A tip o' the hat in thanks to and affirmation of Amir Attaran

 Amir Attaran, professor of law and public health at the University of Ottawa, made a somewhat startling and also cogent point on last night’s TVO exploration of the strength of democracy in its attempt to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The virus is not the cause, rather the strength and resolve of government is the ‘agent’ of the pandemic.” This penetrating perspective, turning the public lens away from the virus, a mindless, imperceptible, valueless, amoral, ideology-less, indifferent piece of biology to the “agent” in the human, global landscape, that confronts the virus, seems to offer both a profound critique of the various roles played by governments of various ideologies in different nations. Human agency, in the face of any kind of ‘enemy,’ is essentially the core issue in any discussion of any conflict, drama, success, already embedded in the history books, and about to be embedded in history books in the future.

After the virus was unleashed, however that happened, (whether through accidental, or nefarious and cynical deployment), we have to take a serious look at the Attaran point that human stupidity, trying to ‘cut a deal’ with the virus, is at the heart of how the virus has killed, or not, hundreds of thousands of human beings. Attaran reminds us that the business of government is ‘cutting deals’ and that to apply this to the pandemic, is bound to fail. If the pandemic, as Attaran asserts, is fairly predictable, based on the uncanny clarity of mathematical models, then whether or not specific leaders, governments, public health officials, or pundits, take an aggressive, or passive, or indifferent posture in their assessment of the risk and in the need for specific measures is at the core of the “agency” that impacts with and confronts this scourge.

Attaran goes further in his scathing criticism of the low ranking of the scientific competence (and also a secrecy about this scarcity), especially in the Canadian government and public service, as another component of our political “stupidity” trying to cope with the virus. Having studied and worked in several countries, Attaran’s critique has the credibility of experience-based observations and evaluations. He argues that we spend very little on scientific research, that we have very few “public voices” with a scientific background, and our collective silent complicity in this “resistance” (or whatever impulses lie at the root of our shared cultural legacy) can be detailed as an integral part of our success/failure in coping with the pandemic.

Tonda McCharles, senior reporter at The Star, argues on the same TVO special program, too, that the failure in communications on the part of the public figures in addressing the various issues, numbers, spread, and mediation of the virus. Included in that failure of both commission and omission, she cites the absence of a professional scientist from the federal government’s public ‘face’ of their response.

Addressing the communication gap, too, Attaran, points to the “loss of hard bastards” replaced by social scientists, who, rather than taking a heavy hand in the crisis, have attempted to persuade, cajole and urge, and motivate the public into compliance with pandemic preventive measures like masks, social-distance, and even isolating in order to retard the spread. Discerning the difference between dictatorial and “hard bastards,” Attaran believes that, for example, the history of having taken a similar approach to cigarette smoking, over a protracted period, the public health professionals have be resistant to putting a hard edge of “mandatory musts” on their professional counsel.

It was, however, the attribution of the word “contrarian” to professor Attaran, by Ms McCharles, based on the indisputable evidence that when he appears at a parliamentary committee ‘sparks will fly” (Ms McMcharles’ words) that really irked this scribe. A government that is either complicity in playing down the significance of the scientific competence, and also generating a culture inside committees, in which Professor Attaran ‘ignites sparks’ only exposes the cozy, comfortable, risk-averse, politically correct and potentially intellectually indifferent or worse, lazy, at the heart of the federal government. And this culture cannot and must not be laid, exclusively at the feet of any political party, given that, collectively, the Ottawa ethos pervades and infuses all political operatives, conversations, expectations and also results emanating from the body politic.

(A couple of personal anecdotes: When presenting and proposing a “FreshStart” program to reintegrate displaced tech workers at the beginning of this century, to an Ottawa bureaucrat, after designing and writing the program, in northern Ontario, the first question out of her mouth, was, surprisingly, not even focused on the merits of the program, or the difficulties of implementation, but rather, “Why cannot we have a program written here in Ottawa?” I guess only thoughts and ideas, for her, in order to be worthy of consideration, had to originate inside the city limits. Another example of ingrown “myopia” emerged in a recent conversation with a business consultant familiar with government contracts, at all levels, municipal, provincial, and federal: that only business consultants who have previously been engaged in a government contract are eligible to submit proposals for new contracts. Leadership, one would have thought, can only be effectively, ethically and efficiently pursued, and certainly achieved, if and when minds, hearts, persons with authority and responsibility show courage, leadership, and openness to ideas that do not come out of the brain-trust-establishment that seeks to serve as the national government. A closed system is constitutionally, intellectually, and pre-determined to follow in the foot-steps of other closed systems…thereby digging that uroborus snake “circle” in which it continually circles around the same “ditch”.)

The world wants to focus on the massive and perhaps criminal negligence of the trump administration in their deplorable failure at mitigating the COVID-19 pandemic. However, there are other nations, including Canada, where the results are far less than they could/would have been, if the government had exhibited some civic muscle, drawn on the “hard bastards” (as Attaran describes them) that would have put a very different stamp on ‘mediating’ and ‘moderating’ and ‘mitigating’ and even ‘blocking’ the spread of the virus. History books and doctoral theses will be written to dissect the specific failures, for example, in long-term-care facilities, and in closing/opening economic activity, school-openings-and-closings, the psychological impacts on children of how we dealt with the pandemic.

However, our shared ‘thumbing’ our noses at the original declarations of “global pandemic” from the World Health Organization, and our shared complicity in following, compliantly, and in some considerable confusion and thereby enhanced anxiety, and now, in tolerating the libertarian strain of narcissistic egocentrism, highlighted by the despicable “theatre” comments by Senator Rand Paul, himself an ophthalmologist, when confronting Dr. Fauci in a Senate hearing yesterday, “If you are vaccinated and unable to spread the disease, and you continue to wear a mask, then that is only theatre!” Fauci instantly retorted, I completely disagree with that…and he pointed to the rising number of variants, for which there is still far too little known about their lethality, and their capacity to spread, not to mention the scarcity of data on immunity among those already vaccinated.

In fact, we are at a point, most scientists argue, that we are in a race between the marathon of herd immunity through 80+% vaccinations in all communities and the proportion of variants that dominate various populations. And the dumb, unconscionable, indifferent, narcissistic, hubristic, and libertarian aardvarks in the political world, (think Bolsonaro, trump, Cruz, Nunes, Fox news) all of whom refuse, avoid, deny and absolutely reject all “cajoling” and persuading and even incentivizing toward taking a vaccination) are already threatening to render all legitimate efforts at herd immunity as null and void. And the implications of that “personal freedom” that ought to stop at the line where everyone’s compliance is a step either toward or away from accomplishing the goal of returning to what once considered normal, including open schools, open main streets, open church services, sports events, concerts, picnics and community barbeques. Human rights, including free speech, freedom to worship, freedom to carry a gun…these are all NOT absolute, in any jurisdiction. It is the attempt of those who claim that they are absolute that the rest of us will have to endure for generations.

The minimal limitation of one’s freedom, through wearing a mask, is not only a tolerable limit to my freedom, given that, in doing so, I impair and limit the freedom of both myself and any others in my space, from spreading a blind, indifferent and imperceptible virus that can and does kill. The minimal limit to my freedom, to step aside, at least six feet if and when I meet another on a daily walk, is not only tolerable but actually worthy of social and political and public health mandate. The minimal expectation that I refrain from entering social groups, for the sake of everyone, my family and the families of those in the larger group, while perhaps in the long-term is irritating, depressing and sad, is nevertheless a reasonable, legitimate constraint on my personal freedom, for the sake of the community prevention of deadly sickness, especially when no one can know who is infected or infectious.

The social contract is not violated if and when the public health authorities mandate measures in the best interest of most people in the community. It is violated, however, if and when a minority of individuals deliberately defy those same public health measures. And there can be no doubt that Attaran’s call for “hard bastards” not only among public health leaders, but also among politicians, educators, civic leaders, and even ecclesial leadership, is worthy of note, and also of amending, if each community is going to restrict the mortality rates among their boundaries, limit the spread of the virus, and, hopefully, buy enough time for not only herd immunity, but also vaccines and treatments that have the scale and effectiveness of those measures that virtually eliminated small pox and other lethal diseases.

It took “hard bastards” to grab the leadership, to set the tone, to provide the beacon of light in the darkness of those pandemics. They were not tyrannical’ they were not dictatorial. They were not evil, or indifferent to individual personal freedom. They were pragmatic, professional health-care exponents, incarnating a depth of commitment, conviction and ethical discernment that seems to Attaran, and others, to be sadly missing, in proportions required in the current circumstances. Of course, there are exceptions, but too many of those exceptions are bully-shouts, and edicts from the side of those who denigrate the virus, who defy all public health limitations and who seem to be carrying the day in far too many jurisdictions. From some provincial premiers whose determination to “open the economy” prematurely is far too risky a political act, dependent first on their political fortunes, to state governors, to national leaders who ought to be held accountable for crimes against humanity, given their blatant and tragic failure to carry out their civic responsibility.

Would they have been able to get away with such defiance if there were to have been a larger voice in public opinion that provided a unified and science-based argument for limits to public freedoms, as a global initiative, based on reasonable, enforceable and responsible public health measures? Doubtful.

Would such an example offer to the world, evidence of the need for and the advisable of pursuing enhanced collaboration in the search for, and the discovery of public leadership that, at least in the public health arena, would and could be proud to wear the “hard bastard” moniker advocated by Amir Attaran, the international legal-public health scholar born in the United States, of Iranian parents, who has a unique and valid and somewhat unconventional international perspective.

His perspective does not merit “contrarian” so much as “healthy truth pursuer” in the interests of humanity, including Canadians. And we need many more Amir’s!!  

Happy St. Patrick's Day, 2021

May the road rise up to meet you.

May the wind be always at your back.

May the sun shine warm upon your face,

The rains fall soft upon your fields,

And, until we meet again,

May God hold you in the palm of His hand. (Irish Blessing)

The phrase “confluence of influences,” if memory serves, came across my ears first from a Russian professor of Comparative Education, Prof. Ramunas, at the University of Ottawa.

It rises like a long-forgotten time-capsule, as we all watch and listen to the convergence of factors around the globe that pose a threat to the existence of humanity. Perhaps it is the very size and force of the confluence, comparable to the most compelling cataract, Niagara Falls, or Victoria Falls, that, surveyed from the safety of cordoned walkways, simply takes one’s breath away. Magnificent, awesome, powerful, somewhat miraculous, magnetic, memorable, epic, stunning and also picturesque…worthy of the best and most creative photographers and also of the most dramatic layouts in the world’s most treasured glossy magazines, (think National Geographic! for example) Water from smaller tributaries merge with other tributaries, and glide over landscapes that generally slope downwards, sometimes even from north to south, culminating in an encounter with a rock formation like a cliff, a chasm, a canyon and literally tonnes of H2O thunder over the rocks in a white blizzard of roaring  vapour.

Spectacular, for sure! Unforgettable, absolutely! Dangerous, definitely!

And yet, few rarely attempt the quixotic leap into the ‘beyond’ of that danger, knowing full well, and fearing their own demise at the hands of nature’s unforgiving power.

We can see, hear and even feel the multiple stimuli from those cataracts; we can wrap a camera lens around parts of the scene and sound bowl; and we can stay safe while in their presence.

A rather difference ‘confluence of influences’ seems to be gathering energy, from the flow of multiple streams, rivulets, creeks, and rivers that, from this vantage point, seem to be coming together in a political, cultural, social, economic, environmental and biological river that, without considerable collaborative urgent measures to slow the pace of each of these forces, bring with it a destructive power that could, and likely will, impact every man, woman, and child on the planet. And, given that these ‘streams’ are not restricted to the ‘unconscious’ in some quarters, but are very much at the forefront of the consciousness of some, there is a gaping divide between the perceptions, attitudes, beliefs and actions of those who take this confluence seriously, and those who prefer a nonchalance, an insouciance and a kind of indifference (is it arrogance or fear?)

A shared planet’s resources, a phrase encapsulated in clichés of rhetorical propaganda, by those whom many consider(ed) tree-huggers, or catastrophizers, is little more than a passing ‘fad’ for those whose daily lives depend on the mining, drilling, pumping, trucking, transporting, shipping, selling, burning and building on the strength of the energies that the earth’s coal and oil reserves provide. All of the men and women whose lives and families rely on the maintenance of all of the structural, legal, economic and even ethical pilings that western societies have been driving into the ground of our collective governments and consciousnesses for generations. Capitalism considers the earth to be at the heart of the pulse of their activities, even potentially regarded by many as inexhaustible and also manageable, from the perspectives of worker health and planetary ecosystems. Preserving an economic, political, cultural and ethical system that relies on the bounty of the earth, directly and indirectly, is a religious creed, sanctified by decades of benefits, deeply embedded as both needed and life-giving.

At the same time as these rivulets of political consciousness continue to flow and to gather younger generations of disciples, advocates and dependents, there is another stream of political, social, cultural and ethic consciousness that ‘sees’ things very differently. These folks are convinced that the future depends on the reduction, if not the actual elimination of those gases from the atmosphere that the earth’s coal and oil and gas emit, in their mining and drilling and fracking to ‘dig’ them out, and in their processing and refining, and also in their final burning in power generating stations, transports and airplanes, ships, automobiles, busses streetcars and ambulances…not to mention in the furnaces and air-conditioning of many if not most of our buildings, including hospitals, schools, churches, libraries, universities, sports stadiums, arenas and our homes.

Transferring the bulk of our energy needs from one carbon-centric group of fuels to an enviro-friendly, renewable group of fuels like wind and solar and battery (although their final destination seems somewhat uncertain) and also nuclear (although the final resting place/use of spent radioactive nuclear rods is still under research investigation) is a shift that many, especially those dedicated to the ‘tradition’ of fossil fuels, find both traumatic and worthy of their boldest resistance. To those who fervently believe that only in and through the transformation will our grandchildren be able to survive, given the potential rise in temperatures being predicted by qualified and credible climatologists from around the world.

“Follow the money trail” is a chorus that the fourth estate chimes at some time in many of the stories they investigate, especially when they are attempting to uncover and lay bare activities that endanger people, both individuals and large groups. As the fossil fuel corporations have amassed mountains of profits and investments, they continue to have a large “hand” to play in this high-stakes poker game. And given the absolute dependence on truck-loads of case needed for political campaigns, those seeking elected office find their steps leading them into the boardrooms of those fossil-fuel executives, who are ready and eager to fund supportive (and also dependent) political candidates. Naturally, the predictable next step is for those fossil-fuel-funded candidates to utter the words, attitudes and values of their benefactors, both in their campaigns and in their legislative functions, following elections.

Start-ups in the environmentally friendly sector, naturally, have far less profit and investments, and thereby have less to “offer” to political candidates who could/would support their attitudes, beliefs and values on behalf of a protected environment. And while their ethic is no less strongly held and supported, their capacity to give it ‘legs’ is considerably reduced compared to the fossil fuel lobby.

Government intervention, through tax subsidies long-ago established in favour of the fossil fuel industries, continue, and require political vigilance in order to preserve them. Similarly, government intervention to support sustainable-renewables, has the uphill climb as the ‘new-kid-on-the-block’ from a political perspective, and we all know how rookies far in a new team’s locker-room. However, high-tech insurgent corporations, having established a strong foot-hold on the flow of revenues in most western countries, tend to follow the play-book of established corporations, in a manner that a rookie athlete will admire, emulate and hold in awe an established ‘star’. Their divided loyalties, between the corporate model (based largely on the fossil fuel models) and the new economy of the digital information age, has not yet seen a deep bow to the environmental-protection lobby, given their fixation on keeping and preserving their distance from and independence from government intervention in their businesses, including the question of personal privacy and security.

Clearly, the question of government intervention in the affairs of the fossil-fuel corporates, in any attempts to require environmental protections increasing costs and potentially reducing profits, as well as restricting leasing agreements for new fossil-fuel exploration, is one that continues to ‘fire’ the engines of both fossil-fuel executives and their lobbyists, as well as the legislatures in which their elected officials work. Government intervention in the private lives of individuals, especially in the United States, although the issue is raising its ugly head in other jurisdictions as well, is anathema to those who define their personal freedom from the hill-top of “the least government is the best government” no matter what the issue may be.

Enter, in late 2019 and in early 2020 THE COVID-19 pandemic, infecting now millions, and killings hundreds of thousands, irrespective of geography, culture, language, social and political status, education, wealth or even increasingly age. A once-in-a-century pandemic, comparable only to the Spanish flu of 1918, when science and communications were very different. Doubtless, the anxiety of our grandparents’ generation was no less than our own, although they would not have listened to or read hourly reports of the scourge of their time and place, as we do today, from every corner of the globe. Vaccinations, therapeutics, treatments, ventilators, antibodies, RNA research and the capacity  to generate, test, evaluate, approve, distribute and inoculate are all processes that have exponentially exploded in scope and speed, in funding and in credibility over the last century.

However, given another social and cultural bedrock of western civilization, the penchant, if not the actual addiction to and affirmation of a masculine trait of “above and beyond” all of the threats (similar to the climate-deniers’ dubbing global warming a hoax perpetrated by China), fear of the spectre of rising temperatures, draughts, fires, tropical storms, hurricanes, is flicked off, disdained, almost defiantly by many, as just another of nature’s normal behaviours as seem from the last several centuries. And here is the spot on the pavement of the freeway on which all of us drive, (in every country and county and town and city on the planet)…the spot where the rubber of defiant denial, insouciance, ignorance, avoidance and personal bravado meets the asphalt of science: rising temperatures, rising death rates, rising rates of viral variants.

And the implications of the deniers, both of environmental disaster, as well as of COVID death and destruction (it is after all imperceptible, and spreads from one to another without either knowing the spread was happening, ) refusing to listen to the warning signs, to take them seriously, and to act as if those warning signs actually meant something worthy of serious consideration, and even committing to learning more about how we can each play our part in “healing the world” are epic and potentially catastrophic.

No one is catastrophizing to witness and to describe the confluence of these rivers of social and political influence represented by two competing strong rivers of public opinion. Respectively, they are those that seek to move in the direction of personal health and wellness, as well as supporting that process for all others, and those who seek to deny negative symptoms on not only the body politic but also the body-planet. Both of those rivers and bodies now must demand the proactive and shared commitment not only to wearing masks, to maintaining social distance, to agree not to gather in large groups both indoors and out, and also to seek and to acquire one of the vaccines that have been approved to slow and hopefully to stop the spread of a virus that threatens each and every one of us. Both of those rivers also must come to a deep and lasting and profound agreement that carbon dioxide and methane continue to threaten the life of the planet and the lives of our grandchildren.

We need the rivers of science and political activism for positive change, along with the river of tradition, preservation, the establishment, and the monied interests to finally converge in a giant cataract that will overflow the resistance of insouciance, bravado, indifference, fear and anxiety, in order to find a way to behave our planet out of this confluence of existential crises.

Israel, the nation, frequently notes their existential fear of extinction at the hands of Iran. This is a real, genuine and legitimate fear. And the people of Israel walk in and through the tunnels of that anxiety every day. The west, on the other hand, seems to consider the compound threat of global warming and the pandemic, even taken together, NOT to be an combined existential threat to all of us. To be sure, our shared threat does not have a ‘face’ and a geography; it is not able to the contained on any world map, as a piece of land, a body of water. It is however, clear to all, that the implications of both of these existential threats now have taken a foothold on every continent, in every country, among all religions, languages, cultures, economies and ideologies. There is no single person, and no group, and no political party, and no faith community that is not already suffering from the collective impacts of these two forces.

No longer can the old shibboleth of “man’s domination of nature” be considered with biblical proportions. No longer can man’s hubris that accompanied that concept be either sustained or justified. And the question of whether or not we individually and collectively value our life enough, or not, and consider our life bringing with it the decision to leave a legacy that can and will sustain the lives of our grandchildren, can no longer be either denied or avoided. Even those who for centuries have been gifted by the beneficence of nature’s resources that have already killed millions, will have to accede to nature’s cry for help…and just as we have all helped to make her very ill, we also have the opportunity to relieve much of that global illness.

Can and will we accept the challenge and the opportunity? 

"Truth does not need publicity, lies do!" (Abhijit Naskar)

The hue and cry that continues to echo, reverberate and tremble throughout the caves of political rhetoric, primarily in the U.S., but also to varying degrees around the globe, is burdened with a ironic and tragic history and a legacy of information peddling the depends on lies, even ‘organized lies’ (borrowed from Hannah Arendt).

In an essay entitled, “Organized lying and professional legitimacy: Public relations’ accountability in the disinformation debate,” on journals.sagepub..com, published December 16, 2020, Lee Edwards writes:….’this article argues that disinformation and fake news are well-established tools in public relations work and are implicated in the current crisis….’(O)rganized lying-the intentional systemic dissemination o falsehoods by groups, organisations and institutions—has long been part of political life.(Arendt 1968*) and the tools used to create and promote disinformation come directly from the mainstream stable of promotional tactics, dating back to the days of propaganda and public opinion manipulation. (Bernays, 2005 (1928): Corner, 2007,; Demetrious, 2019; Mayhew, 1997; Ong and Cabanes, 2018; Shir-Raz and Avraham, 2017)…In a [political world driven by opinion formation about the meaning of things, (Arendt) argues that facts, with their ‘intractable unreasonable stubbornness’ (Arendt, 1968:243) are potentially impotent in political debates because they can only reflect the world as it is. Lying, however—defined as the instrumental dissemination of information and/or opinion that has no basis in fact—is always a form of political agency. Lies can readily be used to promote a particular point of view or to encourage particulate forms of action, because of their persuasive power: unconstrained by reality, ‘the liar is free to fashion his ‘facts’ to fit the profit and pleasure, or even the mere expectations, of his audience. (Arendt, 1968:251). Organized lying takes the impact of the lie further. More than obscuring some interpretations of the world, it actively destroys them in service of a ‘major and permanent adjustment of displacement of reality; (Arendt, 1971: Corner, 2007, 674) Such fundamental ontological work requires that these systematic distortions of reality are embedded in the ways in which politics is not only communicated, but also organised, in order that policymakers themselves believes the distortions. Thus organised lying has the potential to replace concern for the common good in political debates with a concern for vested interests, while misrepresenting those interests to both the public and to policymakers as the common good….As Harsin (2019) argues, ‘Both consumer capitalism, deeply embedded in everyday life, and elite liberal democracy…demand deceptive communication. There is a structural incitement to deception…To claim one truth as definitive may be tantamount to totalitarian dictatorship, opening the door to violence and inequality (Mejia et al., 2018: Nelson, 1978)…As Arendt (1968) argues, the result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is…that the sense by which we take out bearings in the real world—and the category of truth vs falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed. (p.257)

From a piece entitled, Noam Chomsky Defines the Real Responsibility of Intellectuals: ‘To Speak the Truth and to Expose Lies’ (1967), dated July 18, 2018, on openculture.com we read this:

“It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies,” wrote Chomsky in his 1967 essay. ‘This, at least, may seem enough of a truism to pass over without comment. No so, however. For the modern intellectual, it is not at all obvious.’ Chomsky proceeds from the pro-Nazi statements of Martin Heidegger to the distortions and outright falsehoods issued routinely by such thinkers and shapers of foreign policy as Arthur Schlesinger, economist Walt Rostow, and Henry Kissinger in their defense of the disastrous Vietnam War. The background for all of these figures’ distortions of fact, Chomsky argues, is the perpetual presumption of innocence on the part of the U.S., a feature of the doctrine of exceptionalism under which ‘it is an article of faith that American motives are pure an not subject to analysis.’ Chomsky would include the rhetorical appeal to a nobler past in the category of ‘;imperialist apologia’—a presumption of innocence that ‘becomes increasingly distasteful as the power it serves grows more dominant in world affairs, and more capable, therefore, of the unconstrained viciousness that the mass media present to us each day.’…For those who well recall the events of fifteen years ago (2003) when the U.S. government, with the aid of a compliant press, lied its way into the second Iraq war, condoning torture and the ‘extraordinary rendition’ of supposed hostiles to black sites in the name of liberating the Iraqi people, Chomsky’s Vietnam-era critiques may sound just as fresh as they did in the mid-sixties. Are we already in danger of misremembering that recent history?

There is a long history of distortion in the theatre of politics, foreign policy, economics, military manipulations, many, if not most of them, generated by some version of the phrase “national interests” of the nation…seemingly the history of the twentieth century’s dive into totalitarianism, was not enough of a red flag to preclude more propaganda manipulation in the administration of George W. Bush. Nor was it an adequate reminder and caution against the regime of lies that now characterize the last American administration. And, where there is power, the seat of power, and the people who sit in those seats, there is an inevitable coterie of men and women whose needs are so great that, like moths to brilliant light, they stampede, and then, just as suddenly and unceremoniously, they die in the shadows of that ‘light’.

Similarly, in the corporate world, lies to protect the public mask of the corporation continue to run rampant on the advertising and public relations engines, themselves complicit in the ‘smooth running’ of the much larger ‘engine of public information. Magnetizing eyes, ears, hearts and minds, for profit, through sales, is the primary instrument/industry that has been merged into the public consciousness as “respectful” and “ethical” and “moral” and “honourable” given that it energizes employment rates, Gross Domestic Product numbers, tax revenues, and those benchmarks that denote a health economy.

Bigness, in military machines, in sales volumes, in DOW indices, in speed and horsepower of autos, boats, airplanes, as well as fighter jets, and ‘McMansions…they all are calculated to evoke/provoke collective “WOW’s from an allegedly amazed citizenry. Having more, too, at the domestic family level, is also considered a societal “good” enhanced only by additional bobbles, and the social reputation that flows therefrom.

Power over, too, is considered, under this epistemological umbrella, to be better than weakness, so, naturally, those men and women and children who have substantially less, or even quite literally ‘nothing’ of the world’s affluence, are considered ‘inferior’ and in North America, those groups include black, brown, Asian, indigenous…all of them also targets of something publicly discussed as racism. Yet, there is an implicit and built-in bias of inferiority, based on house size, wardrobe styles, sport equipment, and even body size….given that taller people are reported to earn more than less tall men and women.

The lies in which we are all ensnared include such corporate distortions that climate change and global warming are a hoax, (perpetrated by the Chinese, just like the COVID-19), the “magic” of trump, (as told in adulation by Senator Lindsay Graham), the stolen election of the U.S. presidency, the imposition of restrictions on personal liberty through required mask wearing, social distancing, and vaccinations.

The penetration of ‘alternative facts’ and the swirling ethos of distortions lies, dissemblings has so “smogged” the culture of the United States, that, like the pandemic itself, and the failure of the world to trust much of the establishment’s utterances, as well as it policies, threatens to render, at least the U.S. as potentially ungovernable.

And the lies are not the exclusive domain of the elite; ordinary people, too, with universal access to cell phones, tablets, the internet and the opportunity to spread their own lies, distortions, gossip, character assassinations, rumours…all with a degree of impunity that leaves them unleashed to their own destructive ‘power’ tendencies.

The issues of reining in the already uncapped ‘pandora’s box of human narcissism, linked to the political and corporate culture of deliberate lies, seems to implicate so many individuals, as well as all demographics, that those actually charged with responsibility for ‘cleaning’ up the cultural ethos, are themselves, first going to have to acknowledge their own complicity in the game. And it is, after all, a game into which we have all been recruited, perhaps ever seduced, and naively succumbed to that recruitment.

Training military recruits in the arts and the science of military action, espionage, weaponry, and then discovering those same men and women, trained on the public purse, to defend the country, have turned their aim on the very nation that raised them, educated them and employed and deployed them is another of the indices that demonstrate the depth of innocence, naivety, and even ignorance among those charged with recruitment. Similarly, however, the Republican Party was unable and/or unwilling to block the candidacy of trump back in 2015, a master-manipulator whose strategy and tactics were well know to all of his opponents in their presidential campaigns as well as the media whose task was to report on that campaign.

Documenting lies, however, as history amply proves, is no guarantee of reducing their production, or their sophisticated chicanery, nor is it a pathway to putting limits to hate speech. Like so much of the rest of the political theatre, it has become another game-box, manipulated by those seeking entertainment, separated from the foundation of provable factual information. And, as actors in a drama whose script is manipulated and controlled by others whose motives are, in a word, not innocent, or focussed on the public good, but rather on their personal and private self-aggrandizement, we are increasingly rendered victims, albeit conscious victims of a game whose rules we no longer set, and no longer have the range and depth of power to change.

If the history of lying in the United States is imitated, even at only a 50% rate by other nations, how can ordinary people come to the place, a very necessary place, where we can breathe relatively easily, with any confidence that those making decisions will make those decisions on publicly available and demonstrable information, and then will subject those decisions to the scrutiny of a dwindling demographic of ordinary people who have and will continue to take the time to become familiar with the truth, in order to better judge and to hold accountable those in public service, both elected and appointed.

A one-hour public lecture on implicit racial bias, on ABC television last evening, while noteworthy, scanned the ways by which we all develop implicit bias. Nevertheless, the lies that continue to confound the body politic, and have for far too long, need much more exposure, and a concentrated initiative among public officials, the media, the academe, the ecclesial hierarchies, and educators at all levels, to discern the fullness of the truth of their/our utterances, and to develop an awareness of the implications of distortions and lies not only on their immediate goals, but on the long-term health of the globe.

Grappling with personal denial in a culture of avoidance

 Complex personal behaviour, attitudes, beliefs and especially perceptions are extremely difficult to untangle, as are the manifold implications of the many intersections with a group, family, organization, political party, church, or even region and culture. Observing one’s actions, words, beliefs and attitudes, too, adds another layer of complexity to what is already an apparent infinite number of factors in any given moment.

What each person “sees” and considers important, at any given moment, is coloured, from his/her perspective, by the mood, the history, the ambience, the cognition and the multiple impulses that comprise a character or personality. And from the ‘group’ perspective, there are the distinguishing traits like structure, ethos, culture, leadership, belief system, values and current curation of relevant size, trend lines, history and future probabilities.

Whether one’s gaze is on a single individual, or a specific group, or on a specific set of circumstances, a case, a legislative bill, a legal system, an educational system, there is also the tension between significant individual parts/components and the whole. And while humans have a capacity to make such discernments, we often fall into the trap of equating a highlighted “part” as the “whole” of the person, or the case. In language, this is dubbed an elision, when, for example, two sounds merge into a single sound. The language of practical sense, ordinary street-speak, is predominantly an expression of what has been noted, observed, with the occasional deduction or induction, in order to sum up a set of observations. Such street-speak, however, customarily pays little to no attention to those aspects of the person, the organization, the negative, hidden, denied, avoided or repressed aspects of either the person or the subject, whatever that might be.

We are swimming in oceans of objective data, themselves increasingly starving for their own oxygen, both literally and metaphorically, as we continue to dump dead things into that space. Some of the dead things, on the literal level, include discarded plastics, drugs, and a wide range of things for which we no longer have use. In the ocean of public discourse, too, we are dumping many of the very defense mechanisms that individual humans deploy in order to cope with strong, difficult, and perhaps even intolerable feelings. There is a reasonable case to be made for the notion that we, both individually and collectively, spend a good deal of our time over the decades coming to terms (and the meaning of that phrase differs for each person) with events, incidents, memories, traumas and tragedies that previously were psychically insurmountable, or so we thought and believed.

Rightly or not, much of this space has been, and will continue to untangle the unmistakable and intricate interaction between what the culture is talking about and what the individual is facing, in the conviction that these two ‘independent variables’ are not indeed, “independent” but rather mutually inter-dependent. Who we are, as individuals, is necessarily a part of ‘all that we have met’…we are reminded of this intimacy by Tennyson’s poem Ulysses:

I am a part of all that I have met

Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough

Gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades

Forever and forever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make and end,

To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!

And yet, for many, their experience is not ‘seen’ as a strong arch, added to in strength and durability with the encounter of each new moment. For many, experience is more like a never-ending storm, perhaps even a hurricane, a tornado, an earth-quake, that seems to have slammed a door to the field of hopes and dreams. And in the lives of many of those people, only a metaphoric re-birth, a resurrection, a transformation, a new person, or a new challenge offers the possibility that their cloud morphs into an “arch” or even a telescope that can see sun and blue sky on a horizon previously laden in darkness. The story of the life of Pfizer CEO, Albert Bourla, exhibits much of this narrative, shared by so many whose families are survivors of the Holocaust. His parents were Sephardic (originating from the Iberian Peninsula, modern Spain and Portugal) Jews living in Thessolonika. Bourla told MSNBC’s Morning Joe, today, that his mother used to say, over and over again to him, “Life is good, sure we have suffered, but, look I have you and life is good!” He credits her influence on him as helping him to the place where he is convicted of the notion that none of us knows what we are capable of, unless and until we let go of those limits we have accepted on our potential, both individually and collectively. Thinking outside, the box, inside Pfizer, for example, in pursuit of the COVID-19 vaccine meant two things: at least four levels of management were in the room at all times when decisions were being made, so the structural bureaucracy could not and would not impede progress, and refusal to accept government funds meant that the Pfizer scientists would be uninfluenced or impeded by government demands, another ‘outside-the-box” feature of the speed and the success of the vaccine development story. Both Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’ and the Bourla bio focus on the heroic person; however, similar and parallel stories are accessible regardless of the level of education, achievement, wealth or ethnic factors in lives everywhere.

The question, here, is how to begin the process of what might be an impossible puzzle to solve: how for the purveyors of street-talk, for example, to begin to include those influential background impulses that continue to energize the moment, in the life of the individual, as well as in the life of the family, the organization and the community. How, for example, does a town whose history is intimately linked to a series of generations of blue-collar, mining or industrial enterprises, in which workplace injuries, stress and long-term health conditions continue to walk on those streets in complete silence? Or, for example, how does a community whose experiences include significant exposure to betrayal, in both the physical and the inevitably emotional areas of life, engage in a collective process of grief, share the pain by remembering its poignant scars, and begin to glimpse the ‘light’ of new awareness, new ways of ‘seeing’ not only the betrayal but the potential (and usually undocumented and thereby ignored) pain of the perpetrator(s) of the betrayal? How does a family who lost a loved one from lung cancer, for example, begin to exercise the anger, the rage even, at those tobacco companies whose advertising totally denied any responsibility for that disease as a result of their cigarettes? How do those hundreds of thousands of families whose loved ones perished from COVID-19, in substantial part because a president of the United States was negligent in carrying out his duties of his office: not merely the legal duties to uphold the constitution, but especially the moral and ethical duties and responsibilities as a human being? How does a family of a loyal worker, dependent on the income of that worker for survivor, for example, deal with not only the loss of income, and the hope and security that came with that income, but also the loss of dignity, community respect, and potential alienation not only of the “redundant” worker but the school community of his/her children, the neighbours, the social circle, and the prospect of trying to secure additional work? The individuals who suffer at the ‘hands’ of the mega-corporations (for-profit as well as not-for-profit), even if and when they made errors in judgement, nevertheless, too often have been reduced to those errors, without a passing glance to the whole person, or the responsibilities of the employer in deploying that individual in untenable circumstances?  

We are becoming, or perhaps already have become, a culture in which microscopic attention to the “part” or the incident, or the event, or the error in judgement, too often has been substituted for a full analysis of the situation, as if we, collectively are prepared to comply with the determinants of how our society works as established and imposed by those with excessive power, excessive neurosis that demands their first priority is their own nest. It is not merely the demise of the labour movement that we decry; it is also the demise of corporate and governmental and organizational responsibility for their part in the multiple crises we face as human beings. Denial of climate change and global warming, just like the denial of cigarettes as the primary cause of lung cancer, as well as secondary smoke-induced caners, continues to face the world’s people and their governments, their corporations, their universities and their hospitals. Denial of a process either of appeal or of conflict resolution is the “power-down” answer to those details they have come to regard as outside their sphere of influence, read, responsibility.

It is not only trump who has exhibited and championed this kind of colonial attitude and behaviour, accompanied with and sustained by a convention of social compliance in which the schools, the universities, the churches and the social service agencies are both implicated and have to confront. We put far too many people in prison, for reasons of social and cultural denial, avoidance and other defense mechanisms too infrequently acknowledged.

For example, as polite, ‘fitting-in’ individuals, seeking to avoid conflict and the pain it inflicts on all participants, we silently ‘go-along-to-get-along’…and thereby permit the abuse of power while sabotaging ourselves and perpetuating the abuse of power on others. Another of the ways by which we deflect strong feelings of anger and anxiety is to displace those feelings onto others whom we find to be non-threatening. Such deflection (displacement) inflicts unjust anger on an unsuspecting innocent, too frequently one attempting to incarnate and promote both peace and collaboration. So, in the process of displacement, we have “avoided” how we really feel, while victimizing an innocent who is trying to live a peaceful life of contribution. Some of us regress backwards, when faced with strong and uncontainable emotions, and others rationalize the situation, thereby pouring a veneer of denial over both our eyes/ears and the situation itself, again permitting the ‘causative’ incident and person to continue unimpeded, and unchallenged…both effectively becoming victims. For many men, especially, sublimation, the redirecting of strong unsustainable feelings into an object of an activity is another path denoting a defense mechanism, a version of avoidance and denial, an escape from the full acknowledgement of the legitimate feelings, as well as an avoidance of attempting a new pathway to confront, without engaging in the same or similar behaviour as that which precipitated those feelings in the first place. For those who are, or who see themselves as accomplished ‘actors,’ another defence mechanism that might appeal, in order to defend against unwanted and intolerable strong and deep and justified feelings, is termed reaction formation, whereby an individual behaves in precisely the opposite manner to those strong negative emotions, so that no one will really ‘know’ and/or catch on to the truth of the situation that has taken place.

There are other ways to explore the concept of denial. One really insidious type in the denial of denial, whereby an individual simply denies s/he is in denial. And then there is the denial of a cycle, in which a pattern of power-down abuse has created a pattern or a cycle, which has become so familiar that it has taken on a life of its own, supported, aided and abetted by the denier. And, as mentioned previously, a denial of responsibility is the one cited about the former U.S. president, along with multiple corporations, and philanthropists whose political agenda is dedicated to the proposition that the pursuit of profit reduces the societal goal of clean air, water and land to an irritant, and worse, a potentially lethal prosecutor of ‘my’ personal and corporate and philanthropic goals and objectives, so that the zero-sum game becomes the driving force for his/her actions, beliefs, perceptions and values.’

Underlying all of the various defense mechanisms that individuals deploy, however, is a culture reared and nurtured in dominant professions like the law and medicine. In the legal definition of evidence, four types are listed: real, demonstrative, documentary and testimonial. In the medical field, a symptom is presented often in a complaint, while a signal is noted in a sensation. A subjective expression, too, qualifies as a kind of symptom. The scientific laboratory, too, is fully engaged in, and committed to the pursuit of evidence that either supports or refutes a theory, or an experiment based, itself, on a theory. So, in street-talk, as well as in self-talk, we all engage in a form of imitation of one or other of the many paths by which we attempt to cope, and even to confront whatever it is that might be ‘bothering’ us. And in a culture seemingly ‘drugged’ with defense mechanisms, it will be increasingly difficult, if not impossible, for many to break through the veil of denial, avoidance and psychic ‘paving’ that we have all consciously or unconsciously laid down on our own path, and on the paths of our children and grandchildren.

Exploring questions of public disclosure and private secrecy...

When it comes to privacy and accountability, people always demand the former for themselves and the latter for everyone else. (David Brin)

England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare’s much-quoted message, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr. Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich relations who have to be kow-towed to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income. It is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes ranks. A family with the wrong members in control—that, perhaps is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase. (George Orwell)

The collision of the public and the private is one over which there is not, and likely never will be, an agreed formula for reconciling the two. And, as one might expect, when the details of a private (high visibility) life and marriage and family are shared with some 30 million (17M in the U.S. and 14M in the UK) over two days, that collision reverberates like a trans-Atlantic thunderstorm. Harry and Megan, Duke and Duchess of Sussex (at least for now), engaged in a public pulling back of the veil of secrecy and privacy that has enshrined the royal family for centuries, not with the compliance of the very public, and highly sensational, tabloid media. Specifically, the issue of racism through off-the-record discussion of baby boy, Archie, and the prospective colour of his skin, as well as the allegedly rejected plea for help from Meghan who obviously felt constrained (to put it mildly) in what she was permitted to do and to say, as a newly minted bride of the House of Windsor. She was not only a mixed-race woman, of ‘common class’ marrying a British prince; she was also a divorcee and a professional American actor prior to her engagement to Prince Harry. For those who casually criticize her for not having “googled” what it might be like to attempt such a canyon-like leap, suffice it to say that whatever Harry shared about the prospects of life inside the royal family would have been incomplete, at best, and relatively empty and prettified at worst.

Without adequate ‘orientation’ for such a conjugal union, or for the many expected rituals, rigours and disciplines of royal performance, it is nigh onto impossible for the rest of us to being even to imagine how treacherous her path was, and potentially still is. And, at the intersection of the history of Harry’s life (as Princess Diana’s second son), including the trauma of her death and the protracted and merciless pursuit by the paparazzi and the renewal of such pursuit for Meghan, in a nation that quite literally feeds on gossip, (whatever else Orwell and others might say), the divorce between the young royals and the palace was no surprise to millions. Whether or not private security was to be paid by the palace, or the British government (or for that matter by the Canadian government, should they have remained in Canada), or whether Archie was to have a royal title, as many of his cousins equally removed in the line of succession to the throne were given, seems both irrelevant and dismissible following the furor of “the interview”.

What is not irrelevant, or dismissible, however, is the profound intersection of the interview/divorce, and the global tide ofooverwhelming consciousness of racial discrimination and bias, both explicit and implicit, personal and structural, familial and organizational. Although the U.S. government may have experienced a significant decline in mature governance, including responsibility for many of the factors that comprise “world order,” over the last four years, the penetration of the American reality television show (the narrative of the capital and former president) into the farthest reaches of the minds and hearts of people everywhere has never been deeper or more indelible. Raised in the culture of stardom, Hollywood, klieg lights, tabloid and personality media industries, and having participated in the theatrical culture on both sides of the 49^th parallel, Meghan was like that proverbial ‘hire’ from whom high accomplishments can and will be expected, along with the possibility of significant failures. I such a ‘hire’ too risky for the royal family? The answer is most likely. Were both Harry and Meghan fully conscious, or apprised, of the risks and the dangers? Unlikely. Was the royal family, still eager to adopt and embrace a ‘new’ bride, of mixed race, into a family that serves as the Head of the Commonwealth of Nations, of which group of countries more than half the people are black or brown. (of the “54 member countries, 19 African, 13 in the Caribbean and Americas, 8 Asian, 11 Pacific and 3 European…Commonwealth countries are diverse—they are amongst the world’s biggest, smallest, richest and poorest countries” …from thecommonwealth.org)? Undoubtedly…marketing of the royal “brand” translates into the cliché, keeping up with the trends of the world!

While racism gets top public billing in the headlines, right next to it squirms, mental health….an issue in and through which there is not a country, province, state, city or town on the planet is not wrestling to comprehend, to manage, to ameliorate, and to integrate into the public conventional conversation. And some countries are much more sensitive to the needs and the demands and the costs of mental illness, while others, especially the United States, are far behind in their national embrace of the issue. One of the primary arguments raised in opposition to government budgets that incorporate and provide funds for support of mental illnesses, is that one’s privacy is inextricably enmeshed with one’s freedom. To disclose a mental or an emotional distress, for many, especially North American men, is a deplorable indication of weakness, verging on a denial of one’s masculinity, akin to femininity. At the same time, many women, and many “evolved” (we dislike ‘woke!) men take an antiquarian view, that to acknowledged one’s fears, anxieties, depressions, and even suicidal thoughts is not a sign of weakness, but rather an indication of courage, strength, truth-telling and an will to confront whatever ‘demons’ that need to be neutralized (not surgically or pharamacologically removed!)

And while the queen’s public statement expresses sadness that Harry and Meghan have had difficulties over the last few years, and that they will always be loved members of the royal family, the issue of racism will be carefully assessed “privately”. Many pundits point immediately to the discrepancy between the “public” investigation by the palace of Meghan’s alleged “bullying” of staff  while she was still ‘inside’ the royal ambit. So, the monarch has both discerned and segregated the public from the private…something no sentient citizen of the Commonwealth can or will miss or ignore. Workplace conditions warrant public investigation, while scuttlebutt (confirmed and affirmed by both Harry and Meghan) about the colour of Archie’s skin, and the implications of that potential blemish on the reputation of the royal family, will remain behind the velvet crapes of the palace windows and walls.

Whether the public will remain passive, silent, accepting and tolerant of that position, however, will be answered in many quarters, by many figures, including public leaders, royal watchers, social columnists and, in the long run, the historical doctoral theses that shine light on Elizabeth’s reign.

In the meantime, there remains the looming question of how the secular, and the ecclesial cultures will address the issue of both racism and mental health. “Let’s talk,” the well-dispersed cliché promoting Bell Canada’s investment in the cause of improving the mental health of Canadians, is a beginning, and a meagre one at that. Individual athletes have come forward to acknowledge their depression, their anxieties, fears and even thoughts of suicide. LGBTQ individuals, especially, have publicly voiced their victimization in all aspects of public life, giving both volume and clarity to the collective cries for sensitivity between and among human beings, of all races, genders, ethnicities and cultural backgrounds.

However, Asians have experienced a spike in hate crimes, including hate speech in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Blacks have reared up in a cacophonous plea for respect, dignity, honour and trust, in the midst of the multiple injuries and deaths of black men and women, at the hand of white law enforcement officers. The American military has taken to investigating and exposing white supremacists who have already enlisted in their ranks, and presumably will also screen for similar traits among new recruits. Anti-Semitism, too, continues to find voice, weapons and both injuries and deaths in a spirit of contempt, bigotry and a rise of fascism, in North America and in Europe. At the same time, not to be ignored or dismissed, governments, like China, are abusing Uighers in their own country, and repressing activists in their determination to liquidate the 50-year agreement they made with Great Britain in 1997, over the governance of Hong Kong. The dramas, including murder and injury to democratic protesters in Myanmar, also play out on television screens around the world. And the Pope meets with a Shia cleric in Iraq, as a signal that both Christians (whose numbers have evaporated in the Middle East) and Muslims need to respect each other…in a world in which physical sickness, poverty, disease, refugees, and tyrants and their sycophants continue to abuse their power….

The spectre of the British monarchy being involved, regardless of how seriously one considers the issue, in a family investigation of both racism and a refusal to support a human request for mental health support, seems historic and tragic at the same time. It is not that British history books have not recorded appalling behaviour and attitudes from royals; some suggest legitimately and with considerable cause, that the Commonwealth itself was an instrument of racism designed to favour the white people under its umbrella. Similarly, the Queen, as head of the government, the Commonwealth and the Church of England (and all of its many iterations around the globe), carries a heavy burden of a symbol, not only of peace order and good government, (as the Canadian constitution reads), but she is also considered a shining symbol of racial, social, gender and ethic equity to millions around the world. Her ceremonial rituals, including births, weddings, christenings, knightings, funerals, anniversaries are all both calculated and performed as acts of unifying various political, religions, ethnic, and cultural groups, beliefs, perspectives and values.

And while many will consider her 70-word public statement to be a masterpiece of diplomacy, ‘buying time’ in order to gather time to reflect on what next steps might look like, as one commentator put it, nevertheless, this is another bruise on the global good name and reputation of the monarchy. And some, like Barbados, are currently moving toward republic as a preferred state for their nation, rather than to continue to operate inside the British Commonwealth of Nations. New Zealand’s prime minister indicates that such a move is unlikely for her nation. However, questions will continue to swirl around how the private “truth” of such a gold-plated (self-administered) institution can continue to keep its dirty laundry locked in the vault of its diaries, archives and internal discussions.

A similar question has to be asked of other public/private institutions, including the Church of England, as one of many organizations striving for a kind of balance and harmony in its capacity to carry out its spiritual and ethical obligations without selling out to the corporate manifesto of secrecy, privacy, and processes not subject to appeal or even to the right to due process.

Of course, it will be argued that Harry And Meghan have already surrendered their right to appeal and their right to due process, both by leaving and by speaking out. However, their voices, their faces, and their children will continue to shine a light (enhanced and supported by a public appetite on both sides of the Atlantic) into the questions of how individuals relate in and to large organizations, including family and how or even if “truth” will matter to people who do not exhibit attitudes and beliefs displayed by Piers Morgan. There are still armies of his type in positions of responsibility in corporate hierarchies, as well as in church and educational establishments. 

Advocating for an organic, wholistic view of organizations

There are a number of sources exploring the concept that an organization is a lot more than a machine, adjustable and amenable to various tweeks, new ‘plugs’ additional oil and especially high-octane gasoline. Lines like, “Maybe if we change ‘drivers’ we will get more and better results!” are just an example of the kind of thinking, perception and especially conception that linger in the minds of executives, supported by a culture whose archetypal roots were ‘poured’ in the industrial revolution. This specific ‘metaphor’ lurks in and through the minds of many male organizational leaders, dependent on and supportive of a set of management principles that point to raising production, lowering costs, enhancing performance as measured by observable, predictable and reliable data.

As the cultural consciousness about the risks to global warming and climate change rises, there is a predictable and almost inevitable shift among some organizational leaders and theorists, to a different metaphor. No longer a machine (auto), some of these thinkers/executives are revising their notion, into something more organic…a kind of natural system, interacting with its environment, not only on those traditional scales of profit and loss, sales and revenue streams, but even more complex. Some of this thinking details environmental (eco-system, political, economic, labour and even values determinants and goals) as a much more complex, inclusive and even ‘living’ thing that requires detailed attention, nuanced and sensitive observations and judgements and monitoring.

Half a century ago, Charles A. Reich wrote a book entitled, The Greening of America, in which he outlines three levels of consciousness:

1)    The values of rural farmers and small business people that dominated the 19^th century

2)    An organizational society that features meritocracy and social improvement through large institutions like the New Deal, the Second War and the 1950’s Silent Generation

3)    The worldview of the 1960’s counterculture, including personal freedom, egalitarianism, and obviously recreational drugs.

Twenty-five years later (1995), Reich penned an even more urgent warning inside the cover: “If there was any doubt about the need for social transformation in 1970, that need is clear and urgent today…I am now more convinced than ever that the conflict and suffering now threatening to engulf us are entirely unnecessary, and a tragic waste of our energy and resources. We can create an economic system that is not at war with human beings or nature, and we can get from here to there by democratic means. Predictably, given the ‘hippy’ characterization of the author, the book and the author received many ‘one-star’ reviews. Words like naïve, idealistic, were amply applied. George Will argued it was the worst book ever written.

However, as the world “turns” and we face some still urgent dynamics over which we (collectively, especially in liberal democracies!) potentially can have an influence, the ‘organic’ notion is finding resonance in our diet, as well as in our glimpses of how we would like our world to be perceived and engaged. Authenticity, that cliché criterion/lens by and through which many assess people and situations, we can hope, may be a glimmer of candle-light in our tunnel to the future.

With respect to organizations, when they are considered “organisms” (rather than machines), they take on a vibrancy, as well as perceptible needs in order to ‘function’ in the most optimum manner. Working conditions from the most basic that include adequate training, effective equipment, personal safety and security, environmental protections, to such human resource benchmarks as ‘worker turn-over,’ employee reviews, even extrinsic evaluations (Top 500 companies, for example) and evidence of social responsibility are all included in many of the profiles of successful business organizations. Some corporate organizations use these indicators in their arguments against the right of workers to unionize. (Not incidentally, the labour movement has suffered serious depletion in both Canada and the United States over the last two or three decades.)

Obviously, many of these metrics, taken individually and together, offer both the potential of increased costs, as well as enhanced worker loyalty. Human Resource departments, at least in the larger firms, keep track of both the company’s and the employee’s relationships as they monitor sick-time, scheduling, holiday time, potentially merit incentives, and also potentially dis-incentive programs, as well as the long-standing pay-distribution, accounting and reconciliations as required.

All of these variables, when considered in the albeit growing portfolio of organizational responsibilities and expectations, continue to be monitored as well as to reflect those social and cultural waves that occur outside the walls and the fences of specific organizations. For example, over the recent months and years, there has been a growing public consciousness of the disparity in employment and unemployment numbers between with and non-white workers, as well as a significant gap in the wages earned by black and brown workers, when compared with white workers. There is also a rising tide of political activism around the disparity between the income earned by men and that earned by women doing the same jobs with the same qualifications. These metrics, too, are having a significant impact on the expectations of both the labour supply, as well as on the management theories and practices especially in larger organizations. Added to this “stew” of organizational ingredients/expectations/perceptions, is also the issue of gender politics, given that women experience abuse from male colleagues at a rate that continues to grow, in the public consciousness.

Race, gender, social and professional guidelines, these are all a matter of growing importance in all organizational settings, whether they are operating as for profit or as not-for-profit.

Serving as one of the driving energy forces in the organization too is the growth in the development and deployment of technology, giving rise to new working conditions, as well as completely new and deeply embedded social media communications among people everywhere in real time. So it is not an exaggeration to note that whatever is happening in the social and political discourse is going to make its way into the deepest recesses of each and every organization. And this dynamic is especially true, if not actually exaggerated, at a time of a pandemic, like the one infecting every nation and organization on the planet.

So far, we have been exploring objective data, even that data that discloses racial and gender conflict inside and outside the organizational boundaries.

Now, it seems a reasonable time and place to stretch our consideration beyond the extrinsic, the objective, empirical and the ‘scientific’…given the considerably high importance in our culture as well as in our organizations, of numerical, algorithmic instruments of manipulating mountains and seas of information.

And here we cross into the realm of what is common termed ‘anthropomorphism’….the attribution of human characteristics or behaviour to a god, an animal or an object. This tendency to attribute traits, emotions and intentions to non-human entities is considered to be an innate tendency of human psychology. The study of religion and theology has included the notion of giving human traits to God, whereby God has eyes, hands, feet, and molds humans out of dust, plants a garden, takes his rest is an area familiar to many. The very notion of ascribing traits of humans to an organization, runs the risk of ridicule, for many reasons.

First, the separation of religion and state has been long advocated especially in the United States. Secondly, the corporate and scientific, including the medical and legal disciplines, rely heavily on the observation, detection, collection and curation of empirical data, in order to conduct their ‘business’ generating a conventional tidal wave of ‘authenticity’ and validity, and reliability and thereby trust, in the pre-eminence of the objective, empirical way of knowing, and assessing and then deciding. Clients, patients, workers, managers, and leaders all gravitate to the conventional vernacular as well as the epistemology that undergirds this way of seeing and of knowing.

It is the artist, the poet, the shaman, the psychotherapist, the dreamer, and the spiritual guide, while clearly aware of and capable of grasping the empirical reality in every organization, is not only open to the connotative, the poetic, the imaginary and the wholeness of the picture, based not only on cognition but also on intuition, imagination and the images the empirical reality generate. Just as there is much “more” to a human being than the list of symptoms and numbers in a diagnosis and prescribed treatment, there is certainly ‘more’ to an organization than those empirical digits that are assigned to the many and varied symptoms of the operation of an organization.

Call it the intuition, the psyche, the spirit, the so9ul…that dimension which, in some way perhaps, integrates the reflections, the data, the symptoms, into what some call the gestalt. There is what we common term a conscious and an unconscious in each of us…following the mapping of both Freud and Jung and their successors. Let’s speculate, for a moment, that it is legitimate to consider that there is a conscious and as unconscious aspect to each organization, each family, team etc. And while the conversation today centres around the word “identity” especially as it regards ‘identity politics’ (under which classification each voter’s identity falls using such categories as race, gender, ethnicity, age, income, education etc.), and we hear every day about how an athletic team needs to find its ‘identity’ in order to be successful, here we are picturing a slightly different, slightly more complicated and complicating aspect of the human being, not to the exclusion of those identity markers, but in addition to them.

Instantly, many will have already shuddered at the thought of considering something that smack of therapeutic language and its inferences and implications when discussion an organization. The last thing most executives seek, want or even will tolerate, (and this tragically includes too many educators and theologians) is to consider the relevance, important and need for ‘help’. The Los Angeles Times reports on royal biographer, Anna Pasternak’s response to the Oprah interview with Harry And Meg last night: It was a very soft-serving, soapy interview in Meghan’s favor…This is a woman who seems to make a habit of falling out with people.” The LA Times reports also includes this quote from Piers Morgan on Good Morning Britain, “I expect all this vile destructive self-=service nonsense from Meghan Markle—but for Harry to let her take down his family and the Monarchy like this is shameful.” Also, in the LA Times report, “A column in the Sun tabloid, which alleges that palace staff have dubbed the interview “Moperah” because of all the complaining, called the interview the ‘biggest theatrical performance of Meghan’s life.” In the same report, Clare Foges in the London Times said Harry and Meghan should have their titles removed. ‘The Oprah interview seems like the Sussexes’ own queen sacrifice: a strategic decision to burn bridges with the British in order to build them with the Americans,’ Foges wrote.

Any suggestion that the ‘firm’ (the British Monarchy) can and will tolerate a request for help against the tabloid press, who themselves are regularly entertained at Buckingham Palace, seems to have evoked, “That’s just the way it is; we have all suffered the same treatment and survived,” if Harry is to be believed. And it is precisely the chasm of both reality and perception that separates the “management” view of their organization and the “intrinsic, organic, intuitive, imaginative and (obviously the much more sensitive, compassionate and caring, and wholistic concept which, from their perspective would only lead to a “surrender” to the emotional frailties, akin to what they consider the emotional frailties of the Sussexes.

And yet, if Harry’s perspective has credence, especially his view that he “saw history repeating itself”, following the appalling treatment of his mother at the ‘hands’ of the tabloid press, then it seems some are more willing and ready to take a walk in his ‘mocassins’ than others.

The discarding of an organic perspective, including an organic epistemology, is a risk that too many in positions of power and leadership are not only willing to take. They may even be taking it unconsciously, unaware of the underlying, apparently imperceptible, and therefore unimportant energies that are flowing, potentially erupting and complicating the effective, efficient and ‘successful’ running of the organization.

This organic, intrinsic, wholistic, intuitive, imaginative, psychic and spiritual lens and the many nuanced colours, rhythms, patterns, and pulsations at the heart of the organization are not to be lumped into the category of facial technology that robs individuals of privacy. It is more aligned with a perception and a cognition of “identity” not as a demographic marker, but as a ‘fellow being’…in which those charged with its growth, health, and survival can feel an enhanced sense of comradeship. This organic framing, too, could apply not only to the organizations in our human community, but to the planet itself. We are long past time when we can legitimately continue to grab whatever resources the planet has for our corporate, political, ideological, narcissistic “profit”. And, the same is true of how we treat other humans: if we are nothing more than a productive resource, objectified, replaceable and easily and casually disposed, like trash, we will all have to live with such an attitude and a mind-set, long after the multiple human tragedies will have witnessed, and been complicit it permitting. 

The words of the prophet A.R. Ammons

A.R. Ammons, American poet, raised in North Carolina to poor parents, eventually won a National Book Award, and spent his last decades teaching at Cornell.

Here is his poem,

“Project” (1970)

My subject’s

still the wind still

difficult to

present

being invisible:

nevertheless should I

presume it not

I’d be compelled

to say

how the honeysuckle

bushlimbs

wave themselves:

difficult

beyond presumption               

(From The Great American Poet of Daily Chores, Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker, November 27, 2017)

The quixotic pursuit of presenting ‘the wind’ all the while recognizing, acknowledging and confessing to the absolute impossibility of the task, and then to place it beside the even more “beyond presumption” of  ‘saying how the honeysuckle bushlimbs wave themselves’ is to confound the empirical absolutists, to elevate the spiritual through its only possible vehicle, the poem.

In another piece, “Garbage,” Ammons writes:

When we brawl over our

predicaments we merely accuse ourselves…(and)

 

where but in the very asshole of comedown is

redemption: as where but brought low, where

 

but in the grief of failure, loss, error do we

discern the savage afflictions that turn us around:

 

where but in the arrangements love crawls us

through, not a thing left in our self-display

 

unhumiliated, do we find the sweet seed of

new routes: but we are natural: nature, not

 

we, gave rise to us: we are not, though, though

natural, divorced from high finer configurations:

 

These “sprinkles” of word-gems, little pieces of the weeds that grow in all of our gardens, are never to be either over-looked or forgotten, for their capacity to ignite life itself….as in “where but in the arrangements love crawls us through” …not the prosaic and predictable “we crawl through love’s arrangements”…We all must acknowledge, with Ammons, that his truth legitimately over-rides our conventional, conversational, street talk. And it is that plucking truth from the refuse of detritus that comprises some of each of our lives, that ‘seeing into life’s gutters, ditches, sloughs, swamps and mud’ in which we have all spent time there is a halo of beauty, insight, candour and profound and private truth.

From Garbage too:

the new’s an angle of emphasis on the old:

new religions are surfaces, beliefs the shadows

 

of images trying to construe what needs no

belief: only born die, and if something is

 

born or new, then that is not it, that is not

the it: the it is the indifference of all the

 

differences, the nothingness of all the poised

somethings, the finest issue of energy in which

 

boulders and dead stars float;

 

This “indifference”, “the nothingness of all the poised somethings” is that ephemeral, ethereal, magic web that holds all things in some kind of pattern…far beyond the pattern of our rationality, far outside the scope of our micro-and-tele-and-peri-SCOPES, refusing confinement, squirming against all definitive diagnoses, and even definition itself.

And our herculean efforts to pin down our “situation” and our “circumstances” and the “context” of the January 6^th insurrection, as our legal and political and accounting and security forces are charged with accomplishing, will likely remain blind and deaf to the indifference, the nothingness, while focusing on the “poised somethings”. It is the poised somethings that fill up our screens and our consciousness, and even our cognition, as our fledgling attempt to feed a hollow hunger of meaninglessness.

If our conscious sensibilities are fixated on the “poised somethings” and we have our own binoculars tethered to our foreheads as we devour enlarged, almost lasered images of destruction, how can and will we ever ‘see’ those indifferences, those inscrutable, imperceptible and ethereal winds that are at the heart of all life and the energy that generates and sustains all of life?

Increasingly we are living in a world determined to inflict accountability, responsibility and blame-and-shame on everyone who exhibits weakness of judgement, of indiscretion, of any abuse of power, defined by those “courageous” enough to come forward to tell their story. And while the victim’s integrity is to be credited, the public square’s capacity and willingness to suspend disbelief, without immediately rushing to judgement, seems imperiled. Big, loud, strong, dominating, winning, alpha, almost always male,….these stereotyped symbols of power, especially of “white” (not as in pure, holy, or sacred) are counter-poised, and given incarnation by such deplorables as trump and his cult, that we are left scouring the human landscape for the garbage we once sought and found in the landfill.

Is our lostness a sign of our having abandoned the “nothingness” of all the poised somethings?

Are we so afraid of our own “nothingness” that we have succumbed to the lie of “alternative facts” as proposed by Kelly Anne Conway?

Are we in danger of entering a burning planet without fire-fighters, water, strategy, water-bombers, and warning sirens, because we have ceased to belief there is even a fire and that all those calls coming into “the fire station” are merely robocalls, without merit, without a human in distress on the other end?

Succumbing to the absence of indifference, and rejecting our own nothingness, have we imposed a binary choice on all of us, one in which a perfectly defined morality is in an epic conflict with another perfectly defined evil?

Is my truth now pre-determined to be the veritable lie of those who disagree with me? And is my enemy’s truth pre-assigned to the garbage heap of all things Satanic?

There is much sinew in the notion of a human pursuit of purpose, meaning and the concomitant goals and objectives that attempt to define that identity. However, when that laser-nuclear-personal identity life goal is so flaming hot that it literally and metaphorically incinerates all other personal life goals, as if a pre-determined, pre-destined assignment of “religious determinism” holds sway over the body politic, that flame has not only obliterated others, it threatens to obliterate the playing field on which we are trying to seek and pursue a respectful and respected life.

Trying to construe, in a new and different way, language, rhetoric and stage-acting, what each of us “knows” deeply that some of the most important aspects of being alive are far beyond the scope of our cognition, and of our epistemology is a death march over a cliff of our own sentient embrace. And attempting to “fit” those unknowables into either a political or a ‘religious’ or a moral or ethical strait-jacket, to fit our narrow, narcissistic, and inevitably narcissistic emptiness is a collective act of self-sabotage.

We hear much talk about herd immunity as a term deployed to suggest boundaries around a ubiquitous, lethal, mutating, global pandemic, if and when a sufficient percentage of people have received a vaccination, then the spread of the virus will be slowed. It will, however, not necessarily be stopped or eliminated. Efficacious vaccines, effective vaccines, measured by their strength and capacity to mediate the sickness, reduce hospitalizations, and curtail mortality, while needed, are nevertheless, not going to crack the indifference about one’s potential allegiance to the public trust, to the community, to the nothingness that millions already fell in their bones and muscles, in the brains and hearts, and in their spirits and wills.

How we each “see” the nothingness, the indifference, the capacity and willingness to even consider such res horribilis (horrible things), is and will continue to be a “temperature” of the body politic for which we have no thermometer, no MRI, no CAT-SCAN, and certainly no vaccination. We all know that nature abhors a vacuum. (horror vacui), another of Aristotle’s legacy gifts, meaning that every space in nature needs to be filled with something. Over against this, we also know that “negative space” in art is the space around the between the subjects of an image. “Negative spaces are very important for creating compositions that are balanced and unified. Negative space in a composition can help identify toe focal point. Without enough negative space, a composition can look busy, with too many distracting elements (from liveabout.com) And from medium.com, ‘the power of a negative space is in its capacity to disrupt your normal expectations of reality….Dismantle a whole room and the event is spectral. It is hard not to use the word ghostly to describe it, as the family itself appears to revise the very ambience of the space. With the furniture gone, a series of personal memories begins to overlay one another—nostalgia glimmering with a hundred facets—as the past life of the room is somehow amassed and dissolved in the same instant.

There is a case to be made that we are collectively, (and perhaps individually as well) committed to the notion, like nature, that all space must be filled: every nook and cranny in every room, and certainly every brain cell in every brain with the most momentous, sensational and ‘news-worthy’ information, as well as the garages, offices, desks, and trophy cases of our “academy award-winning performances.

We fear our own abyss; we are terrorized by any glimpse of nothingness, indifference, and collectively have mutated such notions into signs of lassitude, purposelessness, ‘driftiness’, shiftlessness, and untrustworthiness. And in doing so, whether consciously or not, we have effectively colonized all others who do not share that perspective.

We have so objectivized ourselves, our accomplishments, our enemies, and our work and our planet, that we have reached a tipping point (Gladwell) whereby, should we persist in denial of the indifference and the nothingness that surrounds us, (including the indifference of nature) we risk falling into a trap of our own design: these are just some of the many sine qua non(s) that North American culture has (allegedly) scorned, dismissed and effectively obliterated.

Just as there can be little to no balance in a painter’s canvas, without negative space, so too there can be little to no balance in the life of a culture (or an individual) without the beauty and the gift of noticing the energy and the life-giving impetus from indifference, nothingness and the quixotic purpose of “presenting the wind”….that blows in, around and through each of our universes.

Let’s abandon the vacuity of ideology, of zero-sum games, of the absolutes of war (of all sorts and varieties with all forms of weaponry) and accept the larger truth that each of us lives ‘in the wind’ surrounded by and infused by our own and others’ nothingness, indifference, and the pursuit of the quixotic.

In that light, perhaps, we might shed some of our finally acknowledged hubris, and the accompanying feint of “perfect control”.