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.