Effective Learning Report

 

By Richard John Stapleton

About half the voters of the US voted for Donald Trump again November 5, 2024, enough for him to win the election, despite irrefutable facts and evidence made public about his atrocious and insidious lies and crimes, his damnable moral and ethical behavior, and his avowed intention to turn the US into a fascist dictatorship if he got elected USian president again. These lies, crimes, and abominable behaviors had been clearly and vividly described almost daily in broadcasts throughout the US by newscasters in mass media, in which many of them play a psychological Game that might be called GEE, YOU’RE WONDERFUL, MS./MRS./MR. NEWSCASTER.

The facts and evidence the mostly beautiful and handsome newscasters said and showed using politically correct Adult ego states and good English, sometimes lecturing using Parent ego states, sometimes joking with Free Child ego states in entertaining ways, inserted into the eyes and ears of their passive Adapted Child/Critical Parent listeners and viewers, was like water running off a duck’s back, or, in this case, like water running off the backs of Trump’s supporters, who did not “learn” a thing listening to and watching what the wonderful  beautiful, handsome, and intelligent newscasters and commentators said and showed.

Trump’s Adapted Child/Critical Parent cult members did not care what he said or did. They loved the guy, they said, despite most of them considering themselves to be Christians, even wanting to turn the US into a Christian nation, despite Trump violating just about every Christian principle you can think of over and over for over eight years as president or former president, with not a sign of repentance. On the other hand, there is a Christian principle that says “Judge not lest ye be judged,” which might be construed to mean it’s OK for Christians to vote for a Not-OK -3 Monster and not get sent to hell for doing so.

Those voters “believed” and had “faith” that Trump would somehow make them great again, and that was all that counted; but instead of “America” being made great again the US is being made a third-world nation again, to be ruled by an irrational extremist fascist president who appoints his own kind of dogmatic irrational right-wing extremists into leadership positions of USian government departments and right-wing ideological sycophantic judges into USian courts, including the Supreme Court, making the US once again a ravaged and pillaged land controlled by the elite rich who pay politicians with maga million dollar donations to reduce their taxes and rig the laws in their favor, leaving honest hard-working truth-seeking folks at the mercy of desperadoes and lawless renegades, as in The Wild West.

H L Mencken, a long-time columnist for The Baltimore Sun newspaper, hit the nail right on the head, writing in that paper July 26, 1920: “As democracy is perfected, the office (of president of the US) represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move towards a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

H L Mencken was also known for his coverage of the Scopes Trial, in Dayton, Tennessee in 1925, labeling it in his newspaper column the “Monkey Trial”, in which a local high school science teacher John Scopes set himself up to get sued for violating the state’s 1925 Butler Act that outlawed the teaching of evolution in public schools in Tennessee, since the act outlawed teaching anything that contradicted the “truth” of the story about how Earthian human life began as written in the book of Genesis in the Christian bible. The trial was a put-up show trial designed by members of the local Chamber of Commerce to drum up business that worked. The trial was the first trial in the US to be broadcast on public radio. Williams Jennings Bryan was the prosecutor for the state and the ACLU,  Clarence Darrow, and others, were attorneys for the defendant. In the end the defendant was convicted and fined $100 for violating the law, but the case was dismissed the next day on a technicality concocted by Clarence Darrow, and the whole legal charade wound up more or less good fun for the country.

Trump’s election was not good fun for the country. About 51 percent of voters in the election decided Trump should not stand trial for fomenting an insurrection against the constitution and government of the US on January 6, 2021, since getting elected president caused him not to go to trial, an insurrection that millions of Earthians saw and heard him lead with their own eyes and ears on TV. The US is now more polarized than ever and millions of citizens are wondering if the USian legal system only works if criminals are not wealthy or powerful enough to pay millions of dollars to smart lawyers to defend them or stack the USian Supreme Court with judges who will kowtow to them with rulings in their favor.

Trump cult supporters, and diehard Dem supporters as well, for that matter, are closed systems buried in their own peculiar wormholes of existence shut off from participating in serious dialectical dialogical case method arguments about what is really going on in human states of affairs, being primarily exposed to ideas, beliefs, doctrines, schemata, scripts, etc. of people who were scripted much as they were by infinite cause-effect chains.

Thus, Red states stay red and Blue states stay blue, decade after decade, as the US inexorably splits up and sinks into polarized isolated abysses of hatred, ignorance, fear, cynicism, despair, and violence, devoid of bottom-up-derived democratic peaceful consensual truths about serious things that count.

Most USians have “learned” nothing about how to manage economic and political states of affairs in political parties in recent decades, maybe, even, in centuries, having been scripted by their parents and others in early childhood with injunctions and counter-injunctions causing them to prefer certain kinds of political and economic processes, systems, parties, etc., including such things as authoritarianism and democracy.

It appears about half of USian voters prefer to be told what to do from the top down based on the impulses of a Nazi-type loser fascist Fuhrer like the spoiled-brat rich-kid and narcissistic nihilistic nitwit Donald Trump, being willing to subjugate their lives to his lawless ego states and his capricious violent political behavior, a nitwit being a person who does not try to see the whole picture.

Among all the dumb and stupid ideas Trump has come up with and expressed, such as deporting twelve million illegal immigrants from the US, charging foreign countries three trillion dollars in the form of tariffs (which is tantamount to imposing a cruel regressive sales tax of about that amount on the poorest USians), gutting or abolishing the Education Department, getting rid of the Civil Service System, gutting or abolishing the National Institute of Health, cutting the taxes of large corporations and the elite rich again by another three trillion dollars, and enacting a national ban on abortions, perhaps the dumbest and stupidest idea of all is exemplified in his supercilious chanting of “Drill Baby Drill,” which includes such things as gutting or destroying the Environmental Protection Agency, selling off public lands to oil companies, maximizing energy usage in the economy at large, and possibly destroying the Earthian environment, trying to maximize dog eat dog competition among people, corporations, and countries, hastening the race to the bottom by the human species, the bottom being the extinction of human life on Earth, caused by Earthian humans denuding and destroying their resources as they produce more and more goods and more and more humans, heating the Earthian atmosphere more and more, burning more and more fossil fuel, causing more and worse wildfires and hurricanes, Earthian humans fouling their nest with over-fecundity and rampant dog eat dog competition, producing more people and products than Mother Earth can sustain.

What the world needs now is cooperation, not competition, and de-growth, not growth, of products and populations, if any sort of peaceful and satisfying human life is to be enjoyed by all humans alive aboard Spaceship Earth indefinitely.

It’s incredible and almost unbelievable that diabolical processes such as these could be happening in the US; but they are, and they have happened over and over again all around Spaceship Earth since time immemorial.

Every so often in Earthian human history here and there around Spaceship Earth scripted losers in various societies get fed up with being considered inferior to scripted winners in a society, so they subjugate themselves to a Not-OK human monster who promises to steal what the losers need from winners in the society using violent means and share the plunder with them, who are also promised superior status in a restored or new great and wonderful, and beautiful, as Trump says, political world, after he takes over, but who are suckers playing psychological Games, going nowhere, Games such as DO ME SOMETHING and I’M ONLY TRYING TO HELP YOU.

If you don’t believe this has happened over and over around Spaceship Earth take a look at what happened to ordinary Russians after the communist revolution in Russia and Stalin took over imposing a fascist dictatorship, or what happened to ordinary Germans after Hitler and his fascist Nazi party took over, or what happened to ordinary Spaniards after Franco took over in Spain, or what happened to ordinary Italians after Mussolini took over Italy, or what happened to ordinary Chileans after Pinochet took over in Chile.

Or what happened to ordinary Frenchmen after their authoritarian leaders tried to wipe out the French aristocracy, or what happened to ordinary Chinese, Koreans, and Vietnamese after their authoritarian leaders took over those countries, or what happened to ordinary Cambodians after Pol Pot took over Cambodia, or what happened to ordinary Hutus after their authoritarian leaders told them to massacre overnight their Tutsis neighbors in Rwanda using machetes, or, for that matter, what happened to ordinary USians after their authoritarian leaders tried to wipe out the Indians of North America, or what will happen now to ordinary Jews, Palestinians, Russians, and Ukrainians after their authoritarian leaders get through trying to take over in their wars, all playing a psychological Game called NIGYSOB, NOW I’VE GOT YOU, YOU SOB, trying to triumph and reign supreme, to be superior.

All of these authoritarian leaders and followers were also playing a psychological Game called I’F IT WEREN’T FOR YOU that caused their wars. 

Scripted ordinary people everywhere have gone nowhere economically and politically despite all the revolutions and all the violence, theft, killing, loss of property and infrastructure, and human misery in wars of all kinds all around Spaceship Earth, started by ordinary lawless fascist street gang leaders promising losers he will make them great if they help him take over the country.

Seems to me the only way ordinary Earthian humans can get ahead is to learn better scripts and schemata. I disagree with Karl Marx about how to cure this over-and-over-again process of losers and dictators taking over societies. Marx thought such processes were caused by have/have-not class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, in what came to be called the Marxian Dialectic. The bourgeoisie was a better educated, freer, more accomplished, relatively well off, luckier, and somewhat more satisfied element of society and the proletariat was a less educated, less free, less accomplished, less well off, unluckier, and dissatisfied element of society.

Karl Marx thought this class struggle would inevitably be stopped and permanently cured by the establishment of a communist society wherein the means of production was owned by the common people and goods and benefits were distributed to everyone based on their needs, regardless of what they contributed to the society, in a dictatorship of the proletariat. Well, this has been promised and tried in several countries and to date it has not worked. Authoritarian top-down leaders have taken over and corrupted such societies, idealistic to begin with, becoming brutal fascist dictatorships in the end, becoming a simple dictatorship of a dictator, by no means a dictatorship of the proletariat. Seems to me the optimum solution is for societies to be managed from the bottom up by Earthian humans using non-violent I’m OK—You’re OK Adult-Adult Game-Free Democratic peaceful learning and decision processes, requiring dialectical dialogical discussions by participants randomly selected from all elements of societies to establish consensual decisions and policies.

See my article The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc. for some ideas on how this sort of world might one day come to pass at https://blog.effectivelearning.net/the-evolution-of-spaceship-earth-inc-3/.

Whether Trump will do in office this time around what he has said he will do remains to be seen, since most of what he says about anything is a lie or fictitious; but if he does do what he has said he will do we Earthian humans are in serious trouble. Who knows what this sociopathic impulsive amoral unethical human might do in the heat of battle, in control of the most powerful country on Earth, to personally survive?

It takes time for a new fascist dictator in a country to go through the stages of the whole fascistic process after taking over a country, to undemocratize it, escalating from minor bureaucratic changes to full blown violence playing third-degree IF IT WERE’NT FOR YOU psychological Games with internal political adversaries, migrants, dissidents, scapegoats, and with external enemy countries, trying to the bitter end to win with a I’m OK We’re OK—You’re Not OK Critical Parent-Adapted Child life position and script, almost devoid of Adult and Free Child ego state energy.

Causing a large disadvantaged group of Victim people in a society to get better off quick economically and politically entails more goods and services being produced for everyone in the society, or goods and resources being stolen from Persecutor groups and doled out to the privileged special Victim group. Trump has talked about having the “largest deportation program in history” to make his special Victim group better off. How this would work remains to be seen but at least theoretically the goods and resources in a country that would have been required to keep twelve million deported Persecutor/Victim in-migrants alive might be reallocated somehow to the special Victim group legally entitled to be in the country, which leaves the problem of who would do the work the twelve million one-down deported immigrants would have done at low wages.

But it can get worse. If more goods and resources cannot be produced in a country, which is most likely the case, the dictator will have to steal goods and resources from perceived Persecutor groups inside the country or from Earthian humans in other countries in wars to make his special Victim group better off, if deporting twelve million immigrants does not do the trick.

If fascist dictators try to steal from external enemy countries now, what with the advent and proliferation of nuclear weapons, Earthian humans could be rendered extinct in a nuclear winter.

The fascism process is a fool’s errand, with little or no chance of permanently making Victim groups better off. Hopefully the democratic republic processes of the US, despite the fascist Electoral College enshrined in the US constitution, designed to protect Victims in small states, but making them Persecutors instead, will be able to survive another four years of Trump and keep the US inching forward in its wormhole of existence caused by accidental/inevitable cause-effect chains, long enough for another Rescuer non-fascist USian president to “win” the next quasi or pseudo-democratic presidential election.

I am now working on a new book tentatively titled LEARNING, UNLEARNING, RELEARNING:  How I’m OK—You’re OK Adult—Adult De-Gamed Democratic Case Method Learning Processes Can Increase Earthian OKness.

In the meantime, you might want to check out my 2021 novel As The Rooster Crows Earthian OKness Increases showing how some of these ideas were used in a fictional management seminar coordinated by the protagonist Rout Logger.

And go to the EFFECTIVE LEARNING REPORT at https://blog.effectivelearning.net/

And RJS Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/richard.stapleton.397. 

Best wishes, Richard John Stapleton, Cedar Hill, Bulloch County, Georgia, USA, December 5, 2024

“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”

William Shakespeare,  Act 5, Scene 5, Macbeth

 

 

 

 

 

 

November 7, 2024

 

By Richard John Stapleton, Ph.D, CTA

Unfortunately, I could not watch and hear the debate itself, having no access to TV in our home here in Bulloch County, Georgia, thanks to Hurricane Hellene, but, based on snatches of it I have read and seen, Vance won this battle in the USian Civil War of Ego States.

His victory came about when Walz asked him if he thought the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. His response was a masterful act of lying by omission by not answering the question yes or no, while saying and implying how he did not care about such trivialities, or have time to think about such trivial things, being consumed with thinking about important things to do in the future.

Not only did he lie and get away with it, he psychologically made Walz out to be some sort of nincompoop for even asking about something as irrelevant as what he thought about something Trump said about the 2020 election, such as whether Vance thought the election was stolen from Trump.

How did Vance do it? He did it by controlling his ego states and his transactional vectors with what he did say, mostly irrelevant lies. He cathected a Nurturing Parent ego state by talking to Walz in a condescending polite way as if Walz were a poorly informed child, calling him  “Tim” in a friendly-sounding transactional vector directed from his Nurturing Parent ego state to Walz’s Adapted Child ego state, basically psychologically lecturing in a holier-than-thou way about the important things he was supposedly focused on, which was irrelevant bullshit in the context of the debate.

To which Walz then crossed Vance’s Parent—>Child transactional vector with an Adult ego state transactional vector transmitted to Vance’s Adult ego state using the words, “Now that was a damning non-answer.”  

Which for sure it was, but it was much more, and Walz, not being a transactional analyst, let Vance get away with his overall con Game. Walz could have said something like, “What the hell are you doing you damn fool, answer the goddamn question. Do you think you can lie like that and get away with that shit in front of millions of people on TV? Not only is it lying by omission, it’s an insult to all of us. You know damn well the election was not stolen from Trump.”

But no, Walz discounted the psychological Game, a variant of NIGYSOB, Now I’ve Got You, You SOB, and MINE’S BETTER, or Walz was oblivious to it.  And maybe it was best. He may have made matters worse had he responded using his Adult and Critical Parent ego states to seriously confront Vance’s lie of omission and attack his Nurturing Parent Ego State. It’s as if discounting and lying in USian politics are now not only OK but required if you want to impress supporters. Most political supporters like, even love in Trump’s case, mean-spirited callous liars, who show up wearing Critical Parent Ego States looking as if they’re cocky tough guys who know how to get things done. Many political supporters would agree with Trump that Harris and Walz are too clean-cut, moral, honest, and empathetic to be “smart” USian politicians.

Vance even cast aspersions on the CBS moderators for doing some fact-checking using his Critical Parent ego state, complaining they told him before the debate there would not be any fact-checking, psychologically accusing them of lying. Was this also a lie or was it fact? And does it matter?

Vance, on the other hand, does not always come across in public appearances and utterances like your standard angry rigid Critical Parent ideological patriarchal dictator. Dressed in a suit and tie, sometimes wearing a red MAGA baseball cap, he has a tall bulky frame and body that is characteristic of stereotypical macho male patriarchal dictators, replete with a dark beard and apparently natural dark hair on the top of his head, but close-up pictures do not always reveal this stereotypical macho persona/image. The man in his eyes and voice sometimes comes across as insecure and humble, a bit nervous, but intelligent, and to some extent gentle. 

Unfortunately, Vance is also “smart” enough to do what he is told to do by Trump (unlike the reviled and demeaned former Trumpian vice-president, Mike Pence, a FIJI fraternity brother of mine, a true USian hero, who saved our democratic way of life in the Washington Capitol Building January 6, 2021, by refusing to do what Trump told him to do—don’t approve the results of the 2020 presidential election—doing instead his constitutional duty, approving the results, for we the people) and Vance, unlike Trump, can think on his feet while constructing plausible-sounding if irrelevant false utterances in grammatically-correct compound sentences. And he comes across as young, unlike Walz, who comes across as a wise, moral, ethical, genial, empathetic, caring parent. Most alarming, Vance shows up at times wearing a Free Child ego state on his face, appearing to be light-hearted, joyous, maybe a little angelic, free of sin, like any good evangelical TV preacher.

Based on a quick Internet search, it seems to me Vance probably won the vice-president debate in the eyes of Trump’s base by a large margin and Walz might have won in the eyes of the Dem base. And according to one poll I saw it seems voters are still about equally split again, as usual, no doubt polarized along the same USian Red and Blue ideological and demographic ego state civil war battle lines, indicating, alas, that almost all of Trump’s Pied-Piper mesmerized Repug Adapted Child-Critical Parent cult members will vote for him again.

At first I thought Harris could easily defeat Trump this time because enough Trump supporters had had enough of Trump’s lies, crimes, and misogyny to decide not to vote for him again, and it looked at first that Vance might be a weird off-the-wall  male version of another Sarah Palin, or Dan Quayle, but he’s not. He’s not a dummy. He has a Yale law degree after all, which might not mean much, considering the inarticulate bumbling Repug USian president Bush II had a Yale degree of some sort, and Dems Bill and Hillary Clinton also had Yale law degrees.

Seems to me the major problem with USian politics, and probably politics everywhere, is that most voters care less about the real truth, what is really going on, than about said truth, what someone with “standing” merely says the truth is. Hell, many USians even believe somehow what the babbling incoherent Trump says. In other words, ego states, the way people say things, are more significant to most people than facts, data, evidence, and reasoning about what is really going on in the case at hand.

Most voters are more concerned about how politicians make them feel when they say things than they are with what they know after politicians say things, which is why Repugs are now attacking Harris and Walz over and over in TV advertising messages, paid for by their greedy rapacious power-mad corporate and elite rich overlords, out to get even more profit and wealth in their pockets with even more federal tax cuts and subsidies, now paying  Trump and Vance with dark money in the form of campaign contributions to make it happen—who are now using TV attack ads with no context costing millions of dollars to invade and flood millions of USian homes with pure propaganda and lies, assuming they now have TV service, if they were flooded with water and mud by Hurricane Hellene.

Politicians and preachers have similar scripts. Their job security and pay as leaders of their flocks depend more on their form than their substance.

Unfortunately, Vance and the Repug attack ads might have what it takes with voters to swing the election back to Trump, setting in motion a process that could cause the destruction of our USian democratic way of life in a few years. The first thing they will do if they get elected is start hiring Trump’s obedient loyal Adapted Child family members, cronies, lackeys, and knaves into positions of authority to run the departments of the US government, who will be “smart” enough to do what Trump tells them to do, creating in the process a despotic arbitrary chaotic ideological authoritarian fascist dictatorship, managing the US based on the nefarious personal predatory and exploitative ambitions and impulses of designated street gang leaders, using platitudes, dogmas, irrelevant scripts, and ideologies to justify their behavior and decisions.

They will do this because this is all they can do, since they will not have knowledge and expertise for dealing with the cases that will confront them in all the departments of government. Even if they wanted to, there is no way they could manage the country for the good of everyone, since they will not know how, and, regardless, not to worry, Trump will tell everyone from the top down what to do, using his supposedly-divine natural “stable genius” intellect.

What the US, and all countries around Spaceship Earth, need are decision processes that develop policies and procedures based on consensual answers based on knowing what is really going on around Spaceship Earth after rigorous dialectical group case discussions by democratic Game-free I’m OK—You’re OK Adult-Adult experts with serious training in all relevant fields of all departments of government.

Harris and Walz aren’t perfect, but we don’t have to worry about them enslaving us, and destroying our traditional USian democratic way of life, if they get elected November 5, 2024.

The bottom line is that Repugs use a lot more Critical Parent and Adapted Child ego state energy than Dems fighting in the USian ego state civil war, that has been going on for decades, and Dems use a lot more Nurturing Parent and Free Child energy fighting their battles in the ego state war than Repugs; and both Repugs and Dems need to bring this civil war to an end somehow as soon as possible by both parties using a lot more Adult ego state energy by reducing the energy they cathect and invest in Parent and Child ego state transactions playing their deleterious, sometimes hamartic, psychological Games in senseless wars, both foreign and domestic.

 BACKSTORIES

“HOW PLAYING PATHOLOGICAL POLITIAL PSYCHOLOGIAL GAMES CAN DESTROY EARTHIAN HUMAN LIFE,” by Richard John Stapleton, Effective Learning Report, June 27, 2024 https://blog.effectivelearning.net/how-playing-pathological-political-psychological-games-can-destroy-earthian-human-life/?fbclid=IwY2xjawFitCNleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHX3UqystJNI1k3pzOBs6CMEBcUqSn7nD8wjWd5SnbqtJwPBCBKt86atRBQ_aem_zInoelRnTN8JReDMh8sCLQ

IS TRUMP A -3 NOT-OK MONSTER LOSER-SURVIVOR?, by Richard John Stapleton, EFFECTIVE LEARNING REPORT, September 26, 2024, https://blog.effectivelearning.net/is-trump-a-3-not-ok-monster-loser-survivor/

 

 

 

 

By Richard John Stapleton, PhD, CTA

A purpose of transactional analysis is to help individuals and groups insert new fair causes into unfair natural cause-effect chains so as to increase the probabilities and proportions of winner outcomes occurring in the populace by non-violent means.

Changing a non-winner or loser script into a winner script requires hard work but it can happen if a person somehow acquires new script messages powerful enough to control frustrating, debilitating, or hamartic script messages instilled in his or her sub-conscious mind by a naturally-occurring concatenation of infinite cause-effect chains before s/he was eight years old. TA can provide people basic concepts and tools for attempting such a thing, requiring learning new time structuring patterns and learning to use different ego states and transactional patterns and learning how to communicate in more effective ways psychologically and socially.

Most people seem to think if only Earthian humans could solve their economic, political, military, and religious troubles, beat their competitors and enemies, etc., then everything would be just hunky-dory swell and the bluebirds would start chirping again. Not so, many people would not be happy and successful living in paradise because of script messages instilled in their sub-conscious minds before they were eight years old. In order for everyone to live happily and successfully humans would have to solve not only economic, political, religious, and social problems, but also psychological problems.

Changing a loser or non-winner script into a winner script generally requires changing  the Ego States one uses and how much time one spends daily pastiming, performing rituals, doing work, playing psychological Games, and being intimate with others. It entails changing a Not-OK life position into an OK life position.

Here is what Martin Groder, MD, a founder of transactional analysis who studied with Eric Berne, the best transactional analysis teacher and mentor I experienced at the Southeast Institute at Chapel Hill, NC in the late 1970s, taught about individual and group OKness that I called Groder’s People Map, in a passage I wrote and published in my book Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds (2011), Effective Learning Publications, Statesboro, Georgia,  pp. 148-150:

Martin Groder’s People Map

“Humans generally give little thought to what kind of human they are and where they fit in the spectrum of various types of humans. Innumerable philosophers, writers, social scientists, and others have categorized humans in various ways. Following is a schema developed by Martin Groder, MD, a psychiatrist, organizational development consultant, and entrepreneur (Groder, 1977).

“Groder developed this schema while working with hardcore inmates at the maximum security federal prison at Marion, Illinois in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. He was involved in a process of changing hard-core criminals into law-abiding citizens. Such a process would challenge the abilities of the most skillful and powerful of change agents.

“According to Groder, humans vary on two fundamental spatial dimensions. One dimension is Okness, which is estimated on the horizontal axis of Figure 1 (see Figure 1 in Born to Learn); the other dimension is the energy level of the individual estimated on the vertical axis.

“People vary in terms of how OK they see, feel about, and experience, (1) themselves, (2) the other individual, (3) their group, (4) other groups, and (5) the world. In Groder’s terms, they are OK or not-OK with respect to I, You, We, They, and It (the world). Groder estimates how OK they are on each of these five existential dimensions on a scale of -1 to +1, -1 being as not-OK as possible and +1 being as OK as possible.

“Thus people with extremely high self-esteem might exist at the +1 level regarding themselves; someone with extremely low self-esteem might exist at the -1 level regarding themselves. People could exist at any level in between, at -.5, 0, +.25, etc. The same would be true of the positions of specific individuals with respect to buddies on a one-to-one basis, groups with which one belongs, other groups with which your group cooperates or competes, and the world in general.

“Summing the 5 existential OKness positions for an individual, I, You, We, They, and It, the highest possible OKness rating would be +5 and the lowest possible would be -5. A +5 person would have the highest possible feelings of Okness regarding his OKness, the OKness of his buddy, the OKness of his group, the OKness of other groups, and the OKness of the world. Such an individual would have very positive feelings and thoughts for self and others. On the other end of the spectrum, a -5 person would have the lowest possible feelings and thoughts for self and others. Very negative people tend to end up in prison. Very positive people tend to end up cultural heroes.

“Probably the most profitable attitude for an entrepreneur in a capitalistic economic system would be I’m OK, my employees are OK, my company is OK, the world is OK, but my competitors aren’t worth a damn, since this attitude would motivate his or her sales employees to steal more business from competitors to increase the profits of his company.

“Entrepreneurs have higher energy levels than middle managers and normal people. It takes less energy to be a normal person than anything else. Entrepreneurs in Groder’s schema have approximately the same energy level on the vertical axis of Figure 1 as Monsters, the -3 OKness level convict leaders of other convicts. Monsters have the attitude “I’m OK, my buddy is OK, but everything else is not OK, and I am going to make the world pay.” According to Groder, it’s more difficult to change the energy level of a human than the OKness position.

“In rehabilitation work, Groder attempted to arc people across the gap of Figure 1, and make +3 OKness level entrepreneurs out of -3 monsters, +2 OKness middle managers out of -2 OKness creeps, slobs, lunch buckets, etc. Sometimes people arc across the gap the other way. Honest entrepreneurs can turn criminal. Entrepreneurs are winner-survivors; Monsters are loser-survivors. Winners achieve goals and objectives; losers do not.”

There is no doubt that Trump has a high energy level, but unfortunately he could become a -3 Monster.  He is close to having a -3 OKness level rating now. Whether he is a loser-survivor remains to be seen. There is no doubt that he has been a loser as a business entrepreneur. His father gave him about seven hundred million dollars to play with when he started out, that he mostly squandered one way or another. He has started many businesses and schemes, most legal and some not. Five of them went bankrupt. Along the way he accumulated three failed marriages. He was a successful player in a survivor tv reality show. He did not win a majority popular vote but became US president anyway in 2016 because of the undemocratic USian electoral college. He lost both the popular vote and the electoral college vote running for a second term as US president, having in effect been fired from the job of US president after one term. He claimed the second election in 2020 was a fraud and the election was stolen from him. He has told this lie over and over since and still says it running again for a second term as US president now in 2024. So far he has been a loser as a president. If he somehow becomes US president again and installs himself as the first US dictator as he says he will he will no doubt consider himself a winner. If only he could have encountered Martin Groder one on one in his earlier life the current Earthian human OKness level might be a little higher than it is.

See Martin Groder, MD. Business Games: How to Recognize the Players and Deal With Them (1980), Boardroom Books, New York and Graham Barnes, PhD, “Groder’s 5-OK Diagrams,” in Transactional Analysis After Eric Berne: Teachings and Practices of three TA Schools (1977), Harper’s College Press, New York.

And, by the way, the way to deal with Donald Trump now is to vow now not to vote for him November 5, 2024, if you read this before you vote in the USian presidential election dead ahead.

Trump inherited a more or less standard loser dictator script with Don’t Be Close, Don’t Belong, Don’t Think, Don’t Feel for Others, Don’t Be Intellectual, Don’t Be Moral, and Don’t Be Honest Injunctions and script messages at the Child-Child level, along with Be Smart, Be Superior, Be Powerful, Be Sexually Attractive, Be Right, and Be Rich counter-injunction script messages at the Parent-Parent level. 

According to Martin Groder, the only real sin in TA is lying.

A bitter pill to swallow found embedded in my books Business Voyages and Born to Learn is that everything that happens is either predetermined or accidental, as the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein propositioned in his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and therefore no one is to blame or praise, since everything that happens is caused by accidental or inevitable concatenations of infinite cause-effect chains.

Believing and acting otherwise will perpetuate the same sorry I’m OK–You’re Not OK life position that has bedeviled humankind since time immemorial contributing to if not causing repeats of historical abominations such as genocides, wars, slavery, economic depressions, famines, mental illnesses, and social collapses.

The Prayer of Serenity goes something like this: Lord give me the intelligence and strength to change what needs changing, and the wisdom to know what I can and cannot change, knowing full well that some suffering, losing, and grieving is inevitable.

Using TA in some cases can help people become more serene, by enabling them to see more clearly what is going on to make salutary changes, or by learning to accept one’s script and focus on finding a niche in which it fits. On the other hand, a basic problem or question is whether serenity is possible in today’s world, beset by global warming and climate change and by escalating tensions and agitations among nations around planet Earth who have nuclear weapons and Game-infested Not OK leaders.

TA never promised anyone any rose gardens, or eternal bliss in heaven, but it does advertise that it can help individuals, groups, and organizations become more OK, OK not only in terms of achieving goals but more OK transacting with others so as to live with more dignity, satisfaction, peace, and tranquility, based on Adult mutually agreed-to contracts.

No one can blame you if you believe in tuning out TA and articles such as this one. Maybe the best strategy is to tune out the world as much as you can, inexorably inching through your life’s wormhole tunnel, reading no newspapers and not watching television, with no Internet. The problem however if you do that is boredom. Most humans have an innate need for stimulation, achievement, and recognition.

Regardless of what sort of cognitive structures humans might use, TA or whatever, sooner or later they have to take action, and this entails defining problems, delineating alternatives, making recommendations, choosing things, trying new things, over and over, till something works.

1 – What is the problem?

2 – What are the alternatives?

3 – What do you recommend?

We live in precarious times that probably encourage people to play more frequently AIN’T IT AWFUL, a psychological Game in which Game players collect strokes for making the world seem worse off than it is, complaining about the evils and troubles of the world, positioning themselves as Victims of obsolete economic, religious, and political policies and systems manipulated and exploited by greedy self-interested power-mad narcissistic sociopathic oligarchs and their corrupt bought and paid for cronies, lackeys, and knaves, such as lobbyists, politicians, religious leaders, and judges, however true this state of affairs might be in reality in various societies.

By the same token, it will do no good for humans to passively pretend the world is just hunky-dory and swell, better off than it really is, with everything coming up roses for everyone, living in small imaginary Candide-like best of all possible worlds, playing a psychological Game called GREENHOUSE by transactional analysts, in which players are rewarded with plastic strokes for making nonsensical positive cheerful upbeat comments about the environment and social, economic, political, and religious states of affairs, regardless of how bleak they are in reality.

It seems to me the most dangerous psychological Game played politically right now around planet Earth is IF IT WEREN’T FOR YOU, involving polarized individuals, groups, and organizations who experience increasing insecurity and hopelessness causing them to blame others and find scapegoats for their plights, escalating their anger as they transmit threats from their angry and fearful Parent and Child ego states to the Parent and Child ego states of others, sometimes attacking others verbally and physically for their perceived misdeeds and beliefs. Some of the threats include the threat of international and civil war. Israel and Palestine are playing a third-degree IF IT WEREN’T FOR YOU Game right now in the Middle East. In most cases wars entail the parties also playing another psychological Game called YOU STARTED IT.

IF IT WEREN’T FOR YOU is a Game that entails aggrieved humans psychologically acting as if opposing warring or competing parties maliciously and arbitrarily decided using free will to commit the harmful or heinous actions and deeds they are accused of committing, instead of realizing the others were caused to exist and do what they did by concatenations of infinite cause-effect chains just like you were. Getting rid of the other will not solve problems caused by poor educational systems, poor family scripts, poor religions, and hamartic economic and political policies and systems.

For more information regarding the use of Transactional Analysis https://www.itaaworld.org/ to create better discussion groups and democratic processes read my book Born to Learn: A Transactional Analysis of Human Learning. https://www.amazon.com/Born-Learn-Transactional-Analysis-Learning/dp/0692584331

For more information on how to co-construct better organizations and economic systems using TA read my book Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata, and Tools for Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds https://www.amazon.com/Business-Voyages-Schemata-Discovering-Co-Constructing/dp/1413480810

See my article “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc,” https://blog.effectivelearning.net/the-evolution-of-spaceship-earth-inc/ for some management science ideas on how human Earthians might eventually co-construct an idealistic democratic bottom-up economic system that is viable and satisfying for everyone aboard Spaceship Earth, making it possible for all Earthian humans to develop an I’m OK – You’re OK life position.

This entails human Earthians never doing work that machines can do better, and delegating the day-to-day management of systems for scheduling, producing, and distributing the necessities of life to artificial intelligence programs and supercomputers.

This can be done using linear programming based on the general algorithmic matrix algebra form

Max CjXj, s.t. AijXj <, =, or > Bi

as explained in my article “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc.” https://blog.effectivelearning.net/the-evolution-of-spaceship-earth-inc/

Flying aboard an airliner about to land at night moving at four hundred miles an hour at thirty thousand feet, what would you rather have landing the plane, the plane’s computer system and auto-pilot or the human pilot and co-pilot, looking out their windows with their hands on their steering devices, seeing nothing but clouds and lightning below? Thanks are due to Buckminster Fuller for creating this airplane-landing metaphor, that he published in his 1964 book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth.

It’s not easy to see what’s really going on, impossible some say, while being inundated and intimidated with fake news daily around Spaceship Earth, made public in mass media and the Internet and in internal communication processes of various types of organizations. To see what’s really going on, Earthian humans have to use inductive and analogical reasoning, based on probability, not deductive logic. Almost never can anyone prove with deductive logic that a general proposition about economic, social, psychological, religious, or political states affairs is absolutely true. About the best humans can hope for is to develop consensual answers that are generally acceptable and true based on probability.

It’s better to be honestly wrong, saying something is true because you really don’t know it’s not true, than to say something is true when you know damn well it’s not true.

Seems to me most lying is lying by omission (people not telling people things they know are true to gain or preserve advantages in competitive situations). Whether lying by omission is more or less harmful in overall perspective than lying by commission (telling people things you know are not true for ill-gotten gains), is debatable, as is proving whether it’s getting easier or harder for most people to see what’s really going on in economic and political states of affairs.

Political parties, governments, and mainstream media often lie by omission about what is going on, presumably to protect national security and their organizational revenues, in many cases socially presenting selective true facts but omitting true analysis about what is really going on.

For whatever it’s worth, I would rather be told what to do by a well-programmed AI robot than a demented deranged unhinged human fascist dictator. On the other hand, I am convinced the best situation would be to be told what to do by a group of randomly-selected intelligent rational humans who had fully studied the facts of the case at hand and who had fully discussed and debated about what to do in an open Game-free, Adult, I’m OK—You’re OK, democratic process. For a quick mental voyage exploring how Earthian humans might change their hamartic psychological, social, economic, religious, and political states of affairs read my 2021 novel, As the Rooster Crows Earthian OKness Increases.

 

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Elon Musk@elonmusk

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Shamala is an extinctionist. The natural extension of her philosophy would be a de facto holocaust for all of humanity!

4:45 PM · Jul 27, 2024

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“Elon Musk calls Harris an ‘extinctionist’,” by Miranda Nazzaro, THE HILL, July 28, 2024, https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4797024-elon-musk-kamala-harris-extinctionist/

Comment by Richard John Stapleton

What makes Musk think and say this referring to Kamela Harris as Shamala? Is he implying all Earthian women would follow Harris Pied Piper-like into careers and forgo becoming mothers? Seems like nonsense to me. If he is not implying this what is he implying? The only quasi-logical thing I can think of is that he is implying that Harris not having had children caused by some sort of “philosophy” would destroy the human race by “logical extension” if she became president of the US. If this sort of scurrilous hyperbolic reasoning is not behind his extinctionist statement what was? But how could a man as smart as he is really think this?

Apparently Musk is a Trump crony having said he would donate up to $45 million a month to Trump’s campaign according to Trump. Trump’s vice president candidate JD Vance has been saying in a statement broadcasted to millions of USians that Harris is some sort of childless cat lady, disparaging her childless lifestyle. Where there’s smoke there’s fire. Most likely Musk was implying Harris’s lifestyle and her views on contraception and abortions are not OK by ulterior means, playing the psychological Game called BLEMISH, trying to influence USians not to vote for her November 5, 2024 by besmirching her character.

Why should Musk give a rip about this? Your guess is as good as mine. He has already got hundreds of times more of Earth’s goodies than most mere mortals could ever dream of, according to some reports about $250 billion worth of them. Why should he care if Harris becomes president of the US? Maybe he just got bored with everything he’s got, and he’s attacking Harris to ward off personal depression, to entertain himself, get strokes, attention, etc.

Or is it just a simple matter of Musk thinking he can get back more than 3X $65 million in tax savings and subsidies in four years if Trump becomes US president again, recovering more than his three monthly $65 million donations to Trump’s campaign between now and November 5, 2024? If so, he is not only Spaceship Earth’s richest man. He is also the greediest man on Earth.

Global warming and climate change is the most serious existential threat facing Earthian humans today. Reducing the human population aboard Spaceship Earth by women like Harris deciding as she apparently did not to have children would safely reduce by logical extension the Earthian human population and the consequent burning of fossil fuel to produce goods for consumption in the short run, while conserving scarce and irreplaceable resources to produce food, clothing, and shelter and other necessities of life for generations of Earthian humans in the long run.

Musk is asserting psychologically that reducing the Earthian human population through contraceptives, abortions, etc. would lead to human extinction, and Harris’s role modeling as a successful childless Earthian human woman as president of the US would exacerbate the process.           

But common sense would tell you that this would never happen just because of the success of one woman. True enough, Harris’s leadership might influence some women to forgo motherhood but common sense would tell you it would be a small percentage of child-bearing-age Earthian human women.

On the other hand, reducing the Earthian human population through natural attrition, natural deaths exceeding natural births, over time, would be a good policy, reducing strife and competition for the necessities of life for all Earthian humans, engendering Earthian peace and tranquility, lowering global warming, thereby increasing the chances of perpetuating Earthian human life and civilization, much to the contrary of Musk’s psychological assertions.

Rest assured Kamela Harris would not be powerful enough or influential enough as US president to cause enough Earthian women by “logical extension” to cause the extinction of Earthian human life by not choosing to become barefoot in a kitchen cooking meals and gestating offspring subservient to a Christian patriarchal male.

Or is Musk trying to justify his own lifestyle, similar to the lifestyle of his bought and paid for politician, the would-be Fuhrer of the US, Trump, trying to normalize heterosexual males siring as many offspring as they wish with as many girlfriends and divorced wives as they wish?

If so, one can build a case that Elon Musk, boy genius that he indubitably is in physics and economics, having become Spaceship Earth’s richest heterosexual male in a short period of time manufacturing electric cars and spaceships, among other things, becoming the top corporate boss of about 150,000 Earthian humans enslaved as his employees doing the work of his business organizations, is, like Trump, also deficient in rational and humane morals and ethics; and, he is now able to spread propaganda, including Trump’s big lies, to millions of Earthian humans, after spending, and maybe losing, some say, $44 billion to purchase ownership control of Twitter, now called X, to achieve his goal of becoming an “Influencer”.

For more on the Earthian problem of overly-fecund Earthian human sexual activity and over-population, and many other problems, see my 2021 novel, As the Rooster Crows Earthian OKness Increases, to see what my fictionalized hero Rout Logger, an efficient and effective management consultant and seminar leader, and his forty seminar participants randomly-selected from all walks of life, arguing about and discussing Trump and Musk behavior, and other Earthian existential problems, including the rights and responsibilities of all Earthian humans in a Game-free I’m OK—You’re OK Adult—Adult democratic monthly six-hour seminar in upscale downtown hotels in randomly-selected large cities throughout the US, decided by consensus what to do now about existential threats facing Earthian humans, after one of them was randomly-selected to lead every discussion by a spinning three-foot-tall copper rooster, positioned in the center of the conference room, called The Truther Rooster, that raucously and loudly crowed, bobbing his head up and down, after the spinning stopped, pointing out the discussion “Leader of the Moment”, sitting in the circle, at https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d…

HOW TO EMPOWER EARTHIAN HUMANS

Richard John Stapleton, PhD, CTA would spin the spinner of his Classroom De-GAMER™ in his classes to randomly select a student at the beginning of each class session to lead a discussion of the case assigned for the day, a case taken from a planned or operating business prepared by case writers at Georgia Southern University, Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Alabama. He taught management systems, researched, published, and conducted a small business institute at Georgia Southern University thirty-five years, 1970-2005.

All case analyses entail considering three existential questions:

WHAT IS THE PROBLEM? WHAT ARE THE ALTERNATIVES? WHAT DO YOU RECOMMEND?

 

Whomever the spinner of the Classroom De-Gamer™ selected when it wound down after spinning by an imaginary line of fire extending from the point of the spinner to a class member sitting in the circle classroom layout would become the “Leader of the Moment” required to answer the three existential questions shown above laying out the case to all class members.

The purpose of the Classroom De-Gamer™ is to de-Game the playing of OK I’LL READ IT by students in which students psychologically tell teachers they will read the assigned homework but don’t. Randomly selecting a discussion leader insures that no student can psychologically think or feel that s/he is being picked on or favored by a teacher calling on someone to start a discussion, thereby banishing from the classroom the three psychological Game roles of Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim.

The overall purpose of the Game-free I’m OK-You’re OK Adult-Adult democratic teaching and learning process is to produce comprehension of the relevant facts and focal points of the case among class members in order to create rational policies and strategies for successfully managing the states of affairs of the case. All humans have Adult ego states that can be cathected, even children at young ages.

Cathecting an ego state is turning on energy, cognition and emotion in the human psyche for transacting with fellow humans. There are three basic types of ego states that can be cathected: Parent, Adult, and Child.

A soft drink bottle as in playing the childhood game Spin the Bottle works about as well as a Classroom De-Gamer™ to randomly select the Leader of the Moment to answer the Three Existential Questions. No one can interrupt anyone once someone has the floor. Communicating overtly or covertly with individuals in the room for the whole session is not allowed. Anyone can respond to any speaker once the speaker has finished, disagreeing or agreeing with what was said, and may bring up another problem if appropriate in the context of the discussion.

How long should a discussion last? Long enough for group members to comprehend the system under consideration, a system including interrelations between relevant focal point entities of the system—relevant facts and issues comprising the problem, alternatives and recommendations.

According to R. Buckminster Fuller in his Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969) comprehension of a system entails separating the relevant points from the irrelevant points in the system under consideration. It takes time to do this. According to Fuller, Comprehension = (N²-N) / 2, where N = Number of total focal point entities in the system, counting the number of focal point facts or issues and all the inter-relationships between the focal point entities.

Comprehension required and produced expands exponentially as the size of the system increases. One has to wonder if most Earthian systems today are ever fully comprehended by Earthian humans. Rather than most Earthian human systems being managed today based on comprehension in general they are managed based on dogmas, doctrines, rules, algorithms, scripts, and the like, many of which are irrelevant. As matters now stand about the best Earthian humans can hope for is that somehow the smartest, wisest, most knowledgeable, most ethical, and most empathetic Earthian humans somehow manage to become top leaders in major systems.

When most members of the discussion group seem to generally comprehend the system it is time to stop. Most paper cases in Stapleton’s classes of about 30 students took about one hour. Real cases and systems in your organizations and groups may take more or less time, perhaps several hourly sessions for one system. Stick with the discussion until most members have comprehended the relevant problems, alternatives, and recommendations of the system under consideration as best they can. In most cases this will produce a solution considered the most rational of alternatives for most members of the group, about the best that can be hoped for at present. Perhaps at some future date supercomputers will be able to comprehend large systems well enough to develop answers that are provably true.

Since all members of the group will not have been caused to develop the same pictures in their heads about what should be done in the case before the discussion starts, a high percentage of the discussants will learn in the discussion as they comprehend what is really going on that their initial conceptions were wrong, causing both unlearning and learning. Sometimes unlearning is more important than learning for creating better Earthian human states of affairs. Unlearning, in fact, might be what is now needed most in order for Earthian humans to develop peaceful and sustainable systems around Spaceship Earth.

Most discussants will not leave the discussions with the same mental pictures they started out with caused by the greater comprehension caused by the back and forth dialectical arguing caused by the Game-free I’m OK-You’re OK Adult-Adult democratic discussion process, proving both unlearning and learning happened.

Stapleton’s De-Gaming process insured that everyone would be relatively GAME-free transacting in class discussions. They all agreed to a learning contract at the outset of the course that they would read assigned cases and would be graded on the quantity and quality of ideas sold in the class market. Anyone caught obviously unprepared by the spinning De-GAMER would lose a whole letter grade from the course grade. No one could feel or think that s/he was being Persecuted or Rescued as a Victim if selected to start the class discussion of the day by the Classroom De-GAMER. The psychological GAME Drama Triangle roles of Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim were largely eliminated from the course learning process. The actual grades received-A’s, B’s, C’s, D’s, and F’s-were relative grades, not absolute grades, Excellent, Good, Average, Poor, and Failing relative to the class. There were no numbers ostensibly proving what percentage of the course knowledge was retained in memory for so-called objective exams.

Stapleton sat in the same circle in the same kind of chair as students, and the De-GAMING rules also applied to him. If the Classroom De-GAMER landed on him he had to lay out the case just like any other student and discuss what was the problem, what were the alternatives, and what he recommended.

Grades were based eighty percent on class participation in dialectical discussions about what to do about problems and opportunities found in cases; the rest of the final grade was based on two case write-ups. One write-up was about what the student observed, researched, analyzed, and wrote about an existing business in the local environment or a business plan the student created. The other write-up was an analysis of a case researched and written by professors about a business assigned as the final exam. Cases used in his courses contained processes, problems, opportunities, and data occurring in all functional areas of business such as entrepreneurship, finance, marketing, operations management, control, management information systems, and business policy and strategy.

Stapleton published refereed journal articles and books explaining how his democratic GAME-free Adult-Adult I’m OK-You’re OK case method system works, by banishing Persecutors, Rescuers, and Victims playing psychological GAMES from the teaching and learning process, first documented in an article titled the Classroom De-GAMER™ he published in 1978 in the Transactional Analysis Journal. He has published seven books and over one hundred articles in various media containing cases, research data, and essays on teaching and learning and management systems, policies, and practices.

He learned and trained using transactional analysis with Martin Groder, MD; Graham Barnes, PhD; Vann Joines, PhD; and many others at the Southeast Institute at Chapel Hill, North Carolina (1975-1978).

Learned how the Harvard  Business School case method works teaching with Bernard Bienvenu, DBA and Rexford Hauser, DBA, Harvard Business School doctorates, at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette in 1969-70.

Has a BS in economics (1962), an MBA in organizational behavior (1966), and a PhD in management science (1969) from Texas Tech University, and an organizational and educational certification in transactional analysis (CTA) from the International Transactional Analysis Association (1978).

Taught his own case method track at the undergraduate level in the management department in the business school at Georgia Southern University offering four or five different elective case method courses each academic year during 1970-2005 in which he led, coordinated, and graded about twenty-five or so students every year who took all or most of those case method courses in their junior and senior years, of about two hundred students who signed up for all his courses every year. He used a democratic circle or amphitheater classroom layout in all his classes. He also taught most semesters two sections of a capstone integrative business policy course that included moral and ethical issues as well as planning, organizing, directing, and controlling issues he added to the business school curriculum in 1970 that was required for all undergraduate business majors that could be elected by any student in any major.  He was the only professor in the business school to use the case method in any course.

Class members agreed to a course learning contract that stipulated they would read the facts of the case before class and would lose a whole letter grade from the course final grade if the De-GAMER randomly caught them obviously not having read the case before class, if they had not slipped a note under his office door before class telling him they had not read the case, which they could do twice during the course without penalty.

About ten percent of his students made A’s and about five percent made D’s. Most made C’s, which is about right, since C = Average. There were few F’s in his courses. The main criterion for course grades was the quantity and quality of ideas sold by students in case method discussions. He used peer ratings to give students feedback showing what their fellow students thought about the quantity and quality of their ideas sold in class, having made it clear the final decision about final grades was his. He did not believe in Lake Wobegon grading.

No student was ever forced to take one of his courses to graduate, and the most hardened GAME-players in the school did not sign up for his courses after he issued his Edict of 1972 in which he clearly spelled out in his syllabi the penalty for getting caught unprepared. His Classroom De-Gamer™ was roundly discussed by students in bull sessions across campus every year and was labeled various things, such as The Wheel of Fate and The Death Wheel. Most students near the end of his career simply called it The Spinner.

He appreciated Georgia Southern honoring his academic freedom by allowing him control of his teaching methods, classroom layouts, grading procedures, and course books, cases, and materials, some of which he researched, wrote, and published. He was promoted to full professor with tenure at age thirty-six and was the senior professor of the university the academic year he retired in 2005.

He solicited anonymous longitudinal research data using questionnaires in 1992 showing his case method students during 1972-1982 reported higher yearly incomes in 1992 than students electing the same courses in 1972-1982 taught by professors using the authoritarian lecture method and the militaristic row and column classroom layout, who graded students based on memorizing or calculating “right answers” for tests, indicating learners learning in Adult-Adult I’m OK-You’re OK GAME-free democratic learning processes graded subjectively became more successful in the real world of business than learners lectured to and graded using Parent-Child transactions, row and column classroom layouts, and so-called objective tests.  

Only former students who had worked in the real world of business ten or more years after graduating from the Georgia Southern business school were included in the study. The data are shown, analyzed, and discussed in full in “Evidence the Case Method Works” published in his book Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata, and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds, 2008, pg. 475. The data were also used in several refereed articles.

Ancient Greeks used a similar random-selection democratic process in the Third Century BCE to select leaders of political discussions, learning, and policy formulation in their halls of government. Such a process is called sortition.

For more information on related classroom management ethical issues in universities see Stapleton, R.J. and Murkison, G. (2001), “Optimizing the fairness of student evaluations: A study of correlations between instructor excellence, study production, learning production, and expected grades,” in the Journal of Management Education, 25(3), 269-292.

He had one of the lowest student grade point averages among professors in the business school and was one of the lowest-ranked professors as an instructor on computerized campus-wide student evaluations that weighted only instructor excellence scores up to 2000; but he was one of the highest-ranked professors in a computerized student evaluation system he designed that generated data also showing and weighting study production, learning production, and expected grades scores for each professor, published in “Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations.”

To read the Optimizing Fairness article in full, go to https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=4394a6e5b3532a914d9fc9a43ccbfd0f54833ad8   After this research was published, Georgia Southern in 2001 added study production, learning production, and expected grades questions to the student evaluation form used campus-wide.

“Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations” has by now (December 30, 2023) been cited as a reference in 89 refereed journal articles concerned about the ethics and fairness of student evaluations in several academic disciplines, including 21 new citations since April 2021, proving the article is still being read and used.

As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein propositioned in his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “The case is all there is.”

If so, everything else said about Earthian human states of affairs is a rendition of what was or might be.

His latest book is As the Rooster Crows Earthian OKness Increases.

Feel free to share this article any way you see fit.

BACKSTORIES

“RJS ANCESTRY AND SCRIPTING,” by Richard John Stapleton, EFFECTIVE LEARNING REPORT, https://blog.effectivelearning.net/rjs-ancestry-and-scripting/

“RJS ATHLETIC, BUSINESS, AND ACADEMIC VITA,” by Richard John Stapleton, EFFECTIVE LEARNING REPORT, https://blog.effectivelearning.net/rjs-athletic-business-and-academic-vita/

 

 

By RICHARD JOHN STAPLETON

Trump is now playing POOR ME in his lying brainwashing utterances.

It’s possible that Trump is the crookedest unstraightest mass media communicator in Earthian human history.

Despite having a child and grandchildren of Jewish heritage Trump attacks USians of Jewish heritage for not voting for him and causing him to lose elections in one of his standard ulterior Parent-Child ego state Game-infested transactions. It’s as if the man does not even have an Adult ego state, making him incapable of uttering a true sentence. USians of Jewish heritage are only about two percent of voting USians; therefore from an Adult ego state standpoint they could not have caused him to lose a presidential election. The comment was also a veiled psychological Persecutor Parent-Child ulterior transaction playing his usual psychological Game of IF IT WEREN’T FOR YOU, a  threat to USians of Jewish heritage and descent that harm could come to them if he loses the 2024 election. In the same context he switched to a Victim Child Ego State playing a psychological Game of POOR ME and whined that “they treated me very badly” by not voting for him in 2020. The orange man does this over and over. Probably 80 percent of his public communication transactions are of this nature, ulterior psychological attacks on someone or something. How any USian could even dream of voting for someone like this for US president again is incomprehensible.

To learn more about the particular Trumpian lying brainwashing utterance above go here https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=trump+says+jewish+people+would+have+a+lot+ot+lose+if+he+loses.

Transactional analysts in the 1960s and 70s invented a new way to understand and communicate about complex psychological and social issues using ordinary words that anyone can use that make it easier for anyone to see what is really going on in human states of affairs.

This article focuses primarily on the pervasive and pernicious playing of psychological Games in political states of affairs. The I’m OK—You’re OK life position is one of four life positions for individuals; the other three are I’m OK—You’re Not OK, You’re OK—I’m Not OK, and You’re Not OK—I’m Not OK.

National governments since time immemorial have had a life position of We’re OK, our cronies, vassals, lackeys, and knaves are OK, but all other nations are Not OK, and we are going to make them pay. How to change this life position to We’re OK—You’re OK is what Earthian humans need to work on most if they intend to indefinitely survive as a species aboard Spaceship Earth.

This article explains a recurring Earthian human psychological and social global process that has produced authoritarian Rescuer leaders capable of murdering millions of humans in wars and other operations to destroy social, economic, political, and religious systems perceived to have been caused by Persecutor groups that would cause Victim groups to live in one-down intolerable life positions, a process that has become increasingly lethal with repeat iterations in Earthian human history, having now become capable of destroying human life on Earth in the next iteration of world war, caused by the evolution and proliferation of nuclear weapons in the hands of unhinged authoritarian human leaders of nations.

Politics is almost the antithesis of We’re OK—You’re OK. While politics gets some useful and necessary work done, most of the time structuring of politics is spent playing entropic and sometimes hamartic psychological Games.

Psychological Games spelled with a capital G are different from games such as football, basketball, bridge, and chess that are spelled with a lower-case g. Psychological Games are inherently dishonest and games are not. Lower-case g games have clear rules that are spelled out for everyone that are enforced by referees and players every time an infraction occurs. Psychological Games don’t have any rules. It’s basically a matter of making up your own rules as you go along, if you can get away with it.

When politicians promise to lower poverty rates by creating infrastructure spending and creating programs to fight poverty and the poor stay poor the Game is called  I’M ONLY TRYING TO HELP YOU.

Why play I’M ONLY TRYING TO HELP YOU? To get elected and maintain political control in a country …

When USian government tax and funny money and military equipment are given to allies and vassals to fight wars to maintain or increase USian international hegemony and business for the USian Military-Industrial establishment the Game is called LET’S YOU AND THEM FIGHT.

Why play LET’S YOU AND THEM FIGHT? To maintain or enhance economic and political positions of a country internationally without arousing the ire of Earthian humans in the country who do not know what is going on … 

When politicians promise to lower taxes so middle and lower income USians can become more productive and earn higher real incomes and their disposable incomes stay the same or go down the Game is called BUSINESS AS USUAL.

Why play BUSINESS AS USUAL? To get elected or stay in office …

When politicians significantly lower the income tax rates of the elite rich and large corporations and the rich get exponentially richer as the poor get poorer or stay the same the Game is called TRICKLE DOWN ECONOMICS.

Why play TRICKLE DOWN ECONOMICS? To increase donations from the elite rich and large corporations to get elected or stay in office, and to play PUMP AND DUMP, a major Game played by Republican politicians who cut the taxes of large corporations and the elite rich while increasing military and other expenses, building up the economy in the short run and causing the USian budget deficit and debt to explode, causing the next recession, and, one of these days, the next catastrophic depression …

When politicians spend more and more tax and funny money on the Military-Industrial Complex and the US becomes less secure and more impoverished the psychological Game is called NATIONAL SECURITY.

Why play NATIONAL SECURITY? To extract larger donations from fat cats in the military-industrial complex to buy advertising to get elected or stay in office …

When Western nations in NATO and the US unilaterally move more and more military bases and nuclear weapons closer and closer to the borders of Russia and China causing more militarization and nuclear weapons proliferation the Game is called BRINKMANSHIP.

Why play BRINKMANSHIP? To maintain and improve employment in a country by creating a need for military expenditures to employ war-making personnel and to manufacture war-making equipment and to solidify the control of a political regime over Earthian humans living in the country …

When politicians promise to build an elaborate wall at the southern border of the US and enact draconian policies to keep the poor of Spaceship Earth out of the US and little or nothing seems to happen the Game is called IMMIGRATION POLICY.

Why play IMMIGRATION POLICY? To get votes from middle and lower income Earthian humans in a country by assuaging their fears that poor immigrants entering a country might steal their insecure low-paying jobs …

When governments and their central banks decide to create funny money by punching digits into central bank computers and call the resulting numbers money and then use the funny money to buy enough government treasury bonds, bills, and notes to generate enough cash for the government to make up the difference between yearly tax money taken in and money paid out, year after year, for military and pork and non-pork government expenses, inexorably piling up more and more trillions of dollars of government debt, that can never be paid back, the Game is called FINANCIAL ENGINEERING.

Why play FINANCIAL ENGINEERING? To take in more Earthian resources in the short run and maintain employment and production levels in a country and to maintain or increase government expenditures for unnecessary products and busy-work jobs without ordinary humans knowing what is going on, magically hoping for the best …

When corrupt USian Supreme Court judges based on their political biases and prejudices rule in favor of idiosyncratic USian groups lobbying for laws to eliminate abortions and reduce the control of women over their own bodies and deny the right of LGTBQ USians to express themselves as they were naturally caused to sexually function the Game is called RELIGIOUS FREEDOM.

Why play RELIGIOUS FREEDOM? To engender emoluments by ruling for laws benefiting benefactors …

When large corporations and politicians move the erstwhile good industrial jobs of the US to low-wage countries and substitute more and more robots and artificial intelligence for human labor inside the US and more and more USians are left with insecure low-wage jobs the Game is called PROGRESS.

Why play PROGRESS? To take in more money for your organization and to keep erstwhile ordinary Earthian humans employed by your organization in the dark about what is really going on, ignoring the elephant in the room, the need to change the economic system itself into a system that works for everyone, not just large corporations and the elite rich …

When mainstream media selectively publish and broadcast factual political news but omit true analysis about what is really going on the Game is called FAIR AND BALANCED REPORTING.

Why play FAIR AND BALANCED REPORTING? To maximize money taken in by your organization and to keep ordinary Earthian humans in the dark about what is really going on …

When the most dangerous politician on the Earthian political stage running again for president of the US in the November 5, 2024 presidential election tells you over and over in mass media that his last presidential race in 2020 that he lost fair and square was rigged and stolen from him despite overwhelming irrefutable evidence to the contrary the Game is called THE BIG LIE.

Why play THE BIG LIE? Because history has shown if a fascist dictator and regime tells big lies over and over enough in mass media most ordinary Earthian humans in a country will believe them, or pretend to believe them …

When Earthian humans decide they cannot get their needs met in their societies competing in their way of life under their existing rule of law and start believing and having faith that fascist dictators will take care of them using violent unlawful means the Game is called DO ME SOMETHING.

Why play DO ME SOMETHING? To attempt to get personal needs met without assuming responsibility for taking care of yourself by enslaving yourself to authoritarian leaders who will tell you what to do, rather than do what you can to change the economic system into a system that works for everyone …

When corrupt bought and paid for USian Supreme Court judges decide based on their idiosyncratic biases and prejudices that USian presidents, even a convicted sexual offender, are immune in some or most cases from prosecution for violating the laws of the US, having the power of kings, and citizens and politicians of a country go along with it, the Game is called FASCISM.

Why play FASCISM? To get personal needs met by enslaving yourself to an authoritarian leader and his cronies, lackeys, and knaves who say they will tell you what to do and take care of you and give you a share of plunder taken by any means, violent or non-violent, to significantly raise your OKness level in your country …

Psychological Games have always been a major component of Earthian economic and political behavior, and a Game transactional analysts call NIGYSOB has been one of the most significant and pervasive psychological Games in business, economics, and politics. NIGYSOB (Now I’ve Got You, You S.O.B.) entails psychological Game players trying to reign supreme over others, to triumph over others, to become “one-up”, to be superior, to beat, to win, etc. any way they can. NIGYSOB players are motivated by anger that they feel justified in releasing because of perceived social and psychological actions and manipulations on the part of Persecutors that might cause them to become loser Victims, causing them to feel their psychological, social, economic, and political standing and security are threatened.

Eric Berne defined a psychological Game as: “An ongoing series of complementary ulterior transactions progressing to a well-defined, predictable outcome. Descriptively, it is a recurring set of transactions, often repetitious, superficially plausible, with a concealed motivation; or, more colloquially, a series of moves with a snare, or “gimmick.” Games are clearly differentiated from procedures, rituals, and pastimes by two chief characteristics: (1) their ulterior quality and (2) the payoff. Procedures may be successful, rituals effective, and sometimes profitable, but all of them are by definition candid; they may involve contest, but not conflict, and the ending may be sensational, but is not dramatic. Every Game (emphasis added), on the other hand, is basically dishonest, and the outcome has a dramatic, as distinct from merely exciting quality.” 

See Eric Berne, MD (1964). Games people play: The psychology of human relationships. New York: Grove Press, p. 48.     

Psychological Games include two sets of transactions conducted simultaneously between Game players, a spoken overt social set, and an ulterior covert unspoken psychological set, with three basic roles, Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim acted out by the players, involving three basic ego states, Parent, Adult, and Child, with switches of transactional vectors between various combinations of the Ego States in all players, as the players switch around from Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim on a “Drama Triangle.”

See Stephen Karpman, MD (1968). “Fairy tales and script drama analysis.” Transactional Analysis Bulletin. 7(26), 39-43.

Ego States are states of being including thoughts, beliefs, behaviors, feelings, gestures, body language, and other signals determining how people come across with others in communication episodes, whether parent-like, adult-like, or child-like, in all kinds of situations.  People switch Ego States depending on who they are communicating with and what sort of circumstances they are in, whether they are parenting, working, socializing, teaching, having fun, playing Games, politicking, or whatever.  They transmit messages from three Ego States in themselves to three Ego States in others in pair vectors, Parent-Parent, Adult-Adult, Child-Child, Parent-Child, Child-Adult, Adult-Parent, Child-Parent, or whatever combination.  These transactions are especially meaningful in situations in which there is some sort of authoritarian system involving leaders and members, such as parents parenting children in homes, teachers teaching students in schools, or bosses bossing subordinates in a business, military, or political organization, which normally entail primarily Parent-Child transactions. In general however the more Adult-Adult transactions there are the better things go in families, schools, businesses, military commands, and political organizations.

See Eric Berne, MD (1970). What do you say after you say hello? The psychology of human destiny. New York: Grove Press, and Eric Berne, MD (1963). The structure and dynamics of organizations and groups. New York: Grove Press.

Adult Ego State transactions are generally factual, honest, and overt; Parent and Child Ego State transactions are often covert dishonest ulterior lies, transmitted by body language instead of words.

Donald Trump, the most prominent, pernicious, and dangerous Game-player on the Earthian political stage at present, is a master at using body language to switch Ego States in his monologues, harangues, and diatribes at rallies and in personal conversations. He’s a psychologically Not-OK mesmerizing Pied Piper with a tall imposing 6’3″ body frame and a charismatic persona that is produced with orange facial coloring and a bizarre hair-do. Most of the time his words do not socially make sense at the Adult Ego State level but his body language at Parent and Child Ego State levels is clear: he is not only OK but superior and his psychologically Not-OK loyal cronies, lackeys, and knaves are OK and superior too, which is one of the biggest lies he tells.

Trump is not psychologically saving his cult members from their sins at his political rallies, as his analogue charismatic preachers claim to at their religious rallies; he is saving them from their psychological Not OKness. 

He is adept at switching Ego States and transactions from Rescuer to Persecutor to Victim by changing his posture and gait as he struts and swaggers about on stage in his Drama Triangle, flailing his arms and fingers about, randomly producing smirks, smiles, grins, grimaces, glares, stares and bodily contortions, and by changing the speed, volume, pitch, cadence, and tone of his sing-songy voice, that ranges from guttural to prissy falsetto. He is somewhat analogous to a made-up circus clown and ring-master as he titillates, entertains, agitates, and cultivates his captivated enthralled sucker cult members at his rallies. If he didn’t put on his make-up and fix his hair as he does he would look like what he really is, a pasty pale balding almost octogenarian Earthian human male, and most likely he could not get elected to anything.

Trump’s a master of pantomime and playing Games. But don’t be fooled. Trump’s not a circus clown; he’s a dangerous angry hardened convicted criminal who shows no remorse for what he has done who intends to turn the US into a fascist dictatorship if he gets elected president of the US again. Do you really want to live day by day subject to the whims of a fascist crime boss dictator who can do you harm at any time? Think about that when you vote for Trump for president of the US November 5, 2024, if you do. You should feel sorry for him, not vote for him.

NIGYSOB Game-playing underlies conflicts, competitions, and wars among individuals, groups, and organizations, including nations and corporations domestically and internationally. You might think nations and international corporations competing among themselves do not entail real anger, but it seems to me anger is a major factor when serious fighting breaks out. Leaders try to engender fear and anger among their followers before the first outbursts of fighting to motivate followers. You might think a war is not an ego trip for leaders. You might think leaders are simply doing their perceived ethical duty to preserve the safety and security of their followers and constituents. But the unspoken psychological truth is more than that. Wars are also ego trips, with leaders trying to triumph over other leaders, wanting to become one-up top dogs.

You can build a case competitions among political parties in presidential elections more than anything else are NIGYSOB Games, with Rescuer leaders saying they want to improve the plight of Victim citizens, increase their relative share of national and international income, provide them with better and cheaper health care, and so forth; but here too the contest is probably an ego trip for leaders who are more interested in being top dog than anything else. Political contests become an ego trip for followers as well as the leaders foment fear and anger among them to beat the bad guy Persecutors and run them out of office. If their party wins followers may also feel “one-up” because their party ideology and their dear leader “won”, regardless of whether anything is done to improve economic and social conditions in the real world.

The capitalistic economic system is based on NIGYSOB-playing. It’s what makes the world go round. It makes everyone richer, the defenders of capitalism say, because it motivates people to work harder and longer and more efficiently than they would if they did not have to compete and do battle with others to make a living.

Pathological entrepreneurs may say their major motivation is to create a new business that will improve the lives of customers, but creating a successful, powerful business is also an ego trip, especially if the entrepreneur is able to take in much more money than others. The money may be important for what it can buy, but a major satisfaction a big pile of money generates is the ego satisfaction and recognition a winner gets because of being able to take in much more money than others, producing a bigger and better balance sheet to show off, proof one is superior, having won the business Game called BALANCE SHEET, and no matter how much money they take in it’s never enough.

I was a good football and basketball player back in my junior high, high school, and college years. I was the quarterback of the team and I found it satisfying and exhilarating calling plays in the huddle, doing battle at the scrimmage line, and throwing touchdown passes in a real game before cheering fans in a football stadium, especially when winning, as was the case when I was in the eighth grade, when we won eleven out of eleven football games. On the other hand, I don’t recall ever feeling anger caused by the opposing team trying to beat us as we tried to beat them.

The main payoff for an amateur athlete is getting plenty of what transactional analysts call “strokes”, or units of recognition, that can be positive or negative, depending on how well you do something. Eric Berne said positive strokes are what everyone wants and needs. He said they keep your spinal column from “shriveling up”.

There are two kinds of scripts people have to act out in organizations, to keep their jobs or get promoted: psychological life scripts and organizational social scripts.

Psychological Life Scripts are programmed into children by virtue of constantly being exposed to and dependent on their parents before the age of eight. Almost as if by osmosis parents psychologically script their children not to feel, think, and do certain things in various ways and degrees as various events happen in the environment, largely non-verbally by how parents respond to a child, by how they get mad, glad, sad, or scared, or not, when the child does something when various things happen. Psychological scripts are automatically “introjected” into the personalities of children during early childhood, and most children wind up pretty much like their parents, with the same accents, the same religions, and the same kinds of feeling, thinking, deciding, doing, and communicating patterns.

There are also some generic overt social script messages such as brush your teeth, clean those finger nails, study hard, make something of yourself, work hard, etc. that are socially overt and spoken.

Psychological life script messages are called injunctions and social script messages are called counter-injunctions. These messages wind up creating a life script that includes a life position. There are four basic TA life positions: I am OK and You are OK, I am OK and you are Not OK, I’m Not OK and You are OK, and I am Not OK and You are Not OK; and there are three generic TA life script outcomes: Winner, Loser, and Non-Winner.

There is no way under competitive capitalism for all people to be fully OK economically and politically, making the I’m OK – You’re OK life position infeasible among all humans.

Most people are what they are because of family scripts, not economic conditions, and they can respond in adult life only in certain ways because of their introjected injunctions and life scripts. Some people are more flexible and adaptable than others, but most people in order to make a living and achieve some satisfaction in life have to find a slot, niche, and level in an organization in which their life script is congruent.

Social scripts, on the other hand, include the sum total of social do’s and don’t’s required for a person to be successful dealing with others in a particular job or role. These scripts include the algorithmic physical and mental steps required to do the specific job you are paid to do and required words and phrases to say to others and how to emotionally and behaviorally respond to people around you, up, across, and down the organizational chain of command, including playing the psychological Games people around you want or need to play.

All organizations, including political organizations, require particular social scripts for participants with words and phrases that have to be memorized and used. Almost nobody can be her or his true self most of the time making a living in an organization. Most employees have to act out scripts created by the organization. Organizations such as Disney World are the most scripted of all. Employees there are called characters and are required to wear costumes and “go on stage” after they clock in for work, pretending while on the job to be characters such as Donald Duck or Mickey or Minnie Mouse dealing with customers, parroting memorized lines. While all employees in all organizations have to pretend to some extent they are something they are not to keep their jobs the scripting is not as overt and extreme as it is at Disney World.

Click here to see a Parent, Adult, and Child diagram I published in the TAJ depicting a script matrix with some typical social script messages in an organizational chain of command.

See Richard John Stapleton, PhD, CTA (1978). “The chain of ego states.” Transactional Analysis Journal. 8(3), 215-219.

USians who get into politics for a living are just like all other employees under capitalism: they have to act out the right scripts to keep their jobs.

Most people who get fired in organizations are fired because of their psychological life scripts that are thought to be inappropriate in an organizational culture, or for being unwilling or unable to act out social scripts, not for being unable to perform the required mental and physical algorithmic steps of the job.

Eric Berne defined success in organizations as adaptability plus flexibility, one being able to adapt his/her group imago (the way s/he thinks the railroad should be run), and her/his personality, (how s/he presents her/himself with Ego States transacting with others). In other words, Berne believed in the old adage, “When in Rome do as the Romans do.”

There are certain things politicians have to do that might be called work in the physical algorithmic sense, but in the best of circumstances they are paid to think and make decisions, not do repetitive work. On the other hand, if they do not obey the script requirements of their political party they will be fired or sluiced out of the party organization one way or another. Therefore to get honest Game-free governments only individuals who have no intentions of being a politician for a living should be elected to office.

Psychological Games are a way of getting stimulation, recognition, and structure as one goes about one’s business of surviving and making a living. Basically they involve trying to gain satisfactions dealing with others, by making yourself feel better at someone’s else’s expense, or by making a fool of someone. Psychological Games entail people discounting problems, opportunities, and people, and the significance of someone or something. All psychological Games entail players acting out one of three roles on a Drama Triangle: Victim, Persecutor, and Rescuer.

Why vote in the first place? The best Adult ego state reason in a democratic republic such as the US would be to take social satisfaction in helping select the best person for offices to help set rational goals, objectives, procedures, and laws for everyone. Lesser Parent and Child reasons would be to vote for people who will do things to benefit you and yours financially, and who will provide for you and yours satisfying psychological Game payoffs to secure psychological structure, recognition, and stimulation similar to what you experienced with your parents, friends, and others in your early life that support and reinforce the psychological, social, economic, religious, political, and moral states of affairs of organizations such as your family, community, school, or church.

Once psychologically scripted most people do not rebel. Red states stay red and blue states stay blue, regardless of the logical Adult ego state reasoning of idealistic generally-OK political candidates with script-free ideas on how to improve the functioning of the economic and political system in the real world. It’s like water running off a duck’s back.

I remember a TV interviewer in 2000 asking an attractive woman who ran a bar and grill why she intended to vote for Bush II. “Cuz he’s a good-lookin’ man” was her quick response.

There are several psychological Games people play in political races; but it seems to me based on observing presidential races on the Internet and elsewhere, listening to comments people make on my Facebook news feed timeline and elsewhere, most politicians play a first-degree psychological Game called RAPO by transactional analysts, since one of the surest ways to get votes in our narcissistic USian culture is to be considered good lookin’.

There are three degrees of psychological Games: First Degree Games entail comments, insults, discounts, jokes, and body language displays designed to build up or tear down someone’s self-esteem, or gain or lose some sort of psychological advantage; Second Degree Games entail more serious discounts and payoffs, threatening someone, firing someone, getting divorced, etc.; Third Degree Games are sometimes called tissue-tearing Games with payoffs such as getting into physical fights, getting divorced, going to war, winding up in a morgue, etc.

All Games are to some extent pathological, producing some harmful or painful effects, ranging in severity from very little pain to a lot of pain. Third degree Games are seriously pathological.

On the positive side, Games provide structure and stimulation that produce positive or negative strokes, and in some cases negative strokes are better than no strokes at all. Games are sometimes called a bridge to intimacy, meaning it’s possible to play a first degree Game or two with someone in order to develop a satisfying intimate relationship with the person. On the other hand, you can’t be intimate with someone and play Games with the person at the same time, since real intimacy requires honesty.

A RAPO Game starts by someone psychologically promising some sort of satisfaction to someone for responding to her or his sexual attractiveness. There are various social and psychological transactions that can bring this about, social transactions being spoken and overt, psychological transactions being unspoken and covert. The payoff for a first degree RAPO player is not a real sexual liaison but making a fool of a mark or sucker who will be punished or humiliated in some way if he or she responds to the psychological sexual messages. Most psychological Games do not entail sexual messaging but a lot of them do. All psychological Games involve a con of some degree taking advantage of the vulnerabilities and weaknesses of a mark or suckers, promising things the Game starter has no intentions of delivering. Most of the promises of first-degree Games are insignificant and relatively inconsequential. First degree Games are ubiquitous and most people play them at various times. Sometimes they have to to survive in organizations.

Psychological Games and scripts are what make folk tales and fairy tales (such as Robin Hood, the Pied Piper, Superman, The Lone Ranger, Snow White, Goldilocks, Cinderella, Jack & Jill, Humpty-Dumpty, Hansel and Gretel, The Big Bad Wolf and Little Red Riding Hood, and Jack and the Beanstalk) interesting and dramatic.

Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Bush II, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden won political races to some extent caused by successfully playing first degree RAPO Games, caused by having physical and psychological characteristics that enabled them to transmit non-verbal psychological messages to voters that they would deliver to them titillating psychological and social satisfactions if they voted for them, somehow providing supporters, followers, and voters with various sorts of desired or fantasied psychological stimulation, structure, and recognition. Whether these politicians produced for their voters the psychological satisfactions the voters sought would be difficult to prove, just as it would be for these voters (for sure middle and lower income voters) to prove voting for these politicians produced any economic improvements for them. Any president during the last fifty years would have a difficult time proving he produced significant tangible economic benefits for middle and lower income voters, regardless of how much psychological and social satisfaction he produced for them.

And here we are, having degenerated in the US into a situation in which a convicted sexual assaulter, Donald John Trump, a former president of the US, is now running for USian president again, and it appears about half of USian voters intend to vote for him again. What does this tell you? I don’t know what it tells you but it tells me that about half of USian voters just don’t care if the president of the US is a convicted sexual assaulter, which means they have some moral and ethical deficiencies, just like all of us. And why is this? Why don’t they care? Most likely it means they were scripted not to believe this matters. I don’t know exactly, but it seems to me most likely it does not matter to them because of what Trump has told them about he would do as president if reelected. He wants to be a fascist dictator of the US, and they surely know it, and it seems to me this unfortunately means about half of USian voters like authoritarian dictators, whether in disguise as parents, teachers, preachers, military generals, business bosses, or politicians. In other words, they like dictators who will tell them what to do using Parent-Child Ego State transactions, rather than participate using I’m OK—You’re OK transactions in democratic discussions about what to do using their Adult Ego States.

Seems to me Earthian humans are polarized intellectually between two general extreme categories that might be described as democratic idealists and authoritarian nihilists, with most successful humans being clustered near the middle of the continuum.

Democratic idealists are not necessarily members of the Democratic Party in the US; and all authoritarian nihilists are not necessarily members of the Republican Party.

A democratic idealist in my view is someone who visualizes new states of affairs that might make an unsatisfying current situation more efficient, effective, just, and satisfying through consultation, collaboration, and cooperation.

Authoritarian nihilists in my view are dissatisfied with states of affairs as they are but do not visualize changing them by creating new states of affairs, believing instead that what is needed is authoritarian dictators in positions of authority who will make existing or superseded systems and processes work for them by out-competing competitors or destroying scapegoats and enemies.

Most so-called liberals and progressives would be included in the democratic idealist category and most so-called conservatives would be included in the authoritarian nihilist category.

An extreme democratic idealist would focus primarily on ideal states to be achieved in the future and extreme authoritarian nihilists would be focused primarily on what now exists and tearing down what they do not like, not creating better systems to achieve better states of affairs.

Abraham Lincoln once remarked there are two kinds of people who never amount to much in life: those who cannot do what they are told, and those who cannot do anything but what they are told. Unrealistic idealistic builders of imaginary air castles often have a hard time making a go of things in life, and people with no goals and imagination are pretty much stuck where they are. Probably most successful people lie somewhere in between the two extremes of idealism and nihilism.

Extreme democratic idealists worry a lot. Extreme authoritarian nihilists just don’t give a rip, and some are happy savages.

I agree with most transactional analysts that Earthian humans are scripted to be what they are emotionally, intellectually, and behaviorally in early childhood by Injunctions that are psychologically transmitted from the child ego states of parents to the child ego states of their offspring.

According to Bob and Mary Goulding, quoted in my book Business Voyages, page 160, there are about fourteen generic psychological Injunctions widely transmitted in family scripting:

Don’t Be, Don’t Be You (the sex you are), Don’t Be A Child, Don’t Grow, Don’t Make It, Don’t, Don’t Be Important, Don’t Be Close, Don’t Belong, Don’t Be Well (or sane), Don’t Think About X (forbidden subject), Don’t Think What You Think, Think What I Think, Don’t Feel, Don’t Feel X, Mad, Sad, Glad, Scared, etc., Don’t Feel What You Feel, Feel What I Feel. 

See Bob Goulding, MD and Mary Goulding, MSW (1976). “Injunctions, decisions, and redecisions.” Transactional Analysis Journal, 6(1), 41-48.

These script injunctions are transmitted primarily psychologically, not overtly spoken, from the Child ego state of the parent to the Child ego state of the child. Rarely would a parent socially or overtly tell a child what one of the above injunctions requires. They are primarily transmitted non-verbally by Parent and Child ego states when caregivers exhibit mad, glad, sad, or scared emotions in response to what a child naturally feels, thinks, and does as shared life events occur in early childhood. On the other hand, children are scripted by the ego states they observe parents using when parents feel, think, and do things. Children psychologically “introject” in living color the ego states of parents, including the accents, mannerisms, facial expressions, tone of voice, and behaviors of parents, as parents and children deal with life events. To introject is to take in or absorb the personality and behavioral characteristics of another. So children more or less grow up to replicate their parents, and the replications become hard-wired in their brains for life in most cases.

For good or ill, the scripting process may determine not only the personality and behavioral characteristics of a child but also his/her life position and role in life, including determining whether a child grows up to become a democratic idealist or an authoritarian nihilist.

Therefore the scripting process largely determines which political parties win in any culture; and the fate of planet Earth may depend on changing the scripting of humans, which entails a process of change that includes not only changing economic and political systems but also psychological and social systems.

An assumption of transactional analysis is that humans can learn to “see what is really going on” with themselves and others as they transact with one another socially and psychologically living their daily lives so as to increase their chances of living satisfactory lives, regardless of how not-OK their economic, social, psychological, and political worlds might be.

According to transactional analysis theory there are three naturally occurring generic life outcomes caused for humans: winner, loser, and non-winner—caused by inherited physical characteristics and script injunctions, “messages” one is exposed to throughout life—and by the early decisions offspring make about the messages that become determinants of emotional, intellectual, and behavioral responses throughout life. Inherited money can also make a difference. People like Donald Trump are trapped more than others in their family scripts by inherited money that makes them less likely to grow up psychologically and socially healthy than others. 

Whether one inherits a winner, loser, or non-winner script is determined by naturally-occurring inevitable cause-effect chains one is accidentally exposed to. Some transactional analysts assume proportions of winner, loser, and non-winner scripts in the population remain relatively constant from one generation to another.

The natural scripting process is not fair; and Earthian human history does not encourage optimism about the probability of this unfairness being eradicated anytime soon.

It seems to me most of the worst human abominations of Earthian human history such as mass murders, genocides, and democides were caused by non-winners and losers of a society who were tired of being one-down living in unequal societies that had basically capitalistic economic systems who decided, since they could not win fair and square under the existing rule of law, given their inherited biological genetic abilities and their inherited psychological life scripts and social scripts, that the best way for them to get strokes and become equal or one-up in their societies was to enslave themselves to an authoritarian dictator who would tell them what to do to violently destroy the existing government and structure of their society and probably other societies.

In other words, they decided since they could not win using their inherited abilities and scripts in their society under its existing rule of law the solution for their dilemma was to destroy the existing society by becoming obedient loyal non-thinking subordinates (cronies, lackeys, knaves, warriors, slaves, etc.) doing what they were “told” by an authoritarian gang-leading lawless dictator or king or queen who would arbitrarily reward them with shares of stolen plunder from wars and other takeovers and one-up status in some sort of new society after they destroyed their old society by means of violent force.

When Earthian humans decide they cannot get their needs met in their societies competing fairly and squarely under their rules of law and start believing and having faith that fascist dictators will take care of them through violent unlawful means the Game is called DO ME SOMETHING.

Seems to me this hamartic process has happened over and over in Earthian human history, in Germany under Hitler, in Russia under Stalin, in China under Mao Tse Tung, in Cambodia under Pol Pot, and elsewhere for thousands of years; and it could happen again, in the US under Trump and in other countries around Spaceship Earth. Authoritarian undemocratic political parties are now growing stronger in countries such as Hungary, Venezuela, Israel, Germany, France, India, China, and England.

A transactional analysis colleague Jake Jacobs, a social worker in Chicago, spent a good bit of time and energy back in the 1970s and 1980s researching and studying the causes of the German holocaust under Hitler, having had family members gassed at Auschwitz. An amateur photographer, he took trips to Auschwitz for a firsthand view of the concentration camp and its gas chambers that he photographed and studied trying to get a feel for what it was like to have been there and die there. In his research he found that 150,000,000 Earthian humans were murdered by authoritarian dictators in their own and other countries by starvation, wars, and other means in genocidal and democidal operations in the 20th Century. He concluded that a major cause of mass murders by governments is a desire of authoritarian dictators to be the only one that counts.

See Alan Jacobs, MSW, CTA (1991). “Aspects of Survival: Triumph over death and onliness.” Transactional Analysis Journal. 21(1). 4-11.

A purpose of transactional analysis is to help individuals and groups insert new fair causes into unfair natural cause-effect chains so as to increase the probabilities and proportions of winner outcomes occurring in the populace by non-violent means.

Changing a non-winner or loser script into a winner script requires hard work but it can happen if a person somehow acquires new script messages powerful enough to control frustrating, debilitating, or hamartic script messages instilled in his or her sub-conscious mind by a naturally-occurring concatenation of infinite cause-effect chains before s/he was eight years old. TA can provide people basic concepts and tools for attempting such a thing, requiring learning new time structuring patterns and learning to use different ego states and transactional patterns and learning how to communicate in more effective ways psychologically and socially.

Most people seem to think if only Earthian humans could solve their economic, political, military, and religious troubles, beat their competitors and enemies, etc., then everything would be just hunky-dory swell and the bluebirds would start chirping again. Not so, many people would not be happy and successful living in paradise because of script messages instilled in their sub-conscious minds before they were eight years old. In order for everyone to live happily and successfully humans would have to solve not only economic, political, religious, and social problems, but also psychological problems.

Changing a loser or non-winner script into a winner script generally requires changing  the Ego States one uses and how much time one spends daily pastiming, performing rituals, doing work, playing psychological Games, and being intimate with others. It entails changing a Not-OK life position into an OK life position.

Here is what Martin Groder, MD, a founder of transactional analysis who studied with Eric Berne, the best transactional analysis teacher and mentor I experienced at Chapel Hill, NC in the late 1970s taught about individual and group OKness that I called Groder’s People Map, in a passage I wrote and published in 2011 in Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds, pp. 148-150:

Martin Groder’s People Map

“Humans generally give little thought to what kind of human they are and where they fit in the spectrum of various types of humans. Innumerable philosophers, writers, social scientists, and others have categorized humans in various ways. Following is a schema developed by Martin Groder, MD, a psychiatrist, organizational development consultant, and entrepreneur (Groder, 1977).

“Groder developed this schema while working with hardcore inmates at the maximum security federal prison at Marion, Illinois in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. He was involved in a process of changing hard-core criminals into law-abiding citizens. Such a process would challenge the abilities of the most skillful and powerful of change agents.

“According to Groder, humans vary on two fundamental spatial dimensions. One dimension is Okness, which is estimated on the horizontal axis of Figure 1 (see Figure 1 in Born to Learn); the other dimension is the energy level of the individual estimated on the vertical axis.

“People vary in terms of how OK they see, feel about, and experience, (1) themselves, (2) the other individual, (3) their group, (4) other groups, and (5) the world. In Groder’s terms, they are OK or not-OK with respect to I, You, We, They, and It (the world). Groder estimates how OK they are on each of these five existential dimensions on a scale of -1 to +1, -1 being as not-OK as possible and +1 being as OK as possible.

“Thus people with extremely high self-esteem might exist at the +1 level regarding themselves; someone with extremely low self-esteem might exist at the -1 level regarding themselves. People could exist at any level in between, at -.5, 0, +.25, etc. The same would be true of the positions of specific individuals with respect to buddies on a one-to-one basis, groups with which one belongs, other groups with which your group cooperates or competes, and the world in general.

“Summing the 5 existential OKness positions for an individual, I, You, We, They, and It, the highest possible OKness rating would be +5 and the lowest possible would be -5. A +5 person would have the highest possible feelings of Okness regarding his OKness, the OKness of his buddy, the OKness of his group, the OKness of other groups, and the OKness of the world. Such an individual would have very positive feelings and thoughts for self and others. On the other end of the spectrum, a -5 person would have the lowest possible feelings and thoughts for self and others. Very negative people tend to end up in prison. Very positive people tend to end up cultural heroes.

“Probably the most profitable attitude for an entrepreneur in a capitalistic economic system would be I’m OK, my employees are OK, my company is OK, the world is OK, but my competitors aren’t worth a damn, since this attitude would motivate his or her sales employees to steal more business from competitors to increase the profits of his company.

“Entrepreneurs have higher energy levels than middle managers and normal people. It takes less energy to be a normal person than anything else. Entrepreneurs in Groder’s schema have approximately the same energy level on the vertical axis of Figure 1 as Monsters, the -3 OKness level convict leaders of other convicts. Monsters have the attitude “I’m OK, my buddy is OK, but everything else is not OK, and I am going to make the world pay.” According to Groder, it’s more difficult to change the energy level of a human than the OKness position.

“In rehabilitation work, Groder attempted to arc people across the gap of Figure 1, and make +3 OKness level entrepreneurs out of -3 monsters, +2 OKness middle managers out of -2 OKness creeps, slobs, lunch buckets, etc. Sometimes people arc across the gap the other way. Honest entrepreneurs can turn criminal. Entrepreneurs are winner-survivors; Monsters are loser-survivors. Winners achieve goals and objectives; losers do not.”

There is no doubt that Trump has a high energy level, but unfortunately he could become a -3 Monster.  He is close to having a -3 OKness level rating now. Whether he is a loser-survivor remains to be seen. There is no doubt that he has been a loser as a business entrepreneur. His father gave him about seven hundred million dollars to play with when he started out, that he mostly squandered one way or another. He has started many businesses and schemes, most legal and some not. Five of them went bankrupt. Along the way he accumulated three failed marriages. He was a successful player in a survivor tv reality show. He did not win a majority popular vote but became US president anyway in 2016 because of the undemocratic USian electoral college. He lost both the popular vote and the electoral college vote running for a second term as US president, having in effect been fired from the job of US president after one term. He claimed the second election in 2020 was a fraud and the election was stolen from him. He has told this lie over and over since and still says it running again for a second term as US president now in 2024. So far he has been a loser as a president. If he somehow becomes US president again and installs himself as the first US dictator as he says he will he will no doubt consider himself a winner. If only he could have encountered Martin Groder one on one in his earlier life the current Earthian human OKness level might be a little higher than it is.

See Martin Groder, MD. Business Games: How to Recognize the Players and Deal With Them (1980), Boardroom Books, New York and Graham Barnes, PhD, “Groder’s 5-OK Diagrams,” in Transactional Analysis After Eric Berne: Teachings and Practices of three TA Schools (1977), Harper’s College Press, New York.

And, by the way, the way to deal with Donald Trump now is to vow now not to vote for him November 5, 2024, if you read this before you vote in the USian presidential election dead ahead.

Trump inherited a more or less standard loser dictator script with Don’t Be Close, Don’t Belong, Don’t Think, Don’t Feel for Others, Don’t Be Intellectual, Don’t Be Moral, and Don’t Be Honest Injunction script messages at the Child-Child level, along with Be Smart, Be Superior, Be Powerful, Be Sexually Attractive, Be Right, and Be Rich counter-injunction script messages at the Parent-Parent level. 

A bitter pill to swallow found embedded in my books Business Voyages and Born to Learn is that everything that happens is either predetermined or accidental, as the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein propositioned in his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and therefore no one is to blame or praise, since everything that happens is caused by accidental or inevitable concatenations of infinite cause-effect chains.

Believing and acting otherwise will perpetuate the same sorry I’m OK–You’re Not OK life position that has bedeviled humankind since time immemorial contributing to if not causing repeats of historical abominations such as genocides, wars, slavery, economic depressions, famines, mental illnesses, and social collapses.

The Prayer of Serenity goes something like this: Lord give me the intelligence and strength to change what needs changing, and the wisdom to know what I can and cannot change, knowing full well that some suffering, losing, and grieving is inevitable.

Using TA in some cases can help people become more serene, by enabling them to see more clearly what is going on to make salutary changes, or by learning to accept one’s script and focus on finding a niche in which it fits. On the other hand, a basic problem or question is whether serenity is possible in today’s world, beset by global warming and climate change and by escalating tensions and agitations among nations around planet Earth who have nuclear weapons and Game-infested Not OK leaders.

TA never promised anyone any rose gardens, or eternal bliss in heaven, but it does advertise that it can help individuals, groups, and organizations become more OK, OK not only in terms of achieving goals but more OK transacting with others so as to live with more dignity, satisfaction, peace, and tranquility, based on Adult mutually agreed-to contracts.

No one can blame you if you believe in tuning out TA and articles such as this one. Maybe the best strategy is to tune out the world as much as you can, inexorably inching through your life’s wormhole tunnel, reading no newspapers and not watching television, with no Internet. The problem however if you do that is boredom. Most humans have an innate need for stimulation, achievement, and recognition.

Regardless of what sort of cognitive structures humans might use, TA or whatever, sooner or later they have to take action, and this entails defining problems, delineating alternatives, making recommendations, choosing things, trying new things, over and over, till something works.

1 – What is the problem?

2 – What are the alternatives?

3 – What do you recommend?

We live in precarious times that probably encourage people to play more frequently AIN’T IT AWFUL, a psychological Game in which Game players collect strokes for making the world seem worse off than it is, complaining about the evils and troubles of the world, positioning themselves as Victims of obsolete economic, religious, and political policies and systems manipulated and exploited by greedy self-interested power-mad narcissistic sociopathic oligarchs and their corrupt bought and paid for cronies, lackeys, and knaves, such as lobbyists, politicians, religious leaders, and judges, however true this state of affairs might be in reality in various societies.

By the same token, it will do no good for humans to passively pretend the world is just hunky-dory and swell, better off than it really is, with everything coming up roses for everyone, living in small imaginary Candide-like best of all possible worlds, playing a psychological Game called GREENHOUSE by transactional analysts, in which players are rewarded with plastic strokes for making nonsensical positive cheerful upbeat comments about the environment and social, economic, political, and religious states of affairs, regardless of how bleak they are in reality.

It seems to me the most dangerous psychological Game played politically right now around planet Earth is IF IT WEREN’T FOR YOU, involving polarized individuals, groups, and organizations who experience increasing insecurity and hopelessness causing them to blame others and find scapegoats for their plights, escalating their anger as they transmit threats from their angry and fearful Parent and Child ego states to the Parent and Child ego states of others, sometimes attacking others verbally and physically for their perceived misdeeds and beliefs. Some of the threats include the threat of international and civil war. Israel is playing a third-degree IF IT WEREN’T FOR YOU Game with Palestine right now.

IF IT WEREN’T FOR YOU is a Game that entails aggrieved humans psychologically acting as if opposing warring or competing parties maliciously and arbitrarily decided using free will to commit the harmful or heinous actions and deeds they are accused of committing, instead of realizing the others were caused to exist and do what they did by concatenations of infinite cause-effect chains just like you were. Getting rid of the other will not solve problems caused by poor educational systems, poor family scripts, poor religions, and hamartic economic and political policies and systems.

For more information regarding the use of Transactional Analysis https://www.itaaworld.org/ to create better discussion groups and democratic processes read my book Born to Learn: A Transactional Analysis of Human Learning. https://www.amazon.com/Born-Learn-Transactional-Analysis-Learning/dp/0692584331

For more information on how to co-construct better organizations and economic systems using TA read my book Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata, and Tools for Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds https://www.amazon.com/Business-Voyages-Schemata-Discovering-Co-Constructing/dp/1413480810

See my article “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc,” https://blog.effectivelearning.net/the-evolution-of-spaceship-earth-inc/ for some management science ideas on how human Earthians might eventually co-construct an idealistic democratic bottom-up economic system that is viable and satisfying for everyone aboard Spaceship Earth, making it possible for all Earthian humans to develop an I’m OK – You’re OK life position.

This entails human Earthians never doing work that machines can do better, and delegating the day-to-day management of systems for scheduling, producing, and distributing the necessities of life to artificial intelligence programs and supercomputers.

This can be done using linear programming based on the general algorithmic matrix algebra form

Max CjXj, s.t. AijXj <, =, or > Bi

as explained in my article “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc.” https://blog.effectivelearning.net/the-evolution-of-spaceship-earth-inc/

Flying aboard an airliner about to land at night moving at four hundred miles an hour at thirty thousand feet, what would you rather have landing the plane, the plane’s computer system and auto-pilot or the human pilot and co-pilot, looking out their windows with their hands on their steering devices, seeing nothing but clouds and lightning below? Thanks are due to Buckminster Fuller for creating this airplane-landing metaphor, that he published in his 1964 book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth.

It’s not easy to see what’s really going on, impossible some say, while being inundated and intimidated with fake news daily around Spaceship Earth, made public in mass media and the Internet and in internal communication processes of various types of organizations. To see what’s really going on, Earthian humans have to use inductive and analogical reasoning, based on probability, not deductive logic. Almost never can anyone prove with deductive logic that a general proposition about economic, social, psychological, religious, or political states affairs is absolutely true. About the best humans can hope for is to develop consensual answers that are generally acceptable and true based on probability.

It’s better to be honestly wrong, saying something is true because you really don’t know it’s not true, than to say something is true when you know damn well it’s not true.

Seems to me most lying is lying by omission (people not telling people things they know are true to gain or preserve advantages in competitive situations). Whether lying by omission is more or less harmful in overall perspective than lying by commission (telling people things you know are not true for ill-gotten gains), is debatable, as is proving whether it’s getting easier or harder for most people to see what’s really going on in economic and political states of affairs.

Political parties, governments, and mainstream media often lie by omission about what is going on, presumably to protect national security and their organizational revenues, in many cases socially presenting selective true facts but omitting true analysis about what is really going on.

For whatever it’s worth, I would rather be told what to do by a well-programmed AI robot than a demented deranged unhinged human fascist dictator. On the other hand, I am convinced the best situation would be to be told what to do by a group of randomly-selected intelligent rational humans who had fully studied the facts of the case at hand and who had fully discussed and debated about what to do in an open Game-free, Adult, I’m OK—You’re OK, democratic process.

 

 

By RICHARD JOHN STAPLETON

Eric Berne, MD in the 1960s invented a new way to understand and communicate about complex psychological and social issues that he called transactional analysis, using ordinary words that anyone can use that make it easier for anyone to see what is really going on in human states of affairs. This article focuses primarily on the pervasive and pernicious playing of psychological Games in political states of affairs.

The I’m OK—You’re OK life position is one of four life positions for individuals; the other three are I’m OK—You’re Not OK, You’re OK—I’m Not OK, and You’re Not OK—I’m Not OK. National governments since time immemorial have had a life position of We’re OK, our cronies, vassals, lackeys, and knaves are OK, but all other nations are Not OK, and we are going to make them pay.

How to change this life position to We’re OK—You’re OK is what Earthian humans need to work on most if they intend to indefinitely survive as a species aboard Spaceship Earth.

This article explains a recurring Earthian human global process that has produced authoritarian rescuer leaders capable of murdering millions of humans to destroy social, economic, political, and religious systems perceived to have been caused by persecutor groups that would cause perceived victim groups to live in one-down intolerable life positions, a process that has become increasingly lethal with repeat iterations in Earthian human history, having become capable of destroying human life on Earth in the next iteration of world war, caused by the evolution and proliferation of nuclear weapons in the hands of unhinged authoritarian human leaders of nations.

Politics is almost the antithesis of We’re OK—You’re OK. While politics gets some useful and necessary work done, most of the time structuring of politics is spent playing entropic and sometimes hamartic psychological Games.

Psychological Games spelled with a capital G are different from games such as football, basketball, bridge, and chess that are spelled with a lower-case g. Psychological Games are inherently dishonest and games are not. Lower-case g games have clear rules that are spelled out for everyone that are enforced by referees and players every time an infraction occurs. Psychological Games don’t have any rules. It’s basically a matter of making up your own rules as you go along, if you can get away with it.

When politicians promise to lower poverty rates by creating infrastructure spending and creating programs to fight poverty and the poor stay poor the Game is called  I’M ONLY TRYING TO HELP YOU.

When USian government tax and funny money and military equipment are given to allies to fight wars to maintain or increase USian international hegemony and USians become even more insecure the Game is called LET’S YOU AND THEM FIGHT.

When politicians promise to lower taxes so middle and lower income USians can become more productive and earn higher real incomes and their disposable incomes stay the same or go down the Game is called BUSINESS AS USUAL.

When politicians significantly lower the income tax rates of the elite rich and large corporations and the rich get exponentially richer as the poor get poorer or stay the same the Game is called TRICKLE DOWN ECONOMICS.

When politicians spend more and more money on the Military-Industrial Complex and the US becomes less secure and more impoverished the psychological Game is called NATIONAL SECURITY.

When politicians promise to build an elaborate wall at the southern border of the US and enact draconian policies to keep the poor of Spaceship Earth out of the US the Game is called IMMIGRATION POLICY.

When governments and their central banks decide to create funny money by punching digits into central bank computers and calling the resulting numbers money and then using the funny money to buy enough government treasury bonds, bills, and notes to generate enough cash for the government to make up the difference between tax money taken in and military and pork and non-pork expenses money paid out, year after year, inexorably piling up more and more trillions of dollars of government debt, that can never be paid back, the Game is called FINANCIAL ENGINEERING.

When corrupt USian Supreme Court judges based on their political biases and prejudices rule in favor of idiosyncratic USian groups lobbying for laws to eliminate abortions and reduce the control of women over their own bodies and deny the right of LGTBQ USians to express themselves as they were naturally caused to sexually function the Game is called RELIGIOUS FREEDOM.

When large corporations move the erstwhile good industrial jobs of the US to low-wage countries and substitute more and more robots and artificial intelligence for human labor inside the US and more and more USians are left with insecure low-wage jobs the Game is called PROGRESS.

When mainstream media selectively publish and broadcast factual political news but omit true analysis of what is really going on the Game is called FAIR AND BALANCED REPORTING.

When the most dangerous politician on the Earthian political stage running again for president of the US in the November 5, 2024 presidential election tells you over and over in mass media that his last presidential race in 2020 that he lost fair and square was rigged and stolen from him despite overwhelming irrefutable evidence to the contrary the Game is called THE BIG LIE.

When Earthian humans decide they cannot get their needs met in their societies competing in their way of life under their existing rule of law and start believing and having faith that fascist dictators will take care of them through violent unlawful means the Game is called DO ME SOMETHING.

When corrupt bought and paid for USian Supreme Court judges decide based on their idiosyncratic biases and prejudices that a USian president is above the law of the land, immune from prosecution for violating laws of the US, having the power of kings, the Game is called FASCISM.

Psychological Games have always been a major component of Earthian economic and political behavior, and a Game transactional analysts call NIGYSOB has been one of the most significant and pervasive psychological Games in business, economics, and politics. NIGYSOB (Now I’ve Got You, You S.O.B.) entails psychological Game players trying to reign supreme over others, to triumph over others, to become “one-up”, to be superior, to beat, to win, etc. any way they can.

NIGYSOB players are motivated by anger that they feel justified in releasing because of perceived social and psychological actions and manipulations on the part of Persecutors that might cause them to become loser Victims, causing them to feel their psychological, social, economic, and political standing and security are threatened.

Eric Berne defined a psychological Game as: “An ongoing series of complementary ulterior transactions progressing to a well-defined, predictable outcome. Descriptively, it is a recurring set of transactions, often repetitious, superficially plausible, with a concealed motivation; or, more colloquially, a series of moves with a snare, or “gimmick.” Games are clearly differentiated from procedures, rituals, and pastimes by two chief characteristics: (1) their ulterior quality and (2) the payoff. Procedures may be successful, rituals effective, and sometimes profitable, but all of them are by definition candid; they may involve contest, but not conflict, and the ending may be sensational, but is not dramatic. Every Game (emphasis added), on the other hand, is basically dishonest, and the outcome has a dramatic, as distinct from merely exciting quality.”  See Berne, Eric. (1964). Games people play: The psychology of human relationships. New York: Grove Press, p. 48.

Psychological Games include two sets of transactions conducted simultaneously between Game players, a spoken overt social set, and an ulterior covert unspoken psychological set, with three basic roles, Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim acted out by the players, involving three basic ego states, Parent, Adult, and Child, with switches of transactional vectors between various combinations of the Ego States in all players, as the players switch around from Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim on a “Drama Triangle.” See Karpman, Stephen (1968). “Fairy tales and script drama analysis.” Transactional Analysis Bulletin. 7(26), 39-43.

Ego states are states of being including thoughts, beliefs, behaviors, feelings, gestures, body language, and other signals determining how people come across with others in communication episodes, whether parent-like, adult-like, or child-like, in all kinds of situations.  People switch ego states depending on who they are communicating with and what sort of circumstances they are in, whether they are parenting, working, socializing, teaching, having fun, playing Games, politicking, or whatever.  They transmit messages from three ego states in themselves to three ego states in others in pair vectors, Parent-Parent, Adult-Adult, Child-Child, Parent-Child, Child-Adult, Adult-Parent, Child-Parent, or whatever combination.  These transactions are especially meaningful in situations in which there is some sort of authoritarian system involving leaders and members, such as parents parenting children in homes, teachers teaching students in schools, or bosses bossing subordinates in a business or political organization, which normally entail primarily Parent-Child transactions. In general however the more Adult-Adult transactions there are the better things go in families, schools, businesses, and political organizations. See Berne, Eric (1970). What do you say after you say hello? The psychology of human destiny. New York: Grove Press, and Berne, Eric (1963). The structure and dynamics of organizations and groups. New York: Grove Press.

Adult ego state transactions are generally factual, honest, and overt; Parent and Child ego state transactions are often covert dishonest ulterior lies, transmitted by body language instead of words.

Donald Trump, the most prominent, pernicious, and dangerous Game-player on the Earthian political stage at present, is a master at using body language to switch ego states in his monologues, harangues, and diatribes at rallies and in personal conversations. He has a tall imposing 6’3″ body frame and a commanding persona that is enhanced with orange facial coloring and a bizarre hair-do. Most of the time his words do not make sense but his body language is clear: he is not only OK but superior and his loyal cronies, lackeys, and knaves are too. He is adept at switching ego states and transactions by changing his posture and gait as he struts and swaggers about, by flailing his arms and small fingers about, randomly producing smirks, smiles, grins, grimaces, glares, stares and bodily contortions, and by changing the speed, volume, pitch, cadence, and tone of his sing-songy voice, that ranges from guttural to prissy falsetto. He is somewhat analogous to a made-up circus clown and ring-master as he titillates, entertains, agitates, and cultivates his captivated enthralled cult members at rallies. If he didn’t put on his make-up and fix his hair as he does he would look like what he really is, a pasty pale balding almost octogenarian Earthian human male, and most likely he could not get elected to anything. Trump’s a master of pantomime and playing Games. But don’t be fooled. Trump’s not a circus clown; he’s a dangerous hardened criminal who intends to turn the US into a fascist dictatorship if he gets elected president of the US again. Do you really want to live day by day subject to the whims of a fascist crime boss dictator who can do you harm at any time? Think about that when you vote for Trump for president of the US November 5, 2024, if you do.

NIGYSOB Game-playing underlies conflicts, competitions, and wars among individuals, groups, and organizations, including nations and corporations domestically and internationally. You might think nations and international corporations competing among themselves do not entail real anger, but it seems to me anger is a major factor when serious fighting breaks out. Leaders try to engender fear and anger among their followers before the first outbursts of fighting to motivate followers. You might think a war is not an ego trip for leaders. You might think leaders are simply doing their perceived ethical duty to preserve the safety and security of their followers and constituents. But the unspoken psychological truth is more than that. Wars are also ego trips, with leaders trying to triumph over other leaders, wanting to become one-up top dogs.

You can build a case competitions among political parties in presidential elections more than anything else are NIGYSOB Games, with leaders saying they want to improve the plight of Victim citizens, increase their relative share of national and international income, provide them with better and cheaper health care, and so forth; but here too the contest is probably an ego trip for leaders who are more interested in being top dog than anything else. Political contests become an ego trip for followers as well as the leaders foment fear and anger among them to beat the bad guy Persecutors and run them out of office. If their party wins followers may also feel “one-up” because their party ideology and their dear leader “won”, regardless of whether anything is done to improve economic and social conditions.

The capitalistic economic system is based on NIGYSOB-playing. It’s what makes the world go round. It makes everyone richer, the defenders of capitalism say, because it motivates people to work harder and longer and more efficiently than they would if they did not have to compete and do battle with others to make a living.

Entrepreneurs may say their major motivation is to create a new business that will improve the lives of customers, but creating a successful, powerful business is also an ego trip, especially if the entrepreneur is able to take in much more money than others. The money may be important for what it can buy, but a major satisfaction a big pile of money generates is the ego satisfaction and recognition a winner gets because of being able to take in much more money than others, producing a bigger and better balance sheet to show off, proof one is superior, having won the business Game called BALANCE SHEET.

I was a good football and basketball player back in my junior high, high school, and college years. I was the quarterback and I found it satisfying and exhilarating calling plays in the huddle, doing battle at the scrimmage line, and throwing touchdown passes in a real game before cheering fans in a football stadium, especially when winning, as was the case when I was in the eighth grade, when we won eleven out of eleven games. On the other hand, I don’t recall ever feeling anger caused by the opposing team trying to beat us as we tried to beat them. The main payoff for an amateur athlete is getting plenty of what transactional analysts call “strokes”, or units of recognition, that can be positive or negative, depending on how well you do something. Eric Berne said positive strokes are what everyone wants and needs. He said they keep your spinal column from “shriveling up”.

There are two kinds of scripts people have to act out in organizations, to keep their jobs or get promoted: psychological life scripts and organizational social scripts.

Psychological Life Scripts are programmed into children by virtue of being constantly exposed to and dependent on their parents before the age of eight. Almost as if by osmosis parents psychologically script their children not to feel, think, and do certain things in various ways and degrees as various events happen in the environment, largely non-verbally by how parents respond to a child, by how they get mad, glad, sad, or scared, or not, when the child does something when various things happen. Psychological scripts are automatically “introjected” into the personalities of children during early childhood, and most children wind up pretty much like their parents, with the same accents, and the same kinds of feeling, thinking, doing, and communicating patterns.

There are also some generic overt social script messages such as brush your teeth, clean those finger nails, study hard, make something of yourself, work hard, etc. that are socially overt and spoken.

Psychological life script messages are called injunctions and social script messages are called counter-injunctions. These messages wind up creating a life script that includes a life position. There are four basic TA life positions: I am OK and You are OK, I am OK and you are Not OK, I’m Not OK and You are OK, and I am Not OK and You are Not OK; and there are three generic TA life script outcomes: Winner, Loser, and Non-Winner.

There is no way under competitive capitalism for all people to be fully OK economically and politically, making the I’m OK – You’re OK life position infeasible among all humans.

Most people are what they are because of family scripts, not economic conditions, and they can respond in adult life only in certain ways because of their introjected injunctions and life scripts. Some people are more flexible and adaptable than others, but most people in order to make a living and achieve some satisfaction in life have to find a slot, niche, and level in an organization in which their life script is congruent.

Social scripts, on the other hand, include the sum total of do’s and don’t’s required for a person to be successful dealing with others in a particular job or role. These scripts include the algorithmic physical and mental steps required to do the specific job you are paid to do and required words and phrases to say to others and how to emotionally and behaviorally respond to people around you, up, across, and down the organizational chain of command, including playing the psychological Games people around you want or need to play.

All organizations, including political organizations, require particular social scripts for participants with words and phrases that have to be memorized and used. Almost nobody can be her or his true self most of the time making a living in an organization. Most employees have to act out scripts created by the organization. Organizations such as Disney World are the most scripted of all. Employees there are called characters and are required to wear costumes and “go on stage” after they clock in for work, pretending while on the job to be characters such as Donald Duck or Mickey or Minnie Mouse dealing with customers, parroting memorized lines. While all employees in all organizations have to pretend to some extent they are something they are not to keep their jobs the scripting is not as overt and extreme as it is at Disney World.

Click here to see a Parent, Adult, and Child diagram I published in the TAJ depicting a script matrix with some typical social script messages in an organizational chain of command. See Stapleton, Richard John (1978). “The chain of ego states.” Transactional Analysis Journal. 8(3), 215-219. USians who get into politics for a living are just like all other employees under capitalism: they have to act out the right scripts to keep their jobs.

Most people who get fired in organizations are fired because of their psychological life scripts that are thought to be inappropriate in an organizational culture, or for being unwilling or unable to act out social scripts, not for being unable to perform the required physical and mental algorithmic steps of the job.

There are certain things politicians have to do that might be called work in the physical algorithmic sense, but in the best of circumstances they are paid to think and make decisions, not do repetitive work. On the other hand, if they do not obey the script requirements of their political party they will be fired or sluiced out of the party organization one way or another. Therefore to get honest Game-free governments only individuals who have no intentions of being a politician for a living should be elected to office.

Psychological Games are a way of getting stimulation, recognition, and structure as one goes about one’s business of surviving and making a living. Basically they involve trying to gain satisfactions dealing with others, by making yourself feel better at someone’s else’s expense, or by making a fool of someone. Psychological Games entail people discounting problems, opportunities, and people, and the significance of someone or something. All psychological Games entail players acting out one of three roles on a Drama Triangle: Victim, Persecutor, and Rescuer.

Why vote in the first place? The best Adult ego state reason in a democratic republic such as the US would be to take social satisfaction in helping select the best person for offices to help set rational goals, objectives, procedures, and laws for everyone. Lesser Parent and Child reasons would be to vote for people who will do things to benefit you and yours financially, and who will provide for you and yours satisfying psychological Game payoffs to secure psychological structure, recognition, and stimulation similar to what you experienced with your parents, friends, and others in your early life that support and reinforce the psychological, social, economic, religious, political, and moral states of affairs of organizations such as your family, school, or church.

Once psychologically scripted most people do not rebel. Red states stay red and blue states stay blue, regardless of the logical Adult ego state reasoning of idealistic generally-OK political candidates with script-free ideas on how to improve the functioning of the economic and political system.

I remember a TV interviewer in 2000 asking an attractive woman who ran a bar and grill why she intended to vote for Bush II. “Cuz he’s a good-lookin’ man” was her quick response.

There are several psychological Games people play in political races; but it seems to me based on observing presidential races on the Internet and elsewhere, listening to comments people make on my Facebook news feed timeline and elsewhere, most politicians play a first-degree psychological Game called RAPO by transactional analysts, since one of the surest ways to get votes in our narcissistic USian culture is to be considered good lookin’.

There are three degrees of psychological Games: First Degree Games entail comments, insults, discounts, jokes, and body language displays designed to build up or tear down someone’s self-esteem, or gain or lose some sort of psychological advantage; Second Degree Games entail more serious discounts and payoffs, threatening someone, firing someone, getting divorced, etc.; Third Degree Games are sometimes called tissue-tearing Games with payoffs such as getting into physical fights, going to war, winding up in a morgue, etc.

A RAPO Game starts by someone psychologically promising some sort of satisfaction to someone for responding to her or his sexual attractiveness. There are various social and psychological transactions that can bring this about, social transactions being spoken and overt, psychological transactions being unspoken and covert. The payoff for a first degree RAPO player is not a real sexual liaison but making a fool of a mark or sucker who will be punished or humiliated in some way if he or she responds to the psychological sexual messages. Most psychological Games do not entail sexual messaging but a lot of them do. All psychological Games involve a con of some degree taking advantage of the vulnerabilities and weaknesses of a mark or suckers, promising things the Game starter has no intentions of delivering. Most of the promises of first-degree Games are insignificant and inconsequential. First degree Games are ubiquitous and most people play them at various times. Sometimes they have to to survive in organizations.

Psychological Games and scripts are what make folk tales and fairy tales (such as Robin Hood, the Pied Piper, Superman, The Lone Ranger, Snow White, Goldilocks, Cinderella, Jack & Jill, Humpty-Dumpty, Hansel and Gretel, The Big Bad Wolf and Little Red Riding Hood) interesting and dramatic.

Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Bush II, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden won political races to some extent caused by successfully playing first degree RAPO Games, caused by having physical and psychological characteristics that enabled them to transmit non-verbal psychological messages to voters that they would deliver to them titillating psychological and social satisfactions if they voted for them, somehow providing supporters, followers, and voters with various sorts of desired or fantasied psychological stimulation, structure, and recognition. Whether these politicians produced for their voters the psychological satisfactions the voters sought would be difficult to prove, just as it would be for these voters (for sure middle and lower income voters) to prove voting for these politicians produced any economic improvements for them. Any president during the last fifty years would have a difficult time proving he produced significant tangible economic benefits for middle and lower income voters, regardless of how much psychological and social satisfaction he produced for them.

And here we are, having degenerated in the US into a situation in which a convicted rapist, Donald John Trump, a former president of the US, is now running for USian president again, and it appears about half of USian voters intend to vote for him again. What does this tell you? I don’t know what it tells you but it tells me that about half of USian voters just don’t care if the president of the US is a rapist. And why is this? Why don’t they care? I don’t know, but it seems to me it does not matter to them because of what Trump has told them about he would do as president if reelected. He wants to be a fascist dictator of the US, and it seems to me this means about half of USian voters like authoritarian dictators, whether in disguise as parents, teachers, preachers, business bosses, or politicians. In other words, they like dictators who tell them what to do, rather than have democratic discussions about what to do.

Seems to me Earthian humans are polarized intellectually between two general extreme categories that might be described as democratic idealists and authoritarian nihilists, with most humans being clustered near the middle of the continuum.

Democratic idealists are not necessarily members of the Democratic Party in the US; and all authoritarian nihilists are not necessarily members of the Republican Party.

A democratic idealist in my view is someone who visualizes new states of affairs that might make an unsatisfying current situation more efficient, effective, just, and satisfying through consultation, collaboration, and cooperation.

Authoritarian nihilists in my view are dissatisfied with states of affairs as they are but do not visualize changing them by creating new states of affairs, believing instead that what is needed is authoritarian dictators in positions of authority who will make existing or superseded systems and processes work for them by out-competing competitors or destroying scapegoats and enemies.

Most so-called liberals and progressives would be included in the democratic idealist category and most so-called conservatives would be included in the authoritarian nihilist category.

An extreme democratic idealist would focus primarily on ideal states to be achieved in the future and extreme authoritarian nihilists would be focused primarily on what now exists and tearing down what they do not like, not creating better systems to achieve better states of affairs.

Abraham Lincoln once remarked there are two kinds of people who never amount to much in life: those who cannot do what they are told, and those who cannot do anything but what they are told. Unrealistic idealistic builders of imaginary air castles often have a hard time making a go of things in life, and people with no goals and imagination are pretty much stuck where they are. Probably most successful people lie somewhere in between the two extremes of idealism and nihilism.

Extreme democratic idealists worry a lot. Extreme authoritarian nihilists just don’t give a rip, and some are happy savages.

I agree with most transactional analysts that Earthian humans are scripted to be what they are emotionally, intellectually, and behaviorally in early childhood by Injunctions that are psychologically transmitted from the child ego states of parents to the child ego states of their offspring.

According to Bob Goulding, MD and Mary Goulding, MSW, quoted in my book Business Voyages, page 160, there are about fourteen generic psychological Injunctions widely transmitted in family scripting:

Don’t Be, Don’t Be You (the sex you are), Don’t Be A Child, Don’t Grow, Don’t Make It, Don’t, Don’t Be Important, Don’t Be Close, Don’t Belong, Don’t Be Well (or sane), Don’t Think About X (forbidden subject), Don’t Think What You Think, Think What I Think, Don’t Feel, Don’t Feel X, Mad, Sad, Glad, Scared, etc., Don’t Feel What You Feel, Feel What I Feel.              See Goulding, Bob and Goulding, Mary. (1976). “Injunctions, decisions, and redecisions.” Transactional Analysis Journal, 6(1), 41-48.

These script injunctions are transmitted primarily psychologically, not overtly spoken, from the Child ego state of the parent to the Child ego state of the child. Rarely would a parent socially or overtly tell a child what one of the above injunctions requires. They are primarily transmitted non-verbally by Parent and Child ego states when caregivers exhibit mad, glad, sad, or scared emotions in response to what a child naturally feels, thinks, and does as shared life events occur in early childhood. On the other hand, children are scripted by the ego states they observe parents using when parents feel, think, and do things. Children psychologically “introject” in living color the ego states of parents, including the accents, mannerisms, facial expressions, tone of voice, and behaviors of parents, as parents and children deal with life events. To introject is to take in or absorb the personality and behavioral characteristics of another. So children more or less grow up to replicate their parents, and the replications become hard-wired in their brains for life in most cases.

For good or ill, the scripting process may determine not only the personality and behavioral characteristics of a child but also his/her life position and role in life, including determining whether a child grows up to become a democratic idealist or an authoritarian nihilist.

Therefore the scripting process largely determines which political parties win in any culture; and the fate of planet Earth may depend on changing the scripting of humans, which entails a process of change that includes not only changing economic and political systems but also psychological and social systems.

An assumption of transactional analysis is that humans can learn to “see what is really going on” with themselves and others as they transact with one another socially and psychologically living their daily lives so as to increase their chances of living satisfactory lives, regardless of how not-OK their economic, social, psychological, and political worlds might be.

According to transactional analysis theory there are three naturally occurring generic life outcomes caused for humans: winner, loser, and non-winner—caused by inherited physical characteristics and script “messages” one is exposed to throughout life—and by the early decisions offspring make about the messages that become determinants of emotional, intellectual, and behavioral responses throughout life.

Whether one inherits a winner, loser, or non-winner script is determined by naturally-occurring inevitable cause-effect chains one is accidentally exposed to. Some transactional analysts assume proportions of winner, loser, and non-winner scripts in the population remain relatively constant from one generation to another.

The natural scripting process is not fair; and Earthian human history does not encourage optimism about the probability of this unfairness being eradicated anytime soon.

It seems to me most of the worst human abominations of Earthian human history such as mass murders, genocides, and democides were caused by non-winners and losers of a society who were tired of being one-down living in unequal societies that had basically capitalistic economic systems who decided, since they could not win fair and square under the existing rule of law, given their inherited biological genetic abilities and their inherited psychological life scripts and social scripts, that the best way for them to get strokes and become equal or one-up in their societies was to enslave themselves to an authoritarian dictator who would tell them what to do to violently destroy the existing government and structure of their society and/or other societies.

In other words, they decided since they could not win using their inherited abilities and scripts in their society under its existing rule of law the solution for their dilemma was to destroy the existing society by becoming obedient loyal non-thinking subordinates (cronies, lackeys, knaves, warriors, slaves, etc.) doing what they were “told” by an authoritarian gang-leading lawless dictator who would arbitrarily reward them with shares of stolen plunder and one-up status in some sort of new society after they destroyed their old society by means of violent force.

When Earthian humans decide they cannot get their needs met in their societies competing fairly and squarely under their rules of law and start believing and having faith that fascist dictators will take care of them through violent unlawful means the Game is called DO ME SOMETHING.

Seems to me this hamartic process has happened over and over in Earthian human history, in Germany under Hitler, in Russia under Stalin, in China under Mao Tse Tung, and elsewhere; and it could happen again, in the US under Trump and in other countries around Spaceship Earth. Authoritarian political parties are now growing stronger in countries such as Hungary, Israel, Germany, and France.

A transactional analysis colleague Jake Jacobs, a social worker in Chicago, spent a good bit of time and energy back in the 1970s and 1980s researching and studying the causes of the German holocaust under Hitler, having had family members gassed at Auschwitz. An amateur photographer, he took trips to Auschwitz for a firsthand view of the concentration camp and its gas chambers that he photographed and studied trying to get a feel for what it was like to have been there and die there. In his research he found that 150,000,000 Earthian humans were murdered by authoritarian dictators in their own and other countries by starvation and other means in genocidal and democidal operations in the 20th Century. He concluded that a major cause of mass murders by governments is a desire of authoritarian dictators to be the only one that counts. See Jacobs, Alan (1991). “Aspects of Survival: Triumph over death and onliness.” Transactional Analysis Journal. 21(1). 4-11.

A purpose of transactional analysis is to help individuals and groups insert new fair causes into unfair natural cause-effect chains so as to increase the probabilities and proportions of winner outcomes occurring in the populace by non-violent means.

Changing a non-winner or loser script into a winner script requires hard work but it can happen if a person somehow acquires new script messages powerful enough to control frustrating, debilitating, or hamartic script messages instilled in his or her sub-conscious mind. TA can provide people basic concepts and tools for attempting such a thing, requiring learning to use different ego states and transactional patterns and learning how to communicate in more effective ways psychologically and socially.

Most people seem to think if only Earthian humans could solve their economic, political, military, and religious troubles, beat their competitors and enemies, etc., then everything would be just hunky-dory and the bluebirds would start chirping again. Not so, many people would not be happy and successful living in paradise because of script messages instilled in their sub-conscious minds before they were eight years old. In order for everyone to live happily and successfully humans would have to solve not only economic, political, religious, and social problems, but also psychological problems.

Changing a loser or non-winner script into a winner script generally requires changing  the ego states one uses and how much time one spends daily pastiming, performing rituals, doing work, playing psychological Games, and being intimate with others.

The Prayer of Serenity goes something like this: Lord give me the intelligence and strength to change what needs changing, and the wisdom to know what I can and cannot change, knowing full well that some suffering, losing, and grieving is inevitable.

Using TA in some cases can help people become more serene, by enabling them to see more clearly what is going on to make salutary changes, or by learning to accept one’s script and focus on finding a niche in which it fits. On the other hand, a basic problem or question is whether serenity is possible in today’s world, beset by global warming and climate change and by escalating tensions and agitations among nations around planet Earth who have nuclear weapons.

TA never promised anyone any rose gardens, or eternal bliss in heaven, but it does advertise that it can help individuals, groups, and organizations become more OK, OK not only in terms of achieving goals but more OK transacting with others so as to live with more dignity, satisfaction, peace, and tranquility, based on Adult mutually agreed-to contracts.

No one can blame you if you believe in tuning out TA and articles such as this one. Maybe the best strategy is to tune out the world as much as you can, inexorably inching through your life’s wormhole tunnel, reading no newspapers and not watching television, with no Internet. The problem however if you do that is boredom. Most humans have an innate need for stimulation, achievement, and recognition.

Regardless of what sort of cognitive structures humans might use, TA or whatever, sooner or later they have to take action, and this entails defining problems, delineating alternatives, making recommendations, choosing things, trying new things, over and over, till something works.

1 – What is the problem?

2 – What are the alternatives?

3 – What do you recommend?

We live in precarious times that probably encourage people to play more frequently AIN’T IT AWFUL, a psychological Game in which Game players collect strokes for making the world seem worse than it is, complaining about the evils and troubles of the world, positioning themselves as Victims of obsolete economic, religious, and political policies and systems manipulated and exploited by greedy self-interested power-mad narcissistic sociopathic oligarchs and their corrupt bought and paid for cronies, lackeys, and knaves, such as lobbyists, politicians, religious leaders, and judges, however true this state of affairs might be in reality.

By the same token, it will do no good for humans to passively pretend the world is just hunky-dory and swell, better off than it really is, with everything coming up roses for everyone, living in small imaginary Candide-like best of all possible worlds, playing a psychological Game called GREENHOUSE by transactional analysts, in which players are rewarded with plastic strokes for making nonsensical positive cheerful upbeat comments about the environment and social, economic, political, and religious states of affairs, regardless of how bleak they are in reality.

It seems to me the most dangerous psychological Game played politically right now around planet Earth is IF IT WEREN’T FOR YOU, involving polarized individuals, groups, and organizations who experience increasing insecurity and hopelessness causing them to blame others and find scapegoats for their plights, escalating their anger as they transmit threats from their angry Parent and Child ego states to the Parent and Child ego states of others, sometimes attacking others verbally and physically for their perceived misdeeds and beliefs. Some of the threats include the threat of international and civil war. Israel is playing a third-degree IF IT WEREN’T FOR YOU Game with Palestine right now.

IF IT WEREN’T FOR YOU is a Game that entails aggrieved humans psychologically acting as if opposing warring or competing parties maliciously and arbitrarily decided using free will to commit the harmful or heinous actions and deeds they are accused of committing, instead of realizing the others were caused to exist and do what they did by concatenations of infinite cause-effect chains just like you were. Getting rid of the other will not solve problems caused by poor educational systems, poor family scripts, poor religions, and hamartic economic and political policies and systems.

For more information regarding the use of Transactional Analysis https://www.itaaworld.org/ to create better discussion groups and democratic processes read my book Born to Learn: A Transactional Analysis of Human Learning. https://www.amazon.com/Born-Learn-Transactional-Analysis-Learning/dp/0692584331

For more information on how to co-construct better organizations and economic systems using TA read my book Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata, and Tools for Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds https://www.amazon.com/Business-Voyages-Schemata-Discovering-Co-Constructing/dp/1413480810

See my article “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc,” https://blog.effectivelearning.net/the-evolution-of-spaceship-earth-inc/ for some management science ideas on how human Earthians might eventually co-construct an idealistic democratic bottom-up economic system that is viable and satisfying for everyone aboard Spaceship Earth, making it possible for all Earthian humans to develop an I’m OK – You’re OK life position.

This entails human Earthians never doing work that machines can do better, and delegating the day-to-day management of systems for scheduling, producing, and distributing the necessities of life to artificial intelligence programs and supercomputers.

This can be done using linear programming based on the general algorithmic matrix algebra form

Max CjXj, s.t. AijXj <, =, or > Bi

as explained in my article “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc.” https://blog.effectivelearning.net/the-evolution-of-spaceship-earth-inc/

Flying aboard an airliner about to land at night moving at four hundred miles an hour at thirty thousand feet, what would you rather have landing the plane, the plane’s computer system and auto-pilot or the human pilot and co-pilot, looking out their windows with their hands on their steering devices, seeing nothing but clouds and lightning below? Thanks are due to Buckminster Fuller for creating this airplane-landing metaphor, that he published in his 1964 book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth.

It’s not easy to see what’s really going on, impossible some say, while being inundated with fake news daily around Spaceship Earth, made public in mass media and the Internet. To see what’s really going on, Earthian humans have to use inductive and analogical reasoning, based on probability, not deductive logic. Almost never can anyone prove with deductive logic that a general proposition about economic, social, psychological, religious, or political states affairs is absolutely true. About the best humans can hope for is to develop consensual answers that are generally acceptable and true based on probability.

It’s better to be honestly wrong, saying something is true because you really don’t know it’s not true, than to say something is true when you know damn well it’s not true.

Seems to me most lying is lying by omission (people not telling people things they know are true to gain or preserve advantages in competitive situations). Whether lying by omission is more or less harmful in overall perspective than lying by commission (telling people things you know are not true for ill-gotten gains), is debatable, as is proving whether it’s getting easier or harder for most people to see what’s really going on in economic and political states of affairs.

Political parties, governments, and mainstream media often lie by omission about what is going on, presumably to protect national security and their organizational revenues, in many cases socially presenting selective true facts but omitting true analysis about what is really going on.

For whatever it’s worth, I would rather be told what to do by a well-programmed AI robot than a demented deranged unhinged human fascist dictator. On the other hand, I am convinced the best situation would be to be told what to do by a group of randomly-selected intelligent rational humans who had fully studied the facts of the case at hand and who had fully discussed and debated about what to do in an open Game-free, Adult, I’m OK—You’re OK, democratic process.

For a quick mental voyage exploring how Earthian humans might change their hamartic psychological, social, economic, religious, and political states of affairs read my 2021 novel, As the Rooster Crows Earthian OKness Increases.

HOW TO EMPOWER EARTHIAN HUMANS

Richard John Stapleton, PhD, CTA would spin the spinner of his Classroom De-GAMER in his classes to randomly select a student at the beginning of each class session to lead a discussion of the case assigned for the day, a case taken from a planned or operating business prepared by case writers at Georgia Southern University, Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Alabama. He taught management systems, researched, published, and conducted a small business institute at Georgia Southern University thirty-five years, 1970-2005.

All case analyses entail considering three existential questions:

WHAT IS THE PROBLEM? WHAT ARE THE ALTERNATIVES? WHAT DO YOU RECOMMEND?

 

Whomever the spinner of the “Classroom De-Gamer” selected when it wound down after spinning by an imaginary line of fire extending from the point of the spinner to a class member sitting in the circle classroom layout would become the “Leader of the Moment” required to answer the three existential questions shown above laying out the case to all class members.

The overall purpose of the Game-free I’m OK—You’re OK Adult-Adult democratic teaching and learning process is to produce comprehension of the relevant facts and focal points of the case among class members in order to create rational policies and strategies for successfully managing the states of affairs of the case. All humans have Adult ego states that can be cathected, even children at young ages.

Cathecting an ego state is turning on energy, cognition and emotion in the human psyche for transacting with fellow humans. There are three basic types of ego states that can be cathected: Parent, Adult, and Child.

A soft drink bottle as in playing the childhood game Spin the Bottle works about as well as a Classroom De-Gamer to randomly select the Leader of the Moment to answer the Three Existential Questions. No one can interrupt anyone once someone has the floor. Communicating overtly or covertly with individuals in the room for the whole session is not allowed. Anyone can respond to any speaker once the speaker has finished, disagreeing or agreeing with what was said, and may bring up another problem if appropriate in the context of the discussion.

How long should a discussion last? Long enough for group members to comprehend the system under consideration, a system including interrelations between relevant focal point entities of the system–relevant facts and issues comprising the problem, alternatives and recommendations.

According to R. Buckminster Fuller in his Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969) comprehension of a system entails separating the relevant points from the irrelevant points in the system under consideration. It takes time to do this. According to Fuller, Comprehension = (N²-N) / 2, where N = Number of total focal point entities in the system, counting the number of focal point facts or issues and all the inter-relationships between the focal point entities.

Comprehension required and produced expands exponentially as the size of the system increases. One has to wonder if most Earthian systems today are ever fully comprehended by Earthian humans. Rather than most Earthian human systems being managed today based on comprehension in general they are managed based on dogmas, doctrines, rules, algorithms, scripts, and the like, many of which are irrelevant. As matters now stand about the best Earthian humans can hope for is that somehow the smartest, wisest, most knowledgeable, most ethical, and most empathetic Earthian humans somehow manage to become top leaders in major systems.

When most members of the discussion group seem to generally comprehend the system it is time to stop. Most paper cases in Stapleton’s classes of about 30 students took about one hour. Real cases and systems in your organizations and groups may take more or less time, perhaps several hourly sessions for one system. Stick with the discussion until most members have comprehended the relevant problems, alternatives, and recommendations of the system under consideration as best they can. In most cases this will produce a solution considered the most rational of alternatives for most members of the group, about the best that can be hoped for at present. Perhaps at some future date supercomputers will be able to comprehend large systems well enough to develop answers that are provably true.

Since all members of the group will not have been caused to develop the same pictures in their heads about what should be done in the case before the discussion starts, a high percentage of the discussants will learn in the discussion as they comprehend what is really going on that their initial conceptions were wrong, causing both unlearning and learning. Sometimes unlearning is more important than learning for creating better Earthian human states of affairs. Unlearning, in fact, might be what is now needed most in order for Earthian humans to develop peaceful and sustainable systems around Spaceship Earth.

Most discussants will not leave the discussions with the same mental pictures they started out with caused by the greater comprehension caused by the back and forth dialectical arguing caused by the Game-free I’m OK-You’re OK Adult-Adult democratic discussion process, proving both unlearning and learning happened.

Stapleton’s De-Gaming process insured that everyone would be relatively GAME-free transacting in class discussions. They all agreed to a learning contract at the outset of the course that they would read assigned cases and would be graded on the quantity and quality of ideas sold in the class market. Anyone caught obviously unprepared by the spinning De-GAMER would lose a whole letter grade from the course grade. No one could feel or think that s/he was being persecuted or rescued if selected to start the class discussion of the day by the Classroom De-GAMER. The psychological GAME Drama Triangle roles of Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim were largely banished from the course learning process. The actual grades received—A’s, B’s, C’s, D’s, and F’s—were relative grades, not absolute grades, Excellent, Good, Average, Poor, and Failing relative to the class. There were no numbers ostensibly proving what percentage of the course knowledge was retained in memory for so-called objective exams.

Stapleton sat in the same circle in the same kind of chair as students, and the De-GAMING rules also applied to him. If the Classroom De-GAMER landed on him he had to lay out the case just like any other student and discuss what was the problem, what were the alternatives, and what he recommended.

Grades were based eighty percent on class participation in dialectical discussions about what to do about problems and opportunities found in cases; the rest of the final grade was based on two case write-ups. One write-up was about what the student observed, researched, analyzed, and wrote about an existing business in the local environment or a business plan the student created. The other write-up was an analysis of a case researched and written by professors about a business assigned as the final exam. Cases used in his courses contained processes, problems, opportunities, and data occurring in all functional areas of business such as entrepreneurship, finance, marketing, operations management, control, management information systems, and business policy and strategy.

Published refereed journal articles and books explaining how his democratic GAME-free Adult-Adult I’m OK—You’re OK case method system works, by banishing Persecutors, Rescuers, and Victims playing psychological GAMES from the teaching and learning process, first documented in an article titled the Classroom De-GAMER he published in 1978 in the Transactional Analysis Journal. He has published seven books and over one hundred articles in various media containing cases, research data, and essays on teaching and learning and management systems, policies, and practices.

Learned and trained using transactional analysis with Martin Groder, MD; Graham Barnes, PhD; Vann Joines, PhD; and many others at the Southeast Institute at Chapel Hill, North Carolina (1975-1978).

Learned how the Harvard business school case method works teaching with Bernard Bienvenu, DBA and Rexford Hauser, DBA, Harvard Business School doctorates, at the University of Louisiana—Lafayette in 1969-70.

Has a BS in economics (1962), an MBA in organizational behavior (1966), and a PhD in management science (1969) from Texas Tech University, and an organizational and educational certification in transactional analysis (CTA) from the International Transactional Analysis Association (1978).

Taught his own case method track at the undergraduate level in the management department in the business school at Georgia Southern University offering four or five different elective case method courses each academic year during 1970-2005 in which he led, coordinated, and graded about twenty-five or so students each year who took all or most of those case method courses in their junior and senior years, of about two hundred students who signed up for all his courses each year. He used a democratic circle or amphitheater classroom layout in all his classes. He also taught most semesters two sections of a capstone integrative business policy course he added to the business school curriculum in 1970 that was required for all undergraduate business majors that could be elected by any student in any major.  He was the only professor in the business school to use the case method in any course.

Class members agreed to a course learning contract that stipulated they would read the facts of the case before class and would lose a whole letter grade from the course final grade if the De-GAMER randomly caught them obviously not having read the case before class, if they had not slipped a note under his office door before class telling him they had not read the case, which they could do twice during the course without penalty.

About ten percent of his students made A’s and about five percent made D’s. Most made C’s, which is about right, since C = Average. There were few F’s in his courses. The main criterion for course grades was the quantity and quality of ideas sold by students in case method discussions. He used peer ratings to give students feedback showing what their fellow students thought about the quantity and quality of their ideas sold in class, having made it clear the final decision about final grades was his. He did not believe in Lake Wobegon grading.

No class member was ever forced to take one of his courses to graduate, and the most hardened GAME-players in the school did not sign up for his courses after he issued his Edict of 1972 in which he clearly spelled out in his syllabi the penalty for getting caught unprepared. His Classroom De-Gamer was roundly discussed by students in bull sessions across campus every year and was labeled various things, such as The Wheel of Fate and The Death Wheel. Most students near the end of his career simply called it The Spinner.

Appreciated Georgia Southern honoring his academic freedom by allowing him control of his teaching methods, classroom layouts, grading procedures, and course books, cases, and materials, some of which he researched, wrote, and published. He was promoted to full professor with tenure at age thirty-six and was the senior professor of the university when he retired in 2005.

Solicited anonymous longitudinal research data using questionnaires in 1992 showing his case method students during 1972-1982 reported higher yearly incomes in 1992 than students electing the same courses in 1972-1982 taught by professors using the authoritarian lecture method and the militaristic row and column classroom layout, who graded students based on memorizing or calculating “right answers” for tests, indicating learners learning in Adult-Adult I’m OK—You’re OK GAME-free democratic learning processes graded subjectively became more successful in the real world of business than learners lectured to and graded using Parent-Child transactions, row and column classroom layouts, and so-called objective tests.  

Only former students who had worked in the real world of business ten or more years after graduating from the Georgia Southern business school were included in the study. The data are shown, analyzed, and discussed in full in “Evidence the Case Method Works” published in his book Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata, and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds, 2008, pg. 475. The data were also used in several refereed articles.

See also Stapleton, R.J. (1989-1990). “Academic entrepreneurship: Using the case method to simulate competitive business markets.” Organizational Behavior Teaching Review. Vol. XIV, No. IV, pp. 88-104; Stapleton, R.J., Murkison, G., and Stapleton, D.C. (1993). “Feedback regarding a game-free case method process used to educate general management and entrepreneurship students.” Proceedings of the 1993 Annual Meeting of the Southeast CHAPTER of the Institute for Management Science. Myrtle Beach, SC, October, 1993; and Stapleton, R. J. and Stapleton, D.C. (1998), “Teaching Business Using the Case Method and Transactional Analysis: A Constructivist Approach”Transactional Analysis Journal, 28, no. 2: 157-167.

Ancient Greeks used a similar random-selection democratic process in the Third Century BCE to select leaders of political discussions, learning, and policy formulation in their halls of government. Such a process is called sortition.

For more information on related classroom management ethical issues in universities see Stapleton, R.J. and Murkison, G. (2001), “Optimizing the fairness of student evaluations: A study of correlations between instructor excellence, study production, learning production, and expected grades,” in the Journal of Management Education, 25(3), 269-292.

Had one of the lowest student grade point averages among professors in the business school and was one of the lowest-ranked professors as an instructor on computerized campus-wide student evaluations that weighted only instructor excellence scores up to 2000; but he was one of the highest-ranked professors in a computerized student evaluation system he designed that generated data also showing and weighting study production, learning production, and expected grades scores for each professor, published in “Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations.“

To read the Optimizing Fairness article in full, go to https://studysites.sagepub.com/holt/articles/Stapleton.pdf . After this research was published, Georgia Southern in 2001 added study production, learning production, and expected grades questions to the student evaluation form used campus-wide.

“Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations” has by now (December 30, 2023) been cited as a reference in 89 refereed journal articles concerned about the ethics and fairness of student evaluations in several academic disciplines, including 21 new citations since April 2021, proving the article is still being read and used.

As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein propositioned in his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “The case is all there is.“

If so, everything else said about Earthian human states of affairs is a rendition of what was or might be.

See https://blog.effectivelearning.net/rjs-athletic-business-and-academic-vita/ for a full listing of RJS credentials

By RICHARD JOHN STAPLETON

Eric Berne, MD in the 1960s invented a new way to understand and communicate about complex psychological and social issues that he called transactional analysis, using ordinary words that anyone can use that make it easier for anyone to see what is really going on in human states of affairs. This article focuses primarily on the pervasive and pernicious playing of psychological Games in political states of affairs.

The I’m OK—You’re OK life position is one of four life positions for individuals; the other three are I’m OK—You’re Not OK, You’re OK—I’m Not OK, and You’re Not OK—I’m Not OK.

National governments since time immemorial have had a life position of We’re OK, our cronies, vassals, lackeys, and knaves are OK, but all other nations are Not OK, and we are going to make them pay. How to change this life position to We’re OK—You’re OK is what Earthian humans need to work on most if they intend to indefinitely survive as a species aboard Spaceship Earth.

This article explains a recurring Earthian human global process that has produced authoritarian rescuer leaders capable of murdering millions of humans to destroy social, economic, political, and religious systems perceived to have been caused by persecutor groups that would cause perceived victim groups to live in one-down intolerable life positions, a process that has become increasingly lethal with repeat iterations in Earthian human history, having become capable of destroying human life on Earth in the next iteration of world war, caused by the evolution and proliferation of nuclear weapons in the hands of unhinged authoritarian human leaders of nations.    

Politics is almost the antithesis of We’re OK—You’re OK. While politics gets some useful and necessary work done, most of the time structuring of politics is spent playing entropic and sometimes hamartic psychological Games.

Psychological Games spelled with a capital G are different from games such as football, basketball, bridge, and chess that are spelled with a lower-case g. Psychological Games are inherently dishonest and games are not. Lower-case g games have clear rules that are spelled out for everyone that are enforced by referees and players every time an infraction occurs. Psychological Games don’t have any rules. It’s basically a matter of making up your own rules as you go along, if you can get away with it.

When politicians promise to lower poverty rates by creating infrastructure spending and creating programs to fight poverty and the poor stay poor the Game is called  I’M ONLY TRYING TO HELP YOU.

When USian government tax and funny money and military equipment are given to allies to fight wars to maintain or increase USian international hegemony and USians become even more insecure the Game is called LET’S YOU AND THEM FIGHT.

When politicians promise to lower taxes so middle and lower income USians can become more productive and earn higher real incomes and their disposable incomes stay the same or go down the Game is called BUSINESS AS USUAL.

When politicians significantly lower the income tax rates of the elite rich and large corporations and the rich get exponentially richer as the poor get poorer or stay the same the Game is called TRICKLE DOWN ECONOMICS.

When politicians spend more and more money on the Military-Industrial Complex and the US becomes less secure and more impoverished the psychological Game is called NATIONAL SECURITY.

When politicians promise to build an elaborate wall at the southern border of the US and enact draconian policies to keep the poor of Spaceship Earth out of the US the Game is called IMMIGRATION POLICY.

When governments and their central banks decide to create funny money by punching digits into central bank computers and calling the resulting numbers money and then using the funny money to buy enough government treasury bonds, bills, and notes to generate enough cash for the government to make up the difference between tax money taken in and military and pork and non-pork expenses money paid out, year after year, inexorably piling up more and more trillions of dollars of government debt, that can never be paid back, the Game is called FINANCIAL ENGINEERING.

When corrupt USian Supreme Court judges based on their political biases and prejudices rule in favor of idiosyncratic USian groups lobbying for laws to eliminate abortions and reduce the control of women over their own bodies and deny the right of LGTBQ USians to express themselves as they were naturally caused to sexually function the Game is called RELIGIOUS FREEDOM.

When large corporations move the erstwhile good industrial jobs of the US to low-wage countries and substitute more and more robots and artificial intelligence for human labor inside the US and more and more USians are left with insecure low-wage jobs the Game is called PROGRESS.

When mainstream media selectively publish and broadcast factual political news but omit analysis of what is really going on the Game is called FAIR AND BALANCED REPORTING.

When the most prominent politician on the Earthian political stage running for president of the US November 5, 2024 tells you over and over in mass media that his last presidential race in 2020 that he lost fair and square was rigged and stolen from him despite overwhelming irrefutable evidence to the contrary the Game is called THE BIG LIE.

When Earthian humans decide they cannot get their needs met in their societies competing fairly and squarely under their rules of law and start believing and having faith that fascist dictators will take care of them through violent unlawful means the Game is called DO ME SOMETHING. 

When corrupt bought and paid for USian Supreme Court judges decide based on their idiosyncratic biases and prejudices that a USian president is above the law of the land, immune from prosecution for violating laws of the US, having the power of kings, the Game is called FASCISM.  

Psychological Games have always been a major component of Earthian economic and political behavior, and a Game transactional analysts call NIGYSOB has been one of the most significant and pervasive psychological Games in business, economics, and politics.

NIGYSOB (Now I’ve Got You, You S.O.B.) entails psychological Game players trying to reign supreme over others, to triumph over others, to become “one-up”, to be superior, to beat, to win, etc. any way they can. NIGYSOB players are motivated by anger that they feel justified in releasing because of perceived social and psychological actions and manipulations on the part of Persecutors that might cause them to become loser Victims, causing them to feel their psychological, social, economic, and political standing and security are threatened.

Eric Berne defined a psychological Game as: “An ongoing series of complementary ulterior transactions progressing to a well-defined, predictable outcome. Descriptively, it is a recurring set of transactions, often repetitious, superficially plausible, with a concealed motivation; or, more colloquially, a series of moves with a snare, or “gimmick.” Games are clearly differentiated from procedures, rituals, and pastimes by two chief characteristics: (1) their ulterior quality and (2) the payoff. Procedures may be successful, rituals effective, and sometimes profitable, but all of them are by definition candid; they may involve contest, but not conflict, and the ending may be sensational, but is not dramatic. Every Game (emphasis added), on the other hand, is basically dishonest, and the outcome has a dramatic, as distinct from merely exciting quality.”  See Berne, Eric. (1964). Games people play: The psychology of human relationships. New York: Grove Press, p. 48.

Psychological Games include two sets of transactions conducted simultaneously between Game players, a spoken overt social set, and an ulterior covert unspoken psychological set, with three basic roles, Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim acted out by the players, involving three basic ego states, Parent, Adult, and Child, with switches of transactional vectors between various combinations of the Ego States in all players, as the players switch around from Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim on a “Drama Triangle.” See Karpman, Stephen (1968). “Fairy tales and script drama analysis.” Transactional Analysis Bulletin. 7(26), 39-43.

Ego states are states of being including thoughts, beliefs, behaviors, feelings, gestures, body language, and other signals determining how people come across with others in communication episodes, whether parent-like, adult-like, or child-like, in all kinds of situations.  People switch ego states depending on who they are communicating with and what sort of circumstances they are in, whether they are parenting, working, socializing, teaching, having fun, playing Games, politicking, or whatever.  They transmit messages from three ego states in themselves to three ego states in others in pair vectors, Parent-Parent, Adult-Adult, Child-Child, Parent-Child, Child-Adult, Adult-Parent, Child-Parent, or whatever combination.  These transactions are especially meaningful in situations in which there is some sort of authoritarian system involving leaders and members, such as parents parenting children in homes, teachers teaching students in schools, or bosses bossing subordinates in a business or political organization, which normally entail primarily Parent-Child transactions. In general however the more Adult-Adult transactions there are the better things go in families, schools, businesses, and political organizations. See Berne, Eric (1970). What do you say after you say hello? The psychology of human destiny. New York: Grove Press, and Berne, Eric (1963). The structure and dynamics of organizations and groups. New York: Grove Press.

Adult ego state transactions are generally factual, honest, and overt; Parent and Child ego state transactions are often covert dishonest ulterior lies, transmitted by body language instead of words.

Donald Trump, the most prominent, pernicious, and dangerous Game-player on the Earthian political stage at present, is a master at using body language to switch ego states in his monologues, harangues, and diatribes at rallies and in personal conversations. He has a tall imposing 6’3″ body frame and a commanding persona that is enhanced with orange facial coloring and a bizarre hair-do. Most of the time his words do not make sense but his body language is clear: he is not only OK but superior and his loyal cronies, lackeys, and knaves are too. He is adept at switching ego states and transactions by changing his posture and gait as he struts and swaggers about, by flailing his arms and small fingers about, randomly producing smirks, smiles, grins, grimaces, glares, stares and bodily contortions, and by changing the speed, volume, pitch, cadence, and tone of his sing-songy voice, that ranges from guttural to prissy falsetto. He is somewhat analogous to a made-up circus clown and ring-master as he titillates, entertains, agitates, and cultivates his captivated enthralled cult members at rallies. If he didn’t put on his make-up and fix his hair as he does he would look like what he really is, a pasty pale balding almost octogenarian Earthian human male, and most likely he could not get elected to anything. Trump’s a master of pantomime and playing Games. But don’t be fooled. Trump’s not a circus clown; he’s a dangerous hardened criminal who intends to turn the US into a fascist dictatorship if he gets elected president of the US again. Do you really want to live day by day subject to the whims of a fascist crime boss dictator who can do you harm at any time? Think about that when you vote for Trump for president of the US November 5, 2024, if you do.

NIGYSOB Game-playing underlies conflicts, competitions, and wars among individuals, groups, and organizations, including nations and corporations domestically and internationally. You might think nations and international corporations competing among themselves do not entail real anger, but it seems to me anger is a major factor when serious fighting breaks out. Leaders try to engender fear and anger among their followers before the first outbursts of fighting to motivate followers. You might think a war is not an ego trip for leaders. You might think leaders are simply doing their perceived ethical duty to preserve the safety and security of their followers and constituents. But the unspoken psychological truth is another matter. Wars are also ego trips, with leaders trying to triumph over other leaders, wanting to become one-up top dogs.

You can build a case competitions among political parties in presidential elections more than anything else are NIGYSOB Games, with leaders saying they want to improve the plight of Victim citizens, increase their relative share of national and international income, provide them with better and cheaper health care, and so forth; but here too the contest is probably an ego trip for leaders who are more interested in being top dog than anything else. Political contests become an ego trip for followers as well as the leaders foment fear and anger among them to beat the bad guy Persecutors and run them out of office. If their party wins followers may also feel “one-up” because their party ideology and their dear leader “won”, regardless of whether anything is done to improve economic and social conditions.

The capitalistic economic system is based on NIGYSOB-playing. It’s what makes the world go round. It makes everyone richer, the defenders of capitalism say, because it motivates people to work harder and longer and more efficiently than they would if they did not have to compete and do battle with others to make a living. 

I was a good football and basketball player back in my junior high, high school, and college years. I was the quarterback and I found it satisfying and exhilarating calling plays in the huddle, doing battle at the scrimmage line, and throwing touchdown passes in a real game before cheering fans in a football stadium, especially when winning, as was the case when I was in the eighth grade, when we won eleven out of eleven games. On the other hand, I don’t recall ever feeling anger caused by the opposing team trying to beat us as we tried to beat them. The main payoff for an amateur athlete is getting plenty of what transactional analysts call “strokes”, or units of recognition, that can be positive or negative, depending on how well you do something. Eric Berne said positive strokes are what everyone wants and needs. He said they keep your spinal column from “shriveling up”.

There are two kinds of scripts people have to act out in organizations, to keep their jobs or get promoted: psychological life scripts and organizational social scripts.

Psychological Life Scripts are programmed into children by virtue of being constantly exposed to and dependent on their parents before the age of eight. Almost as if by osmosis parents psychologically script their children not to feel, think, and do certain things in various ways and degrees as various events happen in the environment, largely non-verbally by how parents respond to a child, by how they get mad, glad, sad, or scared, or not, when the child does something when various things happen. Psychological scripts are automatically “introjected” into the personalities of children during early childhood, and most children wind up pretty much like their parents, with the same accents, and the same kinds of feeling, thinking, doing, and communicating patterns.

There are also some generic overt social script messages such as brush your teeth, clean those finger nails, study hard, make something of yourself, work hard, etc. that are socially overt and spoken.

Psychological life script messages are called injunctions and social script messages are called counter-injunctions. These messages wind up creating a life script that includes a life position. There are four basic TA life positions: I am OK and You are OK, I am OK and you are Not OK, I’m Not OK and You are OK, and I am Not OK and You are Not OK; and there are three generic TA life script outcomes: Winner, Loser, and Non-Winner.

There is no way under competitive capitalism for all people to be fully OK economically and politically, making the I’m OK – You’re OK life position infeasible among all humans.

Most people are what they are because of family scripts, not economic conditions, and they can respond in adult life only in certain ways because of their introjected injunctions and life scripts. Some people are more flexible and adaptable than others, but most people in order to make a living and achieve some satisfaction in life have to find a slot, niche, and level in an organization in which their life script is congruent.

Social scripts, on the other hand, include the sum total of do’s and don’t’s required for a person to be successful dealing with others in a particular job or role. These scripts include the physical and mental algorithmic steps required to do the specific job you are paid to do and required words and phrases to say to others and how to emotionally and behaviorally respond to people around you, up, across, and down the organizational chain of command, including playing the psychological Games people around you want or need to play.

All organizations, including political organizations, require particular social scripts for participants with words and phrases that have to be memorized and used. Almost nobody can be her or his true self most of the time making a living in an organization. Most employees have to act out scripts created by the organization. Organizations such as Disney World are the most scripted of all. Employees there are called characters and are required to wear costumes and “go on stage” after they clock in for work, pretending while on the job to be characters such as Donald Duck or Mickey or Minnie Mouse dealing with customers, parroting memorized lines. While all employees in all organizations have to pretend to some extent they are something they are not to keep their jobs the scripting is not as overt and extreme as it is at Disney World.

Click here to see a Parent, Adult, and Child diagram I published in the TAJ depicting a script matrix with some typical social script messages in an organizational chain of command. See Stapleton, Richard John (1978). “The chain of ego states.” Transactional Analysis Journal. 8(3), 215-219.

USians who get into politics for a living are just like all other employees under capitalism: they have to act out the right scripts to keep their jobs.

Most people who get fired in organizations are fired because of their psychological life scripts that are thought to be inappropriate in an organizational culture, or for being unwilling or unable to act out social scripts, not for being unable to perform the required physical and mental algorithmic steps of the job.

There are certain things politicians have to do that might be called work in the physical algorithmic sense, but in the best of circumstances they are paid to think and make decisions, not do repetitive work. On the other hand, if they do not obey the script requirements of their political party they will be fired or sluiced out of the party organization one way or another. Therefore to get honest Game-free governments only individuals who have no intentions of being a politician for a living should be elected to office.

Psychological Games are a way of getting stimulation, recognition, and structure as one goes about one’s business of surviving and making a living. Basically they involve trying to gain satisfactions dealing with others, by making yourself feel better at someone’s else’s expense, or by making a fool of someone. Psychological Games entail people discounting problems, opportunities, and people, and the significance of someone or something. All psychological Games entail players acting out one of three roles on a Drama Triangle: Victim, Persecutor, and Rescuer.

Why vote in the first place? The best Adult ego state reason in a democratic republic such as the US would be to take social satisfaction in helping select the best person for offices to help set rational goals, objectives, procedures, and laws for everyone. Lesser Parent and Child reasons would be to vote for people who will do things to benefit you and yours financially, and who will provide for you and yours satisfying psychological Game payoffs to secure psychological structure, recognition, and stimulation similar to what you experienced with your parents, friends, and others in your early life that support and reinforce the psychological, social, economic, religious, political, and moral states of affairs of organizations such as your family, school, or church.

Once psychologically scripted most people do not rebel. Red states stay red and blue states stay blue, regardless of the logical Adult ego state reasoning of idealistic generally-OK political candidates with script-free ideas on how to improve the functioning of the economic and political system.

I remember a TV interviewer in 2000 asking an attractive woman who ran a bar and grill why she intended to vote for Bush II. “Cuz he’s a good-lookin’ man” was her quick response.

There are several psychological Games people play in political races; but it seems to me based on observing presidential races on the Internet and elsewhere, listening to comments people make on my Facebook news feed timeline and elsewhere, most politicians play a first-degree psychological Game called RAPO by transactional analysts, since one of the surest ways to get votes in our narcissistic USian culture is to be considered good lookin’.

There are three degrees of psychological Games: First Degree Games entail comments, insults, discounts, jokes, and body language displays designed to build up or tear down someone’s self-esteem, or gain or lose some sort of psychological advantage; Second Degree Games entail more serious discounts and payoffs, threatening someone, firing someone, getting divorced, etc.; Third Degree Games are sometimes called tissue-tearing Games with payoffs such as getting into physical fights, going to war, winding up in a morgue, etc.

A RAPO Game starts by someone psychologically promising some sort of satisfaction to someone for responding to her or his sexual attractiveness. There are various social and psychological transactions that can bring this about, social transactions being spoken and overt, psychological transactions being unspoken and covert. The payoff for a first degree RAPO player is not a real sexual liaison but making a fool of a mark or sucker who will be punished or humiliated in some way if he or she responds to the psychological sexual messages. Most psychological Games do not entail sexual messaging but a lot of them do. All psychological Games involve a con of some degree taking advantage of the vulnerabilities and weaknesses of a mark or suckers, promising things the Game starter has no intentions of delivering. Most of the promises of first-degree Games are insignificant and inconsequential. First degree Games are ubiquitous and most people play them at various times. Sometimes they have to to survive in organizations.

Psychological Games and scripts are what make folk tales and fairy tales (such as Robin Hood, the Pied Piper, Superman, The Lone Ranger, Snow White, Goldilocks, Cinderella, Jack & Jill, Humpty-Dumpty, Hansel and Gretel, The Big Bad Wolf and Little Red Riding Hood) interesting and dramatic.

Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Bush II, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden won political races to some extent caused by successfully playing first degree RAPO Games, caused by having physical and psychological characteristics that enabled them to transmit non-verbal psychological messages to voters that they would deliver to them titillating psychological and social satisfactions if they voted for them, somehow providing supporters, followers, and voters with various sorts of desired or fantasied psychological stimulation, structure, and recognition. Whether these politicians produced for their voters the psychological satisfactions the voters sought would be difficult to prove, just as it would be for these voters (for sure middle and lower income voters) to prove voting for these politicians produced any economic improvements for them. Any president during the last fifty years would have a difficult time proving he produced significant tangible economic benefits for middle and lower income voters, regardless of how much psychological and social satisfaction he produced for them.

And here we are, having degenerated in the US into a situation in which a convicted rapist, Donald John Trump, a former president of the US, is now running for USian president again, and it appears about half of USian voters intend to vote for him again. What does this tell you? I don’t know what it tells you but it tells me that about half of USian voters just don’t care if the president of the US is a rapist. And why is this? Why don’t they care? I don’t know, but it seems to me it does not matter to them because of what Trump has told them about he would do as president if reelected. He wants to be a fascist dictator of the US, and it seems to me this means about half of USian voters like authoritarian dictators, whether in disguise as parents, teachers, preachers, business bosses, or politicians. In other words, they like dictators who tell them what to do, rather than participate in democratic discussions about what to do.

Seems to me Earthian humans are polarized intellectually between two general extreme categories that might be described as democratic idealists and authoritarian nihilists, with most humans being clustered near the middle of the continuum.

Democratic idealists are not necessarily members of the Democratic Party in the US; and all authoritarian nihilists are not necessarily members of the Republican Party.

A democratic idealist in my view is someone who visualizes new states of affairs that might make an unsatisfying current situation more efficient, effective, just, and satisfying through consultation, collaboration, and cooperation.

Authoritarian nihilists in my view are dissatisfied with states of affairs as they are but do not visualize changing them by creating new states of affairs, believing instead that what is needed is authoritarian dictators in positions of authority who will make existing or superseded systems and processes work for them by out-competing competitors or destroying scapegoats and enemies.

Most so-called liberals and progressives would be included in the democratic idealist category and most so-called conservatives would be included in the authoritarian nihilist category.

An extreme democratic idealist would focus primarily on ideal states to be achieved in the future and extreme authoritarian nihilists would be focused primarily on what now exists and tearing down what they do not like, not creating better systems to achieve better states of affairs.

Abraham Lincoln once remarked there are two kinds of people who never amount to much in life: those who cannot do what they are told, and those who cannot do anything but what they are told. Unrealistic idealistic builders of imaginary air castles often have a hard time making a go of things in life, and people with no goals and imagination are pretty much stuck where they are. Probably most successful people lie somewhere in between the two extremes of idealism and nihilism.

Extreme democratic idealists worry a lot. Extreme authoritarian nihilists just don’t give a rip, and some are happy savages.

I agree with most transactional analysts that Earthian humans are scripted to be what they are emotionally, intellectually, and behaviorally in early childhood by Injunctions that are psychologically transmitted from the child ego states of parents to the child ego states of their offspring.

According to Bob Goulding, MD and Mary Goulding, MSW, quoted in my book Business Voyages, page 160, there are about fourteen generic psychological Injunctions widely transmitted in family scripting:

Don’t Be, Don’t Be You (the sex you are), Don’t Be A Child, Don’t Grow, Don’t Make It, Don’t, Don’t Be Important, Don’t Be Close, Don’t Belong, Don’t Be Well (or sane), Don’t Think About X (forbidden subject), Don’t Think What You Think, Think What I Think, Don’t Feel, Don’t Feel X, Mad, Sad, Glad, Scared, etc., Don’t Feel What You Feel, Feel What I Feel.              See Goulding, Bob and Goulding, Mary. (1976). “Injunctions, decisions, and redecisions.” Transactional Analysis Journal, 6(1), 41-48.

These script injunctions are transmitted primarily psychologically, not overtly spoken, from the Child ego state of the parent to the Child ego state of the child. Rarely would a parent socially or overtly tell a child what one of the above injunctions requires. They are primarily transmitted non-verbally by Parent and Child ego states when caregivers exhibit mad, glad, sad, or scared emotions in response to what a child naturally feels, thinks, and does as shared life events occur in early childhood. On the other hand, children are scripted by the ego states they observe parents using when parents feel, think, and do things. Children psychologically “introject” in living color the ego states of parents, including the accents, mannerisms, facial expressions, tone of voice, and behaviors of parents, as parents and children deal with life events. To introject is to take in or absorb the personality and behavioral characteristics of another. So children more or less grow up to replicate their parents, and the replications become hard-wired in their brains for life in most cases.

For good or ill, the scripting process may determine not only the personality and behavioral characteristics of a child but also his/her life position and role in life, including determining whether a child grows up to become a democratic idealist or an authoritarian nihilist.

Therefore the scripting process largely determines which political parties win in any culture; and the fate of planet Earth may depend on changing the scripting of humans, which entails a process of change that includes not only changing economic and political systems but also psychological and social systems.

An assumption of transactional analysis is that humans can learn to “see what is really going on” with themselves and others as they transact with one another socially and psychologically living their daily lives so as to increase their chances of living satisfactory lives, regardless of how not-OK their economic, social, psychological, and political worlds might be.

According to transactional analysis theory there are three naturally occurring generic life outcomes caused for humans: winner, loser, and non-winner—caused by inherited physical characteristics and script “messages” one is exposed to throughout life—and by the early decisions offspring make about the messages that become determinants of emotional, intellectual, and behavioral responses throughout life.

Whether one inherits a winner, loser, or non-winner script is determined by naturally-occurring inevitable cause-effect chains one is accidentally exposed to. Some transactional analysts assume proportions of winner, loser, and non-winner scripts in the population remain relatively constant from one generation to another.

The natural scripting process is not fair; and Earthian human history does not encourage optimism about the probability of this unfairness being eradicated anytime soon.

It seems to me most of the worst human abominations of Earthian human history such as mass murders, genocides, and democides were caused by non-winners and losers of a society who were tired of being one-down living in unequal societies that had basically capitalistic economic systems who decided, since they could not win fair and square under the existing rule of law, given their inherited biological genetic abilities and their psychological life scripts and social scripts, that the best way for them to get strokes and become equal or one-up in their societies was to enslave themselves to an authoritarian dictator who would tell them what to do to violently destroy the existing government and structure of their society and/or other societies.

In other words, they decided since they could not win using their inherited abilities and scripts in their society under its existing rule of law the solution for their dilemma was to destroy the existing society by becoming obedient loyal non-thinking subordinates (cronies, lackeys, knaves, warriors, slaves, etc.) doing what they were “told” by an authoritarian gang-leading lawless dictator who would arbitrarily reward them with shares of stolen plunder and one-up status in some sort of new society after they destroyed their old society by means of violent force.

When Earthian humans decide they cannot get their needs met in their societies competing fairly and squarely under their rules of law and start believing and having faith that fascist dictators will take care of them through violent unlawful means the Game is called DO ME SOMETHING.   

Seems to me this hamartic process has happened over and over in Earthian human history, in Germany under Hitler, in Russia under Stalin, in China under Mao Tse Tung, and elsewhere; and it could happen again, in the US under Trump and in other countries around Spaceship Earth. Authoritarian political parties are growing stronger in countries such as Hungary, Israel, Germany, and France.

A transactional analysis colleague Jake Jacobs, a social worker in Chicago, spent a good bit of time and energy back in the 1970s and 1980s researching and studying the causes of the German holocaust under Hitler, having had family members gassed at Auschwitz. An amateur photographer, he took trips to Auschwitz for a firsthand view of the concentration camp and its gas chambers that he photographed and studied trying to get a feel for what it was like to have been there and die there. In his research he found that 150,000,000 Earthian humans were murdered by authoritarian dictators in their own and other countries by starvation and other means in genocidal and democidal operations in the 20th Century. He concluded that a major cause of mass murders by governments is a desire of authoritarian dictators to be the only ones that count. See Jacobs, Alan (1991). “Aspects of Survival: Triumph over death and onliness.” Transactional Analysis Journal. 21(1). 4-11.

A purpose of transactional analysis is to help individuals and groups insert new fair causes into unfair natural cause-effect chains so as to increase the probabilities and proportions of winner outcomes occurring in the populace by non-violent means.

Changing a non-winner or loser script into a winner script requires hard work but it can happen if a person somehow acquires new script messages powerful enough to control frustrating, debilitating, or hamartic script messages instilled in his or her sub-conscious mind. TA can provide people basic concepts and tools for attempting such a thing, requiring learning to use different ego states and transactional patterns and learning how to communicate in more effective ways psychologically and socially.

Most people seem to think if only Earthian humans could solve their economic, political, military, and religious troubles, beat their competitors and enemies, etc., then everything would be just hunky-dory and the bluebirds would start chirping again. Not so, many people would not be happy and successful living in paradise because of script messages instilled in their sub-conscious minds before they were eight years old. In order for everyone to live happily and successfully humans would have to solve not only economic, political, religious, and social problems, but also psychological problems.

Changing a loser or non-winner script into a winner script generally requires changing  the ego states one uses and how much time one spends daily pastiming, performing rituals, doing work, playing psychological Games, and being intimate with others.

The Prayer of Serenity goes something like this: Lord give me the intelligence and strength to change what needs changing, and the wisdom to know what I can and cannot change, knowing full well that some suffering, losing, and grieving is inevitable.

Using TA in some cases can help people become more serene, by enabling them to see more clearly what is going on to make salutary changes, or by learning to accept one’s script and focus on finding a niche in which it fits. On the other hand, a basic problem or question is whether serenity is possible in today’s world, beset by global warming and climate change and by escalating tensions and agitations among nations around planet Earth who have nuclear weapons.

TA never promised anyone any rose gardens, or eternal bliss in heaven, but it does advertise that it can help individuals, groups, and organizations become more OK, OK not only in terms of achieving goals but more OK transacting with others so as to live with more dignity, satisfaction, peace, and tranquility, based on Adult mutually agreed-to contracts.

No one can blame you if you believe in tuning out TA and articles such as this one. Maybe the best strategy is to tune out the world as much as you can, inexorably inching through your life’s wormhole tunnel, reading no newspapers and not watching television, with no Internet. The problem however if you do that is boredom. Most humans have an innate need for stimulation, achievement, and recognition.

Regardless of what sort of cognitive structures humans might use, TA or whatever, sooner or later they have to take action, and this entails defining problems, delineating alternatives, making recommendations, choosing things, trying new things, over and over, till something works.

1 – What is the problem?

2 – What are the alternatives?

3 – What do you recommend?

We live in precarious times that probably encourage people to play more frequently AIN’T IT AWFUL, a psychological Game in which Game players collect strokes for making the world seem worse than it is, complaining about the evils and troubles of the world, positioning themselves as Victims of obsolete economic, religious, and political policies and systems manipulated and exploited by greedy self-interested power-mad narcissistic sociopathic oligarchs and their corrupt bought and paid for cronies, lackeys, and knaves, such as lobbyists, politicians, religious leaders, and judges, however true this state of affairs might be in reality.

By the same token, it will do no good for humans to passively pretend the world is just hunky-dory and swell, better off than it really is, with everything coming up roses for everyone, living in small imaginary Candide-like best of all possible worlds, playing a psychological Game called GREENHOUSE by transactional analysts, in which players are rewarded with plastic strokes for making nonsensical positive cheerful upbeat comments about the environment and social, economic, political, and religious states of affairs, regardless of how bleak they are in reality.

It seems to me the most dangerous psychological Game played politically right now around planet Earth is IF IT WEREN’T FOR YOU, involving polarized individuals, groups, and organizations who experience increasing insecurity and hopelessness causing them to blame others and find scapegoats for their plights, escalating their anger as they transmit threats from their angry Parent and Child ego states to the Parent and Child ego states of others, sometimes attacking others verbally and physically for their perceived misdeeds and beliefs. Some of the threats include the threat of international and civil war. Israel is playing a third-degree IF IT WEREN’T FOR YOU Game with Palestine right now.

IF IT WEREN’T FOR YOU is a Game that entails aggrieved humans psychologically acting as if opposing warring or competing parties maliciously and arbitrarily decided using free will to commit the harmful or heinous actions and deeds they are accused of committing, instead of realizing the others were caused to exist and do what they did by concatenations of infinite cause-effect chains just like you were. Getting rid of the other will not solve problems caused by poor educational systems, poor family scripts, poor religions, and hamartic economic and political policies and systems.

For more information regarding the use of Transactional Analysis https://www.itaaworld.org/ to create better discussion groups and democratic processes read my book Born to Learn: A Transactional Analysis of Human Learning. https://www.amazon.com/Born-Learn-Transactional-Analysis-Learning/dp/0692584331

For more information on how to co-construct better organizations and economic systems using TA read my book Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata, and Tools for Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds https://www.amazon.com/Business-Voyages-Schemata-Discovering-Co-Constructing/dp/1413480810

See my article “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc,” https://blog.effectivelearning.net/the-evolution-of-spaceship-earth-inc/ for some management science ideas on how human Earthians might eventually co-construct an idealistic democratic bottom-up economic system that is viable and satisfying for everyone aboard Spaceship Earth, making it possible for all Earthian humans to develop an I’m OK – You’re OK life position.

This entails human Earthians never doing work that machines can do better, and delegating the day-to-day management of systems for scheduling, producing, and distributing the necessities of life to artificial intelligence programs and supercomputers.

This can be done using linear programming based on the general algorithmic matrix algebra form

Max CjXj, s.t. AijXj <, =, or > Bi

as explained in my article “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc.” https://blog.effectivelearning.net/the-evolution-of-spaceship-earth-inc/

Flying aboard an airliner about to land at night moving at four hundred miles an hour at thirty thousand feet, what would you rather have landing the plane, the plane’s computer system and auto-pilot or the pilot and co-pilot, looking out their windows with their hands on their steering devices, seeing nothing but clouds and lightning below? Thanks are due to Buckminster Fuller for creating this airplane-landing metaphor, that he published in his 1964 book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth.

It’s not easy to see what’s really going on, impossible some say, while being inundated with fake news daily around planet Earth, made public in mass media and the Internet. To see what’s really going on, Earthian humans have to use inductive and analogical reasoning, based on probability, not deductive logic. Almost never can anyone prove with deductive logic that a general proposition about economic, social, psychological, religious, or political states affairs is absolutely true. About the best humans can hope for is to develop consensual answers that are generally acceptable and true based on probability.

It’s better to be honestly wrong, saying something is true because you really don’t know it’s not true, than to say something is true when you know damn well it’s not true.

Seems to me most lying is lying by omission (people not telling people things they know are true to gain or preserve advantages in competitive situations). Whether lying by omission is more or less harmful in overall perspective than lying by commission (telling people things you know are not true for ill-gotten gains), is debatable, as is proving whether it’s getting easier or harder for most people to see what’s really going on in economic and political states of affairs.

Political parties, governments, and mainstream media often lie by omission about what is going on, presumably to protect national security and their organizational revenues, in many cases socially presenting selective true facts but omitting analysis about what is really going on.

For whatever it’s worth, I would rather be told what to do by a well-programmed AI robot than a demented deranged unhinged human fascist dictator. On the other hand, I am convinced the best situation would be to be told what to do by a group of randomly-selected intelligent rational humans who had fully studied the facts of the case at hand and who had fully discussed and debated about what to do in an open Game-free, Adult, I’m OK—You’re OK, democratic process.

For a quick mental voyage exploring how Earthian humans might change their hamartic psychological, social, economic, religious, and political processes read my 2021 novel, As the Rooster Crows Earthian OKness Increases.

HOW TO EMPOWER EARTHIAN HUMANS

Richard John Stapleton, PhD, CTA would spin the spinner of his Classroom De-GAMER in his classes to randomly select a student at the beginning of each class session to lead a discussion of the case assigned for the day, a case taken from a planned or operating business prepared by case writers at Georgia Southern University, Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Alabama. He taught management systems, researched, published, and conducted a small business institute at Georgia Southern University thirty-five years, 1970-2005.

All case analyses entail considering three existential questions:

WHAT IS THE PROBLEM? WHAT ARE THE ALTERNATIVES? WHAT DO YOU RECOMMEND?

 

Whomever the spinner of the “Classroom De-Gamer” selected when it wound down after spinning by an imaginary line of fire extending from the point of the spinner to a class member sitting in the circle classroom layout would become the “Leader of the Moment” required to answer the three existential questions shown above laying out the case to all class members.

The overall purpose of the Game-free I’m OK—You’re OK Adult-Adult democratic teaching and learning process is to produce comprehension of the relevant facts and focal points of the case among class members in order to create rational policies and strategies for successfully managing the states of affairs of the case. All humans have Adult ego states that can be cathected, even children at young ages.

Cathecting an ego state is turning on energy, cognition and emotion in the human psyche for transacting with fellow humans. There are three basic types of ego states that can be cathected: Parent, Adult, and Child.

A soft drink bottle as in playing the childhood game Spin the Bottle works about as well as a Classroom De-Gamer to randomly select the Leader of the Moment to answer the Three Existential Questions. No one can interrupt anyone once someone has the floor. Communicating overtly or covertly with individuals in the room for the whole session is not allowed. Anyone can respond to any speaker once the speaker has finished, disagreeing or agreeing with what was said, and may bring up another problem if appropriate in the context of the discussion.

How long should a discussion last? Long enough for group members to comprehend the system under consideration, a system including interrelations between relevant focal point entities of the system–relevant facts and issues comprising the problem, alternatives and recommendations.

According to R. Buckminster Fuller in his Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969) comprehension of a system entails separating the relevant points from the irrelevant points in the system under consideration. It takes time to do this. According to Fuller, Comprehension = (N²-N) / 2, where N = Number of total focal point entities in the system, counting the number of focal point facts or issues and all the inter-relationships between the focal point entities.

Comprehension required and produced expands exponentially as the size of the system increases. One has to wonder if most Earthian systems today are ever fully comprehended by Earthian humans. Rather than most Earthian human systems being managed today based on comprehension in general they are managed based on dogmas, doctrines, rules, algorithms, scripts, and the like, many of which are irrelevant. As matters now stand about the best Earthian humans can hope for is that somehow the smartest, wisest, most knowledgeable, most ethical, and most empathetic Earthian humans somehow manage to become top leaders in major systems.

When most members of the discussion group seem to generally comprehend the system it is time to stop. Most paper cases in Stapleton’s classes of about 30 students took about one hour. Real cases and systems in your organizations and groups may take more or less time, perhaps several hourly sessions for one system. Stick with the discussion until most members have comprehended the relevant problems, alternatives, and recommendations of the system under consideration as best they can. In most cases this will produce a solution considered the most rational of alternatives for most members of the group, about the best that can be hoped for at present. Perhaps at some future date supercomputers will be able to comprehend large systems well enough to develop answers that are provably true.

Since all members of the group will not have been caused to develop the same pictures in their heads about what should be done in the case before the discussion starts, a high percentage of the discussants will learn in the discussion as they comprehend what is really going on that their initial conceptions were wrong, causing both unlearning and learning. Sometimes unlearning is more important than learning for creating better Earthian human states of affairs. Unlearning, in fact, might be what is now needed most in order for Earthian humans to develop peaceful and sustainable systems around Spaceship Earth.

Most discussants will not leave the discussions with the same mental pictures they started out with caused by the greater comprehension caused by the back and forth dialectical arguing caused by the Game-free I’m OK-You’re OK Adult-Adult democratic discussion process, proving both unlearning and learning happened.

Stapleton’s De-Gaming process insured that everyone would be relatively GAME-free transacting in class discussions. They all agreed to a learning contract at the outset of the course that they would read assigned cases and would be graded on the quantity and quality of ideas sold in the class market. Anyone caught obviously unprepared by the spinning De-GAMER would lose a whole letter grade from the course grade. No one could feel or think that s/he was being persecuted or rescued if selected to start the class discussion of the day by the Classroom De-GAMER. The psychological GAME Drama Triangle roles of Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim were largely banished from the course learning process. The actual grades received—A’s, B’s, C’s, D’s, and F’s—were relative grades, not absolute grades, Excellent, Good, Average, Poor, and Failing relative to the class. There were no numbers ostensibly proving what percentage of the course knowledge was retained in memory for so-called objective exams.

Stapleton sat in the same circle in the same kind of chair as students, and the De-GAMING rules also applied to him. If the Classroom De-GAMER landed on him he had to lay out the case just like any other student and discuss what was the problem, what were the alternatives, and what he recommended.

Grades were based eighty percent on class participation in dialectical discussions about what to do about problems and opportunities found in cases; the rest of the final grade was based on two case write-ups. One write-up was about what the student observed, researched, analyzed, and wrote about an existing business in the local environment or a business plan the student created. The other write-up was an analysis of a case researched and written by professors about a business assigned as the final exam. Cases used in his courses contained processes, problems, opportunities, and data occurring in all functional areas of business such as entrepreneurship, finance, marketing, operations management, control, management information systems, and business policy and strategy.

Published refereed journal articles and books explaining how his democratic GAME-free Adult-Adult I’m OK—You’re OK case method system works, by banishing Persecutors, Rescuers, and Victims playing psychological GAMES from the teaching and learning process, first documented in an article titled the Classroom De-GAMER he published in 1978 in the Transactional Analysis Journal. He has published seven books and over one hundred articles in various media containing cases, research data, and essays on teaching and learning and management systems, policies, and practices.

Learned and trained using transactional analysis with Martin Groder, MD; Graham Barnes, PhD; Vann Joines, PhD; and many others at the Southeast Institute at Chapel Hill, North Carolina (1975-1978).

Learned how the Harvard business school case method works teaching with Bernard Bienvenu, DBA and Rexford Hauser, DBA, Harvard Business School doctorates, at the University of Louisiana—Lafayette in 1969-70.

Has a BS in economics (1962), an MBA in organizational behavior (1966), and a PhD in management science (1969) from Texas Tech University, and an organizational and educational certification in transactional analysis (CTA) from the International Transactional Analysis Association (1978).

Taught his own case method track at the undergraduate level in the management department in the business school at Georgia Southern University offering four or five different elective case method courses each academic year during 1970-2005 in which he led, coordinated, and graded about twenty-five or so students each year who took all or most of those case method courses in their junior and senior years, of about two hundred students who signed up for all his courses each year. He used a democratic circle or amphitheater classroom layout in all his classes. He also taught most semesters two sections of a capstone integrative business policy course he added to the business school curriculum in 1970 that was required for all undergraduate business majors that could be elected by any student in any major.  He was the only professor in the business school to use the case method in any course.

Class members agreed to a course learning contract that stipulated they would read the facts of the case before class and would lose a whole letter grade from the course final grade if the De-GAMER randomly caught them obviously not having read the case before class, if they had not slipped a note under his office door before class telling him they had not read the case, which they could do twice during the course without penalty.

About ten percent of his students made A’s and about five percent made D’s. Most made C’s, which is about right, since C = Average. There were few F’s in his courses. The main criterion for course grades was the quantity and quality of ideas sold by students in case method discussions. He used peer ratings to give students feedback showing what their fellow students thought about the quantity and quality of their ideas sold in class, having made it clear the final decision about final grades was his. He did not believe in Lake Wobegon grading.   

No class member was ever forced to take one of his courses to graduate, and the most hardened GAME-players in the school did not sign up for his courses after he issued his Edict of 1972 in which he clearly spelled out in his syllabi the penalty for getting caught unprepared. His Classroom De-Gamer was roundly discussed by students in bull sessions across campus every year and was labeled various things, such as The Wheel of Fate and The Death Wheel. Most students near the end of his career simply called it The Spinner.

Appreciated Georgia Southern honoring his academic freedom by allowing him control of his teaching methods, classroom layouts, grading procedures, and course books, cases, and materials, some of which he researched, wrote, and published. He was promoted to full professor with tenure at age thirty-six and was the senior professor of the university when he retired in 2005.

Solicited anonymous longitudinal research data using questionnaires in 1992 showing his case method students during 1972-1982 reported higher yearly incomes in 1992 than students electing the same courses in 1972-1982 taught by professors using the authoritarian lecture method and the militaristic row and column classroom layout, who graded students based on memorizing or calculating “right answers” for tests, indicating learners learning in Adult-Adult I’m OK—You’re OK GAME-free democratic learning processes graded subjectively became more successful in the real world of business than learners lectured to and graded using Parent-Child transactions, row and column classroom layouts, and so-called objective tests.  

Only former students who had worked in the real world of business ten or more years after graduating from the Georgia Southern business school were included in the study. The data are shown, analyzed, and discussed in full in “Evidence the Case Method Works” published in his book Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata, and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds, 2008, pg. 475. The data were also used in several refereed articles.

See also Stapleton, R.J. (1989-1990). “Academic entrepreneurship: Using the case method to simulate competitive business markets.” Organizational Behavior Teaching Review. Vol. XIV, No. IV, pp. 88-104; Stapleton, R.J., Murkison, G., and Stapleton, D.C. (1993). “Feedback regarding a game-free case method process used to educate general management and entrepreneurship students.” Proceedings of the 1993 Annual Meeting of the Southeast CHAPTER of the Institute for Management Science. Myrtle Beach, SC, October, 1993; and Stapleton, R. J. and Stapleton, D.C. (1998), “Teaching Business Using the Case Method and Transactional Analysis: A Constructivist Approach”Transactional Analysis Journal, 28, no. 2: 157-167.

Ancient Greeks used a similar random-selection democratic process in the Third Century BCE to select leaders of political discussions, learning, and policy formulation in their halls of government. Such a process is called sortition.

For more information on related classroom management ethical issues in universities see Stapleton, R.J. and Murkison, G. (2001), “Optimizing the fairness of student evaluations: A study of correlations between instructor excellence, study production, learning production, and expected grades,” in the Journal of Management Education, 25(3), 269-292.

Had one of the lowest student grade point averages among professors in the business school and was one of the lowest-ranked professors as an instructor on computerized campus-wide student evaluations that weighted only instructor excellence scores up to 2000; but he was one of the highest-ranked professors in a computerized student evaluation system he designed that generated data also showing and weighting study production, learning production, and expected grades scores for each professor, published in “Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations.“

To read the Optimizing Fairness article in full, go to https://studysites.sagepub.com/holt/articles/Stapleton.pdf . After this research was published, Georgia Southern in 2001 added study production, learning production, and expected grades questions to the student evaluation form used campus-wide.

“Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations” has by now (December 30, 2023) been cited as a reference in 89 refereed journal articles concerned about the ethics and fairness of student evaluations in several academic disciplines, including 21 new citations since April 2021, proving the article is still being read and used.

As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein propositioned in his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “The case is all there is.“

If so, everything else said about Earthian human states of affairs is a rendition of what was or might be.

See https://blog.effectivelearning.net/rjs-athletic-business-and-academic-vita/ for a full listing of RJS credentials

By RICHARD JOHN STAPLETON

Eric Berne, MD in the 1960s invented a new way to understand and communicate about complex psychological and social issues that he called transactional analysis, using ordinary words that anyone can use that make it easier for anyone to see what is really going on in human states of affairs. This article focuses primarily on the pervasive and pernicious effects of psychological Games in political states of affairs.

The I’m OK—You’re OK life position is one of four life positions for individuals; the other three are I’m OK—You’re Not OK, You’re OK—I’m Not OK, and You’re Not OK—I’m Not OK. Nations since time immemorial have had a life position of We’re OK, our cronies, lackeys, and knaves are OK, but all other nations are Not OK, and we are going to make them pay. How to change this life position to We’re OK—You’re OK is what Earthian humans need to work on most if they intend to survive indefinitely as a species on planet Earth.

This article explains a recurring Earthian human global process that has produced authoritarian rescuer leaders capable of murdering millions of humans to destroy social, economic, political, and religious systems perceived to have been caused by persecutor groups that would cause perceived victim groups to live in one-down intolerable life positions, a process that has become increasingly lethal with repeat iterations in Earthian human history, having become capable of destroying human life on Earth in the next iteration of world war, caused by the evolution and proliferation of nuclear weapons in the hands of unhinged authoritarian human leaders of nations.    

Politics is almost the antithesis of We’re OK—You’re OK. While politics gets some useful and necessary work done, most of the time structuring of politics is spent playing entropic psychological Games.

When politicians promise to lower poverty rates by creating infrastructure spending and creating programs to fight poverty and the poor stay poor the psychological Game is called  I’M ONLY TRYING TO HELP YOU.

When USian government tax and funny money and military equipment are given to allies to fight wars to increase USian national security and USians become even more insecure the psychological Game is called LET’S YOU AND THEM FIGHT.

When politicians promise to lower taxes so middle and lower income USians can become more productive and have higher real incomes and their incomes stay the same or go down the psychological Game is called BUSINESS AS USUAL.

When politicians significantly lower the income tax rates of the elite rich and large corporations and the rich get exponentially richer as the poor get poorer or stay the same the psychological Game is called TRICKLE DOWN ECONOMICS.

When politicians spend more and more money on the Military-Industrial Establishment and the US becomes less secure the psychological Game is called NATIONAL SECURITY.

When politicians promise to an build an elaborate wall at the southern border of the US and enact draconian policies to keep the poor of planet Earth out of the US the psychological game is called IF ONLY IT WEREN’T FOR YOU.

When governments and their central banks decide to create funny money by punching digits into central bank computers and calling the resulting numbers money and then using the funny money to buy enough government treasury bonds, bills, and notes to generate enough cash for the government to make up the difference between tax money taken in and military and pork and non-pork expenses money paid out, year after year, inexorably piling up more and more trillions of dollars of government debt, that can never be paid back, the Game is called FINANCIAL ENGINEERING.

When ideologically-biased Supreme Court judges rule in favor of idiosyncratic USian groups lobbying for laws to eliminate abortions and reduce the control of women over their own bodies and deny the right of LGTBQ USians to express themselves as they were naturally caused to sexually function the psychological Game is called RELIGIOUS FREEDOM.

When large corporations move the erstwhile good industrial jobs of the US to low-wage countries and substitute more and more robots and artificial intelligence for human labor and more and more USians are left with insecure low-wage jobs the psychological Game is called PROGRESS.

When corrupt bought and paid for USian Supreme Court judges decide based on their idiosyncratic biases and prejudices that a USian president is above the law of the land, immune from prosecution for violating laws of the US, having the power of kings, the Game is called FASCISM.

Psychological Games have always been a major component of Earthian economic and political behavior, and a Game transactional analysts call NIGYSOB has been one of the most significant and pervasive psychological Games in business, economics, and politics.

Psychological Games spelled with a capital G are different from games such as football, basketball, bridge, and chess that are spelled with a lower-case g. Psychological Games are inherently dishonest and games are not.

NIGYSOB (Now I’ve Got You, You S.O.B.) entails psychological Game players trying to reign supreme over others, to triumph over others, to become “one-up”, to be superior, to beat, to win, etc. any way they can. NIGYSOB players are motivated by anger that they feel justified in releasing because of perceived social and psychological actions and manipulations on the part of Persecutors that might cause them to become loser Victims, causing them to feel their psychological, social, economic, and political standing and security are threatened.

Eric Berne defined a psychological Game as: “An ongoing series of complementary ulterior transactions progressing to a well-defined, predictable outcome. Descriptively, it is a recurring set of transactions, often repetitious, superficially plausible, with a concealed motivation; or, more colloquially, a series of moves with a snare, or “gimmick.” Games are clearly differentiated from procedures, rituals, and pastimes by two chief characteristics: (1) their ulterior quality and (2) the payoff. Procedures may be successful, rituals effective, and sometimes profitable, but all of them are by definition candid; they may involve contest, but not conflict, and the ending may be sensational, but is not dramatic. Every Game (emphasis added), on the other hand, is basically dishonest, and the outcome has a dramatic, as distinct from merely exciting quality”.  See Berne, Eric. (1964). Games people play: The psychology of human relationships. New York: Grove Press, p. 48.

Psychological Games include two sets of transactions conducted simultaneously between Game players, a spoken overt social set, and an ulterior covert unspoken psychological set, with three basic roles, Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim acted out by the players, involving three basic ego states, Parent, Adult, and Child, with switches of transactional vectors between various combinations of the Ego States in all players, as the players switch around from Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim on a “Drama Triangle”. See Karpman, Stephen (1968). “Fairy tales and script drama analysis,” Transactional Analysis Bulletin. 7(26), 39-43.

Ego states are states of being including thoughts, beliefs, behaviors, feelings, gestures, body language, and other signals determining how people come across with others in communication episodes, whether parent-like, adult-like, or child-like, in all kinds of situations.  People switch ego states depending on who they are communicating with and what sort of circumstances they are in, whether they are parenting, working, socializing, teaching, having fun, playing Games, politicking, or whatever.  They transmit messages from three ego states in themselves to three ego states in others in pair vectors, Parent-Parent, Adult-Adult, Child-Child, Parent-Child, Child-Adult, Adult-Parent, Child-Parent, or whatever combination.  These transactions are especially meaningful in situations in which there is some sort of authoritarian system involved involving leaders and members, such as parents parenting children in homes, teachers teaching students in schools, or bosses bossing subordinates in a business or political organization, which normally entail primarily Parent-Child transactions. In general however the more Adult-Adult transactions there are the better things go in families, schools, businesses, and political organizations. See Berne, Eric. (1970) What do you say after you say hello? The psychology of human destiny. New York: Grove Press, and Berne, Eric (1963). The structure and dynamics of organizations and groups. New York: Grove Press.

Adult ego state transactions are generally factual, honest, and overt; Parent and Child ego state transactions are often dishonest and ulterior lies, often transmitted by body language instead of words.

Donald Trump, the most prominent Game-player on the Earthian political stage at present, is a master at using body language to switch ego states in his monologues, harangues, and diatribes at rallies and in personal conversations. He has a tall imposing body and a strange orange facial color and bizarre hair-do. Most of the time his words do not make sense but his body language is clear: he is not only OK but superior and his loyal cronies, lackeys, and knaves are too. He is adept at switching ego states and transactions by changing his posture and gait as he struts and swaggers about, by flailing his arms and fingers about,  by producing smirks, smiles, grimaces, glares, stares and jerky bodily contortions, and by changing the speed, volume, cadence, and tone of his unique voice, that ranges from guttural to prissy falsetto. He is somewhat analogous to a made-up circus clown and ring-master, and his sycophantic cult members are enthralled and entertained. If he didn’t apply his make-up and fix his hair as he does he would look like what he really is, a pasty pale balding almost octogenarian Earthian human male, and most likely he could not get elected to anything. Trump’s a master of pantomime and playing Games. But don’t be fooled. Trump’s not a circus clown; he’s a dangerous criminal who intends to turn the US into a fascist dictatorship if he gets elected president of the US again. Do you really want to live day by day subject to the whims of a fascist crime boss dictator who can do you harm at any time? Think about that when you vote for Trump for president of the US November 4, 2024, if you do.

NIGYSOB Game-playing underlies all conflicts, competitions, and wars among individuals, groups, and organizations, including nations and corporations domestically and internationally. You might think nations and international corporations competing constantly among themselves do not entail real anger, but it seems to me anger is a major factor when serious fighting breaks out. Leaders try to engender fear and anger among their followers before the first outbursts of fighting to psyche up the followers. You might think a war is not an ego trip for leaders. You might think leaders are simply doing their perceived ethical duty to preserve the safety and security of their followers and constituents. But the unspoken psychological truth is another matter. Wars are also ego trips, with leaders trying to triumph over other leaders, wanting to become one-up top dogs.

You can build a case competitions among political parties in presidential elections more than anything else are NIGYSOB Games, with leaders saying they want to improve the plight of Victim citizens, increase their relative share of national and international income, provide them with better and cheaper health care, and so forth; but here too the contest is probably an ego trip for leaders who are more interested in being the top dog than anything else. Political contests become an ego trip for followers as well as the leaders foment fear and anger among them to beat the bad guy Persecutors and run them out of office. If their party wins followers may also feel “one-up” because their party ideology won, regardless if nothing is done to improve economic and social conditions.

The capitalistic economic system is based on NIGYSOB-playing. It’s what makes the world go round. It makes everyone richer, the defenders of capitalism say, because it motivates people to work harder and longer and more efficiently than they would if they did not have to compete and do battle with others to make a living. Even the losers under capitalism get richer than they would have under socialism, many think, because they assume capitalistic countries are able to capture larger GNPs (Gross National Products) than socialistic and communistic countries.

I was a pretty good football and basketball player back in my junior high, high school, and college years. I found it satisfying calling plays and running the team in a real game before cheering ecstatic fans on a football field, especially when winning, as was the case when I was in the eighth grade, when we won eleven out of eleven games. On the other hand, I don’t recall ever feeling serious anger caused by football and basketball opponents, however much I seriously wanted to beat them. The main payoff if you are an amateur athlete is getting plenty of what transactional analysts call “strokes”, or units of recognition, that can be positive or negative, depending on how well you do something. Eric Berne said positive strokes are what everyone wants and needs. He said they keep your spinal column from “shriveling up”. Politicians also get a lot of strokes, as does anyone in the public eye.

There are basically two kinds of scripts people have to act out in organizations, including political organizations, to keep their jobs or get promoted: psychological life scripts and organizational social scripts.

Psychological Life Scripts are programmed into children by virtue of being constantly exposed to and dependent on their parents before the age of eight. Almost as if by osmosis parents psychologically script their children not to feel, think, and do certain things in various ways and degrees as various events happen in the environment, largely non-verbally by how parents respond to a child, by how they get mad, glad, sad, or scared, or not, when the child does something when various things happen. Psychological scripts are automatically “introjected” into the personalities of children during early childhood, and most children wind up pretty much like their parents, with the same accents, and the same kinds of feeling, thinking, doing, and communicating patterns.

There are also some generic overt social script messages such as brush your teeth, study hard, make something of yourself, work hard, etc. that are socially overt and spoken, but they are not as significant or powerful over a lifetime as psychological script messages.

Psychological life script messages are called injunctions and social script messages are called counter-injunctions. These messages wind up creating a life script that includes a life position. There are four basic TA life positions: I am OK and You are OK, I am OK and you are Not OK, I’m Not OK and You are OK, and I am Not OK and You are Not OK; and there are three generic TA life script outcomes: Winner, Loser, and Non-Winner.

There is no way under competitive capitalism for all people to be fully OK economically and politically, making the I’m OK – You’re OK life position infeasible among all humans.

Most people are what they are because of family scripts, not economic conditions, and they can respond in adult life only in certain ways because of their life scripts. Some people are more flexible and adaptable than others, but most people in order to make a living and achieve some satisfaction in life have to find a slot, niche, and level in an organization in which their life script is considered congruent, regardless of whether the economy is booming, flat, or imploding.

Social scripts, on the other hand, include the sum total of do’s and don’t’s required for a person to be successful dealing with others in a particular job or role. These scripts include the algorithmic steps required to do the specific job you are paid to do and required words and phrases to say to others and how to respond to people around you, up, across, and down the organizational chain of command, including playing the psychological Games people around you want or need to play.

All organizations, including political organizations, require particular social scripts for participants with words and phrases that have to be memorized and used. Almost nobody can be her or his true self most of the time making a living in an organization. Most employees have to act out scripts created by the organization. Organizations such as Disney World are the most scripted of all. Employees there are called characters and are required to wear costumes and “go on stage” after they clock in for work, pretending while on the job to be characters such as Donald Duck or Mickey or Minnie Mouse dealing with customers, parroting memorized lines. While all employees in all organizations have to pretend to some extent they are something they are not to keep their jobs, the scripting is not this extreme in most organizations.

USians who get into politics for a living are just like all other employees under capitalism: they have to act out the right scripts to keep their jobs.

Most people who get fired in organizations are fired because of their psychological life scripts that are thought to be inappropriate in an organizational culture, or for being unwilling or unable to act out social scripts, not for being unable to perform the required physical and mental algorithmic steps of the job.

There are certain things politicians have to do that might be called work in the physical algorithmic sense, but in the best of circumstances they are paid to think and make decisions, not do work. On the other hand, if they do not obey the script requirements of their political party most likely they will be fired or sluiced out of the party organization one way or another. Therefore to get fully honest Game-free politicians only individuals who have no intentions of being a politician for a living should be elected.

Psychological Games are a way of getting stimulation, recognition, and structure as one goes about one’s business of surviving and making a living. Basically they involve trying to gain satisfactions dealing with others, such as by making yourself or someone else feel comfortable or by causing a loss of some sort for others, or by making a fool of someone. Psychological Games entail people discounting problems, opportunities, and people, and the significance of someone or something. All psychological Games entail players acting out one of three roles on a Drama Triangle: Victim, Persecutor, and Rescuer.

Why vote in the first place? The best Adult ego state reason would be to take social satisfaction in helping select the best leader for an organization or group to achieve rational goals and objectives for everyone. Lesser Parent and Child reasons would be to create satisfying psychological Game payoffs for yourself and to secure psychological structure, recognition, and stimulation similar to what you experienced with your parents, friends, and others in your early life, and in adolescence, that supported the psychological, social, economic, religious, political, and moral states of affairs of organizations such as your family, school, church, political party, or nation.

Once psychologically scripted most people do not rebel. Red states stay red and blue states stay blue, regardless of the logical Adult ego state reasoning of idealistic generally-OK political candidates with script-free ideas on how to improve the functioning of the economic and political system.

I remember a TV interviewer in 2000 asking an attractive woman who ran a bar and grill why she intended to vote for Bush II. “Cuz he’s a good-lookin’ man” was her quick response.

There are several psychological Games people play in political races; but it seems to me based on observing presidential races on the Internet and elsewhere, listening to comments people make on my Facebook news feed timeline and elsewhere, most politicians play a first-degree psychological Game called RAPO by transactional analysts, since one of the surest ways to get votes in our narcissistic USian culture is to be considered good lookin’.

There are three degrees of psychological Games: First Degree Games entail comments, insults, discounts, jokes, and body language displays designed to build tear down someone’s self-esteem, or gain or lose some sort of psychological advantage; Second Degree Games entail more serious discounts and payoffs, threatening someone, firing someone, getting divorced, etc.; Third Degree Games are sometimes called tissue-tearing Games with payoffs such as getting into physical fights, going to war, winding up in a morgue, etc.

A RAPO Game starts by someone psychologically promising some sort of satisfaction to someone for responding to her or his sexual attractiveness. There are various social and psychological transactions that can bring this about, social transactions being spoken and overt, psychological transactions being unspoken and covert. The payoff for a first-degree RAPO player is not a real sexual liaison but making a fool of a mark or sucker who will be punished or humiliated in some way if he or she responds to the psychological sexual messages. Most psychological Games do not entail sexual messaging but a lot of them do. All psychological Games involve a con of some degree taking advantage of the vulnerabilities and weaknesses of a mark or suckers, promising things the Game starter has no intentions of delivering. Most of the promises of first-degree Games are insignificant and inconsequential. These Games are ubiquitous and most people play them at various times. Sometimes they have to to survive in organizations.

Psychological Games and scripts are what make folk tales and fairy tales (such as Robin Hood, Superman, The Lone Ranger, Snow White, Goldilocks, Cinderella, Jack & Jill, Humpty-Dumpty, Hansel and Gretel, The Big Bad Wolf, and Little Red Riding Hood) interesting and dramatic.

Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Bush II, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden won some political races largely because of being successful psychological Game players, having physical and psychological characteristics that enabled them to transmit non-verbal psychological messages to voters that they would deliver to them psychological and social satisfactions if they voted for them, somehow providing them with various sorts of desired or fantasied psychological stimulation, structures, and recognition. Whether these politicians produced for their voters the psychological satisfactions the voters sought would be difficult to prove, just as it would be for these voters (for sure middle and lower income voters) to prove voting for these politicians produced any economic improvements for them. Any president during the last forty years would have a difficult time proving he produced significant tangible economic benefits for middle and lower income voters, regardless of how much psychological and social satisfaction he produced for them.

And here we are, having degenerated in the US into a situation in which a convicted rapist, Donald John Trump, a former president of the US, is now running for USian president again, and it appears about half of USian voters intend to vote for him again. What does this tell you? I don’t know what it tells you but it tells me that about half of USian voters just don’t care if the president of the US is a rapist. And why is this? Why don’t they care? I don’t know, but it seems to me it does not matter to them because of what Trump has told them about he would do as president if reelected. He wants to be a fascist dictator of the US, and it seems to me this means about half of USian voters like authoritarian dictators, whether in disguise as parents, teachers, preachers, business bosses, or politicians. In other words, they like dictators who tell them what to do, rather than participate in democratic discussions about what to do.

Seems to me Earthian humans are polarized intellectually between two general extreme categories that might be best described as democratic idealists and authoritarian nihilists, with most humans being clustered near the middle of the continuum.

Democratic idealists are not necessarily members of the Democratic Party in the US; and all authoritarian nihilists are not necessarily members of the Republican Party.

A democratic idealist in my view is someone who visualizes new states of affairs that might make an unsatisfying situation more efficient, effective, just, and satisfying through consultation, collaboration, and cooperation.

Authoritarian nihilists in my view are dissatisfied with states of affairs as they are but do not visualize changing them by creating new states of affairs through democratic processes, believing instead that strong leaders in positions of authority will make existing or older superseded systems and processes work better for them by out-competing others.

Most so-called liberals and progressives would be included in the democratic idealist category and most so-called conservatives would be included in the authoritarian nihilist category.

An extreme democratic idealist would focus primarily on ideal states to be achieved in the future; extreme authoritarian nihilists would be focused primarily on what now exists and tearing down what they do not like, not creating better systems to achieve better states of affairs.

Abraham Lincoln once remarked there are two kinds of people who never amount to much in life: those who cannot do what they are told, and those who cannot do anything but what they are told. Unrealistic idealistic builders of imaginary air castles often have a hard time making a go of things in life, and people with no goals and imagination are pretty much stuck where they are, if they’re lucky. Probably most successful people lie somewhere in between the two extremes of idealism and nihilism.

Extreme democratic idealists worry a lot. Extreme authoritarian nihilists just don’t give a rip, and some are happy savages.

I agree with most transactional analysts that Earthian humans are scripted to be what they are emotionally, intellectually, and behaviorally in early childhood by Injunctions that are psychologically transmitted from the child ego states of parents to the child ego states of their offspring.

According to Robert Goulding, MD and Mary Goulding, MSW, quoted in my book Business Voyages, page 160, there are about fourteen generic psychological Injunctions widely transmitted in family scripting:

Don’t Be, Don’t Be You (the sex you are), Don’t Be A Child, Don’t Grow, Don’t Make It, Don’t, Don’t Be Important, Don’t Be Close, Don’t Belong, Don’t Be Well (or sane), Don’t Think About X (forbidden subject), Don’t Think What You Think, Think What I Think, Don’t Feel, Don’t Feel X, Mad, Sad, Glad, Scared, etc., Don’t Feel What You Feel, Feel What I Feel.              See Goulding, R. and Goulding, M. (1976). “Injunctions, decisions, and redecisions.” Transactional Analysis Journal, 6(1), 41-48.

These script injunctions are transmitted primarily psychologically, not overtly spoken, from the Child ego state of the parent to the Child ego state of the child. Rarely would a parent socially or overtly tell a child what one of the above injunctions requires. They are primarily transmitted non-verbally by Parent and Child ego states when caregivers exhibit mad, glad, sad, or scared emotions in response to what a child naturally feels, thinks, and does as shared life events occur in early childhood. On the other hand, children are scripted by the ego states they observe parents using when parents feel, think, and do things. Children psychologically “introject” in living color the ego states of parents, including the accents, mannerisms, facial expressions, tone of voice, and behaviors of parents, as parents and children deal with life events. To introject is to take in or absorb the personality and behavioral characteristics of another. So children more or less replicate their parents, and the replications become hard-wired in their brains for life in most cases.

For good or ill, the scripting process may determine not only the personality and behavioral characteristics of a child but also his/her life position and role in life, including determining whether a child grows up to become a democratic idealist or an authoritarian nihilist.

Therefore the scripting process largely determines which political parties win in any culture; and the fate of planet Earth may depend on changing the scripting of humans, which entails a process of change that includes not only changing economic and political systems but also psychological and social systems.

An assumption of transactional analysis is that humans can learn to “see what is really going on” with themselves and others as they transact with one another socially and psychologically living their daily lives so as to increase their chances of living satisfactory lives, regardless of how not-OK their economic, social, psychological, and political worlds might be.

According to transactional analysis theory there are three naturally occurring generic life outcomes caused for humans: winner, loser, and non-winner – caused by inherited physical characteristics and “messages” one is exposed to throughout life – and by the early decisions offspring make about the messages that become determinants of emotional, intellectual, and behavioral responses throughout life.

Whether one inherits a winner, loser, or non-winner script is determined by naturally-occurring inevitable cause-effect chains one is accidentally exposed to. Some transactional analysts assume proportions of winner, loser, and non-winner scripts in the population remain relatively constant from one generation to another.

It follows that the natural scripting process is not fair.

A purpose of transactional analysis is to help individuals and groups insert new causes into natural cause-effect chains so as to increase the probabilities and proportions of winner outcomes in the populace.

Changing a loser script to a winner script requires hard work but it can happen if a person somehow acquires new script messages powerful enough to control frustrating, debilitating, or harmartic script messages recorded in his or her sub-conscious mind. TA can provide people basic concepts and tools for attempting such a thing, perhaps requiring learning to use different ego states and transactional patterns and learning how to communicate in more effective ways psychologically and socially.

Most people seem to think if only Earthian humans could solve their economic, political, military, and religious troubles, beat their competitors and enemies, etc., then everything would be wonderful. Not so, many people would not be happy and successful living in paradise because of script messages recorded in their sub-conscious minds before they were eight years old. In order for everyone to live happily and successfully humans would have to solve not only economic, political, religious, and social problems, but also psychological problems.

Changing a loser script may require changing the ego states one uses and the way one structures time (learning how to spend more or less time in different ways)—withdrawing into their heads, pastiming (shooting the bull), performing rituals, doing work activity, not playing psychological Games, or being intimate with others.

The Prayer of Serenity goes something like this: Lord give me the intelligence and strength to change what needs changing, and the wisdom to know what I can and cannot change, knowing full well that some suffering, losing, and grieving is inevitable.

Using TA in some cases can help people become more serene, by enabling them to see more clearly what is going on to make salutary changes, or by learning to accept one’s script and focus on finding a niche in which it fits. On the other hand, a basic problem or question is whether serenity is possible in today’s world, beset by global warming and climate change and by escalating tensions and agitations among organizations and groups around planet Earth.

TA never promised anyone any rose gardens, or eternal bliss in heaven, but it does advertise that it can help individuals, groups, and organizations become more OK, OK not only in terms of achieving goals but more OK transacting with others so as to live with more dignity, satisfaction, peace, and tranquility, based on Adult mutually agreed-to contracts.

No one can blame you if you believe in tuning out TA and articles such as this one. Maybe the best strategy is to tune out the world as much as you can, burrowing up in your wormhole as much as possible, reading no newspapers and not watching television, with no Internet. The problem however if you do that is boredom. Most humans have an innate need for stimulation, achievement, and recognition.

Regardless of what sort of cognitive structures humans might use, TA or whatever, sooner or later they have to take action, and this entails defining problems, delineating alternatives, making recommendations, choosing things, trying new things, over and over, till something works.

1 – What is the problem?

2 – What are the alternatives?

3 – What do you recommend?

We live in precarious times that probably encourage people to play more frequently AIN’T IT AWFUL, a psychological Game in which Game players collect strokes for complaining about the evils and troubles of the world, positioning themselves as Victims of obsolete economic, religious, and political systems and policies manipulated and exploited by greedy self-interested power-mad narcissistic sociopathic oligarchs and leaders and their corrupt bought and paid for cronies, lackeys, and knaves, especially lobbyists, politicians, and religious leaders, however true this state of affairs might be in reality.

By the same token, it will do no good for humans to passively pretend everything is just hunky-dory and swell, with everything coming up roses for everyone, living in small imaginary Candide-like best of all possible worlds, playing a psychological Game called GREENHOUSE by transactional analysts, in which players are rewarded with plastic strokes for making nonsensical positive cheerful upbeat comments about the environment and social, economic, political, and religious states of affairs, regardless of how bleak they are in reality.

It seems to me the most dangerous psychological Game played politically right now around planet Earth is IF IT WEREN’T FOR YOU, involving polarized individuals, groups, and organizations who experience increasing insecurity and hopelessness causing them to blame others and find scapegoats for their plights, escalating their anger as they transmit threats from their angry Parent and Child ego states to the Parent and Child ego states of others, sometimes attacking others verbally and physically for their perceived misdeeds and beliefs. Some of the threats include the threat of international and civil war. Israel is playing a third-degree IF IT WEREN’T FOR YOU Game with Palestine right now. One can build a case about all politicians do is play psychological Games with supporters, opponents, and enemies.

IF IT WEREN’T FOR YOU is a Game that entails aggrieved humans psychologically acting as if opposing warring or competing parties maliciously and arbitrarily decided using free will to commit the harmful or heinous actions and deeds they are accused of committing, instead of realizing the others were caused by circumstances and script messages to do what they did just like the aggrieved aggressive people were. Getting rid of the other will not solve problems such as poor educational systems, poor family scripts, poor religions, and hamartic economic and political policies and systems.

For more information regarding the use of Transactional Analysis https://www.itaaworld.org/ to create better discussion groups and democratic processes read my book Born to Learn: A Transactional Analysis of Human Learning. https://www.amazon.com/Born-Learn-Transactional-Analysis-Learning/dp/0692584331

For more information on how to co-construct better organizations and economic systems using TA read my book Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata, and Tools for Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds https://www.amazon.com/Business-Voyages-Schemata-Discovering-Co-Constructing/dp/1413480810

See my article “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc,” https://blog.effectivelearning.net/the-evolution-of-spaceship-earth-inc/ for some management science ideas on how human Earthians might eventually co-construct an idealistic democratic economic system that is viable and satisfying for everyone aboard Spaceship Earth, making it possible for all Earthian humans to develop an I’m OK – You’re OK life position.

This entails human Earthians never doing work that machines can do better, and delegating the day-to-day management of systems for scheduling, producing, and distributing the necessities of life to artificial intelligence programs and supercomputers.

This can be done using linear programming based on the general algorithmic matrix algebra form

Max CjXj, s.t. AijXj <, =, or > Bi

as explained in “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc.” https://blog.effectivelearning.net/the-evolution-of-spaceship-earth-inc/

Flying aboard an airliner about to land at night moving at four hundred miles an hour at thirty thousand feet, which would you rather have landing the plane, the plane’s computer system and auto-pilot or the pilot and co-pilot, looking out their windows with their hands on their steering devices, seeing nothing but dark clouds and lightning below?

Some AINT IT AWFUL Game-playing goes on in mass and social media, i.e. writers and editors are psychologically Persecuting, Rescuing, or Victimizing someone, but it seems to me most writers and editors are generally trying to paint accurate pictures of what they think is really going on economically, socially, psychologically, economically, and politically. Unfortunately one can build a case that politicians spend most of their time playing psychological Games, wasting most of their time with pastiming (bullshitting), doing rituals (filling out unnecessary forms, attending useless meetings, conducting useless investigations, and the like), and playing psychological Games. Seems to me most expenditures of time, money, and energy in so-called foreign policy are moves in psychological Games.

On the other hand, there is a lot of awful stuff going on. There’s such a thing as Positive Critical Parent Ego State energy, and one can build a case that Critical Parent economic, political, and religious criticism is necessary and rational to stave off dire consequences staring humanity in the face, caused by GWCC and MNWP, global warming and climate change and militarization and nuclear weapons proliferation.

It’s not easy to see what’s really going on, impossible some say, while being inundated with fake news daily around planet Earth, made public in mass media and on the Internet and elsewhere. To see what’s really going on, Earthian humans must use primarily inductive and analogical reasoning, based on probability, not deductive logic. Almost never can anyone prove with deductive logic that a general proposition about economic, social, psychological, or political states affairs is absolutely true. About the best humans can hope for is to develop consensual answers that are generally acceptable and true based on probability.

It’s better to be honestly wrong, saying something is true because you really don’t know it’s not true, than to say something is true when you know damn well it’s not true.

Seems to me most lying is lying by omission (people not telling people things they know are true to gain or preserve advantages in competitive situations). Whether lying by omission is more or less harmful in overall perspective than lying by commission (telling people things you know are not true for ill-gotten gains), is debatable, as is proving whether it’s getting easier or harder for most people to see what’s really going on in economic and political states of affairs.

Political parties, the US government, and mainstream media often lie by omission about what is going on with alacrity, presumably to protect national security and their corporate revenues, in many cases socially presenting selective true facts but omitting analysis about what is really going on.

For whatever it’s worth, I would rather be told what to do by a well-programmed AI robot than a demented deranged unhinged human fascist dictator. On the other hand, I am convinced the best situation would be to be told what to do by a group of randomly-selected intelligent rational humans who had fully studied the facts of the case at hand and who had fully discussed and debated about what to do in an open Game-free, Adult, I’m OK—You’re OK, democratic process.

Richard John Stapleton, PhD, CTA is a certified transactional analyst and an emeritus professor of management at Georgia Southern University. See https://blog.effectivelearning.net/rjs-athletic-business-and-academic-vita/ for a full listing of credentials

By RICHARD JOHN STAPLETON

Eric Berne, MD in the 1960s invented a new way to understand and communicate about complex psychological and social issues that he called transactional analysis, using ordinary words that anyone can use that make it easier for anyone to see what is really going on in human states of affairs. A central part of transactional analysis is the life position.

The I’m OK—You’re OK life position is one of four life positions for individuals; the other three are I’m OK—You’re Not OK, You’re OK—I’m Not OK, and You’re Not OK—I’m Not OK.

Nations since time immemorial have had a life position of We’re OK, our cronies, lackeys, and knaves are OK, but all other nations are Not OK, and we are going to make them pay. How to change this life position to We’re OK—You’re OK is what Earthian humans need to work on most if they intend to survive indefinitely as a species on planet Earth.

This article explains a recurring Earthian human global process that has produced authoritarian rescuer leaders capable of murdering millions of humans to destroy social, economic, political, and religious systems perceived to have been caused by persecutor groups that would cause perceived victim groups to live in one-down intolerable life positions, a process that has become increasingly lethal with repeat iterations in Earthian human history, having become capable of destroying human life on Earth in the next iteration of world war, caused by the evolution and proliferation of nuclear weapons in the hands of unhinged authoritarian human leaders of nations.    

Politics is almost the antithesis of We’re OK—You’re OK. While politics gets some useful and necessary work done, most of the time structuring of politics is spent playing entropic psychological Games.

When politicians promise to lower poverty rates by creating infrastructure spending and creating programs to fight poverty and the poor stay poor the psychological Game is called  I’M ONLY TRYING TO HELP YOU.

When USian government tax and funny money and military equipment are given to allies to fight wars to increase USian national security and USians become even more insecure the psychological Game is called LET’S YOU AND THEM FIGHT.

When politicians promise to lower taxes so middle and lower income USians can become more productive and have higher real incomes and their incomes stay the same or go down the psychological Game is called BUSINESS AS USUAL.

When politicians significantly lower the income tax rates of the elite rich and large corporations and the rich get exponentially richer as the poor get poorer or stay the same the psychological Game is called TRICKLE DOWN ECONOMICS.

When politicians spend more and more money on the Military-Industrial Establishment and the US becomes less secure the psychological Game is called NATIONAL SECURITY.

When politicians promise to an build an elaborate wall at the southern border of the US and enact draconian policies to keep the poor of planet Earth out of the US the psychological game is called IF ONLY IT WEREN’T FOR YOU.

When governments and their central banks decide to create funny money by punching digits into central bank computers and calling the resulting numbers money and then using the funny money to buy enough government treasury bonds, bills, and notes to generate enough cash for the government to make up the difference between tax money taken in and military and pork and non-pork expenses money paid out, year after year, inexorably piling up more and more trillions of dollars of government debt, that can never be paid back, the Game is called FINANCIAL ENGINEERING.

When ideologically-biased Supreme Court judges rule in favor of idiosyncratic USian groups lobbying for laws to eliminate abortions and reduce the control of women over their own bodies and deny the right of LGTBQ USians to express themselves as they were naturally caused to sexually function the psychological Game is called RELIGIOUS FREEDOM.

When large corporations move the erstwhile good industrial jobs of the US to low-wage countries and substitute more and more robots and artificial intelligence for human labor and more and more USians are left with insecure low-wage jobs the psychological Game is called PROGRESS.

When corrupt bought and paid for USian Supreme Court judges decide based on their idiosyncratic biases and prejudices that a USian president is above the law of the land, immune from prosecution for violating laws of the US, having the power of kings, the Game is called FASCISM.

Psychological Games are different from games such as football and basketball, where the objectives and rules are clearly spelled out and are strictly enforced at the time infractions occur by impartial referees.

Eric Berne defined a psychological Game as:

“An ongoing series of complementary ulterior transactions progressing to a well-defined, predictable outcome. Descriptively, it is a recurring set of transactions, often repetitious, superficially plausible, with a concealed motivation; or, more colloquially, a series of moves with a snare, or “gimmick.” Games are clearly differentiated from procedures, rituals, and pastimes by two chief characteristics: (1) their ulterior quality and (2) the payoff. Procedures may be successful, rituals effective, and sometimes profitable, but all of them are by definition candid; they may involve contest, but not conflict, and the ending may be sensational, but is not dramatic. Every Game (emphasis added), on the other hand, is basically dishonest, and the outcome has a dramatic, as distinct from merely exciting quality”.  See Berne, E. (1964). Games people play: The psychology of human relationships. New York: Grove Press, p. 48.

Psychological Games have always been a major determinant of Earthian economic and political behavior, and a Game transactional analysts call NIGYSOB has been one of the most significant and pervasive psychological Games in business, economics, and politics.

NIGYSOB (Now I’ve Got You, You S.O.B.) entails psychological Game players trying to reign supreme over others, to triumph over others, to become “one-up”, to be superior, to beat, to win, etc. any way they can. NIGYSOB players are motivated by anger that they feel justified in releasing because of perceived social and psychological actions and manipulations on the part of Persecutors that might cause them to become loser Victims, causing them to feel their psychological, social, economic, and political standing and security are threatened.

All psychological Games include two sets of transactions conducted simultaneously between the Game players, a spoken overt social set, and an ulterior covert unspoken psychological set, with three basic roles, Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim acted out by the players, involving three basic ego states, Parent, Adult, and Child, with switches of transactional vectors between various combinations of the Ego States in all players, as the players switch around from Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim on a “Drama Triangle”. See Karpman, S (1968). “Fairy tales and script drama analysis,” Transactional Analysis Bulletin. 7(26), 39-43.  

Ego states are states of being including thoughts, beliefs, behaviors, feelings, gestures, body language, and other signals determining how people come across with others in communication episodes, whether parent-like, adult-like, or child-like, in all kinds of situations.  People switch ego states depending on who they are communicating with and what sort of circumstances they are in, whether they are parenting, working, socializing, teaching, having fun, playing Games, politicking, or whatever.  They transmit messages from three ego states in themselves to three ego states in others in pair vectors, Parent-Parent, Adult-Adult, Child-Child, Parent-Child, Child-Adult, Adult-Parent, Child-Parent, or whatever combination.  These transactions are especially meaningful in situations in which there is some sort of authoritarian system involved involving leaders and members, such as parents parenting children in homes, teachers teaching students in schools, or bosses bossing subordinates in a business or political organization, which normally entail primarily Parent-Child transactions. In general however the more Adult-Adult transactions there are the better things go in families, schools, businesses, and political organizations. See Berne, Eric. (1970) What do you say after you say hello? The psychology of human destiny. New York: Grove Press, and Berne, Eric (1963). The structure and dynamics of organizations and groups. New York: Grove Press.

Adult ego state transactions are factual, honest, and overt; Parent and Child ego state transactions are often lies, dishonest and ulterior, often transmitted by body language instead of words.

Trump is a master at using body language to switch ego states in his monologues, harangues, and diatribes at rallies and in personal conversations. He has a tall imposing body considered impressive by millions despite his strange orange facial color and bizarre hair-do. Most of the time his words do not make sense but his body language is clear: he is not only ok but superior and his loyal cronies, lackeys, and knaves are too. He can switch ego states in a heartbeat by jabbing his fingers in the air while using patented smirks, smiles, grimaces, and stares with jerky bodily contortions, and by changing the speed, volume, cadence, and tone of his unique voice, that ranges from guttural to prissy falsetto. He resembles a made-up circus clown and ring-master, but his sycophantic cult members could care less. They pretend to like him regardless. If he did not apply his make-up every day and fix his hair as he does he would look like what he really is, a pasty pale balding almost octogenarian Earthian human male, and most likely he could not get elected to anything. Trump’s a master of pantomime and playing Games. But don’t be fooled. Trump’s not a circus clown; he’s a dangerous criminal who intends to turn the US into a fascist dictatorship if he gets elected president of the US again. Do you really want to live day by day subject to the whims of a crime boss who can do you harm at any time? Think about that when you vote for Trump for president of the US November 4, 2024, if you do.

NIGYSOB Game-playing underlies all conflicts, competitions, and wars among individuals, groups, and organizations, including nations and corporations domestically and internationally. You might think nations and international corporations competing constantly among themselves do not entail real anger, but it seems to me anger is a major factor when serious fighting breaks out. Leaders try to engender fear and anger among their followers before the first outbursts of fighting to psyche up the followers. You might think a war is not an ego trip for the leaders. You might think instead the leaders are simply doing their perceived ethical duty to preserve the safety and security of their followers, to Rescue Victims and Persecute bad guys. This might be true at the overt spoken social level; but the unspoken psychological truth is another matter. All wars are ego trips, with leaders trying to triumph over other leaders, wanting to become one-up top dogs.

This raises the question of whether it’s possible for organizations such as a large financial, manufacturing, or communications corporation, or the Federal Reserve System, the FBI, CIA, or Pentagon, or the US government, to be fully OK, since they are all led by egotistical human leaders?

You can build a case competitions among political parties in presidential elections more than anything else are NIGYSOB Games, with leaders saying they want to improve the plight of Victim citizens, increase their relative share of national and international income, provide them with better and cheaper health care, and the like; but here too the contest is largely an ego trip for the leaders who are more interested in being the top dog one-up winner than anything else. It becomes an ego trip for followers as well as the leaders foment fear and anger among them to beat the bad guy Persecutors and run them out of office. If their party wins the followers also feel “one-up” because their party ideology won, regardless of nothing being done to improve economic and social conditions.

Entrepreneurs may say their major motivation is to create a new business that will improve the lives of customers, but creating a successful, powerful business is also an ego trip, especially if the entrepreneur is able to take in much more money than others. The money may be important for what it can buy, but a major satisfaction a big pile of money generates is the ego satisfaction and recognition a winner gets because of being able to take in much more money than others, producing a bigger and better balance sheet to show off, proof one is superior, having won the business Game called BALANCE SHEET.

The capitalistic economic system is based on NIGYSOB-playing. It’s what makes the world go round. It makes everyone richer, the defenders of capitalism say, because it motivates people to work harder and longer and more efficiently than they would if they did not have to compete and do battle with others to make a living. Even the losers under capitalism get richer than they would under socialism, many imply, because they assume capitalistic countries are able to capture much larger GNPs (Gross National Products) than socialistic and communistic countries. Nations sometimes think they can win in international competition by out-NIGYSOBing other countries using sanctions and wars.

Capitalism does indeed make some NIGYSOB players richer, those who wipe out their competitors and those who exploit and dispose of their employees to get cheaper ones in impoverished countries; but, of about 7.6 billion humans now aboard Spaceship Earth under capitalism, most will never get ahead, and a billion or so or will stay dirt poor the rest of their natural lives, however long or short, if global warming and climate change, or nuclear bombs, do not render the Earthian human species extinct in the meantime.

I was a pretty good football and basketball player back in my junior high, high school, and college years. I found it satisfying calling plays and running the team in a real game before cheering ecstatic fans on a football field, especially when we were winning, in control of the team on offense, as was the case, especially when I was in the eighth grade, when we won every game, eleven out of eleven. On the other hand, I don’t recall ever feeling serious anger caused by my football and basketball opponents, however much I seriously wanted to beat them. The main payoff if you are a successful athlete is getting plenty of what transactional analysts call conditional “strokes”, or units of recognition, that can be positive or negative, for excelling at something. Eric Berne said positive strokes are what everyone wants and needs. He said they keep your spinal column from “shriveling” up.

I read a post on my Facebook news feed a few days ago featuring Larry Bird, the Boston Celtics basketball superstar, back in 1980 or so, reminiscing about the intense anger he and his teammates felt when they played the Los Angeles Lakers. He said the anger was real and serious. Maybe you have to be a little angry to be a superstar basketball player.

Eighteen years ago when I was 65, Joe Moring, who coached me three years in junior high and high school football, basketball, and track back in the 1950s, telephoned me out of the blue. In the conversation, the first one we had had since the Texas state basketball tournament in 1960, he told me “You may have been the ‘most coachable’ player I ever had.” This was quite a “stroke” coming from a superstar athlete and coach like Joe Moring. It never occurred to me back in the day that my success in sports may have been partially due to repressed anger released playing an underlying second-degree NIGYSOB psychological Game.

Competitive capitalism may be a poor kind of economic system, but it’s better than the alternatives, some say. Just take a look at what happened to people in socialistic and communistic countries, they say.

Maybe so, maybe no.

As a certified transactional analyst with professional experience dealing with psychological Games in organizations, it seems to me under capitalism people are forced to play psychological Games to vie for a greater share of the whole income pie generated by organizations, including not only money but strokes, structure, and stimulation, to satisfy their ego needs.

There are basically two kinds of scripts people have to act out in organizations to keep their jobs or get promoted: psychological life scripts and organizational social scripts.

Psychological Life Scripts are programmed into children by virtue of being constantly exposed to and dependent on their parents before the age of eight. Almost as if by osmosis parents psychologically script their children not to feel, think, and do certain things in various ways and degrees as various events happen in the environment, largely non-verbally by how parents respond to a child, by how they get mad, glad, sad, or scared, or not, when the child does something when various things happen. Psychological scripts are automatically “introjected” into the personalities of children during early childhood, and most children wind up pretty much like their parents, with the same accents, and the same kinds of feeling, thinking, doing, saying, and living patterns.

There are also some generic overt social script messages such as brush your teeth, study hard, make something of yourself, work hard, etc. that are socially overt and spoken, but they are not as significant or powerful over a lifetime as psychological script injunctions.

Psychological life script messages are called injunctions and social script messages are called counter-injunctions. These messages wind up creating a life script that includes a life position. There are four basic TA life positions: I am OK and You are OK, I am OK and you are Not OK, I’m Not OK and You are OK, and I am Not OK and You are Not OK; and there are three generic TA life script outcomes: Winner, Loser, and Non-Winner.

There is no way under capitalism for all people to be fully OK economically and politically, making the I’m OK – You’re OK life position impossible among humans en masse.

The bottom line is that most people are what they are because of family scripts, not economic conditions, and can only respond in adult life in certain ways because of their life scripts that cause the life positions and outcomes. Some people are more flexible and adaptable than others, but most people in order to make a living and achieve some satisfaction in life have to find a slot, niche, and level in an organization in which their life script is considered congruent, regardless of whether the economy is booming, flat, or imploding. In this sense the type of economic system is largely irrelevant.

Social scripts, on the other hand, include the sum total of do’s and don’t’s required for a person to be successful dealing with others in a particular job or role. These scripts include the algorithmic steps required to do the specific job you are paid to do and required words and phrases to say to others and how to respond to people around you, up, across, and down the organizational chain of command, including playing the psychological Games people around you want or need to play.

All organizations require particular social scripts for participants with words and phrases that have to be memorized and used. Almost nobody can be her or his true self most of the time making a living in an organization. Most employees have to act out scripts created by the organization. Organizations such as Disney World are the most scripted of all. Employees there are called characters and are required to wear costumes and “go on stage” after they clock in for work, pretending while on the job to be characters such as Donald Duck or Mickey or Minnie Mouse dealing with customers, parroting memorized lines. While all employees in all organizations have to pretend to some extent they are something they are not to keep their jobs, the scripting is not this extreme in most organizations.

Most people who get fired in organizations are fired because of their psychological life scripts that are thought to be inappropriate in an organizational culture, and for being unwilling or unable to act out social scripts, not for being unable to perform the required physical or mental algorithmic steps of the job.

A problem under capitalism is that the easiest way for upper managers to do a good job increasing the profit of the corporation is by eliminating jobs, regardless of how well their employees are acting out their required scripts and doing the algorithmic therbligs of their jobs. Therbligs are the smallest units of doing something your job requires, such as moving something from Point A to B or making some sort of calculation. Therblig is a made-up word using various letters of Gilbreath, the surname of two of the founders of so-called scientific management in the US.

Psychological Games are a way of getting stimulation, recognition, and structure as one goes about one’s business of surviving and making a living. Basically they involve trying to gain satisfactions dealing with others, such as by making yourself or someone else feel comfortable or by causing a loss of some sort for others, or by making a fool of someone. Psychological Games entail people discounting problems, opportunities, and people, and the significance of someone or something. All psychological Games entail players acting out one of three roles on a Drama Triangle: Victim, Persecutor, and Rescuer.

Common psychological script injunctions are Don’t Be Excellent and Don’t Be Important, among about fourteen kinds of Don’t feel, think, and do injunctions generally recognized by transactional analysts, widely transmitted in family scripting. I have covered them in detail in my books Business Voyages and Born to Learn , easily found on the Internet. Why would any parent tell a child not to be excellent or important? Well, no rational parent would socially. They do it psychologically largely outside of conscious Adult ego state awareness mainly because they too did not have psychological permission to be excellent or important when they were children. People play psychological Games by “cathecting”, or turning on, all three of their ego states, including their Parent and Child ego states to create and maintain stimulation, recognition, and structure similar to what they experienced earlier in life, and in most cases they are not aware of what they are doing.

While all managers say they want excellent important employees many of them don’t want them to be too excellent or important, otherwise they might have to pay them more money, or one of them might take over his or her job as manager or supervisor, pushing him or her out the door.

I have described and explained the dynamics and significance of ego states, psychological Games, and scripts in my books, as they were first described and explained in a large gush of books and papers written by Eric Berne, MD (the originator of transactional analysis), and others, published since the 1960s that are still in print and offered for sale on the Internet. The International Transactional Analysis Association has published an excellent collection of refereed scholarly articles on transactional analysis quarterly in the Transactional Analysis Journal since the early 1970s. I studied and trained in transactional analysis at the Southeast Institute at Chapel Hill, North Carolina during 1975–1978, passing written and oral comprehensive exams on transactional analysis in 1978 administered by the ITAA.

Two major purposes of TA are to help people become more authentic and script free so as to gain more satisfaction from life in general and to see social and psychological scripts for what they are in organizations to help people learn how to adapt and flex to them to make a living.

Political races entail opponents playing psychological Games producing psychological satisfactions for all stakeholders – vested interests, candidates, and voters. On the other hand some politicians are not just playing Games to win in politics. They are doing it to make a living.

Why vote in the first place? The best Adult ego state reason would be to take social satisfaction in helping select the best leader for an organization or group to achieve rational goals and objectives for everyone. Lesser Parent and Child reasons would be to create satisfying psychological Game payoffs for yourself and to secure psychological structure, recognition, and stimulation similar to what you experienced with your parents, friends, and others in your early life, and in adolescence, that supported the psychological, social, economic, religious, political, and moral states of affairs of organizations such as your family, school, church, political party, or nation.

Once psychologically scripted most people do not rebel. Red states stay red and blue states stay blue, regardless of the logical Adult ego state reasoning of idealistic generally-OK presidential candidates like Bernie Sanders with script-free ideas on how to improve the functioning of the economic and political system.

I remember a TV interviewer in 2000 asking an attractive woman who ran a bar and grill why she intended to vote for Bush II. “Cuz he’s a good-lookin’ man” was her quick response.

There are several psychological Games people play in political races; but it seems to me based on observing presidential races on the Internet and elsewhere, listening to comments people make on my Facebook news feed timeline and elsewhere, most politicians play a first-degree psychological Game called RAPO by transactional analysts, since one of the surest ways to get votes in our narcissistic USian culture is to be considered good lookin’.

There are three degrees of psychological Games: First Degree Games are basically compliments, insults, discounts, jokes, and body language displays designed to build up or tear down someone’s self-esteem, or gain or lose some sort of psychological advantage; Second Degree Games entail more serious discounts and payoffs, threatening someone, firing someone, getting divorced, etc.; Third Degree Games are sometimes called tissue-tearing Games with payoffs such as getting into physical fights, going to war, winding up in a morgue, etc.

A RAPO Game starts by someone psychologically promising some sort of satisfaction to someone for responding to her or his sexual attractiveness. There are various social and psychological transactions that can bring this about, social transactions being spoken and overt, psychological transactions being unspoken and covert. The payoff for a first-degree RAPO player is not a real sexual liaison but making a fool of a mark or sucker who will be punished or humiliated in some way if he or she responds to the psychological sexual messages. Most psychological Games do not entail sexual messaging but a lot of them do. All psychological Games involve a con of some degree taking advantage of the vulnerabilities and weaknesses of a mark or suckers, promising things the Game starter has no intentions of delivering. Most of the promises of first-degree Games are insignificant and inconsequential. These Games are ubiquitous and most people play them at various times. Sometimes they have to to survive in organizations.

Psychological Games and scripts are what make folk tales and fairy tales (such as Robin Hood, Superman, The Lone Ranger, Snow White, Cinderella, Jack & Jill, Humpty-Dumpty, Hansel and Gretel, The Big Bad Wolf, and Little Red Riding Hood) interesting and dramatic.

Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Bush II, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden won some political races largely because of being successful psychological Game players, having physical and psychological characteristics that enabled them to transmit non-verbal psychological messages to voters that they would deliver to them psychological and social satisfactions if they voted for them, somehow providing them with various sorts of desired or fantasied psychological stimulation, structures, and recognition. Whether these politicians produced for their voters the psychological satisfactions the voters sought would be difficult to prove, just as it would be for these voters (for sure middle and lower income voters) to prove voting for these politicians produced any economic improvements for them. Any president during the last forty years would have a difficult time proving he produced significant tangible economic benefits for middle and lower income voters, regardless of how much psychological and social satisfaction he produced for them.

And here we are, having degenerated in the US into a situation in which a convicted rapist, Donald John Trump, a former president of the US, is now running for USian president again, and it appears about half of USian voters intend to vote for him again. What does this tell you? I don’t know what it tells you but it tells me that about half of USian voters just don’t care if the president of the US is a rapist. And why is this? Why don’t they care? I don’t know, but it seems to me it does not matter to them because of what Trump has told them about he would do as president if reelected. He wants to be a fascist dictator of the US, and it seems to me this means about half of USian voters like authoritarian dictators, whether in disguise as parents, teachers, preachers, business bosses, or politicians. In other words, they like dictators who tell them what to do, rather than participate in democratic discussions about what to do.

Seems to me Earthian humans are polarized intellectually between two general extreme categories that might be best described as democratic idealists and authoritarian nihilists, with most humans being clustered near the middle of the continuum.

Democratic idealists are not necessarily members of the Democratic Party in the US; and all authoritarian nihilists are not necessarily members of the Republican Party.

A democratic idealist in my view is someone who visualizes new states of affairs that might make an unsatisfying situation more efficient, effective, just, and satisfying through consultation, collaboration, and cooperation.

Authoritarian nihilists in my view are dissatisfied with states of affairs as they are but do not visualize changing them by creating new states of affairs through democratic processes, believing instead that strong leaders in positions of authority will make existing or older superseded systems and processes work better for them by out-competing others.

Most so-called liberals and progressives would be included in the democratic idealist category and most so-called conservatives would be included in the authoritarian nihilist category.

An extreme democratic idealist would focus primarily on ideal states to be achieved in the future; extreme authoritarian nihilists would be focused primarily on what now exists and tearing down what they do not like, not creating better systems to achieve better states of affairs.

Abraham Lincoln once remarked there are two kinds of people who never amount to much in life: those who cannot do what they are told, and those who cannot do anything but what they are told. Unrealistic idealistic builders of imaginary air castles often have a hard time making a go of things in life, and people with no goals and imagination are pretty much stuck where they are, if they’re lucky. Probably most successful people lie somewhere in between the two extremes of idealism and nihilism.

Extreme democratic idealists worry a lot. Extreme authoritarian nihilists just don’t give a rip, and some are happy savages.

I agree with most transactional analysts that Earthian humans are scripted to be what they are emotionally, intellectually, and behaviorally in early childhood by Injunctions that are psychologically transmitted from the child ego states of parents to the child ego states of their offspring.

According to Robert Goulding, MD and Mary Goulding, MSW, quoted in my book Business Voyages, page 160, there are about fourteen generic psychological Injunctions widely transmitted in family scripting:

Don’t Be, Don’t Be You (the sex you are), Don’t Be A Child, Don’t Grow, Don’t Make It, Don’t, Don’t Be Important, Don’t Be Close, Don’t Belong, Don’t Be Well (or sane), Don’t Think About X (forbidden subject), Don’t Think What You Think, Think What I Think, Don’t Feel, Don’t Feel X, Mad, Sad, Glad, Scared, etc., Don’t Feel What You Feel, Feel What I Feel.              See Goulding, R. and Goulding, M. (1976). “Injunctions, decisions, and redecisions.” Transactional Analysis Journal, 6(1), 41-48.

These script injunctions are transmitted primarily psychologically, not overtly spoken, from the Child ego state of the parent to the Child ego state of the child. Rarely would a parent socially or overtly tell a child what one of the above injunctions requires. They are primarily transmitted non-verbally by Parent and Child ego states when caregivers exhibit mad, glad, sad, or scared emotions in response to what a child naturally feels, thinks, and does as shared life events occur in early childhood. On the other hand, children are scripted by the ego states they observe parents using when parents feel, think, and do things. Children psychologically “introject” in living color the ego states of parents, including the accents, mannerisms, facial expressions, tone of voice, and behaviors of parents, as parents and children deal with life events. To introject is to take in or absorb the personality and behavioral characteristics of another. So children more or less replicate their parents, and the replications become hard-wired in their brains for life in most cases.

For good or ill, the scripting process may determine not only the personality and behavioral characteristics of a child but also his/her life position and role in life, including determining whether a child grows up to become a democratic idealist or an authoritarian nihilist.

Therefore the scripting process largely determines which political parties win in any culture; and the fate of Spaceship Earth may depend on changing the scripting of humans, which entails a process of change that includes not only changing economic and political systems but also psychological and social systems.

An assumption of transactional analysis is that humans can learn to “see what is really going on” with themselves and others as they transact with one another socially and psychologically living their daily lives so as to increase their chances of living satisfactory lives, regardless of how not-OK their economic, social, psychological, and political worlds might be.

According to transactional analysis theory there are three naturally occurring generic life outcomes caused for humans: winner, loser, and non-winner – caused by inherited physical characteristics and “messages” one is exposed to throughout life – and by the early decisions offspring make about the messages that become determinants of emotional, intellectual, and behavioral responses throughout life.

Whether one inherits a winner, loser, or non-winner script is determined by naturally-occurring inevitable cause-effect chains one is accidentally exposed to. Some transactional analysts assume proportions of winner, loser, and non-winner scripts in the population remain relatively constant from one generation to another.

It follows that the natural scripting process is not fair.

A purpose of transactional analysis is to help individuals and groups insert new causes into natural cause-effect chains so as to increase the probabilities and proportions of winner outcomes in the populace.

Changing a loser script to a winner script requires hard work but it can happen if a person somehow acquires new script messages powerful enough to control frustrating, debilitating, or harmartic script messages recorded in his or her sub-conscious mind. TA can provide people basic concepts and tools for attempting such a thing, perhaps requiring learning to use different ego states and transactional patterns and learning how to communicate in more effective ways psychologically and socially.

Most people seem to think if only Earthian humans could solve their economic, political, military, and religious troubles, beat their competitors and enemies, etc., then everything would be wonderful. Not so, many people would not be happy and successful living in paradise because of script messages recorded in their sub-conscious minds before they were eight years old. In order for everyone to live happily and successfully humans would have to solve not only economic, political, religious, and social problems, but also psychological problems.

Changing a loser script may entail changing the ego states one uses, the way one structures time (learning how to spend more or less time in different ways)—withdrawing into their heads, pastiming (shooting the bull) with others, performing rituals, doing work activity, playing psychological Games, or being intimate with others.

The Prayer of Serenity goes something like this: Lord give me the intelligence and strength to change what needs changing, and the wisdom to know what I can and cannot change, knowing full well that some suffering, losing, and grieving is inevitable.

Using TA in some cases can help people become more serene, by enabling them to see more clearly what is going on to make salutary changes, or by learning to accept one’s script and focus on finding a niche in which it fits. On the other hand, a basic problem or question is whether serenity is possible in today’s world, beset by global warming and climate change and by escalating tensions and agitations among organizations and groups around planet Earth.

TA never promised anyone any rose gardens, or eternal bliss in heaven, but it does advertise that it can help individuals, groups, and organizations become more OK, OK not only in terms of achieving goals but more OK transacting with others so as to live with more dignity, satisfaction, peace, and tranquility, based on Adult mutually agreed-to contracts.

No one could blame you if you believe in tuning out TA and articles such as this one. Maybe the best strategy is to tune out the world as much as you can, burrowing up in your wormhole as much as possible, reading no newspapers and not watching television, with no Internet. The problem however if you do that is boredom. Most humans have an innate need for stimulation, achievement, and recognition.

Regardless of what sort of cognitive structures humans might use, TA or whatever, sooner or later they have to take action, and this entails defining problems, delineating alternatives, making recommendations, choosing things, trying new things, over and over, till something works.

1 – What is the problem?

2 – What are the alternatives?

3 – What do you recommend?

We live in precarious times that probably encourage people to play AIN’T IT AWFUL more now than in the past, a psychological Game in which Game players collect strokes for complaining about the evils and troubles of world, positioning themselves as Victims of obsolete economic, religious, and political systems and policies manipulated and exploited by greedy self-interested power-mad narcissistic sociopathic oligarchs and leaders and their corrupt bought and paid for cronies, lackeys, and knaves, especially lobbyists, politicians, and religious leaders, however true this state of affairs might be in reality.

By the same token, it will do no good for humans to passively pretend everything is just hunky-dory and swell, with everything coming up roses for everyone, living in small imaginary Candide-like best of all possible worlds, playing a psychological Game called GREENHOUSE by transactional analysts, in which players are rewarded with plastic strokes for making nonsensical positive cheerful upbeat comments about the environment and social, economic, political, and religious states of affairs, regardless of how bleak they are in reality.

It seems to me the most dangerous psychological Game played politically right now around planet Earth is IF IT WEREN’T FOR YOU, involving polarized individuals, groups, and organizations who experience increasing insecurity and hopelessness causing them to blame others and find scapegoats for their plights, escalating their anger as they transmit threats from their angry Parent and Child ego states to the Parent and Child ego states of others, sometimes attacking others verbally and physically for their perceived misdeeds and beliefs. Some of the threats include the threat of international and civil war. Israel is playing a third-degree IF IT WEREN’T FOR YOU Game with Palestine right now. One can build a case about all politicians do is play psychological Games with supporters, opponents, and enemies.

IF IT WEREN’T FOR YOU entails aggrieved humans psychologically acting as if opposing warring or competing parties maliciously and arbitrarily decided using free will to commit the harmful or heinous actions and deeds they are accused of committing, instead of realizing the others were caused by circumstances and script messages to do what they did just like the aggrieved aggressive people were. Getting rid of the other will not solve problems such as poor educational systems, poor family scripts, poor religions, and hamartic economic and political policies and systems.

For more information regarding the use of Transactional Analysis https://www.itaaworld.org/ to create better discussion groups and democratic processes read my book Born to Learn: A Transactional Analysis of Human Learning. https://www.amazon.com/Born-Learn-Transactional-Analysis-Learning/dp/0692584331

For more information on how to co-construct better organizations and economic systems using TA read my book Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata, and Tools for Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds https://www.amazon.com/Business-Voyages-Schemata-Discovering-Co-Constructing/dp/1413480810

See my article “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc,” https://blog.effectivelearning.net/the-evolution-of-spaceship-earth-inc/ for some management science ideas on how human Earthians might eventually co-construct an idealistic democratic economic system that is viable and satisfying for everyone aboard Spaceship Earth, making it possible for all Earthian humans to develop an I’m OK – You’re OK life position.

This entails human Earthians never doing work that machines can do better, and delegating the day-to-day management of systems for scheduling, producing, and distributing the necessities of life to artificial intelligence programs and supercomputers.

This can be done using linear programming based on the general algorithmic matrix algebra form

Max CjXj, s.t. AijXj <, =, or > Bi

as explained in “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc.” https://blog.effectivelearning.net/the-evolution-of-spaceship-earth-inc/

Flying aboard an airliner about to land at night moving at four hundred miles an hour at thirty thousand feet, which would you rather have landing the plane, the plane’s computer system and auto-pilot or the pilot and co-pilot, looking out their windows with their hands on their steering devices, seeing nothing but dark clouds and lightning below?

Some AINT IT AWFUL Game-playing goes on in mass and social media, i.e. writers and editors are psychologically Persecuting, Rescuing, or Victimizing someone, but it seems to me most writers and editors are generally trying to paint accurate pictures of what they think is really going on economically, socially, psychologically, economically, and politically. Unfortunately one can build a case that politicians spend most of their time playing psychological Games, wasting most of their time with pastiming (bullshitting), doing rituals (filling out unnecessary forms, attending useless meetings, conducting useless investigations, and the like), and playing psychological Games. Seems to me most expenditures of time, money, and energy in so-called foreign policy are moves in psychological Games.

On the other hand, there is a lot of awful stuff going on. There’s such a thing as Positive Critical Parent Ego State energy, and one can build a case that Critical Parent economic, political, and religious criticism is necessary and rational to stave off dire consequences staring humanity in the face, caused by GWCC and MNWP, global warming and climate change and militarization and nuclear weapons proliferation.

It’s not easy to see what’s really going on, impossible some say, while being inundated with fake news daily around planet Earth, made public in mass media and on the Internet and elsewhere. To see what’s really going on, Earthian humans must use primarily inductive and analogical reasoning, based on probability, not deductive logic. Almost never can anyone prove with deductive logic that a general proposition about economic, social, psychological, or political states affairs is absolutely true. About the best humans can hope for is to develop consensual answers that are generally acceptable and true based on probability.

It’s better to be honestly wrong, saying something is true because you really don’t know it’s not true, than to say something is true when you know damn well it’s not true.

Seems to me most lying is lying by omission (people not telling people things they know are true to gain or preserve advantages in competitive situations). Whether lying by omission is more or less harmful in overall perspective than lying by commission (telling people things you know are not true for ill-gotten gains), is debatable, as is proving whether it’s getting easier or harder for most people to see what’s really going on in economic and political states of affairs.

Political parties, the US government, and mainstream media often lie by omission about what is going on with alacrity, presumably to protect national security and their corporate revenues, in many cases socially presenting selective true facts but omitting analysis about what is really going on.

For whatever it’s worth, I would rather be told what to do by a well-programmed AI robot than a demented deranged unhinged human fascist dictator. On the other hand, I am convinced the best situation would be to be told what to do by a group of randomly-selected intelligent rational humans who had fully studied the facts of the case at hand and who had fully discussed and debated about what to do in an open Game-free, Adult, I’m OK—You’re OK, democratic process.

Richard John Stapleton, PhD, CTA is a certified transactional analyst and an emeritus professor of management at Georgia Southern University. See https://blog.effectivelearning.net/rjs-athletic-business-and-academic-vita/ for a full listing of credentials

By Richard John Stapleton

My father’s name is Richard Gathright Maury Stapleton and my mother’s name is Ida Belle Coston Stapleton. My grandparents’ birthright names are Sidney Clay Stapleton, Katharine Gathright Maury, Elbert Harry Coston, and Darlie Brown Walker.

Frank Parker, a Statesboro, Georgia hobby genealogist, located all my great grandparents bearing the Stapleton, Coston, Maury, and Walker family names, however many times removed from me in every generation, including basic data for each one such as name, date and location of birth and death, marriages, and offspring in North America, also including anecdotal information about the quality of life some of them had, filling three thick click-open three-ring notebooks filled with copied information on letter sized paper, back to before the American Revolution in 1776 in unbroken family lines. Not all of my great grandparents are mentioned in this article, just some seeming to have had unusual interesting lives. Frank said my great grandparents were easy to find, the easiest search of this type he had conducted with his computerized genealogical system. Most of them were dyed-in-the-wool Calvinists.

Ego states are states of being including thoughts, beliefs, behaviors, feelings, gestures, body language, and other signals determining how people come across with others in communication episodes, whether parent-like, adult-like, or child-like, in all kinds of situations.  People switch ego states depending on who they are communicating with and what sort of circumstances they are in, whether they are parenting, working, socializing, teaching, having fun, playing Games, or whatever.  They transmit messages from three ego states in themselves to three ego states in others in pair vectors, Parent-Parent, Adult-Adult, Child-Child, Parent-Child, Child-Adult, Adult-Parent, Child-Parent, or whatever combination.  These transactions are especially meaningful in situations in which there is some sort of authoritarian system involved, such as parents parenting children in homes, teachers teaching students in schools, or bosses bossing subordinates in a business or political organization, which normally entail primarily Parent-Child transactions. In general however the more Adult-Adult transactions there are the better things go in families, schools, businesses, and political organizations.

A TA life script diagram shows the three stacked Parent, Adult, and Child ego state circles representing parent, adult, and child ego states for each parent and child. The solid lines in the diagram denote overt spoken social messages and dotted lines denote covert psychological unspoken ulterior messages.  Social messages are verbalized overt auditory messages; psychological messages are covert non-spoken ulterior messages transmitted by body language, emotional states, and after the fact positive or negative stroking as people react to situations and feel and do things.

Scripts in families are created automatically when parents transmit various messages to their children from various ego states socially and psychologically, in and out of awareness.  Scripts are life plans generally decided before the age of eight by offspring based on script messages transmitted to them by their parents and others.  Since parents by and large transmit the same script messages that were transmitted to them before they were eight years old script messages in families can remain intact for many generations.  According to transactional analysts script decisions made before the age of eight have lasting effects determining three general life outcomes:  winner, loser, and non-winner.  These decisions can be redecided and updated later in life but it’s not easy for most people.

Psychological Child-Child ego state script injunctions are what cause the most trouble for people in their lives.  Script injunctions forbid appropriate behavior in the here and now. Script injunctions are caused by emotional and behavioral requirements created by families through time as they adapted to and coped with problems and environmental forces that may have been appropriate in past environments, but which are inappropriate in here and now more benign and hospitable environments.

Opposing script messages transmitted by parents can put a child in a Not-OK bind in childhood and throughout adolescence, assuming a divorce has not already occurred, causing considerable trouble within a family, since the child cannot please both parents in the presence of both parents, which can put parents in worse Not-OK positions if the child makes a decision about which parent is right, increasing Not-OKness in the family system as a whole.

What many people need is psychological permission to violate and ignore their psychological outdated obsolete family Child ego state script message Injunctions, not only to increase their own OKness but the OKness of all living members of the family system, and the OKness of Earthian humans in general, for that matter.

Two common family script Injunctions in most cultures are Don’t Think about the true nature and causes of states of affairs and Don’t Feel certain feelings, such as glad, mad, sad, or scared, when certain things happen in certain environments.

I became a certified transactional analyst in education and organizations, a CTA, after passing written, oral, and experiential comprehensive exams administered by the International Transactional Analysis Association in 1978, after undergoing three years of once-a-month training, all day Saturday and half of Sunday, at the Southeast Institute at Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

I have covered ego states and scripts in my books Business Voyages  and Born to Learn: A Transactional Analysis of Human Learning,  listing common Parent ego state script messages and Child ego state injunctions.  All parents do not transmit the same script messages creating considerable variety among family scripts and outcomes.  Certain life scripts conveniently fit certain roles, jobs, professions, careers, and what have you more than others, providing fresh recruits already scripted for job openings, slots, roles, and positions in an economy, which is fine so long as the economy does not change very much.  Unfortunately in recent years in the United States the offshoring of high wage blue collar jobs to foreign low wage countries and the use of more and more automation has rendered many family scripts obsolete.

Here are some parent and child script messages that were passed down to me by my parents, which were passed down to them by their parents.

Stapleton father overt Parent ego state social script messages:  Work hard and long; think; know the details; don’t make mistakes; be successful; be productive; Don’t work for anyone but yourself.

Father covert Child ego state psychological script injunctions:  Don’t be a child; Don’t Belong; Don’t be Close; Don’t feel glad or sad; Don’t be sexually promiscuous; Don’t waste time on sports and hobbies; Don’t make good grades in school.

Coston mother overt Parent ego state social script messages:  Obey the law; know what you’re doing; be good in competitive sports; understand things; pay your bills on time; make money; just live till you die.

Mother covert Child ego state psychological script injunctions:  Don’t be spontaneous or wild; Don’t be happy; Don’t be imperfect; Don’t belong; Don’t feel glad; Don’t act silly; Don’t associate with riffraff; Don’t be sexually promiscuous; Don’t waste time on trivia.

My brother James Clay Stapleton and I have been generally successful, having been exposed to and ruled by the above script messages. He became a multi-millionaire entrepreneur and I became a tenured full professor with publications; but both he and I have suffered more from depression and psychological frustrations than most people.  There are no free lunches it seems, and there are advantages and disadvantages to almost everything, including script messages.  The major advantage to knowing about and understanding transactional analysis is that it gives you more Adult ego state knowledge of what caused the Parent and Child ego states and script messages you introjected before you were eight years old that cause you to psychologically function in groups and organizations as you do, giving you more social control over them, enabling you to be more successful than you otherwise would have been, not only making a living, but living harmoniously with others, to live a satisfying life.

Following are descriptions of some interesting ancestors whose lives in North America were determined by script messages that were probably similar to script messages that percolated up to me on my shoot of my branch of the family tree, contributing to the creation of the family story I present herein.

A great-grandfather many times removed, The Reverend Doctor James Maury, a French Huguenot, taught four American presidents, Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, in a boarding school in Virginia. A distant cousin, Matthew Fontaine Maury, a West Point graduate, a commodore in the Civil War, fighting for the South, published a book still in print, Physical Geography of the Sea.  He was a founder of Virginia Tech, retiring as a professor of physics at Virginia Military Institute, included in a Hall of Fame of great Americans in New York, among other honors, including recognition from kings in other countries for his scientific achievements.

Another distant cousin Dabney Herndon Maury, also a West Point graduate, a general in the Civil War fighting for the South, published a widely circulated book titled, Recollections of a Southerner in the Mexican, Indian, and Civil Wars.

A great great grandfather Thomas Sanford Gathright, a Confederate draft dodger who opposed the South’s seceding from the Union, was the first president of Texas A & M University, recommended for his post by Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America. Having a liberal arts academic background amid faculty and funding turmoil he was fired as president of Texas A & M after a few years and replaced by a Southern civil war hero with a more agricultural and mechanical academic background.

My father’s uncle, Richard Gathright Maury, was a prominent lawyer in his time, the youngest district attorney in Harris County history, the county in which Houston, Texas just got flooded, who once served papers in person on a golf course in New York to John D. Rockefeller, indicting him and his Standard Oil Trust for violating Texas anti-trust laws, whose grave site in Center, Texas, replete with a statue, is now a designated historical site recognized by the Texas Historical Society. Rockefeller asked him on the golf course if he was not a little afraid to serve papers like that and he replied he was not. As near as I can tell Richard Gathright Maury never went to school at all.

Based on genealogical records produced for me by Frank Parker, a real estate developer and investor and a hobby genealogist, here in Statesboro, Richard Gathright Maury was home schooled on a plantation in Mississippi and read law with a law firm to pass the bar exam. A bachelor, he died mysteriously at age 34 driving his automobile alone when it collided with a cow on a highway, according to a newspaper story, or when he drove his new automobile off a bridge, according to a story someone in the family told. Perhaps he should have been afraid to serve legal papers on that New York golf course.

Richard Gathright Maury’s father, my great grandfather, Matthew Henry Maury, attended the University of Mississippi two years and was later killed along with another “prominent” citizen in a “race riot” in Wahalak, Mississippi, according to an article published on page one in a San Francisco newspaper I accidentally ran across in an email promotion by Ancestry.com. My father thought his grandfather was killed on the Maury plantation by an African-American farm worker, probably a freed slave, or the son of one. Someone wrote in handwriting years ago on one of Frank Parker’s copied genealogical record sheets that he may have been killed in a race riot. This happened when Matthew Henry Maury was in his late-thirties after the Civil War.

My grandfather on my mother’s side, Elbert Harry Coston, a Methodist minister, the son of Isom Alexander Coston, who was blind, according to my grandmother, Darlie Brown Walker Coston, whose father David Montgomery Walker was a cotton farmer and a wagon manufacturer in the area, near Enloe, Texas, “never did a day’s work in his life. All he ever did was sit up on the front porch with his brothers and read.” She said most of the work on the Coston farm near Palestine, Texas was done by African-Americans, freed slaves apparently, managed by her mother-in-law, Mattie Elizabeth Allen Coston, born on a ranch in Texas in 1854, shortly after Texas stopped pretending to be a nation and joined the Union as a mere state.

My mother told me in her last days in Willow Pond here in Statesboro that her grandfather Isom would swat each of his five boys on the rear one time with a razor strop when they came in for supper, telling them he didn’t know what they had done wrong that day but he knew they had “been up to somethin’.” She also said somebody had to read the whole newspaper to him every day.

I lived with Moma and Snazzy for two years in Lubbock while I studied for my doctorate at Texas Tech University. Snazzy had a personal library he had collected through the years containing a thousand or more books on various subjects. I named him myself when I was about three years old, Snazzy being the name of a radio character I had listened to. He was called Snazzy by almost everyone the rest of his life.

Snazzy took some courses at East Texas State College for a couple of years before he became an ordained Methodist minister, becoming a minister according to my hard-working father so he wouldn’t ever have to work at all. One of his brothers graduated from the University of Texas and became a county school superintendent. Another brother graduated from East Texas State College and became a lawyer. A business started by the son or grandson of one of these brothers, Coston and Son Ready Mix, still operates in the city of Palestine, Texas, not far from Enloe. Snazzy’s youngest brother, who wanted to farm, inherited the whole farm, near Enloe, Texas, thanks to his four older brothers disclaiming their inherited shares of the family farm to him.

Moma, my grandmother, Darlie, said Snazzy reading on the front porch with his four brothers was the “smartest one of all, knowing more about history and such.” She said they called him “the doctor” since he would “see about” their field hands when they got hurt or sick. Snazzy had a Coston uncle in the area who was a real doctor with whom he would consult who would give them medical treatments.

Snazzy, who preached in the Methodist, Presbyterian, and Baptist denominations before he settled on Methodism, at one point in his career managed the chemicals in the Texas Tech College chemistry laboratory. 

My mother Ida Belle Coston Stapleton took a few business courses at a Draughn’s Business College after she got out of high school. She told me shortly before she died here in Statesboro, at age 92, that she “never made less than an A in school.”

My father Richard Gathright Maury Stapleton, born in 1913 at Jasper, Texas, in the Piney Woods of East Texas, where his father managed a sawmill, took some courses in agronomy at Texas Tech before he dropped out to become a successful entrepreneur, farming and ranching, building houses, starting and owning a lumber yard and hardware store for twelve years, installing and servicing two hundred miles of natural gas pipeline, installing and servicing irrigation pumps, and starting a bank, in and around Wolfforth, Texas, having never taken a business course or read a business book, or a book of any kind after I was born, to my knowledge, except maybe an arcane treatise or two on Free Masonry, to become a third degree Scottish Rite Mason, as I understand it. He saw to it I became a DeMolay in high school but I never had any interest in it. He told me he was glad his father taught him a trade (carpentry) and he liked to work with his hands.

My father, Dick everyone called him, was an autodidact. He not only taught himself how to do the work of the above businesses, he was a self-taught architect. He could take the dream home ideas of customers and draw them to scale on paper using his architectural drawing board and instruments and have them reproduced as blueprints at the same engineering firm as real architects, that any carpenter, plumber, or electrician could follow,  replete with a complete bill of materials. And he was lightning fast figuring how much those materials would cost.

Dick assiduously read the local newspaper, farm magazines, and the US News & World Report. He put me to work building houses when I was eight years old. I had no desire to work with my hands and took no satisfaction doing carpenter work. I fell asleep one time in the closet of a house he was building, which he thought was a seriously disgraceful thing for a son twelve or so years old to do, making him look bad in the eyes of the adult carpenters working on the job. He never forgot it. My brother told me he seriously criticized me for it during recent visits he had with him, when he was in his eighties. I don’t think he ever forgave me when I told him I had no intentions of working for him for a living at age 21.

He and Ida were millionaires by this time in today’s money, having had very little money when they married, but they were not filthy rich like the Kennedy’s or Trump’s, and there was no way they were going to give me enough money to get married and live in middle class status on my own, like the Kennedy’s and Trump’s did with their children; and Dick never intended to pay me any more than he paid anyone else for doing something, so I was on my own from then on. Dick and Ida made their money the old-fashioned way, by damn hard work, producing and selling  tangible goods to customers one by one, not by importing scotch whiskey into the US, playing the stock market, or by exploiting renters in New York City.  And there was no way I was going to get married while struggling as a small businessman or maybe working forever in boring jobs enslaved to bosses in established businesses to put food on the table for a family. So, I learned what it’s like to be poor and single, for eight years, up until I became a professor at age 29.

Dick and I never did get along together that well. He accused me as a child of not respecting him. Both he and Ida worked all the time and had little time to spend with a kid like me. I basically took care of myself. I called them Dick and Ida up until I went to school. The kids and teachers thought this was strange and teased me about it, so I called them Mother and Daddy from then on. I knew from an early age there was something wrong with them and me. In retrospect Dick was probably a high-functioning narcissistic, possibly a high-functioning autistic. None of us had any close friends or had much fun. Dick and Ida were hardcore Critical Parent Calvinists with good Adult ego states. I never had any friends I hung out with and I was bored most of the time. I lived in my own head, having an episodic eidetic memory, analyzing introjects and creating my own audio-visual constructions on the screen of my mind. Kids thought I was weird and said so. I was accused of thinking too much. Several teachers told me that. About the only time I was really there paying full attention to details in the here and now was when I was playing in serious competitive football and basketball games and practices. Joe Moring, who coached me in football, basketball, and track in the 7th, 8th, and 9th grades when he was fresh out of college, by far the best coach I ever had in any sport, who got fired at the Frenship school in Wolfforth in 1954 for working his players too hard, whom I had not seen or talked with since 1960, called me up one day out of the blue after I had retired as a professor in 2005, and among other things told me that I may have been the “most coachable” player he ever had.

After I graduated from college with an economics degree at age 21 and after having experimented with several activities in businesses I started and owned, which, after I got them set up and got them running, also got boring, having had several beautiful young girlfriends my age whom I loved but never married, by age 24 I had figured out things did not look good for me from then on in the small town of Wolfforth. So, I consulted a neurologist and psychiatrist to get some new information about things, Jerome Smith, MD, in Lubbock, Texas. I told him I always thought Dick was crazy and wondered if I was too. After a few visits he told me I was not crazy, that he agreed with my ideas and thinking most of the time, but I had some “longstanding problems” that were holding me back. He agreed to counsel with me in his office about these problems for $20 per contact hour with no medical records being kept on an as-needed basis. I would come in the back door of his office so no one would see me in his waiting room, walk into his private office, sit down in an armchair across from his desk, hand him a $20 dollar bill, and for one hour non-stop I would tell him what I had had on my mind since the last visit, including anything I could remember about dreams I had had. He also told me to write a history of my family including anything I could remember about the lives of my parents and grandparents.

The upshot is that I found this satisfying. Dr. Smith was the only person I have encountered in my life that fully listened to me, randomly selected among neurologists in the yellow pages of a telephone book. He gave me a few suggestions here and here, and that’s all he did. He said I downgraded myself, had an authority problem, was uncomfortable around people, had some distorted views on sex, was not crazy, and had a high I.Q.  When I asked him how high it was, he said, “I don’t know. After you pass a certain level of intelligence it’s difficult to measure.”

After having had problems communicating with customers in my businesses, hating to ask for business selling advertising and insurance, and getting fired working for a large corporation as a dispatcher and expiditer in production control, for being too sensitive to the needs of people and talking back to my boss, I thought about becoming a college professor. Maybe that would be less boring and frustrating than working in the real world. When I told Dr. Smith I wondered if I was smart enough to get a doctor’s degree in business at Texas Tech, he told me, “There might be one or two students in that program brighter than you, but I doubt it.”

That cash money I paid Dr. Smith across his desk was the best money I ever spent, even considering those $20 bills in 1964-1969 were worth about $200 apiece adjusted for inflation in 2024. 

Dick and Ida were partners in business. He did the work and she managed things and kept the books, sending out the accounts receivable invoices, paying the bills, depositing the checks, making out the payroll, paying the taxes, etc. Unlike Dick, she was a good listener and kept a good rapport with customers, not saying much, but making sense when she did. Dick said she had a memory like an elephant and never forgot anything, awed by her, calling her a “strong”woman. I told him one time, “strong, hell; she’s heartless.”  She was also good at local politics, knowing what was going on, consulted in her office in the lumber yard by community leaders about what to do when push came to shove about serious things that counted.

They sold the lumber yard and their other holdings on the South Plains of Texas in 1963 at ages 48 and 50 and bought a 1,000 acre ranch near Eastland, Texas, in Central Texas, spending the rest of their lives farming and ranching in Dick’s case and Ida reading and taking it easy. She was an avid reader of books she got through the Book of the Month Club. Their cattle brand was the Spear X, the same brand Dick’s father, Sidney Clay Stapleton, used on his 10,000 acre cattle ranch near Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, before he sold out during the Great Depression and moved his family of four boys and two girls back east to Northwest Texas when my father was in junior high school. Sidney spent the rest of his life as a carpenter and contractor in Northwest Texas and Oklahoma, spending several years at Muscogee, Oklahoma. The oldest of his siblings, he had a brother Daniel who owned a Chevrolet automobile dealership in Lone Wolf, Oklahoma. Their mother Cordelia Jane Watson Stapleton died there, living with Daniel and his family, after moving to Lone Wolf from Mississippi in old age.

After a few years Dick and Ida sold their ranch in Eastland, Texas and moved to Dumas, Texas, where Ida’s sister and husband had recently moved, having sold their cotton farm at Shallowater, Texas, about ten miles west of Lubbock. Ida and her sister Billie started a dress shop they called The Boutique they owned and ran for a few years. Billie bought and sold the dresses and Ida kept the books.  Billie’s husband, A.J. Brown, owned a Farmall tractor dealership in Dumas. Dick bought himself a stock farm, growing corn and wheat and feeding cattle. They sold their holdings in Dumas after about thirty years and moved to Houston, Texas, living in “The Woodlands”, to be near my brother and his wife. Ida moved to Statesboro, Georgia to be near me and my wife, Debbye, where she died at Willow Pond, an assisted living facility, at age 92, after Dick died at age 85 in Houston.

Dick graduated from high school at Carnegie, Oklahoma at age twenty, after dropping out of high school for two years to work to help support his family during the Great Depression. He said he changed high schools five times. He said his father’s favorite saying was, “A rolling stone gathers no moss.”

The leap-frog westward migration paths of my four family lines in the South of North America were as follows:

Costons—>Virginia—North Carolina—Tennessee—Texas

Walkers—>Virginia—Alabama—Texas

Maurys—>Virginia—Alabama—Mississippi—Texas

Stapletons—>Virginia—South Carolina—Georgia—Florida—Alabama—Mississippi—Texas—New Mexico—Texas

Frank Parker, the above-mentioned Statesboro, Georgia real estate developer, investor, and hobby genealogist, traced all four of my grandparents back to Virginia before the American Revolutionary War, in which several ancestors fought. At least two of them, a Walker and a Maury, were mentioned as being especially courageous Indian fighters in Virginia, sometimes spending weeks at a time horseback in the woods in all kinds of weather, not living long. Descendants of my Virginia ancestors, many of whom became cotton farmers, spread out from Virginia migrating into South Carolina, North Carolina, Kentucky, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, and New Mexico.

One of my great grandparents many times removed Ludovic Stapleton migrated from Virginia to Marlboro County, South Carolina from where he and his son Stephen Stapleton migrated into what is now Long County, Georgia in the early 1800s, about 75 miles from where I live now, surrounded by cotton fields six miles south of Statesboro, in Bulloch County, Georgia.

Stephen Stapleton’s descendants later embarked on my Stapleton family intermittent westward trek (and back east in my case) up to now some 200 years later, establishing cotton farms in five states in the process. The first wave of my Stapleton ancestral runaways or castaways after leaving Georgia found cheap land in Florida, near the Alabama line, from whence all or some of them started leap-frog migrating westward in search of cheap new land freshly stolen from Indians, after descendant numbers in the immediate family grew too large for the established family farm or plantation in a state to support, to Alabama to Mississippi to Texas to New Mexico and back to Northwest Texas where I grew up, starting off in life living on my parents’ 160-acre irrigated cotton farm near Wofforth, Texas, ten miles southwest of Lubbock, five miles west of the town of Wolfforth, a wide spot around a paved highway parallel to a Santa Fe railroad track with about five businesses and about two hundred residents.

My almost-cousin Dave Thompson and I pulled bolls in our uncle Duck Thompson’s cotton field five miles west of Wolfforth with African-American field hands one day when we were about eight years old in 1948, learning what hard work was like on a cotton farm at a young age, however little of it we did that day, in my case learning how unfair life could be for some people, especially black people at that time. “Pulling ” bolls in some ways was easier than “picking” cotton, which required picking cotton out of the opened boll or husk on the stalk with your fingers, a much more tedious task that all “cotton pickers” in history in the Deep South had to do. To “pull” a boll all you had to do was run two of your fingers to each side of a stalk and pull up on the boll to separate it from the stalk, and then drop the whole thing in your cotton sack.

I think Dave and I pulled about one hundred pounds apiece working four or five hours that day, both of us having our own custom-made scaled-down cotton sacks, made from feed sacks, about three feet long, paid as I recall $1.25 per one hundred pounds pulled, and weighed, the same as the other field hands. Some of the fastest, strongest, and most skillful of the 30 or so adults in the field could pull one thousand pounds of cotton bolls a day as I recall, dragging cotton sacks eight or so feet long behind them in the cotton rows that when full were weighed with a spring-actuated scale hanging from a tripod about seven feet off the ground and recorded in a book by the name of each worker by someone who did nothing but weigh cotton and record the results. The weighed and recorded cotton sacks, most weighing over 100 pounds, were emptied in a cotton trailer which when filled was hauled off to a cotton gin, replaced in the field by another empty cotton trailer. Most seasoned boll pullers would fill, empty, and refill their cotton sacks six or more times a day, possibly from sunup to sundown, till the harvest season was over. Most of the cotton field hands working on farms around Wolfforth, chopping cotton with hoes in the summer, and pulling bolls in the fall, lived in the nearby city of Lubbock, about fifteen miles away, in 1948, riding to and from the fields each day in the open air on the beds of trucks.

Herbicides and mechanical cotton strippers came along in Northwest Texas in about fifteen years eliminating the need for this labor.

According to Frank Parker’s data, one of my great great grandfathers William Anthony Stapleton, according to the 1850 US Census, was a farmer in Dale County, Alabama, owning twenty-one slaves.  According to a first cousin, Stephen Carter, also a hobby genealogist, this great great grandfather made several trips to England, for reasons unknown, apparently doing business of some sort during his adult life.  According to Frank Parker, William Anthony Stapleton was relatively wealthy, since individual slaves at the time according to Frank were worth about $100,000 in 2005 money.  According to Stephen Carter, who had his Stapleton mother’s DNA line searched using Ancestry.com, the Stapletons and Maurys in our family tree were descended from English, Irish, Scottish, and French aristocracy.  Stephen said he was distantly related to President Jimmy Carter on his father’s side.

One Brian De Stapleton, an English baron, signed Magna Carta in 1215. I have no idea if my Stapleton ancestors were actually related to him but they could have been.

Here is a passage from my book Business Voyages, first published in 2011, pages 47-50. Read all about it free at https://www.amazon.com/Business-Voyages-Schemata-Discovering-Co-Constructing/dp/1413480810.

“In October 2009 I told and showed my friend Frank Parker a genealogist here in Statesboro, Georgia I had recently found proof on the Internet my grandmother Katharine Gathright Maury was related to Matthew Fontaine Maury, that one of her Maury ancestors taught four American presidents in Virginia, and she was descended from French Huguenots and the Randolphs of Virginia, starting with a family tree furnished me about 1985 by Mary Stapleton, wife of my uncle Matthew Henry Stapleton, that traced our Stapleton/Maury line back four generations to James Woodville Maury and William Anthony Stapleton in 1850, that I used with Horace Randoph’s Updated Database at www.randolpharchives.org that traced Katharine Gathright Maury back to Abraham Maury in Virginia in 1758 that traced Abraham Maury through the Randolph line back to 17th century England, that I used with Some Descendants of Jean de la Fontaine in Bob Juch’s Kin Including 61,000 People at www.juch.org that traced the Maury line from Abraham Maury back to James Fontaine born in Barnstaple, Devonshire, England in 1686 to Guy de la Fontaine, Lord of Seville, born in 1400 in France and to Jean de la Fontaine born in 1375 in France.

“Frank then offered to use his computerized genealogical system to check out people down my family tree. Among much else, he found Dick’s grandfather Matthew Henry Maury, age 25, in the 1880 US census living on a plantation in Kemper County, Mississippi with his wife Virginia John Gathright Maury, age 24, and five offspring including Dick’s mother Katharine, infant, and her brother Richard, age 3, in one household and Dick’s great grandfather James Woodville Maury, age 59, living in another unusual household including his wife, Rachel Harris Maury, age 53, and a servant Milby, age 31, and her five young children, all named Maury. Included in another household on the plantation was Sarah Maury, age 55, listed as a mother and farmer, presumably the mother of Milby. Listed in another household was Aaron Maury, age 45, listed as a farmer. Dick’s Maury grandfather and his great grandfather and their wives and children were listed as white and the rest of the Maurys on the census page were listed as black.

“Frank also found in the 1850 US census before the Civil War that Dick’s great grandfather William Anthony Stapleton was a farmer in Dale County, Alabama, owning twenty-one slaves. This family history was kept secret from Dick or he kept it secret from me. I would never have known about it had it not been for the Internet and Frank Parker’s genealogical skills in 2009. The slave owning was something not to be proud of and perhaps it should have been kept secret. I sometimes thought as a child Dick was a slave driver; now I know where he got the proclivity. If you Google Richard John Stapleton on the Internet you can find several Stapleton barons, lords and sirs that lived in England and Ireland through the centuries after 1215 and our Stapleton line is likely descended from lesser sons of some of these families who migrated to North America in search of their own lands and fortunes.

“Life on the USian frontier for most of my ancestors as they fanned out from Virginia into South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri, Texas, New Mexico, or Oklahoma was far from easy, secure, squeaky clean or pleasant much of the time. Many of them did not live long, and they were beset with all manner of problems on their farms, plantations and ranches–economic recessions and depressions, diseases of all sorts, psychological problems, hail, drought, sandstorms, hoof and mouth disease, slavery, the Civil War and much else. Dick thought his grandfather Matthew Henry Maury was killed by an African-American farm worker on a Mississippi plantation after the Civil War because Matthew insulted or made some sort of sexual advance toward the worker’s wife and he thought his mother was afterwards reared by her Gathright grandmother. He also said his Maury ancestors were either great or crazy. While his grandfather may or may not have been killed for this reason, his mother was not reared by her Gathright grandmother, at least not completely, although Dick did know something about what he was talking about. According to the 1900 US Census, Dick’s Maury grandmother formerly Virginia John Gathright Maury now listed as age 40 had remarried Thornton Walters born in Illinois and was living in Brazoria, Texas in a reconstituted family consisting of 10 children, six named Maury including Dick’s mother Katharine now age 21 and four children named Walters ranging in age from 9 to 23. According to the 1910 US Census Virginia John Gathright Maury Walters, widowed, now age 50 was back in Lauderdale County, Mississippi listed as a patient in some sort of hospital or nursing home that included 24 other patients, all unrelated females ranging in age from 18 to 66.

“On Ida’s side of the family her grandmother Mattie Elizabeth Allen Coston born in Texas about 1854 according to the 1870 US Census was living in a reconstituted family headed by John Doak married to Catharine Doak, presumably Mattie’s mother, including six children, four named Doak and two named Allen, Mattie and Robert. According to Ida at 90 years of age not many years ago at Willow Pond here in Statesboro, Georgia, Mattie “traveled all over” and had a good time at a ripe old age after her one and only Coston husband died of natural causes in East Texas. For whatever it’s worth, Ida was probably related to Doak Walker, the All-American football player at Southern Methodist University, not by blood though the Doak’s, but through her mother’s Walker line . She saw to it I had the same football jersey number in high school that Doak Walker had at SMU, Southern Methodist University, in Dallas, Texas, number 37.

“While some of Ida’s ancestors were intelligent, relatively well educated and successful athletically and professionally none to my knowledge equaled the intellectual achievements of some of Dick’s Maury and Gathright ancestors, causing conflict in the family. Ida resented her mother-in-law, Gammy everyone called her, “bragging about her ‘blue-blooded ancestors’,” considering her arrogant, eccentric, and misanthropic, which she was to some extent. She liked to use big words and talked with a weird uppity accent. Dick took Gammy and my brother and me to see the movie “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” by Jules Verne when I was about twelve years old. He asked her how she liked it, and she said, “It was all right, but I never got the synopsis of it.”

“My Maury ancestor making the most significant contribution of my family tree, one of my great grandfathers however many times removed, was the Reverend Doctor James Maury, an Anglican priest, who taught four American presidents, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe, all instrumental in creating the US Constitution. The Reverend Doctor Maury taught classics, manners and morals, mathematics, literature, history, and geography in what was considered the best boarding school in Albemarle County,Virginia, attended by Thomas Jefferson who lived with the Reverend Maury and his family two years as a child (Wikipedia.org).

“I heard rumors of this family history growing up as a child, but I had no factual knowledge of it. In general in our family talking about ancestors was taboo. It was as if my parents had no knowledge of anyone in their families back past their parents. I always thought they had something to hide, which I suppose they did, slavery. They seemed shamed by their family history, either ashamed of what their ancestors did, or ashamed their social positions in their societies were lower than the social positions their ancestors had in their societies, having been de-classed by the Civil War, with good riddance, in my opinion.”

Frank Parker’s computerized genealogical system does not do tracking in Europe, so I have no verifiable official data about how my Virginia ancestors got over here. Frank did find an interesting tidbit about one of my early Virginia Scottish great grandmothers, whose name was listed as Donnell on immigration papers. Frank’s anecdotal information however indicates she had changed her name from MacDonald to Donnell. One of my Georgia Scottish Heritage Society friends told me it was common for Scottish immigrants to Americanize their names trying to escape Old World clan competition and enmity in the New World. Frank found anecdotal data that one of my Scottish great grandfathers, a Watson, got to North America as a stowaway.

Some forty-five percent of the USian population called white now living in Southeast Georgia supposedly have Scottish ancestry, as no doubt do some percent of the population called black. This is probably also true to some degree throughout the South, including Northwest Texas. When I was about five years old I asked my mother what we were and she said, “Oh, I don’t know, Scotch-Irish I guess.”

I had my genes analyzed by Ancestry.com a few years ago and according to their findings my genes are similar to genes of humans living in Earthian geographic territories in the following proportions:  Scotland, 53%; England and Northwestern Europe, 30%; Wales, 11%; Ireland, 4%; Norway, 2%.

 I made mostly C’s in grade, junior, and high school, but did better in college. I was according to the Lubbock Avalanche Journal probably the youngest and smallest Class A high school starting quarterback in the United States in 1954, at age thirteen, one hundred ten pounds, five feet three inches tall. I played basketball on an athletic scholarship at Hardin-Simmons University two years before transferring to Texas Tech College (now university). I made three A’s in high school, in plane geometry and physics, winning a gold medal in a regional science fair for a project in which I explained in a paper and demonstrated how to generate and measure electricity with magnets and Ohm’s law. I also scored relatively high on aptitude tests administered by the county. In the 8th grade I scored as high in most subjects as juniors and seniors in high school on an achievement test administered by the county, despite making mostly C’s in my grade and junior high school classes. I had a 3.0 in economics in undergraduate school but did better in the doctoral program, graduating with a 3.67 grade point average in a program that included all business disciplines in which A’s were not easy to come by. One of my classmates who became the dean of a business school graduated with a 3.0. Despite scoring 840 on the Graduate Record Exam (GRE), at a time when 1000 was about average, Texas Tech accepted me provisionally into their doctoral program and gave me a part-time instructor position in economics that paid $3000 per academic year, enough for me to pay my way through the doctoral program and write my dissertation in three years, while living with my Coston grandparents.

I was working at a full time job in a Litton Industries electronics plant in Lubbock as a production control expediter and dispatcher and publishing my weekly newspaper the Wolfforth-Frenship Gazette when I took the Graduate Record Exam (the GRE), having stayed up most of the night before the exam putting out the paper. I fell asleep several times taking the exam, not thinking it was important, just something I had to do to get into graduate school, filling in the remaining blanks for the various timed sections without reading the questions. I saw the exam proctor, the head of the psychology department at Texas Tech at the time, staring at me in amazement when I woke up from one of those naps. Considering the GRE computerized grading system took off more points for questions answered wrong than for those left blank, I was lucky to have scored as high as 840.

I taught Eco 133, American Economic History, twelve times, two courses in the fall and spring semesters each academic year during 1966-69 at Texas Tech. I got pretty good at it by the end of my tenure there. A fellow doctoral student, who knew someone in the dean’s office, several years after we had graduated, told me I had scored high on student evaluations as a professor but had never been recognized for it because I was just a graduate student.

The Office of Manpower Evaluation and Research of the US Department of Labor awarded me a $6500 grant to write my dissertation in 1968, An Analysis of Rural Manpower Migration Patterns in the South Plains Region of Texas, free download copies of which are still available online from Texas Tech University.

I was hired at the associate professor rank after finishing my doctorate in 1970, skipping the assistant rank, at the University of Southwestern Louisiana, now Louisiana University–Lafayette, after completing my doctorate in business administration, management science major, economics minor, at Texas Tech, becoming a full professor at age thirty-six at Georgia Southern College (now university), where I was the senior professor of the business school for about fifteen years, carrying the mace as the senior professor of what is now Georgia Southern University for the spring graduation ceremony the year I retired in 2005.

I was the highest paid professor in the business school and maybe the second-highest-paid faculty member at Georgia Southern in 1970, behind Jim Oliver, in biology, who had a large grant for the study of ticks, when I started at age thirty, hired by President Pope Duncan.

My son Jonathan Walker Stapleton, my only child, from my first marriage to Virginia Marie Luchsinger during 1969-1984, was the Star Student for our Congressional District in Georgia in 1990, scoring 1520 on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) back in the days when 1600 was the maximum score. He maxed the math part of the Graduate Record Exam, the GRE, when he finished his undergraduate degree in bio-chemistry at Rice University in Houston, Texas in 1994, almost maxing the verbal part.

Jonathan is the inventor of Reptangles™, a plastic educational toy comprising twenty-four parts that snap together and pull apart to assemble into more than one hundred mathematically identifiable geometric shapes and symmetrical configurations, manufactured in China, licensed to, marketed, and distributed around Earth by the Fat Brain Toy Company. Reptangles™ have been demonstrated and explained on national TV by George Stephanopuolos, on ABC’s Good Morning America. Reptangles™ are no longer manufactured, after thousands of copies were sold, but can still be purchased on eBay and at other sites on the Internet. He is also the author of the Reptangles™ Exploration User Guide, which can also be found on the internet.

Jonathan is now a physics teacher at Essex High School and inventor living near Burlington, Vermont with his family. He is married to Renee Doney Stapleton, MD, PhD, a researcher in pulmonary medicine at the University of Vermont medical school. They have three children, Walker, Emmerson, and Orion. Walker recently graduated from the University of Vermont at age 21 with a master’s degree in accounting. He now works for a national accounting firm in Boston, having passed the first three parts of the CPA exam, waiting on the results for the fourth part. Emmerson just gradauated from high school and is now studying medicine and music at the University of Vermont. This past year she was the solo violinist of the Vermont Youth Symphony Orchestra. Orion, who also played the violin with the Vermont Youth Symphony Orchestra as a 7th grader is now in the 8th grade taking an advanced high school algebra course with high school students, ranking among the top three cross-country runners in Vermont junior high track and field.

For whatever it’s worth, while my parents and I seriously discussed political issues at the dinner table during my high school and college years neither of my parents as I recall ever said anything about who they voted for. To my knowledge neither of them had any interest in Democratic or Republican party-line politics.

Most likely a significant percentage of my hundreds of unknown and known relatives on the numerous branches down our family tree from today back to Virginia before the American Revolution in 1776 in the South of North America turned out to be hardcore redneck Republicans. I have been accused of being a redneck myself. My father in many ways was as fascist as you can get, telling me numerous times during my growing-up years, “There can be only one boss,” namely him. He ended several arguments I had with him enraged telling me, “If you don’t shut up, you’ve got me to kill,” swinging his clenched right fist in my face, which was not to be taken lightly. He had been a Golden Gloves boxer in high school.  He may have been the only boss bossing his employees during work hours, but he never really bossed me. I did what I had to do to survive subject to his group imago and personality as a dependent child, but after age 21 I was on my own.

Having the fate of being the castoff descendants of aristocrats who willed their estates to the eldest sons in their families in the Old World, some of my ancestors saw North America as a source of cheap land and a way to perpetuate their patriarchal scripting with large families, while escaping poverty, overpopulation, political injustice, and religious persecution and superstition in the Old World. The same would probably be true of some of my commoner ancestors, who saw the New World as a chance to own enough land on their own growing cotton in the South of North America to finance lifestyles somewhat similar to those of Old World hereditary aristocrats.

Some of them experienced success as they defined success in the so-called New World. Unfortunately the cheap North American land had to be conquered and stolen from its original owners, so some became Indian fighters; and getting control of relatively large plots of land in the South of North America where my parents, grandparents and great grandparents lived required cheap labor to make serious money growing cotton, so some of them owned slaves. Some of them claimed to oppose slavery and claimed to take good care of their slaves and treat them kindly and humanely given the laws and culture in which they lived. But this did not excuse the greed, harshness, and inhumanity required to own and employ slaves. Contrary to a good bit of contemporary story-telling slave-based life was not an easy life for most humans in the South, including humans who happened to be “white” and who had enough money, connections, or credit to purchase slaves. Life in the South of North America was full of moral and ethical conflicts and tradeoffs for slavers, who worried about their inmates on their prison farms getting sick, rebelling, running away, and turning violent. Participating in slavery caused white humans to get meaner, harder, and more hypocritical over time the farther West lesser sons moved every generation or so in search of new cheap land recently conquered and stolen from Indians. It’s a wonder the culture and process did not drive them crazier than they became, making it impossible for most of them to develop I’m OK–You’re OK life positions, causing them to operate with primarily Critical Parent and Adapted Child ego state energy, and adopt and enforce hard rigid doctrines and dogma, learning to live with little real fun, generally requiring the exclusion of Adult, Free Child, and Nurturing Parent ego state energy, obeying Don’t Think and Don’t Feel script injunctions.

This evolutionary process has culminated in today’s polarized I’m OK–You’re Not OK hyper-aggressive and competitive USian culture and economy, where another civil war and another world war have again become serious topics of conversation. While Biden has a more I’m OK–You’re OK life position than Trump, I’m OK–You’re Not OK fascist life positions have grown stronger and more prevalent among the general USian population since 1980, as I’m OK–You’re OK democratic processes have grown weaker.

Joe Biden at least socially comes across projecting an I’m OK–You’re OK life position. Donald Trump unfortunately unashamedly projects and has a life position of I’m OK, my cronies, lackeys, and knaves are OK; but you and your kind are not-OK; and we are going to make you and the world pay. Even more unfortunate for Spaceship Earth, Trump’s cronies Putin, Kim Jong Un, Netanyahu, Bolsonaro, and several others, also operate from this sort of life position. No kind of economic or political system will work for everyone if not-OK fascist dictators get control of them at the top.

Here is what Martin Groder, MD, the best transactional analysis teacher and mentor I learned with, at the Southeast Institute at Chapel Hill, NC in the late 1970s, taught about individual and group OKness that I called Groder’s People Map, in a passage I wrote and published in 2011 in Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds, pp. 148-150:

Martin Groder’s People Map

“Humans generally give little thought to what kind of human they are and where they fit in the spectrum of various types of humans. Innumerable philosophers, writers, social scientists, and others have categorized humans in various ways. Following is a schema developed by Martin Groder, MD, a psychiatrist, organizational development consultant, and entrepreneur (Groder, 1977). Groder developed this schema while working with hardcore inmates at the maximum security federal prison at Marion, Illinois in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. He was involved in a process of changing hard-core criminals into law-abiding citizens. Such a process would challenge the abilities of the most skillful and powerful of change agents.

“According to Groder, humans vary on two fundamental spatial dimensions. One dimension is Okness, which is estimated on the horizontal axis of Figure 1 shown in the Born to Win section of this book, showing points on a curve line the energy level and OKness level variables in two-dimensional space.

“People vary in terms of how OK they see, feel about, and experience, (1) themselves, (2) the other individual, (3) their group, (4) other groups, and (5) the world. In Groder’s terms, they are OK or not-OK with respect to I, You, We, They, and It (the world). Groder estimates how OK they are on each of these five existential dimensions on a scale of -1 to +1, -1 being as not-OK as possible and +1 being as OK as possible. Thus people with extremely high self-esteem might exist at the +1 level regarding themselves; someone with extremely low self-esteem might exist at the -1 level regarding themselves. People could exist at any level in between, at -.5, 0, +.25, etc. The same would be true of the positions of specific individuals with respect to buddies on a one-to-one basis, groups with which one belongs, other groups with which your group cooperates or competes, and the world in general. Summing the 5 existential OKness positions for an individual, I, You, We, They, and It, the highest possible OKness rating would be +5 and the lowest possible would be -5. A +5 person would have the highest possible feelings of Okness regarding his OKness, the OKness of his buddy, the OKness of his group, the OKness of other groups, and the OKness of the world. Such an individual would have very positive feelings and thoughts for self and others. On the other end of the spectrum, a -5 person would have the lowest possible feelings and thoughts for self and others. Very negative people tend to end up in prison. Very positive people tend to end up cultural heroes. Probably the most profitable attitude for an entrepreneur in a capitalistic economic system would be I’m OK, my employees are OK, my company is OK, the world is OK, but my competitors aren’t worth a damn, since this attitude would motivate his or her sales employees to steal business from competitors to increase the profits of the company.

“Entrepreneurs have higher energy levels than middle managers and normal people. It takes less energy to be a normal person than anything else. Entrepreneurs in Groder’s schema have approximately the same energy level on the vertical axis of Figure 1 as Monsters, the -3 OKness level convict leaders of other convicts. Monsters have the attitude “I’m OK, my buddy is OK, but everything else is not OK, and I am going to make the world pay.” According to Groder, it’s more difficult to change the energy level of a human than the OKness position. In rehabilitation work, Groder attempted to arc people across the gap of Figure 1, and make +3 OKness level entrepreneurs out of -3 monsters, +2 OKness middle managers out of -2 OKness creeps, slobs, lunch buckets, etc. Sometimes people arc across the gap the other way. Honest entrepreneurs can turn criminal. Entrepreneurs are winner-survivors; Monsters are loser-survivors. Winners achieve goals and objectives; losers do not.”

There is no doubt that Trump has a high energy level, but unfortunately he could become a -3 Monster. Maybe he already is. He is a convicted felon, after all. Make no mistake, Trump is a loser as a real entrepreneur, having failed based on rigorous metrics at most of his ventures, making little or no money the old fashioned way, pleasing customers providing ethical and competitive goods and services.  What he unfortunately is is a winner at manipulating suckers in con Games and reality shows. If only he could have encountered Martin Groder one on one when he was younger the current Earthian human OKness level might be a little higher than it is. The same goes for Trump’s new buddy and partner in sleaze and grift Elon Musk.

A bitter pill to swallow found embedded in my books Business Voyages and Born to Learn is that everything that happens is either predetermined or accidental, as the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein propositioned in his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and therefore no one is to blame or praise, since everything that happens is caused by accidental or inevitable concatenations of infinite cause-effect chains. Both Trump and Musk probably had parents who abandoned them in early childhood, causing them to turn out like they have.

Believing and acting otherwise will perpetuate the same sorry I’m OK–You’re Not OK life position that has bedeviled humankind since time immemorial contributing to if not causing repeats of historical abominations such as genocides, wars, slavery, economic depressions, famines, mental illnesses, and social collapses.

One might think with ancestors like mine I ought to be rounded up and summarily shot to compensate for their sins; but I don’t think it was my fault.  I did not make up the rules for how humans or human affairs happen on Earth.  They happen gradually and inexorably from generation to generation according to genetic codes and script messages passed down to children from parents biologically and from all ego states, socially and psychologically, like runners passing a baton in a track race.

Richard John Stapleton, PhD, CTA is a transactional analyst, writer, editor, publisher, and emeritus professor of management living with his emeritus assistant professor of mathematics wife, Deborah Coleman Stapleton, BSED, MED, MEDS, MSOR, also descended from cotton farmers, in their Cedar Hill home, surrounded by fairways of the Georgia Southern University golf course, six miles south of Statesboro, Georgia, surrounded by cotton farms and fields.