Emotional outbursts at Meeting times and how we can learn from them .

 This is a note I published after most people in Australia rejected the ambition to do something they thought necessary for the Aboriginals of Australia.
It was a unexpected result. 
 The ambition shared by nearly all Australian's was that a proposed action might improve listening. 

One straight talking, clear thinking aboriginal named Jacinta Price became a national and world wide hero for reminding us that we should avoid trying to solve another's problems when we are not really where they are. She grew up where they are.  

The change sought was supposed to improve our listening ability?  What could be wrong with that ?
Nothing except, perhaps qualifying things like this.

1. The idea that we can make people listen is quite mad.
   
2. The goings on ,during and after in parliament  and any house you like to think of is   an example of the fact that hearing is not believing  .The amount of time spent listening in our version of Parliament is huge and we oldies  have learnt to trust ( at least still in parliament , if not in our homes ) that starting finishing and order are needed to prevent the house becoming a home for just noise ;  loud hailers, compliant children  and half asleep pigeons.  The Refoct23 proposal was going to interrupt that tenuous order, but by not knowing where and how it would do that, secured the ideas place in the fully asleep dustbin of history. 
3. The lack of discussion, let alone consensus, about how such an impossibly high ideal could clearly happen clearly could be expected to jettison any agreement with intelligent fair minded people to agree to same. The HOW didn't come close to becoming WHAT ,which makes the proponents campaign seem quite mad in itself. What if the HOW was clearly stated ? would that have made a difference ; we will never know   
   
   
4. The idea that a new method of getting people to listen had arrived and needed to put into tablets of stone  ( like those from Mt Sinai ) would have made God laugh , \
5. The idea that some group or individual can have special relevant knowledge is quite true but it s quite wrong to assume that person's opinion or understanding should always have special status is quite wrong .
6. Culture and science must know their proper place 
    This is the crux of the mistaken expectations of many on October 14. Bruce Pascoe had correctly reminded the audience that first Australians had ,in their many thousands of years of life here, learnt to adapt to this environment ( and should be properly heard for that).
   What Bruce and proponents of the Voice failed to say was why special status for that knowledge was justified above other sources, when it was like all knowledge, incomplete and quite inadequate.
   Westerners, whatever their faults and fancies ( a  lack of real experience of this place on earth)  are entitled to expect that objective scientific analysis of all facts knowledge and old practices of the past will reveal new and important and  more precise connections to the course calibration of actions by people in the past .
   In other words ,for our children's future,  we all believe that scientific evaluation of past practices should be objective thorough relevant and scientific first , A first filter,  if not the last 
   
7. Order is an absolute necessity for at least enabling efficient listening to happen. think response allowance and  timing.  
   No order was given for when the VOICE would be heard,:   to initiate a bill, after or before readings,
   
8.  All Culturally derived knowledge should be subject to objective evaluation by independent scientific process evaluators. This IMO doesn't mean that independent scientific process evaluation will tell us all we need to know, only that it will help eliminate some areas in inadequate and incomplete knowledge.
   Because science cannot establish or deny all relevant processes and the origin of all of them ( we create our own as well as accept created ones )  we best IMO leave the door open to ideas, visions and spooky things that pass by .Time use,
   We must allow the child to speak ,That will take time  Everyone saw that the emperor was wearing no clothes.  but it took the honest observer to resist denial and confront us with the truth that is necessary to move on , The objective of all parliaments is truth and moving on , just as the rhetoric says . The question of whether we agree or accept payback is one separate question of justice ( not truth ) that cannot become an insistence through a permanent and fixed hearing method. Questions of justice are, as Bryant says, so big they are often best not defined.  
   
   
9. The huge distance between the rhetoric and the path to achieving the fine ambition was a major reason Australians rejected it.  This is what mature adults often have to do when they address the right focus of children on justice matters . " yes it doesn't appear fair " son 
10. Cultural practices are not gods in themselves  
    The cultural practices that Europeans brought with them in the handling of sheep were not all wrong, but they were very inadequate for the very poor thin hard setting soils of this Savannah land.    Aborigines did know many Australians soils a lot better than Europeans , but its  not correct to say that either party knows how to evaluate soil use better than soil scientists do, 
    Pascoe's attempt to say Aboriginals use of fire and food production was more fully informed than those who had been using steel and furnaces for thousands of years was clearly overstating the aboriginals right to be always heard as a most experienced resource user.   
          
11. The whole principal of parliament is that we assume we don't know whose ideas when will move us closer to better working relationships, As Bryant say,  the early parliaments had no constitution, and the tradition still is to reject people who insist on their right to be heard. 
    
12. More quality time use is the key ingredient to make better listening and responding work - the proposal did not address HOW that would be possible; and the question of HOW more wasted time ( already a huge issue) would be avoided. 
13. You have to be very smart to know HOW to get people to listen ( ask your wife )
14. That not enough thought was given to the proponents on the HOW question above , 
15.  That too much confidence was given to a single quantitative solution ( based on volume ) cf qualitative integrated solutions 
16. That something as rigid as a constitution was no place to lodge an idea  ( listening)  so fluid 
17. Proponents and many idealists were quite mad and dangerous ( see A Bryants summary of parliament and constitutions) to insist the addition would work, when unexpected consequences were the bread-and-butter expectations of any scientist looking at the aim of the project. 
     
18. To give any one person or group more power is against the long tradition of the commonwealth where" hatred of power is an obsession "(  A Bryant  "The Search for Justice)

Towards an explanation

In my opinion a sound basic explanation was published in 1975 in a Telecom 2000 report on Social futures . 
The above study implicates the city and screen watchers in a predictable failure to really understand the needs of others.
Because this scientific prediction ( Science is best proven by being stated beforehand ) was clear and well established by three groups with Psychological expertise , there is a real risk of ongoing denial by those who don't now listen of accept it ,
A deep paradox since the ambition shared by nearly all Australian's was that a proposed action might improve listening. 

This risk of ongoing denial is heightened by our societies expectation that the majority knows best and additional progressive ideas that people educated at Universities are smarter.
This temptation to offer up prejudices has already happened with Waheed Aly - offering the last one as a false equivalence which developed a life of its own for a while because he is so popular.

The clear conclusions of the authors of Tel 2000 was predicted by a very capable and once famous scientist named Whitehead who left the world the word http://misplacedconcreteness.blogspot.com  . Whitehead in the 1920's was quite deeply troubled to see that the use of scientific arguments in the West was most likely heading off the rails.

That use of the good name of Science is off the rails in popular use is evident by the number of people who ask a How question and accept the first available part of a possible much longer and more complex answer.
As  any good practicing scientist knows , correlation is not causation but  the former is a common quick finish closure clause  that doesn't work .    

An explanation I gave to a friend 
I don't think political alliance is very important in this unstable moment in Western history. see end
Maybe this is a mental illness moment when many suffer fanaticism and retreat to their cultural roots and call that wisdom ; when it was really little more than an emotional outburst -- that they want to last ; instead of listening and learning as such moments can lead to
. If we use our brains, by contrast to the above , we are always trying to escape the moribund set of rules that becomes set in concrete by the popular and the powerbrokers. We need to learn not to ignore history and other cultures but to move on to better and more concrete long term solutions; some of which are already conserved in some form.

As the famous philosopher come activist AC Grayling is saying, this mad grabbing at sky high solutions like referendums ( Brexit ) and anything that seems efficiently effective is appealing to the shallow shit and the presence of puppets , man pleasers and woke talkers is reminiscent of prewar times . Many are making the way out too simple.
As Bonhoeffer,Neibuhr and Orwell pointed out , there are times when reason and causation is actually hidden by denial guilt projection , failure frustration ( esp old cynics ) cultural imperialism by left and right and mum and dad , mere men and whatever .
See also the more recent AN Whiteheadwho coined the terms " mere description" to highlight that people were becoming more interested in naming their own solutions rather than waiting and working together for real ones ( particularly pointed was J Ellul) ; hence his phrase http://misplacedconcreteness.blogspot.com

Real progress , not this shallow headed vanity of those who think themselves uniquely progressive is always about working together using the sound science of sustainability evaluation :
---listening to observers AND participants ( not just them as the City unwisely insisted with their blind support for an undiscussed entrenched constitutional ammendment !)

Progressive in the West clearly need to take heed from those who ARE CLOSER to sources of real CONFLICT / productive change and resilience under pressure ( COUNTRY ) than they themselves are ( say in cities , armchairs screens and via their favoured media links ).

The referendum result was quite predictable ,s the psychologists who wrote about the risks in impending Media blinkeredness in the Telecom 2000 futures report SAID in 1975 . Whether we learn from this billion dollar mistake ( all our time wasted ) is up to us . Good listening people !Our children will need the best we can give !  

Emotional outbursts and how we can learn from them .

 Before the West goes completely mad , let me remind you that anger and emotion is not wrong but the post modern west is all wrong . It tries to solve complex problems by making them far too simple . 
By not reading the signals and motions for sustainable change it creates its most notable products . Depression and Inertia . 

And its very clear that by hoping for a solution in pure reason, the depression can only get worse - unless we accept that we know oh so little and need much help ( not the adverts in the media ) and not from the media . 
 Anyway ,read about that and our mental illness over the shallow  ( we are after all born with adrnalin and nor adrenalin, testosterone etc eslewhere.>