What One Does One Becomes: Response to a Query
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 2005
A correspondent reacts to my missive with exasperation and frustration from his own personal experience. This is my response to him with self-effacing personal references, as the problem of organization and our relationship to it is deeply personal.
You say you have taken two things from what I have written:
(1) You sense that I am implying that you should give up and not care because the organization cannot see beyond its kind or its vital linkage to the community.
I sense your angst in this perception. But organization is the nucleus around which we wrap our lives. Therefore, it is as impossible to give up and not care for the organization, as it would be to give up and decide not to breathe anymore.
The organization is not an inanimate thing. Nor is it "out there" separate from us. It is as connected to us as bone, sinew and blood are part of our bodies. Make no mistake; the organization has a soul, a soul that can die just as our souls leave our body when we perish. And like humans, an organization that ultimately dies gives up long before it gives out.
Put another way, the organization is as real as personality. It is the best and worst of us, the good, the bad, and the ugly, the petty and the courageous, the cruel and the generous.
Each organization has a matrix of connections to every other organization. This forms community. Communities provide a composite portrait, or extant profile of life as we experience it. Joseph Wambaugh, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) sergeant turned author, once wrote, "A community gets the police it deserves."
The same applies to organization. If an organization is misguided, it is because the people in it choose to be misguided. If an organization is not doing what is best for it, look to its people's failure to understand and deal with the why of it.
In my attempt to understand why organizations are not performing, I have come to focus on leadership and culture. Paraphrasing Wambaugh, I would suggest that the organization gets the leadership and culture it deserves.
So, should a caring and concerned individual give up? Of course not. I would suggest that instead that same individual use his faculties to get through false images of what the organization projects to what it really is. This should provide you with a clue as to where it is going.
Don't turn cynical. Cynicism is idealism without a cause. Plow forward. Remember what St. Francis said, change what you can, accept what you can't, and recognize the difference.
An organization, like an individual, prefers to think it is on top of things when it is not, in control when chaos reigns. Just as there are personal relationships that enhance or eviscerate identity, there are corporate relationships of the same hue and cry.
Know this: a corporate culture can change us, but we are unlikely to change it.
For example, if we are complacent and enter a culture of contribution, we are likely to shed our complacency, and discover new found maturity, or decide to leave because the demand is too much. Likewise, if we are a conscientious performer and find ourselves in a culture of complacency, we will be pressed to become complacent, or be forced to leave to retain our self-respect and dignity.
Cultures are brutal, definitive, and deeply engrained. All too often the person thinks there is something wrong with him, when it is the wrong culture for his temperament and drive. Don't be fooled by the placards posted about the organization. Study the dominant behaviors and reward systems.
Love is not the expression of words, but the act of demonstrating love in action. The same is true of organizational behavior. It is not the rhetoric but the reality that counts.
(2) You agree with my premise that a job seeker should seek personal satisfaction in his work, seek employment where his skill base is needed, and focus on a specific job. You further claim that this is what you did but found you did not belong to the "tribe."
By the "tribe" I sense that you did not belong to the club, which is a euphemism in current parlance for having connections.
You mention a posh lawyer on the board with experience only in manufacturing was awarded a senior position in the healthcare field, over a highly qualified professional in that field, adding, "Go figure!"
There is no figuring to it. This is a no brainer as it is the rule rather than the exception. Leadership sees itself as a separate entity from the work, or the doing, in other words, the led.
You see, we have become cynical of leadership. The rhetoric is that leadership and the led are one, but in practice leadership is chosen on the whim of its influence quotient, not on the basis of its contribution connection. Contribution is up to the led. Gladhanding and cheerleading no longer form a bridge between leaders and doers. Rah-rah doesn't resonate with doers who hold the keys to all the tool kits.
In my years among the executive ranks or as a consultant, I have never once seen companies I have worked or consulted for skipping executive bonuses in down years. I have witnessed during those same periods, however, massive redundancy exercises, realignments, reorganizations, and other cost cutting schemes.
No one seemed to notice that the companies were in trouble because of too many executives doing too little. The executive ranks always had a vocabulary to explain and justify their existence and the down times: inflated or deflated dollar, cost of oil, and other raw materials, worldwide deflation or inflation, unstable international economic climate, or market change, and so on.
Consequently, for every one hundred doers discharged one executive was reassigned, as opposed to being let go. Since executives were doing the trimming, they would always take care of their own. I was often a part of this charade.
Leadership, you see, is chosen with little if any regard for the led. The led are essentially disenfranchised from the process. They have no vote. Leadership sees no problem with this, and the led have never given it much thought.
This translates into the leadership being cavalier about the subtle nuances that make up the symbolic and real connection of the leadership to the led. I have been told on more than one occasion that I have exaggerated its significance. Yet, that is essentially all the leadership does. It leads symbolically. It thinks it makes decisions, but the decisions are made by those that do, and if they are not in the decision-making process, it doesn't spell much hope for the future of the organization.
The unintended consequences of leadership without doers' input are that it develops grand schemes that fail to resonate with those meant to carry them out. If you want to know how healthy or sick an organization is, you don't sit in the boardroom and visit with executives, you wander about the operations and talk to the doers.
The sickness appears here. It shows its face in frustration and anger, and in depressing cells of polarity where malcontents fume with indignation in passive behaviors. These behaviors literally destroy the organization from within, silently and certainly with no one the wiser until it is too late for damage control.
The sad thing about this masochistic behavior is that it hurts only the led, never the leadership. The organization, of course, is placed in jeopardy, but again the leadership always survives. It doesn't work paycheck to paycheck. The leadership will go on to deposit its influence quotient elsewhere, because it belongs to the club, while the led will frantically search for comparable employment once the organization folds with unlikely success.
This has happened so often in recent times that it has become a very sad melody.
The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars, but in ourselves. We have elevated leadership to the point of omniscience, when it is not omniscient at all. We have anointed leadership with the divine rights of kings, when it operates in atavistic nostalgia of centuries past. Meanwhile, the led go ignominiously along with the deception.
You cannot change this, but you can change your heart and mind to recognize what it is and why it is so, and then deal with it on a personal basis.
By that I mean, you can leave and seek a more suitable climate. Once I was told by a young engineer when I suggested this, "Doc, I'm paid a dollar more an hour than I can afford to quit." When my face didn't register support, he added, "I've got obligations."
Current leadership is counting on this mentality, and it has not been disappointed.
You mention how age discrimination prevents qualified people in their 50s from getting positions of merit simply because of age. This, too, is true.
You cite the example of the leader/founder of a poverty law center, who was beyond that age, and would never have had a chance of being considered for the position today. That drew a smile.
When I joined Nalco in 1958 as a young chemical sales engineer, some fifty of us had been handpicked, out of more than a thousand applicants interviewed. To make the final cut, we had extensive interviews with company executives, had to submit to an intelligence test, and then had to endure an exhaustive interview (three hours) with a psychiatrist. We had earned degrees in chemistry, chemical engineering, mechanical engineering or electrical engineering. And we were all recent college graduates -- i.e., young and privy to the latest technologies in our disciplines.
Nalco had ambitions to become a major player in the specialty chemical business and spent dearly to acquire the people it expected to take it there.
When the cofounder of Nalco addressed us, I can still remember his words, "If I were to seek employment with my company today, I wouldn't get as much as an interview." Nalco had been formed only a short twenty years before.
The cofounder was a salesman without technical credentials. His legacy was to establish salesmen's mystique in Nalco. Most executives were promoted up through the ranks of selling. This created an elitist culture which echoed a reverberating sentiment: "you research chemist, you accountant, you plant worker know that you would not have a job were it not for these people in the field beating the bushes to grow the business."
So, you see, the more things change the more they remain the same.
You mention that the hard charger that companies hire have filled up their dance cards with all the right names -- right degrees, right schools, right previous jobs, right pedigrees, right connections -- and then work to build a reputation while always looking for greener pastures elsewhere, seldom within their current employer.
That is relatively new. It has become the modus operandi of the professional since the pyramid collapsed. There are no more pyramid climbers. These were people who constantly campaigned for the next job, seldom finding time to work their current job. Now, pyramid climbers are dinosaurs of the past as the organization has flattened. I endured the pyramid climbing culture, worked for them, fought with them, and later would write about them.
What has not changed is that clueless working stiffs, the led who take these hard chargers as being truly the anointed ones, have failed to realize hard chargers do it on the backs of the led, riding them to their purposes. This is not limited to corpocracy. It is equally apparent in academia as in other institutions.
When I was in graduate school as a senior person, one of my professors noted that I wrote with some facility. "How would you like to breeze through this place?" he said. I waited, and then he continued. "Since you write well, I was wondering if you would mind editing some of my work for publication."
What he meant was, would I write his work to be published with his name, not mine as author? I said, "No thanks." He not only made my student life difficult but also tried to eliminate me from the program. It is not an uncommon experience of mine.
Some at Nalco thought I was a naive hard charger, who allowed my boss to take credit for a lot of my work, which I did. What my boss didn't expect, nor did I, was that my work drew the attention of top management. I could sell and most technical people at Nalco could not. They would wow the customer with technology, which developed distrust. I would try to understand what they needed, which formed a partnership.
A vice president came out to ride with me one week. He saw the connection I had with people from operations to the general manager. He said, "I think a lot of our people would like to know how you do it."
Well, I didn't have a clue because I had no training in selling, but only in Nalco's technology. I was operating intuitively, naturally. I had to read selling books to learn the vocabulary to what I was doing.
This led to my being invited across the country to give speeches at Nalco regional meetings, for which I received no compensation. I saw it as part of my job. From that exposure, however, I became known and the rest is history.
Imagine your boss has kept you in place, and then you jump three intermediate positions to associated vice president in the international division, and are sent off to South Africa to form a new company. That is what happened.
One day I saw a confidential report in Nalco's headquarters. It was an unflattering evaluation of my executive talent by my former boss. He had been asked my readiness for this promotion. His comments not only failed to derail the promotion, but essentially derailed his career. Yes, it was that malicious.
This would happen again under different circumstances, but it begs the question: do I bring out the venom in my superiors or are my superiors confounded by my lack of obeisance? It is probably a combination of the two. The irony is that no one has gleaned the fact that my naiveté is simply a function of my idealism, and not of a hidden agenda. I don't put anyone above or below anyone else. I don't see intellect, or talent as something personal, but a gift to be used, not to be advertised or abused as a personal advantage.
This is shared with you because how the world accepts or rejects us as individuals is immaterial and irrelevant. More important is how we accept or reject ourselves. To know where we stand with ourselves, we must first examine our lives in the light of our experience.
There is a pattern here, and the examination is like the turning of the pages of a novel, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The pattern has a consistency, continuity, and confluence that identifies who and what we are, and even where we are. The payoff of this process is self-acceptance. Everything is possible when we accept ourselves as we are, because then we cannot but accept others as we find them.
Self-hatred, on the other hand, is much more destructive than any other kind of hatred. We can choose to be miserable or happy. The content of happiness is not our comfort level, nor is it our security or possessions, but the context of our self-acceptance and willingness to deal with our circumstances.
* * * * * *
Note: Soon I will add to my series, "So you want to be a leader?" The title: "When Leadership lost the Tribe."
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 2005
Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr. is an industrial and organizational psychologist writing in the genre of organizational psychology, author of Confident Selling, Work Without Managers, The Worker, Alone, Six Silent Killers, Corporate Sin, Time Out for Sanity, Meet Your New Best Friend, Purposeful Selling, In the Shadow of the Courthouse and Confident Thinking and Confidence in Subtext. A Way of Thinking About Things, Who Put You in a Cage, and Another Kind of Cruelty are in Amazon’s KINDLE Library.
Friday, October 28, 2005
Thursday, October 27, 2005
What One Does One Becomes!
What One Does One Becomes!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 2005
I have written extensively on this subject of job interviews over the years, and have come to accept the unreality of hiring. We don't hire the best people for the job, and therefore it is a challenge for the prospective job seeker to have some understanding of why this is so, and what to do about it.
First of all, the good old boy and good old girl network has never died. It just went to Ivy League schools.
I was an "A" student at a state university. One of my peers, a girl who had spent two years at Harvard, and returned to graduate at Iowa to satisfy her grandmother, told me a truism that, at the time in my naiveté, I did not accept.
She said, "You'll never make it to the first echelon because you aren't graduating from a first or second echelon school." I scoffed at the idea, but in my professional life I have found her right on the money.
We are a classless society very much obsessed with class.
It is as true in engineering and science as in the arts and letters. At both Nalco and Honeywell, the fast trackers in the technical fields graduated from MIT, Cal Tech, and so on.
But even graduating from these schools, you still had to have another connection before getting an interview, whatever your qualifications. You had to have belonged to a certain fraternity or sorority, or have an uncle or aunt, father or mother, or some other relative with a connection to the firm as well. We take care of our own while preaching the democracy of our hiring.
Then once you are in the interview, there is a formula that I have seen demonstrated with universal consistency, a formula that I know well because I was often on the interviewing board of new hires. It goes like this in this chronology without exception:
(1) Am I comfortable with this individual?
(2) Will this individual fit on our team?
(3) Is this individual qualified to do the work?
If the interviewee passes muster on the first two, whatever his or her qualifications, he or she will be justified as having the third.
The irony is that I was always known as a touchy-feely person with enabling empathy. Yet, I always emphasized the third as of first importance in deference to its priority on this scale, and I was invariably overruled.
I have in my files countless cases of people who failed on the job "but were a good person" and "everybody liked them," erroneously assuming they would somehow be able to do the work.
Often, my colleagues on the selection board had impressive cognitive credentials in engineering, mathematics and technology. Yet, when it came to hiring people, they went with their gut, which is what they would say I always preached, but seldom with a close examination of the appropriate skills and requirements of the job in question.
To me, and this may sound coarse, we were hiring a machine to replace a worn part, or to meet the new requirements of the next iteration of that machine.
Should the person hired fail based on these evaluative criteria; would interviewers admit their error? Not likely.
Instead, they would see him or her placed in a much less demanding and critical position, but with the same salary and perks of the position originally hired, an accident of unintended consequences. This became a routine of one step forward, and two steps back, increasing rather than diminishing the load of the performers.
The other factor which never entered the interviewing process, but which was important to me, was the nature of the culture.
Nalco had a culture of contribution in my days with it, and its rapid growth and profitability reflected this. I have been away from it for more than thirty years, and I wonder what it is like today.
Honeywell had a culture of complacency with rhetoric of contribution. It has had over recent years a record of cyclic performance, punctuated by clever maneuvering, facility and cost accounting manipulation and spotty performance. Like other high tech companies in recent years, Honeywell's culture and performance is the rule rather than the exception.
High tech companies keep Wall Street happy by cutting costs and constant personnel redundancy exercises, using this as a gauge of performance, when it is actually a gauge of failure to address the problem of performance.
I worked in two tough cultures. You could call one common and the elitist; one was a performing culture, and the other cosmetic, meaning, it bought into all the fads as substitutes for performance and change management.
The corporation has been my laboratory.
It is also the reason I was tough on qualifications and suspect of interviewees with silk tongues and vapid minds. You could make a case that I was tough because I never fitted into any organization, as Charles Hayes has pointed out in one of his books. He found it interesting that I was an authority on organization and never found an organization in which I fitted.
But I had a deeper motivation. I wanted the new hire not only to survive but also to profit in his or her new job.
When you are really good at your job, despite all that I have written above, the organization caves in (pun intended) to your excellence. People may talk behind your back, may wish that you were elsewhere, never accept you as one of them, but they tolerate you because you are needed. It isn't the company politicians but its performers who signal a company's survival. Performers have little time to make nice. They are too busy doing.
A professor in graduate school once told me -- the course was advanced social psychology -- that nothing would give him more pleasure than to fail me, but to do that he would have to fail all the other members of the seminar. He gave me an "A."
So, the final factor in this most subjective business of interviewing for hire is that the interviewer invariably will be looking for something in the interviewee that is consistent with how one sees oneself.
In defense of form letters that wish the job seeker success elsewhere, "but regrettably, we have received more qualified applications," I have empathy for them as a one-man corporation. Yet, I receive almost daily resumes from people so highly qualified I wonder when they have had a chance to be performers. Did I mention I never advertise any positions?
It is not uncommon for me to receive resumes of people with technical and law degrees, and impressive titles in this and that job. What is missing, and it is consistently missing, is growth and development to satisfying fruition in a specific job or function.
If I would give the prospective job seeker advice, it would be to pursue something of a singular nature that (1) gives personal satisfaction; (2) is a needed skill; and (3) is job specific.
The Renaissance man is a good idea and may do well on "Jeopardy," but he or she is not likely the employee you would want to hire for a specific job.
While part of me abhors specialization, it is the nature of the extant beast. What one does one becomes. Those five simple words cover a philosophy of life and work as well.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 2005
I have written extensively on this subject of job interviews over the years, and have come to accept the unreality of hiring. We don't hire the best people for the job, and therefore it is a challenge for the prospective job seeker to have some understanding of why this is so, and what to do about it.
First of all, the good old boy and good old girl network has never died. It just went to Ivy League schools.
I was an "A" student at a state university. One of my peers, a girl who had spent two years at Harvard, and returned to graduate at Iowa to satisfy her grandmother, told me a truism that, at the time in my naiveté, I did not accept.
She said, "You'll never make it to the first echelon because you aren't graduating from a first or second echelon school." I scoffed at the idea, but in my professional life I have found her right on the money.
We are a classless society very much obsessed with class.
It is as true in engineering and science as in the arts and letters. At both Nalco and Honeywell, the fast trackers in the technical fields graduated from MIT, Cal Tech, and so on.
But even graduating from these schools, you still had to have another connection before getting an interview, whatever your qualifications. You had to have belonged to a certain fraternity or sorority, or have an uncle or aunt, father or mother, or some other relative with a connection to the firm as well. We take care of our own while preaching the democracy of our hiring.
Then once you are in the interview, there is a formula that I have seen demonstrated with universal consistency, a formula that I know well because I was often on the interviewing board of new hires. It goes like this in this chronology without exception:
(1) Am I comfortable with this individual?
(2) Will this individual fit on our team?
(3) Is this individual qualified to do the work?
If the interviewee passes muster on the first two, whatever his or her qualifications, he or she will be justified as having the third.
The irony is that I was always known as a touchy-feely person with enabling empathy. Yet, I always emphasized the third as of first importance in deference to its priority on this scale, and I was invariably overruled.
I have in my files countless cases of people who failed on the job "but were a good person" and "everybody liked them," erroneously assuming they would somehow be able to do the work.
Often, my colleagues on the selection board had impressive cognitive credentials in engineering, mathematics and technology. Yet, when it came to hiring people, they went with their gut, which is what they would say I always preached, but seldom with a close examination of the appropriate skills and requirements of the job in question.
To me, and this may sound coarse, we were hiring a machine to replace a worn part, or to meet the new requirements of the next iteration of that machine.
Should the person hired fail based on these evaluative criteria; would interviewers admit their error? Not likely.
Instead, they would see him or her placed in a much less demanding and critical position, but with the same salary and perks of the position originally hired, an accident of unintended consequences. This became a routine of one step forward, and two steps back, increasing rather than diminishing the load of the performers.
The other factor which never entered the interviewing process, but which was important to me, was the nature of the culture.
Nalco had a culture of contribution in my days with it, and its rapid growth and profitability reflected this. I have been away from it for more than thirty years, and I wonder what it is like today.
Honeywell had a culture of complacency with rhetoric of contribution. It has had over recent years a record of cyclic performance, punctuated by clever maneuvering, facility and cost accounting manipulation and spotty performance. Like other high tech companies in recent years, Honeywell's culture and performance is the rule rather than the exception.
High tech companies keep Wall Street happy by cutting costs and constant personnel redundancy exercises, using this as a gauge of performance, when it is actually a gauge of failure to address the problem of performance.
I worked in two tough cultures. You could call one common and the elitist; one was a performing culture, and the other cosmetic, meaning, it bought into all the fads as substitutes for performance and change management.
The corporation has been my laboratory.
It is also the reason I was tough on qualifications and suspect of interviewees with silk tongues and vapid minds. You could make a case that I was tough because I never fitted into any organization, as Charles Hayes has pointed out in one of his books. He found it interesting that I was an authority on organization and never found an organization in which I fitted.
But I had a deeper motivation. I wanted the new hire not only to survive but also to profit in his or her new job.
When you are really good at your job, despite all that I have written above, the organization caves in (pun intended) to your excellence. People may talk behind your back, may wish that you were elsewhere, never accept you as one of them, but they tolerate you because you are needed. It isn't the company politicians but its performers who signal a company's survival. Performers have little time to make nice. They are too busy doing.
A professor in graduate school once told me -- the course was advanced social psychology -- that nothing would give him more pleasure than to fail me, but to do that he would have to fail all the other members of the seminar. He gave me an "A."
So, the final factor in this most subjective business of interviewing for hire is that the interviewer invariably will be looking for something in the interviewee that is consistent with how one sees oneself.
In defense of form letters that wish the job seeker success elsewhere, "but regrettably, we have received more qualified applications," I have empathy for them as a one-man corporation. Yet, I receive almost daily resumes from people so highly qualified I wonder when they have had a chance to be performers. Did I mention I never advertise any positions?
It is not uncommon for me to receive resumes of people with technical and law degrees, and impressive titles in this and that job. What is missing, and it is consistently missing, is growth and development to satisfying fruition in a specific job or function.
If I would give the prospective job seeker advice, it would be to pursue something of a singular nature that (1) gives personal satisfaction; (2) is a needed skill; and (3) is job specific.
The Renaissance man is a good idea and may do well on "Jeopardy," but he or she is not likely the employee you would want to hire for a specific job.
While part of me abhors specialization, it is the nature of the extant beast. What one does one becomes. Those five simple words cover a philosophy of life and work as well.
Friday, October 21, 2005
Introduction: On Writing Who Put You In The Cage?
INTRODUCTION: On Writing
Who Put You In The Cage?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 2005
A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure
in which he reveals to us the inner working of his soul.
Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910)
Russian aesthetic philosopher, moralist, and mystic
Writing is like religion. Every man who feels the call must
work out his own salvation.
George Horace Lorimer (1868 – 1937)
American editor
Cage we all share – denial of death
I know of the cage as I write out of experience and observation. Whatever the genre, an author’s words emanate from life. Writers mirror the pain, struggles, and triumphs of their subjects. If they write perceptively, it is because they identify with their material. Novelist William Faulkner said upon receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in December 1950 these often repeated words:
I believe that man will not merely endure. He will survive. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.1
The poignancy of these remarks was brought to my attention with a recent email. The writer states he is dying, but is ready for death, although not in the sense that he wants to die. He claims his house in order, leaving two well-educated children, both of whom have yet to marry, and who have a slim extended family for support. His wife died when they were young and he has never remarried. “I am providing them with my strength to live with nobility as I plan to die with dignity.” Then he adds, “I have had a wonderful life.”
Six months earlier, he was in robust health and was told he looked ten years younger than his seventy years, claiming it was “part of my genetic pool.” He was number one in his age group at the club in tennis, a position that he has maintained through several decades.
From 1997 to 2002, he volunteered at the University of Denver to be part of an experimental group monitoring cancer detection and prevention. During that period, no cancer was detected. The doctors constantly remarked about his superior health for his age, and then one-day, six months ago, he fell off a ladder at home, and his whole world suddenly changed.
I thought about his concession to death long after reading this email. Life is, at best, such a short visit that I wondered if anyone is ever ready to die. Ernest Becker, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Denial of Death (1973), was interviewed by a reporter shortly before he died at the age of 50. His wife recalls that when a reporter rang the doorbell, during his final days, Becker quickly moved from the sofa to his study, and made as if the intrusion interrupted his work. He confessed later he couldn’t allow a stranger to think him lazy. What is it about life that inclines us to be self-conscious deniers of death to the end?
Poets and, indeed, philosophers have written volumes about life, but seldom about death. It is as if death is separate from life, when death is all about life. We exist before we come, stay but a little while, and return again to the magnificent hereafter. Between short happenings or life, eternity embraces each of us with the same equality and without a shred of distinction. In the end as in the beginning, we are all feebly the same.
No one escapes death, so why are we so afraid of life? Why do we construct cages around us? Pondering that puzzle is why I have written this book. I have no solutions to this puzzle, if there are any, but I do hope to bring some clarity to the business of living.
Learning of the Cage from Readers
As I do my daily walk, I reflect on my correspondents with readers as I did this one. I call myself the peripatetic philosopher, discovering as Aristotle did that my muse visits me as I walk. I never know what will surface in my mind as I walk. I make no demands upon it, allowing it to master my consciousness, as it will, and when it will. Sometimes my muse doesn’t disturb my walk. With my trusty recorder in one hand and a bottle of water and handkerchief in the other, I move to the rhythm of my mind.
When I listen to my words later, I hear the syncopating cadence of my feet against the pavement beating to the rhythm of my heart. Gurdjieff called this “the dance of the soul.”
The emailer in sharing his soul with me made him more in charge of it. While I reflected on his many wrenching encounters in life, and how he dispatched them, I realized I was witness to the courage of an authentic person. He displayed no bitterness about his fate; no sense of being shortchanged by life, but thrilled in what life has brought him.2 He experienced the resilience of love because he chose it over regret.
Life has been his teacher, and a wonderful teacher at that. His situation is not a cage. It is life. Life has exacted a series of tests of which this is one, tests he grappled with, and passed with distinction. In doing so, he has demonstrated a depth few of us experience. He has endured life and profundity is his. It is holy and cannot be taken from him. The poet Lord Bryron claims that adversity is the first path to truth, while Buddha says that truth is found through the joyful participation in the sorrows of the world. He knows this path well.
The cage of which I write here is not one of test takers and life engagers. It is the cage of test and life avoiders. People construct cages around themselves to deny and avoid reality checks, yet everyone receives a report card every day of their lives. These report cards are a measure of awareness, acceptance, and resilience. Herein is the brutal paradox: no one can take another person’s tests or engage in another person’s life challenges without compromising both. No one.
The Cage of “No” and the Open Road of “Yes!”
For many, life is a journey not taken, but a road less traveled. Such people exist; they do not live. They wait for retirement when all passion is spent. They hide in obsessions or look for answers in all the wrong places, which are always outside themselves.
The most critical test in life is the ability to say “no” when pressured to say “yes.” To say, “yes” because it pleases others when it would be better to say “no” is a hundred times more stressful to the spirit than any other conceivable activity, barring none. We want to be liked so that we can approve of ourselves. It seldom occurs to us that to be liked at the expense of accepting ourselves as we are exacts a heavy toll. It is we that suffer in the end.
Our passions and interests provide the direction of our spirit. They require our freedom, and the open road to expression. I enjoy an immeasurable freedom to write. I work harder at writing than I have at any job, and I have always worked those jobs with industry. I write because I want to, not because I have to. I am connected to my passion and interest.
A better question than asking how I came to have such freedom is what sacrifices or choices have I had to make to realize this freedom.
The cages we enter are about choices not made, where we have allowed others to impinge upon our freedoms. Often, choices not made are reflected in letting others dictate what we are and should be, as well as what we should and should not do with little or no input from the center of our being, from which passions and interests spring. We see this when children are not made to appreciate their parents’ space, and likewise, when parents become slaves to their children’s activities. They neutralize each other’s respective possibilities, as it is unlikely that such choices are fueled by either passion or interest, but rather to social convention and assumed roles. There is no greater cage than the absence of “no” in social interaction.
One can never do for others what they could better do for themselves. Codependency is the vicious cage of our times. Children need to experience the pain of growing up so that they may eventually become adults and go their own way, and live and survive by their own wits. There are too many parachutes and too many umbrellas for individuals when they foul up, and thus there have been a proliferation of cages as never before.
As the per capita income of the individual increases, freedom shrinks and the cage beacons with the Siren’s bewitching sweetness. This was a Western phenomenon in the twentieth century. Now it is becoming an Eastern phenomenon as well in the twenty-first century.
Carrying other people’s burdens as our own weakens their resolve and frustrates us, as we can never satisfy their demands. It is a vicious circle of which there is no escape.
When Colin Wilson was young, he found he enjoyed his own company and had little inclination to yield to peer pressure. He saw how the world was constructed, and realized his only place in that world was as an outsider. There he could experience the delicious freedom and daunting perspective only an outsider enjoys.3 As a writer, he observed the homeless mind of the modern world from this perspective:
The Outsider’s case against society is very clear. All men and women have these dangerous, unnamable impulses, yet they keep up a pretense, to themselves, to others; their respectability, their philosophy, their religion, are all attempts to gloss over, to make look civilized and rational something that is savage, unorganized, irrational. He is an Outsider because he stands for Truth.4
Wilson’s words resonated with his generation. His book became an international best seller over night. It resonated because he stepped outside convention and looked back with love, not hate, with courage, not contempt. It was his open road of truth, as he perceived it. Creative reflection came naturally to him, but I suspect his parents had a hand in it. We all need help to become the person we become. It commences with a supportive climate where the early choices we make come to haunt or liberate us.
Leaving the Cage: A Celebration of Choices
We live in a corporate society. People have become caged in that society. Many have lost the power of knowing and accepting themselves as they are, and others as they find them. Instead, they have taken on the corporate identity of the cage.
When the corporation made no sense to me, I didn’t hesitate to resign. I was young, 35, with a family of four small children, and had long ago decided I could never be as poor as I had been as a youth. In an inverted way, it turned my natural insecurity on its head.
So, when my boss said -- “How can you do this to us when the company has done so much for you?” – I responded, “If I wasn’t doing my job, the company would fire me. I’m firing the company. It’s not meeting my needs.” I made the company redundant to my life. My boss had to have the last word. He warned me that I would never do as well. He was right, but for the wrong reason.
Now, with time on my hands, and with family and friends wondering if I had turned hippie – it was 1969 -- I pondered my decision. What surfaced was the matter of tolerance. I decided tolerance starts with self-acceptance. This begins with accepting or liking oneself, warts and all, without excuses or recriminations. I had no sense of guilt despite it being drummed into my character. Nor did I have a particular concern what others might think of my actions. It never took. I did wonder why it didn’t.
It was then that I discovered that I wasn’t inclined to own other people’s problems. I would listen to people complain about how others dressed, talked, walked, cut their hair, or a million other incidental things and marvel at the attention. The strain would show on their faces, as they would try to convince me to feel the same. I couldn’t, but didn’t understand why. It took writing a book to find the answer.
A publisher, upon receiving the manuscript, asked for a paragraph to describe the premise of my book. I did it in one sentence:
Accept yourself as you are and you will accept others as you find them.
Trained as a bench chemist, finding myself in chemical sales without training, it was the critical key I found to confidence in dealing with prospects. The book was Confident Selling (Prentice-Hall 1970), an attempt to explain why I had been successful in selling when I failed to employ conventional sales tool. The book was a best seller and remained in print for twenty years.
Now, these many years later, I am again writing about self-acceptance, a journey that requires discarding all the misguided directions one encounters in a life determined by the choices we make, or allow others to make for us. It is now up to the individual as never before to rediscover the passions and interests of that road less traveled.
Discovering and Appreciating an Authentic Life
Each of us walks the walk, talks the talk, thinks the thoughts, believes the beliefs, and displays the behaviors of our programming. Yet, if we have eyes to see, and brains to discern, we can reprogram ourselves to an authentic life. It is not enough to criticize our programming, or to point out that many promoters of goodness and light are hypocrites and lead duplicitous lives.
In corporate society, there will always be people caught up in its nonsense. We need not live an inauthentic life because others do.
The aim here is not to make readers comfortable in their cages; nor is a formula provided for their escape. Just as I cannot own the readers’ problems, I cannot design the readers’ escape routes. Certain thinking and behavior put them in their cages, and only rethinking and recasting those behaviors provide ways out.
Gurus typically solve their own problems using readers and audiences to validate their solutions. Germans love Freud, not for his psychoanalytical theories, but for the beauty of his German prose. Were it not for the United States, which is solution driven to didactic simplistic formulas, chances are Freud would best be remembered as a literary figure. There is a novelist’s panache to his writing that even he conceded. More importantly, none of his theories can be proved or disproved, and therefore invalid from a scientific point of view.5
Whatever the problem, we are inevitably drawn to those who ease our conscience with simplistic solutions, formulas that would change our lives without changing them at all. An authentic person cannot be duped by such promises.
And what, dare we ask, is the “Ultimate Cage”?
An emailer read my novel In the Shadow of the Courthouse: Memoir of the 1940s Written as a Novel (2003), and felt pangs of nostalgia for a less complicated, more quiet, less demanding and distracting world that the book illustrated.
He has grown to maturity in a time when the small town and simpler lifestyle can be found only in books. Rivers you could once swim in are now polluted streams endangering our health. Open country that once filled our lungs with fresh air and a breathtaking visage is now covered with pastel colored little boxes as houses. Dense forests that once penciled the sky are now naked eroding hills. Train stations that once bustled with activity are now abandoned as freight trains whistle by without stopping. Passenger trains that once connected the smallest community with the outside world no longer exist. All this saddens him. There is no way to make him feel better. It is the way it is because of the way we are.
Environmental degradation is not a twentieth century phenomenon, nor is it a nineteenth or eighteenth century affair. It is a progressive development since the dawn of Western Civilization. The Romans had a hand in it that is still felt. Recently, geologists discovered that mining for iron ore in the mountains of Italy with pick ax and shovel, long before the time of Christ, polluted streams and created deep fissures in the mountain landscape. Mudslides and avalanches have always occurred in this mountainous terrain only now it is more critical due to heavy population in their midst.
It didn’t get any better when the Roman Empire became Christian. Genesis reads:
Every living thing shall be meat for you. The fear of you and dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth. Into your hands they are delivered. Have dominion over the earth and subdue it.
There couldn’t have been a better prescription for progress than this. The conquest of Nature is nearly complete. Now there is little left of Nature to support our species. We have conquered the planet, and now the planet is about to conquer us. It is our final cage.
So, as I walk thinking of these things, I’m reminded that there is little chance in my lifetime of much correction. My son’s wife had twin boys in 2005. I’m writing for Keaton Michael and Killian James, and their generation. They will come to maturity in the middle of the century. My sense is that they will be forced to be less indulgent, more responsible, more sensitive, and more authentically consistent with the rhythm of this planet. They must resist the cage to realize that authenticity.
Nietzsche once said that he loved only what people wrote with their blood. There is no other way.
Winners and Losers, or How do you see your friends?
In 1974, after the CEO of Bristol-Myers read my book, Confident Selling (1970), I was invited to interview for a job with its Dracket Division (makers of Drano). I had retired from Nalco Chemical Company in 1969 only in my 30s, and was pursuing a Ph.D. in psychology, while consulting and struggling to be a writer on the side.
My world was pretty well defined: school, traveling (to consult), writing (creating mounting journals of my scribbling), and readings of the likes of Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, Krisnamurti and Eckhart. I lived in a world of ideas and of writers whose feet rarely touched the ground of my reality.
So, it was with some curiosity that I journeyed to Cincinnati, Ohio, and interviewed with this CEO, who was in town, and his local cadre of executives. In the course of these interviews, the CEO asked me if I liked football. I had played high school football, and was even recruited to play in college, including my alma mater, Iowa, but truthfully I was not a huge fan of the sport, and could still feel the bruises incurred those several years before every time the weather changed. The job appeared most attractive, one I could work for a few years, and retire, this time permanently, with a nice economic cushion, and write to my heart's content.
"Oh, yes," I lied, "I'm a big fan," hoping he would not ask me any specific questions about players or team standings. He didn't. Instead, he went into a soliloquy I remember to this day.
"I'm part owner of the Cincinnati Bengals," he began. "Paul Brown (the coach and principal owner) is a friend of mine. I still remember that time he invited me to rookie camp in the middle of the summer. It was early August and hot as blazes. The practice field was full of new recruits and recycled guys who wanted to get a slot on the roaster. There I was, suit and tie, which I had to ditch, and still felt faint from the heat. I couldn't imagine how those guys could stand to be in pads.
"There must have been fifty or sixty guys out there. I walked over to coach Brown, and said, 'How in the devil do you decide who stays and who goes?'
"The coach smiled at me in that knowing Irish twinkle of his, grinning from ear-to-ear. 'John,' he said, 'I don't decide at all. They do.'
"Then he pointed to the players on the field in various stages of working out. 'See those guys over there,' he pointed to the sidelines. I nodded my head. There was a cluster of guys joking and talking to people on the sidelines. 'None of those guys are going to make it and they know it. You see those guys near the end zone, doing wind sprints, and working on their cuts?' Again, I nodded. 'Those guys are going to make it, and know they well, but are still working hard to stay.'
'My job,' he continued, 'isn't all that hard. I'm not only the coach, but also the general manager, and owner, too, and you'd think my job would be impossible. But I've learned in my time in this game that winners stick together, but so do losers. They know who they are, and where they are, and when I give them the nod that they are being cut or staying, it is never that big a surprise.'
Once he finished, he looked at me hard, took out a brown cigarette and lighted it, took a deep drag, and said, "So, what do you think?"
Halfway through his soliloquy I knew the question was coming, so I answered with a question, "Is that how you see it in your company?"
"That’s how I see it in life," he said waving his cigarette like a sword, and challenging me with his eyes to differ.
Instead, I said, "How do you see me helping you?"
This seemed to surprise him, expecting some other response. Once he recovered, he said, "I read your book, did I tell you that?" He had. "Told the coach about it, thought his people should read it. It's a motivator."
The hardest thing in an interview is to know when to talk and when to ride the silence. He waited for me to respond. When nothing was coming after a full minute, he shook my hand, and said, “You’ll be hearing from us.”
It reminds me now, these many years later, of watching the Nature channel, and hearing the narrator say, "Determine who is the leader of the pack is of any animal and you can control the group." He was the leader of the pack, and I knew I was in.
I made demands when offered the job, but they weren't salary demands, or the expected perks. I wanted to teach at Xavier University as an adjunct -- no problem; to finish off my semester at the University of South Florida before moving to Cincinnati -- no problem; and to continue to pursue my Ph.D. at the University of Cincinnati -- well, we'll talk about that.
Arrangements were made to have someone come down to Tampa from Cincinnati weekly to brief me on my new job and bring me up to speed. This went on for six weeks, and then OPEC placed an embargo on oil, and gasoline dried up at the pumps. Long lines sometimes wrapped around the block at gas stations. This also meant no petrochemicals for Drano's products, and they were all petroleum based.
The result was that all Dracket positions were frozen. So, I was hired and fired before I even started.
Fate is a strange customer. The Bristol-Myers's CEO took a liking to me on the basis of a book I had written. This was an arbitrary standard to say the least. The written word and the person behind the written words are not always the same. He waxed euphoric saying he could see us working together in New York in a few years. I listened and smiled and nodded, thinking only of how this job would contribute to my writing career.
After that interview, I found myself stranded at the Cincinnati airport with all the flights backed up because of bad weather. There across from me as big as life was Paul Brown, resplendent in a auburn soft felt hat tilted at an angel, an Irish brown tweed suit with a red and brown tie, and polished brown brogues sitting cross-legged on some football equipment bags. His football players who looked as big as small houses and dressed for a parade surrounded him. I am naturally shy, and not much of a small talker, but I had to mention my meeting of his friend. I walked over, and he smiled when I mentioned his name. Then his eyes sparkled with knowing as I said, "He told me about your philosophy of winners, and losers." I wanted to mention my book, and that his friend planned to recommend it to his players, but thought better of it. To this day, I don't know if any of them ever read it.
So, if you find it difficult seeing yourself in the following pages, can you see your friends?
Who Put You In The Cage?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 2005
A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure
in which he reveals to us the inner working of his soul.
Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910)
Russian aesthetic philosopher, moralist, and mystic
Writing is like religion. Every man who feels the call must
work out his own salvation.
George Horace Lorimer (1868 – 1937)
American editor
Cage we all share – denial of death
I know of the cage as I write out of experience and observation. Whatever the genre, an author’s words emanate from life. Writers mirror the pain, struggles, and triumphs of their subjects. If they write perceptively, it is because they identify with their material. Novelist William Faulkner said upon receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in December 1950 these often repeated words:
I believe that man will not merely endure. He will survive. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.1
The poignancy of these remarks was brought to my attention with a recent email. The writer states he is dying, but is ready for death, although not in the sense that he wants to die. He claims his house in order, leaving two well-educated children, both of whom have yet to marry, and who have a slim extended family for support. His wife died when they were young and he has never remarried. “I am providing them with my strength to live with nobility as I plan to die with dignity.” Then he adds, “I have had a wonderful life.”
Six months earlier, he was in robust health and was told he looked ten years younger than his seventy years, claiming it was “part of my genetic pool.” He was number one in his age group at the club in tennis, a position that he has maintained through several decades.
From 1997 to 2002, he volunteered at the University of Denver to be part of an experimental group monitoring cancer detection and prevention. During that period, no cancer was detected. The doctors constantly remarked about his superior health for his age, and then one-day, six months ago, he fell off a ladder at home, and his whole world suddenly changed.
I thought about his concession to death long after reading this email. Life is, at best, such a short visit that I wondered if anyone is ever ready to die. Ernest Becker, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Denial of Death (1973), was interviewed by a reporter shortly before he died at the age of 50. His wife recalls that when a reporter rang the doorbell, during his final days, Becker quickly moved from the sofa to his study, and made as if the intrusion interrupted his work. He confessed later he couldn’t allow a stranger to think him lazy. What is it about life that inclines us to be self-conscious deniers of death to the end?
Poets and, indeed, philosophers have written volumes about life, but seldom about death. It is as if death is separate from life, when death is all about life. We exist before we come, stay but a little while, and return again to the magnificent hereafter. Between short happenings or life, eternity embraces each of us with the same equality and without a shred of distinction. In the end as in the beginning, we are all feebly the same.
No one escapes death, so why are we so afraid of life? Why do we construct cages around us? Pondering that puzzle is why I have written this book. I have no solutions to this puzzle, if there are any, but I do hope to bring some clarity to the business of living.
Learning of the Cage from Readers
As I do my daily walk, I reflect on my correspondents with readers as I did this one. I call myself the peripatetic philosopher, discovering as Aristotle did that my muse visits me as I walk. I never know what will surface in my mind as I walk. I make no demands upon it, allowing it to master my consciousness, as it will, and when it will. Sometimes my muse doesn’t disturb my walk. With my trusty recorder in one hand and a bottle of water and handkerchief in the other, I move to the rhythm of my mind.
When I listen to my words later, I hear the syncopating cadence of my feet against the pavement beating to the rhythm of my heart. Gurdjieff called this “the dance of the soul.”
The emailer in sharing his soul with me made him more in charge of it. While I reflected on his many wrenching encounters in life, and how he dispatched them, I realized I was witness to the courage of an authentic person. He displayed no bitterness about his fate; no sense of being shortchanged by life, but thrilled in what life has brought him.2 He experienced the resilience of love because he chose it over regret.
Life has been his teacher, and a wonderful teacher at that. His situation is not a cage. It is life. Life has exacted a series of tests of which this is one, tests he grappled with, and passed with distinction. In doing so, he has demonstrated a depth few of us experience. He has endured life and profundity is his. It is holy and cannot be taken from him. The poet Lord Bryron claims that adversity is the first path to truth, while Buddha says that truth is found through the joyful participation in the sorrows of the world. He knows this path well.
The cage of which I write here is not one of test takers and life engagers. It is the cage of test and life avoiders. People construct cages around themselves to deny and avoid reality checks, yet everyone receives a report card every day of their lives. These report cards are a measure of awareness, acceptance, and resilience. Herein is the brutal paradox: no one can take another person’s tests or engage in another person’s life challenges without compromising both. No one.
The Cage of “No” and the Open Road of “Yes!”
For many, life is a journey not taken, but a road less traveled. Such people exist; they do not live. They wait for retirement when all passion is spent. They hide in obsessions or look for answers in all the wrong places, which are always outside themselves.
The most critical test in life is the ability to say “no” when pressured to say “yes.” To say, “yes” because it pleases others when it would be better to say “no” is a hundred times more stressful to the spirit than any other conceivable activity, barring none. We want to be liked so that we can approve of ourselves. It seldom occurs to us that to be liked at the expense of accepting ourselves as we are exacts a heavy toll. It is we that suffer in the end.
Our passions and interests provide the direction of our spirit. They require our freedom, and the open road to expression. I enjoy an immeasurable freedom to write. I work harder at writing than I have at any job, and I have always worked those jobs with industry. I write because I want to, not because I have to. I am connected to my passion and interest.
A better question than asking how I came to have such freedom is what sacrifices or choices have I had to make to realize this freedom.
The cages we enter are about choices not made, where we have allowed others to impinge upon our freedoms. Often, choices not made are reflected in letting others dictate what we are and should be, as well as what we should and should not do with little or no input from the center of our being, from which passions and interests spring. We see this when children are not made to appreciate their parents’ space, and likewise, when parents become slaves to their children’s activities. They neutralize each other’s respective possibilities, as it is unlikely that such choices are fueled by either passion or interest, but rather to social convention and assumed roles. There is no greater cage than the absence of “no” in social interaction.
One can never do for others what they could better do for themselves. Codependency is the vicious cage of our times. Children need to experience the pain of growing up so that they may eventually become adults and go their own way, and live and survive by their own wits. There are too many parachutes and too many umbrellas for individuals when they foul up, and thus there have been a proliferation of cages as never before.
As the per capita income of the individual increases, freedom shrinks and the cage beacons with the Siren’s bewitching sweetness. This was a Western phenomenon in the twentieth century. Now it is becoming an Eastern phenomenon as well in the twenty-first century.
Carrying other people’s burdens as our own weakens their resolve and frustrates us, as we can never satisfy their demands. It is a vicious circle of which there is no escape.
When Colin Wilson was young, he found he enjoyed his own company and had little inclination to yield to peer pressure. He saw how the world was constructed, and realized his only place in that world was as an outsider. There he could experience the delicious freedom and daunting perspective only an outsider enjoys.3 As a writer, he observed the homeless mind of the modern world from this perspective:
The Outsider’s case against society is very clear. All men and women have these dangerous, unnamable impulses, yet they keep up a pretense, to themselves, to others; their respectability, their philosophy, their religion, are all attempts to gloss over, to make look civilized and rational something that is savage, unorganized, irrational. He is an Outsider because he stands for Truth.4
Wilson’s words resonated with his generation. His book became an international best seller over night. It resonated because he stepped outside convention and looked back with love, not hate, with courage, not contempt. It was his open road of truth, as he perceived it. Creative reflection came naturally to him, but I suspect his parents had a hand in it. We all need help to become the person we become. It commences with a supportive climate where the early choices we make come to haunt or liberate us.
Leaving the Cage: A Celebration of Choices
We live in a corporate society. People have become caged in that society. Many have lost the power of knowing and accepting themselves as they are, and others as they find them. Instead, they have taken on the corporate identity of the cage.
When the corporation made no sense to me, I didn’t hesitate to resign. I was young, 35, with a family of four small children, and had long ago decided I could never be as poor as I had been as a youth. In an inverted way, it turned my natural insecurity on its head.
So, when my boss said -- “How can you do this to us when the company has done so much for you?” – I responded, “If I wasn’t doing my job, the company would fire me. I’m firing the company. It’s not meeting my needs.” I made the company redundant to my life. My boss had to have the last word. He warned me that I would never do as well. He was right, but for the wrong reason.
Now, with time on my hands, and with family and friends wondering if I had turned hippie – it was 1969 -- I pondered my decision. What surfaced was the matter of tolerance. I decided tolerance starts with self-acceptance. This begins with accepting or liking oneself, warts and all, without excuses or recriminations. I had no sense of guilt despite it being drummed into my character. Nor did I have a particular concern what others might think of my actions. It never took. I did wonder why it didn’t.
It was then that I discovered that I wasn’t inclined to own other people’s problems. I would listen to people complain about how others dressed, talked, walked, cut their hair, or a million other incidental things and marvel at the attention. The strain would show on their faces, as they would try to convince me to feel the same. I couldn’t, but didn’t understand why. It took writing a book to find the answer.
A publisher, upon receiving the manuscript, asked for a paragraph to describe the premise of my book. I did it in one sentence:
Accept yourself as you are and you will accept others as you find them.
Trained as a bench chemist, finding myself in chemical sales without training, it was the critical key I found to confidence in dealing with prospects. The book was Confident Selling (Prentice-Hall 1970), an attempt to explain why I had been successful in selling when I failed to employ conventional sales tool. The book was a best seller and remained in print for twenty years.
Now, these many years later, I am again writing about self-acceptance, a journey that requires discarding all the misguided directions one encounters in a life determined by the choices we make, or allow others to make for us. It is now up to the individual as never before to rediscover the passions and interests of that road less traveled.
Discovering and Appreciating an Authentic Life
Each of us walks the walk, talks the talk, thinks the thoughts, believes the beliefs, and displays the behaviors of our programming. Yet, if we have eyes to see, and brains to discern, we can reprogram ourselves to an authentic life. It is not enough to criticize our programming, or to point out that many promoters of goodness and light are hypocrites and lead duplicitous lives.
In corporate society, there will always be people caught up in its nonsense. We need not live an inauthentic life because others do.
The aim here is not to make readers comfortable in their cages; nor is a formula provided for their escape. Just as I cannot own the readers’ problems, I cannot design the readers’ escape routes. Certain thinking and behavior put them in their cages, and only rethinking and recasting those behaviors provide ways out.
Gurus typically solve their own problems using readers and audiences to validate their solutions. Germans love Freud, not for his psychoanalytical theories, but for the beauty of his German prose. Were it not for the United States, which is solution driven to didactic simplistic formulas, chances are Freud would best be remembered as a literary figure. There is a novelist’s panache to his writing that even he conceded. More importantly, none of his theories can be proved or disproved, and therefore invalid from a scientific point of view.5
Whatever the problem, we are inevitably drawn to those who ease our conscience with simplistic solutions, formulas that would change our lives without changing them at all. An authentic person cannot be duped by such promises.
And what, dare we ask, is the “Ultimate Cage”?
An emailer read my novel In the Shadow of the Courthouse: Memoir of the 1940s Written as a Novel (2003), and felt pangs of nostalgia for a less complicated, more quiet, less demanding and distracting world that the book illustrated.
He has grown to maturity in a time when the small town and simpler lifestyle can be found only in books. Rivers you could once swim in are now polluted streams endangering our health. Open country that once filled our lungs with fresh air and a breathtaking visage is now covered with pastel colored little boxes as houses. Dense forests that once penciled the sky are now naked eroding hills. Train stations that once bustled with activity are now abandoned as freight trains whistle by without stopping. Passenger trains that once connected the smallest community with the outside world no longer exist. All this saddens him. There is no way to make him feel better. It is the way it is because of the way we are.
Environmental degradation is not a twentieth century phenomenon, nor is it a nineteenth or eighteenth century affair. It is a progressive development since the dawn of Western Civilization. The Romans had a hand in it that is still felt. Recently, geologists discovered that mining for iron ore in the mountains of Italy with pick ax and shovel, long before the time of Christ, polluted streams and created deep fissures in the mountain landscape. Mudslides and avalanches have always occurred in this mountainous terrain only now it is more critical due to heavy population in their midst.
It didn’t get any better when the Roman Empire became Christian. Genesis reads:
Every living thing shall be meat for you. The fear of you and dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth. Into your hands they are delivered. Have dominion over the earth and subdue it.
There couldn’t have been a better prescription for progress than this. The conquest of Nature is nearly complete. Now there is little left of Nature to support our species. We have conquered the planet, and now the planet is about to conquer us. It is our final cage.
So, as I walk thinking of these things, I’m reminded that there is little chance in my lifetime of much correction. My son’s wife had twin boys in 2005. I’m writing for Keaton Michael and Killian James, and their generation. They will come to maturity in the middle of the century. My sense is that they will be forced to be less indulgent, more responsible, more sensitive, and more authentically consistent with the rhythm of this planet. They must resist the cage to realize that authenticity.
Nietzsche once said that he loved only what people wrote with their blood. There is no other way.
Winners and Losers, or How do you see your friends?
In 1974, after the CEO of Bristol-Myers read my book, Confident Selling (1970), I was invited to interview for a job with its Dracket Division (makers of Drano). I had retired from Nalco Chemical Company in 1969 only in my 30s, and was pursuing a Ph.D. in psychology, while consulting and struggling to be a writer on the side.
My world was pretty well defined: school, traveling (to consult), writing (creating mounting journals of my scribbling), and readings of the likes of Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, Krisnamurti and Eckhart. I lived in a world of ideas and of writers whose feet rarely touched the ground of my reality.
So, it was with some curiosity that I journeyed to Cincinnati, Ohio, and interviewed with this CEO, who was in town, and his local cadre of executives. In the course of these interviews, the CEO asked me if I liked football. I had played high school football, and was even recruited to play in college, including my alma mater, Iowa, but truthfully I was not a huge fan of the sport, and could still feel the bruises incurred those several years before every time the weather changed. The job appeared most attractive, one I could work for a few years, and retire, this time permanently, with a nice economic cushion, and write to my heart's content.
"Oh, yes," I lied, "I'm a big fan," hoping he would not ask me any specific questions about players or team standings. He didn't. Instead, he went into a soliloquy I remember to this day.
"I'm part owner of the Cincinnati Bengals," he began. "Paul Brown (the coach and principal owner) is a friend of mine. I still remember that time he invited me to rookie camp in the middle of the summer. It was early August and hot as blazes. The practice field was full of new recruits and recycled guys who wanted to get a slot on the roaster. There I was, suit and tie, which I had to ditch, and still felt faint from the heat. I couldn't imagine how those guys could stand to be in pads.
"There must have been fifty or sixty guys out there. I walked over to coach Brown, and said, 'How in the devil do you decide who stays and who goes?'
"The coach smiled at me in that knowing Irish twinkle of his, grinning from ear-to-ear. 'John,' he said, 'I don't decide at all. They do.'
"Then he pointed to the players on the field in various stages of working out. 'See those guys over there,' he pointed to the sidelines. I nodded my head. There was a cluster of guys joking and talking to people on the sidelines. 'None of those guys are going to make it and they know it. You see those guys near the end zone, doing wind sprints, and working on their cuts?' Again, I nodded. 'Those guys are going to make it, and know they well, but are still working hard to stay.'
'My job,' he continued, 'isn't all that hard. I'm not only the coach, but also the general manager, and owner, too, and you'd think my job would be impossible. But I've learned in my time in this game that winners stick together, but so do losers. They know who they are, and where they are, and when I give them the nod that they are being cut or staying, it is never that big a surprise.'
Once he finished, he looked at me hard, took out a brown cigarette and lighted it, took a deep drag, and said, "So, what do you think?"
Halfway through his soliloquy I knew the question was coming, so I answered with a question, "Is that how you see it in your company?"
"That’s how I see it in life," he said waving his cigarette like a sword, and challenging me with his eyes to differ.
Instead, I said, "How do you see me helping you?"
This seemed to surprise him, expecting some other response. Once he recovered, he said, "I read your book, did I tell you that?" He had. "Told the coach about it, thought his people should read it. It's a motivator."
The hardest thing in an interview is to know when to talk and when to ride the silence. He waited for me to respond. When nothing was coming after a full minute, he shook my hand, and said, “You’ll be hearing from us.”
It reminds me now, these many years later, of watching the Nature channel, and hearing the narrator say, "Determine who is the leader of the pack is of any animal and you can control the group." He was the leader of the pack, and I knew I was in.
I made demands when offered the job, but they weren't salary demands, or the expected perks. I wanted to teach at Xavier University as an adjunct -- no problem; to finish off my semester at the University of South Florida before moving to Cincinnati -- no problem; and to continue to pursue my Ph.D. at the University of Cincinnati -- well, we'll talk about that.
Arrangements were made to have someone come down to Tampa from Cincinnati weekly to brief me on my new job and bring me up to speed. This went on for six weeks, and then OPEC placed an embargo on oil, and gasoline dried up at the pumps. Long lines sometimes wrapped around the block at gas stations. This also meant no petrochemicals for Drano's products, and they were all petroleum based.
The result was that all Dracket positions were frozen. So, I was hired and fired before I even started.
Fate is a strange customer. The Bristol-Myers's CEO took a liking to me on the basis of a book I had written. This was an arbitrary standard to say the least. The written word and the person behind the written words are not always the same. He waxed euphoric saying he could see us working together in New York in a few years. I listened and smiled and nodded, thinking only of how this job would contribute to my writing career.
After that interview, I found myself stranded at the Cincinnati airport with all the flights backed up because of bad weather. There across from me as big as life was Paul Brown, resplendent in a auburn soft felt hat tilted at an angel, an Irish brown tweed suit with a red and brown tie, and polished brown brogues sitting cross-legged on some football equipment bags. His football players who looked as big as small houses and dressed for a parade surrounded him. I am naturally shy, and not much of a small talker, but I had to mention my meeting of his friend. I walked over, and he smiled when I mentioned his name. Then his eyes sparkled with knowing as I said, "He told me about your philosophy of winners, and losers." I wanted to mention my book, and that his friend planned to recommend it to his players, but thought better of it. To this day, I don't know if any of them ever read it.
So, if you find it difficult seeing yourself in the following pages, can you see your friends?
Who Put You In The Cage?
WHO PUT YOU IN THE CAGE?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© 2005
It is the fact that man does not experience himself as the active
bearer of his own powers and richness, but as an impoverished
“thing,” dependent on powers outside himself, unto whom he
has projected his living substance.
Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (1955)
Depend on no man, on no friend but him who can depend on himself.
He only who acts consciously toward himself, will act so toward others.
John Caspar Lavater (1741 – 1801)
Swiss theologian
Destiny is the scapegoat which we make responsible for all our crimes
and follies; a necessity which we set down for invincible when we have
no wish to strive against it.
Francis Maitland Balfour (1851 – 1882)
English biologist
The other day I had a conversation with a man full of concern for his sister. He was trying to understand why his sister is a liar, a cheat, an alcoholic, a poor mother, and a possessively jealous lover. He told me a horror story of the single parent gone over the edge. It opens this book because it reveals a common cage of modern society.
His sister has not only done severe damage to herself by her profligacy but she uses her child as chattel to play on the guilt of siblings and her mother. The father, who has remarried, has washed his hands of his daughter and will be no party to the charade. At this writing, she wants her son back. The boy’s grandmother is taking good care of him in another state, “with loving attention,” he adds. No mention is made of what might be best for the boy, but the implicit concern, which seems most apparent, is how to placate the delinquent mother.
It is learned that ever since the boy was quite young, he has had to be parent to his inattentive mother, her protector, her only friend, as well as her constant companion while a cadre of boyfriends periodically took her attention and loyalty from him. To her credit, she has never had a boyfriend live with her, but she has always placed the boyfriend, whomever he might be, ahead of her son. This has included leaving the boy alone for as long as two weeks when he was eleven to fend for himself, only returning when the current boyfriend kicked her out.
The boy has done poorly in school, and now with his grandmother, for the first time, is doing better academically, playing sports, and has a positive outlook on life. At this late stage, he is finally being allowed to have a childhood, as he is about to become a teenager. His mother, now between boyfriends, wants him returned to her care, and the law is on her side. Given all this information, I asked, “How old is she?”
“She’s in her mid-forties, never taken hold or settled down.”
This man, also in his mid-forties, who looks younger, suddenly raised his voice in breezy justification. “Of course, it’s not her fault. It’s our father’s fault.”
“How is it your father’s fault?”
“Well, he wasn’t there for her when she needed him now was he?”
“When was that?”
“Well, when she was screwing up.”
“And how old was she when she was doing that?”
“It started, I guess, when she was about eleven or twelve. She started smoking and drinking and stuff like that.”
“Oh! And what did your father do about that?”
“You mean when he found out? Well, she lied about it of course. A teacher caught her smoking in the restroom at school and she was suspended for three days. She said she was holding someone else’s cigarette when the teacher came in. My father didn’t buy her story. My mother did because she wanted to. Then he grounded her. She snuck out, and he grounded her again. She snuck out again. This went on forever. He tried to talk to her but my mother always interrupted him saying he was browbeating her.”
“Was he?”
“Was he what?”
“Browbeating her?”
“No, I don’t think so, though I wasn’t paying much attention. Looking back, I think he was just trying to get her to see what she was doing to herself. Anyway, it didn’t work because then she started to skip school. Did these things constantly. Even came home drunk one night when she was fourteen. My father never knew that. The short of it, he never got her under control. My mother didn’t help. She was always making excuses for her actions, hiding a lot of her mischief from my father, including that first time she got drunk. Her teachers didn’t do any better, nor did the priest. Then one day she snuck out again. My father knew it, and didn’t do anything.”
“Did you ask him why?”
“As a matter of fact, I did.”
“What did he say?”
“All he said was, ‘Should I care if she doesn’t?’”
“How old was she by that time?”
“I don’t know for sure, maybe about fifteen, sixteen.”
“What did you think of that, your father saying why should he care if she doesn’t?”
“I thought it insensitive. What about you? How would you see it?”
“Me? Oh, I think your father was on to something.”
“On to what?”
“Do you have any children?”
“Yes.”
“Hold old are they?”
“Teenagers.”
“Well, I’m sure then that you understand, at some point, children have to assume control of their consequences. It differs with every child. How about your sister? “
“What do you mean, ‘how about her’?”
“How about her finally taking control of her own life in middle age?”
“Oh, I see what you mean. Well, she’s handicapped.”
“Handicapped?”
“Yes, she has poor eyesight.”
“A lot of people have poor eyesight. I don’t think they see themselves as handicapped.”
“Well, hers is different. Hers is from birth. She had to have eye surgery for being born cross-eyed. I think she developed an inferiority complex out of it.”
Thanks to the professions of psychology and psychiatry, there are always terms for laymen to throw around that are relatively meaningless, which form a cage of deception that covers a lot of sins. Rather than pursue this confusing issue of inferiority complex, I turned my attention to his sister.
“I’ve seen your sister and she’s actually quite pretty, some might say beautiful. She’s tall, blond, blue-eyed with a stunning figure. Yes, I can see where she would attract men.”
“Yeah, I guess so, but a lot of guys have taken advantage of her good looks. I’d say she’s been exploited because of them.”
“And whose fault is that?”
“Well, theirs I guess, boyfriends, she’s an easy mark for them.”
“Why do you think she’s an easy mark?”
“Well, she’s a pleaser, isn’t she? She’s kind of needy and doesn’t like to hurt people’s feelings.”
“From what I hear she wasn’t much of a pleaser of your parents, her teachers, not even of her son.”
“That’s different.”
“How so?”
“It’s different in that she, well ah, she has a hatred of her father, you know, kind of a love-hate thing. He’s kind of a big deal and so she has kind of an antagonism towards all guys because of him.”
“Oh, so now you’re a psychologist?”
“No, I’m a tennis pro.”
“That surprises me, not that you’re a tennis professional, but because your comments have the ring of a psychologist making an assessment of a client. Have you discussed this with your psychologist?”
“I don’t have one or need one! Can’t I make my own assessment? I’m not stupid, you know!”
Ignoring this minor outburst, I went on. It was clear that his sister’s condition represented a lot of emotional baggage that he was carrying, and that he was obsessed with somehow getting rid of it, if it meant simply dumping it all on his father.
“So, what I hear you’re saying is that your father is responsible because your sister has never been able to get herself under control; that her good looks have been used against her; that handicapped with poor eyesight, she has never been able to get on top of her need for lying, cheating, smoking, drinking and partying; and that these problems harkened back to when she was an early teenager. Is that a somewhat accurate assessment of what you’re saying?
“Well, pretty much so, yeah.”
“And now you tell me her son has been taken away from her; that this has improved his health and well being; and that she wants him back now, not for his own good, but because she can, that is, legally speaking. Is that also the case?”
“Yes, that’s true, but I still insist it’s our father’s fault. You haven’t addressed that issue.”
“Oh, I see. You’re claiming that she is treating her son as if a piece of property that she can do with as she wills because your father did all these terrible things to her?”
“That’s right.”
I paused a moment not satisfied with my question because, first, it was a closed-end question that could be answered easily with either “yes” or “no,” and the answer given was the only answer you might expect from him. It also failed to move the discussion on to any understanding. I could see why lawyers never asked a question the answer to which they did not already know. So, instead of pursuing what the father did or didn’t do, I decided to ask another question.
“Now, let me ask you a question. What would you have done under the same circumstances? When she snuck out at night, when she started smoking you say at about eleven, when she was going on drinking binges when she was only fourteen, when she started to skip school, when she had several sexual encounters with boys when she was still only in her early teens, what would you have done?”
The sexual encounters were only a guess, but I could see they didn’t cause any raised eyebrows. Instead, he grew pensive.
“What would I have done?”
“Yes, you are a father now. What would you have done then different than your father?”
He pauses, reties his shoe, and then looks at me.
“How should I know? I’m her brother.”
“Well, you have children.”
“Yes.”
“Do they behave like this?”
“No. That’s what I say. I don’t have kids that behave like this. That’s why it’s my father’s fault.”
“Have you ever talked to your father about this?”
“Are you kidding? Hell, no!”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, I don’t have a relationship with my father.”
“Oh, you don’t have a relationship with him either?”
“No. He wanted me to study in school, wanted me to find myself and get stuff on my own, like he did, and I just wanted to play sports. Well, he said to me, ‘son, the choices you make you have to live with.’ As it turns out, I’ve made a good living at tennis. I make a six-figure income and have for years.”
“That’s nice. How about your other siblings. You say you have another sister and brother. How have they turned out?”
“Well, my other sister has done very well. She is a wife, mother and professional model with a husband who is a real go-getter. He does better than I do. And my other brother, who never spent a day in college, has done about as well as I’ve done working his way up from day laborer in high school to the executive ranks of an international sign company. Hell, his wife even makes a six-figure income in the beautician business. Then there’s my sister. She’s not done well at all. She’s a waitress and can never seem to hold a job for too long because of her habits if you catch my meaning.”
“You mentioned that your brother didn’t attend college. Did you or any of your other siblings?”
“Yeah, my sister the model and I both went more than four years. Neither of us graduated. She kept changing her major and I always took the minimum hours to devote more time to sports. I’m three hours short of graduating. My sister the waitress and my brother never went to college.”
“Money seems important to you. Is it important to your father?”
“Hell no, but that’s because he’s got it. Academics are important to him. He could paper the walls with all his academic degrees and honors.”
“But I thought you said he came from nothing.”
“He did. But let me tell you something, he’s an oddball. You’d agree with me if you ever met him. He’s never smoked or drank, spends money like it’s the last nickel in his pocket, and prefers his own company to anyone else’s.”
“Why is that?”
“Why is what? I don’t follow you.”
“Why do you think he is the way he is and why the rest of you are the way you are?”
“Well, he was born in the depression. I guess that’s part of it. He told me one time his only way out was using his mind. As long as I’ve known him, he has had a book in his face. It soured me on education because with him school is never out. None of us liked school and my sister the waitress least of all.”
“And is that also your father’s fault? That none of you were interested in school especially her?”
“I think so, yeah.”
“How is that?”
“Well, he tried to show her things as he did the rest of us. When she wasn’t interested, he simply said, ‘Well, that’s the choice you make.’ Just like he said it to me. He didn’t badger her anymore than he did us. He said education was a privilege, not a right, and if we couldn’t appreciate that, he couldn’t make us.”
“You think that was wrong?”
“Well, yes!”
“Why?”
“Well, it didn’t work with her now did it?”
“Maybe she has the life she wants. Did you ever consider that possibility? Maybe she wants to be irresponsible, maybe she wants to live on the fly, maybe she has the attention span of a gnat, maybe all these things add up to what she sees herself as being. How do you feel about that?”
“Well, then you’re saying it’s her fault for the way she’s turned out.”
There were several ways to proceed. I moved papers about my desk as if they were important trying to decide what tact to take. Finally, I said,
“Let me ask you a question. Do you think she has free will?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Has she been allowed the freedom to make free choices in her life, using your father’s expression, whether to stay in school, or not; whether to stay in her bedroom at night, or not; whether to avoid drinking and smoking when she was a teenager, or not; whether to abstain from sex as a young girl, or not; whether to esteem herself as a person, or not; whether…”
“That’s it! You hit upon it. She lacks self-esteem.”
There again he was playing the role of the self-help popular psychologist as analysand. He came to me for confirmation and corroboration of his analysis, not to gather an insight into his sister’s condition or dilemma. He knew what was wrong. All he needed was an authority figure to confirm it.
“And that’s her father’s fault?”
“Absolutely, don’t you agree?”
Instead of answering, I asked,
“What exactly does self-esteem mean to you?”
“What do you mean what does it mean? It means exactly what it is.”
“And what exactly is that?”
“You esteem yourself.”
“You don’t think she esteems herself?”
“Well, no! She wouldn’t be in the mess that she’s in if she did.”
“I get the impression from what you’ve shared with me that she actually esteems herself very much. It seems her self is what dominates her. Her self love. Her flaunting self over commitment to others, at home, in school, in her relationship to her son, in her relationship to her job, in…”
“How do you know she’s that way on the job?”
“You told me she had difficulty holding a job. I assumed she is also very convincing in that it is always someone else’s fault when she loses one.”
“It’s true, but how did you know that?”
“The pattern is there. She can’t stand any pressure, any stress, or anything that nullifies the dominance of her self first, second and always.”
“I don’t think I quite understand that.”
“Let me ask you this, do you help her out financially when she gets into trouble?”
“Of course, I’m her brother.” Then to further justify this approach, he added, “Every time she gets into financial straits I help her, so does my sister, so does my brother. We’ve bailed her out of jail when she broke into her boyfriend’s apartment and trashed it. We got her son back when she ran into trouble with the social services. But lately, well, social services’ patience is wearing thin and we don’t know if we can save her relationship with her son. We’ve sent him off to our mother, but she wants him back now, and it’s not good for the boy. It is the reason I’m here. We’ve run out of options. She is forty-five and her son turns thirteen soon.” The man bent forward his head in his hands as if he had just lost the tennis match of his life.
“So, you’re saying each time she falls on her face there is a safety net to break her fall. She keeps falling, and falling, but the net is always there.”
“That’s right.”
“You say that proudly. Why?”
“What do you mean, why? She’s my sister. She’s my flesh and blood. That’s why.”
“How about you? What’s your safety net?”
It was as if I hit his funny bone. He sprung alive, waved his arms in the air as if in surrender, and then bent over in ruckus laughter.
“I don’t have one. It’s up to me. I’m a self-employed kind of guy. If I screw up, I’m out of business. One club can so damage my reputation that I couldn’t find another job not only in this country, but also in this cotton picking tennis world. That tells you something about my industry.”
“So, you go by rules?”
“Yes.”
“You make choices?”
“Yes.”
“You respect authority, accept responsibility, and abide by the rules that govern your life.”
“Yes to all that. Your point?”
I ignored his question.
“You are sensitive to the needs and demands of your clientele?”
“Yes, yes, yes! Would you make your point?”
“You do all these things, accept all these pressures, and realize as a result that you are successful. That’s my point.”
“Yes, so?”
“Now, let us look at your sister. Does she do any of these things?
“No, but that’s my point. She doesn’t do any of these things. But she can’t because, as you can see from what I’ve told you, she’s not in control.”
“Now I come back to my question again, are you, your brother and sister helping her get under control?”
“No, but as I told you that’s why I’m here. We’re doing the best we can, and whose going to help her if we don’t?”
“How about herself?”
“She’s not capable.”
“How do you know? Did you ever think by helping her that you were in fact hurting her? That you were weakening her resolve to help herself? That in helping her you are actually destroying her resolve to carry her own baggage?”
“That’s kind of funny.”
“Why so?”
“Well it comes back to my father.”
“Yes?”
“A long time ago when my sister was first married. She’s divorced now. She and her husband purchased a very expensive car with no income whatsoever. They couldn’t make the payments. She came to my father and told him, ‘I need $800 for two car payments today or they’re going to take my car from me.’ Guess what my father said?”
“I have no idea.”
“My father smiled at her, and said, ‘I’m going to do you a favor.’”
“And?”
“He said, ‘I’m not going to loan you the money.’”
“And?”
“Well, he could have loaned her $8,000 and it wouldn’t have hurt him, but he wouldn’t loan her a measly $800 to keep her car.”
“Do you think it was a matter of the amount of money or something else?”
“What else could it be?”
“Could it be he didn’t want to create a codependency with her?”
“Oh come on now. Don’t start talking to me in that psychological double talk. I’ve read those books. They’re pure BS!”
“No, I’m quite serious when I say that. Codependency is real.” Then a thought occurred to me. “Why is it do you think that you remember what your father said about that car purchase? Why do you think that stuck in your mind?”
“Because I’ve hated him ever since for doing this to her.”
Rather than challenge his thinking on this, his face told me he held ripe bitterness toward his father still, I decided on another approach.
“Let me ask you another question, when your sister gets in deep yogurt, does she ever call on your father?”
“You’ve got to be kidding. No chance.”
“Why do you think that is so?”
“Well, he’s a heartless bastard and she knows the answer doesn’t she?”
“Now, imagine if she got the same answer from the rest of you, imagine what would happen then? You said she’s been in jail and you’ve bailed her out.”
“True.”
“That she was going to be kicked out of her apartment and you came up with two months rent that she didn’t use on the apartment but spent otherwise, still getting kicked out of her apartment.”
“That’s also true. My brother-in-law even gave her three-months advance for the rent on another apartment, and she never paid a month’s rent with that money either.”
“Well, well, well. We see a pattern here don’t we?”
“Yeah, I guess kind of.”
“I’m going to say something now, and I don’t mean any disrespect to your sister or the rest of your family. Your sister is in a cage. And there is not one steel bar of that cage that she did not purchase and install herself. However, she did purchase some of the bars with money given to her by you and others. No one but herself marked off the space, and constructed those barriers. Each bar is an excuse she has provided to avoid the consequences of her actions. The cage is enclosed in the wire mesh safety net that you and your family have provided her over the years. She did this to herself and has not learned what she has done. She’s living in a cage, and she put herself in it, while you and your family are ensuring that she never escapes.”
“I think that is a little harsh.”
“Oh, no, it’s not harsh enough.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because she doesn’t understand it nor do you.”
* * * * *
By the nature of our species, the newborn child cannot survive without tender loving care for a number of years. But then a point is reached between nurturing and nature, between parents as caretakers and the child discovering its own essence.
The parental fallacy is a cultural phenomenon when nurturing becomes an obsession at the expense of the individual’s nature. Parents epitomize authority figures. They are expressed in the double-binding mother, the seductive mother, and now the absent, possessive or punitive mother. The latter has previously been identified with the father.
Notice that all of these parental fallacies draw attention away from the child and back to the parents. Parents always worry about such questions as: have I the right attitude, am I too strict, too lenient, or am I good enough parent? These self-referenced narcissisms give meaning to the parental fallacy, which spins off into parental fantasy. The child is protected from ever discovering what makes it tick, or the meaning and consequences of right and wrong because the parent is always there to put a positive spin on otherwise untoward behavior.
We have a parental society, which sponsors a parental culture, which in turn gives moment to parental fallacies on every level of society. Our schools, churches, workplaces, and our government perform as caretakers, providing a cage of security, a place of regression where we as members of that community need never grow up.
We even see parents as mentors, which they cannot be or cannot perform because the role between caretaker and mentor are different. A caretaker’s focus is on the person; the mentor’s focus is on the person’s talent. Mentors, however, often behave as parents. Consequently, mentoring has become not unlike that of parental authority with the ready answers and developmental ideas for the mentored without so much as a hint of the invisible load that is at the heart of the mentored.
A point is reached, therefore, in the present climate of this parental fallacy that the individual must become parent to the man, separate from his parents and those who would mentor him, and take charge of his own mentoring and development.
Self-mentoring is an idea whose time has come to combat a society, which forgives all transgressions. This society discourages the idea of genius because that would mean we differ widely in talent and ability, which we do. As a result, society places everyone in some kind of a cage. In many ways, our present society has become an unconditional positive parental fantasyland. It has not made us happy campers. We will now explore why this is so in some depth.
* * * * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© 2005
It is the fact that man does not experience himself as the active
bearer of his own powers and richness, but as an impoverished
“thing,” dependent on powers outside himself, unto whom he
has projected his living substance.
Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (1955)
Depend on no man, on no friend but him who can depend on himself.
He only who acts consciously toward himself, will act so toward others.
John Caspar Lavater (1741 – 1801)
Swiss theologian
Destiny is the scapegoat which we make responsible for all our crimes
and follies; a necessity which we set down for invincible when we have
no wish to strive against it.
Francis Maitland Balfour (1851 – 1882)
English biologist
The other day I had a conversation with a man full of concern for his sister. He was trying to understand why his sister is a liar, a cheat, an alcoholic, a poor mother, and a possessively jealous lover. He told me a horror story of the single parent gone over the edge. It opens this book because it reveals a common cage of modern society.
His sister has not only done severe damage to herself by her profligacy but she uses her child as chattel to play on the guilt of siblings and her mother. The father, who has remarried, has washed his hands of his daughter and will be no party to the charade. At this writing, she wants her son back. The boy’s grandmother is taking good care of him in another state, “with loving attention,” he adds. No mention is made of what might be best for the boy, but the implicit concern, which seems most apparent, is how to placate the delinquent mother.
It is learned that ever since the boy was quite young, he has had to be parent to his inattentive mother, her protector, her only friend, as well as her constant companion while a cadre of boyfriends periodically took her attention and loyalty from him. To her credit, she has never had a boyfriend live with her, but she has always placed the boyfriend, whomever he might be, ahead of her son. This has included leaving the boy alone for as long as two weeks when he was eleven to fend for himself, only returning when the current boyfriend kicked her out.
The boy has done poorly in school, and now with his grandmother, for the first time, is doing better academically, playing sports, and has a positive outlook on life. At this late stage, he is finally being allowed to have a childhood, as he is about to become a teenager. His mother, now between boyfriends, wants him returned to her care, and the law is on her side. Given all this information, I asked, “How old is she?”
“She’s in her mid-forties, never taken hold or settled down.”
This man, also in his mid-forties, who looks younger, suddenly raised his voice in breezy justification. “Of course, it’s not her fault. It’s our father’s fault.”
“How is it your father’s fault?”
“Well, he wasn’t there for her when she needed him now was he?”
“When was that?”
“Well, when she was screwing up.”
“And how old was she when she was doing that?”
“It started, I guess, when she was about eleven or twelve. She started smoking and drinking and stuff like that.”
“Oh! And what did your father do about that?”
“You mean when he found out? Well, she lied about it of course. A teacher caught her smoking in the restroom at school and she was suspended for three days. She said she was holding someone else’s cigarette when the teacher came in. My father didn’t buy her story. My mother did because she wanted to. Then he grounded her. She snuck out, and he grounded her again. She snuck out again. This went on forever. He tried to talk to her but my mother always interrupted him saying he was browbeating her.”
“Was he?”
“Was he what?”
“Browbeating her?”
“No, I don’t think so, though I wasn’t paying much attention. Looking back, I think he was just trying to get her to see what she was doing to herself. Anyway, it didn’t work because then she started to skip school. Did these things constantly. Even came home drunk one night when she was fourteen. My father never knew that. The short of it, he never got her under control. My mother didn’t help. She was always making excuses for her actions, hiding a lot of her mischief from my father, including that first time she got drunk. Her teachers didn’t do any better, nor did the priest. Then one day she snuck out again. My father knew it, and didn’t do anything.”
“Did you ask him why?”
“As a matter of fact, I did.”
“What did he say?”
“All he said was, ‘Should I care if she doesn’t?’”
“How old was she by that time?”
“I don’t know for sure, maybe about fifteen, sixteen.”
“What did you think of that, your father saying why should he care if she doesn’t?”
“I thought it insensitive. What about you? How would you see it?”
“Me? Oh, I think your father was on to something.”
“On to what?”
“Do you have any children?”
“Yes.”
“Hold old are they?”
“Teenagers.”
“Well, I’m sure then that you understand, at some point, children have to assume control of their consequences. It differs with every child. How about your sister? “
“What do you mean, ‘how about her’?”
“How about her finally taking control of her own life in middle age?”
“Oh, I see what you mean. Well, she’s handicapped.”
“Handicapped?”
“Yes, she has poor eyesight.”
“A lot of people have poor eyesight. I don’t think they see themselves as handicapped.”
“Well, hers is different. Hers is from birth. She had to have eye surgery for being born cross-eyed. I think she developed an inferiority complex out of it.”
Thanks to the professions of psychology and psychiatry, there are always terms for laymen to throw around that are relatively meaningless, which form a cage of deception that covers a lot of sins. Rather than pursue this confusing issue of inferiority complex, I turned my attention to his sister.
“I’ve seen your sister and she’s actually quite pretty, some might say beautiful. She’s tall, blond, blue-eyed with a stunning figure. Yes, I can see where she would attract men.”
“Yeah, I guess so, but a lot of guys have taken advantage of her good looks. I’d say she’s been exploited because of them.”
“And whose fault is that?”
“Well, theirs I guess, boyfriends, she’s an easy mark for them.”
“Why do you think she’s an easy mark?”
“Well, she’s a pleaser, isn’t she? She’s kind of needy and doesn’t like to hurt people’s feelings.”
“From what I hear she wasn’t much of a pleaser of your parents, her teachers, not even of her son.”
“That’s different.”
“How so?”
“It’s different in that she, well ah, she has a hatred of her father, you know, kind of a love-hate thing. He’s kind of a big deal and so she has kind of an antagonism towards all guys because of him.”
“Oh, so now you’re a psychologist?”
“No, I’m a tennis pro.”
“That surprises me, not that you’re a tennis professional, but because your comments have the ring of a psychologist making an assessment of a client. Have you discussed this with your psychologist?”
“I don’t have one or need one! Can’t I make my own assessment? I’m not stupid, you know!”
Ignoring this minor outburst, I went on. It was clear that his sister’s condition represented a lot of emotional baggage that he was carrying, and that he was obsessed with somehow getting rid of it, if it meant simply dumping it all on his father.
“So, what I hear you’re saying is that your father is responsible because your sister has never been able to get herself under control; that her good looks have been used against her; that handicapped with poor eyesight, she has never been able to get on top of her need for lying, cheating, smoking, drinking and partying; and that these problems harkened back to when she was an early teenager. Is that a somewhat accurate assessment of what you’re saying?
“Well, pretty much so, yeah.”
“And now you tell me her son has been taken away from her; that this has improved his health and well being; and that she wants him back now, not for his own good, but because she can, that is, legally speaking. Is that also the case?”
“Yes, that’s true, but I still insist it’s our father’s fault. You haven’t addressed that issue.”
“Oh, I see. You’re claiming that she is treating her son as if a piece of property that she can do with as she wills because your father did all these terrible things to her?”
“That’s right.”
I paused a moment not satisfied with my question because, first, it was a closed-end question that could be answered easily with either “yes” or “no,” and the answer given was the only answer you might expect from him. It also failed to move the discussion on to any understanding. I could see why lawyers never asked a question the answer to which they did not already know. So, instead of pursuing what the father did or didn’t do, I decided to ask another question.
“Now, let me ask you a question. What would you have done under the same circumstances? When she snuck out at night, when she started smoking you say at about eleven, when she was going on drinking binges when she was only fourteen, when she started to skip school, when she had several sexual encounters with boys when she was still only in her early teens, what would you have done?”
The sexual encounters were only a guess, but I could see they didn’t cause any raised eyebrows. Instead, he grew pensive.
“What would I have done?”
“Yes, you are a father now. What would you have done then different than your father?”
He pauses, reties his shoe, and then looks at me.
“How should I know? I’m her brother.”
“Well, you have children.”
“Yes.”
“Do they behave like this?”
“No. That’s what I say. I don’t have kids that behave like this. That’s why it’s my father’s fault.”
“Have you ever talked to your father about this?”
“Are you kidding? Hell, no!”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, I don’t have a relationship with my father.”
“Oh, you don’t have a relationship with him either?”
“No. He wanted me to study in school, wanted me to find myself and get stuff on my own, like he did, and I just wanted to play sports. Well, he said to me, ‘son, the choices you make you have to live with.’ As it turns out, I’ve made a good living at tennis. I make a six-figure income and have for years.”
“That’s nice. How about your other siblings. You say you have another sister and brother. How have they turned out?”
“Well, my other sister has done very well. She is a wife, mother and professional model with a husband who is a real go-getter. He does better than I do. And my other brother, who never spent a day in college, has done about as well as I’ve done working his way up from day laborer in high school to the executive ranks of an international sign company. Hell, his wife even makes a six-figure income in the beautician business. Then there’s my sister. She’s not done well at all. She’s a waitress and can never seem to hold a job for too long because of her habits if you catch my meaning.”
“You mentioned that your brother didn’t attend college. Did you or any of your other siblings?”
“Yeah, my sister the model and I both went more than four years. Neither of us graduated. She kept changing her major and I always took the minimum hours to devote more time to sports. I’m three hours short of graduating. My sister the waitress and my brother never went to college.”
“Money seems important to you. Is it important to your father?”
“Hell no, but that’s because he’s got it. Academics are important to him. He could paper the walls with all his academic degrees and honors.”
“But I thought you said he came from nothing.”
“He did. But let me tell you something, he’s an oddball. You’d agree with me if you ever met him. He’s never smoked or drank, spends money like it’s the last nickel in his pocket, and prefers his own company to anyone else’s.”
“Why is that?”
“Why is what? I don’t follow you.”
“Why do you think he is the way he is and why the rest of you are the way you are?”
“Well, he was born in the depression. I guess that’s part of it. He told me one time his only way out was using his mind. As long as I’ve known him, he has had a book in his face. It soured me on education because with him school is never out. None of us liked school and my sister the waitress least of all.”
“And is that also your father’s fault? That none of you were interested in school especially her?”
“I think so, yeah.”
“How is that?”
“Well, he tried to show her things as he did the rest of us. When she wasn’t interested, he simply said, ‘Well, that’s the choice you make.’ Just like he said it to me. He didn’t badger her anymore than he did us. He said education was a privilege, not a right, and if we couldn’t appreciate that, he couldn’t make us.”
“You think that was wrong?”
“Well, yes!”
“Why?”
“Well, it didn’t work with her now did it?”
“Maybe she has the life she wants. Did you ever consider that possibility? Maybe she wants to be irresponsible, maybe she wants to live on the fly, maybe she has the attention span of a gnat, maybe all these things add up to what she sees herself as being. How do you feel about that?”
“Well, then you’re saying it’s her fault for the way she’s turned out.”
There were several ways to proceed. I moved papers about my desk as if they were important trying to decide what tact to take. Finally, I said,
“Let me ask you a question. Do you think she has free will?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Has she been allowed the freedom to make free choices in her life, using your father’s expression, whether to stay in school, or not; whether to stay in her bedroom at night, or not; whether to avoid drinking and smoking when she was a teenager, or not; whether to abstain from sex as a young girl, or not; whether to esteem herself as a person, or not; whether…”
“That’s it! You hit upon it. She lacks self-esteem.”
There again he was playing the role of the self-help popular psychologist as analysand. He came to me for confirmation and corroboration of his analysis, not to gather an insight into his sister’s condition or dilemma. He knew what was wrong. All he needed was an authority figure to confirm it.
“And that’s her father’s fault?”
“Absolutely, don’t you agree?”
Instead of answering, I asked,
“What exactly does self-esteem mean to you?”
“What do you mean what does it mean? It means exactly what it is.”
“And what exactly is that?”
“You esteem yourself.”
“You don’t think she esteems herself?”
“Well, no! She wouldn’t be in the mess that she’s in if she did.”
“I get the impression from what you’ve shared with me that she actually esteems herself very much. It seems her self is what dominates her. Her self love. Her flaunting self over commitment to others, at home, in school, in her relationship to her son, in her relationship to her job, in…”
“How do you know she’s that way on the job?”
“You told me she had difficulty holding a job. I assumed she is also very convincing in that it is always someone else’s fault when she loses one.”
“It’s true, but how did you know that?”
“The pattern is there. She can’t stand any pressure, any stress, or anything that nullifies the dominance of her self first, second and always.”
“I don’t think I quite understand that.”
“Let me ask you this, do you help her out financially when she gets into trouble?”
“Of course, I’m her brother.” Then to further justify this approach, he added, “Every time she gets into financial straits I help her, so does my sister, so does my brother. We’ve bailed her out of jail when she broke into her boyfriend’s apartment and trashed it. We got her son back when she ran into trouble with the social services. But lately, well, social services’ patience is wearing thin and we don’t know if we can save her relationship with her son. We’ve sent him off to our mother, but she wants him back now, and it’s not good for the boy. It is the reason I’m here. We’ve run out of options. She is forty-five and her son turns thirteen soon.” The man bent forward his head in his hands as if he had just lost the tennis match of his life.
“So, you’re saying each time she falls on her face there is a safety net to break her fall. She keeps falling, and falling, but the net is always there.”
“That’s right.”
“You say that proudly. Why?”
“What do you mean, why? She’s my sister. She’s my flesh and blood. That’s why.”
“How about you? What’s your safety net?”
It was as if I hit his funny bone. He sprung alive, waved his arms in the air as if in surrender, and then bent over in ruckus laughter.
“I don’t have one. It’s up to me. I’m a self-employed kind of guy. If I screw up, I’m out of business. One club can so damage my reputation that I couldn’t find another job not only in this country, but also in this cotton picking tennis world. That tells you something about my industry.”
“So, you go by rules?”
“Yes.”
“You make choices?”
“Yes.”
“You respect authority, accept responsibility, and abide by the rules that govern your life.”
“Yes to all that. Your point?”
I ignored his question.
“You are sensitive to the needs and demands of your clientele?”
“Yes, yes, yes! Would you make your point?”
“You do all these things, accept all these pressures, and realize as a result that you are successful. That’s my point.”
“Yes, so?”
“Now, let us look at your sister. Does she do any of these things?
“No, but that’s my point. She doesn’t do any of these things. But she can’t because, as you can see from what I’ve told you, she’s not in control.”
“Now I come back to my question again, are you, your brother and sister helping her get under control?”
“No, but as I told you that’s why I’m here. We’re doing the best we can, and whose going to help her if we don’t?”
“How about herself?”
“She’s not capable.”
“How do you know? Did you ever think by helping her that you were in fact hurting her? That you were weakening her resolve to help herself? That in helping her you are actually destroying her resolve to carry her own baggage?”
“That’s kind of funny.”
“Why so?”
“Well it comes back to my father.”
“Yes?”
“A long time ago when my sister was first married. She’s divorced now. She and her husband purchased a very expensive car with no income whatsoever. They couldn’t make the payments. She came to my father and told him, ‘I need $800 for two car payments today or they’re going to take my car from me.’ Guess what my father said?”
“I have no idea.”
“My father smiled at her, and said, ‘I’m going to do you a favor.’”
“And?”
“He said, ‘I’m not going to loan you the money.’”
“And?”
“Well, he could have loaned her $8,000 and it wouldn’t have hurt him, but he wouldn’t loan her a measly $800 to keep her car.”
“Do you think it was a matter of the amount of money or something else?”
“What else could it be?”
“Could it be he didn’t want to create a codependency with her?”
“Oh come on now. Don’t start talking to me in that psychological double talk. I’ve read those books. They’re pure BS!”
“No, I’m quite serious when I say that. Codependency is real.” Then a thought occurred to me. “Why is it do you think that you remember what your father said about that car purchase? Why do you think that stuck in your mind?”
“Because I’ve hated him ever since for doing this to her.”
Rather than challenge his thinking on this, his face told me he held ripe bitterness toward his father still, I decided on another approach.
“Let me ask you another question, when your sister gets in deep yogurt, does she ever call on your father?”
“You’ve got to be kidding. No chance.”
“Why do you think that is so?”
“Well, he’s a heartless bastard and she knows the answer doesn’t she?”
“Now, imagine if she got the same answer from the rest of you, imagine what would happen then? You said she’s been in jail and you’ve bailed her out.”
“True.”
“That she was going to be kicked out of her apartment and you came up with two months rent that she didn’t use on the apartment but spent otherwise, still getting kicked out of her apartment.”
“That’s also true. My brother-in-law even gave her three-months advance for the rent on another apartment, and she never paid a month’s rent with that money either.”
“Well, well, well. We see a pattern here don’t we?”
“Yeah, I guess kind of.”
“I’m going to say something now, and I don’t mean any disrespect to your sister or the rest of your family. Your sister is in a cage. And there is not one steel bar of that cage that she did not purchase and install herself. However, she did purchase some of the bars with money given to her by you and others. No one but herself marked off the space, and constructed those barriers. Each bar is an excuse she has provided to avoid the consequences of her actions. The cage is enclosed in the wire mesh safety net that you and your family have provided her over the years. She did this to herself and has not learned what she has done. She’s living in a cage, and she put herself in it, while you and your family are ensuring that she never escapes.”
“I think that is a little harsh.”
“Oh, no, it’s not harsh enough.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because she doesn’t understand it nor do you.”
* * * * *
By the nature of our species, the newborn child cannot survive without tender loving care for a number of years. But then a point is reached between nurturing and nature, between parents as caretakers and the child discovering its own essence.
The parental fallacy is a cultural phenomenon when nurturing becomes an obsession at the expense of the individual’s nature. Parents epitomize authority figures. They are expressed in the double-binding mother, the seductive mother, and now the absent, possessive or punitive mother. The latter has previously been identified with the father.
Notice that all of these parental fallacies draw attention away from the child and back to the parents. Parents always worry about such questions as: have I the right attitude, am I too strict, too lenient, or am I good enough parent? These self-referenced narcissisms give meaning to the parental fallacy, which spins off into parental fantasy. The child is protected from ever discovering what makes it tick, or the meaning and consequences of right and wrong because the parent is always there to put a positive spin on otherwise untoward behavior.
We have a parental society, which sponsors a parental culture, which in turn gives moment to parental fallacies on every level of society. Our schools, churches, workplaces, and our government perform as caretakers, providing a cage of security, a place of regression where we as members of that community need never grow up.
We even see parents as mentors, which they cannot be or cannot perform because the role between caretaker and mentor are different. A caretaker’s focus is on the person; the mentor’s focus is on the person’s talent. Mentors, however, often behave as parents. Consequently, mentoring has become not unlike that of parental authority with the ready answers and developmental ideas for the mentored without so much as a hint of the invisible load that is at the heart of the mentored.
A point is reached, therefore, in the present climate of this parental fallacy that the individual must become parent to the man, separate from his parents and those who would mentor him, and take charge of his own mentoring and development.
Self-mentoring is an idea whose time has come to combat a society, which forgives all transgressions. This society discourages the idea of genius because that would mean we differ widely in talent and ability, which we do. As a result, society places everyone in some kind of a cage. In many ways, our present society has become an unconditional positive parental fantasyland. It has not made us happy campers. We will now explore why this is so in some depth.
* * * * *
Search for Identity
Search for Identity
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 2005Note
The mental process the mind goes through to escape self-awareness
can be grouped under the headings of rejection of meaning, shrinkage
of time span, focus on details and procedures, rigid thinking and banality.
Roy F. Baumeister, Escaping the Self
Linda. Are you home to stay now?
Biff. I don’t know. I want to look around, see what’s doin’.
Linda. Biff, you can’t look around all your life, can you?
Biff. I just can’t take hold, Mom. I can’t take hold of some kind of a life.
Linda. Biff, a man is not a bird, to come and go with the springtime.
Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman
With the loss of reliable symbols, we have become confused identity-seekers. There was a time when a farmer’s son expected to farm the family homestead, and the farmer’s daughter was likely to marry another farmer in the community. It was the same for factory workers and even doctors, lawyers and other professionals. They followed the lead of their parents, as their parents had followed that of theirs. Consequently, the community that young people inherited differed little with previous generations.
The constant speed of technological change has fragmented this comfortable sense of community, and has led to individual confusion. The previous ease with which the individual went about “making one’s way” has been replaced by the frantic search of “finding one’s self.” Likewise, the shift has been from the common good, or from a community perspective, to personhood, or to an individual perspective. The transition has been traumatic but not necessarily apparent. It has evolved from the common identity constructs of authority, loyalty, discipline and motivation.
The Common Good versus Personhood
The common good held sway with position power for most of our social and economic history. The change started more than a generation ago, and it is still gathering momentum if without much transparency.
With the common good position power was exclusively in the hands of authority figures; with personhood it is in the process of shifting to knowledge power, which is in the hands of information specialists and knowledge workers. The irony is that position power still attempts to maintain its authority and to lead without the necessary intellectual capital to do so. Consequently, we have spun off two generations of leaderless leadership in virtually every institution of society. Meanwhile, those with the intellectual capital fail to identify themselves with the concomitant authority, and so, as the saying goes, productive effort falls between the chairs.
Loyalty with the common good has been traditionally with the family, community, church, school, and company; with personhood loyalty is predominantly to the self, and therefore to the individual, and the profession served. Loyalty represents a precarious identity as the family, church, company and community are increasingly fragmented. In one sense, the individual has been liberated from traditional loyalties, but in another, he has entered an uncertain world where old loyalties no longer apply, not even to the self. Sociologist Peter Berger writes:
Modernity has indeed been liberating. It has liberated human beings from the narrow controls of family, clan, tribe or small community. It has opened up for the individual previously unheard-of options and avenues of mobility. It has provided enormous power, both in the control of nature and in the management of human affairs. However, these liberations have had a high price. Perhaps the easiest way to describe it is to refer to it once more as “homelessness.” Demodernizing ideas and movements promise liberation from the many discontents of modernity. Again, the most economical way of describing the content of this promised liberation is to call it “home.” The demodernizing impulse, whether it looks backward into the past or forward into the future, seeks a reversal of the modern trends that have left the individual “alienated” and beset with the threats of meaninglessness.1
Ambivalence toward social and personal loyalty has created new cages of unfreedom rather than escapes from them. We see this when people sabotage their own lives and careers in obsessive personhood, demonstrating as little loyalty to self and to others.
The common good created discipline around rewards and recognition, intimidation and punishment. Personhood is unresponsive to such devices. It is more inclined to self-discipline in a climate of trust, respect with a sense of ownership.
The common good exercised motivation through fear and scarcity, competition and comparing, classifying achievers from non-achievers. Shame was a powerful device to keep people in check. Since the line between the sacred and profane has been blurred to the point of being erased, it no longer applies. Personhood, while considering shame a non-factor, is bored with this motivational rhetoric of intimidation. It is instead motivated by a climate of cooperation, where contribution is possible in an atmosphere of give and take in which the work is challenging, and the life outside of work is not routine.
Nearly one hundred years later, the individual in search for identity echoes the sentiments of William James:
A man’s character is discernible in the mental or moral attitude in which, when it came upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely active and alive. At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: “This is the real me!”2
Obviously, it is a very different world than the nineteenth century United States of this American psychologist. There is no longer a hometown like Boston was to him in his day. Now life is played out on the run resonating with the lyrics to the Willie Nelson song, “On the Road Again.” The urgent quest in the midst of looming leisure is not “What can I do?” but “Who can I be?” It is a disconnected world of actors on a stage playing someone else’s part. Regional distinctions have become hazy, accents have disappeared, and imitation has reached the level of distinction.
Who questions has become more important than what questions, and a new right has been defined as the right to be capricious in a disposable world.
The Divided Self Between WHO I AM and WHAT I AM
There is a problem here, however, and that who I am is defined by my genetic code. It is my essence and it cannot be changed. What I am, defined by my experience, is in a constant state of change, and it is determined by my experience and how my character develops.
The problem of the divided self between WHO I AM and WHAT I AM is at least a one hundred year old problem that rotates around the axis of nature and nurture. WHO I AM I cannot change. I am stuck with it. It is my individual nature. It is what I am born with. It is my genetic code, the acorn that can produce the great oak tree in James Hillman’s language, if we but discover the code or our soul, which is our true vocation. It is our essence. It is “our real self.”
WHAT I AM is constantly changing all my life. It is my nurtured self. It is a product of my culture, my programmed conditioning, my individual experience, and my personal growth and development. It is dependent on my maturity, discipline, focus, performance, stability, and my ability to handle surprise and adversity, in other words, it is my character.
WHAT I AM is fed by WHO I AM so that there is much overlapping, and therefore identity confusion along the way. WHAT I AM is my “acquired self,” influenced by all the people and forces in my life, molding, pressing and shaping me into the person I become, which is more prosaically known as “my personality.”
The divided self between WHO I AM and WHAT I AM does not make it an easy road to becoming a human being. Indeed, it has been difficult throughout history to have WHO I AM on the same page as WHAT I AM working in consort and harmony each with the other.
Sigmund Freud recognized the problem one hundred years ago, and developed an explanatory model to define WHAT I AM. It purported to be scientific, but today is chiefly regarding for its explanatory efficacy. His model included the ego, id, and superego. Freud correctly envisioned the drive of technological society coming to dwarf and overwhelm conventional man producing palpable hysteria in individuals unable to cope with this crushing reality. His model has more relevance to anxiety than psychosis as he developed what has come to be known as the “talking cure.” Psychotherapists take clients through their pasts to unravel the psychological blinds spots and pitfalls preventing them from functioning as healthy human beings.
Freud called the ego “the reality principle,” meaning the individual viewed life in real terms and engaged experience with maturity and judgment. This would be referred to as “the adult” in transactional analytical terms by Eric Berne in The Games People Play (1964). Thomas Harris would popularize the adult in his book “I’m OK – You’re OK” (1967). John Dusay would then publish Egograms – How I See You and You See Me (1977), which further refined Freud’s model in bar graphs for greater comprehension. The ego relates to the adult or cognitive (thinking) man and provides the rational aspect to interpersonal transactions. This is the computer within us that problem solves with logic and reason. Too much adult makes us dull and boring; too little makes us irresponsible.
Freud referred to the id as “the pleasure principle,” meaning the individual would avoid pain at all cost and seek out pleasure with capricious abandon without a thought to consequences. Berne referred to this in transactional terms as “the child.” Harris saw the child ambivalently between “I’m OK – You’re Not OK” and “I’m Not OK – You’re Not OK.” Dusay broke “the child” down further to the “free child,” who recognizes no restraints and is the fun-loving part, and the “adapted child,” who demonstrates total conformity and is the repressed part. The id relates to conative (instinctive) behavior of an impulsive, whimsical and irresponsible character in interpersonal transactions. Too much id and we may be foot-loose and fancy-free; too little and we may get short changed out of life’s fun and sexual satisfaction.
Freud referred to the superego as “the morality principle,” meaning the individual was programmed by society in the shoulds and should nots of propriety. Berne referred to this in transactional terms as “the parent.” Harris added further ambivalence to the parent including the mother and father and child recognizable in transactions, and giving expression at various stages to his four life positions: (1) “I’m not OK – You’re OK”; (2) “I’m not OK – You’re not OK”; (3) “I’m OK – You’re not OK”; (4) “I’m OK – You’re OK.”
If this sounds confusing, Harris goes to great pains to explain that all these roles – adult, parent, and child – are part of the superego makeup, and can surface at any time, given the right stimulus. We never totally relinquish the role of the child, he claims, or demonstrate constancy as either the parent or the adult. In frustration, we can even fall prey to the tantrums of the child.
Dusay gives further expression to the superego in differentiating between the “nurturing parent,” the part of us that wants to see the good in others, and to make everyone feel better, and the “critical parent,” the judgmental part of us that is always looking for something to correct. With too much nurturing parent, we can create debilitating codependency with others; too little and we are likely to become heartless. With too much critical parent, we can become tyrannical; too little and people are likely to push us around.
These explanatory models, and that is all that they are, deal with WHAT I AM or my personality, examining the transitional stages of life from child to adult to parent, but not necessarily in that order. Notice all the attention is on personality in terms of thinking, feeling and behaving, as if WHO I AM is a common essence, which it clearly is not.
How the Divided Self plays out in a Macro Sense!
It is easy to confuse one’s essence with one’s personality. Essence is the reservoir of our potential and can only be mined if we go to the trouble of developing that potential. A seeker is not looking for answers within, but is searching for a new self, or new identity, a more expansive and charismatic personality.
There are many in the ready to accommodate this pursuit. Let us call them “personality gurus.” They imply they possess Holy Grail answers to life’s meaning and one’s identity. A personality palliative can be wheat germ or Zen or an explanatory model. It can also be a personal trainer or a mystic with a compelling personality. These gurus provide a service you could better provide for yourself but in all probability you lack the gumption, given the popularity of their appeal.
Identity rests as a fragile mechanism between self and others. People without identity problems have a definite style and swagger. They don’t engage in soul searching. They don’t shop for answers. They live for experience and experience living, not as a second-hand proposition but as the real thing.
The turbulence of defining the situations of life makes it harder for people to find themselves. There is the explosion of technology that displaces people from familiar roles and settings. This results in a breakup of old traditions and produces an implosion in identity needs. We see a great movement of people from one status to another in a mobile society as some climb, others fall, while still others can’t even get a grip on the bottom rung of the socio-economic ladder. Then there is the proliferation of fads, fashions and styles with everyone pretending how great life is while feeling miserable. It used to be said, “Clothes make the man.” Now they hide him. Consequently, there is furious playacting in search of identity. You see this in the restless pursuit of heroes in an age that produces only celebrities. Small wonder that most feel like being small cogs in a giant machine. Now women try to behave like men, as there is a loss of femininity and masculinity in jobs as well as relationships. The loss of joy and pride in craftsmanship that disappeared a half century ago is now being felt. There is actually a need to be mediocre to fit in this egalitarian society, while the rhetoric continually proclaims a societal commitment to excellence.
Paradoxically, there is an abundance of status symbols with little status. It boils down to a meaning vacuum. This haunts us at every turn. We are not wiser and more content in our persons. The knowledge explosion has not been accompanied by a self-knowledge implosion. We are becoming increasingly strangers to ourselves, looking for answers in all the wrong places. History and tradition are becoming less relevant to what we do.
Emerson says it is not knowledge that makes for happiness but experience. In experience, we find self-understanding, which gives us a reliable compass to where we are, how we got there, and where we are going. The best adviser we know lives in our heads. Its only requirement is that we activate our brains.
Place and Space
We no longer have a hometown. A sense of place has acceded to a matter of space. A man who lives where he was born is a rare commodity and a person who is rarely alone. The voices of his youth never leave him. Every day he passes the graves of ancestors, and their aspirations have become part of his own. When the bulldozers crush landmarks, obliterate old neighborhoods to make way for industrial expansion, or new commercial shopping malls, they crush him as well. Injury to his integrity comes not from progress, as heartless as it is, but from a sweeping away of Holy Grail symbols.
One of the characteristics of our time is a reversal of roles in the usual socialization pattern. The old not only turn to the young for know-how, but they seem obsessed with mimicking them in every way, from dress to speech to manners to music to becoming likewise suspended in youthful terminal adolescence of actions without consequences. This raises the question of the dignity and integrity of our society. It implies that society has lost its moral center and its way, that the past is ruthlessly disengaged from the present, that history, tradition, cumulative values and experience have little meaning to the old and even less to the young.
If past is prologue to the future as Joyce insists, then this is equivalent to psychological blindness. We have lost our sense of place and have substituted space to fill the void. Space is human geography. Place is our moral compass. It guides us through space. Without it, we find everyone is in a hurry to go somewhere, which is often nowhere.
I sense also there is a desire to please and to be envied to feel authentic. Space – travel always being on the go – has taken over a sense of place. Fancy hotels work hard to create the ambience of the desired reality, but they are much more space than place. Place nurtures. Space collects. Place makes us feel we belong. Space exacerbates the sense of rootlessness. Place provides a moral compass, a sense of who as well as where we are. Space is a vacuum to be filled with whatever.
Physical mobility is movement in space. Social mobility is contact with groups and classes of people. Rootlessness finds us seeking signals from others as to what is important and what is not. It is being other-directed instead of self-directed, and being management-dependent rather than self-managers. Rootless in space is about being anxious about what other people think with little assurance that they are right. It is being gullible to opinion makers who have their own agendas, and who seek validity by making them yours. It is about conforming to the popular code to make it.
We are constantly bombarded with stimuli with polls, bestseller lists, in and out styles, new fads and the most desirable cliques. We are also reminded of the preferred professions, the most prestigious schools to attend, and the right credentials to attain card-carrying membership in the herd mentality. Yet self-university is a reality with the introduction of the Internet. Soon universities will go the way of the horse and buggy.
When kinship structure is destroyed, as it has been with progress and the technological explosion, mobility brings a loss of tradition, a shallowness of relationships, the inadequacy of candor and meaningful feedback, which makes for unhappiness and a pervading dullness to life.
Lack of Identity Rituals
To discover our true identity, we need to dive into the cold waters of introspection and plunge into the murky encounters found there to which we despair. We are not the image created by ourselves nor that projected into our psyches by others. Both miss our true identity by a mile. Still, without reassuring identity, we are inclined to go through life feeling lost, depressed or cheated. Identity is not what we are. Identity is what we do.
Young people today color or bleach their hair, cut it short, grow it long, or shave it all off; tattoo their bodies including their faces, and wear peek-a-boo clothing to draw attention and hopefully disgust from their elders. They drive trendy cars, switch from one fad to another, scream for heroes, and plunge into activities like surfing, scuba diving, mountain climbing, or dropping out as if they are suspended on a perpetual holiday.
Curiously, their elders are aping these behaviors. Adults are not leading. They are following. Adults are not in charge. They are in submission. Adults, rich in life and experience, should have a sense of self but to see them you would have little confidence of this being the case. They are so busy becoming they have never found time to being.
We live in a society in which sentiments are in doubt: romantic love, family feeling, collegial support, patriotism, morality, religious faith, school spirit, civic pride, intellectual curiosity, and deep-soul feelings for the rare beauty of Mother Nature.
The modern social system deprives many of identity, which has little relationship to economic achievement or reward. Identity is the sanctity of persons, a sense of connection with everyone and everything else, and the realization that there is no free lunch, ever, that everything in life is quid pro quo and all actions are subject to like consequences, and that school is never out. It is the shroud of denial that drives the devious mind to think it can get away with anything. No one ever does. All debts are paid in like kind: compassion with self-contentment; cruelty with self-contempt.
Identity dislocation may lead to hero worship wherein worshipers try to be someone else, someone unsuited for their character and circumstance. Looking up to someone of quality is one thing, trying to be them is quite another. It denies the worshiper his own unique identity, and weakens his resolve to develop his sui generis.
Ritual is not only pleasant but also necessary for giving people a full sense of themselves connected to others, of their sense of place in space, of their sense of belonging to something bigger than self. It fills the emotional void of mechanized and routinized life. Poverty of ritual is, in part, the reason for poverty of sentiment today. We have become jaded, fatigued by the constant bombardment of car commercials on TV, by the news-of-the-day presented as an entertainment, by the marketing of schadenfreude to fill our appetite for public scandal, and by working as if on a treadmill to satisfy our appetite for more. The anti-ritual of the profane has replaced the ritual of the sacred.
That is one reason why life seems empty. Sacred holidays of Christianity have become perfunctory and commercialized into pseudo-symbolic sentiments and synthetic rituals. The rites of passage that we all experience have become nonevents, for the most part, and fail to recharge our batteries as they are intended. Judaism and Islam, which are part of our culture, remain vigilant in protecting their respective cultures in this climate of indifference, but they too are not beyond harm’s way. The poverty of ritual finds we have everything we could ever imagine and that everything sometimes seems to be nothing at all.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 2005Note
The mental process the mind goes through to escape self-awareness
can be grouped under the headings of rejection of meaning, shrinkage
of time span, focus on details and procedures, rigid thinking and banality.
Roy F. Baumeister, Escaping the Self
Linda. Are you home to stay now?
Biff. I don’t know. I want to look around, see what’s doin’.
Linda. Biff, you can’t look around all your life, can you?
Biff. I just can’t take hold, Mom. I can’t take hold of some kind of a life.
Linda. Biff, a man is not a bird, to come and go with the springtime.
Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman
With the loss of reliable symbols, we have become confused identity-seekers. There was a time when a farmer’s son expected to farm the family homestead, and the farmer’s daughter was likely to marry another farmer in the community. It was the same for factory workers and even doctors, lawyers and other professionals. They followed the lead of their parents, as their parents had followed that of theirs. Consequently, the community that young people inherited differed little with previous generations.
The constant speed of technological change has fragmented this comfortable sense of community, and has led to individual confusion. The previous ease with which the individual went about “making one’s way” has been replaced by the frantic search of “finding one’s self.” Likewise, the shift has been from the common good, or from a community perspective, to personhood, or to an individual perspective. The transition has been traumatic but not necessarily apparent. It has evolved from the common identity constructs of authority, loyalty, discipline and motivation.
The Common Good versus Personhood
The common good held sway with position power for most of our social and economic history. The change started more than a generation ago, and it is still gathering momentum if without much transparency.
With the common good position power was exclusively in the hands of authority figures; with personhood it is in the process of shifting to knowledge power, which is in the hands of information specialists and knowledge workers. The irony is that position power still attempts to maintain its authority and to lead without the necessary intellectual capital to do so. Consequently, we have spun off two generations of leaderless leadership in virtually every institution of society. Meanwhile, those with the intellectual capital fail to identify themselves with the concomitant authority, and so, as the saying goes, productive effort falls between the chairs.
Loyalty with the common good has been traditionally with the family, community, church, school, and company; with personhood loyalty is predominantly to the self, and therefore to the individual, and the profession served. Loyalty represents a precarious identity as the family, church, company and community are increasingly fragmented. In one sense, the individual has been liberated from traditional loyalties, but in another, he has entered an uncertain world where old loyalties no longer apply, not even to the self. Sociologist Peter Berger writes:
Modernity has indeed been liberating. It has liberated human beings from the narrow controls of family, clan, tribe or small community. It has opened up for the individual previously unheard-of options and avenues of mobility. It has provided enormous power, both in the control of nature and in the management of human affairs. However, these liberations have had a high price. Perhaps the easiest way to describe it is to refer to it once more as “homelessness.” Demodernizing ideas and movements promise liberation from the many discontents of modernity. Again, the most economical way of describing the content of this promised liberation is to call it “home.” The demodernizing impulse, whether it looks backward into the past or forward into the future, seeks a reversal of the modern trends that have left the individual “alienated” and beset with the threats of meaninglessness.1
Ambivalence toward social and personal loyalty has created new cages of unfreedom rather than escapes from them. We see this when people sabotage their own lives and careers in obsessive personhood, demonstrating as little loyalty to self and to others.
The common good created discipline around rewards and recognition, intimidation and punishment. Personhood is unresponsive to such devices. It is more inclined to self-discipline in a climate of trust, respect with a sense of ownership.
The common good exercised motivation through fear and scarcity, competition and comparing, classifying achievers from non-achievers. Shame was a powerful device to keep people in check. Since the line between the sacred and profane has been blurred to the point of being erased, it no longer applies. Personhood, while considering shame a non-factor, is bored with this motivational rhetoric of intimidation. It is instead motivated by a climate of cooperation, where contribution is possible in an atmosphere of give and take in which the work is challenging, and the life outside of work is not routine.
Nearly one hundred years later, the individual in search for identity echoes the sentiments of William James:
A man’s character is discernible in the mental or moral attitude in which, when it came upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely active and alive. At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: “This is the real me!”2
Obviously, it is a very different world than the nineteenth century United States of this American psychologist. There is no longer a hometown like Boston was to him in his day. Now life is played out on the run resonating with the lyrics to the Willie Nelson song, “On the Road Again.” The urgent quest in the midst of looming leisure is not “What can I do?” but “Who can I be?” It is a disconnected world of actors on a stage playing someone else’s part. Regional distinctions have become hazy, accents have disappeared, and imitation has reached the level of distinction.
Who questions has become more important than what questions, and a new right has been defined as the right to be capricious in a disposable world.
The Divided Self Between WHO I AM and WHAT I AM
There is a problem here, however, and that who I am is defined by my genetic code. It is my essence and it cannot be changed. What I am, defined by my experience, is in a constant state of change, and it is determined by my experience and how my character develops.
The problem of the divided self between WHO I AM and WHAT I AM is at least a one hundred year old problem that rotates around the axis of nature and nurture. WHO I AM I cannot change. I am stuck with it. It is my individual nature. It is what I am born with. It is my genetic code, the acorn that can produce the great oak tree in James Hillman’s language, if we but discover the code or our soul, which is our true vocation. It is our essence. It is “our real self.”
WHAT I AM is constantly changing all my life. It is my nurtured self. It is a product of my culture, my programmed conditioning, my individual experience, and my personal growth and development. It is dependent on my maturity, discipline, focus, performance, stability, and my ability to handle surprise and adversity, in other words, it is my character.
WHAT I AM is fed by WHO I AM so that there is much overlapping, and therefore identity confusion along the way. WHAT I AM is my “acquired self,” influenced by all the people and forces in my life, molding, pressing and shaping me into the person I become, which is more prosaically known as “my personality.”
The divided self between WHO I AM and WHAT I AM does not make it an easy road to becoming a human being. Indeed, it has been difficult throughout history to have WHO I AM on the same page as WHAT I AM working in consort and harmony each with the other.
Sigmund Freud recognized the problem one hundred years ago, and developed an explanatory model to define WHAT I AM. It purported to be scientific, but today is chiefly regarding for its explanatory efficacy. His model included the ego, id, and superego. Freud correctly envisioned the drive of technological society coming to dwarf and overwhelm conventional man producing palpable hysteria in individuals unable to cope with this crushing reality. His model has more relevance to anxiety than psychosis as he developed what has come to be known as the “talking cure.” Psychotherapists take clients through their pasts to unravel the psychological blinds spots and pitfalls preventing them from functioning as healthy human beings.
Freud called the ego “the reality principle,” meaning the individual viewed life in real terms and engaged experience with maturity and judgment. This would be referred to as “the adult” in transactional analytical terms by Eric Berne in The Games People Play (1964). Thomas Harris would popularize the adult in his book “I’m OK – You’re OK” (1967). John Dusay would then publish Egograms – How I See You and You See Me (1977), which further refined Freud’s model in bar graphs for greater comprehension. The ego relates to the adult or cognitive (thinking) man and provides the rational aspect to interpersonal transactions. This is the computer within us that problem solves with logic and reason. Too much adult makes us dull and boring; too little makes us irresponsible.
Freud referred to the id as “the pleasure principle,” meaning the individual would avoid pain at all cost and seek out pleasure with capricious abandon without a thought to consequences. Berne referred to this in transactional terms as “the child.” Harris saw the child ambivalently between “I’m OK – You’re Not OK” and “I’m Not OK – You’re Not OK.” Dusay broke “the child” down further to the “free child,” who recognizes no restraints and is the fun-loving part, and the “adapted child,” who demonstrates total conformity and is the repressed part. The id relates to conative (instinctive) behavior of an impulsive, whimsical and irresponsible character in interpersonal transactions. Too much id and we may be foot-loose and fancy-free; too little and we may get short changed out of life’s fun and sexual satisfaction.
Freud referred to the superego as “the morality principle,” meaning the individual was programmed by society in the shoulds and should nots of propriety. Berne referred to this in transactional terms as “the parent.” Harris added further ambivalence to the parent including the mother and father and child recognizable in transactions, and giving expression at various stages to his four life positions: (1) “I’m not OK – You’re OK”; (2) “I’m not OK – You’re not OK”; (3) “I’m OK – You’re not OK”; (4) “I’m OK – You’re OK.”
If this sounds confusing, Harris goes to great pains to explain that all these roles – adult, parent, and child – are part of the superego makeup, and can surface at any time, given the right stimulus. We never totally relinquish the role of the child, he claims, or demonstrate constancy as either the parent or the adult. In frustration, we can even fall prey to the tantrums of the child.
Dusay gives further expression to the superego in differentiating between the “nurturing parent,” the part of us that wants to see the good in others, and to make everyone feel better, and the “critical parent,” the judgmental part of us that is always looking for something to correct. With too much nurturing parent, we can create debilitating codependency with others; too little and we are likely to become heartless. With too much critical parent, we can become tyrannical; too little and people are likely to push us around.
These explanatory models, and that is all that they are, deal with WHAT I AM or my personality, examining the transitional stages of life from child to adult to parent, but not necessarily in that order. Notice all the attention is on personality in terms of thinking, feeling and behaving, as if WHO I AM is a common essence, which it clearly is not.
How the Divided Self plays out in a Macro Sense!
It is easy to confuse one’s essence with one’s personality. Essence is the reservoir of our potential and can only be mined if we go to the trouble of developing that potential. A seeker is not looking for answers within, but is searching for a new self, or new identity, a more expansive and charismatic personality.
There are many in the ready to accommodate this pursuit. Let us call them “personality gurus.” They imply they possess Holy Grail answers to life’s meaning and one’s identity. A personality palliative can be wheat germ or Zen or an explanatory model. It can also be a personal trainer or a mystic with a compelling personality. These gurus provide a service you could better provide for yourself but in all probability you lack the gumption, given the popularity of their appeal.
Identity rests as a fragile mechanism between self and others. People without identity problems have a definite style and swagger. They don’t engage in soul searching. They don’t shop for answers. They live for experience and experience living, not as a second-hand proposition but as the real thing.
The turbulence of defining the situations of life makes it harder for people to find themselves. There is the explosion of technology that displaces people from familiar roles and settings. This results in a breakup of old traditions and produces an implosion in identity needs. We see a great movement of people from one status to another in a mobile society as some climb, others fall, while still others can’t even get a grip on the bottom rung of the socio-economic ladder. Then there is the proliferation of fads, fashions and styles with everyone pretending how great life is while feeling miserable. It used to be said, “Clothes make the man.” Now they hide him. Consequently, there is furious playacting in search of identity. You see this in the restless pursuit of heroes in an age that produces only celebrities. Small wonder that most feel like being small cogs in a giant machine. Now women try to behave like men, as there is a loss of femininity and masculinity in jobs as well as relationships. The loss of joy and pride in craftsmanship that disappeared a half century ago is now being felt. There is actually a need to be mediocre to fit in this egalitarian society, while the rhetoric continually proclaims a societal commitment to excellence.
Paradoxically, there is an abundance of status symbols with little status. It boils down to a meaning vacuum. This haunts us at every turn. We are not wiser and more content in our persons. The knowledge explosion has not been accompanied by a self-knowledge implosion. We are becoming increasingly strangers to ourselves, looking for answers in all the wrong places. History and tradition are becoming less relevant to what we do.
Emerson says it is not knowledge that makes for happiness but experience. In experience, we find self-understanding, which gives us a reliable compass to where we are, how we got there, and where we are going. The best adviser we know lives in our heads. Its only requirement is that we activate our brains.
Place and Space
We no longer have a hometown. A sense of place has acceded to a matter of space. A man who lives where he was born is a rare commodity and a person who is rarely alone. The voices of his youth never leave him. Every day he passes the graves of ancestors, and their aspirations have become part of his own. When the bulldozers crush landmarks, obliterate old neighborhoods to make way for industrial expansion, or new commercial shopping malls, they crush him as well. Injury to his integrity comes not from progress, as heartless as it is, but from a sweeping away of Holy Grail symbols.
One of the characteristics of our time is a reversal of roles in the usual socialization pattern. The old not only turn to the young for know-how, but they seem obsessed with mimicking them in every way, from dress to speech to manners to music to becoming likewise suspended in youthful terminal adolescence of actions without consequences. This raises the question of the dignity and integrity of our society. It implies that society has lost its moral center and its way, that the past is ruthlessly disengaged from the present, that history, tradition, cumulative values and experience have little meaning to the old and even less to the young.
If past is prologue to the future as Joyce insists, then this is equivalent to psychological blindness. We have lost our sense of place and have substituted space to fill the void. Space is human geography. Place is our moral compass. It guides us through space. Without it, we find everyone is in a hurry to go somewhere, which is often nowhere.
I sense also there is a desire to please and to be envied to feel authentic. Space – travel always being on the go – has taken over a sense of place. Fancy hotels work hard to create the ambience of the desired reality, but they are much more space than place. Place nurtures. Space collects. Place makes us feel we belong. Space exacerbates the sense of rootlessness. Place provides a moral compass, a sense of who as well as where we are. Space is a vacuum to be filled with whatever.
Physical mobility is movement in space. Social mobility is contact with groups and classes of people. Rootlessness finds us seeking signals from others as to what is important and what is not. It is being other-directed instead of self-directed, and being management-dependent rather than self-managers. Rootless in space is about being anxious about what other people think with little assurance that they are right. It is being gullible to opinion makers who have their own agendas, and who seek validity by making them yours. It is about conforming to the popular code to make it.
We are constantly bombarded with stimuli with polls, bestseller lists, in and out styles, new fads and the most desirable cliques. We are also reminded of the preferred professions, the most prestigious schools to attend, and the right credentials to attain card-carrying membership in the herd mentality. Yet self-university is a reality with the introduction of the Internet. Soon universities will go the way of the horse and buggy.
When kinship structure is destroyed, as it has been with progress and the technological explosion, mobility brings a loss of tradition, a shallowness of relationships, the inadequacy of candor and meaningful feedback, which makes for unhappiness and a pervading dullness to life.
Lack of Identity Rituals
To discover our true identity, we need to dive into the cold waters of introspection and plunge into the murky encounters found there to which we despair. We are not the image created by ourselves nor that projected into our psyches by others. Both miss our true identity by a mile. Still, without reassuring identity, we are inclined to go through life feeling lost, depressed or cheated. Identity is not what we are. Identity is what we do.
Young people today color or bleach their hair, cut it short, grow it long, or shave it all off; tattoo their bodies including their faces, and wear peek-a-boo clothing to draw attention and hopefully disgust from their elders. They drive trendy cars, switch from one fad to another, scream for heroes, and plunge into activities like surfing, scuba diving, mountain climbing, or dropping out as if they are suspended on a perpetual holiday.
Curiously, their elders are aping these behaviors. Adults are not leading. They are following. Adults are not in charge. They are in submission. Adults, rich in life and experience, should have a sense of self but to see them you would have little confidence of this being the case. They are so busy becoming they have never found time to being.
We live in a society in which sentiments are in doubt: romantic love, family feeling, collegial support, patriotism, morality, religious faith, school spirit, civic pride, intellectual curiosity, and deep-soul feelings for the rare beauty of Mother Nature.
The modern social system deprives many of identity, which has little relationship to economic achievement or reward. Identity is the sanctity of persons, a sense of connection with everyone and everything else, and the realization that there is no free lunch, ever, that everything in life is quid pro quo and all actions are subject to like consequences, and that school is never out. It is the shroud of denial that drives the devious mind to think it can get away with anything. No one ever does. All debts are paid in like kind: compassion with self-contentment; cruelty with self-contempt.
Identity dislocation may lead to hero worship wherein worshipers try to be someone else, someone unsuited for their character and circumstance. Looking up to someone of quality is one thing, trying to be them is quite another. It denies the worshiper his own unique identity, and weakens his resolve to develop his sui generis.
Ritual is not only pleasant but also necessary for giving people a full sense of themselves connected to others, of their sense of place in space, of their sense of belonging to something bigger than self. It fills the emotional void of mechanized and routinized life. Poverty of ritual is, in part, the reason for poverty of sentiment today. We have become jaded, fatigued by the constant bombardment of car commercials on TV, by the news-of-the-day presented as an entertainment, by the marketing of schadenfreude to fill our appetite for public scandal, and by working as if on a treadmill to satisfy our appetite for more. The anti-ritual of the profane has replaced the ritual of the sacred.
That is one reason why life seems empty. Sacred holidays of Christianity have become perfunctory and commercialized into pseudo-symbolic sentiments and synthetic rituals. The rites of passage that we all experience have become nonevents, for the most part, and fail to recharge our batteries as they are intended. Judaism and Islam, which are part of our culture, remain vigilant in protecting their respective cultures in this climate of indifference, but they too are not beyond harm’s way. The poverty of ritual finds we have everything we could ever imagine and that everything sometimes seems to be nothing at all.
Code of the Soul
Code of the Soul
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 2005Note
In the final analysis, we count for something only because of the
essential we embody, and if we do not embody that, life is wasted.
Carl G. Jung
In his book The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, James Hillman encourages us to grow down into earth, as an acorn does when it becomes a mighty oak tree. So many fail either to “grow down” or to “grow up,” and instead look for others upon which to project their sense of failure or incompleteness in life: Hillman writes:
The more my life is accounted for by what already occurred in my
chromosomes, by what my parents did or didn’t do, and by my early
years now long past, the more my biography is the story of a victim.
He argues that character and calling are the result of the particularity you feel to be you, and reproves those who blame childhood difficulties for their problems as adults. Hillman continues, The victim identity is the flip side of the coin whose head brightly displays the identity of the heroic self-made man or woman, carving out their destiny with unflagging will.
The acorn is metaphor for the lot your soul chose before you ever took a breadth. Hillman believes each of us is born with two potential outcomes: destructive or constructive. What we are to become is coded in this acorn.
We need to find the courage to accept and live consistent with our own unique talents and limitations. Whether we are aware of it or not, we all choose our own destinies. We say yea or nay to our most essential selves.
Regarding our parents, they are not equipped to perceive clearly our specialness. We must discover this on our own. This means we must engage mentors who recognize our genius and help persuade us to look in the mirror of our lives to see a visible image of our inner truth. Our senses may be attuned to this code of the soul, this roadmap or blueprint for our own personal growth, but our culture distracts us by encouraging us to listen to foreign calls rather the music of our own hearts.
Each person enters the world called. The idea comes from Plato, his Myth of Er at the end of his most well known work, The Republic. To put this abstract almost mythical notion into firmer language, consider my personal confession. It is offered as a stimulus to introduce you to your own soul’s code.
Envisioning the Soul
As a lad, I was taller, bigger, stronger and faster than most my own age. Coaches found me and athletics followed. I didn’t seek athletics. Athletics sought me.
In St. Patrick’s grammar school, I won the spelling bee for the school, but the good Sisters of St. Francis, who saw me as primarily a “jock,” thought it was a fluke even though I was a good student. John Knoerschild, however, was a “scholar” and a child prodigy having played concert piano in symphonies although only 13. They prevailed upon me to accede to him representing St. Patrick’s in the citywide contest, which he lost in the first round. Clearly, John was more gifted than I but he wasn’t conditioned to competitive situations as I was in sport.
Recruited by coaches to the public high school in the area, I was an unknown entity other than “one of those Catholic boys” brought in to play sports. From my perspective, it was cultural shock from the get go. All my education to that point was in the Catholic parochial school system under the watchful eye and nurturing patience of the good nuns. Now, I was in a public high school, a culture totally different from my own experience. I had no portfolio, no connection to the public school system where junior high and high school teachers were well aware of the “who’s who” list of budding scholars. They saw this six-one, 170 pound 14-year-old blond boy with the piercing blue eyes, and nothing in his countenance, manner or demeanor suggested “a student.” On the contrary, a natural enmity seemed to develop between freshman teachers and me, as I was slow to acclimate to their authority. One incident stands out which has followed me through life.
My freshman English teacher was attempting to diagram a complex sentence on the board, and she got lost and confused in the subtext of the diagram. I went to the blackboard, picked up a piece of chalk and diagramed the sentence correctly, smiled, and returned to my seat. My teacher wrote something on a pink slip, walked to my desk, handed it to me, and told me to give it to the principle. That pink slip kept me out of National Honor Society, although I was eligible for it from my sophomore year on, and would graduate in the top ten percent of my class. It was considered insubordination, while my restless spirit saw it as incompetence. Years later, when I was researching a book of my youth,1 I learned that my teacher was a guidance counselor and not trained to teach English. The good Sisters of St. Francis drilled us on English relentlessly, perhaps contributing to my frustration. Obviously, it wasn’t the appropriate behavior, but looking back on a long lifetime I see that I’ve never chosen discretion over directness.
Fortunately, in subsequent years, a history teacher in my sophomore year, a math teacher in my junior year, and a chemistry teacher in my senior year singled me out to discover who and what I was. We don’t know who we are until someone tells us. The history teacher told me I had “conceptual skills.” She saw this when I could translate the seed of class discussion into its crystallized essence. She encouraged me to compete in an oratorical contest by writing an essay. The speech instructor upon reading it told me I had a talent for provocative expression and clearly an ability to articulate my point of view. I proved less skilled, however, at oratory.
The math teacher recognized that I had a knack for quantitative thinking, but was emotionally inconsistent. He proved his point by giving the class the same national test at the end of the year as in the beginning. I had performed poorly in the first exam and was in the 90th percentile in the second; never realizing it was the same test. When I discovered this fact from classmates, I went to him and asked if it were true. He admitted it was. “You are an emotional guy, but I couldn’t believe the results of your first test. I wanted to confirm my suspicions.” He went on to say I must be aware of this aspect of my personality, as “it is what makes you but could also break you.”
The chemistry teacher noted how naturally I thought with symbols, inspiring me to read more outside class on chemistry. “You have a knack for theory,” he observed, “though not a burning desire for lab work. You could have a promising career in theoretical chemistry, playing with molecular models, and not having to worry about titrations.”
Instead of accepting a full athletic scholarship to college, I took an academic scholarship that paid only tuition but allowed me to concentrate on scholarship. I majored in chemistry.
I was blessed with several mentors in my early development. The university was next. There I confirmed my high school chemistry teacher’s awareness of my affinity for theory and abhorrence of the lab. Then one day everything changed for me.
It was in my sophomore year taking a “core” course for undergraduates titled “Modern Literature, Greeks, and the Bible.” Virtually everyone in my class was much more conversant with the subject matter than I was. It was embarrassing to feebly participate in discussions. Then one day we were assigned Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man, the biographical novel of the great Irish novelist James Joyce. I was unable to take the written examination as I became ill and was hospitalized for a week in the university’s infirmary. When I returned to class, my professor decided to have me take the examination orally.
He started to ask me questions as if it were a written exam, when I suggested boldly, “I’ve read this book three times, Dr. Armens, and have it practically memorized. Can I tell you how I see Joyce?”
He put his hands on his hips, with a cigarette dangling from his lower lip, an amused expression on his face. “You’re going to tell me about Joyce? Is that it?”
I had no idea that scholars had pondered this author for years. “Yes, sir.” And I did, for more than an hour without interruption. Concluding with these remarks:
What may be even more confusing is why such a person so naturally horny would be attracted to the celibate life of the religious, as Joyce was, I mean Stephen, when the director of his school suggested he would make a good Jesuit. Stephen was overjoyed. He could visualize himself in that role, an automatic reprieve from debauchery and guilt, and a clear invitation to salvation. I went through a similar drill. I had serious thoughts of becoming a priest. My mother wanted me to be a Jesuit, my da a New York cop – in a way they are the same thing.
You may not get this impression because I don’t say much in class but I am a talker, like Joyce, a dreamer, schemer, fantasizer and fatalist. Stephen’s two friends, Davin and Lynch were his sounding board like Eric Chalgren and Bobby Witt were mine. Stephen is a talker. He needs an audience, not a large one, but an audience just the same to hear his own mind working. My doubt is that Joyce at this early stage knew as much about the world as Stephen professes to know. Doubt is a powerful force in the emerging young Catholic mind I can assure you, whereas memory is faulty.
The discussion about beauty and the working of the mind, which are obviously central to his art, and the reason for the title, were for me a cover for Stephen’s sense of displacement. When Davin challenged Stephen’s ideas and suggested that in everything Ireland should come first, and Stephen answered that Ireland was an old sow that ate its own children, he was actually describing the devouring nightmares of his own doubt.
Then Emma, his sweetheart since he was a boy tells him he is a fraud. This hit home as I think he believed himself to be one as did his friends. They saw him hiding behind high-minded talk to justify his desire to break links with Ireland.
To prove them and himself wrong, he had no choice but to become a nomad, a man without a country. Only by leaving Ireland could he sort everything out. He needed space and a place to do this. He promised never to return but to write a book that would make clear his views on Ireland and the Irish. The arrogance of this is quite telling, and I must confess compelling as well. This is the book; a book I believe was written more to quiet his Irish soul than for the Irish. Don’t get me wrong. I loved the book but I doubt very much if it gave Joyce any peace.
When I finished, he shook his head, “Do you know something? I had a clue you were like this when I read your paper The Influence of Religion on My Life.”
“But you didn’t read it in the class like you did the others,” I complained peevishly. I wanted so badly to be accepted by my classmates.
“No, I didn’t,” he confessed, “and I’ll tell you the reason. Yours was totally without guile, so incredibly intimate, perhaps naïvely so that I couldn’t share it. I’m not used to such student candor.” Then he added, “Then there was the matter of your confidence. You write in a way that may be offensive to some of differing views on the subject.”
A change smoker, he crumpled up a pack he first opened when I arrived, opened a fresh one, pounded out one, lit it, took a long drag, and then continued. “What is your major?” I told him. “What are you doing in science? You belong in the arts.” I gave him an incredulous look. I was the least sophisticated person in my class. “I’m serious,” he insisted. “I’ve been teaching for twenty years and you are the first student I’ve ever had that understood Joyce. How do you explain that?”
I answered simply, “I am Joyce.” Then when he didn’t say anything, I continued. “I understand him, his pain in the classroom, anguish with priests, ambivalent lusting of girls, strangeness with his da, anger touched with disappointment for his da’s friends, sense of exile in the middle of his peers, sensitivity to everything and everybody, obsession with class, awareness of the power and corruption of money, and his growing contempt for the imprisoning lies and illusions of his family and Church.
“Of course, I understand Joyce. His life is my life. His desire to fly into the sun and into his greatness, to soar where he believed he belonged was his only escape and death as well. We Irish court death like a favorite relative. It is perhaps why we are obsessed in seeking the real parents of our soul. For Joyce it was through art. He never escaped his imprisoning ties to Ireland. I can relate to that. Beautiful as the book is, and as self-consciously posturing as his art is, I think the book was a great catharsis for him, and I envy him for having written it.”
Sitting on the edge of the desk, his head enveloped in cigarette smoke as if a halo, he said. “Here is what I want you to do.” He then outlined the Honors Program in the Humanities, a program involving tutorials, extensive reading and writing, the independent study of philosophy, theology, religion and psychology and other related disciplines in quest of artistic acumen in Arts and Letters. Dr. Armens compared it to similar programs at Cambridge in Oxford, England. “Before you say you’re not interested, discuss it with your parents.”
This I did the following weekend. My da an Irish Roman Catholic brakeman on the railroad claimed I didn’t even write a good letter. His first question was, “Did they revoke your scholarship?” Before I could “no,” he launched into a tirade ending with, “Can I ask you a question. I want you to answer honestly and I love you no matter. Jimmy, you’re not a goddamned fag are you?”
“What? No! What gave you that idea?”
“I see those characters on my trains, beatniks, loud, rude, long dirty hair, tennis shoes, unkempt, smell worse than goats, shabby clothes, reading filthy books, arms around each other,” then turning to my mother, “Dorothy, it’s disgusting. Is that the kind of people you want your son to hang out with? These characters tell me they go to Iowa, too. Dorothy, can you believe it? Can you believe our son has come to this? Honestly, Jimmy, I ask you again, are you a goddamned fag?”
“NOOO!” I shouted. It was too much. Even in the 1950s, I knew people of such persuasion, some were in my lit class, but I found them sensitive, and far more informed about the world than I was. But coward that I was I said nothing, went back to school, continued and graduated in chemistry.
After a career as chemist, salesman, corporate executive, consultant, and psychologist, bouncing around the globe in different jobs and industries, retiring once in my 30s and going back to school to earn my Ph.D., then retiring for good in my 50s, I turned my attention to writing articles and books in the genre of cultural and organizational psychology. Then by the serendipity of the electronic technology explosion, and the introduction of the Internet, I discovered a global audience for my ideas. Now, my laboratory wasn’t theoretical chemistry, but cultural behavioral patterns. Eight books and more than 300 journal and periodical articles later, I have written my portrait of the artist as a young man.
Like the Irish novelist James Joyce, I refused to confine myself to convention and continued to push the envelope. What was in vogue proved not sufficient to express the condition of my burning soul. Alas, after a half century of stumbling, bumbling along through assorted vocations, I discovered my calling. I uncovered the code of my soul. I am now no longer at cross-purposes with myself.
Imagine, if you well, at my advance age that I plow forward as if most of my life is ahead rather than behind me. Silly? Folly? I don’t think so. Nor is it for you whatever your age or circumstances.
This confession is not important in itself. What is important is what it tells you about yourself, about your character, about what your attributes keep bombarding your consciousness but which you ignore “because it isn’t safe.” Baloney!
Safety isn’t even relevant. We know when you press too hard you are likely to lose; when you play it safe you are more likely to embrace defeat; when you wait until all the conditions are precisely right for you to finally take a chance, you have already run out of life. Sad.
In one of my books, I write,
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 sooner we overcome the bondage of loneliness and find true friendship with ourselves.2
* * * * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 2005Note
In the final analysis, we count for something only because of the
essential we embody, and if we do not embody that, life is wasted.
Carl G. Jung
In his book The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, James Hillman encourages us to grow down into earth, as an acorn does when it becomes a mighty oak tree. So many fail either to “grow down” or to “grow up,” and instead look for others upon which to project their sense of failure or incompleteness in life: Hillman writes:
The more my life is accounted for by what already occurred in my
chromosomes, by what my parents did or didn’t do, and by my early
years now long past, the more my biography is the story of a victim.
He argues that character and calling are the result of the particularity you feel to be you, and reproves those who blame childhood difficulties for their problems as adults. Hillman continues, The victim identity is the flip side of the coin whose head brightly displays the identity of the heroic self-made man or woman, carving out their destiny with unflagging will.
The acorn is metaphor for the lot your soul chose before you ever took a breadth. Hillman believes each of us is born with two potential outcomes: destructive or constructive. What we are to become is coded in this acorn.
We need to find the courage to accept and live consistent with our own unique talents and limitations. Whether we are aware of it or not, we all choose our own destinies. We say yea or nay to our most essential selves.
Regarding our parents, they are not equipped to perceive clearly our specialness. We must discover this on our own. This means we must engage mentors who recognize our genius and help persuade us to look in the mirror of our lives to see a visible image of our inner truth. Our senses may be attuned to this code of the soul, this roadmap or blueprint for our own personal growth, but our culture distracts us by encouraging us to listen to foreign calls rather the music of our own hearts.
Each person enters the world called. The idea comes from Plato, his Myth of Er at the end of his most well known work, The Republic. To put this abstract almost mythical notion into firmer language, consider my personal confession. It is offered as a stimulus to introduce you to your own soul’s code.
Envisioning the Soul
As a lad, I was taller, bigger, stronger and faster than most my own age. Coaches found me and athletics followed. I didn’t seek athletics. Athletics sought me.
In St. Patrick’s grammar school, I won the spelling bee for the school, but the good Sisters of St. Francis, who saw me as primarily a “jock,” thought it was a fluke even though I was a good student. John Knoerschild, however, was a “scholar” and a child prodigy having played concert piano in symphonies although only 13. They prevailed upon me to accede to him representing St. Patrick’s in the citywide contest, which he lost in the first round. Clearly, John was more gifted than I but he wasn’t conditioned to competitive situations as I was in sport.
Recruited by coaches to the public high school in the area, I was an unknown entity other than “one of those Catholic boys” brought in to play sports. From my perspective, it was cultural shock from the get go. All my education to that point was in the Catholic parochial school system under the watchful eye and nurturing patience of the good nuns. Now, I was in a public high school, a culture totally different from my own experience. I had no portfolio, no connection to the public school system where junior high and high school teachers were well aware of the “who’s who” list of budding scholars. They saw this six-one, 170 pound 14-year-old blond boy with the piercing blue eyes, and nothing in his countenance, manner or demeanor suggested “a student.” On the contrary, a natural enmity seemed to develop between freshman teachers and me, as I was slow to acclimate to their authority. One incident stands out which has followed me through life.
My freshman English teacher was attempting to diagram a complex sentence on the board, and she got lost and confused in the subtext of the diagram. I went to the blackboard, picked up a piece of chalk and diagramed the sentence correctly, smiled, and returned to my seat. My teacher wrote something on a pink slip, walked to my desk, handed it to me, and told me to give it to the principle. That pink slip kept me out of National Honor Society, although I was eligible for it from my sophomore year on, and would graduate in the top ten percent of my class. It was considered insubordination, while my restless spirit saw it as incompetence. Years later, when I was researching a book of my youth,1 I learned that my teacher was a guidance counselor and not trained to teach English. The good Sisters of St. Francis drilled us on English relentlessly, perhaps contributing to my frustration. Obviously, it wasn’t the appropriate behavior, but looking back on a long lifetime I see that I’ve never chosen discretion over directness.
Fortunately, in subsequent years, a history teacher in my sophomore year, a math teacher in my junior year, and a chemistry teacher in my senior year singled me out to discover who and what I was. We don’t know who we are until someone tells us. The history teacher told me I had “conceptual skills.” She saw this when I could translate the seed of class discussion into its crystallized essence. She encouraged me to compete in an oratorical contest by writing an essay. The speech instructor upon reading it told me I had a talent for provocative expression and clearly an ability to articulate my point of view. I proved less skilled, however, at oratory.
The math teacher recognized that I had a knack for quantitative thinking, but was emotionally inconsistent. He proved his point by giving the class the same national test at the end of the year as in the beginning. I had performed poorly in the first exam and was in the 90th percentile in the second; never realizing it was the same test. When I discovered this fact from classmates, I went to him and asked if it were true. He admitted it was. “You are an emotional guy, but I couldn’t believe the results of your first test. I wanted to confirm my suspicions.” He went on to say I must be aware of this aspect of my personality, as “it is what makes you but could also break you.”
The chemistry teacher noted how naturally I thought with symbols, inspiring me to read more outside class on chemistry. “You have a knack for theory,” he observed, “though not a burning desire for lab work. You could have a promising career in theoretical chemistry, playing with molecular models, and not having to worry about titrations.”
Instead of accepting a full athletic scholarship to college, I took an academic scholarship that paid only tuition but allowed me to concentrate on scholarship. I majored in chemistry.
I was blessed with several mentors in my early development. The university was next. There I confirmed my high school chemistry teacher’s awareness of my affinity for theory and abhorrence of the lab. Then one day everything changed for me.
It was in my sophomore year taking a “core” course for undergraduates titled “Modern Literature, Greeks, and the Bible.” Virtually everyone in my class was much more conversant with the subject matter than I was. It was embarrassing to feebly participate in discussions. Then one day we were assigned Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man, the biographical novel of the great Irish novelist James Joyce. I was unable to take the written examination as I became ill and was hospitalized for a week in the university’s infirmary. When I returned to class, my professor decided to have me take the examination orally.
He started to ask me questions as if it were a written exam, when I suggested boldly, “I’ve read this book three times, Dr. Armens, and have it practically memorized. Can I tell you how I see Joyce?”
He put his hands on his hips, with a cigarette dangling from his lower lip, an amused expression on his face. “You’re going to tell me about Joyce? Is that it?”
I had no idea that scholars had pondered this author for years. “Yes, sir.” And I did, for more than an hour without interruption. Concluding with these remarks:
What may be even more confusing is why such a person so naturally horny would be attracted to the celibate life of the religious, as Joyce was, I mean Stephen, when the director of his school suggested he would make a good Jesuit. Stephen was overjoyed. He could visualize himself in that role, an automatic reprieve from debauchery and guilt, and a clear invitation to salvation. I went through a similar drill. I had serious thoughts of becoming a priest. My mother wanted me to be a Jesuit, my da a New York cop – in a way they are the same thing.
You may not get this impression because I don’t say much in class but I am a talker, like Joyce, a dreamer, schemer, fantasizer and fatalist. Stephen’s two friends, Davin and Lynch were his sounding board like Eric Chalgren and Bobby Witt were mine. Stephen is a talker. He needs an audience, not a large one, but an audience just the same to hear his own mind working. My doubt is that Joyce at this early stage knew as much about the world as Stephen professes to know. Doubt is a powerful force in the emerging young Catholic mind I can assure you, whereas memory is faulty.
The discussion about beauty and the working of the mind, which are obviously central to his art, and the reason for the title, were for me a cover for Stephen’s sense of displacement. When Davin challenged Stephen’s ideas and suggested that in everything Ireland should come first, and Stephen answered that Ireland was an old sow that ate its own children, he was actually describing the devouring nightmares of his own doubt.
Then Emma, his sweetheart since he was a boy tells him he is a fraud. This hit home as I think he believed himself to be one as did his friends. They saw him hiding behind high-minded talk to justify his desire to break links with Ireland.
To prove them and himself wrong, he had no choice but to become a nomad, a man without a country. Only by leaving Ireland could he sort everything out. He needed space and a place to do this. He promised never to return but to write a book that would make clear his views on Ireland and the Irish. The arrogance of this is quite telling, and I must confess compelling as well. This is the book; a book I believe was written more to quiet his Irish soul than for the Irish. Don’t get me wrong. I loved the book but I doubt very much if it gave Joyce any peace.
When I finished, he shook his head, “Do you know something? I had a clue you were like this when I read your paper The Influence of Religion on My Life.”
“But you didn’t read it in the class like you did the others,” I complained peevishly. I wanted so badly to be accepted by my classmates.
“No, I didn’t,” he confessed, “and I’ll tell you the reason. Yours was totally without guile, so incredibly intimate, perhaps naïvely so that I couldn’t share it. I’m not used to such student candor.” Then he added, “Then there was the matter of your confidence. You write in a way that may be offensive to some of differing views on the subject.”
A change smoker, he crumpled up a pack he first opened when I arrived, opened a fresh one, pounded out one, lit it, took a long drag, and then continued. “What is your major?” I told him. “What are you doing in science? You belong in the arts.” I gave him an incredulous look. I was the least sophisticated person in my class. “I’m serious,” he insisted. “I’ve been teaching for twenty years and you are the first student I’ve ever had that understood Joyce. How do you explain that?”
I answered simply, “I am Joyce.” Then when he didn’t say anything, I continued. “I understand him, his pain in the classroom, anguish with priests, ambivalent lusting of girls, strangeness with his da, anger touched with disappointment for his da’s friends, sense of exile in the middle of his peers, sensitivity to everything and everybody, obsession with class, awareness of the power and corruption of money, and his growing contempt for the imprisoning lies and illusions of his family and Church.
“Of course, I understand Joyce. His life is my life. His desire to fly into the sun and into his greatness, to soar where he believed he belonged was his only escape and death as well. We Irish court death like a favorite relative. It is perhaps why we are obsessed in seeking the real parents of our soul. For Joyce it was through art. He never escaped his imprisoning ties to Ireland. I can relate to that. Beautiful as the book is, and as self-consciously posturing as his art is, I think the book was a great catharsis for him, and I envy him for having written it.”
Sitting on the edge of the desk, his head enveloped in cigarette smoke as if a halo, he said. “Here is what I want you to do.” He then outlined the Honors Program in the Humanities, a program involving tutorials, extensive reading and writing, the independent study of philosophy, theology, religion and psychology and other related disciplines in quest of artistic acumen in Arts and Letters. Dr. Armens compared it to similar programs at Cambridge in Oxford, England. “Before you say you’re not interested, discuss it with your parents.”
This I did the following weekend. My da an Irish Roman Catholic brakeman on the railroad claimed I didn’t even write a good letter. His first question was, “Did they revoke your scholarship?” Before I could “no,” he launched into a tirade ending with, “Can I ask you a question. I want you to answer honestly and I love you no matter. Jimmy, you’re not a goddamned fag are you?”
“What? No! What gave you that idea?”
“I see those characters on my trains, beatniks, loud, rude, long dirty hair, tennis shoes, unkempt, smell worse than goats, shabby clothes, reading filthy books, arms around each other,” then turning to my mother, “Dorothy, it’s disgusting. Is that the kind of people you want your son to hang out with? These characters tell me they go to Iowa, too. Dorothy, can you believe it? Can you believe our son has come to this? Honestly, Jimmy, I ask you again, are you a goddamned fag?”
“NOOO!” I shouted. It was too much. Even in the 1950s, I knew people of such persuasion, some were in my lit class, but I found them sensitive, and far more informed about the world than I was. But coward that I was I said nothing, went back to school, continued and graduated in chemistry.
After a career as chemist, salesman, corporate executive, consultant, and psychologist, bouncing around the globe in different jobs and industries, retiring once in my 30s and going back to school to earn my Ph.D., then retiring for good in my 50s, I turned my attention to writing articles and books in the genre of cultural and organizational psychology. Then by the serendipity of the electronic technology explosion, and the introduction of the Internet, I discovered a global audience for my ideas. Now, my laboratory wasn’t theoretical chemistry, but cultural behavioral patterns. Eight books and more than 300 journal and periodical articles later, I have written my portrait of the artist as a young man.
Like the Irish novelist James Joyce, I refused to confine myself to convention and continued to push the envelope. What was in vogue proved not sufficient to express the condition of my burning soul. Alas, after a half century of stumbling, bumbling along through assorted vocations, I discovered my calling. I uncovered the code of my soul. I am now no longer at cross-purposes with myself.
Imagine, if you well, at my advance age that I plow forward as if most of my life is ahead rather than behind me. Silly? Folly? I don’t think so. Nor is it for you whatever your age or circumstances.
This confession is not important in itself. What is important is what it tells you about yourself, about your character, about what your attributes keep bombarding your consciousness but which you ignore “because it isn’t safe.” Baloney!
Safety isn’t even relevant. We know when you press too hard you are likely to lose; when you play it safe you are more likely to embrace defeat; when you wait until all the conditions are precisely right for you to finally take a chance, you have already run out of life. Sad.
In one of my books, I write,
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 sooner we overcome the bondage of loneliness and find true friendship with ourselves.2
* * * * *