When you’re working in a group, it’s hard to know what you truly think. We’re such social animals that we instinctively mimic others’ opinions, often without realizing we’re doing it. And when we do disagree consciously, we pay a psychic price. The Emory University neuroscientist Gregory Berns found that people who dissent from group wisdom show heightened activation in the amygdala, a small organ in the brain associated with the sting of social rejection. Berns calls this the “pain of independence.”

 

Take the example of brainstorming sessions, which have been wildly popular in corporate America since the 1950s, when they were pioneered by a charismatic ad executive named Alex Osborn. Forty years of research shows that brainstorming in groups is a terrible way to produce creative ideas. The organizational psychologist Adrian Furnham puts it pretty bluntly: The “evidence from science suggests that business people must be insane to use brainstorming groups. If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority.”

This is not to say that we should abolish groupwork. But we should use it a lot more judiciously than we do today.

Author Susan Cain interview with Gareth Cook, Scientific American Jan 24, 2012

A while back, I did a post on politics over at the Defeatists (In full disclosure, I post my stuff several places at a time if it fits, and that’s my primary place. It’s also the easiest to throw in videos and such…so if you think there may have been tune-age that you missed, check it out.) One of my frustrations with blogging and one reason that I have cut back is the lack of feedback, by the way. Comments are welcome, good, bad or indifferent. Anyway, most of the comments over there seem to come from people who are trying to sell something like Gucci handbags but have been fascinated by some brilliant thing one of us said, either recently or a couple of years ago. We’re about due for the annual “How dare you say anything bad about boy bands, you misogynist bastards, especially you, Commandante!” which has some interesting semiotic undertext in it. However, this one was from a real human being who was interested in what I said and conflicted…I might be right, but what the hell…

Here’s the conversation. Any emphasis is mine…

Good post, good post…but what if the “middle” is, objectively moronic and absolutely wrong? The middle says:

“We need to invade Iraq and kill or displace a million people and turn the country over to the Shiite theocrats, but we will do so with properly audited spending and well-trained troops who will follow the letter of the rules”

The middle says: “Medical care funding in this country is broken so let’s require people to buy overpriced private insurance with their minimum wage jobs”.

Sometimes, to parpaphrase Jim Hightower, “the only thing in the middle of the road are yellow lines or dead armadillos”

And…do you really see any Democratic Party politicians with any position or any influence in the party (which means…Jesse Jackson does not really count) as being anywhere near as crazy as the current GOP? Really? Which ones? I can’t think of any…I’m a little younger than you but I remember Jimmy Carter and Dukakis and their ilk…and they are NOT Santorum or Gingrich, let alone Bachmann.

Posted by: Brian M | 31 January 2012 at 10:48 AM

The middle is also gung ho about the upcoming hot war with Iran…either run driectly by the United States or by our good buddies in Israel. (Another nuclear power. Hmmmm….why is Israel “allowed” to have nuclear weapons?”

Posted by: Brian M | 31 January 2012 at 10:59 AM

Not sure where the middle is…you see it further off to the right than I do. Oddly, we could take either Eisenhower or Nixon and their social policies as a starting point for the middle, and we’d look pretty leftist today. Imagine the New Deal or the Fair Deal or the Great Society in swing today…but, of course, what we got is what we got and determines what we’re gonna get near term and possibly long term. What that doesn’t do is allow us to just give up. I remain convinced that the lesser of two evils is the better choice. By having Bush beat Gore, how did Nader make things better? Devolve for 8 years and here we go again? (Nader is not to blame completely for Bush — lots of things conspired to make things this bad.) However, the difference between John Kerry and George Bush can be summed up with two names — Samuel Alito and John Roberts as well as one Supreme Court Decision — Citizens United. A Democrat wins in 2000 or in 2004, even an uninspiring Democrat like Kerry, and money doesn’t equal speech. However, it’s probably time for my periodic Yeats post…

Posted by: Crusader AXE | 31 January 2012 at 11:47 AM

I guess I am gloomier than you.

I wished I believed things could be “reformed”. I think Chalmers Johnston nailed it. Even as things devolve and crash and burn, the people that benefit from the system still have plentiful opportunities for looting and rent seeking. And, the system promotes sociopaths (no…I am not saying everyone in government is a sociopath…but still, there are a lot of ’em).

People like Obama merely provide a cover, a gloss, for the ongoing predation. Arguably, Obama has made things worse in that the “anti-war left” (a feeble force given America’s history as a violent culture based on conquest)) was lulled to sleep and ineffectiveness.

Posted by: Brian M | 31 January 2012 at 02:04 PM

From a guy who calls himself “The High Arka”

You can refuse to play either of their terrible games. You can resist them. Most of all, you have the power to give up the deception that Barack Obama is a hero because he might murder “fewer” innocent people. The crucial difference between voting for Obama in the real world, and choosing to allow him to murder only 3 preschoolers in the example above, is that the example above describes a terrible choice being made one time only. The presidential farce is recurring. Imagine the preschool example, but this time imagine that it happens every day. Times ten or fifty or a hundred. Every day, you go by the preschool, and every day the madmen execute either 3 or 5 children–your choice. At what point do you stop choosing? At what point do you stop playing along and say, “Enough”? At some point, it must become apparent to you that the game is never going to end.

The children are going to keep dying–there will always be new madmen willing to take the hostages, make the speeches, and carry out the killings. Choose your decade. Choose your war. Choose your murders. Choose your “party.” How long can you justify this morbid farce? How long will you play the terrible game with the killer? Go back to Vietnam, if you like. Go back to Hiroshima and “choose” which rich, powerful national leader you want to press the button. Go back to the invasion of the Philippines. Go back to the Mexican American War. The fucking crusades, or the genocide of the neanderthals. Count the bodies. Is it ever going to end? Are you ever going to say, “Enough”?

Every day you walk by the school. Every day the madmen are there. When are you going to stop giving them what they want? When are you going to stop validating not only the deaths they cause, but their entire horrific game? It will never stop unless we stop it. If we keep supporting it, year after year, always justifying it as “a little less murder than we could otherwise commit,” it will never end. When you refuse to vote, or vote for someone else, you are a grain of sand. But at some point, change has to happen, and it will take individual people willing to refuse to support the killing. A few crazies, at first, who refuse to compromise by saying, “I guess it’s fine if Obama kills people, because he’ll kill fewer than Gingrich will.” (This is, essentially, what that haughty piece of shit George Clooney is saying as the televised 2012 contest approaches) A few crazies, and maybe someday, more. It’s as daunting a task as any, but it has to happen for the killing to stop: human individuals–without an automatic, reassuring group consensus–refusing to support killing any longer.

Posted by: Brian M | 31 January 2012 at 04:31 PM

I’m guessing Brian isn’t the High Arka, but HA is definitely invited to the conversation…

This bothered me, and I was blogging about it. However, I was composing on Typepad, which my Defeatist brothers continually caution me against because a couple of times a year the Google or the Typepad Hobbits decide to fuck me over and eat everything I had written. I learn for a while, and then revert to form…so, I have brief moments of sanity, interspersing the Einsteinian standard insanity of doing something again and again and being surprised when it goes wrong. Terribly wrong. So, I dropped it for a while.

However, it’s still bugging me. I’m a lifelong Democrat who thinks that Jefferson, Jackson, both Roosevelts and Truman were among the great presidents, but the greatest was Lincoln. Lincoln would have serious problems in today’s Republican party of course. In fact, he’d probably either be a Democrat or possibly something further left. It’s fun to imagine him with David Boies, arguing Citizen’s United against some Koch brothers mercenary. Of course, as Jesus wouldn’t be allowed to preach in modern Christianity, Lincoln could never be admitted to the bar. Paul Tillich, the Existentialist Christian theologian and philosopher wrote in the introductory remarks to his most approachable work, The Dynamics of Faith, a series of lectures given at Cambridge in the 50s that “Today, faith is more productive of disease than of health. It confuses, misleads, creates alternately skepticism and fanaticism, intellectual resistance and emotional surrender…”

One reason that I admire Lincoln is simple – he personifies human compassion. Lincoln wasn’t overtly religious publicly, but he was a man of deep spirituality and concern. Tillich contends that “Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned. The dymanics of faith are the dynamics of ultimate concern…” Lincoln’s ultimate concern was justice which he saw as fairness, compassion, compromise and the acceptance of the other side’s humanity. He was generally disappointed, but he strove to achieve that world by doing what he could to maintain the union based on that idea of justice – not because the Union was itself just, but because he saw the potential for justice as lying in the Union, depending on it, deriving it’s future from it. And, in order to preserve it as source of ultimate good, he was willing to risk everything, including his soul and sanity and sense of self to preserve it. Had the South been victorious, would he have been treated like a hero by the North? He’d have been hung…he was risking his life, and the irony of his assassination lies in the reality that Wilkes egotistical madness created.

Today’s political world is based largely on something that goes back to the beginning – between those who are ALWAYS RIGHT and those who suspect quietly that they could have made a mistake. I don’t think Lincoln ever signed an execution order easily or without struggle; we know that George W. Bush had no such concerns, and that Rick Perry was almost gleeful about it at times. And, we know that the people who go to Republican debates cheer executions. Where would Lincoln have been on that? I suspect he’d have vomited…

I’ve been doing some reading about Afghanistan and our continued adventures there. Now, I have colleagues who are 9/11 Truthers, which I am not. I have colleagues who think Osama bin Laden was killed years ago and then dumped in the Ocean for a propaganda victory; I have colleagues that believe that Israel and the Mossad did 9/11 and got us into the various mid-eastern debacles. Well, if I were Israel I would probably have reacted to the news of 9/11 attacks with some restrained glee especially if I was concerned about the US cutting a separate deal that would be to Israel’s disadvantage. Churchill confessed to a feeling of relief and happiness when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Do we really think Churchill planned Pearl Harbor? I know that the Israelis and their various lobbies in this country really want Iran to go away – and, they’d like us to do it. However, as Zbigniew Brzezinski argued on Hardball on Friday we’re facing a reality. There is nothing that makes sense about backing an attack on Iran for us; lots to make it a really bad idea; and, exactly what does Israel get out of the attack? NBC’s chief “go get shot at” correspondent Richard Engle was in the same segment, and he indicated that the political leadership in Israel might be really excited by the possibility of an attack on Iran, but the actual soldiers and covert operators think it would be stupid, that their focus needs to be on Egypt and Jordan. Brzezinski argued that Iran may be crazy, but that particular empire in various incarnations has been around for 0ver 3000 years, and do we really think they’re suicidal? He also points out to those who say “Israel can’t live under the threat of nuclear attack” the degree of fatuous reasoning. We did it for over 40 years as did the Soviets and Western Europe. If Iran gets a bomb and uses it, do they expect to survive? Everybody in the neighborhood who counts, including Israel, has a credible nuclear deterrent, as well as delivery systems. The Iranians are depending in so far as they are on anything, on North Korean technology…what the hell. Let them spend themselves into oblivion, which was Reagan’s strategy in the 80s. It works…unless you screw up and spend yourself into oblivion.

This is relevant to Afghanistan for a number of reasons. I know that the administration has agreed to stop combat operations sooner than later, but I’m really wondering why not now! It really helps to have some historical awareness, and the only tactic that has worked with Afghanistan is the punitive raid. Get in, fuck up the bad guys and anybody in the vicinity, threaten worse if they do it again, unass the AO. Invade and try to make it better, and you’ll just make it a helluva lot worse, and you’ll suffer for it. By April of 2002, the Taliban is gone from power although still there; al Queida was severely damaged there; Pakistan is/was/will be totally fucked up; and we’re there because…we’re going to turn it into a Jeffersonian Democracy? As soon as the Taliban was defeated and Osama bin Laden et al were in Tora Bora, we should have declared victory, given them a check, possibly re-established the monarchy and gotten out. The Afghan people don’t want western culture; they don’t want women to have any rights; they don’t want to not kill each other. It’s that simple – we’re trying to impose an improvement on people who see no reason to change and regard the “improvements” as evil. NATO and the US would be further ahead to fund emigration to some reasonable location – Barstow, California for example – for those who want to live under something other than Sharia law. That’ll assuage some consciences. But whether we leave now or in five years or in ten years, it will be the same…only worse.

The piece from Susan Cain is very relevant here. We got into Iraq due to a rush to judgment and the influence of Ike’s military industrial complex combined with green, hubris and myopia. It’s interesting in comparing our Iraq-Afghanistan experience to the Soviet experience. Unlike the Soviets, we did have a reason for attacking within Afghanistan – they were harboring a threat, and we had a just reason for wanting to eliminate that threat. The Soviets had been dithering around with the Afghans for years and chose to invade because of the Brezhnev doctrine that once a Red Block Country always a Red Block combined with the belief that they could control matters. They sold themselves a bill of goods. The Soviet experience looks a lot like US experience in Vietnam – lots of people with good intentions and an absolute inability to see the consequences of their actions. I’ve been reading former British Ambassador to Moscow Rodric Braithwaite’s Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan 1979-1989 with a degree of déjà vu combined with a strong sense of WHAT THE FUCK ARE WE DOING? Working from Russian sources and interviews, Braithwaite has a history of a cosmic comedy of errors that looks and smells a lot like Vietnam. Lousy policy, self-delusion, group-think run amuck, combined with inefficient tactics, lousy planning, and dumbfounding mismatches between outcomes, methods and resources. The good news for the Soviets was that Spetznaz was really well honed in Afghanistan. The bad news is that they failed to achieve any of their goals while turning the Red Block essentially into Cuba and North Korea. We achieved our initial goals, dithered and screwed around for the next 10 years and are still looking for a goal that we can achieve. Somebody in power needs to stop talking, listen to the record and the history and start focusing on ultimate concerns, desired outcomes – I define a desired outcome as something that can be achieved within the reasonable constraints of blood, time, treasure and lost opportunity. The most desirable outcome today is not to listen to the congressional storm or the media tumult but to listen to the inner voice of reason and make the sort of courageous decision that Lincoln made routinely. And, don’t wait for elections or consensus. Do what’s right, now…for Lincoln’s sake.

Braithwaite begins the third portion of his book, the Long Goodbye with a poem by one the Russian Afghan veterans, Igor Morozov. It reads, in part –

Down from the heights we once commanded/ with burning feet we descend to the ground/ bombarded with calumny, slander and lies/ we’re leaving, we’re leaving, we’re leaving.

Farewell you mountains you know best/ what prices paid while we were here/what foes unconquered still survive/what friends we had to leave behind…

 

I generally find Russian poems and song lyrics somewhat of a blend of overly didactic and overly romantic…peasant and soldier poetry. The Soviet Army and its soldiers deserved a better use; so did the British with Lord Elphinstone in 1820. The Soviets in many ways repeated the British experience. We repeat the Soviety experience…if history repeats itself with the first time as tragedy and the second as farce, what exactly is our experience going to be? Tragical farce? We deserve better, and if someone listens not to the crowd but to the inner voices or reason, creativity and common sense, we may get it. I remain pessimistically hopeful…

 

 

 

 

 

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