Is it true that human beings, in the West, are generally incapable of holding more than seven logical views of a particular problem in their heads at any one time? It is said that the norm for holding, in the Western mind, a series of numbers flashed on a screen is seven. Is that why the invention of the computer and the ability of the Integrated Structural Modeling computer programs to use over two hundred different syllogisms at once analyzing a problematic situation was such a breakthrough? Is it true as a psychometrist told me some time ago that on standardized tests the mean limit to human memory is seven at any one moment and the size of a group working with an Integrated Structural Modeling in Nominal Group Techniques is considered no more than fifteen with ideal being smaller six or seven?
If so, is this "human" or is it learned culture? I was taught in pedagogy in college that the human child is capable, prior to literacy, of handling literally thousands of bits of information as a whole while being poor at the ability to manage small bits at any one time. It was Kierkegaard who said that "Purity of Heart is the ability to will one thing" but not a thousand. Why is it common for so many political management structures to have seven individuals and even more common for them to be purely one gender from the most provincial to the most sophisticated? It is true as Stephen Jay Gould notes in the "Mismanagement of Man" that Western tests done on forest dwellers to the standards of the English or French, or any other European culture, always puts the forest dweller at a distinct disadvantage because the European standards are different. In the Hottentot Venus by Gould, Saartjie Baartman, a member of the bush Koikhoi people, was exhibited to the sophisticated Europeans for her physique and presumed hunter/gatherer insufficiencies when in reality she spoke four European languages and was learning a fifth, as noted by Gould, when she died of a European disease. For years her labia was next to Broca's brain on a shelf the French Museum of Man. It was not her brain arising from the forest that interested the Europeans but her labia. It seems one scientist wanted to prove one of his hunter/gatherer theories about forest folks being better at sex than the western civilian. We still hear such nonsense that constitutes a Freudian pathology cast off on women when in effect it was more racial than gender. We even see it in responses to our President. This is just an observation here but "Europeans seem to have a distinct problem with the whole truth about these matters." On a personal anecdote about my own experience with "Western Truth." I used to testify in court on cultural matters but found that I could never tell the whole truth because to a European American court the "Whole Truth" was not considered relevant nor was it useful in presenting a case to a jury of Europeans. The last time I testified, one of our community lost his entire pension because the Judge couldn't believe cultural differences in language affect and considered that our member was obsequious and lying when in reality he was being ritually polite rather than assaulting the judge for the Judge's rudeness. My associate also had to hold me back when the state's attorney characterized my people in a stereotypical, prejudicial and ignorant manner. I was told that my friend would lose his case if I made a fuss but he lost his entire livelihood anyway. After that I swore never to testify in a Western court again for any reason. Maybe what I am looking at here is the reason that ancient European culture had trouble in the forest. As I asked before: Is it true that they can't handle more than seven views of a problematic situation as documented by their own psychologists and rescued by their own computers? On the other hand, a typical examination of a problematic situation (by what is termed by Europeans as "Hunter/Gatherers") contains processes that, like the child, examines the problem holistically within all of the perceptual realms and can include upward of over a thousand views of the issue. That is a method of the Eastern Forest Dwellers of the Americas known as the Medicine Wheel. Some examinations of multiple input is instantaneous as in performance in the woods or in battle, while others take councils of seven, several months of examination through ancient structures that put all seven people through thousands of views of a problem (784 views per person per week individually and considered implications down to the seventh generation in time) before arriving at consensus. We have never found a citizen trained in Western Schools capable of doing the process except through Interactive Management techniques using the Integrated Structural computer modeling and Nominal Group Techniques. In that case the computer does all of the perceptual work. It resembles taking a railway tram to the top of a peak rather than climbing it. One way you get the view, the other way you learn the mountain. Indian children who are expected to know and do these processes are still held secret and out of school by communities in Canada although the Canadians are relentless about their superiority. In the US, that element of culture is still practiced only in the Pueblos of the Southwest, that I know of, since the European side of the rest of the country controls Indian education. A synthesis of native pedagogy to expand the consciousness and performance of the individual in a modern context does not at this time exist. Native schools teach native spirituality as if it were Sunday School or Schule. That is the Greek way of thinking that has led to the diminution of Indian performance in the world. American Indian pedagogy or as Keith and the others call them "Hunter/Gatherers" [a term from the old racist secretary of war, of Andrew Jackson, Lewis Cass] is really a form of religious thinking based in the history of the people as opposed to the Christian theology that destroys history for the purpose of a redemption from some sort of original flaw. That being the case I must reject Keith's story about cliques as applied to his original Hunter/Gatherers. He has no way other than fanciful thinking of knowing what their counsels thought nor the personal responsibilities they felt to their families, their clans and their nations as they planned. Nor do I but I do know what the laws are for the more recent descendants of Indigenous peoples happen to be. I don't even think the clique applies to the Western European Councils either although they do exhibit a healthy cronyism in their networks. Rather the what Keith describes seems like the last gasps of Feudal Aristocracy or its apologists. We have plenty of Council structures in our history in America. One needs only consider the private councils from the Color Council of the Fashion Industry to the Railway Councils that set the time zones to the Dawes Commission that decided to practice their social theories on American Indians trapped on reservations by the U.S. Army and stripped of their culture and educational and political methods clothed in their religion. From the Florentine Camerata and its musical and scientific discoveries to the Gentleman's Clubs, the Masons the Churches and Synagogues and even a few Mosques there has been the tendency to exert psychological projection of their own reality off on to the bulk of humanity and make it OK to take advantage of them for personal gain. Somehow they all seem larger than a mere clique or committee. Either way we alleged Hunter/Gatherer descendants aren't like the Europeans and our ways are not Middle Eastern. If I were to put it in Middle Eastern terms I would say that we never left the garden and weren't afraid of fruit. Any Native Council that is a clique will not be followed by the people because the people are free to follow the wisest, most charitable and responsible of the leaders and to not suffer the foolish, the unbalanced or simple venality. Hope this isn't too incoherent. I have to go to work and don't have time to clean it up. REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Keith Hudson Sent: Saturday, September 17, 2011 4:22 AM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, , EDUCATION Subject: [Futurework] Three disastrous cliques The whole human world operates by means of cliques of no more than a dozen individuals, usually fewer. This applies to governments or businesses, the arts or the sciences, professionals or tradespeople, worthy or less-worthy pressure groups, legal or illegal enterprises, religious or secular cultures, physical or intellectual fashions, ideologies of the left or the right, highly intellectual specialisms or trivial hobbies, democracies or bureaucracies, elite classes or underclasses, teenagers and oldies, and so on. Even in the case of apparently over-powerful individual leaderships, a loyal clique is necessary immediately below them or they don't last long. Even in the case of lone creative intellectuals, their ideas never see the light of day unless they acquire a clique of believers who propagate them. It takes no more than a few minutes of thoughtful scrutiny of any purposeful decision-making activity that we read or see about us to realize this fact. But, other than those in the really powerful cliques at the very top of their particular heaps, most of the motley don't realize this, anymore than they notice the air they breathe, or fish in the water they swim in. This small group-ness has applied to us ever since our ancestors broke away from other primates and struck out (probably forced out!), bewildered, fearful yet ever curious, into the savannahs of Africa six million years ago. There are many more behavioural characteristics -- social certainties and cultural predispositions -- that our genes and epigenes have shaped in us due to the particular exigencies of life on the savannah. But the basic platform is still that of the small hunter-gatherer cliques of mature adults. This has not changed. Civilizations don't succeed others bodily by means of some sort of spontaneous urge but only when they're spearheaded by small groups who've adopted new physical or mental innovations or have moved to new locations and shown that they can do better than before. Historians know this but they're small in number and usually don't come to balanced views about a topic until it lies many generations or even centuries or millennia in the past. Also, they're not usually to be found as advisors to present-day power cliques. If they have any wisdom to offer it is only of an anecdotal sort and may seem unlikely to apply to specific modern circumstances. But evolutionary science is entirely a different matter. Apart from a premature phase of eliciting catastrophic misinterpretations by politicians, Darwin's ideas largely slumbered for about a century after his death until being revived with a whoosh when genes were elucidated beyond doubt 60 years ago. Evolutionary scientists who carry out precise experiments at gene level and upwards, and fellow specialists such as anthropologists who closely observe all sorts of society, all agree to a surprisingly large number of universal characteristics that are found in every society of whatever sort. And the small-group nature of our species is arguably by far and away the most important of these. Because evolutionary scientists are also engaged in research which will have vast medical applications, their future reputation overall will grow and their role as advisors will become a great deal more influential than historians have ever been (or even economists dare I say?). They'll not be advising us to change the principle or practice of clique-ridden cultures because they know that this will never change this side of a million years. But in a future of many more necessary specialist cliques -- with even greater powers than now for good or ill -- they will undoubtedly be able to offer better ways in which cliques can recruit better candidates. Undoubtedly they will be offering demoselection of governance rather than our present 'democracy' which has yielded cliques who don't what they're doing apart from bribing electorates to vote for them at election time. Meanwhile, at least the present generation of children and young people in both the advanced countries and elsewhere will have to get through the consequences of those cliques which have led the Western world into our present parlous condition. My selection of the most disastrous three of these are: 1. The clique at the Geneva Conference of 1922 which overthrew the primacy of non-inflationary gold-backed money and made it subservient to government-manufactured stuff; 2. The cliques of Western central bankers and politicians ever since who have over-printed money to such an extent that almost all their countries are now deep in debt; 3. The cliques of traders at JPMorganChase and other investment banks who invented sophisticated derivatives in the last 20 years beyond all understanding of their consequences even by their own notional bosses. Keith Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2012/08/
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