Healing and empowering relationships

"See me, feel me, touch me, heal me"
( From Tommy, the rock opera, by The Who)

A concept that keeps coming up in looking at how relationships take shape and keep their shape as they are recreated daily is that of active vision.

This really needs a term of its own, so maybe I'll call it proactive-vision.

What is involved is a kind of looking and seeing people that is not passive, not like the way a television camera looks. It is a kind of looking that active reaches out and shapes the person or thing that is being "viewed", and helps coax or even force that "external" state into a stable viewable state.

I think you need something like Quantum Mechanics, or advanced database concepts to find scientific examples of this on other scales. In quantum mechanics, for example an electron doesn't really "have" a shape -- it has an infinity of possible shapes and it swims happily in that sea of possibilities UNTIL some crass and cruel OBSERVER comes along and, by the very act of observing, FORCES it to resolve itself into one particular shape. What is unmentioned is that the forcing has a persistent after effect, and now the electron has been forced into that shape even after the observer waltzes away to force some other electron into a single shape.

Photons, or bits of light, also have this kind of behavior -- they can enter an atom and be TENTATIVELY absorbed by the electron shell of the atom, where they sit for a while and see how that goes. If they don't like it there, they can EXIT again, exactly UNDOING what they did on entering so that the final state of the atom is exactly as if the photon was never there at all. (You can do the same thing in advanced databases -- you can execute a transaction that attempts to update all necessary tables, and, if it fails, it automatically is "rolled back" in such a way that it, effectively, never really happened.)

In other words, on at least some scales and some instances, Life or Nature has an amazing ability to try out a billion things at once, see which ones it wants to keep, and then UNdo the (billion minus one) that didn't work out as if they had never happened in the first place. They don't need to be "killed", which would leave a billion dead bodies around, they simply are UN-happened away, to coin a phrase. They are magically made to never have been here in the first place. It is and ASTOUNDINGLY efficient use of resources and, aside from some side effects, is 100% undetectable by most scientific means, because, hey, how can you detect something that never happened in the first place.

It is as if life has a "before you begin" page (one of my pet peeves) that comes in, looks around, goes "Nahh, I guess not", and leaves before it begins, taking the packaging and even the memory of the event with it as it goes, and leaving no hole behind.

Anyway, the point is that PEOPLE seem to have an equivalent sort of affair. By simply sitting and LISTENING to a person, or by LOOKING at them, as the intrusive OBSERVER, you are actually CAUSING their billions of possible states to take shape. WORSE, or BETTER, your framework for vision and your very expectations of WHAT you EXPECT to see actually has an impact in tweaking, nudging, or even FORCING that person into one of the shapes that you EXPECT to see, where they are now stuck, even if they were not there and didn't want to be there in the first place.

OBSERVATION IS INTRUSIVE. There is no such thing as "passive" observation of electrons, nor, I think, of people. Much, or even MOST of what the observer SEES was brought to the scene by the observer, not the observed person.

In other terms, life is just chock FULL of self-fulfilling expectations when it comes to what you see. Especially in situations where someone with higher authority is doing the "looking", this can be a very powerful, even determining, shaping effect.

When Professor Lev ? from Harvard was here giving a talk on Theory X (old style hierarchy) versus Theory Y (new style collaborative) teams, he gave an example where someone asked him, "Well, which is it, are people basically theory X or theory Y?" and his answer was "Yes"...
meaning, your staff or team or employees or children or students are WHATEVER you FORCE THEM or EMPOWER THEM to be by your own expectations and the way you "LOOK" at them.

If you expect them to be unruly, selfish, lazy trouble-makers, and you SEE that in them, and you keep SEEING it and persist it in your own head and mind, you will soon see much more of it because it will embody itself in the real world, and they will BECOME that way. On the other hand, if you expect them to be organized, efficient, helpful, reliable people , and you SEE traces of that and keep on persisting THAT vision of them in your mind, they will become THAT way.

Either one is a self-fulfilling PERCEPTION. This is real. This actually happens.

Reproducible research studies show that, in school, if teachers EXPECT a student to be a good student, odds are very high he or she will turn into one; and if teachers EXPECT a studentn to be bad or a trouble-maker, odds are also very high he or she will turn into one. Again, here is a very strong argument that all forms of prejudice and racism are, in fact, in themselves a kind of hate-crime, causing continual damage to the target group, and effectively FORCING The target group towards or into the very behaviors that are detested.

I recall once, in freshman Chemistry at Cornell, a teaching assistant got it into his head that I had cheated on an exam. He noted that I had simply written down the answer to a problem with no intermediate steps shown. When I explained to him that I had use the technique shown in the book to get the answer, it became apparent that he had not read the book, and further, that he was unwilling to consider the concept that he was wrong and that I was NOT a cheater. He left the meeting with words like "You got away with it this time, but I have my eye on you, and I'll GET you before the term is done!"

That single framework destroyed the rest of the course for me. I had a terrible time. I got migrane headaches when I even thought about going to class and facing him. I felt a tremendous URGE to cheat on exams, even though I don't do that, just because I was being TREATED that way so I might as well behave that way. It was a startlingly strong impulse.
At the end of the course, I literally tore my textbook into small pieces and threw it in the dumpster, along with any desire to EVER take another chemistry course again, EVER. It reshaped my life.

I can only imagine what it must be like to be black in a city where every time you walk into a store, you are followed by security guards who expect you to be shoplifting because you are obviously a thief because you are "one of those people." I can imagine the rage of President Obama's friend when the police forced their way into his house and arrested him because the neighbor reported that an obvious intruder had gone into the house. This is not a passive act, to be continually treated as a criminal or as an enemy of the rich-white-man's-system. If we do it long enough, we can FORCE people into that identity, good people who would never have gone there if not forced to by our prejudiced "observation".

The UPSIDE is that we can similarly EXPECT people to deliver their very best in such a way that we EMPOWER them to do so, and release their latent energy to do so.

Every day, in every observation, in every glance, we challenge or reaffirm our own mental model of other people and apply a persistent pressure on them for them to become the way we think they are.

It's an amazing power we hold.

We need to learn to use it wisely.

We need to expect the other people in our lives to use it wisely too, and close the loop, so that we raise each other up, each day, in a thousand small ways, instead of cutting each other down each day in a thousand small ways.

People become what you SEE them as being. TEAMS become what you SEE Them as being.

And other cultures and nations become what you SEE them as being. If you SEE them as being threats to you, your continued perception of them that way and reaction to them that way draws energy into the universe in such a way that it TURNS them INTO that threat, where you can now feel 100% justified and say, "See, they are bad people, they are troublemakers and worse, they are terrorists, they are trying to kill us, so we should kill them first!"

The totally surprising fact is that, had you seen them as being friends from the start, it is very likely that they would have turned out to be friends.

You, we, all of us, have an AMAZING power to RESHAPE the world around us by the simple act of persistent perception.

This is one reason, for example why holding onto a grudge for past behavior is a terrible thing to do -- it FORCES the person you are mad at to STAY that way, even if they want to change.

I thought the song from the rock-opera Tommy that I headed this piece with was relevant.
"See me, feel me, touch me, heal me" are part of the words of one song in that opera.

We do this every day -- except all too often it's "see me, feel me, touch me, injure me". So often in fact, that, despite the pain of isolation and loneliness, many people today simply want to stay apart from others so they are not damaged MORE by poor expectations and looks that kill.

And, yes, looks can kill. Or heal.

It's something we need to become much more aware of, and literate in managing.


In light of this effect, it's interesting to ponder the impact on President Obama to have received the Noble Peace Prize. Suddenly he has to be aware that the world outside the USA views him in a certain way.

Another implication of this effect has to do with the way we treat people in authority over us, including government officials and corporate managers and officers. If the majority of people treat someone in authority as if they are a self-interested idiot and crook, there are very good odds that the person will turn out to fulfill those expectations.

On the other hand, to treat a boss as a wise person when they are an exploitive fool is not a winning move, nor is it wise on the boss's part to treat staff as if they are competent and caring if they are incompetent and amoral.

These transitions from BAD to GOOD sides of both the boss AND the staff need to occur together. The feedback loops overlap and generate a process that will run to completion, but doesn't care whether it runs UPWARDS, generating greatness on both sides, or runs DOWNWARDS, generating pettiness on both sides.

THE REALLY tricky problem, the one I'm trying to crack using virtual reality, is getting a boss+team that has latched into the DOWN side to transition out of that state and upwards into the UPSIDE state.

The same math applies whether it is a couple trying to fix their relationship, or a workteam trying to fix their working relationships, or a nation and culture trying to fix its working relationships with other nations and cultures.

Downside (bad) states are NOT a "fact of life" -- they persist only because we actively participate in persisting them. THAT is the great hope. They are ACTIVE BEINGS, so there are no constants -- they need to be created and recreated every single new day. The very same people can just as well be latched UPWARDS into a mutually supportive state as latched DOWNWARDS into a mutually destructive state.

This is the logjam we need to get an adequate social mechanism to fix, on a case-by-case basis, whether through therapy or "healing circles" on a domestic relationship level, or on a work-team/boss level within a company.

The downside shape simply BLEEDS wealth and opportunity costs. Companies that begrudge the costs of a $12 pizza for the staff for lunch can waste $10,000 worth of good will by this bleeding shape in the same day, and not bat an eyelash at it.

If there is one thing that needs to be fixed in American industry to make us "competitive" and "thrive" again, it is this problem. If there was only one thing we could teach in our schools and colleges, it should be how to recognize and fix this problem. After that, let the empowered work-teams and domestic-couples tackle the rest of our problems.

It's a two-stage solution pathway, and, I think the right one to pursue.

Racism, prejudice, and unity in diversity worldwide

working together
Originally uploaded by tigerluxe

"Name a distinguishing feature — skin color, religion, nationality, language — and it’s likely that people here have suffered unjustly for it, either through the freelance hatred of citizens or as a matter of official government policy."

October 22, 2007
New York Times

Editorial (Excerpts)

Ain’t That America

Think of America’s greatest historical shames. Most have involved the singling out of groups of people for abuse. Name a distinguishing feature — skin color, religion, nationality, language — and it’s likely that people here have suffered unjustly for it, either through the freelance hatred of citizens or as a matter of official government policy.

We are heading down this road again. The country needs to have a working immigration policy, one that corresponds to economic realities and is based on good sense and fairness. But it doesn’t. It has federal inertia and a rising immigrant tide, and a national mood of frustration and anxiety that is slipping, as it has so many times before, into hatred and fear. Hostility for illegal immigrants falls disproportionately on an entire population of people, documented or not, who speak Spanish and are working-class or poor. By blinding the country to solutions, it has harmed us all.

The evidence can be seen in any state or town that has passed constitutionally dubious laws to deny undocumented immigrants the basics of living, like housing or the right to gather or to seek work. It’s in hot lines for citizens to turn in neighbors. It’s on talk radio and blogs. It’s on the campaign trail, where candidates are pressed to disown moderate positions. And it can be heard nearly every night on CNN, in the nativist drumming of Lou Dobbs, for whom immigration is an obsessive cause.

In New York, Gov. Eliot Spitzer has proposed allowing illegal immigrants to earn driver’s licenses. It is a good, practical idea, designed to replace anonymous drivers with registered competent ones. In show after show, Mr. Dobbs has trained his biggest guns on Mr. Spitzer, branding him with puerile epithets like “spoiled, rich-kid brat” and depicting his policy as some sort of sanctuary program for the 9/11 hijackers. Someday there may be a calm debate, in Albany and nationally, about immigrant drivers. But with Mr. Dobbs at the megaphone, for now there is only histrionics and outrage.

[ what might be done? ...]

C. Catch the few you can, and harass and frighten the rest. Treat the entire group as a de facto class of criminals, and disrupt or shout down anyone or any plan seen as abetting their evildoing.

And so here we are at C. It’s a policy that can’t work; it’s too small-bore, too petty, too narrow. And all the while it’s not working, it can only lead to the festering of hate. Americans are a practical and generous people, with a tolerant streak a mile wide. But there is a combustible strain of nativism in this country, and it takes only a handful of match tossers to ignite it.

The new demagogues are united in their zeal to uproot the illegal population. They do not discriminate between criminals and the much larger group of ambitious strivers. They champion misguided policies, like a mythically airtight border fence and a reckless campaign of home invasions. And they summon the worst of America’s past by treating a hidden group of vulnerable people as an enemy to be hated and vanquished, not as part of a problem to be managed.

Comment -

In economic hard times, it is all too common to focus on those getting the jobs that are left, not on those who set what policies in place that led to us having so few jobs in the first place. It's closer and easier to stereotype and rally around.

Historically, this has often led to hatred against precisely the latest group of people we just attracted and imported, or even "Shanghai-ed" and virtually enslaved, to do dirty work at low pay that no one else wanted to do. Many groups have held this spot - Jews, Catholics, Blacks, Irish, Chinese railroad workers in the mid 1800's, Italians (Sacco and Vanzetti), and currently it seems to be "Hispanic-surnamed" that have become the focus of hatred and blame for economic hard times and pain and frustration and job losses that they had nothing to do with creating.

It seems it's not enough that they are subjected to working conditions in migrant labor or meat-packing that are nightmares, (Like Upton Sinclair's The Jungle) but then we have to get angry at them for having taken on such work in the first place and done it for us and in our name.

I think the actual causal loop that slowly deepens is this: first some random group of powerless people is exploited, then we can't live with ourselves and the fact of our being exploiters of decent human beings, so we solve that by "dehumanizing" the group we're currently exploiting which lessens the pain and justifies the sub-minimum wage, which makes them easier to exploit if not actually "deserving" of being exploited to "get even" with them for some never-named crime.

It is a feedback loop where our own guilt and actions lead to beliefs which lead to actions in a downward spiral - driven by a mistaken attempt of our own minds to reduce the conflict between our actions and our self-image as being "good decent people" who would never harm innocent people.

A generation later we snap out of this hypnotic trance, and can't figure out why we thought that particular group of people were "bad" when it now is obvious they aren't ... it's this OTHER group of people who are now "obviously bad."

So a few cases of "bad people" are magnified and echoed by TV and media until we think these represent the norm, and that all "those people" are "that way" - whatever it is this time. It seems to take a generation or longer to undo the damage caused by these successive waves of hatred-as-national-policy - a sort of "genocide-lite".

But so long as attention focuses on some target of choice, it distracts us from getting back upstream to the root-cause problem, and fixing it. We should be asking "Why are there so few jobs left?" and one that is so common we don't even ask it "Why do I and my wife have to work three or four jobs when my grandparents could make do and get by on just one?"

Put another way - "Why is my life going downhill when the TV says things are getting better? Who can I blame for this? It must be someone's fault!"

Well, it's not the fault of other people who are in the same boat as you, for starters.

There are two larger forces at work here. First, a basic law of economics or pressure of any kind - in an open world, "real wages" will tend to even out around the globe. It it is as easy to order a widget to be made in Thailand as next door, and they charge much less abroad, money will flow to Thailand, raising their average wage and standard of living, and lowering ours. That's huge and dominates what's going on around us and has been going on for the past 50 years.

Globalization and arrangements like NAFTA may speed it up, but it will happen regardless, one way or another. The pressure just finds some way to leak out and equalize.

So one fact of life we can count on is that Asian standards of living will go up, and our own standards of living in the USA will go down, regardless what policies we follow, unless we figure out how to make the "pie keep growing." Lately, this shows up as wages and bank accounts grow by 2 percent a year, and the global purchasing value of the dollar falls by 8 percent a year - we earn slightly more, viewed locally, but it and our pension savings are all worth a lot less so we can afford to buy fewer things for even more money.

The only escape clause is if we can make the "pie keep growing." We'll get back to that.

A second fact of life is that the very rich are more or less addicted to the "pie growing" life and tend to make sure that their total income continues growing.

In the US then this produces a whipsaw effect, as the rich have to extract even more and more wealth from the poor in order to keep their own income rising in a falling world. So not only is there less and less real wealth to go around, but most of us get a smaller and smaller share of it to keep. Again, it is not likely that any human force will change that trend.

A third and scary trend is that the very rich see the USA in decline and are moving their bases of operations off the sinking ship, and moving their headquarters offshore to someplace like Dubai, as Halliburton did recently. Since much of the world has rising standards of living, there are some pretty nice places out there now, with way more open space and better and cheaper health care than the US can provide.

The effect of that is equivalent to the rich pulling their kids out of public schools - which then lose the students, the income, and the influential parents caring what happens to the schools, and leads to yet another downward spiral of schools getting worse and more rich parents pulling their kids out and sending them to private schools.

All three of these changes are "structural" not "cyclic" - which means the past is not a good guide to the future, and these changes will just keep on going, not reverse and return to some mythic equilibrium if we just wait long enough.

In short, the dismal picture is that, unless the pie can be made to grow, the average person in the USA will lose on all three fronts - falling in health, education, and welfare, let alone their paycheck and job quality. We can't ever cure this by shutting some group out with immigration policy, because these changes aren't due to something that immigrants do or did.

In fact, it is the immigrant populations that tend to keep revitalizing the nation and providing the new growth that finds the one way out - new growth of innovative new approaches and industries.

As I've discussed in numerous other posts, the real hope is in "synergy" or the unlimited upward power of collaboration. It is precisely in the niche-space created between our own culture and other cultures, interacting creatively, that new life and new growth and new hope are born and flow into this world.

Here's the problem. For that to happen, for creative power to exceed the normal power of decline and decay, we need to have the largest "angle" possible between our own culture and each other culture. If you think of an angle as the point of a piece of pie, the amount of pie goes up as the angle at the point goes up. More angle = more pie.

If we interact well with another culture, we want the largest angle (most pie) we can get, which means we want them to be as different from us as we can stand and still interact.

We need, in other words, "unity in diversity". If they are identical to us, the angle is about zero and the slice of pie will barely matter.

So, the only policy that will work in the scenario I just described is one where we are very open and specialize in finding and dealing creatively and cooperatively with as many diverse other cultures as we can, treasuring their difference from us as our joint asset, which it is.

The worst possible policy in that model would be to (a) shut our borders and cut down interactions with others, and (b) avoid dealing with people who are different, or try to make everyone the same as us.

Parochialism, inter-group hatred, conformity, and higher walls of isolation are the opposite of what we need to be doing as a national policy.

True wealth decays away, regardless, everywhere. It is a living thing. Some strategies regenerate new wealth faster than the decay rate, and those groups will grow. Building a wall around the US and cutting off the living interactions that generate new growth will not, and cannot possibly "sustain" our wealth -- those policies will simply guarantee that no new growth will occur and hasten our decline.

The statistics are plain to see. Other countries have passed the US and are pulling further and further ahead in health of their populations, in skill and knowledge, in industry of all kinds, etc.
The last thing we need now is to cut off our interaction and ability to learn from them.

One measure of health of a population is simply average height, which reflects how healthy, overall, our childhood was for us. Healthier people tend to be taller. This year the USA finally lost the place of tallest country, and the average Dutch males is now taller than the average US male by almost an inch. "Size doesn't matter" but the implications do.

We need to take down the barriers to embracing global unity in diversity, not put up new ones of hatred and fear, if we are going to start growing again economically.

I should comment that I don't support these ideas because the Baha'i Faith tells me to - I support the Baha'i faith because it has been preaching this "unity with diversity" message for over 150 years and I'm finally understanding why that is so important and how all the feedback loops and emergent system effects work together.