Occupy Wall Street – Engaging Peace

The “Just Enough” Policy: Behavioral Control of Collective Protest through Minimum Reward, Part 2 of a 3-part series

Posted on April 7, 2016April 6, 2016 by kathiemm

Author: James Montgomery Flagg. 1917. In the public domain

The “Just Enough” Principle

by Dr. Anthony Marsella

The answer to questions raised in my previous post may reside in an organized effort to control behavioral responses by making use of a well-known psychological principle that offers “Just enough.” This principle pairs a positive behavior with a “sufficient” reward to maintain control of desired outcomes.

While there are increasing signs of American citizen discontent with both

government (e.g., 6% citizen satisfaction with Congress based on surveys, election defeats of incumbents) and corporate (e.g., community activism, Occupy Wall Street, union protests) sectors, collective discontent has been denied, contained, or suppressed.

The well-known words attributed to Queen Marie Antoinette — actually penned by Jean-Jacques Rousseau — capture the exigencies of the situation. “The peasants have no bread, let them eat cake (brioche).” No, no, no, never give too much! The key is “Just Enough!”

Just enough comfort, to keep them pacified;
Just enough tolerance, to keep them silent;
Just enough patience, to keep them waiting;
Just enough doubt, to keep them wondering;
Just enough satisfaction, to keep them content;
Just enough humiliation, to keep them humbled;
Just enough force, to keep them controlled;
Just enough deceit, to keep them believing;
Just enough confusion, to keep them bewildered;
Jus enough money, to keep them grateful;
Just enough vilification, to keep them angry;
Just enough sorrow, to keep them dulled;
Just enough entertainment, to keep them pre-occupied;
Just enough suspicion, to keep them paranoid;
Just enough patriotism, to keep them feeling exceptional;
Just enough comfort food, to keep them lethargic;
Just enough uncertainty, to keep them fearful;
Just enough secrecy, to keep them guessing;
Just enough “stupid” movies and TV shows, to keep them dumb;
Just enough partisanship, to keep them divided;
Just enough fear of job loss, to keep them passive;
Just enough force, to keep them hesitant;
Just enough technology changes, to keep them hypnotized;
Just enough media collaboration, to keep them ignorant;
Just enough freedom, to keep them thinking they have choice;
Just enough surveillance, monitoring, and archiving of privacy, to keep them ignorant of technological realities;
Just enough beer, grass, dope, and dancing to keep them laughing;
Just enough violence, to keep them violent;
Just enough celebrities, to keep them dreaming;
Just enough stereotyping, to keep them biased;
Just enough advertising, to keep them buying;
Just enough hope, to keep them hopeful.

Anthony Marsella, Ph.D., a member of the TRANSCEND Network, is a past president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii, and past director of the World Health Organization Psychiatric Research Center in Honolulu. He is known nationally and internationally as a pioneer figure in the study of culture and psychopathology who challenged the ethnocentrism and racial biases of many assumptions, theories, and practices in psychology and psychiatry. In more recent years, he has been writing and lecturing on peace and social justice. He has published 15 edited books, and more than 250 articles, chapters, book reviews, and popular pieces. He can be reached at marsella@hawaii.edu.

This is the second in a three-part series originally published on https://www.transcend.org/tms/2014/06/the-just-enough-policy-behavioral-control-of-collective-protest-through-minimum-reward/

The “Just Enough” Policy: Behavioral Control of Collective Protest through Minimum Reward, Part 1 of a 3-part series

Posted on April 4, 2016April 5, 2016 by kathiemm

By Anthony Marsella, Ph.D.

What does it take?

What does it take to awaken the American (USA) people to the egregious political, economic, and moral abuses and violations of their Constitutional rights and privileges? What does it take for the American people to demand changes in existing government and corporate political, economic, and social policies and actions limiting accountability, transparency, and participation?

What does it take for the American people to successfully reduce the concentration of power, wealth, and position favoring a few and denying equality and opportunity for the masses? Why are American people failing to respond to the numerous crises in American society that reveal widespread corruption, cronyism, and incompetence in public and private institutions and organizations?

Why are Americans savoring the fruits of consumerism, materialism, commodification, competition when the consequences of these institutionalized values are destructive for individuals and the social fabric? These questions are but a few of the many questions being asked daily across America and the world. At issue is the disproportionate presence of silence and passivity, and the absence of activism.

I am not discussing, nor am I advocating, widespread rebellion or revolt, even as some voices have called for these as solutions in the face of a creeping oppression. Rather, I am seeking an understanding of why so few protests have emerged and been sustained across time and place?

No one can deny the existence of protests from both “liberal/progressive” circles, (e.g., Occupy Wall Street, Wisconsin Teacher Unions, LBGT organizations) and conservative/tea party circles (e.g., regarding border immigration, abortion rights, gun ownership rights). Yet, in my opinion, these protests have been focused on specific causes, often informed by narrow ideological reasons. I am seeking an understanding of sources that could undertake a broader and unified protest, seeking to re-claim and to improve upon America’s inspired heritage of human rights — a protest to reclaim “moral authority,” “national identity,” and “social and civic responsibility,” not through guns, violence, and anger, but through virtue.

It must be asked whether current divisions across gender, racial, ethnicity, social class, political, wealth, regional, and religious boundaries have limited any collective citizen response challenging the concentration of power, wealth, and position that seeks national and global domination. In my opinion, the concentration denies citizen participation by controlling means, motives, and consequences of national activism, especially by creating divisions across diverse population sectors. Although developing diverse identities is to be encouraged because diversity is the essence of life itself, a sense of unity is lost as too many are denied equality.

And how does the fractioning of a society lend itself to external control and domination by those with wealth, power, and position? For me, the answer is simple: “A society can assume unlimited diversity, as long as it provides equal access to opportunity.”

It is the disproportion in opportunity, rights, and freedoms that lead to resentment, struggle, and violence. The USA needs a national vision identity that recognizes and accepts the conditions required for civility and citizen accommodation in our global era, including (1) an appreciation of the value of diversity, (2) a willingness to accept an interdependence ethic, (3) the commitment to nonviolence/nonkilling, and (4) a belief in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Unfortunately, what has emerged in the USA is a “limited good” mentality¹ in which gains by one group or sector are considered losses by another, because there is only so much “good” to go around. But while this may be, in part, an accurate appraisal of our global situation, there are forces at work that seek control stemming from the age-old divisions rooted in concentrations of power, wealth, and position. Choose your century, country, or cause, and “concentration” will always be the root of problems.

In today’s global era, filled with challenges that defy solution (e.g., population increases, poverty, violence, wars, environmental pollution, crime), “control” by a few (e.g., 1%, bankers, dictators, corporate royalty, Davos faction, monopolies) has become the means and the end. In the USA, which leads the world in military force, financial wealth, corporate cartels, and exportation of popular culture, “control” is essential to preserve an existing state of affairs that denies equality, and promotes homogeneity.

The USA has the world’s largest military budget, highest medical costs, greatest number of prisons and prison inmates, and greatest divisions of wealth (e.g., 1% versus 99%). What this enables — indeed ensures — is the opportunity to implement a “Just Enough” approach to keeping collective control.

NOTE:

George Foster (1965). Peasant society and the image of limited good. American Anthropologist. Limited good refers to the concept that in peasant societies the world is seen as a “competitive” place in which “goods” are limited, and so distrust, envy, jealousy, and resentment are fostered. Hmmm?

Anthony Marsella, Ph.D., a member of the TRANSCEND Network, is a past president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii, and past director of the World Health Organization Psychiatric Research Center in Honolulu. He is known nationally and internationally as a pioneer figure in the study of culture and psychopathology who challenged the ethnocentrism and racial biases of many assumptions, theories, and practices in psychology and psychiatry. In more recent years, he has been writing and lecturing on peace and social justice. He has published 15 edited books, and more than 250 articles, chapters, book reviews, and popular pieces. He can be reached at marsella@hawaii.edu.

This is the first in a three-part series originally published on https://www.transcend.org/tms/2014/06/the-just-enough-policy-behavioral-control-of-collective-protest-through-minimum-reward/

News of its Death is Greatly Exaggerated

Posted on October 20, 2014October 20, 2014 by kathiemm

It is alive. It is well. It goes underground and then reasserts itself.

It can currently be seen in Hong Kong, striving for greater democracy, under the name of Occupy Central—Central being the major financial center in Hong Kong, sort of like Wall Street, New York.

Occupy Central was described this morning, Monday October 20, 2014, in the South China Morning Post, as “a civil disobedience movement which began in Hong Kong on September 28, 2014. It calls on thousands of protesters to block roads and paralyse Hong Kong’s financial district if the Beijing and Hong Kong governments do not agree to implement universal suffrage…”

The full name of Occupy Central is Occupy Central with Love and Peace –love and peace being central themes in Gene Sharp’s book, the “Manual of Disobedience.” This manual and Sharp’s other publications have energized and guided a growing number of nonviolent resistance movements such as the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement of 2011.

Sharp, who has been nominated three times for a Nobel Peace Prize, is founder of the Albert Einstein Institution, a non-profit organization devoted to the use of nonviolence in struggles for human rights, peace, and social justice. Many of his books and papers are available free on the Institution’s website. To see, for example, a list of his “198 methods of nonviolent action,” click here. Be inspired: Consider the extent to which many of these methods can be applied not just to Occupy Movement tactics but to conflicts at all levels of society. Become engaged: Join the nonviolence movement.

Nonviolent activism: Engine of change, Part 1

Posted on July 22, 2013March 11, 2021 by kathiemm

Recovering nonviolent history: Civil resistance in liberation struggles. Edited by Maciej J. Bartkowski. Lynne Reinner Publishers, 2013 (US).

Reviewed by Ed Agro

This volume will interest anyone who is curious about the history of nonviolent activism and its prospects as an engine of change. The book shows in some detail the birth, development, and fate of little-known (or unknown) nonviolent liberation struggles in 17 countries. The aim is to counterbalance national histories that heroize violence and discount the nonviolent activism that preceded and/or paralleled armed struggle.

The editor and chapter authors are “engaged academics” in the field of peace studies; some were intimately involved in the activism they describe or are inheritors of that activism. In the introduction Bartkowski outlines the importance of these stories for peace studies; in his concluding chapter he draws lessons for those not only studying, but also actively pursuing, peace activism.

The tactics described will be familiar to those who have read Gene Sharp’s studies of strategic nonviolence (From dictatorship to democracy: A conceptual framework for liberation). What’s new here is the explicit recognition of how culture-dependent the expression of those tactics is. In fact, the first reading of the book can be difficult, because from chapter to chapter one has to reorient oneself to different modes of expression.

All peoples desire the same autonomy and dignity; all have discovered the same tools of struggle; yet each re-forges them suitably for their own culture. For example, the description of the Egyptian struggles for a nation-state between 1805 and 1922 are, despite different times and mores, similar to tactics used in the Egyptian revolt (Arab Spring) of 2011. Astoundingly, they also read like a description of Occupy Wall Street.

These convergences are partly due to historical memory and the worldwide intercommunication of activists; but they are also due to the rediscovery of the common principles underlying nonviolent resistance and nonviolent citizenship.

From this book I get the sense that there’s hope yet.

Ed Agro is a long-time peace activist. To learn more about Ed, read his autobiographical statement, as published in Forbes Magazine.