How might we, as the moderate middle majority, liberate ourselves from minority rule, authoritarianism and tyranny by regressive extremists?
How might we, as equity leaders, mentors, muses and learning designers, empower people to awaken the "unawoke" from their mass psychosis and the cult trance of blind unconditional loyalty?
How might we become equity muses: a new transformational change agent archetype?
For deep thinkers who take the time to think slowly and listen deeply. Reflect on complex questions, and learn how we can become equity muses together.
As Socratic Sherpas, we ask complex questions to catalyze how to exponentiate our capabilities and capacities to solve our wicked problems. This quest calls for radical transformational changes in our learning systems.
Wicked problems are complex because they have no simple, single, ultimate solution, with no right-wrong answers. Our wicked problems arise from our amoral and immoral abuses of power. The tail wags the dog.
How might we, equity leaders, mentors, muses, and learning designers, co-create ecological inquiry frameworks of complex questions to evoke our imaginations and develop innovations for solving our interconnected webs of self-inflicted wicked problems in the 21st century?
How might we co-create generative-strategic dialogues, engage in civil discourse with equanimity, and collaborate on how to solve our interconnected webs of self-inflicted wicked problems in the 21st century?
Equity, the humanitarian virtue of fairness, is the ethical antidote to the abuses of power. Equity governance is a prerequisite for solving our wicked problems. Our neoliberal systems are systematically biased against equity governance.
How might we, as activated citizens and voters, overcome our systemic prejudices against equity governance?
This calls for redressing the abuses of power by disordered personalities and dysfunctional systems. They collude together to exacerbate our escalating meritocracy and unfair opportunities favoring the elites and escalating inequities and unfair disadvantages disfavoring the people.
How might we unravel the Dark Quad of ALPD?
Politics is the best playground for people with Asocial Leadership Personality Disorder (ALPD) to thrive and flourish. The character flaws of this disorder include pathological megalomania, malignant narcissism, incessant sociopathy, and autocratic authoritarianism.
How might we, as voters:
Overcome our gullibility to prevent ALPD candidates from gaining political power?
Develop media literacy to redress the dark arts of propaganda and mindset manipulations subverting democracy?
How might we derail the menticide of mob rule by cult ALPD leaders?
Our two-party political system is corrupt and ineffective. The Forward and the No Labels initiatives are third-party appeals to the moderate middle majority to derail the minority mob rule driven by emotional regression to self-righteous fundamentalism and primitive tribalism.
Modernizing a concept coined by Joost Meerloo (a 1950s Dutch psychiatrist), menticide is a metaphor for the neo-terrorist killing of the mind. Menticide is the systematic abuse of power to indoctrinate and radicalize minds with BIPID (biases, isms, prejudices, inequities, and discriminations), maladaptive beliefs, and delusions.
Cult ALPD leaders and their propaganda machines deploy a wide range of political strategies to amass political power: using neo-terrorism, dysfunctional triangulations, divisive polarizations, scapegoating, and virtuous victimhood signaling: to name but a few.
Neo-terrorism is a propaganda war of words, with sociopathic disregard for the integrity of transparent accountability and truth-seeking.
Cult leaders and their propaganda machines abuse neo-terrorism to induce cult trance states of heightened vulnerability, gullibility, and virtuous victimhood signaling (VVS).
Machiavellian cult leaders exploit VVS, such as using the 1984 doublespeak about awareness and unawareness. They propagate the negative frame of wokeness and exalt the positive frame of unwokeness instead of calling out the negative frames of unwokeness and exalting the positive frame of wokeness.
ALPD leaders conspicuously express victimhood and moral values to enhance tribal bonding and gain power. VVS is not limited to ALPD. Individuals, causes and movements exploit this Machiavellian strategy for the same purposes.
VVS is about empathic self-promotion, emotional indifference toward others, and deceitful double-dealing: such as masquerading narcissism as altruism. Cult leaders use VVS to gain sympathy, praise, fame, power, and resources, with the exploitative purpose of extracting resources from others.
Cult leaders use the dark arts of mindset control. They use the neo-terrorism of disinformation to incite the mayhem of divisiveness, chaos, and collective vulnerability. They evoke negative feelings (fear, despair, hopelessness, anger, rage, hate, disgust, etc.,) to build up the walls of tribal bonding. They manipulate feelings to enhance their political control, domination, and power.
These emotional threats over-activate the amygdala-limbic-reptilian brain to deactivate the higher brain functioning of the neocortex.
Political menticide is the mass indoctrination that subjugates our freedom and sovereignty to induce mass psychosis with anti-social norms and heinous consequences. It is far more dangerous than genocide and mass massacres. Menticide sets up corrupt governance, and legal and political systems to increase the never-ending recurrence of dehumanization, terrorism, wars, massacres, and genocides.
How might we use equity governance as the antidote to power abuses?
Equity governance is based on ensuring safety, trust, and the ethical integrity of transparent accountability and truth-seeking.
Without truth, no trust.
Without trust, no humanity.
Without humanity, no good governance.
The ethical quest for equity governance is to do good for the commons, humanity, the common good, the well-being of all life, and the health of the planet.
How might our leaders and political systems:
Cultivate equity governance: co-create fair rules, fair plays, fair games, fair opportunities, and fair rewards for the benefit of all, on a healthy planet?
Use equity governance to guide us through our toxic world of dysfunctional polarizations, divisiveness, and distrust?
How might we disseminate the equity meme and implement the Rhodium rule?
This ultimate quest for humanity is Equity Moonshot: co-design and build an equitable, regenerative, and sustainable future for the benefit of all.
This massive transformational purpose calls for galvanizing empowerment networks to implement the equity meme and the Rhodium simple rule of equity governance.
Disseminate the equity meme
To Love, Equity, and the pursuit of truth-seeking
Equity is the North Star within a constellation of guiding virtues.
How might we, the people, use this constellation of virtues to move us beyond the conflicting hierarchies of value systems within our corporate-business-political world of power that prevent us from cultivating equity governance?
Implement the Rhodium rule
Be fair and kind to all people, the planet, the environment, nature, biodiversity, animals, the soil, and plants.
How might we lower our walls of defensiveness to understand our differences to make positive differences?
Create safe spaces to lower the guard of emotional defensiveness
Be aware of what triggers emotional reactivity
Empathize to understand what underlies negative emotions (fear, anger, etc.,)
Inquiry to understand what underlies emotional reactivity
Develop a shared vision of a common future
Build a middle ground of common interests
Assure civility despite differences
Clarify consensus about areas of agreement and disagreement
Encourage individuals to discern and question their claims to know
Invite individuals to share their knowledge and their evidence for their claims
Discern facts, inferences, and the difference between associations and cause-and-effects
How might we humanize our interpersonal relationships with deeper conversations across the political spectrum?
David Brook’s new book provides a heuristic stance to address the above question.
Approach with awe
Ask elevating questions
Ask open-ended questions
Make them authors, not witnesses
Treat attention as all or nothing
Don’t fear the pause
Keep the gem statement front and center
Find the disagreement under the disagreement
The midwife model
Additional learning resources
The interpersonal suggestions (above) are mere stepping stones to enable functioning relationships across the political spectrum, but they do not address the deep state of alt-right extremism.
How might we, as equity leaders, mentors, muses, and learning designers, empower people to cultivate sovereignty and equity governance to deconstruct the deep state of authoritarianism, the Dark Quad of ALPD, and the alt-extreme propaganda machines of neo-terrorism?
The GOP's American psychosis didn't start with Trump. It won't end with him, either.
Polarization, Democracy, and Political Violence in the United States: What the Research Says
Citations
Signaling virtuous victimhood as indicators of Dark Triad personalities. Ok, E., Qian, Y., Strejcek, B., & Aquino, K (2020). Journal of personality and social https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:220309572
Signaling virtuous victimhood as indicators of Dark Triad personalities. Ok, E., Qian, Y., Strejcek, B., & Aquino, K. (2021). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 120(6), 1634–1661. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000329
Virtuous victims. Jordan, JJ, Kouchaki, M. Science advances 13 Oct 2021, Vol 7, Issue 42. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abg5902
For a deeper dive into equity governance, begin your learning journey by exploring the complex questions in this newsletter.