Nowak writes of “cooperation” as if it were some sort of fundamental force or property in the universe: that the universe has this tendency towards the cooperation of “parts”. For example, atoms cooperate to form molecules, molecules cooperate to form RNA, RNA combines in interesting ways through the evolutionary chain to eventually form single- and multi-celled organisms, all the way up to our planetary ecosystem. In society, we cooperate to form interest groups such as “organisations”, cities, countries, and “humanity”.

Smuts wrote way back in 1927 that he observed this strange tendency of the universe to form “wholes”, whose properties were somehow greater than a simple linear sum of their constituent parts. It is quite interesting to look at the universe from this perspective: instead of organised wholes (such as you and me) being purely coincidental by-products of perchance encounters between smaller constituent parts, what if there is some sort of intrinsic law in the universe which drives constituent parts towards forming “wholes”? These wholes are then often said to exhibit new types of properties (emergent ones) which cannot simply be inferred from the properties of their constituents.

To me, it looks as though there’s quite a bit of overlap between Nowak’s “law of cooperation” and Smuts’ “holism”. From what I can remember, Nowak doesn’t cite Smuts as a reference, and so it’s really interesting to me that this paradigm has been developed by two quite different individuals in different time periods. Could this be yet further rumblings of an emerging field of inquiry, which by its very nature is interdisciplinary and holistic, making its way over the scientific horizon?

Several questions pop up in my mind (so far) after thinking about these sorts of things, reflecting against other thinking in emergence and complexity.

1. Can all of the emergent properties of the whole be accounted for by linear and non-linear relationships (i.e. mathematically) between the parts of the whole, or is there perhaps something else, intrinsic to “interaction” itself, which produces the emergent properties? [In what we understand to be human consciousness, for example, does consciousness only look as though it's emergent as a result of our inability to measure certain attributes of individual neurons and/or derive accurate mathematical formulae to represent the relationships between neurons, or is there genuinely something in the "fabric" of the interaction between neurons that we're omitting when we're developing our mathematical models?]
2. Following from the previous question, what exactly is “interaction”? (Or is this just another futile attempt at developing a blanket term for things which should not be categorised together?).
3. Do different types of “interaction” produce different types of emergent properties? If so, can we establish useful, repeatable patterns in the different interactions which produce different emergent properties? If so, what are these patterns?
4. In what ways do the “materials” that are “interacting” have an effect on these emergent properties?

These are, no doubt, pretty big questions. I’m not sure yet if they have answers. Any takers?

The production line

Think of a modern manufacturing line: the line assembles one or more types of products, and today it’s possible to have the line do so with very little human interaction at all, except for the occasional programming and maintenance. We then churn out as many products as there is demand in order to make a profit.

Figure 1. Car production/assembly line

Many web-based businesses are set up like this too: think Facebook, Google, Groupon, etc. And with artificial intelligence, we’re most likely going to start needing even less human intervention. The only time human beings are really needed on the business side is when things go wrong, or one needs to do things that are outside of the system’s programming, or one needs to teach someone else how to use the system.

The nice things about systems are that, in general, they can be controlled, they can be optimised (see The Goal by E. Goldratt), and, if set up properly, you don’t need highly skilled people (like the original developers of the system) to watch over the operation of the system. It’s only in times of serious crisis that the original developers are called back in. This is certainly appealing, especially when it means being able to cut your operating costs, developing economies of scale, to the point that the money just rolls in without you, as the original architect, having to lift a finger.

The organisation as a system

Many people advocate looking at an organisation holistically as a system (for example, Peter Senge’s Fifth Discipline) – one whose purpose is to produce profit. So we come up with elaborate organisational designs and incentive schemes to encourage the various “parts” of the system (i.e. you and me) to act in such a way that the whole system produces this profit. We even try to get the organisation as a whole to “learn”. Often, the long-term aim of the entrepreneur who establishes such a system is to reduce the organisation’s dependence on him.

Figure 2. Traditional organisational chart

The appeal of this kind of perspective, at least in theory, is clear: the smartest person (the entrepreneur) designs the money-making machine, putting all the necessary cogs, wheels, etc. (the “not-so-smart” or highly specialised employees) in place and connecting them in appropriate ways (hierarchies, incentive schemes, etc.), and the entrepreneur cracks the whip (in whatever form that may be) to get them to work together. Out pops a continual stream of profits, and the entrepreneur plays golf all day and goes on long, frequent overseas holidays. (Note: “entrepreneur” here could also refer rather to “shareholders”).

Of course, the employees are not so dumb any more, and they know when they’re being taken for a ride, so we’ve established all sorts of elaborate psychological schemes (read here: human resource management, internal branding, team-building, etc.) to basically trick people into thinking that “the company really cares”. Sure it does: if its cogs break down, the stream of profit stops, and the shareholders have to cut their overseas holidays short to come home and fix the system.

Not everyone’s a greedy, profit-hungry blighter

Not all companies, I admit, are solely focused on profit – many of them have products or services which are truly beneficial to humanity. But seriously, do we really need another iPad? Click here for a pictures of what need looks like. Surely we should all be working together towards fixing this?

Some companies do a lot of good. The non-profit arm of a company I used to work for, the Praekelt Foundation, is using technology in novel ways that’s helping solve serious social issues. I’m sure there’s a whole range of other companies out there trying really hard to do similar things.

People are getting smarter

Back to the systemic perspective. So it’s all fine and well when you’ve got a simple product line with a relatively stable demand and a work force that’s happy with being kept unempowered in exchange for a mere pittance of a salary. What happens though when the people you employ, as an entrepreneur with this systemic perspective, are smarter than you? Perhaps they’ll find ways around your incentive schemes and systems to screw you over? Perhaps they’ll figure out how to start a company just like yours, only better? You’ll probably end up regretting that you treated them like idiots or in ways that made it seem as though you were stepping on them.

Markets are shifting more rapidly

Not only is the composition of the “organisation” changing, but people are getting smarter (especially in first-world countries), the amount of consumer choice that we have is growing at a dizzying rate, and attention spans are shortening (largely, I think, due to social media and a lack of discipline in its use), so it’s becoming increasingly difficult to keep people satisfied. Their wants and desires are becoming ever-more fickle, and so the days of setting up production lines that pump out hundreds of thousands of black model-T Fords are most likely over.

The trouble with the system in this case is that even though the market shifts, the system stays facing the same way it was “programmed” to face. If this system is a monstrous organisation with 100,000 employees, and its product or service demand shifts significantly and rapidly enough, imagine the upheaval and distress this would cause! (And the obscene sums of money made by change management consultants in the process of trying to get everyone to work in the new direction).

Towards new ways of organising

We need to start looking at new ways of organising. A friend of mine pointed me towards this site this morning: http://unboss.com/. “UnBoss yourself” is the idea behind it. Quite a simple, powerful idea, but I think it’s rather impractical when you’re part of a completely under-educated work force and can’t do much more than drill holes, wield a spanner and phone the engineers when things go wrong (like huge numbers of people in many factor- and efficiency-driven economies).

Newer ways of organising, such as that seen in Semco and most likely advocated by UnBoss, as far as I can currently see, are most likely only applicable to a highly educated, skilled work force. These are much “flatter”, more networked, emergent approaches to organising together. These models assume that the people in these networks can think for themselves – at least to a certain degree, and with at least some individual and collective creativity.

The trouble, I think, comes in with people who cannot yet think critically, and have been oppressed and suppressed and disempowered by the “system” for so long that it would be a mammoth task to free them. I know for a fact that public schooling in South Africa is downright broken at the moment, with us being ranked 127th out of 142 countries in the 2011-2012 Global Competitiveness Report in terms of the quality of our primary school education, and 133rd in terms of the quality of our overall education system. How are we going to be relevant in 20 years’ time as a global player if things keep going this way?

In conclusion

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for an appropriately-placed and appropriately-maintained system. We need to admit to ourselves the limitations of these systems though, as well as what we, as humanity, can truly control.

I think that the economy of the future is going to struggle to incorporate docile employees with very specific skill sets such as just Java programming or bookkeeping. We are going to need people who can think critically and creatively for themselves, on top of having a variety of useful, practical skills, and who can network both in the real and the virtual worlds. All of our education systems are most likely going to have to change and evolve to facilitate this. This, I think, is as close to a definition of “true empowerment” that I can get, given our current context.

Not only this, but we will have to rethink our work – that is, what we do on a daily basis – and the ways in which we organise together to accomplish this work.

• “Black Tuesday”: There’s more where that came from
• Evading the questions with Big Mac
• Info bill: who voted how (the names will surely be publicised today)
• ANC smiling over “Secrecy Bill” (think about the headline)
• Zapiro cartoon: Black Tuesday and the end of democracy in South Africa
• Zapiro cartoon: Dr Jacob and Mr Hide
• Twitter #SecrecyBill

The first thing that popped into my mind was this: according to what we know about social influence (a.k.a. power), there are two major mechanisms that society uses to remove it. Those mechanisms are gossip and ridicule. The moment we perceive those in power to not be acting in our interests any more we employ these mechanisms, and from the little I can see at the moment, it would seem as though the middle/upper class in South Africa is using them against the ANC. (The middle/upper class minority is generally the only group with access to this sort of media and voice in South Africa at the moment – and you will see clearly from the people commenting on the various news articles that it is no longer just “white” people who make up this group).

Some of the most prominent spokespeople and organisations in South Africa are also chiming in:

• Secrecy Bill Insults South Africans – Desmond Tutu
• Protection of State Information Bill – an expression of concern from the Mandela Centre of Memory
• Secrecy and Tyranny – Helen Suzman Foundation
• Business urges rethink on secrecy bill – Business Unity South Africa
• Statement by Media Monitoring Africa

It will be interesting to watch how things play out here. The middle/upper class minority doesn’t have much by way of voter might, but what else does this minority control? How else can it flex its own power? Nothing draws a disjoint, individualistic society like our middle/upper class together like a common enemy. The media just might have the influence to be able to co-ordinate this.

Although, we do have a reputation for sitting comfortably and quietly behind our 3m-high walls, security gates and laser beams inside our security estates when the going gets tough (largely because we feel our actions won’t make any difference whatsoever, saying: “who are we to go up against the under-educated masses who vote for whichever politician sings the best tune or dances the best dance?”). We point out that the ANC constantly acts against the interests of those who voted them into power and those most vulnerable in society. (By the way, if they’re not acting in the interests of the masses, and the minorities are also indicating, by way of gossip and ridicule as pointed out, that the ANC is not acting in their interests, in whose interests is the ANC really acting?). We sit and gossip to each other about how little the government actually works for us, and recount hundreds of tales of incompetence, and of being inconvenienced and insulted. We complain about paying relatively exorbitant taxes in exchange for poor or non-existent service delivery. We’re tired of hearing about how R20 of every R100 in our hard-earned taxpayer money goes to greasing the palms of corrupt politicians and public servants – and how they’re now, with a “secrecy bill”, going to be able to legally cover it up (an opinion which, admittedly, might just be blown out of proportion at the moment). We then still live in blissful ignorance, telling ourselves: “don’t worry, everything’s going to carry on just as it’s always carried on”.

Perhaps, by the time we’re moved by worsening circumstances to take any serious action, leveraging our collective influence, it will be too late.

Correspondence, coherence and pragmatic utility

Kvale writes of a number of perspectives on validity and truth, where the most precise definitions seem to contain some measure of correspondence, coherence and pragmatic utility. Traditionally, valid or true statements exhibit all three.

• Correspondence – does the statement/knowledge correspond to objective reality? (Think: realism, positivism, pretty much most of modern science).
• Coherence – does the statement/knowledge have some sort of logical, internal consistency? (Think: mathematics).
• Pragmatic utility – can we actually use the statement/knowledge in some practical way? (Think: pragmatism).

Especially from a postmodernist point of view, saying that a statement corresponds to reality is highly dubious. (See this lecture by Rick Roderick on Derrida’s work). The view that correspondence is a real possibility is known as a positivist view, which says that reality can be known directly. For most people’s everyday practical purposes, this is certainly not a bad world view – people seem to have gotten by just fine on this view for ages.

It’s only when slightly odd people (such as myself) start asking too many questions, drawing them into the details, that this view starts to unravel:

This apple I’m eating is really sweet. I wonder what it’s made of?

A variety of different types of cells.

Hmmm, interesting. What are those cells made of?

Molecules, which are made up of atoms.

Cool. But what are atoms made of?

Subatomic particles: protons, neutrons and electrons. And those are most likely made up of quarks.

Wow, I didn’t know quarks could be so tasty! What’re quarks made of?

We don’t really know, but we’ve got a couple of theories about what they could be made of.

Wait a minute… So what the hell am I eating?

Good question. Nobody really knows. Like I said, we’ve got some theories…

Reductionism and correspondence

The reductionists hope that by isolating smaller and smaller bits of things we’ll eventually come up with a true description of “objective reality”, i.e. correspondence. They obviously haven’t read Sapolsky and Balt’s paper entitled Reductionism and Variability in Data: a Meta-Analysis (published in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 39(2), 1996 – I had to personally contact Professor Sapolsky to get hold of a copy of it).

One of the major assumptions in reductionist philosophy is that “noise” or variability in experimental data will vanish as we get closer and closer to “objective reality” by examining finer and finer levels detail. In Sapolsky and Balt’s paper, they test this assumption: they gathered many years’ papers on the subject of testosterone and aggression and organised them into six “levels”: organismal, organ systems, single organs, multicellular, single-cellular, and sub-cellular papers. They then catalogued the variability in each and every paper, plotting the six levels’ variability against each other.

The expectation: a decreasing trend in variation as they zoomed in more.

The result: no observable trend.

The interpretation: reductionism is helpful, but only to a certain extent. At this point, your options pretty much include moving on to chaos/complexity theory. You’ve come too far down the rabbit hole to go back to positivist thinking.

Conclusion

For many practical purposes, however, we can talk of apples and the effects of testosterone on primate behaviour, but practical purposes are something quite different to correspondence. As for coherence, that’s a topic for another day, because I’d have to convince you that mathematics, similar to English, is just another language, rooted in and emergent from interaction between people in society (see this blog article).

Going forward, I’ve given up on being able to expound “what things are”, and especially on being able to write “truth” down or speak about it. Instead, I’m focusing much of my energy on discovering/coming up with relatively stable guiding narratives (knowledge, statements, etc.) that I will test and put to practical use in different contexts, tweaking the narratives depending on the desired results – my personal view of what research should be.

We can’t hold on to the promise that someone’s going to give us the ultimate answer. I think we’ve each got to seek it out for ourselves, relentlessly and carefully questioning our own and others’ internal assumptions.

Foundations

The authors had two fundamental assumptions (p 152) regarding social influence that they took from an evolutionary perspective in primate hierarchies, as follows.

1. Power relations are bi-directional, and are governed according to the extent to which individuals act in ways that advance the interests of the group.
2. Power is a heuristic solution to the problem of allocating resources in interdependent relations, and as such, should be a basic dimension of social perception and social behaviour.

Interesting. Seems rather plausible and pragmatic to me, I think. I’d like to investigate these assumptions more deeply at some point though – especially the second one. Let’s assume for a while that this is how things work right now, because the authors do distil these assumptions into 7 propositions (p 157) that are all proven to a degree by experimental evidence.

So, we, the people, give particular individuals or groups of individuals power if they further our interests (or at least appear to further our interests). Democratic elections would be an example of this. If one candidate or political party keeps shouting about how they are going to address your interests, and the other candidates/parties don’t, surely you’re going to be more likely to vote for that candidate/party? You’re going to give them authority over you to provide the necessary frameworks in which you will live and you’ll hope that, working and living within those frameworks, you’ll have your particular interests addressed (unemployment, healthcare, education, etc.).

Not only this, but we progressively (heuristically) give power to and take it from the relevant people who will be allocating resources, and we give to and take from them the relevant resources. Money, in my mind, would be one such resource, amongst others such as tangible resources (water, food, machinery, etc.) or even possibly intangible ones (our time, intellectual property, etc.).

Surely then, when theorising about “business”, we need to do so against the backdrop of an understanding of the dynamics of social influence? In my brief bit of research so far in the field of entrepreneurship, I haven’t seen much talk of this – people mainly seem to focus on innovation, and gathering resources towards addressing an opportunity. The social influence dynamics behind this seem taken for granted (perhaps I haven’t read enough yet – I am certainly open to being corrected).

Business and power

The way I see things is as follows: if you create some kind of value (a product, service, experience, etc.) that a particular group of people wants (call them your “target audience”), and they’re willing to give you a certain amount of money for your offering, and if once you’ve paid all of your bills and delivered on your promises you’ve got some money left over, you’ve got a business – especially if you can keep this going. But that money that you’ve got left over: what is it? From one perspective, one could think of it as purchasing power. Useful resources, that afford you freedom and a certain degree of influence (not the only type of influence in society, I might add), have been allocated to you by the group – not necessarily consciously, but perhaps as a built-in mechanism in society (see this other article I wrote on Mead’s view of society). Is this perhaps an emergent effect of some simpler, more fundamental things that you and I do on a daily basis? Entirely possible, I think.

What do you then do with those resources? Do you re-invest them in creating more value for society (i.e. that which society at least perceives as being valuable)? If so, it’s likely that you’ll be able to carry on gaining purchasing power. Do you waste them on things that only further your own interests and nobody else’s (even perhaps working against the interests of others)? If so, you’d better hope that nobody finds out, because if the group sees you as wasteful (think: Lehman Brothers, et al.) they will at least try to find ways (consciously or subconsciously) to remove your power from you (think: Occupy Wall Street).

(Just to clarify, from my phrasing above: I don’t at all think the Occupy Wall Street movement had anything to do with Lehman Brothers’ swift descent, but its emergence after the financial crisis seems to me to be a growing signal of societal discontent with the corporate gestures made by those currently in power, who wield much of humanity’s resources. Although it’s a very scattered movement filled with discord, to me it’s a sign that growing parts of society are not having their interests taken seriously by those who have historically been afforded power, and are looking for new ways of having their needs met, and perhaps new authorities).

Power, and business

So it seems to me as though social influence dynamics (under the two assumptions by Keltner et al.) are at the heart of what drives business. Power is thus a primary construct to understanding the present-day phenomenon which we call “business”. “Business”, as we currently understand it, is, in language more amenable to complexity theory and emergence, a form of societal patterning.

With this understanding, what other sorts of societal patterning are possible towards creating real value?

The perception of value

As you might have seen, I’m quite careful when talking about the way in which society affords power to those who at least appear to create value for them. I think that it’s entirely possible to fool people into thinking that you’re creating value (think again: Lehman Brothers, et al.). The problem is, if you’re not creating real value, it will eventually surface in some form of deficiency or chasm somewhere. In the most extreme case, it might even surface in societal collapse and extinction of the species.

So far we’ve been lucky: all of the major collapses and scandals have been relatively small-scale in comparison to total extinction, and the aftermath is quite clearly a removal of power from those who instigated the societal harm.

A question comes to my mind then: what is real value?

Depending on how you look at it, this is either a very easy or very difficult thing to answer, and I think that the answer lies in your fundamental frame of reference. Do you consider long-term survival of humanity, attempting to progressively improve the quality of life of all people, as a worthwhile goal? If so, then I would say that whatever contributes (no matter how small the contribution might seem) towards this dynamic, running goal would constitute real value. What’s your definition of real value?

Implications and questions

Surely we need to start thinking more carefully about the ways in which we afford power to others, allowing them to mould and shape us according to their thinking and desires? Going back to symbolic interactionist theory, it seems, to me at least, as though our unwillingness to part with our constructed selves (the “me” phases of self) traps us in being controlled from within by influential people and groups.

What sort of society would be possible if we all allowed ourselves and others to be a bit more spontaneous, living creatively “in the moment”?

And finally, we need to bolster the postmodern movement, which is essentially a sceptical movement, by continually interrogating our own motives and those of others. We need to start crafting and asking the right questions, towards creating real value for each other.

The main theory that he came up with is symbolic interactionism, parts of which I describe in this article. To me it seems to be a very pragmatic way of looking at the development of language, an individual sense of self, and society as a whole – both in terms of the historical evolution of those phenomena, as well as how we learn language, develop a sense of self and form society today.

Meaning

Filipe Carreira da Silva gives a pretty decent, simple overview of Mead’s works, and most of my insights come from da Silva’s work. Let me give a run-down of how I see symbolic interactionism working in contemporary society.

A child is born with certain instincts (we won’t go into too much detail there). So, for example, the child might experience a certain kind of discomfort, in response to which the child instinctively cries. If this cry (a “gesture”, in Mead’s terminology) is followed by food from her mother and thus satisfaction (the “response”), the meaning we eventually attribute to this interplay of gestures and responses is hunger.

The meanings of things, therefore, are constructed. Meaning is not something that is inherent in our daily lives – it is something that we create in our minds and in our interactions with one another. This has tremendous implications for language as a whole: for example, Derrida noted that the meaning of a word is altered with every single use of that word, over time. Each word stands on top of this massive “pile” of meaning then, constructed, morphed and tweaked over the ages.

A practical example of this would be the word “dog”. I’m quite sure that the first thing that comes to your mind when you read that word is something not exactly the same as in my mind: you might envision a small, white dog, or a large, brown one, whereas I would envisage a black one. My experiences with dogs would be linked to my internal representation of “dog”, and your experiences would most likely be linked to your internal representation of the word “dog”. An understanding of how our brains are wired seems to give a little understanding as to why our associations would be subtly different: each and every human brain is uniquely wired.

Some people say that each neuron in our brains is wired to between 7,000 and 10,000 other neurons. We also apparently have 100 billion neurons in our brains. That’s a lot of interconnectivity: interconnectivity that’s nudged and tweaked continuously by tiny processes every second of every day, from when we’re born to when we die.

Surely it’s not possible then to share meaning precisely? If I read a piece of text, I might get a relatively similar understanding of it to you, but there doesn’t seem to be any chance that we will interpret it in exactly the same way. I will hopefully cover the implications of this when I write about the systemic way of thinking.

Self

In our super-individualistic society today, it seems as though the common picture of society is that it’s a group of individuals – that is, we all develop rather independently, and come together to form society.

Mead thinks of it the other way round. He said that it is society which exists prior to the individual, and the individual is first formed by society, and then goes on to form and be formed by society. Let me explain with an example.

When a child is born, he soaks up stimuli like a little sponge. He learns simple behaviours and starts mimicking sounds made by his parents (who are part of society).

At a later stage, the child starts to play. The child, for example, pretends to be a cop, and a friend pretends to be a robber, and they chase each other round the garden pretending to shoot each other. Let’s look at what happens here: the child pretending to be the cop, in Mead’s words, “takes on the attitude” of the cop. In other words, the child has some kind of built-up picture of what a cop is and does (potentially from watching movies or reading stories or seeing them in everyday life), and acts out from that perspective – making decisions as if he were a cop, in his understanding of how a cop would make decisions. A similar dynamic occurs with the friend who pretends to be the robber.

At some point, the child also begins to engage in more complex social behaviour involving co-ordination amongst several other people. A classic example of this used by Mead (1925, p 269) is a baseball game:

The child must not only take the role of the other, as he does in play, but he must assume the various roles of all the participants in the game, and govern his action accordingly. If he plays first base, it is as the one to whom the ball will be thrown from the field or from the catcher. Their organised reactions to him he has imbedded in his own playing of the different positions, and this organised reaction becomes what I have called the “generalised other” that accompanies and controls his conduct. And it is this generalised other in his experience which provides him with a self.

According to Mead, every group has its own “generalised other”, which I see as an “average” or “sum total” or “least common denominator” of sorts containing the attitudes of that group. Strong examples of this would be stereotypes: “blondes”, “car mechanics”, “cat lovers”, “men”, “women”. Do you have the inherent ability to pin down a few attributes of each of these groups of people? If so, you’ve built up generalised others in interaction with them over time.

The child, in reflecting his actions off of other people and groups as he develops, constructs a sense of self such that he can say: “I am a [X] type of person”. He can list his attributes in comparison to other individuals and groups, and is eventually capable of self-awareness. The conversations between him and society have built up a self.

Mind

Given this understanding of the development of the self, what is your mind then? This is certainly quite a complex thing to answer, because it’s affected by so many things right down to the biology of your brain and body.

According to Mead, the phenomenon of mind is simply conversation with generalised others that have been internalised. In other words, we talk to the “blondes”, “car mechanics”, “cat lovers”, and so on, or even generalisations of specific individuals, in our minds. We build up pictures of who we think other individuals or groups of people are, and then we often rehearse conversations with them in our minds prior to seeing them, trying to establish what we think their responses will be. Society as a whole, also, will have a generalised other in your mind – in case you ever have to communicate with the whole of humanity.

“I” and “me”

There’s something rather mysterious in this whole conception of mind and self by Mead. Let me illustrate.

Think of the last time you had lunch. Imagine viewing yourself while you were eating. What were you thinking of? Who were you at that point?

Two questions are posed.

1. Who is it that you’re looking at in your mind’s eye?
2. What’s doing the looking?

Mead conceptualises the self as having two phases: the “I” and the “me” phases. In answering the first question, Mead says that this is your “me” phase of self, or object self – the one constructed in interaction with society over time. As for the second question, Mead calls this the “I” phase of your self, or subject self.

Note how you can’t ever really look at your “I” phase. Every time you think of yourself, you think in terms of the object version of your self, or your “me” phase – your “I” phase is always actively doing the looking, and any thinking about your self is done retrospectively. David Bohm (I wrote a bit about his work in this article) seems, to me at least, to speak of the “I” phase of self as being part of the immeasurable, and is thus rather mysterious.

Another interesting thing about the “I” and “me” phases of self is that different people seem to live more through the one than the other. The vast majority of people seem to live through the “me” phase of their selves: they’re the people who are rather predictable, who can tell you exactly who they are and that they know themselves well.

Da Silva gives some examples of people throughout history whose “I” phase of self was very strong, such as Buddha, Jesus and Socrates. Such individuals are apparently more likely to be unpredictable and often act from an unknown (and possibly unknowable) source. Mead says that the “I” phase of self is a source of novelty and thus creativity. The stronger your “I” phase of self, the more powerfully you could potentially change a group of people (think of the impact that individuals such as Buddha, Jesus and Socrates have had on modern society).

Everyone else is somewhere in between being creative and predictable.

Social control

Social control then need not be something forced upon people – society and sub-groups within society already implicitly control those whose “me” phases are strong. They act according to who they think they are, but who they think they are is simply a product of the groups that have influenced them the most. We all suffer from this to a certain degree, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing.

People who don’t conform to the group often get ostracised, and as Malcolm Gladwell points out at the beginning of Outliers, it seems as though we need a certain amount of community to be healthy. Erich Fromm, in The Fear of Freedom, noted that life seems to be a trade-off between individuality and community.

How does this control look? It’s actually quite simple. When you’re thinking of doing something, if you start thinking it’s a bad idea, often it’s because the “generalised other” of the person or persons who will be affected by this action say it’s a bad idea, so you don’t do it. Or, something fits quite well with your conception of who you think you are (your “me” construction), and so you do it (you’re the kind of person who likes to go for long walks on the beach, so you go for a long walk on the beach, but you wouldn’t consider going for a quick run because you’re not that kind of person). This kind of social control is thus a form of self-criticism.

Society

“Society” then is defined by Mead (from da Silva, p 61) as

the organised set of responses individuals can use for the purposes of social control – which … operates in terms of self-criticism.

Krishnamurti, who apparently influenced and was influenced by David Bohm, wrote about society in The First and Last Freedom (p 36):

The act of relationship between you and another, between you and me, is society.

So, “society” is a blanket term that we use to describe the complex network of relationships between all of us, each of us seeming to have an “I” and “me” phase to our selves, where the majority of us act according to the “me” phase (for a variety of reasons, of course). Thus, we allow dominant groups to influence our thinking.

If two groups are vying for your attention, what is it that will cause you to allow one of them to influence you and not the other? Surely it’s the amount of power you perceive them to have over you? I’ll hopefully write a bit about power and social influence soon.

Conclusion

I hope you’ve managed to stomach this rather philosophical article. I find it all very interesting, and I will hopefully tie this together with a few of my other articles (and some yet to be written) to show why this is all important in present-day society. In the meantime, I hope you see, as I do, the potential value of Mead’s relatively practical framework in coming to understand present-day society and societal patterning.

There is a richness and depth in this community that can only be experienced by seeing them for yourself, in person, on the ground, on their terms – as it should be when you walk into someone else’s home.

In terms of brands, some of the people here in the lower income groups aspire to wear Carvela shoes and Diesel jeans, sometimes saving for months to buy a pair, or offer them as bribes to get their children to finish their schooling. They would love to drive a BMW or a Mercedes. Within their respective income groups, they pay just that little extra for their premium food or clothing brands, sometimes only on special occasions. Just like all the rest of us, they seek significance, and it would be interesting to perform more academic studies on the relationship between their individual identities and the brands to which they aspire.

Being the only Caucasian person in my group, I seemed to be the object of much spectacle in the eyes of the people of Alex: “what’s the white man doing in Alex?” they would ask each other and our guide. I cringe thinking of what it must have been like for non-Caucasians in South Africa in the apartheid years, and by default I carry a legacy everywhere the colour of my skin is visible. I am a walking brand, evoking a history of millions of memories and emotional associations by my mere presence there. It’s a brand both carefully and carelessly crafted by my predecessors; sometimes, unfortunately, also lived out by some of my contemporaries, continually acknowledging its persistence.

One of our interviewees, despite being overwhelmingly welcoming to all of us, me included, when the conversation happened to tend in the direction of politics, glazed over at one point, reciting a script that seems to have played through her mind (and most likely conversations with many others in her circles) a number of times: “South Africa is for the blacks – all of the foreigners and the whites must go.”

In transactional psychology terms, her recitation would probably be classified as typical parent data: completely devoid of adult, rational thinking, purely the playing of a recording to allay, at least a little, some internal discomfort; something we all engage in on a daily basis in one way or another. In social constructionist terms, it would seem to me to be an expression of her object self: the socially constructed “me” speaking to the “generalised other” that is her community. Whatever the technical term for what happened there, I don’t hold her personally accountable for her remarks, as I think I understand how those scripts were constructed. What’s most concerning for me is that this seems to be a conversation that’s still taking place, internally in people’s minds and most likely externally out on the streets, in August of 2011.

The architecture of a brand is such a complex thing, primarily because we’re dealing with the human mind here. This particular brand of which I speak is a deeply embedded one, carried by millions here in South Africa. Most seem to attempt to plaster over it with trite apologies as they’re rushing about building walls to protect themselves in some way or another from its looming, growing, menacing presence.

Is this fear justified, or is it an illusion bolstered by our deep separation?

“White South Africa” is still, quite evidently, in desperate need of a re-branding, and those who still support the old brand in any way, playing out the old scripts, whichever side of the “line” they stand on, need to be freed of their terminal myopia (perhaps by a first-hand meeting of the other of which they are so afraid).

We need to change the conversations South Africans are having, in their own minds and in their communities, and this will only happen when there’s growing evidence at an ever-increasing number of touch points in favour of this change.