GOLGOTHARISM – THE ART OF PROVENANCE

What is the alchemy of our immediate environment?

Let us begin by examining our technology, such as laptops, mobile phones, gadgets and toys, to unearth how they are so much more than they seem. What are they made of? Essentially comprising of circuit boards and fibre optics, they are made of glass which comes from sand, which comes from grounded rocks. Our laptops and mobiles made by glittering surf crashing against rocks! More than this, their plastic and rubber, amazingly comes from oil, which comes from decaying sea creatures and plant life found on the ocean bed, such as rainbow coral, zebra fish, pink jellyfish, blue whales, white sharks and purple octopus! Actually, far more meaningful than simple deconstruction or demystification, how enthralling we find life to be, when we fully acknowledge the true origins, journey and destination of every nuanced element in the physical world around us.

We strengthen ourselves by eating meat originating from animals, while our vegetables come from vitamins in soil and rain water from fluffy clouds, evaporated from the sea, and our medicine comes from herbs in gardens and jungles! We dance in clothes made of silk, which comes from silk worms, and in cotton, which is from cotton plantations! When we protect ourselves with sportswear made of synthetic polyester, we are literally wearing sea creatures! When our children play with dolls and remote control cars, or ride tricycles and skateboards, all made of plastic and rubber, they are literally playing with tropical fish, red crabs and electric eels! We watch television in social gatherings on furniture made of wood, which originates from trees in forests. We play with gadgets and toys made of metal mined from our Earth, melted by lava, and pushed to the surface by tectonic plates. 

What else in our lives might we examine? Let us, society, ask collectively, what are the origins of our Art, such as the decorations in our homes, work places and recreational places? What comprises the materials of our houses, caravans, trailers, huts, caves, wigwams, cinema, theatre, and stadiums? Who built and made these things? Let us, society, individually and collectively remember and celebrate, these people! These local cider-drinking builders who keep myths, legends and folklore alive, frequenting our pubs! These eccentric fashion designers and romantic architects that flirt and bed one another, exchanging ideas at our cocktail parties! These tragically poetic singers & musicians of bands, who interact with the exotic dancers at our strip bars and melodramatic poets & thespians at our theatres and cabaret clubs. These impoverished artists and artisans who smoke hookahs and drink coffee in our cafes. These tribes in lush jungles and sweat shop workers in hot beautiful countries, who as slaves, are forced to make the goods we consume! 

Yet beautiful Eastern & Asian they - these workers who are the very makers of these awe inspiring geometric patterns manifest in their pottery, sculpture, jewellery and fashion - are never actually associated with the alchemy of their unique craft, by the Western peoples they sell them to. A “made in Taiwan” label on a toy, or a “made in Nepal” label on a rainbow hoody is not good enough, because these simple labels still do not do justice to the hard working crafters who continue to be exploited, forgotten and left for dead, and even the transporters of these goods meet the same fate. Imagine if instead we had publicly available, easily accessible list of all the factories and farms who produced every element comprising the product, along with options to donate to the workers to say “thank you” and/or to fund a charity ensuring their wellbeing? More than this. Imagine if we - metaphorically – “danced” for these workers, making our “thank you” to them a FUN activity to participate in; a bonding exchange in social media, such as Facebook & Twitter. We need all media, such as television, magazines, and newspapers to include in their advertisements, the origin of every ingredient and aspect of their goods, with a holistic website online with an easy to use search bar, so that the public may quickly make a check on anything they consume, with an option to donate and/or support the makers of their chosen product. We need a revolutionary radical change to our current ethos and fast!

I bring you… “Golgotharism!”

Golgotharism, inspired by the Christian prophet Jesus Christ’s ‘Stations Of The Cross’ - which maps out the many stages of his crucifixion on mount Golgotha - is the acknowledgement, examination, and celebration of our internal and external reality as human beings, on the atomic and cellular level, expressing in a obviously perceivable fashion, artistically, musically, theatrically or in literary form, our past, present and future, simultaneously, giving sacred cosmic reverence to all object(s) as they evolve and moves through time-space, whether with pride or horror.

When we embrace Golgotharism, as many Psychedelic artists, such as Alex Grey, we come to place where we fully realise the “illusion of separation”. We all consist of matter moving through time-space, where our bodies are literally made up of physical ingredients attracted and accumulated in world cuisine from all corners of the Earth. Each element being literally near identical to one another in physical make up, despite their differences in geographical origins - and in doing so, recognise our Nationalism as being not from one country, but from one world. As one species we call human, allowing us then to put aside our petty differences to dissolve racism, classism and sexism, instead identifying ourselves as being pure consciousness (electro-magnetic wave form information) manifest in diverse Earthly forms, with identical brains. 

Lamb from New Zealand. Pineapples from Africa. Cheeses from Cornwall. Naans from India. Rice from Persia. Tomatoes from Spain. All of this embodied in your Saturday night Kebab and can of Lilt – something cosmic. 

Golgotharism is about giving reverence to every aspect of what makes up our world; keeping everything sacred, so that we as society knows at any one point, where’s we’ve been, where we are, and we’re going, allowing us to never repeat our mistakes to evolve positively as one peoples. 

Golgotharism teaches us to “Honours Thy Parents” because we all come from our father’s sperm and our mother’s egg, and in revering this path our Earthly being takes, we can as a society, learn to treat elderly people and young children with respect, listening to their opinions with heightened interest, instead of side lining them like we do circus and carnival freaks, such as Torso Boy, Bearded Lady, Dwarves, Disfigured Clown and Siamese Twins. Do we desire our children to look like this? Of course, however, we do not all share the same values. Once we begin to judge what atomic and cellular forms we desire the most, and attempt to protect and revere these subjectively chosen forms, to the point where we’re trying to make more of them. It starts to look very much like Stem Cell Research and Cloning, Genetically-Modified Crops and Eugenics, the latter embraced by the German dictator Hitler and his Nazi soldiers in World War 2, who created the Holocaust in the 1940’s, which was the extermination of Jews on the basis of their blood and physical appearance alone, in favour of creating a totally blond, blue-eyed Aryan race. Perhaps if we saw the true beauty of other countries races and their art forms e.g. song, dance, theatre, instead of our very narrow perspective shaped by Western media, we would desire human diversity over racism. 

Golgotharism not only instantly associates this beautiful environment with our radios, but also encourages us to protect this environment from which it came, protecting wild life. Imagine if we had a list all the factories and farms who produced every element comprising the product, along with options to donate to the workers to say “thank you” and/or to fund a charity ensuring their wellbeing?

Questions raised on Golgotharism include: How can multiple births of object(s) be identified, acknowledge and expressed, when they are seemingly infinite and eternal? Should certain trajectories of evolution thus be prioritized over others, and who or what should govern this, when our subjective tastes are so different from one another? Meta-Modernism, for example, encourages the “coaxing of excess to presence”. When all matter is bound to time, which is in a constant “flux” of evolution, then should the Art intentioned to express it, itself, too embody kinetic movement? Romance and alchemy is after all, by nature, an interactive event, which can sometimes, but not always, be freeze framed.

Tigris Ta’eed  ~ Cyberpunk, Poet & Artist

 

VA - Internet of Value - Olinga Ta'eed

VA - Internet of Value - Maryam Taghiyeva

On the Potentiality of a [Mathematical] Model for Social Value

Haley Beer & Kélig Aujogue

Quantifying and discovering mathematical models has long been part of human understanding and progression. Whether it is applied to scientific, technological or social matters a mathematical model can help us to comprehend, predict, and compare important phenomenon, and their influences, in our environment.

“By curious skill they could number the stars and the sand, and measure the starry heavens, and track the courses of the planets. For with their understanding and wit, which Thou bestowedst on them, they search out these things; and much have they found out; and foretold, many years before… But they knew not the way, Thy Word, by Whom Thou madest these things which they number, and themselves who number, and the sense whereby they perceive what they number, and the understanding, out of which they number; or that of Thy wisdom there is no number.” - Saint Augustine

Typically, the use of mathematical models follows a pattern: it is developed within the sciences to describe natural phenomenon and/or laws and then diffused towards other applied subjects.  For instance, partial differential equations utilized for centuries in physics to describe continuous medium are now applied to understand financial values; as in the Black-Scholes equation being used to predict the price of European options. Similarly, the Fourier Transform, a mathematical tool discovered nearly 200 years ago that projects a continuous timeline of events into a series of frequencies, is now used in signal processing devices (vocal, optical…) around the world.

Justly, the influence of many mathematical models has expanded away from their original applications in sciences and one could legitimately wonder: Can we model and predict social values with such tools? Probably. If we are interested in modelling a social value such as happiness and make the assumption that it reacts as a fluid, we could use the Navier-Stokes equation. The advection in time or the rate of Happiness would then be described as the sum of external forces (e.g., relationships, satisfaction with job, personal resources, opportunities for expression, etc.) and the diffusivity of happiness.  We could then write in terms of mathematical formalism that:

where VHappiness is the value of Happiness at a given position in space and in time, Fexterior corresponds to the external constraints (positive or negative) influencing the happiness and v a “viscous” coefficient of happiness. This last term could thereby be interpreted as some capacity of the happiness holder to share or influence their environment.

However, as much as this model shines a different light on the notion of Happiness and is a good starting point, it is conceivably not fully satisfactory for modelling social values. Natural science models are founded in the belief that phenomenon exist 'out there' and are independent from humans; but, arguably social value such as happiness reside 'inside', or at the very least are interpreted individually interiorly, so somehow motions to be known in a different way.

By using a model to derive a figure for social value, whichever way we choose to define it using present mathematical models, we largely overlook the interior process of coming to know such value (whether that is the process of interpretation of an external social value or the nurturing of personal social value understanding and expression).

Just because I am capable of describing Happiness in a model does not necessarily translate into the generation of more (or less) Happiness for others or myself. That is, mathematical models as they are used today encourage us to ‘know’ something as external to us, to identify things in the physical realm, but not necessarily to understand what they mean for us as individual people, or how to change such things (e.g., how am I affected by knowing the phenomenon Happiness exists and what does it mean for how I conduct myself or my organization?). We may have developed models which help us predict Earthquakes and Solar Flares, but is there anything we can actually do to stop/transform them? No. Though, do we have some sway over our levels of happiness? By all means yes.

Likely for a veracious modelling of social value we will eventually need to come up with new 'models' that stretch our current conceptions of 'coming to know' something. That is, because the point is to lend ontological (or a part of reality) credence that in the past was not considered (at least not very much in institutional and organizational settings), we arguably need new epistemologies (ways of knowing that reality). While the natural science models might bring us a first way to measure for social value, and thereby discuss its potential and usefulness at organizational, institutional, national and international levels, due to its intersubjective nature, we think the way of measuring for social value should itself evolve to enable different kinds of knowing. Why only use models to predict and compare levels of Happiness when there is a seeming opportunity to personally foster, understand, and express it more meaningfully?

Atlas Coelestis – The Copernican System - 1660

In practice also, mathematically such equations as the Happiness one needs boundary conditions to be solved. These conditions are properties at the end of the studied domain that are not well defined in the known reality of social values. What are the limits or boundaries to social values anyway? And should there even be any placed? Besides, can we really limit the movement of social values to an advection/diffusion process? Maybe for some of them but it seems that there are insufficiencies for most social values.

Taking an example such as freedom, we have to admit that even if we could find some ground to justify the advection it would be harder to explain the diffusion. Certainly, freedom is something that is owned by its holder and sometimes can be given by its holder. These points highlight only the tip of the iceberg for the complexity of human relations and modelling social values. Perhaps the measuring rate in the world of social values can be approached through a different formalism such as Network Theory or Thermodynamics. Nonetheless, humans’ capacity to experience, generate, express and share social value is arguably one of the most under appreciated resources in our present use of mathematical models.

In other words, these existing mathematical models might help us bridge the initial gap between this so far much neglected interior realm of our universe and our obsession with objectivity since the Enlightenment, but once we become more comfortable talking about and ‘modelling’ social value, then we bet we can also come up with original ways of knowing, discussing, and/or generating it. However, in the meantime, using a host of mathematical models from the natural sciences to begin exploring how to integrate social value into economic and organizational discourse is helpful as it stimulates interest in and energies towards social value- and this is ultimately a first step towards discovering its potentiality!  

“Spirale” by Michelle Gouin

UK academics release algorithm measuring Personal Value in 60 seconds

Can Seratio change your life in 60 seconds?

Seratio, world leader in the measurement of non-financial  value, today launches their Personal Value (PV) campaign to measure the social impact of 1 million people for free. In less time than it takes to boil a kettle, you can now measure your PV at www.serat.io. Measuring Personal Value takes 60 seconds and consists of 6 online questions.

According to COO Karen Bryson, “Seratio’s Personal Value service is the only place where individuals can get an overall score on their unique contribution to societal welfare. Measuring Personal Value allows us to reflect on our choices and actions – and challenge ourselves to improve our personal score and watch it grow over time.”

Seratio is the licensing arm of the not-for-profit Centre for Citizenship, Enterprise and Governance (CCEG) based in the UK. Developed over 4 years and across 90 universities, Seratio's algorithms measure value at citizen, family, community, team, organisational, network, regional, national, global levels and even the value of our thoughts. Their disruptive Social Earnings Ratio® is "the most rapidly adopted metric in the world" (Vatican press) already supporting  two laws in the UK – the Social Value Act 2012 and Modern Slavery Act 2015 - and has measured $4 trillion of organisations internationally.

To support measuring Personal Value, Seratio has launched a crowdfunding campaign at Generosity.com . A percentage of funds raised will support the Tutu Foundation to continue its work on peace and reconciliation. The Tutu Foundation UK endorses the work of Seratio to measure Personal Value, recognising that "my humanity is tied to your humanity". Measuring PV allows people to express their humanity and start to understand the impact they have on others. 

Raisa Ambros

Editor Social Value & Intangibles Review

Raisa.ambros@cceg.org.uk

Mobile: +39 (3203) 551053

@RaisaAmbros

Growing Old Gracefully: Valuing Personal Care

By Peter Adams
Director, Avida Care

Most of us want to grow old gracefully, don’t we? However, despite our best efforts, this is by no means a certainty; in fact it is something of a lottery. Being careful and responsible in our own life is unfortunately no guarantee of a long life, let alone a graceful old age. Whilst there are many personal choices and actions we can take to help stave off what used to be called "decrepitude", sadly most of us will, sooner or later, become frailer and more dependent on others to perform functions we previously took for granted.

I should clarify that all I mean here by growing old gracefully is merely how we can grow old while maintaining a reasonable quality of life and standard of living for as long as possible. I suggest that for most of us this means being of sound enough mind and body, with enough money to be able to lead a largely self-determined, happy life, and leave something to our children.
But how can we continue to remain "graceful" in our older years, particularly when we need help coping and caring for ourselves? How can our hard-pressed care system help make this happen? This is surely one of the greatest challenges our society faces, because it will face each one of us sooner or later. We are living longer; can we live happily longer? This begs some very important questions of the care system, our funding of it, and indeed our very attitude to caring.

The current care system does indeed face massive pressures. It has been geared mostly to doing the basics to keep older people out of crisis, and less to promoting happiness and wellbeing, so there is a transformative expectation that the system needs to satisfy – extremely challenging in its own right. Moreover, the available funding for care has not kept up with both the fact that we are living longer and that the population is ageing. So budgets have been stretched thin; like a pastry chef with one lump of pastry left to roll a pastry lid to cover an ever growing pie, the lid is rolled ever thinner to the point of falling apart. Of course, factor in the austerity cuts to council budgets and the funding outlook becomes dramatically worse. To cap it all, to use a very inappropriate phrase, the prospects for hard-pressed families have hardly been helped by the Government’s recent decision to renege on bringing in the long-awaited cap on care fees.
So the system is at breaking point, with serious danger of collapse in the near future. So what can be done, now, to properly address this funding crisis? Well, one of the answers is certainly more money. Nice one Einstein you might reply, but hear me out, because making more money available, though vital, needs to be done in a totally new way. So whilst there is a good argument for re-prioritising current government expenditure budgets, such a solution, involving as it does robbing Peter to pay Paul, cannot be the long-term answer, even though there may be obvious, less-deserving candidates right now to "rob" from.
Moreover, making more money available is actually not the starting point, but an ending point, once the proper worth to society of care funding has been calculated. This requires a deeper, more fundamental approach based on values – specifically how we value care and caring, and our notion of real value, which is more than just monetary worth. Ultimately this approach forces us to reflect what real value society places on older people. This is important not just morally, but economically too, because any economist will tell you that investors search out value – or to put it another way – money follows the value. So, we have no hope of funding care properly as a social good if we do not first appreciate its true value.

So how do we put a true value on care and caring? Well we need to look at both economic value and social value. Let’s look at some figures.
For many of us the first steps along "reliance road" will be to receive support or care from immediate family or friends – and this army of "informal" (ie unpaid) carers actually delivers a huge amount of care. ONS data show that, between 1995 and 2010, the total amount of informal care delivered to adults increased by nearly 50% to over 7.5 billion hours per year! Around half of these care hours were for people aged 70 years or older. In 2011 the Valuing Carers report estimated that unpaid carers contributed the equivalent of well over £100 billion per year to the economy, and much of this "value" concerned personal care for older people. Yet this is not properly reflected in budgetary planning for the funding of care, which assumes this free service will continue ad infinitum – an unlikely scenario given that many carers are elderly and indeed frail themselves. Also does even this stupendous figure begin to adequately reflect the real value of these carers’ love, commitment and sacrifice to those they care for, let alone to society at large? So this social added value needs to be measured properly too.

Of course, informal care is just part of the picture – there is another army of professional care workers out there. As we become frailer, these paid care workers supplement, and sometimes replace altogether, our unpaid carers. Does the funding for paid care (or indeed the amount of money these care workers are paid) really reflect the true value of their contribution to those they care for, on behalf of the rest of us? Once again we need to recognise and measure the true social value of what they do, and add this into the funding mix. Only then can we hope to make, as a society, a properly informed decision as to how much money we should, and are willing to, put into care funding.
This more holistic, values-based approach to funding our care system for older people is urgently needed. Progress is starting to be made in the right direction. Organisations such as Carers UK and In-Control – with the latter’s conception of a transformed "public offer" based on the "real wealth" of individuals and communities – are making valuable contributions to this new values-based thinking. But there is much more to be done, and quickly. Far more emphasis must be placed on ground-up values measurement, combined with more focused, top-down values-based policy making.
Only when we recognise and measure the true value – both economic and social – of our older people and of caring properly for them, can we possibly hope to invest the right amount of money in funding a care system that is fit for an enlightened, 21st Century society; one in which more of us can grow old gracefully; one where we really can live happily for longer.

Female Perpetrators of Murder, Domestic Violence and Modern Slavery

By Professor Olinga Ta’eed

Director, Centre for Citizenship, Enterprise and Governance

Intuition tells us that these three subjects must be connected by sentiment if nothing else. Words such as rage, oppression, freedom are emotive expressions  which until recently could not be quantified and thus only qualitatively connected.  The latter makes for an interesting lecture, but frankly it’s hardly ground breaking. This made last weeks inaugural lecture by Dr Jarka Hrabetova, our newly appointed Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Citizenship, Enterprise and Governance all the more fascinating in her unique approach to these delicate subjects.

Her research sample consisted of all imprisoned women who had perpetrated murder in one particular prison ie half of all incarcerated women in the Czech Republic. The data detected the forms of murderous behaviour of women, the typology of murder by motivation, mapping the social situation of female convicts in prison, selected attitudes of homicide offenders including the analysis of family murders. The results indicate that most are intimate murders with the most common being partner homicide in conflict situations, long-term domestic violence and excessive alcohol consumption for both victim and perpetrator. The 100+ academic audience found comfort in her robust methodology which supported her conclusions but the real surprise was what she presented next. 

Building on the results of her sound but traditional research approach, Jarka has gone on to use Sentiment Analysis, a methodology stemming from the burgeoning Semantic Web 3.0, to analyse her data with a view to devise quantifiable metrics to define, and thereby forecast,  catastrophic events based on emotion – like murder. This is the stuff of the future and her work cannot be undervalued. My daughter, Tigris, has drawn out the analogy to Tom Cruise’s 2002 film ‘Minority Report’ where foreknowledge Is used to predict crime. This is powerful stuff.

Going even further, Jarka’s has extended her theory to applications in Domestic Violence, Honoured Based Violence and Modern Slavery. Using the Social Earnings Ratio in the context of ‘Personal Value’, she is defining trigger points to intimate murders, to DV and HBV in the context of criminology. And even further still, the Modern Slavery Act 2015 which is obtained Queen’s Royal Ascent in March 2015 in the UK will be enacted later this year. Companies with turnover of more than UK£36m will have to disclose whether they are making efforts to eliminate slavery in supply chains. Modern Slavery has principally two components – pay and oppression – and Jarka is working to define the latter benchmark whilst her colleague, Rani Kaur, works on the former. In this respect Jarka’s previous research work on Human Trafficking and her 12 year background in the police force has provided us with great insights. CCEG aims to provide the go-to metric behind the Modern Slavery Act 2015, just as we have become the leading provider of measurement under the Social Value Act 2012.

We are living in a time when how we feel about things can be quantified and becomes the new lexicon of intangible non-financial values. These modern tools such as S/E allow Jarka to seamlessly draw from her Prague work on female perpetrators of murder and apply it to the measurement of Ambition for the Arts Council in Corby, a middle-England town which is the focus of her most recent work. Who would have believed that would be possible?

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[The views and opinions expressed in this blogs by guests or members of the CCEG are those of the author, and not of the CCEG or the University of Northampton Business School]