"NOWHERE MAN" DEFINED!

“NOWHERE MAN” DEFINED

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



It so happens that I've just completed a new book that is now with my agent titled "NOWHERE MAN" in "NOWHERE LAND." With every book that I write, I always have the trepidation that perhaps I've gone too far, hit too hard on the theme that is my focus, and, indeed, could be totally off base, that perhaps matters are not nearly as bad as I thought.

Then I go into the Internet and there is posted an article by Roberto Rocha on "11 Habits That Exude Success," and I say to myself, "Oh my God, she has defined my worst suspicions. She has defined NOWHERE MAN!”

Now, "Nowhere" is the loose translation of the word from Greek of "utopia," a state of idealism where the surreal glamour of a prized existence without the pain of the process is defined. It is a perfect world where everyone behaves in predictable robotic splendor. Many have written over the centuries of positive or optimistic utopia and negative or pessimistic utopia, among them Thomas More’s UTOPIA (positive utopia) and George Orwell’s “1984” (negative utopia).

These writers and others in the genre combine penetrating criticism of their own society, its irrationality and its injustices, with an idealistic (or pessimistic) picture of society, which, though perhaps not actually perfect, has managed to solve most of the human problems, which remained insoluble in their own contemporary experience. These pictures are tantalizing or disturbing, as the case may be, because they do not speak in general terms of principles being followed or ignored, but present an imaginative picture of the concrete details of a society which corresponds to their deepest longings or their most debilitating dread. What makes such pictures truly engaging is that these perfect societies or faulted societies, as the case may be, exist to some extent in pockets in the world of today.

Man’s social perfectibility was clearly expressed in philosophical and anthropological terms in the writings of the Enlightenment philosophers of the eighteenth century and of the social thinkers of the nineteenth century, and remained essentially unchanged until after the First World War. This war, and the subsequent world war, which would follow a score of years later, tended to destroy a two-thousand-year-old Western tradition of idealistic hope transforming Western society into a mood of palpable despair. To rescue the West from this sense of losing dominance and its dream-like idealistic individualism, indeed, of losing its sense of its core values, progress became its most important product and NOWHERE MAN its most improbable creation.

NOWHERE MAN is the person who wants the prize without enduring the process; who dreams of gain without pain, of “getting there” skipping the hard work by taking a quantum leap over the details. We find this with college students who cheat to get their degrees; with a scientist who spends millions of dollars on bogus research on stem cells; with young people that are hysterical contestants on "American Idol" and “Survivor,” who want so desperately to be famous but don't want to endure the systematic pain of getting an education and doing something worthwhile.

We find this also true with careerists that want to "exude success" by making a good impression, being successful pyramid climbers, saying and doing the right thing -- in other words, the "11 Habits That Exude Success" -- rather than developing their unique skills and manifest potential to make an actual difference.

It brought a smile to my face as I read the 11 success generators: (1) brag discreetly; (2) be a good communicator; (3) exit graciously; (4) know about life's finer things; (5) have good manners; (6) make public speeches; (7) keep a network of contacts; (8) travel; (9) have a positive attitude; (10) dress well; and (11) be worldly.

It brought that smile because leaders of my twentieth century generation would never have made the cut: J. Robert Oppenheimer, Albert Einstein, Robert E. Wood, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Alfred P. Sloan, Steven Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, all representative of this group.

Not one of them would have made it because they were too busy, too obnoxious, and too focused on their passionate interests, stumbling and bumbling along and going against the grain to make a difference. They became leaders by leading where their minds and hearts took them, leaders that we so often lack today because too many people are too busy having too much of too many and too soon. As a consequence, they are unwittingly being groomed for leaderless leadership. The evidence is in this "success menu," a preoccupation with making an impression by having a presence with an eye on the prize at the expense of the vital process.

Of the 11 markers to "exude success" not any of these distinguished people mentioned here possessed these markers because they were too busy focusing and thinking outside the box, going beyond “what is” to “what can be.” They were not being preoccupied with themselves or how others might perceive them, indeed, they were in the business of pleasing themselves by feeding and exercising their unique passions, and letting the chips fall where they may. They were and are the core of our fading leadership, cut out of the fabric of our society and marching to their own drummer, not anyone else's. To wit:

OPPENHEIMER, who headed the Manhattan Project that manufactured the first atomic bomb, was appalled at what he had created, and fought against the making of the hydrogen bomb, and for it lost his security clearance, and was thereafter treated as a non-person for his stand.

EINSTEIN lived in his head and dreamed of soaring on a light beam, and broke us free of our dependence on Newtonian physics that had lasted more than 300 years.

FORD, a bicycle mechanic who didn't invent anything but took ideas of others and created the Model "T" Ford, and used another new idea, the assembly line to produce his automobile, driving the cost down from $850 when it first came out to $275 by the early 1920s, making it affordable to his workers. By so doing, he created the blue-collar working middle class.

SLOAN exploited Ford's obsession with making the same model over and over again, and always in the same color (black) by making a more colorful and advanced model at General Motors, causing Ford's share in the automotive market to drop from 57 to 45 percent in one year (1925).

EDISON was a persistent researcher once saying that success was 99 percent perspiration and 1 percent inspiration, not only giving us the electric light bulb but also inventing the electrical utility so that a city need never be dark. Like Ford, he had practically no formal education, and in addition was nearly deaf. He was also insufferably moody, which he also had in common with Ford.

GENERAL WOOD took Sears primarily a catalogue distribution merchandiser into the department store business after World War II. Sevell Avery of Montgomery Ward played it close-to-the-vest expecting a postwar bust and depression rather than the boom that Wood saw clearly to be on the horizon. Wood paid attention to demographics, which he saw indicated America was moving from a rural to an urban society. While Avery hoarded his cash afraid to take risks, Wood built thousands of stores across the country to accommodate the hungry shoppers for affordable apparel and crafted tools.

JOBS literally stole the personal computer from Xerox (called the “Alto”), whose engineers created it, but Xerox executives failed to finance the laboratory, unable to see the potential, instead seeing it mainly as a toy. The irony is that Jobs got his start designing electronic video games, but could see a new world with the personal computer.

GATES signed a software contract with IBM that was hardly equitable but was necessary to get his foot in the door. He bought software packages (including Windows) others developed but had no idea what they had created to realize his "Windows" empire. IBM, which played draconian with Gates, was totally blind to the new direction information technology was taking society, until it was too late. IBM, incidentally, was (and is) a company that played (and plays) heavy on the image business treating these “11 markers” as if a religious text.

THE GOOGLE BOYS, Larry and Sergey, took Bill Gates who was lulling comfortably with his empire, and for that matter, everyone else by surprise by making the Internet networking their domain. Page, an academically trained Ph.D. was always interested in Nikola Tesla, a scientist whose list of brilliant inventions – wireless communication and X-ray to solar cells and the modern power grid. Tesla's genius for invention was not matched by his success in marketing them, or himself. Page liked the idea of making things that caught on. He had no interest in hiding his light under a bushel as Tesla had. That started the thinking of his own web page, and who was reading it, and whether or not anyone was not just reading it but linking to it. This would be more an indication of more than casual interest. To find out who was linking to his site, he wrote a program (“BackRub”) and that was the start of Google history.

They were all dreamers but not utopian dreamers but practical dreamers taking possibility and turning it into an idea and then giving that idea life and shape and form and format and then running with it through the darkness where most daydreamers live (i.e., "NOWHERE LAND") to engaging sunlight, and then taking their idea as far as it could possibly take them.

They were and are that rare breed that we lack today across the board with only a few glimmers of light, and that is leadership. When the focus is on making an impression there is little energy and even less time to make a difference; when you are afraid to take risks that cry in your gut to take you personify Jean Paul Sartre "inauthentic man." It is not the beautifully coiffure man or woman in the three-piece-bottom-down world that makes the difference, but people who see over the horizon to the new day, people not locked into solipsistic image making.

* * * * *