Categories

Keith E Rice's Integrated SocioPsychology Blog & Pages

Aligning, integrating and applying the behavioural sciences

‘human rights’

Money, Islamophobia and the Surge in Right-Wing Extremism

The mosque shootings in New Zealand on 15 March may represent a significant step up in anti- Muslim right-wing terrorism. At the time of writing, while there has been no further incident of major large-scale violence against Muslims, there has been a significant increase in anti-Muslim rhetoric and minor assaults, both verbal and physical, In the UK alone, in the week following the massacre in Christchurch, The Guardian’s Vikram Dodd reports: “…95 incidents were reported… between 15 March, the day of the New Zealand atrocity, and midnight on 21 March. Of those, 85 incidents – 89% of the total – contained direct references to the New Zealand attacks and featured gestures such as mimicking firearms being fired at Muslims…. Verbal abuse directed at Muslims in London in separate incidents is alleged to have included shouts of ‘you need to be shot’, ‘you deserve it’ and ‘Muslims must die’. Incidents were reported in Scotland, where a mosque was attacked; in Stanwell, Surrey, where police declared the stabbing of a teenager to be a suspected far-right terror attack; and in Lancashire. Meanwhile in Birmingham, police continue to hunt for those behind sledgehammer attacks on five mosques.” After the Charlie Hedo shootings in 2015, Juan… Read More

BACP Complaint #2

PART 2 Correspondence with officers of the BAPC (cont) Letter from Fay Reaney, Professional Conduct Case Manager for BACP 30/03/10 Dear Mr Rice BACP Professional Conduct Procedure: Case 588301 The Professional Conduct Panel has reached a decision with regard to this case. I enclose a copy of its report. I draw your attention to the fact that you have the right to appeal. The formal appeals procedure is outlined at paragraph six of the Professional Conduct Procedure. Any appeal submitted must in writing, specify which grounds it is submitted under and be accompanied by any supporting documentation. The deadline for receipt of appeal is Tuesday 27 April 2010. If no appeal is received, the deadline for receipt of the first part of the sanction is Thursday 27 May 2010. I also enclose, for your information, some material that you may find useful in presenting evidence of sanction compliance. Yours sincerely Fay Reaney Professional Conduct Case Manager Letter to Mr Laurie Clarke 06/04/10 Dear Mr Clarke BACP Professional Conduct Procedure: Case 588301 Thank you for your letter of 29 March 2010. The same day I received your letter I received the judgement of the Professional Conduct Hearing conducted on 19 March 2010.… Read More

BACP Complaint

May 2010: Keith Rice, Reference No: 588301, Harrogate On 19 March 2010 I was the subject of a Professional Conduct Hearing of the British Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy (BACP) of which I was a member. I went into the hearing acknowledging and apologising for certain wrongdoings and having caused hurt and offence to the complainant and his wife. However, I was convinced I could clear my good name of the more spurious allegations of the complainant. Due to the manner in which the hearing was conducted, I found it a harrowing and traumatic experience. On 20 March I wrote to Professor Cary Cooper, President of the BACP, complaining of procedural irregularities, clear bias to the complainant and unethical treatment of myself amounting to a breach of my Human Rights. I also queried the competence of the hearing committee. At least one member is supposed be of the same theoretical orientation as myself but no member showed any understanding of either the Gravesian approach (vMEMES) or NLP. The committee members also displayed an alarming degree of ignorance with regard to Hans J Eysenck’s Dimensions of Temperament. Professor Cooper did not respond to my letter but Laurie Clarke, Chief Executive, did (29… Read More

Overcoming Intractable Elements in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict through Spiral Dynamics

by Neri Bar-on I am honoured to publish this ‘guest blog’ by Neri Bar-on, one of the founders of Integral Israel. He is a professional electronics engineer with degrees from Tel Aviv University in economics and philosophy. He lives in Tel Aviv. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict seems to become more intractable by the day: if anything, in recent years both sides are marked by increasing radicalization. Yet the advent of Donald Trump and his pattern of impatiently shattering paradigms could propel the stagnant Israeli-Palestinian process out of its paralysis. It is an opportunity to introduce the principles of Spiral Dynamics to the Israeli and Palestinian leadership, with the goal of forging a new, sustainable system based on both sides making a sober assessment of their real greater good and potential for collaboration. The Spiral Dynamics approach proved helpful before, in advancing collaboration between two seemingly irreconcilable groups in South Africa. The case of Israel and the Palestinians is different but also involves aggrieved people with radically different narratives who are locked in vicious circles of retaliation. Points of origin The strife between Israelis and Palestinians is fanned by their own internal struggles. To oversimplify for the sake of brevity: their internal battles both involve… Read More

Don Beck & South Africa #2

PART 2 Beck’s legacy A personal annecdote…in June 1999 I fell into conversation with a group of visiting South African students in Leeds. To my surprise, they not only knew of Don Beck but regarded him as something of a ‘political hero’. (2 of them had actually seen him speak at a university appearance.) One of them told me that, thanks to Beck’s work, race would be a dead issue in South Africa inside 5 years – and these students were from the Transvaal, hard Boer Afrikaner stock from an inherently-racist tradition! Race-as-a-dead-issue has proved hopelessly optimistic but the students’ comments give a flavour of just how much impact Beck and Clare W Graves’ ideas had in South Africa in the 1990s. In an August 1993 interview with Padraig O’Malley, archived on the Nelson Mandela Foundation web site, Hall, explains the  model Beck used in South Africa: “Donald Beck, he’s the American sort of sociologist who has been working in this country with my companies for a long time and he makes it very complicated, I simplify everything – as you know. So level one is a hunter/gatherer, level two is a tribal collectivist, level three is people that have urbanised, come into… Read More

How the Brain develops the Mind

with minor editing by Chris Cowan This feature was originally published on the old Humberside Partnership Connexions web site in June 2001. Developed by Don Beck & Chris Cowan (1996) from the ground-breaking work of Clare W Graves (1970) and integrating Richard Dawkins’ (1976) concept of ‘memes’, Spiral Dynamics expands exponentially Abraham Maslow’s (1943) human motivation model, Hierarchy of Needs. It is the most advanced of the ‘Levels of Existence’ theories – yet, at the same time, its ‘map’ of human motivation is very easy to use. The biggest field trial of Spiral Dynamics to date was in South Africa in the early-mid 1990s when Don Beck used it to help Nelson Mandela and F W DeKlerk design the transition from Apartheid to multi-cultural democracy. However, it has also influenced the Community Policing Policy of Victoria, New South Wales, been championed as a means of investigating new strands of racism on the Atlantic Seaboard and more recently has been taken up by Dutch Traffic Planners(!). The work of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) psychologist Robert Dilts (1990) on Neurological Levels provides a useful frame for understanding Spiral Dynamics. Dilts identifies that the mind orders its perceptions of the world at 5 levels…. Identity… Read More

Is Theresa May going to bring about a Constitutional Crisis?

So, after the meeting of Theresa May’s Cabinet at Chequers last Wednesday (31 August), the formal pre-G20 interview (released Sunday 4 September) and comments made at the G20, it appears we are still not much nearer understanding what “Brexit means Brexit” will actually mean in reality. Labour MP Stephen Kinnock told the Westminster Hour it was “the most vaccous phrase in modern political history”. The BBC’s Gavin Hewitt reflects similar consternation abroad: “The much-quoted ‘Brexit means Brexit’ is met with bafflement. A Washington Post columnist said it had as much meaning as a parent declaring ‘bedtime means bedtime’. The French talk of ‘le grand flou de Theresa May’, the great vagueness of the British PM.” In the meantime, in this extended period of uncertainty, hate crimes against ‘foreigners’ continue to rise, the economy flounders for the most part, investment in business & industry remains largely on hold (with threats of withdrawal by major Japanese TNCs), sterling is in freefall more often than  it is stable and savers lose hundreds of thousands via the lowest interest rates in generations. (David Cameron’s legacy truly will be one of best-forgotten ignominy!) Following the Chequers meeting, BBC News (2016c) cited former Foreign Office minister Hugo Swire as saying there was a… Read More

On Being Sane in Insane Places

Updated: 19 January 2018 David Rosenhan’s classic 1973 study remains one of the most important in the field of mental health. For all its faults – and there are a number of serious ones – it almost encapsulates the difficulties in trying to determine if someone is mentally ill. The last half of the 20th Century and the first decades of the 21st have witnessed virtual ‘epidemics’ of ‘mental illness’ inflicting themselves upon the Western world. These ‘epidemics’ have, in turn, spawned huge industries in mental health care and pharmacology – and there is increasing concern about the role of the pharmaceutical industry in influencing what is classified as mental illness and how such illnesses are treated. Lisa Cosgrove &  Sheldon Krimsky’s 2012 expose is just one of many focusing on just how many of the authors of the Diagnostical & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – latest version DSM-5 (2015) – more and more have financial interests in the pharmaceutical industry. Thus, to some, it looks like the ORANGE vMEME’s desire for profit is driving changes in DSM – the medicalisation of mental illness that can be cured, or at least managed, by chemotherapy. Opponents to this direction tend to favour GREEN’s motif… Read More

What is Globalisation?

Relaunched: 13 December 2016 “Despite huge differences in distance, upbringing and social context, many of us now listen to the same music, read the same books and watch the same films and television. Youth in Soweto listen to LA rap; viewers in southern China’s Guandong province watch pirated tapes of Jackie Chan; Sri Lankan refugee kids in Toronto come home from school to settle down in front of Tamil movies rented from the local grocery store. Teenagers and their young siblings in almost every place on earth know Bart and Lisa Simpson. I can sit at my home computer downloading the latest comminqués from Mexico’s indigenous Zapatista rebels and out of the corner of my eye watch the World Cup live from Korea on the TV in the next room.” Peter Steven (2004, p16-17) is describing the communication aspect of globalisation. Alan Cochrane & Kathy Pain (2000) describe other aspects:- “Drugs, crime, sex, disease, people, ideas, images, news, information, entertainment, pollution, goods and money now all travel the globe. They are crossing national boundaries and connecting the world on an unprecedented scale and with previously unimaginable speed. The lives of ordinary people everywhere in the world seem increasingly to be shaped by events,… Read More

Good Boys gone bad…?

Updated: 29 October 2016 Some years ago I encountered ‘Johnny’ and his younger brother, ‘Harry’, at a school I taught at in a run-down town in East Yorkshire. Their behaviour tended towards the extreme – although I have come across worse in my time as a teacher! – but was not that far removed from the behaviour of many boys (and some girls!) in secondary schools in deprived areas. As I taught both boys and had Harry in my tutor group, I learned a fair amount about their backgrounds and factors which influenced their attitudes and behaviours. I developed this diagnostic case study and recommendations from those experiences. My experiences in schools since, my conversations with other educationalists and my readings in Sociology and Psychology leave me still convinced that schools and society in general fail this kind of child. The case study is updated with more of my understanding in Integrated SocioPsychology. ‘Johnny’ was an ‘interesting’ 11-year who came to the school I was teaching at to start Year 7. He was bright, enthusiastic, eager both to learn and to show off his knowledge – almost always the first to have his hand up to answer a question. He was often ahead… Read More