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[ 9 minute read ]

Whiling and wiling away time

Imagining the future

On occasion, I come across a person who will stand me a conversation. Most people will do that funny hand movement that signifies they have exhausted all their methods for allowing time to make decisions for them on how to end something they have just come to recognise as laborious for them. 

One of my favourite things to do is to examine a subject from as many perspectives as I can, including the person I am having the conversation with. Generally though, they haven't really thought things through before I button-hole them and bend their ear. I think you might look upon this as; I intimidate people with word-wizardry. Except this kind of wizardry is not Mickey Mouse in 'Fantasia' incompetently fighting a broom, or Harry Potter waving a wand and conjuring solutions to problems that only he can fathom. Most of the time I know what someone is going to say. That may sound supercilious and self-promoting, but it is not meant to be. And, here we have a problem I identified long ago. If I make statements like that the listener will immediately second-guess me. They actually believe that I believe that I can read minds or something. No, I mean that I expect to hear a common standpoint that conforms with the zeitgeist of a society. 

This is how my conversations usually work. I want to understand why something is so. Yesterday, my attention was piqued by a newspaper article I read in my local Post Office shop. 

As I approached my local Post Office shop I noticed a woman leave the shop and open the boot (Am. trunk) of her car. Mindful not to just throw my bicycle against the plate glass window of the shop, I had time to view her activity. She moved some bags around. Rather than practice my superb rendition of a gawking three-year-old with a 'why?' question on my lips, I 'thickened the air'. I do that sometimes when I sense something amiss or portentious. Anything that happened from that point on would leave a trace that lasts a few seconds; a trace that will allow me to identify commonalities to other traces and tracks within the same soup of 'now'. In plain English that means I paid more attention than I normally would and carefully stored my perceptions.

It is highly unusual for me to need to actively consider events that immediately precede the present I find myself in. Normally, I ignore pretty much everything because most of the time, stuff goes on around me and it is just thin, flavourless and clear dishwater; not worth keeping, because being the past as soon as it has occurred, it has no value; no freshness and no energy. We don't derive any nutrition from the past. It is consideration of the past, in the present, as much as it can be, that sustains us. And there it is, the present has value; which is why I like the present so much and the past not much at all. Even the future is preferable to the past because the future is bendy. (I prefer to hope that the future is bendy; 'malleable' means can be shaped and for me usually means with intent - I prefer the weather to uncontrolled manipulation by hopeful tyros). 

The future is bendy. It has curves in it that make the journey interesting. It has, within it, scenery and events seemingly scattered by the hand of a Supreme Being. Of course, there is no Supreme Being who idly chucks fantasy Lego bricks across a carpet for us to assemble or tread on bare-foot in the dark, as might suit our wit. It is the past and the manipulation of the present that shapes the future. I know this is as it is, so my playful protestations that I am prescient fall upon my own deaf ears. If other people hear me state that I am a seer they should recognise it for an umbrella position that encompasses 'I looked at the past and some futures and there is a high probability that one future could manifest as this or that'. And here is where most people I talk to get lost; they have no idea that I want to tell them about a future. They, invariably think I want to 'while away' the time, when I actually want to 'wile away' a future. 

I can't remember where I heard or read this parable. (It should be known that I did not come up with this and I have reproduced it verbatim to the source in order that in a future it may be used in a search term to establish its provenance):

A Parable

It was a chilly, overcast day when the horseman spied the little sparrow on its back in the middle of the road. Reining in his mount he looked down and inquired of the fragile creature,
"Why are lying upside down like that?"
"I heard, the heavens are going to fall today." replied the bird.
The horseman laughed, "And I suppose your spindly little legs can hold up the heavens?"
"One does what one can." said the sparrow.

We know that 'to wile' is to use guile and manipulation. In one kind of reality anyone can plant a seed of doubt and expect a change. We can't control the trickle of change when other people become involved in the making of a torrent though.

Once I had selected my items I noticed the woman was conducting a transaction at the Post Office counter and the man was close by, not really doing anything except mumbling to himself. When I do that it is soliloquy; when other people do it is incoherent mumbling. 'Scary Monsters', I thought. (It is just an expression; not an impression). Reading the marks where a wooden spoon of activity was stirring the pot of slowly coagulating sauce that was developing into the past, I predicted that he and the young woman would leave together. You know, you have to recognise the past to see a future. I had time to 'while away' so I read the front page of a newspaper. The Government will mandate businesses to tell all employees that being in a union is a good thing. Good Crikeyness! Really? Have they thought this through? Young people, whom some businesses supposedly find unemployable due to their attitude of entitlement, should be told that it is a good idea to discuss the bosses behind their backs, and form a limping team that resembles the one they have had all their school lives and is resistent to external influence. This is a good thing? Of course, I already know that these young people feel alienated when they find themselves in their first job after leaving school or training. Suddenly, they find themselves bereft of a supporting team. No matter how pathetic that team was, it was a position of belonging and a comfortable bubble of confirmation bias. In order for these young newbies to be part of a new team at work, they are going to need to impress their work colleagues of their worth. That, today, is quite difficult when no-one talks in the canteen anymore. Teams are found on SmartPhones these days. 

       'I hate it here. It is dull and boring and stupid and I don't know what to do!'

       'I know, it is the same here. I hate it too. See you later. the boss is looking at me. She wants me to work, Here she comes. Bye'.

It is plainly a good idea to cause young people to think their opinion is valued when they present an attitude of 'Why should I?' towards their work environment. Any union will leap at having someone like this on their team. 'Work to rule' is definitely on the cards and statements such as, 'That is not what it says in the job description!' will be rife. 'All out!'. I predict that the adaptive UK will be crippled. Happy empowered teenagers. That is what we want, don't we?

I don't speak young people 'Lingua-do-do' as Lady Gaga put it, or not. (She did in one YouTube video but 'Genius' doesn't think so). I might as well be Shakespeare to teenagers. Fantastic range of multisyllabic words but it takes deliberate and focused thinking to decipher their meaning, and without a team, I suggest, they shan't attempt it. So, the extremely knowledgeable chap, who lives over the road from me, had to be the only poor opening for wiling. He, though, standing in the cold, close to the Post Office shop, expected to mildly discuss unions with a handful of anecdotes brightening the environment. By this time, the coagulated past in the shop had proven to be no more than a bagatelle that was essential in snapping me into the grid of fate. Now, however, fate's train was drawing into a remote station on a heritage line.

Shaping my argument by using a second party is of course reprehensible but I can be blind to individual sentiment sometimes when the world needs to be saved. It turns out that he is not the conduit that I hoped he might be. To be honest, I didn't even have that hope with any degree of confidence that my words might stick like strands of spaghetti casually flung against the hard wall of his conscience and his concern about the demise of the horse-drawn hansom carriage. I usually cook words on the fly and without having ever read a cookbook. My 'wiling' would inevitably fizzle out in a cul-de-sac of indifference. This chap has been fired in the furnace of experience so many times there can be no expectation that any solvent will release the rigid bonds of his thinking. And, he doesn't speak teenager  'Lingua-do-do' either. But he is not the carrier; I never thought he was.

That conversation with him was stimulating, even if it was a little irritating when he kept trying to drift off into nostalgia and stereotypical views on whippersnappers voting in elections, coal, and gypsies. But I am not one to dismiss a colourful tart of delicious tidbits. Everything he said has some relevance, but like me, he doesn't join all the dots. Lecturing helps but thinking things through and trying to make sense of information or opinion bears far more fruit for a vintner of knowledge. Connoisseur, I may not be, but I do enjoy a good brandy, or distillation of loquaciousness, if you will.

Only I seem to make the connection between teams at schools, voting in elections and union meetings. I can paint futures run by teenagers both good and bad. I feel that in order to understand what we really want, we might have to use a technique that I invented after a whole bunch of people invented it long before I was born.

Imagine painting a scene of what you would like your future to be like. Now imagine painting a picture of what you would not like. What is missing from the first painting?

[ 1909 words - over 2 hours to write and edit - I hate editing so much that I had to leave it and finish with a final re-edit 8 hours later]

Blog address for all the posts: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551

14 minute read

What is the difference between a team and a group?

Listening to LBC, a radio talk station broadcast throughout Britain, I hear a woman voted ‘Britain’s strictest headteacher of the year’ stating that students in one form group are inwardly chanting ‘C’mon team, we are going to beat that team!’ That is a gang. A crowd of people are a group. A music band is a group. A group is a set of individual people with individual goals that have a shared interest in other individuals and their pursuits. A team is competitive and is trained to fight to beat other teams. A school classroom team was envisioned to help the slowest learner in the class by utilising the fastest learners’ abilities. In effect, this is handicapping the individualistic high achievers to bring the lower achievers up to, at best, a temporary level which falsely allows them to believe that they can achieve as much as naturally high achievers. When the high achievers are released from school, at age 18, they, mostly, go on to great things. However, the low achievers, in their mistaken belief that they are individually worthy of their school examination results, are floundering around suddenly searching for a team to help them in the real world, and they are using a fast diminishing shield of shared responsibility as a defence against real-world justified righteousness. What a shambles! Don't despair, I am not ridiculing people who are not high achievers.

Some years ago, the UK government decided that boys and girls learn differently. The educationalists went on to believe that there are different learning styles, visual learning, role-playing, positive reinforcement, audio learning, and others.

There is a list of seven learning styles here:

Visual Learning; Auditory Learning; Reading and Writing; Kinesthetic; Verbal or linguistic learning; Social and interpersonal learning; Solitary or intrapersonal learning (The word intrapersonal is similar to introvert). An explanation of these seven is given here:

https://teachable.com/blog/types-of-learning-styles

What happened is that teachers were not taught how to effectively teach all these techniques simultaneously to a class of thirty children. There used to be girls schools and boys schools; these are all, now almost entirely privately run. These used to be forms for high-achievers, average learners; and students who could not grasp the teaching techniques well enough to keep up with the average student, so these pupils were regarded as un-salvageable and were segregated from the rest of the school society, though they were allowed in the playground and dinner hall.

Why don’t we segregate ALL the pupils or students? Visual learners to the right, role-players to the left…. Separate the boys from the girls or group the students together who learn best with a particular style of learning. ‘Oh no!’ we cry we would then have to partition the whole world into different segments more suited to one group or another. Heaven forbid! Yet, do we have divergent thinkers as accountants? The answer, I suspect lies in most of us believing that accountants are not financial speculators, just the same as it is engineers who build bridges and not scientists.

In Swedish, "lika barn leka bäst" ("children that are alike play the best [together]") - Wikipedia

We, after compulsory schooling, tend to flock together into our preferred groups of friends, and support each other by forming cross-functional teams: that means we do not all work in the same place and have different types of jobs. Unfortunately, though, teams are the norm in schools; they are encouraged; no, foisted upon small children. While at school, and especially when school-leavers suddenly discover that they have been given a false idea about their capabilities to be successful in both the work and social environments, they maintain their absolutely necessary need to belong to a gang; sorry, a team. Actually, I am fairly sure that most people never find out they have been given a useless set of values at school.

In a crowd, when two people are physically fighting, they may be allowed to get close to a finish until one of them is obviously losing and about to get seriously hurt, then the crowd; sorry, group of people, will intervene and separate the victor from the vanquished. Nobody attacks the winner. In a gang, sorry, team, when another team member is showing signs of losing, all the other gang-members attack the single fighter who is not in their gang. In sports event, referees and the threat of disqualification prevent mobbing and lynching.

In the real world, in the un-refereed streets, as soon as a fight breaks out the whole gang attacks the person who is arguing with their gang member, unless the gang member is winning. That is what a team, with team loyalty does. They are a baying pack of feral dogs, trained and indoctrinated to be so by modern UK schooling that hampers individual excellence at the expense of the whole of society, by falsely saving the children who simply could not understand a faulty teacher in their first years at primary school. ‘What is the square root of nine?’ ‘What has a shape got to do with a plant?’, the small confused child might inwardly ask? As adults, we know that the answer to the confused child's lamenting query is: nothing at all if we exclude matrices that have a square shape, filled with numbers. Here is a real-life example to ponder: If you missed the first year of Latin classes, such as I did, you would not do well in the second year of Latin classes. Because I did not do Latin in the first year of secondary education, I was not required to ever learn Latin; all I had to do, during those lessons was my other homework. Do you know why? Because I would have held the whole class back. What should the school have done? Put me in class of beginners and knocked my confidence with, no team support from team members to dissipate the effects of bullying.

What is the difference between a group and a team? A group is like a shoal of individual friendly fish all with a common purpose and all conforming to a swim pattern to confuse predators. That shoaling is herd behaviour, just like apes grooming each other, but a bit less altruistic. A team is a pod of dolphins all acting together to destroy a group by picking off the individuals, one by one. Yes, I know, the dolphins are hungry. Friendly-looking dolphins they may seem, and they are certainly portrayed as such, but predatory, atavistic, wolves of the seas, dolphins really are.

The definition of ‘atavistic’ given by Cambridge Dictionary, https://dictionary.cambridge.org › dictionary › english › atavistic

‘Atavistic means happening because of a very old habit from a long time ago in human history, not because of a conscious decision or because it is necessary now.’

That is what a team, such as you might find in schools, is; predators trained towards forming a pack-like existence that historically served to jointly hunt for food and overwhelm others to achieve supremacy (which necessitated the conquering of another group). When a young person finds themselves alone ‘in the wild’ they, instead of recognising their irresponsibility and mistakes, and learning from it, they are trained to shrug it off in the belief that their team will save them, and like herd immunity and herd behaviour, if there are enough team members around, they can attack all and every form of complaint towards them, imagined or otherwise. Later, the gang, sorry, team, will disseminate and analyse any attack by any individual gang-member using Smartphone videos, messages, and chat. Even, when the gang-members, sorry team-members are absent they are still silently and invisibly watching from within the heads of savages with no idea of what individual responsibility is.

We all make mistakes. Please don’t ask your team to dissipate your guilt.

Are immigrants in your team? Are women in your team? Are men in your team? Are they in their own teams?

A cross-functional team is a group of people who have their own set of abilities and skills, and in meeting with one another rely on each other to contribute towards a common goal that furthers the aims of the group. A film or movie has producers, actors, directors, camera-operators, editors, and a myriad of other people, highly skilled and otherwise, all working together to achieve a common goal of making a good film / movie. If they were simply a team, they would be industrial spies and saboteurs, armed with knives and poison, spoiling the efforts of other rival film-makers.

(Just so you know, obviously defaming a legal entity, person or business, in the UK is usually punished by significantly large fines and financial restitution awarded to the aggrieved; and ‘tit for tat’ strategy inevitably fails in any game because it results in mutual destruction. That is why we can’t say any shop sells poor quality products, because it is really expensive to prove it and the onus is firmly on the accuser).

For this to fully register, imagine a trained boxer or MMA fighter entering into an area where muggers frequent. Do you think this person will reach for a team? Do you think this capable person will expect backup with a much later phone call? Depending on whether a mugger or two have knives and guns on their team will determine this high-achiever’s immediate response to a direct threat. That is the difference between an individual in a cross-functional team (boxing trainers, spar partners, club members, sponsors, etc.) and a person ill-equipped to deal with the harsh realities of life because they were told to belong to a team of similar people who WILL be absent when they grow up. No, wait! They are prevented from growing up because there are no ‘real’ people to save and teach them, only team members of the same ilk and sentiment.

Birds of a feather flock together

I have just learnt the word for only speaking a portion of a saying and the rest being implied – ‘anapodoton’, as in, ‘Birds of a feather….’ I think 'pot kettle black' also qualifies as an anapodoton. The rub is that the recipient needs to know the full saying. 'That is like the pot calling the kettle black'. Ooh er! We might need to live before the Industrial Revolution in european times to get the meaning of that. For everyone under the age of 250 or so, that last alludes to a pot and a kettle both having black marks from which the fire they are heated - if the pot calls the kettle black, then the kettle can also call the pot black. 'We came from the same fire'.

Plato may have said in ‘Republic’, that men of his age flock together. There is an idea that truth resides with those who practice the same thinking or beliefs. This is similar to a Christian saying, the saying I once heard that goes something like this: ‘A horse and an ox cannot pull a cart together’; which was said to me to warn of the danger of a Christian and a non-believer marrying. This expression does not necessarily need to remain in the bailiwick of religion; if any man or woman needs a team outside of their romantic partnership, and their partner does not, I suggest that a lawyer or solicitor is about to make some money from both of them, or there may be a psychological discord in the relationship for a long time, albeit suppressed.