CONFIDENT THINKING COMMANDMENT NO. 7 -- DESIRE TO CREATE SOMETHING GOOD, SEE THE LIFE FORCE IN ALL, STRIVE TO ENHANCE NATURE!

CONFIDENT THINKING COMMANDMENT NO. 7

DESIRE TO CREATE SOMETHING GOOD FOR OTHERS
SEE THE LIFE FORCE IN ALL THAT YOU DO
STRIVE TO ENHANCE THE QUALITY OF LIFE FOR EVERYONE YOU TOUCH!

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

When it comes to confident thinking in terms of creating something good, we must first define “goodness,” and then take on that most ambiguous expression “quality of life.”

Novelist George Eliot (born Mary Ann Evans, 1819 –1880) wrote under a pseudonym because women in her day were not accepted as creative artists. She captures the sense of goodness here: “By desiring what is perfectly good, even when we do not quite know what it is, and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil, widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.”

Complement to this is the more muscular definition of American theologian Tryon Edwards (1809 – 1894): “To be good, we must do good; and by doing good we take a sure means of being good, as the use and exercise of the muscles increase their power.”

Goodness, then, is your vital connection within the fabric of being. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882) states it metaphorically: “Your good nature is stronger than tomahawks.” Goodness, then, is a constant war against darkness, but the question is what darkness, and whose darkness? Is it the darkness of ignorance of nature and the universe, or of the human soul? Or is it both?


Goodness is idealistic and action dependent on both the physical and spiritual plane. Science has focused its creativity mainly on the physical plane at the neglect of the spiritual, whereas most of us are likely to create something good for others by our actions in the social and psychological sphere.

Therefore, initially, creating something good is derivative of good sense out of a positive character that makes allowances for failure, and is energized by judgment and candor, especially candor. The confident thinker is not afraid to see the darkness in his own soul and to work through it to create some light.

That brings us to the expression “quality of life.” Never has there been greater disparity between the quality and inequality of life than at the present time. It is not only a matter of the rich becoming richer and the poor poorer, but the distance between good and evil appears to be widening. I’m not referring to conventional evil, but the malevolence we do to each other and ourselves by our addictive lifestyles. Such evil has taken on a kind of normalcy. Consequently, few appear interested and less capable of addressing the monumental gap between good sense and sound behavior except rhetorically.

While 80 percent of the world’s wealth is controlled by 20 percent of the world’s population, and while 80 percent struggle in deprivation to make do with 20 percent of the world’s resources, despicable waste and self-indulgence has become meter of the times. If this were not bad enough, the minority that controls the majority of the planet’s resources has failed to find happiness in blatant materialism.

Writing of the French Revolution and the “Reign of Terror,” Charles Dickens (1812 – 1870) opened “A Tale of Two Cities” (1859) with this line: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness . . .” Dickens could have been describing our times.

Unfortunately, we can describe our dilemma but we cannot seem to find the will or the way to deal with it. Edward de Bono writes in “Parallel Thinking” (1995): “Our thinking habits and our education have placed all the emphasis on analysis and judgment. There has been no emphasis placed on design and creativity. Yet the present day problems of the world are crying out for those skills.” He notes that critical thinking captivates us, which is dealing with what is already known, while we are seemingly averse to creative thinking, or what is not known but could be found out.

Creative thinking is conceptual, nonlinear, systemic, provocative, and contradictory, or the geography of the unknown. It explores the darkness without night vision, but with intuitive confidence because it embraces the darkness of the soul. Critical thinking is afraid of such darkness. So, as the human spirit becomes more lost in this eerie fog, the will to take action diminishes. Explanation becomes an end in itself.

Critical thinking is searching for the solution. We are a solution driven society looking for problems to attach to our plethora of solutions. Creative thinking designs and constructs a way forward, not to solve the dilemma but to improve the situation. Creative thinking understands problems are never solved, at best only controlled, and control is always temporary because change is a constant.

It is the conceit of Western man to be preoccupied with final solutions. There are no such things. “Western thinking is failing,” de Bono continues, “because its complacent arrogance prevents it from seeing the extent of its failure.” This failure, he argues, is because Western thinking is not designed to deal with a changing world. It has proven inadequate to deal with change because it does not offer creative, but admittedly temporary actions forward. It has a mania “to solve problems” now and for good. Therefore, the problems critical thinking solves are the problems it creates, repeatedly. The nuclear arms race has now resulted in a colossal problem of nuclear waste disposal; global warming is given feint attention as the East now attempts to out-West the West in technological progress and modernization. Why not more attention to fusion than fission or solar energy; why progress at any cost? Fear, the darkness of the human soul, consumes while critical thinking remains slave to change without embracing it.

With all the wonderful tools as toys modern society has created to promote “quality of life,” man has been on a century long self-destructive terror. Tens of millions were slaughtered in conventional warfare in the last century, and now in a new iteration of terror there is the possibility of nuclear holocaust while anyone can be a suicide bomber in such places as Iraq, Afghanistan, India, Israel, or Indonesia to name only a few. If this were not enough, the governments of Sudan and Zimbabwe have displaced and literally led to the starvation of tens of thousands of their own people. As horrendous as these tragedies, the conflicts in Darfur, Cote d’Ivoire, Somalia, and northern Uganda continue only to be outstripped by the devastating death rate of HIV/AIDS infected Africans. These calamities rise out of material and human deprivation, while Western man is self-destructing in a lifestyle of material and human unrestrained behavior.

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While modernity celebrates its accomplishments, goodness has often been on holiday in a homeless mind. The greatest challenge to creativity is finding the key to behaving in peace, harmony and mutual support of each other, starting with those with the most abdicating their self-indulgent lifestyles.

Once the role of religion was to spread light in this darkness and guide the human soul to find its way forward to goodness and light, but no more. It would appear religion has lost its way in the past century or so. Now God is confined to pomp and circumstance, ritual and rites of passage, or jihads, but not a deciding factor in normal daily life.

Materialism engulfs the planet and materialism has nothing to do with leadership. Leadership has always been grounded in spirituality, and it is missing today, everywhere. Modern surrogates to religion, the social sciences, have only compounded the problem with their doublespeak and suspect research, mainly, because they are critical thinkers.

Psychiatry has failed; psychology has failed; anthropology has failed; sociology has failed; all the social and behavioral sciences have failed because their attention has been on description rather than on action. Most of what they tell us we already know, and that is the problem. We need to find away out, not more sophisticated explanations why we are in.

These disciplines are concerned with the values that arise from the “truth” rather than only with the “truth” itself. The truth is man is addicted to death and not to life; to self-destruction, and not self-creation. His teacher often is poverty, ignorance, and neglect. But paradoxically, the same teacher is often wealth, knowledge, and luxury. Waste from neglect and waste from indulgence is still waste.


Social sciences search for understanding of man’s plight with statistical correlations rather than designing means to ameliorate the suffering. Action! They operate from ivory towers not from the trenches of the sick and weary. Action! They can be found as consultants in the boardrooms of corpocracy, not on the line. Action! They conduct studies of penal institutions rather than developing strategies to civilize the lost.

Likewise, modern medicine and pharmacology seek to discover cures for AIDS and other lifestyle diseases playing a complicit role with social science and critical thinking.

It is no longer a matter of discovering “what is” the problem, but of designing a way forward out of it. It may be a matter of creating new bold counterintuitive ideas directly opposed to conventional logic rather than repeating the standard ones.

There is no point in judging dysfunctional governments, evil as some may be. Energy might better be directed at finding a way to make connection. Many African leaders, for example, have never gotten past their deep-seated hatred of repressive colonialism that still rankles though long gone. The same applies to AIDS. A way forward is only possible if there is a softening of hard-edged thinking and condescending morality. Bless the Doctors Without Boarders; bless the volunteers; bless the missionaries; bless the UN workers; bless Bill Gates and his foundation, bless Bono and his work with the UN to forgive the debt of the insolvent African nations, bless the journalists that attempt to reveal the source of the carnage, and bless all the others that are the exception to this charge. They are like George Eliot’s definition of goodness, showing in their actions a desire for what is perfectly good without knowing clearly what it is. They are not waiting for the perfect moment or quintessential paradigm; they are a very small army of hope creating good.

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Traditional critical thinking focuses on identifying, evaluating, describing, assessing the problem with hard logic, then developing a set of objectives, followed by a process to correct the problem, then monitoring results, assessing with results, and looking backwards to how the results compare with previous interventions. The cow is often already out of the barn when it comes the right time for action.

Much of modern science is conducted without a single human being directly involved, but only a coded number in a stratified random sample. It is the antiseptic modern scientific method. There is little room in this method for subjectivity, perception of the principals because they are not present, or, indeed, for provocation, contradiction, self-organization of the flow of information, or continuous change of the focus or process itself with discursive spuriousness. There is a mania for “control of data.” It is the climate of “value free” analysis, and consequently, too frequently valueless in the end. It gets the results expected in linear terms with elemental verification. One of the odd things about science is that it infrequently publishes experiments that fail, when failure reported is often the riches learning experience. So, little or nothing changes.

Human behavior vacillates between deprivation on one front and lifestyle excess on the other. Between these poles, the AIDS epidemic continues to spread unabated while more people die everyday from overeating, overdrinking, smoking, and various forms of drug and lifestyle addictions.

The Drug War has failed because law-abiding citizens did not want to give up their illegal recreation drugs. The diabetes epidemic continues for America’s poorest because it lives on a high caloric diet of condiments not infrequently purchased at a premium price from fast food and convenient stores across the nation. Why has little been done to change this diet, or these purchasing and eating habits? Every single day 5,000 American teenagers start up smoking cigarettes for the first time, a habit that has led to a meteoric rise in health care insurance costs for all Americans. What has been done about this problem except rhetorically?

Obviously, while much is made of the breakthrough in genome research based on solving the riddle of DNA, little attention has been focused on understanding the DNA of man’s soul. The soul directs behavior and the body follows its direction, not the other way around.

When science looks at man, it takes the easy root and looks at the disease, not the person, not the cause, which is most likely inappropriate behavior. Man, the person, has become a magnificent toy to manipulate from the scientist to the entrepreneur with little apparent motive to find a way forward out of this trap.

Christopher Lasch wrote in “The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations” (1978) that consumption had become therapy for an anxious age. Thirty years later it is far more anxious than he had envisioned. He saw a flight from feeling and a shattering of regenerating life. It was as if, “why bother!” Alarming as his explanation, his words changed nothing. He sold a few books; stunned the American populace with a mosquito bite that didn’t change its cadence.

No real attempt has been made to change the mind of modern man. No one wants to penetrate the darkness of his soul. It is enough to have him lying on a couch, a specimen in a petri dish, or an algorithm, and then to objectify him as if he isn’t real. The mind and behavior has been classified, categorized, defined, compartmentalized, and mapped to satisfy curiosity, but not to take action. Action takes other more safe forms.

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Modern kineseology has made great strides in understanding the principles of mechanics and anatomy in relation to human movement. The lag is not in man’s physicality; the lag is in his mentality. The Greeks once worshiped perfection of man’s athleticism, but not at the expense of the cultivation of his mind. Today athleticism is mainly a spectator sport as is the exercise of the mind.

The confident thinker believes in a sound mind and sound body and not the development of one at the expense of the other, but both in concert. Nor does the confident thinker retreat to a couch potato glued to an iPod or cell phone, BlackBerry, or television screen in a bloated body and with an empty room for a mind.

While only ten percent of Americans are claimed by social scientists to be emotionally self-reliant and mature, it would seem a healthy balance between mind and body would be even less so. Unfortunately, recent reports indicate Europeans are declining in the same direction and at nearly the same rate.


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During the Age of Faith when the Roman Catholic Church was mightier than the sword, and emperors bowed to the will of his Holiness the Pope, and only less than ten percent of the people were literate, men of great courage stepped into this vacuum of ignorance at the expense of their professional station, social status, wealth, and life. Many were members of the clergy and our first scientists.

One of the earliest was the English clergyman Roger Bacon (1220 – 1292), called the first scientist for challenging the orthodoxy of his day. He advanced the understanding of optics, predicted everything from the horseless carriage to the telescope and stressed the importance of mathematics in science, and was long credited with the invention of gunpowder. His scientific writings were passionate attempts to warn the Church against suppressing the new science, and for it his works were banned.

Just as the Information Age created the Internet and changed our lives, the invention of the moveable type printing press by Gutenberg (1400 – 1468) dramatically changed the world. Printing led to books, books led to a reading public, which in turn led to translation into multiple languages, which then led to the creation of nations, and nations led to a new world economy and social structure. Printing also fueled The Reformation of Martin Luther (1483 – 1546), which spread like a prairie fire once ignited by his 95 theses of protest against the selling of indulgences by the Church.

Staggering change was in the air. Polish astronomer Nicholas Copernicus (1473 – 1543) came up with the mathematical proof that put the sun at the center of the solar system in which the earth was but one single planet of several orbiting around it. The implications were philosophically mind-boggling. It denied the ancient belief that the earth was the center of the universe befitting a creature made in the image of God. The work was published in the year of his death (1543) and so the Inquisition could not touch him. It did, however, disturbed the lives of many brave men that followed.

Galileo (1564 –1642) called the “first physicist” confirmed the work of Copernicus and was tried by the Inquisition and placed on house arrest for the rest of his life. Giordano Bruno (1548 – 1600), a Dominican friar, and enthusiastic supporter of Copernicus was burned at the stake. Johannes Kepler (1571 – 1630), the “Protestant Galileo,” was attacked for his laws of planetary motion and his mother tried as a witch.

In Church history from the time of Constantine when he declared Christianity the empire’s religion (312 AD) until the high Middle Ages and the Renaissance (1260 – 1594) the clergy remained the intellectual power. So, it is not surprising the first to note the “acres of diamonds,” or creative opportunities underfoot were the clergy. These rank amateurs introduced the scientific age, where knowing was appreciated and the consequences of such knowing were not in the equation. They unlocked the universe for us, not as the Church would have it seem.

And so creativity that is in the heart of every human being, discouraged for centuries, managed to breakthrough with a handful of courageous and curious men to see the light of day amidst the darkness.

There are no such constrains on creativity today. Why does it then have so little appeal? There is no one to oppose anyone from looking down and picking up one of these diamonds and examining it for what it is. Instead, Americans in the pink busy themselves with noise crunching the diamonds underfoot. Noise is anathema to creativity. But there might be another more profound reason. While man has come to accept that the earth is not the center of the universe, he still fails to accept that he is not the center of nature. This has had as devastating consequences as God being declared dead because it has meant the death of man as god on earth.

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There are more than seventy eight million working baby boomers in America between the ages of 45 and 62 who have been crippled by the Vietnam War and the frantic Nuclear and Space Race, shaken again awake by the Civil Rights and Women’s Rights Movements, and then lulled back to sleep with runaway economic prosperity.

Baby boomers at work became pyramid climbers on the job with constant campaigning for the next position willing to go the extra mile to make an impression. Eternal optimists, they bought into the utopia of their own American Dream as reality, and are now dogged and depressed with global competition crushing many of their employers in Chapter 11 bankrupsy and themselves with them. They fear they won’t even have a pension when they retire.

Now, baby boomer children are joining the workforce being defined by September 11, 2001 and the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York City, the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the jihad terrorist movement, multiculturalism, and the Internet. With a plate of too much complexity, they have become floaters hard to nail down to a career, a belief, a relationship, or a purpose. They see their parents running scared on varicose veins and say, “Lighten up!” They are just hanging out, going with the flow, having a good time while they can, repeating the same sins of their parents only without the guilt. They have abandoned the race and abdicated the leadership role that their parents turned inside out.

Fear, in the present climate, whether repressed or expressed, dominates. Questionable is not only the will to survive but to prevail. It is a time when war is the appetite of the mind rather than creativity and fear is its fuel. Where creativity exists it is in technology with its ubiquitous electronic eye of surveillance. This has made self-trust, self-reliance, self-activation, and self-renewal virtually impossible. We see the level of panic increase with every level to displace it. There is no longer domestic privacy, and so we have become obsessed with tools as toys.

We have entered the crucible of self-disgust descending into Dante’ Inferno because fear rules. Our collective hysteria demands that we be in constant motion serenaded by noise. Advertisers, always privy to societal madness, have latched on to this with commercials of car crashes to show if you own “the right car” you can survive, frying an egg on a skillet to show how drugs fry the brain, or using real terminal patients ravaged with lifestyle diseases to illustrate their dangers. Panic sells. Advertisers know people don’t want to think, but to be shocked into awareness if not necessarily sensible behavior. Can we again find our way to quiet, peace, and connection where the little rhythms count, where love is possible, relationships real, and trust is honest?

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The present ambience is the climate of the “big lie.” George Orwell gave us “1984” published in 1984, just after World War II when post modernity was ratcheting up into high gear and self-estrangement was taking on a Faustian form.

Now in the early twenty-first century we see Orwell’s doublespeak is the language of the times where war is peace and pain is pleasure and sorrow is happiness and insanity is sanity. Can we reverse this?

The evidence is not encouraging. We are not ready to give up the idea of being the god of nature. While Copernicus proved the earth was not the center of the universe, man has yet to accept the fact he is not the center of nature. We see ourselves as meant to have domain over nature not to live in accordance with her laws. So, we defy nature and that has spelled the plight of the earth.

It is so easy to run away from our problems. More books are being published than ever before while less people are reading. The ranks of the affluent grow, as do those below the poverty line shrinking the middle class. Education is accessible to nearly everyone, yet illiteracy is greater than it was a century ago. More leisure time is available, but increasingly the void is filled with work. A city of any size can flood instantly from a typical summer rain because the earth can’t breathe for the cement, concrete and asphalt suffocating it. And it goes on and on.

Creativity is not in happy circumstance. It is meant to make connection, not separation, first with self and then with others. It rises out of the soul and then projects a level of trust to make the world better. If only ten percent of the American population is self-reliant and mature, then I wager less than one percent is creatively self-confident. Self-confidence is genuine, not contrived. The disingenuous masquerades in the façade of confidence in the mock appeal of dress, manner, elocution, diction, syntax, curriculum vitae, and conversation oozing a self-assurance that is skin deep, a trust that is ephemeral, and a belief that has no foundation. Welcome to the modern world of the cynical. There is no chance for creativity if you are looking out instead of in for inspiration.

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It was the clergy as amateur scientists that broke free of the repressive Church doctrine to liberate man from his ignorance. Creativity took the form of curiosity verging on the dangerous because Church dogma was absolute. Did they appreciate the danger? This is not known, but what is known is that they used their passion to “find out.” They entertained the “god within,” as inspiration to discover the Mind of Nature.

Perhaps, it will be the new clergy that will break us free from our solipsistic arrogance and pervasive dullness. This will be difficult. The new clergy, you see, are not in the pulpit, but in the scientific laboratories. They are not free of solipsism as they discover as they please with little thought what technologists might do with their discoveries. Spirituality, which once guided early scientists, is not in their repertoire.

If the new clergy is the scientist, and the scientist believes in a value free analysis where there is no subjectivity, and feelings cannot enter the equation, then there is not room for the soul that must be energized for man not to disabuse Nature as he continues to do.

If the new clergy are the leaders of the new religion, but have little interest in guiding the mind and will of man, it is unlikely that man will go where he expects to go.

If the new clergy are the scientists and they are looking only to the complexity of the universe but have little inclination to look into the complexity of the human heart, it will never understand why Sammy never stops running.

If the new clergy are the scientists and fail to address the illicit connection between wealthy drug users and the cartels, and instead focuses on ghetto poor distributors, supply side economics will continue and flourish unabated.

If the new clergy are the scientists and fail to expose the link between lifestyle and epidemics such as AIDS and diabetes and heart disease, and likewise fail to come up with a strategy of action, they will be as pusillanimous as their religious predecessors.

If the new clergy are the scientists and they limit its role to scientific evidence of global warming and other maladies of nature, but remains above the politics of ecology, then such places as Florida will sink into the sea.

Once the religious was the beacon of hope of spiritual salvation, but that has died without anyone noticing. It was a psychic force when it took on authority and suffered for it. Likewise, early scientists were ostracized from society, their families humiliated, their papers and books burned reducing them to a pariah, but yet they persisted. Will scientists, as the new clergy, be so persistent on the human plane?

The new religion and its clergy have taken the easy root of looking at the universe, nature, and subatomic man, but not social man. It has left that to the descendents of the witch doctors who ape hard science with soft science replication. Lost in the equation is nowhere man because the eternal conflict within man is outside its purview.

Hard science has left all this to soft science, to the data collectors and statistical reifiers and paradigm creators, the labelers and cosmetic interventionists. This has kept the mind of man as flat as he once saw the earth. It has kept the attention on cloning, stem cell research, DNA identification, digital technology, and printed circuitry that is as small as a pen, but always away from the problems of man being able to control his diet, his sex life, his lifestyle, and therefore his inclination to self-reliance and maturity. Man is a freak of nature because he sees himself as the center of it. He and his religions have never reconciled him to the fact that he has no more right to be than any other creature on earth. Not only is it time for man to put no one above the other or no other above the one, but it is time that the same holds true of man with nature.

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