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Keith E Rice's Integrated SocioPsychology Blog & Pages

Aligning, integrating and applying the behavioural sciences

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Is Vladimir Putin what CORAL looks like?

PROLOGUE  (04/03/22) This post has undoubtedly caused a lot of offence amongst people who subscribe to Gravesian and developmental thinking. Unfortunately, some people have assumed I’m saying Putin definitely does CORAL thinking. I wasn’t and I’m not. I’m offering it as a potential explanation for his outrageous and deadly behaviour. I’m saying: Maybe we should look at this as a possible explanation..? If we can understand Putin, then maybe we can deal with him. The post is meant to stimulate discussion amongst people who, quite frankly, understand 2nd Tier thinking a lot better than I do. It reflects none too well on me that I failed to anticipate just how badly it would be received. So I’m sorry for the offence caused…but I have decided to leave the post up (for the time being). I’m hoping that, with this prologue, it can still serve to stimulate discussion which can help lead to greater understanding of Putin and the dreadful situation he has put the world in – and most especially the people of Ukraine. _____________________________________________________________ I once wondered whether Vladimir Putin was a 2nd Tier thinker – and whether Barack Obama, for all his many laudable qualities, wasn’t. As Putin’s war… Read More

Putin, Trump and the Endgame for Syria

A  couple of years back I stopped writing about Syria. It wasn’t a deliberate decision. It just seemed to happen. The routine nature of the horrific atrocities committed with relative abandon by both sides, with advantage seeming to swing first one way and then the other and then the other and then the other yet again seemed endless and wearisome. Everything that could be said seemed to have been said…and yet still it went on. Meanwhile, the Crimea, the Ukraine, the Scottish independence referendum, the Peshawar Massacre, Charlie Hebdo and other UnIsamic State atrocities, Jeremy Corbyn, the Brexit referendum, Jeremy Corbyn (again!), Donald Trump…. So many other things have happened in those 2-3 years and so many of them ‘closer to home’…and, as the apocryphal ‘McClurg’s Law’ postulates: the more something is closer to you (racially, nationalistically, culturally), the more newsworthy it is (Stephen Moore, Steve Chapman & Dave Aiken, 2009). Thus, it is understandable (in some senses, at least) that Syria went ‘off the radar’ at times not only for myself but for many other ‘thinkers’ and much of the Western media. Now, though, as what seems to be the final, heartbreaking agonies of Aleppo are so grim and apparently so decisive, they actually break through the news barrier and Syria becomes… Read More

Fare Thee Well, Christopher Cowan!

Spiral Dynamics co-developer Chris Cowan passed away on 15 July at the Serenity House hospice in Santa Barbara, California. He was diagnosed with aggressive and incurable pancreatic cancer in June after returning from delivering a training programme in Italy with his personal and business partner Natasha Todorovic. I hadn’t seen Chris since December 1998. We hadn’t had a meaningful discourse since 2009 and hadn’t had any communication at all since the end of 2012 (exchange of Christmas best wishes). So it’s a measure of the man and his influence on my life that I feel compelled to write something about him at his passing. Put quite simply, the Spiral Dynamics (SD-1 certification) workshops that Chris and his then-business partner Don Beck staged with the Business Link in Wakefield in March-April 1998 were a major turning point in my life. I was acutely stressed at the time in both my work and relationship situations, unable to see how to resolve either one or even to understand what was happening to me. In terms of the process of change, I was in the Gamma Trap in both. Through the understanding Spiral Dynamics gave me, I was able to resolve both situations and, apart from… Read More