BIG BODY BOOK WORK
Page II
- Learning to Diagnose Corporate
Maladies in Your Body Politic

BIG BODY PATHOLOGIES
- Diverse Symptoms of Our Common Plague

BIG BODY PHYSIOLOGY
- Techniques & Trials of Terminal Incorporation

BEYOND BIG BODIES
- New Paradigms & Sources of Courage

Big Body Physiology

GENERAL PRINCIPLES
- Complementary Perspectives on Big Body Culture

  • LIVING SYSTEMS by James Grier Miller
  • Book Description
    This encyclopedic volume presents and analyzes many diverse facts about cells, organs, organisms, groups, organizations, societies, and supranational systems, but it integrates all this knowledge into a single conceptual system. The book is a presentation of the state of current knowledge in all of the sciences relevant to these seven levels of living systems. It also provides a theoretical integration and a methodological approach to quantitative basic research, and how applied research and development can arise from this. The set of concepts presented by the author is powerful and draws attention to all facets of a given problem in a social system.

    Nancho Comment
    A pioneering effort to show the commonalities of all living systems, and to develop a typology of their common functions and physiologies. Dr. Miller presided over a fractious team of 100 researchers in seven different fields, many of whom never got the hang of his interdisciplinary vision and stuck rather stubbornly to their narrow classical paradigms and perspectives. (Socilogists didn't know much about biology and thus were loathe to admit its relevence for understanding phenomena in their field. Ditto for biologists and psychology, physicians and political economy. ) The flow, therefore, is choppy and unpersuasive, and only unified by Miller's heroic post-project efforts to bind these belligerantly diverse fields together with a common new (and pretty clunky) vocabulary. This is the direction of the future, however, and this book deserves considerable veneration for starting the ball rolling.

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  • SOCIAL GROUPS OF MONKEYS, APES, AND MEN by M.R.A. Chance and Clifford Jolly and
    SOCIAL STRUCTURE OF ATTENTION by M.R.A. Chance and R. Larsen
    Nancho Comment
    Incredible! Chance and Jolly (great pair up or what?), two of the most respected voices in modern anthropology write THE BREAKTHROUGH WORK on attention and its dominant role in creating, maintaining and overthrowing social structures, and instead of receiving a Nobel Prize their blessed book is ridiculed, attacked and remaindered. Think about it. More than any other single factor, our attention determines the content of our consciousness from moment to moment, and thus determines our experience, our memories, and finally our lives. Attention creatively nourishes the beings and tasks that receive it. Its channeling and command is the secret of all entertainment, leadership and organizational management. It is what advertisers spend billions of dollars each year to buy from publications, broadcast outlets and Internet sites. In short, it is humanity's most important social and existential resource and yet who in the world is studying it? Where it goes and how it is controlled should be a central issue in psychology, sociology and political science, yet when is the last time you saw a documentary, book or even article on it? Strange, no? Because there appears to be a widespread hunger for that kind of knowledge. The Celestine Prophecy proved that, if nothing else. But try to launch that discussion in academia today like Chance and Jolly did, and you risk professional destruction. Anyway, find and read their books or as a poor substitute read my riff on the phenomenon in the Ki Papers. To aid thy search, here are all the details I have at hand: The Social Structure of Attention, Chance M.R.A and Larsen. R (eds) (1976) John Wiley and Sons Ltd and Social Groups of Monkeys Apes and Men, Chance, M.R.A. and Jolly, C. (1970) London: Cape and Dutton 1970 ISBN 22461870-9 N.Y (USA) and Cirenchester (UK). End of rant. Good luck.
  • ESCAPE FROM FREEDOM by Erich H. Fromm
    Nancho Comment
    Still THE BOOK on the authoritarian personality - that steady dangerous percentage among us driven by fear and weakness to sacifice their lives (and many others') to hierarchical power. Gratefully subordinate and reflexively obedient, this is the population that corporate education covets, trains and screens for. Clearly explains the mindset of the teeming "functionaries" in all the commercial/military/ecclesiastic Big Bodies of the world. Also works as a text for fundamentalism of any flavor. See Milgram's work on Obedience for the anaesthetic consequences of this conditioning.
  • THE GROUP MIND by William McDougall
    Nancho Comment
    First great English language inquiry into our collective instincts and how quickly cultural conditioning can replace individual thought as the primary engine of behavior. Pretty racist in the old British style but still basically relevant and seminal.
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  • THE CROWD : A STUDY OF THE POPULAR MIND by Gustave Le Bon
    Nancho Comment
    Fundamental insights into group psychology and our psychic susceptibility to collectivized exploitation. Greatly useful for corporate being breeders and those who would escape them.
  • MEIN KAMPF by Adolf Hitler
    Nancho Comment
    Classic insights on breaking down individuals for corporate enslavement by one of the great Big Body-builders of all time.
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  • JAPANESE SOCIETY by Chie Nakane
    Nancho Comment
    After 20 years, still the most intelligent book on Japanese social dynamics and the reasons why Japanese Big Bodies are still the most integrated, evolved, and scariest on the planet. Almost a workbook on how to build a thriving Big Body farm of your own.
  • LIFE OF THE BEE by Maurice Maeterlink
    Nancho Comment
    This 1901 classic features great poetry and insight into the great sensual/existential sacrifices social beings will make for the security of terminal incorporation. Long out of print but now available free online. God bless the Book Project.
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  • OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORITY (Original) and
    OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORITY : AN EXPERIMENTAL VIEW
    (Updated) by Stanley Milgram

    Nancho Comment
    Finally some psychology relevent to our planetary plight. Milgram's extraordinary and often replicated studies show that we as a species seem to be divided into relatively equal thirds with regard to empathy/obedience - 1/3 who will refuse to inflict pain on others despite official pressure to do so, 1/3 who will object/question/protest but ultimately obey if an "authority" insists, and 1/3 who will obey almost any "authority" reflexively and execute orders to harm others quite indifferently (including a few percent who really get into it). So, people, this is "us" and our raw material for building a brave new world. Big Body builders thus have a decided advantage - a vast readymade population of obedient candidates to choose from - easily incorporated "members" who will cheerfully pillage, impoverish, or pollute "other" peoples on command of authoritative corporate leaders.

    Our challenge as empathic "refuseniks" within a democratic society is the batlle for the hearts and minds of the conscientious but weak middle third. If we can strengthen their resolve (unbreak their balls, as it were), we have a clear majority that can legitimately command authority and thus legally/ethically/psychologically control the other morally anaesthetized third. Read the reader comments below, study the book, and meditate on what you can do to help. The Great Work begins here.

    Reader Responses
    "An intense, haunting, and enlightening illumination. Stanley Milgram's experiments in human response to authority in the 1970's offer as much insight today as when they were originally conducted. The experiments are best known as a series of tests performed through Yale University, where a subject was told to administer an increasingly high level of electrical shock to a victim attempting to learn a series of word relationships. The frightening results showed the majority of subjects, at the bequest of the authority involved, applied maximum voltage despite the begging and pleading of the victim to stop the test (the victim being an actor pretending to be shocked)... We still have a lot to learn from the evidence gathered by Milgram. His book presents scientific and psychological studies in lay terms that are accessible to anyone." -- Los Angeles, California

    "This is a book that could save the World. This book presents a mind-blowing revelation on every page, and yet you will recognize everything in it from your everyday life. That is what makes it so chilling. Milgram demonstrates in definitive experiments how typical people recruited from off the street can, using no more than a veneer of authority, easily be persuaded to commit torture and even murder on innocent victims. The book thereby essentially explains the psychological mechanics of the Nazi and other concentration camps, the Death Squads in El Salvador and across the World, and the many other forms of atrocity that have become so characteristic of the 20th Century, this "Century of barbed wire and watchtowers". Ever wonder how you can find air force pilots willing to drop the bombs to start a nuclear holocaust? Answer: It's the easiest thing in the World! A certain percentage of the population will have the proper psychological profile, and you just select them. If psychologists and social scientists really wanted to know what are the ruling principles of civilization and what are the sources of so many of its ills, they'd be running experiments like Milgram's year-round in labs across the planet. Instead, very little work of this kind has since been done. Why? Because it's considered "ethically questionable"! In a classic case of "kill the messenger", the very man who shows us concretely how torture has been so thoroughly integrated into the political structure and who exposes the blatant hypocracy of our rulers, is accused of abusing his subjects and of betraying their trust! In the back of the book Milgram, by the way, faces all ethical objections head-on and refutes them all convincingly. Buy this book if you want to find out what is "really going on", but you may be upset by what you find." -- East Bay, California

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    CORPORATE ANTHROCULTURE
    - Breeding Docile Men for Acquiescent Incorporation
    Nancho Comment
    If I were paranoid - not that I AM of course, but IF I were, the fact that 90% of the most important books on Big Body building are out of print would be a cause of enormous alarm. But the work has been done, is still "out there" somewhere, and with a little help from you - either monetary or manual - could/should at least be summarized on the Net. Anyway, here are leads
  • A BRIEF HISTORY OF CASTRATION by Victor T. Cheney

    Nancho Comment
    Fine companion volume to Chinese Eunuchs by Taisuke Mitamura which reminds us that castration was not practiced on men to limit fertility but as a behavioral modification to ensure unquestioning obedience. Testosterone was the problem and ambitious mothers would often hold their boys down while the authority-offending glands were excised. The results proved ideal for Big Body building and the Chinese finally made it a mandatory prerequisite for all bureaucratic employment. We are more evolved today of course, or at least more technically advanced. Today corporate types can keep the meat, because the Big T can now be held in check by fat, fear, stress and environmental hormones.
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  • THE ORGANIZATION MAN by William Hollingsworth Whyte
    Nancho Comment
    The wise and learned classic that looked up Big Body skirts and scared the Sixties silly. The corporate bookshelves still bristle with counter-texts entitled "Beyond the O.M."/"After the O.M."/Goodby to the O.M." assuring you those bad, ball-busted days are all over and now we're all macho, rough tough, individualistic "team players" up here in the corporate hive. Who you gonna trust?
  • THE PSYCHOLOGY OF FEAR AND STRESS by Jeffrey Alan Gray

    Nancho Comment
    Pretty dry and technical academic research, but it dramatically illustrates the direct correlation between fear/stress and impotence, timidity and "team spirit"
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  • THE CORPORATE EUNUCH by O. William. Battalia

    Nancho Comment
    Ball-busting pressures on middle management
  • BEHAVIOURAL PROBLEMS OF FARM ANIMALS by M. Kiley-Worthington
    Nancho Comment
    Fascinating sections on obesity-related impotence, stress retardation of psychosomatic development, and "psychological castration" caused by low social status. How are things around your water cooler?
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  • THE FEMINIZED MALE: CLASSROOMS, WHITE COLLARS,
    AND THE DECLINE OF MANLINESS
    by Patricia Cayo Sexton
    Nancho Comment
    Dr. Sexton traces the fecklessness of the corporate crowd right back to their long years of unnatural imprisonment in chairs, at desks, under tube lights, deadlines and authoritarian oversight. Is that any way to raise a healthy animal, let alone an entire male? Her male reviewers (all veterans of that 16-year docile squat and a wee bit touchy) yipped at her viciously. Feminists were irked that she focused (sympathetically) on boys and ignored her in turn. A pox on both their houses. It's a good and important book. Exhume it.
  • THE MALE IN CRISIS by Karl Bednarik
    Book Description
    "Karl Bednarik states that the majority of men suffer from central disturbance in their masculine life in modern industrial society. He shows that prevailing conditions are introducing radical changes in masculine behavior and that the emasculation of contemporary man is due to the increasing overorganization of modern society."
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    BEYOND BIG BODIES
    - New Paradigms & Sources of Courage

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  • THE UNIVERSE IS A GREEN DRAGON : A COSMIC CREATION STORY
    by Brian Swimme

    Reader Comments
    " An invaluable teaching resource. There is probably no better way to introduce the non-scientist to the philosophical implications of the emerging 'quantum' worldview. As a mathematical cosmologist, Brian understands the details behind the amazing revelations of the 'new physics' and with unique talent weaves a wonderful tale of the complementary meaning we must see in these details. I have used this book as a primary text in courses I have taught in science and society and years later had students recall with great fondness the sense of awe, spirit and personal vision it awakened in them. This is not another work of the nice but limited science-and -religion-are-the-same school, but a truly deep and accessable presentation of the new scientific worldview that combines technical understanding with spiritual meaning. A true gem that educates and inspires hope!" - Collingwood, Canada

    "Awe-inspiring explanation of life, meaning, and existence. As a supplement to the thoughts of Lonergan, Ursula Franklin, Thomas Aquinas, and Plato, this book serves to put into poetic terms the dance of physics, biology, cognitive thought, creation, evolution, spirituality, psychology, love, life, death, meaning,and essentially everything else this universe holds. It was interesting to see this work done in the matter of the dialogues - it worked for the Greeks for teaching difficult topics. The book holds much more meaning if you have already studied concepts of life, such as those expressed by Lonergan. The reader is really forced to think in a completely different manner in order to understand Swimme's thoughts. You look at everything differently after reading this; you gain a new love of life and in the process become more human. I would whole-heartedly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in life and existence, no matter what your background knowledge is. Best thing out there!" - Vancouver, Canada

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