IS OUR QUEST FOR SUCCESS KILLING US?

IS OUR QUEST FOR SUCCESS KILLING US?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2005

Corrupt influence is itself the perennial spring of all prodigality, and of all disorder; it loads us more than millions of debt; takes away vigor from our arms, wisdom from our councils, and every shadow of authority and credit from the most venerable parts of our constitution.

Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797)
English Statesman

Shame may restrain what law does not prohibit.

Seneca (4 B.C. – 65 A.D.)


At one point in my life, when my work took me about the globe, I thought what ails the world was the “American Disease,” CORPOCRACY. In my writings, I go against the grain and claim business is the prime practitioner of this disease if not its architect.

I have come now to understand that corpocracy is only symptomatic of this disease. For the reader not familiar with my work, I claim CORPOCRACY consists of ten elements of management:

· It is insensitive to its employees;
· It supports company politics at the expense of productivity;
· Secretiveness is the controlling aspect of communication;
· Documentation is its principle product;
· Endless meetings get in the way of productive work;
· Its focus is internal while its language is external;
· Its planning is proxy for action;
· Individual initiative is suspect for you never know where it might lead;
· It is isolated from operations by the insulation of mahogany; and
· It overtly praises while covertly discouraging innovation.

Corpocracy, outlined here, is the working (not the theoretical) model of most multi-national corporations despite all the electronic wizardry of the moment. The evidence is palpable with a predisposition to treat people as things to be managed rather than people to be led.

We see this from the recent New York transit strike over the 2005 Holiday Season to the constant battle of Wal-Mart to put a halo on its business by a full-court public relations campaign, rather than quietly dealing with internal problems directly. We see it, too, with employers of steel workers, autoworkers, airline employees, and retail clerks across this nation, and now it is infecting other parts of the globe as well.

Missing in the paradigm is that most people, wherever they are, prove to be quite reasonable. They want a living wage, but along with the living wage the respect, dignity, trust and freedom to do the job. Not all pay is in coin.

The curse is that we are addicted to progress, and progress is impersonal.

People are a thing in this equation, which finds them being hired and fired at whim as the economy fluctuates, and it fluctuates radically because progress is its most important product.

The fall back position of corpocracy is that entitlements are killing companies, which I addressed nearly a score of years ago (Work Without Managers 1990).

The disease, I have come to concede, is not corpocracy. Success is the disease. No company can ever have too much success, even if its success is at the expense of killing the land, killing the sea, killing the air, and killing the spirit of the workers who grind at the core of progress.

Success is the narcotic that has found companies losing their moral compass and way. Sartre says an authentic life is lost when what people do has little to do with what people would prefer to do. It is the same with companies.

Companies have jumped aboard the treadmill, which goes faster and faster. Rather than get off when they can't keep up, they attempt to slim down to stay on. They do this by cutting and trimming, and downsizing, and reorganizing, and reengineering, and doing whatever is the current fad to stay aboard.

It never works because companies lose their identity in the frenzy. Companies are dying like the land, the sea, the air and the spirit of their people that they have unwittingly killed.

Success has resulted in the world being turned inside out with the natural perverted to the unnatural, the good to the bad, and the sensible to the ridiculous. Small wonder that we have corruption, collusion, wire fraud, bribery, duplicity, chicanery and scandals of all description. A singular appetite for success with reckless abandon feeds this beast.

Once sensible people viewed a little comfort, a roof over their heads, clothes on their back, food on their table, the company of family and friends, and a job to go to enough. The rest was fluff.

It is this fluff that has made success a disease, and its master driver, corpocracy.

This finds research scientists painting spots on laboratory animals at the Sloan-Kettering Research Institute to corroborate research data. It leads renowned physicist William Shockley, a Nobel Laureate, to fudged research data on race to show whites superior to blacks. It results in Dr. John Darsee, a brilliant young doctor, creating fictional medical studies, getting gullible and lazy famous medical scientists to “co-author” these works.

Once these works were published and found bogus, scores of papers and abstracts had to be rescinded, damaging literally thousands of works where other medical scientists had referenced Darsee’s works.

It underscores the blatant denial that cigarette smoking is harmful to your health of a panel of tobacco CEOs before the US Congress, when they held the overwhelming evidence of this fact in their bulging files.

Most recently, an esteemed South Korean scientist, Hwang Woo-suk, admits his stem cell research is unhappily counterfeit. A national hero, the drive to achieve, to win adoration and acclamation was too heady for this scientist when success was the Siren.

Even the great discovery of DNA and the “double helix” by James Watson and Francis Crick is not without its chicanery.

The key to the discovery was the exhaustive basic research work of the late Rosalind Franklin. She spent thousands of hours in refractory X-ray analysis of coal, exposing herself to excessive amounts of radiation. Exposure to this took her life in her mid-thirties, or before the Nobel Prize was awarded to these two men, along with her boss, Maurice Wilkins.

Incidentally, Wilkins gave the vital X-ray photograph of crystalline DNA in A form to James Watson without her knowledge. Once he and Crick saw this photograph the rest, as they say, was history.

Watson in his best selling book THE DOUBLE HELIX (1968) referred sarcastically to Dr. Franklin as “the dark lady,” because of her singular dedication to research and little inclination to small talk. Watson and Crick were model builders far removed from the laboratory. The American biochemist, Linus Pauling, already a Nobel Laureate, was hot in pursuit of this prize as well, but an ocean and a continental coast away from his enterprising fellow American Watson.

Science is grossly Machiavellian when reduced to transparent success.

We live in the so-called “scientific age” with miraculous scientific breakthroughs taking precedence in status to billionaire CEOs, or to corporations growing ten percent per year. The marvel of success has shifted and with it our moral moorings.

While some think a McDonald’s on every square mile of the planet typifies American crass materialism, others believe industrial global expansion mirroring that of the United States is killing the planet. If true, it would seem the quest for success has become iatrogenic, or the economic cure worse than the disease treated.

While half the people in the world have no decent housing, clothes to protect their bodies from the elements, enough food on their table, or even a job to go to, but instead are subjected to unimaginable terrors, the other half of the well-fed world are dying from too much of everything.

Dubious success is a disease that fractures the soul, kills the spirit, and plays havoc with the capacity for moral goodness. It is not because success is necessarily bad; it is because it has been turned inside out exposing devious motivation.

Look at history and you see war and terror are at root dissatisfaction: the “haves” look for justification, the “have-nots” for satisfaction.

Traditionally, religion has assuaged this division. Now, it is part of the problem, as science has eclipsed its roll and is meant to provide the solution. The new knights of the periodic table, however, are proving just as vulnerable to this crippling disease of success with its driver, corpocracy. Einstein was on to something when he said, “Science without religion is lame, and religion without science is blind.”

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Author’s note: Dr. Fisher’s books and articles address this concern, with an in depth discussion in his not yet released book, “Near Journey’s End: Can the Planet Earth Survive Self-indulgent Man?”

AN IMPRESSIONISTIC YOUTH MANY CHRISTMASES AGO!

AN IMPRESSIONISTIC YOUTH MANY CHRISTMASES AGO

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© Christmas 2005

As dreams are the fancies of those that sleep, so fancies are but the dreams of those awake.

Sir Thomas Pope Blount (1649 – 1697)
English Author

The Christmas Season was always a nostalgic period in my hometown of CLINTON, IOWA on the banks of the MISSISSIPPI RIVER, which often froze over because of the cold. Of particular significance was the ITEN CHRISTMAS DISPLAY, which the Iten family always erected on their majestic estate on South Bluff Boulevard.

Frank Iten, who with his brother ran and then sold the ITEN BISCUIT COMPANY, which was known in those mid-twentieth century days as The Snow White Bakery. The company was sold to NABISCO, which wanted to gain the patent rights to the brothers’ saltine cracker formula. So, now you know the origin of “Saltine Crackers,” an invention of two enterprising brothers in a little town of 30,000 on the Mississippi River.

The Christmas Display was a hobby of these two men that grew in eloquence and elaboration over the years, becoming a tourist attraction bringing people from far and wide to view this winter delight.

Author and Clinton historian Gary Herrity has poignantly captured the sense and sensibility of this attraction in his columns in The Clinton Herald, noting that the Iten brothers employed a couple dozen men to design, build, construct and set up the elaborate lighting and sound system to bring the display to state-of-the-arts perfection. This was the era before electronics, computers, or touch-of-the-button synchronicity.

This is all also mentioned here because Iten Christmas Display plays with the mind of an impressionistic youth in the Christmas following World War Two, when the display was moved.

What follows has appeared in a published story and will reappear in another form in the present novel I am writing, titled THE TRIPLE FOOLE.

I was a student at St. Patrick's Grammar School on Third Street and Fourth Avenue North, which has since been erased from sight if not history this past year. I had attended a Friday Novena, which is a series of Catholic worships on nine successive Fridays, with my mother, and was going to Warren's Grocery store on Fourth Street and Fourth Avenue North, or west instead of directly north to my home.

My mother was going straight home as the temperature was between 10 - 15 degrees below zero on this early December night. Christmas was weeks away, but the Christmas spirit had already lightened my mood in anticipation. It was a time when Christmas was treated as the Holy Season, and the focus was on the celebration of the birth of Jesus. The Clinton Herald was resplendent throughout the season with pictures of the Nativity Scene, the Madonna, and of the Three Wise Men.

I might add that this was a very devout period of my life, going to mass and communion every day, trying never to swear, think bad thoughts, or lie, preparing myself for what I thought was to be my vocation, as a priest in the Jesuit order. It was my mother's wish and I thought God ordained.

It was a very dark moonless night, crunchy cold, too cold to snow, but it had snowed the previous week. So, each step I took made that crunchy music with my feet like stepping on eggshells.

As I approached Fifth Avenue North on Fourth Street, after going to Warren's, on my way to Six Avenue North and home, I heard this ethereal music and saw this misty light emanating from Congregational Hill, what we had always called "Hoot Owl Hollow," but which had been purchased by the Congregational Church.

A faint light and even fainter sound emanating in that direction startled me. Instinctively, I stopped, made the Sign of the Cross, and then a vision of the poor children of Fatima crossed my mind. Between May 13 and October 13, 1917, The Lady of the Rosary, or the Madonna appeared at Fatima in Portugal on six occasions to three simple shepherd children, giving them profound messages for the Church and the world, many of which came true. I shuddered with the thought that I was about to be visited by the Blessed Virgin Mother, and I was not ready! I was not worthy!

I actually fell to my knees in the snow directly by the side of Kirkwood Elementary school, where the cylinder fire escape shoot snaked down from the second floor of the school, a slide I often crawled up to slide down, shivering now, not so much from the cold as from the idea that I was either losing my mind or about to have a beatific vision.

Not only was I not ready, I knew nobody would believe me. I wanted to retrace my steps from whence I had come all the way back to St. Patrick Church, but my legs wouldn't move. How can I escape the Virgin? I asked myself, answering, I can't!

My mind was oblivious to the few passing cars, and fortunately, no one else was on the street it was so cold. Then I made out the music as "Silent Night."

I picked myself up, so embarrassed and humiliated that I shouted with a vapor trail leaving my mouth, "Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!"

I swore I would never tell a soul, not even my best friend, Bobby Witt, and never did, until I wrote about it. Not yet a teenager, it was, however, an experienced that changed me. I promised myself that I would take life seriously, but never myself. Only a boy, I realized how impressionistic my mind was, and how impressionable I was. It is probably why I became a chemist, and later a psychologist.

Some who think me a bit cynical, were they to know what I share here, could trace it like a wire back to its source where wisdom and folly reside.

If you read my more than a million published words, the hint of that night is buried in there somewhere, which all started when the location of the Iten Christmas Display was changed.

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IDEAS CONTROL THE WORLD -- OUR DEBT TO PLATO!

IDEAS CONTROL THE WORLD

OUR DEBT TO PLATO

Ideas control the world.

James Abram Garfield (1831 – 1881)
Twentieth President of the United States of America


James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2005

If you want to identify the source of the joy and sorrow, the pleasure and the pain, beauty and ugliness in the world, you would do well to see the connection of these emotions to ideas that have spawned them, ideas once born were doomed to be interpreted and reinterpreted until they often meant the exact opposite of what they were intended to mean. Take the idea of brotherly love.

Religion for all its assertions that it is the righteous possessor of truth is at root an idea. This was brought home to me in Time magazine (December 12, 2005). Andrew Sullivan, in his interesting article, points out that the new German Pope Benedict XVI’s draconian measures against gays for being or becoming priests are inconsistent with the idea advocated by Jesus to hate the sin but never the sinner; that “he who would be without sin cast the first stone.”

It would seem that ideas like everything else erode with time and are reduced to acronyms such as, “WWJT?” – or – “What Would Jesus Think?”

Author Sullivan reminds us that Jesus wasn’t into stereotypes. Take Mary Magdalene. She was a sinner in the biblical sense, but Jesus did not reject her, but embraced her as a person worthy of love. Jesus believed pigeonholing people into categories was not only wrong, but also not useful.

People of ideas don’t have to write books, be revered by the public or courted by people in power. People such as Socrates and Jesus captured the spirit and weaved the invisible themes of their times into a tapestry of thought that would grow in prominence far after their parting.

WESTERN THOUGHT AND AN UGLY LITTLE MAN

Socrates was an ugly little man in the physical sense, but beautiful in a soulful sense. He wandered about Athens engaging his fellow citizens in debate without portfolio or prominence. Plato, on the other hand, was tall and handsome and born around 427 B.C., when Socrates was 42.

In his late teens, Plato became enraptured of this peculiar man, as did several of his aristocratic friends. They followed Socrates through the streets of Athens, accepting with good humor as he reduced their patrician arrogance to students lost in a wilderness, a wilderness that he understood and walked every day.

The importance of ideas is as much on how they arrive in the fabric of society as to whoever becomes the personification of their expression. You will see in this series of little essays that the men of ideas may have relevance to our time, but it is also important to note that their ideas were created out of the world they inhabited, a world that often misunderstood them as well as their ideas.

PLATO’S TIME

Plato came of age during the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, the war in which Athens suffered a total and humiliating defeat in 404 B.C. He was twenty-three when the war ended.

Sparta then imposed a dictatorship of thirty tyrants, some of whom were Plato’s relatives and Socrates’ fellow students. This led to corruption, chaos, confusion, and rebellion with democracy eventually being restored.

The irony is that it was the new democratic government of Athens that tried Socrates for religious heresy and corrupting of the youth of Athens. He was executed in 399 B.C. by choosing not to recant his ways or to admit the charges of corruption by swallowing hemlock. Plato was then twenty-eight, and never held democracy in much esteem thereafter.

This wrenching event found Plato turning his back on public life, inspiring him instead to turn to philosophy. But first, after the execution of Socrates, he had to flee to safety with other followers. Plato took temporary refuge in Megara in Greece with the philosopher Euclides. He then traveled widely in Greece, Egypt and Italy and commenced to write his dialogues in the format of the conversations Socrates had had with his fellow Athenians.

A decade later, now thirty-eight, he traveled to Syracuse in Sicily to study Pythagorean philosophy, eventually returning to Athens in 387 B.C. at the age of forty, founding his Academy. Aristotle was among his young students with whom we will learn more in a later essay. The Academy discussed philosophy and mathematics and lasted until A.D. 527, or nearly a thousand years.

He returned to Syracuse in 367 B.C. at the age of sixty in an attempt to mold the city’s young tyrant, Dionysus II, into a philosopher-king, which was his utopian idea of governance. It failed to take hold. He revisited Syracuse six years later in 361 B.C. to attempt the process again. It failed so miserably that it placed him in personal danger and he had to flea for his life.

He never made such an attempt again, but turned his complete attention to the dialogues that featured Socrates as the protagonist. These secured his reputation. He died at the age of eighty in Athens in 347 B.C.

THE MORE THINGS CHANGE THE MORE THEY REMAIN THE SAME

Plato lived in a transitional period both for Athens and for the Greek civilization. There was a literary boom in his time as histories and philosophies of the past were recorded and critically studied.

Meanwhile, religious rituals and myths of the gods and titans were coming under greater scrutiny after the death of Socrates, as scholars and philosophers were adopting a more worldview compared to Greece’s more relaxed ethnocentrism.

A whole set of traditional values had fallen into doubt led by itinerant philosophers known as sophists. They preached that morals were relative and not specific. For a fee, sophists provided instruction in rhetoric and debate selling people with the idea the only measure of what is right or true is who comes out of the debate on top.

Sophists capitalized on the vulnerable void left by the disenchantment of citizens with ancient myths and religion, as the Greek world moved toward a more rational aspect.

Old values no longer computed with what people were experiencing in their own lives, and therefore these values were losing their relevance. With no new values to replace them, moral relativism became popular with sophist bravado being taken as wisdom.

It was a time when man was searching for understanding of the world and his place in it. This thirst for knowing would give birth to Western mathematics, science, psychology and ethics, as well as Western philosophy.

Sophists were relatively new in Plato’s day, but he considered them from the first the enemy of virtue. His Republic is his answer to sophist relativism, using dialogue to find a solid grounding for moral values posing questions of popular positions, and then using dialectics to cross-examine these positions to recognize and refute sophist errors and assist readers in making positive discoveries in rational principles.

Plato perfected this style over time by the systematic process of dividing a position into parts and then making generalizations that would advance the idea.

For example, Plato’s “theory of forms” maintains there are two levels of reality: the visible world of sight and sound. We can recognize beauty in a painting or hear it in a voice, and therefore have a general sense of beauty whichever form it takes.

This capacity to recognize beauty is abstract and therefore invisible and lives in the mind. We take the conceptual beauty with us as memory and it lives in our minds as an extension of us.

Plato, however, does not develop this theory of forms, as he apparently felt no such need. It was self-evident. In essence, the “theory of forms” represents his attempt to cultivate our capacity for conceptual and abstract thought, something we still struggle with to this day.

In the Republic and Phaedrus, Plato describes the soul as divided into three parts: sensual (appetite), spiritual, and rational. He explains our psychological complexity partly to provide justification for philosophy as the highest of all pursuits, and being representative of the highest part of the soul, the rational part.

Psychology grew out of philosophy. What is interesting is that psychology has never found a more comfortable home since leaving its philosophical roots. At various times in the past century, psychology has mimicked mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, and science, never quite leaving religion. There are more than sixty disciplines and sub-disciplines in psychology today. Small wonder the expression “homeless mind” has come into prominence in recent decades.

Plato acknowledges and seeks to explain the fact that we all experience inner conflict. This is the basis of his psychology. But his theory seeks not only to explain this inner conflict but also to present the rational part of the soul as superior. Philosophy, according to Plato, is essentially the practice of refining our rationality.

Another contribution of Plato is that he recognized the importance of education as an aspect of community health and well being. He would be appalled to see that education has become essentially job training instead of life enhancing.

Perhaps hard to believe, but Plato was into pre-natal care with exercises for pregnant women to ensure the healthy birth of their babies.

Plato grew to maturity in a transitional society in which corruption was rampant, moral standards had been discarded, and people were easily inflamed by seductive and hollow sophist rhetoric. He saw his fellow Athenians eating, drinking, and indulging in unrestrained sexual hedonism and concluded his generation was hopelessly corrupt. He recognized a society with a corrupt soul is not inclined to listen to arguments of the efficacy of virtue, or that a virtuous life is a better life. So, he redirected his energies.

Instead, he turned his attention to children. His focus was on teaching children from an early age to live virtuous lives and to seek wisdom. That was the aim of his Academy. Education, he insisted, provides the child with a tolerant as well as discriminating mind, a mind that can be molded into embracing rather than denying reality with the goal to make for a better world. No one has ever improved on this idea, or indeed, on this agenda.

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Author’s note: This is one of a series of Dr. Fisher’s essays on “Ideas Control the World.”

NEAR JOURNEY'S END & HORNS OF THE DILEMMA!

My book NJE & The Horns of the Dilemma!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2005

Reference: an email to a concerned friend regarding the state of the planet with reference to my book, not yet published, Near Journey’s End: Can the Planet Earth Survive Self-indulgent Man?

Ned,

Last night the spokeswoman for the Inuit Eskimos was on Jim Lehrer. She was talking about how climate change at the polar cap is negatively impacting the whole lifestyle of the natives, as well as the animals. She was one of the delegates at the Montreal Conference on Global Warming. She also was quite gracious finding satisfaction that her people's situation managed to get on the agenda. But she expected little satisfaction beyond that. Sad.

Then I happened on a segment on the BBC concerning a small nation in the Himalayas called "Butan." People of this nation have suffered similar plight to that of New Orleans. When lakes formed by melting snow, snow that never before used to form such lakes, the security the communities below are put in jeopardy.

What happens is that the walls of these lakes overflow their weak natural barriers, and cascade down the mountainside. One city was nearly wiped away in the 1990s.

A statistic was thrown out that startled me. A diplomat from this country said that there are over 200,000 such lakes in these mountains, and the possibility exists that his entire country could one day be wiped out.

Mention was made also on this program that US accounts for one-quarter of the CO2 pollution of the planet. This was not new, and of course the US leads in leaderless leadership, and there is little sense that this will change. On the contrary, the US has become the Pied Piper to oblivion, as if everyone is marching to the end of the earth and falling off in merry cadence.

But what was most astounding of all was to see, while France and Germany are reducing their emissions in double digits, countries such as Portugal and Spain and Ireland are increasing theirs in double digits.

I experienced this directly when I was with Honeywell Europe in the 1980s as these countries were then on the initial phase of their late Industrial Revolutions. And then of course there is China, our imitative twin, which is the second greatest polluter on the face of the earth, and doing everything it took us a century to do in a score or so of years.

I had a modest agenda for my book, Near Journey's End: Can the Planet Earth Survive Self-indulgent Man?

I am neither a crusader nor even a well-informed scientist on global warming or pandemics for that matter.

What I am, at least I thought I was, was capable of framing a problem and how its nascent incipiency has developed into what it is today with my "cut & control" explanations over the past few thousand years.

My book was not meant to be a compact "WOW!!!" book nor was it meant to be, but an opportunity for the reader to see how religion, politics, government, culture, history, science and man's eternal solipsism measured his superiority in a gauge called "progress." The book is peopled with the heroes of our Western civilization, which might be the planet's greatest enemies.

As much as self-interest dominates man, I know that chances for him to wake up are not good. One pandemic won't be enough, but a series of pandemics and "natural disasters" -- disasters created naturally by man's artificial disruption of nature -- will have to hit him again and again and again.

When they do, and I have no doubt that they will, I would like for this book to be available so the reader can see where man has been, where he is now, and where he is going, and why.

I don't expect man to wise up and make the major sacrifices because I think it is going to take a series of major disasters to get his attention.

Just as Catholicism and the Inquisition kept man in the Dark Ages, science and its dogmatic hubris has put man into a Dream World.

President Bush is right. Had the US imposed the Kyoto Accords; tens of thousands of American jobs would be lost, threatening the American economy. I think it would be closer to millions of jobs and possibly throw the country into a major depression.

As one scientist said from this conference in Montreal, being somewhat empathic with the president, "Fossil fuels will have to be replaced by other sources such as solar energy and nonpolluting other means. Science and technology have to find the answer, and they will." I wish I were so confident.

Not only the US but also the world sits on the horns of the dilemma.

Be well and have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
Jim

THE PERIPATETIC PHILOSOPHER'S DILEMMA!

The Philosopher’s Dilemma

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2005

A philosopher and an oyster have each their respective stations. The oyster fulfills the law of his existence (whatever it be) as long as he lives, and at length for the nourishment of the philosopher. The philosopher leads a life of learned ease, which he employs in ingeniously arguing (or attempting to argue) away the first instinctive principles of nature, reason, faith, and religion.

Charles Moore (1790)

Philosophers, unlike scientists in general, tend to show rather than to hide their feelings, that is, in the era of Hume, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Robeck, Montaigne and Donne. When mathematicians and scientists moved from their respective disciplines into philosophy, in the era of Russell, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche and Heidegger, in other words in more recent times, feelings were there but disguised in arguments that drifted far from these sensory moorings. Feelings connect us to community, not intellect, and when feelings are well disguised, and intellect is celebrated as if some magic wand we may wave at a problem, situation or condition, we have the world that we experience today in all its contradictions.

A philosopher, if he is to be of any moment to his age, it would seem to me should not only know but acknowledge a distinction between the general laws of nature and the human powers of matter and motion, and the particular movements of an individual body in that climate, culture and time.

The philosophers who were more openly expressive of their feelings lived in a more believing although increasingly skeptical climate, where man was not so highly and hastily exalted. These philosophers communicated by a sense of the Deity, while the latter, the philosophers in more recent times, saw matters were more within the compass of man’s agency, and the discharge and satisfaction of these matters, more depended on the individual’s free will for their direction.

No matter what the argument, if you go deeply enough, and ferret through all the claimers and disclaimers to the core expression of value, and philosophy no matter how much the philosopher may insist it is “value free” philosophy is forever value laden, you will see that the doctrine of local good, otherwise better known as the “common good,” has all but disappeared from the consciousness of postmodern Western man, replaced, as it were, by a doctrine of the private good, better understood as “personhood.”

In the quote above of Charles Moore, it is taken from his book titled A FULL ENQUIRY INTO THE SUBJECT OF SUICIDE. So, while Western man believes that in his God-centered universe life is precious, and has always been so, think again.

Man has been moving away from the consensus belief in self-preservation and towards the justification of self-murder for centuries, and nearly on the same schedule as man has moved away from a centrifugal Deity.

Long ago, argument was given that “a man’s life is his own property, and therefore may be disposed of at a man’s own pleasure.”

Such arguments were more common in academia in the last few centuries than in general society, but eventually shop talk finds its way into the fabric of social existence.

Fore example, in most recent times, it has not been the physical deed but spiritual death that has been the instrument of self-murder. This has been epitomized in a lifestyle that has created a scourge of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, lung cancer, stomach cancer, genital cancer, AIDS, workaholism, ambition, exhibitionism, celebrity worship, mental illness, jealousy, envy, sloth and rage.

Things have become more important than persons, and persons equate and justify their station and existence on the basis of things accumulated at the expense of a dying soul. The will is a nobler power of the soul than is the intellect. And the will, in Freudian terminology, no longer has the superego as a “lid on the id.” Intellect has surrendered to the child of the universe.

Put otherwise, we have lost our capacity to distinguish voluntary, violent, and mixed actions, having no standard by which to measure them other than a drive in which no one is at the controls.

The success of voluntary actions depends on having a good or a bad will on check. Violent action is action that has an external principle which, when opposing cannot be resisted by the active or suffering man. A tsunami may sweep a man up without recourse, while a man may voluntarily walk away from a fight that has no purpose other to fuel his pride.

Mixed actions arise externally by force, and internally from the will, which find us wavering and vacillating. Recently, a young lady while driving home from work at dusk in Tampa hit and killed two young boys in an African American neighborhood. The right thing to do was to stop, and render aid, and comfort, but she went home. Her parents in collusion with her attempted to hide the act, justifying it in the belief that she, being a white woman, was in danger for her life having killed the children in a black area. This is the private good taking precedence over the local good.

What prompted this discourse is that I have had an interesting reaction to a recent missive of mine (“When did God make color a sign of quality?”). I attempted in the piece to understand why an African American businessman was treated as a criminal by Wal-Mart when he attempted to purchase $13,600 worth the Holiday gift certificates for employees, when his company had been doing business with Wal-Mart for years. My question: was it only because he was black?

Most of my respondents were from white people, as I am white, and all of them were reasonable, intelligent and perceptive of the situation. Missing was an expression of feelings for the man and what he experienced. I can’t imagine, myself, ever being treated this way and not being seriously injured, but I am a feeling philosopher.

The responses were overwhelmingly intellectual but not one of them implied an understanding or what it must have felt like to be black and so treated. One African American respondent admitted that he had never been so treated, and considered being lucky. But was it luck, or something deeper? That is what I hoped to learn.

As always, I am appreciative of people willing to share their views, and I always learn from them.

But my point, and the reason for the philosopher’s dilemma is that the question goes beyond simple argument to a mindset of the private good versus the mindset of the local good that I feel is endemic to our times.

The young lady mentioned above was tried and put on house arrest for two years, meaning she will serve no prison time but will remain at home. Only a year ago, a black man and immigrant to this country, driving a truck in my area of Tampa Bay, hit and killed a youngster. He did not leave the scene of the accident, but attempted to render aid. He was tried for vehicular homicide and sentenced to ten years in prison, which he is now serving. I might add that he had no police record, was not emotionally or physically impaired, in other words, had no drugs or alcohol in his system, and yet he begs the question of my earlier piece, which I sense is not soon to come. My hope is that virtue wins out for this young woman and young man and that they find solace in their souls for embracing the future even though the hand of justice was not blind.

© December 2005 James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D., the Peripatetic Philosopher.

WHEN DID GOD MAKE COLOR A SIGN OF QUALITY?

When Did God Make Color A Sign of Quality?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2005


Prejudice is the child of ignorance.

William Hazlitt (1778 – 1830)
English critic

When I was in graduate school as a mature adult, having gone back for my doctorate after a career spanning the United States, South America, Europe and South Africa, I thought I had experienced the ultimate in societal prejudice in South African apartheid.

For those of you not familiar with this policy, the Afrikaner government of white South Africans, after coming to power in 1948, created this policy of “separate development of the races.” It was designed to send the majority of South African Bantu or blacks into several different homelands, homelands that were outside the urban-industrial wealth bearing regions of the country, while expecting the Bantu and Coloreds, or those of mix races to carry identity cards to validate their presence in the white areas.

Moreover, the policy was such that a person of race could be held ninety days without charges, and this could be extended another ninety days should the courts so desire. When I lived there, the white population was about 3.5 million mainly of Dutch, French Huguenot and British ancestry, while 14 million were Bantu and Coloreds.

I lived there in 1968 when apartheid was being fully enforced. It is gone today with the majority Bantu population now in power. What made the policy especially disconcerting to an American is that I was in South Africa at the same time Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was being assassinated, which made it hard to defend our American policy of tolerance and freedom.

Still, at the time a young man in my thirties, the South African experience was so wrenching that I resigned my executive position with a chemical company, and did little more than read, write a little, and try to understand what I had experienced for a period of more than two years. At the end of that period, I went back to school.

During this self-imposed sabbatical, I wrote some articles on South Africa attempting to create a balanced view, but abandoned a project of writing a South Africa novel. Now more than a quarter century later, I still haven’t written the novel, and I still try to understand how my company, and my fellow Americans with whom I worked were not as deeply wounded by the incongruity of my company’s principles and actual policy in the field.

Some of my colleagues accused me of being an idealist, others a romantic, and still others of being a breast-thumping liberal. I saw myself as none of these, but only as a person growing confused seeing the company playing games of duplicity, while purporting to being upstanding and holding to the beliefs that all men are created equal with certain unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Then only the other day I read of Reginald Pitts, a black man, who carries out an assignment of a white colleague, who wasn’t available, to buy season holiday gift cards from Wal-Mart, something that his company has done for years to the tune of $50,000 per year, and he is subjected to the nightmare of being treated as if a criminal attempting to pass a bogus check of $13,600, something that had never happened before to anyone in his company on a similar assignment. And I was outraged. South Africa came back with a vengeance.

A Wal-Mart spokeswoman stated, “Our company is built upon respect for the individual and we have no tolerance for discrimination of any type.”

The statement made me think of my company in South Africa. It not only made such statements but put out brochures to that same effect. But in practice, and I know directly from experience, if you were too familiar, too relaxed, and too accommodating to Bantu, as I was my driver, and the servants in my home, you were called on the carpet with a statement to the effect, “This is not your country. Do you want to get deported?”

My point is that the offending party in this case, the Wal-Mart person who might be reprimanded or possibly even fired for this prejudicial behavior, is not the boogeyman.

It goes far higher up the tree, if it is anything like my own experience. The rhetoric, the official policy, and all the company’s talking heads when the mike is on will serenade the listener with the same melody of tolerance. It is, however, the casual conversation one hears among executives or employees during relaxed periods on the job, or in the privacy of their homes far away from the crowd that you are reminded from the highest to the lowest in the pecking order what is the prevalent mindset. Then there are those sidebar conversations, like the one that I alluded to, where you are told the lay of the land, but “don’t quote me on that.”

We have seen it with Katrina in a most blatant way, but we see it every day in little ways, ways that irritate but are not life threatening as they were with Katrina. Reginald Pitts, who experienced this shopping nightmare, sadly, may speak to the rule rather than the exception.

Curtis Stokes, who is a 37-year-old Tampa vice president with the Fifth Third Bank, a member of the private University Club, an exclusive Tampa business and professional organization, and a father, and first vice president of the Hillsborough County (Tampa) chapter of the NAACP, said he isn’t surprised at what happened to Mr. Pitts. He says people see him first as black, and stare at him with fear in their eyes, why he doesn’t know. He has had undercover security officers trail him in department stores, cops pull him over when he’s driving a block from his Tampa Palms home, one of the upscale neighborhoods in Tampa. “It’s one of those things no matter how you dress or act, you’re a black guy at the end of the day.”

What is especially sad about Mr. Stokes’s remarks is that he is now teaching his seven-year-old son to dress and act in non-confrontational ways, to act essentially invisible so that no harm will come to him. I heard about the same words from my driver in South Africa for his son. “You’re a Kaffir,” he told his child, “remember that, don’t look them (whites) in the eye, just go about your business.”

A few years ago, when Barry Bonds had yet another tremendous year, a Tampa businessman said to me, “He’s one hellava black player.” I corrected him, “He’s one hellava player who happens to be black.” He looked at me as if I were tilted, turned away and said, “Whatever.”

This problem is not one of color but culture, and it is deep in our society’s veins, and cannot be changed without a cultural value transfusion, especially now that Caucasians are increasingly the minority in the world’s population. Ignorance is no longer bliss.

The referenced articles appeared in The Tampa Tribune, Nation/World section, December 3, 2005.

WHEN THE LEADER LOST THE TRIBE -- PART FOUR: MAJOR LAYOFFS & WHAT THEY MEAN!

When the Leader Lost the Tribe

Part Four



James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 2005



I think it’s nothing less than a prostitution of good sense that the Federal Government bails corporations out of their excesses while workers are made to take the pain. In years past, it has been working slobs like myself who have gotten the pink slip at Christmas time, but now, guess what, there ain’t many of us. So I’ve got no tears for college boys and girls getting the heave ho at GM, Merck and God knows where else at this time of year. See how they deal with it!

An email from a reader of www.peripateticphilosopher.blogspot.com


You listen to Market Place on National Public Radio and the commentators are in euphoria because the market has gone up with GM set to fire some 30,000 employees over the next few years, while Wall Street is not quite so elated at Merck’s promise to trim its workforce by some 7,000 workers, having expected it to be more. Most of these workers being “let go” are white collar or indirect labor, that is, they don’t touch the product in production.

This is the fourth in a series of essays on the leader and the tribe. These little essays have not been meant to provide the solution to the problem but to frame the problem so that those experiencing it can more accurately define it. Once defined in content and context, mistakes can be examined, changes made, and some sense of recovery initiated.

My remarks have been limited to corpocracy in a non-military context, but the same behavior is equally endemic to the military as it is to commerce, industry, academia and the religious. David Brooks and other journalists have been trying to understand the military in Iraq. Typically, the coalition forces launch a successful attack on an insurgency strong hold, wrought out, kill or capture the enemy, and then leave. Insurgency fighters reclaim the area, and launch their counterattacks from the same place, only to have another coalition force repeat the same insanity again. The military comes away with the phrase “not enough troops,” which is no less ridiculous than a corporation claiming “not enough profit,” trimming its operations of tens of thousands of workers, then turning around and doing massive rehiring as profits rise, only to again repeat the same scenario a year or two later.

Crises may be caused, or corporations collapse, not necessarily through some extraordinary chicanery in the first place, but from multitudinous cases of petty betrayal, or individual neglect, the kind that has become so rampant in today’s society. This betrayal or neglect goes relatively unnoticed until corporations clean their hands once again, and divorce themselves from their honored commitment to their employees.

A corporation’s announcement to investors that it will “save $5 billion” by releasing 30,000 workers, sends the stock price inching up, and creates the faux feeling of relief that a couple feels after a stormy marriage is dissolved, or a bankruptcy is put behind them.

Each sees the situation as a “second chance,” but unfortunately, is likely to repeat the same petty betrayals that put it in this position in the first place. The casualties of these excesses are buried in individual neglect of the workers in the case of the corporation, the children in the case of the couple, and creditors in the case of the bankruptcy. We see little learning in each of these instances because national statistics inform us that they are all on the rise.

“The soul and spirit that animates and keeps up a society is mutual trust,” writes English writer Robert South (1634 – 1716).

Trust is at issue and trust is what has created the great divide.

The leadership doesn’t trust the workers; doesn’t understand the workers; doesn’t confront the workers; doesn’t demand of the workers; doesn’t make the workers suffer the consequences of their untoward and disruptive behavior; attempts to bribe the workers into compliance and conformity with entitlements and praise; fails to tie rewards and promotion to productivity, allowing eighty percent of the work to be accomplished by twenty percent of the workforce; falls prey to the eighty percent whose largest contribution is showing up for work, spending the rest of the time politicking, socializing, flattering management, dividing and conquering, spawning rumors, and playing games of misdirection.

Power always has the most to perceive from its own illusions. Leaders in memorial have incurred more hazards from the follies of their own that have grown up under the adulation of parasites -- the eighty percent non-performers -- than from the machinations of their competitors.

I have participated in downsizing, redundancy exercises, and I can assure you that the eighty percent most assuredly that should lead the roles of the “let go” seldom are. The reason is simple. While the twenty percent doing most of the work are performing, the eighty percent not doing the work are measuring the lay of the land, and creating failsafe positions when the pink slips are handed out. These workers, whom I have described elsewhere as suspended in terminal adolescence in arrested development, know one thing, and that is that the leadership is not confrontational, and will avoid conflict at nearly any cost.

Paradoxically, the twenty percent doing most of the work have little time for games, and may grovel and complain amongst themselves, but take their pink slips and go out with little fuss.

The leadership knows this, and to its disgrace, uses it against such workers, which means it uses itself against itself. Indeed, the adulation of parasites does more to drive a wedge between productive workers and work, and a climate of trust than all the corporation’s competitors combined.

The clarion call to the younger generation of professional workers is to set principle above expediency in the approach to employment. I am not suggesting that these workers imitate the behavior of the eighty percent I allude to here, but that they protest frequently and politely wherever or whenever there is a breech in fairness, consistency, ethics, the equity of rewards and punishment, and opportunity and promotion.

The realist faces and deals with the facts, and the only facts he is likely to see, unless he is especially attentive, are those presented to skip suspicion or challenge or doubt. If that is the case, there can be compliance, which is always coercive, but never cooperation, which is always voluntary. Cooperation comes from challenging directives and directions until they are understood and agreed upon as consistent with one’s ethics and standards. Workers cannot go on indefinitely sitting on the safety valve.

In the context of trust and in terms of finding a bridge between the leader and the tribe, three things are eminent: the recognition of the essential value of people as persons; the belief that all workers have a contribution to make; and that they should all have not only an opportunity to make it, but that they should be expected to make it.

One of the charades that the leader has allowed to develop which has taken the workplace off course and out of focus is the liberal idea that all men are created equal in ability, talent, and capacity to perform. They are not.

Liberalism that has invaded the workplace was not meant to proffer the idea of equality. It actually meant to provide the provision of reasonable opportunity for all workers. Where liberalism was right, but made a wrong turn is in its rightful rejection of authoritarianism, which is anachronistic in today’s world, sponsoring instead the spiritual values of justice, freedom, and tolerance. Where liberalism made a wrong turn was making these higher than the ideals of discipline and efficiency.

Leadership didn’t have to throw the baby out with the bath water; it didn’t need to scrub the value of discipline and efficiency from the equation in order to emphasize these other values. After all, they are natural complements in a competitive world.

What the leadership needed to do, and hasn’t yet accomplished, is to realize that discipline and efficiency don’t need paternalistic authority to make them work in a liberal and liberating environment, because the interdependent partnership between leaders and workers involves them both.

It is in a spirited community where discipline and efficiency are married in happy enterprise with these liberating values that things get done, on time, and with the minimum of wasted effort or expense.

Draconian measures of massive layoffs brought an email to my attention, and prompted these thoughts. It saddens me to see this happening knowing that such measures are not the answer to the problem. They only make it more apparent why the leader has lost the tribe, and how the distance between the leader and the tribe continues to grow.

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About the author: Dr. Fisher has been a corporate executive with international experience with Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe, Ltd., having worked on four continents. He continues to write about these experiences in several books and articles. Check out his website for more information: www.peripateticphilosopher.com

THE MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE -- A PSYCHOLOGICAL POINT OF VIEW!

THE MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE -- A PSYCHOLOGICAL POINT OF VIEW!
The Mystical Experience
A Psychological Point of View

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 2005

Author’s Note: This was a presentation at an ESP Adventure Seminar, The Tides Bath Club, St. Petersburg, Florida 33711 on November 11, 1973.

You step off the curb and a speeding car misses hitting you by inches; a powerful current pulls you under in Tampa Bay, and you nearly drown, but are saved by your eight-year-old son whose rubber raft is there when you surface, although you had instructed him not to go into the deep water; you are working as a chemical engineer in a chemical plant when an electrical line malfunctions throwing you ten feet without injury; you complete a consulting call at a petrol-chemical plant and miss by minutes being one of more than a hundred causalities when multiple explosions rip through the facility; you are accosted early one morning in Washington, DC by three rowdy youths set to rob you, when they have a sudden change of mind; you have a head on collision with a van that totals your Oldsmobile, and sends you flying into the back seat, crushing your car like an accordion, presumed dead, emergency crews attend to the van driver who was thrown clear of his vehicle, when you suffered no serious injury, only shaken up; you are high-lined in a transfer basket between two ships in a storm and the crew on one ship loses the torque of its line, dumping you into the angry sea, but are pulled eventually to safety, drenched but unhurt; you are on another vessel that is quarantined because of an Asian flu epidemic being one of less than a hundred on a 1,400 man crew untouched by the disease and still able to work

To say these experiences have had a spiritual impact on me, who has experienced them, begs the question, but are they mystical experiences? I'll let you decide. This is obviously a Christian perspective. I suspect many readers may be more interested in the psychic or metaphysical, and therefore not highly tied to the Christian ethic. Others no doubt would still be Christian, but not traditionally so. The mystical experience has been recorded and related in all cultures from Chinese, Hindu, and Egyptian to the tribal cultures of the Indians of the Americas and the Eskimos. My purposes here are to develop a psychological point of view, and to do that effectively, I have taken the liberty to make it somewhat personal.

Mysticism is not the occult in my view but the patterns of enter light that guide one through situations that cannot be explained otherwise. Are they happy accidents or mystical experiences?

With regard to mysticism in particular and the occult in general, I am what you might call a non-believer. Yet, I'll admit there are supernormal situations and occurrences that cannot, or cannot yet be explained in normal terms, that have been known to occur. Mystics throughout history have recorded them. The Roman Catholic Church calls them "miracles."

Mysticism claims a direct communion with the ultimate reality, which we commonly call God. The occult, on the other hand, relates to matters involving actions or influences of supernatural or supernormal powers or some secret knowledge of them. I believe life is mysterious, but I am suspect of this premise.

Krishnamurti provides words to express my doubt:

“How easily we destroy the delicate sensitivity of our being. The incessant strife and struggle, the anxious escapes and fears, soon dull the mind and the heart; and the cunning mind quickly finds substitutes for the sensitivity of life. Amusements, family, politics, and gods take the place of clarity and love. Clarity is lost by knowledge and belief, and love by sensations.

“Does the tightly enclosing wall of belief bring understanding? What is the necessity of beliefs, and do they not darken the already crowded mind?

“The understanding of what is does not demand beliefs, but direct perception, which is to be directly aware without the interference of desire. It is desire that makes for confusion, and belief is the extension of desire. The ways of desire are subtle, and without understanding them belief only increases conflict, confusion and antagonism. The other name for belief is faith, and faith is also the refuge of desire.

“To most of us, life has no meaning but that which belief gives it; belief has greater significance than life.” (Commentaries on Living: First Series, pp. 55 – 56).

Why is that I wonder?

There are many mystifying things in life as I have already alluded to as possible “happy accidents.” The mystical experience is perhaps the most beautiful known to man. But what is it?

Paul the Apostle, the converted, the tortured saint was many things: gifted, sensuous and guilt ridden. You need only read his "Letters to the Corinthians" to register a sense of this. He was at a constant war with his own spirit and exorcised it in his zeal to build a church. His spirit was bound so tightly to him until it finally sublimated into mystical expression and charismatic passion.

To suggest that each of us goes through this same painful sublimation as well might seem a stretch if not sacrilegeous, but think about it.

All of us wrestle with needs, desires and wants. We run into a wall when needs are not realized, which is manifested as frustration. This may grow into anxiety. Anxiety can sink into depression and even despair. If not careful, petty neuroses can blossom into full-blown psychoses. We are fragile, but we are mystical in our fragility.

Some have found purification through the flesh. Others have realized purification by denial of the flesh. Paul chose the latter and grew. Augustine went the full route, first through the flesh and then through the flesh’s denial. Some of us cannot make up our minds which is right for us:

“If I must boast,” states Paul in Second Corinthians (Chapter 12: Versus 1 – 10), “it is not indeed expedient to do so, but I will come to visions and revelations of the Lord. I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago, whether in the body I do not know, or out of the body I do not know, God knows, such a one was caught up to the third heaven. And I know such a man, whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows, that he was caught up into paradise and heard secret words that man may not repeat. Of such a man I will boast, I shall not be foolish; for I shall be speaking the truth. But I forbear, lest any man should reckon me beyond what he sees in me or hears from me. And lest the greatness of the revelations should puff me up, there was given me a thorn for the flesh, a messenger of Satan, to buffet me. Concerning this I thrice besought the Lord that it might leave me. And he has said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for thee, for strength is made perfect in weakness.' Gladly, therefore, I will glory in my infirmities, that the strength of Christ may dwell in me. Wherefore I am satisfied, for Christ’s sake, with infirmities, with insults, with hardships, with persecutions, with distresses. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”

Paul found himself and in the finding discovered Jesus. And thus Jesus, who was an interesting man – I only wish we knew more about him for he was indeed a man of flesh and blood and sensuous form – was not allowed by tradition to be just that, a man.

Paul made Jesus into a mystical body by the sublimation of his spirit through transubstantiation into the body, and blood of Christ. This Christian dogma relates to the elements of bread and wine being transformed by God’s power into the substance of the body and blood of Jesus Christ by priestly consecration in the mass.

I am a Roman Catholic reared in this ritualistic tradition from a very early age with its dogmas stenciled on my soul with little chance of thinking otherwise. Doubters don’t buy this believing that one can reprogram oneself with little difficulty. It has been my experience the more one tries to deprogram oneself the deeper it drives the conundrum into one’s soul. Now, in my mature years, I have come to accept my Catholicism, renegade that I am, as much a part of my flesh and blood as I am a part of it. Moreover, I have come to accept that I have a Catholic mind and am a Catholic writer with all the limitations and possibilities that that might suggest.

Jesus is not as real to me in a mystical sense (body of Christ) as he is in a historic sense (as a man), ironically, largely because of the very human letters of Paul. Dogma and belief remain obstacles to this human foundation, as do the Catholic walls of guilt anchored in Paul’s salesmanship of sin. His great talent was not originality of design, but that of taking the words of the Old and New Testament and making them his own.

The only sin I know is waste, any kind of waste. Mortal sin, venial sin, original sin are constructs of this saintly architect. Still, were it not for sin and guilt, which consumed men such as Paul, they would not be nearly as fascinating.

The “happy accidents” reported in my opening remarks were not mystical experiences in the sense that they were surpranormal, but rather fortuitous to the extreme. Point taken.

A common mystical experience is psycho-sensual and psychosexual in nature. Consider how much the dance of life consumes our spiritual drive in out-of-body experience by entering that of another in pleasure and creation. Without this mysticism, where would poetry and literature be, indeed, all the arts? Mystics, as I hope to show, were no strangers to this duality.

It was the fall of the year and everything was dying, and no place more serenely so than in the quiet sanctuary of a cemetery. Here the stillness of eternity was my audience, with the ghosts of my ancestors in attendance. You could feel the moon caress the earth; hear the wind whisper through the grass as you made love for the first time.

She was young, as was I, virgins that didn’t understand how sacred the church we were entering was and would be for the rest of our lives. Was it love, or lust, need or desire, pleasure or pain? Or was it what the Greeks called aphesis, “the letting go”?

For the briefest of mystical moments the self is forgotten, dies, and is reborn in love. Just as the mystical experience cannot be sustained by hysteria neither can the act of love be sustained by the physical expression of it.

Not long ago I gave a seminar on humanistic management for a corporation. Management, pleased with the results, celebrated it by having a dinner for the hundred participants and their mates. Sitting beside the CEO, he asked, “Were my people responsive to your efforts?” I am one of those people you don’t ask a question if you are not prepared for the answer.

“Well,” I said levelly, “some of them came fresh out of the shower, naked; others never took off their overcoats in the summer’s heat.”

Then smiling to myself, remembering certain characters, I continued, “Some in fact put overcoats over their overcoats. But I suspect the naked ones learned something new, discovered something they will find useful.”

Pausing to study his expression, I could imagine he was doing the math of how much this outing cost, I added, “It has been my experience that if twenty percent of a group are learners and not simply knowers you are ahead of the curve.”

It was not what he expected nor was he happy with my assessment. I would imagine human resources led him to believe the seminar was a resounding success. All he wanted was a polite confirmation that justified the expense of the venture, which was in the five figures.

Clearly, the CEO was a member of the overcoat brigade. When you already know, already believe, and already understand, how can you discover anything new?

Now, the mystics of the past, who saw into themselves and found self-forgetfulness and called it “God,” were experiencing love, and were naked to experience.

We are enjoying a form of collective communion, whereas the mystics often preferred to find theirs alone, sublimating human need for affirmation and confirmation on a higher astral plane. The wonder is how little different their experience is to ours. Paul Zweig writes:

“To mount to God is to enter into oneself. For he who inwardly entereth and intimately penetrateth into himself gets above and beyond himself and truly mounts up to God.” (The Heresy of Self-Love, p. 23)

These are the words of an Arab mystic which are analogous to intercourse with self and invite wondering.

Augustine, in the Ninth Book of his Confessions echoes these sentiments:

”The good, which I now sought, was not outside myself. I did not look for it in things, which are seen with the eyes of the flesh but the light of the sun. For those who try to find joy in things outside themselves easily vanish away into emptiness. They waste themselves on the temporal pleasures of the visible world. Their minds are starved and they nibble at empty shadows.”

Augustine was very much a man of the flesh. When his ardor had cooled, he became a man of God. He never saw God as the Christ. He always referred to God as the Light.

There are two distinct but complementary currents in Christian feelings and worship. One is directed towards God, the Eternal and Infinite Spirit; the other towards His incarnate revelation in Jesus Christ.

In technical language, there are three different ways in which God is so called. There is the theo-centric or God centered. God is realized under more or less impersonal symbols such as Light and Love. Then there is the Christo-centric or Christ centered. Here the mystic senses a direct personal communion with Our Lord. And finally, there is the phallic-centric or life centered. The latter has risen to some distinction as we have become increasingly self-indulgent and puerile in our obsession with the sensate.

The mystic Catherine of Siena (1347 – 1380) would have understood this struggle. For her, God was a pull between a life-centered need and a Christ-centered desire. She chronicled this in her “Mystical Marriage with Christ.” Here she candidly described her spiritual intercourse with Christ. Today, that might offend people inasmuch as Catherine had an orgiastic experience with Christ. Yet, her experience if the truth were known is as painfully true today for many who struggle on the horns of this dilemma.

My first real experience in mysticism was making love. Since then, I have found there are many ways of making love other than physical. All the mystics had an interest in it: St. Augustine, St. Francis of Assisi, Dionysius the Areopagite, St. Bernard, Eckhard, Tauler, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Catherine of Genoa, St. Ignatius Loyola, St. Teresa, St. John of the Cross, and Madame Acarie, and Boehme. I had the good fortune to read of these mystical saints as a boy, and found they all had love affairs with an idea or ideal.

Many of us have similar love affairs with ideas. Is it because we are afraid to have love affairs with something real? Do ideas keep us protected from confrontation with reality?

Is the occult world the world of ideas or is it beyond such a world? People who take the occult seriously, and many do, would appear to live in the world beyond the real. Others attempt to find something they already possess and cannot lose. Alan W. Watts likens this to operating in life as if we have our foot on the accelerator and brake at once burning up rubber and going nowhere, while William F. Buckley, Jr. simply calls it, “forward inertia.”

With all due respect, I am a skeptic that flip-flops through these worlds celebrating my ignorance. I have found the only way to unshackle my mind from thinking I know is to realize I know nothing; that life is a rehearsal for the game of eternity, and I am involved in this rehearsal and cannot escape the game.

We all know this, as Paul would say, in the body or out of the body, I do not know, God knows.

There is no need for me to confirm this because you already think it yourself. You think it in the shower, when you’re playing solitaire, when you’re pulling weeds in your garden, when you’re doing something that puts your mind on automatic pilot. I think the shower is the best place in the world for your muses to visit you. The second best place is taking a leisurely stroll through the neighborhood.

As you are cleaning your body, or walking the frustration out of your limbs, your soul comes clean in the process and clears your mind of detritus. Ever noticed that?

As you look in the mirror, drying yourself, truth smiles back at you in good humor. All our blemishes fail to diminish us, but tickle our spines. So, you have sag here, and a bulge there, clothing is the mirror’s way to cover our vanity, as knowledge and belief are the mind’s way to cover our ignorance.

The wonder is why we don’t see ordinary people as mystics, people such as the NFL player Joe Namath. He seems unafraid to live in the real world and to take it for what it is, which in my view is truly a mystical experience. I don’t know Joe Namath, might not like him, but it wouldn’t seem to matter to him because he likes himself, and celebrates life in his own inimitable way. It would seem he has experiences, mystical and otherwise, on terms that are real to him.

Chances are he has not read Gurdjieff, but he doesn’t have to. Gurdjieff writes:

“The sole means now for saving of the beings of the planet earth would be to implant again into their presence a new organ of such properties that everyone of these unfortunates during the process of existence should constantly sense and be cognizant of the inevitability of his own death as well as the death of everyone upon whom his eyes or attention rests. Only such a sensation and such a cognizance can now destroy the egoism completely crystallized in them” (All and Everything: First Series – Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson, p. 1183)

Gurdjieff, strangely enough, could write this and still not live it. He was another of the occult world who could not or would not “let go.” He talked incessantly about “self-remembering” instead of “self-forgetting” (which is love). Self-remembering is of course just the opposite of love. Still, Gurdjieff had a great following and has risen to a new prominence today.

I think Gurdjieff and the occult have had a revival because “self-hatred” appears rampant in our society. The occult exists in a secret world well above the petty games of survival. Gurdjieff made a wonder of himself in this world untouched by the common.

Ouspensky’s “In Search of the Miraculous” deifies Gurdjieff, while Gurdjieff adds to his own mystical reputation in “Meetings of Remarkable Men.” You get the same sense of wonder about this man in Thomas de Hartmann’s “Our Life with Mr. Gurdjieff,” and Fritz Peters’s “Gurdjieff Remembered.”

No doubt Gurdjieff was a clever man. He picked the esoteric brains of the best minds in the occult world such as Ouspensky, de Hartmann, and Osokin, and made a reputation for daring with their words echoing as his. To wit:

“Everything that people do is connected with sex: politics, religion, art, the theater, music is all sex. Do you think people go to the theater or to church to pray or to see some new play? That is only for the sake of appearance. The principal thing in the theater as well as in church is that there will be a lot of women or a lot of men. This is the center of gravity of all gatherings.” (Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, p. 254)

Ouspensky puts these words in the mouth of Gurdjieff sounding all the while the more like Ouspensky. The others do the same.

We are all vulnerable to the mystical, to the idea that someone else embodies the answers to our destiny that we cannot seem to discover ourselves.

We project on others degrees of knowing and wisdom, degrees of understanding and insight that escape our attention. We are all looking for a savior, someone that will lead us out of the dark forest of our confusion and loneliness; if not that, someone to quiet our pain and reassure us of our worth.

Some look for it in the bottle, others in psychedelic drugs, still others in sexual conquests, some in achievment, power and influence, and then, of course, those that are most vulnerable of all, in a mystical guru.

A young woman came to me after a seminar. Very attractive, she told me she was twenty-six, divorced, mother of a little girl, and then went on to describe her life and woes in the most intimate details. She went on and on until I finally said, “Why?”

The question startled her. “Why? I don’t understand.”

“Why me?”

“Well, it’s because you seem to have answers.”

“Thank you,” I replied with a smile, “but I don’t.” Disappointment masked her face. “What you are looking for,” I continued, “you will never find in me or anyone else. You are looking for a teacher, a guide, may I say it, a guru, perhaps even a messiah.”

She started to raise her hands in protest. “Please, hear me out,” I said quietly, “I’ve been there. It is not an easy place to be when you are fresh out of answers and it seems people with answers are all around you.

“You find yourself looking for a book, an idea, a belief, a church, something that will end your doubt and bring you back to yourself with a sense of peace. It is perhaps why I am here tonight sharing with you my take on the mystical experience. I am older than you are and if I have discovered anything it is this: what you are looking for is not out there, it is in here,” I said pointing to my heart, “and it is waiting for you to discover it. I don’t have it. You have it and you cannot lose it.”

Tears rolled down her eyes. She took out a Kleenex and wiped them with the tissue turning black with mascara. She forced a smile through the tears, “I can’t lose it, right?”

“Right!” I repeated.

I hope she found it. She didn’t return to the balance of the seminar.

Later, I walked into a session conducted by Helmi (Indian Medicine Woman) and made instant communion. I felt her in the most exquisite way. She gave me such exuberance, such joy. This thing lasted all evening until a person who was very unhappy with life tried to ram into my car as I was parking at a restaurant. When I got to the front door, there he was looking defiantly at me. I expected an apology so I suppose my look was no less defiant.

“What’s your problem, Mac,” he said.

“Don’t you know?” I answered.

“No idea.”

“You. You’re my problem.”

About that time, a policeman who witnessed the situation joined us. “Is this fellow bothering you?” he asked me.

“No, officer. He’s just a little surly,” I said not wanting to make any trouble.

“I’m what?” my surly friend said.

In the most uncharitable manner, I said, “Want me to define the word surly for you?”

There we were, the officer, the angry man, and me in all my pomposity. The fine state that Helmi’s presentation had warmed my spirit to had left me. If only that young lady had seen her guru now!

We flow in and out of trouble, in and out of highs and lows, in and out of joys and sorrows. The mind and experience meet and repeat the same natural phenomenon as if children of the moon with the rising and lowering tide. Then unexpected storms crash into our world and all semblances of order and control vanish as if they never existed.

I felt poorly the rest of the evening for how I treated that man. All the esteem that young lady had heaped upon me, and then reinforced by Helmi’s session, was flittered away. My mind flows like a river because life is a river. I wrote this poem to express this sense a long time ago:

Ever moving ever changing ever enchanting ever vexing
Forging through space climbing to mountains and sky cascading unto parch earth and green valleys
Growing muddy and putrefying every decaying ever stinking ever polluting ever stagnating
Becoming clear lucid pure sparkling happy invigorating refreshing
Gravitating from frigidity coldness coolness to comfort warmth hotness incontinent heat
Exploding particulate matter into flotsam and jetsam
Exposing arrogance aloofness stupidity affection flippancy irrationality
Bringing peace satisfaction power convenience temporality
Surrendering solace fulfillment tranquility transcendence essence
Experimenting with fear hate envy lust greed deceit pleasure courage happiness music
Searching for valor love hope beauty charity faith kindness caring
Creating chaos by raging abandoning destroying disfiguring lying distorting scarring killing
Inundating indiscriminately presumptively
Every singing ever praising ever soothing ever titillating ever mesmerizing ever enticing ever fantasizing ever duping ever using ever toying
Offering to play pray sport escape entertain travel dream nourish know see think feel
Making love laughter music war hate peace tomorrow
Causing growth atrophy health debility inspiration apathy discovery disillusionment
Establishing order by producing reproducing transforming transplanting transmutating transmigrating transmitting transmogrifying
Ever balancing ever imbalancing ever taking ever giving
Emulsifying demulsifying foaming defoaming coagulating dispersing scaling softening corroding electroplating sequestering precipitating hurting helping killing saving losing winning hating loving bombing building destroying remaking upsetting stabilizing confusing elucidating excoriating nurturing acidizing neutralizing beginning ending coloring decoloring oxidizing reducing liquefying solidifying catabolizing fermenting

Influent to
Effluent from

Nunc fluens of time
Tota simul of eternity

Being born existing living dying
Being buried

Eons after eons after eons

Without a rhyme or reason for
Without a known fons et origo or a fathomable terminus

With only a promised promise promised

Transporting this fragile tissue hope mankind by a swift noiseless pulling mysterious gentle ceaseless subtle mighty treacherous conflicting fascinating sweeping force

With an irresistible current

Carrying all to a sea of light or a sea of doubt [© James R. Fisher, Jr., October 1969]

Life is not a box. It has no beginning, middle or end. It is not a set of definitions, problems and situations. It is not a concept, not a simple handle or a complex abstraction. It is simply a river and we are all on it.

Edgar Cayce, dear friend of my uncle’s, Dr. Leonard M. Ekland, a noted psychologist in his own right, once told him that there is no system but only this river. It has taken me a good while to grasp this fact.

“Watergate” is an interesting word. It dates back to biblical times and has come to mean something totally different from what it is.

A Watergate is not an office complex, nor is it a gate for preventing the flow of water, but simply a gate preventing animals from going upstream. The present dilemma of our society makes watergate an interesting metaphor.

We have failed to see the river for what it is. Or for that matter, we have failed to see the gate for what it is not.

There is a Zen saying, “You cannot push the water.” This matches life is a river. So, what does this all have to do with the topic of mystical experience? Eric Hoffer says:

“Man’s thoughts and imaginings are the music drawn from the taut strings of the soul. The stretching of the soul that produces music is the result of a pull of opposites, opposite bents, attachments, yearnings. Where there is no polarity, where energies flow smoothly in one direction, there can be hustle and noise but no music.” (Calvin Tomkins, Eric Hoffer, An American Odyssey)

The mystical experience is all about tension that produces music. Instead, we have a society today that generates little music, but a great deal of noise. This is not stated for spite, but for the way it is at the moment on the river of life.

Mystics cannot save us from ourselves, reveal truths that only they possess, but they can enrich our illusions. One of the amazing things of life is that what is real is always simple. It is “we” who make it complex:

“That in living life, and wondering about life, and thinking about life, if you are lucky, you will discover some truth. And once you tell your truth to someone else that truth will become a lie because your truth is only true to you and none other.” (JRF, Fragments of a Philosophy)

Psychologists call this perception, while in mysticism it is called apperception. There is first the apprehension of the message, which comes to us from the outside world, and then there are the ideas, images and memories already present in our minds. The environment, then, of the mystic is carried into his truth.

When the mystic writes about truth, if he is a cobbler, he writes in the mystical expression of the cobbler, like Boehme did. If he is the son of an aristocrat and soldier, he writes of his mystical experience like Ignatius Loyola did. Loyola was a physical man with a fragile sense of machismo and so saw his redeemer as “that most powerful Wrestler, our boundless God,” reasoning that he must first wrestle with himself to obtain salvation. The order of the Jesuits, then, was meant to be “Soldiers of Christ.” Loyola was sort of a Norman Mailer of the Middle Ages.

It is the reason I stated in the beginning that I have a Catholic mind and am a Catholic writer. My ideas and reasoning grow out of that experience.

If you happen to be a person without roots, like Kahlil Gibran, your whole life is a river. The character of your mysticism is then an expression of the passing scenery envisioned on that journey. Read any of his works and you get a sense of this: “Life is love made visible as is all work an expression of love.”

Krishnamurti, too, essentially adopted by a rich woman, educated and then meant to be deified into heading a new theosophy, which he rejected, said, “There is no race, there is no religion, there is no system that you can use to discover truth. There is no method, there is no teacher. Truth is only discovered by you.”

He appears to be speaking to us but at the same time he is speaking to himself in all his gusto as he fought his whole life to escape the imprisonment of the devotion of others.

The only way you can discover truth is by being aware of yourself as you are, and others as you find them. That means accepting what you see for what it is and isn’t, no more, no less. For in seeing things as they are, there is no longer conflict but truth, and the joy of that truth is peace.

Simple, isn’t it? Then why do so few practice it? Or if they do, would we ever know? If they tell us, they have discovered truth then it is a lie.

One of the surprises when people study the great mystics is to realize that many of them were not very holy people, that they were physical, perhaps even immoral people. Listen to the words of Angela of Foligno:

“Being the while full of greediness, gluttony and drunkenness, I feigned to desire naught, save what was needful. I diligently made an outward show of being poor, but caused many sheets and coverings to be put where I lay down to sleep, and to be taken up in the morning so that none might see them. I was given over to pride and the devil, but I feigned to have God in my soul, and His consolation in my chamber, whereas I had the devil alike in my soul and my chamber. And know that during the whole of my life, I have studied how I might obtain the fame of sanctity.” (Evelyn Underhill, The Mystics of the Church, p. 101)

Now why is that? Why do we equate mysticism with morality? Morality is in the mind of the times, and it is sometimes quite unholy, as in our present age, virtue is often hard to come by.

Morality changes as it moves down the river. The candor of the mystic, Angela, lost in the wake of her confession, stirs us not.

Today, they are all holy, all apart from our earthily ways: St. Angela of Foligno, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Ignatius Loyola, John Duns Scotus, St. Francis of Assisi, and Madame Acarie. They worked hard on their own histories to become saintly. They went against the flow of the river, and fought nature to become good. But is this the lesson we want to learn from them about ourselves?

Eastern mystics as compared to Western mystics arrive at holiness without effort as they have learned to let go and to go with the flow.

Eastern mystics are not interested in becoming for to them holiness is already possessed by us, only waiting for us to recognize it in us. They remind us that there is no effort involved because what we already have we cannot lose. So, the way to see into things is not through effort but in being, something so easy that we cannot do it.

Krisnamurti reminds us that religion is not a church, but awareness of what is, which is reality.

Awareness is the key to everything, but we place so many obstacles in the way of it that we equate intelligence with someone with a great deal of information, when all this reflects is a constipated mind.

If we could wake up long enough from this sleep to see things as they are, we wouldn’t have to have so many dog and pony shows to entertain us. Of course, we like dog and pony shows, and hide and seek games, and all the other elaborate constructions of society that obstruct our vision. We don't want to see; we seek entertainment, not enlightenment; mysticism, not reality; religion, not education.

We want an edge, a religion of haves pitted against the have nots; an elite, occult, true believers, possessors in a world of the dispossessed. We see the world of losers apart from ourselves; the forfeiters bankrupt from we the solvent, lower animals dumb and needy while we scorn their limitations against our sagacity. Is there any wonder why we are disillusioned?

When I was young and very believing and very pure, I was very much afraid. I wrote mainly about and out of fear. I had been very successful but had little understanding why until I wrote a book, which became an international best seller in the selling profession (Confident Selling 1970). Fear, I came to understand, was not apart from me but flowed in my veins and was the source of my motivation.

When I understood this, fear left me while still being a part of me. Fear was always there but it did not get in the way. Fear no longer was a stranger to me. I still had fears, doubts and misgivings. I still encountered obstacles and barriers that frustrated and thwarted me. I still had unfulfilled needs, wants and desires. Yet, once fear became a companion to me, it no longer was my enemy. Fear retired to the shadows of my mind, but kept me alert to possible dangers, which is its primitive role in Nature.

Now in my thirties, I have had a remarkable career yet I am very average. This is neither false modesty nor humility speaking. It is the voice of awareness.

This voice has risen out of my spirit, not out of books. We have had a spate of tantalizing books – “The Games People Play.” “What Do You Say After You Say, Hello?” “I’m OK – You’re OK!” “What You Always Wanted To Know About Sex and Were Afraid To Ask.” “Transactional Analysis.” “Biofeedback.” “Alpha Potential.” – all meant to cure the disease while feeding it.

People don’t actually need a teacher or a book to tell them what they are much less how they are. They need only pay attention.

If you have ever notice, the people with the most hang-ups cling to their fears as possessively as if they were lovers. The last thing they want to get rid of is fear. What would they have to talk about? They read every book that comes down the pike that gives them a new fix on their fear, and a new vocabulary to express it to friends.

At the moment, it would seem our entertainment is self-remembering, not self-forgetting. It is all about self-hatred. We are much more comfortable expressing what is wrong with us rather than what is right about us; much more inclined to complain than to celebrate our good fortune; much more afraid when the other shoe will fall. We can handle failure far better than success, disaster far better than good fortune.

Alas, there is no handle, no theory, and no concept that will free us from ourselves except ourselves. A student says to me, “But this is so abstract. I need something concrete. I can’t use what you say. It is too flighty. I can’t put it together.”

I answer, “Can you feel my words?”

“Yes, I can feel them.”

“Then they are yours, not mine. Don’t try to understand me because feelings drive consciousness. Feelings are all that there is to being human when it comes to dealing with our fears.“

Intellect has the tendency to complex the simple into a quadratic equation of confusion. Facts have their place, of course, but facts cannot explain fears. If you can deal with your fears on a simple mystical plane, fine. But if you have to soar to astral planes, and some people prefer this, I think you will have robbed yourself of the full appreciation of the scenery along this river called life.

You have plenty of time to play these astral games when you leave life and return to eternity. Life is only a short visitation from your permanent home. Too many very bright people are afraid to experience life because they don’t think it deserves their efforts, or it is below their station. Intelligence is a gift and it is not personal. People should not treat it as if it belongs to them because it is so acutely present in them. It is something to be used in the service of others, and not hoarded as a miser might his gold.

Life is not fair and some people go from birth to death never knowing what it is to have the comfort of a full meal, soft bed or safe resting place.

Then there are those who have too many full meals, too soft a bed, and too much rest and still wait for life to provide them with what they want when they cannot define it themselves. They sit and wait to die for 50, 60, 70 or more years. They play martyr games for entertainment, telling anyone who will listen how bad they have it. They devour ideas and beliefs as they come down the pike. They divorce themselves from life and try to re-remember what it was like back home in eternity.

In an unpublished novel of mine, I describe such a person:

"Harry felt nothing toward them. Nor did he feel anything for his country, the state of the world, the state of the human race, for his wife, Sarah, his son, Timothy, or for the state of his mind. He was beyond feeling, detached from human sensation, by choice. He was not pro or anti social, or for or against anything or anybody. Nor was he a deist, atheist, or agnostic. He was beyond such definitions as enigmatic as an amoeba. He was in life but not of life.

"Then it happened! The eye saw the eye and knew itself. The soul looked into the soul and moved to another plane of being. In that instant, Harry understood all knowing, seeing the most complex products of man’s genius as simple toys of vanity, thinking in the seeing that nothing is more nor less than unity, that ego is a myth invented by man as companion to his soul. People paraded pass the eye and all were familiar and known, the most humble were the same as the most elevated, as was race the same, as was wealth the same, as was the most dastardly the same as the most saintly, as were the birds of the air and the crawling creatures of the land the same, as were the species that fly the same as those that swam the deep, as were all things the same. Harry was one with himself and with his universe. He had left his home but he was still at home."(James R. Fisher, Jr., © The Triple Foole)

To such an end, I wish you all the happiest of mystical experiences.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

© November 11, 1973; © November 28, 2005
posted by The Peripatetic Philosopher | 2:10 PM
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COMMENTARY ON SOCIETY'S DOUBLE STANDARDS!

COMMENTARY

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
Sunday, November 27, 2005

Note: What follows is my response to Joseph H. Brown’s column in the Sunday edition of The Tampa Tribune. Mr. Brown is an editorial writer for this paper, whom I have come to respect, and with whom I often correspond. His Sunday columns are always though provoking, reasonable and reasoning. He looks at various issues in the community and comments on them, while sometimes extending these assessments to the wider national community, especially as it might relate to African Americans and their challenges. We have never met but have some dots that connect us. He is a Midwesterner, reared in Chicago, but is an alumnus of the University of Iowa as I am as well. Although he is black and I am white, I often find his comments as relevant to me as to African Americans because we share a common culture. Many years ago, while calling on a client in Jamaica, a black physical chemist trained at the California Institute of Technology, he made a comment that resonated with me, “Real differences in people are not a matter of color but of culture.” I have always believed that to be true even when the evidence suggest some contradictions to that assessment.

In the present column to which I make reference, titled “Lady Justice Smiles On Debra Lafave.” She is the young lady that recently was given a sentence of house arrest and community service when, by law, she could have been sentenced to serve many years in prison for having an affair with a teenage boy. The mother of the boy wanted the matter to be done with, and not to have her son exposed to a national tabloid assassination.

Mr. Brown’s article, however, focused on the double standard of justice for men and women when it comes to sex with teenagers in their charge.

But that is not what prompted my response to Mr. Brown. It was this comment by him:

“What did disturb me about this case was the observation by a psychiatrist on one of the local morning shows: if she had been an ugly woman, she would be going to jail.”

Mr. Brown continues: “For years I’ve believed that the symbol of our criminal justice system – a blindfolded woman holding scales to be unbalanced by evidence – was outdated, if in fact it ever was realistic. Most Americans would agree that race, social status and wealth can radically tip the scales of justice.”

I wanted to confirm, in fact, corroborate his suspicion with regard to justice, but even in a broader context. So, I wrote the following:

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Joseph,

The most poignant comment in your column today was your reference to crime and justice being influenced by the "good looks" of the defendant.

There is precedence for this in psychology and psychiatry. Both have been shown by studies to (a) be more apt to see the client making a full recovery; and (b) to insist on a somewhat protracted therapy and counseling to that end.

Conversely, ugly people were shown to be regarded as much less likely to respond positively to therapy, and psychologists and psychiatrists were more apt to discourage continuing sessions with them.

Similarly, in industry, it has been my experience that not only were we more apt to hire good looking people of lesser qualifications than uglier applicants, we were even more likely to promote them, not so much on the merits of their actual achievements as to the fact of their physical appearance. Obviously, an elaborate rationale justifying such hiring and promoting has been sophisticated to an art form if not a pseudo science.

I once remarked to a fellow director when I worked for Honeywell Europe that there wasn't a single director under six feet of height, and although men are not routinely known to be good at gauging handsomest, the grooming of these people clearly stood out compared to their direct reports. It was as if everyone subscribed to “Gentlemen’s Quarterly.” He looked at me quite astounded, he a handsome man of six-three, trim and athletic, "Why does that surprise you? It's as it should be."

But should it? There once was a US senator who was quite brilliant by the name of Frank Church, who was discouraged from running for the presidency of the United States by his party promoters "because his face was too round." Senator Church suffered the photogenic anomaly of a trim body and a fat countenance.

In my writing, I've referred to our cosmetic culture, which supports cosmetic interventions, which in turn inevitably produces cosmetic results, and then we wonders why the problems that haunt us are never solved.

Subjectivity is natural to man, but it is a little disingenuous when man flaunts objectivity in the face of this narcissistic subjectivity, only to then wonder why justice is seldom served.

Debra LaFave, the person you refer to in your column, is indeed lucky. She got off without prison time for having an affair with a 14-year-old student, but that is not my point.

My point is that a definitive pattern has been established in our culture. She would seem simply representative of it. Viewing her on television, she looks more like a porcelain doll than a flesh and blood person. She seems to have perfect skin, perfect make-up, not a hair out of place, and the precise smile and movement of, well, a mechanical wind up doll. With all due respect, she may be a nice young lady with confused priorities, but from a distance she appears the epitome of our wind up mechanical culture carried to its arbitrary and self-deceiving perfection.

The same could be said of that young lady that accidentally killed those two young black boys, and then fled the scene of the crime with the support of her parents in the cover up, claiming, "she feared for her life" because it was a black neighborhood, as if blackness was an ominous threat.

Recently, we learned of a young black man, about her same age, who accidentally killed a person with his van. He attempted to go to the aid of the person injured. Unfortunate for him, he came from the islands, was an immigrant with no prison record, and no extended support system, and so was sentenced to a large term prison sentence for vehicular manslaughter. The press gave him little space or sympathy, and now he languishes in prison wondering at his fate.

O. J. Simpson got off allegedly murdering his wife and a young man who came to return her sunglasses left at the restaurant. A clever defense is offered as reason for his acquittal, but I don’t think it hurt that he had movie star good look and sport hero credentials.

Shelby Steele wrote a wonderful book, "The Content of Our Character," with his point being that whites are apt to see color before character. But the book’s premise, written by an African American, is just as likely to apply to whites seeing appearance before character as well.

It saddened me, but did not surprise me, when Moslem men in France, who were born into that culture, assimilated that culture, spoke the French language with a lilt and beauty as moving as any Frenchmen complained, "We are French, but when we go for a job, we are not Frenchmen; when we go to the police to complain of harassment, we are not Frenchman. Then we are Moslems.” Why are Frenchmen surprised at the recent riots among this population? There is only so much humans can take, any humans, before spontaneous human combustion occurs.

Would jail time be good for Debra LaFavre? I don't think so. It is not good for most people, but too often a training ground in hate and violence.

We take such pride in our technological advancement, but we remain primitives when it comes to culture.

As always, I enjoy your insights and humanity. Always be well,
Jim