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-GAMERâ„¢ 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-GAMERâ„¢. 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-GAMERâ„¢ 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-GAMERâ„¢ 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.â€
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.â€
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-GAMERâ„¢ 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-GAMERâ„¢. 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-GAMERâ„¢ 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-GAMERâ„¢ 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.â€
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.â€
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 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, training 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, both overt and covert lying, deliberately telling falsehoods, and not speaking your mind about what you know, understand, think, and feel that would be useful for others to know. It’s OK to be honestly wrong; but it’s not OK to be dishonestly wrong. It’s likely that no one is smart enough to increase OKness by dishonestly 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.
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 University, Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Alabama.He taught management systems, researched, published,and conducted a small business institute at Georgia Southern University thirty-five years, 1970-2005.
All case analyses entail considering three existential questions:
WHAT IS THE PROBLEM? WHAT ARE THE ALTERNATIVES? WHAT DO YOU RECOMMEND?
Whomever the spinner of the “Classroom De-Gamer” selected when it wound down after spinning by an imaginary line of fire extending from the point of the spinner to a class member sitting in the circle classroom layout would become the “Leader of the Moment” required to answer the three existential questions shown above laying out the case to all class members.
The overall purpose of the Game-free I’m OK—You’re OK Adult-Adult democratic teaching and learning process is to produce comprehension of the relevant facts and focal points of the case among class members in order to create rational policies and strategies for successfully managing the states of affairs of the case.All humans have Adult ego states that can be cathected, even children at young ages.
Cathecting an ego state is turning on energy, cognition and emotion in the human psyche for transacting with fellow humans. There are three basic types of ego states that can be cathected: Parent, Adult, and Child.
A soft drink bottle as in playing the childhood game Spin the Bottle works about as well as a Classroom De-Gamer to randomly select the Leader of the Moment to answer the Three Existential Questions. No one can interrupt anyone once someone has the floor. Communicating overtly or covertly with individuals in the room for the whole session is not allowed. Anyone can respond to any speaker once the speaker has finished, disagreeing or agreeing with what was said, and may bring up another problem if appropriate in the context of the discussion.
How long should a discussion last? Long enough for group members to comprehend the system under consideration, a system including interrelations between relevant focal point entities of the system–relevant facts and issues comprising the problem, alternatives and recommendations.
According to R. Buckminster Fuller in his Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969) comprehension of a system entails separating the relevant points from the irrelevant points in the system under consideration. It takes time to do this. According to Fuller, Comprehension = (N2-N) / 2, where N = Number of total focal point entities in the system, counting the number of focal point facts or issues and all the inter-relationships between the focal point entities.
Comprehension required and produced expands exponentially as the size of the system increases. One has to wonder if most Earthian systems today are ever fully comprehended by Earthian humans. Rather than most Earthian human systems being managed today based on comprehension in general they are managed based on dogmas, doctrines, rules, algorithms, scripts, and the like, many of which are irrelevant. As matters now stand about the best Earthian humans can hope for is that somehow the smartest, wisest, most knowledgeable, most ethical, and most empathetic Earthian humans somehow manage to become top leaders in major systems.
When most members of the discussion group seem to generally comprehend the system it is time to stop. Most paper cases in Stapleton’s classes of about 30 students took about one hour. Real cases and systems in your organizations and groups may take more or less time, perhaps several hourly sessions for one system. Stick with the discussion until most members have comprehended the relevant problems, alternatives, and recommendations of the system under consideration as best they can.In most cases this will produce a solution considered the most rational of alternatives for most members of the group, about the best that can be hoped for at present. Perhaps at some future date supercomputers will be able to comprehend large systems well enough to develop answers that are provably true.
Since all members of the group will not have been caused to develop the same pictures in their heads about what should be done in the case before the discussion starts, a high percentage of the discussants will learn in the discussion as they comprehend what is really going on that their initial conceptions were wrong, causing both unlearning and learning. Sometimes unlearning is more important than learning for creating better Earthian human states of affairs. Unlearning, in fact, might be what is now needed most in order for Earthian humans to develop peaceful and sustainable systems around Spaceship Earth.
Most discussants will not leave the discussions with the same mental pictures they started out with caused by the greater comprehension caused by the back and forth dialectical arguing caused by the Game-free I’m OK-You’re OK Adult-Adult democratic discussion process, proving both unlearning and learning happened.
Stapleton’s De-Gaming process insured that everyone would be relatively GAME-free transacting in class discussions. They all agreed to a learning contract at the outset of the course that they would read assigned cases and would be graded on the quantity and quality of ideas sold in the class market. Anyone caught obviously unprepared by the spinning De-GAMER would lose a whole letter grade from the course grade. No one could feel or think that s/he was being persecuted or rescued if selected to start the class discussion of the day by the Classroom De-GAMER. The psychological GAME Drama Triangle roles of Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim were largely banished from the course learning process.The actual grades received—A’s, B’s, C’s, D’s, and F’s—were relative grades, not absolute grades, Excellent, Good, Average, Poor, and Failing relative to the class. There were no numbers ostensibly proving what percentage of the course €œcontent€ was retained in memory for so-called objective exams.
Stapleton sat in the same circle in the same kind of chair as students, and the De-GAMING rules also applied to him. If the Classroom De-GAMER landed on him he had to lay out the case just like any other student and discuss what was the problem, what were the alternatives, and what he recommended.
Grades were based eighty percent on class participation in dialectical discussions about what to do about problems and opportunities found in cases; the rest of the final grade was based on two case write-ups. One write-up was about what the student observed, researched, analyzed, and wrote about an existing business in the local environment or a business plan the student created. The other write-up was an analysis of a case researched and written by professors about a business assigned as the final exam. Cases used in his courses contained processes, problems, opportunities, and data occurring in all functional areas of business such as entrepreneurship, finance, marketing, operations management, control, management information systems, and business policy and strategy.
Published refereed journal articles and books explaining how his democratic GAME-free Adult-Adult I’m OK—You’re OK case method system works, by banishing Persecutors, Rescuers, and Victims playing psychological GAMES from the teaching and learning process, first documented in an article titled the Classroom De-GAMER he published in 1978 in the Transactional Analysis Journal. He has published seven books and over one hundred articles in various media containing cases, research data, and essays on teaching and learning and management systems, policies, and practices.
Learned and trained using transactional analysis with Martin Groder, MD; Graham Barnes, PhD; Vann Joines, PhD; and many others at the Southeast Institute at Chapel Hill, North Carolina (1975-1978).
Learned how the Harvard case method works teaching with Bernard Bienvenu, DBA and Rexford Hauser, DBA, Harvard Business School doctorates, at the University of Louisiana—Lafayette in 1969-70.
Has a BS in economics (1962), an MBA in organizational behavior (1966), and a PhD in management science (1969) from Texas Tech University, and an organizational and educational certification in transactional analysis (CTA) from the International Transactional Analysis Association (1978).
Taught his own case method track at the undergraduate level in the management department in the business school at Georgia Southern University offering four or five different elective case method courses each academic year during 1970-2005 in which he led, coordinated, and graded about twenty-five or so students each year who took all or most of those case method courses in their junior and senior years, of about two hundred students who signed up for all his courses each year. He used a democratic circle or amphitheater classroom layout in all his classes. He also taught most semesters two sections of a capstone integrative business policy course he added to the business school curriculum in 1970 that was required for all undergraduate business majors that could be elected by any student in any major. He was the only professor in the business school to use the case method in any course.
Class members agreed to a course learning contract that stipulated they would read the facts of the case before class and would lose a whole letter grade from the course final grade if the De-GAMER randomly caught them obviously not having read the case before class, if they had not slipped a note under his office door before class telling him they had not read the case, which they could do twice during the course without penalty.
About ten percent of his students made A’s and about five percent made D’s. Most made C’s, which is about right, since C = Average. There were few F’s in his courses. The main criterion for course grades was the quantity and quality of ideas sold by students in case method discussions. He used peer ratings to give students feedback showing what their fellow students thought about the quantity and quality of their ideas sold in class, having made it clear the final decision about final grades was his. He did not believe in Lake Wobegon grading.
No 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.
Appreciated Georgia Southern honoring his academic freedom by allowing him control of his teaching methods, classroom layouts, grading procedures, and course books, cases, and materials, some of which he researched, wrote, and published. He was promoted to full professor with tenure at age thirty-six and was the senior professor of the university when he retired in 2005.
Solicited anonymous longitudinal research data using questionnaires in 1992 showing his case method students during 1972-1982 reported higher yearly incomes in 1992 than students electing the same courses in 1972-1982 taught by professors using the authoritarian lecture method and the militaristic row and column classroom layout, who graded students based on memorizing or calculating “right answers” for tests, indicating learners learning in Adult-Adult I’m OK—You’re OK GAME-free democratic learning processes graded subjectively became more successful in the real world of business than learners lectured to and graded using Parent-Child transactions, row and column classroom layouts, and so-called objective tests.
Only former students who had worked in the real world of business ten or more years after graduating from the Georgia Southern business school were included in the study. The data are shown, analyzed, and discussed in full in “Evidence the Case Method Works” published in his book Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata, and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds, 2008, pg. 475. The data were also used in several refereed articles.
See also Stapleton, R.J. (1989-1990). “Academic entrepreneurship: Using the case method to simulate competitive business markets.” Organizational Behavior Teaching Review. Vol. XIV, No. IV, pp. 88-104; Stapleton, R.J., Murkison, G., and Stapleton, D.C. (1993). “Feedback regarding a game-free case method process used to educate general management and entrepreneurship students.” Proceedings of the 1993 Annual Meeting of the Southeast CHAPTER of the Institute for Management Science. Myrtle Beach, SC, October, 1993; and Stapleton, R. J. and Stapleton, D.C. (1998), Teaching Business Using the Case Method and Transactional Analysis: A Constructivist Approach”Transactional Analysis Journal, 28, no. 2: 157€“167
Ancient Greeks used a similar random-selection democratic process in the Third Century BCE to select leaders of political discussions, learning, and policy formulation in their halls of government. Such a process is called sortition.
For more information on related classroom management ethical issues in universities see Stapleton, R.J. and Murkison, G. (2001), “Optimizing the fairness of student evaluations: A study of correlations between instructor excellence, study production, learning production, and expected grades,” in the Journal of Management Education, 25(3), 269-292.
Had one of the lowest student grade point averages among professors in the business school and was one of the lowest-ranked professors as an instructor on computerized campus-wide student evaluations that weighted only instructor excellence scores up to 2000; but he was one of the highest-ranked professors in a computerized student evaluation system he designed that generated data also showing and weighting study production, learning production, and expected grades scores for each professor, published in “Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations.“
To read the Optimizing Fairness article in full, go to https://studysites.sagepub.com/holt/articles/Stapleton.pdf . After this research was published, Georgia Southern in 2001 added study production, learning production, and expected grades questions to the student evaluation form used campus-wide.
“Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations” has by now (December 30, 2023) been cited as a reference in 89 refereed journal articles concerned about the ethics and fairness of student evaluations in several academic disciplines, including 21 new citations since April 2021, proving the article is still being read and used.
As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein propositioned in his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “The case is all there is.“
If so, everything else said about Earthian human states of affairs is a rendition of what was or might be.
His latest book is As the Rooster Crows Earthian OKness Increases.
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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 »
