Dialogue, dessert and healthy snack buffet, and book giftival tomorrow Wednesday January 29 at Humai

”Never do anything that isn’t play.” - Marshall Rosenberg

“If you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything.” - Alice Walker

Group Dynamic is the focus tomorrow Wednesday January 29 at Humainologie, 1514 Seventh Street SW. The dialogue starts at 6 PM. The dessert and healthy snack buffet and book giftival are de rigeur.

Instead of a book synopsis, here’s a way of thinking about group dynamic in history. Within any group – take for example the Allies in the World War II era and each national group within that larger group – there is a psychosocial choice between working together or working alone. At any time and place in history, a society can be characterized by where it is along the spectrum between the two.

In the two decades of the two World Wars, the culture at the interpersonal, national, and international level among the Allies (and separately among their adversaries) tended toward together. A citizen of the United Kingdom or of the United States, for example, would feel a boost of “we’re all in this together” at a personal and interpersonal level. One of the associated epidemiologic changes was an accelerated increase in life expectancy documented among citizens of the United Kingdom, not only in the decade of the Second but also of the First World War, compared to all other decades of the twentieth century. (There had been about a two-year increase in life expectancy in other decades of the same century, which jumped to an increase of about five years during each of the decades 1910-1920 and 1940-1950.)

In dramatic contrast to that choice of together, is the contemporary choice of alone. This is easily understood simply by thinking not only of Donald Trump’s ascendancy, but of the pronounced increase in ad hominem insults and attacks that we see in national politics in the United States. This historical choice (unconscious though it may be) may well be leading us toward a decrease in life expectancy and other shadows on the road ahead. It’s a choice.

James Carse wrote a book Finite and Infinite Games, in which he characterizes the finite game as being played to define winners and losers and to come to an end; whereas an infinite game is played to continue the play. Of course, it is possible to design a competition for cooperation (position finite games within a framework of an infinite game), but we would have to know what we’re doing.

Hope to see you tomorrow.

Arthur