Cold Shower 24: The Silent Invasion of an Uptight Society

Cold Shower Silent Invasions of an Uptight Society
Volume I, Article XXIV

This is a column by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., industrial psychologist and former corporate executive of 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, You write in Corporate Sin (2000) about “silent invasions” in our lives. Quite frankly, it never occurred to me that this was true, yet increasingly I see that this is the case in every direction – government, TV, noises of all kinds. Why is this? Why do we put up with it? And what can we do about it?

Dr. Fisher replies:

It is this way because you permit it to be so. Think about it? Do you get exercised if your favorite team doesn’t win? Do you play homage to your favorite players like they are gods? Do you watch television shows in which stupid people act stupidly in front of an audience for no other reason then to feed their need for exhibition and yours for voyeurism? Do you plug into television gossip journalists who entertain you with the most egregious pranks of your favorite celebrities? Do you limit your knowledge of current events to the celebrity pretty faces of network news? In short do you avoid a modicum of thinking for fear it might fry your brain?

We are a personality society with a cult of celebrity keeping us as far as possible from personal intimacy, while at the same time, allowing dissembling voices, such as ex-presidents, rock stars and film stars, winning coaches, star athletes, et al, to be treated with more gravity than family members. Ex-presidents make anywhere from $100,000 to $350,000 for a single speech according to the Key Speakers Bureau, which handles celebrity engagements. Chances are slim that it is the context of their messages but rather the content of their celebrity that demands these exorbitant fees.

The same fiction and nonfiction authors are repeatedly on the bestseller list, the same faces get elected and reelected to Congress, and the same inane television shows win our allegiance time and again. We speak, dress and behave the way these television icons sell the latest rust buckets on TV. And we think the way social scientists regroup and interpret the facts.

Social psychologists have given us such terms as “complex,” “sublimation,” “repression,” “identity crisis,” “objective relations,” “borderline personality,” and so on. You may have no idea what they are talking about, but take what they say to heart because “they’re supposed to know.” We fail to reflect that their counsel is nonspecific, collated, and subject to verification, while being constantly revised, monitored, updated and retold in new ways with us accepting the new ways as if gospel.

One day we’re told one thing, the next another, and we believe them both, and wonder why we are conflicting. Nutritionists get in the act as well, saying milk is good, then not good for us; coffee is bad for us, then good for us. The point is we look for veracity from experts, not from the common sense of our lives. We are living in a kind of stunned submission to circumstances and rules that have silently invaded our sanctuary. Rather than creators of our culture, we are made by it.

Given this invasion, we lie about our actions and misrepresent the actions of others. We piously pretend to principles we don’t believe in. We whine and blame others for the wrong that we do. We think only of ourselves and our own and are brutally indifferent to the needs of everyone else. We manipulate people, call them names, con them and rob them blind. And as much as we are guilty of these sins, those in positions of power, be they in the church, state, government, industry or commerce, sin at a magnitude beyond our comprehension. They do so because we allow them to.

Silent invasions destroy our balance. We have many truths to live by, self-reliance, frugality, patriotism, and so on, but anyone of these can become grotesque when carried to fanaticism. George Orwell in 1984 understood the seductive attraction of these silent invaders with what he called doublethink: “to know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions . . . knowing them to be contradictory and believing both of them.”

We live in Orwell’s “Big Brother” world, where to defend the indefensible, these silent invaders need to deform the language, use words not to communicate but to prevent it, need to brainwash people, rewrite history, deaden language, wage war on phantom fears, and maintain control by forever keeping us strangers to ourselves.

We put up with it because we have lobotomized ourselves by giving control of our reality to “experts,” by indiscriminately buying into pop-culture’s latest desires and fears.

What can we do about it? I think you know. To cure our individual learned helplessness we must first put ourselves back together. To rebuild our sense of self, we may have to go back to our childhood, to the past, and down into our dreams, and start again.

There is a pattern to who we are and what we have become that is as persistent and as palpable as our face in the mirror. The problem is, with all these silent invasions, the face we see in the mirror is not likely to be the face we project to the crowd. In my book Being Your Own Best Friend (1996) I put it this way: We are all authors of our own footprints in the sand, heroes of the novels inscribed in our hearts. Everyone’s life, without exception, is sacred, unique, scripted high drama, played out before an audience of one, with but one actor on stage. The sooner we realize this the more quickly we overcome the bondage of loneliness and find true friendship with ourselves.

Copyright (1996) Look for Dr. Fisher’s new book in 2005, WHO PUT YOU IN THE CAGE?