A Way of Looking at Things No. 8: I'm Not for Everyone!

A Way of Looking at Things No. 8: I’m Not for Everyone!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
TheDeltaGroupFL@cs.com
(Copyright May 22, 2001)

Eric Hoffer, the German immigrant, longshoreman turned philosopher, and autodidact, who had never been formally educated, wrote a book and sent it to Harper’s & Row, and miraculously was published.

The book was “The True Believer,” and dealt with the herd mentality. This mentality has a need to find a cause outside itself in order to authenticate its existence.

Celebrated CBS commentator, Eric Severide, read the book and sought Hoffer for a series of televised interviews in the late 1960s. Hoffer was an immediate celebrity, as the nation at the time was suffering an economic and psychological collapse, the hangover aftermath of Viet Nam, which was to produce double-digit inflation and double-digit unemployment.

Severide asked Hoffer where he got his ideas. Hoffer replied that he was an eclectic reader, and compared himself to a guy who stands on a busy street corner and picks ideas from passersby that tickle his fancy. He was an unapologetic self-interested reader, and if you have read him, writes passionately out of a singular perspective and orientation. Blind until age 19, this might have something to do with it as well.

Woody Allen, in a rare public appearance at the New York Public Library, was asked for whom he creates his films. “I do the movies just for myself, like an institutionalized person who basket weaves,” he said. “Busy fingers are happy fingers. I don’t care about the films. I don’t care if they’re flushed down the toilet after I die.”

Many readers may find this solipsistic and narcissistic. We like to put labels on everything, especially creativity.

A creative person is not trying to get in touch with you. A creative person is trying to get in touch with him or herself. It is that simple.

Writing and what constitutes “books” today may actually be in a genre all its own – non-book-books. A book, which is attempting to find a public, is like a used car salesman trying to sell a lemon. It is a formula bound to sell because it stimulates an immediate craving, like for chocolate, while content and context are flippantly disregarded.

Mystery novel readers (and I am one) are not likely to remember the plot much less the people in the story a week after reading the book. This is not true of “Les Miserables,” “Hunchback of Notre Dame,” “The Great Gatsby,” “Madame Bovary,” and so on.

If you’ve read living legends, you remember them because the stories resonate with your own life.

Who can forget the bishop who catches Jean Valjean stealing silverware in Les Miserables, and tells him to take it all?

Readers, I believe, were justifiably incensed when the movie of “The Scarlet Letter” was changed by Hollywood to minimize the disgrace of minister Dimmesdale and to produce a happy ending for Hester and her daughter Pearl – again the used car salesman selling a lemon.


Writing is self-discovery. I, for one, don’t write for an audience. I write for me. And I read to establish a dialogue with authors to energize that dialogue with myself. The fuel of a writer is ideas, and ideas are generated by eclectic means, some originate like they did for Hoffer, others like they do for Allen, and still others in conversation as they did for Oscar Wilde.

Now I’m talking about writers or would-be-writers. On the other hand, it is perfectly legitimate to read for entertainment, edification, escape, self-forgetfulness, or as a narcotic to help one go to sleep. My wife, for example, can read a few lines and be gone. I have a similar effect upon her with my bedtime pontifications.

Words are my weapons, and I am an assassin hitting the reader between the eyes with reality as I see it. If the reader doesn’t blink, chances are the reader doesn’t get it, and that is okay, but it is probably a waste of the reader’s time as well as mine. A writer writes whether he is read or not. Can you imagine Woody Allen not making movies if they did not sell? I can’t. The same goes for Spike Lee.

Writing, as with reading, stimulates thinking. Thinking is not much in favor at the moment. Giving readers what they want or what they think they need are equally irrelevant. A writer is not driven by conspicuous consumption.

The reader decides the need-want continuum, not the writer. Stephen King was once asked why he didn’t write a “great novel” instead of busying himself with blockbuster bestsellers. He responded that as hard as the reader might find it difficult to believe that he wrote the best he could every time, and didn’t think at all about writing “best sellers.” Now you can believe that or not, but if you read about his youth you will see nightmares were real and writing is a form of catharsis.

Thinking is the only thing that separates us from the animal kingdom, and even with thinking we are closer to them then we would like to believe.

One of my correspondents sees my “A Way of Looking at Things” as one-sided essays. Of course they are one-sided. They are offered to stimulate internal dialogue with the reader, and to be accepted or rejected, masticated or discarded on that basis and that basis alone. He sees no interplay, and he has a point.

What triggers my little essays often is something one e-mails to me. Yet none are meant to encourage a “chat room” – not on your life. I wouldn’t have any time to read or write, and both take enormous amounts of both.

Writers may sometimes seem insensitive but the craft is a demanding one. I chuckled when I read novelist Stuart Woods’ disclaimer in one of his books:

“Please do not send me your ideas for a book, as I have a policy of writing only what I myself invent. If you send me story ideas, I will immediately delete them without reading them. If you have a good idea for a book, write it yourself, but I will not be able to advise you on how to get it published.”

Woods writes more than one book a year, and given how much research he must do, likely works seven days a week. I work six, and I am supposed to be retired.

Many of you wonder if I read others in my genre. Alas, I do not. Most of my ideas come from dead authors, or writers who write about dead authors, philosophers, theologians, scientists, or novelists. My self-understanding is largely derived from reading such writers as Alan W. Watts, Krishnamurti, Joseph Campbell, Garry Wills, Rollo May, Carl Becker, Pitrim Sorokin, et al. All struggled mightily to find themselves and I can identify with that.

My primary intention in all my writings is to introduce you to yourself, warts and all, and to assist you in making your peace with that discovery, then moving on. This will get you outside the box, leastwise, for a little while.

People don’t want to think, and so they like to sequester others into definable boxes. That is what most books are about – that is, giving you a vocabulary for boxamania.

Some see me as frustrated because I fail to have a “big” audience. That, I confess, is my fault. I do make reference to “not having a big audience” from time to time, but actually it has no impact in changing my behavior so it must not be too important. You see what governs behavior is interest leavened with values to satisfy a need. Writing, I have discovered in this sense, is an end in itself.

Still, I am delighted with my e-mail listings, which include 23 professional women and 26 professional men. Among these are consultants, editors (journals, books, newspapers), accountants, writers, engineers, scientists, inventors (one with 101 patents), publicists, teachers, principals, international consultants in Germany, France, Belgium, Great Britain, Austria, Canada, and the United States, CEOs, professors, editorial writers, students, computer specialists, housewives, university alumni directors, and retirees.

Some confess they have little time to read me, especially when my e-mails are so long. Others say they take me home and read me there. Still others download and share my ideas with family and friends, and find themselves sometimes in the middle of heated discussions, where few agree with me. Some have asked to be taken off the list “reluctantly” as they are too busy, and I oblige them. Still others say that they think they know me better and understand my books better having had the chance to read these essays. Some are old friends who went to school with me and don’t remember me being “a brain.” Still others have ambitions to see me collect these “little gems” (their words) into a book and have it published. That thought could produce nightmares given how well my current books sell. Somebody else can do that after I’m dead. Henry Harding is doing it for Isaiah Berlin and making him far more comprehensible than he was in life. And many have given me reading lists of people with similar ideas. Some see me as a “moralist,” and wonder if I’ve ever thought of building a “spiritual following” around my views. My reply, “Never!” Still others are “amazed” (their word) at the depth and breadth of my views, while others see me simply as a dilettante. And of course all are partially correct because they are projecting themselves into me, and seeing a reflection that makes some sense to them.

Everyone experiences an epiphany in life even if they don’t know it. Mine came when my da died at the age of 49 still pushing the rock of Sisyphus up the hill, and having it roll down over him again and again. My da was physically the most courageous man I ever met, even to the end when his body was racked with cancer and he weighed less than sixty pounds. He had little moral courage, however, and the family was punished for that. He was obsequious to a fault to authority, which seems indigenous to the Irish race for some reason.

I grew up in a culture in which if you cannot get what you want, you must teach yourself to want what you can get. If the boss, for example, rides you mercilessly, you think like a renter and concede his authority over you. If you deserve promotion and the boss withholds promotion because he can, promotion is deemed trivial, unimportant. If coworkers steal valued possessions from you, or family cheats you out of what is coming to you, possessions are treated as nothing. If unable to render the necessary medical attention to your children, because you can’t afford the insurance, and as a result they become gravely ill, earthy attachments, even love of children, is considered nothing compared to the love of God.

This mystifying form of retreat in depth, into a kind of inner citadel, in which a person tries to lock himself up against all the fearful ills of the world, springs from the philosophy “if you expect the worst you will never be disappointed.”

Such a person encloses himself within a kind of tight wall by which he seeks to reduce his vulnerable surfaces to pain. From his perspective, every conceivable kind of pain has been heaped upon him, and he wishes to contract himself into the smallest ball as possible so that little of him is exposed to hurt, ridicule, or humiliation.

He totally rejects the equation of life: Pain + risk = growth & development

This brings us back to the beginning of this essay and Eric Hoffer. Hoffer claims such a person wants to fit, wants to be part of something bigger than himself so that he can brag about the group and get away with it, because he is not construed as being conceited, and he enjoys the protection of the group from hurt, ridicule and humiliation. For this identity he is willing to become a psychological amoeba.

The intellect is a weapon, and woe is the person who openly treats it as such. It is far more appealing to be governed by polls, best-selling lists, advice columns, personal trainers, letting it all hang out, than to examine one’s life and live with integrity to that intimacy, and self-discovery.

We live in an age where nothing is sacred, and the profane has been made sacred in its place (Corporate Sin devotes a full chapter to this “The Silent Invasion that Nobody Sees”) with intimacy taking a holiday. Instead of thinking, based upon what we see, feel, and experience, we flippantly wave the bible, hide behind God and certain beliefs, or quote the Koran or the Torah as substitutes for organizing a personal point of view.

My wife says that I am Mr. Contrary. She may be right. I see there is a hatred of the intellect, as if we are afraid to think. So, I think, not because I am so good at it, but because I take the time. Count von Zinzendorf (1700-1760) put it bluntly; “Whoso wishes to grasp God with his intellect becomes an atheist.” So the fear is real.

My life has been a fight against complacency with no prisoners taken. When I was young, and an outstanding athlete, coaches tried to imprison me in flattery and the promise of fame. I would have none of it. One coach never spoke to me again after high school because I didn’t play college football. My Catholicism, influenced by my mother and the good nuns, marked me for a Jesuit. Again, the same reaction. Some academics at university saluted my interpretive skills in literature (which was not my major), and my skills with words and ideas, and attempted to force fit me into becoming an academic. This, too, failed. My corporate bosses threw money and promotions at me, as long as I would behave, and would suspend my individualism “for the greater good.” I refused and moved on.

My quest in life is a simple one: to understand ideas as they cross my path and limited vision, and to share this understanding with whoever has a similar interest. If my quest appeals to readers, fine. If not, no harm done. In a word I’m not for everyone.

* * * * *
Visit Dr. Fisher’s website, www.peripateticphilosopher.com