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Drawing on a central metaphor that they describe as the “Diogenes paradigm”, these authors set out to describe and analyse the ways in which the in-group/out-group dynamics of violence are inserted into, even formative of, societal institutions. The Diogenes paradigm is named after the ancient Greek history/myth of Diogenes, a criminal come vagabond who came to live in a barrel in the centre of the city, openly displaying his poverty, vagrancy, and all his life emotions and activities. Central to the story as related is a supposed meeting between Diogenes and Alexander the Great—a meeting juxtaposing the great power of Alexander with the abject poverty and powerlessness of Diogenes. Yet a paradox is revealed when after initial hostile feelings on both sides, Alexander, recognising something perhaps of pride in Diogenes, and out of his own narcissistically founded seeming generosity, offers a lucrative post to Diogenes and asks what he might do for the beggar. I won't give a “spoiler” by relating the full story here, except needless to say, Diogenes refuses gifts from Alexander.
This encounter, then, offers us an archetypal and fundamentally psycho-social image to represent two worlds colliding. This image is both clinical and societal, personal and collective. Diogenes stands for our latter day socially excluded: the homeless, the displaced, the truant, the starved, the addicted, the anti-social, and all those others of us who in their “un-housed” states of mind, literally and/or metaphorically, do not find themselves accommodated either in the formal structures of the social world or in the minds of that in-group's members. It stands for those more ordinary members whose experience is of being “dissed” by virtue of the body they inhabit, the class into which they were born, the god to whom they pray, or who more mundanely find themselves unable or unwilling to take up the role and position allocated to them by the self-defining in-group. (p. 49)
The paradigm is used