A STRATEGY FOR ACTUALLY DRAINING THE POLITICAL SWAMP OF SPACESHIP EARTH

By Richard John Stapleton

About thirty percent of US citizens love Donald Trump, mostly true-believing conservatives, evangelicals, etc.

About fifty percent of US citizens detest Donald Trump, mostly liberals, freethinkers, etc.

Some say the most significant difference between the two groups is racism, pure and simple. Who can prove it?

And some say there are fundamental differences in how the two groups see their worlds and think they should be run. 

True believer conservatives are in general authoritarians, generally seeing the world as black or white, with clear-cut rules that must be obeyed.

Liberals (moderates at least) are more democratic, more open-minded, more inclined to see shades of grey, and are more tolerant of differences.

And the personalities of the two groups are different.

True-believing Conservatives use more critical parent and adapted child ego state energy than Liberals. They believe more and question less.  

Since extreme Conservatives and Liberals know they are right they have permission to do less unto others than they would have others do unto them.  

They are more militant and warlike, more clannish. Their attitude is I’m OK and You (if you are different from me) are NOT OK.

Dyed-in-the-wool Liberals use more nurturing parent and free child ego state energy transacting with others. Being less authoritarian and less rigid they experiment more and are more respecting of the rights, feelings, thoughts, and behaviors of others.

Members of both groups think they are smarter than the other. Since they know they are right they must be smarter or they would not have decided what they decided in the first place, about how the world works and how it should be run, and about what and how one should adapt and flex transacting with others.

Trump may be the least hypocritical president the US has had, the most transparent, the least deceptive, thanks to his Tweets, in which he often blurts out whatever happens to pop up in his mind, despite generally being a venal ungodly selfish lying clown, who was smart enough not to lose all the money his family gave him, and who was smart enough to parlay his simplistic ideas and behaviors, and that inherited money, into becoming President of the (dis)United States–winning the biggest ego trip contest around Spaceship Earth.

Since Trump thinks like his supporters his supporters therefore think he is smart and they are smart for electing him president, confirming how smart they were all along, smarter than Liberals.

What needs to be drained in the Earthian political swamp is the pernicious pentagonal paradigm of organizational perversity, described by Stephen Karpman, MD, and the five deadly organizational sins, told to me by Martin Groder, MD, one of my transactional analysis mentors, described in detail in my book Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata, and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds (2008), still in print, available at Effective Learning Publications listed on the masthead of this blog above.

The Five Deadly Organizational Sins (drumroll please) are: Power, Money, Sex, Righteousness, and Smarts.

Why are these sins deadly in organizations? They’re deadly because they corrupt organizations, rendering them incapable of achieving effective goals efficiently.

If an organization’s members focus most of their mental and physical energy on proving how powerful they are, how much money they have (regardless of how gained), how sexy they are, how right they are, and how smart they are they will naturally waste energy that should have been used to achieve the organization’s legitimate goals.

Teaching organizational behavior in a business school and doing organizational development work with organizations as a consultant, I used to draw a pentagon on a flip sheet and then label the five points of the pentagon with the words power, money, sex, righteousness, and smarts, and then explain to my learners how each of the points could erode and maybe destroy the functioning of their or any organization.

In order to be effective and worthwhile an organization has to do work in its environment, changing something for the better or producing necessary goods and services in its environment, that cannot be done efficiently, or maybe at all, if people in the organization are primarily focused on adapting and flexing to the power, money, sexual, righteousness, and smarts urges and messages of others, especially if supervisors and managers up the organizational chain of command are demonstrating in multifarious social and psychological ways they are more OK than others, playing Top Dog, the most ubiquitous psychological Game in organizational life, caused by organizational leaders engendering an organizational culture in which subordinates are required to recognize socially and psychologically using verbal and body language signals (by saluting in fascist organizations) how powerful, rich, sexy, right, and smart their supposedly superior organizational leaders are.

For more detail on why and how this is true read my e-book, Recommendations for Waking Up From The American Nightmare, at Amazon.com, or my paperback book, Born to Learn: A Transactional Analysis of Human Learning, also available at Effective Learning Publications above.

One can build a case the US under Trump as an organization is now more sinful than any previous US administration, and the US is now the most organizationally sinful nation around Spaceship Earth.

The US has been sinking into its power-mad narcissistic self-righteous egotistical sinful ways for decades after inevitably winning WWII, electing relatively sinful presidents, starting in 1946 with Truman, with since then one relatively sin-free president, Jimmy Carter, but including three off-the-chart sexual sinners, Kennedy, Clinton, and Trump.

Truman, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II were among the worst money-grubbing, power-mad, and self-righteous US presidential sinners since the 1950s, dislocating and killing millions of Earthian humans, trying to prove capitalism is right, communism is wrong, and the US is entitled to a disproportionately large share of Earth’s wealth and resources.

Trump seems to think he is the smartest, calling himself a stable genius.

How to get the populations of all nations around Earth off the Five Deadly Organizational Sins Pentagon, not only top dog leaders, is another matter.

Whether it can be done before the consequences of past organizational sins destroy all Earthian species through global warming and climate change or shooting off nuclear bombs remains to be seen. 

Fascist economic and political systems encourage the five deadly organizational sins more than most, but no Earthian nation has been without organizational sin.

The US and China are now the economic and political leaders among Earthian nations. Both the supposedly capitalistic US and the supposedly communistic China have become more fascist in recent years. Whether Communist China becomes as fascist as Communist Russia did before it imploded remains to be seen.

One can build a case all national governments throughout Earthian history eventually ruined themselves committing The Five Deadly Organizational Sins, Power, Money, Sex, Righteousness, and Smarts, eventually becoming ruled by fascists mired in orgies of organizational sin, attempting to gratify themselves ensconced in isolated centralized power-mad hierarchies. Nero comes to mind.

Nations as organizations exist because of historical evolutionary forces that caused existing human practices and problems to be moved into new territories enabling individuals and groups to accumulate enough power to delineate and defend geographic boundaries, within which Earthian humans with similar beliefs, ideas, practices, and so forth could live with a modicum of peace and satisfaction. This process naturally entailed conflict, competition, and wars among nations and people.

Through time humans became addicted to competition and war, many finding it satisfying, raping, killing, pillaging, etc.

Many Earthian humans now think the major purpose of a nation is to win wars and prove it’s more powerful, rich, sexy, right, and smart than competing nations, as if playing college or professional football and basketball games in conferences and leagues, hoping to win a national championship.

Not so. The only legitimate justification for the existence of a nation is to produce services that enable Earthian humans to live peaceful and satisfying lives, proving in the process its salaried teachers, politicians, judges, civil servants, and military employees actually do some work, rather than waste their time and energy engaged in entropic time structuring such as playing Top Dog, I’m Only Trying to Help You, If It Weren’t For You, and other psychological Games not doing much for citizens and doing violence against other nations, imposing sanctions, invading and looting, and dropping bombs; reciting, performing, marching, and participating in ceremonies and rituals; and bullshitting with individuals, groups, and organizations.   

The best hope in the short run would be for deep-thinking hard-hitting politicians like Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard to resign from the contaminated ineffectual DNC to run in 2020 as Independents for president and vice president.

There might be enough of us disillusioned US voters and non-voters out there to put them in office.

They could not fully drain the swamp in eight years, but they could make a good start, proving third party candidates are more likely to drain the swamp than Deep State bought and paid for pork barrel establishment politicians, touted by conservative establishment Demos and Repugs in the DNC and RNC National Committees.

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Richard John Stapleton, PhD, CTA, is a certified transactional analyst, and the Editor & Publisher of the Effective Learning Report and The Earthian Forum at www.effectivelearning.net