Radical Man

Seminal work on the psychology of self development applied to social development. This includes the personal, political, and corporate realms.

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https://openlibrary.org/works/OL3627017W/Radical_man

Notes

• We nearly all become authoritarian in situations of sufficient danger or perplexity
  • Imagine what the world would be like if the cultural norm became open collaborative in response to high danger and perplexity
• Uncreative persons fail to risk, and miss the peak experience of reconciled opposites. The only way the uncreative tastes such glory - is under siege conditions
• Radical man tastes death by leaping into unbelievable chasms - hence the growth.
• Authoritarian miltance substitutes for the contrast between reconciled polarities
• Most of our sensations are sharpened by contrast - hence our drive to the gap
• Liberals may devolve to authoritarian behavior when they encounter problems of communication too great for their level of development.
• Egalitarian dialectic aiming towards a synergistic and just merging of the opposites
• Self-transcendence comes to those who say something different
• Why should a proponent of eternal verities change his message?
• Conservatism glowing deficiency is its shortage of articulate spokesmen
• Pursuing goals which constitute public symbols of success seems to lower the amount of self-actualization experienced. Status frustration, alienation, poor life satisfaction.
• Left rebels not for nothing. There is an expectation of a higher fulfillment.
• 253 - self-transcendence as a test of acting rightly towards others
• 252 - the ingenuity of anticommunism lies in taking the widest, most feared distance - and substituting it with more proximal, though smaller distances.
• When a group of 500 acclaims an object, such as a flag, it creates a sense of unity with negligible risk, or learning.
• Where distances are shirt, interactions are safe, structured, predictable.
• Conservatives have nothing but kind words for the family, community, church, chamber of commerce, etc.
• 249 - conservatives call to close ranks against the enemy. Use objects to symbolize the unity of shared values
• Dogmatics do not reject on ethnicity as much as belief. Trump has black friends.
• The rigid claim they are besieged
• Dogmatic - refusing to integrate singular conflicting data into their current set
• B, Rokeach, The Open and Closed Mind
• Despair about the human condition is also found among the less educated conservatives of the right and left, but serves a different purpose: that he should be deservedly abandoned
• Radical man permitted human suffering to flood periodically over his consciousness
• 244 - conservatives view getting help as losing freedom, while libs see help as liberation
• 242- in the radical view the failings of man are seen as a failure of the system that compromises moral competence - not failure of the individual
• 241 - truth is insufficiently profitable.
• There are limits to the extent that conservatives allow each other to be competent
• 240 - morally competent - or full of superior moral purpose?
• 240 - need inviolacy - fear of letting one's true needs be known
• 233-Classical conservatism - rejection of human needs in favor of moral imperatives
• Radical Man rejects conservatism in all of its guises
• Leszek Kolakowski describes his radical opposition to communism
• 232 - radicals value psycho-social development, while conservative value it less if at all
• 223 - discusses the fixed mindset tests, and scores of commies, left, right, center, and non-activists are shown on p224. Can use these tests for Growth Mindset
• 221 - Milton Rokeach devised a test for dogmatic though patterns. Commies, fascists, and religious fundamentalists scored high.
• 218 - pro-gov and anti-gov results in a mixed government satisfying moderates and liberals, with only right extremists favoring solely free enterprise and only left extremists wanting the complete welfare state
• 217 - in politics - radical behavior. Most conservative and some left proscribe the anxiety necessary for development. High levels of psycho-social dev correspond to certain kinds of political radicalism
• 207 - promoti young anxiety tolerance is a mature behavior
• Anomie
• The Scanlon Plan - empowring workers to be creative and sharing gains with them
• 'The Hawthorne Effect' - experiment described in known book, Management and the Worker - on how improved productivity comes from taking workers into a radicalization setting
• 183 - The fact that radicalization o of human relationships can increase profitability does not mean that corporations appreciate this fact
• 179 - Education involves the process of relinquishing authority over the young in tune with their growing needs for freedom.
• declaring a morotorium on routine busy work - a critique of university.
• 178 - from a developmental point of view, win-lose games corrupt both the winner and loser alike
• 176 - Robert Blake and Jane Mouton - on role of win-lose dynamics, which are regressive. Interesting comparison to standard competitions.
• The post-Sputnik emphasis on science and technology may be mass-producing anomic men. Have we become a nation of mechanical tinkerers with a shriveled self-hood, each constructing a tiny piece of the largest military-technical complex the world has known?
• 174 Intuitive perceiver is superior performer in Myer Briggs. Note - observe the conservative forces do not like psychosocial progress. Heavy thinkers are typically anomic - do not like personal discussion. Man, you can see that so clearly with the Russians.
• 174 - Sensation-intuition of Myers Briggs. Sensation is scientific observation. Intuition is holistic, involves feelings.
• 174 - Technically trained staff experts don't respond well to t-groups. Is this how we weed out those not willing to grow? Humanize the technocrats!
• 142 - it is common for a ship designed by geniuses to be operated by idiots
• 140 - Morals (stage 6) is not understood by Law and Order.
• 134 - a system with technological and economic ends is not designed for psychosocial integration
• 133 - Students of Business administration have been found lower on Independence and civil liberties
• 130 - structure in an org must support psycho-social dev; rebels will require this. Org norms can and should change as the Enterprise grows
• 123 - majority of adults are at stages 3-4 of Kohlberg's scale - and they cannot comprehend 2 stages above. Scary.
• 116 - trust comes from openness and vulnerability, and a good ability to assess trustworthiness of others, setting up a climate of trust. One can afford to trust if he has spare capacity and high survival capacity.
• 112 - both dissenters and conformers are equally mentally healthy, but conformers can be destabilized more easily?
• 106 -Those of us who needlessly accept the commands of authority cannot yet claim to be civilized men.o
• P120- Kohlberg's moral judgment scale. For obedience vs rebelliousness (principles)
• P148 - definition of creative vs uncreative research engineering departments
• P192 - Theory Y - on making workers self-mamging and thus growing in responsibility.
• Asch and Crutchford experiment showed that integrity drops from 80% to 40% as people want to confirm to others' views. See p. 98.
• Those who rebelled at the Milgram Experiment were more developed psycho-social than the obedient majority. 78% pulled the trigger for horrendous pain, 65% at life-threatening pain. 30% would knowingly torture - actually force the subject's hand to the shock plate! Consistent with the The Best and the Brightest. It would be interesting to see how the same test would fare at a more earthy A&M university, or at a more progressive school. P. 99.
• Totalitarians are willing to subject themselves to a strong authority to repair them by force? P.93
• Another source of meaningless and repetitive activity is the work that many people must do
• Competence is enhancing the development of others
• Individualism and cooperation are only two of the many false dichotomies over which men deadlock and thereby proclaim their psycho-social infancy.