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Keith E Rice's Integrated SocioPsychology Blog & Pages

Aligning, integrating and applying the behavioural sciences

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Culture Clash – why China meets Africa’s Needs

by Jon Twigge The following is a ‘guest blog’ by Jon Twigge, an ardent Spiral Dynamics Integral enthusiast and supporter of the Centre of Human Emergence – UK. Jon wrote the piece for his own blog and has graciously consented to it being published here as well. It was a few weeks ago that I read on the BBC that the Rwandan president, Paul Kagame, had praised the way that China deals with Africa.  Apparently, unlike the West, China invests in Africa and trades with it which helps it build up its infrastructure.  The West on the other hand, according to the Rwandan president, is more likely to offer aid and to tie it more to conditions. Kagame – seen below with American president George W Bush – went as far to say that European and American involvement was polluting Africa. Why would that be? It immediately struck me, from a Spiral Dynamics point of view, that we are seeing a values clash here.  Essentially we have 3 different cultural sets of values that interact in different ways. From a very simplistic and generalised point of view we could summarise the relevant aspects of the 3 different cultures. Africa Much of… Read More

The Thatcherite Project is ended. Whither Britain?

As Gordon Brown sits in 10 Downing Street and contemplates the terrible drubbing the small turn-out of disillusioned voters inflicted on Labour in Thursday’s local elections – 273 Labour seats lost – while hoping desperately that yesterday’s emergency reshuffle of his Cabinet will at least temporarily stall the intra-Labour campaign to oust him and that Sunday’s European election results will not be as bad as predicted, there is one crumb of comfort for him in all this…. The Thatcherite project, which, with his roots in traditional Socialism, he must have hated, is at an end. Margaret Thatcher’s philosophy of the pursuit of individual wealth in an unregulated market, with few or no social responsibilities, was an ethos driven by the ORANGE vMEME. And, for quite a time, that philosophy seemed vindicated. After being the ‘sick man of Europe’ in the 1970s, Britain once again become an economic powerhouse and a country of standing on the world stage, with Thatcher seen clearly to exert influence on those ‘leaders of the free world’, Ronald Reagan and the first George Bush. Thatcherism reached its Capitalist zenith in 1989 with the collapse of European Communism and even China starting to crawl towards a sort of… Read More