On the February 20th of this year I was terminated by Jessie Woodson, a member of the Terminix management team in the Customer Communications Center located in Memphis, Tennessee.
The reason given for this action is that I wrote and circulated the following E-Mail:
From: Virtue, William Sent: Monday, February 19, 2007 12:05 PM To: Hill, Richard Cc: Woodson, Jessie; Harris, Shenika; Barker, Tola; Barrett, Karen; Crone, Rene; Degruy, Carmen; 'Dorothy Farris'; Ford, Arthur; Hughes, Clifford; McCain, Ashley; Musicante, Jorge; 'Patricia Burkett'; 'Quincy Brown'; Spruille, Sheila; Culver, Kristi; Finley, Michael; Johnson, Mario; Willard, Kellie; Barnett, Sakilla; Johnson, Angela; 'Kristie Garner'; Stout, Catrina
Subject: Enemies!
About a week and a half ago in a meeting Shenika Harris said to me, “You can’t change anything here all you can do is make a lot of enemies.”
She also said that coming to work every day and on time did not make me a good worker.
The reason why she said this is that during my tenure as a Real Timer she has done everything to thwart my efforts to increase phone discipline in Inbound Sales.
Just as Ashley McCain did everything to support my efforts to improve phone discipline in Customer Service, my supervisor did every thing to raise obstacles to my changing things.
My meeting with you was a last ditch attempt to stop her from doing this.
I told Shun Wilson, as I already indicated to you, the most undisciplined Agent in the Department, that he was not showing in either split.
Lo and Behold, I was told by Ms. Harris that I should not say this to the Agent, a stricture that made it impossible to do my job.
She did everything, she called me a snitch, she said I had no people skills; she questioned the tone with which I spoke to the Agents, all in an effort to perpetuate the slackness and inefficiency in Inbound Sales.
Remember, I asked you what must have seemed a strange question, if I could speak to these agents, if I could visit this Department in the course of my duties.
Let me give you an example of the course of my duties:
If I need them to do dual phones, I needed to phone each Agent individually, or, I could go to the location, a very short distance away, and request aloud that everyone toggle, a much quicker way of responding to changes in call volume.
I have made no enemies here, I have acted professionally at all times, those who have animus toward me are those who wish the job to be like a visit to a mall, as it was when I first came here.
Your might think this situation is unique; it is not, because of the difference between concept and precept in human societies, everywhere there are ideals that are being promoted that provide window dressing and obscure a reality of corrupt practices.
What was unique here; was that supervisors overtly covered up for the indiscipline of those they sought to supervise.
What is also unique, is that you have an employee who will not in any way, and for any reason, participate in blowing off customers.
Thanks
Bill
I stand by these observations; indeed, I will go further, if it becomes necessary, I will testify to any component of this experience, while hooked up to a lie detector machine in any duly constituted court or inquiry and waive my rights under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.
I was terminated without a hearing, without any reference to whether what I stated was true, because everyone knows that what I said was true, that it was the simple truth that only I have had the courage to attempt to expose what has become a sad state of affairs.
One of the justifications given for my abrupt termination, which was a complete travesty of justice, was that I circulated the E-Mail to my peers; this is ludicrous because everyone to whom I circulated the information, knows from their own experiences that what I said was the simple truth; and, that the action taken by the management is an attempt to cover up a malignant cancer spreading and metastasizing through the operation that no one has previously had the courage to speak out about.
It is the most incredible component of a work experience; one that has produced a never ending series of cultural shocks for me, that two of this Company's objectives were to:
HONOR GOD IN ALL WE DO
EXCEL WITH CUSTOMERS.
Last Christmas, a competition was run to see which department could decorate their area in a way that celebrated and expressed the spirit of this holiday.
The committee that judged the competing entries was composed of Richard Hill, Jessie Woodson, Ashley McCain and Quincy Brown; I was shocked and outraged to observe that even in this innocuous and insignificant competition the result was wholly and palpably inconsistent with the merit of the several entries.
The Christian religion was founded in the Grecian-Hebraic notion that all men were equal before an All Powerful, All Knowing God.
For years I wrestled with understanding exactly what this principle was intended to convey; it was clear to me that equality was a construct that could never be applied to human beings who had such disparate experiences and circumstances which determined their individual personalities that this precluded them from attaining equality.
At last I concluded that it encouraged human beings to extend to other human beings with whom they came in contact the balm of simple justice.
Yet, members of management of a Company whose stated objective was to honor God in all they did were incapable of deciding merit in a competition that was designed to foster and promote something as wholesome and positive as the Christmas spirit.
In that meeting with Shenika Harris, which was also attended by Angela Mimes, issues were frankly discussed that delineated and clarified the cultural conflict and cultural shocks with have marred my tenure here; I was labeled, as I have been many times before, a perfectionist; by a Supervisor who has consistently found me a source of inconvenient truths.
I watched the members of my department make a great effort to embellish the space around us to win the competition, an effort to which I made no significant contribution except for a small donation of cash to purchase the decorations; only to lose, not because they had not obviously and demonstrably created the best decorated space; but, because the management could not afford them the smallest, least significant measure of simple justice.
Not by the widest stretch of the imagination have I been striving for perfection during my tenure at Terminix; the reality is I have been striving against insurmountable odds to see applied to the operation the very minimum standards of business practices and commercial principles; to an operation which, over time, had degenerated into the world of anything goes.
I started working for Terminix in its Customer Communications Center located at 6399 Shelby View Drive, in Bartlett, Tennessee on August 14, 2007.
I had recently migrated from Pompano Beach in South Florida and had run out of money; and, as recently as 30th June, 2007 had been working while living in my car, and had been eating one meal every other day; indeed, during this period of intense privation sometimes two or three days passed without my being able to afford to eat anything at all; and, I wondered, on the first few days on the job, whether this experience of homelessness had affected my dedication to doing the right thing, I had no idea the acid test of my morality and resolve this job would prove to be.
Even as I was being terminated and enduring the cover up initiated by the immoral, godless hypocrites to whom I was employed at Terminix I reflected that what I had done, for the umpteenth time in the USA, was throw the pearls of my attitudes towards life and work before swine, and once again, they had turned and damaged me.
On further reflection, I decided that this Biblical analogy was inadequate to the reality of what had occurred; I would have been damaged by this experience only if I had participated in any of the immoral and corrupt practices that pervade this location, if I had failed to follow the dictates of my conscience as I did my job.
It was also inadequate to the reality I faced because swine always act instinctively; those who made the decisions that made inevitable that I would once again be unemployed, have the capacity for moral and intelligent action, they have a capacity for justice and fair play.
I feel constrained to state that this is less an appeal for justice than it is an attempt to provide the information that would permit solutions of the numerous and manifest problems that I perceive to exist at this Costumer Care Center; what I am consciously doing is providing an accurate description of those problems, the necessary prerequisite to their solution.
After one week of training to be a Real Timer I began working the shift that had been assigned to me, a shift that began at 12:00pm and ended at 9:00pm and received the first of numerous cultural shocks that has assailed me while working in this operation; I observed, on my first day, that the Customer Service Department was dropping calls at an alarming rate, that in the five minute period after 6:00pm that they had dropped more than sixty calls.
This in itself was something I had experienced before; what shocked me was that both Supervisors in this department were absent; indeed, neither showed up for work in the
next few hours as I attempted to reverse this disturbing trend.
Over the next few weeks I became aware that this was not an aberration but the norm in this Department.
For the first few weeks on the job I devoted my energies to ensuring that such a spate of abandoned calls would not reoccur on my shift with some small degree of success as the letter inserted below indicates:
I suggested other innovations to improve the Service Level in Customer Service, notably that all Agents answer dual phones, an innovation which was less successful because most of the Agents were not trained to toggle, to deal with the intricacies and difficulties of simultaneously answering both phones.
In the interests of accuracy I feel constrained to state that until I received my first paycheck my competence might have been affected by fact that I was subsisting on one meal a day; and, the lack of nutrition might have affected my capacity to assimilate the training material as well as my competence overall, prior to this experience I have never had any difficulty with assimilating even the most complex components of any training program.
I was also responsible for monitoring the performance of Agents in the Inbound and Outbound Sales Departments.
I began working in Call Centers in October, 1986 when I accepted employment with Opinion Research Corporation in South Plainfield, New Jersey; in the succeeding years I have never encountered a group of Agents so lacking in phone discipline as those individuals who were employed in the Inbound Sales Department.
They did exactly what they wanted; they would take time to smoke or take other unscheduled breaks and leave their phones in the “Ready” position; any call that came in while they were absent would not be answered and eventually would be abandoned.
This produced another in that unending series of cultural shocks; if any Agent's phone was found to be in the “Ready” position while that Agent was away from his/her desk, in most of the Call Centers that I have been employed, that Agent would have been summarily dismissed.
Is it not the ultimate paradox and consummate irony of human existence that eventually I was summarily dismissed for my efforts to improve the Service Level in this Center?
They took breaks and lunches when it was convenient for them, without consideration of the implications their combined absences had on the Service Level.
If the situation was difficult during the evening hours on weekdays, it became chaotic on Sundays; they would congregate in the middle of the area in which they were located and discuss some topic of interest to them; they would set their ring tones on high and could be observed racing back to their desks when their phones rang; a race they won more times than they lost, but each time that race was lost a call was abandoned.
They were connected to the Internet, and had software installed on their computers which permitted them to watch movies on compact disks, or download music videos, or purchase any item their hearts desired; entertainments from which the calls in which they were required to make a sales pitch to customers were brief distractions which they endured.
Which is why I described their duties and responsibilities as little more onerous, demanding and inconvenient than a visit to the mall; that any management would construct and maintain such a licentious working environment for the individuals they employed was altogether disturbing and deeply shocking to my sensibilities.
There was one Agent, Winston Curry, to whom these observations did not apply; he was, in marked contrast to his colleagues, extremely diligent and industrious; and, was always in the “Ready” position which caused me to conclude in an E-Mail I circulated that he was the rock on which the Service Level was built on Sundays.
His industry was reflected in his results, he took more calls and was the leader in sales; a situation which eventually proved to be a disadvantage; he was moved to the Outbound Sales Department and when he returned to Inbound Sales he had somehow lost the drive, discipline and enthusiasm that made him such a great salesperson.
As I considered this unfolding work experience it became clear that this approach by most of the Agents in Inbound Sales was viable because this was an entirely different market from the one that existed in South Florida, the geographical location from which I had migrated; there I had sold Septic Helper, pet foods and pet medications; burglar alarm systems; made reservations for a major airline and car rental companies; the difference, the fundamental difference, was the level of competition.
In every one of the enterprises in South Florida there was intense competition for customers; indeed, Septic Helper was a product about which there were widely divergent opinions and views about its efficacy, whether its impact on septic systems was positive, or, distressingly negative.
In comparison, Terminix enjoyed a virtual monopoly in its market, this Company had, nationwide, very few competitors who were capable of matching or duplicating the service it offered.
A customer who was experiencing an infestation of rodents, or fleas, or roaches, or spiders; whose call was abandoned was very likely to call back, and, if they failed to get through on the second attempt they would make a third, or fourth attempt, having little choice in the matter – if they were to rid their domiciles or businesses of these pests.
Most of the shortcomings of the Call Center that I perceived, had, as its root cause, this one irreducible fact; a fact that I comprehended and appreciated intellectually as soon as I compared both markets, but one that had little effect on two decades of my conditioning to put the customer first, in every situation.
First of all, it created a situation in which though the Call Center operated twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, including holidays; this requirement was limited to Agents and their Supervisors; every Manager worked 9am to 5pm in Customer Service or Sales.
Indeed, my requests at different times, in different meetings as the situation unfolded and I appealed for assistance to stem the rising tide of inefficiency and indiscipline; those appeals to Liz Rutter, Shenika Harris, Jeff Walter, and Jessie Woodson, to visit the Call Center outside regular hours, particularly on a Sunday; to view for themselves the chaos and indiscipline which were palpably and unmistakably obvious during these time frames, fell on deaf ears.
Some training was done after hours, but that fact is irrelevant to the situation which I am describing here.
This produced a dichotomy that was easily and readily discernible in the operation.
During normal office hours, and for an overlapping period, operations were not very much different from what my experience had been in previous Call Centers; the Supervisors and Agents did their jobs; there were exceptions especially among those Agents whose shifts extended and overlapped the evening, overnight or weekend periods but, by and large, the situations were not very different.
Nor was there a problem with the training provided for Agents; in both the Customer Service and Sales Departments the Agents were competent and obviously had been adequately trained read the scripts, provide the information and manipulate the software, the skills required to service customers.
What was different, what created innumerable cultural shocks for me, were those patterns of behavior that occurred outside normal business hours.
The Customer Service Department had three Supervisors who were scheduled to work the evening and overnight shifts respectively, who in the beginning were absent a large percentage of the time; since there was no one present who could observe or validate their attendance, or absence.
The Outbound Sales Department also had two Supervisors who worked these shifts; the Inbound Sales Department had one Supervisor who worked the day shift; there was no one supervising the performance of these Agents in the evenings or on weekends; it should not be surprising therefore, that it was this group that had the most inappropriate and debilitating to the operation, work habits; and, who had the most difficulty breaking these habits.
I began, in my attempt to create attitudes and patterns of behavior, in the evening and weekend shifts, similar to those that obtained on the day shift; by carefully documenting the discrepancies and exceptions of the Agents; what I was doing was learning the job, and, gaining the trust of the Agents.
I had found, in the past, to the point where it has become my conscious modus operandi, that if I did my job without fear or favor, without demonstrating preference to any individual, that those individuals whose performance I supervised or monitored responded very favorably to this approach.
In documenting the inadequacies in the performance of the Agents in Inbound Sales, I took into consideration that the habits of work avoidance and sloth that had developed in that Department were a consequence of a lack of supervision as much as any other factor; in practical terms this meant that, in that initial period, if I had documented all the exceptions I observed; and, if this documentation had resulted in the appropriate disciplinary action, there would have been few individuals left in this Department to take the calls.
In learning the job, I was greatly assisted by Jorge Musicante and Carmen De Gruy; the first named individual was particularly helpful in training me to access the reports that indicated the down time of Agents which had been an important aid in documenting the performance of Agents in Call Centers where I had previously been employed.
These reports were available; indeed, I became aware that the Managers received a monthly report that indicated the exceptions and discrepancies that I confronted on the different screens everyday; it became palpably obvious that some Agents were available and ready to take calls for less than fifty per cent of their shift; others were unavailable for seventy five per cent of their shift, and, still others who were engaging in other activities for even greater percentages of the time they should have been available to take calls; one agent came in and played video games for most of his shift - when he was not smoking in the area provided for that pastime
This fact was obscured by the fact that the operation was in transition between two phone systems; but, it was clear to me that some Agents were spending very little time actually taking calls.
One Agent in particular, Shun Wilson, attracted my notice because one of the entertainments he engaged in on the job was evoking laughter in all and sundry by parodying my accent.
He mimicked my accent at the first potluck I attended, and evoked such a positive response from his audience, an audience that included Jessie Woodson and Ashley McCain, that this became part of his daily activities, something he did regularly; he was always having fun at my expense.
The fact that not one individual in management was aware of the implications, the possible discriminatory, prejudicial and statutory implications of his behavior, that several other individuals began to engage in, following his example; was another component of this industrial culture that made me aware of how primitive and anachronistic it was.
This was the thin edge of a wedge of discrimination; thereafter those whose entertainments I limited with requests that they do the jobs they were hired to do, subsumed their disgruntlement and resistance under the heading, they did not like the “tone” in which I couched my requests that they adequately carry out their job functions.
Shun Wilson made me aware that his main concern for several years had been, launching a career as a comic; and, that his employment at Terminix funded, facilitated and was secondary to his pursuit of that ambition.
He was often tired from his activities on stage and this was reflected in his performance; he was one of the most undisciplined Agents in the Inbound Sales Department; and, he had somehow come to the conclusion that we had somehow developed a special relationship that would cause me to extend to him special privileges and not document his lapses.
Eventually I was forced to disabuse him of this misconception; and, one Sunday after he had regaled everyone with an especially humorous parody of my behavior, I sympathized with him; and, described him as a failed, frustrated comic and conveyed to him my understanding of his need to evoke laughter by belittling me, a response that he seemed dismally incapable of stimulating from complete strangers during his appearances on stage.
Thereafter, this sally dampened to a much more tolerable level his enthusiasm for mimicking me, something I would never have endured at the level he deemed appropriate prompted by his obvious frustration at his failure to launch his career in comedy; but for the fact that I very much needed the job.
Meanwhile, I was doing everything that I could think of improve the work habits of the Inbound Sales Agents; where it was difficult to track which split they were in, I discussed this with Jorge and he moved the numerically superior Outbound Sales Agents to another screen so the status of Inbound Sales Agents became more visible and easily discernible.
I began to print both screens and document that some Agents were sitting for long periods engaged in other activities for significant intervals, not taking any calls.
When this failed to have the desired effect; I began to log them out so that they were not paid for the substantial periods that they were unavailable to take calls.
And, was told by my supervisor, Shenika Harris, that I should confine myself to documenting their delinquencies but that I should not log them out; I began to wonder where her loyalties, responsibilities and obligations lay in this matter; I had never witnessed a Supervisor who overtly supported action that permitted Agents to be paid for surfing the world wide web; and, engaging in other not job related activities.
I also began to log out Agents who were logged in but who were not at their desks for substantial periods - after I documented this discrepancy; an effort that was also frustrated by Ms. Harris who indicated that I should remain at my desk and not visit the Inbound Sales location, so I could not see who was absent from their desks.
I persevered and continued to do my job through all these limitations; but, after a particularly difficult Sunday evening, when four agents were on the schedule, and in the half hour period under review, one call came in, which was abandoned; I decided that I had no alternative but to confront this situation head on.
It was not only that my supervisor was imposing limitations that frustrated my efforts to maintain the Service Level, to maintain the percentage of customers calls that were answered; it was becoming more and more obvious to me that the documents that created a record of the failure of Agents to do their jobs were having no effect, the same inadequacies in phone discipline were being repeated again and again.
I might share an anecdote from my native land, Jamaica, which I shared with Richard Hill during my meeting with him - to clarify the difficulties I had with this situation.
A man employed another to milk his twelve cows, and they agreed on a daily wage for providing this service; one day the employee noted that the number of cows had begun to decline, where there had been twelve cows there were ten, next day eight, until there were none.
However, he did not report this sad state of affairs but continued to go to the location now bereft of animals with bovine characteristics, and, collect his pay; until his employer belatedly became aware of this unproductive state of affairs and questioned his employee as to what had occurred.
The employee rejoined in his defense that, “You hired me to milk cows, not to count cows.”
The fundamental difference between my poor self and the rest of those employed in the Customer Care Center is that given the job to milk cows, I would also see it as my duty to count them; because if they disappeared I would, soon or late, be out of a job.
The fundamental problem at Terminix, and with the American economy in my poor opinion; is that historically human beings were driven to work with whips, chains, intense privation, and the threat of dismissal; and, when these motivations were ameliorated or significantly reduced - these individuals created organizational structures that reflected the aversion to work created when coercion was relied on to galvanize effort, and gradually over an extended period of time all employed in these structures have drifted into a states of inertia and stagnation, mentally and physically.
More, where provided that opportunity, employees formed cliques for which they used the more palatable and politically correct term, teams; and created a modern, more virulent form of patronage and dependence; team members routinely covered the mistakes of other members and social and economic mobility came to depend on being a good team player – and increasingly less on job performance, or any other criteria that related to merit.
Laterally, at the end of my tether, I set about overtly confronting the lack of phone discipline by telling those in supervision and management what was going on.
I told my supervisor in detail about the situation I was confronting after hours, pretending that I was unaware that she was on the list of those who received the report that indicated in impressive and incontrovertible detail the information that I was providing.
Together we met with Jeff Walter, the manager of Inbound Sales, and I regaled him with the same information; he was another individual on the list that received the documentation I compiled, and the monthly report I referred to earlier.
We also met with Liz Rutter and in that meeting I provided the same information.
In a subsequent meeting I described to her an incentive scheme which had been implemented in a Call Center in South Florida and had had a very positive impact on the high level of turnover of customer service representatives.
I indicated that an incentive was paid to Agents who achieved three goals; an average of over ninety per cent on calls monitored by the Quality Control Department; perfect attendance, defined as no unexcused absences or tardies; and, after call work of less than two per cent.
I made the argument in support of adopting this program; that funding it would cost less than training new agents; that it would be paid only to those Agents who consistently achieved these goals; and, that it focused on those specific patterns of behavior that were required by the operation.
Ms. Rutter made the remarkable comment that it was the institution of monitoring these elements of performance and the requirement of achieving high standards of phone discipline that had produced the high rate of turnover; and, that she thought the introduction of an incentive scheme similar to one I had described would have little effect on the situation.
A thin partition separated the Inbound Sales Department from the location where Real Timers sat; and, shortly thereafter I was regaled with a very similar perspective from the Agent, Jeremy Barthalow, who had found the very amusing television show and encouraged the rest of the Agents present to watch it, a situation which resulted in the call being abandoned.
This Agent, protested loudly and vehemently where I could not help but overhear his comments, the fact that I revealed what had occurred to the management; he said that I had snitched and indicated that I had left him no alternative but to confront me physically.
This threat of physical confrontation was never carried out; but it speaks volumes for the attitude of managers and employees that they accepted and were lethargic about curbing indiscipline, they were willing to put up with it, and saw it as normal behavior; but saw my efforts to curb this indiscipline as being somehow wrong and deserving of their opprobrium and censure.
What I am actually describing here is what would be the consequence if someone who was actually trying to do the right thing, not in concept but in precept, was employed by Terminix.
It was obvious to me from the beginning that there was a small clique in control at this location who saw the operation here as their private fiefdom over which they had absolute power; and, the members of this group were unlikely to view any diminution in that power as a positive development and would resist this with all the means at their disposal, even while making the pretense of supporting the goal of improving the Service Level.
Improvements occurred slowly as I kept this goal on the table by documenting inadequacies in the phone discipline of the Agents.
One means I used to keep this goal before the eyes of Managers was adding comments to the documents; for example, if I an Agent passed me and I observed from the screens he was in ready status on either split, I would note this on the printed record; until I was told that I should not editorialize by my supervisor, that I should refrain from using phrases like “phone discipline.”
The situation was becoming more and more ludicrous; anything I said that was complimentary was allowable and permissible, and I did record positive developments no matter how minor to reinforce these patterns of behavior; but anything smacking of criticism was repressed by her, as were any of the ploys I tried to break the bad habits of Agents.
Moreover, she was wholly unconcerned about my attempts to improve phone discipline in the Customer Service operation, where with Ashley McCain's support, even in her absence, in the evenings and on weekends, I literally did anything and everything that I deemed necessary to improve and maintain the Service Level; in stark contrast to the limitations imposed on my actions with regards to my relations with Agents in the Inbound Sales Department.
I am constrained to confess that I ignored most of the more ridiculous limitations and strictures she imposed especially those that inhibited providing minimum standards of customer service.
She was careful never to document these limitations which became more and more inconsistent with management practice and principles and simply outrageous as time passed; her comments were made in meetings between us, meetings of which there was no record.
Two factors resulted in significant amelioration of these problems; two lead agents were hired in the Inbound Sales Department, and the phone volume decreased as the seasons changed, and pest control became less of a problem with the onset of colder weather.
Thus, I received a breather from treating the Agents in Inbound Sales as if they were attending Kindergarten; and, my supervisor was able to suggest she had taught me 'balance' in the performance of my duties, and be pleased with my performance.
Ironically, when the attendance of the supervisors began to improve in the Customer Service Department; this circumstance had a negative effect on my efforts to improve phone discipline.
One of the reasons for this was that each supervisor had an agent who was his/her favorite; Arthur Ford was partial to Candace Maclin; Tola Barker was partial to Cedric Spears; and, Patricia Burkett was partial to Dominque Roberts.
Under the guise of providing training and development these supervisors would take those Agents off the phone for long periods to sit at their desks and shoot the breeze with them.
I mention this because one of the problems that must arise further down the road is with the credibility of this report; but the records in the system and the fact that all calls are now being recorded, will support beyond the shadow of a reasonable doubt, my version of these proceedings, if they are objectively and dispassionately scrutinized.
These supervisors would also, without reference to the Service Level, have meetings, do training, and authorize absence from the phones to engage in Potlucks and other celebrations.
The E-Mail inserted below refers to an incident that the occurred on the day of the Potluck put on by Terminix to celebrate the Christmas Holidays:
____________________________________________From: Woodson, JessieSent: Wednesday, December 20, 2006 3:01 PMTo: Ford, Arthur; Virtue, William; McCain, Ashley; Brown, QuincyCc: Harris, ShenikaSubject: RE: Extra Hours-Candace Macklin
Thanks Arthur - what about the EH she was scheduled to work earlier – according to Bill – she did not report? Also, did you advise Central Command of the change in her whereabouts?
_____________________________________________From: Ford, ArthurSent: Wednesday, December 20, 2006 2:58 PMTo: Woodson, Jessie; Virtue, William; McCain, Ashley; Brown, QuincyCc: Harris, ShenikaSubject: RE: Extra Hours-Candace Macklin
Jessie –
On Tuesdays Candace should be scheduled to work 1830-2230. Candace came in at the time that we were about to stop serving food. Since she was one of the last to eat, I asked her and Patricia Mendez to assist with cleaning the room, washing dishes, and assist with setting up the food for the overnight agents. Please let me know if you have further questions…Thanks
Arthur Ford
Customer Service Supervisor
Terminix International
Memphis Communication Center
Phone: 901-266-7663
Email: aford@terminix.com
_____________________________________________From: Woodson, JessieSent: Wednesday, December 20, 2006 7:34 AMTo: Virtue, William; Ford, Arthur; McCain, Ashley; Brown, QuincyCc: Harris, ShenikaSubject: RE: Extra Hours-Candace Macklin
Arthur – please advise …thanks…jessie
"Exceeding Customer Expectations Is Our Standard"
We believe in exceeding expectations. We are committed to doing it RIGHT THE FIRST TIME while delivering more than what is required of us.
Jessie L. Woodson
Candace Maclin was scheduled to work on the morning of the potluck from 9a.m. to 12 noon, but declined to attend, she was a no call no show; she worked a split shift justified by the fact that she was a student, the second part of her shift began at 9p.m.
She logged in at 6:30p.m and never took one call but stayed in the room in which the Potluck was being held shooting the breeze with her patron, Arthur Ford, and Cedric Spears the favorite of Tola Barker, who was also present for the duration and lead a prayer meeting that continued until the end of my shift at 9p.m.
The Potluck was set up so that participants could serve themselves with disposable cups and plates, so cleaning up would consist of placing the disposable utensils in garbage cans-a few minutes work – not the two and one half hours that Arthur Ford indicated was the reason why Candace Maclin never was on the phone during this period; an explanation Jessie Woodson so quickly and adroitly accepted.
I visited the room where the Potluck was being held at about 8p.m. searching for Agents who were missing from my screens; I did not say anything but they knew what I was about and when I resumed my position the missing personnel were back in their seats and ready to take calls.
I have deliberately capitalized the word “Agents” wherever it has occurred positively in this report to emphasize the dedication and commitment displayed by the vast majority of these individuals who continued to do the jobs they were hired to do and competently and efficiently function despite circumstances and conditions which should have adversely affected their morale; for example, the fact that for significant periods a few of their colleagues were off the phone because of their relationships with supervisors.
That I managed to continue to be obsessed with preserving and maintaining the Service Level; and sustain, what Ashley McCain described as my ' passion ' for the job; despite the difficulties and frustrations implicit in the actions of supervisors who reduced the personnel ready to take calls so that they could be trained or so that they could participate in other activities without warning or consultation - was not my only contribution to the success of the Company.
I reside in a motel and when I became aware that it was having a perennial and chronic problem with an infestation of roaches I suggested to the owner that he switch to Terminix for pest control.
Through Shenika Harris, I contacted a commercial salesperson for the area in which I reside; and, oversaw and facilitated the negotiations which had the happy outcome of a contract being signed between the Executive Inn and Terminix.
Indeed, I would have been happy to drum up more business for Terminix among commercial enterprises with whom I had contact but for the fact that I was informed by Ms. Harris that there was no way I could be compensated for my efforts and the salesperson never indicated even a vestige of appreciation or gratitude for my making this sale.
Further, a few days ago, I informed the owner of the Executive Inn that I had been terminated by Terminix and gave enough details to convince him of the massive injustice involved in this action; and, he immediately offered to terminate this contract, an offer I refused because my sense of justice and objectivity made clear to me that one situation had nothing to do with the other.
As previously indicated I recently migrated to reside in Memphis; and, as a result, have no family or friends here.
To facilitate the other Real Timers spending the holidays with their loved ones; I volunteered to work all the hours I could over the Thanksgiving and Christmas Holidays, even though I was paid single time for the Thanksgiving Holiday, and not at the premium rate, because I was still employed to a temporary service at that time.
For most of the hours I worked on these holidays I was alone since the supervisors, Tola Barker and Arthur Ford declined to fulfill their obligations to attend work on these days; so when the supervisors from the day shift left I solely and singly handled the operation until the end of my shift.
I also volunteered to represent Central Command on the S.W.A.T team, the group that would handle the operation in the event of an emergency and participated on the one occasion that this was required because of inclement weather.
The point I am trying somewhat laboriously to emphasize is that merit cannot coexist with the corrupt practices that must be the consequence of the formation of cliques and their gaining a stranglehold on an organization structure.
To belabor the point of how hard I tried to adjust to the industrial culture I confronted at Terminix; I describe the means I used to give my colleagues gifts at Christmas.
I make compilations of music, the computer I own permits to create such compilations of music and copy them to compact disks.
During my tenure at Terminix, whenever I put together a new compilation of pieces I determined merited being included and contributed to the totality of the listening experience in a particular genre; I made extra copies and shared these with those colleagues whom I deemed might be appreciative of these gifts.
I feel constrained to state that I did not accept any money for these compact disks; and, this in no way was a commercial transaction, which would be in breach of copyright laws.
To make these gifts special and not to place to great a strain on my very limited budget I decided that I would decorate the cases that contained the disks with a picture of the recipient; and, also a picture that reflected the Christmas spirit.
An opportunity to obtain these pictures without alerting these recipients presented itself when the Company declared that on a Saturday morning late in December, Santa would give out gifts to the children of employees.
I attended this celebration with my digital camera and recorded it in the memory disk of the camera; and, for the most part accomplished my purpose of superstitiously garnering the pictures to decorate my gifts, with a notable exception.
A Real timer, Catrina Stout, declined to have her picture taken by me, and really hurt my feelings by her failure to trust me.
She had trained me to do the job, she had become my confidant, a surcease for the deep loneliness I was experiencing; and, I had hoped, a friend.
When she refused, I pressed her, to no avail.
On Christmas Eve when I was distributing the compact disks, as I handed her gift; I discussed her unwillingness to have her picture taken by me.
I asked her if during the period of our acquaintance she had observed me doing one wrong thing, or if she had heard me tell a lie?
I reminded her that as soon as I apprehended that buying compact disks from Debbie might be illegal I refrained from engaging in that practice.
I refer here to the fact that during the several years that I have endured loneliness, increasing loneliness because of my penchant for telling the truth, one solace has been watching movies on compact disks.
When I came to Memphis one of the first casualties of my poverty was my collection of movies and music on compact disks, I sold them to buy food.
At Terminix, I discovered that Debbie copied movies on to disks and sold these for Five Dollars; this was a way to replace the DVDs I had sold at a price I could afford, and, I took advantage of this opportunity – until I questioned its legality.
This may seem a small thing - except to an individual committed to doing the right thing.
As I indicated earlier, I reside in a motel, a place in which perforce exists many temptations; each night after work, when I was employed, I passed the bar on my way to my room; many nights before I reach my door, I am regaled with the not unfamiliar smell of marijuana.
I cannot help but be aware that there are rooms in which prostitutes are plying their trade; I have received invitations to knock at any hour, I daily avoid these temptations – my relief from the tedium and boredom of my existence is to enter the world created by the dream merchants of Hollywood; a world in which right triumphs over might, a world in which those who fall in love live happily ever after.
I feel constrained to state that I do make mistakes; nor do I tell the truth one hundred per cent of the time, I tell it as much as I can and that includes taking responsibility for my mistakes.
And, I too have a favorite Agent, Shyronica Watson Reynolds, who came to my attention because I never have to call to tell her she is in the wrong status, or log her out because she has exceeded her break, or for any reason whatsoever; in short she was the only Agent who consistently, habitually did her job.
She became another adjustment to the sere reality in which I exist.
Once a man involved in promoting economic development hired a rickshaw driver for an entire week in Bangkok, Thailand.
At the end of the week he paid that driver a relatively large sum of money; he observed that individual bought a large container of rice, and, a bouquet of flowers.
He asked the rickshaw driver why he spent money on flowers when he was so poor?
The driver answered, “The rice is something my family and myself live on, and the flowers are to give us something to live for.”
This Agent served the same purpose in my life as that bouquet of flowers did for the family of that rickshaw driver; she creates the hope, which perhaps is an illusion, that one day I will not be lonely; that I will find someone who will not use or exploit me, but will see me as I am.
She is a very beautiful young woman; not only on the outside but also on the inside, she does her job and does not need to exploit my affections for her so I may conclude that her feelings for me are genuine.
I feel constrained to relate that these feelings are wholly platonic; for she is married and if we had any contact outside the job the illusion that good exists in this world of anything goes might be shattered beyond repair.
So each day before starting work I go to her location to say hello, to engage in some innocuous, casual physical contact that confirms, reinforces and validates our feelings for each other; and, gives me the strength to endure the endless minutiae of indifference, sloth and indiscipline that overburdens to surfeit my working day.
One day Shenika Harris came to my location and told me that I should no longer use exclamation points, not exclamation marks mind you, in my E-Mails and I decided that I had to meet with Richard Hill; something I had been threatening to do for some time in the hope that this would ameliorate or extinguish the impact of the more farcical and irrational strictures she placed in the way of my doing my job.
When I first suggested that I pursue this option she was so obviously filled with disquiet and trepidation that I thought I had found a means to leash her importuning me to disregard the dictates of my conscience.
She made several argument to persuade me to see her point of view and just milk the cows not count them.
She told me that she was forced to work two jobs to support her family, that she worked in a retail store on the weekends.
She told me that working for Terminix was for her a stepping stone to a better job; she said she endured working for the Company because in the future it would look good on her resume.
She told me that the supervisors whose behavior I excoriated earned Thirteen Dollar per hour and implied that this justified the scant regard with which they treated their jobs.
She sympathized with my frustrations at the inefficiencies that plagued the operation but reminded me that this was the ' Dirty South.'
As the meeting came to a close we agreed that in moving from South Florida to Memphis I had jumped from the frying pan into the fire.
These arguments in which was implied the entreaty that I not reveal the fact that she had done everything in her power to thwart my efforts to improve the Service Level in Inbound Sales, had little or no effect; even when seen in the most positive light that she had been trying to facilitate my adjustment to the industrial culture that exists in the Dirty South; they made little impression on more than forty five years of conditioning to give a fair day's work for a fair day's pay.
I never hoped that my supervisor would do an about face and begin to support the objective of maintaining the Service Level, that this should be the priority of the operation; however, I did entertain the hope that she could be persuaded to allow me to do my job without fear or favor.
During this meeting it became clear to me that this was unlikely to happen; even as together we walked back to our location, I deemed it prudent as a last resort that I deliver a warning about the possible consequences of preventing me from doing my job.
I told her that I had been documenting the evolution of my relationship with Terminix from the very beginning; and, that one day using this documentation as supporting evidence that I would write about this experience and distribute my observations to all the print and electronic media as well as publishing this on every message board to which I had access.
I also noted that I had no roots in Memphis, and had deliberately declined to become a permanent resident until I was sure that I would fit in; and, that I could be on my way to Connecticut in no time at all; but, that this time I would be able to collect unemployment until I settled in.
She said that Terminix never paid anyone unemployment benefits; and; out of bravado I told her they would this time.
I approached the meeting with Richard Hill with mixed feelings; with hope, awe and trepidation combined.
I had never met with anyone before who had blown off Nine Thousand Calls from customers in a sixteen hour period; with a great deal of certainty I could attest that I had never encountered anyone who had accomplished that feat and kept his job.
The Communications Center accomplished this feat on the 26th December, 2006; they accomplished this feat in the absence of every manager, all of whom took the long weekend and returned to work the next day.
The cause of this debacle was that all the Terminix Branches nationwide also took Monday off; a day that was perennially the day when the Center experienced the highest call volume.
Almost everyone with whom I discussed this situation, including Richard Hill, considered it an aberration; a one time calamity that would never be repeated.
A few said that there was a recorded telephone message that if the Branches had utilized it, would have reduced the number of calls received in the Communications Center.
As usual, I had a diametrically opposed perspective of this situation; I do not believe in any circumstances any call center should fail to answer Nine Thousand calls from its customers.
The first defense was that a lot of these customers called back, once, twice or three times; and, endured the wait, the very lengthy wait, until they got through.
I would say it was a complete failure among those who project call volume for the Center; if I had been made aware of the circumstances I would have known, beyond doubt, that there would have been a gigantic increase in calls on that day; despite my less than six months experience.
I would have hired thirty agents, trained them for eight hours, and made sure the calls were answered.
Or, I would have changed the phones of the Agents in the Sales Departments so they would receive Customer Service calls and avoided this debacle; but then I am dedicated to the proposition that the customer is the most important resource of any business.
Having said this, Richard Hill shared in concept, more than anyone else I had met with at Terminix, my view of how customers should be treated.
Without going into specifics I outlined the problems I was having; with the Service Level being subordinated to meetings, training sessions, potlucks, and to individuals just wanting to shoot the breeze with each other; I requested his support as I tried to improve this situation, and he promised to give it.
He said I should send him an E-Mail if a situation arose that he could help with.
Near the end of the meeting, again without going in to specifics I asked if there was any problem with me speaking with the Agents in Inbound Sales, or visiting that location; he indicated that there was not and we parted on that note.
My supervisor actually asked if I had discussed with him the special strictures and limitations that she used to limit my doing my job, I indicated that I had and no more was said about the matter.
But the situation did not improve and eventually it came down to my confronting the issue by providing specifics; I ruminated that if I avoided being dismissed I would have found a job I could be comfortable doing; and, if I were dismissed I would have access to unemployment benefits to support me as I moved on in my quest to find honest work in the USA.
In my mind, it came down to how my behavior was interpreted; whether despite the fact that I told the truth and tried to do what was right my E-Mail would be perceived as a threat, as my attempt to take her picture had been perceived by Catrina Stout, or, whether it was perceived as my continuing to do what was right?
What she saw as a threat, was my attempt to give her a Christmas gift that was an improvement, an upgrade on the compilations of music that I provided free of cost or obligation.
Those whose picture I took got not only the compact disk decorated with their picture; but, a glossy, color photo 8 X 11 in dimension.
I beg your patience to lead another example of the difference between what I intend; and how this is perceived by individuals.
When I blew the whistle on Arthur Ford, he was visibly upset, because he had to spend more time on the job.
But was this a bad thing?
He had become habituated to coming to work at his convenience, and that meant he was there less than ten per cent, by my estimate, of his schedule; and, when he was present he was not working for another significant percentage the time he spent at the location.
That he could get away with doing this was the result of a special set of circumstances that I have attempted to give the reader an appreciation of; but could he reasonably expect that such a circumstance would ever recur in another job situation?
Could it not be construed that I have provided the opportunity for him to learn work attitudes and patterns of behavior that would be more widely applicable?
I contend that I have; and, the same applies to this document.
Terminix, in the future, must face increasing competition which will require, for the Company to survive, that this Company provide a quality service that will cause them not only acquire but retain customers.
Its Customer Care Center now caters to an elite, a small cadre of employees who reap the benefits of the operation for doing comparatively very little, Agents are next in this hierarchy of satisfaction, with the needs of customers satisfied last, a situation I attempted unsuccessfully to change.
Agents are currently denied the solace of surfing the World Wide Web but this is unlikely to be enough to change the situation; since they are more and more hand held, wireless devices which are already proliferating in the Center, which can be used for this purpose.
But I have provided an adequate and accurate description of the problem which can be confirmed or discredited by system records; including the irreducible fact that all calls are now being recorded so there need be no debate about the ' tone ' of my contacts with Agents.
My comments and observations could be the point of departure, even a spur to galvanize this necessary development; or, it can become a part of the continued cover up of this situation dismissed as adroitly and diplomatically as Jessie Woodson dismissed my query about who authorized extra hours for Candice Macklin.
I feel constrained to record what made me different from the other Real Timers; why was it impossible for me to accept the compromise offered and legitimized by my supervisor; that we document the discrepancies of the Agents, and advise them that they were in the wrong status?
What was the source of my passion to do the job so that it would result in function?
When fresh in my memory was the completely debilitating and wholly degrading experience of homelessness; of an existence totally bereft of security, one in which I had lost every semblance of control over the circumstances of my life?
I can remember with a total clarity undiminished by the passage of time the night when sitting in the parking lot of the Flying J truck stop when I gave in to despair and decided to end my life.
I had called my niece collect and she had declined to accept that call, I had transported her mother to the hospital on the occasion of her birth; and, her rejection confirmed my loneliness and the hopelessness of my situation and that I had used up and become completely separated and alienated from every emotional, social and economic resource available to me for the same fundamental reason, good guys come last.
On my key ring I had a small Swiss Army knife which was very sharp; and I used it to cut my wrist; but could not make the second cut which would have opened the vein.
It required a quixotic gesture, a complete repudiation of the hypocrisy and fraud in human societies, that I had always been convinced I was capable of; which when I actually was called upon to go through with it, I found it was too dramatic, too irrational and illogical an action for me to actually engage in.
In a Shakespearean play, one player states:
"All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages."
--From As You Like It (II, vii, 139-143)
My rejoinder would be, does it have to be?
I suggest that existence for most human beings is a drama, one that ends in tragedy; because in solving problems we do not apply the facts, we cannot apply the facts; but apply, out of the conditioning of many millions of years the world view developed during our sojourn in a ' state of nature,' an ideology that causes us to repeat the past, over, and over, and over again.
My definition of happiness is a drama free existence, based on the perception that we no longer live in that 'state of nature' surrounded by gigantic denizens and predators, threatened by the possibility of Ice Ages and the floods they engender; the ball of dirt we live on has become relatively stable; and, if we develop the capacity to accurately describe social problems we will create workable and functional solutions.
I used a tissue to staunch the flow of blood; and, the crisis behind me, I soon succumbed to the blessed solace of sleep.
Next day was Sunday, and, when I woke up; I walked the short distance to a restroom for truck drivers in which there was a television set and prepared to endure, without eating anything, the passage of another day.
I found two small packages of sugar that someone had discarded and consumed them for the small amounts of energy they contained.
Later that day, the girlfriend of a driver, seemed to discard a small square of popcorn; I waited and when I deemed that enough time had elapsed consumed it; she returned after a long period to claim it; and, I was completely mortified by the thought that I had stolen something.
I began to comprehend and appreciate, not in a theoretical sense; but in a deeply visceral practical way, the relationship between poverty and crime.
Early that following Monday morning I went to a location that hired day laborers, registered for this employment, and was lucky enough to get a day's work, though hungry somehow did what was required of me, was paid; and, that evening consumed my first real sustenance in five days.
I worked every day of that week as a casual laborer, and could afford to eat one meal a day, pay for gasoline, and sleep at night in my car in Flying J's parking lot.
On that following Friday, I was offered work in a nearby recycling center; I survived the day but by late evening of that day, it was clear that I had picked up some sort of virus on that job.
I began to experience an intense fever, and in its grip, to shake like a leaf.
I experienced a powerful need to urinate; and before I could don the sneakers I had divested myself in preparation for sleep I lost control of my bladder.
During the night this sequence recurred several times; and, in my wet and smelly state I declined to attempt to reach the Flying J restroom but shivered and shook through bouts of fever until morning came.
As dawn came, I found I had attracted the attention of another of Flying J's clientele because one of the sneakers I had hastily tried to don in my aborted effort to empty my bladder had fallen outside the car; and had remained there unclaimed as I succumbed to the effects of the virus.
This passerby became interested in my welfare, and persisted with concerned queries, even after I assured him that I was all right.
When the sun came up I drove less than a mile to a nearby rest area, took a change of clothes out the suitcase in the trunk; and, crept into the trees to change.
But I was completely dehydrated and realized that the liquid I drank to overcome this would be soon be filling the bladder which I could not control; I needed shelter near a toilet.
I threw myself on the mercy of a motel owner, and he rented me a room for Twenty Five Dollars which had no lock; but, had a chain that would give me some security while I was inside the room.
Once ensconced in this location, with the chain in place, I took a shower, my first in several weeks, slept for twelve hours; and somehow found the strength to report for my casual labor assignment on Monday.
Where do I find the strength to risk a return to that frenzied and chaotic existence?
The thing is, my life is not my own, it is dedicated to creating a monument to the two children who died in the Fire at Orange Lane; indeed, it is dedicated to creating a monument to all my hallowed dead, those individuals who died senselessly and needlessly in the decade of the Seventies in my native land.
My definition of happiness is a drama free existence; yet, I entertain and voluntarily embrace at the core of my being an obsession that has become during three decades an exercise in complete futility; a self imposed task and burden of which I anticipate I will never ever be relieved, until it is complete, which I am sure will not be in my lifetime.
In an introduction to his volume of poetry Dylan Thomas said:
I read somewhere of a shepherd who, when asked why made, from
within fairy rings, ritual observances to the moon to protect his flocks,
replied: ' I would be a damn fool if I didn't! '
These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written
for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I 'd be a damn fool if they
weren't.
During that period in Jamaica's extremely violent and sanguine history, I was forced to the realization that the vast majority of human beings were talking animals; habituated to playing the roles of territorial predator or prey to the exclusion of all others; that deeply embedded in our psyches were the attitudes, beliefs, ways of thinking and patterns of behavior that we had learned during our very lengthy sojourn in a ' state of nature; ' that, as a consequence, we create and recreate these primitive conditions wherever we go; thus, our cities replete with magnificent buildings and skyscrapers that demonstrate our burgeoning scientific and technological achievements, are concrete jungles; and, as Leon Uris in “Trinity” observed about Ireland, we have no future just the past happening over, and over, and over, again.
Having come to this realization; prompted not by hubris, but by necessity, I felt I had no alternative but dedicated my life to contributing to the human race realizing its potential for civilized and peaceful existence .
I had, in a very brief space of time in the decade of the Seventies, witnessed too many excruciatingly brutal incidents of man's inhumanity to man in my native land to do otherwise.
I read of a gang of men invading the home of a family composed of a man, his wife, and two underage daughters; these men, one after the other, raped the women of the household, including the two small children; and, forced the father and husband to watch.
All the members of this family survived this attack; but the husband and father had a heart attack and died within twenty four, unable to live with the horrific scenes he had witnessed.
Two posses clashed in a movie house on Slipe Road in Kingston; leaving one individual lying on the asphalt his throat slashed, breathing through his wound.
Those who survived the assault retreated to Concrete Jungle, the headquarters of their posse; and soon returned in strength to that parking lot.
Having witnessed the plight of their “ hidrin “ asphyxiating through his windpipe; and, made mindless with rage by this macabre scene, they proceeded South on Slipe Road; and, soon overtook two men who ran at their approach.
The Jungleists pursued these individuals in full cry, individuals who were very likely innocent bystanders caught up in this tragedy; the perpetrators of this assault would have been too streetwise to use the main thoroughfare to flee the scene of this crime, fully aware as they were, of the close proximity of “Concrete Jungle.”
The denizens of “Concrete Jungle” soon were snapping on the heels of their prey since many of them were riding motorcycles; the pursued when they saw they soon must be caught, sought refuge in large ramshackle wooden building that housed many poverty stricken families.
The frustrated and completely enraged Jungleists unable to identify or separate their prey from the tenants of the building used Molotov cocktails to set the wooden structure on fire; and, prevented those who inhabited that doomed structure with the force of their arms from rescuing their pitiful belongings from the flames.
They also prevented the Kingston Fire Brigade from fighting the greedy flames or assisting the occupants from rescuing furniture and bedding from the conflagration.
When the Police arrived, and latterly elements of the Jamaica Defense Force, the members of this Posse aided and abetted by the Member of Parliament for the area, who was also a Minister of Government continued to hinder all efforts to contain, extinguish or reduce the impact of the fire on the wretched existences of the occupants of that ill fated building.
It was reported that two children died in the Fire at Orange Lane; and, rumors sped through the city on the carrion wings of gossip and speculation, that mothers leaving the burning building had their children torn from their arms and that these were tossed back into the inferno where they perished.
There were many similar incidents of brutality and violence in the escalating conflict between rival political tribes, a conflict that bordered on civil war, that erupted in my native land during that period.
I was more deeply affected by this particular incident because it was perpetuated by members of the political movement I supported and promoted.
Also, because my first daughter was about one year old when that incident occurred; and was a boundless, endless source of love and affection in my life.
The thought of losing her so senselessly and needlessly caused me to wholly empathize with the parents of the children who died in the fire.
I used my sources in the city to create an accurate account of what had occurred; and became more and more incensed by the results of this investigation.
It was a close thing; but I managed to avoid becoming involved in violent retributions and reprisals against those who were responsible for this crime; in the end I concluded that to engage in violence would eventually cause me to become like ' them ' just another predator; and, I began the journey on the road to freedom and culminated in my becoming a voice of peace.
I was the Negotiating Officer for large numbers of workers who were employed in the Public Utilities in my country and it was decided by the powers that be that my idealism and naiveté would be a major obstacle and hindrance to the achievement of early and strike free settlements in contract negotiations for these workers so I was sent on an Organization of American States scholarship to study economic development in the State of Israel.
It was in the small park that contained the memorial to athletes who had died in the Munich Massacre that I made the decision that was to create a channel for my outrage and anger against those who engaged in brutal, criminal acts to further their political ambitions.
I was deep in a pit of depression created by my imminent divorce; and, experiencing my first period of separation from my two small children, a loss that had resulted in intense loneliness and anomie; a state that I believed would become permanent when my divorce was finalized.
I believed that my major contribution to this sad state of affairs had been the numerous sexual infidelities and affairs I had engaged in for the duration of my marriage; which had been facilitated by too numerous to mention lies and deceits; plagued by guilt I decided to tell the truth whatever the consequence for the rest of my life.
If the crimes of senseless brutality provided the motivation that galvanized the attempt to change the world, telling the truth provided the creative intelligence and objectivity that gave me an outside chance of being successful in this transcendent enterprise, an audit of the human condition.
In his book “Two Jamaica's,” Philip Curtin defined the problem confronting humanity in the Nineteenth Century with the development and increasing popularity of democratic ideas and principles and the strengthening of institutions based on these ideas.
He stated that:
The intellectual problem in its broadest setting was to find a viable set of ideas to explain the proper working of free-labor tropical society. (Curtin 102)
As I wrestled, during the decade of the Seventies of the Twentieth Century, with forces unleashed by an attempt to create positive developments in Jamaican society I determined that the this problem had never been addressed; and, that what was necessary was to create a body of ideas to explain the proper functioning of modern democratic societies composed of nuclear families with burgeoning scientific and technological establishments.
As previously stated my only ' edge ' over the past three decades since has been that the practice of this discipline, this has caused me to achieve moral consistency; and, created my ability to predict the future, with some degree of accuracy.
I have no idea what degree of deceit and obfuscation that would cause me to lose this gift so I tell the truth and do the right thing as much as I can, in the ever diminishing and receding hope that one day the ideology I have developed will contribute to right conquering might, and, the world of men and women in which I exist becomes aware that morality is the bridge between fact and function.
In this context it must be clear why I could never accept the compromise offered by
Ms Harris and document the inadequacies of phone discipline of Agents without doing anything further to ensure that my efforts were meaningful, that they impacted the Service Level positively.
In effect what I have been doing is similar to the modus operandi embraced by Shun Wilson, using his employment at Terminix to fund his career in comedy; the difference being that his appearances on stage had a negative effect on his performance, while my preoccupation with improving the efficiency of social and economic relations resulted in all the positive developments during my tenure at the Terminix Customer Care Center.
Also, even as I write momentous events are occurring in the world; the government in Iran is embracing, and becoming deeply involved in the game of brinkmanship that the Bush Administration initiated with their act of naked aggression against Iraq; a tawdry and risky enterprise that is almost certain to result in World War Three.
It struck me that I might solve two problems with this report, this very lengthy report; I might not only bring to your attention the situation in your Customer Care Center, but also I might bring forcibly bring to the attention of all of humanity the fact that the problem is cultural, and can only be resolved by a fundamental change in human culture.
The problem is that human history has made human beings incapable of creating accurate descriptions of certain social problems; making it well nigh impossible to resolve these problems.
The problem is the perspective of managers in the Customer Care Center, who to preserve certain benefits and prerogatives they currently enjoy have a distorted view of the operation; they cannot see how their presence affects efficiency, since if they saw this they would have to give up the very convenient hours they currently work.
Similarly, the Bush Administration wanted to cause a regime change in Iraq; and, contrived justifications to attack Iraq to precipitate this change and sink deeper and deeper into the quagmire of this conflict because the justifications, the false justifications for this action, have become a version of reality that mentally and emotionally, they cannot abandon.
“Beliefs are opportune, they conceal interests.”
Or, human beings have an unlimited capacity for self delusion, a theory that I have adduced and given the name the Cassandra Syndrome.
Within the first decade of my practice of the discipline of truth I developed the main elements of the body of ideas that would explain the proper functioning of democratic social systems; and, discovered that that was the easy part of this enterprise, that the difficult component of this endeavor was to communicate these ideas to even a single individual.
Indeed, before I departed from the State of Israel in 1975, I had been exposed to a specification of the attitudes and patterns of behavior that would form the basis for a functional culture; the “Modernization Ideals” as promulgated by Professor Gunnar Myrdal:
(1) efficiency;
(2) diligence;
(3) orderliness;
(4) punctuality;
(5) frugality;
(6) scrupulous honesty ( which pays in the long run an is a condition for raising efficiency in all social and economic relations);
(7) rationality in decisions on action (liberation from reliance on static customs, from group allegiances and favoritism, from superstitious beliefs and prejudices, approaching the rationally calculating “economic man” of Western liberal ideology);
(8) preparedness of change (for experimentation along new lines, and for moving around spatially, economically, socially);
(9) alertness to opportunities as they arise in a changing world;
(10) energetic enterprise;
(11) integrity and self-reliance;
(12) cooperativeness ( not limiting by redirecting egoistic striving in a socially beneficial channel; acceptance of responsibility for the welfare of the community and the nation);
(13) willingness to take the long view (and to forego short-term profiteering; subordination of speculation to investment and of commerce and finance to production, etc.).(Myrdal 61)
On my way to Israel I was gifted with a text “Personality and Psychotherapy” by John Dollard and Neal E. Miller which contained the following:
Human behavior is learned; precisely that behavior which is widely
felt to characterize man as a rational being, or as a member of a
particular nation or social class, is learned rather than innate.
The field of human learning covers phenomena which range all the way
from the simple, almost reflex, learning of a child to avoid a hot radiator,
to the complex processes of insight by which a scientist constructs a theory.
Throughout the whole range, however, the same fundamental factors
seem to be exceedingly important. These factors are: drive, cue, response
and reinforcement. They are frequently referred to with other roughly
equivalent words – drive as motivation, cue as stimulus, response as act
or thought, and reinforcement as reward. (Dollard 25)
In Israel, the notion of a learning circle composed of attitude and reinforcement was the basis of social engineering; the components of drive and cue were combined, subsumed under the heading attitude; and, response and reinforcement were combined as well.
Officially and ostensibly, what was being taught were aptitudes, the notion of changing the attitudes of individuals was politically an anathema; because it might be confused with, or construed to be, brainwashing, but I immediately understood the implications and saw the potential for cultural change.
Perhaps Israel made such a great and lasting impression on my personality because I was seeking something, anything to replace the failed way of life that I was enduring; both in my personal and professional life everything had gone to pieces, my marriage was failing causing my family to fall apart; my dreams of contributing to the successful government and progress in my native land was in ruins; and, most destructively and debilitating to my commitment my idealism and naivety had caused me to antagonize the experienced leadership in the political movement I supported.
But the achievements I witnessed in Israel were impressive, so impressive that I left that country with the belief that highly motivated human beings could accomplish anything if they set their minds to it.
In Israel I had witnessed the desert blooming; I had witnessed a country which had managed to integrate and settle large numbers of refugees in successive waves of migration from the Arab countries after the wars with those neighbors from which this small nation emerged victorious.
I met human beings who possessed massive intellects, Yehuda Don, Yair Levi, and Shimon Zuckerman during a brief space of time.
I was regaled with stories of the Kibbutz Movement, of the ' crazy men ' who had been the Change Agents in these organizational structures.
After three and one half months I returned to Jamaica, my confidence restored; having learned albeit by rote what it meant to be a catalyst for social change.
I was armed with the modernization ideals and set about understanding my culture so that I could appreciate and understand better those attitudes and patterns of behavior that would be obstacles to achieving the quality of life that would reduce the intense conflict that tainted every aspect of existence.
Professor Rex Nettleford recommended a text “The Sociology of Slavery” written by Orlando Patterson and I began a journey into the tragic and violent history of my island in the sun.
It became clear that it was a society engendered and sustained by intense violence and brutality:
Professor Paterson reported in the “Sociology of Slavery,” that:
Sloane, who never questioned the idea of slavery and whose evidence is therefore reliable with regard to punishment, wrote that the usual punishment for rebellion was:
Burning them by nailing them down on the ground with crooked
sticks on every limb and applying the Fire by degrees from the
feet and hands, burning them gradually up to the head, whereby
their pains are extravagant . . . .
For crimes of lessor nature Gelding, or chopping off half of the
foot with an Ax . . . For running away they put Iron rings of
great weight on their Ankles, or Pottocks about their Necks,
which are Iron Rings with two long Necks rivetted to them,
or a Spur in the Mouth . . . For Negligence, they are usually
whipt by the overseer with Lance-wood Switches, till they be
bloody, and several of the Switches broken, being first tied up
by the hands in the Mill-Houses . . .After they are whip'd till
they are Raw, some put on their Skins Pepper and Salt to
make them smart; at other times their Masters will drop
melted Wax on their skins and use several exquisite
tortures . . .
When Leslie published his account in 1739 the barbarities seemed to have been just as excessive. Slaves were still burned to death for striking a white man and ' others they starve to death with a loaf of hanging before their Mouths . . . ' Like Sloane, Leslie claimed that ' such severities may in some shape be excused.' (Paterson 83)
Even as I studied the tragic history of my country in spare moments I was doing what I had been trained to do in Israel; organize cooperative societies among workers.
The first project I was involved in was to organize a group of stevedores to load oil in cans and pails, and, fertilizer materials over the Esso Dry Cargo Dock.
The project had been operated by a Contractor who had absconded, allegedly taking with him pension fund contributions made by stevedores.
In the past when a motor vessel moored at the Dry Cargo Dock a large number of workers gathered at the site; and, the Contractor chose from this group the gangs of stevedores who would unload the fertilizer material, or, load for export to the Caribbean and Central America the drums, cans and pails of Lube Oil.
The fertilizer was transported on conveyor belts, which were extended when needed to the side of the motor vessel; these belts moved the material into storage bins which had chutes through which the fertilizer flowed into the bags in which it was marketed to farmers in Jamaica.
The Fertilizer Plant was owned by Grace Chemicals, the Lube Oil Operation by Esso; that Company had constructed both facilities but afterwards had sold the Fertilizer Plant to Grace.
If a stevedore was chosen to participate in the operation, he worked all the hours necessary to load or unload the motor vessel.
As long as a motor vessel was in port, a large number of potential stevedores remained at the gate of the location hoping that they might receive a few hours work; the unemployment rate remained above twenty per cent for the entire period under consideration in that poverty stricken nation.
If any stevedore failed to make his maximum effort, for any reason; or, if he engaged in any behavior that could, in any way, be construed to be inimical to the efficiency of the operation, he was immediately replaced from the group of hopefuls who remained at the gate, available to take advantage of just such a contingency.
Under this regime loading rates of up to twenty four tons per hour were achieved in the loading of lube oil.
This operation was disrupted by the arrival of a Motor Vessel that could unload its cargo of fertilizer without the assistance of stevedores; and, was designated by them, as the “automatic boat.”
Motivated and lead by the skilled workers in the operations, by those who supervised the stevedores and operated the winches, the stevedores opted to join a Union.
To support this demand, the stevedores went on strike; and, the Contractor recruited strikebreakers from the nearby political stronghold of the Opposition Party, Tivoli Gardens.
This should have resulted in a bloody confrontation but for a deal that was struck between those on strike, and, the strikebreakers; it was decided that one gang of stevedores would be recruited from among the residents of Tivoli Gardens, if and when the strike was settled.
Under the auspices of the Ministry of Labor, a poll was taken and with the majority of stevedores voted in the affirmative, the Union was granted bargaining rights.
With the advent of the Union, the threat of dismissal lost much of its potency, as did the allied mechanism of randomly selecting stevedores; whenever a motor vessel arrived at the dock, the same gangs of stevedores participated in the loading or unloading of its cargo; the only change in the composition of the stevedoring gangs was a consequence of the implementation of the agreement that had avoided a bloody confrontation that required that one gang of stevedores come from Tivoli Gardens.
As a consequence of the new balance of power, loading rates fell; indeed, on the graveyard shift, in both operations, stevedores adopted reclining positions and emitted loud sounds as they inhaled and exhaled, auditory expressions much more appropriate to bedrooms than to the confines of a industrial operation.
The Contractor tried everything that he could think of reimpose his authority but failed miserably; the fertilizer unloading operation was tied to the Dry Cargo Dock because of the conveyor belt system, the lube oil operation was not; and, Esso soon ran out of patience, and moved the loading of lube oil to the Kingston Commercial Docks, at much increased costs, causing the Contractor who was deprived of a significant portion of his income, to be navigating the shoals and reefs of insolvency.
He eventually absconded; and, fresh from my training to be a Change Agent in Israel, I was interjected into this industrial equation to restore the efficiency and viability of the operation.
This is not a dry, boring description of an innocuous industrial enterprise; what I am doing is creating the context to explain the proper functioning of modern democratic societies.
I am suggesting that every nation, every social or economic institution, is trapped in the same evolutionary process as the stevedoring group and the Customer Care Center in Memphis.
Efficiency was destroyed in the stevedoring operation with the advent of the Union because the motivation to perform created by the immediate and ever present threat of dismissal was removed.
Indiscipline and sloth reared its ugly head on the evening and graveyard shifts, and, during weekends and on holidays, in the Terminix Customer Care Center because of a lack of proper oversight by management.
In both operations there was a lack of motivation that resulted in indifference and lack of effort in performing the functions required for an efficient operation.
Low levels of motivation is the cause of the failure of the education system; the high rates of divorce; low productivity; the palpable incapacity of the government to govern; the failure of the family; for most, if not all, of the social ills affecting citizens of the USA.
The fact is that the human race was driven up the steep incline towards civilization; and, in the failed attempt to create a functioning democracy the degree and extent to which coercion, in any form, can be applied to any citizen has been substantially reduced – without creating an alternative means of motivating the patterns of behavior necessary for societal order and progress.
China and Japan continue to achieve relatively high growth rates in their economies because they still coerce their populations; and, this is the situation in other Asian nations, an American citizen was recently sentenced to twenty five years in jail for writing graffiti on a wall in Bangkok, Thailand, compare the situation in Western civilizations, where human beings are unsuccessfully attempting to duplicate the Westminster model of parliamentary democracy.
The fact is that there is no credible evidence that any nation in the world has ever achieved industrial revolution under a democratic regime.
From the beginning of time human beings have relied on coercion in some form, overt or covert, and that habit has not been broken; indeed, if small pockets of human beings have developed gentler more civilized cultures, these have not endured; they have not survived the onslaught of their more aggressive neighbors.
In his watershed work, Two Jamaica's, Philip Curtin concluded that:
Jamaicans of the ruling class had only two readily available sources
of ideas, neither of which really fit the situation in which they found
themselves. One source was in the ideas and the example of Great Britain
and the Empire. The mother country was indeed a free-labor society with
an economic order that might be copied in Jamaica, but the British situation
was otherwise very different. British thought in all fields was principally
oriented toward an explanation of British society and a solution of British problems. These problems were those of a temperate country entering a
period of political democracy, economic growth, urbanization, and industrialization. Ideas designed to solve them could hardly be helpful to
a declining planting society.
The other source was the body of Jamaican beliefs, attitudes, sentiments,
and emotional reactions that had been built up under slavery. A direct
return to slavery, was, of course, impossible, but the old regime was the
only kind of tropical society within the experience of most Jamaicans.
One tendency, therefore, in the reconstruction of a new tropical society
was to build on the model of the old with the single omission of slavery.
(Curtin 103)
The reality is that everywhere on Planet Earth, including in the Southern States of the USA, that no viable alternative was developed to coercion; and, those who attempted to ameliorate, reduce and mitigate the rigors and excesses of Absolutism reduced the extent and degree to which overt and covert forms of coercion could be applied to citizens without developing an alternative means of motivating action.
Thus, the revolutions that occurred notably in France, the USA, Russia and China resulted in sterile exchanges of elites that had little, or no impact, on the status quo; nor altered significantly the ubiquitous and sere reality of dominant social roles of territorial predators and their prey.
There was no revolution in Great Britain, which nation developed the much respected and revered Westminster model of parliamentary democracy, which has had little impact on the status quo of attitudes, beliefs and patterns of behavior which were the cultural inheritance of a race that evolved out of a ' state of nature.'
During the period that limited and curtailed the power and prerogatives of the British King, no change occurred in the status quo because the change was accomplished by the application of force, because the nobles of the Realm accumulated sufficient military might to change and redress the balance of power vis-Ã -vis their King; and, as a consequence, became possessors of certain rights and privileges in law and custom.
Charles I, pushing his finances to bankruptcy and trying to force a new prayer book on Scotland, was badly beaten by the Scots, who demanded £850 per day from the English until the two sides reached agreement. Charles had no choice but to summon Parliament.The Long Parliament, taking an aggressive stance, steadfastly refused to authorize any funding until Charles was brought to heel. The Triennial Act of 1641 assured the summoning of Parliament at least every three years, a formidable challenge to royal prerogative. The Tudor institutions of fiscal feudalism (manipulating antiquated feudal fealty laws to extract money), the Court of the Star Chamber and the Court of High Commission were declared illegal by Act of Parliament later in 1641. A new era of leadership from the House of Commons (backed by middle class merchants, tradesmen and Puritans) had commenced. Parliament resented the insincerity with which Charles settled with both them and the Scots, and despised his links with Catholicism.1642 was a banner year for Parliament. They stripped Charles of the last vestiges of prerogative by abolishing episcopacy, placed the army and navy directly under parliamentary supervision and declared this bill become law even if the king refused his signature. Charles entered the House of Commons (the first king to do so), intent on arresting John Pym, the leader of Parliament and four others, but the five conspirators had already fled, making the king appear inept. Charles traveled north to recruit an army and raised his standard against the forces of Parliaments (Roundheads) at Nottingham on August 22, 1642. England was again embroiled in civil war. (Wikipedia.org)
After the Industrial Revolution in that country, workers developed the power to restrain trade and production of goods and services, used that power to organize Trade Unions, accumulated a share of political power; and, attained certain rights and privileges in law and custom.
The point I am trying to make that each of these classes, the nobility and the working class, accumulated and applied force to change their status; they used coercion, and, as a consequence as a group were elevated to the status, that in totality, permitted them to be predators, as against always being subordinated and being perennially the prey of an Absolute Ruler.
As have women, minorities, and, laterally, the gay population.
In all these situations; might contended with might and was victorious; there has never been an occasion when right conquered might.
In his book, “ The Challenge of World Poverty “ Professor Myrdal states:
It has never occurred in recorded history that a privileged group, on its own
initiative and simply in order to give reality to its ideals, has climbed down
from its privileges and opened its monopolies to the unprivileged. (Myrdal 81)
Right has never conquered right from the beginning of the human story, that is what will create function, since morality is the bridge between facts and function.
What is popular, or results in votes for ambitious politicians is not always right, nor does it always contribute to improved function.
For example, homosexuality is a learned behavior; it is not embedded in the genes, it is mostly a consequence of the sexual abuse of children and adolescents by adults; yet because the gay population is vocal and organized there is a move afoot to elevate this aberration and perversion of nature into an alternative life style.
We have become so unprincipled, so depraved that what has been for most of human history an indicator of the triumph of uninhibited hedonism, decadence and moral decline, the certain harbinger of the destruction of empires and great civilizations; we would make legitimate.
This could result in slow but sure suicide for our race; it could limit and curtail the operation of our gene pool and prevent it producing the innovations and positive changes that ensure our survival and progress as more and more individuals are seduced by the siren call of this alternative lifestyle; more than anything else this is an accurate and absolute measure of our moral turpitude.
What I posit is a world in which right triumphs over might; a world in which human beings rely on positive reinforcements in their relationships with the other; a world which rejects the roles of territorial predator or prey, emerges from the ' state of nature ' and realizes its potential for civilized behavior.
This world became more than a potential with the development and implementation of an open ended system of rewards for the lube oil loading operation; this innovation was created by Vernon McKenzie Meikle, Hiram “Pete” Fenton and Leighton “Skeets McGregor, the last two mentioned individuals now sadly deceased.
These representatives of a transnational company, one of those structures then attracting massive opprobrium for causing all the economic ills affecting Third World countries, translated the rates per hour that had been traditionally applied in the stevedoring operation into a rate per ton.
The significance of this watershed development was that historically when the stevedores were paid an hourly rate; and, during the period when the threat of dismissal had been extinguished by the advent of the Union, the stevedores in both operations began to act in concert to reduce the loading and unloading rates to increase their take home pay.
The development and implementation of a rate per ton for each stevedoring category which would the basis for the payment of wages; created a situation in which the management and the stevedoring group in the lube oil segment of the operation, had the same objective; to load the motor vessel as quickly as possible.
Further, the managers representing Esso in the negotiations that took place in an attempt to resume the loading of lube oil over the Dry Cargo Dock, proposed that any demurrage savings achieved by increases in the loading rate would be shared equally among the stevedores; the Esso “Caribe” was hired for $1200 per hour they disclosed, a not insignificant amount; so increases in the loading rate above the established norm of 8 tons per hour, had the potential to produce significant increases in the take home pay of each stevedore.
It is necessary to emphasize that this should have been an obvious and completely logical development in the context of the evolution of this organizational structure; instead of being the earthshaking, watershed development that it came to be.
To further illuminate and elucidate this point, in the context of the deep distrust and suspicion that drove, exacerbated and escalated the intense competition between entrepreneurs and other members of the ruling class; and, members of the working class for goods and services, between Capitalist interests and those who represented Labor that was the experience in the decade of the Seventies in Jamaica; it was the one and only occasion on which I observed managers to voluntarily and without coercion disclose information about any item of cost, however relevant to the proceedings, in their operations.
The Esso Refinery in Jamaica was competing with other Refineries in the region owned by Esso as well as those owned and operated by the other major Oil Companies for the lube oil markets in the Caribbean and Central America; and, the cost of exporting this product from the Commercial Docks, which required that the cargo be transported in flatbed trucks from the Lube Oil Plant to that location, partially but not completely explained the more forthcoming attitude of Esso in this one negotiation.
Implied everywhere in this analysis of the evolution of human culture is a deep and totally innovative appreciation of the laming effects of repression that intensely inhibited the application of the higher mental processes of human beings to resolve the problems produced by changes in the political environment, changes precipitated by efforts to create social justice and functioning democracies.
On the first occasion that this open ended system of rewards was utilized a loading rate of eight tons per hour was achieved; thereafter this rate was increased to twelve tons per hour.
The management of Esso procured from a similar operation in a Baltic State, improved loading hooks; and, the loading rate was increased to sixteen tons per hour.
On one occasion the loading operation was completed on New Year's Eve; the stevedores calculated that to free to celebrate this holiday they would need to achieve a loading rate of twenty four tons and this rate was attained.
Whenever an increased rate was achieved, the stevedores were able to sustain it in subsequent loading operations.
As the level of cooperation increased between the Esso management and the members of the Stevedoring Cooperative pilfering of lube oil decreased, because it was no longer sanctioned by the opinion leaders in the group.
The stevedores, a militant group of workers, became less hostile in relation to the Esso management; and, it became increasingly difficult to motivate them to engage in any form of industrial action that affected the operation or the amicable relations that had developed subsequent to the application of the open ended system of rewards.
As this development unfolded I could not help but perceive that the carrot was a far superior means of motivating the other than the stick; and, consciously adopted this as the basis for all my social relationships, and reduced the level of conflict in my life and cooperation replaced competition as the ethos of my existence.
Yet I had no success in convincing anyone of the validity of the development that had occurred in this operation; in the fertilizer operation the tonnage rate was applied only after a lengthy strike, and was imposed on Grace.
The new payment system was developed without their input; and over their resistance, it therefore never had the same effect on the level of cooperation in that segment of the business.
As I have indicated, a conflict between political tribes raged in Jamaica during this period, and the principles that were applied and resulted in a very significant increase in efficiency in this operation; if they had been applied, would have had the impact of reducing the intensity of this conflict that claimed so many innocent lives, senselessly and needlessly.
This palpable inability and incapacity to perceive the manifest benefits of substituting positive reinforcements for coercion was so irrational and illogical that I was galvanized to seek its cause.
After subjecting this phenomenon to an exhaustive period of study and examination I concluded that the habit of depending on coercion was so powerful because it had been practiced for such a long period of human history; and, because it was learned in the crucible that existence in a ' state of nature' had been.
The true impact and length of that learning period could be demonstrated by comparing it with the life stages of contemporary human adult; who would be considered an infant for the initial few years of its existence; that individual would be considered adolescent with the onset of puberty and until he or she attained maturity; and, would be considered an adult until death.
If the period of adulthood began at age eighteen, usually that period would last for three or four times as long as all the other periods combined.
If we compare the evolution of the human race it would be clear that the period of its infancy lasted much longer than the period of infancy experienced by any contemporary adult; if we measure the period of infancy from the point when homo sapiens became the dominant humanoid animal and have it end when the human race discovered agriculture and ceased to be hunting and gathering societies, we are looking at a period that spanned millions of years.
Further, that period was the most intense learning experience for the human race because of the instability of the planet, because there were successive Ice Ages, and, because human beings were surrounded by animals which were much better suited to survival physically than they were, dinosaurs, saber tooth tigers, mastodons, etc.
Ergo, we should not be surprised that patterns of behavior learned then became powerful habits and these that are difficult to extinguish; for example, the strongest human beings then, the best hunters in reality had the power of life and death over other members of the tribe because they must have had a powerful and decisive say in the allocation and distribution of the energy resources they procured; and, also because they defended other weaker members of the tribe from the forays of other denizens seeking food.
Is it a large stretch of the imagination to perceive that this distribution of power was deeply embedded and formalized in the Absolutist regimes, that held sway for most of human history; wherein a ruler had the power of life and death over all of his subjects?
I have developed the hypothesis that the major factor determining the intrinsic nature of human culture was the motivation, coercion, relied on by the vast majority of human beings; this ensured that the ethos of all surviving cultures would be competition; that a small percentage of human beings would control most of the political, social and economic power; that there would be conflict and that this would manifest itself in wars, civil disturbances and criminal activity.
Further, it is clear that we never consciously chose, coercion, what would become the major determinant of 'the conscious and unconscious premises for thinking and action;'
This was the only model for social relationships we had been exposed to; over the millions of years of the infancy of the human race we had become habituated to the roles of territorial predator or prey so when we began to built civilizations; these roles that mandated how individuals acted when they confronted another human being that was more powerful, and how they related to the weak, were deeply embedded in social organizations.
There was another fact that greatly contributed to the development of Absolutist regimes, the competition and conflict between those who settled in cities, and engaged in agriculture for the most part on the deltas of large rivers; and, those who continued to practice a nomadic, pastoral existence.
The domestication of horses combined with the military skills required for this nomadic way of life, caused these populations to be an ever present threat to those who lived in the cities; and, allowed those who governed and protected city dwellers to concentrate in their hands ever increasing increments of power.
The standing armies which were required to protect city dwellers from marauding bands spawned by the nomadic populations also served to legitimize the claims of these early rulers, who were also supported, and sometimes ordained by the priests of local deities; thus, the institution of kingship emerged and powerful links of convenience between the military, popular religion and the absolute ruler, forged; a tradition of distributing and perpetuating power that can be observed in contemporary governments.
In some cases, the king was the strongest warrior among those who inhabited the city; or, if the city was conquered, the leader of the conquering horde became king and started a new dynasty.
There is nothing new under the sun; and the utilization and manipulation of real, contrived or imagined terrorist threats to garner support for the many bizarre, bordering on lunatic policies of the Bush Administration validates this truism.
Recently, President Bush declaimed that every component of the insurgency in Iraq was evil; a more rational and logical perspective of this very predictable phenomenon, given the vacuum of power created by the regime change precipitated by the actions of no one else but President Bush, is that it is an intense competition for the proceeds from the second largest pool of oil on Planet Earth and that it is no more unusual or remarkable than the political gyrations and policy gymnastics being engaged in by Presidential hopefuls; for example, the recent statement attributed to Senator John McCain, someone who should know better, someone about whom I have always entertained great hopes, that Baghdad has achieved a level of safety and security that allowed him to travel through its precincts unsecured and unprotected, without great personal risk, what a bumbling, naive, sycophantic, ingenuous whopper!
Iraqis face 'immense' suffering
The International Committee of the Red Cross says the situation for ordinary Iraqis is getting steadily worse.
Four years after the US-led invasion, the ICRC says the conflict is inflicting immense suffering, and calls for greater protection of civilians.
An Iraqi woman quoted in the report said people wanted help to collect bodies lining streets every morning.
The ICRC still has a presence in Iraq despite the bombing of its Baghdad offices three and a half years ago.
In the report called Civilians Without protection - The Ever-worsening Crisis in Iraq, the Red Cross asked Iraqis what could be done to help them.
The answer was a shock, says ICRC director of operations Pierre Kraehenbuehl.
I saw a four-year-old boy sitting beside his mother's body, which had been decapitated by the explosion. He was talking to her, asking her what had happened
Saad
"The suffering that Iraqi men, women and children are enduring today is unbearable and unacceptable," he said.
"The ICRC calls on all those who can influence the situation on the ground to act now to ensure that the lives of ordinary people are spared and protected. This is an obligation under international humanitarian law for both states and non-state actors."
The famously neutral International Red Cross will not blame anyone in particular for what it calls the current disastrous security situation, says the BBC's Imogen Foulkes in Geneva.
The report makes it clear that nobody - including the Iraqi government and coalition forces - has done enough so far, our correspondent adds.
'Simply unbearable'
Red Cross workers asked Iraqi women about their lives.
"If there's anything that anybody could do that would really help us today would be to help us collect the bodies that line the streets in front of our homes every morning and that we find nobody dares to touch or remove after security reasons," one woman said.
Women found it "simply unbearable" to confront their children with them morning after morning as they tried to take them to school, the woman added. (BBC News Report)
President Bush is becoming visibly more and more distraught, he is doing very little to hide his deep emotional disquiet, and, the inescapable fact that he is becoming increasingly irrational as his innumerable designs and strategies, his very idiotic intellectual and ideational constructs are frustrated and thwarted by contact and application to the existing social reality; a mental state which is an ever increasing threat to the very survival of democracy.
I perceive an entirely different reality from the vast majority of Americans, whom it is becoming more and more clear that they are palpably incapable of connecting the dots, that they are completely out of touch with reality.
To the body politic in the USA, the emergence of Senator Barack Obama is a truly remarkable, very inspiring and uplifting political phenomenon; I think Karl Rove et al see him as their best and dearest hope of electing a Republican President; I would not be surprised if many of those who are promoting the fact that he is a very charismatic personality with their adulation and donations, have had, hanging on their clotheslines sometime in the past fifty years, bed sheets with holes in them; as, very opportunistically, they do their best to make him the Democratic candidate confronting some white Caucasian even another actor turned politician like Fred Thompson - in these dark, perilous times of unparalleled national insecurity.
I happen to think that President Reagan was a great President – only if he is judged by American standards, the same attitudes that found acceptable the situation I confronted on my first day on shift in the Terminix Customer Care Center.
Nor do I think Republicans need to worry overmuch about Senator Hilary Clinton; that there will be a Clinton Dynasty to replace the Bush Dynasty that has fared so miserably, so pitiably that has been so dysfunctional that it would have been the hope of any and every objective observer that its failure would have convinced the most implacably traditional voter of the futility and potential agony, of the searing masochism inherent in trying to revive this antiquated wholly anachronistic institution.
I am sure that at some opportune moment in the year ahead a new list of former President Bill Clinton's amorous conquests during a period when he has had so much time on his hands, will be made public; and, be the albatross of a wholly ironic, insentient, insensate, implacable, cruel destiny signaling the consignment of Senator Hilary Clinton's campaign to the poisonously odorous dumpster of failed dynastic pretensions.
The Surge strategy will fail; it has already failed in the eyes of any intelligent observer, as the fighters of the Insurgency relinquish the streets of Baghdad to the augmented infidel forces and melt away to ply their tragic wares of death, dismemberment and despair in other less dangerous and tightly guarded sectors of this beleaguered, unfortunate, ill fated nation, as it was always certain they would; and, the Shia majority opportunistically begins to demonstrate for the removal of Allied Forces, how, in God's name, can Americans be so consistently and perennially naive and gullible?
The answer of course is that there is so much spin, so much propaganda in the past six years that no one in this deluded nation knows the difference between the convenient lie and the inconvenient truth; ordinary men and women, for example, Jeremy Barthalow and Shenika Harris, have the same problem as Senator John McCain and President George Bush they have completely lost touch with reality; the spin doctors have created a vortex of such power that it seems certain to suck into its impenetrable depths the hopes and aspirations of citizens of this nation, both those now alive and unborn generations yet to come.
Is the suicide bomb attack in a cafeteria of the Iraq parliament building in the heart of the Green Zone, a harbinger of the abject failure of the Surge, or that the Shia controlled Government have joined the groups in the country vociferously demanding, “ Yankees, Go Home?”
Does it seem to anyone else that there are individuals in Iraq, who are monitoring the political situation in the USA and who have such power as to be able to stage strategic acts of violence to totally embarrass the Bush Administration?
The major casualty of the suicide attack on the parliament and the destruction of the bridge is the propaganda campaign to convince Americans that the Surge is working, that Baghdad has become safer.
If, after four years of occupation such a coherent, powerful and adaptable force exists, is it not clear that the Allied Forces cannot stop the civil war; but, by continuing the occupation they can only prolong the agony of the Iraq people; and, waste American lives in what has become an exercise in futility?
Perhaps the best bet, to guide this nation to safe harbor through the reefs and shoals of the perils ahead, is that spokesman for the preservation of the natural balance, that promoter and purveyor of the inconvenient truth, former Vice President Al Gore.
Perhaps he is most qualified to confront and overcome what must, at last, be confronted and overcome, the inconvenient truths of our collective past; and, the impact these are having on contemporary existence.
The problem, the fundamental problem, is that the best description of the existing social and political milieu can be found in a line from a poem I wrote in my young adulthood:
“ Where lines brawl on a barren world, which to believe.”
Human beings have developed an unlimited capacity for self delusion, a characteristic that as its discoverer, its modern discoverer, I have named the Cassandra Syndrome.
What creates this debilitating characteristic is the fact that the human psyche is divided into two compartments, the conscious and the unconscious; and, the human animal developed and refined over many millennia the capacity to move inconvenient truths into the unconscious compartment, into the oblivion of ignorance.
Jesus, in extremis, cried out, “Father forgive them, they know
not what they do.”
The fact is that the vast majority of human beings in certain selected areas do not know what they are doing.
I state again for emphasis that this is the major obstacle to creating positive developments.
It is the most obscure and esoteric challenge facing human beings.
First of all, this applies only to social problems; it has little impact on the physical world, which has caused a dangerous dichotomy in the development of knowledge in the physical universe, as against the social milieu.
In the physical universe there is no problem, placing a man on the moon, transplanting organs, or, eradicating the Anopheles mosquito; that is beyond the mental acuity of members of the human race.
In the social milieu, there is no problem that we can confront and overcome; the social diseases of poverty, crime, drug abuse, corruption in government, the socialization of our young, world peace; all these issues are beyond our intellectual capabilities.
At the core of this stupidity in respect of these problems is the fact that we are incapable of creating accurate descriptions of these issues, of processing and interpreting the facts of social reality into ideas that would be the basis for function.
I wish to present a hypothesis to account for this incapacity.
Early in documented human history, there was developed the notion that ethics and values, for example, justice, compassion, equality, mercy and liberty should inform social relationships; but these ideals were wholly unrealistic given the type of social organization that had been developed based on the culture that humanity had evolved and become habituated to during the period when they were hunting and gathering societies in the 'state of nature;' and, which culture was deeply embedded in the social institutions that existed then.
Another very important factor in understanding this hypothesis is implied throughout this essay; that those habits have not been broken, that human beings still carry the attitudes and patterns of behavior developed in the ' state of nature ' much like crabs carry their shells; that these habits are the basis for thinking and action, and human cities are replete with structures that reflect the advanced technology and architectural skills that we have developed; but, socially, they continue to be concrete jungles in which ' might is right ' and these paved and asphalted surfaces and magnificent buildings continue to be havens for territorial predators and their prey.
To illustrate the difference between concept and precept in human civilizations there are many inconvenient truths I could bring to the attention of my readers; but, let me begin what I sincerely hope will be - a process of debunking the myths, irrational beliefs, illusions and delusions that creates the intellectual logjam that is currently making social development impossible - by creating a different perspective on the attack on Iraq.
Hindsight is supposed to be twenty twenty vision; but, even with the help of hindsight we cannot seem to create the accurate description of this problem that is the necessary prerequisite to its solution.
In fact, if by some miracle, and this would take supernatural intervention on a massive, unprecedented scale, victory were to be achieved by the Allied Forces, would this restore the popularity and credibility of the Bush Administration, would the President be seen as the conquering hero that he appeared to be after his famous speech announcing victory and the cessation of hostilities from the deck of that aircraft carrier five years ago?
It probably would, but victory would not change the facts of this situation; and, if victory were seen to vindicate and validate the actions and policies of the Bush Administration, is there no one able to see that such a massive change in public opinion would completely validate the fact that might continues to be right in human societies?
That the success or failure of the attack by Allied Forces on Iraq, is subject, as are all circumstances, to a universal and eternal equation, a connection between cause and effect, a fact that we ignore at our peril, a fact that is the fundamental cause of our peril.
And, we continue to fail to learn the lessons of recent history, even of history as recent as the Vietnam War.
The justification, the major justification for that incursion was the domino theory; that with the fall of South Vietnam, to the Communists, that this would be followed by all other nations of South East Asia succumbing to the lure of the communist ideology to the detriment of American interests.
Again, we have hindsight to cause us to perceive the reality, this has not happened; the nations of South East Asia, whatever their ideological position, continue to work towards what they perceive to be their national interests.
More, the Monroe Doctrine, would seem to legitimize the right of the USA to dictate the ideological complexion of governments that should be permitted to hold sway in the Americas; yet Socialist Governments now hold power in South and Central America, added to the perennial thorn in the side of the USA, the Castro Government in Cuba, without this having a calamitous impact on trade or the interests of the USA.
It is time for us to accept the world as it is, that it will never be as we want it to be, or as threatening as our irrational fears tell us it might be, facts rule; and what is necessary is that we develop the ability to perceive and apply the facts that will support function.
The fact is, in a world with a specific balance of power, we discovered ideals that were unrealistic in that social and political matrix; and, made an adjustment to that reality.
We afforded great honor to, and promoted these ideals; even while we paid lip service and did not practice them.
We used them as window dressing to obscure our savage, primitive nature even as we continued the job of stabilizing the planet, an enterprise which required the use of brutal, and often, deadly force.
Thus, we created a dichotomy in human affairs, an ever increasing difference between concept and precept, by consigning to our unconscious many inconvenient truths.
We lamed our intellects by the simple mechanism and expedient of becoming adept at lying, deceiving and obfuscating; and, paid a high price, we can no longer apply our higher mental processes to certain aspects and components of our existence.
We discovered and came to revere an individual who gained wisdom in the conduct of human affairs by telling, the truth; unable to follow his example; but, perceiving that his ideas might become universally popular we opportunistically wove a tissue of lies, only preserving kernels of truth, around the facts of his existence.
We wove a web of lies around the circumstance of his birth, that it was a fulfillment of prophecy; and twisted and distorted history to make it fit our version of that birth.
We, the human race, created a myth that that man who we revered conquered death, by stealing his body; and, falsifying reports that he had been seen by his most loyal supporters and followers.
Nothing escaped our attempts to prostitute his life and teachings; very opportunistically, so as not to provoke the wrath of the Roman Empire, we vested that bloodthirsty monolith with a compassion that history strenuously denies that they were capable of; and, claimed that the Agents of this Empire did not react murderously to an individual claiming that he was the “ King of the Jews, “ a claim that was wholly inconsistent with documented history; which documents that the Roman Empire during that period obliterated completely any human tribe that did not accept the Pax Romana.
Most damaging of all, they concealed their inability to practice the prescription that was at the core of his world view, that would have produced societal function, by making it magical and supernatural; telling the truth will make you free became, to become a Christian you would need to be filled with the Holy Ghost.
But this was a completed fabrication which perpetuated the status quo; and, function depended as it had before, on coercion; and, the social roles of territorial predator and prey, continued to be dominant in the vast majority of human societies.
The most compelling argument supporting this heretical and iconoclastic hypothesis is that the Seminaries of the Roman Catholic Church produce many human beings who cannot make any claim to be Christians, who in fact are pederasts and sodomites; who have been protected by a Church hierarchy who developed the quaint self serving notion that the lifetimes of suffering produced by the sexual abuse of children can somehow be justified, rectified and forgiven because of the payment to victims of large sums of money.
The other major support to the massive edifice of deceit and obfuscation constructed by the Catholic Church is the fact that the practice of the discipline of truth is, and always has been, so difficult, so replete with agony and suffering that very few could practice this discipline long enough to become sure of the inestimable value of telling the truth.
But I have and this has transformed me into the ultimate iconoclast of human history.
I see with awful clarity that the threat of coercion, supported and augmented where necessary by brutal example, has been for all of human history the motivation that impelled human beings up the steep incline towards civilization.
That from the moment man split the atom and began to be able to construct weapons of mass destruction, coercion based culture began to be anachronistic; because coercion based culture with its ethos of competition must produce intense conflicts, and conflict between populations or nations armed with weapons of mass destruction must create destruction on such a scale that to avoid such catastrophes freedom must be curtailed producing more sources of injustice and conflict, which must eventually precipitate a regression to savagery.
I contend that human beings are insulated from the existing social reality by the skeletons in their cupboards; by the a social system in which no individual has free will, one in which for a human being to be a success, for a human being to enjoy even a minimum standard of living he, or she, must accept, or appear to accept, the reality convenient to those who have power over them, a reality that reflects the interests of those who control ninety five per cent of the economic power in the matrix in which they exist; moreover, this social system was shaped not by human choice but was determined when this was a prerequisite to the very survival of the human race, it was shaped by the sheer necessity of human beings becoming adept at applying coercion to the beings around them, in the crucible of the ' state of nature ' over millions of years and inevitably they became habituated to perpetuating that endless cycle of intense suffering and despair.
I became trapped in a continuum in which human beings, including children and senior citizens, were being brutally maimed and murdered needlessly and senselessly on a daily basis.
I decided that this situation was emotionally, morally and functionally unacceptable to me, that it was at odds with my conscience and I determined to discover a body of ideas that would be the basis for a social system in which human beings could realize what I believe is there innate potential for civilized existence; that as they became adept at utilizing coercion they could embrace positive reinforcements as the means relied on to motivate the other and shatter for all time, the endless cycle of suffering and despair.
I discerned the roots and the awesome reality of Absolutism, the Medusa like visage and unrelenting cruelty of coercion based culture, shaped in the many millennial of existence in a ' state of nature, ' and, at last, confronted the impervious and immutable monolith of ideas, irrational beliefs, illusions, delusions, ways of thinking and patterns of behavior that was human culture, that created, recreated and was continually reinventing itself throughout human history that had withstood every assault of moral and progressive forces; to the extent that instead of being changed by them it had wrought its alchemy upon them and transformed the value of their ideals, of their good intentions, of their humanitarianism into the dross of corruption, and eventually, insidiously and invidiously made them agents of its cycle of suffering and despair.
I confronted my own demons, understood and overcame them; the fact that I had witnessed my mother being unfaithful to my father at a tender age, and the feelings of low self esteem and self worth this experience precipitated; the loneliness her absence engendered after she deserted us for a better life in the USA, and the surcease of sex which became the means to fill that void; the rage I became capable of to protect my siblings and myself from the depredations of predators around us, to whom in the absence of my mother, we appeared to be easy prey.
I faced the ultimate choice when I came dangerously close to killing another human being when I confronted the infidelity of my wife, and chose life and civility and refrained from entering and becoming part and parcel of that cycle of suffering and despair.
To me, every idea, every belief, every human tradition became suspect and subject to the test; whether it was truth or lie, whether it supported function or whether it perpetuated the status quo.
I discerned the conditioning inherent in every social system, that to exist, to have access to any intrinsic or extrinsic reward it was required that you accepted its ends, and the mystique that justified those ends.
At the core of that conditioning was, and is, the institution in which was distributed the means, money, which was, and is, the prerequisite to satisfying any and every of the innate needs of human beings; to stave off hunger, to have shelter and clothing, to protect your health and life, and to satisfy your needs for sex and human contact.
But the price of satisfying those needs was that you perpetuate the status quo, that you not rebel against coercion based culture and the injustices, the suffering and misery this has produced.
The human condition is wholly and completely intolerable, and the component of existence that insulates human beings from perception and comprehension of this sere reality is that which I had stripped from my psyche by practicing the discipline of truth.
Imagine a continuum in which not one single human being has the right to act consistent with the dictates of his or her conscience; imagine a social milieu in which the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness does not include the right to do the right thing.
Do you have that right, is there anyone who you know of that who dares to exercise that right?
If I am right the only hope to create positive developments in human societies is to engage in the most fundamental change that is possible; if we change the motivation relied on to motivate the other, that we substitute positive reinforcements, the carrot, for coercion, the stick, because of the malefic effects of relying on coercion.
Ashley Wilkes, in the most famous fictional novel about existence in the States that Shenika Harris and I agreed now together constitute the Dirty South, said that existence there during that period, was “a symmetry to perfection.”
The wealth that made that observation contain more than a grain of truth was generated by the institution of chattel slavery, whose efficiency and efficacy was founded on the fact that the slaves were brutally coerced to work.
Again, board with me that vessel fueled by our imaginations, that vehicle powered by the spirit of unlimited speculation, and consider that the labor who worked on the plantations came from different parts of Africa, and spoke many different languages; and, an entirely different language from those who owned them and supervised their labor yet this was no bar to the production of cotton so profitably that it created unheard of wealth in the Southern States of the USA, a group of States that have collectively languished in genteel poverty since the Abolition of Slavery, how important I ask you, is motivation to the efficient functioning of social institutions?
Let us pass quickly on to the fact that a much respected publication has referred to the USA in a cover story as the dropout nation of the world.
A teacher who taught High School in the three decades, the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties in Broward County in South Florida gave me his take on the cause of this secular decline in education; that, thus far, has proved to be irreversible.
He reported that when the schools were integrated white parents did not want black teachers to discipline their children and corporal punishment was removed from this institution and this produced the indiscipline and disorder that now pervades education.
We are experiencing very high rates of divorce, fifty per cent of the marriages that are contracted this June, will not last five years.
Again the cause is a lack of motivation because wives were once the chattels of their husbands, subject to the every whim and will of their masters; indeed, in the much vaunted Westminster model of parliamentary democracy, a wife could not testify against her husband in a court of law.
When the thirst for liberty and freedom changed all social institutions in Nineteenth Century, this institution experienced the winds of change; but again there was the tendency to recreate the past with the single omission of chattel slavery.
Women were denied the means to make a living, they were denied access to education and so remained economically dependent on their spouses; and, if they rebelled against the conditions of marriage that caused them to be household drudges, their alternative was poverty and/or prostitution.
Contemporary women whose antecedents organized and accumulated the political power that afforded them the right to vote; now have access to educational opportunities and the means to make a living; and, therefore are no longer subject to the motivation of overt coercion in the form of physical cruelty that was their lot for most of human history, nor, are they economically dependent on their spouses and need not be content to the subordinate position dictated by tradition and since the hidebound institution of marriage is ill suited to fulfill the needs of the emancipated woman, this accounts for the high rates of divorce.
I say again, that the human race was driven up the steep incline towards civilization and when democratic ideas, values and institutions became popular this resulted in a reduction in the degree and extent to which coercion in any form, overt or covert, could be applied to individuals in society, who began the journey from subject to citizen – without the development and implementation of an alternative means of motivating the attitudes and patterns of behavior necessary for societal order, function and progress with the consequence of widespread dysfunction and anomie in human societies.
Implicit in this report, this realistic and accurate report on the evolution of social relationships is the so far immutable and wholly selfish attitude of the human animal that is the basis for predation.
The reality of human beings physically and sexually abusing their young, of the mature adults of a species consigning sex to the closet because of their guilt; thus constructing inhibitions and limitations on sexual expression that cause human children and adolescents to continually be in a state of high drive with the consequence that they are easy prey for sexual predators is one that is completely intolerable and inconceivable and must be completely repressed.
For any individual to perceive this by accident and have the burden of communicating this message for the common good is to expose that individual to the ignited and concentrated animus and opprobrium of his race, no greater love has a man than this, that he lay down his life for his enemies; for most of the three decades of my practice of the discipline of truth, something of which I had no prior appreciation or warning whatsoever of its baleful consequences, I have endured the animus of all the human beings with whom I have come in contact, my former colleagues at Terminix are only the most recent of those who have crucified me with all the means at their disposal for exposing their inadequacies and intense guilt.
The fact is, the simple truth is, predation is deeply embedded in every social system; because it is the expression, the natural expression of the dominant roles of territorial predator which was determined by the adoption and perpetuation of coercion based culture.
Reduction in what is now seen to be criminal activity, amelioration in acts of murder, rape, theft and other heinous crimes requires the rejection of coercion as the means relied on to motivate the other and of the social roles of territorial predator and prey; and, substituting positive reinforcements as the means relied on to motivate the other which will result in cooperation replacing competition as the ethos of human societies.
More and more policemen, prisons and increasingly harsh penalties are policies of total futility what is required is the fundamental cultural change I have described the major obstacle to this very necessary epiphany in human societies is that coercion based culture produces personalities that are all neurotic to some degree:
Most people, even scientists, are vague about neurosis. Neither the neurotic
victim nor those who know him seem able to state precisely what is involved.
The victim feels a mysterious malady. The witness observes inexplicable
behavior. The neurotic is mysterious because he is capable of acting yet he
is unable to act and enjoy.
The therapist confronts a person who is miserable, stupid (in some ways),
and who has symptoms.
Suffering so intense as that shown by neurotics must have powerful causes,
and it does. The neurotic is miserable because he is in conflict. As a usual
thing two or more strong drives are operating in him and producing
incompatible responses.
Many people remember from their adolescence the tension of a strong sex
conflict. Primary sex responses heightened by imaginative elaboration are
met by intense fear. Though not allowed to talk about such matters,
children sometimes can, and the misery they reveal is one of the most
serious prices exacted of adolescents in our culture.
Although in many ways superficial, the symptoms of the neurotic are the
most obvious aspects of his problems. These are what the patient is familiar
with and feels he should be rid of. The phobias, inhibitions, avoidances,
compulsions, rationalizations, and psychosomatic symptoms of the neurotic
are experienced as a nuisance by him and by all who have to deal with him.
The symptoms cannot be integrated into the texture of sensible social
relations. The patient, however, believes that the symptoms are his disorder.
It is these he wishes to be rid of and, not knowing that a serious conflict
underlies them, he would like to confine the therapeutic discussions to
getting rid of the symptoms.
Though the neurotic is sure he is miserable and is vocal about his symptoms,
he is vague about what it is within him that could produce such painful
effects. The fact that the neurotic cannot describe his own conflicts has been
the source of great confusion in dealing with him either in terms of scientific
theory or in terms of clinical practice. Nor can the therapist immediately
spot these areas of stupidity. Only after extensive study of the patient's
life can the areas of repression be clearly identified. Then the surprising
fact emerges that the competing drives which afflict the neurotic person
are not labeled. He has no language to describe the conflicting forces within
him.
Without language and adequate labeling the higher mental processes cannot
function. When these processes are knocked out by repression, the person
cannot guide himself by mental means to a resolution of his conflict. Since
the neurotic cannot help himself, he must have the help of others if he is to
helped at all – though millions today live out their lives in strong neurotic
pain and never get help. The neurotic, therefore, is, or appears to be, stupid
because he is unable to use his mind in dealing with certain of his mind in
dealing with certain of his problems. (Dollard 12)
This description of neurosis is a condensed version lifted from the text “Personality and Psychotherapy by John Dollard and Neale Miller; and, I feel constrained to state that this text, in its entirety, is required reading for anyone who is interested in the functioning of the psyche of human beings; when my son became an adult I tried unsuccessfully to find a copy for him.
This text is possibly the most important link in the chain of circumstances and events that together made it possible for me to create a body of ideas to explain the proper functioning of modern democratic societies.
I also feel constrained, at this point, to state that I believe in God, but that my belief is not unequivocal, I continue to have doubts; and, these doubts are prompted, for the most part by the many lies and deceits with I have been inundated over the past thirty years as I have studied human history in my audit of the human condition..
I set against these doubts the chain of events and circumstances that has shaped this world view; for example, I was idly leafing through the text “Personality and Psychotherapy” during a stop in Boston, Massachusetts when its owner, Carlos Beharrie, a medical student at Boston College, said I might have it; I cannot emphasize enough the impact of the ideas it contained – when I eventually got around to perusing it in depth.
Also, there was a time when, during my latest episode of homelessness, when I knew I was teetering on the brink of a nervous breakdown and admitted it to myself; and, observed that the pressure was eased and that I have since then not had an experience so intense as to push me over the edge.
Also, I have on occasion fallen off the wagon of morality; but, was always driven back by circumstances and events back on to the straight and narrow.
However, I am leaning over backwards to never be promoting another lie, never to be creating, or being associated in the slightest with any of the lies that brawl on the barren world created by coercion based culture, contending for belief; so I state that when I made the decision to tell the truth I was an atheist, and this prescription is composed of two main principles – that you adopt the discipline of truth; and, that you commit to relying on positive reinforcements in your relations with other human beings – will work whatever the beliefs you bring to it with regards to the concept, God.
I believe that any human being who accepts and practices the discipline of truth will come in contact with the existing social reality; he or she will begin to describe the problems that arise out of day to day existence accurately and be able to produce viable solutions to these problems; and, that individual will in time gain wisdom in the conduct of human affairs, the process being self sustaining and irreversible.
16.And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you
another Comforter, that he may abide with you forever.
17. Even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive,
because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him: but ye know
him: for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you.
St John Chap 14 King James Bible
Could be that the two preceding paragraphs have exactly the same meaning, is this conceivable to anyone but me?
I am certain that this prescription is the one Jesus attempted to communicate during His Ministry on earth, a prescription that the dogma, rituals and cant of the Roman Catholic Church obscures and makes meaningless.
I am certain of this because numerous priests of that Church can abuse children, and I cannot.
I am certain because I last had sex with a woman on 23rd April, 1993, fourteen years ago.
I made one mistake about three years later; when a colleague from work was giving me a lift to my bus stop.
As I was exiting her vehicle, another female colleague, Monefa Reid, leaned over to kiss me goodbye; and, my naughty, naughty hand came in contact with her breast and I fondled it.
I think an individual for whom sex was his Achilles heel for most of his life, who became all hands when alone with a woman, could be allowed one mistake.
It is more likely that I will fly than it is that I would sexually abuse a minor child, those who do have the wrong doctrine, and that is the absolute proof of it.
They have the forms of Christianity, I have its substance; I make no comment about those who aid and abet that abuse by funding it, because no further comment is needed.
The duality in human personalities and the conflicts that resulted from this condition had its genesis in the ever increasing difference between the ethics, and in totality, the morality human beings desired to achieve and, pretended to have achieved; and the reality of attitudes and patterns of behavior that were deeply embedded in the human culture, and, which were required for survival.
This difference, this ever widening gulf between concept and precept, was obscured by repression as I have described; but also by codes of silence, for example the code of Omerta practiced by members of the Italian crime organization, the Mafia.
There is a tacit, informal, but not less powerful because of its informality, agreement among members of a family, of an organization, of an institution; that prevents members from divulging information, to which only members are privy, that would have a negative impact on the social organization as a whole, or on a another member.
This was a component of socialization that I somehow missed, one that never took with me; I have always had great difficulty comprehending why I should conceal and cove up the mistakes of others, or those that I was guilty of.
When I began to practice the discipline of truth, a tendency produced by a deficiency in my socialization to be a ' snitch ' was powerfully reinforced as I became aware of the dreadfully negative impact of repression and of keeping SECRETS.
Thus, I have completely antagonized family and friends with my penchant for telling the truth.
It is only in the last decade that I have begun to understand that every individual or group of human beings have skeletons in their closet, and, to open the door of this closet and expose this apparition to the world, as I am prone to doing is to invite, with open arms, the animus of just about everyone.
To emphasize this I present a brief resume of the impact of my morality on ability to make a living.
For the first ten years of my working life, from May 13th, 1963, I worked in an Esso Oil Refinery in Kingston, Jamaica.
When the refinery went on stream six months later it soon became clear that everyone who was on shift was stealing gasoline.
I engaged in this corrupt practice for about two years until I witnessed a technician, with his new wife in his car on his way to his honeymoon, stealing gas.
I ruminated that everyone was becoming habituated to this practice and that this must result in someone being caught, with the attendant shame and disgrace; and, to ensure that that individual was not me, I stopped stealing gasoline.
Working on shift, especially the graveyard shift, caused us to communicate with other workers with a similar schedule, for example, telephone company international operators.
Which caused me to discover another widespread, corrupt practice; that these operators would make long distance calls to any country for their friends, relatives and personal customers for which they would not be billed.
When the Refinery operations became boring I became a Trade Union Officer and began to be exposed to the reality of the extent and degree of graft and corruption in human societies, everyone, everywhere had a scam going.
Trade Union Officers were not exempt from this widespread corruption and I began to hear of colleagues who were 'easy' on employers, in return for favors these employers would perform, for example, the daughter of an Officer would gain employment in a section in which he represented the workers.
I never engaged in these rituals of corruption; indeed, I never had sex with any woman in any section I represented while I was the Officer responsible for handling grievances and negotiations for that section, a gigantic accomplishment of virtue when compared with the activities of other Officers and the fact that this was my Achilles heel.
The Stevedoring Cooperative would have been as productive whoever had been its Officer, because that high level of efficiency the workers attained was a consequence of the system of rewards, the open ended system of rewards developed and applied by the Esso managers.
The operation would not have been sustained but for my honesty and integrity.
After the General Elections that occurred in late 1977, I was approached by Puncie, the stevedore with whom I had the most friendly relations; when there were no motor vessels at the Dry Cargo Dock he sold ' drop han ' a popular but illegal form of gambling on the corner of Wildman Street in Rae Town; he said that since the Laborites had been swamped in these Elections and were in disarray this would be an opportune time to divest the Cooperative of the members from Tivoli Gardens.
I told him that if there was any attempt to separate the Laborites from Tivoli Gardens from their jobs I would fight with them; and, if I lost the fight and they were separated I would leave with them.
It would be difficult for anyone who was not involved in Jamaican politics in the Seventies to comprehend the courage and honesty involved in that statement.
Involvement in politics was about the distribution of scarce resources; and, a job, of any kind, was a very scarce resource for any politician, or individual with political ambitions, to make such a declaration was political suicide.
But because I did not equivocate or mince words about where I stood, the Cooperative survived and attained a loading rate of 32 tons per hour, the Esso “Caribe” was loaded in Baton Rouge Louisiana with the exact same cargo by American stevedores at 36 tons per hour, the closest productivity in Jamaica has ever come to that achieved by Americans to the best of my knowledge.
I digress to recap, every social group, every organization, every institution demonstrates the evolutionary sequence that the Cooperative displayed:
A period when coercion was relied on as the motivation relied on to stimulate effort; and, high levels of efficiency were attained.
A period when democratic ideas and institutions were interjected and had the impact of reducing the degree and extent to which coercion, in any form, overt or covert, could be applied to any individual with the consequence of dramatic decreases and declines in efficiency and function.
Western civilizations, including those outposts the former colonies of European nations, abound with examples of the phenomena I have been trying to communicate for three decades; that the impact of democracy in the Twentieth Century has been to reduce the degree and extent to which coercion in any form, overt or covert, can be applied to individuals without creating an alternative means of motivating attitudes and patterns of behavior essential to societal order, function and progress causing widespread dysfunction, stagnation and anomie.
Nations founded on the Westminster model of parliamentary democracy have been in the vanguard of human progress for most of human history – after gunpowder was imported from China, until the situation that I have described emerged after World War Two.
Nor am I unaware of the high stakes for which I am playing.
From the beginning of time the world lived by the law of the jungle, the strongest survived, and might was right.
This cultural template produced societies that were elitist and despotic, social systems in which five per cent of the population controlled ninety per cent of the wealth produced by any society.
What I have developed is a hypothesis to explain this situation that still obtains today.
The strongest, the hunters in hunting and gathering societies, were successful and became habituated to relating to other beings as prey; as beings without rights, to which no rules applied except that they be captured and killed by any means to serve as a source of energy.
This group had, in practical terms, absolute power, the power of life and death over the rest of the group; because they decided how the energy resources were shared; and, they had to protect the other members of the tribe from the incursions of the savage and numerous denizens around the; hence the evolution of Absolutism in which a ruler had absolute power over his subjects.
With the discovery of agriculture, and as human beings began to develop cities, organizational structures emerged to dealing with the increasing complexities of human societies.
There came to be a small elite, a larger class of administrators, merchants, skilled craftsmen and artisans; and, a still larger mass of human beings.
This scheme of things, which in the beginning was just a 'state of nature' with relationships depended on relative strengths, began to be formalized.
They divided to rule, women were indisposed and vulnerable because of childbearing responsibilities were subordinated to men.
An army, which was the basis of the ruler's power, were recruited, trained, and paid, and, utilized to coerce other members of the group to conform.
With the emergence of ethics, there emerged, as already described, that ever increasing difference between concept and precept.
But the fundamental distribution of wealth continues, with that small elite composed of the ruler and his intimates controlling most of the wealth.
A group that administered, managed, engaged in commerce, and provided the skills in the society who received incomes commensurate with their skills.
And, lastly the masses who lived at subsistence levels or in abject poverty.
The institutions of servitude, of serfdom and slavery, that evolved out of Absolutism were a powerful indication of how the masses of human beings were perceived by those who ruled them; they were seen as chattels, hewers of wood and drawers of water, not very far removed from other domesticated animals like sheep and cows, except that they could communicate.
It has always been clear to me that many social scientists, for example, Professor Curtin chose Jamaica as the context in which to examine the institutions that evolved under Absolutist regimes, for example chattel slavery, because their conclusions which would have applied anywhere, since everywhere the roles of territorial predator and prey continued to be dominant, were less likely to ignite controversy and animus if applied to those who inhabited the backwaters of Western civilizations:
The arguments against the emancipation of slaves in Jamaica as reproduced in “Two Jamaica” by the aforementioned Professor Curtin support my analysis of their being an dichotomy in the psyche of human beings as well as those indicating that the treatment of human prey whether in Jamaica or England were different only in theory:
The proslavery writers were Jamaican in their social and economic
surroundings, but they were English in education, in intellectual
environment, and in emotional attachment. They lived in one society
with intellectual equipment largely formed in another. They felt called
to defend slavery, because they saw no way of preserving their
society without it; and they felt called to condemn it as immoral,
because they were convinced of its immorality through their training
and through the prestige of British opinions.
Since the Jamaicans were unwilling to use the kind of argument that
would enable them to paint their labor system as a moral blessing, they
were all the more anxious to show it as an economic and social necessity.
This was the ground on which they chose to argue their case, and it
necessarily involved them in quantities of diffuse argument. They had to
balance the amount of injustice against the amount of economic profit
- a discussion necessarily inconclusive because these are incommensurate
quantities.
There was an occasional maverick argument, like that advanced by a
member of the House of Assembly, who tried to convince the British
upper class that the emancipation of the West Indian Negro was the
first step in the destruction of all social order. Most Jamaican writers,
however, stuck to well-worn lines of reasoning. These were picked
up and used over and over again from the 1820's onward. They fit
logically into three groups.
The first of these was the set of arguments designed to demonstrate
that slavery was a beneficial institution to the people of Great Britain
and therefore could not be given up immediately. The specific points
was as old as the “Old Colonial System.” They were the same arguments
used to show the value of colonization in general. They emphasized the
value to England of the colonial trade as a school for seamen, to the
Crown from the high sugar duties, the usefulness of Jamaica as a
“vent” for British manufactures, the work created for British laborers
by the expenditures of absentee proprietors, and the numbers of people
engaged in trade and shipping to Jamaica. The entire case was based,
sometimes tacitly, on the assumption that the end of slavery would mean
the end of sugar production in the colonies.
The second set of arguments tried to show how little the evils of slavery
bothered the Jamaican slaves. The most common device was the
comparison already mentioned, between the physical comfort of the
Jamaican slave and that of the British workingman. The Jamaican writers
liked this argument: it gave them a chance to counterattack their
attackers. A.H. Beaumont, in stating his hatred of slavery, added that
it was evil,
. . . whether in its undisguised form in Jamaica, or in its insidiously
masked character in other countries, where it assumes the semblance
of freedom, in order to better trample on the rights of man; centering
the object of the real, tho' disguised solicitude of the rulers, in the
in the welfare of a few haughty Aristocrats. . .
Again and again the Jamaicans came back to the assertion that the
slave was happy and contented and, oddly enough, without making
the claims on racial grounds – without stating that the Negro was
incapable of appreciating the “higher” things.
The third set of arguments dealt not with the system of slavery as
it existed, but with the predicted results of emancipation. This
was a much more complex point, and it required more theoretical
justification. It required striking a balance between the good and
evil that would result from an event that was still only foreseen.
Over the years this argument in its various forms led the white
Jamaicans to construct a mental picture predicting the results of
emancipation. It had an importance, therefore, extending beyond
the struggle over emancipation. It fixed, for the whites, a
preconceived view of the situation they would meet, once the
slaves were free. (Curtin 67)
I have inflicted this exceedingly long quote on my readers from a text written by a white American from the University of Wisconsin with deliberate intent.
It reinforces the main point underlying this document, that there is a social reality; one that is entirely different from that perceived by those who experience it daily.
White Jamaicans believed that the Negroes were happy and contented lot, the facts were quite different; in fact, they were diametrically opposed to that perception.
Lewis, who thought that poisoning was the Negroes' greatest vice,
cited the following cases:
A neighbouring gentleman, as I hear, has now three Negroes in
prison, all domestics, and one of them grown grey in his service,
for poisoning him with corrosive sublimate; his brother was
actually killed by similar means . . . Another agent, who appears
to be in high favor with the Negroes, whom he now governs,
was obliged to quit an estate, from the frequent attempts to
poison him; and a person against whom there is no sort of
charge alleged for tyranny, after being brought to the doors
of death by a cup of coffee, only escaped a second time by
his civility, in giving the beverage, prepared for himself, to
two young book-keepers, to both of whom it proved fatal.
Collective Violence Rebellion, or the threat of it, was an
permanent feature of Jamaican slave society. A distinction
may be made between three types of rebellions in the
island. First, there were the purely spontaneous revolts.
These were usually hastily conceived affairs restricted to either one estate or to a few neighbouring properties.
The immediate occasion of such revolts varied – sometimes it was out of a desire for vengeance, as in the rebellion of 1798; at other times the immediate instigation may simply have come from a favourable opportunity offering itself, as when Captain Duck's estate was cut off from neighbouring whites by the flooding of a river; but in the majority of cases simply out of a desire to escape the terrors of slavery. Secondly, there were planned revolts involving or meant to involve either all the slaves in the island (as in the rebellion of 1831-1832) or restricted to one particular group of slaves throughout the island who planned, after the overthrow of whites, to rule the island themselves, for example, the Coromantee rebellions of 1760 and 1765. The third type of rebellion sometimes developed independently, but more often grew out of the remnants of the first two. These were the revolts involving mainly slaves who had already absconded who lived in rebel hideouts. The most famous of these revolts was the first Maroon war which lasted for fifteen years beginning about 1725. (Patterson 267)
It is obvious that white Jamaicans believed the roles played by the slaves when relating to
whites, which they wanted to believe instead of the facts of the different types of resistance to slavery which they experienced, which evoked fear and anxiety, or, that these whites chose opportunistically to edit from the discussion about the benefits of slavery the savagery and violence that this regime evoked.
Also, this strongly supports another contention important to the logic of this letter; that the means used, force, to cause oppressed groups in society, for example, women and minorities, did not lead to accurate and realistic descriptions of their actual personalities and characteristics.
In fact, these conflicts produced pictures of these beings that abstracted from reality just as occurred in the debate over the emancipation of the slaves.
It is clear that at the beginning of the human story, as I have discerned, human beings treated the other based on the strength or weakness of the other, without any other consideration.
This continued down the years – until the group, women for example, began to resist and demand equality; at this point, in defense of the status quo, a representation of the nature of women was created, one tainted by the need to suppress their incipient rebellion, one which had little to with the reality of their persona but which was impressed upon the participants in this conflict and became the accepted persona of the female of the species.
What I am trying to create an appreciation of is another odious consequence of relying on coercion to motivate the other.
A need or want arises, whether it be to build burial houses for rulers of Egypt, or, to find a labor force to make agriculture possible in the newly discovered lands of the Americas.
The end is accomplished without any consideration give to the consequences, the short term or long term consequences; or, the morality, or, any of the facts relating to the impact of such action; if, at any time resistance emerged to what was already a fiat accompli, justifications and rationalizations would be found to justify these actions.
Fundamentally, what I am suggesting is a more rational approach to action, one based on the facts and one that takes into the short term and long term as well as the moral and other implications of actions.
And, to produce a world in which the vast majority of human beings do not live wretched lives we need to agree that no human beings should be considered 'prey' should be equated to a food resource, without rights or prerogatives.
This is the first step, that we do not see any human being as prey; this is the fundamental problem that lames all our efforts to progress beyond the jungle.
The fact is that coercion was a necessity for survival in the ' state of nature ' from which we evolved; but, to become adept at applying coercion, after we discovered ethics, we had to be able to consign such experiences to the unconscious, we had to be unaware of what we were doing, which lamed our intellects.
This was a snowball when it fell on the mountain of time so many millennia ago, it has now become an avalanche as I have attempted to describe sweeping away the legitimate and valid aspirations of the human race for an existence replete with peace, prosperity and civility.
These are the stakes I am playing for because I stumbled upon a means to return this, and every other experience tainted with the brush of coercion and unawareness to the conscious portion of our psyches so that we can our apply our intelligence to these phenomena and find viable solutions; these are the highest stakes that any human being could ever play for, the possibility of transforming the human story from the tragedy it has been for the vast majority of human beings; and, offer to those wretched of this earth the possibility of happiness.
The point of departure might be the best description that I have ever encountered of the intrinsic nature of human beings:
From the point of view of the individual, socialization is the fulfillment of his potentialities for personal growth and development. Socialization humanizes the biological organism and transforms it into a self having a sense of identity, capable of disciplined and ordered behavior, and endowed with ideals, values and aspirations. Socialization regulates behavior, but it is also the indispensable condition for individuality and self-awareness. Thus socialization has two complementary meanings: the transmission of culture and the development of personality.
BIOLOGICAL BASIS FOR SOCIALIZATION
The human infant comes into the world as a biological organism with animal needs and impulses and certain innate capacities. Man's biological nature makes socialization both possible and necessary. For example, socialization is possible because man has the inborn capacity to use language, but this capacity is realized only with socialization. The following are some of the biological characteristics of the human animal on which socialization is based:
Absence of instincts An instinct is a relatively complex behavior pattern biologically fixed for a species. Nest-building techniques among birds are a familiar example: they vary between species but not within species. If man possessed such biologically fixed behavior patterns, they would limit his learning and his socialization; variation and change would then be impossible.
Man has biological drives rather than instincts. A drive, such as hunger or sex, is an organic tension that is felt as discomfort or impulse but does not direct behavior to specific goals or in specific ways. A drive impels activity but does not determine it in detail. That man is activated by drives rather than by biologically fixed behavior patterns makes his needs amenable to social direction.(Selznick 85)
Each human being, each man or woman, is an organism with an unlimited capacity for learning, for creating and adopting innovations.
Every human being can develop beyond the stagnation and inertia that pervades Western civilizations today and enter the sphere of liberty produced in the Stevedoring Cooperative by the adoption of the open ended system of rewards formulated by the Esso Managers.
I was exposed to the achievements of people of the nation of Israel who responded to the continuous threat of war and extinction by making the desert bloom.
The impact of their achievement was increased because I had lived all my life in a lush, tropical paradise which contained plains of deep alluvial soil, a nation that was forced to import large quantities of food because the low levels of motivation inherent in this social system inhibited the production and productivity that would have caused this poverty stricken nation to achieve self sufficiency and the ability to feed its citizens.
I had witnessed the evolution of the Stevedoring Cooperative and saw the group experience the function motivated by coercion and by an open ended system of rewards; and, the stagnation, inertia and inefficiency that was the consequence of the interjection of democratic ideas and institutions without the necessary alternative form of motivation.
What I have attempted to describe is the powerful resistance that must be overcome if the human race is to break the habits learned in the state of nature and adjust to and embrace the potentials and possibilities inherent in the large pool of knowledge, and the massive scientific establishment and burgeoning technology that we have created during the period of documented human history after the discovery of agriculture.
The first area of powerful resistance is the gap between concept and precept, that every human individual and social organization has become habituated to paying lip service to moral values even while it practiced the patterns of behavior required for function.
Thus, the truth is a powerful threat to every individual and every social organization – yet telling the truth is the means to overcome the repression that imprisons the human race in a 'state of nature,' that causes them to create and recreate its horrific and tragic past, over, and over and over again and be unable to escape the cultural template of that past and create conditions consistent with existing possibilities and potentials.
The second area of inhibition to positive developments is the world view and the traditions deeply embedded in the social institutions that have the impact and effect of perpetuating the status quo; playing the roles of territorial predator and prey are the instituted means, the only means of achieving intrinsic and extrinsic rewards.
The third factor perpetuating the status quo is that those who have the education and means to effect the transformation that would give the wretched of this earth access to a better quality of life; compose the existing elite in every country and change would mean that they would have to develop the moral courage and will to preside over the dismantlement and dissolution of their power and prerogatives; given that what is required is the fundamental change possible, that human beings reject coercion and become adept at utilizing positive reinforcements in their relationships with other human beings.
Telling the truth will have the desired effect – if individuals can be motivated to practice this discipline.
When I began this journey of discovery I was as neurotic as any other member of the human race.
With six months I began to be filled with wonderment at what a fool I had been to neglect my wife and mother of my children, a young healthy adult, sexually while I engaged in numerous affairs with younger more attractive women.
I began to wonder how I could have dared to tell her in jest that I was thinking of trading her in for a younger more attractive model of femininity?
I would never have separated my children from their mother; a separation I had experienced when my mother migrated to the USA and I was too well aware of the pain and suffering inherent in that experience; so how could I, I wondered, have done things that was clear would have that almost certain result?
Today, I have expanded my consciousness so that there are very few memories or experiences that are not available to me.
I know exactly why I am able to endure the loneliness and privation that pervades my existence; it arises out of the sibling rivalry that was the bane of my childhood.
I had a sister who was a year older than I was, who was extremely intelligent, and quite plain and ugly; these factors caused my advent to be the worst thing that could ever have happened to her, she hated me with all of her being and she had cause.
First of all, I was a pretty child with the delicate features that she was not blessed with; in retrospect she would have been much happier and better adjusted if she had been a male child.
I was a sickly child who developed asthma at an early age, and until I was six years old, had the psychosomatic ability to congest my lungs to give the appearance that I was at death's door; so I could get the attention of my parents at will.
To compete she had to develop and display diabolical cunning and malice which was easy for her because of her innate genius, for example, she was a child musical prodigy, and played classical pieces on the piano for the local radio station when she was five years old.
For example, when I was three years old I was gifted with a beautiful kite made of crepe paper, bamboo and cloth that formed a long tail that balanced its flight.
In a nearby park, for the first time, I got that kite to fly high into the sky to the maximum length of the thread that connected to the ground; and, stood beneath it, filled with all the innocent happiness that a child is capable of, as it pirouetted and glided through the blue sky above me.
My sister came over and asked if I could let her fly the kite, and I refused knowing exactly what she was about; in fact, I told her that if I gave it into her control she would let it go.
She kept pestering me, and reassuring me, that she would not the kite go, until out of the kindness of my heart, I handed the thread to her.
And, I can remember with a clarity undiminished by the passage of time, the look in her eyes, the expression on her face, and; most of all, her smile so filled with enjoyment as she let the kite go.
I hit her several times to wipe that smile from her face, and then followed the kite as it slowly collapsed out of the sky and ended up in a tree filled with nettles.
I stood under the tree, crying inconsolably, until a man named Mr. Edwards, who was a painter and who, in the past, had been hired by my father to ply his trade, was attracted by my noisy grief; and, at some personal risk, climbed the tree and rescued the kite.
It was damaged beyond repair, and when its shattered frame was delivered into my hands, I inspected it, and was again completely incensed and pursued my sister to pummel her some more for her treachery.
I was restrained by Mr. Edwards, and after I told him what had happened he promised to build me another kite, and this calmed me down somewhat.
In retrospect, I think she tired of hearing individuals with whom we came in contact exclaim, “What a beautiful child,” knowing that they were not talking about her.
I remember, years later, that we took a formal photograph; the three boys of the family and herself; and, how she tore that picture to remove what she perceived to be her unattractiveness when contrasted to her siblings; and, began to appreciate the depth and extent of her feelings.
She made me ugly in the eyes of all and sundry by teasing me until I hit her, the attitude of most adults being, whatever the provocation, I should not hit her.
I was a sensitive, gentle, sickly, and shy child and to get me to hit her required that she pull out all the stops; a requirement that she was equal to as the above mentioned incident demonstrates.
Eventually my mother became involved and decided to beat that tendency out of me; she would beat me for hours, and when that was not enough she would choke me until I was gasping for air, for hours afterwards I would feel the sting where her fingernails had scratched my skin; but she was never able to break my spirit and cause me to give in to my sister and her indefatigable attempts to torment me; I made it clear, that at some point if she plagued me long enough that I would lash out - whatever the consequences.
When I became aware of the high stakes I was playing for, that I could, if I could just focus the attention of human beings on what was the major determinant of human culture, that it fundamentally was shaped and determined by the motivation relied on by the majority in any society; and that if we changed and began to rely on positive reinforcements, the only viable alternative, it would cause us to exit the 'state of nature;' when I came to that conclusion I realized I had the means to build a fitting monument to my existence, and, an appropriate memorial to the lives of the children who had perished in the Fire at Orange Lane.
I became deeply committed, even obsessed with this cause.
The Esso management had developed the tonnage rate, Grace, the management of the fertilizer plant resisted the very idea of the tonnage rate with every means at their disposal.
This prompted a long strike which was supported strongly by the stevedores who had a long festering grievance, with regards to pension monies which they had paid to the Contractor who had absconded allegedly taking with him these funds.
No matter how clear I tried to make it to the stevedores that Grace Chemical could not be held liable for the actions or delinquencies of the Contractor they were unable to comprehend this.
Further, with regards to the tonnage rate, the Company had a point; if the cost of the unloading operation could change depending on an increased rate; it would be difficult to keep the price of a bag of fertilizer constant to the farmer but this might become subject to fluctuations with every cargo of fertilizer.
The dispute over the tonnage rate was eventually settled by a Board of Inquiry, and it was during these proceedings that I was called obsessed with regards to this cause.
To ensure that the tonnage rate was implemented, I led evidence that during the unloading operation stevedores slept on the midnight shift; this was such a departure from the traditional dialogue between management and unions in which representatives of workers defended, and never exposed delinquencies of workers that my doing this threatened the popularity of the Union; and, my credibility with the stevedores.
The Inquirer which determined this issue in my favor because I exposed the effect the advent of the Union had on the tonnage rate was the first observer to note my obsession, to be oblivious of the implications of the impact of changing the type of motivation relied on would have on social relationships; also, it was the first time I was to experience first hand the effect exposure of inadequacies had on human beings, the stevedores were enraged with the fact that I reported that they slept on the job, and walked out; despite the fact that everyone present with the possible exception of the Inquirer were aware of what was a regular occurrence, and that most present had actually witnessed this practice.
It may be that this incapacity to accept responsibility for immoral acts may condemn human beings to endless existence in the 'state of nature,' because release from the thralldom of this milieu requires that human beings take responsibility for their mistakes, even their very serious mistakes.
Can judges or politicians admit they take bribes? Can police officers admit that there is a sheet? Can process technicians in oil refineries admit that they routinely steal gasoline, or telephone operators admit that they make illegal calls? The prognosis is terrible given the inability of human beings to own up even when they are completely busted.
In the thrust of create a democratic socialist society in Jamaica there was one organization in which that change was a complete success, one organization that became more efficient and profitable as a consequence of that change, it was the Stevedoring Cooperative for which I was the Change Agent.
In those halcyon days of the decade of the Seventies many individuals leaped on the bandwagon of Socialism without have the slightest inkling about the origin and development of Socialist thought, many did not take the time to study the history and become aware that this was nothing new, that the Chartist Movement had existed long before the refinement of Socialist Theory by Karl Marx and his collaborator Friedrich Engels.
I not only had studied, in some detail, the evolution of Socialist thought, I had witnessed successful examples of such social structures and had the signal honor of being made a member of Kibbutz Hagoshrim; and, on my return to Jamaica was consciously examining whether this doctrine could prompt positive developments in that milieu.
Its application in Russia had been a complete failure in my view, there, and in many other places, it had become 'the stale dogma of a secular religion.'
But I was aware of the ideas that Karl Marx had developed out of his experience with a Cooperative in Paris that he believed:
That consequent to the change in the ownership in the modes of production,
a sphere of liberty would replace the world of necessity and the management
of men would be replaced by the administration of things.
Subsequent to my experience with the Stevedoring Cooperative I was able to assess the relevance and validity of these ideas, whether they were adequate to the social reality in Jamaica.
I concluded that subsequent to the stevedores becoming the owners of the business there were positive and negative aspects of that change; the positive aspect was that the stevedores were privy to all information related to the operation, financial information regarding the profits being especially important in convincing them that they were not being exploited as they had been in the past.
But there was a negative aspect, because they could together direct that certain payments not be made, for example, payments into National Insurance Scheme and National Housing Trust; these two funds had been established to create a national pension scheme and low cost housing for workers.
The Stevedores used the monies that should have gone into these funds, to provide loans to members of the cooperative, to themselves in between motor vessels when they ran out of funds; despite my best efforts to persuade them to do what was a statutory requirement.
I saw the danger of this misuse of funds becoming institutionalized in the organization; but eventually an alternative means was found to give them access to loans by causing them to become members of a Credit Union.
It was clear to me that the change that resulted in the success of the enterprise, in the stevedores developing work habits that would result in the creation of wealth, was the development and implementation of the open ended system of rewards.
Marx was right when he said that each organization was a microcosm of culture; and that the social change should begin in the workplace because this was the location in which intrinsic and extrinsic rewards were created and distributed for any society.
He was wrong in his conclusion that change of ownership that would require revolutions was the key log in the log jam of social development, the key log as I have tried to demonstrate is the motivating factor relied on to stimulate action; and, that the critical change was that individuals should not see the other as 'prey' and therefore subject to unlimited exploitation but to see the other as human beings like themselves with a potential for civilized existence and beings which therefore needed to be afforded certain inalienable rights and prerogatives.
For emphasis, the failure of Socialism, why revolutions have resulted in sterile exchanges of elites is that the change required is a cultural change; a change from coercion as the motivation factor relied on, which produced social systems in which the dominant roles were territorial predator or prey; in which the ethos of the culture was competition; in which small elites controlled a vastly disproportionate amount of the wealth produced; in which produced intense conflict which was dissipated by war or other civil disturbances in a recurring cycle of despair; which perpetuated itself because all personalities in such systems were neurotic to some degree.
To a situation in which positive reinforcements was the motivating factor relied on; in which cooperation was the ethos; which would result in more even distribution of the wealth as now occurs in the Scandinavian nations; which would in turn create less conflict and result in more stable, enduring and peaceful relations.
Even more than this what I am trying to do is to substitute a rational mental approach for the irrational approach that has dominated for most of human history.
Karl Marx was the father of modern Communism and someone who promoted the notion that revolution, violent revolution was the panacea that would result in relief for the wretched of this earth, the question is from a rational and objective perspective is he deserving of the animus and opprobrium the very mention of his name generates?
The fact is that from his garret apartment in London in poverty stricken circumstances he attempted an audit of the human condition with the intent of improving that condition; he attempted to create a body of ideas to explain the proper functioning of human societies.
He had limited success, the ideology he created was inadequate to the reality in ways I have tried to indicate; that failure was increased ten fold when human beings tried to implement these ideas; in many cases they became the stale dogma of a secular religion, but there have been notable successes for socialist theory, for example, in the Kibbutz Movement which is one of pillars of the Israeli economy, a nation which is a staunch ally of the USA which abhors communism in all its forms.
The point I am trying to make is that objectively and rationally Karl Marx is a great philosopher and humanitarian but has been made into a monster as a consequence of the Cold War; and, because he dared to suggest that the five per cent of human populations should be deprived of that wealth.
The Cold War was lost because of the failure of the Russian economy; it was never in any real sense a triumph for democracy because this wonderful prescription for relieving the suffering for the wretched of the earth has failed in most countries – with the notable exception of Scandinavian countries for example Norway.
To overcome poverty would require that human beings become adept in creating wealth, distributing the wealth in any country, even the wealthiest nations, would replace a situation in which a few people are very rich, with one in which everyone is very poor.
During one of the initial sessions in Afro Asian Institute in Tel Aviv Israel my tutor Haim Beniamini demonstrated this truism, that is so difficult for human beings to comprehend resulting in the popularity of the myth of Robin Hood, by dividing the gross national product by the total population; in every case resulting in incomes which could not support any individual or family anywhere.
In defending Karl Marx I am consciously and deliberately defending myself; because, in essence, what I am trying to do is educate people to embrace a rational approach and eschew an irrational approach to the contemporary problems of human existence; more, I am denoting and defining the selfishness of human beings and the impact that selfishness and venality has on human existence.
What is also clear is that what we must discover a way to create wealth, the wealth that will create certain minimum levels of nutrition, shelter, education and health care for all the inhabitants of Planet Earth.
Also, what must be developed is the policies and programs which will move economies from where they are today, to the point where they can create the wealth necessary to fund that ambitious program; and, how can this wealth be channeled to those who need it is the other question.
It is clear from the comments of Jeremy Barthalow and other at Terminix that there are human beings who believe that the accomplishment of this task has nothing to do with them, that they should be concerned with making the best livelihood for themselves and their immediate family and that this the extent of their obligation.
Most believe that this is a complex problem, I believe that if the majority of human beings lived by the Golden Rule, “Do to others as you would have them do to you” most of the problems that are so pervasive and daunting would disappear.
More, I believe that if those who had the responsibility of governing did the right thing, if they followed the dictates of their consciences these problems would disappear.
I feel constrained at this point is to make the distinction between philanthropy and charity; and, doing the right thing.
There are those who have emerged as the powerful predators from the jungles of corporate boardrooms and have amassed fortunes as a result.
These human beings seek to assuage their consciences by donating sums of money to the poor; these donations do not change the status quo, in fact, they serve to perpetuate coercion based culture by causing these predators to be seen as something much more positive; when in fact these benevolent donations might in fact cost the giver nothing at all since that personage may have had to pay a similar amount in taxes anyway and channeling it into a charitable organization may provide tax relief and cause the contributor to appear to be an altruistic humanitarian.
I wish to make clear that such actions perpetuate the status quo; they provided guilt reduction for the predation that I contend continues unmitigated and unchanged.
Community service and charitable donations by athletes who are paid gargantuan salaries to chase balls under stadiums attract the same criticism; and, in the brand new world that I posit where merit determines rewards, teachers who have a vastly important role to play in the transition from coercion based society to the new milieu of cooperative capitalism in which there will be open ended systems of reward for labor as well as entrepreneurs, will have higher salaries commensurate with their contributions compared with athletes whom, at best, should be a welcome distraction at the end of a working day in which a fair day's work was given for a fair day's pay.
Today, as I write, the emphasis is on entertainment and leisure – and not on the creation of wealth that is the prerequisite to solving the massive problems of poverty, crime and drug abuse that continue to plague human societies; the push towards creating functioning democracies has hardly begun and complacency and lethargy are incongruous and wholly inappropriate attitudes given the state of the world.
I wish to suggest that at the core of this lethargy is the fact that real meaningful progress cannot be achieved without change in the status quo; and, that there are only two alternatives open to us with regards to motivation, the carrot or the stick; it must be clear that if we return to a degree of coercion that would provide for the economy the labor efficiency that would create the powerful momentum required for development this would precipitate conflict that would hamper our efforts; and, higher standards of living and a better quality of life for the wretched of this earth would be inconsistent and incompatible with such regression, the logical and reasonable means to galvanize and release the creativity of labor and harness the energy of the mass of human beings to the national plough is positive reinforcements.
Of all the areas of stupidity in the national psyche, given the analysis of the problems of creating development and wealth commensurate with the task of overcoming the dread social disease, poverty, is the failure to recognize the clear and present danger in causing the winner in election races to be those with the biggest war chests; the effect of this is to cause the wealthy to control the government – if this situation had ever changed.
How can the electorate not see that this must place the power that should be vested in the people to be vested in big money interests?
I think that it is because throughout the culture human beings are playing the same roles, predator and prey; they are stealing gasoline, they are on the sheet, they are taking part in the corruption that they have access to their lives, and this makes them oblivious to the corruption that occurs right out in the open before their eyes; for example watching politicians boost about their ability to garner campaign contributions; what in the world do they think someone who makes a donation to a candidate is buying?
Also, because they are distracted by the information, a flood of negative circumstances and events that is so pervasive that they are defeated by it; they do not believe the manifest and numerous problems that existence contains can be overcome, and the tendency is to escape not confront and solve.
And lastly, because of the distractions, the movies, the music, the sports events which causes them to transcend their mundane existences; and live, albeit vicariously using the vehicle of their imaginations and through their fantasies different lives, an escapist attitude that prompts them to use and abuse
The criteria for those who would be competent to be catalysts in the transformation from coercion based culture to the culture I posit, cooperative capitalism, would require that candidates be the change agents for a development program in which poverty is overcome among a small group of human beings; this would be the acid test that they themselves have become agents changed, have become agents of the modernization ideals; those who have the greatest war chests are likely to be owned by interests dedicated to perpetuating the status quo and cannot be of any use to us.
But more even than morality, what is needed, what is urgently required is rationality.
As I have said again and again the most urgent problem facing humanity is global warming and that this problem must be addressed before the impact of burning fossil fuels on the atmosphere gains a momentum that make it irreversible.
Instead of confronting this problem the Bush Administration has attempted using the tactics of obfuscation and propaganda to question the credibility of conclusions reached by an overwhelming majority of scientists worldwide – because the corrective action required to reverse this dangerous trend would affect adversely the profits of oil companies, some of this President from Texas most ardent supporters.
The attack on Iraq exhibited the same irrationality; this potentially dangerous course was charted without the facts being given sufficient weight in this decision that has needlessly and senselessly cost so many lives as well as billions of dollars.
I saw Senator Harry Reid on television this evening April 23rd, and he seemed, in a single word, rational; as against the fact that on every occasion that I witness a speech from the President he seems more and more irrational; and postulate that this might be the fundamental problem from the very outset, he was never dealing from a full deck.
It is obvious that the justifications and rationalizations for this act of naked aggression were contrived; it is clear that there were no weapons of mass destruction; that there were no links between the regime of Saddam Hussein and the 911 attack; and, acts of oppression against minorities in Iraq, even of genocide against minorities in Iraq was not a valid justification since no government can claim to be innocent in this regard, certainly not the USA, given its track record with Native American and African American populations.
By a strange and opportunistic alchemy those justifications which have proved false and completely incredible with the passage have become the need for regime change and to create a functioning democracy in the region to be a model for other nations; it is a measure of the extent to which this nation has lost its way and become confused by the blandishments of the Bush spin doctors; and of the increasing desperation of these idiot savants, that such a transformation, such a openly fraudulent and despicable transposition of the events, circumstances and the dialogue that preceded this failed policy should be foisted on the American body politic.
The guilt of the Bush Administration is clearly and indelibly written in its actions.
It is clear that Vice President Cheney chivvied and used every means at his disposal to prompt individuals in the Intelligence Agencies to tell him what he wanted to hear, until they provided him with barely credible evidence that he could use to bamboozle the American people.
It is clear that any individual, up to and including the ranking General of the Army, who attempted to interject any factual item or issue into the discussion was rewarded by having their careers, no matter how illustrious, ruined.
This ill conceived and ill considered adventure is more than any contemporary debacle an illustration of the effect, of the wholly negative effects, of irrationality; and, demonstrates its palpable incapacity to achieve any objective.
It emphasizes a truism that I have been trying to communicate for the last four years; that since the beginning of time coercion has created function, and stifled dissent, examination and exposure of mistakes by the powerful since the beginning of human history; but this is no longer possible because the balance of power has changed and this change is irreversible.
Where Absolute power could with impunity ruthlessly colonize the known world; and commit genocide against any population that resisted or were unable to fit in with their grandiose schemes without any voice raised in outrage or to mark the extinction of these lives; this is no longer possible.
Where such power could with impunity win and celebrate empty victories over poorly armed adversaries, native populations armed with spears and bows and arrows, against repeating rifles; without a single voice raised in protest or condemnation, this is no longer possible.
In fact, what has galvanized my efforts to communicate the truism that morality is the bridge between fact and function and that human activities and enterprises that ignored this principle were certain to fail, to be always and perennially, too little, too late; was not only the insight four years ago that the Allied Forces would be unsuccessful in the attempt to occupy Iraq; but also that it was probable that this sortie would lead to an attack on Iran; and, that this would lead to World War Three in which a nuclear device would be detonated by someone and that the government of a people, by the people, for the people would perish from the face of this earth.
My appreciation of this possible future has not changed; indeed, the increasing desperation of the Bush Administration, oblivious of the fact that it is the spin that ensured their success in elections, is that which poisons and taints their attempts to create workable strategies since it makes impossible the accurate description of any problem the necessary prerequisite to solving these problems; combined with the fact that the government of Iran is sensing the weakness and vulnerability of the Allied Forces and this is making them more confident and aggressive; to me, these factors together constitute a recipe for disaster.
I saw yesterday, April 20th, a news report that said the Pentagon has revealed that it has funds that would allow it to function efficiently until sometime in the month of July, even as President Bush says that the war effort will shortly be adversely affected by the failure of Congress to deliver the Emergency Funding Bill for the war in Iraq.
What stands between this great nation and the realization of the dearest hopes and aspirations of its citizens for an existence replete with peace and prosperity is the fact that the vast majority of its citizens tell the truth opportunistically
They do this because they are blissfully unaware of the intrinsic value of telling the truth, that this causes you to become capable of creating accurate descriptions of reality, the prerequisite to the solution of any and every problem.
I contend that practicing the discipline of truth is the prerequisite to interpreting the facts of experience to produce ideas adequate to the reality, ideas that will support function; it is also the necessary prerequisite to dispensing justice.
I completely agree with members of the Bush Administration that withdrawal of the Allied Forces from Iraq without resolution of the problems that the naked act of aggression inflicted on the people of Iraq, would make a bad situation worst.
It would almost be as bad as staying the course or continuing to support the surge, these are just variations on the prescription, the age old and now anachronistic prescription that I have been at pains to debunk – that might is right.
What Americans need to give to the Iraqi people is the balm of simple justice, and it is poetic justice that the viable means of extricating this nation from the mess the Bush Administration has made of Iraq is that Americans must afford to someone other than white Caucasians the balm of simple justice.
This is something I have seldom received in the twenty three years I have lived in this country, one of the major reasons why I still hold a green card, and have not become a citizen.
I remember during my first winter and the first real blizzard I experienced in this country, that I made three trips between Morristown and Newark Airport in the stress and strain of navigating roads and highways covered with the white stuff.
I was a limousine driver, and arrived at the air terminal after midnight on that evening completely exhausted from my efforts – only to discover that the flight of my last passenger had been delayed.
I sat down on a bench to await that passenger; and, dozed off.
I was awakened by a Transit policeman kicking my feet, I produced documentation to prove that I had legitimate business in the air terminal; and, after he was satisfied that I was not one the homeless seeking warmth and shelter, I asked him why he had not tapped the bench or found some more appropriate means of awakening me than kicking my feet?
He had no acceptable defense for his actions, and I requested to speak to his supervisor, whom he called on his hand held radio; whom when he arrived on the scene and was apprised of my complaint also kicked my feet.
I perceived he was trying to precipitate some response from me that would have nullified my complaint, I declined to be taken in by this ploy.
There were many other individuals sitting on benches nearby who witnessed this incident, all declined to get involved, none of these were sympathetic or would even meet my eyes.
About two years later I was working in an office supplies warehouse when I sprained my back lifting a heavy desk from the highest shelf where these were stored; I indicated to my supervisor that these items should be relocated to a more accessible site to prevent such injuries; and, when he blew me off I made a report to OSHA, and was fired for my temerity.
In 1993, I was working for American Transtech through a temporary agency, when my manager informed the team that to meet the requirement from Corporate HQ set in stone by AT&T managers in Basking Ridge, New Jersey that we attain an eighteen per cent conversion rate in the Winback program; that we code all customers whom we failed to convince to return to using the long distance service, as a no answer.
The consequence was that even after we had made several passes through the calling lists provided by the Baby Bells, we would still attain the set in stone conversion rate, even though this subterfuge and tactic created massive inconveniences for customers who were called, again and again, though they had made it abundantly clear that they had no desire to ever again use the AT&T long distance service.
My arguments that we were killing the golden goose of telemarketing by denying justice to customers fell on deaf ears; and, while the other members of my team complied and kept their jobs, I refused to engage in this subterfuge and was fired under the hubris that my assignment was completed.
By an unfortunate and unhappy coincidence, the mother of my last child had just lost her job in Jamaica and needed my support; as she had single-handedly supported that child for most of her life, she had been born in 1978, during a period when I was unemployed there again because of my quixotic attachment to principle; but I could not come through for her because I deemed maintaining my incorruptibility more important.
I feel constrained to state that I was never seized with the misapprehension that I was denied justice because I was of African descent or because of my national origin; indeed, I was well aware that black politicians in Jamaica were generally as corrupt and venal as those anywhere else; and that more Jamaicans had been murdered while attacking members of the Police Force with stones than the powerful instinct for survival would make credible.
After ten years of continuous employment in the Esso Kingston Refinery, I had entered politics and resigned my job as a Trade Union Officer when the leadership of the Union sided with the political hierarchy in a dispute, and caused union members to cross picket lines of workers I represented.
Good guys come last everywhere in the world, powerful evidence, if such were needed; that the roles of territorial predator and prey are dominant everywhere on Planet Earth.
The point I am trying to make here, is that justice in the USA is not justice at all; it is a variation on the theme that 'might is right' that can be negated – if the victim is a member of a powerful organization or group, or, is willing to go to the expense of pursuing his or her right in court.
Justice, as I have come to be able to dispense it, is yet another out shoot of my practice of the discipline of truth; and, my determination not to coerce or exploit any other human being, I see the reality of my actions as they impact other human beings and am bound by my principles to take responsibility for my actions; I am constrained to give simple justice to the weak as well as the strong, indeed, I am consciously more careful that I never trample on the rights of the weak, the fundamental basis for civilized existence.
A direct contrast to the attitude of the vast majority of Americans who follow the line of least moral resistance.
When I became aware of the fraud in the education system in the USA way back in 1996, I tried to apprise every politician of note including Jesse Jackson and Newt Gingrich of this cancer that was likely to be the most destructive force in American politics, both declined to respond to my letter or act on its contents; both John McCain and John Kerry are on the list of those to whom I regularly forward my analysis of current events though the response I get are solicitations for contributions from Senator Kerry.
Even though as much as four years ago I predicted the course of the occupation, that it would be unsuccessful and that it would result in a civil war – with Allied Forces trapped in the middle.
This war was lost before it began, not the least because it was likely to change the balance of power in the Middle East and create another powerful Government of Shia Muslim Fundamentalists opposed to the existence of the State of Israel; and, because it was more likely that a snowball would survive the legendary heat of hell than that the Allied Forces had the possibility create a stable democracy in the region; and I said this publicly when it should have made a difference.
And if it did not make a difference then, it would have made a difference now, because it would have been remembered and given credibility of the a world view informed by the practice of the discipline of truth; it is not only that the individuals in the print and electronic media are impacted by the neurosis that effects the agents of coercion based culture, they collectively resist any ideas that would promise relief.
How could a nation whose citizens are incapable of dispensing justice, which has the forms but not the substance of democracy, take action and implement policies that would create democracy anywhere, this is a contradiction in terms?
That would require scrupulous honesty, such as I demonstrate in my life everyday as an agent of the modernization ideals, the Allied Forces could only recreate the template of coercion based culture as they have done all over Iraq in Abu Graib and everywhere.
When Jorge Musciante became aware that for several hours the personnel in Inbound Sales had not logged in to one phone system for several hours he declined to bring it to the attention of their manager; but gave me that information certain that I would act on it.
When Servicemaster arbitrarily terminated the service of indubitably and undoubtedly the most hard working and committed employee in the Terminix Customer Care Center they did so certain that their organizational might in Memphis will protect them from any negative repercussions that might arise from this act of gross and rank injustice, and it might.
The intellectual appreciation that the vast majority of human beings have no idea what they are doing, however much this is hypothesis is supported and validated by their results, does not prevent the fact that I am a one eyed person in a world that is blind, becoming a terrible worry and strain.
I had planned to knock this letter out over the weekend and be on my way to Seattle to kayak with the pods of Orcas.
This was not to be, I became depressed and found that I could hardly find the will to do more than meet the minimum demands of eating and sleeping which I did a lot of.
I tried physical exercise but I remained trapped and becalmed in a circle of despair.
Eventually one morning while aimlessly watching television I stumbled upon the speech to Congress by King Abdullah of Jordan:
Jordan's king urges US peace push
King Abdullah followed his father by addressing Congress King Abdullah speech
King Abdullah of Jordan has told the US Congress that America must throw its weight behind an urgent drive to make peace in the Middle East.
Addressing representatives and senators in Washington, the king said the status quo could not be allowed to continue.
It "is pulling the region and the world towards greater danger... the cycle of crisis is spinning faster," he warned.
The king suggested a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was more urgent than the conflict in Iraq.
While Iraq was a source of concern, "the wellspring of regional division, the source of resentment and frustration... is the denial of justice and peace in Palestine".
"Sixty years of Palestinian dispossession, 40 years of occupation... have left a bitter legacy of disappointment and despair," he said.
The BBC's James Coomarasamy in Washington says King Abdullah came as an honoured guest, and an important US friend and ally in a volatile region.
His speech was couched in flattering terms, our correspondent says, but it was also designed as a wake-up call to Washington, an implicit criticism of its lack of engagement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
He said there was now a "rare and historic moment of opportunity".
He called for support for a Saudi peace plan drawn up in 2002, which offered collective Arab recognition of Israel in return for a viable Palestinian state.
Hopes unfulfilled
But he said the US must move fast.
"Nothing can assert America's moral vision more clearly, nothing can reach the world's youth more directly than your leadership in a peace process that delivers results, not next year, not in five years, but this year," he said.
"We need all hands on deck. The international community, especially the US, must be engaged in moving the process forward."
King Abdullah was addressing a joint session of Congress for the first time, but in doing so followed in the footsteps of his father, King Hussein, who spoke in 1994 when, following the Oslo Peace Accords, there was optimism that the Arab-Israeli conflict could be resolved.
"With Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin beside him, he spoke of a new vision for the Middle East. And their courageous work for peace received bipartisan support from your leaders," King Abdullah told US lawmakers.
"Thirteen years later, that work is still not completed. And until it is, we are all at risk."
Four years ago, I perceived the dangers inherent in the attack on Iraq, and did all that I could to warn the people of this nation of those dangers; and, had all my efforts blocked or ignored, as they were when I tried to warn of the failure in education a decade before Time Magazine, Bill Gates, Jesse Jackson and Oprah Winfrey sounded the tocsin.
Today, as I write, the Trojans have constructed the horse and sailed away, as Cassandra of that fable advised the Greeks to set fire to the horse, I am advising you of the clear and present danger inherent in this situation.
I record my fear that a completely desperate and out of options Bush Administration in August of this year, will contrive the means to launch an attack of Iran, a sortie that will result in World War Three.
Prophecy is not a certain thing, my predictions are not certain things, based on they are not on clairvoyance or the application of anything supernatural; but based on the logical interpretation of circumstances and events, so suppose we avoid the bullet this time, the fact of a different balance of power, the obdurate and irreducible fact of a different balance of power will remain.
There are those who say that simple justice has no place in international relations, I would suggest that there can be no international relations without simple justice given the new balance of power, with large numbers of individuals and groups having access to the means to construct weapons of mass destruction.
It is time for American people to take responsibility for the future of this nation and impeach this rogue President; who, it is abundantly clear, does not have the flexibility to change a course, a course that has produced a failed and lost cause.
The time when leaders were infallible, when the truth could not be spoken was that time when might was right, that period of history when Absolutism ruled, that time is past and we must reject it, or repeat its tragedies over, and over, and over, again.
President Bush has made mistakes, which he refuses to address, and which cannot wait two years to be addressed; nor, should we wait until after that time has elapsed so it can be claimed the acceptance of defeat did not occur during his Administration.
When the votes to impeach are in place we need to use this handle to force the President to fire his Vice President and replace his with Senator John McCain; then address the United Nations to disclose truthfully and accurately the reasons for the attack on Iraq and beg the pardon of the people of Iraq for the suffering it has caused; or face hard time in prison.
He would also, during his mea culpa speech, petition for a United Nations force to oversee the orderly and complete withdrawal of the Allied Forces from Iraq; he would also outline reparations that the USA will make for the damage this unjustified attack has caused in Iraq.
After his resignation closely following on this speech, the new President should appoint Senator John Kerry to be Vice President and together they should create an administration of national unity to govern until the next presidential election is held.
The first order of business of the new government would be to call for talks to create peace in the Middle East and end the forty year conflict in this region; the talks would be called to resolve the historical problems created by Europeans, by the Romans who decided to destroy the nation of Israel when it could not pacify it; by Europeans down the years who persecuted the hapless Jews, culminating in the Shoah when six million innocent Jews, and other populations Hitler thought undesirable perished in the Nazi Concentration Camps.
The war on terror would come to an end if the world recognized that the actions of the Palestinians and their supporters though extreme were justified, since they were in defense against the invasion of refugees from the Nazi war machine and the German Concentration Camps backed by the vast near unlimited resources of International Jewry; if the Arab States, as they have proposed, recognize the State of Israel; if the State of Israel in turn withdraws to borders acceptable to the Arab States, recognizes a Palestinian State and agrees to refrain from interfering in the internal affairs of that state; that forty year conflict would be at an end.
I suggest that the extremism of the Arab peoples is produced by feelings of the terrible injustice that was done to them; the Bedouins were a nomadic people who survived a series of conquerors notably the Romans, the Turks, and the British, by not resisting them, by continuing to wander through the deserts of Palestine with their flocks of sheep and goats.
After the end of the First World War an Israeli State came to be the objective of powerful Jewish families who controlled rich banking houses throughout Europe; and, the promise of an Israeli state was a means of manipulating these powerful financial entities; but this was never intended to be more than a promise until the news began to pour out of Germany of the atrocities committed in Dachau, Auschwitz, and other scenes of indescribable and unspeakable horrors as these camps were liberated.
The Arab nations could not overcome the Jews who were refugees from these Camps; and, those from Europe who had escaped this experience, and, those Jews who lived in Israel but were motivated by the treatment of members of their race in these Camps, these Jews were fighting for their survival; and the Arab armies were defeated on at least four separate occasions in conventional battles, defeats which were demoralizing and which created deep wounds in national pride given their numerical superiority and the relative ease with which these victories were achieved, and were eventually forced to curb the expansionist policies of the Jewish State by ever more extreme acts of violence and terrorism.
But because the peoples of the world were so amazed and horrified at Nazi atrocities they felt a deep and enduring sympathy for the survivors of these death camps the Arab nations were seen as the aggressors; and, I was one of those individuals saw them as monsters, and were increasingly antagonized by the depredations attributed to terrorist groups.
As I practiced the discipline of truth I became more and more rational and began to interpret the facts differently, as my perspective changed and more and more I saw the reality behind conditioning I had been subjected to in Israel.
I overcame experiences like the visit to the memorial to the six million Jews that died in the Shoah, and, began to give weight to the fact that groups of Jewish emigrants to Palestine had purchased land from Sheiks who had held this land from time immemorial.
I ask the reader to question as he or she attempts to develop the capacity to dispense justice to the people of Iraq: why is it that no Democrat ever reveals anything really negative about his or her Party? Why does this code of silence apply to Republicans as well? And lastly, why have they alternated in governing of this nation for the last five decades and both have had so little success in getting anything done?
The settlement of the forty year conflict between Israel and the Palestinians could create a momentum that could create a stable government in Iraq; and that would be the next order of business.
The final issue I will raise has to do with the recent massacre on the campus of Virginia Tech by the mass murderer Cho of the thirty two innocent individuals.
The question I want to ask is, if this social, political and philosophical milieu can produce such monsters, why is not possible that it can produce someone who is good, someone who is dedicated to the common good?
For more than twenty five years I have tried to communicate a positive development that I have stumbled upon, that telling the truth would have a very positive effect on human existence; and I wonder why it is so difficult to engage the interest of individuals so that they would try this?
I am a scrupulously honest man, I have become a gentle man, where before I was like the common run of human beings as impulsive, as deluded, as prone to error as anyone else.
Why is it that this society is so preoccupied with Original Sin, with the faux pas of Don Imus which was the item in the news two weeks ago to the exclusion of everything else; as this week it is the brutal, cold, dispassionate and unfeeling murders that are the focus of attention?
Is Original Innocence as remarkable, would the fact that someone is attempting to achieve this not only in concept but also in precept be as newsworthy and produce as high ratings in this world of anything goes? Or does the powers that be wish to perpetually create and sustain the delusion that achieving moral consistency is impossible or meaningless because it would affect their power, or that this is superfluous or unnecessary because we have already done it?
I say again that continuing the climb up the steep incline towards civilization depends on a bare majority in every social system attaining moral consistency and that this is an achievable goal; and, that telling the truth is the necessary prerequisite to that end; that unless this is accomplished and we become adept in the use of positive reinforcements it is very likely, if not certain, that humanity will regress into savagery because of the detonation, soon or late, of the weapons of mass destruction we have developed.
Moreover, moral development will cause us to be acting in harmony and in concert with the natural convergence of forces that together create and sustain the ecology that supports all life on this planet; that continuing to diverge from and destroy that natural balance ensures that we will unleash forces that are completely beyond our control, that must destroy us.
One course, the high road of morality, will result in longevity for the human race; the other course, the low road of immorality will certainly have the consequence of our speedy demise.
The miracle of technology has allowed every one of us, everywhere to witness via television the awesome power of hurricanes, of tidal waves, of tornadoes; can we remain unconvinced of the possibility that we can become extinct and leave as little evidence of our passing as the dinosaurs that preceded us as the dominant species on this planet?
I seek neither riches, celebrity status, nor notoriety; nor do I have any political ambitions, my commitment is to the common good, why is that so incredible and impossible for anyone to believe?
Especially since I offer only factual and empirical evidence combined with logical arguments that promote and support the substantially improved efficacy and functionality that would be the consequence of adopting and practicing the discipline of truth in such a way that you have the unfettered, unmitigated and unhindered right to chose, to decline or accept this prescription.
When reading this essay on the human condition the reader needs to take into consideration that the writer has accomplished, to a significant degree, the cultural change envisioned herein, in contrast to those who are seeking a patron; who use their intelligence and writing skills to improve their social and economic status; the writer is motivated by altruism, the objective here is as stated, to create functioning democracies for the common good.
I feel constrained to make explicit what this is about, that I am asking the American people to give justice to the people of Iraq.
They must demonstrate to the world, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that they, and this nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to proposition that all men are created equal, accepts the rule of law, a rule of law based on the principle of natural justice that universally and eternally is applicable to the relationships between individuals, and the relationships between nations.
It is clear that the Bush Administration is not capable of dispensing justice to the people of Iraq, tonight, April 24th, I heard, with my own ears despite the tragic unfolding of events, Vice President Cheney describe Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid as defeatist.
I say to Vice President Cheney that this war was lost long ago when the Allied Forces engaged in a naked act of aggression against the people of Iraq, when the USA and its Allies attacked another sovereign nation and overthrew its duly constituted government without justification.
If a citizen of the USA takes the life of another citizen, he, or she, must have a reason, a justification for that action, or that individual is guilty of murder and is subject to the death penalty.
This standard, the bar of justice must be set higher for any nation when it contemplates going to war; and, higher still for the most powerful nation on Planet Earth, given the dire consequences measured in the massive loss of life and the widespread destruction of property that might result, when hostilities begin.
There needs to be iron clad justifications, and victory cannot and must not change, in the slightest, that requirement; or, it will be impatient of debate that we have regressed once again into the ' state of nature ' and have again begun to live by the law of the jungle, the rule of fang and claw, a matrix in which might is right and only the strong survive.
I am saying to the American people that every nation on Planet Earth needs to be able to trust that the United States of America will not unleash its numerically powerful and superior armed forces and sophisticated weaponry, without real justification, without ironclad justifications - otherwise the international arena becomes fraught with danger, pregnant with distrust and fear; and, the government of United States of America becomes an outlaw government, a scoff-law organization operating above and outside the law.
It was clear to me from the outset that these ironclad justifications did not exist, that the rush to initiate hostilities was a consequence of the inexperience, opportunism and irrationality of the Bush Administration which had several alternatives; for example, it could have pushed for its own Inspectors, to replace those of the United Nations, to determine once and for all whether the Saddam Hussein regime possessed weapons of mass destruction.
The Bush Administration, as an incompetent and criminal substitute to prudently and responsibly acting as they were mandated and sworn to do; to ensure that the evidence - that prompted it to so hastily and precipitately loose the savage primordial bloodthirsty dogs of war - proved beyond reasonable doubt that a clear and imminent danger existed to this nation; instead, they contrived and manufactured the tainted and since discredited means and issues that justified the attack on Iraq.
I say again, as I said several years ago, that I hold President Bush personally responsible for every war related death in Iraq; and, promise him that he will face, one day, an all knowing and omnipotent justice that will not be deflected, swayed or deceived by spin, and made to answer for his part in this debacle.
I call upon the American people to be the highest court of appeal and dispense that sweet, healing balm of simple justice to the Iraqi people, that equity and sound judgment that has been so palpably and sadly lacking hitherto from this tragic and ill conceived adventure; so that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish but belatedly create for humanity a viable and enduring future of peace and prosperity, and, provide for all the wretched of this earth, the possibility of happiness.
Copyright Retained, All Rights Reserved
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Personality and Psychotherapy by John Dollard and Neale Miller, Mcgraw-Hill Book Company, Inc 1950
Asian Drama by Gunnar Myrdal, Pantheon 1968
The Challenge of World Poverty by Gunnar Myrdal, Vintage Books 1970
Selected Poems(1934-1952) by Dylan Thomas, New Directions Publishing Corporation 1971
The Sociology of Slavery by Orlando Patterson, Associated University Presses 1969
Two Jamaica's by Philip D. Curtin, Harvard University Press 1955
Sociology, Fourth Edition by Leonard Broom & Philip Selznick, Harper International Edition, 1955
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx.
William E. Virtue
3222 Airways Blvd # 312
Memphis, TN 38116
Home phone: 901-338-3200
Cell phone: 901-201-8090
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