Excerpts from White Refugee's
First Amicus Filed in Concourt
II: TRUTH AND FORGIVENESS SOCIAL CONTRACT PRINCIPLES
- A. Radical Honesty Overview: Being Specific about Anger and Forgiveness
- B. Stanley Milgram Studies on Obedience: Legal, Socio-political Implications
- C. Common Law Reasonableness Test: Skills and Competencies
- D. Rule of Law & Forgiveness: Individuality, Independence & Integrity
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II. TRUTH AND FORGIVENESS SOCIAL CONTRACT PRINCIPLES
“The struggle to establish a human rights culture in Africa cannot be won unless Africans address the causes of massive human rights violations[97]… Africa must reexamine its priorities if it has to come out of the culture of conflict and poverty.[98]”
A. Radical Honesty Overview: Being Specific About Anger and Forgiveness
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26. In Practicing Radical Honesty[99], Dr. Blanton qualifies the conflict between intellectual fairness and sensate forgiveness:Many of us are concerned about fairness and use the principle of fairness as our primary rationalization for withholding anger. Advanced instruction in this principle creates lawyers who are miserable people. Divorces handled by lawyers often result in children shot back and forth like missiles between hostile camps. If you force yourself to be fair while still angry, you are a fool, and any agreements you make in such a state won't work for you.
Judges and lawyers ignore this fact. Judges and lawyers exist for people who can't handle their anger. A judge tells you what to do, based on what he or she thinks is fair, whether you like it or not, because you haven't been able to work things out on your own.
27. The Radical Honesty Methodology or Process or definition of Sincere Sensate Forgiveness is explained in depth in Practicing Radical Honesty[100], also referred to as the Truth and Forgiveness Social Contract[101], with the six minimal requirements, none of which may be skipped, being:
- You have to tell the truth about the specific behavior you resent, to the person, face-toface;
- You have to be verbally and vocally unrestrained with regard to volume and propriety;
- You have to pay attention to the feelings and sensations in your body and to the other person as you speak;
- You have to express any appreciations for the person that come up in the process, with the same attention to your feelings and to the other person as when you are expressing resentments;
- You have to stay with any feelings that emerge in the process, like tears or laughter, regardless of any evaluations you may have about how it makes you look; and let the tears or laughter or pain or anger not be interrupted by your mind until they go naturally to completion;
- You have to stay with the discussion until you no longer feel resentful of the other person.
28. Dr. Blanton -- the worlds expert on sincere sensate forgiveness -- concludes, with great emphasis, that is not to be contradicted by any lawyer, priest, psychotherapist, diplomat, bureaucrat, democrat, labour leader, company executive, head of government or any other patrolman, that: “Then, and only then, are you ready to talk about the future, make arrangements for the future, or make any agreements.”[97] Nelson Mandela Foundation, SAHRC and Office of the High Comm. for Human Rights, Dignity and Justice for All of Us, Reflecting on Human Rights in Africa Today, Human Rights Lecture and Roundtable Discussion, 10 Dec 2007 (p.12)
[98] N. Mandela Foundation, SAHRC & UNHCHR, Ibid (p.13)
[99] Practicing Radical Honesty, by Brad Blanton [PDF]
[100] Practicing Radical Honesty: Chapter 9: Radical Honesty About Anger [PDF]
[101] UB: [A.11] Being Specific About Anger and Metholody of Forgiveness [PDF]
B. Stanley Milgram Studies on Obedience: Legal, Socio-Political Implications
29. In Affidavit of Brad Blanton, Ph.D, evidencing the legal, psychological, and sociopolitical ‘citizens privilege’, Nuremberg Principles skills and competencies of Individual Responsibility, required for acts of civil disobedience to perceived illegitimate authority; and their application to the common law ‘reasonableness test’[102] filed as Expert Witness Affidavit in High Court, W.C. # 19963-09; Dr. Blanton explains what happens in cultures of obedience; how and why studies show that 92% of citizens lack the psychological and emotional skills for non-violent disobedience.
Brief Description of the Milgram Experiment:
[19.] The Milgram experiment was a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, which measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience.
[20.] Milgram devised the experiments in response to the question raised by Hannah Arendt, in her coverage of the war crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann. Eichmanns defence was that he should not be held personally responsible for a crime against mankind because he was doing his duty in the social system of which he was a part. His lawyers said a court might judge the social system as criminal, but not the person doing their duty within that social system. This argument was rejected. Eichmann’s adjudicators concluded that he was individually responsible for the crimes he committed, regardless of the social system of which he was a part, and he was executed.
[21.] Arendt then raised the question which fascinated Milgram: Was Adolf Eichmann some unusual deviant, some sadistic exception to common humanity, or was he just a bureaucrat? What he actually did was shuffle papers in an office and make phone calls and give orders. Was he normal?
[22.] The Milgram experiment was designed to simulate the conditions in which Eichmann operated, and to determine how many individuals would – like Eichmann – follow orders and be obedient to the system in which they operated; and how many would practice civil disobedience and refuse to be obedient to perceived illegal authority. Milgram’s experiment revealed that a significant majority of the population – 65%, like Eichmanns millions of accomplices – merely follow orders, irrespective whether the orders violate their deepest moral beliefs; only 35 % possessed the skills and competencies for civil disobedience.
[23.] Furthermore, when individuals could share the responsibility or blame, with just one other person, 92% of individuals would, like Eichmann, cooperate with authority; and refrain from civil disobedience; and only 8% possessed the skills and competencies for civil disobedience.
[25.] The relevant questions then become, what are the resources: the emotional, psychological, and socio-political skills and competencies, that:A. the 37% possess, when individually confronting perceived illegal authority; and
B. the 8% possess, refusing the given opportunity, from an ideological or social peer, to share the blame, with them; and individually confront perceived illegal authority.
[27] The results of the Stanley Milgram Tests on Obedience (which have since been replicated by other social-scientists with the same results) clearly show that acts of civil disobedience are acts that the man on the Clapham omnibus are emotionally, psychologically and socio-politically incapable of. Put differently they are acts that require the use of special emotional, psychological and socio-political skills and competencies.
[28] To apply the man on the Clapham omnibus reasonableness test, to someone consciously and deliberately committing an act of civil disobedience to perceived illegal authority; would be the same as applying the man on the Clapham omnibus reasonableness test, to determine whether a heart surgeon’s decisions and actions made during open-heart surgery, were negligent or unreasonable; or asking a clown, whether an astronauts decisions during lift-off, were ‘reasonable’ or not.
[29]. Consequently, the reasonableness test that should be applied to cases of civil disobedience, are not those of the man on the Clapham omnibus; because he does not have these special skills and competencies. The reasonableness test that should be applied, is the standard of the ordinary skilled person, exercising and professing to have that special skill.[102] Blanton, Brad Ph.D: Reasonableness Test Radical Honesty Skills & Competencies Affidavit [PDF]
C. Common Law Reasonableness Test: Skills and Competencies
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30. In Dr. Blanton’s Radical Honesty skills and capabilities forgiveness expert witness affidavit[103] he confirms that “[Johnstone] is being ridiculously prosecuted, and her defence is justified and accurate and her opinion that there is a significant difference between posed forgiveness and real forgiveness is entirely accurate and, so far, almost always avoided by politicians.”[D] There is a difference between posed, fake intellectual forgiveness, and sincere, sensate being forgiveness:Forgiveness occurs through telling the truth and then staying there to experience the sensations in the body and the emotional response of the person speaking the truth. Staying present to the experience requires a broadening of attention, a widening of focus from the narrower focus on right and wrong, admitting lies, admitting crimes, reporting what really happened in the past. The shift from primary attention to the intellectual domain of judging right and wrong, to giving primary attention to the bodily experience that comes with telling the truth, is so that the person can feel their way through, rather than think their way around, the experience triggered by the report about the past.
Forgiveness is required for reconciliation. And the process of reconciliation is forgiveness squared. Because, as the one who initiates telling the truth, whether it is confessing what you have done or reporting on what others have done, you have to stay present to the persons who responds to your words, and to your feeling response and verbal response to them, and they must do the same in response to you...and this must go on for however long it takes for all the parties to be moved in their emotions, in their bodies and at the level of sensations experienced in the body, so that the sensations can increase, persist for a while, decrease, and then recede and go away. It is this bodily sensation of a change of heart that is the criterion for forgiveness that creates the possibility of reconciliation. If this process goes on honestly and is supported by those who give the invitation to reconciliation, sometimes former enemies become allies and friends out of mutual respect for each other's willingness to go through the process of telling the truth and experiencing and sharing their honest heartfelt, bodyfelt response. Sometimes, many times, the truth never gets told.
Sometimes, many times, even if the truth is told, reconciliation does not occur. Sometimes truth and reconciliation happens. When it does, new people make a new beginning."[103] Blanton, Brad Ph.D: Reasonableness Test Radical Honesty Skills & Competencies Affidavit [PDF]
D. Rule of Law and Forgiveness: Individuality, Independence, Integrity
31. In Practicing Radical Honesty, Dr. Blanton describes the importance of sincere forgiveness to changing the statistics of the Stanley Milgram studies of Obedience, which proved that 92% of humans are as culturally, racially, ideologically or religiously obedient, and unquestioning to their beliefs as Adolf Eichmann was to Nazism:The key to individuality, integrity, and individual freedom has something to do with forgiveness, which involves getting over anger. That is done in the public domain, in community, and it is the pathway to freedom for individuals and the key to free societies. It is the way the statistics from Stanley Milgram's experiments get changed. Learning forgiveness, as an individual skill, by practice in getting over anger in the context of a community of friends, is an absolutely necessary prerequisite to creating a world that works for everyone. To be an individual who operates independently of authority and according to compassion, you need to learn the fundamental skills of getting mad and getting over it.
Once you gain experience of getting mad and sincere forgiveness, you learn skills of noticing. You learn to notice even your mind. You notice that ‘I think, therefore I am’ is erroneous; and you begin to know “I am, therefore I think”. You notice yourself thinking. Your thoughts are just thoughts, not ‘me’. You become a being with a mind (I am, therefore I think) rather than a mind with a being (I think, therefore I am) as your culture has taught you all your life.
32. In Obedience to Authority, Stanley Milgram describes the perils of blind obedience to authority, as described in An Essay on Proudly South African Hypocrisy[104]:Nothing unites a community or builds national-unity easier than a common enemy, where the 'unity' is often of superiority. Usually systematic intense devaluation of the enemy prior to action against him provides a measure of psychological justification for his brutal treatment. Once having acted against the enemy, these individuals often find it necessary to view the enemy as an unworthy individual, whose punishment was made inevitable by his own deficiencies of intellect and character.
Building national unity by drawing people together in a common unified posture of anger and indignation (at the 'criminal' enemy), is the use of political policy to redefine the meaning of the situation. …. Control the manner in which a man -- in South Africa, America or wherever -- interprets his world, and you go a long way toward controlling his behaviour, because there is a propensity for people to accept definitions and interpretations of action, situations and behaviour provided to them by individuals whom they consider to be legitimate authority. That is why governments invest heavily in ideological propaganda, which constitutes the official manner of interpreting events.
Additionally every situation also possesses a kind of ideology, which is called the "definition of the situation," and which is the interpretation of the meaning of the particular social occasion. It provides the perspective through which the elements of a situation gain coherence and clarity. An act viewed in one perspective may seem heinous; the same action viewed in another perspective seems fully warranted.
When people accept definitions of action provided by legitimate authority, although the individual performs the action, he allows authority to define its meaning. It is this ideological abrogation to the authority that constitutes the principal cognitive basis of obedience. If, after all, the world, event, job, or the particular situation is as the authority defines and describes it, a certain set of actions follows logically. Because the individual conforms and without critical analysis accepts the authority's definition of the situation, obedient action follows willingly, often enthusiastically.
33. In Perils of Obedience, Dr. Stanley Milgram summarised ‘Eichmann’ Obedience as:The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects [participants] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects [participants] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation. Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.[103] Blanton, Brad Ph.D: Reasonableness Test Radical Honesty Skills & Competencies Affidavit [PDF]
[104] 04-06-11: Proudly SA Parasite Hypocrisy: Fraudulent Rehabilitation Boomerang [PDF]
|| Intro || Part I || Part II || Part III || Part IV || Part V ||
» » » » [Excerpt: 10-07-18: Citizen v McBride: 1st Amicus: Heads of Argument: TRC's 'Crime of Apartheid' is Falsification of History (PDF)]
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