Trip Prep

As I mentioned last blog, next week I travel to Wyoming to meet with Al and update our plans for the rest of 2015 into 2016. I am also looking for some part-time teaching work to expand my reserves (I originally planned for working with IRI two years before having to go back to work - I made it five, so I'm overdue). As a result, things have been a bit busy for me. This means a shorter post today, and possibly no post next Monday, as I will be traveling, but I will try to post something later this week, to make up for today's lightness and next week's lack.

Schedule Changes Change Things

Well, it appears that, due to both immigration policy changes and some issues regarding water availability in Chimoio, my trip to Mozambique has been postponed for the foreseeable future. The water issues are, apparently, creating a high-mosquito environment that Malaria turns into a high-risk environment, and is also creating water shortages. I don't have all the details on what the background on the issues are, but it is apparently significant enough that our Mozambican Director thinks I should probably stay away for now.

This leaves me with more time to find work, however, so it isn't all bad. With some contracted or adjunct work, I should be able to start rebuilding my cash reserves for the next few years working with IRI. Sometimes, one closed door opens another.

I will be traveling to Wyoming in early August to meet with Al when he gets back from Mozambique. We will discuss everything he has seen while he was there, and work on our goals for 2016 and beyond. There's a lot happening with IRI (even if my personal adventures are a bit curtailed), and we need to make sure we have a plan of action. Granted, most plans don't survive the first "interesting" event they encounter, but at least it gives us a foundation to build and modify our approach.

Exciting things are happening - we just need to make sure we are ready to act on them!

Checking in With A Thought

It seems I'm pretty busy this week. I'm still working on finding work to support my work, so that's keeping things exciting. I'm also working on a newsletter article for this month, and making sure I don't miss any birthdays (apparently, I know a LOT of people who were born in July). I've also been working on follow-up for the last few Incoming Insights articles, which may still take a little while.

In the meantime, I want to make sure that I'm clear about the reason we are looking in to the nature of human cognition, the effects of suppression, and the impact these things have on education and development. Ultimately, it is about building relationships. Not just relationships between ourselves and the people we work with, but how they relate with each other and other (often more aggressive and powerful) cultures around them. It is about identifying what goes wrong in relationships, and how to change things to make it right. All too often, organization or individuals will attempt to intervene in what is clearly a bad situation, only to find that their intervention has had its own set of negative consequences. Sometimes, the overall situation will still be improved, but occasionally, the intervention sets off a series of cultural events that ultimately makes things worse. There has been a lot of work that has gone into understanding what has happened in these cases, and more work focused on how to prevent similar issues in the future. We are focused on the latter. IRI wants to help people understand themselves and the world they live in so that they can build relationships and initiate works that are appropriate to their context. Our goal is to bring clarity and self-development to all areas of life: personal, social, economic, spiritual, educational, and whatever else may be affected. Much of what we have seen tells us that most people want to do good and be good people, but they often have disconnects about what is really good for themselves, their communities, and their environments. Our goal is not to correct them, but to give them the tools to figure out for themselves how to deal with their relationships.

That's all for now.

Preparing for the Fall

I am currently in the process of preparing for my fall activities. When I started working with IRI, I decided to save up enough money to work with them full-time for two years, with a plan to basically take a year off to work to save up enough for an additional few years. That was five years ago. I am now well past the point I thought I would need to get work again, but I have finally reached that point. As a result, I am now looking for work in undergraduate education (as an adjunct or lecturer), Instructional Design, or corporate training. While we still have plans for me to travel to Mozambique in August, this fall will hopefully entail me finding one of those three jobs to make back some of my savings, and finish paying off a few outstanding bills I have accumulated over the last five years. This week involves a lot of visits with potential employers, phone calls, and e-mails. It isn't terribly glamorous, but it is necessary, and I do look forward to teaching regularly again.

This does not mean I am stopping work with IRI - far from it, but the fact is, the current plans we have leave me relatively physically inactive for the upcoming semester at least, and I can use that time to recover some funds to facilitate future work. I will still be working on IRI material, and still posting blogs as regularly as possible. Thank you to everyone who has and is (and wants to?) support me and/or the work being done at IRI. Your help has been deeply appreciated.

Q A (Question Answered - there's only the one)

During my last splurge of Incoming Insight posts, someone sent me a question about the potential benefits of suppression. Discounting the (in my opinion short-sighted) view that there are several benefits for the oppressor, it does leave an interesting question about when and where enforcement of will is appropriate. Superficially, law enforcement "suppresses" criminals, by refusing to allow them to do bad things to other people (and occasionally themselves). Likewise, parents could be said to "suppress" children, by disallowing certain activities - or only permitting them under special circumstances or after certain criteria have been met.

I think, however, there are two distinctions between these examples and the example I gave of cultural suppression. The first is intent: the intent of the suppressor in my examples was to keep themselves in power and the suppressed population...well, suppressed. In the case of my illustration, the intent was the acquisition and maintenance of power--at the expense of the suppressed culture. In the examples above, you have two very different motivations, namely protection (in the case of law enforcement) and protection/education (in the case of parents). I think many cases of abuse of power by these groups is often identified, in no small part, by their intent. If the cop pulls you over because you were speeding, that's keeping people safe, and (while annoying) a general good. If the cop pulls you over to shake you down, however, that's utilizing power to promote the officer at your expense, and that is suppression. Thus, intent has a substantial role in identifying cases of systematic suppression and their possible impact.

Of course, as the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The fact that you want to protect/help people is only marginally useful as a defense if what you have actually been doing is inflicting various degrees of psychological/social/economic trauma on them. the second difference between suppression and these other examples is proper application of power. Namely, that those who hold power are diligent in analyzing the impact of their actions, and willing and able to change their approach in the event that the results do not match with their intent. (Someone is always going to hold power, by the way - we don't get to actually live in a "balanced" or power-neutral world.)

The area of intent is where you get your "moral monsters" - those who walk over other people or cultures to get what they want. They are the obvious examples of terrible things, and everyone can name at least one Terrible Person who has willfully harmed others to advance themselves. The area of application, however, is where I think the most harm actually gets done. We like to feel good about ourselves, and often make the mistake of believing that because we have good ideas or intentions, that we are helping others. As a friend of mine says, we front-load our help, looking at how our plans should benefit people, without taking a hard look at what those actions are really doing. One example I have heard personal testimony about are the education of Native American tribes. While, ostensibly, the goal was to help the tribes "get up to speed" with Western culture,* the actual effect of much of this education was to separate the tribal culture from their language and heritage, causing substantial fractures in their identity and sense of ability. The government may have thought it was doing good, but the actually effect was really quite terrible.

So to sum up, I do believe that controlling persons or groups is necessary for social order and development, but it has to be done very carefully. With this in mind, allow me to clarify my concept of cultural suppression. Cultural suppression is the control of one culture by another culture in such a way as to suppress the identity and ability of the controlled culture, resulting in fractured identity, loss of perceived ability and worth, and dependence on the suppressing culture. This does not necessarily overlap with other definitions of suppression (suppressing fire, suppression of crime, fire suppression, etc.). Yes, this is a complicated concept, but since when was life actually simple? As noted, our drive for simplistic explanations and actions are part of the reason we see so much damage in our global society today.