THE EARTHIAN, Number Forty-Three, February 25, 2024, Effective Learning Publications, 32 East Main Street, Statesboro, Georgia, USA, Richard John Stapleton, Writer, Editor & Publisher, Copyright 2024, All Rights Reserved
Ask more what your country can do for all Earthians to reduce the probability of catastrophes caused by global warming and climate change (GWCC) and militarization and nuclear weapons proliferation (MNWP), the two major existential threats confronting humans and all Earthian species of fauna and flora.
Everything that happens is an inevitable accident; it was not planned using free will, but it was caused by inexorably-progressing cause-effect chains. It behooves Earthian humans to tie loose ends together in comprehensive whole pictures trying to let Earthian humans know what is really going on around Earth, regardless of the problems, given the robot-like programmed beliefs and behaviors of most Earthian humans, ensconced in their worm hole tunnels of existence, shut off from relevant outside information inputs, caused by concatenations of inexorably progressing infinitely-regressive cause-effect chains all around Spaceship Earth. — Richard John Stapleton
“I must quit marrying men who feel inferior to me. Somewhere, there must be a man who could be my husband and not feel inferior. I need a superior inferior man.” — Heddy Lamarr, Hollywood actress who invented wireless communication. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d….
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.†— Buckminster Fuller, who said in his book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth that Earthian humans are “abysmally ignorant and omni-befuddled.” https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d….
FROM THE EDITOR’S DESKTOP COMPUTER KEYBOARD
It’s been over two months since the last issue of The Earthian was published. The asymmetric Hamas/Gaza-Zionist/Israel killing field has been the most horrible event around Spaceship Earth. It grinds on seemingly with no solutions in sight, with about the same rhetoric about what to do in the short run, with some discussion of whether a two or a one state solution would be best in the long run. As pointed out below it seems to me a one state solution is best. But for right now, there is only one viable solution: a ceasefire. Likewise, the Ukraine War also continues to grind on. I have no suggestions for how to bring it to a halt, but I will say I think the leadership of all the parties to the war—the US, NATO, Ukraine, and Russia—is the root cause of the fiasco. How to get better Earthian human leadership is another matter, a horrendously complex problem, involving the internal political processes of all the countries. How the United States will sort out its troubling internal political and legal problems is probably foremost in the minds of most USians. Will it be Biden or Trump as president after November 24, 2024? Will the US be able to work out democratic solutions, or will it sink into a fascist authoritarian anti-intellectual dictatorship? Meanwhile Planet Earth continues to heat up and more polar ice melts, causing more destructive and costly extreme weather events all around Earth irrespective of religious, economic, and political ideologies and boundaries.
Everything that happens is an inevitable accident. Nothing planned it using free will, but it was caused by infinite cause-effect chains. — RJS.
CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE
1 — RECENT EXISTENTIAL ARTICLES, IDEAS, AND COMMENTS BY HUMANS ABOARD SPACESHIP EARTH
2 — OPINION OF A HYPOTHETICAL EXONEXUS OBSERVER FROM A PLANET BEYOND THE EARTHIAN SOLAR SYSTEM
3 — TOWARD THE CO-CONSTRUCTION OF SUSTAINABLE EARTHIAN PRODUCTION AND DISTRIBUTION SYSTEMS, INC. (SEPDC)
4 — A GAME-FREE I’M OK—YOU’RE OK DEMOCRATIC CASE METHOD TEACHING AND LEARNING PROCESS THAT COULD 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.†— KOKO
See and read more about KOKO, the gorilla who knew over 1,000 words.
1 — RECENT EXISTENTIAL ARTICLES, IDEAS, AND COMMENTS BY HUMANS ABOARD SPACESHIP EARTH
February 29, 2024
Here’s a major elephant in the room most USians do not want to talk about. — RJS
“Joe Biden wants you to believe that spending money on weapons is good for the economy. That tired old myth — regularly repeated by the political leaders of both parties — could help create an even more militarized economy that could threaten our peace and prosperity for decades to come. Any short-term gains from pumping in more arms spending will be more than offset by the long-term damage caused by crowding out new industries and innovations, while vacuuming up funds needed to address other urgent national priorities.” — by William Hartung
“War is Bad for You…and the Economy,†by William Hartung, COUNTERPUNCH, https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/02/28/war-is-bad-for-you-and-the-economy/?fbclid=IwAR1dJMKxyHl23bxDgYrVFev_zbUzitdkKf-Yg7m-enTG0weF206MPiqS_C0.
February 29
“Putin is responsible for Alex Navalny’s death. Again, this is true but irrelevant to the subject at hand. Whether or not Russian agents had anything to do with Navalny’s poisoning in 2020, the regime did try him on trumped up charges and did imprison him in a colony on the Arctic Circle, where he died at the age of 47. This was a tragedy but not a great surprise. With the brief exception of the Gorbachev regime (1985-1991), Russian rulers from the czars onward have often persecuted domestic dissenters, and Putin’s government is no exception. But this does not constitute a threat to Europe unless one is a neo-con ideologue trying to construct a neo-Cold War struggle between “democratic†and “authoritarian†blocs.” — Richard E. Rubenstein
“More Anti-Russian Hysteria From the New York Times,†by Richard E. Rubenstein, COUNTERPUNCH, https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/02/29/more-anti-russian-hysteria-from-the-new-york-times/?fbclid=IwAR1oS1qSajmobS5eiM3Z_Kvsouwcz7JkDT2NH5ZxBAcb-pmT1LzGaav3w84.
February 29, 2024
“In the minds of many, the US state of Vermont is an idyllic place of trees, mountains, ski resorts, craft beer and people with lots of money. In all honesty, Vermont does have its share of all these things. However, like any other place in the world’s capitalist economy, they come at a price. Until recently, that price was mostly hidden from the bulk of Vermont’s residents and even more of its visitors. However, the combination of the COVID-19 pandemic and the drastic reordering of that capitalist economy that followed has revealed the ugly underside of Vermont’s picture-book reality. Like most of the rest of the world, the unhoused live on the streets of the state’s small cities, panhandling, living out their lives’ dramas and wondering where they can sleep out of the cold. An epidemic of drug addiction uglier than any I have ever seen makes its presence known in those streets, in the property crime statistics and in the numbers of overdoses reported by various public health officials and police. Given the visual evidence, I can’t help but wonder how many more addicts hide behind their rural and suburban homes.
“As is all too often the case across our nation, Vermont’s governor is joining the chorus of those calling for more people to be put in prison because the media and various conservative groups are exaggerating the crime situation in Vermont. The question is how many liberal legislators will go along with the governor’s alarmist and reactionary rhetoric. Already, how to respond to the rise in illegal activity in the state’s largest city, Burlington, is becoming a major election issue in the contest between the candidates.” — Ron Jacobs
“Unchained Capitalism: A Demonic Theology,†by Ron Jacobs, COUNTERPUNCH, https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/02/29/unchained-capitalism-a-demonic-theology/.
February 23, 2024
A Ray of Light
I have watched and listened to this video for the second time all the way through, and I do not think it’s bullshit, and I have read much of Jeremy Griffin’s 595-page well-thought, well-reasoned, well-researched, well-crafted, well-documented, well-presented book, entitled Freedom. Griffin provides the best summary answers i have seen and heard explaining how Earthian human states of affairs got as “upset” (Griffin’s word) as they are and what must be done to make corrections. This video is not a book sales pitch. His book Freedom really is free. You can download it to your desktop free at www.humancondition.com. Jeremy Griffin is an Australian biologist, inventor, entrepreneur, researcher, author, and speaker who has done some serious thinking about human behavior. He presents his case with his authentic Australian accent speaking and writing in a straightforward manner devoid of manipulation, hyperbole, and drama, backed by a well-funded and well-organized ethical worldwide movement. This video is well worth a watch and listen and the free book is well worth a read. I guarantee you have never seen a book like Freedom. — RJS
“The Breakthrough Biological Explanation of the Human Condition,†by Jeremy Griffin,, a video interview, WORLD TRANSFORMATION MOVEMENT, https://www.humancondition.com/?fbclid=IwAR1LMWMVfLVXd7QXbyScoojIpJ4WjJyrz001duKz1UdqcuckDhdzt1rfDtA.
February 25
Jeremy Griffin is the first international thinker I remember explicitly pointing out that a solution to the current Earthian human “upset” (Griffin’s word) cannot be solved overnight by a magic bullet like socialism or fascism. He says it will probably take several generations to change the current brainwashing of Earthian humans to create a new way of life lived by loving and cooperative Earthian humans instead of the current way of life lived by selfish, aggressive, competitive Earthian humans. — RJS
“The Human Condition and Fix the World,†by Jeremy Griffin, a video of endorsements, https://www.facebook.com/worldtransformationmovement/videos/6100488106723694.
February 25
“If Gaza falls, all Palestinians in the rest of Palestine will become the new target for Israeli violence, ethnic cleansing and, if necessary, genocide.
“Reducing all these issues to that of finding creative political solutions that would merely sell false hope to the Palestinian people is not only ignorant, or devious, but also a diversion from the real issue: Israel’s Zionist ideology.
“Zionism, like all racist colonial ideologies, operates with a zero-sum approach to their relationship with the natives of colonized land: dominance through ethnic cleansing and genocide.
“For ‘long-term peace’ to take place, Zionism must end.” — Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is “These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons†(Clarity Press, Atlanta). Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA), Istanbul Zaim University (IZU). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net
“’Two-State Solution’ as a Distraction: The Problem is Zionism,†by Ramzy Baroud, COUNTERPUNCH, https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/02/23/two-state-solution-as-a-distraction-the-problem-is-zionism/?fbclid=IwAR2ErtiDWTuktaDOS9_TISbhAzfD3u-LJQyvsep-RWDz9_onYTm6yw9-v7U.
February 24
Yuk
“The Fastest Warming on Earth,†by Robert Hunziker, COUNTERPUNCH, https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/02/23/the-fastest-warming-on-earth/?fbclid=IwAR2SoBKuBD4wtVn0E9iP7YdLZAJFL0877lx4UIGJyNLDmMADU5wJ2dFhzmI.
February 23
How many USians just want to watch the US burn to the ground? — RJS
“The researchers came up with a term to describe the motivation behind these all-purpose conspiracy mongers. They called it the “need for chaos,†which they defined as “a mindset to gain status†by destroying the established order. In their study, nearly a third of respondents demonstrated a need for chaos, Petersen said. And for about 5 percent of voters, old-fashioned party allegiances to the Democratic Party or the Republican Party melted away and were replaced by a desire to see the entire political elite destroyed—even without a plan to build something better in the ashes.
“’These [need-for-chaos] individuals are not idealists seeking to tear down the established order so that they can build a better society for everyone,’ the authors wrote in their conclusion. ‘Rather, they indiscriminately share hostile political rumors as a way to unleash chaos and mobilize individuals against the established order that fails to accord them the respect that they feel they personally deserve.’ To sum up their worldview, Petersen quoted a famous line from the film The Dark Knight: ‘Some men just want to watch the world burn’.†— Derek Thompson, The Atlantic
“The Americans Who Need Chaos,†by Derek Thompson, THE ATLANTIC, https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/the-americans-who-need-chaos/ar-BB1iLqx6?ocid=socialshare&fbclid=IwAR3sTDzY9J90QrPNFbvoOKQctAC8jhlFkg9TYmYpfX37DVfIXmHcuw934HU.
February 23
Barbarity and Insanity — RJS
“’We Didn’t Get All The Way There On Jan 6’: Trump Booster Pledges to End Democracy in CPAC Rant as Bannon Cheers On,†by Jennifer Bowers Bahney, MEDIAITE, https://www.mediaite.com/trump/welcome-to-the-end-of-democracy-trump-booster-jack-posobiec-vows-to-finish-what-began-on-jan-6-as-steve-bannon-cheers-on/?fbclid=IwAR1erMWgHDd_H9SbZHIA92UeryI72iJKHoKlPPVyvdP8CuJkY0Btv7c-AW0.
February 23
Parasitical all right — RJS
“Unheeded Urban Warnings,†by Gray Brechin, COUNTERPUNCH, https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/02/22/unheeded-urban-warnings/?fbclid=IwAR0OBBJz91Tj1daAD_sJLprG10qKSSYFkNVRxloWdCQ4TkUjSHia04nn7cI.
February 23
Another excellent summary article by the indefatigable Paul Street tying together loose ends to let Earthian humans know what is really going on, as if that makes much difference, given the robot-like programmed beliefs and behaviors of most Earthian humans, ensconced in their worm hole tunnels of existence caused by infinite concatenations of cause-effect chains all around Earth, shut off from relevant outside information inputs. — RJS
“500,000 Dead and Maimed in Ukraine, Enough Already,†by Paul Street, COUNTERPUNCH, https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/02/22/500000-dead-and-maimed-in-ukraine/?fbclid=IwAR3CXUdjAtI1e1YK1o7xv4bLfQcUyMCcRSp4ggKWix3q3lPdmFQKHEhDlxc.
February 21
Why a two-state solution cannot work
I posted on my Facebook page about this several weeks ago. It seems obvious to me that a two-state solution cannot work. How could it? How could you possibly fairly divide what Israel has conquered and stolen since 1948 into two plots of ground that would satisfy both ethnic groups? This would entail millions of Jews moving back into what would be called Israel from what would be called Palestine. No, only a one state solution stands a snowball’s chance in hell of creating a fair and sustainable solution. It would entail changing the name of the whole plot of ground to something that would be acceptable to both Zionists and Palestinians, writing a new constitution fair to both ethnic groups who could live wherever they wanted in the whole plot of ground, and Jews giving back to individual Palestinians land and houses Zionists stole since 1948. This solution might not stand a snowball’s chance in hell either, but at least it might melt slower than the two state absurdity. — RJS
“CRITICAL CONDITIONS
“Instead of pushing for a two-state outcome that has almost no prospect of materializing, Washington should recognize the current reality and use its influence to enforce adherence to international laws and norms by all parties. The United States has long avoided holding Israel to those standards; the Biden administration has gone further, shielding Israel from the United States’ own laws. (In January, an investigation by The Guardian found that since 2020, the U.S. State Department had used “special mechanisms†to continue providing weapons to Israel despite a U.S. law prohibiting assistance to foreign military units involved in gross human rights violations.) That needs to change. Simply by upholding the rules-based liberal international order, Washington could do much to mitigate the darkest injustices of the present situation. Such an approach would not be about Washington dictating what the Israelis and the Palestinians should do. Rather, it is about ending the anomalous practice of using significant U.S. resources to empower behavior that the U.S. finds objectionable and that even conflicts with U.S. interests.” — Foreign Affairs, read more in the article below
“The Two-State Mirage,†by Marc Lynch and Shibley Tehami, FOREIGN AFFAIRS, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/israel/two-state-mirage-gaza-palestinians-lynch?utm_medium=social&fbclid=IwAR3gTD6FYZlwPLsuOqG1_F-8bKzNxEalIVJftNdsPYXuS54B45RCjV4KE3M.
February 13
Not only an army general but a USian president — RJS
“Ulysses S. Grant: Speech at the Annual Reunion of the Society of the Army of Tennessee at Des Moines, Iowa, 29 September 1875″, by Mike Marion, https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10229678728819934&set=a.3225424401929.
February 13
“Sapolsky says that we have no choice in how to react and respond to a situation. According to him, there is no such thing as free will, Sapolsky argues that “Put all the scientific results together from all the relevant scientific disciplines, and there’s no room for free will.â€
“The lack of free will, he says, means that people are not accountable for their good or bad behaviors, a perspective that has attracted some skepticism.
“’If we ‘freely’ choose to do something but there was never a possibility of choosing something else, we’re not free. And if we’re not free, Sapolsky says, there is no more reason to castigate a killer than to punish a broken machine. Killers should receive medical and psychological treatment to address the larger issues that caused the problem,†Stanford magazine states about Sapolsky’s concept of the absence of free will in humans.” —Marjorie Hecht
“Prepared Learning: What Are Humans Hard-Wired for at Birth,†by Marjorie Hecht, COUNTERPUNCH, https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/02/12/prepared-learning-what-are-humans-hard-wired-for-at-birth/?fbclid=IwAR1CJAjdt3jmZc0OuYuAE5k4mqs8zu637C3CHLC_DAPQhlhqViRuNz_vQcY.
February 13
Perspectives on economics and politics
About 25 percent of USian eligible voters are Republican Trumpites; about 25 percent of USian eligible voters are traditional Biden Democrats; about 40 percent of USian eligible voters are Independents; about 10 percent of eligible USian voters are left-leaning Democrats and Moderate Republicans.
If a USian presidential candidate such as Cornel West, RFK Jr, Gavin Newsome, Gretchen Whitcomb, Elizabeth Warren, or Jill Stein could receive 60 percent of the votes of eligible Independents, left-learning Democrats, and moderate Republicans she or he could win the USian presidential race of 2024, without stealing votes from traditional Biden Democrats.
Forces of change are more likely to foster a more peaceful and sustainable Spaceship Earth than forces of conformity. One can build a case in the real world of economics and politics there is no such thing as right or wrong, that there is merely functioning, OK, Not-OK, or Not at all.
If only the US had a rank-order system of voting USians would have truer democracy; but, alas, if only a frog had wings….
Unfortunately fascist forces in the US through time have done their best to eliminate democratic processes via petty rules in the US to gain unfair advantages for themselves in competitive endeavors, working for their own selfish interests rather than for the interests of all citizens, sub-optimizing, damaging the whole by debilitating a part. — RJS
read more…
“West is Best,†by Richard John Stapleton, EFFECTIVE LEARNING REPORT, https://blog.effectivelearning.net/west-is-best/?fbclid=IwAR2mirkX02eDvFScsGmROlOG6rnBwZ6gEjAKy9GImmITzQVTC6YjnPAQtj8.
August 24, 2023
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.
“Earthian Empowerment Systems,” by Richard John Stapleton, EFFECTIVE LEARNING REPORT,
2 — OPINION OF 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.
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 or so billion Earthian humans alive on Earth has required so many goods and services to be produced to satisfy human biological and psychological needs and wants and so much carbon-based fuel to be burned to produce the goods that the climate of Spaceship Earth has been altered by carbon dioxide and methane 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.
3 — TOWARD THE CO-CONSTRUCTION OF SUSTAINABLE EARTHIAN PRODUCTION AND DISTRIBUTION SYSTEMS, INC. (EPDC)
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 systems used around Spaceship Earth that have historically empowered fickle, egotistical, greedy, power mad, grandiose, poorly educated, not-very-bright individual Earthian humans to make existential decisions affecting the OKness of thousands, millions, and billions of humans around Earth, that have been used over and over again for millennia, resulting in incredible losses and suffering at various moments of history caused by the unfair and indiscriminate inexorable tunneling out of bad, ok, or good luck for hundreds, thousands, millions, or billons of Earthian humans around Spaceship Earth, resulting from the cosmic evolution commencing with a big bang some fourteen billion years ago. Humans thus far in Earthian human history have not been caused to develop knowledge and decisions that prevents them from empowering greedy, selfish, power mad, narcissistic, not very bright leaders in their largest management systems over and over again.
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.
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, analogical arguing about facts using reasoning of all kinds, dealing with Earthian human existential states of affairs over a relatively long period of time. Yet, this rarely happens.
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 a meaningless drift in the infinity of time and space.
What is God? Whatever it was that caused the universe to exist.
For more information on the use of Transactional Analysis to create better discussion groups and democratic processes read Born to Learn: A Transactional Analysis of Human Learning
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 “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.
Read As the Rooster Crows Earthian OKness Increases.
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,
Max CjXj, s.t. AijXj ≤, =, or ≥ Bi,
explained in “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc.†.
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 I’M OK—YOU’RE OK DEMOCRATIC TEACHING AND LEARNING PROCESS THAT COULD PRODUCE DEMOCRATIC DISCUSSIONS, LEARNING, AND POLICY FORMULATION AROUND EARTH
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 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 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-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 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. “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, 2001, 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€
After this research was published, Georgia Southern in 2001 added study production, learning production, and expected grades questions to the student evaluation form used campus-wide.
“Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations†has by now (March 2, 2024) been cited as a reference in 90 refereed journal articles concerned about the ethics of student evaluations in several academic disciplines, including 15 new citations since April 2021, proving the article is still being read and used by educators.
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.
For more on Stapleton’s cultural, educational, and professional experiences see “RJS Academic Vita,â€
Feel free to share this journal any way you see fit.