Effective Learning Report

GEE, YOU’RE WONDERFUL, PROFESSOR

B y Richard John Stapleton

I recently published a new book, GEE, YOU’RE WONDERFUL, PROFESSOR: HOW TO MOTIVATE LEARNERS AND INCREASE OKNESS WITH I’M OK—YOU’RE OK ADULT—ADULT GAME—FREE DIALECTICAL CASE-BASED LEARNING PROCESSES.

If interested you can read the book immediately as an ebook at amazon.com for $3.99, 364 pages.

Here’s a short video about the book. Just click on the Google link below to view the video.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UQ4Q1MdR_Dom7EVPaOBZCr2yaP1OVV0P/view?usp=sharing

By Courtenay Barnett

Myself, a lawyer, I take off my running shoes from a prior, younger time, to enjoy a view of a very special race for me, from the privileged vantage point where I now sit.

Still a fan of athletics on the track, I am extremely enthused by the race I am watching below me (albeit with three politicians running). This time round there are two Americans and a Jamaican vying for the medals – gold, silver and bronze. Before me I see President Donald Trump, Mayor Eric Adams, and the Jamaican Prime Minister, Andrew Holness. All three are competing in this corruption contest and my task is to offer sensible legal commentary as the race proceeds.

President Trump, of course, is the leader of the world’s wealthiest nation, the United States of America. Next to him is Eric Adams, the Mayor of the leading city in the US in financial terms, New York. In the next lane is Andrew Holness, the Prime Minister of Jamaica, a country which continues to face extreme economic challenges.

The gun has been fired and all three are off and running well in the race for most corrupt leader. They are all moving impressively and I shall say how so. Trump has the distinction of having been convicted in a US court. Before we get to conviction, we must note that Trump earned himself the distinction of being the first US President ever to be charged in criminal court and he excelled by being charged fully four times in four criminal cases. Trump became the first US President to be a convicted felon, as of on May 30, 2024. Much more could be said about this contender, but we shall leave it there for now as political interventions have muddied the otherwise pure legal waters. Trump nevertheless remains a strong contender in this corruption race.

We move on. With Eric Adams, Mayor of New York, we are obliged to get directly to the politics, for while he was indicted on very clear evidence, the politics got in the way. It is an intertwined and compromised process, but I am here to focus on the depth and abilities of the competitors. Adams has succeeded in having the top US prosecutorial attorney in Manhattan resign, when the Justice Department directed the New York office to drop a corruption case against him. Additionally, no less than five  prosecutors have effected their  ‘protest resignations’ in response to the directive. Needless to say – Adams remains a strong contender for the win in this tightly run race.

While Jamaica is known for its prowess in the athletics field, PM Andrew Holness, of Jamaica, is not as well known in the international arena, I feel it is necessary to offer a few additional explanatory words. To adumbrate, Jamaica, under the law, has an Integrity Commission in place under an Integrity Commission Act, which legally requires disclosures from public officials to declare and explain their income and assets while they are in office. Annual declarations are a part of the regiment under which the officials are obliged to operate and comply. In essence, the millions in earnings and assets of PM Holness have, so far, failed to level up
squarely to the declarations so far made by him. Suffice to say that the Integrity Commission is not satisfied with Mr. Holness’s declarations made so far – and Mr. Holness has taken the Commission to court (i.e. seeking to curb the Commission’s on-going probing while refusing to satisfy the declaration stipulations of the Commission while awaiting the court’s determination).

There you have it. The elected officials against the system – and the system scrutinizing the officials, as best can be done, as the race goes on.

First, second or third – we shall see as the race progresses.

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— Courtenay Barnett, an ELR contributor for several years, was born and reared in Jamaica, studied economics and international law at London University, and practiced law in the Turks and Caicos Islands, where he retired and now lives and writes.

By Richard John Stapleton

I submitted an article including most of this material and data to the Academy of Management Review in 1997 and the editor sent it back telling me it was too quantitative for the AMR, suggesting I send it to the Academy of Management Journal, which was more quantitative. I polished the article some after the AMR review, but I did not send it to the Academy of Management. I got most of the data and ideas published in refereed business management proceedings articles and in the Transactional Analysis Journal, and I printed the article as a chapter in my book Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata, and Tools for Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds.

Few business professors not using the case method wanted to read in the top management professional journal of the US that the case method really was the best teaching method for teaching business management, and most teachers in fields other than business management, except perhaps law, probably would have thought it bizarre and impractical.

I do not assert the data in this article prove the case method would work best for business teachers everywhere in all courses, or that it would work for all teachers anywhere teaching any subject; but I do assert the data provide compelling evidence that case method Game-Free I’m OK—You’re OK Adult—Adult Democratic processes produced valuable learning for business students at Georgia Southern University, irrespective of my being ranked in the lowest 25 percent of business faculty as an instructor on student evaluations up to 2001.

Our (Stapleton & Murkison, 2001 ) article “Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations: A Study of Correlations Between Instructor Excellence, Study Production, Learning Production, and Expected Grades,” published as the lead article in an issue of the Journal of Management Education, dispelled the bad press student evaluations caused me for over twenty years at Georgia Southern. I was professor S in the study. I am the only professor or teacher of any sort I know of who has any quantitative longitudinal research data showing his teaching worked for former students in the real world, shown here in this article.

Our Optimizing Fairness article has by now been cited as a reference in 91 refereed professional journal articles in several fields, several since 2021, proving the article is still being read and cited in serious research articles on how to evaluate teaching. The article showed that student evaluations in colleges and universities unfairly discriminated against professors using teaching methods and processes such as the case method. After our Optimizing Fairness article was published in 2001 Georgia Southern University added  Study Production, Learning Production, and Expected Grades questions to the student evaluation form administered to every instructor and professor at Georgia Southern at the end of every course.  Hopefully the article has caused the same to happen at many colleges and universities. You can read a full copy of Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations by clicking on the Fair Student Evaluations  prompt in the menu of the Effective Learning Report atop this page.

Most teachers and professors were scripted to use the ego states, transactional patterns, classroom layouts, teaching methods, and testing methods they use by copying and learning by osmosis the ego states, teaching methods, etc. that were used by their favorite teachers during their years of schooling getting their degrees.

Teachers once scripted rarely change the methods of their learning processes throughout their teaching careers, despite having little or no data or evidence showing their learning processes worked in the real world for their students.

As indicated in my “RJS Athletic, Business, and Academic Vita”, published in the Effective Learning Report, I never had a case method course in my years of schooling getting my degrees. I learned how the case method works teaching with Bernard Bienvenu and Rexford Hauser, two Harvard Business School doctorates, at what is now Louisiana University-Lafayette, as an associate professor my first year in academia after getting my doctorate at Texas Tech University in 1969.

Learning how the case method works is not an easy thing to do. I never would have learned how it works had the case method not been required in every course in the management department at Louisiana University-Lafayette at the time. My first semester there I felt uncomfortable using the case method, having serious doubts my students were learning anything of value, prompting me to accept a new position, at a higher salary, making me in the process one of the highest paid professors at Georgia Southern University.

During my second semester at Louisiana University-Lafayette it dawned on me how the case method worked, and I used nothing but the case method throughout my career teaching business at Georgia Southern, making me a case method lone wolf, the only professor in the business school using the case method, also making me a pariah at times, in the culture of the school. Fortunately, some of my colleagues realized I was producing OK learning for some of my students and we got along. Paul LaGrone, the business school dean that recruited me to Georgia Southern in 1970 told me in a golf cart at the annual School of Business Golf Tournament in about 1992 that “Everything would have been fine if you just had not used those damn circles.”

I used circle classroom layouts requiring my learners to rearrange their desks from row and column classroom layouts to circle layouts, with desks positioned around the perimeter of the room. This upset some authoritarian faculty and administrators, and probably some authoritarian students as well, when they heard about it, even though I made sure my democratic learners put their desks back in respectful orderly row and column layouts when class was over.

The Lecture Method

Lecture systems purport to transmit knowledge to students in the form of facts, rules, procedures, techniques, theories, and concepts. The assumption is that this material represents what exists or will exist in the real world, or will be useful in the real world, and, if students memorize and master the material for tests, they should be able to do a better job in dealing with the real world after they graduate than they would have had they not memorized and mastered the material. This overall process is basically a top-down deductive process. The material is presented by a superior instructor to students who supposedly retain the material in memory. The material contained in memory will later be applied to perceived phenomena in the real world of the student at the time. Based on this memorization and application, the student, it is hoped, will be able to deduce additional relevant phenomena about the situation in question at the time and understand and deal with the situation better than would have been the case had the student not memorized what the instructor instructed him or her with back in college. To what degree this process works is another matter; many students think they forget most of what is memorized for tests three weeks after the course is over.

Lecture method tests frequently contain true-false and multiple-choice questions. This is the most authoritarian method of all, allowing top-down I’m OK—You’re Not OK lecturing of supposedly “right answers” that Less OK or Not OK students have to memorize for tests in order to be OK.

The Seminar Method

This method entails the assigning and reading of published research articles, books, and other materials to be discussed in small groups or classes. The articles and books may contain essays, business histories, concepts, theories, techniques, literature reviews, hypotheses, statistical methods, and research findings. Students and discussants generally discuss what they have read and take exams covering the discussed material. The exams or tests generally include essay questions. A major assumption of the method is that students can remember what they read and do not require oral recitation in class by an instructor. The method is relatively democratic but the learning and testing are concerned about how well students memorized what supposedly superior authors thought about the real world in most courses.

The Computer Game Method

The computer game method simulates a hypothetical company operating in a hypothetical industry. Students learn to make decisions required to “run” the simulated company, such as how much money to spend on advertising, whether to hire more people, whether to increase inventory or production, whether to borrow more money, and the like. Assuming the simulated hypothetical company and industry contain decisions and processes similar to those found in most real world companies students might be exposed to in later life, students should know more about what to in those companies than people not exposed to computer game courses in business school. Computer game approaches are also basically top-down, in that students are told the rules of the game and what decisions to make by the teacher. Based on these general rules and other concepts taught by teachers, the students deduce what to do making their decisions in the game. Presumably students who win do so because of using superior deductive logic with the taught rules and concepts, although many claim the key success factor is learning secret algorithms in the computer program not taught by the teacher. A strength of computer games is that they teach students to seek information to use for competitive purposes. Games effectively teach competitive organizational behavior, regardless of the degree to which they teach students about the real world in general. Various teachers use various schemes for grading computer game performance, but true-false and multiple-choice questions are rarely used. This method is somewhat democratic in that students get to think for themselves, somewhat, but what they think about is an abstract model, not problems, opportunities, facts, and data that naturally occur in the real world.

The On-Line Method

This method does not entail a teacher teaching the content of the course in person in class. Students are assigned material to read and learn on-line using home computers, mobile devices, and the like to complete lesson plans and take tests on-line. The teacher may have a few on-line sessions with students individually and as a group dealing with special issues involved in accessing and using the material with computers and explaining what students could not understand on their own with in ad hoc emails. I did not ask questions about this method in this research because this method was not used much for college courses when this research was conducted, being a relatively new innovation, having significantly increased in usage during and after the Covid epidemic. Since there is little or no face-to-face transactions between teachers and students when this method is used, transactional analysis, or TA, is generally rendered irrelevant, since you cannot see or feel ego states and transactions happening between you and others. You can detect to some degree ego states and transactions changing to some extent by the way and what teachers and students type in emails back and forth dealing with on-line course issues and problems. It’s possible that no learning occurs at all in these courses, as learning is defined by radical constructivists below.

Earthian humans and societies around Spaceship Earth may now be learning less because of being forced to use computers, mobile devices, text messages, passwords, user names, etc. emails, etc. as they attempt to do business withmenu systems, robots, and websites in isolation instead of in face-to-face and voice-to-voice conversations. This method is pretty much fill-in-the-blank monkey see-monkey do authoritarianism.

The Case Method

The case method (Christensen, 1992; Christensen & Hanson, 1986; Dooley & Skinner, 1977; Stapleton, 1976, 1985, 1990; Towl, 1969) is a bottom-up inductive approach in which students are exposed to a large number of real world samples of human states of affairs in the form of written cases. Students are required to study, analyze, and discuss the cases face-to- face in groups. The major task is to identify problems and opportunities in the cases and decide what to do about them. In this process, students learn to communicate with fellow students and sell their ideas about what to do

about problems and opportunities in the cases. They also learn about possible problems, processes, scripts, and recurrences that exist in the real world. Students are generally graded on their overall performance based on class participation and case write-ups. True-false and multiple-choice questions are rarely used with the case method. The teacher’s job is to lead and motivate learners in the class discussions making sure relevant points are brought up and explaining anything students are not able to understand on their own.

The main reason most teachers do not use the case method is that teachers must grade class participation that requires making subjective judgements about the performance of each learner relative to the performance of the class as a whole. The case method is relatively democratic and requires learners to think for themselves in a learning environment that to some extent simulates what really goes on in the real world..

Entrepreneurship in the Real World

Most entrepreneurial decisions are wrong, or at least sub-optimum. No one knows for sure what he or she is doing when a new venture is created. According to Brandt (1989), the best of entrepreneurs with the best of entrepreneurial educations may have little more than a 50-50 chance of success. On the other hand, naive or impulsive entrepreneurs, with little or no education for the entrepreneurial task, have an even lower a priori chance.

The entrepreneurial task entails deciding upon what to do, where to do it, when to do it, how to do it, and by whom it should be done. The what and where decisions are probably the most vital and are what primarily distinguish entrepreneurs from other types of players in business. What and where decisions are among the toughest kinds to make because there are so many possible things entrepreneurs might do and so many places in which they might be done. In order to decide rationally what to do the entrepreneur would have to rank the possible returns for all possible ventures in various locations. With a little imagination, these possibilities can easily run into the thousands.

In most cases the entrepreneur confines his or her thinking to a domain bounded by more practical limits, using what Herbert Simon called “bounded rationality” (Simon, 1957), but, even here, the problem may be very complex. Rationally choosing among as few as 10 or 15 what and where combinations requires knowing about sources of financing, numbers and locations of possible customers, technological processes, transportations ystems, supplier relations, employee availabilities, organizational structures, how it all hangs together, and expected returns to investors in the short and long runs, for each alternative—which might require several megabytes of memory.

The rational entrepreneur would decide what to do based on an understanding of the above data, which entails a more complex problem than problems faced by players inside businesses, such as managers, accountants, engineers, salespeople, computer experts, and hourly employees. Most problems inside established businesses are relatively finite with deterministic answers, given expert technical knowledge and skill. Answers to these problems can normally be found using top-down deductive processes involving concepts and techniques taught and learned in schools and on the job through experience. Given good training, most employees can learn how to do their jobs inside businesses with a high probability of success. This is not true for entrepreneurs because there is no way to train someone to do something that has never been done before. Assuming business educators could instruct entrepreneurs with what they would need to know for guaranteed success, which they in reality cannot, they would tell them what exists in the real world and what will exist given the inevitability of change. Carland, Carland, and Stewart (1996) assert entrepreneurs learn to see what is not there. How could a teacher teach someone to see what is not there? Should teachers teach students to “see” constructions inside their own heads?

In my opinion, as a transactional analyst, it seems to me most successful entrepreneurs are simply lucky enough to be in or find environments in which they can succeed acting out what they have been scripted to do by inevitable infinite cause-effect chains.

Business Plans Written in A Business School

It’s obvious entrepreneurs have to be able to create business plans, however difficult it might be to explain how they do it. They have to develop the ability to visualize, conceptualize, and coordinate future time-sequenced events in spatial dimensions and sometimes put this down on paper. It seems entrepreneurship teachers should require entrepreneurial students how to create business plans in sink or swim processes.

Following is a listing of business plans and the number of times theywere created by gender by undergraduate entrepreneurial students in my classes in the Georgia Southern University business school during the years 1972-1982 (Stapleton, 1984).

Each student in the classes was told to write a business plan for a small business he or she might one day like to start, own, and operate. Here is a listing of numbers of those business plans by student gender and by type of business planned.

Males: N = 290

Tavern/Pub(19), Franchise Restaurant(14), Sporting Goods Store(12), Weight Lifting Gym(12), Non-Franchise Restaurant(8), Stereo Equipment Store(7), Convenience Grocery Store(7), Auto Repair(7), Men’s Clothing Store(7), Golf Driving Range(7), Liquor/ Beer Package Store(6), Lawn Mowing Service(6), Miniature Golf Course(6), Barber Shop(5), Construction Company(5), Racquetball Gym(5), Auto Parts Store(4), Insurance Agency(4), Movie Theater(4), Printing Company(4), Gun Shop(3), Service Station(3), Car Wash(3), Roller Skating Rink(3), Catfish Farm(2), Clothing Manufacturer(2), Carpet Outlet(2), Water Well Service(2), Bowling Lanes(2), Bookstore(2), Tennis Club(2), Motel(2), Running Shoe Store(2), Pinball Arcade(2), Dry Cleaners/Laundry(2), Jeep Dealership(2), Bait and Tackle Shop(2), Golf Club Repair(2), Home Rentals(2), Pecan Grove(2), Sailboat Rental(2), Bicycle Shop(2), Self-Service Laundromat(2), Floral Shop(2), Firewood Business(2), Bluejeans Store(2), T-Shirt Store(2), Egg Farm(2), Landscaping Service(2), Golf Pro Shop(2), Insulation Company(2), Poultry Farm(2), Tefl on Motor Treatment(2), Metal Building Company, Diet Restaurant, Crab Fishing, Swimming Pool Company, Tile Company, Wallpaper Studio, Pool Hall, Muffl er Shop, Upholstery Shop, Furniture Store, Fishing Camp, Guard Dog Service, Shalkee Direct Sales, Oil Distributorship, Logging Business, Refrigerator Repair, Real Estate Agency, Pet Kennel, Clock Business, Ambulance Service, Tire Retreading Company, News and Record Shop, Box Packaging Company, Wallpaper Installation Company, Radio Station, Pig Production Operation, Trailer Park, Trucking Company, Addressing System Company, Tree Surgery, Formal Clothing Rental, Miniwarehouse Storage, Dress Shop, Tool Sales, Charter Flying Service, Apartment Rentals, Crop dusting, Shoe Store, Paint and Landscaping Company, Scaffolding Sales and Service, Ready-Mix Concrete, Citrus Farm, Door to Door Bookselling, Roofi ng Company, Cemetary Vaults, Taxidermy Shop, Seafood Emporium, Parachute School, Frame Shop, ExterminatingService, Fish and Aquarium Sales, Shrimping Company, Dirt Hauling Business, Scuba Diving School, Clunker Car Rental, Mobile Home Park, Bagel Shop, Plumbing Company, Produce Company, Commercial Fishing, Tanning Parlor, Butcher Shop, Nitrogen Fixing Product Sales, Import Gift Shop, Music Company, Recording Studio, Karate School, Silk Screen T-Shirt Business, Photography Shop, Grain Moving Business, Travel Agency, Golf Pro Shop, Charter Bus Service, Antique Store, Wood Heater Store, Wholesale auto Auction Company, Permanent Wave hair Treatment Product, Golf Course, Land Surveying, Aluminum Windows, TV Sales and Service, Hunting and Fishing Guide Service, Maid Service, Painting and Renovating Service, Nursing Home.

Females: N = 74

Dress Shop/Boutique(15), Needle and Thread Shop(7), Bridal Shop(4), Slender Health Spa(3), Art Supply Store(3), Ceramics Store(2), Gift Shop(2), Photography Studio(2), Used Car Lot(2), Dunkin Donuts Shop(2), Home Maid Service(2), Beauty Shop, Custom Industrial Manufacturing, Beer and Wine Package Store, Travel Agency, Answering Service, T-Shirt Lettering and Sales, Dog Kennel, General Insurance Agency, Pork Rinds Sales, Ice Crème Shop, Plant Shop, Marina, Produce Store, Handicraft Store, Rental Office Complex, Limosine Service, Sporting Goods Store, Bark Chips for Landscaping, Tennis Clothing Store, Tailor Shop, Flower Shop, Personnel Agency, Kentucky Fried Chicken Restaurant, Taco Hut, Dance Studio, Arby’s Roast Beef, Roller Rink, Movie Theater, PA/RINT Company, MaryKay Cosmetics.

Most of the students wrote about businesses they had thought about years earlier. Many had carried these ideas around in their memories for five or more years. Based on a sample of 70 students, over 50 percent had created the business idea before taking the course. While most of these students were about 21 years old, the average age of business idea conception was 15.5 years. Most of the ideas were developed in the hometowns of the students and 66 percent chose their hometown as the location for the business. It is obvious that many of the business type choices were based on stereotypical gender-based activity preferences.

Most of the above plans involved little real entrepreneurial planning. Since the students only had about five weeks to complete the plans after they were assigned, few did any environmental scanning or considering of different types of businesses or locations. They generally ignored what and where entrepreneurial decisions complexity by writing about a business they had learned about through experience in their hometowns.

Almost none did any marketing research to identify and quantify customers with which to make sales projections. Still, they wrote a “plan” for a business, in that they basically described how to operate the business. They told where it would be located, generated numbers for dollars of start-up capital required and said something about where they would get the money, and they projected income statements and balance sheets as required by any business plan.

Where did these words and numbers come from? They had learned how the businesses basically operated by virtue of being around such businesses, as employees and customers, and they generally created from thin air numbers for sales and costs that they plugged into blank income statement and balance sheet formats. The plugged-in numbers and resulting totals generally reflected not what the created business would likely yield based on real world events but what the learners wanted it to yield.

The learners had some idea about how much income they wanted to receive in 5 or 10 years, so they manipulated their numbers to show that much as profit. Figuring out what their net worth would be in 10 years was not a problem. This was deterministic since net worth would logically follow given that so much profit was supposedly made each year and that so much profit was retained in the business. This required assuming that certain financial policies and decisions were made.

Figuring out what to assume was a problem. In some respects, you might say the above experience reflected poor teaching, and that I should have controlled the process more and should hav told the students exactly what to do to make the exercise more academically respectable. Perhaps students should have been assigned to teams to work on plans for businesses in various locations specified by me the teacher, rather than require each learner to create his/her own small business.

On the other hand, you might say the exercise was a success because it gave students some sense of what it is like to create and start a business in the real world. They were at least exposed to the nature of the problem encountered by entrepreneurs when they make what and where entrepreneurial decisions. The exercise enabled them to utilize, learn from, and improve the business experience they had developed on their own.

They learned how little they knew about starting a business. Since each learner was required to make copies of her or his plan for each student in the class, each learner in the class studied and saw what all other learners created and developed. Each learner was able to compare her or his plan with the plans of 20 or 30 other learners and could see how well she or he relatively did writing the plan and doing what was assigned. Each learner vicariously learned from others in the class because of being exposed to 20 or 30 alternative business plans involving many environments and processes. The learners said they learned a great deal from the experience and said they found it satisfying.

As shamefully imprecise as some Critical Parent academics and business people might think the process was, it is roughly analogous to what goes on the real world when people on the street decide to start their own business. Implausibly, it is also roughly analogous to the process the ex-entrepreneur and now president of the US Donald Trump used to start his businesses that went bankrupt, but which, without furnishing audited financial statements of any sort to prove it, he said made him over one billion dollars. Donald Trump is one of the worst role models for serious entrepreneurs that ever lived, but somehow here he is now president of the US trying to Make “America” Great Again by turning the US into a fascist dictatorship.

Cognitive Structures

The case can be made that the above business plans were scripts selected as a function of the schemata of the students. Script and schema concepts are found in the areas of cognitive psychology, transactional analysis, and organizational behavior. Cognitive psychology is concerned with the internal structures people develop as they experience life that are used to understand and deal with current experience.

Schemata

A schema is a mental framework developed through experience and stored in memory that determines what environmental stimuli will be recognized and processed by a person and what will be ignored (Eckblad,1981; Nisbett & Ross, 1980; Nisser, 1976; Piaget, 1971; Thorndyke & Hayes-Roth, 1979). A schema is what causes a person to respond as he or she does when called on to do a certain thing, such as develop a business plan. By virtue of living in a business-oriented society people develop schemata in the form of words, pictures, sounds, and perhaps smells, of what the word business means. The same is true for words such as plan. Therefore almost anyone reared in a business society can write a “business plan”, based on schemata and scripts stored in memory.

Scripts

A script is a repetitive sequence of verbal, motor, and kinesthetic steps learned through experience that is required or useable in various roles and situations (Abelson, 1981; Allen & Allen, 1988; Berne, 1964; Carlson, 1981; Gioia & Poole, 1984; Lord & Kernan, 1987; Schank & Abelson, 1977; Stapleton & Murkison, 1990; Stapleton, Murkison, & Stapleton, 1998; Steiner, 1974). There are situational scripts and individual scripts. All businesses entail differentiated situational scripts that are acted out in various slots and functions. Customers in restaurants are required to act out a situational script to get served (Schank & Abelson, 1977). All sit- down restaurants have similar scripts. To eat in a restaurant, you park, enter, get seated, order, eat, pay the check, and leave. The script entails certain words and phrases at various steps in the process. After people have experienced a few restaurants as customers, they generally know what to expect in most restaurants after that and know what to say and do.

Differentiated scripts exist in most businesses: banks, taverns and pubs, dress shops, travel stores, home depots, fitness centers, golf courses, floral and gift shops, auto parts stores, discount centers, and what have you. People learn the lines and behavioral routines of the script through experience. In large organizations different departments and functions entail different scripts for employees, depending on the technological aspects of the roles and departments, and the individual scripts of the supervisors and managers who control the departments and functions (Gioia & Poole, 1984; Lord & Kernan,1987). Individual scripts are developed as a function of unique experiences in various environments.

Humans are scripted in families to assume certain roles in society and behave in certain repetitive ways by messages transmitted from parents to offspring (Allen & Allen, 1988; Berne, 1963, 1964, 1972; Cornell, 1988;English, 1988; Steiner, 1974).

Shank and Abelson (1977) describe relations between experience, scripts, and understanding as follows:

“By subscribing to a script-based theory of understanding, we are making some strong claims about the nature of the understanding process. In order to understand the actions that are going on in a given situation, a person must have been in that situation before. That is, understanding is knowledge-based. The actions of others make sense only insofar as they are part of a stored pattern of actions that have been previously experienced. Deviations from the standard pattern are handled with some difficulty.. .  Understanding, then, is a process by which people match what they see and hear to pre-stored groupings of actions that they have already experienced. New information is understood in terms of old information . . . .We will meet other bases for understanding, but we view human understanding as heavily script-based. A human understander comes equipped with thousands of scripts. He uses these scripts almost without thinking (Shank & Abelson, 1977, pp. 67-68).. . . . Understanding, then, is sometimes all plan-based, sometimes all script-based, and sometimes a mix. The main point is that in order to understand you must predict and in order to predict there must beknowledge of how events connect (Shank & Abelson, 1977, p. 78.)”

Script-based understanding is based on past experience and prior learning whereas plan-based understanding is based on developing new knowledge peculiar to a current situation based on current research and facts, data, phenomena, etc.

Learning by Doing Processes

Do entrepreneurs in the real world use scripts when they start businesses? Yes, they do. Based on a sample of 2,000 entrepreneurs randomly selected from across the United States my colleague Gene Murkison and I generated data we published in “Scripts and Entrepreneurship” (Stapleton & Murkison, Transactional Analysis Journal, 1990) showing 35 percent of the respondents (N=445) created the idea for their operating small  business in childhood or adolescence. Seventy-six percent of the respondents started their businesses within 100 miles of their hometowns.

As shown in Table 1, in general failure rates were higher for businesses based on ideas created at younger ages, indicating people get better at creating entrepreneurial ideas as they learn more scripts and more about what is really going on in the real world.

TABLE 1

Age of Idea Conception and Failure Rates

Age at First Flicker  Number     %.    Cumulative %    Failure Rate

0-9                                      42           9.43              9.43        .        .4474

10-13                                   28           6.29              15.72.              . 4286

14-15                                   16           3.59              19.31                 .7500

16-17                                  25            5.61             24.92                .4800

18-19                                  45           10.11            35.03                 .4889

20-21                                 52           11.68             46.71                 5000

22-25                                 77            17.30             64.01                .2338

26-30                                49             11.01               75.02               3469

31-35                                 35              7.86               82.88              .2857

36-40                               32               7.19               90.07               .3458

Over 40                          44                9.88                99.95               .1538

TOTAL = 445

All Earthian humans have learned certain scripts by virtue of their unique past experiences and in the process have developed certain schemata. The problem is these schemata and scripts will only be effective in certain kinds of situations, and there is a good probability a person will use the wrong schema and script in the wrong situation. Most people after reaching age 28 or so tend to quit learning and developing new schemata and scripts, having learned to live with and become dedicated to schemata and scripts already learned, generally trying to conserve interactions with places, people, organizations, and other objects in the environment using those schemata and scripts from then on, if possible.

For more detail on this process, see my article “The Velocity of Youth Mobility,” using longitudinal data generated in my doctoral research, published in the Atlanta Economic Review in 1973, cited in my RJS Athletic, Business, and Academic Vita, published in the Effective Learning Report. See the prompt in the menu at the top of this page for more information about this research.

In other words, Earthian humans explore and experiment with the external real world less and less after about age 28 and attempt to conserve their current life patterns using the internal cognitive structures they have already developed. They tend to become closed systems operating in what they hope are closed systems and maintain as long as possible the interactions with people and other objects in the environment that have enabled them to be satisfied or successful thus far.

Radical Constructivism

Structural determinism has been discussed at length by radical constructivists (Allen & Allen, 1991; Loria, 1991; Maturana & Varela, 1980, 1987; Von Glaserfeld, 1988) who assert that no one ever has true knowledge about the real world. All people know is what they have constructed in their memories about what they think the real world is like, starting at birth. Since people have no way of observing ontological features of the real world in general, what they think is the real world is simply the internal representations or concepts they have constructed about the real world. In all cases there is a wide variance between these internal representations and what exists in the real world. Even assuming a person can construct and store in memory an accurate picture, concept, or structure of what the real world she or he has observed and experienced is really like, given the inevitability of change in the real world, it is inevitable the cognitive structure contained in memory will become inaccurate as time elapses. Therefore no one ever “knows” what any real world is really like for very long.

Entrepreneurs, if they have any hope of success, must either have developed good internal representations of what their real worlds are like or they must have some special means of learning ontologically or veridically about their real worlds on an ad hoc basis. A good entrepreneur would need relevant scripts stored in memory that would apply in various environments and would need schemata that would enable or compel him or her to focus on relevant phenomena in exposed environments. The ideal scenario would be for the entrepreneur to always be able to perceive the environment veridically, i.e., see it for what it really is, but, according to constructivists, this is impossible.

Whether the success of successful entrepreneurs is due more to superior knowledge of the real world and acting accordingly or to simply being luckily at the right time and place with the right technological knowledge or scripts is an interesting question. It may well be that successful entrepreneurs know more about the real world in general than non-entrepreneurs, and at least one writer (Schrage,1965) thinks veridical perception, i.e. knowing ontologically what is going on in the environment, is the major key success factor for entrepreneurs. It is possible successful entrepreneurs understand the real worlds they interact with better than non-entrepreneurs, even though they might not know much about the real world in general. All of this would suggest, however, that reading how-to books or listening to lectures about business theories and concepts would not do a prospective entrepreneur much good.

Dialectical Learning

According to Gagne (1977, p. 3), learning is “a change in human disposition or capability, which persists for some period of time, and which is not simply ascribable to processes of growth.”

A change in disposition would entail a change in schemata. According to Anderson (1977, p. 439):

“Schema change is the sine qua non of the acquisition of knowledge as opposed to the mere aggregation of information. I speculated that large-scale accommodation may be a dialectical process which entails a confrontation with difficulties in one’s current schema and coming to appreciate the power of an alternative. People resist change in high-level schemata. In the first place, well-developed schemata have great assimilative power. What is supposed to be a new view may be assimilated by the old. Again, it is probably difficult for teachers to distinguish between assimilation and accommodation. People whose important beliefs are threatened will attempt to defend their positions, dismiss objections, ignore contraexamples, keep segregated logically incompatible schemata. If this is a reasonable account, then a forthrightly dialectical method such as Socratic teaching is a plausible candidate as a deliberate instrument for causing students to change schemata.”

The case method and the Socratic method involve discussion but the methods involve different types of reasoning. The purpose of a case method discussion is to understand and comprehend the case and inductively decide what to do about it, whereas the purpose of the Socratic method is to deductively arrive at a provably true conclusion.

Case method learners learn by arguing back and forth about what is right in a dialectical dialogical process. An acceptable “truth” or true story will gradually emerge in the course of a good discussion, but a provably true “right” answer will not. What seems to be the truth at the beginning of a case method discussion in most cases is not what seems to be the truth at the end of the discussion. Students who started out thinking and arguing that the final “accepted” truth was the truth feel confirmed and triumphant at the end of the hour, and students who started out thinking and arguing that something else was the truth may learn that they were wrong, in the opinion of the class.

The teacher or students cannot prove what is the real truth or right answer regardless of how long the discussion lasts, but they learn that some possible truths are better than others, and in most cases most learners in the group will agree that one truth is better than the others. On the other hand, some hardheaded people seem never to accept that they are wrong after a discussion regardless of the evidence.

In some cases, however, learners learn their schemata and scripts were not the best ones, not as good as those of others, and their dispositions to act in future situations will be different as a result. In good dialectical case method discussion processes, the communication skills of some learners are improved, producing another form of learning—better skills and capabilities. According to constructivists, the only way someone can learn is for their internal cognitive structures to change, which entails a rerouting of neural pathways in the brain.

This explains why about half the voters in the US, less than one-third of USian eligible voters,voted for Donald Trump again November 5, 2024 despite irrefutable facts and evidence about his atrocious and insidious lies and crimes, his damnable moral and ethical behavior, and his avowed intention to turn the US into a fascist dictatorship if he gets elected USian president again, having been graphically described almost daily for over eight years in broadcasts throughout the US by newscasters in mass media, in which many of them play a psychological Game that might be called GEE, YOU’REWONDERFIUL, MS./MRS./MR. NEWSCASTER, coming across on TV screens more like programmed plastic robots than authentic human beings Trump’s voters did not “learn” a thing in the process. Facts, data, and evidence broadcasted was like water running off a duck’s back.

I attempted in 1992 to determine whether case method students were more successful in the real world than non-case method students (Stapleton, Murkison & Stapleton, 1993, 1994).

This study compared 115 students in the Georgia Southern business school who took two or more inductive, relatively graded case method courses with 94 business students from the same department in the same school who avoided the case method courses. All students of the school who graduated during 1972-1987 who took two or more of my case method courses, who had snail mail addresses that could be found in 1992, were surveyed, as were all management majors, generating a total sample of 1,380. There were 1,091 management majors in the survey; 529 took case method courses and 562 avoided them. There were some 2,000 management graduates during 1972-1987.

Gene Murkison and I thought 5 years out of business school using what had been taught and learned would be sufficient time to develop credible wisdom regarding the efficacy of what had been taught and learned. Some of the respondents had been using what they had learned in the GA SO business school 15 years.

The reported incomes of the two groups were compared and the respondents were asked what teaching method they thought prepared them best for their careers. They were asked to list the four courses they thought were most valuable in their careers, and what they would recommend as improvements for the business curriculum. They were asked to list the four business professors from whom they thought they learned the most. They were asked to indicate how they currently spent their working days. They were guaranteed anonymity and the cover letter was signed by a professor who had never used the case method (Murkison).

The results are shown in Table 2. Twenty-seven of the 199 respondents were small business owners in 1987, indicating they were entrepreneurs who had morphed into small business owners. But no doubt some of the small business owners inherited their businesses, and you might think they were not real entrepreneurs since they did not make the what and where decisions causing the business to exist. But a case can also be made that they made an entrepreneurial decision about where they would live, since they had to decide to go back home and take over the family business rather than go somewhere else to start a new business in a potentially more profitable market, or try to find a job somewhere enslaved to a boss working in a large corporation who would tell them what to do.

Based on evidence presented earlier in this paper. it is obvious that many business students are scripted with entrepreneurial and small business ideas before they enter college. Those scripts were developed in childhood and adolescence working in family businesses, serving as employees in businesses, and being customers in business of various types. Research findings presented in this paper show that many entrepreneurs start businesses based on scripts they have stored in their memories for many years, and generally ignore alternative business types and markets in current reality when they start their businesses.

Constructivist philosophers assert that humans from birth onward construct what they think is the real world in their memories. By age 21 or so this constructed internal world starts causing a human to make some significant decisions, not the least of which include what to do for a living, where to live, when and whom to marry, how many children to have, and what kind of socio-economic role to act out. Eric Berne, the inventor of transactional analysis, said only trivial decisions are made using logic in the here and now, asserting important decisions such as these are scripted.

TABLE 2

Reported Incomes of the Respondents who Chose and Avoided Case Method Courses. Incomes are expressed in 1992 dollars. $1 in 1992 was equivalent in purchasing power to about $2.25 in 2024, adjusted for inflation, so incomes in 1992 should be multiplied by 2.25 to get a realistic perspective of value of 1992 incomes in 2024.

Case Method Choosers                    Case Method Avoiders

Total Sample

$59,999 (n=115)                                 $46,565 (n=84)

p <.016

Males

$61,495 (n=97)                                    $51,818 (n=55)

p <.13

Females

$48,654 (n=13).                                  $35,611 (n=27)

p <.35

Entrepreneurs

$88,269 (n=13)                                    $50,357 (n=14)

p <.066

Grade Point and Income Comparison by Gender

Females                                                    Males

Incomes

$39,850 (n=40)                                  $57,993 (n=152)

p <.0024

Overall G.P.A.

3.084 (n=35)                                          2.676 (n=152)

p =.0000

Correlation Between Overall Grade Point Average and Incomes:

Pearson’s r = -.014

Correlation Between Grade Points in Case Method Courses and incomes:

Pearson’s r = .101

Incomes by Number of Case Method Courses Taken

1 $50,714 (n=14) 2 $47,879 (n=33) 3 $62,604 (n=24) 4 $61,250 (n=16) 5 or more $82,273 (n=11)

Pearson’s r = .245

Opinions of Former Students Regarding Their Work Days and Pedagogical Issues. Estimates of Percentage of Work Day Spent in Various Activities

Case Method Choosers %        Case Method Avoiders %

Talking With People 35.1         Talking With People 26.06

Using a Computer 20.36           Using a Computer 17.65

Thinking 15.42                             Thinking 16.6

Working With People 8.72       Working With People 12.36

Writing 7.87                                   Writing 10.94

Reading 7.44                                  Reading 7.76

Doing Arithmetic 4.81               Doing Arithmetic 6.44

Doing Manual Work 1.3            Doing Manual Work 4.34

Which Teaching Methodology Do You Think Prepared You Best For Your Career?

Case Method Choosers %.        Case Method Avoiders %

Case Method                70.64        Case Method               73.07

Lecture Method          25.86        Lecture Method         23.07

Computer Game            3.68       Computer Game            1.28

Other                                 0.00        Other                                  1.28

Note: 42 respondents had taken a computer game course and 5 ranked it the best method. Case method avoiders avoided my case method courses using dialectical discussion for grading but took courses in which teacher used cases to supplement concepts used for standard tests.

Which Four of Your Business Courses Were Most Valuable in Your Career?

Numbers are number of times listed.

Case Method Choosers                            Case Method Avoiders

Business Policy 33                                    Accounting Principles I 25

Accounting Principles I 28                   Marketing Principles 21

Marketing Principles 28                        Bus Communications 19

Accounting Principles II 25                  Business Law I 19

Small Business 25                                     Business Policy 18

Economic Principles I 24                      Management Principles 18

Economic Principles II 24                    Corporate Finance I 15

Business Law I 22                                    Intro Data Processing 12

Statistics 22                                                Organizational Behavior 12

Corporate Finance I 22                          Statistics 12

Management Principles 21                   Economic Principles I 11

Decision Science 20                                 Decision Science 10

Organizational Behavior 19                 Accounting Principles II 9

Business Communications 16             Production I 9

Personnel 16                                               Personnel 8

Production I 16                                           Cobol I 7

Cobol I 10                                                    Current Workplace Issues 7

Collective Bargaining 7                         Systems Design I 7

Systems Design I 7                                  Data Base Management 5

Business Law II 5                                     Systems Design II 5

Consumer Economics 5                        Economic Principles II 3

Human Relations 5

Intro Data Processing 5                         Wage and Salary Adm. 3

Professional Selling 5                             obol II 2

Real Estate 5                                               Corporate Finance II 2

Cost Accounting 4                                    Mgt. Information Systems 2

Systems Analysis I 4                               Production II 2

Systems Analysis II 4                             Real Estate 2

Tax Accounting 4                                    Systems Analysis I 2

Advertising 4                                             Cost Accounting 1

Staffing and Training 4                        History of Management 1

Money and Banking 4                           Tax Accounting I

If You Were to Design an Ideal Business Curriculum for this School, Based on Your Experience at this School and Career Experience, What Would You Suggest? Numbers are number of times a particular suggestion was listed.

Suggestions made once are omitted. There were approximately 50 separate suggestions.

Case Method Choosers                               Case Method Avoiders

More Case Method 34                                More Case Method 23

More Guest Speakers 14                            Software Packages 12

Teach Software Packages 8                     More Internships 10

More Internships 5                                     Guest Speakers 10

Less Theory 4                                               More Field Research 6

More Organizational Skills 3                 Job Hunting Skills 4

Career Planning Course 5                       Oral Communication 2

College and university professors can use their favorite teaching method if students sign up and they have evidence their students are learning something of value. Data in this article suggest, but do not prove, that the case method is the best method for teaching entrepreneurship and business management.  While I may think the case method is best method for learners in general based on my experience and research, this generalization is a mere proposition. If it can be proved to be wrong with better facts, data, and evidence than mine then so be it.

The fact over 70 percent of the former learners in our study said the case method prepared them best for their careers gives the case method credibility. The fact these learners overwhelmingly recommended that more case method teaching be added to the curriculum adds more credibility. The 13 entrepreneurs, who took more case method courses than others, had the highest reported incomes of all. The case method small business course in the study was the only elective course rated highly by case method choosers or avoiders. The capstone business policy course (taught by me using the case method, but not by others) required of all business majors was ranked the most valuable course by students who chose case method courses, whereas the non-case method business policy course was ranked fifth by learners who avoided case method courses.

The respondents were asked to list the names of four professors from whom they learned the most. I, using nothing but the case method, was listed as one of the top four learning producers 52 times. One other professor was listed 51 times, and several others were listed 20-30 times.

GEE, YOU’RE WONDERFUL, PROFESSOR

I did my best during my teaching career not to play one of the most ubiquitous psychological Games played in schools, colleges, and universities: GEE, YOU’RE WONDERFUL, PROFESSOR (GYWP).

I learned the name and dynamics of this psychological Game while learning about transactional analysis at the Southeast Institute at Chapel Hill, North Carolina in 1975-1978. GYWP entails teachers and professors doing all they can to come across as wonderful teachers, instructors, and professors in the eyes and ears of admiring passive Critical Parent/Adapted Child students, learners, colleagues, administrators, parents, politicians and donors by teaching, lecturing, instructing, and interacting using primarily Nurturing Parent and Adapted Child ego states, investing considerable time and energy trying to appear not only competent but highly intelligent, knowledgeable, clever, talented, good-looking, caring, concerned, conscientious, congenial, friendly, collegial, considerate, cooperative, politically correct, and obedient and cooperative.

You might think I am playing GYWP in this article, maybe even making up the above numbers and data just to make myself look good as a professor. If so, rest assured I am not. Unlike Trump wanting paper copies of votes cast in his second presidential election (that he indubitably lost fair and square) to be hand-counted to prove what a wonderful president he had been and will be, I can probably find the original mailed-in paper source documents for the above research projects stored in boxes somewhere to prove the above numbers and data are real if anyone wants to hand count them. I will admit I did have some ulterior Adapted Child motives causing me to do the above research. In addition to doing what I was being paid to do as part of my Adult ego state contract as a professor of a university to do research and produce new knowledge and publish the results, I wanted to prove I had done a good job as a teacher using the facts and data of the research to keep from getting screwed when it came time to allot merit raise money to professors every year. In that regard I think I was moderately successful.

In my opinion, the major purpose of a teacher, instructor, or professor is to make learning happen in the minds of learners, not to lecture, dispense, or spoon-feed information using Critical Parent, Nurturing Parent and Adapted Child ego states to entertain and satisfy passive obedient Adapted Child students in impressive, cheerful, caring, nurturing, friendly or entertaining ways, teaching to and then using so-called objective tests containing test questions that almost all students in the course can memorize answers for so as to make mostly A’s and B’s in the course, to engender high grades for teachers from students on student evaluations, and by extension high grades for administrators assigned by parents, politicians, taxpayers, and others for hiring such wonderful teachers and professors to teach their above average kids, as in Garrison Kellor’s mythical Lake Wobegon.

I invested or wasted very little Parent and Child ego state energy in my courses trying to win playing the GEE, YOU’RE WONDERFUL, PROFESSOR psychological Game. I used mostly Adult ego state energy causing my learners to learn.

The first thing I did in my classes was pass out a one-page course syllabus, a learning contract spelling out what I intended to do and what I required learners in the course to do, and tell them to read it as soon as they got their hands on it, as it circulated around the room.

The contract included my office hours, the name of the book to be used, what the course content was about, and how learners would be graded. A major clause in the contract was that students were required to read every assigned case before class and be prepared to lay it out to all class members if they were randomly selected to be a leader of the moment by a Classroom De-Gamer, a spinner, to start the class discussion of the day. I emphasized that I kept my office hours and would be available to discuss outside of class one-on-one problems they might have adapting and flexing to the course learning contract requirements or understanding technical or conceptual content in the cases and text material in the course book. There could be no coming into class late more than twice without grade consequences. There could be no covert or overt, social or ulterior, communication with individuals or cliques around you where you sat when someone had the floor talking to the whole group.

The contract asserted that you agreed to accept that a whole letter grade would be deducted from your course grade if the Classroom De-Gamer™ caught you unprepared.

Everyone in the class would receive a seating chart showing the names of all class members. Cutting class more than four times would have grade consequences. Peer ratings would be used to give learners feedback about what grades learners thought they deserved based on their overall performance. The main grade criterion was the quantity and quality of ideas a learner sold in the class market. A sale was someone coming up with an idea that you bought.

Each learner would rate every other learner on a 1-4 scale, 1 below average, 2 average, 3 good, 4 excellent. Those numbers were summed producing a group rank. Most of the time I agreed with the summed group scores. Regardless, I used my own judgement assigning final grades. I told them if they were not willing to accept this Adult learning contract they should leave now and drop the course, reminding them that no student at Georgia Southern was required to take one of my courses to graduate.

I came into class every day and sat somewhere in the room in a seat just like the seats all the other learners sat in. I did not say good morning, or how are you today, or do you have any questions, or tell jokes, or talk about football games, or anything else to lighten things up. I did not pretend to be happy if I was not, or invest Parent and Child ego state energy trying to make the course fun.

If the class was in a room with movable desks, the desks would be rearranged around the walls of the room in a circle classroom layout. The De-Gamer would be placed on a desk in the center of the room, and whomever got selected as the last leader of the moment would walk to the center of the room and twirl the De-Gamer to randomly select the new leader of the moment. Whomever got pointed out would then start the discussion. If the room was a larger amphitheater room with fixed seats I would sit in one of the seats somewhere in the room and spin the De-Gamer myself to select the leader of the moment making sure nearby learners could see the number the spinner landed on was the number that was announced to the whole group, proving I did not play Games with this. Each leaner had a permanent number for the selection process. I would boom out the selected number to make sure everyone heard it (we had one amphitheater room in our new business building that could hold about 100 students), and then it was off to the races for some exhilarating sink or swim dialectical case method learning for fifty minutes.

I had a cowbell I would clang if I saw anyone disrupting the proceedings during a discussion. I always waited until all the other learners were in their seats before I walked in the room, which got very quiet. I said nothing until after I sat down in a seat somewhere in the room. If the De-Gamer randomly selected me I would lay out the case just like any other learner would have if selected. If I thought learners had covered the relevant points of the case and had generally comprehended the case and had developed good consensual answers I would say nothing for the whole fifty minutes, except for saying Number 30, or whatever was the number the De-Gamer randomly selected, to kick things off in an amphitheater room. I would walk out of the room just like everyone else at the end of the fifty minutes doing a little pastiming with other learners in the process as we walked out.

We would discuss the next case in the book in the next meeting using the same format day after day most of the time. If I thought learners had not covered the relevant points and learned what was generally going on in the states of affairs of the case in a session, I would do my best to fill the group in on what I thought they should have learned if they missed something, and I would try to straighten them out where I thought they were technically wrong or inappropriate, if no other learner in the group was able to.

In general learners probably did about eighty percent of the talking in my courses. Learners who have done a good job of learning something and have done a good job of telling a learning group about it feel discounted if the teacher for no good reason repeats what they have already taught the class, stealing their thunder to rip off plastic strokes for him or herself playing GYWP.

I would check the roll by looking at the seating chart. Each learner was furnished a copy of the seating chart and had to make sure they were sitting between the to students the chart said they were. I paid attention to what every learner said and did in the course and did my best to fairly grade their performance as excellent, good, average, poor, or failing, relative to the performance of all learners in the course. About eighty percent of the final grade was based on class participation and about twenty percent was based on case write-ups.

I had very few complaints told to me about the grades I assigned, but according to Pick-A-Prof.com, an on-line service for students created by enterprising students at the University of Texas in about 2000, I had one of the lowest grade point averages in the Georgia Southern business school and at Georgia Southern in general, assigning about ten percent A’s. Somehow those enterprising UT students figured out how to download the course grades professors assigned at colleges and universities in states that had open records laws, as Georgia did, and make them available for students and everyone else to see in broad daylight on the website they created, Pick-a-Prof.com, thereby De-Gaming a lot of grade inflation Games in a lot of colleges and universities.

––––––––––––

Richard John Stapleton, PhD, CTA was the senior professor at Georgia Southern University the academic year he retired, 2004-2005. For a full listing of his credentials see “RJS Ancestry and Scripting” and “RJS Athletic, Business, and Academic Vita” by clicking on their prompts in the menu of the Effective Learning Report at the top of this blog page.

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By Richard John Stapleton

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

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

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

Those voters “believed” and had “faith” that Trump would somehow make them great again, and that was all that counted; but instead of “America” being made great again the US is being made a third-world nation again, to be ruled by an irrational extremist fascist president who appoints his own kind of dogmatic irrational right-wing extremists into leadership positions of USian government departments and who also appoints right-wing ideological sycophantic judges into USian courts, including the Supreme Court, making the US once again a ravaged and pillaged land controlled by the elite rich who pay politicians with maga million dollar donations to reduce their taxes and rig the laws in their favor, leaving honest hard-working truth-seeking folks in the towns and cities of the US at the mercy of desperadoes and lawless renegades, as in the Wild West of the 19th Century.

Mark Twain once said the US congress was the largest criminal class in the world. Now it appears the US government is being taken over by a gang of character-disordered misfits. How did this happen? It happened because about 79 million USian voters out of about 250 milliion USian eligible voters, voted for a character-disordered misfit as president of the US.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Every so often in Earthian human history here and there around Spaceship Earth scripted losers in various societies get fed up with being considered inferior to scripted winners in a society, so they subjugate themselves to a -3 Not-OK human monster who promises to provide what the losers need and want using barbaric means, who are promised superior status in a restored or new great and wonderful, and beautiful, as Trump says, political world, after he takes over, but who are suckers playing psychological Games, going nowhere, Games such as DO ME SOMETHING and I’M ONLY TRYING TO HELP YOU, which Trump has superior abilities for playing, relative to other presidents and aspirants, being so good at playing them that his sucker voters cannot see that they are being conned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

William Shakespeare,  Act 5, Scene 5, Macbeth

By Richard John Stapleton, Ph.D, CTA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 BACKSTORIES

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

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

 

 

 

 

By Richard John Stapleton, PhD, CTA

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

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

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

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

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

Martin Groder’s People Map

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1 – What is the problem?

2 – What are the alternatives?

3 – What do you recommend?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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Elon Musk@elonmusk

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

4:45 PM · Jul 27, 2024

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See also

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

Comment by Richard John Stapleton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HOW TO EMPOWER EARTHIAN HUMANS

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

All case analyses entail considering three existential questions:

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BACKSTORIES

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

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

 

 

By RICHARD JOHN STAPLETON

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Martin Groder’s People Map

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1 – What is the problem?

2 – What are the alternatives?

3 – What do you recommend?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

By RICHARD JOHN STAPLETON

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1 – What is the problem?

2 – What are the alternatives?

3 – What do you recommend?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HOW TO EMPOWER EARTHIAN HUMANS

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

All case analyses entail considering three existential questions:

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By RICHARD JOHN STAPLETON

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1 – What is the problem?

2 – What are the alternatives?

3 – What do you recommend?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HOW TO EMPOWER EARTHIAN HUMANS

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

All case analyses entail considering three existential questions:

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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