Open School
This section stands as an open gateway, inviting individuals from across the globe to explore our seminars and study materials. Our primary objective is to empower individuals, unlocking their inherent potentials and cultivating a collective vision aimed at preserving the perpetual enhancement of our society. Rooted in a departure from the constraining Bureaucratic Way of Life, we advocate for an Evolutionary Way of Life, encouraging for a liberation from the confines of narrow specialization, conformity, and rigid hierarchy. Through the dissemination of knowledge and the promotion of alternative perspectives, we aspire to catalyze a transformative paradigm shift, fostering a dynamic environment that encourages intellectual autonomy and innovative thinking. In doing so, we pave the way for a society characterized by continuous improvement and a departure from the limitations that have traditionally impeded progress.
PLYMOUTH HARBOUR SEMINAR
E.I. (Evolutionary Intelligence)
Applying an Interdisciplinary Science of Human Behavior
2023
June 2023 Session
E.I. (Evolutionary Intelligence)
Applying an Interdisciplinary Science of Human Behavior
Session 1
The title of this four-session seminar says it all: “Fulfilling Our Infinite Potentials: Solving the World’s Problems.” Yes, every single one of us is blessed with unbelievable strengths that are imprisoned by our bureaucratic way of life. And yes, we can learn to escape from our prisons and employ those incredible powers to help solve the full range of world problems, some of which threaten our very survival. The key that will open that door is the integration of the highly specialized knowledge of human behavior that presently exists throughout the social sciences. This will yield the basis for a new social movement centering on the infinite empowerment of ever more individuals throughout the world.
Empowering the individual requires attention to the three basic elements of one’s behavior: intellect or “head,” emotions or “heart,” and actions or “hand.” We will focus on “head” today, with “heart” and “hand” as the subjects of the following two sessions. As one example of our integrated knowledge, we’ll learn that no one is limited by a fixed IQ or intelligence quotient. We’ll also come to understand the decisive role of society’s failure to integrate knowledge of human behavior in the 9/11 disaster as well as eleven near-catastrophes of stumbling into a nuclear war.
Our textbook, Creating Life Before Death: Discover Your Amazing Self, coupled with our website, behavioral-scientists.com, can provide the basis for learning to pull together the valuable bits and pieces of knowledge of human behavior scattered throughout the academic world.
The importance of emotions in shaping our behavior is well illustrated by the role of music, art, film and television in our lives. Yet emotions are ruled out of academic research on human behavior because they supposedly get in the way of scientific knowledge. By contrast, we see our emotions as potentially yielding a vision of our infinite powers not only to enjoy life but also to help solve the problems of the human race. It is when we combine that vision with integrated knowledge of human behavior that we achieve the empowerment we all desperately require to change the destructive aspects of our present way of life.
This session summarizes the entire Seminar
Following an ancient Japanese proverb, “Vision without action is a daydream,” just as “Action without vision is a nightmare.” Our vision of the infinite empowerment of the individual is absolutely essential,
but action is no less important. Lord Acton, a British historian, wrote: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” That is all too true within our bureaucratic way of life. But we can understand the importance of combining vision and action within an evolutionary way of life: “Power tends to empower, and absolute power empowers infinitely.” When we succeed in developing the habit of combining interdisciplinary knowledge with the vision of personal and world evolution, no power on earth can get in the way of our movement.
VISION
Step 1.
Gain awareness of your conforming to a bureaucratic way of life centering on hierarchy (“head”), narrow specialization (“heart”), and conformity (“hand”).
*Tom Savage’s Sunday school experience of bureaucracy at age 7 (pp. 3-4),
*Specialized information by the CIA, FBI, State Department and FBI of the impending 9/11 catastrophe was not shared (p. 7).
*The failure of NASA employees to emphasize the O-ring problem to management, based on limited communications up their hierarchy, was largely responsible for the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger (p. 7),
Step 2.
Envision an evolutionary way of life centered on equality (“head”), broad understanding (“heart”), and actions for personal development (“hand”).
*Tom Savage’s reaction to his Sunday school teacher, including the questioning of his authority, not accepting the simplicity of the biblical story, and daring to stand up and face up to being kicked out of Sunday school (p. 4).
*Biologically, following Stephen Jay Gould, humans are “learning animals.” We are the only organisms throughout the entire known universe with the capacity to continue to evolve, based in part on our complex languages, within our own lifetimes (p. 12).
*Physically, following the interactive nature of the entire universe along our languages, we are the most interactive entities throughout the known universe (pp. 15-16). By contrast with a see-saw that depicts bureaucracy, we can envision a stairway with steps wide enough for the entire human race. It does not narrow as it moves upward infinitely, and it includes horizontal paths to create interaction among people in the many specialized areas (pp. 39-40).
Step 3.
Develop awareness of your addiction to a static and dichotomous orientation, following the nature of almost all language.
*Following Alfred Korzybski, the Polish engineer who founded General Semantics and wrote Science and Sanity (1933), we are all very deeply addicted to an either-or static or dichotomous way of thinking, by contrast with a dynamic and gradational orientation pointing toward human development (p. 46).
*Samuel Hayakawa, a former Senator from California, wrote Language in Thought and Action (1949), furthering Korzybski’s ideas. He saw all language on a ladder of linguistic abstraction taking one from concrete phenomena like “cow” to abstract entities like “the human race.” Staying on one rung of that ladder reinforces a static and dichotomous orientation (p. 46).
*Jack Levin’s doctoral dissertation under Phillips at Boston University replicated many social science studies by finding that the results of severe frustration was aggression, as illustrated by increased prejudice against a minority group. He learned that this occurred only among those of his student subjects who were outward oriented, following the nature of addiction. They compared their grades to the grades of other students, or to the class average (pp. 114-116).
Step 4.
Move toward a gradational orientation, following the scientific method’s number system, and its unlimited potential.
*Korzybski had some success in teaching his students a gradational approach. This is illustrated by the emergence of the journal ETC, devoted to developing general semantics (p. 46).
*Hayakawa found that by moving up and down the ladder of linguistic abstraction not only illustrates a gradational orientation but also enables one to take into account an increasing range of knowledge (p. 46). C. Wright Mills, in his famous book, The Sociological Imagination (1959/2000), stated: “The capacity to shuttle between levels of abstraction, with ease and with clarity, is a signal mark of the imaginative and systematic thinker” (p. 34 of his book).
*By contrast with the outward-oriented students in Levin’s experiment, a minority of the students were less outward oriented, for they compared their grades with their own previous grades. Lo and behold, they didn’t increase prejudice against a minority group when they were deeply frustrated (pp. 114-16).
Step 5.
Achieve awareness of your victimization by the revolution of rising expectations and your increasing aspirations-fulfillment gap.
For the Buddha, the central problem of the human race is one’s negative feelings tied to the gap between one’s wants and actual achievements. This aspirations-fulfillment gap is his First Noble Truth (p. 67). Emile Durkheim wrote about this same gap in his book, Suicide (1897), at a time when the industrial revolution was gathering speed: “From top to bottom of the ladder, greed is aroused without knowing where to find ultimate foothold. Nothing can calm it, since its goal is far beyond all it can attain” (p. 69).
In his book with Louis C. Johnston, The Invisible Crisis of Contemporary Society (2007), Phillips concluded: “The gap between aspirations and their fulfillment is in fact increasing in contemporary society.” This is very largely a result of what Harlan Cleveland called ”a revolution of rising expectations” accompanying the industrial revolution ( p. 69).
In Value-Free Science? Ideals and Illusions (2007), Harold Kincaid and eleven other philosophers of social science documented the misleading and often harmful idea of “value neutrality” that continues to dominate scientific research. There is absolutely no way that scientists can somehow expunge their own basic goals from having an impact on their research. Kincaid and his colleagues free researchers to include their feelings, such as happiness, within the research process. (p. 88).
Step 6.
Follow the East-West Strategy to close that gap, and then continue to increase your aspirations and their fulfillment with the aid of an interdisciplinary scientific method.
Following the conclusions of the psychologist George A. Kelly in his A Theory of Personality (1963), “Might not the individual man [and woman] . . . assume more of the stature of a scientist, ever seeking to predict and control the course of events with which he is involved? Would he not have his theories, test his hypotheses, and weight his experimental evidence?” (p. 14).
The East-West strategy begins with the Buddha’s Eastern strategy of lowering one’s unrealistic aspirations until they become realistic. Then one continues to raise both aspirations and their fulfillment in tandem, given that one can make use of the powerful scientific method developed in Western society (pp. 84, 86, 88).
Following the analysis of the idea of value neutrality by Kincaid and his colleagues, it is important for scientists to assess the impact of their values on their research. That assessment of “investigator effects,” which adds to the validity of their research, follows Alvin W. Gouldner’s call for a “reflexive sociology” in his The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (1970) (p. 44).
ACTION
Step 7,
Use Turner’s Law of Negative Emotional Energy to gain awareness of your receiving negative sanctions from yourself and others for your failure to fulfill your expectations (p. 93).
Retain awareness of your vision, which includes Steps 1-6: bureaucratic conformity, challenging authority, addiction, scientific method, victimization, and closing gap.
Use your vision to help you gain awareness of your encounters of negative sanctions from yourself.
Use your vision to help you gain awareness of your encounters of negative sanctions from others.
Step 8.
Transform those negatives into positives by turning them into learning experiences with the aid of your vision, making lemons into lemonade.
Retain awareness of your vision, which includes Steps 1-6.
Use your vision to transform those negative sanctions from yourself into learning experiences that then become positive reinforcements.
Use your vision to transform those negative sanctions from others into learning experiences that then become positive reinforcements.
Step 9.
Use Turner’s Law of Positive Emotional Energy to gain awareness of your receiving positive sanctions from yourself and others for fulfilling your expectations (p. 930.
Retain awareness of your vision, which includes Steps 1-6.
Use your vision to transform those positive sanctions from yourself into learning to make progress on personal evolution.
Use your vision to transform those positive sanctions from others into learning to make progress on personal evolution
Step 10.
Learn to see your mundane procedures for achieving positive emotional energy as part of your vision of a 12-step program for personal evolution.
Retain awareness of your vision, which includes Steps 1-6.
Use your vision to transform those positive sanctions from yourself into learning to make progress on world problems.
Use your vision to transform those positive sanctions from others into learning to make progress on world problems.
Step 11.
Gain awareness that your everyday habits point you in a bureaucratic direction.
Retain awareness of your vision, which includes Steps 1-6.
Use your vision to gain awareness of the existence of your everyday habits that point you in a bureaucratic direction.
Use your vision to transform your awareness of the existence of your bureaucratic habits into learning experiences that then become positive reinforcements.
Step 12.
Develop evolutionary habits that include an evolutionary self-image, based on commitment to the entire 12-step program.
Retain awareness of your vision, which includes Steps 1-6.
Retain awareness of your actions, which include Steps 7-11.
Use your vision and actions to develop an evolutionary self-image, illustrating EI or Evolutionary Intelligence which points toward continuing evolution.