Kafka Shuffle

by Alan G. Carter 05.01.2007

In the Introduction pages I describe how low level stress is enough to reduce working memory and access to the semantic and associative network. In this focused attention hardware state, people can’t program or perform other tasks central to software engineering. If a person spends most or all of their waking hours in focused attention, they’ll stop expecting or relying on self-consistency, distrust the evidence of their own senses, and develop an increasing reliance on heuristics (procedures) and their policing. They will also be conditioned to resent others who do not match their stress level, either stressing them too much, or not performing the anxiety raising social stereotypies enough to give an addictive hit of stress chemistry. Just as with drunk humor, a group of people suffering the same distortion of their thinking will produce a distorted culture. Once a distorted is established, it can sustain itself by driving newcomers into stress, and conceal itself by rationalizing or even celebrating the goings on.

Such a culture is the kiss of death to any commercial activity. It is operationally inefficient because workers aren’t alive to the possibilities for intelligent optimizations of their tasks and instead develop buck-passing skills. It produces constant, invisible opportunity costs because of the emphasis on reactive behaviours. It produces conflict with customers and business partners as dealings develop the character we call “bureaucratic” — because government bureaucracies are places where stress addicted culture can get really bad. I emphasize that a stress addicted culture will eventually doom any enterprise — those that get by doing predictable business with such a culture are always vulnerable to sudden death by innovative competition, or even trivial changes to the business environment if they cannot adapt.

In this posting I’m going to look at an example of such a stress addicted culture, showing how deep and pervasive the reality warp can get, and how it creates conflict with non-members. In a commercial context we should ask how the attitudes revealed will affect motivation, quality, efficiency, flexibility, creativity and other good things. Conversely, think about how such a culture will inevitably display the extreme rejection of improvement and hence organizational inertia I call The Dreaded Jungian Backlash, while endorsing the correctness of each member’s distorted perceptions. Consider the idea that there’s a kind of organizational hygiene that anyone responsible for leading others should be aware of, and stress addicted culture is a disease of morale that can render the wage bill worse than wasted.

The example is an often repeated Internet article written by a physician turned homeschooler called Matt James. James went on to write Homeschooling Odyssey

, a well received book with the tag line, “Hour-a-day homeschooling has sent our six children to Stanford and beyond. While academic achievements are gratifying, they represent a drop in the bucket of benefits in store for families who choose to homeschool.” The most direct citation for James’ article that I’ve found is Little Manchurian Candidates, but because the model of stress addicted culture fits so well with everything he observes and expresses, I’m going to quote the whole thing here:

Little Manchurian Candidates
by Matt James
“One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them,
One ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.”
–Tolkien

Our six-year-old daughter was so excited to start school. At our first parent-teacher conference, Barb and I expected to hear the usual compliments and heartwarming anecdotes about our bright little angel. From our experiences with activities like T-ball and soccer, or dance and music recitals, we had learned that parents always say nice things about the children of others. If the compliments are sometimes unrealistic or excessive, well, parenting is tough work. We can all use the encouragement. I guess we had been spoiled. Jenny’s teacher got right to the point. She had some negatives to address. For one thing, Jenny was struggling with her reading. The teacher confessed that one of the most difficult parts of her job was deflating parents with the news that their children were simply not exceptional. Jenny was, at best, an average reader. She was not an Eagle; she was a Pony. Our job was to learn to enjoy her as a 40-watt bulb rather than a bright light. Was it my imagination, or did this middle-aged matron’s sweet smile contain a trace of malice as she related these tidings? I was confused by this assessment of Jenny’s reading abilities because it simply didn’t fit in with her prior history. She had a love affair with books for her entire childhood. We have a photograph of her at 11 months of age staring earnestly at the contents of an open book. I remember reading to her when she was three. I stopped for some reason, but she continued the narration. She knew her stories by heart. Like many other children, Jenny had learned to read at home. She was a bookworm, and she was an experienced and passionate reader before she ever started first grade. The teacher went on to explain that Jenny cried too much at school and that we needed to correct this problem with the appropriate discipline. Barb and I exchanged glances but didn’t argue. We were in shock.

I was curious about the crying. Jenny was such a happy child. I asked her that night what made her sad at school. Expecting to hear about something on the playground, I was surprised by her answer. The listening-hour stories made her sad:

Once upon a time there was a daddy duck with seven ducklings. They ranged in age down to the youngest (who reminded Jenny of a first grader). The daddy was mean. One day he demanded that all his children learn three tasks, such as running, swimming, and diving. If a duckling was unable to master all of the tasks, he would be banished from the family to live with the chickens. The youngsters struggled under the cruel eye of their father. When it came to diving, the first grader floundered and was sent away to live with the chickens.

This was the story Jenny related, in her own words, as an example. I heard it told a second time several years later, by my cousin Nancy, as a sample of objectionable curriculum. We were impressed with the coincidence, since our families resided in different states.

Jenny told me she also cried over stories in her readers. They made her sad and frustrated in some way. What a mess! In one evening we had found out that Jenny was unhappy at school, that her teacher thought she was a poor reader and a dim bulb, and that she heard mean tales during listening-hour that I wouldn’t repeat to hardened convicts. What in the name of heaven was going on at this school?

I was determined to get to the bottom of things. Since they didn’t send books home with students in the younger grades, I went to the school the following day and spent a couple of hours reviewing the elementary readers. As I read, my eyes opened wider and wider. I had assumed the purpose of the reading curriculum was to stimulate the juvenile imagination and teach reading skills. Instead, I saw material saturated with, to borrow another parent’s language, “an unadvertised agenda promoting parental alienation, loss of identity and self-confidence, group-dependence, passivity, and anti-intellectualism.”

I once daydreamed through a basic psychology class in medical school which described the work of Pavlov and B.F Skinner in the twentieth century. Their conclusions were that animal (and human) behaviors can be encouraged or discouraged by associating them with pleasure or pain. This is such an obvious fact of nature. It is amazing that anyone would bother to prove it with experimentation, as if the carrot and the stick haven’t been used since time began.

In behaviorist experiments various stimuli, such as food or electrical shocks, were used as rewards or deterrents. Over time, due to animal memory, a pattern of behavior could be established without food or shocks coming into play. This educational or training process is called “conditioning.” With enough conditioning, the dog will stop chasing cars.

As I read the stories and poems in Jenny’s readers, I was astonished to discover that they were alive, in their own way, with the theories and practices of these dead scientists. But the animals to be trained weren’t dogs or rats. They were our young students. Pleasure and pain signals were embedded into the reading material in a consistent way. Given the vicarious nature of the reading experience, and by identifying with the protagonists in the stories, it was our first graders who were “learning” certain attitudes and behaviors.

When a child-figure in the stories split away from his group, for example, he would get rained on, his toes would get cold in the snow, or he would experience some other form of discomfort or torment. Similar material was repeated ad infinitum. Through their reading, our students would feel the stinging rain and the pain of freezing toes. They would learn the lesson like one of Pavlov’s dogs: avoid the pain, stay with the group.

The stories in the readers consistently associated individual initiative with emotional or physical pain. Consider the example of the little squirrel whose wheel falls off his wagon. When he tries to replace it, the wagon rides with an awkward and embarrassing bump, noticeable to his friends, who then tease him about it. Another attempt to repair the wheel results in an accident, with bruising and bleeding and more humiliation. The cumulative effect of this and similar story lines, given the vicarious nature of the reading experience, would be to discourage initiative and reduce self-confidence in the first grader.

Animal dads, moms, and grandparents were portrayed over and over in various combinations as mean, stupid, unreliable, bungling, impotent or incompetent. Relationships with their children were almost always dysfunctional; communication and reciprocal trust were non-existent. A toxic mom or dad, for instance, might have stepped in to help our youthful squirrel repair his wagon, only to make matters worse and wreak emotional havoc in the process. Jenny’s heart would be lacerated by stories which constantly portrayed parent/child relationships as strained, cruel, or distant. I could see her crying with hurt or frustration.

It occurred to me that over the long run, at some level of consciousness, our daughter would have to hold us accountable for permitting her to be tortured in school. Logically, Barb and I had to be stupid, unreliable, uncaring, or impotent, just like the parents in the books. By sending her to school, we were validating the message in her readers, contributing significantly to the parental alienation curriculum. Continuing in her school-based reading series, Jenny’s relationship with us would have become tarnished or eroded, and an element of bitterness or cynicism might have crept into her personality.

I borrow the term “anti-intellectualism” to describe another dominant theme in the readers. Many of the compositions were, essentially, word salad. They lacked intrinsic interest, coherence, or continuity, and they often demonstrated a sort of anti-rationality. The stories and the corresponding questions seemed to require the student to suspend the natural operations of his intellect, such as the desire to make sense out of things or the impulse to be curious. Under this yoke, a student could learn to hate reading or even thought itself.

The following “story” and “comprehension” questions are representative of the anti-intellectualism that I found in the readers:

Once upon a time there was a little green mouse who hopped after a tiger onto a yellow airplane. The plane turned into a big red bird in flight, and the mouse turned into a blue pumpkin. The pumpkin fell to the ground and its seeds grew into pots and pans. Blah, blah, blah

1) “What color was the mouse?”

2) “Why do mice turn into pumpkins?”

3) “How do seeds grow?”

I can see children getting frustrated over material like this. It is debatable as to which facet of the exercise is more onerous, the reading or the “comprehension.” I almost incline to the latter. Among other concerns, I wonder if it is a good thing to pressure children to respond to stupid or unanswerable questions. Such a process would lead to passivity and a loss of confidence, to a little engine that couldn’t.

According to Pavlov and B.F. Skinner, repetition of unpleasant reading experiences would turn a student off to the reading activity. Predictable consequences would be a child who hates reading and loses out on vast intellectual benefits and development. In addition, his reading failure would tax his self-confidence, and he could be branded with one of society’s popular labels such as dyslexia.

I considered Jenny’s reading struggles in the context of performance expectations as well as grading and comparisons with other children. It seemed as if she faced a nasty dilemma: force herself to read alienating material, or disengage and then disappoint parents, teachers and self. What an impossible predicament for a young child. Once sunny and blue, the skies had turned dark and stormy for our happy little girl whose only offense had been to attend her friendly neighborhood school at the innocent age of six.

It has occurred to me that the cause of America’s illiteracy crisis has been discovered. It is the reading curriculum in our schools. Unfortunately, the damage to children appears to extend way beyond reading failure. One wonders if the hidden agenda in the readers has created our victim culture, a generation of withdrawn and resentful children, alienated from themselves, their parents, society, books and ideas.

I was reminded of the plight of our neighbors. The father and mother were loving, dedicated parents. He was an accountant and she was a homemaker and community leader. They were nice people, and so were their children. The two teenagers were bright but got poor grades and hated school. They hung out with the crowd and participated in the kind of self-destructive behaviors that are commonplace today. I asked these young people why they would behave in ways which would cause pain for themselves or their loved ones. They smiled quizzically and professed not to know. Maybe the ideas that moved them truly were subconscious.

We are all familiar with kids like this (Our own kids are kids like this, or they come too close for comfort). They spend a lot of time “doing nothing” with like-minded friends. Passive-aggressive with suppressed individuality, they all seem cut from the same mold. Self mutilation with tattoos and body armor is almost universal. Some of their groups are virtually masochistic cults. Sadism is the other side of the masochism coin.

That so many of these dysfunctional teenagers come from loving homes and neat families is inexplicable and shocking, until you realize that they have all been tortured together in school since the first grade. They are a batch of little Manchurian Candidates with attitude, victims of the obscure behaviorism that I found, and that others have found before and since, in school readers.

Barb and I had seen some perplexing changes in Jenny’s reading since she started in first grade. For one thing, she had stopped reading her favorite books and stories at home. Before starting school, she had feasted on Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Although she still begged us to read these to her, she now explained that she was not supposed to read them herself, according to her understanding from her teacher, because they contained big words and content in advance of her abilities. Barb and I, holding our tongues, exchanged tortured grimaces and cross-eyed glances.

When reviewing the school readers, I had noticed an impoverished vocabulary, composed mostly of three and four letter words. I brought this up with the teacher. She explained that the readers were integrated into a district policy that no more than five hundred new words be introduced to students during any grade level. The idea was to protect children from the dizzying and confusing effects of an overabundance of words and ideas. I nodded as if I understood, but I didn’t really get it.

Barb and I had clearly used the wrong approach with Jenny. We had allowed her to read anything she wanted and had provided her with a flourishing home library. Furthermore, we had encouraged her to run around in the grassy meadows and on the sandy beaches. She must have collided with great numbers of unfamiliar words and ideas, as well as a perilous diversity of flowers and sea shells. It’s a wonder she survived at all.

We considered the various elements of Jenny’s brief experience in first grade. She had a clueless teacher. She was regressing in her reading skills, vocabulary, and enthusiasm. She was being indoctrinated with character destroying qualities like passivity and group dependence. Her intellectual development was being stunted and she was being bombarded with a curriculum of parental alienation.

Judging by her crying in the classroom, she was part of a captive audience being repeatedly exposed to painful stimuli. To put it plainly, she was the victim of ongoing torture and cruelty. Along with her classmates, she was becoming, as one of her school poems pointed out, “Small, small, small, just a tiny, tiny, tiny piece of it all.”

In our state at that time, compulsory education began at the age of eight. Jenny was not obliged by law to attend school. With our various concerns, we pulled her out of school while we tried to figure out what to do.

First let’s consider the idea that the reading primer is an artifact of some sinister conspiracy that is consciously using behaviourist conditioning to stunt children’s growth. So many people have formed the impression (that is, they’ve spontaneously noticed a pattern with their juxtapositionally active prefrontal cortexes) of something like this going on that it’s a familiar idea in the homeschooling world. The trouble is, like many conspiracy theories it’s an implausibly complicated idea. The conspiracy must be huge. Even the junior grade teacher seems to be in on it.

How does it work? Do the buses go round collecting all the teachers on a Friday night, and take them off for New World Order indoctrination sessions where the sinister plans for manipulating everyone else are revealed to them?

Who does the catering? “Twelve thousand cheese rolls, six thousand classic, six thousand lite, a hundred boxes of eye in the pyramid paper napkins? Sign here please…”

It isn’t very plausible, yet the impression remains. I think popular culture has a better sense of the kind of thing that happens at times of high background stress. The junior grade teacher, along with various other people, has gone weird — and the people who have gone weird are in spooky agreement with each other!

Of course I’m not suggesting that the education industry has been infiltrated by pod people, but I am saying that it forms a closely connected social group which can run up very high levels of purely socially generated stress, so stress addiction can reach binge levels, and everyone involved will experience the same cognitive impairments. There is hostility towards those with mismatching stress levels, and a certain self-satisfied complacency that is also seen in people who have produced the same changes in brain chemistry using addictive drugs. So the junior grade teacher will exhibit a patronizing and smug malice towards those not sharing her crazy ideas.

What are her crazy ideas and where do they come from? In the posting Response to a Reddit Comment I expand on some of the logical effects of not being used to seeing self consistency. People stop expecting it, looking for it, or reasoning from it. Without being able to construct and validate their own chains of reasoning, it’s hardly surprising that they fall back on heuristics, and concentrate on demonstrating compliance as their principle tactic of blame avoidance. They become reactive, and live in constant fear of random misery coming their way. This is how background stress becomes a vicious circle, and giving people good reason to be self-confident becomes a virtuous one.

Consider the supply chain for the reading primer. The authors are probably ex teachers, or in some way connected with the education industry. That’s how they differentiated themselves to the publishers, who will be proud of their “close contacts” with the bureaucracy which will include the purchasing committee. In common with many other industries, the people involved will sometimes change employers, but stay within the same group. Teachers will become authors, committee members will go to work for the publishers, perhaps the publisher’s chief executive will chair the bureaucracy. They will all complain of how stressed they are and express pride in their “knowledge of the industry”, but not notice that they raise the stress amongst themselves with their industry practices or put two and two together. (Those that do become disillusioned and leave.)

So everyone from author to teacher has the same stress addiction warped crazy ideas, and it’s not surprising that the reading primer they deliver to children with great pride reflects those crazy ideas. Demands are random, cruel and impossible. Nothing has narrative continuity, causality disappears. Safety is in the herd, trying anything will lead to danger and worse — group mockery. From their point of view, the reading primer is a collection of worthy tales, perhaps with a vague memory of The Gashlycrumb Tinies mixed in without humour or taste.

The most powerful line in the article for me was:

I wonder if it is a good thing to pressure children to respond to stupid or unanswerable questions. Such a process would lead to passivity and a loss of confidence, to a little engine that couldn’t.

How often have I seen the “Oh just put something and get on” mentality, seen it make a shallow pretence — even mockery — of whatever simple task supposedly intelligent people have been trying to do! Humans need causality — reason — to stay sane. We are not healthy if we spend all our time in focussed attention, unable to establish context or weigh significance. Saint Bob saw this when in response to Brenda Ann Spencer’s trend setting school massacre he wrote,

And he can see no reasons
Cos there are no reasons
What reasons do you need to be shown?

There is no-one stroking a white cat. No conspiracy to damage children. The reading primer just reflects the frightened and frightening, sorry state of the people who produced it, and that state of mind has the property that it will drag other minds down to its own level if they are exposed to it for too long. But its effects are far deeper and far worse than any fiendish plan could conceive. Until we recognize and address it, this stupid socially generated disease will be in control.

It’s a state of mind that destroys firms and causes nations to stagnate as well as producing spontaneous explosions of nihilistic behaviour in schoolchildren.

Full Disclosure

I am prejudiced against claims of the world-girdling power of white cats. Twirip of the Mists has received immense investment as I try to build up “special static electricity”, but despite developing a very encouraging Gremlin impersonation she has not yet attracted a mononomative1 girlfriend, yet alone phalanxes of boiler-suited minions.

1: Having only one name.