"SURFACE FEEDERS" & "BOTTOM FEEDERS"

SURFACE FEEDERS & BOTTOM FEEDERS

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

We are somewhat more than ourselves in our sleeps, and the slumber of the body seems to be but the waking of the soul. It is the litigation of sense, but the liberty of reason; and our waking conceptions do not match the fancies of our sleeps.

Sir Thomas Browne, English physician (1605 – 1682)


Dreams full oft are found of real event’s the forms and shadows.

Joanna Baillie, English poet (1762 – 1851)


I am at sea in the Gulf of Mexico on a cruise ship to Cozumel, and I had this dream last night. Now, my dreams are usually negative dreams, dreams of failure, dreams of incompleteness, dreams of being lost. For example, I’ve had this one constant dream all my life. It is of my failure in college. I am afraid to go to the Registrar’s for my grades for fear that I will find I am flunking out. In point of fact I graduated with honors along with a Phi Beta Kappa key.

That said this dream was different, although it didn’t start out that way. My eldest son (in my dream) is visiting me, a son with whom I’ve had essentially an estrangement since he was seventeen. It was then that he came to me and said I was too much of a “head-trip” for him, and that he had made arrangements to move in with a tennis buddy.

It was a most embarrassing confrontation as my high school basketball coach was at the door. He had come a thousand miles to visit me and watch the “Final Four” NCAA Basketball Championship with me in my home. Here I was with a son about to abandon his father while my coach was at the door to bond again with his player, a ritual repeated year-after-year. This actually happened, and there it was, again, in the dream.

As I said, the dream started out in its typical negative fashion with all the promise of a subsequent migraine. My son shows up at my door with a huge smile on his face, and says he’s as hungry as a bear. There is little food in the house and so I anxiously run to the store, glad to see him after all these years, only to find I have no money, and no credit cards, and, well, not enough charm to receive anything on my good name. The dream at this point has all the promise of my typical dreams. As dreams can and will do on occasion, it makes a quantum leap to the lecture hall where I am conducting a seminar. And to my delight I look up from the rostrum in the amphitheater and see my son amongst all the students. Now, he was never much of a student albeit true he had the ability but neither the tenacity nor the inclination to be one. It resulted in more than six degrees of separation between us.

For many years, I was an adjunct professor at several universities in Florida but never an academic, per se. So, a college professor was not too much of a stretch in the dream.

The title of my lecture was inspired I do believe by the fact that I was in the Gulf of Mexico and could view or imagine the activities of the behavioral habits of birds that skimmed the surface of the sea, while imagining the activities in its magical depths beyond my vision.

At the same time, I was imprisoned on a luxury cruise liner whose sheer function was to suspend reality and to create the hedonistic fantasy of forgivable conspicuous consumption of mind, body and soul as a respite from reality, if however limited in duration.

Smiling attendants served our every need with smiling excess while eating companions, who were always strangers, exchanged smiles as if smiles were the content and context of a surreal Samuel Beckett play.

Beckett would have much fun with these actors limiting them to hiccup lines, the subjects of which he might confine to: how good (or bad) the service was compared to previous cruises, as most are veteran cruisers, how much won (or lost) at the gambling tables, or what (when or where) they plan to go on their next cruise, along with an alphabetical recital of all that mattered most to them.

No one talks about subjects of substance such as the state of the economy, the petroleum cartel, Darfur, Iran’s nuclear program, the Enron corruption trial, the War in Iraq, or even the weather, as it is so tranquil and peaceful as if reality is, indeed, a dream.

Given this numbing bombardment of my senses, the title of my lecture in my dream was “Surface Feeders & Bottom Feeders.” I used the ocean metaphor, I do believe, to explain that morality is suspended on a cruise, as it is suspended in the sea that embraces the ship. Such “surface feeders” as fish skim the surface to feast on insects while birds of prey comb the surface to feast on fish. Meanwhile, “bottom feeders” comb the dark recesses of the deep for nourishment and deceptive advantage no less engagingly than “surface feeders” in blind obedience to need and circumstance.

Now, I ask myself rather rhetorically in my dream if there is no moral distinction between “surface feeders” and “bottom feeders,” why should there be such a distinction, I say to myself again rhetorically, between “team management” and “authoritative management”? Immediately, surveying the wary eyes of my students I see the glaze cynicism as the common classroom façade as they prepare to endure yet another boring lecture.

Then to break through this frozen suspension, I pick out an executive in the group, a former CEO who has returned to university to satisfy his own private agenda. He has been an effective leader of his company, but a man known to have run his operation with an iron fist and will, taking no prisoners. For this disposition, he took a dying company and put life into it with it becoming one of the most successful companies in its industry.

His name in the dream is “Will,” and I might add at this point that Will is a “surface feeder,” a person who has managed to pick and choose, select and dispatch as he literally willed without ever complicating his actions with self-doubt or reflection, operating on basic instincts in a dressed up three-piece world of business, where nothing is left to chance, resulting in chance controlling everything.

He now has chosen the cathedral of the classroom where he has the power of the learner, but no longer the certainty of the knower. Why this is so can only be conjecture on my part, but I do know his company has chosen to go in another direction.

Company documents cite the reason for this new course to be lagging markets, implying this is largely due to micromanagement without of course mentioning Will by name as the culprit for the style. In euphoric zeal, the company announces it is going with team management. The published language of these documents chirp with idealism: “everyone will now have a voice in operations and feel empowered to express their views whatever they may be.” I ape these lines to the assembled students with histrionic sarcasm to chuckles and laughter as many of these students work part-time in putative “team managed” companies.

The general sense of these pronouncements is that coming to work now will be as much fun as going on holiday: no stress, no strain, no struggle, just cooperation, collaboration, and communication to a common objective. To no surprise, not even from Will, does anyone mention altruism is the death knell to competitive advantage. Nor has Will chosen to defend his reputation and tenor as CEO. Yet he knows it is his company I am profiling.

No place is more stamped with authoritarianism than the classroom where the professor has little power outside its confines, but here the magic power of the grade is decisive.

My point was that Will’s company in a state pending death operated as it did to survive skimming the surface of opportunity and operating intuitively meeting and exploiting demands as they appeared. It wasn’t a case of being morally right or wrong, but simply a matter of being the prisoner of circumstances. Moreover, if Will’s life depended on it, he couldn’t have operated differently, nor would his company consider competing as a “bottom feeder.” A necessary prerequisite to experimental “bottom feeding” would be in fact to first admit, and then embrace and deal with the reality of being in the preconditioned cage of “surface feeding.”

You don’t become a “bottom feeder” and announce a new disposition of operations as if words were the deed when words have nothing at all to do with it. Perhaps that was why Will was back in school: he wanted to discover his deeper nature that was never a matter of interest much less concern to anyone from his parents to his teachers and beyond, as his primary job in life from the beginning was “to make it,” doing whatever that took.

Then I said to my students that once a company, and I was implying and I would imagine not all that subtly that this was as true of them individually as to them collectively in whatever association they found themselves, establishes a culture of a kind, in this case, “surface feeders,” it is necessary to appreciate this fact in all its implicit and contradictory details before moving on to another more grander and definitive culture.

Culture gets into the blood stream and locks unto the genes as if it were part of one’s collective DNA. If you doubt this, consider the fact of where you are sitting at the moment in this amphitheater. Chances are you are sitting in the same seat you sat in before in my previous lecture. And if someone were sitting in “your seat” when you arrived late, it would put you in a bit of a funk because it is “your seat,” not actually but in your DNA mind. Multiply this inherent conceit through many iterations of life to the moment and you will discover that you are not, in fact, your own person but a collection of biases and beliefs and preferences that have little to do with logic but much to do with conditioning and familiarity. We are not what we think but what we do, repeatedly and unconsciously.

It should therefore be quite apparent that moving from one culture to another culture is risky business. It can actually become a catastrophic experience, that is, if time, attention, care, grooming, and emotional adjustment are not part of the exercise.

For one, I claim a culture of “surface feeders” looks only to surface feeding, which translates into being other directed, other dependent, other oriented, and other facilitated, in other words, suspended in terminal adolescence, or adults dressed up in waddling clothes.

The leader, whatever he may be called – CEO, general manager, director, department head, parent, teacher, priest, government official, police officer, guru, or whatever – is believed without the mind allowing itself to question the wisdom of his leadership. It is a counter dependency on authority figures with little sense of the authority of one’s own conscience based upon one’s own experience. Something is considered to be true because somebody says it is so, and that somebody is different from oneself in whom we relegate the equivalent of seeing that self as a nobody.

Most of us lead second-hand lives, blaming others for our failures while following their muses instead of our own.

So, in this climate, along comes an authority figure that says, “We are abandoning our old ways. We are creating a team environment.” Then he displays a PowerPoint slide with the caption, “We are ONE TEAM with ONE WILL to control the COMPANY’S DESTINY.”

This sounds good, but it won’t get it done. The workplace is not a morality play but a place of prudent action if it works at all. And it works when the programming before matches the programming now. When there is a departure from the programming before, the challenge is a magnitude of one hundred times one hundred times one hundred, in other words, impossible without a significant mind change. Culture is the mindset of the group.

The troops will listen to these boastful words, grab the pendants with these chosen slogans and place them dutifully in their cubicles. But when push comes to shove, they will continue to wait around for orders from headquarters. They will not bend the rules or challenge policy or procedure, nor will they take the initiative to display creative departure from the status quo. They embody the status quo.

It is their collective DNA. No matter how small the window of opportunity, no matter how privy they are to the importance of timely action at the level of consequences, they will fall back on the known, which is the conditioning of old, and watch the company bleed without applying a tourniquet because it is not in their job description.

The placards of “now you are in charge, go for it, do your own thing, make it happen” won’t cut it because it is written with invisible ink placed on a blank wall. The same goes for the cadence of the constant cheerleading sessions. The music they hear must match the music that has been programmed into their heads, otherwise they won’t get it. The message won’t register. Their ears are not tuned to such language. It might as well be a foreign tongue.

Instead, much like a child first learning to crawl, then taking those first hesitant steps without support, then finally stumbling into objects, and then exploring and getting into things they shouldn’t, someone has to be there every-step-of-the-way constructing barriers, and developing passages so that they don’t fall down the stairs, or lock themselves into cabinets, or ingest poisons that could do them bodily harm, or wander into swimming pools and drown.

Likewise, you have to go through an elaborate step-by-step-process to bring people in touch with the new reality of experience that will allow them to function successfully without support under their cognizant will.

In order to make connections with others, real connections that is, we must first be in charge of ourselves. The paradox is that before there is a “collective will,” which is teaming, there must an “individual will,” which an authentic person in the mix. Otherwise, we are dealing with robotics.

Unfortunately, it is a long torturous journey from becoming everyone-else to becoming oneself when we grow, in fact, from the outside in rather than the inside out. The first voices of our individual authority are likely to be our parents, then teachers and preachers, relatives and friends, and other authority figures long before we find it in our hearts to rebel, and establish ourselves as authentic individuals. The fact that very few ever arrive at this happy state of self-awareness and self-acceptance and self-worth independent of what others may think, feel, believe, or care about them is why this is such a challenging proposition.

We are not by nature altruistic, nor are we by nature especially competitive or confrontational. We are by nature self-interested even if not especially self-directed. And we are by nature social animals, again, mainly because we couldn’t survive without each other. It is this combination of contradictions and challenges that makes “bottom feeders,” or feeders that live in the dark and operate more blindly by instinct than by conditioning that puts them in touch with their primordial nature.

To reach this level where there are no barriers, where we swim in schools of our own kind changing leaders as opportunities and dangers change, where there is no language of “one for all and all for one” because it is the nature of existence and not the theme of a campaign, the initial steps are self-evident:

(1) Self-awareness starts with the recognition of things as they are, not as you would prefer them to be. You recognize that the way it was is always in a state of transition as everything is moving, changing, growing old and renewing, dissolving and solidifying, coming together or dispersing, everything! It isn’t a case of being morally right or morally wrong. Morality has nothing to do with it. It is the nature of the situation at the time with those in that situation dealing with conditions as they were and as they are. “Surface feeders,” in an earlier iteration of existence, were then the most advantageous way to go, because robotic existence met few perils, and so “surface feeders” thrived in the prevailing climate. The climate has now changed. Warfare has changed; economics have changed; nationhood has changed; daily life has changed; and society has changed.


(2) In the work situation, workers and students and people of all activities need to remain committed to their respective assignments that they have had before. What is different is that now there is less room for excuses or for failure to complete the tasks at hand. Failure is not a moral issue, not the denial of a right but the squandering of a privilege. One has only so many privileges in the fabric of a lifetime. The gonna do’s, gonna be’s, and gonna have’s – the “surface feeders” of old – are being swept into the depths of the “bottom feeder” territory where there is no forgiveness, only survival and death, not necessarily of the body but most certainly of the spirit. Where the benevolent “surface feeder” leaders would forgive and forget excesses and failures in a generous spirit, a ploy they used to solidify their control and weaken resolve to challenge them, they are now no longer about swept away with the flotsam and jetsam debris of surface feeding. Now, leadership is challenged by the confidence and measured assurance of “bottom feeders” who know the territory, know the subtle games of survival, and long ago have been made strong and self-willed by the nature of the deep. Platitudes and intimidations have the weight and measure of air bubbles on the “bottom feeder’s” disposition.


(3) The visible barriers that have been constructed between “surface feeders” and their prey, the high walls between specialists and everyone else, between disciplines and hierarchical positions, between privileges and perks, between postings and postures have no relevance in the deep. The status quo of “surface feeding” is not only no longer relevant but dysfunctional. “Surface feeding” engineers delighted in never having to relate to non-engineers that didn’t speak their language, didn’t live in their left brain, didn’t understand or communicate in their algorithms. Now, in the deep, they find they have to speak in complete sentences with a subject, predicate and direct object, without slurring their words, and no longer can survive in acronyms. The same is equally true of directors who resort by habit to doublespeak and “do you know who I am?” Again, it is not a moral issue, not a matter of right or wrong, but simply the prudent course as ideas and solutions are the province of the “bottom feeders,” and everyone is now emerged in their territory. “Bottom feeders” have the will, the way, and the savoir faire critical to survival, which is now much more meaningful in the scheme of things than simple success and failure.

One of the peculiarities of the nature of “surface feeders” is that they will continue to skim the surface when the plankton has disappeared, when only the insect population thrives because the air is no longer filled with birds of prey who have perished in polluted waters, and dead fish float by like a flotilla of a billion small ships. Likewise, engineers will ignore others who fail to understand them, directors will continue to bark out commands as if they are still in charge, and workers on automatic pilot will go through the motions as if their efforts had a purpose until entropy catches up with everything and a state of stasis is reached. This is occurring before our very eyes. The air, the land, the sea, and yes, companies, and all that would sustain us are breaking up owing to the misapplication of the divine laws upon which those things of nature rests so fragilely.

What once controlled “surface feeder” excess, religion, is now considered false belief, superstition even, claiming that the troubles of humanity started with religion. Once man had conquered natural forces, once he had put aside the worship of his God, once he had cleared his mind of illusions, once he had come to rely on science and reason, the earth would turn into heaven for “surface feeders,” and everyone would bask in the calm, cool light of knowledge. Indeed, science envisioned its own illusion: that with knowledge applied to society there would be no poverty, no war and no misery. Man has used his reason to question authority, but somehow society has degenerated into a kind of free-for-all with everybody grabbing what they can and with nobody in charge. Unfortunately, the problem is more complicated than it seems, and that should give us pause.

It is not a moral issue. Science is necessary to feed man’s curiosity; religion is necessary to assuage man’s loneliness and sense of mystery. While reason feeds the mind, religion feeds the soul, neither being mutually exclusive or necessarily mutually inclusive. They just are, as natural as breathing and always have been since the dawn of man. There are many steps before “surface feeders” become acclimated to the climate of “bottom feeders,” and conversely, before “bottom feeders” assimilate “surface feeders.”

This starts with recognizing differences and then commences with careful engagement and exploration of these differences until commonalities surface, as they always do, and then moving on to the next obstacle of separation, whatever it may be. As with the child going from the crawling to the walking stage, the emotional transition can be a killer.

“Surface feeders” have been programmed to follow the leader. “Bottom feeders” have no sense of leadership in such terms as they have always traveled in schools in which leadership changes as circumstances change, and no one was ever considered above or more important than anyone else. Instead, they were acclimated to the nature of shifting roles as conditions dictated. “Bottom feeders” live in an organic environment; “surface feeders” live in a stratified climate. “Surface feeders” are obsessed with planning and execution in terms of linear logic. “Bottom feeders” perfect their central essence and let the chips fall where they may. “Surface feeders” have their eye on competition and are self-corrupting. “Bottom feeders” have no time for such preoccupation being too busy enjoying their total quintessence.

The lecture completed, and my son, whom I thought surely would have left by now, comes over to me, and says, “You know, da, it may seem confusing to all these kids, but it was a head trip I knew well, and I think I finally understand. I hated you for so long for letting me hang out there on that plank, and doing nothing. You could have said something, done something, but you let me go without a word. I was seventeen, da, seventeen, do you realize that? Two months before graduation. Education was everything to you, and you did absolutely nothing! What if I didn’t finish? Didn’t go to college? What then?” My mind was raging with emotions. “But you did finish, son, you did go to college, on a full tennis-ride as I remember.” Ignoring these facts, he continued, “You didn’t even throw me a rope when I jumped into that crazy sea. Why?”

My son has been a very successful tennis professional of one of the three or four major tennis resorts in the United States. He has made a very good living, and yet, it is true, he was never on the professional tour. He blamed me for that then, and it seemed he was still blaming me for it now, that is, for not sponsoring him on the tour. He would have had to compete in preliminary tournaments, and have been trained at a major tennis complex for development, all of which could easily have cost in the high six figures. What I knew about him that he didn’t know about himself was that he lacked the “killer instinct” necessary to survive in that “surface feeder” climate. He was too polite, too much a gentleman, too naïve to fathom the duplicity and politics involved.

Once when he was playing and beating the number one player in the state in the eighteen and under category, and his opponent came up lame having sprained his ankle, he let up and allowed himself to be beaten rather than putting his opponent away.

There was no point in telling him this, or chiding him for it. He was always a “bottom feeder” but didn’t recognize it. To find this out, he had to struggle, prove his mettle as a coach, groomer of other players with more heart, and in doing so, finding his own. He also found he had a capacity to grow the business of a club and supervise a staff of forty other tennis players facilitating club clientele on fifty courts.

It was painful losing him, and since this is a dream, he hasn’t returned to me yet, but is obviously much closer than ever before. Would I have treated him differently if he had been truly a “surface feeder”? The question is academic. He wasn’t.

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