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Archive for the ‘Sociology’ Category

Good bye Moby Dick! Farewell Crime and Punishment! Adios National Geographic and Readers Digest!

PowerPoint and the generation of the 7th Millennium rules.

If you’re a “Baby Boomer”, PowerPoint will likely not appeal to you. Perhaps you will even feel it is evil. But I’ll give you two good reasons you ought to understand and appreciate PowerPoint. Your children and grandchildren.

PowerPoint is the way the Generation of the 7th Millennium and beyond will cope in this fast-paced, frenetic world of iPods, search engines and micro-minute attention spans. (If man came on to the scene in the year 4026 BCE then 1975 would mark the beginning of the seventh Millennium

Yes, if you were a teen in ’75, you remember reading novels and composing essays for your teachers and professors. On the weekends, you caught movies like Dog Day Afternoon, Mahogany, The Man Who Would Be King, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Love Story, The Stepford Wives, Three Days of the Condor and Monty Python and the Holy Grail (“Sir, by what name be ye known?” …reply? “Some call me Tim?”)

A good plot, drama, and wit (ok, we weren’t perfect then either) ruled the big screen.

But times have evolved. What was a “New York Minute” back then is a New York milli-second today.

The big screen stars born in that notable year include Drew Barrymore, Angelina Jolie, Charlize Theron, and Kate Winslet.

In ’75, there were five notable deaths — Marjorie Main (Ma Kettle), Susan Hayward, The Three Stooges’ Larry Fine and Moe Howard. The fifth death at the birth of the 7th Millennium was not noted for almost 20 years.

The death of which I am speaking is the death of reading and comprehension skills.

Many college professors trace the decline of student reading and retention to 1975, or the beginning of the 7th Millennium.

This is manifested by students who take no notes, wear stylish headsets that re-play lectures which were recorded by professors.
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You have listened to me for a year now talking about Choice Theory but I know I’ve never really explained what Choice Theory is. Choice Theory is actually an explanation of all human behavior developed by Dr. William Glasser.

There are basically five components of this theory—the basic human needs, the quality world, the perceived world, the comparing place and total behavior. I’ll give a brief overview of each one, starting with the five basic human needs.

The Basic Human Needs
We are born with five basic human needs—survival, love & belonging, power, freedom and fun. We are all born with these needs but we experience them to varying degrees. One person might have a high love & belonging need, while another person is high in freedom. We are born with these needs and are biologically driven to get them met in the best way available to us.

The Quality World
This is a place that exists inside all of us where we store pictures of things that have satisfied one or more of our basic needs in the past or things we think may satisfy them in the future. These things do not have to meet society’s definition of quality. Alcohol is in the quality world of an alcoholic, steeling cars in the quality world of a car thief, and domestic violence is in the quality world of a batterer. The only two requirements for entry into the quality world are that it meets one or more of our needs and it feels good.

The Perceived World
There is much to be said about the perceived world but for the purposes of this article, all I want to say is that we each have our own perceptions of the world. Our sensory system takes in information through sight, touch, sound, taste and scent, however we all have unique ways of processing that information based on our life experiences, our culture, and our values.

The main thing to remember about the perceived world is that if you encounter others whose perceived world doesn’t match yours, it doesn’t mean one of you is wrong. It simply means you are different. Remembering this simply statement will reduce much of the disagreements and fighting that occurs in people’s lives. Acceptance of this fact would mean we could give up the need to convince others of our point of view. We could simply accept the fact that we see things differently and move on.

The Comparing Place
The comparing place is where we weigh what we want from our quality world against our perceptions of what we believe we are actually getting. When these two things are a match, all is well.

However, when our perceptions and quality world don’t line up, in other words we perceive we are not in possession of the things we want, then we are driven to action to get those things we are thinking about. People generally don’t make a lot of progress or change the things they are currently doing unless they are in some degree of discomfort—the greater the pain the more motivation to try something different.

This is where conventional wisdom tells us that if we want what’s best for other people in our lives, then it is our responsibility to raise their pain level to get them to do things differently because we generally know what’s best for them. Right?

Wrong. We can only know what’s best for ourselves. Remember, our perceived worlds are all different. We have unique values and experiences. How can we possibly know what’s best for someone else when we haven’t been in their skin or lived their life? We can only know what’s best for ourselves.

Total Behavior
There are two main things about behavior. One is that all behavior is purposeful and two is that all behavior is total. Let’s begin with the idea that all behavior is total. There are four inseparable components of behavior—action, thinking, feeling and physiology. These all exist simultaneously during any given behavior in which we engage. The first two components—acting and thinking—are the only components over which we can have direct control. This means that if we want to change how we are feeling or something that is happening in our bodies (physiology), then we must first consciously change what we are doing or how we are thinking.
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Auschwitz was the most notorious of the Nazi labor camps in WWII. There, a man or woman could expect at any moment to be sent to the gas chambers, used for medical experiments or given a phenol injection to the heart which would cause death in 15 seconds. If lucky, they would instead be used for exhaustive labor under the most grueling conditions.

A selection committee decided who was fit for labor and who would be used for medical experiments or exterminated. One ‘doctor’ drew an arbitrary height line of 5 feet 2 inches and any child who was not tall enough was sent to the gas chambers immediately.

Many were sent to the chambers directly upon arriving at Auschwitz. For that reason records do not exist for all of the people who were killed.

Their horrible suffering and the conditions they endured were beyond belief. People would tell each other lies just to give hope. “The allies have landed in Greece”. The implication was that they would be rescued soon. There were many other stories concocted to keep one another from utter despair.

After Auschwitz was closed and the inmates released there was a reckoning. The Nazis were hunted down over the years and brought to account for their crimes one by one.
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