle; the process of becoming more, of growth, is a spiral, either up or down according as the growth is towards or away from wholeness. Buddhism begins with the Buddha’s Enlightenment and ends with man’s.

And the final goal? We know not, nor is it yet, or likely to be for aeons to come, our immediate concern. The faint of heart will ever seek some resting-place, some weak finality; for the strong, the first and the last word is and ever more will be - Walk On!