Feeling Beat Up in Life?

via i.imgur.com

It will all be better soon

Posted via web from poobumwee's posterous

Uplifting Story of the Day

This made me sad. We are all conditioned by this kind of thinking in small and large ways. I wonder how my behaviour is instilling this kind of thinking on my kids. Go for those bananas kids!

Picture 5 monkeys placed in a cage. A new community is formed. From the ceiling of the cage hangs a bunch of bananas. A stepladder is placed under the bananas. As the first eager monkey rushes up the ladder, a firehose knocks him off and hoses down all the monekys. Shocked, they sit back and regroup. Later another monkey tries, with the same result. It make take repeated attempts by each monkey before they become conditioned (socialized really) to not climb the ladder.

At some point, the lesson has been learned by this closed culture and controls how they respond as a community. Then one monkey forgets and steps onto the ladder. But the firehose doesn’t have time to react. The other four monkeys grab the offender and beat him senseless. They’ve learned that in this society, you don’t climb the ladder.

Now the process of attrition and replacement in the society begins. One of the original monkeys is removed and a new monkey is added to the group. He spies the bananas and leaps onto the ladder, only to be dragged down and beaten by the rest of the group. After several attempts, the new monkey learns.

Another original monkey is replaced with a new monkey. And the same process follows. Then another and another and another. Soon we have a group of five monkeys who’ve never been soaked by the firehose, but won’t climb the ladder. This learned behavior was socialized into the group over time.

It no longer matters how many generations of monkeys follow. The new behavior is that a monkey climbing the ladder will be dragged off and beaten. None of the monkeys in the cage has ever been knocked off the ladder with a firehose. None have been soaked down. They don’t know what the consequence is because it’s been replaced by group behavior. They can’t remember being soaked. They don’t know why they do what they do. The accepted norm for this closed community is to beat anyone who tries to climb the ladder.

The Australian Tall Poppy Syndrome is an institutionalised version of this story. It is hard to break out of destructive patterns. We retreat into what we know and rarely challenge the negative aspects of our lives, be they personal, work related or political.

Thanks Bart for this ugly reminder.

Delusions of Grandeur

Why Nauru is like Bear Stearns.

Nauruans were high on the hog on a mix of Bird Poo and Coral until they dug it all up and spent the money on frivolous things. And then along came Kevin Rudd and shut down their last cash cow, the immmigration detention centre with about two refugees and two hundred employees. Cash cow to beat all cash cows.

Nauruans realise that the party is well and truly over.

Now comes the hangover and then, with luck, some sort of recovery. But it will take squeaky clean governance, hard work and rock-solid investments for Pleasant Island to once again live up to its name.

It may not yet be paradise lost, but it is most definitely paradise postponed.

And delusional Bear Stearns employees, who believed that everything would always go up in value lost that bet when their customers smelled the roses.

The deal values Bear Stearns, which has been at the centre of the US mortgage debt crisis, at just $236m (£116m).

Its shares have lost 98% of their value since their high of $158 in April one year ago, when the bank was worth $18bn.

Sometimes life is just not as rosy as we would like to think it should be.