A Way of Looking at Things No. 30: The Country is being run by 14-year-old Mentalities

A Way of Looking at Things – No. 30:
The Country is being run by 14-year-old Mentalities

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© 2002


Jack Welch, venerated former CEO of General Electric, you could say was larger than life. Syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman recently reported that he confessed that looking at a picture of his high school sports team he never realized how short he was.

Welch became the ultimate workaholic, an American disease, to compensate for this “shortcoming,” and one day found himself “like a man standing 6 feet 4 with a full head of hair” on the pinnacle of the corporate ladder of ladders, the quintessential executive and corporate leader.

The bald little fellow had his management team as well as the rank and file membership of GE basking in his reflected sunlight with soaring accomplishments with Daedalus wings. The Minotaur of competition couldn’t escape his Labyrinth. What of the 300,000 GE employees? What part did they have in this success? Apparently little. The Caesars of Rome never enjoyed such adoration, such privilege, and such envied omniscience.

More cool heads, buried in academia, such as Dr. Rahesh Khurana of Harvard are not so easily impressed. Dr. Khurana had the audacity recently on the “Newshour with Jim Lehrer” on PBS to suggest that leadership at GE has been superb over the past 100 years and that Welch’s contribution to that leadership is consistent with but not an excessive departure from that reputation. The “system,” he points out created the climate for such leadership to evolve; the “system” created Jack Welch, Jack Welch did not create the system.

But the hungry media knows that copy is not a function of such ambiguous terms as “culture” and “system,” but of personality. Copy is based on celebrity, which is a function of the fantasy of leadership where the mystique of the brash, brazen 14-year-old in the 60-year-old body suit becomes the prototype of what the media would constitute as “leadership.” Welch has been on the cover of more business magazines than Madonna has been on those of her cult.

Welch fits the mold with his semi-literate lingo, dumbing down to create the impression that he is just a regular guy and working stiff like everybody else, even if he is making 700 times more, describing how it feels at the top as “being a CEO is the nuts!” Welch writes books that are national bestsellers, which describe “his leadership” in language and appeal of a romance novel with as much long-term staying power.

MBA’s – The Program Learning of Obeisance

Given this scenario, one has to wonder how could a single man or CEO at the top of an organization be treated as if God reincarnate, when organizations that thrive are organizations in which intelligent decision making is accomplished close to the level of consequences, and intelligent feedback is produced in a timely fashion to generate intelligent strategies with positive outcomes. The answer is a revealing one.

Corporate success is indeed a collaborative model but produced not unlike pyramid building with obedient serfs sacrificing their well-being to the Pharaoh’s narcissistic desires for immortality with little material benefit to the serfs themselves. We can make allowances for the Egyptian serfs because they were programmed to be nonpersons, but what of 21st century well-educated employees? Ah, now there is the rub!

You look at the implicit curriculum of an MBA program and you see that it differs little with the programming of the Egyptian serfs. They are taught to be “team players” and “loyal to the corporation” and “dutiful models for other employees” in the pursuit of their profession. And what is their profession? The management of things with only a passing attention to the management of people as persons. People are an expendable critical mass necessary to accomplish a given goal; the less people involved the better the financial advantage. The engine of career is financial advantage.

One executive took his Harvard MBA and this philosophy to heart and instituted a “20-40-60” plan: reevaluate all employees with twenty years or more of service for possible redundancy, look at people of 40-years-of-age and older and/or making $60,000 or more with the same objective in mind. He is no longer CEO of this company, but the damage is done. The company continues to flounder and is unlikely to survive.

The model is a mechanical one with a lexicon “driving towards profits with all engines burning.” It is also the philosophy of war with winners and losers and no prisoners taken. In this war there is the necessity of the suspension of humanity with forgiveness for plant closings, redundancy exercises, reengineering, streamlining, moving plants and equipment at will with the loss of jobs and the disruption of lives with nary a protest of any consequence from the consequential.

It is the love of total war where competition cannot simply be beaten but must be obliterated. It is the mindset of the 14-year-old playing with plastic guns in my generation and now video games where “the enemy” is destroyed and no mercy granted and “collateral damage” is a condition of the game and easily justified.

It doesn’t stop there!

If only companies were engaged in these war games with the mindset of 14-year-olds, it would be one thing. But when the country is run by men who think and behave like 14-year-olds, it is quite another. This puts everyone at risk.

Make no mistake about it; we Americans developed an appetite for virtuous hate in World War Two. Many reading this were not yet born, but such a venerated leader as Sir Winston Churchill, then British Prime Minister, piously rumbled in 1943 that “the Germans must bleed and burn, they must be crushed into a mass of smoldering ruin,” and as for the Japanese “we shall wipe them out, every one of them, men, women and children.” It was our jihad when evil had no room for compassion and it gave rise to the refined pleasure of virtuous hate.

Virtuous hate has appeal to the 14-year-old mindset that wants answers to complex problems in simplistic terms, terms that can be digested whole without the necessity or inconvenience of chewing on them.

This hatred is spawned and sustained by the geography of fear, the fear that I have been programmed to embrace all my life from the Great Depression to Nazism and Japanese Imperialism to the “Red Scare” and Communism to the Soviet Union to Détente to McCarthyism to the House Un-American Activities Committee to the Korean War to the Viet Nam War to the Cuban Missile Crisis to Watergate to the Gulf War to 9-11 to now with no peace in this geography of fear throughout my adolescence, adulthood and middle age. Gunter Grass was on to something when he wrote The Tin Drum.

You look at these episodic developments throughout our history and you see the 14-year-old reacting to the situation with the same juvenile insight into the situation of well, a 14-year-old who is not expected to think but simply to be loyal and patriotic without reflection or protest

So, when wronged, with a 14-year-old mindset, it is time to react with vengeance, not to reflect with insight into what factors contributed to the situation. Obliteration is an escape from reflection by dehumanizing those things that we don’t understand and don’t want to contemplate. It is the love of total war fueled by virtuous hate.

We have a president, a popular president, who talks in sound bites, and simple black and white terms that a 14-year-old understands viscerally. He is Jack Welch with another mask, a former CEO, a former MBA, and a man who understands how the dumbing down works and where its mass appeal lies. He has the support of a Viet Nam war hero in Senator John McCain, who has that same 14-year-old esprit de corps vigor that once did him honor. I would have expected more of him, but I suppose I shouldn’t, given that he has admirals in his gene pool.

Now we are about to go to war against a sovereign nation with a preemptive strike policy of engagement based upon little more than the geography of fear, a fear that dominated the 20th century, and a fear that still motivates those that operate this country at all levels as if we were obedient 14-year-olds, which I guess we are.


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Check out Dr. Fisher’s website: www.peripateticphilosopher.com