THE MISSING CHINK?

THE MISSING CHINK?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© August 2006

A READER WROTE:

Someone is using your metaphor Jim. Nothing to worry about - it's a book about something quite different than a self-constructed cage. However, it's interesting they decided to use the same metaphor as you. See below:

Our Schools/Our Selves: Spring 2006

Education's Iron Cage and Its Dismantling In the New Global Order
May 1, 2006 | National Office | Topic(s): Education | Author(s): George Martel | Publication Type: Our Schools Our Selves | Research Desk: Education | ISBN: 0-88627-474-5 | Pages: 220

Over the last three decades, global capitalism has carried out a full-scale assault on public school systems around the world. This collection of essays, edited by George Martell, describes the range and power of this assault and opens up our understanding of the savage privatization agenda in public education The contributors to this collection come from Australia, Canada, England, First Nations Communities, Latin America, Quebec, Western Europe, South Africa, South America, South Korea and the United States. And they bring more than a story of neo-liberal dominance in our schools. The explore the resistance that is building to this dominance, among students and teachers, parents and communities.

THIS WAS SHARED WITH A FRIEND WHO IN TURN WROTE:

Education's cage for our children is a hot button for me. The more obtuse and pseudo-scientific/professional their language gets, the worse education gets.

If you think the nowhere man has problems, they are most visible and exasperating in those crafts that have tried to turn themselves into "professions." Teachers, Police, and Corporate/Government Managers - grin - run a close second as a group to lawyers and doctors as those who can turn ordinary lives into Kafkaesque nightmares!

AND FINALLY, I RESPONDED IN KIND WITH A PIECE I CALL “A MISSING CHINK?” It follows:

I don't differ with you a whole lot in this assessment. Where I do depart is that I think I understand the inevitability of this kind of fumbling as we are in a transitional period, and no transitional period has ever been without disruption, contradiction, and folly.

I just completed my "social conscience" segment in my latest walk -- not yet transcribed however -- in which I take the social parameters from birth to rebirth in old age. I have no idea how it will read once transcribed, but as I told BB it seemed some of the most integrated stuff I've come up with of late. We shall see.

Yes, there is something of the cage metaphor in almost everything around us; and yes, we are very much encapsulated in the routine if not the mindset of NOWHERE MAN in NOWHERE LAND.

But unlike Orwell, who had the right medium with the right message for the right time, I seem to be a little out of sync with the mindset of my contemporaries. Not something new, however.

Ken Shelton sent me my article in the February issue of Leadership Excellence -- he had previously sent me the PDF electronic version, but I like a hard copy in my hands.

Ken presents "in" and "out" favorites in leadership, among the "in" were John Kotter and Michael Dell. I have peripheral connection with these two gentlemen.

With Dell, because I've lost a great deal of money on the Dell stock, and Kotter, as I sent my Director of the Management Development Center for Honeywell Europe Ltd. to interview him when I was operating out of Brussels.

Kotter, you may recall, was advocating "cutting edge" technology when the horse was already out of the barn. This was 1987 and Japan and South East Asia were already eating our lunch.

I wanted my man to get a sense of his thinking in the period of the 1970s when a little advanced warning might have helped. Well, my man never got to Kotter although he had an appointment, and had traveled from Brussels to interview him among other "change agents." The bureaucracy at Harvard was thicker than the Kremlin in the hey days of the Soviet Union.

My point is that both men are members of the myth-making machine that still believes in the dominance of the US in business. It is reactionary thinking of Monday morning describing why we didn't win on Saturday night. We call it "Monday morning quarterbacking," or always having answers for why what we expected didn't happen and whose fault it was. We are good at this.

What we are not so good at is anticipating and dealing with problems before they coalesce into a nightmare.

It is the American idea of "if it ain't broke don't fix it," which I think is the most stupid slogan in the American business lexicon. I ran into it at Nalco, and of course at Honeywell as well.

I attempt to point out that we are locked into vertical thinking and cognitive reasoning (explaining everything after the fact) and not complementing it with lateral thinking (anticipating the trouble ahead when things are going splendidly). Stated otherwise, vertical thinking is critical thinking, or dealing with what is known, or in accepted terms with what has been done before, whereas lateral thinking is creative thinking or concerning itself with what is not known or nailed down but can be found out by being speculative, conceptual, contradictory, and illogical.

Obviously, lateral thinking would be unwise without vertical thinking, but vertical thinking would be much more complete complemented by lateral thinking.

There isn't a front in which I don't see the existence of this gap.

Education has always been a leader in "gap thinking" -- when in trouble invent another course or program, don't stop and consider that the curriculum is possibly totally wrong for the times. Where is it written, for example, that a student of fourteen-years-old ready for college should have to spend four boring years in high school? Instead, we have a curriculum of 12-years of schooling that has been written in concrete. Nor where is it written that "C" students in my day should graduate with 3.9 GPA's today?

A professor wrote only yesterday in the op-ed page of The Tampa Tribune (August 25, 2006) that her college students, all with high grade point averages from high school, don't read books. When asked who their favorite authors were, the only author they could think of was Dan Brown of "The De Vinci Code." She laments, if you don't read, you can't write, and it you can't write you can't express yourself, and if you can't express yourself you have no business in college. Hurrah! I hope she doesn't lose her job!

You mention the word "professional." I've written a good deal on this subject. We have been in a 50-year fixation with management, management as a profession, if you want to call it that, which became only of serious moment during and after World War II.

Management has every right to be proud of its accomplishments in that Great War, but it has ridden that status for more than 60-years now. Management is however not the stick that stirs the drink. It hasn't been so since the flood of college trained people have come to dominate the workforce. The least able contingent in the corporation is those that lead it. This is verified every day. You don't have to take my word. Just read the headlines of the business news.

The problem, and it has not yet been resolved, but it will, because in peace as in war necessity is the mother of invention. Otherwise, entropy wins out.

We have made stars of the Dells and Jobs and Gates and Buffets when they simply rode a trend based upon the work of many people now forgotten who created the major technologies a century ago. We are in the imitative and refinement stage. None of these billionaires created the science or technology that they have come to perfect. Indeed, this is currently the least creative period in over a century. They are riding on the back of the inventions of the radio, telephone, television, computer, airplane, automobile, and on and on that were invented in the nineteenth or early twentieth century.

So, I don't think the problem is whether you believe there is such a thing as a professional class or not -- I can see your point -- as people deemed professional don't behave like professionals.

That said professionals are the next iteration in the scheme of things. Unfortunately, their voices are not being heard because the most brilliant of them are silenced and the most affable and symbiotic are promoted and ride the gravy train as long as they can. Sycophantism is not a disease. It is the character of the complex organization today. Professionals are trained to this distinction.

First, professionals have a conforming and conformist education that is reified in MBA programs as if taken from a page of Roman Catholic indoctrination. Second, self-interests and survival win over integrity. And third, they know what happens if you don't toe the mark, ring the bell, salute the chair, and walk quietly on the job -- you get dumped or demoted.

There is an interesting story of Eric Edward "Chink" Dorman-Smith of the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers in World War II.

Chink was a tall, well read, witty, sardonic, charming man, and a brilliant strategist.

He, not Montgomery, was responsible for the planning that resulted in turning the Second World War around by the decisive British victory in North Africa against Rommel at Alamein.

Chink was purged into obscurity because he forgot to conceal his brilliance or tolerate the mediocrity around him, including the strutting General Montgomery.

Chink had an astonishing run of quick promotions from captain to brigadier general in ten years. He wore brilliance openly on his sleeve -- a mistake. He was a theoretician (lateral thinker) and a perfectionist; he did not however always understand how to handle the common clay of mankind (he lacked touchy-feely palaver); and he could not and would not compromise his principles in the comfortable British way.

Junior officers while his outspokenness and quick-witted personality created enemies above admired his intellect and imagination.

He had such a flow of ideas combined with a caustic tongue that it was often imagined that he was essentially a staff officer and a theorists rather than a commander. No commander would ever be so direct!

Rommel knew of him and respectfully mentioned him in his memoirs. But his superiors envied him, not least of whom were General Montgomery and Prime Minister Churchill.

They both disliked his failure to show obeisance to them, not to mention his arrogant manner and sharp tongue when asked his assessment of a situation.

Doubts spread about his ability to command troops, not from the troops, but from senior commanders. Skepticism grew about his military theories, confessing they were brilliant but unsound.

But here is where the rubber hit the road -- Montgomery used his strategy to defeat Rommel, going against convention, at the second Battle of Alamein, which turned the war around. Great Britain needed this victory to gain the total support of the United States.

Chink made his bed when he challenged Churchill in an open staff meeting prior to the first battle. He saw the proposed strategy as being wrong for the situation although previously successful elsewhere, arguing it would result in the unnecessary sacrifice of too many men.

As Chink predicted, he was right and the prime minister wrong. His action sealed his professional doom. He was demoted, relieved of his command, removed from central command, and ultimately reduced to the rank of colonel and then captain. It was a long fall from grace.

One of the ironies is that those responsible for the disasters at Tobruk and Gazala, that Chink had predicted, went unpunished and their careers flourished, while the strategy that Chink had proposed and was eventually used at Alamein ended in a super victory.

I share this with you because I know, personally, that the Chinks of the world become scapegoats for those in a position to cover-their-asses, and no one is above doing so, even great men.

Churchill, incidentally, attempted to justify his approach to this situation in his volume "The Hinge of Fate." You may recall he was named by Time magazine "The Man of the Twentieth Century," and received the Nobel Prize for Literature for his Memoirs. Churchill wasn't the first great man to do this nor will he be the last.

Professionals, such as Chink, will not rise to the occasion until the organization develops a capacity to deal with conflict management in positive terms.

We are afraid of brilliance, afraid of arrogance (defined as people not obeisant to the powers at hand), afraid of imaginative ideas, and subject to retreat to a dark mood when someone is skeptical of our leadership and motivation when it is clearly wrong.

There is no phase of the system in which this declension doesn't exist.

One time when I was teaching a graduate seminar in organizational development (OD) to US Air Force officers at MacDill Air Force Base for Golden Gate University, a young man rose to his feet, looked me in the eye, and chastised me for a litany of reasons, finding my teaching method chaotic, confusing, conflicting, and on and on.

All the time he was talking growing redder and redder in the face, I was smiling. He must have talked for at least five minutes. When he was done, I said stretching out my hand to embrace his, "Welcome to OD?"

I had been goading the class on to penetrate its ubiquitous passivity. They acted as if I had all the answers and they none; as if I was giving them something and they were not expected to get anything on their own. I wanted them to be actively engaged not passively responsive. I wanted to create a typical OD climate, and I was willing to wait until someone discovered that they were immersed in it. Risky? Yes. But well worth it!

A few years later, I received a letter from this young man. He was now a pilot, a major in the USAF. He said that moment in that class was a turnaround moment in his life. Funny thing happened, he said, I finally started to trust myself, which lowered my contempt level, and I found I started to become more trusting of others. It has been smooth sailing ever since.

Well, that is a bit grand, but he was ready. All I did was give him permission to recognize his readiness. I don't see many like him, and until we do, this United States of America will sink deeper and deeper into the quicksand of NOWHERE LAND playing the role of NOWHERE MAN.

Always be well,
Jim

* * * * * *
An exchange of correspondents on a subject common to us all. NOWHERE MAN in NOWHERE LAND is a book that I have completed but has not yet found a publisher.

PLAN YOUR WORK, WORK YOUR PLAN! Where do you want to go in life?

Plan Your Work,
Work Your Plan
Where do you want to go in life?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© August 2006

If you are not organized, you will get somewhere, but not necessarily where you would like to go. Ask yourself, “Am I in the pilot’s chair on in a passenger’s seat?” You don’t have to be a captain of industry, only the captain of your own destiny.

Be patient and it will be returned tenfold. Don’t be taken in by the tough exteriors of others. We all walk this earth with great vulnerability.

When we think of planning, we often think of something written in concrete. That is not the case. Planning is not absolute but rather the unfolding of life’s journey.

A well-planned life is an exploration of our unique character. The two defining parts: essence and personality. These must be in balance to prosper in life.

Personality is the acquired self—the many masks we wear in public. There is a time when personality is assertive; other times conciliatory. When the display is inappropriate, a person can be perceived as a tick out of sync. There are behavioral expectations that make some comfortable with us, and others not; a person desperate to be as expected is always uptight.

Essence is that sleeping talent crying out to be expressed. It is never the talent of another person. So, comparing and competing will be a disappointment at the expense of that talent.

It takes awareness and risks to put talent to use. This begins with a test as we often discover our talent by accident, or in play.

We may be doodling and discover we can draw; organizing a neighborhood spoof and feel a passion for drama; humming a song and find we can carry a tune; tinkering with a radio and discover a fascination with electronics; recalling something we read and discover an eidetic memory; reciting in class and find we have command presence; doing a science project and discover a facility for explaining complex ideas in simple terms; daydreaming and imagine stories already in print.

High achievers confess the accidental discovery of talent. While everyone is gifted, few run far and hard and long as these people. Most need someone to point out their gifts to them.

There are many talents: athletics, music, writing, painting, learning foreign languages, mathematics, science, conceptual thinking. Talent cannot be developed if it is not recognized. Once recognized, the risk factor enters. The talent must be disciplined to perfect it as something special and useful to others. Life is a series of wins, losses and lessons. Talent is never enough. You must embrace failure to succeed.

Mentors recognize something in a person, and then assist in developing of it. It is never too late for one’s essence to bloom. As long as the mind is alive and the body healthy, it is possible to do what you have been postponing.

The Mind’s Plan Set Free

Many factors go into a life’s plan. Often they are composed of what we should do. It is counterintuitive to think that the best plan is a plan that allows essence to rise to the occasion when it is ready, and not before.

Nothing we learn is ever lost. Everything is integrated into our life as we venture forward. The road may prove bumpy, but in the counterintuitive world, the mind is always free to venture into new and surprising territory.

Confident thinking planning is a learning process in constant motion, a journey of surprises and happenstances fueled by the effective utilization of one’s inherent ability.

Obstacles placed in the way challenge passion, test resolve, and congeal character. We are in the learning business from start to finish. Little successes build to greater successes, which encourages us to seek new challenges and higher expectations.

It is almost as if there is an secret plan inside our mind waiting to unfold, a plan of many junctions, and timetable as to when best to take one or another road, while making it clear you can always double back. The sign ahead may indicate the best possibility consistent with logic, but it may not be the best road for you.

Society gets better one person at a time. To be useful to others, you must first be useful to yourself. To be comfortable with others, you first must be comfortable with yourself. This means you must accept yourself as you are and others as you find them.

A person who plans his work only in the context of his colored perspective—without correction and compromise—will never find satisfaction.

Nothing is ever wasted. No matter how many turns you make you are picking up valuable material along the way. No one escapes the impact of culture. It dominates when you believe you are operating with free will unencumbered with social convention. It is in recognizing cultural constraint that suitable choices will surface with a natural confluence of essence and personality.

So often planning is a maddening quest for consistency as if a puppet on a string. More real is that you may tire of your initial plans and decide do something entirely different. That is not being indecisive. That is being open to life.

The Prudence of Destiny

Confident thinking is not about impressing. It is about being useful. If a plan doesn’t have a social payoff than it is an immature plan. A plan should mold your personality to fit your essence in service to others.

Our life has a plan, and since we don’t know the plan, we don’t always pick up the gauntlet. Thinking about my own career, a professor at university introduced me to my writing self, but I backed away from that introduction to become a chemist. Was this vanity? Yes. I was vain to taking the low risk road. But I was vain to keep my mind and body disciplined to avoid lifestyle excesses. I was also vain to husband my talents and master my skills so as not to be a passenger in someone else’s vehicle.

People always looking for the lucky break seldom get off their duff. They are looking for answers in all the wrong places. When not found, they collapse into self-pity and fold into bitterness. You don’t seek a career. You create a career. Asked what they want to do, they answer flippantly, “Certainly not what I’m doing now.” They are in a cage of their own making.

The confident thinker recognizes success is a journey, not an end. Little triumphs segue to larger ones, always with the recognition that setbacks and detours are part of the course, and that a plan acquires greater clarity with persistence.

You can start at any time to reboot your plan. One of my blessings was I never came from money; never had a parachute to break my fall. If I didn’t come up with a winning strategy to move forward, then I took a “time out.” Can you imagine the power I have had to control my destiny? You become enterprising knowing failure is your constant companion and have no option but to succeed.

So, what is the right age to become a confident thinking planner? There is no right age. People have turned hobbies into livelihoods after they have retired.

Nor is there a limit to the talent that lies right under your nose. It could be painting, writing, inventing, or homemaking. Ordinary people have always changed the way we think, and what we appreciate. They find their niche when they don’t ignore the itch.

Article is an excerpt from Dr. Fisher’s next book Ten Steps to Confident Thinking. Visit www.fisherofideas.com

BE YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND!

Note to readers: This article is to appear in the October 2006 issue of The Personal Excellence Journal. It is an excerpt from The Taboo Against Being Your Own Friend (1996) authored by Dr. Fisher. The book is available from www.amazon.com or www.fisherofideas.com or ask for it at your favorite bookstore.


Be Your Own
Best Friend

By James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

We are all authors of our own footprints in the sand, heroes of the novels inscribed in our hearts. Everyone’s life, without exception, is sacred, unique, scripted high drama, played out before an audience of one, with but one actor on stage.

The sooner we realize this, the more quickly we overcome the bondage of loneliness and find true friendship with ourselves. Indeed, it is a long road from being the apple of everyone’s eye to being our own person, warts and all. Some of us never make the transition or transformation. We are programmed from birth as how to think, feel, and even wonder about the mysteries of life. It is called socialization, and society is rather reluctant to deal with new contingencies brought on by drastic change. Society worships control, harmony, and conformity. Society resists change, and attempts to reconfigure new information to conforming criteria, or to what society already knows to be true. Society is rich in denial and impoverished of reality.

Society is the cage we enter when we are born and the cage we must deal with all our days. Society is always looking through the rear-view mirror as it moves ahead, and thus clashes with reality. That is why society often becomes hysterical, unable to accept deviation from its arbitrary norms. Therefore, it must be the individual who is wrong. The individual is meant to feel self-contempt for being out of step with the expected, as if the expected were written in the individual’s DNA code.

The only safe haven in a world of constant change is to be your own best friend by asking:

· How do I feel about myself—not as I am supposed to be, but as I am?
· How comfortable am I in my own skin?
· Am I in control of my own life?
· Is my day from sun up to sundown an attempt to please others because that is what is expected of me?
· Or do I go against the grain and assert myself as I am?
· Do I take the risks that ensure my integrity, my authenticity?
· Or do I play it safe and accept self-hating as my inevitable baggage?

How can you find and relate to yourself in this labyrinth of life—this cage in an age that has no discernible center and has lost its moral compass. Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre writes: “Man’s problem is not to keep his freedom but to win it. Men are not visible to one another. Too many machines and social structures block the view.” Man is no moral abstraction to Sartre, but a living, pulsing human being in need of his fellow man’s involvement and support, and not likely to get it from his society.

I believe that we must climb this mountain called “society,” first within ourselves before we can negotiate the abyss below and the trap beyond. To the question: "Is there no hope, no exit from this labyrinth?" Sartre replies: “Certainly. You can take action against what people have made of you and transform yourself. It is not a question of knowing oneself, but of changing one’s life. It is not addressed to us yet, but willing or not, it is of us that the fundamental question is asked: By what activity can an ‘accidental individual’ realize the human person within himself?”

I submit the hope is by you being your own best friend. It is a lifelong struggle from childhood through adolescence to maturity to establish a career, a relationship with significant others, and then, should you have children, to go through the process again.

Often, you do to your children what was done to you. You put the same monkey on their backs that was put on yours. You create the same self-doubt in them that was created in you. You blame yourself while growing up by second guessing what you should and should not do, failing to understand why we desired what we actually did. It is a monkey circus we play on ourselves.

Like a spinning top, your life can spin out of control and come to rest exactly where it started without interruption or insight, denying you the freedom to experience life to the fullest. Or you can become obsessively concerned with always looking over your shoulder to see if someone is watching.

Each of us, as we come to our journey’s end, must realize we come in alone and leave alone, and that the portrait we paint can be either like Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray or it can be an honest reflection of a life lived.

To have a friend, you must be a friend—starting with yourself. PE

Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr. is the author of the prize-winning article and book The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend.

CONFIDENT THINKING NO. 9 -- PLAN YOUR WORK & LIVE YOUR OWN AGENDA!

CONFIDENT THINKING NO. 9

PLAN YOUR WORK, AND THEN WORK YOUR PLAN!
WHERE DO YOU WANT TO GO IN LIFE?
THE PURPOSE OF YOUR LIFE IS WHAT YOU DO!
LIVE YOUR OWN AGENDA!

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

If you are not organized, you are going to get somewhere but not necessarily where you would like to go. Ask yourself, “Am I in the pilot’s chair, or in a passenger’s seat?” You don’t have to be a captain of industry, only the captain of your own destiny.

Be patient and your patience will be returned tenfold. Don’t be taken in by the tough exteriors of others. We all walk this earth with great vulnerability. It is therefore an asset to be acquainted with our own, not to be embarrassed by it, or apologetic for it. To be vulnerable is to be alive and receptive to experience.

When we think of planning a life, and working a plan, we often think of something written in concrete, well defined with little left to chance. That is not the case at all. Planning is not about the ultimate goal, but rather preparation for and exhilaration with the unfolding journey at hand.

A well-planned life is first of all an exploration of many sides of our unique character, disposition and talent. The two defining parts in all of us are our essence and our personality. These must be in balance in order for us to prosper in life. If one is developed at the expense or exception of the other, then we lose.

Personality is the acquired self. It is the many masks we wear in public given the situation and the circumstances. There is a time when personality displays its assertive side, other times its conciliatory side, and still other times its light-hearted humorous side. It is when one of these sides on display is inappropriate that a person can be perceived as a tick out of sync, or off center.

With personality, there are numerous unwritten but well-defined behavioral expectations that make others comfortable or uncomfortable. A person can become so obsessed with these unwritten rules, wanting so desperately to behave as expected that the person is generally uptight and self-defeating from the first.

One time in undergraduate school, the most brilliant member of my class, who had this inordinate need to please and fit in, invited me to have a coffee with him. Once we were seated, he grabbed my shoulders and looked into my eyes, and said, “Teach me how to be sincere!”

Essence is that raw indefinable yet not realized sleeping talent in a person crying out to be expressed. Virtually everyone has a deep reservoir of talent. The problem is that the talent a person has is never the talent another person has, and therefore if the focus is on comparing and competing with someone else, to be just like them, the result is bound to be disappointing and usually at the expense of that raw talent that lies dormant in its deep dark chamber.

It takes awareness, judgment, diagnostic skills, and risks to wrest this raw talent from its dark chamber and put it to some kind of use, which of course always begins with a test. The pleasant thing about talent is that we often discover we have it quite by accident, or in play.

We may be doodling to while the time away, and discover we have the ability to draw.

We may like organizing the kids in the neighborhood to create a pretend drama, and discover we have the nascent gift of the dramatist.

We may be humming a tune we hear on the radio and find we have a voice that can carry it like a songbird.

We may tinker with an old radio on the blink and discover we can think in three dimensions and have mechanical aptitude.

We may read a few lines in a book, or hear a teacher speak and find later we can remember nearly every word spoken, and also can find buried quotes in the book going directly to the page upon which they occurred, assets for a writer.

People listen to us; want to be in our company, and to go where we are going, and qualities of the leader.

We find mathematics not only easy but also stimulating. The language of mathematics speaks to us in a way that makes our understanding of physics, chemistry and biology moving, qualities of the budding scientist.

We have moving pictures in our heads that are like our own private screening, rolling stories out as if they were already in print.

These talents are expressed in biographies of individuals who often came quite by accident to realize they were special. The point is everyone is special, but unfortunately too few run so far and so hard and so long to exploit their specialness.

* * * * * *

Since so many have absolutely no idea they have a special talent, they need someone else to point this out.

One time I was in Denver giving a seminar, and my cousin, an engineer attached to the Atomic Energy Commission, invited me to a party of his friends. They were all talking about an individual not there who apparently had incredible skills in quantum mechanics and related engineering principles. Episode after episode was related about his astounding work in the laboratory, and yet to a person, they thought he undervalued and underutilized his supreme talent.

“There is no question in my mind,” said one, “if he focused on this discipline he would come up with a Nobel Prize making project.” The heads all nodded in agreement.

During this discussion, I had remained silent, and so it was a bit of a shock when I said, “It will never happen.”

They all turned to look at me suspiciously, me the intruder, disturbing their hagiography. Then I smiled, “Until someone tells him he is special, and has this possibility, it won't happen. We tend to take for granted what we do with ease as if everyone else possessed the same capability."

They all seem to take this in with quiet reserve. “I wonder,” I said finally, “has anyone here ever talk to him the way you are talking about him now?” No one ever had. “Well, then, there is the problem," I said quietly.

Years later I asked my cousin if anyone had ever taken up my challenge. “I did,” he said, “and he was stunned.” Did he do anything with it? “Well, he didn’t win the Nobel Prize," he laughed, "but he did become head of our department, and then went on into intelligence work for the government.” My cousin had gone with him.

* * * * *

There is a twenty-two-year-old baseball player by the name of Scott Kazmir. He plays for the Tampa Bay Devil Ways in the American League. When he was a boy of nine-years-old trying out for the Little League team, the coach was hitting ground balls to each player at shortstop. When the ball was hit to Scott, it went through his legs and rolled all the way to the center field fence. He ran out, picked it up, and threw a strike to first base. The throw traveled more than 200 feet away on a straight line.

This was no small of achievement for a boy so young. His coach told him that few boys have such a good arm. “I’m going to make you a pitcher,” he declared, and he did. Up to that point, Scott had no idea that his arm was special. In 2006, he was a member of the American League all-star baseball team, having won ten games in the first half of the season. Only ten other pitchers so young in the more than hundred year of major league baseball history have won so many games.

So, it was this scrawny little kid, Scott Kazmir, whose talent was first noted and then molded has made him into a major league baseball player.

* * * * *

It doesn’t always work out that way. When I was a boy, playing baseball on the courthouse lawn between the jail and courthouse in Clinton, Iowa, a patch sheriff Ky Petersen had converted into a baseball diamond for us, Dick Tharp had an arm not unlike Scott Kazmir’s.

Only it was Dick’s misfortune it was the time of World War II. There was no Little League, no organized baseball for boys of the ages of 9 to 12 to profile their talents, just pick up baseball among kids.

That said Dick had an arm that could throw the baseball 300 feet on a line, and many of us watched this in awe as he demonstrated it repeatedly.

One time he even threw the baseball from home plate in Riverview Stadium hitting the scoreboard on the fly 390 feet away. But there was no major league scout assessing Dick's talent, only the Courthouse Tigers, a neighborhood team, playing against other neighborhoods in the city.

Dick turned out to be a good pitcher but without anyone to promote his talent. Instead, he became a cross-country truck driver and that became his life’s work.

* * * * * *

A moment of déjà vu was experienced when I was invited to his home outside Orlando (Florida) to celebrate his fiftieth wedding anniversary. I hadn’t seen Dick since we were kids. It was a country home with a large open field behind the house, a pasture for his horses. After dinner, I mentioned to his wife what a great arm he had as a boy, only to have his thirty-three-year-old son interrupt me, “I’ve got a better arm than dad had, don’t I dad?”

Dick smiled, and said nothing. His son, a devil-may-care kind of guy, a smoker and drinker, who still doesn’t like the idea being nailed down to anything permanent, looked a bit wasted, leading me to say. “I hardly think so.”

“Want me to prove it?” he asked. Dick’s son picked up a new baseball with his left hand -- Dick had been right handed -- took the cigarette out of his mouth, rolled up his left sleeve, and said, “What do you want me to hit?”

The red wood fence at the edge of the pasture was at least 300 feet away. I said in an incredulous voice, “Hit the fence.”

Undaunted, ignoring my sarcasm, he said, “Where do you want me to hit it?”

Well, I couldn’t help myself; I roared with laughter, “Where do I want you to hit it? Anywhere, okay?” I thought he was putting me on. Sensing this, he said, “I’m serious. Where do you want me to hit it?”

Well, there was a red post that joined the two sections of the fence together with a diameter of about ten inches. “Hit that post!” I laughed again.

It was obvious that he now felt the challenge. “Where do you want me to hit it, high, low, or in the center?”

“Come on now, this has been enough fun," I said, "You don’t have to hit it at all. I apologize for putting you on like this.”

I was ready to go back into the house when he said; “I’m going to hit it about in the middle if that is okay by you.” And he did. On the fly. It was simply beautiful to watch. That white new baseball flying through the air as if it had eyes, a jet propulsion motor, and an electronic guiding system made that wonderful baseball sound as baseball and wood collided. I was back at the courthouse, back to those many years before with Dick Tharp's beautiful arm on display.

* * * * * *

Two talented left handed arms, one realized and one clearly not, both gifted by genetics, one gifted by discipline and the other not. Scott Kazmir received a $2 million signing bonus when he turned professional. Dick’s son has never pitched professionally. He confesses he wasn’t interested, but I suspect he didn’t want to submit to the discipline. His arm was simply something to show off, like for me, and to stay loose from any formal commitments, such as a baseball contract.

* * * * * *

Athleticism is one talent. There are many others. Musical. Talent to write. To paint. To draw. To acquire foreign languages. To excel in mathematics and science. To think conceptually.

All these talents can be realized only if the person recognizes talent as a gift, and then develops it. This takes discipline to bring out the latent talent and then to perfect it as something special and useful to others. It means taking the bumps in the road when the pavement ahead is not always smooth, when broken down bridges can derail your effort if you are not hardened to the task at hand.

Some of us acquire mentors that recognize in us something special and then assist us in developing it. I have been lucky to have had many mentors in my life.

When I was in undergraduate school, taking a required core course in “Modern Literature, Greeks, and the Bible,” a professor had me take a make-up examination orally rather than written. I sensed that he didn’t want to grade another paper with the semester near ending. Previously, I had written a paper on “The Influence of Religion in My Life,” which was rather long and somewhat complex and I think this was another factor contributing to the oral examination.

In any case, the oral examination was on James Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” The examination started with a few routine questions, which I answered, then interrupting said, “Would it be possible if I could tell you what the book meant to me and how I interrupted it in light of my own experience?”

Behind a veil of spiraling cigarette mist, I couldn’t quite make out his face. I thought I heard a sigh, and then, “Indeed. Go on.”

For the next forty-five minutes I weaved the story of Joyce’s art with that of Stephen Dedalus, the main character, who was obviously Joyce, and his war with his religion, family, youth, and all the wild fury of his tormented soul. It was the sublimation of his personal confusion into his artistic compulsion, and the events that led him to think and act as he did. It was as if I was reading my own life. I not only had read the book, but also had reread it as if the bible, experiencing something like an epiphany.

Here I was a lad from a small Iowa town with no books on literature in my home, never having heard of James Joyce, but yet I could see an empathetic soul and parallel life with my own in his words.

It astounded me that someone could describe what had no language but gnawed at my conscience every day. I wondered how anyone could be so honest and forthwith, and yes, so gifted. My face burned with passion as I concluded my remarks and looked to the professor.

For a long moment, the room was silent. Then the professor asked, “What is your major?” I said that I was a chemistry major. He replied, “What are you doing in science?” I said self-consciously if not a bit arrogantly, “I’m good at it.” He said flatly, “You should be in the humanities, not science.”

The professor wanted to recommend me for the Honor’s Program at the University of Iowa, a program with international prestige, where I would pursue literature and the possibly of becoming a writer.

When I broached the subject with my railroad brakeman da, he was incensed, claiming such people road his trains: “Reading books, long hair, dirty, unkempt, hanging on each other.” Then he exploded a bomb. “Jimmie, can I ask you a question?" I nodded. "You’re not a goddamn fag are you?”

It didn’t matter that I wasn’t. It was clear he would be ashamed of me if I left science for the arts. I didn’t. I became a chemist.

What resulted from the professor’s observation is that I became a reader to which I have been loyal all my life. Writers who have influenced Western thought have been my constant companions. It has also made me a devout student of culture and its impact on behavior. You could say it was a combination of my reading and my international career that found me abruptly retiring, the first time, in my thirties to assess where I was and where I was going.

During this two-year sabbatical, I wrote one book, but instead of rejoining the workforce I returned to the university to earn my doctorate in industrial and organizational psychology. Armed with this training, I eventually returned to industry, only to retire a second time in my fifties to pursue the promise my good professor had suggested so many years before. It is never too late to start again.
As long as the mind is alive, the body healthy, and soul not ignored, it is possible to do what you have always postponed doing. The time is right, right now! More on this later.

THE COUNTERINTUITIVE PLAN OF THE MIND SET FREE

There are many factors that go into a life’s plan. Often they are composed of ideas we believe we should do with little room for variance. It is counterintuitive to think that the best plan is an open ended plan, or essentially no plan at all.

Intuitively we think getting there is all the fun, when that is not the case at all. We have this mania for sticking with things that become meaningless because we don't want to be seen as quitters, or we have this mania for completing tasks that take us where we don't want to go. I am talking from experience. We need people to point out our assets so that we can recognize and use them. We need to listen to people when their counsel makes sense to us. A plan has to breathe in order to live.

Sometimes we become stuck because no one is there to remind us of our talent. I think that is rare. More commonly, we take the safe road, the road most traveled. In my day, the safest road was to become a doctor of medicine, with it came a guaranteed income, communal prestige as a healer, and recognition of a person of substance, intellect, compassion, and caring.

Medical doctors have come in for a lot of heat in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Many MDs are leaving the profession because of the exorbitant malpractice insurance costs.

Medicine was once a male-dominated profession, but now more women than men are in the medical schools across the land.

Men like certainty. Western man has a reputation for being left-brain thinkers: logical, analytical, rational, sequential, digital, in a word, walking computers. And like computers, a lot that is going on can be missed, driving the good doctors into malpractice suits.

Women, on the other hand, while being left-brain efficient, are equally comfortable being right brain thinkers: holistic, intuitive, conceptual, non sequential, spatial, analogical. They think comfortably outside the box, be the box a computer or conventional wisdom. This is mainly because they have been traditionally treated on the periphery of serious thought. All that is changing now.

The medical analogy is given because both hemispheres of the brain can and should be used by everyone instead of the two hemispheres being at war with each other.

* * * * * *

We are moving through that wonderful Machine Age thinking where there was a place for everything and everything in its place to where we are today, living in total chaos. What we are doing now we probably won't be doing tomorrow because it and we won't be there for the doing.

Psychologist B. F. Skinner was first into music; Albert Schweitzer was first an organist, then a theologian, then a medical missionary, and finally a philosopher. There is a musicality to Skinner’s behavioral theories, as there is to Schweitzer’s philosophy. Both were Machine Age thinkers who had a confident sense of morality, humanity, and its predictability. Few read them anymore.

It is my belief that nothing we learn is ever lost but is integrated into patterns of our lives as we venture into the wilderness of the new. A chemist or engineer that becomes a psychologist will invariably bring his sense of balance into play in his theories and applications.

Such is the case with David McClelland’s theory of “expectancy valence motivation.” This comes right out of chemistry and atomic physics. Valence is the electronic charge on an ion, the higher the positive or negative charge the greater the magnetic attraction or separation, which dictates activity in a liquid or gaseous medium. Likewise, "expectancy valence motivation" is the theory that behavior will change as the valence of success builds to greater success. This encourages the individual to seek new challenges and higher expectations.

* * * * * *

It would seem there is an unrevealed plan inside everyone’s mind that is waiting to be unfolded. It is a plan of many roads and many junctions, and even with a timetable as to when best to take one or another road, while making it clear that you can always double back if you should choose, or find yourself lost.

This life road map has four-way stops and two-way roads, or super highways separated by islands in the middle with the roads going in all possible directions. There are road signs suggesting miles to desired destinations, informing of detours and rest areas as well for the traveler.

The signs indicate the possibilities ahead, which might be read intuitively or counter intuitively, that is, taking as given consistent with logic and speedy arrival, or as being too mundane causing the traveler to venture into the countryside with no clear idea where the road may go, reveling in the surprises along the way.

* * * * * *

Such was my counterintuitive experience after completing an assignment in South Africa, and retiring the first time.

Life made no sense to me. I was making a good living but I was not happy with what I saw, and experienced. It was inconsistent with my beliefs and values. It was the era of apartheid in South Africa.

I could ignore it and simply do my job, and let it go at that. But something in me would not allow that. Logic told me that I was too young to retire in my thirties. Logic further told me I had a wife and four small children to support. Beyond that no one in my extended family appreciated the idea, yet I did it. I took a two-year “time out,” and then backtracked on a road I had already taken, going back to school full-time and consulted on the side. Madness of course.

It has all worked out well for me but the road ahead would be bumpy with many potholes, washed out bridges, and sometimes roads completely blocked off or closed. After getting my doctorate, I had enjoyed a second ten-year career in industry, and was happily retired for the second time publishing a series of books and articles, making speeches and consulting. Life was good.

In the world of counterintuitive wisdom the mind is free and may sometimes find itself in surprising territory. When you are so self-absorbed, you forget about something as mundane as mortality, that is, until a close friend dies, and then everything changes.


That was the case with me when a dear childhood friend died. He was in his fifties at the height of his career. His death set my mind to remembering those halcyon Courthouse Tiger days. It found me doing field research for thirteen years (1990 - 2003) collecting information of that boyhood in the 1940s in my hometown, eventually publishing a memoir as a novel, “In the Shadow of the Courthouse” (2003).

Were it not for taking that road less traveled, the book would never have been written. The book is now frozen music of a time, which cannot be changed even though there is no longer a courthouse lawn. A large public safety building has been constructed in its place. Nor is there the complex of St. Patrick’s Grammar School, Church and Rectory where we both were programmed as Irish Roman Catholic students. This complex is pivotal to the courthouse story. That, too, has been erased from the community.


If I never write another book, I am glad this book was written. It is a snapshot of a period (1941 – 1947) when such lads as we came of age in the shadow of the courthouse while the United States struggled to come of age in the shadow of the atomic bomb.

THE BEST LAID PLANS GO AWRY OR THE POWER OF SURENDIPITY

Planning in confident thinking is a learning process in constant motion, a journey not an end, full of surprise and happenstance. Its only demand is the effective utilization of your inherent ability in the service of others.

Since our talent is not usually revealed to us whole, obstacles are to be expected as it fights its way to the surface of our being. It is the reason why we are half finished to the end.

So, in planning our work and working our plan, we are in the learning business from the beginning to the very end of our lives.

* * * * * *

Take the case of Seamus Farrell. Seamus was a good high school student taking a college preparatory course of four years of English, two years of Latin, four years of mathematics, physics, chemistry, social science, psychology and ancient and American history.

He majored in chemistry at a midwestern university, took a degree in it, and a position in research and development with a food processing company.

The “first obstacle” he encountered was to find he was not a competent bench chemist.

He lacked the mechanical aptitude to set up experiments, a crucial skill. Like others university trained students who had come to find themselves incompetent in the workplace, he thought the answer to his problem was more education. He applied for and was granted a fellowship to an eastern university to pursue graduate work in theoretical chemistry, thinking he would be happier building chemical models than monitoring laboratory experiments.

Already the father of two children under the age of four, he learned his wife was pregnant with a third child due when he was to assume his fellowship. Given the size of the grant, the expected course load, it was clear he could not satisfy the fellowship and support his family. He needed to make some honest money in a hurry.

"Chemical & Engineering News" had an interesting ad for a chemical sales engineer. He applied for the position and was hired. This meant relocating his family 350 miles from his hometown, where he was employed. He didn't like it much but was convinced that it would prove the right move; besides, it was only for nine months, or until he had to report to the eastern university.

Seamus had never sold anything, but that did not concern him. He had this vague notion that salesmen made money quickly and easily. Therefore, no problem, this detour would keep his plan on track.

The youngest member of a field district staff of eight seasoned sales engineers, he rode with the area manager the first two weeks in the field. At the end of that period, he was asked to critique what he had learned.

Now, it should be mentioned that Seamus was by nature opinionated, suffered fools poorly, and tended to be blunt and to the point of callousness, be the comments about him or others.

Conceived in innocence and molded in naiveté, Seamus, who had nearly a photographic memory, launched into a critique of each day and every call.

The substance of this analysis was that the sales calls were little more than social calls, that the area manager dominated the conversation in every instance never allowing the prospect to either express his interests or needs, that the focus was always on how wonderful our company’s products were, along with our company’s standing in the industry, but never any discussion of the customer's chronic problems or the cost benefits we might provide to the operation using our products. The area manager's face was burning, but Seamus was not through. "Plus, you never asked for an order.”

The following Monday, when Seamus went to the office, only his district and area manager were present, his seven colleagues were conspicuously absent. It was soon apparent that he was in trouble. He was told that he was obviously not cut out for this kind of work, that technical competence was not enough to succeed in the field, and that he should start looking for another job.

His mind raced. He was close to losing his composure. 'Oh my God, what a mess I've made of things,' he thought. 'I've disrupted my family, cut off my wife from her mother, the children from their grandparents. I've placed all my plans in jeopardy, plans my bosses know nothing about.'

One of his redeeming graces, something that he developed as a small child in the trauma of living in foster homes those first five years of his life, is to contain his emotions in the steel grip of contretemps of silence.

Noting this painful silence, the district manager looked to the area manager and nodded, and then said. "We will give you a complement of marginal accounts to service, which you are free to upgrade for the commission." Then packing his cigarette holder with a fresh cigarette, and lighting it, added, "And of course if you have a mind to call on competitor accounts in the area, feel free to do so."

Then the area manager broke the good news climate with, "Remember! This is only for 90-days. We expect you to have found another job before the end of this period."

* * * * * *

It was also during this same morning session that Seamus learned the company had a three-year sales training program in which the salesman was not expected to sell. The focus was primarily on developing technical skills to call on major utilities, paper mills, chemical and mechanical manufacturers, and the petroleum industry.

Out of this technical proficiency came the demand for the company’s products and services. There was apparently no need for any sycophantic salesmanship. The company, indeed, was designed to wow the customer into buying. The area manager was the prototype of the company's product, and Seamus had crashed him and the company with one blast of his mouth.

This information was a shock and surprise, as he needed to make commission money now, not three years from now. He never told anyone that the job was an interim step to his academic objective. Nor did he buy into the company’s elitism. The company claimed it recruited only chemists and chemical engineers; that only one of every 200 interviewed for selling positions was hired. True, the company had an elaborate screening process including an intelligence test, a three-hour session with a psychiatrist, and a full day of interviews with company executives. In the late 1950s, that was par for the course for most companies.

“Chemical & Engineering News” had duped him. Its advertisement had displayed the company’s field test kits, which were the reason he had applied for the position. These portable laboratories made him feel it was not too big a jump from the R&D laboratory. It made the transitioning from the lab to the field seem less radical.

Now, after this session with his bosses, it appeared he was not likely to make any quick cash, but more likely to lose his new job. He had gambled in the first place taking the position on a draw that was less than he had been making as a monthly salary in the laboratory.

So, the “second obstacle” was to upgrade the accounts he was given, and to find some way to breakthrough to sell accounts now held by competitors without any sales training.

His orientation in the company was a month’s technical training course at the company’s headquarters in Chicago. This course did not spend one minute on the selling situation. Complicating the matter further, Seamus was an introvert and introspective. No one could be further from a hearty fellow well meant like his area manager. Seamus was a better listener than an ad-libber, more inclined to study the customer and the surroundings than to bang his company's drums. He had no idea this would be found appealing to customers and prospects alike.

Seamus knew chemical engineering processes from pilot plant experience, but he did not know company products and applications. His low-tech marginal accounts seemed to enjoy his attention, happy to explain processes using his company’s products and how they worked or failed to work.

Often, these operations ran 24/7. Being on the road, Seamus was happy to work 12-hour days, calling on customers well into the night. What made this an easy option was the fact that he didn't watch television and had no inclination to hang out at bars. When in his motel, he either read books or planned for the next day. He also kept copious records of his calls as a way to check for consistencies and patterns of comments and complaints. He found by this device that there were only about 50 different ways prospects said "no," and not a single one beyond that. He found this both amazing and exhilarating. It meant it was easy for him to control the interviewing process, noting which prospects were likely to use which type of comments. He was on a steep learning curve but found it surprisingly easy.

His managers were mildly surprised when the first week he upgraded all the accounts he called on by at least 25 percent. This was a modest sum because they were small accounts. But the second week, he repeated the performance by upgrading another group of accounts by more than 33 percent. Then on the third week he went beyond the point of credulity. He sold the largest account of the district in the past three years.

In a small industrial town, one national company had three large plants employing a total of some 3,000 workers. It was Seamus's company's major competitor, who had held the account for the past quarter century. It was considered so solid no one called on it before Seamus did.

More remarkably, Seamus was given a blanket order for products and applications he knew only theoretically. It required his area manager to assist him in surveying these plants, ordering the appropriate chemicals, feeding and monitoring equipment. All the time the area manager was making these calculations, he kept shaking his head. Finally, he asked Seamus, “How did you do it?”

His immediate reaction was to lie, to hit back as hard as he had been hit, choosing to say simply, “I asked for the order.”

Actually, it was much more complicated than that. Seamus had learned some powerful lessons in servicing his marginal accounts.

All the problems his accounts were experiencing using his company’s products he assumed were problems for competitors' accounts using their similar products.

Success and failure was not unique to either but consistent with two other factors: how interested customer personnel were in applying his company's products correctly; and how well trained and motivated they had been by his company's sales engineer.

Seamus found it was easy to motivate technicians to test correctly and to modify pump feed and chemical dosages based on test results. It was also easy to show them how using more appropriate chemicals (chemical and system upgrades) the results would be even better and more cost effective, making their jobs easier and leading to kudos for jog performance.

The other thing he learned is that customer technicians enjoyed training him in better understanding his own company's technology. Changing roles as teacher and student seemed to solidify his relationship with these small accounts. But more importantly, Seamus was becoming savvy on applications. Many of these application engineers had inventive ideas for optimal performance of his company’s products.

This became the boilerplate of his presentation. He also discovered he had a facility for drawing visual schematics of systems capturing how they worked and where the trouble spots were likely to occur. He never used company brochures or product bulletins but used the spontaneity of creating process flow charts to illustrate his points.

A CASE IN POINT

His signal opportunity came when he called on this major competitor’s account in this small town with its three large plants of a national company.

While the superintendent of operations was busy putting out fires, his secretary escorted Seamus to the superintendent’s office in the middle of a seven-acre plant. Here Seamus could see just how chaotic operations were. When the superintendent finally appeared, nearly an hour later, he lit a cigarette, leaned on his desk, and said, “Okay, sport, you’ve got five minutes. What have you got for me?”

The previous 45 minutes Seamus observed the frantic behavior of people coming in and leaving the office, the samples of failed equipment on every surface, the constant ringing of the telephone that was never answered, the overflowing ash trays of cigarette butts, the coffee stains on papers and documents on desks and chairs, clipboards everywhere with highlighted action lists, and with the weary look on the face of the superintendent, he found himself saying, “I’m here to save your job!”

The superintendent almost swallowed his cigarette, but then broke into a gut-wrenching laugh that broke the tension and gave him a gleeful appearance. He relaxed and fell into his chair behind his desk. “You’re going to save my job!”

Then without preamble Seamus stepped behind the desk, beside the superintendent, and started to draw schematics of systems he was certain had failed, indicating where chronic problem were likely to be occurring and why, which gained the superintendent’s attention. He did this for every system he could think of with the superintendent correcting and adding detail. He then laid the several pages out neatly before him showing where the problems were, and how these problems could be systematically addressed.

Then without hesitation, Seamus asked for a month’s order in which he would install monitoring devices in the processes that would be evaluated on a weekly basis with chemical dosage levels adjusted until all systems were up and running to capacity.

You could say it was serendipity, luck of the novice, and there were grounds for such thinking. More accurately, it was confident thinking that was built on a base of listening and learning and relating to the fact that applications critical to success are the same for all competitors. Seamus saw it in his own accounts: applications could easily devolve to complacency that had little to do with the merit of one company’s products over another’s.

There was no way for Seamus to explain his success because he didn’t have the language of selling upon which to rely. Other successes followed. Regional managers invited him to explain how he planned and worked his plan in acquiring new business. He had to read selling books to approach making his ideas comprehensible, but found them inadequate to express his typology and methodology.

Sales books all focused on the customer as adversary, someone that had to be finessed, when he saw the obstacle to selling the arrogance of the salesman. Seamus developed a jingle to express this: To sell to Mr. Blue what Mr. Blue will buy, you must see Mr. Blue through Mr. Blue’s eyes.

The irony is that Seamus did, but he could never convince others in his company that it was that simple

A TOUCH OF RADICALISM SOMETIMES IS NECESSARY

So, thus far we have the career of a student who becomes a chemist, finds that not of his liking, seeks a grant to further his training in chemistry, only to be derailed by the pending arrival of a third child, where he attempts to take a detour into selling to keep his graduate plan on course to supplement the grant money, only to find he is almost fired from day one, but somehow is given a second chance, and succeeds beyond his wildest expectations.

So, Seamus stays in selling, with many wishing to learn of his success. This gives him exposure to the company brass, which he eventually joins, finding him an international troubleshooter for the company, eventually landing in South Africa.

It is 1968, a time of turmoil. The Untied States seems to be coming apart at the seams with riots in Chicago and Miami at the national presidential nominating conventions, with riots on college campuses across the nation over the draft and the war in Viet Nam, Dr. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy are assassinated, students are burning their draft cards, fleeing to Canada, and African American medal winners are raising their black gloved fists in defiance at the Summer Olympics in Mexico City. All of this is seem by from South Africa while experiencing apartheid or the separation of the races with draconian finality.

Yes, Seamus is yours truly.

When nothing makes sense, there are two options: deny it and go forward as usual, or deal with it and act accordingly to the dictates of your will. That may necessitate a bit of radicalism to break free from the modus operandi.

Radicalism can be self-creative or self-destructive. For example, a person, who has never been a drinker, turns to drink or drugs, who has never been a smoker, takes up smoking, who has never been promiscuous, becomes preoccupied with pornography, who has never been unfaithful, becomes adulterous. Such radicalism destroys. Equally destructive is to give up and give out and become embittered with life and everyone in it as if this turmoil will not pass.

Radicalism can be self-creative by taking a break from the grind, going on holiday, visiting the old neighborhood, and reliving the nostalgia that are the linchpins that have made you who and what you are. Life can take you out of the neighborhood, but never the neighborhood out of you. You carry it wherever you go, as it is part of your geography.

You could also take a total break as I did. In the back of my mind, once I was no longer working for a company, was the idea that I would be a successful writer, having no sense of what a ludicrous idea that was. I had published a book and a few articles, but it was clear that a freelance writing career was not sufficient to support my family.

My radicalism was then compounded when instead of seeking a full-time job; I went back to school full-time for the next six-years, year around to earn my master’s and doctor’s degree. I did that because I thought the university had answers. It did not.

The factory mentality has metastasized to citadels of learning. To be fair, the university made me aware of how my thinking had been carefully programmed into me. Its function was to prepare me to fill a certain slot in society with sufficient training. I was expected to be content with that status for the duration of my working life. The university had no qualms about making me aware that subliminal stimulation programmed me to be a conspicuous consumer and a slave to my lifestyle appetites. It was how society controlled me. My problem was not with what the university taught, but its complicit corruption in feeling its role was ended with the message.

The lack of self-creative radicalism is indicative that individualism, which Americans cherish, is actually nonexistent.

We are all conformists; even radicalism when it is expressed gives off the odor of conformity. Whatever we do, whatever we are we occupy well-defined slots to support the utopian clock that is always running faster and faster. Speed is the measure of all things. The unintended consequences of this are that we lose ourselves in being in constant motion.

THE CONFLUENCE OF ESSENCE AND PERSONALITY

Everything starts with the individual. We get better one person at a time. To be useful to others we must first be useful to ourselves. This is considered being selfish, as selfishness is defined. However, to be comfortable with others we first must be comfortable with ourselves. This means meeting our needs, which then become self-generating and available to meet those of others.

Stated another way, to please others at the expense of pleasing ourselves is to find us being used rather than being useful, exploited rather than positively engaged. We develop a codependency in which we are used until we have nothing left to give, and for the trouble we weaken the person and his resolve to help himself. This means that we must know, understand and accept ourselves as you are in order for us to be tolerant of others as we find them.

People are the same only different. This may sound as if a play on words but it is true. A society that sponsors comparing and competing is a society that is imitative, lacks originality, and is fearful of embracing the new or dealing with others that are different. People so inclined can only see and understand others as reflections of how they see and understand themselves.

A society is an organism not unlike the individual. If a society can only see other societies in its own image, then it is a blind society. Whatever its plans it will quicken its doom. Likewise, an individual who plans his work and works his plan without anticipating the need for correction, compromise, regrouping and refocusing, backtracking and reprioritizing as he encounters others and differing circumstances will never find satisfaction.

Ergo, it is not enough to know oneself, but one must also accept oneself as one is with the full knowledge and understanding of how that self came to be. For example, when we are reared as a goal oriented child, getting good grades in grammar school, high school and college, chances are we cannot turn off the pressure to continually seek such arbitrary standards. In school, it is grades; in adult life it is income, status and prestige. Lost in the equation is the simple pleasure of doing what one enjoys for its own sake. I know.

Once back in school as a mature adult, as disenchanted as I was with the graduate curriculum, as much as I thought it was more oriented to psychobabble than creative thinking, as much as I found many of my studies reification of the obvious, I stuck with them until I graduated with my doctorate. I didn't want to see myself as a quitter. Yet, perhaps the greatest quitter in history was Leonardo da Vinci. He never completed anything, not even his paintings. I've envied him his freedom. He seemed to know that in every case a life is half finished. He left others that followed him to finish his work.

To look at the various detours we take in life to get to where we eventually arrive is to realize nothing is ever wasted. Nothing. No matter how many turns you make to get where you are going you are picking up valuable material along the way. Graduate school acquainted me with studies and gave me a language to express my thoughts here. It also made me aware that as mechanical as society may be that I moved in robotic confluence with it. I read, write, walk, play tennis and basketball, eat and sleep, watch television and films with my wife, visit my grandchildren, and publish books and articles. What could be more robotic than that?

No one escapes the culture of his time. It impacts both his essence and personality. But it comes to dominate when we believe we are in charge and operate with free will unencumbered by social convention. This is never the case. It is in recognizing this that suitable choices can be made. Then we have confidence in the knowledge of why we are the way we are, or a natural confluence between our essence and personality.

So often when it comes to planning it is with the idea that I’m going to be this or that, do this or that, or become this or that come hell or high water. Such pressure can destroy and take all the fun out of discovery. We may find time to be and do all these things, and again we may lose interest early on and decide to be and do something entirely different. That is not being indecisive. That is being open to life and its possibilities when life touches us in all its amazing hues. Nothing is forever including life. Maddening consistency, besides living life like a puppet on a string, is boring.

THE PRUDENCE OF DESTINY

Confident thinking is not about impressing. Confident thinking is about expressing our uniqueness in useful ways. If our plan doesn’t have a benefit to others than it is an irresponsible plan. We are here on earth to be used in a positive sense, which translates into being useful to others. I have revealed some of my plans and how they have played out to illustrate how crooked the timber that is man, and to suggest no straight line plan has ever been made by anyone.

Our life does have a plan, and since we don’t know the plan, we don’t always pick up the gauntlet to the plan when we should. We need someone to tell us. That was the reason for sharing the case of the nuclear scientist in Denver whose colleagues thought he was so great, but he had no idea of his greatness.

There is a terrible waste of talent because such talent is not harnessed. That was the case of the man with the powerful left arm that could hit a spot in a fence with a baseball 300 feet away. Thinking of my own career, I should have listened to that professor in a core course that introduced me to myself. I backed away from that introduction, and stayed in chemistry.

It was my life in the chemical industry that allowed me to retire early and go back to school and become a psychologist, and later a writer, where the good professor thought from the beginning I belonged. In a way, I have had my cake and have been able to eat it, too.

Some might suggest I have been lucky, and I have. But luck is when preparation meets opportunity. Luck is not a mystical thing. Some are looking for that "lucky break," waiting for something “real” to happen, something that will move them off the dime. Nothing will. They are looking for answers in all the wrong places. When they are not discovered, such break-obsessed people will collapse in self-pity and fold in bitterness. They have had plans but their plans have gone awry. They don’t see any light at the end of the tunnel because they are looking into their cage, not out of it.

Asked where they would like to be; what would they like to do; what gives them satisfaction, the common answers are all flippant: “Certainly not doing what I’m now doing,” or “Making enough money that I can take a vacation now and then,” or “Being my own boss.” Asked again, “Doing what?” Answer in same, “I don’t know, something important, something where you get some respect.” Flippant. Not real because they have not thought seriously about pulling themselves up by the bootstraps and working their way into something worthwhile. They are looking to win the lottery.

The confident thinker thinks about success, and recognizes success is in the eye of the beholder, and that it is a journey, not an end. He knows little triumphs can lead to larger ones, always recognizing setbacks can occur at any moment, setbacks necessitating periodic detours in quest of the objective.

The confident thinker knows that he can start at any time in his life to reboot his career to another plane and dimension. I retired from gainful employment the first time in my mid-thirties, and published my first book when I was 37. I was 39 when I went back to school full-time for six years, year around. I was 57 when I published my second book. Since then six books and hundreds of articles have followed. I am now in my seventh-decade and still writing, speaking, publishing, reading, walking, and playing tennis and basketball with new ideas for articles and books constantly surfacing in my mind.

Some might suggest I took the selfish course; that I punished my family by changing the lifestyle to which they had become accustomed. My children are now adults with the youngest in his mid-forties, and they are all doing just fine on their own. Actually, three of them are doing better financially than their father ever did in his best years. It would appear they remembered that lifestyle and were willing to work their way back into it, no credit to their father, all credit to them and their persistence. My children could have become bitter. They could have collapsed into self-pity. They could have blamed their father for damaging their existence and causing them to go through life as emotional cripples. But they didn’t. They moved on.


One of my blessings was that I was born poor. Whatever I did I knew there would not be a golden parachute to break my fall. I had no extended family "with connections," no powerful, well-placed friends to ease me into a safety should I become reckless and unconscionable. If I didn’t succeed, if I didn’t come up with some strategy to move forward, then I was doomed. I had no one to blame but myself. Can you imagine how much that makes you rely on your own engine? I was born in the depression when the world was engulfed in poverty, a world without grandparents who were already deceased, but a world of a two-parent family that struggled to make ends meet week-to-week.

You become enterprising, self-reliant, a planner, a schemer, an exploiter of advantage, a utilizer of your assets, always knowing that failure is part of success, but also knowing the wisdom of insecurity gives you an edge on the inevitable intimidators you are sure to encounter, because you know you could never be as poor as you once were. It is a wonderful feeling to know you have no choice but to pick yourself up and move on without complaint. Whenever I made a move, and it didn't work out, I had no choice but to accept it, and now in my advance years I still accept it.

THE PRECEDENCE OF ETERNAL POSSIBILITY

So, what is the age when you can best start becoming a planning confident thinker?

Anna Mary Robertson, better known as “Grandma Moses,” began to paint childhood country scenes at about the age of 75, when arthritis made it too difficult for her to sew. Two of her famous paintings are “Catching the Thanksgiving Turkey,” and “Over the River to Grandma’s Home.” She had her first show in New York City at the age of 80 in 1940, and lived to 101, dying in 1961.

There is no certain age that you can move in the direction of your talent. Likewise, there is no activity useful to others and self-generating that is not of consequence. I have known people who have turned hobbies into livelihoods, and I'm sure so have you.

Eric Hoffer became blind as a youngster of seven with his sight not returning until he was fifteen. When his eyesight returned, he was seized with an enormous hunger for the printed word. He went to the library and checked out the largest book of essays with the smallest print, and relished the stylish sentences of Montaigne.

During the subsequent years as a migrant worker, gold miner, and longshoreman, Hoffer began to capture his insights into thought provoking epigrams and poignant sentences.

In 1950, he sent a handwritten manuscript to what he thought was the best publisher, Harper & Row, which published “The True Believer” in 1951. He was 49-years-old.

His work was mildly well received, but it wasn’t until he appeared with Eric Sevareid in an hour-long conversation on CBS-TV in 1967 at the age of 65 that he became really famous. Hoffer came on the American seen in the confusing and chaotic 1960s. He successfully pulled aside the veils of supposed sophistication and, in new ways, showed Americans again the old truths about America, and why they remain alive and valid.

There is no limit to what talent lies right under a person’s nose. It could be a painting or the written word as was the case with these two, or it could be a talent for systematic thought, creating mechanical objects, homemaking, or a zillion other possibilities.

It is ordinary people as visionaries who create things that have changed the way we think, behave, believe, and what we appreciate. Even the revised popularity of our comic heroes is part of this precedence. A Jewish artist who could not find his niche as an artist because there already was a Marc Chagall invented “Superman”.

The creator of “The Twilight Zone” of television, Rod Serling, couldn’t find a sponsor for his work, or a network amendable to his stories because they were considered too controversial. He got around that by creating the same ideas in trenchant sci-fi fantasy parables. He was free in this medium to explore and express humanity's hopes, despairs, pride and prejudices in metaphoric ways conventional television considered too sensitive.

So it is and so it will always be. People find their niche by exploring their latent talent and when they encounter conventional resistance, create new ways to circumvent it. That is why planning is one of the ten commandments of confident thinking. Planning with such thinking is always moving over and around and above and below obstacles it encounters in a continuing drive to self-realization.

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WALK THE WALK! DESIGN YOUR OWN DESTINY!

Walk the Walk
Design your own destiny.

By James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 2006

Note: This is to appear in a national journal, HEALTH & FITNESS EXCELLENCE in the near future. It is provided here for your enjoyment.

If you are concerned about designing your own destiny, my message is for you—and for anyone whose head is turned with every new fad and stimulant. Personally I’ve never listened to such nonsense. I grew up when it was popular to smoke cigarettes, yet I did not smoke; to get smashed when you turned 21, yet I did not drink; and to burn the candle at both ends yet I did not engage in dissipation.

We are confronted daily with new ways to destroy ourselves—aided by the idea that school should be fun, not stressful; that work should be fun, not energy sapping; that life should be fun, not full of pain. Yet we experience no maturity without embracing these obstacles. “Health is so necessary to all the duties and pleasures of life that the crime of squandering it is equal to the folly,” wrote Samuel Johnson.

You don’t have to be a body builder to have a healthy body; nor be a celebrated athlete to have all your working parts responsive to your call. You do need courage to make suitable choices. It is not good fortune but discipline that carries you to fulfillment.

What is killing the mind, heart, and body is our lifestyle choices. There would be little diabetes if people didn’t have their bodies full of fatty tissue. There would be little lung cancer if people didn’t smoke. There would be less kidney or liver failure if people didn’t consume excessive amounts of alcohol. There would be far less colon cancer if people had more roughage in their diets. There would be little or no brain damage if people didn’t abuse recreational drugs. There would be little or no venereal disease if people practiced continence outside of marriage.

Safe sex is an oxymoron. Many people today have a sense of immortality and are restless to seek relief of their raging hormones.

THE WALK STARTS EARLY

At my advanced age, I maintain the same body weight of high school of 190 pounds on a six-four frame. I’ve never been a smoker or drinker, mainly because I came from an Irish clan and could see what it had done to my relatives.

When I was in the US Navy on a ship in the Mediterranean, my white-hat shipmates would hit the beach and get smashed, while I would go on an educational tour. I was called a “culture vulture” for my hunger to learn about Europe.

While on the ship, I often lifted weights on the fantail, did my duty in the hospital division, read, typed “The Sojourn of a Sailor,” a collection of European impressions, and stayed fit on Navy chow, the best in the world.

As a boy, we were poor but we ate well. My dad had a saying, whatever he ate we ate, and he liked to eat lean meat, fish, poultry, eggs, butter, vegetables, fresh fruit, and cereals. My mother canned preserves of tomatoes, apples, grapes and currents grown in our garden. My dad liked whole milk with the cream on the top, fresh asparagus from the garden, and fresh baked bread with every meal.

An excellent diet doesn’t always insure good health, as he died three days after turning 50 of multiple myeloma, the same disease that took the life of Sam Walton of Wal-Mart. His death changed my life. Henceforth life was to be taken seriously, but not myself.

I wasn’t going to worry about what people thought of my choices. Dying young, always pushing the Sisyphus rock up the hill only to be buried by it, again and again, made a deep impression on me. I decided to live my life as if it could end at any moment.

Life is a series of choices, but it is easy to make wise choices when you have resolve. You are not driven by what others deem important but what you feel is self-affirming. I planned to be neither a prisoner of my appetites nor ignorant of the damage they could cause. The key word was vigilance.

Some might say I have had an easy life because I have enjoyed my own company, have not been intimidated by being alone, have never needed to belong, nor have I felt a sense of loss when not included. For this disposition, I have also enjoyed a life free of major illness, which has allowed me to function at a very active level to this day. I have lived and worked worldwide; have been a student, chemist, salesman, executive, consultant, professor, author, lecturer, entrepreneur, book publisher, poet, researcher, psychologist, journalist, and a voracious reader all my life.

People say they never find time to read. That is because reading gets short shrift when it comes to setting priorities. I always have a book with me wherever I go, and read three to five books a week and have for more than fifty years. My reading is as eclectic as are my professions. My interests are as diverse as mythology and mathematics, philosophy and poetry, mystery novels and metaphysics.

Participating in athletics is a socialization process. Were it not for this, I would have been even more reclusive. I played organized baseball, basketball, football, and track from grammar school through high school. Sports taught me about following rules, respecting boundaries, accepting penalties, also the thrill of winning and the agony of losing.

Athletic discipline appealed to me more than the competition. I still love the feel of some kind of ball in my hands. To this day my heart sings when I see a stunning athletic performance. I know it takes high athletic intelligence to be outstanding.

I have trouble understanding how well honed athletes can contaminate their systems with recreational drugs, nicotine or alcohol, or sully their reputations by gambling or becoming promiscuous. It seems they’re attracted to the Sisyphus dilemma.

I was a good high school student-athlete, but elected to take an academic scholarship that paid only tuition whereas an athletic scholarship was a full-ride. I don’t regret the choice, working my way through school, or never skipping classes. It was, after all, my money and I wanted to get the most for it.

A dedicated student, I graduated Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa; never joined a social fraternity, but was on the varsity fencing team. I was also a member of Phi Eta Sigma, freshman scholastic honorary, Omicron Delta Kappa, leadership honorary, and won the Freshman Athletic Trophy for having the highest GPA.

What has this to do with health or performance? I share my history and the benefits I have derived over seven decades living in a certain way. They have blessed me with good health and have allowed me to remain still actively involved in writing books, publishing articles, giving speeches, playing tennis, walking, and reading the same as I did as a youth.

It has been a health and human performance regiment that has worked for me, and variations of it could work for you, whether you are just turning 30, or 80, and also for you who have been led to believe that life is as it will be the rest of your journey. Not so. Not if you have the gumption to make choices.

I published my first book when I was 37, my second at 57. Seven books and hundreds of articles have followed. I was 39 when I went back to school for six years, year around, to earn my master’s and doctor’s degrees, while supporting a family of four children consulting on the side.

Health and human performance don’t stop with a degree or commencement address. Commencement means to begin, and it is never too late! There is no job that pays you too much that you can’t quit it and start over. If the job makes you depressed and angry, it is probably killing you. It is the wrong job in the wrong place with the wrong people, and it might even be the wrong profession. Forget how much time and money you have invested. Learning transfers.

I was 35 making the equivalent of $250,000 (2006 dollars) a year, paying no taxes, because I was living in South Africa's apartheid, and was miserable when I decided to dropout. Life made no sense to me. My boss said, “How can you do this when we have done so much for you?” I said, “If I wasn’t doing my job, you would fire me. The company isn’t meeting my needs. I am firing the company.”

It was that simple. If I had stayed I would be long dead. I was living a lie in South Africa. That society and its system of separate development of the races made no sense to me, nor did company practices in collusion with it.

Choice is a powerful tool—one that is often contaminated by rationalization and justification. Friends thought I had lost my mind, when I knew that I had actually found it. My boss said that I would never again know such power or affluence and he was right.

Martin Heidegger said, “The day we are born, we are old enough to die.” Imagine what a profound invitation that is to live fully every day, not to worry what others think or do, but pay attention to the drummer of your own heart. HFE

Dr. James R. Fisher Jr. is author of several books. Visit: www.fisherofideas.com.

THE END OF OUR WAY OF LIFE AS WE KNOW IT!

THE END OF OUR WAY OF LIFE AS WE KNOW IT

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© August 2006


We map with words as well as images but because words come in bits and pieces many people have assumed that the world is in bits and pieces, too, with bits corresponding to words. Not so, said Alfred Korzybski, the map is not the thing. Word maps have a fragmentary structure that derives from language itself, not necessarily from what language describes. The idea of linear cause and effect, for example, is inherent in the structure of a sentence, where a subject acts by way of a verb upon an object, but this may be very inadequate rendering of what is happening, especially of mutual influences. One way to correct this verbal bias is to supplement with visual maps. If the human mind is to be conceived as a whole as well as parts, we need not just words to convey parts, but patterns, pictures, and schemata to convey the whole. Words must also be used in ways that suggest wholeness.

Charles Hampden-Turner
“Maps of the Mind” (1981)


DISSONANCE DANCE TO DISSIDENCE


From the common man on the street to those wearing the mantle of power in Washington, DC, everyone knows in their bones that something is amiss, something doesn't compute, something is awry, and nobody wants to think about it much less deal with it.

We have retreated into language, into words, into symbols of actions without the need or appetite or, indeed, the energy to get inside the words to act, to do something that makes sense and is meant to embrace resistance to the problem if not solve the situation.

We have been at war with ourselves, it would seem to me, all my life, and I have experienced that war in many forms, from the economic war of the Great Depression when I was born to the celebratory war of World War II to the present military wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon. War has been transformed from wars against states and armies to wars against armed civilians without state status. Now, an expression “collateral damage” has entered the language as accepted rationale to describe the necessity of civilian casualties in quest of a military objective.

In my lifetime, I have seen the collapse of the British Empire and the Soviet Union, and the cessation of other formal colonial expansionists such as the Belgium, Germany, Portugal, Spain, and Holland in Africa as well as other places in the world.

“Formal colonialism” set up governments and ruled consistent with that nation state’s culture and institutions. These governments were invariably exploitative and violent; exploitative in taking of the natural resources be they oil, rubber, ore or vegetation; violent in one sense treating workers essentially as slave labor and in another, stripping them of their culture, religion and lifestyle, while imposing draconian colonial rule, which included incarceration for resistance to it. By the way, it was not the Germans who invented the concentration camp but the British. They set up such camps in such places as Kenya and South Africa.

Now we have “informal colonialism” as empire. It is practiced by the United States. No formal rule is established, but it is meant to protect vital national interests, for example, oil in the Middle East. “Informal colonialism” is a strategy to win the hearts and minds of people to desire the American economic and political system. This is a strategy that continues to fail. There is the suggestion that this failed strategy may ultimately reduce the United States one day to the present status of Great Britain and Russia, as it has other former empire builders.

“Informal colonialism,” as practiced by the United States, is somewhat dyslexic in that it is neither democratic nor republican, neither conservative nor liberal, but ostensibly driven by a stubborn insistence in moral clarity without moral authority. To some it is unprecedented lawlessness; to others a combination of religious bullying to reckless militarism. It may be likened to a policy with an apocalyptical view of the economy and the world and therefore emotional inclined to panic.

Such a dependent view by necessity must paint everything in clear shades of black and white because without a well-defined hatred of an enemy there would be no rallying force to launch a crusade to save the world from that enemy. This “informal colonialism” could ultimately result in a long campaign against American democracy itself. Abraham Lincoln once observed that should the United States ever be subverted, it would be conquered from within.


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PUSILLANIMOUS WORDS PROVIDE POWERLESS PUNCH

There is a certain benefit to age. Like a child you can say what is on your mind and be tolerated, but like a child you are unlikely to be heeded because, as we know, with age not necessarily does wisdom come.

Knowing this, I share my thoughts here; thoughts that are not mine alone, but have been echoed by others, others who transcribe them to serve their careers in journalism, broadcasting, academics, or entertainment but in a way to promote their celebrity. I have no such lofty aim. Call it the therapy of an old man. Meanwhile, those echoing similar sentiments provide the background cacophony to the rumble on stage of a world gone mad with leaders performing as if already relegated to the wax museum.

What I would like to take up in this obituary of our times is the business of words, although briefly. I spend much more time with this subject in NOWWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND, a book written and yet to be published. The book deals with the illusorily world that we have created and then retreated to as our permanent residence, a world hauntingly similar to that of George Orwell's "1984."


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Our mind seems to believe in the magic of words. I can recall in my industrial career the use of such words as "lifetime employment,” and "empowerment," and "total employee involvement," and "total quality management," and "intellectual capital," and so forth.

“Empowerment” was the idea of giving workers the power. Left out was the fact that workers once had the power but it was taken from them by the collusion of management and the union. The union sued for wage and entitlement benefits, and management complied, if reluctantly, by giving up so little to increase its power over work, workers, and the workplace, as well as workers’ lives.

Management had no idea that it was cutting off its nose to spite its face. But we know today that this bargain has resulted in a lose-lose proposition for both workers and management, as jobs, benefits and companies are disappearing at an alarming rate.

Once workers maintained their machines, ordered parts and repaired them, set their schedules and took pride in their craftsmanship and the quality of their work. After this was surrendered they became wage slaves and passively robotic.

The infrastructure of passive employment programmed into workers for more than fifty years is now the curse of postmodern industry. “Empowerment” is an attempt to use the magic of words to reverse a fifty-year travesty. Suddenly, workers are meant to act responsibly, creatively, and authoritatively. It hasn't yet happened, albeit 1980 was the year “empowerment” programming was first launched as the magic word to recovery.

Management cannot instantly recreate a passive and reactive workforce; a workforce emotionally, intellectually, and morally reliant and isolated from maturity to self-reliance and emotional maturity. Nor can management take a 50-year-old employees suspended in terminal adolescence, and expect words to do the job of heavy lifting for management. A long campaign of engagement, conflict management, failure, fear and suspicion must be embraced with inevitable concomitant setbacks on the ground before such performance turns the corner and mature adults make their presence on the workforce.

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WHEN THE MIND DOES NOT MATTER, MATTER HAS NO MIND

The motivation behind wordsmiths was of course exploitative and violent; exploitative in that it took from the workers the esteem they once enjoyed in work for wage and benefits; and violent in that it excused the pain, suffering, failure, and disappointment that are normal fare for self-reliance and maturity to be experienced. When 90 percent of the power is in the hands of a few the influence of that power on the workers is 10 percent or less.
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The problem with labels is that they can never replace the actions described. There are no shortcuts to the hearts and minds of workers. Panic and crisis management have spawned the idea that general semantics are the root to the worker's heart, that propaganda can mask the confusion. Yet, in every avenue of life, when heart and minds are indeed reached, words invariably are turned into action, but not before.

Words are symbols and unreliable symbols in the best of circumstances. Words never relate to reality because reality is action and words can only describe action. Words cannot replace it.

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Words are currently bombarding my conscience from television and meant to have meaning to me when they have little meaning at all. For example, I am confused when Hezbollah is painted with a single brush as a “terrorist organization,” and yet in southern Lebanon, where I have been, Hezbollah has built schools, hospitals, created social services, and assisted the poor. They have among their ranks doctors, lawyers, engineers, and other professionals.

Obviously, something is awry when Hezbollah decides to attack Israel, and hold its soldiers hostage, but clearly this does not make Hezbollah one-dimensional. I am not qualified to judge it politically, but others are. I would like to know what members of this state-within-a-state value, believe, seek and why. It is not enough to say they are driven by madness in a world in which madness is the current norm. How different can the human interests of Hezbollah be to that of Israel? People are people. Call me naïve, be that as it may, but please explain so I can understand instead of making everyone that differs with us out to be simply Satanic.

So, my wonder is why Hezbollah and Israel cannot talk to each other, sorting out what they have in common instead of being driven by differences. War has become the norm and ordinary people suffer for it.

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WORDS AS WINGS OF ACTION AND DECEPTION

While we celebrate our achievements in electronics, space exploration, microbiological research and quantum mechanics, why can’t we get along with each other? Where is the intelligence for this? If we cannot live with each other, these achievements are little more than pabulum. It is not enough to seek shelter behind such words as "terrorists."

Then there is that word “democracy,” a word we promote while turning our backs on democratically elected governments such as Bolivia and the Palestinian territory. We do this openly and defiantly because these governments are not “the right kind of democracies.” Why is this not confusing to us? Not only that, our own government refuses to have diplomatic relationships with such governments. You cannot understand another person much less another society if you are not actively engaged in dialogue with that person or society. The human group is complex but the complexities are not unknown as they have been the same for centuries.

Mature grown up leaders do not refuse to talk, relate, or to treat so-called “enemies” as pariah. The only explanation is that "democracy" is another word game; that we seek association and negotiation with democratically governments that are in our own image and likeness, believing what we believe, valuing what we value, and behaving as we would have them behave. If there is a better doomsday strategy, I don't know what it is.

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People vote with their hearts not their heads and that is as true of Americans as anywhere else. These people voted with their hearts and now they are meant to suffer for it.

That brings up another set of words, "the United States is the only superpower in the world." These are of course empty words but unfortunately the United States and the media have bought into them. It dominates our identity and is as inauthentic and one-dimensional as is our ethnocentrism.

Time after time the world has proven far less than America's oyster to shuck as it likes. But our cognitive dissonance puts this aside to maintain our present belief in our hegemony. Selectively dissociated from this preferred image is the fact we cannot clean up our own backyard when it comes to hurricanes, reduce poverty, homelessness, illiteracy, or win the war on drugs, not to mention the stalemates in shooting wars abroad. We have encountered our limits in a changing world that uses its weaknesses to subvert our strengths and to humble us in the process.

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ACTORS AND ACRONYMS ON THE STAGE OF FOLLY

The orchestration of words, which I have spent some time in my books defining and elaborating, have been those professions that live in the constant garden of words, describing conditions and rendering advice, advice that often they find little time to take themselves. Be weary of those who pontificate as if they have all the answers because chances are they are hiding their own problems in the guise of wisdom. I am speaking of the Dr. Phil types and the Oprah imitators, the psychologists and psychiatrists, the counselors and therapists that have a word for everything and everything reduced to a word, or a collection of words. You know they have made their mark when their words are reduced to acronyms.

Take the expression "attention deficit disorder." Psychiatrists make zombies of kids dulling their passions and seeing to it that they behave as if robots. Are ADD’s children cured? Of course not. They are dulled out of their wits. And if anything, we are witless enough without poisoning our children with this contagion.

It was inevitable that children addicted to sweets would ultimately start bouncing off the walls. What else would you expect? You cannot cure a child of hyperactivity that is constantly fed sugar in canteen machines at school, at the convenient store after school, and then compounded by a sugar treat once the child is home.

The science of brain function and the impact of processed sugar on the brain is not new science. It is simply far easier to placate with sugar than to discipline a child’s diet to enhance brain function and more stable behavior. Disciplining is too challenging and time consuming and the little rascals might say they “hate you,” and no one can endure that assertion

Feeding empty calories to children trigger impulsive reactions in the brain. This is a cultural and behavioral phenomenon. It cannot be simply reversed by brain altering chemicals in narcotic ADD packages.

Are children more impetuous than in the past? It would seem so, but I wonder if our tolerance for the uncontrollable exuberance of the young is more a matter of its negative impact on our comfort level, obsession with control, and being too busy to provide the attention parents once gave to children.

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Passion is not bad, and passion comes out in many forms, especially in children, forms that don't necessarily subscribe to our desired expectations. It would be well for us to watch these passions open up as we would watch a flower bloom. A child is an exciting entity that warms the coldest heart as its large eyes smile in innocence and engage life without fear, embarrassment or agenda.

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MINDSET OF ENGINEERS AND ECOLOGISTS TO EQUITY AND EXCELLENCE

Going back almost fifty years, thinking of my many careers, starting out as a trained scientist, moving into the world of business first as a salesman, then an executive, and then again back to school as a student of psychology, then a consultant, publisher, and again an executive, and now a full-time writer, I have persisted in attempting to find a balance between cognitive and affective thinking; between what I have been trained to see rationally but have come to perceive irrationally.

The naïve assumption was made that answers in academia were in psychology, sociology and anthropology for what troubled me, but I was wrong. They are only in life. But even in life, words sometimes capture a hint of the idea that swims around loose in the conscious mind looking for a shore upon which to rest.

William G. Gowen, Martin A. Kutzwell, Eugene M. Tobin and Susanne C. Pitcher in "Equity and Excellence" (2005) provide some clues to the conundrum of why some people in power behave as they do.

They suggest there are two major schools of thought that dominate our society at the moment, one is the world of ecologists and the other is the world of engineers. This sparked my curiosity as I have the mindset of the engineer from my training and the ethical orientation of the ecologist from my experience.

The ecologists, according to the authors, believe human beings are formed amid a web of relationships. Behavior is then shaped by the weave of expectations and motivations that become first part of our lexicon and then our behavior.

Gregory Bateson in “Steps to an Ecology of Mind” (1972) earlier suggested that there is a natural selection in which some ideas survive and others die; that economic limits are as real to the mind as they are to the environment; and that the mind is driven by instinct for survival.

Engineers believe everything is cut and dry and can be quantified, or if it cannot, then it does not exist. To sink into the nebulous quicksand of philosophical speculation is the engineer’s greatest nightmare.

Engineers are problem solvers. Ambiguous problems of love and hate and fear and loathing, lust and lucre are outside the domain of engineers, and treated as if do not exist. For engineers, all this talk about relationships can be handled effectively by reducing the matter of motivation to an appropriate program of incentives. Engineers see themselves as rationalists and for them incentives are the rational approach to shaping the behavior desired. The engineer’s mantra: give people what they want and people will behave, as you want them to behave.

These two extreme positions of the engineer and ecologist have dominated society during the last half-century.

It is no accident that most major companies in the United States are run by engineers. These CEOs have little time for the “mumble jumble” of the ecology of mind. They want to know the “bottom line” of what the content, context and process of the problem reveals, in tens words or less because they are driven by the cycle of control. This has opened them to the con of wordsmiths.

Paradoxically, were it not for their ability to hone relationships, they would not be CEOs. This is quickly forgotten once in the role. Yet, no one becomes a CEO without constant campaigning for the next job until the ultimate job is realized. It commences with finding a mentor in the top ranks, then being the boss’s gopher, telling the boss what he wants to hear, running interference for the boss, soft peddling bad news, and creating the reputation that his value added status is what keeps the boss continuing to look good.

Engineers’ counterparts in government have been lawyers. Lawyers in government engineer relationships to get them to where they want to go as well. Once there, however, the CEO-engineer or the lawyer-engineer appear to have forgotten how they got there. Instead, they behave as if it was all done under their own power, talent, good looks and persuasive appeal.

With that mindset, the inclination is to treat others as if their motivations and expectations are as if that of an entirely different species, as if supportive relationships had little to do with the web of who and what they are or where they desired to go, that they could be easily appeased, controlled, and flattered into behaving as desired by a program of incentives. Sadly, this mindset has translated into a misguided strategy.

For some inexplicable reason the engineer and lawyer have assumed that people need to be pushed, prodded, flattered and provided with incentives to get them off their asses, that people working paycheck to paycheck think only of money and little else, that ordinary workers are not interested naturally in excellence but desire equity only to disrupt the status quo, that workers are mere children that need the guidance of surrogate parents in the persons of the engineers and lawyers to solve their problems, that they are incapable of sacrifice, delayed gratification or thinking long term.

If this is so, this is self-fulfilling prophecy, if workers are indeed as described here, then engineers in management and lawyers in government have created this monster.

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WISER PERSON THAN ALL MANAGEMENT, THE WORKER

I have written copiously about the engineer-turned-human resource professional and how incentives have made a mess of the complex organization (see “Work Without Managers,” 1990, “The Worker, Alone,” 1992, “Six Silent Killers,”1998, “Corporate Sin,” 2000). It was obvious that the more given to workers that was not related directed to performance would eventually backfire, as it has.

We have seen one-hundred-old companies expire, go into bankruptcy, or be forced to merge with other companies to survive. Ironically, incentive programs of human resources have accelerated the process. These incentive programs, which targeted the establishment of cultures of contribution, went from comfort and management dependent workers to complacency and counter dependence of workers on the company. Such companies became workers’ surrogate parents and responsible for workers' total well being.

It is no accident that today Toyota is number two car seller in the United States ahead of Ford and Chrysler, and will soon eclipse General Motors. GM has a cost in excess of $1,500 in employee benefits for every car that rolls off its assembly line. If this were not bad enough, it has paid many workers for years that didn’t even work, but were on call on the payroll nonetheless. I saw the same happening in the Department of Defense (DOD) contracts with high tech industry where cost plus contracts were awarded where workers sat around drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, as they had no work. The incentive to create such contracts was a function of the number of workers the contractor determined a contract would require, in other words, mutual complicity.

The only way to look at these American automotive and DOD practices is not so much as incentives, but also as bribes. Engineers ran and still run these companies and they would rather throw money at a problem than entertain its irrational contingencies.

When workers receive so little satisfaction with the work at hand they are going to resort to the juvenile behavior of punishing the company for their dissatisfaction. It would not occur to them that they could quit, and move on. They want satisfaction now with groundless complaints much as a baby uses tears for satisfaction. Toyota never subscribed to this flatulent culture but established instead a culture of excellence in quality with the expectation of equity and excellence in its meritorious workforce.

Toyota’s profits soared 39 percent in the first quarter of 2006, and largely realized from car sales in the United States from their twelve plants with American workers, not Japanese workers.

Meanwhile, the same day Toyota’s profits were announced (August 5, 2006), Delta Air Lines petitioned the bankruptcy court to cancel its pilots’ pension program completely. The 6,000 pilots are part of a $280 million bailout already agreed to with this the latest additional desired concession. Several years ago employees of Delta actually bought a jumbo jet with their own money for the company in appreciation of working there. Imagine how they feel today.

All kinds of contingencies can be ticked off contributing to this crisis, but one that looms above all the rest is that management for the times has not blueprinted work, workers and the workplace culture consistent with the challenges.

The Japanese presence in the American culture is simply one dimension of the transitional change we are seeing in Western civilization. We are becoming truly a melting pot of cultures, languages and people, and for many this is unsettling.

Now the bubble has burst for American workers. Workers who counted on generous retirement incomes find that is not to be. Mind you, this is often a retirement income that many of them never contributed to other than the longevity of their service. Management created the myth that showing up for work on time for forty years and punching out when expected was enough to qualify.
Meanwhile, studies have indicated that the time between these data points in a day’s work found 80 percent of the work to have been completed consistently by 20 percent of the workforce.

This effective performance of one in five workers was enough to give the United States economic dominance in a world playing catch up. When longevity is the deciding factor in the level of retirement income, workers become quickly acclimated to treading water. Such workers often hate the company, hate their bosses, hate their work, and spend most of their time complaining instead of working. This poisons the very air that workers’ breathe. Illogically, expected retirement benefits provide justification for such dissident workers wasting their lives. Remarkably, these same workers consistently escape redundancy and downsizing exercises because they have the cunning of the snake. Now that snake has bitten many companies in the ass with them going under, while dedicated workers see no gold at the end of their rainbow.

NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND

We have seen gas go up from 25 cents a gallon fifty years ago to $3 today. This was before the rise of Japan, Inc. in the East and before quality became essential. Vance Packard wrote a sociological study “The Waste Makers” (1961) in which he showed how American products were designed to fail. Americans had a penchant for constant shopping and an insatiable appetite for always something new. It became a surface thing. Car manufacturers changed the body design of their models every year but little else. Other product makers did the same. For example, the technology has existed for years to create an automobile that will run 100 miles on a gallon of gas, with low pollution emission, but it has been tabled. Utopia was a mindset that Americans insisted was reality.

Then, in 1980, NBC television produced a program called “Japan Can, Why Can’t We?” Tom Brokaw narrated it. At the time, we were seeing a precipitous decline in basic markets in steel, glass, cloth, shoes, rubber, electronics, and automobiles. Since that time, as I have mentioned here, suddenly American government and American management got religion, and the religion they got was that designed by engineers in the discipline of human resources management. It has been downhill ever since.

The way we have expected it to always be no longer is and never will be again, but truth is harder to swallow than fiction, and so cosmetic change has become our mantra and incentives our game.

David Brooks reminds us that we cannot continue to solve our human relation problems as engineers. He brings up the matter of the $750 billion spent on financial aid to increase the percentage of Americans who graduate from college. Guess what?

The percentage of college graduates after the tuition aid and tax credit flood of dollars has hardly budged the level of college graduates as a percentage of the population. Incentives proved once again not to be the answer.
On a personal note, I am a lower middle class boy from a family of no college graduates who was encouraged from grammar school on by my mother to study, to respect and listen to my teachers, who were mainly nuns, and to learn as much as my mind would allow, not to become rich, but to be enriched.

That is where expectations and motivation are founded, that is the ecology of the mind that the authors of "Equity and Excellence" are alluding to. Because of my indoctrination, I was able to test out of required courses in college. I did not have to take remedial courses to be able to do college work. Family background is the key to academic success, not incentives from government.

Likewise, here in my home base in Tampa in the year 2006, with the price of gasoline soaring, one of the county commissioners of Hillsborough County has suggested that the county put a 90-day waiver on the gas tax -- 7 cents per gallon -- charged by the county. This is engineer-lawyer speak asking the county to wave $30 million in revenue annually to oblige gas-guzzling-driver-happy-clueless motorists to further indulge their excess rather than face reality and sacrifice.

Nowhere in this suggestion is driving less, of acquiring smaller less gas-guzzling machines, or in anyway inconveniencing drivers.

Perhaps the best price for gasoline right now to get the attention of consumers and the world they live in would be gasoline at $5 or $6 a gallon, which would still be far less than that of Europe or Asia.

To conserve gasoline there, automobiles are smaller, more efficient, the streets narrower, and the pollution less. These limits are not a function of magnanimity but out of behavior as a product of motivation and expectation.

Life changes when income will stretch only so far. Similarly, everything we purchase from movie tickets to groceries to clothes to DVDs to electronics to our dwellings will continue to climb a steep linear curve as the reality of fossil fuel and its limited supply increasingly hits our pocketbooks. Then change will come about, reactionary rather than anticipated change, but change nonetheless. This will drive home the fact that a deficit economy of negative savings is an economy that is enslaved to its masters. These masters are not bad people but will use our ecology and psychology against us because they can.

THE MATTER OF RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES

Americans believe it is their "birthright" to enjoy the "good life," while they consume one-quarter of the world's energy supply while being only one-twentieth of the world's population.

This brings us to yet two other words popular in the lexicon, “privilege” and “right.” Many disadvantaged young people are buried in inner cities roaming the streets getting into trouble, many of them minorities that speak little American, avoiding education as if it were the plague.

There are also legions of those not disadvantaged that come from middle class homes that also become grade and high school dropouts. They consider education a right. Again, they are wrong.

Education is a privilege. It is a privilege to have free public grammar and high schools to attend and acquire an education. It is a privilege to have a network of tens of thousands of free libraries across the United States where you can check out books of every imaginable discipline and learn. It is a privilege to live in a country where there is free access to these opportunities. A university is at everyone’s feet in the public library.

It is a right that is stated in the Bills of Rights that I have the freedom to express my mind as I am doing here, but to have something to express I need to take advantage of that privilege, education.

Rights and privileges can be taken away from us if we do not esteem them, use them and protect them. We are now in a time of fear. Panic in the air. Rights and privileges are reduced with another set of words “for our own good.”

This is the whole basis of Homeland Security and the rationale of constant ubiquitous surveillance of ordinary citizens in everyday life. Paranoia, suspicion, and distrust are chipping away at rights and privileges.

We oblige, we surrender these rights, and fail to use these privileges. We allow ourselves to be patted down at sporting events checking for weapons. We allow our phones to be tapped, our emails to be read, and our vehicles to be stopped for our “own security and safety.” We watch senseless television instead of reading books, going to libraries, attending symphonies and operas, and the legitimate theatre. We spend countless hours chatting on line and writing emails.

Even the President of the United States of America finds time, not only to greet heroes of our culture such as scientists, humanitarians, and artists, but most recently the ten finalists of the “American Idol” competition on television. What does that do for a child’s motivation that aspires to do something worthwhile? When the dumbing down of society is symbolically reinforced by the president, then freedom moves away from diligence to dandyism.

Isaiah Berlin in “Freedom and Its Betrayal” (2002) defines “negative freedom” as being freedom with no constraints. These are freedoms we have but can give up. The freedom most of us enjoy is “positive freedom” in which we have already given up much of our freedom for comfort, security, peace, prosperity or some other arbitrary value more precious to us than freedom, itself. It is also manifested when we are influenced by utopian images such as being a famous athlete, entertainer, or celebrity. We are increasingly becoming a positive freedom society with less and less freedom left to give up. This finds us moving away from meaningful contribution and increasingly into comport and complacency where others make decisions for us, and of course always promising to have our best interests at heart.

MAKING SENSE OF A TOPSY-TURVY WORLD

Now, when I felt confident that the pragmatic psychology of William James would kick in and prevail among Americans, when I thought we would pull back from our indulgent lifestyle, utopian mindset, and husband our liberties and resources, I find the world spinning topsy-turvy seemingly bent on committing all our mortal and venial sins. India and China are engulfed in ambitious expansionistic materialistic excesses that we know so well in a wild dash to be even more acquisitive than their model, the United States.

Meanwhile, Russia is spinning in another direction as it attempts to reinvent itself as a culture and society after the collapse of communism in 1989. This is not easy after 82-years of being a doctrinaire subjugated state. The vacuum that evolved after the split up of the Soviet Union collapse has been filled with exploiters, corruption, mafia type criminals, and ethnic rebels, as well as diligent democratic advocates. Not so long ago thugs ran the economy with a drunken president at the helm.

Few people in America have good words to say about President Putin, a former KGB head of intelligence, and a man that displays a certain muscular leadership. I thank God for Putin in the present climate despite his restrictions on freedom of the press and his alleged violation of human rights. I sense that the instability of Russia could grow into a plague to spread across the world without his strong leadership.

This is not the evaluation of the cognitive engineer but the affective ecologist. Were the Russian president not of the mind and heart and resolute spirit that he is I think the world would be in greater jeopardy.

Call President Putin a “dictator” if you like but also get beyond the word and ask yourself if you would like the former president to be in office now given the chaotic state of Russia and its many challenges.


STUDY THE PAST IF YOU WOULD DIVINE THE FUTURE

Given this rambling discussion, do I hold much hope for the future? Again, I answer with concern, which is not directly an answer, I know, but it is the best that I can do. I always look at immediate trends and patterns.

When students get into the best colleges and universities of the land by boning up for an SAT or GRE test, or similar examination, I wonder. Obviously, they are afraid to rest the measurement of what they have learned as an index of potential capability to pursue further education. It is not too far removed from cribbing for an examination with the answers written on your sleeve. I took the GRE examination after nearly twenty years out of school with no such preparation, and performed well enough to be accepted into graduate school at the University of South Florida in the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences. I don’t find this remarkable. I find this appropriate.

There is a policy of engineer-lawyer legislature of “no student left behind” in which grammar schools are grading “A,” “B,” “C,” “D,” “E,” and “F” schools here in Florida. What do you think teachers in these schools teach to: they teach to the bias of the test and not to the subject matter at hand. The whole entire curriculum is to perform well enough to get as high a ranking as possible because financial aid will be distributed accordingly.

Something is wrong with teaching to a test. It is not only restrictive but also restricting to both teacher and student alike. The spontaneity and joy of learning are put on hold to perform to a compromising curriculum.

Another way of looking at this is that the “A” schools could better be described as the most conforming. American society could do with a lot less conformity. “Conformity” is a problem of our society. It lives within the comfort zone of critical thinking or what is already known rather than engaging creative thinking and what can be found out but not yet known.

“Conformity” is the thinking of “if it ain’t broke then don’t fix it.” This is reactionary thinking, the thinking that keeps getting us into trouble.

“Violence,” on the other hand, is a word common to the American lexicon. Violence is not only a condition of contemporary society; it is our history and the major engine of our creativity. Much of the music, popular literature, television programming, movies, even television nightly news promulgates violence by making it the main menu of its reporting. Were it not for our appetite for schadenfreude the airwaves would be truly a cold medium. Indeed, violence in declared and undeclared wars is used as a major strategy to solve cultural, ethnic, and political problems. If this is not madness, what is?

Sexual innuendo and sophomoric humor in television situation comedies has so desensitized us that we no longer note its violence. It is as if without a sexual slant no one would watch. Perhaps that is true. If so, it suggests that American intellectual life has failed to reach above the belt buckle. Then, there is exhibitionistic television where people display bizarre behavior and confess embarrassing intimacies to some somber faced host before a cacophonous rabble. This, too, is a form of violence. Television programs that exploit suffering are not only in bad taste, but the most violent form of exploitation of human dignity.


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I can already hear those voices that support conformity with the claim that certain draconian measures are necessary to ensure law and order. They would meet violence with violence, and as has been increasingly the case since World War II. It is not working. Communal violence is on the increase, and so what have we learned? We have learned little because we keep attacking the problem at its outcome, not at its conception. The bad and rotten apples of society were not bad and rotten apples when they first fell from the tree. The bad and rotten apples became that way from neglect.

People who fail to go to school, can’t or won’t learn, and consequently feel stupid, don’t have jobs because they don’t qualify for any, and don’t have a vocabulary to express their angst, often become violent. These are not bad people. These are neglected people. These are people that should be provided an alternative to conventional education, given job training as early as counseling and placement deem desirable. I’m talking pre-teens.

People don’t want a free lunch. A free lunch doesn’t make them feel good about themselves. Doing something that is positive, possible, palpable, and promising does make them feel good, and gives them a whole different slant on themselves, and therefore on life and others.

Of course, neglected and allowed to stagnate they will take shortcuts and use their animal instincts to bully, intimidate, and violate the persons, property, and space of those they envy. Hate is simply love that has never been allowed to bloom. And of course they will ease their delicate psyches with sexual prowess, making babies, selling illicit drugs, living in a psychedelic world that has no boundaries because the boundaries imposed upon them were never of their making, and therefore neither acknowledged nor owned. Once hardened to the life of outcasts they might as well be sitting on Mars.

OUR PROBLEMS ARE SMALL AGAINST OUR ASTRAL NEIGHBORHOOD

To put this in perspective, we know the planet Earth is much larger than Mars, Mercury and Pluto, and only a little larger than Venus. Yet, when we compare the Earth to Jupiter and Saturn, and even Uranus and Neptune, we realize planet Earth is quite small as a planet. But then when we compare the Earth to the Sun, well, the Earth is little more than a dot. By the same token, our giant Sun appears as only a dot when compared to Sirius, Pollux and Arcturus, while the Earth is so small it is invisible. This should not only be humbling but also put our existence on this small planet in terms of the galaxy in a more realistic context. So while we celebrate how great we are, how wise we are, how we dominate our little planet, think again because increasingly it is apparent our tiny planet dominates us.

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Dr. Fisher is a former chemist, corporate executive, consultant, author, publisher, and prolific writer of articles as well as books that come to him as he walks through his neighborhood with a recorder in hand. This is the product of such a long walk.