Customer Reviews

Radical Man

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a mature, robust, detailed, often dense existentialist broadside and theoretical alternative to man's attempt to address his world through increased fragmentation and control rather than through greater integration and synergy. The foil for the author's attack and the alternative he eventually introduces and tests, is the behavioralist's approach to theorizing, whereby the world is sliced and diced into arbitrary and artificial categories, with the narrower and misguided aim of trying to gain more control over it. Under this research paradigm, mathematical tools are used to quantify the "so-called "dependent and independent variables." They are then manipulated ("factor analyzed" and correlated, for instance), impervious to the confounding meaninglessness of the analysis due in large part to the original erroneous assumption that the facts involved are "objective" and unrelated; that is: impervious to the reality that the facts being manipulated are not strictly independent, but are indeed part of the same continuously related whole.

According to the author, increased fragmentation (man's more conservative approach to his existence), invariably leads to such analytic and political meaninglessness: more and more "apparent control" is claimed over less and less psychological terrain. This, process then of course becomes a self-fulfilling downwardly regressing prophesy into the inevitable psychological abyss of stasis, paranoia and increased fear and entropy. The author's main point is that with each cycle of the behavioralist's "illusion of control" comes the built-in existential trap of increased constriction of individual creativity and freedom, eventually leading to the inescapable end product: arbitrary rule by oppression and tyranny.

The author proposes a novel existentialist escape from this well-known behavioralist trap, which leads to increased synergy and to upwardly spiraling cyclical integration, decreased entropy (or increased order), and more creativity. In reality, and for the individual, this alternative is conceived of and implemented simply: by being one's authentic self, facing the world squarely with authenticity, and by not living in a constant state of fear and denial. According to existentialist philosophy (Abert Camus, Jean Paul Sartre, and Authur Koestler in particular are quoted liberally), each new struggle in life offers man a new opportunity to plot a course towards excellence, increased creativity, increased effectiveness and towards an eventual defeat over the source of the struggle: constriction, fear and un-freedom or tyranny. By facing each struggle squarely, that is honestly and without denial, even man's greatest fear, the fear of death can be overcome.

The correct methodological approach to the world, according to the author's existentialist perspective, is "field theory," which is the same paradigm used by both evolution and quantum physics. Implicit in both is the notion that everything is connected, thus properly taking into account the larger matrix of interrelatedness and the fact that all facts are not just relational but affect each other in the Heisenberg sense an effect that always "operative"and prevalent (but much ignored) in the study of most social phenomena.

The existential research perspective and paradigm of the Radical Man is captured in eight basic elements that guide the discourse and serve as a taxonomic matrix for organizing the rest of the material in the book: They are:

1.Man's synthesizing capacity goes well beyond the limited Stimulus-response (S-R) model. It involves not just reinforcements of stimuli, but transforming old data into more novel creatively combined forms. This combining of parts is new in the sense that it represents a transformation in human meaning and significance that is often larger than the whole itself. By being able to weave "remembered experiences" into a personal synthesis man introduces new significances into his world.

2.Man's Symbolizing Capacity: The worse forms of oppression: torture, being socially and politically-adjusted, cult-like brain-washing, and colonization more generally, are in the end, mere Skinnerian S-R models brought, writ large, about by "negative Pavlovian reinforcements" designed mostly to elicit "predictable behaviors." Their ultimate goal is to further restrict ones reality. But to the existentialist mind, oppression only shows that man is the final arbiter of value and meaning in his world, that through re-symbolization (the escape through redefining meanings is perhaps the supreme act of rebellion), he can generate new meanings that contradict the absurdity of his S-R conditioning. Thus, man is always capable of plotting a new route to freedom through his choice of symbols, which he can then use to re-label (as legitimate or illegitimate) the pressures and bad experiences brought down on him. Through new symbols he is able to escape the absurdity of oppression by re-synthesizing the oppressive experiences into new structured fields of meaning through which he can then begin to live a new, freer psychological existence.

3.Man's Exploring Capacity: Man has an innate exploratory drive. It is a lie that he is driven by reinforcements alone. When his exploratory capacity is combined with his synthesizing and symbolizing abilities, man is propelled to fill in his mental map. Rats will learn a maze much faster on a full rather than an empty stomach, and will sit down right next to food without eating it. Depravation, diminishes man's natural exploratory instincts. Through exploration, man develops and grows; he seeks to relate rather than isolate experience.

4.A Field Theory - not a Monadic Theory of Man's Existence: "Live matter" and "dead matter," are both composed of the same chemical elements. The difference is that "live matter" represents a peculiar state of organization and arrangements of these chemicals, a vital synthesis of their constituent parts. Being primarily a synthesizing, symbolizing and exploring animal, fragmentation, and tyranny are alien and regressive to man's nature, which is constantly in search of higher levels of developmental organization. The Behavioralist's Monadic theory suggests that once broken down (reductively), the relationship between units inheres in the units themselves. However, the truth is that it is the overall organization that imparts the property of "aliveness." Unlike chemicals, "meaning" is not intrinsic to life but "extrinsic' to it, and thus dependent on how it is synthesized. Life through symbols is comprehended through the meanings the symbols carry, and meaning is a property of the organizational wholeness of the "live being," not of its chemistry, or even its individual constituent parts. Therefore what the psychology of human existence needs is a "field theory" rather than a "monadic theory." The whole must first be grasped in order to understand the full meaning of the parts.

5.Freedom within the law versus strict determinism: Man's freedom is always bounded by his human condition. However, to the existentialist mind, recognizing the certainties of this boundedness is the very springboard to freedom. To attain his freedom, man thus subordinates his physical being, his biology, to his overall style and purposes of the "value matrix" of his meanings and his symbolic existence.

6.Relational Facts not Objective facts: For the most part, our knowledge, expectancy, symbols and synthesis, control both what, and how we see the world beyond our heads. Facts are organized by our style of existence, which is an integrated structure of relational data, not a true reflection of a reality "out there." The dichotomy between "object" and "subject" is thus a false one, an artifact provided merely for convenience. In truth, "objectivity" is just a self-validating consensus among investigators.

7.Involvement with self and others - not detachment: If man exists he inevitably influences what he studies, the ultimate Heisenberg effect. Thus his only choice is to become aware of what he contributes to the relationship and to ensure that it facilitates the developmental process in which he himself is involved.

8."Value full" rather than "value free" investigations: If man is only the sum of his reinforcements, then his values are mere genuflections provided mostly for the benefit of his trainers. He is not free and his "values" while under colonial control, are not to be trusted as his true values. If on the other hand, man is the creator of his own symbolic world through a synthesis of his experiences, these can transform his "reinforcements" or colonized behaviors into his own true values, values that can be trusted as representing the authentic self, and also representing blueprints for his rebellion and transformation into his own personal freedom.

Chapter III provides the grand schemata of the Existentialist feedback paradigm, embracing these eight pillars. It becomes a paradigm of the Psycho-social Development of all people, but especially of creative people. According to the author, creative people move from the quality of their perception and the strength of their identities to a synthesis brought about through anticipated and experienced competence. This is a competence in which the individual invests his identity with intensity and authenticity, but which he is willing to periodically suspend and risk in order to try to bridge the distance between himself and others. Through dialectics in search of higher synergy, creative people seek to make a self-confirming, self-transcending impacts on others. Each person will then try to integrate the feedback from this process into his own mental matrices of (shared and) increasing developmental complexity.

This paradigm is used throughout the rest of the book to analyze and test various theories about different types of peoples and different types of social phenomena. For instance, the model describes anomie as man's failure to exist, rendering his perception narrow and impoverished; his identity becomes "locked in" and stagnant, leading to an overall sense of incompetence and anticipated loss and thus a failure to invest in himself with authenticity and intensity. Such a personality is likely to suspend interactions with others and is incapable of self-confirming impacts on his world and surroundings. Rather than engage in dialectics, the anomic personality seeks to dominate others in a failed attempt at control, his own perverse approach to synergy. Such a personality, of course accepts no responsibility for his failure at authenticity or his failure to connect with others.

Although the paradigm has been well thought-out as is true of all of the author's work, it is dense and the author attempts to cover the waterfront makes the book rough going. One can also question its not so subtle political slant: It appears to be an attempt to restore the balance between the conservative political and corporate that have been ruling the world since the Middle Ages and a more creative and liberal existentialist paradigm which the author hopes will make the world less anal-retentive.

Five Stars because its Charles-Hampden-Turner

This book changed my life in the sense that it served as a foundation for my first Master's thesis on Predicting Revolution, work that has not yet been surpassed.

I myself developed one side of the matrix, finding through the secondary literature that revolutions were generally distinct within each of the following domains:

Political-Legal
Military-Law Enforcement
Socio-Economic
Ideo-Cultural
Techno-Demographic
Natural-Geographic

It was not until I chanced across this work, which the author points out is the first ever theoretical dissertation at the Harvard Business School. I share the author's disdain for the Know-Nothings stepped in their rote learning who label all that they do not understand as "naive idealism." They've become prostitutes, while the author and those like him continue to "live free."

What this book did for me personally was provide and explain "Radical Man" in terms precisely suited to explode my first thesis from something pedestrian to something that today, a quarter of a century later, is still "best in class" (available at OSS.Net in Library, Steele's Early Papers).

He provided a model of psycho-social development with the following elements:

+ Perception
+ Identity
+ Competence
+ Investment
+ Suspension & Risk
+ Transcendance
+ Synergy
+ Integration
+ Complexity

Along the other side of the matrix, that allowed me to create a framework in which the secondary literature could be pigeon-holed into a third of the boxes, and then I did primary research to both complete the other two thirds, and to operationalize each element (identify specific collectable data with which to determine the degree of risk, scope, etc.).

Charles Hampden-Turner is in my view one of the great minds of our time, and I point readers to my review of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable so as to meet the second mind that I most admire in my time (there are others, of course, like E. O. Wilson, Alvin Toffler, but see my reviews for the details).

See also:
Maps of the Mind: Charts and Concepts of the Mind and its Labyrinths
Riding The Waves of Culture: Understanding Diversity in Global Business
Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics
The Tao of Democracy: Using co-intelligence to create a world that works for all
The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political--Citizen's Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption

This one is free online at Army War College Strategic Studies Institute
The New Craft of Intelligence: Achieving Asymmetric Advantage in the Face of Nontraditional Threats