Tag Archives: Psychosynthesis

Finale of the Dangerous Mindset Trilogy: Spreading the Contagion to Fundamentally Alter How We Think and Live

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How many of you read the comment this past week by Christiana Figueres, head of the UN’s Framework on Climate Change, on how much easier it is for a dictatorship like China to do what the UN insists is necessary to deal with climate change? Many people wondered where the mental governor was that would have prevented such a politically inept statement, but immersion in the taxpayer-funded institutions seeking wholesale transformation globally seems to make the people involved tone-deaf about the ramifications and validity of what they are advocating for. The same directness about intentions and acceptable methods can be found in the related 50+20 Agenda of Management Education for the World. Let’s take a look at the future being envisioned by the current K-12 and college “reforms” so that we can become the “content, unified” people who are “ultimately cooperative” in a “well-organized civilization working towards the singular goal of sustainability.” http://www.unprme.org/resource-docs/5020ManagementEducationfortheWorld.pdf

We can see where the jet-setting bureaucrats could begin to believe they are entitled to strong arm people into new sets of values and morals and beliefs. After all they have decided they are working toward a “world worth living in.” One that of course benefits them instead of us, but then we are not supposed to read the small print. With 12 years or so of obuchenie ‘teaching and learning’ and ‘guided reflection’, even if future graduates do read the small print, few will appreciate what is wrong with such intentions.

“Everything within the State” as a motto of a very dark period in World History simply won’t be part of the syllabus of coursework or approved, pre-supplied Enduring Understandings. This time there will be the collaboratory of leaders working together with all stakeholders to ‘solve’ the world’s complex problems as they arise and plan the future. If things do not turn out as envisioned, adjustments can be made. It’s not like such a history-blind approach would be squandering national resources or committing permanent Mind Arson or anything.

In case you don’t recognize the significance of same of the names quoted in that report, they include Peter Senge’s Society for Organizational Learning-SOL-and his long-time collaborator Otto Scharmer (who has his own tag plus his Capitalism 3.0 tag). We also have Howard Gardner of Multiple Intelligences and Harvard’s Project Zero and Joseph Stiglitz who took part in Anthony Gidden’s Global Third Way Debate book and panel that we have looked at as well as heading the Subjective Well-Being (also tagged) panel that commenced in 2009 at French President Nicholas Sarkozy’s request. So please don’t tell me that this vision is unrelated to the so-called Great Transition or that the transformative learning described is not related to the US Common Core or the Australian Core Skills or the Canadian Learning for a Sustainable Future. It’s all the same interconnected ‘transdisciplinary’ vision and we will remain imperiled until we begin to realize this better.

There’s a Goethe expression that keeps being quoted as part of this transformative vision. It goes “Knowing is not enough, we must apply. Willing is not enough, we must do.” We also need to take it to heart before deliberately kept ignorant credentialed Change Agents, and business professors who don’t understand how economies work, and self-interested politicians and their cronies and consultants blow up what currently works.  We saw numerous well-compensated false statements in out last post, and PRME quoting, with pictures, George Bernard Shaw’s statement that “We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future” suggests we need to keep our Ignoramus alert gauges firmly in our hands at all times in 2014.

If K-12 education reforms like the Common Core or blended learning or the college tour at that expensive Ivy League school confessed that the “time has come to initiate a fundamental change in the way we think and live,” the alarm bells that need to be going off now would start to peal in more people’s minds. And they would properly keep their wallets shut. Which is precisely why no one in school or higher ed administration or the public sector is being that honest. We have to rely on sleuthing like those Great Transition documents or unwise declarations like Giddens conceding that actual temperature changes do not really matter, it’s just all an excuse for desired social, political, and economic changes in the West. The “Management Education for the World: An Agenda” report is much the same way. Because it is linked but tangential to the area of most people’s focus, its authors are brutally honest about the entire picture.

Making the purpose of K-12 being ‘Career-Ready’ takes on new meaning if management education globally has been simultaneously tasked with the “transformation of business and the economy” so that it serves what the politicians and planners in academia and think-tanks determine to be “serving the common good.” No more relying on consumers and individual choices. It rather puts a new light on selling K-12 education reforms as “What Business Wants” when those businesses have been told they get to be established players “in a new kind of society” with “a revised economic framework where business is celebrated for its contribution to society and the world.”

I will take a break in this quote as we think about how dangerous it is to have management students trying to earn degrees and get jobs in business or governments being told they are to “become custodians of society.” [italics here and elsewhere are in original report] It will be quite flattering to a twenty-something ego, but oh-so-dangerous to the rest of us for them to be trained and believe that is their acceptable 21st century role.

Especially when we realize how few will have enough knowledge of history to know what Fascism looks like, what its dangers are, and why people wrote about ‘vampire economies’ in the 30s. This is the rest of the quote that I broke from (top of page 6). Please pay attention because we have to be the ones who recognize all this for the self-interested, rent-seeking, parasitic justifying nonsense that it is. This is not a minor report.

“The starting point for reframing business is to reassign economics to its appropriate status as a subset of a larger system, not its center. We must develop a global society that is supported by the economy, based on a new environmental, societal and economic framework that serves the global common good. Businesses need to become intimately involved in this transformation by accepting challenges and responsibilities that lie beyond short-term economic performance. The purpose of business should be measured through its positive contribution to the transformation of society towards a better world.”

So the envisioned purpose of business in the future is to no longer satisfy customers making voluntary decisions on how to spend their own money. It will be about satisfying the politicians and bureaucrats like Ms Figueres who get to decide what they believe would be a better world based on a misguided fallacy that economies are a finite collection of goods and resources that can simply be rearranged. It is hardly a shock to those of us who have been tracking all the machinations in education over the decades, and the layers of deceit to hide the actual objectives, that the key to all these sought changes is transformative learning. This requires an awareness of the viewpoints of others and how to change our own beliefs, values, and ethics and proceed with action even in the face of uncertainty. “Achieving such awareness” says the report “requires a fundamentally different approach to teaching and learning.”

There’s that obuchenie reference again where we began our trilogy. Essential to what is sought is always “the process of perspective transformation, enabling individuals to revise their beliefs and modify their behavior. We understand transformative learning not only as a rational or intellectual exercise but fundamentally consider personal experience as a critical enabler to trigger a transformation in the participant. Such learning is embedded in the philosophy of whole person learning: respecting a person in their mental, emotional, physical and spiritual dimensions, and recognizing the need to develop all these aspects of the individual in order to progress towards an increasingly integrated and therefore ‘whole’ person.”

Now let’s end this with some of the names in K-12 education for just that very aim that we have covered on this blog. Assagioli called it psychosynthesis. Carol Dweck is doing CCSSI professional development webinars calling it Growth Mindsets. ASCD has a Whole Child Initiative that it wishes to be an essential component of the Common Core implementation. Personal experience is also the project-based learning being pushed now or hands-on science. References to head, heart, hands, and soul are rampant in the rhetoric being used by Superintendents. We called it Triune Consciousness in our League of Innovative Schools research.

Transformative learning and perspective transformation are the real purpose of the K-12 reforms as well as college. It attaches to the same planned alteration of business and the economy as what the 50+20 report describes.

No wonder we have legislators travelling around states bragging about the collusion going on between politicians and education administrators to promote this vision. They would have probably been more careful if they knew we had the rest of the story.

 

Creating King’s Blessed Community Thru Federal Spending, a Curriculum of Affect, and No Rational Mind

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No matter how lofty the rhetoric about the beautiful, idealistic future to be built via education, if the foundation is mind arson and a refusal to teach reading well because it might foster an independent mind, the future will be one of exploiting people. If governments are directing the economy, who gets what will become parasitic. If I want someone to regularly buy my legal services or tap my knowledge, I have to be good. I better be right. And I ought to be polite and congenial to work with. That’s the private marketplace.

When the public sector controls and pays itself with taxpayer money or incurs debt, power is all that matters. And people get paid not for what they know or can do but for what they are willing to do. Or push. Or advocate for. Even if it’s a terrible idea. Beyond the inherent political favoritism of which companies get chosen when politicians and bureaucrats make economic decisions instead of consumers, there’s no real personal penalty for being wrong or wasteful or pushing abusive ideas like a psychological approach to education grounded in research from the Soviet Union. If the charitable foundations with their compounding annually, untaxed assets push socially and economically destructive ideas, there will still be money for salaries and benefits and more destructive grants next year.

That may all be obvious but it creates huge problems with the idea of research universities, government agencies, politicians, nonprofits, and connected Big Business collaborating and coordinating together to direct a new kind of 21st century economy and society. Only the parasites are getting seats at the decision-making table or they can greatly outvote the productive sector that ultimately has to fund it all. Making my own way in the private economy, I have to get the big picture and appreciate likely consequences. Even the hard to foresee ones. But there’s really no incentive for someone who gets paid for what they push on others from the public trough to figure out what the consequences will be. The only consequence that counts is the inability to get a lucrative consulting contract or research grant or promotion. That’s what controls. It’s why dirigiste economies ultimately produce stagnancy if not worse.

So Sunday and Monday I was at the first ever (co)lab, A Collaborative Leadership Summit in Atlanta with all sorts of Big Business sponsorship. It was to be the template for what is to go on in other cities to push this new economic/social vision for the future. Tom Friedman flew in to give the closing address and Sir Ken Robinson and Tony Wagner from Harvard were just two of the famous education reformers who laid out the ed component for getting to the new desired future. The Fulton County School District’s Conversion Charter that I have been so horrified by ever since I read it was featured as a key component of getting to this reimagined society. A woman by the name of April Rinne spoke on the collaboration, support economy of the future. And since she is also with the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders, there’s our link of what Atlanta inaugurated and what went on a week earlier in Dalian, China (Sept 18, 2013 post).

When I went to look into the whole concept of collaborative leadership a bit more, I discovered it is being pushed hard globally by the same group that planned that Dalian conference.   http://www.managementexchange.com/hack/stone-soup-global-leadership-new-model-collaborative-leadership-address-today%E2%80%99s-global-challeng Ah, sustainability as the excuse for government control of the economy. That was another key component of the (co)lab vision of the future. I could spend the next few weeks laying out all the troubling aspects of what was presented as The Vision for Our Collective Future. Like it or not, here it comes. No more of an emphasis on the individual and making their own choices. This is an imposed vision and education with a curriculum of affect designed to make students either like it or simply accept it as inevitable. Hopefully though they will act to help make it so, completely unaware of what I laid out in the first few paragraphs of this post.

I want to focus today on a comment in just one of the speeches. It was so inspiring to the audience the speaker got a standing ovation. I sat there in horror though wondering precisely what was coming at Atlanta and the rest of the country in the name of honoring Martin Luther King, Jr. Now I have encountered and written about so many examples of the communitarian mindsets the real Common Core implementation seeks to instill. So when the speaker, after pitching the need for all of us to develop empathy for all others so they no longer seem to be the ‘other’ and the need to ‘hold multiple truths’ at the same time (I wondered if maybe she had been listening to Robert Kegan describing his 4th Stage Consciousness or reading Psychosynthesis), then brought up the “blessed community,” I was very uneasy. She said (co)lab and what was being discussed there were supposed to help make Atlanta the “living embodiment of MLK’s ‘blessed community.”

Now I was already going to look that up when I got home even before the next line. Creating that ‘beloved community’ was going to require “qualitative change in our souls as well as quantitative change in our lives.” Sounds like wholesale noetic change and then redistribution. Well, I have heard that pitch so many times in recent years and it never bodes well. Change what we feel, believe, value, wish for, and how we live. How comprehensive that is. How transformative. How personally intrusive.  That’s also the goal Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers had that we have covered and for similar reasons. It’s the goal of the humanistic education and the Curriculum of Affect. I have those Ford Foundation financed visions from the 60’s that we will go over in the next post.

What I did not know though is that there were so many people waiting to finalize King’s ‘blessed community’ revolution of civil society and the economy. Conducted through the schools and in the name of the disadvantaged and saving the inner Cities where ever they are located. The most explicit layout of what is really being contemplated dovetails with what King-aide Bayard Rustin laid out in 1965 that we discussed here   http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/commencing-the-long-sought-bloodless-coup-via-education-to-make-equality-for-all-a-fact/ But the MLK ‘blessed community’ vision that virtually duplicates what we have learned to associate with little ‘c’ Marxist Humanism is described here http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/a-conspiracy-of-hope/the-beloved-community-of-martin-luther-king as being where Dr King had gone in the last two years of his life. And it is this vision that (co)lab and Fulton’s charter and the described reforms consistent with changing the purpose of education are now unquestionably linked to.

When the vision attached to education reforms or political reforms to restructure the nature of cities is attached to language about ” a new more human society” with ‘new values” we all need to pay attention. That aspiration has never worked out well. In the name of avoiding exploitation and oppression and achieving justice and equality, the exact opposites occur because political power and its ability to coerce with minimal consequences to the pushers become dominant. But there is such reverence now for King. Will anyone recognize in time the dangers of blindly advocating for fulfilling his vision “to develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole”?

What about putting the public sector and charitable foundations in charge of shifting us all from a “thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society?” Wouldn’t a curriculum of affect grounded in psychology as the new focus of education be a useful tool for that goal?

We are all being hurdled towards uprooting what we have now to design and create anew. And most people are not in the meetings where this is being laid out at. And there are lots of lies being told in meetings we are at to cover this up so we do not rebel before it is all done. And most of the people advocating for all this are doing it because such advocacy is their livelihood.

No one getting paid to push this has to bear the likely atrocious long-term consequences and they have no incentive to even be aware of them. The people who do have to bear the consequences are largely unaware of what is even intended.

Which is why my typing fingers are getting calloused and my voice hoarse from trying to sound the alarm in time.

As soon as I hear it or see it or read it. Sometimes all three like this time.

 

Shifting the Way People Relate and Feel Towards One Another is the Crucial Leverage Point

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When we encounter the exact same point being made over the decades despite dramatic differences in circumstances and intervening events, we have located an important handmaiden to ideology. So before we talk about what is intended, let’s go back to 1983 for some wisdom from a veteran European observer of what were the methods of choice during the Cold War. That great ideological struggle that my research says morphed in its strategies and tools but never vanished as we were led to believe. In his book Why Democracies Perish, Jean-Francois Revel has a chapter on “Ideological Warfare and Disinformation.” Since I believe education and especially this forced, largely invisible, psychological emphasis of changing personal values, attitudes, feelings, and dispositions was, and is, a means of ideological warfare, I looked for some advice from the past.

“its job is to fight propaganda not with counterpropaganda but with truth. Unfortunately, this is not something democracies are good at.

They are disadvantaged from the start by the long odds against halting the spread of utopian notions with plain facts. [http://futurewewant.org/ is a link to an example of how ed reform globally is now intertwined with these utopian visions of the future]. And they are unskilled in defending themselves against communism’s falsification of these very facts. [Today it is the idea that the crisis of 2008 and the global downturn proves free markets do not work and the public sector must intervene even more]. As weapons in the ideological war, propaganda and disinformation have a double objective: to concoct false images of Communist reality and of its leaders’ intentions and to circulate through the non-Communist world the plausible lies and deformed versions of events best calculated to disorganize the world.”

Disorganize the world. Still useful if you want economic and political power. When I first read a description of Transformational Outcomes Based education and watched it being pushed in the 90s all over the world everywhere with a tradition of liberty and cherishing individualism it struck me as a coordinated attempt to gain unilateral intellectual disarmament. When I read Psychosynthesis complaining about how those “who identify themselves with their mind and are proud of their intelligence” have “lopsided development” that is difficult to change but those with a “loose self-identity” are more adaptable and amenable to change it gave me pause.

Let’s use education to force a laying down of that mighty weapon–the human mind–lest it develop changes in unapproved directions. We may not be dealing with Capital C Communism anymore but we certainly are dealing with a ruling elite wanting to use the financial and coercive powers of the public sector globally to dictate what any of us can be, or become, or perhaps even do, in the future.

And the media, educators, and NGOs like the UN and the OECD or the World Wildlife Fund are all definitely spreading plausible lies and deformed versions of events that are easy to challenge with truth if enough people are aware and still have Axemaker Minds. Did you know though that there was ” a great and important law of the psychological life?” Roberto Assagioli laid it out in just that language  in Psychosynthesis as a tool to be used to “achieve the right inner attitude toward other people and to successfully perform intended actions involving others.” What Assagioli called the “loving will.”

Doesn’t that aim sound almost the same as what  Maslow and Rogers and the NEA started pushing in 1962 as the new focus of education where “the important thing is not the specific method used but rather the way people relate and feel toward one another in the classroom?” And this change was important because “pessimistic views regarding the nature of man and methods of discouragement have to be discarded. One has to enter wholeheartedly into a cooperative adventure with those involved.” As Revel and others have noted, we are changing only one side in the Cold War or in the dangerous world of 2013 as we glance at Syria and evil on both sides with chemical weapons use staining multiple hands. Only one side is being asked to disarm and just “feel” that all can be fixed if we just “refashion our interpretation of the lived environment so that we can intelligibly act within in it.”

Can we? That last quote has jumped across a time gap of almost 50 years but has the same pursuit. From the UK this time and a report called “Transforming Behaviour Change: Beyond Nudge and Neuromania.” http://www.thersa.org/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/553542/RSA-Transforming-Behaviour-Change.pdf Before we get to that November 2011 report, let’s go back for that great psychological law: “images and mental pictures tend to produce the physical conditions and the external acts corresponding to them.” Another way of saying this is to point out the “immense power of images.” Assagioli says:

“It seems high time that this law should be utilized for higher and more constructive purposes [than advertising is what he means], and the fullest use of it should be made for the purpose of psychosynthesis.”

As I first explored in this post http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/when-gaming-intends-to-shape-and-distort-our-perceptions-of-everything-around-us-viva-la-revolution/ , educators and the ruling elite and those who would like to join have a modern day tool in the computer and adaptive software and especially the coming classroom emphasis around gaming that would have made Assagioli and Maslow drool. No wonder UNESCO sees media education as the means to achieve Marxist Humanism. No wonder CCSSI wants media and digital literacy to be as important as print literacy. The power of images. Especially when schools define ‘engaged learning’ as the goal and immersion in a virtual reality as the means. Then the student can regularly try out utopias or envision potential future catastrophes that MUST be avoided. And precisely what will tell a student that something is in fact unworkable in reality or unlikely to really happen? An actual catastrophe with real lives?

The “Transforming Behaviour Change” report talks about preparing the “brain for social bonding and empathy” but what if we are bonding with bullies who have no desire for Peace in the real world? What if we are being primed to use the “motor-power of imagination” to redesign an economy and society in ways that ultimately cannot maintain the prosperity we will need to consistently keep most people well-fed? Feeling and intuition may create adaptability to transformative change but it is only knowledge that can deal with the inevitable consequences. And personal knowledge is precisely what is being extinguished in order to gain a widespread personality that seeks, or is amenable to, such wholesale change.

“The baby will have disappeared with the bath water” before most of us will even know any water has been drawn. But meanwhile the ruling elite will be “reworking the foundations of economic models” as that 2011 document put it. In a disinterested way of course. No wonder the report keeps mentioning George Soros. We simply use student-centered education to “change your sense of who you are and what you value” and voila! Reimagined human societies and economies can be ours. Education merely needs to create “the development of an inner authority which can ‘write upon’ existing social and psychological productions rather than be ‘written by’ them.”

Maybe we could call that inner authority the common core or triune consciousness (see previous post under that tag) obtained via the techniques of psychosynthesis brought in to achieve a Positive School Climate. All as we chase after this OECD-endorsed utopian vision of “21st Century enlightenment” to get “successful lives in well-functioning societies.”

“Behaviour change becoming an explicit goal of government policy” sounds like something from a science fiction novel, doesn’t it? Not a well-funded initiative of  the present called the Social Brain Project. Never forget please that the US and UK are already working together as lead partners in seeking behavioral, economic, and social change as part of the Belmont Challenge and Future Earth Alliance [see tags] work. Hiding conveniently from prying eyes over in Sweden. So once again this is NOT a matter of pulling together sensational quotes. However, I do intend to end with one more from the Social Brain Project so we can ponder what freedom will mean in such a future vision.

“The ‘Think’ approach is more democratic, and contends that if we deliberate collectively as rational agents responsive to argument, we will find a suitable course of action and collectively follow it through.” Now the Social Brain Project clearly likes all that collective decision-making on behalf of all of us but it thinks the “Think’ approach is too reliant on reason and not enough on the unconscious mind and habits. It wants a ‘steering’ approach to behaviour change that “literally changes the subject.”

The subject is not Algebra or English. It is us and our children.

Being launched via transformative education into a world where our perception of reality and new values and attitudes are to be shaped just as surely by deliberate propaganda as anything a Khrushchev or Brezhnev ever sought to do during the Cold War.