EMBRACING THE WIND -- SAGA OF AN INVISIBLE THOUGHT LEADER!

THEDELTAGRPFL@cs.com wrote:
Note to Emailers:

My agent thinks my two recently completed manuscripts, CONFIDENT SELLING** and CONFIDENT THINKING together should be a blockbuster. We shall see. Since I have done little else the last several months then work on them 60 to 70 hours a week, I gave pause to vent my frustration in this missive to him. Call it what you like, but it felt good to get it off my chest. Almost euphoric. Be always well.
Jim

**Confident Selling was first published in 1971 and became an international best seller. This is a totally revised and updated version of the original text, but with the same premise, which is that the problem with selling is not the buyer, but the seller. Once the seller overcomes his fears by embracing them, the rest is easy, and success is assured.
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Ned,
I think I've finally written a combination of books, and like you say, which complement each other and may prove useful to people in all walks of life.

We, too, complement each other. I know industry from a cadre of positions in the corporation: from six summers in a chemical processing factory (food industry) in virtually every phase of the operation as a laborer in a workforce of some 2,000.

I was one of the most respected summer workers, getting the most hours, and not afraid of any kind of work. I've written about the valuable lessons it taught me about labor and management. It also gave me a vivid appreciation of the factory process, philosophically, psychologically and economically. It is the basis of my three cultures: comfort, complacency and contribution.

When I graduated from Iowa, I wrote to the company for a recommendation, and Standard Brands Inc., now ADM, said they would match or exceed anyone that made me an offer.

I worked there as a chemist. I followed this with two years in the Navy as a white hat on the Flag Ship of the Mediterranean fleet, the USS Salem (CA-139), so I've got the military perspective, too. Thanks to it, I acquired the GI Bill which made it possible to get my Ph.D.

The rest of the story is pretty well documented in my writing: from chemical sales engineer with Nalco to area manager in the field, then as a corporate executive trouble shooter about the globe for Nalco to facilitator of the formation of a new company in South Africa.

At that point, during my best wage-earning years, I took a two-year sabbatical. I went back to school for the next six years, and got my Ph.D. in organizational/industrial psychology. I know academia up close and personal, too. Factory process is clearly in evidence if the conflicts are not more petty. Henry Kessinger once summed it up very well: "The reason academic infighting is so bitter is that the stakes are so small."

Concomitantly, I had a ten year stint as an adjunct professor to several universities, up and down the East coast, including one with AMA Professional Institute, doing extensive OD consulting as well.

Then, I went back in industry with Honeywell (USA) as an OD psychologist, and then with Honeywell Europe as Director of Human Resources Planning & Development.

So, I've spent my time in the laboratory of experience on all phases of the modern workforce from being a day laborer to a working bee both in line (sales and R&D) and staff (OD psychologist and corporate executive and internal-external consultant), not to mention a student (undergraduate and graduate level) and academic (adjunct professor).

I write from that all inclusive range and perspective. I don't know of a thought leader in the country that can match my eclectic background.

And yet, to this date, I am virtually unknown. So, well CS/CT change all that? The question is academic because in any case:

(a) We are all in the selling business; and

(b) The biggest sale we ever have to make is on ourselves. The rest is gravy.

These two books: CS &CT, as you point out, address that problem.

If we can ever find a publisher, perhaps the one that publishes Steven Covey, we could sell the book in bulk to corporations.

The other thing I envision is that it could be made into a training program in which trained professionals could deliver the course across the globe, not just in the USA.

I wrote a book for Honeywell on train-the-trainer, and it was so well received that a professor (psychology) at the University of Tampa wanted to use it as a text. Honeywell refused because it was proprietary material. Honeywell was not in the publishing business.

In any case, I wouldn't have gotten a dime out of it inasmuch as I signed that authority away when I joined Honeywell, as I had done the same thing with Nalco.

I mention the latter because I wrote CONFIDENT SELLING for my people when with Nalco but in an abbreviated form. Still, it was essentially the same book. As I've said before, I wrote the book in six weeks, sent it off to Prentice-Hall and it was accepted the first week P-H received it. I hadn't mentioned that I had written the book in outline form long before it was published as a book.

Two things that come to mind of recent memory that tell me we are on to something.

(1 ) I attended a concert at my grandson's exclusive private school, Tampa Preparatory, and a series of "young scholars" gave their take on what they thought and what was important, then the director of the school, along with other faculty members gave their two cents.

I looked to BB, and whispered in her ear, "What does that sound like?" She smiled, "Your book." I corrected her. "My books!" She shrugged her shoulders as if to say, "Whatever."

I don't know what you mean by 10-10. You must accept that I don't know your end of the business. You are my agent, but I look to you also to be my business manager. Down the road if we need a public relations person, it will be as much your call as mine. If I create a syllabus and have a training program to license this material to others, I will want your input and advice on what would be the best deal.

We have been starving in the literary sense for so long that whatever is offered the tendency might be to jump. As I said before, I will not give up the copyright to either book. I've done that before, and lost. The residuals to CS/CT are where the money will be made, not on the initial printings.

(2) The timing of these books is right. The current major feature of Time magazine is on worrying about the wrong risks in which people consume their energy locked in the past (with nostalgia) or focused on the future (with trepidation). CS/CT are about what you can and should do right now (with gusto)!

Finally, I don't want publicity for publicity sake. I want to sell books. We both deserve that. We have treaded water long enough.

Be always well,
Jim

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STRANGE REACTION TO A BOOK ABOUT AMERICAN HOMES!

When I was selected as one of 60 out of thousands to be included in a book about homes of Americans during their youth, it never occurred to me that the senator and his wife, and their assembled crew on this project, would be the focus.

I thought the homes of people from all socioeconomic, political, ethnic, cultural, religion, occupational, regional, and name identity, from famous to unknown, would be the focus. I was wrong. People think it is a hagiography to the senator and his kind.

You can't get much lower in the food chain than I am, the son of an Irish Roman Catholic brakeman on the railroad from a small river town called Clinton, Iowa.

I have heard such comments: "I'm a Republican," with a smile, meaning, I couldn't touch this book. Another person looked at me, "Are you one of them," meaning am I a Democrat. Another person said, "I don't like John Edwards and his politics." I made no attempt to explain the book was not about politics but about American homes of, ah, forget it. And these are just the polite comments.

For those of interests, I was raised in a very devote Catholic home, whereas I am now very much still a Catholic, but a secular catholic at that. My home was one in which my parents voted the straight Democratic ticket and voted in virtually every election at whatever level it was, and I've followed that tradition. I am a registered Republican that votes Democratic as much as Republican, and so I guess I am somewhat of an independent. I have enjoyed a certain affluence, but grew up in a home that failed to make it from paycheck to paycheck. I have never forgotten that I am a lower class kid from a blue collar family. Never. I have lived a life that is like that Forest Gump character in the movie, seemingly always somewhere in the world that the serendipity of circumstances puts me where the action and the names of my times are showing up. Just a for instance, when I was a young chemist with Standard Brands, and the company sent me to a Food Technology Convention in Chicago, I was standing beside Adlai Stevenson waiting for the elevator to take me up to my room in the Palmer House in Chicago, when the television cameras blinded me, a secret service guy pushed me aside, and not gently, and Democratic presidential hopeful Stevenson was given a private elevator. And that is only the tip of the iceberg about such experiences.

So, I don't put people higher than I am or lower than I am, and I don't judge them by whether they are red or blue (politically), or white or black, red or yellow (ethnically), Catholic, Protestant, Hindus, Islam, Buddha, or any other persuasion.

So, if you think I have some difficulty with people judging a book about homes in terms of politics, you've got it right. Nor do I lead with the idea I am an American. I am a man who happens to be an American and I respect other men and women that happen to be of other national connections by the accident of their birth.

For me it is not an "either/or" world, but a world of you "and" me. It is not big you and little me, or big me and little you, but of you and I trying to do the best we can with what we've got and the chances we have had and what we have done with them.

I cannot at this late stage in my life understand sectarianism, violence or otherwise, local or international, and yet I know it keeps the pot boiling. I will not change this. Certainly, Senator John Edwards won't change this. I don't know him, will most likely never meet him, but if you read the book you'll see that he and the other 59 entries have paid their dues, and didn't have the time to wonder about much of anything else but making the most of their circumstances.

Be always well,

Jim

Reference: The book is HOME: THE BLUEPRINT OF OUR LIVES, HarperCollins Publishers, 2006. I have a four-page article with a picture of the home of my youth along with a picture of the courthouse. My piece was taken from my book IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE: MEMOIR OF THE 1940s WRITTEN AS A NOVEL (AuthorHouse 2003).

THE OPEN LETTER TO THE DES MOINES REGISTER & THE DANCE OF THE CLOUT AND CLOUTLESS

THE DES MOINES REGISTER OPEN LETTER
&
THE DANCE OF THE CLOUT AND CLOUTLESS

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

Several of you have emailed me and asked if I received a reply from The Des Moines Register to my open letter. It is now past two weeks and the answers is “no.” Nor did I expect to hear from this newspaper.

What generated this open letter was the review of Des Moines native Robert Bryon’s new book on growing up in the 1950s in Des Moines.

I was somewhat incensed because the newspaper didn’t give me as much as a mention for my book growing up in Clinton, Iowa during the Second World War titled In the Shadow of the Courthouse: Memoir of the 1940s Written as a Novel (AuthorHouse 2003).

Incidentally, I copied all the newspapers mentioned in the piece. Nothing from them as well. You readers know that whenever I use your name in an email you will be copied. That behavior is a product of my upbringing as my da said to me, “Jimmy, if you can’t say what is on your mind to a person’s face best that you keep it to yourself.”

He also said, “The best way to look at life is as if whomever you’re talking about is standing right behind your shoulder.”

It was those two messages that have proven both reassuring and somewhat disparaging. I have found people would rather not know what you think about them than know for certain where you stand. When I was in graduate school as a mature student, 38, after I retired the first time, it was the 1970s and someone came up with the theory that students should evaluate professors as professors evaluated students.

It was that old great deception of the clout and cloutless in happy union.

I had a four-point in my graduate course work, but evaluated one professor rather harshly, and none of them even close to four-point territory with the exception of one. He was all about business and could care less what I thought of him.

Having been a corporate executive, I had little stomach for professors who didn’t do their homework and treated students as their personal friends at the expense of focusing on the subject matter. I wasn’t in school for a holiday. Obviously, these professors wanted to appear student-centered with positive student evaluations as if they were campaigning for office, something of which I was familiar with in the corporation.

In any event, my seminar professor said to me one day, “You write so well I’m going to give a pass on having you write a paper, let’s go to lunch and discuss the subject.” We went to lunch, the subject never came up, and I got an “A” in the course. In the essay portion of the student evaluation, I mentioned this, and then went to the professor, and told him so.

The rest of the story is that the professor was on my committee, which nearly resulted in failing my orals. You need a passing grade on them as well as your written work. It was hell, but I created the hell for myself, and knew it. Were it not for another professor who programmed me to respond to the questions asked in my orals mechanically and succinctly, I doubt if I would have made it. More than one-third of ABD’s (all but dissertations) complete the course work required but never receive the degree because they cannot write. My problem is I cannot keep my mouth shut.

THE DANCE OF CLOUT AND CLOUTLESS

With that in mind, I am not surprised I haven’t heard from The Des Moines Register or any of the other newspapers mentioned in my open letter.

You see the world is divided into those with clout and the cloutless. That’s the world we live in. It is not a Democratic and Republican world, not a liberal and conservative world, not a good and evil world, not a wise and ignorant world, nor indeed, not a competent and incompetent world. It is a world of clout, alone.

Those that have clout, or want it, or are intimidated by it behave in one manner and those that do not have it behave in another manner. It follows that the somebodys with clout are clueless about the cloutless because they are only concerned with those that can hurt them, which they take to be those with clout.

I am dictating this on my peripatetic walk the day after the massacre of the Republican Party by the Democratic Party, which has risen up at this mid-term election to take over the majority in Congress of both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

What is the first item on the agenda of our Republican president’s news conference? It is the ditching of his Secretary of Defense, something he swore he wouldn’t do only last week. Secretary Rumsfeld has been made cloutless by the clout of the Democratic Party’s success.

It is the nature of our society, but it is not only the nature of our society but also the nature of civilization.

There are those with clout and those without clout. I happen to be cloutless. I’ve been cloutless ever since I left the corporation. In the corporation, in my day, position power, alone, determined whether you had clout or not. It had nothing to do with competence or incompetence. People did what you told them to do because you had clout even if it meant walking off the cliff to their doom. Nor did clout have anything to do with leadership. Quite the contrary.

If you think this is an exaggeration, try convincing me cloutless people in Enron didn’t feel someone was amiss.

I made my living as an organization-industrial psychologist talking to these people to find out what was going on. I never learned it from the brass. Never. But the cloutless knew but did nothing for the simple reason they saw themselves as cloutless.

One of the great deceptions I encountered was the cloutless projecting their competence into those with clout who were incompetent.

You could be incompetent and beyond your depth, but people without clout would listen to you because of your clout. They would rationalize your leadership as wise when it clearly wasn’t, knowing in their bones this to be the case. Why?

It is easier for the cloutless to remain silent and submissive and compliant than to state their case or concerns, or, indeed, show their anger.

The problem with this is when the cloutless refuse to be upfront about how they feel, this is inevitable:

· Compliance will be doubtlessly established. Compliance is always the effect of veiled coercion. This is so because suspicions have not been satisfied, anger neither dealt with nor dissipated, and so decorum and politeness is but a charade. Compliance is a reaction to clout demonstrating the nature of cloutlessness.

This is not unlike the relationship of the master and the slave, which are only the extremes of clout and cloutlessness.

Once you are programmed into cloutlessness you react as I am reacting here to my sense of the fact. It will be interesting to see how the Democrats react to their new situation of having the clout after and absence of more than a decade.

When you are cloutless, it is easy to do as I did, write a letter and state my case, and then take comfort in the quiet that greets it, knowing that nothing will happen. The complaint is an end in itself, something the Democrats know well. It shows my weakness and not my strength. Now, I get around this in writing books and articles and emails and blog commentaries, which are sometimes written in anger, sometimes in sarcasm, sometimes in cynical detachment, and sometimes even in scholarship.

Should you feel my cloutlessness, take comfort in the case of Clarence Earl Gideon. He proves the cloutless can also have their day.

GIDEON’S TRUMPET

Gideon was a drifter who was charged in a Florida State court with breaking into a poolroom. Gideon was indigent, and asked the trial court to appoint an attorney to assist him in his defense. At the time, only an indigent person facing the death penalty in Florida would qualify to have an appointed attorney to his case.

Gideon’s request was denied. He represented himself and was found guilty, and sentenced to five years in prison. While in prison, he sent a handwritten petition to the United States Supreme Court seeking a review of his conviction. The bulky package was almost discarded, as it did not appear as a legal document or petition.

The Supreme Court read Gideon’s petition and agreed to review the case. Since Gideon was penniless, the Supreme Court agreed to appoint a lawyer to represent him. It appointed Abe Fortas as his attorney.

Justice Douglas described Fortas’ oral argument in the Gideon case as the best he heard in his 36 years on the Supreme Court bench.

The Gideon vs Wainwright 1963 Supreme Court decision affirmed that every person charged with a serious criminal offense is constitutionally entitled under the fourteenth amendment to the assistance of a lawyer, and if he is poor, that it is the duty of the state to hire and furnish him with defense counsel to represent him in court.

Here is a case of a cloutless person with little education and no money changing the law of the land. Now, persons charged with capital crimes automatically are furnished pro bono representation. Moreover, subsequent court rulings in the Supreme Court have expanded the rights of the indigent.

Anthony Lewis wrote a wonderful book about this titled “GIDEON’S TRUMPET” (1964) in which he writes, “In the morning mail of January 8, 1962, the Supreme Court of the United States received a large envelope from Clarence Earl Gideon . . .” The rest is history.

So, cloutless, take heart, there is always a chance to make history.

Be always well,

Jim

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE DES MOINES REGISTER

October 25, 2006

OPEN LETTER TO THE DES MOINES REGISTER

Reference: Iowa authors
Cross Reference: Book Review & Profile - Robert Bryson - Book, "Thunderbolt Kid"
Iowa Life Section: Des Moines Sunday Register, October 15, 2006

A businessman from Clinton, Iowa sent me a copy of your review of Mr. Bryson new book. I'm happy for Mr. Bryson, who is an established writer and humorous, who writes about the 1950s growing up in Iowa, while I write about the 1940s growing up in the same state. Historians now say that the 1940s were a major transitional period in our culture, which speeded up during the 1950s and beyond.

As an Iowan, I graduated from the University of Iowa, Phi Beta Kappa, won three major letters in sports there, had an executive career with Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe, and have had over 300 published articles from learned journals to popular magazines and newspapers such as Reader's Digest, The Wall Street Journal and Industry Week, and seven books in my discipline of organization/industry psychology, yet when I published my first novel, In the Shadow of the Courthouse: Memoir of the 1940s Written As A Novel (authorHouse 2003), with real names of real people in real circumstances, and real situations, it was as if I were one hand clapping in the forest.

It so happened that my preteen years from eight to twelve years-of-age paralleled the war years of World War II. I grew up in the industrial river town of Clinton, Iowa that sits on the snout of Iowa where the Mississippi River makes a violent bend. It was that narrow passage that proved providential in the early twentieth century. Clinton became the "sawdust capital" of the world, for it wasn't economical to float logs from Wisconsin and Minnesota beyond it.

Clinton went from boom to bust in just a few short years, but reinvented itself during the Great Depression to be a fully industrialized community as the United States entered WWII, and became a major contributor to that war effort.

My book was meant to be a snapshot of that time, place, and circumstance through the impressionistic eyes of a pre-teenager "who was coming of age "in the shadow of the courthouse" (our playground) while his nation struggled to come of age in the shadow of the atomic bomb." The book, then, was the story of that boy coming of age in this violent world, a world that now consumes us.

I sent a book to your newspaper, and didn't receive as much as a courtesy form letter in reply stating that "we don't review self-published books."

AuthorHouse published the novel. I am not a novice writer but a novice novelist, to be sure. The book has still managed to find a small audience with several posting their comments on Amazon.com. But other than that, it has not had any national exposure.

It is sad when it is so hard for a native Iowan to generate any kind of response from the media of his state. Your newspaper is not the only one that has ignored me. I sent books also to the Daily Iowan, the newspaper of my university, and to several other newspapers across the state without as so much as an acknowledgement. I also sent books to The Chicago Tribune, New York Times, and Washington Post with the same non-reply. I even sent a copy to John Kerry when he was at the Iowa Caucus, and was talking so positively about Iowa. The irony is that his running mate, John Edwards, is coming out with a book in which a piece from mine is to be included.

A friend of mind contacted the Davenport daily, and the book reviewer there said the newspaper didn't review self-published books. Then she added, "If we start publishing reviews of those books, my lord, there'll be a deluge." It was as if we self-published authors were a pariah. It seems to me with over 100,000 books published by mainline publishers, and only a handful of those books being reviewed this logic leaves something to be desired.

There were exceptions. My hometown newspaper, The Clinton Herald, did everything possible to make my book a success. They gave it front page and editorial coverage; published letters-to-the-editor endorsing the book, and even sent reporters to cover me when I was speaking on various subjects. In addition, the local radio station KROS gave me interviews, and spot announcements when I was speaking or available for book signings. And finally, National Public Radio's Rock Island, Illinois affiliate interviewed me, and made spot announcements when I was in the Davenport area.

If I sound angry, I'm not; disappointed, yes. I have learned that I am in a media age and without the wherewithal or the inclination to self-promote I am relegated to the also ran. Even Oprah, who claims to have such an egalitarian spirit, never answers my mail, nor, indeed, intercessors to her in my behalf. Again, I know there are limits of time, as well as tastes, and this is a discretionary problem. I don't expect to be treated differently. But earlier, some forty years ago, when I first started to write, I could expect at least a form letter reply.

Now, I am a man in my seventies and still writing, but realize that the hourglass sands are quickly spilling through. So, I write this letter not expecting a reply but for the satisfaction of getting it off my chest.

If I may, I do want to mention something about the book and why I am glad I wrote it. Early in the twentieth century, a young Irish priest by the name of Father James Murray came to Clinton. He built a school, church, and rectory. It was St. Patrick's School in the shadow of the courthouse, which I attended.

Father Murray then built a convent to house the nuns to teach the children. Then he built a college to educate the nuns, and a boarding school for the students. He wasn't done. He built a hospital, and a retirement home.

The Davenport Diocese razed these landmarks a few years ago. Now, the school, church and rectory exist only on the cover of my book and in the memory of that young boy, and all those who populate his story. The college of the Sisters of St. Francis is now a secular university, only the hospital and retirement home still stand.

I have had a long and productive life working in South America, across the United States and Europe and in South Africa. Always, I took with me the lessons learned at St. Patrick's that Father Murray had the foresight to build. I have several college degrees, and yet when I look back to the greatest influence of my life, it was those eight years spent in that small school.

I tried to bring this to life in my clumsy way in my book, not in celebration of religion, but to capture something of the essence of the influence of good discipline and instruction from people who cared. Since I am trained as an organization psychologist, I'm sure I've leavened my memory with the imprint of that training and perspective. My purpose was to establish a connection with a time, a place, and a circumstance that is now history, and I fear largely forgotten.

And so I end my rambling with this comment: giants do not make society but giants are made by society. In between, are all the little people like myself, amateurs, who will not and cannot and need not play to a discipline or profession or a particular audience when they are trying simply to produce a three-dimensional picture of the reality that memory can recall.

Be always well,





James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
6714 Jennifer Drive
Temple Terrace, FL 33617-2504
(813) 989 - 3631
Email: thedeltagrpfl@cs.com
Website: www.fisherofideas.com

WHAT MAKES THEM RIGHT?

WHAT MAKES THEM RIGHT?

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

I am in the process of writing a book on CONFIDENT THINKING, when a constant reader of my stuff asks, “What makes you think these guys are right?”

Since he had not read my book, I wasn’t certain of the origin of his remark. What do you mean, right? And whom are you talking about? I asked.

“Well, you’re always making such a case we’re the voice of our own authority, and then you spiel off these authority figures who have influenced you in your writing, so I want to know what makes you think they’re right?”

I am not a glib guy who can talk in sound bites so I dodged the question suggesting he take another look at what I’ve said.

On my walk today, however, I pondered his question: what makes them right?

I think the basic reason is because my teachers told me they were right; that if their words were between printed pages they must have something to say that I should pay attention to, and I did, religiously so.

I assumed, on that basis, that my teachers were wise and so I accepted the wisdom of these teachers. I would imagine it set a pattern in my hard wiring.

When I got older, and read liberally about these people that my teachers presented to me, I discovered I had a selective memory. What I remembered as true was chiseled into conforming shape, taunted by my reason, pulled together by my appetites, haunted by my fears, and beckoned into acceptance by my promise. Self-forgetting was as important a part of my programming as self-remembering.

I would remember those that appealed to my particular experience, mindset and fancy as they resonated with me, and would conveniently forget about those that did not. The others were buried in my unconscious, or were they? I say that because a writer goes to his own graveyard to find where his secrets are interred.

That is perhaps the key to our vulnerability: what we are programmed to believe and think we know is not necessarily how things are but how we choose to see them.

Digging deeper, I found my questioner had a legitimate concern. What makes them right? Or are they? Or are they attempting to make their problems our problems; their ghosts our ghosts; their longing for the eternal tomorrow ours as well; indeed, their God our God.

THIS BUSINESS OF TRUTH

I concluded that the reason I thought they were right is because they thought they were right, and since I felt comfortable thinking as they did, I was sure they were right with no more proof than my own credulity.

I failed to understand that truth sometimes changes as fast as the weather, being sublime today and trivial tomorrow, or that their truth may not be my truth or my truth, theirs. That truth may be limited by my ability and willingness to see what I can and will see against what others can and will see. And then there is the whole matter of my cultural lens versus their cultural lens.

There is “their truth” and there is “my truth,” and since I only know them through their writing and not working with them, or conversing directly with them, as many of them, perhaps most of them are now deceased, I must weigh their merits in the sublime light of my own experience. It is not at all simple to understand the simple truth of a thing because the weakness of my soul protects me from simple truth. I bury it in my complexity and think it is safely beyond excavation.

It is well for us to remember this when gauging the merits of truth as expressed by others. Obviously, they are believers of the truth as they know it, and doubtless there is a point to believe as they believe because they are persuasive.

Do they lie to me? Do they lie to themselves? I don’t know. But if they do lie to me, they lie loudest to themselves. And the bigger the lie everyone believes it the more.

Do they make connection with me? And if so, why?

Again, it is a matter of them first making connection with themselves, otherwise it is impossible to make connection with me. Stated another way, for them to be genuine, they first must see themselves as being authentic to themselves.

What does being authentic mean?

They must speak to my soul by revealing their own. Otherwise, it is just the cacophony of words juxtaposed to each other in meaningless babble. Be weary of those who would have you renounce your idols, whatever they may be, because their fervor suggests the assertion rather than the denial of theirs.

Idols are idols no matter what name we give them. The iconoclast is often more idolatrous than the idol worshiper.

This is apparent when those that preach from the high and mighty moral ground are found to have feet of clay. How could it be otherwise? Why should we expect them to escape life’s most basic appetites while they seem obsessed with them? The irony is that they demonize sins of the flesh and fall into profligacy, while having us believe they have escaped such sins. No matter what the “sin” is the more you think about it the more it owns you.

It is a weakness of the mind to take up their cause as they attempt to persuade us that they suffer “for” something when they suffer only “from” something. They are running away and they want us to join them in their flight. They want to convince us that they see the light when they only feel the heat. They want us to believe they are special, indeed, chosen as our emissaries, when they fear being ignored. The more they are obsessed with human ugliness the more they are possessed by it.

The escape is to recognize we have a capacity for evil as well as good, and evil is not somebody else’s problem that we can slough off in sanctimonious rhetoric, but we must deal with it ourselves, and quietly alone.

Are the truth tellers driven by fear and guilt?

There is always that possibility as the guilty are wont to be afraid, and they who are afraid often feel guilty. The question that always must be asked is this:

· Are they making their fear our guilt or their pride our fear?

There is fear and intolerance in pride. It is uncompromising. The less self-confident we are the more imperative is the need for pride.

The core of pride is self-rejection. Yet, the self is all we have. To renounce it is to reject the real; to unburden us from life and its troubles. It is no accident that the core of salvation hawkers is pride and it is generated by self-hatred.

We are imperfect but perfectible, and don’t reach perfection by denying our reality, our sensuality, our passion, our longing for connection, are desire to be useful, are need to be accepted, and the pursuit of love in the business of working and living.

It is a sickness of a time when there is an eagerness to unite as true believers in a cause against the self, when the self is the only thing that is ours; to identify ourselves with a mythical or ideal self that is espoused by a leader, a holy cause, a race, religion, a party, a nation, a truth, proclaiming in our loss of identity a new found uniqueness beyond our experience; something worth dying for but not necessarily worth living with.

The proud so often are ready to die for freedom but not willing to live within constraints. We have seen the results of unlimited individual freedom in decades of chaos, confusion, debauchery, licentiousness, brutality, bestiality, and a desolate sameness across the population. Such living has produced the sexual revolution and free love only to make the normal weird and the weird normal, and for the disease of self-hate to spread to a societal epidemic in drug addiction, AIDS, and other societal dysfunctions.

When a society commands discipline, controls its appetites, and is strict but not draconian, creativity and originality thrive. We are not in such a climate.

In a climate of unlimited freedom, imitation runs amuck with a sameness and uniformity that is not unlike tyranny. Rebels once flaunted tattoos now everyone does. This is but a symptom of a society devoid of spontaneity retreating into inanimate inventions in a mechanistic retreat from the self. These inanimate tools have become toys of distraction to burned-out mediocre individuals who imitate the hard wiring of the inventors.

We can see through the veiled intentions of society only when we are able to see through our own. This is difficult because we are programmed to be self-ignorant; to yield to extremism because we doubt being capable of growing without their blessings.

Who are these extremists?

They are the sophists, priests, gurus, demagogues, evangelists and theocons who would have us be guided by their ghosts or gods instead of by our own empirical experience.

Both Faith and intimidation are instruments to compromise self-respect. Intimidation crushes the autonomy of self-respect, while Faith obtains this advantage without a struggle. Its persuasive tools are our vulnerable appetites, hidden fears and prideful vanities.

THE SOURCE OF BELIEF

One of the interesting things about education, about enlightenment, about everything that we believe is true is that somebody at some time or other wrote it down.

Subsequently, somebody or several somebodys thought they got it right. That is true of the Old Testament and the New Testament of the Bible, the Jewish Talmud, the Koran, the Tao, the Upanishads, and all the other religious writings. Religion is a cry for light in the darkness, or to put it another way, a cry for knowing beyond what can be known. It is safe territory for the charlatan and extremists of similar cloth.

Something they said, or something they implied but didn’t necessarily say, or something that somebody they had seen and we have designated as wise, and they wrote down what they remembered of that occasion as they remember what that person had said was true, and so we have come to accept it as so.

We are told the wisdom of humility and the renunciation of pride, but what is humility but the substitution of one pride for another?

Religion treats the self as full of sin, but what is sin but the self trying to find its way in the darkness, not shrinking from the darkness as religion would have the self do, but finding out for itself as any animal finds out by living.

If there be sin, it is not sin as described by religion but the sin of pride, of taking ourselves too seriously, and assuming too many responsibilities that leave little time for living, and living is what life is all about, not the postponing of it for another place called “heaven.” The earth can be either a heaven or a hell depending on the choices we make, but it is all we know for sure, and that certainty is suspect even then.

Life is a comedy and often a tragic comedy but that is only because it lacks humor.

Without a sense of humor, there cannot be a sense of proportion, without a sense of proportion, there cannot be a sense of balance, without a sense of balance there can be neither good sense nor genuine intelligence, nor, indeed, moral integrity. The humor is in the self looking at itself in the mirror with a knowing smile and not disgust.

And who is most likely to do that? The nonconformist.

That is why the most stable person in society is always the nonconformist. He doesn’t get caught up in the trite, trials and tribulations of his time, nor does he become an automatic push-button to consumer demands.

The nonconformist is his own agent knowing that the greatest liberty is not unbridled freedom, but freedom in which the individual demonstrates self-restrain, knows when to withdraw or retreat, and when to abstain from the madness of his time. He is of a common type throughout the centuries. Now, the nonconformist must survive push-button theocratic technology by not deifying it. It is a technology that has no feel for people as persons, or the means by which they grow and develop, and therefore spawns unintended consequences.

We can turn our conditioning on its head by engaging only in competition with ourselves and not with others. In that manner, we are able to see progress and regression, derive satisfaction and come to appreciate the leavening effect of disappointment in the scheme of things. It leaves us unimpaired by our faults and false steps, while bringing us to accept others as we find them. Embracing his resistance is the nonconformist credo.

On the other hand, to be preoccupied with other people and what they are or aren’t doing is to represent a total retreat from the self. The basic attempt to compare and compete with others represents a breathless race to get ahead by running away from ourselves.

Why do we run?

Our God has changed. Once the God we believed in was far off in Heaven, never to be seen, only to be felt, intangible. It was the God we had much faith in because we believed in the unknown and the unknown was the ever-retreating future beyond our vision. The ancient Jews had faith in such an invisible God, and were possessed of a vivid faith in the future. I was blessed with that faith in the Judeo-Christian tradition of Irish Roman Catholicism. There was no need of proof, no need of tangible evidence, no need to question the future. I was at home in the present because I had faith in the future.

Then the postmodern world rolled in on the wings of science that has been gaining momentum for 500 years. Like the primitives of thousands of years ago, somehow a more tangible palpable God was demanded by science. The future was now and thus a lack of faith in the future of the intangible God.

Science had a noble cause, to push back ignorance and explore our internal and external universe systematically and objectively. It shouldn’t have overwhelmed us, but it has, leaving us hopeless and empty, and paradoxically, creating a reemerging need for the worship of idols. Only a tangible God or gods will now suffice.

Where does that leave us in this godless or god changing age?

The word is vulnerable. There is mania, a fanaticism to predict everything because we have no faith in anything. We crave security, a rigid routine, and predictable indices as a defense against the future.

We cannot even trust ourselves with elections. There must be hundreds or even thousands of polls to tell us how we think so when we vote we can have the reassurance of voting rightly.

We live in an era without patience; without a temperament for delayed gratification. Everything must be now. We want a definitive answer when American troops are to leave Afghanistan and Iraq even if no such answer is possible. We want to find out how events are going to turn out before they occur. We all have Tarot card minds.

We don’t want to think. We want to be told how to think. Religion once provided this sanctuary. Science is fumbling because it is outside its retinue.

Traditional religion is anachronistic, discredited, but that has not changed the religious impulse. We are still concerned about our immortal souls. Science may try to isolate the soul, calculate its DNA, but we all know the 64 grams are real, and that when we die, this weight leaves our temporary home of the body to find its home in the future.

Now, no church is home as it once was during this rental period of life. Now, the only home is the self who must find some way to save its soul. The weight of this is so great that we blind our minds by retreating into the religion of work, business, politics, literature, art, sex, celebrity, sport, or acquisition. We make progress our beatific vision as if it has permanence.

IN A SIMPLER TIME

I was reared Irish Roman Catholic. From my earliest days, I was told in the words of the Baltimore Catechism, which were truth incarnate to my impressionistic mind, that the Roman Catholic Church was the only true church established by Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and no other church shall stand before her.

When I’m five-years-old, I heard this. I’m six-years-old, I hear it again. I’m seven-years-old, and I hear it once more, making my First Holy Communion, dressed in white, with white shirt and tie, white pants, and white shoes with a little black prayer book with a picture in it of Jesus Christ who is blond, blue-eyed, fine boned, and handsome. Since I have similar looks, family and friends celebrate me as purity personified, and I believe it. Pretense is an indispensable step in the attainment of genuineness. It is a form into which genuine inclinations flow and solidify, and I would come to carry such baggage.

This experience was idyllic except for my First Confession, which was not holy, and not reassuring but quite the contrary. Reality contaminated the self of my assumed holiness.

Then, when I’m twelve-years-old, I hear it again as I am confirmed as a “Solider of Jesus Christ” in the Roman Catholic Church.

So, I have had succession of reinforcements of an idea, which I have accepted as true without qualification. Since I accepted it as true, I practice it as the truth. I don’t question it. I don’t question the pope when he says he is infallible in his encyclicals relating to doctrines of faith or morals. His word is the word of the church and the word of the church is by extension the word of our savior, Jesus Christ. It is so simple, so easy and comforting to believe.

The church says that Blessed Virgin Mary was born without Original Sin (Immaculate Conception) on her soul, and I believe; the church says that Jesus was born of a Virgin Mary, and I believe. The church says I cannot eat meat on Friday without sinning, so I don’t eat meat on Friday. The church says I must fast before receiving Holy Communion, so I fast from food or drink the night and morning before I receive this Sacrament. I must go to confession before I go to Holy Communion in order not to have mortal sin on my soul, and so I do.

The church is very ambiguous and vague as to what mortal sin is, but the safe thing is to consider almost everything a sin, so going to confession and confessing all these remembered sins is the safe thing to do, otherwise going to communion with mortal sin on your soul means you will roast forever in eternal hell. And I believe this to be true.

It is a mortal sin to miss mass on Sunday; it is a moral sin to lie; there are more egregious sins but lying is a sin a seven-year-old can understand, also swearing or taking the Lord’s name in vain, or even saying some words you hear your parents say such as damn or hell or shit or goddamn.

My hard wiring has always had a question mark when it came to sin. When I made my First Confession, and the priest thought I wasn’t cooperating, he told me I had made a “bad confession,” as he gave me my absolution and penance. I was to say the rosary, the complete Sorrowful Mysteries, when most kids got three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys and were done with it.

I was so ashamed and mortified that I never told anyone about this, not even my mother. I thought she would think that I was damned for sure.

I’ve been trapped in my Catholicism now in my seventh decade having had made a bad confession in my first. Somehow that small question mark that was so tiny when I was a boy has grown taller than the Empire State Building, yet quite remarkably, I am a Roman Catholic writer who has made little progress beyond that seven-year-old boy with my catechistic mind.

My Catholicism is no longer expressed as a believer as it has gone beyond belief to touch the bedrock of my soul. And that is to make connection with myself. I have not found answers but I understand the questions more clearly.

What do I mean by that?

I am no longer afraid to think, to express my mind clearly and directly, and to state emphatically such things, as that life has no purpose other than to be lived to the fullest. That doesn’t mean cheaply but wisely.

Purpose and worth, I have discovered, are illusions that subjugate the will to a set of duties that pile duty on duty until there is an unalloyed submission to someone’s nebulous idea of performance.

Working becomes an end all, leaving no time to live, but only to exist on someone else’s arbitrary schedule. We see this in the perennial student; in the pyramid-climbing executive; in the workaholic, in the social and political climbing celebrity, in the public seeking philanthropist, and all others whose god is some type of performance.

Performance has become the most fashionable exit ramp to self-knowing and the quickest on ramp to self-delusion. It is the social disease of our time, which has become treated as an expression of normalcy.

THE ANTITOXIN TO THE SOUL

The best way to guard against doing harm to others is to introduce them to themselves. It is an antitoxin of the soul. Where there is self-knowing even the most poisonous impulses can be held in check. It would be better to see the world run by men who set their hearts on toys but do not try to kid themselves about it, than by men animated with lofty ideals whose dedication makes them ruthless taskmasters.

Make no mistake, noble attributes such as courage, honor, duty, loyalty and faith can be transmuted into ruthlessness, as many reading this can attest. Self-knowing combined with self-acceptance stands apart from such evil as such a self cannot lie to itself without being conflicting.

That means that what we consider self-evident truths may not be in the eyes of others:

“Everyone in the world wants to live in the United States.”

That is not true. If people had jobs, if people could support their families where they live, in the culture of their birth, in the climate of their heritage, in the comfort of their own home, there would be little interest to move to the United States. If we are honest with ourselves, we can see this is consistent with the way we feel about being Americans.

“America is the greatest idea that has ever been created.”

No question the democratic republic of the United States is one of the greatest political experiments in man’s history. Equally true, it has been severely tested in its 230-years. Should the reader examine that idea, he would find it has had its episodes of tyranny. The presidency of Andrew Jackson was somewhat tyrannical, as were that of Abraham Lincoln in the Civil War, and more recently that of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in World War Two.

Americans were stripped of many of their freedoms in those periods “for their own good.” We are in an equally challenging time with the presidency of George Bush and the “war on terror.” It is an idea that is now in a precarious state. So, it is dangerous to take comfort in patriotism by slamming the door on those that don’t buy into the political rhetoric of the neocons and theocons of the time.

Ask Japanese Americans who were sent off to internment camps during the Second World War about democratic freedoms. They were stripped not only of these freedoms, but also of all their wealth and possessions by FDR who operated very much as a dictator towards them in that Great War. Paranoia has always been a problem of the American soul especially in times of crises. The Empire of Japan bombed Pearl Harbor December 7, 1941, and therefore all Japanese; even Japanese Americans who had been in the United States for generations were suspect.

When it comes to “what makes them right,” it would be well to be a “doubting Thomas.” Isn’t it interesting that the Gospel of St. Thomas has never been included in either the Catholic Vulgate or the King James Bible, yet it exists, and was written in the same period as the other Four Gospels.

Was I a doubting Thomas with that First Confession? I don’t know, but it seemed to have marked me for being a bit of a rascal, always wondering and asking why.

What makes them right?

We do!

We do it by omission or commission, by acquiescence or acclamation, by retreating into our fears or ignoring our instincts.

The wisdom of others is only valid if it touches our souls. We are in the world but apart from it. If the wisdom of others is not compatible with our blood, then we must have the courage to reject it. The soul recognizes rightness if we would but listen to it. Know that the lowest to the most exalted struggle with this same reality and no one, absolutely no one has special purchase of it.

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