WHEN GOLDMAN SACHS SPEAKS -- COMMENTS!

WHEN GOLDMAN SACHS SPEAKS – COMMENTS!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© March 16, 2012

REFERENCE:

Some have written asking, “Do you cherry pick those responses you publish?  “Absolutely!”  I do comment on other remarks.

For example, I’m often asked why I’m so hard on MBAs.  I’m not hard on degree holders; I’m hard on the curriculum and the programming it imposes.  I wrote this in WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990):

Middle management has already died and is ready for burial.  It represents an anachronistic function, which is being deceptively retained by the MBA brigade.

Like a revolving door, one set of buffers to organizational performance is removed only to be replaced by an even more insidious set. 

The organization’s romance with the MBA needs to be necessarily a brief one.  The argument that the training of middle managers makes them good candidates for top management is a faulty one.  That is what we now have.  No, MBAs are wrong.  Middle managers are gophers and MBAs are mechanics to cipher ($) management.  Leadership requires more, much more (p. 295).

Elsewhere I write we have become a one-dimensional society:

Vocational education puts the emphasis on doing what makes people successful in their careers only, or towards a one-dimensional society.  In this context, an MBA is merely a vocational degree as if learning a trade in trade school.  Essentially ignorant of the world, many MBAs scoff at the mere mention of the cultural implications of their work, being trained in a set of skills (finance, management, information systems) that are unlikely to find them acculturated to the demands of the cultural world beyond (p. 261).

For ten years, I was an adjunct professor in the graduate MBA programs at such schools as the University of South Florida, St. Leo University, Golden Gate University, and George Mason University.  I taught management theory & thought, organization and leaderships development, and the psychology of management, among other courses. 

Students of mine will remember my thrust was to develop intellectual capital centered on minimizing management and maximizing the role of professionals in organizational life.

We are a capitalistic society, which operates in creative destruction.  That is our socioeconomic system.  Business gives us jobs and without business acumen the United States of America would cease to be the force in the world economy that it currently enjoys.  But it is our moral authority that fuels that engine.      

Recently, my grandson, a senior at Tampa Prep, invited me to give a lecture to his class in ethics and leadership.  It was apparent that neither the teacher nor the students had a firm grasp of the relationship, causing me to wonder what was the basis of the course other than to fill an elective. 

Can you imagine students flocking to colleges offering a Master’s Degree in Leadership & Ethics?  I can’t.  Students would wonder what the payback would be.  We do things today because of what we expect to get out of them economically not psychologically. 

By the accident of my birth I have traced this development throughout my career, causing me to retire the first time in my mid-thirties, and the second time in my mid-fifties.  As NASA used to say when something went wrong in space, “Houston, we have a problem!”  I say, “America, we have a problem.”  We have a problem those commenting here clearly recognize.

As high as ninety percent of Americans are ethical, but it is the other ten percent that create havoc for society.  It is not a good omen that many of this ten percent are near the top of our power structure.

MICHAEL WRITES:

Hi Jim,

My guess is Mr. Smith is sitting in his Manhattan condo suffering a serious hangover from his moral epiphany. It will be tough to find another company needing his skills and the accompanying moralistic op-ed bent.

You referenced ethics. Mr. Smith has been with GS for about a dozen years joining about the time many investors were getting their first sucker punch in the dot com bust. I could imagine him learning how to giggle as he told his cohorts how he just dumped a pile of dot com stock on an unsuspecting and trusting client fully knowing it was bout to go belly up.  It was also the time that Enron was exposed and consultants with Ethics Training Programs inundated the corporate world in hand. It took him twelve years to figure out he was wrong?

Extrapolating the timeline I would guess Mr. Smith was a Tween when the movie Wall Street came out. The movie highlighted some of the worst aspects of traders including the underhanded tactics Mr. Smith described.

There's some eleven year old somewhere, totally oblivious to the mini firestorm of moral navel gazing inspired by Mr. Smith, as he peddles watered down lemonade from some corner stand. Money never sleeps. Wall Street never changes. The rest of us never learn.

Michael

RITA WRITES:

Listened to that former Goldman Sachs man on CNBC this a.m. or might have been Bloomberg, anyway, I sat listening with my eyes wide open.  OK, so now all is absolved because we are playing by new rules for a while?  Amusing, elephant hunting.  Ethics went out the window when the last statesman shook his head and retired.  Usury?  The poor pay higher everything, credit rates, fees, on and on.  Who ever heard of 29.9% interest?  In the 50's?   And we the people get a % of a % on our Golden accounts?  Keep up the vanguard, shout out the alarm, why do we sit and take the crumbs, let us eat cake!!!!!!!!!!  We deserve it!  Jim Fisher you are right on!!!

Rita

CAROL WRITES:

Just had to reply to this one.  Quote from the Bible.  "The love of money is the root of all evil."  And I am sorry to say in the Business World Peggy Lee's song "Is that All There IS."   Yes, I am afraid in business that is all there is but the love of money.   Has been since forever.   

Carol

DON WRITES:

These are the people who have an MBA, a Masters Degree in Business Administration. It is what is taught in Business School.  Maximize Profit!

Don

*     *     *

WHEN GOLDMAN SACHS SPEAKS IS ANYONE LISTENING?

WHEN GOLDMAN SACHS SPEAKS IS ANYONE LISTENING?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© March 15, 2012 (The Ides of March)

Depending on your perspective, today, March 15, the “Ides of March,” Greg Smith, former top executive at the Goldman Sachs brokerage firm, is either a turncoat, whistleblower or just another frustrated slob like nearly everyone else.  In any case, he chose this date, the day after leaving the firm, to publish his reasons for leaving. 

The “Ides of March,” which literally means the middle of the month, was the date of the betrayal of Julius Caesar by Marcus Brutus and other Roman senators in 44 B.C.  Whether Smith chose this date strategically or not, it will be interesting to see what follows.

He claims Goldman Sachs is more interested in profits than people.  You may oh hum, what else is new?  This was standard operating procedure before the Wall Street crash of 2008 when Lehman Brothers disappeared.  Post-2008, Goldman Sachs and others on Wall Street wrenched their hands, and promised to extirpate excesses, only to return to business as usual once the dust cleared.

So, what do we make of this titan of Wall Street who suddenly betrays the hand that made him rich?  Should we be surprised that Goldman Sachs stretches what is legal with little regard for what is ethical?  Should we see him as hero or heel? 

Quite frankly, for one who controlled customer purse strings of over $ trillion and had influence across the globe, especially for Goldman Sach’s US equity derivatives business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, he is actually telling us Op Ed page readers nothing new, nothing we didn’t know or suspect, and certainly nothing startling.

Cheating has reached a cultural norm.  

So, what does he say in his confession ("Why I am leaving Goldman Sachs”) that would reach us above the blasé?   Frankly nothing.

He says the Goldman Sachs environment is as toxic and destructive as he has ever seen it.  He then goes on to tell of his idealism coming from Stanford University twelve years ago finding the firm, over the years, descending into a culture of greed. 

To put an asterisk on it, he reveals how multimillionaire brokers brag about selling clients worthless or marginal paper, how they described customers that comply as “muppets,” and how the bottom line is about “ripping eyeballs out” of clients in the interest of getting paid. 

Then we wonder why there is an "Occupy Wall Street" moment, well intentioned as it might be, that has little or no impact because outrage becomes an end in itself.

Smith says, as if he again is telling the reader something it doesn’t already know, that “the firm’s leadership has changed the way it thinks about leadership.”  Some have written this tectonic shift has been going on for sixty years, so why the sudden surprise?  Leadership has been replaced by management, and nowhere apparently more assiduously so than in the management of this brokerage firm. 

He says, “Leadership needs to be about ideas, setting an example and doing the right thing.”  One word describes this, ethics!

Ethics is nowhere to be found in the morality of our times.  It doesn’t exist in the home, school, church, company or government.  Ethics has taken a holiday.  To suggest that by saying "ethics counts" will change anything is to be trapped between angst and anger if not naiveté.   

Leadership is about getting outside the ego, outside the delimiting aspects of the culture, outside the pecking order and into the business of seeing, serving and saving the culture from itself, especially when it is so wrapped up in how wonderful it is that it goes forward with blinders on. 

Has Smith taken them off?  Before you decide, listen to the current ways he claims people such as he have become leaders in Goldman Sachs:

(1)   Persuading clients to invest in stocks the firm wants to get rid of.

(2)   Convincing clients to trade stocks that will bring the biggest profit to Goldman Sachs.  He calls this “hunting elephants.”

(3)   Trading illiquid (his word) and opaque products that look impressive but aren’t but have three-letter acronyms.

He ends by saying, “People who care only about making money will not sustain this firm.”  He sees it as a matter of trust. 

But if anything is lacking today, it is trust, self-trust as well as the trust of others.  Polls confirm this. 

Peggy Lee once sang a song in which there is a line “Is that all there is to love?”  Greg Smith, giving him the benefit of the doubt, is saying to readers that he climbed the heights of the money tree and was left with the refrain, “Is that all there is to money?”

*     *     *

MORAL PHILOSOPHY OF A RENEGADE

MORAL PHILOSOPHY OF A RENEGADE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© March 13, 2012

A READER WRITES:

I’m new to reading you.  Well actually, that is not quite true.  If I have a lull in my work, I check your blog from time to time.  I am intrigued with the heretical aspect to your moral philosophy.  It is apparent in “Present Ridiculous.”  I missed this when it was first published.

You are less a “peripatetic philosopher” and more a moral philosopher after Freud.  You get it all out there come hell or high water, the reader be damned!  Am I right?

Signed: Curious

*     *     *

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Dear Curious:

I had to smile when I read your note. 

I am no Freud, closer to the influence of an Isaiah Berlin, Pitrim Sorokin or Gustave Le Bon.  Berlin had Henry Hardy to edit his writing, into something of a systematic philosophy.  Sorokin was a visionary; Le Bon's greatness was in taking the general and weaving it into the particular on transtemporal themes. 

I got a late start in this writing business, and am trying to get as much of what I think, see, feel and fear out "there" before my light burns out.

My daughter, Jennifer, once asked me how my unpublished works compared to my published works.  I thought for a second, and said, “There is no comparison."  More of what I think is in manuscript form waiting for a Henry Hardy to show up after I pass on.

“Present Ridiculous” is the central part of a three-phase book: "Past Imperfect," "Present Ridiculous" and "Future Perfect."  It has the Armageddon like title: “Near Journey’s End?  Can Planet Earth Survive Self-Indulgent Man?"  (Completed in 2004).

When this failed to find a publisher, inspired by T.S. Eliot’s “Hollow Men,” I rewrote the book from a different perspective with such chapter headings as:

(1) The Road Most Traveled

(2)  Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land

(3) Nowhere Man’s Cut & Control Journey Through Time

(4) Future Perfect, or The End of Western Dominance

(5) Fast Forward to Scientists as the New Gods

(6) Man as Earth’s Destroyer

That, too, failed to generate any commercial interest, but it is “there!” 

Reared as an Irish Roman Catholic, I completed a 75,000-word diatribe on my waning Catholic faith in “The Roman Catholic Laity in Search of Its Church” (Completed in 1974).  Surprisingly perceptive in some parts and embarrassingly sophomoric in others, it, too, is out “there!”

During the 1990s a series of 30 Q&A responses to letters resulted in the publication of what was called “Cold Shower,” abbreviated missives of 400 words.  They varied from “How never to get fired!” to “The New Professional” to “Downside of Being a Career Woman” to “Words and Wonder” to “Overwhelmed in the Land of Future Shock” to “Prison of the Mind” to “Camelot, the Auction.” 

In 2009, sick to death with everything being packaged as a product, while promoting the superfluous idea that greed not combative thinking caused the 2008 meltdown, I wrote “Creative Selling: Winning through Cooperation.”  Money like sin is fueled by fear and paranoia, symptoms but hardly the cause of the problem.

"Creative Thinking " is an intuitive approach to selling but uses the cognitive tools to frame the picture. 

It was a clearer statement to the philosophy presented in the international best seller “Confident Selling” (Prentice Hall 1970).  One publisher sent me a contract but with strings attached.  Strings were what were wrong with the Prentice Hall contract, which I didn't want repeated.  So, it, too, is “there.”

Earlier, after reading books on “How the Mind Works” and “Thoughts Without a Thinker,” I put together a practical guide to thinking that had worked for me with the blasé title, “Ten Steps to Confident Thinking.” (Completed in 2006). 

The basic idea here is that critical thinking, the basket Western thinkers put all their eggs, has resulted in circular logic and a constant recycling of the same problems.  The tsunami in Japan of 2011 is evidence of how totally critical thinking dominates and cripples. 

Critical thinking can only solve problems from a perspective that is already known.  There is no room for the imagination.  If it can’t be imagined, the belief is that it cannot happen, but of course it does, repeatedly.  My view was to complement critical thinking with creative thinking, or the embracing of the unknown, which I suggested would lead to “confident thinking."  It found no interest, but it is “there,” as well.

My recent missives on the “Retreat of the Adult” and “We Don’t Choose Our Parents” have generated an interesting potpourri of comments.  These missives are resurfaced aspects of,  "Who Put You in the Cage” (Completed in 2005).  In this manuscript, I look back on the need to constantly reinvent yourself in order to escape the cage that others have designed for you, but which I would have you refuse to settle.

There is the published work, "In the Shadow of the Courthouse" (2003), which has a manuscript of that same subject yet unpublished sitting on the shelf.

*     *     *

People equate writers with authors on the best selling list.  They don’t see your books there, and can’t understand why you are not available when they want you “because you are retired, aren’t you,” implying you can stop whatever you're doing because it is not that important.  But time is important, and there is no way of explaining that. 

Writing is self-directed and much of life is other-directed.  It is a profession in which you are largely alone but it is not a lonely profession.  If I am in a cage, and I can see where people might see it that way, it is a cage of my own design.  Knowing this was the impetus for writing "Who Put You In The Cage?" 

Some chapters of this unpublished work:

 (1) Who put you in the cage?              

 (2) Search for identity                          

 (3) Code of the soul                          

 (4) Will and a way                                      

 (5) Understanding others                            

 (6) Trying too hard?                           

 (7) Love what you do                            

 (8) Are you passionate?                               

 (9) Are you You?                                         

        (10) Selling yourself

        (11) Compulsions of Wannabes  

        (12) Signposts and Signs

        (13) Enablers and Chameleons 

        (14) Taking control

        (15) Choosing a profession

        (16) Job security in an uncertain world

        (17) Out of the mouths of babes

        (18) Celebrate life!

*     *     *

Some manuscripts don't stay on dusty shelves.  One day in 2007, I came across a long essay I wrote in 1972.  It seemed as apropos thirty-five years later as it did when I wrote it.  The title was, “Time Out for Sanity: A Blueprint for Coping in a Sick Society.” 

This was before the economic crash of 2008, but anticipated nonetheless as we were well into being the United States of Anxiety.  The book was titled “A Look Back To See Ahead” (2007).  It has a line that resonates to the moment: “Congress stayed the same, missed the changes, wouldn’t face them, and left the future up for grabs.”  After nearly a $trillion bailout of Wall Street, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the auto industry, Congress still remains like a petulant child.  It is why, Dear Curious, you may have a point.

Be always well,

Jim

*     *     *

COMMENTING ON RESPONSES TO "WE DON'T CHOOSE OUR PARENTS"

COMMMENTING ON RESPONSES TO “WE DON’T CHOOSE OUR PARENTS”

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© March 10, 2012

We are unconscious sponges, especially in our most formative years, of the stimuli with which we are exposed, none more so than with our parents.  Our unconscious minds are imitative minds.  In the process, much as we might wish otherwise, we become our parents.  This occurs, as our subconscious becomes the character of our personality.   

We are far less in control of this character than we may choose to believe.  Often the most disturbing aspects of our personality are mirror images of aspects of our parents that we most despised.

A middle age woman writes that she “hated” her mother in many ways for her whining and needy disposition only to discover one day she sounded just like her mother.  She said she laughed about it, but I wonder if it was a happy or derisive laugh.

Another person writes he would like to take me to task for being “so bluntly honest” about something "still painfully real fifty years later."  Pain is necessary to growth, and it is never too late to grow out of something that is imprisoning.

*     *     *

Forty years ago, I conducted a public seminar titled, “Let Me Introduce You To Yourself.”  In that seminar, I asked participants to describe positive and negative aspects of their parents.  These were summarized on flipcharts and posted around the room as descriptions of themselves.  If they could accept these as possible attributes of their personalities, they had a good chance of controlling their respective behaviors.

On another occasion, I conducted a retreat for top executives of a high tech company.  The weeklong affair included one-hour personal interviews with each of the thirty-five in attendances in which they were asked to describe positive and negative aspects of their colleagues.  I might add they did so with enthusiasm. 

With the help of my staff, we created condensed portraits of these thirty-five men and women, placed them on tables, and asked them to pick up the profile that most nearly fit how they saw themselves.  No one was successful in this identification.   

These were people who made decisions for hundreds of others and yet were lacking in either self-knowing or self-acceptance in terms of how others saw them. 

*     *     *

It is impossible to be in control while controlling the actions of others if self-ignorance is dominant.  Nothing is easier for manipulators than to exploit this ignorance to advantage.  The person, whatever the title or function, is little more than a puppet on a string to their devises.

Perceptive children know this practically from birth using it to get what they want by crying, creating a fuss, or pestering until they get their way.  Some people never rise above this strategy, as it is continued throughout their careers.  I’ve described them in my writing as “pyramid climbers,” that is, when there was an organizational pyramid to climb. 

Many of the young Turks of the offsite seminar cited above were manipulators par excellent, but just as self-ignorant as everyone else.

Self-awareness is predicated on self-acceptance.  Self-acceptance is predicated on realizing the engine of one's soul is in developing one's essence (unique self) and controlling one's personality (acquired self).  Otherwise, one is putty in the hands of others and never likely to realize traction to be all one could be.  Freud recognized that most of what is real within ourselves is not conscious, and that most of what is conscious is not real.  The exercise with the executives confirmed this.   

*     *     *                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

The parental paradigm is a useful touchstone.  We are becoming an increasingly repressive society as higher forms of sophistication become incompatible with the familiar roots of the family.  This has been going on at least since the Industrial Revolution.  The concern is it appears to be leaving us detached from ourselves. 

For those who see the family sacrosanct, my comments are considered just this side of sacrilegious, especially with reference to rebellion.  Human history according to myth began with an act of disobedience of Adam and Eve.  Disobedience was the first act of freedom, and the beginning of human history. 

In the context described in this missive, disobedience is a necessary step to individual identity.  My interest is not to offend, but to destroy the popular illusions that rebellion is not part of the rites of passage.  Intelligent involvement, aside from the native faculty, is a function of independent thinking with the moral courage to do what makes sense, and not simply to go along to get along.  

Loyalty is first to self with a commitment to others only in terms of what sponsors inner health and well being.  If another person exploits that health, represses that well being, or destroys one’s sense of worth, then that person is to be avoided even if it is a mother or father, brother or sister, or partner. 

Caving in to the demands of others is self-crippling.  It often rises out of fear, neediness, or an inner deadness.  The wisdom of inner security is founded on the recognition that there is no such thing as security.  We live in a world of uncertainty and can deal best with it by the associative synergy of like-minded souls.

*     *     *

   

Some wonder at my distaste of  “electronic contraptions” (my expression) and contempt for the corporation that I describe as “corpocracy.”  If that is how I am perceived, I apologize because that is not my intent.

On the other hand, these are contributory to the parental drift.  Children were once taught to be seen but not heard, to follow parental instructions to the letter without complaint, and certainly never to speak until spoken to, especially at meals. 

When industrial society took hold, a new formula was adopted that ended in the “organization man.”  He was like that nineteenth century child only now in the twentieth century.  It was not the family but the corporation that now was his home, and he expected everything from it that he once felt entitled to in the family as a child.  What' more, the corporation was willing to give this to him as long as he behaved as that obedient child, that is, until it could no longer afford to be so magnanimous. 

The twentieth century was an unconscious century, especially in the last half century, in which it felt no restraints, and was far better at describing problems than defining and solving them. 

Like in the family, workers were without conscience convictions, cogs in a giant machine.  They were not paid to think but to do, not to ask questions, but to behave, not to think critically, but to take orders, and not to have passionate interests because that might impede the machine. 

The problem is that man is not made to be a cog in a machine, not created to be managed, manipulated, mobilized and then dispatched when found redundant as if an inanimate thing. 

Social engineers used reengineering, job enrichment, empowerment and other cosmetic interventions to disguise the fact that the role of complacent passive workers no longer existed.  The corporation failed to inform these workers, and thus was born corpocracy, the secretive and deceptive scheme to put profits before workers, while giving workers the impression it was their fault when never party to the process.  

Corpocracy is spelled out in a number of my books.  Its unintended consequences were to make leadership a subset of management.  The result is that people are treated as things to be managed rather than individuals to be led.

With regard to my concern about “electronic contraptions,” my problem is not with them.  It is with their unintended consequences.  Fifty years ago, Erich Fromm wrote in “Beyond the Chains of Illusion” (1962):

“The modern individual is even more isolated and lonely than his grandfather was.  He goes to an analyst, to somebody else to listen to him.  He has the satisfaction of somebody who listens sympathetically and without accusing him.  This is important in a society where hardly anybody listens to anybody.  While people talk to ach other, they do not listen to each other, except for a superficial and polite hearing of what the other says”

Fast forward to today, and we see this problem has increased exponentially. 

*     *     *

My missive, as one person suggests, is not a war on parents.  If it were, it would be a very old war, a war I have had little to do with its perpetuation. 

The idea a half-century ago of the perplexity of parenting was organized around “transactional analysis.”  It looked at the individual in terms of that person’s “adult” and “parent” and “child” in the personality.  A plethora of books followed among them “Games People Play” (1964) and “Egograms” (1977). 

In Eric Berne’s “Games,” he demonstrated how the parent or child could come to dominate the adult personality with disastrous results.  The “parent” is described as the morality principle, or the judgmental part of our personality, the “adult” the reality principle, or things as they are, and the “child” as the pleasure principle, or impulsive side of our nature.  Berne’s claimed we have all three dispositions actively working in us. 

John Dusay’s “Egograms” differentiated further seeing a “critical parent” and a “nurturing parent,” the same “adult” as with Berne’s, and a “free child” and an “adapted child.” 

The “critical parent” has to always be right, the “nurturing parent” cares about the feelings of others, the “free child” is interested in sexual trysts, drugs and a carefree lifestyle without boundaries, and the “adapted child” is part of the cog in the machine, the safe hire that causes no trouble, who learns a job in a year and coasts for the next forty years.

Dusay's “free child” is a rebel but in a self-destructive manner.  On the other hand, the “adapted child” is close to my description of the thirty to fifty-year old worker with the working mentality of an obedient twelve-year-old suspended in terminal adolescence on the job.

*     *     *

The blue-collar working stiff is fast disappearing being replaced by factory level working professionals.  Likewise, corporate glasshouse skyscrapers are being replaced by ground level garage, basement and storefront operations at one-thousandth of the overhead as the new business model.  Meanwhile, the nature of work, workers and the workplace is changing 

Finally, of the many responses I have received, and I value them all, none displays the adult more than this one, a person who had to leave a brilliant career at the height of professional achievement because of an incurable disease, an illness that she does not allow to slow her down.  I close with her words that embody the essence of  “We don’t’ choose our parents”:

Thank you!  This missive is so very true.  We all do have a choice to not be our parents. I do not know why some of us are able to step out of that mold while others follow blindly after, but I am thankful I am one of those who chose to be different (but then, I was always a maverick and the "black sheep" of the family). I was still a maverick in my profession, going against some of the established "rules" or " regulations" of my profession in order to better serve our citizens. That was a great article.

*     *    *

To the request to list my books, note the following:

Sales Training & Technical Development (1968)

Confident Selling (1970)

Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches (1990)

Confident Selling for the 90s (1992)

The Worker, Alone! Going Against the Grain (1995)

The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend (1996)

Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge (1998)

Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leaders & Dissonant Workers (2000)

In the Shadow of the Courthouse: Memoir of the 1940s Written as a Novel (2003)

A Look Back to See Ahead: Our Chronic Culture Viewed from the 1970s (2007)

A Green Island in a Black Sea: A Novel of South Africa during Apartheid (due 2012)

--
 

WE DON'T CHOOSE OUR PARENTS, BUT THAT DOESN'T MEAN WE HAVE TO BE STUCK WITH THEM ALL OUR LIVES!

WE DON’T CHOOSE OUR PARENTS, BUT THAT DOESN’T MEAN WE HAVE TO BE STUCK WITH THEM ALL OUR LIVES!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 8, 2012



IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE: MEMOIR OF THE 1940s Written as a Novel (2003), I profiled several youths of that period, including an especially good baseball player who was short in stature but the complete player, being able to play all positions, hitting for power and average as well.  He is now suffering an incurable (macular degeneration) disease of his eyes, which prompted me to write a celebratory piece on him about that 1940s period. 

It turns out that he was shuttled about between families, often lived with his grandmother, then family friends in which the father of that family, a former professional baseball player, saw athletic potential in the boy, and breathed life into that promise, but not without creating angst and acrimony among his own boys.  Several candid exchanges with one of these boys, who is now in his mid-sixties, illustrates the difficulty of growing up without some resentment of one’s parents in the process, especially when there is a sense of little positive reinforcement.

WE DON’T CHOOSE OUR PARENTS

Sometimes parents make the way easy for us and sometimes not so easy.  Most parents provide adequate shelter, food, clothing and a climate for maturation into adulthood, but not always.  Psychological and emotional sometimes are the result that can last a lifetime.

We live in a compare and compete society.  This can foster envy, imitation and self-negation, the putting of ourselves down if we don’t realize parental attention.  It doesn’t necessarily end there when they remind us that they see it in our friends, believing this to be motivational when clearly it has the opposite affect. 

Parents compound the frustration by creating rivalry between siblings.  Children know what talents parents value and who among them possess such gifts.  All children are uniquely gifted but gifted differently.  Comparing one child to another, either inside or outside the family, finds the spurned child struggling to please pursuing assets not its own. 

Our institutional culture sets arbitrary norms as to what is important.  Currently, it is that everyone should go to college when societal needs and individual interests range far wide of this delimiting prescription.

The consequence is children become obsessed with what they are not at the expense of what they are.  With a focus on flaws, the process is counterproductive and everyone loses.  We try, sometimes desperately, to pursue what we are bound to fail in, while blind to what we do well.  Should we succeed at what is natural to us, we are likely to be unhappy in work and life, and to drift into mediocrity. 

THE DIFFICULT TERRAIN OF SELF-ACCEPTANCE

The hardest person to like, the most difficult person to accept is ourselves as we are, warts and all.  We are all imperfect but perfectible.  Perfection is the metaphorical rabbit chased around the greyhound track that is never caught.   

From our earliest experience, unless we have the fortitude to resist, we are told what we are, what we are capable of, what we can and cannot do, and where we fit in the scheme of things. 

It never occurs to us, because we are impressionistic, that the tellers and sellers have a vested interest in us seeing things as they see them.  Society is in the image business and we as children are seen as projections of that image.  It starts with our parents is reinforced by our teachers in school our priests in church our leaders in the community, by the pundits, politicians and entertainers in the media reinforcing that moment in time.

Social thinker Murray Kempton reflects, “Why America, did you, in your arrogance, teach so many of your children to hate themselves.” 

Alas, we do have trouble liking ourselves, which means accepting ourselves as we are.  We are too often in the pleasing business, which leaves little time for self-acceptance.  This psychology of the crowd prevails.  It personifies “true believers,” who unable to believe in themselves move instinctively to the amorphous mob for identity. 

Professor Billy Gunter calls this “ambient deficiency motivation.”  We become obsessed with what we are not: the sinner with being the priest, the criminal the cop, the poor student a professor, the ugly person a film star, the bully the counselor, the beauty the scholar, the nerd the athlete, the introvert the comedian, the coward the soldier, the alcoholic the preacher, the fraud the crime buster, the drug addict the vice squad leader, the farmer the dentist, the embezzler the banker.   

Because of the social climate and social networks, we run constantly from ourselves.  We equate affluence to happiness, luxury to the ideal existence.  So we read the books, copy the moguls, and become wealthy, only to discover we are a poor imitation of the self we once knew.  Psychiatrist Willard Beecher in “Beyond Success and Failure” (1966) says:

“Competition is a sign of persisting infantilism if it is dominating us after adolescence, a sign of retarded psychological development, a persisting childishness of monkey see monkey do, as we are trapped in imitation.”

PARENTS ARE PEOPLE

Parents as people identify what they are or believe themselves to be largely by projecting and experiencing those ego ideal projections through their children.  If they don’t find that identity there, they look for it elsewhere. 

Parents as people don’t always choose the right mate.  As a result, they and their children suffer sometimes torturously. 

Over fifty percent of the baby boomer generation end marriage in divorce.  Two generations before it was much less common.  Yet, divorce may prove the medicine that saves the family and preserves a modicum of sanity and happiness. 

Children born a half century or more ago often suffered through loveless marriages and contentious divorces.  Love is hard to survive in such circumstances, especially for the children.  Once adults, these children are likely to find it difficult to love, to make commitments, to take hold, as they have little or no acquaintance with love.

Parents as people struggle to make a living.  They don’t have to apologize for that, don’t have to make excuses to their children for not being able to give them everything they want, everything they see their friends as having. 

Love has no price tag.  When I was five, and we were finally a family, of my sister and me with a father who had no job.  At Christmas, he told me he had gotten my little sister, age three, a doll, but he had no money for anything for me.  I still remember his candor as an expression of love.  Perhaps it explains why I have never been materialistic.  Things don’t turn me on, ideas and behavior do. 

Parents are likely to find it impossible to be loving if love does not fuel the marriage.  Too often parents express words of love as a substitute for caring, use material success and the gift of “things” as a substitute for involvement. 

An equally devastating posture is for parents to act as if they were never young, never vulnerable to mistakes and blunders as they seek to be heroes to their children knowers not learners.  Yet life is a constant learning process.  There is no safe middle ground where it is permissible to coast.  It is why we call graduations “commencements,” or new beginnings.

Parents as people don’t have to carry their children throughout life.  Nor do they have to provide a safety net for them when they fail.  Failure is the best teacher in life, success tends to be the worse.  If children are prevented from experiencing the consequences of their action, then no learning takes place, much as children might insist otherwise. 

That failure without taking stock, and dealing accordingly with the consequences will be likely be repeated, ad nauseam.  Parents can be there for moral support but they can’t own their children’s problems. 

PAIN + RISK = GROWTH

There is a lot of pain and confusion for children in growing into adulthood, especially between the ages of thirteen and eighteen.  During those years, they are transitioning from being a child and extension of their parents into a person.

From that point forward, matters become somewhat complicated.  There is a natural competition between being a satisfactory projection of one’s parents, and dealing with the pressures and influences of peers.   

Peers can be more dictatorial and demanding than any parent ever was.  They do this by taunting, cajoling and pressuring us to behave as they would have us behave.  There is no cowardice in refusing to drink alcoholic beverages, smoke cigarettes, do drugs, or have casual sex, but peers can make it seem so.  This gets truly complicated because there is another simple formula I have devised to explain the difficulty:

BELIEF (VALUES) + BELONGING (ACCEPTANCE) = BEHAVIOR

Implicit blackmail is a device of peers in withholding friendship and inclusion in a desired group.  Philosopher Gustave Le Bon says three people can be a crowd.  He goes on to say a crowd is never a good index of rational behavior or authentic identification.  If there is a clash of values, it is evidence that it is not the right group for us.  Respect is key, and if none is shown to us as we are then acceptance is a ruse and wrong for us. 

The adult world looks ominous even threatening when we look beyond the bosom of family to other connections.  Often we find these new associations as conflicting and contradictory as we once judged our parents.  Yet the desire to connect is a normal one.

Adulthood, once taken for granted as an ordinary progression, is now avoided as if a chimera. 

People of fifteen to fifty today escape into an elaborate world of fantasy once the domain of children.  It is the digital age.  More excuses exist today to never grow up than ever existed before.  It is now possible to remain suspended in an adolescent mindset from birth to death distracted in some kind of nonsense.  It is not that the digital age is bad.  It is that it owns us rather than we own it.  So, by default, the digital age has become a device to postpone growing up forever. 

PARENTAL CONTROL AND ITS FALL OUT

Some parents refuse to relinquish control of the child as they fail to see that child capable of being a person independent from them.  As Kahlil Gibran says in “The Prophet” (1972):

“Our children are not our children.  They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.  They come through us but not from us, and though they are with us yet they belong not to us.”

Parents must earn the love of their children; children deserve the love of their parents without qualification. 

Parents should not expect their children to love them because they are their parents.  They didn’t bring themselves into the world, their parents did.  Parents should be obliged to take a course in parenting before being allowed to be parents, but of course that will never happen, although no job is more difficult. 

Often parents demand the love of their children, which is impossible, and instead receive compliance at best and resentment at worse.  Love is not automatic.  Nor is it a quid pro quo proposition.  Parents can neither demand love nor respect but must earn both. 

This involves guiding, not controlling, encouraging, not demanding, discovering what children do well (strengths) and where they need help (weaknesses).  Parenting is not a zero sum game where children accumulate debt owed to the parents later to be collected.

Nor is it wise for parents to live through the achievements of their children as if it were their own achievements if they are not equally willing to share in children’s failures. 

Children loved with genuine affection will return it to parents ten fold. Children want to make their parents proud of them, but they want to think it was their idea and not their parents.  There are many convolutions in a loving family.

Children would prefer to see their parents as facilitators rather than dominators of choices made.  Controlling parents see their involvement as an expression of love when it cripples independent engagement.  Moral character is shown when children as young adults stand up to parents politely and respectfully in pursuit of their own agenda.  

Two controlling mothers of history might scoff at this suggestion.  The mother of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt left her comfortable estate in New York to live in Washington, DC when he was president.  The mother of General Douglas MacArthur not only dominated her son, but his wife as well. 

Psychologist Judith Rich Harris considers parental dominance a myth.  In her book, “The Nurture Assumption”(1998), she suggests that parents have far less influence in the way their children turned out than do their peers.  Put another way, peers are more controlling. 

The book resonates with me as I have written, “Tell me who your friends are, and I’ll tell you who you are” (The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, 1996).  Obviously, the last word has not been written on the nature/nurture controversy  

It is clear, however, that we are attracted to people who accept us as we are.  When I asked a young man I was counseling, who had gone to prison for petty crimes, why he had associated with such unsavory characters?  He answered, “They were the only ones who would accept me.”

STIGMATA

Childhood can mark us with a stigmata of shame that never fades forcing us to be obsessed with what happened years ago, a fault line that may handicap us for life. 

A professional woman was telling me that her hundred-year-old mother, still with all her faculties intact, constantly complains to this day that she had to drop out of school to work and was denied an education. 

A few generations ago, especially during the Great Depression, many could echo her sentiments, but not today.  Despite this positive climate, there are people in there thirties, forties and fifties who are still waiting to find traction.  They suffer from a similar stigmata escaping into elaborate digital distractions not realizing that the future is rushing upon them with toxic regrets.   

No one is immune to this fatal syndrome whatever their socioeconomic situation, education or profession. 

Seldom in my working life as an industrial psychologist did I find people without emotional scars of regret or a sense of betrayal. 

Rarely, would they admit their psychological disfigurement was a matter of self-fulfilling prophecy.  Invariably, they complained and looked for scapegoats for their failure to make adequate progress.  Even if they made suitable progress, but found little satisfaction, guilt and remorse were the drivers of their despair in the form of “I could have been.”.

People can make a great deal of money and hate their work if it is not what they would prefer to do.  They feel duped, having sold out, feeling shame for the doing.  It can be a matter of being in the wrong company the wrong profession the wrong work or in the wrong relationship.  They gravitated to where they are by avoiding risk or enduring the pain of delayed gratification to be and do what they preferred.  Then there are those who have never sat down and asked themselves what they would actually like to do or be. 

The ninety-nine percenters of “Occupy Wall Street” are not new.  They have been legion wherever I worked in the United States, Europe, South Africa or South America.  They are people who have never connected.  Miffed that they are so handicapped, unable or unwilling to do anything concrete about it, they join the crowd, or stay where they are and retreat into six passive behaviors.  In a book, I call these “Six Silent Killers” (1998) behaviors that have contributed mightily to our global competitive disadvantage. 

ARE WE SUSPENDED IN PERMANENT ADOLESCENCE?

It may seem arbitrary but we are a nation that refuses to grow up. 

Childhood is often extended well beyond the age of eighteen with children still living at home, being supported by their parents, in heavy debt to them, living in the virtual reality of electronic games, partying as if there is no tomorrow, or living off a partner without taking hold of anything permanent in a quest to postpone growing up until middle age.  Stuck with the consequences of those postponed decisions, there is often no one to blame, but one’s parents. 

It is our parents fault they didn’t make us do the right thing, their fault that we didn’t buckle down when young and instead drifted from one thing to another, their fault that we didn’t go to college, or complete our college education, their fault that we married right out of high school, their fault that we are not in better financial shape, their fault that we are not happy.

When we reach the age of eighteen, we are attracted to its freedoms and privileges but intimidated by its responsibilities and sorrows. 

We prefer consequences to dictate our decisions for then we have a built in excuse when things go awry.  It wasn’t our fault.  We allowed the situation to control us rather than for us to control the situation.  The adult world is a competitive world, a world in which the idea of fairness does not apply.  It is a political world in which people are attracted to people like them.  If you are not one of these people, no matter how good you are at what you do, you are unlikely to break through the network.  So what do we do? 

There are several things we do.  We do nothing, pray that things will get better, and drift, afraid of failure so we have no chance for success. 

We stay stuck in a job we hate and blame the world for being so stuck.  The irony is where we are is exactly where we belong because we cannot see ourselves anywhere else.

We have a meeting with ourselves, seek help, and come to understand we are the problem.  We then adjust our desires to balance with our potential and prospects, and seek qualification in some kind of work.  We grow up. 

As much as our national tradition resents the idea of a class and caste system, no society since the beginning of time has ever escaped the business of social, economic, political, religious, cultural and ethnic boundaries. 

We have a natural affinity to be with people like ourselves, and a natural aversion toward people of differences.  As much as we are a melting pot of nations, we stay pretty much within our own ethnic group.

The irony about boundaries is that they exist mainly in our heads, which explains why we limit our parameters often to the point of suffocation.  People are people the world over, and once we penetrate the façade of self-protection, we gravitate to what we have in common.

The support system of the family, as imperfect as it may seem as a child, can produce a rude awakening once it no longer exists.  Once that safety net vanishes, we are exposed to the real world where the good, the bad and the ugly operate with enthusiasm. 

As inscrutable as we might find our parents during our adolescent years, as contrary and clueless as they might appear, chances are we will have no idea what they have endured until we are ourselves parents of teenagers. 

Generations change but disdain and disgust of the intransigence of parents never changes in the minds of teenagers.  Rebellion is a natural phenomenon.  It is necessary to achieve personal identity.  Some children rebel early, others late, and still others never.  Those who never challenge their parents are unlikely ever to grow up.  Their lives become a permanent lie founded in self-deceit in which unhappiness has a permanent home and adulthood is a distant mirage. 

It is probably why we have so few adults today in our institutional society.  Our collective culture has little interest in growing old and therefore growing up.  American life is predicated on being a juvenile forever.  We preserve our adolescence with tummy tucks and face lifts with mind enhancing drugs with films and books and music promoting virtual reality where entitlements have no limitations and the national debt causes no real sorrow.  . 

Last year I wrote a series of four missives on “Retreat from Adulthood” (June/July 2011).  It was before I had read the nineteenth century philosopher Gustave Le Bon only to realize that we have a long Western history of juvenility. 

We are our own parents, which means much as we may resent our parents it magnifies self-resentment.  It is nearly impossible to cope in this world we have created with so little self-regard.  A word to the wise: make peace with your parents now.

*     *     *