This is a story about two kinds of lies: Trump lying about his not possessing classified US government documents in his Mar a Largo “fort” and Trump lying in a recorded statement that was aired on CNN about the existence of a classified document in his possession that might have been fake. It’s a story about a liar’s pants on fire.
The story started during Trump’s last week in office as USian president caused by the possibility of a war being started against Iran so Trump could stay in office. Pentagon chief of staff General Milley was apparently worried at the time that Trump might try to do this, and Trump said in the statement aired by CNN after leaving office that Milley was thinking about invading Iran as proved by a document he waved or flapped in his hand, so listeners could hear the sound the paper made as it was flapped, proving a paper document existed. Trump said he could not show the document to them because it was classified, thereby proving he knew he possessed after leaving office a sensitive classified US government document that could not be shared because it would pose a national security risk.
The Jack Smith investigation subpoenaed the CNN-aired document, prompting Trump’s lawyers to reply that they could not furnish the document to the investigators because they could not “find” the document, raising questions such as whether the paper Trump held and flapped about in the recorded statement contained classified information, or was it a fake classified document containing no relevant information, just a new way of lying invented by Trump to cover his ass about thinking about invading Iran to give him an excuse to declare martial law during his last week in office as a last resort to remain USian president indefinitely?
Or was it a real classified document that Trump or his lawyers burned or shredded after it was aired by CNN, having figured out by then that the existence of the document put Trump in a light as bad or worse than he was in had the document not existed?
If so, Trump’s lawyers are now not technically lying about not being able to “find” the document that Trump flapped around in the recording so listeners could hear the sound caused by the flapping, thereby proving he at least had some sort of paper in his hands. The basic facts of this case were discussed on MSNBC June 2, 2023.
The most sickening piece of this sordid insane story is the implication that Trump and General Milley likely did consider the possibility of Trump trying to start a war against Iran to keep himself in office his last week in office, which would have been treason against the US and a crime against humanity.
The story may boil down to he said—he said, but it seems to me any communication between Trump and Milley about the US invading Iran to keep Trump in office happening during Trump’s last week in office, leaked to the public, would have been a security risk for the US and Spaceship Earth.
How any Earthian human could now consider voting into office again as USian president in 2024 the sociopathic Earthian human Trump, after having been exposed to his lies, misdemeanors, probable crimes, and threats, almost every day, for over six years, as a sitting and former USian president, wasting millions, if not billions, maybe trillions, of dollars, is unfathomable!
About the Author
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, Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Alabama.
This 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 roles of Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim were largely banished from the course learning process.
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.
He has 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 policies and practices.
Stapleton 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).
He was a Harvard Case Method teacher who never went to Harvard, having learned how the 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.
He 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).
He taught his own case method track at the undergraduate level in the management department of the business school at Georgia Southern University offering four or five different elective case method courses each academic year (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.
His students 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 at age thirty-six.
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 so-called objective multiple-choice tests.
Only former students who had worked in the real world 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” 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.
The 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 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.
Stapleton 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 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 (April 7, 2023) been cited as a reference in 85 refereed journal articles concerned about the ethics of student evaluations in several academic disciplines, including ten new citations since April 2021.
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.
Raising-the-debt ceiling-time in the USian congress is when repugnant Repug and dim Dem congressmice come out to play when the cat president is weakest, trying to siphon money from the USian federal government real and funny money revenue stream for their selfish hides, threatening to plunge the USian economy into chaos for everyone, playing DEBT CEILING.
It’s quite a Game these chaps play.
DEBT CEILING is an all-encompassing variant of the transactional analysis psychological Game called COPS AND ROBBERS that entails supposed good-guy Rescuers incessantly trying to catch and punish supposed bad-guy Persecutors while seeing themselves as Victims.
Playing DEBT CEILING causes the USian Federal debt to increase more in the year following the year in which it is played than in other years because the Victim cat, the president, cannot veto unnecessary pork barrel demands for more spending or tax cuts by bad-guy Repug and Dem congressmice and their supporters without causing the USian government to default on its debt.
There is no such thing as a USian debt ceiling. It’s just a temporary number concocted to exist for a while that will have to be raised again with a new round of DEBT CEILING Game-playing when the actual USian federal debt expands up to that number, disingenuously called a debt ceiling, because doing otherwise would be disastrous.
The USian federal debt would expand less over time as matters now stand if USian bad-guy congressmice would stop playing their disingenuous DEBT CEILING Game. Rescuer bad-guy congressmice are socially saying they are imposing their debt ceiling process to make it harder for Persecutor bad-guy congressmice to increase the USian budget deficit and debt, when they are psychologically doing it to make it easier for themselves to increase the deficit and debt, to enrich themselves in the short run with more pork barrel spending or tax cuts, regardless of the consequences for Victim USian citizens in the long run.
As matters now stand, the USian government has no choice but to keep on kicking its budget and debt can of worms down the road every time the last so-called debt ceiling number is reached—until all hell breaks loose—if significant changes are not made in its economic-political-military modus operandi.
Eric Berne achieved fame with his best-selling book, Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships. In it, he defines a psychological Game as follows:
“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 (psychological (emphasis added)) game, on the other hand, is basically dishonest, and the outcome has a dramatic, as distinct from merely exciting quality (Berne, 1970a).”
Games such as football, basketball, poker, and chess are games with a little g. They are honest and overt. Everybody knows the rules and referees make sure the fair rules are impartially imposed on all players.
The basic formula for psychological Games (Berne, 1970a) is :
Two sets of complementary transactions are going on at once—a spoken social level overt set and a psychological level non-verbal covert set.
In general, Games take place outside the awareness of the Adult Ego State, which unfortunately means Game players do not know they are playing Games. They have been playing Games for so long they think Game-playing is just natural.
The Con is the basic invitation the Game stimulator throws out; the Gimmick is some trick or bait, that causes the responder, sometimes referred to as the “mark,” to respond and get hooked, much like a trout rising to take a fisherman’s artificial fly.
Once the responder is hooked, after a series of Adult transactions, which may require a minute or so, or several days, or perhaps months, or years, surprises will occur.
The Game stimulator and responder will switch roles—Persecutor, Rescuer, or Victim—from whatever role they started with to a different role, and the Game stimulator will begin to cross the original Adult-Adult transactions with a heavy Parent-Child cross.
One of the most common psychological Games identified by transactional analysts played by Earthian humans in general is called NIGYSOB, NOW I’VE GOT YOU, YOU SOB, and for sure it is one of the most common Games played in governments.
Move 1 in a NIGYSOB Game will be concerned with some Adult-sounding faults, mistakes, or deficiencies the Game stimulator has detected.
At move 1 the stimulator says something to the effect that such and such is a problem, which may be true. The responder in response to move 1 will then ask what specifically is wrong, etc. Several transactions may then happen at the Adult level dealing with what appear to be Adult data and information in back and forth transactions on Adult-Adult complementary stimulus-response transactional vectors.
At the same time the above transaction is happening socially, another unspoken transaction is happening between the Parent Ego State of the Game stimulator and the Child ego state of the Game responder at the psychological ulterior level. The Parent-Child non-verbal message is an angry variant of “It’s your fault, kid, and you’re badly out of line.” The Child-Parent response is a variant of “Don’t give me a spanking, who cares, etc.”
In a few minutes, or perhaps, days or weeks, or years the Game stimulator will decide the Game responder has been securely hooked, and now it’s time to go for the Payoff.
At payoff-time the Game stimulator will switch from Rescuer to Persecutor and move the social level message away from the Adult data, the issue, or the problem after cathecting a heavy Parent ego state. At this stage of the Game the stimulator at the social level will cross the previous Adult-Adult transactions with a heavy overt verbal Parent-Child transaction that lets the responder know socially in various ways, means, and words that “Now I’ve got you, you SOB.”
The psychological Payoff for a NIGYSOB stimulator is a feeling of triumph or being “one up.” The payoff for the Game responder in a NIGYSOB Game will to feel humiliated and dejected, and perhaps rejected. The Game stimulator psychologically wanted all along to feel superior and reign supreme. A major reason NIGYSOB players play NIGYSOB is to feel justified in venting their anger, which they have pent up inside themselves.
Some people go through these antics on an over-and-over again basis. I think many people assume that all people are NIGYSOB players, since “one-up” Game playing is so widespread. In order to gain psychological satisfaction from playing NIGYSOB as a responder, you need to be a KICK ME or COPS AND ROBBERS player. Some Earthian humans might psychologically gain satisfaction from being manipulated, debased, or discounted.
People play psychological Games in general to get structure, stimulus, and recognition. If you grew up in a family with NIGYSOB-playing parents in order to get along in the family system you had to learn to tolerate NIGYSOB playing, and it’s likely you too became a NIGYSOB player, having learned how to do it from your parents.
All normal Earthian humans like to be liked, recognized, and paid-attention-to, and negative strokes are better than no strokes at all.
Getting attention and strokes, or units of recognition, is another major reason people play Games. Be it noted that playing Games as a politician in a government is one of the surest ways of getting lots of strokes. In general the more extreme the politician the more strokes s/he gets. Trump got and gets more strokes some days playing Games in politics than normal Earthian humans get in a lifetime conducting pastimes, rituals, and activities. He thrives on drama strokes; he’s a stroke addict.
There are positive, negative, conditional and unconditional strokes. Conditional strokes, such as receiving good or bad grades in school, or receiving awards in sports for being the highest scorer on the team, are earned and merited. Positive and negative unconditional strokes are bestowed and inflicted on others just because they are liked or disliked.
Other psychological Games often played in governments are MINE’S BETTER; BLEMISH; GEE, YOU’RE WONDERFUL SUPPORTERS; AIN’T IT AWFUL, GREENHOUSE; DO ME SOMETHING; I’M ONLY TRYING TO HELP YOU; IF ONLY IT WEREN’T FOR YOU; YOU STARTED IT; and, the most deleterious Game of all, LET’S YOU AND THEM FIGHT.
Psychological Game-playing happens in all organizations—families, churches, schools, small businesses, large corporations, and governments. They are one of several ways of structuring, or spending, time.
Eric Berne in his book What Do You Do After You Say Hello: The Psychology of Human Destiny (Berne, 1970b) said you can spend most of your time engaged in Withdrawal, retiring into your cave, talking to yourself inside your own head researching and creating things; Pastimes, small talk, gossip, talking about sports, hobbies, etc. with others; Rituals, reciting the same things over-and-over again with others, performing mental and physical movements required for eating, drinking, sleeping, praying, worshiping, teaching, following precedents, etc.; Activities, doing things in the real world, working, creating, changing things, solving problems; Playing Games, structuring your time trying to take advantage of others and make fools out of them; and Intimacy, transacting with others in Game-free ways, joyously and honestly feeling, thinking, communicating, and having fun after cathecting Free Child Ego States.
Time structuring possibilities are ordered in the above paragraph from low to high based on the likelihood of them producing strokes if conducted. How they will be conducted in what proportions is determined by the way individuals and organizations were scripted throughout their lives in the evolutionary cause-effect chains causing their personas, feelings, thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors to happen.
Some transactional analysts believe it’s possible for Earthian humans and organizations to change their time structuring patterns and life scripts by somehow acquiring better script messages than those that naturally happened.
Believers in free will would probably think this should be easy. Believers in compatibilism might think it might or might not be possible. Strict determinists would think it’s just a pipe dream.
I became a certified transactional analyst in the 1970s preparing myself to do a better job of teaching organizational development in a business school and consulting with organizations in the real world. I was successful in some cases, but most organizations were not interested in what I had to offer as a TA consultant. Unfortunately, in my opinion most organizations around Spaceship Earth are more in need of organizational development work now than they were in 1980. It seems to me USian culture was more intellectual and open to new learning in the 1960s and 1970s than it is now, having become more and more anti-intellectual, authoritarian, intolerant, fascistic, revanchist, and violent, starting with the USian Repug Reagan government in 1980. Seems to me the need for well-functioning governments around Spaceship Earth is greater now than ever.
Regardless, it seems to me governments are the best hope for eradicating the two modern horsemen of the apocalypse: GWCC, global warming and climate change, and MNWP, militarization and nuclear weapons proliferation. Unfortunately, these existential threats are not psychological Games.
The USian political system and government, and most Earthian governments, it seems to me, are cesspools of Game-playing. Earthian humans running them structure most of their time playing Games and conforming to script messages in pastimes, rituals and procedures dealing with constituents, politicians, political parties, voters, bureaucracies, large corporations, and other countries that are generally out to control and consume more than their fair share of finite Earthian resources.
After they say hello after they get elected new Earthian governments mostly structure their time busying themselves conducting pastimes, rituals, procedures, and ceremonies, and playing Games, wasting most of their time and energy in entropic time structuring instead of doing real work; a minuscule fraction of their time is structured conducting work activities that might solve systemic and existential problems.
Most likely former USian Repug president Trump’s surprise switch and cross January 6, 2021 in the USian capitol building attempting to take over the USian government as a fascist dictator were moves in one of the biggest NIGYSOB Games of Earthian human history, leading to what he hoped would be a glorious payoff.
READING:
Berne, Eric. The Structure and Dynamics of Organizations and Groups. New York: Grove Press, 1963.
Berne, Eric. Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships. New York: Grove Press, 1970a.
Berne, Eric. What Do You Do After You Say Hello? The Psychology of Human Destiny. New York: Grove Press, 1970b.
Stapleton, Richard John. De-Gaming Teaching and Learning: How to Motivate Learners and Invite OKness. Statesboro, GA: Effective Learning Publications, 1979.
Stapleton, Richard John. Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds. Statesboro, Georgia: Effective Learning Publications, 2012.
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, Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Alabama.
This 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 roles of Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim were largely banished from the course learning process.
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.
He has 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 policies and practices.
Stapleton 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).
He was a Harvard Case Method teacher who never went to Harvard, having learned how the 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.
He 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).
He taught his own case method track at the undergraduate level in the management department of the business school at Georgia Southern University offering four or five different elective case method courses each academic year (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.
His students 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 at age thirty-six.
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 so-called objective multiple-choice tests.
Only former students who had worked in the real world 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” 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.
The 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 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.
Stapleton 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 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 (April 7, 2023) been cited as a reference in 85 refereed journal articles concerned about the ethics of student evaluations in several academic disciplines, including ten new citations since April 2021.
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.
Raising-the-debt ceiling-time in the USian congress is when congressmice come out to play when the cat president is weakest, trying to siphon money from the USian federal govt real and funny money revenue stream for their selfish hides, threatening to plunge the USian economy into chaos for everyone, playing DEBT CEILING.
It’s quite a Game these chaps play.
DEBT CEILING is an all-encompassing variant of the transactional analysis psychological Game called COPS AND ROBBERS that entails supposed good-guy Rescuers incessantly trying to catch and punish supposed bad-guy Persecutors while seeing themselves as Victims.
Playing DEBT CEILING causes the USian Federal debt to increase more in the year following the year in which it is played than in other years because the Victim cat, the president, cannot veto unnecessary pork barrel demands for more spending or tax cuts by bad-guy congressmice and their supporters without causing the USian government to default on its debt.
There is no such thing as a USian debt ceiling. It’s just a temporary number concocted to exist for a while that will have to be raised again with a new round of DEBT CEILING Game-playing when the actual USian federal debt expands up to that toothless number, disingenuously called a debt ceiling, because doing otherwise would be disastrous.
The USian federal debt would expand less over time as matters now stand if USian repugnant Repub and dim Dem bad-guy congressmice would stop playing their disingenuous DEBT CEILING Game. Rescuer bad-guy congressmice are socially saying they are imposing their debt ceiling process to make it harder for Persecutor bad-guy congressmice to increase the USian budget deficit and debt, when they are psychologically doing it to make it easier for themselves to increase the deficit and debt, to enrich themselves in the short run with more pork barrel spending or tax cuts, regardless of the consequences for Victim USian citizens in the long run.
As matters now stand, the USian government has no choice but to keep on kicking its budget and debt can of worms down the road every time the last so-called debt ceiling number is reached — until all hell breaks loose — if significant changes are not made in its economic-political-military modus operandi.
Eric Berne achieved fame with his best-selling book, Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships. In it, he defines a psychological Game as follows:
“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 (psychological (emphasis added)) game, on the other hand, is basically dishonest, and the outcome has a dramatic, as distinct from merely exciting quality (Berne, 1970a).”
Games such as football, basketball, poker, and chess are games with a little g. They are honest and overt. Everybody knows the rules and referees make sure the fair rules are impartially imposed on all players.
The basic formula for psychological Games (Berne, 1970a) is :
Two sets of complementary transactions are going on at once — a spoken level overt set and a psychological level non-verbal covert set.
In general, Games take place outside the awareness of the Adult Ego State, which unfortunately means Game players do not know they are playing Games. They have been playing Games for so long they think Game-playing is just natural.
The Con is the basic invitation the Game starter throws out; the Gimmick is some trick or bait, that causes the responder, sometimes referred to as the “mark,” to respond and get hooked, much like a trout rising to take a fisherman’s artificial fly.
Once the responder is hooked, after a series of transactions, which may require a minute or so, or several days, or perhaps months, or years, surprises will occur.
The Game starter will begin to cross transactions, and the starter and responder will switch roles — Persecutor, Rescuer, or Victim — from whatever role they started with to a different role.
One of the most common psychological Games identified by transactional analysts played by Earthian humans in general is called NIGYSOB, NOW I’VE GOT YOU, YOU SOB, and for sure it is one of the most common Games played in governments.
Move 1 in a NIGYSOB Game will be concerned with some Adult-sounding faults, mistakes, or deficiencies the Game starter has detected in the Game responder.
At move 1 the starter says something to the effect that such and such is a problem, which may be true. The responder in response to move 1 will then ask what specifically is wrong, etc. Several transactions may then happen at the Adult level dealing with what appear to be Adult data and information in back and forth transactions on Adult-Adult complementary transactional vectors.
At the same time the above transaction is happening socially, another transaction is happening between the Parent Ego State of the Game starter and the Child ego state of the Game responder at the psychological ulterior level. The Parent-Child message is an angry variant of “You’re seriously out of line, kid.” The Child-Parent response is a variant of “Don’t give me a spanking, who cares, etc.”
In a few minutes, or perhaps, days or weeks, the Game starter will decide the Game responder has been securely hooked, and now it’s time to go for the Payoff.
What the starter will do at payoff-time is switch the social level message away from the Adult data, the issue, or the problem and move into a Parent ego state. At this stage of the Game the starter at the social level will cross the previous Adult-Adult transactions with a heavy Parent-Child transaction that lets the responder know in various ways, means, and words that “Now I’ve got you, you SOB.”
The Payoff for a NIGYSOB player is a feeling of triumph or being “one up.” One of the main reasons NIGYSOB players play NIGYSOB is to feel justified in venting their anger, which they have pent up inside themselves. The payoff for the Game responder in a NIGYSOB Game will to feel humiliated and dejected, and perhaps rejected.
Some people go through these antics on an over-and-over again basis. I think many people assume that all people are NIGYSOB players, since “one-up” Game playing is so widespread. In order to gain psychological satisfaction from playing NIGYSOB as a responder, you need to be a KICK ME or COPS AND ROBBERS player. Yes, some Earthian humans psychologically enjoy being manipulated, debased, and discounted.
People play psychological Games in general to get structure, stimulus, and recognition. If you grew up in a family with NIGYSOB-playing parents in order to get along in the family system you had to learn to tolerate NIGYSOB playing. All normal Earthian humans like to be liked, recognized, and paid-attention-to, and negative strokes are better than no strokes at all.
Other psychological Games often played in governments are MINE’S BETTER; GEE, YOU’RE WONDERFUL SUPPORTERS; BLEMISH; AIN’T IT AWFUL; GREENHOUSE; DO ME SOMETHING; I’M ONLY TRYING TO HELP YOU; YOU STARTED IT; IF ONLY IT WEREN’T FOR YOU; and probably the most dangerous government Game of all, LET’S YOU AND THEM FIGHT.
Psychological Game-playing goes on in all organizations — families, churches, schools, small businesses, large corporations, and in governments. They are one of several ways of structuring, or spending, time. Eric Berne in his book What Do You Do After You Say Hello: The Psychology of Human Destiny (Berne, 1970b) said you can spend most of your time engaged in Withdrawal, retiring into your cave, talking to yourself while researching and creating things in your own head; Pastimes, small talk, gossip, talking about sports, hobbies, etc.; Rituals, doing the same things over-and-over again, eating, drinking, sleeping, praying, worshiping, teaching, acting out ceremonial roles in governments, etc.; Activities, doing things in the real world, working, creating, changing things, solving problems; Playing Games, structuring your time trying to take advantage of others and make fools out of them; and Intimacy, transacting with others in Game-free ways, joyously and honestly feeling, thinking, communicating, having fun by cathecting Free Child Ego States.
I became a certified transactional analyst in the 1970s preparing myself to do a better job of teaching organizational development in a business school and consulting with organizations in the real world. I was successful in some cases, but most organizations were not interested in what I had to offer applying transactional analysis concepts and techniques. Since about 1980 USian culture became increasingly anti-intellectual, having little interest in abstract concepts and techniques. Unfortunately, today organizations around Spaceship Earth are more in need of organizational development work than they were in 1980, especially governments, since governments have more power, resources, and responsibility than other organizations for eradicating the two modern horsemen of the apocalypse: GWCC, global warming and climate change and MNWP, militarization and nuclear weapons proliferation. These existential threats are not psychological Games.
Unfortunately, the USian political system and government, and most Earthian governments, are cesspools of Game-playing. Earthian humans running them structure most of their time playing Games and conforming to scripted precedents in pastimes, rituals and procedures dealing with constituents, politicians, political parties, voters, bureaucracies, large corporations, and other countries that are generally out to control and consume more than their fair share of finite Earthian resources. After they say hello when they get elected they mostly waste their time busying themselves in trivial personal time structuring.
READING:
Berne, Eric. The Structure and Dynamics of Organizations and Groups. New York: Grove Press, 1963.
Berne, Eric. Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships. New York: Grove Press, 1970a.
Berne, Eric. What Do You Do After You Say Hello? The Psychology of Human Destiny. New York: Grove Press, 1970b.
Stapleton, R. J. De-Gaming Teaching and Learning: How to Motivate Learners and Invite OKness. Statesboro, GA: Effective Learning Publications, 1979.
Stapleton, R. J. Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds. Statesboro, Georgia: Effective Learning Publications, 2012.
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, Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Alabama.
This 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 roles of Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim were largely banished from the course learning process.
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.
He has 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 policies and practices.
Stapleton 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).
He was a Harvard Case Method teacher who never went to Harvard, having learned how the 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.
He 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).
He taught his own case method track at the undergraduate level in the management department of the business school at Georgia Southern University offering four or five different elective case method courses each academic year (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.
His students 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 at age thirty-six.
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 so-called objective multiple-choice tests.
Only former students who had worked in the real world 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” 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.
The 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 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.
Stapleton 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 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 (April 7, 2023) been cited as a reference in 85 refereed journal articles concerned about the ethics of student evaluations in several academic disciplines, including ten new citations since April 2021.
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.
THE EARTHIAN, Number Forty, April 6, 2023, Effective Learning Publications, https://blog.effectivelearning.net/ , 32 East Main Street, Statesboro, Georgia, USA, Richard John Stapleton, Writer, Editor & Publisher, Copyright 2023, All Rights Reserved
ASK MORE WHAT YOUR COUNTRY CAN DO FOR ALL EARTHIAN HUMANS—TO MINIMIZE THE PROBABILITY OF EARTHIAN HUMAN EXTINCTION—CAUSED BY GLOBAL WARMING AND CLIMATE CHANGE (GWCC) AND/OR MILITARIZATION AND NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROLIFERATION (MNWP)
AN EARTHIAN ELDER SPEAKS
“So, I guess what I’m saying is that, as we can establish that the earth is a sphere, and thus finite, then growth in your population and artifacts must have limits. And, your lack of a social-economic system…
AN EARTHIAN HUMAN TELLS IT LIKE SHE THINKS IT IS, WHICH IT PROBABLY IS…
“To scale the pinnacles of corporate, political or military power in the United States requires certain rigid deficiencies of character, specifically the absence of compassion, decency and humanity. In their personal lives, powerful individuals may possess these qualities, but as an elite class, they lack them utterly. How else to explain the abandoned cruelty of U.S. foreign policy since 1945, the wars, with napalm and Agent Orange in Vietnam, depleted uranium and white phosphorus in Iraq, the massive bombing campaigns that destroyed 85 percent of all buildings in Korea, to say nothing of the deliberate destruction of Iraq and Vietnam, the millions upon millions of dead all over the planet, the regime changes, setting countless countries back, developmentally, decades, even centuries, and installing fascist rulers throughout what used to be called the Third World?
“True, a president, four-star general or corporate chieftain can be a nice guy, somebody you’d like to have a beer with, someone who’s polite, cultured, agreeable. But to get to where they got in this system, they did things that are unforgi…
1 — Observations and Analyses of Current Earthian Human Existential States of Affairs by Earthian Humans Stationed around Spaceship Earth, Cathecting all Ego States Feeling, Thinking, and Writing
2 — A Posting by a Hypothetical Exonexus Observer from a Planet Beyond the Earthian Solar System
3 — On the Need to Co-Construct a Sustainable Long Run Earthian Political-Economic-Management System
4 — A Democratic Earthian Game-Free Case Method Teaching and Learning Process for Producing Democratic Discussions, Learning, and Policy Formulation Around Spaceship Earth
April 6, 2023
I had about decided this Bragg investigation was just another nothing burger like the pusillanimous Mueller, January 6th Committee, and Garland investigations, all sound and no fury. The Bragg investigation and indictment in the Manhattan District of New York have restored some of my previous respect for and faith in the USian rule of law. I had begun to think USian law-enforcers were very good at bullying, arresting, prosecuting, indicting, and imprisoning poor and hapless young black and white males and females for petty theft and drug selling but too cowardly to prosecute a dangerous older white male con artist with access to serious money and good lawyers such as the law-disrespecting playground bully Donald Trump. Hallelujah. Apparently, the Bragg investigators uncovered and developed facts and reasoning they think prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the hush money paid to Stormy Daniel and at least one other woman was not merely to make sure Trump’s wife would not learn about one more act of adultery…
I’m not for “overthrowing” the existing economic and social order. I’m for evolving a better one, peacefully, ASAP. How to bring that about is the question. Violent revolution is not the answer. All violence in the form of all-out war does is temporarily tear down the existing economic and social order, doing no permanent good. Oligarchies just start over again rising from the ashes and evolve the same sort of top-down tyranny as the one that just got torn down, which is in turn also ultimately torn down. Unfortunately, GWCC and MNWP in the current age may have made it inevitable that the existing economic and social order will be torn down, while this time around eliminating the possibility of a new Earthian human economic and social order rising from the ashes, since Earthian humans will have been rendered extinct. Comment by RJS
Ben Barnes, a Texas state legislator, was a crony of John Connolly and a major player in Texas politics. Connolly was a Texas governor and a US sec of treasury under Nixon, who was shot in the front seat of the same car in Dallas, Texas as USian president John F. Kennedy in 1963, when JFK was assassinated in the back seat. I was working as an expediter and dispatcher in production control with an undergraduate degree in economics from Texas Tech in a Litton industries plant in Lubbock, Texas that assembled electronic components for USian military aircraft guidance and control systems one evening in 1965 when Barnes and Connolly came strolling through the plant shaking hands with everybody. The plant was put there by Tex Thornton, originally from Stamford, Texas, the Litton Industries founder, and an ex crony of Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam War secretary of defense Robert McNamara. Both Thornton and McNamara were Harvard Business School graduates who worked as whiz kids in production control at Ford Motor Company for a while. They were all flying high back in those days. I was hired at Litton by a Harvard Business School graduate. A few months later he fired me. He said I was too sensitive to the needs of people for production control work, telling me I ought to get into something like personnel. Basically, he was right, and he did me a favor firing me when he did from the ill-scripted Litton plant, saving me months and maybe years of wasted time. I worked there seven months, learning a lot that I did not want to know. The HBS-educated fellow who hired and fired me left Litton himself a few months later, taking a new job with the international management consulting firm Booze Allen Hamilton. Comment by RJS
“After the Cold War’s end, a small circle of policymakers and academics calling themselves neoconservatives argued that the United States, rather than drawing down, should wield its now mostly unchallenged power to enforce an era of ‘global benevolent hegemony.’ The United States’ military dominance, rooted in American ideals, would smash the last vestiges of despotism from the world, allowing democracy and peace to flourish. Any resistance, they warned, however small or remote, was a threat to the entire American-led order.”
I remember when Putin announced the development of their new hypersonic missiles in 2018. USian mainstream media have done a good job of lulling USians into a sense of complacency about the danger of these missiles by not saying much if anything about them. Apparently, these hypersonic missiles can destroy aircraft carriers without using nukes. If this Croat admiral is competent and honest, Russia can sink all USian sailing aircraft carriers in a heartbeat by shooting off hypersonic missiles from as far away as two thousand miles from submarines and other launch vehicles. Comment by RJS
“With the world only a few tenths of a degree away from the globally accepted goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times, scientists stressed a sense of urgency. The goal was adopted as part of the 2015 Paris climate agreement and the world has already warmed 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit).”
2 — A Posting by a Hypothetical Exonexus Observer from a Planet Beyond the Earthian Solar
The poor Earthian humans are enthralled, manipulated, and in various degrees controlled by their leaders in some two hundred countries aboard Spaceship Earth. The leaders became leaders because of being caused to be leaders by concatenations of unbroken cause-effect chains resulting after our universe started evolving some thirteen billion years ago in the infinity of time and space.
Leaders are generally products of the same sorts of differentiated configurations of cause-effect chains as differentiated followers and members in differentiated countries. All Earthian humans are all doing what they were caused to do in their daily lives starting at birth.
Earth as a planet was formed about 4.5 billion years ago and has undergone innumerable transformations in the meantime. Humanoid creatures have been aboard Spaceship Earth for some two million years, and they too have undergone numerous evolutionary changes.
Unfortunately, Earthian humans have now reached a precarious and dangerous stage in their evolution as biological creatures. After slowly evolving more and more accurate, complex, and powerful understandings, technologies, and ways of life for two million years on Earth, during the last two hundred years Earthian humans evolved new technological devices at exponential rates that enabled them to increase the overly-fecund Earthian human population of Earth so much that they now threaten not only to destroy their own existence as a species aboard Spaceship Earth but also the existence of most other species alive on Earth.
Keeping eight billion or so Earthian humans alive on Earth has required so many goods and services to be produced to satisfy human biological and psychological needs and wants and so much carbon-based fuel to be burned to produce the goods that the climate of Spaceship Earth has been altered by carbon dioxide gas released into the Earthian atmosphere in large-enough quantities to cause extra heat to be trapped on Earth causing the mean Earthian temperature to increase at a yearly rate that threatens to destroy Earthian human life as it now exists, within centuries, if not decades.
Unfortunately, Earthian humans cannot determine exactly how long this catastrophic scenario will take to unfold, even after an Internet search, since information sources show average Earthian temperatures in both Celsius and Fahrenheit and use different base years, different assumptions about causes of rates of change, and changing rates of change in calculating average Earthian temperature.
However, one can build a case based on available Internet data that it will take over 35 years for the mean Earthian temperature to rise enough to cause the Earthian polar ice caps to melt causing enough sea level rise to displace billions of Earthian humans living on sea coasts and to cause enough decrease in food production to cause billions of Earthian humans to starve—if Earthian humans do not significantly change in the meantime their life scripts, technological processes, and political and economic systems.
Unfortunately, Earthian humans have developed technological knowledge that has enabled them to produce over 10,000 nuclear weapons that could destroy human life aboard Spaceship Earth if dropped and detonated on defined enemies around Spaceship Earth, as they have the capability to do.
Earthian countries dependent on fossil fuel energy in the short run are pitted in a zero-sum struggle for control of oil and gas supplies around Earth, with the two largest military nations on Earth possessing over ninety percent of the nuclear weapons now threatening one another in a war they started in a minor country, a pawn in their Earthian game of chess, a tissue-tearing psychological Game in this case called KING OF THE MOUNTAIN by Earthian humans, caused by egoistic leaders and top members of the two countries who are primarily concerned about maintaining and enhancing their personal power, wealth, prestige, lifestyles, and legacies.
Top leaders of one of these countries, fighting in the pawn country with non-nuclear weapons so far, have publicly declared they will fire and detonate some nuclear weapons if necessary to prevent their being defeated and humiliated in the war/Game started in the minor pawn country. Hopefully this is just a bluff in another reincarnation of the Earthian human psychological Game known as CHICKEN.
As dangerous as this psychological high-stakes Game-playing is most Earthian humans find it stimulating, interesting, patriotic, heroic, and so forth in their nightly news, a release from the normal grind of their boring and banal daily routines and rituals, and their pastimes, jobs, activities, and intimacies.
The new war Game in the minor country is a helluva way to generate strokes, aka units of recognition, to get attention, to get recognized, stimulated, and affirmed, now that some Earthian human strokes, nuclear strokes, have become so powerful they can cause the elimination of all Earthian human strokes forever.
The probability of a MNWP catastrophe at any time has significantly increased in recent years.
3 — On Co-Constructing a Sustainable Long Run Earthian Political-Economic-Management System
Establishing democracy chapters around Spaceship Earth as recommended in the Effective Learning Publications novel As the Rooster Crows Earthian OKness Increases might develop consensual answers regarding existential matters from the bottom up that might help save Spaceship Earth. These ideas would filter up to randomly-selected humans who would count the consensual answers to make necessary changes. Consensual tactics, strategies, and policies would then be developed around Earth for dealing with the computerized Spaceship Earth management system, operated and controlled using artificial intelligence programming and supercomputers.
Randomly-selected groups of Earthian humans of high intelligence with impeccable moral and ethical character and credentials would control codes for changing the Earthian Magnum Computer System programming to implement bottom-up recommendations of millions of members in discussions in democracy chapters around Spaceship Earth. Each member of the group in charge of the codes for the magnum computer system would serve limited terms. These members would not vote or decide what to do. They would see to it that the computer system implemented the consensual answers of millions of Earthian humans from all walks of life, as determined by honest, free, fair, and frank democratic Game-free discussions in democracy chapters all around Spaceship Earth, as explained and shown in As the Rooster Crows Earthian OKness Increases. The overall objective would be to manage the system in such a way as to maximize the lifetime satisfactions of all Earthian humans, as well as all other species of life aboard Spaceship Earth, while insuring the indefinite functioning of all Spaceship Earth ecosystems.
Necessary moral and ethical requirements and constraints could be programmed in the Magnum Management System that Earthian humans at the top would be obliged to obey. If changes should be made in the moral and ethical codes in the overall program they would be sent back to the Earthian democracy chapters for discussion and then tabulated and analyzed before algorithms programmed in the system would create changes in the MMS operating system.
This Magnum Computerized Management System would require a strict system of security controls like the current codes of nations possessing nuclear weapons, hopefully providing security several magnitudes more secure than current nuclear codes, to make sure a madman could not get in control of any aspect of the Magnum Spaceship Earth Management System.
A management system such as this would significantly improve previous systems used around Spaceship Earth that have historically empowered fickle, egotistical, greedy, power mad, grandiose, poorly educated, not-very-bright individual Earthian humans to make existential decisions affecting the OKness of thousands, millions, and billions of humans around Earth, an incredibly dumb thing to do, that has been done over and over again for millennia, resulting in incredible losses and suffering at various moments of history caused by the unfair and indiscriminate inexorable tunneling out of Bad, OK, or Good Luck for hundreds, thousands, millions, or billons of Earthian humans around Spaceship Earth at all times since time immemorial, resulting from the cosmic evolution commencing with the creation of the Universe some ten billion years ago.
A tough lesson for Earthian humans to accept propositioned in Effective Learning Publications books is that everything that happens in human states of affairs is either predetermined or accidental and therefore individuals are not to blame or praise for what happens in human states of affairs. This is easier to swallow after accepting that believing and acting otherwise will support and perpetuate the I’m OK—You’re Not OK life position that has bedeviled, sabotaged, and undermined Earthian humans since time immemorial, making losers out of most of them.
About the only way significant numbers of Earthian humans can be caused to be significantly changed psychologically and socially by others is through democratic face to face discussions in honest serious and rigorous dialectical, dialogical, analogical arguing about facts using reasoning of all kinds, dealing with Earthian human existential states of affairs.
What is considered natural, unnatural; normal, abnormal; right, wrong; ethical, unethical; righteous, sinful; worthy, unworthy; or sane or insane by a particular Earthian human is caused by information lodged in her/his brain caused to be lodged there by the concatenation of infinite cause-effect chains causing her/him to exist and slowly inch through the Earthian worm hole of existence inexorably tunneled out for her or him by her/his specific unbroken infinitely-regressing cause-effect chains inexorably-progressing throughout his/her infinitesimally short cosmic life, regardless of how Bad, OK, or Good that luck or fate might be as judged by any Earthian human; and all Earthian humans must keep on inching forward in their worm holes as best they can dealing with inevitable problems and opportunities caused to exist at that stage in their unique tunnels, as they are knocked around like balls in a pin-ball machine, as events inevitably and/or accidentally happen in their so-called real worlds, and in their subconscious and conscious minds, however Bad, OK, or Good their inherited Luck might have absolutely been, which cannot be proved, however easy it might be to relatively estimate.
It follows that changing the life scripts of Earthian humans for the better requires changing the course of unique tunnels of existence in which individual humans accidentally and inevitably live, a tall order indeed. Some biological constructivists would consider this notion a pipedream, while considering the whole process a meaningless drift in the infinity of time and space.
Constructivism is considered relevant in Effective Learning Publications books recommended below, having been discussed in some detail in Business Voyages and listed as a source in the bibliographies of three books.
For more information on how to co-construct better organizations and economic systems using transactional analysis read Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata, and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds
Read free “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc,” https://blog.effectivelearning.net/the-evolution-of-spaceship-earth-inc/ for some management science ideas on how Earthian humans might eventually co-construct an 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 recently-published novel shows how to conduct a new kind of seminar invented and coordinated by Rout Logger, the protagonist of the novel, that might reduce the probability of Earthian human extinction that requires participants in a seminar to speak out and up when randomly selected by a Truther rooster positioned in the center of a randomly-selected group of forty humans sitting in a circle. The Truther rooster resembles a spinning weather vane. The rooster is programmed to bob its head up and down and raucously crow after being twirled by a randomly-selected seminar participant, as it spins round and round winding down, letting group members know it’s time to wake up and get to work, before it’s too late. When the Truther rooster stops spinning whoever is at the end of a line of imaginary fire extending from the rooster’s beak to her or him sitting in the circle is automatically selected as the Leader of the Moment for the group, proving pure democracy can happen. The Leader of the Moment must then lead the group into a democratic discussion of what s/he considers the most serious existential problem around Spaceship Earth. Forty participants from all walks of life were paid $5000 monthly for participating in weekend seminars conducted in central city hotels in various cities randomly selected around the US. If randomly selected as the Leader of the Moment the participant had to define what s/he thought was the most important problem facing Spaceship Earth, present alternatives, and make a recommendation for change. What s/he said would then be discussed by members of the group on a free-flow first come-first serve basis. It was against the law of the seminar to interrupt speakers or raise hands to get permission to speak. Discussions lasted until they ran out of steam with most issues covered. The results of the discussions would be published to the wealthy donors financing the process and the Earthian public.
Rout Logger was convinced most Earthian humans would not volunteer to participate in this sort of seminar to merely help save Spaceship Earth from GWCC and/or MNWP using their Nurturing Parent, Adult, and Free Child Ego States, given the reality that their life time and energy was already programmed and consumed with various forms of withdrawal, rituals, pastimes, psychological Games, activities, and intimacy in their unique tunnels of reality, as they acted out their inherited life scripts; so they were paid $5000 per month to participate in a Game-free, Adult-Adult democratic seminar that would require them to honestly discuss existential problems with forty other participants from disparate walks of life, if they were randomly selected by the spinning Truther Rooster as the Leader of the Moment.
According to Effective Learning Publications books, achieving Earthian human sustainability entails such things as Earthian humans peacefully reducing through natural attrition (natural deaths exceeding births) the human population aboard Spaceship Earth, 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, assuming sufficient quantities of non-human clean energy can be discovered and developed using mind grants.
The general algorithmic matrix algebra form below can help bring this state of affairs about,
This mathematical formulation might one happy day develop for Earthian humans power in economics loosely analogous to the power of E=mc2 in physics. This formulation, Max or Min CjXj, subject to, AijXj ≤, =, or ≥ Bi, is a general form of the linear programming model, which has been around for many years in management science, operations research, and linear algebra courses.
Max CjXj, s.t. AijXj ≤, =, or ≥ Bi symbolizes knowledge that gives the Earthian human species about as much potential power to perpetuate itself as Albert Einstein’s formula E=mc2 symbolizes knowledge that gives the Earthian human species the power to exterminate itself.
Riding aboard an airliner about to land at night traveling at four hundred miles an hour at thirty-five thousand feet with clouds, rain, wind, and lightning below, what would you rather have figuring out the path, speed, and angle of descent of the aircraft for touch-down, the plane’s auto-pilot, radar, and computer system or the pilot and co-pilot, seeing nothing out their windows below but clouds and lightning?
The main reason why delegating the scheduling, production, and distribution of the necessities of life to AI programs and magnum computers would be a good idea is that magnum computers and algorithmic AI programs do not get greedy and power hungry or play psychological Games. Thus far in Earthian human history most leaders and rulers atop large organizations such as nations have become corrupt one way or another playing psychological Games, acting out selfish greedy ego trips, hogging all the power, money, strokes, stimulation, and recognition they could get their hands on for themselves and their cronies, leaving the hindmost to their underlings. Whatever their limitations and possible threats, algorithmic computer programs and super computers are not egotistical, greedy, and power-hungry.
Thanks to Buckminster Fuller for providing the above airplane-landing metaphor in his book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, first published in 1969, and for planting seeds for other ideas in the essay “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc.,” published in the Effective Learning Report, such as computers being the best hope for mankind and humans not doing work machines can do better, being paid to think instead with what Fuller called mind grants. Fuller said unemployment all around Spaceship Earth could be eliminated overnight with mind grants. Buckminster Fuller was the inventor of the appellations Earthian and Spaceship Earth.
Most Earthian humans like to win BALANCE SHEET psychological Games, to feel superior and lord it over others, regardless if Spaceship Earth is going to hell in a handbasket around them because of global warming and climate change (GWCC) and militarization and nuclear weapons proliferation (MNWP), regardless of how much they have failed in other areas of their lives, and regardless of how heinous were crimes and misdemeanors they may have gotten away with in the process of amassing their riches, since they were saved, as it were, by taking in and controlling more almighty monetary units than other lesser mortals, saved, hallelujah, as if by Jesus, who forgave them their sins.
If you want to learn more about transactional analysis, such as Ego States, Scripts, and psychological Games, read Born to Learn: A Transactional Analysis of Human Learning.
Most Earthian humans know what it is to be egotistical, but they have little understanding of how specific human egotistical manifestations, such as Parent, Adult, and Child ego states, can be used to control and manipulate human behavior for nefarious ends.
One of the biggest egotists of Earthian human history, a narcissist, playing BALANCE SHEET psychological Games, is Donald Trump of the US. He is also a world-class liar and loser playing BALANCE SHEET, and he might go to jail for it, just like other political USian BALANCE SHEET psychological Game players in the US have, such as Georgia US representative, Bo Ginn, in 1995, and cotton farmer Billie Sol Estes of Pecos, Texas in 1965, who had political ties to the USian president from Texas Lyndon Johnson.
Trump psychologically told voters and bankers using his Parent ego state he was extorting votes and money from he was a stable genius and billionaire who could pay them back for their votes and loans. How many billions worth of a billionaire he was he never said, at least not to voters, arithmetic not being his strong suit; but it now appears it’s possible he’s no billionaire at all, using generally-accepted accounting principles and real market values, which he has refused to show since walking on the USian political stage for the 2016 presidential election. It’s possible he’s no kind of naire at all, not even a millionaire, having liabilities that exceed the market value of his assets, being close to bankruptcy.
It now appears as shown in recent public posts that Trump, his loyal Trump Organization lackeys, and his chosen loyal family members lied to bankers about his net worth to get loans, proving once again that “All that glitters is not gold.”
P.T. Barnum is said to have proved there’s a sucker born every minute. If so, Trump may have proved there’s a sucker born every second, in high and low places.
If you feel you’ve gained value from THE EARTHIAN, go to the Internet or any walk-in bookstore around Spaceship Earth and purchase or order one or more Effective Learning Publications books. As the Rooster Crows Earthian OKness Increases is the latest and probably most engaging Effective Learning Publications book, including an overview of USian economic history, including the Trumpian affair. Rout Logger is the protagonist of the novel story. It’s available now at Amazon.com for immediate unrestricted digital reading on any device as a Kindle book for $4.99. You can read it free at Amazon in a restricted KDP option.
4 — A Democratic Earthian Game-Free Case Method Teaching and Learning Process for Producing Democratic Discussion, Learning, and Policy Formulation Around Spaceship Earth
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, Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Alabama.
This 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 roles of Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim were largely banished from the course learning process.
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.
He has 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 policies and practices.
Stapleton 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).
He was a Harvard Case Method teacher who never went to Harvard, having learned how the 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.
He 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).
He taught his own case method track at the undergraduate level in the management department of the business school at Georgia Southern University offering four or five different elective case method courses each academic year (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.
His students 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 at age thirty-six.
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 so-called objective multiple-choice tests.
Only former students who had worked in the real world 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” 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.
The 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 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.
Stapleton 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 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 (April 7, 2023) been cited as a reference in 85 refereed journal articles concerned about the ethics of student evaluations in several academic disciplines, including ten new citations since April 2021.
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.
Ben Barnes, a Texas state legislator, was a crony of John Connolly and a major player in Texas politics. Connolly was a Texas governor and a USian Secretary of Treasury under Richard Nixon, who was shot in the front seat of the same car in Dallas, Texas as President Kennedy when JFK was assassinated in the back seat in 1963, and we still cannot “prove” who killed him.
I was working as an expediter and dispatcher in production control with an undergraduate degree in economics from Texas Tech University in a Litton Industries plant in Lubbock, Texas that assembled electronic components for USian military aircraft guidance and control systems one evening in 1965 when Barnes and Connolly came strolling through the plant shaking hands with everybody. The plant was put there by Tex Thornton, originally from Texas, the Litton Industries founder, and an ex-crony of USian president Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam War Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Both Thornton and McNamara were Harvard Business School graduates who worked as whiz kids in production control at Ford Motor Company. They were all flying high back in those days. I was hired at Litton by a Harvard Business School graduate, who fired me seven months later. He told me I was too sensitive to the needs of people for production control work, telling me I ought to get into something like personnel. He was generally right about this, and he did me a big favor firing me when he did from the ill-scripted Litton plant, saving me months and maybe years of wasted time. I learned a lot there in seven months that I did not want to know about how the Earthian economic and social system works. The HBS-educated fellow who hired and fired me left Litton Industries himself a few months later, taking a new job with the international management consulting firm Booze Allen Hamilton.
I had about decided this Bragg investigation was just another nothing burger like the pusillanimous Mueller, January 6th Committee, and Garland investigations, all sound and no fury. The Bragg investigation and indictment in the Manhattan District of New York have restored some of my previous respect for and faith in the USian rule of law. I had begun to think USian law-enforcers were very good at bullying, arresting, prosecuting, indicting, and imprisoning poor and hapless young black and white males and females for petty theft and drug selling but too cowardly to prosecute a dangerous older white male con artist with access to serious money and good lawyers such as the law-disrespecting playground bully Donald Trump. Hallelujah. Apparently, the Bragg investigators uncovered and developed facts they think prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the hush money paid to Stormy Daniel and at least one other woman was not merely to make sure Trump’s wife would not learn about another act of adultery on Trump’s part but to make sure information about this paid-for sexual act did not become public knowledge before the electors of the nefarious USian Electoral College cast their votes for the new USian president in 2016. If information about the Stormy Daniel case had become public knowledge before the electoral vote it’s possible that Trump would not have become a USian president. Evidently, these facts and this reasoning raised a misdemeanor offense to the level of a felony crime. We will have to wait and see to learn what these facts were as the trial proceeds and eventually learn whether Trump will be declared guilty of committing a felony crime by a jury of twelve Earthian humans who may or may not consider the facts and reasoning of the case real and relevant. It’s hard for Earthian human prosecutors to prove the truth of anything beyond a shadow of a doubt communicating with normal and abnormal Earthian humans and skilled highly-paid defense lawyers in a courtroom who can use all manner of irrelevant, hypothetical, and poorly-defined and misleading words, ego states, and scripts to manipulate fickle and obtuse jurors into voting in their favor. Furthermore, given the incessant broadcasting in public media of “stories” showing Trump’s morals, ethics, and behaviors, that untold millions of USians saw and heard, for over five years now, having had facts, pictures, and numbers poured into their eyes, ears, and minds about what was going on, it seems no rational human would ever dream of voting for Trump again. But, alas, this is not the case. While this indictment will cause Trump to lose voters, millions of his voters will vote for him again if they have the chance. There is no way anyone can prove what the truth is to these Earthian humans in this case. Given that this sort of human behavior has without doubt happened over and over throughout Earthian human history, is it any wonder that incredible injustice and incompetence have always existed in all countries around Spaceship Earth, and that Earthian humans are now faced with the possibility of their imminent extinction as a species, caused by GWCC and MNWP, Global Warming and Climate Change and Militarization and Nuclear Weapons Proliferation?
I’m not for “overthrowing” the existing economic and social order. I’m for evolving a better one, peacefully, ASAP. How to bring that about is the question. Violent revolution is not the answer. All violence in the form of all-out war does is temporarily tear down the existing economic and social order, doing no permanent good. Oligarchies just start over again rising from the ashes and evolve the same sort of top-down tyranny as the one that just got torn down, which is in turn also ultimately torn down. Unfortunately GWCC and MNWP in the current age may have made it inevitable that the existing Earthian economic and social order will be torn down one more time, but this time precluding the possibility of a new Earthian human economic and social order rising from the ashes, since Earthian humans will have been rendered extinct by GWCC and/or MNWP.
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, Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Alabama.
This 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 roles of Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim were largely banished from the course learning process.
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.
He has 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 policies and practices.
Stapleton 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).
He was a Harvard Case Method teacher who never went to Harvard, having learned how the 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.
He 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).
He taught his own case method track at the undergraduate level in the management department of the business school at Georgia Southern University offering four or five different elective case method courses each academic year (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.
His students 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 at age thirty-six.
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 so-called objective multiple-choice tests.
Only former students who had worked in the real world 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” 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.
The 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 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.
Stapleton 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 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 April 2, 2023 been cited as a reference in 85 refereed journal articles concerned about the ethics of student evaluations in several academic disciplines, including ten new citations since April S2021.
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.
THE EARTHIAN, Number Thirty-Nine, March 20, 2023, Effective Learning Publications, https://blog.effectivelearning.net/ , 32 East Main Street, Statesboro, Georgia, USA, Richard John Stapleton, Writer, Editor & Publisher, Copyright 2023, All Rights Reserved
ASK MORE WHAT YOUR COUNTRY CAN DO FOR ALL EARTHIAN HUMANS—TO MINIMIZE THE PROBABILITY OF EARTHIAN HUMAN EXTINCTION—CAUSED BY GLOBAL WARMING AND CLIMATE CHANGE (GWCC) AND/OR MILITARIZATION AND NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROLIFERATION (MNWP)
Since the publication of THE EARTHIAN — 38 the USian government destroyed the functioning of the Russian Nord Stream pipelines according to information leaked to and published by Seymour Hersh. The Hersh article is linked below. According to the source inside the USian intelligence service, the Nord Stream pipelines were destroyed by bombs attached to them by USian Navy deep-sea diving specialists after weeks of policy planning by numerous USian intelligence and military experts at the behest of USian President Joe Biden. This act has significantly increased global MNWP tensions and risks in the global chess Game now being played by the US, Russia, and China and has caused economic hardship in Europe for millions of Earthian humans forced to pay higher fuel bills during winter weather. The Biden administration said the Nord Stream bombing information leaked to Hersh was wrong and untrue, with no elaboration.
Inside the US, nothing systemic has occurred in the war against GWCC and Biden has apparently approved more oil drilling in Alaska. Three major USian banks have failed, portending bank failures in smaller banks throughout the USian economy, very likely culminating in stagflation or recession in the US, according to Michael Hudson linked below. Former president Trump is on the verge of being indicted for felony fraud in the Stormy Daniels case. He is now telling his cult members to “protest” and “take our nation back,” whatever that means. Is he psychologically inciting more violence against the USian rule of law?
CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE
1 — Observations and Analyses of Current Earthian Human Existential States of Affairs by Earthian Humans Stationed around Spaceship Earth, Cathecting all Ego States Feeling, Thinking, and Writing
2 — A Posting by a Hypothetical Exonexus Observer from a Planet Beyond the Earthian Solar System
3 — On the Need to Co-Construct a Sustainable Long Run Earthian Political-Economic-Management System
4 — A Democratic Earthian Game-Free Case Method Teaching and Learning Process for Producing Democratic Discussions, Learning, and Policy Formulation Around Spaceship Earth
March 20, 2023
Here’s an update on the MNWP (Militarization and Nuclear Weapons Proliferation) problem
If this is so why not just say unrealized losses don’t count and keep on with business as usual, operating on a cash flow basis? Everything would have been fine would it not if crazy depositors had not started withdrawing their deposits?
The USian govt finds budget deficit spending money necessary to pay for things not covered by yearly tax revenues extracted from USian taxpayers—cash money to pay bills for USian on-going programs and systems, such as military ops, to pay bills from USian corporations that manufacture USian military hardware and to meet the payroll of military workers, about 1.3 million of them—that inexorably increases the USian federal debt, now amounting to about $33 trillion, that exceeded the USian GDP, gross domestric product, the total nominal value of goods and services produced by the USian economy in 2022, about $25.5 trillion—by selling treasury bills and notes to individuals, pension funds, and other countries, and, if all else fails, telling the USian Federal Reserve System golden goose money machine to create more funny money from thin air, by simply punching digits into Federal Reserve System computers and calling the resulting numbers money, to buy USian govt treasury notes, bills, and bonds.
For how much longer can this process proceed before it collapses? Japan has been using a similar process longer than the US suggesting the USian process can last a while yet, perhaps a decade or more. Japan’s debt to GDP ratio is now about 250 percent; but the process, a natural recurrence in a system such as Japan’s and the USian r…
Violence is fueled by defeat and desperation, caused by inability to win in fair competition. It’s getting what you want regardless of rules and facts. The root cause is not white supremacy per se; it’s supremacy period, saying you and your kind are supreme because you say they are, and you will prove it using violent means. This includes individuals and groups of all kinds, from playground bullies on playgrounds to bully nations around Spaceship Earth, such as the US
Here’s Seymour Hersh himself explaining in a video interview how and why he wrote his article asserting Joe Biden ordered the Nord Stream pipelines blown up
Here’s a novel showing how to increase Earthian human OKness using an innovative discussion process in democracy chapters around Spaceship Earth that might help save Spaceship Earth from the two modern horses of the apocalypse, global warming and climate change (GWCC) and militarization and nuclear weapons proliferation (MNWP)
Might be a good thing to get invaded by these fiendish creatures. USian gun lovers can shoot themselves some free ham and bacon and save the nation at the same time
2 — A Posting by a Hypothetical Exonexus Observer from a Planet Beyond the Earthian SolarSystem
The poor Earthian humans are enthralled, manipulated, and in various degrees controlled by their leaders in some two hundred countries aboard Spaceship Earth. The leaders became leaders because of being caused to be leaders by concatenations of unbroken cause-effect chains resulting after our universe started evolving some thirteen billion years ago in the infinity of time and space.
Leaders are generally products of the same sorts of differentiated configurations of cause-effect chains as differentiated followers and members in differentiated countries. All Earthian humans are all doing what they were caused to do in their daily lives starting at birth.
Earth as a planet was formed about 4.5 billion years ago and has undergone innumerable transformations in the meantime. Humanoid creatures have been aboard Spaceship Earth for some two million years, and they too have undergone numerous evolutionary changes.
Unfortunately, Earthian humans have now reached a precarious and dangerous stage in their evolution as biological creatures. After slowly evolving more and more accurate, complex, and powerful understandings, technologies, and ways of life for two million years on Earth, during the last two hundred years Earthian humans evolved new technological devices at exponential rates that enabled them to increase the overly-fecund Earthian human population of Earth so much that they now threaten not only to destroy their own existence as a species aboard Spaceship Earth but also the existence of most other species alive on Earth.
Keeping eight billion or so Earthian humans alive on Earth has required so many goods and services to be produced to satisfy human biological and psychological needs and wants and so much carbon-based fuel to be burned to produce the goods that the climate of Spaceship Earth has been altered by carbon dioxide gas released into the Earthian atmosphere in large-enough quantities to cause extra heat to be trapped on Earth causing the mean Earthian temperature to increase at a yearly rate that threatens to destroy Earthian human life as it now exists, within centuries, if not decades.
Unfortunately, Earthian humans cannot determine exactly how long this catastrophic scenario will take to unfold, even after an Internet search, since information sources show average Earthian temperatures in both Celsius and Fahrenheit and use different base years, different assumptions about causes of rates of change, and changing rates of change in calculating average Earthian temperature.
However, one can build a case based on available Internet data that it will take over 35 years for the mean Earthian temperature to rise enough to cause the Earthian polar ice caps to melt causing enough sea level rise to displace billions of Earthian humans living on sea coasts and to cause enough decrease in food production to cause billions of Earthian humans to starve—if Earthian humans do not significantly change in the meantime their life scripts, technological processes, and political and economic systems.
Unfortunately, Earthian humans have developed technological knowledge that has enabled them to produce over 10,000 nuclear weapons that could destroy human life aboard Spaceship Earth if dropped and detonated on defined enemies around Spaceship Earth, as they have the capability to do.
Earthian countries dependent on fossil fuel energy in the short run are pitted in a zero-sum struggle for control of oil and gas supplies around Earth, with the two largest military nations on Earth possessing over ninety percent of the nuclear weapons now threatening one another in a war they started in a minor country, a pawn in their Earthian game of chess, a tissue-tearing psychological Game in this case called KING OF THE MOUNTAIN by Earthian humans, caused by egoistic leaders and top members of the two countries who are primarily concerned about maintaining and enhancing their personal power, wealth, prestige, lifestyles, and legacies.
Top leaders of one of these countries, fighting in the pawn country with non-nuclear weapons so far, have publicly declared they will fire and detonate some nuclear weapons if necessary to prevent their being defeated and humiliated in the war/Game started in the minor pawn country. Hopefully this is just a bluff in another reincarnation of the Earthian human psychological Game known as CHICKEN.
As dangerous as this psychological high-stakes Game-playing is most Earthian humans find it stimulating, interesting, patriotic, heroic, and so forth in their nightly news, a release from the normal grind of their boring and banal daily routines and rituals, and their pastimes, jobs, activities, and intimacies.
The new war Game in the minor country is a helluva way to generate strokes, aka units of recognition, to get attention, to get recognized, stimulated, and affirmed, now that some Earthian human strokes, nuclear strokes, have become so powerful they can cause the elimination of all Earthian human strokes forever.
The probability of a MNWP catastrophe at any time has significantly increased in recent years.
3 — On Co-Constructing a Sustainable Long Run Earthian Political-Economic-Management System
Establishing democracy chapters around Spaceship Earth as recommended in the Effective Learning Publications novel As the Rooster Crows Earthian OKness Increases might develop consensual answers regarding existential matters from the bottom up that might help save Spaceship Earth. These ideas would filter up to randomly-selected humans who would count the consensual answers to make necessary changes. Consensual tactics, strategies, and policies would then be developed around Earth for dealing with the computerized Spaceship Earth management system, operated and controlled using artificial intelligence programming and supercomputers.
Randomly-selected groups of Earthian humans of high intelligence with impeccable moral and ethical character and credentials would control codes for changing the Earthian Magnum Computer System programming to implement bottom-up recommendations of millions of members in discussions in democracy chapters around Spaceship Earth. Each member of the group in charge of the codes for the magnum computer system would serve limited terms. These members would not vote or decide what to do. They would see to it that the computer system implemented the consensual answers of millions of Earthian humans from all walks of life, as determined by honest, free, fair, and frank democratic Game-free discussions in democracy chapters all around Spaceship Earth, as explained and shown in As the Rooster Crows Earthian OKness Increases. The overall objective would be to manage the system in such a way as to maximize the lifetime satisfactions of all Earthian humans, as well as all other species of life aboard Spaceship Earth, while insuring the indefinite functioning of all Spaceship Earth ecosystems.
Necessary moral and ethical requirements and constraints could be programmed in the Magnum Management System that Earthian humans at the top would be obliged to obey. If changes should be made in the moral and ethical codes in the overall program they would be sent back to the Earthian democracy chapters for discussion and then tabulated and analyzed before algorithms programmed in the system would create changes in the MMS operating system.
This Magnum Computerized Management System would require a strict system of security controls like the current codes of nations possessing nuclear weapons, hopefully providing security several magnitudes more secure than current nuclear codes, to make sure a madman could not get in control of any aspect of the Magnum Spaceship Earth Management System.
A management system such as this would significantly improve previous systems used around Spaceship Earth that have historically empowered fickle, egotistical, greedy, power mad, grandiose, poorly educated, not-very-bright individual Earthian humans to make existential decisions affecting the OKness of thousands, millions, and billions of humans around Earth, an incredibly dumb thing to do, that has been done over and over again for millennia, resulting in incredible losses and suffering at various moments of history caused by the unfair and indiscriminate inexorable tunneling out of Bad, OK, or Good Luck for hundreds, thousands, millions, or billons of Earthian humans around Spaceship Earth at all times since time immemorial, resulting from the cosmic evolution commencing with the creation of the Universe some ten billion years ago.
A tough lesson for Earthian humans to accept propositioned in Effective Learning Publications books is that everything that happens in human states of affairs is either predetermined or accidental and therefore individuals are not to blame or praise for what happens in human states of affairs. This is easier to swallow after accepting that believing and acting otherwise will support and perpetuate the I’m OK—You’re Not OK life position that has bedeviled, sabotaged, and undermined Earthian humans since time immemorial, making losers out of most of them.
About the only way significant numbers of Earthian humans can be caused to be significantly changed psychologically and socially by others is through democratic face to face discussions in honest serious and rigorous dialectical, dialogical, analogical arguing about facts using reasoning of all kinds, dealing with Earthian human existential states of affairs.
What is considered natural, unnatural; normal, abnormal; right, wrong; ethical, unethical; righteous, sinful; worthy, unworthy; or sane or insane by a particular Earthian human is caused by information lodged in her/his brain caused to be lodged there by the concatenation of infinite cause-effect chains causing her/him to exist and slowly inch through the Earthian worm hole of existence inexorably tunneled out for her or him by her/his specific unbroken infinitely-regressing cause-effect chains inexorably-progressing throughout his/her infinitesimally short cosmic life, regardless of how Bad, OK, or Good that luck or fate might be as judged by any Earthian human; and all Earthian humans must keep on inching forward in their worm holes as best they can dealing with inevitable problems and opportunities caused to exist at that stage in their unique tunnels, as they are knocked around like balls in a pin-ball machine, as events inevitably and/or accidentally happen in their so-called real worlds, and in their subconscious and conscious minds, however Bad, OK, or Good their inherited Luck might have absolutely been, which cannot be proved, however easy it might be to relatively estimate.
It follows that changing the life scripts of Earthian humans for the better requires changing the course of unique tunnels of existence in which individual humans accidentally and inevitably live, a tall order indeed. Some biological constructivists would consider this notion a pipedream, while considering the whole process a meaningless drift in the infinity of time and space.
What is God? Whatever it was that caused the Universe to exist.
Constructivism is considered relevant in Effective Learning Publications books recommended below, having been discussed in some detail in Business Voyages and listed as a source in the bibliographies of three books.
For more information on how to co-construct better organizations and economic systems using transactional analysis read Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata, and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds
Read free “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc,” https://blog.effectivelearning.net/the-evolution-of-spaceship-earth-inc/ for some management science ideas on how Earthian humans might eventually co-construct an 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 recently-published novel shows how to conduct a new kind of seminar invented and coordinated by Rout Logger, the protagonist of the novel, that might reduce the probability of Earthian human extinction that requires participants in a seminar to speak out and up when randomly selected by a Truther rooster positioned in the center of a randomly-selected group of forty humans sitting in a circle. The Truther rooster resembles a spinning weather vane. The rooster is programmed to bob its head up and down and raucously crow after being twirled by a randomly-selected seminar participant, as it spins round and round winding down, letting group members know it’s time to wake up and get to work, before it’s too late. When the Truther rooster stops spinning whoever is at the end of a line of imaginary fire extending from the rooster’s beak to her or him sitting in the circle is automatically selected as the Leader of the Moment for the group, proving pure democracy can happen. The Leader of the Moment must then lead the group into a democratic discussion of what s/he considers the most serious existential problem around Spaceship Earth. Forty participants from all walks of life were paid $5000 monthly for participating in weekend seminars conducted in central city hotels in various cities randomly selected around the US. If randomly selected as the Leader of the Moment the participant had to define what s/he thought was the most important problem facing Spaceship Earth, present alternatives, and make a recommendation for change. What s/he said would then be discussed by members of the group on a free-flow first come-first serve basis. It was against the law of the seminar to interrupt speakers or raise hands to get permission to speak. Discussions lasted until they ran out of steam with most issues covered. The results of the discussions would be published to the wealthy donors financing the process and the Earthian public.
Rout Logger was convinced most Earthian humans would not volunteer to participate in this sort of seminar to merely help save Spaceship Earth from GWCC and/or MNWP using their Nurturing Parent, Adult, and Free Child Ego States, given the reality that their life time and energy was already programmed and consumed with various forms of withdrawal, rituals, pastimes, psychological Games, activities, and intimacy in their unique tunnels of reality, as they acted out their inherited life scripts; so they were paid $5000 per month to participate in a Game-free, Adult-Adult democratic seminar that would require them to honestly discuss existential problems with forty other participants from disparate walks of life, if they were randomly selected by the spinning Truther Rooster as the Leader of the Moment.
According to Effective Learning Publications books, achieving Earthian human sustainability entails such things as Earthian humans peacefully reducing through natural attrition (natural deaths exceeding births) the human population aboard Spaceship Earth, 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, assuming sufficient quantities of non-human clean energy can be discovered and developed using mind grants.
The general algorithmic matrix algebra form below can help bring this state of affairs about,
This mathematical formulation might one happy day develop for Earthian humans power in economics loosely analogous to the power of E=mc2 in physics. This formulation, Max or Min CjXj, subject to, AijXj ≤, =, or ≥ Bi, is a general form of the linear programming model, which has been around for many years in management science, operations research, and linear algebra courses.
Max CjXj, s.t. AijXj ≤, =, or ≥ Bi symbolizes knowledge that gives the Earthian human species about as much potential power to perpetuate itself as Albert Einstein’s formula E=mc2 symbolizes knowledge that gives the Earthian human species the power to exterminate itself.
Riding aboard an airliner about to land at night traveling at four hundred miles an hour at thirty-five thousand feet with clouds, rain, wind, and lightning below, what would you rather have figuring out the path, speed, and angle of descent of the aircraft for touch-down, the plane’s auto-pilot, radar, and computer system or the pilot and co-pilot, seeing nothing out their windows below but clouds and lightning?
The main reason why delegating the scheduling, production, and distribution of the necessities of life to AI programs and magnum computers would be a good idea is that magnum computers and algorithmic AI programs do not get greedy and power hungry or play psychological Games. Thus far in Earthian human history most leaders and rulers atop large organizations such as nations have become corrupt one way or another playing psychological Games, acting out selfish greedy ego trips, hogging all the power, money, strokes, stimulation, and recognition they could get their hands on for themselves and their cronies, leaving the hindmost to their underlings. Whatever their limitations and possible threats, algorithmic computer programs and super computers are not egotistical, greedy, and power-hungry.
Thanks to Buckminster Fuller for providing the above airplane-landing metaphor in his book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, first published in 1969, and for planting seeds for other ideas in the essay “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc.,” published in the Effective Learning Report, such as computers being the best hope for mankind and humans not doing work machines can do better, being paid to think instead with what Fuller called mind grants. Fuller said unemployment all around Spaceship Earth could be eliminated overnight with mind grants. Buckminster Fuller was the inventor of the appellations Earthian and Spaceship Earth.
Most Earthian humans like to win BALANCE SHEET psychological Games, to feel superior and lord it over others, regardless if Spaceship Earth is going to hell in a handbasket around them because of global warming and climate change (GWCC) and militarization and nuclear weapons proliferation (MNWP), regardless of how much they have failed in other areas of their lives, and regardless of how heinous were crimes and misdemeanors they may have gotten away with in the process of amassing their riches, since they were saved, as it were, by taking in and controlling more almighty monetary units than other lesser mortals, saved, hallelujah, as if by Jesus, who forgave them their sins.
If you want to learn more about transactional analysis, such as Ego States, Scripts, and psychological Games, read Born to Learn: A Transactional Analysis of Human Learning.
Most Earthian humans know what it is to be egotistical, but they have little understanding of how specific human egotistical manifestations, such as Parent, Adult, and Child ego states, can be used to control and manipulate human behavior for nefarious ends.
One of the biggest egotists of Earthian human history, a narcissist, playing BALANCE SHEET psychological Games, is Donald Trump of the US. He is also a world-class liar and loser playing BALANCE SHEET, and he might go to jail for it, just like other political USian BALANCE SHEET psychological Game players in the US have, such as Georgia US representative, Bo Ginn, in 1995, and cotton farmer Billie Sol Estes of Pecos, Texas in 1965, who had political ties to the USian president from Texas Lyndon Johnson.
Trump psychologically told voters and bankers using his Parent ego state he was extorting votes and money from he was a stable genius and billionaire who could pay them back for their votes and loans. How many billions worth of a billionaire he was he never said, at least not to voters, arithmetic not being his strong suit; but it now appears it’s possible he’s no billionaire at all, using generally-accepted accounting principles and real market values, which he has refused to show since walking on the USian political stage for the 2016 presidential election. It’s possible he’s no kind of naire at all, not even a millionaire, having liabilities that exceed the market value of his assets, being close to bankruptcy.
It now appears as shown in recent public posts that Trump, his loyal Trump Organization lackeys, and his chosen loyal family members lied to bankers about his net worth to get loans, proving once again that “All that glitters is not gold.”
P.T. Barnum is said to have proved there’s a sucker born every minute. If so, Trump may have proved there’s a sucker born every second, in high and low places.
If you feel you’ve gained value from THE EARTHIAN, go to the Internet or any walk-in bookstore around Spaceship Earth and purchase or order one or more Effective Learning Publications books. As the Rooster Crows Earthian OKness Increases is the latest and probably most engaging Effective Learning Publications book, including an overview of USian economic history, including the Trumpian affair. Rout Logger is the protagonist of the novel story. It’s available now at Amazon.com for immediate unrestricted digital reading on any device as a Kindle book for $4.99. You can read it free at Amazon in a restricted KDP option.
4 — A Democratic Earthian Game-Free Case Method Teaching and Learning Process for Producing Democratic Discussion, Learning, and Policy Formulation Around Spaceship Earth
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, Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Alabama.
This 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 roles of Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim were largely banished from the course learning process.
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.
He has 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 policies and practices.
Stapleton 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).
He was a Harvard Case Method teacher who never went to Harvard, having learned how the 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.
He 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).
He taught his own case method track at the undergraduate level in the management department of the business school at Georgia Southern University offering four or five different elective case method courses each academic year (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.
His students 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 at age thirty-six.
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 so-called objective multiple-choice tests.
Only former students who had worked in the real world 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” 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.
The 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 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.
Stapleton 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 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 (March 20, 2023) been cited as a reference in 85 refereed journal articles concerned about the ethics of student evaluations in several academic disciplines, including 10 new citations since April 2021.
As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein propositioned in his book Proto-Tractatus, “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.
The USian govt finds budget deficit spending money necessary to pay for things not covered by yearly tax revenues extracted from USian taxpayers—cash money to pay bills for USian on-going programs and systems, such as military ops, to pay bills from USian corporations that manufacture USian military hardware and to meet the payroll of military workers, about 1.3 million of them—that inexorably increases the USian federal debt, now amounting to about $33 trillion, that exceeded the USian GDP, gross domestric product, the total nominal value of goods and services produced by the USian economy in 2022, $25,464,500 million, about $25.5 trillion—by selling treasury bills and notes to individuals, pension funds, and other countries, and, if all else fails, telling the USian Federal Reserve System golden goose money machine to create more funny money from thin air, by simply punching digits into Federal Reserve System computers and calling the resulting numbers money, to buy USian govt treasury bills and notes.
For how much longer can this process proceed before it collapses? Japan has been using a similar process longer than the US suggesting the USian process can last a while yet, perhaps a decade or more. Japan’s debt to GDP ratio is now about 250 percent; but the process, a natural recurrence in a system such as Japan’s and the USian republic-capitalist system, has, throughout Earthian economic history, always eventually collapsed. In the past Earthian humans in such situations have always been able to rise from their ashes after such collapses, after much suffering, and eventually go on to new higher levels of productivity, if not economic satisfaction and justice . The risk this time around however is the possibility that there will be no more rising from the ashes, thanks to GWCC and MNWP, global warming and climate change and militarization and nuclear weapons proliferation.
This boom-and-bust capitalistic process is fundamentally caused by the Earthian human population rising faster than the capacity of Earthian economic systems to produce the necessities of life for all Earthian humans (food, clothing, and shelter), causing chronic unsatisfied wants and needs of individuals and groups. In the USian capitalistic economic system this boom-and-bust process has been accentuated and enhanced by the USian republic form of representational government. Rather than choose direct democracy the founders of the USian government chose to make the US a republic rather than a democracy. Ordinary citizens would be represented in halls of government by individuals they democratically voted for, but they themselves would not be able to discuss and choose how the country would be run.
Needy and greedy individuals and groups having no say-so in how to create a fair and effective economic system for getting their legitimate needs met had to vote for “representatives” to argue their cases in halls of government. This led to corruption caused by a competitive struggle that naturally erupted among voters to get their “representatives” to advocate and vote for things in halls of government that would help them get their wants and needs met, rather than the wants and needs of others.
This led to bribing representatives in the form of campaign contributions, which led to the creation of a class of politicians that did nothing but politic, who made their livings politicking, who often enriched themselves one way or the other by extracting money from their constituents in quid pro quo side deals, made possible by the power their positions gave them.
The contributions of individuals were corrupting enough, but the contributions of large corporations, defined as people with free speech with the right to contribute unlimited amounts of money to politicians to express their speech, by a republican supreme court, increased the corruption by many magnitudes. Whose needs and greed would be satisfied? It was up to the highest bidder. Meanwhile the price tags of programs and acts required to satisfy the needs, wants, and greed of constituents kept getting larger and larger, leading to the perilous predicament now facing Earthain humans in the US and elsewhere, anywhere around Spaceship Earth where you find republic governments conjoined with capitalistic economic systems.
One of the biggest cash cows of the USian republic-capitalistic political-economic process in Washington for politicians turned out to be taking contributions for lowering the taxes of large corporations and the elite rich and to increase the funding of the USian military-industrial complex, causing most of the USian yearly budget deficits, and the now-existing pile of USian treasury debt, that hangs over the heads of all Earthian humans like a cloud of doom.
Regardless, let us grieve that Earthian humans will be able to rise from their ashes one more time.
About the Author
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, Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Alabama.
This 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 roles of Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim were largely banished from the course learning process.
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 has 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 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).
He was a Harvard Case Method professor who never went to Harvard, having learned how the 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.
He 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).
He taught his own case method track at the undergraduate level in the management department of the business school at Georgia Southern University offering four or five different elective case method courses each academic year (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.
His students 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 at age thirty-six.
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 so-called objective tests, such as multiple-choice tests.
Only former students who had worked in the real world 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” 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.
For more information on related classroom management ethical issues 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.
Stapleton 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 (February 24, 2023) been cited as a reference in 84 refereed journal articles concerned about the ethics of student evaluations in several academic disciplines, including nine new citations since April 2021.
His courses were designed to teach managers rather than employees, management rather than employment.
He retired as a university professor at Georgia Southern in June 2005, as the senior professor of the university for the 2004-2005 academic year, after thirty-five years of service.
As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein propositioned, “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.
THE EARTHIANDIGEST, Number Thirty-Eight, February 23, 2023, Effective Learning Publications https://blog.effectivelearning.net/ , 32 East Main Street, Statesboro, Georgia, USA, Richard John Stapleton, Writer, Editor & Publisher, Copyright 2023, All Rights Reserved
CONTENTS
Current Earthian Human Existential States of Affairs
Observations of a Hypothetical Exonexus Observer From Beyond the Earthian Solar System
Co-Constructing a Sustainable Long Run Earthian Economic System
Democratic Earthian Game-Free Case Method Teaching and Learning
ASK MORE WHAT YOUR COUNTRY CAN DO FOR ALL EARTHIAN HUMANS—TO MINIMIZE THE PROBABILITY OF EARTHIAN HUMAN EXTINCTION—CAUSED BY GLOBAL WARMING AND CLIMATE CHANGE (GWCC) AND/OR MILITARIZATION AND NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROLIFERATION (MNWP)
FOLLOWING IS THE MOST PRESSING PART OF THE EARTHIAN, A COLLECTION OF RECENT FACT-BASED INTERNET POSTS BY TRUTH-TELLING WRITERS AND ARTISTS AROUND SPACESHIP EARTH, FEELING, THINKING, WRITING, AND CREATING USING ALL EGO STATES.
Here’s another move in the global Cold War II forever wars chess Game the USian military is now playing on two fronts, against Russia and China, using Ukraine and Taiwan as pawns in the Game
Here’s some straight information on the LGBT question. There’s a very high probability LGBT Earthian humans are caused to be LGBT by natural genetic, psychological, and social cause-effect chains, that cannot be changed, and LGBTs should be protected by the same human rights laws as straight Earthian humans, who were caused to be straight by natural genetic, psychological, and social cause-effect chains.
The Repug controlled USian house shows its true colors, fascism. Unbelievable they would stoop this low. What do they think the USian military is, free enterprise or something? What do they think Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are? What do they think agricultural subsidies are? What do they think any subsidy or bail-out to any industry is? What do they think food stamps are? The US is and has been socialist in many ways for a long time. These Repug Earthian humans elected to the USian House are living in some sort of dream world and could care less what reality is. This resolution not only demeans USian allies it demeans all rational Earthian humans by insulting their intelligence.
It was an interesting well-played closely-matched football game; but all the rest was a fantastical rendition of Earthian human experience produced to hype goods and services produced by the USian economic system and to glorify the USian military system
Excellent article on “The Iron Law of Oligarchy”. Thanks for sharing Paul. Contains a good bit of truth. My Game-free I’m OK—You’re OK democratic sortition process used in the Ogeechee Economic Forum is an attempt to manage things from the bottom up rather than from the top down, as demonstrated in my novel As The Rooster Crows Earthian OKness Increases. It can work in certain situations. One can build a case that only about twenty percent of Earthian humans can critically think about existential states of affairs, the rest having been successfully brainwashed and cowed into permanent conformity to authoritarianism and oligarchy at an early age, having learned to actually want to be told what to do by ordinary Earthian humans in positions of power in oligarchic hierarchical fascistic authoritarian organizations. Yes the words oligarchy and organization are synonymous in several ways. Unfortunately, this brainwashed cowed conformity may cause the extinction of Earthian humans sooner or later by allowing GWCC and MNWP to continue to march through time on courses set by natural cause-effect chains.
How to analyze this article? What is causing what? Scary stuff indeed. The author paints a clear picture of what’s really going on in the US. Well worth a read. It appears poor white Republicans in rural areas are suffering in a self-perpetuating degenerative spiral.
Here’s Chris Hedges again, telling it like he sees it. Identity politics is just more I’m OK—You’re Not OK bullshit. White Repug oligarchs came within a hair’s breath of installing Herschel Walker as a Georgia senator.
Seems to me this is a major new computer software innovation. I still think however that computers cannot think for themselves. If AI chat comments are dystopian it seems to me the Earthian humans who wrote the new algorithmic code for the new AI software are the dystopian ones.
A new novel showing how to increase Earthian human OKness in a new kind of discussion process in democracy chapters around Spaceship Earth that might help save Spaceship Earth from the two modern horses of the apocalypse, global warming and climate change (GWCC) and militarization and nuclear weapons proliferation (MNWP)
I lived in Italy three months in 1983. Tuscany was the most beautiful part. The city of Florence had more beautiful women per capita than any place I have seen.
Afraid Falk is right. I thought as I watched the SOTU address that Biden was amazingly effective at making USians feel better by selectively harping on slogans and hot button words. He seemed energetic, fluent, and mentally alert, but his story was just too good to be true
Here’s another high-minded technological article on the overall problem of Earthian human sustainability, discussing relevant points, but never mentioning the biggest cause of Earthian human unsustainability. You would not need to increase the size of the economy every year if you did not have an ever–increasing Earthian human population requiring the consumption and destruction of more and more Earthian resources every year to satisfy basic human needs, causing the consequent necessary pumping of more and more greenhouse gases into Earth’s atmosphere causing global warming. While the author of this article has some good ideas she as usual never mentions the elephant in the room: human over-fecundity. How to peacefully and painlessly reduce the human population aboard Spaceship Earth, that is the problem. The answer is to birth fewer Earthian humans every year than naturally die every year. The way to co-construct a peaceful and prosperous future for Earthian humans is to bake smaller global economic pies every year for a peacefully-caused smaller and smaller Earthian human population that shrinks more per year than the yearly Earthian economic pie, thus producing more pie per human alive on Earth per year despite reducing yearly the global production of goods and services around Spaceship Earth to combat global warming.
Ecological problems have been evident in Region 6 for a long time. I left the region in 1969. See my doctoral dissertation from Texas Tech University, at Lubbock, Texas for more detail, An Analysis of Rural Manpower Migration Patterns in the South Plains Region of Texas, at https://ttu-ir.tdl.org/handle/2346/11659?locale-attribute=es .
A brave statement in his time considering what most religions said about the consequences of death, considering Twain almost certainly knew what they had said about the consequences
“Throughout the relationship between our countries, what we come back to time and again is that it is rooted both in shared interests and shared values. That includes our support for core democratic principles and institutions, including respect for human rights, the equal administration of justice for all, the equal rights of minority groups, the rule of law, free press, a robust civil society — and the vibrancy of Israel’s civil society has been on full display of late.”
A POSTING BY A HYPOTHETICAL EXONEXUS OBSERVER FROM A PLANET BEYOND THE EARHIAN SOLAR SYSTEM
The poor Earthian humans are enthralled, manipulated, and in various degrees controlled by their leaders in some two hundred countries aboard Spaceship Earth. The leaders became leaders because of being caused to be leaders by concatenations of unbroken cause-effect chains resulting after our universe started evolving some thirteen billion years ago in the infinity of time and space.
(You might think this post is the same as it was in The Earthian — 37 but it’s not. It contains some polishing and new paragraphs)
Leaders are generally products of the same sorts of cause-effect chains as followers and members in differentiated countries. All Earthian humans are all doing what they were caused to do in their daily lives starting at birth.
Earth as a planet was formed about 4.5 billion years ago and has undergone innumerable transformations in the meantime. Humanoid creatures have been aboard Spaceship Earth for some two million years, and they too have undergone numerous evolutionary changes.
Unfortunately, Earthian humans have now reached a precarious and dangerous stage in their evolution as biological creatures. After slowly evolving more and more accurate, complex, and powerful understandings, technologies, and ways of life for two million years on Earth, during the last two hundred years Earthian humans evolved new technological devices at exponential rates that enabled them to increase the overly-fecund Earthian human population of Earth so much that humans now threaten not only to destroy their own existence as a species aboard Spaceship Earth but also the existence of most other species alive on Earth.
Keeping eight billion or so Earthian humans alive on Earth has required so many goods and services to be produced to satisfy human biological and psychological needs and wants and so much carbon-based fuel to be burned to produce the goods that the climate of Spaceship Earth has been altered by carbon dioxide gas released into the Earthian atmosphere in large-enough quantities to cause extra heat to be trapped on Earth causing the mean Earthian temperature to increase at a yearly rate that threatens to destroy Earthian human life as it now exists, within centuries, if not decades.
Unfortunately, Earthian humans cannot determine exactly how long this catastrophic scenario will take to unfold, even after an Internet search, since information sources show average Earthian temperatures in both Celsius and Fahrenheit and use different base years, different assumptions about causes of rates of change, and changing rates of change when calculating average Earthian temperature.
Come what may, one can build a case based on historical Earthian temperature data that a catastrophic GWCC situation could evolve on Spaceship Earth in about thirty years, sufficient to cause the Earthian polar ice caps to melt causing enough sea level rise to displace billions of Earthian humans living on sea coasts and to cause enough decrease in food production to cause billions of Earthian humans to starve—if Earthian humans do not significantly change in the meantime their life scripts, technological processes, and political and economic systems.
Unfortunately, Earthian humans have developed technological knowledge and processes that enabled them to produce over 10,000 nuclear weapons that they can drop on defined enemies that can quickly destroy human life aboard Spaceship Earth.
Earthian countries dependent on fossil fuel energy in the short run are pitted in a zero-sum struggle for control of oil and gas supplies around Earth, with the two largest military nations on Earth possessing over ninety percent of the nuclear weapons now threatening one another in a war they started in a minor country, a pawn in their Earthian game of chess, a tissue-tearing psychological Game called KING OF THE MOUNTAIN by Earthian humans, caused by egoistic leaders and top members of the two countries who are concerned about maintaining and enhancing their personal power, wealth, prestige, lifestyles, and legacies.
Top leaders of one of these countries, fighting in the pawn country with non-nuclear weapons so far, have publicly declared they will fire and detonate some nuclear weapons if necessary to prevent their being defeated and humiliated in the war/Game started in the minor pawn country. Hopefully this is just a bluff in another reincarnation of the Earthian human psychological Game called CHICKEN.
As dangerous as this psychological high-stakes Game-playing is most Earthian humans find it stimulating, interesting, patriotic, heroic, and so forth in their nightly news, a release from the normal grind of their boring and banal daily routines and rituals, and their pastimes, jobs, activities, and intimacies.
The new war Game in the minor country is a macabre way to generate strokes, aka units of recognition, to get attention, to get recognized, stimulated, and affirmed, now that some Earthian human strokes, nuclear strokes, have become so powerful they can cause the elimination of all Earthian human strokes forever.
Without doubt the probability of a MNWP catastrophe at any time has significantly increased in recent years.
TOWARD THE CO-CONSTRUCTION OF A FAIR AND SUSTAINABLE LONG RUN EARTHIAN ECONOMIC SYSTEM
Establishing democracy chapters around Spaceship Earth as recommended in the Effective Learning Publications novel As the Rooster Crows Earthian OKness Increases might develop consensual answers regarding existential matters from the bottom up that might help save Spaceship Earth. These ideas would filter up to randomly-selected humans who would count the consensual answers to make necessary changes. Consensual tactics, strategies, and policies would then be developed around Earth for dealing with the computerized Spaceship Earth management system, operated and controlled using artificial intelligence programming and supercomputers.
Randomly-selected groups of Earthian humans of high intelligence with impeccable moral and ethical character and credentials would control codes for changing the Earthian Magnum Computer System programming to implement bottom-up recommendations of millions of members in discussions in democracy chapters around Spaceship Earth. Each member of the group in charge of the codes for the magnum computer system would serve limited terms. These members would not vote or decide what to do. They would see to it that the computer system implemented the consensual answers of millions of Earthian humans from all walks of life, as determined by honest, free, fair, and frank democratic Game-free discussions in democracy chapters all around Spaceship Earth, as explained and shown in As the Rooster Crows Earthian OKness Increases. The overall objective would be to manage the system in such a way as to maximize the lifetime satisfactions of all Earthian humans, as well as all other species of life aboard Spaceship Earth, while insuring the indefinite functioning of all Spaceship Earth ecosystems.
Necessary moral and ethical requirements and constraints could be programmed in the Magnum Management System that Earthian humans at the top would be obliged to obey. If changes should be made in the moral and ethical codes in the overall program they would be sent back to the Earthian democracy chapters for discussion and then tabulated and analyzed before algorithms programmed in the system would create changes in the MMS operating system.
This Magnum Computerized Management System would require a strict system of security controls like the current codes of nations possessing nuclear weapons, hopefully providing security several magnitudes more secure than current nuclear codes, to make sure a madman could not get in control of any aspect of the Magnum Spaceship Earth Management System.
A management system such as this would significantly improve previous systems used around Spaceship Earth that have historically empowered fickle, egotistical, greedy, power mad, grandiose, poorly educated, not-very-bright individual Earthian humans to make existential decisions affecting the OKness of thousands, millions, and billions of humans around Earth, an incredibly dumb thing to do, that has been done over and over again for millennia, resulting in incredible losses and suffering at various moments of history caused by the unfair and indiscriminate inexorable tunneling out of Bad, OK, or Good Luck for hundreds, thousands, millions, or billons of Earthian humans around Spaceship Earth at all times since time immemorial, resulting from the cosmic evolution commencing with the creation of the Universe some thirteen billion years ago.
A tough lesson for Earthian humans to accept propositioned in Effective Learning Publications books is that everything that happens in human states of affairs is either predetermined or accidental and therefore individuals are not to blame or praise for what happens in human states of affairs. This is easier to swallow after accepting that believing and acting otherwise will support and perpetuate the I’m OK—You’re Not OK life position that has bedeviled, sabotaged, and undermined Earthian humans since time immemorial, making losers out of most of them.
About the only way Earthian humans can be changed psychologically and socially is through democratic face to face discussions in honest serious and rigorous dialectical, dialogical, analogical discussiion processes arguing about facts using reasoning of all kinds, dealing with Earthian human existential states of affairs.
What is considered natural, unnatural; normal, abnormal; right, wrong; ethical, unethical; righteous, sinful; worthy, unworthy; or sane or insane by a particular Earthian human is caused by information lodged in her/his brain caused to be lodged there by the concatenation of infinite cause-effect chains causing her/him to exist and slowly inch through the Earthian worm hole of existence inexorably tunneled out for her or him by her/his specific combination of unbroken infinitely-regressing cause-effect chains inexorably-progressing throughout his/her infinitesimally short cosmic life, regardless of how Bad, OK, or Good that luck or fate might be as judged by any Earthian human; and all Earthian humans must keep on inching forward in their worm holes as best they can dealing with inevitable problems and opportunities caused to exist at that stage in their unique tunnels, as they are knocked around like balls in a pin-ball machine, as events inevitably and/or accidentally happen in their so-called real worlds, and in their subconscious and conscious minds, however Bad, OK, or Good their inherited Luck might have absolutely been, which cannot be proved, however easy it might be to relatively estimate.
It follows that changing the life scripts of Earthian humans for the better requires changing the course of unique tunnels of existence in which individual humans accidentally and inevitably live, a tall order indeed. Some biological constructivists would consider this notion a pipedream, while considering the whole process a meaningless drift in the infinity of time and space.
What is God? Whatever it was that caused the Universe to exist.
Constructivism is considered relevant in Effective Learning Publications books recommended below, having been discussed in some detail in Business Voyages and listed as a source in the bibliographies of three books.
For more information on how to co-construct better organizations and economic systems using transactional analysis read Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata, and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds
Read free “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc,” https://blog.effectivelearning.net/the-evolution-of-spaceship-earth-inc/ for some management science ideas on how Earthian humans might eventually co-construct an 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 recently-published novel shows how to conduct a new kind of seminar invented and coordinated by Rout Logger, the protagonist of the novel, that might reduce the probability of Earthian human extinction that requires participants in a seminar to speak out and up when randomly selected by a Truther rooster positioned in the center of a randomly-selected group of forty humans sitting in a circle. The Truther rooster resembles a spinning weather vane. The rooster is programmed to bob its head up and down and raucously crow after being twirled by a randomly-selected seminar participant, as it spins round and round winding down, letting group members know it’s time to wake up and get to work, before it’s too late. When the Truther rooster stops spinning whoever is at the end of a line of imaginary fire extending from the rooster’s beak to her or him sitting in the circle is automatically selected as the Leader of the Moment for the group, proving pure democracy can happen. The Leader of the Moment must then lead the group into a democratic discussion of what s/he considers the most serious existential problem around Spaceship Earth. Forty participants from all walks of life were paid $5000 monthly for participating in weekend seminars conducted in central city hotels in various cities randomly selected around the US. If randomly selected as the Leader of the Moment the participant had to define what s/he thought was the most important problem facing Spaceship Earth, present alternatives, and make a recommendation for change. What s/he said would then be discussed by members of the group on a free-flow first come-first serve basis. It was against the law of the seminar to interrupt speakers or raise hands to get permission to speak. Discussions lasted until they ran out of steam with most issues covered. The results of the discussions would be published to the wealthy donors financing the process and the Earthian public.
Rout Logger was convinced most Earthian humans would not volunteer to participate in this sort of seminar to merely help save Spaceship Earth from GWCC and/or MNWP using their Nurturing Parent, Adult, and Free Child Ego States, given the reality that their life time and energy was already programmed and consumed with various forms of withdrawal, rituals, pastimes, psychological Games, activities, and intimacy in their unique tunnels of reality, as they acted out their inherited life scripts; so they were paid $5000 per month to participate in a Game-free, Adult-Adult democratic seminar that would require them to honestly discuss existential problems with forty other participants from disparate walks of life, if they were randomly selected by the spinning Truther Rooster as the Leader of the Moment.
According to Effective Learning Publications books, achieving Earthian human sustainability entails such things as Earthian humans peacefully reducing through natural attrition (natural deaths exceeding births) the human population aboard Spaceship Earth, 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, assuming sufficient quantities of non-human clean energy can be discovered and developed using mind grants.
The general algorithmic matrix algebra form below can help bring this state of affairs about,
This mathematical formulation might one happy day develop for Earthian humans power in economics loosely analogous to the power of E=mc2 in physics. This formulation, Max or Min CjXj, subject to, AijXj ≤, =, or ≥ Bi, is a general form of the linear programming model, which has been around for many years in management science, operations research, and linear algebra courses.
Max CjXj, s.t. AijXj ≤, =, or ≥ Bi symbolizes knowledge that gives the Earthian human species about as much potential power to perpetuate itself as Albert Einstein’s formula E=mc2 symbolizes knowledge that gives the Earthian human species the power to exterminate itself.
Riding aboard an airliner about to land at night traveling at four hundred miles an hour at thirty-five thousand feet with clouds, rain, wind, and lightning below, what would you rather have figuring out the path, speed, and angle of descent of the aircraft for touch-down, the plane’s auto-pilot, radar, and computer system or the Earthian human pilot and co-pilot, seeing nothing out their windows below but clouds and lightning?
The main reason why delegating the scheduling, production, and distribution of the necessities of life to AI programs and magnum computers would be a good idea is that magnum computers and algorithmic AI programs do not get greedy and power hungry or play psychological Games. Thus far in Earthian human history most leaders and rulers atop large organizations such as nations have become corrupt one way or another playing psychological Games, acting out selfish greedy ego trips, hogging all the power, money, strokes, stimulation, and recognition they could get their hands on for themselves and their cronies, leaving the hindmost to their underlings. Whatever their limitations and possible threats, algorithmic computer programs and super computers are not egotistical, greedy, and power-hungry.
Thanks to Buckminster Fuller for providing the above airplane-landing metaphor in his book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, first published in 1969, and for planting seeds for other ideas in the essay “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc.,” published in the Effective Learning Report, such as computers being the best hope for mankind and humans not doing work machines can do better, being paid to think instead with what Fuller called mind grants. Fuller said unemployment all around Spaceship Earth could be eliminated overnight with mind grants. Buckminster Fuller was the inventor of the appellations Earthian and Spaceship Earth.
Most Earthian humans like to win BALANCE SHEET psychological Games, to feel superior and lord it over others, regardless if Spaceship Earth is going to hell in a handbasket around them because of global warming and climate change (GWCC) and militarization and nuclear weapons proliferation (MNWP), regardless of how much they have failed in other areas of their lives, and regardless of how heinous were crimes and misdemeanors they may have gotten away with in the process of amassing their riches, since they were saved, as it were, by taking in and controlling more almighty monetary units than other lesser mortals, saved, hallelujah, as if by Jesus, who forgave them their sins.
If you want to learn more about transactional analysis, such as Ego States, Scripts, and psychological Games, read Born to Learn: A Transactional Analysis of Human Learning.
Most Earthian humans know what it is to be egotistical, but they have little understanding of how specific human egotistical manifestations, such as Parent, Adult, and Child ego states, can be used to control and manipulate human behavior for nefarious ends.
One of the biggest egotists of Earthian human history, a narcissist, playing BALANCE SHEET psychological Games, is Donald Trump of the US. He is also a world-class liar and loser playing BALANCE SHEET, and he might go to jail for it, just like other political USian BALANCE SHEET psychological Game players in the US have, such as Georgia US representative, Bo Ginn, in 1995, and cotton farmer Billie Sol Estes of Pecos, Texas in 1965, who had political ties to the USian president from Texas Lyndon Johnson.
Trump psychologically told voters and bankers using his Parent ego state he was extorting votes and money from he was a stable genius and billionaire who could pay them back for their votes and loans. How many billions worth of a billionaire he was he never said, at least not to voters, arithmetic not being his strong suit; but it now appears it’s possible he’s no billionaire at all, using generally-accepted accounting principles and real market values, which he has refused to show since walking on the USian political stage for the 2016 presidential election. It’s possible he’s no kind of naire at all, not even a millionaire, possibly having liabilities that exceed the market value of his assets, being close to bankruptcy.
It now appears as shown in recent public posts that Trump, his loyal Trump Organization lackeys, and his chosen loyal family members lied to bankers about his net worth to get loans, proving once again that “All that glitters is not gold.”
P.T. Barnum is said to have proved there’s a sucker born every minute. If so, Trump may have proved there’s a sucker born every second, in high and low places.
If you feel you’ve gained value from THE EARTHIAN, go to the Internet or any walk-in bookstore around Spaceship Earth and purchase or order one or more Effective Learning Publications books. As the Rooster Crows Earthian OKness Increases is the latest and probably most engaging Effective Learning Publications book, including an overview of USian economic history, including the Trumpian affair. Rout Logger is the protagonist of the novel story. It’s available now at Amazon.com for immediate unrestricted digital reading on any device as a Kindle book for $4.99. You can read it free using Amazon trechnology in a restricted KDP option.
EARTHIAN DEMOCRATIC GAME-FREE CASE METHOD TEACHING AND LEARNING
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, Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Alabama.
This 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 roles of Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim were largely banished from the course learning process.
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 has 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 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).
He was a Harvard Case Method professor who never went to Harvard, having learned how the 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.
He 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).
He taught his own case method track at the undergraduate level in the management department of the business school at Georgia Southern University offering four or five different elective case method courses each academic year (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.
His students 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 at age thirty-six.
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 so-called objective tests, such as multiple-choice tests.
Only former students who had worked in the real world 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” 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.
For more information on related classroom management ethical issues 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.
Stapleton 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 (February 24, 2023) been cited as a reference in 84 refereed journal articles concerned about the ethics of student evaluations in several academic disciplines, including nine new citations since April 2021.
He retired as a university professor at Georgia Southern in June 2005, as the senior professor of the university for the 2004-2005 academic year, after thirty-five years of service.
As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein propositioned, “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.
THE EARTHIAN, Number Thirty-Seven, February 5, 2023, Effective Learning Publications https://blog.effectivelearning.net/ , 32 East Main Street, Statesboro, Georgia, USA, Richard John Stapleton, Writer, Editor & Publisher, Copyright 2023, All Rights Reserved
A Posting by a Hypothetical Exonexus Observer from a Planet beyond the Earthian Solar System
The poor Earthian humans are enthralled, manipulated, and in various degrees controlled by their leaders in some two hundred countries aboard Spaceship Earth. The leaders became leaders because of being caused to be leaders by unbroken cause-effect chains resulting after our universe started evolving some ten billion years ago in the infinity of time and space and from innumerable unique configurations of concatenations of cause-effect chains causing differentiated humans and countries on Earth through time.
Leaders are generally products of the same sorts of cause-effect chains as followers and members. They are all doing what they were caused to do in their daily lives starting at birth.
Earth as a planet was formed about 4.5 billion years ago and has undergone innumerable transformations in the meantime. Humanoid creatures have been aboard Spaceship Earth for some two million years, and they too have undergone numerous evolutionary changes.
Unfortunately, it now appears Earthian humans have reached a precarious and dangerous stage in their evolution as biological creatures. After slowly evolving more and more accurate, complex, and powerful understandings, technologies, and ways of life for two million years on Earth, during the last two hundred years Earthian humans evolved new technological devices at exponential rates that enabled them to increase their population of Earth as a species to a degree that they now threaten not only their own existence as a species aboard Spaceship Earth but also the existence of most other species alive on Earth.
Keeping eight billion Earthian humans alive on Earth has required so many goods and services to be produced to satisfy human biological and psychological needs and wants and so much fossil fuel energy to be burned to produce the goods that the climate of Spaceship Earth has been altered by carbon dioxide released yearly into the Earthian atmosphere, in sufficient quantities to cause extra heat to be trapped on Earth causing the mean Earthian temperature to increase at a yearly rate that threatens to destroy Earthian human life as it now exists, within centuries, if not decades.
At the same time Earthian humans have developed technological knowledge that has enabled them to produce over 10,000 nuclear weapons that could destroy human life aboard Spaceship Earth if dropped and detonated on defined enemies around Spaceship Earth, as they have the capability to do.
Earthian countries dependent on fossil fuel energy in the short run are pitted in a zero-sum struggle for control of oil and gas supplies around Earth, with the two largest militant nations on Earth possessing over ninety percent of the nuclear weapons now threatening one another in a war they started in a minor country, a pawn in their Earthian game of chess, a tissue-tearing psychological Game called KING OF THE MOUNTAIN by Earthian humans, caused by egoistic leaders and top members of the two countries who are primarily concerned about maintaining and enhancing their personal power, wealth, prestige, lifestyles, and legacies.
Top leaders of one of these countries, fighting in the pawn country with non-nuclear weapons so far, have publicly declared they will fire and detonate some nuclear weapons if necessary to prevent their being defeated and humiliated in the war/Game started in the minor pawn country. Hopefully this is just a bluff in another reincarnation of the Earthian human psychological Game called CHICKEN.
As dangerous as this psychological high-stakes Game-playing is most Earthian humans find it stimulating, interesting, patriotic, heroic, and so forth in their nightly news, a release from the normal grind of their boring and banal daily routines and rituals, and their pastimes, jobs, activities, and intimacies.
The new war Game in the minor country is a helluva way to generate strokes, aka units of recognition, to get attention, to get recognized, stimulated, and affirmed, now that some Earthian human strokes, nuclear strokes, have become so powerful they can cause the elimination of all Earthian human strokes forever.
ASK MORE WHAT YOUR COUNTRY CAN DO FOR ALL EARTHIAN HUMANS—TO MINIMIZE THE PROBABILITY OF EARTHIAN HUMAN EXTINCTION—CAUSED BY GLOBAL WARMING AND CLIMATE CHANGE (GWCC) AND/OR MILITARIZATION AND NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROLIFERATION (MNWP)
FOLLOWING IS THE MOST CURRENT PART OF THE EARTHIAN, A COLLECTION OF FACT-BASED POSTS BY TRUTH-TELLING WRITERS AND ARTISTS AROUND SPACESHIP EARTH, FEELING, THINKING, WRITING, AND CREATING USING ALL EGO STATES.
SOURCES FOR THIS ISSUE OF THE EARTHIAN:
February 3, 2023
What next? If these things can work as well as they can play and if enough could be made and if enough clean energy could be produced to power them Earthian biological humans would not have to do any more menial manual labor.
So much for upward mobility in USian society. Thom Hartmann’s answer to his question below is that the ultra-rich oppose democracy because they want to keep people in their places to stabilize society. kind of like the divine right of king’s bullshit that god wanted Earthian humans to be rich poor, etc, obiediently do what they were told, and worship him for blessing them by making everything happen as well as it did in their lives.
Here’s the most sadistic venomous callous inhumane insane antisocial ignorant dumb stupid idea I ever heard of coming out of the USian House, hatched by Repug House legislators to cut even more the taxes of the ultra-rich, who have no real need to make more money from Federal tax cuts, instigated by Repug legislators to generate increased tax cut bribe money from the ultra-rich for themselves to get reelected—caring not a whit about the suffering this would cause the USian poor in the private sector, nor the strife and civil discord this would cause in USian society as a whole, perhaps its complete destruction.
“Following the Paris Agreement on the environment of 2015, many governments appeared to have finally risen to the occasion, by collectively agreeing that climate change is, indeed, the greatest danger facing humankind. That promising moment did not last for long, however, as the US Administration of Donald Trump reneged on Washington’s earlier commitment, thus weakening the resolve of others to lower greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40% by 2030.”
Here’s another high minded technological article on the overall problem of Earthian human sustainability, discussing relevant points, but never mentioning the biggest cause of Earthian human unsustainability. You would not need to increase the size of the economy every year if you did not have an ever–increasing Earthian human population requiring the consumption and destruction of more and more Earthian resources every year to satisfy basic human needs, causing the consequent necessary pumping of more and more greenhouse gases into Earth’s atmosphere causing global warming. While the author of this article has some good ideas she as usual never mentions the elephant in the room: human over-fecundity. How to peacefully and painlessly reduce the human population aboard Spaceship Earth, that is the problem. The answer is to birth fewer Earthian humans every year than naturally die every year. The way to co-construct a peaceful and prosperous future for Earthian humans is to bake smaller global economic pies every year for a peacefully-caused smaller and smaller Earthian human population that shrinks more per year than the yearly Earthian economic pie, thus producing more pie per human alive on Earth despite reducing yearly the global production of goods and services around Spaceship Earth.
Of course. All they will do is look out for their own special interests. No agency with any significant power is looking out for the interests of Earthian humans as a whole.
“In the midst of a global food and energy crisis, the top 95 food and energy corporations more than doubled their profits in 2022, according to the report, making $306 billion in windfall profits and paying out $257 billion of that to rich shareholders, at the same time as nearly 1 billion people went hungry. Meanwhile, the Oxfam report warned that three-quarters of the world’s governments are planning austerity-driven public sector spending cuts, including health care and education, by a whopping $7.8 trillion over the next five years.”
I included the doomsday clock in my novel As the Rooster Crows Eartthian OKness increases. It’s set even closer to doomsday now than it was in my novel year before last.
A new novel showing how to increase Earthian human OKness in a new kind of discussion process in democracy chapters around Spaceship Earth that might help save Spaceship Earth from the two modern horses of the apocalypse, global warming and climate change (GWCC) and militarization and nuclear weapons proliferation (MNWP).
The anonymous Kirkus reviewer was most likely a smart person, calling the novel a smart book on everything that’s wrong with the world, but s/he failed to mention anything about the major strength of the novel, which s/he says is only nominally a novel, since it does not follow the standard novel format for plotting and character development, saying most readers coming to the book looking for a story will be disappointed: the novel concludes by proposing a new discussion process that might help Earthian humans change their current course heading into hell on Earth. It is not like most novels since it includes forty characters randomly selected from all walks of life who are guaranteed equal opportunity to succeed in the plot by the protagonist, Rout Logger.
Just click on the diagram to read the messages transmitted on the chain of ego states. This was first published in 1978 in my article “The Chain of Ego States” in the Transactional Analysis Journal. Shows how subordinates are scripted in organizations, including families. 1 can be a parent having been scripted by his/her parents transmitting the family script to his/her children, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. The diagram can also be applied in other types of organizations such as corporations where 1 is the top leader and 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 are his/her subordinates, who then transmit the family/organization script to his/her children or subordinates. Differentiated family scripts comprising various combinations of script messages can remain intact in a family for many generations if the scripts of both parents are similar at generational levels of the family tree.
As brute force political violence becomes more prevalent in the land ignorance and bigotry triumph over reason and compassion using edicts backed by force of law making a mockery of truth, fairness, and justice.
At issue is who owns the country, only the rich who have the money to buy it, or all the people of the country because they live and work there? Or, for that matter, who owns Spaceship Earth?
Here we go again. Who caused most of the Federal debt? Mostly Repug politicians, by voting to cut taxes for the ultra-rich and increase military spending to generate more bribe money from the ultra-rich and defense contractors to spend on advertising hype to get reelected.
“Jay Inslee’s signature issue in the last campaign was climate change. Since this is one of the three mammoth threats of our time – the other being nuclear war with either Beijing or Moscow and the third being fascism – that puts him head and shoulders above most other Dem candidates, even those to his so-called left. But he, like Hogan, has a marketing problem, to wit, he’s not insane. Because the media and the public they drive into a frenzy prefer kooks or overt fascists. Corporate news loved Trump, gave him unlimited coverage, and he’s about as unbalanced an individual as ever popped up in public life. Who knows what mentally ill soul or swastika-tattooed nutjob our news outfits will settle on next, but average candidates like Hogan or Inslee are at a disadvantage: they’re pretty good at their jobs, namely governance, and so commit the unpardonable media sin of being boring.”
Good article. Abled or disabled, it was all caused by infinite cause-effect chains. Why should the abled have so many rewards they did not cause? This is a basic question most Earthian humans have not answered. See my new novel AS THE ROOSTER CROWS EARTHIAN OKNESS INCREASES for more background on the problem.
Whoopee. More ransacking and pillaging of the USian interior. Before long the USian people won’t own anything in common, being subject to the whims of greedy private capitalistic owners, thanks to their agents in Washington, such as this jubilant one, and his cohorts.
Yes, distractions from what might be done to ameliorate pressing problems in the here and now. A supreme irony is that the US is seen by others as a great place to immigrate into, given the horrendous economic and political problems inside the US, considering their countries to be much worse off, when the reality is that Spaceship Earth itself is in dire peril from GWCC and MNWP, global warming and climate change and militarization and nuclear weapons proliferation.
Still don’t know exactly what “I brought the tiger” means but this sheds light on what is going on. sounds like serious hardball. Based on this video Gaetz and McCarthy are the two weirdest dudes I have seen and heard in the US House.
TOWARD THE CO-CONSTRUCTION OF A FAIR AND SUSTAINABLE LONG RUN EARTHIAN ECONOMIC SYSTEM
Establishing democracy chapters around Spaceship Earth as recommended in the Effective Learning Publications novel As the Rooster Crows Earthian OKness Increases might develop consensual answers regarding existential matters from the bottom up that might help save Spaceship Earth. These ideas would filter up to randomly-selected humans who would count the consensual answers to make necessary changes. Consensual tactics, strategies, and policies would then be developed around Earth for dealing with the computerized Spaceship Earth management system, operated and controlled using artificial intelligence programming and supercomputers.
Randomly-selected groups of Earthian humans of high intelligence with impeccable moral and ethical character and credentials would control codes for changing the Earthian Magnum Computer System programming to implement bottom-up recommendations of millions of members in discussions in democracy chapters around Spaceship Earth. Each member of the group in charge of the codes for the magnum computer system would serve limited terms. These members would not vote or decide what to do. They would see to it that the computer system implemented the consensual answers of millions of Earthian humans from all walks of life, as determined by honest, free, fair, and frank democratic Game-free discussions in democracy chapters all around Spaceship Earth, as explained and shown in As the Rooster Crows Earthian OKness Increases. The overall objective would be to manage the system in such a way as to maximize the lifetime satisfactions of all Earthian humans, as well as all other species of life aboard Spaceship Earth, while insuring the indefinite functioning of all Spaceship Earth ecosystems.
Necessary moral and ethical requirements and constraints could be programmed in the Magnum Management System that Earthian humans at the top would be obliged to obey. If changes should be made in the moral and ethical codes in the overall program they would be sent back to the Earthian democracy chapters for discussion and then tabulated and analyzed before algorithms programmed in the system would create changes in the MMS operating system.
This Magnum Computerized Management System would require a strict system of security controls like the current codes of nations possessing nuclear weapons, hopefully providing security several magnitudes more secure than current nuclear codes, to make sure a madman could not get in control of any aspect of the Magnum Spaceship Earth Management System.
A management system such as this would significantly improve previous systems used around Spaceship Earth that have historically empowered fickle, egotistical, greedy, power mad, grandiose, poorly educated, not-very-bright individual Earthian humans to make existential decisions affecting the OKness of thousands, millions, and billions of humans around Earth, an incredibly dumb thing to do, that has been done over and over again for millennia, resulting in incredible losses and suffering at various moments of history caused by the unfair and indiscriminate inexorable tunneling out of Bad, OK, or Good Luck for hundreds, thousands, millions, or billons of Earthian humans around Spaceship Earth at all times since time immemorial, resulting from the cosmic evolution commencing with the creation of the Universe some ten billion years ago.
A tough lesson for Earthian humans to accept propositioned in Effective Learning Publications books is that everything that happens in human states of affairs is either predetermined or accidental and therefore individuals are not to blame or praise for what happens in human states of affairs. This is easier to swallow after accepting that believing and acting otherwise will support and perpetuate the I’m OK—You’re Not OK life position that has bedeviled, sabotaged, and undermined Earthian humans since time immemorial, making losers out of most of them.
About the only way significant numbers of Earthian humans can be caused to be significantly changed psychologically and socially by others is through democratic face to face discussions in honest serious and rigorous dialectical, dialogical, analogical arguing about facts using reasoning of all kinds, dealing with Earthian human existential states of affairs.
What is considered natural, unnatural; normal, abnormal; right, wrong; ethical, unethical; righteous, sinful; worthy, unworthy; or sane or insane by a particular Earthian human is caused by information lodged in her/his brain caused to be lodged there by the concatenation of infinite cause-effect chains causing her/him to exist and slowly inch through the Earthian worm hole of existence inexorably tunneled out for her or him by her/his specific unbroken infinitely-regressing cause-effect chains inexorably-progressing throughout his/her infinitesimally short cosmic life, regardless of how Bad, OK, or Good that luck or fate might be as judged by any Earthian human; and all Earthian humans must keep on inching forward in their worm holes as best they can dealing with inevitable problems and opportunities caused to exist at that stage in their unique tunnels, as they are knocked around like balls in a pin-ball machine, as events inevitably and/or accidentally happen in their so-called real worlds, and in their subconscious and conscious minds, however Bad, OK, or Good their inherited Luck might have absolutely been, which cannot be proved, however easy it might be to relatively estimate.
It follows that changing the life scripts of Earthian humans for the better requires changing the course of unique tunnels of existence in which individual humans accidentally and inevitably live, a tall order indeed. Some biological constructivists would consider this notion a pipedream, while considering the whole process a meaningless drift in the infinity of time and space.
What is God? Whatever it was that caused the Universe to exist.
Constructivism is considered relevant in Effective Learning Publications books recommended below, having been discussed in some detail in Business Voyages and listed as a source in the bibliographies of three books.
For more information on how to co-construct better organizations and economic systems using transactional analysis read Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata, and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds
Read free “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc,” https://blog.effectivelearning.net/the-evolution-of-spaceship-earth-inc/ for some management science ideas on how Earthian humans might eventually co-construct an 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 recently-published novel shows how to conduct a new kind of seminar invented and coordinated by Rout Logger, the protagonist of the novel, that might reduce the probability of Earthian human extinction that requires participants in a seminar to speak out and up when randomly selected by a Truther rooster positioned in the center of a randomly-selected group of forty humans sitting in a circle. The Truther rooster resembles a spinning weather vane. The rooster is programmed to bob its head up and down and raucously crow after being twirled by a randomly-selected seminar participant, as it spins round and round winding down, letting group members know it’s time to wake up and get to work, before it’s too late. When the Truther rooster stops spinning whoever is at the end of a line of imaginary fire extending from the rooster’s beak to her or him sitting in the circle is automatically selected as the Leader of the Moment for the group, proving pure democracy can happen. The Leader of the Moment must then lead the group into a democratic discussion of what s/he considers the most serious existential problem around Spaceship Earth. Forty participants from all walks of life were paid $5000 monthly for participating in weekend seminars conducted in central city hotels in various cities randomly selected around the US. If randomly selected as the Leader of the Moment the participant had to define what s/he thought was the most important problem facing Spaceship Earth, present alternatives, and make a recommendation for change. What s/he said would then be discussed by members of the group on a free-flow first come-first serve basis. It was against the law of the seminar to interrupt speakers or raise hands to get permission to speak. Discussions lasted until they ran out of steam with most issues covered. The results of the discussions would be published to the wealthy donors financing the process and the Earthian public.
Rout Logger was convinced most Earthian humans would not volunteer to participate in this sort of seminar to merely help save Spaceship Earth from GWCC and/or MNWP using their Nurturing Parent, Adult, and Free Child Ego States, given the reality that their life time and energy was already programmed and consumed with various forms of withdrawal, rituals, pastimes, psychological Games, activities, and intimacy in their unique tunnels of reality, as they acted out their inherited life scripts; so they were paid $5000 per month to participate in a Game-free, Adult-Adult democratic seminar that would require them to honestly discuss existential problems with forty other participants from disparate walks of life, if they were randomly selected by the spinning Truther Rooster as the Leader of the Moment.
According to Effective Learning Publications books, achieving Earthian human sustainability entails such things as Earthian humans peacefully reducing through natural attrition (natural deaths exceeding births) the human population aboard Spaceship Earth, 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, assuming sufficient quantities of non-human clean energy can be discovered and developed using mind grants.
The general algorithmic matrix algebra form below can help bring this state of affairs about,
This mathematical formulation might one happy day develop for Earthian humans power in economics loosely analogous to the power of E=mc2 in physics. This formulation, Max or Min CjXj, subject to, AijXj ≤, =, or ≥ Bi, is a general form of the linear programming model, which has been around for many years in management science, operations research, and linear algebra courses.
Max CjXj, s.t. AijXj ≤, =, or ≥ Bi symbolizes knowledge that gives the Earthian human species about as much potential power to perpetuate itself as Albert Einstein’s formula E=mc2 symbolizes knowledge that gives the Earthian human species the power to exterminate itself.
Riding aboard an airliner about to land at night traveling at four hundred miles an hour at thirty-five thousand feet with clouds, rain, wind, and lightning below, what would you rather have figuring out the path, speed, and angle of descent of the aircraft for touch-down, the plane’s auto-pilot, radar, and computer system or the pilot and co-pilot, seeing nothing out their windows below but clouds and lightning?
The main reason why delegating the scheduling, production, and distribution of the necessities of life to AI programs and magnum computers would be a good idea is that magnum computers and algorithmic AI programs do not get greedy and power hungry or play psychological Games. Thus far in Earthian human history most leaders and rulers atop large organizations such as nations have become corrupt one way or another playing psychological Games, acting out selfish greedy ego trips, hogging all the power, money, strokes, stimulation, and recognition they could get their hands on for themselves and their cronies, leaving the hindmost to their underlings. Whatever their limitations and possible threats, algorithmic computer programs and super computers are not egotistical, greedy, and power-hungry.
Thanks to Buckminster Fuller for providing the above airplane-landing metaphor in his book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, first published in 1969, and for planting seeds for other ideas in the essay “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc.,” published in the Effective Learning Report, such as computers being the best hope for mankind and humans not doing work machines can do better, being paid to think instead with what Fuller called mind grants. Fuller said unemployment all around Spaceship Earth could be eliminated overnight with mind grants. Buckminster Fuller was the inventor of the appellations Earthian and Spaceship Earth.
Most Earthian humans like to win BALANCE SHEET psychological Games, to feel superior and lord it over others, regardless if Spaceship Earth is going to hell in a handbasket around them because of global warming and climate change (GWCC) and militarization and nuclear weapons proliferation (MNWP), regardless of how much they have failed in other areas of their lives, and regardless of how heinous were crimes and misdemeanors they may have gotten away with in the process of amassing their riches, since they were saved, as it were, by taking in and controlling more almighty monetary units than other lesser mortals, saved, hallelujah, as if by Jesus, who forgave them their sins.
If you want to learn more about transactional analysis, such as Ego States, Scripts, and psychological Games, read Born to Learn: A Transactional Analysis of Human Learning.
Most Earthian humans know what it is to be egotistical, but they have little understanding of how specific human egotistical manifestations, such as Parent, Adult, and Child ego states, can be used to control and manipulate human behavior for nefarious ends.
One of the biggest egotists of Earthian human history, a narcissist, playing BALANCE SHEET psychological Games, is Donald Trump of the US. He is also a world-class liar and loser playing BALANCE SHEET, and he might go to jail for it, just like other political USian BALANCE SHEET psychological Game players in the US have, such as Georgia US representative, Bo Ginn, in 1995, and cotton farmer Billie Sol Estes of Pecos, Texas in 1965, who had political ties to the USian president from Texas Lyndon Johnson.
Trump psychologically told voters and bankers using his Parent ego state he was extorting votes and money from he was a stable genius and billionaire who could pay them back for their votes and loans. How many billions worth of a billionaire he was he never said, at least not to voters, arithmetic not being his strong suit; but it now appears it’s possible he’s no billionaire at all, using generally-accepted accounting principles and real market values, which he has refused to show since walking on the USian political stage for the 2016 presidential election. It’s possible he’s no kind of naire at all, not even a millionaire, having liabilities that exceed the market value of his assets, being close to bankruptcy.
It now appears as shown in recent public posts that Trump, his loyal Trump Organization lackeys, and his chosen loyal family members lied to bankers about his net worth to get loans, proving once again that “All that glitters is not gold.”
P.T. Barnum is said to have proved there’s a sucker born every minute. If so, Trump may have proved there’s a sucker born every second, in high and low places.
If you feel you’ve gained value from THE EARTHIAN, go to the Internet or any walk-in bookstore around Spaceship Earth and purchase or order one or more Effective Learning Publications books. As the Rooster Crows Earthian OKness Increases is the latest and probably most engaging Effective Learning Publications book, including an overview of USian economic history, including the Trumpian affair. Rout Logger is the protagonist of the novel story. It’s available now at Amazon.com for immediate unrestricted digital reading on any device as a Kindle book for $4.99. You can read it free at Amazon in a restricted KDP option.
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, Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Alabama.
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.
He has 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 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).
He learned how the 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.
He 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).
He taught his own case method track at the undergraduate level in the management department of the business school at Georgia Southern University offering four or five different elective case method courses each academic year (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.
His students 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 at age thirty-six.
He collected 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 so-called objective multiple-choice tests.
Only former students who had worked in the real world 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” 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.
For more information on related classroom management ethical issues 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.
Stapleton 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 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 (October 24, 2022) been cited as a reference in 83 refereed journal articles concerned about the ethics of student evaluations in several academic disciplines, including eight new citations since April 2021.
He retired at Georgia Southern as the senior professor of the university in 2005.
As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein propositioned, “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.
