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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