Cold Shower 19: Overwhelmed in the land of Future Shock?

Cold Shower Overwhelmed in the land of Future Shock?
Volume I, Article XIX

This is a column by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., industrial psychologist and former corporate executive for Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe Ltd. For the past 30 years he has been working and consulting in North & South America, Europe and South Africa. Author of seven books and more than 300 articles on what he calls cultural capital – risk taking, self-reliance, social cohesion, work habits and relation to power – for a changing work force in a changing workplace, he writes about interests of the modern worker. Dr. Fisher started out as a laborer in a chemical plant, worked his way through college, and ended in the boardrooms of multinational corporations. These columns are designed to provoke discussion.

Question:

Dr. Fisher, I don’t know if you can help, but you have a way of getting to the heart of the matter, and I thought it worth a try. I don’t believe in anything anymore. I was religious as a kid, now that is gone; once believed in my profession (teaching), now can barely get myself to school. Teaching is like being in an armed camp of dissidents, deviants and delinquents. I once believed in my marriage, now I’m beat, not much of a father or a husband. My kids are wild but not bad. My wife is actually a nice sort, but oblivious to everything. She smiles in the face of everything as if it’s 1950, and she’s not yet forty. What’s happening? Am I an old man at 38, or is that just the way it is?

Dr. Fisher replies:

Recently I dealt with a sixteen year old who felt he had no future, and exhibited the same sense of hopelessness. Living today is demanding, but no more than before. True, the rules keep changing. Things once believed to be true are now taboo or said to be irrelevant. Acts once scandalous are now the norm. So what?

We are in the midst of what Alvin Toffler coins, “future shock.” He was referring to the impact of technology. We are also in the midst of unprecedented affluence. Money has displaced traditional moorings with unprecedented freedom. Freedom is personal, social, sexual, psychological, emotional, economic, moral and cultural. Traditional constraints are gone: living together without marriage, abortion, divorce, same sex relationships, and freaky lifestyles (body tattoos, skin punctures) are the norm. There is an unprecedented explosion in politics. Everything is now politic. There isn’t a cultural group that doesn’t have a political agenda.

The paradox is with all this freedom never have we been more enslaved to our animal appetites and nature. Fear and desire dominate. We fear we may lose what we have (paranoia), and so we barricade ourselves in gated communities called “homes.” We stay close to our kind, and believe our unhappiness is caused by some nefarious group designated “them” (schizophrenia). “Them” may be of a different color, language, accent, dress, religion, region, social-economic status, class, education, university, profession, neighborhood, or national origin. The only devil there is, however, is the devil in us, and not in someone else.
We desire what we don’t have, or someone else has, or we feel we’re missing something. Here fantasy plays a role, as the sacred becomes the profane.

Take sex. It is natural, beautiful, and necessary to sustain the race of man. Therefore, it is sacred. Pornography and promiscuity are profane because they demean the natural. They attempt to do this by shocking until they die of fatigue, as they are dying today. Religion has nothing to do with this change. The shocking has become mundane.

Take drugs. People desire pleasure without pain, but pain is the only root to pleasure. Pain has the paradox of being the only starting place to growth and development. Drug takers – and I include all forms of addiction (sex, religious fanaticism, gambling, alcohol, prescription drugs, illicit drugs) – attempt to bypass pain for pleasure and come to experience only constant pain, which starts the cycle of self-disintegration.

You are a husband, father and educator. There is much that you say between your words. You say you don’t believe in anything, which implies that belief is a stop sign, not a road sign on your journey through life. You say you were once religious and now that is gone, implying that religion is a belief system, a church, and not what it is, a state of wonder (agape) at the richness of being, and vehicle to love and understanding. You say you once believed in teaching and now that is gone, as if teaching is teacher-centered and not what it is, student-centered and the most sacred profession of all. Students that are dissident, deviant, and delinquent are not students but frustrated pleasure seekers. Education is not an assembly line curriculum set up in a factory called a “school.” Education is a systemic function to draw out the latent talent within, not a system of one-size-fits-all. You once believed in marriage, and now you say you are “beat,” implying marriage is a contest and not a communion. Your wife is not “a nice sort,” but your partner. Your patronizing implies she is out of touch when it is you who are. I sense just the opposite of what you say about your children. They are indeed “bad,” meaning not disciplined, which implies they are not being guided, directed, and led to create self-identities out of their own raw talent. That is the role of parenting.

Are you an old 38? Mental vigor and relevance are not a matter of chronology but perspective. You can be an old 38 or a young 68, depending on your enthusiasm for life and your ability to embrace the unexpected and the new.

Nothing is “just the way it is,” but the way we make it. The irony to life is that all of us, without exception, designs our own cage, and then imprisons ourselves in it bound to our fabricated limitations. A person says, “I can’t go to that church. Everyone is so wealthy and I’d be out of place.” That cage is one of arrogance. Another person says, “I can’t do that. I lack the education.” That cage implies education stops when formal school ends, and is the cage of elitism. A Greek man I know rose to some wealth from a humble beginning. His secret desire was to return to Greece, the land of his father, but he claimed, “I can’t afford it,” yet he was a millionaire. His cage is classism.

What is your cage? I think you know. It is the cage of cynicism. It is apparently easier for you to be a critical thinker, skeptical and pessimistic, than to be a creative thinker, a wonderer and builder of something new out of something old. Your wife is changing with the times. Your sin is that you would prefer not to change, and want someone like me to be complicit with you in your anguish. I don’t think so.
Copyright (1996) Look for two new books by Dr. Fisher in 2005: (1) WHO PUT YOU IN THE CAGE?; and Near Journey’s End: Can the Planet Earth Survive Self-indulgent Man?