Would you like to increase Earthian human OKness? If so, read the three Earthian Empowerment Systems books provided in the EES post below and set up your own EE discussion group where you live.
The Forty-Second Issue of a Management Systems Journal Concerned About Existential Earthian Human States of Affairs, December 1, 2023, Effective Learning Publications, 32 East Main Street, Statesboro, Georgia, USA, Richard John Stapleton, Editor & Publisher, Copyright 2023, All Rights Reserved
ASK MORE WHAT YOUR COUNTRY CAN DO FOR ALL EARTHIANS—TO REDUCE THE PROBABILITY OF EXTINCTIONS—CAUSED BY GLOBAL WARMING AND CLIMATE CHANGE (GWCC) AND/OR MILITARIZATION AND NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROLIFERATION (MNWP)
CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE
1 — PERSPECTIVE OF A HYPOTHETICAL EXONEXUS OBSERVER FROM A PLANET BEYOND THE EARTHIAN SOLAR SYSTEM
2 — RECENT EXISTENTIAL ARTICLES, IDEAS, AND COMMENTS
3 — TOWARD THE CO-CONSTRUCTION OF EARTHIAN PRODUCTION AND DISTRIBUTION SYSTEMS, INC. (EPDS)
4 — A GAME-FREE CASE METHOD TEACHING AND LEARNING PROCESS THAT WOULD PRODUCE DEMOCRATIC DISCUSSIONS, LEARNING, AND POLICY FORMULATION AROUND EARTH
AN EARTHIAN ELDER SPEAKS
“So, I guess what I’m saying is that, as we can establish that the earth is a sphere, and thus finite, then growth in your population and artifacts must have limits. And, your lack of a social-economic system to recognize those limits is leading us all to diaster.”
1 — OPINION OF A HYPOTHETICAL EXONEXUS OBSERVER FROM A PLANET BEYOND THE EARTHIAN SOLARSYSTEM
Earthian humans are enthralled, manipulated, and in various degrees controlled by their leaders in some two hundred countries aboard Spaceship Earth. Leaders became leaders because of being caused to be leaders by concatenations of unbroken cause-effect chains resulting after our universe started evolving some thirteen billion years ago in the infinity of time and space.
Leaders are generally products of the same sorts of differentiated configurations of cause-effect chains as differentiated followers and members in differentiated countries. All Earthian humans are doing what they were caused to do in their daily lives starting at birth.
Earth as a planet was formed about 4.5 billion years ago and has undergone innumerable transformations in the meantime. Humanoid creatures have been aboard Spaceship Earth for some two million years, and they too have undergone numerous evolutionary changes, as have other Earthian species.
Unfortunately, Earthian humans have now reached a precarious and dangerous stage in their evolution as biological creatures. After slowly evolving more and more accurate, complex, and powerful understandings, technologies, and ways of life for two million years on Earth, during the last two hundred years Earthian humans evolved new technological devices at exponential rates that enabled them to increase the overly-fecund human population of Earth so much that they now threaten not only to destroy their own existence as a species aboard Spaceship Earth but also the existence of most other species alive on Earth.
Keeping eight or so billion humans alive on Earth has required so many goods and services to be produced to satisfy human biological and psychological needs and wants and so much carbon-based fuel to be burned to produce the goods that the climate of Spaceship Earth has been altered by carbon dioxide gas released into the Earthian atmosphere in large-enough quantities to cause extra heat to be trapped on Earth causing the mean Earthian temperature to increase at a yearly rate that threatens to destroy Earthian human life as it now exists, within centuries, if not decades.
Unfortunately, Earthian humans have also developed technological knowledge that has enabled them to produce over 10,000 nuclear weapons that could destroy human life if dropped and detonated around Earth, as they have the capability to do.
2 — RECENT EARTHIAN EXISTENTIAL ARTICLES, IDEAS, AND COMMENTS
“You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of birth pains.
“Then you will be handed over to be persecuted and put to death, and you will be hated by all nations because of me. At that time many will turn away from the faith and will betray and hate each other, and many false prophets will appear and deceive many people. Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold, but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved.” — Holy Bible, New International Version
Seems prophetic alright, but it also normalizes war, and hopelessness, except for the “saved”. Saved from what, the eternal fires of a vengeful god? What greater torture could there be than that, created by a supposedly loving god. It’s bad enough to be bombed and tortured in wars by deranged not very bright sadistic Earthian humans, but getting punished and tortured eternally by a god for not keeping a “faith” is off the charts for cruelty and callousness. — RJS
Michael Hudson, the greatest economic historian alive, ties it all together in this article, the most relevant and illuminating article I have read in a good while. It’s a should-read for all Earthian humans. Seems to me there was not an old man up there in the sky with a long white beard wearing a long white robe on a white puffy cloud with a walking stick in his hand telling Jewish prophets what to do about economic policy: It was some highly intelligent Earthian humans called prophets considering rationality itself (truth, justice, mercy, love, etc.) God. — RJS
This article is too cynical perhaps but it contains more than a grain of truth.
Here is what a renowned USian diplomat and historian had to say about the problem:— RJS
“Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.” George F. Kennan (1904-2005), quote published in Foreword to ‘The Pathology of Power’” by Norman Cousins (Norton, 1987), from At a Century’s Ending: Reflections 1982-1995 (Norton, 1997, ISBN 0-393-31609-2), Part II: Cold War in Full Bloom, p. 118. Read more at https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_F._Kennan
Why not just create a new name for the place, like the United States of Western Asia, or some such, perhaps something like the United State of Judah, Palestine, Israel, and Edum, giving all inhabitants equal rights of citizenship, with no mention of religion in a new constitution, save perhaps one sentence stating the United State of Judah, Israel, Palestine, and Edum shall pass no laws respecting the efficacy or irrelevance of religion, like the United States of America did in its constitution, the bravest and best thing the USian founders did. — RJS
The land of Israel has been populated by the Jewish people since 2000 BC. Here’s the timeline, in case you didn’t realize that it is their homeland.
1900 BC: Abraham chosen by God as the Father of the Jewish Nation.
1900 BC: Isaac, Abraham’s son, rules over Israel.
1850 BC: Jacob, son of Issac, rules over Israel.
1400 BC: Moses leads the people out of Egypt and back to Israel.
1010 BC: King David unites the 12 tribes into one nation.
970 BC: King Solomon, son of David, builds the first temple structure in Jerusalem
930 BC: Israel is divided into two kingdoms, the Kingdom of Israel and the Kingdom of Judah.
800s BC: The rise of the prophets, God’s messengers.
722 BC: Kingdom of Israel is conquered by Assyrians.
605 BC: Kingdom Judah is conquered by the Babylonians.
586 BC: Solomon’s Temple is destroyed by the Babylonians.
539 BC: Persians conquer the Babylonians and take control of Israel.
538 BC: The Jews return to Israel from exile.
520 BC: The Temple is rebuilt.
450 BC: Reforms made by Ezra and Nehemiah.
433 BC: Malachi is the end of the prophetic age.
432 BC: The last group of Jews return from exile.
333 BC: The Greeks conquer the Persian empire.
323 BC: The Egyptian and Syrian empire take over Israel.
167 BC: Hasmonean’s recapture Israel, and the Jews are ruled independently.
70 BC: Romans conquer Israel.
20 BC: King Herod builds the “second” temple
6 BC: Yeshua is born in Bethlehem
70 AD: Romans destroy the temple
After that, the people were captives to the Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, and Crusaders. Through all of these events, the Jewish people continued to live in Israel. There were more or less of them, depending on the centuries, but there was never a time when the Jews didn’t live in the land. They stayed, they built their communities, they raised their families, practiced their faith and they suffered at the hands of many outside rulers, but they always kept their faith. It is what sustains them, even now.
In 1948, the UN established the State of Israel, the nation of Jews. Don’t listen to the Palestinian lies that they are entitled to the land. It simply is not true. God will also provide a way for his chosen people to live in Israel, as He has for thousands of years. Pray for the people of Israel. — copied by Elisheva Neuman
Very sad. Map makes the stark reality of the problem clear. Why would anyone have wanted in 1948 to put a state like Israel in this situation in the first place? Included in the comments below is an excellent utube video containing a refreshing answer. Well worth a look and listen. — RJS
Shows ya competent Arabs are — SB
In my fantasy novel, the dragons and witches promised that land to me! — MR
I’m an Atheist so I’m not buying any of that right to ownership crap. Israel can have their land. However, the Palestinian people also deserve to have their land with their own government and not continue to live in an apartheid state. And yes, Hamas should be destroyed. — PB
Can you show in scripture where Israel is mentioned and where exactly on that map is Palestine? — DS
As you know, Richard, this is a myth-filled fake history, until it gets to 1948, and even there he falsifies the one solidly accurate sentence with fundamentalist prophecy. — PG
The land of Israel, is a greater land mass now, than during the time it had two states (Israel and Judea). There were many of other groups residing in Palestine. Elisheva Neuman, Do you live in Israel? If not would you like it if someone tried to expel you from your home? — CS
I see a lot of Zionist live out of Israel. So how do they justify their rights to ownership in a foreign land? When you consider that you may then have sympathetic understanding of the Palestinians plight. We need to dismantle borders. — CS
Israel including the USA makes a difference – GC
The Bible is made up bullshit. — TS
The Zionists and Hebrews have been manipulating the Bible in their favor. Israel is the barren fig tree, the modern Pharisees. Israel is so racist, that they killed Jesus because He wasn’t from David’s house. — MR
The only problem is, it’s presenting mythology as fact and then using that to justify genocide…otherwise yeah sure, spot on. — JS
Why do you think that these people of today are the same as two thousand years ago? And why don’t you understand that when Jesus came the covenant changed? — JK
Get rid of religion and treat everyone as an equal
It’s not hard
Both think they are superior to the other because of religion — MJ
Though I sympathize with the people of Israel this argument is faulty for if man gave back the land to its ancestral beginnings then dismantle America, England Europe and so many other countries. Why would Israel be the only country restored to its ancestral lands. The only argument I can see is why not let them both learn to share a small slither of earth and have other countries stay out of the affairs the region. Stop the racism and apartheid. Both nations need leaders that want to get along and live in peace versus destroy one another and get the world out of your nation. They are both being used by other nations for their own political financial agenda that doesn’t seem to benefit either group who live in the region. Overly simplistic answers to a complicated problem or is our only solution when we don’t like one another is to destroy the other. If so then man still lives in caves and progress is just a dressing. We are not ready for the stars because we can’t solve our oldest problems. — HP
The god stuff is Made up nonsense. The land is land. It’s not holy and it’s not worth losing one life over — MS
We are all inhabitants, temporarily placed here to know ourselves and learn how to get along with each other… all places are good for all of us… humankind has been on this earth for millennia. there is a real purpose for our temporary life on this Earth…which we still need to understand so we move forward, instead of keep coming back to make the same mistakes. — AA
A bunch of Eastern European Slavs and Western Jews who had never set foot on this Unholy Land, nor their ancestors for over 2,000 years, are suddenly, by Biblical fiat, entitled to displace its residents and apartheid these untermensch, this life unworthy of life, into Warsaw-like ghettos to be treated like animals? — CJ
The territory of Palestine is one of the most strategically located parts of the planet, flanking the Suez Canal which is vital to the world economy. Having a Western style nation in control of it is advantageous to US Imperialism. — DK
All the US needs now is another costly war in Western Asia. Europeans, Zionists, and USians have made a hell of a mess of the situation in Palestine for over seventy-five years, having done seven or so times as much damage to Palestinians as Palestinians have done unto them. Zionists and their supporters have projected onto the Palestinians what they have done unto the Palestinians: destroying their existence as a state, stealing more and more Palestinian land and property, having by now reduced Palestinian territory to two small apartheid slivers of its original size before 1948, concentration camps for surviving Palestinians, having hypocritically used the Jewish religion and the German Jewish holocaust as an excuse for their colonial-settler crimes. End this barbaric merciless cruelty and callousness. Cease firing and bombing now! Both sides! Change the name of the state now called Israel to something acceptable to all inhabitants within its borders. Write a new constitution providing equal rights for all inhabitants, including a sentence in the new constitution stating the state shall pass no laws respecting the efficacy or irrelevance of religion, one of the things USians did right in their constitution. This would cure the overall problem in Israel/Palestine, if anything would, as screwed-up as Earthian human states of affairs are now in general. — RJS
More on war than most Earthian humans want to know — RJS
“What we know of history is mostly a form of literature akin to politicized fiction. Histories are written to legitimize the authority of the powerful, to justify the result of the wars and apportion blame as necessary for the desired political narrative. The ideal of history-writing proposed by the 19th-century German historian Leopold von Ranke, according to whom a historian should “simply” write history “wie es eigentlich gewesen” – how it actually happened – is not that simple, and has never been achieved.” — Alfred de Zayas
“Those Who Call Us Fascists Will Have Their Sad, Miserable Existence Crushed!” — DJT
Well, I guess I am crushed because I have said quite a few times lately I think Trump is a fascist. I am not so sure about his base. I think most of them just don’t know what they are doing. I think what is happening now in the US is similar to what has happened over and over in Earthian human history: a have-less class of people accumulate enough hatred for a have-more class that they become willing to commit crimes under an irrational dictator to take what they think they deserve from the targeted have-more class using violent physical force. In the case of the US now the have-more class is a relatively well-educated group that has more economic security and prestige than the have-less class. Seems to me the same sort of thing happened in situations that empowered Franco, Hitler, Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, Pol Pot, Pinochet, Hutu Power and other Earthian dictatorships that caused millions of deaths and massive suffering. Whether the have-less class and their leaders call themselves fascists, communists, socialists, democratic socialists, christians, magas, nationalists, or anything else is irrelevant. Rationality is irrelevant in these situations. The only thing that counts in the end with the have-lesses in these situations is their exaggerated hatred of the scapegoated have-mores that gives them permission to do anything they can to take what they think they deserve by violent brute force. Seems to me this process is now going on to some degree in several Earthian countries. Nobody knows what’s going to happen. — RJS
You can build a case this assassination started the downward spiral of the US into what it has become today, an economy and society dependent on its military expenditures for its economic functioning. On the other hand, you can build a case this process got started during WWII when it became obvious military spending can get a country out of a great depression, causing the USian deep state to decide to perpetuate a war-machine system after winning WWII, the excuse at the time being it had to be done to fight communism. Well, after defeating Russian communism in the cold war in 1989, the military economy was perpetuated using Bush II’s War on Terror after 9/11. Both the Ukrainian and the Israeli/Palestine Wars have done a good job keeping a new cold war and cash flows flowing for the USian military-industrial-intelligence-banking-media economy.
Of course, there is no proof that the CIA was responsible for the JFK assassination. How could such a thing ever be proved to all Earthian humans? Nothing can be proved to all Earthian humans given the way their beliefs are caused to exist in all their learning processes and systems.
Up to now the USian military has not supported Trump in his efforts to turn the US into a full-fledged military dictatorship, thanks to General Milley’s handling of Trump during Trump’s January 6, 2021 insurrection attempt. But if Trump should be elected again in 2024 it’s possible a new insurrection attempt could work if Trump increases his power more and more by hiring and appointing more and more obsequious bootlicking USians to high offices who would follow his orders to destroy USian democracy in another insurrection. — RJS
This article is too cynical perhaps but it contains more than a grain of truth.
Here is what a renowned USian diplomat and historian had to say about the general problem: — RJS
“Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.” George F. Kennan (1904-2005), quote published in Foreword to ‘The Pathology of Power’” by Norman Cousins (Norton, 1987), from At a Century’s Ending: Reflections 1982-1995 (Norton, 1997, ISBN 0-393-31609-2), Part II: –Cold War in Full Bloom, p. 118. Read more at https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_F._Kennan
I took Army ROTC for one year at Hardin-Simmons University, a Baptist college with about 1,700 students, at Abilene, Texas in 1958-59 as a freshman on a basketball scholarship. ROTC was required for two years for all males at Hardin-Simmons. I basically detested it, thinking marching, saluting, presenting arms, shining brass, etc. was the dumbest thing I ever did. I got out of the second year of required ROTC after finding out I could never be commissioned as an officer in the military because of a spinal fusion back surgery I had when I was a sophomore in high school. All I had to do was show a medical doctor in Abilene the ten-inch scar running up my back and have him sign a form affirming he had seen it. I was called up for the USian draft in 1962 and was required to take a standard Army physical at Amarillo, Texas. As I stood in line naked with other potential draftees during the physical a medical doctor took one look at the scar and told me, “I’m sorry but you are permanently disqualified from military service.”
I thus never had to worry about getting drafted and sent to Vietnam to get my ass shot off, as a lot of not-yet-drafted young males in the States used to say back in those days. I would have volunteered to help defend the US in a war from a serious enemy threatening to invade the US. I am not sure there have been any since the War of 1812. — RJS
Interesting article, but I agree with the writers of the constitution that the commander in chief should be a civilian. We need politicians with these values to build a military to support them.
I’ve often wondered if professionalizing the military by eliminating the draft was a mistake. — PEZ
I served in all commissioned ranks from a second lieutenant to a major general. And during that time, I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer. — Smedley Butler, Two Time Medal of Honor Recipient
Bidenism is old and outdated. Seems to me what is needed is younger new blood in a Dem, Independent, Green ticket comprising a combination of Newsome, West, RJK Jr., Harris, or Warren, to reduce the probability of the Trumpist threat to USian democracy. — RJS
You gotta be kidding!!! — VBC
I’m no expert on these matters but it seems like a good idea to me. All USians are entitled to express their opinions about these matters as of now. — RJS
Rick you are so right. Many have given the ultimate price to give us the freedom of speech and opinion. —VBC
Biden is nothing more than Trump in blue drag. — ML
There may be hundreds of dead planets in our Universe that were once inhabited by human-like creatures that lived, learned, and evolved on their planets in learning processes resembling the learning processes of Earthian humans, who through eons on their planets learned how to develop lethal weapons like Earthian nuclear bombs and complex industrial processes requiring burning fossil fuel who became extinct because of what they were caused to learn and develop through natural evolutionary cause-effect chains.
The same sort of thing could happen to Earthian humans if they do not quickly in cosmic time learn how to satisfy their biological, psychological, social, economic, and political needs in significantly improved social, psychological, economic, political, and military systems that do not require or entail the burning of carbon-based fuel or the decision-making of ordinary and sometimes demented Earthian humans in fascist organizations.
Up to now, overthrowing existing economic, social, and political orders with new economic, social, and political orders in violent revolutions or wars has not been not a good idea. Existing dysfunctional orders were torn down or disintegrated and were replaced by new dysfunctional orders. — RJS
Assign the best probabilities you can to the possibilities confronting you and choose the best one. Unfortunately, there is no way to avoid risk. — RJS
Somewhat agree but many people would feel like a winner making it to 80 even as a has-been or having a lot of money. The rest definitely did not win and most have difficult lives. I think the key is for one to be thankful for what they have or had and be very tough to grow old. Hope you are doing well Dr. Stapleton. — AO
Thanks, Andy. Well said. I’m doing ok I guess. A wellness nurse asked me recently doing a Medicare checkup, “How much pain do you feel on a scale of 0-10?” I told her probably about a 2. So far no life-threatening maladies. I’m probably one of the lucky ones. Cheers. — RJS
3 — TOWARD THE CO-CONSTRUCTION OF EARTHIAN PRODUCTION AND DISTRIBUTION SYSTEMS, INC. (EPDS)
Establishing democracy chapters around Spaceship Earth as described and recommended in As the Rooster Crows Earthian OKness Increases might develop consensual answers regarding existential matters from the bottom up that might help save Spaceship Earth. These ideas would filter up to randomly-selected humans who would count the consensual answers to make necessary changes. Consensual tactics, strategies, and policies would then be developed around Earth for dealing with the computerized Spaceship Earth management system, operated and controlled using artificial intelligence programming and supercomputers.
Randomly-selected groups of Earthian humans of high intelligence with impeccable moral and ethical character and credentials would control codes for changing the Earthian Magnum Computer System programming to implement bottom-up recommendations of millions of members in discussions in democracy chapters around Spaceship Earth. Each member of the group in charge of the codes for the magnum computer system would serve limited terms. These members would not vote or decide what to do. They would see to it that the computer system implemented the consensual answers of millions of Earthian humans from all walks of life, as determined by honest, free, fair, and frank democratic GAME-free discussions in democracy chapters all around Spaceship Earth, as explained and shown in As the Rooster Crows Earthian OKness Increases. The overall objective would be to manage the system in such a way as to maximize the lifetime satisfactions of all Earthian humans, as well as all other species of life aboard Spaceship Earth, while insuring the indefinite functioning of all Spaceship Earth ecosystems.
Necessary moral and ethical requirements and constraints could be programmed in the Magnum Management System that Earthian humans at the top would be obliged to obey. If changes should be made in the moral and ethical codes in the overall program they would be sent back to the Earthian democracy chapters for discussion and then tabulated and analyzed before algorithms programmed in the system would create changes in the magnum operating system.
This computerized management system would require a strict system of security controls like the current codes of nations possessing nuclear weapons, hopefully providing security several magnitudes more secure than current nuclear codes, to make sure a madman could not get in control of any aspect of the system
A management system such as this would significantly improve previous management systems used around Spaceship Earth that have frequently empowered egotistical, greedy, power mad, grandiose, poorly educated, not-very-bright Earthian humans to make existential decisions affecting the OKness of thousands, millions, or billions of humans around Earth, that have been used over and over again for millennia, that caused incredible losses and suffering at various moments of Earthian history, that were basically caused by indiscriminate unbroken cause-effect chains inexorably tunneling out through time bad, ok, or good luck for Earthian humans around Spaceship Earth, starting with the evolution of our universe some fourteen billion years ago.
A tough lesson for Earthian humans to accept propositioned in Effective Learning Publications books is that everything that happens in human states of affairs is either predetermined or accidental and therefore individuals are not to blame or praise for what happens in human states of affairs. This is easier to swallow after accepting that believing and acting otherwise will support and perpetuate the I’m OK—You’re Not OK life position that has bedeviled, sabotaged, and undermined Earthian humans since time immemorial, causing wars and other disasters.
It follows that significant changes must be made in the way Earthian humans feel, think, and behave if the probability of human extinction is to be reduced..
Probably the best way significant numbers of Earthian humans can be caused to be significantly changed psychologically and socially by others is through democratic face to face discussions in honest serious and rigorous dialectical, dialogical arguing about facts using reasoning of all kinds, inductive, deductive, analogical, or whatever, dealing with Earthian human existential states of affairs over a relatively long period of time.
What is considered natural, unnatural; normal, abnormal; right, wrong; ethical, unethical; righteous, sinful; worthy, unworthy; or sane or insane by a particular Earthian human is caused by information lodged in her/his brain caused to be lodged there by the concatenation of infinite cause-effect chains causing her/him to exist and slowly inch through the Earthian worm hole of existence inexorably tunneled out for her or him by her/his specific unbroken infinitely-regressing cause-effect chains inexorably-progressing throughout his/her infinitesimally short cosmic life, regardless of how bad, ok, or good that luck or fate might be as judged by any Earthian human; and all Earthian humans must keep on inching forward in their worm holes as best they can dealing with inevitable problems and opportunities caused to exist at stages in their unique tunnels, as they are knocked around like balls in a pin-ball machine, as events inevitably and/or accidentally happen externally and in their subconscious and conscious minds, however bad, ok, or good their inherited luck might have absolutely been, which cannot be proved, however easy it might be to relatively estimate.
Changing the life scripts of Earthian humans for the better requires changing the course of unique tunnels of existence in which individual humans accidentally and inevitably live, a tall order indeed. Some biological constructivists would consider this notion a pipedream, while considering the whole process of Earthian human evolution a meaningless drift in the infinity of time and space.
What is God? Whatever it was that caused the universe to exist.
Read “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc,” for some management science ideas on how Earthian humans might eventually co-construct an economic system that is viable and satisfying for everyone aboard Spaceship Earth, making it possible for all Earthian humans to develop an I’m OK—You’re OK life position.
This novel shows how to conduct a new kind of seminar invented and coordinated by Rout Logger, the protagonist, that might reduce the probability of Earthian human extinction if widely implemented that requires participants in a seminar to speak up when randomly selected by a Truther rooster positioned in the center of a randomly-selected group of forty humans sitting in a circle.
The Truther rooster resembles a spinning weather vane. The rooster is programmed to bob its head up and down and crow after being twirled by a randomly-selected seminar participant, as it spins round and round winding down, letting group members know it’s time to wake up and get to work, before it’s too late. When the Truther rooster stops spinning whoever is at the end of a line of imaginary fire extending from the rooster’s beak to her or him sitting in the circle is automatically selected as the Leader of the Moment for the group.
The Leader of the Moment then leads the group into a democratic discussion of what s/he considers the most serious existential problem around Spaceship Earth. Forty participants from all walks of life were paid $5000 monthly for participating in weekend seminars conducted in central city hotels in various cities randomly selected around the US. If randomly selected as the Leader of the Moment the participant would define what s/he thought was the most important problem facing Spaceship Earth, present alternatives, and make a recommendation for change. What s/he said was discussed by members of the group on a free-flow first come-first serve basis. It was against the law of the seminar to interrupt speakers or raise hands to get permission to speak. Discussions lasted until they ran out of steam. The results of the discussions were published to wealthy donors who financed the process.
Rout Logger was convinced most Earthian humans would not volunteer to participate in this sort of seminar to merely help save Spaceship Earth from GWCC and/or MNWP using their Nurturing Parent, Adult, and Free Child Ego States, given the reality that their life time and energy was already programmed and consumed with various forms of withdrawal, rituals, pastimes, psychological games, activities, and intimacy in their unique tunnels of reality, as they acted out their inherited life scripts; so they were paid $5000 per month to participate in a game-free, Adult-Adult democratic seminar that would require them to honestly discuss existential problems with forty other participants from disparate walks of life, if they were randomly selected by the spinning Truther Rooster as the Leader of the Moment.
Achieving Earthian human sustainability entails such things as Earthian humans peacefully reducing through natural attrition (natural deaths exceeding births) the human population aboard Spaceship Earth, never doing work that machines can do better, and delegating the day-to-day management of systems for scheduling, producing, and distributing the necessities of life to artificial intelligence programs and supercomputers, assuming sufficient quantities of non-human clean energy can be discovered and developed using mind grants.
This general algorithmic matrix algebra form can help bring this state of affairs about,
This mathematical formulation could help develop power in economics loosely analogous to the power of E=mc2 in physics. This formulation, Max CjXj, subject to, AijXj ≤, =, or ≥ Bi, is a general form of the linear programming model, which has been around for many years in management science, operations research, and linear algebra courses.
Max CjXj, s.t. AijXj ≤, =, or ≥ Bi symbolizes knowledge that gives the Earthian human species about as much potential power to perpetuate itself as Albert Einstein’s formulation E=mc2 symbolizes knowledge that gives the Earthian human species the power to exterminate itself.
Riding aboard an airliner about to land at night traveling at four hundred miles an hour at thirty-five thousand feet with clouds, rain, wind, and lightning below, what would you rather have figuring out the path, speed, and angle of descent of the aircraft for touch-down, the plane’s auto-pilot, radar, and computer system or the pilot and co-pilot, seeing nothing out their windows below but clouds and lightning?
The main reason why delegating the scheduling, production, and distribution of the necessities of life to AI programs and magnum computers would be a good idea is that magnum computers and algorithmic AI programs do not get greedy and power hungry or play psychological GAMES. Thus far in Earthian human history most leaders and rulers atop large organizations such as nations have become corrupt one way or another playing psychological GAMES, acting out selfish greedy ego trips, hogging all the power, money, strokes, stimulation, and recognition they could get their hands on for themselves and their cronies, leaving the hindmost to their underlings. Whatever their limitations and possible threats, algorithmic computer programs and super computers are not egotistical, greedy, and power-hungry.
Thanks to Buckminster Fuller for providing the above airplane-landing metaphor in his book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, first published in 1969, and for planting seeds for other ideas in the essay “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc.,” published in the Effective Learning Report, such as computers being the best hope for mankind and humans not doing work machines can do better, being paid to think instead with what Fuller called mind grants. Fuller said unemployment all around Spaceship Earth could be eliminated overnight with mind grants. He was the inventor of the appellations Earthian and Spaceship Earth.
Many Earthian humans like to win BALANCE SHEET psychological GAMES, to feel superior and lord it over others, regardless if Spaceship Earth is going to hell in a handbasket around them because of global warming and climate change (GWCC) and militarization and nuclear weapons proliferation (MNWP), regardless of how much they have failed in other areas of their lives, and regardless of how heinous were crimes and misdemeanors they may have gotten away with in the process of amassing their riches, since they were saved, as it were, by taking in and controlling more almighty monetary units than other lesser mortals.
If you want to learn more about transactional analysis, such as Ego States, Scripts, and psychological GAMES, read Born to Learn: A Transactional Analysis of Human Learning.
Most Earthian humans know what it is to be egotistical, but they have little understanding of how specific human egotistical manifestations, such as Parent, Adult, and Child ego states, can be used to control and manipulate human behavior for nefarious ends.
For short run policies and strategies for dealing with USian economic and political problems read free the platform of the FreeFairProgressParty .
4 — A GAME-FREE CASE METHOD TEACHING AND LEARNING PROCESS THAT WOULD PRODUCE DEMOCRATIC DISCUSSIONS, LEARNING, AND POLICY FORMULATION AROUND EARTH
Richard John Stapleton, PhD, CTA would spin the spinner of his Classroom De-GAMER™ in his classes to randomly select a student at the beginning of each class session to lead a discussion of the case assigned for the day, a case taken from a planned or operating business prepared by case writers at Georgia Southern, Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Alabama.
This process insured that everyone would be relatively GAME-free transacting in class discussions. They all agreed to a learning contract at the outset of the course that they would read assigned cases and would be graded on the quantity and quality of ideas sold in the class market. Anyone caught obviously unprepared by the spinning De-GAMER would lose a whole letter grade from the course grade. No one could feel or think that s/he was being persecuted or rescued if selected to start the class discussion of the day by the Classroom De-GAMER™. The psychological GAME roles of Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim were largely banished from the course learning process.
Be it noted that 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.
He has published refereed journal articles and books explaining how his democratic GAME-free Adult-Adult I’m OK—You’re OK case method system works, by banishing Persecutors, Rescuers, and Victims playing psychological GAMES from the teaching and learning process, first documented in an article titled “The Classroom De-GAMER” he published in 1978 in the Transactional Analysis Journal. He has published seven books and over one hundred articles in various media containing cases, research data, and essays on teaching and learning and management policies and practices.
Stapleton learned and trained using transactional analysis with Martin Groder, MD; Graham Barnes, PhD; Vann Joines, PhD; and many others at the Southeast Institute at Chapel Hill, North Carolina (1975-1978).
He was a Harvard Case Method teacher who never went to Harvard, having learned how the case method works teaching with Bernard Bienvenu, DBA and Rexford Hauser, DBA (Harvard Business School doctorates) at the University of Louisiana– Lafayette in 1969-70.
He has a BS in economics (1962), an MBA in organizational behavior (1966), and a PhD in management science (1969) from Texas Tech University, and an organizational and educational certification in transactional analysis (CTA) from the International Transactional Analysis Association (1978).
He taught his own case method track at the undergraduate level in the management department of the business school at Georgia Southern University offering four or five different elective case method courses each academic year (1970-2005), in which he led, coordinated, and graded about twenty-five or so students each year who took all or most of those case method courses in their junior and senior years, of about two hundred students who signed up for all his courses each year. He used a democratic circle or amphitheater classroom layout in all his classes. He also taught most semesters two sections of a capstone integrative business policy course he added to the business school curriculum in 1970 that was required for all undergraduate business majors that could be elected by any student in any major. He was the only professor in the business school to use the case method in any course.
His students agreed to a course learning contract that stipulated they would read the facts of the case before class and would lose a whole letter grade from the course final grade if the De-GAMER randomly caught them obviously not having read the case before class, if they had not slipped a note under his office door before class telling him they had not read the case, which they could do twice during the course without penalty.
About ten percent of his students made A’s and about five percent made D’s. Most made C’s, which is about right, since C = Average. There were few F’s in his courses. The main criterion for course grades was the quantity and quality of ideas sold by students in case method discussions. He used peer ratings to give students feedback showing what their fellow students thought about the quantity and quality of their ideas sold in class, having made it clear the final decision about final grades was his. He did not believe in Lake Wobegon grading.
No student was ever forced to take one of his courses to graduate, and the most hardened Game-players in the school did not sign up for his courses after he issued his Edict of 1972 in which he clearly spelled out in his syllabi the penalty for getting caught unprepared. His Classroom De-GAMER™ was roundly discussed by students in bull sessions across campus every year and was labeled various things, such as The Wheel of Fate and The Death Wheel. Most students near the end of his career simply called it The Spinner.
He appreciated Georgia Southern honoring his academic freedom by allowing him control of his teaching methods, classroom layouts, grading procedures, and course books, cases, and materials, some of which he researched, wrote, and published. He was promoted to full professor at age thirty-six.
He solicited anonymous longitudinal research data using questionnaires in 1992 showing his case method students during 1972-1982 reported higher yearly incomes in 1992 than students electing the same courses in 1972-1982 taught by professors using the authoritarian lecture method and the militaristic row and column classroom layout, who graded students based on memorizing or calculating “right answers” for tests, indicating learners learning in Adult—Adult I’m OK—You’re OK GAME-free democratic learning processes graded subjectively became more successful in the real world of business than learners lectured to and graded using so-called objective multiple-choice tests.
Only former students who had worked in the real world ten or more years after graduating from the Georgia Southern business school were included in the study. The data are shown, analyzed, and discussed in full in “Evidence the Case Method Works” in his book Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata, and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds, 2008, pg. 475). The data were also used in several refereed articles.
The ancient Greeks used a similar random-selection democratic process in the Third Century BCE to select leaders of political discussions, learning, and policy formulation in their halls of government. Such a process is called sortition.
Stapleton had one of the lowest student grade point averages among professors in the business school and was one of the lowest-ranked professors as an instructor on computerized campus-wide student evaluations that weighted only instructor excellence scores up to 2000; but he was one of the highest-ranked professors in a computerized student evaluation he designed that generated data also showing and weighting study production, learning production, and expected grades scores for each professor, published in “Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations.”
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 (November 24, 2023) been cited as a reference in 89 refereed journal articles concerned about the ethics of student evaluations in several academic disciplines, including 21 new citations since April 2021.
Don Trump has been warned by judges in his criminal trials that they may issue orders to have him gagged from making inflamatory statements that might intimidate witnesses in his trials. Here of late he has made some extreme public statements that could intimidate or threaten anyone having critical thinking ability. He has said in public if he is elected president again he would punish NBC and MSNBC for making treasonous statements about him, and he has also said recently that General Milley, the head of the joint chiefs of the Usian military, should be executed for treason.
“If you come after me, I will come after you.”
How could statements such as these threaten witnesses in his criminal trials? Well, they could intimidate any USian citizen who criticizes or decides against Trump, in any way, since if he were elected president again, even if found guilty in his criminal trials, he might still serve as president. He has already said “If you come after me, I will come after you.” That means using his street level crime boss words and grammar that he might track people down if he becomes president again to get even for their having done him harm in any way, which for sure would include judges, witnesses, and jury members in his criminal trials, or anyone who criticizes him in public media of any kind. Trump told us when he was USian president that he believed in
“An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.”
So far, no gag orders have been issued to Don Trump. Will there be? If they are issued, how will they be enforced? Will Trump be put in jail for contempt of court if he is gagged and continues to make intimidating and threatening statements in public?
I watched last night on MSNBC, after the first repugnant Repuglican primary debate, a group discussion in which six or so of MSNBC’s brightest and most astute analysts/commentators/discussion leaders compared their opinions about the debate. They agreed the candidates were loquacious babbling lightweights who were not presidential material, compared to average or above past USian presidents, and that, not that Trump is not a lightweight himself, Trump remains without question the leading Repug candidate in the primary race, even though he refused to participate in the debate, possibly even increasing his lead as the Repug front runner, by not being there.
“Most people are too moral to make any money.”
The MSNBC group also generally agreed about why the above is true. How can it be that Trump can be qualified to lead anything now that he is going to several trials for multiple crimes, and after a New York judge in a civil case recently ruled that he lied about billions of dollars on financial statements to get loans from banks and evade taxes, in a trial that could cause him to lose his holdings in NYC, including his penthouse atop his Trump Tower. How dumb it was of poor Don to blurt out in public after he decided to run for president in 2016 that “Most people are too moral to make any money.” He should have said most people are too moral to extort money from banks and evade taxes by lying about how rich or poor they are on financial statements.
This New York civil trial, his upcoming federal criminal trials, other litigated cases, and his actions in various and sundry public episodes show that Don Trump has a character disorder. That being the case, how is it possible that Trump might be elected president of the US again?
Well, sadly, the only answer is that millions of USian voters do not care if the president of the US is a character-disordered criminal. I reached this conclusion some time ago, and last night the MSNBC discussion group reached this conclusion in so many words, the first time I have seen, read, or heard in any mainstream medium anyone state such a conclusion. They agreed that large numbers of USian voters, perhaps forty percent, have given up on democracy, because of becoming aware that the quality of their USian life has relatively declined over several decades; and they have decided what they need is a “strongman” who will do anything, legally or illegally, to solve their problems. In other words, they want a fascist dictator, however mentally, emotionally, morally, and behaviorally deranged he might be, who will tell everyone what to do, rather than deal with the responsibility, complexities, frustrations, and uncertainties of free, fair, rational, open democratic policy-making, deciding, and doing.
Will Trump be put in jail before trial if he does not refrain from making intimidating and threatening statements in public? Probably not, if it appears to judges that doing so would cause him to ignite some of his gun-obsessed cult members in violent shooting nationwide.
It’s unbelievable that USians would now be faced with this fascist dilemma, but that’s where we’re at; and it will probably take over a year, until after the 2024 presidential election, to find out what will happen to the US because of Trumpism.
Here’s the dilemma in a nutshell: If you put him in jail for contempt of court some of his deranged followers might start shooting; if you let him run free he might take over the country and turn it into a fascist dictatorship.
ABOUT THE WRITER
Richard John Stapleton, PhD, CTA would spin the spinner of his Classroom De-GAMER™ in his classes to randomly select a student at the beginning of each class session to lead a discussion of the case assigned for the day, a case taken from a planned or operating business prepared by case writers at Georgia Southern, Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Alabama.
This process insured that everyone would be relatively GAME-free transacting in class discussions. They all agreed to a learning contract at the outset of the course that they would read assigned cases and would be graded on the quantity and quality of ideas sold in the class market. Anyone caught obviously unprepared by the spinning De-GAMER would lose a whole letter grade from the course grade. No one could feel or think that s/he was being persecuted or rescued if selected to start the class discussion of the day by the Classroom De-GAMER™. The psychological GAME Drama Triangle roles of Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim were largely banished from the course learning process.
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.
He has published refereed journal articles and books explaining how his democratic GAME-free Adult-Adult I’m OK—You’re OK case method system works, by banishing Persecutors, Rescuers, and Victims playing psychological GAMES from the teaching and learning process, first documented in an article titled “The Classroom De-GAMER” he published in 1978 in the Transactional Analysis Journal. He has published seven books and over one hundred articles in various media containing cases, research data, and essays on teaching and learning and management systems, policies and practices.
Stapleton learned and trained using transactional analysis with Martin Groder, MD; Graham Barnes, PhD; Vann Joines, PhD; and many others at the Southeast Institute at Chapel Hill, North Carolina (1975-1978).
He was a Harvard Case Method teacher who never went to Harvard, having learned how the case method works teaching with Bernard Bienvenu, DBA and Rexford Hauser, DBA (Harvard Business School doctorates) at the University of Louisiana–Lafayette in 1969-70.
He has a BS in economics (1962), an MBA in organizational behavior (1966), and a PhD in management science (1969) from Texas Tech University, and an organizational and educational certification in transactional analysis (CTA) from the International Transactional Analysis Association (1978).
He taught his own case method track at the undergraduate level in the management department in the business school at Georgia Southern University offering four or five different elective case method courses each academic year (1970-2005), in which he led, coordinated, and graded about twenty-five or so students each year who took all or most of those case method courses in their junior and senior years, of about two hundred students who signed up for all his courses each year. He used a democratic circle or amphitheater classroom layout in all his classes. He also taught most semesters two sections of a capstone integrative business policy course he added to the business school curriculum in 1970 that was required for all undergraduate business majors that could be elected by any student in any major. He was the only professor in the business school to use the case method in any course.
His students agreed to a course learning contract that stipulated they would read the facts of the case before class and would lose a whole letter grade from the course final grade if the De-GAMER randomly caught them obviously not having read the case before class, if they had not slipped a note under his office door before class telling him they had not read the case, which they could do twice during the course without penalty.
About ten percent of his students made A’s and about five percent made D’s. Most made C’s, which is about right, since C = Average. There were few F’s in his courses. The main criterion for course grades was the quantity and quality of ideas sold by students in case method discussions. He used peer ratings to give students feedback showing what their fellow students thought about the quantity and quality of their ideas sold in class, having made it clear the final decision about final grades was his. He did not believe in Lake Wobegon grading.
No student was ever forced to take one of his courses to graduate, and the most hardened GAME-players in the school did not sign up for his courses after he issued his Edict of 1972 in which he clearly spelled out in his syllabi the penalty for getting caught unprepared. His Classroom De-GAMER™ was roundly discussed by students in bull sessions across campus every year and was labeled various things, such as The Wheel of Fate and The Death Wheel. Most students near the end of his career simply called it The Spinner.
He appreciated Georgia Southern honoring his academic freedom by allowing him control of his teaching methods, classroom layouts, grading procedures, and course books, cases, and materials, some of which he researched, wrote, and published. He was promoted to full professor with tenure at age thirty-six.
He solicited anonymous longitudinal research data using questionnaires in 1992 showing his case method students during 1972-1982 reported higher yearly incomes in 1992 than students electing the same courses in 1972-1982 taught by professors using the authoritarian lecture method and the militaristic row and column classroom layout, who graded students based on memorizing or calculating “right answers” for tests, indicating learners learning in Adult—Adult I’m OK—You’re OK GAME-free democratic learning processes graded subjectively became more successful in the real world of business than learners lectured to and graded using Parent-Child transactions, row and column classroom layouts, and so-called objective multiple-choice 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 Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata, and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds, 2008, pg. 475). The data were also used in several refereed articles.
The ancient Greeks used a similar random-selection democratic process in the Third Century BCE to select leaders of political discussions, learning, and policy formulation in their halls of government. Such a process is called sortition.
For more information on related classroom management ethical issues 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.
Stapleton had one of the lowest student grade point averages among professors in the business school and was one of the lowest-ranked professors as an instructor on computerized campus-wide student evaluations that weighted only instructor excellence scores up to 2000; but he was one of the highest-ranked professors in a computerized student evaluation he designed that generated data also showing and weighting study production, learning production, and expected grades scores for each professor, published in “Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations.”
To read the Optimizing Fairness article in full, go to https://studysites.sagepub.com/holt/articles/Stapleton.pdf . After this research was published, Georgia Southern in 2001 added study production, learning production, and expected grades questions to the student evaluation form used campus-wide.
“Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations” has by now (August 27, 2023) been cited as a reference in 88 refereed journal articles concerned about the ethics and fairness of student evaluations in several academic disciplines, including thirteen new citations since April 2021.
As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein propositioned in his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “The case is all there is.”
If so, everything else said about Earthian human states of affairs is a rendition of what was or might be.
His latest book is As the Rooster Crows Earthian OKness Increases.
I saw and heard Cornel West interviewed on MSNBC three or four days ago just after he formally announced he would run for USian president, and I agreed with everything he said.
He respects truth and justice and it sounds like he will do what he can to make it happen if he gets elected.
He said he was a Bernie Sanders democratic socialist in the last two presidential elections but he is now convinced the Dem party has been corrupted and will rig the next primary for Biden just like they did in the last one, so he will run as a Green Party candidate.
He says he will confront the USian deep state in his campaign, arguing for reducing the size of the USian military, reducing the influence of rich donors, large corporations, and lobbyists in Washington, doing what can to done to bring about democratic socialism in the US, and better internationalism, to foster a fair and just sustainable economic and political system for all Earthians.
Asked in the MSNBC interview if he worried about stealing enough votes from Dems running as a Green Party candidate to enable Trump to win again, West said he was not. He said he would focus on gaining the support of the forty percent of eligible USian voters who do not vote in USian presidential elections. If he could get the votes of all of them he would win in the general election.
On the other hand, he said if during his Green Party campaign he does not attract enough followers to win in the general election he would drop out of the race and tell his supporters to vote for the Dem candidate to make sure Trump did not win again.
Brother West was also asked if he didn’t worry about his own safety speaking truth to power in his campaign in the contemporary USian political maelstrom. He averred he was not, adding, “My coffin’s ready.” He seemed to have no fear of winding up like JFK, RFK, MLK, and Jesus if he is successful.
Richard John Stapleton, PhD, CTA would spin the spinner of his Classroom De-GAMER™ in his classes to randomly select a student at the beginning of each class session to lead a discussion of the case assigned for the day, a case taken from a planned or operating business prepared by case writers at Georgia Southern, Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Alabama.
This process insured that everyone would be relatively GAME-free transacting in class discussions. They all agreed to a learning contract at the outset of the course that they would read assigned cases and would be graded on the quantity and quality of ideas sold in the class market. Anyone caught obviously unprepared by the spinning De-GAMER would lose a whole letter grade from the course grade. No one could feel or think that s/he was being persecuted or rescued if selected to start the class discussion of the day by the Classroom De-GAMER™. The psychological GAME Drama Triangle roles of Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim were largely banished from the course learning process.
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.
He has published refereed journal articles and books explaining how his democratic GAME-free Adult-Adult I’m OK—You’re OK case method system works, by banishing Persecutors, Rescuers, and Victims playing psychological GAMES from the teaching and learning process, first documented in an article titled “The Classroom De-GAMER” he published in 1978 in the Transactional Analysis Journal. He has published seven books and over one hundred articles in various media containing cases, research data, and essays on teaching and learning and management systems, policies and practices.
Stapleton learned and trained using transactional analysis with Martin Groder, MD; Graham Barnes, PhD; Vann Joines, PhD; and many others at the Southeast Institute at Chapel Hill, North Carolina (1975-1978).
He was a Harvard Case Method teacher who never went to Harvard, having learned how the case method works teaching with Bernard Bienvenu, DBA and Rexford Hauser, DBA (Harvard Business School doctorates) at the University of Louisiana–Lafayette in 1969-70.
He has a BS in economics (1962), an MBA in organizational behavior (1966), and a PhD in management science (1969) from Texas Tech University, and an organizational and educational certification in transactional analysis (CTA) from the International Transactional Analysis Association (1978).
He taught his own case method track at the undergraduate level in the management department in the business school at Georgia Southern University offering four or five different elective case method courses each academic year (1970-2005), in which he led, coordinated, and graded about twenty-five or so students each year who took all or most of those case method courses in their junior and senior years, of about two hundred students who signed up for all his courses each year. He used a democratic circle or amphitheater classroom layout in all his classes. He also taught most semesters two sections of a capstone integrative business policy course he added to the business school curriculum in 1970 that was required for all undergraduate business majors that could be elected by any student in any major. He was the only professor in the business school to use the case method in any course.
His students agreed to a course learning contract that stipulated they would read the facts of the case before class and would lose a whole letter grade from the course final grade if the De-GAMER randomly caught them obviously not having read the case before class, if they had not slipped a note under his office door before class telling him they had not read the case, which they could do twice during the course without penalty.
About ten percent of his students made A’s and about five percent made D’s. Most made C’s, which is about right, since C = Average. There were few F’s in his courses. The main criterion for course grades was the quantity and quality of ideas sold by students in case method discussions. He used peer ratings to give students feedback showing what their fellow students thought about the quantity and quality of their ideas sold in class, having made it clear the final decision about final grades was his. He did not believe in Lake Wobegon grading.
No student was ever forced to take one of his courses to graduate, and the most hardened GAME-players in the school did not sign up for his courses after he issued his Edict of 1972 in which he clearly spelled out in his syllabi the penalty for getting caught unprepared. His Classroom De-GAMER™ was roundly discussed by students in bull sessions across campus every year and was labeled various things, such as The Wheel of Fate and The Death Wheel. Most students near the end of his career simply called it The Spinner.
He appreciated Georgia Southern honoring his academic freedom by allowing him control of his teaching methods, classroom layouts, grading procedures, and course books, cases, and materials, some of which he researched, wrote, and published. He was promoted to full professor with tenure at age thirty-six.
He solicited anonymous longitudinal research data using questionnaires in 1992 showing his case method students during 1972-1982 reported higher yearly incomes in 1992 than students electing the same courses in 1972-1982 taught by professors using the authoritarian lecture method and the militaristic row and column classroom layout, who graded students based on memorizing or calculating “right answers” for tests, indicating learners learning in Adult—Adult I’m OK—You’re OK GAME-free democratic learning processes graded subjectively became more successful in the real world of business than learners lectured to and graded using Parent-Child transactions, row and column classroom layouts, and so-called objective multiple-choice 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 Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata, and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds, 2008, pg. 475). The data were also used in several refereed articles.
The ancient Greeks used a similar random-selection democratic process in the Third Century BCE to select leaders of political discussions, learning, and policy formulation in their halls of government. Such a process is called sortition.
For more information on related classroom management ethical issues 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.
Stapleton had one of the lowest student grade point averages among professors in the business school and was one of the lowest-ranked professors as an instructor on computerized campus-wide student evaluations that weighted only instructor excellence scores up to 2000; but he was one of the highest-ranked professors in a computerized student evaluation he designed that generated data also showing and weighting study production, learning production, and expected grades scores for each professor, published in “Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations.”
To read the Optimizing Fairness article in full, go to https://studysites.sagepub.com/holt/articles/Stapleton.pdf . After this research was published, Georgia Southern in 2001 added study production, learning production, and expected grades questions to the student evaluation form used campus-wide.
“Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations” has by now (August 27, 2023) been cited as a reference in 88 refereed journal articles concerned about the ethics and fairness of student evaluations in several academic disciplines, including thirteen new citations since April 2021.
As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein propositioned in his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “The case is all there is.”
If so, everything else said about Earthian human states of affairs is a rendition of what was or might be.
His latest book is As the Rooster Crows Earthian OKness Increases.
There may be hundreds of dead planets in our Universe that were once inhabited by human-like creatures that lived, learned, and evolved on their planets in learning processes resembling the learning processes of Earthian humans, who through eons on their planets learned how to develop lethal weapons like Earthian nuclear bombs and complex industrial processes requiring burning fossil fuel who became extinct because of what they were caused to learn and develop through natural evolutionary cause-effect chains.
The same sort of thing could happen to Earthian humans if they do not quickly in cosmic time learn how to satisfy their biological, psychological, social, economic, and political needs in significantly improved social, psychological, economic, political, and military systems that do not require or entail the burning of carbon-based fuel or the decision-making of ordinary and sometimes demented Earthian humans in fascist organizations.
Up to now, overthrowing existing economic, social, and political orders with new economic, social, and political orders in violent revolutions or wars has not been not a good idea. Existing dysfunctional orders were torn down or disintegrated and were replaced by new dysfunctional orders.
Earthian humans are now enthralled, manipulated, and in various degrees controlled by their leaders in some two hundred countries aboard Spaceship Earth. Leaders became leaders because of being caused to be leaders by concatenations of infinite cause-effect chains resulting after our universe started evolving some fourteen billion years ago in the infinity of time and space.
Leaders are products of the same sorts of differentiated configurations of cause-effect chains as differentiated followers and members in differentiated countries. All Earthian humans are doing what they were caused to do in their daily lives starting at birth.
Earth as a planet was formed about 4.5 billion years ago and has undergone innumerable transformations in the meantime. Humanoid creatures have been aboard Spaceship Earth for some two million years, and they too have undergone numerous evolutionary changes, as have other Earthian species.
Unfortunately, Earthian humans have now reached a precarious and dangerous stage in their evolution as biological creatures. After slowly evolving more and more accurate, complex, and powerful understandings, technologies, and ways of life for two million years on Earth, during the last two hundred years Earthian humans evolved new technological devices at exponential rates that enabled them to increase the overly-fecund Earthian human population of Earth so much that they now threaten not only to destroy their own existence as a species aboard Spaceship Earth but also the existence of most other species alive on Earth.
Keeping eight billion or so Earthian humans alive on Earth has required so many goods and services to be produced to satisfy human biological and psychological needs and wants and so much carbon-based fuel to be burned to produce the goods that the climate of Spaceship Earth has been altered by carbon dioxide gas released into the Earthian atmosphere in large-enough quantities to cause extra heat to be trapped on Earth causing the mean Earthian temperature to increase at a yearly rate that threatens to destroy Earthian human life as it now exists, within centuries, if not decades.
Unfortunately, Earthian humans cannot determine exactly how long this catastrophic scenario will take to unfold with an Internet search, since Internet information sources show average Earthian temperatures in both Celsius and Fahrenheit and use different base years, different assumptions about causes of rates of change, and changing rates of change in calculating average Earthian temperature.
However, one can build a case based on available Internet data that it will take 35 years or so for the mean Earthian temperature to rise enough to cause the Earthian polar ice caps to melt enough to cause enough sea level rise to displace billions of Earthian humans living on sea coasts and to cause enough decrease in food production to cause billions of Earthian humans to starve—if Earthian humans do not significantly change in the meantime their life scripts, technological processes, and political and economic systems.
At the same time, one can build a case that global warming and climate change (GWCC) has already caused serious reductions in the quality of Earthian life. The recent forest fires covering much of Canada causing New York City and much of the Northeast to be engulfed in a thick orange haze causing serious breathing problems is a recent case in point, as is the recent burning of Hawaii and increased flooding and wildfires around Spaceship Earth in recent years.
Earthian humans have developed technological knowledge that has enabled them to produce over 10,000 nuclear weapons that could destroy human life aboard Spaceship Earth if dropped and detonated on defined enemies around Spaceship Earth, as they have the capability to do.
Dangerous escalations in the Ukraine-Russia War, fomented and aggravated by the United States and NATO, could cause the outbreak of World War III that could cause nuclear weapons to be used.
Earthian countries are dependent on fossil fuel energy in the short run and are pitted in a zero-sum struggle for control of oil and gas supplies around Earth, with the two largest military nations on Earth possessing over ninety percent of the nuclear weapons now threatening one another in a war they started in a minor country, a pawn in their Earthian game of chess, a tissue-tearing psychological GAME called KING OF THE MOUNTAIN by Earthian humans, caused by egotistical leaders and top members of the two countries who are primarily concerned about maintaining and enhancing their personal power, wealth, prestige, lifestyles, and legacies.
Top leaders of Russia fighting in Ukraine with non-nuclear weapons so far have publicly declared they will fire and detonate nuclear weapons if necessary to prevent their being defeated and humiliated in the war fomented in the minor pawn country of Ukraine by the US and NATO and started by Russia. Hopefully this threat to use nuclear weapons is just a bluff in another reincarnation of the Earthian psychological GAME called CHICKEN.
Unfortunately, the USian military-industrial-intelligence-political-financial-media complex needs wars and Russia as an enemy to generate cash flow for their operations and to keep the USian economyfunctioning as usual. This cash flow is provided by real USian tax dollars and funny money dollars created by the USian Federal Reserve System by punching digits into its computers and calling the resulting numbers money, in a process that through time has raised the USian federal budget deficit and debt to ominous levels.
As dangerous as this psychological high-stakes GAME-playing is, most Earthian humans find it stimulating, interesting, patriotic, heroic, and so forth in their nightly news, a release from the normal grind of their boring and banal daily routines and rituals, and their pastimes, jobs, activities, and intimacies, however much their attention might be diverted by the tiresome and ludicrous antics of former USian president Donald Trump, his buffoonish reality show political rallies, his crimes, and, now, his trials.
The probability of a militarization and nuclear weapons proliferation (MNWP) catastrophe at any time has significantly increased in recent years because of psychological GAME-playing.
All Earthian humans should have an equal opportunity to contribute to Earthian life in meaningful ways and be entitled to the necessities of life, not just watch and obey buffoonish fascist leaders playing Games. Not to recognize different levels of achievement for all Earthians will be disastrous for Spaceship Earth in the long run. The problem is that rewards in society are often not a function of achievement. The wealthy and powerful are often rewarded merely because of being wealthy and powerful.
What is needed is better leading and learning around Spaceship Earth, at all levels, in families, churches, schools, businesses, governments, and political parties. A leader can cause more learning to occur among members in learning sessions by arranging chairs in a I’m OK—You’re OK circle layout than by lecturing in a I’m OK—You’re Not OK militaristic row and column layout, to give one example of an easy way to improve the quality of learning leadership.
Learners passively sitting in their places in militaristic row and column layouts in living rooms, classrooms, sanctuaries, conference rooms, and legislative chambers trying to stay awake and remember what the leader said works in some cases if your purpose is to cause members to memorize platitudes, dogmas, doctrines, and procedures. But it is not best for generating discussion and comprehension of complex problems, issues, and systems.
To maximize learning a random selection device can be used to select a member to start the discussion in a circle learning layout as the leader of the moment. The designated leader should remain silent for the entire discussion if it is obvious the relevant points of the discussion material have been discussed and most of the members comprehended it, if members have no questions about something they could not understand on their own.
A tough lesson for Earthian humans to accept is that everything that happens in human states of affairs is either predetermined or accidental and therefore individuals are not to blame or praise for what happens in human states of affairs. This is easier to swallow after accepting that believing and acting otherwise will support and perpetuate the I’m OK—You’re Not OK Parent-Child life position that has bedeviled, sabotaged, and undermined Earthian humans since time immemorial, causing wars, and making losers out of most of those who actually fought in the wars.
The OKness positions of Earthian humans can be changed for the better psychologically and socially in democratic Adult-Adult Game-free I’m OK—You’re OK face-to-face transactions that entail honestly and rigorously reasoning and arguing about facts, cases, and states of affairs using dialectical, dialogical, analogical, deductive, and inductive methods, or sheer imagination, or the scientific method, or any other kind of reasoning or thought process.
The most astounding discovery of users of democratic Game-free Adult-Adult I’m OK—You’re OK learning processes, in which all participants have a right and responsibility to honestly tell the group what they feel and think about relevant facts, cases, and states of affairs, regardless of the quantity and quality of their prior learning, if randomly selected as the leader of the moment by a random-selection device, is that the comprehension and OKness of the whole group is increased in the discussion that ensues, if leaders of the moment and counter-arguers are fully honest about what they say as they transact in the back and forth of the discussion.
The only real sin in such a process is lying.
On the other hand, thinking the OKness levels and positions of Earthian humans can easily be changed in significant ways through ordinary conversation is a pipe dream, mainly because most Earthian humans do not believe in honestly arguing in Game-free Adult-Adult democratic I’m OK—You’re OK transactions about the facts of cases or states of affairs. The current so-called democratic political system used in the US is a case in point. Yes, USians can vote for the candidate of their choice, a so-called citizen who in almost all cases will not use free will deciding how to vote if elected, who will vote as told by party bosses in Parent-Child transactions who determine the position of a political party. Almost all significant political decisions in the US are predetermined by cause-effect chains emanating from the so-called deep state, rich oligarchs funding politicians, causing party leaders to decide whatever they decide about issues.
What is considered natural, unnatural; normal, abnormal; right, wrong; ethical, unethical; righteous, sinful; worthy, unworthy; or sane or insane by a particular Earthian human is caused by information lodged in her/his brain caused to be lodged there by an accidental or inevitable unique concatenation of infinite cause-effect chains causing her/him to exist and slowly inch through the Earthian worm hole of existence inexorably tunneled out for her or him by her/his specific unbroken unique infinitely progressing cause-effect chains, as s/he is knocked around like a ball in a pin-ball machine, as events inevitably and/or accidentally happen in the so-called real world, and in subconscious and conscious minds, however bad, ok, or good the luck causing his/her cause-effect chains to happen might have been.
Based on this line of reasoning Earthian human free will has little or nothing to do with what Earthian humans are caused to feel, think, decide, or do at a particular moment in time.
It follows that changing the life scripts of Earthian humans for the better requires changing the course of unique tunnels of existence in which individual humans accidentally and inevitably live, a tall order indeed. Most biological constructivists would consider this notion a pipe dream, while considering the whole process a meaningless drift in the infinity of time and space. A life script is a program based on messages passed from parents to offspring transmitted from Parent and Child ego states in parents to Parent and Child ego states in offspring allowing and forbidding certain kinds of feelings, thoughts, and behaviors determining what an individual Earthian human will do in a particular worm hole of reality, such as a legislature; and the script itself is caused by a unique concatenation of causes as outlined above.
According to biological constructivists, Earthian humans are closed systems that will not or cannot change unless forced to change by force majeure events. They will conserve as long as possible their original sources of biological, psychological, social, religious, cultural, economic, and political satisfactions. As psychiatrists and clinical psychologists know, Earthian humans cannot change their early psychological programming in the short run even if they want to.
Randomly-selecting leaders of the moment in democratic Adult-Adult Game-free I’m OK—You’re OK discussion processes is a way of creating pseudo-free will, a way of causing concatenations of Earthian human cause-effect chains that would not have happened in naturally-evolving states of nature.
What Spaceship Earth needs now are bottom-up Game-free Adult-Adult I’m OK—You’re OK democratic discussion processes that can significantly empower all Earthian humans.
Would you like to increase Earthian human Okness? If so, read the three Earthian Empowerment Systems books provided below and set up an EE discussion group where you live.
EARTHIAN EMPOWERMENT SYSTEMS BOOKS, ARTICLES, AND INSIGHTS
BOOKS
Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata, and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds, Effective Learning Publications, 2008, 2010, 2012, 754 pages
This is a comprehensive entrepreneurship and small business management book, must reading for any serious student, professor, or practitioner of entrepreneurship and small business management. Provides tools for ascertaining whether you are cut out for small business, applying transactional analysis concepts and techniques to learn whether you have the right kind of energy level and life script for success in the field. Includes relevant marketing, finance, operations management, and information systems concepts in the field, including a user-friendly computer format for writing a business plan you can use to do what-if simulations to see what will happen in your whole operating and financial system if you make changes in parts of the system. Includes statistical data, cases, and articles to enable you to know more about historical probabilities of success in the field. Provides the data and analysis of a USian-wide survey of successful small business owners using factor analysis that showed how successful entrepreneurs and small business owners will their wealth to their offspring. A major hypothesis of the study was that they would will on an equal share basis. Some did, but not all. The major finding was that they generally treated their offspring in their wills as they had been treated as offspring by their parents in their wills, indicating how the Golden Rule generally works in the real world: Earthian humans generally do unto others as others have done unto them.
Seller of the book with the lowest price for readers
Born to Learn: A Transactional Analysis of Human Learning, Effective Learning Publications, 2016, 253 pages
Originally titled De-Gaming Teaching and Learning: How to Motivate Learners and Invite OKness, Effective Learning Publications, 1979, 132 pages. Used in over three hundred school systems. Re-titled and updated in 2015 to emphasize its application in various kinds of learning situations. Includes concise definitions and explanations of transactional analysis variables and processes affecting Earthian human feeling, thinking, and behaving enabling readers to better understand what is really going on as they interact and transact with others. The unique contribution of this book is its comprehension of how the physical structuring of the learning environment and the ego states of the leader affect the quantity and quality of learning among members in learning systems, such as families, churches, schools, businesses, and governments. Attention is given to the salutary benefits of random selection of discussants in Game-free Adult-Adult I’m OK—You’re OK democratic learning systems, including data and evidence such systems work. Must reading for learning leaders and members in groups and organizations.
Seller of the book with the lowest price for readers
As the Rooster Crows Earthian OKness Increases, Effective Learning Publications, 2021, 350 pages
This book is an analogy, a novel, induced from the author’s experiences as a transactional analyst using the case method in a business school, describing a new kind of seminar invented by the protagonist/seminar leader, Rout Logger, conducted once a month for six months on weekends in randomly selected cities in the US, comprising forty members randomly selected from all walks of demographic life, who were paid five thousand dollars per month to participate. Discussant Leaders of the Moment were randomly selected by a spinning copper rooster, called the Truther Rooster, in the center of a circle learning layout who had to answer three questions if selected. What is the problem? What are the alternatives? What do you recommend? Analyses and dialectical discussions of the members and problems Rout Logger encountered among members are included. None of the members had ever experienced a Game-free Adult-Adult I’m OK—You’re OK democratic learning process such as this one, and there were serious problems requiring the adapting of group imagoes and flexing of personalities. The seminar was financed by rich donors. The seminar was terminated early because of the Covid virus. Rout and the donors were convinced the seminar increased the OKness of members and planned to roll out a computerized version of the seminar using zoom technology around Spaceship Earth to foster Earthian human sustainability.
Richard John Stapleton, PhD, CTA would spin the spinner of his Classroom De-GAMER™ in his classes to randomly select a student at the beginning of each class session to lead a discussion of the case assigned for the day, a case taken from a planned or operating business prepared by case writers at Georgia Southern, Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Alabama.
This process insured that everyone would be relatively GAME-free transacting in class discussions. They all agreed to a learning contract at the outset of the course that they would read assigned cases and would be graded on the quantity and quality of ideas sold in the class market. Anyone caught obviously unprepared by the spinning De-GAMER would lose a whole letter grade from the course grade. No one could feel or think that s/he was being persecuted or rescued if selected to start the class discussion of the day by the Classroom De-GAMER™. The psychological GAME Drama Triangle roles of Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim were largely banished from the course learning process.
Be it noted that 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.
He has published refereed journal articles and books explaining how his democratic GAME-free Adult-Adult I’m OK—You’re OK case method system works, by banishing Persecutors, Rescuers, and Victims playing psychological GAMES from the teaching and learning process, first documented in an article titled “The Classroom De-GAMER” he published in 1978 in the Transactional Analysis Journal. He has published seven books and over one hundred articles in various media containing cases, research data, and essays on teaching and learning and management systems, policies and practices.
Stapleton learned and trained using transactional analysis with Martin Groder, MD; Graham Barnes, PhD; Vann Joines, PhD; and many others at the Southeast Institute at Chapel Hill, North Carolina (1975-1978).
He was a Harvard Case Method teacher who never went to Harvard, having learned how the case method works teaching with Bernard Bienvenu, DBA and Rexford Hauser, DBA (Harvard Business School doctorates) at the University of Louisiana–Lafayette in 1969-70.
He has a BS in economics (1962), an MBA in organizational behavior (1966), and a PhD in management science (1969) from Texas Tech University, and an organizational and educational certification in transactional analysis (CTA) from the International Transactional Analysis Association (1978).
He taught his own case method track at the undergraduate level in the management department in the business school at Georgia Southern University offering four or five different elective case method courses each academic year (1970-2005), in which he led, coordinated, and graded about twenty-five or so students each year who took all or most of those case method courses in their junior and senior years, of about two hundred students who signed up for all his courses each year. He used a democratic circle or amphitheater classroom layout in all his classes. He also taught most semesters two sections of a capstone integrative business policy course he added to the business school curriculum in 1970 that was required for all undergraduate business majors that could be elected by any student in any major. He was the only professor in the business school to use the case method in any course.
His students agreed to a course learning contract that stipulated they would read the facts of the case before class and would lose a whole letter grade from the course final grade if the De-GAMER randomly caught them obviously not having read the case before class, if they had not slipped a note under his office door before class telling him they had not read the case, which they could do twice during the course without penalty.
About ten percent of his students made A’s and about five percent made D’s. Most made C’s, which is about right, since C = Average. There were few F’s in his courses. The main criterion for course grades was the quantity and quality of ideas sold by students in case method discussions. He used peer ratings to give students feedback showing what their fellow students thought about the quantity and quality of their ideas sold in class, having made it clear the final decision about final grades was his. He did not believe in Lake Wobegon grading.
No student was ever forced to take one of his courses to graduate, and the most hardened GAME-players in the school did not sign up for his courses after he issued his Edict of 1972 in which he clearly spelled out in his syllabi the penalty for getting caught unprepared. His Classroom De-GAMER™ was roundly discussed by students in bull sessions across campus every year and was labeled various things, such as The Wheel of Fate and The Death Wheel. Most students near the end of his career simply called it The Spinner.
He appreciated Georgia Southern honoring his academic freedom by allowing him control of his teaching methods, classroom layouts, grading procedures, and course books, cases, and materials, some of which he researched, wrote, and published. He was promoted to full professor with tenure at age thirty-six.
He solicited anonymous longitudinal research data using questionnaires in 1992 showing his case method students during 1972-1982 reported higher yearly incomes in 1992 than students electing the same courses in 1972-1982 taught by professors using the authoritarian lecture method and the militaristic row and column classroom layout, who graded students based on memorizing or calculating “right answers” for tests, indicating learners learning in Adult—Adult I’m OK—You’re OK GAME-free democratic learning processes graded subjectively became more successful in the real world of business than learners lectured to and graded using Parent-Child transactions, row and column classroom layouts, and so-called objective multiple-choice 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 Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata, and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds, 2008, pg. 475). The data were also used in several refereed articles.
The ancient Greeks used a similar random-selection democratic process in the Third Century BCE to select leaders of political discussions, learning, and policy formulation in their halls of government. Such a process is called sortition.
For more information on related classroom management ethical issues 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.
Stapleton had one of the lowest student grade point averages among professors in the business school and was one of the lowest-ranked professors as an instructor on computerized campus-wide student evaluations that weighted only instructor excellence scores up to 2000; but he was one of the highest-ranked professors in a computerized student evaluation he designed that generated data also showing and weighting study production, learning production, and expected grades scores for each professor, published in “Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations.”
To read the Optimizing Fairness article in full, go to https://studysites.sagepub.com/holt/articles/Stapleton.pdf . After this research was published, Georgia Southern in 2001 added study production, learning production, and expected grades questions to the student evaluation form used campus-wide.
“Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations” has by now (August 27, 2023) been cited as a reference in 88 refereed journal articles concerned about the ethics and fairness of student evaluations in several academic disciplines, including thirteen new citations since April 2021.
As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein propositioned in his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “The case is all there is.”
If so, everything else said about Earthian human states of affairs is a rendition of what was or might be.
His latest book is As the Rooster Crows Earthian OKness Increases.
Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin By Richard John Stapleton I think Eve Ottenberg is basically correct in her article, “The World Would be Better Off Without NATO,” https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/08/18/the-world-would-be-better-off-without-nato/?fbclid=IwAR1-YhaJsjn4JCxCHBbgW6q6ErSOEwCaZFS5SzPo9tnuq-3FuI0C4MCZfbk. I taught systems management in a master’s degree program with Troy State University in the US on United States Air Force/NATO …Read on »
Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin By Richard John Stapleton It’s a case of lying, lying, and more lying, and 91 criminal charges, with no convictions. i watched them on live TV watching the insurrection unfold on TV ensconced in a tent on a cold day. Damnedest thing I ever …Read on »
Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin By Richard John Stapleton Donald J. Trump, a USian son of a German-descended father and a Scottish-descended mother, after graduating from college with suspicious test scores and grades is given an inheritance of over four hundred million dollars and an organization known as The …Read on »
Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin By Richard John Stapleton Earthian humans are again confronted with a probability, albeit a low probabilty, hopefully, of mob violence in a major country, the US, the so-called exceptional shining democratic country on a hill among all the countries of Spaceship Earth, caused by …Read on »
Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin By Courtenay Barnett Having watched the news and consistently seen former President Donald Trump featuring, I woke up this morning in a reflective frame of mind. I asked myself – who in my lifetime was the most problem stricken and/or incompetent and/or simply dumb …Read on »
Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin By Richard John Stapleton This is a story about two kinds of lies: Trump lying about his not possessing classified US government documents in his Mar a Largo “fort” and Trump lying in a recorded statement that was aired on CNN about the existence …Read on »
Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin By Richard John Stapleton When the cat’s away the mice will play. Raising-the-debt ceiling-time in the USian congress is when repugnant Repug and dim Dem congressmice come out to play when the cat president is weakest, trying to siphon money from the USian federal …Read on »
Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin By Richard John Stapleton When the cat’s away the mice will play. Raising-the-debt ceiling-time in the USian congress is when congressmice come out to play when the cat president is weakest, trying to siphon money from the USian federal govt real and funny money …Read on »
I taught systems management in a master’s degree program with Troy State University in the US on United States Air Force/NATO bases in Europe during academic year 1982-83 on leave from Georgia Southern University in the US starting in the fall quarter of 1982 at Incirlik Air Base at Adana, Turkey, moving on in the winter quarter to Hellinikon Air Base at Athens, Greece, then to Soesterberg Air Base in Soesterberg, Holland in the spring quarter, and then to Aviano Air Base in Aviano, Italy in the summer quarter of 1983, and then flying back to the States in August of 1983, to spend the rest of my career teaching in my own case method/transactional analysis program in the business school at Georgia Southern University, retiring as the senior professor of the university in 2005.
Since then, I have published four books and over one hundred articles on the Internet, such as this one, dealing with social, economic, political, and military states of affairs, more or less pro bono, considering this work a civic duty in a supposedly democratic country such as the United States of America.
It was quite a ride in 1982-83, the most enlightening year of my life, riding in all sorts of USAF planes, PCSing (PCS stands for permanent change of duty station) from one duty station to another.
I even rode on a general’s plane once PCSing from Greece to Soesterberg, Holland after the transport plane I was riding on got laid up for repairs at Torrejon, Spain.
A colonel I was talking with at the base at Torrejon who had the same problem with a transport plane asked me how I would like to ride from Torrejon to Ramstein, Germany in a general’s plane. He said they had a few seats left in the back of the bus and he thought he could get us on the flight. We had a great visit and ride on the way to Ramstein drinking beer and eating snacks in the back of the bus while the commanding general for Europe hosted dignitaries in the front of the plane with steak and scotch whiskey.
After about two hours or so in the air an attractive young stewardess walked to the back of the bus and told us we might want to attach our seat belts since we were about to touch down.
A minute or so later we felt a slight bump and we were on the ground. I had no idea you could have an airline flight that smooth, what they called a gradual descent landing. We had been descending for a hundred or more miles and nobody knew it.
A USAF general’s plane in Europe at the time looked exactly like a USian president’s plane, solid white with the words United States of America painted on its sides.
I had a GS-13 civil service rating as a civilian full professor working for the Air Force that gave me officer’s club privileges equivalent to those of a full colonel on USian bases. While I had a security clearance, I was not privy to any military secrets, although I was privy to many interesting private conversations with high-ranking officers in officer’s clubs.
I had one full colonel in one of my classes, who was also a fighter pilot, a top gun in the system, who was exceptionally interesting and effective in class analyzing and discussing systems management cases with students in the class that ranged from him as a full bird down to enlisted personnel who did maintenance work on the planes. Students in my classes had undergraduate degrees from all sorts of colleges and universities in the States, including the Air Force Academy.
I had some nationals (mainly local business people working on the TSU-E master’s degree in systems management) in my classes in Greece and Holland.
A colonel told me in August 1982 in Ramstein, Germany after I first touched down in Europe (the first time I ever set foot in Europe), having departed the US from Charleston, SC the previous day, over lunch in a German restaurant, giving me my first taste of authentic German food, that the real purpose for US military personnel in Europe in NATO at the time was to serve as hostages if the Russians decided to roll their tanks into Europe to take over new territory, thereby guaranteeing the US would defend Europe in an all-out war.
No one I talked with during my year in Europe with the USAF on NATO bases, 1982-83—USAF officer, USAF enlisted person, local politician, or local national—was seriously worried about a war breaking out anytime soon.
I took Army ROTC for one year at Hardin-Simmons University, a Baptist college with about 1,700 students, at Abilene, Texas in 1958-59 as a freshman on a basketball scholarship. ROTC was required for two years for all males at Hardin-Simmons. I basically detested it, thinking shining brass, saluting, presenting arms, marching on the drill field, etc. was the dumbest thing I ever did. I got out of the second year of required ROTC after finding out I could never be commissioned as an officer in the military because of a spinal fusion back surgery I had when I was a sophomore in high school. All I had to do was show a medical doctor in Abilene the ten-inch scar running up my back and have him sign a form affirming he had seen it. I was called up for the USian draft in 1962 and was required to take a standard Army physical at Amarillo, Texas. As I stood in line naked with other potential draftees during the physical a medical doctor took one look at the scar and told me, “I’m sorry but you are permanently disqualified from military service.”
I thus never had to worry about getting drafted and sent to Vietnam to get my ass shot off, as a lot of not-yet-drafted young males in the States used to say back in those days. I would have volunteered to help defend the US in a war from a serious enemy threatening to invade the US. The USian-Brit War of 1812 was probably the only one.
At a Southern Management Association meeting for management professors in Atlanta, Georgia in 1981 a recruiter from Troy State University asked me at a cocktail party, “How would you like to teach for a year in Europe?” It turned out he was recruiting for the TSU-E systems management master’s degree program on USAF NATO bases. Despite my generally negative attitude regarding military organizations I took them up on the deal.
I maintained relations with administrators in the TSU-Europe program for several years after I got back to the States. I was impressed with the USAF—its operations, its efficiency, its personnel, and its culture—and the TSU-E educational program, and I thought about going back over there again for another tour.
Despite all military organizations being authoritarian, with a rigid hierarchy and a strict chain of command, the USAF was a benevolent organization with the best system of guaranteed human rights I had experienced. It had almost eradicated racial and sexual discrimination, and so long as members adhered to clearly spelled-out rules within limits they were free to be themselves regardless of whether they were caused by fate to be straight or LGBTQ, freer than most USians are in the States.
I talked with numerous people on USAF NATO bases who had gotten out of the Air Force after a few years who, after experiencing life in the USian market economy, reenlisted because life to them was more satisfying in the Air Force than it was in ordinary USian life, proving a socialistic benevolent authoritarian organization paid for by USian taxes, investors buying Federal Government debt instruments with real money, and funny money created from thin air by the USian Federal Reserve System can be more satisfying than capitalistic market-driven authoritarian organizations are to some people. For sure job security in the Air Force was greater than it was in market-driven organizations.
In 1989 I casually told the head of the TSU-E management program in a snail mail letter that it was too bad the Russians had declared peace against us by tearing down the Berlin Wall after Ronald Reagan told them to.
I naively assumed there would no longer be a need for USian NATO bases in Europe or the TSU-E program since the Russians were talking about wanting to join NATO themselves at the time.
Another teaching tour in Europe did not happen. The upshot is that I lost contact with TSU-E administrators and have no idea what ultimately happened to the management program I taught in in Europe in 1982-83.
But I do know NATO was not disbanded. Instead it was expanded, moving closer to the Russian border, after the Berlin Wall came down, and no USian bases were closed, to my knowledge, and the Russian-Ukrainian USian proxy war is now a costly expense for USian taxpayers.
It’s a shame states of affairs have turned out as they have. I thought we might have peace on Earth after 1989 since we USians had defeated communism in Russia.
Unfortunately, it seems the USian Deep State decided the US could not afford peace.
It’s irrelevant that the Russians were fascist communists then and fascist capitalists now. The USian Deep State still needs Russia as an enemy to generate cash flow in a new kind of cold war.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard John Stapleton, PhD, CTA would spin the spinner of his Classroom De-GAMER™ in his classes to randomly select a student at the beginning of each class session to lead a discussion of the case assigned for the day, a case taken from a planned or operating business prepared by case writers at Georgia Southern, Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Alabama.
This process insured that everyone would be relatively GAME-free transacting in class discussions. They all agreed to a learning contract at the outset of the course that they would read assigned cases and would be graded on the quantity and quality of ideas sold in the class market. Anyone caught obviously unprepared by the spinning De-GAMER would lose a whole letter grade from the course grade. No one could feel or think that s/he was being persecuted or rescued if selected to start the class discussion of the day by the Classroom De-GAMER™. The psychological GAME roles of Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim were largely banished from the course learning process.
Be it noted that 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 has published refereed journal articles and books explaining how his democratic GAME-free Adult-Adult I’m OK—You’re OK case method system works, by banishing Persecutors, Rescuers, and Victims playing psychological GAMES from the teaching and learning process, first documented in an article titled “The Classroom De-GAMER” he published in 1978 in the Transactional Analysis Journal. He has published seven books and over one hundred articles in various media containing cases, research data, and essays on teaching and learning, management systems, and business policies and practices.
Stapleton learned and trained using transactional analysis with Martin Groder, MD; Graham Barnes, PhD; Vann Joines, PhD; and many others at the Southeast Institute at Chapel Hill, North Carolina (1975-1978).
He was a Harvard Case Method teacher who never went to Harvard, having learned how the case method works teaching with Bernard Bienvenu, DBA and Rexford Hauser, DBA (Harvard Business School doctorates) at the University of Louisiana–Lafayette in 1969-70.
He has a BS in economics (1962), an MBA in organizational behavior (1966), and a PhD in management science (1969) from Texas Tech University, and an organizational and educational certification in transactional analysis (CTA) from the International Transactional Analysis Association (1978).
He taught his own case method track at the undergraduate level in the management department in the business school at Georgia Southern University offering four or five different elective case method courses each academic year (1970-2005), in which he led, coordinated, and graded about twenty-five or so students each year who took all or most of those case method courses in their junior and senior years, of about two hundred students who signed up for all his courses each year. He used a democratic circle or amphitheater classroom layout in all his classes. He also taught most semesters two sections of a capstone integrative business policy course he added to the business school curriculum in 1970 that was required for all undergraduate business majors that could be elected by any student in any major. He was the only professor in the business school to use the case method in any course.
His students agreed to a course learning contract that stipulated they would read the facts of the case before class and would lose a whole letter grade from the course final grade if the De-GAMER randomly caught them obviously not having read the case before class, if they had not slipped a note under his office door before class telling him they had not read the case, which they could do twice during the course without penalty.
About ten percent of his students made A’s and about five percent made D’s. Most made C’s, which is about right, since C = Average. There were few F’s in his courses. The main criterion for course grades was the quantity and quality of ideas sold by students in case method discussions. He used peer ratings to give students feedback showing what their fellow students thought about the quantity and quality of their ideas sold in class, having made it clear the final decision about final grades was his. He did not believe in Lake Wobegon grading.
No student was ever forced to take one of his courses to graduate, and the most hardened GAME-players in the school did not sign up for his courses after he issued his Edict of 1972 in which he clearly spelled out in his syllabi the penalty for getting caught unprepared. His Classroom De-GAMER™ was roundly discussed by students in bull sessions across campus every year and was labeled various things, such as The Wheel of Fate and The Death Wheel. Most students near the end of his career simply called it The Spinner.
He appreciated Georgia Southern honoring his academic freedom by allowing him control of his teaching methods, classroom layouts, grading procedures, and course books, cases, and materials, some of which he researched, wrote, and published. He was promoted to full professor at age thirty-six.
He solicited anonymous longitudinal research data using questionnaires in 1992 showing his case method students during 1972-1982 reported higher yearly incomes in 1992 than students electing the same courses in 1972-1982 taught by professors using the authoritarian lecture method and the militaristic row and column classroom layout, who graded students based on memorizing or calculating “right answers” for tests, indicating learners learning in Adult—Adult I’m OK—You’re OK GAME-free democratic learning processes graded subjectively became more successful in the real world of business than learners lectured to and graded using so-called objective multiple-choice tests.
Only former students who had worked in the real world ten or more years after graduating from the Georgia Southern business school were included in the study. The data are shown, analyzed, and discussed in full in “Evidence the Case Method Works” in his book Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata, and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds, 2008, pg. 475). The data were also used in several refereed articles.
The ancient Greeks used a similar random-selection democratic process in the Third Century BCE to select leaders of political discussions, learning, and policy formulation in their halls of government. Such a process is called sortition.
For more information on related classroom management ethical issues see Stapleton, R.J. and Murkison, G. (2001), “Optimizing the fairness of student evaluations: A study of correlations between instructor excellence, study production, learning production, and expected grades,” in the Journal of Management Education, 25(3), 269-292.
Stapleton had one of the lowest student grade point averages among professors in the business school and was one of the lowest-ranked professors as an instructor on computerized campus-wide student evaluations that weighted only instructor excellence scores up to 2000; but he was one of the highest-ranked professors in a computerized student evaluation 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 (July 10, 2023) been cited as a reference in 88 refereed journal articles concerned about the ethics of student evaluations in several academic disciplines, including eleven new citations since April 2021.
As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein propositioned in his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “The case is all there is.”
If so, everything else said about Earthian human states of affairs is a rendition of what was or might be.
Stapleton’s latest book is As the Rooster Crows Earthian OKness Increases.
It’s a case of lying, lying, and more lying, and 91 criminal charges, with no convictions.
i watched them on live TV watching the insurrection unfold on TV ensconced in a tent on a cold day.
Damnedest thing I ever saw.
Some of them looked like they were high on something. Trump junior in the foreground got interviewed along with a female supporter who was gleefully doing the twist in a heavy coat and heels.
Eyes bulging Trump junior looking into the camera shouted Fight! Fight! Fight!.
Trump senior standing in the background never took his eyes off the TV screen, pointing out happenings on the screen while making muted comments now and then to people standing around him, including his daughter.
Napoleon Bonaparte never had it so good drinking brandy in his tent watching his troops fighting for him in one of his battles.
Come to think of it, if only the USian deep state could “find a way” to exile Trump on an island like Elba somewhere ASAP, and bring this frustrating, picayune, pusillanimous, maddening USian Trump insurrection investigation-indictment-trial-by-jury-media-circus process to a screeching halt, to solve the problem before all hell breaks loose, while preserving the functioning of the USian justice process, that generally functions well enough to enable the US to muddle through, however flawed the USian justice process might be, we would all be a lot better off.
If probably not, there is no telling what kinds of absurdities and abominations USians, and all Earthian humans, for that matter, will be seeing and hearing on TV for a long time, caused by the happening of Trumpism.
There have been innumerable cases throughout Earthian human history in which aspiring or successful fascist dictators have been caused to exist in large organizations such as countries by rare concatenations of infinitely-progressing universal cause-effect chains; but most likely never in Earthian human history has such a concatenation caused the existence of an aspiring fascist dictator who is an emotionally and intellectually deranged crime boss circus clown, in an organization such as the United States of America.
To see what the tent, the TV screen, Trump, and his entourage looked like on January 6, 2021 as they watched his insurrection live on TV click here:
We no longer have political debates in the USA. What we have now are political lying contests, disconnected from reality, telling us what we saw and heard January 6, 2021 on live TV with our own eyes and ears as Trump’s insurrection happened did not happen. According to lyin’ Repug politicians and paid essayists, Trump committed a heroic patriotic act with his insurrection January 6, 2021 no matter what US law says or what millions of TV viewers saw and heard live with their own eyes and ears as the insurrection happened.
It’s easy for intelligent Earthian humans to be overtaken by feelings of sadness, madness, and scaredness in today’s psychological and social worlds.
It’s unlikely that intelligent Earthian humans will be overtaken with feelings of gladness when considering Earthian states of affairs.
It’s easy to learn how to put Earthian humans to work increasing human OKness for everyone by reading AS THE ROOSTER CROWS EARTHIAN OKNESS INCREASES.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard John Stapleton, PhD, CTA would spin the spinner of his Classroom De-GAMER™ in his classes to randomly select a student at the beginning of each class session to lead a discussion of the case assigned for the day, a case taken from a planned or operating business prepared by case writers at Georgia Southern, Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Alabama.
This process insured that everyone would be relatively GAME-free transacting in class discussions. They all agreed to a learning contract at the outset of the course that they would read assigned cases and would be graded on the quantity and quality of ideas sold in the class market. Anyone caught obviously unprepared by the spinning De-GAMER would lose a whole letter grade from the course grade. No one could feel or think that s/he was being persecuted or rescued if selected to start the class discussion of the day by the Classroom De-GAMER™. The psychological GAME roles of Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim were largely banished from the course learning process.
Be it noted that 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 has published refereed journal articles and books explaining how his democratic GAME-free Adult-Adult I’m OK—You’re OK case method system works, by banishing Persecutors, Rescuers, and Victims playing psychological GAMES from the teaching and learning process, first documented in an article titled “The Classroom De-GAMER” he published in 1978 in the Transactional Analysis Journal. He has published seven books and over one hundred articles in various media containing cases, research data, and essays on teaching and learning, management systems, and business policies and practices.
Stapleton learned and trained using transactional analysis with Martin Groder, MD; Graham Barnes, PhD; Vann Joines, PhD; and many others at the Southeast Institute at Chapel Hill, North Carolina (1975-1978).
He was a Harvard Case Method teacher who never went to Harvard, having learned how the case method works teaching with Bernard Bienvenu, DBA and Rexford Hauser, DBA (Harvard Business School doctorates) at the University of Louisiana– Lafayette in 1969-70.
He has a BS in economics (1962), an MBA in organizational behavior (1966), and a PhD in management science (1969) from Texas Tech University, and an organizational and educational certification in transactional analysis (CTA) from the International Transactional Analysis Association (1978).
He taught his own case method track at the undergraduate level in the management department in the business school at Georgia Southern University offering four or five different elective case method courses each academic year (1970-2005), in which he led, coordinated, and graded about twenty-five or so students each year who took all or most of those case method courses in their junior and senior years, of about two hundred students who signed up for all his courses each year. He used a democratic circle or amphitheater classroom layout in all his classes. He also taught most semesters two sections of a capstone integrative business policy course he added to the business school curriculum in 1970 that was required for all undergraduate business majors that could be elected by any student in any major. He was the only professor in the business school to use the case method in any course.
His students agreed to a course learning contract that stipulated they would read the facts of the case before class and would lose a whole letter grade from the course final grade if the De-GAMER randomly caught them obviously not having read the case before class, if they had not slipped a note under his office door before class telling him they had not read the case, which they could do twice during the course without penalty.
About ten percent of his students made A’s and about five percent made D’s. Most made C’s, which is about right, since C = Average. There were few F’s in his courses. The main criterion for course grades was the quantity and quality of ideas sold by students in case method discussions. He used peer ratings to give students feedback showing what their fellow students thought about the quantity and quality of their ideas sold in class, having made it clear the final decision about final grades was his. He did not believe in Lake Wobegon grading.
No student was ever forced to take one of his courses to graduate, and the most hardened GAME-players in the school did not sign up for his courses after he issued his Edict of 1972 in which he clearly spelled out in his syllabi the penalty for getting caught unprepared. His Classroom De-GAMER™ was roundly discussed by students in bull sessions across campus every year and was labeled various things, such as The Wheel of Fate and The Death Wheel. Most students near the end of his career simply called it The Spinner.
He appreciated Georgia Southern honoring his academic freedom by allowing him control of his teaching methods, classroom layouts, grading procedures, and course books, cases, and materials, some of which he researched, wrote, and published. He was promoted to full professor at age thirty-six.
He solicited anonymous longitudinal research data using questionnaires in 1992 showing his case method students during 1972-1982 reported higher yearly incomes in 1992 than students electing the same courses in 1972-1982 taught by professors using the authoritarian lecture method and the militaristic row and column classroom layout, who graded students based on memorizing or calculating “right answers” for tests, indicating learners learning in Adult—Adult I’m OK—You’re OK GAME-free democratic learning processes graded subjectively became more successful in the real world of business than learners lectured to and graded using so-called objective multiple-choice tests.
Only former students who had worked in the real world ten or more years after graduating from the Georgia Southern business school were included in the study. The data are shown, analyzed, and discussed in full in “Evidence the Case Method Works” in his book Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata, and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds, 2008, pg. 475). The data were also used in several refereed articles.
The ancient Greeks used a similar random-selection democratic process in the Third Century BCE to select leaders of political discussions, learning, and policy formulation in their halls of government. Such a process is called sortition.
For more information on related classroom management ethical issues see Stapleton, R.J. and Murkison, G. (2001), “Optimizing the fairness of student evaluations: A study of correlations between instructor excellence, study production, learning production, and expected grades,” in the Journal of Management Education, 25(3), 269-292.
Stapleton had one of the lowest student grade point averages among professors in the business school and was one of the lowest-ranked professors as an instructor on computerized campus-wide student evaluations that weighted only instructor excellence scores up to 2000; but he was one of the highest-ranked professors in a computerized student evaluation 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 (July 10, 2023) been cited as a reference in 88 refereed journal articles concerned about the ethics of student evaluations in several academic disciplines, including eleven new citations since April 2021.
As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein propositioned in his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “The case is all there is.”
If so, everything else said about Earthian human states of affairs is a rendition of what was or might be.
Stapleton’s latest book is As the Rooster Crows Earthian OKness Increases.
Donald J. Trump, a USian son of a German-descended father and a Scottish-descended mother, after graduating from college with suspicious test scores and grades is given an inheritance of over four hundred million dollars and an organization known as The Trump Organization to play with in real estate schemes of all sorts, including gambling casinos.
Don Trump later becomes the star of a nationally-televised reality show called The Apprentice in which he is scripted as a billionaire real estate tycoon who spends his time hiring and firing ambitious people who want to work for his organization. The show consists of banal sit-com-like conversations in episodes in which underlings discuss ideas with the boss designed to take in more money for the boss, who owns the place, that often culminate with Trump resolutely and self-righteously spewing “You’re fired!”— thereby producing entertaining drama for millions of hypnotized television viewers.
Over the years, Don Trump loses millions of dollars of his inheritance in the real world in fraudulent and legal ventures, resulting in several bankruptcies, but supposedly many triumphs, according to Don, that propel him into billionaire status in the real world. Almost no one outside his inner circle knows for sure whether he ever had one billion dollars in net worth since financial statements compiled by certified public accountants were not made public by his ethically-challenged mafia-like Trump Organization.
An aging Trump, who admired Adolph Hitler and read his writings, having separated from the reality show TV business, got bored with hiring, firing, and bossing real lackeys and employees in his Trump Organization, so he decided to run for President of the United States as a Republican.
Lo and behold, he wins the Republican primary election of 2016 against seasoned Republican politicians such as Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush. In televised debates he cows down antagonists using barely literate crime boss words, sentences, and concepts, having learned his lines and nuances well through experience during his Trump Organization and Apprentice reality show days. No matter what his opponents in debates argued, Trump could concoct a short terse inane rebuttal that would appeal to viewers of the Republican debates, just as they appealed to viewers of his Apprentice reality show, proving his political viewers, like his reality show viewers, would believe and lap up almost anything he said because of the way he said it.
After losing the general presidential election to Hillary Clinton in 2016, he won the USian Electoral College vote, and the USian presidency, because of the way elections in the US are structured by the US Constitution, giving voters in Republican Red states, where Trump’s reality show viewers were in a majority, more power per vote than the per-vote power of voters in Democratic Blue states.
Thus, at age 70 Trump becomes the USian president, with no political experience, because of his early “success” playing a billionaire in a television reality show, since millions of Republican voters in Red states had been hypnotized by Trump watching his nationally-televised Apprentice reality show, who admired his crime boss lingo and schtick, and who therefore voted for him as USian president.
The aging Trump then begins his career as president of the United States using the same crime boss personality, group imago, and script he used in his reality show, and in real life bossing The Trump Organization, now seeing all USians and Earthian humans as he saw his millions of reality show viewers and Trump Organization lackeys and employees.
He came across on national and international political stages much as he did when he was a real estate con artist and billionaire tycoon on TV, as a flashy tough blunt brave boss, creating and projecting an aura of personal power and superiority.
He expected his US government subordinates to react to him as his Trump Organization lackeys and his scripted reality show lackeys had. Most of his government hires flexed and adapted to his personality, group imago (the way saw the world), and script messages; but some did not. After hiring the Chairman and CEO of Exxon-Mobil as Secretary of State, the now-Secretary of State blurted out in public, “He’s a f—— moron.” Trump as usual fired him. How many other Trump hires had enough net worth to risk telling the truth about their boss?
Since USian presidents have a lot of power appointing a lot people to do government jobs and a lot of people want government jobs, Trump over four years in his first and so-far only term found a lot of people willing and able to adapt and flex to his personality, group imago, and script, as his lackeys did in his Trump Organization and in his reality show, including three judges for the USian Supreme Court, that he stacked to a 6-3 Republican advantage, proving truth is almost as scarce in political and legal milieus as it is in TV reality shows.
Trump becomes one of the worst presidents of USian history, with no documented betterments for citizens except large tax cuts for the elite rich and significantly increased spending for the USian military, thereby significantly increasing the ominous USian budget deficit and debt, producing an administration that was mostly sound and fury with no systemic or existential accomplishments, featuring Trump as the star of the show every day.
Running for a second term, he loses the general election of 2020 to the aging addled good ole boy Democrat Joe Biden, but refuses to admit he lost and accuses enemies of stealing the election, while manipulating everything he can after the election to overturn the election results, including inciting an insurrection against the USian government January 6, 2021 to prevent the USian Congress from approving the results of the presidential election. After finally being forced to vacate the USian White House he took with him US documents containing information classified and marked top-secret that he showed to cronies at his Mar a Largo “fort,” a crime for which he is indicted by the US Justice Department in 2023.
After losing the 2020 election and refusing to peacefully leave office he creates and manipulates several action scene episodes, recorded and videotaped in some instances, featuring him threatening and trying to intimidate elected government officials into changing vote counts so he could stay in office, coming on strong in one-on-one mano-to-mano encounters applying a heavy dose of his time-tested crime boss demeanor and schtick. He is investigated for having committed USian crimes while acting out these machinations.
He is found liable by a jury for battery in a civil case in which he paid E Jean Carroll $5 million in damages, $2 million for sexual abuse and $3 million for defamation.
His Trump Organization is convicted of tax evasion.
Showing no signs of remorse for what he has done, the now 77-year-old Trump entertains, enchants, titillates, and inflames his still-hypnotized reality show audience in person at political rallies around the country, running for USian president again in 2024, still conning supporters out of millions of dollars in political donations, who say they will vote for him again. He is has taken in hundreds of millions of dollars from his followers and donors from various sources — trinkets, red baseball caps, t-shirts, baseball cards with his picture on them, donations, speeches, etc. — since leaving the White House.
Despite his abysmal record as a politician, he is the front runner among Republican prospects for president in 2024. He still struts and swaggers around free at rallies wearing a red baseball cap with the letters MAGA printed across the front, Make America Great Again, wearing a white shirt, red tie, and a blue suit, coming across psychologically on stage like a P.T. Barnum and Bailey circus performer in the greatest show on Earth.
In reality he’s an inverse Robin Hood wearing wolf’s clothing, stealing from the poor and giving to the rich, saying little if anything about how he, specifically, would make America great again if he became president again, more than likely not having a clue about what he would do specifically to make this happen. At least the first time around in 2016 he told his hypnotized followers he would build a wall across the southern border of the US to keep out immigrants to make America great again. He did build a bit of this wall when in office, but the immigration problem is as bad or worse now as it was in 2016, and he seems to have forgotten about his great wall.
If he gets elected again there is a significant probability he could start choosing the same sorts of paths taken by fascist dictators such as Hitler and Stalin, ordering mob violence, this time to steal resources by force from Earthian humans defined as enemies, to make America great again, in wars against other countries or in pogroms against demographic groups inside the US, possibly leading to genocidal or democidal crimes against humanity.
His credulous hypnotized adoring loyal ecstatic fans now enjoy his real reality show in rallies, videos, and social and mainstream media. Very likely no one outside his still-operating secret Trump Organization, and possibly a few inside lawyers and bankers, knows how wealthy Trump is now, since most likely no one in published media has yet seen a balance sheet audited by certified public accountants using generally-accepted accounting principles showing his true wealth position. His rhetoric all along about being a billionaire, like his make America great again rhetoric, may have been a hoax.
On the other hand, while he he was probably the worst USian president in history, most likely he has taken in more money from followers and supporters as a loser former president than any other former president.
The 80-year-old Democrat President Joe Biden is becoming increasingly senile and no announced Democratic candidate for president seems likely to beat Biden in the 2024 Democratic primary. While they have not announced their intentions to run in the 2024 Democratic primary, Governor Gavin Newsom of California and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts are seasoned Democratic presidential prospects with good records. If only the USian political system would allow relatively equitable presidential candidates to win….
Trump could get elected USian president again in 2024.
His horror movie-like life script now contains language about his cultish followers using mob violence to rescue him if he is convicted of committing federal crimes such as his insurrection January 6, 2021 in the USian capitol building. He has recently told his hypnotized fascist cult members he wants to change the laws of the US after he is reelected in 2024 so he can deport from the US all citizens who were born here who believe in communism; and it’s a good bet he would also like to deport, fire, or disappear anyone unwilling or unable to adapt and flex to his authoritarian personality and his fascist group imago and life script. His role model, Adolph Hitler, would be proud.
There are two basic types of management systems for organizations, fascist and democratic. Fascist organizations are run top-down by a strong man and his cronies at the top. Democratic organizations are run bottom-up by a majority at the bottom.
There are three basic types of economic systems: capitalism, socialism, and communism. Capitalism is where everything is owned and run by individuals and corporations, for the good of owners. Socialism is where most everything is owned by individuals and corporations but run by governments for the good of the people. Communism is where everything is owned by the people and run for the people.
These possibilities pose six general combinations of mixed systems that now exist in various degrees in various countries—fascist capitalism, fascist socialism, fascist communism, democratic capitalism, democratic socialism, and democratic communism, none of which could be proved best in all circumstances for all Earthian humans; but, according to Trump, in his finite wisdom, only fascistic capitalism should be allowable in the US, and maybe anywhere aboard Spaceship Earth.
Regardless of the consequences for all Earthians, antihero Don Trump is determined to show all Earthian humans he can get away with doing whatever he wants, for life, center stage, in the Earthian human psychodrama.
You like freedom? If so, you don’t want to vote for Trump for president of the US in 2024.
Former President Donald Trump, a 2024 Republican presidential candidate, delivered the keynote address at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s 2023 policy conference in Washington, D.C. He focused most of his remarks on his time as president, touting anti-abortion policies his administration backed and his conservative appointments to the Supreme Court and other lower courts. He also talked about his recent federal indictment, saying his popularity among supporters had only grown since his arraignment.
“Probably the stupidest and creepiest thing I’ve run across in all my years as a radical US American socialist and communist is the Trumpenleft. By the Trumpenleft I mean among other things all the very disproportionately white and male left-identified so-called socialists who accused me and other anti-fascist radicals of supposed hysterical Trump Derangement Syndrome and who mocked and otherwise attacked us for making the elementary observation that Donald Trump is a fascist – and who idiotically accused us of being in cahoots with the dismal, dollar-drenched Democrats for having the basic historical and social- and political-scientific integrity to identify and call out Trump and Trumpism for what they are: fascist.
“I’ve dedicated three or four book chapters and numerous essays and interviews to showing exactly how and why Trump, Trumpism, the Trump base, the Trump presidency, and now the Trump ex-presidency are fascist. Not “populist.” Not merely “conservative.” Not simply “extremist.” Nationalist but not just nationalist. Nativist but not merely nativist. Racist but not merely racist. Sexist but not only sexist. Authoritarian but not just authoritarian. No, all of that and more. Fascist, cultist, and eliminationist, potentially genocidal if you ask me, determined to overthrow what’s left of bourgeois democracy and constitutional rule of law and to substitute for the rule of law the rule of raw power and men in the ironic name of law and “order.”
— Paul Street
September 27, 2022
“Dr Bandy Lee warned five years ago that Trump was dangerous. She’s more worried now.” — THE INDEPENDENT
“Psychiatrist Bandy Lee works with gang leaders and maximum security offenders. When Donald Trump ran for office, she noticed frightening similarities and warned the world. Much of her predictions have come – or are coming – true. Now, she’s worried about America’s ‘demise’,” by Shelia Flynn, THE INDEPENDENT,
“This article describes the universal (beyond nation, philosophy of life, and leader) reasons for the German Holocaust, specifically, the relationship between the atrocious Ideological/Enslaving Master and his or her Followers. Two script payoffs for this kind of Master are described: a moment of triumph over death and a moment of onliness, or ultimate aloneness, achieved through the deaths of many other people. The exaggeration and joining of these two human needs produce the psychological basis for genocide and holocaust.” — Abstract — Transactional Analysis Journal
I (RJS) got to know Alan “Jake” Jacobs at the Southeast Institute at Chapel Hill, North Carolina in 1975-1978 where he and I took some training and participated as presenters learning and applying the new science of transactional analysis, recently invented by Eric Berne, MD. We were transactional analysis colleagues for many years. Jake was haunted by stories about his recent family members who had perished in Nazi gas chambers in Germany and this motivated him to do some rigorous research into the nature and causes of genocide. He took trips to Germany to personally inspect and photograph the Nazi death camps. His research produced the above-cited Source article that he published in the Transactional Analysis Journal, for which he received an Eric Berne Memorial Scientific Award.
According to his research, documented in “Aspects of Survival,” 150,000,000 Earthian humans were killed in democidal and genocidal actions by governments around Spaceship Earth during the 20th Century, and the question still is, can it be stopped? One of Jake’s conclusions in his “Aspects of Survival” article is that fascist dictators are pursuing what he calls onliness when they commit their democidal and genocidal crimes against humanity.
Jake died at age 87, July 30, 2022. Here is a video of his celebration of life service giving details of his achievements and his well lived life.
Hopefully citing Alan Jacobs’s “Aspects of Survival: Triumph over Death and Onliness” as a Source for this article will help memorialize his outstanding contributions to the I’m OK—You’re OK movement of the 20th Century.
About the authorof this article
Richard John Stapleton, PhD, CTA would spin the spinner of his Classroom De-GAMER™ in his classes to randomly select a student at the beginning of each class session to lead a discussion of the case assigned for the day, a case taken from a planned or operating business prepared by case writers at Georgia Southern, Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Alabama.
This process insured that everyone would be relatively GAME-free transacting in class discussions. They all agreed to a learning contract at the outset of the course that they would read assigned cases and would be graded on the quantity and quality of ideas sold in the class market. Anyone caught obviously unprepared by the spinning De-GAMER would lose a whole letter grade from the course grade. No one could feel or think that s/he was being persecuted or rescued if selected to start the class discussion of the day by the Classroom De-GAMER™. The psychological GAME roles of Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim were largely banished from the course learning process.
Be it noted that 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 has published refereed journal articles and books explaining how his democratic GAME-free Adult-Adult I’m OK—You’re OK case method system works, by banishing Persecutors, Rescuers, and Victims playing psychological GAMES from the teaching and learning process, first documented in an article titled “The Classroom De-GAMER” he published in 1978 in the Transactional Analysis Journal. He has published seven books and over one hundred articles in various media containing cases, research data, and essays on teaching and learning, management systems, and business policies and practices.
Stapleton learned and trained using transactional analysis with Martin Groder, MD; Graham Barnes, PhD; Vann Joines, PhD; and many others at the Southeast Institute at Chapel Hill, North Carolina (1975-1978).
He was a Harvard Case Method teacher who never went to Harvard, having learned how the case method works teaching with Bernard Bienvenu, DBA and Rexford Hauser, DBA (Harvard Business School doctorates) at the University of Louisiana– Lafayette in 1969-70.
He has a BS in economics (1962), an MBA in organizational behavior (1966), and a PhD in management science (1969) from Texas Tech University, and an organizational and educational certification in transactional analysis (CTA) from the International Transactional Analysis Association (1978).
He taught his own case method track at the undergraduate level in the management department in the business school at Georgia Southern University offering four or five different elective case method courses each academic year (1970-2005), in which he led, coordinated, and graded about twenty-five or so students each year who took all or most of those case method courses in their junior and senior years, of about two hundred students who signed up for all his courses each year. He used a democratic circle or amphitheater classroom layout in all his classes. He also taught most semesters two sections of a capstone integrative business policy course he added to the business school curriculum in 1970 that was required for all undergraduate business majors that could be elected by any student in any major. He was the only professor in the business school to use the case method in any course.
His students agreed to a course learning contract that stipulated they would read the facts of the case before class and would lose a whole letter grade from the course final grade if the De-GAMER randomly caught them obviously not having read the case before class, if they had not slipped a note under his office door before class telling him they had not read the case, which they could do twice during the course without penalty.
About ten percent of his students made A’s and about five percent made D’s. Most made C’s, which is about right, since C = Average. There were few F’s in his courses. The main criterion for course grades was the quantity and quality of ideas sold by students in case method discussions. He used peer ratings to give students feedback showing what their fellow students thought about the quantity and quality of their ideas sold in class, having made it clear the final decision about final grades was his. He did not believe in Lake Wobegon grading.
No student was ever forced to take one of his courses to graduate, and the most hardened GAME-players in the school did not sign up for his courses after he issued his Edict of 1972 in which he clearly spelled out in his syllabi the penalty for getting caught unprepared. His Classroom De-GAMER™ was roundly discussed by students in bull sessions across campus every year and was labeled various things, such as The Wheel of Fate and The Death Wheel. Most students near the end of his career simply called it The Spinner.
He appreciated Georgia Southern honoring his academic freedom by allowing him control of his teaching methods, classroom layouts, grading procedures, and course books, cases, and materials, some of which he researched, wrote, and published. He was promoted to full professor at age thirty-six.
He solicited anonymous longitudinal research data using questionnaires in 1992 showing his case method students during 1972-1982 reported higher yearly incomes in 1992 than students electing the same courses in 1972-1982 taught by professors using the authoritarian lecture method and the militaristic row and column classroom layout, who graded students based on memorizing or calculating “right answers” for tests, indicating learners learning in Adult—Adult I’m OK—You’re OK GAME-free democratic learning processes graded subjectively became more successful in the real world of business than learners lectured to and graded using so-called objective multiple-choice tests.
Only former students who had worked in the real world ten or more years after graduating from the Georgia Southern business school were included in the study. The data are shown, analyzed, and discussed in full in “Evidence the Case Method Works” in his book Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata, and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds, 2008, pg. 475). The data were also used in several refereed articles.
The ancient Greeks used a similar random-selection democratic process in the Third Century BCE to select leaders of political discussions, learning, and policy formulation in their halls of government. Such a process is called sortition.
For more information on related classroom management ethical issues see Stapleton, R.J. and Murkison, G. (2001), “Optimizing the fairness of student evaluations: A study of correlations between instructor excellence, study production, learning production, and expected grades,” in the Journal of Management Education, 25(3), 269-292.
Stapleton had one of the lowest student grade point averages among professors in the business school and was one of the lowest-ranked professors as an instructor on computerized campus-wide student evaluations that weighted only instructor excellence scores up to 2000; but he was one of the highest-ranked professors in a computerized student evaluation 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 (July 10, 2023) been cited as a reference in 88 refereed journal articles concerned about the ethics of student evaluations in several academic disciplines, including eleven new citations since April 2021.
As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein propositioned in his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “The case is all there is.”
If so, everything else said about Earthian human states of affairs is a rendition of what was or might be.
Stapleton’s latest book is As the Rooster Crows Earthian OKness Increases.
THE EARTHIAN, Number Forty-One, June 18, 2023, Effective Learning Publications, https://blog.effectivelearning.net/ , 32 East Main Street, Statesboro, Georgia, USA, Richard John Stapleton, Writer, Editor & Publisher, Copyright 2023, All Rights Reserved
ASK MORE WHAT YOUR COUNTRY CAN DO FOR ALL EARTHIANS—TO REDUCE THE PROBABILITY OF EXTINCTIONS—CAUSED BY GLOBAL WARMING AND CLIMATE CHANGE (GWCC) AND/OR MILITARIZATION AND NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROLIFERATION (MNWP)
CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE
1 — Observations and Analyses of Current Earthian Human Existential States of Affairs by Earthian Humans Stationed around Spaceship Earth Cathecting all Ego States Feeling, Thinking, and Writing
2 — A Posting by a Hypothetical Exonexus Observer from a Planet Beyond the Earthian Solar System
3 — On the Need to Co-Construct a Sustainable Long Run Earthian Political-Economic-Management System
4 — A Democratic Earthian GAME-Free Case Method Teaching and Learning Process for Producing Democratic Discussions, Learning, and Policy Formulation Around Spaceship Earth
AN EARTHIAN ELDER SPEAKS
“So, I guess what I’m saying is that, as we can establish that the earth is a sphere, and thus finite, then growth in your population and artifacts must have limits. And, your lack of a social-economic system to recognize those limits is leading us all to disaster.”— KOKO
See and read more about KOKO, the gorilla who knew over 1,000 words, at
There may be thousands of dead planets in our Universe that were once inhabited by human-like creatures that lived, evolved, and learned on their planets in learning processes resembling the learning processes of Earthian humans, who through eons on their planets learned how to develop lethal weapons like Earthian nuclear bombs and complex industrial processes requiring burning fossil fuel who became extinct because of what they were caused to learn and develop through natural evolutionary cause-effect chains. The same sort of thing could happen to Earthian humans if they do not quickly in cosmic time learn how to satisfy their social, psychological, economic, political, and biological needs in significantly improved social, psychological, economic, political, and military systems that do not require or entail the burning of carbon-based fuel or the decision-making of ordinary and sometimes demented Earthian humans in fascist organizations.
I’m not for “overthrowing” the existing economic and social order with another revolution or civil war. I’m for evolving a better one, peacefully, ASAP. How to bring that about is the question. Violent revolution is not the answer it seems to me. All-out war destroys the existing economic and social order, but it is not a solution. Up to now fascist oligarchies have risen from the ashes of wars to evolve the same sort of top-down dysfunctional tyrannies as those that just got torn down, which are in turn also ultimately destroyed. GWCC and MNWP in the current age may have caused conditions that could preclude the possibility of Earthian economic and social orders rising from ashes if another world war happens, since Earthian humans may have been rendered extinct. — RJS
1 — Observations and Analyses of Current Earthian Human Existential States of Affairs by Earthian Humans Stationed around Spaceship Earth, Cathecting all Ego States Feeling, Thinking, and Writing
June 18, 2023
Say it aint so Joe
“Special federal Trump prosecutor Jack Smith looks stern, anxious, and less than happy as he goes about his duties of indicting the United States’ forty-fifth president, the first actual fascist (see my book This Happened Here on the Trump presidency and world view) to sit in the White House.
“It makes sense. His job comes in a nation where tens of millions of demented and disproportionately armed Amerikaners believe anything their orange-hued Fuhrer says, no matter how preposterous and vile (see this soul-chilling “P”BS segment on two recent focus groups with Iowa Trump voters). Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump could very well become president again in 2025, whereupon Smith might be well advised to take up residence in another country, as would many others, including the present writer.
“The Malignant One has called Smith a “maniac,” a “lunatic,” a “Soviet-style thug” and other choice names. It has even called out Smith’s wife by name, putting her life in danger.
“A Gentlemen’s Agreement
“It’s hard to imagine that the milquetoast centrist Merrick Garland relishes his new role as the first US Attorney General to oversee the prosecution of a former US president. He is a member of the US ruling class and there’s long been a ruling class gentleman’s agreement about prosecuting US presidents and former presidents: you don’t do it since the “commander in chief” of the giant and mass murderous US Empire regularly commits grave crimes – and must always feel free to commit such crimes – in the execution of his duties. The agreement has been honored again and again, as when Gerald Ford infamously pardoned Richard Nixon for his deranged Watergate skullduggery (which only scratched the surface of Nixon’s crimes against humanity at home and abroad) and when Barack “Look Forward Not Backwards” Obama (himself a blood-soaked war criminal) deigned to investigate his wife’s good buddy George W. Bush for epic war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the epically fraudulent, truth-negating, mass-homicidal, and illegal invasion of Iraq – still the biggest crime of the century.
“Fascist Dictatorships are One Thing Abroad and a Different Thing at Home
“The problem for Jack Smith and Garland and the state-level prosecutor Fanni Willis (Fulton County, Georgia) is that Herr Donald has left them with no choice but to make novel exceptions to the gentleman’s agreement. Trump tried to criminally overthrow previously normative bourgeois electoral democracy and constitutional rule of law, establishing himself as a de facto fascist strongman and “president for life” within the imperial homeland itself. US -backed Third World Fascist dictatorships abroad are one thing; trying to set up a fascist tyranny in the self-described homeland and headquarters of global freedom and democracy – “the beacon to the world of the way life should” (then Republican US Senator Kay Bay Hutchinson in the fall of 2002[1]) – is quite something else.” — Paul Street
Read the article in full with all links energized below …
“It should be obvious that the two greatest greenhouse gas producers, China and the United States, will rise or fall (as will the rest of us) on the basis of how well (or desperately poorly) they cooperate in the future when it comes to the overheating of this planet. The question is: Can this country, or for that matter the world, respond in some reasonable fashion to what’s clearly going to be climate terror attack after terror attack potentially leading to dystopian vistas that could stretch into the distant future?” — Tom Engelhardt
How Many More Episodes of the Trumpian Reality Show Do We Have to Endure?
Earthian humans are again confronted with a probability, albeit a low probabilty, hopefully, of mob violence in a major country, the US, the so-called exceptional shining democratic country on a hill among all the countries of Spaceship Earth, caused by a significant percentage of the country’s population, who apparently do not value the rule of law of the US, or the values of all its citizens. These malcontents frame themselves as Victims and Rescuers, but they are primarily Persecutors, willing to do serious harm, apparently, to those who oppose them, via mob violence and brute force if necessary to win their psychological GAMES. According to the Rescuer/Persecutor lady demagogue below in the article below, 75 million Trump supporters, most of them armed N.R.A. card-carriers, will make sure Trump is not sent to prison if he is convicted for doing what he has been ethically and legally indicted for doing. According to the article below, some of Trump’s supporters are thinking about starting a civil war to Rescue Trump if he is convicted, escalating their psychological GAMES to the tissue-tearing level. Framing themselves and Trump as Victims and Rescuers, they feel justified in Persecuting adversaries in a Drama Triangle inside the US. Start a civil war against whom? Do these potential internal aggressors against the USian government think they could defeat the USian military in another insurrection attempt? Such a war would be suicidal for them, millions of innocents would be killed, and the once-dreamed-about exceptional shining country on a hill would no longer exist. Please, let Earthian humans be freed from this Trumpian reality show psychodrama in the US, before it’s too late. This GAME is fun no more. — RJS
“Having watched the news and consistently seen former President Donald Trump featuring, I woke up this morning in a reflective frame of mind. I asked myself – who in my lifetime was the most problem stricken and/or incompetent and/or simply dumb President the US has had. I decided that a gold medal – a silver medal – and a bronze medal could be assigned to the ‘successful’ candidate.” —Courtenay Barnett
Interesting insightful article on the Ukrainian situation, that more and more is looking like an enigma wrapped in an enigma, created by mainstream media to serve the interests of the USian deep state, NATO, and a pretty fascist-like Ukraine
“That’s Me, Number 37, Second Row from Bottom, Fourth from Left, According to the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal Probably the Youngest and Smallest Class A High School Starting Quarterback in the US in 1954, 13 years old, 110 pounds, and 5’3” Tall,” Richard John Stapleton, https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=6379906632030929&set=a.717465464941769.
For how much longer can this go on? Here’s a good article about USian economic, political, and military policies in the Caribbean, that are similar to USian policies implemented in numerous underdeveloped countries. – RJS
“From 1957 until 1971 the U.S. government worked through Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his private military force, the Tonton Makouts. Duvalier’s security force murdered over 60,000 Haitian leftists in the 14 years that “Papa Doc” was in power. These merciless killers, who were officially called the Volunteers for National Security, persecuted, disappeared, exiled, tortured and massacred a generation of Haiti’s most courageous and brightest daughters and sons.” —Danny Shaw
Cornel West enters the fray. He has some good ideas, but he also has this to contend with:
“West’s decision to run drew positive reviews from some progressives, such as former Ohio state senator and longtime Sanders ally Nina Turner, who tweeted, “Elevate this thing Dr. West.”
“But it also inspired blowback from others, such as longtime Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe, who asked, ‘WTF?! Does Cornel West really want to help the GOP nominee win—the way Ralph Nader helped G.W. Bush defeat Al Gore in 2000?’
“’Ego trips can come at a heavy price, Cornel,’ added Tribe. ‘Please stop this foolishness, before you really hurt the things you care to help’.”
This is a story about two kinds of lies: Trump lying about his not possessing classified US government documents in his Mar a Largo “fort” and Trump lying in a recorded statement that was aired on CNN about the existence of a classified document in his possession that might have been fake. It’s a story about a liar’s pants on fire.
This is a story about two kinds of lies: Trump lying about his not possessing classified US government documents in his Mar a Largo “fort” and Trump lying in a recorded statement that was aired on CNN about the existence of a classified document in his possession that might have been fake. It’s a story about a liar’s pants on fire.
The lying episode started during Trump’s last week in office as USian president caused by the possibility of a war being started against Iran so Trump could stay in office. Pentagon chief of staff General Milley was apparently worried at the time that Trump might try to do this, and Trump said in the statement aired by CNN after leaving office that Milley was thinking about invading Iran as proved by a document he waved or flapped in his hand, so listeners could hear the sound the paper made as it was flapped, proving a paper document existed. Trump said he could not show the document to them because it was classified, thereby proving he knew he possessed after leaving office a sensitive classified US government document that could not be shared because it would pose a national security risk.
The Jack Smith investigation subpoenaed the CNN-aired document, prompting Trump’s lawyers to reply that they could not furnish the document to the investigators because they could not “find” the document, raising questions such as whether the paper Trump held and flapped about in the recorded statement contained classified information, or was it a fake classified document containing no relevant information, just a new way of lying invented by Trump to cover his ass about thinking about invading Iran to give him an excuse to declare martial law during his last week in office as a last resort to remain USian president indefinitely?
Or was it a real classified document that Trump or his lawyers burned or shredded after it was aired by CNN, having figured out by then that the existence of the document put Trump in a light as bad or worse than he was in had the document not existed?
If so, Trump’s lawyers are now not technically lying about not being able to “find” the document that Trump flapped around in the recording so listeners could hear the sound caused by the flapping, thereby proving he at least had some sort of paper in his hands. The basic facts of this case were discussed on MSNBC June 2, 2023.
The most sickening piece of this sordid insane story is the implication that Trump and General Milley likely did consider the possibility of Trump trying to start a war against Iran to keep himself in office his last week in office, which would have been treason against the US and a crime against humanity.
The story may boil down to he said—he said, but it seems to me any communication between Trump and Milley about the US invading Iran to keep Trump in office happening during Trump’s last week in office, leaked to the public, would have been a security risk for the US and Spaceship Earth.
How any Earthian human could now consider voting into office again as USian president in 2024 the sociopathic Earthian human Trump, after having been exposed to his lies, misdemeanors, probable crimes, and threats, almost every day, for over six years, as a sitting and former USian president, wasting millions, if not billions, maybe trillions, of dollars, is unfathomable! – RJS
Read my article on how congressmice play the psychological Game DEBT CEILING to rake off more revenue for themselves, in “How Governments Waste Their Time”, at https://blog.effectivelearning.net/how-governments-waste…/ for more background on this story – RJS
“And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not alarmed, for this must take place, but the end is not yet.” — Matthew 24:6
English Standard Version of the Christian Bible
This statement is probably more relevant today than it was when it was created. Assuming it’s true, there is no hope of eliminating wars and violence in general among Earthian humans and no hope of Earthian humans not being rendered extinct by GWCC, global warming and climate change, and MNWP, militarization and nuclear weapons proliferation.
Hopefully, it’s not true.
Maybe Earthian humans will accidentally be caused to develop ways and means of existing indefinitely.
Regardless, here are my thoughts of today about the causes of wars and violence.
Seems to me the basic cause of wars and violence is Earthian humans in groups and organizations who became a relatively uneducated, impoverished, and discounted underclass who think their only path to fame and fortune is to slaughter a relatively educated overclass, who enslave themselves to more educated imaginative sociopathic fascist leaders who lead the underclass slaughtering an overclass, as in extreme cases such as these listed by Robert Higgs at this website: https://www.goodreads.com/…/691409-anarchists-did-not… —RJS
“Anarchists did not try to carry out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey; they did not deliberately starve to death millions of Ukrainians; they did not create a system of death camps to kill millions of Jews, gypsies, and Slavs in Europe; they did not fire-bomb scores of large German and Japanese cities and drop nuclear bombs on two of them; they did not carry out a ‘Great Leap Forward’ that killed scores of millions of Chinese people; they did not kill more than 500,000 members of the Indonesian Communist party, alleged party sympathizers, and others; they did not attempt to kill everybody with any appreciable education in Cambodia, murdering one fourth of the country’s population; they did not kill as many as 200,000 Mayan peasants and others in Guatemala; they did not kill more than 500,000 Tutsis and pro-peace Hutus in Rwanda; they did not implement US and Allied trade sanctions that killed perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children; they did not launch one aggressive US war after another. In debates between anarchists and statists, the burden of proof clearly should rest on those who place their trust in the state. Anarchy’s mayhem is wholly conjectural; the state’s mayhem is undeniably, factually horrendous.” – Robert Higgs
Repugs have been merrily and gleefully lying about their plundering nihilistic ways since Ronald Reagan’s time in 1980. Reagan taught them it’s ok to lie and extract all the federal funding they can for themselves, by simultaneously cutting taxes for the elite rich and increasing military spending, because the USian government is the problem, he said. The Reagan government tripled the USian federal debt in eight years, increasing its debt from $1 trillion to $3 trillion, from 1980-1988, while writing the immoral, unethical script used by USian Repug politicians ever since. Yes, they’ve been trying to destroy the egalitarian fabric of USian culture, not caring about conserving or enhancing anything except the wealth and power of the elite rich who finance their campaigns. As more or less ordinary USians posing as big shots in Washington they are also out to increase their own meager wealth, power, and fame, not caring one whit about the welfare of all USians, the real owners of the country. Their current behavior dealing with the latest DEBT CEILING psychological Game in Washington shows the depth of their avarice and depravity. Read more about the USian DEBT CEILING Game in links on posts on this page. —RJS
After they say hello after they get elected new Earthian governments mostly structure their time busying themselves conducting pastimes, rituals, procedures, and ceremonies, and playing GAMES, wasting most of their time and energy in entropic time structuring instead of doing real work; a minuscule fraction of their time is structured conducting work activities that might solve systemic and existential problems.
Most likely former USian Repug president Trump’s surprise switc…
People play psychological Games in general to get structure, stimulus, and recognition. If you grew up in a family with NIGYSOB-playing parents in order to get along in the family system you had to learn to tolerate NIGYSOB playing, and it’s likely you too became a NIGYSOB player, having learned how to do it from your parents.
All normal Earthian humans like to be liked, recognized, and paid-attention-to, and negative strokes are better than no strokes at all.
And yet the Repugs say they are the conservative ones. If so what are they conserving? Certainly not the long run economic viability of the US. This picture does not include Repug president Ronald Reagan, the grandfather of Repug slash and burn fascist tactics, who tripled the USian federal debt during 1980-1988, originating the insane Repug practice of simultaneously cutting taxes for the elite rich and increasing military spending, aka trickle-down economics, that never wor…
Raising-the-debt ceiling-time in the USian congress is when congressmice come out to play when the cat president is weakest, trying to siphon money from the USian federal govt real and funny money revenue stream for their selfish hides, threatening to plunge the USian economy into chaos for everyone, playing DEBT CEILING.
It’s quite a Game these chaps play.
DEBT CEILING is an all-encompassing variant of the transactional analysis psychological Game called COPS AND ROBBERS t…
Guns don’t kill people according to some people. According to some people people kill people by pulling the triggers of guns. What does this picture tell you about USian people?
DEBT CEILING is an all-encompassing variant of the transactional analysis psychological Game called COPS AND ROBBERS that entails supposed good-guy Rescuers incessantly trying to catch and punish supposed bad-guy Persecutors while seeing themselves as Victims.
Playing DEBT CEILING causes the USian Federal debt to increase more in the year following the year in which it is played than in other years because the Victim cat, the president, cannot veto unnecessary pork barrel de…
Very dumb. Everyone should have an equal opportunity to contribute, and be entitled to the necessities of life, but not to recognize different levels of achievement would be disastrous for all of society in the long run, or so it seems to me. The problem of course is that rewards in society are often not a function of achievement. The wealthy are often rewarded year after year merely because of being wealthy.
A teacher can cause three times more learning to occur among class members per class session by rearranging those chairs below into a circle classroom layout around the perimeter of the room, sitting in one of those chairs just like any other class “member”, and discussing democratically what was supposed to be learned, assuming class members can read before the discussion starts whatever it was the teacher would orally say standing behind his/her lectern to “students” passively sitting in their chairs in their places in the militaristic row and column classroom layout, trying to stay awake and remember what the teacher said to pass true-false and multiple choice tests. Numerous former class members of mine told me throughout my 35-year teaching career that they had forgotten ninety percent of what they had memorized for tests two weeks after the course was over.
To maximize learning a Classroom De-Gamer™ should be used to randomly select a class member to start the discussion. The teacher should keep his/her mouth shut for the entire session if it is obvious the relevant points of the discussion material have been discussed and most of the class members comprehended it, if class members have no questions about something they could not understand on their own.
Read my book Born to Learn: A Transactional Analysis of Human Learning for more detail explaining why the above is generally true. The book can be read free on any device at amazon.com. –RJS
Here’s some significant truth-telling by Bruce E. Levine about the mental health industry.
“While researchers have not linked any psychiatric condition to neurobiological variables, there are many links between these conditions and socioeconomic variables. Results from a 2013 national survey, issued by the U.S. government’s Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), provide extensive evidence that unemployment, poverty, and involvement in the criminal justice system are highly associated with depression and suicidality.
“Moreover, in the late 1990s, the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study revealed a powerful relationship between childhood trauma (including physical and emotional abuse) with later adult emotional difficulties and behavioral disturbances. An alienating and dehumanizing society such as ours that creates extensive anxiety, powerlessness, resentment, and rage is a society that creates adults who, in their interactions with children, have little frustration tolerance; and this lack of frustration tolerance makes abuse and trauma of children more likely—resulting in the adverse childhood experiences that create later adult emotional difficulties and behavioral disturbances.
“The ruling class could not care less whether psychiatric treatment consists of bloodletting, lobotomy, electroshock, SSRI antidepressants, or psychedelic microdosing. As long as the “ruling idea” of society is that our emotional difficulties and behavioral disturbances are caused by our medical defects, this keeps us diverted from just how much shit we have to eat in order to survive and how extraordinary our good luck need be for us to find joy.
“As Marx stated, “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas,” and you would have to be an especially stupid member of the ruling class not to see the value of the “ruling idea” that emotional suffering and behavioral disturbances are the result of medical individual defects—and not the result of a society that is a good deal for the ruling class but is alienating and traumatizing for many of the rest of us.”
Bruce E. Levine, a practicing clinical psychologist, writes and speaks about how society, culture, politics, and psychology intersect. His most recent book is A Profession Without Reason: The Crisis of Contemporary Psychiatry—Untangled and Solved by Spinoza, Freethinking, and Radical Enlightenment (2022). His Web site is brucelevine.net
Sounds almost as bad as the Roman emperor Nero who allegedly drank wine and fiddled as Rome burned around him. Trump plays golf and dines at Mar-a-Largo instead as his Rome burns. His only forbidden pleasure, crime, or sin up to now is apparently drinking alcoholic beverages. Or is it Trump is more like the sadistic misogynistic Roman emperor Caligula? — RJS
Raising-the-debt ceiling-time in the USian congress is when congressmice come out to play when the cat president is weakest, trying to siphon money from the USian federal govt real and funny money revenue stream for their selfish hides, threatening to plunge the USian economy into chaos for everyone, playing DEBT CEILING.
It’s quite a Game these chaps play.
Basically, it’s an all-encompassing variant of the transactional analysis psychological Game called COPS AND ROBBERS that entails supposed good guy Rescuers incessantly trying to catch and punish supposed bad guy Persecutors while seeing themselves as Victims.
Playing DEBT CEILING causes the USian Federal debt to increase more in the year following the year in which it is played than in other years because the cat, the president, cannot veto unnecessary pork barrel demands for more spending by congressmice and their supporters without causing the USian government to default on its debt.
There is no such thing as a USian debt ceiling. It’s just a temporary number concocted to exist for a while that will have to be raised again with a new round of DEBT CEILING Game-playing when the actual USian federal debt expands up to that toothless number, disingenuously called a debt ceiling, because doing otherwise would be disastrous.
The USian federal debt would expand less over time as matters now stand if USian congressmice would stop playing their disingenuous debt ceiling Game. They are socially saying they are imposing their debt ceiling process to make it harder for congressmice to increase the USian budget deficit and debt, when they are psychologically doing it to make it easier for them to increase the deficit and debt, to enrich themselves in the short run, regardless of the consequences for USian citizens in the long run.
As matters now stand, the USian government has no choice but to keep on kicking its budget and debt can of worms down the road every time the new so-called debt ceiling number is reached—until all hell breaks loose—if significant changes are not made in its economic-political-military modus operandi.
“’The fiscal recklessness of the last decade has been like watching a horror movie unfold,’ Druckenmiller, who once was George Soros’ chief strategist and now runs his own Duquesne Family Office, said in a speech Monday at the USC Marshall School of Business.
“In a follow-up email to Bloomberg, he said he hopes the US government doesn’t go into default, ‘but honestly, all this focus on the debt ceiling instead of the future fiscal issue is like sitting on the beach at Santa Monica worrying about whether a 30-foot wave will damage the pier when you know there’s a 200-foot tsunami just 10 miles out.’
“According to Bloomberg, Druckenmiller’s comments are similar to the ones the billionaire investor gave a decade ago during a tour of 14 university campuses, when he encouraged students to pay attention to ballooning federal deficits that he believed – correctly – would bankrupt future generations.” —Tyler Durden
2 — A Posting by a Hypothetical Exonexus Observer from a Planet Beyond the Earthian Solar System
Earthian humans are enthralled, manipulated, and in various degrees controlled by their leaders in some two hundred countries aboard Spaceship Earth. Leaders became leaders because of being caused to be leaders by concatenations of unbroken cause-effect chains resulting after our universe started evolving some thirteen billion years ago in the infinity of time and space.
(You might think this post is the same as it was in The Earthian —40, but it’s not. It contains some polishing and new paragraphs)
Leaders are generally products of the same sorts of differentiated configurations of cause-effect chains as differentiated followers and members in differentiated countries. All Earthian humans are doing what they were caused to do in their daily lives starting at birth.
Earth as a planet was formed about 4.5 billion years ago and has undergone innumerable transformations in the meantime. Humanoid creatures have been aboard Spaceship Earth for some two million years, and they too have undergone numerous evolutionary changes, as have other Earthian species.
Unfortunately, Earthian humans have now reached a precarious and dangerous stage in their evolution as biological creatures. After slowly evolving more and more accurate, complex, and powerful understandings, technologies, and ways of life for two million years on Earth, during the last two hundred years Earthian humans evolved new technological devices at exponential rates that enabled them to increase the overly-fecund Earthian human population of Earth so much that they now threaten not only to destroy their own existence as a species aboard Spaceship Earth but also the existence of most other species alive on Earth.
Keeping eight billion or so Earthian humans alive on Earth has required so many goods and services to be produced to satisfy human biological and psychological needs and wants and so much carbon-based fuel to be burned to produce the goods that the climate of Spaceship Earth has been altered by carbon dioxide gas released into the Earthian atmosphere in large-enough quantities to cause extra heat to be trapped on Earth causing the mean Earthian temperature to increase at a yearly rate that threatens to destroy Earthian human life as it now exists, within centuries, if not decades.
Unfortunately, Earthian humans cannot determine exactly how long this catastrophic scenario will take to unfold, even after an Internet search, since Internet information sources show average Earthian temperatures in both Celsius and Fahrenheit and use different base years, different assumptions about causes of rates of change, and changing rates of change in calculating average Earthian temperature.
However, one can build a case based on available Internet data that it will take over 35 years for the mean Earthian temperature to rise enough to cause the Earthian polar ice caps to melt causing enough sea level rise to displace billions of Earthian humans living on sea coasts and to cause enough decrease in food production to cause billions of Earthian humans to starve—if Earthian humans do not significantly change in the meantime their life scripts, technological processes, and political and economic systems.
On the other hand, one can build a case that GWCC has already caused serious degradations in the quality of Earthian life. The recent forest fires covering much of Canada causing New York City and much of the Northeast to be engulfed in a thick orange haze causing serious breathing problems is a recent dramatic case in point.
Earthian humans have developed technological knowledge that has enabled them to produce over 10,000 nuclear weapons that could destroy human life aboard Spaceship Earth if dropped and detonated on defined enemies around Spaceship Earth, as they have the capability to do.
Dangerous escalations in the Ukraine-Russia War, fomented and aggravated by the United States and NATO, could cause the outbreak of World War III that could cause nuclear weapons to be used.
Earthian countries dependent on fossil fuel energy in the short run are pitted in a zero-sum struggle for control of oil and gas supplies around Earth, with the two largest military nations on Earth possessing over ninety percent of the nuclear weapons now threatening one another in a war they started in a minor country, a pawn in their Earthian game of chess, a tissue-tearing psychological GAME in this case called KING OF THE MOUNTAIN by Earthian humans, caused by egoistic leaders and top members of the two countries who are primarily concerned about maintaining and enhancing their personal power, wealth, prestige, lifestyles, and legacies.
Top leaders of Russia fighting in Ukraine with non-nuclear weapons so far have publicly declared they will fire and detonate nuclear weapons if necessary to prevent their being defeated and humiliated in the war/GAME started in the minor pawn country of Ukraine by the US, NATO, and Russia. Hopefully this is just a bluff in another reincarnation of the Earthian human psychological GAME called CHICKEN.
As dangerous as this psychological high-stakes GAME-playing is, most Earthian humans find it stimulating, interesting, patriotic, heroic, and so forth in their nightly news, a release from the normal grind of their boring and banal daily routines and rituals, and their pastimes, jobs, activities, and intimacies.
The new war GAME in the minor country is a helluva way to generate strokes, aka units of recognition, to get attention, to get recognized, stimulated, and affirmed, now that some Earthian human strokes, nuclear strokes, have become so powerful they can cause the elimination of all Earthian human strokes forever.
The probability of a MNWP catastrophe at any time has significantly increased in recent years because of GAME-playing.
3 — On Co-Constructing a Sustainable Long Run Earthian Political-Economic-Management System
Establishing democracy chapters around Spaceship Earth as recommended in the Effective Learning Publications novel As the Rooster Crows Earthian OKness Increases might develop consensual answers regarding existential matters from the bottom up that might help save Spaceship Earth. These ideas would filter up to randomly-selected humans who would count the consensual answers to make necessary changes. Consensual tactics, strategies, and policies would then be developed around Earth for dealing with the computerized Spaceship Earth management system, operated and controlled using artificial intelligence programming and supercomputers.
Randomly-selected groups of Earthian humans of high intelligence with impeccable moral and ethical character and credentials would control codes for changing the Earthian Magnum Computer System programming to implement bottom-up recommendations of millions of members in discussions in democracy chapters around Spaceship Earth. Each member of the group in charge of the codes for the magnum computer system would serve limited terms. These members would not vote or decide what to do. They would see to it that the computer system implemented the consensual answers of millions of Earthian humans from all walks of life, as determined by honest, free, fair, and frank democratic GAME-free discussions in democracy chapters all around Spaceship Earth, as explained and shown in As the Rooster Crows Earthian OKness Increases.
The overall objective would be to manage the system in such a way as to maximize the lifetime satisfactions of all Earthian humans, as well as all other species of life aboard Spaceship Earth, while insuring the indefinite functioning of all Spaceship Earth ecosystems.
Necessary moral and ethical requirements and constraints would be programmed into the Magnum Management System that Earthian humans at the top would be obliged to obey. If changes should be made in the moral and ethical codes in the overall program they would be made in the Earthian democracy chapters. Alternative solutions would be tabulated and analyzed using statistical techniques such as factor analysis to discern consensual solutions among thousands of members in democracy chapters around Spaceship Earth.
This Magnum Computerized Management System would require a strict system of security controls like the current codes of nations possessing nuclear weapons, hopefully providing security several magnitudes more secure than current nuclear codes, to make sure a madman could not get in control of any aspect of the Magnum Spaceship Earth Management System.
A management system such as this would by many factors improve previous systems used around Spaceship Earth that have historically allowed egotistical, greedy, power mad, grandiose, poorly educated, not-very-bright individual Earthian fascist leaders to make existential decisions, such as deciding to start a war, that affected the OKness of thousands, millions, and billions of humans around Earth, an incredibly dumb thing to do, that has been done over and over again for millennia, resulting in incredible losses and suffering at various moments of history.
A tough lesson for Earthian humans to accept propositioned in Effective Learning Publications books is that everything that happens in human states of affairs is either predetermined or accidental and therefore individuals are not to blame or praise for what happens in human states of affairs. This is easier to swallow after accepting that believing and acting otherwise will support and perpetuate the I’m OK—You’re Not OK life position that has bedeviled, sabotaged, and undermined Earthian humans since time immemorial, making losers out of most of them.
About the only way significant numbers of Earthian humans can be caused to be significantly changed psychologically and socially by others is through democratic face to face discussions in honest serious and rigorous dialectical, dialogical, analogical arguing about facts using reasoning of all kinds, in many encounters over relatively long periods of time. Thinking Earthain humans can be changed in significant ways through ordinary conversation is a pipe dream. The current so-called democratic political system used in the US is a case in point. Yes, USians can vote for the candidate of their choice, a so-called citizen who in almost all cases will not use free will deciding how to vote, who will vote as told by party bosses who determine the position of a political party. Almost all significant political decisions in the US are predetermined by cause-effect chains causing party leaders to decide whatever they decide about issues.
What is considered natural, unnatural; normal, abnormal; right, wrong; ethical, unethical; righteous, sinful; worthy, unworthy; or sane or insane by a particular Earthian human is caused by information lodged in her/his brain caused to be lodged there by the concatenation of infinite cause-effect chains causing her/him to exist and slowly inch through the Earthian worm hole of existence inexorably tunneled out for her or him by her/his specific unbroken infinitely-regressing cause-effect chains inexorably-progressing throughout his/her infinitesimally short cosmic life, regardless of how Bad, OK, or Good that luck or fate might be as judged by any Earthian human; and all Earthian humans must keep on inching forward in their worm holes as best they can dealing with inevitable problems and opportunities caused to exist at that stage in their unique tunnels, as they are knocked around like balls in a pin-ball machine, as events inevitably and/or accidentally happen in their so-called real worlds, and in their subconscious and conscious minds, however Bad, OK, or Good their inherited Luck might have absolutely been, which cannot be proved, however easy it might be to relatively estimate.
Free will on their part has little or nothing to do with what they feel, think, decide, or do at a particular moment in time.
It follows that changing the life scripts of Earthian humans for the better requires changing the course of the unique tunnels of existence in which individual humans accidentally and inevitably live, a tall order indeed. Some biological constructivists would consider this notion a pipedream, while considering the whole process a meaningless drift in the infinity of time and space. A life script is a program determining what an individual Earthian human will do in a particular worm hole of reality, such as a legislature; and the script itself is caused in the overall infinite cause-effect process as outlined above.
According to biological constructivists, cited in Business Voyages, Earthian humans are closed systems that will not or cannot change unless forced to change by force majeure events. They will conserve as long as they can their original sources of biological, psychological, social, religious, cultural, economic, and political satisfactions. As psychiatrists and clinical psychologists know, their patients or clients cannot change their fundamental psychological and social programming in the short run even if they want to.
The democratic decision process invented and shown in As the Rooster Crows covered the learning of forty group members in six monthly six-hour sessions. No pretense was made in the novel that anyone’s mind was changed about any issue discussed in any session of the process. Democracy group members in As the Rooster Crows were randomly selected among all walks of life among the population, and every member of the group had an equal chance to start the discussion of any session by answering Three Reality Questions: What is the problem? What are the Alternatives? What do you recommend?
All sessions of the group meetings were videotaped and recorded. After a session ended all aspects of the discussion, including all comments of all members, were digitized, computerized, and analyzed. Supercomputers using algorithmic programming and statistical techniques such as factor analysis would then discern consensual answers among the group members, which would be included with those of thousands of members in recommended democracy chapters around Spaceship Earth. Per the overall plan recommended in the novel, composite recommendations would then be implemented by a computerized Magnum Earthian Management System. There was no voting at any level of the democratic system.
For more information on how to co-construct better organizations and economic systems using transactional analysis read Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata, and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds
Read free “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc,” https://blog.effectivelearning.net/the-evolution-of-spaceship-earth-inc/ for some management science ideas on how Earthian humans might eventually co-construct an economic system that is viable and satisfying for everyone aboard Spaceship Earth, making it possible for all Earthian humans to develop an I’m OK—You’re OK life position.
This recently-published novel shows how to conduct a new kind of seminar invented and coordinated by Rout Logger, the protagonist of the novel, that might reduce the probability of Earthian human extinction that requires participants in a seminar to speak out and up when randomly selected by a Truther rooster positioned in the center of a randomly-selected group of forty humans sitting in a circle.
The Truther rooster resembles a spinning weather vane. The rooster is programmed to bob its head up and down and raucously crow after being twirled by a randomly-selected seminar participant, as it spins round and round winding down, letting group members know it’s time to wake up and get to work, before it’s too late.
When the Truther rooster stops spinning whoever is at the end of a line of imaginary fire extending from the rooster’s beak to her or him sitting in the circle is automatically selected as the Leader of the Moment for the group, proving pure democracy can happen.
The Leader of the Moment must then lead the group into a democratic discussion of what s/he considers the most serious existential problem around Spaceship Earth.
Forty participants from all walks of life were paid $5000 monthly for participating in weekend seminars conducted in central city hotels in various cities randomly selected around the US. If randomly selected as the Leader of the Moment the participant had to define what s/he thought was the most important problem facing Spaceship Earth, present alternatives, and make a recommendation for change.
What s/he said would then be discussed by members of the group on a free-flow first come-first serve basis. It was against the law of the seminar to interrupt speakers or raise hands to get permission to speak. Discussions lasted until they ran out of steam with most issues covered. The results of the discussions would be published to the wealthy donors financing the process and the Earthian public.
Rout Logger was convinced most Earthian humans would not volunteer to participate in this sort of seminar to merely help save Spaceship Earth from GWCC and/or MNWP using their Nurturing Parent, Adult, and Free Child Ego States, given the reality that their life time and energy was already programmed and consumed with various forms of withdrawal, rituals, pastimes, psychological GAMES, activities, and intimacy in their unique tunnels of reality, as they acted out their inherited life scripts; so they were paid $5000 per month to participate in a GAME-free, Adult-Adult democratic seminar that would require them to honestly discuss existential problems with forty other participants from disparate walks of life, if they were randomly selected by the spinning Truther Rooster as the Leader of the Moment.
Some Details of the Magnum Management System
According to Effective Learning Publications books, achieving Earthian human sustainability entails such things as Earthian humans peacefully reducing through natural attrition (natural deaths exceeding births) the human population aboard Spaceship Earth, never doing work that machines can do better, and delegating the day-to-day management of systems for scheduling, producing, and distributing the necessities of life to artificial intelligence programs and supercomputers, assuming sufficient quantities of non-human clean energy can be discovered and developed using mind grants.
The general algorithmic matrix algebra form below can help bring this state of affairs about,
This mathematical formulation might one happy day develop for Earthian humans power in economics loosely analogous to the power of E=mc2 in physics. This formulation, Max or Min CjXj, subject to, AijXj ≤, =, or ≥ Bi, is a general form of the linear programming model, which has been around for many years in management science, operations research, and linear algebra courses.
Max CjXj, s.t. AijXj ≤, =, or ≥ Bi symbolizes knowledge that gives the Earthian human species about as much potential power to perpetuate itself as Albert Einstein’s formula E=mc2 symbolizes knowledge that gives the Earthian human species the power to exterminate itself.
The main reason why delegating the scheduling, production, and distribution of the necessities of life to AI programs and magnum computers would be a good idea is that magnum computers and algorithmic AI programs do not get greedy and power hungry or play psychological GAMES. Thus far in Earthian human history most leaders and rulers atop large organizations such as nations have become corrupt one way or another playing psychological GAMES, acting out selfish greedy ego trips, hogging all the power, money, strokes, stimulation, and recognition they could get their hands on for themselves and their cronies, leaving the hindmost to their underlings. Whatever their limitations and possible threats, algorithmic computer programs and super computers are not egotistical, greedy, and power-hungry.
Riding aboard an airliner about to land at night traveling at four hundred miles an hour at thirty-five thousand feet with clouds, rain, wind, and lightning below, what would you rather have figuring out the path, speed, and angle of descent of the aircraft for touch-down, the plane’s auto-pilot, radar, and computer system or the human pilot and co-pilot, seeing nothing out their windows below but clouds and lightning?
Thanks to Buckminster Fuller for providing the above airplane-landing metaphor in his book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, first published in 1969, and for planting seeds for other ideas in the essay “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc.,” published in the Effective Learning Report, such as computers being the best hope for mankind and humans not doing work machines can do better, being paid to think instead with what Fuller called mind grants. Fuller said unemployment all around Spaceship Earth could be eliminated overnight with mind grants. Buckminster Fuller was the inventor of the appellations Earthian and Spaceship Earth.
Most Earthian humans like to win BALANCE SHEET psychological GAMES, to feel superior and lord it over others, regardless if Spaceship Earth is going to hell in a handbasket around them because of global warming and climate change (GWCC) and militarization and nuclear weapons proliferation (MNWP), regardless of how much they have failed in other areas of their lives, and regardless of how heinous were crimes and misdemeanors they may have gotten away with in the process of amassing their riches, since they were saved, as it were, by taking in and controlling more almighty monetary units than other lesser mortals, saved, hallelujah, as if by Jesus, who forgave them their sins.
If you want to learn more about transactional analysis, such as Ego States, Scripts, and psychological GAMES, read Born to Learn: A Transactional Analysis of Human Learning.
Most Earthian humans know what it is to be egotistical, but they have little understanding of how specific human egotistical manifestations, such as Parent, Adult, and Child ego states, can be used to control and manipulate human behavior for nefarious ends.
One of the biggest egotists of Earthian human history, a narcissist, playing BALANCE SHEET psychological GAMES, is Donald Trump of the US. He is also a world-class liar and loser playing BALANCE SHEET, and he might go to jail for it.
Trump psychologically told voters and bankers using his Parent ego state he was extorting votes and money from he was a stable genius and billionaire who could pay them back for their votes and loans. How many billions worth of a billionaire he was he never said, at least not to voters, arithmetic not being his strong suit; but it now appears it’s possible he’s no billionaire at all, using generally-accepted accounting principles and real market values, which he has refused to show since walking onto the USian political stage for the 2016 presidential election. It’s possible he’s no kind of naire at all, not even a millionaire, having liabilities that exceed the market value of his assets, being close to bankruptcy.
It now appears as shown in recent public posts that Trump, his loyal Trump Organization lackeys, and his chosen loyal family members lied to bankers about his net worth to get loans, proving once again that “All that glitters is not gold.”
P.T. Barnum is said to have proved there’s a sucker born every minute. If so, Trump has proved there’s a sucker born every second, in high and low places.
If you feel you’ve gained value from THE EARTHIAN, go to the Internet or any walk-in bookstore around Spaceship Earth and purchase or order one or more Effective Learning Publications books. As the Rooster Crows Earthian OKness Increases is the latest and probably most engaging Effective Learning Publications book, including an overview of USian economic history, including the Trumpian affair. Rout Logger is the protagonist of the novel story. It’s available now at Amazon.com for immediate unrestricted digital reading on any device as a Kindle book for $4.99. You can read it free at Amazon in a restricted KDP option.
4 — A Democratic Earthian GAME-Free Case Method Teaching and Learning Process for Producing Democratic Discussion, Learning, and Policy Formulation Around Spaceship Earth
Richard John Stapleton, PhD, CTA would spin the spinner of his Classroom De-GAMER™ in his classes to randomly select a student at the beginning of each class session to lead a discussion of the case assigned for the day, a case taken from a planned or operating business prepared by case writers at Georgia Southern, Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Alabama.
This process insured that everyone would be relatively GAME-free transacting in class discussions. They all agreed to a learning contract at the outset of the course that they would read assigned cases and would be graded on the quantity and quality of ideas sold in the class market. Anyone caught obviously unprepared by the spinning De-GAMER would lose a whole letter grade from the course grade. No one could feel or think that s/he was being persecuted or rescued if selected to start the class discussion of the day by the Classroom De-GAMER™. The psychological GAME roles of Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim were largely banished from the course learning process.
Be it noted that 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.
He has published refereed journal articles and books explaining how his democratic GAME-free Adult-Adult I’m OK—You’re OK case method system works, by banishing Persecutors, Rescuers, and Victims playing psychological GAMES from the teaching and learning process, first documented in an article titled “The Classroom De-GAMER” he published in 1978 in the Transactional Analysis Journal. He has published seven books and over one hundred articles in various media containing cases, research data, and essays on teaching and learning and management systems, policies and practices.
Stapleton learned and trained using transactional analysis with Martin Groder, MD; Graham Barnes, PhD; Vann Joines, PhD; and many others at the Southeast Institute at Chapel Hill, North Carolina (1975-1978).
He was a Harvard Case Method teacher who never went to Harvard, having learned how the case method works teaching with Bernard Bienvenu, DBA and Rexford Hauser, DBA (Harvard Business School doctorates) at the University of Louisiana– Lafayette in 1969-70.
He has a BS in economics (1962), an MBA in organizational behavior (1966), and a PhD in management science (1969) from Texas Tech University, and an organizational and educational certification in transactional analysis (CTA) from the International Transactional Analysis Association (1978).
He taught his own case method track at the undergraduate level in the management department in the business school at Georgia Southern University offering four or five different elective case method courses each academic year (1970-2005), in which he led, coordinated, and graded about twenty-five or so students each year who took all or most of those case method courses in their junior and senior years, of about two hundred students who signed up for all his courses each year. He used a democratic circle or amphitheater classroom layout in all his classes. He also taught most semesters two sections of a capstone integrative business policy course he added to the business school curriculum in 1970 that was required for all undergraduate business majors that could be elected by any student in any major. He was the only professor in the business school to use the case method in any course.
His students agreed to a course learning contract that stipulated they would read the facts of the case before class and would lose a whole letter grade from the course final grade if the De-GAMER randomly caught them obviously not having read the case before class, if they had not slipped a note under his office door before class telling him they had not read the case, which they could do twice during the course without penalty.
About ten percent of his students made A’s and about five percent made D’s. Most made C’s, which is about right, since C = Average. There were few F’s in his courses. The main criterion for course grades was the quantity and quality of ideas sold by students in case method discussions. He used peer ratings to give students feedback showing what their fellow students thought about the quantity and quality of their ideas sold in class, having made it clear the final decision about final grades was his. He did not believe in Lake Wobegon grading.
No student was ever forced to take one of his courses to graduate, and the most hardened GAME-players in the school did not sign up for his courses after he issued his Edict of 1972 in which he clearly spelled out in his syllabi the penalty for getting caught unprepared. His Classroom De-GAMER™ was roundly discussed by students in bull sessions across campus every year and was labeled various things, such as The Wheel of Fate and The Death Wheel. Most students near the end of his career simply called it The Spinner.
He appreciated Georgia Southern honoring his academic freedom by allowing him control of his teaching methods, classroom layouts, grading procedures, and course books, cases, and materials, some of which he researched, wrote, and published. He was promoted to full professor at age thirty-six.
He solicited anonymous longitudinal research data using questionnaires in 1992 showing his case method students during 1972-1982 reported higher yearly incomes in 1992 than students electing the same courses in 1972-1982 taught by professors using the authoritarian lecture method and the militaristic row and column classroom layout, who graded students based on memorizing or calculating “right answers” for tests, indicating learners learning in Adult—Adult I’m OK—You’re OK GAME-free democratic learning processes graded subjectively became more successful in the real world of business than learners lectured to and graded using so-called objective multiple-choice tests.
Only former students who had worked in the real world ten or more years after graduating from the Georgia Southern business school were included in the study. The data are shown, analyzed, and discussed in full in “Evidence the Case Method Works” in his book Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata, and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds, 2008, pg. 475). The data were also used in several refereed articles.
The ancient Greeks used a similar random-selection democratic process in the Third Century BCE to select leaders of political discussions, learning, and policy formulation in their halls of government. Such a process is called sortition.
For more information on related classroom management ethical issues see Stapleton, R.J. and Murkison, G. (2001), “Optimizing the fairness of student evaluations: A study of correlations between instructor excellence, study production, learning production, and expected grades,” in the Journal of Management Education, 25(3), 269-292.
Stapleton had one of the lowest student grade point averages among professors in the business school and was one of the lowest-ranked professors as an instructor on computerized campus-wide student evaluations that weighted only instructor excellence scores up to 2000; but he was one of the highest-ranked professors in a computerized student evaluation he designed that generated data also showing and weighting study production, learning production, and expected grades scores for each professor, published in “Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations.”
To read the Optimizing Fairness article in full, go to https://studysites.sagepub.com/holt/articles/Stapleton.pdf . After this research was published, Georgia Southern in 2001 added study production, learning production, and expected grades questions to the student evaluation form used campus-wide.
“Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations” has by now (April 7, 2023) been cited as a reference in 85 refereed journal articles concerned about the ethics of student evaluations in several academic disciplines, including ten new citations since April 2021.
As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein propositioned in his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “The case is all there is.”
If so, everything else said about Earthian human states of affairs is a rendition of what was or might be.
His latest book is As the Rooster Crows Earthian OKness Increases.
Earthian humans are again confronted with a probability, albeit a low probabilty, hopefully, of mob violence in a major country, the US, the so-called exceptional shining democratic country on a hill among all the countries of Spaceship Earth, caused by a significant percentage of the country’s population, who it seems do not value the rule of law of the US, or the values of all its citizens.
These malcontents frame themselves as Victims and Rescuers, but they are primarily Persecutors, willing to do serious harm, it seems, to those who oppose them, via mob violence and brute force if necessary, to win their psychological GAMES.
According to the Trumpian Rescuer/Persecutor demagogue in this article, 75 million Trump supporters, most of them armed N.R.A. card-carriers, will make sure Trump is not sent to prison if he is convicted for doing what he has been ethically and legally indicted for doing. According to the article, some of Trump’s supporters are thinking about starting a civil war to Rescue Trump if he is convicted, thereby escalating their psychological GAMES to the tissue-tearing level.
Framing themselves and Trump as Victims and Rescuers, most Trumpian supporters feel justified in Persecuting adversaries in a Drama Triangle.
Start a civil war against whom?
Playing GAMES is one thing. Shooting people is another.
Do these potential internal aggressors against the USian government think they could defeat the USian military in another insurrection attempt?
Such a war, an attempted coup, would be suicidal for them, millions of innocents could be killed, and the once-dreamed-about exceptional shining country on a hill might no longer exist as a Democratic Republic. It would become a Fascist Republic.
Please, let Earthian humans be freed from this GAME-infested Trumpian reality show psychodrama before it’s too late.
Berne, Eric. The Structure and Dynamics of Organizations and Groups. New York: Grove Press, 1963.
Berne, Eric. Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships. New York: Grove Press, 1970a.
Berne, Eric. What Do You Do After You Say Hello? The Psychology of Human Destiny. New York: Grove Press, 1970b.
Stapleton, Richard John. De-Gaming Teaching and Learning: How to Motivate Learners and Invite OKness. Statesboro, GA: Effective Learning Publications, 1979.
Stapleton, Richard John. Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds. Statesboro, Georgia: Effective Learning Publications, 2012.
TECHNICAL NOTE
Eric Berne achieved fame with his best-selling book, Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships. In it, he defines a psychological Game as follows:
“An ongoing series of complementary ulterior transactions progressing to a well-defined, predictable outcome. Descriptively, it is a recurring set of transactions, often repetitious, superficially plausible, with a concealed motivation; or, more colloquially, a series of moves with a snare, or “gimmick.” Games are clearly differentiated from procedures, rituals, and pastimes by two chief characteristics: (1) their ulterior quality and (2) the payoff. Procedures may be successful, rituals effective, and sometimes profitable, but all of them are by definition candid; they may involve contest, but not conflict, and the ending may be sensational, but is not dramatic. Every (psychological (emphasis added)) game, on the other hand, is basically dishonest, and the outcome has a dramatic, as distinct from merely exciting quality (Berne, 1970a).”
Games such as football, basketball, poker, and chess are games with a little g. They are honest and overt. Everybody knows the rules and referees make sure the fair rules are impartially imposed on all players.
The basic formula for psychological GAMES (Berne, 1970a) is :
Two sets of complementary transactions are going on at once—a spoken social level overt set and a psychological level non-verbal covert set.
A transaction in this context is an exchange between two or more people caused by transmitting messages from one person to another along transactional vectors from one ego state to another. In this context there are three types of ego states: Parent, Adult, and Child.
Feelings, thoughts, behaviors, and strokes are exchanged. These exchanges cause changes in the OKness levels of people. OKness means what it says. People are OK, not Great, about themselves and others in varying degrees, ranging from OK to Not-OK.
GAMES entail grandiosity and/or discounting. People may be considered “great”, grandiosity; and they may be considered “worthless,” discounting.
In general, Games take place outside the awareness of the Adult Ego State, which unfortunately means Game players do not know they are playing Games. They have been playing Games for so long they think Game-playing is just natural.
The Con is the basic invitation the Game starter throws out; the Gimmick is some trick or bait, that causes the responder, sometimes referred to as the “mark,” to respond and get hooked, much like a trout rising to take a fisherman’s artificial fly.
Once the responder is hooked, after a series of Adult transactions, which may require a minute or so, or several days, or perhaps months, or years, surprises will occur.
The Game starter and responder will switch roles—Persecutor, Rescuer, or Victim—from whatever role they started with to a different role, and the Game starter will begin to cross the original Adult-Adult transactional vectors with Parent-Child crosses.
One of the most common psychological Games identified by transactional analysts played by Earthian humans in general is called NIGYSOB, NOW I’VE GOT YOU, YOU SOB, and for sure it is one of the most common Games played in governments.
Move 1 in a NIGYSOB Game will be concerned with some Adult-sounding faults, mistakes, or deficiencies the Game starter has detected.
At move 1 the starter says something to the effect that such and such is a problem, which may be true. The responder in response to move 1 will then ask what specifically is wrong, etc. Several transactions may then happen at the Adult level dealing with what appear to be Adult data and information in back and forth transactions on Adult-Adult complementary stimulus-response transactional vectors.
At the same time the above transaction is happening socially, another unspoken transaction is happening between the Parent Ego State of the Game starter and the Child ego state of the Game responder at the psychological ulterior level. The Parent-Child non-verbal message is an angry variant of “It’s your fault, kid, and you’re badly out of line.” The Child-Parent response is a variant of “Don’t give me a spanking, who cares, etc.”
In a few minutes, or perhaps, days or weeks, or years the Game starter will decide the Game responder has been securely hooked, and now it’s time to go for the Payoff.
At payoff-time the Game starter will switch from Rescuer to Persecutor and move the social level message away from the Adult data, the issue, or the problem after cathecting, or turning on, a heavy Parent ego state. At this stage of the Game the starter at the social level will cross the previous Adult-Adult transactions with a heavy overt verbal Parent-Child transaction that lets the responder know socially in various ways, means, and words that “Now I’ve got you, you SOB.”
The psychological Payoff for a NIGYSOB starter is a feeling of triumph or being “one up.” The payoff for the Game responder in a NIGYSOB Game will to feel humiliated and dejected, and perhaps rejected. The Game starter psychologically wanted all along to feel superior and reign supreme. A major reason NIGYSOB players play NIGYSOB is to feel justified in venting their anger, which they have pent up inside themselves.
Some people go through these antics on an over-and-over again basis. I think many people assume that all people are NIGYSOB players, since “one-up” Game playing is so widespread. In order to gain psychological satisfaction from playing NIGYSOB as a responder, you need to be a KICK ME or COPS AND ROBBERS player. Some Earthian humans psychologically gain satisfaction from being manipulated, debased, or discounted.
People play psychological GAMES in general to get structure, stimulus, and recognition. If you grew up in a family with NIGYSOB-playing parents in order to get along in the family system you had to learn to tolerate NIGYSOB playing, and it’s likely you too became a NIGYSOB player, having learned how to do it from your parents.
If you were lucky enough to have grown up in a healthy functional family in which all family members had permission to freely use all three ego states when appropriate you probably grew up with a healthy functional personality and life script and you will have little need to play psychological GAMES. You can get your needs met in healthy ways without having to constantly strive for attention and recognition by trying to lord it over others or get richer or prove how smart, right, powerful, and sexy you are, as do people like Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and other pathological entrepreneurs and politicians.
In the TA world, Money, Power, Sex, Smarts, and Righteousness are known as the “Five Deadly Organizational Sins,” sometimes referred to as the Pernicious Pentagonal Paradigm of Organizational Perversity, leading to all sorts of corruption.
Unfortunately, a high percentage of Earthian humans grow up in relatively dysfunctional families and cultures, being deprived of or denied healthy script messages and permissions in childhood and adolescence. It’s obvious Trump grew up in a relatively dysfunctional family, as his niece, a credentialed psychologist, has discussed at length in her published book.
Almost all Earthian humans like to be liked, recognized, and paid-attention-to and negative strokes are better than no strokes at all.
Getting attention and strokes, or units of recognition, is the main reason people play Games. Be it noted that playing Games as a politician in a government is one of the surest ways of getting lots of strokes. In general, the more extreme the politician the more strokes s/he gets. Trump got and gets more strokes some days playing Games in politics than normal Earthian humans get in a lifetime conducting ordinary pastimes, rituals, and activities. Yesterday, June 13, 2013, the day Trump finally got booked on criminal charges by the federal government, was such a day for Trump.
There are positive, negative, conditional and unconditional strokes. Conditional strokes, such as receiving good or bad grades in school, or receiving awards in sports for being the highest scorer on the team, are earned and merited. Positive and negative unconditional strokes are bestowed and inflicted on others just because they are liked or disliked.
Other psychological Games often played in governments are MINE’S BETTER; BLEMISH; GEE, YOU’RE WONDERFUL SUPPORTERS; AIN’T IT AWFUL, GREENHOUSE; DO ME SOMETHING; I’M ONLY TRYING TO HELP YOU; IF ONLY IT WEREN’T FOR YOU; YOU STARTED IT; and, the most deleterious Game of all, LET’S YOU AND THEM FIGHT.
Psychological Game-playing happens in all organizations—families, churches, schools, small businesses, large corporations, and governments. They are one of several ways of structuring, or spending, time.
Eric Berne in his book What Do You Do After You Say Hello: The Psychology of Human Destiny (Berne, 1970b) said you can spend most of your time engaged in Withdrawal, retiring into your cave, talking to yourself inside your own head researching and creating things; Pastimes, small talk, gossip, talking about sports, hobbies, etc. with others; Rituals, reciting the same things over-and-over again with others, performing mental and physical movements required for eating, drinking, sleeping, praying, worshiping, teaching, following precedents, etc.; Activities, doing things in the real world, working, creating, changing things, solving problems; Playing Games, structuring your time trying to take advantage of others and make fools out of them; and Intimacy, transacting with others in Game-free ways, joyously and honestly feeling, thinking, communicating, and having fun after cathecting Free Child Ego States.
Time structuring possibilities are ordered in the above paragraph from low to high based on the likelihood of them producing strokes if conducted. How they will be conducted in what proportions is determined by the way individuals and organizations were scripted throughout their lives in the evolutionary cause-effect chains causing their personas, feelings, thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors to happen.
Some transactional analysts believe it’s possible for Earthian humans and organizations to change their time structuring patterns and life scripts by somehow acquiring better script messages than those that naturally happened.
Believers in free will would probably think this should be easy. Believers in compatibilism might think it might or might not be possible. Strict determinists would think it’s just a pipe dream.
I became a certified transactional analyst in the 1970s preparing myself to do a better job of teaching organizational development in a business school and consulting with organizations in the real world. I was successful in some cases, but most organizations were not interested in what I had to offer as a TA consultant. Unfortunately, in my opinion most organizations around Spaceship Earth are more in need of organizational development work now than they were in 1980. It seems to me USian culture was more open to new learning in the 1960s and 1970s than it is now, having become more and more anti-intellectual, authoritarian, intolerant, fascistic, revanchist, and violent, starting with the USian Repug Reagan government in 1980. Seems to me the need for well-functioning governments around Spaceship Earth is greater now than ever.
Regardless, it seems to me governments are the best hope for eradicating the two modern horsemen of the apocalypse: GWCC, global warming and climate change, and MNWP, militarization and nuclear weapons proliferation. Unfortunately, these existential threats are not psychological Games.
The USian political system and government, and most Earthian governments, it seems to me, are cesspools of Game-playing. Earthian humans running them structure most of their time playing Games and conforming to script messages in pastimes, rituals and procedures dealing with constituents, politicians, political parties, voters, bureaucracies, large corporations, and other countries that are generally out to control and consume more than their fair share of finite Earthian resources.
After they say hello after they get elected new Earthian governments mostly structure their time busying themselves conducting pastimes, rituals, procedures, and ceremonies, and playing Games, wasting most of their time and energy in entropic time structuring instead of doing real work in the environment; a minuscule fraction of their time is structured conducting work activities that might solve systemic and existential problems.
Most likely former USian Repug president Trump’s surprise switch and cross January 6, 2021 in the USian capitol building attempting to take over the USian government as a fascist dictator were moves in one of the biggest NIGYSOB Games of Earthian human history, leading to what he hoped would be a glorious payoff.
About the Author
Richard John Stapleton, PhD, CTA would spin the spinner of his Classroom De-Gamer™ in his classes to randomly select a student at the beginning of each class session to lead a discussion of the case assigned for the day, a case taken from a planned or operating business prepared by case writers at Georgia Southern, Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Alabama.
This process insured that everyone would be relatively Game-free transacting in class discussions. They all agreed to a learning contract at the outset of the course that they would read assigned cases and would be graded on the quantity and quality of ideas sold in the class market. Anyone caught obviously unprepared by the spinning De-Gamer would lose a whole letter grade from the course grade. No one could feel or think that s/he was being persecuted or rescued if selected to start the class discussion of the day by the Classroom De-Gamer™. The psychological Game roles of Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim were largely banished from the course learning process.
Be it noted that 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.
He has published refereed journal articles and books explaining how his democratic Game-free Adult-Adult I’m OK—You’re OK case method system works, by banishing Persecutors, Rescuers, and Victims playing psychological Games from the teaching and learning process, first documented in an article titled “The Classroom De-Gamer” he published in 1978 in the Transactional Analysis Journal. He has published seven books and over one hundred articles in various media containing cases, research data, and essays on teaching and learning and management policies and practices.
Stapleton learned and trained using transactional analysis with Martin Groder, MD; Graham Barnes, PhD; Vann Joines, PhD; and many others at the Southeast Institute at Chapel Hill, North Carolina (1975-1978).
He was a Harvard Case Method teacher who never went to Harvard, having learned how the case method works teaching with Bernard Bienvenu, DBA and Rexford Hauser, DBA (Harvard Business School doctorates) at the University of Louisiana– Lafayette in 1969-70.
He has a BS in economics (1962), an MBA in organizational behavior (1966), and a PhD in management science (1969) from Texas Tech University, and an organizational and educational certification in transactional analysis (CTA) from the International Transactional Analysis Association (1978).
He taught his own case method track at the undergraduate level in the management department of the business school at Georgia Southern University offering four or five different elective case method courses each academic year (1970-2005), in which he led, coordinated, and graded about twenty-five or so students each year who took all or most of those case method courses in their junior and senior years, of about two hundred students who signed up for all his courses each year. He used a democratic circle or amphitheater classroom layout in all his classes. He also taught most semesters two sections of a capstone integrative business policy course he added to the business school curriculum in 1970 that was required for all undergraduate business majors that could be elected by any student in any major. He was the only professor in the business school to use the case method in any course.
His students agreed to a course learning contract that stipulated they would read the facts of the case before class and would lose a whole letter grade from the course final grade if the De-Gamer randomly caught them obviously not having read the case before class, if they had not slipped a note under his office door before class telling him they had not read the case, which they could do twice during the course without penalty.
About ten percent of his students made A’s and about five percent made D’s. Most made C’s, which is about right, since C = Average. There were few F’s in his courses. The main criterion for course grades was the quantity and quality of ideas sold by students in case method discussions. He used peer ratings to give students feedback showing what their fellow students thought about the quantity and quality of their ideas sold in class, having made it clear the final decision about final grades was his. He did not believe in Lake Wobegon grading.
No student was ever forced to take one of his courses to graduate, and the most hardened Game-players in the school did not sign up for his courses after he issued his Edict of 1972 in which he clearly spelled out in his syllabi the penalty for getting caught unprepared. His Classroom De-Gamer™ was roundly discussed by students in bull sessions across campus every year and was labeled various things, such as The Wheel of Fate and The Death Wheel. Most students near the end of his career simply called it The Spinner.
He appreciated Georgia Southern honoring his academic freedom by allowing him control of his teaching methods, classroom layouts, grading procedures, and course books, cases, and materials, some of which he researched, wrote, and published. He was promoted to full professor at age thirty-six.
He solicited anonymous longitudinal research data using questionnaires in 1992 showing his case method students during 1972-1982 reported higher yearly incomes in 1992 than students electing the same courses in 1972-1982 taught by professors using the authoritarian lecture method and the militaristic row and column classroom layout, who graded students based on memorizing or calculating “right answers” for tests, indicating learners learning in Adult—Adult I’m OK—You’re OK Game-free democratic learning processes graded subjectively became more successful in the real world of business than learners lectured to and graded using so-called objective multiple-choice tests.
Only former students who had worked in the real world ten or more years after graduating from the Georgia Southern business school were included in the study. The data are shown, analyzed, and discussed in full in “Evidence the Case Method Works” in his book Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata, and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds, 2008, pg. 475). The data were also used in several refereed articles.
The ancient Greeks used a similar random-selection democratic process in the Third Century BCE to select leaders of political discussions, learning, and policy formulation in their halls of government. Such a process is called sortition.
For more information on related classroom management ethical issues see Stapleton, R.J. and Murkison, G. (2001), “Optimizing the fairness of student evaluations: A study of correlations between instructor excellence, study production, learning production, and expected grades,” in the Journal of Management Education, 25(3), 269-292.
Stapleton had one of the lowest student grade point averages among professors in the business school and was one of the lowest-ranked professors as an instructor on computerized campus-wide student evaluations that weighted only instructor excellence scores up to 2000; but he was one of the highest-ranked professors in a computerized student evaluation he designed that generated data also showing and weighting study production, learning production, and expected grades scores for each professor, published in “Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations.”
To read the Optimizing Fairness article in full, go to https://studysites.sagepub.com/holt/articles/Stapleton.pdf . After this research was published, Georgia Southern in 2001 added study production, learning production, and expected grades questions to the student evaluation form used campus-wide.
“Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations” has by now (April 7, 2023) been cited as a reference in 85 refereed journal articles concerned about the ethics of student evaluations in several academic disciplines, including ten new citations since April 2021.
As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein propositioned in his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “The case is all there is.”
If so, everything else said about Earthian human states of affairs is a rendition of what was or might be.
His latest book is As the Rooster Crows Earthian OKness Increases.
Having watched the news and consistently seen former President Donald Trump featuring, I woke up this morning in a reflective frame of mind. I asked myself – who in my lifetime was the most problem stricken and/or incompetent and/or simply dumb President the US has had. I decided that a gold medal – a silver medal – and a bronze medal could be assigned to the ‘successful’ candidate.
First, President Nixon sprung to mind. However, on reflection I changed my mind because he faced serious legal problems then he resigned. Simple enough.
Next, in the dumb category Gerald Ford came to mind. It was said of him that he must have taken too many blows to the head for reason of not wearing a helmet during the days he played American football.
Next, I thought of George Bush Jr. but he did not qualify for when you are dumb and acknowledge and know that you are dumb then that will not qualify you for a medal versus a person who is but does not recognize that he is.
So who?
Finally, I thought of Donald Trump – same one – the one and only Donald Trump. But, I refused simply to hand out any medal unless he was first found to be truly deserving. So, I started a check list and then outlined ( not in any chronological sequence) the points of merit for Trump.
E. Jean Carroll
Well, for years a lady said that Trump had raped her. Finally she took the allegation to court and Trump kept making denials. Eventually, the jury decided in her favour and awarded US$5m against Trump.
Well – how dumb can you be in relying on a defence of denial but you do not actually go to court and make the denial in your defence?
Anyway, the jury already had evidence to hold on to – separate and apart from what the lady directly told them from the witness box. Trump had said that a man should just grab ‘em by the P……. So, they concluded that was just what he did to the lady.
Tax returns
Not myself an expert in the US Presidency nor a Presidential historian, nevertheless I think that I am accurate in saying that all Presidents before Trump made financial disclosures and declarations of their financial status at time of taking office – inclusive of IRS disclosures.
Well, Trump applies his own law to himself and refuses to make the necessary disclosure. So, the court compels the disclosure.
But, the frying pan leads into the fire. The low ending of the IRS returns to pay minimum taxes and the high ending of the value of the same collateral ( buildings/properties) raises the spectre of fraudulent declarations.
Now, the prosecutor is after Trump and there are huge further implications beyond having already been convicted on one aspect of the tax issue.
Election issues
Trump, having tried to be re-elected and failed is not satisfied so decides to make more problems for himself.
Trump claims that the election was stolen and takes his allegation(s) to court in the most dramatic way. The night before the first case Giuliani announces on CNN that he is going to court in the morning to prove the fraud. Giuliani is asked by the Judge as the first question whether the case is an election fraud allegation case. Giuliani promptly answers ‘no’. Why did he do so? As a lawyer he knows that if he brings a case which is ‘frivolous and/or vexatious’ then he can be cited for contempt with further implications of imprisonment – so he plays safe. Case dismissed. And so too are a total of about 60 election cases brought to establish election fraud.
To make matters worse, Trump had alleged that the voting machines were the mechanical vehicle used to effect the fraud. Well, the main election machine company sues and wins in a significant amount for the false allegation made. In fact settlement was made to avoid significantly more damages and costs at the end if a trial had followed through to conclusion.
Now, that was really smart – wasn’t it?
Just find the votes
So, on one hand Trump claimed that votes were stolen/lost from him; on the other hand Trump wanted the Georgia Secretary of State to find just 11,000 plus more votes to win the election.
Then, in attempting to have that fraud effected Trump finds himself in trouble with the law.
My, my, this guy Donald Trump must be super smart.
Retention of classified government documents
Trump, if not anything else is unique.
All other Presidents at end of term have returned the government’s classified documents. Trump is different because he can just classify and declassify by just thinking about it – and that is what he actually said. Gee – a magician accompanied by all his other proven accomplishments.
A contempt, fine if not other legal charges seem to be the end game. Quite impressive.
What next….?
At this stage I think that I have enough facts to award the medals.
Most problem stricken — Donald Trump — Gold
Incompetent — Donald Trump — Silver
Dumb President — Donald Trump — Bronze
If I have been inaccurate and/or unfair in any way – please promptly inform why so.
______________________________________
Courtenay Barnett is a graduate of London University. His areas of study were economics, political science and international law. He has been a practising lawyer for almost fully forty years, has been arrested for defending his views, and has argued public interest and human rights cases.
