BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, AND THE YOU HE IS WATCHING IS NOT THE SAME YOU THAT YOU WERE!

BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, AND THE YOU HE IS WATCHING IS NOT THE SAME YOU THAT YOU WERE!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 2006

Who controls the past controls the future
Who controls the present controls the past.

George Orwell (1902 – 1950)
Novel, 1984 (1949)


PART TWO

We have had a phenomenon in the recent past that defies explanation. The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the United States has continued to climb impressively over the past decade or so, while the actual wages and benefits to workers has, during the same period, continued to decline.

Yet, there have been few protests, even less litigation and no mounted employee boycott or rebellion.

Nearly two decades ago, I reminded corporate America that its entitlement program was approaching $3 trillion dollars or equal to the then national debt, and accelerating. I pointed out that entitlements were driving companies to bankruptcy and were not tied to performance but were given across-the-board to everyone indiscriminately (see “Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches,” 1990). My book was considered an “angry book” and was discounted on that basis.

Repeatedly, I have written about “leaderless leadership,” outlining the pusillanimous and disastrous initiatives of human resources.

People have never been a long suit of corporate leadership. Corpocracy feels more comfortable in the management of things than in the leadership of people. It has been willing to abdicate this role to human resources throwing money at the problem rather than taking the reins to understand, appreciate and leverage a changing workforce to high performance. Human resources have made such a mess of things with a series of interventions transforming the workplace culture from comfort to complacency skipping contribution (see “Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge,” 1998).

Now, we find the American workforce quietly acquiescing to pay and benefit cuts as if they were the actual designers of this failed strategy. They were not. They are its victims. In the grand scheme of things, these workers have failed to participate in the economic boom, distracted by comfort and bribed with entitlements, benefits now being taken away from them. Even pension plans are going defunct. This situation defies understanding. While 85 percent of American workers have found their actual spending power reduced, the other 15 percent have found their good fortunes increasing by leaps and bounds. Something is wrong with this picture.

THE PAST IMPERFECT – THREE KINDS OF PEOPLE

The typical organization is represented by three kinds of people. There has been little movement or change between these categories with consequences yet to be felt. Internal stress and external demands are straining towards collapse and no one is paying attention.

“Foot Draggers”

Every organization has “foot draggers.” They represent 15 percent of the workforce and are considered “losers” or “takaholics.” They have little interest in the health of the organization and refuse to grow up.

Ambivalent leadership is inclined to vacillate between ensuring workers are management dependent or counter dependent on the organization, assuming the role of surrogate parents to these workers as dependent children. This is palpable in 50-year-old workers with the emotional maturity of 12-year-old obedient and passive children.

“Foot draggers” are self-indulgent and suspended in permanent adolescence. Driven by impulse and sensory gratification, they are the darlings of compulsive management that would save them when they are in fact unsalvageable. “Foot draggers” like to play the role of the martyr and there are always ambulance chaser managers bent on saving them from themselves.

“Followers”

“Followers” are appeasers that desire to play it safe and aim to please. They represent about 70 percent of the workforce. Descendents of workers of compulsory education where they learned the three r’s (reading, riting, rithmetic), they were groomed to run the machines of exploding factories in the early 20th century American economy. The subtle curriculum of this required education was training in discipline, obedience, punctuality, conformity, politeness, passivity, and submissiveness.

Stated otherwise, American education was never designed to provide an enriching intellectual and living experience for the majority where one could learn to appreciate the arts and the possibilities of leisure. Webster’s dictionary makes it brutally clear that education was designed to make a machine of man to do a job.

By no accident, then, public education created this monster and we are saddled with it now. Even our universities, which once escaped this stultifying confinement, have become factories producing professional workers to man technology. It should therefore come as no surprise that few American geniuses in matters of the heart were outstanding students: Steinbeck, Faulkner, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, to name a few.

“Followers” display moderation in all their actions. They are safe hires, seldom taking chances on or off the job, living within their means, never moving off the dime or displaying what they think or feel. It is not because they don’t think or feel. It is simply they are as much a stranger to themselves as everyone else.

“Followers” are a perfectly controlled species and demonstrate this disposition by being nearly inconspicuous to a fault.

“Hard Chargers”

The final 15 percent are the “hard chargers.” These “workaholics” think nothing of working 70 or 80 hours a week, while the cushion of their efforts is never great enough. They must have more, do more, and achieve more. If they have six-figure incomes, they must be millionaires. If they are millionaires, they must be multi-millionaires. It is not that money, per se, is important to them. It is as composer Billy Rose put it, how you measure up with the upper crust in America.

Work is a narcotic. Paradoxically, “hard chargers” mirror “foot draggers,” only to the opposite extreme. They both are compulsive; both driven toward reckless abandon; both inclined toward the dangerous with a feeling of invisibility; and both are governed by their own rules.

Whereas the “foot draggers” are out-of-control, “hard chargers” are obsessed with being in control. Both maintain individualized identities: “foot draggers” as victims and “hard chargers” as vanquishers. Incongruously, political “conservatives” are notable within both their ranks being equally inclined to be critics of the disadvantaged. Whereas “foot draggers” are predisposed to martyrdom, “hard chargers” are prone to grandstanding.

Both “foot draggers” and “hard chargers” are gamblers, but “foot draggers” always lose because they “have to win,” whereas “hard chargers” always win because they expect losing is part of the odds embraced to winning.

PRESENT RIDICULOUS – OPPORTUNITY AS COMPLIANCE, FREEDOM AS PRISON

A peculiar thing has happened which nobody seems to notice.

Take American autoworkers. They once enjoyed the same economic success (“As GM goes, so goes America!”), as most professionals, including doctors, lawyers and engineers. The ranks of these workers are shrinking fast, their pay decreasing, and benefits disappearing to the point of being nonexistent.

In the 21st century, many sons and daughters of these autoworkers have college degrees and professional careers. But with all the education, their spending and benefit power is unlikely to match that once enjoyed by their parents at mid-century.

As a boy, I spent my summers in Detroit at the home of my uncle who was a professor at the University of Detroit and a practicing psychologist. I played baseball with children of these autoworkers and visited their homes. I also visited the homes of my uncle’s professional colleagues. There was no comparison.

Middle class wealth in Detroit at mid-century was skewed towards these blue-collar workers. Now that class and wealth are gone.

Closer to home, my da had a seventh grade education and worked as a brakeman on the railroad while I was able to become a chemist, then a salesman, then an executive retiring the first time in my mid-thirties, mainly because the “rat race” made little sense to me. I would later go back to school and acquire my Ph.D. and become an organizational psychologist for a high tech company, and later a corporate executive for the same firm.

It was in that climate I experienced the “present ridiculous.” A study indicated company workers were motivated primarily by comfort, not job challenge, as the system was designed towards making them audience to rather than participation in the decision-making. As a consequence, most workers did as little as possible to get by.

Management, confused by this response, had human resources implement interventions meant to bring these workers on board by feeding them more benefits and making more concessions. This strategy drove workers more deeply into dependent compliance.

When you are not made to feel part of the problem, then the solution, no matter how perfect, is not your solution. You don’t own it because you feel as if a renter, not an owner.

This was made dramatically apparent when I was in attendance when the general managers and his direct reports were discussing how to distribute the quarterly bonus of some $5 million.

One director said, “We had a great quarter. Why don’t we share it with the troops?”

Another director clearly flabbergasted with the idea said, “Are you saying they expect a bonus?”

“No,” he answered, “just think it’s a good idea.”

Quickly, the disconcerted director made some calculations. “Can you imagine what that would do to our bonuses?” Typical bonuses were in the four figures for a quarter. Then seemingly to realize his position was too self-serving, he added, “They would get $400 at best. How would that motivate them?”

“The amount isn’t my point. The symbolic gesture would be clear: they count for something. I think it would spur them on to greater effort next quarter.”

“Bad precedence. Terrible precedence,” the astounded director continued. “What about our motivation? We made it happen? They didn’t! Well, didn’t we?”

Nods around the room, including that of the general manager, the point was conceded. The discussion was over. I stayed clear of the director that had made the suggestion to dispel the fear that it was my idea, which it wasn’t. I was as surprised as everyone.

An opportunity was missed. Over the next several years, I never heard the idea brought up again.

THE PRESENT RIDICULOUS PERSONIFIED – DELTA AIR LINES!

A number of years ago the employees of Delta Airlines were so happy with the company that employees purchased a jet liner out of their own pockets. It cost tens of millions of dollars.

That same company is now at death’s door struggling to stay afloat without a thing to hold on to except monumental concessions by these same rank and file workers.

It could be said that in this modern era of electronics in which planes take off and land essentially without human involvement that pilots are overpaid air bus drivers.

It reminds me of how the job of coal handler continued with the railroad long after trains ran totally on diesel fuel. Vestigial workers are apt to hold on long after their role has played out.

Now these pilots are being subjected to a second humiliation in less than two years. They have seen their $275,000 salary reduced to less than $200,000 with a 32.5 percent pay concession in 2004. This pay cut was meant to save Delta. Now, these same pilots are being asked, and have accepted a salary cut from $170,000 to about $146,000, or another 14 – 15 percent pay cut concession.

How many of us could take a 50 percent cut in our income and do it without complaint? Careful, don’t answer too quickly!

In my experience, most of us! We would likely behave precisely as the Delta Air Line pilots are now behaving for at least two reasons: we are mainly “followers” and into comfort and other-directedness rather than being self-directed; into security without pain rather than opportunity with some risk; and secondly, we have bought into the idea that the situation is “not our problem,” mainly because we have had little or no input into the problem.

Meanwhile, the airline executives, who own the problem, take comfort in complaining about the sins of deregulation, the fluctuating value of the dollar, escalating crude oil prices, competition from low budget air lines, the crunch of entitlement programs, government security requirements, and on and on. In other words, it is their problem but not their fault.

Clearly, nobody is in charge. Leaderless leadership reins supreme! The airline industry is not alone in suffering this malaise, as it is endemic to most institutions of our times.

My wonder is how much longer American workers will continue to take it on the chin while the GDP continues to grow with only a privileged few participating in the boom. That old adage, “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer,” is in fact true. While the incomes of the top 15 percent persists in climbing, the income of the bottom 85 percent continues to decline at a depressing rate, creating an ever-larger delta differential.

An engineer once told me, “I get paid a dollar more an hour than I can afford to quit and do what I really like.” That same engineer is now working a job several dollars less an hour than he once earned, as his place of employment has been reduced from some 2,000 to less than 400 engineers now. Prudence proved “ present ridiculous,” as he still isn’t doing what he “really liked” to do.

FUTURE PERFECT – THE PARALLEL PARANOID UNIVERSE OF PANIC

We are all living in a schizoid world.

If you have any doubt, why would we build houses on swamp land, or on land that Mother Nature washes down the sides of hills in a moderate downpour, or along beaches that disappear in an instant from a hurricane or tsunami, or where mudslides devour villages because the trees that secured the soil above are gone, or why would we turn our cities into hostile gas saunas that pollute the air we breathe, or why would we produce nuclear armaments we don’t intend to use, but whose waste could contaminate our environment forever should they leak their venomous poisons into our soils and streams, or why do we randomly destroy the sanctuaries of exotic plants and animals, or, indeed, why do we allow others to steal our own inward lives putting trust in their voices while not being able to hear our own?

Luce Irigaray in “Elemental Passions” (1992) speaks for us:

“But am I a not a reminder of what you buried in oblivion to build your world? Where am I? There and not there. In the space of your dreams. And how can I return from that landscape, which I do not know? From those surroundings, which I cannot see. Where I take place only in you. And you fallen into the depths of me, into that dark abyss, which you imagine me to be.”

She is speaking of people doing stupid things because others say they should. This is tantamount to self-abandonment and negation of self-responsibility. Life is not fair and we will go to our grave with such complaint.

This life lived in the awareness of always moving to the will of others until that will is “swallowed” is what is called “schizophrenia.” This division, this hesitation and detachment, this self-alienation is embodied in the pervasive tendency to passivity. It is a kind of living and acting as if one’s life was a fiction created by someone else to fulfill his or her purposes and not one’s own.

Michael Foucault in “Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison” (1979) is looking at culture, but could just as well be addressing the cage we put ourselves in. He writes, “We come to know who we are by understanding how others see us and expect us to behave.”

The tendency for internal division is the architectural figure of speech that explains how our institutions have become cages by design with us their willing occupants.

This is so because of a radical separation between the observer and the observed, keeping the latter in constant surveillance. It is a cultural phenomenon that “the self” is not only a given but has become a “divided self.” We experience this division when we become a subject within ourselves, or when others objectify us as their subject. The extreme of this is when people are paralyzed to act because they are obsessed with what other people will think when they do.

Stated plainly, we don’t trust ourselves and we fail to trust others. Fear rules. And fear is guided by paranoia, which makes existence a total prison.

The other night a television news commentator stated that she had no idea why people resented all this intrusive electronic surveillance. “It saves lives,” she said, referencing the instance where a pedophile had raped and killed a little girl, but was quickly apprehended because surveillance cameras at a carwash caught the abduction.

Freedom is losing to the slavery of fear. The other day a shopper’s car in my area was broken into at a shopping mall, and the shopper blared to the television reporter, “Why isn’t there surveillance cameras in the parking lot? They should be everywhere. How else will we be safe?”

Imagine not being able to escape the ubiquitous eye of surveillance scrutiny no matter where you go. We are all in George Orwell’s “1984 world.”

No one mentions that ninety-nine percent of citizens are law-abiding who would be forced to conform to these intrusive demands, or that the sanctity of privacy was once a guaranteed right of American citizenship.

Consider this: since the person would never know when he or she was being watched, he or she could never cease to be vigilant. The self would have to observe the self. Paradoxically, this situation has already given rise to a sense of freedom in the prison of constant surveillance, the enslaved self bent on scrutinizing and subduing a “lower” or more objectified part of one’s own being.

Orwell wrote about this dualism in “Animal Farm” (1945). The paranoid person is both the observer and observed giving the person trouble identifying with these polarized roles of self-presence and/or observing-consciousness. A team of psychologists has used this “cut and control” phenomenon to proffer the idea of an imaginary eye looking down on one’s actions (see “Sanity, Insanity and Common Sense,” 1980), providing subjective health from the perspective of objective reality. The book promises a “groundbreaking approach to happiness.” In Orwell-speak “hell is happiness; happiness is hell.”

Insofar as one identifies oneself with the mind, one will be identifying with a being whose essence is always elsewhere, always perpetually watching from a remove. Louis Sass in “Madness and Modernism” (1992) sees the situation as a variation of the master/slave dialectic, considering those to the extreme of this lived experience, schizophrenic. He writes:

“Each self – observer and observed – comes to be defined almost completely by a relationship whose essence is distance and difference; thus the prisoner’s body would have to be experienced by the prisoner as a body-as-perceived, a body for the distant observer; when the observer’s being would be reduced to a single function, the being-who-observes-me-from-afar.”


“Big Brother is watching you, and the you he is watching is not the same you that you were!”

These sources are quoted to give evidence that there is professional awareness of the apparent collapse of integrity of the integrated personality in this age of living on the edge. Haynes Johnson in “The Age of Anxiety: McCarthyism to Terrorism” (2005) suggests we have witnessed a half century of mounting hysteria producing this inevitability. Likewise, in an increasingly cookie cutter sterile world, Foucault claims the tendency is toward paranoia and self-policing in the face of four-corner electronic surveillance. Earlier, Sartre claimed simply that the inauthentic self is a product of people never doing what they most desire to do, caged in their fears, which bars the expression of their unencumbered passions.

This characteristic self-conscious subjectivity finds routine experiences becoming “shreds of evidence” vulnerable to suspect interpretation at the expense creativity, passion and the epiphanies they may contain.

A celebrated columnist that covers technology said recently on the “News Hour With Jim Lehrer” that he is never without some gadget. He has an iPod or video cell phone to entertain him should he be eating, dressing, exercising on a treadmill, sitting in a doctor’s office, or traveling by air. No quiet time for him. The eye is always focused on a subject with him as the observer. His fractured mind personifies the divided self with the hubris of having a hold on the good life while living in the serenity of the modern electronic prison.

No matter how he may retreat into the depths of these thingamajigs, he is lost in what James Joyce states in “Finnegans Wake” (1939) as “fathomglasses to find out all the fathoms,” later warning, “mustforget there’s an audience.” Once you forget, you are no longer self-conscious, and now in control, for you as subject-object have merged as one.


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Dr. Fisher is an organizational/industrial psychologists and former corporate executive who writes on themes that touch his fancy from time to time. Many of these subsequently are published in journals and periodicals after first appearing here on his blog: www.peripateticphilosopher.blogspot.com