I dream of a Star Trek world. This think tank will focus on creative actions
designed to initiate a global paradigm shift towards a world where racism, poverty
and war will be a thing of the past.
Naked Lunch is considered Burroughs’ seminal work, and one of the landmark publications in the history of American literature. Extremely controversial in both its subject matter and its use of obscene language (something Burroughs recognized and intended), the book was banned in Boston and Los Angeles in the United States, and several European publishers were harassed. It was one of the most recent American books over which an obscenity trial was held. The book was banned in Boston in 1962 due to obscenity (notably child murder and acts of pedophilia), but that decision was reversed in 1966 by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. The Appeals Court found the book did not violate obscenity statutes, as it was found to have some social value. The hearing included testimony in support of the work by Allen Ginsberg and Norman Mailer.
Wilhelm Reich (March 24, 1897 â November 3, 1957) was an Austrian-American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, known as one of the most radical figures in the history of psychiatry. He was the author of several notable books, including The Mass Psychology of Fascism and Character Analysis, both published in 1933.
Reich worked with Sigmund Freud in the 1920s and was a respected analyst for much of his life, focusing on character structure rather than on individual neurotic symptoms. He tried to reconcile Marxism and psychoanalysis, arguing that neurosis is rooted in the physical, sexual, economic, and social conditions of the patient, and promoted adolescent sexuality, the availability of contraceptives, abortion, and divorce, and the importance for women of economic independence. His work influenced a generation of intellectuals, including Saul Bellow, William S. Burroughs, Paul Edwards, Norman Mailer, A. S. Neill, and Robert Anton Wilson, and shaped innovations such as Fritz Perls’s Gestalt therapy, Alexander Lowen’s bioenergetic analysis, and Arthur Janov’s primal therapy.
Later in life he became a controversial figure who was both adored and condemned. He began to violate some of the key taboos of psychoanalysis, using touch during sessions, and treating patients in their underwear to improve their “orgastic potency.” He said he had discovered a primordial cosmic energy, which he said others called God and that he called “orgone”. He built orgone energy accumulators that his patients sat inside to harness the reputed health benefits, leading to newspaper stories about sex boxes that cured cancer.
Reich was living in Germany when Adolf Hitler came to power in January 1933. On March 2 that year the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter published an attack on one of Reich’s pamphlets, The Sexual Struggle of Youth. He left immediately for Vienna, then Scandinavia, moving to the United States in 1939. In 1947, following a series of articles about orgone in The New Republic and Harper’s, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) obtained an injunction against the interstate sale of orgone accumulators. Charged with contempt for violating it, Reich conducted his own defense, which involved sending the judge all his books to read and arguing that a court was no place to decide matters of science. He was sentenced to two years in prison, and in August 1956 several tons of his publications were burned by the FDA – a notable example of censorship in U.S. history. He died in jail of heart failure just over a year later, days before he was due to apply for parole.
Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah is a novel by writer and pilot Richard Bach. First published in 1977, the story questions the reader’s view of reality, proposing that what we call reality is merely an illusion we create for learning and enjoyment. Illusions was the author’s followup to 1970’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
Conflict resolution is a wide range of methods of addressing sources of conflict – whether at the inter-personal level or between states – and of finding means of resolving a given conflict or of continuing it in less destructive forms than, say, armed conflict. Processes of conflict resolution generally include negotiation, mediation, diplomacy and creative peacebuilding. The term “conflict resolution” is sometimes used interchangeably with the terms dispute resolution or alternative dispute resolution. The processes of arbitration, litigation, and formal complaint processes through an ombudsman, are part of dispute resolution, and therefore they are also part of “conflict resolution.” The concept of conflict resolution can also encompass the use of non-violent methods such as civil resistance (also often called nonviolent resistance) by a party to a conflict as a means of pursuing its goals, on the grounds that such means are more likely than armed struggle to lead to effective resolution of the conflict.
Five basic ways of addressing conflict were identified by Thomas and Kilmann in 1976:
Accommodation â surrender one’s own needs and wishes to accommodate the other party.
Avoidance â avoid or postpone conflict by ignoring it, changing the subject, etc. Avoidance can be useful as a temporary measure to buy time or as an expedient means of dealing with very minor, non-recurring conflicts. In more severe cases, conflict avoidance can involve severing a relationship or leaving a group.
Collaboration â work together to find a mutually beneficial solution. While the Thomas-Kilmann grid views collaboration as the only win-win solution to conflict, collaboration can also be time-intensive and inappropriate when there is not enough trust, respect or communication among participants for collaboration to occur.
Compromise â bring the problem into the open and have the third person present. The aim of conflict resolution is to reach agreement and most often this will mean compromise.
Competition â assert one’s viewpoint at the potential expense of another. It can be useful when achieving one’s objectives outweighs one’s concern for the relationship.
The Thomas Kilmann Instrument can be used to assess one’s dominant style for addressing conflict. (read more)
