PRESENT RIDICULOUS
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 2006
Contemporary society is “postindustrial,” “postcolonial,”
“posthistorical,” post-Freudian,” and “post-Christian.”
Politics are “neoconservative,” “neoliberal,” “post-Cold
War,” and “neopopulist.” Art is “neorealist,” neo-
conceptualist,” and “neo-Expressionist.” Philosophy is
“poststructuralist,” “neopragmatist,” and “postrationalist.”
David S. Awbrey, Finding Hope in the Age of Melancholy (1999)
You can’t smoke in any public place, but anyone can roar down the street in a vehicle with decibel splitting twin carburetors roaring. They can shout through a cell phone a booth away in a restaurant, or in a checkout line in a supermarket, or in line at the post office, or sitting beside you in an AMC theater. They can be on their cell phones during an entire concert, baseball, basketball or football game. Cell phones can interrupt your reverie in the library, classroom, or church. It is nothing to take calls in your home, failing to excuse themselves as smokers do without preamble. They treat your home as their own private space, feeling no need to justify the discourtesy. They are as likely to lolly gab on their cell phone while you are in their vehicle. Equally menacing, kids can walk down the street their blasting boom boxes shattering windowpanes as they pass, becoming incensed if you ask them to turn down the volume. Motorcyclists choose to rev up their engines just as they pass your home or you on the street. Fat people wear body-hugging jeans with naked midriffs to offend your eyes as you walk through the mall. People flaunt tattoos or their body parts exposed to view including on their neck or even forehead and you wonder if your nation has gone primitive. People drive by your neighborhood throw McDonald trash out the window as they smilingly speed by. The sidewalk becomes an obstacle course as you attempt to avoid dog poop the size of bear droppings. You are forced to step off the sidewalk as dogs the size of small horses prance by on their masters’ leashes. A $200 million cross town expressway under construction collapses because it was unwittingly constructed over a sandy fault, a fault not alluded to in the $5 million consultant’s feasibility study. This information was available for free at the local university from work of graduate students, which was not sourced. A $10 million turnaround is constructed to relieve beach side traffic congestion. This increases it tenfold. The turnaround is removed along with the $500,000 fountain placed in its center. A new $4 million outdoors concert arena is opened to cause frazzled nerves and nightmares for area residences as hard metal rock concerts in decibel splitting thunder turn the night into dissonant noise. This was not considered when the project was approved. Not far away with a similar short-term focus, a teenage nightclub is opened in an adult nightclub area. Young people are served pretend alcoholic beverages so they can behave like inebriated adults. Authorities come to find those in attendance are as likely to be eight as eighteen roaming the streets at three a.m. The mayor with a bronze smile and an iron will give project overseers big bonuses as if the city is a corporation with unlimited revenues. With short-term memory, high rise condominiums, strip malls, upscale restaurants and supermarkets go up with reckless abandon on stratified sand not limestone beds, areas formerly swamp lands. New businesses open and close before the paint is dry or after a heavy rain are swallowed up in sinkholes. Water is a precious in these parts. So, lawn sprinkling is restricted. This miffs some residences, who show their disdain by keeping their automatic sprinklers running during torrential downpours. Department stores conduct 50 percent sales with the sales extending only from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. with tons of people answering the call to buy things they don’t need, don’t know where to put, and won’t use, but will buy anyway because they are on sale. People take cruises to foreign lands not to visit museums, see landmarks, study the architecture, breathe in the foreign atmosphere and culture, but to do precisely what they do at home: find a modern mall, shop until they drop, eat until they can’t move, and avoid talking to the natives at all cost. They do however acquire a cachet of postcards and last minute camera shots with them of course in the frame, proof they were there. They go on crash diets to look good at reunions, gain the weight back, and five years later go on crash diet again to look good at the next. They sign up for weight watcher programs, only to gain more weight, quitting in disgust, blaming the programs for the diet they failed to follow. They buy big gas-guzzling SUVs and then complain about the price of gasoline. Companies hire consultants to determine what is wrong with the company. The consultants talk to the workers who tell them. The consultants tell management what they heard. Management pays the consultants a large fee, and then shares the findings with the board. The board passes the word on to stockholders in the annual report. Nothing actually changes. Pharmaceutical companies develop therapeutic patches to ease the discomfort of smokers’ withdrawal. The patches are expensive. This validates smokers are serious. Smokers still crave cigarettes. They sneak a smoke occasionally. Finally, they scrap the patch and smoke with abandon. Several months later when they can no longer breath, they return to the patch or gum or pill, repeating the same old ritual. Stock prices soar for the drug and placebo marketers. A rush of remedial groups emerges including smokers anonymous, alcohol anonymous, gamblers anonymous, child abusers anonymous, and depression anonymous. The anonymous sit around and talk about their addiction or affliction or depression. They watch films of the cumulative horrors of it. Little addictive behavior stays in the bottle or holds the dark shadows in abeyance. More than two million citizens in US, alone, are in prison at anyone time. This represents an annual cost of $50,000 per prisoner, more than the yearly tuition for Harvard University. What do citizens get for their crime prevention tax dollars? They get recidivism. Ninety percent of the incarcerated, once released, are likely to end up back in prison. Imprisonment is a turnstile. This requires the building of more prisons to hold more prisoners. There are no sins and no sinners in the modern world, only victims of social deprivation and dysfunctional relationships. If anything is at fault, it is society. Who is society? You and me! Given this, everyone remains purposely oblivious to anything socially disgusting. Instead, they wax congenial with an automatic “hi there” and “have a nice day,” and so the beat goes on . . .
* * * * *
The PRESENT RIDICULOUS now ambles along before settling down to an extended jaunt through FUTURE PERFECT. There we will see how man has taken up permanent residence in NOWHERE. Before developing that discussion, however, we will roam through the world of the PRESENT RIDICULOUS to show man is not the thinking animal he claims, but an animal that can think but seldom displays the will or stomach for it. He takes his own nonsense for sense and then feels obliged to take it seriously. As Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723 – 1792) puts it, “There is no expedient to which man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.”
One day I was eating my lunch flipping the television channels and came across Tommy Franks addressing the Press Club in Washington, D.C. Four Star General Franks, now retired, was Commander in Chief of Central Command and the Coalition Forces (translated, mainly American) that preemptively invaded Iraq in 2003.
The general has a cool demeanor but nervous tic that punctuates his remarks with “ah hum” quotation marks. He struck me as a foxy devil, indeed a character from the past. Nothing is more serious than war, and nothing more serious than an ex-general hawking his memoirs American Soldier (2004) about his role in that war. Soldiering in the PRESENT RIDICULOUS makes for instant celebrity and millionaire status.
This is not a new phenomenon, to be sure, but a recent development in an age devoid of heroes. Terror and anxiety has gripped the nation since the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York City on September 11, 2001. Islam terrorists drove commercial jet liners full of passengers into these structures, killing more than 3,000 people including firefighters, police and rescue workers. Naked fear has turned to heroes with epaulets.
Justifying a preemptive invasion of a sovereign nation on the pretext it has chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction, and that its tyrannical leader is an eminent threat to the security of the United States and world is something of a stretch even on a most paranoid day.
The phantom weapons were never found fueling the joke that Saddam Hussein wasn’t in control, as he truly believed they existed, but was duped by his scientists and generals. This damaged the specter of Saddam as Attila the Hun, which was compounded when he, bearded and gray, was found cowering in a dark “spider hole” like a pharaoh in a tomb surrounded by symbols of his lost power – two AK-47s, a pistol, and $750,000 in $100 bills. The “Butcher of Baghdad” had the terrified look of a trapped raccoon and surrendered without resistance.
Somehow the cry, “Iraq has been made safe for democracy and the world a safer place in which to live” had the dull thud of a dropped bomb that didn’t go off.
Leaders in the world don’t seem to get it. This appears especially true of American politicians and generals. We don’t own the world. It is not our playground to muck up as we please because we think we can. I suspect politicians and generals love to be hated because any attention is better than being ignored. They behave like the last bastion of the Roman Empire, and we know what happened to it. Essayist Andrew Sullivan writes:
This was surely the year in which we ambled hopefully, foolishly, gamely into the dark. Some would like to ascribe the many human failings of the year to willful deception. Bush lied! But cover-ups are not as common in human history as screw-ups. This was, rather, a year in which we all got it wrong. It was the year of living erroneously.
It is no longer the eighteenth century when logical positivism and the epistemology of truth were so certain. Nor is it the nineteenth century when industrialization ripped the soul out of the body and people from the land into sweltering urban ghettos. Nor indeed is it the twentieth century when madness reached its pinnacle and hundreds of millions were killed, permanently maimed, or displaced by the symphony of another “wars to end wars.” It was in this climate that God died, atheistic existentialism was born, and religion got a bad name.
We are now in the twenty-first century with the bizarre posturing that settles in after a shock to the system by awe. Walking on pins and needles, our stomachs churning like we have lunched on ground glass, we are made, despite our mounting discomfort, to watch for flashing amber alerts across our television screens from Homeland Security. This is right out of George Orwell’s “1984”: keep them anxious and you will keep them quiet.
The maddening tension is the psychological equivalent of the lull before the anticipation of a Category “5” hurricane. A amber alert happened in August 2004 with a total security shutdown in Washington, D.C. and New York City, costing American tax payers billions of tax dollars, disrupting lives and playing the fear card for all it was worth. Homeland Security admitted later the critical data on which the amber alert was based was more than four years old.
“Say what?” Heightened awareness now turned to anger with “Chicken Little” hysteria. Leader-speak stepped in to quiet the day with “it was the right thing to do at the right time.” A shout across the American psychic cried, “Says who?”
Words poured out of Washington from unhinged bubblehead dolls that placated no one. When psychic trust is flummoxed by fear games, leader-speak cannot lessen the sense of loss. It only increases the sense of disgust. Only a candid admission of the snafu could have assuaged the situation, and then just barely, but that did not occur.
In this hubristic technological age, leader-speak expressed in George Orwell’s “1984” doublethink has been upgraded to digital status. Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously with a feeling of falsity and hence guilt. Big Brother “big lie” is not “out there.” Big Brother now produces it in a microchip to bombard our collective unconscious. Consider this scenario from Orwell’s book:
At the Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith, a Party functionary, plunges into his routine. He has the job of rewriting records. If the Party has made a wrong prediction on the progress of the war, if some aspect of production does not accord with the published goals of the ninth three-year plan, Winston’s job was to correct the record to fit the lie. All published material had to be constantly changed so that all history accorded with the wishes and aims of the Party.
During the second George Bush administration, we listen to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld who has perfected Orwellian leader-speak. He declares with that squinty smile of his that there are “known unknowns” and then there are “unknown unknowns,” and because of this some things are actually quite hard to fix and therefore much harder to explain. Still smiling, “You may ask why that is?” Continuing the Q&A on himself, he tells us that it is because the systems behind these “unknown unknowns” or “known unknowns” are intricate, complicated and created by humans. Then with a slight chuckle and hunch of his shoulders, with an “oh shucks” lopsided grin, he adds, “Being human as we are, what else can you expect?” Indeed. One wonders how long he practiced this before a mirror.
There is evidence in all this of the logical atomism of Wittgenstein. His aim was to “cut and control” language to linguistic atoms comparable to the elemental atoms of physics.
There is precedence for this. You can hear the ring of aristocratic leader-speak in Edmund Burke’s (1729 – 1797) advocacy of a rationally ordered reality. Burke reflects the way social and political relationships are inevitably built on tradition as the organic society. An organic society functions like a human body, with all its parts carrying out their functions:
“Such a society creates a habitual social discipline, in which the wiser, the more expert, and the more opulent conduct, and by conducting enlighten and protect the weaker, the less knowing, and the less provided with the goods of fortune.”
Translated, those eating caviar are obligated to see those that are not are supplied with sufficient canned sardines to appreciate the wisdom of their betters.
Leader-speak may accommodate its audience with a touch of Jean-Paul Sartre’s (1905 – 1980) existentialism as well. Sartre declares feelings, anxieties, and irrational impulses override rational decision-making:
“We make our nature. We do not have one ready-made. Man creates himself by the choices he makes.”
So, if you’ve not made the Darwinian cut, don’t blame me! It is the deficiencies of your genetic code, which would see most of us lapdogs than leaders of our own destiny.
Implicit in leader-speak is the humanistic empathy of Jean-Jacques Rosseau’s (1712 – 1778) whose Social Contract (1762) opens with the line:
“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”
The refuge in society is the family and leader-speak is always for it. With all its implied humanism, Rosseau insists he is a dissenter. He rejects original sin and orthodox Christianity. He believes human misfortune results from a repressive society rather than from a biblical fall from grace, or a basic flaw in humanity’s makeup.
By breaking the chains of clerical and political tyranny, Rosseau argues, humanity can achieve freedom and justice. Human perfection is possible through education and progressive social institutions. Guilt, evil, and misery aren’t indelible to human nature, but tools of oppression that would disappear if society put human needs above the political status quo and religious dogma.
On the other hand, to give you a sense of the power of his ideas, Rosseau influenced the French revolutionaries of 1789, while both forms of populist democracy and Marxist despotism trace some of their fundamental ideas to him. He also opened the door for the dominance of science while he closed it on the Church. He did not envision, however, the impact of technology in this scheme, or its pull to NOWHERE.
With this arsenal, leader-speak can make any nonsense sensible and anything sensible, nonsense. Leader-speak has risen to the level of cartoonist Jules Feiffer’s The Explainers (1960). The function of speech and of the intellect here is not to serve as a tool of the will, but, rather, to rationalize the fact that the will is already inert. Feiffer’s cartoons speak volumes regarding the sterility, conformity and hypocrisy of the middle class. He captures this by observing its sterility in being proudly anti-intellectual; its conformity in being ruled by obsessive cliques in matters of dress, sex, speech, and dirt; and its hypocrisy in its basic pretenses with reference to money.
Feiffer has one carton showing total moral nihilism and irresponsibility with the excuse, Hey, man, I’m only doing my job! In other words, not my problem! But the classic cartoon sequence is the one that illustrates the roller coaster lifestyle in a therapeutic culture:
We see here a man who explains how he feels at different times. It is characteristic that none of his feelings are just a series of subjective states of feeling. Sometimes this man feels “small,” and sometimes he feels “larger than life like a king.” Sometimes he feels slow and stupid, and other times clever and witty. But it is his misfortune that “most of the times I feel just like me.” The final cartoon shows him, a glum expression on his face, a glass in his hand, as he speaks the words of the logical conclusion, “So I drink.”
There is a deep sickness in leader-speak and it isn’t confined to generals or defense secretaries, to priests or professors, to pundits and promoters. If we are to explain it in terms of the history of ideas, we might say we have arrived at the conclusion of two great developments of thought. We stand at the end of Kant’s rationalism and at the other end of Sartre’s romanticism. The name for the first is positivism. The name for the second is existentialism. Many social scientists, most professors of logic and nearly all scientists cling to the first to this day. Artists, novelists, some psychologists, and many theologians, meanwhile, still cling equally emphatically to the second. Both claim to have a firm grasp of reality, when it would appear they are running away from it, as both seem afraid of life. Denial of death, as Ernest Becker puts it, covers the modern world like a shroud.
The irony is that for all the meticulous analyses of the positivists they appear afraid of reason, while for all the caterwauling of the existentialists they seem afraid of emotions. Reason has become inane to the positivists because it is no longer directed to an objective reality, but feeds on itself. If it will not submit to quantitative analysis, it does not exist. Likewise, emotion has become idiotic with the existentialist because now the self has strong feelings only about its own feelings. Robert Elliot Fitch calls this the “heresy of the self-centered self.” So, the good general and secretary have much company for the failure of their leader-speak.
Leader-speak resonates with THE PRESENT RIDICULOUS. It thinks it can heal us with words, which need not be back with deeds, and can set everything right with promises, when it knows in fact it cannot deliver them.
Ever since two commercial jets flew into the Twin Towers in New York City piloted by terrorists on September 11, 2001, killing more than 3,000 people, hysteria pervades the collective unconscious, while leader-speak dominates the media, placing politicians and generals front and center, and television commentators the equivalent of rock stars. It is the fear game again, only now it has shifted into overdrive as mass hysteria envelopes society. What is the problem? Nobody seems in control. In NOWHERE, there is no place for the buck to stop.
Was the Press Club buying the leader-speak of general Tommy Franks? As the cameras spanned the room, I noticed most sat on their hands as if the first day of school wanting to be somewhere else. Not the general. He was working the crowd, as if it were the reviewing board for another star on his epaulets. He wanted these opinion makers to think him as even handed, as they like to think they are. So, his ploy was to seduce their minds to buy his sincerity. He didn’t seem to have many takers; most had Hillary Clinton blank smirks on their faces. His safety net was his wife, Kathy, who was off camera, but to whom he constantly referred to as if to make sure someone was listening. I was. He was mesmerizing, disturbingly so.
Take the word “absolutely,” one of his favorites. It has no meaning when used with such cavalier assurance.
The Q&A session involved such predictable questions: Do you have any problem with preemptive warfare? “Absolutely none. I’d rather fight them over there than over here.”
Any problem with WMDs not being found? “Absolutely none. We got rid of Sadam and his two sons, got rid of a cancer. The United States of America is a safer place today, as is the world.”
Notice how we have adopted leader-speak acronyms along with the non-sequiturs that connect the dots.
It’s seems obvious he paid his dues to get to where he is. He’s tough as nails with the hierarchy below him; has a reputation for being direct, but I wonder. A tall craggy faced man with a ruddy complexion, handsome in a cowboy way, I saw something else. I saw the fright you see in a man that has never left the child. I liked that. Vulnerability in our heroes is reassuring. It makes them real. I don’t like leader-speak, however, that puts us on. Perhaps that is why he was playing up to the Press Corps. He fears and hates it like a report card you don’t want to pick up. Clearly, he wasn’t on its dance card when he was a kid. I sensed that he was surprised to be standing before the Press Corps, when it should have been the other way around.
Then I wondered how he would have dealt with Michael Moore in the audience, he of Fahrenheit 9/11 documentary fame. Would he treat Moore with humor or disgust? Moore steps over the line but someone should. I sense Moore would ask Franks what he thought of the insanity of the Department of Homeland Security; what he thought of the CIA and FBI being a day late and a dollar short when it came to earning their keep and protecting this nation; why we are fighting for oil and calling it a “war on terror,” why the president lies; why cabinet members lie; why Congress lies; why generals lie; and why we’re all supposed to bag groceries of half-truths at the supermarket of ideas?
Oh, Moore would have been fun. No. That’s not quite true. Moore would have been crude and that would have blown it for us. It is true he has a gift for exposing our penchant for chasing phantoms, for catching our leaders in the cross hairs when they cachet our freedoms with fear games. But let’s face it. Moore comes off as something of a flake. In terms of the PRESENT RIDICULOUS, Moore is the best we’ve got. In fact, he epitomizes the vacuity of NOWHERE.
Imagine if he were a pretty face, instead of a brutish personality and chunky body with unkempt hair, and the failure of an adequate beard to cover his imperfections. Contrast him with national media commentators, who are corporate clones with pretty faces that are disinclined to take risks or have one intelligent original comment. To Moore’s credit, he has not perfected leader-speak to three-minute news segments followed by five-minute commercials breaks with no degree of separation between fact and fiction.
Leader-speak is an art form perfected from emulating 60 Minutes, which when it gets it wrong, it is always the pretty face that takes the heat and not “Big Brother” decision-makers. The program left Dan Rather high and dry when he got it wrong about president Bush’s reservist record during the 2004 presidential campaign. So much for loyalty and dedication. There has never been a harder working and more responsible journalist covering politics than Mr. Rather. Ask historians of president Nixon. At one news conference in the White House, when Dan Rather was a young journalist, he had the president so nailed to the wall, that the president parried in exasperation, “What office are you running for?”
Programs such as 60 Minutes are in the image making business and news is hype in casual support of appearance. Mike Wallace, supposedly an acerbic interviewer was himself cut to shreds when he interviewed the actor Morgan Freeman. Wallace couldn’t believe Freeman was again “Black History Month?” With that beautiful wry smile of Freeman’s, he answered that it made as much sense as a “White History Month.” Touché.
To be fair, however, public television with such programs as The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, Washington Week, Now with Bill Moyers, Washington Journal and White House Chronicles are notable exceptions. Meantime, Moore’s credibility rests in not being a pretty face while looking and thinking like everyman.
There wasn’t a hard question asked of the general. Instead, the Press Corps wondered about such things as the general’s political ambitions. Interest of course denied. It appeared as if he had finally made the Press Club’s dance card. While disclaiming any interest in politics, he continued to act like one. He managed to say nary an offensive word about any of his former bosses: Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Powell, or President Bush. They were all good persons, buddies. Yet, he claimed several times to be a registered independent. So, the beat goes on.
Obviously, it isn’t only psychologists and psychiatrists who are proficient in leader-speak. We see it is endemic to politicians, economists, educators, technologists and the clergy. Life has become a word game for an out-of-control society with a “cut and control” fixation finding language a soothing palliative but not necessarily an effective one.
* * * * *
Longshoreman turned philosopher Eric Hoffer claims you can know a people by studying the games people play. He writes:
“Man learned to paint, carve, sculpt, and model in clay long before he made a pot or wove cloth or domesticated an animal. Man as an artist is infinitely more ancient than man as a worker. We picture to ourselves the life of earliest man as unimaginably hard and dangerous, a violent and protracted duel, always facing the problem of how to eat without being eaten, never knowing, on retiring, whether he would be there in the morning. Yet as we trace back the aptitudes, skills, and practices, which enabled man to survive and gain mastery over his environment, we always reach the realm of play. Most utilitarian devices and inventions had their birth in nonutilitarian pursuits. Play is older than work, art older than production for use. Man was shaped less by what he had to do than by what he did in playful moments. The ascent of man was enacted in something like an Eden playground rather than on a desolate battlefield.”
Since Americans don’t know how to play, and since work is mainly their play, and play their work, I will look at this in a slightly different way, which reveals something of the current character of Americans and their times, which sad to say, is being exported as not only America’s destiny, but increasingly the world’s.
NOWHERE starts small with a MacDonald’s burger, and then grows to a crystal cathedral as a work place with the sky alight in purple fog as road clogging machines crisscross the landscape.
Steven Jobs and Steven Wozniak worked on creating video games before they became pioneers in developing the personal computer, and co-creators of Apple Computer. You will see in FUTURE PERFECT where creators of world changing ideas often were just futzing around, and either stumbled on discoveries or experienced a bit of fortuitous serendipity.
But first, let us explore now why we have seemingly gone haywire in the PRESENT RIDICULOUS. It may help to understand and be less vulnerable to leader-speak.
Not only the games people play but also the novels people read tell us a lot about the PRESENT RIDICULOUS. Most science fiction today, for example, is about contraptions in conflict, not about people in conflict. The contraptions war with each other with no humans on the scene, only digital Androids. The same is true of video games. Monsters resemble hybrid machines, which annihilate each other in inner galactic space, never in your backyard.
Most popular novels are about violence, sex, carnage, revenge, and betrayal in which the protagonists are reduced to cardboard figures of rampaging hormones doing battle, not as people with bodies and souls, but as machines with automatic urges.
Evil in these novels is made so sinister that it is outside experience of ninety-nine percent of the readers, and therefore no threat to their psychic safety. Body types, not people dance across the page in situations neither sub nor superhuman but consistently sub rosa. Perhaps the novel as well as God is dead!
People are presented as a collection of phobias wrapped in psychological jargon with actions that give us little insight into their secret garden. There are exceptions of course, novelist Ian McEwan coming to mind. It is a wonder he can make a living as a writer. The Cement Garden (1978), a McEwan’s title, is metaphor for the PRESENT RIDICULOUS, while his novel Atonement (2002) indicates there is still hope for stories with flesh and blood people in recognizable crises.
In the real everyday world, this dehumanizing can be toxic to children who are designed for innocence, detachment, and play. Some children who lose this insouciance kill other children without remorse as if they are stepping on a bug. A seven-year-old boy dumps a three-year-old child in the family pool and watches him drown, feeling he has done nothing wrong. He claims it was an experiment. This is not an isolated case. The Columbine High School shootings in Littleton, Colorado on April 20, 1999 have proven the toxin can gestate through adolescence and materialize at any time into senseless violence.
Something is missing in our hard wiring and many, like author Bob Larson in his book Extreme Evil: Kids Killing Kids (1999), believe it is a “God thing,” the absence of spiritual roots. Whether you are religious or not, the “God thing” can be translated into one word, love. Love is missing in such warped lives, and love cannot live when the soul is killed. And the soul is killed when there is no time for caring.
Unconscionable behavior is at one end and children with attention deficit disorders at the other. Experts have little clue as to what possesses kids to kill kids other than to write books about it. They appear even less confident explaining the behavior of children with overactive thyroids that have the attention of flies. What do experts do? They prescribe mind-altering drugs that produce controllable zombies.
Some physiologists claim hyperactive or senseless behavior is the fault of too much sugar in the diet, while others claim using television as babysitter has rewired the brain to the point of over stimulation so that children behave more like bouncing balls with the social sensitivity of jackals in pixel metaphor.
In this technological age, while applauding the advancements in science, we make robots of kids by treating them with Celexa, Effexor, Lexapro, Paxil, Prozac, Zoloft or Ritalin. Now researchers tell us these “wonder drugs,” especially Ritalin, may be stunting or delaying the growth of children ages 7 to 9. Clearly, researchers do not know. What’s more, they don’t have a clue as to what cell phones clued to the ear of kids this age and younger will mean in the future. Imagine all these electrons bouncing off the neurons. It puts one in mind of a dervish dance in hell.
The fact is ADHD specialists and pharmacologists are groping in the dark. No one knows the lasting effects of any of these drugs on kids. It may not be too severe a criticism to describe this as playing Russian roulette with kids’ brains. It seems scientists, and theologians before them, have the identical trouble of saying, “We don’t know,” or “We don’t understand.” Leader-speak has the patina of omniscience.
There is evidence that too much sugar in the diet does in fact over stimulate certain areas of the brain with a push toward impulsive behavior. In Freudian terms, “There is no lid on the Id.” Imagine if children had less processed sugar in their diet; imagine if parents set the example with using less processed sugar. This might discourage children from being so sugar addicted to sweets and empty calories. Imagine if school cafeteria lunches did not serve processed sugar meals. Imagine if schools didn’t supplement their budgets with candy and carbonated soft drink machines. Imagine if processed sugar companies did not sponsor cartoons on television. Imagine if society dealt with the causes of hyperactivity instead of masking them with mind-numbing drugs. Just imagine what the world might be!
An ambivalent society finds it easier to feed children processed sugar products than it is prepared to serve a healthy diet, or say “No!” to spoiled children’s demands. When the child is in control and driven by instant gratification, then no one is in control. Robert Elliot Fitch writes in Odyssey of the Self-Centered Self (1960):
If the child is the authoritative center of being, it follows that when something goes wrong, it cannot be the fault of the child. It must be the fault of the teacher . . . Plato remarked as a sign of the decay of democracy in ancient Athens: “I mean, for example, that a father accustoms himself to behave like a child, and stands in awe of his sons, and that a son behaves himself like a father, and ceases to respect or fear his parents. The schoolmaster, in these circumstances, fears and flatters his scholars, and the scholars despise their masters and also their tutors.”
Children rule parents, while parents in turn frantically seek to behave like children. It is part of the PRESENT RIDICULOUS, and what Andrew Calcutt in Arrested Development: Pop Culture and the Erosion of Adulthood (1998) calls “Peter Pan-itis.” While the apologetic guru panders to the “Inner Child” of the adult, the “Inner Adult” gets lost in the shuffle. We see this in the merry chase for a second youth in Viagra, plastic surgery for sagging jowls, dressing young, never growing up and therefore never having to grow old.
Then there is the science that keeps us alive after the quality of life evaporates. We are kept breathing in a near catatonic state, longevity zombies, when the only people getting healthy are geriatric medical professionals, nursing homes, managed care companies, the insurance providers, and the pharmaceutical industry.
So, in the PRESENT RIDICULOUS, we have hyperactive children at one pole considered a threat to the tranquility of the home, classroom, office and public place, therefore made into automatons with mind-altering drugs; and at the other end, we have old folks in nursing homes on regimental diets of an assortment of colored pills. Senior citizens, confined to these homes, sit in semi-stupors watching mindless television programs morning, noon and night. One wonders if in these golden years there are any other reasons for keeping them alive then because science can.
Before moving on, there is hope for hyperactive children. We know of Father Flanagan’s Boys Town in Nebraska and how that has turned delinquent children into solid citizens. Chances are you have not heard of the effective program for ADHD boys at Advent Home in Calhoun, Tennessee. I have not only seen the home first hand, but have met many of the success stories personally. Nearly twenty years ago, psychologist Dr. Blondel Senior and his wife Gloria acquired this property and started this home with the aim to establish a minimum distraction environment, vegan diet, group therapy, one-on-one counseling, outdoor activities, tutoring and close supervision to turn young men around who were defiant, refused to cooperate, ate what they wanted when they wanted, went to bed and got up when they wanted, went to school when they wanted, considered church for clowns, and parents, doctors and teachers idiots. Dr. Senior calls his program Maturation Therapy ©.
What is remarkable about Dr. Senior’s approach to therapy is that there are no drugs, but a minimum distracting environment in which TV, video games, and worldly music have been taken away replaced by outdoor education programs, country fresh air, sunshine, exercise, along with vigorous academic programs involving individual research, group participation, and intensive tutorial counseling.
The home is on a farm with the expected farm animals as well as exotic ones, such as llamas. The boys do gardening, feed the animals, landscape and participate in organized sports. They live in modern well-equipped dormitories with each house having a live-in proctor. Meals are on a schedule, as is homework, bedtime and morning calls. The staff includes accredited teachers, developmental and professional counselors, and childcare supervisors. The home has its own radio station, chapel and bible school, and agricultural program. The campus is quite beautiful and modern with state-of-the-art classrooms, laboratories and library. The boys also have their own dock and pontoon boat where they study currents, erosion, and the wetlands that adjoin the campus on this branch of the Tennessee River.
The students have built a 30-foot climbing wall to develop teamwork and social skills, along with a nine-hole golf course on the campus. During a recent special leadership challenge, one student half way up a difficult rock climb struggled to overcome his fear of heights. After struggling for several minutes to overcome his fear, he was able to complete the climb with lots of encouraging words from other students. He felt so good afterwards that he talked about another climb.
One parent who had his defiant fourteen-year-old son in the program said, “I can go to bed at night now not worrying about when Keith will be coming home and not wondering if he is getting into drugs, alcohol, or promiscuous activities. I sleep peacefully knowing that Keith is in a safe environment at Advent Home.” If this sounds too good to be true, it isn’t. Many of the boys have gone on to some of the best colleges and universities in the country, and have successfully completed professional careers and are now serving society. Notice that the Advent Home has moved away from technology, away from NOWHERE, and into SOMEWHERE living in harmony with nature naturing.
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If Sorokin is correct, we are in the last days of our dying Sensate culture. Rome was experiencing its Sensate culture in the third and fourth century. We know the Romans held chariot races in amphitheaters with intermissions filled with hungry lions devouring defenseless Christians, and gladiators fighting to the death. This was a time when Rome was approaching its nadir. Roman citizens wandered the city streets unemployed, complaining, looking for trouble, disillusioned and angry. Some people seek danger as a way of feeling alive, others seek confrontation for similar reasons. When life has no purpose, the crowd turns into the mob, crime is rampant, and chaos rules. Roman authorities turned this mob into voyeurs entertaining them and redirecting their angst to bloodbaths in the coliseum.
Rome neglected its agriculture, seeing the empire epitomized in soldiering, conquering, and ruling, not in passive farming. This neglect meant it could not feed its armies in the field and the swollen restless urban population. To complicate the picture further, peasant youth were pried from their farms to be soldiers, leaving farms largely fallow. Militarily, Rome had failed to keep pace with the modern technology of warfare, putting light cavalry into the field of battle against the heavy cavalry of the northern invaders.
The fall of Rome came about from societal decay and failure on the battlefield. In this unstable climate, the Huns shook the empire, and the Visigoths and Germanic tribes from the north then shattered it. These northern tribes didn’t create the catastrophe. Rome had already collapsed from within, waiting for an outside force to end its agony. The idle urban proletariat, combined with the lack of preparation to defend the city spelled doom for Rome and the Roman Empire. In the modern metaphor, it had run out of gas and was attempting to run on empty.
To better understand the fall of Rome, and other catastrophes consider Rene Thom’s Catastrophe Theory (1978). Alexander Woodcock and Monte Davis present this mathematician’s theory.
Thom’s theory is a controversial new way to think about change, change in the course of events, in systems’ behavior, and in ideas themselves. It bears comparison with Thomas Kuhn’s “paradigm shift” already discussed, and Edward de Bono’s “lateral thinking” that will be covered shortly. This is not, however, a book on theoretical mathematics. Catastrophe theory is pivotal to how the mindset of a people can pollute its ecology, and lead to incipient catastrophe.
Thom’s argues we are all programmed to chronological continuous quantitative change. We observe it ourselves, but rarely, and more often have it pointed out to us by experts. It is unexpected discontinuous qualitative change, however, that throws us off course and gives rise to catastrophe.
The elements of catastrophe are always there, but not always observable. It is like the tectonic shifting of the earth plates that can cause an earthquake in a matter of seconds, but the result of continuous tectonic quantitative change over decades or longer. Likewise, the apparent docile behavior of a prison population that can suddenly erupt into a riot is likely to have been festering for some time. Human behavior in the large can resemble social termites burrowing away at the infrastructure of an institution, only to be discovered too late for damage control.
Thom has developed a geometric topology to track such events from inception, not quantitatively, but qualitatively, not measuring the magnitude of scale, but the conditions giving rise to them. For example, in Six Silent Killers (1998), I identify six qualitative behaviors that identify and track these social termites of organization.
Catastrophe theory suggests disaster, and indeed the theory can be applied to literal catastrophes, such as the collapse of a bridge, the downfall of an empire, or the ultimate dysfunction of a company. Earlier, mention was made of the collapse of a bridge under construction. Eight of its twelve critical pilings were constructed on sand beds, not limestone rock as intended. Long before the collapse Thom’s theory would have raised the red flag. The same could be said for the collapse of the Soviet Union. All the elements were there -- over extended military budget, bloated bureaucracy, and top-heavy leadership – for its eventual collapse as it engaged in a “cut and control” quantitative race with the US that it could not sustain. As this is being written, the same formula seems to have been adopted by China. Even at the rate of a Gross Domestic Product of 11 percent, that China is currently producing, this quantitative construct could run into qualitative collapse if it is “cut and control” policies are not attentive to what is being lost. This GDP is not likely to be maintained, but if it were, it would still not manage to reach parity with the US in the next half century. The bubble could burst for China long before that with internal social, psychological, economic and cultural pressure.
Thom’s theory is controversial also because it proposes mathematics underlying 300 years of science that have encouraged one-sided change. These mathematical principles are ideally suited to quantitative analysis because they were created to depict smooth continuous change. There is another kind of change, change that is less suited to mathematical models, the abrupt bursting of a bubble, and the discontinuous shift in our minds when we suddenly “get it.” Catastrophe theory is mathematical language created to describe and classify this second type of change rather than provide explanation of the phenomenon after the fact.
The twentieth century has taught us the universe is a queerer place than we thought. Neither the unstable atom nor the constant speed of light would fit the classical scheme of Newtonian physics. A gap opened between observing and what could be explained. On the smallest scale, change is sudden and discontinuous. Electrons jump from one energy level to another, as do social conditions ala “paradigm shifts,” without passing through states between. At high speeds, Newtonian principles no longer hold true, as Einstein has proved. Classical physics had to be amended. The results were quantum physics and relativity, anti-matter and curved space.
Thom insists physical science is not just about formulating laws of nature, but should also provides a picture, leastwise to the mind’s eye, of a qualitative grasp of forms and orders that go beyond our quantitative comprehension of numbers and magnitudes. He points out that Newton’s work in physics to a large measure was geometric, as was Einstein’s peaks and valleys on his space-time map.
Our main interest here is how Thom’s theory helps us to more clearly understand human events. His topology attempts to grasp the ceaseless creation, evolution, and destruction of forms, which is life. Because of its foundation in topology, catastrophe theory is qualitative, not quantitative. As geometry treats the properties of the triangle without regard to its size, so topology deals with properties that have no magnitude. So, while it is well suited to describe the shape of processes, its descriptions are not quantitative like those of theories in calculus, but rather like maps without scales. They tell us there are mountains to the left, a river to the right and a cliff somewhere ahead, but not how far away each is, or how large.
A second theme of catastrophe theory is based on the assumption of structural stability, stressing qualitative rather than quantitative regularity. To give a sense of this, one quantitative approach is to rely on statistical verification. We know, however, that probabilities and correlations do not necessarily identify causes or predict events. There is a qualitative gap, especially of complex issues, between what is measured and what is actually happening discontinuously.
Discontinuity and qualitative change are part of the natural disruption that occur as systems age and wear down. Systems are in qualitative transition from one stable state to another. Montgomery Wards, Inc. was a one-hundred-year-old firm that abruptly disappeared. It went from the stable state of innovative merchandiser to demise. It caught customers, creditors and Wall Street by surprise. No quantitative indices could have thrown light on its demise – e.g. sales, inventories, customer base, market share, credit line, community standing – as it simply ran out of qualitative gas.
Yet, it is chronology and quantitative indices by which specific problems are viewed and resolved. Thom insists something acts to trigger destabilization. He maintains human as well as biological processes have a stable (homeorhesis), canalized pathway of change that resists disturbing influences while seeking homeostasis (same state). This resistance is not likely to be observed because it is qualitative and discontinuous and occurs below the radar screen of the main focus.
Psychological or spiritual entropy resists quantitative analysis. Psychology relies typically on language and abstractions to explain; while this disturbance may have a spiritual or immaterial component, or simply be an unobservable phenomenon. It still exists and it still does its damage.
That said quantitative and qualitative changes are related. For example, in a prison riot, the quantitative levels of tension and alienation are obviously different for each prisoner, but the qualitative behavior, the outbreak of a riot, is a qualitative group phenomenon. What triggered it, and why now? Thom catastrophe theory maps more than one stable pathway of change showing any discontinuous transition represents “a jump” to another stable state: prison harmony to prison chaos.
Catastrophe is any discontinuous transition that occurs when a system can have more than one stable state. Catastrophe occurs when one stable state jumps to the other stable state. For example, ninety percent of the prisoners are docile, but there is a fight, of all places, in the library. It is considered an anomaly and disregarded. Similar behavior occurs in Sunday religious services. Something is afoot and Thom’s would chart it for its possible relevance.
In the PRESENT RIDICULOUS, change on the surface is proceeding at a quantitative meteoric clip. We see and quantify this without any trouble. As mentioned earlier, author Sullivan suggests we struggle to maintain the stable state we are “living erroneously in,” while a radically different stable state moves tectonically beyond our awareness. Then surprise! It is here!
A case can be made that American democracy, as we know it, has suddenly disappeared to police state justification in Homeland Security with disruptive discontinuous qualitative change. Electronic surveillance, for example, is ubiquitous, and hundreds of thousands of citizens come to find their emails are being read, their purchases being tracked, and their library book checkouts being tabulated, all in the name of “protection against terrorists.”
Doublethink is the language of the war on terror, while Homeland Security, preemptive war, and media manipulation are the price of security. Successful manipulation of the mind is the new stable state as opposed to the previous stable state of guaranteed freedoms in the “Bill of Rights.” With this change, the person is no longer saying the opposite of what he thinks, but he thinks the opposite of what is true. Thus, if he surrenders his independence and his integrity completely, if he comes to experience himself as a thing which belongs either to the state, the party, or the corporation, then as Orwell says in “1984, two plus two equals five, or “slavery is freedom.” On the surface, he feels free because there is no longer any awareness of the discrepancy between truth and falsehood. Incipient catastrophe is restlessly boiling however below.
If you have any doubt, the West presents society as being one of free initiative, individualism, and idealism, when in reality these are mostly words. In the United States, for example, the federal government is much stronger than states rights; in industry, centralized managerial authority cuts jobs and closes plants “to preserve the integrity of the company” with not a single vote from the workers; in commerce the bureaucratic power and control of media is used by advertisers to bombard consumers to buy what they don’t need “to keep the American economy healthy”; while the church takes a little from each of these institutions, being centralized, authoritative, bureaucratic, and astute at media manipulation only being slightly mitigated by truly spiritual and religious concerns. And all of these are connected with BlackBerries, iPods, cell phones, laptops and videophones to keep reality at bay and NOWHERE in play.
Thom’s explains this by linking his concept to that of equilibrium. In living systems, equilibrium is dynamic rather than static, because organisms and societies are always taking in and transforming energy. They tend to establish cycles in which no one state is stable, but a whole series of states resist disturbance like a spinning gyroscope. Nearly all physical systems, and all biological ones are dissipative. There is friction and wear, and the system is dissipative unless energy is added in some form to make up for its losses, in other words, negative entropy. Otherwise, the system will spiral down towards the minimum and eventually come to rest, the definition of entropy.
Recognizing this, and that topological models must depict both continuous and discontinuous change, and must themselves be stable, they have to retain their qualitative structure in spite of small quantitative variations. Put another way, qualitative discontinuity does not depend on the nature of the potential involved, merely on its existence. For instance, no one has any idea of the true impact of all these new tools mentioned above, or what harm they may do to human physiology (brain neurons), or the social fabric of society. As matters now stand, they are treated as toys of distraction as well as tools of employment with equal enthusiasm.
Catastrophe theory does not depend on conditions regulating behavior, merely on their number. It does not depend on the quantitative cause and effect relationship, merely on the empirical fact that such a relationship exists. For Thom the goal is not explanation but description, and the way in which he has combined mathematical ideas is a natural consequence of his assumption of structural stability.
Two assumptions are needed to apply catastrophe theory: first, the system described be governed by a potential; and second, its behavior depend on a limited number of control factors. It can be used in a wide range of applications, physical, biological, psychological, sociological, economic or political.
The latter happened in 1935 with the “Long March” of the Chinese Communist forces. This started out as a massive rag-tag army retreating in total defeat, only to arrive at the end of the march a nationalized army with a mission. How it went from total disorder and a lack of connection to an orderly, controlled, and cohesive force is one of the hallmarks of history. Our Times (1995) puts this in perspective:
“Outnumbered and surrounded by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces, the Communists of China’s Jiangxi province abandoned their beleaguered encampment in 1934. On October 16, under the cover of darkness, some 80,000 men broke out of Jiangxi, near the cities of Ganzhou and Huichang, piercing Chiang’s cordon. They left behind their wives and children and a rear guard of 28,000 troops, 20,000 of whom were sick and wounded. But from this abject defeat arose the defining event of Chinese communism: the Long March.
Dogged by Nationalist troops and hostile warlords, the retreating Communists marched 6,000 miles, traversing 18 mountain ranges and crossing 24 rivers before reaching safety in Yan’an, in the northern province of Shaanxi. More than half the army of 80,000 was lost during the yearlong ordeal, but the epic Long March was a powerful symbolic victory for the Communists.”
China had never been under one political system in modern times until the Communist came to power in 1949. The Nationalists capitulated, moved to Taiwan, and Mainland China became a Communist state, the only major one in the world today.
Because there is no stable state between the two in Thom’s topology the transition is always discontinuous. Quantitative continuous changes are of course occurring (Long March) and observable. Meanwhile, discontinuous qualitative change, below the surface, are building tectonically steeling resolve against impossible odds, then one day reaching synergy and there is a “leap” to another stable state, solidarity.
Consider the “storming of the Bastille” in Paris, France on July 14, 1789. The soldiers guarding that prison dropped their arms and joined the mob, going from the solidarity of soldiers loyal to the crown to comrades-in-arms of the revolutionaries. The French Revolution followed, and the monarchy was deposed.
Another instance is the collapse of the communist German Democratic Republic of East Germany. The tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989 caught the world by surprise. Yet the discontinuous qualitative change below the surface was building momentum in contrast to lack of quantitative continuous change observed. It fits Thom’s topology as East Germans leaped from a Communist state to a unified German republic.
What will be the outcome of our gadget conscious superfluous society, where man is increasingly dehumanized, lacking vitality, and where war is not over territory or ideology, but reduced to a frantic retreat from boredom and anxiety?
* * * * *
The PRESENT RIDICULOUS worships power, especially highly organized technological power. Henry Adams fell in awe of the Dynamo at the Paris Exhibition in 1900. The Dynamo, the electricity generator that powered the new machine age, captivated him as the modern age’s new symbol of devotion.
Adams contrasted devotion to the Dynamo to the Middle Ages, when adoration of the Virgin gave Western society an inner harmony and linked humanity to divine authority.
Now power, Adams observed, could never satisfy such a deep human need. Power was now an end in itself, and the individual had no choice but to feel alienated because “history has no purpose other than to consume energy, and society eventually exhausts itself in an irrational, entropic burst of cosmic violence.”
Adams had a sense of NOWHERE more than a century ago, but to be fair he never reconciled himself to the new technological order. His metaphor of the Dynamo and the Virgin actually captured the drastic cultural change that was being manifested. Man-made industrial power would govern the human imagination of the twentieth century and beyond, not God.
German Sociologist Max Weber, a contemporary of Adams, saw people abandoning traditional religion for a faceless, merciless industrial system, what he likened to “an iron cage” that offered financial prosperity in exchange for mind numbing routine. One hundred years later, we live in a mood moderating climate of drugs we consciously consume; foods we eat that are genetically enhanced; things we smoke, or chew or drink that play havoc with our lungs, livers, kidneys, throats and stomachs; noises we call music that deaden our hearing; television we call entertainment that blurs our minds; spectator sports we call recreation that multiply our fat cells; and all in order to convince ourselves we are in control of a repressive environment when in fact we are its slaves.
If this were not stressful enough, we spend more than we make; want more than we need; compare and compete in a never ending ritual of imitating what others tell us is important, and necessary for blissful happiness. While so preoccupied, we constantly worry about what others think of us rather than what we think of ourselves. We are so wired to modems, fax machines, cell phones, BlackBerries, and laptops that we have lost the capacity to experience a quiet moment of say ten minutes a month when there is no thought, no talk, no noise, only the rhythm of nature naturing. We are information Google junkies deaf to the voices deep inside that ask: who is in charge here? Who lives here?
The answer comes back, no one. We are residence of NOWHERE. The tectonic shift was observed some time ago. German historian Johann Schiller (1759 – 1805) noted in the eighteenth century that civilization had already inflicted a wound on humanity with the modern division of labor, which mutilated man’s natural possibilities. He wrote:
“Gratification is separated from labor, means from ends, effort from reward. Eternally fettered only to a single little fragment of the whole, man fashions himself only as a fragment.”
Man has indeed been increasingly confined to a part, a single repeated gesture calculated to reduce him to the mindlessness of the machine he attends. Yet Schiller’s observation was a century before the assembly line of production was invented.
Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle (1795 – 1881) was equally prophetic:
“Not the external and physical alone is now managed by machinery, but the internal and spiritual also. Men are grown mechanical in head and heart, as well as in hand. Not for internal perfection, but for external combinations and arrangements, for institutions, constitutions -- for mechanism of one sort or another, do they hope and struggle. Their whole efforts, attachments, opinions, turn on mechanism, and are of a mechanical character.”
With the establishment of the machine age, Carlyle sensed that society was crippling man instead of creating him, that it was forcing its members into a network of antisocial circumstances, which must, in the end, dehumanize him and perhaps even alienate him in the purely clinical sense.
Alas, the Dynamo has proved to be a false God. THE PRESENT RIDICULOUS has not brought peace and social harmony through science and technology, but massive destruction, bloodshed, and millions of atomized disinherited individuals. It has also brought the sickness of an affluent society out in the open where the greatest personal satisfaction seemingly is for people to tell daytime television talk show hosts their most intimate, embarrassing, and sick moments. These programs draw viewers into the secret personal hell of public confessors to elicit sympathy or pleasure as the case may be. It is apparently easier to disclose a disadvantaged, overworked, abused, exploited, perverted, evil, misunderstood, drug-dependent life than to establish intimacy with a friend or loved one. Exhibitionism has become the new church in a sick society as people address themselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love.
“Chest beaters” personify the self-pitying biblical Job of an affluent society. It is only an affluent society that can allow itself the indulgence and luxury of self-pity. Poor disrupted families in Darfur in the Sudan living in refugee camps with inhumanity written on their lives and etched in their souls cannot afford this luxury. For them it is a triumph to survive another day. Struggle is all they know. A mother tells of being raped, her husband murdered and her two daughters, six and eight, raped several times by the evil soldiers on horseback. She is on NBC Nightly Television News, reluctantly so, as a microphone and camera are pushed in her face. She is in her twenties but looks sixty, and all she wants is to return to her modest hut in her village and till her arid soil with her ox and hand plow, and feed her goats. But hope is unlikely, as her village has been burnt to the ground, her ox killed, and her goats eaten.
When life is truly hard, cruel and terrifying, all our energy is husband for survival. It is only the affluent that has the luxury to cultivate self-pity to a television audience. The patron saint of the affluent is Job, not the biblical prophets. With the prophets, our compassion was directed outward to a suffering society like the people of Darfur. With Job, our pity is directed inward to a pathetic self that has failed at marriage, work, life, or has become a drug addict, prostitute, alcoholic, glutton, liar, exhibitionist, bigot, or has squandered a fortune, been accused of a crime, or cannot seem to get its act together for free floating anxiety, and so the beat goes on.
With the biblical prophetic self, we are concerned with a wrong done to others. With the biblical Job self, we are concerned with a wrong done to us. The irony is that when we really suffer the severest deprivations, such as losing everything in a hurricane, we become capable of generous sympathy for others. When we are wallowing in affluence, we begin to cherish resentment against God for the least slight, setback or inconvenience.
The self-pitying self cannot stand being alone; it has no tolerance for quiet. It is addicted to noise. It eats noise in restaurants; consumes noise as a psychic high with loud radios, loud concerts, and loud athletic contests. The self-pitying self cannot spend a single hour in a day without calling someone or hearing from someone on its cell phones. It is important to keep the satellite waves bombarding its senses to remind it that it is alive, that someone “out there” cares. The self-pitying self views films so loud and flashy that scenes change so quickly it cannot absorb them other than subliminally, while being put in an hypnotic trance by digitally enhanced car chases, pyrotechnics, and we wonder why nothing seems real anymore.
There is no personal connection to a larger vision of life. There is no consensus, no clear direction to the future. At work, we remain secluded within corporate cubicles, sending binary bytes into cybernetic mist, or sequestered ourselves in living rooms watching moronic sitcom comedies or playing vacuous video games in the dark.
We take pride in being workaholics imitating in every way the ants that crawl under foot, anxiously moving from one place to another, with no down time, no quiet time, no time to wonder what we are all about. The greatest fear is to be alone with our thoughts, our doubts, our confusion, and ourselves. There is no place or time for our dreams.
Then we wonder why our children go to all-night raves and get high on Ecstasy when we’re in a state of getting high on everything possible except life itself. The greatest fear of all is boredom fed by the near total lack of curiosity. Boredom is a mind on automatic pilot looking for someone, something or somewhere to shock it awake. Boredom is a brain that short-circuits the mind. Boredom lives on its appetites and is consumed by them. Boredom is progress’s most important product.
Look at what we do for addicts. We put drug addicts on Methadone to ease them off drugs, which addicts claim is like weak heroin and makes them want to go back to the hard stuff. For cigarette addicts who are killing themselves day-by-day, we invent a pill or a patch to ease their addiction. Not to be out done, we create nonalcoholic beers so people can pretend like children they are drinking when they are not. We put people guilty of social or criminal pathology in institutions, which further alienates them from the community, and hardens them into psychopaths.
Rehabilitation is too staggering a challenge. So prison is more likely a training center for advanced criminality. And what are most prisoners confined for – drug related crimes. The United States has more people in prison, two million plus, then all other Western nations combined. How could it be otherwise? The United States is a drugstore. It has perfected every kind of drug apology for every kind of addiction from workaholism (Prozac) to impotence (Viagra), failing to see one is likely contributory to the other.
What do we do for obesity? We create a pill to turn the mind off its desire for food or we short circuit the body with surgery. We don’t condition the person to be less obsessive about food by reprogramming, except in some instances such as Weight Watchers International ©.
This program is about developing food intelligence and following a sensible regiment of gradual weight loss and control. Over 50 percent of the American population is overweight; one out of every four adolescents is obese. While the weight problem has been designated a medical disease to be treated by a physician, the problem remains epidemic with diet books second in sales only to the Bible. The only problem is they are not read and followed. Good intentions are never enough.
The pervading theme to all of this is never growing up because it is deemed not necessary. There will always be a safe place to land in NOWHERE: a new wonder drug of science, the generosity of friends, the welfare of the state, the development of a new sympathetic psychology.
The rationale for addiction is that it is not our fault. Society made us this way. It is the fault of our upbringing, for which we had no control; the fault of our parents for not parenting; the fault of our teachers for not teaching; the failure of our church for not giving moral guidance; the fault of seductive advertising, the surround-sound of ubiquitous temptation; the fault of our culture; the abandonment of our Creator; alas, the fault lies in the stars, but never in us! We are all victims, helpless in the lap of plenty.
A number of apologists agree, seeing modernity producing an anti-society. Instead of forming the individual, it oppresses him. But what is society? We are society! In our gospel of greed, if we have a lot, we want more. Why not? If we don’t take it, someone else will. We don’t want to hear how good we have it, how half the world’s population lives an entire year on what we make in a single week. Not our problem! It’s a reality we don’t need. So, we sequester ourselves in gated communities with private police forces that keep such things far from our door.
Even those of us of more modest circumstances have home security systems with fenced in yards to ensure peace and security in a world out-of-control. In Hillsborough County, Florida where I live, there are 14,000 homeless people that roam the streets that everyone ignores.
For comparison, Moscow, Russia has only 10,000 and it is many times larger than my county. The homeless are invisible to us as we see right through them as we wait frantically in our cars for the stoplight to change where they inevitably camp out.
We need not save, as the government will provide our shortfall. We need not worry about healthcare, substance abuse, or having inappropriate education and training. There is always the “Government of Last Resort.” Forty million Americans are without health insurance, forty-six million below the poverty level. No problem! Help is on the way! Health insurance will be provided for everyone one day soon without any sacrifice on our part according to leader-speak. So, we may continue to do what we’re doing without fear.
Meanwhile, a quarter of those who attend four-year colleges have been shown not to be able to read a timetable, calculate the adequate tip for service in a restaurant, or do simple math to balance their checking accounts. College has become a respite in NOWHERE with parents footing the bill while throwing money not sense at the problem.
We sit down to dinner with the TV blaring news of new atrocities across the globe, of people starving in the Sudan, of marauding gangs sanctioned by corrupt governments raping, killing, maiming, pillaging and terrorizing innocent people. We see a refugee camp of a million displaced persons living in sweltering heat with no fresh water, sanitation, little food, work, recreation, and less hope, with the only constant disease and death, and we say, “Pass the butter!” Or we put the TV on mute until these disturbing images turn to the commercial. We prefer noise to quiet and commercials have perfected noise. Our maudlin justification is in the question: does anyone have any idea how difficult it is to cope with abundance?
You wonder when will it end, how will it end, will it ever end? Learned men such as Rosseau, Schiller and Carlyle would agree that society is at fault. The only problem with this is that if we don’t change, society won’t.
* * * * *
What seems to dislodge NOWHERE is catastrophe. The possibility for it looms on the horizon with rogue nation-states and radical splinter groups across the globe with an appetite to self-destruct for a holy cause. The current instruments of this madness are mostly children. Suicide bombers go to their deaths not fully understanding why. These innocent, ignorant, gullible children are instruments of hatred often sacrificed to the cause by their own parents. Could hatred have a more diabolical face? Yes it could: rogue groups that acquire and use nuclear weapons. The French Reign of Terror will look like a Sunday school picnic should that occur.
Hate is not one-sided. The hated have a role in creation of the hater. Journalist Jonathan Randal in Osama: Making of a Terrorist (2004) sees the United States inadvertently played a role in helping Osama bin Laden do his work by decisions made over a 25-year period in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and the Israeli-Palestinian situation.
Islam is not a religion of hate anymore than Christianity; nor is Islam a religion of violence anymore than Christianity. Both religions have had their fanatics throughout comparable histories.
Lest we forget there were six Crusades from 1095 to 1229, and they were hardly “holy,” but rather naked preemptive invasions of the Middle East by the Western Church and its complicit Western powers. Christians justified their plunder and destruction of the Moslem people and their culture because they were Infidels, and Christians were believers of faith in Christ Jesus.
We hate what we don’t understand. We hate what makes us feel weak and offends our pride. We hate when we compare and cannot compete, when what little we have is taken from us in the name of some euphemistic obligation to our betters. We hate when our pride is hurt and we are shown no respect.
This happened to early Americans in the eighteenth century, and gave rise to the American Revolution. America had no army, and couldn’t possibly take on the massive Imperial British Army and Navy in conventional warfare. Therefore, Americans became terrorists, revolutionaries, spies, saboteurs and guerilla warriors. Read American history. The Minute Men left their farms and hid in trees, in snow banks, in deep ravines and tops of mountains to pick off the Red Coated British soldiers like turkeys in a gallery as they marched in symmetrical lines across open fields.
Americans boated across frozen rivers to surprise sleeping Red Coats and their families, killing them as they slept. It wasn’t the conventional way to wage war. It wasn’t honorable. Americans did not care. Weakness becomes strength when the unexpected is exploited. Deceptive warfare can and has always humbled technology when people change the rules.
Despite the rhetoric, hatred must boil a long time in the cauldron of despair before it rises to contemplation much less execution of violence. Long before hatred reaches this stage there are many iterative steps of despair: disgust, humiliation, neglect, exploitation, discrimination, anger, disrespect, and then nothing left to lose. This is followed with a passion for retribution, revenge and violence in a risk-all strategy of obliterating the enemy, the scourge of the soul.
At this stage, it becomes a holy cause, a jihad. We are now witnessing this in Iraq, Afghanistan, Indonesia and across the globe, and no one seems to be asking: what did we do wrong to lead to this? Instead, paranoia is fed with Homeland Security, and the creation of essentially a police state to curb this violence without ever understanding why it exists in the first place.
We in the ambivalent PRESENT RIDICULOUS have trouble admitting how much hatred possesses our own actions. Hatred becomes a god and then violence follows. We wonder how such violence is protected by legitimate nation-states, failing to see that such protectors may like to see a power shift more to their self-interest, while secretly resenting the hegemony of the United States. So, an unstable world is not bane to all.
When violence is the principle tool of a holy cause it points away from internal inadequacies of that society. The holy cause through violence is meant to redress societal inadequacies and impotence, but it never does. It instead drives the society into deeper poverty and its world into deeper chaos It is a story as old as the family of man.
A clash of cultures exists from central Africa to Bosnia, from Afghanistan to Iraq, from Palestine to Israel, from Indonesia to Korea, from Taiwan to China, from Pakistan to India, from Morocco to Spain. The only nation seemingly with a handle on cavalier violence is China, perhaps the least tolerant of human rights. What will happen there when social unrest triggers spontaneous human combustion? No one knows. But it is part of the PRESENT RIDICULOUS.
We are at the foot of a bridge, and we’ve been there a long time, trying to work out a way to cross it. The United States has been often embarrassed in its attempts to provide a libertarian model for governance to the world. The reception has been decidedly mixed.
Failures are mounting: from Korea to Viet Nam to Somalia to Granada to Bosnia to Afghanistan to Iraq. It is no accident that the indigenous peoples of South America have moved away from this influence to being led by their own. Democratic elections in such countries as Chile, Venezuela, and Bolivia have turned to socialistic models. First it was Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, then Michelle Bachelet of Chile, and now Evo Morales of Bolivia. Next it is likely to be Ollanta Humala in Peru and Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in Mexico. Honduras and Uruguay earlier embraced socialism. These countries have lived in the totalitarianism of doublethink and puppet governments in the land of NOWHERE, and are defiantly charting new courses.
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We are moving into a unique period in man’s history, the demarcation between leaders and followers is disappearing. Leaders are emerging out of followers, speaking the same language, thinking the same thoughts, as followers become leaders. Either everyone is a leader or no one is. This is unprecedented and makes little sense except counter intuitively. Vaunted friendships with American administrations have gone NOWHERE.
The days of the all-knowing shaman, fatherly priest, divine god-king, infallible pope, revered emperor, visionary president, and omniscient prime minister of nation-states are gone. True, a president or prime minister stands before his audience and goes through the charade of leading, a company CEO does the same, but what do they control? What do they know? What do they understand of the bottom feeders? What can they actually do? What is leadership anymore?
Leadership is people finally taking control of their own destiny in self-governance. The interdependent voices buoyed by the same struggle are registering harmony in a common orchestrated cause. The difference between the leader and follower has been a 12,000-year odyssey in “cut and control” divisiveness in which those who possessed the knowledge and controlled the resources always ruled. Knowledge has perpetually been the power and resources the energy to control the wealth.
When the social, economic, and political pie of society was divided, knowers invariably received a disproportionate piece of the resources. You say, I see no change in this distribution, and you would be right and wrong at once. A 12,000-year tradition will not disappear overnight.
What we have always called “leadership,” however, is losing the power because it does not control knowledge, and resources are moving away from it and toward people governance, as Latin America is clearly showing.
The knowledge controllers or present day knowers remain in Weber’s “iron cage,” but uncomfortably so, and no longer complacent. As we move toward NOWHERE, qualitative discontinuous change is generating heat in the belly of the volcano of indigenous peoples. This will erupt one day soon and result in a leap to a new stable state where the majority rule because the majority hold the power, and now control the resources.
The evidence is in the march to the left in Latin America on a societal level. On a corporate level, executive corruption indicates corporate abandonment of a dying sensate system where wealth means worth. What we see in these dying days is executives getting as much as they can before they escape out of town. Morality has nothing to do with it. Executives look out the window of their executive suite and discover they are on the basement floor. Panic takes over.
We have had a century of what we call “progress.” There has been an explosion in the education of the common man with the creation of the professional class of workers. They number in the tens of millions in advanced societies across the globe. Knowledge is no longer the province of the minority but in possession of the majority. What has traditional leadership to offer this majority? Nothing but takeaways.
Despite this, we still have the complex organization full of managers taking disproportionate pieces of the economic pie because they still can. They can because workers, professional and blue collar alike, have been programmed to believe they need caregivers and care takers. Change of the type we are witnessing starts with governance and then move slowly into the fabric of society.
More than a quarter century ago, the complex organization saw this coming, but attempted to redirect the momentum away from executive leadership with benefit packages and entitlements. This amounted to a corporate welfare system for workers including health insurance, life insurance, and generous retirement benefit packages. Now, this is killing companies in global competition, especially in the automotive industry.
General Motors, Chrysler and Ford, combined, are paying generous retirement benefits to more than 800,000 former workers. Ford has announced a cut back of 30,000 workers by 2012, and the closing of 14 North American Auto Plants. General Motors has a similar schedule, and Chrysler less so. What is not commonly known is that these furloughed employees will be getting up to 96 percent of their salaries well into the future without working. The irony here is that these companies feel this is the lesser of two evils: of producing cars nobody buys, and paying benefits to workers who are no longer needed.
Corpocracy cannot carry the burden of its entitlements. But this was so more than a score of years ago, as I was one of the writers who pointed it out (Work Without Managers 1990).
In any case, the Dervish dance is a “catch 22”:
Corporations enjoy the dependency of professionals for the leverage it gives them, professionals like the security and choose to be oblivious to top heavy management, but for “corpocracy” to maintain the status quo it has to provide the comforting entitlements which it can no longer do, and thus circumstances are pulling it down like a house of tumbling cards.
Against a backdrop of corporate malfeasance on a grand scale – Enron, WorldCom, et al -- the evidence of qualitative discontinuous change has been seeded by these blatant developments:
· The average pay of CEOs of electronic and high tech companies in 2003 was $8 million.
· CEOs saw their pay increase from 8 percent in 2002 to nearly 23 percent in 2003.
· This came on the heels of declining performance of many Fortune 500 companies: sharp reductions in personnel, lower return on investment, and plummeting sales.
· Delta Air Lines in 2004 has asked its pilots to take a $1 billion cut in their annual salaries “to save the company” from bankruptcy;
· American Air Lines and United Air Lines are negotiating as part of their bankruptcy proceedings to have their respective company retirees take reductions in retirement benefits.
· US Airways is asking $800 million in salary and benefit concessions from its employees to forestall bankruptcy. The airline last filed for bankruptcy in 2002. US Airways pilots pension plan is currently under funded by $2.5 billion. And this is just the tip of the iceberg in discontinuous qualitative change.
Professionals do not seem to realize their reticence is cutting their legs out from under them. Downsizing, relocating, moving abroad, or aborting retirement benefits is never written in concrete. Companies feel they have run out of options. Professionals see themselves running out of work. They hide their resentment in passivity when they might rectify the situation by contributing to the problem solving. Professionals are in denial, resulting in being management dependent or counter dependent on the company for their total well being, when the company and management are lost in NOWHERE, as they are disintegrating right before their eyes while they choose to do nothing about it.
In the PRESENT RIDICULOUS no one challenges leadership, or why we have leaders at all that have nothing in common with us. It is because our programming has convinced us they are necessary, that leadership is separate from followers, when in fact it isn’t. The two cannot be separated but in a “cut and control” world such division seems logical, correct and desirable, another factor bringing us to NOWHERE.
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PAST IMPERFECT segued to the PRESENT RIDICULOUS with the paradox of our times, so many new toys and so little real creativity. Often our most creative periods have come when writers and artists attempted to escape the deafening noise of calamity, and create a more sanguine world of ordinary life and people. Such was the case with the writings of Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters during the Napoleonic Wars. They wrote of ordinary people in extraordinary times. Jane Austen’s titles are a clue: Persuasion (1818), Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Sense and Sensibility (1811), while the dark novel of Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights (1847), describes the tumult of her stormy time for ordinary people.
Edith Wharton wrote about extraordinary people closer to our own time with The Age of Innocence (1920) profiling virtue in the midst of corruption. Recognizable people grace these pages explaining why they are still read today.
It seems we are neither interested in nor comfortable with ordinary people in life today much less novels or films. It is as if we can’t wait to escape our skin because we have lost our soul. We prefer machines and machinations, or mysteries with irresolvable conundrums to deaden our consciousness of reality. Or we dramatize themes outside the normal bonds of ordinary people such as perversion, homosexuality, bestiality, mayhem, and the macabre.
With “cut and control” precision, we envision digital people from humans to Androids in which ordinary people come to be replaced by robots. The popular film “RoboCop” was retooled with state-of-the-art technology to become the ultimate law enforcer. The film shows a society where everyone trusts robots, except for one suspicious detective.
Then there are the Arnold Schwarzenegger “Terminator” films. The robotic Terminator has a head for justice and is an invincible law unto himself. No doubt California voters saw fiction-reality merge as they voted the Terminator in as governor to restore order to an out-of-control state, clearly an impossibility for a mere human. Unfortunately, Schwarzenegger proved only too human, and therefore disappointing.
Macho films explore a new world dominated by thinking machines. Media images of “violent masculinity” are in fact normalizing bad behavior and making misogyny more acceptable, according to experts. It has been with us a long time. Machine like heroes such as Humphrey Bogart in the 1940s as the tough guy in “The Big Sleep” and “The Maltese Falcon”; Steve McQueen in “Bullitt” in the 1960s; Clint Eastwood in the 1970s “Dirty Harry” series with the famous line holding a .44 Magnum in the face of the bad guys, saying, “Make my day!”; Sylvester Stallone in the 1980s as John Rambo with the big gun and bigger muscles winning the Viet Nam War that we had lost; Schwarzenegger in the 1990s in the “Terminator” films; and now today the violent video games in which players search and destroy good and bad guys at will.
Sometime in the not-too-distant future, the world of people and robots will inevitably merge. We already have false teeth and hair, plastic limbs, intraocular lenses, mechanical organs and drug-dispensing implants. Robots are becoming more like us in facial expression, voice recognition, and ability to walk, talk and make decisions. Sidney Perkowitz, a physicist at Emory University, has written Digital People: From Bionic Humans to Androids (2004) in which he describes how a new generation of robots could serve as the “next level of humanity.
The thought of a humanoid developing consciousness is not new. Mary Shelley explored it nearly 200 years ago in her novel Frankenstein (1817). Meanwhile, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have dedicated laboratories to Cog and Kismet, two groundbreaking projects in which the robots mimic human actions and reactions. Cyrano 320 is an electronic nose that can smell a spectrum of odors.
In Japan, the $38 million Humanoid Robotics Project is developing a machine with the mental, physical and emotional capacity of a 5-year-old. Then there is Honda Motor Company’s Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility (ASIMO). This 115-pound machine mimics a person through 26 “degrees of freedom” that allows it to move in all directions, pick up objects, balance on one leg and even kick a soccer ball. ASIMO also responds to 50 verbal commands and recognizes the faces of up to ten people.
Marvin Minsky, author of The Society of Mind (1998), laments, “Most people still believe that no machine could ever be conscious, or feel ambition, jealousy, humor or have any other mental life experiences. But this only means that we need better theories about how thinking works.” Indeed.
The Da Vinci Code (2004) by Dan Brown is entertaining nonsense about a painting as key to the Holy Grail and the relationship of Jesus to Mary Magdalene. Will people be reading it 50 years from now like they are still reading Frankenstein? A spate of copycat books on the Da Vinci theme and presented as weighty tomes are now flooding the market. This novelized world reduces the origin of a great religion to speculations about a painting. The book’s popularity tells us a lot about ourselves.
Imagine not knowing what truth is. Imagine life without a philosophical structure or religion without a tradition. Imagine life without authentic individualism. Then imagine the entrepreneurial personality and you have in summary the PRESENT RIDICULOUS.
Such a personality is unburdened by religion or tradition and acts as if Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” is leading him toward a better society: that is, in the belief that if people love themselves, the more they will pursue self-interests, the more they will enhance their happiness and improve the world.
The problem with this is that the individual has no way to authenticate himself but by his own self-interests, which denies social morality where authentication can only be found. As David Ambrey correctly points out, the self is complete and empty at the same time; it is overflowing with self but empty of soul.
All the “self-actualizing,” “sensitivity training,” “self-esteem seminars,” and “Buddha awakening sessions” prove one thing: one’s own self-interests cannot authenticate the self to the self. Only love can and love is self-forgetfulness.
That said postmodernism holds that truth is relative to an individual’s perspective. Native American tribes believe their ancestors emerged from an underground spirit world, others believe they came out of the womb of the crow. Anthropologists have traced such odysseys to North America from Asia thousands of years ago. Cultural relativism has the Indian account correct according to the truths of mythmaking; the anthropological view is accurate under the methods of social science.
Facts can no longer be independently verified but now must be the judgment of individuals. Truth is on a relative scale. As Krisnamurti puts it, Your truth is not my truth, and my truth is not your truth. As soon as you tell me your truth, it is a lie. Lacking a universal scale to weigh appeals to truth, an individual can establish only personal truths contingent on particular assumptions. Many academics have dismissed Western civilization’s historic quest for objective truth as a voyage without a destination, or a journey to NOWHERE. This adds to the uncertainty of the times and the sense of wandering in a wasteland.
Rosseau and others took away the philosophical scaffolding and religious infrastructure that once defined so clearly who we were, where we were, why we were, and what was our primary purpose in life. The Baltimore Catholic catechism provided unambiguous answers that I learned as a little boy. Now modernity gives me the personal liberty to seek truth without hindrance to wherever it might lead.
Instead of a priest to guide me, I have had Abraham Maslow (The Farther Reaches of Human Nature), Carl R. Rogers (On Becoming a Person), Alfred Adler (The Drive for Self), Erik H. Erikson (Identity Youth and Crisis), Nathaniel Brandon (The Psychology of Self-Esteem), James Redfield (The Celestine Prophecy), among others. Without intending, they have driven me, and others like me, away from my soul and to my lonely self in NOWHERE.
Psychologists are among the most aggressive promoters of unrestricted individuality. Today there is unlikely a person reading this that has not had some exposure to self-help seminars, books and tapes. Maslow, founder of humanistic psychology, urges individuals to choose how to behave and to fulfill themselves according to their own enthusiasms. Contrary to Judeo-Christian religion, which sees the human soul sinful and in need of moral clarity, Maslow says human nature is neutral, echoing Rosseau.
Such psychologists maintain that society causes most mental problems. The goal, they say, is to release the individual’s inner nature to express itself freely, rather than being warped, suppressed or denied. They conclude that the self-fulfilled individual will help to build a compassionate society in which human potential flowers.
Baby boomers have ridden this steer for all it’s worth in an attempt to “follow their bliss.” Daniel Yankelovich, who has followed baby boomer behavior for years, claims as much as 80 percent of Americans have at some time pursued “self-fulfillment.” This self-obsession extends from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “self-reliance” in the nineteenth century to Norman Vincent Peale’s “positive thinking” and est seminars in the twentieth, to Dr. Wayne Dyer’s “Power of Intention,” and Reverend Robert Schuller’s “possibility thinking” in the twenty-first.
As Yankelovich describes these self-seekers, they are preoccupied with self-fulfillment on several levels: having a career, marriage, children, sexual freedom, autonomy, being liberal, having money, choosing non-conformity, insisting on social justice, enjoying city life and country living, simplicity, graciousness, reading, good friends, and on and on.
There is an army of therapists, gurus, psychics, soothsayers, motivational speakers, seminar leaders, and self-help clubs programmed to tell self-seekers what they want to hear. It is almost comic to watch as they go from a New Age worship to self-esteem workshop to an est seminar to a group encounter to an Eastern meditation to a Western psychotherapy “breakthrough” program, and then back again to a New Age worship, starting the process all over again.
The solipsistic self brings little satisfaction for this roller coaster ride has to come eventually to the realization of English poet G. K. Chesterton (1874 – 1936): “That Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones.” George Bernard Shaw (1856 – 1950) adds, “God created us in his own image, and we decided to return the favor.”
You shall see now as we enter FUTURE PERFECT, that the divided self that R. D. Laing identified is a product of the “cut and control” philosophy that predates our time by centuries. Laing was writing about the despair of self-estrangement and the false self we invent to cope, leading in extreme instances to schizophrenia. The schizophrenic is a man who cannot risk to become ridiculous, for he is so unsure of his location in the world that the slightest shock could make him lose all his sense of direction. The world as such has become an inhospitable cage to him, a prison without bars. He reacts to his worldly insecurity by withdrawing from the world: by devaluating those parts of himself which deal with the world, his body, and by establishing residence in the part of himself which he feels to be impregnable, his mind.
This is how R. D. Lain in The Divided Self (1960) characterizes the “split” between the body and mind, which becomes progressively deeper as a man fails to anchor his personality, until it finally overcomes him and he becomes properly “mad.”
Laing suggests that we have all experienced this worldly insecurity to varying degrees and, without necessarily going mad, form our psychological responses (our character) in order to deal with it. Most of us fail some of the time in our life strategy, experiencing anxiety, depression, etc. The schizophrenic is a man whose failure has become permanent, until it has completely disorganized his personality. Several years ago a mini psychological test sample was taken of New York City shoppers in Manhattan. Half of the sample was found to be walking schizoids.
If the PRESENT RIDICULOUS is not a time of madness, it is hardly a time of sanity. NOWHERE finds the current self is a personality trying to balance competing and conflicting self-interests. There is evidence that a collapsing environment and crumbling self are intertwined. Laing claims the real self attempts valiantly to keep pace with the growing unreality of the false self, expressed in having one identity at home, another at work, one identity today and another tomorrow, always swinging on the pendulum of circumstantial moods.
Given these demands, Lain is surprised schizophrenia is not more widespread. It speaks to human resilience which now comes into play in FUTURE PERFECT.
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