Noticing and countering manipulation
Aidan Ward and Philip Hellyer
You know, I find it so unhelpful to think either that there is an objective world out there that is even in principle knowable, or that people are basically from the same cookie cutter (yuck!) and respond in basically similar ways. Put another way, anybody who tries to persuade me that the world is this way or that way or that people are like this or that, only alerts me to their ulterior motives and defences.[1] Just saying.
As a species my observation is only that the range of niches we can inhabit seems essentially infinite and the more I look the more diverse people are. In the last blog we quoted from Daniel Everett, Dark Matter of the Mind, the whole essence of which is that we each acquire different dark matter, which results in different behaviour that we are not conscious of. Very, very, very different behaviour: I have just been reading more about the Dagara and their involvement in a sensory world that does not even map onto ours or vice versa. (Kathryn Linn Geurts, Culture and the Senses). And we have rehearsed over and over again that our bodies are holobionts[2], that the major genetic adaptability is in the bacterial genes not in “our own”, and that therefore what we do with “food” is highly diverse. We have the ability for instance, via our symbiotic bacteria, to detect maybe a trillion different smells. That is real evolution as we experience it.
We deal with what we in the West think of as a world out there in a way that is almost entirely instrumental. We don’t enquire abstractly and intellectually and scientifically with our senses, we take hold, we grasp, we use, and our sense of ourselves is formed as we do so. The reason why science is so sullied and debased is that it does not respect this phenomenological truth and very few people have the discipline or desire to develop that incredibly arcane and specialised approach to the world that science requires. We just use science to beat people up, let’s get real about that.
If you read (highly recommended) David Graeber and Marshal Sahlins, On Kings you will be able to admire some of the highly sophisticated moves societies have always made to create kings: a move that makes everyone else equal before the king in a way they could not be without one. No scientist could come up with such sophistication. That relates to the ants in the last blog.
I have my own dark matter as we all must. I have some sense of what might be important: “formative experiences”. Some of it has a positive valuation from society, the dreaming spires perhaps, and some of it is darker dark matter. The point is that it forms the way I grasp the world and maybe therefore what I can see that you don’t: please return the favour! When I went out to discover what work was, I had no idea how slippery it would be, and absolutely no idea that forty years later I would be writing about “real work”.
Nigerian dark matter
On my first ever job, as a seismic geophysicist, I was posted to the delta in Nigeria. I learnt some things I didn’t want to learn[3] and understood racism from the other side: being deliberately messed about because I was white. One of my self-appointed jobs was to oversee the surveyors. In conducting a seismic survey, you basically want to traverse straight lines through the bush. The surveyors position those lines and leave wooden pegs at regular intervals for the survey itself.
Simple? Well the point of the survey is to look for oil reservoirs so you need to know where you have been. But even leaving massive, I mean massive, concrete blocks at the end of survey lines, one thing you find out is that the delta moves. A lot.
Let me divert for a minute to Pakistan where the surveyors in 1981 used as base stations a British Imperial survey from 1898, a Pakistan Army survey from 1947 and some satellite positions. Shell, the client, thought they could insist on that working but actually …
Back in Nigeria I was out in the field listening to the drillers drilling holes to put dynamite charges down. It seemed to me that I could hear drill teams in three different directions. On a straight line, really? The surveyors had surveyed in a line, decided they had come out in the wrong place, and surveyed the line in again without telling anyone there were now two lines …
I am still there. Everyone else on the big crew was hard at work by 7 am and at 9 am the chief surveyor was getting his men out of bed. Basically, that meant that the surveyors were immune in some way from management instructions, which in Nigeria means that the power and influence structure is not as it seems. That mattered. The surveyors filled in their field notebooks in the field in pencil. Where they could create a loop with four lines, they knew they could check their positions with “loop closure”. When I looked at the calculations, entries had been changed in pen so that the loop closed to the nearest centimetre. So it was not possible after the event and with the management situation to understand the accuracy of the work.
And the pain was so near the surface. One day with the chief driller, a lovely man, we noted that everyone was going back to base early in the morning. He said someone had had an accident and after some hours (just in case) we would go and see. Straight tire tracks on a dual carriageway marked where the truck had tried to avoid someone doing a U-turn. The driver of the truck gave me his wage packet and asked me to make sure it got to his family. The mechanics failed to bail the driver that evening and by the next day it was too late to get him out of jail.
I am still there. One final anecdote. One time at the airport it was guarded by elite troops in close fitting steel helmets, long gunmetal greatcoats and jackboots for the arrival of a general. In the oppressive tropical heat and humidity. We watched as an armed convoy set off up the road. They came to a fork and the general went one way and the armed guards the other. Who knows. What happens in England makes no more sense to me and I find just as threatening. There are systematic coverups in all sectors and whistle-blowers are still on a hiding to nothing.
Taking back control
Working for another geophysical contractor, doing groundbreaking research, giving much admired presentations at the European conference, creating stunning software systems: I just got on. I was sacked for my pains: much too challenging I think. One evening after the business day one of the directors was making his points to me so firmly that his pencil went clean through his pad of paper more than once. He probably should have been committed.
A colleague in the same firm, Jim, was a sort of chief quality person. He explained to me that his actual job was bailing out the directors when they got it wrong. We had a heart to heart conversation about whether his very presence and the knowledge that he would bail people out led to even more reckless and stupid behaviour than if he had not been there. He decided to move on. His own formative dark matter was being thrown out of the USAF for being gay.
We formed a business together. Hey, that is what you are supposed to do: be entrepreneurial, turn things to your advantage. What did we do, we helped businesses manage business risk: you know the sort of unacknowledged blindness and rashness that does actually take thriving businesses down. So, I have seen lots of dark dark matter. Individuals. Teams. Companies. They grasp things the way they do because that is what they do. Introducing new considerations, now matter how obvious and desirable, is ticklish and the more strategic and vital it is the more ticklish it is. Just as there is very little actual science, there is very little actual smart business when you go looking. Does it matter?
Video level reality
I had another colleague who even put together a four day course that involved the concept of “video level reality”. If you set a video camera running it records what it records and in a sense there is little dispute about what is in the images in the recording. But does that make anything obvious in the sense of being beyond dispute?
Jim from the story above was doing a psychotherapy masters. He was training with Bob Hinshelwood at the Cassel Hospital. One of his tasks was to sit in the waiting room at the Maudesley Hospital and to record only what happened with no interpretation. Video level reality if you like. I have been through some of the same training, but this time observing infants. The task is essentially impossible, and of course the insights about what it is we take for granted that we have seen, but which we have actually supplied from our dark matter, are wonderful and painful.
If a politician says “I did not say that” and you produce smartphone footage of them saying it, that is a useful corrective. If you produce a videoclip of shelling in Syria it probably proves that there was shelling in Syria but it may be informative or misleading about what is going on. The whole reason for paying attention to what we see, hear, feel is to understand its status. In general, we need multiple modes, multiple observers, multiple beliefs to put against each other to deepen our understanding. This is the context in which repressive types want to insist on video level reality as being somehow incontrovertible.
There is a tool called Sensemaker that helps collect stories about a situation and to analyse them for their range of attributed meanings. The immediate drawback of such a tool in a work situation is that people who might commission a study want clear cut outcomes, not evidence of the complexity of the meanings that have been found.
Back in Nigeria I was getting no news from my fiancé back in England. Having understood that from my letters she sent a succession of telegrams to assure me she was OK. The telegrams gathered dust in the corner of someone’s office on a different site and I found them by accident. Who knows what it is that we need to know?
There is nothing, and there cannot be anything, whose meaning or significance is obvious or self-evident. Whether we are talking climate change or the crucifixion, or whether we are talking a baby’s cry or an animal’s joy, video level description will not disambiguate anything. Gregory Bateson has a reputation as having the very foremost ability to understand people. And when he and his team were developing family therapy, they accumulated masses of filmed interviews which only proved how subtle their ambitions were: to understand properly the interactions between a small group of related people.
Binary flags
Maybe what we are discussing in this whole blog, both this individual blog and many of the others, is how to understand manipulation. And bullying and coercion of all kinds. When is meaning-making in bad faith? When is discussion and debate only there to undermine and destroy others? When do we need to engage in social digestion of difficult events because without which, nothing? And when do social processes merely disable us further?
One the key flags, that Nora Bateson is very good at spotting, is reducing things to a binary choice. Good or bad, for us or against us, progress or regress. Arguments and discussion dressed up this way are very often coercive and destructive. Go and read some journalism, any journalism, with an eye to whether it lays out the complexity of a situation, or whether it wants you to takes sides. Or invert that and say that the journalism covering the war in an around Syria is abjectly awful and useless because there are no clear sides, no binary division that lasts more than a month or two.
Things can’t be binary because, where we started out, there are no things. There is only how we see things, how we understand them via our buried accumulated experience. How I see them, how you see them and how those people over there see them. We can’t even be sure that we are talking about the same thing. Brexit means Brexit, duh, but an anthropologist could find a thousand authentic meanings among people for whom it matters. Binary flag manipulation alert: it is being claimed that the meaning is obvious, while the destruction going on can’t be real because it can’t exist because the meaning is clear, right?
Let’s be positive for a moment. Here’s my binary! There is no creative potential in discussions around binary positions. The learning and social development that is needed depends on complexity and nuance. It often rests on the quiet voices that need space to be heard. Which does not mean that complexity is never used to hide awkward and somewhat binary truths: long grass. We need deep respect, especially for people who have long been denied it, we need deep trust that people can bring their pain to bear on the issues, and we need steadfast imagination to know it doesn’t have to be like this.
[1] In the same spirit, advice often reflects the worldview of the giver, and has little to do with the recipient’s situation. (Doubly true for unsolicited advice…) When trying to make a decision, I’ll seek much advice, from varied sources, in order to feel my way through it.
[2] Holobionts are assemblages of different species that form ecological units. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holobiont
[3] e.g. Hitch-hiking soldiers with automatic weapons
