407. Military Chaplaincy, Pt. 25 (Davidson (a), pt. 1)

I had my epidural and already the pain is better close to the site, so I'm looking forward to it hopefully also improving the functionality in my legs and feet in the days and weeks to come. (Yay!)

***

This next article is:

Davidson, Donald L. (1990, Spring). Modern warfare and Christian conscience. Military Chaplains' Review, 35-42. [no volume provided]

***

This article's different sections are given titles that are sections and it might be helpful to know up front what those question-titles are:

1. Can a Christian "Bless" a War[?]

2. War is Wrong, but, [sic] is it ever the "Right" Thing for a Christian to do?

3. If War is Sometimes, Regretfully, Justified, Can it - Should it - Also be Limited?

4. What Would Jesus Say?

Before I go any farther I should let it be known that the bumper sticker on my car reads "Who Would Jesus Bomb?" so that should tell you where I stand on these kinds of issues.  Don't expect an unbiased commentary.  And I should say that a good part of the blame for that can go to my friend in Minneapolis with whom I stayed while I was collecting all these research articles.  I attended a certain book discussion group that got me thinking more on these kind of things and I was already  upset that my life was so affected by my dad.  So in addition to making reams (!) of copies from my research, I also bought a suitcase full of books mostly on peace subjects and I have indeed read through every single one of them and I have one of them here next to me to use.  So let's begin.

***
The author has the good sense to understand that the church can not bless war and his reasoning is good enough, so I have nothing particularly to add to it, so I'm skipping the first section.

This text falls at the end of the second section of the article:

"What is it right to go to war? According to the Just War Tradition, mentioned in Walzer, it is right when the cause is defense and the goal is restoring a just peace; when war is conducted as a last resort and led by authorities who represent the victimized people; and when the war will not destroy more values than it preserves (proportion).

All of this may sound rather convoluted, so let me abbreviate: war is terrible destruction and an evil we should avoid, except when it is absolutely necessary to protect the lives and rights of people for whom we are responsible." (p. 39)

Sometimes when you are teaching you need to simplify things to help students understand things but sometimes you simplify things so much that you end out actually with something totally different than the thing you were trying to simplify.  Going to war only "when it is absolutely necessary to protect they lives and rights of people for whom" a group is responsible is so far removed from just war teaching as to be something totally different.

In fact the initial definition the author gives also omits some very important issues that I'd like to correct here, using my book from Minneapolis, via Russia and back to the USA:

Kennedy, Paul. (1992)  A declining empire goes to war. In J. J. Fahey, & R. Armstrong. A (Eds.). Peace Reader: Essential Readings on War, Justice, Non-Violence and World Order, Rev. Ed. (pp. 76-85). New York: Paulist Press.

"II. Just War...

The following are widely regarded rules which must be followed:

(1) Just Cause. Citizens may engage in a war only to defend the innocent. Offensive wars are not permitted.

(2) Legitimate Authority.  Only those duly constitutionally authorized may declare a war if it is to be legitimate.  In the United States this power is exclusively reserved to the Congress.

(3) Right Intention. Total victory must not be the goal of the war but rather the restoration of injured rights.

(4) Last Resort. All nonviolent methods must be exhausted before a war can legitimately begin.  This includes boycotts, mediation, arbitration, diplomacy, and the activity of international institutions such as the United Nations and the World Court.

(5) Probability of Success. There must be a reasonable and measured hope that insured rights will be restored without disproportionate damage to any resulting peace.  A war may not be fought if it is probably that the evil results will outweight the desired good.

(6) Just Conduct. Innocent. Innocent civilians may not be objects of military action. The war is to be strictly limited to combat between opposing soldiers, and even then not all weapons are permitted (such as atomic, biologic, and chemical weapons).

(7) Proportionality. A war ceases to be just when it becomes evidenttually committed outweaghs the expected good.  Proportionality always demands that any surrender will recognize legimate conditions for surrender proposed by the losing nation." (p. 83; underlines mine)

 So, just in case you didn't notice there are a few things there that seemed to miss Mr. Davidson's attention.  Maybe the full list as per Kennedy wouldn't have passed the censor or would have raised too much of a stink.  I underlined the ones that were completely ommitted by Davidson, and those are the ones that would have put more limitations on the military than they would have accepted.  The just conduct one is especially always included in the just war theories so to omit it is just unheard of, really, except maybe in military circles I guess, where they routinely rework things to their pleasing.  That way they can toss around the word "just word" only they're thinking their definition and the rest of the world is thinking the standard definition.  The chaplains are part of military think, evidently.  In how many other ways is this so?

***

Section three is divided into two sections, the first of which is titled:

(1) "Limiting the Causes of War: Defense"

"War is always judged twice," according to Michael Walzer," first with reference to the reasons states have for fighting, secondly with reference to the means they adopt". (Walzer, p. 21) The first judgment, whether to go to war or not, is more often made by politicians than soldiers. But, as we learned in Vietnam, sooner or later citizens and soldiers also make judgments on the rightness or wrongness of war...

The implicatioin of these judgments is that each of us retains the ethical responsibility to judge the causes of war, and to object to those who are wrong.  However, soldiers in the first echelon most often do not have eenough information to judge whether or not a war is justified.  And, until we do, we should trust the judgment of our leaders." (p. 39)

This is crucial here, but not how you might think.  I'm going to use this as a comparison to the situation in the Vienna mission.  I've already said many times that there was segregation of knowledge, where everyone was on a kind of "need-to-know" basis and individuals only knew and had access to information necessary for their work.  Their were at least a couple ways you people had access to more information than others.  One was by working your way sort of inward in the informal organization, and that would be one kind of information.  The other way was by more formal job, which generally didn't change much (unless you were me and it changed approximately quarterly - you can NOT say I don't know how to deal with ambiguity).

I think of it a lot like the anciet gnostic system in many ways, although the comparison isn't perfect.

At the very heart of the system is the board of directors, and right behind them are the director, assistant director and North America director, who are all on the board anyway along with representatives from the member missions.   These guys all really know what's going on.  But remember there's this big secrecy thing and the need-to-know principle and it's better not to know more than you need to because who knows just your luck you'd get picked up by a security guard in Bulgaria who'd question you up the wazoo and you'd be up a creek without a paddle.  We never had a big problem because we were careful, but it could be a disaster if we did, so better safe than sorry, right?  And no one wants to be the first one to be in that kind of situation and spill the beans.  So they're just as happy to not know everything when they go in these countries.

But the thing is that when they were treating me the way they did and putting some of the other issues together - chaplaincy, my father, the mission (on the board) that I used to work with that took money from the CIA - so I began to be really uncomfortable about that area of secrecy and not like it so much.

This text says that soldiers in the first echelons don't have enough information on which to base a decision so they should just trust their leaders until they do have enough information, but I couldn't do that because I had enough information that I couldn't trust them and then when I arrived in Vienna I trusted them well enough but how they treated me clicked too well into other things that I couldn't trust them.

So the thing is that, does this belong in a mission?  Obviously a whole lot of Christians think that Christians and the government and politics and military and the ethics of how they use psychology is all great and fine and they think it's just okay and just another day on the mission field and I"m  just making a mountain out of a molehill.  And I think Christianity is really in a mess.  It feels lonely to be in such a minority though.

***

I think that's all I'm going to comment on on this article, although from a pacifist perspective it just begs a thorough tearing apart.  I don't think that's what I want to do right now though.

358. Trust, Pt. 4 (Michalos, pt. 1)

This article is as follows:

Michalos, Alex C. (1990). The impact of trust on business, international security and the quality of life. Journal of Business Ethics, 9(8), 639-653.

***

"Virtually all contemporary research on subjective well-being, quality of life, happiness and satisfaction with life as a whole shows that good interpersonal relations contribute more than anything else to these desirable states.  If one were to list plausible necessary conditions for good interpersonal relations, trust would certainly be included in the list" (p. 639)

If it is such a necessary condition, and, as I have already described in my previous posts, trust was so problematic for me at the Vienna mission, it's a wonder that I had any positive relations.  Actually, it's possible that the positive relations on their end were just as withheld as they were on my end.  On my end, I just did as much as I could agree with them, but beyond that I chose to stay out my term.  As it turned out my relations with the mission were only instrumental, because they turned on my so quickly.  This is an example, too, of how the trust issue really to the forefront, because they obviously did not trust me at all.

***

 "[T]he moral principle which is at the basis of a civilized society ... is a principle of mutual trust, of mutual respect for certain basic rights: that persons will not, in the normal course of life, knowingly inflict physical physical harm on one another, that they will abstain from such harms insofar as it is in their power to do so, insofar as they can informedly control their relevant conduct." (p. 633)

The leadership at the Vienna mission clearly did not adhere to these principles in how they treated me.  If they had treated me with mutual respect they wouldn't have given me such menial work (reading software manuals) and shuffling me around all over the place in my various jobs.  And being sent back to the U.S. I think they were knowingly inflicting physical harm on me in doing that, as a kind of brain washing just like how they sent back the two other wives for counseling - to scare them into towing the line. 

***

"Alternatively, one might say that insofar as adherence to the No Harm Principle is necessary for a civilized society or a moral community, so is trusting people and being trustworthy.  Thus, I prefer the Principle of Beneficence, even those who prefer the No Harm Principle as the fundamental basis of morality would have a good reason to take trust and trustworthiness seriously." (p. 633)

For clarity's sake here are the referred to principles:

"1. Principle of Beneficence: One ought to try to act so that one's actions tend to impartially improve the human condition.


2. No Harm Principle. One ought to try to act so that one's actions tend not to harm anyone." (p. 633)


The point I want to make here is that trust should be a basic element of a civilized society and a moral community.  A submit that a Christian mission counts as a moral community, and therefore trust should be rather high in such a community, at least if this text is right.  Well, it turns out that it isn't right, because the mission doesn't apply trust and trustworthiness impartially (the principle of beneficence) or to "anyone" (no harm principle), because it seems I was left out.  The mission left me out of its trustworthiness.  That's they only way I can explain the way I was treated.

***

"From a logical point of view, there are four relevant possible worlds to consider.  The world might be such that most people are actually


1. trustworthy and trusted,
2. trustworthy but not trusted,
3. not trustworthy but trusted,
4. not trustworthy and not trusted." (p. 634)

Michalos goes on to describe each of these and gives them each such names as Real Hell and Fool's Paradise. 

I think that I was trustworthy to the mission in that I never ever harmed the mission or intended anything of that nature.  So I was always trustworthy in that way.  And when I was out having my Austrian contacts I didn't do foolish things or cause any security breaches or anything stupid like that.  But If they insisted on controlling all my thoughts and my opinions, etc. then to them I'd be untrustworthy because they didn't like it that anyone had thoughts or opinions that they didn't know about.  Well, and they didn't know what I really wanted, but I couldn't tell them because they'd have just freaked out because of how much I was disagreeing with them. 

But if you turn the tables and ask how much I could trust the mission... from early on I decided I couldn't really trust them at all.  That is, I didn't open up to them at all after they sent me back to the U.S.  I made no more admissions to anything after that, because I didn't trust them, any of them.  You just never knew who to trust.  Not after what they did to me.  No way.

357. Trust, Pt. 3 (Pascarella, pt. 1)

There were a couple things in physical therapy (p/t) that reflected my degrading from the botox loss of effect.  Also, on the way (about 15 or so miles down a major highway), I found myself sort of off in another world of thought.  And then I'd come to and not really remember driving several miles, which is sort of scary.  So my concentration is a bit limited.

At the same time my lower back is hurting more and next Monday I see the anesthesiologist and I expect I'm going to be in for another epidural. 

You know that children's song "heads and shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes..."?  Well, that pretty well describes how my body is a mess.  I just keep plugging along the best I can though.

***

I got a letter from my youngest brother, the one in New England, and I'm sort of dreading opening it.  He's undoubtedly responding to my being candid to what I was thinking and doing the last few years mom was alive.  I'm sure he doesn't like it and he'd like to castigate me, but my other brother might be even worse.  It's hard to tell sometimes though.  I could be surprised.  I do know that mom kept saying that I was the one that always understood the people best, like that brother and his ex-wife.  I can make mistakes and misjudge characters, but I think I generally have a pretty keen sense of character.  I hope that comes through in this blog.  Some people might not like it though.

***

This next article is:

Pascarella, Perry. (1993, Feb. 1). 15 ways to win people's trust. Industry Week. 242(3), 47-48, 50.

Don't worry - I'm not going to give you all 50.

***

"1 Demonstrate that you are working for others' interests as well as our own....


... They will observe whether you build and enable others to excel or treat them as competitors.


If you're not demonstrating respect for others, you have to expect them to conclude, 'If you don't respect me, then I can't trust you to look out for my interests.'" (p. 48)

During the middle of my two-year term with the Vienna mission I began to experience this kind of competitiveness that seemed like it really didn't belong in a mission (...or a church ...or among Christians).  What is this competing against each other?  It's stupid!  The two main people were my boss' wife and a gal from the layout and art department.  It was almost like we were pitted against each other or something but I wasn't sure if it was for real or if it was a set up (there were so many games going on, you understand, that I was leery of things half the time wasn't sure what to believe).  I'm not the competitive type to begin with and then to add such an ambiguous situation even detracted all the further from it.  Still, it was rather in your face and because these were people I had to relate to every day it was hard to avoid. 

My boss didn't show respect for me because he didn't give me work to do that showed he respected me.  How is reading software manuals for weeks on end supposed to be respecting me?  It isn't.  Clearly it isn't.  I was much more qualified than that!  Just because I wasn't an executive secretary didn't mean that I didn't have any background as a secretary.  That's ridiculous.  So my boss definitely did not respect me.  Then he just sat by with the others and agreed with the going to America garbage for counseling.  I didn't need to go to America.  That's stupid.  There's no way I could trust him or the management to look out for my interests after that. 

***

"2 Listen in ways that show you respect others and that you value their ideas.


Anyone around you is likely to have information and viewpoints that are of value to you and the organization.  Be a magnet for facts.  Listen especially for the frame of reference, the vision, the new ways of looking at a situation that others bring." (p. 48)

When I first arrived in Vienna I especially did this.  I didn't really plan on taking that approach, but when I realized that the mission was different than I expected and not in a good way especially, that's when I went pretty much full gear into doing this.  I was very attentive, I think and really tried to understand what was going on.  I thought I had a pretty good background in East European mission that should help me understand them, but my background failed me there and I had to create a new understanding and I ended out comparing them more to a spy agency or even to the Communists (in how they treat believers and how the mission treated me as a kind of dissident).

I found it very difficult to find very many facts about the mission, other than the ones we feed folks back home for fund raising, but then I don't think that facts are what would really have explained the mission, unless it would have been the real heart of the mission and how it operated. 

It was difficult to be too open to new ways of looking at situations, because in that group, if you weren't a bona fide accepted insider, they could feed you all kinds of ways to look at a situation and pretty soon you'd be so confused you wouldn't know which end is up.  So with that group it was better to not be too open to new ways to looking at situations.  Smiling and nodding with and occasional "interesting" or "mm-hmmm" thrown in might satisfy them you've been adequately duped.

***

"7 Show consistency in the basic values that guide your decision-making.


Mistrust comes from no knowing what to expect - not seeing any boundaries to or purpose for what you're doing.  Don't put people in the positiong of saying. 'You're honest, but you're liable to make a decision that I don't expect - and possibly don't even understand.'" (p. 48, 50)

I definitely felt this way about the Vienna leadership.  I didn't agree with their reasoning for doing things (that affected me) and then they'd make decisions that to me didn't seem consistent with earlier decisions.  For example:

They sent me to the States for counselling only 5 months into my stay in Vienna.  Then I stayed on and worked in the U.S. office.  They determined that I could come back to the Vienna office and return to my old office.  So I pretty much returned to where I was and they thought that I was reformed, I think.  So they had me go with the Secretaries on the ESL trip and then I went on a women's ministry trip.  After that my parents came and shortly thereafter I was demoted to receptionist. 

Why was I demoted to receptionist?  What had I done?  No one had ever told me that I'd done anything wrong or anything.  So this was a HUGE inconsistency. 

***

I'm going to have dinner now and think about some other things for the rest of the evening... like portioning out my meds for the week.  My g.i. doctor prescribed nexxium for me and I just found out a bit ago (before I started on this post) that my pharmacy is holding it up because it has erythromycin in it which causes heart palpitations in me, and since I recently had the heart arhithmia problem we'd better not mess with that, so they're trying to get him to prescribe something else.  I'll call him in the morning to explain more why I shouldn't take it.


 

356. Trust, Pt. 2 (Sonnenberg, pt. 1)

The next article is:

Sonnenberg, Frank K. (1993). Trust me... trust me not.  Industry Week. 242(15), 22-24, 26, 28.

These were all articles I researched in Minneapolis while I was in visiting in the States while living in Russia.  I later tried to categorize them into files and that's how I ended out with this "trust" file.  I don't think that trust was a theme I went out looking for in the first place. For those of you knew to this blog, I was trying to make sense of my life and it seemed that there was too much political fallout from things interfering with my life.

***

"Employees in organizations marked by low levels of trust usually operate under higher levels of stress, spend a great deal of effort covering their backsides, justifying past decisions and conducting witch hunts or looking for scapegoats when something doesn't work out." (p. 24).

This didn't describe the Vienna mission because if you didn't fairly quickly internalize the mission's values and norms and let yourself be pretty much be totally submitted to the mission (so that the mission didn't have to worry about trusting you, because they knew virtually everything about you), then you'd end out more or less where I was. 

The thing is that the mission, I think, assumed that the problem was that I was too distracted by everything external to the mission and when they had pretty much reigned me in in every way they could think of and that still didn't work then they resorted to telling me that I was "standing up on the inside" (the words of my mentor, via a sort of parable/fable told me more than once at the end of my time with the mission).  But they erred in assuming that I was just a secretary.  They really didn't understand my mental abilities, and that's what tripped them up and that's what allowed me to get out of there without completely submitting.  So my cover, if you will, was being a "dumb blonde."  I did have all my books up in my office at one point (just before being sent back to the USA), though, but I guess they didn't take that seriously or something. 

Of course, there's the issue of what they really wanted too, and they maybe didn't really know what I wanted.  I just took things at face value that I was told I was to be a secretary and I would have some off time that I would be able to work with Austrians.  I wasn't told that if I worked as a secretary my whole identity would have to be wrapped up in being a secretary, and the folk at the Austrian mission somehow missed the agreement that I would spend some off time working with Austrians.  I came there trusting them, but they couldn't accept that arrangement because they weren't in control and it wasn't agreed to by them; my sending mission is the one who had agreed to it and the Vienna mission didn't like that, I guess.

***

"Furthermore, in organizations marked by low levels of trust, employees have so much difficulty exploring the full range of options or responding creatively to problems at hand that new challenges are avoided.  Employees are so afraid of being reprimanded for failure of ridiculed by their colleagues that they shy away from new activities that will require new ways of thinking.  Their defensiveness and mutual suspicions limit them to the restricted set of alternatives they have all agreed upon, which are designed to minimize their vulnerability.  Exploration, innovation, and creativity become dangers in this kind of environment." (p. 24)

You have to keep in mind that I am discussing these texts only for myself, because my experience of the mission was way different from most other people's.  So don't think that anyone else would think the same thing, because probably most everyone else would say the exact opposite, although it's possible that a few people might say that they could understand how I might see things the way I am, whether or not they agree. 

I absolutely had terrific difficulty exploring options or responding creatively to problems at hand.  The only problems I could deal with were things like filing systems or the organization of supply cabinets.  Whoopee!  I was at the bottom of the organizational power chart.  No one would listen to me for anything.  I wouldn't be reprimanded for my work, though.  The more time went by the harder it became, I think, to try to win their trust and get a good position or the position I was supposed to have when I came to Vienna to work with the mission in the first place. 

I was strong and it was only as I began to flag and faulter that then I began to shy away from the things I knew they didn't like - like attending the Austrian church.

***

Next the author discusses "the rings of trust."  You start at the center, the rod, and move outward through 3 concentric circles.

"The rod, at the center of the ring, represents the beginning of a relationship and depicts the history of those involved.  We generally start off with some preconceived notion about others..." (p. 24)

The odd thing is that I'm not sure that the problem was the preconceived notions about one another (me and the mission) was the problem.  Rather, it was what we learned about each other once I arrived there.  I felt misled because the things I'd been assured of were not so and I did not like the dishonesty and deceit of the mission and I did not trust it nor agree with its ways nor perceived need for this kind of blatant unbiblical behavior.  I'm not sure what the mission thought about me.  If they were concerned about my father's work it probably thought I would be too hard to control and so too much of a (national) security risk (and the staff military chaplains could possibly have contributed to that sentiment).  If they just wanted a mission in their image they might have been very upset.

***

"The first ring around the rod represents the characteristics that lead to trust.  They are the attributes, such as integrity, reliability, and openness, that allow us to build trusting relationships.  Once these characteristics are demonstrated, they become part of a person's or organization's track record.  When those actions are repeated time and time again, the relationship is strengthened and becomes the foundation of the next phase." (p. 26)

I think that for the missionaries who make it through the socialization process they see the mission in all these positive ways, but I didn't.  The very first summer I was there I personally experienced the mission lie to me multiple times, and I've already shared these here more than once.  That's not integrity.  The mission moved me around from job to job and I was hardly even in the job I was supposed to be in.  What kind of reliability is that?  And there was never any complaint about my work, nor about my attitude!  I always had a good attitude and was social and helped out.  So it was just that they couldn't get to me and this security thing that they couldn't really control me and have my full and total submission.  So they didn't like it and they made me pay for it.  They didn't have openness either and that's why I couldn't understand them.  Oh, if I'd talk with them (when I bothered to) they'd have some mumbo jumbo think to say that didn't really mean anything.  But they were not really open.  No one else got moved around like me. No one.  Period.  And that's nothing to build a trusting relationship on.

***

"The second ring, consistency, allows us to anticipate probable actions.  It provides a degree of comfort [by] helping us to maintain the relationship even through difficult times." (p. 26)

There was never any consistency in the relationship between me and the mission.  It did have a few brief interludes of reasonably good high points, though, generally because I was doing something I thought was using more of my skills on mission trips.  But the problems always remained, so when I returned back home everything would be just as usual. 

***

"The third ring is faith; as it is added to the other two rings, everything that came before it is  strenghened.  This ring, which does not adhere to the others, but rather encompasses them, is the stage at which actions are so predictable that we don't consciously have to think about the relationship.  Trust has become so integral a part of the relationship that we expect it to work.  At their peak, relationships imbued with trust are welded together by a faith so strong that it is very difficult to destroy them.  It is at this stage that people allow themselves to become entirely vulnerable to others." (p. 26)

This is pretty much how the Vienna mission members were supposed to operate among each other as part of the mission, and I think they did.  The mission made sure they did, I think, because it was a security issue.  But they didn't feel it as a negative thing, unless somene had something to hide, I suppose, which is what the security aspect of it would have been meant to catch.

I didn't think I had anything to hide, but I refused to let anyone but God have that kind of power over me, because once you're in that kind of relationship I think you're hooked into it and I think it would be just about impossible to entertain your own thoughts or opinions with any conviction and have them conflict with the group.  You'd have to stifle them, but that kind of thing would come to light eventually and then you'd have a nice talk about it to put it in perspective so you could keep on with the work.  And before you know it your disagreements are not so important after all.

It's not like working at a seminary where you just don't teach everything, but you can still have strong opinions.  The seminary doeson't control your every thought like the Vienna mission did.  It's totally different. 

I just couldn't do it, I didn't think it was biblical and the deception of the mission was a huge red flag.  The mission did great work, but I don't like how they work.  And I don't like that they have political ties either (get the military chaplains out of there)..

In any case, it doesn't take much for you to imagine, I guess, that I absolutely could not be vulnerable.  Being vulnerable was how they sort of sucked you in.  That's how I thought while I was there.  So I ended out not ever being vulnerable and when I left they still didn't know what I was thinking.  If I had been vulnerable it would have been a whole lot harder than it was for me, I am very sure.

***

Here are a few of the traits from the frist ring...

"Integrity.  In assessing people's integrity, ask: Do theyhave a good value system? Are they honest, straightforward, and nonmanipulating?...


Confidence.... It is important to determine whether the people you build relationships with are comfortable within themselves and believe in themselves enough to admit their faults and errors.  Ask yourself, do they always have to be right?


Openness.  Opennesss.  Openness in relationships is built upon some existing level of trust.  You feel comfortable confiding in people knowing they would never break our confidence or use the information against you later.  If they respond to that openness as expected, trust is enhanced and intimacy and honesty grow.  It is not enough to be totally open and honest with your employees.  This philosophy must be demonstrated to your customers and suppliers as well." (p. 26, 28)

Integrity!  Despite the fact that the mission was comprised totally of conservative Evangelical Christians and mostly of advanced degree (Th.M. or higher) theologians the lifestyle use of deception for security and even just with me, presumably for socialization is despicable!  What kind of integrity is that for a Christian mission?!  It's terrible! And that was my early reaction and one of the main reasons I sort of put on the brakes and started observing them and trying to figure out what was going on.  They were lying to me and not giving me enough work to do, which was a waste of my supporters' money which was stupid and idiotic.  I'm not into that kind of gamesmanship.  Just get to the point and tell me what you want and get it out. That's not integrity.  I know a lot of non-Christians that have a lot more integrity than those people.

Regarding confidence, the leaders of the mission didn't always have to be right depending on the issue.  If it was something like the staff's field of work, then the leader might defer to the staff and admit error.  The leader might admit error if it were in, for example, a more mission-wide area of concern, but he might somehow hedge it to maintain his image.

I think that virtually everyone (except me) at the Vienna mission experience this openness as a kind of big happy family.  Once you got through the initial socialization period then you would be accepted by everyone and begin to be a part of this.  I think, though, that one probably grew into it as one internalized more and more of the missions norms proved oneself and values, proved oneself a valuable worker, and got to know the people in the mission better.

Again, I didn't get that far with the mission.  I learned early on that I couldn't confide in other missionaries because it would come back to me, in one way or another.  For example, I confided in a couple secretaries that I was experiencing some stress from the office.  I was recommended to jog, that some of the men jog as a way to relieve stress.  So that's why I started to jog, and I also bought a bike and I biked some.  A certain herb blend was also recommended that Austrians take for stress.  So I tried that.   Then the U.S. military chaplain/H.R. director called me saying I had culture shock and wanted to send me to the U.S. for counseling.  How do you think I felt about those secretaries about then?  What was my trust level vis a vis them at that point?  Do you think I'd be sharing anything personal with them again any time soon?  I don't think so!  So much for openness!  If there was any hope for openness it was just flushed right down the toilet.

It looks like me and the mission are stuck at the center rod as far as trust is concerned.  What do you think?

***

I was looking through the letters I had written mom and dad while I lived in Vienna (my brother sent them to me from mom's stuff from after she died).  I was writing all upbeat so that no one really knew what I was thinking, but I can still sense a change from the earlier letters to the later ones.  So I could use them to point that out and discuss the various things.  Some of the things I write about doing I'd forgotten. 

But the thing is that my migrains is not good and that will take some concentrated mental power for when I'm feeling pretty good.  It appears that the Botox shot worked about 3 weeks this time.  I hope it works longer next time, but I guess they only do them every 91 days, so I have to wait awhile for the next one.

355. Trust, Pt. 1 (Luker, pt. 1; Peterson; pt. 1)

I have to keep you on your toes a bit.  Am I succeeding?

I can't find a really critical document, so I'm depending on it being on one of my old 3.5" floppy disks and I ordered a floppy drive, which was high on my to-do list anyway.  It's all of $20 but I just never got around to it.  There always seemed to be a million other things begging for my attention.

So we're going to look at trust, which seems to be a pretty relevant subject for a mission that puts such high regard on security.  But in the end, the trust issue went both ways, which is not how it's supposed to go, as everyone in the mission is supposed to be the subject, the object, and the mission is the doer.  In grammatical terms, we'd say the the mission was the subject and the members were the objects, right?  As in, The mission trusts the missionary.  Or, the mission distrusts the new recruit.  But not, the new recruit distrusts the mission.  The new recruit, in the world of the Vienna mission most emphatically does not have the right to trust or distrust the Vienna mission, that is to make a determination on his/her own.  The mission makes determinations and the missionary accepts the mission's determination and owns it.  Period.

Since I was the renegade that refused to live by those rules, however, we are going to look at trust/mistrust coming from both sides of the relationship.

***

Luker, Norman W. (1990). Do you trust your employees? Security Management, 34(9), 127-130.

"Yet, trust plays a vital role in the whole security operation.  Yes security technology is important.  Yes, controls and procedures are absolutely essential in protecting information.  But ultimately, if a company cannot trust its employees - and if those employees themselves don't feel they are trusted - all the machines and rules in the world won't amount to much.  Trust is the most important human factor of all." (p. 130)

That's the final paragraph after he's described procedures of incorporating the human factor into all stages of and aspects of security.  The Vienna mission had a pretty elaborate security system in place too, although a unique one appropriate to its setting.  I think that most people in the mission did feel the trust that Mr. Luker speaks of in his final paragraph, but I most decidedly didn't.  Otherwise, why would I alone have been shuffled around from position to position?  And being sent home to the United States because of stress that was concocted by them in the first place but attributed to Austria?  No, it is clear that the mission did not trust me, and the reason is not immediately clear to me.

***

Peterson, Joel C. (1993, Sept./Oct.). Can You Trust Your Company? Executive Female, 16(5), 69-71.

"Whether or consciously or not, we all evaluate the trustworthiness of those who lead us.  Our evaluation is vital to our commitment.  Consider the ten aspects of trust that follow, and evaluate, in a systematic way, the people and systems in your organization.  Read the questions and assign scores from 0 (where never true) to 10 (where always true).  Add your scores to determine whether your scores is a high-, medium- or low-trust environment." (p. 69)

I hope I don't have to quote the whole descriptions for each 10, but I'm going to rate the Vienna mission and the Komsomols, who invited me to work in Siberia under questionable circumstances in 1991.  This should be an interesting comparison.  If it were't for the fact that these two organizations caused me a lot of grief I could actually have fun with this.

***

 "Integrity  A leader's character has more impact on trust than any other single factor.  Some leaders try to compartmentalize their lives into private and public areas, filing violations of personal trust under the private label.


...Second, no matter what their competence, charisma or command, leaders inspire trust only to the level of their personal integrity.


Are your leaders above reproach in their professional and personal lifes?" (p. 69-70)

Vienna mission: 0
KOMSOMOLS: 0

I had marked up this article when I read it when I first found it and I gave the BEE leaders a somewhat higher score.  But after what I've already written on this blog, I don't think I can give a higher score, because they're the ones that induced all the security-led deception. 


"Respect Trust depends more on the value placed on individual human beings than on management techniques or policy statements.  Watch how organizations actually treat those over whom they have dominion (or from whom they have nothing to gain). ... If leaders engage in people-bashing - inside or outside an organization- even those who have been spared the attacks will have reason to mistrust.


Does your organization respect all who deal with it?" (p. 70)

Vienna mission: 2
KOMSOMOLS: 2

I gave both a 2 because as soon as someone they have dominion over disagrees with them or somehow clashes with them then they don't show respect to that individual.  So they only show respect as long as their underlings tow the party line.

"Empowerment Trust-rich organizations expect people to do - and to become - their best.  They encourage people to focus more on fairness than legalities...


By contrast, mistrustful organizations are preoccupied with keeping people from doing their worst.  In trust-poor enterprises, heavy reliance on the paraphernalia of paranoia (policy manuals, compliance committies, rule books, legal departments, and tattler rewards) ensures there will never be a spontaneous outbreak of trust." (p. 70)

Vienna mission: 0

KOMSOMOLS: 2


I had given the Vienna mission a higher score, but this is my subjective experience, and the mission wouldn't let me hardly take initiative on anything to I didn't feel empowered at all.  On the contrary, by being shuffled around from position to position and being pressured to quit my Austrian involvement, I felt very disempowered.

With the Komsomols they did seem to have ulterior motives for brining me to Siberia, but they did let me teach and more or less supported me in what I needed.

"Responsibility = Authority = Accountability  When responsibility, authority and accountability are not in sync, finger-pointing invariably supplants accountability, and politics, replaces measurement.


Does your organization match responsibility, authority and accountability?" (p. 70)


Vienna mission:0
KOMSOMOLS:0

Both of these get 0, clearly because there is no accountability, or accountability is hidden.

"Vision ..... Are members of your organization inspired by its mission, and are dealings within the organization consistent with it?" (p.70)

Vienna mission:7
KOMSOMOLS:2

I kept these scores the same as the earlier ones I wrote on the article.  The Vienna mission had a high score because I think that much of its activities were mission-centric, but the other part were messed up around security and other things that I thought were off course.

Regarding the Komsomols' score, it was pretty famous that by then (the early 1990's) most Communist party members (including Komsomols) were not necessarily ideologues, but members for practical reasons, such as to help get ahead or to get accepted into a college, for example.  So I don't know that these Komsomols were necessarily ideological communists; I don't have any evidence that they were.  So in this case, they wouldn't have been "inspired by" their party vision or mission.

"Communication Trust-building organizations tell the truth.  They tell it simply, persuasively and competently.....


Does your organization communicate frequently, clearly and broadly?" (p. 70)

Vienna mission: 0
KOMSOMOLS:2

This is sort of a tough one.  The Thing is that the Vienna mission was all about deception because of its security concerns.  And, of course, the leadership always reserved the right to frame issues, so you could never be sure, I suppose how much was being left out or interpreted.  But generally, stories of trips and that would be true.  Also, I experienced not really knowing what was true or not, so it was hard sometimes figuring out what was going on, which is a kind of truth.

Regarding the Komsomols, the two leaders lied straight up to me regarding who they were because when I was in Siberia people were starting to tell me they were the Komsomols, but they called themselves by another name.  So I asked them if that's who they were and they immediately said no, like a knee jerk reaction, which was very suspicious, especially when both of them did the same thing, independently.  Then I had problems with the director and it became clear that he wanted to compromise me.  I was supposed to go on a trip and I agreed to go with one of the gals in the group but instead the director showed up to take me, and things like that.

"Sacrifice Trust-rich organizations require sacrifice because it is the only way to use limited resources to achieve the common dream...

Does your organization ask people to sacrifice to meet common goals?" (p. 70-71)

Vienna mission:10
KOMSOMOLS:10

In this case both organizations required sacrifice.

"Budgets Because budgets reveal an organization's real values, trust-rich organizations share and explain their budgets.  Only by doing this can people understand why certain sacrifices are being made.  In trust-poor organizations, budgets are secret documents because leaders either conflict or are acting in ways that are inconsistent with the stated mission of the organization.  They have failed to recognize that budgets often generate conflict whether they are kept secret or open.

Are budgets shared and discussed in your organization?" (p. 71)

Vienna mission:4
KOMSOMOLS:7

These were the numbers I gave these former employers on my earlier reading of this article.  The mission budget was discussed, I think, among the department heads and when there was a change that affected everone else it might be mentioned to all, but you must remember that the mission was anything but a democratic institution, so it's not like there was going to be huge amounts of input from the masses or anything.

Since the Komsomols were a small group (5 altogether) I'm sure they discussed finances among themselves regularly.  I can't say with any certainty, but I it would seem strange if they didn't.  I know that one of their staff was an accountant.

"Conflict Healthy organizations are frequently the noisiest ones.  To the outsider, they may appear conflict-ridden.  On the inside, however, people are working through friction in a spirit of mutual trust, and ideas are sparked, wrong-headedness is corrected, difference in values are discovered early, and mutually beneficial solutions are created.  Trust-poor enterprises, on the other hand, often enjoy the superficial peace of a hospital of a prison.  Just below the surface brews suffering or conflict.  Deprived of the information that comes from expressing disagreement along the way, they suppress and punish conflict, resolving differences in destructive ways.


Can people comfortably disagree in your organization?" (p. 71)

Vienna mission: 0
KOMSOMOLS: 0

I gave 0 to both, but for somewhat different reasons.  In the Vienna mission, disonance was not tolerated.  If, behind closed doors, you disclosed some kind of disagreement to an approved person (your mentor, etc.) then the mission would have an in to you to get to you in whatever way they wanted.  But generally, it was not okay to disagree with the mission.  The Vienna  mission was like the "trust-poor enterprise" described above, except that everyone had so internalized the mission's norms and values that it would be highly unlikely that anyone would have any disagreements.  Which was just fine with the mission.

The Komsomols, on the other hand, just made it very very difficult to be in conflict with their desires.  So you might know what you want (to do) and know that it is in contradiction to what the Komsomols want, and try as you may, they outsmart you as to how to get out of it.  So this is a special case of conflict, in which an action is involved.  This kind of think happened several tims with them, generally with their leadership.

"Humility Organizations that seek to appear invicible to their members put off workers in the same way that smug, self-righteous people put a distance between themselves and others.


Do people in your organization understand its vulnerabilities?" (p. 71)

Vienna mission:9
KOMSOMOLS:5

I gave the mission a high score because I think the mission did present to the missionaries its vulnerabilities, which is why it was so preoccupied with security.  It also discussed money when that was a concern.  I actually think this was maybe too high because they didn't trust God enough and got too caught up in it.

I wasn't part of the Komsomols, so I don't know what they talked about among themselves regarding this kind of thing, so I'm just guessing, really, on this one.

Total score:

Vienna mission:32
KOMSOMOLS:30

 High (good) scores are over 74 and low (poor) scores are under 26.  As you can see, these are close to the poor end, which the author also calls "a suspicious and confining organization." I answered the questions for myself, just from my own perspective, not trying to answer for the whole organization necessarily.

***

I think that's it for now.  The Botox is wearing off and my migraine is getting worse again... rats... It was good while it lasted anyway.

313. Migraine & Current Events

I saw the neurologist yesterday and he wants to try a new medicine, which isn't surprising since I was pretty well maxed out (on about as high a dose as they give) of the one I was on).  It's the same medicine as one of the ones that helps me sleep for fibromyalgia, though.  So we're decreasing the medicine I've been on at the same time we're increasing that one (as needed).  I'm sort of skeptical about the prognosis of this one, but my physical therapist, whom I saw later in the afternoon, said I should give it a chance.  (Although she was skeptical about how much she could do with physical therapy for my legs, so techincally I could have turned the tables on her too - if the problem is neurological she can only do so much, though.).

The next few weeks could be a nightmare if this new medicine doesn't work, and if that's the case, then it might be a while before I'm up to serious mental work.

Today I got my new glasses.  My optometrist is on the south end of town where I lived when I first moved here in 2006.  I didn't think I was up to driving through the city, so I took advantage of the disabled transportation service here, which is like a group taxi.  I'm glad I did, but it took up most of my day.

Then I've been gradually working my way through the condo doing a deep cleaning, especially around the baseboards and window sills - I haven't done the windows yet.  It's going slowly because I don't feel well and everything is slow with me and I have various interruptions too.  Well, I was working on the dining room a little bit ago in the area where the patch of new floor was put in, where there formerly was a platform area.  And it turns out that some of the grout is already coming out!  So now that is one more thing to address in my complaints and that brings in another worker.  While I wasn't terribly impressed with the painting job of the painter, it wasn't bad enough to make a stink about, but the painter is the one who did this and this is something that most definitely would need to be fixed.  The other things that need fixing are from the work of the plumber/electrician.  I need to pull together all the concrete details and call the  Better Business Bureau, because that's the next place I want to try to see if I can get these things resolved.  I was hoping that the interior decorator and her company would help out, but they aren't.  I just feel so violated by these kinds of things and by the thefts, and on top of my being sick and not able to really adequately monitor things and I though that I was being sent reliable and trustworthy workers and neither the interior decorator nor the furniture store she works for seem to care at all about that, yet that's the main reason why I chose them because I thought they'd be more trustworthy.  Did I ever get that one wrong.  It really hurts though and I don't have limitless money and now that money that I'd spend on things that were stolen or work that was poorly done is more or less money down the drain.  So if you don't trust people you're paranoid, or if you do trust people you're a fool and get taken advantage of.

Well, I'm going to try to have people over Sunday after church.  I really like both cooking and entertaining, but I"m not much up to either so it's going to be a challenge.  I told them it's going to be simple - as in very simple, and I figure people should understand, that it's mainly about getting together anyway.   So it's a couple and a gal with 3 kids.  I'm having pulled beef sandwiches, which I'll start tomorrow.   And I'll have a sort of a molded coleslaw salad - being molded means you can make it ahead easier.  Then I'll have stuffed celery sticks and homemade tortilla chips.  The couple are bringing ice cream for dessert.  I haven't decided what to serve for drinks yet.  Anyway, the thing is that I can make it all in advance so that's what I'm doing tomorrow, and that's about all I'm doing tomorrow.

I guess that's all for now.  I'm really nervous about the migraine medicine change though.

174. Socialization File, Pt. 57 (Senge, pt. 2)

I'm tired, as usual. I spent the afternoon at a doctor's appointment and then moseying around nearby. Since I didn't get lunch before leaving home I decided before I left to eat out. But I could only find one place in the strip mall that was open for lunch. It was more than I intended to spend and wasn't all that great. But then I went to Marshall's next door and found a wide-brimmed hat that will be good for sun protection, especially since I'm fair skinned. I also bought a replacement for the container I use to make my stevia tea to sweeten my oatmeal. I slept for about half an hour when I returned home.

The doctor I saw today works out of the same office as my rheumatologist, who wants me to switch to having physical therapy at their office, so I got that set up today. But I'll have a whole week without physical therapy, so I had better start doing more self-directed physical therapy. Tomorrow I don't have any appointments, so I'll make that a priority.

Now I'm waiting for my dinner to finish cooking, but it's late and I haven't had my dinner meds either. I thought I'd finish the phyllo package I got for the vegetable strudel I made a couple weeks ago, but there's still enough for something else left. I'm making a spinach tart, which is seasoned with chives, basil and oregano from my garden. I like it when I can use the herbs.

***

I was going to say more about my family, but I decided not to. I do need to get back to the Greek tragedy issue though. There's more I want to say about that.

But that will have to wait for another time. For now, let's return to the text.

***

"The most productive learning usually occurs when managers combine skills in advocacy and inquiry. Another way to say this is 'reciprocal inquiry.' By this we mean that everyone makes his or her thinking explicit and subject to public examination. This creates an atmosphere of genuine vulnerability. No on is hiding the evidence or reasoning behind his views - advancing them without making them open to scrutiny." (p. 9)

Here we're hitting pretty close to adult education, which is one of my professions. However, this is all wrong for the Vienna mission context, which shouldn't come as too much of a surprise at this juncture of the game. Ultimately, Senge hopes to advance organizational learning, but here he's only dealing with one part of it (albeit probably not an incidental one), so I'm not sure it comes across as organizational learning. But I think it is, because the back and forth he's talking about would affect all parties involved and lead to (individual and collective) learning that could be translated into some kind of organizational change, depending on what the issue being debated is.

However, the Vienna mission was not very interested in organizational learning. Any organizational learning that was going to happen was going to happen on their terms, and their terms only. My experience with them gives me reason to be pretty sure about this.

If there was going to be any learning done, I was the one that was supposed to be learning. So in this way, it was very one way. Now I suppose that this is not unusual in a socialization context, but it felt that that was the way it was pretty much always going to be. Of course, it would depend on the issue too. Some issues would have been pretty much untouchable, such as those involving basic values and ideological underpinnings for the way they operated. If you didn't agree with those things you really just didn't belong there, because these kinds of things were nonnegotiable.

Yet every organization has some of these issues that aren't up for discussion. But in looking back over my life, I think the Vienna mission is the only organization I've ever worked for that I so disagreed with their values (the values that allowed to function in ways I disagreed with on biblical grounds). This seems strange, considering we otherwise didn't have any issues regarding theology or mission strategy (meaning the most effective way to have an impact in that part of the world, namely, via leadership training).

In any event, I can't imagine how either I or the mission might have made "his or her thinking explicit and subject to public examination." And any vulnerability was only going to be mine. And not only did the mission not make their views "open to scrutiny", they weren't even going to explicitly express their views. I expect they'd deny this, but I don't believe it. If they want to formulate a public expression of their view, they would also have to answer all my questions about my time there.

The mission really wasn't, I don't think, a learning organization. Leadership decided something and funneled it down the appropriate channels. I'm talking about anything of any consequence. In that way it was bureaucratic in nature. I wouldn't be surprised that if the mission changed following the regime changes in Eastern Europe, that change was also top-down in nature. It's not as if they would have been likely to have instigated cooperative management techniques, or democratic study groups to propose organizational change options to the administration, or discussion as Senge described here would suddenly happen.

***

"When operating in pure advocacy, the goal is to win the argument. When inquiry and advocacy are combined, the goal is no longer winning, but rather finding the best argument." (p. 10)

I have to admit here that I was as guilty of this as I perceived the mission leadership to be. I wasn't open to changing my views. Probably the only way I could have given in was if the mission explained to me, in a very credible way, that I was mistaken in my understanding of what was happening. Then they would have had to have stopped trying to stuff me in a square hole I didn't fit in (i.e., making my whole life revolve around me being a secretary). But this is all speculation because it didn't happen this way and as far as I'm concerned I had no indication that anything at all close to it was possible.

***

"... [W]hen both advocacy and inquiry are high, we are open to disconfirming data as well as confirming data - because we are genuinely interested in finding flaws in our views." (p. 10)

I think the only thing I would have been open to is if they offered another credible explanation, other than my interpretation, for what was happening and why, and their explanation would have to still fit within my value structure, because I wasn't open to change in that regard. The mission probably would have been open to changing their understanding of me, but that doesn't mean they'd use that knowledge in a way that would be acceptable to me, and my doubts about their use of such information kept me from being more open with them.

***

"The ideal of combining inquiry and advocacy is challenging. It can be especially difficult if you work in a highly political organization that is not open to genuine inquiry." (p. 10)

I think Senge means "political" here to refer to office politics, but in the Vienna mission the other meaning of political is probably more apt, and it was a significant barrier to "genuine inquiry." Since the mission was more or less built around the idea of segmented knowledge and information for the sake of security, and members soon learned the art of being security conscious without seeming to be, so it would be second nature to not inquire too much about others' work. In this sense the mission could know everything about the individual, but the individual was trained to respect organizational secrets. In this respect, the debate between mission and individual was never going to be truly open.

***

"...[T]he true practice of inquiry and advocacy means being willing to expose the limitations in your own thinking - the willingness to be wrong. Nothing less will make it safe for others to do likewise." (p. 44)

Since the mission organization was the 10 ton elephant in the room and had the most secrets to hide, as well as the weight behind it to affect the the individual mouse opponent, the organization would have had to be the one to be "willing to expose the limitations in [their] own thinking - the willingness to be wrong" before any open debate could occur. If they let down their guard than maybe I could too, but if I let down my guard I was at their mercy and would have to believe that they only had benevolent (how I defined benevolent, not how they defined it) intentions towards me before I could open up and be straight with them. They didn't initiate the process by opening up and I didn't ever become convinced that they had only benevolent intentions towards me, so we remained at a stalemate in that manner the whole 2 years of my time with them, although there were twists and turns during that experience.

***

This ends this text, so next time I'll pick another one. Good night.

~ Meg

69. Espionage (CIA, KGB, FBI) File, Pt. 10 (Levinger, pt. 1) (Was:Spy File, Part IX)

I'm skipping over several things I have in my file that are sort of interesting but only tangentially applicable, maybe. So now I'm down to 2 books that I'm not sure about - whether to proceed with them or not here. But I'll touch a little on the first one now (and decide on the other one later).

This one is actually a special issue of the Journal of Social Issues (v. 43, no. 3, 1987) on "Covert Facilitation of Crime" with the issue editor being George Levinger.

The topic at hand here is really about issues around the use of "covert facilitation" of law enforcement agencies in the apprehension of crime in the USA. In the editor's introduction he gives this definition:

"As defined by Braithwaite, Fisse, and Geis in this issue, covert facilitation, is 'the practice of law enforcement officials who seek through the conscious use of deception to encourage criminal acts under circumstances where they can be observed by undercover operatives.' (p.6); the goal is to catch potential offenders." (p. 2)

The only way that I can think of for that to apply to my situation exactly, would be if a U.S. law enforcement agency / officer(s) tried to see if I had any intentions getting involved in espionage (via my dad, for example). I can't say that I experienced anything like that. But sometimes I did feel like I was being intimidated indirectly by (to me what seemed to be) unusual events, so that I would forsake my interest in Eastern Europe/USSR. This is really something different and it's probable that completely different laws, at least, would be involved, if not also different possible agencies.

So the one thing this book does give me, though, is some indication of what law enforcers do/can do by way of covert facilitation that may at least let me know if any of the things I experienced had been used in this covert facilitation context, and if so, maybe such means could be used to protect my dad and his work by means of trying to hinder me.

I know this is rather circuitous thinking, but, believe me, if you'd been through some of the things I had been through, you'd understand that any sort of glimmer that such things might happen even if in a somewhat different context, then it possibly could have happened to you to. That's a lot of hedging, but it's hard living with a lot of questions unanswered about some really awful things.

So that's why I even have this journal issue in this file, and I'll proceed with it from that standpoint.

***

From the lead article:

Covert facilitatation and crime: restoring balance to the entrapment debate, by John Brathwaite, Brent Fisse & Gilbert Geis, p. 5-41.

***

The referenced articles (which I omit as noted by the ...) are dated from 1977 to 1986.

"Criminal justice practices have become increasingly subversive of privacy... There has been expanded use of undercover agents and informers, and increased emphasis on campaigns to have citizens report drug users to the police (including instances of children turning in their parents), phone tapping, electronic eavesdropping, hidden cameras, periscopic prisms, electronic bracelets for tracking persons under house arrest, lie detector tests, 'spy dust,' computerized data banks, satellite surveillance, and similar procedures... Gary T. Marx... has been the leading figure in documenting what Michel Foucault ... called the modern state's 'subtle calculated technology of subjection.'" (p. 7)

Some of these things, like "computerized data banks", seem pretty routine today, but others, such as the eavesdropping and hidden cameras might raise a few hackles. If law enforcers are doing these kind of things in an effort to apprehend (potential) criminals, it seems likely that it would be easy for them to use these things in a case like mine, depending on the laws and other possible restrictions different from the covert facilitation context discussed here. And this was roughly the time frame too, that it might have applied in my case.

***

"Covert facilitation guidelines cannot be written to provide much practical protection against abuse. Nor can the prior approval of a judge bring in substantial practical control over any unfairness by the police in carrying out the undercover operation as it unfolds." (p. 12)

If protection in covert facilitation is difficult, I think it would be even more so in a case involving protecting a high-profile military project such as SDI.

***

"Covert facilitation is an appealing law enforcement tactic to nab drug addicts, dissidents, or prostitutes, but a less attractive strategy when it comes to white-collar criminals." (p. 25-26)

This is only interesting because of my social movement research in which agents did infiltrate cell groups preparing for major protests.

***

"Milgram's... renowned work indicated that experimental subjects are prone to obey authority figures when commanded to perform hurtful and, by general standards, immoral acts." (p. 34)

If you are unfamiliar with this experiment check out what Wikipedia has to say about it, or BBC's re-enactment of it.

Using this kind of psychology, what would it have taken for people to turn against me if told to do so? (But who would tell them to do so if they did?) I don't know, but I also do not know how some of the things happened to me that did during my Vienna tenure.

***

Restoring realism and logic to the covert facilitation debate, by Gary T. Marx, p. 43-55.

"Looking at the history of U.S. law enforcement, the key question is: How over the last century (and particularly the last decade), has the United States gone from being among the Western nations most opposed to domestic secret police practices to being their leading practitioner (and even exporter) for criminal cases...?" (p. 46)

It seems to me that even though the immediate topic is covert facilitation in this whole journal issue, that this question is broader than that, and refers to all sorts of "domestic secret police practices." Without any other details to go on, it doesn't tell us much, but is sort of enlightening if researchers of the field note this broad trend. It could provide a context wherein some of my experiences might have been more plausibly explained. I hope I'm not too far out in left field or grasping at straws in my hopes for some clarity regarding my life experiences.

***

"The recent expansion of undercover tactics does not stand alone; it must be seen as part of gradual changes that are making social control more intrusive, manipulative, hidden, intensive, and extensive. Covert facilitation must be considered alongside enhanced dossier, electronic, biological, and chemical means of surveillance and control." (p. 54)

Well, now we at least have a blatant extension of the trend to other areas. But what are biological and chemical means of surveillance?

***

The risks of covert facilitation, by Jerome H. Skolnick, p. 79-85.

"The requirements for issuing a warrant to wiretap are stringent. Title III of 18 U.S.C. #2510-20 prescribes a careful procedure for obtaining a warrant, and federal law preempts state law." (p. 82)

I never felt like the U.S. was eavesdropping on me. But in the USSR/Russia yes, and maybe also in Austria, but I'd need to check my notes about that time period, since so much has happened since.

***

"That covert facilitation will not be used indiscriminately - against politically dangerous persons - seems naive. Once we institutionalize a practice to control one set of dangerous criminals, we are scarcely in a position to protest its use against another 'dangerous' category." (p. 83)

I think the author means by "politically dangerous" someone who could be harmful to one's (a politician's) political aims - maybe Watergate-like targets.

But still, the point here is that the use of something like covert facilitation wouldn't just end where it was supposed, with the legal uses of it.

That's the whole trouble with covert things, if I may take a moment to go into a tirade (that's one of the benefits of this being my blog), once you enter a world of secrecy than everything is possible... well, almost. But you know what I mean.

Here's my understanding of the Scriptural stance on these kinds of things:

John 3:17 For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.
18 He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.
19 And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.
20 For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved.
21 But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God.

Ephesians 5:11 And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them.
12 For it is a shame even to speak of those things which are done of them in secret.

And instead of trusting in our own wisdom and strength, here's another way that doesn't involve secrecy and hiding and doing things in the dark, behind closed doors:

For we would not, brethren, have you ignorant of our trouble which came to us in Asia, that we were pressed out of measure, above strength, so that we despaired even of life: But we had the sentence of death in ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God who raiseth the dead (II Cor. 1:8-9)

Of course, missions and Christians in general should particularly consider these things, but it also shows in general what I think of this whole secrecy thing.

***

Here's another excellent quote that reaches far beyond the specific subject matter it addresses:

"But it seems just as reasonable to focus on the psychology of the investigator. Can psychologists help answer the question of whether we should be skeptical of the testimony of an investigator who has spent much of his career covert facilitating? Put more abstractly, to what extent do deceptive practices - especially those encouraging wrongdoing - generalize to become absorbed throughout one's personality, thus impairing the moral character of the wrongdoer? Put more colloquially, can an accomplished conman - with or without badge - ever be trusted?" (p. 85)

Let me rephrase this a bit:

Can an accomplished missionary to 'closed' countries, considering s/he's spent much of his/her career being deceptive in his/her ministry ever be trusted? If such a missionary is deceptive with border patrol, others asking about the work ("we do publishing"), other missionaries, where does the deception end?

I really hope someone, and NOT a mission itself, write an honest history of what really went/goes on in 'closed' country missions, and specifically those who worked in the former East Bloc countries.

But I also feel that my dad may have been guilty here to a certain extent. Overall I think he had a lot of integrity, but I think regarding things of his work, and even sometimes as related to me, he may have had to live a bit in this underworld. I do know that after he retired he was able to focus more on his spiritual life and I think he really grew in that realm, so I wonder if not just having more time as a retired person, but the constraints of his work freed him inside to have a deeper spiritual life. I'm not sure, but maybe.

***

That's all for that book. There wasn't a lot of substance to help me unravel my experiences, but it might help with some of the broader framework issues.

~ Meg

67. Dad, Again (and Trust)

I just want to add something to the last post, regarding my sort of outburst against my dad's insinuating that I left the adult education doctoral program because I couldn't trust anyone.

The first thing I would like to say about that is that that outburst is indicative of part of the ambivalence I've had towards my dad starting in my mid 20s. I felt like our relationship was fraught with intense good things and equally intense not so good things, like this event/issue about leaving my studies. You'll see more of this, I'm sure, as we go along. Having said that though, it wasn't just me, but he did concrete things and some things that weren't so directly and visibly connected to him, so this isn't just my problem. He's dead now, but I imagine he had (probably mostly) unspoken struggles (although he may have confided to other family members at times, making it just unspoken to me specifically. I refuse to take all the blame and listen to a bunch of gobbledy-gook about it being all in my head or all my fault. I know that dad is sort of this patron saint of the family, but he was just human after all, and others in the family have the choice of whether they care to hear my side of the story (really hear it, not just go through the motions) or not. At this point I'm assuming they've chosen the "not" option.

The other thing that I would point out about the situation in question here, is that actually it could be said that my leaving the doctoral program was actually a step of trust in my professors, who kept insisting that I was on a doctoral track. I believed them so much that I dropped out based on their statements alone. I risked my whole career on believing what they said, that I would become a professor if I stuck with it and got my doctorate. But I didn't WANT to be a professor, so, believing them, I left the program. Perhaps that was foolish faith, but it was faith; I believed that they were right and that's what would happen. I was under the impression that at least most people in the program were there because they thought their studies could help them meet their career goals. Once I became convinced that the program could not do that for me I left.

~ Meg

66. Espionage (CIA, KGB, FBI) File, Pt. 8 (Sarbin & Eoyang, pt. 3) (Was: Spy File, Part VIII (Sarbin, et al Cont'd - again))

I wish I could say I'm all rested up and raring to go this morning, but I'm not. I'm still tired. Nevertheless, I'm up, so... on with the show!

***

This is our last chapter in this book:

Chapter 9, Work Organizations as Contexts for Trust and Betrayal, by James H. Morris and Dennis J. Moberg, p. 163-187.

Actually, the subject of this chapter also comes up in sources in other files too.

***

"Three work-process conditions increase the need for personal trust between functionality interdependent workers: (1) ambiguous or dynamic tasks, (2) difficulty in observing tasks, (2) outcomes that are hard to assess (Govindarajan and Fisher, 1990; Ouchi, 1979)." (p. 166)

I'll discuss these in the next chapter sections, which are based on these three situations.

***

"Ambiguous or Dynamic Tasks...

Fiduciary responsibility requires the trustee to preserve the interests of those who have conferred trust (e.g., the employer, the military organization, the government), and it requires the trustee to subordinate his or her own self-interest....

"The distinction between technical competence and fiduciary responsibility should be important in deliberations about conferring personal trust... It is probably easy to think of examples in which people whom we know to have the technical skill to perform a job well cannot always be relied on to do so of their own volition, and vice versa." (p. 167)

I'm going to address the issues here in relation to my work in Vienna. I don't think I have ever given any employer reason to think that there is reason to doubt my 'fiduciary responsibility' as implied in the last sentence here quoted. I'm the kind of person that you want on your committee - I'm going to pull my own weight and come through. And if there is any doubt that I'll be able to complete a task within the given perimeters I work the communication channels to make sure everyone who needs to know about this does. However, the issue in Vienna was not regarding whether I would do my work or not; it wasn't about my 'fiduciary responsibility'.

***

"Behaviors That Are Difficult to Observe...

"Examples of jobs in which the trustee's behavior is difficult to observe include traveling salespersons, missionaries, and covert intelligence agents. In each of these jobs, the trustee's actual conduct is difficult to observe because of physical distance from the colleagues or parent organizations who have conferred trust. Yet even when jobs are conducted in close proximity to one another, it can be difficult to observe task behaviors in a meaningful way because (1) particular patterns of behavior cannot reliably be linked to desired results (e.g., many different ways of doing the job may be appropriate for the objective at hand, but the observer cannot determine which ways are and are not appropriate) or (2) the behaviors of the trustee are deliberately veiled." (p. 168)

I'm not sure I necessarily like "missionaries" being so closely aligned with "covert intelligence agents," but even following "traveling salespersons" involves some distasteful issues.

But getting back to my situation in Vienna... since I was an office worker, my work wasn't any more difficult to monitor than your average secretary, although I did do a little traveling for the mission. I don't think I "deliberately veiled" anything involving the carrying out of my duties. Whatever task I was given I tried to carry out to the best of my ability, and I don't think there was ever any question about that.

***

"In summary, work organizations cannot always remove the need for personal trust between members, nor can they fully indemnify such trust when it emerges. What organizations can do, however, is to encourage local work contexts in which the members themselves develop covenantal understandings, strong normative regulation, and loyal commitments to one another - all of which are important social conditions for the rational bestowal of personal trust." (p. 171)

Since there was a lot of ambiguity about what the mission's intentions towards me were (i.e., suggestions about this or that opportunity somewhere down the pike), I'm just going to address what my concrete responsibilities were in actuality. I eventually felt like the mission would not really trust me until it had a firm grip on my whole life, including relationships and extracurricular activities. If you know anything about me, however, you should know my basic personality doesn't agree with such confinements. I'm not inclined to give anyone that kind of control or influence over my life.

***

The next section of the chapter is:

"Organizational Control Systems and Need for Personal Trust"

"All organizations must rely to some degree on external controls (e.g., written job descriptions, rules, policies, standard operating procedures, hierarchical supervision, productive or sales quotas, formal performance appraisal systems, phone monitoring, and polygraph examinations), but such controls typically are aimed at preserving the impersonal trust inherent to the employment relationship, namely, the meeting of formally prescribed role expectations. As we suggested above, however, in certain circumstances, functionally dependent organization members must convey personal trust in their colleagues to contribute the spontaneous, unprescribed actions that are necessary to get the job done well, and to preserve the good faith that is elemental to that trust. External controls alone can neither encourage nor maintain such personal trust among functionally dependent organization members.

By contrast, internal control systems rely less on official mandates and surveillance and more on participant self-control and peer influence... An emphasis on internal control seems particularly apropos when the need for personal trust is high. Instead of focusing on detection and correction of inappropriate behavior, internal control systems rely on creating contexts in which informal (e.g., social) impediments to incompetent or self-interested behavior tend to arise..." (p. 171-172)

Now I'm sure that the list of relevant professions mentioned in the earlier quote ("traveling salespersons, missionaries, and covert intelligence agents") wasn't necessarily meant to be exhaustive, but suggestive, but I'm going to let the list limit my discussion anyway.

My job description in Vienna was as a secretary (albeit in a missionary setting), but I wasn't a missionary in the sense most likely intended here, wherein a person has the hands-on people-contact type of mission work. So as far as the job is concerned, I don't think that you could say I met the "missionary" criteria for purposes of this discussion. Now, I wouldn't say that the mission was exactly "covert intelligence" either, but I do think that my situation actually has more in common with a "covert intelligence" context than with "missionary." In a covert intelligence setting I suspect that it to a certain point it doesn't really matter what your actual position is; if you are a secretary in a covert intelligence office, then this need for "internal control" even extends you, and not just the agents out in the field. The agents, for example, need to know that you are reliable and won't blow their cover. This is the kind of thing that was going on in Vienna. In regards to the need for internal or external control my situation was more like that of a secretary in a covert operations office than that of a secretary in a mission office.

If that doesn't make sense to you now, you'll have plenty of opportunity later on to catch on.

***

"Under internal control systems, the group uses its social influence to regulate members' work activities. Identification with and loyalty to one's colleagues are thought to be engendered when a group members sees himself or herself as a pivotal contributor to the group's outcomes and when the group is viewed by the member to be an important source of personal success" (p. 173)

This sounds foreign to me. I include it here because this might point to something else going on in my Vienna experience that isn't addressed in this text. For example, I don't remember thinking that the group used its influence to regulate my work activities - the actual job I did. There may have been some of that, but the off-hours influence was what I sensed most. Maybe that's just because I did technically do my job fully to my best abilities and so there was no need to apply pressure there, or that wasn't an area where I could be influenced, and so the focus for my experience was off-hours activities.

***

This next chapter section is...

Personal Trust and Personal Betrayal in the Work Setting

"... [P]ivotal expectations involve covenantal understandings about moral conduct, justice, and human decency that are more fundamental than the formal codes and mandates emplaced by any particular organization. Pivotal expectations can also be distinguished by the high degree of psychological investment or commitment that inheres in the people who hold them. Although they may be implicit, pivotal expectations are sacred - they have a powerful and fundamental influence on the person who holds them and are elemental to that person's sense of social identity. In this respect, pivotal expectations serve as constraints not only on the person toward whom they are held but also on the person who holds them toward others...

... For the person who holds them, violations of pivotal expectations can constitute significant, perhaps catastrophic, disturbances to the social foundations of personal trust." (p. 175-176)

This section, in contrast to a lot of the earlier discussion, refers to how I felt regarding the mission. I hope you can see by now that I have fundamental beliefs that the mission in Vienna betrayed, in my view. It was indeed catastrophic to me, and even to this day the horror of it extends to churches who I see as being "accomplices in the crime" by their unwillingness to hold the missions accountable, not just for how I was treated, but for their general modus operandi. This lack of willing oversight has created in me a great ambivalence regarding churches, even when I would otherwise agree with their theology. In this way, the catastrophe continues to this day in the form of how I relate to/feel about churches in the here and now.

***

The next section is...

"A Prototype of Feeling Betrayed"

"We propose that four dimensions are primary objects of attention in the reasoning that a victim does when a trustee violates the victim's pivotal expectations in the work setting: (1) sufficient harm, (2) intentionality, (3) personalization, and (4) inadequate redress." (p. 176)

That's me... I feel that sufficient harm was done intentionally to me personally with inadequate redress in Vienna. That is, all four of these sub-parts describe me/my situation vis a vis the Vienna mission(s).

***

I'm skipping over points 1 and 2 above and going to 3, about personalization. After explaining how there are levels of personalization, from the highest being against the person solely and directly down to actions taken against the larger group that the person identifies with. At the end of this discussion on personalization the text concludes that:

"Overall, personalization is perhaps the key dimension in determining the emotional stink of personal trust violation because it threatens the victim's views of his or her own social identity and sense of agency... High personalization requires the victim to adjust orientations toward the particular transgressor. But perhaps more unfortunately, it can so disturb the victim's fundamental views of self and others that the victim is less able to trust anyone." (p. 182)

My dad later picked up on this, but in a situation where it was totally irrelevant, implying, I think, that an action I took was out of paranoia. Let me explain. That particular context was when I dropped out of my doctoral studies, which my dad attributed to my lack of trust in the leadership of the program. But the main reason was that I kept hearing that I was on a track to become a professor and it's not that in general I didn't want to be a professor, but I didn't want to be a professor in Adult Education because I hadn't realized before that the field of adult education in the USA (in contrast to many other countries, but far from all) is focused mainly on supporting the workforce. In other countries there are stronger individual improvement segments of the field (think European Folk High School) or grassroots community development (e.g., participatory action research) or popular education (Brazil's Paolo Freire and beyond). I'm not the least interested in dedicating my life to making sure that corporations (who are "persons" in US law) can have workers to meet their interests, which may or may not be the best interests of the workers. Even ESL and literacy in the US is so mainstream, I tried and tried to find popular education programs here and I was shocked at how few and far between these are. THAT is why I dropped out, not because of lack of trust or paranoia. That was my reason at the time and it remains so to this day. After I left the program I went on to do social movement learning research ON MY OWN for which I gave numerous conference presentations. Sorry, dad, you're wrong here. Later I read that in a book on the history of the American Library Association that in the 1920s (I believe that's when it was) ALA was considering developing closer connections to the then manifestation of adult education association (there were several changes throughout the years in adult education association name and function in the USA), but they found, even back then, that adult education was too conservative, so they decided not to proceed that with that collaboration.

But back to the text. Yes, my trust in other churches is not what it was prior to my Vienna experience. But I think of it as being a case of knowing too much and not believing that anything's changed and believing also that churches back home don't have any problem with that modus operandi, which I still disagree with completely (can you tell?). Sometimes when I find a church that that isn't an issue with I might have other problems, like general disagreements of theology, which is not particularly related to the Vienna issue. After all, I was raised in a pretty opinionated church context, way before anything about Vienna came into play.

***

Now on to the 4th issue, inadequate redress.

"...[R]edress can involve efforts by the trust violator to (1) undo the harm or remove its objective effects, (2) soothe the implications of high perceived intentionality and personalization, as with an apology..., or (3) provide compensation after the fact for acknowledged harm." (p. 183)

The missions in Vienna did none of these things, and I suspect they may well think they did nothing wrong in relation to me. I also think that some things happened to me specifically which they weren't aware of, or which only a few might have known. The problem with the likelihood of there could have even been an effective redress is that 1) I felt that how I was treated was a part of the modus operandi in general, although perhaps in a rather extreme manifestation of it, but not out of character, and 2) if what happened vis a vis my experiences while with the mission involved other things related to my dad, they might not have even been able to do anything about it without putting the ministry at risk. If part of my experience in Vienna was connected with my dad's work, then it could very well be that the mission or only very few of them knew about these kinds of things. If that is the case, they might have been somewhere bewildered also at my actions, not being completely aware of all of the causes of my actions. Even so, the mission did enough clearly on its own, things that it quite clearly and actively did in relation to me, for whatever reason, that I think I had/have reasonable cause to "feel betrayed."

***

"Given a strong sense of personal betrayal, the victim's efforts at redress are likely to depend on his or her sense of power and control over the transgressor or parties who have the capacity to extract restitution from the transgressor." (p. 184)

After about 5 months into my time in Vienna, I realized I was up against a behemoth, and began to feel pretty powerless to wield any influence. For a long time, though, I did hold out a little glimmer of hope that I would be found to be a valuable worker and we could talk openly (which would have to have entailed a certain amount of equality of relationship considering my virtually lost faith in them). Eventually I realized that that was just wishful thinking and naivete on my part.

***

That's all for that book, but I'll talk about some of these things from different perspectives more as we go on, especially in a couple other files that deal with these kinds of issues.

~ Meg