CONFIDENT THINKING COMMANDMENT NO. 5 -- RECOGNIZE IMPORTANCE OF OTHERS, BECOME OTHER-PEOPLE ORIENTED, ENABLE THEM TO BE THEMSELVES!

CONFIDENT THINKING COMMANDMENT NO. FIVE

RECOGNIZE THE IMPORTANCE OF OTHERS
BECOME OTHER-PEOPLE DIRECTED
ENABLE THEM TO BE THEMSELVES

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

Enabling people to be all that they could be does not mean you become self-absorbed in the other’s well being. That is their responsibility. It means creating a climate that brings out the authentic self of the other by being unpretentious and cooperative. It means helping him help himself. You may have skills in that regard.

It starts by being empathic, and progresses to enabling the other to find the way first to his own center, then he can voluntarily come to focus on a joint effort with you to lift him out of his plight, whatever it may be. Sometimes all he needs is moral support.

Without a healthy and stable center, there is no chance for genuine collective effort. We are a social animal and need each other. This is more so the case when we put on the face of not needing such connection. So, don’t be deterred by tough exteriors. It is a guise hat has been created to protect a fragile ego with a chaotic, bruised or damaged center.

Nor should you expect an unreceptive façade to collapse with your smiles and reassurance, or to be shattered by reasoning or, indeed, intimidation. Struggle and survival teach us two things: one is that a sick soul has a steep climb to collect itself out of the pit of its own hell of hate; and two, hate and contempt are family to such a mindset. You are asking the other to abandon hate, which is kin to him, a hate that has kept him upright and functioning even if self-destructively. The terrorists come to mind.

Once this tough customer is won over he cannot do enough for you. It is a heady thing to contemplate. A person can go from an apathetic mass of confusion to a zealot fueled by the new love he has found, failing to realize his hate has been turned inside out and now is used as a weapon against him for the purpose of another. The other is even less his own man than he was before. This can happen, has happened and is happening today and so it will be considered in this segment as well.

Being a social animal, we cannot survive without each other. Physical and nurturing care is essential from the moment we come into this world. Dr. Maria Montessori (1870 – 1952) captured its essence when she said, “Give me a child until it is seven-years-old and it will be mine for the rest of its life.” Her reference was to the conditioning process when our lot is that of pliable, formless, impressionistic and defenseless creatures. It is the programming that will determine to a large measure the way we will view life for the rest of our life.

Due to these significant seven years, it is one of the reasons why children grow up with such different attitudes, aptitudes, dispositions, and behaviors. It behooves us that have had the privilege of nurturing care not only to be aware of this but also accepting of the responsibility we have towards others less fortunate. People telegraph disturbances to their souls in attention deficit disorder, restless posture, profane language, inappropriate dress, body tattoos, and belligerence. The world has never gotten used to the fact that 80 percent of what and who we are represents nearly a match with everyone else in the world. Yet, we compare and compete as if we are truly different only to magnify the 20 percent difference that might actually exist.

When I was a boy about seven, an Irish uncle said to me one day, “Jimmy, you need the clothes on your back, a roof over your head, three square meals a day, and if you have that you’re in company with the richest men in the world.” He was of course right but he wasn’t aware, nor was I that 50 percent of the world failed to enjoy that luxury. He had no idea that little morsel would stick with me all my life, and turn my attention away from blatant materialism, while giving me confidence and security that as long as I had these things I was “a rich man.” He provided me with the wisdom of insecurity, which is the best form of confident thinking. When you have that, no man can corrupt you with financial or other gain.

Even with nurturing, we are all vulnerable to losing this advantage. Studies have shown when a child first starts to develop his personality, away from the nurturing care of his parents, incredible pressure is exerted by peers with the coercion to comply to certain deviancies in order to belong. Middle class parents once thought their children exempted from such pressures, that only the lower classes engaged in such deviancies. They were wrong.

Middle class children have been instigators of deviant behavior. They have used their wits to flaunt the law, and then play on their parents’ embarrassment once discovered to promote a cover up. This has spiraled into a collapsing moral center in which such parents preach one thing and practice another. It has produced an army of cynical children that haunts society today.

It seems to be driven by the dichotomy of belonging. A rather unusual source put this in pragmatic perspective for me. I was on a consulting trip and being held over at the airport in Cincinnati because of bad weather. Paul Brown and the NFL Cincinnati Bengal football team were there as well. Earlier in the day, my client had told me a story about coach Brown. He had attended a rookie training camp, and asked coach Brown, “How in the world do you decide who makes it and who doesn’t?” He smiled. “I don’t. They do.” Then he stretched out his arm and pointed to the players on the field. “See those guys?” He pointed to a group diligently working drills and perfecting their skills. “They’re all going to make it.” Then he pointed to a group shooting the breeze around the Gatorade cooler. “They’re not.” Mr. Brown, a good-looking man, with an Irish tilt to his hat, only smiled when I asked to confirm the story.

Winners hang together and so do losers. I suspect winners were doing as much as they could to make the most of the opportunity, while losers felt it was a rookie camp and they need not showcase their talent. They were wrong. Coach Brown was known as a disciplinarian who valued character as much as athleticism.

Another client, an ex-con, after serving his time at Florida’s maximum-security prison in Raeford, came to me with a proposition. He wanted me to write a book about his life. I never got around to writing the book, but his situation did have relevance to this discussion. He seemed a nice young man that I had to wonder how he went wrong. Why did he associate with such losers? He looked at me as if I were dense, “Don’t you know? They’re were the only ones who would accept me.”

Here was a man who had been reared by a mother who was a prostitute and an alcoholic. Often there was no food in the house, only booze, with him and his little brother having little to eat for days. His mother would bring men home, and if he and his little brother made any noise the man would beat on them until they were quiet. One time, a drunken regular looked for them as soon as he came into the house. He hid his little brother in the pantry, where the man never looked. He believes that saved his little brother’s life. He was not so fortunate. He was beaten unconscious and left for dead. He was six-years-old. Neighbors called the police and he was taken to the hospital and his brother put in foster care. After a month’s stay in the hospital, he ended up in a foster home but separated from his brother.

When I met him, he was a mountain of a man about six-one and weighed more than 350 pounds and appeared as solid as a rock. He had the incongruity of kind eyes with the hint of repressed terror suggesting how a wild animal might look if cornered. He confirmed my suspicions by saying, “I got myself in a terrible mess the first time the police came for me by going berserk.” Indeed, I learned he threw nine policemen around as if they were confetti, injury three seriously when they tried to subdue him. This and subsequent encounters ended with him being sentenced to prison at Raeford.

Was he a bad man? No. Was he a good man? In many ways, yes. He rebuilt his life, married a woman much older than him who became a surrogate mother, had one daughter with her, and became foster parent to several, whom he raised with loving care. He became religious in prison, joined the Masonic Lodge, and found satisfaction in that association. He was a heavy equipment operator working on highway construction and made a decent living for his family. He died in his fifties.

For everyone like him that escapes the shroud of the ex-con, the wonder is how many do not?

The jury is out on why we are so cruel to each other, and why we do such terrible things to each other. This is being written in the era of “international terrorism.” We see society in a state of hysteria since jihad (holy war) has been declared on Euro-American countries, most dramatically and tragically with the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York City on September 11, 2001, as commercial jet airliners became suicide missiles. You say, “How could this happen? How could people behave like this?”

The answer may be in the study of laboratory animals. Rodents when subjected to overcrowded conditions began to kill each other; turkeys when spooked trample each other to death. It happens in a crowded building when someone yells, “fire!” Equilibrium collapses when the expected collides with the unexpected. Fear flickers in the hidden recesses of the eye of all animals, humans included, as survival kicks in leading often to self-destructive behavior. Panic is enemy to good sense.

It would be nice in confident thinking to bypass the subject of fear as it applies to the importance of others, indeed, to disregard the subject of death, destruction and terror altogether as it relates to human beings when they turn themselves into suicide missiles.

These human carriers of death have been programmed to believe they will be eternally happy in paradise for their sacrifice. We don’t have to make much of a leap of faith to recognize that St. Paul had a similar message. As Christianity is his invention, he promoted the idea that this life was only preparation for the eternal bliss of heaven, where the last shall be first and the first last. It can be argued jihad programming is another version of Christian martyrdom once famous in early Christian history. For those who would scoff at this, martyrdom was once considered the ultimate sign of holiness, and promise of heavenly paradise. It was part of my Roman Catholic education.

Our world is getting much smaller. Stephen Hawking, who occupies the chair in physics at Cambridge once held by Isaac Newton, insists that we must colonize other planets because he can envision the human calamity of over crowdedness. We are already experiencing it between the halves and have-nots among nations. It seeds terrorism.

Meanwhile, we have a situation in which television, electronics, and speed-of-sound travel have made us a global community. We have electronic surveillance of our every move and have willingly sacrificed our freedom for security. Not only are there no secrets anymore, there is no privacy. The idea of freedom, which is the foundation of the United States, is disappearing in a sinkhole of panic as its understructure collapses.

America has gone from the “lighthouse on the hill and beacon of hope to the world” to becoming itself lost in the troubles of the world. The world, on the other hand, has taken the material success of this “melting pot of nations,” as a measure of its own. We see this in emerging technological progress of China and India. Shanghai has become a modern city with workers building skyscrapers, being paid only enough to keep body and soul together, but not paid their promised wages. We see India emerging into a technological power while 80 percent of its people are far removed from this sophistication. The world emulating the United States has become a well-dressed man hiding the decay inside the suit. You step outside the major cities of the emerging Third World countries and they more resemble primitive Africa. The United States doesn’t escape this comparison.

In the United States, the venerated middle class is shrinking. In 1982, there were 42 billionaires; in 2005, there were 474; in 1981, there were 20,444 millionaires; in 2003, there were 181, 282. In 1982, there were 1,858,000 with incomes of about $250,000; in 2004, there were nearly 6 million with this income. Meanwhile, those below the poverty line are also increasing so that the vibrant American middle class, once representing some 55 percent of all households is now around 40 percent and falling. The United States has a burgeoning upper class and a rapidly increasing underclass with a disappearing middle class. No society survives for long without violence, chaos, confusion and social upheaval without a significant middle class, that is, without a majority of the people well enough educated to be actively involved, economically and spiritually committed to maintain a relevant societal agenda. If not, implosion is a certainty. It happened to Rome.

We have seen in Africa like that child reared for seven years a certain way, and remaining that way in Dr. Montessori’s words, “for the rest of its life,” the aftershock of post colonialism on the nations of that great continent. It is bleeding human misery.

African people are somewhat frozen in that mindset of adolescent passivity, but now they are expected to behave as if nothing interrupted their respective cultural heritage. Tiny European nations such as Portugal and Belgium, among others, plundered these cultures, ripped away their resources with impunity, and subjugated Africans to Western religion and tradition, while denying these same people the continuing practice of their respective cultures.

The nightmare of today was created by the greed and thoughtlessness of yesterday. The vacuum of hopelessness and despair that now has the face of AIDS is now a monument to this past, as many of these African people in the late twentieth century were made independent nations, and left mainly to fend for themselves without the tools.

Africans were expected to do this without a vibrant middle class, without accommodating commerce, or a viable infrastructure, without seasoned leadership, or institutions supportive of a national agenda, and without either the will or the way to make it happen.

For more than one hundred years, these people were used and abused and treated as fodder for the will of their captors. This has left them open for the exploitation by the few amongst them that have been educated and know the Western ways of divisive and mercenary authority. These African leaders have often treated their own people worse than their former colonial rulers. I lived in South Africa during the era of apartheid. I now hear only criticism of how poorly the Bantu and the Coloreds are taking hold of that country, failing to see this is testimony to European as well as Afrikaner exploitation. If we are our brother’s keeper, there is a lot of making up that must happen.


Someone once said that there is only one religion but it has a thousand faces. If you look beyond the dogma or doctrine of Hinduism, Confucianism, Shintoism, Buddhism, Islamism, Judaism, and Christianity, to name only a few, you see how true this is. Respect for another is basic to all religions. They have kept the world reasonably stable but they are losing their grip on its spiritual influence. This seems to have been magnified with the explosive growth and constant disruption of social norms since World War II. We are drunk with the power of toys supplied by technology, and have not yet awakened from our hangover to perceive the damage done to ourselves and others for the “cut and control” narcotic of empty “progress.”

Along with this indulgent dance, we have weapons of mass destruction, and rumors of these WMDs that orchestrate fear in a most compelling way to give those in power a psychological edge to do as they will. Our current national governance has the good twins of Chaney and Rumsfeld that resemble in so many frightening ways the bad twins of Goebbels and Goering, using the same chicanery, duplicity, manipulation of fear, while playing the patriotic card on the national psyche, and the evils of the Infidels to justify a strategy of preemptive war. Nazism rose out of fear and pride and contempt for others not German, creating the myth of a Master Race.

The current myth is “superpower,” and nobody questions it. We hear it every day that the United States is the lone superpower of the world, and yet there is the Katrina disaster, the stalemate in Afghanistan, and Iraq, the fact that nearly half of Americans fail to finish high school, that the middle class is shrinking, that the infrastructure is in sad shape, that obesity is on the rise, and that corporate and governmental corruption is continuously breaking new ground. If this were not enough, the good twins are now saber rattling preparing us for a possible preemptive strike of Iran or North Korea, or both, if these nations don’t behave, as we would instruct them to behave. It all happened before with Rome. Something is wrong with this picture.

One of the reasons these nations are behaving as they do is because of fear. Fear has taken on the guise of the hero of our time in a time without heroes. It is the prime motivator when the world has lost its moral compass and with it its center. It is as true of the smallest nation as the largest, as true of the smallest community to the most sophisticated, as true of the East as the West, the North as the South. Fear is the only symbol that people everywhere understand and embrace with the same trepidation. Fear is what guides the good twins as it did the bad twins.

Fear has shown its face in Iraq and Afghanistan when young boys with guns are overwhelmed and commit atrocities common to war, which are uncommon to nature. You place anyone in harm’s way where fear is his only company and terrible things are bound to happen. Psychologist James Hillman sees war has become normalized as an every day affair. He finds the terrible love of war the direct route to what some want at the expense of others. War fosters an impossible collection of opposites: murder, soldierly comradeship, torture, religious conviction, the destruction of earth, patriotism, annihilation, and hope for immortal glory. It would appear people dead to life find war exhilarating, lifting them out of their stupor and despair. Death is preferred to embracing life, as embracing life means you can no longer hide in fear.

Fear is the driving force in the economics of plenty. It has taken the life out of death, and the death out of life. We have lost confident thinking as a people. We have pushed forward our national agenda fueled by fear to expect others to act in a certain way to stabilize their existence, when we have failed to stabilize ours. Afghanistan and Iraq reflect the way Americans reacted to colonial Great Britain, and unhappily, we fail to see the resemblance. We had a Civil War that nearly destroyed us as a nation. Would we have wanted interference in that war? I think not.

We have this problem of failing to see the snakes sunning themselves on the rocks in our heads, choosing instead to see our intentions as always noble, always above board, and always altruistic, as if we have answers to everyone else’s dilemma when we seem unable to solve our own.

We are a nation that has not been prepared to accept ourselves, as we are, much less to be a student of other nations and their problems as they are. How can we expect Americans who see some Americans as “jungle bunnies” and others as “lords of welfare” to understand that by the accident of birth and circumstance what they are is as much a fluke of chance as anything else? We are a nation that is overweight, undereducated, unsophisticated, grasping for straws while waving the American flag as if the mere fact of doing so changes everything.

There are three things that come to mind for us to live in peace with each other:

One, we must learn to understand each other, not from the perspective of our own experience but from the experience of others.

That means looking at the other through his eyes and not ours. It means having a modicum of understanding of his history and culture and what is especially meaningful to him in that context.

It would include his struggles and triumphs, tragedies and challenges, and how these came to define him. It would mean being acquainted with his leaders, both fanatical and moderate, in governance and religion and how this has impacted him and his people.

It means seeing others in the light of today and what they are struggling with and how it is working out for them. In a word, it means knowing them.

What you are likely to find out is that 80 to 90 percent of most people prefer to be left alone, to enjoy the comfort of their family, to work their chosen job, and to live in peace with the familiar trappings of their parochial life and culture without sanctions or interference.

We are not, by nature, a people in the general, but persons in particular. Much as we are alike, tolerance and acceptance of subtle differences supports a common brotherly love.

When collateral damage of civilian population is considered a necessary cost of warfare, then insanity rules. When you destroy Twin Towers to make a statement, taking 3,000 lives, insanity rules. When you invade a country run by warlords that previously humiliated Russia, insanity rules. When you invade a sovereign nation run by a dictator under the contrived justification of WMDs, insanity rules. When you withhold funds from a duly democratically elected party, because it is designated a terrorist organization, even though the people have spoken, insanity rules. When you spend hundreds of billions of dollars on a war with no defined enemy and no ultimate victory, insanity rules. When the heart and soul and will of a country are flabby because it is self-indulgent, solipsistic, self-important and reactive, then insanity rules.

Two, the confident thinker has to step back from all the information that has bombarded his senses and sift through it to see what makes sense and what does not.

He should not look to media to do it for him, nor government, nor the church, nor his neighbor, nor his boss, nor his family. The answers are not in Time or Newsweek, not in the New York Times nor the Washington Post, not on television network nor cable news, not on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer with pundits Mark Shields and David Brooks, not in the plethora of exposes of insiders that glut the counters of bookstores, not from the think tanks nor the Ivy League dons, but from processing experience that might include talking to a Pakistani service station neighbor or to a Thai barber, or hundreds of others that connect to a life, along with independent study.

This is not an easy quest for one who is a member of a nation that adores celebrity, worships youth, plans never to grow up and therefore never grow old, that spends more for plastic surgery than the Gross Domestic Product of some African nations, and plies its innovative nature in all manner of escapism. When there is no place for reality in the tempo of existence, nowhere land becomes a home.

Three, the confident thinker doesn’t allow himself to be blindsided by another’s “ideal self” or “self-demands.” He sees everyone he meets from the perspective of the “real self” and “role demands.”

This can get tricky because we seldom say what we mean, or mean what we say. You must get past the words to how the other feels and how this matches with how you feel. Your heart reads a person much more accurately than your head. Someone who talks like you, dresses like you, spouts similar litanies, and has similar biases like you, can sway your head, but not your heart if it has your attention.

To learn where the other is coming from, you need to listen, not lecture. The less you fill the void with your information the more you are apt to learn. This means fighting the inclination to be judgmental. Judgment oozes from your pours not necessarily from your mouth. If you think it, he will feel it. Besides, it is not all about you.

On a wider scale, it is impossible to be serious about the plight of others while worrying about your $400,000 home when your kitchen table costs more than the tents that house one hundred in a refugee camp in Darfur. There is something wrong with a world where 80 percent of the people live in near constant jeopardy. You cannot change this picture in the macro sense, but you can discourage the xenophobic comfort of emailers who tattoo your conscience with jokes about Afghans and Iraqis who are convenient store workers, gas station operators, taxi drivers, short order cooks, house cleaners, beautician shop sweepers, computer installers, and neighbors. Xenophobia doesn’t do you or anyone else any good.

The United States of America is an idea, and the idea is in trouble. It is not a place or a space. It is a thought. It is a thought that has survived for only a little while, a couple hundred years, and it can die if others are less important than you. If that should happen, then you are the mortician of the idea. That may not be your intention but a lapse of concern for others in the world could ultimately prove devastating.

It would have been easy to go the route of the self-help books and iterate all the things you would like to hear, reinforcing your comfort level, and therefore prove forgettable. We, who live in relative peace with plenty, and with the freedom to exercise our minds, and keep our bodies and souls in harmony, have a responsibility to pay attention. There is something wrong about a world that has so much needless suffering such as a dying baby covered with flies in Darfur, while her young mother who already is shriveled up as if an old lady attempts to feed her child from a dried up breast.

Africa suffers from the Montessori syndrome. She talked of having a child for seven years; colonizers have had Africa for more than seven generations. Much as we may desire to shed the yoke of the first seven years, the paradox is that only too often we emulate, duplicate, and replicate the good, the bad, and the ugly of that experience in our adult life. Likewise, the cruel and inhuman treatment of Africans on Africans today is consistent with those seven generations of subjugation. As many of us have managed to outgrow some of our faulty indoctrination in due course, so also can Africa.

If the words here anger you, try to understand why. If you find yourself falling back on bromides and rationalizations, try to poke holes in them. If you’re going to discuss them with some learned thinker, view the comments in light of what they reveal about him. If you research this discussion at some university, be skeptical of the content and context of the research. Ultimately, to recognize and truly believe in the importance of others, it is not a zero sum game, where some are accepted and others not. Acceptance is a question of tolerance, and tolerance means you never own the other’s problem, although you will help him solve it. That role is to help him feed, cloth, protect and manage, not to do these things for him. If we do, the escape from the Montessori syndrome will be truly possible.

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