Re: New member interests

Mercedes Lopez Invarato (ML6@soas.ac.uk)
Fri, 16 Aug 1996 17:23:17 GMT

Charles Smith wrote:
"I am a new member of this group.

I am a manager in industry, looking after quality and change management, and
have used Grid techniques in assessing motivation and behaviour norms in my
company.

My aims in all this are to gain proficiency in assessing behaviour (and how
to change it) in the work environment."

Some silly questions:
- Why do you aim to change the behaviour of the workers? What for?
- Is it your aim to become a proficient 'socio/psychological engineer?
- How much will your "directed behaviour modification" affect their personal lives, outside
the workplace?
- Who will set up the 'correct standards' of behaviour?
- The company's "philosophy"? Or yourself?
- Do you think that it will be rightful and moral?
- Is it the final aim to produce good profits for whatever company?
- Is it legitimate to manipulate persons/workers' minds/emotions/behaviour in order to
increase economic profits?
- Is it legitimate at all to try to manipulate/control others? Is it moral?
- Isn't it to enslave human beings?
And who will manipulate the manipulator?

Quotation from Gustav Meyrink El Golem [Der Golem (1915)]. .Ediciones Orbis. Barcelona. 1987.
(Free translation)
"It is said that the origin of the story goes probably to the XVIth century. It is told
that a rabbi crated, according to methods of the Cabala now lost, an artificial man,
the so named Golem, for helping him, as his servant , to ring the synagogue's bells
and to do all the hard work. But it is told also that it did not turn up an authentic
man, since its only form of life consisted in vegetate in a rough and semi-
unconscious way; moreover, as it is said, only during daytime, due to the influence
of a magic leaf that the rabbi set among its teeth, and that attracted the free sidereal
forces of the universe. When one evening the rabbi forgot to take off, before the
prayer time, the leaf from the mouth, it is said that the golem fall in such a delirious
state that, running through the darkness in the narrow streets, destroyed everything
it found on its way....due to the continuous repetition of those thoughts that poison
the air, here in the ghetto there is all at once a sudden firing, an animistic explosion
that pull out to the daylight our subconscious for, like the lighthning there , creating
here a ghost in everything and each one, the symbol of the soul of the masses...
...the distressing security that we are torn away with premeditation and against our
will, of our most true, real and our one's own interior, only in order that with them
could take plastic form the phantom's figure"

Long life to Brave New World, and to the Alpha's + or the present civilization

Mercedes Lopez
Student
Department of Political Studies
Soas
University of London

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