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.


© DECEMBER 2005

PART ONE

Wise distrust and constant watchfulness are the parents of safety. A soul without watchfulness is, like a city without walls, exposed to the inroads of all its enemies.

William Secker (1650)
English clergyman

THE QUIET MIND

The Indian philosopher and mystical thinker, Krishnamurti (1895 – 1986), born in Madras, India, and discovered by Dr. Annie Besant, resisted her attempts to proclaim him the Messiah. The wealthy London theosophist aimed to build a religion around him. Instead, he traveled the world advocating a way of life and thought unconditioned by the narrowness of nationality, race and religion.

Early on, Krisnamurti recognized the “divided self” was endemic to modern man, making him vulnerable to such thinkers as Freud and Jung. Western man in particular, he noted, has come to accept the eccentricities and neuroses described by these men as belonging to him. Thus, Freudian and Jungian language has come to identify modern man’s fears and anxieties. Krisnamurti insists this has made him more anxious and confused rather than less so.

To demonstrate his point, Krisnamurti often uses parables. This is one. There was this painter that would come to the crevice of a mountain where a large tree grew out of the divide. He would set up his easel, place his canvas on it, roll out his paints and rags, and observe the tree, sometimes for hours, but never set paintbrush to canvas.

A man who had observed this unusual behavior several times, one day asked, “Sir, are you a painter?”

The painter nodded, “That I am.”

“Yet you do not paint. I have watched you these several days, and not once have you touched your canvas with paintbrush. Am I correct?”

“Indeed, you are.”

“Help me, sir, understand this as I am quite confused.”

“I am not ready to paint. When I am ready, I shall paint the tree.”

“When you are ready?”

“Yes.”

“Pardon me for my boldness, but when might that be?”

“When I become the tree and the tree becomes me.” Seeing that this further confused his interrogator, he added. “I am not yet ready because I am still the observer and the tree is being observed. When there is no subject, and no object, only the tree, when we are wed as one, I shall paint.” With that he collapsed his easel, restored his paints to his case and left without another word.


THE ANXIOUS MIND


We like other people to do our thinking because we find ourselves too busy to do our own. We let them dictate the agenda of our lives so that we can complain if it is neither wanted nor expected. When asked what we would do with our lives if we didn’t have to work, we are apt to reply, nothing or travel, bookends to a vegetated state.

Most of us wouldn’t have any idea what to do with ourselves if we didn’t have our miseries and boring work. The simple fact is we let life make choices for us and then sit around and wait to see how those choices turn out.

The only commodity we own is time, and it is slipping away as I write these words. It has taken me a lifetime to realize I came in with nothing, and I will leave with nothing. Chasing possessions is a poor way to spend the short time in between.

The second thing I’ve learned is that it is much better to limit my desires than to earn the income to satisfy what Madison Avenue romanticizes as what I need. Most Americans are slaves to appetites invented by advertisers, Hollywood, and television programming. We dress, talk, eat, drink, drive, and couple according to dictums of what is “in” and what is “out.”

The United States of America is called an “individualistic society,” when it is hardly individualistic at all. Take renegades. In my youth, rebels on motorcycles were about the only ones with tattoos. Now tattoos are “in,” and so everyone has to have one. Renegade identity in this instance has neutralized individualism, as there seems almost a frantic fear of not being accepted or belonging to some crowd. As a consequence, the contemporary mind is anxious, and identity inauthentic, for no one wants to stand out as different in a crowd. Most attention, then, is spent on “fitting in” and watching others to see if they are watching us.

When we run into walls the walls we run into are often the walls that our unconscious personality has created, or the walls that others tell us are there. We accept their words because they are respected, expert and authority voices, or voices outside the voice that is in our heads waiting to be listened to, but unlikely to go unheard.

Experts talk of a “glass ceiling” for women seeking careers, and many women would argue it is hardly glass or invisible, but solid impenetrable steel.

This expression of “glass ceiling” came out of the experiment with flies. An aerated container with a glass ceiling watched the behavior of the entrapped flies. Many would bounce off the glass ceiling and return to buzz around the chamber. After some time, the glass lid was removed, only to find the flies were no longer interested in challenging the clear passage to freedom, buzzing about in anxious captivity.

There are similar captivities of choice that are even more remarkable.

Recently, I had dinner with a successful man who is in his forties, who confided to me that he has over a million dollars of capital, not including his real estate holdings. He also proudly informed me that he carries nearly $50,000 in his checking account, and dreams of the day when he will have $4 or 5 million saved so that he can quit a job that he doesn’t particularly like.

“Why not $40 or 50 million?” I asked.

He looked at me oddly, causing me to add, “What would you do when you no longer had to work 70 or 80 hours a week?”

“Nothing,” he answered without hesitation, and then after a moment’s pause, “I’d do some traveling.” Apparently, thinking this too self-serving, added, “I’d of course provide for the education of my kids and grandkids.”

It was clear that while his financial goals were thought out his emotional and psychological goals were not, drifting instead into inanities. Nor had the thought occurred to him what he would do with a 70 or 80 hours gap in his weekly life.

After I left him, I felt a deep sorrow bordering on revulsion, not for him so much, as for the fact that he was in the upper one-tenth of one percent of American earners and he wasn’t aware that he was being programmed, manipulated, and watched like a puppet on a string being pulled and danced to puppeteer refrains while life was draining from him.

LIFE AS PUPPETRY

There are two aspects of this condition that I would like to cover briefly. One is the psychology of the cult leader that controls all our lives whether we know it or not, more so now than ever before. We have become dependent for most of our information and the decisions we make, not out of direct experience, but on the basis of what cult leaders and their acolytes insist are right for us.

Cult leaders constantly bombard our senses telling us what is important, and what is not; what we should think and feel and why; and what makes us anxious and what will make it all go away. They even create their own financial fortunes by telling us how to create ours. Cult leaders have decided what ails us providing trendy ideal type models, when all they are doing is explaining away their own hang ups.

The second aspect is the mentor’s personality in which rests the cult leader’s power. This comes in diverse shapes but its presence is unmistakable. The bearded, smiling, Buddha-like Andrew Weil (Healthy Aging) has it, as did the handsome Werner Erhard (est seminars) of another generation, as does the baldheaded Wayne Dyer (Becoming Spiritual), who is a constant presence on public television. They, and their legion urge us to practice a veritable religion of the self in which the individual determines his own behavior without needing the approval of an outside force, which is ironic, because they certainly are not a force from within.

What makes mentoring personalities dangerous is that they promote the illusion that our conscious and unconscious minds are on different playing fields that must me netted together with their guidance. They know cognitive processes are perceived to have a corresponding weaker hold on the more dominant unconscious processes. That is, reason is more pliable than gut intelligence, and so they dwell on our vanities.

G. K. Chesterton put it well when he said, “That Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones.”

George Bernard Shaw said it even more pungently, “God created us in his image, and we decided to return the favor.”

Weil knows that we fear death and are afraid to live; Erhard knew Generation X considered responsibility a prison and so he provided a solution; and Dyer talks in simple terms about complex ideas giving his audience pabulum philosophy to save them the trouble of working things out for themselves.

CHARISMA UNCOVERED

Charisma, as a psychological emanation, may be thought of as a supplement to personality or leadership characteristics that fills most easily the emptiness of another person’s psyche, especially those created by boredom, too much time on one's hands, depression bordering on self-pity, developmental deficits due to sloth, or simply self-indulgence.

Charisma, through its power to over stimulate in the short term, can effectively mask the narcissistically seductive and self-serving aims that are often blatantly evident in the charismatic personality of the cult leader.

A collusive bargain is struck between the cult leader-as-mentor and the individual who is seductively charmed. This person perhaps has come to think: Okay, maybe I am being manipulated, maybe it is just a bunch of hogwash, but it feels so good it’s worth it! Such people buy the books and pay the hundreds of dollars for the seminars, and go away happy, but never changed.

The mentoring personality-as-cult leader knows his audience and the nature of his seductive appeal. If for only a brief respite from the dog-eat-dog world, the receptive personality wants to feel special, wants somebody to pay attention to him and his needs, as well as his fears, dilemmas, and anxieties. He reasons that he is spending time and money in pursuit of his object, self-approval, concluding, even if I am being used, he (cult leader) wouldn’t be wasting his time on me, important as he is, since he could be anywhere with anyone else, but he is here with me.

The fatal flaw in this chain of reasoning is that no one is less discriminating than the cult leader. He must have an audience, and experienced confirmation of the merits of his ideas. Charisma, then, far from being selective, is a promiscuous engagement cloaked in the addictive power of an idea, be it in blissful long life, hedonism without responsibility, or spirituality without struggle.

There is a hidden agenda of denying a covert deadness and passivity of both the cult leader and his audience by consummating an ephemeral relationship that, while meaningless in terms of change, is however exciting in the moment.

Young people reading this may see the concern raised here as hyperbolic and irrelevant. They of course did not live in the time of Adolph Hitler or Joseph Stalin, or indeed, Joseph McCarthy. Hitler and Stalin took Germany and Russia into war and ran it with the newspeak right out of George Orwell’s “1984” in which Big Brother proclaimed, “War is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.” Joseph McCarthy, on the other hand, was a rabble-rouser who played on the suspicious mind.

Orwell’s novel reflected precisely what these cult leaders were successful in establishing: palpable fear. Big Brother now is not less toxic, but comes to us more indirectly through subliminal stimulation in blind messages in film, television, music, and radio, while the constant eye of electronic surveillance invades our privacy. In “1984” newspeak, “personal privacy is self-imprisonment.” There is evidence this is accepted today without a whimper of protest. Big Brother is not only in our lives but has successfully changed our lives to a way in which we are not only alienated from what we were but self-hating for the attention.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE CULT LEADER

We have this idea that charisma is important in leadership, when it is a manifestation of the puppeteer doing his thing. The cult leader first is a wounded human being who denies there is a connection between the idiosyncratic details of his actual deficit world and the utopian worldview he espouses.

Read biographies of Freud and Jung and you see how they became the cult craving figures that they are. They broke from each other: Freud succeeding with transactional analysis although it could not be scientifically replicated in experience, selling it successfully as “the new science” of psychology; while Jung reached down into cultural mythology and the collective unconscious to explain why man behaves as he does.

Both Freud and Jung, among others, have proven to be failures of great consequence in their appointed tasks, yet society calls them “great men” because society needs great men to believe itself in turn great for having followed their misguided leads.

It is not fair to single out these two men, alone, but this is a short piece, leaving educators, religious leaders, politicians, and others, who display similar behavior unrecorded.

In any case, it is part of the grandiose scheme of cult leaders to believe they transcend their personal deficits in the service of society’s collective unconscious, which puts them closer to Jung than to Freud.

The fact is that cult leaders, whatever their discipline or audience, suffer from a pathology of symbolism.

They see themselves, literally, as the symbols incarnate on a symbolic quest to do for people what they would not do for themselves. They carry the banner of liberty, equality and fraternity, or salvation, or the means to eternal bliss.

Cult leaders are analogous to schizophrenics, which I will subsequently address relative to “Big Brother.” I say this because of the loosened associations engendered in the meaning of words and ideas when the cult leader talks about such things. They are prone to a pathological spreading of cult symbolism. They do this when they focus on our fears, and attempt to persuade us to relax our freedoms to ensure our security. Symbolism, thus, becomes more real than experience and dictates behavior.

They use fear-speak as a suitable mechanism in defense of fear and gauge of their charismatic personality to project their identity with our concerns and how they plan to address them in our behalf. Thus, a single calamity can provide the pathology of symbolism to ride them to controlling our destiny, surrendering self-responsibility and freedom to them with open hands.

With this mechanism cult leaders can deny every scintilla of neurotic conflict, and project this onto society as its own deficit, thus externalizing an unbearable inner tension into a collective paranoia, creating an “us against them” mentality that we assume that belongs to us as well. Whatever they say we should do, we will do because we have not taken the trouble to reflect on what is going on.

Just when the cult leader’s magic is waning, he frequently admits to having failings, the Achilles heel of the great man, because the failings he admits to are always petty.

The cult leader sees himself as a historic figure with an opportunity to write the history of his times by acting as the great rebel, messenger of cultural salvation, or messianic genius matched with the demands of the times. No country or society is without such men.

This genius of cult leader has little to do with intelligence or intellectual acumen, in his mind, preferring to believe that mystical powers beyond his comprehension guides him to do the public’s good, and thus brings to birth a latent but expectant historical trend. Rules do not apply to such men, or rather existing rules, as they can be temporarily suspended to realize the greater good.

This profile could go on, but this is enough to visualize the aspect, realizing the cult leader cannot understand or accept without some devious maneuvering when he encounters sensitive observers who fail to be influenced by the weightiness of his mission, or how it is meant for them as well.

The disenchanted or opposition then become the dangerous and their names are added to some type of enemies list, when their greatest sin is that they failed to buy into the charade.

CULT LEADERS IN THE HOME AND THE DANGERS THEY REFLECT

Much as cult leaders can be upsetting to our lives if we allow them to become influences, a greater danger is the result of what happens when a mundane society buys into many of the constrains that are self-imposed.

A daughter does this when her mother dies at a young age, and she finds herself the servant of her brothers and sisters, and even father long after they should care for themselves. Her life is on hold until there is no longer any life left to hold onto. She does it first out of love, then obligation, then out of knowing nothing else, and then finally out of bitterness, never having had the courage to say, “Enough already!”

A wife does this when her husband keeps getting her pregnant and then drinks and gambles and runs around freely leaving her home to serve the needs of the children, and his needs, with no opportunity to know much less meet hers. She, too, should say enough already, and demand change, divorce, and if that is not likely, to leave.

A man in a job that he hates but pays him well and therefore claims he has no choice is a man who is servant to a master other than himself.

There are three types of people who live in this prosaic danger zone: there are the takers, those who play it safe, and those that never get enough.

The takers are like the husband described above who lives in reckless abandon treating his wife and children as possessions to do with as he pleases. Those who play it safe are what we call “normal,” or people who live, or try to live, within their means and possibilities while wearing blinders to what is happening around them. Then there are those who live constantly on the edge in reckless abandon treating everything they encounter as fodder for their grand design. (See PART TWO)

Inward life was stolen from the daughter who took care of her brothers and father at the expense of her own. The inward life was stolen by the wife that subjugated her needs to the voice of demands of her husband and society “to be a good mother and wife,” whatever the cost. And the inward life was stolen from the man who never found the gumption to do what he really wanted to do.

PERSONALITY PROFILE OF THE CULT LEADERS AMONGST US

The radiance of charisma can be deceptive. The action of charisma may be a deflection and transformation of inner energy to glow and radiate outward into lines of force.

Seen in this way, it represents almost a manic projection, which may explain why manic attacks and bizarre reactions of hysteria are manifestations of charisma.

Yet, the charismatic personality may be no more than the forceful symptom of the psychic work that is necessary for transforming inner affects to outer effects, and therefore may not be so free flowing as it would seem.

There is an obvious connection between this mesmerizing power and the sleight-of-hand tricks of the magician in that the charismatic leader conceals the struggle that was required to produce the effect. Have no doubt that Freud, Jung, Weil, Erhard, Dyer, and many others of their charismatic persuasion have had their struggles. What they have “found out” they desire to share with the happy ease and simmering aplomb of effortless discovery. What is missing is how hard the charismatic personality works at being charismatic.

To understand why charisma works as well as it does, given its duplicitous nature, it must be understood that we are a “divided self” in which subject and object are separated by a convenient miasma. The charismatic personality penetrates this mist with narcissistic giving, by acting as though he is giving something that is not already possessed, and giving it grandiosely. The charismatic personality deflects the awareness of the recipient (who is being given little or nothing) from the actual frustrating present transaction to stimulate the promise of extravagant gratification in the future by appealing to natural greed and sloth.

You experience the flavor of this when the narcissistic appeal is that your weaknesses are actually your strengths, that selfishness is not a curse but a blessing, that greed is good, that workaholism is good for the soul. You get the point. It follows that the charismatic personality, who is obsessed with his impact on the recipient, will not fail to use the full power of his narcissistic giving to penetrate the fragile mind of the devotee.

The influence of charisma is awesome to those predisposed to it. Its effects can best be described with those of a drug. Charisma can often function as a euphoria-building, antidepressant drug. In its ability to make one feel good, charisma can seem a high, and part of the addiction. There is no place for reason, for fair exchange, or for humor as the line has been drawn and the charismatic addicted person cannot imagine crossing it.

There is some truth that we are attracted to what we are not and believe we should be, which makes us vulnerable to charismatic personalities with these apparent qualities:

· They have a significant aura of greater energetic drive than we do, which does not follow from an excess of cheerfulness, but may be an expression of an angry disposition, as is often the case with incendiary leaders of minority groups.
· They seem to have a sense of psychic surplus, which overflows and they wish to share with you.
· Close observation will reveal they are narcissistically self-absorbed believing themselves to understand the profound and to be driven by greater good.
· They have the ability to draw people to them by the psychic force of their personality, which sets up a force field magnetism not unlike iron filings to a magnet.
· This force field is their “promised land” which they are willing to share.

There is a connection between charisma and seduction, and in the prosaic sense, many a person has fallen victim to this fatal charm, often to his or her regret. The charismatic personality is energetic, charming and alive, and sets off goose bumps in you, failing to realize he is always talking about himself, resulting in your not being able to resist the charm of such a know-it-all, upbeat, and heavenly person, who sweeps you off your feet before you know it.

Likely to be missed in this heated climate is that the charismatic personality is obsessed not to be simply a “self,” but a personality, to be not larger than life, but larger than himself.

The charismatic personality strikes us as an embodiment of an archetype, more beautiful or handsome than is possible, more athletic and successful under pressure than is imaginable, more charming and knowledgeable than anyone could remotely attain. In a word, the charismatic personality is on another level, a paradigm of some elemental human force that connects him with the primitive and unconscious depths of our being.

We are in awe and think we have found our leader, our true love, or the answer to our prayers. So, we leave our wits behind and follow blindly leaving the sanctuary of our safe harbor and its moorings where good sense and security once resided.

It should be clear, then, that whatever the charismatic personality offers, be it whatever, it is not love, kindness, understanding, nurturance, empathy, or intimacy in any fundamental human sense. Should there be the promise of enlightenment and guidance, whether religious, political, philosophical, moral, or aesthetic, rest assured it will be delivered grandiosely, but never in a personal way. The charismatic personality abhors the one-on-one setting for reason. It exposes him as fraud.

So, it is not necessarily that face seen on television that is your charismatic personality of concern, but may be that face across the room on the couch in the living room, in a bar having a drink beside a stranger, at a conference of peers, or in coffee shop having a cafe au lait with a colleague who is married to your best friend.

We are most vulnerable to the charismatic personality, when our guard is down and he or she pursues a hidden agenda with indirection and sleight-of-hand finesse when our vanity and sincerity collide to not recognize the invasion.

SOMEBODY IS WATCHING AND THE WATCHER MAY BE UP TO NO GOOD

We are constantly reminded of identity theft. Mystery novelists use this as fodder for their stories. It illustrates another point. We believe bad things only happen to other people, and so we throw caution to the wind, and behave as if we can’t be touched.

The predator in a David Baldacci novel studies automobiles, their age, type, condition, and license plate numbers. He sees a vanity plate, which reads “DEH JD,” and knows the person is a lawyer. She goes to an ATM, and then throws the receipt into the trash. He retrieves it and has more information. He looks her up and gets her phone number, and so on. He does this for a number of potential victims with them all seemingly oblivious to danger leaving information in plain sight. For example, he sees a People magazine with the name and address of the person on the seat of a locked car. From there, he can go to the Internet and get all the information he needs. Paranoia, as a consequence, has become common defense.

It wasn’t like this when I was a boy. That all changed, according to Haynes Johnson in his new book, “The Age of Anxiety” (2005), with the terror of the 1950s called “McCarthyism.” Joseph McCarthy was the junior US Senator from Wisconsin, who claimed there were scores of communist in the government and the media. He used his charismatic personality to stir up blind fear and anxiety into mass public hysteria, convincing the US Congress to create an “Un-American Activities Committee.” Thousands lost their jobs for writing words like you see here, as it was the “Great Red Scare,” which was Communism.

While this mania was sweeping across the nation, “1984” (1949) by George Orwell was being published. Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm wrote an “after word” about it in 1961:

“George Orwell’s 1984 is the expression of a mood, and it is a warning. The mood it expresses is that of near despair about the future of man, and the warning is that unless the course of history changes, men all over the world will lose their most human qualities, will become soulless automatons, and will not even be aware of it.”

To give you a flavor of that novel and how it ties in with this piece, I conclude with a passage from “1984”:

“Crimstop, in short, means protective stupidity. But stupidity is not enough. On the contrary, orthodoxy in the full sense demands control over one’s own mental processes as complete as that of a contortionist over his body. Oceanic society rests ultimately on the belief that Big Brother is omnipotent and the Party is infallible. But since in reality Big Brother is not omnipotent and the Party is not infallible, there is need for an unwearying, moment-to-moment flexibility in the treatment of facts. The key word here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink.” (1984, A Signet Classic Paperback, 1961, p. 175)

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Dr. Fisher is an organizational/industrial psychologist and former corporate executive who writes on themes that touch his fancy from time to time. Many of these subsequently are published. See his website and blog: www.peripateticphilosopher.com.