Dear Organlearners,
Rol Fessenden <76234.3636@compuserve.com> writes to Doc:
> There is, of course, always a little or a lot of hipocracy in the words
> and actions of our govt officials. And yet, I thought At was making a
> different point. It may be I am wrong about this. I am actually saying
> that I don't think our govt officials are any smarter than the rest of us,
> and therefore, I think there is less "mainipulation" going on than there
> is just plain shared values.
...snip...
> I do see serendipitous scapegoating all the time. It's the Marketing
> Dept's fault, or Operations, or Finance's and so on. The causes are
> similar to the more traditional form. It is relatively easy to see simple
> solutions from a distance, but once you get close to the issues, the
> simple solutions are not real solutions.
Rol and Doc, I want to thank both of you for digging into this issue of
scapegoating. I did not realise it, but in my own contribution I refered
to both what we now may call "serendipitous scapegoating" and
"opportunistic scapegoating". Thus it is quite possible that you both
could read different things from the same contribution.
Before I attend to what you each had to write, let me once again stress my
observations over many years. Scapegoating is a symptom of learning
failures, both for individuals and organisations. The more complex an
organisation (and thus the more difficult the learning), the more
proliferant the scapegoating. This symptom is rampant in South Africa, but
I would still like to know what is the status in other countries.
In the case of "serendipitous scapegoating" the learner, apart from not
learning, has also not gained anything else. But in the case of
"opportunistic scapegoating" the learner stands to gain a lot, except in
learning itself.
Rol correctly sensed that I stressed "serendipitous scapegoating". I
recognise it as the learner's cry for help (articulation of tacit
knowledge) when the self-organisation aspect of learning has failed.
Usually, when I help such learners to regain control of their
self-organisation, their scapegoating deminishes and whenever it does
happen, they recognise in it that they are losing control over their
self-organisation.
Rol, I want to thank you very much for the following insight:
> In my mind all of this "my neighborhood is better than
> yours" perspective is the underlying cause of subconscious
> scapegoating.
What you have described, is the opposite of the essentiality
sureness ("identity-categoricity"). I call it demarcationism.
Compare demarcationism with fragmentarism, the opposite of wholeness
("associativity-monadicity"). In my opinion the two main pillars of
Apartheid (a caste system) were demarcationism and fragmentarism.
Apartheid, as you all know, was the ideology of the white monority when
they controlled the goverment in South Africa. Formal Apartheid may now be
almost dead in South Africa, but it still lives on informally in the rest
of the world
This bring us to what Doc had to say. He tuned in to the "opportunistic
scapegoating" of my contribution. That is why many of his excellent
examples refered to societies or nations with a "caste" system. When those
who were favoured did not get what they expected without having had to
learn and thus earn their expectations, they quickly find a scapegoat to
fix the blame. Rulers are the foremost among these oppotunistic
scapegoaters. That is why Doc warned
> Power (wealth, leverage, domination) are all currency in any
> political system--the only hope is ever that the respect for the
> basic laws and principles in a people are sufficient to overcome the
> breaking of that law by those selected to rule, through a process of
> checks and balances, recall and removal from office.
I am a bit worried that this exciting thread may get fixed upon
scapegoating. I merely refered to scapegoating as an important symptom to
recognise when learning did not happend. Are there other symtoms also of
value when it concerns the learning failures of a nation? And after all,
should we not try to give an account of how a nation learns rather than
knowing when it does not learn?
Best wishes
--At de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre for Education University of Pretoria Pretoria, South Africa email: amdelange@gold.up.ac.za
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